5/8/2025

speaker
Conference Call Operator
Operator

Hello and welcome to Allstar's first quarter 2025 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, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. The call today is being recorded and a replay of the call will be available on the Allstar Investor Relations website an hour after the completion of this call. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Jim Fanucci, Investor Relations.

speaker
Jim Fanucci
Investor Relations

Please go ahead. Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone.

speaker
Unidentified Moderator
Earnings Call Host / Investor Relations Representative

Thank you for joining our first quarter 2025 earnings call. Today on the call, we have Chief Executive Officer Angus Bacala and current Interim Chief Financial Officer Chen Gung. As a reminder, after the market closed today, Ouster issued its financial news release, which was also furnished on a form 8K and is posted in the investor relations section of the Ouster website. Today's conference call will also be available for webcast replay in the investor relations section of our website. Before I pass the call over to Angus for his opening remarks, I want to remind everyone that on this call, we will make certain forward-looking statements. These include all statements about our competitive position, anticipated industry trends, our business and strategic priorities, and our revenue guidance for the second quarter of 2025. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results and trends to differ materially from those contained in or implied by these forward-looking statements are set forth in the first quarter 2025 financial results release and in the annual and quarterly reports we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today and other than as may be required by law, Oster assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements which speak only as of their respective dates. In today's conference call, we will discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in the financial results release that was issued today. I would now like to turn the call over to Angus.

