Wallbox N.V. (WBX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, everyone. I'm George Gianarikas, one of Canaccord Genuity's sustainability analysts. And we have a little bit of a tech talk today. We're very happy to have with us Wallbox's esteemed Fast Charging Product Director, Till Wilmschen, and he's going to talk about DC fast charging and Wallbox's product portfolio. Like I said, he's the Director of Product of Fast Charging at Wallbox chargers, and has been part of the company from the early stages. Till started at Wallbox heading the European engineering team and was involved in the development of different products before moving into fast charging. Currently, he's responsible for the full fast charging product portfolio on a global level. And I know Till has -- and his team have prepared a nice presentation for us today, going to last about half an hour or so, and then we'll get into some Q&A. Till, please go ahead.

All right. Thanks, George, for the introduction, and thanks for giving me the platform to talk a bit about my area here today at Wallbox. So just as a recap of what we're going to talk about today is, first of all, I want to put you a bit on context and let you understand better the importance of fast charging and to orient as to why we need a wide product portfolio and then dive into the customer needs, who is the customer and what are the customer needs and what are the challenges that we're trying to solve with our products and then later on introducing, obviously, our product portfolio of our fast chargers and highlighting the differentiating factors that we have in our products and our solutions in general and then finishing off with George, a Q&A session. Before we jump into fast charging, which is my area at Wallbox, I just want to make a quick recap that in Wallbox, obviously, we do not only do fast charging, which you can see on the top right, which I'll dive a bit deeper into, but obviously, we do residential charging, commercial charging and also, we have several software solutions to it. And then generally, also, our portfolio has now been extended with the ABL product portfolio, as you can see here. But again, the focus of today will be in the top right sector, which is public fast charging, which I am going to dive into now. First of all, before we go, let's say, into our product portfolio and which kind of products we have, I want to situate ourselves with where we actually do have fast changing. And obviously, when we talk about public fast charging, we're talking about public infrastructure, which is key for EV adoption. Obviously, there will -- the EV sales depends on having a strong public infrastructure, which we are intending to be a part of. And it's also important to understand that public infrastructure is not that correlated to the direct EV sales, but more towards subsidy programs, especially regions like USA or Europe have significant subsidy programs in place that -- yes, that's [indiscernible] goal to have a stable public infrastructure in place throughout the next years. And just that you understand a bit of different use cases. You can see here 3 columns, you see on the left stationary charging, destination charging and then on-the-go charging. If you start off with the right, this is more like, say, what we see it as a classical approach, which you may know from a combustion engine vehicle as a gas station that you go to a place to fill your vehicle. So it's a place where you really want to spend a few time, like 5 to 10 minutes. And here is where we really go to the higher end of charging power currently possible, which is around 400 kilowatts, which is really the limit that the current charging standards allows. So that in these 5 minutes, you can really add already 100 miles to your vehicle and usually find these places mostly on highways or key federal roads in central locations because with high charging power, and this is important to understand, the investment increases exponentially not only from the charging harbor, but also from the installation, from the station cost itself, all the grid connection, et cetera, plus the timings of the project extends significantly.That's why in other charging locations, where we can see in the middle and on the left, where you spend more time, so 15 to 30 minutes in a destination charging or several hours in the stationary charging. And these are places where you do not go only just to charge, you really go there to make something else, like, for example, going to the shopping mall, going to a restaurant or in the stationary charging, charge at the office or on-the-street parking. And you spend a sufficient amount of time that you don't need that high end of power, which requires that high end of investment, but you need -- in case of destination charging, charging power of around 50-150 kilowatt and stationary charging up to 50 kilowatts of charging power to get again, that similar kind of mileage that you would have on-the-go charging where you spend only a few minutes, and that's the time that you spend