CleanSpark, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLSK) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

CleanSpark, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLSK) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 9, 2023

Operator: Good afternoon. My name is Audra, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the conference call. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Isaac Holyoak, Chief Communications Officer. Please go ahead.

Isaac Holyoak: Thanks, Audra, and thank you for joining us today for CleanSpark’s Fiscal First Quarter Financial Results Call covering the period October 1, 2022, through December 31, 2022. Our press release was issued about 30 minutes ago and is available on our website at www.cleanspark.com/investors. Today’s call is also being webcast, and a replay and transcript will be available on our website. I’m here with Zach Bradford, our Chief Executive Officer; and Gary Vecchiarelli, our Chief Financial Officer. Keep in mind that some of the statements we make today are forward-looking and based on our best view of the world and our businesses as we see them today. As described in our SEC filings and on our website, those elements may change as the world changes.

We will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures about our performance during today’s call. You can find the reconciliation of GAAP financial measures in our press release, which is available on our website. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Zach.

Zach Bradford: Thanks, Isaac. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our call. The last time we spoke with you, we shared the results of our first fiscal year-end 2022. Today, we will discuss the results of our first fiscal quarter, which, as Isaac mentioned, covers the period of October through December 2022. During that time, our industry, in particular, and the economy more broadly faced significant macro headwinds. Even in the face of these headwinds, we persisted and we grew. Our average hashrate rapidly increased, outpacing global hashrate, resulting in significantly increased bitcoin production for the quarter and the subsequent month. The number of machine hashing grew by over 20,000. We added a new mining campus to our portfolio.

The growth in work from those dark winter days has since resulted in our highest bitcoin production ever, last month, which was nearly 700 bitcoin. We also grew our Board, welcoming Amanda Cavaleri, who is an expert in bitcoin policy. No matter the measure, no matter how difficult the quarter we grew, and we are just seeing the majority of the benefits of this growth today and beyond. In fact, we outpaced all of our peers, every single one of them. Data recently published by the Minor mag, a research and data portal focused on institutional bitcoin miners placed us first amongst public miners in terms of percentage hashrate growth. As you can see from the visual, the network hashrate average grew by 46% since January 2022, while we grew over 200%.

Not only did we outpace global hashrate, we did so at a tremendous clip. We started the quarter with a hashrate of 4.2 exahash per second. And by the end of the year, it had grown to 6.2 exahash per second for a 48% increase for the quarter. Since then, we’ve continued to grow, and our hashrate now stands at 6.6 exahash per second. We had 63,700 machine hashing as of December 31. Our fleet was running at an average efficiency of about 31 watts per terahash. For perspective, we understand some of our peers come in at over 40 watts per terahash. Our fleet is tremendously efficient. Most of our machines come from Bitmain S-19 series, and we have started to acquire more XPs. The quality of the machine tells only part of the story. Our Immersion Cool facility has allowed us to test the limits of over and under clocking as we leverage software and firmware to optimize performance.

We are also testing additional software optimization techniques for our air cooled fleet, which we expect to allow us to bring under and overclocking capabilities to all of our campuses. This optimization will prepare us to stay ahead of the curve when happing occurs in 2024. We mined a record number of bitcoin for the quarter, a total of 1,531 bitcoins. For comparison, in the first quarter of our last fiscal year, we mined 660 bitcoins. This represents an increase of 131%, well outpacing global hashrate. We also increased production quarter-over-quarter by 25%. We have reliably grown as we execute on our operational strategy that we believe makes us one of the fastest-growing, most reliable and most efficient publicly traded bitcoin miners in North America.

The secret to our growth has been our proprietary mining model. There are many different mining models out there from asset-light on one side through proprietary mining on the other. In the asset-light model, machines are owned by the company, but cared for and run by hosting companies that also take a cut of the profits. This model introduces less control over a company’s destiny via the company is exposed to the risks and uncertainties of third parties, their ability to build facilities, procure power, operate the machinery and importantly, stay solvent. We believe higher returns are consistently generated by actively participating in the mining process. Contrast that with proprietary mining, miners like CleanSpark that operate almost exclusively as proprietary miners can exercise significant greater control over their own destinies.

