Ouster, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome everyone to Ouster's first quarter earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After today's presentation and remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If you would like to ask a question during this time, press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again. The call today is being recorded, and a replay of the call will be available on the Alster Investor Relations website an hour after the completion of this call. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Sarah Ewing, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I'm joined today by Alster's Chief Executive Officer, Angus Bacala, and Chief Financial Officer, Ana Brunel. Before we begin the prepared remarks, we would like to remind you that Ouster issued a press release announcing its first quarter financial results shortly after market closed today. The company also published an investor presentation, which is available on the investor relations section of Ouster.com. I'd also like to remind everyone that during the course of this conference call, Alster's management will discuss forecasts, targets, and other forward-looking statements regarding the company, including statements from its press release, future customer orders and shipments, near and long-term revenue opportunities, market share trends, future products and commercial paths, potential future opportunities, customer traction, winning an OEM, intended to be covered by the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 for four looking statements. While these statements represent management's expected future results and performance, Oster's actual results are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations that we may share with you today. In addition to any risks highlighted during this call, you should consider outsource future results as described in its most recent annual report on form 10k and its other filings with the sec except as required by law rule or regulation the company undertakes no obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements for any reason after the date of this call information discussed on this call concerning the company's industry competitive position and the markets in which it operates sources and management estimates. Management estimates are derived from publicly available information released by independent industry analysts and other third-party sources, as well as data from the company's internal research and are based on reasonable assumptions and computations made upon reviewing such data and its experience in and knowledge of such industry and markets. By definition, assumptions are subject to uncertainty and risk, which could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in the estimates. During this call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, which exclude the effects and events and transactions we consider to be outside our core operations. These non-GAAP measures should be considered a supplement to, and not a substitute for, measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. For a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please refer to today's press release. I would now like to turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Angus McCullough.

