Amprius Technologies - Q3 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good afternoon. Welcome to Amprius Technologies' third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Joining us for today's presentation are the company's CEO, Dr. Kang Sun, and CFO, Sandra Wallach. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Following management's remarks, we will open the call for questions. Please note that this presentation contains forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements regarding future product commercialization, new customer adoption, and the timing and ability of Amprius to build its large-scale manufacturing facility, expand its manufacturing capacity, scale its business, and achieve a sustainable cost structure.

These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other important factors that may cause Amprius' results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements.

For a more complete discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to Amprius' filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this conference call is being webcast, and a recording will be made available for replay on the company's investor relations website at ir.amprius.com. In addition to the webcast, the company has posted a shareholder letter that accompanies these results, which can also be found on the investor relations website. I'll now turn the call over to Amprius Technologies CEO, Dr. Kang Sun, for his comments. Sir, please proceed.

Kang Sun (CEO)

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us this afternoon. On today's call, I will report our progress and accomplishments at Amprius in the third quarter, and our CFO, Sandra Wallach, will discuss our financial results for the period. After that, I will share some closing remarks before opening the call for questions. The third quarter was an exciting quarter for us.

Before I give the quarterly report, I would like to briefly introduce Amprius to those who may be new to the company. Amprius develops, manufactures, and markets high-energy density and high-power density batteries, with application across all segments of electrical mobility, including aviation and the EV industries. As a pioneer of silicon anode battery technologies, Amprius has spent the last decade developing various silicon anode structures and robust manufacturing processes, as well as a strong patent portfolio of over 80 patents.

Amprius silicon anode batteries provide industry-leading performance today, including 450 Wh/kg specific energy density and 1,150 Wh/L volumetric energy density available commercially since early 2022. The 500 Wh/kg, 1,300 Wh/L battery platform in our lab independently verified by in early 2023. Our battery perform up to 10 C power capability, extremely fast charge rate of 0%-80% state of charge in approximately six minutes, a wide operating temperature range of -30 degrees to 55 degrees Celsius, and the safety design feature that enable us to pass United States military benchmark nail penetration test. Amprius has been in commercial battery production since 2018, so the company has many years the experience manufacturing high-energy density and high-power density lithium-ion batteries.

It's our belief that there are no other commercial batteries on the market that can perform at these levels. Amprius high-performance batteries have attracted market attention and customer demand. Company's priority today is to build additional manufacturing capacity as quickly as we can to meet the increasing demand for our products. Our production capacity scale-up activities in both California and Colorado are moving along well. This quarter, we delivered the new technologies and the new batteries, engaged with and sold to additional customers, and moved closer to completing our battery production capacity expansion in our California factory. I would like to take this opportunity to note a few highlights of our progress. In August, we unveiled a breakthrough battery cell chemistry and the design that enables 400 Wh/kg energy density with simultaneously 10 C power capability.

The energy and the power delivered by this cell make it an ideal solution for electrical mobility applications such as aviation and EVs. For eVTOLs, this battery is designed to provide the necessary propulsion, power, and energy for taking off, cruising and landing, while also expanding flight range by as much as 50% as modeled based on commercially available alternatives.

We plan to make this battery available for customer evaluations this year, and to have commercially available sales in early 2024. Also, to enhance our customers' product performance, Amprius has developed and delivered three additional formats of 450 Wh/kg cells. These customer cells were developed in collaboration with Amprius' strategic customers to address their unique high-altitude pseudo-satellite qualification requirements, and enable them to operate in highly challenging environments.

With greater energy density and a longer cycle life than previously 400 Wh/kg platform, we believe that the new 450 Wh/kg cells are the only known commercially available batteries of their kind that can provide enough power and endurance for HAPS overnight stratospheric flights. Recently, we announced that we had signed purchase orders with three premier electric aviation manufacturers for customer cells from the company's 450 Wh/kg ultra-high energy density platform for battery pack development and qualification. In addition to high energy drone applications, this new customer cell form factors are positioned to improve performance of high energy storage applications for the military as well. We expect the first cell to be commercialized, and that we will begin shipping this year.

Another exciting accomplishment is the performance that our batteries delivered at the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge last month. In this race, the four teams that were powered by Amprius batteries swept the top four places out of the 32 teams. As reported by customers during the race, Amprius power pack provide around 30% better energy capacity for roughly the same amount of weight of units used by other competitors.

I expect to be the standard across all teams by the time the 2025 event rolls around. Although the competing vehicles are not a commercial vehicle, their performance requirements test our battery in very challenging driving conditions. Moving to our customer contracts from the quarter, Amprius silicon anode batteries continue receiving strong attention from the customer as well as the industry. In the third quarter, we shipped to 38 customers, up from 27 in the second quarter.

