EVgo, Inc. (EVGO) Q1 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the EVgo Q1 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Heather Davis, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome to EVgo's first quarter 2026 earnings call. My name is Heather Davis, and I am the Vice President of Investor Relations at EVgo. Joining me on today's call are Badar Khan, EVgo's Chief Executive Officer; and Keefer Lehner, EVgo's Chief Financial Officer. Today, we will be discussing EVgo's first quarter 2026 financial results and our outlook for the year, followed by a Q&A session. Today's call is being webcast and can be accessed on the Investors section of our website at investors.evgo.com. The call will be archived and available there, along with the company's earnings release and investor presentation after the conclusion of this call. During the call, management will be making forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties, including expectations about future performance. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations are detailed in our SEC filings, including in the Risk Factors section of our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. The company's SEC filings are available on the Investors section of our website. These forward-looking statements apply as of today and we undertake no obligation to update these statements after the call. Also, please note that we will be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call. Information about these non-GAAP measures, including definitions and applicable reconciliations to the corresponding GAAP measures can be found in the earnings materials available on the Investors section of our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Badar Khan, EVgo's CEO.

Thank you, Heather. EVgo's first quarter was in line with our expectations. We delivered solid results, headlined by record first quarter revenues of $110 million, a 45% year-over-year increase. Increased revenues were largely driven by the continued growth of our operating network, eXtend and 2 new contracts at dedicated AV hubs locations. Throughput on our public network increased to 91 gigawatt hours in the quarter. Stores in operation across the EVgo network were 5,280 with over 200 new stores added in Q1. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $7 million in the quarter as we continue to invest in the long-term growth of the business by expanding our operations and deployment teams and our next-generation charging architecture. We ended the quarter with a healthy balance sheet with $150 million in cash. We continue to make great progress on our next-generation charging architecture that we expect to start rolling out to the field by the end of the year. This will not only deliver improved reliability and an enhanced customer experience, but is also expected to lower CapEx per store and will further underpin our long-term unit economics that we believe will result in recurring adjusted EBITDA generation at the $0.5 billion level by 2030. We've achieved some noteworthy milestones on the next-gen architecture, including completion of the first system build of the power cabinet and dispenser, successful vehicle charging with EVgo developed controllers and firmware and the start of long-term reliability testing. EVgo has excellent partnerships with rideshare companies who we believe partner with us in part because of our enormous scale advantage versus the dozens of smaller operators and because of the value their drivers get on the EVgo network. Rideshare drivers are already around 1/4 of our network throughput and we continue to deepen our partnership with Uber, where we are working towards finalization of an agreement where they guarantee a minimum level of utilization that incentivizes us to build more and larger charging stations in key urban metros. This would not only meet rising demand from the segment, but further accelerate the electrification of rideshare. We have excellent relationships with our site host partners from grocery stores to retail stores. And this quarter, we had a record number of new stores signed under long-term leases, around 3x the same quarter last year, most of which will come online 9 to 12 months after signing. This level of site lease signings is an indication of the value our site partners believe EVgo brings and their confidence in our ability to deliver fast-charging stores as we continue ramping up store deployments. We have over 100 stores operational with NACS connectors and continue to target having over 500 NAC stores available across the network by the end of the year at approximately 15% of our sites. Strategically, by deploying NACS connectors across our network, we are effectively more than doubling our addressable market where drivers with cars with NACS inlets can charge without an adapter. And importantly, we've agreed an amendment to our loan with the DOE Office of Energy Dominance Financing with the current administration, which we believe increases certainty and reduces complexity of go-forward draws and further enhances our already strong