Beam Global (BEEM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

As today's discussion will show you, we firmly believe that Beam Global is a fantastic company, and we trade and perhaps not getting the recognition we deserve on the capital markets. As you all know, Beam Global trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker BEEM, B-E-E-M, and we're headquartered here in San Diego. We have operations in Chicago, Illinois. And we're also operating in Europe in Kraljevo, Belgrade and Serbia. Just remind everyone today, this is a live webinar. It is being recorded, so it will be shared after. And thanks very much for sending your questions prior to the recording. We'll try to answer as many as we can today. So first, I'd like to share just a quick note. I've been at the company for around 5 months now, thoroughly enjoying it. But obviously, it's not the most ideal time to be getting in the capital markets world with a company that's involved in electric vehicle charging, considering the new administration, but learned a lot, really enjoying getting to know all of you through like investor e-mails, calls and text, good or bad. But I want to assure you that we share the frustration with the current share price, and we're doing all we can to weather that storm at the minute. But despite the current market conditions, I'm very excited where the company is going. Proud to be a part of it. And I hope this webinar clears up a lot of confusion for a lot of you. So we get starting the questions here, doesn't...

Thanks, Luke, and thanks for setting the stage here. Frustration with the share price, there's plenty of that going around, not just with us, but with others as well. But yes, keep our nose to the ground, keep executing. That's what we have to do. So part of that is, of course, communicating, and that's why we're going to go through this exercise of answering. Some of these -- I would guess we'd call these frequently asked questions.

Yes, frequently asked questions.

Some of them very frequently asked and often already answered, but we'll go through them again to the extent that we think you're going to get value out of it.

Yes. So we'll start by addressing the elephant in the room, the new administration. So what's expected? What's the expected impact on sales to government or other unforeseen effects? And what has been response?

Yes. So I mean the new administration has certainly changed things quite dramatically where our federal government business is concerned and not for the better. President Trump has made no bones about the fact that he is not a fan of electric vehicles, although I know that he did just announce last night that he's going to buy a Tesla because Tesla's share price isn't doing very well at the moment. But in general, the federal acquisition of electric vehicles has been brought to a halt as far as we can gather entirely to a halt. And in fact, there's been even more aggressive moves than that. I mean the administration has requested that GSA, the General Services Administration, shut down existing and already deployed electric vehicle chargers on their campuses and try to figure out some way to get rid of the electric vehicles. That seems very strange because the money has already been spent in electric vehicles after you buy them are essentially free to operate. So these things -- none of them are helpful our business. There's no question about that. I don't know how long they'll last. President Trump's already talked about canceling the EV mandate. There was no EV mandate. There never has been one. But the trickle-down effects beyond the federal spend also impacting us are that they have reversed the incentives for buyers of EVs. And those tax incentives make the purchase of an electric vehicle more attractive without a doubt. So we have to expect that, that's going to cause some kind of reduction. Now at the same time, the electric vehicle sales are still growing in the U.S. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute. But the big question for us, I think, is less to do with how the lack of federal sales will impact us. And they will. I mean there's no question about it. We're going to have a couple of tough quarters as a result of that because historically, a great deal of our revenue has come from federal, state and municipal customers. And actually, the federal reluctance around EV charging infrastructure has trickled down to state customers as well and even to some municipal customers, frankly, even some commercial customers. So we have seen impacts rippling across the board from that. But I'm not going to tell you that this time last year, I saw this coming because I didn't. To be honest with you, I did not expect a second Trump presidency. I wasn't anticipating that. And as a result, we were not planning for a reduction in federal sales because of the new administration being in wise. In fact, we thought that quite the opposite would happen. Nevertheless, we have and had already been executing on diversification plans. I think everybody that's listening to this will know that we made a couple of acquisitions in Europe, getting us into that market, the largest market in the world by far for our products. We diversified our product offerings very significantly, really for the first time in the -- starting in the fourth quarter of 2024. If you go back to 2023, when we had revenues of just under $70 million, all of those revenues came essentially from 1 product with 1 or 2 large customers. Now we have multiple products and the legacy products from the companies that we acquired. And we're now trading in 18-plus nations. And again, many of them in the largest market in the world for our products. We're already making aggressive selling maneuvers in the Middle East and in Africa. And both of those are growth markets that offer a great deal of potential for our products as well. So look, we're not going to try and grow this. Lack of federal sales is bound to cause a reduction in revenue for us from that element of our business. But the question is not what's done to us. It's what are we doing about it. And what we're doing about it is diversifying and making sure that we've got other opportunities. Now I originally planned all of that for much more growth. I do still think that we will see much more growth, but we're going to see it without these federal sales. And then the last thing I'll say on this administration point is I quite often get asked questions in -- particularly in the media, and they're looking for controversy. They'd like me to say something to show how angry I am or upset I am or how we differ from the current administration. But actually, my response is always the same. Our philosophy holds a great deal in common, in fact, much more in common with the current administration than we -- than in conflict with it. What do I mean by that? Well, Beam Global is a company that was set up in the belief that there should be abundant, reliable energy. That's pretty much a consistent comment from the Trump administration. The energy should be inexpensive particularly for Americans, very much in common with the current administration. The energy security was absolutely primary. We cannot have the Russians or the Iranians or the Chinese or anybody else hacking into our grid and taking our power down. Well, that's happening, but we're making products which are immune to those sorts of interruptions. And energy that will scale up for AI, for electrification of industry, for the electrification of transportation. These are all goals in common with the current administration. So we don't see ourselves working against them. We don't see eye to eye on drill baby drill. We don't see eye to eye on reversing EV installations and the use of electric vehicles. I'm convinced that electric vehicles are coming. It won't make the slice bit of difference who's in the White House. But we do have a great deal in common, and we will be working on that. We're going to D.C. Our current plan is to go to D.C. in April and meet with members of the administration and point out how much we have in common with what they're trying to do. Our products are made in America. We hire veterans. We're really, in many ways, a foster child for what the new administration is trying to do if we can just get over this little renewable energy EV thing.

