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Q1 2025 Lucid Group Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Maynard Um; Head, Investor Relations; Lucid Group Inc

Marc Winterhoff; Interim Chief Executive Officer; Lucid Group Inc

Taoufiq Boussaid; Chief Financial Officer; Lucid Group Inc

Stephen Gengaro; Analyst; Stifel

Andres Sheppard-Slinger; Analyst; Cantor Fitzgerald

Davis Sunderland; Analyst; Baird

Tobias Beith; Analyst; Redburn Atlantic

Presentation

Operator

Hello, and welcome to Lucid's First Quarter 2025 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions)
I would now like to turn the conference over to Maynard Um. You may begin.

Maynard Um

Thank you, and welcome to Lucid Group's first-quarter 2025 earnings call. Joining me today are Marc Winterhoff, our Interim CEO; and Taoufiq Boussaid, CFO.
Before handing the call over to Marc, let me remind you that some of the statements on this call include forward-looking statements under federal securities laws. These include, without limitation, statements regarding the future financial performance of the company, production and delivery volumes, vehicles and products, studios and service networks financial and operating outlook and guidance, macroeconomic, policy and industry trends, tariffs and trade policy, company initiatives and other future events. These statements are based on predictions and expectations as of today and actual events or results may differ due to a number of risks and uncertainties. We refer you to the cautionary language and the risk factors in our most recent filings with the SEC and the forward-looking statements on Page 2 of our investor deck available on the Investor Relations section of our website at ir.lucidmotors.com.
In addition, management will make reference to non-GAAP financial measures during this call. A discussion of why we use non-GAAP financial measures and information regarding reconciliation of our GAAP versus non-GAAP results is available in our earnings press release issued earlier this afternoon as well as in the investor deck.
With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Lucid's Interim CEO, Marc Winterhoff. Marc, please go ahead.

