Symbotic - Q3 2024
July 29, 2024
Transcript
Operator (participant)
Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Symbotic third quarter fiscal 2024 financial results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I will now hand the conference over to your speakers today, Jeff Evanson, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Jeff Evanson (VP of Investor Relations)
Thank you, Victor. Hello. Welcome to Symbotic's third quarter 2024 financial results webcast. I am Jeff Evanson, Symbotic's VP of Investor Relations. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance may be considered forward-looking. Such statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially. Please refer to our Forms 10-K and 10-Q, including the risk factors. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. In addition, during this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release, which is distributed and available to the public through our investor relations website, located at ir.symbotic.com.
On today's call, we're joined by Rick Cohen, Symbotic's Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, and Carol Hibbard, Symbotic's Chief Financial Officer. These executives will discuss our third quarter fiscal 2024 results and our outlook, followed by Q&A. Rick, I will now turn the call over to you.
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Thank you, Jeff. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us to review our most recent results. Our third quarter reflects record revenue growth, strong recurring revenue growth margin, and careful management of operating expenses. However, our system gross margin reflects elongated construction schedules and implementation costs associated with last quarter's rapid pace of innovation. For example, during the quarter, we decided to retrofit all SymBots in the field with our new sensor array to enhance performance capabilities at the majority of our customer sites. While we believe much of the cost growth is now behind us, we could continue to see some impacts in the coming quarters as we focus on scaling high-quality deployments for our customers. As you recall, two years ago, we embarked on a strategy to outsource much of the manufacturing and installation of our systems. This approach enabled us to scale at a rapid pace.
Based on our key learnings over multiple deployments, we plan to reabsorb a portion of the construction management processing starting this quarter, which will reduce costs. We believe bringing some of these functions back in-house will help us put a sharper focus on the implementation process and reduce costs further. In the short term, our revenue growth may slow as we make these changes. Our backlog demonstrates that demand continues to be very strong for our systems, but we will always prioritize execution on existing deployments ahead of chasing growth. On the innovation front, we made important progress on a new Minibot that will populate our second break pack installation and advanced our non-ambient system development work. We also began deployment of the first Symbotic system for GreenBox. While this did not contribute a significant amount of revenue in the quarter, the GreenBox deployment is on schedule.
I'm confident that we are making the right choices to quickly return to higher system gross margin and faster growth. Thank you to all Symbotic employees, partners, and investors for your efforts and support. Now, Carol will discuss our financial results and outlook. Carol?
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Thank you, Rick. Third quarter revenue grew to $492 million, up 58% compared to the same quarter last year. The strong revenue growth is driven by steady progress across our 39 systems in the process of deployment. As planned, system starts re-accelerated in the third quarter. We started 5 new system deployments and completed 3 systems, bringing us up to 21 fully operational systems. We expect quarterly system starts to increase in the fourth quarter. Our backlog of committed contracted orders of $22.8 billion remained consistent with last quarter, as finalized pricing on contracts already in the backlog was offset by the revenue recognized during the quarter. As Rick mentioned, system gross margin fell below expectations due to scheduled growth and higher labor costs during the quarter.
We are forward-focused on improving our planning, speed of implementation, and project management to enhance performance of the business. We continued to improve our operating leverage with focus on prudent expense management. During the quarter, we generated $50 million in cash from operating activities. In total, our cash and equivalents declined to $81 million sequentially to $870 million. This was driven in part by our first investment in GreenBox as they begin operations. For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024, we expect revenue of $455 million-$475 million and Adjusted EBITDA between $28 million and $32 million, representing temporarily slowed revenue growth and system gross margin returning to historical levels during our fourth quarter. Finally, we believe our first quarter of fiscal 2025 should reflect reaccelerating year-over-year revenue growth. We now welcome your questions. Operator, please begin the Q&A.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. And at this time, we'll conduct a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. One moment for our first question. Our first question will come from the line of Andy Kaplowitz from Citigroup. Your line is open.
Andrew Kaplowitz (Analyst)
Good afternoon, everyone.
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Hi, Andy.
Andrew Kaplowitz (Analyst)
Rick or Carol, can you give a little more color into what happened with system gross margin and why it will rebound in Q4? Are you basically saying that in some cases, outsourcing is not working for your deployments? And maybe what happened to convince you to take construction management again in-house, and what is the visibility into your Q4 expected margin improvement?