A little bump. So staying on the administration, what's the impact of the recent tariffs?

The tariffs. Well, what we've seen from tariffs so far is what we expected to see. Prices are going up, right? We are a consumer of steel. We're a consumer of aluminum. We're a consumer of copper. We're a consumer of all sorts of things. And whether we like it or not, our products, although they were made in America and although they're BABA compliant, Buy America, Build America compliant products, we still use components that come from China. I'm sorry, you cannot make anything in the world that we live in nowadays without doing so. We try very hard not to. It has to be said. Things like solar modules that people commonly buy from China, we do not. Our products do not come from China. The gears that make our tracking work that you can buy, we do not get them in China. So we try very hard not to. But in the world that we live in now, it is impossible not to have some Chinese content. On tariffs, certainly, steel is one of the largest cost contributors to our product. We're seeing prices go up where that's concerned because of the tariffs being levied. Even in advance of the tariffs, just the sniff of tariffs caused pricing to go up. And the same thing with some of the other metals that we're using. So in general, at the moment, and of course, the tariffs are an ever-moving target. We don't know from one day to the next what's going on with them. That uncertainty is certainly not helpful. But in general, they will have an inflationary impact on our cost structure. We are working very hard to immunize ourselves from that. And one of the ways that we can do that is by leaning more heavily on our Serbian operations. So we can do work in Serbia. We can deliver product to the United States tariff-free in a way that we can't if we're buying that product from parts of the world where those tariffs are being leveraged. So we have, again, contingencies in place. It's not making life easier. It's not making life better. But again, we can sit around and talk about what's being done to us or we can talk about what we're doing to manage through that. And what we're doing to manage through is make sure that we've diversified our operation, and we will lean more heavily on our Serbian facilities. Remember, going back to the 2023 numbers, all of that growth that we had in 2023 came out of a facility here in San Diego, California, 50,000 square feet. We have another 250,000 square feet in Serbia and 6 acres that we can build on that in economics that are very much superior to what they are here. So we have a lot of opportunity to manage through this process, and that is what we will do.

Yes. So I was talking a bit about Serbian -- our Serbian facilities in Europe and in fact, EV industry worldwide. Do you have any comments on like the sales and the growth of the EV industry worldwide?

