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Earnings Transcript for EMBKW - Q3 Fiscal Year 2022

Operator: Greetings, and welcome to Embark Truck’s Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host Mr. Adam Fee. You may begin.
Adam Fee: Thank you, operator, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Joining me on today’s call are Co-Founder and CEO, Alex Rodrigues; and CFO, Richard Hawwa. Embark issued its third quarter 2022 press release and presentation, which we will refer to today. These can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.embarktrucks.com. Please note this call will include forward-looking statements based on current expectations and assumptions, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. These statements reflect our views only as of today and should not be relied upon as representative about our views as of any subsequent date. We undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in-light of new information or future events. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. Please refer to our filings with the SEC including our Annual Report on Form 10-K filed on March 21, 2022, our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed on August 12, 2022, and other documents filed with the SEC from time-to-time. We will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of Embark’s performance. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for, or in isolation from, GAAP results. These additional disclosures regarding the non-GAAP financial measures in today’s press release and our filings with the SEC are posted on our company’s investor relations website. Finally, we are recording today’s call, and we’ll make the recording available this evening also on our website. I would now like to turn the call over to Alex.
Alex Rodrigues: Thank you, Adam. Good morning, everyone. I’m excited to provide our last quarterly update in 2022 and walk through what we said we would deliver on, how we have delivered on it, and how these milestones set the stage for our progress in 2023. Before I get into those updates, on Slide 3 I want to take a minute to talk about our Truck Teams here at Embark. In September, Embark celebrated national Truck Driver Appreciation Week, recognizing the around the clock contributions of our Safety Drivers and AV Operators. At Embark, we deeply value safety, and our people. Embark’s Safety Drivers are some of the most experienced truckers in the industry, with an average of over 20 years of experience and over a million miles per person operating big rigs. Our Truck Team’s knowledge and experience are paramount to Embark’s perfect safety record, as reported this past June by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. For those not familiar, a Truck Team consists of a Safety Driver and an AV Operator. The Safety Driver is focused on the truck and on the road, while the AV Operator is in the passenger seat, or now, sometimes remote. The role of the operator is to monitor the AV system, advise the Safety Driver on performance, and continuously capture feedback on the system to relay back to Engineering. This company-wide collaboration between the Truck Teams and our world-class engineering team is paramount to building the software required to ultimately deploy commercial autonomous trucks safely. The underlying theme is always
Richard Hawwa: Thanks Alex. On Slide 10, I want to highlight some of the key financial metrics that support our business progress. Our cash and cash equivalents were $191 million as of September 30, 2022. Our free cash flow spend for the quarter was $29.4 million, compared to last quarter of $24.7 million. I’ll provide a bit more detail on the quarter-over-quarter change, as most of this increase simply reflects the timing of cash payments, and not an increase in the go forward run-rate free cash flow spend, which is why we are also reaffirming our guidance for the full-year free cash flow spend, as provided last quarter. This brings us to our total free cash flow spend for the year to $74.1 million, which is in-line with our expectations. I want to reiterate, we fully expected much of the free cash flow spend to be second half weighted in Q3 and Q4, which is why we are able to reaffirm our guidance for full-year 2022 free cash flow spend to be $100 million to $115 million. And, since it's a question we commonly get asked, you can think about our current run-rate free cash flow spend of around $27 million per quarter, which is reflective of the mid-point of the guidance. And, as you remember, we were able to bring down our original guidance earlier this year of $125million to $140 million, as we continue to adapt to market conditions, which highlights the benefits of our asset-lite business model. To provide a bit more color, the previously provided guidance earlier this year would reflect a run-rate free cash flow spend of around $33 million per quarter, at the midpoint. The actions we took earlier this year resulted in more than half a year of incremental runway, which is why we are very happy with our cash position today given how we planned for market conditions earlier this year. When we revised our guidance, it was our expectation that we would be in a prolonged market downturn, and our view on this has not changed and we continue to operate and plan as such. This swift action we took earlier this year has given us flexibility without compromising our ability to commercialize the business and deliver a product in 2024. As we discussed during the last earnings call, we wanted to really flex our plan to extend the runway, but also ensure we have the appropriate team to execute on the plan to deliver on our timelines. The progress we have made this quarter clearly demonstrates this is exactly what we have done. I’ll provide some metrics on the next slide to show how disciplined and consistent we’ve been on our free cash flow spend. But, before moving on, I do want to talk through the increase in quarter-over-quarter free cash flow spend and how to frame that in the context of a run-rate number. Essentially there was about $5 million of pre-payments related to certain agreements that get paid in Q3 every year, but they are expensed over the course of the year. Also, we had some incremental expenses this quarter as we began to move employees into our new headquarters, which I should state, is really cool. When you adjust for these items, we continue to have conviction, based on what we know today, on the run-rate spend I discussed. Moreover, as you can easily extrapolate based on Q4 expectations, we do expect a higher amount in Q4, hence why we reaffirmed our original guidance for 2022. This also will not reflect a change in the expected run-rate, but again, simply a timing consideration. I’ll talk more on the next slide around our discipline, consistency, and focus as it relates to managing the balance sheet. But, before I go to the next slide I want to summarize the key takeaway here
