Q4 2023 Energy Recovery Inc Earnings Call
Participants
James Siccardi
David Moon
Joshua Ballard; Chief Financial Officer; Energy Recovery Inc
Pavel Molchanov; Analyst; Raymond James
Ryan Pfingst; Analyst; B. Riley Securities
Presentation
Operator
Greetings, and welcome to the Energy Recovery fourth-quarter and full-year 2023 earnings call. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.
It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, James Siccardi, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.
James Siccardi
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Energy Recovery's 2023 fourth-quarter and full-year earnings conference call. My name is Jim Siccardi, Vice President of Investor Relations at Energy Recovery. And I'm here today with our President and Chief Executive Officer, David Moon; and our Chief Financial Officer, Joshua Ballard.
During today's call, we may make projections and other forward-looking statements under the Safe Harbor provisions contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 regarding future events or the future financial performance of the company. These statements may discuss our business, economic and market outlook, growth expectations, new products and performance cost structure and business strategy. Forward-looking statements are based on information currently available to us and on management's beliefs, assumptions, estimates or projections.
Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and other factors. We refer you to the documents the company files from time to time with the SEC, specifically the company's Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. These documents identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in our projections or forward-looking statements.
All statements made during this call are made only as of today, February 21, 2024, and the company expressly disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during this call to reflect subsequent events or circumstances unless otherwise required by law.
At this point, I will turn the call over to our President and Chief Executive Officer, David Moon.
David Moon
Thank you, Jim. First off, I want to thank my fellow Board members for appointing me as the permanent CEO. I look forward to working with our shareholders, the Board, my leadership team, and our employees as we enter this phase of Energy Recovery's growth.
I also want to thank Bob Mao for his grace, assistance, and advice these past four months. As we announced today, Josh Ballard has decided to step down at the end of June as our CFO. He and I are working together with Korn Ferry to conduct our CFO search. I want to thank Josh for his commitment to an orderly CFO transition and for his continued leadership throughout this transition. He and the Energy Recovery leadership team have given me a great foundation to build on, which is a healthy business with nine years of consecutive revenue growth, a strong balance sheet, and a technology that is showing promise outside of our core desal business. I'm excited to be here, and I look forward to our future at Energy Recovery.
I've now been in the seat for approximately four months over this period of taking a deeper dive into our technology and products, our diversification strategy around our pressure exchanger and wastewater technology, and where we are executing on that strategy. I have a better understanding of our markets and customers where we sit in the product development cycle and commercialization of these new products as well as the challenges ahead of us.
I'd like to start with a few observations and how I will approach this role. First, to be very clear, my number one focus is to rebuild the shareholder value that we've seen decline in recent months and then to grow it further, there is nothing more important than creating stability through building trust with shareholders and showing that we can deliver on a full potential of our pressure exchanger technology. We will start with delivering on an orderly CFO transition. We must also execute and therefore deliver on our 2024 financial targets, or walk the talk as I like to say, that we have challenges, but I believe we can create true value for our shareholders in the coming years.
Second, I've had extensive discussions with many of you and heard your opinions regarding the CEO. transition. I assure you that your voices have been heard loud and clear and you concerned have been communicated directly to the Board, sir, this is a strong team and I could not be more excited to lead. Everyone is rolled up their sleeves and jumped in to make the transition as smooth as possible, have been consummate professionals throughout have kept the company moving for, have signed numerous water customer contracts, continue to produce industry-leading products and showed what good teams do during moments of transition, adapt and come together for the company's strategy of PX diversification and growth is the right strategy in mind.
And the Board's opinion is critical to Energy Recovery's future as well as to our ability to rebuild and grow share, both shareholder value. And we continue to grow and diversify our business around our incredible pressure exchanger and intellectual property that creates value for our customers by recovery. Otherwise, wasted, introduced energy and desal wastewater and now CO2 refrigeration. However, we must now do the deeper work to develop our 2025 to 2029 strategic plan for what I call our playbook.
