Earnings Labs

Arbe Robotics Ltd. (ARBE)

Q4 2022 Earnings Call· Thu, Mar 2, 2023

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Transcript

Kobi Marenko

Management

Thank you everyone for joining us today. Welcome to Arbe’s Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2022 Financial Results Webcast. My name is Kobi Marenko and I am the Co-Founder and CEO of Arbe. I am very excited to share the developments made by Arbe in 2022, especially in Q4, where we have progress from the proof-of-concept phase to the production and commercial deployment stage. After my presentation, Karine Pinto-Flomenboim, Arbe’s CFO, will share a view of our financials and outlook. Next, Ram Machness, our Chief Business Officer, will discuss the market forecast and the business opportunities that we are pursuing. Finally, Noam Arkind, our CTO and my Co-Founder, will conclude the presentations and speak about Arbe’s latest innovations and our vision for the future. We value your input and questions. So we will reserve time for a questions-and-answer session. Please take a minute to review the Safe Harbor statement. Throughout the year, Arbe was dedicated to maturing a cutting-edge perception technology that significantly improves vehicle safety and accelerates the realization of Level 2+ advanced driver assistant vehicles. Our company’s progress has parallel the advancement of the vehicle market to Level 2+, which we anticipate will become the industry standard in the automotive by 2025. In 2022, we actively collaborated with leading automakers perception teams to ensure that our best innovations are designed into their groundbreaking revolution. We received clear indications that our Perception Radar technology will be a crucial enabler an integral component of Level 2+ as the mass market increasingly adopts autonomous systems at Level 2+, Arbe become a vital element of the overall solution with a cost-effective sensor. We have been securing global Tier 1 partnerships and commitments to accelerate the transition to advanced vehicle safety systems in the near future. As we look ahead, we remain on…

Karine Pinto-Flomenboim

Management

Thank you, Kobi, and hello, everyone. Let me review our financial results for the fourth quarter and the full year of 2022 in more detail. As Kobi said earlier, Arbe is a company in transition from development to production and our financial results in Q4 reflect this. As we progress with our strategy, we are shifting our focus on to chips for production. As a result, we have decreased engineering sample sales during Q4, this transition will streamline our operations and provide cost savings as we work to adjust our processes and ramp up production accordingly. We believe that these decisions will enable us to better serve our customers and drive innovation forward. Total revenue for the first quarter was $0.15 million, compared to $0.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2021. For the full year of 2022, total revenue was $3.5 million within our guidance and an increase of 56%, compared to $2.2 million in 2021. Gross margin held Q4 -- held negative gross margin of 45.8%, compared to a positive gross margin of 37.7% in Q4 2021. This negative margin is another response to our reduced quarterly revenue as we transition to mass production. Gross margin for the full year of 2022 increased to 63.5%, compared to 36% in 2021. 2022 gross margin improvement was driven mainly by economy of scale, revenue mix and lower cost per unit as we progress towards production. Moving on to expenses. In Q4 2022, we reported total operating expenses of $14 million, compared to $14.2 million in Q4 2021. Decrease in our pre-production related costs and favorable impact of foreign currency exchange rates were offset by an increase in labor cost and noncash share-based compensation expenses. Operating expenses for the full year totaled to $50 million, compared to $34.1 million in 2021.…

Ram Machness

Management

Thank you, Karine. I am Ram Machness, and I am the Chief Business Officer at Arbe. We would like to provide you some outlook for 2023 and summarize 2022. We will talk a bit about the market trends that we have seen in 2022. We will talk about -- a bit about our business model, about what’s next, where we see the main trends and where we see our product winning in the market. So when we look at the market and the trends for 2022, we see a lot of changes in the autonomous driving arena. We saw a lot of buzz around the autonomous driving, but we see that the whole solution providing a full autonomous driving. This is a trend that is diminishing and we are looking at trends of features and scenarios being developed. So instead of providing a full solution that is working in any scenarios, in any road conditions, in any weather conditions and it’s fully unsupervised. We are seeing the trend of developing smaller features, developing capabilities that are more for specific scenarios that are working in specific conditions and are sometimes supervised and sometimes even just alerting the driver for something that is happening around it. So if, for example, in the past, we wanted to the car to drive all around, all the time, now we are talking about scenarios with a very clear entry and exit criteria. For example, when I am driving -- doing -- might drive in a highway or in a traffic jam, in specific weather condition, if it’s day light or if it’s night or a fog and it can be partially supervised by the driver, or for example, just alerting the driver about something dangerous that is about to happen. So the focus of the…

Noam Arkind

Management

Thank you, Ram. Hello, everybody, and I am Noam. I am the Co-Founder and the CTO at Arbe. Today, I am going to show you our technology. So radar in general is the perfect sensor of automotive. We all know that it has great features. It’s active in the day and night. It’s not affected by weather conditions. It’s a very sensitive. It can see targets very far away. It has a high refresh rate. And it directly measures four dimensions azimuthalization [ph] range doppler and it’s extremely reliable and affordable. And this is why this technology was introduced a long time ago into the automotive industry and it’s already very mature with over 20 years into the industry. Now what we do at Arbe, we took this technology and brought it to the edge in terms of performance. So the technology that Arbe provides is the best radar that is possible within the limit of the automotive industry. So we achieved -- and we achieved this using massive MIMO concept and this means that we have a lot of channels inside the radar that we can process, we can use them in process. So our main radar is what we use for -- what we aim for the front of the car and the back some -- in some of applications, we use 48 transmitters and 48 receive channels. And we also have a version which is scaled down of that version, which we aim for the size of the radar, which is 24 transmitters and 12 receivers. Now in radar, channels -- number of channels means performance. It’s really equivalent. So you can think about it like the equivalent of camera pixels. So imagine that you get a camera with 2,000 pixels and you want to compare it…

A - Kobi Marenko

Management

Now we will be happy to take your questions. First question will come from the analyst from Gary Mobley of Wells Fargo. Hi, Gary?

Gary Mobley

Management

Hey, guys. Thank you for taking my question. I want to pick up where you just left off in your prepared remarks and talk about the future architecture in the competitive environment. Do you see a situation where automotive OEMs like Tesla, for example, have -- may have the capability to develop high definition radar solutions in your mind? And do you see a path towards maybe some of what your competition is doing in that is centralizing, using camera image, sensing -- a data sense in the centralized processor or [inaudible] control or do you still secure in terms of edge processing into radar specifically?

Kobi Marenko

Management

So thank you for these questions. So we believe that the amount of data that is generated from a 4D high-resolution Imaging Radar cannot be processed not on the edge. Just to take this data, the theoretical data of 1 tera and move it to the central compute is unrealistic. The same with OEMs that will develop their own chipset. This doesn’t make sense and there’s no economic scale of that. We are working -- we have our own processor. We believe that our core IPs, our process and our next generation of the processor. We will give to the OEMs much better abilities to develop their own stack, their own kind of radar on top of it, and of course, to the Tier 1s, but we don’t see the OEMs -- we haven’t heard even from one OEM that they want to develop their own chipset. They might have -- they might want to go directly to the Tier 2 for making sure that the supply will be there, but not for development.

Gary Mobley

Management

Thank you.

Karine Pinto-Flomenboim

Management

Now we will take questions from Josh from Cowen.

Kobi Marenko

Management

Hi, Josh.

Josh Buchalter

Management

Yeah. Sorry and thank you for taking my question. I appreciate all the fact you made there, but I just want to ask for financials really comparative the original expectations, 2023 is coming in materially softer than your original forecast. I think 2023 was originally driven by ramps of Chinese customers and also robotaxi, can you speak to what’s driving the softer growth outlook versus original expectations and then, in fact, more importantly, [inaudible]?

Kobi Marenko

Management

So basically as we see it, we are in a shift of around three quarters from our original plan two years ago. This shift was caused mainly by the supply chain problems that slowed down our production time line from one end and from the other end it also slowed down the decisions in -- on the OEM side of it. Also, robotaxis and full autonomous driving is slower than expected and forecasting that we got from our customers two quarters ago or even one quarter ago, basically slowing down. But I think that the good news is that, the supply chain issue problem is behind us and behind our customers and China is trying to close the gap rapidly. And we believe that in 2024, we are going to be able to be more or less where we wanted to be before and to close this gap and to narrow the gap, and of course, in 2025 and 2026 as well. We already have a preliminary order for end of 2023, early 2024. And this is just the first order that is around $30 million worth and we believe that in the next coming two quarters, we will have a few more orders that will give -- will build us the 2024 forecast and the 2024 expected revenues.

Karine Pinto-Flomenboim

Management

To add to Kobi, Josh, it’s a little bit also goes together with the language that we wrote. That was -- we wanted to focus this coming quarters on serial production and to aim our revenue to that pace, which will actually give us a more potential reoccurring revenue in the future and to increase our customer base more solidly and to have the customer as we see it now that they endorse our technology.

Josh Buchalter

Management

I will take that offline [inaudible].

Kobi Marenko

Management

Hi, Matthew.

Matthew Galinko

Management

Hello. Can you give -- can you just touch on the OEM repositioning [inaudible] I think in your presentation slide, the OEMs is now are evolving customer stack again supporting and become more comfortable over time. So there [inaudible] is the idea in the sensor the primary sensors or [inaudible] regard and camera we expected to [inaudible]?

Kobi Marenko

Management

Yeah. So I think this is a great question. The -- what we see from the OEMs is a very strong desire to make their hardware ready for the features coming with the autonomous driving Level 2+ going towards Level 3 and make sure that their hardware is capable of processing and being able to sense the environment, and for that, you need the Imaging Radar as an independent sensor compared to the camera. So you have the camera, you will always have the camera and in order to have a safe features, or for example, driving in the highway, driving in a traffic jam, you need another independent source of image, and for that, you must have a high-quality, high-definition Imaging Radar, like the one that we are providing the chipset for.

Matthew Galinko

Management

Okay. If I could just ask a quick follow-up. You mentioned 12 of the top 15 automakers you have been engaged with, for the others engage with advance radar competitors or are they radar skeptics at this point or why isn’t 15 of the top 15 you have?

Kobi Marenko

Management

Yes. So the country as they are doing 4 by 3, 6 by 8, but you are right that some of the basic Imaging Radar are going towards the 12 by 16, but this doesn’t give enough information for the perception stack to really understand the image around us. And only when you go to the 48 by 48 or the higher -- much higher channel count, like also some of our competitors announced that 2,300 channels and few thousands of channels, only then you really get the information that the perception team needs in order to drive safely with those features.

Ram Machness

Management

But to answer the question, we believe that the other three are working with the image -- with the low-end Imaging Radar, like, we call it.

Matthew Galinko

Management

Thank you.

Kobi Marenko

Management

Jaime?

Jaime Perez

Management

Hi. Good day, everybody. Thanks for taking my question. I have more of a technical question. Announced presentation, you mentioned that, you have multiple frequency, is that multiple frequencies against other radar systems or frequencies that are image from other components. So just curious on how that progressing?

Kobi Marenko

Management

The multiple frequencies, yes, it’s for making sure that we want to be interfered with other radars and also with our radars, because sometimes there is more than one radar per car. So that is -- we are changing the frequency of, hoping on the frequency in order to make sure that we are all -- that all of the environment can live together without interfering each other.

Jaime Perez

Management

Okay. And my second follow-up is more of a financial question. I know you mentioned you are going to go into production in the fourth quarter. What are the components of revenues this year? Is it going to be valuation sales or testing sales?

Karine Pinto-Flomenboim

Management

So we are focusing on, of course, as I said, chipset production, but it will be back-end loaded towards the end of the year. During the year, we will still have small amounts of also non-automotive -- small amount of chipsets of non-automotive customers and also additional small volumes for our known customers.

Kobi Marenko

Management

But the major part is the production of our chips and the first…

Karine Pinto-Flomenboim

Management

Which is -- yeah.

Kobi Marenko

Management

… production chips that we have…

Karine Pinto-Flomenboim

Management

Plan…

Kobi Marenko

Management

… preliminary order for that.

Jaime Perez

Management

Oh! Okay. That’s all the questions I have for now. Thanks.

Karine Pinto-Flomenboim

Management

Thank you, Jaime.

Kobi Marenko

Management

Thank you. Okay. We will have some more questions from the audience.

Karine Pinto-Flomenboim

Management

Audience. Yeah. How is our bid different or complementary to Mobileye?

Ram Machness

Management

So both Arbe and Mobileye announced that the direction is for high channel count radars based on what the technology is called FMCW, so in that sense, we are very similar, trying to solve the problem of having a good sensing for perception. Arbe is something -- the chipset right now Arbe is going to be in production this year in the fourth quarter and that’s ahead of the competition. We are working already today with the four Tier 1s that we already announced and in pipe with others as well, as well as other OEMs that are working right now to integrate this technology into their vehicles.

Kobi Marenko

Management

Next question.

Karine Pinto-Flomenboim

Management

Next question from Billy [ph]. How close is the next best competitor to your product performance levels?

Ram Machness

Management

So if we put aside the very high channel count like what Mobileye is doing and Arbe is doing, the next one are the 12 by 16 that are basic Imaging Radar. They are far behind in terms of the channel counts. It’s 192 channels versus 2,300, it is 10x factor comparing these two kind of solutions and the results are accordingly. So the level of details, the level of false alarms that will cause phantom braking the level of misdetection that you get with the low channel count is dramatically higher and the performance that you are getting with the Perception Radar is dramatically higher and better and required to get an image of the surrounding, of the stationery objects of defining and finding the obstacles around you.

Kobi Marenko

Management

Just to add to what Ram said, basically we are providing the same performance -- the 10x more performance, but on the same price as our next best radar. Next?

Karine Pinto-Flomenboim

Management

Several investors had questions. What is the Tesla buzz all about?

Ram Machness

Management

So we can only refer to OEMs that allowed us to say their names, but we are hearing a lot of requirements and global trend of OEMs going into Imaging Radar and Perception Radars with the high channel count and that’s across about -- across the market, across most of the OEMs today.

Karine Pinto-Flomenboim

Management

Thank you. Question from Robert. Are other Chinese EV manufacturers testing using your solutions?

Ram Machness

Management

Yes. So the answer is absolutely yes. There are others that are right now working to integrate radars based on our chipset into their solutions, their vehicles.

Karine Pinto-Flomenboim

Management

Last question. Kobi, what keeps you up at night?

Kobi Marenko

Management

So, of course, except of the fact that we are on a final days of where, sorry, final months of production, what really keeps me up at night is how we are staying motivated for innovation, making sure that side-by-side with taking those chips to production, supporting our customers, generating hundreds of millions of dollars from the current product, we are still doing the innovation like an early-stage start-up with our next-generation product.

Kobi Marenko

Management

Okay, we are grateful for your participation today and we appreciate your ongoing support as we strive to push the boundaries of innovation in the industry and become the leader in Level 2+ and Level 3 advanced perception. To our valued employees and partners, we extend our sincerest thanks to your commitment to Arbe. It is your hard work and dedication that propels us forward to our goals. We are excited about the opportunities that lies ahead and we are committed to keeping you updated on our progress. Should you have any questions or want to discuss potential collaborations, please do not hesitate to reach us at investors@arbe.com or visit our website to schedule a meeting. We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you, all.

Karine Pinto-Flomenboim

Management

Thank you.