管理層發言
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the SES AI second quarter earnings release and call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. Operator instructions were provided. I will now hand the conference over to Kyle Pilkington, Chief Legal Officer. Kyle, please go ahead.
Hello everyone and welcome to our conference call covering our second quarter 2026 results. Joining me today are Qichao Hu, Founder and Chief Executive Officer; and Ray Liu, Chief Financial Officer. We issued our shareholder letter just after 4:00 p.m. today, which provides a business update as well as our financial results. You will find a press release with a link to our shareholder letter and today's conference call webcast in the investor relations section of our website at ses.ai. Before we get started, this is a reminder that the discussion today may contain forward-looking information or forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. These statements are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Such statements involve certain risks, assumptions, and uncertainties, which may cause our actual or future results or performance to be materially different from those expressed or implied in these statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from our current expectations include, but are not limited to, those detailed in our latest earnings release and in our SEC filings. On this call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures as a supplement to our GAAP results. These non-GAAP measures are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles but are intended to illustrate alternative measures of the company's operating performance that may be useful. These non-GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for any GAAP measure, and our definitions may differ from those used by other companies reporting similarly titled measures. Reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in our latest earnings release. With that, I'll pass it over to Qichao.
Thank you, Kyle. SES is solving two of the most difficult challenges in energy storage: accelerating product development using AI for materials and building a robust supply chain to manufacture these products. We originally focused on EV and pivoted more than a year ago to ESS and drones applications. In Q2, we began seeing significant commercial milestones, and we are very excited about the path we're on. Our Q2 revenue grew by more than 40% compared to Q2 last year. And our gross margin improved from 18% to more than 22% due to our differentiated technology and robust supply chain. And we are reaffirming our 2026 revenue guideline of $30 to $35 million. On accelerating product development using AI for materials, we released Molecular Universe MU-3.0, our first agentic workflow platform that works for sodium chemistry as well as lithium chemistry and can be integrated with autonomous labs deployed fully secured and on-premise. We shipped our first Search-in-a-Box order to one of the world's largest battery manufacturers, and some of the materials discovered by Molecular Universe have completed testing and entered pilot commercial deployment. On building a robust supply chain to manufacture these products, for ESS, this is our largest revenue-generating unit. We're making great progress, especially in the U.S. market. We were selected by Sol-Ark as a certified battery partner, and we brought on Paul Diemer, ex-CTO of Flex Power, to our board to help guide our ESS strategy. And we continue to hire a stellar team with backgrounds in leading AI data center total solution providers to execute and deliver our exciting ESS growth. For drones and unmanned systems, we are recruiting a team with a proven track record of selling to defense and commercial drones. We expect to start producing one million NDAA-compliant cells per year in about one month at our Korea plant. And based on the strong customer demand we are seeing, we are taking orders well into 2028. I'll dive into each topic separately. On ESS, while most competitors sell either pure hardware that don't have intelligent software or pure software that are not trained on real-world data, our Edge Box–enabled ESS systems are trained on the specific cells that we use in our hardware systems, allowing for one-to-one matching, accurate state of health and safety management. This prediction accuracy not only helps prevent fire and other incidents, it is a tremendous saving for our customers across residential, commercial, industrial, and data centers. One of the leading U.S.-based FCC-authorized inverter producers, Sol-Ark, certified our subsidiary, UZ's, low-voltage residential batteries for their hybrid inverter systems. We believe this certification with Sol-Ark will greatly accelerate the growth of UZ's revenue in the U.S., especially given the recent FCC restrictions around foreign-produced inverters and other electronics. We were also honored to bring on Paul Diemer to our board of directors. Paul served as the CTO of Flex Power, where he ran the critical and embedded power group that was responsible for delivering power solutions to data centers and other industrial systems. Paul also ran new EV product architecture at BorgWarner. Paul's transition from EV to data centers is very similar to that of SES. On drones and unmanned systems, we expect to complete the scale-up of our Korea-based NDAA-compliant cell production from 200,000 cells a year to one million cells a year in about one month. And we expect to start producing at one million cells a year at full speed starting this Q4. We have already hosted many of the largest American and allied drone makers for line audits, with many more in the queue later this year. We expect revenue contributions from NDAA-compliant cells produced in our Korea line to start in a meaningful way in Q4 this year and really start to take off in the first half of next year. Even at one million NDAA-compliant pouch cells, which we believe is one of the largest NDAA-compliant pouch manufacturing capacities in the world, and combined with our best-in-class energy density and performance, we are looking at securing orders well into 2028. And we're also seeking additional NDAA-compliant manufacturing capacities for both pouch and cylindrical cells to address the strong demand for these products. These cells will be for drones, but also broader unmanned and mobility applications. We recently announced a framework agreement