QuantumScape Corporation (QS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you very much. All right. There we go. So we have the QuantumScape team here, President and CEO; Dr. Siva Sivaram. I hope I didn't butcher that. CFO, Kevin Hettrich. To -- first off, I just want to say congratulations on the announcement yesterday, the great showing yesterday. Perhaps to set the stage, and I think there's some people in the room who aren't as familiar with QuantumScape. I think you have some slides perhaps we can run through the kickoff.

Perfect. Jason, thank you for having us here. Honored to be here with you. all. I just want to set the stage up for who and what is QuantumScape. QuantumScape is a next-generation solid-state battery company. Today, you can see in the IAA mobility, the number of electric cars and most of them are powered by lithium-ion cells. Batteries, in general, need 5 things to be successful. You need to have energy density, that gives it the range. You need to have power density that tells you how fast you can charge or discharge and how fast you can get the car up and what power you can get out of it. You've got to have life. You've got to be able to cycle it up and down. You got to be safe and you have to be affordable. Those are 5 things you need in a battery. And lithium ion batteries have come a tremendous way from where they got started in the '90s. Unfortunately, as you heard in the earlier talk in the mobility within the chance to do us talking and prelude to it, lithium ion batteries are not quite there. Mobility today is not quite there with electric mobility. Batteries are what is holding it back a bit. We need the next-generation battery. The next-generation battery that is a no-compromises battery. A no-compromise battery means if you're getting range, you also need to be able to get fast charge. If you're getting range and the fast charge, you also want to have a long cycle like you can sell the car afterwards. When you get those 3, it is still very safe, and it is still affordable. And that is the QuantumScape solution. The QuantumScape solution, if you go back to that one slide that shows the frontier, usually, most of the cars on the road today have that compromise. So if you take the Taycan versus Rivian, one can charge fast, one can give you a range. They intentionally choose the battery one way or the other. We are coming in and saying, you don't have to make that choice. You can actually have to be the QSE-5 product that we have introduced and you have one in your pocket, Kevin, moves that frontier entirely into a different space. I don't need to choose between power and range. And as we talked about in the announcement yesterday when we get to the larger format such as the unified cell, it gets it even further. So how do we do it? The essentials of the technology is that we are what are called an anode-free lithium metal solid-state battery. What that means is that normally, on the left side, you see -- on my left side, you see this conventional battery. The bottom is the cathode from which lithium moves up to the anode which is on top, separated by that yellowish color thing, which is a separator. And on top is this where the anode is you have a host material like a graphite or silicon infused graphite. That access the host for putting this lithium in. That graphite is in the middle of all this controversy over from China to come into here, there has been import restrictions, et cetera. So a very dirty material and you need a lot of it in every battery to go store the lithium ions on that cost. What we have is what's called an anode free solution. We don't have any of that graphite as we say, the best way not to have an anode kind of material is not to have it at all. And the way we created this, when we charge the battery, lithium-ion move across that separator, and plate pure as we call it, the world's purest lithium gets plated on the other side. That is theoretically the highest density you can get. There's no other host materials. So volumetrically and weight wise, gravimetrically you end up having the highest energy density because you have no other host material. And because I don't have to take these lithium ions and put them in various slots in the graphite, I can do it very fast. All I have to do is go past that separator. And that separator is our magic material. That separator is a ceramic separator that's unique to us. That ceramic separator that's between the self-forming anode and the cathode is a uniquely formed ceramic material that we have created and engineered for high-volume production. Last year, we introduced the Cobra process to the world. And we put this into baseline last quarter when we made the announcement. That separator is the heart of the cell. So what we are, as we announced yesterday, we are a lithium metal anode free ceramic separator, solid-state battery that solves that 5 pentagon problem where you end up compromising one or the other. You don't have to make any compromises. The ceramic allows it to be very safe. It doesn't catch fire. It's not an organic material. So many such advantages come naturally to this technology. So that's the background of the company. We've been around for about 14.5 years. A lot of work went into the fundamental signs and getting the technology ready, lots and lots and lots of patents and trade secrets know-how built around it. We are very unique in that, that it's not something that can be easily reproducible that forms the intellectual property moat around the company. Now we are ready to go into scaling up process right now. That's where we have now made the announcement yesterday. I hope that gives a perspective of what the company is.