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Yeah, so I'll start, and then Rick can chime in in terms of some of the things we're putting in place to improve gross margin going forward. So on the outsourcing, as we talked about outsourcing, our primary reason why we chose outsourcing over a year ago was to go ahead and scale, and so we did that across multiple areas of our supply chain so that we could also have redundancy. We're looking at bringing back in-house just one element, which is the EPC, so the engineering, procurement, construction piece of that. And we continue to own a piece of that, so we actually, Symbotic continued to deploy at some of our sites, and then we had multiple supply chain partners off doing that. What we're finding is why that's not a significant item in terms of the overall cost of a system.
It's a significant item in terms of that final mile of installation when you're extremely focused on making sure that everything comes together. We're finding that focus on schedule and focus on cost, that's a critical point for us. So that's one of the elements that we're gonna bring back in-house so that we have more control over that overall integration. In terms of the other things that really drove our gross margin performance in this quarter, Rick mentioned we've had delays in construction creating inefficiencies. And so some of our more complex projects, we've had delays around, for example, permits. And when you talk about a delay in the construction phase, this is after we've already deployed resources to each of those sites, which is extremely inefficient. And our projects are taking longer.
I think last quarter I referred to some of the projects that we had in flow where we're not always gonna see that 20-month deployment because I think I called them stragglers. And what we're seeing now is some of those complex systems where they're just taking longer. Longer system deployment creates higher cost. And then we did talk about the other contributor to gross margin is implementation of system improvements. There are several cases where we're gonna go ahead and make that decision to go ahead and deploy and retrofit now, which might drive cost. So in terms of some of the things we're focused on going forward, Rick, do you wanna, do you wanna add any other color to that?
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah. I think the most important thing is we're not... I mean, our margin is down, but we're not, we're not a retail company, so we're not discounting. We're getting, we're getting the gross profits that we want, but the projects have been costing more than we anticipated. Keep in mind, we've done about 40 projects so far. We have hundreds ahead of us. We've enhanced our supply chain team. We now have a lot of these people that we've been looking for the last year on board. We have a lot of talent, and so we just simply think we can do it better than some of the partners that we needed to use because we didn't have the resources, and we wanted to hit our sales targets. For me, hitting our sales targets, pushing sales, is something that is critical.
For 50 years, I've been used to running a business on a 1.5% margin and a 6% gross profit, so I have no concerns about getting these costs under control. What I wanna make sure is that we keep our customers broadly happy and that we continue to roll out our sales. So I think we made some choices. We could have fought with the customers over who paid some of these things, but we said: Let's just keep the customer happy. Let's keep the sales rolling. Some of these things we'll absorb now, and some of these things will not be expenses in the future. And I fully well expect our margin to come back, and our goal is to enhance the margin further.
Just getting back to where we, where everybody expected us to be would be a good place in the near term.
Andrew Kaplowitz (Analyst)
No, that's fair, Rick. And should we think about it, though, as sort of like, in quotes, "one time in Q3," and that's why it comes back in Q4? You know, because you, you're talking about normalized margins, you know, just in this current quarter, basically.
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah, I think I'll let Carol speak, but things like delays because things weren't placed orders on time, and you have 200 people standing around the site, that's just not acceptable, and we don't expect that to happen in the future. So it's not like we'll go to zero immediately, but most of this stuff should go away from what we're seeing and the people that we've hired in the fourth quarter.
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Our guide implies, Andy, that we're gonna return to, you know, more gross margins similar to our historical. Now, as Rick said, we've got future plans of improving that gross margin, which we've talked about, and so there, while there might be some pressure on those gross margins still in the fourth quarter, we're not going to be at the levels that we were this quarter.
Andrew Kaplowitz (Analyst)
Got it. And then, Carol, how do we interpret the commentary that you're gonna have accelerating deployments from the 5 you had, you know, in Q3, and then, you know, revenue will accelerate in Q1 2025, with the commentary that improving your deployment process may temporarily slow your revenue growth? Like, you know, obviously, those two are kind of competing, so how do we sort of interpret that as you move forward?
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
... Yeah, so, I'll interpret that as we had three system starts last quarter, which was one of our lows, and so that's impacting the revenue in the fourth quarter. We ramped that up to five this quarter, and you should expect to see that five continue to grow incrementally quarter over quarter as we finish out our backlog.
Andrew Kaplowitz (Analyst)
All right, thank you.
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Thanks, Andy.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from the line of Damian Karas from UBS. Your line is open.
Damian Karas (Analyst)
Hi, good evening, everyone.
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Hi, Damian.
