Solid Power Inc (SLDP) 2023 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Greetings. Welcome to the Solid Power Inc. full year 2023 financial results and business update call. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Jennifer Almquist, Investor Relations for Solid Power Inc.

Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I'm joined on the call today by Solid Power's President and Chief Executive Officer, John Van Scoter and Chief Financial Officer, Kevin Paprzycki. A copy of today's earnings release is available on the Investor Relations section of Solid Power's website at ir.solarpowerbattery.com.

I'd like to remind you that parts of our discussion today will include forward-looking statements as defined by US Securities Laws. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and assumptions about future events and are based on currently available information as to the outcome and timing of future events, except as otherwise required by applicable law.

Solid Power disclaims any duty to update any forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances for a discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in today's forward-looking statements, please see solid Power's most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission which can be found on the company's website at ir.solarpowerbattery.com. With that, let me turn it over to John Van Scoter.

Thank you, Jen, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining the call today. I'll begin today with a brief overview of 2023 and our overall progress. Then I'll walk through our 2024 goals and priorities. After that, I'll hand off the call to Kevin for the financial review, and we'll open up the call for Q&A.

2023 was a milestone year for Solid Power. We successfully commissioned SP2, our second solid power facility to lead electrolyte production. We accelerated our cell development with a key partner and overcame significant yield challenges as we scaled production, and we delivered our first EV cells to officially enter the automotive qualification process.

Before I go further in detail on our progress, I want to give kudos to the Solid Power Team and express my sincere appreciation for their hard work in hitting these milestones. This was a challenging year, and the team did remarkable work to contribute to the business growth.

I'll start with our progress on the electrolyte side. Since commissioning our SP2 plant in April, we've successfully phased out electrolyte production at SP1 and begun using SP2 electrolyte in our EV cells, we successfully ramped up our RSP2 production, achieving an electrolyte production capability of 1.1 metric tons per month in multiple campaigns. This represents a tremendous increase in scale and a new best for the company.

While this does fall just short of our original 2023 production goal, we were able to overcome a couple unexpected challenges with equipment and incoming material quality that we saw late in the year. As we continue to work through these issues, we remain confident in scaling production of electrolyte in 2024. During 2023, we also sampled our electrolyte to new potential customers with positive reception.

To be clear, these are not companies we have a current joint development arrangement with several of these potential customers have engaged in numerous rounds of feedback as we continue to optimize our electrolyte for these customers' unique needs we now have multiple potential customers that are testing our powders, comparing it with our competition and incorporating it into cell designs. This reinforces electrolyte as our core strategy.

And I'm personally very excited about the great long-term opportunity this represents for our shareholders. Overall, it was a strong year for our powder team, pursuing market opportunities and continuing to improve production on the cell development side, we made significant advances in 2023 also First, in regard to cell production, manufacturing yields improved greatly, and we also increased the quality on our 20 amp-hour builds. We translated these learnings from those cells to quickly begin manufacturing our EV cells.

This progress was driven by close collaboration with BMW as well as the utilization of new equipment and improved processes with the increase in production. We've also seen improvements in sales performance, while still early initial testing on A1 samples demonstrates generally good performance with incremental steps forward and cycle life, low temperature performance pressure and energy density goals.

These learnings and continued testing will help to set guidelines and markers as we progress towards the performance targets required by A2 and A3 cells. 2023 cell development also presented us with challenges and unique learnings as we've begun to scale up the size of our cells, safety performance has been varied. We are currently reviewing a small handful of cells that went into thermal runaway over the last couple of weeks.

The team is heavily focused on root cause analysis as safety is an area where we hold ourselves to a high bar and believe we can excel over the long term preliminary findings point to inconsistent or contaminated input materials and small manufacturing defects. We remain proud of the improvements our cell team has been able to achieve in 2023. The team's efforts enabled us to refine our EV cell production process ramp manufacturing volumes and ultimately enter formal automotive qualification this solid execution underscores our confidence in overcoming our current challenges and those that lie ahead.

Taking a step back more generally during 2023. Solid Power also successfully grew the business to a total of over 270 employees, including key hires in late fourth quarter for supply chain and communications and further strengthen our management team and Board with the addition of essential expertise. We also implemented new tools to support multiple areas of the business and increase efficiency, including SAP enterprise software, which has been fully adapted into our business processes.