This group includes repeat customers who continue to place the orders, such as AALTO, AeroVironment, Teledyne FLIR, as well as 18 new accounts, up from 10 last quarter. In addition, we received a volume purchase order from a premier eVTOL OEM during the quarter, which signal our existing technical engagement and our moving to the internal qualification process for our customer cells. Amprius advanced cells now serve the UAS, UAM and eVTOL segments of the growing aviation market for electrical mobility. The pipeline of new customer projects remains strong as well, with the third quarter progress across several areas. First, for example, we successfully completed the U.S. Army RCCTO program, where we demonstrate our technology capabilities for the nano unmanned aircraft system market.

This is a new market segment for our business, and now that we have proven our viability in the nano UAS market, we have transitioned to the commercial production. Secondly, another example is our partnership with Tenergy to utilize our high energy density cells in their rechargeable battery packs. The combination offers a significant performance benefits, including both a 31% weight reduction and a 6% energy boost over other comparable rechargeable battery packs. We believe this partnership will open multiple opportunities for our high energy and high power batteries. Third, recently, we also received a forecast customer demand to serve the large aviation segment at 0.1 MW of the production through 2025 and beyond.

With this demand in mind, we moved to a long-term supply agreement with one of the two battery pack manufacturers, to which we started shipping samples in Q4 of 2022. Overall, we are still facing demand that greatly outstrips our supply, and are confident that we are building toward enough customer commitments to fill our increased capacity in the coming years. As I mentioned earlier, expanding our production capacity is our main priority. Currently, we have two expansion projects under development. First, our megawatt scale production capacity with Amprius silicon anode technology. We plan to deliver two megawatt capacity initially in 2024, which is about 10 times of our current production capacity.

The additional capacity at our California factory is critical for Amprius to serve both as a production facility for increased customer orders and as a pilot facility for large-scale manufacturing process optimization. Our 2024 capacity in Fremont is already sold out, and our list of customer commitments for 2025 continues to grow. To look at how we manufacture our ultra-high energy density silicon anode lithium-ion battery, please check out the overview video post to the technology section of our website.

Also, we look forward to hosting institutional investors and analysts in Fremont, California, for our open house event on December 14th. When we will showcase Amprius' high-performance silicon anode batteries, battery manufacturing facility. Our other production capacity build-up is in the state of Colorado. The manufacturing facility in California is a pilot facility for our gigawatt hour scale factory in Colorado.

While we have at least 774,000 sq ft of the production space, with an additional 525,000 sq ft available for expansion. The initial production capacity is expected to be 500 MWh annually, and we will focus on aviation batteries in this stage. We plan to have this phase operational in 2025 and to then increase capacity over time with 5 GWh module production expansions to keep up the demand. With that, I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Sandra Wallach, to review our financial results for the quarter. Sandra?

Sandra Wallach (CFO)

Thank you, Kang. I would now like to spend a few minutes covering some key financial updates. As a reminder, our detailed financials can be found in our shareholder letter. We finished the third quarter with $2.8 million in revenue, a $2 million increase compared to $0.8 million in the same quarter last year, and up $1.2 million sequentially. There were two main drivers of this increase. First, our product revenue increased by $1.7 million from the prior year period to $2.2 million, largely driven by shipments to 38 customers in the quarter, a second consecutive quarterly record for Amprius. Although our product revenue remains largely driven by customer purchase orders that can arrive at uneven times throughout the year, we have shown consistent new customer growth and diversification in recent quarters.

In the third quarter, we even limited the number of customers that account for greater than 10% of our revenue to only four customers in the quarter, compared to five such customers last quarter. Second, our development services revenue was $0.6 million, a reflection of our successful completion of the RCCTO program for the U.S. Army, as Kang previously mentioned. Moving to our profitability metrics, our gross margin was -152% for the third quarter, compared to -185% in Q3 2022, and an improvement from -186% in Q2 2023. As we've discussed in prior quarters, we see significant gross margin variation as our product and service revenue mix fluctuates. Also, we anticipate that factory start-up costs will ramp up as we start Colorado construction in earnest.

Longer term, we are confident that our GAAP gross margin will begin to normalize as we approach our capacity expansion goal. Now on to our operating expense management. Our operating expenses for the third quarter were $4.9 million. We've maintained a lean operating structure to date, even when accounting for G&A fluctuations in the previous two quarters, for transaction-related expenses and targeted staffing increases in R&D in Q2. Our GAAP net loss for the third quarter was $8.5 million, or a net loss of $0.10 per share. As of September 30th, 2023, our weighted average number of shares outstanding was 86.4 million. Also, as of September 30, 2023, there were 76 full-time employees, up from 72 in the second quarter, with those employees primarily based in our Fremont, California, location.

