Luminar Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:LAZR) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
Luminar Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:LAZR) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 27, 2024
Luminar Technologies, Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.2 EPS, expectations were $-0.19. Luminar Technologies, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Aileen Smith: Welcome, everyone, to Luminar's Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2023 Business Update Call. My name is Aileen Smith and I am Luminar's Head of Investor Relations. With me today are Austin Russell, Founder and Chief Executive Officer; and Tom Fenimore, Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and you can find the shareholder letter that accompanies this call at investors.luminartech.com. Hopefully, most folks have had a chance to review our shareholder letter as we are continuing with our new earnings format this quarter. As with last quarter, we will spend the majority of the call addressing questions from our stakeholders, including the retail investor questions, posted on the SAFE platform, institutional investor questions emailed to our investors inbox, and live questions from our analyst community.
We will be checking these platforms intermittently throughout the duration of the call to address any questions that come in real-time. Austin wanted to begin our call with some welcome remarks, including a look back on '23 and a look ahead into 2024. Before I pass the call over to him, I wanted to remind everyone that during the call we may refer to GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Today's discussion also contains forward-looking statements based on the environment as we currently see it, and as such does include risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our shareholder letter for more information on the specific risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. With that, I'd like to introduce Luminar's Founder and CEO, Austin Russell.
Austin Russell: All right, well, thanks Aileen, and great to see all you guys here. So maybe just a quick opener before we jump into Q&A. If you've had a chance to be able to take a look at that letter kind of informational packet. The team and I have been really quietly heads down, focused on execution and the core execution for our business with all eyes on the industry's first production vehicle launch, with Luminar and Volvo as standard on the new EX90. And it's funny, as I think this is going to be one of the, maybe even the last earnings calls that where we're a pre-production R&D company before we truly enter our growth stage. And I'd say it's become abundantly clear that we've all seen all the challenges that the automotive industry has faced historically in being able to develop, industrialize, and enable this whole next generation capabilities on vehicles and bring it out into the commercial world and into consumers' hands and really all this has been laid bare to the public in recent history, in the media and whatnot.
A lot of this just comes down to the ambition of what most have been in the industry have been trying to do of replacing the driver altogether with robo-taxis and this is where from Luminar from the beginning, we've taken a strategy of enhancing the driver and really focusing in on production vehicles. And that's where Luminar is succeeding, where the rest of the industry hasn't. In the last 10-years of what we've done at Luminar have really been leading up to this global launch on production vehicles right around the corner with Volvo, and we'll be covering this at Luminar Day. To-date, we've invested over a billion dollars to develop a technology foundation, product industrialization capabilities, and this year it's showtime. And it's true that there are incremental costs, like maybe what you saw this quarter, that was more than the target and we don't control all the timing for the vehicle launches and we've learned a lot through the years on how we can even be more efficient.
But now that's in our rearview mirror. And for the first time, our multibillion-dollar order book is going to be converting to revenue this year. For the first time, we're going to start seeing the benefits around the world into consumers' hands. And, of course, automakers are going to be, well, maybe I shouldn't say, of course, but in the case of Luminar, automakers are going to beginning to directly market our technology to their consumers. And this initial EX90 launch is going to be preceded by a flurry of additional mass-produced vehicle launches with automakers around the world over the coming 36 months following this. So, yes, it's very exciting time. Certainly going to be enabling a lot of additional operational and economic efficiencies and exponential economic growth as we start realizing these benefits of the economies of scale with this program.
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