Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you guys for joining us at the H.C. Wainwright 26th Annual Global Investment Conference. My name is Kyle Meury and I'm an analyst on our corporate access team here. We're very excited to have you all. And for this session, we are pleased to welcome Brendan Jones, President and CEO, and Vitalie Stelea, VP of Capital Markets and FP&A from Blink Charging. Thank you.
All right. Well, thanks, everyone. Thanks for coming out this afternoon after I'm sure what has been a very busy morning and crowded hallways, et cetera, at this. So we're gonna jump right into this. The goal is to get through a couple slides and then just jump right into Q&A. So we'll be as expeditious as possible with the slides. So, I shouldn't jump that fast by the safe harbor, but I think you all know what that's all about. Well, you can read it now and read it at your convenience. But let's just jump into talking about Blink. So just as a covering statement, Blink is a full-service EV infrastructure company. So we're vertically integrated on one side, and that means we design, manufacture, our charging equipment.
We develop our own networking services as a SaaS provider, and then we engage in the market through two different models. One is we sell those services out to a variety of different site hosts throughout the United States, Europe, and some other markets, and then we also own and operate our own equipment in certain markets, both in the United States and in Europe, specifically focusing in Europe, the U.K., Belgium, Netherlands, and moving into Germany and Italy just this year, so that's basically, you know, the high-level, 30,000-foot overview of what the company does. When we look at what we've done on the financial side, so we're moving out of Q2 now and well into Q3, in the last month of Q3. Previous quarter, it was $ 33.3 million in revenue.
That was a modest increase over last year, but that increase was in sync with what we're seeing going on in the modest growth that EVs have faced as a whole within calendar year 2024. I think J.P. Morgan just came out with it was 1% growth for this year so far. Definitely a little subdued from previous years. But when we think California, U.S., so 8%-9%, Europe a little higher, and of course, China, EV penetration rate off the charts on that. If you look at gross margin, it's holding steady. For the quarter, it was 32%, and then for the year, it's still at 34%. So we're doing pretty good. In our class of company, in our competitive set, that's the leading margin of any of the companies that compete out there.
We deployed in the previous quarter, 41,000, 4,100, excuse me, chargers. Just a little bit on how much of the GWh dispensed, it was 33, which is a lot, if anybody wanted to know. Now, one of the things we set out to do four years ago, when I joined, and almost five years now, when I joined the company, is we had to get expenses under control. So we've reduced expenses over the last two years by 40%, and it keeps going down. We have more expense reductions. Some significant ones we'll announce later this year as we finalize some of those activities. And that, we're gonna keep reducing that and reducing the burn rate of the company. Some of those have come around organically.
Others were natural ones that came as a result of acquiring six companies over the last five years. We're getting into the point now where we're seeing the last of those synergies and really getting to an efficiently operated machines. But we'll have more opportunities to look at expense avoidance, expense reduction, as we also move into 2025 as well. We look at what our targets are. We did revise our targets due to what we see as a little bit of softness in the industry. So $145 million-$155 million revenue is what we're targeting for the end of the year. Maintaining gross margin at our previous target, and then seeing positive adjusted EBITDA in 2025.
We're determining right now if we want to give a more specific target for when we believe Adjusted EBITDA will be hit within that year. We'll make that determination just prior to the Q3 release that we'll do in November and have an update for you at that time, so we look at where the market is growing. We're still predicting a big EV market as we move forward. Some of the slowdown that we see right now, whether political and others, and a lot of interesting comments being made out there, EVs continue to be sold both here, both Europe, both China, both in Asia, et cetera, and it's eventually going to become the dominant car and the dominant platform that we see out there in the marketplace.
In a minimum prediction, we see 28 million plus, and this is a McKinsey projection we just recently got, of EV chargers needed in the U.S. by 2030. That's off a 30% market penetration rate on it, so 30% of total vehicle volume on a monthly, quarterly, yearly basis has to be 30% to hit that 28 million. And then, when we're looking at global charging, 25.4% of global charging infrastructure on a seasonally adjusted rate by 2030. So the amount of investment in that, at that amount, is $260 billion. So when we translate that, so what does that mean? They're big numbers from an outside company. Well, we're the number three in the U.S. by ports right now.
So these numbers could be greatly reduced, and it still represent a significant increase in revenue and volume, even if we hit 50% of these numbers. And in many areas, especially Europe, we're gonna see better projections than what we're showing here on the screen, and 25% of our revenue is coming from Europe right now. And that percent we expect to actually increase, especially on the owner-operator model service revenue over time. So we look at this. This is a big number on how many chargers we've contracted, deployed since inception. It's a fun little number. It's over 100,000 now, so we'll have a little fun press release out there on hitting 100,000 chargers have been sold and deployed since the history of the company.
