ITEM 1. BUSINESS

General

Envision is a sustainable technology innovation company based in San Diego, California. Focusing on what we refer to as “Solar 3.0,” we invent, design, engineer, manufacture and sell solar powered products that enable vital and highly valuable services in locations where it is either too expensive or too impactful to connect to the utility grid, or where the requirements for electrical power are so important that grid failures, like blackouts, are intolerable. When competing with utilities or typical solar companies, we rely on our products’ deployability, reliability, accessibility, and total cost of ownership, rather than simply producing the cheapest kilowatt hour with the help of subsidies as most competing solar companies do.

Envision’s solar powered products and proprietary technology solutions target three markets that are experiencing significant growth with annual global spending in the billions of dollars.

The Company focuses on creating renewably energized, high-quality products for electric vehicle (“EV”) and drone charging, outdoor media and branding, and energy security that are rapidly deployable and attractively designed.

We believe that there is a clear need for a rapidly deployable and highly scalable EV charging infrastructure, and that our EV ARC™ and Solar Tree™ products fulfill that requirement. We are agnostic as to the EV charging service equipment (“EVSE”) and integrate best of breed solutions based upon our customer’s requirements. For example, our EV ARC™ products have been deployed with Chargepoint, Blink, Juice Box, Bosch, AeroVironment and other high quality EV charging solutions. We can make recommendations to customers or we can comply with their specifications and/or existing charger networks. EV ARC™ and Solar Tree™ products replace the infrastructure required to support EV chargers, not the chargers themselves. We do not sell EV charging, rather we sell products which enable it.

We believe our chief differentiators are:

The resulting products are built to have what we believe is the longest life expectancy in the industry while also delivering valuable amenities and potentially highly attractive revenue opportunities for our customers. Envision’s products are designed to deliver multiple layers of value such as: environmental impact-free renewably energized EV charging; media, branding, and advertising platforms; sustainable and secure energy production; reduced carbon footprint; high visibility "green halo" branding; reduction of net operating costs through reduced utility bills; and revenue creation opportunities through sales of digital out of home (“DOOH”) media, sponsorship and naming rights. The Company sells its products to customers with requirements in one or more of the three markets the Company addresses. Qualified customers can also lease our EV ARC™ products through leasing relationships we have developed. Envision’s products can qualify for various federal, state, and local financial incentives which can significantly reduce final out-of-pocket costs from our selling price for eligible customers. Currently, our revenue is mainly derived from the sale of our standard EV ARC™ to government agencies and private enterprise.

Recent Events

Products and Technologies

We currently produce two categories of product: the patented EV ARC™ (Electric Vehicle Autonomous Renewable Charger) and the patented Solar Tree®. We have recently submitted third and fourth product categories, the EV-Standard™ product and the UAV ARC™ product, for patent approval with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. They are patent pending and in late stage product development and engineering. All four product lines incorporate the same underlying technology and value, having a built-in renewable energy source in the form of attached solar panels or light wind generator, along with on-board battery storage. The EV ARC™ product is a permanent solution in a transportable format and the Solar Tree® product is a permanent solution in a fixed format. The EV-Standard™ is also fixed but uses an existing streetlamp’s foundation and grid connection. The UAV ARC™ is a permanent solution in a transportable format and will be used to charge drone (UAV) fleets. We believe that our series of products offer multiple layers of value to our customers while leveraging the same underlying technology, fabrication techniques and infrastructure that we use for all of our products. This enables us to reach a broad customer base with varied product offerings without maintaining the overhead normally associated with a diverse set of products. Our current list of products includes:

All current Envision products can be upgraded with the addition of the following:

EV ARC™ and Solar Tree® products can also be equipped to provide emergency power to users such as first responders during times of emergency or other grid failures. Because our products replenish their batteries every day, even during cloudy conditions, we believe that they are some of the most robust and reliable back-up energy sources available today. Several of our current government customers are ordering EV ARC™ units with our optional E Power panels integrated into the units. E Power is a series of secured power outlets with directed and primary energy access available to emergency responders or whoever our customers designate. This is a source of increased revenue for us and, we believe, a compelling additional value proposition for our products.

EV ARC™ and Solar Tree® products can be grid connected if the customer wishes. Our first utility customer connected its EV ARC™ units to the grid in 2015. The EV ARC™ products provide solar powered EV charging, but they also serve as grid stability tools. During times of low energy use the utility will charge the EV ARC™ on board batteries. During times of grid stress, the utility takes energy from EV ARC™ batteries thus reducing stress on their generation assets and grid infrastructure. We believe that “Grid Balancing” offers a potentially significant market opportunity for Envision’s products as electrical grids become increasingly unstable due to increased demand, aging infrastructure, and extreme weather events or nefarious foreign or domestic actors. Experts from utilities such as San Diego Gas & Electric have told us that this is the case and that distributed storage is an important part of their future plans.

We believe these factors make our products a compelling value proposition to anyone who intends to install such devices. Our customers can deploy EV charging quickly, efficiently, and without digging up their parking lots. The positive carbon foot print impact is greater because our products use sunlight to charge the EVs and, we believe, the marketing and branding impact is far greater because the enterprise has a highly visible demonstration of its commitment to the environment.

EV ARC™ Products.

According to Bloomberg, financial services firm Morgan Stanley has estimated that the world will need to spend $2.7 trillion on charging infrastructure if it is to support 500 million electric vehicles. MIT Technology Review reports that there are already more than a billion vehicles on the world’s roads right now. It is likely that the number will increase in the coming decades and we believe that many of those vehicles will be electric. We believe the Envision EV ARC™ is the world’s first and only transportable, solar powered EV charger that can resolve many of the global charging problems that currently face the market.

EV ARC™ produces and stores all its own energy, it does not need a grid connection and therefore needs no trenching, switch gear, or transformer upgrades. Management believes the lack of a foundation, trench or electrical infrastructure means that the EV ARC™ will not need a building or any other kind of permit. We have found that to be the case in every jurisdiction in which the product has been deployed to date. It is immune to grid interruptions such as black-outs or brown-outs. As such, it will allow for vehicle charging even in times of grid failure. It can be moved at any time because it is not connected to the ground or grid, and we believe, creates an attractive and highly visible branding asset for the host. There are no utility bills to pay and, as the number of EVs increase on the host campuses, more EV ARC™ units can be added without disruption. We have observed that locations that currently offer grid tied EV chargers have placed those chargers in locations where a suitable circuit was most easily accessed – the “low hanging fruit.” As the number of EVs increase in such locations the existing chargers are no longer sufficient to fulfill the needs, leading to what is called in industry jargon “charge rage,” an event when two or more EV drivers wish to use the same charger at the same time. We believe that this will lead those locations to require more EV chargers and that, having exhausted the low hanging fruit, they will be required to extend circuits to locations in their parking lots which will require invasive, time consuming and expensive infrastructure, permitting, construction and electrical work.

EV ARC™ is a transportable, but essentially permanent EV charging infrastructure product which supports Level I, Level II and DC Fast Charging (requiring 4 to 7 interconnected units). EV ARC™ products can charge between one and six EVs simultaneously and a single unit can provide EV charging in as many as 10 parking spaces. We have observed that the EV ARC™ can solve many problems associated with electric vehicle charging infrastructure deployments. Until the introduction of the EV ARC™, the deployment of EV chargers could be hindered by complications in site acquisition caused by the complicated and invasive requirements of the installation. Typical competing EV charger installations require a pedestal which is typically mounted on a poured concrete foundation which requires excavation. Fixed chargers also typically require a trench to deliver grid connected electricity, and often require transformers and other local electrical equipment upgrades. Additional entitlements, easements, leases, and other site acquisition requirements of fixed chargers can be environmentally impactful and expensive, and may slow, or prevent entirely, the deployment of large numbers of typical fixed format chargers. California’s Department of General Services has informed us that it takes an average of 18 months to go through the process of installing a utility grid-tied EV charger. New York City, currently our largest customer, experiences similar and sometimes longer delays because of the complexities of extending the electrical grid to locations where EVs need to charge. Because the EV ARC™ has its own ballast and traction pad, it does not require a foundation. Because it is entirely powered by locally generated and stored renewable energy, it does not require a grid connection. These innovations allow us to completely avoid any on-site construction or electrical work which, in turn, allows us to avoid the design, engineering and entitlement/planning processes typical of grid-tied installations. We have demonstrated that we are able to deploy EV chargers attached to our EV ARC™ product in as little as four minutes (rather than 18 months).

When a fixed EV charger is deployed successfully, the host may be liable for increased kilowatt hour charges, and at times, more expensive demand charges. Landlords, corporations, venues, and other hosts often do not perceive enough value creation in the deployment of a fixed EV charger to justify the disruption caused by the associated trenching, foundations and electrical civil works. Consequently, they may not be inclined to grant permission to the service providers who approach them, or to install EV chargers at their own expense for their employees and guests, because the costs and disruption incurred with grid tied chargers can be prohibitive.

Many governments and corporations have aggressive goals to install EV charging infrastructure. For example, Governor Brown of California has issued an executive order requiring the installation of 250,000 EV chargers by 2025, 10,000 of which must be DC fast chargers. In September 2018, we announced that Caltrans and the Monterey Bay Air Quality District have ordered $1.2M worth of our DC fast charging EV ARC™ HP units for deployment in two highway rest areas in central California. This equates to an average of more than 40,000 charger installations per year. To date, the EV charging industry has installed a total of about 16,000 grid-tied EV chargers. In September 2018, Governor Brown issued a further executive order setting out a goal for California to be carbon neutral by 2045, meaning that all the electricity consumed in the state will have to come from renewable sources. We believe that the combination of these two executive orders will create an improved set of opportunities for us to sell our products. Nations such as the United Kingdom, France, Norway and Germany have announced total bans on all internal combustion engine vehicles (“ICEs”) during the next two decades starting with Norway in 2025. Others, like China and the State of California, are considering similar bans. China’s President, Xi Jingping has recently called for the installation of 4.8 million EV chargers on public roads by 2020 with a further requirement that EV charging infrastructure should be installed in rural and poor areas where there is limited electrical grid connectivity. Electric Vehicles will be the major replacement technology for ICEs and, as a result, the global demand for EV charging infrastructure is growing rapidly and is forecast to accelerate. Bloomberg recently reported that the global market for EV charging infrastructure is estimated to exceed U.S. $4 trillion. Vehicle manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to EV production. Volvo recently announced that by 2019, its entire portfolio will be hybrid electric (“HEV”) or fully plug-in electric (“PEV”). Ford has committed to spending $11 billion to electrify its portfolio, and VW, BMW, and Mercedes have committed to all electric portfolios. Most, if not all, automobile manufacturers currently sell or plan to sell EVs.

We believe that there is a clear need for a rapidly deployable and highly scalable EV charging infrastructure, and that EV ARC™ fulfills that requirement. We are agnostic as to the EV charging service equipment (“EVSE”) and integrate best of breed solutions based upon our customer’s requirements. For example, our EV ARC™ products have been deployed with Chargepoint, Blink, Juice Box, Bosch, AeroVironment and other high quality EV charging solutions. We can make recommendations to customers or we can comply with their specifications and/or existing charger networks. EV ARC™ replaces the infrastructure required to support EV chargers, not the chargers themselves. We do not sell EV charging, rather we sell products which enable it.

SolarTree® Products.

Our patented Solar Tree® product has been in deployment and continued improvement for several years. We believe the resulting product has become the standard of quality in larger scale solar powered EV charging, energy security, and media and branding. We understand the Solar Tree® product to be the only single column, sun tracking, and architectural solar support structure with integrated energy storage, EV charging and media platforms available today. We believe that Solar Tree® products with integrated battery storage will become important contributors to the growing EV charging infrastructure requirements in California and the rest of the world. Because our products do not require a connection to the electrical grid, they can be rapidly deployed and enable EV charging in locations where it would otherwise be impossible or economically infeasible. For example, rest areas and park and ride locations which might have sufficient energy for lights and vending machines, but do not have sufficient power for EV charging, can be served by our Solar Tree® products which can be optimized for direct current (“DC”) fast charging. The costs and environmental impact associated with delivering a 50kW or greater circuit to a remote rest area may be prohibitive, whereas a Solar Tree® DCFC can be deployed with minimal site disturbance. In April 2017, we received a purchase order from the Fresno County Rural Transit Authority to provide Solar Tree® DCFC products which will be used to charge electric buses from BYD Company Ltd. (“BYD”). The growth in electric bus adoption is happening at a greater pace than EVs at time of writing. BYD is the largest electric bus company in the world. We believe that the successful deployment of these Solar Tree® DCFC products for Fresno and with BYD may create significant opportunities for further deployments of electric bus charging infrastructure and DC fast charging infrastructure for EVs, electric buses and medium and heavy-duty electric vehicles, both in the U.S. and internationally. We further believe that success of the sort that we currently have with Caltrans and others may be leveraged with other departments of transportation across the United States and the rest of the world.

We believe Solar Tree® products with on-board battery storage can provide a highly reliable source of energy to be used in the event of a failure of the grid. We have seen data suggesting that grid failures cost businesses in the United States approximately $200 billion per year and when those failures impact vital services such as hospitals, they have been responsible for loss of life. We believe that a hospital equipped with Solar Tree® energy security products could benefit both economically and from a life safety point of view. We believe that there are many other such instances where the reliable combination of renewable energy and energy storage can deliver value which exceeds simply competing with the utility. This will become particularly true when larger segments of transportation become electrified and grid interruptions mean the “grounding” of EVs which rely solely on the utility grid to re-fuel.

