Bloom Energy Corporation (NYSE:BE) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Bloom Energy Corporation (NYSE:BE) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript May 9, 2023

Operator: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for attending Bloom Energy’s Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Francis, and I’ll be the moderator for today’s call. I will now pass the conference over to your host, Ed Vallejo, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please proceed.

Ed Vallejo: Thank you, and good afternoon everybody. Thank you for joining us for Bloom Energy’s first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. To supplement this conference call, we furnished our first quarter 2023 earnings press release with the SEC on Form 8-K and have posted it along with supplemental financial information that we will reference throughout this call to our Investor Relations website. During this conference call, both in our prepared remarks and in answers to your questions, we may make forward-looking statements that represent our expectations regarding future events and our future financial performance. These include statements about the Company’s business results, products, new markets, strategy, financial position, liquidity and full year outlook for 2023.

These statements are predictions based upon our expectations, estimates and assumptions. However, as these statements deal with future events, they are subject to numerous known and unknown risks and uncertainties as discussed in detail in our documents filed with the SEC including our most recently filed Forms 10-K and 10-Q. We assume no obligation to revise any forward-looking statements made on today’s call. During this call and in our first quarter 2023 earnings press release, we refer to GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. The non-GAAP financial measures are not prepared in accordance with U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and are in addition to, and not a substitute for, or superior to measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP.

A reconciliation between the GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is included in our first quarter 2023 earnings press release available on our Investor Relations website. Joining me on the call today are K.R. Sridhar, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Greg Cameron, our President and Chief Financial Officer. K.R. will begin with an overview of our business, then Greg will review the operating and financial highlights of the quarter as well as the outlook for the year. And after our prepared remarks, we will have time to take your questions. With that, I will now turn the call over to KR.

K.R. Sridhar: Good day, everyone. Bloom Energy is off to a very strong start in 2023. Our Company is operating well and delivering on our goals. We are making great strides in developing products that serve the needs of our customers today, will position them well for the future and importantly create revenue growth for us. On May 23, we will be getting together in New York for our Investor Day and you’ll hear more about our strategy and roadmap then. For today, let me provide you with six examples of how in addition to executing on our plans, we are opportunistically investing in products that have the potential to enable revenue growth and improved margin. We had record product and service revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022.

On the back of that strong year-end finish, we achieved record revenue for product this quarter. We did this because we made the investments to expand factory capacity and executed on bringing that capacity online without any delay. In our call last quarter, we talked about our renewed commitment and increased investment in our cost down program, an enabler for both growth and profitability. We were confident in making those investments because we knew that we will deliver strong returns. I’m happy to report that we have started reaping the benefits of this program as evidenced in our first quarter results. We are on track and expect to see a double-digit product cost down this year. We told you about our investments in topline growth and focus on international growth to open up new markets.

In Q4 of last year, we signed a 10-megawatt order in Taiwan. In Q1, we manufactured and shipped those products. The Bloom servers will be installed and delivering clean reliable power in the coming months to our Taiwanese customer. We take great pride in not only the speed with which we can execute, but also the urgency with which we can meet the critical needs of our customer. During our last earnings call, we told you about releasing a new combined heat and power or CHP product with a total efficiency of 85%. We now have 20 megawatts of orders for CHP energy servers, 10 each from Italy and Belgium. We will start shipping CHP-enabled energy servers in the second half of this year. This is a clear example of the ease with which we can adapt our platform technology and tweak our servers to meet specific customer needs.

Let me now switch to hydrogen and our high-efficiency electrolyzers for the first example. We have reported in the past about our 100-kilowatt electrolyzer innovation project at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Lab, using a simulation of steam and electric inputs from a nuclear power plant. The DoE lab has to-date, completed over 4,500 hours of full load operations with the Bloom electrolyzer and founded to produce hydrogen more efficiently than any other process, over 25% more efficiently than low-temperature electrolyzers. In addition dynamic load testing at I&L showed that the Bloom electrolyzer handled ramping down power from 100% load to 5% load in less than 10 minutes with no adverse impact. In fact even at 5% load, our electrolyzer operated at an efficiency that was equal to or better than low-temperature PEM and alkaline electrolyzers operating at 100% load.

