Greg Cameron
Analyst · Wells Fargo. Michael, your line is now open, if you'd like to proceed with your question
Thanks, K. R. This year was indeed about execution. And we are in an excellent position to achieve the kind of near and long-term growth that will cement our position as a leader in the energy industry. Similar to prior quarters, we've included in our financial performance in our earnings release, and posted additional information in our supplemental financial package to our corporate web page. For this quarter, in addition to our usual financial package, we've included a few slides on our updated growth projections. I'm excited to share we had another record year for revenue and acceptances. Our momentum is accelerating. Our backlog is up nearly 100% year-over-year, our pipeline is stronger than it's ever been. We now have more acceptances in a single quarter than we had in four quarters just a few years ago and our long-term growth rates are accelerating. Now with that as context, let me highlight our key accomplishments for the fourth quarter in 2021. Our record acceptances in revenue were driven by strong deliveries in both South Korea and the United States. In the fourth quarter, we recorded 735 acceptances, which brought our total year to 1879 units, an increase of nearly 42% versus the prior-year. As K.R. discussed, we've benefited from our accomplishments with our EPC and financing partners to simplify our business model by transferring ownership of the systems earlier, thereby improving the predictability of our installation timing and improving our margins. These acceptances deliver total revenue of approximately $340 million in the fourth quarter, up roughly 36% versus the fourth quarter 2020 and over $970 million for the total year up more than 22% versus 2021. It was at the high end of the range that we provided on our third quarter earnings call and was made possible by the outstanding effort of our supply chain and production teams finding new ways to exceed their promise capacity. Overall non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP operating income and CFOA are consistent with our previous guidance as we continue to navigate the global supply chain pressures. Like other companies with similar supply chains, we continue to see availability and price pressure on some components and logistics. While we've not yet seen a significant improvement, we do feel these issues are stabilizing and our teams have adapted well to operating in this environment. Moving on to our bookings and backlog performance. Our strong year positions Bloom well into the future. Based on our performance in the United States and South Korea, we have created a product backlog of approximately $2.4 billion that we will accept over the next three years. When combined with our service contracts that will be fulfilled over the next 15 years. We have a total backlog of $8.5 billion, nearly two times where we finished last year. We also have the strongest pipeline in Bloom history. We believe the commercial momentum we continue to build provides the visibility, confidence to meet our growth goals. Simply put, we have never been this well positioned as a company. And it's a testament to our entire organization. Our cash balances reached $615 million, with $396 million in unrestricted cash. And as expected, we closed the first tranche of the SK Ecoplant equity investment for $255 million in December. As we look forward, we expect our growth to continue with acceptance is expected to increase 27% to 32% for 2022. We will be limited in our capacity in first half of the year, as we replenish our inventories and tour our new Fremont facility. In the first half of 2022, I would expect revenue to be roughly flat to 2021. As capacity is added, second half acceptances should increase product and service revenue growth to around 27% for the total year. We continue our strategic shift away from performing installations by leveraging third-party EPC providers. As a result, our installation revenue which has been roughly flat over the past two years will be about 50% lower than the prior-years. While this reduces total revenue by roughly $50 million versus prior-year, this shift allows us in most cases to transfer ownership at product delivery, allowing us to focus resources on sales and marketing, manufacturing, operating efficiencies, and Research and Development Innovation. While we are planning for the supply chain environment to remain challenge through much of 2022, we're targeting to reduce our product costs by 10% versus prior-year. We expect to leverage our volume increases with the supply chain to reduce material costs 6% to 8% further automate our labor processes for productivity and see a path for logistic costs beginning normalize in the second half of 2022. While there is risk in achieving this cost down in the current environment, we believe that we need to challenge ourselves to return to our 10% to 15% per annum cost reduction targets. Besides the opportunity, this 10% cost down equates to roughly five points of non-GAAP gross margins and $60 million of operating profit. We're creating executable plans to achieve these targets and we'll update each quarter on our progress. Our reducing margin impact from installations and executing on product costs down, we expect our non-GAAP gross margins to expand two points to around 24% and our non-GAAP operating margins to improve five plus points as we achieve additional operating leverage. As we discussed last earnings call, we plan to revisit our growth goals based on our current performance and expectations from our technology roadmap. Before we speak about the future to provide some context, I thought it was worth reviewing what Bloom has achieved since going public in 2018. Our revenue growth since our last full-year prior to the IPO has seen a compounded annual growth rate of 28% for the total business. Over the same period, our product and service revenue grew 36% as we do less installations going forward, we will be highlighting our product and service revenue as the more meaningful measure of future growth. Over the same period by constantly reducing our costs, we've expanded our non-GAAP gross margins 24 points to approximately 22%. To support our growth targets, we require additional staff manufacturing