Volta, Inc. Class A

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My name is Rocco, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Volta, Inc.' 's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call and webcast. All participant lines have been placed in listen-only mode to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and zero. Please note, this conference is being recorded. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to Catherine Bailon, Volta's Head of Investor Relations. Catherine, please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss Volta's first quarter financial results. This call is being broadcast over the web. and can be accessed on the investor section of our website at investors.voltacharging.com. With me from Volta on today's call is Brant Hastings, Interim CEO and CRO, Francois Chadwick, CFO, and Drew Bennett, Executive Vice President, Network Operations. We would like to remind you that during this conference call, management will be making forward-looking statements including statements regarding our expectations related to financial guidance, outlook for the sector and company, and our expected investment and growth initiatives. Please note these forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and assumptions, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. These statements reflect the company's views only as of today, should not be relied upon as representative of views as of any subsequent date. and Volta undertakes no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. For further discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our financial results, Please refer to the company's filings with the SEC, including its most recent annual report on Form 10-K, filed on April 15, 2022. In addition, during today's call, the company will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which they believe are useful as supplemental measures of Volta's performance. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for, or in isolation from GAAP results. You will find additional disclosures regarding the non-GAAP financial measures discussed on today's call in Volta's press release issued this morning and its filings with the SEC, each of which is posted on the Volta charging website. The webcast of this call will also be available on the investor relations section of the company website. With that, I will turn the call over to Brandt.

Thanks Catherine, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Let's get right to it. We made continued progress against our strategy in Q1, with total revenue growing 77%, media revenue up 73%, and total installed stalls growing 39% year over year. We signed multiple new strategic partnerships with top tier commercial properties, retail locations, and global advertisers. We remain laser focused on executing against four key goals for the remainder of 2022, which are continuing to accelerate revenue growth, increasing our connected stall count, turning on charge for charging in the second half of the year, and enhancing public company infrastructure. I want to take a moment to reinforce and clearly articulate the value that I see in Volta's business model. EV adoption is occurring at a faster rate than ever before. More than half of new car buyers say their next car will be an electric vehicle. The marketplace demands a solution that offers convenient public charging stations and provides real value. Volta delivers value to drivers, consumers, commercial properties in advertisers from day one. Commercial properties can better influence foot traffic. Advertisers can reach their target audiences seconds before they make a purchasing decision. And most importantly, EV drivers can seamlessly integrate on the go charging into their daily routines in the most convenient locations possible. The combination of these integrated value propositions sets Volta apart in achieving immediate results. In this quarter, we made a lot of progress. We landed new site partner deals and expanded our contracts with others with heavy hitting commercial properties in retail locations across geographies and industries. We expanded our relationship with Six Flags where our charging and media model continues to resonate. The expansion deal is for an additional five sites and 85 incremental stalls. We also announced that we will install charging stations at Tanger outlets in nine markets throughout the United States, unlocking two new geographies for Volta and expanding our reach in others. Tanger will additionally leverage our media network nationally, regionally, and locally as part of its omnichannel marketing partnership strategy. We also expect this partnership to grow in the coming quarters. And then, as previously shared, we closed our landmark expansion deal with Walgreens to install 1,000 DC fast charging stalls at over 500 Walgreens throughout the United States.

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Our media sales team continues to accelerate revenue growth while expanding our market reach across new and existing high value advertising verticals, including consumer packaged goods, retail, automotive, telecom, financial services, entertainment, and more. In this quarter alone, we added new media partners like Showtime, Zoom, Bank of the West, and T-Mobile to the platform and ran incremental campaigns for PepsiCo, Disney, and Sephora, among others. Nissan and Polestar partnered with Volta to amplify their investments in the Super Bowl by running national campaigns across our media network. And HSBC and Bank of the West took advantage of the ability to effectively showcase their sustainability initiatives, and influence consumer perception through advertising across our media streams. As a reminder, our media business builds throughout the year, consistent with the sector, and Francois is going to talk more about how that all works later on this call. On the data and analytics front, we continue to secure business through our PredictDV products. This proprietary analytics software uses artificial intelligence to analyze local mobility, demographic, socioeconomic, business, and site-specific data sets. And it empowers critical stakeholders, including government agencies, utilities, retailers, real estate developers, municipalities, and more, to make data-driven, easy infrastructure planning decisions. For example, in Q1, we work with the state of Alabama, which used PredictDV to plan to deploy infrastructure intelligently, efficiently, and equitably to boost the economic impact of electric vehicle charging across the state. We continue to close deals like this across segments, and they set us up well for Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act planning software funds. And I'm proud to share that PredictDV was recognized as a finalist in Fast Company's World Changing Ideas Awards.