speaker
Angus Bacala
Chief Executive Officer

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'll start with a brief recap of the quarter, an overview of the market, and an update on our strategic priorities. Chen will cover our financial results in more detail before I close with some final thoughts. Our first quarter results demonstrate our commitment to continued operational execution. We reported revenue of $32.6 million and gross margin of 41%, which includes certain patent royalty of $1.5 million. First quarter shipments exceeded 4,700 sensors. Our balance sheet remains one of the strongest in the industry, ending the quarter with $171 million of cash and equivalents with zero debt. During the quarter, we won multi-million dollar deals across all four of our verticals. Within our smart infrastructure vertical, we expanded our relationship with Laze Pico and signed our largest ever contract for software-attached sales in Europe. LASE will upgrade to REV7 along with Ouster Gemini to power real-time people counting, mobility analytics, and perimeter protection. Within the industrial vertical, we closed a multi-million dollar deal with Komatsu, one of the world's largest heavy equipment manufacturers, to equip their next generation autonomous mining equipment. By replacing legacy 2D LiDAR systems with short and long range REV7 sensors, We are helping Komatsu increase productivity and reduce the total cost of ownership. Within automotive, we were chosen by the mobility subsidiary of a global OEM to supply both short and long range sensors to support the development of their autonomous vehicles. Finally, in our robotics vertical, we continue to expand our relationship with the world's largest provider of mapping and navigation. Ouster is a physical AI company, leveraging our expertise in advanced perception solutions to enable intelligent, real-world autonomy across industries. Our digital LiDAR sensors, combined with our AI software, empower autonomous systems to perceive, understand, and interact with the physical world in real time. Physical AI demands hardware and software that is not only intelligent, but rugged and scalable, qualities that we embed in every product. Turning to our 2025 strategic priorities, we progressed across all three key focus areas. One, scaling the software-attached business. Two, transforming the product portfolio. And three, executing towards profitability. Starting with the software-attached business, we had our strongest quarter yet, landing our largest ever contract for software-attached sales in Europe. Another highlight of the quarter was our partner, Econolite, winning a five-year contract with the Utah Department of Transportation to deploy REV7 and Ouster Blue City to enhance traffic flow, safety, and operational efficiencies at intersections and roadways throughout the state. The Utah DOT assessed multiple LiDAR detection systems, and our solution, in conjunction with Econolite, received the highest overall score. In addition to Utah, we see the potential to expand into additional states as part of the United States DOT's grant for the Connected West project. Moving to LiDAR development, we're excited to be transforming our entire product portfolio in 2025 with new hardware, upgraded firmware capabilities, enhanced features in the Ouster SDK, and expanded software functionality. I want to share some updates on a few of these products discussed in our last call. We continue to see robust customer interest in on-sensor 3D zone monitoring. For industrial and material handling operators, this firmware feature supports collision avoidance on moving vehicles with warnings, deceleration, and emergency stops. By leveraging REV7 and 3D zone monitoring, we recently secured a collision avoidance program with one of the world's largest manufacturers of material handling equipment. I'm optimistic that we will be able to further expand our industrial footprint with this feature. We are also pleased to see rapid customer adoption after the recent launch of our cloud portal for Alistair Gemini, which enables our customers to seamlessly and securely configure, manage, and view all of their LiDAR deployments through a single unified interface. Since its launch last quarter, we already have dozens of customers managing hundreds of their sites on Gemini Portal, allowing these customers to optimize their operations at any time and anywhere. With Gemini Portal, we have combined the convenience of cloud data and device management for Gemini customers for the first time, a key feature for scaling customer deployments. Gemini Portal also supports Alster Blue City, our turnkey traffic management solution to improve traffic management and road safety for all road users. Blue City is the first digital LiDAR solution to leverage a deep learning model for traffic management. And in the first quarter, we achieved a major development milestone in our collaboration with NVIDIA to bring physical AI to cities around the world. Blue City's proprietary AI model has now been trained on over 4 million labeled objects collected from 800 sites encompassing diverse traffic patterns, intersection designs, and environmental conditions using NVIDIA's advanced computing technology for real-time inference at the edge. Deep learning offers significant advantages over classical algorithms, including improved generalization, persistent object detection, and continuous improvement. This expands upon Ouster's longstanding relationship with NVIDIA, including our integration with NVIDIA Drive for autonomous vehicles, NVIDIA Isaac for industrial and robotics, and the NVIDIA Metropolis ecosystem for smart city applications. In addition to reaching new milestones and shipping new firmware and software products, our next generation L4 and Chronos custom silicon remain on track to bring significantly improved performance reliability, and security to the ouster product family. Recent conversations with leading automotive and industrial accounts reinforce the value of our digital ladder roadmap, and we estimate these innovations will more than double our current addressable market. Finally, our solid first quarter results represent another step in our execution towards profitability. We continue to align with our long-term framework of 30% to 50% annual revenue growth maintaining gross margin of 35% to 40%, and operating expenses at or below third quarter 2023 levels, irrespective of the patent royalty. Last week, we announced the appointment of Ken Gianella as Chief Financial Officer, effective May 19th. Ken was most recently the CFO and COO at Quantum Corporation and has extensive operations and finance experience in the technology and communications industries, with both public and private companies. I am confident he will have a positive impact on Ouster. I also want to thank Chen, who will remain with Ouster in his expanded role as Senior Vice President of Strategic Finance and Treasurer for leading the finance group through this transition period. I'll now turn the call over to Chen, who will provide more context on our first quarter financial results.

speaker
Chen Gung
Interim Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Angus, and good afternoon, everyone. In the first quarter, we shipped approximately 4,700 sensors and recognized $32.6 million in revenue. The industrial vertical was the largest contributor to first quarter revenue, followed by automotive. We shipped large volume deals to support applications in warehouse autonomy, robo-taxi, and yard logistics. First quarter gross margin increased by 1,200 basis points year over year to 41%. Gross margin strength reflects the benefit of higher revenues, favorable product mix, and the patent royalty. As Angus stated, our first quarter results include approximately 1.5 million in patent royalty following a confidential legal ruling. This had a positive impact of approximately 300 basis points on GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin. We continue to view 35 to 40% as an appropriate annual gross margin target for the business. For purposes of preparing and presenting our second quarter guidance, we have assumed that we will not have any material revenue from patent royalty. GAAP operating expenses of $37 million in the first quarter were up 12% over the prior year. The increase was primarily driven by higher litigation expenses. We expect operating expenses to fluctuate on a quarterly basis, largely due to the timing of R&D project spending and litigation costs. and remain committed to keeping our operating expenses at or below third quarter 2023 levels. Our balance sheet remains among the strongest in the industry with cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and short-term investments of 171 million at March 31st. During the first quarter, we did not receive any proceeds from our ATM. We are pleased with our cash burn rate in the first quarter, which reflects our strong operational execution and prudent balance sheet management. Finally, a quick note on the geopolitical and macroeconomic environment. The landscape is fluid, and we have worked diligently to assess the effect of tariffs on our costs. We are partnering with our customers to mitigate the impact of these changes. Based on what we know today, we do not expect the currently proposed tariff levels to prevent us from achieving our long-term framework. However, there remains a large degree of uncertainty, and we are currently unable to predict how the demand drivers will play out for the rest of the year. Moving to guidance. For the second quarter, we expect to achieve revenue between 32 and 35 million. I'll now turn the call back to Angus for his closing remarks.