With this playbook, I'll be able to clearly communicate what and where our growth targets will be in the desal waste, water and CO2 verticals as well as the critical actions and milestones needed to achieve these targets. This playbook will also clearly identify what our cash requirements will be to fund our growth going forward. For rest assured, though, we will continue to spend wisely and be mindful of the need to generate strong returns on investments. Our playbook will focus on maintaining our market leadership in desal as well as on executing and with the wastewater verticals where we see the most potential growth, including wastewater treatment for lithium battery manufacturing, chemicals, municipal water, as well as CO2 commercial refrigeration.
I also see derivative verticals where I believe are wastewater and CO2 refrigeration products could be applicable. However, more work needs to be done here to understand and prioritize these many other verticals. We remain committed to sustainability and the products we develop and produce as well as in our internal operations and how we produce those products. Sustainability is a critical piece of our DNA and will remain part of our strategy going forward.
And finally, energy recovery remains in a variable in a very enviable position. Financially, we continue to generate cash, and we expect our cash position to grow in 2024. Even while we invest in growth, which Josh will describe to you, we will need to make decisions on how to deploy this growing cash position with the same financial and commercial focus that we've instilled in Energy Recovery for the past few years. Rest assured, though, I share Josh's vision of expanding our EBITDA margin as we grow into these new verticals.
So where I sit today, I believe the fundamental pieces of Energy Recovery's overall vision and diversification strategy will remain in place. We must continue to defend and strengthen our position in desal. We must accelerate growth in wastewater and where my experience and strengths come to bear. We must define in more detail what the best market and distribution strategy is to deliver our PX G1300.
Successful execution here has the potential to open doors to other vertical opportunities in the coming years, but we must first be laser-focused on the task at hand. In short, I think you can see that while we certainly see changes in Energy Recovery, fundamental principles that have attracted so many of you to our company for these past years remain in place.
With that, let's get into our update and as usual, we will start with water. We delivered growth in our desal business for the ninth consecutive year in 2023. Now this growth was slower than we would have liked due to delay a single, a delay in a single $8 million project in India, which Josh highlighted as a specific risk last quarter. That project is now slated to ship in 2024 due to the slippage we came in at approximately $128 million in revenue.
Now despite the shipment moving into this year, we are holding our revenue water guidance of $140 million to $150 million for 2024. While the India project will increase our revenue for the year since our last earnings call, we have had two projects in Saudi Arabia shift to 2025 that together offset this increase by India. In addition, we have several projects shipping in December that based on our experience in 2023 post some timing risk. And although my team has identified some potential mid-grade mitigation approaches for this risk, I'm still getting my hands around our project base water business and prefer to remain conservative. We will tighten up this guidance throughout the year as more is known.
Note that our wastewater guidance of $12 million to $15 million remains unchanged, which means our overall guidance points to between roughly 10% to 17% growth for the whole of our water business this year.
We also have some great things happening underneath the hood. First, roughly 50% of our desal mega-project revenue will come from our Q4 under our newest and most efficient energy recovery device. We are extremely proud of this fact is our initial projections were to achieve only 25% of revenue this year for the Q400. Not only should we achieve 50% this year, but we believe the Q400 to be as much as 75% of our revenue in 2025. The resounding success of the Q400, which was only introduced to the market in late 2022 is proof that we are continuing to innovate and show leadership in the DSL space.
Second, if we hit our waste, our our guidance in wastewater to symbolize wastewater can double in 2024 and be up to 10% of our overall water revenue after only our 3rd year pursuing diversification into wastewater. Today, we've generated revenue from 16 different industry verticals in wastewater, we have 12 industries in our pipeline, exceeding $1 million each and potential revenue. We are tracking projects in over 30 countries and importantly, more than a quarter of our pipeline years away for us, we consider our wastewater business, a resounding success that highlights the versatility of the PX as well as the acceptance of our value proposition outside of desal.
Now, as you might expect to tackle 16 different wastewater industry verticals takes resources and products that potentially can be unique to each vertical. Our playbook will prioritize those verticals to ensure greater probabilities of success, financial return and customer satisfaction more to come here, our water business remains firmly entrenched in a global secular upward trend in water demand and our confidence in this business has not changed.
