The Lion Electric Company (NYSE:LEV) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Dan Levy: Hi, good morning and thank you for taking the questions. I just want to go back to your comments on the Joliet ramp and plans to get to a 2,500 annualized capacity by the end of the year. Maybe you can just talk about some of the gating factors that are required to be met to achieve that capacity? And then maybe you could give us a little more color of how we think about actual — your run rate of production as that capacity is being unlocked?

Marc Bedard: Yes. Thank you, good morning Dan. So yes, in Joliet, what we’ve been doing and we’ll do the official opening within the next few months, so you’ll be able to see that yourself as well. We have more working stations than we have at the Montreal factory. So basically, the goal in a few years from now will be to have a capacity of 5,000 buses. And at the end of this year, it’s going to be 2,500 buses. So those structure of what we’re doing now with the number of working stations, which is about 70 working stations in Joliet has been planned for this kind of manufacturing capacity. So it’s a little bit less labor intensive. We’ve invested a little bit more in automation as well. But this was the plan. The good news, though, is that by the end of this year, with the CAPEX investments that we still need to do this year to get there, after the end of 2023, when we’re looking at the battery factory at the 1.7 gigawatt hour, when we’re looking at the 2,500 units in Joliet.

I mean, there we’re almost done with CAPEX investment. I mean those plants — and the same thing in Montreal, we’re already done. So we’re kind of done. I mean, this is a big year 2023 for us because this is really the year where we’re managing those three manufacturing plants. And one of them, I mean, is already scaled up on basically on the school buses. And the other two plants, I mean, we’re ramping up but they are there. We have the people on site, a lot of the equipment are already there. So it’s great. I mean this is — 2023 is really a big year of, let’s say, kind of turning point for Lion. So basically, by the end of this year, if we hire the labor because we feel that we need to do the 2,500 units, well then, this will be on — I think you were asking the manufacturing space.

So it’s basically like 50 units a week that we will be able to do if we decide to hire the labor in Joliet. But you’ll see that by yourself. I mean the equipment will be there. So the equipment will be there and after that, to go from 2,500 to 5,000, the amount of CAPEX needed is absolutely not the same that the amount of CAPEX it took to get to 2,500. So it’s a lot more modest than anything we’ve been spending in the past. So it will be kind of, let’s say, almost easy to double the manufacturing capacity at some point. And we do not expect we will need to do that before probably a couple of years after that. But we are ready to take the market by storm and be even bigger than we are right now when the timing will be right.

Dan Levy: Thank you. So just to interpret, it sounds like to unlock further growth, there’s not a lot of additional spend required, meaning there’s not sort of an underlying desire to manage expenses and to limit volume growth. The heavy spending is done now?

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