Innoviz Technologies - Q4 2022

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Welcome to Innoviz fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Rob Moffatt, VP Business Development and IR of Innoviz. Rob, you may begin.

Rob Moffatt (VP of Corporate Development and Investor Relations)

Good morning. This is Rob Moffatt, Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations at Innoviz. I want to welcome you to our earnings conference call. Joining us today are Omer Keilaf, Chief Executive Officer, and Eldar Cegla, Chief Financial Officer. Following their opening remarks, we will open the call for your questions. I would like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded and will be available on the investor relations section of our website at ir.innoviz.tech. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that our discussion today will include forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to future events and the future financial performance of Innoviz. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements made today speak only to our expectations as of today. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise them.

For discussion of some important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements, please see the Risk Factors section of our 20-F filed with the SEC on March 30th, 2022. I will now turn the call over to Omer. Please go ahead.

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

Thank you, Rob, good morning, everyone, thank you for joining us. I'm excited to provide another update on the progress we've been making at Innoviz. This has been a fast-moving quarter with our steady milestones 2023 production, new additions to our pipeline, expanding our order book with existing customers, and something I'm particularly excited about is our special guest today, Steven Schondorf, the former Chief Engineer of ADAS Systems at Ford, who has recently joined us as a Senior Strategic Advisor to the company. That's just on the automotive side. On the non-automotive side, we hit important milestones with the unveiling of the Innoviz360 at CES in January and the addition of non-automotive distributors since our distributor summit last November. With that said, let's start things off with a quick update on our milestones 2023 SOP.

This continues to be a key focus of our company right now. It is something we've been working towards for over five years. We are excited to be so close to achieving it. Both of our 2023 launches, the BMW program and the Shuttle program, are on track, and we are making solid progress towards their volume ramp, which should come in in the back half of the year. You can even see a nice photo here of one of our test vehicles doing some final winter testing, getting ready for the launch. While we are discussing our existing customers, I wanted to let you know that we are currently under discussions to expand our existing commercial agreement with Volkswagen to design in InnovizTwo on additional platforms beyond the one that we already been communicated.

Our initial production win with Volkswagen was awarded in 2022 and was for one meaningful platform with multiple brands and multiple models within the Volkswagen Group. The expansion that is currently being discussed would be in addition to the earlier award and will potentially bring our Innoviz to lidar to one to two new ADAS and autonomy platforms with multiple vehicles models that were not initially designed to include the lidar. We are on track for a mid-decade launch. Expanding our order book with one of our largest customers will validate a key component for our long-term investment business. We believe that once you are on the shelf with an OEM, it becomes easier and easier for them to select you for additional programs as lidar becomes more widely utilized and adopted across their entire vehicle footprint.

This, therefore, has the potential to set the stage for years, if not a decade or more, for growth with each new OEM we win. This is why we view the world through the lens of OEM share. We believe that winning a first platform reduces the friction and makes it much easier to win additional business. As those of you are close to the automotive industry know, OEMs like Volkswagen have many platforms for us to potentially be added to. With that opportunity for growth ahead of us, we announced earlier this week that we're expanding our Munich office and growing our footprint in Germany. We are doing this because we believe there is a long pathway for additional growth for us in Germany and Europe beyond the customers we already have.

For investors that are interested in learning more about our relationship with Volkswagen Group, I want to highlight a very important industry event coming up soon. EcoMotion is the most important platforms in the smart mobility space. The much-anticipated EcoMotion Week conference will be held in Tel Aviv in May. As part of that event, I invited Gero Kempf, the Executive Vice President of ADAS and Autonomous Driving at Audi, to come by our headquarters for a visit and to join me for a fireside chat at the EcoMotion conference. In that conversation, we will talk about our partnership. We'll give listeners a better anticipation for where our engineering and joint effort is going. Moving to our RFI and RFQ pipeline.