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From a public company infrastructure perspective, I would like to highlight two areas. First, our board of directors adopted a change to our governing documents separating the roles of chief executive officer and chair of the board. That is, the same person cannot hold both positions. Second, through agreements with the company's founders, the founders exchanged any interest they each had in Class B common shares, which have 10 votes per share, for Class A common shares, which have one vote per share. As set forth in more detail in our Form 10-K, including a number of assumptions relating to beneficial ownership, had they converted all their Class B interests into shares, the founders together would have had the ability to control some 67% of the voting power of the company's stock. As a result of this agreement, together, they have the ability to control less than 16% of the voting power. The world-class team at Volta is working hard on laser-focused execution of the four goals I mentioned earlier on the call, and I want to thank them for their hard work and dedication to our mission. Since I first joined Volta, I've talked about the significant and strategic opportunity in electric mobility. We're still in the early innings and the market is growing rapidly. I believe that Volta has all the elements necessary to compete and win in this space. Volta delivers value today as it builds the easy infrastructure for tomorrow. Volta seamlessly integrates charging, into an EV driver's daily routine. We influence EV driver and consumer foot traffic for commercial properties. We allow advertisers to message high value consumers seconds before they make purchasing decisions. And we generate revenue on day one, which translates into shareholder value. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Bill, Everything we're doing, including our laser focus on executing against our four goals in 2022, is in service of our ultimate goal, which is cementing Volta as a leading player in electric mobility. And I'm incredibly optimistic about our progress. With that, I'll pass it to Drew Bennett for a breakdown of our installations pipeline and changes.

Thanks, Brent. We think of our pipeline in three major stages. There's top of the funnel, comprised of any site or set of sites we're discussing with new or existing site partners. Then there's the part of the funnel that is under technical evaluation. We and our partners are serious enough about a project that Volta has decided to invest technical resources that will address feasibility and contractual variables required before both parties can agree to sign off on the project. Finally, there's the deployment pipeline. Projects that are signed and clear to move through permitting and construction. On average, sites in this category are opened within one year. During the first quarter, Volta signed three new master service agreements, which alone represent over 450 potential sites. This is an example of top of funnel activity. We now have three more partners whose portfolios are available to us, and we can begin the work to qualify specific projects. In the first quarter, Volta added 775 projects worth 2,484 stalls into the technical evaluation section of the pipeline. We are now visiting these sites. determining feasibility, power runs, and layouts. If a site design works for both us and our partner, we will be able to move forward with signature at that site. Executing the agreement is always a big milestone, which is why we focus on MSAs with large portfolios so that our investment in technical design is more likely to pay off. Also in the first quarter, Volta had the highest quarter ever for stall signings. So for the final section of our pipeline, the deployment pipeline, we closed the quarter at 3,727 stalls signed and ready to be deployed. Our guidance on incremental stall count this year remains at 1,700 to 2,000 stalls. In Q1, we installed 218 stalls. Thus, we have 1,632 stalls to install in the remaining three quarters of 2022 to meet the midpoint of that guidance. This is a significant ramp throughout the year, no doubt about it. You'll see this ramp forecasted on the network development pipeline slide. According to the cadence of 350 in Q2, 450 in Q3, and the remaining 832 in Q4. Our ability to scale our capacity this year will come down to how quickly we can scale our engineering and construction vendors. We have been and continue to onboard more local, regional, and national vendors, training them up on our equipment and installation methodology so that they can pump out volume with us at scale. We have 3,727 stalls worth of projects that are signed. We think we will be able to deploy at least half of those. by the end of this year. Now, I want to pass it over to Francois.

Thanks, Drew.