Yes. The consumer is not listening, okay? The consumer is not listening to the administration and the consumer is not listening to the media either. The administration says the EVs are dead, the media says the EVs are dead, okay? Well, the numbers don't back that up at all. If you look at Argonne National Laboratory's numbers, arguably the most reliable numbers that you can get in the world right now, they have sales in the first couple of months of 2025 at a 42% year-over-year increase. Cox Automotive had them like 34% or something in the United States. So there's a diversity in the numbers there. Argonne is more reliable. They said 42% growth year-over-year. So the consumer clearly is still buying electric vehicles. And this goes back to what I said earlier, electric vehicles are coming regardless of who's in the White House, regardless of what's administered. This is not a tree hugging move or anything. Electric vehicles are just superior. They are less expensive actually to make for the automotive manufacturers once they're geared up to do it in the future. About 50% of automotive OEMs employees make engines and gearboxes. Electric vehicles have neither of them. So they'll be able to make these vehicles with much more utility, much less expensively moving down the road. And again, consumers like them. People who've driven electric vehicles will not go back to internal combustion engine vehicles. So we're still seeing growth. We're seeing significant growth, as I said, 42% year-over-year in the U.S. year-to-date and similar growth rates in Europe and the rest of the world. So I really would -- one thing I would certainly caution everybody on this call is if you're reading media reports that say that EV sales are declining and all this stuff, it's just like most of what you read in the media, nonsense. And if you don't get too hung up on what's going to happen in government over the next couple of years because as I have always said, those of you who have listened to me talk about this in the past will know that I've always said that while we had some government tailwinds in the beginning of this industry, it will be a consumer-led industry. The consumer will end up demanding these things in the same way that demanded cell phones and tablets and WiFi and all the other gadgets that they can't do without. Electric vehicle is just the most magnificent gadget anybody ever owned, except it on 4 wheels.

You have an EV yourself, don't you?

Yes. I have quite a few EVs, and they're not -- they don't all have 4 wheels. So I mean I have a Rivian pickup truck. That's one of the best arguments for electric vehicle. You go to use a pickup truck that does 0 to 60 in 3 seconds. I can beat Ferraris and Lamborghinis and everything away from the lights and I do. And then even faster than that, my Zero electric motorcycle. Zero Motorcycles, a California-based company make a fantastic product. We are now partnering with them with our new BeamPatrol product because they sell those motorcycles to law enforcement in the United States and in Europe and in Asia. The new product, the BeamPatrol product that we have released there, a bundle of their motorcycles and our charging infrastructure allows police departments to deploy charging all the fuel they'll ever consume and the motorcycles in an hour with a single invoice. It's a beautiful product. By the way, we will be demonstrating those in San Diego at TEVCON to law enforcement and to the military in the beginning of April. We will be in Austin, in Texas at the MotoGP with Zero Motorcycles, charging them for test rides and everything else. So it's a brilliant partnership and a brilliant product. I mean, riding Zeros for several years myself now. But yes, I'm a big fan of electric vehicles. I've owned a lot of them since I've been driving electric vehicles since 2010, and I use our products to charge them. My vehicles are always full. They're always full of sunshine, and I haven't been to a gas station or done any maintenance on any vehicle at all for the last decade, except when I rent a car or something I go to a gas station. But otherwise, no gas stations and no maintenance. Again, it's impossible for me to imagine a consumer going down to a dealership and saying, I don't want the 0 to 60 and 3 seconds pickup truck. I'd rather have the 0 to 60 in 10 seconds pickup truck that has to go to the gas station 2 or 3 times a week and requires endless maintenance and costs associated with it. Consumers don't behave like that. So again, that's why you're seeing these increasing EV sales. With increasing EV sales will be increasing demand for charging infrastructure. We have the fastest deployed, most scalable, lowest total cost of ownership and most reliable charging infrastructure solution on the planet today.

Great. This question probably ties into the first 2. A shareholder asked about the main factors that drove the decline in revenue.

The decline in revenue. Okay. Well, all right. So the shareholder presumably is referring to the fact that our first 3 quarters of 2024, there was a slight decline in revenue from our first 3 quarters in 2023 because that's the only metric that's available to them out there. So let me first start off with saying that I don't even accept the premise of a decline in revenue right now. We have -- as of the end of the third quarter of 2024, we had a 70% 5-year CAGR. So what people need to be looking at is actually not '23 to ' 24 numbers. What they need to be looking at is the fact that in 2020, we did $6 million in revenue. 2021, we did $9 million in revenue. 2022, we did $22 million in revenue. 2023, we did just under $70 million in revenue, an extraordinary growth curve. And then in the first 3 quarters of 2024, we did over $40 million in revenue, which, by the way, was twice any full year's revenue in our history, except for 2023. If you straight line, if you put a CAGR on it, which is what we did, that gives us about a 70% CAGR over those 5 years. So yes, we had a very, very significant uptick in 2023 because we got a couple of large orders from the U.S. Army and from the Veterans Administration. We executed on those. If we were game players, we could have pushed some of that revenue into 2024 and had a nice perfectly stepped up revenue chart that showed that 70% CAGR on the bars as well as on the trend line there. But at the same time, obviously, we're all very aggressive here. We're all wired for growth, growth, growth. And of course, we would rather push up beyond that first 3 quarters, which again is what we've announced in 2023. And as I've just -- as I've already pointed out, with the new administration, Q4, Q1 of this year, we're going to have a couple of tough quarters because we're adjusting for that. But again, we're still on that long-term growth chart. And we are no longer selling one product into one market. We're now selling multiple products into multiple markets. And all of those products, by the way, BeamBike, BeamPatrol, [ BeamScoop ], BeamSpot, all of these products were developed in response to customer requirements. So it's not as though we made them up for fun. These are things that people have asked us for. We expect to see good markets in those products. So decline, how do I explain the decline in revenue? What I would say is we did not have the 2 very large orders that we executed on in 2023, but we're still at a 70% 5-year CAGR in terms of growth.