in this location.This really allows the operator or our customers to have many more charging outlets providing enough power for the end user to charge sufficient mileage to the vehicle. And therefore, what we do have is the full product portfolio that covers all these different kind of scenarios. And especially just to highlight, also in the stationary charging, which right now, majority is dominated by AC charging, what we call slow charging, but more and more as battery vehicles -- the battery of the vehicles are increasing nowadays and tomorrow, we already need to go toward a lower power DC charging to be able to charge in a couple of hours the full battery of the vehicle. Now understanding the use cases that we covered in fast charging, let's focus on our customer. Obviously, what the customer wants, and frankly, what we all want is obviously a reliable infrastructure. A charger that you go on the street, you charge and it works. So what we need to do here is provide quality hardware, but also an excellent service offering that can -- if there is any issue, can act in a very few time and ensure a really high uptime of that infrastructure. But what the operator expects, what you can see in the -- what we see in the right bubble here, they need to have a customizable solution. As you see in the beginning, fast changing is not equal to fast charging, it really depends on the location and also on all the ecosystem, which software is being used, et cetera. So you need a system that is flexible to integrate an existing system or even provide a turnkey solution, which I'll explain later on. And obviously, to be scalable, efficient and future-ready as the fast charging world is really also a fast-changing world. So each year, power is changing, some power levels are increasing, new standards like the NACS are introduced. So it really needs to be a model of a solution that is future-ready to evolve with the market situation. But -- and also last, but not the least, on the left side, not to forget EV driver expectations. So the EV driver needs to have a product that he or she comes up to and has a very easy-to-use product, very intuitive with a straightforward payment options and actually giving the charging speeds that is expected. So apart from expecting a charger that works, we always need to go beyond that and really have a smooth user experience so that everybody really trusts that public fast charging infrastructure. And really, this is the focus that we are working on with our product portfolio. So diving into our products that we have at Wallbox is ones that we have what we call Supernova, you can see on the left side, the rate is up to 180 kilowatts. As you see, if you remember in the previous slides, in the use cases, it would be for stationary charging and for destination charging. And then we have Hypernova that reaches to up to 600 kilowatts in terms of its system power, but has charging power up to around 400 kilowatts, which is limited by the charging standards, which is really optimized for that on-the-go scenarios, but also can be applied for destination charging.As you can see also, the main technical differences here is that on Supernova, what we call all-in-one charger, it's one installation, very compact where we have everything inside. And Hypernova separates what is power and that power cabinet, which you see that block on the left side; two, what the user facing, what we call dispenser on that right side, which is very similar size to the Supernova, but gives much higher power. And yes, I will dive a bit deeper into that in the following slides. Starting off with the Supernova. As I mentioned before, it brings up to 180 kilowatts, and these are the 3 key values that we offer for this product. First of all, reliable product design. As I mentioned already several times, reliability is key so the product must always work. This we do by having redundant designs, using quality components. And then it's important also that it's very easy and robust and -- very easy to install and a robust design. As I mentioned before, in stationary charging and destination charging, you will find much higher number of outlets, therefore, more chargers being installed versus the on-the-go charging with higher power levels. Therefore, the rollout, the installation process needs to be very, very straightforward and fast. That's one of the key values of this charger that -- yes, that is straightforward. Second is high-power density, meaning the power that we have on a certain square foot in the space. Basically, it's important as these chargers often is installed in locations where we have existing parking spots that should not be modified so that you can integrate that charger in this charging -- in these parking places. Hence, it internally optimizes space to this high power density and not only provides this high power to what we call high-voltage vehicles but also low-voltage vehicles, like for example, Tesla that you can give that high charging power. So it says 180 kilowatt and really gives 180 kilowatt on a