Good morning. Welcome to Taiga's third quarter 2021 conference call. Joining us today are Taiga's CEO, Samuel Bruneau, and CFO, Mark Orsmond. Following their remarks, we will open the call for your questions. Then, before we conclude, I'll provide you the necessary cautions regarding the forward-looking statements made by management during this call. I would like to remind everyone that this call will be recorded and made available for replay via a link available at the investor relations section of the company's website at ir.taigamotors.ca. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Taiga's CEO, Samuel Bruneau. Sir, please proceed. Thank you. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining today. Before the market opened, we issued a press release announcing our results for the third quarter ending September 30, 2021. A copy of the press release is available in the investor relations section of our website. I encourage all listeners to view our release for additional information on what we'll be discussing today. With that, we'll get started. Before we begin, I do have a quick note. Earlier this week, we announced via press release that we'd be making a transition on the CFO position. Effective next week, Eric Bussières will be joining Taiga as our new CFO. Eric will be taking over from our current CFO, Mark Orsmond, who has agreed to remain on board as an advisor through November to ensure a smooth transition. I'd like to take a moment to recognize Mark for his many contributions since joining us this past year. His hard work and dedication has helped guide us on our journey from a startup to becoming a publicly traded company, and we wish him the best in his new pursuit. Now, understanding that many of you might be new to the Taiga story, I'd like to begin with a brief overview of our business. After that, I'll discuss operations for the quarter, and then I'll turn the call over to Mark to discuss financial results for the period. Following Mark's commentary, I'll come back on to provide closing remarks before turning the call over to the questions. Let's get started. Since the company's inception in 2015, Taiga has been leading off-road powersport electrification by taking on the challenge of engineering electric powertrains and vehicles from a clean sheet up to deliver performance, reliability, and cost in vehicles operating on some of the harshest terrains on the planet. What sets us apart is our thousands of proprietary parts designed from the ground up, including our motors, inverters, battery modules, packs, electronics, thermal management systems, chassis, and software, all optimized together to offer leading power and weight ratios and durability in extreme off-road conditions. It is that technology and our ability to innovate unconstrained from legacy combustion products that continues to create a significant pioneering advantage for Taiga in leading powersport electrification. As a reminder of our business strategy, today we are currently focused on ramping up production for both electric snowmobiles and personal watercraft that share the same Taiga powertrain. To get these products to market, we employ a four-pillar approach. The first two pillars are the core of our business and are, first, the direct sales of our snowmobiles and personal watercraft to recreational customers. Second, the sales of our vehicles to fleet operators such as ski resorts, tour operators, commercial fleet operators, and the energy resource and transportation industries. The other two pillars of our business are, thirdly, the third pillar revolves around supplying our modular powertrain assemblies to OEMs in adjacent industries. Our multi-generation powertrain is a modular hardware and software platform that is designed to simplify production and assembly and decrease development time for both Taiga and our OEM partners. This approach broadens the scope of Taiga's efforts to electrify off-road vehicles. Lastly, we engage in aftermarket sales with parts, upgrades, apparel, and other accessories. With that overview completed, I'll now get into recent updates from the quarter. I'll begin by saying that the third quarter of 2021 was marked by transformational growth and several milestone achievements for Taiga. We officially passed 2,600 pre-orders across product lines as of October 31, continued to build our fleet customer base, and added several key leadership positions, and made continued progress as we look to ramp up our production capacity with the goal of beginning initial customer deliveries in the coming months. A standout moment for the quarter was being able to offer Orca Carbon test rides to customers and media on the St. Lawrence River on the shores of Montreal. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Orca was highlighted as a new category of watercraft, one that is 100% electric, powerful, quiet, and fun to drive, reinforcing it has been in a class of its own. While we are moving quickly to take advantage of our first-mover status in a new product category, significant time and resources are being deployed to ensure we have the proper infrastructure, processes, and leadership to scale, create and fulfill worldwide demand. In support of our deliberate approach to growth, we have chosen to predominantly focus on three key areas of our business for the foreseeable future. The first is product and manufacturing innovation. Our teams have been working hard to ramp up production, navigating the current global supply shortage with agility and keeping us on track to begin initial deliveries in the next few months. Our second point of focus is on continuing to build a world-class team to deliver on our ambitious roadmap pioneering electric powersports. This quarter, we made key additions to our executive team and continued to increase headcount across various departments to support our long-term growth goals. The third area of focus is on growing worldwide pre-orders. Since going public earlier this year, we've seen an increased awareness and interest in our products from fleets and individuals alike. The demand for electric powersport solutions continues to grow. By executing in these three areas, we believe we can fulfill our mission to accelerate electrification of the off-road powersport industry. I'll take a minute now to discuss updates within these initiatives more fully, beginning with manufacturing. Ramping up operations towards production remains the main focal point this quarter, and we made meaningful progress. Currently, we remain laser focused on delivering the first watercraft and snowmobiles by end of this year. Production capabilities have been progressing as planned in Montreal at our 133,000 sq ft facility as powered vehicles, battery packs, and tractor unit lines have been installed. In response to global supply chain shortage, we have accelerated strategic insourcing and automation to decrease cost of goods and increase throughput to ramp up and meet Taiga delivery targets. This production dedicated facility is situated near Taiga's second very advanced R&D building for rapid manufacturing integrations during this initial ramp-up phase. In service of our expanded manufacturing plans, in July, we announced having received CAD 50 million in government funding for our future mass production assembly facility in Shawinigan, Quebec. Once fully operational, we expect this factory will allow Taiga to become the first Canadian EV manufacturer to integrate both automated electric powertrain assemblies, electric vehicle platforms under one roof, which we anticipate will increase efficiency and flexibility. This facility is planned to have a capacity to produce up to 60,000 vehicles and 20,000 powertrain assemblies per year, representing over 3 GW hours of battery pack per year by 2025. Moving to our current production efforts. Our engineering groups have been hard at work navigating the challenges associated with the global supply shortages, and we have managed capably through a challenging period. Because we take full ownership in developing our integrated powertrain platform, we have been able to make iterative design improvements to both our hardware and software components. More specifically, we've introduced proactive enhancements to our software, enabling us to fully operate in a hardware-agnostic environment, which better insulates us from dependency on specific parts which might be in high demand. The upgrades we've made to our modular technology system this quarter simplify the production assembly process and decrease development time for new vehicle models. Through rigorous testing and implementation, our teams have demonstrated incredible flexibility, responsiveness to make this vision a reality in such a short time. During the quarter, we also introduced our next generation integrated motor inverter tractor unit to be used in production of our snowmobiles and watercraft. This next gen technology achieves approximately 3% higher efficiency and approximately 11% higher power density than the previous generation. As we lay the groundwork for scaling our operations, we are continuing to target best-in-class hires to execute our business plan, which is our third area of focus. This quarter, we made additions to our executive management team that position Taiga for success in its next phase of growth. Earlier this week, we announced the appointment of Eric Bussières as Chief Financial Officer. Eric joins Taiga with nearly three decades of experience in finance and M&A, most recently serving as Executive Vice President and CFO of Uni-Select, a CAD 1.7 billion corporation with over 4,000 employees. Previously, he spent over 10 years with CAE, a global leader in aviation security and healthcare services, where he held various roles that culminated in the position of Vice President of Finance, Simulation Products, Digital Training and Services. Having served in executive management positions since 2005, Eric Bussières has built a successful track record as an executive at publicly traded companies with global operations, making him an ideal fit to lead Taiga's finance and strategic planning efforts that drive our mission to accelerate electrification of off-road vehicles. In September, we welcomed Doug Braswell as Vice President of Electrification Operations. Doug is a senior leader who has held several global engineering and R&D management positions at John Deere, Arctic Cat, and most recently led EV product development at CNH Industrial. In addition to overseeing the build-out of the mass production assembly facility, he's responsible for overseeing Taiga's strategic growth in new vehicle platform launches and the acceleration of third-party vehicle platform electrification with our powertrain supply business. Doug's expertise in the power sport industry and decades of