Yes. So in terms of cash, what's the current burn rate? And is the goal not to use the $100 million line of credit? And how you use managing cash?

Yes. So again, this is one of these often asked questions. Okay, from a cash point of view, again, if you go back to the last time that we announced, which was September 30, 2024, you see cash -- the number that's most important to me in there is working capital because we are a company -- we're a simple company. We make products, we sell them, we get paid, okay? There's not a lot of complexity in the way we report our revenues and our numbers. And working capital for us is another pretty simple number for us to look at. So we're talking about cash and AR net of AP and inventory and some prepaid stuff. What's that number? And why is that number important to us? Well, because we convert that into cash generally within a small number of months. There are some outliers here and there. But from a big picture point of view, we convert it within a small number of months. Now September 30, 2024, we had something in the order of $17 million in, 1-7 million, in working capital, same as cash. At the same time, we've been burning, if you like, a couple of million a quarter. If you do the sums there, you can see that, that gives us an awful long runway just on our existing cash resources. But there's another thing that needs to be wound into this or intertwined into this thought process, which is gross profit. We also reported net of noncash, I think we were something just over 18% gross profit. Those are cash dollars. When every time we sell a product, we get all the cash back that we spent making that product, and then we get this delta on top of that, right, which goes towards paying our bills. And that goes towards a reduction in our reliance on the available cash that we have to pay our bills and do those sort of things. We also reported in the third quarter of last year that our unit economics, taking out overhead allocations to sell a product, our unit economics, we were running between 40% and 50% gross profit so that when a unit goes out the door, taking the hard cost out of it, the direct hard cost out of it, we're getting about half the money that we sell the product to the customer is coming to us to cover our overheads and those things, which, again, all makes us less reliant on the cash that we have at the moment. So if you look at working capital and you look at this improving gross profitability picture, you can see that we have a great runway ahead of us. And you can -- and again, as I said, in fact, during my remarks on the -- during that third quarter call, if you just do a bit of back of the napkin calculation, if you look at the revenues that we produced in '23, the gross profit we produced in '24 and look at what -- and the money that we spend, and we're very, very lean, then you can see that we can cash flow in 2025. The outlier in that -- the question is, will we get back to those '23 revenues? And I believe we can and will. And so that puts us on a trajectory for cash flow.

Definitely, definitely. So as we look into 2025 and 2026, what additional levers can you pull to improve margins beyond price increases and international manufacturing capacity?

