Aeva Technologies Inc (AEVA) 2021 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Good day. My name is Betsy, and I will be your conference facilitator. I would like to welcome everyone to Aeva Technologies Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. (Operator Instructions)

As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded and simultaneously webcast. I would now like to turn the call over to Andrew Fung, Director of Investor Relations. Andrew, please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome, everyone, to Aeva's Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Joining on the call today are Soroush Salehian, Aeva's Co-Founder and CEO; and Saurabh Sinha, Aeva's CFO. Ahead of this call, we issued our third quarter press release and presentation, which we will refer to today and can be found on our Investor Relations website at investors.aeva.ai.

Please note that on this call, we will be making forward-looking statements based on current expectations and assumptions, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. These statements reflect our views only as of today and should not be relied upon as representative of our views as of any subsequent dates. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. For a further discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our financial results, please refer to our filings with the SEC, including our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2021.

In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of Aeva's performance. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP results.

The webcast replay of this call will be available on our company website under the Investor Relations link.

With that, let me turn the call over to Soroush.

Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon, everyone. Q3 was an exceptional quarter at Aeva as we achieved a number of important milestones that solidify our path towards commercialization. I would like to highlight a few of our accomplishments, which are summarized on Slide 5.

First, today, we announced a key production win with the automated trucking company Plus to implement Aeva's breakthrough 4D LiDAR on Plus' driver-in and fully autonomous trucks at volume scale. This win is significant because it further confirms the industry's increasing transition to FMCW LiDAR to enable safe, automated driving as well as the leading performance and scalability of Aeva's automotive-grade LiDAR on chip solution.

We also remain on track with key development milestones across our other automotive and nonautomotive collaborations. Second, we continue to strengthen our supply chain to bring Aeva's 4D LiDAR to market. We have announced our agreement with Fabrinet, a leader in advanced precision optical and electronic manufacturing, to produce our 4D LiDAR chip module, which accelerates our manufacturing capability and automotive-grade certified production line.

And third, Aeva achieved the important milestone of completing the design release of our B sample, which finalizes the architecture and provides the path to our final cost structure.

Turning now to Slide 8. I would like to provide more color on our key business updates. We are incredibly excited to share that Plus, a leader in self-driving truck technology, has selected Aeva 4D LiDAR for long-range perception on their production autonomous trucks. This multiyear production program includes Plus' intentions to deploy trucks globally starting in late 2022, with Plus' driver-in solution followed by their fully autonomous system.

And Plus plans to deploy over 100,000 trucks by the end of 2025. We have been working with Plus since 2019 to test and validate Aeva's 4D LiDAR. Plus selected Aeva for its unique combination of ultra-long range and instantaneous velocity measurement, which enhances Plus' long-range perception system and provides faster response time in safety critical situations.

The combination of Aeva's 4D LiDAR and Plus' proprietary autonomy stack also addresses many critical edge cases such as previously unseen obstacles that may confound deep neural networks in the perception stack. Adequate response time is crucial to enabling safe, automated driving, particularly for heavy-duty trucks since they take much longer to stop than passenger vehicles. This has been a challenge to reliably achieve with legacy time-of-flight LiDARs.

While the industry has for some time, understood the potential for FMCW to significantly improve perception with its unique advantages over legacy time-of-flight LiDAR, such as direct velocity measurements and lack of interference, the trade-off between range and resolution with conventional approaches has held back the adoption of conventional FMCW technology.

However, Aeva's 4D LiDAR breaks that dependency, enabled by our proprietary signal processing algorithm that leverage the strength of FMCW to sense precise velocity and position at more than 500 meters of range while simultaneously achieving millions of points per second. This enables Aeva's solution to reliably measure and classify objects with higher confidence and at longer distances than legacy LiDAR solutions and already does so today.

And because FMCW uses a continuous beams to constantly transmit data, we can use our same core LiDAR chip and scale performance through software. This flexibility provides our customers, including Plus, with the ability to not only leverage Aeva's 4D LiDAR for their driver-in solution, but also enable next-level capabilities as they bring their fully driverless solutions to market, utilizing the same Aeva 4D LiDAR hardware.