We believe this gives us a significant edge. First, it provides investors with predictability. Out of the various business models for bitcoin miners, our proprietary mining model minimizes the impacts of unforeseen events. We can plan and react to the unexpected in real time, giving us greater optionality, even during difficult market conditions. We also have multiple sites in different jurisdictions that we own and operate with complete control. Second, it makes us more reliable. Last month, we had our highest uptime ever, over 98%. We believe we have one of the highest uptimes among publicly traded mining companies. We own our infrastructure, develop the teams and culture necessary to staff and run our campuses and execute in very remarkable ways on our operational strategy.

We exercise maximum control over time lines. Now I want to underscore the 98% uptime only happens when you have a team of dedicated people who believe in the work and what we are doing and who share in the rewards of our successes. Third, our proprietary mining model introduces lower production cost. Many factors go into production costs, including staffing costs, power cost and the cost of assets. But directly owning the infrastructure and other assets involved in producing bitcoin means lower operating costs in the long run. We make long-term investments for long-term benefits. And those long-term benefits accrue to our shareholders directly rather than being dispersed amongst a variety of service providers or third parties. We are very proud of these facilities and take every opportunity to open them up to the communities we operate in.

Seeing our mining campuses has a transformational effect on bitcoin enthusiasts and skeptics alike. We see our owned and operated facilities not only a competitive advantage in the bitcoin mining industry, but it’s the key to winning the hearts and minds of the people and communities we work with. One of the newest communities to be brought into the CleanSpark team is the city of Sandersville, Georgia, home to our most recent acquisition, an 80-megawatt facility that we closed in mid-October. And we’ve quickly ramped up our hashrate there, allowing us to exceed our 2022 calendar year-end guidance not just once, but twice. We are well into planning the expansion of the Sandersville facility and expect to add an additional 150 megawatts to the site by the end of 2023 for a total of 230 megawatts supporting over 7 exahash in total.

Subsequent to the quarter, we also broke ground on our 50-megawatt expansion in Washington. I’m particularly proud of our teams and partners that are working tirelessly day in and day out to complete this buildup. As an example, our teams were working long before the sun came up last Saturday to start pouring the concrete pads for the buildings. Construction is proceeding according to time lines. We expect all four buildings, each of which will house 12.5 megawatts of miners to be completed with all miners racked and ready by the end of May. Energization is then expected to take a few weeks more being completed sometime in late June. We receive regular updates from our construction partners and the utility provider, and we will share relevant information in a timely way.

I can also tell you that the city of Washington is glad to have this building in the community. The construction provides jobs and keeps resources in the community. We are very proud to have found great partners in the city of Washington. Allow me to transition to the future and share with you how we plan to continue the rapid growth we’ve witnessed over the past year that has allowed us to triple our hashrate from January 2021 to January 2023. Our past performance should be viewed as the best indicator of our future performance. During our last earnings call, we shared with you our guidance of 16 exahash per second by the end of calendar year 2023. I’d now like to take a few moments to talk about how we plan to meet the expectations by talking in greater detail about our growth strategy and the financial strategy that backs it, essentially, how we plan to build it and pay for it.

First, I’d like to talk about how we plan to build it. We have 6.6 exahash per second operating now, and we expect to squeeze out a bit more efficiency in the coming months, which will allow us to incrementally increase the hashrate. As I mentioned, the Washington expansion is underway, which will result in rack space for over 15,000 miners. We are finalizing the plan on the miner mix and based on the latest plans, we expect the site to ultimately increase our hashrate by 1.9 exahash per second. This expansion brings us to 8.5 exahash in June, leaving 7.5 exahash per second to meet our year-end target. The Sandersville expansion will commence in the coming months with a target completion date of November 2023. This time line is dependent on the completion of a substation that is being constructed by our utility partners.

Photo by André François McKenzie on Unsplash

We intend to align our construction schedules to have our site complete in advance of the power hand off day with the expectation that we have our facility built and the miners racked so that when we go live – so that we can go live as soon as the power is handed over. We expect the Sandersville expansion to add approximately 5.5 exahash per second, bringing our total portfolio to 14 exahash per second. Now this leaves us with a 2 exahash per second gap to fill over the next 11 months. We are confident in our ability to do so. We are currently evaluating several greenfield and acquisition targets to fill the 2 exahash per second gap and expect to source or acquire an additional 50 to 75 megawatts of new opportunities. We have multiple candidates in the pipeline, and we’ll provide additional details as appropriate.