Fantastic. Let's kick off then with the big news yesterday. Obviously, we're very pleased with the stock reaction. You showcased -- you demoed a modified Ducati. Can you tell us about the technology that you showcased in and why you think it was so important?

All the excitement was yesterday, and I want to be boring today. I want to make sure that we put that in the context and the perspective so that I'm not redoing all the beautiful PR work that Volkswagen did for us in getting that done. What we showed yesterday was a demonstration of our technology in a commercially viable product, a motorcycle. In this case, we chose a high-performance race motorcycle to go demonstrate it. It is obviously a very controlled product that is very demanding in its both power and energy, it is supposed to be racing and you've got to get the laps and the speed on it. So it shows off the technology very well. This is our first public demonstration in a mobility vehicle. We worked with Audi to create the pack with Ducati to build a motorcycle. And PowerCo helping us making sure this whole thing works together. Our partner is PowerCo in getting it done. And this has been in the work for us to do work with them for a while. And yesterday was our demonstration coming out and showing the world's first solid-state battery powered motorcycle out on stage yesterday. So we are very, very, very excited and this is a clear public demonstration of where the technology is.

I want to ask about the key partner that you mentioned several times, a lot of people in the room are obviously familiar with, with VW. Can you talk about the evolution of that relationship? How did it start? I imagine it was -- there was many stages of that process and then where we might go from here?

So the Volkswagen Group has been a close partner of ours from our very early days. They are an investor in the company. They have a substantial ownership stake in us, but -- and they have 2 board seats in the company. But outside of that, they have been a true technology development partner. I often repeat this set of phases over and over again. We want to get into this in methodical, systematic iterative fashion. Methodical means you don't skip steps, you want to do this one step at a time. You want to make sure you are going through the progression of product development. Systematic means when we find a problem, you find a system solution to it, not just put a patch on it. Iterative means you want to give them a product, let the customer try it out, come back and tell us what's right, what's wrong, what needs to be changed. Volkswagen has been an ideal partner for that. Given the breadth of their brand presence, given their size and scale and PowerCo being a dedicated battery manufacturer, they have worked hand in glove. We now have a group of Germans in San Jose in our headquarters working with us day-to-day in the line, trying to develop the process in getting it industrialized. Industrialized for an automotive use that has to be robust. That's where they are offering the most help in making that happen. And we continue to work with them closely. Our expectation is that as they proceed one step at a time, as we saw yesterday in the announcement from coin cells to scooter, to a motorcycle, to then in larger series production vehicles, we want to go through this in a very systematic fashion with them and they are doing it very well with us. We have signed a contract and then a subsequent contract commitment where for you as a financial audience, we have defined with them as our demonstration 2 revenue streams. They pay us a royalty licensing fee as every battery is manufactured. But they also pay us an engineering cash inflow into us as we develop the technology with them. And we announced this $133 million contract about 3 months ago in July, it's not quite 3 months ago. And also, last year, we announced the overall licensing deal. So these 2 go play hand in hand. And they have agreed to put in place close to 85 gigawatt hour of production capacity. 85 gigawatt hour of production capacity for us to manufacture together. That's where their plans are. And I don't want to talk too much for them, they should say it themselves, but that's what we have in contract between us.

I believe PowerCo had said the unified cell is "solid state ready" and that should enable a fairly rapid technology transfer to the group's vehicles as soon as the solid-state batteries is ready. Where are you in that readiness process? There was, I believe, a key milestone around ceramics production. Why is that so important?

