Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. My name is Hannah, and I will be your coordinator, conference operator for today's call. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the ChargePoint third quarter fiscal 2022 earnings conference call and webcast. All participants' lines have been placed on a listen-only mode to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I would like to turn the call over to Patrick Hamer, ChargePoint's Vice President of Capital Markets and Investor Relations. Patrick, please go ahead.
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on today's call to discuss ChargePoint's third quarter of fiscal 2022. This call is being broadcast over the web and can be accessed on the investors section of our website at investors.chargepoint.com. With me on today's call are Pasquale Romano, our Chief Executive Officer, and Rex Jackson, our Chief Financial Officer. This afternoon, we issued our press release announcing results for the third quarter of fiscal 2022 ended October 31, 2021, which can also be found on our website. We would like to remind you that during this conference call, management will be making forward-looking statements, including our fiscal fourth quarter and full-year 2022 outlook and our expected investment and growth initiatives. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control and could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations.
These forward-looking statements apply as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements after the call. For a more detailed description of certain factors that could cause actual results to differ, please refer to our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on September 10, 2021, and our earnings release posted today on our website and filed with the SEC on Form 8-K. Also, please note that we use certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call, which we reconcile to GAAP financial measures for the current quarter in our earnings release and for historical periods in the investor presentation posted on the investors section of our website. Finally, we'll be posting the transcript of our call to our investor relations website under the Quarterly Results section. With that, I'll turn it over to Pascal.
Thank you, Pat, and thank you all for joining us today. I'll provide a business update, including details of our strong Q3 execution against plan before turning it over to Rex for financials. As I have stated previously, our success is tied to the arrival of electric vehicles, and this quarter we saw continued momentum in EV sales in both the passenger and fleet categories. According to BloombergNEF, as many as 2.9 million electric vehicles are expected to be sold across North America and Europe this year, an increase of approximately 67% from 2020. Accordingly, we are seeing strong demand from auto dealers for charging infrastructure, an indicator that they are prepping for high-volume EV sales.
Our strong financial performance throughout this year is the result of investments in a product and go-to-market strategy we have made over many years to be able to capture associated demand across commercial, fleet, and residential verticals in both North America and Europe. Historically, our revenue has only been limited by a sufficient breadth of and quantity of vehicle options available to consumers and fleets, and this further reinforces the ChargePoint as the equivalent of an index for the electrification of mobility. Our Q3 revenue of $65 million was at the high end of the guidance range we provided on September 1. This positions us to raise our expectations for the fourth quarter and full-year, despite what continues to be a dynamic supply chain environment. I'd like to call your attention to a number of indicators of the scale we are delivering.
First, we added more commercial and fleet customers in Q3 than any other quarter in the company's history. It is clear that our customers are preparing for the future, as evidenced by 89% year-over-year growth in our commercial business. We finished the quarter with approximately 163,000 network ports under management, inclusive of both acquisitions. Within that, the European port count was approximately 45,000 and globally the DC Fast Charge port count was approximately 11,000. We continue to work with the industry to enable drivers to roam across networks in North America and Europe. This quarter, we crossed through over 290,000 roaming ports accessible to drivers using their ChargePoint account, in addition to the ports directly on our network. Fleet billings in the quarter increased over 69% sequentially and over 198% year-over-year.
I'll remind you, we acquired ViriCiti, a leading e-bus and commercial vehicle management provider, and we also announced the expansion of our partnership with WEX, a leading fleet payment solutions company. The partnership will provide fleet customers ready access to the largest EV charging network for en route charging needs and enable depot and at-home charging, along with easy employee reimbursement. Demand for our residential solutions continues to be robust. Residential billings for the third quarter were up 62% year-over-year and 50% from the last quarter. In Europe, we saw revenues up over 190% year-over-year. As a reminder, we closed the acquisition of has·to·be, an e-mobility provider with a leading charging software platform in the European market at the end of Q3.
Our established and growing channel, which provides unique leverage and efficiency, is growing proportionally with the balance of our business as well. Overall, the scale of our network is generating positive environmental impact, with over 3.3 billion electric miles driven to date. By our estimates, drivers have avoided over 132 million gallons of gasoline and over 529,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Our mission requires world-class talent, and I'm pleased that ChargePoint continues to be a destination for top professionals. We ended the quarter with more than 1,300 employees, including the ChargePointers that joined us through the two recent acquisitions. On the policy front, the passing of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act includes up to $7.5 billion to accelerate the build-out of charging along highways and in our communities.
This is evidence that U.S. policy leaders are committed to an electric future. We are working with policymakers at the federal and state level to shape this. While other state and utility programs are in place now, this new stimulus will likely manifest significantly beginning in 2023. Lastly, I would like to welcome former U.S. Secretary of Transportation and Labor, Elaine Chao, to our board of directors. Her appointment brings depth from both public and private sectors and further strengthens the board composition, which already includes leaders from technology, automotive, and investor communities. Now I'll turn this over to Rex to discuss financials before we move to Q&A. Rex, over to you.
Thanks, Aswal, and good afternoon, everyone. First, my comments are non-GAAP, where we principally exclude stock-based compensation, amortization of intangible assets, and the effect of the valuation of our stock warrants. This quarter we also exclude professional service fees related to acquisitions. For reconciliation of these non-GAAP results to GAAP, please see our earnings release. Second, after a quick review of our results, I will provide revenue estimates for Q4 and the full-year. Third, consistent with our prior calls, and as you can see in our earnings release, we report revenue along three lines, network charging systems, subscriptions, and other. Networked charging systems represents our hardware, also with our cloud services solutions. Subscriptions include those cloud services, our assure warranties, our ChargePoint as a Service offerings, where we bundle our solutions into a recurring subscription, and now software revenue from our ViriCiti and has·to·be acquisitions.
