Fluence Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ:FLNC) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Fluence Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ:FLNC) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 9, 2023

Operator: Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Fluence Energy Incorporated First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Lexington May, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Lexington May: Thank you. Good morning. And welcome to Fluence Energy’s first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. A copy of our earnings presentation, press release and supplementary metric sheet covering financial results along with supporting statements and schedules, including reconciliations and disclosures regarding non-GAAP financial measures are posted on the Investor Relations section of our website at fluenceenergy.com. Joining me on this morning’s call are Julian Nebreda, our President and Chief Executive Officer; Manu Sial, our Chief Financial Officer; and Rebecca Boll, our Chief Product Officer. During the course of this call, Fluence management may make certain forward-looking statements regarding various matters relating to our business and company that are not historical facts.

Such statements are based upon the current expectations and certain assumptions and are, therefore, subject to certain risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our SEC filings for our forward-looking statements and for more information regarding the risks and uncertainties that could impact our future results. You are cautioned to not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of today. Also, please note that the company undertakes no duty to update or revise forward-looking statements for new information. This call will also reference non-GAAP measures that we view as important in assessing the performance of our business. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measure is available in our earnings materials on the company’s Investor Relations website.

Following our prepared comments, we will conduct a question-and-answer session with our team. During this time to give more participants an opportunity to speak on this call, please limit yourself to one initial question and one follow-up. Thank you very much. I will now turn the call over to Julian.

Julian Nebreda: Thank you, Lex. I would like to send a warm welcome to our investors, analysts and employees who are participating on today’s call. This morning, I will provide a brief update on our business and then review our progress on our strategic objectives. Following my remarks, Manu will discuss our financial performance, as well as our outlook for the rest of the fiscal year. Starting on slide four with the key highlights. I am pleased to report that we recognized $310 million of revenue during the quarter. More importantly, we improved gross margin for the quarter both on an adjusted and GAAP basis. Our demand was strong across all three of our business lines and new orders were approximately $856 million, highlighted by the 1200-megawatt hour contract with Orsted we announced on our December call.

Furthermore, our signed contract value as of December 31st was $2.7 billion, a quarter-over-quarter increase of more than 20%. Importantly, over 70% of our backlog is with non-related parts. Lastly, our recurring revenue businesses, which consists of our Services and Digital business continued to grow during the quarter. Our service attachment rate was 11% for the fourth quarter. However, our deployed service attachment rate is rated at 90%, which is based on our community service contracts relative to our deployed storage. Most of our customers wait to sign service agreements closer to the point with the storage solutions coming online. Thus, there is usually a lag between storage contracts and service costs. We believe the deployed attachment rate is more reflective of our true service attachment rate due to a contracted lag that I just mentioned.

Moving forward, we will be providing you with both our contracted and our deployed attachment. Additionally, our Digital signed more than 800 megawatts of contracts since the fourth quarter, providing us visibility to future revenue. Turning to slide five. I would like to discuss the five strategic objectives that we headlined in our last earnings call and provide you with an update on our progress. First, on delivering profitable growth. I am pleased to report that we are raising our fiscal year 2023 guidance for both revenue and adjusted gross profit. As Manu will discuss in more detail, we are able to raise our guidance due to incremental demand and better supply chain shares. Second, we will continue to develop products and solutions that our customers need.

As such, we are now ready to begin offering Northvolt ACT batteries in our Gen 6 Cubes. This provides our customers with more optionality when looking at solar solutions and helps to diversify our battery supply by adding a European battery vendor. Third, we will convert our supply chain into a competitive advantage. I am pleased to say we have all our fiscal year 2023 battery requirements either in-country or in-transit, both providing us high confidence for execution and achievement guidance. As you may recall from last year, one of the challenges we faced was getting our batteries on time from our battery vendors. They were often delayed, and as a result, we incurred liquidated tariffs. Our team has done a tremendous job in mitigating this risk for 2023 by ensuring that all our battery needs are within our control.

Where we stand today, we don’t foresee supply chain issues that could derail our fiscal year 2023 expectations. We continue to implement our risk management processes and proceed and those providers would have confidence. Additionally, if we identify any issues that could cause us to deviate from our plans, we will act swiftly to mitigate the risk to have loss . Fourth, we will use Fluence Digital as a competitive differentiator and margin driver. I am pleased to announce two significant milestones in our Digital business. First, we entered the ERCOT market with our Mosaic Bidding application and having awarded an initial contract with a non-related global FPP Energy. ERCOT is a rapidly expanding market and provides a significant number of opportunities for our Mosaic application.

