Symbotic Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to Symbiotics' fourth quarter and fiscal 2024 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. To remove yourself from the queue, press star 1 1 again. I would now like to hand the call over to Charlie Anderson, VP, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Hello. Welcome to Symbiotics' fourth quarter 2024 financial results webcast. I'm Charlie Anderson, Symbiotics' VP of Investor Relations. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance may be considered forward-looking. Such statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially. Please refer to our Form 10-K, including the risk factors. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement. In addition, during this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's press release, which is distributed and available to the public through our Investor Relations website, located at ir.symbiotic.com. On today's call, we are joined by Rick Cohen, Symbiotics founder, chairman, and chief executive officer, and Carol Hibbard, Symbiotics chief financial officer. These executives will discuss our fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2024 results and our outlook, followed by Q&A. With that, I'll turn it over to Rick to begin. Rick?

Thank you, Charlie. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us to review our most recent results. With a strong finish to the year, delivering on our commitment to quickly return to high growth, and historical gross margin levels. This was highlighted by completing a record number of system deployments in the fourth quarter, reflecting solid project execution. System starts also reaccelerated to a record level. For the full year, we grew revenue 55%, more than double the number of sites in operation, and more than doubled our software revenue, reflecting our ability to convert our backlog and scale. Importantly, we expect to maintain a high rate of year-over-year revenue growth while continuing to stabilize our gross margin in our first quarter. Carol will expand on this in the guidance. On the customer front, we recently announced a new customer, Walmex. By expanding into a new geography, Mexico, we are now officially executing on all five of the growth vectors laid out at our investor day in May. namely customer penetration and expansion, new verticals, new products, and now new geographies. Working with WOMX drives home the point that our solution can deliver significant ROI for customers in new geographies and further expands our addressable market. We believe customers in these geographies see the value of our palletizing and transportation savings on top of labor savings. The bottom line is that the number of opportunities we see for our technology portfolio continues to expand, and I'm excited by what that means in both the short and long term for my fellow shareholders. Turning to Greenbox, I'm pleased to report Greenbox continues to make progress building out its team, customer pipeline, and site network. This quarter, we began deployment on a second Greenbox location, this time in the state of Georgia. On the innovation front, we highlighted last quarter that we added vision capabilities to SIMBOTS at customer sites. Among other features, vision gives our customers the ability to perform teleops, which enables remote bot control for enhanced productivity. We have now successfully demonstrated this capability at multiple sites and view it as a key differentiator. We're making targeted investments in both people and products given the expanding opportunities we see in both new products and new geographies to augment our growth. In summary, this quarter we delivered on our commitment to quickly return to higher system gross margin, strong top line growth, and reaccelerate system starts. Our key objectives for 2025 are scaling for growth and investing in our innovation engine, all while maintaining a focus on delivering high-quality systems for our customers. By doing so, we look forward to another year of strong top-line growth, a significant rise in completed sites as our deployment process improves, and expanding profitability. I want to thank our entire team for their efforts, our customers for their trust, and our investors for their support. Now, Carol will discuss our financial results and outlook. Carol?

