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Exro Technologies Inc T.EXRO

Alternate Symbol(s):  EXROF | T.EXRO.WT | T.EXRO.WT.A

Exro Technologies Inc. is a clean technology company. The Company is engaged in developing power control electronics that expand the capabilities of electric motors and batteries. Its technologies include e-mobility (Coil Driver) and stationary energy storage (Cell Driver). The Coil Drive technology is an adaptive traction inverter that replaces the standard 3-phase inverter in electric vehicles. Utilizing its patented coil switching technology, the Coil Driver enables the motor to dynamically switch between two modes, series mode optimized for high torque at low speeds, and parallel mode optimized for high power and efficiency at high speeds. The Cell Driver technology is a fully integrated energy storage system designed for commercial and industrial applications. Its SEA-Drive power system provides a complete e-propulsion solution to original equipment manufacturers. It encompasses everything from high-capacity batteries and electric motors to next-generation control units.


TSX:EXRO - Post by User

Post by CoCa827on Sep 23, 2021 7:45am
188 Views
Post# 33903769

It was hard to forget the whip cream.

It was hard to forget the whip cream. The Vicinity-EXRO transcript:
 
Q – Why Washington State?
 
A – Will: It's very close to our Vancouver headquarters here it's a 30-minute drive from where we are in our Vancouverlocation. Washington has been just opened arms for us.  We had a ground-breaking with Governor Jay about a month ago and they're just excited to see you know green technology EV manufacturing coming to that state………300k grant towards training.
 
Q – Sue, about Arizona I know that you are opening a facility in mesa and that you know phoenix greater phoenix is of all places has become electric power so
is that the sort of you know from as a CEO of public companies is that the sort of thing where you think you can get returns from your shareholders based on attractive terms  (?)given to you by governor Ducey in Arizona?
 
A - Yeah definitely I mean our first our first phase is pretty small here so there's no you know large size incentives that that brought us here much like will it was um first off a logistical decision for us because it's very close for our Calgary location um you know our next for us was definitely recruitment of talent and being kind of in that electric valley and seeing everything that was coming into Arizona knowing that we would be able to recruit some automotive base talent was a was another big piece for us and definitely future growth you know we hope to keep here in the greater phoenix area and work with governor Ducey and others to see what other incentives we can do as we grow into a bigger model but that's a little bit that's a little bit of a big jump for us right now we're just concentrating on our first little step for now.
 
Q - When would be best to look forward to seeing the validation of this collaboration for both of you?
A – Sue to William:  Well, why don't you go ahead and take it first and I'll go after you okay.
 
William - Well you know we're excited to start getting some validation in order you know we expect to have a vehicle put the technology in our vehicle and you know by q2 of this coming year and then you know validations vary um uh you know hopefully it's uh you know three to six months but yeah I don't really know it we'll get it in there and we've got to get it on a test track there's  a lot of validations to do but you know we're just looking forward to getting the technology into our vehicles
 
Sue - We're on target to be supplying the prototype to Will first, second quarter of next year and you know we anticipate about a three-to-six-month period and I think you know I know validation um you know makes our shareholders cringe sometimes because it's so difficult when you don't come from the research and development side of the business and I mean as a co-founder, Will I'm sure you've been through this a lot more than even me but you know it's
not this methodical type of development you don't you don't get through and go oh I need to tweak an algorithm or change a piece of hardware or adjust something and just do that oftentimes we have to go back to square one – retest everything – and put it in – I think it’s really important that people remember these are people movers, they are passenger vehicles so Vicinity and all of our partners are very concerned with reliability and making sure that we're making the safest best reliable product that we can so we don't take any shortcuts we don't try to rush that because we're trying to get  as we have to reset ourselves each time it can cause delay so that's why you know it's kind of like a three-to-six-month period it doesn't mean something goes wrong because it gets to the sixth month it just means you're just validating and making sure that the product is the best that it can be when it gets on the road and when people start loading that bus. 
 
