Energy Vault Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:NRGV) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Energy Vault Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:NRGV) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript March 12, 2024

Energy Vault Holdings, Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.15 EPS, expectations were $-0.1. NRGV isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Greetings, and welcome to the Energy Vault’s Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host Bernie Colson, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Bernie Colson: Thank you. Hello and welcome to Energy Vault’s fourth quarter and full year 2023 financial results conference call. As a reminder, Energy Vault’s fourth quarter earnings press release and presentation is available now on our Investor website and we will referring to the presentation during this call. A replay of this call will be available later today on the Investor Relations’ page of our website. This call is now being recorded. If you object in any way, please disconnect now. Please note that Energy Vault’s earnings release and this call contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements are only estimates and may differ materially from the actual future events or results due to a variety of factors.

We caution everyone to be guided in their own analysis of Energy Vault by referring to our 10-K filing for a list of factors that may cause our results to differ from those anticipated in any forward-looking statement. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. In addition, please note that we will be presenting and discussing certain non-GAAP information. Please refer to the Safe Harbor disclaimer and the non-GAAP financial measures presented in our earnings release for more details, including a reconciliation to comparable GAAP measures. Joining me on the call today is Robert Piconi, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Jan Kees van Gaalen, our Chief Financial Officer.

At this time, I’d like to hand the call over to Robert Piconi.

Robert Piconi: Great. Thank you, Bernie and I’d like to welcome to everyone to our fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings call. We’re announcing results on our second year now as a public company, which happens to be also our second year of revenue. As you tend to do sometimes, it can be helpful to step back, zoom out, if you will, and look at how we progress these past two years as I did after our first year. We’ve grown this company as a public company globally in unprecedented ways across multiple continents, multiple technologies, while serving different customer segments, public utilities, independent power players, and large industrial energy users. The result has been the fastest-growing company in energy storage in only our first two years.

We continue to monetize our long-duration gravity technology via regional license and royalty agreement that will pay long-term dividends and royalties and capped a tremendous second half of 2023, executing multiple battery energy storage projects across the U.S. market with the newly developed Energy Management Software platform that is winning rave reviews from customers and has been a key differentiator in our rapid commissioning timeframes and ability to quickly get through commissioning and site energization regardless of the underlying hardware. I think finally, and as a testament to our strategy of solving customer problems as an energy storage solutions provider, we began construction on a first-of-its-kind green hydrogen hybrid energy storage system to provide multi-day storage to the city of Calistoga, California for Pacific Gas & Electric, California’s largest utility.

Energy Vault uniquely will own this system under a tolling agreement to PG&E as we also presented the only fully sustainable solution to replace their prior diesel generation systems historically used to secure continuous power, and it will be operational in the mid part of this year. Those are some of the key highlights. Very proud of our progress, our delivery in our first two years, and never been more excited about what the future holds as I am now as we continue to push boundaries and innovation, while fortifying strong customer relationships that will be the basis of our future. Clearly, we continue to operate in our sector in a very volatile capital market and despite that, the team has remained focused on the most important investor priorities, and I would say there are three of those.

First, executing for our customers and keeping the customer loyalty that are really the key to our future and really the foundation of our house that we’re building here after getting through two years. Without those customers and without those future revenue streams and with those customers now uniquely as reference points for future deals and future customers, we would not have a bright future. I feel very good about that. Second, profitable unit economics as we grow. You can imagine as a new company when you’re approaching the likes of some of the largest public utilities and some of the most prominent independent power producers, you don’t necessarily have the highest leverage in the contract negotiation. Despite us having, I think, one of the most experienced team in the industry, which is what led some of these largest customers to have the confidence and faith in us to deliver for them on very critical projects, we negotiated — they put their faith in us, and we’ve delivered quarter-over-quarter with profitable unit economics.