Thank you, Rick. Before I discuss our financial results, I wanted to address the restatements to our quarterly financial statements included in the earnings press release. As we were reviewing our business processes and preparing our full-year financial statements, we identified occurrences during fiscal year 2024 where goods and services, primarily relating to specific milestone achievements, were expensed prior to the time that the corresponding milestones were achieved. The net result is essentially timing differences between the quarters within fiscal 2024 and has no impact on our full-year results since the appropriate expenses were properly recorded in the fourth quarter. Our earnings press release describes the restatements in greater detail, and we have also posted a supplemental presentation with the variances to our investor relations website, which is also included as an exhibit to the 8K we filed today. As a result of the restatement of the financial results for the previously reported quarters, we'll be filing amended form 10Qs for fiscal year 2024 to reflect the amounts that are included in the earnings press release. We also plan to timely file our 10K next week. With that, let me turn to our financial results. Fourth quarter revenue grew to $577 million, with strong revenue growth driven by solid progress across our 44 systems in the process of deployment. Our exceptionally strong fourth quarter results reflect a favorable alignment of symbiotic vendor and customer collaboration and help contribute to $1.8 billion of full-year revenue. This quarter, we also recorded our first quarter of net income as a public company. We also delivered on our commitment to increase system start sequentially. We began nine new system deployments and completed four systems, bringing us up to a total of 25 operational systems. Turning to backlog, our backlog of committed contracted orders of $22.4 billion remained largely consistent with last quarter, as the revenue recognized during the quarter was partially offset by final pricing on contracts already in the backlog. I will note that WALMAX was signed after the quarter end and will be additive to the backlog next quarter. As mentioned earlier, system margins rebounded strongly, returning to a historical level. Gross margin on software maintenance and support eclipsed 50% for the quarter, trending toward typical industry software margins as more systems go operational. In operations services, we did experience a slight negative gross margin as we added resources at certain sites where we have large projects and are adding new capabilities. We do expect to improve upon this performance and return to modest profitability in operations services as we move through the fiscal year. We finished the year with cash and equivalents of $727 million, which declined sequentially from $870 million in the third quarter. This was driven primarily by the timing of cash receipts that we have since received in the first week of October. For the first quarter of fiscal 2025, we expect revenue of $495 million to $515 million and adjusted EBITDA between $27 million and $31 million. reflecting continued strong year-over-year growth, stable gross margins, and an uptick in OpEx student investments Rick alluded to. In short, we are making the improvements outlined this quarter and expect to realize strong EBITDA margin expansion as we scale. We now welcome your questions.

Operator, please begin the Q&A.

Thank you as a reminder to ask a question you will need to press star one one on your telephone to remove yourself from the queue you may press star one one again, please stand by while we compile the Q amp a roster. Our first question comes from the line of Andy capital with city bank your question, please Andy.

Hi, hello, this is Natalia Bach on behalf of Amy Capuch from Citigroup. The first question I'd like to ask is the margins of the quarter were better than we had guided, and for the first quarter you're calling for stable gross margins with EBITDA margins sequentially lower. Can you help us bridge what is pressuring the margin in the quarter? And as you think about the remainder of the year, Would you say that one Q could be the lowest margin quarter and that margins could inflect sequentially over the course of the year?

All right. Good evening, and thanks for the question. So our gross margin this quarter hit 19.6%, which was a rebound back to historical levels. So we quickly returned to those historical gross margins. If you remember, our three Q margin was depressed due to the elongated construction schedules and the implementation of several improvements that we had put in place. We didn't see that same occurrence in 4Q. As we think through our 1Q25 guide, it really reflects a continuation and a period of transition to higher gross margins as we focus on achieving several significant milestones across some of our larger systems. We continue to prioritize quality deployments, and then we're going to still be on a trajectory to continue to improve schedule and improve costs and expand those gross margins throughout the year.

Okay, helpful.

And then if I could just ask one more question. I think you've spoken about increasing sales penetration in Europe. Can you briefly touch on any updates that you have in that region? And then this quarter, you announced an agreement in Mexico. Would you say that relatively lower cost geographies could potentially be either Symbotic or Greenbox's customers, or was it more of a one-time opportunity with Walmex, given your relationship with Walmart?

Yes, so we have nothing new to report on Europe. We continue to have discussions, but nothing new to report there. On Mexico and new geographies, certainly it speaks highly of the relationship that we have with Walmart and the fact that they're happy with us. But in working with Walmart on understanding these new geographies, I think we're appreciating some of the value creation opportunities that we're creating in other markets other than just the U.S. where supply chains are different, transportation is different, wage rates are different, but there are other things that we add value to. So I don't think Mexico is a one-off. I don't think South America, Central America are one-offs, but right now we have our first customer and we're very excited.