Other consists of energy credits, professional services, and certain non-material revenue streams. Q3 revenue was $65 million, up 79% year-over-year at the high end of our previously announced guidance range of $60-$65 million and up 16% sequentially. We are very pleased with this performance despite a number of supply chain challenges and demand in the quarter we could not meet has given us a good start on Q4. Networked charging systems at $48 million was 73% of total revenue for the quarter, consistent with Q2, and grew 111% year-over-year and 16% sequentially. Subscription revenue was $13 million, was 21% of total revenue and up 24% year-over-year and 11% sequentially.
As I mentioned last quarter, the delta in growth rates between networked charging systems and subscription revenue is a function of two main factors, mix and timeline. In Q3, mix again favored DC networked charging systems and Home, which have a much lower ratio of subscriptions to network hardware revenue. Second, for most of our solutions, we begin revenue for subscriptions at a fixed time after the associated hardware shipment to accommodate installations, yielding a time lag of at least a quarter. Our deferred revenue from subscriptions, representing recurring revenue from existing customer commitments and payments, grew nicely, finishing the quarter at over $120 million. Other revenue at $4 million and 6% of total revenue increased 37% year-on-year and 30% sequentially as driver activity and associated credits picked up during the quarter.
Turning to verticals, as you know, we look at verticals from a billings perspective, which approximates the revenue split. Billings by vertical for Q3 were commercial 69%, fleet 16%, residential 13%, and other 2%, reflecting outperformance of both fleet and residential. We are very pleased to see strong growth. Total billings up 96% year-on-year and 25% sequentially, and in particular, commercial up 89% year-on-year in a COVID-impacted community environment. From a geographic perspective, Q3 revenue from North America was 89% and Europe was 11%, representing a slight percentage gain in European contribution driven by both organic growth and acquisition contributions. In the third quarter, our European business did over $7 million in total revenue, almost tripling from last year's third quarter and up 41% sequentially.
Turning to gross margin, non-GAAP gross margin for Q3 was 27%, a 4-point improvement over Q2, reflecting continued improvements in our cost of goods sold and positive margin contributions from our European acquisitions. We estimate elevated logistical costs and supply chain constraints cost us approximately 2% of additional networked charging system margin. Non-GAAP operating expenses for Q3 were $63 million, a year-over-year increase of 61% and a sequential increase of 18%. Included in the quarter was an additional $2 million in operating expenses attributable to our two acquisitions. We continue to invest heavily on product development, customer acquisitions, operations, scaling, and other areas to drive our leadership position in this rapidly evolving and growing market. Stock-based compensation in Q3 was at a normalized level of $16 million, down from $28 million in Q2.
Of the $28 million of stock-based compensation in the second quarter, approximately $14 million was attributable to services performed prior to the second quarter and included grants to employees.
Who joined the company during the preceding 12 months, as well as incentive awards to key personnel. In both cases delayed while the company executed its SPAC transaction. Q3 did not have any such adjustments. With respect to contributions from our two European acquisitions, I mentioned in our September earnings call that we expect a Q4 revenue contribution of approximately $4 million and Q4 operating expenses of approximately $8 million-$10 million. This continues to be true. In Q3, the revenue contribution from the acquisitions was approximately $2 million, comprised of subs, hardware, and other, reflecting the fact that we owned these assets for only a portion of Q3.
Looking at cash, we finished the quarter with approximately $366 million, down from $618 million at the end of Q2, reflecting cash spent on operations and $210 million paid for acquisitions in the quarter. After giving effect to the acquisition of has·to·be and ongoing employee issuances during the quarter, we have approximately 331 million shares outstanding. Turning now to guidance. Demand for our solutions in Q3 continued to outstrip our expectations and production ramp. COVID keeps the markets guessing and employers continually have to adjust return-to-work plans. With a strong third quarter, healthy backlog to start the fourth quarter and continuing broad pipeline build across all verticals, we are moving our Q4 and full-year guidance up. For fiscal Q4, we expect total revenue of $73 million-$78 million.
At midpoint an increase of 78% versus Q4 of last year, and a sequential increase of over 16%. For the fiscal year, we're taking our revenue guidance up from $225 million-$235 million to $235 million-$240 million. At the new midpoint, representing a 62% increase year-over-year. With that, it concludes our prepared remarks, and we'll turn it over to Q&A.
Certainly. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you would like to remove that question, please press star followed by two. Again, to ask a question, press star one. We kindly ask that you limit yourselves to two questions today. As a reminder, if you are using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question. We will pause here briefly as questions are registered. The first question is from the line of Shreyas Patil with Wolfe Research. You may proceed.
Hey, thanks so much. Just the first one, Pat, I think you had mentioned that you know, you expect to see the federal stimulus, you know, to more meaningfully manifest in 2023. Is there a way to maybe frame, you know, how what kind of funding these additional dollars could support in terms of new chargers being added? And maybe also if you can remind us what you're seeing at the moment in terms of funding from utilities in certain states towards charging.
Thanks, Shreyas. Good to hear your voice. It's a complicated question. The federal infrastructure bill is much of the money, not all, much of the money is gonna flow through states, and the states have to design their programs. That's why we're estimating that we won't see much of that in 2022. We may see some in the back half of the year, but it's hard to predict. In terms of how much money is going to flow actually in that year versus subsequent years is right now it's too hard to call. I'm not trying to be evasive. It's just as you look at the. I'll give you an example. The VW Appendix D program that was implemented in an analogous way.