These are heavy lifts, and I want to thank the team for carrying these projects forward across the finish line. These successes gave us a lot of positive momentum as we enter 2024, and we have some wins already this year. In January, we announced a deepened relationship with SKM. We believe this new arrangement will enable us to collaborate more deeply on our cell development with a Tier 1 battery manufacturing partner, strengthen our competitive positioning by increasing our presence in Korea demonstrate our capabilities as an electrolyte supplier with our first-ever electrolyte supply agreement and further strengthen our balance sheet over time.

Importantly, once we have completed the tech transfer and Korea Line installation in 2025, we will have enabled round-the-clock cell development capabilities using our technology on three lines across the US, Europe and Asia. Since announced in January, the team has been busy Jack L. firstly has been promoted to Managing Director of our Korea operations. Since joining Solid Power three years ago. Jack has been a key driver behind the success of many of our strategic and capital projects, including the installation of our ED line and SP1.

We're in the process of rounding out the Korea team and we'll be adding additional key hires very soon. We are acting with urgency and have already placed POs for equipment, moved into our permanent offices, secured back office support and are meeting with local government officials to ensure positive collaboration as our operations grow.

We will provide more updates as we progress and look forward to working more closely with SK in the years to come as we continue to feel confident in our development and strategic progress. This led us to announce a $50 million share buyback program in January to capitalize on what we see as our undervalued stock price. Our ability to execute this program is a reflection of our strong liquidity position and our commitment to driving long-term shareholder value.

Looking forward to 2024. The team has set four goals for Solid Power this year. These goals build upon our current successes and continue our move towards commercialization. Our goals for 2024, our first expand our electrolyte capabilities and available market. Second, continue advancing our cell designs, third, execute on partner commitments, and lastly, further strengthen our presence in Korea.

Let me take a moment to walk through each of these. Our first 2024 goal is to expand our electrolyte capabilities and the available market for our powder. To do this, we intend to lean on three key strategies. First, we plan to increase our production capability SP2 to 30 metric tons per year or 2.5 metric tons per month.

We've already made great strides to achieve a 1.1 metric tonne per month run rate, and we'll use last year's optimizations to increase to 2.5 metric tons per month This assumes the slight equipment modifications and improved quality of incoming material. As I mentioned previous as we increase our volumes, we also intend to improve our manufacturing processes to drive greater consistency and performance.

Second, to expand our sampling program. The team has done a great job getting samples out to six different potential customers with growing interest from battery manufacturers and auto OEMs building off this success in 2024. We're growing this program and are in the process of working with an additional 10 to 15 potential customers and kicking off sampling cycles with each of them. We're excited about the opportunities, these conversations open and are encouraged by the positive feedback we've gotten so far.

Third, we will continue to develop our next generation of powers, which we believe will deliver improvements in connectivity, cost and performance. We're continuing to build and enhance the SP2 R&D lab, which we are targeting to complete mid 2024. This will help us optimize continuous electrolyte production, reduce the cost of our powder and develop future generations of even higher-performing electrolytes.

Our second goal for 2024 is to continue advancing our cell designs as we advance through the initial stages of automotive qualification. We are committed to further elevating our cell performance across the board including cycle life safety, low temperature performance pressure and energy density. The advancements we make in each cell stage will act as key learnings to incorporate as we advance our designs to A2 and A3 sample cells along with many scheduled upgrades. This iterative process will help us deliver incremental steps towards final A3 performance requirements.

We're also now starting from scratch. We do not anticipate that A2 or A3 designs will require a full redesign of the batteries or major changes of the chemistry used in our electrolyte. We plan to shift our focus towards A2 cells in 2024, and this falls in line with our partners' commercialization time lines. The A2 focus will also help us meet partners' performance requirements, which are centered around higher energy density, longer battery life and lower cost compared with today's live [demos].

Most importantly, as we continue to scale our cell size and progress through automotive qualification over the coming years. We believe our A2 cells will be a key step towards meeting our incredibly high safety standards. Our third 2024 goal is to continue to execute on our partner commitments. We have three unique and valued joint development partners each with their own pace, working style and immediate needs from solid power.