Q - you know these things need to be low to the ground and easy to get on and off or why even have a bus it seems is that something that you two have discussed and that the engineers are working on in terms of ingress / egress as far as I mean…
 
A - 14:57 Sue - I'll go ahead first if you want Will so I mean all the technical considerations that 
have definitely been in conversation between the two technical teams and they're they're definitely going point by point and making sure that everything is there i think generally speaking the you know like we said the coil driver is a next generation of the inverter so it doesn't require vicinity or any of our partners to do bus design changes or vehicle design changes they've already perfected that what we're doing is just demonstrating that we can replace an existing part with something that gives them a more cost effective better performing powertrain
 
Q - At 15:41 he scratches his head and then says…yeah i mean i think that's uh
that's spot on so the next question is in terms of this is a question specifically for
Vicinity and Will um but I know you've had some wins or a big win with Calgary if I remember correctly um so how quickly can you start putting these electric buses out and what sort of order cadence are you expecting from your buyers?
 
A- well for us we're ramping up uh you know we've got good scalability our factory in Washington state we plan to put a lot of these buses together down there and manufacture them and the factory will be completed by the end of uh this year uh structurally and then we just got to outfit it with the specialized equipment, so you know we're looking for operational um
early next year.
Yeah, and in the Calgary, order is that’s a significant win really when we look at it you know the 40-foot buses the larger scale buses have been out there being marketed and there's been quite a few sales come through on those but on the mid-size units this is the first large mid-sized contract that's really been let in North America and we want it it's a five-year contract uh
so, we're quite excited about that.
 
Scratches his ear and then…yeah I think that's uh it's amazing and I don't want to talk about politics I’m in Brazil where you'd never talk about politics but I think that Canadian companies have benefited from the fact that both at the federal and provincial level the Canadian government is way ahead of America in terms of this sort of push would you agree with that Will or I mean you're all uh in both countries now but I think it's so far ahead well you know definitely
 
A- Will: you know the push is there to electrify and get cleaner and greener vehicles uh on the road it just makes sense um but uh you know for the lead you know both Canada and the USA has got major uh infrastructure funding in place and you know just earmarked for electric vehicles that's what we're looking at and we're seeing is so exciting coming up here is because
funding is in place a lot of these projects need to get funded properly and with that funding in place I see Canada alone we're looking at changing 5000 vehicles over the next five years to electric vehicles and in the US is such a larger bigger market it's exciting.
 
18:51
Jim - yeah, I agree um and Sue obviously you in terms of your customer base you deal with a very diverse from Potencia to Heinzman making really different stuff.
 
Q- basically so where do you see the fastest pace of the transition to electrification company
scooters, cars, e-bikes I know you shall enter into them all so…
 
A- Sue: absolutely um so you know it's they're so different in in the segmentation that it's hard to say which one's moving faster so definitely in the lower voltage segment where we start to get into recreational atvs motorcycles e-bikes um you know micro mobility across Europe is growing in into Asia of course you see that huge volume of product, but we see that here
in North America as well it's a high-volume low component cost industry where we're seeing a lot of demand you know I go back to kind of the beginning of our talk here um is in
that commercial trucking industry that the demand has been absolutely overwhelming for us from everything from a class three so like a small pickup truck into the buses and I think again it comes down to those government regulations and I would
challenge back Jim and say I don't know if I see Canada ahead or US ahead or Europe ahead, I think each country is really actively trying to put in incentives and trying to put in - you
know President Biden came out with a target to try to do 50 percent of vehicles by 2030
you know everybody would probably argue that and say we won't get there but the point is that they're setting these guidelines where we're all going to that same big vision of an electrified future, so you know you hear lots of lots of great uh CEOS of companies that are electrifying products saying it's not an if it's a when and I’m much in that school of thought so the
commercial trucking, I think will happen a little bit quicker because you know those vehicles have a life cycle of usually around 10 years - Will I’m not sure what it is on your buses but you
know 10 to 13 years and so when you think about a world that is supposed to be 50 electrics in 10 years that means those companies when they're going to replace a bus today need to think about -should that be ice or should that bus be electric versus a passenger vehicle
you know the economics of scale may still make the average person go out and buy an ice vehicle for another year it's going to last a long time, so you know there's a transition it's not going to happen overnight and it's going to take a village of us coming up with great things to get us there
 
Jim - I agree yeah I think that and we did get another question and this one is for Sue specifically.
 
