Tecogen - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Executive Summary

• Q1 2025 delivered revenue growth and improved profitability: revenue rose 17.6% year over year to $7.28M, gross margin expanded to 44.3% (vs. 41.6%), operating loss narrowed to $0.59M, and net loss to $0.66M ($0.03/share) with adjusted EBITDA improving to -$0.38M.
• Management highlighted building AI/data center momentum: active Vertiv go-to-market work, quotes on larger projects, and LOIs sought to scale supply chain; Tecogen’s gas chillers can free up “30% or more” electrical capacity for computing and lower cooling opex by ~50% vs electric chillers, supporting the data center thesis.
• Balance sheet/liquidity: cash at quarter-end was $4.07M; current cash “presently” ~$3M post material purchases; no maturing short-term debt after director notes extended; backlog communicated as ~$10.8M (note: GAAP backlog disclosure of $9.52M excludes service contracts).
• Tariff exposure and uplisting: management expects limited tariff impact (domestic supply chain) and sees potential competitive benefit vs imported absorption chillers; TGEN uplisted to NYSE American on May 6, 2025, improving liquidity and visibility—both potential catalysts.
• Street estimates: S&P Global consensus for Q1 2025 EPS and revenue was unavailable; management said results were “slightly ahead of our forecast,” but no formal guidance was provided (see Estimates Context).

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

• What Went Well

  • Revenue and margin inflection: Revenue +17.6% YoY; total gross margin 44.3% (+2.7 pts), with Products margin up to 41% from 30% (price increases and mix), and Energy Production margin +7 pts (lower fuel).
  • Operating leverage: Operating loss improved to -$0.59M from -$1.05M YoY; adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed to -$0.38M from -$0.90M.
  • Strategic progress: “We have now quoted multiple larger [data center] projects… Vertiv has assigned a project manager… marketing and sales training underway,” positioning for larger orders and faster scaling.

• What Went Wrong

  • Energy Production revenue fell 27% YoY on contract expirations, partially offset by margin improvement; Services margin dipped 1 pt on higher labor/material as engine improvements rolled out.
  • Cash used in operations was -$1.17M in Q1 (vs. +$0.25M prior year), driven largely by deferred revenue drawdown as projects shipped and working-capital needs for product growth.
  • Estimates/guidance visibility: No formal quantitative guidance; S&P Global consensus not available for benchmarking; timing of large data center orders remains uncertain despite increased quoting.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to your host, Jack Whiting, General Counsel. Please go ahead, Jack.

Jack Whiting (General Counsel and Secretary)

Good morning. This is Jack Whiting, General Counsel and Secretary of Tecogen. This call is being recorded and will be archived on our website at tecogen.com. The press release regarding our first quarter 2025 earnings and the presentation provided this morning are available in the investor section of our website as well. I would like to direct your attention to our safe harbor statement included in our earnings press release and presentation. Various remarks that we may make about the company's expectations, plans, and prospects constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provision under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including those listed in the company's most recent annual and quarterly reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q under the caption Risk Factors filed with the SEC and available in the investor section of our website under the heading SEC Filings. While we may elect to update forward-looking statements, we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so, so you should not rely on any forward-looking statements representing our views as of any future date. During this call, we will refer to certain financial measures not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. A reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is provided in the press release regarding our first quarter 2025 earnings and on our website.

I will now turn the call over to Abinand Rangesh, Tecogen CEO, who will provide an overview of first quarter 2025 activity and results, and Roger Deschenes, Tecogen CAO, who will provide additional information regarding first quarter 2025 financial results. Abinand?

Abinand Rangesh (CEO and Director)

Thank you, Jack. Welcome to Tecogen's Q1 2025 earnings presentation. So far this year, we've seen some exciting developments at Tecogen. Before Roger gives us a rundown of the financials, I want to provide a few key updates: our uplisting and the benefits this brings to shareholders, how the data center strategy is going, and what the new tariff environment means for Tecogen. In addition to the strategic moves, we also saw improved financial numbers across the board. Our revenue for the quarter increased 17.6% to $7.3 million, slightly ahead of our forecast. Our adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed from $900,000 to $381,000. Our gross profit margin also increased from 41.6% to 44.3%. The adjusted EBITDA loss would have been even lower, likely less than $200,000, but we needed to incur some additional operating expenses essential to position us to ramp up for the anticipated data center orders. This resulted in increased R&D expenses, recruiter fees for strategic hires, and professional fees for the uplist.