Alex Rodrigues: Thank you, Richard. Moving on to Slide 12. I want to talk through how some of the core design principles that led us to identify the trucking use-case, are continuing to be applied today to ensure a clear path to commercialization in 2024. What we observed early on was that we needed to simplify the operating domain and focus on customers with a clear and present need for our technology in high value applications. Back in 2016, Embark was one of the first players to focus on trucking when others were focused on passenger cars. We made this decision, which was controversial at the time, because it achieved the objectives that we thought, and continue to believe, are critical to advancing the technology development in an economically viable manner. This allowed us to make rapid progress in a highly capital efficient way, achieving our first intervention free run between two cities in 2018 with a few dozen engineers. We were able to achieve this high return on human capital because we took the time to form a view of how to commercialize AV in a focused manner. Since then, as we have continued to develop the system, we’ve also doubled down on this thinking, and in the subsequent years, we’ve further divided the trucking market into sub-segments, enabling us to pull forward the segments of the market that best met our criteria of a simplified operating domain in high value applications. To provide some specific examples, there are three key divisions we made within certain trucking sub-segments
Adam Fee: Thank you, Alex. Operator, let’s begin the question-and-answer session.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Chris Wetherbee with Citi. Please go ahead.
Chris Wetherbee: Thanks and good morning guys. Maybe we could start with cash and just sort of getting a sense of how you think the trajectory looks towards that revenue realization in 2024, Alex, that you just mentioned? So, I think maybe two questions embedded here. Do you think that there were 100 million to 115 million of annual run rate, is it good numbers we're beginning to think of 2023? And then in terms of the fourth quarter, there's a decent, sort of spread between the 100 million and 115 million in terms of what could happen in the fourth quarter? So, any sort of help in determining what the factors would be that would get you at the higher or lower-end of that number for the fourth quarter?
Alex Rodrigues: Yes. Hey, Chris, how's it going? I can talk on the balance sheet first. I think to your first question, we haven't provided guidance yet in 2023, but we try to give you the roadmap of at least how to think about what runway looks like. And I think as we've said, we feel very good about the team that we have today. So, I think it's probably a good place to start. And then as it relates to fourth quarter, I think we want to continue to reaffirm the guidance that we gave. And I think you can expect that guidance to be fairly consistent before we expect. I think there's obviously some timing things that could change one way or the other, but we feel pretty good around the numbers that we provided.
Chris Wetherbee: Okay. So, just the timing of specific items in the fourth quarter that could, sort of account for that 15 million spread. You guys have been running in a relatively tight spread. So, I guess, is that the dynamic for some timing of things that could be there in fourth quarter or first quarter?
Alex Rodrigues: Exactly.
Chris Wetherbee: Okay, that's helpful. And then maybe, I just want to touch on, sort of Alex where you left off, which was, sort of this used-case that could be achieved by 2024. So, I guess I just maybe want to make sure that I'm clear of what you mean by that language, sounds like you're suggesting that through the end of next year and into 2024, there could be a revenue generating case. So, I want to sort of understand how you think about that? I know you can't get into too much detail about specific partners, but maybe a sense of what that might look like? And then I guess a follow-up question would just be on the TTP. Just want to get a sense of how many trucks are being delivered, and if there are any revenue generation opportunities there or if it's going to be solely for testing? If you could just give us a little bit of color on that – those two items, please.
Alex Rodrigues: Yes. Maybe I'll do the last question first there. The TTP program is going to be a fairly limited number of vehicles, really focused on testing. I think what's critical from our perspective is that these will be the first iteration of a real product. And obviously, I spent a bunch of time today walking through some of the important ways that it's going to be a lot more mature and it's going to be able to actually be handed over and used in regular operations, but it's not going to achieve some of those other milestones yet where we're talking about the scalability or the driver out. So, that's really what we're talking about next as we look to what I talked about at the end of the presentation is now that the system has reached a level of maturity where it's ready to be delivered as a product, we're starting to get very serious about making sure that we have a clear path to have that product in the hands of customers that meet those other two criteria, right? They're ultimately scalable and economical. And I think we have a pretty clear path to do that going into 2024.