It's quite a big milestone. We're happy about it, and that's split on where they're located. You can see there, it's 25%-75%, U.S. being dominant, and then the other 25%, those are throughout the countries I've already outlined that we operate in, within Europe, and we expect that, again, that European mix to increase over time, so as I stated, we're the third largest, and that's by ports that have been deployed within the country, so they measure that on how many available ports have you deployed in the history of the company, and right now, in the U.S., you know, you have other players that we're chasing after. Tesla's in there, as I believe it's number one on it.
It may be an unfair comparison, but nonetheless, they're still in there, for comparison's sake. Blink's owner and operator model, so what we see a lot of, you know, positive momentum on is the owner- operator segment, and, you know, that's where we own and operate the charger, and we develop our revenue from the kilowatt sales. Two different things that we measure success at the company to see what we're gonna look for in the future. You can look at vehicle sales, which really impacts the sale of chargers. You might have a little lag time on vehicle sales, whether it's the fleet space or the consumer space on there. You're eventually gonna get an uptick in chargers. Sometimes it's right away, sometimes it takes 60, 90 days.
The other metric that we look at that's key is total units in operation, and as total units in operation grow, you're gonna expect an increase on utilization in your charging station, therefore, an increase in revenue out of those same stations. So we're happy to report globally, we're seeing increases across the board, 37% on an aggregate level, and we're seeing a dramatic increase on DC fast charger in the U.S. as well. These are all very, very positive signs when we look at our individual economics, and we'll just make some comments on L2. If I'm installing a Level 2 charger at, say, it's a healthcare facility, I need a minimum of 10% utilization in under one year to be pro...
To have a return on investment and pay for that capital expense, 'cause on L2s, the capital expense is very, very limited to get that charger in the ground. And we're happy to report that since 2020 and the beginning of 2021, we're at, on average, 15% plus utilization. That grew to 17% last quarter on all those, which means that we're doing a much better job now than we ever did in the past of where we place those chargers. And as units in operation come into the market and more EVs are sold, your utilization on those chargers, if they're well-placed and purpose-placed, continues to go up, and we're seeing that play out in the utilization numbers. So it's a very positive trend.
You have to get the charger in the right place at the right time, but once you do that, the vehicle's gonna come, they're gonna charge at that, and you're gonna generate sustainable and sticky revenue on that. Just a quick look for any of you who don't know, all the chargers listed in the top left-hand corner, those are made exclusively by Blink. Those are our number one sellers. One of the chargers in the upper right, the DC fast charger, that one's made exclusively by Blink. The other chargers listed below, in the left-hand corner, those are all third-party chargers. They are on limited volume in comparison, with the exception of the EQ 200. That charger is third-party in Europe.
That'll be sunset within the next twelve months, and then we'll replace it with one of our own chargers, changing the margin profile from where it sits right now, about 20%, putting that margin profile up between 35% and 40% on that charger. And the rest are DC fast chargers, and those are all contract manufactured on that. We have a lot more products than this that we offer in terms of the SaaS services that we're not listing in then, and we're moving heavier into SaaS as we move forward throughout the next couple of years. List of partnerships, we always call out a couple of these.
I think some of you may know that when we're looking at these fleets, Blink is really happy to receive the largest charger award in the history of the United States, and even some can argue, the history of the world at times, and that's the Post Office. It's 41,500 chargers in that total award over a three-year span. It started with three providers. We're happy to say it's only down to one provider now, and that one provider is Blink, and we actually sit on the Post Office Infrastructure Board for the electrification of their fleet, and we're the only charging manufacturer to do that. That one big sale has opened up all sorts of other sales, both in the United States on a fleet perspective. Good news does beget good news.
And we have a lot of inbound on fleet that we're seeing that keeps driving the revenue picture for the company. And then on the, you know, multifamily, I can't talk enough about this. When I started many, many years ago and we were trying to find a way. First, we didn't even know we had to charge the first Nissan LEAF that came on the market. Everybody was amazed at that. Said, "How do you get it to run? What do you mean you plug it in?" It was still a concern. You know, multifamily was not even a thought. You think in-home was a single-family home. Well, now in-home is a multifamily; it's apartment dweller, and anywhere. That space is growing dramatically, as more states put regulations in where you've gotta have charging in your garage.
As more homeowners associations or condo associations, et cetera, start to structurally adjust and allow charging, we're seeing a lot of sort of momentum on a state-by-state basis here. We'll call it the second hottest space right now. Fleet's the number one. Hospitality, commercial, and government, these are all steady Eddies. You have ebbs and flows of automotive. Automotive was really hot last year while they put OEM mandates to get all the dealers to install chargers. That's down to sort of a current state now, not as hot as it once was, previously. And it's gonna ebb and flow a bit. A lot, though, is starting to come in through government. We're almost through our last bit of certification to be a government sales agent.