I&L will present these results at the DoE Annual Meeting in Washington, DC on June 7. And of course, I am super excited to share with you a major milestone we achieved in hydrogen production by standing up the world’s largest solid oxide electrolyzer demonstration, that’s also the world’s most efficient commercial-scale electrolyzer in operation. By investing and demonstrating this electrolyzer deployment, we are able to showcase the maturity, efficiency and commercial readiness of Bloom solid oxide technology for large-scale clean hydrogen production. The 4-megawatt Bloom electrolyzer is delivering the equivalent of over 2.4 metric tons per day of hydrogen output. It was built, installed and operationalized in a span of two months to demonstrate the speed and ease of deployment.

Given that large-scale projects are predominantly in the planning and early design stages, this timely Bloom demonstration should provide potential customers with the confidence they need to make the right technology choice rather than rely on less efficient legacy technologies. These examples illustrate how we make judicious and timely investments, when we see opportunities to grow revenue and margin and then execute diligently to deliver strong returns on those investments. Let me finish now with a megatrend we are seeing globally on the time-to-power issue for commercial and industrial customers. The delays in permitting interconnections and bringing new capacity online coupled with the early retirements of baseload power plants have contributed to severe generation capacity issues.

Transmission and distribution rate locks and delays and adding to T&D capacity have further severely restricted the ability of utilities to keep up with customers growing electricity needs. Industrial expansion, onshoring, electrification of everything, including transportation, digitization, and artificial intelligence, are all placing significant new demand for electricity. In many places, globally customers are told to wait five to 10 years to get additional power. Such huge shortfalls have delivered electricity is unprecedented in the modern age and places utilities, customers, regulators and policymakers in unchartered territory. I see this time to power problem growing and being an issue that will be with us for the next two decades. For datacenters and factories that need additional capacity waiting for multiple years to get power is not an option.

For Bloom, this issue represents a real opportunity. Bloom Energy has a unique offering that is a perfect solution for such situations. Bloom servers can be deployed in front of the meter with the utility as a customer or behind the meter with the end user as a customer. Our solutions can be interconnected to the grid or standalone in and island and mode to provide always on clean electricity on site. As such, we can be deployed transmission and distribution are lacking. Our low-carbon footprint solution is virtually air pollution free can be deployed rapidly has proven resilience and reliability and future proof to accept green fuels as they become viable and available. As we march forward in this unprecedented scenario, our focus is on ensuring that the policies and regulations enable ease of deployment of our servers.

We will also focus on who will be our ideal partner? Will the partners be utilities, end-use customers or both? Will that vary from geography to geography, and be different for investor on utility versus a municipal utility? These questions will get answered in time but irrespective of that, I expect this to be a big driver of growth for Bloom this decade. I will now turn it over to Greg, who will discuss our financial performance and then we’ll take your questions. Greg?

Greg Cameron: Thanks, K.R. This past quarter, we continued to deliver strong operational and financial results. We are gaining momentum in delivering on our commitments. Let me begin with a few highlights. We had record first quarter revenue. Product and service revenue was up 39% to $234 million and total revenue increased 37% to $275 million both versus the first quarter last year. Our margins improved. First quarter non-GAAP gross margins were 21.2%, up 540 basis points versus the first quarter of 2022. We are seeing strong global demand for our Energy Server, especially in datacenters, we have achieved product cost reductions with unit cost down nearly 10% versus the first quarter 2022. We are taking actions to improve our service businesses’ bottom line, we are reaffirming our 2023 framework for revenues and profitability.

With those as highlights, let me provide some additional context to our performance. The value proposition for energy server and electrolyzer is robust. We are hearing from our customers that they need resilient available power that reduces their carbon intensity today, while providing optionality to move to on-site net zero solutions like hydrogen in the future. Our time-to-power value proposition is particularly meaningful for datacenter customers where their local utility is unable to support their power needs. We are seeing this need globally, especially in the edge markets that need high-quality resilient power to support the growth. As for our electrolyzer, we are engaged with large-scale project developers of hydrogen and green ammonia, as well as oil and gas companies, who clearly value our efficiency advantages in our manufacturing readiness.

The commercial market remains robust with hydrogen incentives in the United States, Canada, South Korea, Japan and Europe accelerating project development. Many of these projects are confirming their offtake agreements and completing their front-end engineering design. As these projects reach their final investment decisions, we expect to make announcements on our technology deployments. We are investing in research and development to support our technology roadmap for electrolyzers hydrogen fuel cells and carbon capture while we drive down our costs. These investments include demonstrations to showcase our product’s maturity, efficiency and resiliency. The 4-megawatt solid oxide electrolyzer demonstration we announced last week is one example of how we’re validating the commercial readiness of our technology.

