John Gibson

Thank you, Mike. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining today's call to discuss Electrovaya's Q3 2024 financial results. Today's call is being hosted by Dr. Raj DasGupta, CEO of Electrovaya; and myself, John Gibson, CFO.

Today, Electrovaya issued a press release concerning its business highlights and financial results for the three and nine months period ending June 30, 2024. If you would like a copy of the release, you can access it on our website. If you want to view our financial statements and management discussion and analysis, you can access those documents on the new SEDAR+ website at www.sedarplus.ca or on the SEC EDGAR website at sec.gov/edgar.

As with previous calls, our comments today are subject to the normal provisions relating to forward-looking information. We will provide information relating to our current views regarding market trends, including their size and potential for growth, and our competitive position within our target markets. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, they do involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ from those expressed or implied in such statements.

Additional information about factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations and about material factors or assumptions applied in making forward-looking statements may be found in the company's press release announcing the Q3 2024 results and the most recent annual information form and management discussion and analysis under Risks and Uncertainties, as well as in other public disclosure documents filed with Canadian security regulatory authorities. Also, please note that all the numbers discussed on the call are in U.S. dollars, unless otherwise noted.

And now I'd like to turn the call over to Raj.

Rajshekar DasGupta

Thank you, John, and good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining our fiscal Q3 2024 call. We continue to strengthen our business through new product development, business development initiatives and in continuing to post consistent, strong margins for our core material handling battery product lines. Our focus this fiscal year and where we demonstrated significant progress in the current quarter is to establish the foundation so that this business can continue with rapid growth -- with a rapid growth trajectory in fiscal 2025 and beyond.

This not only includes the development of new product lines for current and new OEM partners, but also with respect to establishing financial partnerships to sustain our long-term growth objectives. While we continue to expect fiscal 2024 to be a strong year, we are experiencing an impact from the movement of orders to fiscal 2025 by our customers, particularly when the orders are related to new warehouse construction. Accordingly, we are adjusting our fiscal year 2024 outlook for the revenue to be approximately $45 million for the full-year.

This represents growth over fiscal year 2023. And importantly, this is just a shift from one fiscal year to the next due to timing requests from our customers. The orders are in hand and demand for our batteries remains strong. That said, we fully expect that demand for both our core material handling battery products and additional demand from other sectors to grow significantly for fiscal 2025 and especially for fiscal 2026 and beyond.

We are investing for Electrovaya's future. In the current quarter, we had some additional costs associated with new product development, including certification and third-party validation testing, as well as costs associated with a larger engineering team. These are part of our large co-investments that Electrovaya has been making over the course of the last year with respect to an OEM project, which will launch in fiscal year 2025. These additional costs are apparent in our increased research and development spending. This is just one example of a few development programs Electrovaya is currently engaged in. We expect these investments to transform into significant revenue drivers in subsequent fiscal years.

Increased investments in sales and marketing, including increased headcount also contributed to some higher operating costs. We believe these investments will show a strong return as Electrovaya enters new markets and targets increased direct sales. Management has been making significant progress in meeting our strategic financing objectives for both our existing operations in the form of a lower-cost and longer-term refinancing with a major North American bank, and also with respect to financing our Jamestown lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility with a U.S. federal agency.

We are optimistic to close both of these financings in the current fiscal year. Our relationship with Sumitomo Corporation Power & Mobility continues to bring new exciting opportunities. We are on schedule to make our first deliveries to a major Japanese construction equipment OEM as part of our supply agreement with Sumitomo in the Spring of next year.

We have other opportunities that we are actively pursuing with Sumitomo and see significant potential for the company in Japan and the Asia-Pacific region in general. We expect to begin to move to low-volume serial production of our high-voltage battery systems in the first quarter of calendar year 2025, as these products begin to gain sales traction. We see a wide variety of applications for these systems, including but not limited to defense, mining vehicles, construction and even rail applications. Given our battery technology's ability to sustain higher levels of safety, cycle life and overall performance than typical lithium-ion battery systems, there are certain applications where we stand out even further and thus can continue to garner the premium we have established in the material handling industry.

I'd also like to illustrate that concerns about battery safety globally are appearing more and more. Electrovaya has a host of proprietary technologies, which makes lithium-ion batteries substantially safer. Our lithium-ion ceramic technology has been deployed in thousands of passenger vehicles, thousands of material handling vehicles, and without a single safety issue. We passed the most stringent of destructive battery testing available, including literally setting a cell on fire in a high-voltage battery system. We did that twice, and we had no fire propagation inside the battery system.

I don't think there are many, if any, other battery companies who can claim that. Recent lithium-ion battery fires in Korea and elsewhere are bringing this issue to the forefront again. I think our advantage here is going to become more salient as time goes on.

With that, I'd like to pass the call back to John Gibson, who will go into the financial results in more detail.