Good afternoon, welcome to the second day of the J.P. Morgan Auto Conference. My name is Bill Peterson, U.S. Clean Tech, and Metals and Mining Analyst. Really pleased to have Brendan Jones, the CEO, relatively new CEO of Blink. I think he's gonna walk us through a presentation, but basically, I'd like to introduce the audience to maybe some journalists here or people that don't know the story too well, but hopefully, you can kind of, you know, paint the picture of who Blink is, and we'll go to Q&A.
Sure.
I look forward to taking your questions.
Sure, absolutely. I wanna make sure my mic is on. Can everybody hear me? All right, great. Blink is a company that's been around for a long time. It started in 2008 as one of the first charging companies that arrived on the scene and then went through a lot of the fits and starts that a lot of the startups did in those age. It emerged very differently in 2018. It was listed on Nasdaq, and then in 2020 the company decided to restructure and reframe itself in the EV infrastructure space. It brought on new management, brought on new charger technology, and then since that date, has really seen its growth.
To give you an idea, in 2020, in January, we had a little less than 40 employees. We have 623 today in the company. We operated in a few countries. We operate in 27 today. We had 1 product line that we sold, and now we have a multiplicity of product lines, both DC, L2, and other. The company's seen tremendous growth. Year-over-year, we've doubled our revenue and just came out with the best quarter in the history of the company. When we look at how we differentiate ourselves as a company from competition, we're really a full-service infrastructure provider that is fully vertically integrated. We produce a significant amount of our own equipment.
We design our own networking services with our own in-house developers, and we go to market in 2 ways. The company sells chargers, or they own and operate chargers, and that gives us diversification in our revenue streams and allows us to play on what is having more upward trend, the sale of chargers or the owner operating chargers, and we protect our revenue. The other big change in the company is we've gone, while still maintaining a growth-based posture, because we believe that's appropriate. We're also focusing on the fundamentals of the business, and that's cost reduction, cost avoidance, efficiencies, efficiency in the manufacturing process, efficiencies in everything we do. We've acquired 6 companies since September of 2020.
Two of those in the mobility space, four of those in the EV infrastructure space. We're at the final stages of being able to combine them all together now. We still have three networks operating. We're reducing those to two. We have a lot of other back office systems we're reducing to one when we get to the end of this year. We're in both growth mode, efficiency mode, and consolidating the companies that we bought simultaneously and had our best quarter. We see when we look at the automotive industry today and where EV penetration is gonna be predicted, we see nothing but upside opportunity. Basic numbers that we play off on are by 2030, the estimate at 35% EV penetration is you'll need about $300 million, $30 million, excuse me.
It'd be nice if it was $300 million. $30 million chargers in the U.S. Our baseline today is $4 million today. That's where we sit, and those chargers are both in home, in the car, in the workplace, you know, on the highways. It's across the board, and we play in all of those segments as well. We think we're well positioned. That's the. Here's the elevator speech. Now we can jump in.
Yeah. Let's actually stick on IP. You know, you do have a hardware side of the business and software, which software is obviously a key enabler, too. What, what is the core and key sort of IP and the differentiators within that?
Right now, what you want is you're having more integrated services come into your charging environment. We decided to go with a brand-new IP stack, and the reason we did that is we're seeing a lot more API integrations take place, and we had one client where they just say, "Hey, we'll, we'll give you an order for 3,000 chargers, but please customize this to look like everything we want it to look like." Right now, when you take a, a look at some of the legacy networks out there, they have a lot of trouble doing that because they're built on old technology stacks.
We redeveloped our technology stack for this very purpose, because the space of adopting, you know, you can't go to a 100-year-old fleet company and say, "Hey, well, we're gonna teach you how to do it with our fleet software." They're gonna go, "No, we'll take your data, and you're gonna customize it, so it's meaningful in our environment." You have to respond to the customers, and that's why we rebuilt the network.
