Microvast Holdings, Inc. Q2 FY2022 Earnings Call

Thank you, John, and thanks to the audience for joining us today. Sascha Kelterborn, our President and Chief Revenue Officer; and Craig Webster, Chief Financial Officer, will host today's call. Ahead of this call, Microvast issued its second quarter 2022 earnings press release, which can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website at ir.microvast.com. In addition, we have posted a slideshow to our website to accompany tonight's call. As a reminder, please note that we will be making forward-looking statements on this call. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and reflect our views only as of today. They should not be relied upon as representative of views as of any subsequent date and we undertake 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 our filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K filed in March and the 10-Q filed earlier today. In addition, during today's call, we may discuss non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted gross profit, adjusted net loss, and adjusted EBITDA, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of Microvast's performance. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP results. These non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to their most comparable GAAP metric in the tables included at the end of our press release. A webcast replay of this call will also be available on the Investor Relations section of our company website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Sascha for some opening remarks.

Thank you, Sarah. Everyone, please turn to Slide 4 of our presentation as I cover a few highlights from the second quarter. We posted 93% revenue growth during the quarter, delivering USD 64.4 million in Q2 2022. This revenue performance exceeded expectations, especially considering that our shipments were very slow in April and the first half of May due to the COVID lockdowns in Shanghai and the surrounding region. I want to thank our global team, and especially our local team in China this quarter. They faced many external challenges and situations that were out of their control, but they rose to the occasion, maintaining production throughout the lockdown and positioning us to deliver strong quarterly results when the pace of shipments began to pick back up in the second half of May as lockdown restrictions eased. We had an outstanding month in June, allowing us to make up the shortfall from the first half of the quarter. On a regional note, I would highlight that our market share in India continues to increase and was again a key region for our revenue growth this quarter. We ended the second quarter with a strong backlog of USD 105.3 million, driven by a healthy order intake of USD 47.8 million. Our forecasted contracted revenue remained at a solid USD 2.5 billion. Except for backlog, our forecasted contract revenue consists entirely of customers located outside of China. When we refer to forecasted contract revenue, we are describing backlog plus management estimates for revenue we expect to realize from existing contract relationships with customers. Most of these contracts include estimated volume requirements; however, they do not typically include a volume commitment. We expect to realize current forecasted contract revenue figures between 2022 and 2031. The most prominent challenge in the second quarter continued to be raw material prices, remaining at elevated levels due to supply chain disruptions and worldwide inflation. Our unit costs are tracking significantly higher than we anticipated at the beginning of the year. We are actively monitoring these trends and implementing mitigation strategies where possible, including optimizing longer-term supply contracts, identifying new or additional sources of supply, and increasing our selling prices where possible. However, we expect raw material prices, especially for certain key materials like lithium and cobalt, to remain elevated through 2022 and possibly into 2023. Looking forward into 2023, we expect our order volume to increase after we bring the new manufacturing capacities online in Huzhou, and we anticipate this additional volume will increase our production visibility, enabling us to lock in higher volume commitments. Please turn to Slide 5, which highlights some of our key partnerships in the commercial vehicle market. SAFRA is a French bus OEM with a dedicated unit specializing in the renovation of passenger transport equipment and is active in propelling clean and sustainable mobility. One of SAFRA's core strategies centers on the construction and marketing of hydrogen buses under the Businova and HYCITY brands. They focus on retrofitting buses with hydrogen, renovating and maintaining passenger transport vehicles, and providing customer service. Microvast is nominated as the exclusive battery supplier and has signed a framework agreement up to 10 years with SAFRA, with a revenue forecast of over USD 150 million. Clean Logistics is a transport leader in the mobility revolution within the commercial vehicle transport sector. Microvast has already delivered prototype systems for hydrogen buses and trucks for Clean Logistics. The expected volume forecast from 2023 to 2027 is approximately 1,300 to 5,000 vehicles. Weichai Power Group is an international company with various business segments, including power systems, commercial vehicles, aquaculture equipment, construction machinery, smart logistics, and marine transportation equipment. Its products are exported to more than 110 countries and regions. Microvast is currently delivering battery systems to Weichai Power for its heavy tractor project, with a $4 million order volume in Q2. XCMG is one of the most influential large-scale enterprises in China's construction machinery industry, with a product portfolio that includes various heavy-duty construction equipment such as trucks, asphalt machines, concrete mixers, graders, and fire trucks. Microvast expects to deliver 50 sets to their 49-ton hydrogen heavy-duty trucks, generating a total revenue of USD 1.4 million in 2022. Please turn to Slide 6, which highlights some key wins during the second quarter, including an order from JBM Group for over USD 11 million and another order from SWTCH in excess of USD 8 million. We also continue to benefit from ongoing customer relationships with companies like Oshkosh, Wright Bus, ZF, King Long, and others. In total, the order intake for Q2 was USD 47.8 million. I will now turn the call over to Craig to review our financial performance of Q2.

