Blink Charging Co. ($BLNK)

Greetings, and welcome to the Blink Charging Company, Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] And please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Vitalie Stelea, VP of Treasury and Finance for Blink Charging. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Ali, and welcome to Blink's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Call. With us today, we have Mike Battaglia, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Michael Bercovich, Chief Financial Officer. Today's discussions will include non-GAAP references. These are reconciled to the most comparable U.S. GAAP measures in the appendix of our earnings deck. You may find the deck along with the rest of our earnings materials and other important content on Blink's Investor Relations website. Today's discussions may also include forward-looking statements about our expectations. Actual results may differ from those stated, and the most significant factors that could cause actual results to be different are included on Page 2 of the fourth quarter 2025 earnings deck. Unless otherwise noted, all comparisons are year-over-year. For additional events, please follow our media releases in the Events section of Blink Investor Relations website. And now I'll turn the call over to Mike Battaglia, President and CEO of Blink Charging. Mike, please go ahead.

All right. Great. Thanks, Vitalie, and good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. I'm proud to report that the fourth quarter of 2025 marks a pivotal moment for Blink Charging. The most significant transformation in this company's history, our BlinkForward initiative substantially met its 2025 objectives. This quarter represents a transition from rebuilding the foundation to preparing the business for its next phase of growth. We started the year with close to... [Technical Difficulty]

Apologies, ladies and gentlemen, we have lost our speaker temporarily, one moment, please, and we should get them back in the call.