Damian Karas (Analyst)
I think in your commentary on GreenBox, you noted that everything's kind of on track there. I was wondering if maybe you could just kind of, you know, peel back the onion a little bit and give us some additional color on, you know, what all you're seeing for GreenBox JV.
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah, so we have our first install in a site in California, so we're ramping that up. That's our first install. We have several sites where we're now talking to landlords about leasing space, and we're spending a lot of time interviewing, building out the management team. So we're pretty excited about where we are in terms of rolling it out and building out the sales force. But right now, what we're doing is focusing on a couple of critical sites that are in the right geographies, sizing the systems, speccing the systems, finding the real estate, and then building the management team to operate the site. And then we have started having numerous discussions with potential customers to be anchor customers for GreenBox.
So it's going on a good pace. I mean, I'm sure everybody wants it to go faster, but we're pretty happy with the pace. We're thoughtful. I think we're excited about the potential for the business.
Damian Karas (Analyst)
Great. Glad to hear. And Carol, you had made a comment that you're kind of executing some prudent expense management. I was wondering if you might be able to elaborate on that. Was that kind of tied to the insourcing that you also spoke to? Or, kind of what all did you mean by this prudent expense controls?
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Yeah, it's not tied to the insourcing. The commentary there is, if you look at our miss on gross profit this quarter, it is entirely a story around system gross margin. So when you look at our SG&A and R&D, we continue to manage those expenses as we grow. So we did not see any one-time impact in the quarter, associated with Adjusted EBITDA, like we might have seen in other quarters around restructure. We did not have any of that this quarter. We're managing our expenses appropriately as we grow.
Damian Karas (Analyst)
Understood. Thank you.
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Thanks, Damian.
Operator (participant)
One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from the line of Matt Somerville from D.A. Davidson. Your line is open.
Matt Somerville (Analyst)
Thanks. A couple questions. As I think about kind of the commentary coming out of the last quarter, the messaging from the analyst day, I guess, was this, was this something that developed really late in the quarter that you felt kind of blindsided by? 'Cause I, I guess I thought some of the challenges and, and growing pains, if you wanna call it that, growing pains associated with increasing your concurrent deployment capability, I guess I was under the impression that this quarter was gonna sort of be a proof point, that a lot of that stuff was in the rear view.
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah. I mean, I think, with construction costs and delays, a lot of it shows up right at the end. And so, we did not anticipate this, and we're pretty. We're not happy about it. That's why we're taking over some of the management ourselves. We're acting very quickly. I mean, this is not like... This is not acceptable. But yeah, a lot of this stuff came at the end, and we just had to deal with it right at the end of the... Not at the end, but certainly after Investor Day. Well, after Investor Day.
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
And then the other thing I'll add, Matt, is one of the things we're putting in place is, as we scale, one of the things we're finding is that a focus on overall program management and schedule integration across all of our projects and flow is a critical skill set that we need to put more resources against. And I think when you talk about whether it was a surprise? Not a surprise, but, it's those final elements associated with putting the install together. As Rick said, you get to the, the final completion of implementation, we need a better view around all of our program management to predict when those delays might be impacting. Which is one of the reasons why that EPC role is so critical, because they're the ones receiving equipment on site.
They're the ones who will have the first visibility in terms of a potential delay, and that's why we wanna bring that back in-house. That is a critical element for us, that we perhaps weren't getting the visibility we need.
Matt Somerville (Analyst)
... So as my follow-up, one, do you have that role, an individual in that role that is the head of what you just described, so there's organizational accountability as we speak on what's going on? And second, to then my point, has anything that's happened here impacted the performance of the systems in the eyes of the customer?
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
No, that's what we've, that's what we're really protected against. I think, I think the analogy that comes to mind is, our offense is working great. We had five minutes left in the fourth quarter, and the defense blew a couple plays. And so I think that's the way we look at it. We have been hiring people in the supply chain, in the EPC space over the last six months, and they finally got in place. And they're actually the ones that are saying, "We should do this ourselves." Our partners that we picked on supply chains, they got the work done, but then they came in with extra bills at the end, and that's just, that's...
It's a part of the business we have to manage, and we have to make sure we play defense, but it's not what drives the business. We just, we just got to shore it up. And so, that's my answer. And yes, it does come. When you finish a project and you're saying: Okay, we're ready to gear it up, and they're saying: No, no, no, these parts aren't here, and you have people, hundreds of people standing around the site for weeks, that's, that's the problem. So the systems are running well, and they just took longer to bring online than we thought, and we're not gonna tolerate that.