Hi, everyone. Following the breakout year in 2021, Alster continued to bolster its strong position in the market in the first quarter. We maintained positive gross margins, introduced new solutions, and delivered on major automotive milestones along our product roadmap and with our strategic OEM partner. We believe these developments will act as catalysts for growth in each of our target industries and further improve our position in the marketplace. At Alster Automotive, we are pursuing a hardware-first strategy focused on winning the multi-billion dollar opportunity to supply LiDAR hardware into consumer vehicles through the superior price and performance of digital LiDAR. Astra Automotive announced the Digital Flash, or DF series, for automotive last fall, the industry's first multi-sensor suite of short, medium, and long-range solid-state LIDARs for comprehensive coverage around the vehicle. Just like Ouster's OS scanning sensors in market today, the Digital Flash series is powered by a single silicon CMOS chip, enabling us to scale performance in line with Moore's Law, unlike any other LIDAR company, while simultaneously dropping cost and complexity. We continue to track towards automotive readiness for our DF series to support automotive programs starting production in 2025. In the first quarter, we announced the Chronos chip, the automotive-grade, fully custom digital LiDAR system on chip that will power our DF solid-state sensor suite. The Chronos chip is the foundation of the DF architecture and will enable us to deliver more performant, power-efficient, and compact sensors for automotive series production programs. We also shipped the first DF A-sample sensors, delivering on a major milestone in our strategic development agreement with our global automotive OEM partner. We plan to present the upgraded A-sample to over 30 additional auto OEMs, Tier 1s, and AV companies in order to unlock new commercial opportunities and progress to the next round of discussions with those already in motion. The A-sample is another step on the path to achieving what consumers and automakers alike are pushing for, vehicles with safe, convenient, and reliable autonomy features that they can trust with their lives. LiDAR is the bridge from driver assistance to true autonomy, and digital LiDAR goes further to make these systems more feature-rich and affordable for everyone. With no moving parts, Ouster's DF series is the first solid-state digital flash LiDAR on the market. By absorbing the system complexity into the chronos chip, Ouster's suite of short, medium, and long-range DF sensors offers automakers greater affordability and flexibility in vehicle design and coverage. Ouster Automotive can offer a total of up to five VF sensors for roughly $1,000, a lower price and smaller overall size than the single forward-looking analog ladders offered by some of our competitors. This price and form factor advantage extends to single sensor RFQs as well. By being small and affordable, a suite of DF sensors can be integrated around the vehicle, just like digital cameras, to provide 360-degree awareness and a rich set of safe economy features. Short, medium, and long-range LIDARs looking to the front, sides, and behind the vehicle provide the critical data necessary for safe automated lane changes, confident maneuvering through four-way intersections, reliable high-speed merges, and so much more. A vehicle powered by a single forward-looking LiDAR cannot even navigate a four-way intersection without driver oversight. Put simply, multi-sensor digital LiDAR suites are the bridge from driver assistance to safe, affordable autonomy. Turning away from automotive into smart infrastructure, our team was excited to announce the launch of the Ouster Accurate Vision Security Solution this past quarter. Ouster Accurate Vision is a joint security solution that combines Ouster's 3D digital LiDAR with industry-leading security software from Tacticalware, a hexagon company, to target the multibillion-dollar security market. Nearly every high-value piece of infrastructure has a security system in place, from industrial sites and high-value warehouses to airports, military and defense buildings, and data centers. today this market is dominated by cctv cameras and thermal cameras that passively record the events unfolding around them 3d lidar based systems are paradigm shift because they can generate active alerts in real time while providing all of the passive recording capability of legacy technology we see a massive opportunity to disrupt this market with our ouster accurate vision digital ladder security solution Turning to other product updates, we remain on track to release the L3 chip later this year, which will succeed the L2X chip in powering all of our OS sensors. The L3 chip is the culmination of years of R&D inside Ouster and keeps us on the exponential performance path of Moore's Law. The improvements provided by this fully custom and proprietary chip design leverages technology advancements that revolutionize the camera sensor industry and brings them to the high-performance ladder industry for the very first time. I simply can't wait to unveil it to our customers as planned later this year. Another benefit of our digital roadmap is our ability to ship continuous over-the-air software updates to all of our customers, which introduce features that expand our ability to win additional opportunities across our TAM. Since the introduction of our first OS sensor, we have released five firmware updates. Our latest firmware introduces new features to make our sensors more adaptive for remote applications, including data flexibility for faster, more efficient edge computing. We expect these updates to also benefit industrial customers who are accustomed to processing limited data from legacy 3D LiDAR sensors, but are eager to adopt high-resolution 3D LiDAR to improve safety and performance capabilities. We continue to invest in building out a best-in-class software development experience that serves as the foundation of our entire software ecosystem. We recently released an updated version of our software development kit, or SDK for LiDAR, and continue to see tremendous customer adoption with hundreds of downloads each month. Again, this is an important tool that accelerates our customers' time to autonomy, enabling them to test and validate our sensors faster and bring their applications to market sooner. This year, we expect to release more products spanning hardware and software than ever before. Advancements with our DS series for automotive, L3 chip, software ecosystem, and industry certifications are expected to be major catalysts for digital ladder adoption across our four target industries and directly contribute to our growth this year and beyond. I'd now like to turn the call over to our CFO, Ana Brunel, to provide a full update on our Q1 2022 financial results and business outlook.

Thank you, Angus. We made substantial gains over the course of 2021, nearly doubling our revenue over the previous year. We continued our momentum in the first quarter of 2022, recording our second highest quarterly revenue of $8.6 million, up 29% over the first quarter of 2021, and aim to double our revenue again in 2022. We shipped 1,550 sensors, the first quarter of 2021 and produced a record 4,368 sensors, demonstrating our ability to scale to meet market demand. As discussed during our earnings call for the fourth quarter of 2021, we expected some revenue variability in the first quarter and remained confident in our commercial pipeline for the year and our ability to continue to win deals in head-to-head competition across each of our four verticals. We delivered gross margins of 30% up from the 26% gross margins recorded in the first quarter of 2021 and in line with the 30% gross margins recorded in the fourth quarter of 2021. Our proven manufacturing and operations team continued to secure our source materials and scale production of our OS sensor despite headwinds from continued supply chain challenges. Over the course of the first quarter, our average cost per unit sold was up slightly from the fourth quarter of 2021, primarily due to lower absorption of overhead costs per unit. One, we expect our average cost per unit sold will continue to decline faster than our average selling price as our sales volumes continue to increase.

