Drew Hamer
Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead
Thank you, Moriah. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. As Moriah mentioned, I am one of the four members of our OCE and together we are executing on the company's growth strategy as developed by members of our executive team and former CEO, Dr. Anand Gopalan. As many of you know, Anand now serves in an advisory capacity and our Board is undertaking a search to find a full time CEO. The OCE has decades of collective business experience, including operations, general management, supply chain, services, manufacturing, engineering, employee engagement, financial strategy and execution in industries ranging from telecommunications to consumer electronics, automotive and industrial laser market. Speaking of markets, the use of lidar today in our served market and emerging target market like gaming, continues to gain momentum. We are executing against this trend by closing deals with customers across a variety of markets, supported by broad lidar product portfolio that we are manufacturing today. Velodyne is the only Lidar company that has an office shelf both software and hardware solutions that can be put into vehicles and the infrastructure. We are the global lidar leader shipping more units in the second quarter than the aggregate of all our peers when combined have reported shipping year-to-date. We shipped more than 3,800 sensory units in Q2, up from more than 2,600 in Q1 as we increased the breadth of market adoption for our lidar across multiple industries and applications. Of those units 260 were solid-state units. We expect roughly 30% of our sales to be solid-state for the full year. Not only did we ship more sensors in the prior quarter, we also shipped them to a larger group of customers as 72% of our sensors sold were through spot buys, indicated the broader market interest for our solutions. The number of inquiries from customers is increasing. We believe we are now going through the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic. We expect unit volumes to start averaging more than 3,800 sensors a quarter for the rest of the year. We are listening to our customers and moving people and goods closer to them. We have placed inventories in China and Europe. We are strengthening in-country technical support in all the regions we serve, including South Korea. We also established a design center of excellence in India. We continue to deepen our relationships with existing customers and building relationships in new markets. We signed more multiyear agreements bringing our total to 34 and meeting our prior stated goal for the year well before the end of the year. We now expect to sign four additional multiyear agreements by the year end which will bring our total to 38. Our pipeline continues to grow. We had 213 projects at August 1, up from 198 projects at May 1. 25 of these opportunities include solid state Velabit. Included in the signed and awarded pipeline are new ADAS multiyear agreements which we expect will begin to ramp starting in 2026. We have an additional $4.5 billion of opportunity for projects that are not yet signed and awarded that go through 2025. Turning to our served markets, I would like to run through both our lidar sensors and software are being used in the various applications of the various markets as well as provide an update on our progress with customers. We have 300 plus customers who over the past decade have both product and most continue to buy product from Velodyne. We are seeing many of these customers move from a long research and development phase with lidar to the first wave of mass adoption. First automotive. In ADAS you will find our solid state Velarray H800 long range sensor, Velarray M1600, our midrange sensor and Velabit from ultra short range to midrange sensing. All of our sensors can enable Advanced Blind Spot Monitoring, Parking Assist, Lane Keep Assist, Adaptive Cruise Control, Automatic Emergency Braking, including for pedestrians and more. Faraday Future was our first publicly unveiled automotive program using the Velarray H800 and we are currently making progress in our relationships with major high-volume OEM customers as well. For example, our project with a major Tier 1 ADAS provider in Asia for mass production of level III lidar systems continues to move forward. As part of this project, we are adding headcount in countries for this effort and to build further relationships with customers in South Korea. EV can use both solid state and rotational lidar. An application could include the full suite of rotational surround view product family, including our Pucks, Ultra Puck and Alpha Prime mid-long-range sensors, plus our solid state Velarray mid-and-long-range sensors and Velabit which are ultra short range to mid range sensors. Or it can start with rotational and move to solid state as needed. As one example, Trumtech [ph], the first company in China to independently develop level IV driverless trucks will use our Ultra Puck, Puck and Velarray H800 sensors as core sensor hardware in its autonomous trucks. Trumtech [ph] recently became one of the first companies to obtain Beijing's permit that allows road tests for self driving commercial vehicles. As I mentioned earlier in the call, we are increasing our in-country support as well as moving inventories closer to customers. We are already seeing these efforts result in new customer wins. We have signed another large company in China who will use our current and next-generation rotational lidar sensors to support their logistics with precise reliable navigation for real-time autonomous vehicle operation. We are working with existing customers to extend their current agreements with us to include additional products within our portfolio. Some of these opportunities came to us as a result of the customers concern that their current lidar supplier cannot manufacture at the scale they need. In Robotics and Industrial, you will find our surround view product