As many of you have seen, we have successfully uplisted from the OTCQX to the NYSE American Stock Exchange. This is a huge milestone for us. The uplisting enables more shareholders to easily purchase our stock and can already be seen by the increased daily trading volume. One of the questions I regularly get from shareholders is why the company has not seen more growth in the past despite having great technology. I believe there was one missing ingredient. That was finding a market where the dollar per project is large. This means that even if it takes longer and there are more complex sales cycles, the time invested can still provide a good return. The data center market provides this missing ingredient. However, executing the strategy requires employees at every level of the company to deliver.

Some of this is dependent on providing the right incentives, and I believe having a stock that is growing and having stock options that are liquid is critical in that regard. The uplist to the NYSE American achieved this. Before I provide an update on how the data center strategy is going, I want to recap the problem facing AI data centers and why our solution offers such a compelling benefit. As the power density of AI chips has increased, the need for cooling has also increased. The cooling system for a data center needs to be designed for the worst-case scenario. For example, when it is 120 °F outside and all the AI chips are operating at full capacity. This means that a 300 MW data center might need to allocate up to 100 MW of their available power to the cooling system, even if they use the cooling system for only parts of the year.

Since you never know when you'll need the full cooling capacity, once this power is allocated, it can't be used for other more useful loads like AI chips and computing. Given that computing is the primary revenue source for a data center, every bit of additional power that can be used for the chips directly impacts a data center's bottom line. Currently, most data centers use an electrical cooling system. By switching to our high-efficiency advanced natural gas chillers, data centers can increase the amount of power they have available by 30% or more. If you could unlock, for example, 100 MW or more in a larger data center, this could be substantial.

To put this in context, this is equivalent to the combined power used by more than 200 high-rise buildings in Manhattan. Best of all, our solution can even be retrofitted to an existing data center. As hyperscalers attempt to find the fastest way to roll out AI data centers, unlocking power in an existing data center may provide ways to future-proof the data center as chips become more powerful or available capacity needs to increase quickly. How does our TECOCHILL compare versus the alternatives? Compared to the nearest other gas cooling technology called an absorption chiller, TECOCHILL consumes half the amount of gas for the same amount of cooling provided. TECOCHILL has also been proven in many critical cooling applications, including hospitals, ice rinks, and cannabis growing facilities. Most absorption chillers are manufactured overseas.

This means that in the current tariff environment, absorption chillers are likely to be subject to significant tariffs. Compared to the conventional alternative, which is an electric chiller, not only do our chillers free up significant amounts of available power, our solution's operating costs can be 50% lower than the electric chiller. Even if a customer decides to build their own power generation on-site, the installed cost per kilowatt is 50% lower if they use TECOCHILL versus building on-site power generation. Therefore, compared to all the alternatives, TECOCHILL offers some very compelling benefits. In addition to our Vertiv partnership, our own marketing and networking efforts are starting to result in interest for much larger projects. We have now quoted multiple larger projects, much larger than ever before. Having been on some of the sales calls, every one of the prospective customers has immediately grasped the compelling benefit.

The main challenge we're presently facing is convincing customers to do something different from business as usual. This is common in the adoption of new technologies, even though we have ample proof points from critical cooling applications in other industries. We're presently working with prospective customers on approaches to mitigate any perceived risk, including redundancy, and choosing the right projects where power constraints are more acute. Given that some of these projects might require significant ramp-up of our supply chain, we are asking customers for letters of intent so we can start working with our suppliers to ensure we can hit delivery times required. The Vertiv relationship is also making great progress. A project manager from Vertiv has been assigned to manage the TECOCHILL launch through Vertiv's new product introduction process. This includes generation of marketing material and sales training.