Sorry about that, everyone. I think I'm back. This quarter represents the transition from rebuilding the foundation to preparing the business for its next phase of growth. We started the year with close to 600 people globally, and today, we operate with fewer than 300 highly focused and skilled team members. We have fundamentally reshaped how this company operates, became leaner, disciplined and focused on financial excellence, and the results are showing. Let me walk you through what BlinkForward has accomplished. When I took over the role of President and CEO a year ago, it was apparent to me that Blink should operate as a financially focused business that we should fundamentally change our culture and advance with a different vision for Blink. That vision was centered on building a company that can stand on its own financially operate with discipline and scale profitably over time. We launched the BlinkForward restructuring plan in May 2025, as we set out to accelerate our path to profitability and focus on what matters, including long-term sustainable growth. I'm pleased to say that we have accomplished nearly all of the objectives that we set out to achieve in several critical ways. Our shift to contract manufacturing is now fully complete and operational. We have exited in-house production and are leveraging third-party manufacturing partners in both the United States and India. This gives us greater flexibility, optimizes working capital, lowers overhead and improved supply chain resilience, all while retaining full ownership of our proprietary intellectual property with hardware, firmware and software. Importantly, our inventory position has been dramatically improved, and we maintain a lean balance sheet that allows us to be agile and nimble to evolving market needs. We reassessed and subsequently wrote off approximately $6 million of legacy inventory at year-end as part of this realignment. And our go-forward inventory levels will reflect rightsized and asset-light positions, targeting around $15 million on the balance sheet. Moving to Slide 4. We took bold actions throughout 2025. First, our operating expense reductions have been significant. On an adjusted basis, fourth quarter operating expenses were approximately $17.1 million, a decrease of approximately 32% from the beginning of a 2025 adjusted level of $25.2 million. If we annualize our total Q4 adjusted operating expenses and compare against full year 2024 adjusted operating expenses, you would see a reduction of $39 million year-over-year. That is a 36% reduction and I'll emphasize that again, that's a 36% reduction. Importantly, these reductions were not about shrinking the company, they were about creating the operating leverage required to support sustainable growth and innovation going forward. Second, while some of our competitors are burdened by capital-intensive asset-heavy practices, our move to a more agile contract manufacturing model and better working capital discipline will serve as a key pillar in our pursuit of profitability. This is foundational to our ability to deploy EV infrastructure at scale while maintaining financial flexibility and discipline. Third and perhaps most importantly, we have accelerated the shift in our revenue mix towards higher quality, repeatable and recurring service revenues. In Q4, our service revenues reached $14.7 million, up 62% year-over-year. Service revenues represented 54% of our total revenue, up from 32% in Q4 of last year. And for full year 2025, service revenues grew 45% year-over-year to $49.3 million. And as we've said before, this is the future of Blink. Our strategy was further validated by our successful follow-on equity raise in December. We achieved our target of $20 million with a clean, no warrant raise with the majority of proceeds directed toward expanding our DC fast charging network, which we expect will provide repeatable, high-quality revenue streams. This is central to our strategy of building a durable, profitable business. Our Blink forward strategy has been built on 6 pillars: customer-driven market leadership; sustainable profitability; expanding charging solutions; capturing market share; developing recurring revenue; and securing cost-efficient capital. Each of these pillars has guided our transformation, and we will continue to execute against them into 2026 as we balance growth, innovation and profitability in the years ahead. On Slide 5, you can see the trajectory of our quarterly performance throughout 2025. Revenue has stabilized in the $27 million range across Q2, Q3 and Q4, and while we have fundamentally improved the quality and mix of revenue. The story here is clear. We have rightsized the business, shifted our focus toward repeatable and recurring revenue streams, higher margin product sales and dramatically reduced our cost structure. With the business now rightsized and stabilized, our focus is shifting from restructuring to scaling what works. Now let's turn to fourth quarter highlights on Slide 7. Total revenue in Q4 was $27 million compared to $28 million in Q4 of 2024. While top line revenue was relatively flat, this was a deliberate outcome of our strategic pivot to a lean asset-light blank that is more agile and adaptive to changing market realities. We are being selective about product sales, focusing on high-margin accretive opportunities while investing in growing our repeatable and recurring service revenue base. This disciplined approach positions us to pursue growth opportunities that are accretive and aligned with long-term value creation. GAAP gross margin in Q4 was 15.8%. This was primarily impacted by $5.9 million in noncash inventory adjustments related to our transition to contract manufacturing and our general direction of becoming an asset-light company with a robust and lean balance sheet. Excluding these onetime items, our adjusted gross margin was 37.8%, much improved from our Q3 2025 adjusted gross margin of 34.5%. We are highly competitive in our industry and expect gross margins to improve as we move through 2026, with a target of approximately 35% on a full year basis. The quality of our revenue tells the real story. Charging service revenue grew 49% year-over-year to $9.3 million driven by our expanding Blink-owned Charging network and strong performance from our European markets during Q4. For full year 2025, network fees grew 53% year-over-year to $12.2 million driven by an increase in charges added across our network, notably DC chargers, which carry higher network fees. On Slide 8, I want to reiterate that our Blink-owned charger portfolio continues to be a powerful growth engine. Charging revenue from Blink-owned sites grew substantially year-over-year and our DC fast charging revenue from Blink-owned locations in the United States, grew over 200% in 2025. As a result of our successful capital raise in December, we have approximately 30 DC fast-charging sites, representing about 150 ports in various stages of review and construction. And as these come online, they will represent a significant source of future repeatable and recurring revenue. I'd also like to highlight some of our recent DC fast charging installations, including our portfolio of DC chargers with Royal Farms. Revenue in 2025 was up over 300% to nearly $950,000. In 2024, those locations delivered $225,000 in revenue on nearly the same number of chargers. Most of this growth was driven by higher utilization as drivers increasingly recognize Blink as a growing provider of DC fast charging services. And we recently activated a new Denver area site featuring Blink's most powerful DC fast chargers to date, delivering up to 600 kilowatts. Early utilization is trending upward reflecting strong demand for ultra-fast charging. This deployment demonstrates the type of high-power, fast-charging sites that support predictable dwell times and represent compelling long-term growth and value creation opportunities. Turning to Slide 10. Our expense discipline continued to improve in Q4, excluding noncash charges for goodwill and intangibles impairment for our Mobility segment and expenses eliminated on a go-forward basis. Operating expenses came in at approximately $17.1 million. That is down from $25.2 million in Q1 2025. We have reduced our adjusted operating expense run rate by over 30% over the course of the year, reducing annualized expenses by over $32 million from the run rate at the beginning of 2025. Cash management also remained strong. Our cash burn for the quarter was approximately $2 million comparable to Q3's $2.2 million and a fraction of the levels we experienced in the first half of 2025. This continued discipline in working capital and cost management is building a foundation for sustainable operations. And remember, Blink has no debt on the balance sheet. This level of financial discipline gives us flexibility and a strong foundation. So with that, I'll turn it over to Michael Bercovich, our Chief Financial Officer, to review the financials in more detail, and I will circle back at the end of the call with our outlook. Michael?