We had some exciting new growth in our pipeline during the quarter, including the addition of what I can describe as a multi-million-unit RFI from a brand you'll be very excited and potentially surprised about. That's all I can say about the customer at this point, but we are obviously excited for this addition, and the entire team will be working hard on it over the next year. One of the trends that worth pointing out is the fact that the RFI and RFQ order sizes, even for small and mid-sized car companies, appear to be trending higher over time, with RFIs increasingly coming in at the millions of units level instead of tens or hundreds of thousands of units. We believe this reflects plenty store rates moving higher, and some OEMs increasingly exploring lidar as standard equipment, especially on higher-end vehicles.

The second trend we are seeing is that there is also a little bit of uplift with some OEMs exploring true Level 4 programs, utilizing multiple lidar per vehicle as opposed to a single forward-facing lidar with the Level 2+ and Level 3 programs. It's still very early for both of these trends, but I believe that these developments in our pipeline give a decent look into where the industry is ultimately going to. Looking at the pipeline in total, we're disclosing it in the 10-15 program range. Since we described it as 11 on the last call and just mentioned a few additions, you can infer that our RFI and RFQ program count is currently at the higher end of that range. Most of these programs are for Level 2 to Level 3 light vehicle programs, though there are a few that are Level four.

There are also several that are commercial truck programs and shuttle or robotaxi programs as well. The majority of programs are for light vehicle automotive, especially when looking at things from the volume perspective. The majority of the programs are also with new customers. In fact, only two of the programs are extensions with existing customers on the left-hand side of the graph. The majority of these RFIs and RFQs could represent entirely new footholds with new customers for us to grow our long-term penetration. To help put out the opportunity into context, we are providing additional information to size the scope of the pipeline. We took the customer information on requested volumes and our expectations for anticipated ASPs and added a layer of conservatism on top of those numbers. If you sum the total of proposal, it is over 20 million lidar units.

In fact, the higher end has the potential to be well north of that. We anticipate that the value of the pipeline is multiple times larger than the current forward-looking order. Another important factor now is that we became a Tier 1. We have the opportunity to quote for more meaningful NREs. Many of you have heard us talk about this a lot. For those who may be newer to the Innoviz story, NRE stands for Non-Recurring Engineering. It is cash that we receive before production begins for engineering, design, and other services that we provide. Sometimes it is recognized as revenue, and sometimes it is recognized as a contra item to cost. Either way, it's a cash payment that can be meaningfully finance our business. In the automotive world, we're typically designing roughly 3-4 years before the vehicle launches.

During that period, the project gets funded primarily through NREs. These services are mostly performed by our existing staff. This means that they have the potential to offset our existing costs meaningfully, offering a very high flow-through from a profit and cash perspective, and they come on earlier before the start of production. NREs can be an important part of funding the company ahead of production volume inflection. That's why securing NREs is such an important part of our overall strategy. For the majority of the programs in our pipeline, we're seeking potentially meaningful NREs. Summed across the current pipeline, the total NREs that we're currently negotiating for is in the $150 million-$250 million range over the next three to four years.

If we can achieve this, it will be an important part of our financial trajectory and our long-term path towards breakeven. We'll talk more about our near-term projections for NRE when we get to our 2023 outlook show. To summarize, as you can see from this slide, there is a lot of deal activity going on right now, particularly in the automotive space. We continue to believe that the majority of OEMs' market share is going to be likely to be awarded in this year. Our goal is to exit 2023 as the clear leader in the automotive lidar. Given our deep focus is on the automotive industry and the unique opportunity that we have to capture the market leading position in lidar, I'm excited to share that we've added a pre-eminent industry executive as a senior strategic advisor.

Steven Schondorf recently retired from his role as the Chief Engineer of ADAS systems at Ford. In that position, he served at Ford as Ford's internal subject matters expert on everything ADAS related. He was responsible for evaluating many early-stage technologies. He built the company's system architecture and overall product strategy, including features like Ford's BlueCruise hands-free driving system, which has reached millions of customers. Importantly, Steven isn't just an engineer with 30 years of automotive experience and 60 patents under his belt. He has the tremendous ability to also think strategically and drill down on a business case centered around profitability and growth. We are excited to be able to bring his experience, expertise, and deep industry relationship into Innoviz. I'll hand it over to Steven for a quick introduction and some thoughts on the lidar industry from an OEM's perspective. Hi, Steven.