liquidity profile. DOE's loan program has historically been designed as a bridge to commercial finance ability. In the case of EVgo, this is exactly what happened. Less than a year after closing the DOE loan, we closed our commercial bank financing of up to $300 million. The combination of the amended DOE loan and commercial bank facility gives EVgo the capital it needs to deliver on our previously communicated build targets. EVgo successfully drew under the loan 3 times in 2025 and this amendment is a reflection of 2 things: first, the success we've had in securing additional private market funding and acknowledgment that debt -- additional debt capital is available to EVgo in the commercial markets. And secondly, it reflects the current administration's view of the importance of this essential infrastructure build-out across the U.S. Our fast-charging infrastructure is performing well and better than originally modeled when the loan was underwritten. Much of the loan remains the same and I'll highlight a few key updates. The size of the loan has been updated to $750 million, which includes $625 million in borrowings and up to $125 million in capitalized interest. EVgo can draw up to 80% of total eligible project costs. However, because the loan is currently overcollateralized, we can draw up to 95% of eligible project costs on an incremental basis until total leverage hits the 65% loan-to-value ratio. A redundant construction risk-related reserve account of $35 million is eliminated because debt funding occurs after store completion, which reduces restricted cash for EVgo, further improving our liquidity profile. On May 1st, EVgo received our next advance of $81 million, bringing our cash balance on May 1st to $223 million. Other key terms remain the same as the original agreement. The availability period remains 5 years with a term of 17 years. The interest rate on the loan remains very attractive at treasury plus approximately 1.2% and we're able to request advances quarterly. We already have the strongest balance sheet we've had in many years and these changes result in even more free cash available to be reinvested into the business. EVgo has ample liquidity with the DOE loan and our commercial facility. And as of May 1st, we currently have up to $640 million available principal capacity on our 2 credit facilities, inclusive of the incremental availability. Between the DOE loan and our commercial credit facility and reinvestment of profits, we expect to have 12,500 to 13,900 EVgo public sold by the end of 2029, which is unchanged from our previously stated build targets. Given the strong recurring and high-margin cash flows being generated from our charging infrastructure, we believe and the market has acknowledged that this is an infrastructure asset class that should be levered. We will continue to explore other nondilutive financing, all while maintaining a healthy balance sheet to reduce our cost of capital to even lower levels or allow us to grow faster or both. We believe the long-term growth outlook for EVgo remains very attractive. Projections for 2030 EV VIO are near $16 million, representing a 20% CAGR. Recent volatility in the oil market makes the ongoing TCO for EVs even more compelling for American drivers. Sales of new EVs in Q1 are rebounding from the Q4 lows and are expected to accelerate throughout the year, adding to VIO. The market for used EVs has been very strong and we can see that over the past few quarters, quarterly sales of used EVs has approached the 100,000 units level with Q1 just under half the level of new BEV sales. Q1 used EV sales have more than doubled versus 3 years ago and are projected to continue to accelerate going forward. Drivers of used EVs are often customers of public charging networks. This is because used car buyers are more likely to live in multifamily housing and multifamily residents tend to charge more frequently on public networks. As a result, we expect to see the serviceable addressable market for public fast charging to increase faster than overall VIO growth, with growth in public fast charging remaining more resilient compared to growth in the overall EV market. Prices for used EVs have nearly reached parity with their ICE counterparts, given the surge in EV leases following the passage of the IRA. Approximately 1.5 million leases are expected to expire between 2026 and 2028, resulting in a significant number of these cars switching hands from their original owner to an owner that is more likely to utilize public fast charging. As a reference, there's no reason why the battery electric vehicle market over time will not resemble the broader automotive market, where the vast majority of all cars on the road are used. This is a significant tailwind for the business as it was not long ago that a secondary market for EVs did not exist. So not only do we see enormous growth in overall BEV/VIO, but we expect that the average car will be charging more, both of which result in a favorable long-term outlook for EVgo. Now I'll turn it over to Keefer to share more details on the quarter and EVgo's 2026 outlook.

