Enovix Corporation (NASDAQ:ENVX) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Enovix Corporation (NASDAQ:ENVX) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 1, 2024

Enovix Corporation isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Enovix Corporation’s First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, today’s program will be recorded. And now, I’d like to introduce your host for today’s program, Charlie Anderson, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy. Please go ahead, sir.

Charles Anderson: Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Enovix Corporation’s First Quarter 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. With us today are President and Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Raj Talluri; Chief Financial Officer, Farhan Ahmad; and Chief Operating Officer, Ajay Marathe. Raj and Farhan will provide an overview, and then we’ll take your questions. After the Q&A session, we’ll conclude our call. Before we continue, let me kindly remind you that we released our first quarter 2024 Shareholder Letter after the market closed today. It’s available on our website at ir.enovix.com. A replay of this call will be available later today on the Investor Relations page of our website. Please note that the Shareholder Letter, press release, and this conference call all contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties.

These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and may differ materially from actual future events or results due to a variety of factors. For a discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and business, please refer to the disclosure in today’s Shareholder Letter and our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All our statements are made as of today, May 1, 2024, based on information currently available to us. We can give no assurance that these statements will prove to be correct, and we do not intend and undertake no duty to update these statements except as required by law. During this call, we’ll also discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which are not prepared in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

You can find a reconciliation of the GAAP financial measures to the non-GAAP financial measures in our Shareholder Letter, which is posted in the investor relations page of our website. I’ll now turn the call over to Raj to begin. Raj?

Raj Talluri: Thank you, Charlie. And, thank you to everyone joining us today. For our format today, I’m going to start with the recap of our recent results, how we are progressing against our strategy before I turn it over to Farhan, for the financials and the outlook. I’ll also have a few closing comments and then, we’ll take your questions. We’re off to a great start in 2024. To recap our recent achievements, first, we delivered Q1 revenue of $5.3 million which was above our forecast, due to strong performance, from the IoT category. And, thanks to the higher revenue and favorable product mix, we reported positive non-GAAP gross margins for the first time in the company’s history. Second, we completed the Factory Acceptance Testing of our Gen2 Agility Line, and the vast majority of the machines are already in Malaysia, and the SAT is well underway, which is the Site Acceptance Testing.

As a result, we’re on-track to produce our first battery samples of the EX-1M technology this quarter. Now, I’ll also note that the FAT for the high volume, the Gen2 Autoline is nearly complete. And, given that it’s based on the exact same process kernels as Agility Line, for the unique and challenging portions of our battery manufacturing process such as laser dicing and stacking, our yields are already at upwards of 95% in our Gen2 machines. Big picture, manufacturing is in a great place. We are confident we can scale the Gen2 process given the amount of rigor we put into getting these qualification steps right. Now, let’s talk about the customer progress. Let’s start with smartphones, the largest portion of the battery market in consumer electronics.

We are deeply engaged with market leaders, given the value they see in our architecture to enable silicon and increase the battery performance. As we talked about previously, our process has been to work with these OEMs to gather the specific requirements, for the smartphone market and then develop a product that’s tailored to the needs of this market. This is exactly what we’ve done with the EX-1M. And, I’m thrilled to update you that we have now begun producing samples of EX-1M in Fremont for initial testing, which you can see on the cover of our Shareholder Letter. It’s super exciting for us. Now the samples of EX-1M will go out shortly and the customers are really eager to kick-off the qualification products of these samples with their products in mind for 2025 launch.

What does this mean? And, where are we with these customers? Now, let’s take a quick look with this slide. Now, what I’m showing on this slide is basically the size of the smartphone business opportunity for us. The smartphone battery leadership opens a $12 billion opportunity for Enovix. If you look at the top bar on the slide, you can see all the OEMs that shipped around 1.2 billion smartphones, in 2023. The top eight of them represent a, $1 billion units, which is 80% of the volume. Now, of the $12 billion lithium-ion battery TAM in smartphones, $9.5 billion is among this top eight. Collectively, they produced 280 plus models of smartphones, which means an average smartphone unit volume of 3.5 million units per model. So, three or four models of this will take a full line of ours.

Now, six of the top eight of these OEMs are going to receive samples from EX-1M smartphone battery from us. So, that $7.5 billion of smartphone battery TAM is actually represented here. So, we’re in great shape as you can see with the market leaders, something that is a priority for me when I joined the company last year, to focus on the largest part of the battery market. Now, the customer interest, has extended to conversations with OEMs about formalizing our relationship with them as we started making progress over the course of the last year. Some have expressed desire to be the first to market with products in 2025 and beyond. To that end, I am really pleased today to announce our first development agreement with the top five smartphone OEM by volume.

