Planet Labs PBC (NYSE:PL) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

And we are prioritizing internally so that we’re investing in things like our core platform that are enabling the solutions, that are driving the exciting opportunities that we talked about earlier and making sure that as we think about our own internal operations, that we’re freeing up our capacity to continue those investments. So it’s a balancing act. Obviously, if revenue accelerates, that gives us more flexibility. But we’re not relying on acceleration beyond where we are in order to achieve our profitability goals and ultimately our cash goals.

Jason Gursky: Okay, well, last one for me. On the large government opportunities that you’ve got there on Slide 23, which is the outlook slide, can you talk a little bit about the geographic demand with the government customers and where the sources of those opportunities are?

Will Marshall: Yes, actually, I can elaborate a little bit about some of the big deals we’re looking to today. There’s the NGA has the Luno procurement, which is a $300 million-ish procurement mechanism for analytics on top of satellite data that we’ll be going after and competing for this year. NASA has had an expansion of their budget for the CSDA program that’s the commercial space data layer there, and we’ll be competing for more dollars there. Globally, we have a few really important international customers that we’re in the active pursuit of partnerships with significant expansions. And then I mentioned a number of the fact that a lot of our seven-figure deals are civil government. So that sort of tease in as well. So there’s a lot that we’re going after right now. I feel very good about the deals and opportunities that we’re pursuing this year. Yes, we’re feeling pretty solid about that.

Jason Gursky: Right. Okay. Thank you very much for the time, guys.

Ashley Johnson: Great. Thanks, Jason.

Operator: Thank you for your question. The next question comes from the line of Trevor Walsh with JMP Securities. Your line is now open.

Trevor Walsh: Great. Thanks, team, for taking the questions. Will, maybe I’ll start with you, if that’s okay. Could you maybe talk a little bit more about the NIWC Pacific contract from the perspective of – I think you had mentioned that other governments might be able to operationalize kind of a similar type of use case. I guess, how sensitive is the U.S. Navy’s program around this? Whereas you might not be able to kind of share all the learnings from that particular contract and then replicate it for other governments? And then secondarily kind of around that contract, what’s the opportunity for expansion within that? Would that just be kind of broadening the area of interest kind of to beyond the Pacific and to other geos? Or is there just additional kind of imagery services that could come along – I guess, give us a little sense of how that might expand over time? That’d be great.

Will Marshall: Yes, happy to. Look, really excited by that contract overall. It was a – it’s an example where AI on top of our PlanetScope data can enable new capabilities, there it’s maritime domain awareness, MDA as it’s called in the sector, the need is large area frequent monitoring, right? And obviously our PlanetScope daily scan is ideal for that. AI on top really pulls out things like vessel detections, vessel identifications tracking that is useful for situation awareness. That’s what this is getting at. I also note that that was a competitive win over an incumbent that had a system, but theirs was based on a tasking satellite fleet and obviously our scan is more well suited for that. And so it was great to see our team pull off that competitive win.

Now, as to expansion you asked about, that’s certainly possible. Within that, in fact, so far the performance of that contract has been really strong and we’ve got good initial indications from that customer. Very excited by that. And then more broadly, to your question, can this go to other customers? Absolutely. In fact, we already have several conversations ongoing for that capability. It is brought up and there’s nothing that restricts us from doing that with other countries and any more than any other products.

Ashley Johnson: If I could add on to that, I think it’s worth noting, and Will had said this in his prepared remarks, that this was a solution that was initially developed in the commercial sector for energy and financial markets that has applicability to the defense and intelligence sector. So often things start in government and then go out commercial as it relates to geospatial data, but this is actually one where it went the opposite direction.

Trevor Walsh: Awesome. Thanks both for the color on that and good segue for me. So thanks. On the commercial business front, you talked about kind of the budget constraints leading to some of the results for the year within that part of the business. What are – I guess, the outside of just the broader kind of macro things that we’ve all been talking about for the last 18, 24 months are there any other just technical hurdles or things for that part of the business to just really start going and kind of getting back to fuller health? Or is it really just once people feel like interest rates are kind of normalizing or whatever that looks like, then budgets – dollars are available and it’s just a flip of the switch? Or are there other kind of convincing, I guess, that you would need to do around just kind of the value of the solutions?