Blink Charging Co. (BLNK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello. This is Michael Farkas from Blink Charging. Sorry for the little -- the delay. Here's our safe harbor statements. I'm having a little bit of a technical issue for some reason here. Hold on a second. Okay. Perfect. There's our safe statement harbor. I know we're a little bit delayed here, so I'm going to run through this as quickly as I can. Blink Charging, we were founded in 2009. We're based in Miami. We have charging stations throughout the country. We have over 5,600 commercial EV charger stations in 40 states. We have 8,900 residential charging stations deployed for over 15,000 charger stations throughout the United States. We deal with strategic, commercial, municipal and retail partners, and we have direct access to over 180,000 Blink members. EVs are here to stay. Consumers are now -- they're in love with EVs, as you can tell, what's happening with Tesla. There are currently more than 1.2 million electric vehicles in the roads in the U.S., and we're looking at a global EV market, expecting to grow at a 25.6% CAGR from 2019 to 2026. And it is forecasted to be over a $567 billion industry by 2026. By 2025, EV sales are projected to account for over 30% of all global vehicle sales. EVs are growing rapidly. We've seen now that there are OEMs across the board that are investing substantial amounts of money into battery electric vehicles. Every car company is committed now to having a portfolio of electric vehicles, and we see a lot more cars on the road. Every OEM is committed to putting massive amounts of money into EVs. You have companies that are -- legacy car companies that are committing to electrify their entire fleet of cars, and whether it's Volvo, Jaguar as well as others. We've seen the commitments from Volkswagen, GM. It's a massive amounts of money that are being invested in new cars for the market, and you're going to see tremendous amounts, a variety of different vehicles powered by electricity. What does Blink do? We design manufacture and we sell and deploy charging stations. We own and operate a lot of our charging stations, and that's our main focus. Our main business is to own and operate charging stations, and that's where we see our business growing more so than other divisions of our company. And while we do sell hardware today and we do provide network and service today, our main focus of those was really to support us owning and operating charging stations. And because we have some really good equipment, very esthetically prosing tremendous output, we're selling it to others, but we prefer owning the hardware more so than just selling hardware and providing networking services. Blink's history. We started in 2009. We grew through acquisitions. We've had a lot of different developments over the years. Some really, really major milestones, and you could take a look at that on our deck online. I'm just trying to get through this because of, unfortunately, the delay. These are some of our customers. These are locations and property owners that we have our charging stations currently deployed at their properties. And it ranges from parking garage companies and services, multifamily residential commercial properties, workplace. Literally across the board, we have a very, very wide range of different property types that we deploy charging stations. Basically, anywhere where charging car parks is a tremendous opportunity for us to have our hardware deployed there. This is our hardware, and we have a variety of hardware based upon the location. What we have is the residential charging station, which is our Level 2 HQ 100. That is for dedicated parking spaces, carports, single-family homes. Our commercial charging is our Level 2 IQ 200s. Those are the fastest charging stations -- level 2 charging stations of their kind. We also have a portable charging station for service and convenient mobility, if you're off the grid in different areas and you need to have charging. And then we also have our DC fast chargers, which allow for extremely fast charging. This is our Level 2 charging station, and we believe it to be the best of its kind. It is the fastest charging station available on an AC basis. We've maxed out the capacity on the charging stations, which provides 19.2 kilowatts of output. It's modular in the same unit to work for a wall mount single pole, a pull mount, dual pedestal. We have a whole variety of our Level 2. And the most important thing about the hardware is we've really focused on it being able to be future-proof. And sometimes there are some issues at locations with the amount of power available, and we've taken that into consideration. These charging stations can share power, whether it's a small amount of power or a large amount of tower. And it really makes for a pretty economical deployment today if you don't have the infrastructure for tomorrow, you won't have to buy new charging stations in the future. DC fast chargers. These are beautiful, larger charging stations, much faster. Right now in the U.S., they're available for 50 kilowatts of output and up to 175; and in Europe, up to 350 kilowatts. These are -- some of the equipment is pretty expensive, and these are for a long highway routes in different areas where you need to have the fast charging. A lot of these units aren't really made for urban areas because of the infrastructure in some of these legacy buildings, but they're great solutions when you need on-the-road fast charging. These are Level 2 home charging stations, 30 amp charger, inexpensive to install, inexpensive to own and allows for much faster power than just plugging into the wall. And you can buy these on Amazon. These are our mobile chargers. This is really for the service market, recreational market. It's a very unique product, and we're really starting to we just release this recently, and we're starting to see some really interesting interest on the unit. The Blink network. There's a network that operates all the charging stations you saw other than the residential charging stations. And that network, you can access it through your mobile application, and you could download, call it, Blink app or you could log into blinkcharging.com. It allows you to really have some amazing data and access and information to where our charging stations are located. Pricing. It gives you really a tremendous amount of information for you to be able to find and charge your car. It also allows when -- we saw these charging stations to third parties, it allows us and them to be able to monitor those charging stations, manage them, deal with pricing, a whole slew of different functionality. It's really a -- it's a cloud-based network that really is the brains behind Blink. So how does Blink make money? I guess this is the most important question everybody asks us. Our main focus or our main reason why we started our business was to be an EV charging service provider. And the way we would make money in that business was the sale of electricity through our charging stations. No difference than the sale of gasoline to a gas pump. So our charging stations that we would own, that we would provide to our property owner partners, we would make our money off the sale of that electricity off of that fuel. And that's a recurring long-term model, especially when we own our charging stations, we have long-term contracts, exclusive contracts with our property owners. So that's our main focus, is really -- and that's where we see, years down the road, our main revenue source and reoccurring revenue source will be through the sale of fuel. In addition, we make great hardware, and it's being well received by others. So we sell our hardware to third parties. While there are some positives to it, there are also some negatives to it. While we make money right away from the sale