Amprius Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:AMPX) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Kang Sun: We do have Integrity group building blocks or electric mobility applications. We truly believe that’s the case because the energy, the power, safety, charging time, tentative performance, even the pressure performance, low pressure performance we delivered to the aviation market can be applied to other markets, especially for EVs. At this moment, we don’t have a large formal manufacturing capability at Amprius, but that would change. I think we have all the technical building blocks available for the applications.

Tim Moore: That’s helpful. That’s nice to hear. And then my other question, just my follow-up question would be your Colorado Scale Factory cleared that ordinance milestone six weeks ago. Can you just walk us through what else you need to meet or achieve beginning the operations of the fab in the first half of next year besides receiving the equipment. Is there any other kind of hurdles or actions that you need to do besides just receiving and installing equipment?

Kang Sun: The equipment part, we have a select, I would say, the most advanced lithium-ion battery manufacturing equipment suppliers in this industry. We select four suppliers for the internal manufacturing line. The delivery time would be three maximum a month. We have, at this moment, we are negotiating the final details of the purchasing contracts. So that’s not the problem. Currently, we’re still working on some regulatory issues. I think the regulatory issues is the major bottleneck for us to move forward. For example, air permitting of those kinds of things, we did a work out. We, at this moment, look at the schedule we have here, we probably need to push our construction plan to early next year instead this month before we thought that we can get this thing done this month now, we probably push it to sometimes in January to start the construction.

Tim Moore: Great. That’s helpful, King. Thanks for sharing that. I’ll save the rest of my questions for offline later tonight. Thanks.

Operator: Our next question comes from Abhi Sinha with Northland Capital. Please proceed.

Kailash Kamoji: Hi. This is Kailash on behalf of Abishek. So with respect to the conformal wearable batteries, we just wanted to know if you could deliver to militaries outside the U.S.?

Kang Sun: We can to certain countries, for example, Paris, Australia, Japan countries, we shouldn’t have a problem. But for certain countries, we do need to have an export license for that engagement.

Kailash Kamoji: Perfect. And as a follow-up, can you remind us how much revenue you would need to break even with respect to gross margin? And when do you expect that to happen? Thanks.

Sandra Wallach: So as of now, we haven’t given guidance as far as our financial model. So we haven’t disclosed that.

Kailash Kamoji: Perfect. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Amit Dayal with HC Wainwright. Please proceed.

Amit Dayal: Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Can you remind us guys, for the Colorado facility, what the total CapEx requirement is to get to that 500 megawatt hour Phase 1 capacity target?

Sandra Wallach: Yeah. We have given some ranges before. What we’ve updated as we get more information is we now know that the production equipment will run between $70 million and $100 million, including tariffs for delivery to Colorado and the construction costs are still being updated based on the 60% drawings for the facility. So we haven’t updated that range recently.

Amit Dayal: Okay. Thank you, Sandra. I guess a follow-up to or adjacent question to that with respect to the Fremont capacity is how should we think about modeling for the ramp at three months for the two megawatt hour?

Sandra Wallach: So we’ll have the equipment online and available. We’re very excited to showcase it on December 14, along with the rest of the 2-megawatt facility. We would expect that it will ramp up slowly throughout the year sequentially each quarter. It won’t all be available Q1.

Amit Dayal: Okay. All right. Yeah, that’s all I have for now. I will, you know, follow-up with you offline. Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Jeff Grant with Alliance Global. Please proceed.

Jeff Grant: Good afternoon. Thanks for the time. With the impending additional capacity at Fremont, I imagine there’s some potential to add more new customers while also increasing allocations to existing customers. Is that something you guys are considering at all? Or are there any constraints internally from maybe a personnel standpoint in managing more new customers?

Kang Sun: That would be the case. We view this capacity expansion with a new customer in mind. One of the reasons we built this new capacity because we’re already out of the capacity for current customers. So the new capacity will enable us to engage more customers.