Good morning, and thank you for joining us. I'm joined by Brendan Jones and Vitalie Stelea from Blink Charging, and we would like to-- Before I begin, I just have to go through a couple disclosures real quick. So as a research analyst at UBS, I need to provide certain disclosures related to my own relationship or that of UBS with any companies where we express a view on the call today. These disclosures can be found at www.ubs.com/disclosures, or alternatively, you can reach out to me directly, and I can send them to you. Guys, thank you very much for being here. Really appreciate it.
Absolutely.
So I guess a great place to start would be, can you talk a little bit about some of the differentiation between your company and some of your competitors? You know, some of the, you know, the, the differences, some of the similarities, and just how, how that looks from a competitive landscape. Because I feel like that's a lot of the conversations that I'm having these days, kind of educating investors on, you know, what those competitive dynamics look like.
Sure, absolutely. So, you know, our perspective is that in order to have sustainable growth and sustainable revenue growth and control expenses, you need to move to or achieve fully is vertical integration in what your operations are, where your product comes from, where your software development takes place. And you need to do that in order to keep in front or keep up with an ever-changing environment that is the EV landscape. So we've set forth over the last three years to structurally adjust the company to do that very thing. So right now we're about 60% of our product is made by Blink. All of our software solutions are made by Blink, except for some ancillary solutions. We're moving that to 80% within the next year to 18 months.
Most of that will be the final fulfillment of the U.S. transition and the fulfillment of the European transition. So then you look at that, and you lay that over our complementary business model. So we don't say no to a site host, because if a site host wants to buy a charger, we go, "We got a charger for you, we have a network solution, we have maintenance contracts," and we get the repeatable revenue off of the maintenance contract and the networking fees. And the networking fees vary from $20-$40 on DC fast chargers, et cetera. And if they say, "Well, we wanna partner with you," well, we got a solution for that. They pay for the install, we pay for the charger, the maintenance, the upkeep, the network fees, and we split the revenue.
We get 60, they get 40, or we go to turnkey. The premise of never saying no to a customer is really benefiting us because we turn in from salespeople into consultants automatically with them and tailor a solution that works for them instead of saying no. You add that to vertical integration, and that really starts to, over time, to be very powerful towards revenue. Then you get synergies because there's no difference. You got the network, you got the chargers. It's only which way they're going. Everything else is the same: call center, network operations center, maintenance, all that is the same. You don't need to say, "Hey, I'm one thing or the other." You need to exploit load for sustainable growth in this space.
That makes total sense. Particularly as we talk, and we're gonna get into this later, but utilization rates and you know, how you can leverage that, and that's an additional revenue stream that's unique to your company versus, you know, some of your closer peers that also sell hardware. I think kind of a great place to start then, just kind of on your financials. You guys have put up some very, very impressive gross margins here recently. In the second quarter, you were upwards of 37%. Most recent quarter, you're about 30% gross margins.
I'm just curious if you can explain to us just your ability to generate those margins, the sustainability of that, particularly with what we've been seeing from some of your peers where, you know, maybe we've had a inventory write-down or, you know, something else that's kinda happened. I mean, how have you guys been able to generate these really healthy margins over?
So when we look at the margins, especially as they started materializing in Q2 and then maintained to a degree in Q3, it goes back to vertical integration, particularly on the L2 product. And, you know, where we see some margin degradation is when we move to DC in a heavy amount, and everybody sees that on the sales side with DCs. So you gotta have a healthy balance. I think our unique position is we can offset one with the other, and we can keep driving while we're reducing expenses simultaneously to improve margin on an aggregate level. And then, that's been the key.
I mean, if you had to describe the perfect storm, it is making the transition and upping production on vertically integrated product, and then at the same time, realizing all the synergies from six acquisitions over a period of three years and bringing that to bear, and we're still not done that. So you reduce the cost, so you improve your bottom line margin. Now, we have robust, on the sales side, DC fast charger sales right now. Now, we've taken a step, and that is we put into our own portfolio of manufacturing our DC9, which is a 30kW-40 kW charger. That's a big fleet player, dealership player, et cetera. So we're gonna see some margin improvement on that product now. The bigger question is: how much further do we go in? And we're still doing the analysis on that.
