Symbotic Inc. (NASDAQ:SYM) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Symbotic Inc. (NASDAQ:SYM) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript November 21, 2022

Symbotic Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.1 EPS, expectations were $-0.04.

Operator: Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Symbotic’s Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2022 Results Webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I’d now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Jeff Evanson. Please go ahead.

Jeff Evanson: Thank you, Victor. Hello everyone, welcome to Symbotic’s fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022 results webcast. I am Jeff Evanson, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Our press release and discussion today will include forward-looking statements based on assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Including as a result of the factors described in cautionary statements and risk factors in Symbotic’s financial release and regulatory filings with the SEC. By which any forward-looking statements made during this call are qualified in their entirety. In addition, during this call, certain financial measures may be discussed that are not recognized under US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which the SEC refers to as non-GAAP measures.

Photo by Remy Gieling on Unsplash

We believe these non-GAAP measures assist management in planning, forecasting and evaluating our business and financial performance, including allocating resources. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to their most comparable reported GAAP measures are included in our financial press release, which has been furnished to the SEC and is available in the Investor Relations section of our website and in our filings with the SEC. These non-GAAP measures may not be comparable to measures used by other issuers. Today, we will provide guidance for the first quarter including revenue and adjusted EBITDA. We’re not providing guidance for net loss today which is the most comparable GAAP financial measure to adjusted EBITDA. We’re not able to provide reconciliations of adjusted EBITDA to GAAP financial measures, because certain items required for such reconciliations are outside of our control or cannot be reasonably predicted such as the provision for stock based compensation.

On today’s call we are joined by Rick Cohen Symbotic’s Founder and, Chief Executive Officer and Tom Ernst Symbotic’s, Chief Financial Officer. These executives will discuss our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022 results followed by Q&A. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Rick. Rick?

Richard Cohen: Thank you, Jeff. 2022 has been an incredible year. We went public in June and over the past year we’ve signed new contracts to increase our backlog to over $11 billion and we added a new customer with a multi-site contract as well. Our team has responded with incredible effort and passion, and in August we gave every full-time employee shares in Symbotic. We’re all partners here. The proof is in our quarterly results, fourth-quarter revenue more than doubled compared to a year-ago and gross profit and adjusted EBITDA, both reached record levels. Our roadmap is clear. We are facing the challenges of hyper-growth and we are executing well and very focused on customer deliverables of quality and speed. The market for our systems is huge and demand is growing with repeat orders from new and existing customers that are battling for our capacity.

The global supply-chain is undergoing transformational change and as the innovation leader we are benefiting from a variety of trends. Traditional Big Tech is laying off while we are hiring. Our supplier network is improving and supply-chain shortages are going away, just as we are increasing orders and partnerships and demand for our systems is increasing, because we solve critical problems and providing people with the necessities of life, like food, like clothing and like household goods. During the quarter, we significantly increased internal manufacturing output, we also accelerated system deployments and secured Tier 1 partner capacity to grow even faster, while we remain focused on our internal and external innovations. As announced in our earnings release, I’m returning to the role of Chief Executive Officer.

When reflecting on our critical next phase of growth, we determined that a single point of leadership is the best way to lead Symbotic. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Michael Loparco for his many contributions, including advancing our partner network and helping us to scale for future growth. 2023 is off to a great start and we’re excited about our future. Now, Tom will discuss our financial performance and our outlook. Tom?

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Tom Ernst: Thank you, Rick. Our fourth quarter revenue of $244 million grew 167% over the prior year period, despite last year’s fourth quarter including approximately $35 million of proof-of-concept milestone revenue. Excluding that one-time revenue, total fourth quarter revenue more than tripled year-over-year. We initiated a record five new system deployments during the quarter and as planned advanced one system into the fully functional production stage. We now have 17 active system deployments with multiple customers, which represents an increase from 13 systems last quarter and an increase from just five systems in the fourth quarter of last year. On, September 26, two days after our quarter closed, we won an agreement for five systems with new customer UNFI.

Under the agreement, UNFI also has an option to implement Symbotic’s warehouse automation systems in additional distribution centers. Our extraordinary revenue growth was driven by both faster progress on deployments already underway and five deployment started during the quarter. We accelerated deployments by standardizing our systems and streamlining our deployment processes. Next, we gained speed through our scaling efforts, including strong contributions from our outsourcing partners. Finally, while still seeing challenges, the overall supply-chain environment has improved. One of the very attractive financial elements of our business model is our recurring revenue stream, which represents a significant portion of the lifetime value of the systems and our over $11 billion backlog.

