Planet Labs PBC (NYSE:PL) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Ken Mestemacher: Great. I had one more follow-up on the Accenture, AWS, Microsoft. You look at marketing, will those three groups be looking into doing a lot of marketing for you or will it be mostly directed by Planet? Just trying to get a good feel for – how to reach customers?

Will Marshall: Definitely marketing is part of this. And we’re seeing their leadership of these companies lean in and speak about Planet in high level forms and stuff, so that in of itself helps us. Yes. So I think we will see them help. And again, so broadly expands our reach and we’re excited by that. Yes, it really expand our reach. We have a number of initiatives that through this quarter that expand our reach beyond that as well. I would note a couple of things that came out recently that both the economists and Bloomberg leveraged our Planetary Variables and got them into their various magazines and notes. And just incredibly important to see how these Planetary Variables are powering insights into the finance sector and they bringing awareness to our products in that sense as well.

So I encourage you to have a look at those, it’s quite cool to see how that’s being and that’s just tip of the iceberg. Let’s start with some of that marketing piece, but I think it’s – the tip of the iceberg of the potential.

Ken Mestemacher: Great. It’s always good to have them – do some marketing for us, that’s really exciting great news. So again congratulations…

Will Marshall: Thank you. I was just going to add that we are on the front page of The New York Times again today, that we get a lot of this sort of free advertising anyway.

Ken Mestemacher: Absolutely. That’s great. Well again, congrats on the quarter and thank you for taking my questions.

Will Marshall: You’re welcome.

Operator: Thank you, Mr. Mestemacher. The next question is from the line of Noah Poponak with Goldman Sachs. You may proceed.

Noah Poponak: Hello? Hello, can you hear me?

Ashley Fieglein Johnson: We can.

Noah Poponak: Yes. How is it going? How is it going? Sorry about that. Sorry about that. It wasn’t coming through, but nice to speak to you. Ashley, so last quarter you had guidance for revenue to grow sequentially but EBITDA to be down a decent amount. And the EBITDA didn’t play out that way for next quarter, at the same guidance revenue to be up sequentially EBITDA to be down. If I go into your revenue guidance range and your gross margin guidance range, the operating cost between gross profit and EBITDA have to be up quite a lot sequentially to get into the EBITDA range. So what’s the dynamic there and why will that actually happen in the fourth quarter?

Ashley Fieglein Johnson: So as I mentioned on the lower spend in Q3 on the R&D side, there was some timing of procurements. And then I’d say across the Board there was timing of new hires. So some of that is what you saw in Q3 and the anticipation is, we’ll be catching up to some of that spend and hiring in Q4. So that’s the primary driver.

Noah Poponak: Okay. That type of spending can bounce around that much quarter-to-quarter, I would think you would be laying that out on a longer-term planning basis and that it will be smoother, but it sounds like you’re getting pretty onto it?

Ashley Fieglein Johnson: Yes. On the space system side when we do procurements waiver in R&D mode for some of our newer fleets, that gets expensed as incurred, as opposed to being capitalized. So that’s why you can see, if we make a large procurement for ground stations, some of the other spacecraft purchases that we make. If those procurements come in later than that spend just moves from quarter to quarter. So, yes, so it’s a little bit lumpier because of that dynamic while these fleets are in R&D mode, it obviously will smooth out as we move out of R&D mode and into capitalizing those expenses. And then it would just obviously be capitalized as CapEx and run through DNA, primarily through gross margin in future years.

Noah Poponak: Okay. And then two months through the quarter here, you’re almost to your fiscal year end. Sure you’re doing a lot of planning for next year. How are you feeling about next year’s total company organic revenue growth compared to this year? And how are you feeling about the ability to march towards breakeven EBITDA?

Will Marshall: Well, overall we feel very good about the tailwinds behind the company right now. And I mentioned just the demand and pipeline earlier for example is really strong, slightly more cautious on the commercial segment. The reasons we discussed, very bullish on the government segment, both the civil and defense, intelligence. Extremely pleased with the team’s execution across the Board and product side and the sales and marketing side. And so that feels like we’re well set up similar to last year we will provide guidance on the next earnings call for next year.

Noah Poponak: Okay. All right. Thanks very much.