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spk02: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Brent and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Proterra's fourth quarter conference call webcast. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question at that time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, again, press star 1. Thank you. It is now my pleasure to turn today's call over to Mr. Aaron Chu, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
spk01: Thank you, Operator, and thank you all for joining us for Proterra's fourth quarter 2021 Congress call. Joining us today from Proterra are our CEO, Gareth Joyce, as well as our CFO, Karina Padilla. After the markets closed, we published our quarterly letter on our website and an SEC filing, which we encourage everyone to read for details on our financials and insights into our operating results and strategy, industry dynamics, and outlook. During this conference call, we will make statements related to our business and industry that are forward-looking These statements are not guarantees of future performance. They are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainty, and our actual results could differ materially from expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements. For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings available on the SEC's website and via the investor relations section of our website. Additionally, non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed on today's conference call. The reconciliation of these measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in today's quarterly letter. We will kick off the call today by introducing our Chief Executive Officer, Gareth Joyce, for his opening remarks.
spk00: Thank you, Aaron, and to everyone joining us on the call today. I'm honored to lead my first call as CEO of Proterra and thrilled about the opportunity that lies ahead. I'm fortunate not to have to start from scratch, but I'm taking over as CEO, heading the ground running. I couldn't be more grateful to continue the work that Ryan Popple began in Proterra's foundational years, putting us on the map as a leader in electric transit buses and bringing on board our Chief Technology Officer, Dustin Grace, to develop our proprietary battery technology. And for Jack Allen's subsequent leadership in maturing our manufacturing operations, carrying us across the COVID chasm and helping us raise nearly $650 million in the transaction to take us public. Because of their efforts, I have the luxury of taking the reins of a leading horse in the race. I'm inheriting a company that is on its fourth generation battery technology that has broken new boundaries in the size and weight of vehicles that can be electrified, has produced more than 500 megawatt hours of batteries to date, is on pace to increase its battery manufacturing capacity from around one gigawatt hours today by multiple gigawatt hours in 2023. And as a decade of vehicle manufacturing and electric powertrain integration experience with more than 800 vehicles produced and delivered, including more than 200 electric buses in 2021. And a fantastic team of employees who not only bring their experience intellect, and ingenuity to the table, but the passion to help us pursue our vision of clean, quiet transportation for all. Let me start first by reflecting on our 2021 accomplishments. Second, I will provide our revenue guidance for 2022, and then I will discuss our order backlog growth before handing it off to Karina to discuss Q4 in more detail. First, on 2021, leveraging our technology and manufacturing platform, we reported strong growth. Even in the face of well-publicized supply chain dislocations affecting manufacturers across the globe, in 2021, power deliveries of battery systems increased by 155% year-over-year to 273 vehicle sets. Proterra transit deliveries grew 22% year-over-year to 208 new electric transit buses. Battery production grew by 70% to 189 megawatt hours for the year, and total revenue grew 23% year-over-year to $243 million. In addition, raw order growth across all of our business lines drove our backlog and contracted orders in total to $1.3 billion at year-end. This growth we achieved in 2021 did not come without its share of challenges, though. The impact of global logistics, supply chain, and COVID-related complications has been widely reported across the industrial landscape, not only for Q4, but early in 2022 as well. We have continued to manage through this well, but we