Lastly, I’ve recently been asked about Lancium. At this time, we do not have any further updates other then we still hold the contractual rights to the power when completed. We are currently not expecting any of it to come online in 2023. And as soon as we have more information about the 2024 outlook and beyond, we’ll let you know. Now how do we plan to secure all the miners to fill these shelves? Over the last few months, we have sourced brand-new inbox, latest generation miners at bottom dollar prices. We’ve gone to the spot market for the majority of these purchases. The spot market continues to be full of opportunities, and we expect to rely on the spot market for at least a portion of our miners. We also expect to shift our strategy when the time is right and look towards future contracts once again for opportunities.

We believe the tides are starting to shift and locking in prices for large orders will begin to be part of our strategy in the coming months. Lastly, let me share a few thoughts about how we plan to pay for it. Central to achieving our guidance is a path premised on accretive growth. That means we issue shares for growth. For assets that quickly generate free cash flow. This is why at our upcoming annual meeting, we have proposed to increase the number of shares authorized for issuance from 100 million shares to 300 million shares. It is important to note that these shares are simply authorized, and it is not required that we ever issue them. Rather, this proposal gives us the flexibility to use equity for targeted growth. We believe these shares would provide us the flexibility to not only maintain market share but to substantially grow market share just as we have in the past.

To continue to scale, we need full access to capital markets, increasing our authorized shares provides that. I want to thank our shareholders for trusting us and taking this journey with us. I want to thank our teams for all their hard work this quarter, which has allowed us to move forward even in these challenging times. As I said in our last call, bitcoin is a technological and financial advancement that grows year after year. Markets rise and fall, but bitcoin adoption just keeps rising. It just keeps growing and price. Well, we strongly believe we’ll recover. We are seeing indications that some of that is starting to happen. And as I remind my colleagues all the time, and I’d like to remind you, as our shareholders, we are just at the beginning.

Thank you for choosing to invest in CleanSpark. I do not take likely to trust you as shareholders place in us. Thank you for your support. I’d now like to give the floor to Gary, our Chief Financial Officer, to discuss our financial results.

Gary Vecchiarelli: Thank you, Zach. Diving into the numbers for the first quarter of our 2023 fiscal year, I want to draw your attention to the orange bar chart on this page. You will note that our bitcoin production increased 130% over the same quarter of the prior year as we mined over 1,500 bitcoin. This was due to the rapid growth we experienced over the past 12 months, deploying an additional 45,000 miners in that period. However, you will see that we recognized about $10 million less in revenue compared to that same period. This is strictly due to the steep decline in bitcoin price. For reference, the price of bitcoin was over $46,000 at December 31, 2021, and bitcoin was just over 16,000 at the end of our most recent quarter.

Looking at the immediate prior fourth quarter, you’ll see a similar story as we mined approximately 25% more bitcoin between the quarters, yet only saw 6% greater revenue. This is also due to the decline in bitcoin prices as the price of bitcoin was approximately $19,000 at September 30, 2022. This bar chart puts into context how far we have come as a company despite headwinds of bitcoin prices. Turning to gross profit on the right-hand side of the slide, our gross profit was $7.4 million, was declined from over $31 million in the same quarter of last year. This decline was directly attributable to the decline in bicorn prices. When compared to the immediate prior fourth quarter, we saw a decline in gross profit despite seeing incremental revenue growth between the periods.

This shows how profitable our business model can be when bitcoin prices are just slightly elevated, which they were in the fourth quarter. Moving on to the next slide. We recognized a GAAP net loss of $29 million compared to net income of $14.5 million in Q1 of last year. Again, the high margins due to record bitcoin prices in the prior year, mostly dropped to the bottom line. In the current quarter, we recognized a large net loss primarily due to two non-cash items. Depreciation and amortization was approximately $19 million and stock-based compensation was $5.9 million. These two items comprise almost $25 million of the $29 million net loss in the current period. I want to point out that with respect to depreciation, we have recognized depreciation of miners with acquisition costs as high as $107 a terahash.

Additionally, as I’ve mentioned in previous quarters, our stock-based compensation was expected to come down as this number was relatively flat compared to the stock-based compensation expense in Q1 of last year and decreased from $14 million in the immediately preceding fourth quarter. Regarding the fourth quarter, you will see our net loss decreased from over $42 million, which was partly attributed to the significant reduction in stock-based compensation and non-cash charge related to goodwill, which is recognized in the fourth quarter. Looking at adjusted EBITDA, you’ll see we recognized a slightly negative adjusted EBITDA of $1.4 million. This was indicative of how challenging of a quarter was, as lower bitcoin prices resulted in compressed margins.