It was money that flowed from the federal government on the federal portion of the settlement anyway, to all states but California. California had its own settlement carve-out. It has taken multiple years for that to roll through. Some states are quick to define a program. Some are slower. That's why it's challenging for us. Then the color of the program in terms of the, you know, exactly what the constraints are, is gonna influence the installation cost versus the equipment cost, et cetera. Really hard to call. The sum total of the money, like I said, we didn't expect to be in next year.
I also want to draw your attention to one other thing is that the budget, reconciliation and other associated conversations about where the government is trying to generate stimulus in other areas for EV charging, that could have faster effects. Again, it's too hard to pin that down right now. In terms of your question with respect to utility funding effectively amounts, Rex, do you wanna comment on that? I don't know if you have a current number.
I actually do not have a current number. My apologies.
Yeah. Just to remind everyone, the AT represents approved utility programs and then those programs roll out over multiple years. Not all the funds are relevant to our revenue even in those programs. In previous quarters we've reported it's similar or analogous to a backlog number associated with kind of the sum total of approved utility programs that are running in the United States. It's not necessarily our backlog, but it's sort of analogous in that domain from the industry's view. We don't have an update for you right now.
Yeah. Pat, I just want to make sure-
Um-
Is it a question in terms of what the programs are out there that's available? Because that's how I heard the question as opposed to.
Yes. We have a billings number for utilities for us, but in terms of total programs, it's in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In terms of the exact figure, it's, yeah, hundreds of millions is a fair total.
Okay. Rex, just looking at an OpEx. Oh, sorry. Was there something-
No, go ahead.
Sorry.
No, it's okay.
Okay. Looking at OpEx, it was up modestly as a percent of revenue in Q3 versus Q2, but you know, R&D was up more meaningfully. I was wondering if you can just talk about some of the main priorities that are driving R&D spending, and then just you know, how should we think about the magnitude of OpEx leverage, you know, especially as we think about you know, maybe the next few quarters or even into next year.
Sure. First of all, you know, the OpEx number is a broad-based number, because we're investing heavily in sales and marketing. Obviously, we're a newly public company, so we do need to deal with those things. Specifically, our priorities are some major product releases that we have coming out this year. As you may have seen, we had a big fleet announcement several months ago, and that's just a huge watershed event for the company, so there's an enormous amount of energy going into that. We've got some very interesting things that we have in mind for Europe coming out shortly. There's a huge amount of energy that goes into what we see as one of our greatest differentiators, which is, of course, the software platform.
There's a big push right now. Obviously, since we play in all verticals in North America and Europe, and we see that the time is now from an industry perspective, we're really putting our shoulder to it. That aggressive strategy, we think will pay off in steady improvements in that ratio next year. Can't give you a number, obviously, because it's early yet, but I think we should see some steady leverage next year, that I think you guys will be happy about.
Okay. Then just last housekeeping for me. Could you give us a sense of the non-GAAP gross margin between network and software and service? I just wanted to confirm that. Thanks.
That's tough because on the subscription side, as you probably know, we do put our driver and host support into our subscription line, so that line tends to be in the fifties. Other bounces around depending on what the components are. So if you do the math, you can tell that the hardware, you know, you can back into the hardware number by just looking at the overall math. Once you know one, you can solve for the other.
Thank you, Mr. Patel. The next question is from the line of Greg Wasikowski with Webber Research & Advisory. You may proceed.
Hey, good afternoon, guys. Nice to be on the call. Thanks for taking the questions.
Thank you.
I wanted to ask about your targets for market share in Europe and the pathway for reaching those, specifically the balance between an organic versus an inorganic approach, given the relatively more fragmented market over there. Just thinking through, you know, what does that do to the cash flow profile and/or tapping your own equity currency? Yeah, just wondering how you're thinking about the path of least resistance and while you're evaluating opportunities in Europe. Thanks.
Great. Very good question. First of all, market share targets, you know, is obviously as high as we can get them. That's everyone's market share target in an industry. We've done pretty well in North America, and we've recently over the last couple of years, made enormous progress in Europe, and we're not putting a ceiling on that. We've done two acquisitions in very different industries. One is targeted at extending, consolidating customers as well as extending functionality in the fleet space. That was the ViriCiti one that you saw. Then has·to·be is in the center of the commercial business in Europe. They serve very different verticals.
With respect to inorganic versus organic growth, you know, we'll be intelligent. We obviously will evaluate opportunities as they present. I don't think it's necessary to have an all-inorganic strategy to gain market share. It's early innings in the EV market in general, or early enough, and we have strength that's, you know, broad-based with respect to our product portfolio position. Now mind you, we're in every vertical that we can think of in both continents. There's a tremendous amount of leverage there that we have.
With that said, if there's an opportunity that presents itself, like has to be or ViriCiti, and it has team, it has tech, and it has customers that are aligned with our business model, we'd certainly look at it, but we'd be very, very astute buyers.
Perfect. Thanks. Very helpful. For my next one, more of a theoretical question around site owners' decisions between Level two and Level three charging, especially at places with, like, shorter visit times, like grocery stores, malls, parks, et cetera. Early conversations we're having, I think there's some split opinions on, you know, what the preference may be for future EV drivers. You guys offer both solutions obviously, but have more of a presence in L2. I'm just curious, you know, what are your conversations been like with new site owners deciding which route to go with? If any existing Level ttwo customers are, you know, looking to expand, but with a DC solution.
There's a lot of misinformation on this, and too many folks are pattern matching on gasoline. You know, one point by way of fact, it's not an opinion. When you make the switch to an electric drive, a depot is not your primary fuel anymore, meaning you don't wait till the little yellow light's on, go drive somewhere, fill up and go home. That doesn't happen, especially if you have access to charging at home or work or both or street side parking. This is. We've seen these driver patterns that you know kind of dominate how people behave.