Yeah. The company's, I guess, becoming more vertically integrated, and even early on, it's kind of always had a hybrid model, meaning you can sell hardware and software, you can operate a network, and that was kind of early on. We actually see some more evidence that, you know, some sort of others are moving in that direction, too. I guess, you know, how should we think about the mix or the progression of the business? Maybe first, you know, the, the hybrid from, from purchasing equipment to being an operator, and then what are the key benefits, maybe to enable that, that, by being vertically integrated, drives that?
Yeah. Let's first, and some of the comments I made earlier, when we look at selling equipment. The need for equipment is gonna continue for the foreseeable future. We get to the 2035 number, and we need the 30 million chargers. If we get to 2040, and we're at 50%, that number goes up dramatically. There's gonna be no short-term or even long-term drop-off for the need for chargers on the sales model. What we're also seeing, while the sales model continues to grow, you also want a lot more companies, and municipalities are asking for Charging as a Service simultaneously, where they're like, "Well, you guys operate it, and we might wanna cut of the revenue. We might give you some capital to help install them." We see that growing simultaneously.
We wanna make sure that when we approach, whether it's a municipality, whether it's a private owner of property, that whatever they need for charging, we have a solution, and we don't say no. That's where we feel is the biggest differentiator. We do this in Europe, and we're doing this in the United States. If it's, you know, the post office, if the post office wanted us to own the chargers, we'd say, "Yeah, but you have to pay a kilowatt price." They wanted to operate the chargers, so we're now their service provider. We'll maintain them. We get network fees, and we get the, the cost, the margin on the commodity sale.
Mm-hmm. How should the mix look like, you know, if you go out 3 to 5 years?
Yeah, in terms of the split between the models?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, you know, it, it's hard to predict, but I think right now we're about 80/20, and I'm okay with that right now. I think you're gonna see it get closer to 50/50, but we'd be happy if we get to 60/40 right now by 2030. We like that sustainable long-term revenue that you get from the owner/operator model. We're not gonna turn away sales.
Yeah. Okay. Let's maybe pull it kind of more to the, the near term. Last quarter, most of Blink's energy sales came from L2. I think there's a perception that it's all about DC fast and public charging, which I know we're gonna get to that, but, you know, I guess, do, do you expect this to continue towards L2 charging, or is it just more of a factor that the fast charging network broadly, not only yourselves, but really even the industry, is just still kind of new?
Yeah, I think it, it... The data hasn't changed. Well, new cars have come out in the market, new platforms, faster onboard chargers in the vehicles, and then more DC fast chargers and a higher speed. When I started, I was arguing that, you know, you need DC fast charging because some people didn't think you even needed that. In fact, one auto OEM was arguing you needed only 110 charging. You know, this is, this is way back in 2009 and 2010, and that doesn't seem like that long ago. When we look at, you know, DC, let's look at Bloomberg Financial Services, McKinsey, PricewaterhouseCoopers. All of these data analytics companies have come back and said 90%-10%. Bloomberg was even much more...
Actually, they said 97% L2 and 3% DC fast charger. We tend to think the number is closer to the 90 number, so that, that is most likely our future, and that fits. What we have to-- the bright, shiny object of DC fast charger, and I, I've installed, installed a ton of them, so I can't say I don't like them. I do like them. It's clear that it's the bright, shiny object. There's nothing sexy about L2 charging. You know, you hide L2 charging in a garage, or it's around the corner. You know, you put out DC right in front, so everybody can see it. The utilization you're gonna see move, and it's gonna always be overwhelmingly the kilowatts dispensed from L2.
Yeah.