We have already seen sales leads from the Vertiv team, but should see further activity in the upcoming months as the new product introduction process proceeds. Therefore, I'm very optimistic that the Vertiv relationship will be successful. I know many shareholders are wondering how exposed Tecogen is to tariffs. We are predominantly a domestic manufacturer. We have contacted all our major vendors and don't anticipate any meaningful impacts as a result of tariffs. This is particularly true for the DTX chillers, which are likely to be our product most used by data centers. The most impacted components are circuit boards and electronics, which make up a small percentage of our overall costs. The only meaningful components likely affected are permanent magnet generators used in our inverters, mainly due to export controls from China. We have sufficient inventory presently to handle anticipated orders in 2025 while we obtain the relevant permissions.

I believe the tariffs may give us a competitive advantage. As already discussed, other gas cooling technologies are facing big tariffs. Our systems were already ahead of the competition due to our increased efficiencies. Now, with tariffs, absorption chillers are at a further disadvantage. The tariffs may also have knock-on effects on long lead-time equipment like electrical switchgear. Our ability to alleviate power constraints quickly and being a domestic manufacturer is likely to be more of an advantage than ever. Backlog and cash. The backlog is presently at $10.8 million, including the $2 million Las Vegas prepaid service contract. We expect $2 million of non-data center projects to enter the backlog in the next couple of months. As mentioned earlier, we are quoting some very large chiller projects, but the timing of these closing is uncertain.

Combined with Vertiv's marketing, I'm very confident we will be successful in securing some of these larger orders. Therefore, I would caution shareholders not to expect linear increases in backlog since a single data center order will fundamentally change our backlog number. Our current cash position is $3 million, following material purchases to increase product revenue and roll out engine improvements to the service fleet. Our engine improvements are resulting in 50% longer intervals between oil changes, but require cash investments to complete. Our balance sheet is also stronger today since we have no maturing short-term debt. This means our cash allocation can go towards increasing revenue and capacity.

I'll now hand over to Roger to take us through the financials.

Roger Deschenes (CAO)

Thank you, Abinand. Good morning, everybody. Tecogen is organized under three operating or revenue segments. Our products of revenue consist of sales of cogeneration units, microgrid systems, and chillers to a range of markets and customers. Our services revenue primarily consists of our contracted operations and maintenance services. Our energy production revenue stream is from energy sales, including the sales of electricity and thermal energy produced by our equipment on-site at customer facilities. Moving over to slide 12, I'll review the first quarter results. Our total revenues were $7.3 million in the first quarter of 2025, which compares to $6.2 million in the first quarter of 2024. This represents an increase of just under 18%. For the quarter, our net loss decreased to $660,000, which compares to $1.1 million in the first quarter of 2024.

The decrease in the loss is due to the increase in our products revenue and improved gross margin in the products segment. Our gross profit increased 25%, and operating expenses increased 5.2% quarter over quarter. The gross margin for the first quarter rose by 3% to 44% from 41% in 2024. We'll review gross margin further in the segment performance discussion. For the first quarter of 2025, our operating expenses, as Abinand mentioned previously, were increased. This is due to higher recruitment fees as we staff up the production function, some increased payroll costs, and professional fees incurred for the uplist, and also for increased hiring in our R&D staff.

Moving over to EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA. For the first quarter of 2025, EBITDA loss was $441,000, and adjusted EBITDA loss was $381,000. This compares to an EBITDA loss of $921,000 and the adjusted EBITDA loss of $898,000 in the first quarter of 2024. Moving on to performance by segment, products revenue increased 70% quarter over quarter to $2.4 million in Q1 2025 from $1.5 million in the first quarter of 2024. This is due to increases in chiller and cogeneration shipments. The products gross margin increased to 41% quarter over quarter from 30% in the first quarter of 2024. Services revenue increased 6% quarter over quarter to $4.2 million in the first quarter of 2025 from $4 million in the similar period in 2024. The gross profit margin was slightly lower at 47%, and this is due to increased labor and material costs that we incurred as we continue to roll out engine improvements on our Vertiv product.

