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

Good morning. My name is Bill Peterson, U.S. Clean Tech analyst, and we're pleased to have the team from Blink Charging here. It's Michael Battaglia. I probably screwed that up. But he's the Chief Operating Officer of the company. We also have Vitalie Stelea, who's from IR. We're going to go to straight to fireside chat. They also had their earnings yesterday. But first of all, thanks for supporting the JPMorgan Auto Conference. And maybe first, you can just provide a quick introduction to the company, and then we'll move on to the quarterly earnings that you did yesterday before talking about more strategic efforts that you're doing.

Yes. Will do. Thanks, Bill, and good to see you again. Appreciate it. So yesterday, we did release earnings. We'll get to that in a minute, but to give you some context about who Blink is. Blink is a full service EV infrastructure company. Now what does that mean? It means we offer the full suite of EV charging hardware. We own, operate, maintain, develop our own cloud-based software network, and we provide installation services where customers would like them. What sets us apart and what our go-to-market strategy is, is that we offer flexible business models to our customers. So there's 4 to be exact, and there's variations even off of those 4. We sell equipment to customers that want to buy from us. We own and operate equipment. And within our owner-operator model, we have 2 different approaches. One of them is what we call turnkey or 0 CapEx, which is where a customer comes to us and says, "Hey, I want to put an EV charging, but I don't want to pay for any of it. And if that property meets our criteria for ROI, we'll go ahead and take on that project." That's a relatively small part of our business. What's a much bigger part of our business in the owner operator model is what we call the hybrid. And that is where the customer is responsible for the electrical infrastructure at the property. So think of things like electrical panel upgrades and running conduit to a parking spot and what we call stubbing out that parking spot in the EV infrastructure industry. So the customer would be responsible for all of that construction. And then Blink would provide the charging hardware at no cost. We own it, we operate it, we maintain it and we share the revenue with the host. So that is the vast majority of our owner-operator business. And then we also provide charging as a service, which in effect provides all of the elements of as if I own the charging station, but they just pay for a monthly -- they just pay for the charger on a monthly basis and it includes things like network fees and maintenance.

Great. So again, you had quarterly -- your second quarter results yesterday. And I guess, when we think about the results themselves and also the guidance, first of all, what drove the decrease in the product revenue year-over-year? And how should we think about the revenue and your confidence that it can improve later this year in the fourth quarter and then to 2025?

Yes, it's the question everybody wants to know. So what drove the softness for us into the second quarter is basically EV sales overall in the United States and specifically in the U.S., but also this is also happening in Europe to an extent is EV sales in new car sales have shown some softness. So when we modeled out 2024, we were looking at an industry of somewhere between 10% battery electric and 13% BEV. What we've seen instead of that is, I think the first quarter was 7-something percent and then it ticked up a little bit to 8-something percent in the second quarter. But again, well behind where we expected 2024 to be. So to some extent, our sales will mirror what's happening in the EV industry, again, to some extent. So we see some softness in the second quarter. We see that running into the third quarter a little bit, but then we see some strengthening visibility into the fourth quarter. And one thing I'll just mention is that when I joined Blink 4 years ago, our full year revenue in 2019 was $2.7 million. So I always ground our team back to that because we've grown so far so fast. And we've had a successive string of really great quarters, and call this a small bump in the road, but it doesn't change our optimism. It doesn't change our strategy, and we're as optimistic as ever.

And along with that, so the revenue guidance for the year, you did take down to $150 million at the midpoint. But you maintained your margin target at 33%. So what are the drivers there and how you're able to, I guess, maintain that mix despite revenue base coming down?

Yes. So we love to point out the fact that we have the highest gross margins in the industry among alike companies. So we have now in multiple quarters in a row, have had 30%-plus gross margins. We feel good about that for the balance of the year. So what drives that? There's a few things. Number one is we're a vertically integrated company. And that is a differentiator compared to others. What does that mean? It means we manufacture in -- to a large degree, our own equipment. So we have 2 production facilities globally. One of them is in Bowie, Maryland, which produces made in America Level 2 charging stations. And we also have a manufacturing facility in India. So we can serve global markets through our manufacturing footprint in India. We can serve Buy America requirements in the United States. And again, that is all Blink-manufactured equipment. So that gives us an opportunity to gain more margin. The second area is on the owner-operator business. So when we look at software services, when we look at things like recurring monthly networking fees and most importantly, when we look at charging revenues. Those are high-margin recurring revenues, which are continuing to grow. And in fact, we expanded that segment of our business from 21% in the second quarter of last year to 24% this year. So it's nearly 1/4 of our revenue now is coming from that high margin recurring Blink-owned charging revenue.