Thank you, Badar. We ended Q1 with 5,280 stalls in operation, a more than 3x increase compared to the end of 2021. We added 200 new total stalls to the network in Q1 2026, including 100 new public EVgo-owned stalls. Our customer base continues to grow and we look forward to welcoming more native NACS drivers to our network as we deploy more sites in 2026 with NACS connectors. Total energy dispensed on EVgo's network was 373 gigawatt hours for the trailing 12 months, a 21% increase from the TTM period ended Q1 2025. Charging gross margin was 39% over the last 12 months, expanding by 2 percentage points over the prior year's TTM. Adjusted EBITDA margin improved to 3% on a trailing 12-month basis as we get closer to the operational inflection point where charging network gross profit alone is expected to cover all of our G&A costs. Our throughput on the public network during the first quarter was 91 gigawatt hours, a 10% increase compared to last year. Throughput per stall per day was 257 kilowatt hours in the quarter. Q1 2026 throughput was impacted by the ongoing maturation of the record high number of new stalls deployed in Q4 2025 as we elected to select sites with slightly lower throughput potential in order to capture a higher amount of state grant funding as expected lifetime economics were attractive. It was also driven by lower usage of our legacy equipment, several severe winter storms as well as seasonally lower vehicle miles traveled. Revenue for Q1 2026 was $110 million, which represents a 45% year-over-year increase with growth across all 3 revenue categories. Total charging network revenue was $56 million, an 18% increase versus prior year, driven primarily by a larger operating network, representing our 17th consecutive quarter of double digit year-over-year charging revenue growth. eXtend revenue was $33 million, delivering growth of 41% over the same period in 2025, driven by an increase in construction revenues and equipment sales. And AV and ancillary revenue was $21 million, up over 300%, driven by gain on sales for 2 dedicated AV hubs locations. It's important to note that almost half of the anticipated 2026 AV ancillary revenue was recognized in the first quarter. Charging network gross profit was $20 million, a 15% increase compared to the prior year. Charging network gross margin was 36%, a percentage point lower than last year. First quarter adjusted gross profit was $30 million, up 17% against the prior year. Adjusted gross margin was 27% in Q1, a decrease of 660 basis points over the same period in 2025, driven primarily by higher non-charging revenue contribution. Adjusted G&A for the quarter was $37 million, an increase of 19% compared to prior year as we are investing in network scale and accelerating cell deployment. As a percentage of revenue, the first quarter of 2026 was 34% compared to 42% in the first quarter of 2025. The above resulted in an adjusted EBITDA loss of $7 million in the first quarter of 2026. Turning to our outlook and guidance for 2026. Our new stall guidance remains unchanged from the last quarter with 1,400 to 1,650 new stalls expected to be added over the year, including 350 to 400 eXtend stalls, approximately 100 of which were deployed in Q1. The growth in public stalls deployed is expected to be around 70% year-over-year and the vast majority of the 2026 public build plan is expected to be deployed in the back half of the year with a significant weighting towards Q4. We are reaffirming our recently provided 2026 total revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance of $410 million to $470 million and negative $20 million to positive $20 million, respectively. Charging network revenue should be around 70% of 2026 total revenue. Charging revenue is expected to increase each quarter sequentially and on a year-over-year basis. At the midpoint, charging network revenue are expected to be up 40%. eXtend revenue for 2026 is expected to be $80 million to $90 million. AV and ancillary revenues are anticipated to be $40 million to $50 million for full year 2026 with just under half that amount realized in Q1. Adjusted G&A for the year is still anticipated to be $150 million to $155 million as we continue to invest in our scale and deployment of new chargers. Q1 and Q4 are expected to be the strongest quarters for the non-charging business, eXtend and AV and ancillary, representing approximately 75% of our non-charging revenues. As a result, we expect Q2 to be our softest quarter of the year with revenue and margins leading to an estimated Q2 revenue of $75 million to $85 million and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $12.5 million to $7.5 million. We expect modest sequential improvement into Q3. Q4 is expected to be our strongest quarter of the year by a wide margin. We should drive improved incremental margins and sustainable profitability on a go-forward basis. With that, we will open the call to Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from the line of Chris Dendrinos of RBC Capital Markets.

Maybe to start out here and I'm just kind of looking at the charging network performance and 2 things stand out. I think you kind of talked through a little bit of the dynamics around the lower throughput this quarter, but maybe talk to the cadence of that increase going through the rest of the year? And then separately, just on the margin performance in that segment as well. Are you seeing some of the, I guess, call it, leverage or operational leverage points that you're kind of expecting to see in the longer-term outlook?