In March, we received $311 million from SK ecoplant for roughly $13.5 million, redeemable, convertible preferred shares at a price of $23.05 per share. The price share, count and proceeds is consistent with the option SK ecoplant exercise in August. At SK ecoplant’s request, we changed the shares delivered from Class A common to preferred shares to facilitate closure. We expect the shares to convert to Class A common by September 30, 2023. We ended the first quarter with $483 million in total cash. We are investing in our business to deliver on our commitment for profitable growth. Cash used in operating activities for the first quarter was $315 million, partially driven by near term working capital investments and inventory. Our time-to-power value proposition is impacting our working capital levels as we build, ship, permit and install and compress cycle times to meet our customers’ power needs.

We expect to recapture this cash over the coming quarters to generate positive cash flow from operations for the year. Inventory balances, net of changes in payables increased roughly $155 million in the first quarter. Consistent with prior years and driven by individual project plans, our acceptances are greater in the second half than the first half of the year. This year to minimize the impacts of a production ramp we budgeted a levelized build plan. This plan requires a temporary increase in inventories in the first half for the second half acceptances. We are already seeing the benefits of an optimized build plan through lower employee turnover, less expedited shipping costs and improved yields. These benefits coupled with increased automation, lower material costs and increase power output are driving down our product cost 10% versus the first quarter of last year.

We are very pleased with our return to double-digit cost reductions and are confident we will achieve our 2023, 12% cost-down targets. We are taking actions in service that position this business for long-term profitability. Some of our actions such as the timing of replacement module shipments will accelerate service costs, but they are incorporated in our 2023 company guidance. Last year as we were capacity constrained we prioritized our power module shipments for revenue over service replacements, while it was the right economic trade it required some fueled units to operate longer, which lowered their electricity output in some locations. If delivered electricity is below our commitment, we are required to make a performance payments to the financial investor.

With our increased capacity we are aggressively shipping replacement power modules to increase output. We recognize the full cost of the replacement module at shipment as these replacement modules come online power output will increase, thus reducing performance payments. Over the next few quarters, we will be incurring, both the cost of the replacement power modules and the performance payments. The performance payments should moderate as the power output increases. In addition, service business margins should improve as we continue to reduce our costs and grow revenues with the expanding installed base. Over the long-term, we are confident we will deliver a profitable service business. To meet localization commitments in South Korea, we’ve begun to move the final assembly of units to be delivered to SK ecoplant to our South Korea JV.

This change will move title transfer and revenue recognition point from the U.S. port to post-completion of assembly in South Korea. As we implement this change, we will have minimum Korean acceptances in revenue in the first half of the year. This does not change our outlook for total year revenue but instead shifts most of our Korea revenue to the second half of the year. We are reaffirming our 2023 annual guidance for revenue, margins and cash flows. With our backlog and pipeline we remain confident that we will deliver at least $1.4 billion of annual revenue at our targeted 25% non-GAAP gross margins. At this annual revenue and gross margin profile for the year, we should achieve positive non-GAAP operating margins and cash flow from operations.

For the second quarter 2023 based on likely acceptances, I would expect our revenue growth and margins to be similar to the first quarter as we continue to meet our customers’ needs and invest in profitable growth. In summary, we had a strong operational quarter in our building momentum with increasing demand for abundant clean and resilient energy. As we move forward, we believe the company can build upon our mature solid oxide platform, strong record of accomplishments and our robust growth roadmap. There are multiple growth opportunities to leverage our platform to enable the energy transition. We are extremely excited about our future. I look forward to showcasing the team at our Investor Conference on May 23 at the New York Stock Exchange.

With that, operator, please open the line for questions.

Q&A Session

Operator: The first question comes from Andrew Percoco with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Andrew Percoco: Great, thanks so much for taking my question, and congrats on the strong results here. So just had a question around ASP trends, so great to see you executing on the cost down targets. But on the ASP side. I know things can move around from quarter-to-quarter, because of geographic mix shift. But just given some of the time to power demand trends that you mentioned in the prepared remarks, is there an opportunity for you to take price here increase ASPs, and maybe see some faster-than-expected margin expansion?