of the hardware, and we have the recurring revenue stream through network fees and so on, it's not long term. Then there's network management services. There's advertising potential revenues through advertising models and then ultimately, energy services, not only providing energy to our EV drivers, but assisting our property owner partners with different energy solutions. We have a couple of different partnership models. One is Blink-owned, one is hybrid-owned, one is host-owned and Blink as a service. One is we pay for everything, one is we partner with the property owner, the third is the property owner pace for everything, and the fourth is -- it's basically a lease. We own the hardware, the property owner pays us a fixed fee every month. And they receive utilization and we receive a fixed rate. This is our business model, which breaks it down a little bit more, who covers what expenses, and how it breaks out between us and the property owners. This is the competitive landscape. We are the only vertically integrated EV charging station company in the U.S. We not only design and manufacture our hardware, we own the network that the charging stations operate on, and we own and operate a decent amount of our charging stations, both DC and Level 2. If you look at the competitive landscape, none of the competitors really are as integrated, vertically integrated as we are, and there's a lot of benefits because there's a lot that we learn from owning and operating the hardware that you could then put into the hardware in the network itself. So the own-and-operate category gives us a lot of information, experience, knowledge and data that we put into our hardware, which makes us have a much better piece equipment than our competitors. We've had some amazing strategic partnerships. They've been announced over the last few weeks and months. Cushman & Wakefield, we're expanding in our partnership with EUNICE ENERGY in Greece and working with Nissan in Greece as well. There's a lot of other expansion in Latin America with InterEnergy, and we're going to continuously grow that side of our business and grow internationally. Obviously, there's a tremendous importance of EV infrastructure. Key takeaways. We have over 180,000 members. We have experience and have deployed more than 23,000 charging stations throughout the U.S. We have a global expansion we have amazing charging stations, and then we have the highest-rated output on any AC charging station available, and we have flexible business models. Thank you. Any questions?

Okay. Please update the current status of the rechargeable parking lot bumpers. Is Blink developing those? Or is it being done through a partner. Please describe the potential revenue models once they are available. We are moving forward on the inductive parking lot bumper. It is a inductive charger. So it's a transmitter of energy. We are in the process of developing, and we are developing that with a partner. We -- Blink has the patent pending for the design of the parking bumper. And our partner, EnerSys, who were working with to develop the technology, is the owner of the energy transfer technology of the project. So it's going to be jointly developed, our bumper, our locations and their energy transfer technology. The revenue model is going to be very simple. We are going to sell the product to others as well as deploy them in our locations. The main focus for that product today is for the autonomous automotive market, that's going to be happening, and we see a lot of investments being made by various different companies, technology companies, automotive companies. So we believe that there'll be different uses for the product, but it will definitely have a major focus on the autonomous automotive market. Okay. I'm looking at some of these questions. What is your main advantage against your competitors? We believe that being vertically integrated as a business allows us to acquire real-world solutions that are really necessary. Developing a technology in a lab is a lot different than having that technology out in the real home. And if you look at the EV charging market, you're looking at and starting off with hardware development, manufacturing of that hardware and then the sales of that hardware. And then when you look at it from a deployment perspective, there's site acquisition. There's site evaluation. There's relationships with the host -- the owner of those properties. And then you go through the installation of that equipment, the maintenance of that equipment and dealing with the EV driver who is ultimately the consumer of our services. There's a lot that you learn from the site evaluation point onward. You really learn what do you need because of what you're seeing at these sites when you're deploying this hardware. And then, as you install it, you realize what can I do to save time to make it more efficient to install this hardware? And then from a maintenance perspective, what can we do to make this hardware better so that these issues that we have out in the field won't impact us in the future? And then again, dealing with the consumer and knowing what functionality they want, that part is something that our competitors who manufacture hardware don't do, but we do it and it adds to what our equipment -- their capabilities and functionality are. Okay. So it really -- that's really a major difference. And also, we have flexibility of models. One thing I've been seeing is, we've been asked about the research reports, the negative research reports that were written about us in the ongoing litigation. I just want to let you guys know something very clearly. You have unknown -- no research house, no name on the report, no phone number to get in touch with people, no way to have communications. We got people who call into question, what we've done? Where we've been? What we've accomplished in over here at Blink? And I can tell you, there's tremendous amount of fabrication, manipulation. And this fake news in what was written in these research reports for one purpose and one purpose only, to drive down the stock price so that they could benefit off of it. If you look at how many shares we're short in this company before and how many puts were bought beforehand, times perfectly an unknown ghost of research reports get filed afterwards. And the facts of what they bring up were just false. It's very important to know, again, we have -- we own hardware and we sell hardware to others. We have no ability to service hardware when we sell it to someone else, and we don't own it anymore. And if they choose not to service it and take care of it because the building was bought by someone else at 2 different owners since that stuff was deployed years and years ago, and sometimes not even by us, processor companies that we bought out prior to bankruptcy. There are certain things we can and can't do. And I understand someone claims to run around to 88 different locations. I don't believe it. They took -- they would have taken a lot more pictures if that was the case. And It's Important to note that there was no pictures or issues of our new generation [ hot ] charger station that we developed when we owned Blink. So I just want to assure people that we're dealing with this. It's a nuisance lawsuit. It's ambulance chasing, and we have a strategy. We're not the only guys they have done this to. You can be rest assured, we're building our business, we're growing our business, we're deploying more charging stations. And you really have to look at us as a business. Open up your mobile applications, go online and to drive around and check out our charging stations on your own, and you can see for ourselves what we have done and what we're going to continuously do.

Well, thank you for a great presentation today. That concludes the session. Enjoy the rest of your conference. Thank you.