Our share-based compensation for the quarter was $1.1 million. Turning now to the balance sheet, we exited the third quarter with $53.4 million in cash and no debt. The key drivers of our cash activity for the quarter were -$8.7 million in operating cash flow, although excluding transaction costs, our run rate remains at approximately $2 million-$2.5 million per quarter. A -$8.9 million related to the build-out of the Fremont facility and ordering of long lead time equipment for Colorado, and +$6 million added through the usage of our committed equity facility. Considering our business achievements and ongoing projects, we believe we are efficiently using capital to drive Amprius forward. Before I turn the call back over to Kang, I would like to take a moment to discuss our outlook.

We expect to be capacity constrained until the end of 2023, when our new 2 MW capacity is expected to come online. That project and our build-out of Amprius Fab in Colorado remain our top capital allocation priorities. As we project our capital expenditures for the rest of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, we expect to spend another $5 million-$7 million over the rest of the year to complete the build-out of the Fremont facility. Also, we estimate that we'll spend another $20 million-$30 million over the balance of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 on the start of construction for the Colorado facility and on procuring long lead time items and production equipment. As part of our ongoing business planning, we filed a shelf registration on October 2 and included a new at-the-market facility for $100 million in that filing.

We have terminated the committed equity facility concurrent with the effectiveness of the shelf. Overall, with the strength of our balance sheet and multiple vehicles to generate additional funding through both equity issuances, such as warrant exercises and sales under our ATM, and non-dilutive sources such as grants, loans, and incentives, we believe that we will have enough cash to continue executing on our strategic plan. With that, I will conclude the financial discussion and pass the call back to Kang.

Kang Sun (CEO)

Thanks, Sandra. I would like to reemphasize a few key points before closing. First, Amprius silicon anode technology continues to demonstrate unmatched performance in our industry. Amprius batteries command a firm lead with their combination of safety, energy, power, charging time, and temperature performance, and are uniquely positioned for the electric mobility market. Second, Amprius batteries are commercially available today. We have been shipping commercial products since 2018, and our technological advancements continue to bring in significant customer demand. This quarter, we not only delivered to repeat customers and expand our technical engagements, we add 18 new customers as well. Our demand pipeline is robust, and we look forward to further building out our customer book in the coming quarters. Third, we are scaling our manufacturing capacity to serve significant demand ahead.

With our 2 MWh production line nearing completion, we are expanding our footprint and capacity at the Amprius Lab in California. We also remain on track to build out Amprius Fab, our gigawatt-scale facility in Colorado, which we expect to be operational entering 2025. Finally, we are looking forward to several exciting milestones as we head into 2024. We expect to operationalize our megawatt-scale silicon anode battery manufacturing facility at the Amprius Lab, continue securing customer commitments to fulfill Amprius Fab, expect production capacity for 2025, and deliver 500 Wh/kg battery prototypes to select customers. As we look to the rest of the year, our strategy and focus at Amprius remains unchanged. We have a tremendous opportunity ahead.... With a product portfolio that positioned us to both growth in aviation market and extend to other industries seeking batteries with a leading performance.

The opportunities in front of Amprius are enormous, including the $49 billion aviation battery market by 2025, the $67 billion EV battery market by 2025, and the $1.25 billion conformal wearable battery market by 2030, all of which are on Amprius' growth path in coming years. 2023 has been a very productive year for the company thus far. Our solid third quarter performance has demonstrated our team's capability to deliver what we have planned and promised. Thank you for your continued support of Amprius Technologies. With that, I will turn it back to the operator. Questions and answers.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now conduct a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Once again, that's star one at this time. One moment while we poll for our first question. Our first question comes from Colin Rusch with Oppenheimer. Please proceed.

Colin Rusch (Managing Director and Head of Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Research)

Thanks so much, guys. I'll just pack them all into a single line of questioning. Can you talk a little bit about your potential price leverage given the higher energy density of the cells? Any risk to capital equipment coming from international sources into the U.S. as you start to ramp up? And then for Sandra, if you could address you know, timing for any potential incremental sources of capital, and then I'll hop back in the queue after that. Thanks.

Kang Sun (CEO)

Okay, Colin. Thanks. Yeah. First, at this moment, we have a significant leverage in terms of our product selling price, because this is the only product which can perform at a desired level, and there is no other commercial product that can perform at a 450 Wh/kg, with the power capacity we deliver. So we do have better pricing than alternatives, as far as I know. Secondly, in terms of production equipment, we have entire large scale. Large scale, I mean, the megawatt scale, 500 MW scale production equipment is specified and supplier selected at this moment, working on the details of the purchasing contracts.