What this agreement reflects is a progression of our technology relationship with this company and a mutual plan from both the company and us to bring out our technology into user’s hands, very exciting development that has happened in the last quarter. And, we see similar interest in collaboration from other customers who are also sampling to, who we are going to sample with our EX-1M technology in the coming months. Our goal is very straightforward. We begin with a handful of SKUs from this group of customers, ramp EX-1M to production in ‘25, then further differentiate with our EX-2M, a battery that samples later this year for product launches in ‘26. As I have highlighted in the past, there is secular demand for increased battery capacity with every smartphone generation, and Enovix may be the only company that can help these leading companies, leading smartphone OEMs keep up with the demand for the higher and higher energy density needs of the batteries because of all the AI applications that are coming into smartphone, particularly for all the on-device AI applications.

So, let’s recap what products we plan to bring to the market on the next slide. We’ve shown this slide to you before, EX1 is our current technology that we were sampling last year. EX-1M is a new technology that we will be sampling the second quarter this year. And, this technology is comparable on energy density to EX-1M, which is quite a bit differentiated from all the cells shipping out there in the market. But, we’ve made a few important advancements to this battery. We’ve increased our cycle life, increased our capability to charge fast, both of which are very important in cell phone market. Now, we plan to sample EX-2M, which is the generation after this, where we continue to make improvements on energy density and cycle life and fast charge capability.

Our R&D teams have already started working on EX-3M, where we will further make improvements over EX-2M in all of these three factors, energy density, faster charge and so on. And, our plan is to sample them in 2025. Once we bring a leading smartphone battery to market, our view is that this gives us the entitlement to win in other large parts of the battery market, namely the IoT and computing. There is another $12 billion of TAM in those two markets. The reason for this is a smartphone battery has the highest bar of all consumer batteries. The demands of on-device AI are very high, so it needs higher energy density, higher cycle life, people like to keep the smartphone for a while, fast charge rate, they like to charge it quickly and move on, highest levels of safety, it’s a device you carry with you all the time.

So, when we produce a battery that meets these requirements, all the other markets are entitlements for us. This is actually something, same thing I saw at Qualcomm. When I was at Qualcomm, we built a significant mobile phone business, but very quickly we were able to sell the Snapdragon into IoT businesses after that. Now, it should also be not lost to anyone. The logos you saw in the previous slide of the smartphone OEMs are the same logos of some of these customers who are actually leading in some of the IoT markets like wearables and tablets and computers. So, proof positive for strategy is once we qualify with a smartphone customer, takes our EX-1M sample, they’re not only qualifying us for smartphones, but also for smart watches and so on.

To this point, we are continuing to make inroads into multiple other IoT customers. We are applying our vertical markets philosophy, where we selectively engage with a few high-volume opportunities with leading OEMs that are products that take advantage of the higher energy density and higher better battery performance of EX-1M and EX-2M. Presently, our commercial team is focused on select IoT design opportunities for both 1M and 2M with product launches targeted in ‘25 and ‘26 for high energy density batteries. So, some really meaningful progress here. Now, as we look forward, we’re approaching some key milestones this quarter. As production begins in Fab2 and we get samples of our EX-1M going out to the customers. Now, let’s take a look at our scale up strategy.

We’ve shown this slide before. Q2 ‘24 is when we are going to be sampling our first EX-1M batteries from our Agility Line to some of the smartphone customers and also some IoT customers. Second half of ‘24 is when our Fab2 will get ready for production. And, Q4 of ‘24, we expect to sample the EX-2M, the next generation of the battery. Now, that takes more and people take some more time to qualify that and we expect that to launch to production in ‘26. In 2025, our goal is to launch multiple smartphones and also IoT customers with our EX-1M battery. Now, what does scale look like when we get to launching multiple products with multiple customers in the coming years? This is a slide that we haven’t shown before. Our R&D, this is a slide about the smartphone production line unit economics.

Our manufacturing R&D team has been very busy at work to reduce the cost of our lines. Now, we are targeting the CapEx per line to be in the $60 million range in the out years. And, we’ve also targeting now with the experiments we’ve done to be able to get the throughput to be 1,650 units per hour. What that does is, each line has a capability of producing a revenue of $150 million. What we’re finding is that as we produce higher and higher energy density batteries with better performance, there is the opportunity to increase the ASP because the customers want a higher energy density battery because that will help them differentiate the products much better. At that point, we expect our cash gross margin to be in the 50% plus and we estimate the payback of each of these lines to be one year.