Plus shares a similar focus with us to deploy their self-driving technology to volume scale. The company's customers include some of the largest freight carriers and OEMs, including Amazon, and FAW, the largest heavy-duty truck OEM in the world. We are excited to be selected for production and look forward to supporting Plus' volume ramp.

Let's now move to Slide 9, which highlights a key development in solidifying the path to bringing Aeva's 4D LiDAR to market. Earlier this week, we announced that Aeva has selected Fabrinet to produce our 4D LiDAR chip module. As the engine of Aeva's unique FMCW LiDAR technology, the chip module is the critical element to integrate all core sensing components onto a single silicon photonics platform.

We are pleased to work with Fabrinet, a leading manufacturer of silicon photonics integrated devices and advanced precision optical systems and equally important, a trusted automotive qualified supplier to many global OEMs and Tier 1s. As part of the agreement, we are bringing online an advanced production line at Fabrinet that accelerates Aeva's production manufacturing capabilities. The new line will produce our third-generation chip module and scale for series production.

By securing capacity with a leading manufacturer now, we feel confident in our ability to supply the expected volume at automotive-grade quality for our customers' programs. Ahead of that, we are working with Fabrinet to increase automation and process efficiency as well as establishing a local engineering team in Thailand to support the manufacturing ramp-up well before the start of series production.

I would now like to update everyone on our 2021 objectives, which are detailed on Slide 11. We have already achieved 3 of the 4 goals set for 2021, and we are confident in delivering on the final remaining goal to finish B sample development this year based on the significant progress already made to date.

First, we have reached our goal for 2 additional programs towards production with Plus and Nikon, 2 leaders in their respective markets with opportunities to scale to large volumes. Importantly, we also continue to deliver on development milestones for our other partners. With our growing team, we believe we are well positioned to support ongoing work across all of our programs.

Second, on accelerating engagement in nonautomotive applications. This goal was met with our Nikon collaboration announced last quarter, which we expect to accelerate Aeva's non-auto opportunity in the $10 billion and growing industrial automation and metrology markets. As I mentioned earlier, there is growing interest in Aeva's 4D LiDAR for both automotive and non-automotive applications. We will continue to put our focus and resources towards opportunities that align with our mission to bring Aeva 4D LiDAR to mass scale.

Third, we have significantly strengthened our supply chain for production with a number of key developments throughout this year, including finalizing the key supply chain for our silicon processing chip and most recently, selecting Fabrinet to produce Aeva's 4D LiDAR chip module, which accelerates our manufacturing capability towards start of production.

And fourth, on our B sample development. This quarter, we completed the product design release, which is a key milestone to finalizing the product architecture and provides us a path toward the final cost structure. As mentioned earlier, we expect to complete development this year and are planning to deliver B sample units to our partners for qualification starting in 2022. This leaves us well on track with our time line to commercialization.

And with that, I will turn the call over to Saurabh to discuss the financials.

Thank you, Soroush. Let's turn to Slide 13, which summarizes our financial results. Revenue in the third quarter was $3.5 million, reflecting substantial progress we continue to make on customer development milestones and our path towards production.

Our non-GAAP operating loss was $19.9 million, comprising of R&D expenses related to product development and to a lesser extent, G&A and sales and marketing expenses. Gross cash use, which we define as operating cash flow less capital expenditures, was $24.2 million for the third quarter. Our balance sheet remains strong with cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities totaling $478 million at the end of the third quarter, demonstrating continued discipline in how we spend and invest for growth.

Finally, our weighted average shares outstanding in the third quarter was 212.6 million.

In summary, our results reflect the great progress we have realized with a growing list of customers. And as we continue to advance towards commercialization, we are in a strong financial position to execute on our programs and bring Aeva's 4D LiDAR to mass scale.

With that, I'll turn the call back over to Soroush for closing remarks.