There are always corner cases, where people, you know, certain, you know, certain percentages of the population, you know, don't conform, but they usually have outlier reasons, for not conforming. It is not as speed gets faster, you put it in. In fact, it's actually matching the natural parking duration and how much energy is expected to be reloaded in that stay. If you're going to the grocery store near your house, you're not trying to fill your tank or your battery. You're not trying to do that. You're trying to avail yourself of some convenience miles you may pick up as an amenity by your grocery store.
Now, if you pulled off a highway and you're on your way to a weekend holiday and you happen to pick a grocery store to stop at because it had a fast charger, you're doing that because you want to make essentially a refueling stop. They're very different use cases, and they get conflated. The average shopper doesn't want to use a fast charger if they're in their local area. It's. I'm not talking down one or the other. It's about matching it correctly. If you don't match it correctly, let's say you're at that grocery store. If you don't match it correctly, you have a very expensive utilization mistake of the total construction cost and equipment cost versus the number of parking spaces and customers you can serve. It's not an oops.
I got a real problem because I really made a massive mistake. If you plug in around town and you're just topping up, a fast charger is such an expensive proposition for that use case and consumes so much electrical capacity for that use case that you've made a mistake. If you're well positioned to serve highway drivers as they're going out of their beyond their battery range, having a mix on your grocery store site between L2 for your local customers and fast for your long distance customers makes a whole lot of sense. What we do is we consult with customers to try to help them understand how to allocate the right strength for the likely use cases that are gonna present in that parking lot.
Because the number of parking spaces you can electrify with the electrical capacity and the cost of one fast charger is pretty significant if you're primarily serving local clientele. That's just some of the coloring. It's so much different than putting gas stations up. It's just there's no relationship to that legacy market at all.
Okay. Appreciate the color. Thanks, guys.
Thank you, Mr. Wasikowski. The next question is from the line of Colin Rusch with Oppenheimer. You may proceed.
Hey, this is Brendan on for Colin. First one for me. Would you be able to give us a bit of color on early progress on acquisition integration in Europe and maybe any insight on initial returns for cross-selling opportunities there? I mean, I'll give you generalities because we're not commenting on typical specifics. In both acquisitions, you know, we're newer to the has·to·be one, frankly, than the ViriCiti one because it's earlier innings, because that closed, you know, a couple of months past when the ViriCiti one did. On both we're making good progress on integration. On the fleet side, we're already co-selling. You know, we have customers that, like I said, we've done some customer consolidation there.
We've had customers that have used ViriCiti for different functionality from our and had our charging solution and a ViriCiti vehicle solution. Where that's the case, we're already moving the ball down the field to integrate the two solutions. With that said, it'll take some time to get things integrated in an orderly way. We're in earlier innings with has·to·be, but we've already got some customer activity going on, where one plus one is already equaling three, where we can bring additional functionality either to their customer base or ours, vice versa. We're already making nice progress there. Awesome. Then just secondly, on the supply chain and pricing, are you seeing the need to redesign products or particular subsystems in order to help the resilience of the supply chain?
How active have you guys been in terms of passing additional cost to customers? Yeah. So I was chuckling as you said that. You know, we're incredibly proud of what our engineering and supply chain teams have had to do. As you've seen, we turned in upside results now over several quarters. If you can imagine how hard that is in a supply chain constrained environment, because obviously we're laying forecasts into our supply chain, you know, on even under normal circumstances with a significant percentage of a year's worth of visibility, because that's just what you need to do, especially as you're scaling.
To then come up with upside when you get obviously surprise decommits, which is happening everywhere in the industry, means that your organization is responding by rapid qualification of substitute components and rapid adjustment in software to enable that. It is definitely happening inside of our organization. They are doing a tremendous job keeping things moving through our supply chain. Yes, it is a drag. You know, we could have put those resources in different places. Rex, I'll let you comment on the question of pass through pricing.
Yeah. Brent, good question. Without getting into specifics, we definitely have a program in place for passing through some level of our increased logistics fees, which I referenced in my gross margin comments. There may be some price adjustments in the not too distant future to take account of what's going on in the supply chain. We definitely have some movement ahead. No, nothing made and reflected. It's mostly prospective.
Carl, I'll remind you of two things. Rex, first of all, I believe in your prepared remarks, you commented that, correct me if I'm wrong, that supply chain issues resulted in about a 2-point penalty on gross margin relative to what we could have turned in.
That's right.
Verify that. Yeah. And so, Colin, you know, we had that working against us, but we still turned in strong improvement in gross margin quarter-over-quarter and turned in results on the high side. You can imagine internally what that took to achieve.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Rusch. The next question is from the line of Gabe Daoud with Cowen , You may proceed.
Thanks, good afternoon, everyone. Maybe just kind of back to the supply chain, can you give us a sense of how much visibility you have into fulfilling orders over the next several quarters and maybe just any thoughts around or commentary around inventory that's on hand currently?
I'll let Rex comment on inventory, but in terms of visibility, it's not so much visibility into supply chain that causes us, many other companies say the same thing, grief in the quarter. It's unplanned decommit, which happens. And we respond to that. Now there's a bit of, you know, there's not a bit there's quite a bit of pre-planning going on there where we're scrambling to multiple sources, wherever possible on parts that we forecast as possibly being problematic. But you know, our communication to supply chain, the firm orders that we're placing in the supply chain for product, et cetera, are well out next year. Well out into next year. Rex, do you wanna comment further?