Yes. Okay. So beyond -- because it's beyond international manufacturing, we're going to take Serbia. But Serbia is certainly going to be very helpful for us in terms of cost reduction. The economics are very, very good there. But additional things that we can do. We're not planning on increasing our prices at the moment. Obviously, we've already talked in this discussion about the inflationary impact of the tariffs, which we still haven't seen the full impact of that. If we spend more money buying steel, aluminum and copper and all that sort of stuff, that's either going to eat into our margins or it's going to -- or we have to pass that on to the customer, which we prefer not to do. Nevertheless, we still have other opportunities to save money. This is a never-ending process for us, is what I tell the operations team here all the time. It's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. You finish good, start at the beginning, start all over again. And we keep doing that, and we're good at it. I mean you can see the reason that our margins are where they are today, our gross margins are where they are today in comparison to where they were just a year or 18 months ago, very dramatically improved. Why is that? Certain things certainly didn't get cheaper. In fact, we were in an inflationary process even at that time, prior to the tariff-related stuff. And yet, we were able to improve our gross profit. In fact, we've improved it 30% or 40% since the beginning of COVID, even though we've seen some very significant price increases. So we'll keep doing that. Engineering will keep looking at ways to do things better. The rule is, you figure out ways to cut costs, but never at the expense of quality. And so engineering looks at different ways to do things better. They look at ways to make the product easier to make so we can run more of it through the factory. And I hate to discount the international operations because, of course, we're going to rely on our employees in Serbia to help us with that process as well. And part of the reason we made that acquisition was because the economics are so good over there. We're very lucky in that, although we're dealing with really challenging times where the public markets are concerned. And although we're dealing with really challenging times where the current administration is concerned and their stance on electric vehicles, et cetera, we have put a lot of pieces in play over the last couple of years that have put us in really good shape to manage these things. Acquiring the battery company, so that we're no longer at risk from supply chain and from margin there, acquiring our facilities in Europe so that we've opened up a massive new market, but also given ourselves the capability to make product there and sell it across Europe and into the Middle East and Africa, acquiring the power electronics company to lessen our reliance on outside vendors, pay less margin. And by the way, power electronics will be one of the ways that we'll reduce costs. Today, we buy a lot of power electronics from other people and integrate them into the product. Our teams in Serbia right now are working on replacing that with bespoke Beam-manufactured components, which will be less expensive, will have less margin, will be more reliable, and it will be better for the product. So we have a lot of levers that we can pull moving forward, and none of them are accidental. We did it. We caused these things to happen, and that's managing the business. That's what we're paid to do.

Yes, definitely. And then this is a very popular question that comes up quite a lot. How are backlog and pipeline segmented geographically and across product lines? And also, what time frame is the backlog expected to be recognized as revenue?

Okay, good. So the first half of the question, I'm not going to answer because we don't segment our business, and it's important that we don't. There are rules around that. So we don't segment the Chicago versus San Diego. We don't segment Belgrade versus Kraljevo. We don't segment any of that stuff. And we're not going to because, again, there are rules that govern that sort of thing. And the way we have set the business up, we're not doing it. And by the way, that philosophically works for me, too. I don't want to have competing profit centers within the same company. What I want is everybody working very hard to make all of the products as efficiently and as profitably as they can. So we're not going to have a segmenting conversation because we don't do it. It's just Beam Global. Doesn't matter whether you're in San Diego, in Chicago, in Belgrade, or in Kraljevo. You're just a Beam Global employee making Beam Global products, and your job is to do that as efficiently and as inexpensively as possible, and to sell as much of it as possible and to get paid for as much as possible. On backlog conversion ratio, we generally convert most of our backlog within a quarter. Again, there are some outliers to that. We'll have customer -- I just left a department heads meeting this morning. There was a customer there where we would like to deliver in the first quarter. They can't take delivery of the product in the first quarter because they're going to be resurfacing their parking lot, and they happen to be in a part of the country where it's really cold right now, and they don't want to do that until after March. So we won't deliver those in the first quarter. That would push it out. But it's those kind of interruptions. In general, we convert all backlog that we have within a quarter, certainly 2 quarters.

Okay. And then how are Beam Europe performing? And what are your expectations for growth?

By the way, just coming back to that last comment. I want you to ask me that question again in a second. But just coming back to that last comment. There's another thing that -- I don't know if it's on your list, it may even be on your list, but one of the questions that I get a lot is, well, you haven't announced any sales since January of last year, or something like that. You haven't sold anything since January of last year. Well, first of all, that's nonsense. Read our press releases. We've announced sales. But secondly, you don't need us to announce sales. You can have a look at our filings. You can look at the revenues that we've announced. As I said, we did $40 million in revenue in the first 3 quarters of 2023. It doesn't sound like no sales to me, okay? So if there are people out there that are concerned that we haven't made any sales, or we haven't announced any sales, it's true that we have not made any of the U.S. Army scale sale. We haven't made the $30 million purchase order sale since that time. I believe we will again, but we haven't since that time. But clearly, we've made an awful lot of other sales, more than $30 million. Otherwise, we wouldn't have been able to announce that revenue and still have backlog. I think we had about $10 million in backlog at the end of the third quarter of 2023. So add that to the $40-plus million in revenue that we did. That doesn't sound like no sales to me. Sorry, I just wanted to make sure that we were clear on that.

Okay, 100%. I was just asking, how are Beam Europe performing and your expectations for growth in that area.

