T.J. Rodgers
Oh my God. Okay. My connection is a cell phone. All right. Good luck. Okay. This is a report we sent out. I will refer to certain parts of it. Today, we're going to talk about Q4 '24, which is a month behind us. Unfortunately, it's subject to a full year audit, which is currently in progress. And that audit is currently hampered by the fact we have to recreate as if merged financials for SunPower and SunPower doesn't have complete financials. So that may take us till mid-March. Hence. I'm not waiting until mid-March to talk about 2024. So I call this meeting today. That puts me here in Silicon Valley because I got other Board meetings here. I apologize for that. Because this is a preliminary report and it's unaudited for the reasons I just gave, we're only going to talk about what I think you want to know now, which is how did we do last quarter and here where we think we're going in the current quarter, and that's what all we're going to do today. First of all, accomplishments. We had a great quarter. In our last third quarter report to you, we gave you a plan for Complete Solar. And that plan was aggressive. It was predicated on a successful $45 million acquisition business unit assets from SunPower to form a new company. And the plan had 2 big accomplishments that were required in it. One, that the little company, a $5.5 million company would acquire a much bigger company, the SunPower Corporation, which has been around for almost 40 years, and it's about 10x bigger than us. That was one assumption achieved. And the second assumption in our plan that we wrote in our third quarter report, our revenue would be $80 million in Q4 '24. That is revenue would jump from $5 million to $80 million in one quarter. This is a slide I showed to investors. I talked about all Complete Solaria, the trouble we had with private equity. We originally marketed $100 million quarter as a likely quarter that turned in to be an $80 million quarter, which we announced on 11/13. And I was worried about taking a jump from here to here as opposed to a jump from here to here until I watched your response to it and your response was right here. There is November 12, and your response was favorable, you'll take a solid $80 million, and that's where we ended up. I'd like to talk about our accomplishments through the quarter. I've got a series of bullets on that and a few slides to illustrate it. First of all, the SunPower integration is substantially complete. We're together. We're organized together. We are starting to -- we've already got down to our headcount. This is a graph by work week going back to the beginning of October. So there is the fourth quarter we're reporting right there. We started out when we first agreed to merge with 3,499 employees. Within 3 weeks, we were down to 416 in our first org chart and then a week later, 2 weeks later, down to 1,257. So this is about what the company needed. We have some people come in on post-merger on day 1. We worked that number down. We got the number down to $11.65, and we thought we were there. And then you noticed here the number went up, and this is when we started discovering employees that, let's just say the 2 companies didn't count very well. And I found 35 Pakistanis that think I'm their CEO. So that count went back in. Then we started working on it again. And as of the end of the quarter, we were down to 1,140 employees. Our goal is to get to 980. So I'm claiming major progress from there to there, and I'm saying we're getting close to the goal. And I actually was going to do that. I pointed -- we've got 2 new divisional GMs in place, EVP/GMs. Dan Myers, this guy -- all right, let me go back, I announced about a month ago. He was a star manager from the Blue Raven Systems division. He was a supply -- is a supply chain expert, and he took over New Homes for us. And then more recently, we got Steve Erickson. Steve is a well-known figure in Salt Lake, which is Solar Valley, the middle Solar Valley. In his career, he had 12 promotions from 3 companies between 2011 and 2024 when he came in. He hit the ground running, wrote me a comprehensive memo the very first week he was there, explaining what he saw that he liked and didn't like, and I advised him to fix the stuff he didn't like and move on. Okay. So we've got our GMs in place. We are forecasting revenue growth next quarter. As you all know, the solar industry has in the winter quarter, has the dip, orders go down, people aren't interested in ordering solar when their roofs are covered with ice. And I did some research that number has typically been 5% to 14%. We're going to buck that because we're finally getting our act together, and we're going to have a good second quarter. And I'm forecasting $82 million up a little bit from the prior quarter, not down. The last point is the company is almost at its fighting weight. I went through that with you showing we're down to 1,140 employees. And we will hit the 980 we need to have. I'll tell you where that number comes from a little bit later. So here's the same slide I already showed you, showing the actual against the $80 million forecast last quarter, in Q4 and the forecast for the quarter we're in at $82 million. And I'll just tell you, we're confident of that number. I'll show you why and when I show you the daily revenue charts. We've cut our operating expense by a factor of 2. That, of course, comes from head count reduction. Our OpEx was an incredible $94 million in the third quarter. That's because we had most of the people from both the companies and a lot of expensive software, $5 million a year for salesforce.com, et cetera. We've gone from $94 million in Q3 to $35 million in Q4 for the combined and cost-reduced companies that I showed you the curve for a minute ago. I like to look at operating expenses, less sales commissions GAAP requires that you call OpEx to be general sales and administrative and if you have sales commissions, then they go into OpEx. So I'd like to look at the OpEx without commissions because commissions come in as directly with sales, and I really care about the fixed expense we've got back in the plant also. In that case, you subtract out the numbers. And in Q3, we were at $84 million, again, an astronomical number. And in Q4, just finished, we had non-GAAP expense of $20 million. So we actually went down from $80 million to $20 million. It's a factor of 4 reduction, and we're planning on dropping another 30% in Q1. That's the 1,140 to 980 that I showed you earlier. We're also forecasting that our cash -- we are forecasting -- this is a big one, income -- operating income breakeven in Q1 '25. The words carefully chosen to say, given our current backlog and cost-cutting plan, we're forecasting non-GAAP operating income at breakeven in Q1 '25. I can tell you that, that number is plus $800,000. And it includes all the expenses we know about, but that's a kind of a fragile margin to predict operating income breakeven and normally in presentations like this, you give numbers, you're absolutely sure of achieving. In this case, we're going to get real close worst case, and I'm announcing