Daniel Barel
Analyst · D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead
Thank you, Limor. Good morning, and welcome to our first quarter 2022 update call. Let's go to Slide 3. I will begin the call with an update on the significant strong progress we are making towards commercial production in 2023 as we focus on converting our pipeline into backlog and establishing the production capacity to fulfill orders. Let me start by saying we are delivering on our commitments. We are preparing for full vehicle customer evaluation this summer and we've demonstrated our robotic assembly capability. This is a very excited time for REE as we continue the disciplined execution of our funded P7 commercialization and achieve the milestones we have been communicating to the market as we have advanced towards firm orders and commercial production. Moving to Slide 4. We show a track record of execution and continue on pace to deliver. This has been a significant year for us already and let me touch briefly on the strong foundation we've built. We spent 2019 building our core engineering capabilities and 2020 establishing supply chain capacity and validating our technology. Last year, we focused on building out the comprehensive ecosystem needed to enable commercial vehicle electrification, broke ground on our production facilities, and established a strong plan towards commercialization of our products. This include establishing our X-By-Wire homologation path and securing funding for P7 commercialization. This year, we've made significant progress validating our P7 platform at our U.K. engineering center and advance our manufacturing readiness demonstrating robotic assembly capability for our highly automated integration center that is expected to become operational this year. We are also presenting for the first time a full vehicle for customer's validation this summer. Following the completion of prototype validation by our customers on private roads, we expect to receive firm orders towards the end of the year. After that, we expect to validate advanced prototypes on public roads and obtain purchase orders. Moving forward, I will detail our recent progress to bring our P7 product to market and a step forward in manufacturing readiness to achieve our 2023 commercial production plan. Let's go to Slide 5. Commercialization of our P7 platform also continues on track. The product allows customers across many segments such as delivery, logistic, retail, and passenger, unique benefits, efficiencies, and flexibility enabled by the REEcorners and they're fully independent X-By-Wire control system. It is suited for application including commercial trucks, school buses, walk-in-vans, and recreational vehicles. It is also designed to significantly reduce development times of electric commercial models. Fully flat from end-to-end, the P7 platform is intended to power Class 3 to 5 vehicles with payloads up to 8,880 pounds range of up to 370 miles and all-wheel steering and drive. As we shared before, in some of our P7 programs, REE is the manufacturer of records, MOR, responsible for the homologation and registration of the electric platform. Their homologation activities are progressing on track on both the component and system level. Additionally, core control system software and functional safety development, a key element of the development of mission-specific variation enabled by REEcorner are progressing according to plan. We have a number of ongoing P7 programs with several counterparties in addition of bringing full vehicle to market for fleets, including a leading logistic company. OEMs remain an important part of our go-to-market strategy. As we have previously shared, we have a joint development agreement with a major commercial vehicle OEM to develop electric vehicles from Class 3 to Class 5 for North America and we continue to progress in this joint development phase. REE displayed the P7 platform for the first time in the U.S. at NTEA's Work Truck Week, where we showed our REEcorner technology and platform to dozens of existing and new potential customers across fleet owners, technology companies, OEMs, upfitters, and auto manufacturers. We also hosted several customers at our engineering center in the U.K. to experience and evaluate the P7 platform on the track and this has our advancements on build, verification and validation activities. The short clip from our platform testing is available in the presentation on our website. We are very encouraged by our customers' feedback from our own track demonstration in Israel and in the U.K. and feel confident in our previously communicated timeline. Let's move to Slide 6. Earlier today, we announced the major milestones of commencing customer validation on private roads this summer of a full electric vehicle powered by REE. We are very excited by the opportunity to bring the two market, the industry's first fully drive-by-wire commercial vehicle to our pipeline customers in the U.S. with our new Class 5 walk-in van prototype, developed in partnership with EAVX, the EV business unit of JB Poindexter. This new electric commercial van is the first in many ways. It is the first one to use EAVX's new body design that was developed from the ground up to first be showcased on our new P7 platform. In addition, this is the industry's first full vehicle that is powered by REE in our novel REEcorner technology. It is a true game-changer in so many ways, and most importantly, we are on track to deliver a commercial EV powered by REE less than 12 months after announcing our partnership with EAVX. I'm very proud of both our teams and our joint commitment to electrification and carbon neutrality. Customer evaluations on the new electric van will take place this summer over the course of several weeks in Michigan. The pre-booked event will allow EAVX and REE's pipeline customers across retail, delivery, and logistics segments to experience the vehicles, discuss their unique requirements and secure production capacity for 2023 deliveries. Our strategic go-to-market partnership with EAVX leverages JB Poindexter's distribution network of large fleet operators and backed by a proven history of creating excellent work truck and commercial vehicle bodies and subsidiaries through their business unit Morgan Olson. As a reminder, Morgan Olson is the largest producer of walk-in van bodies in North America, and