Thank you, Mike, and good afternoon, everyone. 2025 was a monumental year in the history of being charging, and I'm so proud to be a part of it. This was a year defined by building a stronger financial foundation and positioning the business for sustainable operations going forward. Let's turn to Slide 12 for our selected financials. Q4 2025 revenues were $27 million compared to $28 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. For the full year, total revenues were $103.5 million compared to $124 million in 2024. Product revenues for the fourth quarter were $11 million compared to $17.2 million in Q4 of last year. As Mike described earlier, this reflects our deliberate strategic decision to prioritize quality of revenue or quality. We are focused on higher-margin product opportunities and being disciplined in the deals we pursue. With our focused approach for evaluating sales and our transition to contract manufacturing, we expect product margins to improve as we move through 2026. This reflects a more disciplined scalable approach to product revenue that supports long-term profitability. Service revenue increased 62% to $14.7 million in Q4 2025, up from $9 million in the fourth quarter of last year. For the full year, service revenue grew 45% to $49.3 million. This growth validates our strategy of investing in Blink-owned and operated infrastructure and network services. This service revenue are repeatable and recurring in nature, contributing to improve revenue quality and productibility. Other revenues, which consist of warranty fees, grants and rebates and other revenue items were $1.3 million in the first quarter compared to $1.8 million in Q4 of last year. The decrease was primarily due to the shift of procuring third-party extended warranty contracts resulting in modifications to the way our warranty revenue was record as previously from a gross revenue basis to a net revenue basis. GAAP gross profit in Q4 was $4.3 million or 15.8% of revenue. This compares to gross profit of $4.4 million or 15.7% of revenue in Q4 of 2024. I want to call out that Q4 included approximately $5.9 million in noncash adjustments, mainly in inventory related to our manufacturing transition and a year-end inventory utilization. Excluding these items, gross margin was approximately 37.8%, significantly above the 34.5% as we reported in Q3 of this year, and year-over-year gross margin improvement of 1,100 basis points. And I want to repeat, 1,100 basis points. For the full year 2025, gross margin was 24.6% on a reported basis, impacted by various noncash inventory charges throughout the year. Excluding those charges, full year gross margin was approximately 36% even. Turning to operating expenses. Total operating expense reported in Q4 were $37 million, which included $17.9 million related to impairment of goodwill and $800,000 in intangible assets for our mobility segment. . Excluding these noncash items, standout operating expenses were $18.3 million. And when we further exclude approximately $1.2 million of expenses that have been eliminated on a go-forward basis, and are not expected to recur, adjusted operating expenses were approximately $17.1 million. This compares to adjusted operating expenses of $25.2 million in Q1 of 2025, representing a 32% reduction over the course of the year. These reductions reflect structural changes to our cost base rather than temporary measures. Compensation expenses decreased to $10.5 million from $11.7 million in Q3, sequential improvement of 10% and reflecting the full benefit of our head count reductions. G&A expenses came down to $3.4 million from $5.3 million in Q3, a 36% sequential reduction driven by continued cost optimization across the organization. The G&A for fourth quarter were $3.4 million, which includes a $1.3 million reversal of bad debt provisions following successful recovery efforts. Without this reversal, our G&A expenses would have been $4.7 million in Q4. Net loss for Q4 was $32.7 million on a reported basis, primarily driven by the noncash charges I mentioned. Adjusted net loss was approximately $6.9 million. Full year net loss was $83.4 million on a reporting basis compared to $201.3 million in the prior year. Full year loss per diluted share was $0.76 compared to $2 loss in fiscal 2024. Total adjusted EPS in 2025 was a loss of $0.63 compared to a total adjusted EPS loss of $0.64 in the same period of 2024. Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter of 2025 was a loss of $10.3 million compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $14.8 million in the same period of 2024. Normalizing for $6.6 million follows in recurring headwinds, specifically to a $5.9 million in inventory rationalization and $1.4 million in BlinkForward restructuring compensation costs and adjusting for $700,000 G&A benefit. Our adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed to only $3.7 million. The result represents a substantial multiquarter improvement in financial performance. Total adjusted EBITDA for 2025 was a loss of $58.1 million compared to a total adjusted EBITDA loss of $52.7 million in 2024. Regarding our balance sheet and liquidity. As we previously announced, we successfully raised capital during the fourth quarter, strengthening our financial position to fund our DC fast charging investment program. Cash burn for the quarter was $2 million comparable to Q3 is $2.2 million. This consistency demonstrates that our working capital and cost discipline is durable and not a onetime in nature. Looking at our business outlook, I would like to provide guidance across 4 key areas: number one, revenue growth for fiscal year 2026, we are targeting total revenue in the range of $105 million to $150 million, representing 1% to 11% growth over 2025. This is driven by continued expansion in repeatable and recurring service revenues, selective margin accretive strategic product sales and the contribution from our growing DC fast-charging footprint, as Mike covered earlier on this call. This revenue target range is particularly encouraging as it represents the clean growth coming out of our restructuring plan last year. Following more, we are continuing to lean into our DC fast charging network strategy. While we are investing heavily in the sites today, we expect to see the initial revenue contribution from these investments in late 2026 with 2027 serving the first full year of scale revenue from the DC network expansion and our transition to a more robust recurring and repairing revenue model. This growth is driven by the core operating framework we have established rather than a balance sheet expansion or elevated cost structures, patterns that we see with some of our competitors. Number two, gross margin. We are targeting gross margins of approximately 34% -- 35% for fiscal 2026. The specific level will depend on product revenue mix between L2 and DC chargers, market conditions and the impact of tariffs on our supply chain. We see an opportunity for 100 to 300 basis points of gross margin improvement as we realize the full benefit of contract manufacturing and favorable revenue mix shift. Number three, cash flow and liquidity. Operational discipline has directly translated to our bottom line and cash preservation goals. For the second consecutive quarter, our total cash burn, including essential capital investment, has stabilized at approximately $2 million per quarter, and we can see the same pattern in Q1 of 2026. Through the successful execution of our working capital and liquidity management programs, we have extended our runway, allowing us to find our DC fast charging growth initiatives from a position of strength. Lastly, number four, path to profitability. With operating expenses down approximately 30% year-over-year, a significantly leaner operations, we are aggressively working to our operational cash flow breakeven. We anticipate significantly reduced adjusted EBITDA loss compared to prior periods. This improvement is supported by the operating leverage created through our cost reductions and revenue mix shifts. We also expect continued operational improvements to position the company for profitability. This is a target for us, an internal measure and KPI, and we will continue to pull levers across both revenue growth and expense optimization to achieve it. And with the few levers that we are targeting is our revenue growth and product sales that are focused and disciplined in various tactical opportunities to shed significant costs that are not related to headcount, but operational excellence. We believe that with successful execution that we have already exhibited during this last year, we will see additional increases in our margins. The things for improvement include optimizing charging demand fees, simplifying our payment processing and SIM card fee structures and rationalizing charger assets. We have concluded an internal review and with a unified effort, this items with progress tracked and reported accordingly. Some of our peers continue to struggle with legacy debt and high cash burn. Our no debt lean balance sheet position allows us for aggressive capital-efficient DC fast infrastructure deployment, a significant difference as we move towards profitability while maintaining financial flexibility and discipline. I will now turn it back over to Mike to wrap it up. Go ahead, Mike.

