Jason Few
Analyst · Craig-Hallum. Your line is open
Thank you, Mike. Next on Slide 10, I want to provide more insight on our accomplishments under our Powerhouse business strategy, which we unveiled last quarter consisting of the following priorities; transform, strengthen and grow. Fiscal 2019, and the first quarter of fiscal 2020, we undertook various restructuring initiatives to support the next phase of our business strategy. We accomplished several foundational milestones but recognized there is still work to do, thus we are keenly focused on additional improvements while we are also shifting focus to growing our business, achieving profitability, and establishing our position of industry leadership. We continue to focus on progressing our advanced technologies innovations across carbon capture, hydrogen generation, electrolysis and hydrogen-based long duration energy storage. As we detailed last quarter, we implemented a cost reduction and restructuring plan that resulted in annualized operating savings of approximately $15 million in fiscal 2019. We plan to continue to deliver on a lower operating expense profile. Moving to strengthening; we are now focused on strengthening our business by optimizing capital deployment. We will continue to focus on disciplined capital deployment and securing lower cost, long-term financing and tax equity financing, were completed generation projects. The most recent example is the successful sale leaseback of Tulare BioMAT, FuelCell project. Pursuing commercial excellence; over the past quarter we have focused on strengthening our customer relationships and building a world-class customer centric reputation by keeping close to the markets we serve and responding to the needs of our customers. We also remain focused on developing business opportunities for the company. We are encouraged by the marketplaces response to our product solutions and our reinvigorated and broadened go-to-market efforts. Our priority is to continue to provide a deep and strategic partnership to our existing customers and develop such relationships with future customers. On operational excellence; we strive to execute on projects, manufacturing and customer service. I am pleased with the current performance of our operational platform, particularly with the delivery of the Tulare project and the progress of our project at the United States Navy Base in Groton, Connecticut. In addition to these projects, we continue to evolve our operational management processes and approaches with the goal of ensuring our ability to execute against growing future demand. Related to cost reductions; we continue to be focused across all aspects of our organization and operations on continued lean resource management and cost reduction opportunities while adhering to safety and product quality standards. These efforts have yielded a reduction in our run rate expenses and we expect to continue to pace our additional capital deployment to revenue and financing over the strategic horizon. As we grow, we will also pursue the following growth strategies. For sales growth, we will seek to increase product sales. Two, and power purchase agreements with strategic customers and perspective customers around the world. We intend to build alternative distribution channels, win new projects by exploiting the differentiating capabilities of our products, grow service revenues and further reduce the total cost of ownership for our customers. I am encouraged by the positive change in the tone and tenure of our conversations with both, customers and prospective customers over the past six months. We are very active in CHP, micro grid, biofuel, hydrogen and power generation conversations across customer segments, energy applications in global geographies. We will continue to innovate. We will continue to focus on increasing product life, reliability and exploiting our competitive advantage on multi-fuel use applications, our scalable platform, and multi-feature capabilities. In addition, we intend to develop and commercialize our advanced technologies platforms across carbon capture, distributed hydrogen production, and long duration hydrogen-based energy storage. On solution leadership; we will seek to capitalize on our core strengths meeting customer needs for power and combined heat and power, utilizing available biofuels for power production which contributes to the reduction of bring out gas emissions by eliminating the need to flare biogas, enabling micro grids and generating distributed hydrogen for industry, transportation and ultimately energy storage and power generation. We continue to believe education is important, and that governments and companies like FuelCell Energy must work together to pursue a transition to clean energy that continues to advance [indiscernible] progress while intelligently addressing climate change. We are working to ensure that policymakers, environmental advocates, and consumers understand the environmental increased security and enhanced reliability benefits realized by deploying FuelCell Energy platforms. It is important to note, that transformation, strengthening and growth of our business is happening, and we intend that it will continue to happen, including in international markets. We are working to regain