And while our operations team did a fantastic job operating on a profitable basis and forecasting in advance high energy prices during December, we still recognize negative adjusted EBITDA due to corporate overhead. While we’re printing negative adjusted EBITDA this quarter, I feel very comfortable in saying that this is not a trend we expect to continue into the second quarter. As you are aware, bitcoin prices increased almost 30% since the end of our first quarter, and that increase in price has expanded our margins significantly. While we can’t predict where bitcoin prices will go in the future, I will say that we are operating comfortably at a profit in the second quarter as energy prices are some of the lowest prices we’ve seen in a long time.

So we expect the second quarter numbers to be much better. So as long as bitcoin prices cooperate and our operations teams maintain extremely high uptimes. Looking at the balance sheet. We have over $2 million of cash on hand at December 31 and 228 bitcoin. That brought our total liquidity to $6 million. We also have over $6 million in assets held for sale. I want to point out that this week, we closed a deal with a third party to sell almost $5 million of our legacy energy assets. This is further described in the subsequent event footnote for Form 10-Q, which will be filed today. On a final note, our total debt is less than $20 million. During the first quarter, we paid down $1.6 million of our debt, which is approximately 8% of the total balance.

Many of our peers have higher debt balances, however, I’m happy to report that we have a rather clean and healthy balance sheet, one that could take on additional leverage in the future, which I will speak to in a few minutes. For right now, I want to discuss CapEx. As you’re aware, we are in an industry which requires significant investment in capital expenditures. As of December 31, we had almost 64,000 machines deployed, representing 6.2 exahash. While the company incurred significant CapEx to get to this point, I want to share what CapEx looks like for the remainder of this calendar year. As we discussed on the last earnings call, we have stated that we will be at 16 exahash by December 31 of this year. That required an additional 9.4 exahash machines.

Just to remind you, we went from 1.9 exahash at December 31, 2021, to 6.2 exahash all in 12 months. As Zach said, we have confidence we will get there, primarily through the 200 megawatts of additional capacity coming online. We expect the total CapEx for miners for the additional 9.4 exahash will be in the range of $140 million to $200 million at current prices before coupons and discounts. With respect to our expansion efforts in Washington and Sandersville, our construction costs are expected to be approximately $70 million, which represents approximately $350,000 a megawatt to build out those sites. Of that amount, we’ve already paid $10 million, and we expect to make announcements in the coming weeks regarding purchases of miners as well.

Our minor purchases throughout 2023 could be comprised of several different models to help us to get to our 16 exahash goal, and could range between 75,000 to 95,000 miners in total, depending on the speed and model of the miners. However, we remain very focused on purchasing and deploying miners, which have the greatest ROI. As we previously mentioned, there is still a value disconnect between the current cost of new Bitmain Antminer XPs and other models. So we keep a careful eye on our CapEx as we get the proverbial more bang for our buck and thus greater hashrate by optimizing the mix of non-XP and XP models. Before I wrap up, I want to take a minute to follow up on a few of Zach’s comments. Now CleanSpark has seen explosive growth in the last 12 months.

We feel very comfortable with our plans. As Zach discussed, we are laser-focused on executing with a clear path to our current goal of 16 exahash by December 31 of this year. We are in this for the long term, and we maintain a long-term vision and strategy, one that has us all rowing in the same direction towards our calendar year-end guidance. With respect to our strategy regarding M&A, we have been one of the most active miners to date in acquiring infrastructure and machines, and we will continue to be active. While deal flow decreased going into the holiday season, we have seen activity pick up since the New Year. We are still buyers in this market, and our strategy has not changed. That strategy is defined accretive acquisitions, which meet our ROI metrics and start producing free cash flow shortly after the deployment of capital.

To finance these acquisitions, we will continue to use the levers available to us, which right now include the sale of bitcoin and equity. And as Zach mentioned, we have a shareholder proposal to increase the outstanding share count to 300 million shares. On that note, I want to emphasize that we will continue to be methodical and calculated when raising capital and deploying that capital as we’re conscious of responsible equity management and want to be as efficient as possible when pulling any of our three levers. Additionally, the recent increase in bitcoin prices have allowed us to build back our huddle balance, a balance we will use to be opportunistic in the marketplace. Therefore, our huddle balance may fluctuate from month to month depending on the opportunities we take advantage of.