Mosaic now is in three markets, Australia NEM, CAISO and ERCOT. As we discussed last time, we are looking to expand to four additional markets in the next three years. Additionally, we have now successfully launched Nispera on its capability on to battery services. This offering now provides those customers with renewable asset portfolio. The opportunity to utilize one asset performance management platform for all their assets rather than multiple platforms. And finally, our fifth objective is to work better. We are continuing to see successful execution on our transformation, including enhancing our risk management capabilities, improving our project execution and optimizing our cost structure, which I will touch on a little later. Turning to slide six.

Demand for any historical continues to accelerate. In fact, our pipeline now sits at more than $10.3 billion, nearly 4 times our current backlog of $2.7 billion. As you can see from the chart, our funnel reflects some early projects that are attributable to the Inflation Reduction Act. We expect we will see some of these projects turn into signed contracts beginning in the second half of this year. Additionally, our project leads are at an all-time high, which is a good indicator of potential opportunities. As such, we expect the IRA to drive our U.S. revenue growth in 2024 to 40% to 50%, thus implying consolidated revenue growth of 35 to 40 predicated on a timely issuance of the IRA guidance. While the exact timing of the IRA guidance is unclear, we are hopeful that some initial commentary will be released this year.

Continuing with demand, we are becoming increasingly important by the actions that coming out of Europe. Earlier this month, the European Commission built its Green Deal Industrial Plan, which aims to increase spending and reduce regulations and rent pay in order to accelerate the expansion of renewal energy and sustainable technology. While still early days, the details of the plan has not been shared, we applaud the efforts of the European Commission as they take serious steps towards securing their energy independence by increasing their share of renewal energy, including battery energy storage. On slide seven, we have highlighted some of the reasons why our customers choose us to provide their energy storage solution. For instance they are looking for someone who can provide them with a safe product.

We are proud to be one of the market leaders in safety and have surpassed the industry standards. Time after time, our customers tell us that safety is their top priority when selecting an energy storage. We will continue to make safety our highest priority when developing additional solutions. Second, performance. Our customers demand not only a safe product, but one that performs at high level. To that point, we are pleased to have deployed the world’s fastest responding battery and storage facility. Our team has achieved the demand response times below 150 milliseconds on assets deployment . Third, bankability. This is critical to our customers as they look for further finance, especially for the larger projects, which are becoming more and more common.

Banks and financial institutions have told our customers, they feel confident in underwriting projects with Fluence Battery Energy Storage Solutions. In fact, in December year-on-year, Fluence is Battery Energy Storage System Cost Survey. These are a report in which BNEF will rate 185 industry participants. One of the survey questions asked participants to rank the bankability of 15 integrators and providers. We are proud to be ranked at the top for bankability, reflecting our successful track. And fourth, supply chain assurance. Our customers want someone who will be able to deliver their projects on time. This comes only with efficient supply chain. We are proud to say that we have all our battery needs for the remainder of the fiscal year either in-country or in-transit.

This significantly reduces the risk of Project Litgrid. Our track record of safety and performance, our understanding with bank and other lenders and the steps we have taken to significantly reduce supply chain risk allows us to continue attracting some of the world’s largest infrastructure players as our customers. These customers are seeking a long-term relationship that begins with our storage solutions and opens up the opportunity for long-term Services and Digital contracts that provide recurring revenue. This evident as greater than 90% of our community storage deployed has a long-term service contract. Turning to slide eight. We continue to expand our Digital offering in order to help our customers maximize their profit. First, we have officially entered the ERCOT market with our Mosaic Bidding application.

This is now the third market for Mosaic with the orders to be in Australia NEM and CAISO. More importantly, we have been awarded our first contract in ERCOT. We signed a framework agreement with an unrelated global IPP & Utility to optimize any ERCOT BESS brought online in the next three years. The first allotment totaled 289 megawatts. This is a significant award as it establishes our product in a new market with a blue-chip customer. Second, as I briefly mentioned, we have officially launched storage on Nispera asset performance management platform. This is a major milestone. As a Nispera platform, it’s one of the first APMs in the world to be deployed into all four major renewable asset classes, wind, solar, on hydro and now battery energy storage.

Nispera additional battery capabilities include providing real-time monitoring of the battery subcomponent, data performance analysis of the system and ticketing for acetate. The advantage Nispera brings that many of our customers bought more than one renewable asset class. Nispera can now provide with one APM for all renewable assets in the portfolio. So instead of having different APM for each asset class, they can now have just one for the entire portfolio. Similar to our Mosaic offering, the overall objective of Nispera product is to maximize our customer process by having an asset performance management platform where it also helped lower the total cost of ownership of our customers and increase our customer business. Turning to slide nine.