So you need to get them out there. Let's face it, when it's Americans driving their cars, DOT keeps telling us for the last 30 years that they sit 95% of the time. I don't think having an EV is gonna change that. I don't think you're gonna drive it any more. Fleets is a different situation there, so you have to manage that duty cycle, but that's the healthy split. We will invest as a company in DC fast charging where it makes sense, but you have to have some capital offset on those installations, and we'll sell them. Right now, we've sold 1,000 DC fast chargers, actually 987. I gotta correct myself, stick to the numbers, but almost 1,000-
Might have sold-
DC fast chargers, yeah, this year already. Only, only of those, only a few, few of them were on the owner/operator model. We'll do the owner/operator model, but the cost and the operation intensive nature of it and the cost of install, you know, is, is 15%-25% more than what it is for DC, for an L2. I gave you that example of if an average cost is between $1 million and $1.3 million for 4 350 kilowatt DC fast chargers, and then if you ask me to put in 4 L2 chargers, and I say, "Okay, you know, $7,000 for the full install of each charger," and then you, you break even on those installs in under 24 months, and that's return on C.
That's not on the just on being able to positive on the units.
Mm-hmm.
DC fast charger, 7-10 years at a minimum, and depending how much capital offset that you get from NEVI programs or others, you know, that's just getting to the break even. The return on C is, is further out.
Yeah, I know. It needs to be high utilization and, and probably some benefits like you're talking about.
Yeah.
So one other recent, fairly recent announcement, so the contract for the U.S. Postal Service, you know, can you elaborate on the momentum of, I guess, these sort of public fleet, you know, contracts such as, such as this one? This is an area we've talked about a lot is the fleet side that is probably underappreciated in the grand scheme of things.
Yeah, fleet, fleet is the hot space, right? We see multifamily dwelling, you know, on fire right now, and then we see fleet. Government fleet is leading the charge first, and then private industry fleet is following up second. The Post Office was the single largest government EV contract that went out for EV infrastructure, 41,000, 200, 500 chargers over a three-year-plus period of time. Blink was one of three companies that won that award. This represents a major sea change for a U.S. government entity or quasi. It's the Post Office. We gotta always remember that, to make this big leap. The revenue that this represents over those three years for Blink is outstanding.
You know, one year of this revenue forecasted next year is more than all the revenue Blink made in 2021. It's a sea change in terms of what it does as it transitions a very, very large municipal fleet over to EVs and the opportunity that it presents to us. Now, what our job is to maximize the way we're doing business with the U.S. government. We get our unfair share of this. You know, it's really interesting the way they structured it. It's a bit of year two. We're in year one now, and year two, how much you're gonna get is performance-based. It's based on how well you did in that.
We've gotten some extremely positive indicators from the U.S. Post Office, even maybe some awards, hopefully, on how well we performed, as a vendor. What is interesting, though, it's just not that. When we made the announcement that we got U.S. Post Office, the floodgates opened up, and we just got another governmental fleet deal that we signed today in Washington, D.C. You get that positive momentum as a company, and we're just at the very, very beginning of it. It's gonna explode over the next 5 to 10 years.
Yep. Yep. I'd say the whole, the broader charging space has been sort of, you know, volatile and impacted by the announcements from Ford and GM and others to move to the, you know, the Tesla NACS standard and, you know, obviously, can use the Tesla network. Blink and others have really... Everyone's kind of announced that they can use NACS, but I guess, how do you think of this sort of move by the OEMs to the standard? What does it mean for Blink? What does it mean for the industry? Is it really that important, you know, in the grand scheme of things?
I have to be careful what I say, 'cause I, I don't wanna take away from the big announcement. It's a lot of hoopla, and, you know, and, and the reason why I say that, let me qualify. You know, my job at Nissan, as the leading executive for EV and EV sales, was to push the CHAdeMO standard, which is not even a standard anymore, but yet the industry moved on.
Cars still have it.
It does. They do have it.
Yeah, they support it for some period of time.
Yeah. The industry moved on. It adapted. It, it, it was just more of a, you know, okay, so we're gonna go with CCS, and the cars changed to CCS. Whilst Tesla has been doing a great job out there in the space, so is the rest of the industry. What has come up is the manufacturing capability of chargers, the manufacturing capability of cables and connectors. Remember, it's only in this country. In Europe, CCS is mandated by law. You can't do a Tesla standard. They banned it. Well, they allowed it in the United States, so they wanna make it. The cable and the charger companies, including Blink, are going, "Well, we can beat the cables. We can make the chargers. It's no big deal." What this provides is more charging opportunities out there. You don't have to go to a Tesla station.
