Earnings Call Transcript - OUST Q1 2022

Operator, Operator

Good afternoon, and welcome everyone to Ouster’s First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After today's presentation and remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. The call today is being recorded. And a replay of the call will be available on the Ouster Investor Relations website an hour after the completion of this call. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Sarah Ewing, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Sarah Ewing, Director of Investor Relations

Thank you. I'm joined today by Ouster’s Chief Executive Officer Angus Pacala and Chief Financial Officer, Anna Brunelle. Before we begin the prepared remarks, we would like to remind you that Ouster issued a press release announcing its first quarter financial results shortly after market close today. The company also published an investor presentation which is available on the Investor Relations section of ouster.com. I'd also like to remind everyone that during the course of this conference call Ouster's management will discuss forecasts, targets and other forward-looking statements regarding the company, including statements from its press release, future customer orders and shipments, near and long-term revenue opportunity, market share trends, future products and commercial path, potential future opportunities, customer traction, winning an OEM program and the company's business outlook and 2022 guidance and trajectory that are intended to be covered by the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 for forward-looking statements. While these statements represent management's expected future results and performance, Ouster's actual results are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations that we may share with you today. In addition to any risks highlighted during this call, you should consider the important risk factors and other disclosures that may affect Ouster's future results as described in its most recent annual report on Form 10-K and its other filings with the SEC. Except as required by law, rule or regulation, the company undertakes no obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements for any reason after the date of this call. Information discussed on this call concerning the company's industry, competitive position and the markets in which it operates is based on information from independent industry and research organizations, other third-party sources and management estimates. Management estimates are derived from publicly available information released by independent industry analysts and other third-party sources, as well as data from the company’s internal research, and are based on assumptions and computations made upon reviewing such data and its experience in and knowledge of such industry and market. By definition, assumptions are subject to uncertainty and risk which could causes results to differ materially from those expressed in the estimates. During this call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, which exclude the effects and events and transactions we consider to be outside of our core operations. These non-GAAP measures should be considered as supplement to and not a substitute for measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please refer to today’s press release. I would now like to turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Angus Pacala.