aren't immune to the effects. Not only has the production challenges not improved since Q3, but they have gotten worse in some areas. we are somewhat in a perfect storm of past shortages, shipping delays, inflation in material costs, and all of the resulting production line inefficiencies. On top of that, since December and the spike in Omicron, there has been widespread labor absenteeism at our suppliers, our customers, and our facilities that have further complicated operational efficiency. But we don't expect all of this to last. But for now, these complications are not only constraining our growth, but as Karina will discuss in more detail shortly, impacting our gross margins as well. Even in the face of these headwinds, we're establishing 2022 guidance as follows. Revenue growth to accelerate from 2021 levels to between plus 24 and plus 34% year over year. to a range of $300 to $325 million in revenue. Our order backlog supports even faster growth, but given the state of the supply chain, we think it's prudent to establish guidance assuming no material improvement in supply chain and, in turn, transit production rates for the balance of the year. And importantly, our guidance does not reflect any potential impact from Russia's invasion of the Ukraine. This revenue level isn't where we would like it to be for 2022, but the fact is the manufacturing environment is very challenging right now. We will grow as fast as the supply chain and our production capacity allow us to this year. But our guidance assumes, one, that our transit manufacturing operates only on one shift for the rest of the year, and two, the expansion of our battery manufacturing capacity at Greer does not come online until Q4 and doesn't contribute meaningfully to volumes until 2023. Nevertheless, even incorporating these constraints, we're still confident in the opportunity to generate at least 24% revenue growth in 2022. While production is facing constraints, demand is most certainly not. We have built a healthy book of business, supporting strong growth across all of our businesses for the next few years. Our contracted orders are powered, combined with our transit and energy backlog, with approximately $1.2 billion at the end of 2021. First, on transit, orders grew 45% last year, topped by record orders in Q4, which were 50% better than our next best quarter, and our backlog is now at approximately $450 million. This is all before the electric transit bus funding has become available from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that was just enacted last November. Previously, for example, no-no funding totals approximately $130 million in 2020, where approximately 400 electric buses were deployed in the U.S. Low-note funding for zero-emission buses in the new act will increase more than five-fold to approximately $800 million per year through 2026, supporting a step-changing growth in transit bus demand. Howard experienced even better growth, The fact is, commercial vehicle electrification is no longer only about buses. Demand has truly broadened to the rest of the commercial vehicle landscape. Proterra Power had partnerships with five OEMs early in 2021, four of which were for buses. In 2021, we expanded Proterra Power's partnerships to 13 OEMs covering 19 vehicle programs, spanning trucks to buses to off-highway equipment. Ten of these programs are currently scheduled to be in serial production by the end of 2022. Altogether, Proterra Powered has $800 million of contracted orders, representing close to two-thirds of our total backlog and contracted orders. Meanwhile, Proterra Energy is starting to book some large depot-scale charging projects that our solutions are designed for. One, a 3-megawatt installation for the Santa Clara Transportation Authority, and the other, a 7.5-megawatt one for the LADOT we disclosed in our last call. These projects are orders of magnitude larger than a typical public charging station for passenger vehicles. Both will be built with a solar-storage microgrid that will support critical vehicle charging, even in a power outage. This is the size and type of fleet-scale charging infrastructure that will be increasingly required for higher commercial vehicle adoption and that we believe we have the experience and capabilities to deliver. So while I covered our accomplishments for the full year of 2021 and our outlook for 2022, I will now hand it off to our new Chief Financial Officer, Karina Padilla, who will discuss our Q4 results in more detail, and in particular, our gross margins. Karina?