We also believe that Solar Tree® products optimized for branding can create visually stunning platforms for the delivery of a business’ brand message with a less onerous planning and entitlement process than that experienced with traditional signage.

We believe Envision’s larger Solar Tree® structures also make effective multi-use and wireless EV charging infrastructure solutions. Considering the list of impediments to EV infrastructure deployments, we believe that the Solar Tree® structure with column integrated EV chargers offers significant advantages over a typical grid tied EV charger. We believe that they offer the most attractive and practical mounting assets for fixed EV charging stations. The single column design is ideal for centrally locating multiple chargers and making them available to the maximum number of parking spaces. Entitlement might go more smoothly because the Solar Tree® structures contribute more benefits to the local environment than simple EV chargers. Those additional benefits include shade, reduction in heat islanding, reduction in light pollution, architectural appeal, reduction in grid stress, and disaster preparedness when equipped with ARC™ storage technology. We believe that commercial real estate owners and corporate campuses will recognize the multiple layers of increased value delivered by Solar Tree® structures and CleanCharge™ deployed with little disruption to their facilities.

Solar Tree® structures with ARC™ energy storage technology can generate and store enough energy to provide over 1,000 e miles per day through any high quality EV charger including DC fast chargers. They can be deployed in any location that is not shaded and they do not require any utility grid connection. We believe that this vital factor makes them a compelling choice for remote locations where there is inadequate utility grid connection (e.g. rest areas). Corridor charging, the term used to describe EV charging on highways between built up areas, is recognized as being very important, but also very difficult to achieve with traditional grid tied chargers because of the lack of electrical circuits and the environmental and economic impact of bringing infrastructure to remote sites. We believe that our Solar Tree® and EV ARC™ products are ideal for corridor charging because they do not need to connect to the electrical grid. Additionally, where the requirement is for charging of mission critical vehicles (e.g. first responders, hospitals, fleet vehicles), Solar Tree® and EV ARC™ products can provide a highly robust and secure source of energy even when the grid is not available. Unlike gasoline or diesel-powered generators, our products are not reliant on external sources of fuel and, we believe, require much less maintenance, testing and service. It is our further contention that any campus environment with an EV charging need and a wish for a high degree of reliability in its electrical supply can benefit from our Solar Tree® structures with ARC™ on-board energy storage because, we believe, in times of grid instability (e.g. natural disaster, terrorism, capacity constraints), the Envision products can provide the most reliable source of energy at the location.

EV-Standard™ Product.

We have invented and are in the late stages of product development on our patent pending EV-Standard product which is, in our belief, the ideal curb side charging solution. We believe this is another area in the developing charging ecosystem which provides major opportunities and challenges within the “curbside” or “on street” sector. Because so many owners of vehicles and even fleet operators (in cities like New York and San Francisco) park their vehicles on the street, there is a significant need for curb side charging. In fact, the CEC has publicly stated that only one in seven Californian apartment dwellers are able to park their car close enough to a circuit to charge at home. Their conclusion is that curb side, on street charging will be an important contributor to the successful electrification of transportation in California. Many other jurisdictions such as New York City have made the same statements.

We believe our EV-Standard™ product is a solution to solve this problem. EV-Standard™ is a streetlamp replacement which incorporates renewable energy and on-board energy storage, and which provides a meaningful EV charging experience without significant infrastructure or construction requirements. The EV-Standard™ design includes a light-wind generator fixed atop a new streetlamp. Also integrated is a tracking solar panel and on-board battery storage. The EV-Standard™ product design takes power from the existing streetlamp grid connection and uses it to charge the on-board batteries. The streetlamp’s circuit is available 24 hours per day but is only in use during the hours of darkness. As a result, EV-Standard™ is able to use the full capacity of the grid connection to charge its batteries during the day time. A further advantage of the EV-Standard is that it is delivered with a low energy, high lumens, LED light fixture which reduces the energy required for street lighting during the hours of darkness. This makes the street light more efficient and, crucially, the EV-Standard™ can use the unused capacity of night-time operations to further charge its on-board batteries. The additional renewable energy generated by both the tracking solar array and the light-wind generator supplies more energy to EV-Standards’ batteries. The energy from the batteries is then delivered to a Level II EV charger which is mounted to the EV-Standard™ products’ column. The combination of the three sources of capacity, when delivered at once through our on-board batteries, allows us to deliver a much more powerful and therefore more meaningful EV charging experience than would be available simply through connecting to the existing street lamps’ utility grid connection as some of our competitors currently offer.

We believe that the improved EV charging experience offered by the EV-Standard™ design will be a differentiator for our company in a potentially large market. We currently provide work-place and fleet charging to the State of California, New York City and many others, through our EV ARC™ product. We believe that EV-Standard will become an excellent choice for California, New York and many other jurisdictions across the U.S., and the world, as a viable and reliable on-street EV charging solution. Accordingly, we believe that EV-Standard™ represents an important opportunity for future growth. Like the EV ARC™ and Solar Tree® products, the EV-Standard™ will not rely upon a grid connection and as such will be able to continue to charge EVs during black-outs or other grid interruptions.

The UAV ARC™ Product.

In July 2018, we filed a patent application for our new UAV ARC™ product which is currently in the advanced stage of product development. The UAV ARC™ is a rapidly deployable, highly scalable, range extending drone recharging product which forms a network. It does not require any fueling or grid connection because it generates and stores all of its own energy from renewable sources. UAV ARC™ is self-ballasted and leveling and does not require any planning or construction for its installation. UAV ARC™ has a hardened exterior and countermeasures designed to protect it from vandalism, theft or other nefarious activities. Each UAV ARC™ forms part of a broader network which fuels drones and gathers and shares information about their health and flight plans as part of the Internet of Things (“IoT”). UAV ARC™ units can be deployed on flat roofs in cities or on any terrain in remote locations. The maritime version can be deployed at sea to extend UAV missions in a maritime environment. The planned networks of UAV ARC™ units will be designed to be open to any operator of unmanned aerial vehicles as part of a subscription or individual usage plan.

Current Market Participants That We Target

Envision’s markets consist of five broad segments: State, Municipal, Federal, Enterprise and International. These segments can further be broken down into increasingly granular segments as different market opportunities are identified. Examples are University, Fleet, Resiliency, Ports and Department of Transportation, Parks, Corrections, Education and many others. Envision’s largest market is currently Municipal.

Envision’s biggest customer is the City of New York followed by the State of California which is a conglomeration of California state agencies and municipalities. Currently the most appealing markets for Envision are New York, California and Colorado. The factors are considered in our determination of an appealing primary market for our products:

Growth Strategy

We currently operate in three rapidly growing and underserved markets: EV charging infrastructure, outdoor media and energy security. Our products are being used in 16 U.S. states, 70 municipalities, two international countries, and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. We believe that the products we produce have a global appeal and that we are only at a nascent period in the development of our sector. We believe we have a strategic growth plan in place that will enable us to increase our user base and revenues while leading to increased profitability in the following manners:

Variable costs include the cost of the direct raw materials, such as batteries, solar panels, electronics, steel, and direct labor associated with each product and as such vary in proportion to the volume of units we sell. When we sell more units, our variable costs increase and when we sell less, the opposite generally occurs.

Fixed costs are more or less constant at certain levels of sales and production and include contributions such as rent, insurance and underutilized labor (assuming a fixed labor pool, underutilized labor costs decrease with increased unit production volumes). The lower the volume of production, the higher the contribution of fixed costs will be to each of such units sold. Conversely, as we increase our production volumes the contribution of fixed costs to each unit is decreased. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) require that, under “absorption costing”, a portion of our fixed costs are assigned to each unit of production. For example, if our fixed costs were $1M per year and we only produced one product during that year, the fixed cost contribution for that product would be $1M dollars and would be added to the variable cost to calculate our gross profits (or more likely, losses) when the unit was sold. If, on the other hand, we produced 100 units during the same period, the fixed cost contribution for each product would be $10,000 per unit, or 1/100 ^th of $1M, and, when added to our variable costs, would result in a far lower cost of goods sold (COGS) per unit when such unit was sold and as a result, a much-improved gross profit. At a certain volume of unit production, any manufacturing company should meet a fixed cost break-even point assuming their variable costs are less than the price they charge their customers for the products.

There are a variety of ways we can reduce our variable costs which include:

We believe that there is really only one way to reduce our per unit fixed costs as long as we continue to pursue our current strategy: increase unit sales volumes.

During the first three quarters of 2018, our fixed costs allocated to sold units were, according to GAAP, approximately 18% of our revenues. We arrived at this percentage of allocation by estimating the number of units we anticipated producing during the full year, using the best information available to us about our contracted backlog, and then allocating a proportionate share (based upon those estimates) of our fixed costs to each of the units we actually produced during the first three quarters. If we had estimated that we would produce twice as many units and sold those with similar pricing, then our estimated fixed cost contribution would have been approximately half that amount, or around 9% of revenue, which would have improved our estimated gross profit by the same amount. If we had sold four times as many similarly priced units, then our fixed cost contributions would be around 4.5% of our revenue and so on. In each case the more units we produce, the less fixed costs are allocated to each unit because the fixed costs are shared among more units. Even if our variable costs per unit do not decline with increased volume (which we expect them to do), our total costs per unit should fall as we increase the number of units we produce and sell. In fact, as a result of design and production delays caused by operating capital shortages, we produced less units in the fourth quarter of 2018 than we had anticipated. We recognized the resulting negative impact to our gross profits in the fourth quarter of 2018. The gross profits associated with the units which we failed to produce and deliver in 2018 are now expected to be recognized in 2019.

According to GAAP, our variable direct costs per unit in 2018 have been as low as approximately 70% of our revenues meaning that, excluding the fixed costs described above, our per unit gross profit has been as high as approximately 30% even with the lower volumes we have produced to date. The following infographics show breakdowns of unit economics for a typical EV ARC™ product and for our least profitable EV ARC™ product:

We have historically reported gross losses because the combination of our fixed and variable costs resulted in COGS which were greater than the revenues we generated from the sale of our products. Please refer to the Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations for a full description of our consolidated financial results.

We have assumed in the past, and continue to assume, that our sales will increase and will, as a result, reduce the impact of our per unit fixed cost contributions. For example, we believe that our factory and current staffing level are sufficiently large to allow for a five-fold increase in unit production without significant increases in fixed costs. We selected a factory and staffing level of this size (along with its fixed costs) because we believe that we will grow our sales as the markets for electric vehicle (EV) charging expand as further discussed in this document. We also believe that it is not unusual for manufacturing companies to have higher fixed cost contributions to their COGS in the early stages of market and product development. We anticipated this as we planned for growth with our current facilities even though we understood that these higher fixed costs would negatively impact our gross profits in the early stages of our evolution.

We also continue to strive to reduce our direct variable costs and we have observed that in many instances we have been successful in this area. For example, we have negotiated reduced pricing with our vendors of steel, solar panels, inverters, tracking gears and batteries which are the largest cost contributors to each of our products. We have also become more efficient in our fabrication processes which has reduced the direct unit labor hours associated with producing our products.

There are also market forces at work which, in the case of our most expensive components, are contributing to lower direct variable costs for our products. According to Forbes, battery prices have fallen from over $1,000 per kWh in 2010 to less than $200 per kWh in 2017, and Forbes forecasts that prices will reach $100 per kWh by 2025. Forbes also forecasts that second life (used batteries which would still work on our products) will fall to less than $50 per kWh. We currently pay more than $300 per kWh and as such see significant opportunities for future reductions in our COGS as the price of batteries falls. Batteries currently make up approximately 24% of our COGS on an average EV ARC™ unit.

Solar modules have seen similar precipitous price declines. Bloomberg provides a benchmark monocrystaline module price of $0.37 per watt in 2017 down from $10.00 per watt in the early nineties. While we use more expensive modules than the Bloomberg benchmark (because they are higher quality and have a higher output efficiency), we have still benefited significantly during the last few years from the decrease in solar module pricing. We believe that we will see further reductions in cost per watt for the foreseeable future. Solar modules currently make up approximately 11% of our COGS on an average EV ARC™ unit.

We have observed that increased unit sales do not only reduce our fixed per unit costs but can also favorably impact our direct variable costs. For example, on October 1, 2018, we negotiated a reduction of approximately five percent on the price we pay for steel for our products. On the same day we negotiated a reduction of approximately three percent on the price that we pay for certain major electronic components that we integrate into our products. Our solar module vendor has informed us that our current increased purchasing should result in a further 4% reduction in the price that we pay for solar modules. These price reductions have not been driven by commodity pricing, rather, they are the result of our increased buying power with our vendors and in particular, the large orders we are placing so that we can execute on our backlog which, as of December 31, 2018, is at approximately $4.4M. We have observed that we have been able to negotiate price reductions on other components and commodities which we integrate into our end products as a result of our increased buying power. We believe that there are further significant gains to be made in that area as our sales volumes increase.