Angus Pacala, CEO

Hi, everyone. Following the breakout year in 2021, Ouster continued to bolster its strong position in the market in the first quarter. We maintained positive gross margins, introduced new solutions, delivered on major automotive milestones along our product roadmap and with our strategic OEM partner. We believe these developments will act as catalysts for growth in each of our target industries and further improve our position in the marketplace. At Ouster Automotive, we are pursuing a hardware-first strategy, focused on winning the multi-billion dollar opportunity to supply lidar hardware into consumer vehicles through the superior price and performance of digital lidar. Ouster Automotive announced the Digital Flash or DF series for automotive last fall. The industry's first multi-sensor suite of short, medium and long-range solid-state lidars for comprehensive coverage around the vehicle. Just like Ouster’s OS scanning sensors available in the market today, the Digital Flash Series is powered by a single silicon CMOS chip, enabling us to scale performance in line with Moore's Law unlike any other lidar company, while simultaneously dropping cost and complexity. We continue to track towards automotive readiness for our DS Series to support automotive programs starting production in 2025. In the first quarter, we announced the Chronos chip, an automotive-grade fully custom digital lidar system-on-chip that will power our DS solid-state sensor suite. The Chronos chip is the foundation of the DF architecture and will enable us to deliver more performance, power-efficient and compact sensors to automotive serial production programs. We also shipped the first DF A-Sample sensors, fulfilling a major milestone in our strategic development agreement with our global automotive OEM partner. The plan is to present the upgraded A-Sample to over 30 additional auto OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers and EV companies in order to unlock new commercial opportunities and progress to the next round of discussions with those already in motion. The A-Sample is another step on the path to achieving more customers and automakers alike are pushing for vehicles with safe, convenient, and reliable autonomy features that they can trust with their lives. Lidar is the bridge from driver assistance to true autonomy, and digital lidar goes further to make these systems more feature-rich and affordable for everyone. With no moving parts, Ouster’s DF Series is the first solid-state Digital Flash lidar on the market. By absorbing the system complexity into the Chronos chip, Ouster’s suite of short, medium and long-range DS sensors offers automakers greater affordability and flexibility in vehicle design and coverage. Ouster automotive can offer a total of up to five DF sensors for roughly $1,000, a lower price and smaller overall size than the single forward-looking analog lidar offered by some of our competitors. This price and form factor advantage extends to the single-sensor RFQs as well. By being small and affordable, a fleet of DF sensors can be integrated around the vehicle, just like digital cameras to provide 360-degree awareness and a rich set of safe autonomy features. Short, medium and long-range lidars looking to the front, side and behind the vehicle provide the critical data necessary for state-automated lane changes, confident maneuvering through four-way intersections, reliable high-speed merges, and so much more. A vehicle powered by a single forward-looking lidar cannot even navigate a four-way intersection without driver oversight. Put simply, multi-sensor digital lidar suites are the bridge from driver assistance to safe affordable autonomy. Turning away from automotive into smart infrastructure, our team was excited to announce the launch of the Ouster Accurate Vision security solution this past quarter. Ouster Accurate Vision is a joint security solution that combines Ouster’s 3D digital lidar with industry-leading security software from Tacticaware, a Hexagon company, to target the multi-billion dollar security market. Nearly every high-value piece of infrastructure has a security system in place from industrial sites and high-value warehouses to airports, military and defense buildings, and data centers. Today, this market is dominated by CCTV cameras and thermal cameras that passively record the events around them. 3D lidar-based systems represent a paradigm shift because they can generate active alerts in real-time, while providing all the possible recording capability of legacy technology. We see a massive opportunity to disrupt this market with our Ouster Accurate Vision digital lidar security solution. Turning to other product updates, we remain on track to release the L3 chip later this year, which will succeed the L2X chip empowering all of our OS sensors. The L3 chip is the culmination of years of research and development at Ouster, and keeps us on the exponential performance path of Moore's Law. The improvements provided by this fully custom and proprietary chip design leverage technology advancements that revolutionized the camera sensor industry and bring them to the high-performance lidar industry for the very first time. I simply can't wait to unveil it to our customers as planned later this year. Another benefit of our digital roadmap is our ability to ship continuous over-the-air software updates to all of our customers, which introduce features that expand our ability to seize new opportunities across our total addressable market. Since the introduction of our first OS sensor, we have released five firmware updates. Our latest firmware introduces new features that adapt our sensors for remote applications, including data flexibility for faster, more efficient edge computing. We expect these updates to also benefit industrial customers who are accustomed to processing limited data from legacy 2D lidar sensors but are eager to adopt high-resolution 3D lidar to improve safety and performance capabilities. We continue to invest in building out a best-in-class software development experience that serves as the foundation of our entire software ecosystem. We recently released an updated version of our software development kit or SDK for lidar and continue to see tremendous customer adoption with hundreds of downloads each month. Again, this is an important tool that accelerates our customers' time to autonomy, enabling them to test and validate our sensors faster and bring their applications to market sooner. This year we expect to release more products from hardware and software than ever before. Advancements with our DS Series for automotive, L3 chip, software ecosystem, and industry certifications are expected to be major catalysts for digital lidar adoption across our four targeted industries and directly contribute to our growth this year and beyond. I'd now like to turn the call over to our CFO, Anna Brunelle to provide a full update on our Q1 2022 financial results and business outlook.