with Doroni, where we'll be responsible for designing and developing the complete battery pack for their H1-X eVTOL. It's a really cool two-seater. With Molecular Universe, we released MU-3.0. This is the most powerful and complete end-to-end workflow automation in energy storage. We sold a Search-in-a-Box module to one of the largest battery makers in the world, and we are trialing the full MU-3.0 workflow integrated with autonomous labs with many more. We do have competitors for AI for materials, but none offers solutions as complete, accurate, and most importantly, secure as ours. Many of our customers switched to MU after trying competitors' offerings. Many competitors try to offer building blocks in a cloud-based toolkit, but product development is more than a toolkit. Very few enterprise customers would allow their proprietary data to leave their premises or be used to train external models. It requires a fully secured on-premise integration of domain expertise, experimental data, and computational chemistry simulation full stack. Some of the materials discovered by Molecular Universe have completed testing and entered revenue-generating early-stage commercial pilot development. We expect to release MU-4.0 later this year. It will feature the ability to generate new molecules based on desired properties, and it will be integrated with autonomous labs. So users can generate or discover new molecules, synthesize them, validate them in full devices, and provide actual experimental data back to train their own foundation models, all fully secured and on-premise. This flywheel that connects simulation with experimental validation can organize and generate high-quality data and train models fully secured and on-premise. And without humans in the loop, it can run much faster than humans ever can. I do think a lot of investors are underestimating Molecular Universe, especially if viewed purely through the lens of near-term monetization. But I believe in the next three to five years, Molecular Universe will power the majority of product development, definitely in energy storage and expanding to complex fluids and eventually other material applications. The SES team is solving two of the most difficult challenges in energy storage, accelerating product development using AI for materials and building a robust supply chain to manufacture these products. We have a healthy cash runway, highly differentiated capability across products and manufacturing, and one of the most dedicated teams. I'm incredibly proud to work with our team on these critical challenges, even when the market may perhaps underestimate us. And I'd like to thank the team for their hard work. Now here's Ray for the financial updates.
Thank you, Qichao. I'll walk through our second quarter 2026 financial results. Second quarter revenue was $5.1 million compared to $6.7 million in the first quarter of 2026 and $3.5 million in the second quarter of 2025. Notably, this quarter validated our commercial momentum. For the first time, we saw revenue contribution across all product lines: ESS, drone battery cells, materials, and Molecular Universe. Our GAAP gross margin was 22.6% in the quarter, an improvement from 18.1% in the first quarter. The improvement was particularly driven by the ESS business, where we saw a higher mix of international sales and continued pricing discipline. Turning to operating expenses, our GAAP operating expenses for the second quarter were $20.3 million compared to $19.1 million in the first quarter. The slight sequential increase was primarily due to a bad debt provision related to a legacy EV service contract. Year over year, however, operating expenses were down 26% and we remain confident in our ability to sustain the expense reduction of more than 20% year-over-year. Our GAAP net loss for the second quarter was $17.8 million, or $0.05 loss per share, compared to a GAAP net loss of $12.1 million, or $0.04 loss per share in the first quarter. I want to remind everyone that our GAAP net loss can be impacted by non-cash mark-to-market movement in the fair value of our sponsor earn-out liabilities, which are required to be measured each reporting period under GAAP. In the first quarter, we recorded a $4.2 million non-cash gain related to these liabilities. That impact was insignificant in the second quarter. Excluding change in sponsor earn-out liabilities, stock-based compensation, depreciation and amortization, and including interest income, our non-GAAP net loss for the second quarter was $13.1 million, or $0.04 loss per share, compared to a non-GAAP net loss of $11.1 million, or $0.03 loss per share in the first quarter. The sequential widening in non-GAAP net loss was primarily due to lower revenue in the second quarter and the bad debt provision that I mentioned earlier. Looking ahead, we expect our net loss to narrow in the second half of the year, driven by a pickup in revenue and continued reductions in operating expenses as our cost reduction program takes full effect. Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was a loss of $14.6 million compared to a loss of $12.8 million in the first quarter. A detailed reconciliation of GAAP net loss to adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP net loss is included in the financial tables at the end of the shareholder letter. Turning to capital allocation, we ended the second quarter with cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments of approximately $163 million. Our CapEx-light business model remains a core financial discipline and we're confident our current liquidity provides a runway to fund operations and execute on our 2026 growth initiatives. We're actively looking for inorganic growth opportunities, including M&A that complement our strategy, while maintaining financial discipline. We believe the second quarter demonstrates continued execution against the plan we laid out: broadening revenue contribution across all our products, continued gross margin improvement, and disciplined cost management. We are reaffirming our full year 2026 revenue guidance of $30 to $35 million. As we look to the second half of the year, our priorities are clear: continue to scale energy storage systems and Edge Box distribution; convert our drone qualification pipeline into commercial orders as the Chungju ramp completes; and close our supply agreement for materials discovered through Molecular Universe. With that, I will hand over to the operator.