Okay. And then maybe just on the hardware, just product mix. At this point, where do we stand on third-party manufacturer chargers, I guess when will that be depleted, looking at?

Yes. So our stated goal has always been that we want to maximize that vertical integration strategy. So that means minimizing the amount of third-party products that we're purchasing and that we're deploying out into the market. So our goal is 80% -- is to have 80% of the charging hardware that we deploy, be manufactured by Blink on the L2 side. So we have 2 different things going on. We have L2 hardware, and we have DC hardware. So on the L2 side, we still have some legacy customers that have purchased third-party hardware and just kind of continue to purchase that. Most of the reason why they have continued to purchase that is that we did not have a Blink-manufactured single port Level 2 charging station. We have that product coming out this year in October. So we're going to see more customers shift over to the higher-margin Blink, what we call Series product. We are doing the same thing in Europe. In fact, 100% of what we do in Europe is third-party product. And we have a charger in development that will cover 80% of the work we do in Europe that will be launched mid- next year. So again, we're going to shift that entire product set over to Blink-manufactured. Now just to round it out real quickly, on the DC side, we've taken a different tack. And on the DC side, we've elected to actually go 100% third party. And the reason why is really twofold. Number one, many companies that have manufactured DC charging hardware have gotten burned. They've carried inventory, the prices have adjusted and they've had to take fairly substantial write-downs on that. Secondly, and with that, we see more price movement in DC than we do in L2. So for example, you see -- in the DC side, you see charging hardware speeds going up and you see prices coming down. So for us, on the DC side, we're build-to-order. We don't carry inventory in our warehouses for build-to-order. And on the third-party side, even on the L2 side, we used to carry inventory and we carry very little inventory on hand. Now it's nearly build-to-order, and the inventory that we keep on ourselves is, again, the Blink-manufactured.

Yes. I want to take a step back and talk about market trends, but then also how you guys fit in with those market trends. And you outlined the business model. And typically, we think about bookends like owner operator and then hardware, software. So you truly do span this. But I guess how do you see that as being a key differentiator and help you within the -- especially the U.S. market, but markets you participate in?

Yes, Bill, it's actually one of my favorite questions. So when you look at the EV charging hardware market, there are certain customers that only want to purchase the hardware. And think of fleets. Fleets aren't going to have Blink own and operate that equipment. When they look at building out their fleets and building out the fueling infrastructure for that, they want to buy that equipment. So we sell them that equipment. And in fact, the best example of that at Blink is the United States Postal Service and our contract with them, which has been very successful. So -- but then at the same time, there are other customers think about retail shopping centers, think about hospitals, think about other nondirectly automotive customer locations. And in many instances, they need EV charging on site, but they don't want to manage that. They don't want to have to take care of that equipment, et cetera. So they are more apt to say, "Hey, can you guys put this stuff in for us? Can you manage it?" And the other thing that drives that too are mandates within certain areas of the country where, for instance, in apartment buildings, now if you -- there are certain areas of the country you build the new apartment buildings, got to have EV charging included. And again, they may not want to necessarily buy that.

Yes. We think about just where we are today, I'd like to kind of talk about that, but then how you think this evolves over time. So I guess from an owner operator, it seems there's been more of a focus on L2 currently. I guess why is that? But how do you see this evolving over time such that you expect more of a mix for DC charger to move to that model? And how should we think about the long-term split between L2 and DC for your owner-operator model?