Greg Cameron: Yes. Andrew, it’s Greg. So we’re really pleased with our ASP performance year-over-year. I think we were up better than 6% driven just for those needs, both time-to-power, as well as a little bit of the ITC benefit coming forward. We see as we go forward a model would have existed before we’d be talking about taking cost down faster than we take price down. I would say as we look forward, given the roadmap we have on cost coming down, we’ll continue to execute that, but given the demand for our products, we don’t expect to be taking price down in line with that, if not we’ll hold it to get it slightly better. We were down sequentially quarter-over-quarter, fourth quarter to first quarter but remember that whole last year, we knew the fourth quarter is going to be very strong given on the mix of deals.

I would suspect that our first quarter performance is more in line what you’re going to see for the rest of the year. But to your point going forward, as price holds about this point and maybe even creep up a little bit and our costs come down, that’s one of the reasons we’re so confident we’re going to get to our margin targets, not only for this year but for 2025 when we get to those 30% gross margins.

K.R. Sridhar: And Andrew, this is K.R. One other element that I would like to address for you on the ASP is, there are geographies where we simply could not transact and make expenses a lot because the cost of the utility grid was very low. But today, when a customer is faced with the option of not having power, it’s no longer for them the cost of power, it’s the price to the business of not having the power and the expansion of capacity. So it opens up the marketplace that much more significantly for us. And we don’t have to discount or try to figure out how to manage the grid price or a slight premium to the grid, because for them it’s a choice between not having power and we being the only solution to giving them that base load reliable, clean power.

Operator: The next question comes from Manav Gupta with UBS. Please go ahead.

Manav Gupta: Guys, I just wanted to quickly focus on some of the very interesting stuff you put out in your Sustainability Report. And what really caught my eye was that you are looking to grow sales to $4 billion to $5 billion by 2026 and then $15 billion to $20 billion by 2031. So if you could help us walk through some of those buckets, which are the key areas where that growth will happen and what gives you the confidence to get there because, if you do there you are trading sub-one times your sales in 2026. So there is a big dislocation in your stock price. Thank you.

Greg Cameron: Thanks, Manav. And just for the record, that wasn’t new guidance. We published that earlier in 2021, we reaffirmed it at our Investor Day in 2022. And I imagine you’re going to see a chart, very similar to that in a couple of weeks when we get to New York. Listen, here’s the way we think about it. We’re $1.2 billion to power generation business last year, we’ll be in the $1.4 billion to $1.5 billion range. That growth has historically been in the 25% to 30% range. And we’ve been able to execute on that. And we’re very comfortable with that. As you play that out as you get to 2026 as you said, that’s a $2.5 billion to $3 billion power generation business. Just continuing what we do and if you play that out to the end of the decade and into 2031, you got something in the $8 billion to $10 billion range.

And I would say, based on the way we’ve been executing since we published that guidance, we’re on track for that. But you’ve also got other applications that we can put on our platform. So in addition to the power generation business they can work on natural gas, they can work on renewables natural gas, can work on hydrogen. We’ve got a very specific effort here around what we call decarbonization efforts. And we’ve targeted by 2026 that should be a $1 billion to $2 billion business. Now the majority of that, when we did the analysis, was really going to be focused on our electrolyzer business. We’ve talked about, as we go through the investment cycle here with those different projects, I would expect to see orders in the ’23-’24, last half of ’24 into ’25, you begin to see the revenue but it scales very quickly.

So we think a $1 billion to $2 billion decarbonization platform, primarily driven by the electrolyzer is well within range. And we think that grows to another $6 billion to $8 billion as you get closer to 2031. Now in that decarbonization, we also had a small amount. I think that it was less than 20% of the overall amount we contributed to our carbon capture business. Now, it’s not a separate business. It’s the same units we shipped today with a way to capture the anode exhaust. But I think that’s one area that could either be A), optionality for folks as we move towards hydrogen, and then within a financial modeling standpoint, it creates a bit of a natural hedge. As hydrogen begins to take, move into place, other types of decarbonizing technologies like carbon capture will be in place.

And since we have an anode exhaust stream here at close to 95% when you knock out the water. We think those two businesses are logical. And we think they’ll grow to that $6 billion to $8 billion by 2031. And then at the end here, we’ve talked always about our Marine business, where we’ve got an application, where we can run on ship, we’ve done some demonstrations with some customers that’s all scheduled for later in the decade half back of the decade, but that in itself could be the $1 billion to $2 billion business. So we’re really confident that we’ve got a growth trajectory here that not only at that 25% to 30% that we’ve done traditionally and we’ve continued to execute here, but we think we can pick up another 5 points of growth, at least as you add these other applications on it.