family, including our Pucks, Ultra Puck, and Alpha Prime, plus our solid state Velarray and Velabit. We recently signed an agreement with an undisclosed North American large company to provide our sensors and solutions for use in warehouses. This builds upon our existing agreement or relationship with this customer for last mile delivery. It is another example of our success in deepening our relationships with our customers due to our broad product portfolio. As announced earlier this week ANYbotics is equipping its autonomous mobile robots with our Puck sensors. By using our Puck sensors the ANYbotics robotic inspection solution is able to map industrial environments to detect obstacles and allow ANYmal to avoid any collisions while navigating harsh environments with a higher level of accuracy. We also signed a five-year sales agreement with a leading defense and security company who has selected our sensors to provide mapping and autonomy capabilities for their robot, the large-scale manufacturing and production of which is scheduled to begin in 2024. The quality of our lidar sensors, plus our ability to mass manufacture, continues to set Velodyne apart from its competitors, and are driving additional customer wins for us. In addition, you will also find our surround view product family. Seabed B.V. which specializes in high quality equipment for offshore surveying and dredging, has selected our Puck sensors for its lidar mobile mapping system. The Seabed system is a turnkey mobile lidar solution for hydrographic surveys that helps companies transform their businesses with offshore 3D mapping solutions which can deliver highly accurate detailed data collection to support safe navigation and protection of marine environment. Last but not least, our smart city solutions, which is our first offering to combine software and hardware. Our Intelligent Infrastructure Solution or IIS combines our award winning lidar sensors and powerful AI software to monitor traffic networks in public spaces. In May IIS was named winner of the 2021 Smart 50 Award, which honors the 50 most transformative smart cities projects in the world. IIS is deployed in multiple North American cities, including Québec and British Columbia, Boca Raton Florida with upcoming installations at the Rutgers campus in New Jersey and Austin, Texas and moving forward with a significant product in the Bay Area. In July we announced we joined the NVIDIA Metropolis Program which is designed to nurture and bring to market a new generation of applications and solutions to make the world's most important spaces and operations safer and more efficient with advancements in AI vision. At Velodyne we continue to advance our industry-leading technology. On the hardware side in June we launched the next generation of our Velabit sensor which delivers on what our customers are asking for, an ultra wide Field Of View, FOV and higher resolution. Our next generation Velabit was launched in under a year, highlighting our commitment to meeting our customers demand. We held a Velabit demo day for key customers in June. 17 companies attended, including five OEMs and other customers evaluating or using our solutions in industrial and robotics, delivery, AV and ADAS applications. Across the board companies told us they are looking forward to incorporating the product in their solutions. Importantly, the Velabit is equipped with our breakthrough proprietary Micro LiDAR ready architecture for MLA. The MLA brings together the core elements that make lidar work, the optical chip in our ASIC or application specific integrated circuit technology. The miniaturization, combined with Velodyne's proprietary fully automated manufacturing process enables cost effective high-quality mass production. We are currently working on our next-generation rotational sensors that will use proprietary ASICs and our MLA technology to provide ultra long-range high-resolution auto great performance at scale overall for all hardware technology choices we have made, we are marrying the high performance that is needed with scalability and the ability to manufacture these technologies at the right cost point to enable mass-market adoption. On the software side, last week we launched a new Software Development Kit that allows customers to utilize the advanced capabilities of our Velo lidar perception software in their [indiscernible] solution. The Velo developed kit or VDK enables companies to accelerate time-to-market for bringing cutting-edge lidar capabilities to autonomous vehicles, ADAS, mobile delivery services, industrial robotics, drones and more. Technology innovations, such as these, advance our mission to democratized lidar-based safety and autonomy. The role lidar can play in improving safety and autonomy continues to gain recognition by the larger public sphere as well. Recent news from the NHTSA on reporting crashes involving autonomous vehicles and ADAS shows that the federal government is taking a hard look at crashes and near misses for vulnerable road users such as pedestrians. We have a solution available now that enables automatic emergency braking for wide variety of objects, including pedestrians. On the commercial vehicle side, we developed our Velarray for windshield implementation and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration recently published a notice of proposed rulemaking concerning vehicle safety technology installed on the interior of commercial motor vehicle windshields, which if adopted will provide a blanket exemption for lidar and therefore lower the threshold to its adoption. On the infrastructure side, the Smart Cities and Communities Act will provide technical and financial resources to local governments to implement smart city technology, especially suburban and rural community. Smart cities is a proxy for technology that enhances and deploys safety in the infrastructure. At Velodyne we have technology for both infrastructure and vehicles and are the only lidar company as a result