spk07: Thanks, Gareth. I'm excited to join you all in my first conference call as CFO of Proterra, and I'm even more excited to have joined Proterra as commercial vehicle electrification continues to gain momentum. First, I'll give you a quick intro on my background, then I'll dive into our fourth quarter results. For those who don't know me, I've spent my entire career in finance, spending over 20 years at technology companies like Dell and Motorola Semiconductors to industrial firms like Ingersoll Rand and Jelglin. all of which were in various different stages of their maturity and growth. I've held leadership roles across a wide range of functions ranging from divisional CFO with responsibilities spanning multiple countries to investor relations and everything in between. I'm excited to join Proterra at this critical juncture for both the company and the industry. I'm passionate about the industry as I want to do my part to leave the world in a better place for my children and the generations that follow them. Proterra, to me, is the perfect mix of green, tech, and industrial. I'm looking forward to working with all of you in the years ahead. Now jumping on to our fourth quarter results. We achieved strong growth in deliveries and revenue across both business units. However, our margins were adversely impacted by a wide range of supply chain challenges compounded by the impact of inflation in plant inefficiencies. Our total revenue in Q4 grew 26% year-on-year to $68 million, driven by record Proterra power deliveries of battery systems and Proterra transit deliveries of new electric buses matching our prior record order. Power and energy revenue grew 19% year-on-year to $13 million, representing 19% of our total revenue. Proterra power deliveries of battery systems grew more than 300% year-over-year to 139 vehicle sets. Proterra energy installations were down 24% year-over-year to 2 megawatts, primarily because charging hardware shortages constrained our ability to complete installations in the quarter and have been pushed into 2022. On the transit side of the business, our revenue grew 28% year-over-year to $55 million, representing 81% of our revenue. Fourth quarter deliveries of new electric buses rose 13% year-on-year to match our highest quarter of deliveries at 54 buses. We also, for the first time, sold nine pre-owned buses in the quarter, which demonstrates the potential for a pre-owned market in electric transit buses. We acted as a supporter with a healthy order growth of $1.3 billion in backlog and contracted orders, with record Proterra transit orders in the fourth quarter and Proterra Powered adding three new partnerships in the quarter to grow its contracted orders to $800 million, with positions as well for growth in 2022 and beyond. On the gross margin side, we reported a negative gross margin of $2.8 million in Q4 of 2021, as compared to a gross profit of $1.1 million in Q4 of 2020. While we typically focus on year-on-year comparisons, I will focus my margin commentary on the sequential comparison to our third quarter 2021 performance. It is useful to compare to Q3 2021 because it is most representative of the price-cost dynamics we are facing today. In Q3 2021, we generated a gross profit of $2.7 million, a sequential decline of approximately $5 million in Q4 2021. Increases in material cost from inflation, volume, and product mix accounted for almost $4 million of the variance, and over $1 million from increased freight costs and volume. Both of these are driven by two unexpected impacts largely stemming from supply chain disruption. First on freight. Container shipping rates have more than doubled since the start of 2021 to approximately $10,000 per container. And while ports remain congested, they can delay shipments for weeks, if not months. In many cases, we have resorted to pay for expedited premium freight to meet customer delivery times. Second is the impact from product mix and inflation. We're excited to see the market opportunity for the sale of nine pre-owned buses as it substantiates the longevity of our product. However, this new market opportunity resulted in a revenue mixdown impact in the quarter. In addition, we had one large contract that shifted in the quarter that was originally signed in 2018 with a marquee customer presenting a large long-term opportunity. This opportunity was priced aggressively and did not account for the rate of inflation we would see three years later creating a headwind on our margins. We are facing similar headwinds across our portfolio from inflationary pressures this global supply chain is experiencing, in particular on our long cycle contracts. We are taking actions to mitigate some of these headwinds. These actions in progress will be more permanent in nature, so they will take time to work through and will not provide immediate relief. As a result, the current environment will challenge growth margin improvement in 2022. However, we have a three-point plan in place to improve growth margin as supply chain normalizes. First, we raise pricing of our electric transit buses in December, not only for new bus orders, but we are also evaluating existing contracts with inflation taxes. Second, we should see production efficiencies as supply chain improves. This should lead to lower freight pricing and the need for fewer expedites. lower material costs, as we will depend less on alternative suppliers, and gain efficiencies across all areas of the production floor. Third, as supply chain and logistics normalize, we will execute on our capacity expansion, currently limited by part shortages. Over time, increased capacity through the addition of shifts and the expansion of our new battery facility in Greer, South Carolina, will enable revenue growth, scale, and better asset utilization. As a result, we expect growth margins to continue to steadily improve in subsequent years. With that said, as of today, we have not seen evidence of the supply chain normalization and the effects of the war in Eastern Europe are unknown at this stage. Moving on to cash. Our balance sheet remains healthy, ending the year with $661 million in cash and short-term investments. Proterra has a balance sheet strength to enable us to scale and give us room to ride out any short-term turbulence while providing flexibility to invest in both manufacturing capacity extension and R&D. Our free cash flow for the year was $150 million. This was inflated by higher than normal working capital consumption in Q4, mainly from an increase in accounts receivable due to a large number of buses that were delivered late in the quarter, and an increase in inventory stemming from these strategic decisions to stock up on battery cells. Normalizing for these two items, pre-cash flow burn would have been closer to $120 million. Our cash position gives us ample flexibility to fund our operations while continuing to invest for future growth. The last important point of our Q4 and 2021 financial statements I want to mention is that we will be filing a 12B25 form today with the SEC, as we need extra time for our auditors to finalize a review of our fourth quarter and our full-year financial statements. We do not anticipate this filing extension to lead to any material adverse change in our financial results. Given it's our first year as a public company, with large accelerated filing requirements, we ran into some staffing limitations impacted by COVID on our end, and we just need a bit more time to file. And with that, I'll pass it back to Gareth for his closing commentary.