I'd like to take a moment to review how Volta makes money. We have four revenue buckets. Our primary bucket at 80% of our revenue in 2021 and 73% of our revenue in the first quarter is media. This bucket was previously called behavior and commerce. The way this works is we sell advertising space on our 55-inch digital media screens, which are an integral part of our charging stalls. Let me outline it for you in its simplest terms. Unit times price. We have a national network of these screens, 4,695 as of the end of the first quarter, and the screens have an associated amount of eyeballs that see them. In the media world, this is called impressions. The impressions we have to sell are determined not by how many drivers park their electric vehicles in the stall, but by how many people pass by those highly visible large format screens and see the media on the screens. We intentionally place our stations so that many people walking into places where the stations are, like in front of grocery stores, movie theaters, and malls, can see the media on the screens. This is fundamental to Volta's unique go-to-market proposition, which no other EV charging company offers. We are choosing sites that have high visitor traffic. Then we choose parking stalls within those sites with high foot traffic within a few feet of the screen. This means our media-enabled charging stalls are located near the entrances to retail stores or venues with an activity. Each site's available impression count is determined by a third-party auditor called GeoPath, which is similar to Nielsen, but specific to our industry. The amount of impressions we can sell at any given time is calculated by adding our network's available screens to per store currently. Generally, our network shows ads of eight-second length, and we also support 15-second long ads. Our ads run 24 hours a day, unless a site partner or jurisdiction mandates otherwise. The price that we sell our impressions at has a wide range. Think of that as between $10 to $22 per CPM, which stands for cost per meal thousand. Our CPM pricing is very independent on the designated marketing area, also known as DMA, and derived from the volume of stores and advertising demand. More competitive markets garner higher rates. Our delivery is dynamic based on the inventory available. Another thing we wanted to share is that we look at the media business with an advertising-orientated utilization lens called sell-through. It is different from the utilization lens that measures how many people use our charging stations to receive electrons, which we largely still do not charge for. Our media sell-through, our media utilization, has been improving over the last year from levels in the mid-teens to current levels of the mid-20s across our entire network. Our sell-through in certain established markets is even higher. The media we offer is sold to advertising customers in one of three ways. Firstly, direct to national brand managers via Volta's direct sales force, which is the largest bucket. Secondly, through third-party reseller channels, for example, Peapod, a shopping marketing dollar arm of our whole Delhaize USA. And finally, through a self-service channel called Programmatic. Buyers of our media could be intending to build brand awareness, a top of the funnel activity, all the way down to what is called a call to action, where the success of the campaign is measured by the action of the viewer. The price paid for media impressions tends to scale with where they are in the funnel just described. and by the specificity of the impressions purchased. When a buyer asks to target a message to be seen by a subset of our network, that could be a subset by the time of day, day of the year, demographic, proximity to a specific retail establishment, and so on. And then the price rises. Our media customers span a broad segment of sectors of the economy, but this wasn't always the case. Before COVID, the largest segment for Volta was automobile OEMs with EV products. This unique world event created a pause in the spending from this group, which led Volta to begin making inroads into the consumer packaged goods, CPG segment. Today, as Brian mentioned, we continue to expand our market reach to additional advertising verticals, such as retail, telecom, financial services, entertainment, and more. This diversification and the fact that our media network is placed mainly within the footprint of essential businesses like grocery stores, drug stores, and other critical shopping locations should allow Walter to weather any economic downturn much better than other advertising participants. Now that I have outlined how our media business makes money, I would like to shed light on what I feel is the most important dynamic to understand about the Volta business model. That is, the ways our business has further upside with no further capital outlay. The first two biggest levers are, one, we have the ability to sell more and more of our screen time for advertising, and two, we may sell it at a higher CPM. Said another way, The two levels we may pull, even if we were to invest no more capital, are one, higher CPM, and two, higher sell-through. We expect to achieve higher CPM as we demonstrate the efficacy of our unique position in the marketplace to affect the actions of the ad viewer. We have a number of studies underway, and over time, we expect to see our average CPMs move higher. And the second concept is that we expect to increase our sell-through from approximately the mid-20s to 50% or higher at maturity, depending on the DMA. In addition to the leverage items I have just outlined, all of which are at play without any additional capital outlay, I want to further the leverage discussion with the third key point of leverage, scale in the Vault and media network. Scale does require additional capital, but it is already planned capital, and here is how we think about it. For Volta's advertising customer, geographic coverage is important. Media buyers are looking for exposure of a sufficient nature to a DMA. At our current 4,695 screens, we are credible, as demonstrated by our marquee customer list that includes most major household brands. But you should know, national scale for the Volta Media Network is, we think, 10,000 screens. Such a scale would mark another milestone level for Valter and would enable us to participate in portions of available marketing dollars that perhaps we do not address today. We imagine achieving 10,000 screens in 2023, and this milestone will drive improved price and improved sell-through. To summarize, the media business model and its leverage, let me offer a pro forma example. For 2021, our media revenue per average stall was just over $13,000, and our media revenue per average screen was just under $7,000. At a mature scale, we would expect our media revenue to achieve $23,000 per stall or $11,500 per screen, as we generally have two screens per stall, which is a 77% increase from current levels due to the three leverage items just discussed earlier. The media business has thus far demonstrated solid repeat customers. In the last five quarters, 16 of Volta's top 20 media customers have purchased advertising across multiple quarters. Seven of the top 20 media customers have bought in all five of those quarters. In the first quarter, five of Volta's top six customers grew their spend with Volta by triple digits.