Steven Schondorf (Senior Strategic Advisor)

Thank you, Omer, and to the whole Innoviz team. I'm really excited to be working with Innoviz, a clear early market leader in an industry that has significant exponential growth ahead of it. Omer asked me to say a couple of words on the importance of lidar and Level 3 systems from an OEM's perspective and talk about the things we've done together since I've begun working in my advisory role. Autonomous driving is an incredibly complex problem to solve. Human eyes and brains are much more sophisticated than any camera and compute system available for cars. The world's driving infrastructure has been designed with these capabilities in mind. It hasn't been designed for computers and robots to succeed. Most people trying to design autonomous systems want as many sensing capabilities as possible to deal with the trickiest edge and corner cases.

These are expensive endeavors that autonomous teams are engaged in, and time is of the essence. It doesn't make sense to overconstrain your team and jeopardize the ultimate success of your system by limiting the amount of sensory input. Of course, they have to consider the overall system cost, but most people I've talked to and read about are focused on using cameras, radar, and lidar to attack the problem. I've been working with Innoviz for three months now, and I've just returned from my first on-site visit in Israel. My mission is to help evolve Innoviz's strategy and to accelerate their path towards being the best Tier 1 direct supplier in the lidar space. I already had a positive view of Innoviz's technology and expertise before I started working with the company. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here.

My recent trip to their facilities in Israel expanded and confirmed those impressions. In the last 15 years, I've met many suppliers working on amazing technologies, some mature, some cutting edge. Success depends on good technology, strong leadership, a highly skilled team, and the right mindset. Innoviz has all of those. The team is top-notch with amazing potential. I've had the opportunity to get a much closer look behind the curtain, and I feel strongly that the company is at the head of the pack from a design and technology perspective. The design is robust, the manufacturing process is well considered, and the strategies they have in place will take them far. Thank you for the opportunity to work with you and the team, Omer, and for giving me a chance to speak with your investors as well. I look forward to working together.

I'll hand it back to you.

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

Thank you, Steven. Having someone who can bring the mindset of an OEM more directly into the company will be a valuable asset for Innoviz going forward. Thank you, Steven. Moving from the automotive side to products that aim more at the non-automotive world. I'm very proud of the work that our innovation team has done over the past year to turn the Innoviz360 from an idea into a reality. We first announced the intention to develop the Innoviz360 at the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show, setting an ambitious goal to launch it the following year in 2023. It's hard to explain how ambitious of a goal this was, going from a concept to a working sample with such exceptional performance and such a compact design in only one year.

Honestly, the final month before the show involved a lot of late nights making final tweaks ahead of its unveiling to the world. As always, the Innoviz team put in the work and came through to meet the deadline. The product is aimed largely on the non-automotive side of the industry with very strong use cases across commercial trucks, heavy machinery, shuttles, rails, smart cities, logistics, and maritime industries. We've heard directly from customers in this industry that there is a major opportunity for disruption here for new solutions with automotive-grade specs and automotive-scaled price points. We are still in the product's earliest days, but we believe that there is opportunity to become a meaningful disruptor in the 360 space.

On the price point side, the Innoviz360 design leverages many hardware advances from InnovizTwo, including a single laser, single detector, and an ASIC, and will benefit from the economics of scale as the products will share many of the same components, particularly the highest cost components. This means that as InnovizTwo is produced at automotive volumes in the coming years, the Innoviz360 could be very rapidly become both a performance and price leader in the non-automotive space. While we are on the non-automotive space, I wanted to give a quick recap of the distributor summit that we hosted in November and previewed on our third quarter earnings call. This was our first-ever full day-long summit focused on industrial and non-automotive distribution channels.

The event was a big success, with nine distributors joining us at our headquarters in Israel, coming from across Asia, Europe, and North America. We educated them on our technology, armed them with our marketing tools, and introduced them to our ordering and logistic platforms. We prepared a short video to highlight the event.

Speaker 9

Innoviz is positioning to be the number one lidar supplier.