We continue to innovate and to provide compelling argument for our product offering in the marketplace. As you all know, there's simply not enough freshwater in the world today, the world is beginning to understand that to address these freshwater challenges, we must use the water that we have, which are wastewater products address and that decel is critical to providing new freshwater capacity at scale, which our DI products are, which are decent products address.
Now let's move on to our CO2 business. This year. Our focus for the CO2 business unit is to gain market penetration and OEM.s and supermarkets through increased site validations. This will allow us to continue stress testing a greater number of PX cheese in the field and very climates and operating conditions while validating and fine-tuning our value proposition.
One thing we learned during PX G field testing in 2023 was that we were seeing some operating issues that needed to be addressed by temporarily slowed our PX G rollout in late Q4 23, 2023, to allow our engineering team sufficient time to apply these learnings to upgrade the PSC to address these issues.
Our second-generation PX G is now being tested in our lab with very positive results and will be deployed for two field validation sites in Europe and the U.S. in the second quarter. This second-generation PX G is a drop-in replacement for the first generation and also makes for a more reliable and quieter PX G. In addition, we design a more streamlined and cost-effective skid for retrofits in the field. We have two critical milestones to achieve in 2024 with this next with the second-generation PX G to move forward with a broader commercialization in 2025.
The first milestone is the successful completion of testing in our internal labs in Q2 2024, where we are encouraged by the results thus far. The second milestone is successful installation operations and third party validation of the 30 to 50 30 to 50 additional validation site by Q4 2024.
Now, as a reminder, supermarkets are very conservative when it comes to adopting disruptive technology, especially large chains with billions of dollars of existing refrigeration infrastructure. We must take the time and pay our dues to perform extensive field validation while continuing to work with end users, OEMs and engineering firms. However, we have several things on our side. Number one, growing relationships with new informal until supermarket customers in the US and Europe for our marquee national and international chains. Repeat orders with existing supermarkets such as by our 10 Carrefour recent EPA legislation in the US, the AIM Act and the EUF. gas regulations have accelerated the phaseout of HFCs, thereby putting the pressure on supermarkets and its supply chain to begin serious planning to convert refrigeration infrastructure to natural refrigerants like CO2.
Number four, a historical track record record of successful supermarket industry adoption of past disruptive technologies such as aluminum, aluminum, coils, objectors and others. And number five, two years of PX G field testing and extreme operating conditions, which has led to the second generation PX G and provided the prioritized list of upgrades, improvements for future generations of PHAs. And my experience in this industry has taught me that when introducing a disruptive technology like the PSG into this market on a broader scale for liabilities of the utmost importance to end users and users. And that's why we must be more deliberate and conservative spending the necessary time to validate the product in the lab in the field while developing relationships with the industry stakeholders such as supermarkets, OEMs, major contractors and engineering firms, a new product introduction must be must provide a seamless installation experience must be operationally, reliable and repeatable across varied regions and contractors. If we've done our job successfully, we will be invisible to the supermarket site manager, especially in the summer months. As part of our playbook development, we're moving towards a more standardized PX G that will allow future generation PX cheese to be a drop in or plug and play of the refrigeration rack. We believe this more standardized version, which is closer to what supermarkets and OEMs are more comfortable with. We'll provide a more seamless option to further accelerate the rate at which we can penetrate the market.
Our initial step to this plug-and-play element is with the second-generation PX G. Looking forward, our focus for 2024 is deployed at least 30 to 50 PSCs between North America and Europe. However, because I intentionally slowed our PX G progress to allow for the second generation PX G to be launched, we are more likely to be closer to 30 solid 30 validation sites. When it comes to selecting validation sites, we're focusing on quality versus quantity. This will provide us the critical mass we need for validation purposes and puts us in a good position to to the second critical milestone in Q4. And by the time we get to our first quarter earnings call, I'll be able to better define the number of validation sites for 2024.
