Good afternoon, and welcome everyone to Ouster's first quarter earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After today's presentation and remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If you would like to ask a question during this time, press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again. The call today is being recorded and a replay of the call will be available on the Ouster Investor Relations website an hour after the completion of this call. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Sarah Ewing, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you. I'm joined today by Ouster's Chief Executive Officer, Angus Pacala, and Chief Financial Officer, Anna Brunelle. Before we begin the prepared remarks, we would like to remind you that Ouster issued a press release announcing its first quarter financial results shortly after market close today. The company also published an investor presentation which is available on the investor relations section of ouster.com.
I'd also like to remind everyone that during the course of this conference call, Ouster's management will discuss forecasts, targets, and other forward-looking statements regarding the company, including statements from its press release, future customer orders and shipments, near and long-term revenue opportunities, market share trends, future products and commercial paths, potential future opportunities, customer traction, winning an OEM program, and the company's business outlook, and 2022 guidance and trajectory that are intended to be covered by the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 for forward-looking statements. While these statements represent management's expected future results and performance, Ouster's actual results are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations that we may share with you today.
In addition to any risks highlighted during this call, you should consider the important risk factors and other disclosures that may affect Ouster's future results as described in its most recent annual report on Form 10-K, and its other filings with the SEC. Except as required by law, rule, or regulation, the company undertakes no obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements for any reason after the date of this call. Information discussed on this call concerning the company's industry, competitive position, and the markets in which it operates, is based on information from independent industry and research organizations, other third-party sources and management estimates.
Management estimates are derived from publicly available information released by independent industry analysts and other third-party sources, as well as data from the company's internal research and are based on reasonable assumptions and computations made upon reviewing such data and its experience in and knowledge of such industry and markets. By definition, assumptions are subject to uncertainty and risk, which could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in the estimates. During this call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures which exclude the effects and events and transactions we consider to be outside our core operations. These non-GAAP measures should be considered a supplement to and not a substitute for measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. For a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please refer to today's press release.
I would now like to turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Angus Pacala.
Hi, everyone. Following a breakout year in 2021, Ouster continued to bolster its strong position in the market in the first quarter. We maintained positive gross margins, introduced new solutions, and delivered on major automotive milestones along our product roadmap and with our strategic OEM partner. We believe these developments will act as catalysts for growth in each of our target industries and further improve our position in the marketplace. At Ouster Automotive, we are pursuing a hardware-first strategy focused on winning the multi-billion dollar opportunity to supply lidar hardware into consumer vehicles through the superior price and performance of digital lidar. Ouster Automotive announced the Digital Flash, or DF series for automotive last fall, the industry's first multi-sensor suite of short, medium, and long-range solid-state lidars for comprehensive coverage around the vehicle.
Just like Ouster's OS scanning sensors in market today, the Digital Flash series is powered by a single silicon CMOS chip, enabling us to scale performance in line with Moore's Law unlike any other lidar company, while simultaneously dropping cost and complexity. We continue to track toward automotive readiness for our DF series to support automotive programs starting production in 2025. In the first quarter, we announced the Chronos chip, the automotive-grade fully custom digital lidar system-on-chip that will power our DF solid-state sensor suite. The Chronos chip is the foundation of the DF architecture and will enable us to deliver more performant, power efficient, and compact sensors for automotive series production programs. We also shipped the first DF A-sample sensors, delivering on a major milestone in our strategic development agreement with our global automotive OEM partner.
We plan to present the upgraded A-sample to over 30 additional auto OEMs, Tier ones, and AV companies in order to unlock new commercial opportunities and progress to the next round of discussions with those already in motion. The A-sample is another step on the path to achieving what consumers and automakers alike are pushing for. Vehicles with safe, convenient, and reliable autonomy features that they can trust with their lives. Lidar is the bridge from driver assistance to true autonomy, and digital lidar goes further to make these systems more feature-rich and affordable for everyone. With no moving parts, Ouster's DF series is the first solid-state Digital Flash lidar on the market. By absorbing the system complexity into the Chronos chip, Ouster's suite of short, medium, and long-range DF sensors offers automakers greater affordability and flexibility in vehicle design and coverage.