And finally, and I think this is definitely not least from an investor perspective, we have protected our balance sheet and liquidity as a company to allow us to control our destiny, to invest in growth, and eliminate any dilutive types of financing to shareholders. I think this, and as you’ve seen, if our results, if you happen to read through them, which I’ll highlight them here in just a minute, this has been an important aspect in particular, in Q4, where we took some proactive actions as it is clear the market has spoken on the desire for even new young companies in a very high growth and necessary market for the future of the planet must get to cash flow positive. With that, I want to begin by covering some of the highlights from our release with some more color, and then we’ll turn it over to Jan Kees, our CFO, to review detailed financials and get to questions.

Off the top, our revenue finished in the range that we’ve been reaffirming all year, $341.5 million, which is up over 130% year-over-year and 18% quarter-over-quarter, within our annual range due to some shifts of revenue at the end of Q4 that will take place in Q1 and in 2024, its towards the lower end of that range. We ended the year, however, with an increased cash position of $146 million and with no debt, which is above our prior guidance of $132 million from Q3 2023 earnings and projections. This is pretty noteworthy as we have kept and funded projects in California, for example, the Calistoga project for PG&E and Texas on our balance sheet, so we can participate in these projects in the longer term, predictable and less lumpy cash flows, and revenue streams from these tolling agreements, yet we were still able to grow cash quarter-over-quarter as we began to turn some of our first projects in the second half of the year to substantial completion and final completion.

Very importantly, we also reduced our quarterly cash operating expense run rate by 25% to 30% through actions taken in Q4 2023. This should enable a 2024 reduced quarterly cash OpEx of a range of $13 million to $15 million. We expect these actions to help us accelerate our shift to cash flow positive as we exit 2024 and for full year 2025 results, which we’ll be sharing more about during our announced Investor Day, which I’ll be talking about shortly. For the year on gross margin, we delivered a positive gross margin of 5.1%, while reflecting a portion of that, a lower-than-expected Q4 gross margin, due only to timing of revenue and associated gross profit recognition that shifted from Q4 into Q1 and 2024 for gravity license and also some battery projects.

As I will discuss, gross margins will improve significantly in the first quarter of 2024, benefiting from this shift from Q4, but also due to the mix of revenue with gravity and battery project timing. While this did impact Q4 for both revenue and final EBITDA and EPS, this represents only a timing shift, which will be recognized under U.S. GAAP accounting in 2024. And finally, our commercial pipeline continues to expand with annual year-over-year growth of 24.5 gigawatt hours to a total of 52 gigawatt hours or almost 90% growth. It also expanded sequentially quarter-over-quarter by 5.8 gigawatt hours, up 13%. This shows continued market growth, continued market activity, also with significantly larger projects, two of which we are announcing as new project awards in the U.S. for gravity and a large 2.5 gigawatt hour long-duration battery project, representing an additional continental expansion with a large global IPP.

While these larger projects boards have large impacts on forecasting revenue recognition and can create more lumpy quarters and annual guidance, they are both quite transformational in size, scope, and technology adoption in both first-of-a-kind because of those attributes. As always, we are focused on converting this growing commercial funnel into contracts that further bolster our revenue and backlog, and we remain committed to continue our track record of building profitable growth and unit economics with all new projects we choose to take on. We want to work on the velocity through our funnel. We post every quarter, our four stages of our more near-term sales funnel that starts from submitted proposals, goes to shortlisted, goes to awarded projects, and then to final bookings.

I encourage you to keep an eye on that and take a look at our latest Investor website with that update with the numbers that I just reviewed. As you all know from our announced and executed projects so far, we focus on larger and meaningful projects with strong customers that have a funnel of projects where we are developing deep partnerships over time. I realize for many of you in our investor base, Energy Vault is quite a unique animal, relative to any other pure-play energy storage company, given our unique portfolio of short, long, and even ultra-long duration storage solutions. But I believe this has also enabled us to be one of the most customer-centric energy storage customers, listening to our customers and solving their problems with a broad portfolio of technology, innovation, and solutions that is unmatched in the market.

