Sono Group NV (SEV) 2022 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Welcome, everyone, to Sono Group's earnings conference call. A press release including financial information for the second quarter of 2022 was released recently, and it is available on our website and on EDGAR. A full interim report will be published later this week. My name is (inaudible), and I'm Director Corporate Finance at Sono Group.

On today's call, we have our CEO, Laurin Hahn, our COO, Thomas Hausch; and our CFO, Torsten Kiedel. Laurin and Thomas will first provide an update on our activities of the past months. Torsten will then review our Q2 financials before we open the call for questions.

Before we continue, please be reminded that today's presentation will contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. As such, the company's actual results may be materially different from the views expressed today. Further information regarding risks and uncertainties is included in the recent filings of the company with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company does not assume an obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required under applicable law.

With that, I will now turn the call over to our CEO. Laurin, please go ahead.

Hi, there, and a warm welcome to everyone. As you know, we are working very hard every single day to deliver on our mission, solar on every vehicle. And I want to start with this beautiful picture here. This was the moment when we revealed the production design of the Sion. And this was one of these, I will never forget moment in my life.

Okay. But with that, I'm happy to share some insights on both the business and the corporate side. So let's start. My main message today, we are on track towards on a growth target and achieved major milestones. In the second quarter, we signed 3 additional solar partner contracts. Our revenues in H1 2022 were 2.6x higher than the full year '21 revenues. We filed 9 patents and paid patent utility models. And we had a strong cash position of EUR 90 million as of June 30.

But let me give you even more exciting recent updates. We reached more than 20,000 direct consumers reservations with an equivalent net sales volume of EUR 435 million. And we just signed an LOI for another 12,600 B2B preorders for our Sion with FINN Auto, equivalent to about EUR 370 million in net sales.

In the solar business unit, we reached now a total of 21 solar partner agreements including a Mitsubishi subsidiary, of which several solar products have already been delivered or are in operations. And we will showcase 4 solar B2B customer trailers in 2 weeks at the IAA transportation.

Patent-wise, we have 13 new ones filed year-to-date in 2022, leading to 29 in total file or granted patents. We recently celebrated 2 world premieres in July, designed in its production design and our new solar basket for solar. On our Sion program, we are making great progress and have assembled our first series-validation vehicles.

So let's dive deeper into some details and start with our B2B solar business. It's all about timing. We see steep increases in energy prices, which in our opinion, underlies the need for our solar integration. The fuel prices steadily increased over the last 2 years. It's just getting more and more expensive, and this is exactly where our solar technology can help. It can help to reduce fuel consumptions even on diesel buses or diesel vehicles. This means our technology can save costs for fleet operators. And that's why we think the world needs our solar technology now. And this is what we can actually see on the customer side. We see continuous high growth, which shows our massive potential.

Until today, we have signed 21 partnership agreements. This means that today, we have 14 more partners than we had 1 year ago at the end of Q2. And we are not just signing partners, we have already delivered several products of our technology. In the last 2 months, we delivered 4 customer solar trailer project alone.

So to sum it up, we have new partners signed, various solar products delivered, installed and in testing, and we are making revenues with these projects.

At the same time, we are really excited about the quality and the growth of our customer portfolio. Let me give you 1 example. Our new customer, Mitsubishi. Mitsubishi is Japan's largest trading company with an annual revenue of EUR 90 billion and 86,000 employees. We have already delivered a solar reefer trailer to MTTE, a European subsidiary of Mitsubishi Corporation. And we will show this trailer in 2 weeks' time at the IAA transportation trade fair.

Well, with that great news, let's have a look at our next solar product. On our solar basket, we successfully entered into the scale-up phase. Several bus solutions have been delivered and are in daily usage on the street. We are focusing heavily on scaling this product. Why do we do so? Well, let's have a quick recap on the specs again. It's expected to have a potential payback time of about 3 to 4 years. The solar basket can save up to 1,500 liters of diesel and up to 4 tonnes of CO2 emissions per bus an year.