You're shaping the future of all those construction, agricultural, self-operating machines.

The lidar is a part of a system, so next time I would like to find another application for different uses. In Innoviz, they have a lot of energies, and they have unbelievable skills.

We are very exciting to know the more details, information like, the better performance of InnovizTwo and Innoviz360.

Innoviz' are definitely gonna be our primary lidar sensor of choice going forward.

We have to be ready with the best technology that will allow us to win. Innoviz will have a very sustainable business for the next decade with millions of lidars orders.

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

As you can see from the video, leveraging distributors is an important part of our go-to-market strategy. It's a lower-cost way to amplify the efforts of our sales staff, expanding our reach in non-automotive quickly and without meaningful increases to our headcount and fixed costs. The event was also a catalyst for additional meetings at CES and one-on-one interactions with additional distributors afterwards. These engagements are the first step in building out our distribution channel. As we said before, 2023 will be an important year for our growth in the non-automotive market, and we are making progress in building the partnerships and the overall foundation for success in the coming years. Before moving to our 2023 targets, I wanted to offer a recap of our original 2022 goals and remind you where things shook out for the year.

In the bubbles on the slide, you can see where we have finished the year versus the original goals that we have set for ourselves at the onset. In terms of the pre-production programs, we came into the year targeting 10, and we finished the year with 14. In terms of automotive design wins, we came into the year targeting one, and we finished the year with two, including Volkswagen and the Asian EV-focused OEM we announced in September. In terms of the forward-looking order book, we originally targeted a 30% increase, and we blew that number away with 165% increase, thanks in large part to our Volkswagen win. Wins like that offer a good reminder of how much large automotive contracts can move the needle for a company our size.

Looking at this slide, you can see that we set ambitious targets, and we over-delivered on what we said we would do. With that said, let's take a look at our 2023 goals. Our top goal for the year is to bring in at least two new series production awards with all new customers. As we said earlier in the call, as we hope to prove by expanding our relationships with Volkswagen, we believe that winning a new OEM gives us a foothold for a relationship that we can expand with the customer for years to come as lidar-based Level 2+ and Level 3, and eventually even Level 4, becomes increasingly common. We are also targeting at least 1-2 additional program awards from existing customers.

If we can secure additional platforms, we believe we can offer firm evidence that validates this key aspect of our long-term investment thesis. For the full year 2023, we are targeting $12 million-$15 million of revenue, more than double the 2022 base. In addition to that, related to these goals, is our target to achieve $20 million-$40 million of new NRE booking in 2023. Internally, this is how we are running the business, with our primary focus on winning additional programs and securing substantial NREs in order to help drive revenue growth going forward. We see tremendous opportunity for growth in both the near and the long term.

As we noted when reviewing the pipeline, we believe there is a total pool of roughly $150 million-$250 million of NREs across the 10-15 programs that are already in the pipeline, with most of those deals offering NREs in the $10 million-$50 million range each. NREs are an important indicator of our performance because each deal we take across the finish line will offer meaningful growth to our top line from the 2023 base and could rapidly accelerate the rate at which we compound our top line once the new programs enter the production phase. Securing the NREs could also play a major role in funding our business. Many of these services within the NREs will be performed by our existing engineering headcount.

The revenues would largely go to offset existing fixed costs, offering a very high flow through that could materially extend our cash runway. Lastly, every deal that we win is a deal that's no longer available to a competitor. When we look at our pipeline, we can see that the bulk of early OEM share in the lidar space is going to be decided in 2023, with nearly every major global OEM likely to have given an award by 2024. Make no mistake, this is a land grab, and we're given that these contracts can last for 8-10 years, like our Volkswagen and BMW contracts. We believe this is an opportunity to lock up early automotive lidar market share, not only for years to come, but possibly for the next decade or more.

This is why we are so deeply focused on winning new deals and securing additional NREs. One more point I will make before moving on is that the NREs are typically only available in large amounts to Tier 1s. This was a huge part of our logic to shift from a Tier 2 to a Tier 1. Not only does this more give us more direct control in the bidding process, it's also giving us the opportunity to secure more meaningful pre-production revenues, which can be an important part of our medium-term financial trajectory. With that, I'll turn it over to Eldar to go over the financials.