All right. Thanks, Michael, and the call didn't drop, which is nice. So the fourth quarter full year 2025 represents a defining chapter for Blink Charging. As we continue to BlinkForward into 2026, our focus is on building a business that can stand and grow on its own. We have transformed this company from the ground up and accomplished several notable milestones, including reducing our head count and operating expenses significantly, transitioning to contract manufacturing and improving working capital, reducing quarterly cash burn from $15 million to $2 million, improving our repeatable and recurring revenue mix, raising $20 million with favorable terms and beginning deployment of our high-speed DC charging footprint. Since my time as CEO, I've been clear about what we set out to do, and we've executed against it. We said it, we did it and the results are visible in the business day. That same disciplined approach continues to guide how we operate as we move into 2026 and beyond. So I would like to extend a thank you to the Blink team for its resilience and focus throughout this past year of transformation. And I would like to thank our customers and drivers who rely on Blink to provide energy to the vehicles every day. So with that, let's move on to Q&A. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is coming from Craig Irwin with ROTH Capital Partners.

Congratulations on strong execution in this environment. So Michael, I wanted to start by asking about the impact of your restructuring, right, the way you've repositioned the business for better profitability in '26. The big item, I guess, is the repositioning of your manufacturing and the change in strategy around the way you're managing working capital. That's generated a lot of improvement for you, it's like a great significant -- very significant reduction in cash needs. But the overall benefit is still cutting in, at least as far as I understand. Can you help us unpack how this continues to benefit you over the course of this year? You got to burn down to -- was it $2 million a quarter, which is incredible. I mean...

Yes.

Better than last quarter. I mean, again, but how does this continue to benefit the organization over the course of this year? Does this bring down OpEx for it? Does it improve overall cash needs? And can you talk about the facility footprint? Is other likely changes that you made the key changes at the company?

I'll start, and then I'm sure Michael is going to jump in on this. So one of the things that we introduced into Blink this year is -- and we talk about it all the time, is a notion of radical simplicity. So we use that against everything we're doing at the company. So how can we reduce complexity throughout every facet of this organization in order to enable focused execution on the core parts of the business. So let me unpack that a little bit. So when you look at this major shift that you referenced from in-house production to contract manufacturing, what's the benefit? Well, first of all, and I'm going to start with the bottom line and then work back. The bottom line, our cost per unit did not change. So think about that. We were building units ourselves. We outsource them to contract manufacturers and the cost per unit stay the same. So what's the implication of that? The implication of that is that we don't have to manage the entire supply chain. We don't have to stock parts. We don't have to forecast individual components. We have significantly reduced revenue -- inventory risk on our balance sheet. And so then it brings us to a point where we can simply plan for demand. So we can forecast out 1 SKU, 2 SKUs, 5 SKUs rather than 500 SKUs associated with components and manufacturing. It also allows us to carry less inventory, so to be far more efficient from a working capital standpoint and to think of the business more in a just-in-time inventory type environment. So we've never built DC fast chargers. If you think about it, we've always sourced them. And now we're just simply extending that and doing that the same on the O2 side. So Michael, I think you probably have some perspective on this as well.

Yes, absolutely, Craig. This is a great question. And really one of the most maybe important shifts in the business over the past few quarters. The improvement is really driven by a combination of factors that Mike was mentioning. First, will become significantly more disciplined, everything we do, cash burn on collections, right? We're collecting faster and more consistently than at any point historically, which will had a meaningful impact on our working capital. Two quarters in a row as you said, and already provided hint into the Q1 2026. Second, we structurally reduced operating expenses through the actions we have taken under the BlinkForward initiative, the onetime benefit. This is not a onetime benefit, this is a reset, complete reset of the cost base. And as Mike talked about, reducing inventory levels, that is all part of our transition to contract manufacturing and really becoming more disciplined and focused and freed up cash and reduce balance sheet intensity, which is, again, if you're comparing companies. . Our balance sheet is very light, and it will allow us to be nimble, allow it to be agile. So when we put all this together, you're seeing a much more efficient operating model, and we expect to continue managing cash burn and our business at this reduced levels going forward.