We currently outsource the painting and coating of our products to a third party. We are aware that this third-party endeavors to earn a gross profit when selling paint and coating services to us. We also incur costs and disruptions transporting our products to and from the painting vendor’s facility. We believe that an investment in an improvement to our facility that would make it possible for us to paint and coat our own products could lead to significant cost reductions related to those tasks and improved product flow, which might further reduce our COGS and increase our production capacity.

Our pricing strategies and our investments in fixed overheads such as our manufacturing facility have been driven by our belief that the demand for our products will increase as the markets on which we focus evolve, and we see an increase in unit sales as a result. We have not endeavored to cover all of our costs with the sale of a small number of units because we believe that the higher sales price might have priced our products out of the market. Our belief in the growth of our target markets and in our ability to continually reduce costs as we increase production volumes has led us to the decisions we have made around product pricing and investment in overhead. We believe that the growth in our sales and our historical ability to reduce direct variable costs, support our continuation of this strategy, and that we can increase our gross profit margins significantly, in the future. The management team encourages all members of our sales and operations teams to contribute continuously to these efforts.

Key Initiatives

Our growth strategy will target a number of key initiatives as we scale our business. Currently we are focused as follows:

Targeting State and Local Governments Who Are Implementing Renewable Energy Initiatives.

We have been successful in wining contracts from a number of state and local governments. We will continue to target these entities as a result of changing environmental policies that are positively impacting the products that we produce.

During 2016 and 2017, the State of California’s Department of General Services and New York City’s Department of City Administration Services, respectively, both conducted global searches for products which could compete with the EV ARC™. In both instances they released publicly available Requests for Proposals (“RFP”) for competing products and in both cases, though the contracts were competitively offered, only Envision demonstrated that it has a product which met their specifications. In both cases we were the only qualified respondents to the contracting process and in both cases, we were awarded multi-year, multi-million dollar contracts.

Envision’s EV ARC™ product was selected for a State of California contract for transportable, solar powered EV chargers. As far as we are aware, there were no other respondents to the State’s RFP (request for proposal) with products which qualified, further supporting our belief that EV ARC™ is a product which is unique in the market. Similarly, when we responded to the New York City RFP, we believe we were the only respondent with a qualifying product. Staff members from the State of California have commented to us that they believe that they are behind goals where the deployment of EV charging infrastructure is concerned. In July 2015, we were awarded a mandatory contract to supply EV ARC™ to California state agencies (to the extent ordered by them) by the Department of General Services of the State of California, for a term of one year with two one-year renewal options. This contract was renewed by the State of California in 2016 and we have regularly delivered EV ARC™ products to state agencies since 2016. In June 2018, our contract with the State of California was renewed by the State for up to four more years (two years with two more one-year options at the State’s election), and its scope was expanded to include more of our products. The State estimated the value of the renewed contract to be over $20 million. On September 10, 2018, the Company received a new $3.3 million order from the City of New York for 50 EV ARC™ units for delivery.

We believe that the major impediments to the deployment of EV chargers are the requirements for civil works such as trenching and foundations, as well as limited access to sufficient electrical circuits to support EV charging in the locations where it is needed. However, Envision’s products do not require access to utility grid circuits, and as such are perfect for remote locations such as rest areas and park & rides. Our EV ARC™ products can be deployed in minutes and our Solar Tree® and EV ARC™ DCFC products can provide over 1,000 e miles per day through DC fast chargers which will deliver a full charge to a Nissan Leaf (for example) in 30 minutes or so. We believe that this makes our products ideal for many of the State of California’s goals for the electrification of transportation, and as such, we are aggressively targeting the State with face to face meetings and educational materials. We believe that if we continue to be successful with the State of California and Caltrans, these relationships will help us to expand sales to other states, the federal government, and the Department of Defense as a result of us having gone through the extensive due diligence with these entities. We believe that the purchase orders we have received from multiple municipalities and also from Department of Energy National Laboratories are validating our business plan and the need for our products in the market.

New York City made its first purchase of EV ARC™ products during the second quarter of 2015. New York’s Mayor Deblasio recently announced what the city believes are the most aggressive EV adoption targets of any major city in the world. Its goals call for over 2,000 EVs to enter the city’s fleets by the end of 2018 with an investment of $50 to $80 million over the next 10 years to support additional charging infrastructure.

In September 2016, New York City’s Department of City Administration Services (DCAS) (the City’s contracting department) released an Invitation to Bid (“ITB”) for EV charging infrastructure. The ITB specified Envision Solar’s EV ARC™ product. After submitting our response, we attended the bid opening where Envision was the only respondent. We were awarded a contract by DCAS in April 2017. The contract is similar to the one we have with the State of California in that it enables any NYC department to buy EV ARC™ products without having to go through any further due diligence or competitive bidding process. DCAS itself is a customer and has ordered product from us. So far, as of December 31, 2018, we have delivered 52 EV ARC™ units to New York City for a total value of approximately $3.5 million. EV ARC™ is being used by NYPD, Department of Design and Construction, NY Dept. of Education and other entities. We believe that the City’s requirements for rapidly deployed and highly scalable EV charging infrastructure will only increase in the coming year and the recent order of 50 more EV ARC™ units from New York reinforces that belief.

There are over 19,000 municipalities in the U.S. Our products are being used in approximately 70 of them as of the date of this report. We believe that the municipal market for our products is robust and offers significant opportunities.

Creative Financing Mechanisms to Solve Our Customers’ Needs.

We have observed that our EV ARC™ product is often less expensive for our customers than the costs associated with grid-connected chargers. We have also observed that many of our customers do not always have sufficient capital resources to allow them to purchase as much EV charging infrastructure as they need. We have been told by certain government customers that they have greater flexibility to pay operating expenses (“Op Ex”) than capital expenditures (“Cap Ex”). Furthermore, many of our customers, for example government entities, are not able to take advantage of the tax incentives offered by the Federal and state governments as they do not have a tax liability. As a result, we are working with a group of equity and tax equity investors and debt providers to create a financing mechanism which will allow our prospective customers to take advantage of our products through making a series of monthly payments spread out over many years. The cost of the products to our customers will be reduced by the available tax incentives which will inure to the investors who will in turn pass on the savings in the form of reduced monthly payments. In the future, we may offer financing of our products internally so that we can increase our recurring revenue and capture the tax incentives for the benefit of the Company.

During meetings with various state government officials we have been led to believe that the combination of reduced overall costs and the spreading of those costs across many years through monthly payments might make it more likely that government entities can order larger volumes of our products. Initially the Company’s cash flows are not expected to be impacted by this structure as the investors would take title to the products and pay Envision the full price for them at the inception of the plan. However, it is possible that at some time in the future we may elect to increase our involvement in this process as a means to create a source of recurring revenue and also to take advantage of the spread on the cost of the capital we source and that which we charge our customers for the financing.

International Renewable Energy Policy is Facilitating our International Expansion Plans.

EV growth is active in many parts of the globe. So is the need for energy security and the desire for outdoor media. Many nations are ahead of the U.S. in terms of per capita spending for EVs and also in the rates of the growth. We believe that our products solve many of the same problems globally that they solve in the United States. We believe our ability to export our intellectual property and our knowledge is better than it has ever been in the past. We have adapted our products so that they are easily shipped as simple kits or in folded expandable form in a standard shipping container. We have moved from project to product so that we do not have to be on site when our products are installed, which means that we can ship products anywhere in the world, leaving the installation work to local resources. We also believe that the knowledge we gained by putting an in-house fabrication facility in place, inexpensively, to fabricate our products could allow us to rapidly scale in international markets.

Many nations including the United Kingdom, Norway, Germany, France, and India have announced total bans on internal combustion vehicle sales after 2040, starting with Norway in 2025. China is considering similar bans.

We believe that in order to achieve global goals for EV charging infrastructure, a rapidly deployable and highly scalable set of EV charging solutions like those we offer will be vital. We believe our products will be needed both in the U.S. and internationally. For this reason, we are continuing to explore opportunities to expand internationally.

Our current international focuses are in the European Union (“EU”), the UAE (specifically Dubai) and China. In Spain, we continue to work with Aconfort, a Spanish company with whom we have a multi-year relationship. We have registered the name Envision Europe SA and we plan to send the EV ARC™ components to Spain as sales volumes dictate. Initially, we expect that EV ARC™ will be shipped in pieces to Spain where it will be reassembled by Envision Europe personnel (these will be Aconfort employees in the early stages). Certain components such as solar modules and gears, which are subject to tariffs when imported to the EU, will be sourced locally to reduce costs. As the market for our products expands, we plan to hire employees and take on more of the fabrication tasks in Spain while reducing the components we ship from the United States. As quickly as the market will support this, we intend to become self-sufficient in the EU. It is our intention to form a subsidiary in Spain. We shipped the first EV ARC™ unit to Spain in 2016 where it has been featured in a highly visible location in the center of Malaga.

According to the government in Beijing, China will spend $200 billion on EV charging infrastructure over the next decade. Some industry experts have suggested that as much as two thirds of the global spending on EV charging infrastructure will take place in China during the next decade. China is currently the worlds’ largest market for EVs according to Bloomberg. China’s requirements for energy security products are massive and growing rapidly due to electricity interruptions, according to Chinese governmental agencies. According to ABC News, studies suggest more than one million people die prematurely every year from the toxic air that has engulfed northern China. The Chinese government’s “War on Pollution” will involve the spending of billions of dollars on renewable energy and the electrification of transportation.

Since 2016, we have been engaged in discussions and negotiations with various Chinese entities. We have observed the business and negotiation environment to be complicated and opaque. In April 2018, Envision’s CEO and a delegation from the U.S./China Chamber of Commerce visited China with particular emphasis on one particular province. We believe that substantial progress was made in negotiating a deal whereby Envision’s products might be produced for sale in China in a manner which is beneficial to our shareholders. Our strategy is to take no deal, rather than a poor deal that we do not have full confidence will deliver positive and secure results for the Company. We believe that we have taken a significant step towards realizing the benefits of this strategy.

We continue to work with entities such as the U.S./China Chamber of Commerce in an effort to identify other suitable potential partners in China. We seek to find a partner that can manufacture and sell our products in that region. We have observed that many such entities exist and we further believe that the Chinese market affords attractive opportunities. In April 2018 Envision’s CEO travelled to China with a delegation from the U.S./China Chamber of Commerce with the specific intention of meeting with Shanxi Energy and Traffic Investment Company, LTD. or SETIC, a State-Owned Enterprise (SOE) with approximately 50,000 employees. SETIC is responsible for major transportation and energy initiatives such as the construction of high-speed rail, the owning and operating of fleets of public buses and taxis, and the deployment of renewable energy generation. SETIC currently operates 4,000 electric buses and 10,000 electric taxis, and has plans to electrify its entire fleets. They currently lack sufficient charging infrastructure to service their own requirements and have been tasked by the governing Party in Beijing to expand EV charging infrastructure across Shanxi Province and the rest of China. Envision and SETIC signed a non-binding LOI which describes the terms and conditions governing how both parties will form a NEWCO with equal (50/50) ownership. SETIC will contribute the required financial, human and physical infrastructure resources while Envision will contribute a non-exclusive license to its proprietary technology solutions further described in this document. The NEWCO will be responsible for the selling, manufacturing and deployment of Envision’s products in China. On October 16, 2018, a delegation from SETIC visited Envision’s factory to perform due diligence on the Company, its products and facilities, and to discuss moving forward with the negotiations on a definitive agreement for a new jointly owned company in China (NEWCO). At the end of a series of meetings which took place throughout the day, the SETIC delegation reported to the Company that they were impressed with the Company, its products and facilities. They expressed their intention to return to Shanxi, China with a recommendation to proceed with the business relationship outlined in the LOI executed by Envision and SETIC in April 2018, and that they wish to accelerate the pace of negotiations and activities required to that end. Our subsequent meeting with SETIC in China in January 2019 continued the progress toward achieving a definitive agreement for launching NEWCO. While this transaction and relationship are not finalized or formalized, we believe that these activities are useful advances towards our goal of becoming active in the world’s largest and most active EV market. We will continue to endeavor to create an agreement with a partner in China with whom we can execute a secure and beneficial arrangement for Envision Solar.

We believe that our international efforts could represent a significant set of new, large, and growing opportunities for the Company to monetize in the future.

Continue to Create Innovative Industry Leading Products.

EV Standard™ - We have invented and are in the late stages of product development on, our patent pending EV-Standard ™ product which is, in our belief, the ideal curb side charging solution. We believe that the “curbside” or “on-street” sector is another area in the developing charging ecosystem which provides major opportunities for us and challenges for our prospective customers and competitors.

UAV ARC™ - We are in the development stage of, and have filed a patent application in the United States for, our new invention providing for aerial and maritime electric drone charging networks powered by renewable energy and readily deployable. Our electric drone charging network infrastructure is designed to extend the range and improve the effectiveness of electrically powered drones.

ARC Mobility™ - We have observed that the commercialization of our ARC Mobility™ transportation solution has revolutionized the way that we deliver our EV ARC™ product to our customers. We believe that EV ARC™ is already the most easily deployed EV charging solution available today. ARC Mobility™ makes it even easier and as a result, we believe it could help increase the product’s penetration and sales. We have already sold ARC Mobility™ to customers including New York City and Google.

