Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Josh Milberg with Morgan Stanley.
Joshua Milberg: You guys made the comfortable nature of your liquidity position crystal clear. But in spite of that and the PDP collection, I just wanted to ask if you are contemplating at all the possibility of additional equity investments by either your existing shareholders, like United or new ones? And then my second question is just on the broader eVTOL environment. You talked about the advantage, your advantage on the certification process relative to the multiple applicants at the FAA. And I wondered if you could elaborate on that point and also just provide some additional perspective on how you see the industry having evolved in recent months with respect not only to the whole issue of certification, but also in terms of design, maybe proof of concept and manufacturing strategies.
Obviously, in terms of higher interest rates and some other respects, the environment has gotten somewhat more challenging. I’m not sure how much you can say on your competitors individually. Thank you very much.
Gerard DeMuro: All right. Let me kick it off, and then we’ll turn it over to the team. On the first question about, do we contemplate additional equity investments? That’s certainly an option that we have available to us. We have a number of strategic partners, as you know. That’s pretty much all that was included in the PIPE. There are potentials there. We will wait and see what is the most advantageous course of action for us. As you know, when we came out of our listing, we had a very, very clean balance sheet, and we’re able to be opportunistic and look at the most cost-effective ways to get the capital that is required. So that is an option that we will consider. And again, we have the luxury of significant time and allow the situations to mature and be opportunistic.
With respect to the FAA, the comment really is that whether it’s ANAC or FAA, they have to develop or combine existing requirements from different parts of the regulations today and that will take some time. The comment that we make about being really the singular focus of ANAC is a bit advantageous because we’re all resource-limited, right? There’s only a certain number of expert in these areas, whether they be an FAA or ANAC. And as you have multiple applicants, they may find that there’s a resource constraint in processing. That’s really what we were alluding to there. In terms of the industry maturing, you have early phases as you do in any industry where some are better capitalized than others. Some designs will be more effective than others, and I think you’re just seeing a natural evolution in that regard.
I’ll turn it over to Edu and Stein to see if they want to pick up on any of those topics any further.
Andre Stein: Just one comment on the things overall. I think you are passing beyond the stage of hype. And realistically, there was a point in this industry, there was a lot of hype. We are beyond that or passing through that point of the curve already. So now it’s when you are really seeing the potential future consolidations and so on. And we are seeing a smaller number of this way. At a certain point, you were talking about 200 different projects for eVTOLs and so on. Now it’s all about a handful already, and that’s when we are starting to see the final results, right? But I do believe we are moving beyond the hype curve already.
Gerard DeMuro: On the liquidity side, we are not anticipating any new equity.
Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Marvin Fong with BTIG.
Marvin Fong: Just a couple for me, kind of building on previous questions. So first one, just Edu, if you could discuss in terms of PDP payments, do we have any more visibility? Do you think that, that might come in, in 2024? Or should — is that more of a 2025, even 2026 event? And then a question just on the overall environment. I think you added about 700 orders to your book in the last 6 months. Just wondering if you could kind of characterize the current demand environment. Do you expect the ability to bring in new orders to be as active as it was in 2022, or do a lot of the potential players, have they already made their orders, and we should sort of think about the order activity kind of slowing down?
Eduardo Couto: Okay. Thanks, Marvin. In terms of the PDPs, of course, we are highly engaged with all our customers’ rights to define define the potential skyline of deliveries and refine all these orders. We believe it’s difficult to know exactly when we’re going to start to collect higher PDPs. We may start to see something in 2024,, definitely going higher in ’25 and ’26. But we are fully engaged with our partners, right, our customers, and we believe that could be an interesting cash inflow to the company that today we are not considering .
Gerard DeMuro: Well, on the second piece, Marvin, yes, we expect to add some strategic customers, but if you look at our backlog and our business plan, we really have enough coverage there in the LOIs for the first several years of production. So the issue isn’t so much for us in building backlog at this particular time. It’s what are the right regions and strategic customers to add. And as Stein talked about, we want to be able to support and service not only the aircraft, but support operations on a global basis, and we’re recognizing, again, that there’s likely to be dispersed implementation and adoption and that has to be resourced properly. So simply adding backlog is not our focus right now. It’s about strategy and now defining, as Stein talked about, launch customers, launch cities, and what is the total plan to support launch in those cities. Stein, do you want to add anything to that?
Andre Stein: No, I think you covered it. Yes, we might expect to see additional customers, but our main focus is — we are in a comfortable position in terms of pipeline and backlog that we can put a lot of focus on assuring how the deployment will be.
Operator: The next question we have is coming from the line of Savi Syth with Raymond James.
Savi Syth: Just a quick clarification on the UATM side of things. As that develops and when do you expect that, that could start generating revenue? Like when can that segment get stood up?
Gerard DeMuro: Stein, do you want to talk about the 6 customers we have and the plan for implementation?