You can go to a Blink station and charge your Tesla. Today, Tesla is our number one customer. More Teslas charge on our Blink chargers than any other brand. Makes sense. It's the largest market share. But they also. They have to use the little adapter. They have no problem. For the industry, I see this as easy. We proved the design. First thing we did is, in the test facility, we got a Tesla cable. We attached it to one of our AC chargers. We ran it through the paces, no problem. We've now got the prototypes for the DCs. We're gonna put it on. We'll have the first unit ready to go to deliver in November, and then we'll start mass production of our new advanced DC fast charger next year with a Tesla connector on it.
Yeah.
NACS. We're trying to get away from calling it Tesla and call it NACS, North American Charging Standard, instead of say, Tesla.
Yeah. Presumably, you're gonna have to support even CHAdeMO for some period of time, and then it'll be probably CCS and NACS.
Yeah. What we'll do with CHAdeMO is we, we won't rip any CHAdeMOs off, but we probably won't add any more on.
Add CCS, then.
Yeah, keep the CCSs out there and do a dual charger system. Now, Teslas right now, one of the things that confuses people is you can't go to a Tesla station today and charge if you're one of those other OEMs. First, you got a cable length issue. It, it only is designed to reach Teslas. Independents do 12-foot and 14-foot cables for a reason, so they can meet all the port placements on every vehicle. A Tesla station is a very short cable, only meant to hit a Tesla. Vitaly, my partner, he's His Mustang Mach-E in Ford is transitioning. It will not charge at a Tesla station. What Tesla's gonna do, is they're gonna change the stations moving forward. They're not gonna retro back to the old stations.
You know, while we're adding new NACS chargers at the same time, and I think that's great, because remember, we need 30 million chargers. It's legitimized independent charging companies like Blink in the eyes of Tesla drivers to now do DC fast charging for Teslas as well. We see that as a big revenue opportunity, not a negative.
Yeah. Talk, talk a little bit about the, some of the, you know, policy support benefits. I'd like you to, to kind of comment on where, you know, how you guys can benefit from, from NEVI, and how your sourcing and manufacturing strategy may help there, or any benefits from the IRA that you'd point out that are, you know, really kind of tailwinds for the firm moving forward.
Yeah, NEVI is gonna be, as we, we talked about DC fast chargers just a second ago, we talked about the capital-intensive nature of them. That, the money in this, you know, it's $5 million dedicated, $5 billion dedicated to highway-based infrastructure, that's needed 'cause it's, it's very difficult to get a positive ROI on those stations. That's gonna help accelerate that adoption. The other $2.5 billion in, in that funding, that's for rural and for disadvantaged communities. We're gonna play a big role in that 'cause we already do that today, and that's where you need a mix of L2 and DC fast chargers to really build up the infrastructure. 'Cause what we, what we see going on today is that if you're a rural community, the only thing that's there is a highway charger.
You don't have charging in the community. The 2.5 is gonna focus on that and bring charging to the, to the disadvantaged communities. EV adoption can be whole scale, not only isolated to rich areas and rich demographics. The next part is great. You know, we're building a new factory, and we're doing this because of the Inflation Reduction Act and the benefits afforded there, and from DOE lending, lending that, you know. JPMorgan conference, 1% or 1.5% interest rate on, on a preleg is a good deal. Thank you, U.S. government. We're taking advantage of those opportunities provided to get to scale. Right now, it's a unique opportunity. I've got the land and the building and everything.