Very well. I remain very happy that we made that acquisition. The core business that we acquired, and again, we're not segmenting, but the core business that we acquired there has done well. It's growing. The team is executing on everything they're doing profitably. But on top of that, they've also produced an awful lot of EV ARCs and are helping produce the BeamSpot product and everything else. These are all things that we've layered on top of them without increasing costs there. So we've been able to get a lot more leverage out of that. A very talented team of people, it's very well run. I just spent a month -- over a month with them selling across the region. The meetings that they set up were excellent. The way they conduct themselves in the meetings, their knowledge of the products, their ability to describe it, and I've been very, very happy with all of that. And I believed -- when I made that acquisition, I believed that Europe would end up being a bigger opportunity for us than the U.S. And that was before the new administration. I continue to believe that Europe will be a bigger market for us simply because it is a bigger market. There are 405 million cars in Europe, 320 million in China, and 290 million in the United States. That makes Europe by far the largest market in the world. And by the way, they're aggressively electrifying. 2035, you will not be able to buy a diesel or gasoline vehicle in that market anymore. So we're going to see, I believe, an awful lot of growth in that market. And then the other thing that Europe has done for us is it's opened up the Middle East and Africa for us. We've already shipped to the Levant. The Middle East is next. And we're -- as I said earlier, we're aggressively selling on to the African continent at the moment. A lot of misconceptions about Africa. People ask, Africa, why would you go there? There's no money there. Please Google that. There's plenty of money there. It's not always spent in the right ways, and there are certainly a lot of people who don't have any money, but there's plenty of money there for products like ours, and that's what we're going after. It's a massive opportunity as well for us. So I'm actually thrilled. Listen, as I said, I made that European acquisition long before I expected any kind of a downward trend of federal sales in the United States of America. It was the right thing to do then. It's only more the right thing to do now.

Okay. So you were talking about the size of facilities we have in Europe as well, the 250,000 square foot. One shareholder asked, do you plan on building on the property in Europe? And if so, please explain what?

Yes, I do plan on building on that property in Europe. I don't have specifics to give there, but we've got 6 acres. We have a very friendly local government. We have a very friendly national government in Serbia. I meet with the ministers at the highest level there. They're big supporters of Beam and what we're doing, particularly now that we've made 2 acquisitions in 18 months in that part of the world. And, yes, we've got a great deal of opportunity there to do a whole lot more. And honestly, that's one of the great promises of the place. We can scale up like crazy there pretty inexpensively. And when we do build on that spot, we'll still perform a great deal of it. That's one of the other great benefits of having a 250,000 square feet, amongst other things, steel manufacturing facility is we can build the buildings and everything else that we want. We can self-perform an awful lot of that work over there. So from a capital point of view, that would be a very inexpensive expansion for us.

Definitely. And then you were talking about your travels in Europe. Can you please expand on some of the customer meetings and their priorities or what they're most interested in?

