Amprius Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:AMPX) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Kang Sun: Tim, Amprius today is focusing on aviation market. For aviation markets three top priorities safety, energy and the power. They cannot miss any one of those, because the safety is absolutely important for aviation and our company in the leadership position for safety will pass United States Army military spec for safety. Secondly, the energy is very important because these dictates how far they can fly. This is very, very important for them. Otherwise, they don’t have any commercial value if they cannot fly far enough. The third one is the power. They need to have power to lift off and the landing. This is the reason that Amprius has a large customer inquiries because if we look at the market, there is almost no battery chemistry today can deliver what we have here.

In addition to safety and have ready to compromise between the power and energy. As our news release published a few days ago, we have 400 watt-hour per kilo battery can deliver 10C power capability.

Tim Moore: Great. Kang, that’s very helpful. And I will save my questions for offline later. Thanks.

Kang Sun: Thanks.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Abhi Sinha with Northland Financial. Please proceed with your question.

Abhi Sinha: Yes. Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. So, just on the customers, I just want to press on more on that. If you could talk about the process of acquiring a new customer, like what does it take in terms of the process and the timeline before you get an order? And more importantly, if you could talk about the feedback that you get from the customers from whom you are not able to get orders? Like what do they have to say?

Kang Sun: Okay. First, I will talk about what they want in terms of product specs. Our customer, basically as I have mentioned earlier, put in three things safety, energy and power. Now, with all of those three performance parameters meet their spec and there is no discussion. So, those are very, very important parameters we need to deliver. In addition to that, the customer, we don’t get an order normally is a capacity issue. And this is why the Amprius has been focusing on the capacity expansion about 12 months, 18 months ago. That’s our primary focus. The customer will not engage with us if they cannot – if we cannot guarantee, okay, we can support their growth, for example, in the next 24 months, at least. And the customer I have visited in Europe and in United States, recently, they basically asked us the guarantee on Q2 2026. We want to see that there is a roadmap to the capacity expansion before they place order.

Abhi Sinha: Thank you. That’s helpful. So, just on that, how – when you go to a new customer, when you provided MO or something, how long does it take for them to approve or to place an order?

Kang Sun: It varies, okay. Some customer takes about seven months or eight months to be done because they take our standard products. They take tests. They see other people use it. So, it’s relatively easy. But for the new program started from the scratch, okay, they have a different technical spec to meet that you really take 1.5 years. Definitely, in aviation is much shorter than the electrical vehicle at this time, okay. In the future, the lead time may be longer because of the time we have. At this moment, the most customers we are working with are unmanned flying devices, okay, like super satellite phones [ph], okay. Once we get a passenger carrying vehicles, the time of development will take longer. When we see the development time, okay, this is two parts. One part is our battery development, another part is our customers’ own product development.