Hello, and welcome to the Beam Global Third Quarter 2024 Operating Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the call to Lisa Potok, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good afternoon and thank you for participating in Beam Global's third quarter ‘24 operating results conference call. We appreciate you joining us today to hear an update on our business. Joining me is Desmond Wheatley, the President, CEO and Chairman of Beam. Desmond will be providing an update on recent activities at Beam followed by a question-and-answer session. But first, I'd like to communicate to you that during this call management will be making forward-looking statements, including statements that address Beam's expectations for future performance or operational results. Forward-looking statements involve risks and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those statements. For more information about these risks, please refer to the risk factors described in Beam's most recently filed 10-Q and other periodic -- I'm sorry, 10-K and other periodic reports filed with the SEC. The content of this call contains time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of today, November 15, 2024, except as required by law being disclaimed any obligations to publicly update or revised any information to reflect events or circumstances that occur after this call. Next, I would like to provide an overview of our financial results for being's third quarter of 2024. Our third quarter revenues are $11.5 million. This is the second highest third quarter revenues in the history of the company, 47.9% of our revenue in third quarter was derived from commercial customers. This is an increase of 80% over quarter three of 2023. For the nine months into September 30th of ‘24, our revenues for $41 million. We have grown our pipeline of prospective customers to over $200 million, although we cannot be sure of when or if those prospective orders will turn into actual sales. Our backlog is $7 million for the USA and an…

Thanks, Lisa. Joining us for the third quarter 2024 Beam Global earnings call and business update. Just before I get into my comments, there was several mentions of warrants in Lisa's comments. I just want to be clear and remind everybody that the warrants that we issued as part of our 2019 uplisting to NASDAQ have all either [Technical Difficulty] I'm speaking to you tonight from Oman & Jordan where it's heading towards 1 o'clock in the morning. I'm in Oman as part of a much more extensive trip to Europe, Africa and the Middle East promoting Beam Global's products and business. I'll give you more information on this trip later in the call, but first I want to talk about our third quarter results and describe some of the exciting progress we're making. Just in case I drop off this call which is always possible when I'm in the Middle East or you know these distant parts, chime amongst yourselves I'll dial back in as quickly as I can. Q3 paradoxically has been one of the most expansive for Beam Global in our history because of course I'm speaking of expansion during the quarter when we've just announced a reduction in revenues from the same period prior year. But the fact is that, we've grown our geographic coverage very significantly and we've released a whole suite of new products, as a result of our best customers' demands. And we saw growth actually in our battery business during the period. Geographic expansion and the addition of new products, puts us in a position to capitalize on much larger and much more varied sets of opportunities both in the United States and internationally. This is especially relevant, because of that third quarter revenue which came in at about $11.5 million in…

[Operator Instructions] Today's first question comes from Tate Sullivan with Maxim Group.

Congratulations on all the new products. Sounds like all great opportunities to sell. And I'm interested in Europe, what you've seen, is there more government funding available for EV charging structure in Europe going forward than in the U.S. in your opinion?

I mean, look, I don't want to guess at what's going to happen in the U.S. As I said in my comments, I think that uncertainty is the biggest problem that we're facing right now. But there certainly is going to be a tremendous amount of spending in Europe. I met with OZEV, the office for zero emission vehicles while I was in London, met with people in Paris and all over Europe and this electrification things going at a pace. As you know, they've banned the sale of internal combustion in 2035. There's an awful lot of work to do. There's not enough energy on the grid, capacity on the grid and it takes a long time to install grid tied charging infrastructure. So the same things that made us successful in the U.S. are going to make us as successful if not much more so, in Europe. And by the way, for anybody that's questioning whether or not EVs are going to happen, -- unbelievable here. Half the cars that are today are electric vehicles already and they're starting to bang up against the same problems, lack of capacity on the grid and taking too long to deploy. So I think we're going to see an awful lot of government spending everywhere, but yes Europe is the largest market in the world and probably we'll see the most money spent.

And then just to the certification process is just with the UL in the U.S. are there any similar certification challenges that you run into in Europe yet?

Without a doubt, I mean, this is an evolving process. Batteries, stationary storage, the integration of energy storage and renewable sources or grid sources for that matter. All of these are evolving and we are seeing increased regulations and we're seeing evolving certification processes and we're trying to keep up with them. As the biggest challenge that we're facing right now is that, the certifying all these have done this before. And so, I want to be careful what I say, but our people are teaching the people who were certifying us in many instances. Same thing in Europe, we've got CE in Europe, but the good news is all the efforts that we put into UL will do this, will solve for the CE thing. So to do anything in Europe, we still have a lot of customer prospects who are not impacted by it, but it's taken a chunk out of our sales. And I just wanted everybody to understand when we're looking at reduction in some of these or the moving right of some of these purchase orders, some of them are explicitly because of these new UL certification requirements. We are going to meet them and the good news is, as is always the case with being global, we use this as forcing opportunities to force us to take further steps to make it the product better and much easier to make and the next sort of evolution of EV ARC that will meet these new certification requirements will be less expensive and faster to produce, but a better product again. So it's onerous, it's time consuming, it's pushed some of our purchase orders to the right, but we'll come through on the other side of it without losing those opportunities with a better product. And as I said in my comments, I think we'll see a bit of a logjam bursting with a couple of them, when we do get that UL certification, which at the moment we are very hopeful we will get before the end of first quarter, but I'm not going to make promises that other people have to keep. I have been wrong about that before, but that's what I'm hearing from everybody.