Energy production revenue decreased by 27% quarter over quarter to just under $500,000 in the first quarter of 2025 from $680,000 in the first quarter of 2024. This is largely due to the expiration of a few of our contracts. The gross margin increased 7% to 38% in the first quarter of 2025, which compares to 31% in 2024. This is due to lower fuel costs. Our overall gross profit margin increased 2% quarter over quarter due to improvements in our products services segment margin. This concludes our review of the first quarter 2025 financials.

I'll turn the call back over to Abinand.

Abinand Rangesh (CEO and Director)

Thank you, Roger. As I mentioned at the start, one of the key missing ingredients to making TECOCHILL successful has been having bigger projects and an expanding market. The macroeconomic drivers are now in our favor. Our market positioning of our chiller is being validated by favorable feedback from prospective customers. Once we get over the short-term hurdles of securing the first few larger data center projects, I'm confident we will see rapid growth. I believe the probabilities of success are now in our favor because our technology has been proven in other markets, and we have the credibility of partnering with a world leader like Vertiv in the data center segment. I'll now take any questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Now begin jumping into the question and answer session. If you'd like to be placed into the question queue, please press star one on your telephone keypad. One moment, please, while we pull for questions. Our first question today is coming from Alexander Blanton from Clear Harbor Asset Management. Your line is now live.

Alexander M. Blanton (Senior Analyst)

Hi, good morning. Very good report.

Abinand Rangesh (CEO and Director)

Good morning, Alex. How are you?

Alexander M. Blanton (Senior Analyst)

Fine. Thank you. I'd like to ask about the backlog first. Over what period is that to be delivered?

Abinand Rangesh (CEO and Director)

We are hoping to be able to deliver that over the next 9-12 months. That's currently the forecast. It really depends on what else comes in in the backlog. We're trying to ramp up faster, but I'd expect between the next 9-12 months.

Alexander M. Blanton (Senior Analyst)

Okay, thank you. Now, I want to ask about the hiring. In what parts of the company are you doing that? You had an increase in recruitment fees, and I think that's the first time I've heard about that in a long time. You're hiring in sales or in manufacturing?

Abinand Rangesh (CEO and Director)

There are a couple of critical areas, I think, that are going to be really crucial to be able to ramp up. One of the areas you might have seen we hired was a manufacturing manager. The other one to support the manufacturing manager was also a supply chain manager, especially in this kind of tariff environment. Also, as we look to, you know, if we get a large data center order, the single first bottleneck is going to be getting our suppliers to ramp up. Some of that is going to, we're doing that work right now to really start working with our suppliers to say, look, what's it going to take? Because many of the key components on a chiller, for example, are built by very large vessel suppliers. Their capacity is less of an issue.

It's really how do we work with them ahead of time to make sure that they ramp up to hit delivery time. Part of doing that and making sure that, you know, we can control our costs well is we felt the critical portion was also having a supply chain manager. The other area that we're seeing some recruitment costs associated is also on the service side of the business. I believe that to get close to, you know, to get the profitability, really, we're going to have to get the service margin up by another 5% or 6%. Some of that is going to come with actually increasing the service revenue to go with it. That really is getting the right kind of technicians with the right experience.

Some of that, getting some recruiters involved to get some strategic hires in that space, I think, is also going to be critical to get our profitability side of things up. That is really where we have been hiring. We have also hired one or, you know, an engineer or two, again, to support the R&D efforts associated with data center projects because data centers operate in very different chilled water conditions that other industries operate in. Part of what we are doing right now is also making sure that the data centers, like all the conditions that a data center would operate in, we are able to show test data to potential data center customers that our chiller can do that. That requires some test time in the test cell and having engineers that can actually run that.

Alexander M. Blanton (Senior Analyst)

Yeah, one of the problems a small company has in dealing with large projects is you have to convince your customer that you can deliver on time. I am glad to see that you are building up. I am sure that is something that Vertiv will want you to do too, because if they are going to put your equipment into one of their data centers, they do not want a situation in which the installation of the cooling is holding things up, correct?

