ChargePoint Holdings, Inc. (CHPT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Chris Pierce with Needham Investment Bank in the research department in transportation technology. It's covering EV, OEMs and EV charging. Happy to have a couple -- ChargePoint and Verizon. We've got Rich Mohr, Vice President of Fleet Solutions from ChargePoint; along with Patrick Hamer, VP of Capital Markets and Investor Relations. And we've got a special guest, Erik Varney, Managing Director of Telematics and Industrial IoT at Verizon Wireless. We're going to spend about 35 minutes talking about EV charging and fleet solutions kind of space within the broader EV charging ecosystem. I know that investors are familiar with that as they could be or should be, and I hope to do some kind of -- just some general conversations and get into details about the ChargePoint, Verizon, how they kind of come together to help each other out. And everyone, good morning, good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Chris.

Cool. So Rich and Erik, why don't you guys give a little bit of a bio on yourselves? And Erik, if you could, I kind of just want to get a sense of -- don't just talk about EV electrification, how it plays into Verizon. You also have other responsibilities at Verizon. We're talking about -- that will fall under your purview: telematics, industrial IoT charging. It all sort of falls into your purview. So Erik, if you could go a little deeper into kind of the boxes you check within Verizon after Rich kind of gives a kind of brief introduction about how he fits in on the ChargePoint picture. Appreciate it.

Absolutely. So yes, I've been with Verizon just over 20 years. I have the opportunity to work on a bunch of really exciting technologies and ChargePoint being one of our key partners in this space that we've been able to do and doing, again, connectivity across all types of devices and solutions from, as I like to say, from ankle bracelets to charging stations to sprinkler controllers, if you will, right? So everything that has connectivity that isn't a smartphone or a tablet is something that falls within the main -- my team's purview. We've spoke -- spent a lot of time lately specifically focused in on the vehicles and understanding the power of telematics and information coming out of vehicles and being able to -- interacting with charging stations and charging posts and different things like that because, again, it's been really interesting to watch as we see kind of the future coming at us with electric power vehicles and the power that they have to really transform not only what's going on in the industry as a whole, but also what's going on for the environment and for a lot of other things. So we're excited to be a part of it and be a partner with ChargePoint moving forward in a lot of these initiatives.

Rich, how about you? How long have you been at ChargePoint? What's your kind of day-to-day look like and kind of what falls under your purview within ChargePoint?

Yes, sure. So at ChargePoint, just under 3 years now. So prior to this, I was at Ryder out of Miami for almost 27 years. I was the Chief Technology Officer for Ryder. And before that, it was the Global VP of Fleet. So it was interesting. I've gotten to work with Verizon in multiple lives now in my old roles and responsibility from the connected fleet in the IoT side. And then coming over to ChargePoint, it was interesting. Verizon was really, first, a workplace customer, providing charging for their employees at their corporate facilities. And when fleet vehicles started to become available and as we are upgrading technology on the hardware side at ChargePoint, we became more reliant and tightly partnered with Verizon because they do power our connectivity in our chargers as well as us providing them with workplace charging. So when these started to come together over years, you can see how all the different kind of inputs are starting to come together from multiple companies from an IoT standpoint, from a telematics standpoint, from a connected fleet standpoint. And then certainly, it all starts with being able to charge a couple of vehicles for early adopter employees. And then as the market's matured, certainly, the technologies have matured on how companies like us work together to solve problems for fleets.

Okay. So can we -- Erik, can we kind of start at the beginning? Like can you just give us a background on Verizon's journey towards electrifying their fleet? Like what type of vehicles are we talking about? What factors played in the decision? Where you are in the path?