Eldar Cegla (CFO)

Thank you, Omer. Good morning, everyone. Before going too deep into the financials, I first wanted to take a moment to give an update on our unit sales from the fourth quarter. As you remember, our third quarter revenues was impacted by the move of our company headquarters and the associated downtime of our calibration and testing line. At the time of our third quarter call, we communicated that volumes were recovering nicely into Q4. I'm pleased to announce that units sold were up an impressive 170% for 3Q and 164% versus the fourth quarter of last year. When looked at on the full year basis, units were just shy of doubling, coming in at growth of 99%.

These number highlight the impressive progress we have made over the last year on the manufacturing side as we ramp up our capabilities ahead of our SOP launch later this year. Moving to the 2022 financials, starting with cash, we ended the 2022 with approximately $186.2 million in cash, short-term deposits, short-term restricted cash, and marketable securities on the balance sheet. Our largely mature cost structure and our operating cash outlays remained mostly stable during the quarter and were in line with our 2022 budget. Moving to the income statement, revenues in 2022 came in at $6 million compared to 2021 revenues of $5.5 million, representing a growth of 10.2% year-over-year.

The difference between the unit volumes growth of 99% and revenue growth of over 10% come from the non-repeat of 2021 machinery and other revenues, coupled with the natural decline in ASPs as we pivot from sample unit pricing to production level pricing for our largest customers. This phenomenon is likely to continue into 2023 as we move towards full production with the BMW program and our Shuttle program. For the BMW program specifically, we will transition from selling full lidar sample units to selling components to Magna, who will in turn manufacture the components into lidars for BMW. To help put this into context in very broad strokes, a sample unit can often sell in the $5,000-$10,000 range, whereas at production level volumes, components are sold below $1,000.

Naturally, this lower ASPs should be offset by higher unit volumes, which should begin in the back half of 2023 as volumes ramp. That said, a trough revenue should occur in the 1st quarter of 2023, with each consecutive quarter thereafter looking stronger as those volumes come on, with a bigger inflection expected in the back half of the year. While there are a lot of moving parts here, it's important to look at the overall picture. Even with the headwinds from ASPs, we expect the step up in volumes growth to be meaningful net positive, with revenues more than doubling to the $12 million-$15 million range for the year.

Moving further down the income statement, on the cost side, operating expenses for 2022 were $124.6 million, a decrease from $152.6 million in 2021. 2022 operating expenses included $19.3 million of share-based compensation compared to $64.7 million in 2021. The year-over-year decrease in operating expenses was primarily due to lower levels of share-based compensation, partially offset by an increase in headcount, InnovizTwo development costs, depreciation, amortization costs, and facility costs. Research and development expenses for 2022 were $95.1 million, an increase from $93.3 million in 2021. The year included $12 million attributable to share-based compensation compared to $25.5 million in 2021.

In conclusion, we grew our revenues, delivered a record number of units to our clients, improved our manufacturing throughput, and made meaningful progress on the march towards SOP with the BMW and Shuttle programs launching later this year. We believe there is a strong momentum in the automotive space we can leverage on. With mature products at hand, we can generate additional revenues for our non-automotive segments. With that, I return the call back to Omer. Thank you very much. Thank you, Eldar. I have just one housekeeping item before we transition over to Q&A. As we've indicated in the past, we've had some customer pushback on communicating changes to our forward-looking order book in real time as deals are announced, as this can be a source of competitive intelligence.

