ESS Tech, Inc. (NYSE:GWH) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Thomas Boyes: Yes, thanks again. Just one more. You know, it was great to see the improvements on the system commissioning times. I was wondering if you could kind of rank order the actions that kind of led to those improvements, you know, changing to the contracts, kind of the overwhelming component there, or is a lot of it the team that you had put in place to assist with commissioning?

Tony Rabb: Yes, Thomas, this is Tony. A lot of it has to do with how we’re out in the field as we’re, you know, getting set up to do the startup and the commissioning. So it’s productivity on our field service engineers’ part. And part of it is productivity from just implementing more units throughout the year. Part of it is that we’ve changed some of the procedures that we follow as we are out in the field and starting up and commissioning the units. And then it’s also because of the simplification and the work we’ve done to improve the reliability and durability of the units as they’re put out there. So it’s a number of things, but a lot of it is a testament to the learnings that our customer success team has been able to realize throughout the year from the early units that were installed to the units later in the year.

And more specifically, with something like SMUD, where there’s multiple units out at a site and you’re able to get quite a bit of productivity when you’re working through multiple units at one time. And so as we see that type of increase going forward, we would anticipate that we’d be able to continue to make progress on those types of field initiatives. And that will significantly reduce our cost and allow us to be a lot more productive with our field service engineers as we scale up the business.

Operator: I’ll now pass the call back to the management team for any closing remarks.

Eric Dresselhuys: Well, we’d like to thank everybody for joining the call today and for your interest in ESS. We are now almost a quarter into 2024 and really excited about how the business continues to progress. Our really great progress around the key initiatives around driving costs out and keeping us on our path to profitability. We look forward to talking to everybody again in just a few weeks as we talk about Q1 results.

Operator: That concludes today’s conference call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.