Absolutely. Wish we were farther along. But as I think every industry is, what's been interesting in this space as I've worked very closely with our fleet team and moving towards is that Verizon is extremely -- we have -- we are one of the first companies to put green bonds out there. And a lot of our capital expenditures are in the green bond initiatives and making sure that we have sustainable and renewable resources for a lot of the power consumption that we have as a company. But on top of that, we have one of the largest fleet especially concentrated in the northeast. In the City of New York, I think we're right behind the city sanitation fleet and maybe FedEx and UPS. So we have -- you can't really go around a block and not see a Verizon vehicle of some sort is because of our large presence. So that's where we were looking at a lot of our offset, having vehicles that maybe go 50 to 75 miles a day or a little bit longer if they're installation bands, all the way up through light-duty trucks and then moving up into some of the heavier equipment and everything else. But as everybody is really aware, as you make these shifts, things start to get really kind of interesting because of the way that we have to shift the way our infrastructure is deployed. Oh, we can't go to the corner gas station anymore. You've got to have infrastructure to be able to charge and then working with the city and partnering with the cities and counties and areas around the places that we're going to be serving because, again, it's infrastructure, right? It's a major shift of infrastructure to ensure that we can have sufficient power to run the charging post when we all -- while the vehicles come in at night and put that kind of burden on the grid and we had to make sure of that as well. So we are about a year into our 10-year plan where we're really moving towards a lot of that. We now have well over a couple of hundred vehicles in our fleet already that are electric-powered, again, light duty primarily today that are going to be used for very specific work tasks that have very specific capabilities. But that is going to grow exponentially, especially as we start to see that dearth of electric vehicles for fleets getting opened up by a lot of the manufacturers and being able to do a lot of those capabilities as we move forward.

Okay. And when does EV charging enter the equation? You're thinking about getting allocation of these vehicles, putting in orders for these vehicles. Like when do you have to think about how am I going to charge these vehicles? Where am I going to keep these vehicles? What am I going to -- what do I need to do to the facility where I keep these vehicles? And how quickly can I do it? Like how does all that kind of factor into this decision?

So that has to be the first thing. You really can't have and say, "Oh, here. We're going to give you an electric vehicle but it's nowhere to charge. Have fun," right? There's got to be capabilities. So that's one thing that Verizon, as Rich alluded to earlier, we've been doing very forward thinking on a lot of our facilities. So a lot of our switch facilities, infrastructure facilities, retail stores have ChargePoint infrastructure in them already today. But again, moving to just taking 25% of [indiscernible] where you have -- that would be moving from gas to electric -- or from fossil fuels to electric, I should say, requires quite a bit of infrastructure shift, right, and knowing that now I have to be able to run cables, I have to be able to do different types of capabilities. But what's been really interesting is some of these ideas that we've been pioneering with ChargePoint, they introduced to us from a private-public infrastructure capacity. Hey, well, you've got a yard. You can park your vehicles. Why not have an infrastructure that's available at that yard that can both do your private fleet at night, but then during the day, maybe having cables and infrastructure that goes outside the fence that can be used by the public, which is -- that can benefit a neighborhood and a lot of other things? So there's been some really interesting planning that's been going on within Verizon to really drive forward on a lot of those initiatives to ensure that we're doing things that are equitable for everybody.

And Rich, how does ChargePoint approach -- just kind of broadly approach the fleet market? Is it about partnering with OEMs by vehicle type? Is it about leveraging your partner distribution network? I just want to get a sense of when you think about -- is someone like Verizon calling you, saying, hey, we're trying to get vehicles and we -- or are you going to someone like Verizon and saying, "We've got a customer like Verizon. This is how we help them electrify their fleet. This is how we can help you." Like what's the push/pull?