So while we expect our huddle balance to increase over time, there may be fluctuations in our month-to-month reports, where decreases in our huddle are strictly for CapEx purchases that drive hashrate and cash flow. On a final note, we haven’t talked much about the debt lever, but we continue to have conversations with lenders in this market. When the time is right, we do expect to apply a small amount of leverage to our balance sheet. And when we do so, we believe it will be at a reasonable cost of capital. On that note, I want to take a few minutes to also discuss what we believe differentiates CleanSpark from other mining companies. Exactly 1 year ago, Zach and I shared our vision and strategy with the goal of being a top 5 miner. Not only did we achieve that goal rather quickly, but we have also set the tone for other miners about what a proper and prudent business model looks like in this industry.

You may remember, we stated that 100% huddle strategy was not sustainable and that our plan was to strategically sell bitcoin, and it was the prudent business decision. As we now know, miners who were previous 100% have sold much of the bitcoin balance in 2022 and even recently in 2023, oftentimes at a loss compared to what they minded at or even purchased bitcoin. We believe that our selling of bitcoin is strategic, not idealistic and it is that strategy which has helped us experience the high growth we’ve reported over the last year. We’re thoughtful and calculated buyers in this market, seeking out accretive acquisitions. And as you can tell from the deals we have completed in the past 12 months, we have been successful in sourcing and closing transactions to not only grow our percentage of the total global hashrate but also produce meaningful bitcoin and cash flow.

In closing, we can’t underscore enough the value of human capital and that of our team members. They are the secret sauce that make this work. While there have been macro headwinds over the last quarter, I’m personally very excited to see what 2023 brings as we believe this will be a year of continued execution and growth. Thank you for your time, Isaac, back to you.

Isaac Holyoak: Thank you, Gary. Audra, this concludes our prepared remarks. We would now like to open the line for questions from analysts.

 See also 35 Most Expensive Countries in the World and 10 Most Advanced Countries in Battery Technology.

Q&A Session

Q – Mike Colonnese: Hi, guys. Thank you for taking my questions today. My first question is on your capital management and allocation strategy. In our view, bitcoin prices still look subdued at these levels. So at what point do you think you might start holding on to a larger portion of the bitcoin you’re mining? And what factors would you need to see before making that call?

Zach Bradford: Hey, Mike, it’s – good taking. Thanks for joining the call. Just like we said, we always approach this very strategic rather than with an ideological approach. We will look to measure this really by the market indicators. We agree with you. I think that bitcoin is, as I said, the tides are turning, and I expect to see a change of direction, which is why we do intend to see that huddle balance grow. But again, strategy over ideology is how we want to approach this on a real-time basis. With that said, I’m going to let Garry add a little bit to that.

Gary Vecchiarelli: Yes. Thanks for the question, Mike. I think you can look at the huddle balance, particularly at these bitcoin price levels to be directly reflective of what our margins are. So as the margins expand, I’d expect the huddle balance to accelerate. But right now, we’re really managing on a day-to-day basis because Zach sees a lot of deal inflow, whether it’s infrastructure or bitcoin miners that are available on the market. And by having that balance of bitcoin, we can quickly strike and close a deal with a matter of a couple of days if need be. So we’ll continue to use that opportunistically. But really, that huddle balance is going to be reflective of bitcoin prices directly and the margins thereof.

Mike Colonnese: That’s great. I appreciate the color. And any additional color you can provide on the greenfield sites you’re evaluating to support the growth plans for the year, specifically, if you could talk to any locations that you’re considering? And if these sites offer an opportunity to lock in any PPAs?

Zach Bradford: Yes. So everything we look at, of course, can’t speak to the specifics because it just wouldn’t be appropriate to do so. The one thing I can say is we do have a criteria that they have to meet. And that is, of course, that’s going to have a PPA that will give us access to low-cost power on a long-term basis. It needs to be in a community that we want to put in investment into. But ultimately, we’re looking at a lot of opportunities in a lot of regions, and we’re going to pick the very best, but they have to meet a very strict criteria we have. I can tell you that we say no to a lot. And all kinds of factors that go into that, not least of which, of course, important to us is the energy mix in addition to the cost.

Mike Colonnese: Great. I appreciate it you guys taking my questions.

Operator: We’ll go next to Josh Siegler at Cantor Fitzgerald.

Josh Siegler: Yeah. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question today. Congrats on the continued execution and really great results in January. It’s always great to see. For my first question, I’d love to dive into energy cost. Can you speak to how they trended during the quarter and what you’re seeing so far into 2023? Thanks.