Anna Brunelle, CFO

Thank you, Angus. We made substantial gains over the course of 2021, nearly doubling our revenue over the previous year. We continued our momentum in the first quarter of 2022, recording our second highest quarterly revenue of $8.6 million, up 29% over the first quarter of 2021 and aim to double our revenue again in 2022. We shipped 1,550 sensors, a 58% increase over the first quarter of 2021 and produced a record 4,368 sensors, demonstrating our ability to scale to meet market demand. As discussed during our earnings call for the fourth quarter of 2021, we expected some revenue variability in the first quarter and remain confident in our commercial pipeline for the year and our ability to continue to win deals and head-to-head competition across each of our four verticals. We delivered gross margins of 30%, up from the 26% gross margins recorded in the first quarter of 2021 and in line with the 30% gross margin recorded in the fourth quarter of 2021. Our proven manufacturing and operations team continues to secure our source material and scale production of our OS sensors despite headwinds from continued supply chain challenges. Over the course of the first quarter, our average cost per unit sold was up slightly from the fourth quarter of 2021, primarily due to lower absorption of overhead cost per unit. However, similar to the trend shown throughout 2021, we expect our average cost per unit sold will continue to decline faster than our average selling price as our sales volumes continue to increase. We believe Ouster has the highest hardware gross margin profile among our public lidar peer group, validating our leading cost structure associated with our CMOS digital lidar architecture, which enables high scalability and performance at a lower cost. Over the last quarter, we converted additional pre-production and production-level customers through strategic customer agreements. To date Ouster has signed 72 strategic customer agreements representing over $550 million in contracted revenue opportunity through 2026. While we remain excited about large customer deals in our pipeline, timelines and uncertainties exist; customers are still learning their ramp rates, which can impact the timing of purchase orders quarter to quarter. We continue to improve predictability into our customers' needs and timelines as we grow, such that the timing of orders will have a smaller impact on our quarterly results as we scale. We believe our diverse group of strategic customer agreements exemplifies the success and importance of our multi-market approach, as Ouster is not dependent on a single or small handful of customers or even one market vertical with revenues expected to ramp in 2025 and 2026, but rather on both auto and non-auto opportunities that offer revenues and attractive margins in both the near and long term. Our capital allocation plan continues to focus on three key areas: to accelerate our product roadmap, to expand our software offerings, and to build out our global sales and marketing teams. These initiatives will support our aim to at least double revenue growth this year, increase our market share across our four market verticals, and continue to extend our technical advantage over our peers. We continue to ramp our commercial engine and sales pipeline over the first quarter and subsequently shipped a new software update with the release of the latest firmware and software development kit, and made headway towards the future release of our own verticalized software solution. We also shipped our first Digital Flash Series A samples, achieving a major milestone within our strategic development agreement with our global auto OEM partner as we advance towards automotive readiness for series production starting in 2025. We were able to make these strategic investments while maintaining a cash balance of approximately $163 million at the end of the first quarter. Following the close of the first quarter and as described in our 8-K, Ouster further strengthened its financial position with a $50 million term loan with no dilution to equity holders, including immediate access to $40 million in cash and a potential additional $10 million in 2023, subject to satisfying certain conditions. With this step, we are putting in place corporate finance best practices to ensure access to capital as needed. In the first quarter, we added 90 new customers and expanded sales to existing customers in line with three major market trends playing out across our target industries: the shift to electrification, advanced safety and autonomy in automotive, the automation of our global supply chain and industrials, and the widespread investment in privacy, safety, and efficiency of our day-to-day lives and smart infrastructure. While we continue to execute on our DF product roadmap and advance negotiations for automotive series production programs starting in 2025, we have a rich automotive business to date across robo-trucking, robo-taxi, shuttles, and buses. In 2021, we shipped 34% of our sensors within the automotive vertical, which represents a $1.9 billion total addressable market by 2025. In the first quarter, we shipped sizable orders to multiple trucking customers, both upfront and OEMs in the US and Europe, as well as autonomous bus, shuttle, and robo-taxi customers in the US and Asia. Within automotive, Ouster is emerging as a leader in robo-trucking with customers like Plus.ai and Torc Robotics and other large trucking OEMs. We expect this sub-market to continue to be a primary driver of growth through 2022. There are approximately $12 million freight trucks in the world, of which approximately 10% need to be replaced annually. Customers are already deploying production plans today and are using Ouster lidar to bring L2-plus autonomy features to freight delivery trucks on our highways, saving fuel and other costs for end customers. Within industrial and robotics, we are benefiting from macroeconomic trends as companies take steps to automate their supply chain to increase productivity and solve for a lack of skilled labor in the market. We saw significant demand from the material handling market in the first quarter of 2022, especially for warehouse automation where we signed new strategic business agreements and booked large spot buys. We also continue to expand our commercial traction in off-highway vehicles for mining and agricultural applications, as well as collision avoidance systems for railcars. We saw a significant uptick in the adoption of lidar for more greenfield robotics applications across the supply chain, such as drone and rail-based inspection systems and volumetric monitoring solutions for raw materials. Based on our current pipeline, we expect warehouse automation, port and logistics automation, and raw material processing applications for mining and agriculture to be the major growth drivers in 2022 within the industrial and robotics vertical. We continue to gain market share in the existing $1 billion market for legacy industrial sensors as we further displace high-cost 2D laser safety standards and other legacy sensors, making this one of the largest near-term and fastest-growing opportunities for digital lidar. The warehouse automation market is just in its infancy and is already generating millions in revenue for our business, with an estimated market opportunity of over $15 billion today, as less than 20% of warehouses currently have any form of automation. According to a recent report, the market for mobile robots is estimated to grow tenfold by 2030, driven by the sale of automated mobile robots which tripled from 2018 to 2020. Ouster is already working with customers, including large industrial OEMs looking to automate their own fleet and large global companies looking to invest millions into automating their warehousing operations, as well as several leading warehouse automation companies, including Vecna Robotics, Third Wave Automation, ATI Motors, and Balyo. These customers, as well as our pipeline of future opportunities, position us well to scale in line with market demand. Turning to smart infrastructure, last year we won 110 projects which represented nearly 3,000 sensors for initial deployments that have the potential to expand to hundreds of thousands of sensors. We continue to gain traction in the first quarter of 2022 through new deployment and project expansions in airports, highways, streets, and more, across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America. These include critical infrastructure security, traffic monitoring, connected vehicles, as well as speed enforcement applications. We expect the continued expansion of intelligent transportation projects in addition to crowd analytics applications to be the primary growth drivers in the smart infrastructure vertical in 2022. We also see a massive opportunity to disrupt the multi-billion dollar security market with our new joint security solution, Ouster Accurate Vision, where incumbent technology benefits from the relatively higher average selling prices and faster sales cycles. We expect the lidar industry to evolve in similar ways to the digital camera industry. According to a recent report by Yole, the market for digital cameras for security is the largest non-consumer digital camera market in the world, estimated at $32 billion in 2021. Our growth over the first quarter across each of our critical, especially a handful of fast-developing submarkets such as robo-trucking, warehouse automation, and intelligent transportation systems reinforces our ability to capture market share within the $8.6 billion total addressable market expected by 2025. Our differentiated technology backed by a leading cost structure and our multi-market approach position Ouster to take advantage of both near and long-term revenue opportunities and continue to gain market share. The fundamentals of our business remain unchanged, our bottom-up analysis based on sales pipeline, bookings, and commercial expansion plans, coupled with major product announcements planned for later in the year, provides a commercial path to deliver on our full-year 2022 guidance of $65 million to $85 million in revenue and 25% to 30% gross margin. We expect this will follow a similar trajectory to 2021 with larger customer orders and shipments hitting in the second half of the year. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Angus.