Our DC240 design, so it's 240 kW. It is a silicon carbide design, so it's less heat, cheaper to build, all that, but we have two strategies unfolding. Do we build it ourselves, or do we go to the third party? And that's mostly due to scale and cost on the component side of that business. And we're almost done with that, and we'll make a decision in Q1 on which way we're gonna go. But, you know, be a company today in this environment that is conscious to cost cutting, to cost avoidance, and then continues to develop ways for revenue enhancement and for gross margin enhancement, and you're gonna get it. But it's discipline, it's daily. You've got to practice continuous improvement, and you've got to believe that, hey, I, I made this joke the other day.
Everybody, most people know the movie, It's a Wonderful Life, and there's a famous line from there when George was getting all upset because he couldn't go to the world. He goes: "I'm tired of working hard to save five cents on a 10-foot piece of pipe." Well, I'm not tired of that, and we're gonna continue to do that every day because that five cents adds up to very lean, and eventually, as we've stated, December 2024, EBITDA profitability at that point, and that's the goal.
Absolutely. I think that's a great place to go to next, is that kind of path to profitability that, you know, you touched on the multiple levers. And something that I found really kind of profound when I was doing my diligence and my initiation process was the how clear you were with the different levers and things that you were able to do and working on internally in order to start moving towards that break-even target. So just I'd love to hear a little bit more about some of the actions that you're putting in place, not only with the synergies, but also with the cost cuts and, you know, what's kind of left there that's gonna help you kind of get it across the line?
Yeah. So it's a great question, and, you know, to be clear, A, it was a big team effort, C, we brought in some, and B, we brought in some outside help, so and, and people that are smarter than us, that we had to bring in, to give us a little outside view of the company. So we got that done, and it's a multilevel approach, but as you imagine, it's still going back to so where are those identified areas? And those identified areas are: so we still have three networks going globally. It's taken more time than we thought originally to combine them all, but now we have a target of completion in the beginning of Q1, and some are actually happening right now.
So I'm giving myself a little bit of leeway saying Q1, but so that's the European transition. So there's two separate networks working there. And as you imagine, you're gonna get some synergies and some reduced expenses when you're only managing one as opposed to three. So then our next level is, how efficient are we in our operational structure in Europe, in India, and then in the United States? And where does that duplication? Is it in call center operations? Is it in network service operations? Is it the amount of buildings you have? And we're working through all that. And then simultaneously, you lay this on top, which is our strategic advantage. So we don't.
You know, everybody thinks because of our strong India presence, where we have about 160-190 employees working out of India, but they're Blink. There's no contract, there's none of that. They're our employees. When you think of European operations and then global operations, what makes sense to do there as opposed to the United States, as opposed to Europe? That analysis is fully underway, and it's at the lever. Then there's also, okay, you know, you analyze the market. Do you have opportunities to take price? If so, what does that benchmarking data tell you? That is ongoing, as well.
You combine all these together, it is, I can't describe all the levers we have to pull, but in each category, you know, if it's G&A or G&A, non-headcount, and everything, we have a target that we've got to hit. And if we miss that target, we have a lever that we can, you know, over-deliver on to make up for that, and that's to get to the December goal. And as in across the entire... There's no category left out. But getting efficient and really looking internally at the business and saying on a daily basis, "How can we do this better and more efficient?" That's gonna get us there.
Right. That's really from your time at Nissan, that you spent in kind of that Kaizen approach.
Yeah. You know, Nissan, I love Nissan. You know, they, 21 years, great training, and a very disciplined approach to business, and different business units. As in, "Okay, we're doing this, this way today. Let's look at it and see if we can do it better tomorrow." And it emerged in a culture of self-analysis.
Yeah.
Yeah, always. And it's okay to do that. It's not, you know... And we, Vitalie and I laugh now, that the company is actually, now they get it.
Right.
Everybody sees this, that this isn't, you know, this massive cost-cutting exercise.
Right.
This is efficiency. You know, I think where we look at how well we've done on it, not to toot our own horn, but it is, you know, we've reduced, you know, the company from a cost perspective, and we haven't made a lot of noise about it.
Mm-hmm.
We're doing it very effectively, very quietly, because it's the right thing to do, and it's obvious. No drastic draconian measures have been put in play yet, and we don't plan on doing any.