As we have seen from our financial results, we are making a tremendous progress on our operation. As we briefly discussed on our last call, our transformation is focused on three main areas. The first is enhancing our risk management. We have put in place a set of managerial and commercial initiatives to ensure we identify all materials, at least one we have managed more efficiently and effectively and ensure all rates are quantified and mitigated to then with the product complete. The more robust risk management allows us to be more confident on our prospective financial results. As all these processes as measured continue to mature, we will continue to provide further clarity on the prospects of our report. There is still some way to go in our endeavors.

But I am confident in our ability to continue moving this path forward. Second, improving our execution. A major driver of our execution is our product availability and capability. We recently revised our product roadmap initiative. We are breaking down our product development projects into smaller units, moving away from the concept of generation output and concentrated on improvements projects we know. The smaller projects are easier to manage, more efficient and faster to market. In addition, our recently established best-in-class facility allows us to test each new improvement at a system level and we are able to drive solutions and identify a problem before going to the customers. Third, optimizing our cost structure. As we mentioned on our last call, we have been increasing our resources on India Technology Center.

We have been often taking a competitive workforce strategy that reduce resources in higher cost countries and increase resources in lower cost countries. As part of this, we are utilizing our India Technology Center to provide necessary support function and to retool our Digital class. I am pleased to report that we made significant progress in this endeavor and plan to double the number of employees in India by the end of our fiscal year. As a result, we expect India to represent 10% to 15% of our talent, which provides us with the necessary resources for our significant growth. By focusing on our resources in lower cost countries like India, we are able to reduce our operating leverage as a offering that Manu will later touch on. Overall, I am pleased with the achievement of the first quarter.

Although we are mindful there’s still a lot of work to be done. We will look to continue this momentum as we progress for the remainder of the year. This concludes my prepared remarks. I will now turn the call over to Manu.

Manu Sial: Thank you, Julian, and good morning, everyone. I will begin by reviewing our financial performance for the first quarter and then discuss our outlook and guidance for fiscal year 2023. Please turn to slide 11. In the first quarter, in addition to having the highest order quarter in our history, we delivered $310 million in revenue, representing an increase of 78% year-over-year. We continue to effectively manage our global supply chain and execute on our backlog, including working through our legacy backlog. Greater than 95% of our first quarter sales was made up of legacy backlog and we expect to be materially complete by the end of fiscal year 2023. Moving to gross profit. I am pleased to report that we generated positive gross profit in the first quarter.

We continue to strengthen our contract compliance controls and risk management practices and our gross margin number in the first quarter includes the recovery of net claims worth $18 million we had made against one of our battery suppliers that we previously disclosed and was accounted for as a reduction of two cost of goods sold. The important takeaway is that, we are still in stronger contract compliance procedures to enable us to recover damages per our contractual results if necessary. With regard to operating expense and adjusted EBITDA, first quarter operating expense, excluding stock compensation was approximately $54 million, which is in line with the fourth quarter of 2022. As Julian mentioned, we are executing on our plan to optimize our global workforce, including through leveraging our India Technology Center.

Our previously communicated model are holding operating expense growth to less than 50% of revenue growth is intact and we expect full year 2022 operating expense spend as a percentage of sales to represent the high watermark. This model helps create operating leverage and will drive the improvement in adjusted EBITDA that we expect in 2023 and beyond. Turning to our cash balance. We ended the quarter with approximately $460 million of total cash, including short-term investments and restricted cash. This figure is in line with our comments on our Q4 earnings call. Rounding out the balance sheet discussion, inventory increased by approximately $400 million versus the prior quarter, as a risk mitigation strategy to provide us with supply chain assurance for our 2023 revenue guidance.

As Julian mentioned, all of our battery needs for 2023 are now either in-country or in-transit from China. The inventory increase in the first quarter significantly derisked our 2023 revenue guidance and a significant portion were funded by customer advances and milestone payments. Given our planned first quarter inventory build, we expect our cash usage in the second quarter to be slightly higher than in the first quarter. Furthermore, we do expect inventory turns to improve as we exit 2023 and end 2023 with liquidity greater than $500 million between cash balance and undrawn revolver, in line with previously communicated cash framework. We do not believe we need to raise any additional capital to meet our needs. Please turn to slide 12. As we briefly mentioned, we are increasing our fiscal year 2023 guidance for both revenue and adjusted gross profit.

We now expect our total revenue to be between $1.6 billion and $1.8 billion, which is up from our previous revenue guidance of $1.4 billion to $1.7 billion. Additionally, we now expect our adjusted gross profit to be between $85 million and $115 million. This is up from our previous adjusted gross profit guidance of $60 million to $100 million. The guidance increase is due to the incremental demand and better supply chain visibility. We provided more detail in our appendix similar to last quarter. We are coming into the second quarter with 99% of our 2023 expected revenue in our backlog, providing us high visibility to achieving our guidance. In terms of revenue seasonality, we still expect to see a split of approximately 40% in the first half and 60% in the second half of our fiscal year.