Matt Somerville (Analyst)
Got it. Thank you, guys.
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah.
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Thanks, Matt.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Ross Sparenblek from William Blair. Your line is open.
Ross Sparenblek (Analyst)
Hey, good evening, guys.
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Hi, Ross.
Ross Sparenblek (Analyst)
Hey, just sticking on the insourcing, can you maybe help frame how this has impacted, if it has, your ability to reduce commissioning hours? I know you've provided, you know, some impressive walk at your Investor Day in May on bringing those down. And then maybe just try to get a sense also on, you know, as you're bringing those commissioning hours down, what does that provide on closing the gap on your longer-term gross margin targets?
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
I'd say the commissioning is done by a different group of people than the EPC, and so that walk that you heard Bill talk quite a bit about at our Investor Day, that remains on track. And so the commissioning, think about that as the, you know, the final mile. We're talking about the directing of resources throughout that installation process, and that's where we've seen some of the cost growth and schedule impact around that portion of the build.
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah, the-
Ross Sparenblek (Analyst)
Okay
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
... the actual building of the bots, which was a big problem for us before. We're actually very happy with our partners on building bots, and we have a very competitive situation. Some of the parts suppliers to some of the bots maybe could do a little better, but the actual assembly of the bots is critical. It's the actual big setting up the structure, the construction part of the business that is really gonna be. We gotta be boringly good at that. And so in this process, I think we've learned that, yeah, there's a couple things we should be doing differently. There's timing on the sites, but the most critical thing would be building the bots and building the robotic palletizing cells, and those we've been pretty happy with. It's just when it all comes together, so many people standing around at the end.
Ross Sparenblek (Analyst)
All right, got it. And maybe on, you know, something a little bit more optimistic. Rick, can you just provide any updates on where you guys are, with the European sales force expansion? And any commentary you're willing to provide on, you know, what those early customer conversations have looked like in the region?
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah. So we've had a lot of conversations in Europe. We have, I've been to Europe a bunch of times. We've hired some Europeans to actually do sales work. We've hired a couple of consulting firms. All the big suspects in, especially in the food space in Europe, that now we're engaged with conversations on. We've also had some conversations with some of the port operators, whether it's GreenBox or Symbotic Systems, that we've been helpful with. And we continue to recruit and look at hiring more sales folks. But we've hired a couple of very good salespeople from some of our competitors that we're delighted with.
Ross Sparenblek (Analyst)
So, I mean, just really quick on the follow-on there, maybe I underappreciated the dual nature of the supply chain. Are you gonna need the engineering exposure in Europe as well? So there's gonna be another layer of hiring once these orders do start to come in on delivering this, the deployments?
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
No, no. The systems. Our systems are pretty much cookie cutters. That's designed. And so, we continue within our expense package. We're actually increasing the amount of money and the amount of people we have in R&D. But what we're doing is actually figuring out how to install these things simpler and easier, so that there's just less people doing basically construction work.
Ross Sparenblek (Analyst)
All right. That's perfect. I'll leave it there. Thanks, guys.
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Thanks.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Greg Palm from Craig-Hallum. Your line is open.
Greg Palm (Analyst)
Yeah, thanks. I guess I'm still a little bit confused just in terms of the revenue and profit bridge in the quarter. You know, you had completed 3 systems. You started 5. You actually outperformed revenue by a pretty wide margin relative to the guide. And so I'm trying to tie the statements about deployment delays and construction implementation delays to, you know, the fact that actually revenue outperformed quite a bit, which obviously implies that you were able to recognize the revenue. So can you maybe just dig into that a little bit more?
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Yeah. So, if you start with current revenue, that strong revenue is based on the progress of the 39 systems in deployment, many of which we had a higher sales signature. If you think about 2Q 2023, 3Q 2023, we had signed 5 and 6 sales back in that timeframe. Right now, we are heavy into the implementation, and so the bulk of our revenue is coming from projects that we signed about a year ago, and so that's driving the strong revenue performance. There are a couple things driving our 4Q guide lower. The first one is we had fewer system starts last quarter.
So we had three starts, and so that, you know, start of those systems, we're starting to see the ramp up of revenue would occur in fourth quarter, and so the lower system starts is the first driver of why Q4 is down. The second is when we talk about construction delays and how that impacted our performance this quarter. Those construction delays that started on systems over the last quarter, that's going to delay revenue recognition for implementation milestones in the next quarter, and that's another significant driver in terms of why revenue is down. And then the last one is, Rick talked to, is the technology we're improving. That slowed some things down, so that's also gonna slow milestones that we would have received revenue recognition on next quarter, and that's gonna shift out a quarter or so.