Yes. We've been very vocal and consistent on this topic, which is when you look at EV-charging infrastructure, whether it be in the United States or Europe, all of the research shows that 90% of the infrastructure is going to be Level 2 and about 10% DC. So the addressable market for Level 2 is much larger. That's number one. Number two, the cost of installing a Level 2 charging station are a fraction of what it costs to put in a DC fast charger. And not only that, but the lead times are far, far shorter. So we can put in Level 2 charging stations from the time the project is a go to installation and commissioning easily within 120 days. When you're looking at DC fast charging easily being 18 months, 2 years, sometimes even longer because of things like permitting and planning and availability of transformers in the supply chain, things like that. So that's number one. Now we will continue to focus on Level 2 owner operator. But in my comments yesterday on the earnings release, I talked about the growth we've seen in our DC owner-operator business. And we were asked, well, does that represent a pivot? And no, it doesn't. And we have had grant projects in our pipeline that we're DC for the last 2 years. They just happen to be coming to fruition now, and so we're starting to see the station economics on some of these sites, which look very attractive. And so those stations are online now. That's going to continue to grow for us. And we're going to continue to pursue DC fast charging owner-operator responsibly. And what does responsibly mean? It means that we're going to do it in the right locations that are high traffic and that are supported by things like grants or utility funding where we can offset the cost. Because when we look at the return on capital, it's a much different equation for Level 2 than it is for DC. So we're very disciplined about that approach.

Again, taking a step higher level here. So speaking about the markets and the verticals, especially some of the key ones like fleet, commercial and residential. What are you seeing in the markets maybe differentiated further to delineate between L2 and DC fast across the verticals?

So for Blink, we are primarily commercial. So when we talk about residential, and we talk about people charging at home, for Blink, that's predominantly multifamily. That's predominantly commercial apartment buildings, things like that as opposed to a single-family garage. The commoditization of chargers for a single-family home has been pretty steep. So for us, we have intentionally focused on commercial. So we're -- so number one, we see a lot of activity in fleet. We see fleet transitioning to EV similar to the overall market, maybe not quite as fast as we would like to see. But nevertheless, they're moving and they have -- and they're doing it for a number of different reasons, which, again, we talked about yesterday. Number one, total cost of ownership is less for the fleet. They're easier to maintain. They are cheaper to fuel. So -- and many of these companies have sustainability goals, and that -- and EV charging fits into that. So going very, very well on the fleet side. When we talk about residential, which is a big, big market. Again, it's multifamily. So we are starting to see a ton of activity among the big apartment operators around the United States. And there's 2 different ways that, that charging infrastructure gets installed, either on an individual's parking spot, an individual's tenant parking spot or more commonly, a common group of chargers that all of the residents within that apartment building can share. And when we do that, we love to own and operate that equipment because the utilization is great, and it's kind of constant. So now in terms of L2 versus DC, we continue to see DC primarily applied to corridor charging, think right off highway. So convenience stores, gas stations, any other location that's right off the highway, where there's amenities where somebody can park their car for 30 minutes and either paying there or obviously go into a retail location. But when it comes to L2, that's really community charging. That is workplace that is shopping centers that is anywhere that someone's going to have dwell time probably for at least 30 minutes.

Yes. So one of the things that's always been out there sort of competition you spoke to how Classic, Residential that you'd find in a Home Depot, maybe one area where you see that type of competition. But I guess more broadly, how do you see the competitive trends across commercial and maybe fleet, particularly in the U.S., but maybe if there's any differences between the U.S. and Europe?

So I'll start with the U.S. So first of all, like any market like this, that's been growing, it's quite competitive. There's a lot of companies in the space. That said, we've also seen some washing out of a couple of companies. We've seen valuations come down. And what we see is a lot of market consolidation happening this year into next year. Blink is the third largest EV charging network in the U.S. So it's Tesla ChargePoint, Blink. So there are -- it falls off pretty dramatically after that. So while we do certainly see competitors out there, we think that there's going to be some awesome opportunities to acquire additional companies to consolidate. On the European side, we are -- we offer services in really 3 different countries. So in the Netherlands, in Belgium and in the U.K. And we're very strong in those 3 markets. We're now expanding into additional countries like Italy and Germany. In Europe, we are much more heavily focused on owner-operator business. So in the United States, we sell more equipment as a percentage of the total revenue versus owner operator. In Europe, it's actually exactly the opposite. We own and operate a higher percentage and sell less. So we're just going to continue and march ahead.