Yeah. From an inventory standpoint, as you know, Gabe, first of all. Hi, Gabe. Thanks for joining.
Sure.
Obviously we extensively use CM, so not all inventory sits on our books. Our inventory actually, like I said, this last quarter, I keep wanting it to go up because of the supply chain challenges, but you know, it actually slightly declined quarter-over-quarter here. I would just tell you, if we can build inventory going forward, we will. We just haven't done that yet.
Got it. That makes sense.
Gabe, that's not weakness. That's just, you know, continued upside materializing.
Yeah.
In our opinion, that's a happy problem. I wish we didn't have the supply chain constraints, but nonetheless, it's on the good side of the problem balance sheet.
Gabe, one other comment I would make, because it's kind of odd to have a CFO say, "Hey, let's increase our inventory level." We obviously have a broad portfolio, but we have very minimal obsolescence risk. If you're trying to ramp the business and you've got supply chain challenges that you're trying to meet, building inventory, as Pat says, is a smart thing to do. That's what we're trying to do.
This is also, Gabe, where the modularity of the platform is on all the platforms that we ship, is really coming into play because we drive a very broad set of use cases on the hardware side of the product line with very few SKUs or very few internal parts that we have to make. It may show up as different orderable part numbers, but that's largely just configuration at the end. It really has helped quite a bit. Architecturally, the product line, you know, is not without its challenges in a supply chain constrained environment, but it's better than most.
Got it.
Yeah, it's right there.
Very helpful color. Thanks, guys. Then maybe just as a follow-up, we kinda hit on the fleet side, just owing to the ViriCiti deal. Obviously ton of competition there, particularly on the software side, just given the energy management needs as it's more of a, you know, complex operation. You saw the competition with another announcement today, BP making acquisitions. Could you maybe just give us a little bit of color on conversations, whether it's here in the U.S. and Europe and just generally how demand is stemming from the fleet channel and how you expect that to progress over the next couple quarters?
Gabe, fleets really, you know, just out of interest, just a tremendous. I mean, it's coming at us from all sides, and again, in a good way. The uncertain, I would say in our opinion, we think we have the most wholesome broad-based software solution in that space, especially with the addition of ViriCiti, because now we've even reached up the value chain on the vehicle side and we're also a full service provider with respect to the ability to design, build, consultancy and project management, you know, help with, you know, utility infrastructure on the sites with respect to consultation there. You know, we complete functionality across the board.
We're seeing a tremendous amount of cross vertical leverage. I mentioned on a previous earnings call that one example of that is we're seeing a lot of fleets that have a take home component to parking operations and refueling operations, not refueling in the traditional sense, but with electricity, wanting to reimburse the contractor that is taking the vehicle home. This is, you know, especially prevalent in fleets that are trying to lighten their CapEx load or their real estate load. Because we're operating in those verticals naturally, and especially in Europe, have developed solutions for leasecos that are providing both company cars and leasing services to commercial fleets. We really got a broad set of functionality. We're a one-stop shop for much of that stuff.
As Rex mentioned, on the R&D side, we're piling a tremendous amount of R&D into that, on a continuous basis. We're not stopping with the functionality that we have.
Great. That's really helpful. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Dowd. The next question is from the line of Ryan Greenwald with Bank of America. You may proceed.
Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Appreciate the time. Maybe first, one more on the supply chain. You guys talk about this 200 basis points impact from the elevated logistical costs. I think you guys quoted 300 basis points last quarter. Can you just give a bit more color on the evolution of the bottlenecks quarter over quarter? And any way to help frame the amount of demand in the pipeline that you guys weren't able to meet?
Yeah, right. You definitely have the numbers correct. It was a three-point swing last quarter, two-point swing this quarter. The heaviest component of that is actually logistics. Think expedite fees, putting it on a plane versus putting it on a boat. You know, that's the biggest driver there. I think that, you know, obviously we're gonna continue to battle that a bit as you look forward. The second part of your question was?
Any way to help frame the amount of demand in the pipeline that you guys weren't able to meet this quarter?
Sorry about that. I would tell you that there was a positive spillover from Q3 to Q4. It wasn't massive. I hesitate to give you a number, but I would just tell you, what's important is to understand that there was demand in the quarter, it was a big enough number that warranted mentioning it. It set us up for a nice start here in Q4. It wasn't a massive number, but it was, you know, a meaningful enough number that would push us well above the high end of our range.
Got it. Appreciate that. In terms of the drivers of the revenue increase versus the plan that you guys laid out last quarter, sounds like momentum across the board, but anything you can say in particular in terms of the contribution versus the prior forecast?
Is that a question? Are you saying did our mix shift at all quarter-over-quarter?
No, just in terms of the actual drivers of the revenue increase from last quarter.
Um.
What kind of shaken out better than planned in the last quarter?
As we said earlier, as Pat said earlier, it is broad-based across the three verticals. The mix has been pretty consistent with Q2. Superb performance from home, even though that's not a big revenue number relatively speaking, because it's a fairly inexpensive product relative to our other products. We've seen really good performance from our CPE 250, which is our DC product. And then we've seen workplace, you know, doing okay relative to what we think it should be doing once we get out of COVID. If you were to look at it on a mix perspective, it was actually quite consistent. As I said, my commentary got
Small bump from our acquisitions in Europe. It isn't like I wouldn't say there's anything that's moving left or right. It's very consistent with Q2. It's just bigger.
Awesome.
You know,
I'll leave it there. Thanks, guys.
New customer acquisition was super strong in the quarter, and then the distribution of what they buy, again, consistent. It's just really good growth across the board.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Greenwald. The next question is from the line of James West with Evercore. You may proceed.
Hey, good afternoon, guys.