So we’ll talk more about this in New York. We’ll give you more proof points and commercial points around why we’re so confident in this. But this — this is not new analysis for us. This is how we’re running the company and this is what we’re executing against. And this is why we’re investing so much. K.R. if there’s anything you wanted to add to that?

K.R. Sridhar: No, I think, look when we put these numbers out for our core business of Bloom Energy servers providing reliable power, time to power issue was not as acute as it is today. So if anything, our confidence in these numbers are much more bolstered today than even strong confidence with which we publish those numbers, and we are staying on track. So we see nothing but tailwinds to the business that we have today.

Manav Gupta: Great, thanks a lot.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Julien Dumoulin-Smith with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Alex Vrabel: Hi, guys. It’s Alex Vrabel on for Julien. Just one if you guys could help me clarify I guess some of the sort of cadence trends through the year and again maybe certain doubling back on the pricing question. Greg, I guess the way I’d frame it is you mentioned this sort of cadence of Korea being more of a second half story now as far as RevRec presumably there is also a repowering opportunity late in the year. How would you sort of characterize the pricing drivers with those two sort of moving pieces. It presumably going opposite of each other in the second half and how that informs your revenue cadence for rest of the year. Thanks.

Greg Cameron: Yes, Alex. You know, it’s interesting. And this is, we talk about this a lot internally and externally. The company as we look at pricing opportunities whether it’d be in geographies or applications, we really don’t differentiate all that much between the markets, right? I’m not taking a different price in Korea, then I would take within the U.S. on the base core ASP price on it. So as I think about the rest of the year and I think about the pricing on that in any particular quarter, there might be some slight variations given the exact way in which the ultimate project plays out but pricing for me over the course of the year should remain relatively flat say within $100 to $150 a kilowatt in any particular quarter, as we go through it.

We do have some transactions that will go through some of them will be a little bit higher, some of them will be a little bit lower, but we’ll come back to that $3,500, $3,600, $3,700 a kilowatt that we’ve had over the last few quarters. I’d say, as you look at the year though, just like last year, where every quarter from the first quarter on our product costs came down. My expectation is that as we go through this year, not only do we take 10% out at the beginning of this year. On average for the year, we’re going to take out 12%. So that’s all going to come through improved margins as we go through the year. And that’s why we’re confident we’ll be at that 25% up from the 21%, 22% that we are today.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Sam Burwell with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Sam Burwell: Hi guys, just taking a quick look at the 10-Q here seeing that, like Asia-Pac revenues were 5% of total revenues this quarter versus 65% in 1Q ’22. I mean I think we’re all familiar with the drivers, but certainly implies really, really impressive strength sort of the ex-South Korea areas where you’re selling. So, could you comment on just how the customer mix might have changed this quarter versus 1Q ’22. I mean, how much of that is driven by the time-to-power factors that you called out or anything else behind that?

Greg Cameron: Yes, thanks, Sam. So last year, right, as we got into the year, we talked about each of the first few quarters of us being capacity constrained and really prioritized and get any of the units to Korea as we promised. So I think in the first quarter last year, to your point, we were 65% international. The vast majority of that was to our partners SK ecoplant, so that in the second quarter and third quarter and then later in the year, it tailed off and we are far more domestic. Given the changes and I talked about this in my prepared comments that we’re making on moving final assembly from Delaware to our JV in South Korea, that’s going to delay our RevRec on those units in the first half of the year. It doesn’t change our total year outlook.

We still have the same contract and commercial relationship with them. We’re just going to begin shipping those units. And they won’t see revenue recognition. We won’t see revenue recognition until those units are completed the full assembly and ship from the JV. I think, to your point though, it really shows the strength of our domestic business that were able not to have for the most part, many Korea shipments at all in the first quarter, but able to still meet our growth trajectory and replace that with all good U.S. business. So that’s going to move quarter-to-quarter especially because you get into the second half of the year. My expectations are, you’ll see a similar type of revenue split on the international versus domestic side. And over the long term.