This is sort going to lead to a follow-on like what type of opportunities in Europe, it's a more mature market, much higher penetration rates thus far with EVs. What kind of, I guess, insights you glean there that you can take and maybe help benefit your U.S. businesses over the mid- and long term?

So our European team has and our European business has taught us a lot about where this market is going because EV penetration is much higher in Europe because we own so many charging stations in Europe, the data that's derived from that in terms of utilization, locations where charters are being used, time of day. All of those things that's all data that we've ingested into the United States to help us plan our -- the rollout of our U.S. footprint. So we continue to see great opportunities to expand the owner-operator business. In Europe, as I mentioned, we are expanding now into Italy, into Germany. We announced a couple of different really great partnerships recently that have been super successful, major retail operator in Europe called McArthurGlen. And that is really a fantastic opportunity for us, and we're going to see more things like that as well as Decathlon, which we mentioned on the call yesterday, which is actually the largest sporting goods store in the world. So we're rolling out owner-operator business there. So we're going to see it kind of across the board, but our real opportunities in Europe are going to be market expansion. We get a glimpse into what the U.S. could become as we see that higher adoption rate in Europe. So it's great for us.

I'm going to pause and see if there's any questions from the audience before moving ahead. Okay. Yes. Obviously, last year, there was a lot of -- or earlier this year, of course, too, there's a lot of questions about the dispenser itself, CCS versus NACS. What is the team seeing in the field in terms of CCS versus NACS standards? And how do you see this -- I mean, of course, U.S. may move just to complete in actual time, but that doesn't mean it's an overnight thing.

Yes. First of all, our #1 customer on our charging network today are Tesla drivers. And the connector that's on those charging stations is a J1772 connector. So a Tesla driver simply has an adapter, pops in the adapter and charges. So again, our #1 customer is Tesla. The OEMs have at least announced that they're moving to NACS. We think that's going to continue to happen. We actually just started shipping our first NACS-equipped DC fast chargers. So for us, the connector is -- we're connector-agnostic. Quite frankly, we don't care that much, which way it goes. We like the fact that there's a standard emerging, which looks like it's going to be NACS. But we have the flexibility to build the chassis of the charging station. And then depending on which way the market goes or what the customers requesting, we can put a J1772 cable on it. We can put an NACS cable on it. So for us, again, it's actually a welcome change, but it doesn't affect us much.

In terms of investments in the product and services, where are you investing in terms of R&D and maybe go to market? What areas do you think that there's more innovation required to improve driver experience? How does that lead to even customers potentially want to pay a premium for better service and quality?

Yes. So we're looking at that in 2 primary areas. Number one, we are innovating on the charging hardware side. So again, one of the major hot buttons in the industry is charger uptime. It's reliability, you read articles about that. And one of the big drivers of charger reliability is the interaction of the software between the hardware, the station hardware itself and the cloud-based network or the network. And in order for that to work seamlessly, you really need to have control of the firmware on the station itself. So if I'm buying a third-party charger from another company, I don't control that firmware. So when issues arise, I have to rely on a third-party company to come to the table and fix that and ensure compatibility with our network. When I designed that charger myself and it is a Blink-manufactured charger, I control the entire technology stack. And we often talk at Blink about controlling our own destiny. That's -- you'll hear that in meetings a lot. We need to control our own destiny. And what that means is it means that we control and we write the software code for the firmware on the station as well as the network itself. So again, it's making sure that we have the right hardware in-house that's cost-effective on the hardware side. Then secondly, we're innovating on the network side, which is really, in many ways, core to the future of Blink. And so we're doing a couple of different things on that front. Number one, we're consolidating all of the different third-party networks that we've operated on, predominantly in Europe. So we've acquired several companies in Europe. They each operate it on a different network. We are now in the process of consolidating all of those networks into the global Blink 2.0 network. So that is going to give us scale and cost effectiveness again in both regions where we play. But what that also does is it gives us a global platform to start rolling out things like energy management services. And that's where we think we can move to more of a SaaS model as we offer more and more services on that platform that customers can purchase that they can unlock things like that.