Q-from Christopher Warner from last earnings report EXRO was clearly ramping up expenditures it was far less clearly delineated where things stand with partners and potential customers for coil driver and other EXRO technologies any kind of time -it's a long question- and any kind of timeline for actual earnings could you speak to that please I know many EXRO investors are interested - thanks in advance.
22:08
A – Sue: yeah so, I’ll be really careful yeah I was going to say I’ll be really careful um in that everybody knows we have an upcoming shareholder Q&A session um on October the 7th where we'll be fielding a lot of those questions I will say that we remain forecasting our first substantial revenues for end of next year we, despite our delays, we still feel that we'll be on track to get those revenues and kind of start that cycle of real revenues as we should be into purchase orders for the beginning of second half of next year um I think that you know the separation that they may you may be seeing in in our recent MDNA is aligned to our strategy so when you know when I started out with the company two years ago not only did we completely transform the
form factor of our product but we transformed most of our strategic vision and so what we have been really working on is getting our product to a standard as we can so we can work with partners like Will where we take a standard product and customize it only for their powertrain but we're working off a baseline product versus just last year - had Will approached us we probably would have been in development for two years so as we allocate out our spending what
you're seeing is a great deal of spending as we balance getting it out to these you know customers that everybody knows.  You know Potencia, Zero, Land, Vicinity, Linamar but also standardizing the product alongside of that so that by next year we'd be able to compete with
the other great companies that are out there making inverters that companies like Vicinity and all of his competitors are using today for buses, so we'd be able to actually capture that full market versus just one customer so that's why the kind of increase in spend - you know it takes
a lot of people to get that done - a controller is a very complex combination of hardware and software which requires us to have a very high level of engineering staff that supports all of that design so we're still on track for first revenue you know we'll get a little bit in this year which technically is our first revenue but where our shareholders will feel good and excited about the
you know trajectory forward it would be the second half of next year later in the second half of next year
 
Jim - okay yeah that was a good question, I guess. 
Q- Throwing it back to Will same with you obviously you have talked about guidance for 2021 I think the last the last time we talked was July 30th so it's the old analyst you always ask the same question over and over so how do you feel about your 2021 guidance now that we're close to the end of the third quarter
 
A- Will: well, you know we've had a stellar q1 and q2 we've delivered an awful lot of buses in those two quarters um you know we had given guidance that we're
projecting 150 units delivered this year we're still maintaining uh that guidance um
and you know really looking forward to really what uh 2022 is going to bring us.
 
Jim- yeah, I think that it's the one thing maybe that isn't as well understood about vicinity is that
people look at everything through a consumer lens and yet you're not obviously selling to consumers so you're going to have a different cadence in terms of when the awards are given and when that when the customer asks so he is do you see that he is that?
Q- sorry not asking very well but is that particular factor speeding up are people saying we want to be green tomorrow - I don't care if there are eight years left on this bus we're going to be green tomorrow- or do you think it's just a matter of natural obsolescence of last generation product well which would be like 10 years?
 
A- yeah you know the life expectancy generally is anywhere from 8 to 12 years in the commercial bus side so if you take 10 years on an average you know even if you try to convert every vehicle that's on the road today you're going to be in a 10-year or 12-year life cycle to do that um so i think there's you know there's a big transition going towards the EV’s but it takes time to get in there and get them uh converted and as i stated earlier I think that you know what we see right now with the government um incentives and programs coming out it just it's gonna accelerate it how fast well we'll have to see but uh but uh it's definitely you know when we
look at our sales pipeline and we look at you know our sales cycle generally speaking on the you know we're dealing with public transit agencies and uh you're looking at you know nine to 12 months on a delivery cycle so we're building our sales outlook right now for 2022. uh you know we see a lot of activity out there there's a lot of tenders that have come out on both sides of the border and now you've got to turn those into actual purchase orders so you can fire up and get assembly line and your manufacturing line delivering them.
 
