Greetings, everyone. I'm Alice here at Sidoti. Our first presentation of the day is REE Automotive, ticker REE. For those who are not familiar with the company, REE specializes in advanced automotive technologies, focusing on electric and autonomous vehicles, largely across vehicle classes, but mostly in the Class 1 through Class 6 range. We are fortunate to have with us Daniel Barel. Following the presentation, there will be time for questions and answers. If you have a question, please put it in the Q&A icon, and I'll present it to Dan. With that, thanks for being here today. The floor is yours.
Thank you for having me and hello, everybody, and thank you for joining us today. I would love to share a little bit about REE and our story with you today, and I look forward to your question at the end. First and foremost, REE and about us, REE is a tech company. What we do is we develop software-defined vehicles, as probably some of you know, as SDVs. We are the first to actually reach a full certification of full-by-wire vehicles on the road. Our vehicles are running today in America, licensed to go on road, which is a big, big milestone for SDV companies.
For those of you who are new to software-defined vehicles and what does it mean, it basically means that instead of mechanical connection that used to be driving the vehicle, like a steering rod connecting between the steering wheel and the wheels themselves, and so on and so forth, now vehicles are being built with software in mind, where an array of computers, ECUs, are managing the vehicle far better, safer, and more operational efficient than traditionally. In order to demonstrate that, I'll share with you a quick video on how REE architecture is actually built. So REE is a leader in SDV technologies, software-defined vehicles. We've been winning awards and recognitions over the past few years for innovation and leadership. The last one, a couple of weeks ago at the CES 2025, when we won the most innovative automotive company for 2025.
We've been seeing a very strong demand from the market in recent quarters, especially last quarter, as you can see in the hockey stick truck reservations that we are been reporting. We see very strong demand for our products with both fleets in the U.S. and also other auto manufacturers that are looking for SDVs, we'll talk about later. As part of being a leader in what we do, we have a different approach, where we have different tactics into going to market, where we are horizontally integrated as opposed to being vertically integrated and requiring significant resources and CapEx and investments. We decided to go with a horizontal approach, where we are collaborating, we're competing and not competing.
And a good example of that is that our entire supply chain, meaning our ability to produce and source, is done together with a very good and important partner of ours called Motherson. They're a very large global T1 who have more than 400 plants across 44 countries. And by allocating the supply chain management to them, we're able to tap economies of scale from day one, which is very, very important for the beginning of production. And the assembly itself is done by Roush, which is about more than 40 years of experience in America building vehicles for major players. By doing that, we're able to remain CapEx light and investment light, but drive the best product to have you in the market. We also have the largest service network of its kind in America.
We're covering more than 80 locations across America through a very strong and unique network of dealerships that can service our vehicles on the go for fleets, which is super important, of course. Examples of customers are the likes of Penske and U-Haul. To Penske, we are delivering, and we'll talk about it a little bit later, we're delivering full trucks, which are called P7-C, and to U-Haul, we're delivering a P7-S, which is just a chassis for them to complete the body and others.
In addition to that, because of our advanced capabilities in software-defined vehicles and by-wire, we are running a couple of autonomous programs, such as, for example, our partnership with Airbus, which is the first-ever Level 4 autonomous drive on tarmac in a major airport, in that case, Charles de Gaulle, where Airbus are driving autonomously our trucks, selecting us because of our ability to meet not only automotive safety standards, but actually aviation safety standards. In a nutshell, software-defined vehicles is a technology that everybody wants. Most fleets on the planet are looking to get access to software-defined vehicles, and most OEMs are looking to do that as well, because it just yields much better efficiencies in terms of performance, cost, time to market, and of course, upgradability and future-proofing as the vehicle is being upgraded over time. Our vehicles are advanced software-defined. They have full by-wire systems.
They are running on an array of six high-performance ECUs in what we call a zonal architecture that allows us to be very functional, safe, which is very important. We comply with ISO 26262 ASIL D level, which is the highest level today. And the vehicles have been certified for FMVSS, EPA, and CARB in America. And that's the fruits of 11 years of development and more than 180 patents. Of course, everything is cyber-protected from end to end. And we are very, very happy to say that those benefits are being perceived very warmly in the market. I'll share with you now another video of how the real trucks actually look like from the production to the road.
So being a leader in software-defined vehicles and having technology that almost everybody wants is a very interesting opportunity in today's market, where, according to Morgan Stanley Research, if today we have about 3% or more SDV share in automotive production, it is expected to grow to around 90%, 9-0, towards 2029, and most automakers around the world are seeking to get access to software-defined vehicles because of the efficiencies and advantages it yields, and we are engaging with a few of them, quite a few of them, who are interested in incorporating our technology, our software-defined vehicles technology, and the REEcorner technology into their lineup. Our go-to-market approach is very unique as well, where our motto is that we complement. We do not compete, so on one hand, on the right-hand side, we are a full-fledged automaker.
We have all the capabilities to put vehicles on the road, certify them, and sell them through our dealers to fleets, of course. We can either sell a full vehicle like on the right-hand side or just a platform powered by REE full-by-wire platform for other outfitters to fit. We can also go in second from the left to the REEcorner level, where we can provide REEcorners, which is essentially the by-wire technology and the software-defined technology components to other auto manufacturers, car manufacturers. We can either use our available designs, or we can create customized designs for them for multiple vehicle categories, from passenger vehicles to commercial vehicles, small or large. And last but not least, of course, for all of those, this is the software licensing stream, which is, of course, the base stream of us being a technology company. How do we do that?
That's really important in our approach. We do that, again, through collaborations. So we design and engineer ourselves. We have, as I said, close to 200 patents, 11 years of R&D. We're the first one to ever certify a full-by-wire vehicle in America. So technology innovation, software development, vehicle design, engineering, certification, et cetera, is done by REE. That's really important. But although we design and engineer, we do not produce, and we do not source. We leave this to our very close partner, Motherson, who is a very big player as well. Motherson is a major T1 with close to $20 billion of revenue, 400+ facilities in 44 countries across the world, close to 200,000 employees. They manage our entire supply chain.
It allows our customers the comfort of stability and quality, both for the fleets who order trucks from us and also to other auto manufacturers that are very familiar with Motherson, and some of them, most of them are actually working with Motherson to be able to source components directly from Motherson, relying on their capabilities and known high quality of products. When it comes to assembling our own trucks and selling our own trucks or platforms, chassis, we do the assembly at Roush as a scalable and CapEx light contract manufacturer. Roush is about more than 40 years of experience, operates in 30+ countries. They're very well known in America and globally for their contract manufacturing capabilities, and we are assembling our trucks together with them in Detroit.
That approach basically allows us to be very CapEx light, very asset light, and concentrate on the core of who we are, which is a tech company. That is a very unique approach in today's market, where we've seen some of the other players in the market trying to be new OEMs requiring billions, if not tens of billions of dollars in order to create the supply chain, the stability, the manufacturing footprint, so on and so forth. That's quite a heavy task, where our approach of collaborating, complementing, not competing, is proving itself as we are growing and ramping. It's also important to mention that in commercial vehicles, it's very important to allow and offer aftermarket service and support, especially to fleets like Penske, U-Haul, UPS, and others.
And the way to do that is that we've established one of the largest dealer networks of its kind in America, built out of a very large number of premium dealers that have been very carefully chosen by us to join our REE dealership network. And they have multiple locations across America, ramping up to approximately 80 locations, where each of our customers can come in, get their vehicle serviced. It's also a point of sales. And that allows us for even improved efficiencies because our dealers are basically our sales arms. So it reduces our customer acquisition costs significantly because in commercial vehicles, the majority of the fleets are actually being managed by dealers for years. And we are building on this relationship with dealers and fleets, where our dealers are producing the pipeline for us. They're doing the customer demos and, of course, transaction to vehicles.
Also, very importantly, there are the service network because all of them are capable of providing service, and they've been trained and certified to provide a very high level of REE service to all of our customers. At the bottom, you can see a few examples of on the road, different types of vehicles that we have in America, different configurations from box trucks to high floor box trucks to Kei vans and others. So basically, in 2024, we've put some milestones in front of our investors, and we've met them all from reaching U.S. certification in January, setting up a partnership with Motherson in September, and seeing a very big ramp in reservations in December, and, of course, very importantly, start of production in December. For those of you who have been following us, you are familiar with those milestones and how we've met them.
For those of you, and those of you who are new to the story, what we want to accomplish in 2025 is for the first half of this year, we want to start seeing first deliveries from the production line for the first fleets. Then once we see that the production is stable and the ramp-up is stable and the service is stable and so on and so forth, we'll start ramping it up, the production, and producing more and more trucks in order to reach the bill of material break-even in just the low hundreds of trucks, which we believe significantly de-risk our business case being able to reach that break-even point in the low hundreds of vehicles. Going on to 2026 and onwards, we want to make sure that we get to EBITDA break-even in just the low thousands of vehicles.
We want to see more OEM partnerships coming up utilizing our tech, and, of course, the growing commercialization of our autonomous program collaboration built on our technology. With that, I want to thank you for the time and open it up for any questions you may have.
Thank you, Dan. Anybody has a question, please type it in the Q&A box, and I'll present it to management. I'd like to start off a little bit about some background here for people who are not familiar with the company. Can you talk a little bit about the competitive landscape, who are the key competitors, and how you differentiate yourself?
Of course, so first and foremost, we try to cooperate, not to compete. So we can actually, although we are an auto manufacturer, we actually can work with any other auto manufacturer as well.
Think about us as the same model as, I would say, NVIDIA, where most of the AI programs in the world need to run on NVIDIA chips or back in the day, what used to be called Intel Inside for computers, so the whole idea is that our trucks, the P7 line that's currently on the market, operates at a Class 4 and 5, medium-duty segment in America, where in this class, there is a relatively low number of competitors, and we are collaborating with other auto manufacturers, other OEMs on smaller vehicles, Class 1 to 3, and higher vehicles, 6 to 8.
Got it. Question about how dependent is your revenue on your leading customers, including Penske and U-Haul?
So that's a really good question. Thank you. We have a very diverse customer base, so our customer base is about around 30 customers.
We are not dependent on a specific customer per se. We take very big pride in the fact that we have a relatively large and diverse customer base.
Fair enough. As you mentioned earlier, can you speak about your collaboration with Motherson and how this partnership aligns with REE's broader production and market expansion goals?
Yes. Our collaboration with Motherson, who recently also made an investment in the company and took 19%, 19% ownership of the company, joins our board, is very important for us because it allows us economies of scale. One of the biggest challenges of a new player in automotive is how do you actually reach equilibrium? How do you reach bill of materials break-even? How do you produce at scale? How do you scale that up? Because on one hand, it requires massive upfront investment on production line and capacity.
And second, your bargaining power is relatively low when you're starting up. But when we're outsourcing it, we're collaborating on that with Motherson. And Motherson are running and managing our entire supply chain. So for some parts, Motherson can make it. And whatever Motherson can't make, they can buy. But they buy it on our behalf. So our purchasing power is much stronger. Our ability to scale based on Motherson's pipeline is very big. The footprint of more than 400 plants across the world gives us a global footprint from day one, scalability and redundancy in terms of suppliers and sourcing. And I think this is something that is very, very unique to REE, where we have basically a powerhouse in our corner, allowing us to scale and ensure quality and efficiency from the first truck.
It's good to have.
Along those lines, so what's the conversion timeline from reservations to sales contracts?
So what we have seen, that's a very good point, is that since we have announced the collaboration with Motherson, we have seen more customers interested in reserving multi-year priority production. So it's not just giving us a few purchase orders. They actually want to look at a multi-year reservation view in order to ensure supply. And this is what usually the big companies deal with, right? The big OEMs, as customers reserve multi-year. So what we're doing now is that we see our reservation book and growing, growing very fast. I mean, last quarter, we reported 230% growth in our reservation. And what we're doing now is we're looking to prioritize the first deliveries. And we want to prioritize the deliveries mainly across those customers who are actually ready to receive EVs, right?
Because we want to make sure that their infrastructure is there, the charging is there, the training is there, etc. So our vehicles would actually be put to work. So we are in very close contact with our customers and helping them to evaluate the readiness level towards adaptation of EVs. Some would start in certain numbers. Some will start with other numbers in terms of the ramp-up. It depends, of course, on who they are, what is their EV strategy, etc. But I think that at this point, we are looking at our reservation at this point is higher than our capacity for the next year or so.
Understood. Question about your medium-term expectations on software licensing revenue. Could this account for 50% of total revenues by 2027?
Oh, wow. That's a good question. And unfortunately, it's too early to tell.
So when we sell a vehicle, there is software licensing. Having said that, when we work with other OEMs, part of the partnership is actually software licensing. Now, naturally, we make higher margins on software than on full production of the vehicle, right? Because you naturally make less margins on seats and mirrors as an OEM. So I think that we want to see more and more customers buying data from us, whether it's licensing agreements or whether it's usage agreement per data package or data size. But all in all, I think for investors, you want to look out for the first and the follow-on agreement that hopefully we will have soon that will be software or data revenue streams, right? Pure software and revenue.
Whether it will get to 50% by 2027, let's put some trucks on the road, and then we'll be able to get more clarity on that.
Another question about your plans as far as expanding the dealer network beyond North America.
These are good questions today. Thank you. The answer is not now. I think it's really, really important, and we've been doing this for the past 11 years and ever since we went public also. We are very strong believers in focus. We need to make sure we focus. We need to make sure that we don't juggle too many balls and drop a few. So we want to concentrate on North America now. We've just started.
We want to make sure that as we ramp up production and as we deliver more and more trucks, we want to make sure that our service network in America operates at the levels we expect, and it's a learning curve, right? Because as we would ramp up, there'll be more pressure on them and so on and so forth, and that's good. That's natural, and I want to make sure that we give our customers, the fleets, the absolute best service, best-in-class service and after-sales support before we look at other markets, so I would look at maybe expanding, if it would make sense, the network further in North America before moving into other territories.
Question about do you only work with electric vehicles or gas-powered vehicles also, and how do you see the EV market growing in the future,
So our approach to that is very clear.
We are completely power agnostic. For us, it doesn't matter where the power comes from. We have multiple programs with other OEMs around multiple power sources. We ourselves being a producer in that aspect and not a collaborator with other OEMs. If it's our vehicles, they will only be electric. But with other OEMs, we're working on multiple power sources. Because if you think about the fact that it's software-defined, does not mean it has to be a battery EV. It can be other power sources.
Makes sense to me. And does that minimize the impact of the ending of the EV mandates and tax credits?
I must say that, and I think I've said it before multiple times, when we work with the large fleets in America and in the world, they tend not to factor in incentives in the business case.
What I mean is if you want to win business with the big fleets, the business case needs to hold without incentives because they can't factor in incentives because, as you just mentioned, they can come and go. And the relationship with the big fleets is a multi-year. On average, it's about 10 years on average for a truck. And therefore, we believe our business case is very compelling. Our TCO, our total cost of ownership, is very compelling for those fleets even without those incentives.
Can you talk a little bit about the cash burn you expect this year and how much capital you'll need to reach cash flow break-even?
So we gave clarity on that in the last earnings call, and I welcome all the investors to listen to our CFO speaking on that very clearly and openly at the last earnings call.
I think we're in a good place in terms of funding. We ended up last quarter with $88 million on the balance sheet. We run a very tight and CapEx-light ship or truck, pun intended, and I think that going forward, we continue to see a surge in demand. And the question is, how do we want to address it? If the demand continues to grow, would we want to scale up the production? Do we want to ramp up slower? These are decisions we would be taking and, of course, communicating to the market as we go, but I think, and we said in the last earnings call, we feel very optimistic as we look at 2025 and where we stand on the business side and on the financial side.
Last question from the audience.
I know we didn't get to all of them, everybody, and for that, I apologize. But in terms of your backlog of reservations in 2025, you just touched on the stamp. How do you expect 2025 to compare to, say, 2024 as far as new bookings are concerned?
Well, we just reported 230% growth in one quarter. And the quarter before that, it was double digits, right? So we're seeing an increase in demand for our trucks. We don't see an increase in the general EV market. That's everybody sees. And that's, I think, what's very interesting for investors to look at because there is a reason why the majority of the EV segment is experiencing some softness in demand, and we continue to report growth. And I believe the reason is that we got the right product and the right capabilities to produce, and the number speaks for itself.
So I feel optimistic on the demand side for 2025. And we want to continue to see our reservation number growth. Remember, to an extent, when you have the right product, customers want to make sure that they reserve priority capacity on a multi-year basis to ensure supply. And I think we've started to see that in the last quarter, and I think it's a good sign that people are feeling more confident that we will be their trusted partner over the years.
Well, again, I apologize for not getting to all the questions. If somebody does have a follow-up, feel free to reach out to REE or us, and we can direct you where to go. Dan, any closing comments?
No, actually, thank you, everybody, for taking the time and asking really interesting questions. I really enjoyed them. And I look forward to our next chat.
Okay.
Thank you, sir. Have a great day, and thank you for attending the Sidoti Conference.
Thank you.