Abinand Rangesh (CEO and Director)

Exactly. I mean, I think that's part of the reason why in the short term, we're really focused on trying to remove any potential bottlenecks that we might have in our production. There are multiple ways we can do this, and we have a plan A, plan B, plan C type thing here to really make sure that as things come in, we can ramp up. That is also why we're really pushing early prospective customers on getting us letters of intent. That kind of helps us go to our suppliers and start really putting that into place.

The other area that we have definitely discussed with Vertiv and our original agreement with Vertiv included was them helping us with the supply chain as well, because everybody recognizes that we are a small company and to be able to scale up, it might require a partner like Vertiv to help us scale that.

Alexander M. Blanton (Senior Analyst)

That was my next question. To what extent are they helping you? I would think they would want to because your equipment gives them a competitive advantage in their business. There's a person assigned full time to work with you. Is that what I heard?

Abinand Rangesh (CEO and Director)

There's a project manager. He has some other Vertiv obligations, but one of his predominant roles is just TECOCHILL. As part of that new product introduction process that Vertiv runs, they go through all the marketing material preparation, training, like formal training for the sales team. We've definitely done pre-training for the sales team, but really getting all of those pieces together. Some of that also involves how does the supply delivery, all the different pieces that support essentially this product being included as part of Vertiv's offering. There's a whole package that happens in the background. That's part of the reason why they've been working on that for the last few months. We expect when they finish that full package, you'll start seeing public-facing marketing from Vertiv with our TECOCHILL.

Alexander M. Blanton (Senior Analyst)

When do you think that might happen?

Abinand Rangesh (CEO and Director)

I would say in the next couple of months, they're pretty close to getting a lot of those pieces done. I mean, their sales team is still generating leads, and we are seeing leads from them. They're definitely active. I think part of seeing more success on it is going to be when they start marketing the product, putting out webinars and those kind of other marketing pieces out there.

Alexander M. Blanton (Senior Analyst)

Will your employees be working with them on sales presentations as a backup, or are they going to be doing the whole thing?

Abinand Rangesh (CEO and Director)

Yeah. I think a bit of both. I think early stage, we expect to be supporting them quite a lot on the sales presentations. The other thing that we are trying to do to make sure that this relationship is successful is that we have projects on their other areas that Vertiv can bring in. In addition to the TECOCHILL, we try to bring them into projects as well. Both sides get a benefit on this relationship. Our employees are definitely early on going to help with the sales presentations. I think as the Vertiv sales team becomes more experienced on this, I'm sure they'll take the lead from there.

Alexander M. Blanton (Senior Analyst)

Thank you on that. Could you update us on the Connecticut data center job that you had? How's that going? Also about the relative size.

Abinand Rangesh (CEO and Director)

Yeah. The Connecticut one is a relatively small, it's a very small data center. It's really, you know, it's just a single in Vertiv. Again, it's a proof point that power is a real problem there. It's not an AI data center. It's purely cloud storage. They might convert at a later date, in which case they'll need a lot more power. In the short term, their issue was just lack of, or their utility rates going up 20%-30%. They wanted a way to save money, and our InVerde was the right fit. I mean, they considered fuel cells, they considered other options, and they felt combined the installation cost as well as having service and other support in the area, our InVerde was the better fit there.

With regards to Las Vegas, we are shipping chillers, you know, a couple of chillers every quarter. We're also trying to meet the other orders that we have. This first quarter was particularly critical because some of the customers had to lock in the investment tax credits. We had to make sure we got them at least part of the project in the first quarter. More of the Las Vegas shipments will be delivered next quarter and a little bit in Q3.

Alexander M. Blanton (Senior Analyst)

Yeah, thank you. All right, thank you very much.

Abinand Rangesh (CEO and Director)

Thank you, Alex. Thanks.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. As a reminder, that star one to be placed in the question queue. One moment, please, while we pause for further questions. We reached the end of our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the floor back over for any further closing comments.

Abinand Rangesh (CEO and Director)

Thank you, everyone, for listening to our Q1 2025 call. I will keep people appraised as we have more developments either in the Vertiv data center industry. Thank you very much.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. That does conclude today's teleconference webcast. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation today.