very small footprint to really optimize the installation. And obviously, not only charge it comes back to getting most of the available space, charging 2 vehicles at the same time, combining 2 charging spots with one installation is definitely key and dynamically, distributing the integrated power dynamically amongst the 2 charging outlets to have basically the maximum return of investment of that installed and contracted power towards the grid.And here are just some more product specifications, some highlights. I will just go over them on a high level. First of all, in terms of user interface. So it's a design, I mentioned before, very, very intuitive with its lighting system, with its 10-inch touch display, it's nice and easy-to-use user interface and then part of the user interface is also -- or the user experience is the cable management. As charging power is increasing, cables get heavy and thicker. So we make lots of investigations to have a very easy-to-use, let's say, cable that requires integrated cable management system to support the user on that. And obviously, payment. It comes integrated with a credit card reader so that apart from having the charger integrated maybe to a platform where you could have an application for your membership, you can also straightforward pay with a credit card reader installed. It deploys the mostly available charging standards such as CCS, but also now coming up the North American Charging Standards, or in short NACS, introduced by Tesla. Hence the product can come fully customized from factories or all the white surface that you can see here can be fully branded and preconfigured from factories so that once the product is installed or the commissioning process of the IT infrastructure behind is already preconfigured and the rollout can be done very smoothly and easy. And obviously, it brings all the necessary certifications with it and all the communications.Then as the next part of the portfolio is the Hypernova, which, I mentioned before, is very focused on high power charging. So as the system goes up to 600, which I'll also explain a bit further, the charging power up to 400 kilowatts which if you remember the 3 use cases really focus on that on-the-go charging where you can recharge in 5 minutes up to 100 miles. Obviously, important to mention that a few vehicles actually allow this today, but more and more vehicles are increasing their charging power, and therefore, it's important to be able to offer that high charging power. It's also very focused on the administration's climate package subsidy program called NEVI and, therefore, it will help to solve the current deficit in public charging along key U.S. corridors and simplify long distance traveling for EV drivers. But it's one of the main focus and is designed to comply all what's the NEVI program requires. And scalable, meaning it can be extended with more power over time, more dispensers over time and versatile in a way that it can -- it is very flexible in terms of installation and the power configuration itself and how we distribute the power amongst the systems.So these are, as I said, the 3 key points of that product: High power charging, NEVI compliance and being scalable and versatile towards our customers. When we look -- remember again, that product consists of a power unit and a dispenser. That dispenser looks very similar to what we have in Supernova and on the high levels also it's very similar in terms of its user experience. It has the same -- also interactive lighting system, a touch display. We did some tweaks to it so the touch display is a bit higher, it goes up to 15 inches. It has push buttons for redundancies and also for [ color reasons ] for glove use, et cetera. And also the light indicates the state of charge, SoC, of the vehicle. Because, again, you're spending few time at that charging point, you want to have a very quick look how fully is your car charged and make decisions if you want to wait a couple of minutes or leave to the road again. Also it's equipped with both charging standards, CCS and NACS. And in this case, it comes also, optionally, with liquid cooled cables. These liquid cooled cables essentially allow that you can charge on the high power, on high current, basically power is a product of current and voltage. And to go to that high power, you need to charge at high current, up to 500 amps. And in areas where you have high saturation of use of the product, meaning one vehicle that connects after the other and all demand a high charging power, you need to have a cable that cools itself to be able to provide that high charging power for a long time. Otherwise, if you would not have that liquid cooled technology, the cable will get too thick and very difficult to handle, to be able to provide that kind of charging power. So definitely, it's a must to have it optionally with that product and our product has this available. Then everything else, which is payment, customizations, et cetera, is exactly the same as I mentioned before on the Supernova.And then on the system