We've got it. It's just the final testing period, and then we're fully approved, and we can sell to any government agency in the United States or abroad, as long as the U.S. agency charging services, and our products are gonna be listed there. Only one other company has completed that, so it'll be an honor when we get done, and we were expected to be done in October. WEX is another big thing we just did. So WEX is the fueling card that is represented by the majority of the industry. So if there's a dominant player that emerged from oil and gas as to the fueling card, it was WEX. WEX is then integrated in everybody else's fleet application.
So if we have a fleet provider that says, "Hey, love to do business with you, love to have chargers, but your chargers need to use the WEX card, not some other card or not some other device," that's the only thing, we're done. Now we're integrated fully in this. This opens up the gates to more opportunities for us, for sales, et cetera, so we're really excited about that. If you look at what we're gonna do, we have to continue, as always, in this space. This space is continually changing. It updates the technology that is needed on the chargers. The type of chargers that are needed continue to change. You have to stay flexible, you have to update, you have to adapt, and you have to do that in a cost-effective manner.
We're gonna continue with our advanced vertical integration. As I said, we're at 60% full vertical integration of our product line. We'll move that to 80. We won't go beyond 80, though, 'cause you can't get scale. That 80% represents some slower-moving product, and it's best to source that from third parties who can get scale to get the right price on it, so we'll continue to do that. The other thing is reducing our cost of goods sold. That's how we're maintaining one of our margins, is continuing to take cost and unnecessary cost out of the equation.
And then, you know, the other thing is keep looking at the portfolio as a whole, and from maintenance to warranties to new software offerings, and mostly the new software offerings are gonna come out in terms of energy management solutions that are becoming almost mandates, definitely in Europe. More of the RFPs or tenders in Europe are mandating that because of the availability of electricity. So you have to do load management, building management, load curtailment in order to really be able to charge vehicles and then maintain, if it's a building or a home, et cetera, the available energy toward them. In the US, there's not a production problem, but there's certainly a distribution problem. So that same software will help us both with our own owner-operator chargers and then with our clients' charging and energy management simultaneously.
That's all in development. Some of it's already rolled out. The shift to SaaS is gonna continue as more opportunities develop themselves, and we have that all in our portfolio, from dynamic pricing to energy management, to all sorts of customer-centric service, even rolling out reservations again, if necessary. So I went real quick 'cause I wanted to get to you, and, let's just jump into Q&A. No question is out of bounds for the most part.
Are you doing any industrial type of charging, like mining equipment, that sort of thing?
Mining equipment?
Like large vehicles that sort of like, like stationed there.
So we stop at vehicles that end at the CCS or the NACS standards, and when you get to the higher vehicles, so megawatt charging, we have yet to invest in megawatt yet. It's on the list for us to continue to look at. We know the manufacturers are building megawatt chargers. We haven't made a determination if the scale yet is ready for us in order to be truly profitable on that space, and you have to get that space right because it's super specialized. The equipment is uniquely different in you have to limit human contact on megawatt chargers as much as possible because the amount of electricity going through is extreme. And, yep.
You mentioned early in the discussion that there's a slowdown in the industry.
Yet, you know, they're selling two million EV cars a year, and you have 25.6% compounded growth rate, so where's the slowdown?
So the slowdown is .. is within-
It's in Q2 and Q3, and when we say slowdown, to define it, we're saying it's not growing as fast as predicted, but it's still growing. It's just a slower growth rate. It's not below where it was last year. It's just not as fast as it needs to be. And the slowdown this year. There's political underpinnings to why it's going slower. EVs became political for the first time in my career. Then you have interest rate concerns why some of the investments slow down.
But what we look at as a positive in there, again, is our Q4 bookings rate increased more than our Q2 and our Q3 bookings rates have been, which indicates that the people that were sitting on the sideline waiting to do the orders have now stepped in and said, "You know what? We're gonna do it now." And we look for a bounce in vehicle sales as well.
What's the revenue model with Post Office effect to?
So-
Revenue versus, yeah.
Yeah, so Post office has first commission on the sale of the equipment, right? On the, the margin on the sale of equipment, excuse me. And then it shifts to networking services are a sticky revenue on that deal, so there's networking services embedded in that, and we get those on a recurring basis, and then maintenance contract.
Do you offer a payment system on the charging system so your customers can, you know, make money on their investment?
Can they? Do we offer a payment system so they can?
Like, so your customers can pay for chargers and for charging?
Yeah. Yeah, so, all of our chargers, we have two different versions of them. We have a charger actually has a credit card reader on it, and that can go on DC fast chargers or on L2. We have mobile app, tap-to-pay, everything else on all the chargers as well. We once did a lot of chargers that we called non-network chargers. You know, as a manufacturer, we just sell them and who wanted to buy them. But now we do everything networked, everything with the ability to turn into a pay unit, out there.