As Julian briefly touched on, we expect the IRA tailwinds to benefit order growth in the second half of 2023 with a benefit to topline revenue and gross profit mostly occurring in 2024 and beyond. Thus, we have not included any IRA impact in our 2023 revenue and gross profit guidance. Before I turn the call back to Julian for final remarks, I would like to reiterate that we are committed to and on track to be adjusted EBITDA positive in 2024. With that, I will turn the call back over to Julian.

Julian Nebreda: Thank you, Manu. In closing, I want to reiterate what I consider the main take away from this quarter results. First, we had a strong quarter in terms of our financial performance, with our highest order intake through in history, providing us with a solid base from which we can launch the strong growth we foresee for our company. We continue to make significant progress on our risk management, most notably for this quarter, reducing our supply chain risk through several actions as reflected in our order 2023 battery needs in-country or in-transit. We continue to expand our offerings, concentrate our efforts in developing new products and solutions that create value for our customers, especially relevant this quarter, the new Nispera battery management software.

All the effort covered in today’s call provide us with high confidence to increase our total revenue and adjusted gross profit guidance for fiscal year 2022 and achieve the positive EBITDA in 2024. This will conclude my prepared remarks. We will now open it up for questions. Operator?

Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. And our first question comes from the line of James West with Evercore ISI. Your line is now open.

James West: Hey. Good morning, guys.

Julian Nebreda: Hey, James.

Manu Sial: Hey, James. Good morning.

James West: Julian, obviously, really strong order intake this quarter and it raised guidance a very positive moves there. I am curious what you are seeing in terms of pricing because demand is running well ahead of supply in the market. And thinking about your drive here, you and Manu’s drive to profitable growth, but significant growth of profitable growth, are you at the point where you can exact some pricing power onto the market?

Julian Nebreda: We see pricing — as you said, demand is strong and we see prices supporting our 10% to 15% margin of what we have said to the market. So same within that range, some segments are better, so some segment are going to develop out of the branch, some segments are in the lower side. But generally, we are kind of in that range, that’s our alternative view, so.

James West: Okay. Okay. Understood. And can..

Manu Sial: Yeah. The only thing I will add is, you can start to see that in the new deals we are signing. Those are double-digit margins as well.

James West: Okay. Okay. Makes sense. And then maybe a follow-up for me, a little bit related but on the software side of the business. There was a good uptake on Mosaic and Nispera is seeing some progress here as well. What’s the go-to-market strategy with those software packages? Do you sell them as a package, do they go individually? What’s the — I guess, how is that process run and

Julian Nebreda: So

James West: Yeah.

Julian Nebreda: As we communicated in the last earnings call, remember, one of the things that we are integrating our sales channels better.

James West: Right.

Julian Nebreda: The reality is that the Nispera is product — is a global product. So we can sell it all around the world in all the geographies, wherever they are located. Mosaic is a market product that works in Australia, in California and in — and now in ERCOT.

James West: Okay.

Julian Nebreda: So they are not — you cannot integrate the two together, because they are different and it depends on the business case that each of our customers. But we are integrating with our offering to make it to be a lot more efficient in the way we sell it. So that’s the way we think on it. You will see, I think, a closer integration of our APM or Nispera offering into our product sales as we continue moving forward, it is a global product, the same as our products.

James West: Okay. Understood. Got it. Thanks, Julian. Thanks, Manu.

Julian Nebreda: Thank you. Thank you, James.

Manu Sial: Thanks.

Julian Nebreda: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of George Gianarikas with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is now open.

George Gianarikas: Hey. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for taking my question.

Julian Nebreda: Hey, George.

Manu Sial: Good morning, George.

Julian Nebreda: Good morning, George.

George Gianarikas: I’d like to ask about gross margins and I don’t want to put the cart before the horse, but you have done a really good job getting them back into the mid single digits, and previously, you had guided for your hardware business to be somewhere in the mid-teens, I believe. Is that given that there have been multiple structural changes to the way you contract, is there a potential upside to that mid-teens gross margin target long-term?

Julian Nebreda: No. I think, as I said, we are still seeing this 10% and 15%, lower-teens, some markets doing better, some markets doing a lot tighter. But our view hasn’t changed, not today, same view. It’s not that. Clearly we are on top of and I am clearly always talking to our sales team to ensure we look at the segments where we can capture better margins, but today what we told. What — just to kind of explain why we are not seeing that in our results today. As you know, we are getting out of our legacy customers and we probably will be out completely our legacy contracts by the — with the time we close this fiscal year and you should see a lot of improvement on margin during the year and we will see the new contract coming full in 2024 going forward.