And currently, we are focusing on the most common bus types in Europe. So this can make a real contribution to each city's clean air targets. But in order to keep our promise and to really make this product scalable, we contracted a new partner. So I'm happy to announce our new partner for solar retrofit installations. We have signed an LOI with a company called ÖPNV-Service Hagen. This company provide installation, servicing and logistics services across Europe for our solar basket. ÖPNV-Service has over 15 years of experience as a service provider in the public transport sector, and performs 4,000 modernization of commercial vehicles annually. So we are increasing our assembly capacity in Europe. And with our new partner, we have the capacity to scale the solar basket. And that will be our focus within the next month.

So yes, what's next for the Sono B2B business? Well, we will premiere several customer projects at the IAA Transportation in Hanover, Germany this September. I'm really thrilled to announce 4 world premiere for our B2B business unit. We will showcase solar modules or solar solutions, we will set up for Chereau, Kögel, Wingliner and the Mitsubishi subsidiary MTTE. We believe that all of them show significant potential, operate in a very attractive addressable market and have a real interest in solar integration.

So -- and that's for me and not from the B2B solar business side, turning over now to Thomas, our COO, who will talk about the Sion business unit. Thomas, all yours.

Thank you, Laurin. And indeed, we're making good progress towards series production. Let me give you an update on the first affordable solar electric vehicle, SEB as we call it, the Sion. We completed the built of our first series-validation vehicles, which did mark a milestone towards the start of production planned for the second half of 2023. The assembly of further vehicles and bodies-in-white is ongoing with a total of more than 80,000 parts and components delivered and, we started with street testing with the first of these prototypes.

On the development side, we're really proud that even prior to the completion of the first series-validation vehicles, the German authorities already certified us as an OEM. The German Federal Motor Transport Authority, yes, I know it's a long word, KBA, Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt, granted us the OEM status. This is an important step towards homologation in series production. So we can now say Sono Motors is officially the first solar mobility OEM in Germany. This is also and specifically possible due to our now over 200 engineers and developers working tirelessly on the Sion program, all directly employed by us, and particularly in the currently challenging upstream environment, we also continue to focus with our complete team to protect our key business parameters, for example, cost.

So our partner day at the end of July with over 100 suppliers attending was a big step collectively in achieving our business goals. We could see then again that our mission is relevant also for the majority of our suppliers.

On the series production side, our cooperation with contract manufacturer Valmet Automotive in Finland is on track. We're currently aligning on the details of the production ramp-up plan including volumes, especially for the launch year 2023 and the ramp-up phase in 2024. We also have already ordered the first production machines and robots.

And as Laurin mentioned before, we held our first Celebrate the Sun event with 2 world premieres in July. Over 1,500 community members and media guests attended on site. We received a lot of positive feedback from journalists and reservation holders. And we also saw a big increase in online interactions and reservations. In total, we've now reached more than 20,000 net reservations exactly by, I think, September 1. There, we have an average down payment of approximately EUR 2,000, which would total a net sales revenue of around EUR 435 million. So 20,000 reservations today means a 17% growth from Q1 this year up to now. Well, we did experience a strong demand increase in Sion. And we're convinced now more than ever that the market is ready for solar electric vehicle.

I have to honestly tell you, I'm particularly excited about the development that we reached 20,000 reservations with down payments in the early days of September, and I'm looking at Torsten smiling here because our CFO mentioned this as the annual 2022 aspiration for us in our fiscal year 2021 earnings call. And we've got more news regarding reservations and preorders. I'm happy to share probably the biggest Sion news of today with you. We signed a major volume B2B LOI with FINN Auto. FINN is a car subscription platform operating in the U.S. and Germany. They intend to drive transportation into a future that is as CO2 minimized as possible. And our mission match brands here intend to purchase 12,600 Sions from 2024 on through 2029. We therefore, now exceed a total of 22,000 B2B Sion preorders. These overall preorders are nonbinding and without a down payment, which is normal for B2B customers. But allow me that adding all these reservations together, we have now over 42,000.