side of it, as I mentioned before, it consists of a power cabinet that can connect up to 4 of these dispensers. And then basically distribute the full 600 kilowatt in a dynamic way. So in the bottom, you can see some use cases. So if you have 4 cars demanding 150 kilowatt, all of them get 150 kilowatts. But as you may know, the charging process is not steady. So even if a car allows possibly 300 kilowatts, it will not charge these 300 kilowatt for the whole charging process, but only a few percentage, therefore, only a few minutes. So once the power goes down, it can be redistributed to other cars connected to the system. So what this allows, this dynamic system, is that the available power can be used in a very optimized way versus if you would install, for example, big [indiscernible] for example, 300, 400 kilowatt per charging outlets because assuming the fact that the vehicles will only charge several minutes at that charging power and the fact that many cars charge at that power level at the same time, the chance is very low, okay? So as a system, you can see below some ways how we distribute the power, so you can use the full 600 kilowatts depending what the car is demanding and how many cars are connected. And important to mention that the customer of this system can add dispensers over time or start with lower power and add more power over time depending on the evolving needs of the different sites.Then you can see here some examples of the Supernova in the field. These are throughout Europe right now; in Italy, Spain and also in Netherlands, you can see example of where we do charging with trucks actually. And you can see, especially in Italy and Spain, we work with major CPOs already. Then I talked a lot about the hardware side of it. We can see in the left column that obviously, again, most important is that reliability, it works always, easy to use, easy maintenance, eventually, all leading up to a higher uptime of that hardware. But also we offer to it, also software solutions. So if the customer needs a turnkey solution, hardware plus software and also maintenance and installation, which I will explain later, we're able to offer it. But the same site, we are flexible to integrate into existing systems. So if the customer already has back end in place, we can offer just the hardware or if full solutions needed, we can provide that full solution. And we have a very powerful communication architecture that the charger connects not only to the operating back end but also to our service back end. So in any case, it doesn't matter where that charger eventually is connected to, to which back end, we always have access to it. So in a service case, we can remotely access to it and very fast improve the situation. And another software solution that we are offering is the energy management solution that can manage different charging hardware and is prepared to later on integrate storage capacities like batteries or -- and renewable energy sources. Through the hardware and software comes obviously also the maintenance and installation. Apart from the hardware being designed for fast rollouts, to have -- with easy installation and commissioning process, we do offer what we call a Wallbox Care Program that includes preventive maintenance, but also corrective maintenance and essentially very quick issue resolution and 24/7 customer support in main European countries and North America. Additionally, what we have is a unique production facility, I would say. It's a semi-automated production line, which you can see here on the left. Very based on the automotive standards, which has allowed us not to have -- not only to be scalable for higher production capacity, going up to 10,000 units per year, but also complying with very high quality standards to make sure that the product is produced in the highest quality possible and therefore, all the installation and commissioning process is as smooth as possible. And additionally, it's designed in [indiscernible] way so that we can really ensure short lead times even though the customer has certain customization needs.And then on the right side, we have very substantial internal R&D capacities. Apart from the EMC chamber with high power, that you can see in the bottom, that EMC chamber with high-power, only a few of them exist actually in the world. We also have substantial car validation facilities, mechanical testing lab and environmental testing lab, et cetera, which eventually help us to have to be able to -- when we develop new products, we can iterate very fast, develop prototype, test and kind of close that loop until we have a solution that complies with our quality standards and with certification standards.So once we go to an external third-party lab to get the stamp on the charger, we're very sure that we pass and it really improves our time to market of our products. So that was from my side on the introduction to our fast charging products. I hope it was useful, and I did not run through it too quickly. And I will hand it over to George for the Q&A session.

