ChargePoint Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CHPT) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Rex Jackson : Yes. So I think — so first thing is, as I said earlier, DC mix historically last year was a challenge, but actually, we are improving things markedly on the DC front. So it’s going to be less of a problem. And that’s everything from cost reductions, volume our major new Express Plus platform is brand new and very small volumes. But there’s a combination of things that are going to make that better. We also think that the supply chain side of the picture is going to continue to ease — so I haven’t put a number on it, but I have said I think it’s just going to progress steadily throughout the year. I would be severely disappointed if it was flat or down in any given quarter. So — but I think our outlook is quite positive that we can continue to drive the margins sequentially up this year given a lot of the operational initiatives that we have in the company.

Maheep Mandloi : Got you. And just one on the balance sheet. On Kashy’s question, you talked about maintaining balance sheet at a healthy level as the prime driver here for the ATM. Just curious if you could characterize the — like how should we think about that, is it like a minimum cash balance or some of the metric to think about that?

Rex Jackson : Honestly, I haven’t fixed the number. I don’t mind the $400 million number, but I haven’t fixed a number in stone on that. As we grow the business, we may look at other financing opportunities. And then the nice thing is — we expect our quarterly loss position to continue to decline nicely between now and cash flow positive next year. So there’s a balance there. But if we continue to grow the company and it gets meaningfully bigger than it is today, you’re going to want to have a decent balance sheet. And I kind of think that’s where we are now. So how we maintain that and what we do to maintain, that’s the question, but we’re in a pretty good spot right now.

Operator: We will take the next question from Oliver Huang, TPH.

Oliver Huang : Just had one sort of a multipronged question, but I just wanted to try and get an update with more details around progression of your build cycle over the past quarter? Is it something that still remains fairly back end of the quarter weighted or think that started to really smooth itself out given how there is a backlog to kind of get through — and when thinking about the ability to manufacture these charges at the factory, how close have you all progressed towards full utilization relative to what unconstrained capacity sits at today?

Pasquale Romano : So I’ll take the second part of that question first. We use external contract manufacturers as partners from a build perspective. So utilization of capacity is not a factor here. We use CMs that have substantially broad capacity capabilities. So access to capacity on the upside is not an issue because we’ll see that need coming with adequate lead times. And the excess capacity is not a factor in our financials from a factory perspective. With respect to build linearity, we have much better build linearity now and our build linearity previously was largely driven not by factory issues, so to speak. It was driven mostly by supply chain and getting adequate parts, adequate fully populated kits to assembly lines in a smooth manner.

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