Ouster Automotive can offer a total of up to five DF sensors for roughly $1,000, a lower price and smaller overall size than the single forward-looking analog lidars offered by some of our competitors. This price and form factor advantage extends to single sensor RFQs as well. By being small and affordable, a suite of DF sensors can be integrated around the vehicle, just like digital cameras, to provide 360-degree awareness and a rich set of safe autonomy features. Short, medium, and long-range lidars looking to the front, sides, and behind the vehicle provide the critical data necessary for safe automated lane changes, confident maneuvering through four-way intersections, reliable high-speed merges, and so much more. A vehicle powered by a single forward-looking lidar cannot even navigate a four-way intersection without driver oversight.
Put simply, multi-sensor digital lidar suites are the bridge from driver assistance to safe, affordable autonomy. Turning away from automotive into smart infrastructure, our team was excited to announce the launch of the Ouster x Accur8v ision security solution this past quarter. Ouster x Accur8v ision is a joint security solution that combines Ouster's 3D digital lidar with industry-leading security software from Tactica ware, a Hexagon company, to target the multi-billion-dollar security market. Nearly every high-value piece of infrastructure has a security system in place, from industrial sites and high-value warehouses to airports, military and defense buildings, and data centers. Today, this market is dominated by CCTV cameras and thermal cameras that passively record the events unfolding around them. 3D lidar-based systems are a paradigm shift because they can generate active alerts in real time while providing all of the passive recording capability of legacy technology.
We see a massive opportunity to disrupt this market with our Ouster x Accur8v ision digital lidar security solution. Turning to other product updates, we remain on track to release the L3 chip later this year, which will succeed the L2X chip and powering all of our OS sensors. The L3 chip is the culmination of years of R&D inside Ouster and keeps us on the exponential performance path of Moore's Law. The improvements provided by this fully custom and proprietary chip design leverages technology advancements that revolutionize the camera sensor industry and brings them to the high-performance lidar industry for the very first time. I simply can't wait to unveil it to our customers as planned later this year.
Another benefit of our digital roadmap is our ability to ship continuous over-the-air software updates to all of our customers, which introduce features that expand our ability to win additional opportunities across our TAM. Since the introduction of our first OS sensor, we have released five firmware updates. Our latest firmware introduces new features to make our sensors more adaptive for remote applications, including data flexibility for faster, more efficient edge computing. We expect these updates to also benefit industrial customers who are accustomed to processing limited data from legacy 2D lidar sensors but are eager to adopt high-resolution 3D lidar to improve safety and performance capabilities. We continue to invest in building out a best-in-class software development experience that serves as the foundation of our entire software ecosystem.
We recently released an updated version of our software development kit or SDK for lidar and continue to see tremendous customer adoption with hundreds of downloads each month. Again, this is an important tool that accelerates our customers' time to autonomy, enabling them to test and validate our sensors faster and bring their applications to market sooner. This year, we expect to release more products spanning hardware and software than ever before. Advancements with our DF series for automotive, L3 chip, software ecosystem, and industry certifications are expected to be major catalysts for digital lidar adoption across our four target industries and directly contribute to our growth this year and beyond. I'd now like to turn the call over to our CFO, Anna Brunelle, to provide a full update on our Q1 2022 financial results and business outlook.
Thank you, Angus. We made substantial gains over the course of 2021, nearly doubling our revenue over the previous year. We continued our momentum in the first quarter of 2022, recording our second highest quarterly revenue of $8.6 million, up 29% over the first quarter of 2021, and aim to double our revenue again in 2022. We shipped 1,550 sensors, a 58% increase over the first quarter of 2021, and produced a record 4,368 sensors, demonstrating our ability to scale to meet market demands. As discussed during our earnings call for the fourth quarter of 2021, we expected some revenue variability in the first quarter and remain confident in our commercial pipeline for the year and our ability to continue to win deals in head-to-head competition across each of our four verticals.