Extremely good question for me to put in context. So let's look at it from both sides. They have made the unified cell as a standard building block for all of their vehicles. So that makes it easier for different brands to design, but they know that there's one standard component to buy in the unified cell. And today, they are making, lithium-ion cells within a unified format, and that's what they want to ramp immediately out of Southgate. For us, that size helps me a standard to which I can work with. But our cell, the limiter is how much of the ceramic can I make how quickly. Last year, we announced the Cobra process, which is more than 25x more productive in heat treatment time than the prior generation, which in itself was 10x more than the prior generation. So we have a truly gigawatt hour scale commercial production capable ceramic production process that we have developed. This process, I need to scale it into high volume for me to go into unified cell. This is the reason yesterday in the announcement, I actually said we want to be high-volume production ready before the end of the decade with this kind of a cell to go into it. Right now, the cell we are making is the QSE-5, which is relatively smaller compared to the unified cells scale. And the unified scale cell is about that big. And so we now have to scale our ceramic production to be in that form factor for us to get into high volume.

And Siva, if I could add to that. You introduced the 2 different monetization pathways. One is the collaboration phase. The second is the royalty licensing, of which the expanded VW PowerCo deal is a great example. In the collaboration phase, there's an opportunity for the company to get paid to do the exact type of development that Siva was mentioning, things like form factor, size, the precise power-to-energy type trade-off. These are activities we can do to take our technology and to tailor it to the exact requirements of our OEM partner in advance of the royalty phase. And the size of the opportunity can be quite substantial. Under the VW PowerCo deal just expanded in July, there's an opportunity to have up to $131 million of those payments. And additionally, there's an opportunity to earn a $130 million royalty prepay. If you put those both together, that's over $0.25 billion that can be received by the company in advance of the royalty licensing phase. Of course, the royalty licensing phase where there's up to 85 gigawatt hours, as Siva mentioned, that's the equivalent of about up to 1 million vehicles. So that's a very substantial economic opportunity for the company. And under a success case, of course, partnership with VW PowerCo, the anchor tenant, making them successful is important. But our intent is to replicate this and to get a cadence of these similar types of deals struck. From an investor point of view, there's an opportunity that's quite substantial cash inflows from customers in that collaboration phase. And then as time progresses, you start to layer in those royalty economics. And then meanwhile, we're an innovation company. We would introduce the subsequent platform and similarly repeat the same process.

I wanted to ask about the pipeline of customers as being -- it seems there's a mix of trends going on in the world, right? You have China was very focused on electrification and Europe, maybe in between U.S., obviously, going back to making big VA engines. How does that -- how has that pipeline kind of developed? And is that -- how do you manage this kind of volatility of adoption in the globe?

Yes. So policy regimes change. However, there is a monotonic, a secular adoption of electric vehicles over time. There may be fluctuations here and there, but we do see the demand for electric mobility. I mean just like you saw here, the overall hunger for electric vehicles over time is limited only by the availability of a good battery. That's where we play in. We expect that by our nature, our ability to scale means we will start out at premium vehicles as we and then work ourselves down into mass market as our scale improves and volumes come. We are not a single generation, you make once and we are done kind of company. We'll continue to have further improvements in the technology as we go along. And as Kevin just alluded to, we now start to have a cadence of additional customers that we sign on. With each one of them, we have this 2-stream model where we have an engineering income and a licensing royalty income that comes in over time. And this is what sustains us over time. In the last 2 years, Kevin has managed it in a fashion that once we went to the capital-light model, we saved over $0.5 billion of capital avoidance in terms of prior planned capital spending, cost reduction that went with -- internal spending reduction that went with not having to build those factories. And now you add on top of it the licensing royalty income that is coming in and the engineering income, we have set up for us to be in a good balance sheet position going forward.

One other comment to add, if you set aside the geography-specific trends, if they're a headwind or a tailwind, just the opportunity alone is staggering. I think in North America and Europe combined is something like 380 gigawatt hours in 2025. That's forecast to grow 6x over the next 5 to 10 years. So that's a significant expansion just in automotive alone. So it's -- the space feels almost infinite for a company just starting to penetrate the market and automotive would just be where we as a company start.