Hey, James.
You talked up fleet a considerable amount in your prepared remarks, particularly on the commercial side. I mean, really massive year-over-year growth there, so very impressive. You mentioned, you know, fleet's coming at you from all directions, which is a good thing, of course. Is something changing with fleet? Is there an uptick in just overall demand or a tipping point that we've hit, or are you taking more share? What do you think the evolution is here for fleet?
I think, I mean, it's pretty basic. What I would love to do is say, I mean, I think we are gaining share, but you know, relative to a couple years ago, there was no share to gain because there were limited vehicles. When there aren't vehicles shipping in volume from manufacturers and you're limited to pilot-level program sizes, it just isn't that meaningful. If you remember some of the comments I made in previous earnings calls, I pointed out that the revenue in fleet is not proportional to the opportunity that we've seized. Because as we develop pilots and cement our relationship with our fleet customers, obviously based on earning that trust, as they expand, they'll expand with us.
You have to do all the work to get to a pilot or a lot of the work. You have to integrate with a whole lot of their business systems. You have to have a lot of functionality, and they still are sticklers for reliability, service, response time, all those things. The challenge is it's an incredible from an OpEx perspective relative to money returned in the period, it's certainly in the investment category, not the you know, kind of run rate category, so to speak. That's what I think is most significant, is we are still flag planting.
Wow.
We are doing a ton of work. If you look at the size of our business, the OpEx that we're able to deploy because of the size of our business, it is, in our opinion, a huge differentiation on a go-forward basis because we can afford, frankly, to do the work. We can afford that mode because we have a commercial business that's healthy.
Right. Okay. Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, thanks for that. You had another comment on auto dealers as well and seeing strong demand for them as they prepare for the future here. They're obviously getting the signals from the OEMs, and we all know about all the models that are coming out and about to hit the next 12 to 18 months. What are they telling you, maybe the dealers or even the OEMs, about when they may start to retire their ICEs engines, their older models or their oil models?
You know, I think most any information that I know that isn't, I mean, I couldn't say.
Sure.
Because we'd be in violation of our NDAs with auto OEM partners. If you just look at public announcements in terms of, you know, tipping points where the majority of auto manufacturers' lines will be electric, you're looking in Europe at brands shooting for somewhere between, you know, depending on the brand, 25, I think that's a bit aggressive. You know, by 2030 or the early 2030s, you're seeing most commit to being substantively full, you know, electrified.
Right.
I think the dealers, now, to be able to get what is a production-limited and popular vehicle, they need to put in the charging infrastructure and the training and support for selling those types of vehicles before the OEMs will en masse give them the vehicles. If you wanna get the inventory, you gotta make the investment as a dealer.
Right.
We're seeing the dealers respond to those OEM programs substantially, and we think that especially it's geographically broad-based. It is not in the usual hotspots for EV. It is geographically much more broad-based. Not perfectly broad-based, but much more broad-based. That is a very good indicator that auto OEMs are communicating to dealers that get ready, this stuff's coming.
Right. Right. Okay. Got it. Thanks, Pat.
Thank you, Mr. West. The next question is from the line of Bill Peterson with JPMorgan. You may proceed.
Yeah. Good afternoon, guys, and nice job on the quarterly execution here. I had a question. You answered a prior question about the mix from the second to the third quarter. I guess based off your backlog and midway through the quarter, can you give us some directionality on how you see home and versus commercial versus fleet? I guess better than that is there any sort of seasonality we should think about within that context?
It's hard to say whether growth is gonna eclipse seasonality, you know, or not. I mean, you know, and shift some of the usual trends around, it's just hard to say. Normally we've seen seasonality in the business relative more to construction cycles in Northern Hemisphere. Well, we're only serving the Northern Hemisphere, so it normally has a deep winter construction cycle slowdown in some areas. You've got so much growth going on now, we don't, you know, it's hard to predict how much of that's gonna get offset. In terms of mix, I'll caution you on something.
Revenue mix and unit volume mix are very different because of the wild price point differences between the residential business, inclusive of multifamily, and then the commercial and then the fleet business. The fleet business actually is split right down the middle. Light commercial is mostly AC and some DC. You know, you get to the kinda mid-tier vehicles and the heavy vehicles, and now you've got a substantively all DC business, and then their dwell time determines how shared that DC power conversion infrastructure could be. What that bodes for is a very challenging segment in fleet to reconcile unit volume even within the segment or vertical. It's very difficult to match unit volume to revenue, especially in early innings where averages have not stabilized.
Overall, I believe Rex, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe residential was 13% of our billings this past quarter.
That's right.
Okay.
That's right.
So-
For periods.
Yeah. That gives you an order of magnitude. It's not revenue, it's billings, but you could determine what the correlation is there. That gives you an idea of order of magnitude of that one segment and relative to the rest of our business. I can tell you that the unit volume there to generate that percentage of business has to be quite high relative to, say, the unit volume in our commercial business.
Okay. Yeah, that thanks for that color. There was another question on the infrastructure, and I think you also spoke to it as well. We've actually seen here in the last few weeks the California Energy Commission, as well as the California Air Resources Board, announce some pretty significant.
Mm-hmm.
You know, dollars over the next few years, $1.4 billion total plan, $1.1 billion in new money, of which a big chunk of that is for charging infrastructure. Can you give us a feel for if you're already seeing some activity and how you should expect these type of announcements, which are fairly near-term, frankly, relative to the infrastructure bill, on your business?
