Bloom Energy Corp Q4 FY2021 Earnings Call

Good evening everyone and welcome to the Bloom Energy Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings and Long-Term Outlook Conference Call. My name is Harry and I'll be the event specialist running today's event. I'll now hand over to our host, Ed Vallejo, Vice President of Investor Relations to begin. Mr. Vallejo, please go ahead when you're ready.

Thank you and good afternoon everybody. Thank you for joining us for Bloom Energy's Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings and Long-Term Outlook Call. To supplement this conference call, we furnished our fourth quarter 2021 earnings and long-term outlook press release with the SEC on Form 8-K and have posted it along with supplemental financial information that we will reference throughout this call to our Investor Relations website. During this conference call, both in our prepared remarks and in answers to your questions, we may make forward-looking statements that represent our expectations regarding future events and our future financial performance. These include statements about the company's business results, products, new markets, strategy, financial position, liquidity and full-year outlook for 2022 and long-term growth guidance. These statements are predictions based upon our expectations, estimates and assumptions. However, as these statements deal with future events, they are subject to numerous known and unknown risks and uncertainties as discussed in detail in our documents filed with the SEC, including our most recently filed Forms 10-Q and 10-K. We assume no obligation to revise any forward-looking statements made on today's call. During this call and in our fourth quarter 2021 earnings press release, we refer to GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. The non-GAAP financial measures are not prepared in accordance with U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and are in addition to and not a substitute for or superior to measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation between the GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is included in our fourth quarter 2021 earnings press release available on our Investor Relations website. Joining me on the call today are K.R. Sridhar, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and Greg Cameron, our Chief Financial Officer. K.R. will begin with an overview of our business, then Greg will review the operating and financial highlights of the quarter as well as the long-term outlook for the company. And after our prepared remarks, we will have time to take your questions. I will now turn the call over to K.R.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm delighted to tell you that Bloom Energy's fourth quarter and full-year 2021 results set records on many metrics. Importantly, at nearly $1 billion in revenue, we have reached an exciting inflection point. In 2021, we executed and delivered on our commitments. Additionally, we doubled down and invested in technology innovation, added capacity and drove top line growth. We built support functions and brought in experienced talent to our management team. And we strengthened our relationships with ecosystem partners, a strategy we use to both rapidly innovate and grow. We entered 2022 leaning forward with an ability to take advantage of the numerous tailwinds favoring the company. Importantly, we entered 2022 with a record backlog at $8.5 billion, almost double what it was last year. Our confidence in the future is stronger than ever. We're looking forward to sharing our long-term vision during our investor conference in May and our roadmap to take Bloom from nearly $1 billion in revenue today to $15 billion or greater over the next decade. Yes, I said $15 billion or greater. In many ways as the energy industry transforms, we are in a category of our own with growing revenue, margin expansion, strong backlog, and the best most innovative solutions to customers who want low carbon and resilient power today and zero emissions energy tomorrow. We're poised to capitalize on demand for clean energy, decarbonization and the growth of the hydrogen and renewable fuels economy. So now let me spend some time on our growth strategy. At Bloom Energy, we like markets where our core product has strong traction. And there are conducive policies and market demand for Bloom's decarbonized product offerings. The Bloom Energy platform is architected for such a seamless decarbonization transition that is both pragmatic and responsible. Our two major markets, the U.S. and Korea, exhibit these characteristics. In our U.S. commercial and industrial sector, we are witnessing record setting pipeline and significant backlog. I'm particularly excited about the momentum I'm seeing with some of the world's largest forward-thinking Fortune 100 companies who value the benefits of clean, reliable, and resilient energy. For instance, we just completed a contract with T-Mobile to power several of their sites across multiple states with independently certified low leak natural gas, gas that has been sourced responsibly to limit the release of harmful methane emissions. This is a demonstration of T-Mobile's commitment to creating a more sustainable future in addition to the many steps that they have already taken. Traditionally, most commercial and industrial customers get their baseload electricity from the electric grid. Today, that grid-based electricity is not resilient and is getting more expensive. When customers want an alternative for their baseload power that is clean, cost predictable, and resilient, Bloom is the best and often the only option in the marketplace. The Bloom Advantage is growing stronger, and the value proposition is more evident by the day. Electricity rates are on the rise at an incredible clip. In California, utility rates are increasing by between 20% to 30% for the majority of customers. In Massachusetts, C&I customers will see delivery rates go up 20% by 2024. In New York, rate increases attributable to New York's Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act alone are estimated to add eight percentage points plus per year to New Yorkers' energy bills. Extreme weather events are impacting our resiliency. In just the most recent winter storms that affected the Northeast, hundreds of thousands went without power and in some areas, the outages extended into days, not hours. Over a dozen of Bloom micro-grids deployed in these regions kept our customers' power on all the time. Now, as we look at Korea, our offtake order guarantees a minimum of 450 megawatts in transactions over the next few years, which is three times the total orders we received in Korea over the past three years. Our partner SK ecoplant anticipates that we will transact more than this minimum and our highly efficient hydrogen fuel cells will accelerate revenue growth. Our Bloom’s compelling value proposition of clean and reliable power that is cost competitive and predictable will drive our existing power service businesses' growth. Our growth will also accelerate due to increased demand for renewable natural gas for power generation, Bloom hydrogen, green hydrogen produced from our electrolyzer and net zero energy generation with carbon capture. For instance, the waste-to-energy sector is a new area of growth for us. Demand for RNG and renewable fuels is continuing to outpace the supply. Demand for our solutions in this high growth sector is driven by several factors, including customers' need for clean baseload electricity, the steep growth in waste collection and aggregation, driven by local mandates and the market incentives for making low carbon intensity fuels. A new project was recently announced in Linden, New Jersey, where Bloom will power a facility that takes organic waste and converts it to RNG with a low carbon intensity. As we focus on execution, we assembled a dream team of leaders to commercialize our offerings in hydrogen, renewable fuels, and marine verticals, these talented executives net commercial sales in the same verticals for market-leading companies. Today, our team at Bloom is confident that we will disrupt these multibillion-dollar markets with our groundbreaking products. We're very excited to have them on our team. Before I turn it over to Greg, I want to take a moment to thank our CTO, Venkat Venkataraman and express my heartfelt gratitude for his service. He has been with Bloom for 18 years and will be retiring at the end of June. He leaves the company on a high note having engineered a versatile platform, from the lab bench to the marketplace. Venkat started at Bloom as a system architect, and then as Head of System Engineering, before becoming Head of Engineering, and then CTO. All of us at Bloom are immensely grateful for all his contributions over the years and their impact on making Bloom successful. Venkat has built an incredible team that will continue to maintain our technical leadership and excellence. Thank you, Venkat. Now over to Greg.