Thank you, Sascha. I'll spend the next few minutes discussing our Q2 2022 financial results. Please turn to Slide 8, and I will summarize the main line items from our Q2 P&L. First off, revenue. I am pleased to report strong revenue growth in the second quarter, which grew 93% to $64.4 million from $33.4 million in Q2 2021. I will take you through the geographic breakdown in a later slide, but I would like to highlight that this marks the sixth consecutive quarter that we have shown substantial revenue growth over the same quarter in the prior year. In fact, on a percentage basis, revenue has grown double or triple digits for each quarter since Q1 2021. On a year-to-date basis, revenue was $101.1 million, up 109.2% from $48.3 million in the prior 6-month period. We posted gross profit of $4.8 million in Q2 2022, comparing favorably to a gross loss of $6.8 million in the prior period, demonstrating an improvement of 171.5%. After adjusting for noncash settled share-based compensation expense in our cost of sales, adjusted gross profit was $6.7 million in Q2 2022 compared to an adjusted gross loss of $6.8 million in Q2 2021, translating into an adjusted gross margin of 10.4% in Q2 2022 compared to negative 20.3% in Q2 2021, a 30.7 percentage point improvement. I was pleased to see gross margin improve at a faster rate than revenues during the quarter despite higher raw material prices. This result underpins our efforts to improve our gross margin performance long-term, and it will continue to be an area of focus for us going forward, especially as we plan for significantly higher customer deliveries in 2023. Operating expenses stood at $50.4 million in Q2 2022 compared to $15.8 million in Q2 2021. The most significant contributor to the increased operating expenses was share-based compensation expense, which totaled $28.5 million in the quarter. Operating expenses also increased as the company continues to add headcount to support planned growth initiatives and incurs additional expenses related to operating as a public company compared to the prior year period. As I mentioned previously, noncash share-based compensation expenses significantly contributed to both the increase in GAAP operating expenses and operating losses. The majority of share-based compensation expense relates to equity awards made in the years preceding our business combination last summer. Accounting rules require that those awards be expensed to our P&L over a 3-year period following the merger. We believe a more accurate representation of our financial performance, especially regarding cash operating expenses and operating loss, is illustrated in Slide 9. After adjusting for noncash stock-based compensation in SG&A, our adjusted operating expense in Q2 2022 was $21.7 million compared to $15.8 million in Q2 2021. GAAP net loss was $44.2 million in Q2 2022 compared to a net loss of $27.1 million in Q2 2021. After adjusting for noncash share-based compensation expense and changes in fair value of warrant liability and convertible notes, adjusted net loss was $14.9 million in Q2 2022 compared to $23.8 million in Q2 2021. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP metrics to the most comparable GAAP metrics are included in the tables at the end of our earnings press release. Slide 10 shows the geographic breakdown of our revenue for the 3- and 6-month periods ended June 30, 2022, compared to the prior year period. I am pleased to report that all four of our key geographies posted growth in Q2 2022 compared to Q2 2021. As you can see, the largest growth in revenues came from the Asia Pacific region, excluding China, with growth of 231% compared to Q2 2021 and 310% growth for the first 6 months. India continues to be the biggest driver of growth for us in the Asia Pacific region. Additionally, our China business continues to perform well, posting 57% growth during the quarter, while Europe also posted a healthy 15% growth rate. Even though Europe's growth currently lags the other geographies due to the impacts of the war in Ukraine, we have exciting projects coming up in the region, and we expect growth rates to increase beginning in the second half of 2022, with a very significant uptick starting in 2023. I will now take you through our funding position and cash movement in Q2 2022, which is on Slide 11. We began the quarter with $471 million in cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash. Net cash used in operating activities during the quarter was $39 million, primarily due to increased accounts receivables, notes receivables, and inventory following our higher sales. In particular, April and May were slow months for shipments due to Shanghai port operations being restricted by COVID lockdown measures. This meant the majority of our shipments occurred in June, pushing many payment and collection deadlines into future quarters. Our CapEx spend on Huzhou 3.1 and Clarksville 1A in Q2 2022 totaled $23 million, with another $4 million in capital expenditures relating mainly to improvements to our existing facilities and R&D projects. Our current estimates suggest capital expenditures for the second half will range between $180 million to $220 million, primarily for capacity expansion projects. As our payments are tied to construction and equipment delivery milestones, it is possible that some payments may be accelerated or deferred into 2023. We ended the quarter with a very strong cash position of approximately $396.9 million in cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash. We expect to add modest levels of debt due to the low leverage on our balance sheet as our fixed asset base grows. For example, with 99% of the Huzhou building complete and this facility already backed by strong cash flows from our customers, we have been discussing with a syndicate of local banks to arrange a project finance facility. We expect this to be available for drawdown from late August. With the benefit of this debt financing, we anticipate closing the year with at least $250 million in cash. As the Clarksville construction progresses and receives equipment, it too will support debt financing similar to what we are arranging for the Huzhou expansion. Accordingly, all our capacity expansion projects are fully funded and the business is in a sound balance sheet position to execute its aggressive sales plan for 2023. Lastly, please refer to Slide 12 for an overview of our Huzhou 3.1 expansion project. The new capacity supports our 2023 growth targets, with over half of the available capacity already allocated to customers across Europe, Asia Pacific, and China, who have entered into multiyear framework agreements with us. Huzhou remains on schedule, with the exterior of the building 99% complete. We posted drone footage to our social media accounts earlier this week with aerial views of the facilities. We expect equipment to start being delivered this month, with production ramp-up beginning in Q4 2022. We currently expect Clarksville to begin serial production in late Q3 2023 and be well-positioned to take advantage of the initiatives under the Inflation Reduction Act. With that, I'll turn it back to Sascha to review the outlook.