分析師問答
Your first question comes from the line of Winnie Dong with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
I wanted to touch on the back half of this year. Can you remind us of the mix of revenue that's going to be driven across the different business lines? And then can you also talk about the backlog at the energy segment? It seems like you've got some important certifications that might be good for the U.S. side. What kind of demand management might we be looking at for 2027? And then I have a follow up. Thanks.
In terms of the split: first half is basically majority ESS, almost more than 70% ESS. But in the second half, we do expect drones and materials to pick up. So still more than half from ESS. And then in terms of that certification with Sol-Ark, if you're not certified, then you're competing with like 20 other companies. But once you are certified and there's only like fewer than five, there are like Enphase, Tesla, and Sol-Ark, then really you're competing with like three. So later half of this year, we expect the hockey stick to start to pick up and then a lot more next year. I think the exact number, we don't have the exact number yet, but we're quite excited to be certified by Sol-Ark. Because now we go from competing with 20 other players to now competing with just a few like Enphase and Tesla.
Ok, thank you. That's helpful. And then I was wondering, maybe just on the capital allocation side, it seems that you're sticking with that CapEx-light approach. You do have $160 plus million cash runway. What kind of CapEx might you be looking to spend? And you also alluded to M&A. What are some of the pipelines that you're looking at? What can we anticipate? I think if I look back to the capacity you have for your drone cells out of Korea, it seems like there is demand and orders into 2028. So would you need capacity expansion there and the use of CapEx for that? Thanks.
We definitely do. I mean, if we just had one million cells out of Korea, then literally we're going to supply at most three customers, three drone customers that need NDAA. So without additional capacity and based on this pipeline, we are looking at 2028. Now if we can double the capacity in Korea to two million or triple that or find additional NDAA-compliant capacity in Southeast Asia, so if we quadruple or even more that capacity, and all that pipeline that we were going to supply in 2028, now we can supply in 2027. So in terms of line, not so much this year because most of that has already been spent. Again, most of the Korea CapEx we built back in early during the JDA with GM. So now it's not rebuilding new CapEx; it is more modifying that. So not as much this year. And then later this year or next year, if we're to invest in additional CapEx, either through direct investment or through investing in companies that own those CapEx, I think that's TBD. But again, for drones, we're not talking about gigawatt-hour scale. We're talking about, for example, 20 megawatt-hours, 50 megawatt-hours—way smaller than gigawatt-hours. So I think the spending is a lot more efficient than the EV CapEx.
Thank you. And then what about the M&A portion? Any pipelines that you might be looking at? Anything that we should sort of anticipate?
We are exploring. I think there are some companies that have interesting manufacturing capacities in Korea in the drone space and in the ESS space. Companies that make pouch cells for drones or prismatic LFP, we're very interested in working with them, both cell companies as well as pack companies. We are still evaluating some of those capacities.
Yes. We internally set up some guardrails on doing M&A. So anything we want to do has to fit into our strategy and also be business- and revenue-accretive to our business. So we're just looking to, as Qichao was mentioning, expand with the cash we have on hand.
Your next question comes from the line of Dave Storms with Stonegate. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Just wanted to maybe start with your comments around the expected gross margin improvement. Could you help us understand what might be driving this? Is this continued pricing? Is this volume increases, mix, moving into more drones in the back half? Just any further color here would be great.