spk00: Thanks, Karina. I'm very excited to have someone as capable and dynamic as Karina on board to help us find the right balance between investment and growth and operational discipline on items like margins and cash. When I was provided the opportunity to move to Proterra, it was an easy decision. I did not leave a Fortune 500 company to join an up-and-coming technology company like Proterra because of what I thought could be accomplished in 2022 or even 2023. But for what Proterra is poised to do in 2025 and beyond, vehicle electrification is one of the great secular themes offering one of the select multi-decade growth opportunities before us today. Moreover, the transformation in how we transport ourselves and goods around the world is absolutely imperative for us to accelerate if we ever expect to address the existential environmental challenges confronting the world over the next few decades and leave the world in a better shape, not only for our children, but our children's children to enjoy it as much as we do. This is not about the cliche of saving the world. This is about saving humanity and its standard of living, as we have taken for granted not only our whole lives, but for generations before us. Proterra's path forward is clear. The way I see it, and I'm sure a lot on this call agree, the global fleet of vehicles is on the path towards zero emissions. It has begun with passenger vehicles, and the next phase is commercial and industrials. And the electrification of the global fleet of commercial vehicles will require an enormous supply of batteries. Forecasts for electric penetration of trucks or buses from ACT and Morgan Stanley suggest a market for commercial vehicle batteries in North America and Europe of approximately 40 gigawatt hours in 2025 and close to 100 gigawatt hours in 2030. So please stop and think about the magnitude of those figures for a moment. This is a lot of batteries. And this from a base of maybe a few gigawatt hours today? I believe there are few players in the world that will be able to achieve the necessary safety, performance, and cost attributes required for commercial slash industrial vehicle batteries, and even fewer that can provide the scale. The winners in the space that will capture most of this opportunity will exhibit leadership in three areas. One, execution. They can't just have a strategy, but must have the ability to execute on it. Two, people. The team with ingenuity, competence, and passion to succeed. And finally, three, technology that can break new barriers in performance and actually accelerate adoption. Proterra has demonstrated our capability in all three dimensions already. First, on execution, designing a product is not the same thing as producing it, and producing it is not the same thing as high-volume manufacturing. We have not only produced 500 megawatt-hours of batteries, as well as 800 electric transit buses through the end of 2021, but are poised to be producing batteries at a multi-gigawatt-hour scale in 2023. Patera has already built a mature manufacturing and supply chain operation, We have the capacity in place at three facilities already up and running for years and have demonstrated the ability to rapidly scale. We built our city of industry bus factory in less than a year for under $20 million, and our second 635-megawatt-hour battery factory also in less than a year for under $20 million. And now we're on track to build in less than a year our third battery factory with 327,000 square feet of manufacturing space to produce multiple gigawatt hours of batteries per year, as well as drivetrains and ancillary electrification components. And critically, We had the wherewithal to establish a long-term contract with LG Energy Solutions to supply our most critical raw material, battery cells, through 2028, including from a U.S. facility. Second, on the team, our people are our most valued asset. As passionate for the mission as they are focused on execution, able to take the initiative on their own, as they are able to work together towards a common goal. Without our world-class team, there is no product, and that means to serve us of two. We're all here to make a difference, to build a better future for all of us. I'm grateful for all the work our team puts in every day throughout the year, as I expect our shareholders will be when they see the results of this effort over time. Finally, and most importantly, we have the technology. Batteries are not easy. They are hard. Very high. And we are not talking the light-duty batteries for passenger vehicles, but heavy-duty batteries capable of meeting