Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. My name is Abby, and I'll be your conference operator for today's call. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the ChargePoint fourth quarter fiscal year 2022 earnings conference call and webcast. All participants' lines have been placed in listen-only mode to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. I would now 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 conference call to discuss ChargePoint's fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2022. This call is being broadcast over the web. It 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 from fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2022, ended January 31, 2022, which can be found on our website. We'd like to remind you that during the conference call, management will be making forward-looking statements, including our fiscal first quarter and full fiscal year 2023 outlook and our expected investment in 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 December 15, 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 in our earnings release and for historical periods in the investor presentation posted on the investors website, 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 Pasquale.
Thank you, Pat, and thank you all for joining us today. In my remarks, I'll provide an overview of our execution against our Q4 plan and some highlights from the full- year that just closed, an update on our technology and business infrastructure, and some commentary on how we see this year unfolding. After that, I'll turn it over to Rex Jackson, our CFO, for a more detailed review of the quarter and the year that just closed and guidance for Q1 and the full- year ahead. The mission at ChargePoint has never been more important, and our opportunity has never been greater. This marks our first full- year operating as a public company, and it was a remarkable year on many fronts.
The investments we made over nearly 15 years set us up to capture the demand we are seeing today across commercial, fleet, and residential verticals in both North America and Europe. These results further cement ChargePoint as the equivalent of an index for the electrification of mobility. Our strong performance and record revenue throughout the year was fueled by growth in charging demand from accelerated EV adoption. EV volumes in North America and Europe were up over 70% in 2021 conservatively. In fact, all our verticals, commercial, fleet, and residential, were strong. We began the year with revenue guidance of $195 million-$205 million and repeatedly raised guidance, ending the year with over $242 million in revenue, a number that could have been higher if it weren't for supply chain constraints.
In the challenging supply chain environment of 2021, we chose to optimize for customer acquisition, leading us to prioritize assurance of supply rather than short-term gross margin preservation. This had an impact of 3 percentage points of gross margin for the year and 4 percentage points for the quarter. Given that every commercial and fleet port we sell has attached recurring software subscription revenue, and nearly every customer account represents a significant land and expand opportunity, this decision should have long-term positive implications for our revenue and our gross margin. Now let's talk about the product portfolio and infrastructure required to scale. We continue to invest heavily in our cloud-based software solution, and our software is designed to support the use cases wherever a driver needs a charge, and that includes residential, commercial, and fleet settings. Our software also covers linkages between those settings.
I'll give you an example. Let's say a customer has primarily depot-based charging that occasionally also uses ChargePoint en route. That customer can manage those scenarios on a consolidated basis. To give you some examples of the broad use case coverage our software facilitates, we support payment integration in a multitude of ways, energy management, charger deadline scheduling, and many other features we continue to develop and improve for our fleet and site host customers and ChargePoint drivers. We have additionally strengthened our broad software offering through two acquisitions last year. We made a portfolio announcement last year as well, and we are in deployment now with customers and are ramping production throughout this year. I'll remind you that our architecture is highly modularized, so configurations of the exact same hardware are leveraged across commercial, fleet, and residential verticals.
The entire hardware portfolio has been designed in conjunction with our cloud-based charger control system, enabling ChargePoint to address a very broad set of customer requirements with the minimum number of platforms. The large number of integrations we continue to make with the tech and automotive ecosystems are becoming increasingly important as charging moves into the mainstream. Last year, we added to the list of in-vehicle and in-app integrations with partners Android Auto, Mercedes, Polestar, and Volvo. The investments we made long ago in establishing a strong distribution channel are paying dividends. Now, some highlights from the quarter and the full- year that indicate the scale we are delivering. Our Q4 revenue of $81 million marks a record quarter and above the high end of the guidance range we provided on December 7.
We finished the quarter with over 174,000 network ports under management, an increase of 64% year-over-year. Within that, the European port count was approximately 51,000, and the global DC fast charge port count was approximately 11,500. We're also approaching 300,000 roaming ports accessible to drivers using their ChargePoint account. If you combine that with the 174,000 ports that are directly on our network, our drivers have access to almost 475,000 ports globally. The momentum in our commercial business, which includes everything from retail, parking, fueling and convenience, et cetera, indicates that businesses of all types are preparing for the electric future. ChargePoint is proud to have over 50% of the Fortune 500 as its customers.
Last year, we achieved over 89% year-on-year growth in our commercial business on a billings basis. In 2021, ChargePoint continued to lead across Europe with strategic acquisitions, commercial partnerships, significant roaming progress, an expanded talent base, and industry recognition. We made meaningful advances in Europe, and our market share accelerated with the successful acquisition of has·to·be. It was also a banner year on the fleet front. Fleets are electrifying and turning to ChargePoint for charging solutions, as evidenced by the year-on-year billings increase of 132%. In addition to introducing the industry's most comprehensive global electric fleet charging portfolio, we rounded out the portfolio with the successful acquisition of ViriCiti, landed signature account wins in last mile delivery and transit. We expanded our partnership portfolio to include Element, Datix, LeasePlan USA, WEX, and Wheels Donlen.
These partnerships span fleet management, financial technology services, and leasing providers, and represent an opportunity to provide charging solutions for well over 15 million vehicles as they electrify. Now turning to residential, billings were up 44% year-on-year. Years ago, we calculated that being in all verticals of charging would be a strategic advantage, and our strategy has long included enabling charging where people spend time. Our three verticals came together in residential in a significant way in 2021. Having a residential solution that can be integrated with our commercial and fleet verticals continues to be an advantage, and here are some examples. First, businesses that operate take-home fleets and companies who offer vehicles and fueling as an employee benefit are increasingly turning to ChargePoint to handle charging and the associated reimbursements.
Second, as many continue to work from home, be that an apartment, condo, single-family home, et cetera, we saw corresponding demand from property owners and homeowners. Third, we continue to partner with a growing number of residential charging programs with utilities throughout North America as they seek expert help to plan for residential fueling demand today and for years to come. We're also being recognized for our innovation with strong consumer ratings and continued recognition from leading publications. The scale of our network is generating positive environmental impacts with over 3.6 billion electric miles driven to date. By our estimates, drivers have avoided over 145 million gallons of gasoline and over 608 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
Now turning to fiscal year 2023, we see a steeper revenue trajectory than previously forecast that we expect will continue for the foreseeable future. I'll remind you that the transition from fossil fuels to electric drive will span multiple decades. For ChargePoint, we are forecasting a growth rate acceleration from 65% last year to 96% this year. As I mentioned consistently, we continue to optimize for assurance of supply in this land and expand model that has recurring revenue attached to every hardware port sold, so any resulting margin impact last year or this year is not indicative of the long-term margin profile of the company. We expect increasing operating leverage this year and in the future and continue to expect that we will cross through cash flow breakeven even in calendar 2024.
I would like to thank our customers, partners, and employees for an exceptional year and their commitment to electric mobility. Our mission requires world-class talent, and I'm pleased that ChargePoint continues to be a destination for top professionals. We doubled our talent pool in the year. We ended the quarter with over 650 employees dedicated to R&D and technology-related functions. Our board additions included Susan Heystee, former Verizon Telematics leader, and Elaine Chao, former Secretary of Transportation. These additions further round out the board, which includes leaders from technology, energy, auto, and the investment community. In the U.S., the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act represents a tremendous opportunity for up to $7.5 billion to accelerate the build-out of charging along highways and in our communities.
As we expected and have commented on previously, this new stimulus should substantively manifest in calendar year 2023, rolling for five years. In addition, there are other state and utility programs being formed and in place today, all of which indicate broad commitment to the electric future. In closing, our ability to achieve 65% revenue growth in fiscal year 2022 illustrates the power of our strategy, business model, and operating capability. These capabilities give me tremendous confidence that we will continue to scale the business with the EV market growth forecasted to continue for the decades to come. We are delivering on our plan, exceeding revenue goals, and executing across all our verticals in North America and Europe. Now I'll turn this over to our CFO, Rex Jackson, to discuss financials before we move to Q&A. Rex, over to you.
Thanks, Pasquale, and good afternoon, everyone. First, my comments are non-GAAP, where we principally exclude non-stock-based compensation, amortization of intangible assets, non-recurring costs related to restructuring and acquisitions, and the effect of the valuation of our stock warrants. Please see our earnings release for the reconciliation of these non-GAAP results to GAAP. Second, after covering our Q4 and full-year results, I will guide on Q1 revenue, and for reasons I'll explain later, I'll guide on revenue, non-GAAP gross margin, and non-GAAP operating expenses for the full- year. Excuse me. Third, consistent with prior calls, we continue to report revenue along three lines: Network Charging Systems, Subscriptions, and Other. Network Charging Systems represents our connected hardware. Subscriptions include our cloud services, connecting that hardware, our Assure warranties, our ChargePoint As-a-Service offerings, where we bundle our solutions into recurring subscriptions, and software revenue from our ViriCiti and has-to-be acquisitions.
Other consists of energy credits, professional services, and certain non-material revenue items. Moving to results, Q4 revenue was $81 million, up 90% year-over-year, above our previously announced guidance range of $73 million-$78 million and up 24% sequentially. We're particularly pleased with this performance given continuing supply chain challenges. We've managed this well relative to our guidance commitments, but with demand significantly exceeding supply, our exiting Q4 backlog was significantly higher than any prior quarter in the company's history. Network Charging Systems at $59 million was 73% of Q4 revenue, consistent with Q3, and up 109% year-over-year and 25% sequentially. Subscription revenue at $17 million was 21% of total revenue and up 57% year-over-year and 28% sequentially.
The sequential increase in subscription revenues reflects software activations of recent hardware shipped, as well as stronger take-up rates in Assure, our warranty product, as well as contributions from our acquisitions. Our deferred revenue from subscriptions, representing future recurring revenue from existing customer commitments and payments, continues to grow nicely, finishing the quarter at $147 million, up from $121 million at the end of Q3. Other revenue at $4 million and 5% of total revenue increased 38% year-on-year and was flat sequentially. Turning to verticals, as you know, we look at them from a billings perspective, which approximates the revenue split. Q4 billings percentages were commercial 74%, fleet 14%, residential 10%, and other 2%, reflecting strong performance across all verticals despite supply chain challenges.
Total billings for the quarter were up 95% year-over-year and 20% sequentially. From a geographic perspective, Q4 revenue from North America was 88% and Europe was 12%, representing a slight shift to Europe, driven by both organic growth and acquisition contributions. In the fourth quarter, Europe delivered $10 million in revenue, growing 184% year-over-year and 35% sequentially. Turning to gross margin, non-GAAP gross margin for Q4 was 24%. As Pasquale mentioned, we are focused on assurance of supply to land new customers and to expand with existing ones. While this places pressure on our gross margin, we believe this is the right and necessary strategy.
Once we land a customer, they tend to grow with us over time and also provide ongoing subscription revenue, so it's very important to keep our focus on delivering product and locking customers in. We estimate higher purchase price variances and logistics costs represented approximately 4 margin points, net of our efforts to pass through costs where we can through higher prices and logistics fees. A key point to note, our prices are holding well, so the key margin challenges are supply chain and mix. Non-GAAP operating expenses for Q4 were $77 million, a year-on-year increase of 83% and a sequential increase of 23%. Stock-based compensation in Q4 was $15 million. Looking at cash, we finished the quarter with $316 million, down from $366 million at the end of Q3. We have approximately 335 million shares outstanding.
Turning to the year, annual revenue was $242 million, up 65% year-on-year, above our increased December guidance of $235 million-$240 million. Network Charging Systems at $174 million, with 72% of total revenue for the year and an increase of 90% year-on-year. Subscription revenue at $54 million was 22% of total revenue and up 32% year-on-year. As we've mentioned previously, Subscription revenue is delayed a quarter or more due to activations and heavily influenced by mix. This year, mix trended materially towards residential and best charged solutions, which on a percentage basis have lower software content. Quickly covering verticals for the year, billings by vertical were commercial 73%, fleet 14%, residential 11%, and other 2%.
As Pat mentioned, fleet billings increased 132% year-over-year as that market continues to accelerate, and we display leadership. Total billings are up 81% year-over-year. From a geographic perspective, full- year revenue from North America was 90%, and Europe was 10%. In fiscal year 2022, our European business delivered $25 million in revenue, up 131% year-over-year. As we've said before, Europe is a key growth driver for us, and we are investing accordingly. Turning to gross margin. Non-GAAP gross margin for the year was 24% for the reasons I mentioned earlier, and up one point from the prior year. Total supply chain and logistics impact of the year was approximately three points. Non-GAAP operating expenses for the year were $240 million, a year-over-year increase of 62%.
As you heard in Pasquale's remarks, and I'll again note in our guidance, we believe continued heavy investments are the right answer to pursue our product and sales goals. Turning to guidance. As many of you know, now that we're through our first year as a public company, I plan to move to only quarterly revenue guidance. However, given the strength in demand, movements in mix, continuing supply chain challenges, and our conviction around OpEx investments, we think it is better to recenter everyone on what we see this year by giving annual guidance on multiple measures. Starting with the first quarter of fiscal year 2023, we expect revenue to be $72 million-$77 million, a year-on-year increase of 84% at the midpoint, and seasonally slightly down after a strong fourth quarter.
For the full- year of 2023, fiscal year 2023, we expect revenue to be $450 million-$500 million, an increase year-over-year of 96% at the midpoint. This guidance reflects a number of factors benefiting ChargePoint, including, first, new customer yields from significant investments in our sales and marketing capacity in North America and Europe in calendar 2021 and going forward this year, and a healthy customer rebuy rate, which has continued at 60% or better of our business. Second, significant product releases this year as our investments in R&D, product and operations continue to move our industry-leading portfolio forward. Third, more OEM-mandated investment in charging infrastructure at auto dealerships, an area where our broad, connected and flexible solutions portfolio has served us well.
Fourth, in fleet, we have seen triple the pipeline growth in medium and heavy trucks year-on-year, and our RFP activity continues to be robust. Fifth, in residential, we expect more than 100% category growth with increasing sales to new drivers, with new utility, auto, and take-home fleet programs, and as we expand in multi-family applications. Finally, continued growth in Europe and a full- year of contributions from our recent acquisitions. Looking at gross margin for the year, we're planning for the challenges associated with mix, which was weighted towards lower margin products last year, and supply chain to continue slowing margin expansion. With those assumptions, we expect non-GAAP gross margin to be 22%-26% for the full- year. Keep in mind, this expectation reflects roughly six points of expected supply chain impact.
Turning to OpEx, as Pat and I have said, we are investing heavily across all functions to drive our market position and to take advantage of the enormous opportunities ahead. We expect non-GAAP OpEx to be between $350 million and $370 million for the year and to show leverage on a percentage of revenue basis. Lastly, we remain committed to being cash flow positive in calendar 2024. With that, I'll turn the call back to the operator to facilitate questions. Thank you.
Thank you. At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press star then one on your telephone keypad. We do ask that you please limit yourself to one question. We'll pause for a moment just to compile our Q&A roster. We will take our first question from Shreyas Patil with Wolfe Research.
Hey, thanks a lot for taking my question. Yeah. Maybe just picking up on the last point about, you know, as we think about the improvement in gross margin as we think about the gross margin guide from fiscal year 2022 to 2023, you mentioned, you know, you are baking in about six points of supply chain and headwinds. You know, number one, is that sort of based on what you're seeing right now? You know, are you seeing a tighter supply chain at the moment, or is that something that you're sort of you just wanna put in some cushion on? Then number two, you know, you mentioned unfavorable mix. Maybe if you could just speak a little bit more to that, and how that's maybe having an impact.
Happy to. By the way, hi, Shreyas. In answer to the first part of your question, if you look at our gross margin assumptions, you're right. Yes, there's a six-point headwind that we're flagging. That's a function of one, what we're seeing today. Two, the fact that you know, you heard the revenue guide, right? It's one thing to meet your numbers. It's another thing to go to your suppliers and go, "I appreciate you struggling to get this to me, but now I need twice as much." You know, it's very clear to us that it's gonna be tough to get supply, and we're making that as the primary goal of the company to obviously land and expand with customers. We're gonna run that hard. I think that's the main determinant. Then your second question was around mix.
I think we've been consistent in several calls now. If you look at our gross margins across verticals and solutions, they tend to be highest in the commercial area, followed by home, and then followed by DC fast. Then when those things are bundled into fleet applications and combined with our software, the whole game changes, and that's coming up as a very strong part of the business. That's a little hard to predict. The basic mix shift is if you go away from commercial and towards residential and, you know, AC and urban fast charge applications, it's gonna keep the margin down a bit.
We will take our next question from Colin Rusch with Oppenheimer.
Thanks so much, guys. You know, could you talk about where the incremental OpEx investments are going and what you think the cycle really is on returning those things? Is a lot of that incremental investment going in R&D or is it more on the sales end?
Colin, it's so we exit the year at a pretty nice clip, and I think we've been very consistent. If you look at sales and marketing, we are increasing our sales and marketing spend algorithmically from a capacity planning standpoint. There's a big push this year in particular to get a broader coverage on the ground, both here and in Europe. We've had you know, pretty good coverage in Europe, and we're adding countries and then pretty good coverage here.
As the vehicles fill in the United States, you're gonna wanna be everywhere 'cause a lot of people are going, "Hey, I need to get on the bandwagon and start making these investments." Meaningful investments in sales and marketing consistent with the growth in the business with some leverage being shown. R&D is, as we've said, moving up. I do think from a percentage of revenue perspective, it's gonna significantly taper off. But again, this year's a big year for new product introductions, as Pat alluded to, so we need to get that out. Then, you know, G&A grows at a much slower rate because we've sort of taken the bullet when it comes to being a public company. You shouldn't see a lot of expansion there.
Also, one other thing that's in there, Colin, that most people wouldn't think of 'cause to be honest with you, I don't think of it every day, but it's really in there. There's a lot in R&D when you do new products. There's a lot of spend in terms of new product introduction, testing, destructive testing, et cetera. You know, we're burning through some product now to get these big releases done this year, but you would expect that to taper off next year.
We will take our next question from James West with Evercore ISI.
Hey, Good afternoon guys, and well done.
Thank you.
Thanks, James.
Yeah, thanks. First question from me, maybe more philosophical, somewhat, Pat, but your business, I mean the acceleration here is pretty impressive. It's also you're accelerating at scale too which comes with different challenges. How are you thinking about the operation? I know Rex just mentioned some of the moves on the products and sales and marketing, things like that, but how are you thinking about operationally, how the business needs to be run now that you're achieving this scale and achieving this massive acceleration in revenue at the same time?
James, there's almost a follow-on answer to the question that was just answered in that if you look at where we're deploying some of the OpEx increase, a big chunk of it is going to improving our internal business systems. We're re-looking at our customer onboarding methodology, our station activation methodology. You're looking at a port activation rate in the ground, a channel support rate for our sales channel. I'll maintain that if you look at the numbers, still a very large percentage of our business goes through channel as designed because we feel that that's a big component of getting the coverage we need at a scale market. You see a very high transaction rate.
The long, very long answer to your question is we're investing everywhere operationally we need to be invested. I'll also point out that from a manufacturing operations perspective, we have a deep bench here. We're continuing to invest in that. The supply chain situations keep us on our toes. We're applying the appropriate resource level there. As you've seen, we've been able to. Last year's growth relative to previous year was not insignificant. Even though this year's growth is nearly a double, last year's growth was 65%. You're still looking at a good execution rate against a lot of headwinds, and that was the result of a massive investment in our operations team. Behind that operations team are multiple major contract manufacturers.
Part of the scale that's been built into the strategy is to work deeply with our contract manufacturers, our supply chain partners, et cetera, to make sure that we've got appropriate infrastructure in place to deal with the scale. It's. We're investing across the board and it shows up in the OpEx number.
We will take our next question from Bill Peterson with JPMorgan.
Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. Nice job on the sort of execution. I wanted to talk about your fleet business and how the opportunities look for the year. I guess, you know, as you look at your offering versus your competitors, what do you see as your key differentiators? Whether it be in software or your ability to apply better, you know, cost of ownership. I guess, how should we think about the business opportunities and your growth outlook, I guess, Europe compared to the U.S.? Like, who started? Who's leading the way and how should we think about that opportunity for this year in particular and into next year?
I just wanna make sure I heard the question correctly. There was a little bit of background noise. You were referring to just the value prop around fleet, is the first part of your question?
Yes. Really.
Okay
T he focus on fleet and the value prop on fleet. Pardon for the background noise.
No, that's fine. So, the easiest way to think about it is customers in general, especially fleet customers, don't wanna be the integrator. They want their suppliers to be the integrator. I think one of the many reasons we're doing exceedingly well in that vertical is that, we can help them design and lay out their depot. We can provide a very broad set of software functionality that they can integrate with their business systems seamlessly. Then we have a hardware portfolio that you saw us announce last year that is rolling out now to customers, and we'll be ramping that throughout the year, that really has been designed in conjunction with that software to work seamlessly.
The entire, I think part of your question was on the TCO side. If you look at what we're providing in support services, the modularity that lends itself towards very easy spares maintenance on site for a fleet, et cetera. It's just really the whole package, and we just take care of it all for our fleet customers. I, you know, I'll stop there, but because there's a lot more we could say, but I think you get the picture. If you could remind me of the second part of your question, I couldn't hear that.
Yeah. Growth, how should we think about growth between Europe? Is it gonna be led by Europe or led by the U.S. or is it fairly even? How to think about the growth opportunity relative to your full- year guidance?
You know, I think, you know, we're as Rex mentioned in his remarks and I mentioned in mine, you know, Europe's a big part of our future. We believe that the first company to be able to achieve major market share in both North America and Europe will have a significant scale advantage. If you think about many customers, especially on the fleet side, but even on the commercial side, they're multinational. When they integrate with their business systems, they want one partner for that. It's not only existential from, I think, being able to drive a cost structure that's competitive, in fact, better than competitive.
It will be best in class long term if we can get to you know be a scale leader in both North America and the U.S. or North and Europe. Then also again make sure that we can just cover our customer wherever they go. Also if you just remember from my remarks, the bleed over from the other segments is significant. You know, fleet reinforces residential reinforces fleet. Commercial gets reinforced by both and vice versa. It really is working. This being in all the verticals really really does provide us a big competitive differentiation. Again, on the growth side, we see it coming from everywhere.
We will take our next question from Mark Delaney with Goldman Sachs.
Yes. Good afternoon. Thank you very much for taking the question. I was hoping to speak more on the subscription line. Even though the press release talks about that segment growing more slowly last year overall, the sequential pickup there was very good and the sequential growth rate was higher than I think total revenue overall. Maybe first, if you could comment on what led to that increase. I mean, I think you alluded to activation timing. Was that the, you know, the driver of the pickup in subscription? You know, as you're thinking about the guidance for this year, how should we think about subscription, and is it going to you know timing issues, or should we expect stronger growth there this year? Thanks.
The baseline observations that we've given before in terms of timing, because obviously software only gets turned on when the station gets turned on in essence, and we have a time lag on that. It's usually a quarter plus. I've alluded to that on several occasions. That's a factor in terms of lag. The pickup that you saw recently, certainly our acquisitions didn't hurt since substantially, not all, but almost substantially all of their revenue from those two acquisitions flow into that line. As you may recall, we closed one acquisition in Q, let's see, Q2 I think it was, and then the other one late in Q3. Q4 is the first quarter where we had both of them contributing and, you know, at full volume.
That's a big help as well. We also have had a big push recently in terms of you know expanding our Assure warranty program to more and more customers because you know it's important for everything to be up and running all the time and look great, which is part of our value proposition. We've been pushing that pretty hard. I think those are the main contributors to how that line moves around.
We will take our next question from Matt Summerville with D.A. Davidson.
Thanks. A couple things. First, you know, I wanna think back to the time, you know, you issued your sort of SPAC projections, and I think for fiscal year 2023, you were talking about a number sub-$350 million in revenue. Here today, you know, talking about $450 million-$500 million, I mean, wow. You know, that's a pretty big step function improvement.
I guess I just wanna put a finer point o n what is really, you know, driving that upside versus the view, you know, you had been expressing, you know, not all that long ago, really when you think about it. I imagine there's a component of new customer funnel, rebuy rates, the ramp in subscriptions, all those good new products, all those things. Maybe just rank order of magnitude, what's driving that? Then Rex, if you wouldn't mind, what it was the acquisition, contribution to revenue in the quarter? Thank you guys.
I'll start. First of all, in no particular order, rebuy rates are about the same, virtually identical. That moves around a little bit, but it's always north of about 60%, somewhere between 60%-70%, depending on the quarter. That's just timing. We're seeing strength from existing customers because it is an expand model with cars. The overarching answer to your question is vehicles. The more vehicles that are available to consumers, and you've seen in my remarks, Bloomberg New Energy Finance has increased their prognosis for auto sales in both North America and Europe. As those things flow in at higher rates, we naturally see higher revenue as a result.
The comment that I make consistently is we're broadly exposed to the EV industry, so we're sort of an index in that respect, in that as more and more vehicles come into the commercial space, it drives our commercial customers to purchase more. It drives new commercial customers. You saw my stat on the Fortune 500 and our deep penetration into the Fortune 500 in North America. It works the same way in fleet. Frankly, fleet is just getting started. It's just getting out of the gate. The vehicle demands are certainly there. The vehicle OEMs are just starting to roll vehicles, and you don't have a full complement of vehicles there to cover everything.
Watch that one over time because that's gonna be a very exciting space for ChargePoint. Then, residentially, you know, people just need access to charging where they live. You're seeing very strong demand there as evidenced by all the numbers that Rex laid out for you. Rex, I think there was a question about the acquisition.
Yeah. The follow-on question was, what was the contribution from the European acquisitions? As we had forecasted, it's approximately $4 million in revenue. Then separately from an OpEx perspective, it's about $5 million. But we won't be breaking those out going forward, but I think that gives you a sense of scale.
I do wanna point out one thing on that. Those are software acquisitions, so that revenue is flowing into the software subscription line. As we've said many times, the growth rate which is so fantastically high in new port adds, that hardware revenue associated with that is recognized in the period. There's the difference in the revenue recognition, and so that drives the disparity there in the you know kind of cursory apparent contribution to revenue between the subscription line and the hardware line. They're inextricably linked.
We will take our next question from Ryan Greenwald with Bank of America.
Hey, good afternoon, guys.
Good afternoon.
Good afternoon.
Maybe just going back to the margins and operating expenses. Appreciate the additional color and how you're thinking about fiscal year 2023 here. Can you just talk a bit about how you're thinking about the operating leverage into the outer years as you think about cash flow breakeven in calendar 2024?
Yeah. I think, Ryan, what you have to do is the first calculation is what's the OpEx as a percent of revenue for this year versus last. Last year it was pretty much 100%. But we're gonna get 20-some points of benefit. I think it's to 76%, if I'm not mistaken. Go from 99 to 76. That's a big move in one year. And as I mentioned earlier, I think the R&D should taper off a bit a little bit faster rate than sales and marketing, for example, than G&A should be fairly stable. If you think about our growth rate next year, and obviously I'm not gonna guide to out years, but we're on the front end of this thing.
One would think we're gonna have a meaningful growth rate in the ensuing years as well, but there's no way that OpEx is gonna keep pace with that because it doesn't need to. That's where all the leverage kicks in. We picked up 23 points this time. I'd like to do that two or three more. I'd like to do it better than that next year and better than that the year after and continue to drive that down and cross over in 2024, which is what we suggest.
We will take our next question from Craig Irwin with Roth Capital Partners.
Thank you for taking my question. I should too add my congratulations to your execution and how you've set up the company for some impressive growth this year.
Thank you.
The first question I wanted to ask is really, you know, it's a simple one, right? Product portfolio. You guys have invested a lot of money, a lot of effort in being ready for some of these different opportunities. I guess the top of mind is maybe fleet. There is still quite a lot of innovation going on in the EV charging market. There's sort of micro DC chargers. There's the battery in a box. There's a few different p ermutations that seem to be getting good interest out there from potential customers. You know, we've yet to see if these are gonna sell in significant volumes. Can you tell us sort of, you know, what you see as top priorities for ChargePoint as far as product portfolio over the next year? Should we expect a similar tempo of introductions, or is that tempo even likely to increase from here?
We're constantly rolling product, especially on the software side, and we usually don't formally announce that unless it's through a partnership. On the software side, you're seeing just a tremendous amount of continuous evolution there. Your question centered more around the hardware side, so I'll flip to that. With respect to the fleet announcement that you saw last year, every bit of that product line applies as much to consumer passenger car charging in the wild as it does fleet. We build all our technology, so the platforms are applicable to as broad a set of verticals as possible.
With respect to different speeds and feeds of DC chargers, evolution of the architecture, et cetera, yes, it's either part of stuff that we've already announced, or you know, we have a deep pipeline behind that. Because we haven't announced it, obviously, I can't talk in more detail about that. Same on the AC charging side. Our coverage is really broad. With your specific question around battery, our belief is that battery at the site makes sense, and we tend to focus on site-level energy storage when it makes sense to augment a site. We do not integrate battery directly into our chargers. It's easier to accomplish the same fundamental application benefit when that's applicable and only in those scenarios by using it at a site level. It also makes it much easier to expand at the site level, so we don't integrate battery into our chargers.
The thing that we're all looking at in the space. Hopefully we have improved visibility on how and when exactly this is gonna flow. There's some optimism that some of the money starts flowing later on this calendar year, which would mean almost certainly in your fiscal year. How much of the strong guidance that you issued today would you say is related to this anticipated funding flow, or is that potentially incremental support for what we see as a very strong market?
We have a deep policy team that's you know done you know tremendous work over the nearly 15-year history of the company, so we're very close to this. I'll remind you of comments that we've made consistently over the last year where we said programs which are very ambitious like the Infrastructure Bill monies that are dedicated to our space. Those ambitious programs take a while in our experience to operationalize. We have a pretty good feel for how long that takes. Our expectation is very conservative. We don't really have an expectation of that hitting in our number this year. We would expect it to hit in subsequent years. You know we need to see how the state programs...
The majority of that money is gonna flow through to states, and then states have to construct their programs. We have to see how they're constructed to be able to, you know, really evaluate how it's gonna impact us on a go-forward basis. You know, we've had very good track record as a company historically on large participation rates in programs like that, and we would expect that if things are constructed as things have been in the past, that we would be able to participate in them significantly. Again, nothing built into this year. To remind you, it's the money as it's currently been discussed by the administration, rolls over five years. The first year, it's a slightly smaller amount, but then it's roughly $1 billion a year over you know over that five-year period. Like I said, a little smaller in the first year.
We'll take our next question from Stephen Gengaro with Stifel.
Thanks. Good afternoon, everybody. Just curious, I'm sort of trying to tie this a little bit into the gross margin trajectory you need to get to that 2024 cash flow breakeven number or cash flow positive. When you talked about the mix, Rex, and you've talked about this before, sort of the mix between commercial, home and DC fast and the impact that has on margins. Has there been anything in the macro as far as sort of the EV adoption rates and how that kind of affects where people charge? I'm just sort of thinking about this from the standpoint of, you know, as the EV adoption cycle accelerates, there's probably more people who can't charge at home. I'm just sort of thinking about how that folds into your mix and margin assumptions.
That's a great question, and we, you know, we've been committed from the beginning as a company to make sure that we have solutions so drivers can charge wherever they need to charge. One of the most important aspects to recognize with EV charging is you don't have to go somewhere to go somewhere. That's a very interesting value proposition if you're a consumer. It's an enhancement to your life. From our perspective, there may be, you know, some folks that, you know, purchase an EV that don't directly, initially have available charging infrastructure, where they live, but, we're seeing very strong growth in our residential business. We're seeing that broad base. We're seeing it in both single-family residence.
We're seeing it in multifamily. If you look at our LeaseCo partnerships in Europe, that include a home reimbursement for fuel included with your car that's part of your compensation package, we're seeing tremendous growth there. In fact, we're making huge investments software-wise with our partners in Europe in that vertical, anticipating strong growth to continue there. While some people may not have access at home, frankly, I think that will not be the dominant characteristic. I think most will, at scale, have some level of access, whether it be streetside, multifamily, or single-family residence.
We will take our next question from Steven Fox with Fox Advisors.
Thanks. Excuse me. Good afternoon. I was wondering if you could just double-click a little bit more on the comment about the pipeline for fleet tripling as part of the sales targets for this year. I was just curious how much of that is customer expansion versus changes in buying plans or site plans that you're seeing, like an expanded size of charging infrastructure by certain fleets to support different areas. How would you sort of describe why that pipeline is going up so much? Thank you.
Yeah, happy to. The main driver is, as Pat said earlier, people are starting to see vehicles coming, so passenger vehicles are on the way, and then they're just talking to somebody yesterday. I was talking about getting delivery of a substantial number of electric delivery vans. You go, "Okay, so you know, the vehicles are hitting the streets." What it really is is people believing that this transition's coming. The vehicles will come, and they're getting ready for it because it's 100% an economic total cost of ownership game when it comes to a fleet operator because they. It's a business, right? It's not a personal preference, emotional kind of thing. Our RFP volume, which we've talked about in several calls, is enormous.
It's just extremely vibrant and robust area for us. Our win rates are strong. As Pat said earlier, there's a combination of everything you can imagine. Some people say, "Well, I wanna buy software over here and hardware over there and this hardware over there and this service over there," and they're willing to integrate themselves. I think that's unfortunate when they decide to do that, because that's too hard to do. There are a lot of people who are figuring out, "You know what? If I had a single point solution, an integrator like ChargePoint, that'd be the way to go." I just think people are buying into exactly what Pat said, which is, you know, "I don't wanna be the integrator.
I believe that the total cost of ownership here is gonna really drive my business. Let's go. There are enough vehicles starting to hit the roads on that side, pickup trucks all the way up to 18-wheelers aren't here yet, but up the stack, people know they gotta get ready. I think that part of the customer base has woken up.
We will take our next question from David Kelley with Jefferies.
Hey, good afternoon, guys. The auto dealer investment in charging infrastructure that's being mandated, can you talk a bit more about that opportunity, the mix of chargers that you expect to see there?
Sure. That's a sub-vertical that we've been in for a lot of years. We know it quite well. You know, dealerships as they more and more of their inventory converts to electric, they have the normal care and feeding for their pre-delivery inspection and maintenance groups in the back of house, so to speak, where they deploy a variety of charging infrastructure at different speeds and feeds to suit the particular scenario. They typically will have some form of charger in a service bay. It'll tend to be either an AC charger or potentially a low-end DC charger in a service bay.
You'll see the PDI facilities typically have a fast charger because the pre-delivery inspection doesn't take very long, so you'll see a medium capacity fast charger typically in those. Out front, you'll see a combination of AC chargers and DC chargers. We see both for mostly for customer parking, but occasionally for overflow at a dealership. The way we look at the segment is it's gonna populate relatively quickly over the next, this year and the next several years. You know, they have to get ready to be able to handle the inventory. We expect it to be a robust segment for us. Eventually it saturates. I think that's frankly years away right now. There's a lot of infrastructure to change over.
We will take our next question from Vikram Bagri with Needham & Company.
Good afternoon, everyone. Most of my questions you've answered. I had sort of a housekeeping question. When I look at the port activations in fourth quarter, it seems like most of the growth came from Europe. One, can you talk about, you know, what kind of growth you're seeing? Which sub-segment is the growth coming from? Your strategy for 2023, if you plan to enter new regions and markets within Europe and outside? Two, was there anything unusual, why the port activation growth in the U.S. was not as strong outside of Europe was not as strong? Thank you.
A couple things. Keep one huge thing in mind, which is, in our port count, we don't have residential at all. We have a very robust residential business that we're proud of, but we don't count those in the activated port count space. The main reason why you say it's moved a little more slowly is the mix shift in our business over the past three to four quarters has been a little less, you know, commercial workplace, retail hospitality on the AC side, a little bit more on the DC side, which is a variety of applications. A DC port is 10x plus the cost of an AC port.
Obviously that's great. Great from a revenue perspective, but from a port count perspective, you know, it's a slower growth thing. Keep in mind that activated ports is ports under management. As we add ports in Europe, for example, we just did that by virtue of an acquisition. Through an acquisition, there are ports we add that are not the ones necessarily that we've sold, 'cause we will sell software without hardware, but not hardware without software. That can skew things a little bit towards Europe. The question, of course, is activation, right? We may have a bang-up quarter, which we just did, shipping a lot of product.
If you know, like most people, have a fairly back-end loaded quarter 'cause, you know, we do things accelerate through the three months of a given quarter. Most of what we ship in a Q4 doesn't get turned on that quarter, 'cause it's gotta get there, they gotta put it in the ground, they gotta turn it on, they gotta go through the activation process and, you know, activate software and everything else. That's why you'll see a one-quarter delay on a big chunk of what we sell versus what we activate.
We will take our next question from Kashy Harrison with Piper Sandler.
Good evening, all. Thanks for taking the question. Congrats on the revenue and OpEx leveraging guidance.
Thank you.
I would like to dig into gross margins for a second, if that's okay. You know, you indicated that, you know, gross margins are taking a little bit of a hit, entering calendar 2022, just, you know, given the acceleration in growth, land and expand strategy, and securing supply. You know, presumably your growth rate is gonna be, you know, quite prolific entering calendar 2023, just given, you know, what's implied in the second half of your guidance here. I was wondering if maybe you could walk us through some initiatives you're taking to, you know, drive gross margin expansion as you think about, you know, calendar 2023, 2024. If you could just maybe share some color on how to think about subscription gross margins, how to think about that moving forward. Thank you.
I think the question is, you know, what are the things that could go well as we get a look out into 2023 and 2024 from a gross margin perspective? I'd start out by saying that, we've had three or four quarters of some of the hardest work I've seen anybody do, ever. How we managed to eke out even a point improvement for last year to me is quite remarkable. Again, we've been struggling with mix and then assurance of supply in the face of a very, very high growth rate is really, really hard.
It's also really hard when you're introducing new products, which we're definitely doing this year, and going to CMs and going, "Look, I not only need to know you can supply this, but I don't need very much of them, you know, in week one, and I need more in week two and more in week three," and you start ramping up the, you know, yet another, product that starts off not at scale. That's a headwind. That's very much a headwind. Having said that, you know, as the supply chain things ease, I do think there's a whole documented internal set of cost reductions by product, that we will roll through as quickly as I can once we get past the assurance of supply issue.
I think we've got some favorable things happening in the subscription line from an acquisition perspective, from a growth in our core business perspective. Then there's a lot of things we're doing because from a cost perspective there, because as you know, or at least I hope you know, our support organization lives in that line. There's a lot of leverage and automation and other improvements I think we can get there. One other thing, you know, we used to have a very healthy gross margin in our other line because there was some components there that were heavily dependent on overall utilization. When people stopped driving to work, that takes a bit of a bullet.
We do get back to work in the near term, and that part of the P&L turns back on as well. I think you'll see a good performance there. Honestly, if the weather clears and we can get that six points I referenced in my script back. Life is good. It's real. Keep in mind what I hope I implied, if not said literally in the call, we haven't assumed in our planning that anything materially changes from a go back to work COVID, et cetera, standpoint. We've looked at the world as we know it today. Like, we don't know when that switches, but we're not going to pick a date and set up our forecast and our P&L based on a date. Improvement in the external environment can only help us.
Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our question and answer session. I will now turn the call back to Pasquale for closing remarks.
Well, just we'll wrap up this call, which is pretty much on our anniversary as a public company by thanking you all for, you know, just a, you know, a tremendous amount of great earnings call questions over the last year. We're really happy where we are and the progress that we've made. It's been quite exhilarating here as a company. I want to thank all the ChargePointers out there. I know many of them are listening. It's been a great journey for everyone on our first year as a public company again. On a go-forward basis, exciting times to come. You're really seeing us at the beginning of a very, very, very long multi-decade growth cycle. I can't emphasize that enough. This is not normal circumstances for most markets.
You know, most markets don't have a growth curve nearly as steep, nor do they have a period of growth that lasts as many years as this one will likely have. We're, as I tell folks here all the time, you know, we're plus or minus at 1% penetration, depending on whether you're talking about North America or Europe, into the fleet of vehicles out there, less so for fleets, for consumer passenger cars, plus or minus 1% or so. You know, a company like this can turn in these results at that level for, you know, how early we are in penetration. You know, we have enormous, you know, absolutely enormous expectations for what this looks like in just a very few years. Thank you very much. We will see you next time.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.