its decades of legacy experience enabling last-mile deliveries of a wide range of parcels and goods for retail, Internet, and service companies. We are excited for our customers to experience firsthand the unique benefits of the first X-By-Wire vehicle build with the best-in-class Morgan Olson body and powered by REE. REE is horizontally integrated business and through our collaboration with leading partners such as EAVX, we are well-positioned on the demand side to deliver full vehicles to customers, while remaining focused on our core business of corners and platforms. Agreements with OEMs and body manufacturers allows us to tap into their existing customer base of these automotive leaders. Now onto Slide 7. Accordingly, we are building out our production capabilities in advance of anticipated customer demand. We recently announced the commissioning of our highly robotic integration centers for North America and Europe. As we shared yesterday, we are very happy to update that our core robotic assembly process is on schedule to be implemented into first highly automated integration center in the U.K., as you can see on Slide 7. This is an important milestone on our path to commercial production next year. The robotic assembly and use of autonomous guided vehicles in the 13 manufacturing cells at the heart of our modular production line that will be operational this year. The novel cloud-based robotic manufacturing approach will provide REE significant efficiency, savings, and scalability as they will enable us to continuously fine-tune our assembly procedures and rapidly deploy them to other sites. We have established key strategic supplier agreements to support our manufacturing readiness ahead of commercial production next year. REE has nominated Expert Technologies Group, a leading manufacturer of industrial automation systems, automated assembly, special-purpose machinery, and single and multi-robotics cells, including robotic assembly. For the integration of its robotic and automated manufacturing technologies. We also adopted Rockwell Automation's Plex Manufacturing Execution System or MES to support REE's highly digitized manufacturing across integration centers. The MES system provide us cloud capabilities which will serve as a digital backbone for REE's global operation and future assembly line. Not only does MES enable local scale flexibility to manage our customer-specific manufacturing operation, but it also allows us to quickly share and scale best practices globally. The interconnectedness of our operation will allow us to rapidly deploy changes to assembly procedures to assembly lines globally. You can think of it as a command center for which our global operation will be managed. You can watch a short clip on our core robotic assembly on our website. Our teams are doing tremendous work towards production readiness and I'm happy to update that the European integration center in the U.K. is on schedule to come online in the second half of this year with initial capacity of 10,000 vehicles set. Our North American integration center in Austin, Texas, is also on track to come online next year within additional capacity of 10,000 vehicles set. I'm excited that Josh Tech recently joined REE, as our Chief Operating Officer to lead the design and build-out of our integration centers. Josh served on Tesla's operations leadership team and brings over 23 years of experience to REE in complex product development and launch, industrialization, infrastructure development, engineering, supply chain, quality, and operations management. I have the utmost confidence in Josh and the entire operations team. REE's CapEx-light production approach is based on leveraging its global network of Tier 1 partners' manufacturing capacity. With highly automated component assembly and testing to take place in REE's integration centers. This means not only faster time to market, but also secure supply chain capacity and quality control. Our first highly automated integration center is both the starting point and the backbone of REE's future global manufacturing capacity. We are highly engaged with pipeline customers and since the paramount importance of offering them a full solution for electrification. From financing of infrastructure and vehicles through modular advanced electric vehicles to global maintenance and data and battery as a service. We are able to offer such a comprehensive set of capabilities based on our global ecosystem of partners for a full turnkey solution that will enable and expedite a smooth and scalable transition for our customers from ICE to EV fleets. As I've said before, our efforts are primarily focused on the nearest-term commercial opportunities. Although I have devoted the majority of my time today to the P7 platform and our collaboration with EAVX, we continue to make progress with Hino Motors, a global leader in heavy and medium-duty trucks as we jointly develop the FlatFormer, which we showcased at CES in January with a global -- with the goal to deliver a functional platform prototype for evaluation and testing by the end of this year. The FlatFormer is capable of carrying a customized mobility service module that can carry passengers, goods, and deliver services. The mobility service module can be easily detached from the EV platform and once detached can serve as an independent standalone unit leaving the platform to be operated separately and continue on its next mission. We are very confident with the potential of this program and the demand for it in the market. We are actively exploring multiple business cases relevant for such a novel and future-looking solution with the REECorner technology at its core. As I've mentioned, our platform is indifferent to vehicle side, shape, power source, and level of autonomy. So the potential application is broad and future proof and can be deployed across fleets of varying vehicle classes. We have other exciting programs in various stages of development, including concepts for autonomous vehicles and we will share updates about this when we are able to. I would like to commend the REE teams across the world for their phenomenal work and dedication to making this a more sustainable carbon-neutral world as we move faster towards fully electric vehicle future. With that, I will hand the call over to David Goldberg, REE's CFO, to discuss our financial results. David?