Yes. So I think the first thing to remember when we're talking about fleets in the United States, it's really around not disrupting the current operations that the clients have. So in the transportation business, these teams have spent the past 20 and 30 years kind of fixing their supply chain, implementing their transportation management systems, integrating their fuel card providers. There's been an enormous amount of work in transportation that the teams have done over the past 20 years. So just because we're introducing an electric vehicle, it wasn't necessary to disrupt the work that the teams have done. So the way we approach Verizon like other fleet customers is we look at it from like a visibility, access and control standpoint. So when we talk about introducing electric fleets into their operation, we talk about visibility. Are you going to have the same visibility on your electric fleet that you do on your diesel or gas fleet? Can you access the data in the same manner that you access it right now? So is it still integrated into your transportation management system? Does it still work with your current telematics system? Can you still access it with your fuel card? And then control, to Erik's point, within the infrastructure, can you control how that energy is distributed within your facilities? And can you do things that you need to, to balance power, to give your drivers access, to be able to understand what your peak demands are? So when we approach customers and partners on that type of deployment, that's how we talk about the business, and that's how we show them the business integrate. So I think it's a little bit of push/pull. I think there's probably a handful of companies in the U.S. that are as far along as Verizon is, certainly, from a Fortune 5 standpoint. There's others in a smaller scale that are starting to adopt. But the higher up you get in the Fortune 5 and the Fortune 1000, the more complicated the integrations are because they've spent years driving costs out of their business specifically in transportation. So that's really where the push/pull comes in. And it's interesting, Verizon has all of those. Some of them may own like their telematics deployments, and we have to learn how to integrate with them on those systems so we don't disrupt their operations. That's really kind of the push/pull. It's not a clear case of, "Hey, I'm getting vehicles. Let me go pick a charging company, and I'm sure it will work out." We have to show them that we've done the work on all those integrations over the past 5 years to really be able to do that without disrupting their business.

Got you. So on that kind of front then, Erik, what kind of -- I guess, what kind of -- how did the ChargePoint/Verizon relationship get started? And what kind of led you to think that they were the right person -- right firm to partner with as you went down this road versus other bids you might have seen?

Absolutely. No, again, it's -- from my perspective, I've known ChargePoint for a little over 10 years. They did a very, very good job from the beginning of really democratizing a lot of that access. So there's a lot of capability, a lot of us saying, hey, let's -- how do we get -- how do we make a charger work at a store? How do we make this -- so that's what attracted us initially to ChargePoint was that they said, "Hey, we can make this easy. We can make this deployment solution one that works, [ one that's replicable ]," because, again, we've got very unique situations all across the country, especially in our retail store environment. We've got a lot of infrastructure requirements from different building owners, different location owners that need to be able to be met. And that's where ChargePoint was original and capable of being able to come in and do some really innovative thought processes with us, but also kind of some innovative thinking as we've gone through iterations, right? We started with just basic charging, Level 1 charging at retail stores and some of our -- in a lot of our corporate office headquarters that we have offices for our employees to use. Now we're evolving that into [ particularly ] Level 2, Level 3 charging as we're talking about for fleeting, for fleet needs and capabilities. So there's so much more that needs to be done, and you need a partner that can really do that and really bring the value of knowledge of the space because, again, what do we worry about? We worry about communications, right? Now you asked me about getting communication to that post [ on demand ], right? But when we're talking about, okay, posts are running well. How do we get feedback back from -- to and from the employees? How do we do all that? That's where ChargePoint brings in phenomenal expertise to be able to drive a lot of these solutions.

Okay. And Rich, could you go a little deeper on that expertise? You sort of -- just how you drive differentiation versus peers, whether -- you sort of talk about software integrations with like Verizon having their own telematics that they built internally, if I understood that. Like how do you kind of ensure all those pieces fit together? Like what does it take to kind of move the needle forward as you're kind of moving down the road with a company like Verizon?