Looking forward, as we are just a few weeks away from our Q1 2024 finish, we expect revenue to be in line with our prior Q1 2023, given normal seasonality of revenue recognition and project starts with potential for upside from items that were expected in Q4 2023. We also expect stronger double-digit gross margins in Q1, again, given the shift of revenue and gross margin recognition from the prior Q4 2023. I think very importantly, as we go to investor priorities, we expect to exit Q1 2024 with an unrestricted cash balance in a range of $125 million to $150 million. Additionally, we’ve reduced any remaining restricted cash on the balance sheet to less than $1 million and remain 100% debt-free. Our performance here on cash is attributed to our focus and tight management of our business as our growth and our cash balance at the end of the year shows, and we project to keep cash levels maintained at these levels without the need for debt or any dilutive equity transactions going forward.

As we continue to look at owned projects on our balance sheet, providing predictable longer term revenue streams, we may evaluate project financing alternatives if they’re attractive. This aspect of cash management, managing our operating expense, our culture tied to innovation, and focus on customers is all ingrained in the employees of this company and as demonstrated by the proactive actions we took in Q4 to reduce our quarterly cash OpEx rate by about 30% as we entered into 2024. We took these actions to continue to provide strong balance sheet flexibility for growth, while accelerating our move to operating cash flow positive, which we have guided for our finish in Q4 this year and for the full year of 2025. We understand the nature of the lumpiness in our current business model and are also taking actions to adapt our product mix and business to reduce this volatility over time.

We will be sharing much more detail in this regard in May formally at our first Investor Analyst Day on May 8th. While we are discussing forecast, I want to mention two projects that were awarded in Q4 that are both multi gigawatt hour and transformational and technology and territory expansion. We were awarded in Q4 a 2.5 gigawatt hour DC long-duration battery energy storage project by a leading international IPP that also represents a territorial expansion, and we’ll be sharing more details on this project at our Investor Day. We also announced a new development agreement with a large primary public utility in the State of Washington, using our gravity energy storage technology to address another multi-gigawatt our storage need regionally in the Northwest.

This is so exciting for us as it represents the first public utility in the U.S. with an agreement of this size and scope for gravity, which complements the previously announced gravity collaboration project with ENEL Green Power in Snyder, Texas, which is now up and out of the ground. Most of you are aware that demand for long-duration storage remains more nascent at this stage, although Energy Vault continues to solidify its global leadership role here with various gravity and green hydrogen ultra-long duration solutions and multi-day storage solutions that are now starting deployment in large scale across three of the largest energy storage markets in the world, in the U.S., China, and Africa. Specific to our gravity business, important to highlight our territory expansion to Southern Africa, as I just mentioned, across the 16 member SADC-member countries via a new license and royalty agreement that was executed in Q4.

In China in Rudong, we achieved state grid interconnection as planned in December of Q4 2023 for the first 25 megawatt EVx gravity storage system and achieved inverse power operation. Also in China, there are now three additional gravity energy storage systems of 360 megawatt hour, bringing the total projects underway and announced to over 3.7 gigawatt hours. China continues to be an amazing bed of growth and growth and focus as state-mandated for not only renewable generation projects, but also for the state-mandated energy storage. We continue to be very excited about the work with China Tianying and their active development and expansion in the market locally. As also noted above, we have our first USA-based gravity project with a public utility with the announcement of the new development agreement in Washington and an application of our technology that’s being uniquely applied to take advantage of existing topology to maximize efficiency at a reduced CapEx and thus providing strong economics without the need for any subsidies.

We’ll be very excited to share more on this project, given its scale, size, and application of a new technology. Moving from gravity to our battery businesses. We delivered and progressed final commissioning on our first three battery energy storage systems totaling almost 1 gigawatt hour. Specifically with Wellhead Electric, as previously announced and Nevada Energy, 440 megawatt hour were commissioned on schedule and in record timeframes from site mobilization to system energization. Also, the project with Jupiter Power is expected to be fully commissioned in the coming weeks here prior to the first quarter close. Regarding our green hydrogen, microgrid, and ultra long storage duration, we commenced construction on the largest green hydrogen project and microgrid system in the U.S. with California’s largest public utility, Pacific Gas & Electric.

