Blade Air Mobility, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLDE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Will Heyburn: And Bill, just in case you were asking about the destinations we serve on Long Island, it’s not just one airport and in fact we made a concerted effort to diversify the different landing locations we have. So…

Rob Wiesenthal: Yes. So, right now, just to make that clear, we have scheduled service to Sag Harbor, East Hampton, Montauk, and Southampton throughout the high seasons. And that’s serviced both by amphibious seaplane, which we view as urban air mobility, because it lands in Manhattan, in addition to various types of helicopters.

Bill Peterson: Okay. Yes. Great. Thanks for additional questions.

Rob Wiesenthal: Thanks, Bill.

Operator: One moment, please, for our next question. And our next question coming from the line of Itay Michaeli from Citi. Your line is open.

Itay Michaeli: Great. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Just wanted to go back to the comment around the confidence in the path to the profitability in the release as well as a significant amount of cash for M&A. Maybe just hoping as a bigger picture question, you could just kind of remind us how you view the path to profitability and kind of what gives you the confidence that you’re on that path to be able to deploy a significant majority of your cash for M&A?

Will Heyburn: Yes, absolutely. Thanks for the question. Look, to just give sort of a high-level bridge from the negative $27.5 million of adjusted EBITDA for the full year, on the one hand, right, we talked about how, given the timing of Europe, that was actually a headwind for us this year just because we only owned it during the lowest volume part of the year. So, call that somewhere in the mid-$100,000s of a headwind where we’ve said that it should be adding mid-single digit adjusted EBITDA. So just the full year impact of Europe gets you down to kind of the low (ph) on adjusted EBITDA in terms of a negative adjusted EBITDA. And then, Medical is the biggest driver that we’ve talked about. And as we’ve said, we continue to believe that this is a business that can grow 100% organically over time.

So, if you add another $70 million of revenue from where it was in the calendar year 2022 over some period of time at 15% to 20% flight margins, which is what we’ve talked about, that brings our adjusted EBITDA down to somewhere in the negative single digits and that’s before we make any improvement in airport profitability, which is a significant drag before we’ve made any kind of incremental improvements to our businesses in Europe and Vancouver, which we’re still in the process of launching the brand and technology in both of those new markets for us. And so, we think either of those moves can help reduce that negative adjusted EBITDA even further. And so given the significant growth, particularly in Medical, I don’t think we’re ready to put a stake in the ground on this call as to precisely when we’ll cross into positive adjusted EBITDA territory, but we definitely expect 2023 adjusted EBITDA to improve versus 2022.

And as we get closer into the (ph) part of our year, we hope to be able to give a little more precision on that.

Rob Wiesenthal: And even I’ll add to that, even if you saw any type of mitigation in the stratospheric growth that we’re experiencing in Medical, you would still see an improvement in terms of reducing EBITDA — improving EBITDA for this year. We don’t need to keep the growth consistent or to get to where Will is talking about.

Itay Michaeli: Yes, that’s very, very helpful. Maybe as a quick follow-up, any kind of high-level view on the airport ramp impact on flight margin in Q1 versus the 150 basis points in Q4?