Daniel Barel
Analyst · ROTH Capital Partners. Please ask your question
Good day, everyone and thank you for joining us today. For those of you who have been following our story and for those who recently joined, the past few months have been the most significant in REE's history. We have achieved milestones that we pursued for years. Today I can tell you that we have what we believe is by far the best product offering in our heavily underserved addressable market. I can also tell you that we have secured sufficient production capital and our funding position is strong. Thanks to our recently announced strategic supply chain management agreement with Motherson Group. We de-risked our ability to ramp up to mass production. We have already kicked off US production with Roush as a US-based contract manufacturer for our P7 product line and we continue to see growing demand for our products both from fleets and OEMs. The strategic agreement with Motherson Group is transformational. It will allow us to grow faster, while lowering production challenges that other EV companies often face as they ramp. With Motherson driving manufacturing, customers and shareholders could be confident on this front. Today we are joined by two great gentlemen from Motherson, Mr. Rajesh Goel, President, Head Special Projects and Mr. [indiscernible], Head of Group Strategy and M&A, who will share more on the rationale behind Motherson's decision to partner with REE. But before we jump to discuss these strong milestones in more detail, let's first cover the second quarter of 2024 financials. Second quarter net loss narrowed by 57% quarter-over-quarter and by 59% year-over-year. Free cash flow burn continued to narrow with a 19% reduction quarter-over-quarter. Liquidity was $60.5 million comprised of cash, cash equivalent and short term investment inclusive of a $15 million credit facility. I believe that our strategic agreement with Motherson would allow faster and more stable production scale-up and significant working capital benefits. Motherson is a very strong global engineering and manufacturing company and one of the world's leading automotive supplier. For fiscal year 2024, Motherson achieved gross revenue of $17.2 billion and they operate 400 facilities across 44 countries with 190,000 employees. Motherson has a strong-lasting relationship with some of the leading automotive brands. Combining Motherson's manufacturing expertise and supply chain management with REE's market-leading software-defined EV product, lineup promises to create a dominant new force in the electrified commercial vehicle market globally, allowing us to service customers at scale and address the significant order growth anticipated for our products. As part of the strategic agreement, Motherson will manage sourcing and supply chain management of all production parts and support the assembly of the REEcorner and the REE P7 electric trucks. They will drive operational manufacturing improvements to REE’s production line, which we believe would significantly improve unit costs. Faster revenue growth and improved unit costs are expected to accelerate the road to meaningful free cash flow generation. Demand wise, we continue to see strong interest in our technology from potential customers, including OEMs. Let me repeat that last point. We are currently in discussions with three OEMs seeking to utilize REE’s software-defined technology in their future product lines, offering the potential of meaningfully expand our current offering from full vehicle or platforms to software licensing of our full X by-wire technology, allowing OEMs to take our software to EVs in all classes and segments. Our order book continues to grow, reflecting strong demand, even amidst broader challenges in the EV market. We remain committed to offering excellent products that provide improved operational efficiencies and a low total cost of ownership. With the additional confidence, customers gain from our collaboration with Motherson. We anticipate strong order flow to continue. To put numbers on it, our order book is up 15% quarter-over-quarter as we continue to expand our dealer and service network to 78 locations across North America. We now have one of the largest service networks of its kind in North America. On the demand front, it is important to know that the commercial vehicle fleet globally is not electrifying as quickly as fleet owners would like. The reason is simple. The available electrified vehicle options are simply not good enough. I think it's fair to say that major fleet owners today are desperate for a fit-to-purpose electric product that they can order at scale. At the risk of repeating myself, we believe that REE has the best-in-class technology-led product. Not only do we have the best product, but now, thanks to Motherson. REE also has the manufacturing scale, experience and expertise to scale production to meet the demand of large and global fleet owners. The annual market for medium-duty vehicles in the US alone is 240,000 units with more than double that in Europe and Asia. Currently, only a small part of that is electrified and those units that do sell are essentially retrofitted ICE products. With the right product and production availability, the industry could easily be ordering tens of thousands of EV units per year in the US alone, especially in Class 3 to 5. With the right product, the required manufacturing backing and the required service network, we are ready to meet the growing demand. As you may have seen, last week we announced a $45.35 million capital raise. As you know, we went public via a SPAC transaction, and at the time of the transaction, we underwent approximately $153 million in redemptions, causing us to commence our life as a public company with less cash than we expected. However, since that time we continue to adopt and today we feel that we are finally in a very, very strong cash position. We are proud that we have made it to the mass production point with the best-in-class, full FMVSS certified X by-wire product that has been custom designed for the target customers. Thanks to the continued support of our patient long-term investors, this additional capital allows us to move forward confidently into the mass production phase from a financial standpoint. Motherson contributed to the capital raise, as you have seen, fully aligning their interests with ours. With that, let me head it over to Josh to tell you more about our plans to meet the growing demand we see.