I just need the DOE loan, with the incentive structures coming from some of the states, I can get into the building and start manufacturing at 0 capital investment. That's really gonna spear this movement towards U.S.-based manufacturing for DC fast chargers and others, and more Buy America. You know, to apply for NEVI, your charger has to have 55% local content in it, and that can be a combination of the labor and the componentries, but you can't just assemble, 'cause your sub-assemblies have to be able to be built here. You're talking a little bit core level of manufacturing and just saying, "I'm putting the pieces together, and I'm Buy America now." You can't do that with the, under the new act.
Yeah. Maybe just thinking about globally. Can you discuss the strategy around the global charging market, how you see your position in the key regions, especially Europe, but you also even have footprints in other places. How fragmented are these markets compared to the US, and, you know, how can you leverage the technology and your IP across, you know, the globe?
Yeah, they're, they're in all different shapes and sizes and states right now. Europe is accelerated. In mainland Europe, and when you think of the big countries, all, all of the big countries in Europe are, are very, very they're pushing ahead, and they're ahead of the US. The only country that's ahead of them is China, through a lot of policy mandates in there. Utilization is up in Europe. Europe is much more friendlier from a policy perspective, where they're mandating you do it, and then secondarily, when they mandate it, they're providing the public access to where the chargers are going at a much more higher rate, than the US is. If we look at the policies, it's different.
If you go down a highway between Belgium and the Netherlands, you know, there's gas stations on that highway, and those are where you where the rest stops are. In the U.S., we only see that on toll roads, for the most part. You gotta go off, and it's private. In Europe, they're all there, so they're structurally adjusting those for DC fast charger. Then in the municipalities, they have much more aggressive policies towards putting chargers right curbside. We're seeing some movement. New York City's got some on, on light pole charging, but they're much more aggressive, and they need to be, 'cause, you know, as a anecdotal comment, in Amsterdam, they just banned internal combustion engines from driving into the city by 2025.
If you own one in the city, you can drive it on a legacy basis, and you'll grandfather you, but after that date, if you've got an internal combustion engine, you're not allowed to drive into the city. You have to leave it outside the city. You need more charging in the city for that. Now there's a big push for more L2 to where cars sit and lie. Then, when we look at the other countries that we wanna go into, we go in what we call an arm's length. We'll be a distributor or provide our network to a third-party entity, and we'll test the waters. We don't go into the emerging markets on an owner/operator in a brick-and-mortar base. We just provide our services, and we make revenue out of that.
As those countries start to emerge and become more advanced and the adoption's higher, we'll begin to up our operations and make changes that are needed. When we started our LatAm strategy, it was very, very nascent. We'll get $5 million of revenue this year out of LatAm, and that's out of this very slow, and we see that doubling and then tripling in the years to come out of that region. Europe, we just see a massive opportunity. The hot market for Europe for us will be moving into Spain, which has the highest degree of incentives in the European market today, and that's where we target some of the markets, is who's offering the most dollars to install?
Yeah. Just pivot a little bit to, to technology and also maybe, you know, manufacturing, supply constraints. Last year was obviously kind of a lot of issues for every company, you know, semiconductors, other components, power electronics that were an issue. Do, do any of these remain?
They do. There's still a little of a hangover effect. They're not all, all cleared out. You're still seeing, you know, some issues on, on chips, but they're minor. Power supplies, depending on the manufacturer, and are they overcommitted, and what's their failure rate? Because on a DC, it's one of the most failed parts, is your power supply on it, but they've smoothed out a great deal. What hasn't been relieved is outside of the charging manufacturing ecosystem, there's, you know, the power ecosystem, and transformers are still on the biggest delay out there. The NEVI program, it's not in danger, but it's in delay, because of there's not enough transformers to go around. What we're doing is we learned a lot of lessons. We had to use gray market suppliers.
We had to do a lot of things to bring on new suppliers and then test those new suppliers. For us, it was maintaining those relationships. We don't have one redundancy now, we have three. If we end up in a constraint again, we know who to pivot to, and there's a lot of good lessons to learn. Then the diversification of those supplier bases, don't base them all in one country, because you saw some concentrated shortages in one geographic area, where if you wanted to pivot, they didn't have the capacity in another who could make those. We're making sure we have geographical dispersion on who's making subcomponents, chips, everything. A lot of that is also gonna be moved to the United States.
