Ton Louwers:
Yeah, so youre absolutely right. Its a very good question. Our own and operate, of course, are on our own balance sheet, so we provide CapEx. So
that also means that were exposed to the traffic risk as its nicely called, which means that the returns should also be higher there. So were looking at gross margins a little north of 50% here, where the gross margins on the third
party sites are less.
Ton Louwers:
In general in this
segment, we work with 25 to 30% gross margin, and because thats also just a one off where we then take over the operation side, where we do make a decent margin as well, but in general, that segment has about half the margin of the
own and operate, and of course, thats also because more risk associated to that. Lets be frank, we operate, like Mathieu said, a very specific service, which is a premium service which also carries a higher price and hence also higher
margin.
John Jannarone:
All right, great. Weve got a
couple of the audience questions I want to address here. Now, this one, I think its going to depend on the situation, but how do think about what the consumer pays per kilowatt hour? It varies, I suppose. Its just like if you go to the
gas pump, its going to change sometimes, but if I go to you versus another one, does it tend to be pretty competitive? If I think about gasoline, its usually pretty close among competitors in the same area.
Mathieu Bonnet:
Yeah. So yes, we try to have the same price at
same level. We can have two kind of payment, I would say, of pricing. You can have subscription and you have a rebate on each unit kilowatt hour you use, or you can pay directly with kilowatt hour. This kind of solution exists. But yes, we tend to
have the... There are some networks more expensive than we are. We are in the middle of the pricing, I would say.
Mathieu Bonnet:
Again, its a bit different from the fueling station. When you need to charge, you will charge. So thats the reason why its quite captive. So
far, with what we have seen in that price, because we have been through the fueling station price increase with because of the literacy price, it was quite inelastic in terms of utilization rate because our utilization rate move up, although we
increase the prices.
John Jannarone:
Great. I think this
might go back to Ton again, here. Ton, when I look out at your financial projections, I see that the operational EBITDA is already almost positive, but because the CapEx associated with this expansion, your free cashflow, its going to take
some time. Can you explain to investors how that works? Also as an add-on to that, will this transaction provide sufficient capital to get you out to 2025, 2026, without needing anything else thats
dilutive to other equity holders?
Ton Louwers:
Yeah.
Ill try to combine both questions, John. So thanks for that.
Ton Louwers:
What we look at in our business plan period, which runs until 26, is in a total CapEx requirement of 1.4 billion Euro. So easy to conclude that from
the proceeds of this transaction, were not going to make it. But at the same time, we will start to generate operational cash flows. So lets say based on the plan, we do see a requirement for additional funding somewhere along the road
with the proceeds we currently foresee, itll bring us two and a half years ahead, so 22, 23 and a bit into 24, depending of course on the actual pace. But thats how we currently see it. Again, we need to think about
alternative funding.
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