The next question comes from Noel Parks with Tuohy Brothers.

Thanks for all the great information. Just a few things. Interested to hear what you were saying about adding resources and partnership for international marketing. And I guess, I'm thinking in your overall resource mix right now, if you have one next project or goal that you need to address, whether it's hiring in a particular product or function or manufacturing capacity in a particular region, sort of what's next? What sort of your next things to sort of tackle that kind of keep overall business momentum going?

Yes. From a human resource point of view, it's definitely the addition of resellers, distributors and agents, something we've never had before. I've been keen on doing it for a while, because as I said, we -- all the sales that we've made today have been made by our sales team for that number 6. We sold just under $70 million worth of product. Just imagine what could happen if it wasn't 5 or 6 people, but 50 or 60 people out there telling that, telling the story, because as a fond of telling my sales team that 380 million or some odd people in the United States We've only talked to a few thousand of them. So it's bringing in these distributors, resellers and agents that's the thing that we're really focusing on at the moment. And by the way some of that was also pushed by Europe. Europe likes to think of itself like a sort of United States, but the truth of the matter is it's a different sale in France than it is in Spain, than it is in Germany etcetera. So we want to try and gauge somewhat local resources, but that do not add overhead costs for us and that's what's great about the people that we're bringing in. They work on success fees only. So we don't end up with SG&A burden. We pay them when we get paid by our customers.

Right, right. That totally makes sense. And I am thinking out of a couple of years. I mean, do you see yourself as in order to sort of handle maybe the next step function of upward and growth? Do you see yourself at any point being capital constrained in terms of just what you need to do to keep up with manufacturing capacity or other needs?

Well, the good news is we still have a great deal of room for expansion both in our U.S. and European facilities. I mean even our very busiest, we still had room for about 4x expansion in the U.S. And we have much more room for expansion in Europe, we've got huge facilities 6 acres, 250,000 square feet under roof and a lot of cheap land around us there. So I think we've got a lot of room for expansion. We will invest in growth, we've done a little investment in we've increased our Chicago facilities this year. Lisa mentioned that there was $100,000 or something in our operating expenses which was due to facilities expansion. We've expanded our Chicago facilities this year because we intend to finish out beam spot products in that facility. We need more space to do along with the fact that the battery business is back to growth again. Obviously, we're going to fill up our existing capacity, which is as I say got lots and lots of room for growth and then we're going to invest carefully as we need to moving forward. If we do have to use capital for expansion in the future, it will be because we're trying to keep up with tremendous growth, which is the best possible reason to use capital.

Sure, absolutely. And just a question talking about sort of this post-election period. I'm just curious, do you sort of see California's leadership role with decarbonization and EVs as sort of keeping the ball moving in terms of incentives, policy to sort of maybe help offset what might be a period of sort of extended federal uncertainty?

Yeah, I can tell you that what I've heard so far is that anything that the new administration does to reverse the momentum of EVs at the federal level, the states are not having that. I mean the fact is that transportation is going to electrify anyway and as I said in my comments even federal customers know that they cannot afford to lose four years. In four years we will only have 6 years left before basically everybody electrifies. So it's just this is kind of annoying, but it's not fundamentally going to negatively impact the industry. And I think you'll see the states pushing hard on this and you'll see cities, municipalities pushing and frankly the federal customers have to do it as well. You talk to anybody in the Marine Corps or the Army, they are not electrifying their fleets because they are tree huggers or because Biden or anybody else told them to do it. They are doing it because it's a strategic imperative and so they are going to push forward with it one way or another. I think the problem that we have both from a purchasing point of view and also frankly from a share price point of view.

At this time, we have no further questions. I would now like to turn the call back to Mr. Wheatley for closing remarks.

Okay. Well, listen, thanks everybody again. Thanks for your questions. And if there are any of you that still have questions or that just didn't want to speak up on the call, feel free to get in touch with us directly. Get in touch with Luke Higgins. We're all first name last name beamforall.com and you can always get in touch with me by now. Just please remember that I'm often in odd strange time zones is now one getting on for 1:30 in the morning where I am. But as always, I feel very good about what we're doing. I love the new products we've brought out and it's been very exciting for me to be in these places, East and in Europe and see how much demand there is. And as I say when I compare that to the growth that we've had in the U.S. think about the multiplication effect of that, it's nothing but good news for us. So appreciate your support, appreciate you staying in touch, and we're going to keep our noses to the ground so we're going to keep building a great company. Thank you.

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.