Let me take them one at a time first, BMW, since deepening our relationship with BMW in 2022, we have successfully entered automotive qualification with a one sample EV cells and delivered more than 200 of these cells to BMW. We will continue our strong collaboration in 2024 with BMW and look forward to supporting them as they build the world's first full-size demo sedan powered by solid powers solid-state battery. We are working collaboratively with BMW to ensure that our A2 sample cell will meet their requirements for their demo car.

Turning to SK and our deepened partnership in 2024 is incredibly encouraging, and we look forward to substantial collaboration alongside the SK and team under our recent agreements. We are committed to executing on our tech transfer commitments and beginning the process for the career align installation deliverables, including ordering equipment, integrating teams and responsibilities.

And beginning implementation will also be laying the groundwork for future electrolyte deliveries supported by higher volume production with Ford we continue to execute on our joint development agreement and are committed to continuing execution at a high level for this valued partner. We have shipped electrolyte to Ford and have received positive initial feedback in 2024. We are both setting targets and exploring ways to collaborate even more closely as we continue to advance our technologies.

Our fourth and final 2024 goal is to further strengthen our presence in Korea. We already have a great start here with the exp35 the green. Additionally, we're working to embed solid power in the Korea battery ecosystem through collaborations with local institutions, including government labs, top universities and public private initiatives.

These collaborations will enable us to build a stronger network in Korea with OEMs, battery manufacturers and materials and equipment providers, while also keeping abreast of development trends, government incentives and new technologies. We continue to believe that solid power stands to benefit immensely from the increased presence in this key battery market, and we look forward to sharing our progress as we continue to build our presence in Korea.

Before I hand it over to Kevin, I also want to touch briefly on our extra communications, which we highlighted as a priority in our calls last year, and we remain committed to increasing high-quality interactions and greater visibility with our stakeholders for 2024. I'm happy to share we're planning to roughly double our planned touch points with stakeholders attending a mix of investor and industry conferences around the world.

We also plan to evaluate and enhance our strategy for sharing important news and updates and explore the channels we'll use to distribute, such as our website and social media in order to provide richer, more timely information about Solid Power, our people and our innovative technologies. We look forward to providing you with better visibility into the incredible things happening here.

With that, I'll hand it over to Kevin to take you through our financial results. Kevin.

Thanks, John. Good afternoon, everyone. I'll start off today with an overview of our financial results and then discuss our '24 outlook. Our '23 financial results reflect strong execution by the team from our startup of SP2 the way through our entry into a samples, '23 revenue of $17.4 million fell right in the middle of our guidance range.

This reflects solid performance on key milestones, partner commitments and government contracts. '23 operating expenses were $108 million, reflecting increased operational costs as we ramped both EV cell and electrolyte production over the year and increased R&D costs as we work to deliver our A1 sample cells are '23 operating loss was $90.6 million and net loss was $65.5 million or $0.37 per share.

Turning to our balance sheet and liquidity during '23, we invested $58.3 million in the operations and $34.5 million in CapEx, bringing our total cash investment to $92.8 million. This was well below our guidance range. When we were able during the year, we prudently pushed expenditures into '24. All in we deferred roughly $35 million, consisting of about $20 million in operational investments, mostly development materials and around $15 million in capital investments related to our R&D lab and other SP2 enhancements. As a result of our lower spend, we ended the year with total liquidity just under $416 million.

Our ending liquidity includes $34.5 million in cash and equivalents that we keep on hand but the bulk of this amount around $381 million is invested and shows up in the marketable securities and long-term investment line items on our balance sheet, all of those investments are in A-rated securities. We plan to provide longer-term cash guidance later this year. However, at the moment, we continue to believe the strong liquidity position combined with our capital light business model still gives us a cash runway into the late 2020s.

Looking ahead to '24, we currently expect our '24 revenue to be in the range of $20 million to $25 million. This includes expected revenue from the SK agreement we signed in January as well as the remaining revenue from our BMW Group. Our '24 revenue from government contracts is expected to be lower than '23. This is a result of both successful completion of current contracts as well as us being more selective in the programs we pursue.

We will still pursue government contracts when it makes sense to do so. However, our focus is on delivering for our core customers. We're still firming up the timing of certain deliverables of our SK agreement right now, we believe our revenue will come in pretty ratably over the year.