So to sum up, the operational deliverables that I put in place for 2024 are as follows, maintain and grow our dominant position in detail, grow our wastewater business to 12 to 15 million in revenue installed 30 to 52 June, PX three units across North America and Europe and deliver on our full year revenue guidance of 140 to 150 million.
With that, let me hand the call over to Josh to update you on the financials.
Joshua Ballard
Thanks, David, and good afternoon, everyone. I want to start off by saying how much I have enjoyed my nearly six years here at Energy Recovery. As I will get into shortly, energy recovery is financially in very good shape, and I feel really positive about the company's future.
Before I get to that, I want to make clear that I've been in full support of David since you made the decision to put his hat in the ring for CYO., and I'm pleased the Board thought the same. David has done a great job right out the gate and it's frankly been really enjoyable working with them. This is a decision I personally came to some time ago, which was unrelated to who our future CEO would be.
Now that we have our CEO, I decided it was the right time to formalize my plans. It is important to both David and I that we have a smooth transition, and I look forward to fully supporting David with the CFO search process and with the upcoming transition.
So I'll turn to our financial results results. And as usual, we'll start with revenue. First, I'd like to close the loop on some of my commentary from last quarter. We mentioned three risks to revenue from projects shipping to Israel, Algeria and India. We were able to ship off all project in Israel and Algeria successfully within the quarter. And as I highlighted, the risks only the India project of 8 million was delayed to this year despite achieving slightly lower revenue than projected in 2023. We had a great fourth quarter, a record one as matter of fact, we recognized 35% more revenue than our previous highest quarter in Q4 2022. The team continues to prove that we can operationally handle higher and higher volumes. So I'm confident that they can handle a substantial volume in the second half of this year as well.
Notably, our Middle East and Africa revenue fell for the first time in 2023 from 86 to 77 million. This reduction was driven by our Middle East business, which fell to 37% of revenue in 2023, down from 56% in 2022, driven from temporary declines in sales to Saudi Arabia. Although Middle East sales are rebounding to similar levels this year as we saw in 2022. Growth in the region will likely slow in the coming years, and other regions of the world will continue to show strength in Algeria. The real story of 2023, increasing from a little over 4 billion in 2020 to over 23 million last year. Although we forecast less activity in Algeria this year, as we have mentioned, North Africa is expected to remain a strong source of revenue in the upcoming years. This year, we are expecting substantial revenue from Morocco, and we currently see potentially strong revenues in Algeria and Egypt in 2025. Both our Asia and Americas businesses continue to expand in 2023 as well. Asia grew 23%, also reaching over 24% of revenue from 20% in 2022. This was driven by growth of over 100% in China and a substantial bump from South Korea. India and other growth country for us ended weaker due to the shifting of that project in the fourth quarter, but had our planned India project shipped. Asia would have almost reached 30% of revenue last year. The Americas grew 77% from 8.6 million to over 15 million in 2023, driven by strength in Chile, in particular, as well as some Caribbean island nations such as the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic. This growth in regions outside of the Middle East continues to hit home. The underlying shift occurring in our revenues that I've mentioned in the past. We expect the Middle East to remain strong in the coming years. And for example, it is rebounding back to similar levels this year as we saw in 2022. However, growth in the Middle East will likely slow in the coming years, and other regions of the world will continue to show strength This dynamic creates two risks for us that we must watch as we look forward in our water forecast, in particular in desalination attached funding streams separately in prior quarters, but want to summarize here for clarity. First, any slowdown in our Middle East business should be offset by growth in other regions. We could see an imbalance during this shift in growth from the Middle East, other region that could cause a slowdown in growth or even a temporary dip in a given year despite long term trends remain firmly in place.
Second, some of these new and upcoming regions may pose short-term risks to our forecast, especially with regards to project timing and potential delays such as we experienced last year, we will need to factor this risk into our projections and guidance. And one reason why you see us taking some caution in our forecast this year, our sales are once again heavily weighted to the second half of the year and 40% of our mega projects in the third and fourth quarters are shipping out to emerging markets such as Morocco and India. It was a higher risk to timing than those countries more established in desalination in the Middle East.