27:39
Jim- absolutely yeah - we did just get another one on the through the q a channel
 
Q – For Sue - Sue having just completed the battery show expo and the ramp up of engineering
employment within EXRO is there any intention or thoughts of extending EXRO technologies towards military customers?
 
A- yes there is um so again we continue to evaluate a lot of different segments and a lot of different partnerships and you know there is definitely a great value proposition for us in military
applications that we're investigating right now, and you know as soon as something material arises, we’ll be happy to share that with everybody.
 
28:24
Jim- okay and then one for and I probably should have asked this one myself but uh
one for both of you both Sue and Will
Q- when should we expect the opening day ribbon cutting ceremonies for your new
US  facilities?
 
A- Will: I’ll go first we had a ground-breaking here a month ago so actual ribbon
cutting for us we'll probably be in uh q2 - early q2 of this coming year
 
A- Sue: yeah and I’m gonna split mine to include our Canadian because again we do have our new manufacturing facility which is in Calgary Alberta it's going to be a world-class automotive certified inverter manufacturing facility thatincludes our own SMT line and we've been putting a lot into that and so we have been under construction for the pastmany months and we anticipate a ribbon cutting for that in the fourth quarter of next year we'll be up and running before that but we won't do an official opening until after we run our lines a few times and really work through the manufacturing process itself here.
Here in the us uh we are under construction as my recent shareholder update uh advised i I’ve walked the facility a few times in the last few weeks and it's been you know it's fantastic to see it kind of getting built up there's still a lot of work to do um should everything arrive on time we will have all our parts and pieces in by the end of the year be in construction through the first quarter and we'll probably have our grand opening right at the beginning of the third quarter maybe the end of the second quarter of next year full ribbon cutting.
 
30:00
Jim - okay yeah that's great thank you for the uh the details um i guess you're just getting back to the specific agreement between EXRO and vicinity
Q - I’m wondering how the exclusivity works there can EXRO sell to other bus companies?
Q - can vicinity use different inverter technologies?
 
30:26
Sue - yeah, the uh Will if it's okay with you I’ll go ahead and start that one. So, the great thing about bringing disruptive technology to the market is that you know you really don't see a lot
of exclusivities especially in your early stages as our partners continue to investigate lots of different tech out there of course they're using you know I know with vicinity he's using Dan- Foss and other applications so as we earn our spot in the supply chain of our customers then perhaps conversations will go a different way but as of today, we don't have exclusivities on our partnerships.
 
Jim- and i guess to continue that uh four Will uh obviously when you're dealing with an electrified powertrain the inverter or the technology of the inverter race is pretty key dc ac and all that stuff what else what are the other key technological improvements that you think need to happen to make electric buses i mean already obviously, they're feasible but to make them more
economically viable? People talk about the tires with electric cars the Tesla's for instance we'll talk about all these other sorts of things so what else can you do to green vicinity's offer
obviously including “?”
 
A – Will: well you know in the electric uh space really it comes down to you know storage energy storage and distance that you can travel that that's what the customers want to see so you know that's why we're constantly evaluating uh new technology that's coming out there but the other thing too is that you know you want strong relationships you want good partners and you know that's what we feel we've got here with uh with EXRO
 
32:16
Jim - absolutely yeah.
Is there scale for you to at my conference soon throughout the laundry list of stuff different uh obviously the people at EXRO were not watching YouTube videos all day-very busy engineers.
 
Q - and so is there scope for further cooperation between EXRO and Vicinity?
 