Thank you, Saurabh. Before taking questions, I would like to first thank the Aeva team for their relentless dedication to our mission, which is resulting in our growing commercial fraction. And to all of our stakeholders, we appreciate the commitment and confidence in Aeva's breakthrough 4D LiDAR technology, which we hope will enable the next wave of perception.

I am incredibly excited by Aeva's accelerating momentum. The production win with Plus marks an important milestone for us. And with all of our progress towards commercialization in the last quarter, I have great confidence in the increasing demand for our unique technology and the upcoming opportunities that lay ahead. We remain laser-focused on supporting our customers on the path to production and Aeva's mission to bring perception to all devices.

Thanks, everyone, for your time today. We will now open the line for questions.

(Operator Instructions) The first question today comes from Colin Rusch with Oppenheimer.

Can we start with Fabrinet? I just hope to get a little bit better understanding of what sort of the value-added engineering and specialized procurement expertise they're bringing to the table formally in the agreement you've made with them?

Sure, Colin. Yes, thanks for the question. So obviously, Fabrinet is a leader in silicon photonics integration and manufacturing. We've been working with them for quite some time already. And what they really bring to the table is the capability to manufacture automotive-grade LiDAR chip modules, right? That chip module is at the heart of our system.

And to be clear, their expertise is in this LiDAR chip module manufacturing, and they're already automotive certified and a supplier to both OEMs and Tier 1s.

So today, Fabrinet is already manufacturing hundreds of thousands of silicon photonics-integrated modules. So they're really capable and expert at what they do, which is one of the reasons that we actually decided to work with them.

And the other thing I think that's interesting about our -- with Fabrinet is they are already manufacturing our LiDAR chip module at their auto-grade facilities, and we do plan to intend to continue using them for production as we scale core volumes in those same facilities.

Perfect. I'll take a couple of other questions around that relationship offline. But then as you enter into production agreements now and if you look at your pricing model, the velocity data and capabilities that they bring to the table are pretty significant. So I'm curious how you're thinking about pricing and how that conversation is going with the handful of customers that you're working on right now, particularly as you move into these production agreements?

Sure. Yes. Look, obviously, I can't provide details on exact ASPs, but we are seeing strong traction in the market. We are really encouraged by the increased momentum as evidenced by the number of engagements and the win that we've had and talked about in the past quarters. With this Plus win, obviously, as an example for automated trucking, this is also lays the foundation for us to scale up in the automated trucking space.

As far as the pricing goes, of course, for each customer, we work closely with them to make sure that we have the ability to support them all the way through to volume production. And in general, we are in line with what we have discussed before in terms of that.

The next question comes from Tristan Gerra with Baird.

Any color that you could provide in terms of the potential volume and the timing of plan for the Plus design win that you've announced today? And is the functionality pretty much the same as previously announced win that will be with TuSimple?

Sure. Thanks, Tristan, for your question. So first of all, look, we are very excited to be selected by Plus for this key production program. I'll give you a little bit of color about this. So this is a multiyear supply agreement for global deployment. It is actually beginning in late 2022. And Plus selected Aeva because they believe in our unique capabilities, including instant velocities and ultra-long-range capability, which really enhances long-rage perception for Plus and helps us to bring safe automated driving to scale.

That is why they see significant value, as you mentioned, not just incorporating Aeva in fully autonomous solutions but also on their driver-in solutions. So that's how they're starting with driver-in a bit earlier, but intend to continue and implement the same Aeva 4D LiDAR hardware into a fully autonomous or driverless solutions.

And I think that really shows the importance of Aeva's unique value add and flexibility for both assisted driving as well as autonomous driving. And with our work on the B sample, we're starting to really see that traction pick up.

And in general, from giving you a bit of context about -- you asked about of the scale, so as I mentioned on the call, Plus plans to deploy over 100,000 units by 2025. And what's interesting, I think, for that is we have the right to supply majority of the truck volumes with the long-range LiDAR in this time frame. And so that should give you a sense of the scale that we're talking about here.