Yes. Let me just touch on the first point and just kind of reemphasize for the quarter, daily throughput per stall, it's about 3.5% lower than last year. And that's really driven by 3 or 4 things, none of which really are long-term issues. As we said on the last earnings call, we did have more severe winter storms this quarter than we saw in the same quarter last year. We also had a record number of stores deployed in Q4 that they always take -- new branding stores usually take 3 to 6 months to ramp up. So that's a little higher impact this quarter than prior quarters just because of the record deployment we had in Q4. And we also mentioned a couple of times last year that many of these Q4 deployments in 2025 came with much higher CapEx offsets which is obviously great from a returns perspective, but they also come with lower productivity in throughput for the first year or 2. So that's really what we're seeing. One additional thing that we're calling out here is that we are seeing lower throughput from our legacy 50 and 100-kilowatt store, especially as we're actually putting in a whole bunch of faster 350 across the network. I think the good news is that today, in Q1, about 65 -- almost 65% of our throughput is already 350-kilowatt machines. That's up from kind of low 20% range 3 years ago and it will be in the 95% range by 2030. So in the long term, the performance of the kind of sub-350 just becomes immaterial. So I'd say none of these factors really are issues in the long term. For the full year, we do expect daily throughput per store to grow versus last year at the bottom end of guidance in the kind of mid-single digit percentage range to high teens in percentage range growth over '25, top end of guidance, that hasn't changed since the last quarter. Keefer, do you want to just address the market?

Yes, to follow up on the second part of your question. We did experience slightly lower charging network gross margin in Q1. It was down 1 percentage point on a year-over-year basis. We did have higher ASP in Q1. It came in right around $0.61 on a fully loaded basis, which was offset by increased energy costs and solid payment costs given some of the noise that we experienced in the quarter. We don't see that as kind of a structural or long-term shift in the cost structure. Last quarter, we did provide long-term outlook of a 50% to 60% CAGR for gross network -- or gross margin at the charging network level and we wouldn't really expect that to be changing as we look out to the future.

Got it. And then maybe just as a follow-up, on the NACS deployment, I think previously you kind of spoke to slightly lower charging rates on that segment of the market initially. Are you still kind of seeing that? Or is adoption on the NACS portion of the network increasing?

Yes, Chris, it's -- we are just taking a very quick step back with NACS. We're really very excited about deploying NACS stores across the network because effectively, we double our addressable market for people choosing to charge their vehicles without an adapter, which is the majority of people. I said last quarter that we deployed NACS like a little pilot 100 stores in kind of the fall of last year. And since then, we've seen throughput on those NACS stores rise. That's continued to rise since we talked about this last quarter. So we still remain very excited about the deployment of NACS stores. They are still below the level of throughput that we see in our CCS stores. As I said last time and saying again this time, it does take customers who have not been used to charging in our network to become familiar with our network and to charge if they've got these NACS cables. Tesla drivers continue to charge at a higher rate every month. So we're very excited. And so we're very much intending to continue with the rollout of these NACS cables. We'll look to do about 400 more to get to around 500. That will be about 15% of our sites. That will be pretty broadly spread between Q2, Q3 and Q4. We do expect that within maybe 2 or 3 years for all of our sites to have both NACS and CCS cables. And that's the point where I'd look at the addressable market having doubled. So hopefully, that answers that question.

And our next question will come from Andres Sheppard of Cantor Fitzgerald.

This is [ Anadan ] for Andres. Congrats on the quarter. So I wanted to touch on a little bit of the AV charging. So with Uber partnering with a variety of OEMs for EVs and we noticed you were named as a partner as well, we were wondering maybe if you could give us some granularity on what you expect from charging demand for yourselves on this front from the AVs?