To wrap up revenue, our projections for the first half of this year largely remain the same as I mentioned last quarter, although I will tighten our first quarter forecast to between 10 to 13 million. We will give an update on Q2 and the second half of the year in our next call.
With regards to gross margin, we ended the year beating our guidance by about 80 basis points. Our gross margin forecast for water remains unchanged in 2024 at 64% to 67% because of our wider forecast ranges related to the launch of our new Q. 400, we are moving into volume. Production will be dialing in our material and labor costs as we do so therefore, we are being cautiously conservative in our forecast as we start the year. I believe there is potential upside here, which is reflected in the higher end of our range, but we are seeing another year of margin decline regardless of the Q 400, as I mentioned before, this is due to inflation catching up to us, which we've been predicting for some time as long as we can reasonably grow ASPs in line with normalized inflation in the coming years. And we keep a firm focus on managing growing manufacturing costs. My full expectation is that we should see our water gross margin begin to move back up to the 68% to 70% range over the next couple of years. Our OpEx came in at the lower end of our guidance of 60 million or 53% of revenue, which includes nearly 1 million of one-time expenses related to the recruiting of board members and the transition to the new CEO. Excluding those one-time expenses, our base recurring operating expense grew about 7.5% despite fairly high labor inflation last year. Our goal this year is to increase our base recurring OpEx by 7% to 10%, which excludes any one-time transition costs that are not entirely known related to our announced changes to the executive team. Most of this increase will be driven by three factors. First, we project growing sales and marketing spend by 20% to 25%. Second, G&A will grow 3% to 5%, largely driven by increased spend related to CYO. compensation, the CFO transition and other EXECUTIVE related costs.
Finally, note that roughly half the growth in OpEx this year will come from share-based compensation. If we take the midpoint of our revenue guidance for the year, these assumptions will put us at 50% to 52% of revenue for the year. And at the high end of our growth, we could fall below 50%. If we look one layer down, I'm very comfortable on the trajectory of our spend versus where we want to be in the next three years.
First, again, taking the midpoint of our guidance, if we look at our expense components as a percentage of revenue, we continue to see progress. We are seeing a reduction of G&A from 22% of revenue in 2023 to under 21% this year. We see a similar trend in R & D was a reduction from 13% to 12%. And with the fast growth in sales and marketing spend, we see that increase from 17 to between 18% to 19% of revenue this year. So in short, excluding any one-time transition costs this year, we continue to see reduction in spend as percentage of revenue, G&A and R&D and a temporary temporary increase in sales and marketing as compared to revenue should be lowered as we either begin to hit our revenue growth.
Stride in the next one to two years forward, we begin to lower spend because we have not this is what I had expected and previously described.
Finally, I want to comment on our cash position, we increased our cash and investments by roughly 30 million in 2023, ending the year at 122 million. We currently expect to end this year between 140, 250 million in cash and investments. And depending on collections from Q4 sales, we could exceed 175 million by the end of the first quarter in 2025. Note that we will see cash dipped somewhat during the year, especially in Q2 as revenues decrease in these initial quarters. In addition, as we saw last year, we will be building inventory throughout the year to support shipments in the third and fourth quarters. Therefore, we could see inventory levels increased to as high as 35 to $40 million again this year to again decrease and settle out likely 10% to 15% higher than the end of 2023. As we stand today, David will be assessing our go-forward strategy to execute in our various business units and more concrete decisions around capital allocation will occur later this year or early next together with the new CFO. This growing cash position is a clear indicator of how closely we have managed our spending in recent years and the immense value this company can create as we grow as a part of our playbook a playbook from this year, we will need to make specific decisions around the utilization of this cash in whether to invest in new paths to accelerate growth or to return capital to shareholders.
With that, let's move to Q&A.
Question and Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Pavel Molchanov, Raymond James.
