ECARX Holdings (NASDAQ:ECX) released first-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Tuesday. Read the complete transcript below.
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The full earnings call is available at https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/st42j89f/
Summary
ECARX Holdings reported a 6% year-over-year decrease in sales of goods revenue to $140 million, with gross profit reaching $28 million and a gross margin expansion to 21.4%.
The company is accelerating its globalization strategy, investing in R&D, and maintaining robust cost discipline to sustain profitability, achieving positive adjusted EBITDA of $4 million for the third consecutive quarter.
Notable strategic initiatives include a major milestone in autonomous driving with Main Mobility and continued global expansion efforts supported by significant equity and board appointments.
ECARX Holdings reiterated their full-year 2026 revenue guidance of $1 to $1.1 billion, reflecting confidence in their strategic trajectory despite challenges such as memory cost dynamics.
The company announced the debut of its Zenith computing platform, showcasing its commitment to innovation and leadership in the automotive intelligence sector.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ECARX Q1 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press Star one and one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question. Please press Star one and one again. Alternatively, you may submit your questions via the webcast. Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I’d now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Mark Hankinson, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you.
Mark Hankinson (Head of Investor Relations)
Good morning and welcome to Ecarx’s first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. With me today from Ecarx are our founder and Chief Executive Officer Ziyu Shen, Chief Operating Officer Peter Serino and Chief Financial Officer Dylan Zheng. Following their prepared remarks, they will all be available to answer your questions. Before we start, I would like to refer you to our forward looking statements at the bottom of our earnings press release, which also applies to this call. Further information on specific risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially can be found in our filings with the SEC. In addition, this call will include discussions of certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to the GAAP financial measures can also be found at the bottom of our earnings release. With that, I’d like to hand over the call to our founder and Chief Executive Officer Ziyu Shen. Ziyu, please go ahead.
Ziyu Shen (Founder and Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you Mark Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. The first quarter was defined by continued disciplined execution and continuing momentum in our global strategy. Our vision for ECARX remains clear. push the boundaries of automotive intelligence globally and lead the industry’s transition from feature centric to intelligence centric experiences. We are building the high performance computing platforms or intelligent brands, that power software defined vehicles. We are uniquely positioned to to capitalize on the growing global demand for higher value software and physical AI across automotive industry. We have made strong progress on our strategic objectives since the start of 2026, building upon the momentum we gained last year. Throughout the first quarter we executed relentlessly on our core priorities for the year. Accelerating our globalization strategy, investing in our R and D roadmap and optimizing our lean operating strategy to sustain profitability. First, on our global expansion, we continue to build out of our global footprint and governance structure underscored by significant equity and board appointments. Crucially the nearly 200 million US dollar in capital we raised later last year and early this year is now being actively deployed. This is fueling the build out of our R and D hub in Germany and our operational infrastructure across South America and in our office in Singapore. Second, the global expansion is being fueled by our commercial execution and continuous investment in our R and D roadmap. We continue to make solid progress driving further technical innovation and winning new business. A critical component of accelerating this innovation is our broader ecosystem of strategic partnerships. Third, we announced a major milestone in autonomous driving. ECRX expects to develop and deliver thousands of autonomous enabled vehicles for Main Mobility’s next generation Autonomy system. This marks ecarx first entry into the Robotaxi market, a market with significant global potential. Finally, we are maintaining robust cost discipline, reducing our operating costs to sustain profitability. Our results for the quarter demonstrate the disciplined execution driving this next phase of growth and how we are actively accelerating that transformation to build a truly global business. Our results for the quarter demonstrated this disciplined execution driving this next phase of growth. They demonstrate how we are actively accelerating that transformation to build a truly global business and sustain this momentum. While the first quarter is traditionally impacted by seasonality, the broad market also navigated micro headwinds including shifting government policies and memory component inflation. However, our strong project pipeline and the robust backlog allowed us to largely mitigate the impact of these dynamics. As a result, we delivered sales of goods revenue of 140 million US dollar noted a 6% decrease year over year. This demonstrates the underlying resilience of our core business. Crucially, our disciplined execution translated into meaningful profitability improvements. Overall gross profit was 28 million US dollar driving and expansion increased margin to 21.4%. We also significantly narrowed our operating loss to 13 million US dollar, nearly halving the 25 million US dollar loss reported in the same period last year. Perhaps most notably, we achieved positive adjust ebitda for the third straight quarter, delivering US$4 million compared to negative US$15 million in the same quarter last year. This robust performance allows us to confidently repeat our four year 2026 revenue guidance of 1 to 1.1 billion US dollar. This financial resilience is no accident. It is the direct result of the strategic framework we established later last year. Let me dive a bit deeper into how we are executing against these priorities. Starting with our global expansion, we remain focused on our target of 50% of total revenue from international markets by 2030. To drive the execution of this, we spent the first quarter actively fortifying our corporate governance and global Leadership team As ECARX rapidly scales, it is crucial that we adopt top tier global governance standards to match our expanding commercial footprint. Last month we appointed Loner Shark as our new Chairperson. This separates the roles of Chairperson and CEO to strengthen governance and align the global Best Practices Loner has extensive experience across automotive technology and finance sectors. This will be invaluable as we scale and accelerate the expansion of our Central Computing Cockpit and ADA solution across Europe, the Americas and Asia. I’m also pleased to officially welcome our new Chief Financial Officer, Dylan Zheng. Dylan joined us in March to drive global financial discipline from our newly operationalized Singapore office. Mark Hexen, who spoke at the start of this call, joined us as Head of Investor Relationships and Corporate Development and it’s based alongside myself and Peter in London. Commercially, our global partnerships continue to deepen. Each vehicle rolling of partner production lines demonstrates the repeatability and scalability of our solutions. This unique ability to scale across diverse brands and markets is perfectly demonstrated by our strategic relationship with Volkswagen Group in Latin America. Peter will speak more about this later. Today we are excited to announce a major milestone in autonomous driving through our Strategic Framework agreement with Main Mobility, a leading US based autonomous vehicle company. Under agreement, ECARTX is expected to develop and deliver thousands of autonomous enabled vehicles to Main Mobility. This will include customized central computing tables, a full stack autonomous driving system kit and a complete sensor suit for Main Mobility’s next generation autonomy system. This collaboration brings together ECAI’s deep expertise in Full Stack Intelligent Driving solution and Main Mobility industry leading autonomous driving system. It will allow us to leverage the best of …
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