Sam, to your point, you’re going to see a lot more international shipments. Tim is making progress, both in Europe and in Asia. There are smaller deals now that won’t move it from a revenue reporting side in the near quarters, but over the long term, we think we’re building a very powerful international platform just not in South Korea, but in Europe and in other countries in Asia.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is from Colin Rusch with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Jason Vernoff: Hi, this is Jason Vernoff on for Colin Rusch. Thank you for taking my question. So with the 4-megawatt electrolyzer, can you speak to how long it was run at maximum power and your expectations for cadence of maintenance on the product? Thank you.

K.R. Sridhar: So what we announced in the press release and what’s publicly at this point is we have commenced operations on those. It is a demonstration. It is a demonstration to prove the technology and close the commercial operation. And that’s all it is right now. And we will keep you posted during our earnings call on how that’s operating, give you a lot more details during that earnings call. We have commenced operation and the most important thing for you to take away. From the day we said go, to the day we built it, installed it, operated it, and start producing hydrogen was two months. The speed with which we can simply take our platform technology from a fuel cell and electrolyzer things we have been talking about.

We showed the world, we can do this. And we can do this as routine business, number one. Number two, by putting that 4-megawatt, a purpose of doing that was to very clearly demonstrate at a minimum the 25% advantage that we have with our technology compared to the legacy world inefficient technologies and allow the customers to make it brain that simple to choose, the right technology. So that’s the purpose of the demonstration. It’s not about the land. Very clearly on the INL operation we have 4,500 hours and it continues to operate, it continues to operate very effectively without any adverse impact. In fact, the Department of Energy side of the national lab has shown that they are able to ramp down the power dramatically within 10 minutes from 100% lower to 5% lower.

And even at 5% lower, we are as good as rated lower for those legacy technologies. So we will have endurance records operating separately, we will have demonstration at scale operating separately all this to provide the potential customers with absolute confidence in choosing our technology and choosing it knowing that picking the right technology.

Greg Cameron: Yes. So, Jason, will talk more about this at our Investor Conference in New York in a couple of weeks. And for those of you that are interested that happened to be out here in the Bay Area, we do have a process, which you can click on, on our website and we’re trying to bring as many people as we can. So if you’ve got an interest in your, in the Bay Area, let us know and we’ll try to get you in the queue and bring over them off it, and have you take a look at the technology go-live, So thanks, Jason.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Sangita Jain with KeyBanc. Please go ahead.

Sangita Jain: Hi, Greg, and thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask about the clean energy tax credit that comes into effect in 2025 and whether Bloom’s fuel cells will qualify in their current state or if you’re going to have to have a carbon capture feature attached to them. If you do have to have a carbon capture feature attached, what would the storage and transport of the CO2 look like? Thank you.

Greg Cameron: Yes, thanks, Sangita. Thanks for the question. So on the carbon capture side, so it’s just important to think about that from a business standpoint, those projects settlements amongst themselves are going to be — will be tens of megawatts, if not hundreds of megawatts. And we think that’s ideal applications for us to use the capture of anode exhausted and either to sequester that or utilize that in some type of commercial or industrial applications. So as we think about our everyday fuel cells that we’re providing as resilient primary power in the field at 5, 10, 20 megawatt opportunity, it’s probably not going to pencil out for the customer to include all the other sequestration equipment, compressors and like that are going to be needed in order to use it for carbon capture demonstration.

So we don’t look at that is a net trade off on something we would do. Listen the answer to your question is we don’t know yet in some circumstances. We’re still waiting for treasury to come out with their final rules. We do have some of them that have been very encouraging around energy communities and like and around the apprenticeship and prevailing ways that are very helpful and telling us how the ITC benefits are going to play out for our product. We’re still waiting for some additional guidance to come out that we expect over the course of the year but us like everybody else in the industry had some uncertainty as we go forward exactly how it all plays, but we know that the purpose of the legislation was to make clean investments and accelerate our path towards decarbonization and we think we are a primary tool to help enable that transition.

So we expect to be part of that conversation.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is from Pavel Molchanov with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Pavel Molchanov: Thanks for taking the question. You said that many of the green hydrogen projects around the world are still on the drawing board, but hypothetically if demand were limitless today, what would be your capabilities to meet that demand with physical product in ’23 and ’24.

