All right, good morning, everyone. Welcome. This is Track Two. My name is Andres Sheppard. I'm the Lead Covering Analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald. Joining us today is Paul Dobson. He is the Chief Financial Officer of EVgo. In case you have been living under a rock, EVgo is one of the leading charging companies in the United States. We're excited to have a very constructive conversation. Paul, thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
Maybe to get started, just wondering if you could maybe help paint a picture on how you would maybe characterize the current status of both the EV industry and the EV charging industry.
Sure. Yeah. On the EV side, if you think about EV cars, I think people have really moved beyond, you know, the early adopters have moved beyond buying an EV for environmental reasons, right? People love EVs. You talk to people who have them, they absolutely love them. The technology, you know, the performance, everything about them, they love that. We see now in the US, there's almost 97 different models. That was like 40 not too long ago. Now it's 97. It's going to continue. There's lots of choice across the whole spectrum of price points as well, from very expensive ones down to entry-level ones as well. The price is coming down to parity with ICE vehicles. Of course, the maintenance cost is much less as well. They last much longer. There were really two barriers to adoption.
One was price and new technology. I think we're over that. The other barrier, of course, is range anxiety. Where am I going to charge this thing, right? Is it going to fit in with my typical patterns? What people are saying now is you can certainly charge at home, but there's a large population who live in apartments or condos or run around town or whatever. They don't have access to that. Our business is fast charging only. You can charge up your vehicle now with our chargers in like 20 minutes, right? You see that the battery technology of cars as well is improving, is continuing to advance. The latest car, even the entry-level models, can charge up that quickly.
You can go to a grocery store or a bank or whatever, park your car in a really good parking spot, charge it up in 20 minutes, and be on your way, right? That sort of fits with your pattern. Whereas Level 2 chargers do not do that, right? If you went to a slow charger or a Level 2 charger, you would go to the bank, do your grocery, and you might get an extra 5% or something, right? You go, what did I, and still spend the same amount of money, and you go, you know, what did I just do? The value proposition is just totally different.
I guess, you know, obviously there's a lot of uncertainty in the markets at the moment. There's all these talks about tariffs. How do you see the electrification of vehicles progressing over the next few years, in your opinion?
I mean, I think, you know, there's some turmoil now, although I just saw Heather was showing me that there was apparently a Tesla car show on the front lawn of the White House. EVs, you know, I'm not sure which way the current administration is going to fall on EVs and electrification, but like I said, people love them. They love them. You can see the technology, not only in entry-level cars, but you get companies like Ferrari. Even the highest-end cars are coming out with all-electric vehicles, right? Automakers have invested billions and billions of dollars in EVs and battery technology. I don't think, and I haven't talked to anybody who says EVs are going away, that it was a fad.
If you believe that, then you, and what I was saying earlier about range anxiety and chargers and fast charging, there is a place for what we do. Right now, there is a very big gap between the growth rate of EVs, even if you think that's going to modulate a little bit, and where fast chargers are now, right? That gap is just going to continue to widen. We have 4,000 stalls today, EVgo. We, you know, as we look across the U.S. and think about what are the best places to put these chargers, we see anywhere from 30,000-50,000 potential sites that will perform as well as, and even better than, the ones that we already have in the ground.
If you look at the numbers we've posted over the last several quarters, you'll see that our utilization, just the absolute amount of cash that these chargers generate, continues to go up and up and up. We think there's just plenty of opportunity there. I think electrification, though, like to answer your question, I think it's here to stay. Be interested in anybody who wants to take the other side of that argument, but I haven't heard one.
Yeah. I would just maybe add, just to quantify it a little bit further, you know, last year in the United States, there were roughly 1.3 million passenger EVs sold. That accounted for about 8% of all vehicle sales, which was marginally up from the year before. To your point, right, the prices of EVs are starting to get much closer to parity with ICE vehicles. Although now there's the likely scenario of the EV tax credit potentially going away, which would potentially make EVs a bit less competitive on price. Overall, we are seeing these OEMs start to introduce lower-priced vehicles. We also expect that to continue. Let's maybe switch to EVgo specifically. We touched on a few things, but just maybe for those that aren't as familiar, what do you see as your key differentiators for EVgo, maybe relative to competitors?
