Symbotic Inc. (NASDAQ:SYM) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Robert Mason: Okay. Okay. Very good. And just maybe a clarification question around BreakPack. It sounds like that you can market that system to customers who do not or would not necessarily be required to already own or have one of your current case handling systems. Am I understanding that correctly?

Rick Cohen: So they would have a very – they would have – most of the people that are doing BreakPack still have to store boxes. And at some point you take the box, you cut it open and you dispense the items in the box. So they don’t necessarily need a BreakPack. They don’t necessarily need a storage solution as large as some of the ones that we deployed. But they still have to store boxes. They’ll still need the regular SymBot and they’ll still need something to probably palletize the totes when they come out. So it could be a smaller system. But they’ll still need part of our basic system to make it work.

Robert Mason: Okay. Very good. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you for your question. One moment for the next question. Our next question is coming from Joe Giordano of TD Cowen. Your line is open.

Joe Giordano: Hi, everyone. Good evening. I guess I’ll start Rick on the SymBot and some of the innovations you put in there now that you’re standardized on it. Just curious, of the 18 sites that you’re running, I assume that there’s bots that have been deployed that are not like the most vision enabled that using what the current technology. Like what’s your response – what’s your obligation to go back and kind of backward integrate like the newest and greatest into existing facilities?

Rick Cohen: Yes. So Joe, we were very disciplined long time ago about what we sold and there was a period before this big growth spurt where we knew we were going to change the bot. So basically all of – there are about four warehouses that have pre-SymBot’s and part of the restructuring charge is cleaning up everything else but all of our – so, and one of the reasons we’re going to go faster is everything is standardized now. There is no – there are no legacy bots. There are four early sites. One of it is the C&S site. There’s a couple other sites that are early bots but going forward we made the decision, we took the charge, this is the way we want to run the business and so we don’t want to have to always be dealing with all these different versions of bot.

So all of the Walmart systems for instance have the same bot and everybody going forward for the last two years now has the same bot. So we made that decision. We’ve taken the charge. We’re very standardized now.

Joe Giordano: Perfect. And then on GreenBox with the C&S site, is this essentially like an outsourced single tenant site that you’re like where C&S is going to run the entire – utilize the entire capacity? I’m just curious like how you see the balance of GreenBox like on leveraging existing large customers for that sort of purpose versus multi-tenant sites. And like for those multi-tenant sites, do you feel like there’s still like software engineering capabilities that need to be developed to really handle like the on-boarding off-boarding smoothly?

Rick Cohen: Yes. So this is primarily going to be a C&S only site but not necessarily in the future. So if we have extra capacity we’ll bring other customers. GreenBox will bring other customers into the site. And one of the things that makes Symbotic so special in this space is we have perfect inventory management, and by perfect when we ship a million boxes in a week we might have one mistake and we can’t figure out how but it’s six or seven sigma accuracy. And so there’ll be some on-boarding of additional customers. But we have that pretty well figured out. And so this first site will – could be a 100% C&S or it could be 80% C&S and other customers if we have room. And so the model would be for like customers could look at C&S and say oh now I understand GreenBox.

If I want to take a building, and I could be anchor turner and say, I’ll take 50% of the building and GreenBox; you’ll go sell the rest of the building. That’s exactly what we want out of the marketplace. So it could be an anchor customer or in some places it could be 100 customers, and no customer is bigger than 10% of the capacity. So that’s what we’re going to begin selling out there.

Joe Giordano: The technology as it currently exists can support, like in a theoretical facility that’s lots of different customers with no anchor, and they’re all really small. I would imagine that that population changes fairly often if businesses are moving and expanding [indiscernible] going away. The capability exists to bring on and bring off customers into a site like that that already exists?

Rick Cohen: Yes. So we would have to build a management team to handle the customer relations. But in our structure, you could have 100 boxes in a row, and we would have perfect traceability. It could be 100 different customers owning 100 boxes in an aisle. We have perfect traceability. So that part of it, the technology, is already there. We have to build out the customer management piece.

Joe Giordano: Yes, that’s what I figured. Okay, thank you.

Carol Hibbard: Thanks.

Operator: Thank you. And one moment for the next question. And our next question is coming from Derek Soderberg of Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open.