On the CapEx-light point you made, I think everyone would agree, it makes a lot of sense just given what's happened over the last couple of years. Would you ever consider going back to the manufacturing side at some point in the future? Is that something you think about ever?

Yes. You want to say never say never, right? But in the short-term horizon, we have enough things in our hands than try to go build a plant. Using the PowerCo example, PowerCo is building 3 major factories. I'd rather go try to fill those. They know how to build a factory than me trying to go negotiate a government incentive, do a labor contract, build a factory, building. I don't know if U.S. capital market really appreciate me sinking money into buildings and land. And I think this is the reason we leave that to the people who are much better at it than we are, but to have a high-margin licensing income. Kevin, do you want to add something to it?

The only other thing I'd add is the lithium-ion market is dominated by your CATLs and BYDs today. Arguably, it's a more effective strategy under an ecosystem type approach where we can stack the volume of multiple cell manufacturers behind it and there both achieve manufacturing scale and maybe more importantly, developmental dollar scale behind this technology platform. So we think a differentiated product under a licensing type business model is a more effective strategy to compete and to win.

I want to expand on that a little bit more addition, if you give me some time for it. We went with a capital-light business model with our OEM partners. There is a nuance to it. We are also building around ourselves a large ecosystem that goes with us. The ecosystem, for example, expecting an auto OEM to be a ceramic manufacturer, that's too much to ask. A thin ceramic that needs to be precision manufactured in high volume is not the strength of any cell manufacturer today. That's the reason we signed a contract with a precision ceramic manufacturing leader such as Murata. Murata sees what we have developed in this breakthrough technology for this ceramic. They are, wow, this is something we want to get into. And we have since signed a contract with them for them to be one of our manufacturing partners for the ceramic, where we continue to develop successive generations of the ceramic, and they continue to be our manufacturing partner, and they end up supplying to our cell manufacturing partners. So we are bringing together a group of like-minded companies that are working with us to make this happen. We are not just saying, hey, I'll be a capital-light model and somebody manufacture it. It doesn't work that way. We do need to bring along a large system of material suppliers, manufacturing partners, cell makers, equipment makers and the OEM partners, all to be pulling in the right direction together. And we are making great headway in getting that together.

One question we often get is about the value proposition. I think everyone sees the price of lithium-ion has been coming down quite aggressively since it peaked a couple of years ago. And energy density seems to be improving with the use of different cathodes. In this context, how should investors think about the economics versus the performance trade-offs?

Yes. We talk about value all the time. To have -- I'm going to use any high end -- so that I don't violate any one of my Volkswagen Groups. I'll use a third-party high-end sports car. For them to have an extra 100 miles of range and to have the extra juice of producing another 50 horsepower, of course, there's a lot of value in it. I don't measure that in terms of the conventional, hey, do I get $75 per kilowatt hour or $50. The value we create for those high-end players is very high. The value they create for us is in trying to make those, we learn how to manufacture in high volume. I need to be able to learn to have manufactured in high volume so that I can then compete at the low end of the market. This is how we iteratively work with each other. That's why I said we start out at the high end. And there, the premium comes from the fact that we bring value to our customer.

Two other quick points. It's not common you find a significant advantage in a powertrain across similarly positioned brands. So that's precisely what we're trying to enable with our customers. The QSE-5 technology is a unique combination of energy density, power and safety that cannot be met by lithium-ion full stop. And that's a very compelling advantage that we're very excited to work with our partners towards.

Meaning, to Kevin's point, this morning, I was actually talking with an auto executive, and he was talking at length about differentiation. How do we differentiate when I walk in and every car can do the same thing. Every software -- every company is offering similar software features, similar, what is it that we can differentiate with? And they come to us and say, this is a fundamental building block, which can differentiate us.

