Eve Holding, Inc. (NYSE:EVEX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Eve Holding, Inc. (NYSE:EVEX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript March 16, 2023

Operator: Greetings. Welcome to the Eve Air Mobility Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. . I will now turn the conference over to your host, Lucio Aldworth. You may begin.

Lucio Aldworth: Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. This is Lucio Aldworth, the Director of Investor Relations at Eve, and I wanted to welcome everyone to our fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. I have here with me co-CEOs, Gerard DeMuro and André Stein as well as our CFO, Eduardo Couto. After their initial remarks, we're going to open the call for questions. We have prepared a deck with a few slides and additional information, and this is available at our Investor Relations website at ir.eveairmobility.com. So feel free to download it. Let me first start by mentioning that this presentation includes forward-looking statements or statements about events and circumstances that have not yet occurred. We have based these forward-looking statements largely on our current expectations and projections about future events and financial trends affecting our business and our future financial performance.

These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, among other things, general economic, political and business conditions, both in Brazil and in our market. The words believe, may, will, estimate, continues, anticipates, intends, expects and similar words are intended to identify these forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to update publicly or revise any statement because of new information, future events or other factors. In light of these risks and uncertainties, the forward-looking events and circumstances discussed in this presentation might not occur. Our actual results could differ substantially from those anticipated in our forward-looking statements. With that, I will now turn the presentation over to Jerry.

Jerry?

Gerard DeMuro: Thanks, Lucio. Good morning, and thank you to those joining the call today as well. We had a very eventful 2022, accomplishing a number of milestones for the program and for the company. We, as many of you know, are actually a product of Embraer's technology accelerator, EmbraerX, and the first eVTOL concept was actually introduced in and being developed in EmbraerX in 2018. And we were then spun out and eventually, we merged with Zanite and went public in May of last year. Going public, Eve now has the autonomy and agility of a start-up, yet the resources and experience and the backing of Embraer, so that we feel we can be a major player in the OEM market. We listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EVEX last May, and we listed with net proceeds of about $355 million from the de-SPAC that included investments from our PIPE investors as well as United, which came along later in September.

Later in the year, we secured almost another $100 million worth of credit lines with the Brazilian National Development Bank. So that gives us a total liquidity of over $400 million. We believe this is enough to fund our major R&D efforts as well as our sales and support activities well into 2025. You will recall that operating with our critical mass, mostly in Brazil, gives us tremendous OpEx and CapEx advantages. Thus, we think we'll be well set through the R&D program again through 2025. And our eVTOL program has matured significantly over the last year. We have been testing systems and subsystems to validate our design through sophisticated model-based engineering and very high fidelity simulations. We're refining the final design, not only through the use of these advanced engineering tools, but we're also using subscale models and advancing to full-scale commercially representative prototypes eventually in 2024.

This flexible approach allows us to thoroughly test and validate components separately. We are following an effective and efficient process proven over many years by Embraer, which has certified more aircraft in the last 25 years than any other aviation OEM. Our goal, of course, is a safe and reliable eVTOL with the lowest total cost of ownership, and that's what drove us to a Lift + Cruise configuration that is truly optimized for the urban air mission. 2022 also saw us introduce our cabin mock-up at our customer advisory board last spring. We had great reviews, and it will also be available at our investor event this April in Melbourne, Florida. We also initiated our Type Certification process in 2022, which will be done through ANAC, the Brazilian Aviation Authority.

While the Type Certification will be done through ANAC in Brazil, it will also be followed by FAA to a bilateral agreement that ANAC and FAA have had for many years. And typically, this allows a much more efficient process with only limited additional testing and final endorsement of the certification process by FAA. We also began dialogue with EASA, and we intend to follow a similar approach there. But we think we have a significant advantage by being first in line with ANAC and using ANAC as our primary certification authority versus, for instance, multiple applicants at the FAA, all with unique configuration. Our plan remains to enter into service sometime in 2026. In 2022, we also ran a number of simulations with helicopters in Rio, in Chicago and most recently in India.

The goal of these simulations was to gather critical intelligence to help us scale the global UAM ecosystem. We also tested use cases of the eVTOL in actual congested urban areas. Now to the next slide, I'd like to call my Co-CEO, Andre Stein, to talk a little bit more about the program advancements in the last quarter.

Andre Stein: Thanks, Jerry. We made some real progress this quarter and intensify our supplier engagement. We shortlisted potential suppliers of critical systems, such as motors and batteries, and now have more detailed visibility as to the certifications of these components. With that, we can fine-tune our development, refine our flight-control laws, performance envelope, fly-by-wire systems and so on. It also gives us a much better sense of controllability of our aircraft and expected performance under different conditions. In parallel, we have been employing dedicated motor-propeller rigs to test under different conditions and other rigs for batteries and other components and systems. This part of our approach were test systems and components independently and incorporate them in our design, optimizing the configuration.