The Sion in its production design continues to deliver on our promise of a family-friendly spacious C-segment car, that offers a lot of comfort and room for passengers in both the front and back and a lot of space for goods to be stored, ready to be easily shared for nearly all imaginable use cases. We're doing this while delivering a great deal of autonomy from charging infrastructure and charging expenses via our integrated solar technology and be directional charging capability. Therefore, our Sion exterior still followed a clear purpose-driven design approach for an optimized solar yield to protect both our planet and your wallet. And this form follows function approach can also be expected from our future models. But so much about our 2 business pillars.

I'm now handing over to Torsten for our corporate and financial update.

Thank you, Thomas. Also a warm welcome from my side. I would like to pick up on this topic of achieving targets and company growth. Also on the corporate side, we've seen continuous growth in key areas. Just like our customers and community, our employee numbers have been growing fast. As of the end of Q2, we recorded 350 employees, an increase of 27% compared to the end of Q1. And this trend continues. In August, we already had more than 380 people working at our company. Hence, we are on track with our hiring needs and are aiming for around 420 to 470 people by year-end.

In regard to patents, we now expanded our portfolio to 4 patents granted and 25 patents filed, hence, achieving 29 patents overall in the pipeline.

Let's move on to the financial update. We had a strong cash position and a growth in revenues in both quarters. Talking about cash. we believe it's of the utmost importance in this challenging market -- capital market environment that we maintain a very strong cash position. This is what we did throughout the first half of 2022.

At the end of Q2, we had cash and cash equivalents of approximately EUR 90 million. Another important balance sheet item is fixed assets, in particular, property, plant and equipment increased significantly compared to year-end 2021 by EUR 24 million. This increase, among others, mainly represents prepayment to Valmet Automotive for equipment and tooling and indicate the progress we are making on our path to series production.

Looking at the most important income statement items, the solar products and services that we delivered enable us to continue to steadily grow our top line with Q2 revenues exceeding both Q1 and fiscal year 2021 revenues. The growth of operating expenses by EUR 38 million represents continued investments in development. Our total net cash outflow amounted to EUR 45 million in the first 6 months, reflecting our continued investments in series-validation vehicles as well as successful efforts on capital markets.

Let me now briefly review our funding progress and plans. This waterfall graph shows you our year-to-date cash flow and the funding and cash outflows until start of production. Thanks to the successful funding round at the beginning of May, we maintained a strong cash position of approximately EUR 90 million as of June 30. At the end of June, we signed a committed equity facility with Berenberg granting us access to USD 150 million over the next 24 months. In the second half of this year, we plan to raise in total more than EUR 126 million and that includes the usage of the before mentioned equity facility. The expected cash outflow for the second half of 2022 lies in the range of EUR 155 million to EUR 175 million reflecting our planned intensified investments and development and production facilities.

The vast majority of these expected cash outflows are onetime costs for development service providers, machinery and toolings and investments in the production setup. We expect these investments to continue in 2023 and to comprise most of the planned cash outflow next year as well. Overall, from our inception to date, Sono has placed more than EUR 400 million growth in funded and committed capital, indicating a strong commitment to our mission, not only from our founders and the Sono community, but also from our global institutional and retail investors.

Let me provide you some more color on these cash flows we had in the first 6 months. It is important for me to emphasize that we continue to focus on cost efficiency and question every dollar spent. That allows us to have moderate cash needs. In the first half of this year, we spent approximately EUR 80 million, hence, monthly cash outflow average around EUR 14 million. As you can see in that average monthly split between external and internal costs, the majority were one-off and for external expenses. As I founded out earlier, that number will increase for the remaining quarters of this year. However, our cost structure remains mostly driven by one-off expenses related to R&D and production preparation for the Sion, while fixed recurring costs for salaries, rent and marketing remain low. And if we disregard potential further vehicles, cash outflows will decrease significantly once SOP has been achieved.

To summarize, we trigger and we decide when to spend money.