Sandra Wallach (CFO)

Great, and I'll step in and answer the timing of any potential capital needs. Colin, great question. So right now we don't have any immediate plans. We filed the shelf for $400 million. We have a $100 million ATM facility in place, and I think as our schedule becomes more confirmed as far as the build-outs, we'll be taking a harder look at timing.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Chris Souther with B. Riley. Please proceed.

Chris Souther (Research Analyst)

Hey, hey, guys, thanks for taking my questions. Maybe just around the customer progress. Can you talk a little bit about the overall size of the orders from those premier electric aviation manufacturers you called out and, you know, time frame that those orders cover?

Kang Sun (CEO)

Mm.

Chris Souther (Research Analyst)

You know, maybe you could kind of frame, you know, the overall opportunities out there as part of, you know, a broader conversation around the backlog building activity. I'm trying to get a better sense of where we are in starting to sell out, you know, capacity in Colorado.

Kang Sun (CEO)

Yeah. Chris, well, first, as we mentioned, we sold out our 2024 production capacity in California, because that's the place we have the manufacturing factory. So, we also have a very strong forecast because those customers will not give us orders until they see we have production capacity available. But, we did receive commit, okay, forecast, tens of megawatts at this moment. We are keep building the pipeline. If we look at the entire forecast, the entire forecast is very strong. Okay, we have customer give us the indication, okay, over hundreds megawatts. But in terms of signing the agreements, we have tens or several tens of megawatts, the capacity engaged at this moment.

Chris Souther (Research Analyst)

Got it. Okay. That's really helpful, and certainly makes sense around, you know, seeing Colorado kind of in action, you know, before kind of a lot of the formal, you know, larger orders. So on the point around, you know, 2024 capacity being sold out. I assume existing customers with like commercial, you know, products, you know, are prioritized. But how are you prioritizing new potential customers versus, you know, existing, you know, customers who are looking for samples? Since it seems like you continue to add new customers to the fold here, just, you know, what does the mix look like, you know, of new and existing customers kind of next year?

Kang Sun (CEO)

Yeah. We do allocate a certain capacity to serve new customer, as you mentioned, for sampling, prototyping. But our primary commitment will be to the customer we already serve. But we believe we do have... Yeah, we do have a sufficient capacity allocation for new customer engagements.

Chris Souther (Research Analyst)

Okay. Yeah, that's what I was hoping. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Just as a reminder, the company requests that each participant limit their comments to one question and one follow-up. Our next question comes from Tim Moore with EF Hutton. Please proceed.

Tim Moore (Research Analyst)

Thanks. Given that the aviation market prioritizes safety first and energy and power, how meaningful of a breakthrough could that electric vertical take-off and landing purchase order that you recently got be for you to help serve now all the major segments of the electric mobility and aviation? I mean, can you bundle and cross-sell a complete offering now that you got the vertical take-off and landing order?

Kang Sun (CEO)

Yeah. We do have a technical building blocks for all electrical mobility applications. We truly believe that's the case because the energy, the power, safety, charging time, temperature performance, even the pressure performance, low pressure performance we deliver to the aviation market can be applied to other markets, especially for EV. At this moment, we don't have a large-form battery manufacturing capability at Amprius, but that would change. I think we have all the technical building blocks available for those applications.

Tim Moore (Research Analyst)

That's helpful. That's nice to hear. Then my other question, just my follow-up question, would be, you know, your Colorado scale factory cleared that ordinance milestone six weeks ago. Can you just walk us through what else you need to meet or achieve beginning the operations of the fab in the first half of next year, besides receiving the equipment? Is there any other kind of hurdles or actions that you need to do besides just receiving and installing equipment?

Kang Sun (CEO)

The equipment part of, we have a select, I would say, the most advanced lithium-ion battery manufacturing equipment suppliers in this industry. We select four suppliers for the entire manufacturing line. The delivery time would be three times two months. We have, at this moment, we are negotiating the final details of the purchasing contract. So that's not a problem. Currently, we're still working on some regulatory issues. I think the regulatory issues is the major bottleneck for us, okay, to move forward. For example, air permitting, okay, those kind of things, we need to work out. We, at this moment, look at the schedule we have here, we probably need to push our construction time to early next year instead of this month, okay?

Before we thought we can get this thing done this month, now we probably push it to sometime in January to start the construction.

Tim Moore (Research Analyst)

Great. That, that's helpful, Kang. Thanks for sharing that, and I'll save the rest of my questions for offline later tonight. Thanks.