We delivered gross margins of 30%, up from the 26% gross margins recorded in the first quarter of 2021 and in line with the 30% gross margins recorded in the fourth quarter of 2021. Our proven manufacturing and operations team continued to secure our source materials and scale production of our OS sensor despite headwinds from continued supply chain challenges. Over the course of the first quarter, our average cost per unit sold was up slightly from the fourth quarter of 2021, primarily due to lower absorption of overhead costs per unit. One, we expect our average cost per unit sold will continue to decline faster than our average selling price as our sales volumes continue to increase.
We believe Ouster has the highest hardware gross margin profile of our public lidar peer group, validating our leading cost structure associated with our CMOS digital lidar architecture, which enables high scalability in both performance and cost. Over the last quarter, we converted additional pre-production and production level customers to strategic customer agreements or SCAs. To date, Ouster has signed 72 SCAs, representing over $550 million in contracted revenue opportunity through 2026. While we remain excited about large customer deals in our pipeline, timelines and uncertainties exist. Customers are still learning their ramp rates, which can impact the timing of purchase orders quarter to quarter. We continue to improve predictability into our customers' needs and timelines as we grow, such that the timing of orders will have a smaller impact on our quarterly results as we scale.
We believe our diverse group of SCAs exemplifies the success and the importance of our multi-marketed approach, as Ouster is not dependent on a single or small handful of customers or even one market vertical, with revenues expected to ramp in 2025 and 2026, but rather on both auto and non-auto opportunities that offer revenues and attractive margins in both the near and long term. Our capital allocation plan continues to focus on three key areas, to accelerate our product roadmap, to expand our software offerings, and to build out our global sales and marketing team. These initiatives will support our aim to at least double revenue growth this year, increase our market share across our four market verticals, and continue to extend our technical advantage over our peers.
We continue to ramp our commercial engine and sales pipeline over the first quarter and subsequently shipped new software updates with the release of a new firmware and software development kit, and made headway towards the future release of our own verticalized software solution. We also shipped our first Digital Flash series A-sample, achieving a major milestone within our strategic development agreement with our global auto OEM partner as we advance towards automotive readiness for series production starting in 2025. We were able to make these strategic investments while maintaining a cash balance of approximately $163 million at the end of the first quarter.
Following the close of the first quarter and as described in our 8-K, Ouster further strengthened its financial position with a $50 million term loan with no dilution to equity holders, including immediate access to $40 million in cash and a potential additional $10 million in 2023, subject to satisfying certain conditions. With this step, we are putting in place corporate finance best practices to ensure access to capital as needed. In the first quarter, we added 90 new customers and expanded sales to existing customers in line with the three major market trends playing out across our target industry. The shift to electrification, advanced safety and autonomy in automotive, the automation of our global supply chain in industrial, and the widespread investment in privacy, safety, and efficiency of our day-to-day lives in smart infrastructure.
While we continue to execute on our DF product roadmap and advance negotiations for automotive series production programs starting in 2025, we have a rich automotive business today across robo trucking, robo taxis, shuttles, and buses. In 2021, we shipped 34% of our sensors within the automotive vertical, which represents a $1.9 billion total addressable market by 2025. In the first quarter, we shipped sizable orders to multiple trucking customers, both upstarts and OEMs in the U.S. and Europe, as well as autonomous bus, shuttle and robo taxi customers in the U.S. and Asia. Within automotive, Ouster is emerging as a leader in robo trucking with customers like Plus.ai And Torc Robotics and other large trucking OEMs. We expect this sub-market to continue to be a primary driver of growth through 2022.
There are approximately 12 million freight trucks in the world, of which approximately 10% need to be replaced annually. Customers are already deploying production fleets today and are using Ouster lidar to bring L2+ autonomy features to freight delivery trucks on our highways, saving fuel and other costs for end customers. Within industrial and robotics, we are benefiting from macroeconomic trends as companies take steps to automate their supply chains to increase productivity and solve for a lack of skilled labor in the market. We saw significant demand from the material handling market in the first quarter of 2022, especially for warehouse automation, where we signed new SCA customers. Continued to expand our commercial traction in off-highway vehicles for mining and agricultural applications, as well as collision avoidance systems for rail cars.
