Joby Aviation, Inc. (NYSE:JOBY) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Edison Yu: Hi, thanks for taking our questions. First one to start, I’m wondering if we have some sort of scenario analysis we can maybe share in terms of what kind of timeline FAA may be on. I know it’s a tough question to respond to, but it just seems things are definitely delayed and moving slower. So could you maybe share kind of some scenarios you could see on maybe when we could get to the finish line and what would be the gating factors?

Didier Papadopoulos: Yes, thanks for the question, Edison. We remain very excited about the engagement on the FAA side and the progress that we’re making on all fronts. Like we said earlier, a lot of our focus, primarily this quarter, has been in three key areas as it relates to FAA. One, we’re really excited about the G1 being signed and published in the Federal Register. But as we said in the last quarter, this G1 came in with more prescriptive details on the showing compliance elements, which led to additional updates that were needed to the means of compliances and the area-specific certification plans. So the FAA had to work with us to support some of these refreshes, and we spent quite a bit of time making great progress on that front.

Number two, we continue to make progress on submitting test plans that I talked about earlier, which now covers a broader range of types of test plans we submitted, such as equipment and system-level test plans. But third, and probably most importantly for me, a lot of the work has been going on and really upgrading a lot of the test assets that we have here, which is really, really essential when you think about the level of vertical integration at Joby, which is really unique to our success story, and then our plans and ability to deliver and execute on these in the second half with Stage 4, those were some amazing achievements and effectively where we spent a lot of our time purposefully, this quarter.

Edison Yu: Understood. A follow-up on Middle East and actually just more on international. I know we’re not giving any specifics on the assumptions or the economics, but in terms of the go-to-market or the business model at a high level, is this something – are you planning to, for example, in the Middle East, to operate it, to sell it direct? How do we think about just how the go-to-market will look like or the business model will look like?

Paul Sciarra: Thanks a lot, Edison. This is Paul. So with respect to our planned operations in Dubai, we’re going to be doing a lot of the work with respect to both operating those aircraft. That’s in line with the agreements that we’ve made with RTA, and we expect that to extend across the Emirates as we think about expanding that service. So that’s going to look really similar to how we think about commercial operations here in the U.S. Now, all that said, and there may have been some sort of misinformation or sort of misconstrual from some folks on this, we’ve always been very flexible as we think about what is the right way to commercialize. So when we think about customers like the DoD, for example, that is very much going to look like over a long arc, something like a sale of aircraft with sort of ongoing maintenance and support that’s sort of recurring on the back end.

So Joby has two different ways that we’re thinking about going after the market. Some cases where we’re likely to be very vertically integrated, we’re actually doing the operations ourselves and a set of customers and potentially geographies where our commercialization looks a lot more like aircraft sale. And you’ve already seen that really play out in the way that we’re thinking about, say, the UAE market and in turn the DoD as a customer. And we’re going to maintain that flexibility as we think about continuing to expand our modes of commercialization over the next 12 months to 18 months.

Operator: Thank you. And our last question will come from the line of Austin Moeller with Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed.

Austin Moeller: Hi, good afternoon. Just my first question here. Can you differentiate the key hardware differences between your previous flyable prototypes and the current production series aircraft that are rolling off, off the line at Marina now?

Didier Papadopoulos: Yes. Hi, Austin, this is Didier. Great question. So the differences between some of the electronics components, for example, or the actuation systems are primarily, I would say, evolutions between the previous aircraft and the ones coming out of the manufacturing line. The vast majority of these fit in primarily, I would say, two categories. One is expanding, for example, the environment or the flight envelope for these pieces of equipment. So think about temperatures, for example, vibration and so on. And the other set is really associated with learnings that we’ve collected over time relating to expanding, for example, the reliability aspects of these equipments. So the changes are again an evolution based on the four years of collected data from those two airplanes.

Austin Moeller: Great. And any updates on your relationship with Toyota and if or how they might become the contract manufacturer over time while you’re running flight operations?