Right. And then another thing that maybe we haven't talked about, just, along that same thread here, is with, you know, the integration of all the different networks that you've acquired, but then the consolidation of these CRM systems. I mean, we think about, you know, approaching a really fast-growing market. I mean, that's another kind of lever that you'll have in terms of understanding, you know, where the demand is, where you can kind of flex your manufacturing operations. Is that something else that, you know, we can think about further down the road that is gonna be-
Absolutely. So when you go to the big three, and you hit on most of them right now, so the networks, that's the big one. The second one is the financial system-
Mm-hmm
... that, NetSuite or others, and then the CRM.
Right.
So network, as we've talked about, is being done. Financial system is scheduled during the same time frame to come live in Q1, and CRM in the same time frame to come live as well. So those is where you start operating now as this one company globally, and you've got-- We can do it today, but it's a lot of manual process.
Mm-hmm.
And so you're spending a lot of human capital on getting these done, and we'll move forward. It's gonna be a lot of intelligence that gets it done for us as we combine everything together. So yeah, and you have to invest in that. That's something that when you're looking at reducing costs or everything, we—no. You go, you spend the money there, you get more efficient, it pays off down the road.
Mm-hmm.
We committed to that about, you know, 2.5 years ago. We said we're gonna invest heavily in this area to be able to get that, and that's now starting to pay dividends.
Got it. Now, that's very helpful. Thank you for the color there. And I think, you know, just let's pivot real quick to your manufacturing footprint. Can you just kind of remind us what that looks like? How many facilities you have in the U.S. and internationally? What do they produce, you know, and just general capacity right now as well?
Yeah. So we have a large footprint outside of Bangalore, and that facility builds all of our base parts. So they take from different smaller suppliers what we need, whether they're PCB boards or chipsets or everything, and they build them into what we call mini platforms. Then those mini platforms are shipped out to our facility in Bowie, Maryland, and then they assemble them there. DC fast chargers, DC 9-30, that's fully assembled in India, and we're making a decision on whether we're gonna bring that in or not. And right now, that decision is pending on, we've updated the facility in Bowie, Maryland, and we're moving into the new facility within, well, like two weeks here, three weeks. We're waiting on the certificate of occupancy.
That takes capacity up to, you know, we can push 15+ , 15,000 L2s out a year out of the one. Now, that brings us to 40. We can take it to 50 if we go another shift, but you get into quality issues. So we'll reserve that and find out how to build quality into that if we can, on that. Then, we have a larger facility in Phoenix, and Phoenix right now is doing the check on the third-party product. So we bring all third-party product into there. It bench tests everything and does quality checks on everything in that facility, and then ships it out from there. So those two facilities service the United States.
There'll be a transition in Europe over time, whereas we go to more Blink-built product in Europe, we'll have another assembly facility in Europe that'll take the same construct of the base parts and everything, and then do the manufacturing in Europe. So we're expanding in India to get more capacity on parts. We've expanded Bowie, and we have two more expansions we're looking at, one for the DC fast charger, potentially, and then one definitely in Europe, to increase and maintain capacity over time.
Okay, got it. And when was that Bowie facility supposed to be completed in terms of-
So we are supposed to get the certificate of occupancy right now, so-
Okay.
So the big announcement on that, the grand opening, is in Q1.
Okay.
We'll do the big... You know, we'll be operating before that, but you wanna make it look pretty and have a nice party and all that.
Of course, of course. And so you're already doing the hiring stuff in advance of that, and you know-
A- absolutely.
Yeah, so you-
Yeah.
So once that opens, you get the certificate, then you're, you know—
Everything I just laid out, with the exception of the assembly facility in Europe, is all already baked in.
Mm-hmm.
So it's all in our forecast and everything. And we'll see as we move towards—we've got the, you know, we're already on the 18-month clock. We've got two months out of the 18-month clock. We fully anticipate in the budget as we move forward, then we'll have the European aspect of that done, too.
Perfect.
Yeah, and it's not as costly as you think because of the way we build L2 product and the way we assemble them, and we can do it at a much more efficient level with human capital. Eventually, we'll look at machine-based. We're looking at AI, and all those are investigative topics. We don't have anything to report on those, except they're under investigation right now by the technology team.