And the other point I was going to add was to remind that we are a technology platform, the solid-state separator with the lithium metal anode that's formed on first charge. We are cathode agnostic. Our -- the bulk of our prototype data focuses on the NMC cathodes. We're trying to push the frontier of what's possible. But as Siva mentioned, in the fullness of time or to the OEM's preference and model positioning, it's possible to go after other cathodes, for example, LFP, if you want to have a different market segment to go after.

More high-level question. I think you mentioned scaling up a few times or several times. With any new technology, I feel maybe that's the hardest part and an area where we run into issues. What should we be kind of on the lookout for in respect to the scale up? What might be some bottlenecks?

Yes. It is a neonate where I was just talking about before where you were covering Western Digital, and I come from there. Western Digital, for those of you who don't know, makes hard drives. And the hard drives today, the typical hard drive you can buy, which goes into high-end data centers is about 30 terabytes on a little 1-inch form factor. It did not happen overnight. That is the world's most complex little mechanical device ever created. It is not an overnight success. It is not one that you come back and say, aha, some third party says, "Oh, I know how that is made. I'm going to go make it in high volume." Scale manufacturing is execution in a systematic, methodical, iterative fashion. I'm not going to come and give you -- here's some easy milestones and look at this, Voila, I got a volume. You got yields to worry about, reliability to worry about, capital productivity to worry about, labor productivity to worry about, MES systems that need to come in together, make sure the metrology works together with the machines. There is 1,000 little things. We are going to be working. And by the way, our technology transfer is not, oh, I got this bunch of patents and I'm going to throw them over the wall. That's not the way this transfer works. This is -- the reason they are willing to pay us that engineering dollars is because it's a high-touch engagement. Our team and their team work together to make sure that we understand exactly what that is. And then we work with them to transfer the technology and the machines and the materials to go together. So this is the reason Edison, I'm not giving you a simple answer to come back and say, watch for this and after that, it's high volume. It is going to be blocking and tackling every step of the way. We hired our Chief Operating Officer, Luca Fasoli, who is sitting in the back, specifically for this reason. He has probably taken 10 technologies, highly complex technologies into very, very high volumes in his life. Extremely capable individual who has done this many times in the past. And it's his job to make sure he is guiding us through this process of developing a highly rampable, robust technology that we can work with our partners to get into high volume.

I might also draw attention to one of our 4 publicly stated goals for the rest of the year is to bring up a pilot line in San Jose for the QSE-5 technology, having achieved -- having baselined our Cobra process for the separator, the task now is to up-level the equipment and the automation downstream of that line simply to keep pace. We mentioned on our July earnings call that we were tracking to that before the year-end. So please stay tuned as we make progress there with our PowerCo partners.

I appreciate you keeping a real on the last answer. Let's shift gear on the -- to the competitive landscape. So needless to say, there have been many announcements around solid-state technology, lithium metal players that have at least put on some press release saying they're going to do something. I can run off just a few of us, right, Toyota, CATL, LG, BYD, et cetera. How do you view what's kind of going on in the rest of the industry because investors have to obviously look at all these efforts. How do you sort of compare and contrast that? And what advantages do you think -- what are the key advantages you think you have over this?