Pavel Molchanov
Hey, thanks for the detailed narrative and as well as taking the question. So maybe first one on the delay, the India project out, is there a clear timetable for when that product will be deliver to NDA? Is that happening this quarter capability?
Joshua Ballard
Josh, it's not likely to happen this quarter. We're shooting for the first half of the year, but we're confident will be this year.
Pavel Molchanov
Okay. And any sense of why why the project was delayed? Or was it the permitting or currency or just labor?
Joshua Ballard
No, it's been delays in some construction and building it well, weather related to specific weather issues.
Pavel Molchanov
Okay. Maybe on the CO2 refrigeration opportunity, I know you're not giving kind of numerical revenue guidance for that line item. If we look at last year, it was $700,000 or so. Do you expect to exceed that in 2024, bearing in mind this and I read engineering of the product lines and good afternoon.
David Moon
This is David Moon of nice to talk to you again the look of I think it's going to be 1 million to $2 million. And I think that's a reasonable target. If you think about 30 to 50 locations margin-wise, it's not going to be a much to the margin line. If we're going to continue to see some of these nice validation side to continue to get traction. So that 1 million to 2 million is probably the range at this point.
Pavel Molchanov
Okay. That's helpful. And then lastly, you talked about kind of rebuilding shareholder value and improving confidence given the amount of cash you have on the balance sheet. Al, what are your thoughts about buyback, which you have a history of doing?
David Moon
Yes. So a good question until we're mindful of the amount of cash, that's that we've got what I'd like to be able to do is to get through the playbook development to better determine how much cash we're going to need to accelerate, not only growth in wastewater and those verticals, but also continue to drive our CO2 acceleration. And we're going to continue as we do this. And as part of the playbook development, we're going to be closely analyzing the ROIC. obviously, how do you ensure that we pick the best projects for our investors. And so I would ask that you give us, you know, this year to be able to develop that plan and determine how much we're going to need. And then once we do that, and I think we'll be in a good position to talk about what we're going to do with cash and what we don't do with cash.
Pavel Molchanov
Fair enough. Thanks very much.
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Ryan Swift, B. Riley Securities. Please state your question.
Ryan Pfingst
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Can you just talk about what you're seeing in the market for 25? And if you think high 10s decel revenue growth is achievable based on the visibility you have today?
David Moon
Yes, I'd reference my commentary or our commentary last quarter, and we are seeing the potential again for double digit growth in 2025. But there's a lot of moving parts in the world today, we've been talking about a lot of them on our calls, and we've seen some of them start with some of the projects moving here and there. So we're not getting too firm on on giving targets for 2025 yet, but we are seeing some some good potential there.
Ryan Pfingst
Got it. And then going back to something else from the last call. Do you have an update on the macro environment in terms of the misalignment we've spoken about recently between developers, EPCs and end users regarding water tariff expectations?
David Moon
Yes, I think we're still seeing some of that play out also and everywhere because we still have a really strong pipeline for this year. But we do know that from a couple of projects that have shifted out. And then due to that, we heard of one project that literally had one bidder initially because the costs were too low versus what what you see is felt like they could build that, for example. So we are seeing some of that play out still, but we're not expecting massive movements in our in our pipeline at this stage.
Ryan Pfingst
Got it. Thanks for that. And if I could just sneak in one more on. Do you see the possibility for the P x Q 400 to perhaps replace some of your existing devices operating today ahead of schedule given its performance?
David Moon
I doubt it, Ryan is it is a better device, but that's a it's a tall ask to replace, for example, the Q. 300 that's out there already, which is also a really good device. I'm not sure the payback would be there for the weather, whatever the life of a plant might be and you'd have to reconfigure exceeded much bigger devices, right? So it's not exactly just a InnoSwitch, another type of play.
Ryan Pfingst
Got it. Makes sense. Back in the queue.
Operator
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time, so I would like to turn the floor back to Jim Siccardi for closing remarks.
James Siccardi
Thank you, Diego, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today, and we look forward to talking to you next quarter, which is only a few months away.
Operator
Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. All parties may now disconnect. Have a good day.
