Rocket Lab USA, Inc. (NASDAQ:RKLB) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Adam Spice: And Erik I think I’d just add on a little bit there. The — we continue to knockdown the gates towards these milestones in the program, so we’ve cleared quite a few of the scheduled milestones. We’re on schedule. Everything looks to be in good shape. So we will go into all the details of all the milestones and sub-milestones. But we’ve — so far we’ve been very fortunate to be hitting all of our milestone dates getting through successful reviews. So yeah all that looks very, very good. So far we’ve also been pretty fortunate that we haven’t been burned by any supply chain issues at this point. So the quarter is still relatively early, but given everything that we’re seeing right now, everything looks to be on track. And so far we’ve got happy customers.

Erik Rasmussen: Sounds good. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Scott Deuschle of Credit Suisse. Please proceed.

Scott Deuschle: Hey, good afternoon. Adam, it looks like the Q1 EBITDA loss you’re guiding to is about double the loss in Q4 and pretty close to what the Street was expecting for the full year in 2023. So just given the market’s focus on profitability, I was wondering if you could give some further context on what’s driving that increase and then how we should think about the trend from Q1?

Adam Spice: Sure. Yeah, I think that there — I don’t think there’s been a tremendous amount of resolution in some of the models that are out there. I think that when we’ve communicated to investors kind of the level of investment required for the — sorry for the Neutron program when we came out we said, it was going to be roughly a $250 million program to get the first Neutron to the pad at the end of 2024. And we believe we’re still on schedule of that. So if you kind of just look at kind of what that — and we got — we provided a breakdown of how much of that was going to be in CapEx versus prototyping and then OpEx through headcount and so forth. I think the ability there is to model out what that should be, especially given where we are now as we are in Q1 of 2023 and then anticipated launch date in Q4 of next year.

So I guess it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise kind of where we are kind of on that on adjusted EBITDA basis. And I think that at least for internal purposes, it feels like it’s pretty consistent with where we thought we’d be given kind of the — where we are in the life cycle of the program. From a modeling and trending going forward, we’re going to see continued uptick in spending related to Neutron. We’ve — I think we’ve crossed the hump or gotten over the hump for a lot of our Photon Space Systems related pure R&D work. There’s still more to come, but a lot of it is kind of behind us. But I think that the — we’ll crest the Neutron spending hump probably sometime in the middle of next year again as we get closer and closer to the launch date in Q4.