So those are the big drivers of why you see the dip down. That outlook is temporary, so as we look and plan for... You know, the beauty of having the backlog that we've got and being able to look at what we have in deployment, we're getting better at predicting our revenue as long as we remain on schedule.
Greg Palm (Analyst)
Okay, so maybe a little bit of a lag, so I guess that makes sense. And did I hear it right? Was there a cost associated as well with, you know, upgrading or retrofitting some of the bots that were in the field already? Was that an impact as well, that was unforeseen, or was that expected?
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
That was unforeseen. Some of the cables that enable the vision enhancement on the bots, which is one of the ways that we use vision to connect to our servers and use AI a lot, a number of those cables came in late, so we shipped the bots to the customer so they could still do 90% of what they were supposed to do. Then we made the decision to retrofit the cables in the field, which was expensive.
Greg Palm (Analyst)
Got it. Okay, and-
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Now in line at our bot production, but we made the conscious decision to go ahead and retrofit all of what's already in the field.
Greg Palm (Analyst)
Yep. Okay. And then, you know, just lastly, you know, if I think back, you know, a few quarters to your fiscal Q1, you slowed deployment, you slowed deployments, I guess it was for differing but similar reasons, but that ended up really being, at least at that point, a one quarter issue. So what is your visibility? You know, you're talking about, you know, reacceleration in fiscal Q1. Do you have pretty strong visibility that suggests... I mean, what else unforeseen could happen between now and then that would maybe impact that timing?
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
So in terms of the visibility in new system starts, we meet with our customers and try and map out from around our backlog. We try and do a 6-month and a 12-month outlook, and we stay lockstep with our customers because we've talked before about why we may be ready to be full steam ahead and start deployment at a particular site. It's a joint decision with our customer, and so we look out 12 months and map that out. What can cause issues with that? Our construction delays in one phase may delay start of another phase of that project. And so when you talk about those unforeseen things, that's the piece that we've got to remain on schedule so that you can continue the deployment in that phased approach.
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
So we have pretty good visibility. Once the permits are issued, it just flows, and most of the things that we're talking about, I think in the first quarter, we're pretty confident of.
Greg Palm (Analyst)
Okay, perfect. I will leave it there. Thanks.
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Thanks.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Jim Ricchiuti from Needham. Your line is open.
Jim Ricchiuti (Senior Analyst)
Hi, thank you. So when you talk about the revenue growth accelerating in fiscal Q1, should we anticipate a pickup in margins? I mean, you're already suggesting there's gonna be a recovery, some recovery back to historical levels in Q4 margins. I'm just wondering, though, as we start seeing an acceleration in revenue, do we then potentially have some cost issues that could impact margins in the near term beyond Q4?
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
So in terms of revenue acceleration, you're going to see Q4 will be our lowest year-over-year revenue growth. So when we refer to getting back to Q1, Q4 is going to be our lowest point when you look at that. In terms of gross margin impact, the accelerations we're talking about are not accelerating schedule, where we're dumping resources to expend to complete ahead of schedule. I'm not sure if that was the nature of your question. But you should expect to see gross margin incrementally get better as we deploy systems. So the other thing impacting our gross margins is we have lower margin projects in flow right now. The longer they take to deploy, the longer those lower margin projects stay with us.
So we've got to get that deployed so that we can start moving into a higher concentration of our higher margin business.
Jim Ricchiuti (Senior Analyst)
Just a follow-up question on what you're doing in-house with EPC. As you begin to accelerate, I mean, you're talking about a significant acceleration in deployments, you know, over the mid to longer term, and I'm wondering if that's going to require a scale-up in EPC resources as well. Maybe not immediately, but it sounds like as you start doing more of this in-house, and as the deployment really starts to ramp, you're going to require more resources in-house. Is that... Am I thinking about it though?
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah. No, I think in perspective, so let me just step back a second. So we basically doubled the sales of this company in two years. And so, I mean, it's not. I mean, it's like we hope we wouldn't hit a speed bump, and but I think this is. I mean, it's pretty minor. This is actually our highest EBITDA quarter ever. So it's pretty minor. I don't have any below the line adjustments, but yeah, we're going to continue to scale up on some resources, and we're also going to scale down on other resources. We'll do a good job controlling our expenses, and now what we need to do is control the construction costs at the site. So this was a good learning quarter for us. It was a little bit painful.