A- Sue: yeah absolutely uh you know we're discussing lots of different ways I mean when I think about different ways to green for us we have a few different ways from a power electronics standpoint whether it's um streamlining the complexity of the powertrain itself so
right now, we have you know two offerings to market for those uh that were at the battery show they would have seen our new 800-volt system which is our TSA motor with our drive which is
what we're putting into um Vicinity's application, but we can also sell that same drive as a standalone partnered with somebody else's motor, but you know you see in the industry a trend towards e-axles like on the partnerships that we're working on with Linamar where you come you know take out some of the complexity of the system and still have a more cost effective and optimized solution so that's one area where I think the industry will be trending in the future and then another area of course is our battery control system um you know Will i thought you you're exactly you know where we would be aligned is on the energy storage side of it how much you can get out of the battery we're all about repurposing that battery so as we develop our energy storage unit and how we can re reutilize batteries that come out of buses cars bikes and everything else um mobility-wise i think that would be a really important part again we're just coming out of development on that one product you know just finishing the development stages it'll go through a rigorous certification process early part of next year but you know by end of
next year we should be into more commercially viable conversations around
our BCS as well.
 
34:14
Jim- okay yep and there was a follow-up from David Schneider to what you were
Saying.
Q- Sue um can you explain what the e-axel is intended to do
 
A-Sue: um so I’ll just explain what an e-axle in general is intended to do it still does the same thing as a regular powertrain system in that inside of it is your motor your gearbox and your inverter so you're still converting your power and gearing your system but instead of having three distinct separate components that are connected they're all built into one and i've seen it called three in one and e axial and integrated drive unit but essentially you're bringing all your components for power conversion into one so that would
connect into to convert your battery power.
 
35:00
Jim- scratch ear again - okay yeah that's helpful I think that a lot of people throw that term around not everybody really understands where the data is but so I would shift back to um we're having a bad day stock market here so in terms of your valuation and I’ll throw this out to both of you but when you talk to large institutional investors what is the sort of value proposition but obviously you don't value your own company no one does.
 
FINALLY, A question.
 
Q- but what is that what are the key points of value that you're talking about for you know
the Fidelities of the world?
 
A- Will - well you know i think you constantly got to be uh looking at you know what you can bring to the market and what you can bring to your customer base and your shareholders
and you know they're looking they want you to create value that's really where it is you know you've got a great value and uh for your shareholders so that's what we're constantly looking at.
 
36:07
Jim – more mumbling.
Q - and then do you use will these tools like economic value added and those sorts of drilling into the roic or what are your key performance indicators if I were asking your board of directors
what would they say?
 
36:23
A - Will: well you know creating shareholder value really comes down to you've got to look at where your market cap is so you want to drive your market cap up and uh and create uh great value for overall uh shareholders.
 
36:38
Jim - and and Sue is as a yeah oh getting close to the getting close to the goal line but still pre-revenue company
Q - how do you how do you figure those metrics?
 
36:51
A – Sue: yeah so um so i mean from an overall perspective what i would what i would say whether it's an institutional or a retail uh doesn't matter who the shareholder is anybody that's interested in EXRO i'd say we're really bridging the gap to electrification so when what i mean by that is we're making a next generation technology that allows electrified mobility to be a reality in performance and cost and from our kpi perspective we have about a dozen key
kpis i think they're like most you know companies as far as we're trying to take market share we're trying to grow our revenue but beyond that we're trying to create really innovative products and take new products to market through capturing customers so i think that's what our board would kind of support and i think that would be similar to most of the emerging companies in the
space right now.
 
37:43
Jim - sure, yeah i mean i think that you're almost there.
Q - but sometimes just looking at the top line is a good way to tell if a company is winning or not isn't it
 
37:57
A- Sue it's interesting it's interesting you know I I’d openly say that um i think revenue obviously is very important having spent a career at GE I know all too well reportedly a quarterly a quarterly cry in a new quarter new quarter smile but what i what i really love about taking new technology to market is the revenue really needs to be the product of taking that product you know it needs to be the product it can't be the goal if we make revenue our goal right now we'll lose so much else for the business so our goal is you know capturing great partnerships like
we've done with Vicinity establishing ourselves as part of that supply chain earning our position and with that, we're going to have a business that returns for our shareholders great revenue
 
 
 
38:46
Jim- sure absolutely and just get another question actually here uh also from g for both of you both Sue and Will.
Q-with the governmental push towards greener and cleaner energy how old the newly proposed
infrastructure bills specifically benefit your companies.
Q-second part are there any ideas or areas of your companies that would be accelerated or initiated due to that bill passing?
 