Great. Thank you for that, Till. And I can attest that as an EV owner -- a recent EV owner, we need more of your fast chargers on the road here in the United States because we don't have enough. And I certainly think that that's one of the bottlenecks to even faster EV adoption.

Definitely.

So a couple of questions. I have to say that most people that we speak to look at this market, particularly with all the companies that are trying to compete, we're trying to figure out how much of it is commodity versus how much real -- true competitive differentiation is there amongst the vendors in the marketplace? So what do you think of Wallbox' competitive advantages are from a technology perspective?

Well, first of all, and I explained before, the most important thing is that our main focus is on reliability. How do we achieve that is using redundancy in our design, quality components, but also that we have end-to-end control from developing the product, to manufacturing the product, meaning -- and we're very close to our manufacturing line so that first of all we can ensure that every product that is produced is produced in a high quality standard so that once it's rolled out, installation and commissioned, everything goes smooth. And if any issues will be detected on the field, we can bring that back very fast to production and improve how that works. So I think that end-to-end control is essential. And apart from that, that we have a very flexible solution. So we have -- many offer just the hardware, just the software, just the major installation or they oblige you to have always the full package. But many customers need only a part of it. So we are very flexible in which kind of solution we can offer. I think that's summarized, I think, our main points in that.

So what speeds do you think the market is looking for today? I noticed you've shipped a lot of Supernovas, and what do you think it's looking for today versus what it's going to look for a year from now?

So if you bring into mind like that use case that I explained. So we have some stationary charging, destination charging and on-the-go charging that inside these use cases, the power shifted already to higher power ranges, while in destination charging yesterday, let's say, it was 50 kilowatt, now it's 150 kilowatt. And on-the-go charging yesterday was 150, now it's 400 kilowatts. .They're definitely shifting higher, but definitely never -- we don't believe there is going to be only one charging power, which, let's say, 400 kilowatt, there also is going to be an even mix because you will need, for different kind of location, different kind of technical solutions. So definitely, the shift is going higher, but also the lower range, especially in the lower range of DC charging power, we see more and more demand of where we used to install AC chargers that potentially go to 20 kilowatts on AC, but actually the charging power is lower, and more and more DC chargers are installed in that lower power range where you -- locations where you will spend several hours. So there will be a healthy mix between, depending on how much time you spend on the location, of different charging powers.

Now, you talked about different locations having different needs, but how about from a geographical perspective? Are there different countries that you see that have higher interest in higher speeds versus others?

Definitely. As I mentioned before, so it's fast charging or public fast charging really depends on the subsidies in place in different regions because that's where the main funding is coming from. And these subsidies usually come with technical requirements. For example, NEVI in U.S. requires a minimum of 150 kilowatt of charging power. But then there are other countries that require a minimum of 200 or even in different locations, up to 300 or 400 kilowatts. So it really depends geographically. And the main driver for this power drift is -- are the subsidy programs.

And what about the technical differences between Supernova and Hypernova. Outside of -- you obviously have -- you disaggregated power in Hypernova. And what are the other differences between the two?

The main difference is what you said that we can separate -- where we separate what is power and what's user unit in the Hypernova basically then we can have much higher power in the parking space, in a very few space. Let's say that's the main difference. And then obviously, to get to that high power, we need to use new technologies like liquid cooling in the cables, et cetera, to get to these high charging powers. These are the main differences between the 2 products.

Can you talk a little bit about the OCPP or open charge alliance and why it's so important and why you're open to this concept?

Definitely. I mean, the public fast charging ecosystem consists of many stakeholders and they need to be connected with each other. Like the charger -- with a vehicle using, for example, CCS standard or the NACS standard and the charger to the back end. So back end, you need so that someone can control the charger or use the charger with the application. It's also standardized using the protocol, what we call OCPP from the open charge alliance. It's basically -- we are a great fan of it and we support it totally as it standardizes the way how the chargers are connected to back end and essentially allows much easier rollout of the infrastructure and eventually gives our customers a much more flexible integration possibilities.

I alluded to in the beginning that I think in the United States, at least, we definitely need more fast chargers. But we also need the ones that are in place to work. And I have to say, I think reliability right now is pretty poor. Can you just talk about why you think that's been an issue and what you're doing to fix it?

Definitely. There, again, in that ecosystem that I mentioned before, there are many, let's say, places where the system can fail and eventually, the user cannot charge. This can be from the charging hardware, obviously, that power electronics is poorly designed, the part that makes the AC to DC from the grids to the battery part, which is a complex technology, or it's essentially simply poorly manufactured, that I mentioned before that it's very important to have development and manufacturing very close. As it's a very complex product, you need to have both elements very close to align and in sync. But also often there are still car compatibility issues, meaning that half the charger is not communicating properly with the vehicle and fails. So also what we're doing here is there are many events that we attend where we meet with the car manufacturers and our chargers to make compatibility testing. And another element that we bring here to it, as I mentioned before, we have that parallel connection to the charger. So independent of how the charger is connected to the back end to the OCP, et cetera, it is also connected to our service back end. So we can have a very close look of what's happening with that charger and making sure that everything is going well. And even before the client may detect an issue or a warning, we can already see it and be proactive in our issue -- in our -- yes, proactive, so that before actually the error arises, we can put actions in place.