So the most recent trip, and again, I'm on my way again, I'll be leaving in April to go back to Europe and to the Middle East there. As I think most people are aware, we're working on a very exciting solution for Gaza at the moment. And so I will be in Jordan in the middle of April, making sure that that's continuing to operate and meeting with government officials and other prospects there. So I'm going back. This most recent trip, I was about 4 weeks on the road there, visited the United Kingdom, France, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece, North Macedonia, I'm sure I'm forgetting some there. But anyway, it was pretty hectic. 7 days a week, breakfast, lunch and dinner. And it was a combination of our internal sales team in Europe. And then another very exciting aspect of what we're doing there, which is adding distributors and resellers and agents. We're doing that in the U.S. as well. It's another reason I feel confident that we will get back and beat our prior revenue records is because we did all of those with a very small internal sales team. Now we have that same small internal sales team. We have the European sales team, but we're force multiplying that, levering that up with distributors and resellers, and they're keeping us really busy. So when I was in places like Croatia and Montenegro, we were going to meetings that were set up by our resellers in those markets. And the quality of the meetings was fantastic. I'm talking about mayors, I'm talking about local government officials, I'm talking about electric vehicle charging companies, I'm talking about ridesharing companies, I'm talking about large resorts, tourist towns, sorts of places that BeamBike, [ BeamScoot ] and our EV ARC products will be very, very popular. Airports, I was at -- met with Dubrovnik Airport, one of the windiest crosswind airports in the country, perfect for the BeamSpot product there. Met with VINCI Airport Group, who is the group that owns Belgrade Airport, where we have our sponsorship program. They have 70 airports across the world, and we have a great relationship with them. We intend to expand upon that, what we've already done for them in Belgrade. So the quality of the meetings was really excellent. And I think that the most resounding, impactful statement I can make about it was, I've been doing this for a long time. I've been running public companies, I've been running companies for a long time. Inevitably, that means you're doing a lot of selling. You're out there selling the company, you're out there selling the product. You would normally expect that some pretty large percentage of the people that you talk to say, no, thank you, right? That's just a numbers game. Not everybody wants coffee, some people want tea, right? Well, we can't show up with something that everybody wants all the time. In this instance, materially every single meeting that I had, breakfast, lunch and dinner, 7 days a week for a month, the response from the customers or from the prospects was the same. The product is fantastic. We had no idea what we were going to be seeing until you explained it to us. Product's fantastic. We want them. No one said this is a stupid idea. We can't think of a need for this. We don't want it, because they all have the same needs. They need bike sharing, they need EV charging, they need to electrify their fleets. They all have the same needs. They all come up against the same things, construction, electrical work, utility bills, lack of capacity on the grid, blackouts and brownouts, the sorts of things that our products solve for, have been solving for in the United States for a decade plus, and now it's starting to in Europe. So it was really gratifying. And what I left -- I told the team over there, follow-up, follow-up, follow-up. That's what this is going to be all about right now. But what was most gratifying about it was when I left the team and what I said to them is, listen, when you see this happen, when you see this level of yeses coming from these types of meetings, some of them are going to move to purchase orders, right? Some of them are going to move to purchase orders. Our job is to push them over the edge there. I intend to do a lot more of this. I'm going to be really very heavily focused on expanding our sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. That's going to be, frankly, my #1 job this year. And I'll be spending a lot of time on the road. Wife and kids aren't thrilled about that, but they're used to it. I've been doing it for a long Time. Yes. So really very good, very, very good response.

Good stuff. You mentioned the BeamSpot having a lot of potential in Europe there. It's very frequently asked about. So what are the final steps before it hits the market? And then when do you expect it to become a meaningful portion of revenue?

So it's already hit the market. We've already sold it. But not surprisingly, and I've said this many times, our teams have discovered lots of ways to make it better. This is pretty typical for what goes on. We are not a company that keeps products in R&D for years. We build them, we get them out there. And inevitably, when we do that, we find out lots of ways to make them better. That's a good thing. That's why the EV ARC is less expensive today and far more productive than it ever has been in its history, because we keep making them better. We're going through that process with BeamSpot right now. I hesitate to guess at when it will become a meaningful part of our revenue, but I still believe it will end up being the largest single unit seller that we have moving forward, especially when I'm having -- I kind of got it wrong on BeamSpot. I thought BeamSpot was going to be a purely municipal sell. I thought it's really just who we're selling streetlights to, particularly who we're already selling streetlights to in Europe, because we're the fourth-largest streetlight manufacturer in Europe now as a result of our acquisition over there. I thought it was really going to be that type of customer. But what I've learned is actually shopping malls, stadiums, airports, anywhere that has large area parking lots like that, with lighting in those parking lots are great opportunities. And so it may well be that, actually, it's certainly in the early days. We see less of the municipal type rollouts and more of these commercial applications, which is certainly where the first sales have come from. And I must say, when I was traveling and selling over there right now, airports, those types of environments seem like very good. They have these very large parking lots. They're quite remote from the building. It's very expensive to get power out to them, but they have to have lighting. The BeamSpot is a perfect solution for them.

Definitely. Sounds good. Do you foresee any capital constraints as you scale manufacturing and operations? That's another question came in.

Capital constraint is a fact of life, right? But not where your question is concerned. We're not looking at a scenario where we're saying, hey, we would like to do certain things we can't do because we haven't got the capital right now in terms of expanding our current facilities. We're really efficient here in this facility in San Diego, in terms of getting the product out. We're constantly making better. We're constantly tooling things up. That's again, how we improve our margins. Same thing in Europe, very well-equipped over there. So we're not in a situation right now where we're thinking, oh, damn, if only we had X amount of capital, or oh, damn, we're not going to be able to hit this year's numbers because we don't have that capital or whatever else. I think in the future, when you see us using capital, it's going to be either we've seen another acquisition that we think is important to increasing value in the company. And again, if you look at the acquisitions that we've done, the batteries, the 2 acquisitions we've done in Europe, absolutely fantastic, especially given the current environment. Those are fantastic acquisitions. We may do more. There are still gaps that we'd like to fill. And then if there was some other very aggressive growth strategy that we could execute on. But I don't view that as a constraint. I view that as an opportunity that we'll address when it comes.