We believe Ouster has the highest

hardware gross margin profile of our public LIDAR peer group, validating our leading cost structure associated with our CMOS digital LIDAR architecture, which enables high scalability in both performance and cost. Over the last quarter, we converted additional pre-production and production-level customers to Strategic Customer Agreements, or SEAs, To date, Ouster has signed 72 SCAs representing over $550 million in contracted revenue opportunity through 2026. While we remain excited about large customer deals in our pipeline, timelines and uncertainties exist. Customers are still learning their ramp rate, which can impact the timing of purchase orders quarter to quarter. We continue to improve predictability into our customers' needs and timelines as we grow. such that the timing of orders will have a smaller impact on our quarterly results as we scale. We believe our diverse group of SBAs exemplifies the success and the importance of our multi-market approach, as Ouster is not dependent on a single or small handful of customers or even one market vertical with revenues expected to ramp in 2025 and 2026, but rather on both auto and non-auto opportunities that offer revenues and attractive margins in both the near and long term. Our capital allocation plan continues to focus on three key areas. To accelerate our product roadmap, to expand our software offering, and to build out our global sales and marketing team. These initiatives will support our aim to at least double revenue growth this year increase our market share across our four market verticals, and continue to extend our technical advantage over our peers. We continued to ramp our commercial engine and sales pipeline over the first quarter and subsequently shipped new software updates with the release of a new firmware and software development kit and made headway towards the future release of our own verticalized software solution. We also shipped our first digital flash series A sample, achieving a major milestone within our strategic development agreement with our global auto OEM partner as we advanced towards automotive readiness for series production starting in 2025. We were able to make these strategic investments while maintaining a cash balance of approximately 163 million at the end of the first quarter. Following the close of the first quarter, and as described in our 8K, Alster further strengthened its financial position with a $50 million term loan with no dilution to equity holders, including immediate access to $40 million in cash and a potential additional $10 million in 2023, subject to satisfying certain conditions. With this step, we are putting in place corporate finance best practices to ensure access to capital as needed. In the first quarter, we added 90 new customers and expanded sales to existing customers in line with the three major market trends playing out across our target industry. The shift to electrification, advanced safety and autonomy in automotive, the automation of our global supply chain in industrial, and the widespread investment in privacy, safety, and efficiency of our day-to-day lives in smart infrastructure. While we continue to execute on our DF product roadmap and advanced negotiations for automotive series production programs starting in 2025, we have a rich automotive business today across robotrucking, robotaxis, shuttles, and buses. In 2021, we shipped 34% of our sensors within the automotive vertical, which represents a $1.9 billion total addressable market by 2025. In the first quarter, we ship sizable orders to multiple trucking customers, both upstarts and OEMs, in the U.S. and Europe, as well as autonomous bus, shuttle, and robo-taxi customers in the U.S. and Asia. Within automotive, Ouster is emerging as a leader in robotrucking, with customers like PlusAI and Torque Robotics and other large trucking OEMs. And we expect this submarket to continue to be a primary driver of growth through 2022. There are approximately 12 million freight trucks in the world, of which approximately 10% need to be replaced annually. Customers are already deploying production fleets today and are using outdoor LIDAR to bring L2 plus autonomy features to freight delivery trucks on our highways, saving fuel and other costs for end customers. Within industrial and robotics, we are benefiting from macroeconomic trends as companies take steps to automate their supply chain to increase productivity and solve for a lack of skilled labor in the market. We saw significant demand from the material handling market in the first quarter of 2022, especially for warehouse automation, where we find new SBA customers also continue to expand our commercial traction in off-highway vehicles for mining and agricultural applications, as well as collision avoidance systems for rail cars. And finally, we saw a significant uptick in the adoption of LIDAR for more greenfield robotics applications across the supply chain. such as drone and rail-based inspection systems and volumetric monitoring solutions for raw materials. Based on our current pipeline, we expect warehouse automation, port and logistics automation, and raw material processing applications for mining and agriculture to be the major growth drivers in 2022 within the industrial and robotics verticals. We continue to gain market share in the existing $1 billion market for legacy industrial sensors as we further display high-cost 2D laser safety scanners and other legacy sensors, making this one of the largest near-term and fastest-growing opportunities for digital LIDAR. The warehouse automation market is just in its infancy and already generating millions in revenue for our business. The market opportunity is estimated at over $15 billion today, as less than 20% of warehouses currently have any form of automation. According to a recent report, the market for mobile robots is estimated to grow 10 times by 2030. Driven by the sale of automated robots, Alster is already working with customers, including large industrial OEMs looking to automate their own fleet, and a large global company, automation companies, including Vecna Robotics, Third Wave Automation, ATI Motors, and Valeo. These customers, as well as our pipeline of future opportunities, position as well to scale in line with market demand. Turning to smart infrastructure, last year we won 110 projects, which represented nearly 3,000 sensors, for initial deployments that have the potential to expand to hundreds of thousands of sensors. We continue to gain traction in the first quarter of 2022 through new deployments and project expansions in airports, highways, streets, and more across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America. These include critical infrastructure, connected vehicles, as well as speed enforcement applications.