So, very exciting future here as we get into scale of manufacturing. As you can see, we’re making tremendous progress and we have very clear path and very attractive long term financials as we scale this business. Now, none of this would be possible without the collective success of our global teams. From the operations’ team in Malaysia readying our Fab2, to the team in India reducing our R&D cycle times, to the team in Korea improving our coating capability. Based on this progress and taking advantage of our global footprint, we are now accelerating our plans to identify additional efficiencies as we scale to take advantage of this global footprint of our engineering teams and manufacturing teams. Our plan is now reduce our fixed cost by more than a third or by more than $35 million annualized by this year-end.

This significantly reduces our capital needs and accelerates our path to profitability. With that, I’m going to turn it over to, Farhan.

Farhan Ahmad: Thanks, Raj. All the relevant financials are in the quarterly report in the Shareholder Letter, so I’ll kind of keep my comments at a high-level and then provide the outlook. For Q1, we delivered revenue of $5.3 million which was ahead of our expectations. And, we also had a first, positive non-GAAP gross margin, as Raj mentioned. The non-GAAP EBITDA came in at a loss of $26.3 million, better than the midpoint of our guidance. And, non-GAAP EPS came in at $0.31 loss, a penny better than the midpoint of our guidance. We ended the quarter with, $262 million of cash and, equivalents, for Q1 the CapEx was $15 million and, we used about $35 million in operation. Our balance sheet remains strong. And, with the reductions that Raj mentioned, it provides us a strong liquidity into 2026.

As a reminder, we accelerated the depreciation of Fab1 equipment, as we converted it to for usage for our product development. So in Q1, you see that the R&D expenses had about $18.5 million of accelerated depreciation. This won’t occur in Q2, and we expect to return to a normalized level of depreciation expense and operating expenses in Q2. And then, we should see reduction, in back half of the year and into 2025 as we reduce our spending in high cost geographies as, Raj had mentioned. And, now for our guidance, for the second quarter of 2024, we forecast revenue between $3 million to $4 million, and adjusted EBITDA loss of $26 million to $32 million and a non-GAAP EPS loss of $0.22 to $0.28. As we have highlighted on the last call, Q2 tends to be the seasonally low quarter, for the battery business that we acquired last year, and we expect strong revenue growth, from Q2 level in the back half of the year.

With that, I’ll now turn to Raj.

Raj Talluri: Yes. Thank you, Farhan. As you can see, we have a very, very busy quarter ahead of us as we begin production in Malaysia and begin getting our EX-1M samples out of the door to their customers. Customer enthusiasm is very high, and our relationships continue to grow stronger. On that note, we have a number of customers. We’re in the middle of scheduling visits to our Fab2 in Malaysia over the summer, and we are planning to have a grand opening of our factory with all the key constitutions, customers, investors in about August timeframe. We’ll plan to share more details later on. It should be a very exciting event. We are very excited to showcase this facility, and I was there in Malaysia recently, and it’s really phenomenal what the team there has done. And, it’ll be awesome to showcase it to our customers and investors. With that, we can go to questions now. Operator?

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Q&A Session

Operator: We will now begin our Q&A session. Please note this call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from Mark Shooter of William Blair.

Mark Shooter: Hey, team. This is Mark on for Jed Dorsheimer. Congrats on the JDA. That’s great news. A nice surprise for us. Speaking of them, and I know that the target is for a 2025 launch. But does that give you any indication on when you’ll need to see a PO to achieve that timeline?

Raj Talluri: Yes. The question is on, PO for, for the launch in 2025. In consumer electronics, typically, the POs, I’ve been in this business for a long time. Typically, the POs are placed a couple of months before production. And, so from now, we’re going to give them samples. They’re going to qualify these samples and then give us some feedback. And then we’re going to get from them the exact battery size that they actually need to go into a phone. Once they decide the phone model, then we need to give them samples in that exact size, then they go through some more rounds of qualification within that phone. And then, when the phone passes all the EVT, PVT, all the tests and it gets close to production, that’s when we actually get the PO. So, I’d say it really depends upon the couple of months before launch time. So, I’d say second half of next year. Early to I mean, like, summer to second half probably.

Mark Shooter: Got it. Thanks for the color. And, for the follow-up, I’ll ask another one here is, so that it seems as though you’re using a land and expand model with these customers, right? Do they all have many different tiers of performance? Do you think that the customer is looking to get you into is a trial in the top-tier form, or is there do you think you can be in multiple models by the end of 2026 with this customer?