speaker
Angus Bacala
Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Jen. We are starting off the year on solid footing, delivering our ninth consecutive quarter of meeting or exceeding our guidance and making meaningful progress on all three of our 2025 goals. We remain focused on executing towards profitability through the combination of consistent revenue growth, strong gross margins, and stringent control of operating expenses. I'm encouraged to see our business expanding with multimillion-dollar awards from existing customers to support the scaling of their commercialization efforts. We're also seeing a growing number of long-standing Tier 1 customers commit to Ouster for their multi-year production and delivery schedules. The thousands of sensors shipped each quarter and a growing installed base of connected software solutions underscore our customers' confidence in both our product performance and long-term roadmap. These real-world applications exemplify the accelerating adoption of physical AI. Ouster Digital LiDAR, combined with AI software, enables machines to perceive, understand, and interact with the physical world in real time. From bustling cities and remote farms to mines, ports, and global supply chains, Ouster is bringing physical AI to life. With that, I'd like to open up the call for Q&A.

speaker
Conference Call Operator
Operator

At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. We will pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Richard Shannon from Craig Hallam Capital Group, LLC. Please go ahead.

speaker
Richard Shannon
Analyst, Craig Hallam Capital Group, LLC

All right. Thanks, Agus and Shen, for taking my questions. First one I want to ask is on gross margins. If I look at the pro forma number here excluding the patents, revenues are about 43%. This is the third straight quarter you've had above 40%, which is above your 35 to 40% framework here. And while you haven't delineated the software contribution to that, I got to believe it's at least noticeable at this point given your bookings have been good in this area. So I guess I'm wondering why we haven't seen that gross margin framework move up here, and I guess I'd want to delve into a couple of ways that maybe you're thinking about, and if you could address it, that would be great. Is there some sort of mixed dynamics you're expecting in the future, like with automotive, that could bring that down? I think you've been clear on what you expect there. Does this give you some room to lower ASPs while keeping that same margin range, or are you worried about tariffs? Maybe you could just discuss how those bleed into and why we wouldn't see that framework go up at least at some point in time.

speaker
Chen Gung
Interim Chief Financial Officer

Hey Richard, this is Sean. It's a good question. We're very pleased with the margin performance of the business. We have been trending towards the higher end of our range in the past few quarters. So I would know 35 to 40% we look at on a GAAP basis. So when you look at our GAAP gross margins adjusted for some of the one-time items that we have seen in the past few quarters, we are at the high end of the range. And we do believe that that is still an appropriate range for the business. On the software contribution side, we're pleased with the tailwinds that we are seeing in software. What we have said is when it becomes a significant part of the business, we will break it out for additional clarity. And so we'll continue to work on our software efforts and When it's time to give you some additional detail, we'll give it at that time.

speaker
Richard Shannon
Analyst, Craig Hallam Capital Group, LLC

Okay, great. Well, I look forward to seeing that. You guys have done an excellent job in that regard. My second question is regarding the new products. And I know, Angus, you mentioned this in your prepared remarks at least last quarter, perhaps before, but I certainly remember last quarter when you were talking about new products enabling you to double your TAM here. And specifically in your remarks today, you talked about I think, conversations in the, I think, automotive and industrial markets that add a little bit more detail to that. So I guess I'm wondering if you could talk to the improvements with the new L4 and Chronos chips they're going to give you, and what specific areas should we expect to see TAM expansion, and over what time should we see that happen?