Okay. One of the sort of, I'd say, broader complaints in the industry, not, not directly to Blink or any one single company, but it's related to kind of uptime-
Mm-hmm.
-service, reliability. you know, what measures is the team taking to ensure uptime is, you know, for, for example, meeting the NEVI standards or even above?
Yeah, a lot. You know, I'd say the biggest change in this topic, I'll give you just the daily life of it. You know, it's not that quality wasn't important. We paid attention to it. We had 1 quality meeting a week, usually. Now we have quality meetings every day and sometimes twice a day. We're not indifferent than the rest of the companies out there who are taking this very, very seriously. It's allowed us to, you know, we gotta go back and reengineer the process and understand where failure is happening. We've identified that while there are some quality issues in the products themselves, those are minimalistic. It's really software and connectivity and customer validation issues that are driving this level of dissatisfaction. It's 1 of the reasons why Tesla has a better system, quite frankly. It's all plug and play.
The vehicle connects with the charger, the customer does nothing. Plug & Charge on the CCS is gonna help with that, but then eliminating the complexity that you go into. The higher failure chargers are ones with credit cards on them, and it's because the credit card failures, and there's another point in failure. When you go beyond credit cards, it's the ones that aren't simple as tap and go or driven by the mobile phone. You gotta do a different type of credential. Those have the next highest. We have to be really cognizant of, first, we had 1 state that was mandating magstrip credit card-
I know that one.
readers on every charger.
Yeah.
Now, they, they backed off that. That was gonna be a customer disaster. We already know the failure rate is the highest on for customers on that. The industry has formed a council. All the companies are participating in it. Blink is participating in it. It's to get to root cause analysis across the board and to make sure that we structurally adjust so people, when they charge, y-you know, they get it. 15118 or adopting the Tesla standard is gonna really help because the car then talking to the charger, you're done. More and more OEMs are building that into the vehicle. Mercedes-Benz me, it's built the same system as Tesla. You plug into the charger, and it handles everything for you. You don't do anything.
That's the way we wanna move to, as we continue to interact with the public, is less of swiping, less of tapping, less of mobile app, more of just connecting and going.
Before I move on to the financials and kind of use of cash, things like that, I wanna see if anybody in the audience has any questions. All right, we'll just keep moving then. Can you walk us through the gross margin, you know, trajectory through the year? You know, I guess, what are the expected improvements that you see relative, you know, to the second half of last year?
What we'll see this year is we'll see starting out, we're in August, and I wish I could change this, but my friends in Europe simply don't wanna work in August. I haven't figured this part out yet. We'll always. We're gonna see a lit-- I'm all Irish, so I have a little sympathy, but that, just a little. We'll see a, a little drop as we have in previous years in seasonality, in Q3. It always bounces back in Q4, and Q4 usually is our strongest quarter, so we anticipate that to continue. Internally then, we're still working on a lot of cost-saving initiatives, as we talked about. You know, we put our guidance out there.
We upped to $120, excuse me, as the high point for revenue. We see us achieving that target. You know, everybody asks the question, "Is there some upside?" Yeah, there's the potential for upside, but I wanna make sure we hit a target. I don't wanna, you know, go in there and say, "Well, let's be gung ho, and let's, let's make this." No, what our obligation is to our shareholders and our customers is hit the target we said, and that's what we're gonna do.
We see some strong indications of upside in when we do the Q3 number, we'll go ahead and adjust, but we're gonna do that based on the data and the validation of that data, not based on, hey, I wanna put a good number out there and see the stock pop up the next day. We're not gonna do that 'cause what comes up, goes down, always. The same with the EBITDA number. We didn't start giving guidance until, you know, March of this year, is the first time. We started complementing EBITDA, and we really looked at the numbers, and we identified December 2024 as the month that we could really hit it, and all the numbers are really lining up for that. Now, may it happen before that?