Transformer EV ARC™ – We are starting to see increased interest from overseas markets for our products. We are in the process of extending elements of our IP protection to Europe and China. The Chinese have issued a Chinese patent for our EV ARC™ and the European Patent Office issued a notice of intent to grant a patent for EV ARC™ on October 15, 2018. In 2016, we delivered an EV ARC™ to the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands which survived Hurricanes Maria and Irma. We have received several inquiries from Caribbean island communities as a result of that sale. We have designed EV ARC™ to be transportable, and within the Continental United States, we can now transport it using either our ARC Mobility™ trailer or commercial trucking companies. We have invented, tested, and delivered a design modification which allows us to effectively collapse the EV ARC™ for containerization with a simple expansion process at the destination which does not require sophisticated personnel, tools or significant time. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) has issued us a patent on this technological improvement (Transformer ARC™) on or about March 18, 2018. Our first successful deliveries of such units were made to New York City during the third quarter of 2015 as well as to the Caribbean and Spain in 2016. Since that time all EV ARC™ units which have been delivered to customers at locations greater than 1,500 miles from our factory have been Transformer ARC™ products. Management believes that our ability to ship EV ARC™ products in commercial container units will allow us to address overseas and distant markets in a way which has not been possible until the successful testing and delivery of Transformer ARC™, and in a way which we believe no other competitor can match. We believe global growth in EV charging, Out Of Home advertising, and energy security is vibrant. We believe that our ability to ship products worldwide will allow us to take advantage of these global opportunities.

Solar Tree® Structure Product/Technology Development – We are continuing to improve the designs and efficiencies of our products. Significant emphasis is placed on innovation which we believe enables higher quality with increased deployment efficiency and reduced deployment risk. Fabrication and installation methodologies which replace labor with mechanized processes are favored. Our design, fabrication, and procurement processes are under constant improvement to increase efficiency and control costs.

ARC™ Technology is the integration of storage into all existing Envision products. Battery storage removes the intermittency of electrical delivery often cited as a reason for not taking advantage of renewable energy. We believe Envision is positioning itself to be a leader in the convergence of renewable energy generation and storage. We believe our EV ARC™ product is an elegant embodiment of this convergence. We are currently under contract to deliver our Solar Tree® DCFC with integrated battery storage to the Fresno County Rural Transit Authority. Our EV-Standard™ product has battery storage as an integral part of its design. We plan to continue to commit engineering resources to this space with the intention of making all products storage capable. The energy storage market is nascent, and according to industry analysts, poised for growth in the coming months and years. Management intends that we be a leader in the integration of renewable energy products with battery storage solutions.

Our Products can be Used in Multiple Markets including the Out Door Advertising Market (or Out of Home Advertising –“OOH”), Providing Us with a Unique Opportunity to Expand and Monetize the Markets in Which We Operate.

We believe that our technology can potentially be monetized in a variety of ways to commercially exploit inefficiencies in certain markets such as the advertising industry. By offering a unique, appealing and socially worthy outdoor physical platform to host digital and static outdoor advertising displays or sponsorship and naming rights, we are in a special position to earn revenue in this business.

In November 2017, we executed an agreement with OutFront Media (NYSE:OUT). The agreement covers the relationship in which OutFront sells sponsorship and naming rights to networks of EV ARC™ products distributed across major U.S. cities starting in San Diego, California. OutFront has successfully sold similar deals in the past to fund bike sharing programs and believes that the market for sponsorship and/or naming rights for highly visible, solar powered EV charging networks may be as or more lucrative than the bike sharing programs. The business model involves a third party, typically a large corporation looking to enhance its corporate image, paying a fee for the rights to name or sponsor an EV ARC™ network. The duration of the sponsorship might be three to five years. The fee is calculated based upon Envision’s selling price of the product and a success fee paid to OutFront Media. Envision or a related entity would retain title to the units during the term and at the end of the term we would have the right to repeat the process. We believe that this model may constitute a significant opportunity for growth in the volume of units we deploy, and also a recurring revenue stream to augment our one-time product sales revenues. We are currently working with OutFront Media to secure permission from the City of San Diego for our intended use.

We have also secured an agreement with ACE Parking to deploy EV ARC™ Digital in their parking lots across San Diego, California, and more broadly. We may also seek an advertising partner or work with OutFront Media to monetize the value of the advertising screens. We have walked the ACE locations with an OOH company which has confirmed that they will allow for sufficient visibility of our screens to make an attractive advertising platform. The OOH company identified 60 initial locations in San Diego which the Company believes will generate advertising revenue using our EV ARC™ Digital. We will continue to seek to develop relationships with OOH providers. With success in San Diego, management plans to endeavor to expand our EV ARC™ Digital network to other cities. Management believes that the combination of our transportable, solar powered EV chargers with digital and static advertising may present a significant growth opportunity for the Company.

Differentiation from Competitors

We believe our chief differentiators from our competitors are our ability to invent, design, engineer, and manufacture solar powered products which dramatically reduce the cost, time and complexity of the installation and operation of EV charging infrastructure and outdoor media platforms when compared to traditional, utility grid tied alternatives.

We have invented and incorporated EnvisionTrak™, our patented and proprietary tracking solution, into all of our products, furthering the unique nature of our products and, we believe, increasing our technological leadership within the industry. EnvisionTrak™ is a complex integration of high quality gearing, electrical motors, and controls which are combined in a robust, highly engineered, and reliable manner. While there are many tracking solutions available to the solar industry, we believe EnvisionTrak™ is the only tracking solution which causes the solar array to orient itself in alignment with the sun without swinging, rotating, or leaving its lineal alignment with the parking spaces. We have received a patent on our claims of these attributes. We believe this is a vital attribute in solar generators in parking environments, since any swinging or rotating arrays could result in impeding the flow of traffic, particularly first responders such as fire trucks, in the drive aisles. It is a violation of many local codes to have restricted overhead clearance in the drive aisles. EnvisionTrak™ has been demonstrated, through data obtained from our customers, to significantly increase electrical production. An additional value is derived from the high visual appeal created by EV ARC™ or Solar Tree® structures which are tracking the sun in perfect synchronicity. EV ARC™ and Solar Tree® products incorporate our latest engineering and fabrication improvements. This has allowed us to reduce costs and time to deploy Solar Tree® structures, and we have seen improvements in the fabrication processes for all of our products. We anticipate further improvements in future deployments of the products as we incorporate more smart technology, data management and energy storage capabilities.

EV ARC™ products fit in a standard legal-sized parking space but they do not render that parking space unusable because vehicles, EV or otherwise, can park on the high-traction ballast pad. This is a significant differentiator for our product as most commercial and government owned parking lots have a minimum number of parking spaces which they must provide, according to local codes, to support their tenants, employees and visitors. Reducing, even by one, the number of available parking spaces might place the building out of compliance with local and perhaps other codes. We believe that the fact that EV ARC™ does not reduce parking creates a significant barrier to entry for our competition as our high-traction ballast pad forms part of our patent. EV ARC™ products are delivered to our customers’ sites ready to operate.

For customer locations within 1,500 miles of our factory, we use our proprietary and unique transportation system, the ARC Mobility™ trailer (“AMT”). The AMT is a hydraulically operated trailer which is towed behind a standard one-ton pick-up truck with either a hitch or a gooseneck connection. The AMT uses hydraulics to elevate the EV ARC™ unit above the ground and fix it beneath the AMT trailer where it stays during transportation. Upon arrival at the site the driver uses the hydraulic system to lower the EV ARC™ product into its designated parking space. This process takes as little as four minutes and is performed by one individual with no other specialized equipment. We typically deliver EV ARC™ products during the night because our target parking spaces are generally open at that time. For very tight locations we have a small electric powered tug which can maneuver the AMT into locations which will not accommodate both the truck and the trailer. Destinations which are greater than 1,500 miles from our office are reached through deliveries by third-party carrier’s trucks and trailers or in standard shipping containers by truck, rail or sea. Because the EV ARC™ is too large to fit inside a container in its fully erect position we have invented, patented and perfected a modification to the product which we call Transformer ARC™. Transformer ARC™ products can, using a hydraulic ram, collapse in upon themselves (stowing) thus presenting a much smaller form factor which will fit inside a shipping container. When the Transformer ARC™ product arrives at its destination it is un-stowed using the same hydraulic ram and then placed, fully erect, into its designated parking space. The Transformer ARC™ modification to the EV ARC™ is patented. We believe that our ability to ship the EV ARC™ in different configurations and by different means is both unique and a significant differentiator from our competition.

In some instances, we have integrated a digital, static or scrolling advertising screen onto the EV ARC™ creating the EV ARC™ Media. These advertising screens are resistant to weather, theft, and vandalism and are powered entirely by the EV ARC™. The introduction of the advertising screen creates new potential revenue streams for the owner of the EV ARC™ and we believe that this makes an EV ARC™ a more attractive product for certain prospective customers. This advancement could lead to multiple other similar uses of our products. Because the EV ARC™ product delivers valuable services such as solar powered EV charging and a secure energy source which can be used by first responders during grid failures, management believes that the signage, promotion and advertising may be eligible for permitting where other advertising platforms would be prohibited.

EV ARC™, the Solar Tree® and EV Standard™ are designed to address the sizable market of EV charging infrastructure. We believe the current lack of such infrastructure is the single greatest impediment to the adoption of EVs in the U.S. and elsewhere. A standardized, portable, easily deployable EV charger, which is renewably energized rather than relying on carbon based electrical energy, would appear to have significant appeal to those who are interested in the proliferation of EV’s and EV charging infrastructure. We believe no competing company has a similar product, so the Company’s first-to-market position should create an opportunity for a sizable share in the market interest.

Manufacturing and Operating Efficiency

Through ongoing operational improvements, cost reductions and increasing sales volumes, we have reduced the total costs for labor and parts for each individual EV ARC™ product to the point where they are lower than the selling price at the individual product level. Our fixed overhead costs such as rent, insurance, and other direct overhead costs are spread across the modest volume of units we had produced and, as a result, we generally recognize net losses on sales rather than gross profits. We continually endeavor to make production improvements in both our products and our processes to reduce our manufacturing costs while maintaining the high quality for which we strive. As unit sales continue to increase and continue to be sufficient to overcome certain fixed overhead costs shared amongst all of our production, and we sustain the trend of reducing our costs through improved economies of scale, production process improvements, and component cost reductions, management believes that gross profits will be realized and maintained.

Operations

We are headquartered in San Diego, California in a leased 50,000 square foot building professionally equipped to handle the significant growth possibilities we believe are in front of us. The facility houses our corporate operations, sales, design, engineering and product manufacturing.

The EV ARC™ and Solar Tree® structures are currently fabricated in this facility. We intend to fabricate EV-Standard™ and UAV ARC™ in the same facility. We have reduced certain direct costs associated with individual products as a result of insourcing fabrication. We believe we have been better able to control quality as a result of our own in-house manufacturing processes as opposed to outsourcing this activity as we did in the past. We have made improvements to existing products and are able to introduce new products in a much more timely and efficient manner. Management believes that the product development process is significantly faster and less expensive when carried out by an in-house fabrication facility. We sell our Solar Tree® products as an engineered kit of parts to be installed by third parties employed by the buyer of the Solar Tree® kit. We will continue to deliver our EV ARC™ product, using the specialized and proprietary ARC Mobility™ trailer, within an approximate 1,500-mile range of our fabrication facility, and use third party transportation solutions and Transformer ARC™ for greater distances. Our EV Standard™ and UAV ARC™ will be delivered by third party transportation providers.

Management believes that the continuation of our strategy to create highly engineered, highly scalable products which are delivered complete or as a kit of parts to the customer site, and which require minimal planning, entitlement, or field labor activities, is further positioning us as a leader in the provision of unique and highly scalable solutions to the market markets we target. Our products are complex but standardized, readily deployable and reduce the exposure of the Company and our customers to the risks and inherent margin erosion that are incumbent in field deployments. Wherever possible, the components of the Solar Tree® structures are factory integrated and assembled such that complete assemblies are delivered to customer sites so that they may be erected and installed by readily available local labor contracted directly by the site host without our involvement. As part of the delivery of Solar Tree structures to our customers, our design and engineering team has created a detailed, step by step, installation manual that can be used by any competent construction firm to seamlessly erect and install our structures. With this manual, we believe the ease of installation can be directly communicated to minimize installation costs and thereby reduce sales hurdles, resulting in increased sales.

The EV ARC™ product family requires no field installation work and is typically delivered to the customer site by us or by a third-party transportation company for a fee.

We continue to bring engineering improvements to our products that are designed to increase the level of standardization and reduce the field labor and effort required for product deployment. The EV ARC™ is the embodiment of this strategy in that it requires almost no field activity beyond “parking” it in a space. We have invented and produced the ARC Mobility™ trailer which is a hydraulically operated delivery trailer that can place an EV ARC™ in its final location in as little as four minutes.

We strive to benefit by the deliberate continued utilization of certain outsourced resources. While we develop all intellectual property in-house, product designs are vetted by third-party structural and electrical engineering firms to ensure that the designs meet the local jurisdictional requirements and codifications for the deployment locations. We believe this further helps dissipate potential liabilities for the structural and electrical elements by providing additionally insured experts with partial responsibility for the designs.

Sales and Marketing

Envision uses research to identify potential customers utilizing the following list of titles: Fleet Managers, Facilities Mangers, Parking Managers, Public Works, Equipment Managers, City Planners, Acquisitions, Transportation Managers, Sustainability Managers, Environmental Services, Energy Managers, Engineering and Energy Consultants. This is straight forward in the government space, however, reaching persons responsible for adopting and implementing EV charging infrastructure in the enterprise space can be challenging and resource intensive. The challenge for marketing and sales is reaching customers early when they have the initial need and before they choose a more difficult and costly method of installing EV charging infrastructure.

