Company: VLDXW
Filing Date: 2025-01-14
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0000950170-25-005443
Chunk: 33

Company: Velo3D, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-01-14
Form: 10-Q
Item: Part I, Item 1
Chunk 33
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 Printers give our customers who are in space, aviation, defense, automotive, energy and industrial markets the freedom to design and produce metal parts with complex internal features and geometries that had previously been considered impossible for AM. We believe our technology is years ahead of competitors. 

Our technology is novel compared to other AM technologies based on its ability to deliver high-value metal parts that have complex internal channels, structures, and geometries. This affords a wide breadth of design freedom for creating new metal parts and it enables replication of existing parts without the need to redesign the part to be manufacturable with AM. Because of these features, we believe our technology and product capabilities are highly valued by our customers. Our customers are primarily original equipment manufacturers ("OEMs") and contract manufacturers ("CMs") who look to AM to solve issues with traditional metal parts manufacturing technologies. Those traditional manufacturing technologies rely on processes, including casting, stamping and forging, that typically require high volumes to drive competitive costs and have long lead times for production. Our customers look to AM solutions to produce assemblies that are lighter, stronger, and more reliable than those manufactured with traditional technologies. Our customers also expect AM solutions to drive lower costs for low-volume parts and substantially shorter lead times. However, many of our customers have found that other legacy AM technologies failed to produce the required designs for the high-value metal parts and assemblies that our customers wanted to produce with AM. As a result, other AM solutions often require that parts be redesigned so that they can be produced and frequently incur performance losses for high-value applications.

In contrast, our technology can deliver complex high value metal parts with the design advantages, lower costs and faster lead times associated with AM, and generally avoids the need to redesign the parts. As a result, our customers have increasingly adopted our technology into their design and production processes. We believe our value is reflected in our sales patterns, as most customers purchase a single machine to validate our technology and purchase additional systems over time as they embed our technology in their product roadmap and manufacturing infrastructure. We consider this approach a “land and expand” strategy, oriented around a demonstration of our value proposition followed by increasing penetration with key customers.

Recent Trends and Strategic Realignment

During the second half of 2023, we experienced delayed shipments and customer order delays, resulting in an overall decrease in system sales and backlog in the fourth quarter of 2023 and, as a result, lower annual revenue growth than expected. As a result, we believe that our historical focus on revenue growth came at the