Raj Talluri: Yes. Again, I like I said, I think we are we are sampling multiple customers. We’ve just closed the JDA with one of you know, what I announced here is JDA with one of them. The development agreement is one of them. But there, we’re working with multiple ones. Typically, my experience in what happens in smartphones, from what I’ve done with other companies is that they put you in a model. They see how that is. And, before they put you in the model, there is a battery evaluation team that, make sure that they’re comfortable with the battery and where it goes, become one of the chosen battery vendors for a platform. So, it starts with one model, but once you’re qualified by the customer, you make a model, that quickly my experience is moves into multiple models across different tiers.

And, again, people typically optimize the battery for energy density, for fast charge, for cycle life based on the geography in which they’re launching a model and the shape and size of the model. So, my expectation is that once we get in, the next model should come much, much faster and much shorter, qualification cycle.

Mark Shooter: Great. Thanks, Raj.

Operator: Our next question will be from Colin Rusch of Oppenheimer.

Colin Rusch: Thanks so much, guys. As you’ve gone through the equipment testing, and gotten everything installed and you’ve talked about, kind of starting out at roughly a 65% yield sort of ratio. Can you talk about any surprises or positive incremental movement, as you’ve gotten through the exception steps and gotten everything installed?

Raj Talluri: I’ll let Ajay handle that when he’s here.

Ajay Marathe: Sure, Colin. Good question. No. The FAT, as you have been saying, is pretty rigorous process, right? We go through several different, not just critical to quality parameters, but also the marathon runs, the UPH uptimes and yield, of course, right? So, no surprises. We are expecting high yields and that’s what we are getting at FAT. There’ll be more fine tuning that we will continue to do through SAT, Site Acceptance Test. But, generally speaking, I’m particularly quite excited about how the equipment has performed in the FAT cycles that we have run and pretty much, most all the FAT for agility is done, and the yields are exactly where we expected and then some. So, no surprises, only on the positive side.

Colin Rusch: Excellent. And then with the customer engagement, obviously, you guys are getting deeper and more intimate with these customers. And the performance specs, I’m sure, on these phones are changing very quickly. Raj, can you talk a little bit about the cadence of that performance and what they’re demanding of the phones, and how quickly that’s changing as we start to see generative AI become a much bigger part of some of the future growth for the phone functionality.

Raj Talluri: Yes. What we’re noticing is that, customers want higher and higher energy density for, one. And secondly, they’re asking for batteries with more higher and higher capacity, in terms of 6,000 milliamp hours and higher. I think the reason for that is simply that, the Gen AI is just the battery consumption is like crazy. And, when they start using these apps I think, last time I showed some data, on YouTube versus ChatGPT versus now DALL-E and so on. Clear indication from all our customers that they want more energy density, larger batteries, and an ability to charge it quickly and different shapes. But, the unfortunate reality is the battery industry hasn’t kept up for many, many years. And, that’s why when we come and offer a higher energy density battery, the timing is really good because now is when they actually really need it and this is the time that, we are showing up with a great battery.

Colin Rusch: Okay. Thanks, guys.

Operator: Our next question will be from Bill Peterson of JPMorgan.

Bill Peterson: Yes. Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. In the technology and product section of the Shareholder Letter, you mentioned you’re working with two leading smartphone OEMs on launch for next year. Is one of these actually in this development agreement, or is that a separate thing? That’s the first part of the question. But the really, the crux of the question is, what’s the extent of the relation with the second question? And then you mentioned you have four others to receive samples presumably this year or next year. Is there potential upside to the two smartphone customer launches, in terms of revenue generation in 2025 or really the rest of the customers you’re sampling are more like ‘26?

Raj Talluri: Yes. I mean, so I’ll speak to it from my experience and how these things typically work. Typically, in smartphones, we mentioned one of the top OEMs that we’re working with, then we’re sampling another one and another one. So we will sample, like six of the top eight so far, that we have planned. And again, these conversations are going, so people keep asking us for more and more as we get these samples out. And, what happens then is, it’s, some customers may decide may, their qualification may go faster, because they may decide to put us in a particular phone. They can qualify faster. Some customers may be a little bit later. So, it’s hard to tell, exactly how many will be in production next year, but you also got to realize we have limited capacity, so we have to modulate that a little bit, with how many we can sell to. And, so I think it’s possible it could be more than two. It just depends on how the qualifications go.

Bill Peterson: Yes. And, my follow-up is actually kind of related to that. So, I guess for this year, we should assume you’re going to have your high volume line. Is that line still more in the 1350 UPH, I think 9 million unit support, or can this existing line already do up to 1650, which I guess would infer more like 11 million units? Just I’m trying to understand that, that’s just what we should assume for your volumes for the foreseeable future. And then, kind of related, I mean, when at this point do you think that we should consider, putting more lines into the system at this sort of 60 million per clip is I presumably ‘25 timeframe, or how to think about the CapEx cadence for this year and next year?