Yes. Yes, look, I think that the sort of autonomous vehicle space, I remain of the view that it is a very interesting and potentially very significant source of upside to the forecast that we have put out previously. I think that the AV space grows as pretty many people are expecting. We've been operating dedicated sites for autonomous vehicle partners for a number of years. We talked about it in the last quarter, last call. We have separated out the number of dedicated hubs and stores that are dedicated hubs for AV partners for over a year now. We expect that we'll add another 50 to 75 stalls. We did get a little gain on sale from some of the stores that were in operation in the last quarter in Q1. I will say it's still -- we're still in the infancy of the potentially huge market opportunity. We're evaluating the best contract structures. As you know, the contract structures that we have today are really long-term contracted cash flow, which represents kind of good margin with not a lot of risk for us. And so as this grows, we'll be looking at different contract structures that make sense for both ourselves and the AV partners or maybe also continue with what we have today. I do expect that over the long term or midterm or long term, just as we've seen with rideshare, where really I think EVgo has become the partner of choice for rideshare companies, I do expect that there's really no reason why we wouldn't become the partner of choice for AV companies, just given our scale, the balance sheet, our emphasis on reliability and so on.

Got you. I appreciate the detail. And maybe as a quick follow-up, with respect to the DOE loan amendment, you talked about this for quite a bit on the call. You guys eliminated the cash trap, received an $81 million draw on May 1st. Maybe can you walk us through how that amendment changes your practical liquidity, maybe the timing of your draws and ability to fund the accelerated owned and operated build-out?

Yes. Look, [ Anand ], just a comment here. I'm really pleased with where we are with this loan with the DOE. If you compare us to where we were a year ago, so today versus last year, this time last year, it's really just quite a change. A year ago, we had $170 million of cash on the balance sheet as of Q1 and we had $1 billion loan with the prior administration that was largely undrawn. And I would get questions on these calls about whether the current administration supported it, even though the performance was very strong. A year later, we have an agreement that's signed with the current administration. We continue to have a great productive collaborative relationship. It's now been drawn on 4 times. The principal is reduced by $425 million, but we've -- since last year, we've also got a commercial bank facility for up to $300 million. I think more importantly, we've demonstrated the bankability of the company with this continuous inbounds from people interested in financing the business. I think because it's a new asset class and maybe also because we're probably the only ones in the asset class that's actually financeable, today, as of May 1st, we have $223 million in cash, including the $81 million that we received last week with up to $640 million of remaining capacity between these first 2 facilities. That means we have enormous runway to continue to build out this infrastructure really to a point where we're generating adjusted EBITDA in the hundreds of millions. And I think as you say, in the short term, some of these amended terms will result in better liquidity to really an already very strong liquidity profile. So I'm really quite thrilled with where we are today. In terms of your question around -- in terms of deploying capital, we just received $81 million from the DOE. We've got a very strong balance sheet today. We will be disciplined in our approach to capital allocation with the timing of advances just driven by balance sheet needs, which you can see is quite strong. I think one of the great attributes of this loan is that there's no time limit on when we request advances other than the 5-year availability period. So between that, the commercial bank facility, the fact that we're able to advance at a higher rate and if you translate -- if you kind of work out that math, it's about another $20,000 per stall that we're able to advance versus what we had before. We -- there's really no concerns that we have at all about financing the build program we previously discussed or near-term liquidity.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question will be coming from the line of Chris Pierce of Needham.

Badar, I just want to get a sense, you highlighted the EVs in the deck and you spoke about it on the call a little bit. Is there something specific you need to do to market towards these people? And/or is this sort of just a sweet spot of customers that are potentially going to be using the network? And have you seen anything? Or is it too early to sort of see a ramp in new customers from these new EV owners that are buying used EVs?