the much larger payloads and tougher duty cycles required for commercial-industrial vehicle applications. Batteries are not like semiconductors. As you jam more and more transistors onto a square inch, the chip is not likely to become more volatile. With heavy-duty commercial vehicle batteries, It takes a unique balance of technology, engineering, manufacturing, and electrical integration into the vehicle to be able to maximize the amount of energy on board one vehicle to handle payloads of tens of thousands of pounds in some cases and achieve long cycle life that can handle daily charge or discharges for around 10 plus years. and still, of course, maintain an exceptional safety profile that minimizes thermal risk, all at a total cost of ownership that is viable for fleets who profit on a cost per mile basis. Because the first applications of our technology are in transit buses and school buses with the highest safety standards, we have honed in on every one of these factors for years. and not only intimately know what feeds need, but more importantly, what we must do to meet those needs. Demonstrating our excellence, Proterra's battery technology has been adopted by 13 OEMs across 19 vehicle programs, spanning Class 3 cargo vans and Class 46 work trucks to Class 6 and 7 delivery vehicles and Class 8 tractors, including even fuel cell trucks. to school, shuttle and transit buses. And it's also broken new barriers in industrial electrification, empowering multiple off-highway categories that many didn't even think viable for electrification years ago, like mining equipment, construction equipment, and container handling at ports. We're, of course, to see our massive technology powering everything from delivery vans bringing packages to your door to school buses bringing your children home in the middle of the week to tractor trailers carrying goods between cities or 20-ton excavators digging up dirt at construction sites and forklifts and container handlers that carry loads up to 75,000 pounds at ports. Technology leadership is not about the performance of your current product. It's about your ability to continue to improve your product and stay ahead of the curve, not only leading the market, but accelerating it, setting the bar, not chasing it. Our fourth-generation battery already led the market in optimizing energy density, life, and safety. With our new reaction factory in Riyadh, Coming online later this year, we will be launching our fifth-generation battery that is targeting another leap in energy density while still offering thousands of charge or discharge cycles to support an approximate 10-year life. While, of course, still maintaining our exceptional safety profile and further lowering our cost per kilowatt hour. We believe we have the technology and manufacturing platform that centers us in the middle of the commercial vehicle electrification ecosystem and positions us to grow as electric adoption of commercial and industrial fleets accelerates. So we've covered a lot on this call, but if I sum it up in simple terms, 2021 hasn't been easy, but I've seen an excellent job managing through all of the unexpected challenges. 2022 is not starting off any easier, but our biggest constraint to growth this year is not demand, but how much supply chain and production capacity allows us to produce. We grew revenue 23% year over year in 2021, and have now grown revenue at a compound annual growth rate of 25% since 2018. Assuming no major deterioration in production and supply chain dynamics, Revenue growth in 2022 should accelerate to between 24% and 34% year-over-year, so between $300 million and $325 million in revenue, while we have a plan in place to improve gross margin over time as the supply chain environment normalizes. Short-term uncertainty decides over the next three-plus years, the world is going to need tens of gigawatt-hours of heavy-duty batteries Purposely developed for commercial vehicle duty cycles. And Proterra has the technology, the team, and the ability to execute to play a major role in this emerging market. Critically, we also have the capital to fund our technology development and expansion plans. The first priority is to capture the opportunity. The next stage is optimizing the results. We are no longer a starter. We are a scaler. We've done an excellent job so far in capturing the opportunity. Now we can also start focusing on optimizing the results. I can't imagine a company better positioned for this opportunity, and I'm excited to be able to shepherd Fratera on the path to get there. With that, we will open it up to Q&A. Operator? Operator?
spk02: At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press star one. In the interest of time, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. Your first question comes from the line of Courtney Yacovonis with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
spk08: Hi, good morning, guys, or good afternoon. It's been a long day. If you could, you know, just give us a little bit more color on the guidance for powered and energy revenue to more than double to above $100 million, you know, how should we be thinking about how the powered side should ramp versus the energy side? You know, I think you talked about a couple large infrastructure charging projects that should be flowing through, but then, you know, also I believe you talked about some contracts that we're creating that were priced aggressively from 18. Are those also included in that $100 million, and will there be any margin dilution associated with that?
spk00: Hi, Courtney. Thanks. Appreciate the question. So as far as the $100 million for power and energy goes, we have a strong order book for power production through our contracted orders going into next year. So we have a pretty clear line of sight to the production requirements there. The energy business, a little harder to have a clear line of sight to the timing of those projects, as we've highlighted on some previous calls and again today. The infrastructure projects can be less predictable given just the nature of the environment we're working in where if the land is not ready for us to be able to install equipment at a given time for whatever the reasons, It does create some delays for us in certain environments. So it's a little harder to be accurate on the timing of those programs. So we don't split the revenue forecast for powered energy, but certainly we have a much clearer line of sight to the order book and the production timing of what's on the powered book than we do on energy.
spk08: I appreciate that you guys don't split it out. Maybe if you could give us any guideposts for battery systems, targets versus megawatt charging infrastructure installed for the full year just to help give us some framework there.
spk00: So again, we don't break it out into what portion of the revenue is coming out of powered and what portion is coming out of energy. I think it'd be fair to say that in 2022, it biases towards powered, given the clarity we have on the order book and the production planning we have for that product. And as I say, on the energy side, we have a little less control over the timing of the site implementation. And so it biases towards powered.
spk08: Okay, fair enough. And then just one follow up on the transit side. I think you're originally intending to add a second shift next year. Now it sounds like, you know, guidance is only assuming one shift. You know, can you give us any color on, you know, what type of improvement in the supply chain or specifically what the bottlenecks are, you know, and if those do improve, you know, what would be the lead time, you know, to adding that second shift to transit in the back half of the year?
spk00: Yeah. First of all, let me just say, you know, as we go to 2022, Demand is not the challenge for us. We've shared with you that our contracted orders and backlog for both transit and power and energy is healthy at the roughly $1.3 billion mark. So we're confident in the demand that lies ahead of us. Your point about transit production, yes, we are still constrained, running on a one-shift operation, intentionally so, because Until we can ensure that we have stable material flow to the line to be able to keep an efficient second shift running, it really doesn't make sense to ramp up in scale from a cost efficiency point of view. So we're eager to get a second shift running. But right now, the challenges we see on the supply chain side, like we reported last quarter, I mean, resin is still a significant material constraint for connectors and wiring harnesses. Until we have a good stable flow of product like that, it's very hard to scale up a second shift in your production line. I would also say though, There's the actual physical product where we have some constraints on supply, but also the situation around distribution and freight across the globe is still very challenged. Ports are still clogged up. We see long delays in getting product from point of manufacture to point of our production line in some cases. But more importantly, it's still a little unpredictable. So ultimately what we're looking for to be able to ramp up our second shift is stable supply of raw material to our production line in a way that we have confidence we can run it efficiently and cost effectively. As I said, the demand is not a challenge. We have the demand and we're ready to meet it. We have the team to execute on it. We have the production capability. We have the quality management systems. We've just got to make sure we get stable material flow.
spk08: Thank you.
spk02: Your next question is from the line of Brian Johnson with Barclays. Your line is open.
spk06: Thank you. Just kind of continuing in that vein, you know, the $1.3 billion backlog, I just want to confirm, that's up from $750 last year, which would imply a pretty healthy book-to-bill ratio. That's correct. I know you're not doing backlog quarterly.
spk00: That's right. I mean, we committed to report our backlog once a year, and this is the time that we're doing it. And you can see, you know, the book has built nicely, and it's well balanced between the portfolio. As we noted, you have around $450 million on transit and around about $800 million on power and energy.