Going forward in 2023, we're going to transition to communicating the total new order amounts, including NRE awards, annually on our year-end call. I just wanted to flag that change in advance. As you've already heard today, 2023 is going to be a big year for Innoviz with multiple milestones. The entire team is excited for the year ahead, and we have our heads down, focusing on our SOP launch and converting as many customers from the pipeline into the order book as possible. With that, I'll turn the call over to the operator to take us into the Q&A.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. In order to ask a question, please raise your hand using your mobile or desktop application and wait for your name to be announced. Once again, please raise your hand using your mobile or desktop application and wait for your name to be announced. Our first question today comes from the line of Mark Delaney of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Mark Delaney (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Thank you for the updates and appreciate you taking my questions. I was hoping to start first with the NRE commentary. You spoke about a target of $20 million-$40 million of NRE bookings in 2023. If the company were to achieve that, is that bookings something that would be recognized over several years or mostly in 2023? And should we think of that mostly as coming in as revenue or contra costs? 'Cause you said it could vary.

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

Sure. I'll start. I'll let Eldar continue. Generally, every program when we are quoting, we're not only quoting for the piece price or the tooling cost, we also included a big part of NRE, which is fund activity. This is traditionally paid across the program from the nomination time to the SOP. We expect it to be paid in the course of the program, which is roughly 3-4 years, related to the recognition of the Eldar.

Eldar Cegla (CFO)

The recognition goes based on the milestones that we meet. If we potentially win a program this year with NREs, and there is a certain milestone that will converge this year, it means we will recognize this part of the NRE, and this will be, if it will be recognized as revenues, it will be on top of the target that we mentioned.

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

Maybe the fact, I do want to add, the fact that we're now talking about the NRE, we realize that we overlooked this part, which is quite meaningful to our business. Having that we are now at Tier 1 and quoting on programs, the NREs become very meaningful. As you can imagine, $20 million-$40 million only from those, I would say the targets from those 10-15, could eventually, on a recurrent year-over-year, could be a very meaningful base to our funding.

Mark Delaney (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

That's helpful. maybe to round that discussion out, I mean, trying to think through gross margin in 2023, you talked about shifting from selling some full samples to providing components. You know, perhaps there's some NREs coming in that are contra COGS. when you think about some of those factors, what are some of the implications for gross margin? I, you know, I realize you're not giving specific gross margin guidance, but do you think you can cross into positive gross margins at some point in 2023 and perhaps maybe be positive even on gross margin for the full year?

Eldar Cegla (CFO)

I think we should see improvements in gross margins. I don't want to give guidance on whether or not we become positive, but we do expect better gross margins on the overall year outlook.

Mark Delaney (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Okay. One last one from me. On the last call, you spoke about 1-3 OEM decisions taking place over the next six months. Maybe you can just update us on how those have been progressing. You know, have any of them been decided, and how do you think Innoviz is doing? Thanks.

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

We're still pending for several decisions. It's very difficult to really give an accurate estimate of when things happen. This time I'm trying to refrain from doing that. We are working towards several decisions. We feel positive about them, and that will strengthen our order books and NRE.

Mark Delaney (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Thank you.

Eldar Cegla (CFO)

You're welcome.

Operator (participant)

Thank you, Mark.

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

Thank you, Mark.

Operator (participant)

Our next question today comes from the line of Jared Maymon from Berenberg. Please go ahead.

Jared Maymon (Senior Analyst of SMID Cap Industrial Technology and Mobility)

Morning, guys. Thanks for the update. Omer, Eldar, and Steven, good to meet you. Happy to hear you're taking the expertise from Ford and gonna help out the guys at Innoviz. That's great. I guess just two questions from me, kinda high-level stuff. First one's on China. There's obviously been, you know, a few Chinese competitors in the news recently. One for, you know, IPO footprint expansion, and then the other one for production work with a subsidiary of a global OEM. I guess maybe for Omer, just wondering if your view has kinda changed on the threat of Chinese competitors at this point, especially in the mass market segment.

Maybe the right way to frame this question up is, have you seen these guys more often in procurement with the ADAS and purchasing teams of global OEMs? Is there anything you think Innoviz can do or is already planning to do to better your odds in the Asian market or take the fight to China beyond the recent production award with the Asian-based OEM?