If the gross had been good, based on the sales, we would've been delighting our the people we're talking to today. So, you know, we took our hits, we cleaned it up, and we're done.
Jim Ricchiuti (Senior Analyst)
Okay, thank you.
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah.
Operator (participant)
One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Nicole DeBlase from Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.
Nicole DeBlase (Analyst)
Yeah, thanks. Good evening, guys. Hi, just maybe kind of putting all of this together, thinking about, you know, the ramp to 2025, talking about, you know, your, your view that revenue should kind of get back on track and reaccelerate in the first quarter, margins following that, and then ability to kind of hold costs constant. Does that mean that it's fair to assume that EBITDA margins in 2025 move above this mid-single digit level that you're expecting for the fourth quarter of this year?
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
You're definitely going to see a return to EBITDA higher than where we are this quarter. We should be above mid-single digits, and then on a trajectory to continue to improve that gross margin and a EBITDA margin going forward.
Nicole DeBlase (Analyst)
Okay, got it. Thank you. That's very helpful. And then just on steel costs, they've been coming down for some time. Do you think that's reflected in your gross margins yet, or is that an additional help as we move into future quarters?
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
I'd say it's reflected. So what we've gotten a lot better at is locking in our steel pricing at the same time we go ahead and sign an individual contract or an individual project with our customers. When there's a lag, is when we either get the benefit of steel pricing or we get the impact of steel pricing. So what we've gotten better at is locking in a commitment, and our supply chain team is focused on... With that stronger visibility in terms of what's in our backlog, we've been able to lock in commitments with our steel partners further out.
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
A lot of these projects we're doing now, we locked in prices almost 18 months ago when steel was higher, so I can't predict what steel is going to do, but we expect it to come down lower, and that would be reflected in the future. But sites that we're doing now, we actually locked in steel 18 months ago, so we're not buying on the spot market, or if we are buying on the spot market, it's for delivery at a price 18 months from now.
Nicole DeBlase (Analyst)
Got it. Thank you, guys. I'll pass it on.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Mark Delaney from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Mark Delaney (Analyst)
Yes, good afternoon, and thanks for taking my question. Last quarter, the company said it expects to begin the installation of its second break pack solution with a customer this summer. I think you mentioned today progress with the Minibot, but can you comment on when you expect to deploy the second break pack and how break pack more broadly is going?
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah. So we're hitting. So the answer is it's going well. We're meeting our customers' expectations. The second system will start construction in our next fiscal year. And I think it gets rolled out in 2025 or thereabouts. But we've redesigned the Minibot, we've taken it in-house. We've put a lot of new technology in the bot. Customer is really excited. I actually think it's gonna be a growth opportunity for us.
Ken Newman (Analyst)
Thanks for that, Rick. My other question was hoping to better understand the top line. Can you please remind us what % of revenue recognition comes from procurement, installation, and commissioning of the system? Thanks.
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
So our revenue curve, because I think this is where you're going, Mark, is a much more significant part of our revenue is coming from system deployment when you're about 12 months into the install. So I think your question, though, is what % of that overall revenue is driven by the EPC in terms of if we're bringing that back in-house, how much of the revenue drive is driving? That is not a significant contributor to cost. And so the focus there for each individual system, it's a very small percentage of what that overall cost curve is, but it's such a critical element, which is why we're bringing it back.
Ken Newman (Analyst)
Thank you. I'll pass it along.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our question comes from the line of Rob Mason from Baird. Your line is open.
Rob Mason (Analyst)
Yes, good afternoon. Rick, I was gonna see if you could update us on, maybe it's early, but if you could update us on progress on the non-ambient effort that you have ongoing and how you see that timeline? You know, and just referencing that, you know, one of your large customers in the quarter made some commentary around their implementation of, I guess, a vendor they've been working with on that effort, you know, at least since 2018. But, maybe how you see your opportunity unfolding in the non-ambient space with either new or existing customers?
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah. So, we are working on. We have a couple of friendly C&S sites that we're able to experiment with in perishables in Massachusetts, and so we're continuing to work on that. We're learning a lot. We don't see any showstoppers. The perishable system for bots, we're pretty well designed for, but it's just we're so busy right now selling the ambient systems. But we're continuing to spend a lot of money on R&D here. Everybody should know that, that we haven't cut back any of that, and that's reflected in our numbers. But the perishable, that development continues to go well. A lot of what we do in ambient is relevant for perishables, so we don't, we don't have any deployments, but we do have some potential customers that are very interested in deployments.