Chris Wetherbee: And just one follow-up on that. If you bear with me here, just in terms of the time, in terms of production to take to enable the EUI to work with production line vehicles? Do we think that that lead time or do you have a sense of what that lead time is, how long you need to work with the truck or you need to get the OEMs to work with the truck to make sure there's the ability to deliver trucks in 2024?
Alex Rodrigues: Yeah. So, this ends up being an evolution over time. If you look at what we did for TTP, I think that's a pretty good illustrative example where we started a couple of quarters ago in terms of having a brand new OEM platform that Knight-Swift wanted to be ordering on and we'll be delivering first trip by the end of the year. And so, a couple of quarters is a pretty good view of what does it take to go from raw, never having worked on a platform before to able to deliver a first truck. That said, I think there's incremental work that goes in there, right? We're talking about delivering vehicle via an integration, but that level of manufacturing integration is able to go up over time, right. And so, I think as we look at driving efficiencies, there's incremental time and effort to move that installation up in the supply chain, so to speak, so that it's more efficiently done closer to the assembly line. If you think about, sorry, what is the base case requirements to get started on a new platform, a couple of quarters is probably a pretty good yardstick.
Chris Wetherbee: Okay. That's helpful. Thanks for the time this morning. Appreciate it.
Operator: Next question comes from Todd Fowler with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Todd Fowler: Great. Thanks. Good morning, Alex. Good morning, Richard. Alex, just sticking with the truck transfer program with Knight, it seems like you're on track to deliver the truck by the end of the year. Once that truck is fully in Knight’s hands, is it immediately operational at that point or are there things that they'll need to be doing on their end? And then maybe if you could share, kind of what's the operational range that they'll have with that truck, the frequency of using lanes, those sorts of things? So, just a little bit of, kind of the once you deliver the truck to them, what happens next?
Alex Rodrigues: Yes. Great question. So, we – if you think about what we're doing on our side, we're actually in, sort of final stage testing right now. And so by the time the truck gets handed over to Knight, the truck will have been through its paces and really be ready to be used immediately. The final incremental work that we're going to be doing once they have the truck in their hand is they're going to be going through the same driver training program that we put our safety drivers to at Embark. So, they're sort of fully up to speed. And I mentioned that we've already gone through training for dispatchers and for maintenance staff. And so that sort of the first thesis just making sure that all the staff at Knight are ready to utilize the vehicle. So, I think it’s going to a really important piece of the learnings and the work we're doing with TTP. And then following that, it's going to go into their regular operations and do regular commercial loads on one of the highest volume Knight-Swift lanes that they operate. And so, it'll pretty quickly go into our regular service. And I think one of the – if notable and important pieces here is that we've been targeting the same duty cycle as the other trucks in the fleet. And so, when we think about what is the maintenance cycle, what is the number of runs per day, what is the overall availability? All of this will be consistent with the other vehicles they're running. And I think that's really an important objective that we set out for when putting together TTP?
Todd Fowler: Yes, that's great. And that's just helpful just to think about, kind of the next steps beyond when you turn over the truck. With the announcements, I think it was earlier this month about the nine new terminals and expanding the network. Can you maybe provide some context? I think that in the presentation today, I talked about multiple pilots with PDP partners, what is the scope right now? If there's anything you can share either number of trucks, number of partners that are currently utilizing the expanded network? Just kind of any sense of scale would be helpful from where you're at with the network at this point?
Alex Rodrigues: Yes. I would say that the way to think about the network at this stage is really focused on allowing our partners to plan for the future. If you look back at the 14,200 reservations we had through the PDP program, one of the important commitments that we made to those partners is to use those reservation, use the rollout plans that we developed together those management team to be able to really lay the groundwork for them to be able to deploy the vehicles at scale. And so, we have been working with our partners and running loans through these sites, but I think the bigger and more important role that they serve to really be able to provide clarity on what the rollout is going to look like in commercialization and how those partners can think about what percentage of their existing lanes and runs are they in a position to be able to bring online in the medium-term.
Todd Fowler: Okay. That makes sense. I got that. And then Richard, I think you've been clear on this, but I just want to spend one more moment on it. It sounds like that the message here is that the rough baseline for cash burn is around 27 million per quarter, but there'll be some variance around that based on timing of working capital or payments and sounds like second half of this year, maybe a little bit above, but it sounds like just for planning purposes and understanding that you're not giving guidance for 2023, but it seems like you're kind of pointing us to thinking about that 27 million as being the baseline. Is that the correct message that you're providing today?