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Now, moving on to our next revenue stream. Revenue for electricity demand. Also called charge for charging. Charging revenues were only 2% of 2021 total revenues. And given we are a charging company, this might strike you as perplexing. Let me shed some light on what is going on. Historically, we have not charged the driver for the electricity delivered to their vehicle. Please note, revenue for electricity delivered is our fourth lever of the increased revenue. Let me walk you through it. Historically, our charging network was only AC chargers, and we did not charge for charge. We are now at the stage of our beta test rollout of charging for electricity delivered to the driver. Key milestones of this journey include the rollout of authentication and payment mechanism at the charger. Volta now expects to begin charging for electricity we delivered to the drivers in the July-August 2022 timeframe. Once launched, our rollout will be gradual, starting with DC fast charging stalls initially And then in 2023, performing a retrofitting of AC charging stores at minimum cost for authentication and payments. So back to the charging revenue line. While it was 2% of 2021 revenues, and in 2021 that consisted almost entirely of LCFS credits earned and then sold, starting in the second half of 2022, we expect an initial modest contribution from electricity delivery to the driver. And in 2023, we expect this to be a more meaningful line item. At a mature scale, we expect to have revenues from electricity to the driver of $2,000 to $3,500 for level two charges and $10,000 to $12,000 for DC per store per year based on our current product in the field with significant further upside as we deploy higher dispensing stations. From a pricing strategy standpoint, we will unveil specifics as we unveil the functionality in the back half of 2022. We can share that we envision all pricing situations will be structured to yield a positive gross margin contribution. The exact margin level is to be determined and likely will be dynamic. We would also point out that the charging revenue line item should also see improvements to the LCFS credit revenues driven by an increasing mix of DC fast charge installs from low numbers to a more meaningful percentage. At maturity, Voltaire estimates annual LCSF credit revenue of $1,300 for an AC and $3,500 for a DC stall in a state where LCSF credits are available. Our next bucket of revenue is network intelligence. This revenue was just 1% of total revenues in 2021. But we call it out for its importance as an indirect support of our overall business model. This is our predictive e-product offering, which Brandt described earlier, sold as a software as a service subscription to our utility and state customers. This is forecasted to be our highest margin product, and its recurring nature is also very attractive. The fourth and final revenue stream is network development revenue. In 2021, network development revenues were 16% of total revenue. Network development is revenue earned from site partners who contract with us to install charging infrastructure on their behalf. This service revenue for activities such as site design, permitting, trenching, and the installation of electrical infrastructure and has a gross margin profile similar to competitors who construct charging stations in the market. Before I move into the specifics of our first quarter financials, I would like to touch on revenue seasonality. Overall, seasonality is quite pronounced. In 2021, we saw revenues as a percentage of the full year as follows. Q1, 15%, Q2, 21%, Q3, 26%, and Q4, 38%. For 2022, we expect the pattern to be approximately 10%, 20%, 30%, and 40% of total revenue in each of the four quarters respectively. The driver of our seasonality is primarily our media business, which as we have discussed is the majority of our current revenue stack and which sees seasonality comparable to others in the advertising industry. A cohort of the 2021 advertising revenues from Clear Channel Outdoor, Facebook, and BuzzFeed displayed an average seasonal revenue breakdown of 19%, 23%, 25%, and 33%. This occurs as most holidays fall in the fourth quarter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and Hanukkah being the primary ones. The second factor is that budgeting cycles tend to conclude in the fourth calendar quarter, and most customers have what is called a use or lose budget system. For the first calendar quarter, marketing budgets are still being formulated and going through the approval process during the early months of the new year. In addition to these factors that shape media revenue patterns for Volta, we have a back half way into our network development pipeline, as we discussed earlier. This also suggests the network development quarterly revenue pattern we would expect for 2022 to be greater in the second half than the first half and greater in the fourth quarter than the third quarter. We would also like to discuss certain sensitivity analysis with respect to how we think about our future state mature business model. Valters AC stalls cost approximately $50,000 to build, including bill of materials as well as installation. Our DC fast stalls cost about double that. At forecasted maturity, we modeled that our charging revenue at Volta ought to achieve approximately $2,000 to $3,500 per AC stall and $10,000 to $12,000 per DC stall for electricity paid for by the drivers and idle fees. But we expect charging revenue for DC stalls to be even higher as we deploy higher dispensing stations throughout the network. Further to this, we modeled that LCFF credit monetization at approximately $1,300 per AC stall and $3,500 per DC stall. Again, based on current types of station in the network for the states that currently do so. And lastly to this, we also model an expectation that our media enabled stalls could generate approximately 23,000 per AC or DC stall a year. Lastly, As we consider what a mature model for Walter looks like, we reflected on the gross margin profiles for each of our revenue streams and ultimately expect to be at levels achieved by mature companies in similar such businesses.

Now, turning to our Q1 financial results.