George Gianarikas: Thank you. And maybe as a follow-up, we continue to read about auto companies not only obviously building cells, battery cells, but investing in lithium mines. And I am curious as to, when you think strategically over the next couple of few years, I know you have enough supply currently, but is that — is getting deeper into the supply chain something that’s of interest and

Julian Nebreda: Okay.

George Gianarikas: or do you have to maybe partner with — more deeply partner with a cell manufacturer long-term? Thank you.

Julian Nebreda: Last quarter, we announced that we were going into module production, which is a little bit of a further vertical integration with a way of trying or with the objective of commoditizing the cells modernization, opening of the people we can buy from, accelerating the time at which we can integrate sales and for — getting a stronger position in the cell supply chain is strong. Also we don’t have plans to go further down, but so that is essentially where we are going. Our current views that we are expectable to it, but going further down, it’s not — it will not be efficient or effective for us well.

Operator: Thank you.

Manu Sial: Thanks, George.

Julian Nebreda: Thanks, George.

Operator: All right. Our next question will come from the line of Maheep Mandloi with Credit Suisse. Your line is now open.

Maheep Mandloi: Hey. Good morning. Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions here.

Julian Nebreda: Thank you.

Manu Sial: Good morning, Maheep.

Maheep Mandloi: Yeah. Absolutely. And maybe just to start with, could you just talk more about the supply chain improvements you are seeing here? Is this something you are seeing throughout the year here, is it from a timing perspective? And how should we think about that like kind of going into next year and could you expect — just going back to the gross margin question, but like do you expect an earlier faster ramp to your gross margin target here?

Julian Nebreda: Yeah. One of the reasons why we are able to raise our guidance for the year is that we feel more confident on our supply chain. When we — last year — at the end of last year, when the zero COVID policy in China and there was this view that we might enter into a similar situation of what we had when COVID started, remember. That didn’t materialize. But that made us make the decision to kind of accelerate that, because it was not costly, it wasn’t required a lot of working capital, we could do it, accelerate our battery and get as much of them out order in process, we are able to get involved into that. But the reality is that we have seen no disruption. That’s the reality. Great action, we feel makes us feel confident, further assurance to meet our guidance.

But we have seen no — not the — our supply chain seems to be normalized, and in fact logistics, as a main issue a year ago, no longer an issue. The prices of transferring of — moving things around are not back to pre-pandemic prices, but are in line with what I consider normal. So we are happy. I will tell you this is my view on this, where we are today. Our view of the world connects with our financial guidance to the market. As the world improves and it improves to a point that we believe that we will do better, we will communicate it to you that what we are doing today and that’s obviously. But we are very, very confident that the world as it is today and where with — where our risk management tools will lead us to the range in terms of gross profit and revenue we set for ourselves for this year.

But I have said that and maybe a little optimistic, different words and maybe come back to hug me, I think the market demand is growing. There’s a lot more supplies, getting things, moving things are cheaper. So growth pathways at that time improve our world — our view later on, but I think that where we are today in the world as we see it today leads us to the guidance we provided. Yeah, Manu, please.

Manu Sial: I think the only thing you would appreciate, we have both narrowed the range and up the range in terms of our revenue guidance that’s on the last, both from a backlog confidence perspective and supply chain. And then we provide more firmness on our 2024 of how to think about from a revenue percentage. That is also driven by the fact that we feel confident about our supply chain assurance going into 2024 model.

Maheep Mandloi: Got it. No. That’s really helpful. And then maybe just on manufacturing. I mean, I know you guys talked about all the benefits from IRA, but could you like remind on the module manufacturing you guys were talking about on the last call and

Julian Nebreda: Yeah.

Maheep Mandloi: timing on

Julian Nebreda: Yeah.

Maheep Mandloi: Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead.

Julian Nebreda: So thank you for the question. As we said last time, we are in the process of developing the technology and putting in place the manufacturer. Our view that will be ready in summer of 2024. So and we are — it’s going well. Milestones that we met. We — I met the team yesterday and the update looks very good. So very, very happy with the process. So we should be able to start manufacturing out of our facility — our manufacturing facility here in the U.S. in the summer of 2024. Very happy.

Maheep Mandloi: Got you. No. Thanks for the update. I guess I will jump back in the queue. Thank you.

Julian Nebreda: Thank you, Maheep.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Lee with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Julian Nebreda: Hey, Brian.

Brian Lee: Hey.

Julian Nebreda: Hi. Good morning.

Brian Lee: Hey, guys. Good morning. Good morning. Kudos on the execution here.

Manu Sial: Hi, Brian.