This stream of revenue is associated with software license and maintenance, along with operation services that begins when we complete system deployments and recurs monthly as the customer uses the system and our services. During the fourth quarter, we completed our first fully functional system against our large backlog. This deployment triggers recurring revenue for that system. In the near term, we expect the recurring revenue streams to be small relative to our rapidly growing systems revenue, but as system completions waterfall recurring revenue should grow to have much higher gross margin than systems revenue and it should grow to become a greater portion of total revenue and provide powerful operating leverage to our business. Our fourth quarter system gross margin continues to reflect significant costs associated with rapidly scaling our operations and the burden of elevated pass-through steel cost that together represent several 100 basis-points of systems gross margin in the quarter.

In addition, the fourth quarter include significant one-time expenses including costs related to adding outsourcing as an option to our business model. Excluding these one-time and outsourcing costs, system gross margin would have marginally improved quarter-over-quarter. In the fourth quarter, operating expense growth moderated to 7% sequentially despite redundant costs associated with ramping partners and ongoing investments in our innovation initiatives like (ph) and break pack. Operating leverage improved as we achieved a record 8.2% adjusted EBITDA loss rate compared to 26.3% in the fourth quarter a year ago, driven by our increased gross profit and slower operating expense growth. As we look ahead to achieving positive cash flow, we have strong operating leverage and with $353 million of cash on hand, we are very well capitalized to execute our growth plans.

Turning to our outlook. For the first quarter of fiscal 2023, we expect revenue of $170 million to $200 million and an adjusted EBITDA loss of between $21 million and $25 million. This represents 140% revenue growth and a 15 percentage point improvement in our adjusted EBITDA loss rate year-over-year at the midpoint. In closing, we’re excited about our progress in helping revolutionize the supply-chain. As, a part of this journey, we will continue to innovate rapidly and scale our business to deliver against our, more than $11 billion revenue backlog. We are excited to work in partnership with our customers, suppliers and you, our shareholders as we build this great company together. We now welcome your questions. Victor, will you please open the Q&A.

Q&A Session

Operator: Sure. Thanks. Our first question comes from the line of Piyush Awasthi from Citi. Your line is open.

Piyush Awasthi: Good evening, guys.

Richard Cohen: Hello.

Piyush Awasthi: Maybe starting with, Rick, you highlighted that Michael up skilled for future growth. Maybe elaborate on key initiatives that Michael worked on or implemented? And now with you back in the CEO seat, can you talk about your strategic priorities, let’s say, in the next 12 to 18 months?

Richard Cohen: Sure. We had started a lot of these strategic plans over a year ago and those plans were really to outreach to partners who could make — help us in the manufacturing process. We already outsourced to a lot of steel manufacturers, so the plans really are just to continue to develop and work on the partners and what’s happened in the last year as tech has slowed down, we’re finding the partners are more aggressive in pricing, we’re finding partners that were fully booked before are now anxious to help us. So the partnership plan which we started a while ago is now in full bore and we’re expecting that to continue to develop and bear fruit. And what I’m finding in my role is that, the — what’s been interesting is, you can’t really separate the product development from the partners from the scaling and that’s why we’re combining all these offices into one, because a part of what I have to do is actually go out and meet with the partners and convince them how big an industry this is, because a lot of them were focused on electronic vehicles or some other part of tech and people are now starting to realize that warehouse automation is going to be a very, very big industry.

So I’m leading that effort now and we’re building a team to actually work with the suppliers and build up a good backlog of suppliers and more capabilities than hopefully we need, but that’ll be a good thing.

Piyush Awasthi: Got it. Very helpful. And you talked about UNFI contract, to the extent you can, maybe quantify the terms of the agreement? The macro-environment is slowing, so maybe talk about if you’re seeing any changes in the pricing discussions that you’re having with your customers or do you think you can still hold-on to pricing?

Richard Cohen: I can’t really talk about pricing. I can tell you that the macro environment is actually working in our favor. What we’re seeing is that, our customers are pretty successful customers and they’re leaning in to secure the capacity as they expect to actually expand, if the market slows down, most of our customers will do very well in that environment and I want to make sure they have the capacity to grow. And Piyush, we can’t speak to specific customers, but just to add color, as we think about our overall pipeline and the reception we’re getting in the marketplace. The demand for our time is exceptionally high. And so we think that the opportunity for us to realize much stronger pricing than we have in the past is very high without speaking to any specific customer.

Piyush Awasthi: Got it. Very helpful. Thank you guys. A – Tom Ernst Thank you.

Operator: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Jim Ricchiuti from Needham. Your line is open.

Richard Cohen: Hi, Jim.

James Ricchiuti: Hi, can you hear me okay?

Richard Cohen: We can.