Great. Moving to production. So can you -- where are we in the ramp of the Maryland facility? And you mentioned some of the benefits, but maybe just precisely, what are the benefits of having domestic production, now you also have global production as well.

So the Maryland facility is up and running. It opened several months ago now. It has the capacity to produce about 50,000 Level 2 charging stations per year. And that allows us to meet the Buy America requirements today. So what's the benefit of that? Really, it comes in -- directly in terms of government funding. So when we look at things like the nevi program, there's a big L2 program out there right now called CFI. And you need to have that Buy America charging hardware in order to qualify for those programs. So that gives us a benefit on that side. It also gives us faster time to market. So when we can ingest parts and components from India, and we can assemble those in the United States, and we can warehouse them and ship them, our time to market's faster. Now on the flip side, we have this fantastic low-cost manufacturing facility in India. So what does that enable us to do? Well, it enables us to build Level 2 chargers for the U.S. market for non-Buy America applications, and it gives us a little bit of a cost advantage. And then secondly, it allows us to build charging stations for other global markets. So again, as I mentioned earlier, that's going to be the primary conduit for the redesigned Level 2 charger that we're going to introduce into Europe next year.

Yes. You mentioned briefly NEVI and some other programs, but the money has been disbursed to the states. However, just continually feels like it's always more on the come. Where does it stand? Where does the NEVI program stand? And how should we think about when it's available and how Blink could benefit looking at and perhaps where your current rate of success is thus far in terms of share?

Yes. So NEVI specifically, and again, there's a couple of offshoots to NEVI. But NEVI specifically, we've won a few sites. We have been, again, super consistent on this, where we have said we're not going to chase sites. So we're not going to plant flags. We're not going to put in a DC fast charging station in a location that we don't think is ever going to get used. So we're very selective about where we apply in NEVI. And again, we won a couple of sites. NEVI overall in terms of the pace of the rollout seems to be unlocking and loosening up a little bit. More and more stations seem to be going in the ground. And I think what you're going to see is, in the next 6 to 8 months, that station count is going to go up pretty significantly. But again, we're very focused on sort of the offshoots of NEVI. And especially as it comes to the Level 2 community program. So this -- for instance, this CFI program, we can't apply for that directly, but like a municipality can apply. And if they're awarded, they get to implement the plan that they submitted to the government. And we have multiple opportunities in the pipeline right now for CFI, and we're very excited about those.

Yes. Switching gears a little bit, where are you from the FedRAMP certification perspective? And I guess what does the opportunity to represent, but what other opportunities does it open up for you over time?

Yes. So we announced that we are in process FedRAMP designation, and I don't know there was some poking fun online as to what is in process. But basically, the government puts you through different gates. And one of those stages is in process, where it means you've designed the system, you have presented it to the government and now they are evaluating things like security and other requirements associated with being fully FedRAMP compliant. So we're well into that process. We expect to have full certification of FedRAMP in October, November-ish. And what that does is unlocks federal government opportunities for us, specifically with the GSA. So this is something that we have been working on for about 2 years. This is no slow -- this is a slow burn to get FedRAMP. There's investment dollars in it, but we're incredibly excited about the opportunity that it opens up for us, and we're nearly there.

I'm going to pause again to see if there's any questions before moving on. Okay. Blink has actually evolved. There's a number of acquisitions over time. I guess where are we in terms of progress and synergies? And what other steps are remaining from there?

Yes. So in terms of synergies, we see 2 big opportunities. One of them I mentioned, which is the consolidation of the networks in Europe. So once we do that, we're going to gain a number of efficiencies kind of throughout our operations in Europe. The second is we're looking at things -- not looking at things. We're implementing a global ERP system. So for instance, we -- when we acquired these companies, everybody was on different back-end accounting systems and we're going fully, globally on NetSuite. So things like that where we're going to see benefit. But we continue -- this is a good lead into just kind of continuing our cost reduction efforts. So if you look at our release yesterday, quarter-over-quarter from last year to this year, we reduced our operating expenses by 41%. We're going to continue to focus there on our path towards EBITDA profitability. So we see more opportunities in terms of implementing technology solutions within the organization to make us more efficient, to make our employees more efficient and to be able to reduce costs. So there's still a number of opportunities out there for us.

