Xos, Inc. (NASDAQ:XOS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Kingsley Afemikhe: Hey Mike, how are you? So, when you look at our forecast in units for this year, that number includes step vans, powertrains, and also a number of hubs. Primarily the numbers — the vast majority of it is step vans. In addition, on the backlog number — backlog additions that we had last year, that number is a net addition, so a net of cancellations and also net of deliveries over the year.

Dakota Semler: Just wanted to add one more point. As we’ve continued to focus on cost reduction of our platform, we also want to make sure that most of the vehicles we’re delivering this year are gross margin positive and at a point where we’re actually generating contribution margin for the business. And so when we look at even back at Q4, we were profitable on a direct material basis with those vehicles and we’re continuing to see improvement there that we shared in some of the detail in the call and anticipate further improvement in the quarters to come.

Michael Shlisky: Got it. Maybe one last one for me and maybe just taking a big step back, Dakota. Some of the comments that you made here in your prepared comments, kind of suggest that at this point, with certain customers, you’re already beyond the testing phase. In other words, that you’ve gone through the two unit tests, you’ve then gone through second 10 units, 20 units test and now customers are coming in saying you are an official supplier of our company. I haven’t heard anywhere else in the EV truck space. I don’t think it’s off the top of my head ever. So, can you comment as to are customers now calling you just a supplier and not just a test program or a fund those experiment at this point? And what number of customers are considering you that and you get a feel for how many might convert to that in 2023?

Dakota Semler: Yes, absolutely. Mike, you hit the nail on the head and that commercial fleets and large national fleets have a very risk-diverse process to procuring equipment and that starts with a small demonstration, scales up to a slightly larger one in the low tens of units and then scales to hundreds of units. I think Loomis is one of the examples that we can publicly talk about that’s done exactly that over the past few years. But we have several other customers that really are coming into that phase of the relationship where they’re planning to order into the low hundreds of units and following on and they’re either their first or second order. We don’t guide to the specific number of customers that are there, but many of them are recognizable Fortune businesses that have sophisticated fleet operations with thousands of vehicles in them.

So, I would say that that’s one of our proof points as we’ve talked about creating value for customers. We need to ultimately deliver on a TCO promise, deliver on a reliability promise, which is why they test the vehicles in small scale to start and then ultimately, show them that these unit economics scale across their fleet operations and we’re doing it every day.

Michael Shlisky: Okay. That’s great color. I’ll pass along. Thank you.

Dakota Semler: Thanks Mike.

Operator: Our next question comes from Jerry Revich of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Adam Bubes: Hi. This is Adam Bubes on for Jerry today.

Dakota Semler: Hi there Adam.

Adam Bubes: Just wondering — hey. When you talk about gross profit on a unit-level turning positive, can you clarify, does that mean you expect gross profit for the total company to be positive in mid-2023 or are you maybe excluding overhead in that number? And then just wondering how gross profitability could be tracking as we exit the year?