With respect to liquidity, we expect '24 total cash investment to be in the range of $100 million to $120 million. Breaking this down, we expect operating cash investment to be in the range of $60 million to $70 million, including the $20 million carryover from '23. Our operational investment includes development of our A2 sample cells as well as higher volume production of our electrolyte and the development of our next-generation powder as well.

In terms of timing, our cash investment will likely be pretty evenly spread over '24. We expect' 24 total CapEx to be in the range of $40 million to $50 million, which includes around $15 million carryover from '23 for the build-out of our powder development capabilities as well as equipment upgrades for materials handling and cell development. Overall, this CapEx spend is significantly lower than previous years, but we are investing large amounts of cash into the construction of SP2 and the installation of our EV cell line.

With that, I'll turn the call back to John.

Thanks, Kevin. 2023 was a milestone year for Solid Power enabled by hard work and execution of the Solid Power Team and the excellent collaboration we've had with our partners. As we enter 2024, we're acting with competitive urgency. The successes of 2023 have us well positioned to execute and look forward to keeping you updated with them. I will hand it over for Q&A.

We will now begin the question and answer session. (Operator Instructions). Mike Shlisky with DA Davidson. Please go ahead.

Yes, hello, good afternoon and thank you, John, some of your questions. Your comments about buying some some brand-new customers. When you're saying, can you maybe share with us how different would the powder be from one customer to the next we found to one brand new here. And there are major expenses that take place to onboard a potential new customer and a long-term posibilities.

yes, good to hear from you, Mike Good question.

We're finding that the variance across the various customers require a degree of customization, but not substantial difference from customer to customer. We also have designed the SP2 electrolyte facility to already comprehended those changes from customer to customer.

So the facility is responding well to the changes that we're asking it to make on without getting into too much of the weeds, things like particle size, morphology, those sort of things are varying customer customer all well within the variability of our process within SB2. We don't expect that there will be any significant cost difference to manufacture those from customer to customer. But we are very excited about being able to tune our electrolytes specifically to our customer sell design needs.

Great, thanks. Just to follow-up there on about the cost to actually get that potential customer when you're trying to find the right power plant. So they come to you with what they want to spend a lot of time experimenting and there's no cost to that.

Just kind of curious as to and you have new customers that are seeing elevated costs, maybe in '25 or in 2026?

I think we've actually we're seeing what we had predicted where we would go in with an initial sample. There was the initial testing done by the customer at the powder level and then they would give us feedback around changes that they would like to see. We would then reassemble them maybe once maybe twice.

And then that would progress into where they would start to incorporate into cell designs. We have a number of customers that are in that process right now, we have previously, I think, signals that we thought the whole process from that initial sample through integration to their cell designs and then into actual supply agreement could take between 12 and 24 months.

And I think we're seeing now that consistently around 18 to 24 months, it's taking to do that process and very much in line with what we had expected. We don't see a significant cost increase in order to do that this year or next. We've comprehended that in our overhead structures that we've signaled to the market.

Got it. And then I also wanted to follow, but your comments about general terminal is going to wins that you had mentioned in some testing and some of the cells obviously just having one of the problem, one issue, the government community tell us what percent of the cells that you did produce were affected by this wasn't a flaw and just to sell such as down to was the overall were all the cells produce the exacting way. Again, are there going to be some on usual or high cost to resolve that issue. Obviously, everyone wants to be a very safe US cell. I was curious if you could just give us some kind of numbers.

Yes. So as you know, well, Mike, this is not a unique phenomenon to Solid Power. This is a part of the normal battery scaling and technology maturation of the new technology. So in terms of percentage, we have we manufactured over 1,000 cells EV cells in the second half of last year. And this is a very, very small percentage of those handful that have exhibited this phenomena and it is very early on the most current occurrences.

We are not at the root cause yet, but I'm pleased to say that the team is embracing standard well proven engineering principles to get to root cause 8D, Ishikawa, diagrams, FMEA.s, et cetera. And when we've had these type occurrences in the past, we've resolved them rapidly. So we wanted to be transparent chair of this recent occurrence.