Angus Pacala, CEO

Thanks Anna. Essential to driving digital lidar adoption in each of our verticals is a desire to improve safety and quality of life, while increasing efficiency, sustainability, and equity. Applications powered by digital lidar have the potential to do just that. Our technology is already creating safer conditions for miners and among OEM engineers at nuclear facilities in Europe and on roadways in the United States and abroad. Lidar can help reduce traffic congestion, minimize greenhouse gas emissions or monitor critical infrastructure like railways and power lines. These are just a few examples. At scale, the positive impact we can have on society is enormous and starts at home with the actions we take as a company. Earlier this year, Ouster announced a sustainability program predicated on the founding principle of our company, to innovate and deliver technologies that lead to safer and more efficient vehicles, transportation networks, workplaces, and infrastructure for more sustainable and prosperous communities. We have formed an internal advisory committee to guide our sustainability program and look forward to reporting our efforts and impact for 2022. In closing, our increased customer traction across each of our four verticals and critical product development, combined with further capital flexibility, position Ouster to drive near and long-term revenue growth. We believe digital lidar is uniquely positioned to power societal transformations and become an indispensable part of our day-to-day lives. With that, I'd like to open it up for Q&A.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. We’ll now begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question will come from the line of Tristan Gerra with Baird. Please go ahead.

Tyler Bomba, Analyst

Hi, this is Tyler on Tristan. Thanks for taking the questions. First, in light of some supply chain constraints, how are you seeing car OEMs' projected timelines for the ramp of the lidar industry? Are you seeing any push outs or is everything on track with your prior timing expectations?

Anna Brunelle, CFO

I'm sorry, Tyler. I have a little bit of trouble hearing you, did you say car OEMs?

Tyler Bomba, Analyst

Yeah, the car OEMs.

Angus Pacala, CEO

Yeah, I can take that. Thanks for the question. So I guess if this is a question around the broader industry, I think there is always a subset of companies that are going to fall behind their initial projections. This is not something that has historically been true. If you look at automakers releasing any new technology, but there's also a subset that are still moving forward. I'd say the majority of the industry is still moving forward very aggressively into autonomy and lidar. What we see from our conversations is a real effort to stick to their autonomy and electrification strategies and not let any kind of budget restrictions affect that, because it's so core to the business and the future competitiveness of automakers at this point.

Tyler Bomba, Analyst

Yeah. Great. For my follow-up, how should we look at your mix by end market this year? I know you talked about some of the growth drivers for each of your end markets, but how should we think of the next; do you expect any material changes from last year?

Anna Brunelle, CFO

I think we are - we did 34% of our revenue in the automotive sector last year, and I think that continues to drive a lot of our growth going forward. We saw the remainder kind of split evenly between the robotics and industrial verticals where we're also still seeing more traction, but I think, as I highlighted in my prepared remarks, we're really excited as well about the smart infrastructure vertical this year, which was about 15% last year, and that's primarily around, as we said, the 110 contracts that we signed previously that are still continuing to develop and add to our projected revenues this year.

Angus Pacala, CEO

Just to add a little more color there. Smart infrastructure, we come back to again and again, because it's really the true greenfield opportunity for lidar. In the other verticals we're operating in, there's a lot of understanding and use of legacy lidar systems. But in smart infrastructure, there is kind of unbounded opportunity, because it's a new use case for lidar and there is such a huge market existing there on digital cameras, almost $32 billion of digital cameras sold just in the security, not even talking about smart infrastructure or traffic management or crowd analytics. Absolutely we see things progressing as is, but that's the safe with roughly equal distribution across verticals, there is immense potential that we may tap into in smart infrastructure also beyond what we're talking about.

Tyler Bomba, Analyst

Great, thanks for that additional color.

Operator, Operator

Our next question will come from the line of Brian Dobson with Chardan Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Brian Dobson, Analyst

Hi, thanks so much for taking my question. So you pointed to gross margin being up 300 basis points on stronger average sales prices, and you alluded to navigating supply chain issues. Could you just give us a little bit more color on what was driving that pricing power in the quarter? And how you expect pricing to evolve through the balance of the year?

Anna Brunelle, CFO

I mean, I think we talked a bit about that. We had several new customers entering our pipeline in Q1. As a result, that tends to lift our average selling prices. And going forward, we've said we expect average selling prices to fall as we are able to lower our cost of goods sold as we ship more volume. So, if you recall, our cost of goods sold are primarily based on volume increases. We expect to see constant margin improvement as we sell more and more volume, and that's just based on our digital architecture. So, we are expecting further improvements to the product line to get to the cost structure that we're anticipating, mostly coming from these volume improvements. Historically, and into the future, we expect that to continue to drop average selling prices in line as our cost of goods sold drop. That gives us a lot of predictability into the business.

Brian Dobson, Analyst

Great, thanks very much. And then you mentioned that customers are still learning their ramp rates and that impacts the timing of quarters. You're expecting more sales in the back half of the year. Can you just walk us through the quarterly cadence as you expected?

Anna Brunelle, CFO

I mean, I think we are really excited about the guidance that we've given; we guided to $65 million to $85 million in revenue, which is nearly a doubling of our revenue over the prior year, even at the low end of that guidance. When we talk about what we're anticipating over the quarters, we haven't given quarterly guidance historically, but I think that you can see that there have been trends in our business over the last couple of years. We tend to have really strong fourth quarters. So, looking forward, what's really important here is that our guidance is based on our bottom-up pipeline projections. So our pipeline supports our guidance; we have over 600 customers. We've signed 72 strategic customer agreements now where we're getting three- and five-year forecasts from our customers. It's important to understand the bottom-up projections are supported by those customers in that pipeline. We are just expecting a similar trajectory to last year where we're seeing many of our larger orders hitting in the second half of the year.

Brian Dobson, Analyst

Excellent. Thank you very much for the additional color.

Operator, Operator

Our next question will come from the line of Sam Peterman with Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead.

Sam Peterman, Analyst

Hi everyone. Thank you for addressing my question. I appreciate the details provided in the prepared remarks. I wanted to discuss the recently reported quarter. Clearly, revenue fell short compared to the fourth quarter and your expectations. I'm still unclear about what caused this decline. You mentioned seasonality, but could you share more insights on where you observed weaknesses, whether in specific end markets or due to any supply constraints? I'm interested in understanding what you experienced in the first quarter, especially with the lidar revenues decreasing slightly.

Anna Brunelle, CFO

I mean, I don't think that we saw any weakness in any areas, and certainly we haven't lost any major deals with customers. I think when we talked about our projections for 2022 during our fourth quarter earnings update, we did mention we expected some variability going into Q1. I don't think anything fundamentally has changed in the business. We're still signing up new customers, we're still seeing them progress through the pipeline, and we get three- to five-year forecasts for many of our customers. So, I don’t see any fundamental changes in the business; we're really excited about the growth we're seeing in the customers we are working with.