Let me wrap it up with our outlook for the remainder of the year. We plan to continue our growth pattern and continue to execute. As we've shown you during today's presentation, we are delivering on our targets. On the commercial side, the contracts and LOIs for the solar business are growing, and we are on track with the assembly of the series-validation vehicles and presented one of them at the Celebrate the Sun release event at the end of July. The reservation numbers have been growing steadily, and we already exceeded the full year target of 20,000 reservations.

On the corporate side, we significantly increased our number of patent filings and we are on a quite a promising way to achieve our target employee numbers for the end of 2022. Employee growth for next year is then planned at a more moderate growth rate and I'm happy to tell you that we plan to show this series-validation vehicle in the U.S. this year in Q4.

On the financial side, we are advancing our funding activities. With regard to revenue growth, we still intend to generate revenues towards the low 1-digit million euro amount. We continue to expect the over overwhelming share to materialize in the fourth quarter when business with our solar customers fully picks up. However, like the overall automobile and solar industry, we are facing some challenges in the supply chain and try our best to solve these. In order to achieve our milestones and the planned start of production in the second half of next year, the expected cash outflow for the second half of this year is in the range of EUR 155 million to EUR 175 million. Overall, we are maintaining our guidance for 2022 and are making consistent progress towards our milestones.

Now we are happy to take your questions.

(Operator Instructions) We will now take the first question. And it comes from the line of Andres Sheppard from Cantor.

Congrats on the quarter's, it's great to hear everyone's voice. I just wanted to clarify on the reservations versus the new preorder. So to be clear, the reservations now stands at over 20,000. Those, I think, are expected to ramp up again in the second half of next year. And then just give us the timing on the new 12,600 orders. That looks like it all started in 2024.

Andres, it's Thomas here, and great to have you on the call. Thanks for the question. We actually are separating reservations and preorders. We want to be extremely transparent. So what we call reservations are always -- the 20,000 customer reservations are always with a down payment. That's our usual B2C business. So over the last 4 or 5 years, we've always reported that and that's now over 20,000 net. We're super proud of that.

Then we've already started a couple of years ago to talk to business partners and companies where we took on nonbinding let's say, interest declarations where they say we'd like to have a certain amount of cars at a certain time, and we, nonbindingly, said we're reserving these vehicles for you. They have been at 15,500 some time ago. And we've now gotten an LOI, which is more than a nonbinding reservation with FINN Auto, and we were in discussions with these colleagues quite some time, and we're thrilled to say that they're now taking 12,600 preorders, we call it preorders, not to mix it up. There, we don't have down payments, but it's typical in the B2B world.

So we have now overall instead of 15,500 over 22,000 B2B preorders. The quality of the 12,600 is significantly higher because of the LOI, but the total is 22,000. So overall, we are today at 42,000, they're of 20,000 with down payments.

Great. That is very, very helpful. And maybe my -- as a follow-up, a lot of other OEMs in the world have been experiencing continued supply chain disruption in some cases, have even -- maybe they've had to cut down on their manufacturing targets. So I'm wondering, do you foresee any potential hiccups with manufacturing and -- if so, what can be done or what can we put in place to try to hopefully mitigate any disruptions in manufacturing?

Yes. No, thank you, Andres. We will be amiss if you would not say that the risk of cost issues and delivery problems has not increased over the last 2 years. Indeed, the situation is not as great as it was 2 years ago, overall, not only in automotive, but overall, I would say, in the tech sector and in the industry. Laurin mentioned already and Torsten that we are looking, of course, at every euro or dollar before we spend it. So we are having a tight cost control but that's not good enough. We also have with our, for example, automotive engineering team, typical cost control measures like cost analysis with suppliers to try to mitigate costs or cost increases and find offsets for it. There is a risk, but so far, there was no need to change our revisions, but we are experiencing here and there already some impacts of delivery problems or cost increases. So I do not want to rule it out for the future.

Excellent. Congrats again on the quarter. And I'll pass it on.

Thank you, Andres.

We will now take the next question. Please stand by. And the next question comes from the line of Eric Stine from Craig-Hallum.