Oh, that's great. Okay, fantastic. I was gonna ask you about that, so that helps. Got it. Got one ahead of me. So I guess, you know, we've talked a lot about Level 2s, and I have this conversation constantly with investors of what the install base is gonna look like in the U.S. And, you know, I think we hear, you know, I hear DC fast charging talked about, about 90% of the time, and Level 2s very minimally, but it's a flip on where I see the install base going over long term. So can maybe you. It's better to hear it from you, what you think about Level 2, and why that's such a big emphasis for your company.
Yeah, and so let me give you a better background. And the team has done both, right? You know, I had a lot of experience at EVgo and Electrify America. We know the ins and outs of DC fast charging pretty good. We know that Level 2, based on data, and we are a data-driven company, and you can't ignore what the outside group says, whether it's McKinsey, PricewaterhouseCoopers, a m I ever gonna say that right? I always say the name wrong. And then, various other sources of, and always strongly, and the data today still validates this, it's 90%+ L2. You know, some say 95%, and the Bloomberg study, they had it up to 97%. I thought that was probably a little too aggressive.
I think it's closer to 90 is the right number, on their L2, and that is... When you think about the logicalness of this, so, cars sit 95% of the time. That number, according to the Department of Transportation, has not changed in forever.
Okay.
I don't think there's gonna be a change on that. Sure, e-mobility is gonna take some away from that, but it's mostly in the commercial sector-
Mm-hmm.
- and not in the privately, you know, owned sector, so it's still gonna be quite high. So you'll have to exploit opportunities to where you can charge these vehicles at a less capital-intensive way. And our theory, and in practicality as we play it out, is you can put out a multiplicity of charging for the same capital, you can sell one DC fast charger. And that's our premise, and so far, that's proving out to be. The difference is, to your point out, I go back to an advertising analogy. When you look at share of voice for your brand and your commercial, how you're out there. The share of voice is DC. The practical application is L2, and that's where we sort of have to take that back before we over dial and think that's the solution.
Because it's what we're doing, and it's okay because this is hard, it's new, and it's change, and people are resistant to change, is we're holding on to that old paradigm, and we're saying, "Okay, 'cause that's a fueling depot." I get that. I go down, there's the, you know, the Exxon on the corner, and I get it. But why? Because we don't have to.
Right.
We can eliminate all that. You know, it's, you know, Vitaly parks his Mach-E at home, and he wakes up in the morning, he's got a full charge.
Right.
And then he goes to work, he parks in a place in workplace charging. You know, he goes down to Miami Beach, and our garage in back is full, mostly of us and Tesla drivers and everyone else, but he can get a spot.
Yeah.
Then he plugs up and charges, and he never goes to a DC fast charger. But you're going on a trip, you're going anywhere where you need and you're, you're in excess of the battery's capacity, or you just want to fill up, you need DC fast charging. So you know, in that, when you get to that suburban or urban rim at about 40 miles and 30 miles outside the metros, and then get onto the corridors, you absolutely have to have it. And we are investing in those projects.
Right. Yeah, and, and I mean, that's the thing. It's, it I think we, we think too much of EVs as, you know, the same behavior that we would with an ICE vehicle, where you run down to empty. But if you think about your cell phone when you leave the house, great analogy is that you're, you're not gonna run your cell phone down to empty. If you have a, an opportunity to charge it, you're gonna plug it in. Because the worst thing is you don't have access to energy, and you can't charge it up. So there's that incentive and the behavior changes. I think, I think that for non-EV drivers, is something that is still something for them to get their head around a little bit.
We have to continue to educate, but you also think of it as, you know, what is the transition and what does it mean to the grid? And L2 is less impactful and gives us a chance as a country to keep catching up. Keep catching up. DC, at the levels that some want it to be, is impractical-
Mm-hmm.
Because you can't catch up under that. And then you say, "Well, we're not going to have enough infrastructure." No, we are gonna have to have enough infrastructure. You just have to understand the usage of that infrastructure. And we look at our European model, and it's dominant L2, and that utilization of that network continues to increase and outpace, you know, what we're doing in the U.S. right now. So we're—we know that what's working, we're looking at Europe, we're looking at China, which is huge, L2, as well. And they're going 100% EVs sooner than any other country in the world. So we need to pay attention to that. They're going, Europe's shifting. Where's the United States?
Yeah. No, absolutely. And I guess, you know, to kind of maybe dive a little bit deeper in there is just... Can you talk a little bit about the economics of Level 2 chargers?
Mm-hmm.