The project is supported by a 10.5-year tolling agreement with commercial operation expected in mid-2024. This solidifies Energy Vault’s global leadership role in green hydrogen technology for long-duration energy storage and specific microgrids for multi-day storage. It’s important to note here that while owning this project on our balance sheet will impact near-term revenue recognition in favor of long-term and predictable revenue streams from the tolling agreement, we believe this will also result in more predictable and less lumpy revenue streams with increased margins over time, which we believe is best for Energy Vault and our investors as we scale our business. Very excited to share progress now as we ramped up new systems with our new software platform and energy management system, our proprietary VaultOS Energy Management Software, showing its innovation right out of the gate, enabling efficient commissioning of our first projects that were turned over in the second half of 2023 and will begin contributing SaaS-based recurring revenues in 2024.

Albeit small at the start and will always be a smaller percentage of the overall portfolio, but critical high-margin part of the portfolio and our product mix, the software portfolio continues to introduce new capabilities, which now includes two additional products that we will be reviewing in more detail at the upcoming Investor Day. One being Vault-Manager for maximizing project, return on investments via optimizing asset performance, using enhanced performance analytics and predictive models to provide greater system reliability and visibility. And secondly, Vault-Bidder to provide competitive dispatch, continuous revenue optimization via market participation, serving the ISO and IPP markets as well as for our own projects that we manage and operate.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I was not recognizing a great year around our project execution. This was an important proven year for us to execute on over 1.7 gigawatt hour of projects announced in our first year of revenue and as a public company in 2022 in which we demonstrated that we can deliver on our promises and complete world-class energy storage facilities on time, on budget, and at performance levels at or above expectations of our very challenging customers. Although there are many to mention, one example. We built, commissioned, and energized the 440 megawatt hour system in Nevada Energy’s Reid Gardner site about an hour outside of Las Vegas within four months of site mobilization, energizing the system on December 29th in order to meet the customers’ requirement to be online prior to year-end.

I spent some time at the site with our team on site that was working with the local contractors with some of our partners and the tremendous work they did to do something that as far as we know, has never been done before at this size, at this scale, and within this timeframe. These are the things that go unseen and unheard about these unprecedented turnaround times in project delivery and energization are the nights, weekends, holiday times dedicated by our Energy Vault team to move heaven and earth to deliver for the customer. I want to recognize all of our employees that make this happen every day for our customers as our first projects demonstrated, none of which were without supply chain and supplier delivery issues that needed to be managed, solved, anticipated, and resolved.

Just to our employees, I’m happy to be on this call today to stand upon your shoulders on this quarterly report to talk about these results. I do not take it lightly, as you know, it is a pleasure to be here and support you in what you’re doing every day. These customer satisfaction areas and testimonials are proving to be some of our best sales tools as we are well-positioned now for the next level of success, both within these customers that we’ve executed for, as well as new customers that observe our performance. We look forward to providing more detail on our Investor Day and Analyst Day that is scheduled for May 8th, 2024, in New York City. We’ve received a lot of feedback from the investor base about getting in front of you in more detail about our strategy, about the evolution of our portfolio, and also about a view into where we’re going as a company in achieving the vision that we set out at the beginning.

The event’s going to include new product and customer announcements, portfolio updates, and financial guidance. It will include customers and partners that will be speaking — customers and partners that have experience with us in delivery, but also new technology and new partners that we’re working with and expanding our growth across the globe. I look forward to seeing any of you that can attend at that session. I’d like to now turn it over to Jan Kees, who will share some financial details for the quarter. Jan Kees?

Jan Kees van Gaalen: Yes. Thank you, Rob. Good afternoon everybody. Let’s talk about revenue. Financial results are highlighted by our full year 2023 revenue of more than $340 million, 134% higher than in 2022. This revenue reflects the successful execution across our project portfolio in the United States under a build, commission, and transfer model. Next, going into gross margin. Our gross margin was 5.1% for the full year of 2023, temporarily impacted by the unfavorable timing of a few items. First, we delivered a significant amount of hardware in the second half of the year that didn’t have any margin associated with it due to the POC accounting rules under GAAP. The value-add margin on that hardware will be recognized in the first half of 2024.