So it sounds like it's software, better software, better hardware, better communication with the OEMs...

Exactly.

A few months ago, there was a flurry of announcements from different charging companies and OEMs that they would accept Tesla standard, the NACS standard. There's also an existing standard -- several existing standards including CCS, and there was a lot of confusion in the marketplace as to what that would mean for some of the hardware vendors? What's your take on the issue? What does it mean for Wallbox and for others in the marketplace to adopt NACS?

Basically, I mean, what the current situation is that many car manufacturers announced that soon, summer of 2024 or 2025, their vehicles using a CCS to NACS adapter will have access to the supercharger network plus some of them starting from 2025 plan to integrate a NACS or substitute their CCS outlets with the NACS outlet in their vehicle, okay? So that summer 2025, apart from Tesla vehicles out there, there will be other manufacturers with NACS outlets out there. This means eventually for us that we need to provide 2 things. Retrofit sets. So that's already chargers installed can be retrofitted to CCS -- from CCS to NACS. What we see currently that they are going to be multi-standard chargers, so that as you see before the car charger has 2 cables, so that we have CCS on one side and NACS on the other side so they can charge depending on the [indiscernible] arrives. And also have NACS available form factory so that customers that already foresee, let's say, what's happening in the next few years, they can directly install multi-standards in their stations being CCS and NACS.

But as a consumer, if I just have an adapter, it's not like a big deal, right? Just -- yes.

Exactly. There's always the adapter solution. Obviously, I guess, the nicer thing is always to be able to directly to plug. I think that's where we should go to, and we welcome always the new standards. It's good. There is, are we going to transition being 2 standards or 3 standards out there, once we merge to one standard finally.

But when I visit Wallbox in Barcelona, for example, I have to bring my adapter to charge my phone. So it's...

Yes.

We cover a company called Wolfspeed and they're in the business of making silicon carbide. So we paid very close attention to that market. And you guys have talked a lot about how you think that's a differentiating factor for you to use silicon carbide in your chargers. So can you talk about what that does for you and how proprietary that is for Wallbox versus other companies in the space?

Yes. Definitely. Silicon carbide eventually allows to have higher efficiency and higher efficiency basically means that in the charging process, you have less losses. Losses are usually heat, and you need to somehow dissipate this heat. You can do this by active cooling with fans or passive cooling, liquid cooling, et cetera. But the less losses you have -- and a big part of the charger is -- let's say, a big part of the volume of the charger is that cooling system being air or liquid cooled or whatever. So using the silicon carbide technology allowing for high efficiency, actually allows for lower requirements of cooling needs. Therefore, specially products like the quasar, our DC Wallbox bidirectional, et cetera, it's essential to use because it needs to be very compact and high-efficient, as it's not only charging but also discharging. So you have two ways of, let's say, losses. That's -- so depending on the use case, it's a technology that makes total sense, and we're using it.

Do others use it in the marketplace?

There are some others that are starting to use it and at least announcing first products with it. I would say in that sector, because we're working already several years with that technology, we're quite pioneering in that area.

So speaking of heat dissipation, you have talked about and you referred to the liquid cooled as part of, I think, of Hypernova and your products. Can you talk about the differences between liquid cooled and fan cooled and how difficult it is to use both technology?

Sure. Essentially, when it comes to charging, again, we somehow need to -- again, try not to be -- to talk too technical. As I mentioned, we need to transmit current that eventually multiplies with the voltage to get to the right power that we need. The higher the charging power, the more current we need to transport and that transport is using copper. And the higher the current needs, the more copper you need in order to handle that kind of current. But there comes a limit, obviously, if you ever had a fast charging cables in your hands, you see they're getting heavier and heavier. So there's a limit; you cannot make superthick cables. So in order to reduce that copper, you need to cool that copper. And that's why we use, in especially these high-power charging applications going at 400-kilowatt range, we use that liquid cooled cables to be able to reduce the diameter of the cable and be able to provide high power consistently over time. That's the essential use case where we apply that technology.