Marc Winterhoff

Thank you, Maynard, and I thank everyone for joining us on our first quarter 2025 earnings call. I'd like to begin by expressing my sincere appreciation to our employees, customers, partners and shareholders. Your continued belief in our mission is what drives us forward every day.
In the first quarter of 2025, we continue to make significant strides on both operational execution and strategic positioning. We delivered 3,109 vehicles, up more than 58% year-over-year and our fifth consecutive quarter of record deliveries. And this was despite very limited deliveries in Saudi Arabia due to a system change that has been fully resolved since then. We produced 2,212 vehicles, up 28% year-over-year. We also had over 600 vehicles in transit to Saudi Arabia.
This will be counted towards production in Q2. We saw a significant year-over-year improvement in gross margin, which was ahead of our guidance provided in our Q4 earnings call, while managing operating expenses.
More recently, we completed a convertible notes offering with strong support from the public investment fund, I'd be remiss if I didn't personally thank them for their continued support and partnership. Demand for the Lucid Air remains strong, and I'm proud to say that the 2025 Lucid Air was again named Best Luxury Electric Car by U.S. News and Road Report for the fourth consecutive year. In the first quarter, the Lucid Air remained the #1 best-selling EV and the third best-selling sedan overall in its segment in the U.S., including gas cars, from many of the most storied brands in the world. In the month of March, we were even the best-selling vehicle of any type in our segment in the U.S.
according to third-party data. Many of our customers continue to tell us that once they experience a Lucid, it's hard to go back. That's what sets us apart, not just the specs, but the way it feels to drive and live with on a daily basis.
Turning to the Lucid Gravity. We are very excited by the strong interest we're seeing, and one of the most recent significant moments was the special customer event in the just outside of our studio in New York City. Our extraordinary stunt activation delivered meaningful results for Lucid. Over the course of 1 weekend, more than 3,000 people visited our New York store, leading to a significant increase in aided awareness, particularly among EV intenders. On social media, the campaign reached over 11 million people, driving some of our most significant follower and engagement growth to date.
The Lucid Gravity is not just another SUV. It's to both lead forward in design, space, performance and technological elegance. The reaction we received in New York and in our recent media drive events confirm what we believed all along that the Lucid gravity is a game changer. MotorTrend said that the Lucid Gravity is as good as an EV SUV get. Road, Lucid passenger vehicle is almost too good to be real.
added, The gravity is all around capability establishes a new era in electrical SUV engineering. And said Lucid Gravity's brilliance makes other cars seem pointless.
And the Lucid Gravity continues to attract new people to the brand with more than three-quarters of orders coming from those that are new to Lucid. You can expect us to significantly ramp up our marketing campaigns throughout 2025. And as we put greater emphasis behind building the Lucid brand with customers, we are thrilled to share that we signed a global ambassador who's reach across entertainment, culture and fashion will be a catalyst for our next phase of marketing and growth. We have a very special Lucid Gravity campaign we are currently producing and which will air soon. Stay tuned, an official announcement is forthcoming.
And this is just the start. I'm pleased to welcome pronounced AK, to Lucid as Senior Vice President of Marketing. AK brings a wealth of experience to the Lucid team in building iconic brands, including Red and will play a key role in accelerating Lucid's marketing initiatives, increasing the reach and the relevancy of the Lucid brand, strengthening consumer engagement and driving global growth. The continued deliveries of the Lucid Gravity to customers, including the first deliveries of the limited Dream addition. In fact, we are delivering more Lucid Gravity as we speak.
On the technology access and licensing side, we continue to see more interest, and we had a number of new conversations. I think OEMs are starting to see our leading EV technology as complementary to their scaling and manufacturing capabilities. We are also seeing more of an interest in the platform. Our powertrain hardware as well as our software and software-defined architecture. Discussions are ongoing and are at varying stages with some much deeper maturity and some in the early stages.
While many companies are currently focused on the tariff situation, I'm optimistic about the potential for our technology access and licensing business. We've also seen interest in our manufacturing capability in Arizona. As OEMs look for more capital-efficient strategies to make vehicles in the U.S., we've seen several inbound inquiries to discuss possible cooperation.
It's still early and talks are preliminary, but the President and the administration want to have a strong manufacturing sector in the U.S., and we are looking at potential ways we can leverage our assets. The recent purchase of assets gives us further optionality while adding hundreds of more American jobs. So far, we welcomed more than 250 former employees with strong backgrounds in EV technology, which will support our growth plans. We received a lot of questions about this. And I think it's worth highlighting the tremendous value we received.
We paid approximately $17 million in cash plus the assumption of their 2 Arizona leases. Truly a great deal that allows us to gain assets that would have otherwise been significantly more costly by a huge factor. For context, these assets are valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. We have also engaged with strategic partners in Saudi Arabia and recently announced an MOU with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology or KAUST. KAUST world-class research infrastructure and talent has the potential to further boost our technology leadership in many dimensions, including our ADAS and autonomous driving road map, bringing cutting-edge innovation from the lab to the road.
As part of this cooperation, Lucid will have access to KAUST's high-performance supercomputing capabilities, significantly enhancing simulation capabilities and providing compute power to train our AI models for ADAS and autonomous driving technologies. It also dramatically enhances our ability to develop advanced materials, simulate real-world physics, motor fluid dynamics and thermal transfer, analyzed electromagnetic flux and accelerate AI training for autonomous systems, digital twin technology and large language models. We are excited about this collaboration and thrilled about the breakthroughs it will drive across our engineering, autonomous driving and AI initiatives.
On the autonomous vehicle front, we are in advanced discussions with partners. We have told us that Lucid Gravity is the best positioned AV capable platform on the market. Lucid Gravity comes out of production at M1 with an AV capable sensor suite, redundant electrical and controlled architectures and the latest SoC. If you think about what fleet operators care about, they essentially have 2 critical requirements. The first is asset utilization.
The second is operating costs. Lucid's leading technology enables both of those in ways that I believe no one else can. On asset utilization, longer range means less time for stops, while faster charging means less downtime to charge.
On operating costs, greater efficiency means smaller battery for a given amount of range, resulting in lower charging costs. And a smaller battery without sacrificing range results in less weight, which can result in less ware. On Level 4, we believe the industry has acknowledged Lucid's AV capabilities, multiple L4 focused software mobility companies have engaged Lucid about potential collaboration. On Level 2++ and Level 3, we've engaged with several companies to discuss accelerating L2++ L3 development and multiple paths forward. We are focused on delivering the best and safest solution to our customers, leveraging models that can quickly scale in multiple geographies and optimizing Lucid's CapEx and OpEx to get a competitive product timely into market.
Before I close, let me touch on the topic of tariffs, which we've been getting asked about frequently. Taoufiq will go through our guidance in more detail, but I wanted to highlight that the automotive supply chain is global. And of course, I don't believe anyone can be immune. We are in a better position than others given that we produce all of our vehicles we sell and major components like our drive units, battery modules and packs in the U.S. in Arizona, but changes in policy bring about uncertainty until we get more definitive clarity to be able to assess the full impact and consequences.
And the macro impact to the consumer is also something that is uncertain. But we've always been forward thinking in our strategy, and we've been proactively working towards localizing supply. For example, although our 2170 battery cells from Panasonic today are produced in Japan, we expect future production at Panasonic's new production facility in Kansas. We've also committed to sourcing battery raw materials in the United States, such as graphite from partners like Graphite One and Resources. We also engaged in a range of other optimization initiatives to mitigate some of the tariff impacts, including collaborating across the supply chain to share challenges and financial responsibilities.
For example, when you look at rare earth metals, we can make the necessary technical changes in-house to use different suppliers. We could potentially use entirely different rare earth metals as well without impacting performance. Both in the industry that outsource as many do, don't have the same level of flexibility or even technical know-how to do that. But I also want to highlight again the importance of leading technology because of our high-power density, the Lucid driving unit actually uses less rare content compared to others, and Atlas will be even better. It's very similar to how our technology enables us to have a smaller battery for a given amount of range compared with our competitors.
This underscores the importance of in-house technology know-how, and I believe we are among the best in the world in that regard. And it's not just having our factory in the U.S. I think something that's not well appreciated is the advantage of designing, developing and manufacturing your own technology in-house.
By vertically integrating, we are able to have more control over certain components that go into our vehicles. At the same time, we are exploring a variety of strategic adjustments to better align with the changing landscape, including vehicle price changes, tariff risk mitigation and bifurcating the supply chain. These efforts are expected to help support overall cost effectiveness and supply chain efficiency. So the world is rapidly evolving, and we will be as nimble as we can. We are constantly evolving our strategy in examining our sourcing plans.
Some of this may take time. And as I said earlier, no one is likely to be new, including us. But relative to many other OEMs, we have some advantages. Our U.S. manufacturing plant is in Arizona, and we vertically integrate our technology, which provides flexibility.
And we will have production and vertical integration in our new assembly plant in KSA, M2 will allow us to optimize our production, location and supply chain strategies utilizing this highly strategic geographic locale. But of course, we will remain attentive to policy developments and maintain open lines of communication with relevant stakeholders and government partners.
In closing, we are not here to follow the EV playbook. We are here to rewrite it with a Lucid Air, now with a Lucid Gravity and in the near future, our Midsize platform variance. We have a world-class team driving innovation every day, and I feel Lucid is positioned better than it has ever been before. The road ahead is exciting, and we're just getting started. Thank you for your continued support and for believing in what Lucid represents, not just a car company, but as a catalyst for what's possible.
With that, I'd like to turn it over to Taoufiq to provide an update on our financials.