The continued expansion of intelligent transportation projects in addition to crowd analytic application to be the primary growth drivers in the smart infrastructure vertical in 2022.

We also see a massive opportunity to disrupt the multi-billion dollar security market with our new joint security solution, Ouster Accurate Vision. where incumbent technologies benefit from the relatively high ASPs and faster sales cycles. We expect the LiDAR industry to evolve in similar ways as the digital camera industry. According to a recent report by Yole, the market for digital cameras for security is the largest non-consumer digital camera market in the world, estimated at 32 billion in 2021. Our growth over the first quarter across each of our verticals, especially a handful of fast-developing sub-markets such as robotrucking, warehouse automation, and intelligent transportation systems, reinforces our ability to capture market share within the $8.6 billion total addressable market expected by 2025. Our differentiated technology, backed by a leading cost structure and our multi-market approach, positions Alster to take advantage of both near and long-term revenue opportunities unchanged. Our bottom-up analysis, based on sales expansion plans, coupled with major product announcements planned for later in the year, provides a commercial path to deliver on our full-year 2022 guidance, of 65 to 85 million in revenue and 25 to 30% gross margin, which we expect will follow a similar trajectory to 2021 with larger customer orders and shipments hitting in the second half of the year. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Angus.

Thanks, Anna. A central theme driving digital LiDAR adoption in each of our verticals is a desire to improve safety and quality of life while increasing efficiency, sustainability, and equity. Applications powered by digital LiDAR have the potential to do just that. Our technology is already creating safer conditions for miners in Inner Mongolia, engineers at nuclear facilities in Europe, and on roadways in the United States and abroad. LiDAR can help reduce traffic congestion to minimize greenhouse gas emissions or monitor critical infrastructure like railways and power lines. These are just a few of many examples. At scale, the positive impact we can have on society is enormous and starts at home with the actions we take at the company. Earlier this year, AUSR announced a sustainability program predicated on the founding principle of our company to innovate and deliver technologies that lead to safer and more efficient vehicles, transportation networks, workplaces, and infrastructure for more sustainable and prosperous communities. We have formed an internal advisory committee to guide our sustainability program and look forward to reporting out our efforts and impact for 2022. In closing, our increased customer product development, combined with... ...to drive near and long-term revenue growth. We believe Digital LiDAR is uniquely positioned to power societal transformations and become an indispensable part of our day-to-day lives. With that, I'd like to open it up for Q&A.

Thank you. We'll now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. When called upon, please limit yourself to two questions. Our first question will come from the line of Tristan Guerra with Baird. Please go ahead.

Hi, this is Tyler on for Tristan. Thanks for taking the question.

First, in light of the supply chain constraints, how are you seeing car OEMs' productive timelines for the ramp of the LiDAR industry? Are you seeing any pushouts, or is everything on track with what you're... You did say car OEMs?

