Kyle Clark, CEO of @beta.technologies (BETA), explains how the company accelerated its momentum in the electric aerospace and VTOL markets. On recent earnings, Kyle notes the company's more than $3 billion backlog and the ways BETA aims to secure profits on its contract. He also explains why electric aviation is "significantly less expensive" from traditional methods.
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Questions asked in this interview
5
0:56Why start there versus just going straight to the commercial space?
1:55And so how far are we, would you say, from mainstream adoption that if we need to install some of these vertical bases for operations, we need to get through some of these regulatory hurdles?
2:44What are you learning from these first international deployments?
5:11Are they outright purchases? Are they options for purchase?
6:57What does Beta Technologies look like in the next five to ten years, and what does success look like at scale?
Welcome back to Trading 360. I'm Marley Kayden, live in our Chicago headquarters. It's time to spotlight Beta Technologies, an aerospace company that recently went public on the NYSE and reported its third quarter earnings. Joining us now is Kyle Clark, President and Chief Executive Officer at Beta Technologies. Kyle, thank you for taking the time to be with us today. If you wouldn't mind just beginning with telling our viewers a bit about Beta.
Sure. Great to be here. Beta Technologies, as you mentioned, we're an electric aerospace company and we build electric vertical takeoff and landing and airport horizontal takeoff and landing aircraft. And those aircraft initially are used for cargo, medical, logistics applications. We have some military applications before they solve this amazing opportunity of urban air mobility, of moving people at a much lower cost, with low noise footprints in and out of urban environments.
So if the goal is eventually to move people, I know, and I read in your release and went through your earnings, you were starting in cargo and in medical. Why start there versus just going straight to the commercial space?
Yeah, because the regulatory burdens are just lower. You know, we actually were the first company to carry passengers, for example, in an electric airplane into JFK. We have the capability of doing so. But there's a lot of maturation of urban centers and municipal permitting to bring urban air mobility to fruition. Today, we can go from hospitals to airports to military bases to distribution centers without much friction at all. So we have the tools in the airplane. We're working through the type certification. And as we get further down this road and the municipalities start to put vertiports into their cities, or we start to put those in, that will unblock the urban air mobility. But today there's a mission we can solve, and it has a wild cost benefit to our customers. You know, our biggest single order is with UPS, for example.
And so how far are we, would you say, from mainstream adoption that if we need to install some of these vertical bases for operations, we need to get through some of these regulatory hurdles?
Yeah, I think that we're going to start to see these things. We've been flying all over the country. We have aircraft in New Zealand, up in Norway doing a bunch of really cool missions, but that is not widespread adoption. Over the next five years, we're going to deploy thousands of these aircraft. And I think they're going to start in these medical applications. By 2030, 2035, we start to see a saturation around key city centers and urban air mobility. So this isn't far off. This is something I've been working on for 20 years. This was my senior thesis in college 20-plus years ago, and now we're flying. All over the next ten years, we're going to put these into these types of environments, and it's going to be an amazing option for transportation for people.
And you mentioned there that you have aircraft in Norway and in New Zealand, part of the international operations. What are you learning from these first international deployments?
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