Finally, we saw a significant uptick in the adoption of lidar for more greenfield robotics applications across the supply chain, such as drone and rail-based inspection systems and volumetric monitoring solutions for raw materials. Based on our current pipeline, we expect warehouse automation, mining, and agriculture to be the major growth drivers in 2022 within the industrial and robotics verticals. We continue to gain market share in the existing $1 billion market for legacy industrial sensors as we further displace high-cost 2D laser safety scanners and other legacy sensors, making it the fastest-growing opportunities for digital lidar. The warehouse automation market is just in its infancy and already generating millions in revenue for our business. The market opportunity is estimated at over $15 billion today, as less than 20% of warehouses currently have any form of automation.
According to a recent report, the market for mobile robots is estimated to grow 10x by 2030, driven by the sale of automated. Ouster is already working with customers, including large industrial OEMs looking to automate their own fleet and a large global company. Automation companies, including Vecna Robotics, Third Wave Automation, Ati Motors, and Valeo. These customers, as well as our pipeline of future opportunities, position us well to scale in line with market demand. Turning to smart infrastructure, last year we won 110 projects, which represented nearly 3,000 sensors for initial deployments that have the potential to expand to hundreds of thousands of sensors. We continue to gain traction in the first quarter of 2022 through new deployments and project expansions in airports, highways, streets, and more across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America.
These include critical infrastructure security, traffic monitoring, connected vehicles, as well as speed enforcement applications. We expect the continued expansion of intelligent transportation projects in addition to crowd analytic applications to be the primary growth drivers in the smart infrastructure vertical in 2022. We also see a massive opportunity to disrupt the multi-billion-dollar security market with our new joint security solution, Ouster x Accur8v ision, where incumbent technologies benefit from the relatively high ASPs and faster sales cycles. We expect the lidar industry to evolve in similar ways as the digital camera industry. According to a recent report by Yole, the market for digital cameras for security is the largest non-consumer digital camera market in the world, estimated at $32 billion in 2021.
Our growth over the first quarter across each of our verticals, especially a handful of fast-developing submarkets such as robo-trucking, warehouse automation, and intelligent transportation systems, reinforces our ability to capture market share within the $8.6 billion total addressable market expected by 2025. Our differentiated technology backed by new opportunities and continues to gain market share. Unchanged. Our bottom-up analysis based on sales pipeline, bookings, and commercial expansion plans, coupled with major product announcements planned for later in the year, provides a commercial path to deliver on our full year 2022 guidance of $65 million-$85 million in revenue and 25%-30% gross margin, which we expect will follow a similar trajectory to 2021, with larger customer orders and shipments hitting in the H2 of the year. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Angus.
Thanks, Anna. A central theme driving digital lidar adoption in each of our verticals is a desire to improve safety and quality of life while increasing efficiency, sustainability and equity. Applications powered by digital lidar have the potential to do just that. Our technology is already creating safer conditions for miners in Inner Mongolia, engineers at nuclear facilities in Europe and on roadways in the United States and abroad. Lidar can help reduce traffic congestion to minimize greenhouse gas emissions or monitor critical infrastructure like railways and power lines. These are just a few of many examples. At scale, the positive impact we can have on society is enormous, and it starts at home with the actions we take as a company.
Earlier this year, Ouster announced a sustainability program predicated on the founding principle of our company. To innovate and deliver technologies that lead to safer and more efficient vehicles, transportation networks, workplaces, and infrastructure for more sustainable and prosperous communities. We have formed an internal advisory committee to guide our sustainability program and look forward to reporting out our efforts. Our increased customer traction across each of our four verticals in critical product development milestones to drive near- and long-term revenue growth. We believe digital lidar is uniquely positioned to power societal transformations and become an indispensable part of our day-to-day lives. With that, I'd like to open it up for Q&A.
Thank you. We'll now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, press star one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, press star one again. When called upon, please limit yourself to two questions. Our first question will come from the line of Tristan Gerra with Baird. Please go ahead.
