Romeo Power, Inc. Class A

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Romeo Power's fourth quarter and full year 2020 financial results call. My name is Abi and I'll be coordinating your call today. If you'd like to ask a question during the presentation, you may do so by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand over to our host of the call, Sam Dundee, VP of Finance and Strategy. Sam, please go ahead.

Thank you, Abby, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for Romeo Power's inaugural earnings call. Apologies, we had a few technical difficulties, and our earnings release should be coming out shortly. It will be posted on our website, Romeopower.com, and on the Investor Relations homepage. Before we begin the substance of today's call, I want to remind everybody that the conference call will contain forward-looking statements, including our expectations of future results, sales, cost of inputs, market dynamics, etc. Our actual results may differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause these results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements are contained in our press release that will go out shortly after this call, as well as in the disclosures to our public filings with the SEC. Today's call will also include a discussion of non-GAAP financial measures, as that term is defined in Regulation G. Non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for financial information presented in compliance with GAAP. Accordingly, at the end of today's press release, we have provided a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the company's financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP. With that, I'm happy to turn the call over to Lionel Selwood Jr., Romeo Power's President and CEO. Lionel Selwood Jr.:

: Thank you, Sam, and good afternoon to all. With me today is Lauren Webb, our Chief Financial Officer. We hope you have had a chance to review our Honours release, which will be released in a few minutes. As most of you are undoubtedly aware, currently the worldwide market for battery cells is experiencing a significant shortage of certain high-quality performance cells. That shortage has affected our ability to source adequate supplies of key battery cells critical to our specialized, high-density battery solutions. As a result, we are making material updates to our production and revenue outlook for 2021. However, I want to emphasize that we see this sales shortage as temporary and are confident it will not affect our intermediate and longer-term opportunities. As reported by our sales suppliers, the current widespread sales shortage within the EV sector is driven primarily by accelerated demand as more EV companies have secured capital in the last 12 months and was exacerbated by supply chain and logistics disruptions caused by the pandemic. While we saw accelerating demand for cells, the severity of quality cells shortage was unexpected as has increased dramatically over the course of the last several weeks. No one is more frustrated than the Romeo Power team about the delay in bringing our solutions to market caused by the global sales supply constraints, particularly now that we have the capital secured to execute our transition from an early-stage innovator to a commercial enterprise with significant capital inflows. I want to emphasize again that the sales shortage we are facing in 2021 is not expected to have a material impact on our committed backlog. However, the impact to our ability to generate revenue in 2021 is significant. Considering our expected self-supply for the remainder of 2021 will not be confirmed before Q2, we are conservatively projecting materially lower revenue than originally expected. Lauren will discuss this in more detail. However, we are working rigorously to secure the long-term self-supply contracts needed to deliver our solutions in a timely fashion. To that end, we're pursuing three pathways to improve our access to cells. One, we're negotiating long-term agreements with our preferred partners to secure allocation through 2028, and we expect to have an update over the course of Q2. Two, as you know, Romeo Power has a rigorous cell qualification process rooted in safety and reliability, and we are pursuing qualification of alternative, high-quality battery cell providers. We are focusing substantial efforts to qualify new suppliers in 2021. Three, we are also evaluating strategic partnerships and seeking to make investments to drive innovation at the battery cell level. Our memorandum of understanding with Ecelex is a great example of this. We will keep you posted on progress in this key aspect of the business. It is very important to note that the demand for our leading edge battery technology solutions has not changed and is, in fact, growing. Let me go over a few business highlights throughout Q1. We launched the Heritage Environmental Fleet Electrification Program in collaboration with Heritage Environmental Services. Romeo Power will play a critical role in the electrification of 500 battery electric vehicles in Heritage's fleet between 2022 and 2025. Romeo Power and Heritage have selected participants for the fleet electrification program, and we'll be announcing those participants soon. Finally, as previously announced, we have formed a strategic alliance with Republic Services to collaborate on the development of Romeo Power's battery technology for use in Republic's electric refuse trucks, including a retrofit program to be completed in 2021. We're excited by the early success of the Heritage Fleet Electrification Program and hope to replicate this success with Republic in the future. Our merger with RMG Acquisition Corp, which we completed in December 2020, added $336 million to our balance sheet, leaving Romeo well-positioned to manage through virtually any macro environment. As we progress from smaller-value production to a large-scale supply of sophisticated battery technology for a vast array of customer sizes and types in the commercial vehicle space, we are confident that we will optimize our leverage to address any supply chain challenges that might arise. We have been winning thus far based on our unwavering commitment to delivering patented and leading edge battery solutions, which exceeds our customers' expectations in the metrics that matter to them. Safety, reliability, energy density, configurability, and fast charging. Romeo's market-leading performance in these metrics translates to superior uptime, profit per mile, and return on investment for our customer base. In fact, we continue to make R&D investments to refine our product technology to enhance our market-leading position in the commercial electric vehicle space and expect to accelerate our growth in the coming years. Since announcement of the merger with RMG in October and the close in December, the broader team and I have been very pleased with the increased level of engagement with new potential commercial partners as well as those with whom we already are in conversation. The work we did over the last four years to build a strong foundation, including trusted relationships with customers and suppliers alike to develop the industry's best technology, commercialize and deliver committed orders to plant and grow our seeds, is paying dividends. In 2021, the team and I are committed to executing our current strategy to continue diversifying our contract orders and our backlog to expand our partnerships with established operators to electrify their fleets, which is showing promising early results, and to continue working hard to reach signed agreements with an array of new partners. This includes new entrants, companies in adjacent sectors, and those with established product catalogs. I would now like to turn the call over to Lauren Webb, our CFO, to discuss our four-quarter and full-year 2020 results in greater detail.