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

Yeah, great. I'm happy you asked this question. Actually, when talking about non-Chinese OEMs, we currently do not see the China-based lidar companies competing. My assumption is based on the fact that the requirements that we're seeing are far much higher than the solutions that are offered by them. I assume this is a big part of why we do not see them competing on that. On the other hand, we just had a visit of our China team from China visiting Innoviz for the first time after 3.5 years. It was a good opportunity to catch up and I would say reinstall our position or strategy in China. InnovizTwo, in a way, solves many of the difficulties we had in the past.

InnovizOne, when competing on different programs, we got very good feedbacks from customers that were actually quite impressed by the product. From the competitive landscape in China, it was decided to be too expensive. We think... Second part was the fact that our production line is not in China. Those were the two topics that in a way made it a bit more difficult for us to win business in China. Now that InnovizTwo is so significantly cheaper and so significantly better, and also we are targeting a production line in China with InnovizTwo, that opens up that opportunity all over again.

We are revisiting our activity in China with InnovizTwo. We are hoping for a great success there too.

Jared Maymon (Senior Analyst of SMID Cap Industrial Technology and Mobility)

Got it. Great. Thanks, Omer. Second one, actually, you kinda opened this up nicely with the requirements commentary. Just, I guess there's been some talk recently on kind of the use case of Level 3, both from, you know, the silicon guys and then some of your competitors in lidar as well. And kind of on the use case of traffic jam assist versus a full Level 3 highway autonomy system and whether or not each is useful in their own right. That said, one of your competitors recently said publicly and largely unopposed, that your technology won't be able to deliver Level 3 highway autonomy at 130 kilometers per hour.

I'm just wondering, can you kinda talk about the programs that you have with BMW, Volkswagen, the unnamed Asia-based OEM, and what's being targeted both by the OEMs and the platform partners you're working with on those contracts?

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

Oh, definitely. Yeah. I would say, you know, Innoviz technology is currently providing really the highest-end, I would say, requirements. In many ways, we are seeing today RFIs and RFQs that, in a way, are copied from our data sheet. We are happy to set the barrier for the rest of the market. I can go very long, and I'm happy that, you know, actually, I did have a session, a workshop where I introduced Level 3 requirements and explained very well how 80 miles an hour or 130 kilometers an hour are possible through a different, certain specification of the lidar, which is one to one with the requirements that InnovizTwo is providing.

Actually, if you go one by one, you'll see that all of our parameters are, you know, meeting that and exceeding it. The other company that had mentioned that is actually far below that, and I'm surprised by their comment, and I'm happy that they've raised that question. When we are working with the car companies and in their targets to reach 130 kilometers an hour, they are setting very clearly the requirements they have for the frame rate. We're operating at 20 frames per second. As I understand, they operate at 10. Frame rate is a very important element in the reaction time that the car would have.

I would say that this is a very, a huge advantage that Innoviz is able to provide. Other than that, the very uniform resolution of 0.05 degree resolution across the field of view with a very wide vertical field of view, which is needed for different driving scenarios, is something that Innoviz is capable of, while the other solution is not. So I definitely believe that Innoviz is actually the one that is capable in providing those specifications while the rest are not. I'm happy to direct anyone for the white paper I wrote on the matter. I'm happy to find any challenge from anyone on that. Very gladly.

Jared Maymon (Senior Analyst of SMID Cap Industrial Technology and Mobility)

Thanks, Omer.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question today comes from the line of Andres Sheppard from Cantor. Please go ahead.

Andres Sheppard (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Hey, Eldar. Hey, Omer. Good morning or good afternoon, I should say. Congrats on the quarter, and thanks for taking our questions. I just wanted to maybe get a little more clarity on the revenue guidance for 2023, right? I see that $12 million-$15 million. Just to maybe understand, that is predominantly comprised from, and please correct me if I'm mistaken here, but that is predominantly comprised of the revenues from the BMW partnership and the shuttle program, both of which will begin ramping up with the start of production in the second half of this year. Is that, is that correct?

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

It's partially correct. Of course, the shuttle program and the BMW program have a significant part of our revenues for this year. We have additional expectation from the market that we are operating as well as non-automotive opportunities that we are selling into. It will be a mixture.

Andres Sheppard (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Okay. Got it. I guess what I'm wondering is it's probably gonna be a little bit more weighted on the second half of the year, right?