Yes, I can add some color. I think the improvement, as I mentioned in the announcement, is primarily from our ESS business and is mostly driven by increased international sales. We typically, especially in North America, see a higher margin on sales in North America. Additionally, we have maintained price discipline on the ESS business, so that's contributed. I think in the back half of the year, as the drone revenue picks up, we'll see margin increase because a drone sale typically carries a higher margin compared to the ESS business. So we'll see margin improvements in the second half.
Yes, I think one of the key drivers to the gross margin, especially in ESS, is the price of the cells. A year ago, cells were really expensive and we did not have Edge Box. So we were required to buy cells produced by one vendor out of one of their lines, and we had very little pricing power. Since we have Edge Box, now we're able to source cells from multiple vendors and multiple lines because we're able to monitor and then balance between the cells. So that has reduced the price of cells.
That's great commentary. I really appreciate that. Maybe, Qichao, you mentioned that you are exploring beyond drones, the broader unmanned and mobility applications, and you called out a new partnership there. Could you spend a little bit of time talking about some of the technical challenges between drones versus the broader unmanned ecosystem, if there are any? Maybe how that market looks in terms of margins or demand or TAM compared to your current market. Anything else there would be very helpful.
So a lot of it is just timing and go-to-market investment and focus. We focused on drones because that market we have seen is consolidating around one to three major form factors and so the cells we build, we definitely first and foremost supply to drones. Now there are other applications that recently have surfaced: marine applications, boats, submarines, applications that also care about weight and NDAA compliance, as well as some cargo planes, manned eVTOLs, and unmanned eVTOLs. So all of the form factors that we have matured for drone applications, we're also selling those to other adjacent markets.
Your next call comes from the line of Craig Irwin with ROTH Capital. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
So I wanted to ask about Molecular Universe. Qichao, you're clearly excited about this as a longer-term opportunity and the potential both revenue and IP out of the library that you've developed. Can you maybe talk about customer engagement? How actively are you marketing this to new customers at the moment? Do you have strong leads for additional new customers at the moment? If you could maybe give us a little color on the breadth of the customer interest. And how long do you think it will take as far as customers that are already looking for leads out of your database to make those commercial and have those revenue-generating opportunities?
So I would say we have about three customers—three battery companies—that we are deeply engaged with. By 'deeply,' I mean there are at least three to five teams within each company that are evaluating different parts of the Molecular Universe. The entry level is companies that buy modules; for example, some people buy Search-in-a-Box, some buy Predict-in-a-Box, some buy Design-in-a-Box, some buy Ask-in-a-Box, some buy Formulate-in-a-Box. That's the entry level. The second level is companies that buy the entire workflow: ask, search, predict, design, manufacture—basically the entire workflow and also with StarSeeker, so it's an agentic workflow. The third tier are companies that buy what we call M-Labs. M-Labs is the integration of the entire agentic StarSeeker with autonomous labs. So we actually combine the StarSeeker with corresponding autonomous labs. For example, Ask and Search is integrated with a new molecule synthesis A-Lab. Formulate is integrated with an Electrolyte A-Lab. Design and Predict are integrated with Electrolyte Optimization A-Lab. Also part of Predict is integrated with Cell Testing A-Lab. Before, we had pure software platforms installed on-premise, but instead of having pure software in a box delivered on-premise, now the software is delivered together with a lab. So a customer could just provide us 1,000 to 1,500 square meters of space, and then we will lay out all the other A-Labs and the corresponding software. On the customer side, instead of needing 30 to 50 people to run this lab, now you need just one project manager with this entire software and this entire A-Lab together, the M-Labs, and then you can have a complete battery development capability. So there are three major customers that we are outlining at the third-tier discussion. Hopefully we'll announce some revenues at the M-Labs level. Beyond these three, there are also other battery companies that we are engaging at the module level and the workflow level.
Okay, excellent. I understand. My second question is about the cells coming online in Korea. So you're going from 200,000 cells a year in capacity to one million cells a year. When I look at your current capacity of 200,000 cells, that's quite small versus the needs of many defense suppliers, drone producers, and other companies that use lithium-ion batteries in military equipment. But one million cells a year gets you in the game. Have you received any sort of soft commitments from these NDAA-constrained customers as far as probable or potential orders on that one million cells a year? What's your confidence level that you'll see the offtake there? And is it possible we see revenue from the incremental capacity at the end of this current quarter within the month of September?
Yes. Our pipeline for drones for just NDAA, not counting non-NDAA, is over 50 NDAA opportunities. The large customers—by large I mean those needing roughly 200,000 to 300,000 NDAA-compliant cells a year—we have about five large customers. So just the top five large customers, we've already exceeded one million; we're at like 1.5 million. One million is the capacity; if you take into account quality, downtimes, and so on, we probably deliver 700,000 to 800,000. So yes, we are way under capacity purely in terms of NDAA compliance. We're doing two things. One is evaluating other capacities in Korea, either through our own investment or through contract manufacturing so we hope to double or triple NDAA-compliant capacity in Korea. Two, we're also looking at additional capacities in Southeast Asia. Customers have a range of NDAA compliance needs. Some want 100% NDAA compliance—cathode, anode, electrolyte, separator, pouch, and entire assembly done in Korea. We also have customers that are okay with 40% to 50% NDAA compliance. In some cases, there's a Korea-specific approach where you can have cathode and anode from Korea, but cell assembly done in China for one year. We reserve the one million capacity in Korea purely for those that want 100% NDAA-compliant. We do have additional capacity for those that want 40% to 60% NDAA-compliant, and we are looking for additional capacities in Korea and Southeast Asia.
Thank you for that. And my last question: you're increasing capacity commitment five-fold. I realize you're using contract manufacturing, so probably you don't see as big a potential improvement in cost. Is there an improvement in cost that you can expect on this capacity increase? And the five customers that are very large in the drone market that you mentioned—have they already started sampling cells, given that you're going to be using nearly identical production, identical cell recipe, to produce a commercial product?
I want to confirm that one million 100% NDAA-compliant cells out of Korea are entirely our own production. We also have several other million cells that are less than 100% NDAA-compliant provided through contract manufacturers. In terms of where we are with the customers, they've done sample testing—multiple rounds. They've done one to two line audits and are waiting for the one million cell capacity to be operational in September and then will visit again for additional quality audits. In terms of pricing, yes, going from 200,000 to one million would significantly reduce the price.
Excellent. Well, thank you for that, and thank you for the clarification. Congratulations on your progress.
Your next question comes from the line of Mark Shooter with William Blair. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hey, Qichao. Am I coming through?
Yes, we're here.
Great, thank you. On the ESS business, I'm interested in whether you can update us and give a little bit of color on exactly what niche of this segment you're looking to play in ideally. And can you update us on whether you are still trying to sell the full solution including the battery and the DMS or Edge Box, or is there an opportunity to just sell the Edge Box to potentially a utility or an integrator?
Yes, I would divide them into three categories. One is residential. In residential, most companies sell batteries and inverters in one pack—consumers generally buy them together. When some foreign-produced inverters got restricted, that impacted co-selling and co-marketing relationships for battery suppliers because those two are sold together frequently. This partnership with Sol-Ark is one of the three U.S.-produced inverter partners along with Enphase and Tesla, so this will help the residential market, and yes, we include the Edge Box there. Second is larger scale data centers. This is quite new for us; UZ was familiar with residential but not so much with data centers. Here we are trying to provide a total solution, sometimes the entire UPS together with the Edge Box. This is also why we brought on Paul, to help us navigate the go-to-market strategy. Third, some battery inverter distributors are open to us installing the Edge Box and we are testing with them. That may also pick up as a revenue source.
Thank you. I'm talking about that second piece, which is the hyperscalers. Is there anything available or that you're ready to update us on and give us a bit more detail on the level of engagement?
I think we can discuss and share more in Q3 or Q4. Right now a lot of those discussions are very early.
Okay, understood. Also, in the shareholder letter, you mentioned that most competitors just sell hardware without software. The competitors I'm thinking of have very complex and sophisticated software programs attached. So who do you consider your key competitors in this space?
Some competitors do have sophisticated software, especially the large ones. But I think for the majority, they either use a third-party software or they use internal software that's not specifically trained on the cells. For example, if a PCS system is using a 314 amp-hour LFP prismatic produced in Q1 this year out of a line from a vendor, our Edge Box will be trained on that exact batch of cells that go inside the pack. And if we switch to a different vendor that makes the same 314 amp-hour LFP prismatic, we will retrain the software. So the software gets retrained on the specific cell, the specific vendor, and the specific chemistry that we actually put inside the pack.
There appear to be no further questions at this time. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.