Yes. So it comes down to, really, to a planning around capacity. So I think Erik had mentioned earlier a comment about facilities. So like on some of the earlier facilities that we had done, Verizon [ does own ] 100% of their facilities, just like other large businesses don't. So we needed systems in place to be able to move assets to new owners of new facilities. So when their lease is up, if they're not going to keep that facility, we need to be able to work with them to release that asset off their books. And then the new real estate company that's coming in to occupy that building, we need to be able to move that asset and be able to activate that charger at that facility. That's kind of just the starting point of building competencies when we do this on the fleet side. So when we work with the Verizon telematics, we have to spend the time on integrating with Verizon telematics through APIs and through maintaining those connections. So we see those vehicles the minute that they're in service on the Verizon side. That means all the way down into the charge management system. That means gaining access to -- giving access to that vehicle at the appropriate depot in the appropriate zone and making sure it's connected to the appropriate fuel card that they have. So the driver can either use an RFID card, or they can use their fuel card to activate that charging session. So you need to be able to track a gallon of gas just like you do a kilowatt of fuel -- of energy coming into that vehicle. So all those controls have to remain in place. So that takes a lot of work around our software teams doing those integrations with those partners. So Verizon is one of the biggest telematics providers in America. So not only do I have to integrate with them, I have to integrate with their customers. So when their customers who run -- rely on Verizon telematics want to add electric vehicles, I have those integrations already pre-done. So when I bring on a customer of Verizon that has a telematics vehicle, they have no reason to ever leave their telematics provider just because they're getting an electric vehicle. That's why you make these integrations early.

Okay. So just let's kind of talk about a sample project then just so we've got -- and we can talk about whether it's owned real estate or rented real estate. But for both of you guys, vehicles arriving in a year, let's say it's in Wichita, Kansas, somewhere where you don't have -- EV adoption isn't huge, but Verizon made the decision to electrify their fleet. There's cost benefit, software benefits. You're going to get this vehicle on June 30, 2024. Like what needs to happen? Do you have -- like how do you decide, "I want to do Level 2. I want to do Level 3. I want to also do public charging to help the community." Like how do you kind of -- what's the flow chain like to make those decisions? And how -- when does ChargePoint get involved to help?

So the first thing that happens, Erik's facilities team puts a ChargePoint employee in a headlock for about a week and goes through all the engineering on what they're going to do. So Verizon's got an unbelieve facilities department. So when they're scoping out their facilities -- and we're well, he's right, well a year in advance. In some cases, 1.5 years in advance. We have a team of solution engineers at ChargePoint that work with Verizon's facilities teams and their contractors on understanding what that deployment is going to look like. So Verizon has a team of engineers, and they have contractors that do -- build out their facilities. We work with them on understanding line diagrams, drawing balance of power that's going to happen in that facility. They size that facility according to what fleet they're going to have there, anticipate going to be there. We help them validate that all the wiring runs are the most efficient way designed for that facility, that we have the right balance of Level 2 and Level 3 at that facility. And then we do site validation on those facilities to make sure that when our partner or their partner installs those charging stations, we're commissioning and activating those stations based on the way they want them activate it. So that means if they're panel sharing, if they're doing multiple runs for DC, if they're power limited and we're turning down power on DC so they still have DC charging but we're coming under a hard limit on energy, if they're integrating it with their solar or they're integrating with their microgrid, that all of those integrations are done well in advance for the site to go live. And then when the site does go live, when the vehicles arrive, it's making sure those vehicles appear within that instance so they can separate out their organizations the way that they want to separate out based on their design. So every customer has got a different parent-child type of arrangement on how they like to see their vehicles and their fleets and their drivers. So we'll set that up based on their criteria on how they deploy at their facilities. So that's kind of the whole -- that takes about -- roughly speaking, it takes about 1.5 years you're going to start in advance on that. And it gets faster as they do more facilities. So when they get to multiple facilities at one time, a lot of that work has already been done and you can start moving faster. And then we can't pull this off without our distribution partners that Verizon works with because we can inventory and store equipment and ship to them within days so they don't have inventory sitting on site waiting in boxes for chargers to go -- either go missing or get broken. So they're getting equipment just in time for the installers to install and activate that equipment on their site.

Erik, that sounds pretty complicated. I just want to -- it's just kind of -- am I right that, that sounds complicated...

Yes, no, it is. I mean...