Raj Talluri: So I’ll let, Ajay, handle the first part, and I’ll talk about the second part about the next second line.

Ajay Marathe: Sure. The first line is, just as a reminder is, as we said, it is a universal line which can be adapted very quickly, to the smaller cell size to the larger cell size. So, we have been talking about that. So, you can expect 1350 UPH, we have clocked it with marathon runs on this line at 1350 at FAT, which is what, the HVM FAT is also underway as you know. So 1350, 9.5 million roughly batteries a year for the first line is how we should model it. From second line onwards, it’s both things are happening. We are speeding up the line. We are removing some of the bottlenecks. We are looking at exactly how the machine is behaving in terms of what can be condensed, what can be combined and that type of thing. And, that’s where we are getting 1350 to go up to 1650. And, also cost reduce the line as Raj talked about earlier in his presentation.

Raj Talluri: Yes. So, to add a little bit color to the second line and so on, I think the first thing I want to mention is that as we have gotten deeper and deeper into building these lines and manufacturing, a line’s not really a monolithic thing, right? So there’s, the first part of the line where we do dicing is the Zone 1 with the lasers. Then there’s a stacking, and then there is actually the putting into the pouch and so on. Then there’s a formation at the back-end. Each of these parts has a different lead time and a different amount of capacity that we need to put in. So, what we are looking at right now is, what really exciting piece of work, which is which I have a lot of experience coming from place like Micron, is to figure out what is the customer qualification?

How is that going? What’s the demand? How is that shaping? Which models are we getting into? How many customers are coming in? And, then figure out which parts of the line have to be ordered earlier, which can be ordered later to make sure that we balance the lead time of the procurement. But at the same time, we do it in such a way that the capacity ramps in sync with the customer qualifications. So, stay tuned for that as we work through it this year.

Bill Peterson: Can Farhan speak to how to think about CapEx for this year and maybe high level thoughts into next year?

Farhan Ahmad: So, yes, like look, for this year, no change, from what we have said before, just CapEx for this first line. And then into next year, we will, as it’ll be tied together with how the demand shapes up, and, the just related to how, the, qualifications go. And based on that, we will order the lines. It’s probably too early. We don’t guide, CapEx because, it’s flexible. We want to be flexible and maintain the flexibility.

Raj Talluri: Yes. The other thing is as I mentioned, I think, Ajay and his team have come with the way to cost reduce the line. So, we need to make sure we order the right things in the right way. And because the first one is a universal line, so we knew what we wanted to do there. We have the flexibility. But, in the second line on, as it is smartphones we are going after, we can narrow that window down, of the shapes that need to change. That gives us higher throughput. That gives us lower cost and so on.

Farhan Ahmad: Yes. And, I’ll just add one thing, Bill, to your question. In terms of thinking about the cost of the line, in the 2026 timeframe, you should think of that as 60 million. And this year, obviously, first line was a lot more expensive than that. The 2025, if we order, it’ll be closer to 60, but it won’t quite be there because not all the, cost reductions would be, projects will be completed by then.

Bill Peterson: Okay. Thanks. That’s clear. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Derek Soderberg of Cantor.

Derek Soderberg: Yes. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. So just, I’ve got a question on the Shareholder Letter. You guys were talking about, the two smartphone customers, in April when you produced the first internal samples. I’m curious beyond sort of the FAT and SAT associated with the equipment, do you still need to pass internal battery cell qualification, before shipping samples this quarter? Or is it a scenario where, once you get SAT for the Agility Line, you’re ready to ship samples? Just wondering what else you have to do on the battery side to start shipping samples?

Raj Talluri: Yes. Absolutely. So, look, there is two aspects of qualification. One aspect of qualification is, making sure the machines are working right, like FAT, SAT, and so on. But, then there is the testing of the battery to make sure that, it is safe and it is goes through all the testing of safety, and it meets the cycle life, and it meets the performance requirements, it meets the fast charge and so on. So, we are doing that now in parallel, and once we do that, that’s when we will ship the batteries. Because what you don’t want to do is ship the batteries without being fully tested to the customers because you don’t want to see any surprise at the customer side when they test it. So, you want to test it like how the customers test it, which is what been, really interesting for me is that we are now able to get all this test criteria of how they would actually test into Enovix.

So, now we are testing them exactly like how they would test after they got them. Once we’ve had all the tests and everything is good from the main manufacturing line, they can go without that. But, we first need to make sure the early samples go through all of that test.