experience leading innovative teams and already proven to be effective in designing our manufacturing processes for long-term agility and scalability. Moving to our final area of focus, which is expanding pre-orders. During the quarter, we saw sustained growth across geographies and customer segments. As of October 31, we've grown our combined pre-order book of 2,632 units, a more than 100% increase from the beginning of the year. We now have over 130 multi-unit fleet pre-orders from over 80 unique fleet customers across the world. Corporate prospects include ski hill operators, search and rescue, and tourism organizations. Our strategy of selling vehicles solely through own channels has allowed us to better understand our customers' needs and implement feedback. We are currently in active dialogue with an additional 200 global fleet operators, with several expressing interest for pre-order sizes north of 500 units. Given the environmental impact and electrification of commercial operators and the greater ROI we can derive from this customer segment in the near term, to continue driving pre-orders and the adoption of electric off-road vehicles, we believe that it's vital that we have infrastructure in place to support customers, not just during the purchase process, but also for the life of our vehicles. An industry-leading charging network and access to maintenance are essential services we need to be able to provide at scale in order for our products to be viable. In service of that mission, this fall, we officially launched our off-road charging network in North America, with the first on water charging locations completed in Ontario and Quebec, and on land sites set to launch in Quebec soon. Matching the regional demand I noted earlier, we have thousands of charging locations targeted throughout North America first, with the goal of unlocking 75,000 km of off-road trails and waterways by 2025. The charging network will mindfully harness renewable energy in hard to reach arctic locations, high mountain peaks, and undisturbed natural waterways, giving Taiga customers the freedom to explore the outdoors while limiting their impact on the environment. The launch of Taiga's charging network marks a meaningful step towards large-scale adoption of electric vehicles as access to charging in remote locations mitigates range anxiety among those considering the switch from traditional combustion engines. Lastly, this fall, we launched our Ride the Current tour, which is taking place across the United States. These multi-city events give reservation holders, the public and media a chance to experience the Orca, our electric personal watercraft firsthand. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our CFO, Mark Orsmond, to go over the financial results for the quarter. Mark? Thanks, Sam. Firstly, I just want to say that I highly appreciate your kind words, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to have contributed to Taiga's success and growth and maturity into a public company. Taiga currently is in its strongest financial position it's ever been, and I'm very confident that the team that's been put in place is gonna lead this company to the next phase of evolution. With that, this morning, we issued a press release which discussed the results of operations for the third quarter and additionally, our financial statements included, and those filings included our MD&A. We strongly recommend that you read both of those materials in more detail for any additional information that's not being discussed on this call. Now, to our results. As a note, the following amounts are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise indicated. Taiga is in the final stages now of commissioning of transitioning to commercial production of its next-generation snowmobile and personal watercraft products, and the absence of significant revenue is primarily due to this transition. These financial results should not be treated as a long-term indicator of the financial health and future performance of the business. The research and development, R&D expenses increased to CAD 1.1 million and a further CAD 2.2 million approximately was capitalized. So our overall spend was around CAD 3.2 million you know, as we put a lot of effort into our R&D to stay ahead of this curve. That was in comparison to CAD 551,000 for the same period last time. The increase in R&D expenses will accelerate the number of employees that we are able to retain and attract and dedicate to staying ahead of this curve. It will also put an increase in the, you know, company's production output, shifting from a small number of proof of concept units to really production-ready prototypes. General and administration or G&A expenses increased to CAD 2.7 million from CAD 163,000 the same period last year. This increase in G&A expenses were primarily attributed to the increase in the number of employees for administration purposes as well as the production manufacturing. G&A saw an important increase in professional fees to help the company support its growth efforts. Sales and marketing, our expenses were approximately CAD 1.1 million, which is a, you know, massive increase over the CAD 32,000 for the same period last time. The increase in sales and marketing expenses was primarily attributed to the increase in the number of employees in this department, and they've done a fantastic job in positioning