Brian Lee: Hey, Manu. A couple of questions for me. I guess I really appreciate all the additional disclosure and color around the guidance here and even kind of the first look at 2024. I know most of it is focused around kind of volume demand, revenue upside as you factor in the impact of IRA. I think you alluded to also embedding some impact on profit margins. Can you maybe elaborate a little bit on what you are assuming in 2024 in terms of impact of IRA, whether it’s pricing, it’s something on the COGS side? It sounds like there’s some margin uplift you are assuming and just trying to get a sense of what you are embedding in there and also where the puts and takes are if you could see even more versus what you are base casing right now?

Julian Nebreda: Thank you, Brian. Our core view on the IRA is that is same today. What we are embedded in our view of the market, we are communicating to you, it’s not volume. So we are feel more confident so we can give you the guidance of 35% to 40% increase in revenue for next year and that will be profit or EBITDA profit — adjusted EBITDA profit for today in line with what kind of communicated, an improvement, but it’s volumes. Today, I don’t think we are at a stage where we are today that we can give you — that we can commit or embed in our guidance increases in margin. So we continue, as I said, 10% to 15%, some segments higher, some segments on the lower side, but in line with what we have been telling the market what we are going to do. So we are not at a point that we have defined our margin objective.

Brian Lee: Okay. Fair enough. We will look out for more color. I guess second question for me and I will pass it on is, on the contracted backlog, a healthy number here, $2.7 billion. You clearly have the revenue guidance in your crosshairs for 2023. Can you remind us sort of how you define backlog, what we know the $2.7 billion, why wouldn’t it translate to potentially a higher revenue opportunity in 2023 versus the $1.6 million to $1.8 million you are guiding to today? And then also the mix of the backlog, if you could kind of articulate what the $2.7 billion is comprised of? Thanks, guys.

Julian Nebreda: Turn over to Manu.

Manu Sial: Yeah. Sure. So just from a layering in, if you take the remaining three quarters of the year and take our midpoint to our first quarter actuals, that’s roughly $1.4 billion, sort of the $2.7 billion, $1.4 billion translates into the year. Typically from a cycle time perspective, our backlogs translate into revenue between, call it, 12 months to 18 months and some may be a little longer, some may be towards the lower end of the month. So I think that’s been a normal kind of translation of backlog from a revenue perspective going into 2023 and 2024. Look as we tighten up from an execution perspective and a supply chain assurance perspective, is it possible that some of that backlog that we have articulated for 2024 dates back into 2023 and gets us closer to the top end of our guidance?

Yeah, that’s certainly something that we internally strive for. But from a guidance perspective and from a color perspective, we are comfortable with what we told you, which is we narrowed the range, increased the midpoint of $1.7 billion and we have kind of provided a form of 14 to our 2024 number of revenue guidance between 35% to 40% investment spent. What we are seeing in the backlog, and more importantly, what we expect to see come down the pipe in the second half of the year from the IRA.

Brian Lee: Okay. Fair enough. I will pass it on. Thanks, guys.

Julian Nebreda: Yeah. Thanks, Brian.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of David Peters with Wolfe Research. Your line is now open.

Julian Nebreda: Good morning, David.

David Peters: Yeah. hey. Good morning, everybody.

Manu Sial: Good morning.

David Peters: So on slide six, just you are pointing to the IRA driving revenue growth of 40% to 50% in the U.S. and just on the consolidated topline growth that you are pointing to, I think, that implies international growth just above 20%. So just on the international piece, curious if you could speak to the visibility there at this point and is most of that coming from Europe or Asia?

Julian Nebreda: Yeah. I think it’s a combination. Both markets are similar size from our point of view. Some of the markets are move at some point faster or smaller as we move forward. So that’s kind of the way I think on. So there are — where are the markets where we see the most growth? The U.K., Australia, are probably the ones where growth seems to be. Taiwan and the Philippines have been attractive markets for us. We will work on them. Germany with a transmission project has proven to be a good market too also. I think that long-term these two markets should to represent roughly the same size. Today, APAC in our numbers are a little bit smaller, but we see significant growth coming forward.

David Peters: Okay. Great. And then just specifically with what unique clarification on from the IRS by April or the spring can, I guess, just to ensure that 2024 growth expectation in the U.S. materializes. Just what specifically do you need clarification on?

Julian Nebreda: This is more. I don’t think that it won’t affect in any way 2023 revenue. It could affect some time in 2024, but fairly confident that — I think the clarifications for what we are waiting for is some of this to ensure that we can have U.S. manufacturing content and that they are developing as we continue to look at capturing some of our — some of the value that compared to the pressure of that that we can capture more than anything. I will say that it’s very unlikely that the guidance will affect what we are telling you for 2024.

David Peters: Okay. Great. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Ryan Levine with Citi. Your line is now open.

Ryan Levine: Hi. Good morning.

Julian Nebreda: Hey. Good morning, Ryan.