That's very useful. And then for my follow-up, you've talked about getting the design win on your range and velocity. I know that in the past, some people have talked about latency being a little bit different for FMCW than other LiDAR technologies. So the question will be given obviously the design win traction that you have, people must not see latency as an issue, is that because of the algorithms that you have that allows you to enhance latency relative to perhaps other FMCW LiDAR suppliers?

Sure. Look, what I think is interesting is the traditional way, what we call traditional conventional way that FMCW has done, actually has a number of challenges in terms of meeting the -- both high resolution and the long-range simultaneously. And I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the latency, but that is part of the thing that I think Aeva has really figured out to bring.

And Aeva is not the traditional conventional FMCW system. And that's why we are starting to see now a continued momentum with the wins under our belts because of us having solved some of those key challenges. And that, I think, is important and as evident by now we are seeing the traction in trucking, but also we start to see that also across other automotive and non-automotive applications.

Next question comes from Suji Desilva with ROTH Capital.

Congrats on the progress here and the Plus announcement. In trucking, I know you've been working with them for a while, but it seems like that market might come to volume sooner than, say, faster cars. Is that because of the business case or because it's a kind of more controlled environment? Any color there, if that is the case, would be helpful.

Yes. Look, I mean, I think it's no secret that there's obviously a shortage of number of truck drivers today on the market. And the business case for commercial trucking is pretty clear, right? So we are starting to see kind of an acceleration in the market adoption for autonomous trucking on the roads. And also, more importantly, we're starting to see some consensus forming about the type of perception capability you need to enable such autonomous trucking on the road. And we see that going towards FMCW-based technology.

I think that's evident also by the partnership and the win that we announced today with Plus and some of our past partnerships, including TuSimple as well. So I think that's the key driving factors that enable commercial trucking to make sense in terms of a bit earlier time line of production.

Okay. And I just want to get some color on the B sample that you plan to shift to quality to customers at the end of the year. I just want to understand the implications for the schedule, maybe the C sample that comes after that and whether the Tier 1 production line is needed before you go to production? Or whether a partner like Fabrinet obviates the need for the C sample production line build by the Tier 1s? Any color there would be helpful.

Sure. So look, so Fabrinet actually makes our LiDAR chip module. They don't assemble the full system, but that's at the heart of our system. We are working, obviously, with our partners to manufacture the B sample. As I mentioned on the call today, we recently just crossed the key milestone in our product design release of the B sample, which sets upon our architecture.

And B sample, of course, is critical because it provides also with the final cost structure of -- a path to that -- for the system -- path to final cost structure. And so in 2022, our partners will be validating our B sample. With those earnings, we'll continue to refine our system towards production. And in parallel, we're going to continue to work on the supply chain to make sure that we have all the capacity well ahead of production.

And I think with all the work we have done on the supply chain side, including securing our key suppliers for the silicon processing chip as well as the Fabrinet announcement with our LiDAR chip module, we have great confidence in our ability to not just meet the time line but also meet the demand of customers with the capacity and the quantities that are needed.

Next question comes from Pierre Ferragu with New Street.

Congrats on the new win. I have 2 quick questions on trucking. So first, when I look at Aurora, Plus and TuSimple now they all use FMCW revenue. So I'm not sure how you can talk about the market share of these 3 names represented I guess in trucking vicinity. So is it fair to say that FMCW is winning specifically in trucking? And if that's the case, why is that?

And so maybe similar traction in passenger car, for instance, and we -- it's just less visible because of the timing of press releases and things like that. And if that the case, yes, maybe, yes, let us know and (inaudible) product.

Pierre. Yes, sure. Thanks for the question. Look, I think as I mentioned on your first question, first point, yes, we do agree. I think there is a general consensus of increasing transition to FMCW for autonomous driving in general, but I think it's becoming also first evident with the trucking side because of the fact that some of the time lines are actually earlier, right? So that, I think, is clear.