Derek Soderberg: Got it. And, then as my follow-up, I’m curious what the reasons were to sign a development agreement with you guys. What were the reasons that that specific OEM had for signing today? Was it something they finally felt comfortable with on the production side? Was it just a little bit more time working with your battery technology? Curious if we can talk about that. And then, do you think there’s some potential for this customer to provide funding for production someday, if you guys were to sort of hit a certain criteria with the technology or production? Just curious if you could share some more, info on that deal. Thanks.

Raj Talluri: Yes. Absolutely. So, we gave many of these customers early samples from our, Fremont line, which I mentioned before. We will give them small samples. They’re testing them, they’re different stage of testing. They have gone through most of that testing now, and they see what they’re able to get. Many of these customers came and visited us in Fremont and saw how we manufacture the batteries, convince themselves about the viability of the manufacturing. And then, and then they felt like, they want to work closely with us, to actually even further optimize the battery so that it works well in their phone models. Because, you got to remember, every one of these customers use the battery slightly differently, right?

And, I think that is something that’s not so obvious from outside. People don’t just take a battery and slap it in the phone. So, they kind of figure out how do they fast charge, what algorithm used to fast charge, how much energy dense did they use, and how does it work at different temperatures, and what size do they keep and what different shape do they use. So, there’s a lot of proprietary know-how at these customers and how they use the battery. What this agreement does is it allows them to share with us all that information so that we can customize our battery to their actual specifications. And, that’s super exciting because now we’re actually building something that when it’s done and works, will fit in the particular phones that they are looking at.

And, I expect similar things to happen with other customers.

Operator: Our next question comes from Ananda Baruah of Loop Capital Markets.

Ananda Baruah: Yes. Hey, thanks, guys. Yes, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions, and congratulations on the progress. It’s really great to see. I guess, Raj, just I guess sticking with capital, can you walk through like how you’re thinking about raising capital? And I guess, Farhan gave some context by year, how to think about CapEx per line in the coming years. But, like how should we think about timing, and what are the various methods that you have to raise capital with? And, I have a quick follow-up. Thanks.

Raj Talluri: Yes. I think the previous question, I didn’t answer the second part. As we discuss these agreements with the customers, we are clearly getting, offers from them to see what can they do financially with us, to actually get to the next level. So, those conversations are also happening, and we’re also talking to some governments about that. So, I’ll let Farhan add more color to it. But, yes, those are happening now as we make more progress on our batteries.

Farhan Ahmad: Yes. So, in terms of the funding for the lines, I don’t think it’s going to be a big challenge. Once, we have the qualifications in the back and the customers on the other side ready to buy the batteries. And, as Raj mentioned, we have customers that have expressed, even without asking a desire to pay if needed to make us successful and make the factories bring them up. So, the those conversations are happening. We are also talking to sovereign wealth funds and things like that to see if we can get more funding. Where the stock is right now, like, it’s not at a level where, I can have support of the Board to consider any further capital. And, we also don’t feel like, like, that it’s anywhere close to the price that we would consider raising capital here.

And, with the actions that we have taken to reduce our cost, we have a fairly long runway. We have made very dramatic, cuts to our cost structure. And, so we can have long runway before we need to raise capital.

Ananda Baruah: That’s great context, Farhan. Thanks so much. And, the quick follow-up is and maybe this is for, Ajay. There is in the prepared remarks, guys there is some mention of 90% yields. At this point in time, I guess, yes, Farhan thought you could sneak that in. I mean, Ajay thought you could sneak it in. But can yes, just clarification of that, and then are you still on, sort of on track for 90% yields by the end of the year with, with the high speed. Yes. Thanks.

Ajay Marathe: Yes. Thanks, Ananda. I knew somebody would catch up to that and ask that question because, we’re quite proud as where we are in terms of even at FAT, like I mentioned earlier. Some of the tricky processes that we have, obviously, as some of you are closer to it, the laser dicing and stacking process, which is in the front-end. And, that typically is where we, in Gen1, at least we lost a good amount of yield. And, that’s where we feel very confident now that, even in the first shot, FAT, when we did the FAT, not only the 25 parameters of CTQs were looking very good, more than 1.1, 1.3 CPKs. So, for people who are close to that, that’s upwards of 95% yield, in those processes alone, right? So, again, like I said, operations guy gets pretty excited actually when you see anything that is above 95%. So, that’s where we are right now. We will only get better, and very confident about what we talked about yields by the end of the year.

Ananda Baruah: Excellent. Great context. Really appreciate it. Thanks, guys.

Operator: Our next question comes from Gus Richard of Northland Capital Markets.

Gus Richard: Thanks for taking the question. Just curious on, when you’ll start sending samples to customers and, from Fab2 and how quickly that can ramp? Will you start to send samples out of Fab2 in Q3, or will that have to wait until Q4?