So first, I know it looks like that you have completed your first series-validation vehicle. And I know the overall goal or maybe to confirm the overall goal and the timing that we should look for that you'll have 16 complete at some point and then 21 test structures, maybe again, timing of that and then the significance of that and what you think that potentially does both for the B2C channel and the B2B channel?

Yes. Thank you very much. Very good question. We're continuing -- finishing and building these vehicles throughout the complete year for 2022. As I said, we started the first tests already. But these vehicles are very important, first of all, to validate all our work that we did before. And we're now getting into the areas of commissioning, making sure everything that's developed and was frozen is working as advertised or as expected. And the next type of vehicle that will be built as a pre-series vehicle, and that would start the next year.

Got it. And that's just the next step before actual commercial production? I mean kind of the step in between these 2.

Correct.

The current validation vehicle and the -- Okay.

And Eric, you asked -- sorry, I missed 1 answer, you asked how important is that for customers. What you usually have with B2B customers and big fleet customers, they want to drive the final vehicle as it comes off the assembly line. So this would be a typical step to be expected where we have the first sellable vehicles coming off the production line second half of next year and then doing sort of fleet test drives and of course, showing customers cars and so forth.

Got it. And then maybe a good segue, so FINN obviously upping or the LOI. So taking it I guess, another step beyond just a reservation with no down payment. I mean do you think that, that is what is needed to have that vehicle that the customer can drive that gets other B2B customers to take that next step to take it to an LOI or some advanced level thinking about their future plans?

Yes. So let me put it that way. We're not building up a fleet sales force today. we're waiting with that until the vehicle is there. There, you can also understand that we estimate also for us that the fleet business, the rental business and other businesses work like for other OEMs. They usually want to drive the car that's already there and do a certain planning and usually only do a short-term planning for the next year. We're thrilled with FINN because this company also has a mission to reduce the CO2 impact on this planet. So for them to have secured volume with us is great for them and great for us.

To be precise, we will deliver -- we intend to deliver 100 vehicles to them in '24 and then 2,500 per year thereafter. So this is how the 12,600 is consistent. You see with them here, a strategic approach of a cooperation. We don't give ourselves targets here. We don't think it's necessary. Quite frankly, we feel pressured from our 20,000 reservations to deliver them as soon as possible. So we're frankly, preferring the customers with down payment with only a few exceptions, therefore, don't expect this as a monthly announcement.

Okay. Got it. No, that's helpful. Maybe last one for me. Just on the announcement, the recent announcement with the ÖPNV-Service Hagen. Maybe an update on what your outlook is for service. I mean, this would seem to be an important step in towards building that out as your vehicles start to hit the road, are there other announcements similar to this that we should look for? Or what are some other steps you expect to take on the service side to get that set up for launch?

Quickly, clarifying your question. Do you mean on the Sion side or the solar side? Because ÖPNV-Service Hagen is just for the solar kit, on the Sion side we have not announced the service partner yet.

Okay. Well, maybe then take it on the solar side. But then would love to hear kind of updated plans or just maybe current thoughts on the Sion on that side of it as well.

Well, on the solar kit itself, we wanted to have a scalable product, right? And what we do is retrofitting and that's usually not very scalable. And that's why we look for a partner who can make it scalable for us. And that is this ÖPNV-Service Hagen partner who has throughout Europe, the capability of retrofitting our solar kit on buses. So we don't own the operations here. We can just sell the kits, sell at installation service with it and then ÖPNV-Service Hagen is actually doing it.

Okay. So leading on partners, and I would think with the Sion on that side of it, you would do the same thing.

Well, we always want to be asset light, right, as you remember. And this is exactly one important milestone on the asset-light business plan.

(Operator Instructions) We will now take the next question. Next question comes from the line of Christopher Souther from B. Riley.

On the ÖPNV partnership, can you talk a little bit more about the scope of the agreement? Are there any exclusivity components? Are they going to be kind of actively selling the kits with their own kind of existing customer base? Or is it the sales can process still on your own? And are there any capabilities as far as new buses that they could kind of be assisting you with as people who are experiencing kind of that retrofit process?