And second, a high-margin licensing transaction shifted out from the fourth quarter of 2023 to 2024. Adjusted EBITDA. During 2023, our net loss amounted to $98.4 million, reflecting the points I previously mentioned and for the quarter, net loss amounted to $22.2 million. For the year ending December 31st, 2023, our adjusted EBITDA was negative $62.1 million and for the fourth quarter, adjusted EBITDA declined $3.6 million year-over-year to negative $14.8 million, reflecting a shift in timing of both battery and gravity revenue and gross profit from Q4 2023 to Q1 2024. The key non-cash items added back in the fourth quarter were $8.6 million of stock-based compensation expense and $2 million in net interest income. We do remain laser-focused on optimizing our cost structure to realize profitability as soon as possible as the business continues to scale up and we remain very encouraged with our progress towards positive adjusted EBITDA.

Cash. As of December 31st, 2023, we had $145.6 million in cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash, leaving us well-positioned to continue our growth strategy and execute on our projects. Our primary uses of cash are cash operating expenses and working capital needs associated with equipment purchases for our energy storage projects. As the projects achieve milestones and ultimately begin to generate revenue and gross margin, some of that cash will return to our balance sheet. In addition to this strong cash position, as of today, we have reduced the restricted portion of our cash significantly from $35.6 million to — that we had at the end of December 2023. Restricted cash is now down to less than $1 million as of today. Please keep in mind that we maintain a bonding capacity in excess of $1 billion to facilitate additional growth projects as we desire.

Thank you. And with that, I’ll hand the call back to Rob.

Robert Piconi: Great. Thank you, Jan Kees. Look, in closing here, before getting to questions, I want to first thank again all of our employees that, in only our second year as a public company delivered with quality, with velocity, and profitability across all of our projects. Model behaviors define our culture and customer focus, innovation, delivery, all underscored by our core values and humility, collaboration, problem-solving, and leading as an organization to deliver a more sustainable world for our future. A few critical milestones upcoming this year. Full operation of multiple gravity energy storage systems in China, which will generate future royalty streams and help China curtail its current increasing greenhouse gas emissions, which are larger than the next six to seven countries combined.

Delivering commissioning of the first and largest green hydrogen energy storage system in California, to serve as a critical replacement of diesel generation for the residents of Calistoga, California sustainably. And then territory expansions for our entire storage portfolio from Southern Africa to new starts in Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. A few things to keep an eye on there, priorities this year. We’ll begin updates on all those areas at our upcoming Investor Day. And then financially, very clear as you’ve heard as a theme on this call, setting ourselves up in 2024 as a profitable growth platform, while achieving cash flow positive as we exit and for full year 2025. As you have seen in our results and forecast, we have a strong balance sheet with no debt, strong OpEx management in place, and thus the flexibility to continue to invest in growth.

This is enabling us to invest and own projects with longer term and more predictable and higher-margin cash flows as the case in Calistoga, for example, with PG&E with a long-term tolling agreement. While this business model will result in less recognized revenue in the near-term on projects that we would otherwise build commission and transfer under an EPC model. As previously discussed, we believe this can be in the best long-term interest of our shareholders and thus Energy Vault, while helping to buffer the quarterly impact of larger projects that are being awarded on a global basis. We look forward to seeing many of you that could join us in New York at our Investor and Analyst Day on May 8th. We will be speaking again on May 7th at our Q1’s earnings announcement.

We have a lot of new and exciting developments to share that will help provide context on the next 12 months to 24 months given the magnitude of the project awards we’ve announced here today as well as our ongoing growth of the business. With that, operator, we’re now ready for questions.

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And our first question will come from the line of Justin Clare with ROTH MKM. Please proceed.

Justin Clare: Yes, hi. Thanks for taking our questions here. So, I guess, first off, I just wanted to see if you could talk a little bit more about the revenue that had shifted from Q4 into Q1. If you can provide a little bit of more detail on what led to the shift. It sounds like the projects just moved out slightly here? And then maybe if you could just speak to how much additional battery revenue and then royalty or licensing revenue shifted? And then is that all going to be in Q1 or mix of Q1 and Q2?

