ChargePoint Holdings, Inc.

At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the ChargePoint first quarter fiscal 2020 earnings conference call and webcast. All participants' lines have been placed on listen-only mode to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there'll be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question at this time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you need operator assistance, please press star zero. I will now turn to the call to Patrick Hammer, Vice President of Capital Markets and Investors Relations. Patrick, please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss financial results for ChargePoint's first quarter of fiscal 2022. I'm Patrick Hammer, Head of Capital Markets and Investor Relations at ChargePoint. This call is being broadcast over the web and can be accessed on the Investors section of our website at investors.chargepoint.com. With me on today's call are Pasquale Romano, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Rex Jackson, our Chief Financial Officer. This afternoon, we issued our press release announcing results for the first quarter ended April 30th, 2021, which can be found on our website. We would like to remind you that during the conference call, management will be making forward-looking statements, including our second fiscal quarter and fiscal year 2022 outlook and our expected investment and growth initiatives. These forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control and could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. These forward-looking statements apply as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements after the call. For a more detailed description of factors that could cause actual results to differ, please refer to our Form 8K-A, filed with the SEC on April 1st, 2021, and our earnings release posted today on our website and filed with the SEC on Form 8-K. Also, please note that certain financial measures we use on this call are non-GAAP. For historical periods, we provide the reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures in the investor presentation that can be found on the Investors section of our website. And finally, Once we've completed this call, we'll be posting the transcript of our opening remarks to our investor relations website under the quarterly results section. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Pasquale. Thank you, Pat.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our first quarter earnings call. Our strong results this quarter reflect our commitment to execution as we continue to build on our established leadership position in EV charging. Our exceptional charging technology built over 13 years and broad customer-based positions ChargePoint to capitalize on the ongoing and accelerating shift to electric mobility. We are deep in execution. And next, I'll share the extent to which our team and operations are scaling to support the unprecedented pace of fueling infrastructure build-up. The ChargePoint team is now over 900 strong. We have attracted and engaged high-caliber talent across North America and Europe, and our productivity remains strong as we transitioned to predominantly virtual operations amidst the pandemic. Our channel partners in North America and Europe help us reach more customers at a local level, including distribution partners, value-added resellers, and installation partners. In fact, we added 53 additional channel partners in Q1. Our support team services a range of customers, from site hosts to drivers. We continue to offer scaled support operations around the clock in nine languages, and our operations and maintenance group is now 180 partners strong. EV charging requires compliance with electricity metering accuracy requirements, and we continue the extensive software work associated with this. The build-out of the new fueling network is supported by our utility and energy partners, and we saw there was an estimated 200% increase in total approved utility customer incentive program funding in North America over the last 12 months. In Europe, our team is engaged with more than a dozen energy retailers and utilities, developing strong partners that want to leverage our technology. We continue to work with the industry to enable drivers to roam across networks without penalty of access fees. The number of roaming ports accessible from a ChargePoint account now tops 175,000. These are just a few examples of what it takes to generate new customer growth, service existing customers, and deliver a great experience for drivers. The EV and EV charging markets continue to gain momentum. Vehicles are essential to this category. According to Bloomberg NES, There were 378,000 EVs sold in North America in 2020. They expect nearly 540,000 to be sold in 2021, an increase of 43%. The European market is large and growing rapidly. Bloomberg NEF expects over 1.9 million vehicles will be sold in 2021, thanks to the addition of over 165 new vehicle models. Vehicle announcements in both markets are accelerating as OEMs commit to electrification. supply chain willing, the new vehicle sales market is poised for a breakout. We believe ChargePoint's unmatched scale and industry-leading platform uniquely positioned us to win business in this fast-growing market across lines of business. This was evident in our impressive first quarter results. As we saw over the past year, our segment diversity helped us to mitigate the impact of COVID-related slowdowns in the commercial business thanks to strengths in our fleet and residential business. We saw a recovery in our commercial business this quarter, which I will address in more detail shortly. Before we continue, I would like to welcome Susan Heste to our board of directors. Susan brings technology and revenue leadership to our board. She currently serves as a strategic advisor and director of Alster Inc., a public LIDAR company. Previously, she led Verizon Telematics' global