And as you mentioned with the names there, we see that as critical. And I think the reason is really in multiple, and really the key areas of -- the key benefits of Aeva's FMCW approach, long-range perception capability, the ability to go past 500 meters, ability to take instant velocity immediately is super crucial for trucking, it's also because you need to see objects that are quite far out. And when you have even a few points or pixels on an object at those kind of distances, when you add the dimension of velocity, right away you will know that this is something you should care about. And so you don't have to keep looking at it and taking effectively framed snapshots which is typically done with legacy time-of-flight LiDAR to do that.

And that's crucial because trucks take a long time and a long stopping distance. So that's why you want to be able to see further out.

And these are the 2 things. There are other things, of course, around the scalability, the fact that we have been able to integrate this now in the LiDAR chip module, and we're making significant progress on being able to ramp up our supply chain to manufacture LiDAR chip module. I think it is all coming together along with the fact that we have no interference as well, which becomes more and more critical as we have more of these on the road.

So I think it's kind of a bit of the manifestation of -- I think we have talked about before, and we're starting to see that transition happening.

That makes a lot sense. And then my second question is very pragmatic. You've given a lot of specifics about how deep you and how defined, well defined the partnership with Plus is today. Can you give us like a similar description of where you stand with TuSimple in terms of visibility on their ramp? And whether you've already entered a similar agreement to be part of their system through the journey to 2025?

Sure. So look, I can't obviously comment on the details of other customers on this call today, but we are progressing well with TuSimple across a couple of milestones that we continue to support them with our LiDAR technology as we continue to expand their fleet. And we look forward to do that throughout the next year as we continue to build out a robust platform for automated trucking and driver out functionality.

The next question comes from Sam Peterman with Craig-Hallum.

I wanted to ask on automotive as well but specific to passenger cars rather than trucking. Our sense of the industry right now is that OEMs are starting to make decisions on LiDAR for production and in the 2024 or 2025 years today. And obviously, that aligns with your time frame, your time line for ramping sales in automotive. So I was curious if you could share where are you guys in discussions with auto customers today. And do you have any RFI, RFQs?

Sure, Sam. Yes, thanks for the question. So obviously, yes, of course, we are involved in almost all the RFI, RFQs that we see around not just trucking, but also passenger cars in this space for those time frames. We're seeing strong traction in the market, in general, as I mentioned, and encouraged by kind of the increased number of engagements in both automotive across passenger, trucking and mobility, but also non-automotive applications.

I think some of the examples we talked about, okay, we talked about Plus today quite a bit, but also our financial agreement to deploy our 4D LiDAR for the undisclosed customer that we talked about earlier this year and others that we have -- we are, of course, not discussing about today yet, really give us a lot of visibility in the time line and the selection and ramp-up to our -- with our customers that's coming out.

So as I also mentioned before, we will continue to align with our partners who are highly capable and have the desire and also important the capability to bring advanced perception technologies to mass scale, and that's what we want to focus efforts with. And so that's what I can say so far.

Okay. Fair enough. Second question, I wanted to ask, we haven't heard anything on the consumer side in a while. Is there development ongoing to scale your platform down to consumer products like mobile phones, especially now that you've got this B sample almost locked down? Any color on kind of development work that's going on there and when we might see samples there would be great.

Sure. Yes. So in terms of opportunities, of course, generally, we do see significant opportunities in the consumer electronics as well. As I've discussed previously, we're focused currently on enabling foundational capability, right? So that -- what that means is that the raw level of performance needed for our perception solutions. So as we have talked before, we have so far focused on very long-range performance and more recently, working also to provide a completely different level of performance with our micron-level accuracy, which trades off the range of perception.

These levels of performance, this raw fundamental capability is what really allows us to go after those other applications, including consumer because when you measure things at the micron level, that changes the game of perception, right? So -- and to our knowledge, FMCW technology is the only technology that is capable of doing that from a distance, meaning without a contact. And so as we continue to develop this capability and implement it into sampling level, we're going to also go after those applications and working with customers to effectively enter that market. And as we have more updates, we'll share those as well.

This concludes our question-and-answer session and also concludes the conference call. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.