ChargePoint Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CHPT) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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And so in a set of verticals more so in North America than in Europe, you are seeing some delays or delays of ordering, but we don’t see it as a fundamental shift at all. We see it as effectively aligned with the macro and with the increased resilience in the business with respect to just the spread, there’s no hotspots. If you look at the residential business, commercial, fleet, when you look at the geographies, you’ve seen us make meaningful progress in all those fronts. So while there’s definitely an economic overhang in a couple of verticals, I’m really very pleased that the business doesn’t have any significant overweight because if that were the case, I would comment otherwise.

Operator: Our next question comes from Bill Peterson, JPMorgan.

Bill Peterson : I apologize for the background noise. I wanted to ask what your thoughts were around cash flow and outlook. I would think that it wouldn’t have a lot of impact on — you talked about the verticals, you just said that home feed work areas like Level 2 for front of a store or a restaurant. I wouldn’t think there would be really any impact, but maybe large retail locations and maybe some DC fast. Just trying to understand the threat of Pasquale maybe other car companies that have it on networks, of course, Europe exciting subset yourselves. But in terms of the competitive environment, how could that play out?

Pasquale Romano : Yes. So no, I get the question often. And in fact, I think I got it on several previous earnings calls. So the overarching response to that is — the fast charge market in the passenger car sector serves a very narrow use case. It’s for when you’re driving beyond your battery range. So it is not the significant driver for our revenue. Now let’s not be making any excuses or saying that you’re right on Tesla opening up their network either. We’re also seeing now a tremendous sudden attention from what we refer to as players in the 30-minute retail economy that traditionally serve people on road trips they now want to embrace because the broader EV market has shown up. It’s not one OEM now. It’s a multiplicity of OEMs. They’re all moving in the right direction with electrifying their offerings in fact, completely disinvesting in their ICE cars, that’s given the players in the 30-minute retail economy, a lot of confidence that they can start to move the ball down the field with respect to investments at their own properties.

So we see this as a massive opportunity with respect to placing fast chargers along with partners. And if you see how Mercedes-Benz and Volvo, two announcements we made this year, have worked into a 30-minute retail economy sort of aligned network announcement, we think that’s going to continue.

Bill Peterson : Yes. You like in the fleet opportunity to a coiled spring and lack of vehicles. And we’ve talked about this, but are you seeing any signs that this should accelerate through the year? I guess, I know it’s already a meaningful part of your business, but how should we think about your fleet opportunity as this stream uncoils?

Pasquale Romano : So how you should think about fleet is that it’s more land than expand right now. I mean, honestly, it doesn’t have the expansion rate within customers that we’ve won that the more granular commercial business has because passenger cars are increasing in diversity and availability from a lot of OEMs, while on the fleet side, we are severely vehicle limited maybe with the exception of transit buses, but transit buses represent a very small on a vehicle count basis, percentage of fleets globally. So hence the coiled spring analogy, if you’re landing more than you’re expanding, but the expanding has to follow, we’re in good position when our customer base decides to actually get — well, when they can actually get vehicles and can expand.

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