We think that's gonna be a big business.
Rob Mason (Analyst)
Very good. And then, Carol, just real quick, you made the commentary around funding for GreenBox. How does that tie into a couple of the larger outlays that were on the cash flow statement, in the quarter, either around strategic investments or, the distributions for Symbotic Holdings? Is that related?
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Yeah, it's the Symbotic Holdings is not related to GreenBox, but I'll touch on the two things that impacted our cash for the quarter. So you see, you know, an $81 million reduction quarter-over-quarter in terms of cash balance. And so there were two unusual events this quarter. The first one being, this is our first quarter with our GreenBox investment. And so if you may recall from our overall GreenBox LLC agreement, each partner would contribute to the initial capital call associated with that investment. And so that initial capital call that is not related to the systems happened this quarter. And so that was one element of what you saw from the cash burn.
The second element you referenced, which was, you know, in our press release and the financials, distribution to Symbotic Holdings LLC, the non-controlling interest. This has to relate to our Symbotic LLC. We make a distribution to the members in the year that we believe we will become profitable for tax purposes. And so associated with that distribution, you saw a $48 million cash impact. That, that run rate will not continue at that rate. We actually had an April and a June payment that both hit in the quarter, so we had double the impact in one particular quarter. You're not gonna see that run rate going forward.
Rob Mason (Analyst)
Thank you. That's helpful.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Ken Newman from KeyBanc Capital. Your line is open.
Ken Newman (Analyst)
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question here. You know, appreciate all the color so far, just on all the moving pieces for, you know, system gross margins in, into this quarter. But I'm, I'm just curious, Carol, could you just quantify exactly how large those impacts were in the quarter? You know, that way, we get a better sense of just what EBITDA margin would have been, had these, these costs not kind of crept up on you late into the quarter. And then just helping us bridge how much of that is expected to roll off in your 4Q guide.
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
So what you're seeing is the entire impact, if you think about we were at 15.6% gross margin. We had, you know, that full impact from what we would have been predicting at about 20%, which is what we're trying to get back to in terms of fourth quarter. That full impact comes from the three elements we talked about, and I'm not gonna split out between the three, but it's overall cost growth, construction delays, and the going ahead and rolling forward the innovation that we had talked about last quarter. So those were the impacts driving that gross margin.
Ken Newman (Analyst)
Okay. And is it fair to think, I mean, it, it sounds like you're not expecting the full impact or that to roll off here into the fourth quarter, but as I think about just the timing here, is there a sense that, you know, you get back to 20%+ gross margins beginning in the first quarter of 2025, or is that still too hard of a hurdle?
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
No, that's what we're predicting. So our guide reflects getting back to 20% in the fourth quarter. And I'll just do a quick go back on the three categories of what impacted our overall margin. To summarize that, the vast majority of that is labor related. We talked about inefficiencies, we talked about schedule. The bulk of that is people costs, people being ready for work, but then the work and the equipment didn't show up. So our guide for 4Q, our expectation is we'll be back to 20%. Was that where we wanted to be? No. So we're lower than what we would have planned at the beginning of the year, and that's why we're saying there's still some impact heading into the fourth quarter, but our guide reflects that.
Ken Newman (Analyst)
Got it. And then just real quickly for my follow-up here. Just looking at this free cash statement, I mean, it looks like CapEx did step up kinda decently sequentially here this quarter. Just any thoughts on where free cash flow or, you know, CapEx expectations into year-end? And, you know, is it fair to think that you'd still expect to be free cash flow positive in the fourth quarter?
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Yeah, we still expect to be free cash flow positive going into 4Q. What you're seeing on CapEx is a couple things. So we're going ahead and investing in additional equipment as we're ramping up R&D. And then we also talked last quarter about our move from some equipment out of deferred cost into PP&E, and that's what you're seeing. So I think the run rate for this quarter is indicative of what you'll see going forward.
Ken Newman (Analyst)
Helpful. Thanks.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Derek Soderberg from Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open.
Derek Soderberg (Analyst)
Yeah. Hey, everyone, thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to ask about GreenBox. Is there any way you can quantify the interest level you're getting for GreenBox today? Is that pipeline growing? And then how would you characterize the size of the firms you're getting interest from today? Is it more mom-and-pop shops, mid-size, or large regionals? And then I've got a follow-up.