EVgo, we're in the business of owning and operating fast chargers. Not Level 2 chargers. We don't make the equipment and sell the equipment and try and make a margin on it. We want to own and operate, pick the best sites, own and operate, and get that recurring revenue stream from those chargers. That's all we do. The biggest players in the market, of course, is Tesla. We've got 29,000, almost 30,000 chargers out there. They're in the business of selling cars, right? There's very little information about what their strategy is going forward in terms of chargers. You know, they're going to be focusing, they've talked about autonomous vehicles, they've talked about other things. Of course, you know, EVs, like I said, they're going to continue to sell EVs, but how their charging strategy evolves in that, you know, is elusive.
I don't know what that looks like. It hasn't really been clear. The number two player is Electrify America, which came out of the sort of VW settlement.
Private, right?
Private, yeah. They've got more chargers than we do, I think around 5,000 or so. Their funding is due to come to an end. The VW funding is coming to an end this year, I believe it is. They've said they're adding, I do not know, 500 or more chargers. What they're doing beyond that and what happens with that company beyond that, not sure, not clear, right? That has not been publicly stated either, as far as I know. You get a company like ChargePoint, who's pretty well known. They're more in the business of making a margin on equipment, right? That is sort of how they've got. They've also got subscriptions now, and I think they're going more, starting to look at what we do and thinking that might be something that they want to get into.
Making a margin on equipment, I mean, it's a thin margin business, and it's not a recurring revenue stream. So very, very different than what we do.
You mentioned funding. You recently closed in on a $1.2 billion loan from the DOE. Maybe just remind us, what was the purpose of that loan? What will you be using it for? How do you see that working out?
Yeah. Yes, we have a $1.25 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy. The proceeds are going to be used to build 7,500 stalls over the next five years, which will take us to that 4,000 stalls to 11,000-12,000 stalls over that period of time.
I want to just clarify. It'll almost triple your current charger count, which is significant, yes.
Each of these chargers generates cash on its own. Our business model is about scale. Getting more chargers in the ground generates much more cash, overcomes our fixed costs, and then everything else falls to the bottom line, right? Our fixed costs are not growing nearly as fast as obviously our charger costs and everything else. This is very much a scale play. Get more chargers in the ground. That loan will help us get to that point as we add 800-900 owned stalls this year, and that'll continue to go up to get to that 7,500. We're also looking at new technology, working on next-generation charger technology, which is going to lower the cost of chargers by about 30%. We'll get another maybe 1,500, 1,600 chargers on top of that. Now you're talking 9,000 chargers.
When we're up at about 12,000 stalls out there, we'll be generating quite a bit of cash, more than enough to pay down the loan. The loan is a build period of five years. You don't have to pay anything back. You capitalize the interest. You build over the first five years, and then it's 12 years to pay down the loan. That's how it works. It's a 1.2% spread on that money. By the time we build all of these loans, we'll have enough cash to not only pay down the loan, but to continue to grow on top of that.
Because what is roughly the CapEx per stall?
It's about $8,500, or sorry, $85,000, $85,000 CapEx, net CapEx per stall. Each stall, on average today, our network generates just out of Q4, generates about $12,000 or $13,000 per stall. That's a mix of older stuff as well as the new stuff. The top 15%, which are the ones that we're putting in now, the fast chargers, they're generating today $50,000 per stall per year. You put the thing in the ground for $85,000, and it generates $50,000 each and every year. You can quickly see scale that up, pays for your fixed costs and corporate costs and growth costs, and away you go.
Way to go, yeah. You mentioned, you know, as of Q4, you have a little over 4,000 stalls in operation. You mentioned that your utilization rate was about 24% on average. Maybe for people that aren't familiar, first of all, what is utilization rate? How will you compare that 24% with maybe the rest of the industry?
I mean, it's basically 24%, like the number of hours in the day that the charger is being used, right? You would think you would want maximum utilization, but there's kind of a sweet spot because you want to make sure that the charger is available as well when people drive up. If it's always being used, people will not like that experience too much and go somewhere else. There is a sweet spot. We haven't quite found where it is because we've got some performing at 60% and some less than the average. Yeah, 24% is where we are now. We think that sweet spot is probably north of 30% where we would want to be, just to make sure that there's availability when people sign.
That 24 number, I think it's fair to say it's on the higher end of the industry on average.
We believe so. We believe it is. There is not a lot that is published about it, like specifically with the bigger competitors. We know like part of what we really focus on and are continuing to hone is around where we put these chargers. We have a whole AI and data and data scientists who spend all day learning about what is going on with our network, why some are outperforming others, and applying that to the next tranche of chargers. We are getting continuously better and learning about where to put them to get utilization up to that 30% or so range. We have put guidance in some of our investment materials that say our long-term target is 23%-26%, but I am now rethinking that is probably low.
That's what? Oh, okay.
Because we're at 24% today.
Today. Just to add some context there, remember that in the United States, 70%-75% of all charging is being done where? It's being done at home. For a 24% utilization rate of a public location for a charger, that is considered on the higher end.
Yeah. It is about where they are, and it is super convenient for people to use it. That is the key, right? It cannot just be anywhere, and they have got to go and try and find it. It has got to be super convenient, and it is part of their daily or weekend pattern of how they live.
Right. Let's switch gears for a second. Maybe talk about your EVgo eXtend business model. So what is that, and how has that been material to the business over the last maybe year, year and a half?
Yeah. We started that business a few years ago. That's a business where with our partners, we install the charger and the equipment and actually run it, gets a little bit of revenue for running it. We make a margin on the construction cost and the charger, the equipment as well. That's not a business model that we're pursuing. Now we're going to fulfill the contracts that we have. We've got a large contract with PF J to put in 2,000 stalls with them. Having more chargers out there is just great for EV adoption. We're fine with that. It's not a business we're going to be emphasizing going forward. There's more recurring revenue and more money to be made in the owner-operated model.
Got it. We've had a lot of talks yesterday on autonomous driving technology, right? Obviously, we have Waymo's operational. Tesla is going to be unveiling their Robotaxi segment. There's also commercial autonomous vehicles looking to enter into service later this year. How are you thinking about the EV charging opportunities for autonomous vehicles? Is there an opportunity for EVgo to maybe capture some market share there?
Yeah. We already have about 110 stalls with autonomous vehicle operators. I do not know how many people have tried a Waymo or a Zoox or anything like that, but it is quite the experience to get in a vehicle and nobody is driving it. It works. I have tried it a few times. It works great. When you pull into places like an airport or hotel, people take pictures of this thing coming in with no driver. It is kind of a freaky experience. Yeah, we have got relationships with the biggest names you can think of. It is going to be a bit of a different operating model for us. We put the sites in, and they pay us basically a rent, like a fixed amount per stall or per charger. We do not take any kind of utilization risk or pricing risk or anything else.
It's enough to make the economics work very much in our favor. That is something that we're going to be pursuing. We'll meter those investments. It's not going to be the main thing we do, but we'll meter those investments as those companies decide to invest more. Having charging in a great location for those companies, you can imagine, is critical to their success. They have to have it or their business model doesn't work.
Makes sense. I want to maybe, and by the way, let's make this obviously as interactive as we can. If anyone does have any questions, please feel free to jump in. Starting in the five-minute mark, I'll probably be calling out on folks randomly. You know, I want to touch on something. We've had some investor questions on our side about this. It's obviously not an exciting topic, but I think it's one that is worth mentioning. Given the recent wildfires in California that took place a few months ago, obviously California is the state with the highest EV penetration. How impacted were you by those wildfires? From an EV adoption and maybe EV charging perspective, did that have a material impact on the business? What was done to try to maybe mitigate some of that impact?
Yeah. Our headquarters is also in L.A., in the area, quite close to the area where a lot of the fires were. We have roughly half of our team there. It very much hit home when it was happening and impacted some of our employees directly. Luckily, nobody lost a home, but there were power outages and evacuations. Luckily, everything is starting to rebuild there. In terms of the business side, we had some chargers where the power went out, so they could not be utilized. Of course, utilization in the whole area was impacted, but we did not have any damage, any long-term damage at all. We started, because you said penetration in California has been the highest, continues to be, but we are also expanding right across the U.S. We are in 40 states right now.
It used to be, even last year at this time, we had more chargers in California than anywhere else. Now that's flipped. We've got more chargers outside of California than in California. Markets like Texas, Florida, all up the East Coast, we put in, somebody was telling me the other day, we just put in some chargers in the Detroit area where all the automakers are. You think, okay, is that a good market or not? I mean, these chargers, the utilization right out of the gate just went right through the roof. They were like starving for these chargers. Having diversification in multiple markets, I think, is a good business practice for us.
Interesting. Maybe on consumer behavior, without getting into politics too much, I think safe to say Elon Musk has had some polarizing impact in the market. Are you finding any changes in consumer behavior? Are there Tesla owners who are maybe opting not to use the Tesla networks? Are you seeing any material changes in the demand for your chargers maybe as a result of the political landscape?
I mean, I can't tie it to the politics, but we certainly do see utilization continues to grow. Why that politics is part of the reason that's happening, I don't know. I wouldn't say so, but we really haven't seen any kind of specific thing. What we are seeing, though, is what we are doing is putting, retrofitting a lot of our chargers with the NACS or the Tesla connector cable so that Tesla owners then, which is 50%-60% of the EV market, can use our chargers. I think our chargers are better located in many instances than where the Supercharger stations are. That just opens up a whole other market, right? We started to do the testing. These are liquid-cooled, expensive cables.
We're going to make sure the chargers where we think there's Teslas would really like to use them, they go in there first. If we've got chargers that have got high utilization already, we don't really need to retrofit them because they're already high. We don't need even more if they're already highly utilized.
Makes sense.
It's a big opportunity, right? You think if all of our chargers can also take a Tesla charger, they can today with an adapter, but having it just native on the thing, it's going to be a great opportunity for us.
Just to be clear, your chargers are available to all vehicles. With the connector, you can also do the Tesla vehicles as well.
Exactly.
Maybe two quick questions, and then we'll go to the audience. Obviously, there's all the talks about tariffs going on in the industry as of late, the implementation. Obviously, the subject, I think we'd all fair to say, is quite fluid, and it's quite dynamic. What impacts are you seeing for the EV charging industry? Or how should we be thinking about that as these tariffs get implemented?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it all could have changed by the time we walked in this room, the time we arrived. Who knows where it's going to be, right? Tariffs are going to impact if they eventually come to fruition, whether it's on vehicles or on the input steel and aluminum, et cetera, it's going to impact all vehicles, right? Why it would impact one more than the other, I don't know. I don't know that it's going to necessarily directly impact EVs. I guess we'll have to wait and see. For our own business, tariffs, though, we don't think have much of an impact so far. It depends on where they go, but most of our chargers are sourced from Taiwan with a company that also has operations in the U.S.
They can move manufacturing and spin up manufacturing, more manufacturing in the U.S. as well. We think that's a good defensive place to be. A lot of the components are also sourced in places that are not China or Canada, very little in Mexico as well. We will just have to see how extensive these tariffs get. If it's a broad brush, it's going to impact everything, not just us specifically.
Got it. Maybe my last question. I think I'd be doing us a disservice if I didn't ask the CFO maybe a financial question. Maybe just remind us, what is your current liquidity status and what are your capital needs?
Yeah. In January, we had about $200 million in cash. That's after taking a $75 million drawdown on the DOE loan. We're expecting adjusted EBITDA this year to be break-even. Our operating cash flow is roughly flat, a little bit of working capital, but roughly flat. Most of our funding needs then are for our CapEx program. That's about $160 million-$180 million this year. We have $200 million in cash, $160 million-$180 million CapEx program. We have the DOE loan to help fund that. We're also pursuing other financing, project-type financing, been approached by a number of banks who are very interested, like see the cash flow potential of these assets, like the fact that we can go faster or slower. It's not like building a big data center where it's all or nothing. It's like go fast, slow.
We'll have complementary financing to sit alongside the DOE loan, which we'll announce in due course at some point this year. We feel like we're in a pretty good position. All of it's non-dilutive. We're not looking to issue any equity to fund our growth.
Got it. Super helpful. All right. We got about 10 minutes. So we're turning it over to you. First question here, yes?
I'm curious, are the charging networks, are they plugged directly into the grid? What's sort of the margin you get on what you buy electricity for versus what you're selling?
Yes, they are plugged into the grid. There is a hard connection when we put them in. Each site has got about six to eight stalls. There is some equipment to transform the energy and then spread it out to the chargers that are on the site. Our margin is roughly a little more than 50% on the energy. Our average price is about, across the portfolio of different markets and whatever else, but on average, it is about $0.55 a kilowatt. The price, the energy cost, including demand charges and whatnot, is about $0.24. A little less than $0.24.
Are there ways to potentially add solar or batteries to these stations where you can, in a sense, arbitrage pricing? Have you explored any of those types of business models to make a little bit of resets, right?
Not since I've been around, we haven't. No. It might be something we might look at in the future, but that's not something that we have looked at. We're very focused, and I'm very focused, as a new CFO, is that we stick with what works right now without trying a whole bunch of new things. Because, like I said, this charger in Michigan or wherever else, like if we can put more of those in, that's what we should focus on. Just focus on that. Other opportunities when we're hugely profitable will come our way. That's something that I'm pretty adamant about.
Question over here.
Talk to us a little bit about very dense urban localities. While you were talking, I pulled up your map. I think I found three stations in New York City. There is lots of complexity to doing anything infrastructure-related in a city like New York. There are a lot of big urban centers around the country. What are the challenges and maybe the opportunities with specifically building in high-density urban localities?
Yeah. There's a lot of things that go into the algorithm to pick a site. How many EVs are in the area? What do we think are in the area? What's the growth like? Who's the utility? How owners is it going to be to get a connection? Are there any of our partners in the area, grocery store partners, because we know that that model works rather than one-off stations sitting somewhere else, right? There's a lot of data that goes into selecting which sites and why. We're in 4,000 locations today. 3,500 are owned and operated. We think across the U.S., we have anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000 sites that pencil that we know if we apply our algorithm, we've got a pretty good feeling that those are going to be profitable sites, right? How do you pick then between that?
You put the probabilities in your favor, make sure that you know who the utility is and you can get that connection. The utilities have got waiting lists about everybody who wants to make a connection. Do you have a good relationship? Can you get on that list in time? So many things go into it that we might as well pick off the low-hanging fruit where we know it is going to be successful and it is easy to do and we can scale rapidly. We can come back over and see whatever we missed. That is the approach we take.
Yes.
Do you give, what are your per-unit metrics and what are the per-unit economics per charging station?
Sure.
Do you give like a utilization rate across the fleet or what is the utilization rate?
We've got lots of information in our investor materials on our website that goes through the unit economics per charger. The basics of it are that the utilization rate on average is about 24%. I said we set a target, a long-term target of 23%-26%. I think it's probably going to be more like 30% by the time we're done. There is the charge rate, which is the amount of power that a vehicle can take, right? What on average? Because you've got a mix of slow older vehicles and the newer vehicles, which can take a lot, can take whatever a fast charger can give it, right? It's got everything in between.
That charge rate, which is about 47 or so kilowatts today, we think it's going to continue to go up as the EV stock, battery technology improves, and that'll go up to 80. That works out to about 450-500 or so kilowatt-hours per charger per day. From today, that's 230-ish, roughly 270, sorry, 270. That's going to go up this year to over 300 on average, we think, right? You take that's how much each one makes per day, 365 days times $0.55 for the revenue equals the revenue. The cost of power is $0.24. We've got costs for stall-dependent costs for things like maintenance. We have also got what we call sustaining costs. To sustain the network, all the network operating costs, call center, that sort of thing.
You take all of those costs and we put them all on a per-unit basis. Like I said, today, that comes out to about $12,000 net cash per stall across the whole network. The top ones, which look more like what their future is going to look like, are already making $50,000 per stall per year. Okay.
Other questions? Yep.
You talked about, I think earlier, 40,000-50,000 gap in current stations as required. I don't know if you're getting it.
Sorry, say that again.
Just the gap. You said even if EV penetration slows, there's still.
Right. Oh, between supply and demand, yep.
Yeah. Can you just provide a little bit more detail around that, like the timeframe you're discussing and what the embedded EV adoption or penetration rates are in that assumption?
The EVs, like the data, people's projections are changing. I've seen some projections that say we're going to get to about 30 million EVs on the road by 2030, something like that. Is that roughly what you've seen as well?
Yeah. I can help quantify that. I'll let you talk about maybe the charging component. Maybe I'll just weigh in quickly. Remember Tesla last year did 1.7 million vehicles globally. This year they're expecting to grow. They said they haven't quantified. Rivian is going to produce about 41,000-43,000 this year. Lucid is going to produce, they're guiding 20,000. The point that I think we're trying to make is that the demand for these EV chargers is far outpacing the supply of electric vehicles. We've had a slowdown in EVs. There's been supply chain disruptions. There's been higher interest rates. Another reason, and please correct me if I'm wrong, for the higher utilization of these chargers has been a result that there are just not enough chargers for the amount of vehicles that are out there. Is that a fair assessment?
That's exactly right. There are about 53,000 fast chargers. We do not think there are more chargers, like over 220,000 chargers out there. The fast chargers are the relevant ones for our business model, and there are about 53,000 of those. That is about 100 or so per vehicle.
Unless you want to wait 12 hours and use a slow charger, but probably don't want to.
Yeah. It's a totally different proposition from what we're doing, right?
Other questions? Yes.
Has interconnection or permitting been an issue? It's certainly been an issue in the solar industry. Has that been an issue for you? Is it improving or anything like that? Is that a risk going forward?
Yeah. I mean, we're getting much better. Again, I was saying earlier, like understanding who the utilities are, how receptive they are to EV charging, fast charging coming into their space, and what the waitlist is and how onerous a process that is to get the permitting. It is definitely, by the time we say that's a site we want, do we get it in? It could be 12-18 months. The longest pole in that tent is the utility hookup. The permitting and getting the hookup and everything done, that's the longest that can take the longest amount of time. I mean, we're doing it. I mean, we're adding 400-500 stalls a quarter. We are getting through.
It is part of the data analysis and the kind of secret sauce that says where we're going to put a charger to make sure that that doesn't become a problem late in the process.
We've got about a minute and a half left unless there are any other questions. Paul, I want to maybe give you a chance to, what are some key catalysts that you think investors should be aware for this year and any other closing remarks you'd like to share?
Continue to watch our results. We posted pretty good results. Our growth has been fantastic quarter over quarter. Keep looking at throughput. You see average throughput per stall continuing to go up. That is an indication that the cash is being generated in these chargers. Keep looking at the number of stalls that we are putting in. The more we are putting in, the faster we will scale and get to break- even. This year, we have said we are going to be adjusted EBITDA break- even. We put out guidance of between minus $5 million and minus $5 million to $10 million EBITDA. We are aiming to be positive EBITDA this year. Seeing that is a good sign. It is a stepping stone to becoming free cash flow positive a few years after that.
Then look for the financing, like the new financing, not only the DOE loan, but complementary financing to sit alongside it. Because then we've got all the ingredients that we need to scale up and to become a very profitable company.
Wonderful. Just on time. Thank you very much. Paul Dobson, CFO of EVgo.
Thank you .
Thank you very much.
Great job.