Thanks, K.R. This year was indeed about execution. And we are in an excellent position to achieve the kind of near and long-term growth that will cement our position as a leader in the energy industry. Similar to prior quarters, we've included our financial performance in our earnings release, and posted additional information in our supplemental financial package to our corporate web page. For this quarter, in addition to our usual financial package, we've included a few slides on our updated growth projections. I'm excited to share we had another record year for revenue and acceptances. Our momentum is accelerating. Our backlog is up nearly 100% year-over-year, our pipeline is stronger than it's ever been. We now have more acceptances in a single quarter than we had in four quarters just a few years ago and our long-term growth rates are accelerating. Now with that as context, let me highlight our key accomplishments for the fourth quarter in 2021. Our record acceptances in revenue were driven by strong deliveries in both South Korea and the United States. In the fourth quarter, we recorded 735 acceptances, which brought our total year to 1879 units, an increase of nearly 42% versus the prior year. As K.R. discussed, we've benefited from our accomplishments with our EPC and financing partners to simplify our business model by transferring ownership of the systems earlier, thereby improving the predictability of our installation timing and improving our margins. These acceptances delivered total revenue of approximately $340 million in the fourth quarter, up roughly 36% versus the fourth quarter 2020 and over $970 million for the total year, up more than 22% versus 2021. It was at the high end of the range that we provided on our third quarter earnings call and was made possible by the outstanding effort of our supply chain and production teams finding new ways to exceed their promised capacity. Overall non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP operating income, and CFOA are consistent with our previous guidance as we continue to navigate the global supply chain pressures. Like other companies with similar supply chains, we continue to see availability and price pressure on some components and logistics. While we've not yet seen a significant improvement, we do feel these issues are stabilizing and our teams have adapted well to operating in this environment. Moving on to our bookings and backlog performance, our strong year positions Bloom well into the future. Based on our performance in the United States and South Korea, we have created a product backlog of approximately $2.4 billion that we will accept over the next three years. When combined with our service contracts that will be fulfilled over the next 15 years, we have a total backlog of $8.5 billion, nearly two times where we finished last year. We also have the strongest pipeline in Bloom's history. We believe the commercial momentum we continue to build provides the visibility and confidence to meet our growth goals. Simply put, we have never been this well positioned as a company. And it's a testament to our entire organization. Our cash balances reached $615 million, with $396 million in unrestricted cash. And as expected, we closed the first tranche of the SK Ecoplant equity investment for $255 million in December. As we look forward, we expect our growth to continue with acceptances expected to increase 27% to 32% for 2022. We will be limited in our capacity in the first half of the year, as we replenish our inventories and tour our new Fremont facility. In the first half of 2022, I would expect revenue to be roughly flat to 2021. As capacity is added, second half acceptances should increase product and service revenue growth to around 27% for the total year. We continue our strategic shift away from performing installations by leveraging third-party EPC providers. As a result, our installation revenue, which has been roughly flat over the past two years, will be about 50% lower than the prior years. While this reduces total revenue by roughly $50 million versus the prior year, this shift allows us in most cases to transfer ownership at product delivery, allowing us to focus resources on sales and marketing, manufacturing, operating efficiencies, and Research and Development Innovation. While we are planning for the supply chain environment to remain challenging through much of 2022, we're targeting to reduce our product costs by 10% versus the prior year. We expect to leverage our volume increases with the supply chain to reduce material costs by 6% to 8%, further automate our labor processes for productivity, and see a path for logistic costs beginning to normalize in the second half of 2022. While there is risk in achieving this cost down in the current environment, we believe that we need to challenge ourselves to return to our 10% to 15% per annum cost reduction targets. Besides the opportunity, this 10% cost down equates to roughly five points of non-GAAP gross margins and $60 million of operating profit. We're creating executable plans to achieve these targets and we'll update each quarter on our progress. With the reducing margin impact from installations and executing on product costs down, we expect our non-GAAP gross margins to expand two points to around 24% and our non-GAAP operating margins to improve five plus points as we achieve additional operating leverage. As we discussed in the last earnings call, we plan to revisit our growth goals based on our current performance and expectations from our technology roadmap. Before we speak about the future to provide some context, I thought it was worth reviewing what Bloom has achieved since going public in 2018. Our revenue growth since our last full year prior to the IPO has seen a compounded annual growth rate of 28% for the total business. Over the same period, our product and service revenue grew 36%. As we do less installations going forward, we will be highlighting our product and service revenue as the more meaningful measure of future growth. Over the same period, by constantly reducing our costs, we've expanded our non-GAAP gross margins 24 points to approximately 22%. To support our growth targets, we require additional staff manufacturing capacity to meet our revenue and service needs. We manufacture our stacks and columns in California and assemble our servers in Newark, Delaware. We have up to two gigawatts of annual assembly capacity. But we're limited to roughly 280 megawatts of annual stack manufacturing capacity. Last year we leased a 164,000 square foot facility in Fremont, California, that will provide a gigawatt of capacity when fully utilized. We commenced operations in this facility last month, and expect to invest $150 million in new tooling over the course of 2022. This facility can support both Bloom 5.0 and 7.5 platforms. While there will be a limited increase in capacity in the first half of 2022, we expect to have added nearly 300 megawatts of stack capacity by year-end. We expect to reach one gigawatt of capacity by year-end 2023. It's important to remember that these investments are incredibly attractive and provide a less than one-year payback when fully utilized. To ensure we're not capacity constrained in the future, we've already begun to evaluate expansion opportunities in new locations that can best support our growth. Like many companies experiencing this level of growth, we have disciplined investment practices that maximize the value of our current assets while planning future investments. One additional point on capacity, we usually describe capacity on a fuel cell basis, but the stack is common supported by the fuel cell or the electrolyzer. When used as an electrolyzer, the power rating is more than two times that of the fuel cell. As such, our capacity is over doubled when described on an electrolyzer basis, meaning the 580 megawatts of capacity that we are targeting for year-end 2022 will be roughly 1.4 gigawatts that are completely allocated to electrolyzers. This is a significant benefit of a common platform as we can invest in capacity to meet the demand with a reduced risk of underutilized assets if individual markets do not evolve as expected. In advance of our May 2022 Investor Conference, I want to preview an update to our long-term revenue guidance. We expect our medium and long-term growth to accelerate based upon the many industry and Bloom-specific tailwinds, that are giving us a better line of sight into our future performance. Having now reached the $1 billion threshold in 2021, we see revenues in five years in the range of $4 billion to $5 billion and in 10 years in the range of $15 billion to $20 billion. We built these projections from both industry research and our own product segment models. While we are confident in our assumptions, these forecasts may evolve as markets mature. Referring to the forecasted growth rate slide in the deck, let me start with our fuel cell or power generation business. We remain confident in our ability to continue to grow this business at the 25% to 30% rate with improving margins and cash flow. The demand for our resilient, always-on Energy Server remains strong as customer power needs increase and expand the geographies in which we sell. Our fuel flexibility is unique to meet the customers' needs today while providing the option to adapt to renewable fuels and hydrogen as they become commercially available. The Bloom electrolyzer is the most efficient on the market, and we see a market that will grow sharply. To better quantify the future revenue opportunity, we've analyzed the IEA data to build a global electrolyzer market view. Based upon our electrolyzer efficiency benefits and cost reductions, we're projecting a market share of roughly 20% by 2030. In the graph, the electrolyzer represents over 80% of the assumed revenue for our decarbonizing technologies. While we are excited about our electrolyzer opportunity, we know the world cannot solely depend on hydrogen and intermittent renewables during the energy transition. Our Energy Server is incredibly efficient with natural gas, and since we do not combust our exhaust, the high concentration of CO2, we believe there's an opportunity to partner with others in the industry to leverage the value of this CO2, either in sequestration or utilization to offset the cost of the electricity. With carbon capture, we've assumed that this will both facilitate opportunities in our traditional fuel cell business as well as utility scale opportunities that we've captured under decarbonizing technologies. We believe that this market should grow based on existing and proposed incentives over the next decade. To build our forecasts, we've assumed a few utility scale projects coming online starting in 2025, with many of the larger scale carbon capture projects anticipated later in the decade. Due to our unique technology, we believe we would avoid many of the pitfalls of traditional carbon capture projects, and we would see an acceleration in the adoption of new power projects. As we move into the back half of this decade, we should begin to see meaningful revenue from our marine application. We continue to meet our technical milestones, attract new partners, and receive broad industry interest across cargo, tanker, cruise ships, and ferries. We based our growth projections on the forecast of new LNG fueled ships that could reach roughly 1,000 builds by the year 2030. I'd note this assumption does not yet include a retrofit option for existing LNG fueled ships. We believe that as this business scales, it could deliver $1 billion to $2 billion per year by 2031, including these growth opportunities that rely on the same proven fuel cell platform, we are increasing our targeted growth rate to 30% to 35%, compounded annually over the next 10 years. In summary, Bloom had an incredibly strong 2021 by focusing on execution. Our operating and financial performance was strong. As we move into 2022, we have incredible momentum and are taking actions to maintain this growth. We are extremely excited about our future. We believe we're uniquely positioned as we have both demonstrated performance while providing robust and diversified opportunities for growth. We are unique as our Server platform allows us to pursue multiple opportunities from a single supply chain and manufacturing capability. The company is now at an inflection point. We have the product, team, strategy, and track record to demonstrate that we can execute on our growth plans. With that, operator, let's open up the line for questions.

Thank you very much. Our first question is from Stephen Byrd from Morgan Stanley. Stephen, your line is now open, if you'd like to proceed.

Hey, I just want to say congrats on a very constructive update during a challenging time. Very well done.

Thank you, Steve.

And thanks for the visibility as you look out over the next decade, it's really helpful to get your views on growth and margin. I wanted to talk about carbon capture. You gave some good color on sort of the timeframe over which this is going to become material in terms of revenue. Would you mind just sharing perhaps over the next year or two, some of the key catalysts we should be thinking about in terms of your carbon capture product? Also, just curious, as you look at your economics of carbon capture compared to other technologies that you've seen out there, how do you gauge your competitiveness on carbon capture?

Stephen, this is K.R. Nice to hear from you and thanks for your very kind feedback on our quarter. We're excited. So here's what you've always understood how critical and important this carbon capture piece of Bloom's Technology is in the energy transition for the world. Even in the best-case scenarios, they put some kind of fossil fuel being available for the next 30 years is on the horizon, even in the best case put out by everybody and we would all like from a decarbonization perspective for that to be natural gas because it's the cleanest of fossil fuels. I would submit to you that it should be using the Bloom platform because carbon capture is so much easier and you can go from natural gas to zero carbon with this technology. Why is this important? Let me bring everybody up to speed and then ask your specific question. The exhaust coming out of our product, because of the uniqueness of what we do and other fuel cells cannot do this, is there is no nitrogen in our exhaust stream, which means 10 times less mass with what comes out of our stream compared to a combined cycle gas turbine and it is 15% more concentrated—15 times more concentrated than a combined cycle gas turbine. If you multiply the two, we have 150 times or a 15,000% advantage over a combined cycle gas turbine's exhaust regarding the concentration of CO2. I'm happy to share that we've made technical progress this last year with our exhaust stream and condensing the water out; we can put out a 95% pure stream of CO2. We see two clear development paths and demonstration paths coming out of this in the next year, which is the question you asked. It falls into two categories. One is for small scale, and I say small scale, a few megawatts. If you look at the food and beverage industry, they require CO2, and the price volatility and increased price of CO2 and the availability of CO2 has become impossible. You may have noticed in England; food shelves are empty because they couldn't get enough dry ice due to the lack of CO2. So we have a technology where we can take our exhaust stream and make it to food-grade CO2 and make it economically viable. So you will see us demonstrating that next year, a huge opportunity in a very big market. The second one, which is just off the charts, would be to take our Korea kind of a power tower, three stories tall, but Korea kind of a single-level install 20 megawatts in the floor. You put them together, what you end up with is a 100-megawatt power plant. That 100-megawatt power plant in our estimation with even the existing 45 in the book will allow us to offer mid-single-digit zero carbon firm electricity to people, as long as we put that in a place where that carbon dioxide can be sequestered or piped. We're talking to multiple partners now. This has to be a large scale project, and we are hoping that we can announce some partnerships this year.

That's great color. Thank you. Just one other question. Regarding the electrolyzers, you talked about the growth you see there. Yes, I guess one thing I've been thinking a lot about is just the degree of competition for the electrolyzer; competitors' costs are dropping quickly. And I respect that your technology is quite efficient. But I'm also thinking just about the overall product costs, and some competitors are targeting to get below $1,000 a kilowatt. So it does appear to me that there is quite a bit of competition. Would you mind just giving us your latest thoughts on your relative competitive position as well as your cost trajectory? It does strike me that you all reduce your cost very rapidly. And even in this kind of environment, to be able to reduce cost by 10% is an achievement, but just curious how you think you stack up against fairly significant competition out there?

I would say stacking up would be the wrong thing to say; we are head and shoulders above what anybody else can do. Let me walk you through why. Number one, if you just look at our material costs of $2,400—one kilowatt of a fuel cell is the equivalent of about 2.4 times for an electrolyzer. Our material costs today are $1,000. It's not some future costs. That's where our costs are today, just even at the small scale, and high-end hydrogen electrolyzers will be done in very large scale. So we will not just be at cost parity, we will effectively be able to compete with anybody, based on where we are today. But Stephen, I think in the hydrogen world, nobody is going to be competing on the cost of the electrolyzer; they're going to be competing on the cost of delivered hydrogen per kilogram. Every analysis that you would see, including what you've done, McKinsey and other places, in large scale, more than 80% of the cost of hydrogen is the cost of input energy. We will be anywhere from 15% to 40% better than anybody else in that field. So they can offer their electrolyzer at zero cost, and we will still be able to deliver low-cost hydrogen. Not only can we, from a market timing perspective, this is not a luxury good play. We are going to have to transform an amazing large amount of what we need to do. Like everything else we do, we are focused on the right opportunities, and if you just noticed on talent, we just brought in Rick Beuttel, who spent 31 years with the world's largest hair products company. This gentleman was the senior leader for large-scale commercial installations, including hydrogen, and his last project was over $4 billion. He came to Bloom because he's able to see the competitive advantage of what we have to offer. We're super excited about that. Other questions?

Our next question is from Michael Blum from Wells Fargo. Michael, your line is now open, if you'd like to proceed with your question.

Thanks. Good afternoon, everybody. I have a couple of questions, one on your natural gas-powered Energy Server. Just curious, do you have an update on progress in penetrating additional states in the United States?

Hey, Michael, it's Greg; it's good to hear from you. Listen, we have been very active in pursuing additional opportunities. As we've always talked, we've kind of traditionally practiced in those states that tended to have a higher cost of electricity because that was primarily where our value proposition was originally on reducing the cost of electricity. But as we've really improved on our microgrid solution and resiliency has become a larger question for our customers, we've made a lot of progress on that. The other thing that I would say, not only in resiliency, time to power is becoming a critical request from our customers. And what I mean by that, if you just take something like the chip industry that is growing dramatically in the United States as a way to meet customer needs, the need for power is significant as new manufacturing comes online. We are seeing and winning new customers because we're able to supply them more power more quickly than their traditional grid providers. We won this year in some new states in Pennsylvania and Iowa, and have a lot of great prospects in others to continue to expand. I think we're going to continue to push in our geographies over the course of this year.

Thanks very much. And our next question is from George Gianarikas from Baird. George, your line is now open if you'd like to proceed with your question.

Hey, good evening, guys. Thanks for taking my question. First, you can you just articulate to us your really strong multi-year outlook? What was the catalyst behind that? Was it the SK deal that you recently announced? What is your momentum in the backlog? What brought you to the point where you thought you wanted to update the guidance?

Hey, George, it’s Greg. So as we thought about this, for a long time, the last guidance we gave was in December of 2020 during our Analyst Day there. Since that time, the company has continued to execute on our technical roadmap and made tremendous progress on our new products that we had talked about at the time. We’ve since gone through a development phase. I think it wasn't any one particular item; I think we looked at the strength of our core business, we looked at the order book that was building, we looked at the technology adjacencies that we had, and we looked at the balance sheet improvements that we’ve made over the last 24 months. We saw an opportunity internally that maybe folks externally hadn't seen. So we thought it was important to come back and show you what we were seeing from where we were and share that. It really comes down to the amount of tailwinds that we've seen; some are specific to us as well as some in the industry that we thought was important to share with you in advance of our May Investor Conference, where we would start the trajectory of the company and then knowing we can spend time in May really building out with the talent that we have by segment, by product, by opportunity around how we try to go execute that and how it all rolls up. So we thought it was important to share it now.

Thank you. And with regards to this year specifically, just one follow-up on that. You articulated some points during the call, but what sort of operating environment should we assume for this year? In other words, should we assume continued supply chain disruptions throughout the world and we're dealing with this, as well as other companies? If things improved, could there be upside estimates? Or if things deteriorate with another variant, could there be downside? And how should we think about your guidance relative to the overall COVID and supply chain environment?

Yes, so I think on the environment—on the supply chain what we talked about in the script, right, was we don't see it necessarily getting significantly better right now. But we do see that our teams have adapted very well to it. There's obviously pressure around components, there's pressure around the commodities. We have looked at that environment and said we expect that to continue, but we do see that our teams have adapted well to operating in this environment. On the manufacturing side, we need to add some capacity. And in order for us to get to our growth projections, we are fully aligned and making sure that we're getting the tooling done in the first half of the year that we can meet the demand that comes in the second half of the year. A little bit of color as we finished the year: we don’t have a server, effectively in inventory that we could ship—we were operating on all cylinders as we closed out the year and every server that was available, we found a home for it. So we're planning for a continued type of environment where we're putting a tremendous amount of good pressure on our production teams to make sure they are pushing even beyond where they thought possible so that we can meet the demand that's there. Obviously, like any forecast, we're always open to some changes in the environment. But I think we're going into this with our eyes wide open about how this will continue through the rest of the year.

Thanks, George.

And our next question comes from Julien Dumoulin-Smith. Julien, your line is now open, if you would like to proceed with your question.

Yes, hey, good afternoon. Thanks for the time and the opportunity. Congratulations again, all the best.

Thanks, Julien.

Maybe picking up on the long-term guidance here and sort of the origin of the last question, if you will, the number for 2026 is a strong print here on Power Gen. Can you talk about the cadence between where we are today and what you guys are projecting specifically for the Power Gen, and that sort of $3 billion figure, pretty bold. So I want to understand when and how you get there. What are the milestones between here and then that you guys are looking for specifically to achieve that?

Listen, Julien, that number is consistent with our historical growth rates around the Power Gen business. If you look at product and service, and that's what we tried to show into the deck, we expect that our business to grow in that 25% to 30% range and that you see if you take out where we are today, based on what we've done historically, and roll that forward, that gets you to where you are in five years and 2026 for the Power Gen business in that $4 to $5 billion range, and near the $10 billion range by the end of the decade. We think we've got a lot of growth opportunities within that, and you've got the fuel flexibility, so that includes both our natural gas, our renewable gas, and our hydrogen fuel cells in there. We fully expect to be filling in a lot more markets over that period, so it won't totally be the U.S. and South Korea. The work that Tim Schweikert and the team are doing internationally to build out our franchise there, we think we can execute on all those and continue at the historical growth rates that we've had going forward. We think there's as much opportunity, if not more now than there was over the last five years.

Thank you very much. And our next question is from Maheep Mandloi from Credit Suisse. Maheep, your line is now open if you would like to proceed.

Hey, good evening. Thanks for taking my question as well, and congratulations on the quarter. The 2022 guidance was pretty useful in understanding the challenges here. But would it be fair to assume that in the second half, we could see margin expansion as you have more of the capacity come online? I'm just trying to understand the megawatt cadence going forward; it feels like it's more in the 40% to 50% range, and the 30% is on the financial business?

Yes, we’ve traditionally shipped about 40% of our capacity in the first half of the year, with 60% in the second half of the year. I would tell you right now, if I just look at the first quarter in some of the comments, I was making to Julien about just the activity of how much we were selling at the end of the year, we've got to build into capacity. So I would expect that our production levels to be about flat to where they were last year, and thus our revenue and margins to be flat to kind of where we ended the year on a margin level and then revenue kind of back to where we were in 2021. Our expectation is, as we get into the second half of the year, and our capacity increases and our throughput increases, we'll be able to execute our cost down initiatives, you're going to see improvement in our margins in the second half of the year versus the first half of the year. So I would say your assumption is on.

That's great. Thank you, Maheep, for your question. Our next question is from Mark Strouse from JPMorgan. Mark, your line is open now if you'd like to proceed.

Yes, good afternoon. Thanks for taking our questions. Can I take one more shot at the long-term targets here and then I've got a quick follow-up to that if I can? I believe you said you're targeting, or you're assuming a 20% share for the electrolyzer business in this forecast. I think some people could say that maybe sounds high. But then when I hear K.R. say all these great things, your competitive position seems kind of low. So I'm just kind of curious; how did you kind of center on that 20% number?

Yes, here's how we thought about it, right. We took the IEA data, and that looks to be about a 40 gigawatt opportunity, right, towards 2030. And that's built up based on announced projects. So that number could increase as more and more projects are executed. We took a market share and how we got comfortable with the market share was really based on the feedback that we've been receiving from our partners like SK and others that we've announced—the new partners that we've had, that we were in the process of talking to. The efficiency benefits that we have, whether it's with external heat or not, we think are really going to be a differentiator in the market. As K.R. said, 80% of the cost of breaking the water to create hydrogen is going to be the energy associated with doing that. We believe that the most efficient electrolyzer is the one that's going to win and we feel that we should be able to claim one-fifth of that market based on those efficiency benefits. That's how we built up that estimate.

Okay, thanks, Greg. And then just the quick follow-up. Regarding revenue targets here, I don't want to steal anything from the Analyst Day, but how do you think about the margin forecast over this time horizon as these new businesses emerge?

Yes, so we haven't updated our margin guidance, right? So we talked before about moving to a 30% non-GAAP gross margin by 2025. We've talked about getting to an operating margin of about 15% by 2025. I’d say that’s still consistent guidance. We haven't updated that for the fuel cell business. As you begin to layer in the adjacencies, you could see a situation where—low as it is, there will be some price competitiveness as products are introduced, there might be some slight dilution into that on the overall number, but we don’t believe it will be material to our overall guidance and what we provided before. We'll work through and do updates and provide more clarity on that over the next couple of months.

And by the same token, there could be pretty significant upsides based on subsidies and incentives that people put out. It is very difficult not knowing their policies, subsidies and other regimes will play out over a 10-year period on something that in most governments' policies have not yet been enacted. I think it will be difficult for anybody to paint out what those numbers should be. In the areas that we play, because of the competitive advantage that we bring forward, we will obviously be targeting the right geographies and the right markets, where we can command the most margins.

And thank you to Mark for his question. Our next question is from Pavel Molchanov from Raymond James. Pavel, your line is now open if you would like to proceed.

Yes, thanks for taking the question. Let me zoom in on Europe. About a year ago, you hired some sales executives in Europe. We’ve certainly been seeing lots of targets out of Brussels specifically for electrolyzers. Are you seeing any substantive demands from any of the 27 EU member states for electrolyzers at this point?

Pavel, that's a great question. This is K.R., how are you? So look, let's step back a bit and look at our two major markets, right, and look at what their characteristics are. We love markets where we can enter today and have a real business with real revenues and good margins. That's where we start. Okay, and there are many markets where we can do that. But we prefer the markets where we can not only do that but there's a great future outlook in terms of the support for decarbonization, with hydrogen policies, with the policies necessary for renewable natural gas, biogas—all those things, and embracing that in a holistic, pragmatic, realistic, and step-by-step way. Both the U.S. market and Korea market characterize them. So far, if you go back and look in Europe, things were different. But something has changed, right? Europe, in the last year has been plagued with acute energy shortages. People having to decide, and the prices of those energy and electricity have been going up. BBC has the headlines of heat or eat and not having power; you put those things together. And then you also look at the number of big cities in Europe where the customers require power, and the utility is not able to provide power, the time-to-power issue. And then, the last thing that happened as of a few weeks ago, the European Commission coming in and encouraging investments in natural gas infrastructure, that adapt to a zero carbon fuel and technologies when they become available in the future, and blessing that as part of their green investment and being private. All the conditions now are satisfied. We are going to be all-in on Europe, in obvious countries that you would imagine that we should be. This year, you will see us announcing deals and entering those markets.

Thanks, Pavel. Operator, we probably have time for one more question.

Great, thank you. And our next question is from Alex Zukin from Wolfe Research. Alex, your line will be open now if you would like to proceed.