So you're at 100,000 units right now. When do you get positive?
When do we get cash flow positive or EBITDA positive or cash flow? Let's talk EBITDA first. So, you know, we thought we had a fighting chance of hitting it this year in December. We've revised that a little bit. We still see it next year. We will make a determination relatively soon if we're gonna give solid guidance on that for next year. I think we're going to. We have it pegged down to. We have the expenses of the company done. We know where they're coming from. We know what they're gonna increase to. We also know what revenue we need to, all the way down to a dollar, on what we have to be at to hit EBITDA and to get there.
Now, the only uncontrollable or controllable variable, depending on your perspective, is: What's the market doing? We're looking at that, and we're using some, you know, predictive analytics to come in and formulate our final on it. We have a high degree of confidence it's next year. If you ask me to give a timeframe right now, I can't do that, but we will. We're fairly certain we're gonna give that guidance in November. But I say fairly certain with the caveat that we might change our mind and not give that guidance. We might just say 2025. If we do, it'll be then.
That's for Adjusted EBITDA?
That's adjusted EBITDA.
Cash, cash, we haven't guided cash.
Cash flow positive will follow that.
Thanks sir
Yeah. Of course, or else we're in big trouble.
The monetization, the network monetization right now, so where you stand, what % of the hundred thousand are you selling kilowatt hours at, and what the margin is on electricity sales?
Yeah, so the hundred thousand is a historic number, so it's a first in inception. So, you know, the margin on electricity sales, so let's... What we need to break down is the service revenue margin. And, Vitalie, correct me on the numbers, 'cause I get them all mixed up sometimes. So service margin revenue, if we just isolate that, it's around 50%-60%.
Right
... currently, so it's very high, margin in there. There's some variability in that margin, depending on region we're active in. It's a little lower in Europe because they have legislation in place in some areas where you can only get so much margin on it. The U.S. doesn't have those, so you can charge what the market bears in the U.S. The neat thing is, when we bring in dynamic-based pricing, we'll be able to fluctuate margins as the rate changes on a daily basis in demand-sensitive markets and be able to go, in the morning at $0.17 a kilowatt and at evening at $0.49 a kilowatt, and that plays into our energy management solution.
And that's in the development stage right now, and that'll allow us to get more revenue off the same system and take advantage of when you can take price or when you need to reduce price to drive volume. And that's gonna be really interesting to play out there. We have another AI company that we've partnered with now that actually has great predictive analytics that can tell us: A change in price will drive more revenue to this charger, and you'll get more revenue but less margin, and what do you want at that time? So we're bringing all that to bear for all of our stations to be more effective with not only what we're gonna put in the ground but what's in the ground today. How do we eke out the most amount of revenue from that?
Yeah, the company-owned, and is that the only revenue line item, then, is electricity, the company-owned chargers?
It's over 6,000 that we own and operate. The majority of them are L2 chargers, so lower CapEx investments than DC. However, we've seen some really good economics and numbers coming from our DC chargers now.
... so we'll, you're gonna see us lean more into the company-owned DC chargers going forward.
In that line item versus your other service line-
Yes.
Is that the only one that has electricity?
Yes, that's the only one.
Yep.
Chargers are the owned, client-owned or customer-owned?
Yes. So, did you hear me?
How many?
Of the hundred thousand, I can't give you that number 'cause some of those are gone. That's since the inception of the company in 2009.
So I couldn't give you a specific number, but right now, owner-operator model on an aggregate basis, it goes between 25, then dips in a given quarter to, you know, 17%, 17%-25% as a percent of overall revenue. The reason why it dips, just to give you some clarity, is when you take an order from, let's use the Post Office as an example, which can be a $10 million-$20 million order, that skews automatically 'cause you're doing fleet, what it is. So owner-operator revenue on an aggregate is increasing on it, but sometimes the percentage is skewed because of high-volume fleet orders. And we deal with that daily. That's, you know, you can only... If you're getting, you know, 41,000 chargers is huge, and we just delivered another big swap on that.
So on a percentage basis, it looks like we're doing more on charging sale revenue, and that owner-operator isn't growing, but in fact, it is growing.
So, sales, capital sales.
That's it. Yeah, but they deplete the percent of owner-operator revenue out there on a percentage basis. Yeah. So you, when I say 17%, it might be 17% that quarter, and the next quarter it might be 25% 'cause you didn't deliver any to high-volume fleet sale. Yep.
4,100 was, that was on one of the early slides. That was in the second quarter?
Yes, yes.
That was, yes, sold, contracted, sold, delivered, sold, contracted, yep.
Any other questions?
Thank you, everyone, and thank you
... to the Blink team.