And [ it's getting ] less complicated as time goes by, but it's also something where there's a certain stickiness factor here where investors are thinking about, hey, a fleet -- if somebody's like [ buying ] their fleet, they order a charger, the charger shows up and they plug it in. That's just miles away from what actually happens?

It is -- and there's -- what makes this interesting is it's a tectonic shift in the industry, okay? We are a fluid-based industry, I like to joke about, right? We are gasoline, oil and all these things that go on. Now there's pros and cons to that. The big con is there's a lot of maintenance that has to go into a fleet like this. The pro of an electric fleet is the maintenance costs go down exponentially, and the ease of fixing and repairability goes way, way up. So yes, so is there going to be some uncomfortable and some kind of heavy lift that has to happen at the onset? Absolutely. But once that infrastructure is in place, you've got infrastructure that's going to work for years on end with hardly any issues because, again, you're delivering energy instead of having to move energy and have energy be created by the vehicle itself, right? So you're getting a lot of the middlemen out of that process in that energy delivery capabilities. And there's been really interesting advances made with battery technology and everything else. But yes, does that mean we have to change the way we do business a little bit? Sometimes, right? We have to change the way that we do routes and route planning because sometimes, the range might be a little bit less. They can't just stop at any old gas station and charge up the vehicle. And we know that will change over time as well. So as long as we plan for the least common denominator right now and that's something that's been great with the ChargePoint team is that they've said, "Hey, if you are going to be doing a specific deployment, these are the areas," and provide us heads-up notices on, hey, this is where we best to have charging facilities in your infrastructure and capabilities so that we don't ever have a problem with a dead car, right, or a dead vehicle, fleet vehicle and those kinds of capabilities to move forward. And there will be -- and there's always innovative technologies that are pushing forward in this space. So it's -- yes, it's a little bit of a pain up-front as any good change is. But the payoff on the tail end is just you can't even compute it sometimes just because of the benefits that you're going to get not only to your own industry -- I'm [ not only talking ] about stuff that benefits Verizon. I'm talking about now a vehicle that doesn't have to burn through fossil [ fuels that harm the ] environment, right? There's a lot of other things inside that overall capability that we are very interested in driving those.

Okay. So just -- so now Verizon's electrified, I think, some -- year 1 of your 10-year plan, some portion of the fleet, what are some immediate benefits? You sort of talked about benefits you're seeing -- like what are some benefits, whether financially or from changing workflow perspective? And how do you kind of track those benefits? Like just kind of -- and then from a KPI perspective, you've got a lot going on we talked about earlier, connected vision for Verizon's [ entire ] transportation network, like about telematics, IoT, fuel cards. Like how does -- it's kind of a broad question, but I'd just love to get a sense of how do you know what you're doing is working and why do you want to keep doing it.

Right. Well, the biggest thing is visibility. When you move -- when you transition to an electric vehicle, you immediately gain this ability into road use, vehicle use, all of the different things that go on that you didn't have before. And that's a huge step forward in any industry when we can sit there and say, okay, we can see productivity-wise what -- how often our vehicles are being used. We can go to a much more efficient baseline in the past where someone had -- a great example of this is knowing what -- just a simple change in our infrastructure that we can do with electric vehicle where we know if something's been hooked up to it and using the battery inside vehicle for whatever reason. It can be a specific piece of line roller machinery or anything else that goes on. We can now track that [ efficiently ]. We know where it is. We know what we're doing. Where before, it was a little bit of a yard juggle. Oh, I need to have this piece of equipment that's supposed to be checked in at this yard. I now can know where that asset is, where I need it and how long I need to use it for. And the great thing is when I'm done with that, I can put it back into the virtual pool and someone else can come pick it up from me if they need to be, right? So a lot of this starts to open up that whole real productivity gains that you start to see when you have a shared environment of resources, not only in vehicles but equipment that goes on in those vehicles. And so a lot of these things start to -- really start to pay off very quickly because, again, you have your instant-on capabilities. [ You don't have ] to idle, right? There's all those things that go on anyway that people just don't even think about, right, that a fleet manager has to worry about. Our -- one of our largest expenses is parking tickets. How great would it be that we can actually help the infrastructure as these vehicles are moving around, that we can be able to provide real-time knowledge of availability of parking spaces [ for the burn ]. There are so many ways that you go with this because now we've got that foundational connectivity in that vehicle itself that we can do so much with that it really starts to open up the [ broadened ] mind of, "Hey, now we've got a fleet vehicle. We can do all these other things that we [ didn't even intend to do in the first place ].

