Velodyne Lidar, Inc. (NASDAQ:VLDR) Q3 2021 Earnings Highlights
Ted Tewksbury, CEO:
“…Since our last earnings call in August, we’ve done a number of things. We signed one additional multi-year agreement for total 35 on track for a goal of 38 by year end. We’ve grown our pipeline to 220 projects, with an increasing concentration in the industrial and robotics market, which make up 1/3 of the pipeline project and has grown nearly 50% when compared to last year at this time. We believe the industrial and robotics market is one of the LIDAR markets closest to commercialization. And we expect our activity with customers in this market will only accelerate.
We shipped more than 4400 sensors in the third quarter, continuing our market leadership. Our customers today are giving us purchase orders for larger volumes as they move into the first wave of mass commercialization. We are the global LIDAR leader, shipping more sensors in the third quarter than the aggregate of all our peers combined that have reported shipping sensors year-to-date. We expect to ship more than 15,000 sensors in 2021, up at least 28% over 2020 significantly more than our peers.
The interest for our new solid state products continues to grow. We shipped over 630 solid state sensors in the third quarter, more than double the prior quarter. We are excited about the potential for these next generation products and anticipate long-term growth in the linear fashion, smoothing out what could be volatility from quarter-to-quarter.
Velabit projects continue to grow. We now have 33 opportunities including solid state Velabits up from 25 in the prior quarter. We anticipate shipping Velabit samples for revenue late in 2022. Overall, the use of Lidar today in our served markets continues to gain momentum.
In automotive we continue to make progress in our relationships with both emerging and major high volume OEM customers for the use of our Lidar in ADAS systems. In AV we are working with new customers and existing customers who are looking to extend their current agree units with us to include additional products within our portfolio.
In robotics and industrial, we announced a multi-year agreement with renew robotics to use our puck sensors in their vegetation management for solar energy facilities.
In mapping, we have new customers such as TOPODRONE, which is based in Switzerland and develops affordable high precision solutions for aerial surveys. They signed a multi-year agreement for our sensors to be used for high precision mapping, and 3d modeling in demanding environments, including farms, forests, and infrastructure to support development to advances economic sustainability goals.
We are also collaborating with Move.ai to provide robot manufacturers with enterprise grade automation solutions, including mapping, navigation, obstacle avoidance and risk avoidance. We also expanded our relationships with existing customers such as AGM systems, who has deployed our Alpha Prime lidar sensor on AGM-MS5 prime. Their latest high performance mobile scanning solution. This is the second sensor type AGM systems has purchased from Velodyne.
Last but not least, our Smart Cities. Our intelligent infrastructure solution or IIS was selected for a major deployment in the University of California, Irvine Smart Cities Initiative, where it will be used at 25 intersections as part of a $6 million road network project in Irvine. We continue to expand our IAS proof of concept deployments across North America.
Now for our financials, I will first review our third quarter and nine months’ results and then provide our full year 2021 guidance business outlook. Total revenue for the quarter was $13.1 million, compared to $13.6 million in the second quarter of 2021. Product revenue was $11.8 million, slightly down from $12 million in the second quarter of 2021. Due to a combination of a lower weighted average ASP than the prior quarter, reflecting the ongoing evolution of our product mix toward consumer affordable solid state sensors and ensuring consistent performance across and within our product lines. Crucial for our customers as they ramp toward massive commercialization…”