Greg Cameron: Yes, hi Pavel, thanks. So as we look at it, right, the constraint on the green hydrogen isn’t the electrolyzers, definitely not our electrolyzers, right. The largest constraints that we see is the clean energy going in, whether that’s from existing hydro, existing wind or solar or new facilities that need to be built in order to supply that electricity taking that precious renewables off the grid today to make hydrogen and then turn that back into power is not effective investment from a round-trip efficiency standpoint. So we’re still very encouraged on seeing folks build out that renewable sources of power that we’re going to need in order to build out this green hydrogen clean hydrogen economy. Listen on our capacity it’s very simple, right?

We ended the year with 650 megawatt of stack and colin capacity out here, take 200 megawatt off the for service and you’re left with about 400 megawatt, we could do a gigawatt to 2 gigawatts depending on how we allocate that out for electrolyzers beginning of shipments as soon as folks as we had orders for them. We can move our capacity backwards and forward between the fuel cell and the electrolyzers with really little turnover costs.

K.R. Sridhar: So I think the hypothetical question you asked, assuming that the margins are equal or better than the fuel cells that we shipped today we can do 2 gigawatts of electrolyzers and ship them this year.

Operator: The next question comes from Luke Tilkens with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Luke Tilkens: All right, thanks for taking the questions. Can you speak to whether your backlog has grown relative to year-end or just any sort of demand trends. It seems like demand is accelerating. Or is it kind of on the same pace is what you indicated before.

Greg Cameron: Yes, hey look we only give backlog once a year and we did that on the last call. It’s like I would point you to the comments that both K.R. and I made in our prepared remarks around seeing a lot of activity especially in time to power and data centers. Listen, it’s our job over the course of this year to get that interest in pipeline built into our backlog, so we can show you then – report that to you next year and turn that into revenue. But nothing beyond what we’ve already talked about in our prepared comments.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is from Jordan Levy with Truist. Please go ahead.

Jordan Levy: Good afternoon, all. Appreciate you taking my questions. Just a quick one from me. I appreciate the commentary on the South Korean JV, just wondering in terms of other international expansion efforts. If there is any areas in particular you’re seeing really strong opportunity set the target and how you’re thinking about that.

Greg Cameron: Yes. I’ll start. So listen, team is very focused both in Europe and in Asia and in the Middle East. When we look at, we look at Europe, the time to power constraints that we talked about within the U.S. or there whether you’re looking at Dublin or Frankfurt or other data center markets for sure there is a need for resilient power to come online very quickly, we find those things similar. We were able to land our first units in Europe last summer at Ferrari and that created a ton of interest in the Italian market, as well as other parts of Europe. And we’ve got a lot of interest from Tim’s team just on our core natural gas fuel cell. We think over time that will naturally more into our solid oxide electrolyzer especially as additional power comes online and the ability to create sources a green hydrogen on a distributed basis., In Asia K.R. mentioned it, we have shipped our first units to Taiwan into the industrial sector there.

We think given the process – given the environment there and the need for power and the need for energy security, we think that’s going to be a very interesting market for us. And you’ve seen similar types of data center issues in Singapore and other places that we think we can play in going forward. And then in the Middle East early days as we think about it but definitely in electrolyzer space, given the amount of solar that exist there and the need for other power. So we think those markets are interesting, so across those different markets Tim is very active in making sure he’s got a commercial organization that has the technical chops to go sell in that space.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Abhi Sinha with Northland Capital. Please go ahead.

Abhishek Sinha: Yes, hi, thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to build on that internationally, you talked about how the geographic expansion is going to happen. Just wondering how do you – as you expand internationally, how do you expect margins to fair. I mean, do you expect margins to be a drag till you get a critical mass or you expect margins to be in sync with domestic and build on that expense?

Greg Cameron: Yes, thanks, Abhi. It’s a good question and I’ll break it down in two points. On the product side when K.R. and I price deals we look at for the best growth and margin opportunity given where we are on our growth we generally don’t ever entertain the let’s go enter this market at reduced margins and assume we can make them larger over time. When we look at the market, we want to make sure we can at least hurdle and our given margins that we can in other markets and sometimes that means telling the sales team not now, let’s wait for either our product cost to come down or for competitive situation in the market to get more advantageous to us. The other thing we look a lot of time at is our service. We want to make sure that when we’re planting a flag that there is a significant amount of megawatts there that it makes sense for us to put not only the people, but the resources there to service our machines going forward.