the company as it moves forward towards an aggressive digital marketing strategy that has upgraded its website, streamlined a more robust e-commerce capabilities. If anybody is following the company on LinkedIn and social media, you can just see how evident that how well this department is working. Our net loss was CAD 5.1 million compared to CAD 2.7 million for the same period last year. An increase in the net loss primarily related to the increase in expenses as we noted previously. As of September 30, 2021, the company had approximately CAD 110 million in cash and cash equivalents, compared with CAD 7.8 million at December 31, 2020. You know, really strong financial position we are in, and we've been very prudent in what we've been spending our money on. We believe our current cash is sufficient to go forward, and we do not see any additional funds needed to execute our current operational strategy. With this, it concludes my financial review. I'll turn back the call to Sam to discuss the further operations and outlook. Thanks, Sam. Thanks, Mark. Since closing our SPAC transaction in April, we've been focused on getting our units into production. To that end, through the first three quarters of this year, we've increased headcount to 134 total employees with 30% growth in engineering since last quarter. Agility at scale has been our main consideration as we lay the foundations for our future. The recently announced launch of our North American charging network and the ongoing work to build our 80,000-unit facility in Shawinigan are prime examples of this plan in action. We've also continued to make good progress in both our personal watercraft and snowmobiles, despite global microprocessor shortages, which serves as a testament to the creativity and resourcefulness of our R&D and engineering teams. Looking ahead, we believe we have all the necessary resources to execute on our expanded production effort and will continue to be capital efficient as we make material long-term investments in our new mass production facility and scale up production over the coming months. The future of off-road is electric, and the work we're doing today directly supports our belief and mission to provide greater access to the outdoors for all. With that, we are ready to open the call for your questions. Operator? Our first question comes from the line of Derek Dley with Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your question. Yeah. Hi. Thanks and good morning, everyone. Sam, just wanted to talk a little bit about the new production facility in Shawinigan. Are you still comfortable with the previously announced timeline of commissioning the new facility, at least phase one, you know, within the second half of 2022? Currently kind of finishing final planning, ordering materials for construction on the facility. I think overall, our timeline on go-to-production in 2022 remains the same. The Shawinigan facility might be starting construction a bit later than anticipated, but completing on schedule and bridging the gap with the Montreal facility to meet our 2022 targets. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. You're not seeing any I know we're gonna talk about supply chains in a second, but in terms of building out the production facility, semiconductors aside, are you seeing any issues on the supply chain, or are you comfortable with it, with everything there? On build-out side, we've done a careful job of reserving necessary materials to meet our timelines. On that end, I think we're safe. Okay, great. As it relates to the production of the units, have you and you know some others in the combustion powersports side of the business talked about how, you know, they're able to go and build a product, get most of it done, and they're just sort of waiting for the semiconductors to come in, at which point they can put them into the product and get it to market or get it to their customers. Are you guys taking a similar approach, or how are you trying to sort of manage, obviously, this challenging environment as it relates to the semiconductor shortage? Yeah. The teams are working hard on across the board on kind of continuous redesigns around components to be able to secure production on a go-forward basis. We have significant higher amounts of integrated circuits in the electric vehicles than on a comparable combustion one. For us, it's much more difficult to pre-build a unit. It's not efficient because the electronics are really integrated at the system level rather than just a final ECU that's mounted externally on the vehicle. Okay. Got it. Understood. Obviously, you had some really strong growth in your order book, you know, up another almost 350 units from the last update and a 100% year-over-year. What is the demand split roughly between the snowmobile and the PWC? Roughly, slightly higher than 50% on the PWC at the moment and just lower than 50% on the snowmobile. It's quite even still. Great. The PWC, is that predominantly a recreational customer, or are you getting some fleet orders on that as well? In the last quarter, we've seen some strong growth on the fleet side of PWC, but still predominantly recreational. Okay. Great. Then last one for me. Just in terms of when you guys did the SPAC transaction, you mentioned the potential down the road of broadening into adjacent markets, potentially with, you know, third-party OEM partners. Are these conversations that or plans that you're still looking at or still evaluating? Yes, definitely. We're in active discussions with several OEM partners. One of the big reasons for hiring Doug was his deep experience in OEM electrification across the off-road industry. That is something we'll be moving forward to in 2022 and hopefully delivering on some first few projects. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Thanks, Derek. Thank you. As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Cameron Doerksen with National Bank Financial. Please proceed with your question. Yeah, thanks, very much. Good morning. I wanna dig a little bit into the, I guess, the sort of near-term production outlook. I mean, it sounds like you're still reasonably confident that we're gonna have first unit deliveries by the end of the year. I guess maybe you can talk a little bit more about the visibility you have on that outlook. I mean, obviously, we've heard some timelines before, and I know it's largely out of your control, but you know, do you have, I guess, the chips in hand and the other components in hand where you actually have some confidence you're gonna deliver vehicles this quarter? The team's worked very hard to secure some of the necessary materials to start deliveries. We have a high level of confidence we can start delivering really the first few units by the end of the year, and then steadily ramping up in Q1 of 2022 with the snowmobile and watercraft platforms. Okay. As we look ahead to next year, you know, what is your expectation for unit deliveries for the full year? You know, have you secured, I guess, the necessary components, chips especially, to get to that level? I guess at the moment, we're not giving forward guidance across 2022 just due to kind of supply chain volatility and what we've experienced in the past few months. We prefer to keep projections on a shorter term basis once we have inventories fully secured. We've made really good progress in that regards to be able to, you know, meet 2022 delivery targets. Okay, fair enough. Just a question on, I guess the cash burn or I guess the you know, like the cost per quarter. I mean, how is that gonna trend in the next few quarters? Are we sort of gonna be at a similar rate to what we saw in Q3 or I guess you're still hiring people, so maybe we should expect that to go up in the next few quarters? Yeah, I think we can expect a slight increase in the next few quarters, especially as we invest into heavier tooling in the production ramp up. Okay. That's good. Maybe just a last one from me. You had the announcement, I guess, recently with the, you know, the starting of the installation of the chargers. Can you just talk about the economics, I guess longer term for Taiga on that? I mean, is this all a CapEx for you, or is there gonna be some way to recapture that cost? Just wondering if you can just talk a little bit about the business strategy there. Yeah. I think there's a really interesting opportunity that we've identified with this charger network in really deploying some of the best locations across North America, you know, the best trailheads, marinas, hotels, places where people wanna go adventure. With that, we're gonna be deploying a significant amount of chargers and as disclosed. The play on the business standpoint is, you know, Taiga's deploying and owning the charging network. It's going to have the ability to be monetized in the future as EVs become mass adopted in this off-road segment. The goal here is to initially provide an acceleration for electrification with greater access to the trails and lakes, and then long-term, beginning monetizing it to pay to further accelerate the installation of future charging networks. Okay. If I understand, it's sort of initially, you know, these will be sort of offered as, I guess, quote-unquote, "a free service," and then once there are a lot more users out there, you'll have the ability to start charging for that electricity. Yeah, correct. Okay, understood. Okay, that was all for me. I appreciate the time. Thanks, Cameron. Thank you. At this time, this concludes our question and answer session. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Bruneau for his closing remarks. Thank you. Thank you for joining us on the call today. I especially want to thank our employees, partners, and investors for their continued support. Operator. Thank you. Before we conclude today's call, I would like to provide Taiga's safe harbor statement that includes important cautions regarding forward-looking statements made during this call. This call may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Although the corporation believes that the expectations and assumptions on which this forward-looking information is based are reasonable under the current circumstances, listeners are cautioned not to rely unduly on this forward-looking information, as no assurance can be given that it will prove to be correct. Forward-looking information contained herein is made as of the date of this call, and the corporation does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of events or circumstances occurring after the date hereof unless so required by law. Please refer to the forward-looking statement section of our latest MD&A for more information. Thank you for joining us today for Taiga's third quarter 2021 conference call. You may now disconnect.
Loading workspace