And maybe just even just remind like what is your -- how should we think about when that occurs and other sort of key steps to your path to EBITDA profitability? Do you need to improve market conditions? Like what are the key drivers within that?

Yes. So when -- if you look at our year and the revenue that we had modeled before we got into 2024, was in this $165 million to $175 million top line range. We set up our cost structure assuming that revenue number. And we've achieved that cost structure. So if the revenue had held where we expected it to hold, we would have hit that December EBITDA goal that we had discussed. So it's not that we missed on the cost side, it's really just that the market didn't cooperate with us to generate the top line revenue in order to get there. Now that said, we are where we are. So we're going to continue to structurally adjust the company to make sure that we have a path towards EBITDA. As we said on the call yesterday, we're not prepared to say yet when we're going to do that. Is it a point in time? Is it full year? And that is somewhat of a hotly contested issue within Blink.

Yes. I guess on that path to profitability, how does the team feel about the current cash position? And any potential additional liquidity needed in the near term? And I guess, what are the catalysts as we look into the next year?

Yes. So number one, our cash burn is down significantly. And again, we highlighted that in the earnings release and the press release, but cash burn is way down from where it was even just a year ago. So in terms of our cash position and liquidity in general, we have enough cash to get us through the rest of this year. In fact, we have enough cash to get us into 2025. The company is debt-free. So that gives us a lot of flexibility in the future in terms of how we go about the capital markets and cash needs as we are into 2025. So we're looking at various things. We have different levers that we can pull. We're getting a lot of positive feedback from the capital markets in terms of our ability to source that cash. So we can go the debt route. We can go the ATM route. We are trying to not do any dilutive activities. So we're going to start looking at things like project-based financing, et cetera. But we feel good about the cash position. We're not worried about it.

Maybe I'll pick up that last point. Project-based financing is typically very risk-adverse. I mean how can you -- did you speak to any of the earlier discussions you have to that end? Or when do you think that, that could be kind of a key part or maybe key arrow in the quiver.

Yes. So I'm hoping to actually get something together on that front even this year. So we have a lot of large projects in our pipeline that we've won, that we are planning on rolling out in different periods of time over the next 12 months. And they are really conducive to looking at things like project-based financing. So the key for us is we just want to make sure that we have the right partner, the right terms that we certainly aren't signing into anything that we're not going to be happy with later. So we are continuing to kind of vet different companies that are coming to the table, and there's no shortage of them that are interested in lending us money. So when we -- sort of when we find the right fit, that's when I think we'll pull the trigger.

Yes. And maybe wrapping up. So if we think about the company holistically, how do you see this evolving? And what does this company look like in, say, 5 to 10 years from a mix perspective, from a business model perspective and sort of operating model perspective?

Yes. So our strategic plan, and as a long-term strategic plan, encompasses 3 things. It encompasses number one, having a full suite of energy management services. And there's a lot of detail behind exactly what that means, but it's very much pivoting the company towards Software as a Service and high-margin, high-value software services. Number two, it includes operational excellence. So in every single area of the business, ensuring that we are driving quality, efficiency and innovation throughout the company. And then the third pillar of the long-term strategic plan is the customer experience. So the customer experience includes 2 real -- 2 things for us. It includes our drivers, so the people that actually use our charging stations in making sure that, that experience is top notch, in making sure that the chargers are operational and working and have the payment methods that they want to employ when they're there. But it also includes our customers, our host customers and making sure that they have the analytics and that they have the software platform at their disposal to really maximize and optimize their experience with us. So it's really those 3 things. Now in terms of business model, I think we are going to continue with our flexible business models as we've defined them now. They may evolve, they may tweak here and there, but we see no reason to change them. Some folks ask, again, if the DC discussion was a pivot? It's not a pivot. It's just a culmination of the units that we had in the pipeline that are now finally online. So yes, I think I feel good about it. We have our long-term strategic plans to find. It's -- and the company is rallying behind it.

Well, Mike, we are out of time. I really appreciate the insights you shared here this morning, and we look forward to following the progress. Thank you.

Yes. Thanks, Bill.