capacity to meet our revenue and service needs. We manufacture our stacks and columns in California and assemble our servers in Newark, Delaware. We have up to two gigawatts of annual assembly capacity. But we're limited to roughly 280 megawatts of annual stack manufacturing capacity. Last year we leased 164,000 square foot facility in Fremont, California, that will provide a gigawatt of capacity when fully utilized. We commenced operations in this facility last month, and expect to invest $150 million in new tooling over the course of 2022. This facility can support both Bloom 5.0 and 7.5 platforms. While there will be a limited increase in capacity in the first half of 2022, we expect to have added nearly 300 megawatts of stack capacity by year-end. We expect to be at the one gigawatt of capacity by year-end 2023. It's important to remember that these investments are incredibly attractive and provide a less than one year payback and fully utilized. To ensure we're not capacity constrained in the future, we've already begun to evaluate expansion opportunities in new locations that can best support our growth. Like many companies experience this level of growth, we have disciplined investment practices that maximize the value of our current assets, while planning future investments. One additional point on capacity, we usually describe capacity on a fuel cell basis, but the stack is common supported by fuel cell or the electrolyzer, when used as an electrolyzer the power rating is more than two times that of the fuel cell. As such, our capacity is over doubled and described on an electrolyzer basis, meaning the 580 megawatts of capacity that we are targeting for year-end 2022 will be roughly 1.4 gigawatts that were completely allocated to electrolyzers. This is a significant benefit of a common platform as we can invest in capacity to meet the demand with a reduced risk of underutilized assets if individual markets do not evolve as expected. In advance of our May 2022 Investor Conference, I want to preview an update to our long-term revenue guidance. We expect our medium and long-term growth to accelerate based upon the many industry and Bloom specific tailwinds, they're giving us a better line of sight into our future performance. Having now reached the $1 billion threshold in 2021, we see revenues in five years in the range of $4 billion to $5 billion and in 10 years in the range of $15 billion to $20 billion. We built these projections from both industry research, and our own product segment models. While we were confident in our assumptions, these forecasts may evolve as markets mature. Referring to the forecasted growth rate slide in the deck, let me start with our fuel cell or power generation business. We remain confident our ability to continue to grow this business at the 25% to 30% rate with improving margins and cash flow. The demand for our resilient always-on Energy Server remains strong as customer power needs increase and expand the geographies in which we sell. Our fuel flexibility is unique to meet the customer's needs today, while providing the option to adapt to renewable fuels and hydrogen as they become commercially available. The Bloom electrolyzer is the most efficient on the market, and we see a market that will grow sharply. To better quantify the future revenue opportunity, we've analyzed the IEA data to build a global electrolyzer market view. Based upon our electrolyzer efficiency benefits and cost reductions, we're projecting a market share of roughly 20% by 2030. In the graph, the electrolyzer represents over 80% of the assumed revenue for our decarbonizing technologies. While we are excited about our electrolyzer opportunity, we know the world cannot solely depend on hydrogen and intermittent renewables during the energy transition. Our Energy Server is incredibly efficient with natural gas and since we do not combust our exhausted the high concentration of CO2, we believe there's an opportunity to partner with others in the industry to leverage the value of this CO2, either in sequestration or utilization to offset the cost of the electricity. With carbon capture, we've assumed that this will both facilitate opportunities in our traditional fuel cell business, as well as utility scale opportunities that we've captured under decarbonizing technologies. We believe that this market should grow based on existing and proposed incentives over the next decade. To build our forecasts, we've assumed a few utility scale projects coming online starting in 2025, with many of the larger scale carbon capture projects anticipated later in the decade. Due to our unique technology, we believe we would avoid many of the pitfalls of traditional carbon capture projects, and we would see an acceleration in the adoption of new power projects. As we move into the back half of this decade, we should begin to see meaningful revenue from our marine application. We continue to meet our technical milestones, attract new partners, and receive broad industry interests across cargo, tanker, cruise ships and ferries. We based our growth projections on the forecast of new LNG fueled chips that could reach roughly 1000 builds by the year 2030. I'd note this assumption does not yet include a retrofit option for existing LNG fueled ships. We believe that as this business scales, it could deliver $1 billion to $2 billion per year by 2031, including these growth opportunities that rely on the same proven fuel cell platform, we are increasing our targeted growth rate to 30% to 35%, compounded annually over the next 10 years. In summary, Bloom had an incredibly strong 2021 by focusing on execution. Our operating and financial performance was strong. As we move into 2022, we have incredible momentum and are taking actions to maintain this growth. We are extremely excited about our future. We believe we're uniquely positioned as we have both demonstrated performance, while providing robust and diversified opportunities for growth. We are unique as our Server platform allows us to pursue multiple opportunities from a single supply chain, and manufacturing capability. The company is now at an inflection point. We have the product, team, strategy and track record to demonstrate that we can execute on our growth plans. With that, operator, let's open up the line for questions.