The Lion Electric Company Common Shares

At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Isabelle Arche, Vice President, Investor Relations and Sustainable Development. Please go ahead, Ms. Arche.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Lions' third quarter 2023 results conference call. Bienvenue à la conférence téléphonique. sur les résultats financiers du troisième trimestre de l'exercice 2023 de Lyon. Today, I am here with Marc Bédard, our CEO-Funder, Nicolas Brunet, our President, and Richard Coulombe, our Chief Financial Officer. Please note that our discussion may include estimates and other forward-looking information, and that our actual results could differ materially from those implied in any such statements. We invite you to review the questionary language in this morning's press release and in our MD&A, which contains important information regarding various factors, assumptions, and risks that could impact our actual results. With that, let me turn it over to Marc to begin. Marc?

Thank you, Isabelle. Good morning, everyone. Today, we are pleased to report that in Q3, we achieved record deliveries, revenues, and gross margins, clearly showing that our focus remains our goal to profitability. Compared to Q3 2022, we basically doubled our revenues with approximately the same SG&E expenses, and our gross margin went from negative 9% to a positive gross margin of over 6%. mostly driven by higher volume, favorable average selling price, and continued cost control. We had a significant EBITDA improvement as well, increasing from negative 15.1 million in Q3 2022 to negative 3.9 million in Q3 of this year. Also, we now have more than 1,600 vehicles on the road with more than 19 million miles driven or 30 million kilometers, a significant achievement demonstrating our leadership position in the EV space. It is also my pleasure to acknowledge recent leadership appointments. Nicholas, who got deeply acquainted with Lion's products, customers, and operations over the past four years, was named president and works with me on the elaboration and execution of all strategic aspects of the business. His main focus being our commercial operations and the acceleration of sales across the United States and Canada. Richard, who has been instrumental in driving our growth projects with a lot of success for the last two years, was appointed Chief Financial Officer. Richard will leverage his 25 years in executive finance roles to support our objectives of profitability and positive free cash flow. I will now provide an update on several key decisions we have made to focus on our profitability objective and optimize capital usage. On the bus side, we will postpone the commercial production of the Lion-A school bus to prioritize the commercial production of our high demand products and the timely integration of our Lion batteries on our existing platforms. On the truck side, the litigation with Nikola Motors and their decision not to supply us with the Romeo Power batteries will result in us using our own Lion batteries on our Lion-A tractor truck, thus postponing its market entry to mid 2024. And finally, we have great news with respect to both the Lion 5 truck and the Lion D school bus as we started commercial production for both of these vehicles and will soon begin customer deliveries. Now turning to our manufacturing plans and operations. In Joliet, we now have the infrastructure in place to reach a production capacity of 2,500 school buses per year. During Q3, we continued to ramp up the production of Lion C buses And as I just mentioned, we have also started the commercial production of Lion D units. At our battery plant, we continue to ramp up production of Lion battery packs during the quarter. The current production line allows us to reach production capacity of 1.7 gigawatt hour per year, enough to power over 5,000 of our vehicles. The certification process for the Lion packs is progressing well, and we expect final certification to occur before the end of the year. With respect to our innovation center, the building is currently being used as a testing and certification center for our vehicles and batteries, as a pre-delivery inspection site, and as a warehouse for inventory. This allows us to leverage space available and optimize operational efficiency. Additionally, we will soon start using the innovation center as a showroom and delivery center for customers to see and test our vehicles on our test track and take delivery. In a nutshell, we have been able to expand our manufacturing capacity to our targeted levels, and the capex investments for our two growth projects will be completed by the end of this year. On that note, I will now ask Nicolas to dive into our commercial operations performance. Before turning it to Richard, we'll discuss the financial highlights of our Q3 results. Thank you, Brett.