So, we not only want to make sure that this particular deal has the level of return that we want, but there is enough of a pipeline there that we can continue to build out a franchise that overall profitable for us. And you’re not giving it back later by having a sub-scale service operation and servicing a bunch of units spread all over the place that you may make good margin on originally but give it back over time.

Operator: The next question comes from Noel Parks with Tuohy Brothers. Please go ahead.

Noel Parks: Hi, good afternoon. Just had a question about manufacturing capacity and I wondered if, have you reached payback on the Fremont investment. I think the number you talked about previously, was $40 million to $60 million. And looking ahead, sort of what time horizon manufacturing capacity expansion are you working on right now? Are you working on looking to our contracting three years out five years out?

Greg Cameron: Yes. Hi, Noel. So the nice thing is, is once we’ve got our building completed like we have in Fremont, we can add a line, that’s about 330 some odd megawatts of stack and Colin capacity in six to eight months. So when we decide that we need to add capacity, given that it’s a copy exact process that we use, we can move very quickly and we’ve got the blueprint in order to go do that and we’ve built the building to allow us to go do it. I’ll tell you what we’re doing right now is we’re absorbing all the capacity we built last year. As we went through in doubled our capacity from where we started the year to the end of the year, the team has spent a tremendous amount of time making sure that A) the tooling was there and it was operational that the parts were there to continue to build that our associates are labor was well trained and had the opportunity to contribute on.

And we spent a lot of last year and you saw it in our cost line, doing a lot to make sure that we could make that capacity. Not only theoretical but in existence for us to make the fourth quarter and the year. As we come into this year, the capacity we exited with is enough to have us move through the next several quarters. So and the team is spending a lot of time making sure that they’re optimizing the capacity we have. As we move forward through the remainder of the year we’re looking out not only for 2023 but we’re looking into ’24 and ’25 and we’re looking at the growth trajectory that we’ve shared with you all and trying to back date ourselves and when we need to make decisions around adding capacity. So we know that at some point here as we get in through the remainder of the year, we will add that additional lines.

We’ve about $150 million of invested so far in what – in that facility. So we know we’ve got about another 50 maybe 75, but the payback period on that is very quick. I mean if we’re making $1,000 a kilowatt on average, which is always kind of our hurdle, you get to that 200 megawatt situation then you’ve kind of made back in profit what you’ve added to that, so we’ve got a little bit more time in order to we’ve completely payback on a cash basis for our machines, but they are incredibly attractive and will add more as we go forward and we will continue to drive down our costs and run the factory in that way. So I think K.R. that was the last question that we had. So, I’ll pass it over to you.

K.R. Sridhar: Okay. Terrific. Thank you all for joining. The key takeaway as you probably see is, we had talked to you about cost down becoming a priority for us this year. What you should notice from our results is tremendous progress in cost down. There have been questions about growth targets. We are reaffirming our year growth targets for the year, our long-term prospects. In terms of – when you look at our revenue on our performance, you can see we are executing on the key things that we need to stay focused on and we are executing. The platform flexibility is something we have talked about and we gave you a great example of a combined heat and power where we talked about it, we booked 20 megawatt of orders. We will be shipping them and same thing about going into a new country and the flexibility, Taiwan, we booked in Q4.

We’re out there doing what we need to do. So you can see the platform flexibility from those examples. Both international markets for the reasons we talked about in our prepared script, as well as domestic on-time to power that we talked to you about, we feel extremely bullish about our core business. Now here is why Bloom sits in an enviable position for everybody else in the market to think about. Number one in the core business of providing reliable power to people to expand we had a great solution. As people think about transformation, and think about renewable fuels and hydrogen, we have shown that we have one of the best technologies and while implementation of the IRA rules and the certainty and the time it takes for these big projects to come online, it’s not a question is hydrogen of, is going to be important.

It’s a question of timing of when it’s going to take off and unlike other companies which put all their eggs in that basket and are sitting on pins and needles wondering about the time for take-off, we are happy providing the solutions we need to provide with complete factory absorption with our existing product and ready to switch and do it as fast as we need to, as the market wants us to do to be able to satisfy the hydrogen market. So therefore we sit in this enviable position compared to anybody else in the field and if there’s one takeaway that should be your takeaway and we’ll talk a lot more about it, and we hope that you will – later this month in New York during our Investor Day, and we hope you can all come and attend. Thank you very much for participating.

Greg Cameron: Thank you.

Operator: That concludes the Bloom Energy Q1 2023 earnings call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.