Robert Piconi: Sure. Hey Justin, good to hear you. Yes, we had a combination of, as Jan Kees mentioned, there was the hardware deliveries we took that led to the implementations and towards substantial completion and in some cases, final completion of some of the battery projects, there’s a portion of that that has double-digit margins that just due to POC accounting is shifting into Q1, okay? The other thing, as you know, we announced a new gravity energy storage license agreement and that also shifted in revenue recognition that will be shifting into 2024. Our expectation is that some of that will be recognized in Q1 and then throughout 2024 as we progress. So, those were the two, I think, main items that are just timing related.

Even on, I think, the gravity portion alone, had we recognized that, we would have exceeded the adjusted EBITDA EPS numbers as well. But that’s the color I’d say on those — on the two areas that have shifted. And in terms of the amount that shifted, I can share with you that it’s a double-digit million amount at this point. And as I said in the comments, we’ll be providing clarity around both 2024 and into 2025 with the updated information that we’re going to have regarding our — some of these larger project awards and as well as our Investor Day in the context of some of the new product announcements that I referenced on the release here.

Justin Clare: Got it. Okay, I appreciate that. And then I was wondering if you could maybe just speak to the visibility that you have into battery projects for 2024 beyond. After you complete the NV Energy project, the Jupiter Project, those are fully operational. Just what’s next in the pipeline? And then are there key projects that need to reach NTP before you could see awards get converted into the backlog and then you can start moving forward on projects?

Robert Piconi: Sure. Great question. We have a few projects between awards and bookings that are — essentially have notice-to-proceed dates, some of which are known and in other cases, are being finalized. Some of this has to do with some of the supply chain timelines that are not for our scope, but around things like transformers, for example, in the market, which I know as you’re probably aware, have some longer lead-times, breakers is another item. We also have a set of projects that we can choose to own on our balance sheet that have attractive double-digit IRRs. And so we’re working on some of those relative to what I mentioned about potentially continuing to own, not necessarily all but part of those projects that has an impact on rev rec as well.

So, as you can see from the growth in the funnel itself, we have a lot of those sitting in that awarded category where we’re finalizing the actual starts and therefore, will be critical to the 2024 rev rec number. So, we’re — we’ll be in a better position to give an update on that at our Investor Day just after our Q1 earnings on May 8th.

Justin Clare: Got it. Okay. And then just one more on your gravity solution. I was wondering what’s the latest on the Rudong project? Is that expected to be fully operational and in use in the near-term here? And then any sense for the timing on when you could provide performance metrics? Would that likely be at the Analyst Day? Could we see something sooner? And then any sense for what might be shared at that time?

Robert Piconi: Sure. Yes, we — as I mentioned, we were state grid interconnected in December, and they are actively commissioning that system, especially now as things are warming up there in Rudong. Our CTO was just at the site two and a half weeks ago and we’re expecting per their guidance to have in the second half of this month. So, in the coming weeks, some initial performance data. By the time we get to our Investor Day, we should have a good set of metrics for you on performance data of that system as well as, I think, as we announced before, there’s a second system that’s up out of the ground. We don’t expect anything on that system because it will be nearing its completion toward the second half of 2024 and into the first quarter of 2025.

So, I would expect more significant updates, potentially even some videos of all the operations of that system by the Investor Day. But as we get performance data, more than likely, we will be doing probably some announcement dependent on the robustness of the data and some of the timeframes on having accurate data in terms of the actual operation of the systems and the slices.

Justin Clare: Okay. Got it. Thank you.

Robert Piconi: All right. Thanks Justin.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Joseph Osha with Guggenheim Partners. Please proceed.

Joseph Osha: Yes, hey everybody. Thanks for the detail. Yes. Just to follow up a little bit on Justin’s question. I believe I heard during your prepared comments, Rob, that you said full operation of these other systems following on Rudong this year or did I mishear that? I just wanted to make sure I understand what the expectations are for these other systems that are breaking ground?