Hi, this is Tyler on for Tristan. Thanks for taking the question. First, in light of the supply chain constraints, how are you seeing car OEMs projected timelines for the ramp of the lidar industry? Are you seeing any pushouts or is everything on track with what [audio distortion]?
Did you say car OEM?
Yeah. Yep, car OEMs.
Yeah, I can take that. Thanks for the question. I guess if this is a question around the broader industry, and that's something that's just historically true if you look at automakers releasing any new technology. There's also a subset that are still moving forward, and I'd say the majority of the industry is still moving forward very aggressively to their autonomy and electrification strategies and not let any kind of budget restraint restrictions affect that 'cause it's so core to the business and the future kind of competitiveness of automakers at this point.
Thanks. Yeah. Great. For my follow-up, how should we look at your mix by end market this year? I know you talked about some of the growth drivers, but for each of your end markets. How should we think of the mix? Do you expect any material changes from last year?
Percent of our revenue in the automotive sector drive a lot of our growth going forward, and we saw the remainder kind of split evenly between industrial verticals, where we're also still seeing more traction. I think as I highlighted in my prepared remarks, infrastructure vertical this year, which was about 15% last year. You know, that's primarily around, as we said, you know, the 110 contracts that we signed previously our projected revenue this year.
Great. Thanks again.
Just to add a little more color there. Back to it again and again because it's really the true greenfield opportunity for lidar. The other verticals we're operating in use of legacy lidar systems. In smart infrastructure, there's kind of unbounded opportunity because it's a new use case for lidar in digital cameras, almost $32 billion of digital cameras sold just in the security, you know, not even talking about smart infrastructure analytics. Absolutely, you know, we see things progressing as is. That's the safe bet with roughly equal distribution across our verticals. There is immense potential that we may tap into in smart infrastructure above and beyond what we're talking about.
Great. Thanks for that additional color.
Our next question will come from the line of Brian Dobson with Chardan Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks so much for taking my question. You pointed to gross margin being up 300 basis points on stronger averaging and navigating supply chain issues. Can you just give us a little bit more color on what was driving that pricing power in the quarter and how you expect pricing to evolve through the balance of the year?
Yeah. I mean, I think we talked a bit about that we had several new customers entering our pipeline in Q1. As a result of that tended to lift our ASPs. I think, you know, going forward, we've said that we expect ASPs to fall as we are able to lower our COGS as we ship more volume. If you recall, our cost of goods sold, we primarily expect to see constant margin improvement as we sell more and more volume. That's just based on our digital architecture. We aren't expecting kind of further improvements to the product line to get to the cost structure that we're anticipating. It's mostly coming from these volume improvements.
Over time, historically and into the future, we expect that we'll continue to drop, you know, ASPs in line as our COGS drop. That gives us a lot of kind of predictability into the business.
Great. Thanks very much. You know, you mentioned that customers are still learning their ramp rates and that impacts the timing of orders. You're expecting more sales in the back half. Walk us through the quarterly cadence, as you expect it.
Yeah, I mean, I think we're really excited about the guidance that we've given. We guided to $65 million-$85 million in revenue, which is nearly, you know, a doubling of our revenue at the low end of that guidance. About what we're anticipating over the quarters, you know, we haven't given quarterly guidance historically, but I think that you can see that there have been a couple of years where we tend to have really strong quarters. I think, you know, looking forward, what's really important here is that our guidance is based on our bottoms up pipeline projections. You know, our pipeline hundred customers. We've signed 72 up to strategic customer agreements now where we're getting three and five year forecasts from our customers.
You know, it's really important that, you know, you understand the bottoms-up projections are supported by those customers in that pipeline. In a similar trajectory to last year, where we're seeing many of our larger orders hitting in the H2 of the year.
Excellent. Thank you very much for the additional color.