Ryan Levine: Just coming to your go-to-market share — good morning. Regarding the Mosaic entrance into the ERCOT market, can you speak to how the product is differentiated for ERCOT versus CAISO and should we be looking for additional markets that you would be entering in the near-term on that product?

Julian Nebreda: These — our Mosaic product — its main goal today. It’s very good foresight. The ability to predict will affect it to what’s going to happen in the market in the high 90s. So and that happens that for every market you need to really work to get to high numbers. You need to ensure your database and your artificial intelligence tools are working effectively. So that’s why essentially happening. The tools provide the same. The high on where the market is going to play in terms of volumes and price going forward. So in terms of growth, what we had — as we discussed in our last call, we are re-platforming the Mosaic tool. Why? We have proven that it was taken — it was too costly and too cumbersome the processor, the architecture needed some improvement to ensure that we can move standard into new markets at more reasonable cost.

Clearly, that is really matter in California and ERCOT, because these are very, very attractive market, very liquid, a lot of players. But as we go into market that are not as big, not as liquid, we really needed to ensure that we manage the cost of the adaptation to new markets going forward. We are in that process as we announced in the last call of re-platforming the tool and our plan is to — while this re-platform is done, which will be around this year or early next year, we will — our objective will be in the next three years to enter into four new markets. So that’s how we are seeing on it. We have not set the specific date of when each market will come, but you should expect that coming in 2024.

Ryan Levine: Excellent. And as the product continues to evolve, are you seeing certain types of customers being more appropriate for this type of software package in terms of type of resource generation versus some of the initial asset classes that you identified through the IPO?

Julian Nebreda: I think we are working with the same global IPPs who are training their staff. So it hasn’t changed their — who we are working with and it might change as we move into new markets for ERCOT and CAISO and NEM. We work with the same type of customers.

Ryan Levine: Okay. Thank you.

Julian Nebreda: Thank you, Ryan.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Ben Kallo with Baird. Your line is now open.

Ben Kallo: Great. Thank you, guys. Good quarter.

Julian Nebreda: Hi, Ben.

Ben Kallo: Hey. Just on the supply chain, could you talk to us and remind us about your cell supply and how you are with your current relationships and the intent on if there is one on expanding those relationships and how you think about geographic risk on the supply chain from that front and mitigating that? And I have a follow-up.

Julian Nebreda: Thank you. As you know, we are currently buying modules. We are not buying cell yet. We will start buying cells once we have our own module for the summer of 2024. So we are buying modules. We are a — so in terms of — today we are actively looking to diversify the players we work with. We have the Europe players with — there’s a significant or a great majority of supply chain comes from China. We are working hard to diversify it to Europe with the Northvolt process we are doing and we are working with some other markets where we are from Korean production. But generally, when you look at it today, it is mostly China. As we move forward, I think, we will continue, and I guess that’s your question, we will continue to work with some of the people that we are working today.

But as we start buying cells, we will expand significantly we can buy cells from and we can — I think they will expand not only from the companies but also geographic. So that’s kind of where we are. We are actively looking. Diversification is a rule of the game and we have set as to our view of our companies that scales fundamental for this company, because scale is the only way to diversify at an optimal level. So that’s kind of where we see ourselves and I will tell that, that’s where we are.

Ben Kallo: Okay. Thank you. Just on slide seven, you talk about bankability. I am just wondering if that — if the leadership you show here, if that makes a bigger difference now with IRA, the ITC from a tax equity perspective? Thank you.

Julian Nebreda: Yeah. That’s a great question. Thank you. Bankability is very, very important, especially for the bigger — in the U.S. market, where projects are bigger and they are required some cases more complex tax function or structure to make it work. So we see sometimes that we are one of the few that are called to cost of spread there. There are not that many players with whom you can build this project currently . And that I think is reflected in the fact that we are already seeing the IRA reflected in our pipeline. As we said, we should see that higher volumes in 2024 coming out of that. So it’s clearly a competitive advantage, something that we take care of, ensure that we are always — the way we structure our deals and the way we think our product to ensure that we keep that leadership position in bankability.

Ben Kallo: Thank you.

Julian Nebreda: Yeah. Thanks.

Manu Sial: Thank you, Ben.

Operator: Thank you. Our follow-up — final question comes from the line of Julien Dumoulin-Smith with Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Julian Nebreda: Hey, Julien.

Alex Guevara: Hey, guys. Good morning.

Julian Nebreda: Good morning.

Alex Guevara: Hey, guys. Good morning. It’s Alex Guevara actually on for Julien. But thanks for taking our question here. Appreciate it. So apologies, this one’s probably for Manu. It’s a little bit in the weeds, but just trying to make sure we understand. When we look at the deployed, I guess, gigawatts looks up pretty modestly versus the rev recognition coming up quite a bit, and I saw, I guess, unbilled receivables kind of shot up as well? So just trying to understand maybe the nuances there between rev rec and kind of the deployed number, as well as what’s reflected in the contracted backlog versus rev rec if that makes sense, just try to square all those pieces?