Yeah, yep, car OEMs. Yeah, I can take that.

Thanks for the question. So I guess this is a question around the broader industry.

This is not something that's just historically true if you look at automakers releasing any new technology.

But there's also a subset that are still moving forward, and I'd say the majority of the industry is still moving forward very aggressively.

conversations is a real autonomy and electrification strategies and not let any kind of budget restrictions affect that because it's so core to the business and the future kind of competitiveness of automakers at this point. Thanks.

Yeah, great. For my follow-up, how should we look at your mix by end market this year? I know you talked about some of the growth drivers for each of your end markets, but how should we think of the mix? Do you expect any material changes from last year?

Four percent of our revenue in automotive sector drive a lot of our growth going forward, and we saw the remainder kind of split evenly between and industrial verticals where we're also still seeing more traction. But I think as I highlighted in my prepared remarks, we're infrastructure vertical this year, which was about 15% last year. And, you know, that's primarily around, as we said, you know, the 110 contracts that we signed previously are projected revenue this year.

Yeah, just to add a little more color there. Yeah, just to add a little more color there.

back to again and again because it's really it's the the true green field opportunity for lidar the other verticals we're operating in um there's a lot of understanding and and use of legacy lidar systems and um but but in smart infrastructure there's kind of unbounded opportunity because it's a new use case for lidar and there's such a huge market existing there in digital cameras, almost $32 billion of digital cameras sold just into security, you know, not even talking about smart infrastructure or traffic management or crowd analytics. So absolutely, you know, we see things progressing as is, and that's the safe bet with roughly equal distribution across our verticals, but there is immense potential that we may tap into in smart infrastructure beyond what we're talking about.

Great, thanks for that additional caller.

Our next question will come from the line of Brian Dobson with Chardon Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks so much for taking my question. basis points on stronger average sales prices, and you alluded to navigating supply chain issues. Can you just give us a little bit more color on what was driving that pricing power in the quarter and how you expect pricing to evolve through the balance of the year?

Yeah, I mean, I think we talked a bit about that we had several new customers entering our pipeline in Q1, and as a result of that, that tended to lift our ASPs. And I think, you know, going forward, we've said that we expect ASPs to fall as we are able to lower our COG as we ship more volume. So if you recall, our cost of goods sold are primarily based on volume increases. We expect to see constant margin improvement as we sell more and more volume, and that's just based on our digital architecture. And so we aren't expecting kind of further improvements to the product line to get to the cost structure that we're anticipating. It's mostly coming from these volume improvements. And so over time, historically and into the future, we expect that we'll continue to drop, you know, ASPs in line as our COGS drop. And so that gives us a lot of kind of predictability into the business.

Great. Thanks very much. And then, you know, you mentioned that customers are still learning their ramp rates, and that impacts the timing of orders. You're expecting more sales in the back half of the year. Can you just walk us through the quarterly cadence as you expect it?

Yeah, I mean, I think we're really excited about the guidance that we've given. We guided to $65 to $85 million in revenue, which is nearly a doubling of our revenue over the prior year, even at the low end of that guide. About what we're anticipating over the quarters, you know, we haven't given quarterly guidance historically, but I think that you can see that there have been trends in our business over the last couple of years where we tend to

They have really strong fourth quarters.

And so I think, you know, looking forward, what's really important here is that our guidance is based on our bottoms-up pipeline projections. So, you know, our pipeline supports our guidance.

We have over 600 customers.

We've signed 72 up to strategic customer agreements now where we're getting three- and five-year forecasts from our customers. And so, you know, it's really important that, you know, you understand the bottoms-up projections are supported by those customers in that pipeline. And so, you know, I think we're just expecting a similar trajectory.

Excellent. Thank you very much for the additional color.

Our next question will come from the line of Sam Peterman with Craig Hallam. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I appreciate all the color and the prepared remarks. I did want to ask on the quarter you just reported, obviously revenues below the fourth quarter and below kind of what? That I know you mentioned seasonality. If you could give any thoughts on kind of where you saw it.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think that we saw any weakness in any areas, and certainly we haven't lost any kind of head-to-head deals. you know, major deals with customers. I think when we talked about our projections for 2022, when we gave our fourth quarter earnings update, you know, we did say that we expected some variability going into Q1.