And maybe even in that conversation, maybe like, who are your customers for Level 2s? And you know, what segment within that presents the most opportunity?
So, you know, take a broad brush on this because it really presents the vast amount of opportunities we have. So we're not relegated to, you know, street side, replicating what the old charging or fueling paradigm is.
Mm-hmm.
We can go anywhere. You know, healthcare facilities, I'll just pull that one out as an example. You know, we do Lehigh Valley Health, we do Kaiser Permanente, we do a whole bunch of other ones. Your dwell time's over in an hour, we sell to them only 19.2 kW chargers. You're on that for an hour or two hours in the doctor's space. You got a whole lot of kilowatts that were just put back in your car for going to the doctor's office.
Yeah.
That's the opportunistic way that we're approaching it. Then you take that to hospitality and to other long dwell time locations or even short dwell times, like public libraries, et cetera. Municipal garages is big both in Europe and the United States. Our penetration of garage-based infrastructure is huge, and that's one area we're gonna continue to go deeper and deeper in. The reason why is it provides us with inroads into two sub-segments. First, public L2, if the garage is public. Secondarily, it is multifamily dwelling, which is the new definition of in-home charging. When we think of in-home as a single family, but no, in-home is if you have a condo and that condominium has 15 chargers in the garage, that's home charging.
Mm-hmm.
We are. That's the big segment. We're also fleet, as you've seen, success announcements on fleet. You know, we like to toot our own on the Post Office, but not so much if Blink got the award. It's the size of the award to give an indication of other awards that are gonna come. 41,500 chargers was the Post Office order. Split between three vendors, we're proud to say we're outperforming the other vendors. The revenue that we'll generate on a forecast basis next year from that order outstrips the amount of revenue we got in 2021 in total. One customer. We've seen from that, as we've seen another announcement. You know, you get one fleet customer, then you get another, you get another, you get another, and if you deliver, you get even more.
So, and we break it down into two categories: municipal fleet and then commercial fleet. And now we're starting to penetrate commercial fleet at a, at a significant level as well and then continue to build simultaneously your owner-operator model, which is sustainable long-term revenue. But when you do build your owner-operator model, do so in a way that where you place that charger, it's gonna get utilization. There used to be in the industry, the plant-the-flag mentality, and I participated in some of the plant-the-flag mentality. It didn't matter where it went. Get a charger in the ground, say we got a charger in the ground. You know, well, it's a, it's a land grab. Get it in the ground. Well, we're. We don't care about the land grab. If that land isn't good, we're not gonna put a charger there.
We're not gonna invest our capital in somewhere that doesn't get the requisite amount. Our baseline is 10% on an L2. So if we get 10% utilization, we get a 1-year payback on a hybrid, which is where they pay for the install, and then we get an 18 months on an owner-operator, we get a payback at 10. Now, one of the changes in the company that was very significant is, in late 2000, we questioned and looked at all the legacy chargers and looked where they placed, looked at utilization today and what was projected, and said, "We need to refine this model." So we went out and did, you know, what a lot of other people are doing, and we took a baseline software package from ArcGIS. We appended it, we called in the specialists in the industry to build us a system.
And if it doesn't make through that system, and the system looks at drive-by traffic, EV penetration, chargers in the area today and projected to be in the area tomorrow, ease ability of getting in, and a human look at what it looks like westbound, eastbound, easy access to the location, et cetera, and it gives us a utilization projection. If it doesn't hit that, we're not investing capital. And it's cold and hard. And of course, the sales guys go, "No!" But you have to adhere to that, so know that capital is gonna have a return for our shareholders.
Right. Now, and that makes perfect sense. And I mean, and that is the biggest thing that everyone talks about is, you know, the break-even path, and that's just playing straight into what you've discussed earlier as well. Would it be possible for you to disclose the utilization over, you know, internationally and in North America? I think you've said publicly, the majority of your owned and operated are about 15%+ .
On the L2 network, since 2000, we put in the system that we just described.
Mm-hmm.
The majority of those are over 15%. Some of the legacy chargers are, frankly, not.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, but since we put in this methodology, and that's been in line with our growth, the majority are +15.
Is that similar in Europe as well?
No, Europe is higher.
Higher.
Yeah.
Gotcha. That makes sense, just given they're further along that adoption.
Yeah, you see there's some variation between Belgium, Netherlands, UK, Ireland, and Luxembourg, and some of the other countries we're in, but on an aggregate level, it's higher.