Manu Sial: Sure. So let me give you a couple of comments and then we have more detailed definitions on slide 15 of our deck and then there’s a little bit more on our metric sheets. But just the way to think about it, right? So deployed as we talk about that is projects or solutions that have achieved substantial completion. That’s one. From a rev rec basis, as you know, we do a percentage of completion revenue recognition perspective, and therefore, there is some portion of megawatt hours that we recognize as we go. The reason we gave you megawatt hours tied to revenue recognition, because it’s a good volume metric tied to our revenue dollars. I think that’s one way to think about it. That way you can think about how we are doing in terms of our volume, pricing, just makes modeling easy and it’s also a key metric that shows operational progress on a particular project.

So for a variety of reasons, that’s a great metric for us to have a conversation on. But we do give you the deployed megawatts or megawatt hours to show what projects have achieved substantial completion, right? So that’s one. Our contracted backlog is a dollar number that is tied to the value of the project and the layering in of that contracted backlog revenue dollars between the fiscal years 2023, 2024 is influenced in part by the percentage of completion methodology on how we book our revenue. So said differently, we may recognize revenue on a project in 2023 that may achieve substantial completion in 2024. So, hopefully, that was hopeful. We can clear up any of the follow-ups in our call next.

Alex Guevara: Yeah. No. I appreciate it. I know it’s kind of an in the weeds question. Maybe one that’s less in the weeds and let’s just talk about you guys obviously sourcing more and more from Northvolt. I think it’s really impressive actually that you say everything in-country or in-transit, a lot of line of sight there on that backlog. I mean, when you think about more, let’s say, non-China sourcing and sort of this higher rate demand wedge on the other end, I mean, when we think about backlog, do you have, I guess, a broad heuristic as far as line of sight that you anticipate, whether it’s one year, two-year or a lot longer in this business, clearly, it’s evolving. But I think the key lever point towards you guys could have a lot more line of sight than you have had historically on that piece of the business. So just curious how you think about that.

Julian Nebreda: I am not sure I had followed completely the question. I mean, I do — I will tell you kind of how I think of it, I said, how we are looking forward. Supply chain diversifying, reducing the we can create. Clearly, our strategic plan is to capture the IRA, so modules and then buy U.S. manufactured cells and manufacturing products there. In terms of what we are seeing today is, I would say, what we have seen — what we can see line of sight today with our backlog is essentially products that are in line what we were doing. These are not — were not reflected in a U.S. manufacturer product were not reflected. So those will come up as we move forward and we can secure the batteries, we can secure the supply chain and we can get this forward.

So that one, that was clearly another point of side and another — maybe another point of volumes that we have potentially a better view or a different view on markets. But I don’t know if I am answering your question completely. Maybe Manu — that’s how we think about it. So today we are very confident in 2023, very confident on the topline in 2024, on the EBITDA line on 2024. So that’s what we can convene and what we are seeing now.

Manu Sial: Let me just bring this to a close as to how I sort of the question, similar to what Julian said. We have got 2023 supply chain on lockup, like we said. We have got backlog locked up as well. For 2024, we have great line of sight, both from a topline perspective. We provided a fair bit of comments in this call. And then from a supply chain perspective, we have a great line of sight going forward, which gives us the confidence to get to the range we provided of 35% to 40% largely on the back of the growth in management. And then from a diversification perspective, the way to think about diversification is we are going up the chain and making our own product or our modules. And then the Northvolt also provides us a source of diversification. It’s certainly on top of our mind and there are multiple angles to it like we articulated both in terms of making our own systems, as well as identifying sources that are not channels.

Alex Guevara: Okay. That’s helpful and apologies if it was a little bit confusing. I will take the rest offline. Thanks, guys.

Julian Nebreda: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Julian Nebreda for closing remarks.

Julian Nebreda: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you everybody for participating. We are very, very happy with the quarter. I mean, I think, that we have seen the initial effects of our turnaround. There’s a long way to go. There’s a lot of work we need to do. We need to continue maturing, capturing our — what we said our objective, continue growing this company so we can capture the value through the scale, supply chains, derisking, diversifying, capture the IRA and continue development products and going with the market and sell — offering our customers the products that makes their lives easy, that makes the world different. So there’s a lot of work, but we are happy. We probably will celebrate today, but celebration will be more of an impulse to continue working as we are working. So, great, thank you all for participating and hope to talk to you all during the next few weeks. Bye-bye.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. Everyone have a wonderful day.