I mean, we've got a lot of experience with the CEC. We've done quarter billion programs with the CEC for years. The CEC moves relatively quickly, as you said, relative to other programs because it's not. If you look at the federal infrastructure bill, the bulk of the money has to flow to states and then states have to design programs. You've got this inherent two-tier cascade where the CEC doesn't have that two-tier cascade. It's a very large state. It already has a very large EV population, and it's been operating with significant EV programs for a lot of years. How should we say? The relief pitchers are warmed up in the bullpen in California. We, you know, it's hard to call how much of that is gonna flow again to us.
It's always hard to call, a subsidy program, so I'm not gonna venture a guess. Remember, all of the subsidy programs that were announced recently have not been contemplated in any of our previous commentary going forward. It was not in any of our models because we don't put something into a model until we can count on it. We understand that policy has a life of its own, and so we don't count on stuff until we can actually count on it. None of what you're seeing Rex talk about is contemplating any of that.
Good. Thanks again for the color.
Thank you, Mr. Peterson. The next question is from the line of Tyler Bailey with Needham & Company. You may proceed.
Hey, guys. It's Dylan in for Vikram here. Just one last quick one for you related with the supply chain and the mix for that last question. I guess due to some of the supply chain issues you're seeing, is there any potential for a shift in mix to prioritize some of your high margin segments?
We don't financially engineer our margin, and the reason is that a customer today is a customer for a very long time because of the rebuy nature of this. Shaping is dangerous. We try to take all the business we can service, and you know, obviously inventory levels and lead times, you know, may impact our ability to win a deal in the future. Who knows? So far so good and not having an impact on things. Remember, a customer's initial buy is usually a fraction of their ongoing buys, and you have a lot of time over the life of that customer to mature and evolve the product they may buy today.
If they buy a product today that's under, say, supply chain pressure, well, you want that customer anyway because most of the product they're gonna buy is gonna be well past when all of this clears.
Okay. Yep. That's helpful. Appreciate it. One last quick one. Oh, sorry.
I don't think there's a lot of big gifts that we could, to Pat's point, exactly that, you know, we could or would want to engineer backwards or forwards. The fact that our mix has been fairly consistent, Q2, Q3, and it'll probably be fairly consistent in Q4, just means, you know, we have demand that's more than what we can meet. We're meeting demand as best we can, so just leave it there.
Okay. That's helpful. Sorry, one last quick one. In terms of, you mentioned the spillover, just curious, is most of that residential? Is some of that spillover into Q4, or is it just, a mix across the board?
Certainly some of it was residential. It's fundamentally across the board. You know, just, you know, we're. By the way, I got the inventory comment backwards. We're effectively flat, anyway, the difference is so slight it doesn't really matter. You know, we are chasing a very, very strong demand level across our business and, you know, we're meeting it as well as we can. We don't have big open holes anywhere. We would expect that to continue at some level, but thus far we're managing it or else Steve's doing a great job.
If the question is from the vantage point of is there one product that's suffering undue levels of supply chain and the rest are clear to build? No. If that's where your question's coming from, that's not the case.
Sure. That's helpful. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for taking the questions and congrats on the quarter, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Bailey. The next question is from the line of Stephen Gengaro with Stifel. You may proceed.
Thanks. Good afternoon, gentlemen. Two things from me. First, when you look at your opportunity in Europe, any sense how we should think about sort of relative growth rates in Europe over the next couple of years versus the U.S. market?
Relative growth rates of the market itself or our growth rates?
Your growth rates relative to the market for sure, but also you think the European business grows at about the same rate as your U.S. operations, or do you think it's materially different based on sort of the maturity of the market and the product lines?
I don't think it's the product lines aren't substantively different between the two markets. There are some differences in some areas, but they're not substantively in the long term different. We've got some, you know, startup conditions in our business in Europe that we haven't worked ourselves out of yet, but that's in process. I actually think fundamentally in the next few years, just because of the regulatory and the policy environment in Europe, you're likely to see higher percentages of electrification of new car sales than you will in the United States, and that'll normalize out over time. I think well before we hit significant percent penetration of EVs into the install base.
I'll remind you of an interesting stat that almost no one. Everyone says, "Aha," when I say this, but no one realizes it up front. If 100% of cars sold tomorrow were electric, it takes over 20 years to replace the installed base of cars that are in North America and Europe. That's how big this market is. The next couple of years is where there's, I mean, it's certainly where a lot of the customers are won. It's certainly where a lot of the market positions are made. But the volume, wow, the volume continues to grow up for a very, very long time, to serve that installed base.
So we see the two markets as relatively similar, relatively on the margin, maybe differences, but relatively similar, by the time you get to, you know, significant penetration, into the installed base of vehicles, out there. In terms of our business, we should acquire market share faster in Europe than we're acquiring market share in the U.S. because the market share is already so high in the U.S. By definition, we should be acquiring market share in Europe. I'll also point out something else. There is a higher percentage of ports under management in Europe by necessity, because we are acquiring customers that already have some hardware on the ground that do not have our hardware on the other side of our software. It's a much higher percentage in the U.S.
It's not 100%, but it's much higher in the U.S. Therefore, the average, when you look at the ports under management and you try to equate that to revenue, it's a little bit lower in the early days in Europe because not 100% of the customers are on our hardware, or not an equivalent percentage are on our hardware in Europe. Makes it a little harder for you analysts to do the analysis.
I understand and I've seen that, so I appreciate that comment. Just the other quick one for me, I see you mentioned on the call sort of the one quarter lag on the subscriptions just based on the time from installation. Has that been pretty steady, right? I mean, that's a pretty steady number that we should think about as kind of a guidepost going forward.
Rex?