39:18
A – Will: okay the infrastructures that are out there is going to definitely drive the sales and drive the customers uh and enable the customers to purchase the electrified vehicles for us
that's what we see happening in the marketplace right now
 
A- Sue: yeah, and I think very much aligned once again Will uh I think it drives some customer decisions on how they structure themselves in the in the coming months and years um
for us again it's coming from a variety of different areas but mostly from the subsidies and the incentives that are coming out and the mandates that are coming out more than the infrastructure itself.
 
40:02
Jim - sure i think that that is what i always tell c-level executives is that the money is there so
it's completely non-dilutive completely non-repayable so i would advise to take it – yeah -
which is somewhat of an oversimplification somewhat but uh
 
Sue: yeah it's exciting when you think about how much is available out in the markets today um so you know I we'll see what the coming months hold and which ones are a good fit for EXRO
 
Jim - sure and back to will but it's the Vicinity technology I think it's very exciting where you could go with obviously wins like Calgary etcetera but all that said Vicinity is still pretty small for a bus company so when you talk to the board and all these other discussions-
Q- do you think there's scope for you to combine with other oems and improve your product offer that way with your geographical balance all the sort of classic b-school stuff?
 
A - Will: yeah you know we're always looking at what we can do you know i think for us we developed a lot of our own technology in-house particularly you know the power distribution box that that's really the heart of the vehicle and that allows us to go out there and buy a lot of these components like the uh like the coil drivers and whatnot um but we're constantly looking at what we can do with the technology we've developed and how we can you know put that into other markets you know a good example for us is we developed what we consider you know our bus coming to market makes sense uh on a uh operational sense and really on a what we say you know you can build a business case with it you know we've priced our vehicle extremely well for the market and that's what's going to allow a lot of these customers uh private operators that don't get a lot of these incentives they can actually do a business case and you know total cost of ownership over the life of the vehicle you actually save money but we've also taken our
technology and we've seen where else we can place it and a good example of that is we brought to life our uh our little cab over truck it's uh the vmc 1200 uh it utilizes a lot of the same technology we developed for the bus but it it's now in a market that competes in  a 400 000 sales per year market annual sales um so that that's what we're looking at -you know what can we do with our existing technology how can we gain sales how can we gain market share uh and the truck is a good example that and you know and we're not we're looking we have our sites in other markets as well you know we think our product makes perfect sense so now we just got to see
how we can get it into some of these other markets
 
43:04
Jim - yeah i think that's that's something that i talked to investors about Vicinity maybe they miss a little bit is that your business is not entirely as especially given the size of the bus
that you're doing that sweets about being about 30 feet your business isn't entirely driven by municipalities and government spending i mean you can do the airport show i mean there are
large fleets in that size so i'm just wondering how you get to them as opposed to when you would go to Calgary or somewhere like that where it's a tender process that has to be publicly advertised.
Q- so how do you get to the private uh operators which is obviously a larger market
 
43:52
Will - yeah the pride we see you know for our uh um bus market we see the market as being 50 public and 50 private on the sales cycle and you just got to get out there and introduce your product we have uh the after shows coming up here the first week of November down in uh down in Florida you know we'll be introducing our product there that that gets you know a lot of people looking at the product um uh and they get to see it uh on site uh so it's just opportunities like that to get it out into the into the private market and then to you really got to get out and market the vehicle and that's what we're doing we're in trade shows uh constantly in trade shows across the us and you know we've got a strong sales force that's out there uh getting a product in front of the customer base
 
44:43
Jim - absolutely okay we're getting a couple here on the Q&A as soon as we get a little close to hour this one is for Sue from Christopher Warner.
Q - can you speak a bit about what the competitive landscape is for the technologies that EXRO specializes in the larger auto companies both new BYD and Riveon Ford etc for example already have some version of what you sell or are they potentially new customers does exporter see itself
selling to this market?
 