Management of Envision’s product portfolio will, for the time being, remain in a direct sales and marketing channel, pairing customers with sales specialists to ensure their needs are met with the right equipment. Envision has employed a General Services Administration (“GSA”) consultant (FedShed) to assist Envision in the procurement of a GSA title 52 schedule. In this case federal and some state agencies will be able to select products from the GSA catalog. Federal sales and marketing campaigns will continue through direct distribution or organizations will have the option to order indirectly through the GSA catalog. This approach is similar to those we currently have in place with the State of California and City of New York.

Envision uses a layered approach to marketing in support of direct sales, involving a combination of regional and industry focused campaigns, nurturing campaigns, tradeshows, speaking opportunities, product demonstrations, press releases and social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn). We are rebranding and updating our website which will serve as a foundation to connect with our customers, influencers, investors and enthusiasts. Envision is, we believe, an industry leader in the EV charging infrastructure space and the website will be used to highlight that with webinars and industry news to automate the education of our markets helping them confidently make an informed decision about the purchase of our products. Presentation and execution will continue to remain a priority and we will keep sales and marketing materials updated to ensure messaging is on point and consistent with our product offering, customer’s needs and industry standards.

We have recently engaged an artificial intelligence (AI) company, Kriya Ai, to assist us in the identification of prospective customers. We have previously relied upon manual searches to identify potential leads, using certain characteristics we believe are common amongst those who might buy our products. The AI tool can be embedded with the same characteristics and once so embedded, will automatically search the World Wide Web, seeking prospects that meet our requirements. The AI tool will also automate the initial contact with the prospects thus drastically reducing the time and energy our sales people have to invest in prospect identification. We believe that a lack of knowledge about our company and products is one of the most significant inhibitors of our sales and as such we are continuously seeking new ways to efficiently inform potential buyers of our product’s existence. We believe that the use of AI will play a significant role in our future sales efforts.

Envision products can have a long sales cycle. This is a sophisticated sale and often a large capital expense for our customers. Sales often hinge on bureaucratic processes and funding approval. Political mandates do not always equal availability of resources to execute policy into action. We will continue to strive to increase conversion rates by providing a “boutique like” sales experience once prospects have been identified. The sales team uses Salesforce to track and maintain contact with customers and Salesloft to increase the efficiency of campaigns and measure effectiveness. Data metrics and a rigorous evaluation of budgets will be used to maximize the impact of resources. Our sales team personnel are experts on our products and make sure our products are selected and designed to exceed our customer's needs.

Historically, we concentrated a sizeable portion of our resources on product development and engineering. We now have a reproducible suite of products which address the three market verticals in which we operate (EV charging infrastructure; out of home advertising infrastructure; and energy security). As a result, we have increased our focus on sales and marketing and intend to continue to grow this focus in 2019. In 2016, we hired employees to form a sales team to sell our products directly through telephone and emailing campaigns. We believe our sales team has created a significant pipeline of prospective customers and has already converted such efforts into contracted sales. From this point onward, our sales activities are being undertaken in the following manner: direct sales efforts undertaken by our “in-house” sales team, direct sales efforts undertaken by other independent contractors, direct sales efforts as a result of management relationships, and follow-on sales to existing customers. Whenever possible, we will increasingly use AI and other methods we deem appropriate to identify prospective customers.

Our marketing efforts are responsible for the generation of many of our sales leads and have included: attendance at trade shows and conferences, often with live demonstrations of EV ARC™, deliveries of a demonstration EV ARC™ unit to potential customer sites so the customer can directly experience the benefits of the product, web site and limited search engine optimization, direct electronic mailings to prospects within our target markets, social media outreach on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, video postings on YouTube and Vimeo, distribution of printed materials promoting our products, industry speaking engagements and subject matter expertise panel participation across the United States, with media interviews in print, radio and television. Currently we are targeting Corporations, outdoor advertising companies, automotive related companies, municipalities, state and federal government entities, utilities and commercial real estate.

We also have independently contracted sales resources that are paid based upon performance. They are paid a percentage of revenue only when we actually receive payment from our customers. Our team will assist such contractors in the creation of proposal documents when the prospective sale appears to warrant the commitment of resources to such an activity. These contractors are responsible for their own costs except in some instances where the Company’s management pre-approves an expenditure aimed at winning a sales contract.

We continue to explore the use of sales channels to communicate the value of and sell our products. Examples of the types of channels we seek are: upstream vendors such as solar module manufacturers, inverter manufacturers, battery manufacturers, EVSE manufactures, EV charging service providers, outdoor advertising companies, general contractors, architects, and engineers and consultants.

During 2016, we added multiple members to be a part of our national sales team, including a new director of sales and business development, as well as developed national sales strategies. We continue to pursue and make progress on promising sales opportunities. Using our contracts with the State of California and the City of New York, we continue to garner sales and add new government customers. We have received follow on orders from New York City, Caltrans and others, and added new California ordering departments. We believe we are going to secure new orders from other agencies. We continue to have discussions with other governmental and private sector organizations which management believes will result in near term future orders. Additionally, we have been delivering our EV ARC™ on our ARC Mobility™ trailer to a variety of locations during a “Guerilla” marketing road show. The EV ARC™ is being delivered to corporate campuses in major California metropolitan areas such as San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Silicon Valley. We pre-announce the free availability of solar powered EV charging – “Driving on Sunshine” – through the human resource and marketing departments of the host companies. It is hoped that the host companies and their employees will see the ease of deployment and the value of highly visible solar powered EV charging, and as a result, buy our products. We believe that this has been a good way to raise awareness about the unique values that our products deliver.

In December 2017, we hosted our first community outreach event showcasing Envision’s products at our factory in San Diego, California. More than 100 local government and private sector workers who had expressed an interest in learning about our products attended. At a certain point in the evening we demonstrated the delivery of an EV ARC™ product to a parking space in our lot. We timed the delivery from the time our delivery truck crossed the property line to the time that an EV was plugged in and charging on the EV ARC™ product. In this manner we were able to demonstrate, to a large number of potential prospective buyers, our ability to deploy an EV ARC™ in as little as four minutes. We believe that this educational outreach was a success and that it has resulted in an enhanced understanding and awareness of our products value and capabilities. We have executed more community outreach events and plan for multiple locations across California, which started in Orange County in March 2018. Our intention is to educate the broadest possible audience to our products’ capabilities. We intend to video the more polished performances and use those to reach a much wider audience across the Internet and social media.

Major Customer Contracts

In 2017 and 2018, we have had two major customers, the State of California and the City of New York, that have accounted for a substantial portion of our revenue. The following summarizes the basic terms of the current contracts with them:

City of New York Requirement Contract . As of March 17, 2017, the Company received a Requirement Contract from the City of New York (the “NY Contract”) with purchase orders issued for 36 EV ARCs™ and one ARC Mobility™ trailer, all of which have been delivered, for a total contract price of $2,416,356. The NY Contract is a purchase order under the Company’s master contract with the City of New York. The term of the NY Contract commenced on April 17, 2017 and expires on April 16, 2020. When delivered, each unit must be ready for operation. The NY Contract requires the following warranties: at least three years for each complete unit, and 25 years for each photovoltaic (solar) panel, five years for each solar inverter, and two years for each integrated battery solution within each complete unit. We pass through our vendors’ warranties on components such as solar modules and some other long-term warranted items. On September 10, 2018, the Company received a new $3,300,000 order from the City of New York for 50 EV ARC™ units of which the Company delivered 16 such units during 2018 for a contract price of $1,054,560. The Company is intends to deliver the remaining units on the purchase order during the first half of 2019 (see recent events above).

Contract with the California Department of General Services . On June 12, 2015, the Company’s bid for solicitation was accepted by the California Department of General Services (the “California Contract”). The term of the California Contract is for one year with two extension options for one year. The California Contract permits California state and local government agencies, including cities, counties, special districts, California State universities, University of California systems, K-12 school districts, and community colleges, to purchase EV ARCs™, ARC Mobility Trailers, and related accessories from the Company. As of December 31, 2017, the Company had sold a cumulative total of 38 EV ARCs™ for a cumulative total of $2,365,844 through the California Contract. As of December 31, 2018, the Company had sold a cumulative total of 58 EV ARCs™ for a cumulative total of approximately $3,610,980 through the California Contract. In June 2018, our contract with the State of California was renewed for up to four more years (two years with two additional one-year options), and its scope was expanded to include more of our products, including our EV ARC™ HP DC Fast Charging Electric Vehicle Autonomous Renewable Charger, with a State estimated value of over $20 million.

New Patent Applications, Products and Technologies

We believe that the improved EV charging experience offered by the EV-Standard™ design will be a differentiator for our company in a potentially very large market. On street or curbside, charging is considered by many jurisdictions to be an important factor in the future EV charging infrastructure mix. This is particularly true in cities like New York and San Francisco where many residents have to park their vehicles on streets and therefore cannot take advantage of EV chargers deployed in parking lots or residences. In New York City many of the city’s fleet vehicles also park on street at night time. While we are supplying our EV ARC™ products to charge New York’s fleet vehicles in parking lots, they seek solutions to charge those vehicles which are parked on the street most of the time. Furthermore, we have learned from California’s Energy Commission (the “CEC”) that as few as one in seven Californian apartment dwellers park their vehicles close enough to an electrical circuit to charge their vehicles overnight, even if there were EV chargers installed at those locations where circuits do exist. CEC states that this will mean that an increase in work place and on street charging must take place if California’s electrification goals are to be met. We currently provide work place charging to the State of California through our EV ARC™ product. We believe that EV-Standard will become an excellent choice for California, New York and many other cities across the United States and the world as a viable and reliable on-street EV charging solution, and as such, we believe that EV-Standard™ represents an important opportunity for future growth. Like the EV ARC™ and Solar Tree® products, the EV-Standard™ will not rely upon a grid connection and will be able to continue to charge EVs during black-outs or other grid interruptions.

Envision continues to identify other complimentary product offerings and enhancements to current offerings, and is in the design, engineering, and patenting phase on certain such products, including, without limitation, its new UAV ARC™ drone charging infrastructure product for which we recently filed a new patent application in the United States.

Intellectual Property

Envision owns the registered trademark Solar Tree® structure. The Company has been issued five patents (four in the United States and one in China): one for our Solar Tree® structure (patent No. 7,705,277), one for EnvisionTrak™, a dual-synchronous tracking system for its solar products (patent No. 8,648,551), one for our EV ARC™ product (patent No. 9,209,648), one for Transformer ARC™ (patent No. 9,917,471) and one for our EV ARC™ product in China (Patent No. 201380042601.2). Additionally, on October 15, 2018, the European Patent Office issued a notice of intention to grant a patent for our EV ARC™ product in Europe (European Patent No. 13828020.1).

Our EV-Standard™ product is currently patent-pending. Our patented Transformer ARC™ product is patent pending in China and we have two other products in the patent application drafting process. Our UAV ARC™ product is currently patent pending.

All of our patents are used in products which are currently in production and being sold to and used by our key customers. We believe that the patents that we are currently applying for will have similar or better market success.

Competitors

The markets we address can be intensely competitive. The products we produce are chiefly designed to offer an alternative to traditional, utility grid-tied EV charging infrastructure. As such we are subject to competition from a number of companies which are involved in the design, construction and installation of fixed grid-connected EV charging stations that depend on the utility grid for a source of power, and on the construction and civil and electrical engineering services required for the installation of traditional infrastructure. Rather than competing with specific companies, we instead offer a turnkey technology product solution which competes with an entire ecosystem involving the design, engineering, permitting and constructing of civil projects. A potential customer for our products can chose between buying and installing our turnkey product or engaging a company, or group of companies, to provide the services which, in the end, provide essentially the same services and amenities as our transportable, rapidly deployable solutions. Such a group might include architects, civil engineers, electrical engineers, zoning specialists, consultants, general contractors, electrical contractors, and EVSE vendors. We are not aware of any other Company which offers a product which competes directly with ours, rather, we compete with a wide range of vendors and providers who offer the components of an end solution which our products provide in a single package. Whether we are targeting EV charging, outdoor media or energy security, our chief differentiator is our ability to enable these services and amenities without the requirement for constructed and permitted supporting infrastructure.

EV Charging

The EV charging sector is growing rapidly with many companies playing different roles in the space. Companies such as Schneider, Eaton, AeroVironment, and Bosch manufacture EV charging units but do not offer charging services. Companies such as Chargepoint and Blink (NASDAQ: BLNK) offer EV charging services and hardware but not, typically, installation. In November 2018, ChargePoint raised $240M in its Series E funding round led by private equity firm Quantum Energy Partners. Other ChargePoint investors include American Electric Power (NYSE: AEP), Canada Pension Plan Investment Board I Ventures (OTCPK:BMWYY), Braemar Energy Ventures, Linse Capital and Siemens (OTCPK:SIEGY). ChargePoint has raised more than $500M from investors in total. In February 2018, Blink received aggregate gross proceeds of $18.5M from an underwritten public offering and in March 2018, Blink announced that it had raised a further $15M in proceeds from holders exercising and the company issuing common stock purchase warrants. It is possible that we have competed for customers with the above-named vendors, however, in most cases we do not find ourselves competing with them because our products often incorporate their products and as such, rather than competing with them we are creating opportunities for them which they would have missed if they relied solely upon traditional grid tied installations. In some instances, they introduce our products to their customers. A good example of our partnering with a company which can be viewed as a competitor is that all of the EV ARC™ units we sell to New York City have ChargePoint EVSE (the actual EV charger) installed on them. We are not competing with ChargePoint, we are partnering with them to serve New York’s requirements. It is important to note that while we are involved in the EV charging market, we do not provide an EVSE solution, rather, we enable other best of breed EVSE solutions by providing a source of energy and a mounting asset for them.