For the first quarter, we delivered in the top half of our outlook range. for revenue with Q1 revenue growing at 77% year-over-year to $8.4 million. Q1 media revenue, which was formerly called behavior and commerce, grew 73% year-over-year to $6.1 million. We ended the quarter with an install base of 800 sites, adding 81 new sites in the quarter. That is a Volta record. Installed stalls were 2,548, up 39% year-over-year, and up an incremental 218 stalls from Q4. For the first quarter, we signed 844 sites representing 1,947 stalls. We exited the quarter with 1,443 sites and 3,727 stalls in our signed construction pipeline. Within these signings, we have a solid mix of both AC and DC stalls. During the fourth quarter, new brands to Volta's media advertising platform included Showtime, Zoom, Bank of the West, and T-Mobile, and additional campaigns for PepsiCo, Disney, Aetna, and Sephora. Our gross margin, excluding station depreciation for the quarter, was negative 15.5% as compared to negative 5% gross margin in Q1 of 2021. The driver for this negative gross margin is due to our network development product, as installation costs are recognized as incurred and in advance of milestones where revenue recognition can be recorded. We forecast a 25% to 30% gross margin for the full year. Again, it should be clearly understood that with respect to our network development business, costs are recognized upfront as incurred, but revenue is recognized at certain milestones later than the cost. We anticipate that our gross margin percentage for such products to be aligned with market competitors that install and sell EV charging hardware. SG&A expenses excluding stock-based compensation were $39.7 million for the first quarter as compared to $15.3 million, also excluding stock-based compensation, in the prior year period. The increase year-over-year was due principally to increasing headcount and related costs and public company compliance costs. Including stock-based compensation and one-time expenses, SG&A was $56.2 million for the first quarter compared to $60.9 million in the prior year period. Our SG&A quarterly level of $40 million is not one we are satisfied with, so we are looking to closely monitor these costs and we are taking actions to reduce them. Adjusted EBITDA was $41.4 million loss for the first quarter of 2022, as compared to $15.9 million loss for the first quarter of 2021. Net loss was $48.1 million for the first quarter, compared to a loss of $65.2 million in the prior year period. The company had cash and marketable security balance of $205 million as of March 31st, 2022. As we have stated in prior public comments, Volta will be raising non-diluted capital to continue to accelerate the deployment of Stoles in our network. Management believes that from both a strategic and financial point of view, This is the most effective way to accelerate velocity and lower Volta's overall cost of capital. Volta is currently in discussions with multiple parties to structure and provide appropriate facility in the range of $250 million to $300 million, and is confident that a transaction can be completed in the next few months. Volta's headcount at the end of the first quarter stands at 417 people. Our anticipated capex spend for 2022 is $140 to $160 million to install our 2022 stations. Weighted average shares outstanding for the first quarter were $171.99 million. Turning to our outlook for 2022, based on current market conditions and input from our customers and team, We are reiterating our outlook for 2022 revenues to be in the range of 70 to 80 million. As we have stated previously, the seasonality of our revenue is a function of the media industry spending trends, tends to build throughout the calendar year, the first quarter the lightest and the fourth quarter the strongest. Total incremental connected goals in the range of 1,700 to 2,000. and total incremental connected sites to be in the range of 650 to 750 sites. For the second quarter ending June 30, 2022, we are guiding for revenue to be in the range of $13 to $14 million. Now, I'd like to wrap up and share the reasons we remain very excited about the future for Volta. Volta delivers the highest revenue per stall in the charging market. We also stand to demonstrate the best operating leverage per stall in the charging market. Charging for electricity is coming in the second half of this year and will provide further revenue per stall. And finally, Volta's sites are in the best high traffic locations and within those sites, our stalls are the ones closest to the entrances, putting Volta in an enviable position to have market leading charging utilization. With that, I would now like to open up the line for Q&A. I will be directing all questions.

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Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star then 1. If your question has already been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, that's star then one to ask a question. We will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. And today's first question comes from Pavel Molchanov with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Thank you for taking the question. Um, let me start maybe high level first, your initial stations in Europe were built just before the war started. And I'm curious if given the context of a hundred barrel, a hundred dollars a barrel oil, plus the pending oil embargo against Russia, Are you seeing, you know, more engagement, more incoming interest from prospective site partners to deploy this infrastructure?

Pavel, thanks for that. Francois here.

That's a very, very good question. And one that I, you know, the answer, the short answer is yes, we've seen a lot of demand. We're actually landing very well in Europe. We've seen demand coming from the countries that we are already in. We're in Germany and France and a couple of the adjacent countries. But just with the larger macro environment, together with the policy push that is occurring in Europe, we're seeing a lot of incoming demand from site partners and various other potential locations in multiple states across Europe. So the short answer to your question is yes, and it's actually an absolute yes. And I hope to be able to say more in the next quarter or so. It's a lot of demand. So thank you, Pavel.

Turning to the U.S., August 1st, I think you referenced this, is the DOE deadline for states to submit their charging deployment plans. Do you know after August 1st, how long will it take before the cash actually begins to flow to the businesses developing the charging sites?

Yes, Pavel, once again, Francois. Our expectation is this will be late into 2022 or early into 2023. That's the latest we're hearing and seeing from the folks that we are talking to when we're in the meetings in DC.

That's helpful to know. And then finally, just to check a number that you mentioned in terms of guidance, gross margin for the year as a whole between 25 and 35%, is that right?

That is what we model to. Yes, that is what we're expecting to have that gross margin.

Given that you are heavily negative in Q1, that implies that you'll be averaging, you know, 40 to 50% for the rest of the year, correct?