I can add a few more to that list to make sure Samsung has worked on it. And as you said, Toyota is working on it and BYD and CATL we have formed a consortium driven by the Chinese government to go work on solid state. The Japanese government has made solid-state batteries a national priority in making that happen. You can see small companies in the U.S. announcing. Look, let me go back to quote one of our philosophers from the semiconductor industry, only the paranoid survive. So we are paranoid about what's going on outside. Now having put that aside, we control what we control. And we know for a fact that there is something that we do that attracts everybody's attention is because we see the data from everybody's solid state all the time. So this is a little bit of a complex graph that Kevin is displaying. It shows all the data that we have seen from everywhere published in academic papers, in industry papers, et cetera. It shows 2 sort of -- how many cycles does it take to have this shown cycling. How fast can we charge and discharge. How much pressure is needed into making this happen? Does it work across temperatures? If you go look at every one of them, a solid-state battery, one of the worst things that they all end up doing is, oh, I need to put 25 atmospheres of pressure for this to work because it's 2 pieces of solid that I need. Imagine trying to put a pneumatic pressure this thing for a 25 atmosphere in a car. These are all nice to talk about that don't really scale to being a production. We come back and say, I don't need pressure, just one atmosphere or conventionally, what we see in lithium-ion, the 1 to 2 atmospheres that we use, that's all you need. Major difference. Come back and say, what's the temperature range across which it works. And when you do all that, can I still make this in a safe environment? Can this thing be -- doesn't use pure lithium metal that somebody has to deposit on top of it? You know how hard it is to control a pure lithium metal. So to come back and say that I want to use a lithium metal on an anode. So there are many things that you look at it and you say, why we are offering a technology path. So the last part of the answer, as you said, keep it at a high level is this. What you would see from us is every year, we will publicly lay out what our goals are for the year. We'll tell everybody this is what we will be doing this year. And every year, you'll see us executing and making sure we announce to you along with data what is it that we have accomplished. That's the only thing I can count on to come back and say, we are watching all this. We are paranoid about it. They are all wonderful companies. They are amazingly large, highly resourced companies, but I got a technology that is unique to me that shows all the advantages that we have. And I want to make sure we bring it to market in a systematic fashion. I will tell you what we are going to do. And every year, we will hit it. Execution is the only thing that will keep us ahead of the competition.

I think of one question someone probably has in the audience. There's a lot of names on there. If you look at the car batteries industry, it's pretty consolidated. Do you think we kind of spin out at some point?

You can see some of them already are gone. Even in this group, as you can see, there's a whole bunch of them that have since disappeared. What differentiates us is that not only do we have the technology and a tremendous team that is working on this together, but Kevin has managed to squirrel away a phenomenal balance sheet. The balance sheet differentiates us that we know we can continue. Kevin, why don't I let you talk about this.

Yes. We ended last quarter with approximately $800 million of liquidity on the balance sheet. We think that puts us in a very strong position just in terms of the ability to see this through and to go after the substantial market opportunity in automotive alone. I would continue to highlight, though, that we -- the opportunity to replicate that VW deal across other OEMs, we think going forward, it's not the capital markets, it's via those customer collaborations and licensing deals that will be the -- our company's capital markets focus going forward.

And I want to reinforce that point. We have $800 million of cash in the bank. We have gone to the capital markets to get all that money in here. But going forward, we are customer focused. We are getting our money, cash inflow from the customers and not looking at capital markets. There's always a never say never once more. But in our plans, we are focused on getting anything that we need from the customers.

Outside of auto, I saw a couple of humanoids on display, self-flying car or potentially a flying car. Are there applications beyond EVs?

You know the battery demand everywhere -- anywhere you turn, there's a new opportunity. Clearly, humanized robots are an amazing opportunity in the future. But as you know, in any company, you don't take too highly volatile things and make a business out of it. Humanoid robots have to develop on their own pace for a long while more before I come back and put it on my road map to say, that's what I'm going to do. But on the other hand, there are other well-developed markets that are around us that we are clearly paying attention to. Automotive is our primary focus. That's the largest market out there. We have wonderful customers working with us. So we are well focused on it. The big emerging markets such as defense, big emerging markets such as data center are all of interest to us, but our strength in automotive is what is going to help us there. If I can prove something on the automotive marketplace, I can always go back and do that in aviation and defense or inside the data center. Those are things that we are looking at, but our focus continues to be on the automotive marketplace.

I'll open it up for Q&A in the audience. I got some in the front.

