SES AI Corporation (NYSE:SES) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call November 7, 2023 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Eric Goldstein - Vice President, Investor Relations

Qichao Hu - Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Jing Nealis - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Winnie Dong - Deutsche Bank

Shawn Severson - Water Tower Research

Jeff Grampp - Alliance Global Partners

Operator

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the SES AI Corporation Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. My name is Bruno and I'll be operating your call today. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand over to your host, Eric Goldstein, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Eric Goldstein

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our conference call covering our third-quarter 2023 results and financial guidance for 2023.

Joining me today are Qichao Hu, Founder and Chief Executive Officer; and Jing Nealis, Chief Financial Officer.

We issued our shareholder letter earlier this morning, which provides the business update, as well as our financial results. You'll find a press release with a link to our shareholder letter in 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 and 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. This morning, we will review our business as well as results for the quarter.

With that, I will pass it over to Qichao.

Qichao Hu

Thanks, Eric. Earlier this year, we laid out the goal to transition to B-samples and I'm happy to report we're almost there. We expect to sign a B-sample joint development agreement, JDA, with one of our OEM customers in the next few weeks. This will be the world's first automotive B-sample for lithium metal. This will be a historic milestone for SES, for the battery industry, and for the future of transportation.

We had to overcome monumental challenges to get to this point, one of the most important challenges was safety, and we're not talking about labs-scale safety, we are talking about practical real-world safety. In the battery industry, there's is an inherent trade-off between energy density and safety. Many companies improve safety by using safer chemistries such as lithium iron phosphate, LFP cathodes, or solid-state electrolyte. LFP is indeed safer than high nickel cathodes and in theory, solid-state appears to be less volatile than liquid lithium metal. So why don't we switch to these safer chemistries?