Our next question will come from the line of Sam Peterman with Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I appreciate all the color in the prepared remarks. I did want to ask on the quarter you just reported, obviously revenue is below the fourth quarter and below kind of what you were anticipating, and it's still not really clear to me kind of what drove that, where you saw weakness either in terms of end market, or with any supply constraints or anything like that. Just curious, what you saw in the first quarter that led to revenues being down a bit.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think that we saw any weakness in any areas. I mean, certainly we haven't lost any kind of head-to-head deals, you know, major deals with customers. I think when we talked about our projections for 2022, when we gave our fourth quarter earnings update, you know, we did say that we expected some variability going into Q1. I don't think anything, you know, fundamentally has changed in the business. We're still seeing kind of, we're still signing up new customers. We're still seeing them progress through the pipeline. You know, I don't see any fundamentals changing in the business. I think we're really excited about the growth we're seeing and the customers we're working with.
Okay, fair enough. I wanted to follow up on the topic of obviously your sales guidance for the year. Kind of asking it in a different way. Obviously, the quarter-over-quarter increases would be required are pretty substantial to get to that midpoint of your guidance. You mentioned a couple different factors. I just wanted to ask if you could give any color around, you know, what end markets are going to drive strength, and how much of that outlook that you have is booked versus, you know, you have line of sight to versus you expect to be spot buys. Any kind of color on your level of visibility?
Yeah, I mean, I think we highlighted in growth that we're seeing around in automotive, for example, around the road with trucking industry, where we're really emerging as a leader and we're working with several large customers there, you know, that give us a lot of predictability in that sub-market. Our customers and booking some large spot buys. We continue to see traction in, you know, off-highway vehicles for outdoor, et cetera. I think also infrastructure side, you know, Angus had given some color earlier in response to additional new deployments and project expansion, you know, airports, highways, streets, et cetera. We're seeing that kind of worldwide across all of our geographies. I think we remain very excited about this year.
Appreciate the color. I'll jump back in a queue.
One your next question will come from the line of Gerald. Please go ahead.
Congrats on the quarter. Can you hear me okay?
Yes.
Thank you. Most of my questions have been asked, but maybe to follow up on the last one there in terms of revenue, right? With, you know, $8.6 million revenue for the quarter to get, let's call it $75 million, you know, that leaves about $66 million or so. A bit of like a ramp up period or is most of the revenue expected? Color there would be helpful.
Yeah, I could step in and answer it a little bit differently. First and foremost, we have bottoms-up revenue pipeline that supports our guidance item by item, customer by customer, opportunity by opportunity. Because we have the opportunities to support it, and we are winning those opportunities. Nothing fundamental has changed about the business. We see the business growing, and we reaffirm business. We've said that there's going to be a ramp that looks like last year in the second half of this year as well. It's just part of doubling revenue year-over-year that we're seeing with customers placing very significant orders and receiving shipments at the end of the year. By vertical, you know, right now equal contribution from the four verticals.
I don't see the l ast year we did 34% of unit shift into automotive, materials and robotics. It was about 15% of unit shift in the smart infrastructure. I don't see a significant deviation from that, maybe ±10% of shuffling between the verticals for this year, just depending on which orders hit when. You know, want to make it abundantly clear there's a reason we're reaffirming guidance. We understand there's a significant ramp that happens, but we've got the data, and we clearly are able to ship against it. We're doing great on the manufacturing side.
Got it. Thanks, Angus. No, that's very, very thorough. I appreciate it. Maybe, my quick follow-up is, in terms of the margins, which I know has been asked a little bit already for the quarter, you're already at the top end of your guidance, and you've mentioned that, you kind of anticipate to improve. I'm wondering is that 25%-30% all of a sudden may be conservative?
I think you're right. Go ahead.
Oh, sorry. Yeah, I think we said three months ago that we were baking in our guidance on margin in case of further disruptions in the supply chain. You know, the thing that we don't wanna, we never want to alter our margin guidance and shipping to customers. Right? Maintaining our continuity of supply. You know, there may be some upside there, but what we've said is we don't really want it built into models because we retain the right to hit the guidance, which means falling within that range if we need to keep shipping.
Got it. Thanks again, Angus. Anna, congrats again on the quarter. I'll pass it on.
Thanks.
Back over to Angus Pacala for any closing remarks.
No, thank you all for tuning in. We're really happy about how the year started, and we're looking forward to the growth that we're seeing in the business. Thank you all.
Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation.