AEye, Inc. (NASDAQ:LIDR) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Kevin Garrigan: Okay. Perfect. Perfect. And then just as a follow-up, I’d love to get your thoughts on how you kind of see the LIDAR market playing out in 2024. I mean I’m sure you’ve heard a few of your competitors think this is kind of the year of series production awards, which I know we heard the same thing last year and things keep getting pushed out. So just kind of wondering what your thoughts are on the LIDAR market, series production agreements for 2024, whether you kind of think this might be the year where a lot get awarded?

Matt Fisch: Yes. Look, I want to be careful about the crystal ball here as we all know the market has been tricky. But the one thing that I can share with certainty is the activity that we’re seeing in Q1. It was coming at Office EES and into the new year, given all the delays that we had from last year were going okay, is it going to be real quiet? Is it going to be noisy? And there’s been quite a bit of activity. And I think that’s one thing I can speak to definitively, I’m relieved to see through this activity that LiDAR is still very important and relevant when it comes to ADAS safety, first and foremost, and then also autonomous driving, which we know has been sort of part of the underpinnings of some of the delays that we’ve seen. I’m not going to say cautiously optimistic at this point based on the larger-than-expected RFI and RFQ activity we’ve already seen in Q1.

Conor Tierney: Kevin, just to add to that. I think the other thing to mention is just the progress we’ve made in general on the execution side. If you think about everything that we’ve delivered, and we alluded to this on the earnings call, if you think about the progress we’ve made on Apollo, the fact that we now have an LOI with a Tier 1, and we’ve all done that at a very cost-competitive cost structure. And I think we deserve some credit for that, the fact that we’ve been able to go out and execute, and we’ve done that while we’re keeping our costs low.

Kevin Garrigan: Yes, absolutely. That makes a ton of sense. Yes. Congrats again.

Operator: Thank you. At this time, there are no more questions in the queue. Thank you all for joining the call. This does conclude today’s conference call. You all have a great evening.