Great, thanks very much. Thanks for all the updates. Two questions; first is when we're looking at kind of the intermediate timeframe, would it be fair to use that graph on Slide 11 to think about the cadence of revenue growth over the next five years? Is that fair or would that be missing something? The other question is just, we saw the Heliogen announcements on the federal lease earlier this week, and I think it was something like 20,000 tons of hydrogen produced per year and there was some reference to Bloom, I mean in that press release. I’m just kind of wondering, did you kind of confirm that you're involved in that potential expansion as well as maybe potentially, what type of electrolyzer capacity we’ll be talking about for your products to produce that much? Thanks.

Yes, hey Alex, so it's Greg. I'll start off and pass it over to K.R. on the Heliogen announcement. So here's how to think about it: we will continue to target our core power generation fuel cell business to grow in that 25% to 30% range. I think as you build out and begin to think about that, and for next year, we’ve targeted product and service at 20%, 27%. I would assume that over the medium term call it the next five years ought to be that way. At some point here, you're going to begin to see the electrolyzer and carbon capture revenues begin to come online. So if you get later in that cadence over that, call it 2023, '24, '25, you'll begin to see that level in and that will be an increase in our growth rate up to that $4 billion to $5 billion that we've put into it. So it should be fairly logical. We're not planning a hockey stick into that. We're going to continue to run our core business with excellence to deliver the growth order that we've done traditionally, and we expect to do that going forward and then as the new adjacencies and new products come on, those will lift our core growth rate above when our core growth rates have been over the timeline.

Can you repeat that question on Heliogen one more time?

You might have dropped, Alex.

Okay, so with respect to Heliogen, right. I think the question that was asked was those land purchases; what can you do for renewable capacity? So look, for Heliogen, their core value proposition is using their new technology; they can concentrate solar heat a lot more effectively, a lot more efficiently, with very low capital and raise the temperature of the steam to very high levels. When they're able to do that, the amount of renewable electricity needed to break the hydrogen becomes a lot less, and therefore hydrogen is less expensive, that’s number one. Number two is, with that high-temperature steam that you raise and what you do with the heat, you can run that entire hydrogen factory for much longer, rather than just when the sun shines under intermittent fashion, and keep the rest of your factory idle, thereby the capital is not giving the efficiency it needs to give. So it's a win-win. We are completely aligned with that thought process of combining solar concentrated heat and solar produced electricity to make the greenest of green hydrogen at the lowest of green in terms of dollars. We are completely aligned with that. In terms of what capacity we can provide, here is what you need to know: a gigawatt of Bloom factory, which is what we will have at the end of next year, you're seeing the capacity is equivalent to 2.4 gigawatts of electrolyzers. We can fungibly make one or the other. That's number one. The number two is, you've been hearing me say since we started the company, that we have designed our factories to be capital efficient and to be able to stand them up in a year. If you just went on faith, you no longer need to go on faith because the Fremont factory is demonstrating that: one year to build, one year to recoup your money. So if you want 2.4 gigawatts worth of electrolyzers for 2024, as long as you're willing to sign up for the purchase order, I will have the factory and deliver those products to you. So we are ready. And we are eager to go.

Great, K.R., let us switch it over to you to close and thank everybody for their time and apologize to those who weren't able to get to, to their questions.

Yes, thank you so much for joining us. We are a company that's executing on all cylinders, as you have seen, and we look to the future, we see tailwinds that are very significant for our business. The demand for our core value proposition of being cost predictable, reliable, resilient, and offering Clean Energy Solutions is resonating by the day and growing by the day when it comes to the customers. Adding to that, if we needed more tailwinds or obstacles for the customers, who are procuring electricity from the grid, the grid is more brittle; it's not working, and the costs are just going through the roof. Our core power generation business alone will grow from nearly $1 billion to over $10 billion in 10 years. What we have done for the last four years just doing the same thing over and over again for the next five years will take us there. But that's not all. We're incredibly excited about this hydrogen opportunity, the world needs that. But we are not reliant on the development timing of hydrogen or the subsidies and when they come for our growth and profitability goals. That's what differentiates us from everybody else. Okay, I want to be clear; we're running at full speed with our manufacturing capacity, supply chain, talent, and support teams to support the hydrogen market and it will come, and we will be a leader. We are executing our strategy plan by building talent, building technology, innovating, and putting the resources necessary to capitalize on these opportunities in the market. If we put all this together, you see excitement in my voice, you better believe it—I'm super excited and I hope you are too. Thank you for joining us.

This concludes the Bloom Energy fourth quarter 2021 earnings and long-term outlook conference call. Thank you to the shareholders who joined us today, and you may now disconnect your lines.