speaker
Angus Bacala
Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, thanks for the question. And I'm going to talk a little, probably in more generalizations than you might want, and there's good reason for it. We don't want to talk about unreleased products before they're real. But what you're hitting on is while we don't talk publicly about released products, we are able to communicate the incredibly compelling roadmap that we have to our longstanding and important tier one customers on a confidential basis. And the product releases, some are imminent enough in the next year that we're starting to use that to move customers that are looking for a particular set of features, reliability, ruggedization, functional safety certifications, these kinds of things, that are looking for those in order to move into production, communicate those and kind of cement a longer-term relationship with a customer that already may be a long-term relationship, but one that needs to move into production. So, you know, I see the coming product releases as the most significant, most transformational set of product releases in the company's history, roughly a doubling of our addressable market, and we're already seeing some of that impact again, positive impact where we're able to share our roadmap behind closed doors with our most important customers. A lot more to come on that, but definitely positive signals coming from the roadmap conversations.

speaker
Jim Fanucci
Investor Relations

Great. Thanks for that detail. I will jump out of the queue.

speaker
Conference Call Operator
Operator

Again, if you would like to ask a question, press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from the line of... Colin Roche from Oppenheimer, please go ahead.

speaker
Colin Roche
Analyst, Oppenheimer

Thanks so much, guys. Could you talk a little bit about the testing process that you're going through with some of these new customers and how it's translating into new awards? As you go a little bit deeper with some of these folks, I assume that that process gets a little bit faster and that you're able to accelerate some of the production orders.

speaker
Angus Bacala
Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, so that's a great question. Thanks, Colin. So when you're saying a testing process, so there's Testing, we do testing with customers basically on an ongoing basis. Every time we release new firmware, new hardware, new software in Gemini or Blue City, there's a certain set of customers that want to take immediate advantage of that new capability. So that's one of the ways that we build these kind of long-standing and trusted relationships with customers is through that testing that just happens all the time. And I think what we've seen is with some of the releases we just had, like the zone monitoring feature set that we announced last quarter and now we have at some customers, it's We're testing features that allow customers to move into production for the very first time. So it might be a feature like a ruggedization spec or an environmental spec or a dust penetration capability or a zone monitoring feature. that is a requirement of a company, let's say it's a logistics robotics company or a company like Komatsu that has been working with us for many years, has developed a robust autonomy stack, but needs to check the box on a final couple of features. And we're down to, I'd say, that final couple of features with a lot of customers. And so that testing is proving that they can check those final boxes. and expand the scope of their autonomy R&D development into a production-type scale. And that's a big part of the strategy and the growth outlook for Alster is that we have so many of these customers' pans in the fire baking over the last couple years, and now we're moving tranches of them into production. That's going to fuel our growth for years to come. And it's great to be able to communicate about some really high-quality customers like Komatsu on this earnings call. I think there's going to be more like that to come, given all the activity we're seeing behind closed doors.

speaker
Colin Roche
Analyst, Oppenheimer

Amazing. And then just in warehouse automation specifically, can you just give us an update on how close you are to fully validating functional safety and how quickly that full validation could trigger some new orders? And that's it for me. Thanks.

speaker
Angus Bacala
Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, so the functional safety certifications and capability is important and coming in future products that we're releasing. We're not giving a lot of detail there, but it's a major focus of future products coming from Ouster. Now, the value that we bring is that traditionally we play in a non-functionally safe LIDAR space, meaning that you need to, as a customer of Ouster, if you're using our products and you want to use them in places where you need to protect human lives. You need to go through your own certifications and usually build redundancy into your system adjacent to the LIDAR. With functionally safe LIDAR, we can tap into new markets that rely solely on the LIDAR itself to provide that safety for humans in and around the vehicle. So the customer can side step a safety certification or cost and time associated with system level certification. There's a huge amount of value there. There's a huge established market for functionally safe LIDAR. And we've been investing in this for a long period of time. So as to when that will make a major impact on Alster's business, it's coming, but we're not committing to a particular timeline. But given the immense opportunity, there's a huge focus internally here on it.

