SES AI Corporation

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending the SES AI Corporation second quarter earnings call. My name is Matt and I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be needed during the presentation portion of the call and opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Eric Goldstein, Vice President of Investor Relations. Eric, please go ahead.

Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our conference call covering our second quarter 2022 results and outlook for the year. Joining me today are Chi-Chao Hu, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and Jing Nielis, Chief Financial Officer. We issued a press release just after 4 p.m. today detailing our financial results. You'll find the press release and today's conference call webcast in the investor relations section of our website at SES.ai. Before we get started, this is a reminder the discussion today may contain forward-looking information or forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. These statements are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Such statements involve certain risks, assumptions, and uncertainties which may cause the company's actual or future results and performance to be materially different from those expressed or implied in these statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from our current expectations include but are not limited to those details in our latest earnings release and in our SEC filings. This afternoon, we will review our business as well as results for the quarter. With that, I'll pass it over to Chi-Chao. Thank you, Eric.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for taking the time to join our call. Our second quarter performance was in line with our expectations, and our liquidity is strong. We ended the quarter with over $400 million of cash on our balance sheet and continue to believe this will be sufficient funding to reach commercialization. Jim will provide more insight into our financials later in the call. It continues to be a very busy and exciting time for our company and the industry. Consumer interest in electric vehicles continues to grow as OEMs are introducing new models at an accelerating pace. Energy prices remain historically high, and the charging infrastructure continues to expand. As a result, we believe the need for more energy-dense batteries that can improve range and reduce cost has never been greater and supports our belief that lithium metal is the next big thing in batteries. We remain the only next-gen lithium metal company to have any A-sample joint development agreements, JDAs, with global carmakers, and we have three of them in total, one each with General Motors, Hyundai, and Honda. Moreover, we continue to have active dialogue with other OEMs that could potentially lead to additional JDAs. While we don't make any formal announcements, our batteries are being tested by many OEMs. We are working closely with all our partners to make further improvements to our battery technology, including improvements to performance under a variety of different temperatures and charging scenarios and to lower our manufacturing cost. Our product development efforts continue to be focused on a number of different areas. First, we need to develop and manufacture large format 50 and 100 amp power cells. We're working on this at Shanghai Giga and SDS Korea. Over the next few quarters, our intention is to provide more details on manufacturing improvements, supply chain initiatives, and data on the performance of our cells. Second, we continue to make advancements in the areas of materials, electrolytes, and coatings to improve cycle life with periodic fast charge and safety of our batteries. We also continue to explore methods of recycling our batteries, particularly for mock lithium that are cost-effective. Our final KIGA facility has run back up after being down in April because of COVID-related shutdowns. We are producing and testing our 50 and 100 m power cells and sharing the data with our JDA partners. Additionally, our brand new facility in SCS Korea is almost done. The structure of the building is complete and our manufacturing lines are being installed. We expect this facility to be ready for use by the end of the third quarter. We continue to pursue opportunities in other verticals in addition to automotive. Lithium-ion batteries are lighter in weight and particularly good at moving things. We believe there are quite attractive opportunities in verticals such as drones and eVTOLs. We are having discussions with a number of players in those areas and believe there are potentially some very attractive use cases. We hope to provide more details on these initiatives at Better World later this year, including a product demonstration. Finally, There are no changes to the milestones we outlined during our first quarter call in May. We remain confident that by mid-2023, we will, number one, deliver and optimize A samples for our three JDA partners. Number two, begin to transition from A samples to B samples. And number three, continue to establish supply chains for key materials. I will now pass the call to Jimmy Ellis, our CFO, who will take us through the financials.