Ajay Marathe: No. It’ll definitely be Q3 from Fab2. We are gearing up to finishing up the — FAT is, like I said, done. We are going to finish up SAT here in Q3. But, the samples definitely in, going to the same customers that we Raj and Farhan have talked about in Q3.

Raj Talluri: Yes. So, I’ll just to add a little bit more color, we are making samples now of this EX-1M here. So, those will go out to the customers first. And, so they’ll start doing some testing and so on. Meanwhile, we’ll also start building on our side. And, as they start testing, they give us some more feedback and, hey, we’d like this tested, that tested. And, we’re going to do all those tests also of the samples that come out from, Penang, and then we’ll send them those in Q3.

Ajay Marathe: So, just a quick clarification Farhan reminded me. Yes. So, first battery is out of Fab2 still happening here in Q2, right, which is what we have been talking about, and we are confirming that that’s going to happen. But, fully tested batteries as, Raj pointed out to go to the customers after all the safety testing, after everything that is relevant to the customer going out will be in Q3, early Q3.

Gus Richard: Got it. And, then you’re still sampling customers out of Fremont and, sort of what’s the volume that you’re able to ship to customers at this point? Was that a significant portion of Q1 revenue?

Raj Talluri: No. No. These are these are not big volumes. These are hundreds of samples. Like, as you guys know, we don’t have a manufacturing high volume manufacturing line here. We mainly have an R&D line, of with which we can make, make some samples. But, we don’t have to ship a lot because it’s mainly for, testing and make sure they’re okay. But ultimately, customer wants samples from our Agility Line, which as Ajay mentioned, we’re super excited. The FAT is all done and the machines are all almost there in Penang. So, in a short order, we’ll be getting samples from there.

Gus Richard: Thanks so much.

Operator: Our next question comes from George Gianarikas from Canaccord.

George Gianarikas: Hey, everyone. Thank you for taking my question. Appreciate it. I’m wondering if you can update us on what’s happening with materials related conversations, companies like Group 14. Specifically, if you can help us with more better quantify the performance improvement you bring to cells using, relative to those using conventional cell construction with their material? There seems to be still an active debate in the marketplace? Thank you.

Raj Talluri: Yes. I mean, look, we are a material agnostic company, and we’re using different kind of materials. Luckily, we now also have a graphite battery that Routejade makes. So, we are also able to figure out how to improve those batteries with some amount of this newer silicon that we can put on top of that. Everything we’ve seen, between 5% and 8%, if you more put any more than that, the battery swells up. So, the only architecture that I know of that can actually allow people to use more of silicon, in a battery is the Enovix architecture. And, we are at any reasonable amount that actually meaningfully increases the energy density. And, that’s what we are focused on, and we use 100% active silicon. So, as different kinds of silicon materials come out, we are happy to use them, test them, and they all have, properties like longer cycle life, different kinds of fade, different kind of fast charge, and so on.

But, to get the high energy density, we absolutely feel we need the Enovix architecture to constrain the swelling of silicon.

Operator: Our next question comes from Ben Johnson of Piper Sandler.

Ben Johnson: I don’t have a question at this moment.

Operator: Our next question comes from Chris Souther of B. Riley.

Chris Souther: Hey, guys. Seems like we’re getting more confident on the economics where we’re learning about the manufacturing process and pricing strategy here. We’ve talked about customers potentially financing future lines. Does the less than one year payback change that approach, or it makes more sense for you to finance yourselves or, just make it more attractive to customers to potentially finance? Can you kind of walk through, how that decision making process is evolving here?

Farhan Ahmad: Yes. Look, that’s, definitely a big consideration on whether to take customer financing or not. We’ve also talked to Asian banks in terms of project financing options. So, I think if we have signed agreements with demand confirmed and economics, that are attractive, I don’t think it will be a very difficult choice for us to get, financing on a, for project financing. And so, whether we take customer financing or we go project financing will really depend on the economics. And, I think the important thing really is to understand fundamentally what’s driving the model, right? And when you look at it, we give really unmatched energy density. If you look at EX-2M, it’s far superior to anything that’s on the road map that’s out there from any of our competitors, and, customers see that.

And we already know what the pricing is, for sort of the high-end batteries. And, with that pricing and with some premium, which we think will be justified for our differentiated performance and given that we are only game in town, I think we can get to the financial performance that I described along assuming that all the cost reductions that Ajay is targeting, we are also able to execute on it. So I think, like it’s, we have all the pieces, to get to that model, and we just have to execute, towards getting that.

Operator: Our next question comes from Sean Milligan of Janney.