So you should use it more and more as the charging -- as you move up in terms of speeds, et cetera?

Exactly.

One of the reasons we like your company is that you're vertically integrated. You do a lot of things in-house. As a matter of fact, we had a webcast with Generac last week, and they have talked a lot about your vertical integration. And one of the things they used specifically is that you manufacture your own products. What sort of competitive advantage does that give you in the marketplace to manufacture your own hardware as opposed to many others who you compete against that outsource that?

As I mentioned before, especially our fast chargers and the area that I control, obviously, AC chargers, implies similar. The fast charger is a very complex product, okay? It consists of many levels of technology being power electronics, software, hardware, et cetera. It's very key to be very close to the manufacturing line. So while you develop the product, we would have daily meetings with the production team so that they can learn how the product works, they can [indiscernible] develop the line and then especially once we go on a pre-series phase before we actually start the production, the engineering team needs to be in that manufacturing plan to make sure that the product is being assembled and produced and tested in the right way. And we -- after the product is being produced, we bring it to the lab next to the manufacturing line, test thoroughly, maybe find some issues, work again with the manufacturing line to improve it. So it's a kind of interactive process to optimize that manufacturing process. And then later on, once we're in the field, to bring feedback from the field back to the manufacturing line. So I think having it internally allows us to be very agile and essentially go to a higher quality of the product.

It's almost as if you think that you couldn't have the same reliability that your products do if you outsource given that interplay and that back and forth between manufacturing...

I find it difficult. I would find it very difficult. Though again, it involves too many levels. And also you want to have, obviously, that time-to-market in mind that you need to deliver the product, so it's key, definitely.

How much vertical integration is there at Wallbox? So you manufacture your own products. Obviously, you don't make silicon carbide chips, right? So how much do you do in-house and where do you draw that line?

So we -- in general, our mindset at Wallbox is that we want to own as much as possible from our technology, okay? But obviously, at the same time, we need to balance time-to-market, as mentioned before, so we cannot develop products in a 5-year cycle, we need to be faster than that. And so the balance between time-to-market and owning design without impacting quality. So we don't want to become experts or we don't want to jump into the fields, for example, like payments. We don't want to make credit card reader from scratch even though technically we could do it. But there are others that have managed that industry for a long time and are experts into it. So we integrate an external device, while maybe over time, we create expertise and develop things on our own. But -- so we're always trying to find the balance what's right to own of design and what we need to alter for time being and possibly develop a more mid- to long-term strategy to incorporate the design to Wallbox.

Do you make your own charging gun?

No. We currently outsource it for that same reason. Making a charging gun requires a certain expertise that we have not established yet. And that's the main reason why we currently externalize it.

You made an acquisition of a company called ARES, which makes printed circuit boards. Has that found its way into DC fast charging yet?

Definitely, in some ways. It's not -- because -- I think it's more now in our AC -- also AC solutions. We're using it in some ways, but let's say it's not our majority -- major supplier for electronics in fast charging.

The way it's been described to me in the past and as to how you build your DC fast chargers, it's almost like a module or like a blade server approach, where I think you take your quasar when you put 6 of them, I think, in one of your products and you sort of -- it's very modular, and you can, obviously, there are cost savings you can accrete from having a similar design in one product and then using it in another. Can you talk about that? Is that the right way to think about it, almost like a blade server and very modular in design?