Yeah, it's a possibility. It could happen, that's the date that the entire company now is marching to, to make sure, both on cost reduction, revenue avoidance, revenue enhancement, new product offerings, to get to that target. We have to be disciplined now. We can still say growth like we used to, and just be growth, but now we have to be very metric and efficiently driven. We have to act like a mature industry, even though we're still at the nascent stage. We gotta apply everything we learned in business school and everything we learned from our, our, our previous careers to really start running our company that way, that's what we're doing.
Yeah. I think along that, you know, I think you told there's some areas to focus on a core, so I think you're discuss multiple areas to drive further cost synergies and revenue opportunities. Can you elaborate on some of those?
Yeah. You know, right now, on a cost synergy, the networks are our number 1 cost that we have to cut out. They're very intensive, both on a human capital, and on the cost of maintaining something that's a little older than something that's brand new. 1, 2, 3 of those will be sunsetted. Then it's the duplication of 4 different financial systems that we have out there. We have 1 platform identified. We've already integrated 1 in. We have 2 and 3 more that are in the integration process. Again, that's another expense reduction, and it's a headcount reduction as well, that we're gonna hit on that. Then, it's the ancillary systems. CRMs, we're aligning globally, right now in the US and just now in the UK. Thank you. It's on board.
We have the commonized CRM system. In Latin America, we've commonized to, to Salesforce as well. We have to tackle the rest of Europe, and then Israel, Greece, everything, we're integrating into 1 CRM, so we know who our customers are, everything about those customers, everybody, about asset management, where they sit in 1 database. I can pull a report on utilization, on a charger in Greece as easy as I can pull 1 in Latin America and tell you, "Hey, today, this is how many sessions this charger's at." Once we consolidate that, even the amount of people we have administering systems from an operational gets reduced, and we're just more efficient, and we're more accurate in our data and make better decisions.
Yeah. As we kind of come to the end here, how does Blink feel about its current cash position? You know, is there any liquidity needed to see through scale-up? What levers, you know, does Blink have to raise capital opportunistically?
We have to do 1 more raise to get to the EBITDA number. There may be a debt instrument used in conjunction with that, but we've identified the dollar amount, and we've identified that we need 1 more raise. We don't see another raise after that needed. When we go out, we're going out, and we're saying, "This is the raise," and I know people have said that before, but again, falls into this culture we're developing of, if we say it, that's what we're gonna do. We've looked at the numbers. We know where we need to be on the cash burn rate. We already have that in target. We know how much capital we need to get there and then keep that going into the future. We see that. It's gonna be a raise.
The raise will be somewhere between $75 and $125, depending on our needs at that time. We've already... Talking to the bankers and everyone about this, it's out there. Then we're at that number, and you know, I'll tell you, the whole company, Vitaly can tell you, everyone is now, for the first time, they're now involved in this culture of getting us to this, and they understand the significance of being EBITDA positive. Frankly, from a competition and maybe a little bit of ego, I've only got a little ego we wanna beat others on this and get there and say, "We did our la- last raise.
Now look at us go." That's all in sight, but this comes with, you know, what you have to do. We have to restructure the whole company around this idea of continuous improvement. Everything affects everything else. You know, it doesn't matter where someone works in Blink, they gotta become now cost conscious. They have to learn how to be cost avoidant. We have to have better purchasing decisions to take on the cost of raw materials. That's everything that we're doing now from a company that just had under 40 people to one to 623 and growing exponentially every year. You really gotta be disciplined, and we're learning that.
I come from that background, so it makes it easier for me to understand, but it's still, as a leader, you gotta keep preaching this every day, and you gotta live it yourself. You know, you can't fly first class. You know, and you gotta show examples to the employees what that means.
Yeah.
is that when we cost save, we cost save for ourselves and for our shareholders.
Well, that's a good place to wrap up, Brendan. Thanks for sharing your insights. Appreciate it.
Thanks, folks.