Okay. And so Rich, we're talking -- talk about the vehicle and kind of -- can you kind of tie it back to how ChargePoint's software can help communicate with Verizon and what way it is communicating to kind of help them with some of the things Rich -- Erik was describing?

Yes. So I think the main importance of our software is making sure the vehicle is fueled to the appropriate level to do its job. That's its primary role right out of the gate. And then the next phase of our software is to manage the vehicles within the depot themselves. In order to do that, you have to connect with the vehicle's telematics device to understand what the state of charge of that vehicle is coming back when it crosses the plant in the yard. So -- and it's interesting. You don't pick up state of charge off an AC charger. So there isn't a data connection on a J1772. So we have to integrate with the telematics of the vehicle and have a handshake with that vehicle so we can help that software make a decision on what that vehicle is going to do when it comes back in to the charging network. That means if it's parked on the wash line where there's a charger or it's parked inside the building where it's being loaded for the next day, having visibility to that vehicle no matter where it is. So really, having connection on vehicles, especially in the light-, medium- and heavy-duty arena has really -- have been around to this [ extent ] in the last 10 years. So when you look at -- there was a major shift years ago within transportation when the ELD law was passed, which was the electronic logging device laws. That really birth the telematics boom in commercial motor vehicles. Before, telematics was really for theft protection and a little bit of tracking on drivers. But the tools that have been developed over the last 10 years in this space are amazing when you look at route planning, dynamic delivery; to Erik's point, seeing available parking spaces, if there's an IoT connected within that telematics instance. So all of those things start to be possible when you get into a connected infrastructure when it comes to transportation. We're a very small piece of the overall transportation solution, but we do provide the access that you need to be able to get those vehicles fueled appropriately and to the point where it's cost effective. And I think people underestimate that -- how important it is to be able to track a kilowatt of fuel. It's very important because it rolls through the entire accounting system of your total cost of ownership. So when you -- we spent hundreds of millions of dollars looking on fuel tools on how to maximize MPGs, how to keep track of every gallon of fuel we burn, whether it was en route or it was in a depot. We're going to do the same with electric. And having all those legacy integrations already done makes it much easier to transition. So I think it kind of all comes together.

Okay. Okay. And then just some big picture questions. I think we have about 5-or-so minutes. Just some kind of big [ picture ] questions. In my head -- or from an investor head perspective, I guess, I'm hearing what I would call sizable barriers to entry. Is that something that you kind of -- we've got home charging. We've got commercial. We've got fleet. But on the fleet side of the world and on the commercial side of the world, it just seems like -- Rich and Erik, I'm not sure how you guys want to take this, but it seems like in Pasquale -- ChargePoint's CEO talked about this, the [ sales forcification ] of what everything ChargePoint is trying to do. It seems like this is a pretty integrated relationship that would be -- it would be difficult for Verizon to move down the path with it. I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but I guess that's sort of where I'm going. I'd love to kind of get your thoughts on that.