But when we've had these kind of events in the past, applying those type disciplines with the quality of the team that we have here. We expect that we'll resolve this quickly. And again, no significant incremental costs to do this. I think we've comprehended the OpEx that we need to on an ongoing basis continue to iterate, evolve and recover from situations like we've just signaled have occurred,

we have upgrading I'll pass along.

Thank you.

Jeffrey Campbell with Seaport Research.

good afternoon and congratulations on a strong quarter and the FDA on agreement notice that SKs license us solid power, solid-state cell designs and manufacturing processes. It is limited to R&D activities may not be used for commercial sale production and I just visits limitations specifically refer to the SK on site?

Yes, it does is specific to the SK on agreement. If successful in this phase, we would expect that that would give way to a subsequent license agreement for commercial production.

Okay, great. And in your earlier discussion, you mentioned that one is a goals and expanding your presence in Korea was exposure to new technology. I was just wondering what kind of your thinking if there's something specific at this point

you know, there really isn't Jeff. It was so much going on in the Peninsula that we're trying to keep our aperture open. My initial thought is towards some higher nickel content in and sees we're already having those discussions with various vendors had them I thought goes to the tool set and you're staying up with the current state of lithium, iron equipment and manufacturing techniques because the bulk of that.

As I think you know, will be applicable into our manufacturing flow for the cells and then just anything that's coming out of universities or national labs, given the amount of focus that Korea has in the battery space, I kind of is where my head goes, but it's really across the board right now. It's too early to say any specifics on any of those categories.

No, that's a good laundry list of things to keep an eye on.

My last question is you mentioned that the AT. cell design is a focus for BMW in 2024. A one sales have been delivered since October. And I assume that references to BMW, correct me if I'm wrong, do you have a time line for accomplishing your 2024 A2 goals?

Our first confirmation, Yes, those A1 wants to go to BMW last year and we actually worked on a two design last year and when BMW came in with their requirements for the demo car this year, we quickly realized we need to pivot take the learnings from a one which have been substantial, both at BMW as well as within cell power applied into the design that we have free to and then drive to execution on that design by late this year is the current scheduling for that design and initial production.

Okay, great. Thank you.

(Operator Instructions) Brian Dobson with Chardan Capital Markets.

Hi, good evening. Thanks for taking my question. So just just additional question on the expanded relationship with SK and do you view that as a long-term strategic partnership? And do you see that as a no, rather important to expanding on the Korean Peninsula.

The simple answer, Brian, is yes. We think that to be able to do some concurrent development with our technologies on all three continents is going to be a strategic advantage of ours. The the discussion and the relationship with SK cents putting us an agreement in place has only gotten better. We're even discussing follow-on agreements potentially about how we could continue to expand the collaboration.

So it is very strategic to us at the cell level and then feeding back to our electrolyte, the performance given their high volume expertise to make sure that our electrolyte is the best it can be moving forward is very, very important to us. And yes, they are very strong on the peninsula.

So the relationships that they bring across the board, whether it's equipment or whether it's relationships with the government, our universities is all very, very important to us going forward. Also their relationships with material suppliers raw material suppliers that is high is also very important to us. So it's very, very important to us moving forward strategically in Korea.

Yes, I certainly agree with that viewpoint. I guess circling back to one of your key goals for 2024 as far as expanding electrolyte production in that segment, you know, you touched upon expanding your sampling program into the you're already in talks with several companies. Could some of those the automotive OEMs, are you focusing in the automotive area? Are there other areas that you wish to expand into with your sampling program?

Yes, simply put, they are in the automotive space with both EVOEM.s as well as battery manufacturers that target the EV space. And I would say they're roughly evenly split right now between those two categories, how we have had some discussions with our battery OEMs about them, taking that technology into other spaces beyond automotive but I would say that's a very early out at this stage right now. We are going to rely on them to do that right now and leverage their capabilities in those other spaces. So it's really primarily automotive and then evenly split between our EV OEMs and battery OEMs.

Yes, very good. Is it fair to say that those battery suppliers would be Tier 1 battery suppliers or Tier 1 automotive suppliers?

Yes.

Yes, very good. Thanks very much.

Thank you, Brian.

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to John van Scoter for any closing remarks.

Yes, we'll thank you for the questions, and thank you for your interest in Solid Power. We look forward to updating you as we continue to execute along our vision and on our progress along our strategic objectives.

Thank you.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.