Fluence Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ:FLNC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Pavel Molchanov: Okay. Sounds good. Given that you’re vertically integrating, but you’ll still be in-sourcing battery cells. Is there any appetite to look at chemistries beyond lithium, ion, so nickel, zinc, vanadium, iron flow, any of these new battery models that are starting to scale up?

Julian Nebreda: Yes. I’ll let Rebecca answer that one.

Rebecca Boll: Sure. So in the short term, we, of course, look beyond a single type of battery and currently reduce both LFP and NFC batteries in our solutions. We work very closely with our battery OEMs to look beyond that as well. Our platform is designed such that it’s agnostic. So we can — folks who work whatever kind of battery solution is out there that needs to be sort of customer ROI requirements. And the next thing that I would say that we would look at would be solid state batteries and sodium with sodium being the one that we see the nearest term right outside of what we’re doing currently with LFP and NFC.

Pavel Molchanov: Understood. Thank you very much.

Julian Nebreda: Thanks, Pavel.

Operator: Our next question comes from Ryan Levine with Citi. Your line is open.

Ryan Levine: Good morning. With the focus on profitability, has the company slowed its hiring or can you provide color on your views on the tools to manage the cost structure?

Julian Nebreda: So what we’re doing in terms of people, we’re looking at our India Technology Centre. It has been a very, very successful division, already have like around 100 people there. And we have been attracted . We’re very happy with the contributions that have done the duals in our product development so we are looking at expanding that facility to support some of our other areas. Our back office of digital development continue helping us on product development and supply chain. So that’s what I think will be the main driver of our improvements in efficiency. We will as Manu mention we believe our SG&A will grow at a price that we have our revenue growth. So we will continue to become much more efficient in terms of revenue production with our current cost structure as we go forward.

Ryan Levine: Thanks. And then on that vein, can you provide color on the pace of adjusted gross margin recovery you’re seeing for ’23 from the 3.4% in the recent quarter towards the double-digit target that you highlighted by the end of next year?

Manavendra Sial: Yeah. For sure. And I’ll also point your attention to Slide 21, we have we mentioned it. So there are two principal drivers of our confidence level in getting to a much higher gross margin compared to ’22 when you look at the guidance for €˜23. One is, I think a lot of port well, our execution issues brought pretty basalt? You saw early signs of that in our fourth quarter performance. So we think that’s a big driver, and we’ve mentioned that on Slide 21 in the range of 23% to 33%. And then we are signing new deals that at/or close to double-digit margins that is already in our backlog, and that starts to bear fruit in ’23 when you think in terms of gross margin delivery. I will point out that we do have, let’s call it, our legacy contracts that will have growth through the fiscal year ’23.

So by the time we exit ’23, which for us is September 30, you will start to see the double-digit run rate start to show up and it does and definitely a pretty pure play going into ’24. That does drive our confidence level in getting to adjusted EBITDA beginning ’24 forward given the operating leverage comment.

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