Innoviz Technologies Ltd.
Q1 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 12 May 2021

[Operator:]

Good morning everyone and welcome to Innoviz First Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference call. Joining us today are Omer Keilaf, Innoviz's Chief Executive Officer, and Eldar Cegla, Innoviz's Chief Financial Officer. Following the former remarks, we will open the call for your questions. I would like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded and will be available on the investor relations section of our website at IR.innoviz.tech. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that our discussions today will include forward looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to future events and the future financial performance of Innoviz. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements made today speak only to our expectations as of today and we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise them. For discussion of some of the important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward looking statements please see the risk factors section of our form 20-F, filed with the SEC, on April 21, 2021.

[Omer Keilaf:]

Thank you, Maya. And good morning, everyone. Welcome to our garage. What you can see here, we decided to let you see us through the fun clad of InnovizOne, we want you to get a feel of how high resolution it is and how high is the quality. What you can see here are a few cars that we have here in order to collect data you can see here a BMW car. We have here InnovizOne mounted and we also have additional cars. And you can actually see here, the LiDAR is mounted in different heights, because that allows us to collect data to support different applications that we support. So I think it’s like the best way to introduce Innoviz to you through the work the place where things really happen. And I think we can start there. Thank you. Okay, before we start just to avoid any concern. We are all well to save here at our headquarters in Israel. Our employees are working as usual. Our production lines are fully operating abroad. We hope that this unfortunate situation will end. On this call, I'll provide you with an overview of our business, some key performance indicators and future guidance and then turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Eldar to review our financials for the quarter. As you may have already seen, we issued an exciting press release this morning about a major design win. I'm pleased to announce that after a comprehensive due diligence process that lasted over two and a half years, which involve multiple rounds of tests and audits to validate our products reliability, maturity, qualification and certification we were selected by a leading tier one automotive supplier as the LiDAR provider for its autonomous shuttle program. Innoviz will provide its InnovizOne solid state LiDAR units to the company for use on charters across Europe, which are currently expected to be launched towards the end of 2022 and change the face of public transportation. We believe that our selection is a testament to the quality of our technology and the attractiveness of the economics of partnering with Innoviz. To put it simply, this is an incredibly exciting design win for us. This win validates our reputation amongst global OEMs and we believe it puts us ahead of the pack when compared to other LiDAR companies. With every new automotive customer who uses our LiDAR will not only generate incremental revenues, but we also benefit from powerful second order effects like the increased validation of our technology and the growing quality of the Innoviz brand name. As we continue to deal with BMW, we hope to provide ongoing updates as the project evolves.

[Eldar Cegla:]

Thank you, Omer. Thank you. And good morning, everyone. In December 2020, we entered into a definitive agreement to merge with the spec, which resulted in Innoviz becoming a public listed company upon closing of the transaction in early April this year. The transaction included a $230 million fully committed ordinary share pipe which included a strategic investment from our tier 1 partner Magna International. On April 5, 2021, the business combination successfully closed, providing Innoviz with approximately $371 million gross proceeds comprised of the specs of $141 million of cash held in trust as well as $230 million from the pipe. A $30 million increase from the original subscription on the date of signing of the business combination agreement. The cash from this transaction will be instrumental in supporting us ramp up to meet near term production targets, invest in a next generation research and development programs as well as sales and marketing initiatives in the longer term. Ultimately, we believe that our strategic cash position will help drive organic growth now and in the future. Our total revenues for the first quarter of 2021 were $728,000. InnovizOne related sales in the first quarter increased by 48% to $682,000, and represent 94% revenues compared to $459,000 or 55% of revenues in the first quarter of 2020. Innoviz expects the portion of revenues from sales related to InnovizOne LiDARs to increase as production is increased to meet order volumes. Turning to our operating expenses for the first quarter of 2021, our operating expenses increased by approximately 9% to $19.7 million from $18.1 million in quarter one of last year. Driven by the continuous investment in R&D and an increase in G&A expenses in connection with becoming a public company, we anticipate that nearly 80% of the OpEx budget will be spent on R&D and expect to increase R&D headcount by approximately 30%. We also intend to ramp up investment in business development and other marketing activities now that our product is maturing and we are penetrating new markets. To quantify this, we believe that our sales and marketing budget will almost double this year and are looking to grow the team headcount by upwards of 60%. Separately, we anticipate that we will recognize additional transaction costs relating to business combination incurred during the second quarter of this year. This expense are currently recorded on our balance sheet as of Q1, 2021 and may have some impact on our operational costs. We also expect to record share based costs in relation to manage measures to be granted as a part of the business combination closing. This is a non-cash impacting costs and will be reflected in our operational costs. On the balance sheet, we had $199 million in cash at March 31, 2021 compared to $50 million at December 31, 2020. The increase in cash is a result of a portion of the pipe proceeds received in escrow as a part of the business combination closed on April 5, 2021. As previously mentioned, our use of cash in both the near and long term focuses on making key investments in R&D, sales and marketing, and improving our production use and investing in tools to drive automation. This completes my financial summary and with that, we are ready to open the call for your questions.

[Operator:]

Thank you. Our first question today is coming from the line of Michael Pilato. Michael please mute yourself and go ahead.

[Michael Pilato:]

Hi, can you hear me?

[Omer Keilaf:]

Yes.

[Michael Pilato:]

Great. Thanks for taking my question. Glad to hear everyone on the team is safe and doing well and congrats on the first quarter. So just a quick question about the six projects that are in commercial negotiations at the RFP stage. I know, you can't provide any, obviously company names, but I'm wondering if you could maybe provide details around where these companies lie in terms of the end markets whether it's OEMs and for ADAS applications or shuttle companies, etc. Just a little detail there?