Patrick from UBS. I'd like to ask a very high-level question about solid-state technology. Undoubtedly, your company has made significant progress. Others have made some progress, too, but so has the lithium-ion battery industry. And if you walk around the show here, you will find cars with 800 kilometers of range, WLTP. You find cars that have 4C charge rates or some even higher. So in your pentagram, you could say, this is good enough for most consumers. What's been the missing bit so far is the cost side of the equation, right? Now you have latest-gen lithium-ion cells that are available for, let's say, somewhere $60, $70 per kilowatt hour. And I'm wondering, there isn't a number of experts who say solid-state technology will just not get there. It's always going to be more expensive to manufacture even if you scale it up. Does that basically make solid-state a niche technology for particularly high-energy density, high-performance segment vehicles? Or would you just disagree with the statement that solid state is not going to make the cost parity?

So I'll give you a high-level answer, and then I'll go a little bit deeper. When I started in the semiconductor industry in the early 1980s, and there was a quote from the CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation that says, "why do we need more semiconductors? What are we going to put each one of them in every door handle in the world?" Of course, yes, we put them on every door handle these days. And have you seen how far semiconductors have come? They ask me when we have storage, why do we need more storage? And of course, the generations and generations of modern. Now what has happened now more specifically to the batteries is this. Lithium-ion batteries is a 30-year-old technology. Tremendous amazing progress. Sony and the Japanese made the progress in technology in the late '90s and the early '00s. Between 2010 and 2020, the Chinese have just made it perfect and taken it far. But you can visibly see it has leveled off. Now all you get is margin contraction. Cost reduction because there's overcapacity and the cost is going down. What we are talking about is the next S-curve that is starting in solid state. And that's how things move in technology is that an S-curve comes, levels off, the next technology starts, it may even be worse than the prior generation to start with, but then the future potential is enormous. Imagine the orders of magnitude gain that we can get in solid state over time. That's what we are playing for. We are not playing for what is happening today. And over time, if we are to leapfrog and go do this, we need to go through this phase of development, making sure that we have this hand-to-hand combat on pricing right now and then come back and show where this technology is. So we are not a one generation once-and-done solid-state company. We are a technology company. Every 18 months, expect a new breakthrough from us a new generation of energy density, power density, life, new features, temperatures and applications come up. That's how we expect to be in for the long haul.

And what would you say about the cost threshold that keeps coming down.

And it's going to get -- I mean -- so again, if I use the storage and storage now as showed data storage, have you seen the way data storage cost has come down, probably 5 orders of magnitude since the time it come. It sort of this solid state will go do the same thing. It will go through as the volumes go up, the scales go up, the costs will come down. You got to have trust in the technology.

So you would fundamentally disagree that there is something baked into SSP that makes it structurally more expensive?

No. No, no, no, not at all, not at all. You give -- I mean you know how much time and effort has gone into -- if you had asked the same question in 1995, people would have said, yes, there's no way to reduce the cost of lithium-ion batteries. When you put the elbow grease into making that work, costs come down. There's nothing intrinsic about it.

And I wouldn't compare an LFP battery to solid-state lithium metal. Remember, we are cathode agnostic. If we want to optimize for cost, the world's cheapest cathode, LFP; world's cheapest anode, nothing. The separator component is what we need to bring to scale and to volume. And with bringing on the world's leading manufacturers, the PowerCos, the Muratas, as Siva mentioned, if you trust in the technology that it will follow similar type learning curves, longer term, we think it's a better knob to push on watt hours per kilogram and to improve the energy density of the battery generation over generation than to go backwards and actually increase the weight of the cells for a cost optimization.

Go ahead.

[ Mike Rob, Kepler Cheuvreux ]. So first of all, thanks a lot for the very interesting presentation. I have 2 rather, say, technical or scientific questions, if I may. And you can just answer them briefly with yes or no, whatever you like, okay, whatever time allows. But I mean, when I look at it, I guess, factually, it's fair to say you have a breathable anode made out of solid lithium, right? So upon the formation of -- upon charging, we have the formation; upon discharging, it dissolves again. With that, obviously, that imposes mechanical stress on the cell. So what does it mean for the longevity? Question number one. Question number two, as it's not just typical to solid state to any lithium-based battery or cell, how do you control the growth of dendrites that obviously impair the effectivity or workability of the cell?