it, sort of putting -- drawing a line in the sand here people in the factory listening to what I'm saying we're going to break even in Q1 '25. And we're going to be positive in cash flow. We raised $80 million for the purpose of buying SunPower for $45 million and having operating expense going forward to build a new company. We bottomed out at $13 million of cash left out of the $80 million in Q4, and we'll be going up this quarter. Now the -- so these are the bullets and now fellow shareholders, the main numbers. I'm going to turn it over to Dan. Let's -- no, I'm not going to turn it over to Dan. She's getting her cell phone so she can set it. If she can put in on microphone and she's got a ring on her phone. We're not going to do that. So I'll give you the numbers. Again, it's my fault. I called this meeting out of phase with what we wanted to do because of the long audit. Revenue, let me do non-GAAP, $81.1 million. Our gross margin, you notice has been ugly and up and down. Our gross margin is 37% and you notice our GAAP gross margin is the same thing. So we've kind of flushed the ugly out of the gross margin chain. Our operating expenses were $35.7 million, GAAP and non-GAAP, our operating expenses less commission $19.7 million GAAP and non-GAAP. So for our non-GAAP loss, excluding extraordinary costs, which blew up the GAAP number was $59.40 million. So you can say then this is -- you see the small company and then there's the new company. This is our first quarter, we've now been defined. We're a $324 million company, it's losing money. It needs not to lose money as quickly as possible. That's our next goal. And we've got $13 million in the bank, and we expect it to grow. We acquired SunPower on what I call a Noah's Ark model, I'll explain that in a minute. I already explained the leaning out process we've gone to and the fact we're not quite yet at our goal. I've mentioned that we are going to grow next quarter and that number is conservative, I'm pretty confident in it. Now what happened was when we raised money the $80 million with that plan. And then after we had a flurry of cancellations on the SunPower side because of the bankruptcy, we ended up with the first quarter being $80 million. I'm pretty happy for that and solid. So we're going to move forward from that number. Now that says, if you look at our model for the company instead of having 1,225 employees, we're going to have 980. So that's the goal we're enforcing at 1,140, we're actually below our first goal and we said the new goal was more aggressive of head count of 980. To illustrate that to employees, I actually have shown this slide, I will show it again on Friday. The Ark -- Noah's Ark merger theory is actually a typical Silicon Valley start-up plan in the skies. Instead of a big company in trouble asking for and getting too much money, SunPower was trying to raise when I came in $750 million. And of course, what's worsen wanting to raise $750 million. The answer is actually getting it. Then you own interest on it and it burdens you forever. And so that's not the right way to do it in my opinion. The Ark theory, which I used back at Cypress, we did 20 acquisitions at Cypress, asserts this. Your old company has great assets. If I look at what I inherited was $80 million. It's enough to make the company profitable. Your old company has great assets, get venture funding for those assets, in our case, $80 million and build a new organization that can make profit with what you've got. So Noah's Ark, which is to protect us during floods and we're having a flood of interest rate problems right now in the financial markets, got smaller, and it's now got 980 seats. By the way, believe it or not, this is actually a 4-inch thick oak hull on 500-foot long Noah's Ark model that's built in Williamsburg, Kentucky to -- they claim to biblical standards. Okay. A little bit more detail on revenue. This is a picture of my daily revenue report. So the dots are 91 dots quarter. We came in with $100 million Street number I showed you and we created our beginning of quarter plan, which is the daily plan. For example, you can see the weekends and holidays in here. So it's a tight, well-conceived plan. We took off on the plan and then we got behind. And right here, we said that we're not going to make the BOQ, beginning of quarter plan. We need another plan. So we did what we call an end-of-quarter plan. We decided what level we could get to and have the backlog for the next quarter after that, hence, my certainty on the $82 million this quarter. We picked that target. No more fancy. We took a straight line and we started tracking daily to it. And this was a pretty good quarter. The troops did a great job. I was worried because it was the first test and they passed it. As a matter of fact, right there, you notice it goes flat. That says in the middle of this week, instead of working like hell trying to get up here and not quite making it, we told them you worked hard. You'd like to have a 4-day weekend for the vacation. Have a nice weekend, bam, and we went flat. And of course, revenue that we could have accrued there became available to us quickly in the second quarter. Okay. This is for the whole company. New homes. Different kind of story. They had an aggressive plan. They got behind. They had a new plan. Back is the way they were spiking here. They probably could have made the original plan. But what they did was they got to where they needed to get for the Street. This is their component of the Street number of the $80 million number. And they also, like everybody else took the end of the quarter off. Great quarter. Then we have Blue Raven. That was their first and second expectation. They redefined the quarter as well, everybody did, and they stayed ahead of it for the rest of the quarter, and they also took off. And in this case, I think they probably could have made the original plan. So great quarter. Here's the other story, dealers. So we have a dealer network that buys, orders from dealers, and they had a modest plan of $17 million. They started slow and kept on slow and they reduced their plan of big amount. The reduction from $100 million to $80 million for our plan. Half of that was from the smallest division missing this plan by a lot. So we sized up. We're a new company. This quarter defines who we are. And we said this quarter, Q4, defines who we are, and we said we're cutting our head count from 140 to 5 in the dealer division. So instead of having 2 divisions coming from SunPower, New Homes and dealer, we had New Homes only and then Blue Raven, and that's now the company. And we took some of the stars and merged them in Blue Raven. So here's our org chart. So this half of the company right here is 2 divisions now that are the company they have 921 people. And this -- although it's got a lot more boxes says a lot fewer people, 219 or 19% and I should have drawn that circle up around me. We're all in that. We're support. These guys make the money. We do things for them. We're CFO, Chief Administrative, legal, HR, information technology. But I'd like to introduce Venki, say it for me.