Thanks, Craig. Please turn to Slide 13. We are reaffirming our guidance of 35% to 45% revenue growth compared to 2021. We continue to be optimistic about opportunities to grow forecasted contracted revenue this year from its current level of $2.5 billion and are looking forward to the full deployment of our newly launched products to further drive global sales growth, including in nearby markets. Accordingly, we have good visibility into 2023 due to two large SOP projects for deliveries to our customers in Europe, which we currently estimate at $80 million in revenue with potential upside. We are therefore planning for a sustainable increase in customer volumes next year, which truly sets the platform for future years of growth. Executing is critical, and to achieve our targets, we will continue to focus our efforts on revenue growth through new multiyear supply contracts with existing as well as new customers to fill the new capacity coming online in 2023, completing the capacity expansion projects to meet increasing customer demands and throughput, and driving margin improvements as we scale the business model. We recently established a new subsidiary in Denver, Colorado, called Microvast Energy, Inc., and have begun building a dedicated team to focus on energy storage solutions, which we see as a huge growth opportunity, especially in the U.S. market. We believe energy storage is an attractive end market for our new 53.5 ampere-hour cells. Energy storage was valued at over EUR 10 billion in 2020 and is projected to globally reach over EUR 37 billion in 2027. Furthermore, we expect the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 to be important legislation advancing clean energy initiatives and helping to reduce carbon emissions in the U.S., creating even more exciting direct and indirect business opportunities for Microvast going forward. In addition, I'm pleased to report that we have signed an LOI with a NASDAQ listed innovative e-mobility commercial vehicle platform provider and are currently finalizing a strategic cooperation agreement with them. You will hear more about it soon. Finally, as many of you are aware, our annual stock meeting will be held tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. central time. If you have not done so already, please vote your shares. The polls are open until midnight Eastern time tonight. If you would like to meet some of us in person, please come to our booth at the IAA conference in Hanover, Germany, in calendar week 38. Full details are on the IAA website. I will now turn the call back to Sarah.

Thank you, Sascha. The operator will now tune in to moderate the question-and-answer session.

Our first question comes from Colin Rusch with Oppenheimer.

Can you talk a little bit about how involved your customers are in helping source some of their raw materials? Obviously, there's a very dynamic environment. It's very competitive. I'm curious about how active they are in leveraging some of their purchasing power to help you with the supply chain?