Excellent. Excellent. Well, that's big progress. And it actually segues nicely into my next question. So the investment community is very realistic about the EV and charging demand environment right now. So I don't think anyone is going to not understand your revenue guidance for this year. The one area, though, that I think is a nice surprise is the gross margin line. So this doesn't benefit directly from the working capital and manufacturing strategy changes, that you've implemented if the cost per unit is unchanged. So clearly, mix and the internal initiatives, it's your control, right? This is your initiative that's driving this gross margin execution better or execution outlook better than what we've been seeing and what we've been expecting. Can you maybe just talk a little bit more about the opportunity on the margin side how this has come together for you, how long you've been working on this and your confidence in the trajectory because it clearly is something that's been under your control, you've made changes and is delivering.

Yes. It's actually a great question. And again, I'll start and I'll let Michael -- this is -- I think we're excited to answer this question. So first of all, when you look at the progress we made during 2025, we restructured the business with really big levers. We reduced head count nearly 50%. We looked at software subscriptions and all of the normal places that you would go in order to try to cut costs. We rationalized facilities. So we exited some of our facilities in order to save cost. I mean we did many, many things, but they were big and visible. Now what we're doing going into 2026, is exactly the question you asked. What we're seeing -- the way we look at the business is we said, okay, those things were visible. What are the underlying costs that are below the surface that are not immediately visible that affect our margins. And so Michael mentioned them a bit in his comments. There are things like warranty costs, shipping costs, SIM card fees, so a SIM card like a cell phone SIM card that they also go into chargers. So how much are we paying for those? Payment service transaction fees so that we are incurring on our network. Energy management in terms of things like demand fees and how can we better procure energy so that we don't get hit by demand fees on DC fast chargers. So there's multiple things that we're looking at that will directly affect margins.

And Mike, that's exactly right. Yes, that's exactly right. And the improvements are very different from what we did in 2025. And I'm not going to, again, call out the levers themselves that we talked about. But in a nutshell, '25, we focused on larger structural levers, as you said, reduced exposure to low-margin activities, restructure operations, resets the cost base '26. As you said, below the service improvement, it's all about operational optimization. And that's what's exciting about it because we're coming out of the restructuring is so strong. And individually, those are smaller levers, but collectively, they can drive meaningful margin expansion, and we believe that this will help us as we continue moving forward with our multiyear strategy.

That makes a lot of sense. That makes a whole lot of sense. So then a multiyear strategy, right, again, dovetails perfectly into my last question, if I may. So we all know that you guys have been working so hard this last year to develop a strategy to get to EBITDA positive, right? I know you guys want to make money, not just grow fast and grow at the best rate you can given the overall demand environment, but I know you want to that while making money. Are there any major items you can call out for us as external observers of the company that might facilitate that. Clearly, revenue is one that's environment-driven. Are there other things like changes in the portfolio or gaps that you'd like to close that can get you there? And is there something we can maybe consider as a time line or a loose goal given that I guess the Board has to improve disclosure of targets, but if we just talk aspirations, that may be a loophole. You know what I'm saying.

Yes. Craig, again, I'll start. So first of all, we are hell bent at this company on getting to profitability, and we're not going to wait for the market to take us there. And I want to say that again. We are not going to wait for the market to take us there. So we want to continue this theme that we set out last year and into right now, which is, look, we're going to tell you what we feel comfortable telling you in terms of the operating environment of the business, and then we want to deliver on that and then hopefully surpass that. So we're not giving guidance right now, but we're going to continue to optimize on the expense side. And then Craig, it's interesting. I mean if you look at -- for me, personally, as CEO of the company, last year was all inward focused. It was cutting expenses. It was restructuring. It was making sure that we rightsize the business. This year, I'm going to leave that to my compatriot, Michael Bercovich and my whole focus is working with the sales team on growing top line revenue because that's what we need to do. And within growing top line revenue, we need to really understand and really go after and really stay focused on the product sales segments that are moving in the industry, not phantom segments that people keep hoping for but where is the actual activity happening? And how can Blink maximize its position within those particular verticals. So we're not going to run after everything. We're going to run after the stuff that makes sense to run after where we see a market. So Michael, I don't know if you have anything to add to that.