speaker
Conference Call Operator
Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Casey Ryan from West Park Capital. Please go ahead.

speaker
Casey Ryan
Analyst, West Park Capital

uh good afternoon everybody um there's a lot of exciting things to talk about here for the quarter um when you mentioned shen you mentioned robo taxis being an area could you guys give any color on the region if it's sort of you know global robo taxi opportunities or north america or europe or any sort of color around what that category means you know as we move forward in 2025.

speaker
Chen Gung
Interim Chief Financial Officer

Casey, that's a good question. Historically, we've talked about a couple of our Robotaxi customers, Motional being one of them, Mabeability being another. I think generally, Robotaxi as an industry, as a trend, has accelerated over the past 12 months, especially in San Francisco. You see them utilized on a daily basis. It's becoming a real example of physical AI. And so we continue to support that trend, and it's part of Alistair's ability to make physical AI happen.

speaker
Casey Ryan
Analyst, West Park Capital

Okay, and so Motional and May, I think, are sort of North American-centric, if that's fair to say.

speaker
Angus Bacala
Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, so right now, I mean, those are two of our high-profile named Robotaxi customers. We have some Robotrucking customers, but Largely, we're tapping into a North American market. The other big market for robotaxis is a Chinese robotaxi market. We really don't play in that space for a variety of reasons, but we feel we're well-positioned in North America. We have some marquee customers there. There's some positive tailwinds for those customers. I saw just, I think, last week, Maymobility announcing a contract with Uber to get onto their network and expand their offering. You know, Robotaxis are seeing some positive trends. We're partnered with some of the best companies in the space and looking to expand our reach through them and to new partners all the time.

speaker
Casey Ryan
Analyst, West Park Capital

Okay, terrific, terrific. You guys also call that warehouse, which is really, you know, obviously a large opportunity and like a really great space. There are lots of different types of equipment in sort of the warehouse space, right? should we think about all of those as being opportunities for ouster or can we narrow it down to categories say forklifts or sort of loaders unloaders um agvs you know sort of these automated things are moving pallets around and then i guess i'm also curious like is there an opportunity in these things that have a humanoid form factor that may or may not be impactful in warehouses in the next you know 12 months but sort of are all those form factors opportunities for ouster or are there specific categories where we should sort of spend our time looking.

speaker
Angus Bacala
Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, so, I mean, a warehouse, a modern warehouse is a bustling hive of activity, and there are many different machines, some autonomous, many driven by a human, all of which are benefiting from increasingly capable and flexible autonomy that is largely coupled or enabled by LiDAR sensors. And some of them, like driver assistance systems, that significantly reduce accidents in a warehouse, even for human-operated vehicles. And we play across all these applications. I mean, this is the core of the thesis at Ouster, is that autonomy is a diverse set of applications that span the entire logistics supply chain of the globe, and it's all getting automated or being improved with assistance systems. And Ouster is incredibly well positioned to capture all of that activity. So, you know, humanoids is kind of the leading edge of the logistics automation in the warehouse. We do have some humanoid customers. You can see some examples of our sensors on some humanoids. I think that's still, you know, it's unclear what the business model and the timeline for humanoids are. So I'm not expecting the adoption of those devices to kind of drive Ouster's business. But the good thing is that there's such an obvious cost benefit for driving more automation into a warehouse, filling labor shortages with automation, and improving safety with assistance features that you talk to any warehousing robotics or OEM equipment manufacturer, and they have an automation strategy. And Ouster is doing a really good job of blanketing this market. A good example is we were at ProMat just last month, I think, which is a major material handling conference in the United States. And Alistair sensors were on all manner of vehicles and platforms there. So just showing the great job we've had in covering that market. So tons of opportunity. It's one of those practical uses of physical AI today with a clear ROI and technology stack that actually works.

