Nuvve Holding Corp.

Good day, and welcome to the new V Holding Corporation second quarter earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Switching to assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad, and to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note today's event is being recorded. On today's call are Gregory Pallant, Chief Executive Officer, and David Robson, Chief Financial Officer of Navi. Earlier today, Navi issued a press release announcing its quarterly report and fiscal year report. Following prepared remarks, we will open up the call for questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this call may contain forward-looking statements. While these forward-looking statements reflect Navi's best current judgment, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those implied by these forward-looking projections. These risk factors are discussed in the V's filings with the SEC and in the earnings release issued today, which are available on our website. The V undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Gregory Powell, Chief Executive Officer of the V. Gregory?

Thank you, and good afternoon to everyone here today.

Welcome to our Q4 2024 and fiscal year 2024 results call. I'm not going to try to sugarcoat it. 2024 has been an extremely challenging year. I should say horrible as for the first time since 2021, our revenue went down compared to last year. We know that we are not an isolated case as it has been for most of the companies in our industry, with many of them going out of business. delays have been hitting us across the board. Concerning our K-12 school bus business, during the first two quarters of the year, many of the school district partners were expecting to receive the final EPA approval letters, which arrived sometimes with up to six-month delay, forcing them to hold on their purchase orders until they got the final approval letter for their grants. Q3, Q4 then picked up, but the damage was already done. In the same way, I heard projects have been impacted with delays due to their financing taking more time than initially thought. And though we are confident their financing will go through, we are still finalizing some terms. But we did not stay passive. First of all, we have been working hard on reducing our costs, especially our cash expenses. For fiscal year 2024, both our cash and non-cash operating expense, excluding costs of sales, went down by 33% compared to our fiscal year 2023 expenses. We are working every day on reducing our cash expenses, trying to minimize the impact onto operations, product development, and product qualification. I will give you more insight in a few minutes. We have also been working hard on expanding our business in order to reduce our exposure to governmental funding, especially federal subsidies, and accelerate the revenue. With this potential reduction on electric vehicle subsidies, we have decided to move more aggressively into the stationary battery business. Our GIVE platform is very good at managing how to predict batteries availability from electric vehicles such as school buses. It also does an exceptional job at managing stationary batteries and can help extract more value from these batteries. From our perspective, stationary batteries are essential to provide grid modernization either behind a meter or in front of a meter, keeping the cost of energy equitable. We have now announced our first battery and service model in the United States. Our battery as a service business model for electric cooperative allows the co-ops to deploy stationary batteries, reducing their exposure to coincidental peaks, a situation where the system is experiencing a peak consumption while the transmission system they are connected to is also experiencing a peak. These peaks make the cost of the kilowatt hour very expensive. Our service allows co-ops to keep the cost of energy low by reducing peaks while also providing more resiliency to their members. We are also expanding our stationary battery business in Japan, as we announced recently. The Japanese battery aggregation market has been expanding rapidly, and value for a platform like ours is strong. Therefore, we have announced a couple weeks ago we're establishing a new entity in Japan. This company is in the process of pursuing capital raising activities locally. We intend to keep a controlling interest in the new entity while bringing aboard local investors to support the local business entity capital needs. This is our second approach to reducing our cash expenses. sharing some equity of our local subsidiaries while leveraging our existing expenses in Japan in addition to generating potential future cash flow for newbie holding for services and access to the platform. Now, the last but not the least, back in the U.S., we have also been selected by the state of New Mexico to deploy a variety of electric vehicles and the corresponding infrastructure. The addressable market opportunity is estimated at $400 million off capital deployment, which is large, complex, and requires a significant focus from our organization, which is why we have decided that Ted Smith, our COO and president, will be 100% focused on this opportunity and will become the CEO of our local organization. Ted has been driving this effort from the beginning and has created an amazing consortium of companies that we will be announcing very soon. The purpose for which the company is organized is to serve as the designated local presence for the execution of the State Purchase Agreement, SWPA, awarded to Nuvi Holding Corp., pursuing the Electrify New Mexico initiative, and to develop, construct, finance, and operate a comprehensive suite of green energy and transportation electrification solutions in New Mexico and surrounding states. These business activities include, without limitation, A, a turnkey electric vehicle charging infrastructure and related site development services, B, vehicle-to-grid D2G technology deployment and aggregation, C, stationary battery energy storage system, D, microgrid and resilience hubs, E, electric corridor charging network and deployable charging system, F, vehicle procurement, leasing and financing, and G, the valuation, acquisition, removal, and replacement of internal conversion engine, ICE, vehicle, fleet, and related infrastructure to accelerate fleet electrification. This new LLC will also seek investment for local investors while leveraging newbie holding existing cash expenses and providing potential future cash flow to newbie holding through its services provided to the new LLC. In summary, Though 2024 is extremely challenging, we have been able to survive it, sometimes at an expensive price. During these periods, we have been working on transforming the company, but we feel that we are now very well positioned as a grid modernization and vehicle to grid company to close on our key opportunities and accelerate our business expansion, working with both Capelo Global and Roth Capital. And now, I will let David take you through the detail of our financials. David?