Fluence Corporation Limited (FLC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you, and welcome to our Q2 '23 review. It's been an interesting quarter. While orders received have been a little bit below what we expected, we've had a number of indications of interest, letters of intent or verbal confirmations of orders that we have not recorded because we don't record them until we actually get the purchase order. So we're encouraged by the development of the pipeline. You'll hear about that. The pipeline has grown significantly and it puts us in a good position for the second half of this year. I will turn the conference over to Ben Fash, our CFO, who will take you through the financial update and then we'll talk -- we'll hear from Tom Pokorsky about the business development and operations of the company. Ben?

Yes. Thank you very much, Doug, and thank you to everyone for joining the call today. Please note that all the discussions regarding financial results are on an unaudited basis at this point in time. So for the fiscal quarter ending June 30, 2023, the company finished with $16.8 million in revenue, which was up 15% from Q1 of 2023. SPS revenues, in particular, were up 105% from the first quarter and 64% from Q2 of 2022. That's primarily due to the growth in our Specialized Industrial business unit, which is having a very strong year. Further, backlog ended the quarter at $52.2 million, $46.6 million of which is from SPS and recurring revenue. New orders in recurring revenue were up 36% in the quarter from the same period in 2022. Orders in SPS were up 35% in Q2 2023 when compared to Q1 of 2022, but down 43% from the same period in 2022. This was mainly due to, as Doug mentioned earlier, some delays in signing firm orders. However, we have received a number of verbal indications of orders as well as letters of intent and letters of award. And therefore, we're confident that our orders are expected to increase significantly in the second half versus the first half of 2023. Fixed costs were down $3.8 million in the first half of the year when compared to the same period in 2022, which represents a 28% reduction and reflects the successful implementation of the restructuring that was announced in Q4 of 2022. The company also generated $0.5 million in EBITDA for the quarter, Q2 2023, up from a loss of $3 million in Q1 of 2023. The cash balance for the company as at June 30, 2023, was at $18.1 million, plus the company had $11.8 million in short- and long-term deposits. The company generated $2.2 million of operating cash flow and overall cash was up $2.9 million from March 31, 2023. This is primarily due to the collection of Milestone 9 of the Ivory Coast project, which we discussed on the last quarterly update. At this point in time, the company is reducing our guidance to total revenue to $90 million to $95 million, of which SPS plus recurring revenue represents $60 million to $70 million and EBITDA of $2.5 million. As noted earlier, this is primarily due to the delay in securing orders in the first half of 2023, so primarily a timing issue, but still represents an increase of more than 10% from 2022 on an EBITDA growth basis. With that, I'd like to turn it over to our CEO, Tom Pokorsky, to give an update on the business development activities and the operations of the business.

Thank you, Ben, and thank you all for tuning in. We appreciate your interest. Earlier in the year, I told you about the restructure and that we were going to immediately start reporting on the restructure in January, which we did. But we had a lot of work to do to get the restructure up and operational. And we are pleased now that we are fully operating under the new structure and nearly every position that we set up for the structure has been filled, although there are a couple we're still in the process of filling. So the good news is we have already saved $3.8 million in fixed costs for the first half of the year due to the restructure. But more importantly, for the future growth of the company, we are seeing much better collaboration across all business units, and that is exactly what the plan intended. While we did have a slow first half, mainly because of the delays in orders, the pipeline -- because of this collaboration, the pipeline continues to grow in all of our core markets. And in addition, as Ben and Doug both pointed out, we have a number of letters of intent, verbal awards, letters of award that we just don't have the final paperwork on that show a large increase for our third quarter order booking potential. Despite the slower-than-expected start, we still expect strong bookings growth this year. Just a few highlights regarding what is going on. There was a lot of interest in what's happening in North America. We have now completed the first phase of expanding the North American sales and technical support team. We have put in place, I believe, 9 new high-level sales and technical people in North America across various business units, some for municipal, [ some high-strength waste ] and some for industrial water. Keeping in mind that the high level technical people also are an integral part of the sales team because our sales team is a technical sales team that needs this support to put together project designs to put a price tag on. In any event, the sales team in North America for high-strength waste in the biogas area has already built a pipeline of $21 million, and we recently signed our first anaerobic digester for North America worth over $1 million. Additionally, we signed a new service agreement with one of the largest meat processing companies in North America to help them scope out a large anaerobic digestion project for one of their major facilities to create renewable natural gas as they want to support their sustainability goals. Because of this, we are an excellent -- and the intent is we are in excellent position to exclusively negotiate and deliver the full project for the customer who, by the way, has dozens of other identical facilities that need the same kind of work. So the high-strength wastewater is a bright light in our growth. We also have a number of other projects for fish processing, and we just recently booked an order for another food processing plant in, I believe, Indiana. A few other tidbits on how the business is moving along. We are making progress on our build on operate project. And we expect to sign a couple of significant COO projects in the next quarter to end the year. A good surprise is the Specialized Industrial water business in South America, which is already ahead of their expected order bookings, and they're projected to grow even further than that. They are making real good headway in food and beverage as well as the lithium mining space. One of the other things they've done is they went back and acquired a number of service contracts for some of their existing customers, several million dollars worth which, of course, are not revenue of one year because they're 3- and 5-year contracts. But that's the kind of work we want to do with this build up these longer-term service contracts. China is still slow, but Southeast Asia is growing, and we've already -- I think I may have mentioned this earlier in the year, we already have a much bigger pipeline than the rest of Southeast Asia than in China by itself, but China is starting to slowly come back. Overall, Fluence is expecting to book $70 million to $80 million worth of quarters in the second half of 2023, which would be a great increase of probably more than 300% over half 1 of '23 and half 2 of 2022. So the aircraft carrier turns slowly, and we just put in motion the new operations and these orders take a while to come in, but we are highly confident we are going to succeed and have much better growth in the future. With that, I will turn it over for questions.

Thanks, Tom. So we have a few questions about the Ivory Coast O&M contract about when we would expect that to be awarded?

Okay. I can handle that. The Ivory Coast O&M contract is currently in the final stages of quotation. The next step in that project is for the team putting the cost together to come to me for a final approval, and then I will go to the Board for approval to provide a firm contracted price. The intent is -- by the customer is to attempt to get an operating contract in place by year-end. We are going to finish that job. The plant will start running by the end of the year. And at this point, they don't have anybody to run it. So that's the reason for attempting to get the contract in place by year-end. We do have at least one other major competitor trying for it. And we are trying to make sure the scope of the work and the pricing is not only competitive, but appealing from a standpoint of process to the owner. We expect to have that bid in within the next 30 to 45 days.

Okay. Thanks, Tom. There was also another question regarding Ivory Coast. Has global inflation impacted our margins on that project?

No. I mean, actually, they did a very good job of buying all the equipment within the budget. We did have a small contingency in the contract, which the inflation did burn through, but we still have a little left, and we are virtually done buying things. We are into just labor finishing the job and most of all the labor that being done on it now is under a fixed price contract to us. So we do not expect any deterioration on margin on that job.

Okay. There was a question about if the order book is looking strong, why are we lowering guidance for the year?