Ideal Power Inc. (NASDAQ:IPWR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

David Williams: Great. And maybe just from a geographical standpoint, it sounds like you made a lot of progress in terms of the sampling and new customers. Can you talk maybe from a geographical perspective where you’re seeing the greatest interest in demand? Is this Asia-based or European or maybe even North American-based?

Dan Brdar: Most of the companies that we are working with are global. So they have a presence in the U.S., Europe and Asia. So we’re really looking — because our team is small and we are concerned about bandwidth as more and more people learn about the technology, we’re really not spending much time on small companies because it takes almost as much time to support a small company on the technology it does someone new. So we are really focusing our partnering on players that are names that people would recognize in terms of the companies and that are global in the products that they bring to market.

David Williams: Okay. And one last one for me, if you don’t mind. Just kind of thinking about the time line to revenue on some of the automotive stuff that you discussed and some of the other programs that are in place. When do you think we should start beginning to see some real revenue ramp? Is that this year? Or should we expect that maybe later into next year?

Dan Brdar: You’ll see revenue on the industrial segments, things like renewables and motor drives, those sort of things in 2024. You’ll see some modest revenue later in 2023. But when you think about it and customers have to go through a design cycle to incorporate any new semiconductor device. So once they’re through that process, it will €“ the revenue will start to ramp in ‘024. On the automobile side, the stated objective of the program with the global automaker is a production-ready product by mid-2025. So I would expect that real revenue from them would follow shortly after that. And they actually consume a lot of parts just to go through all their certification and testing and qualification. So we’ll actually even see some preproduction revenue on the automobile side starting probably in the second half of 2025.

Operator: I will now turn the call back to Jeff Christensen to read questions submitted through the webcast. Thank you.

Jeff Christensen: Thank you, Sarah. First question that’s been posted to the Q&A button is, could you describe the development agreement with a top 10 global automaker in more detail, including the phases of the program?

Dan Brdar: Sure. We were selected from several competing technologies. And so folks that know us know that we were getting pretty frustrated because it was just a very long evaluation process took over a year. As you can imagine, the automakers are looking at all the technologies that are out there as they think about how are they going to bring out products that are differentiated from what’s already in the market, how are they going to manage costs, how are they going to improve range. So we were competing against a whole variety of technologies, including some self-care technologies. We were selected for that program. They also selected an innovative packaging company that was €“ packaging was also going through its own selection of technologies and innovation.