Beam Global (NASDAQ:BEEM) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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I mean, this is part of the reason our operating expenses have gone up this year. I know that, that will raise some eyebrows, but I’m — this — is as I said in my closing comments, this is not a time to be a churlish about investing in growth. On the contrary, we need to be really aggressive about it. We have such a good thing going. So, they’ll do a lot more, I believe, this year. But I’m not certain that the percentage of revenue will increase because of course, percentage of revenue on the EV charging infrastructure products side of the business is so dramatic.

Noel Parks: Right. Actually, the minute you started laying it out, I was thinking that that’s right. The growth on the charging side is so likely to sort of swamp whatever trends you might have on storage, that standalone storage, it totally makes sense. And I guess just the last thing. Just wondering if there’s anything else as far as greater clarification on NEVI rulemaking or the guidance that around (ph) issues that it seems like a lot of parties are still waiting for, particularly from the IRA. Anything on the horizon with those that has crossed your radar screen during the quarter?

Desmond Wheatley: Yes. So, I will say this, the simple answer to your question is I am certain that we will see benefits from not just NEVI, but from the other couple of billion dollars that federal government is committed to announcing EV charging infrastructure more to the $10 billion or so that California’s putting into it or to all the other spending that’s going on. I mean, there are specifics in NEVI, which I frankly think will be really hard to execute on. The idea of having 600 kilowatts of charting every 50 kilometer — every 50 miles on the highways within the United States is a fantasy. The electrical grid simply doesn’t exist to do that. And actually, that will be a great opportunity for us, for example, for our Solar Tree product, not so much for the EV ARC product.

But for the Solar Tree product, I think there may be locations where there’s 300 or 450 kilowatts, but not 600 kilowatts, and we might be able to fill that last 150 kilowatts for them in a really clever way without having to do all the infrastructure build up. That’s one of the — I don’t see that as necessarily a this year thing for us, but I definitely think that will happen as they recognize some of the shortcomings in the plan as there were need to be filled by different and innovative solutions just like ours. On the $2.5 billion that’s going to be spent, a lot of it’s going to go to disadvantaged communities that tribal lands and all sorts of other things like that. I just don’t know of a better solution for — than ours to do that. We’ve already demonstrated that deploying at disadvantaged communities through the Electrify America deal and also through several kinds of authorities.

We’re very good at that. We bring clean, green, driving on Sunshine with no unit cost for the electricity to these environments where people are — don’t have money. And a lot of that money is going to be channeled in that direction. So, I think we will do very, very well out of those things. But the other thing for us to be concentrating on is this dramatic return from commercial, non-government funded type of growth. That was a really huge number for us to get to 35% of revenues in a year where we had such huge government growth as well. You can see that we’re often — so people say all government. No, we aren’t. 35% of our revenues came from commercial. And I think we’re going to see that continuing to grow as well. And at the end of the day, I think commercial wins.

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