Yes. Look, I think that there's a few things in here in terms of marketing to these customers. We -- I think, as you know, we have more -- the same or more charging sessions on our network than everybody else in the industry combined with the exception of Tesla and Electrify America. And the reason for that is that we've really spent a lot of time building a very productive customer engagement sort of platform. We've got the ability to identify drivers of electric -- battery electric vehicles. We know how to reach out to them. I've mentioned before in previous calls that we've been deploying AI agents that are increasing our level of sophistication in how we reach out to customers and that's why we've got such phenomenal engagement and demand on our network versus pretty much everybody -- almost everybody else in the space. In terms of used electric vehicle drivers versus new EV drivers, there's no distinction. We will deploy the same methodology that's delivered such great success for us for used EV drivers as new EV drivers. I think what's really interesting that we just -- that we're really pointing out here is that for us, it's not just about the growth in battery electric vehicles, used VIO that drives the business. It is expected to grow. It has grown fourfold. It will likely grow another 2.5 to threefold over the next 5 years. I do think these 2030 forecasts swing like a pendulum. They were -- the 2030 forecast was 30 million vehicles 3 years ago. Today, it's 15 million or 16 million. But what's important for us is how many of those vehicles are charging in public fast charging. Rideshare electrifying means they'll charge more at public fast charging, charge rates mean they'll charge more at public fast charging. And as vehicles go from new to used, they'll charge more at public fast charging. What we're seeing is that used vehicle -- used EV owners tend to live in multifamily housing. And from our own data, we can see that drivers who live in multifamily housing charge 1.5x more than drivers who live in single-family housing. And so I'm really quite excited by this. There's probably around 1 million used EVs out of the roughly 6 million today with all of these leases rolling off post the IRA, we're looking at maybe up to about 3 million used EVs out of total EV VIO 3 years from now, which is probably 25%, 30%. And so if you look at the market, there's no reason why the EV market won't resemble the broader market where the vast majority of cars are used. And so I think that represents just another tailwind that I think it's worth bringing out when we think about our long-term growth prospects.

Okay. Perfect. And just one. I mean, I think complexity is the wrong word, but if you look at the model, you've got the core charging business, then you've had the eXtend business, which was sort of in the end sort of kind of -- we're in the later innings of that rolling off so investors can focus on the charging model. If we think about the AV line and the ancillary line, is there a way to kind of know what that's going to look like? Could you -- could that be a construction business similar to eXtend and then you have gain on sale when you flip it back to the end user? Or should we think of that -- like I just want to understand as AV grows, will we get to a point where that sort of becomes a new [Technical Difficulty] and you've got to sort of guide in different pieces? Or like when can charging revenue be just the story a little cleaner for new investors looking at the model?

Yes. Well, look, if I just take that apart, you're right, the eXtend business has been a very valuable source of revenue for the last couple of years and will be for this year, too, and for a portion of 2027. But at some point in 2027, the eXtend -- the majority of the revenue from eXtend will sort of drop off. It will become O&M, which will be quite a bit smaller. Charging revenue, I think you just said that we've had the 17th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. So we will continue to see the charging revenue, the charging network just continue to grow quarter-over-quarter over the next several years. I think this AV piece is really interesting because as you know, Chris, and I think many people have commented, there's a significant amount of capital that needs to get deployed to build out this autonomous vehicle opportunity from the vehicles themselves, the technology in the sort of autonomous vehicle technology whether it's LiDAR or elsewhere for rideshare will be the capital required for the technology stack as well as fleet operations, capital required for charging. Our perspective is that that's a ton of capital required to get deployed. We have the capital available for a piece of that, which is the charging infrastructure. And we're quite excited about it because we're such a large player doing this sort of charging infrastructure. We -- the contracts that we signed to date are these long-term contracts that have contracted cash flow. So we've got -- we're generating $1 per stall per month, if you will. And that doesn't have to be the contract structure for this space going forward. So we're quite excited by it because these are likely to be very heavily utilized vehicles that will have very strong demand in our network. I think that I would be open to exposure to utilization and throughput from this space. So it may look like a -- look a little more like our regular charging business as opposed to, as you're saying, a construction business like eXtend. We're in the early innings of this. As you can see, we've built a very strong competitive advantage with rideshare where we're really the kind of partner of choice for rideshare companies. I see no reason why we wouldn't be a partner of choice for the AV companies, many of whom we've been working with for years already.

And I would now like to turn the conference back to Badar Khan for closing remarks.

Great. Well, thank you, everyone. EVgo had yet another strong and record quarter. We're expecting 2026 to be an inflection year with around 70% growth in new public stores added, supported by strong site post and rideshare partnerships. We continue to see a very strong long-term growth outlook and we're pleased to have reached an amended agreement with the DOE, allowing us to scale the company to that $0.5 billion or more in adjusted EBITDA by 2030. I look forward to sharing our progress with you on our future calls. Thanks very much, everyone.

And this concludes today's program. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.