Sam Peterman, Analyst

Okay, fair enough. And then I wanted to follow up on your sales guidance for the year. The quarter-over-quarter increases come with a substantial dip to that midpoint guidance. And you mentioned a couple of different factors: bookings, your sales pipeline, upcoming products, etc. I just wanted to ask if you could give any color around what end markets are going to drive strength? And how much of that outlook that you have is booked versus your line of sight versus what you expect to be spot buys? Any kind of color on your level of visibility at this point would be helpful.

Anna Brunelle, CFO

I think we highlighted in our prepared remarks some of the growth that we're seeing around automotive, particularly in the robo-trucking industry, where we're really emerging as a leader and working with several large customers that gives us a lot of predictability in that submarket. On the supply chain automation side, particularly in warehouse automation, we are signing new strategic business agreements and booking some large spot buys. We continue to see traction in our highway vehicles for applications like mining and agriculture, and on the smart infrastructure side, Angus had given some color earlier in response to a question where we're just seeing additional new deployments and project expansions in 2022 in airports, highways, streets, etc. We're seeing that kind of worldwide across all of our geographies. So I think we remain very excited about this year.

Operator, Operator

Your next question will come from the line of Andre Shephard with Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.

Andre Shephard, Analyst

Hey, good afternoon guys and congrats on the quarter. Can you hear me okay?

Anna Brunelle, CFO

Yes.

Andre Shephard, Analyst

Thank you. Most of my questions have been asked, but maybe to follow up on the last one in terms of revenue. So with $8.6 million in revenue for the quarter, to get to the midpoint of the guidance, which was reaffirmed today, let's call it $75 million, that leaves about $66 million or so in revenue for the year. Should we account for seasonality? Do you expect a bit of like a ramp-up period or is most of the revenue expected in the later quarters? Just a little more color there would be helpful.

Angus Pacala, CEO

Yeah, I can step in and answer it a little bit differently. First and foremost, we have a bottom-up revenue pipeline that supports our guidance for the year. It's item-by-item, customer by customer, opportunity by opportunity. That's why we're reaffirming guidance, because we have the opportunities to support it and we are winning those opportunities. Nothing fundamentally changed about the business; we see the business growing and we're reaffirming guidance because of that data. If nothing else, we are growing the business and we've said that there is going to be a ramp that looks like last year in the second half of this year as well. It's part of doubling revenue year-over-year. The back half of every year is going to be back weighted. There may be some seasonality that we're seeing with customers placing significant orders and receiving shipments at the end of the year. In terms of contribution split by vertical, right now we see roughly equal contribution from the four verticals. Last year, 34% of units shipped into automotive, about 20%-25% for industrials and robotics, and about 15% of units shipped in smart infrastructure. I don't see a significant deviation from that; maybe plus or minus 10% in shuffling between the verticals for this year depending on which orders they went. I want to make it abundantly clear, there's a reason why we're reaffirming guidance; we understand there is a significant ramp that happens. But we've got the data and we can clearly ship against that; we're doing great on the manufacturing side.

Andre Shephard, Analyst

Got it, thanks. Angus, that's very thorough. I appreciate it. Maybe my quick follow-up is, in terms of the margins, which I know has been asked a little but already. With 30% margins for the quarter, you're already at the top end of your guidance. You've mentioned that you kind of anticipate maybe those margins to improve. Is that 25% to 30% gross margin guidance conservative?

Anna Brunelle, CFO

I think you're right. Go ahead.

Angus Pacala, CEO

I'm sorry. Yeah, I think we said in our Q4 earnings three months ago that we were giving ourselves some headroom in our guidance on margin in case of further disruptions in the supply chain. At the time, we didn't want to be in a position where we had to decide between hitting our margin guidance and shipping to customers, right, and maintaining our continuity of supply. There may be some upside there, but what we've said is we don't really want to build into our models because we retain the right to hit the guidance, which means falling within that range if we need to keep shipping.

Andre Shephard, Analyst

Got it. Thanks again, Angus and Anna, congrats again on the quarter. I'll pass it on.

Angus Pacala, CEO

Thanks.

Operator, Operator

And this does conclude our question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Angus Pacala for any closing remarks.

Angus Pacala, CEO

No. Thank you all for tuning in. We're really happy about the year started and we're looking forward to the growth that we're seeing in the business. Thank you all.

Operator, Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.