speaker
Casey Ryan
Analyst, West Park Capital

Yeah. Okay. Well, that's actually helpful and very, very encouraging. Kind of the last thing I want to, you know, I know we're all eager to sort of get a software hardware breakout and sort of dig into the impacts, you know, around margins, but what can you say trend wise about sort of just where you've had just sensor sales or sort of sensor pricing? What would you call the environment, I guess, as we get into a little bit higher volumes, would you say that? you know, pricing's been stable or sort of a natural curve where we see some price reductions. And then as you refresh the product line, does that kind of change what path all that pricing takes?

speaker
Angus Bacala
Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. So, I mean, generally prices go down, not up. Right. And we want to see that. I mean, I'm focused as much on maintaining gross margins as making sure that that our revenue and our unit shipments are growing. And unit shipments really, in a healthy business where the technology is working for customers, you generally want to see unit shipments rise faster than revenue. And I think we've been able to show that as a business, though, yeah, we've been able to show that as a business. So whenever you're increasing unit shipments faster than revenue, there's a good chance that ASPs are dropping. Now, of course, we have a software-attached business that's making it a little more difficult to pull out the numbers. But suffice it to say, we think we're managing the ASP trend well. Here, there's a lot of stickiness in LIDAR, and so there's a lot of kind of relationship building and things that get priced into the value of a ladder system. So it's not just a commoditized piece of hardware where it's pure pricing discussion. But there's also opportunities to unlock new use cases and new markets by offering lower pricing. And I think we're in a position to do that each and every year that we also lower our costs. And that's what we've been shown we've been able to do. So I don't think there's anything, you know, any fundamental change to pricing or that's coming down the line, like we're doing a good job managing this and enabling our customers' applications, because ultimately they need to be commercially successful, and some of that does come down to the cost of their platforms.

speaker
Chen Gung
Interim Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, Casey, the only thing I would add to the latter half of your question, the impact of future technology certainly does have something to do with ASPs. What you've seen Alster able to accomplish in the past two years since we've rolled out REV7 is we've actually seen our ASPs increase given that customers are able to extract more value proposition out of the product offering that we are providing. And so we have been generally consistent with our expectation that ASPs do decline over time, but our ability to introduce new technology new revisions to our product, new features, does have a tailwind in terms of supporting our ability to price a value proposition to our customer.

speaker
Casey Ryan
Analyst, West Park Capital

Yeah, and like I think certainly, you know, sort of from the analyst perspective, right, we're sort of, Angus, as you alluded to, sort of, you know, ASP price drops could actually be really encouraging when units start to jump, right, and there's some basically halo effect around that and that all could be maybe enabling it doesn't sound like price is a barrier to adoption at this point is sort of one conclusion that like I'm trying to drive to from this conversation which is you know our sensors aren't limiting people's demand it's sort of an evolution of technology and you know as people get the volume you guys sound like you're well positioned to sort of meet that demand I guess from a price you know hardware price component I guess perspective.

speaker
Angus Bacala
Chief Executive Officer

That's right. That's right. For the majority of our customers, the economics are not what is holding back them expanding their volumes. That's a good conclusion.

speaker
Casey Ryan
Analyst, West Park Capital

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great. Thank you. A lot of exciting things. Great quarter. And thanks for taking my questions.

speaker
Conference Call Operator
Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Kevin Garigan from Rosenblatt Securities. Please go ahead.

speaker
Kevin Garigan
Analyst, Rosenblatt Securities

Yeah. Hey, Angus. Hey, Chen. Thanks for taking my questions and congrats on the strong results. Angus, you talked earlier about having a lot of pans in the fire, and you announced a few new multimillion-dollar deals recently. Is LiDAR adoption kind of happening faster than you would have thought maybe a year or two ago, or has it been pretty much on par with what you're thinking?