There are many companies which offer installation services for the EV charging market. They are typically from electrical and general contracting backgrounds as well as some larger project management firms such as Black and Veatch, Bechtel, CH2M Hill and AECOM. They aggregate the disparate and fragmented service providers performing traditional construction services which have, until the introduction of our technology alternatives, been essential for the installation of EV chargers. We could be said to compete with these sorts of providers because our products essentially negate the need for the services they provide. There are one or two companies which are endeavoring to find ways to monetize EV charging beyond generating revenue from services or hardware. These activities compete with our outdoor media initiative in that they attempt to use alternate sources of revenue to support EV charging infrastructure and to generate a profit. Volta is a San Francisco based EV charging company which derives revenue through the sale of advertising. Volta gives charging away for free. They are deployed in a small number of shopping malls and other locations. Volta is a privately held company that recently raised $35 million from investors such as GE Ventures, Orsted Venture, nautilus Venture partners, Idinvest, Virgo Investment and Autotech Ventures. Many solar companies are now fixing EV chargers to their parking lot structures and some are offering packages combining solar rooftop installations and EV charger installations for the residential market place. These installations are almost always grid tied and do not include energy storage. We know of no other company that has a fully self-contained, transportable, autonomous, solar powered EV charging solution, and we know of no other company that offers a product which delivers DC fast charging solely from solar generation.

We also face competition, to some extent, from entities which are offering free or discounted EV charging infrastructure to our prospective customers. Utilities such as the three large IOUs (investor owned utilities) in California (SDG&E, PG&E, SCE) have successfully lobbied the CPUC for permission to rate base the costs of installations of EV chargers. As a result, they can offer the installation, or “make readies” of electrical circuits and other civil infrastructure, for a lower price or in some instances for free, to certain customers. We have found that the types of locations and the types of customers to which these benefits are offered are limited and generally do not compete with our solution. The perception amongst our prospective customers that they might qualify for cheap or free installations can, however, complicate our selling process. SDG&E is already using our products and we are endeavoring to sell our products to PG&E and SCE as well. We believe that we can reduce the negative impact of the competition we face from utilities by demonstrating to them that they can benefit from using our products in the same way that our other customers do, thus converting them to customers and sales channels for our products. In any event, the utilities which do offer discounted installations do not compete with our products post installation where our products offer a life time of free electricity, and the ability to continue delivering EV charging and emergency sources of power during black-outs.

Another example of an entity which is providing free or discounted EV charging infrastructure is Electrify America (EA), the EV charging provider born out of Volkswagen’s “Dieselgate” settlement with the US government. Electrify America is required to spend approximately $2B on EV charging infrastructure ($800M in California) to satisfy the requirements of the settlement. Because EA is paying for some or all of the installation costs associated with the EVSE it deploys, it can compete with us for customers. The provision of the supporting infrastructure is, however, a cost center for EA and not core to its business model. Accordingly, we are in the process of endeavoring to add EA as a customer to enable EA’s EVSE to compete with traditional providers. We believe that in many cases our products will offer a superior and less expensive solution for EA’s requirements. We believe that we can add EA as a customer and reduce its impact as a competitor.

Below is a table showing a comparison between our EV ARC™ product and all the other offerings we can find, which claim to offer at least some of the same attributes:

Outdoor Advertising

Envision’s role in the outdoor advertising space is currently anticipated by management to be one of delivering hardware solutions in the billboard, street furniture, and digital signage space. There are large well-established companies such as JC Decaux and Outfront Media (NYSE: OUT) (with whom we have a contract) which specialize in the sale of advertising and also in the production of street furniture solutions. Other vendors in the space include Daktronics which makes digital billboards and street furniture. We have met with both companies and determined that they do not have a transportable solar powered solution. They have expressed that they recognize the value of EV charging infrastructure as a platform for DOOH. They could potentially compete with us if they determine to invest in developing solar powered products, however, we believe that our patents cover aspects of our product that are crucial to its success.

There are many companies which specialize in the placement of outdoor content on existing infrastructure, including but not limited to Capitol Outdoors, Vistar Media, EMC Outdoor and Outfront Media. We are under contract with OutFront and in contact with some others and intend to be in contact with more advertising media firms to educate them about our products. These companies can be seen as competition as they are in the business of taking as much of the market share as they can for outdoor advertising content. However, they do not always produce hardware. With that in mind we see these companies more as potential partners than competitors. Perhaps one of the most interesting entrants into the outdoor digital content placement market is Google. With its announcement of time and place-based content dispersal on outdoor digital screens, Google is taking its advertising placement technology outdoors. Google has several solar and energy projects underway and as such, could create solar powered outdoor advertising technologies. Google is currently a customer, purchasing EV ARC™ products for EV charging on its campuses.

The large outdoor advertisers such as ClearChannel, Outfront Media, Lamar and JC Decaux have combinations of larger format billboards, digital billboards, screens and street furniture. They use combinations of in house and outsourced resources to acquire hardware. We are not aware that any of them currently have solar powered solutions such as those that we offer, however, we have seen each of them pay close attention to sustainable options such as using solar panels adjacent to billboards to power them. We will endeavor, wherever possible, to sell products to these companies. Each of them could create competing products to our products. However, we believe that our patents cover aspects of our product which we believe to be crucial to its success.

Energy Security

Our focus in energy security is to produce solar powered products which include battery energy storage and which can dispatch power during times of grid or hydrocarbon fueled generator failure. There are many companies, both large and small, with solar energy solutions, many with battery storage solutions, and many with combinations of both capabilities. As our focus is on creating products from the combination of solar power generation and energy delivery and storage, we view the competition from companies producing these types of solutions to be most relevant to our business. Companies in this space range from small startup companies like Green Charge Networks to behemoths like General Electric and NEC. Siemens, Eaton, Schneider and other large electrical component companies are all also working on combined renewables/storage product solutions. We are in contact with all these companies and have not observed that any of them have a product which provides all the same value and differentiation that our EV ARC™ product delivers.

While we believe that our proprietary designs and our deployment strategies differentiate us from our competitors in the market, there is no assurance that our business, operating results, and financial condition will not be materially adversely affected by our competitors.

Industry Overview

Our Target Markets – EV Charging

For the first time in more than a century’s history of the gasoline powered automobile, we are witnessing the beginnings of a major shift in how we fuel transportation. Although electric vehicles (“EVs”) were prevalent at the birth of the automobile era they were replaced entirely by vehicles with internal combustion engines (“ICEs”). A multi trillion-dollar industry was developed around the sourcing, refining and delivery of hydro-carbon fuels for transportation. Today, Americans spend about half a trillion dollars each year on fuel for internal combustion engine vehicles. The petroleum industry has shaped the history of the 20th and the first part of the 21st centuries.

At the government level, nations such as China, the United Kingdom, France, Norway, India, the Netherlands, Germany, and others are either banning ICEs outright within the next two decades or strongly considering such bans. Tax incentives, grants and other funding for EVs and EV charging infrastructure are common across the globe. China’s president Xi Jingping has recently mandated the deployment, in China, of 4.8 million EV chargers by 2020 with a strong emphasis on renewable energy and pushing EV charging infrastructure into rural and poor communities where utility grid connections are often insufficient to support this new load. Envision recently received a Chinese patent for its EV ARC™, solar powered EV charging product. Morgan Stanley estimates that Western Europe will need three million EV chargers by 2030, there are currently less than one hundred thousand. We also intend to assertively expand our presence in the European Union, where we currently have a cooperation arrangement with a local company in Spain, which may become the springboard for eventual manufacturing and sales of our products in the European market.

Following are a sampling of headlines taken from recent press describing EV incentives globally. The list is not exhaustive:

Local and State government activities in the U.S. go beyond offering tax incentives. For example, the City of New York is currently replacing its entire city-owned fleet with EVs. At time of writing, New York City owns approximately 1,700 EVs and is scheduled to own over 1900 by the end of their current fiscal year. The State of California has mandated that 5% of all government-controlled parking spaces must be EV ready by 2022 and California’s department of transportation, Caltrans (along with many other departments), is rapidly electrifying its fleet of sedans. Over 35 California mayors, including the mayors of Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, have signed an open letter to the California Air Resources Board urging the agency to accelerate the deployment of zero-emission buses. In September 2018, Governor Brown issued a further executive order setting out a goal for California to be carbon neutral by 2045, meaning that all the electricity consumed in the state will have to come from renewable sources. Both New York City and the State of California have signed multi-year, multi-million dollar purchasing contracts with Envision and are currently power users of our products.

Federal agencies such as the Department of Energy (“DOE”) are also electrifying their fleets. The federal government consumes 311 million gallons of gasoline each year and is actively working to reduce its reliance on carbon fuels. As a result, it is converting fleet vehicles from ICEs to EVs. The DOE is a repeat customer of Envision as is the Department of the Navy.

Even war fighters are moving to electric vehicles. The U.S. Marine Corps recently tested tactical electric vehicles at a future war fighting training exercise at Camp Pendleton in California. ICEs require liquid fuels which have to be transported to forward operating bases (“FOB”). Diesel can cost as much as $1,000 per gallon to deliver to a FOB and numerous lives have been lost in the process. ICEs are also loud and generate a heat signature which makes them vulnerable to targeting and highly visible at night. EVs do not require liquid fuels, are very quiet and do not generate exhausts and heat. (The U.S. Marine Corps used Envisions EV ARC™ product to fuel the tactical EV it tested at the event described above). Marine Corps General Robert Neller stated that what Marines really need “is a way to recharge batteries—or maintain a sort of expeditionary power capability that doesn’t cause me to pull a wagon or something.” Envision’s products reliably produce power wherever they are located and do not require any other source of fuel.

Following are a sampling of headlines taken from recent press describing EV incentives in various U.S. states. The list is not exhaustive:

The private sector is also actively engaged in the deployment of EV charging infrastructure. There are companies whose core offering is supporting EV charging as a service, such as Chargepoint and Blink (NASDAQ:BLNK). The most aggressive private sector focus on EV charging infrastructure is coming from businesses which seek to attract EV drivers and be ready for them in the future. Companies are offering workplace EV charging for employees as a means to reduce the company’s carbon footprint, and as an essential recruiting and retention tool. As more customers and employees drive EVs, so then must more businesses and employers offer EV charging to satisfy this new need. Google, Johnson and Johnson, McDonalds, Dell and Genentech are good examples of the sorts of companies which are offering EV charging for their guests and employees. All of these named companies are current or former Envision customers and are using or have used our products in the past. There are also other less obvious new entrants in the EV charging space. In 2017, Shell Oil bought New Motion, one of Europe’s largest EV charging providers. Shell (NYSE:RDSA) is also installing EV chargers in its gas stations in Europe. This is the first move by a major oil company into the EV charging space but there is much evidence to suggest that the others will follow suit. Currently major oil companies like Total are also invested in renewable energy. Total owns a large percentage of Sunpower (NASDAQ: SPWR).

As a result of a settlement with the U.S. government over the “Dieselgate” scandal, Volkswagen has formed Electrify America, a company which will deploy EV charging infrastructure. The settlement calls for VW to spend $2 billion dollars on EV charging infrastructure during the next decade with $800 million in California. Electrify America is a potential customer for Envision as they will need a variety of solutions to meet their mandates. We are in regular contact with them.

The automotive industry in general is actively growing its electric vehicle initiatives. Every major automotive original equipment manufacturer (“OEM”) has announced plans to electrify some or all of its available portfolio of products. Following are a sampling of headlines taken from recent press describing the OEMs actions. The list is not exhaustive:

The adoption of EVs by individuals is still relatively low in absolute numbers but the trends show significant growth even in the face of cheap gasoline. According to International Energy Agency (“IEA”) analysis, registrations of electric cars hit a new record in 2016, with over 750,000 sales worldwide. According to Bloomberg, over 400,000 EVs have been sold in the second quarter of 2018. With a 29% market share, Norway has incontestably achieved the most successful deployment of electric cars in terms of market share, globally. It is followed by the Netherlands, with a 6.4% electric car market share, and Sweden with 3.4%. The People’s Republic of China (hereafter, “China”), France and the United Kingdom all have electric car market shares close to 1.5%. In 2016, China was by far the largest electric car market, accounting for more than 40% of the electric cars sold in the world and more than double the amount sold in the United States.

The global electric car stock surpassed 2 million vehicles in 2016 after crossing the 1 million threshold in 2015, and exceeded three million vehicles by November 2017. In the third quarter of 2018, the electric vehicle stock increased to four million.

Global EV Adoption 2010 to 2016

Until 2015, the United States accounted for the largest portion of the global electric car stock. In 2016, China became the country with the largest electric car stock, with about a third of the global total. With more than 200 million electric two-wheelers, 3 to 4 million low-speed electric vehicles (“LSEVs”) and more than 300 thousand electric buses, China is also by far the global leader in the electrification of other transport modes.

The growth rates in electric vehicle sales and, as a result, the requirements for supporting infrastructure are impressive. To date, the deployment of electric vehicle service equipment (“EVSE”) has not met the goals set by federal or state governments or any of the larger companies currently engaged in the space. The reasons for the delays are numerous but the main impediments include the following:

As the number of electric cars on the road has continued to increase, private and publicly accessible charging infrastructure has also continued to grow. In 2016, the annual growth rate of publicly available charging (72%) was higher than, but of a similar magnitude to, the electric car stock growth rate in the same year (60%). We have observed that the rate of sales of our products tracks the growth in EVs.

Source: Bloomberg New Energy for the EV information and the Company for EV ARC™ sales

Traditional thinking within the EV charging industry has been that individuals will choose to charge at home and to a great extent this has been true for the early adopters of EVs who have typically been well-off and owners of their own homes. As EVs become more mainstream, solutions will have to be found for the 70% of Americans who do not own a single-family residence. The California Energy Commission (“CEC”) recently published a study in which it concludes that only one in seven Californians apartment dwellers lives in an environment where they can reasonably expect to charge an EV at home. This leaves six of seven Californians in need of alternate charging options. It seems likely that California’s results will be similar across the nation and even more pronounced in Europe and Asia where far larger sections of the population live in multi-dwelling units (“MDU”).

Fortunately, there are options for current and future EV owners. An immutable link exists between car ownership and travel to destinations, be those trips for work, shopping, leisure, education or any number of other options. People with cars go places and when they get there they tend to dwell for a while. In fact, the average privately-owned sedan in the U.S. spends 95% of its time parked. Typical parking spots offer excellent environments for EVs to re-fuel opportunistically while the owners happen to be at the location for whatever reason originally took them there. Workplace, retail, healthcare, leisure, education – all of these environments, and any others with parking, offer excellent opportunities for the majority of EV owners to refuel. According to the Department of Transportation, the average American sedan travels 31.4 miles each day. A typical Level II EV charger delivers 25 miles of charge to an EV in an hour. In other words, 45 minutes charging at the supermarket and another 45 minutes charging at work delivers more miles than the average driver requires in a day - and that’s without charging at home. Most employees spend at least 6 hours at work each day giving them the opportunity to pick up almost five times the electricity they need to fuel their daily driving needs in each shift at work. We believe that this paradigm shift in fueling behavior will contribute significantly to consumers’ adoption of EVs because it will mean the end of destination fueling. No longer will consumers make special trips to a location (gas station) to fill their cars with fuel. Rather they will fuel, opportunistically, where they were already going. Consumers will fill their cars in the same way that they fill their cellphones today – whenever they are near a charger, and while they are sleeping, working, eating or doing anything other than actually driving.

Battery Electric Vehicles (“BEVs”) are becoming more affordable with the release of each new model. The Chevy Bolt delivers 240 miles of range for around $30k after tax incentives. The Tesla 3 does more or less the same. The average American spends around $5k per year on fuel and maintenance for their ICE. EVs have far lower fuel costs and practically no maintenance. When considering the reduced annual operating costs it’s hard not to view EVs as competitive today, with or without tax incentives. BEVs are also delivering longer driving ranges, though this may not be necessary in light of peoples’ actual driving habits. In fact, there is a strong argument to suggest that the Chinese model of producing lots of lower range vehicles and ensuring that there is ubiquitous charging infrastructure makes more sense than having every vehicle carry around sufficient batteries to support trips that most people rarely, or never, take. Most Americans would not need an EV with a range of greater than 50 miles if they knew that they could reliably charge every day. As batteries continue to be the largest (though falling dramatically) cost contributor to the price of an EV, this would offer a simple and obvious way to further reduce the cost of EVs and increase their range (through reduced weight) in the future.

While Tesla is the recognized leader in the EV space today, it must also be recognized that all of the major automobile manufacturers have plans for all electric product line-ups. In most cases those plans are for exclusively electric line ups, and in some cases automotive OEMs describe a future where their entire portfolio is available in an electric format even if they plan to retain some ICEs for the time being. Consumer choice will flourish as an example of the major OEMs shifting to electric. Ranges may continue to increase, and costs may continue to come down. In a decade or so we believe that car dealerships will offer a wider variety of EVs than any other solution and that those EVs will be better, offer more options and be less expensive than the ICE alternative. It could be said that for the first time in over one hundred years we have Moore’s Law in transportation. EVs may improve so dramatically and so quickly that the ownership experience will be closer to that of the laptop or the smart phone. In fact, studying the adoption curves of both those relatively new technologies might be a useful data source when trying to forecast the consumer adoption of EVs, and therefore EV charging infrastructure, in the coming years.

Autonomous Vehicles will add to charging infrastructure requirements .

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are receiving increasing press coverage and, significantly, increasing investment from national and international participants. On October 4, 2018 the Wall Street Journal reported that Honda will invest $2.75B in GM’s self-driving car unit, GM Cruise. Japan’s SoftBank Group has already invested $2.2B in GM Cruise. Ford has set up the Ford Autonomous Vehicle Unit, Fiat Chrysler has joined a BMW led consortium which includes Intel and Mobileye, with the aim of producing fully automated vehicles by 2021. Toyota announced in August that it would invest $500 million in Uber to jointly develop autonomous vehicles, and Google parent Alphabet continues to invest in Waymo. According to CB Insights there were 46 corporations developing autonomous vehicles as of September 2018.

While there are many approaches to evolving AVs, one constant is that in almost every case the vehicles themselves are or will be electric vehicles. An increase in the volume of electric AVs will mean a requirement for an increase in the availability of EV charging infrastructure which, we believe, further supports our business model.

Fueling AVs will generally require automated fueling infrastructure. Currently the two proposed methods to address this requirement are robotics, which connect a conductive charging cable to the vehicle, and wireless or inductive charging which enables the vehicle to charge without physically connecting to the EV charger. We believe that wireless charging will prevail because it is a proven technology which is already working in the market and because it is less complex, costly and prone to failure than robotic connections. We believe that our products are ideally suited to support wireless charging because the requirement for a power transmitter below the vehicle will easily be supported by our EV ARC™ product with its integrated base pad (into which we can imbed the power transmitter at the factory). A grid tied charger will require further permitting and construction work to facilitate the installation of the power transmitter into the parking surface.

Whether EVs are autonomous or driven by humans and whether they charge wirelessly or conductively, we believe that all eventualities will lead to a requirement for more charging infrastructure which will in turn benefit our business model.

A Massive Need for Charging Infrastructure

EV charging will be required in just about any location where visitors, residents, guests or workers park cars. Slower speed charging such as Level I (120 volt/5 miles per hour) and Level II (240 volt/25 miles per hour) will suffice for most urban environments. Workplace, retail, airport, transit terminal, healthcare, hospitality and any other dwell type environment will be well served with offering around 25 electric miles for each hour of charging which means that Level II will suffice. For certain fleet requirements such as taxis, first responders and certain shared and autonomous vehicles, direct current fast charging (DCFC 50+kW 200 miles per hour and up) may be required. Corridor environments such as rest areas on Interstates and Highways will require direct current fast charging (“DCFC”) because, in general, consumers will not want to wait for long periods of time while their vehicles re-charge during longer journeys. Though we believe that DCFC is an appropriate solution in these types of environments we also believe that it is currently being oversold by many players in the industry. There is, in some camps, an effort to replace the hundred-year-old practice with something similar, through the installation of very fast destination charging just like the current gas station model. It is much more expensive to deploy DCFC than Level I or II charging and it is also much more expensive to operate it. While it might benefit certain incumbents and new entrants to push this model, we believe that consumers will learn to enjoy the new habit of fueling where they were already going and as such will decreasingly seek out destinations which require a special trip for their fueling needs. As mentioned above there is rarely a need to charge for more than two hours in any given day on Level II chargers and the great majority of vehicles are parked somewhere for much longer than that. Therefore, we believe that the extra expense associated with DCFC does not seem warranted or supportable except in specialized use cases like those described above. Envision’s products deliver all three levels and the level selected is based upon our customers’ preferences.

Regardless of which level of EV charging is contemplated in any given location, a source of electricity will have to be delivered to the EV charger itself. The charger, in turn, will have to be located somewhere that an EV can access it conveniently. In the early days of charger deployment, most organizations will pick “low hanging fruit” locations for charger installations if they have them. A typical low hanging fruit scenario would be one in which there is a sufficient electrical circuit close enough to a parking space to allow for the relatively simple and inexpensive installation and connection of the EV charger to the source of electricity. For example, there might be a parking space against an outside wall of a building, which has an electrical circuit conveniently located on the inside of the same wall, thus allowing for an easy connection by penetrating the wall and extending the circuit to the parking space. Most parking spaces, however, are not found in such convenient locations. In fact, most parking spaces are several hundred feet away from the nearest available circuit which is sufficient to support EV charging. This is not surprising as it would be unlikely that any developer of a parking environment would run any more electrical circuit than is required to power lighting and perhaps a parking metering machine. Furthermore, the typical commercial real estate property, which has adjacent parking, will not only have no electrical circuits deployed in the parking lot but equally it is likely that the property does not have sufficient electrical infrastructure to support EV charging at any meaningful scale. Most properties were not designed with the significant increase in load which EV charging creates. A typical EV is the equivalent of a single-family residence in terms of the load it creates. Having 10 EVs charge at a retail environment is like supplying electricity to 10 homes – generally not contemplated in the original design. Thus, delivering EV charging to most parking spaces becomes an involved, time consuming, expensive and disruptive process requiring the involvement of multiple professions and civil and electrical contracting. A typical parking lot installation might require:

When the installation is complete and successful, the fixed EV charger will generate a utility bill which can be as high as $40 to $80 thousand dollars over 20 years (in California) and might often result in demand charges and utility billing tier increases.

Wireless Charging Technologies and Other New and Developing Charging Initiatives

The development and commercialization of wireless or inductive charging is in advanced stages. There are several companies such as Qualcomm, Momentum Dynamics, Wave, Hevo and Witricity/Halo which have commercially available wireless chargers for EVs and larger electrified vehicles. We believe that our products, particularly the EV ARC™, are ideal for the integration of wireless charging for two reasons: (i) the wireless power transmitters can be integrated directly into our base pads whereas traditional grid-connected products may have to install the transmitters into the concrete or asphalt, requiring further permitting and construction activities and, (ii) wireless charging is about 5% less efficient than conductive (plugging in) charging which means that an operator of a large number of vehicles or a network of chargers will find that their utility bill increases by 5% when they upgrade to wireless charging because of this loss. Our products generate all their own energy from renewable sources without generating a utility bill so there will be no increase in energy costs for a fleet operator when they convert to wireless charging with Envision products.

We believe that wireless charging will play a major role in the future of EV charging because (a) the consumer will demand the ease and convenience of simply parking their car and having it fuel without their having to plug in and (b) fleet operators will no longer have to be concerned that their employees have plugged EVs in at the end of a shift. So long as they are parked, they will fuel automatically. Management believes that increased adoption of wireless or inductive charging constitutes another significant opportunity for a differentiated advantage and, as a result, growth in the future.

Another area in the charging ecosystem which provides major opportunities and challenges is the “curbside” or “on street” sector. Because so many owners of vehicles and even fleet operators (in cities like New York and San Francisco) park their vehicles on street, there is a significant need for curb side charging. In fact, the CEC has publicly stated that only one in seven Californian apartment dwellers are able to park their car close enough to a circuit to charge at home. Their conclusion is that curb side, on street charging will be an important contributor to the successful electrification of transportation in the State. Many other jurisdictions such as New York City have made the same statements.

We have invented and are in the late stages of product development on, our patent pending EV-Standard product which is, in our belief, the ideal curb side charging solution. The EV-Standard™ product is a streetlamp replacement which incorporates renewable energy and on-board energy storage, and which provides a meaningful EV charging experience without significant infrastructure or construction requirements. The EV-Standard™ design includes a light-wind generator fixed atop a new streetlamp standard. Also integrated is a tracking solar panel and on-board battery storage. The EV-Standard™ product design takes power from the existing streetlamp grid connection and uses it to charge the on-board batteries. The streetlamp’s circuit is available 24 hours per day but is only in use during the hours of darkness. As a result, EV-Standard™ is able to use the full capacity of the grid connection to charge its batteries during the day time. A further advantage of the EV-Standard is that it is delivered with a low energy, high lumens, LED light fixture which reduces the energy required for street lighting during the hours of darkness. This makes the street light more efficient and, crucially, the EV-Standard™ can use the unused capacity of night-time operations to further charge its on-board batteries. The additional renewable energy generated by both the tracking solar array and the light-wind generator supplies more energy to EV-Standards’ batteries. The energy from the batteries is then delivered to a Level II EV charger which is mounted to the EV-Standard™ products’ column. The combination of the three sources of capacity, when delivered at once through our on-board batteries, allows us to deliver a much more powerful and therefore more meaningful EV charging experience than would be available simply through connecting to the existing street lamps’ utility grid connection as some of our competitors currently offer.

We believe that the improved EV charging experience offered by the EV-Standard™ design will be a differentiator for our company in a potentially large market. We currently provide work-place charging to the State of California through our EV ARC™ product. We believe that EV-Standard will become an excellent choice for California, New York and many other jurisdictions across the U.S., and the world, as a viable and reliable on-street EV charging solution. Accordingly, we believe that EV-Standard™ represents an important opportunity for future growth. Like the EV ARC™ and Solar Tree® products, the EV-Standard™ will not rely upon a grid connection and as such will be able to continue to charge EVs during black-outs or other grid interruptions.

Our Target Markets – Outdoor Media

As the value of traditional advertising media such as television, radio, and print diminishes, advertisers in the United States and abroad are looking for new outlets to capture the attention of consumers. Industry experts believe that there will be significant growth in spending on outdoor advertising platforms particularly when mounted on street furniture. We anticipate this is particularly true relative to digital content. The digital out of home industry (“DOOH”), from what we understand, is enjoying a period of rapid growth and may continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Management has seen statistics suggesting DOOH and other outdoor advertising spending exceeded $7B in the United States and $25B globally in 2014, with massive potential markets such as China just beginning to enter the marketplace. (Source: Magna.)

DOOH advertising is the second fastest growing advertising medium, according to Magna. Double digit growth with billions of dollars per year in national and global spending make outdoor advertising an attractive opportunity. There are, however, significant barriers to making it work. In general, in the United States, it is becoming harder to deploy outdoor advertising in most places where it is of value. Similar to the EV charging market, the outdoor advertising industry seeks new solutions to overcome the significant barriers to entry such as planning, permission, entitlement, electrical circuitry, and civil engineering. Industry veterans spend a good deal of time looking for the “new new” in advertising, a solution that is environmentally friendly, cost effective, and most importantly, can make its way through the significant hurdles of permitting and zoning. We believe that our products are ideally suited to reduce many of the barriers to entry for outdoor advertising and as such we believe that significant opportunities may present themselves to us as we continue to address this market.

In November 2017, we signed an agreement with OutFront Media (NYSE: OUT). Through this agreement OutFront will market the sponsorship and naming rights for networks of EV ARC™ products distributed across major U.S. cities, using the same business model that OutFront has previously used to monetize the deployment of bike sharing programs such as the Deco bike program in San Diego, California. OutFront ranks in the top three outdoor advertising companies in the United States and has been successful selling similar sponsorship and naming rights opportunities. We believe that a significant opportunity exists, though our relationship with OutFront, to deploy large numbers of EV ARC™ products in multiple cities across the U.S. OutFront has identified corporate prospects for this model. One prospect has toured our facility and is advancing the discussions with OutFront as of May 15, 2018.

While we believe there is a great deal of pent up demand for out of home advertising spending in the United States, there are also significant barriers to the widespread deployment of such displays, which we believe enhance our competitive position:

We believe Envision has products that solve each of the above impediments to billboard and DOOH infrastructure deployments. We, together with our partner, OutFront Media (NYSE:OUT), are currently in the process of working to secure agreements with cities to allow for the deployment of our advertising or sponsorship funded, solar powered EV chargers. We are also working with individuals and organizations to encourage investment in our products deployed in this manner.

The Envision products are renewably energized, so they are shrouded in what is often referred to as the “Green Halo.” We have observed that the green/sustainable aspect of our products can make them more likely to win approval through the entitlement process, while also making them more popular with an increasingly environmentally-conscious public. The dual effect, we believe, is that our products may be deployable in locations where traditional signs or billboards may be denied. We believe these products will be more popular with an advertisers’ intended audience and, as a result, advertisers may be willing to pay for them either as a capital purchase or through an existing payment schedule they have with vendors such as Lemar, Clear Channel or JC Decaux, or through sponsorship and naming rights such as those OutFront Media intends to sell. Envision plans to sell products either directly to the end user or to one of the brokerages or to maintain title to the charging products while collecting a fee for the sponsorship and naming rights. We do not currently intend to sell space to content providers except in select locations as there are other well-established companies doing that to which we can sell. Technology advances in advertising operations are making it increasingly possible to place digital content on advertising screens through the leveraging of automated platforms. Google is piloting programs in the United Kingdom for place and time-based advertising on digital screens. Management is meeting with various companies involved in the automatic placement of digital content on outdoor screens to ascertain whether there is a model which will allow us to successfully monetize the EV ARC™ Digital without the active involvement of a third party, thus avoiding an increase in associated direct costs. In the case of the sponsorship deals contemplated with OutFront Media, Envision may retain title to the products throughout the sponsorship period and charge fees for the rights to the network. These fees would constitute recurring revenue for the Company. At the end of the sponsorship period, which is currently contemplated by OutFront Media to be in the three to five year range, the rights to the network would revert to Envision at which point we may be at liberty to re-sell those rights.

Our products produce more energy than they consume through the display of advertising content, so they do not have ongoing operating expenses associated with energy costs. In fact, they can also support other local energy requirements such as lighting or, even more politically important, EV charging infrastructure or disaster preparedness.

Each of our products can be equipped with a wide area network (“WAN”) connection that can be used to monitor the condition and performance of the unit. This WAN connection can be used equally to deliver content updates to our products’ advertising screens and to network the products so that they can be intelligently linked to one another as well as to local consumers through NFC (Near Field Communications). This means that our products can be deployed without any physical connection to power or telecommunications while delivering the same value as those that have gone through expensive construction processes to physically connect to power and data.

Our Target Markets – Energy Security

Power outages cost the United States $200 billion per year according to the Department of Energy. A report in the Wall Street Journal stated that the United States is nine key sub stations away from a total black out, and further reported if one of a few transformer companies who could supply the hardware to repair the sub stations was also disabled, that the black outs would last 18 months. We believe that energy security will be an important growth market and that our Solar Tree® and EV ARC™ products with ARC technology energy storage can address this and provide possible growth opportunities.

According to insideenergy.org, the grid disruption database shows a marked increase in outages from 2000 through the first half of 2014. Outages fluctuate from month to month, season to season, and year to year, but the trend-line shows a steady rise. Here are some other interesting observations:

Because EV ARC™ can be deployed with an optional emergency power (E Power) panel, it can also be used as a reliable source of energy in times of disaster, emergency or grid failure. EV ARC™ can be configured to allow a select group, such as first responders, to access the solar generated and stored energy. A fireman or police officer will be able to safely connect to the EV ARC™ and power any devices that would typically require a gasoline or diesel generator. We believe that the EV ARC™ will be a much more reliable and a cleaner source of energy than the electric grid or other traditional back up energy sources. The EV ARC™ does not require the level of ongoing maintenance required by diesel or gasoline generators, and there is less chance that it will not be operational in times of emergency since first responders are not required to start it or fill it with fuel. We are currently selling EV ARC™ products equipped with E Power panels to New York City, Caltrans and many other entities. In the summer of 2017, our EV ARC™ deployed for the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands was subjected to 185 mph category five hurricane force winds which it survived. Our customer informed us, in writing, that while most other infrastructure had been damaged or destroyed by the storm, our EV ARC™ product not only survived but was still in excellent condition. The EV ARC™ product is independently certified to withstand winds of 110 mph by a licensed structural engineering firm. We and our customers have observed that in practice it can withstand hurricane force winds. Similarly, our Solar Tree® product has survived hurricane force winds in Florida and the foothills of the Rockies.

While the EV ARC™ and Solar Tree® products are designed to be grid independent, they can also be connected to the utility grid at the customers’ request. In one instance we have a utility company customer which is using the EV ARC™ product to charge EVs but also as a grid balancing tool. The utility has connected the EV ARC™ to the grid and is able to use the internal batteries as a buffer during times of grid instability. Industry experts predict that there will be a significant increase in the amount of distributed energy storage connected to the grid to provide stability in the future. We believe that the EV ARC™ products’ ability to act as a grid buffering solution as well as a rapidly deployed EV charging solution is another differentiator and a potentially significant value proposition.

Using solar power to reduce an entity’s utility bill is not new and is now a highly competitive market; however, Envision believes that the growth in energy security products will create a significant opportunity for the Company. We have overcome many hurdles inherent in the production of reliable, cost effective, stand alone, renewable energy generation and storage solutions. Our EV ARC™ product is essentially a micro-grid which generates, stores, and makes available, day or night, clean, reliable electrical energy. This technology is already offering our customers an alternative to back-up generators or other expensive measures which they feel compelled to own to safeguard their increasingly important energy supplies. Many of our customers have expressed that they view the fact that EVs can charge from our products even when the utility grid fails as one of the key components in their decision to buy. Their ability to connect external devices to the EV ARC™ power outlets and “shore power” cable may allow them to eliminate the need for gasoline or diesel generators where EV ARC™ is deployed.

Customers like New York City and Caltrans who own increasingly large fleets of EVs cannot take the chance that there is another major grid outage such as the one that was caused by Hurricane Sandy. The impact of such an outage would be that the EVs would be grounded during such an event. Our products provide a hedge against such a catastrophe because they are immune to grid interruptions.

Distributed generation photovoltaic solar projects have historically been rooftop or adjacent property installations. Rooftops have a number of inherent problems that are avoided by utilizing parking lots and the top levels of parking structures for solar installations. Rooftops are populated with mechanical equipment, vents, skylights, elevator overruns and most importantly, roofing materials and systems including waterproof membranes, that require maintenance, are warranted, and must be replaced more often than solar PV products. Rooftops are also limited in the area which is required for large scale energy production by PV systems. The low returns generated by many roof top and adjacent property solar deployments are often not sufficient inducement to a real estate owner to expose themselves to the encumbrance and risks associated with those sorts of deployments, which in part might explain the relatively low adoption of this otherwise beneficial technology.

There are over 800 million parking spaces in the United States. As the adoption of Electric Vehicles increase, we believe parking lots will be ideal locations for EV charging infrastructure, and Envision’s products with SunCharge™ will offer an attractive option to any entity considering the deployment of such solutions.

We believe, globally, solar deployments are growing significantly. While much of the growth has been focused on competing with utilities to provide cheaper electricity, we believe that there will be a significant growth in Solar 3.0 in which solar energy is used to enable services and amenities where the grid is unavailable or too unreliable for the intended use. Electrical energy is becoming increasingly vital to almost everything that we do and our requirements for it are no longer restricted to indoor locations where standard outlets are readily available. Solar powered products, like those that we produce, which can deliver reliable energy in locations where there is insufficient circuit, like parking lots, streets, parks, and public spaces, appear to have significant market opportunities. Our deployment speed is also important to our marketing efforts. In most cases, we deploy our EV ARC™ and Solar Tree® products in active parking lots of active businesses. Whether we are deploying for EV charging, energy security, or for marketing purposes, our prospective customers often consider business disruption in their analysis and buying decisions. We believe that our products can be installed faster than any other products in the industry, making deployment of Envision products less negatively impactful than the deployment of our competitors’ products. The potential loss of revenue or opportunity caused by a torn-up parking lot can, over time, be quite substantial. We believe our deployment speed will increasingly contribute to Envision’s competitive edge.

Customer Concentration

During 2018, the Company had one customer that exceeded 10% of our revenue.

Government Regulation

Businesses in general and solar energy companies in particular are subject to extensive regulation at the federal, state, and local level. We are subject to extensive government regulation of employment, health, safety, working conditions, labor relations, and the environment in the course of the conduct of our business. In order for our customers to enable the installation of some of our products, they generally are required to obtain permits from local and other governmental agencies. In the case of our grid tied products, they must comply with the applicable rules and regulations of the relevant state public utility agencies. In order for our customers to take advantage of available tax and other governmental incentives associated with the installation of solar power production facilities, and the production and use or sale of solar power, they must comply with the applicable regulatory terms and conditions. Government regulation may have a material adverse impact on our business, operating results, and financial condition.

Employees

As of the date of this report, we had eighteen employees, and ten additional individuals engaged through a temporary employment agency. The individuals we utilize through the temporary employment agency work for us on a full-time basis but were hired through an agency to maximize our flexibility and to reduce the risks and costs associated with full time employees.

Seasonality

Our operations are not expected to be materially affected by seasonality.

Bridge Loan

On August 27, 2018, the Company entered into an unsecured promissory note (the “Note”) in the amount of $750,000 (the “Principal Amount”) with Gemini Special Opportunities Fund, LP (the “Lender”). The Note bears simple interest at an annual rate of 10% and is subject to that certain Securities Purchase Agreement, dated August 27, 2018, with the Company as the seller and the Lender as the buyer. This Note was due and payable on February 28, 2019, but effective that date, a verbal forbearance agreement confirmed by email correspondence was made and is meant to be in effect until the Lender and the Company complete an amendment extending the maturity date of the note, or the note is sooner repaid by the Company. If the Company had repaid the Note on or prior to November 28, 2018, the Company would have been obligated to pay 105% of the original principal amount, plus accrued interest, and if the Company had repaid the Note after November 28, 2018, including repayment on the maturity date of February 28, 2019, the Company would have been obligated to pay 115% of the original principal amount, plus accrued interest. The Company may have to pay more to retire the Note after its original maturity date, depending on its discussions with the Lender. As additional consideration for the loan evidenced by the Note, the Company has issued to the Lender 900,000 common stock purchase warrants exercisable for a period of five years from the date of issuance with an exercise price equal to $0.25 per share.