Richard Hawwa: Yes, I think that's a good assumption.
Todd Fowler: Okay, good. Thanks for the update today and all the additional information on the call here this morning. Thanks a lot.
Operator: Next question comes from Jeff Kauffman with Vertical Research Partners. Please go ahead.
Jeff Kauffman: Thank you and good morning everybody. Alex, Rich, team, I just want to thank you for all the clarity in your slide presentation and congratulations on the achievement of the new milestones. I'd like to follow-up on Todd's question on the nationwide network. The one thing that you've made very clear is, you're not a builder and they will come company necessarily that when you do things, it tends to be driven by customer discussions and customer requests. So, with that in mind, you're testing this nationwide network concept with your PDP partners. What are you being asked to do today that might be a little different than what you were being asked to do, say, six months ago by your partners?
Alex Rodrigues : That’s an interesting question. One of the things that I would highlight about the Coast-to-Coast network is, I think this is a really useful demonstration of Embark’s asset-light approach here, where Embark is able to bring these sites online, but without going on and buying a bunch of physical facilities, and in fact, we have a lot of flexibility to scale up and scale down the actual footprint on many of these sites because of our partnership with Alterra. And so, what we've been able to do is in a very capital efficient way, get access to these sites, bring them on in the form of leases, and then have the flexibility to be able to adjust the scale of those sites to match demand as it scales up. And so, I think that has been something that's been really well received. The next push, I think, for these, for the coverage map is really going to be starting to talk to customers about private sites. So, we typically talk about this Coast-to-Coast coverage map as the backbone and I think that it serves a really important purpose as the backbone to be able to give all of these carriers access to important markets, but the thing that we're now hearing is people are really starting to think about how can they go above and beyond that and deliver a more specialized product that gives them even more value. And that means we're starting to talk about the potential to bring private sites into the coverage map. And I think that's an area where Embark again really differentiates [their selves] [ph] from some of our competitors who want to be, sort of owning their own physical infrastructure.
Jeff Kauffman: Okay. Thank you. And then just a follow-up. One of the things I found interesting was to talk about all the sensor upgrades, and the slide that you had on that. And I think many of us are focused on, okay, let's see the timeline for solving these additional three cases and kind of the timeline of commercialization, but to your point, whether it's the sensors, whether it's the technology, whether it's a software behind it, there's upgrades consistently going on with each iteration of what you're doing? So, I guess my question is, we've talked about the used-cases, what are the technology or hardware opportunities that are out there that would make a meaningful difference in the product to customers, if you still haven't had a chance to get or maybe the technologies where it needs to be, but what are some of the big opportunities on the hardware technology side as opposed to say, road triangles, inspections, [indiscernible]?
Alex Rodrigues: Yes, I think the biggest opportunities for hardware at this stage are actually really starting to become fairly iterative. So, we're quite happy with the capabilities. And even if you look at sort of what we talked about for the upgrades we made for TTP, in many cases, this wasn't the top line spec sheet that we're changing, rather it was the reliability, in some cases the pricing, the serviceability. And that's really where we start looking at those improvements. So, I wouldn't say, we're necessarily looking for big step changes in performance, but really taking a couple of years ago cutting edge performance and starting to see it become more commoditized lower price, better reliability and performance. That's really where we see the opportunities. And I think that's really going to push the industry forward.
Jeff Kauffman: Okay, Alex. Thank you and congratulations.
Operator: Next question comes from David Vernon with Bernstein. Please go ahead.
David Vernon: Hey, good morning, guys. And thanks for the presentation today. Alex, can you talk a little bit about the TTP program as you move from one driver to and Embark to a Knight driver? What's the commercial relationship there? Are you guys still going to be licensing the technology at that stage? I'm just trying to get a sense for how we from two Embark drivers to one Embark driver to one Knight driver to eventually – to eventually no driver. When is it that we should expect the meter to start ticking as far as kind of licensing the technology?