Yes, sure. Happy to do it. And Chris, nice to have you on the call. So ÖPNV-Service Hagen here, is having really experience in that field. They're doing 4,000 modernizations of commercial vehicles annually. They're having 15 years of experience in doing that. They're working basically with all public transport operators here in Germany and throughout Europe. And we're doing service after sales and servicing of the solar kit with them. So they're not only doing installation, but also the other services. Additionally, they are mapped as seller in a lot of ÖPNV (inaudible) public transport operators and can easily access the salesperson of each public transport operator company. So this has a huge potential also for our sales for the retrofit of the solar bus kit.

Okay. No, that's very helpful. Maybe more broadly on the solar kit side, can you talk about what the supply chain challenges are and how we see kind of production scaling and the visibility that you guys have with the 21 partners either maybe for the rest of this year or early next year given the energy crisis we're seeing across Europe right now, how should we think about kind of the backlog starting to build up there?

Yes. Where do I start? I think you all followed the price of raw materials, which has recently seen a little bit of a relief, but over the last 18 to 24 months there was a significant increase of pricing there. War in Ukraine makes certain logistic routes from Asia into Europe, troublesome, particularly by train, so far, we have most of our business anyway, is planned by sea, but we had to air freight through a few important items for development, for example, from China. Chip shortage is an issue. We have experienced shortages with solar panels and solar [labors] but we're still able to deliver several products to customers within the last month. So I do not want to be alarmist in this call, but I would like to acknowledge that, yes, we have these challenges. So far, nothing has been material where we have to -- or had to warn you. But it is a challenge for our team.

We have an absolute crack purchasing and logistics team as well as the overall Sono community, including our suppliers also the second tiers and thirds are quite committed of making things work. So until today, I don't have any dramatic informations for you. But cost development, logistics challenges, I would say, if you want to generalize it, are making us think how to prepare for future events.

Okay. And then maybe just on the demand side as well, this kind of second part there, the visibility with the 21 partners in the near term and how should we think about kind of the backlog building across those different partners and other opportunities here?

Well, good question. As we always said, we have 3 steps with those partners. We go from a prototype stage to a series development stage to a series production or licensing stage. And we are experiencing very good conversion rates of each 1 of those stages. We are in 3 key industries in here, trailers, including reefer trailers, e-vans and vans and buses, (inaudible) buses and electric buses. And those 3 key industries, we see a lot of potential, a lot of new customers, a lot of things in the pipeline. But until now, we also have to, of course, focus on our capacities and what we can scale and what has the highest potential.

And let me add on the Sion side of the business, let's not make our concerned people too happy because there are also massive opportunities. And talking about the increased cost of electricity or fuel or the dependency on other countries and networks, our solar technology overall and for the Sion in particular, makes you, the average European to 40% to 50% independent of a charging location and of charging costs. So I would be amiss of not trying the sales pitch out on you here. That is not just a pitch but reality. Customers do realize that you gain independence of networks, of cost in addition to the good feeling that you do something to the environment. So I think on the demand side, I see actually more upside than downside. Our pressure, I think, is more with delivering has to repeat it again, 20,000 customers that gave us money and overall 42,000 reservations and preorders on the Sion side alone, not even talking about the solar business that drives us every day to deliver.

Got it. That's great to hear. And maybe just the last 1 here on the FINN LOI. Could you talk about like the timing with that customer versus kind of the consumer reservations? I'd imagine these to be fairly high utilization vehicles that will be good for initial deliveries, if not with the pre series next year, giving them kind of chances to kind of test it out. But can you kind of just walk through how we should think about the timing of those deliveries versus kind of the consumer customers?

Yes. So FINN Auto is a subscription company, they're already well established in Germany, and I believe also they operate in the U.S. And their customers are basically average or is to be seen like other customers, they just do a subscription or rent the vehicle and so forth. So we do expect that the user profile of these might be like an average leasing car or other car. Of course, we have our own requirements to our customers through our capability of being shared of our capability of being directional, charging other vehicles and so forth. So we think we will get a very unique use case. And from a timing point of view, we are first trying to fulfill the demand of our private customers that made a down payment. Nevertheless, we did reserve 100 units in 2024 for FINN Auto, and from then on 2,500 every year until 2029.