OEM business. And I would also like to thank Neil Suslik for his many years of service as a board member. Neil made an early commitment to electric mobility as an early investor in ChargePoint and has been a board member since March of 2014. Moving on to the first quarter, we reported revenue of $40.5 million, a 24% year-over-year increase and slightly ahead of the high end of our guidance range. We saw strong trends in all three lines of business, commercial, fleet, and residential, and across North America and Europe. Commercial billings increased by 50% year over year in the first quarter against a quarter last year that was only nominally impacted by COVID. We added a record number of new customers in Q1, bringing the total to more than 5,000. Existing customers expanded ports as EV penetration increased, and this drove top-line growth in the quarter. with a customer rebuy rate at well over 60% in both North America and Europe. We ended the quarter with over 112,000 active public and private charging spots on our network, up from approximately 106,000 last quarter. This reflects activated port growth of 28% year-over-year. We provided active port count as it reflects the ports that are available for use and generating recurring high-margin software subscription revenue. As a reminder, our hardware is always accompanied by our software. We offer both level 2 and DC fast charging solutions. While we continue to observe that the majority of fueling is level 2, we offer higher power DC fast charge solutions for a range of use cases, including those occasions when drivers need to fuel up quickly, such as in fast fill settings and fleet depots. Today, more than 3,500 of our active ports are DC fast charging. We continue to enable a winning driver experience with ChargePoint integrated on a range of screens, from our highly rated mobile app to in-car infotainment systems to proprietary auto OEM apps. We announced our support for Android Auto in April, and this builds on our prior vehicle integration announcements, including Apple CarPlay, Volvo, and Polestar, among others. Now I will discuss in more detail two of our focus areas for growth, our fleet business, and Europe operations. Our fleet business includes delivery and logistics, sales, service, and motor pool, and shared mobility verticals in both North America and Europe. This was a strong fleet quarter with billings up 172% year over year. Fleet billings in the quarter were comprised of a diverse group of clients with a wide array of needs, which speaks to the breadth of our solution offering. We are working with Big Box and other large retailers to design and implement charging solutions for their delivery fleets. IKEA is a great example from this quarter. We are seeing more shared mobility business. With a growing portion of public transit electrified, we are working closely with leading transit authorities with first quarter engagements, including Orange County Transportation Authority in California and Pierce Transit in Washington. New York City continues to deploy EV charging, including ChargePoint solutions, to support its nation-leading municipal EV fleet and is on track to deploy additional network DC fast chargers by the end of 2021 for both fleet and public use. We've seen strong demand for ChargePoint Home Flex, our solution for drivers and single-family residences. We are also seeing corporate customers buying ChargePoint Home solutions for take-home fleets, including through auto leasing and fleet management company LeaseBond, in North America. In Europe, we are working with leading lease management companies like ALD Automotive, for whom we enable automated home reimbursement, public charging, workplace and fleet charging to provide one seamless approach. Our fleet work with utilities continues. This past quarter, we collaborated with Xcel Energy to provide charge point solutions for public charging for its customers at home and across their fleet of utility service vehicles. Fleet is a category that historically understood the significance of the economic benefit of electrification, but has been hampered by the availability of vehicles. We see tremendous potential for growth as more vehicles begin to ship in volume and in a wide range of form factors. Now moving on to Europe. As discussed on our last call, Europe is a key part of our growth strategy. It leads in market adoption of EVs and has progressive policy electrification mandates The charging ecosystem in Europe is fragmented and has suffered reliability issues as compared to the options in North America. Our ground-up technology and field-tested solutions address these reliability issues and are selling well. We continue to invest in our European team. Our European headcount has doubled since the start of 2020 and is just shy of 150. With sales leadership well-established, we continue to grow our sales team We've made significant hires in engineering as well as product and services. Our recent investments are paying off. We had our strongest financial quarter on record in Europe across essentially all metrics. Revenue growth in Europe in the first quarter was up over 140% year over year and activated ports increased 24% sequentially from Q4 to over 4,700. In summary, We believe we are well positioned to pursue growth opportunities in commercial, fleet, and residential in North America and Europe. On the policy front, we are encouraged by the inclusion of EV charging in President Biden's proposed American Jobs Plan for infrastructure funding. We are actively engaged with parties in Washington, D.C., with states across the U.S., in Canada, and the E.U. to provide guidance in shaping policy to support our vision to move all people and goods on electric power. Our balance sheet remains strong with over $610 million in cash at the end of the quarter. Our capital light business model provides us the flexibility to execute on our long-term growth plans. And for more, Rex, over to you.