This allows us to quickly and efficiently evolve the design and reduce program development costs. All the steps mean that we are reaching a critical point in the maturity of our aircraft. I'm going to talk about this in a few moments. But besides having defined that the first production site to be in Brazil, which we announced late last year, we have concluded our manufacturing strategy with the support of Porsche to define model size, flow management and other logistics related specifically to the manufacturing process. Lastly, we defined the system requirement for the Urban Air Traffic Management software and successfully deployed an earlier version in our Chicago simulation last September. Our goal is to enable the safe management of aircraft flow within controlled aerospace and improve efficiency in operations and in vertiports by reducing waiting times and aircraft overall energy consumption.

We can achieve these by optimizing flight plans and integrating flight paths of different aircraft for a cohesive system. Now on to Slide 4. In the end, our strengths translate into the largest and most diversified backlog by number of customers and regions in the industry today. In total, we have nonbinding LOIs, that these are letters of intent, for 2,770 aircraft from 26 different customers spread over 12 countries and different business from to regional airlines to helicopter operators, ridesharing platforms and leasing companies. We believe this pipeline offers strong long-term revenue visibility, and it will help Eve to smooth cash flow consumption in the years to come as we start to convert the existing letters of intention into firm orders and collect predelivery payments, known as PDPs. Beyond that, we are developing a strong network of partners in areas, such as infrastructure and energy, addressing one of the largest challenges ahead of Urban Air Mobility, which is creating a whole new ecosystem beyond simply developing aircraft.

Now let me call Edu to talk about our financials. Edu?

Pixabay/Public domain

Eduardo Couto: Thanks, Stein. At Slide 5, Eve is a pre-operational company formed to develop its eVTOL in the Urban Air Mobility ecosystem. We expect to start to generate material revenues outside of predelivery payments once we start to deliver our eVTOLs, currently estimated for 2026. So our financial results for now reflect mostly the costs associated with our program development. I would like to start with the income statement highlights. We invested $18 million during the fourth quarter 2022 in our program development and $52 million in the full year. The majority was invested to develop our eVTOL and a portion for our service and support solutions and the development of our Urban Air Traffic Management System. We are the only eVTOL company with a complete solution, including the aircraft, maintenance and air traffic control.

In addition to R&D, we also deployed $9 million in SG&A during the quarter and $33 million in the year. Keep in mind that the Eve and Embraer teams dedicated to the eVTOL development have been growing as the program matures. Including R&D and SG&A, we reported a net loss of $20 million in the quarter and $174 million in the year. It's important to highlight that our 2022 results include noncash and nonrecurring costs related to warrants issued to partners as well as some listing expenses of our IPO in 2022. This nonrecurring, noncash expenses were $111 million, so recurring loss for the full year of 2022 was $63 million. Now moving to cash flow. Our operations consumed $21 million in the quarter and a total of $60 million in the year. We ended the fourth quarter with $311 million in total liquidity, down from $330 million in the third quarter of 2022 without considering the recent long-term funding from the Brazilian Development Bank.

Now moving to Slide 6. Considering our current cash position, investments, including with Embraer and the credit lines from the Brazilian Development Bank currently signing, we have total liquidity of more than $400 million. Again, we feel comfortable that this is enough to carry our operations, development and certification efforts through 2025. I also want to call your attention to some of our cost competitive advantages. We have full access to 1,500 identified and skilled engineers from Embraer on a first priority and as-needed basis. This means we don't need to bring hundreds of engineers into our P&L, which helps reduce our development costs. On top of that, most of our team is located in Brazil, where we have specialized engineers and more favorable cost rate.

In the end, our R&D dollars last longer in Brazil compared to U.S. and Europe, where our competitors are located. Lastly, we also have access to Embraer's facilities, reducing investments related to infrastructure and CapEx in general. As Stein mentioned, our R&D efforts are intensifying. This will require an increase in our structure to support the expected development growth in the years ahead. For 2023, we expect Eve's total cash consumption to be between $130 million and $150 million, which, considering our total liquidity above $400 million gives us good comfort to keep our eVTOL development in the years to come. With that, I conclude our financial highlights, and I would like to call Stein to talk about our development milestones.

Andre Stein: Thanks, Edu. During 2022, one of our focus was to put the necessary structures in place, engage the right people and fund the development and certification program for our aircraft as well as other products for the Urban Air Mobility market. With funding now secured, we are accelerating our program as planned with the milestones you see on Slide 7. The first, as I alluded to earlier, is the selection of the primary suppliers of the most critical components of our aircraft, such as propulsion systems and batteries, which will be completed in the first half of 2023. Also defined the suppliers, we continue to refine and validate our estimates for aircraft production, performance envelope and operating costs. The selection will also result in much more detailed specifications of these components, such as dimensions, weight, power output and the systems interface.

This is critical for us to define the final aircraft architecture at a complete system level, which we plan to also accomplish in the first semester of this year. With the final design established, we expect to begin fabrication of our prototype as planned in 2023. Last but not least, we plan to deploy the most recent version of our Urban Air Traffic Management in the second half to start testing in field trials with potential customers. With that, we conclude our prepared remarks, and we'd like to open for the call for questions. Operator?

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