Kang Sun (CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Abhi Sinha with Northland Capital. Please proceed.

Speaker 8

Hi, this is Kailash on behalf of Abhishek. So with respect to the conformable variable batteries, we just wanted to know if you could deliver to militaries outside the U.S.?

Kang Sun (CEO)

Abhi, we can to certain countries, from, for example, far wide, Australia, Japan, those countries, we shouldn't have a problem. But for certain countries, we do need to have an export license for that engagement.

Speaker 8

All right. As a follow-up, can you remind us how much revenue you would need to break even, with respect to gross margin? When do you expect that to happen? Thanks.

Chris Souther (Research Analyst)

As of now, we haven't given guidance as far as our financial model, so we haven't disclosed that.

Speaker 8

Perfect. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question comes from Amit Dayal with H.C. Wainwright. Please proceed.

Amit Dayal (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Can you remind us, guys, you know, for the Colorado facility, what the total CapEx requirement is to get to that 500 MWh phase one capacity target?

Sandra Wallach (CFO)

... Yeah, we have given some ranges before. What we've updated as we get more information is we now know that the production equipment will run between $70 million-$100 million, including tariffs, for delivery to Colorado. And the construction costs are still being updated based on the 60% drawings for this facility. So we haven't updated that range recently.

Amit Dayal (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Okay. Thank you, Sandra. I guess a follow-up to, or an adjacent question to that with respect to the Fremont capacity is, you know, how should we think about modeling for the ramp at Fremont for the 2 MWh?

Sandra Wallach (CFO)

So we'll have the equipment online and available. We're very excited to showcase it on December 14th, along with the rest of the 2 MW facility. We would expect that it will ramp up slowly throughout the year, sequentially each quarter. It won't all be available Q1.

Amit Dayal (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Okay. All right. Yeah, that's all I have for now. I will, you know, follow up with you offline. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question comes from Jeff Grampp with Alliance Global. Please proceed.

Jeff Grampp (Senior Analyst)

Afternoon. Thanks for the time. With the impending additional capacity at Fremont, I imagine there's some potential to add more new customers while also increasing allocations to existing customers. Is that something you guys are considering at all, or are there any constraints internally from maybe a personnel standpoint in managing more new customers?

Kang Sun (CEO)

That would be the case. Yeah. We built this capacity expansion with the new customer in mind. One of the reasons we built this new capacity, because we're already out of the capacity for current customers. So the new capacity will enable us to engage more customers.

Jeff Grampp (Senior Analyst)

Great. Thank you. And can you talk at all about the timeline to commerciality of the 500 Wh battery that you guys are working on? And how... What are kind of the early demand indications you see in terms of where that fits in the market relative to some of the existing offerings that you guys have already commercialized?

Kang Sun (CEO)

We already have a customer demand, actually, quite a strong demand. So, we expect we start, install the equipment and start the initial manufacturing in 2025. At that time, we can have a customer factory inspection. We can provide, we call pilot production prototypes to customer for evaluation.

Jeff Grampp (Senior Analyst)

Great. Thank you for the time.

Sandra Wallach (CFO)

Yeah, I think, Jeff, if your question was more around the 500 Wh/kg or the 5 MW, 500 MW?

Jeff Grampp (Senior Analyst)

Sorry, it was more specific to the 500 MWh battery that you guys are testing.

Sandra Wallach (CFO)

Yep.

Jeff Grampp (Senior Analyst)

I believe you talked about piloting that soon, but was just wondering the path to commerciality.

Sandra Wallach (CFO)

Yeah. No, so that'll be, that will be, we'll be hoping to ship prototypes to select strategics by the end of this year and then move into commercialization in the first part of 2024. To Kang's point, those products have already been designed into several of our customer platforms, so we're expecting that to ramp next year as well.

Jeff Grampp (Senior Analyst)

Great. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. At this time, this concludes our question and answer session. If you have any additional questions, you may contact Amprius investor relations team at [email protected]. I'd now like to turn the call over to Dr. Sun for his closing remarks.

Kang Sun (CEO)

Thanks again, everyone, for joining us today. As a reminder, you may learn more about our company, find additional updates, and then learn about upcoming events and presentations from the investor relations section of our website. We hope to see you at the Advanced Automotive Battery Conference in San Diego next month and at our Fremont, California, expansion showcase event shortly thereafter. We look forward to updating you on Amprius' progress on our next call. Finally, I would like to thank our employees, partners and shareholders for their continued support. Operator?

Operator (participant)

Thank you for joining us today for Amprius Technologies' third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. You may now disconnect.