speaker
Angus Bacala
Chief Executive Officer

Well, that's a good question. I'm nearing my 10-year anniversary at Ouster. So, you know, I think you have to be impatient to run a company like this and keep pushing. And so there's one side of things where we all thought we were going to riding around in like flying cars that were autonomous in 2018, and that didn't happen. But on the other hand, we are tracking to our long-term model, our revenue growth, and seeing, you know, just a ton of positivity in the field of autonomy, in the field of physical AI. what's going on with NVIDIA, with edge capability, with the advancements in AI are making these systems more capable, more affordable and faster to market. And so there's definitely a lot of positivity and that's underpinning Ouster's entire business. Nothing can ever happen fast enough, and yet I also think we're doing everything we can to speed things along with our investments in software and the SDK and peripheral features and the support we provide our customers. So I think we're maximizing the speed that things are being adopted, and it's nothing but kind of a positive outlook for the entire industry.

speaker
Kevin Garigan
Analyst, Rosenblatt Securities

Yeah, that makes kind of sense. Okay, great. And then, Chen, you mentioned, you know, you're not seeing any impacts from tariffs at the moment. But, you know, I'd just love to hear any commentary from customers you can give on whether they're just kind of going about business as usual because things are so fluid and whatever kind of happens, happens. Or are they trying to readjust strategies at all? Anything, you know, you're hearing about how customers are looking at this market would be great.

speaker
Chen Gung
Interim Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, sure. It's a good question. We were just talking about this earlier today. We honestly haven't seen much disruption to our business because of the tariffs. There might be some minor things moving here and there, but overall, I think automation is just such a strong trend. And again, it goes back to the value proposition that we provide with our hardware, with our software, where these tariffs at the current level are not significantly impacting the business. difficult to predict how things evolve from here, but we feel pretty confident that we'll be able to execute the business plan with the status quo.

speaker
Jim Fanucci
Investor Relations

Okay, great. Thanks, guys.

speaker
Conference Call Operator
Operator

Our final question comes from the line of Richard Shannon, Craig Hallam Capital Group, LLC. Please go ahead.

speaker
Richard Shannon
Analyst, Craig Hallam Capital Group, LLC

Hey, guys, thanks for letting me ask a follow-up, and I just have one here. I can't remember how long it's been since we've heard this question on the call, but I always love to get your thoughts here from the competitive dynamic here. So I've seen a lot of other lighter companies have been focused in the automotive space for a long time and have seen the difficulty there in the last year or two, and obviously people focus their businesses in other markets where you've been there, frankly, since the beginning here. I wonder, Angus, if you're seeing any changes in the competitive dynamics here with other companies who used to be in those spaces, primarily now coming into your non-automotive markets and how you're responding to that?

speaker
Angus Bacala
Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Well, first, I'd love to point out that Ouster has continued to be correct in our thesis that there has been plenty of time to develop automotive LiDAR solutions, given the pace of LiDAR adoption in the automotive industry. It's been our founding thesis. diversifying into other industries and being around to be able to be ideally a major player in the automotive industry in the future. So that's still on track. When it comes to our auto-centric competitors, maybe rethinking their strategy and moving into our diverse verticals, I mean, I really haven't seen their... fits and starts. I think each and every earning cycle, one of our competitors has kind of a refresh of their perspective and some announcement about moving into adjacent industries. But I've never seen the consistent push quarter after quarter required to develop ground-up solutions, ground-up hardware, ground-up software, ground-up commercial efforts to be a long-term player in this space. So may change in the future. I'm surprised, frankly, that there hasn't been more of a pivot. I mean, I think Alistair has emerged as a leading player in diverse end markets. But so far, it just fits and starts from, I think, our competitors.

speaker
Jim Fanucci
Investor Relations

Okay. Appreciate that perspective, Angus. That's all for me. I will now turn the call back over to Angus Pakala for closing remarks.

speaker
Angus Bacala
Chief Executive Officer

All right, well thanks everyone for joining the call. We look forward to speaking with you all again next quarter. Thanks and have a good day.

speaker
Conference Call Operator
Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.

speaker
Jim Fanucci
Investor Relations

Please wait. The conference will begin shortly.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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