Yeah. Absolutely. I guess quickly, because I wanna get to some of the, some of the topics I definitely get a bunch of questions on. But first, just within DC fast charging, just how are you positioned there? And, you know, you generated over, you know, almost $20 million revenue in DC sales. Just kind of wanna know a little bit more about that, who your customers are in the business. You know, anything you can share there would be-
Yeah. I'll speak, so I don't give away anything that we haven't announced yet, right? So there's some new developments because. But first, we already talked about making the decision on the DC 240 on what we're gonna do, and that's silicon carbide. So one way or another, that charger is coming to market in ours. Really, it's a margin question of how much margin are we gonna be able to achieve on it based on market pricing, based on manufacturing costs associated with it. So that's coming. Now, we can make that a NEVI-compliant unit. If we assemble in the United States, we know how to do that. That plan is already. It's baked-
Mm.
on how to do that. It's just executing on it. But until then, we continue to, on the DC side, we're utilizing our DC9, which is 30 and 40, and that's the number one seller because that goes heavily into dealers, commercial fleet, and municipal fleet as a stock up, and some that want an abundance of those because they decided to go with DC, but they want low kilowatt DC instead of high kilowatt DC. So that's our number one seller. So when you look at that number for DC, it's that charger. So now we flip that over. But we have secured manufacturing partners with us for NEVI compliant chargers. We've secured manufacturing on our chargers as well, on the L2, with NACS connectors. All that is done.
We'll see some of our first NACS connectors come out in Q1 as customer select, but we're letting the customer tell us: Do you want the NACS connector? Then we'll put it on. And if you go to our Bowie, Maryland facility today, and you pull up, you can charge on a NACS connector today.
Yeah. That's great. I do wanna get to NACS next, but congratulations on the announcement this morning with your Mack Trucks, you know, contract. That was great. Anything you can just kinda wanna talk about there, just from a high level?
I mean, I think, as we spoke about earlier, it's a continuation of making sure that you're offering the right services to fleets, and you're doing so in a very transparent and collaborative way, that you make sure it fits their business needs. We've seen other wins. We'll have announcements on that fit into that category, but it's that: Be transparent, have the right technology, have a commitment to updating that technology as you move forward, and you're gonna start to win these deals. And be transparent about everything. You know, some companies are trying to race to the bottom on price. I think we're starting to see a degree of people understand what that means in the industry. So they don't wanna go back and say, "I've got a charging problem. I got broken chargers." They want a company that's gonna stand behind those chargers, and that's Blink.
That's great. That's great. And then, so next, I mean, this is something that I get questions on all the time. I had a conference call with a couple of my colleagues, Joe Spak and Shneur Gershuni , last week, where we discussed kind of some of the an update on the EV charging landscape and, and more specific to EV penetration rates. But the transition to NACS, I mean, what's the impact to Blink? You know, when we think about this, I felt like I did a ton of work and research on this, and I, I felt like there was a lot of confusion that this was gonna be, you know, a problem for the existing installed base, et cetera, but really, I don't think that's the case.
But I'd love to hear your thoughts there, and, you know, how is that gonna... How, like, is there any ramifications for Tesla, or are they gonna be taking share or increasing share? How does that work for you guys, or is it the opposite?
So it's a positive. And you're right. You know, the first thing we did is we went out and looked. Our first intuition was, this isn't an issue. This is actually a good thing, so no, no overreaction. And we went back and we said, "Okay, let's crank the numbers on a brand level. Who's our number one customer?" Tesla. Oh, then you go outside our garage, and I say this many times, there's a lot of Teslas to park there, into our chargers and charging, and have been for quite a number of time. That's not gonna change, you know. And you add the cable, so the only change there is that the customer doesn't have to put the adapter that comes in every single Tesla out there, and that's the L2 side, right?
So third-party chargers have always existed, okay? Tesla stations today, we know that there's still lines at Tesla stations today. So now for the industry, all the third-party providers now, all they have to do is add the NACS cable, and they can service those Teslas as well. So for us, we see it as a revenue gain and a sales opportunity that is outside that Tesla. The... How you do it has all been released. Tesla's made it all public. So one of the crazy things that, when I talked to my CTO, the minute the announcement came out and we said, "This is a good thing," 'cause we're like-
Yeah
We're looking for the business.