Sean Milligan: Hey, Raj. Thanks for taking my question. I hopped on a little late, so sorry if you already addressed this. But, I think on the last call, you talked about kind of a nine month to 12 month, qualification timeline for the smartphone customers. And, I saw in the press release, starting to deliver samples, the six of eight in 2Q. Just curious if you could comment on that nine months to 12 month qual time. And, is that from delivery of first sample, like final sample? Like, how do we think about that qualification time and sort of the, I guess, the iterations of samples that may go to them if that’s happening concurrently in that whole timeline or not.

Raj Talluri: Yes. I mean, look. We are able to deliver some samples, now from Fremont, and those, we will be sending them soon. As I said, we’re producing them. You saw on our Shareholder Letter some of the pictures of what EX-1M batteries. The customers will do some testing with them, so they’ll get a feel for what it does and so on. But, ultimately they want samples from our high-volume manufacturing I mean, from our Agility Line from Malaysia to really start the qual process. So, that we mentioned, is when we start shipping in 2Q, we produce the first one, send 3Q produce, the next one. So, you can think of nine months to 12 months from, this summer when we start shipping samples, right? That’s why I was saying later half of next year is when we expect to see those productions happen.

Now, will a few customers do them sooner? I hope so. But that’s not what my experience has been with batteries. It typically takes that time, because they’re very careful. Battery is something that people want to be, make sure it’s a 100% safe and so on. So, but that’s for the first launch. Like I mentioned, once we get there, it’s qualified by their technology teams. It’s qualified by their sourcing teams. And, we are in the system. The next products can come much faster. So, the first one is the one that takes nine months to 12 months.

Sean Milligan: Okay. So, would the idea be that, sorry, so just trying to understand like, with the smartphone customers, maybe like, with their main sales season, like would you hope that you would have volumes in commercial phones, like the second half of next year? Or is it more like the first half of ‘26 and you would be building inventory kind of the second half of next year to serve, that 2026 launch?

Raj Talluri: Our target is to have them in phones in second half of next year.

Sean Milligan: Okay.

Raj Talluri: That’s what we’re working towards, yes.

Operator: Our next question comes from Tim Moore of EF Hutton.

Tim Moore: Thanks. My first question is, now that you inked the development agreement with the top five volume smartphone OEM, I’m wondering if you maybe could share a little bit more color and detail on how you evaluate and what hurdles you might be applying for allocating future capacity to customers in 2026 and beyond. In other words, really how do you go about prioritizing your capacity that’s going to be coming on based on proposals that come across your desks from other customers?

Raj Talluri: I mean, this is early stages, right? I mean, I think, this is not, this happens all the time. So, it’ll really depend upon which phone models and which customers and how much we get prioritized and are we in multiple models at one customer or one model at each customer and so on. It really will depend upon how the rest of this year goes and how early part of next year goes. It’s a little too early to talk about prioritizing customers.

Tim Moore: Okay. That’s helpful. And, all my other strategic and operational questions were already addressed. I was just wondering just one financial question for the income statement for the rest of the year. How should we think about accelerated depreciation and R&D showing up in the next few quarters? Is that probably going to occur until you maybe lap the acquisition late October?

Farhan Ahmad: No. So, the accelerated depreciation, just as a reminder, was associated with the restructuring that we did in, Fremont where we announced that we are going to stop the manufacturing activities in Fremont, for the small, so and plans to move high-volume production to Malaysia. So at that time, we had really taken accelerated depreciation in Fremont. And so, we had said that it would be over a two quarter period, so Q4 and Q1. So, and we disclosed that in Q1 $18.5 million were included in the R&D expenses, and that will not repeat in the Q2. So, basically, you take, like your Q1 R&D run rate, subtract $18.5 million. That gives you a baseline. And from that level, that’s kind of where you should start. And we will, we should probably be around similar level and then decline. For operating expenses, we should decline after that, because of the further actions that we announced today. Does that answer your question?

Tim Moore: Great. That’s helpful. Yes. It does. I thought it would last two quarters, but I just want to double check and try to factor in the extra cost savings. So, that clarifies everything. Thank you. That’s it for my question.

Farhan Ahmad: Thank you.

Operator: There are no further questions at this time. With that, I’d like to turn it over to Dr. Raj Talluri for closing remarks.

Raj Talluri: Yes. Thank you, everyone, for your questions, and, thank you for tuning in. Before we wrap, I want to highlight that, we’ll have a livestream of Ask Me Anything on our YouTube channel on Monday, May 6. If your question didn’t get answered today, please feel free to submit your questions for next week, and we look forward to what should be a great dialogue. And, thank you once again.