No, I think the comment was more along the lines of that is how we model out the mature market across the whole company. So, um, that is still the infrastructure spend that has to occur in the front end of, of any project. But as we look at a mature project over its lifetime together with our stocking, all of our revenues together, that's the 25 to 30% guidance that we've given that.

Okay. So, so that's, that's not for this year. That's a, that's a long-term kind of steady state.

That is the long-term steady state. Yes.

okay in any sense of what this year's gross margin might be i've not given that yet good okay all right fair enough thank you very much thank you very much and our next question today comes from andre shepherd with cancer fitzgerald please go ahead hey good morning guys and congrats on the quarter um

I just wanted to maybe follow up regarding the state plan submissions that are due August 1st and then subsequently the plan being confirmed by end of September. I'm just wondering, can you maybe give us a sense of what is Volta expecting or what would be the sweet spot in terms of the funding that you might receive from the state plans?

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you, Andreas. And when you talk about state plans, you're talking about the funding coming through the IIJA, just to confirm.

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That's correct, yes.

Thank you. So a couple of things that I want to point out that I think are well worthwhile knowing. There's $7.5 billion that's on the table, as everybody knows. That's split out into two main categories. There's the $5 billion that's sort of deployment across various different things. Included in that is the corridor charging. And then there's $2.5 billion for community grant funds. So when we look at our model and we've done sort of a rough estimate of the corridor charging, you know, 25% approximately of our existing sales fall within that one mile corridor, 25% of our sites fall within that one mile corridor. So that to us is very attractive in that bucket. And, you know, as we look and we model out where we're going to add additional sites, This is going to be one of the points that we look to. Obviously, we're not going to break our business model. We've always said that this is not, you know, we're not, we are one of the companies that have the revenue from day one based on our business model, but a good indication of where we are cited right now and where we could cite 25% of our current sites are looking to be in that one mile corridor that's currently in the proposed legislation. Let's not forget that, like I said, there's $2.5 billion of community funds. Now, once again, we are very, very well placed for that because our model breaks that chicken and egg situation. So we have the ability to put those stalls in those locations where we're looking at the equity story, making sure that we're putting stalls in the ground to meet the needs of everybody. So that is available to us because of the media that's on our stations. And if the funding is there, then the capex will be reduced. So the ROI on a store like that is going to be very, very attractive to us. And at the cost of repeating myself, that is a unique business model for the community and that matches what we do. And the last thing I want to mention on this, Andres, is that we have our Predict EV software tool. It's not, you know, this is not just an algorithm. This is actually a software tool that we use internally to actually make sure we put the stalls in the right place. You also know that we sell it to third parties. We sell it to utility companies. So that's just straight up validation that this is a tool that works and is beneficial to everybody. We're in conversations with various different folks in D.C. We're in the table. We're in the rooms in D.C. And the software tool is getting a lot of attraction. So as it sits there, those are the areas that we are definitely playing in, definitely something that is something, as I mentioned, at the cost of repeating myself, we're in the room, we're having the discussions. To my prior answer, we expect the funding to be rolling out through the states, whether it's the Department of Energy, Department of Transportation in the states, late into 22 and into 2023. So, Andres, I went through a lot of different things there, but hopefully that lays out exactly how we, Volta, expect to play in this space, which is obviously a very exciting space right now. Yes, it does. I appreciate the insight there. And maybe for my follow-up, apologies if I missed this, but in terms of the partnership with Walgreens, the expectation to install about 1,000 DC chargers over 500 locations, and again, sorry if I missed this, but can you give us a sense of how that is? progressing? I don't know if you could disclose these numbers, but in the past you had said 12 to 18 months was the installation expectation, so just wondering where that stands. Thank you. Yeah, so I can double down. That is the 12 to 18 months. That still stands, but let me pass it over to Mr. Drew Bennett, who can tell you a little bit about where we are in the whole lifecycle with Walgreens and the 500 stores, 1,000

So, Drew. Yeah, thanks, Francois.

So, we started adding these to the pipeline earlier this year. So, that 12 to 18 months means that, you know, some of the fast-moving ones will fall into this year. That's what I expect. That's what I'm seeing as far as velocity through our pipeline. So, definitely the first Walgreens projects will be happening this year. And I think, you know, the balance will come into the first half of next year. Yeah, it's like a very large volume to kind of drop all at the same time. Really exciting to us and we're working really closely with them to accelerate the upfront diligence and then everything that comes following that with approvals and everything else. So yeah, really exciting. There's a lot of potential there. Obviously agreement between the two parties to move forward and what we expect is that the first projects will be dropping definitely this year and then the balance will fall into next year.

Got it. Thank you very much and congrats again. I'll pass it on.

And our next question today comes from Mark Delaney at Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning. Thank you very much for taking the questions and for all the details on the business. So I'm going to start on the materials and operating environment. Some companies in the industry have seen a pressure from rising operating cost and rising cost of components. I'm wondering if Volta has seen anything along those lines, and if so, what steps you're taking to mitigate those?