providing a full circle of safety and autonomy. Now I'd like to discuss our financials. I will review first our second quarter and first half results and then provide our full year 2021 guidance and business outlook. Total revenue is $13.6 million, compared to $17.7 million in the first quarter of 2021 which included a $5.5 million licensing fee. Product revenue was $12 million, up nearly 30% from $10.6 million in the first quarter of 2021 as we were getting renewed demand for our lidar sensors from customers for delayed purchases due to the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The company's weighted average selling price per sensor was $3106 compared to $3887 per sensor in the first quarter of 2021. License and services revenue is $1.6 million compared to $7.1 million in the prior quarter and included a $5.5 million licensing fee I previously mentioned. GAAP gross loss was $5.8 million and non-GAAP gross loss is $5.3 million compared to the first quarter 2021 GAAP gross profit of $1.9 million and non-GAAP gross profit of $2.7 million. GAAP gross loss in Q2 did not benefit from the licensing fee in Q1. GAAP operating expenses were $84.8 million and non-GAAP operating expenses were $28.8 million compared to first quarter of 2021 GAAP operating expenses of $42.5 million and non-GAAP operating expenses of $28.6 million. GAAP operating expenses included $53.2 million stock-based compensation expense and including employer taxes. Included in stock-based compensation expense was approximately $42 million charged against sales and marketing related to our 2020 merger with Graf Industrial. This compared to first quarter 2021 GAAP operating expenses including $13.3 million of stock-based compensation expense including employer taxes. Included in general and administrative expenses of $1.4 million in legal and professional expenses in connection with our audit committee's investigation announced in the first quarter of 2021 into conduct by David Hall, the company's former Chairman and Marta Hall, the company's former Chief Marketing Officer and a current Director of the company. For the first half of 2021 this figure was $3.7 million. GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses included increased spending in research and development that is a response to the visibility provided by a multiyear agreement pipeline. GAAP net loss was $80.7 million and non-GAAP net loss was $34.4 million. GAAP net loss per share was $0.42 and non-GAAP loss per share was $0.18. This compared to our first quarter of 2021 GAAP net loss of $40.8 million, non-GAAP net loss was $26.1 million. First quarter of 2021 GAAP net loss per share was $0.22 and non-GAAP net loss per share was $0.14. EPS for the second quarter of 2021 is calculated using weighted average shares outstanding of 193 million. As of June 30 actual shares outstanding were 195.2 million. Velodyne completed the quarter with $353.6 million in cash and short-term investments on its balance sheet. Now for the first half of 2021, total revenue for the first half of 2021 was $31.3 million comprised of $22.6 million in product revenue and $8.8 million in license and service revenue. This compares to $45.4 million in the first half of 2020 of which $27.9 million was product revenue and $17.6 million was license and service revenue. GAAP net loss for the first half of 2021 was $121.5 million and non-GAAP net loss was $60.5 million. This compares to a GAAP net loss of $33.1 million for the first half of 2020 and $35.9 million in non-GAAP net loss. Now for full year 2021 financial statement guidance. Revenue is expected to range between $77 million and $94 million. We have seen parts of our global markets such as the U.S. and China recover, while other geographies are still negatively impacted by the continuing toll of COVID-19. We believe we have good line of sight to the low end of our guidance range and see a number of larger projects that will provide upside revenues should they come in. Many of the upside projects would generate non-recurring engineering revenue in 2021. Non-GAAP gross margins are expected to be between 13% to 24%. This reflects fewer units sold to cover remaining fixed overhead costs of our factory in San Jose, while we experienced ongoing delays in moving this manufacturing offshore due to COVID-19. Gross margins at the higher end of our revenue guidance would benefit from increased non-recurring engineering. On a GAAP basis, gross margins are expected to include approximately $2 million of stock based compensation expense. On a non-GAAP basis, operating expenses are expected to range between $125 million and $129 million. Based upon our expectations regarding our multiyear agreement pipeline, we are increasing our spend in new product development by approximately 40% in 2021 compared to 2020. We expect, general and administrative expenses will increase by approximately 35% in 2021, compared to 2020, primarily due to increased legal expenses and public company expenses. On a GAAP basis, operating expenses would include approximately $87 million of stock based compensation expense that reflects approximately $42 million we charged against sales and marketing in the second quarter, related to our 2020 merger with Graf Industrial and $8 million related to the recent departure of our CEO. On a GAAP basis, income tax expenses are anticipated to be approximately $800,000. Weighted average shares outstanding for the year are estimated to be $193.5 million. Finally, I would like to review our business outlook. At the end of the second quarter of 2021, we estimate we could have the opportunity for over $1 billion of revenue from signed and awarded projects through 2025, plus a pipeline of projects that are not yet signed and awarded of $4.5 billion. As I mentioned earlier, included in our multiyear agreements, our new ADAS agreements, which are expected to begin to ramp starting in 2026 and the years beyond. This concludes my formal remarks. Operator, we are now ready to take questions.