[Omer Keilaf:]

So, it's. Can you hear me? Okay. So out of these six, four are carmakers for level three programs. The other two are shuttle programs.

[Michael Pilato:]

Okay, got it. Thank you very much. And then maybe just a little detail around sort of the volume numbers in terms of the units you sold this quarter and the average ASP or the weighted ASP, and then how you expect that to sort of progress throughout the rest of the year in into 2022?

[Omer Keilaf:]

Yes. At this point of time, we don't disclose these numbers. In terms of number of units the ASP is north of 10Ks. It's mainly sample units.

[Michael Pilato:]

Okay. Understood. And when you're having these negotiations with ADAS customers and shuttle customers, I guess what is the price point you're quoting them ads for InnovizOne and InnovizTwo, I know it depends on volumes, but roughly, is it that the $1,000 point for the InnovizOne and then the InnovizTwo 500 or sub 500?

[Omer Keilaf:]

Yes. So those are the overall average ASP through the entire program kind of lifetime. So InnovizTwo targeting sub $500 to support several programs with very-very meaningful volumes.

[Michael Pilato:]

Got it. Thank you very much, and congrats on the first quarter.

[Omer Keilaf:]

Thank you very much.

[Operator:]

Our next question will be coming from the line of Mark Delaney from Goldman. Please unmute yourself and go ahead. Mark, are you able to hear us? Okay, Mark will be back with you in just a few moments. We will take another question now from the line of Kevin Cassidy. Kevin, please go ahead and unmute yourself and go ahead.

[Kevin Cassidy:]

Okay, can you hear me? Okay, great. I just understand the transition from InnovizOne to InnovizTwo. When does that happen? What does that mean for your gross margins?

[Omer Keilaf:]

Sure, happy to answer this question. Actually, maybe we can upgrade upload the certain slide about the transition to InnovizOne to InnovizTwo. So since the company first founded, we've done incremental improvements of the technology. Every year we were able to improve the performance between a factor of 20 to 40 times coming from different contribution of different parts of the technology as you might be able to see now on the screen. So you can see in 2016, going into 2017 and 18, every year, we're able to improve the performance by a factor between 20 and 40. Maybe you can click it to play. And also being able to reduce the price quite significantly, as every year we are also pushing the boundaries on that. So we were able to make that through the last five years and now moving from InnovizOne to InnovizTwo providing another very substantial improvement in performance in a factor of 30, on top of InnovizOne and also a very substantial cost reduction which is roughly 70% in the boom. We always target a 50% gross margin when it comes to our business model working in a component model, which means that with the tier 1 that we work with and eventually do the assembly in their sites we sell the components with a gross margin of 50%. Put aside the perception software which we bundle or we add on top of it at around $50 per license. Did I answer your question? Just making sure.

[Kevin Cassidy:]

Yes, absolutely. Great answer. Thank you. I was leaving towards the next question is just how long can you keep up this type of pace? Is it all just a Moore's law, but it's $50 to target.

[Omer Keilaf:]

I think Moore's law doesn't talk about 20 times improvement in a year. I think it talks about maybe two times in every year and a half. We drastically kind of running in a faster speed here. And the reason behind it is because the Moore's law is pretty much accurate. But it's always, mostly focusing on when you’re making an improvement to a specific technology. One of the advantages in the Innoviz that we are actually developing multiple components that help in building our device. So by providing incremental improvements of a factor of two or even sometimes five, when we really do a very good job. Those are additive improvements that eventually you can multiply them. So we're very multidisciplinary team. We're not just doing a very good sensor or very good scanner or very good optical design. We work in on all fronts and we're also going into additional layers of the design because we try to find additional ways to improve, always look at that kind of 10x improvement. I always believe that a company should have a linear plan, but should always keep an exponential plan, meaning that you need to leave some space for variance. And we always keep some investment into our CTO office to work on technology that can actually leapfrog in some cases, and those contribute every year. I think that having the fact that we have such talented engineers help us to together and I already know kind of how InnovizThree will look like and we know exactly where are the knobs that we need to continue to push. Eventually, LiDARs need to be not sub $500, they need to be sub $100. And we always try to find the best ROI on where we should put our investment or focus in research and I would say vertical integration and improvement to performance. So those are things that we keep always working on. And we believe that InnovizTwo would give us an excellent way to penetrate the market until 2030 from what we see in the market on requirements for performance and also price point. It's interesting to see that we actually moved to an offensive kind of approach. We actually educate customers about the requirements they should provide to the LiDAR. InnovizTwo is providing performance metrics that unmatchable and we try to educate customers to understand better about the use cases, which InnovizTwo solves in the application. And I believe that it will give us a lot of opportunities to the market and we'll continue to push on it.

[Kevin Cassidy:]

Great. Thank you.

[Operator:]

Our next question is coming from the line of Mark Delaney from Goldman. Let's try it again. Please go ahead. Okay, unfortunately, we cannot hear Mark. Please stand by for further questions. There are no further questions. Please proceed.

[Omer Keilaf:]

Okay. One second. So thank you all for joining us today's call. I hope that what we shared with you helped you understand how Innoviz is positioned to grow and become the market leader. We have been and will continue to be focused on several big opportunities in the market, but now we're also positioned to grow our customer base as a result of the growing availability of our production line. I especially want to thank our employees, partners and investors for their continued support. As you've heard today, there are many things to be excited about and we can't wait to update you about this in the quarters to come. Thank you very much.