Yeah, Mark, thanks for the question. Very similar to everybody else in the industry, we are seeing some slight uptick in some of the costs, and there's a little bit of pressure there. Um, I think I mentioned this in prior calls, we built out a world-class supply chain team. And so as we look at what we've got to, what we're committed to in 2022, that, and definitely we've already planned into that. There's a lot of, um, a lot of purchases that have already been made or commitments that have already been made to make sure that we got ahead of that curve. As I say, you know, it's, it's there, we're feeling some of the pressure. What we're actually looking to start doing now is to sort of plan into 2023 to see what we can do to get ahead of any issues that may start to hit us and impact us. It's similar to the rest of the industry. But I do feel right now that where we are, what we've got committed, you've heard what the CapEx spend is looking like for 2022, that actually takes account of potentially any slight inflationary costs. Obviously, we're also looking at making sure that we're watching all of our construction costs as well. The figures I gave you with respect to a totally fully-laden cost for an AC and a DC in my prepared remarks, that is installation costs, construction costs, and the bill of materials. Not only do we look at the bill of materials, we're watching construction installation as well very closely.

That's helpful. Thank you for the comments. My other question was a clarification on the gross margin comments and maybe a two-part question on gross margins. So first, the 25 to 30 percent, I wanted to clarify, is that excluding depreciation? And then the second part of that, it sounds like that's a longer-term target at 25 to 30 percent. So maybe you can talk about what's changed relative to the SPAC investor presentation. I think the prior 2025 gross margin target was the upper 40% range, and so I'm trying to understand is the 25% to 30% replacing that 47% target you'd had before, and if so, what's the delta? Thanks.

Yeah, so for your first question there, Mark, yeah, the 25% to 30% gross margin does exclude depreciation, so that's how we model it out. And I think with respect to what you've seen in the SPAC models, what we're seeing right now, is we've spent more time looking at the model itself. We've spent more time investigating what those sort of costs are, cost of service, cost of product. And what we're giving you right now is our current estimate based off what we see for the future. So we feel a lot more, we're in a place right now where we feel that this is a true figure that we can model to, a true figure that I would suggest people who are modeling look to do so.

but that's what we believe we're heading towards in a mature market. Thank you.

And our next question today comes from Matt Somerville with DA Davidson. Please go ahead.

Thanks. A couple questions. First, in your prepared remarks, you referred to the cadence of stall ads as you build throughout the year, and it seems like a pretty big step almost quadrupling your stall ads from Q1 to Q4 in a market highly, highly characterized with skilled labor, scarcity, shortages. Handicap the risk in getting to that number. And I guess, you know, talk about how firm or lack thereof a line of sight you actually have from going, I'm just rounding, but from 200 to 800 plus.

Yeah, thanks for that, Matt. I'm going to pass that one over to Drew Bennett. Sure.

So, indeed, it is a big growth, even on quarter to quarter, especially from a capacity and delivery standpoint. But when we think about what do you need to deliver on numbers, especially in growth when it comes to being an infrastructure group, we think about it in kind of three ways. First, you need to have the opportunity Then you need to have the capacity to deliver on it, and then you actually have to deliver on it and execute. So what we're seeing in front of us right now is that we have the pipeline. You've kind of seen that laid out like the signed opportunities are there for us to start moving through this deployment pipeline. We've spent the last couple of quarters building out our team and really increasing our capacity. And when you have an infrastructure pipeline, those don't just immediately start delivering numbers. You have to kind of get the projects going. So that team has been wrapping up over the last two quarters. So we feel like we have the capacity that aligns with our targets now, and we'll start to see those results coming. So the last thing that remains in front of us is execution. And, you know, it's, it's no small thing. Executing is very hard for a lot of the reasons that you mentioned permitting utilities got to play ball. And of course our site hosts, they don't exist in a vacuum. They have tenants who sometimes also get to have a sign off on that and, And those permissions can kind of have a variability. So I think there are certainly opportunities for things to accelerate or push back. And the closer you get, you kind of have more confidence, right? Like once we break ground, we're confident something's going to happen along a pretty specific timeline. Up until then, things could happen. So, but we feel really good about this. I mean, anytime you have growth, it's difficult, but We've put the team in a position to succeed and execute, and I think we're pretty confident about our expectations here.

And then as a follow-up, I wanted to see if, I believe you've done some piloting on charge for charge already. So I'd be curious as to what you've observed with respect to utilization rates therein on those pilots. You've given your utilization rate overall for the network in the past. I would be interested in that as well. And then I just want to be clear, did the whole, you know, stand up, if you will, of the charge for charge, did that get further pushed to the right with some of that now not happening until 23? Thank you.

Matt, thanks for that. I'll take this.

