Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada – December 20, 2022 – Worksport Ltd. (Nasdaq: WKSP; WKSPW) (the “Company” or “Worksport”), is pleased to announce that CEO Steven Rossi was interviewed on Bloomberg Radio’s “The Tape” on December 16, 2022. During the interview, Rossi discussed the Company’s economic performance, outlook, challenges and its innovative breakthrough products, including SOLIS, the highly anticipated solar tonneau cover, COR mobile energy storage system, and its new lineup of hard, folding, light truck bed covers.
The transcript of the interview follows below; find the link to the full interview at the bottom of this release:
Steven Rossi, Worksport CEO, Live on Bloomberg “The Tape,” with hosts Paul Sweeney and Kriti Gupta. December 16, 2022
Paul Sweeney: We have a really cool guest here.
Steven Rossi, we thank you, as always, for joining the show on a Friday
Steven Rossi: Thanks for having me, Paul and Kriti. We take an interesting approach to the automotive market here at Worksport. We started by humbly producing truck accessories, and then we hybridized products in the automotive accessories market and now we are into new energy products and we are the first company to launch a solar tonneau cover for pickup trucks that will create microgrids out of pickup trucks, or recharge electric pickup trucks and we have new sources of energy, battery operated generators, as a better way of saying it. Both markets literally at this time are lightning in a bottle for us.
Paul Sweeney: Who is your end-market customer, is it the individual, the auto OEM, the parts stores? Who is your customer?
Steven Rossi: A great question. Our solar truck accessory is perfect for the OEM. At this point, we have a named partnership with Hyundai and we have various other discussions happening with other OEMs on the North American side. The accessory can be installed on an electric pickup truck – and charge the truck – or on a gas or diesel truck and turn that truck into a microgrid at the job or campsite. On our battery system, it broadens our market from being a humble supplier to the automotive markets, which is somewhat niche, to the global consumer market. Anybody, whether they drive or not, could use our power generator for a stormy day, or as I said, for the job site or campsite. That fits perfectly with the direct-to-consumer market, or with mass merchandisers like Home Depot, for example.
Kriti Gupta: Let’s talk about the risks here. At the end of the day, we are financial journalists, and we like to look at things from that point of view. We hear a lot of doom and gloom out there about the recession right on the horizon and a really tough 2023 after an already difficult 2022 in the market. What’s your take, are you worried about next year?
Steven Rossi: In the new energy market, among one of the fastest growing in the world, recession usually starts at the niceties, things people don’t really need and then it trickles down, depending on how long, to the thing that people really need, the essentials. But new energy products like back up energy systems for that stormy day are something more than an essential element. So that category is growing. We found some interesting market data that opened our eyes to the fact that this market is 10 times larger than anything we have anticipated by literal dollars on the truck side. On the consumer sales side, pickup trucks are really recession proof. I’ll explain. First off, the main manufacturers are no longer producing sedans, as we know, and are leaning very heavily into pickup trucks. And it would seem that the trend would be in good times, in good economic times, that people buy pickup trucks but in tougher economic times when people have to get out and do a little work, people are still buying pickup trucks. We find that we are in an enviable position, in terms of the market, but with economic times as they are, coming out of COVID, we are noticing supply chain issues, delays and price increases, but there are also silver linings.
Paul Sweeney: On the electric vehicle front, it has been Tesla’s market, then we had Rivian, then we had all the OEMs coming in with electric vehicles. How do you guys think about the growth trajectory of that business?
Steven Rossi: The OEMs are all very heavily focused on electric pickup trucks – almost predominately focused on them. In fact, in some of our meetings in Detroit, in the past week, the words were literally ‘we are putting almost everything we have into an electric line of pickup trucks.’ On a small scale, Hyundai has the Santa Cruz, a little pickup truck, which is more like a car or SUV with a pickup bed. With the OEMs, it’s kind of a race and we’ve had an amazing amount of interest in our product and the reason why a solar tonneau cover for pickup trucks makes sense is that you are now changing from something that used to be the big producer of carbon emissions to a step toward carbon neutrality. As I’ve always asked: are we merely exchanging emissions from the tail pipe of a gas-fed truck to the emissions of a natural gas or coal fed smokestack? With the push toward ESG, a solar tonneau cover makes sense. The statistics are amazing: we produce 948 kilowatt hours per year; with the sale of 100,000 solar pickup covers — pickup trucks sell in the millions – we are expected to increase up to 95,000 megawatt hours, which reduces about 1.3 billion miles of vehicle emissions per year in exchange for clean energy. Again, this cover can be used to recharge an electric pickup truck or with a gas vehicle to power a job site or campsite. It’s very meaningful.
Kriti Gupta: A lot of the technology is coming out from abroad. China, I believe is the leader in electrification even as we have Tesla or GM, as we have these companies trying to advance EVs here in the U.S. But it still seems China is at the center of it. Globally, are you in active competition with Chinese companies? What is your relationship like with your Asian counterparts.
Steven Rossi: We are in competition. There is a big push and recently we’ve noticed from multiple businesses that we are just colleagues with in sourcing or domesticification of production. China is very strong on power electronics and is very strong on battery production but also very much so in changing their rules, laws and regulations to limit these factories’ ability — with almost no real controls on carbon emissions – creating almost smoggy plants, for lack of a better way of saying it. With the battery technology, and automation in North America, production in North America of batteries, although a little further out, is very possible and very exciting for the future in the next two-five years and in terms of power electronics, like circuit boards, we can compete.
Paul Sweeney: Great stuff, Steve, we appreciate your taking the time to bring us up to date on what you are doing. It’s pretty cool technology. That’s Worksport: Nasdaq: WKSP.
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Listen to the full interview below; above is a recap of the interview:
