Gary Vecchiarelli
Analyst · H.C. Wainwright & Co. Your line is now open
Thank you, Zach. Before I get into the financial results for the third quarter, I want to briefly discuss the company’s decision to divest its Energy business assets. As you are aware, it is our goal to become and maintain our status, the top five publicly traded Bitcoin miner. While the decision to exit the Energy business was not taken lightly, we are excited to move on to the next chapter in the evolution of CleanSpark and solely focus on the business of Bitcoin mining. With the decision to divest the Energy business, we have reclassified our Energy business assets, liabilities, revenues and expenses as discontinued operations, and in line with accounting guidance ASC 205. As required under the accounting rules, upon reclassification of its assets and liabilities, the company must adjust the reclassified items to fair market value. The company has assessed the Energy business assets and has impaired a substantial portion of its intangible assets as a result. The write-down of these assets reflects a conservative estimate as to their value. Actual proceeds from the sale of the assets may vary from this estimate, but we feel the write-down is reasonable given the macro environment and low valuations for similar businesses in the current market conditions. Intangible assets, such as goodwill, have been written down in some cases to zero, primarily because the company has reduced its expenses in the Energy business to only essential items and is not directing further working capital to the Energy business. This write-down is due to the expectation that cash flows from the Energy business are expected to decrease going forward, which does not support the carrying value of their respective intangible assets. I called this out specifically, because the reclassification to discontinued operations has a material impact on our financial statements. However, I want to point out that while it was a significant driver of our negative GAAP net income for the period, it is a non-cash item. Our reduction of expenses has also decreased our cash burn by over 80% in the Energy business. These efforts will allow us to further optimize our working capital and focus on maximizing return on investment on our Bitcoin mining business. That being said, our financial statements and reported metrics are now presented on a continuing operations basis and primarily represents the sole focus of our business Bitcoin mining. As you see on this slide, our revenues have increased 2.5x to almost $31 million from $9 million in the same quarter last year. This increase was driven by our substantial growth in hash rate. Looking at the bottom-left corner of this slide, you will note that despite mining more Bitcoin in the third quarter, our revenues decreased 17%. This was solely driven by Bitcoin prices as we are mining more Bitcoin at lower prices. As you are aware, Bitcoin prices have decreased in Q3 and that had a direct effect on our topline. On the right side of the slide, you will see our gross profit. In Q3, our gross profit increased almost three-fold to approximately $21 million compared to the same quarter last year. While we had substantial increases in our gross profits, we did see a decline in our margin percentage by 20 points, directly attributable to the decrease in Bitcoin prices. In the final quadrant of this slide, you can see how the decrease in Bitcoin prices affected our margins and gross profits compared to the immediately preceding quarter. Again, despite mining more Bitcoin, we saw compressed margins by about 10% and approximately $8 million less in gross profit. Moving to the next slide. You will note our net loss increased in Q3 compared to the same quarter last year. The largest driver of this loss includes a non-cash impairment of approximately $10.6 million due to Energy assets reclassified as discontinued operations as I previously discussed. Also contributing to the loss is impairment of Bitcoin held on our balance sheet and realized losses on sale of Bitcoin. Since the accounting rules do not allow companies to mark-to-market their Bitcoin, we had to impair our Bitcoin on a first-in, first-out basis, where the price of Bitcoin on any given day is less than the price when we minted it. While we continue to mine Bitcoin profitably, these losses represent the effect of the accounting rules, which, again, is a non-cash impact. When looking at our net loss in Q3 versus last quarter, you will see we were slightly in the red in Q2 and our current quarter noncash adjustments took us to a $29 million loss. On the right side of the slide, you will see our adjusted EBITDA, which is a non-GAAP metric, management uses to assess its cash flow from operations. I want to point out that our adjusted EBITDA metric is presented on a continuing operations basis and solely represents our Bitcoin operations. A full reconciliation of our GAAP net income to adjusted EBITDA can be found in our earnings release on our website. Our adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter was approximately $15 million, which represents margins on revenue of 49%. The importance of our adjusted EBITDA margins should not be overlooked. These are great margins and why we are in the Bitcoin mining business. With respect to our performance in the third quarter compared to the preceding second quarter, you will note that the lower Bitcoin prices translated to lower adjusted EBITDA amounts and corresponding adjusted EBITDA margin. Our adjusted EBITDA decreased approximately $6 million and our adjusted EBITDA margins also contracted 11 points. However, our adjusted EBITDA margins are still very healthy and represent the resiliency of our business model, especially considering we currently have very little debt service requirements. As you have heard me say several times that the recent decrease in Bitcoin prices have led to lower revenues and contracted margins, I want to take some time discussing our operating expenses. Foremost, while we believe Bitcoin is worth significantly greater than today’s price reflects, we feel very comfortable in our cost structure to survive any bear market or crypto winter. We expect to focus on what we can control in this market and what we can control is our costs, especially our power costs. We control our costs through favorable long-term power purchase agreements and where we are subject to market rates, we optimize our run time. Over the last quarter, we have kept our power costs under $0.04 per kilowatt hour on a blended average basis. While our wholly-owned operations in Norcross are not immune to periods of peak market demand and surges in energy prices, we have not seen the need to curtail our mining activities for more than a few hours in time. We also feel very comfortable with our operations and the geographic location in Georgia as we experienced greater uptime than many of our peers who have operations concentrated in the state of Texas. Looking at our other operating expenses, you will see we have reduced payroll and G&A expenses due to cost containment efforts. We anticipate that we are at a turning point where we have built scale and anticipate increased adjusted EBITDA margins when adding new wholly-owned locations, such as Washington, Georgia. When looking at the balance sheet, our total liquidity at June 30th was over $13 million, comprised of cash and Bitcoin. The third quarter was also when we closed on the Trinity facility and have drawn down $20 million on the $35 million facility to-date, of which we had $18 million of debt outstanding as of June 30th. The transaction announced this morning includes a little over $5 million of debt, part of which is seller based financing and part of which is assumption of a mortgage. This will bring our total debt to approximately $23 million and our debt-to-EBITDA ratio is still exceptionally low. We believe our balance sheet is a source of our financial strength and sets us apart from our peers. We are not carrying much debt, so we don’t have burdensome debt obligations eating away at our cash flow. As of July 31st, we have almost 40,000 miners on hand, the majority of which are deployed. With the miners on hand ready for deployment and 5,100 miners expected to be delivered, we will have over 13,000 miners we can put to work in the new Washington location and the expansion in Norcross. Looking at our future commitments related to CapEx, we have minimal commitments outstanding as of July 31st. The reasons why the Bitcoin prices has caused price protection on our few remaining long-term miner contracts to kick in. The remaining commitments related to miners are very small, less than $2 million in total. I also want to note that the contract for 1,800 XPs signed in June, were not only purchased at a discount, but had price protection, which further decreased the average price per terahash. This has resulted in no further amounts likely due under that contract. As was discussed on our previous calls, we made a decision not to tie up capital in long-term miner purchase contracts with the expectation that miner prices would decrease. And with miner prices either hitting the bottom or near the bottom, we anticipate purchasing more miners on the spot market in the near-term. The most significant portion of our CapEx commitments relates to construction in Norcross. We anticipate remaining Norcross commitments to be around $3 million, putting our current total CapEx commitments to less than $5 million over the next few months. In the coming weeks, we will be assessing potential CapEx at the Washington location. But since the location is relatively turnkey we expect any improvements on the first 36 megawatts to be minimal, primarily to make the location more energy efficient. The acquisition will come with 12 megawatts of miners and we already have miners in hand to fill the remaining 24 megawatts, which means the facility will be at capacity and producing at least five Bitcoin per month based on current difficulty levels. Also, the Washington location has an additional 50 megawatts of capacity that is expected to be available in 2023. We will be completing engineering assessments in the coming months to determine the amount of CapEx needed to utilize this additional 50 megawatts. It is worth noting that since the substation is adjacent to the property, it is expected that any CapEx deployed for this expansion will be in the form of switchgear, transformers, racks and cooling that will be on-premises and there is virtually no cost to us to have the power delivered to the property. On the topic of capital strategy, I want to provide additional color on the comments Zach made early on the call. Our capital strategy has allowed us to play offense, even in down markets such as now. This strategy remains very much in place and we still consider using all three levers, Bitcoin, debt and equity on a frequent basis. In July, we used our self-filing to raise approximately $25 million, 100% of which will be used for growth capital. Most of these proceeds will, in fact, be used to the acquisition we announced this morning. In recent months, debt markets have tightened up and lenders are only entering into transactions with quality names like CleanSpark. However, regardless of how active the debt markets are, a debt transaction takes time, time we didn’t have to capture this accretive opportunity. Going forward, we will continue to be opportunistic and debt remains a lever we anticipate using further. As Bitcoin prices recover, we believe the value of our assets, including the Washington acquisition will also increase in value. Given the fact asset values tend to follow a Bitcoin pricing, we will -- we value being nimble and striking quickly in this market versus acquiring debt at low-to-loan -- at low loan-to-value ratios and running a process which could take weeks or months. I want to stress how important this really is, being nimble in the current market allows us to make acquisitions, which not only immediately contribute to higher hash rate and more Bitcoin mined, but also give us a source of potential refinancing as Bitcoin and asset prices rise. Furthermore, regardless of what number we pull, we expect to minimize the time between the deployment of our capital and when the capital starts producing cash flow. This is especially important in the current market. On a final note, we would like to update our hash rate guidance. Previously, our guidance was 3.4 exahash by September 30th and four exahash by the end of this calendar year. We feel comfortable saying we will surpass 3.4 exahash earlier than expected, and with the Washington acquisition and the planned expansion at that site and other opportunities in our pipeline, we are increasing our guidance for the calendar year-end to five exahash. Furthermore, we are issuing new guidance for the end of calendar year 2023 of 22.4 exahash. This guidance is based on committed and contracted sites, sites currently under development and colocation facilities. Given our history of strong execution, we feel confident in meeting the guidance of 22.4 exahash, which will help secure our position as one of the top miners in the world. We will continue to keep investors apprised of our progress and update our hash rate expectations as transactions warrant. Isaac, back to you.