Got it. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jim Rashudi of Needham & Company. Please go ahead, Jim.

Hi. Thank you. I was wondering if we could just go back to the quarter and the revenue coming in above guidance. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what drove that. And the follow-up on that is we don't obviously have a lot of history with the company, but I Don't recall many instances where we've seen sequentially down revenues. So maybe if you could just help us understand what drove the Q4 revenue performance and what's baked into the Q1 guidance. Thank you.

Yeah, so good evening, Jim. So our 4Q24 operational performance. resulted in the $577 million of revenue. This was a really strong quarter driven by several factors. So we talked about significant progress being made on our 44 systems that are in deployment. We completed four systems, which was a record, and we started nine systems, which was also a record for Symbotic. And the schedule delays that we had in the third quarter that we talked about, those elongated construction delays, they corrected faster than we had planned. which allowed us to complete additional milestones this quarter. And so as we think through the strong quarter, our fourth quarter tends to be very strong. We pull in, tends to be similar to fourth quarter last year. Our year end, we come in at a strong level. Our one Q guide still reflects continued strong growth. We're guiding the 40% year over year as we head into the first quarter.

Got it. And Rick, you alluded to some vision technology that you're adding. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the technology acquisition you made of Veo Robotics, what it brings to you, and just in general how you're viewing the M&A environment, if we could potentially see additional technology-type acquisitions.

Yeah.

So Veo is a... a very unique company that has some really valuable IP on safety and access, which is very important because our robots move very quickly. And so the opportunity at Veo was really unique, and we jumped on it right away, hired the whole company. They're working here now, great people. And I think we are going to find... Even in the last quarter, we have a lot more inbound. We're very focused on being a good acquirer and building good relationships with these companies that we're acquiring. The vision technology that we're employing allows for safety and a bunch of other things to be used in applications that typically aren't used in mobile robotics. So we think there's lots of opportunities, and we continue to get inbound for new technologies.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ross Sparnbleck of William Blair. Please go ahead, Ross.

Hey, good evening, guys.

Hi, Ross.

Hey, the Greenbox Georgia announcement, maybe I missed it. Was that with CNS Wholesale or is it a new customer?

No, the Greenbox is our first Greenbox facility that we're building and we're developing a market now to get customers in there. So we're building this without an anchor customer right now, but it'll take about two years before or 18 months before the building actually come live and so we're very actively recruiting customers and we're very focused on a multi-tenant solution which is where we think Greenbox really offers a lot of opportunity and we've had a number of inbounds from both small and large CPG companies and other e-commerce companies. And so now that we have a building, we're very excited that we hopefully will be closing some deals on some customers in the next year or so. But it'll take a while before the building's actually ready for deployment.

Yeah, I can imagine. That's helpful. I mean, how should we think about the financing of that? Is it a CapEx or OpEx decision with you and SoftBank? And this is all to ask. I mean, CapEx is starting to take up a little bit. Is this... late in the green box, or is it just more capacity expansion as you guys look to kind of double your ability to deliver in the next couple years?

Yeah, it's both. I mean, there will be CapEx that will be spent on getting the infrastructure and the Atlanta facility ready, and we're also continuing to invest in new R&D here at Zimbabwe.

Perfect. Thank you, guys. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Mark Delaney of Goldman Sachs. Your line is open, Mark.

Hey, thanks for taking our question. You have Will on for Mark Delaney. And so for my first question, in fiscal 24, you guys have been targeting one or two new customers per year. Is that still the right framework to think about for fiscal 25? And just kind of on that, when you think about your go-to-market strategy and expanding it to some of these new verticals and geographies, do you need to expand your sales force as well?

I was going to – I'll start, and then, Rick, you can talk to what we need to do to potentially expand our sales force. So if I think about one to two customers per year, for 2024, our new customer is Southern Glaciers. We accomplished that in the first quarter of the year. It seems like forever ago. And as we look forward to 2025, as we announced a few weeks ago, Walmex will be our first new customer in 2025 that will bring our customers set to 10. So I think we're still on that trajectory of one to two new customers per year. We always want to make sure we're prioritizing the build out of our $22 billion backlog with our existing customers. and make sure that we're deploying and executing to the systems we have in our backlog as we create capacity going forward to identify additional new customers.

Rick, do you have anything? And we also made the decision this year that we will be expanding our sales force, and we're in the process of designing what that sales force would look like and how big it will be. But we will be expanding our sales force.

Okay, thank you for the color there. And just for my follow-up, On the Walmart deal, I believe you said it was two new systems. Pardon me if I missed it, but how much does that add to the backlog? And then on the pricing side, do those sites have preferential pricing similar to Walmart given the relationship there? Or is it closer to Southern Glazers? Thank you.

So Walmart Mexico will add about $400 million to the backlog. And again, we'll do that in first quarter. So that's for two sites. So the two first sites that we have in Mexico are much larger than what we have seen in what we've deployed so far, and they're also greenfield sites. And so the timeline in terms of when you actually see revenue contributing for Symbotic will be a little bit different timeframe, but the sites are large. We're excited that they are greenfield because it also shows that we have the capability to not only do a brownfield site, but it is a greenfield. Walmart Mexico is not part of the existing contract geometry, and so that's why it's a new customer and a new opportunity for us going forward. We believe that Walmart has clear ambitions to deploy further than the two, but we're excited to get started on the first two.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question. comes from the line of Ken Newman of KeyBank Capital Markets. Your question, please, Ken.

Hey, thanks. Good evening, guys. Hi, Ken. Hey, maybe just to start on the OpEx side. Carol, I'm sorry if I missed it, but can you just give a little bit more color in sizing the OpEx increases in 1Q, just relative to the tech innovations versus you know, maybe some of the EPC insourcing initiatives you highlighted last quarter. Just to clarify, is the insourcing done or just how far are we into it before that's all settled?

Yeah, so I'll start on the EPC. So EPC is not going, you're not going to see increases in our OPEX because that actually flows through our cost of goods sold. So by bringing in the EPC, that is contractual that is part of our build-out of our system. So that's not what you're seeing going in terms of the OPEX. Just to pull on that thread a little bit, as a reminder, we will have a phase transition for bringing the EPC back in-house. And so we continue to phase out our prior, and Symbotic is taking over incrementally several sites. We've begun the resourcing and hiring associated with the sites that we are taking over. So that work is going well. and we will continue to identify both schedule and cost improvements associated with bringing that in-house. From the OpEx perspective, what you're seeing tick up in 1Q25 is primarily around R&D and then additional SG&A as we continue to scale. And Rick highlighted a couple things in the overall script just related to we're going to continue to focus on bringing innovation, and that's really what you're seeing in our tick-up in OpEx and 1Q.

Okay, that's helpful. And maybe just thinking about the growth margin line, obviously, I think you're highlighting expectations for that to be stable, 4Q to 1Q. And I know steel prices have been a larger portion of your cost, and we've seen that rebound here since the end of September. Obviously, there's some debate on just how much higher that could go, just given the tariff situation. Just curious, what are you embedding from a nominal gross margin impact from higher steel costs in 1Q? And Any early thoughts you have on what margins could be impacted, how they could be impacted from tariffs?

So the majority of our contracts on steel have pass-through clauses. And so what we've focused on is making sure that we're identifying a short order turn once we're on contract going and turning on our steel contracts so that we don't have any pricing issues. So we're maximizing that pricing power. and taking advantage of the fact that we've got pass-through clauses in our contracts, and that will continue. So that will give us protection around steel in the event that there are tariffs and higher prices we need to go worry about.

Just to clarify, though, there, I mean, gross profit dollars are protected, correct? But nominally margins could be impacted. Is that the right way to think about it?

Correct. Yeah, correct. Think about it that way. Yep.

Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Damian Carus of UBS. Your question, please, Damian.

Hey, good evening, everyone. Hello.

So, obviously, it seems like a fair amount has changed since you guys reported, you know, some three and a half months ago or so, last time around. You know, there's been the removal of some uncertainties out there for investors, you know, and, and, and the market and the economy, just thinking about kind of some of the uncertainty around the U S election. And obviously kind of, we're moving forward in this said, uh, you know, rate cutting cycle, just curious if that's, you know, changed or helped advance any of your, you know, conversations with customers at all, or not really just yet. And it's kind of still slow and steady, um, on thinking about some of the expansion opportunities with newer customers?

Yeah, I think we always look at the macroeconomic trends, and I fall back on one of the advantages or several of the advantages of our system revolve around the benefits and the returns that for a customer in going ahead and making the CapEx commitments, the returns around labor, the returns around availability of resources, inventory reduction, all of that will continue as we go into any macro uncertainty in the environment.

Okay, understood.

And then a follow-up question on Wal-Mart. So beyond the two DCs that you spoke to, You know, what's a good way to think about, you know, the potential timing of, you know, winning further opportunities with Wal-Mart beyond those two sites and how that, you know, potentially plays out over time?

So how we're thinking about Wal-Mart, we're excited to start with that customer, and we're going to focus on the two deployments that we have in front of us. There is an opportunity. There are several thousand stores across Mexico for Walmart. So we do believe there's expanding opportunities there. But first and foremost, we have to perform on the existing sites that we've just contracted for, and that's what's going to be our goal.

Thanks very much. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Matt Somerville of DA Davidson. Please go ahead, Matt.

Thanks, Carol. In your prepared remarks, you mentioned 44 systems ongoing, a record four completed, a record nine started. How should we think about those metrics, those KPIs, if you will, how they move over the course of 25? I mean, the jump from 39, as an example, to 44, ongoing deployments, I think that's the biggest jump or equal to the biggest jump, obviously, off of a larger jumping off point. But, Jim, help me understand how I should think about those three KPIs evolving over the course of the year, and then I have a follow-up.

Yeah, thanks, Matt. So, certainly, the jump from 39 to 44 in deployment is our biggest one we've seen, and that is driven by the fact that this quarter we started nine new projects. which is a record for us. And I think we've talked about before that we're not going to see a level of nine every single quarter. The considerations around starting a project are a collaboration between ourselves and our customers. We've got to be ready to start as well as they have to be ready to start. I think what we saw this quarter is the four completes. So that's also the highest number we've seen. We've been ticking up from two per quarter to three per quarter, and now we hit four. I think you're going to see that continue in that neighborhood of four, and then we've got a lot in progress, and the more we focus on making sure we're adhering to schedule, I think you're going to see that consistent throughout the year. We don't guide on number of new starts, which I think we've talked about before. Nine is an unusual amount for the quarter. A lot of things pulled together for us to be able to start nine, the confidence from our customer as well as we were ready to start. So I think if you think about 2025 from an annual perspective, you'll see additional starts than what we had in 2024, but it's certainly not going to be nine every quarter.

Got it. Appreciate that.

And then maybe just a little color on, you know, Rick, you mentioned the remote bot capability as part of your prepared remarks. Can you help me understand how that drives more efficiency or more transactions per hour, whatever the right metric is. And then can you also comment on where you're at with your non-ambient system development? Thank you.

Yeah, so the vision really helps us with the reliability of the robots. So the packaging that we deal with, one of the reasons that what we do is difficult is lids pop open, there's dust, Bottles leak. And so in the past, when we started on this journey, our robots had sensors, but essentially they were blind. So now what's happening is that the robot actually sees where there's a problem, can communicate with the operator. And so there's a process of machine learning where we actually teach the robot how to handle these situations. And we can actually run these robots now remotely from anywhere in the world. And so that has made the systems more reliable, and it's given the customers a lot more confidence on our ability to scale and to do bigger systems. So that's the real value of vision. And the vision is complicated because these are not controlled environments. It's not like a fab plant. I mean, the humidity changes. There's dust. There's different products they leak. So the ability to see and to use the vision and to teach the bot how to do better is very, very important to us. And it's been a long journey, but we made huge progress there. As far as non-ambient work, we continue to get discussions with our customers. We're continuing to work on that as far as our R&D backlog, but nothing new to report on that at this time.

Got it. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Matt.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Derek Soderberg of Cancer Fitzgerald. Your line is open, Derek.

Yeah. Hi, everyone. Just another question on Wal-Mex. Carol, you mentioned that Wal-Mex, you think, has ambitions to go beyond those two facilities. I think Wal-Mex has something like 40 or 50 distribution centers. I'm wondering if you can quantify that opportunity. Should Wal-Mex sort of roll out Symbiotic across their distribution network as they have plans for Walmart US? What does that opportunity look like?

Yeah, we don't want to get ahead of our customer. And again, we're excited to start with the first two, and we want to prove that out. As we look at the overall contribution across Mexico, Central America, South America, in terms of the opportunities out there, that has never been contemplated in our TAM or our SAMs. And so we think there's billions of opportunity in that space. Certainly wouldn't attribute all of that to Walmart, certainly not all of Wal-Mart. We have not quantified what the total amount is. I think you're right to think about it in terms of they have a number of distribution centers servicing thousands of stores, and we hope that we're part of that opportunity.

That's helpful. And then, Rick, as my follow-up, just around Greenbox, I'm wondering if you could talk a bit more about the Georgia facility. I'm wondering if that facility, is the point of that to be more of a profit center or a center to sort of prove as a proof of concept for the market? And then, just taking a step back, the Greenbox agreement that you have with SoftBank, I think they committed to $11 billion in orders by 2029. Otherwise, they have to pay you. Is that still generally the framework of that agreement? And do you think you're tracking well along to sort of hit that agreement? Thanks.

Yeah, so I'll answer the first question. Atlanta is one of those places where there's always opportunity to fill up a distribution center. So Atlanta was almost from day one the site that we wanted to go first. We got a good facility. It's over a million square feet. A lot of potential customers there. So Atlanta will be a multi-tenant facility. And in some cases, what we're having discussions with people now is some people might say, well, instead of buying a whole system, maybe I just want to run 100,000 cases a week through your system, and it's a good test pilot. We think Atlanta will be very successful and will create a lot of growth opportunities. And some of the customers have already said, well, if we like Atlanta, where else are you going to go? So we feel good about the ability to build out multiple systems. And to your second question, nothing's changed between the relationship between SoftBank and Symotic, the way we've done this partnership with Greenbox, and we're very excited about where we are.

Got it.

Really appreciate it. Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Anastasio of TD Cohen. Please go ahead, Michael.

Hey, good morning, guys. How are you doing?

We're good. Great. So, yeah, I just wanted to dive a little bit deeper into the Greenbox announcement. I think, like, initial headlines said it was about $150 million or so for a million-square-foot facility. So how does that – how should we be thinking about that from a sizing of a symbolic content perspective? And then just looking at, like, the revenue margin opportunity for Greenbox, how does that compare to, you know, pure symbolic customer sites? Thank you.

So I'll start with that one, and Rick, I'm on top if you'd like. So the Greenbox Atlanta announcement or Georgia announcement that I believe you're referring to at $150 million, the press release that was out there, think about that as the entire warehouse and facility. So a Greenbox site similar to where we go in and build a system with our other customers has a whole lot of other infrastructure associated with it, of which Symbotic is a piece of it. So you could consider Symbotic systems similar to what our average mod size has been on our contracts that we've gotten flow right now for our Symbotic system. So it's no different. But that number that you saw that was out there includes more than just the Symbotic piece, but that's for the overall how Greenbox will operate that warehouse. In terms of Greenbox revenue and margin opportunity, and so our systems that we are selling into Greenbox are a symbiotic system, and so they're similar in revenue and gross margin like we are selling to our other customers. And so it's our portion of that, then we are a 35% JV partner in that, and some of that comes back to

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Rob Mason of Baird. Please go ahead, Rob.

Yes, good afternoon. Carol, I wanted to just circle back to gross margin. Your expectation for the first quarter sounds, you know, similar to the fourth quarter in that regard, but how should we be thinking you know, in fiscal 25, the ability to scale that from that level. If you work through, you know, some of the issues that you talked about last quarter that were, you know, pulling gross margin lower, just where we are on that in terms of the progression.

Yeah, thanks for the question, Rob. So, we've worked through several of the issues that depressed our 3 margin to lower than historical levels. So I'd say what we've rebounded in the fourth quarter is a level we will likely see as we head into the first half of next year. What we'll continue to focus on are what are those opportunities to improve as we look at the back half of 2025 and then into 2026. We recognize we're not at the gross margin we want to be, so we're focused on what can we do to improve schedule, which we've talked about in the past. The faster we can complete the more we can save from a cost perspective, and we're continuing to look at ways that we maximize our cost performance as we're building a system.

Very good. And then next question is just, maybe this is for Rick. I noticed during the quarter you added a new leader with the title around transformation initiatives, and I'm just, you know, to the extent you can speak to that role, what you expect that person to bring to Symbotic?

Yeah, so we've added quite a few new leaders, but I think who you're talking about is a leader who we expect to be able to help us develop new products faster and is a champion for our R&D efforts. So not necessarily doing the R&D work, but actually helping us focus on which R&D projects would be the most valuable to our customers.

Very good. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Greg Palm of Craig Harlem. Your question, please, Greg.

Yeah, thanks. I wanted to follow up on the Walmarts if I could first. I think what struck me as maybe most surprising as your first international win was in, you know, Mexico, a lower cost sort of labor wage region, which I guess kind of begs the question of, you know, what does that mean for your broader TAM? And I'm thinking, you know, broadly speaking, you know, Asia, for instance, does this maybe increase the TAM potential in terms of opportunities of deploying Symbotic in regions maybe you thought weren't, you know, maybe... had an appetite to do so previously.

Yeah, thanks for the question, Greg. Yeah, that's why we're really excited about this particular one. It does emphasize VRY even in those lower-cost geographies. And so Rick alluded to it on an earlier question. It emphasizes sites in lower-cost geographies are also valuing the inventory improvements, the transportation costs, and just the overall quality of what we are able to deploy. So we do think that opens up the geography and really gives another proof point that the system provides the ROA even in a low-cost geography.

In some ways, what is so interesting and reassuring for us is in some ways the U.S. is the hardest market because it really has one of the best supply chains in the world. But when you get to some other markets where the supply chains really are not very sophisticated, there's lots of opportunity to take inventory out, probably in labor in terms of inefficient labor and transportation in terms of getting all the right products in the right place at the right time. So we're very excited, and we continue to learn about the opportunities that there are in these new markets. Got it. Yeah, that makes sense.

And then I guess my other question on gross margin, maybe it's a two-parter. You had a restructuring charge in the quarter, I think, of $775,000. Where was that? You know, what segment was that in? And you alluded to operation services. By my math, I think that was almost like a 100 basis point drag on total gross margin. So... I don't know if the restructuring was in there as well, but like broadly speaking, you know, as you look to Q1, especially in operations services, I think you said it maybe rebounds a little bit, but can you just go in a little bit more detail on exactly what happened in the quarter there?

Yeah, so the restructuring charge was actually a benefit. And so what you're seeing there is the restructuring that we did around inventory two quarters ago. and we had obsolete inventory, we are working to go sell some of that inventory, and we had a pickup associated with the settling of that. And so that's what that 800K roughly was sitting in the restructuring charge. It was actually a benefit. From an operations services perspective, we did have a significant drop in terms of the margin on that What we saw this quarter is we added resources at a couple of sites where we have some large projects in deployment, and we expect that run rate going forward will improve over time. We don't expect to see that negative run rate. We had a few sites where we provided additional resources to ensure our projects were moving forward. Okay. Thanks for that clarification.

Yep. Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mike Lattimore of Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open, Mike.

Great. Thanks very much. Yeah. In terms of cash flow from operations, how should we think about that over the course of the year? Should that, you know, maybe as a percent of EBITDA?

So we really don't have any change to our fundamentals of our working capital. Our cash inflows continue to be front-loaded. What you saw in our cash for this quarter was really focused on timing of receipts, and we expect that to rebound as we head into 2025.

Got it. Great. Thanks. And then on the, basically on the EPC investments, I guess you're hiring basically project managers there. Can you just Maybe tell us how many project managers you've hired, how many you expect to hire over the course of the year.

Yeah, so I won't quantify the number of people, but we have hired the resources for the first, you know, five to seven sites where we're ready to go deploy. We've got program managers in place, as well as a couple of the other resources for each of those sites. And we're moving forward and taking that work on as we indicated last quarter. Okay.

Thanks very much. Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Guy Hardwick of Freedom Capital Markets. Your question, please, Guy.

Hi. Good evening.

Hello.

Hi. Carol, I just wanted to understand your comments on the backlog a little bit. I think you said the backlog was stable. I assume you're talking sequentially there. even though there was over $500 million of revenue burned from the excellent quarter you had in systems revenue. So can you kind of explain a little bit more what happened? I think you said something about contracts being revised upwards. I mean, to borrow a phrase from another industry, it sounds like there's some sort of plus-ups there. Can you explain that a little bit further, please?

Yeah, so you got it. It's that simple. So last quarter we were at 22.8% from backlog, and now we're at 22.4%. And you're going to see our backlog adjust as we continue to deploy systems. And so that reflects the revenue of $575 for this quarter, $577. And then every time we sign an individual project, there are pluses and minuses, puts and takes around what our final configuration might look for that particular project. And so that's what you're seeing as the offsets to the reduction from revenue this quarter. but there were no other specific customers additive to the backlog in this course. So the nine new projects that we all came from backlog.

And I'm just trying to reconcile what you said about systems, 44 systems at the end of the year, what you said about completions and starts going forward. I'm kind of struggling to, it seems like your revenue guidance is quite conservative given what you said about where you are at the year end and where you should be in terms of potentially further completions and starts throughout the year. So it looks like Q1 guidance implies that you have quite a big step down in revenue per average system, whether you look on just the systems deployed at the end of the year, in deployment at the end of the year, or taking the average of the last eight quarters. Is there a particular reason why that should be the case, that revenue steps down on an average system in deployment per basis?

So our 1Q guide reflects strong year-over-year growth. And what you're seeing is fourth quarter was a unique quarter in which we had the highest number of starts that we've seen as well as the highest number of completes and really achievement of significant milestones in this quarter. So our revenue in an individual quarter is more driven by the amount of systems that we have in deployment at a time and just to the nature of the timing of the milestones and where they're at in their life cycle. And so as we look forward to one queue and we've looked at what we have out in front of us in terms of what's in deployment, that's what our guide reflects.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference back to Charlie Anderson for closing remarks. Sir?

Yeah, thank you, and we appreciate everybody for joining our call tonight and your interest in Symbotic. And we look forward to seeing many of you during the quarter at the various investor conferences that we'll attend. Thank you, and goodbye.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.