(Operator Instructions) And we will now take the next question. And it comes from the line of Michael Filatov from Berenberg.

Can you hear me?

Michael yes, glad we could have you.

Great. Good to talk to you guys. Nice job on securing that LOI from FINN. Just to ask another couple of questions on that. I know when you initially went public, you were talking about how you had about 15,000 or a little over 15,000 sort of orders of interest, I suppose, from B2B customers and now you're at 22,000, though the FINN LOI is for 12,600. So I'm just wondering what the dynamic is there. Were there some like you were talking about how you had about 15,000 or a little over 15,000 sort of orders of interest, I suppose, from B2B customers and now you're at 22,000, though, the FINN LOI is for 12,600. So I'm just wondering what the dynamic is there? Were there some sort of some interest from B2B customers that went away and then so the net increase is a little bit smaller than the 12,600, just sort of the dynamics on that change in number? And then are there any discounts for these B2B sort of customers? I know traditionally, in the automotive industry start to see discounts for higher volumes for commercial customers.

Yes. That's an outstanding question. So thanks for giving the opportunity to explain. Yes, your eagle-eyed analysis has seen that. And no, we didn't lose any of these customers. But actually, in our discussions with FINN by the end of 2020, they already gave a loose indication of at least 5,500 vehicles. So we were quite thrilled to intensify the talks with them. That's why the net increase and it's not 12,600. But let me point out again, we're not going out there. We don't have a sales force trying to do B2B sales, but we're looking for mission match partners that are just a natural fit. So that's point number one.

Your second question on pricing. In general, we do not give information about our pricing agreement, and I want to do that within either. However, in general, there is no discount for us. And I would also say that we don't plan to do that in the future. So if you approach us on B2B business, don't expect to get a discount.

So, you have to do the sales pitch.

Why? Because our car is in hot demand and our normal customers don't get the discount and we cut out the middleman. That means there are no incentives and so forth. That's why we have an awesome pricing. And there's additional benefits for fleet customers that include integrated sharing software, a wonderful data transparency for fleet operators as well as a lot of other benefits, including reduced maintenance costs.

Absolutely. No. Clearly, the demand is there for once you guys get the production. So just another question here on the cash spend you have in your slides, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, but just noticing the change in 2023 expected cash spend from the prior quarter. It looks like cash outflow expected seems to nearly have doubled for 2023, but maybe you can correct me on that. Just any detail on that change.

Good to have you in the call. So it wasn't doubled. Actually, we only shifted some portions of the cash outflow from 2022 into next year. Hence, also decreased the funding needs for this year in order to be as cost efficient and as much focus, as I mentioned earlier, on keeping as much liquidity as possible while still not affecting start of production. So the overall funding requirements increased by, I believe, slightly more than EUR 10 million, let's say, EUR 10 million to EUR 50 million from when we last spoke, due to some price increases and some minor changes, but this is about it.

Okay. Great. And then just jumping once more to the sort of the solar side of the business. In terms of solar engagements with the reefer trailers and some of the bus customers, are those typically for retrofits or for new build solutions? Because I know there's a pretty significant difference in the actual ASP for those solutions, whether it's retrofit or new build. So yes, what do those engagements look like?

You mean between Sono baskets retrofits and series integration solutions. Is that your question?

Yes. Yes. Exactly. For bus (inaudible) and private reefer trailers, yes, for all those customers you're engaged with.

Well, of the 21 partners we showed you on this slide, it's a good mix, but the 4 new names we announced today, they are all on the series integration side. So they really mid- to long term, huge potential market we have there, right?

Okay. Great. Yes, that makes sense. Thanks for all of the time, guys, and nice job on at LOI.

Thank you so much.

(Operator Instructions) There are no more questions at this time. I would like to hand back over to (inaudible) for final remarks.

I would like to thank you all for joining the call. If you need more information, please take a look on our website or reach out directly to the IR team. Thank you.