Great. And then last question for the day, from an IR perspective, what are the plans for the coming year? Keeping shareholders interested and keeping them updated.

So first of all, thank you for your efforts. Since you've come onboard, I think, we've become a lot more street fighting and less strategy where IR is concerned. And a lot of that has to do with where the market is, frankly. When we look at our share price, and we compare it to all our peers, we compare our charts. And if anyone hasn't done this, I encourage you to look at the webinar that we did in the fourth quarter last year, because we went into this in quite a great deal of detail. What you're seeing is that everybody's share price is behaving in exactly the same way in our space. Their charts look identical to us. Some of them spend fortunes on IR, some of them spend nothing on IR, some of them spend very little on IR like we do. In fact, we've reduced our IR spend, although I believe we're doing more now because we're communicating constantly. We have several -- you know better than I do. We have several thousand people in our list, and we're communicating constantly. Some of you are getting pissed off by that. Some of you are writing to us and saying you don't like us telling you about stuff as regularly as we are. Don't open it. That's okay. Just don't open it. It won't hurt you. It doesn't cost you anything. For the rest of you who want to know more, we're communicating as much as we can. But I think the big lesson that we've learned over the last 12 to 18 months is, as I say, companies with very large IR spends, their share prices are performing exactly the same way as companies with very low IR spends. Companies who have really good fundamentals, and I count us in one of those. Cash flow very much on the horizon, positive gross profits, constantly improving, great product, great IP, expanding markets, new products coming to the market and all that sort of stuff. Their stock is trading just as well or just as poorly, frankly, as some other company that's got no revenue and no products, okay? So at the moment, I think we're in an environment where we're saying to ourselves, let's be very mindful of cash. Cash flow this year would be much more important to me than having a fancy IR program. And fancy IR programs cost a lot of money. And by the way, that's even true for those people who say to us, well, you could use shares. Well, first of all, I value our equity a great deal. I don't like doing anything with it at the current price where it is. But at the end of the day, it still has a P&L impact. Even if it is noncash, it has a P&L impact. So what we're going to do is keep you very busy. You're going to carry on doing this stuff. You're going to carry on getting information out. You're going to carry on looking for new customers. One of your initiatives has been to look at people who are invested in other companies like ours, but not invested in Beam, even though we believe we're a better company. Let's have an opportunity to explain that why we believe that. They will be the judges of that, of course. So we're going to keep doing all of those things. What we're not going to do is sink a great deal of money into a huge and expensive IR program because it's a bit like the First World War right now. We can pour people over the top of the trenches all day long, every day, and not make any yardage out of it. I'm not going to do that. We're going to continue to execute on the business. We're going to continue to do everything we can to increase our sales and our opportunities with products and everything else across multiple markets. And we're going to keep communicating that, but without investing a huge sum of money in it.

Great. Thanks very much again for your time today, Desmond. You've definitely covered a lot of topics and questions from our investors. Hopefully, that provides a lot of clarity and updates for all of you out there. And I can safely say for myself, sitting here in San Diego, I'm really excited to see the expansion in such a short period of time since joining the company. I'm looking forward to seeing where it's going. And it doesn't look like it's stopping anytime soon. So I just want to also remind the audience that feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] or [email protected]. Happy to speak with you anytime, good or bad. And obviously, if you want to get in touch with Desmond, feel free to reach out to me. He has obviously a very busy schedule. You can hear from all the recent travels and that. So I'll do my best to coordinate with him, and he's always happy to chat to our shareholders. So it just remains for me to say thanks very much for your attention and for joining today. I hope it was as an informative webinar. And if you have any follow-up questions, I'd be happy to answer them. And of course, thanks very much for your support of Beam Global, and I hope you have a nice week.

That goes for me, too. I'm very appreciative. We all know you're busy, too. So thanks for tuning into this, whether or not you've done it live, or you're looking at the rebroadcast of it. And yes, listen, we're not afraid to answer questions. We're very proud of what we're doing. We're very proud of this company. We're very proud of the products. Times are tough, but we are tougher, and we're going to continue to execute on the business. So be in touch, hit us with your questions, your comments, good, bad or ugly, we'll do our best to make the most out of them. Thank you very much, everybody.

Thanks very much.