Yes, Mike, thank you for that. And for me, it's all about two things that you mentioned, operational excellence. Last year, we hit a lot of balls and a lot of things work out for us. This year, it's going to be operational excellence going and turning every stone that we already turn and turning it again. Sales, smart sales with higher gross margin and complete the shift of the repeatable and recurring revenue that we already talked about. We have inspiration to a DC fast charging network to produce more higher margin, repeatable sales that will help us to get to profitability. We do provide guidance that this year, we anticipate a significantly lower loss on our adjusted EBITDA, and we're seeing that even from Q4, the number that we got to under $4 million and we continue driving it down. From here, we need to continue to invest in the business. continue doing what we did, and we'll get there. This is something that I know we all as a team working on, right? And there's a lot of opportunities, as I said, for 100 to 300 basis points on the gross margin. And then also on operating expenses, we'll continue doing that, but we're very, very focused on what matters. And the business and profitability are incredibly important to us.

Our next question is coming from Ryan Pfingst with B. Riley.

I guess just on the first one, the revenue range for 2026. Could you talk about the cadence a little bit for the year? And then maybe what are some of the drivers that could get you towards the higher end of the range versus the...

Yes. So cadence-wise -- if you look at our business historically, 2024 was, I think, a little bit of an anomaly. But if you look back, at least since I joined in 2020, the revenue pattern kind of stays the same, which is -- the first quarter typically experiences some seasonality, and then it starts to march up from Q4 -- from Q1 throughout the year. So I think we're going to see some of the same. If you look at how we get to the higher end of our range, some of it is going to be market activity in terms of EV sales. So if you look at the predictions of EV sales or the forecast of EV sales, it's following exactly what we expected, which is after expiration of the EV tax credit, EV sales fell dramatically, now they're starting to inch back up again. The question is what does the second half of the year look like? And ultimately, where is the market share. I think it's going to be somewhere in the 7% to 8% range. and I'm not alone in that. So by definition, it means that the second half is going to be quite a bit stronger than the first half, and you're going to see automakers releasing new products during that time. So that's one. Another one is us successfully installing the 30 DC fast charging projects that we have in the pipeline. . So we have a nice cadence of new sites coming online. We highlighted some of that in our comments. And we actually front-loaded a lot of projects, even prior to our capital raise. We greenlighted several projects such that we have them coming online in actually a pretty good flow this month, meaning April and then May into June and throughout the year. So that's another one. And then a final one is simply market consolidation favoring Blink. And I've said this before, but right now, I see -- we have many opportunities that come across our desk every single week right now for M&A. And we're not touching those right now. And a lot of those companies are not going to make it, and we think we're going to benefit from the consolidation that we've been talking about quarter after quarter and that no question is happening at the moment.

Appreciate that. And you kind of just answered my follow-up here. But the next question was going to be about the competitive landscape as the EV market, evolved here in the U.S. and what kind of opportunities that could present to you either in the form of M&A or market share gains? .

Yes. I'll start. Michael may jump in on this, too. But I've said in the past, I mean, I like M&A, I like it as -- but it's got to be -- one of the things that we are not going to do at Blink is after all the work we've done is take our eye off the ball and do something that will jeopardize the operational leverage we've created. So again, we've seen a lot of stuff come across our respective desks, but most of it is asset sales. And when you get into asset sales, the only way you're going to pick something up is if it's highly accretive to what we're doing. And anything that is not highly accretive, we're dismissing immediately anything that could potentially be accretive. We're looking at here and there. But as of now, we haven't seen anything that's really caught our eye. So Michael, I don't know if you have anything to add.