spk06: Okay. So clearly that $1.3 billion supports more than the $300 million. your 300 million next year. But if you don't sign anything else, that would only be 330 million a year in 23, 24, 25. So I guess a couple of things, kind of one, you know, in terms of the pipeline, that's not yet backlogged. Did you get some comfort in growing well beyond that $300 million? And then two, and I think we're kind of circling around this in the last question, you know, if there weren't supply, chip supply or other spiking constraints, given the career factory would open, what would be the theoretical max capacity, max production for next year? I mean, excuse me, for this year. Let me see.
spk00: Yeah, as you know, from our single shift operation, we're running at around about 200 units. If we can run a two shift operation for transit bus, we have a capacity of around 400 units. So once we can get the line fully supplied with raw material, we certainly have growth potential from a production point of view and the ability to feed into that order backlog.
spk06: Okay. And in terms of pipeline of negotiated but not yet signed, does that support for the backlog growth into next year?
spk00: Yeah, for maybe a little bit of clarity, when we talk about contracted orders, that's typically on our power side of our business. The way we build those contracts is we report on minimum order quantities. On the transit side, we talk about backlog, which is typically what comes from the LOIs that we would receive from transit authorities. And in those cases, we know that they have the funding in place to support those LOIs. We don't count options in our backlog. So what you have in that number is essentially what we know under the LOIs. Again, I think the mind is clear on both sides of the business with fairly good line of sight to those numbers.
spk06: Okay, thanks.
spk02: Your next question is from the line of Sharif El-Sabi with Bank of America. Your line is open.
spk03: Hi, good afternoon. so uh then first off not to uh to over discuss the the guide a bit too much but looking at some of the numbers that have been provided around 2022 outlook prior to this would you say that without any of the supply chain constraints that those numbers would likely be achievable given the demand backdrop yeah i think um if we think about the growth outlook um
spk00: As I noted, the demand is there, and we talk about sort of the idea of needing roughly 40 gigawatt hours of batteries by 2025 for trucks and buses just in Europe and the U.S. from what today is just a couple of gigawatt hours. The demand is there, but if you consider what sort of disruption we've seen to supply chain and production in the past 12 to 18 months, the demand curve does shift to the right, simply because we haven't been able to fulfill the demand. So the curve does move to the right, and so the rate at which we continue to build our growth is a little different to what we saw 12 to 18 months ago. What I have confidence in, though, is that when you have the demand out there, we've demonstrated with a 25% compound annual growth rate since 2018, and now guidance towards 24 to 34% growth for 2022, we have a constant drumbeat of growth building in this business. So we know that we're able to scale and meet demand, but we're not going to give a forecast on an outlook that's just it's just not clear enough for us to see four or five years out from now, given the kind of disruption we've seen in the supply environment and how it's impacted production. The final thing I'd probably comment on there is that speaks a lot to the transit environment. I do also just want to mention that Battery Factory 3.0, when that comes on stream in Greer, South Carolina, it's fourth quarter this year. We know that The greatest benefit of that comes in 2023. There we're also very excited to be able to set up a large-scale facility where we have the opportunity to not only meet demand but also do it in a cost-efficient way because it's a large-scale production facility. So there's a lot of positive opportunity ahead of us that we can lean into as we continue to secure a better supply chain fulfillment in order to meet that demand.
spk03: Understood. Thank you. And just as a follow-up on the gross margin, you mentioned that there were pass-throughs that would take some time to come into effect. What's sort of the lag that's currently built into those contracts? And are you taking a different approach to your long-term contracts after this last year of turbulence?
spk00: I'm sorry, I missed the first part of your question. It was dead spot on the line for a moment. Would you mind just repeating it for me?
spk03: Of course. You had mentioned there was a bit of a lag with some of the pass-throughs and long-term contracts. What's sort of the timeframe of that that's built into the portfolio of long-term contracts, and are you taking a different approach to those contracts going forward given the turbulence in the past year?