Chris, that's very well said. No, again, Verizon is good at, what, networks, right, what do we do, right? You can't look at me and say, "Verizon, how do you do charging?" I'll go, "That's what Rich is for," right? That's why I have partners. I'm really, really, really good at making sure data gets where it needs to go, from point A to point B, right, [ and probably the ] communication technology. I have key partners. The reason why I have important partners like ChargePoint is to help us be and help them be the best possible charging company that they can from a charging infrastructure capabilities, knowing the next generation -- because, again, this is all going to get faster. This is all going to get more connected because really, the future of this, we're right on the cusp of a major transformative shift in this space from fossil-powered cars and vehicles to electric vehicles. As that shift happens, you've got to charge from -- you've got to have a partner that knows what they're doing and knows how to help monetize that and make that an easy check box rather than an, oh, go outside and get your jackhammer because you're going to have to [ put -- run ] power up [ from the far end of the street ], right? Good luck, right? That's where a lot of this starts to take place where you start to see where companies like Verizon are saying, hey, we don't want to be the charging experts. We want to be the communications company expert, and we'll have a partner -- phenomenal opportunities with partners like this to be able to say, hey, what can we do better? How can we better provide solutions and capabilities and move into this next generation of connectivity in vehicles as well as these charging posts that we feel is very important?

Rich, anything kind of -- I guess, I would like -- from your perspective, what do you think about the fleet opportunity for ChargePoint going forward? I mean [ fleets card ], I think it's 24% of bookings or 24% of revenue, and it doubled year-over-year in the last quarter. So I'm just kind of -- not necessarily asking how many Verizons are out there. But how -- like what do you take -- everything you've learned working with Verizon over the last few years, the difficulty of the installations and kind of everything you've learned, how you take and kind of apply with other customers?

Yes. I mean it's just getting started. When you look at the -- I mean, transportation on its own is complex when you look at all the logistics and supply chain and transformation that goes in just to making vehicles work now. As we transition to electric vehicles -- and the first vehicles are really just rolling out in the fleet segment. I think auto is, what, 5% of total sales. Fleet is like -- is a rounding [ error ] of that. So we're not even in the beginning yet, and we're making concrete applications work that don't disrupt transportation companies. So when you look at that and you start adopting those vehicles, we're still in the [ moat ] right now. It's either a Board, a boss or a customer. One of the 3 are asking companies to electrify. And generally, it's 1 of those 3 or 2 of those 3. So when you look at that, those are some of the early deployments. We're making this as easy as possible. So I can't do what I do without relying on Verizon and the tools that they put into the marketplace because the tools that they build are for thousands of other customers that are going to electrify, and I need to do that really well. So I mean this is just the beginning from fleet electrification. I wouldn't have made the move to ChargePoint from another Fortune 5 where I had almost a 30-year career if I didn't see this coming in the transportation sector faster than, I think, I was even anticipating. So those are some of the things that are super exciting, looking at some of the larger and mid-sized fleet companies that are starting to roll out vehicles.

And just lastly, Erik, what would like speed up or slow down Verizon's path to electrification? Is it just vehicle availability? Is that the...

That is the biggest crux right now, what -- we're just waiting on vehicle availability. And again, the automakers have -- you've seen that. You've got the Fords and GMs of the world and a lot of these fleet [ chains ] vehicles that are out there. It's just a matter of catching up. We put orders in and waited and got those orders cut in half and cut in half again as we do. So that -- we're seeing that shift dramatically in 2023. So as that continues, that's just going to put more and more opportunity for us in ChargePoint to really be electrifying our fleet hubs and being able to make sure that we're supporting them correctly with what we need from a charging [ perspective ].

Okay. Okay. Well, why don't we leave it there so investors can sort of stay on the schedule they had about with their meetings, I know. But Rich, Erik and Patrick, this was awesome. Thank you. I think that just from my perspective and from investors' perspective, I just don't think they realize what goes into something like this. They think that on a commercial or a fleet side, it's just call somebody or fill out a form and have a charger delivered. But that's just not close to the reality of what needs to happen. And only certain companies can make these complex things happen smoothly, I would say.

For sure.

Absolutely.

Great. Thanks, everybody, and talk to you guys soon.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks.

Thanks.