Alex Rodrigues: Yes. So, the way to think about this is, I think there's that really big shift from trucks that are owned and outside of the one run are maintained, operated, sort of fully under the operating authority of a self-driving company. And here, although – even when we talk about the number of trucks that Embark has, we're not even counting the TTP trucks. They're not our trucks. Their trucks that are owned by Knight-Swift and that we're working on the integration and the upgrades for, but that are not [Embark trucks] [ph]. And so, I think that's a really, sort of meaningful difference in that upstream of all of the changes in staffing that those are then moving to Knight-Swift drivers. I think that in this initial phase, the way that we're really thinking about the value creation is similar to if you think about how an electric vehicle gets deployed. You have a very small number that are getting put into the fleet early, so that they can go through their paces, they can demonstrate maintenance intervals, performance, uptime, and that's the final step for a fleet to really get comfortable to then be able to buy them in much larger volume. So, the initial pilot deployment, we don't have any guidance to give on, sort of when we would see that, let me just start running there. I think the scale is going to be small enough that this is really more about the learnings and the progress towards being able to scale that up.
David Vernon: And could you maybe comment a little bit on your conversations with Knight in terms of what their process would be for making that decision then within the TTP program to take the driver out? I'm just wondering like, how long does this trial and sort of, you know, deeper, sort of testing in my own truck if I'm a trucker, how long is that – how long is that stage will last, do you think?
Alex Rodrigues: Yes. The way I was thinking about this is that, this is going to be the TTP trucks themselves are designed for the 2023 testing phase. And then driver-out is something that will occur as part of commercialization in 2024.
David Vernon: But as far as kind of Knight, sort of thresholds for when they might be – make that decision, right, because, obviously, when they take their driver-out and it's their hardware, then they're going to be [liable] [ph], right?
Alex Rodrigues: [Liability] [ph] is a pretty complex question, but obviously Knight takes their safety and their authority extremely seriously, and so has a really high bar for this stuff. I think that's exactly why TTP is theirs for them to be able to take the tires, so to speak, and see the trucks up close and personal. I think one of the things that they asked us for and sort of part of the reason that the TTP program exists is I think a lot of carriers have been in [demos] [ph] where they've seen a track run for a handful of hours. And in order for them to get comfortable, they really want to be able to see the system performance over a much longer period of time, right. And so, I think that's one of the reasons why it's notable that it's Knight drivers in these trucks. It, for us, demonstrates a level of confidence this system is going to be performing day-in and day-out. And then for Knight, it represents one of the most important things they're going to be looking at is talking to their drivers and looking at the actual performance level that they see over an extended period of time.
David Vernon : All right. Thanks again.
Operator: Next question comes from [indiscernible] with B. Riley. Please go ahead.
Unidentified Analyst: Hi, guys. Kind of piggybacking on the last question there. So, how long does the training program take with the Knight-Swift employees before they can be in the vehicles?
Alex Rodrigues: Yes. So, we've already spent a lot of time getting this kicked off and working with different parts of the Knight-Swift [asset] [ph]. They were pretty far along. The training program is a handful of weeks to do that final step where folks are going in and really learning the specifics of how to interact with a truck that has a self-driving system installed.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay, great. And then just one more from me. So, in terms of overcoming, I guess what would be the biggest issues in terms of overcoming road triangled inspections and blown tires, kind of where do you expect to be held up on those initiatives if you expect hold ups at all?
Alex Rodrigues: Yes, I think each of these is a significant and challenging – a significant and challenging milestone that that's going to require a meaningful amount of work, but I would say that we feel very good about our position on all three. I think, going into next year, there's actually been a lot of progress that some of that we've talked about on these calls, some of it that we haven't had a chance to talk about yet, but we have a pretty good line of sight to the key pieces that need to go into place for each of these next year. And so, I think we're feeling pretty good about our ability to execute on all of them.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. And if you could like, could you give any tangible examples of, like, those key pieces?
Alex Rodrigues: Yes. So, I mean, I think a great example is on the inspection side, one of the biggest inputs to the inspection solution was having a clear direction from the regulators as to what would be an acceptable solution that meets the guidelines without needing to pull into weigh stations and perform level one inspections without a driver present. And as I actually talked about this on one of the slides, so two months ago back in September, the work that we've spent a number of years with CVSA on paid off and they endorsed basically a set of procedures that would allow a driverless truck to be inspected at the transfer point and then [no need to stop] [ph] at the weigh station. And so, we have pretty good line of sight there now to, okay, the procedures have been approved. There's work to be done in terms of both implementing the technical pieces to be able to actually get the bypass. And there's work to be done in terms of training program and that getting rolled out across state. But as far as the coming up with a solution and getting endorsed by the regulators, that's pretty much done at this stage, and so it's a matter of execution. So, I think that's probably a pretty good example.
Unidentified Analyst: Perfect. Thanks for taking my question.
Operator: There are no further questions at this time. This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation. Have a great day.