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Mostly what we're getting interest at this point is medium and large regionals. And what we wanna do is develop a sales force to go after the mom-and-pop shops, which is where we think there's more margin, but we need anchor tenants. So we've had a number of incomings as people are still trying to understand what we're doing, how this all works, but medium and large regionals.
Derek Soderberg (Analyst)
Rick, what do you think they're waiting for to hop on board with that first anchor customer? You know, what are they looking for when that solution comes live? You know, what are you hearing from them in terms of feedback? You know, I guess just what are they watching from that first customer? Thanks.
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
I think they were waiting for the first Symbotic site and GreenBox site to become available, so we'll be able to tour people through that. But I think they're just waiting for us to announce the locations, which we plan to do shortly, of the next couple sites.
Carol Hibbard (CFO)
Great. Thanks, Derek.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question will be from the line of Joe Giordano from TD Cowen. Your line is open.
Joe Giordano (Analyst)
Hey, guys. I wanted to start on just back on the EPC thing. So I just wanna make sure I get this right. Like, you're dealing with companies that do this as, like, the core competency, I guess. So, like, what gives you the comfort that bringing this in-house, like, to do something that's not, like, your, I guess, your core of what you do, like, that you'd be able to do it that much better? And, like, wouldn't... Would you be hiring, like, kinda the same people that you're working with, like, kinda poaching people from those EPCs? So I just wanna make sure I understand that whole dynamic and, you know, what gives you the confidence that that improves significantly in-house?
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah. So, actually, what we did, Joe, fair question, is a lot of the people that we had hired when we were doing this ourselves, were then hired by some of the general contractors who probably are better at defense work than our kind of work. And so, some of these contractors that we will then go back and take over will actually reduce the price and, we're finding that we're spending a lot of time managing the contractors. And what we've done. So that's one thing. The other thing we've done is we've actually been able to hire, people that have done this from some of the large automation firms that do this in-house.
And so that's given us real comfort that, we don't need, in some cases, the middleman, and in some cases, we're just better off to hire people ourselves. So it's simply, I guess, the answer is simply, we've been disappointed at the performance with some of the suppliers that we've hired, and we know we can do it better ourselves.
Joe Giordano (Analyst)
Are you ultimately using these same, like, construction firms? You're just taking a part of the function away? Like, do you plan on keeping the same kind of mix of partners, though?
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah. So, for instance, there's a company that installs all our rack, which is one of the largest contracts that we order in terms of labor. And so we turn those over to the general contractor, and the general contractor used them and did a worse job managing them than we did. So, we'll just take them back. We'll also... And on the electrical side, we've learned a lot about electrical. And so that's been, that's been another part, but yes.
Joe Giordano (Analyst)
It's them not managing the sub, just subbing it out well, and that, that's the capability that you think you can bring more, more efficiency-
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah.
Joe Giordano (Analyst)
By the way. Okay.
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yep. When we took this over, and I think we told the group that we thought these people were gonna manage all the subs better, we're gonna bring in new subs. It just hasn't happened.
Joe Giordano (Analyst)
Okay. Then my, my follow-up here, and I think this was brought up, but I just wanna clarify it. Like, I know that you're frustrated by this. You know, I'm sure investors are gonna be somewhat frustrated by this. But, like, if I'm talking to your customers, like, is this? Am I getting kind of different reactions? Like, do they know? Do, do they see this on their side? Are you bumping up against kind of like timelines that you need to hustle to get to now? Like, how? What's the difference between, like, the conversation we're having right now and the ones that you're having with your customers on site?
Rick Cohen (Chairman and CEO)
Yeah. So what we've done, and this is one of the reasons why we spend more money, is we've tried to, as much as we can, isolate our customers. We think this is a short-term problem, and so we certainly, the customers are leaning in to pay some of it. Some of it we're paying, and we're working with the customers to make sure it goes away. And also, I think we're educating our customers. They have to have some of these sites ready ahead of time, clean ahead of time, and some of them have been lagging with their contractors, getting power to the building and that stuff. So we're all learning together. But I'm confident this is a very short-term problem.
Joe Giordano (Analyst)
Thanks, guys.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. I'm showing no further questions in the queue. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Jeff Evanson for any closing remarks.
Jeff Evanson (VP of Investor Relations)
Thank you, everyone, for joining our call tonight. We appreciate your interest in Symbotic, and we look forward to seeing many of you during the quarter at the various investor conferences we will be attending. Good night.
Operator (participant)
Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.