Exactly.
you know, the amount of cable and, and connector manufacturers that called in and said, "We got it." 'Cause remember, this is what everybody forgets, this is sort of a U.S. type of, move.
Right.
Europe, China, the rest of the world, cable manufacturers and coupler manufacturers have been booming for years now, and these are independent guys that know how to build the cables, whether it's a water-cooled cable, whether it's not, or a fluid-cooled cable, I should say, instead of water. They know how to do them all. And you know, so good PR, great PR for Tesla. Stock went up. Great PR for Ford and GM, stock went up, you know, at that point in time. But impact, more opportunity. And I go back to numbers. So there's no way that with if we look at 2030, and we look at a baseline of 35% penetration, that is estimated, right? California is at 23%-
Right
today, so it's not that hard to get there. That's 30 million chargers. Now, in that, the majority are gonna be L2, about 28 point something, and that's part of the public-based charging. So you think about it, no way one group can take care of that.
Right.
Everybody... I think people want a choice, right? So, and today, we always joke, this is one of the misconceptions. If he went to a Tesla station today, he can't charge. Even with an adapter, he can't charge-
Right
because it, the legacy stations don't fit on that because of the cable.
That's actually, like, for a last question here that I wrote, you know, that I wanna ask, because this is something I've been thinking about as I look at the space longer term, is you, you all have had to service various models and various models that-
Service them all.
Right. So you have to think about, like, what does that mean for Tesla potentially? And I, I don't-
Yes
... necessarily have to, you know, comment on it. I'll kind of tell you my general thought is that there's IP that needs to be done in terms of understanding how to have your supercharger talk to other vehicles, because there's different software underlying it, even though the CCS protocol underlying it is the same. I mean, is that gonna be a learning curve for them, that they're gonna have to go through once that network opens up and you've got Fords, GMs, and you've got others that may have the NACS plug? But is that something that they're gonna have to battle when it's not just dealing with the vertically integrated Teslas?
Well, you know, Tesla has previously enjoyed a very high rating, right? Mostly because it's plug and charge, right? And there, there's no hassle. And people believe in Tesla, so even if it's bad, they have a hard time saying it was bad, right? Because they bought into you buy into the culture of Tesla when you buy a Tesla. Although that's waning a little bit, as of late. The other manufacturers service everybody. EV customers, to begin with, because they made this decision to change technologies, are very discerning, and they don't hold back, especially if you're an independent and not associated with the brand you bought. So you better be ready, and you better be able to handle a vast majority of questions and issues and topics that you didn't think of. I'll give you an example.
You know, we received one the other day that it was a high-speed charger that the customer was on, and super angry and really upset, because the charger said it would charge at 150 kilowatts, and that was correct. Now, unfortunately for this customer, they bought a used Chevy Bolt that only had the ability to charge at 50 kilowatts, and they were very, very upset. But you know, and that's just one example, and you have to go back and educate and say, "No, you didn't buy a car that's capable of that charge." So if your car's not capable, you're not gonna charge at a higher speed, and you have to go through all that level of education. And then you have to go through the complexity of customer misunderstanding.
So you pull up to a legacy station, and even by Tesla, that is one that max out at 120, but if two cars are there, it's pumping out at 60. And then, oh, okay. Now they go to a newer one, and they go, "Okay, this is completely different." And think about trip planning around that.
Right.
You know, you gotta go, "Okay, I gotta make sure that this station has the right kilowatt output to do it." So we need to. That all is going to happen, and it's all gonna be out there. So we need to continue to educate and not make a statement out in the market that confuses the public for your own good, when that's gonna hurt the industry and the growth, because companies are gonna point out it and say, "See, charging isn't working." It is, we're just not communicating it right.
Oh, that's great. Well, thank you, guys. I really appreciate the time. Is there any last bits that you wanna-
No, I mean, I think-
You covered a lot.
You know, in closing for Blink, you know, we're gonna do things on an aggressive but yet fundamental way. We're gonna keep innovating on the product and on the software side. And we're gonna operate as a company that is maturing and needs to focus on the bottom line. That is where we got everybody with all oars in the water and rowing in the same direction, and we're gonna keep moving forward that way.
Fantastic. Well, excellent. Thank you guys so much for being here. Really appreciate the time.
Sure. Thank you, Rob.