So, I'll start with your second point first, if you don't mind. The charge for charge is not being pushed back. Our plans still are to have this up and live and running across our DC stalls in the latter half of 2022. So we've started and we're positioning this as a July, August rollout. That is no different than anything we've said before. And I feel very comfortable with where we stand that you're going to start to see this. As we've always said, we're going to start on our DC stalls. And that's going to kick it off. And as we roll into 2023, I think this may be where you may have heard us talk about 2023. As we relate to 2023, that's when we're going to go back to our AC stalls and do the retrofit for the AC stalls. And then that retrofit is very minor. It doesn't cost much at all to actually do that work. So then eventually, as you roll through 2023, we're going to start to see a full install of all of our stores across all of our sites. Our whole network will have charge for charge capability. As it relates to your first question on the charge for charging utilization rates, we've not released any figures on that right now. What I can tell you is that what we're doing is as we look at the utilization rates, we're actually sort of like doing the AB testing. We do AB testing across various different sites where we actually have some of them turned on charge for charge, some of them that are not. And then we're able to measure the delta in both the, not just the utilization, but also what is very critical and important to get right is the driver experience. And that driver experience is what can and does lead to sort of utilization changes. But this is one of the areas where we are focused on. We take the information we get and we're turning it around and being able to make that driver experience in such a way that while there may be some changes on the slight dip in the charge for charging and the utilization, That's something we've modeled into, and as we say, when we look to a mature market, we're looking for stability across that utilization. One thing I just want to point out to make sure people understand is the utilization on the charge for charge, that's something that we're going to model very carefully as we roll out. But the utilization on the media, what we call the sell-through, that won't change in any way, shape, or form whether or not we turn on the charge for charging. That is the, you know, we've talked about that being in the mid-teens going up to the mid-20 range right now. And as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, you know, we're looking at a mature market of about 50% utilization sell-through for media.

Hopefully that answers your question there, Matt. Thank you very much.

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And our next question today comes from Craig Shearer with TUI Brothers. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thanks for the incredible detail today. So first question on the charge for charging. The guidance is that it will be a positive gross margin, but will the net cost to the end user still be a discounted rate versus most peers in the back of the parking lot?

Craig, thanks for that question. And that is actually a very important question. It's one I think that actually helps Walter be a differentiated business model in various different ways, but this is one that's key to us As we mentioned in the prepared remarks, we gave you the revenue that we expect on a mature market for the media per stall per screen. In our mind, that does allow us to have that differential pricing that we can put on the charge for charging as we look at turning it on across the whole network. But I'd say not only do we have the benefit of actually having the ability to have differentiated pricing from some of our peers and competitors who may be in the back of the parking lot, but one of the other things to also remember is that we have one of the better locations in all of these sites. We're very close to the front door of all of these, whether it's the stores or the cinema or the sports stadiums, we're very close to the entrance there. That just makes it naturally attractive for the drivers to actually go there. So I've had certain conversations where it's sort of like if you've got the most attractive scores, do you always have to be the lowest price? Well, we'll model to what we feel is the right price for the right aspects in the driver experience. And just to go back to your question there, Craig, yeah, we can have that differentiated pricing. And let me just lastly tie that back to the prior question. The use of our differentiated pricing is a lever that we can use for utilization. And it's a tool that we're going to be interested in maximizing the total value that we can bring per store And that total value is, once again, its price and its utilization. And so we feel we're in a very, very good position for pricing and utilization and the total overall use.

Thanks. And the guidance as far as expectations of total charging revenue, the LCFS included in that, what are your pricing assumptions there? And are you incorporating anything for ERAM?

Yeah. So the answer to your latter part is yes. And when we're looking at the current market for the credits, as with all of our peers and competitors, there's definitely been a softening in the market for those credits. We're modeling very similar to what I've heard our peers saying, which is in that sort of

110 to 130 range right now.

Okay, so I would assume there's comfortable upside there. You know, other industries are modeling, you know, in the high 100, so at least that has some potential. And what about alternate, I'm sorry, alternate emission credit opportunities?

Yeah, so Craig, just yes, there's potential upside and we always look to try and get the best we can and we bundle accordingly to get the best price that we can. And the other credits as well, yeah, we're exploring any and all credits. We have a team that's focused on all of these items, whether that's credits, whether it's grants, whether it's incentives, we look for anything that could be available to us. And at the same time, I just want to repeat, you know, we have such a strong, strong business model that, you know, our revenue capability and capacity on a store also gives us the opportunity to make sure we only chase after those credits and after those incentives that actually meet our business model and still enable us to maximize revenue per store.

Great. Thank you. And thank you, Craig.

And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to management for final remarks.

Thanks so much, operator. I'd like to close with thanking you all for your time today. And I'd also like to thank all of our employees for their contributions to Volta's success, our shareholders for their support, and our customers for their commitment. And we look forward to providing future updates on our progress as we drive forward. Thank you all.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.

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