Colin, thanks a lot for that question. It's a very valid question. Yes, we are involved in our strategic partnerships with our customers. As you know, we have a strategic partnership with FPT, and we are involved in finding joint solutions for acquiring raw materials in the market together in order to have better bargaining power. This is what we do as an example. We also do that with other strategic customers to mitigate the risk of further increasing raw material prices.

Excellent. And if you look across the potential customer landscape and you guys did a nice job of booking some new business this quarter. How many new folks are working through qualification right now that you might be able to convert over the next, call it, 3 to 6 months?

We have various customers or potential customers we are working on right now. A quick turnover in 3 to 6 months is always difficult to predict because we are in the automotive industry. This means we normally have summer and winter tests, A samples, B samples, and C samples in case it is a dedicated solution for customers. Otherwise, if it's in already existing solutions, it goes quicker. So, I would say we have at least 10 customers in alignment, which will see revenue upcoming within the next 3 to 6 months.

Great. And then one of the things that we're seeing pretty substantially as we move away from fossil fuels into electrification of a variety of applications, there's an enormous amount of demand coming around energy storage and certainly a variety of supply constraints. Can you talk a little bit about the variety of applications you guys are considering right now from end markets and the inquiries that you are getting from potentially new customers?

We will stay focused on our strategy. One of our most important markets is commercial vehicle applications, which means everything from 3.5 tons all the way to 100 tons. On the energy storage side, we will further explore that topic. We have the technology on hand, so we do not need to develop anything new. We are in discussions with several customers regarding energy storage solutions, and we will continue to expand in that market as well. We are optimistic, as it is now supported by the government, and we will further explore these different markets. There is significant potential in energy storage as well as in the commercial vehicle field across various regions.

And our next question comes from the line of Mike Shlisky from D.A. Davidson.

I wanted to ask about the mechanisms regarding your raw material costs. When you look at companies like some of those larger companies that you've been talking about, they often have contractual clauses that allow you to raise your prices if raw materials hit certain levels. Oftentimes, there's a 30- to 90-day lag, but there is a way to pass it along, and it's documented in writing. Is that what you're experiencing in your current contracts? Can you tell us a little about how you'll be able to pass along pricing that's not in your contract?

Mike, it has to be contractual. If we're in an existing program with a customer, we can only pass costs on if it's per the contract. In many of our multiyear contracts, that provision is included. Looking ahead to next year, as we start new production for new cells, we don't know if we are in a price increase position. What we need to do is deliver per those contracts for at least a quarter. Then we see whether unit costs come out versus what was in the pricing terms. If an escalation event occurs, we'll discuss it with the customer. But we must remember these are long-term partnerships, and it has to work for everyone; we need to ensure that both parties are making money.

Got it. Yes, that makes sense. I wanted to just touch also on the mix you have between hydrogen and battery power, I guess just in general, but hydrogen trucks and battery-powered trucks. Do any of those vehicles in the hydrogen space have a different mix as far as how much you can make per vehicle? They often use a smaller battery because of the hydrogen system. Will there be any kind of mix issue as you start to ship contracts for one versus the other, or do you feel like you'll have pretty consistent gross margins quarter-over-quarter regardless of whether it's a hydrogen or a BEV that you're shipping?

Mike, to answer your question, I believe hydrogen is an emerging technology right now. It started developing in Europe and is quickly picking up. It's also gaining traction in the U.S. market, but it is still in the start-up phase. We have various types of technologies: hybrid trucks, full electric trucks, and hydrogen trucks. At the end of the day, we maintain a good mixture among them. When we deliver hydrogen trucks, they mainly utilize hydrogen for long distances. Yes, you can have a smaller battery, but you need a special fast-charging capable battery. Our battery solution was recently tested on a hydrogen truck in the desert, and it performed perfectly. This gives us a solid foundation for our technology in hydrogen trucks. I believe all three technologies—whether hybrid, hydrogen, or fully electric trucks—will coexist in the market for the long run. Hydrogen, particularly, has a strong future until 2035 because it allows for longer distances until enough fast-charging stations become available for commercial vehicle applications.

At this time, we have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the call back to Sascha for any closing remarks.

Thanks a lot. Thanks for your time, everybody. I wish everyone a peaceful, relaxing evening and thank you again for participating in our Q2 call. Thanks.

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation, and have a great day.