spk00: Yeah, that comment was specifically relating to the energy business where we're building charging infrastructure that's sort of fleet-scale solutions to meet the needs of these depot charging requirements for multiple vehicles running out of a single depot, as you can appreciate, those are pretty large-scale infrastructure projects. And as I mentioned, infrastructure projects are not always that easy to predict where you might see delays. I mean, it could be anything from permitting to site readiness to And candidly, in our case, we've had, again, issues with on-time supply of products. So it's something where I can't say with any certainty what kind of impact that might bring, but we certainly continue to plan as best as we can with the parties that we're working with on those site developments.
spk02: Thanks. Your final question comes from the line of Stephen Fox with Fox Advisors. Your line is open.
spk05: Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. Two questions. First off, can you address a little bit more in detail the inflation pressures you're seeing from two aspects? One, I think you mentioned that you're going to try to reprice some of your backlog, which doesn't seem to be having much success in the supply chain today. So where do you think you could have success on that? And then secondly, When we think about sort of some of the guidance you gave for this year, what are you sort of thinking in terms of inflation going forward from here? And then I had a follow-up.
spk00: Sure. Yeah, first of all, I think on inflation specifically, what I would say is we're seeing the cost pressure already in our business. We've responded to that and have – engaged in discussion with existing customers around the opportunity to seek price relief given that input cost pressure. And we continue to have those discussions on an ongoing basis. But equally, we've also, for a product that is being sold at the moment by our team, we have taken price action already. So I expect that we will see some benefit from that action being taken. But there will be a lag, right, because we've already seen the cost pressure coming on the supply side. We've responded on the demand side. And there is a lag effect that occurs between the timing of that and the opportunity to recover some of that impact.
spk04: And what about repricing the backlog? Is that a significant effort or is that sort of on the margin? I'm trying to understand that comment if I heard it right.
spk00: No, I think there is a significant effort. There are some contracts we have in place with customers that allow us to respond to inflationary pressure, and others do not. So we don't have a homogenous contract environment. As you can appreciate, the transit authorities and contracts for transit buses are very different to what a contract might look like for a powered customer and equally for an energy contract. So it's not a homogenous contract landscape, but we do have opportunity in some of them.
spk05: okay that's helpful and then just lastly just bigger picture understanding that obviously a lot of these impacts are out of your control but um trying to set expectations correctly you know i'm thinking about you know the new battery uh plant coming online by the end of the year the risk that that gets pushed out the risk that um you consider you see uh constraints on um you know wiring harnesses even though you have a massive backlog that could grow a lot more this year Like how do you leverage that backlog in order to become, you know, sort of get a bigger pencil in the supply chain and make sure that you start hitting a lot of these aggressive plans? Thank you.
spk00: Yeah, thank you, Stephen. That's a great question. As I said, we're a business that has gone from startup to scale up. So first of all, you know, we have a leadership team in place and a broader team that is experienced in, in running production systems, operations, management systems, supply chain systems, quality systems. That's an important tool to have at a time like this. So we have in our supply chain team a continuous process of looking at how we can find opportunity to, in some cases, consolidate volume to get volume opportunity with a supplier where we think that that will be beneficial. But in other cases, we actually have to look for alternate sources of supply and diversify our supply base so that we de-risk it. That's a constant series of actions that you have to go through to make sure that you're optimizing your supply chain risk. So there's no single action around that. That's a process of continuous optimization given that we're in a dynamic market where it is, in fact, sometimes very difficult to predict where the next constraint might come. So I think one of the big assets we have is the management operating system to be agile and be able to respond to the market, and we're continuing to invest in that and improve our capability. One action, as we shared with you on past calls, that strategically we knew was very important was to lock in a long-term supply agreement on cell supply with LG Energy Solutions. That was a very important strategic step on behalf of our supply chain team, and it's continuing to think about opportunities like that to ensure the security of supply.
spk05: I appreciate all the color. Thank you very much. Good luck going forward. Thank you, Stephen.
spk02: There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Gareth Joyce.
spk00: Well, thank you, and I'd just like to express my sincere thanks to everyone who joined us today, and certainly looking forward to the exciting journey that lies ahead of us. Appreciate your time. Thank you.
spk02: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This concludes today's conference call. You may now
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