45:16
A – Sue: okay so uh first off, we would say that we have no direct competition so well there is definitely lots of inverter manufacturers on the market Rivian, Ford all of those companies have an existing inverter supplier that they're either outsourcing from or that they've built something in-house um none of them have the value proposition that we have in that we can eliminate other parts of the power electronics like the charging and the onboard charger or different pieces and still bring that performance to market and so there is a value proposition that's very strong with ours and a performance proposition that's very strong with ours that said depending on the segment we have a different set of incumbents so i'm going to break it up into again that low voltage high voltage view. So low voltage is kind of that smaller recreational vehicles two-wheelers motorcycles atvs forklifts, some off highway in that segment we see a lot withincumbents like Curtis and divisions of Borg Warner there is some start-up companies other emerging companies in the space that are doing motor drive combinations um in all cases we have a drive that brings bigger performance in a cost-effective platform. As we go into the bigger ones similar to the buses um class kind of four and higher what we call our high voltage range the incumbents it really is very spread out but what we see is for those that are outsourcing it
meaning for those that are buying it through a supply chain we see Dana, TM4, Borg Warner, Denzo and Magna as big players. Dan Foss comes into there as well. Those would be kind of the big players and again there's a selection of um emerging companies that are coming up with different types of motors or drives and then there's also a selection of companies that have developed in-house like Lucid where they've developed the inverters in-house. For us they're all good target customers.  For us whether they're in sourcing or outsourcing.  When they're outsourcing, we can offer building it in-house at our facility or if the volumes are high enough a licensing agreement. When they're in sourcing it normally means that they have you know they're either building or forecasting to be building a large volume in which case we could support licensing agreements. We wouldn't do licensing agreements for small volume but with large volume it makes sense.
So that's kind of how I see the landscape.
 
47:50
Jim - okay thank you for that we do have a couple more here coming in through the q & a channel. So, this one this one is for both of you.
 
Q- looking out into the ev and electrification space have either of you had any thoughts about merging with or acquiring any other companies that would increase or enhance your company's product offer so that's for both and it's completely legal to answer that question.
 
48:19
Will: well if i would say you know as a publicly traded entity you know we're constantly evaluating what market opportunities are out there.
 
Sue: i'll make the same statement as well we're constantly evaluating it we have
it in our NDA filings that we're always looking for things that would kind of balance either our core competency of power electronics our core target market of mobility we are really driven as a vision for the company to try to increase what we call our EXRO ecosystem. So, the ability to serve our customers and you asked about that Jim earlier what else could we do together with Vicinity so if we can bring in additional partnerships promoters or we could bring in additional partnerships for batteries or vcus or there's just so many components in that powertrain that we would be able to look at.
 
49:14
Jim - okay great it as always happens that they start coming in fast and furious at the end.
 
Q - the questions uh so this one are you familiar with Yasa would they be a potential partner or a
Competitor?
A - um i am familiar with Yasa they were just acquired i believe it was by Daimler or Mercedes um they could you know possibly be a partner they have a type of motor drive combination where the motor is where you're delivering the performance benefit for a lower high torque high performance we haven't seen them in the commercial trucking side they focused on the lower voltage side from what we've seen obviously with a acquisition by Mercedes there's some things that we that we're not privy to um that they're working on um so it will be interesting to see how
they develop and you know yes there is definitely potential there.
 
50:08
Jim - okay great and then one more for Will
Q - is the removal of the onboard charger in value comparable to increased
Performance uh for your product - i didn't tell you is the removal of the onboard charger comparable to increase performance well?
 
A – Will:  i think you know what we want to accomplish you know the on-board charger uh with the EXRO technology it's a great fit you know you can remove one component, and have it all come into uh you know like a three in one or whatever we want to call it it's it makes perfect sense it's uh it's uh you manufacture better uh you know there's less parts to go in the vehicle
uh for all of those reasons it's just it it's a great fit we can't wait to see the product.
 
50:58
Jim - okay yeah i think that makes a lot of sense so okay well we are we're at the hour mark so
i just want to say thank you very much to Sue CEO EXRO technologies and will trainer CEO Vicinity motor corps.
 
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