access to the Asian market, including taking recent steps to ensure we can realize the intended benefits of our license agreement with POSCO Energy. There is a growing global appreciation for our technology solution that we intend that international growth will be a part of our go-forward story. Turning to Slide 11; as I just outlined, execution on project backlog is key to our long-term success. I want to take a quick moment to highlight progress on projects that are nearing the mobilization phase, which consist of our 7.4 megawatt project in Yaphank Long Island, New York, our 14.8 megawatt project in Derby Connecticut, and our 1.4 megawatt biogas projects at the San Bernardino municipal wastewater treatment facility. Our project management teams have been hard at work establishing the detailed timelines for our EPC contractors, working to put in place all necessary permits, site approvals, civil site [ph] and interconnect divide required for us to commence on-site construction. On this slide, we've provided visual renderings of what two of these products are expected to look like upon completion. We are approaching the time when site work commences and these distributed power projects begin to take shape. Additionally, we continue to focus on our advanced technologies, including carbon capture technology under our joint development agreement with ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company. Earlier this month, we announced that the California Public Utilities Commission confirmed FuelCell Energy's understanding of the BioMAT program rules, allowing us to proceed with the deployment of our SureSource Hydrogen Tri-generation platform at the Toyota facility located at the Port of Long Beach. The 2.3 megawatt power plant platform will be carbon-neutral, and enabled to meet the energy needs of Toyota's on-site facilities at the Port in Long Beach with excess electricity going to the Southern California grid. Hydrogen-generated bio tri-gen platform will provide the carbon-free fuel needed to power Toyota zero mission fuel cell vehicles; additional environmental benefits delivered by our Tri-gen platform include improved air quality and reduced water usage. The installation also supports the growing demand for hydrogen infrastructure and transportation applications leveraging FuelCell technology. Turning to Slide 12. We felt it was important to provide longer-term targets and goals that add context to our strategy with a time horizon looking out over the next few years we are targeting by fiscal year 2022; increase in our generation portfolio by 100% from the 26.1 megawatts we had at the end of fiscal year 2019, delivering double-digit percentage compounded annual revenue growth rate over our revenue amount at the end of fiscal year 2019, and achieving positive adjusted EBITDA. Each target is tightly linked to execution of our project backlog, which drives recurring revenues through power generation and long-term service agreement revenues. We are also focused on future goals, including our aspiration to drive our cost per kilowatt hour lower to achieve grid parity, in even more markets than we do today. Fundamental to our strategic business model, is eventually delivering recurring positive EBITDA, as well as consistent positive free cash flow generation. And as I've said in the presentation, we are focused on delivering an appropriate return on invested capital with the ultimate goal of delivering financial returns for our stockholders. The keys to achieving these goals are execution on private construction and achieving commercial operation, which delivers recurring revenue for the company, winning new business globally to replenish and grow our project pipeline, continued cost discipline, achieving our strategic initiatives, continuing to promote a culture of accountability and optimizing capital decisions among our portfolio of choices. On Slide 13, I will conclude my prepared remarks today with the highlights for FuelCell Energy. FuelCell Energy has strengthened it's balance sheet with our credit facility with Orion Energy Partners and our prudent balance sheet management. We expect this $200 million credit facility to help us deliver long-term projects that generate long-term recurring revenue for the company in the future. We have an organization committed and focused on private execution, achieving financial milestones, operational efficiencies and living our core purpose. The breadth and depth of our technology portfolio is second to none, and we are implementing our Powerhouse business strategy to transform, strengthen and grow our company for the long-term. In summary, we delivered a strong quarter compared to where we were over last year. We are more excited than ever about our progress, the opportunities that lie ahead, our ability to successfully navigate headwinds, and the role our SureSource platform plays in the global energy future. This concludes our formal remarks. Before we begin the Q&A, I want to introduce a few more team members that have joined Tom, Mike and me. We are joined by Mike Lisowski, EVP and COO; Tony Leo, EVP and CTO; Jill Crossman, SVP Finance; Ben Toby, SVP Direct Sales and Customer Service; and Frank Wolak, SVP Sales Americas. I will now turn it over to Julian to begin Q&A.