Fundamentally, it's changed in the business.

We're still seeing kind of we're still signing up new customers. We're still seeing them progress through the pipeline.

You know, we get three- to five-year forecasts from many of our customers. I just don't see any fundamentals changing in the business. I think we're really excited about that. Okay, fair enough. And then I wanted to follow up, because obviously your sales guidance for the year, kind of asking it in a different way, obviously the quarter-over-quarter,

increases that would be required are pretty substantial to get to that midpoint of your guidance. And you mentioned a couple different factors. So I just wanted to ask if you could give any color around what end markets are going to drive strength and how much of that outlook that you have is booked versus, you know, you have a lot of sites versus you expect to be spot buys, any kind of color on your level of visibility at this point would be helpful.

What we're seeing around in automotive, for example, around the roadway trucking industry, we're really emerging as a leader and we're working with several large customers there.

you know, that give us a lot of predictability in that sub-market.

And then on the supply chain automation side, you know, we talked particularly about warehouse automation where we're signing new SBA customers, et cetera.

And then, you know, I think also on the infrastructure side, you know, Angus had given some color earlier in response to it. additional new deployments and project expansion, you know, airports, highways, streets, et cetera, and we're seeing that kind of worldwide across all of our geographies. So I think we remain very excited about this year. Appreciate the call, and I'll jump back into you.

Your next question will come from the left. Gerald, please go ahead.

Hey, good afternoon, guys, and congrats on the quarter. Can you hear me okay?

Yes.

Thank you. Most of my questions have been asked, but maybe to follow up on the last one, to get to the midpoint of the guidelines,

let's call it 75 in revenue for the year.

So I'm just wondering, do we account for a bit of like a ramp-up period, or is most of the revenue expected in the color there would be helpful?

Yeah, I could step in and answer it a little bit differently.

First and foremost, we have bottoms-up revenue pipeline that supports our guidance for the year.

Item by item, customer by customer, opportunity by opportunity, because we have the opportunities to support it, and we are winning those opportunities so nothing fundamental has changed about the business growing and we're reaffirming guidance because of that data if nothing else business and we've said that there's going to be a ramp that looks like last year um in the second half of this year as well it's just part of it's part of doubling revenue year over year that we're seeing with customers placing very significant orders and And then in terms of vertical, you know, right now, equal contribution from the four verticals. And I don't see the last year we did 34% of unit shift in automotive. We did about 20 and 25% for industrials and robotics. It was about 15% of units shipped from the smart infrastructure.

And I don't see a significant deviation from that, maybe plus or minus 10% of shuffling between the verticals for this year, just depending on which orders hit when. So, you know, I want to make it abundantly clear there's a reason we're reaffirming guidance. We understand there's a significant ramp that happens, but we've got the data and we clearly are able to ship against it. We're doing great on the manufacturing side.

Got it. Thanks, Angus. No, that's very thorough. I appreciate it. Maybe my quick follow-up is in terms of the margins, which I know has been asked a little bit already for the quarter, you're already at the top end of your guidance, and you've mentioned that you kind of anticipate to improve. So I'm wondering is that 25% to 30% gross margin guidance, is that all of a sudden –

I think you're right.

Go ahead. Oh, sorry.

Yeah, I think we said three months ago that we were giving our guidance on margin in case of further disruptions in the supply chain. You know, the thing that we don't want to, we never want to give our margin guidance and shipping to customers, right, and maintaining our continuity of supply.

So, you know, there may be some upside there, but what we've said is we don't really want it built into models because we retain the right to hit the guidance, which means falling within that range if we need to keep shipping.

Got it. Thanks again, Angus. And, Ana, congrats again on the quarter. I'll pass it on. Thanks.

Back over to Angus Bacala for any closing remarks.

No, thank you all for tuning in.

We're really happy about the year it started, and we're looking forward to the growth that we're seeing.