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

That's correct. That's correct.

Andres Sheppard (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Okay. Thank you. That's helpful. Maybe just a quick follow-up is, just remind us again where things stand with your capital needs, right? Total liquidity is about $186 million. What is the expectation that that gets you through? Is that through SOP or is that into 2024?

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

Yeah.

Andres Sheppard (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Have you talked about that?

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

Of course, it will allow us to get to SOP and even beyond that. I would also say that, you know, our expectation this year is to win additional programs that will actually allow us to subsidize our activity in a meaningful manner. If you add the two launches that we have this year, the sales to the non-automotive that will grow over also over next year, and the NREs that we're going to collect from the different car companies, we believe that it will help us into funding the activities in all going forward.

Andres Sheppard (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Got it. Maybe if I could squeeze just one last one. You mentioned today that you are in conversations with Volkswagen to potentially explore additional opportunities from that relationship. If I ask bluntly, what does that mean, right? Is that for other vehicles? Is that for another one of your products? You know, maybe just help me understand what that means exactly.

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

Sure. We were nominated for a platform where we collaborate with Volkswagen and CARIAD, where this platform is going to sell different brands and different vehicles. This design includes a single lidar and different other sensors and a computing platform, et cetera. There are two other platforms that possibly would include more than one lidar and possibly a different set of other sensors and computing platform. It's a different platform that was decided recently to include also the lidar to reach Level 2+ to Level 3. Having following that decision, there are discussions between them and us about the way that Innoviz could possibly support in parallel these multiple integration platforms and allow them to launch with a lidar.

Obviously, we're very excited and happy to see that this opportunity is now allowing us to grow our business. Obviously, if you look at our original order book from the first win, it does not reflect the entire opportunity of Volkswagen. Volkswagen is a very big car company, eventually the opportunity that beholds behind this group substantially bigger than the first platform. We hope to see us growing into Volkswagen in a more meaningful way.

Andres Sheppard (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Understood. Very, very helpful. Thanks again. Congrats on the quarter. I'll pass it on.

Operator (participant)

Thank you, Andres. Our next question comes from the line of Kevin Cassidy from Rosenblatt Securities. Please go ahead.

Kevin Cassidy (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Thanks for taking my question, and thank you for having this update. Just to expand on those last questions, the for moving to a different platform, right? When you're saying, there are other sensors, is it more lidars or you're moving into other types of sensors?

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

No, no. I'm. Not a different lidar. I'm just saying eventually this platform is designed to serve. It's a different platform that we were awarded to, which is actually launching without the lidar initially, and now there was a decision to include lidar. Generally, this. I'm not aware of the other sense of the. Today, there's no lidar there. It's a different platform that we need to integrate into. That's that what it means.

Kevin Cassidy (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Great. Thanks. You know, it looks like 2023 is going to be a critical year, as you're pointing out. You know, 10 or 15 more bids happening.

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

Every year feels like that.

Kevin Cassidy (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Maybe, you know, as you're looking at this, you know, that some of your competitors will probably fall off the pace and, you know, what is your view of, you know, you're clearly got some major wins and will survive, but would you be interested in acquiring these other companies as they fall off the pace for their technology or even maybe their customer base?

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

Not necessarily. I mean, obviously, you know, we believe that our technology is currently winning the market, and we are very, you know, we believe there is a long path to what we're doing. As you can see, we continue to develop new technologies, such as the Innoviz360. If there will be a technology that we will find as interesting, we might look at it. Right of now, we are very much feeling, I would say content, if the right word, with the technology that we are building ourselves.

Kevin Cassidy (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Understood. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. That concludes the question and answer session for today. Would you like to add closing remarks?

Omer Keilaf (CEO)

As Kevin said, it's a very exciting year for us, like every year, we are excited to things that will come along. We always start the year, we find out more opportunities that becoming that exciting us all through the course of the year which that we're not even aware of. I'm very pleased of where Innoviz is today, I have very good confidence that we'll continue to grow and succeed. Thank you for joining our earnings call.

Operator (participant)

Thank you.