Yes. So the first question, this is the answer. We have shown 1,000 cycles of mechanical movement back and forth where it does, as you say, increase the dimension in one side and comes back. And it is doable, and we have shown it and it can be done. And on the second question on the dendrites, this is an interesting question. Currently, the set of separators that often you see are polymers, sometimes you see gels, you have cell sites. Typically, a critical current density before you form dendrites in these are on the order of 10, 15, 20. When you get to 25 million per square centimeter, it is wow. We start out at 500 milligrams per square centimeter on the ceramic separators. The ceramic separator is what makes that dendrite growth. We are dendrite growth tolerant and then make sure it doesn't work. And so ceramic makes a phenomenal separator preventing dendrite growth. We can talk about this offline. Clearly, we have to make sure it's a thin ceramic separator and it has to be protected, but can be done relatively in well-known methodologies.

In the cell that I'm holding, there's a hard frame, which we call the flex frame and the difference between charge and discharge might be about 1 millimeter, maybe or 2. So at full charge, it will be flushed to the face, when discharge, you have a small gap. And as Siva mentioned, that was at play in this 1,000 cycle data that we've shown.

[Technical Difficulty]

No. Can we take this offline? We can talk about this at length.

Yes, last question. Okay last question.

Yes. I have a few questions. But first of all, thank you for creating and explaining this fascinating technology with us. Just questions on your business model. Dr. Siva mentioned a lot about execution is the key, but you also kind of rely on your customers like these obviously execute on the manufacturing, right? So have you thought about -- if they are slow in ramping their production, then it might slow down your financial performance as well. Have you thought about ways to mitigate this kind of risk? That's first question. And then second is in terms of business model, right, you have the NRE revenue stream and then you have the royalty revenue stream. In the case of VW what's the time line of materializing the NRE revenue, but also based on their production ramp, how quickly can you reach 85 gigawatt hour capacity and you can earn that revenue? I mean so what's the time line in terms of revenue recognition? Sorry, one last question is under the Trump administration, they're doing away with some of the incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act. Do you see that as a headwind for you to any of your potential customers in the U.S. changing their strategy in terms of where they [ spoke they are having us ]?

Okay. So the first question was we are working with partners. Our job is innovation, it's speed and it's partner enablement. So we have very aligned incentives. We would earn royalty revenue at the rate at which our partners' factories scale up. That's why Siva mentioned it's a high-touch licensing model. After transferring the technology from our San Jose pilot line, we'll continue to work with those partners to enable them to ramp that technology as quickly as possible. The second question was on the timing of realization of these 2 different pathways. We, of course, had the expanded relationship, the expanded collaboration licensing document we signed in July. Just on the last earnings call, we mentioned we're going to invoice for the first time in Q3, $10 million that we've already earned under that collaboration agreement. And then if you stay tuned to the Q3 earnings call in October, we'll provide an update in terms of what to expect next. But the answer is that's occurring now. And then the final question was how does recent legislation coming out of the United States impact the opportunity set? I would just reference back to the earlier comment that if you ignore the kind of the changes in legislation that might make one geography more or less attractive and take a bigger step back, the industry is going from outside of -- just in North America and Europe alone from 400 gigawatt hours to 2,400 gigawatt hours. So a massive expansion. And we're focused on that tremendous long-term automotive opportunity and to empowering our customers to go after it with differentiated EV offerings.

And on that last point, just to finish up where -- we are a technology company. We are not moving materials across borders. So we continue to make sure that in every geography, we work with the customers so that they can produce in the most cost-effective fashion for tariff regimes to work around.

With that, thank you very much. Thank you, everybody.

Thank you very much. Thank you all.