Yes, Mike, one thing to add to what you said. What we created is an asset-light less capital-intense balance sheet that will help us with the execution of our plan as we see some of the competitors out there that still live in the past, they're still burdening debt, continued burning an amazing amount of money. And in this environment, this is going to be very detrimental to the survival and detrimental to their business. And that's one of the things that we took care of this year by going through the bring-forward initiative and rolling out a completely different strategy. So we open for small opportunities, but we're also operationally focused on our plan and aim to deliver exactly what we planned.

[Operator Instructions] Our final question today will be coming from Sameer Joshi with H.C. Wainright.

Michael, congrats on the progress. This is good tightening of the belt, I know it could be hard but congratulations on the execution on that front. So on the like sort of -- you have touched on many of those things that I wanted to talk about. But if you are looking at 2026 and beyond, what are the areas of growth? Is it more of own and operate? Is it increasing the service revenues from installed base or as you just talked about some M&A problems that you're on the back burner, but could that be come into play in 2027 and beyond?

Yes. Yes. Great question. So One of the things we mentioned, and it was subtle in our comments is rationalization of our network. And what does that mean? It means the days of the EV infrastructure business planting flags and build a charger and they will come are over. And what we are intently focused on is the production of our portfolio, the profitability of our portfolio, the unit economics. So we are looking at assets that are unproductive. Quite frankly, at this stage in the game, I don't care about how many charges necessarily are connected to the network from a Blink-owned standpoint, I want to know, and I want to retain only the very best ones. So it's absolutely going to come from optimizing the sites that are proving themselves to be productive and profitable. It is about utilizing deep analytics that we have at our disposal now in order to accurately site DC fast charging sites. And then it is obviously opportunistically to take advantage of all the product sales opportunities that present themselves through our distribution channels.

Understood. Sort of maybe a follow-up on the previous one. You did speak about the 30 sites with the 150 ports. Michael mentioned heavy investment in the installed base. What could make this 30 site number grow to, say, 40 or 50? And like what are the sort of scouting activities that you are doing to find such locations that could yield you high service revenue?

Yes. Michael, do you want to take the first part of that from the financial angle and then I can answer the second?

Yes, absolutely. So part of our -- Sameer, if you remember, we talked about the majority of the investment, the majority of the cash that we raised was supposed to go to building a very strong profitable DC fast charging network. And we already had the backlog that I know Mike will talk about. So from a perspective of execution, we really needed the capital. And as Mike already earlier said today, we started with front-loaded that we already started activities of procuring for constructing because we were confident in our capital raise efforts. Mike, back to you because I know you want to talk about the backlog and delivery.

Yes. Yes. So a couple of things. One is we have somewhere in the neighborhood, Sameer, of a $100 million backlog of projects that we could install if we had the capital. So then the next question is, well, what are you going to do to get the capital? We -- as we mentioned time and again, the company has no debt. It gives us flexibility, but what we want to make sure of is that any debt that we incur is not debt for the sake of, but it can be serviced by the cash flows of the projects that we put in the ground. So that we need to prove that out to financial partners in order to get a quantum that is not just what you mentioned, Sameer, actually, our ambitions are quite behind that. So we have to prove out the unit economics, how do we prove out the unit economics? We put chargers in the right size, how do we select the right sites? We look at metro areas. And what we're interested in is density. We want to participate in dense metro areas, both urban and suburban that have high EV sales penetration that have with existing charger footprints that are in that market are demonstrating high utilization and that have gaps in the geography. And then we're going after those gaps. So I'm not going to name specific markets because I don't want to disclose that, but we have multiple metros throughout the U.S. that we're targeting and we're going to go after putting sites there.

Understood. Perfectly good answer. Just one last one and sort of it is cash flow management or working capital management. The inventory you're targeting at around $15 million. And that's -- I'm expecting that is for sales, right? That is what I would say, for sales...

For sales.

Got it. Understood. Thanks for [indiscernible] 2026.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. So I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Vitalie Stelea for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you all for joining on the phone or on line. If there are any additional questions, feel free to drop us a note at [email protected], and we look forward to interacting with you in the future. This is the end of the call.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.