Yes. It's -- I think it's a good way to express this. We generally try to be very modular because modularity essentially allows to have physical power for customers, a very flexible power configuration without us having the need to develop a new product for each kind of operation that their market needs, so we can just plug more or less powers to the stack, let's say. And not only how to configure the power, also later how we distribute the power amongst several connected vehicles. Second, it also allows for more flexible manufacturing, so we can have -- we have several manufacturing lines in parallel and then later, put all the models together and each model is, let's say, sub-tested. And then the final charger is tested again. Again, it's a very complex product. So if you would assemble everything and only have to be under testing, chance for failure is high, and you will need to readjust things on the manufacturing. So it allows for also a more optimized manufacturing process. And then once diffused, the maintenance also becomes easier. So if any components would break or requires maintenance, preventive maintenance, the replacement of it is much easier if you just need to remove a model and replace a model rather than disassembling a whole device and spending a lot of time in the field where the charger will be out of service.

So it's cheaper to maintain over time. And can you upgrade? Can you buy a certain amount of -- you can't over time?

Yes. So in both products, the Supernova and Hypernova, you can start with lower product configurations and then add more power stacks to it and then yes, basically go with the needs of that site.

Yes. Obviously, there's this big NEVI program, and we cover other companies in the space that are unrelated to chargers and are having a hell of a time linking up to the grid infrastructure in the United States. How much work has to be done to the grid infrastructure to enable it for all of the DC fast chargers we want to put in place?

Yes, definitely, one of the most challenging topics in the rollout of fast charging because often the grid is not prepared, and it has -- takes a long time to be prepared. Permits take a long time to be approved, so that actually a project can start. Technology like transformers certainly have a huge bottleneck, so it takes a long time to put them in place. So it becomes more and more key to have solutions that can buffer high power. So to be able to install high power to a grid that is not prepared for it. Using, for example, battery solutions that we -- at Wallbox, we move more towards energy solutions. We have a system called Sirius that's already right now being able to communicate amongst our DC chargers. So if the grid only allows a certain power, but you want to install much more power knowing the fact that all that charging power would never be used at the same time because not every time, all cars are connected, demanding all a very high charging power. So that Sirius system that we developed can manage this restricted availability of power. Plus, it's already prepared to integrate battery systems and renewable energy sources over time because I think that's key to enable faster rollout of the grid.

Have you -- do you have attached batteries currently in Hypernova or is that something you're contemplating and putting in over time?

It's, currently, contemplating. So we're not planning to integrate it directly into the product. So there are some products in the market, let's say, all in one, including the battery, et cetera. We are more -- we believe more in a solution that separates, let's say, what's charged on the battery. Technically, let's say, on the power level, they are connected, but they does not integrate in that device. Just also, again, because it gives much more flexibility in the design of the charging site.

You'd rather have it disaggregated from the hardware, similar to what you're doing right now with Hypernova.

Exactly.

Could you elaborate a little bit on the charging pattern with DC fast charging and the speed difference at different states of charge?

Sure. It's one of the key factors also for example for Hypernova that we have, for example, 600 kilowatt available. Again, it dynamically distributes amongst different vehicles rather than putting high power on one chargers, which duplicates power in the charging sites, essentially because of the fact that a car will not demand the full power, the same through the whole charging process. Usually, below 10% and above 80%, the charging speed goes down significantly. This is basically to protect the battery of the vehicle as in the extreme ends of the battery, the chemical reactions change a bit, and they need to be very careful how much power they put into the battery. So the vehicle automatically protects the battery in that way. So that's why the charging speed varies throughout the charging process.

What you do requires an intimate relationship with the auto OEM, right? And you have to be able to interoperate amongst several different ones, right? It's not just the Rivian or the Tesla or the Nissan. You have to have these relationships with several of them to make sure you're not -- you're interplaying correctly with the EV and you're not destroying the battery of the EV. And that's what you bring to the table.

Exactly.

Yes. Well, as a customer of your consumer products, I very, very, very much look forward to having many Wallbox DC fast chargers in the market for my own personal use, but to also help accelerate EV adoption in our country and across the world. Thank you so much for your time today. That was incredibly educational. That was awesome. Happy holidays, and we'll talk to you soon. Good luck.

All right. Thank you, George.