Ouster, Inc. (NYSE:OUST) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Richard Shannon: Okay. I appreciate those thoughts. And I guess one last quick question for Mark. I was just trying to estimate what your cash balance ending this quarter will be, and you are only eight days from the end, so I figured I would ask you if you could give us an estimate. I was kind of doing back envelope numbers to kind of get into around 270. Is that in the right range?

Mark Weinswig: Yes. Obviously, we entered the quarter with $315 million €“ sorry, into the year. We look at it as a combined basis, both the historical Velodyne and historical Ouster. Obviously, we are burning at their typical run rates for that first 40 days. Since that time, we have continued to do a lot of these integration activities to lower the burn rate. There are some cash costs associated with it. We publicly announced that it would be in this €“ just this first stage of integration, it would be roughly $12 million to $14 million of cash cost. We did note, though that would give us an annualized run rate savings of about $50 million per year. But we are really looking at kind of making sure that we €“ our cash is going to be something that’s very, very important to us because we have a long runway in front of us.

We have a lot of investment that we want to do and so obviously, making sure that we can retain as much cash as we can, lower the burn rate and protect that asset is something that we are very much focused on.

Richard Shannon: Okay. Appreciate the thoughts guys. That’s all for me.

Angus Pacala: Thank you. Great. And I think that’s the €“ I am sorry, I am just checking if there are more questions.

Operator: We do have a couple of more questions, sir. We will go next now to Kevin Garrigan at WestPark Capital.

Kevin Garrigan: Let me echo my congrats on the merger completion and thanks for taking me in. Just two quick questions, so the first one, last quarter, or actually the last two quarters, the macroeconomic environment was impacting some customer cycles in some end markets. Can you kind of update us on whether this is still a big factor? And are customers delaying decisions to deploy your lidar at all, or has macro improved and kind of will it be an impact in 2023?

Angus Pacala: Yes. I think that we €“ looking back, our business came out of 2022 having weathered this environment quite well. And we expect €“ we are a diversified company. We highlighted the growth in industrial and robotics sector for the business in 2022. Those are industries that really have a much more stable customer base than some of the R&D-focused emerging technologies that other companies in the space have kind of focused their companies on. And so diversification allowed us to complete the year with extremely strong bookings-to-bill ratio. I really want to highlight, just kind of indicating how healthy this business is even in this macroeconomic environment. And again, you can see that the places that we are investing in the business are meant to continue to diversify and broaden our scope to build an even more, I guess robust company against any kind of macroeconomic trends.

Kevin Garrigan: Okay. Got it. That makes sense. And then just as a quick follow-up. The combined company is, I would say, a powerhouse in the non-automotive lidar market. We have heard from some other lidar companies that they are trying to break into non-auto. Are you seeing any competitors making a big presence in non-auto, or any increased competition in this market?