Yeah, yeah, that's definitely true. There's a 1 quarter lag, and then the other factor when you look at network solutions versus our subscription revenue is you get a very different outcome on a percentage basis depending on what you sell, right? If you're selling, you know, a home unit that has lower percentage software content than a commercial unit on a percentage basis. In our DC line the equipment itself is sufficiently expensive that again, relative to that number, software is a smaller percentage. Mix can really bang the percentages for subscriptions around.
Okay, great. I appreciate the color, gentlemen. Thank you.
Yep, no worries.
Thank you, Mr. Gengaro. The next question is from the line of David Kelley with Jefferies. You may proceed.
Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe if you could talk a bit about the visibility to workplace ramp and your customers' propensity to revise at the moment. You know, just curious how that is trending recently, given COVID continues to factor into corporate planning here into 2022.
I'd actually really enjoy your insights into when we'll be returning to work for. Oh, I'm kidding. Rex, if you wanna. Well, the jest there is around, you know, it's a difficult predict environment for us in terms of return to work. What we're doing, but what I'll point out is that the growth rate in the overall industry with just the sheer volume of cars that have entered the market, while workplace is certainly not on a proportional basis, hasn't returned to its previous levels because there's not as much utilization pressure at work. There are so many more cars where we're still seeing relatively decent numbers there.
Because there are sections of the country where there are different types of workplaces that have different criticality with their jobs or different policies internally with respect to how they wanna take on the larger administrative burden of having people in the office more often. You're seeing those hotspots everywhere. It's not zero. When it gets to the new normal, whatever that is, well, your guess is as good as mine. Rex, you wanna comment on the other piece of that question?
Yeah. So the only thing I would add is if you look at our Q4 guide, the assumption that's built into that is that workplace doesn't come back in Q4 in a big way because, you know, if you look at all the things that are going on out there, you know, we even got updates today. It's really hard to think that people are gonna be back in the office by the end of January. So what we're doing goes to that as well. So we think our current mix is gonna continue to Q4, hence the numbers at which we think look great as far as guidance is concerned. We're really looking forward to workplace coming back in full force next year.
We're not forecasting that that's gonna happen yet, but you know, that would be a very, very good impact on our business, and we hope that happens. You know, we're sort of staying the course now in terms of how we look at the near term future.
Philosophically, yeah, philosophically, whenever there's doubt, we take a conservative stance in how we think about it because that's safe. As Rex said, we'll build as much inventory as humanly possible because right now it's not possible to overbuild. It's just not, especially with our limited scrap risk and obsolescence risk. So we'll build as much inventory as possible should things come out on the positive side, or, you know, be a, you know, early onset of stimulus money, early retreat of COVID, what have you. If we get surprised to the upside, awesome. We're not gonna engineer our company around expectations given variables we don't control on the rosy side of that equation.
Okay, got it. For the record, my guess on return to work is not very good, so I won't get it. Maybe as a quick follow-up, just on the utilization point, and maybe this is a bit of an oversimplification, but, you know, kind of viewing it as a pull model, as it relates to workplace demand. Are you seeing any shift to more of a push model in the sense that, you know, a lot of companies are certainly focused on ESG metrics, sustainability, where, you know, maybe there's some offsetting impact where their the demand is going up regardless of kind of what the utilization is at the moment?
I'm sure there's some of that, frankly, because you know, all companies are turning their attention to making sure that they have the right posture with respect to supporting electrified transportation, which you know, supports the climate goals we all have. There's certainly an element of that. What I'll point out, which I think is significant, is that early buys from a company just moving into electric vehicle charging tend to be small. It's their revisions based on their run rate experience that tend to be large. Customers trying to plant an ESG flag, I doubt, are moving the needle significantly in our workplace business. I bet you it's in there. I just can't quantify it. Rex, do you have any better commentary?
I don't. I think, you know, it's hard to call the build ahead 'cause, you know, we're so close to the wave's gonna hit us any time now, hitting us now. I think people recognize, well, this is an undeniable trend, and they should get ready for it. I would call it preparation as opposed to early. It's just a smart time to move.
Yeah.
Yeah. By the way, yeah. Right?
What's also happening, I'll point this out, is there actually construction happening during COVID because it's an opportune time to do construction and remodeling of office space because it's unoccupied or lightly occupied. For that, you know, we're not seeing a slowdown at all. In fact, we're seeing that being relatively strong on the construction side.
Okay. Got it. That's helpful color. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Kelley. That concludes the question and answer session. I will now turn the call back over to Pasquale Romano for closing remarks.
First of all, I wanna thank everyone for the questions. I want to welcome all the new folks that have asked questions that haven't participated in our earnings calls interactively before. You're the family. Really great to have you all. Wonderful questions today. I wanna just, you know, sum up again, as I said in last quarter's remarks, I really wanna thank the Charge Point team. I think you've heard a lot of commentary around how much work it's been for this team to manage to the upside in what has been a dynamic environment with respect to supply chain and frankly, the market materializing to the upside, which has been a wonderful thing for our employees.
We also are, you know, well on our way now of integrating two stellar teams from two acquisitions into the family of ChargePointers. I wanna thank the ChargePoint team. I know a lot of them are listening to these calls. so thanks, guys, for doing all the good work that you do. We're, you know, very excited about what the future holds for all of us collectively as an industry and our company and our investors. We think it's just a tremendously bright picture there. We're, you know, really buoyed by the broad-based support that we've seen in the market for all verticals.
Then you've got the cars showing up, and we've always said that we're sort of analogous to an index, the electrification and mobility, because as cars come, we've been so attached to cars, light-duty trucks, et cetera, heavy-duty vehicles. As they continue to materialize, we see that really fueling some great growth ahead. Thank you all again. We look forward to hosting you in a quarter. Thank you, and have a wonderful holiday.
That concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.