Last Tuesday, shares of Symbotic (SYM -13.32%), which makes artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled robotics technology for supply chains, soared 40.2% following the company's release on the prior afternoon of a strong report for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023 (which ended Sept. 30).

Symbotic's quarterly revenue surged 60% year over year to $391.9 million, crushing Wall Street's expectation of 26% growth. Loss per share narrowed 20% to $0.08, comfortably beating analysts' projection of a loss per share of $0.12. Moreover, management guided for fiscal Q1 2024 revenue growth of 70% to 79% year over year, exceeding the Street's consensus estimate of 69%.

Earnings releases tell only part of the story. Following are two key things from Symbotic's fiscal Q4 earnings call that investors should know.

1. Revenue growth "was driven primarily by faster execution on deployments"

From the remarks of CFO Tom Ernst*:

(*Ernst is retiring next month and has been in the process of handing off the CFO baton to Carol Hibbard, who came to Symbotic from Boeing, where she was a senior VP and the corporate controller.)

The [year-over-year] revenue growth this quarter was driven primarily by faster execution on deployments. The pace of new system starts and the acceleration of system installations saw a market improvement. We initiated 4 new system deployments during the quarter and advanced 2 systems to full operation.

At the end of fiscal Q4, Symbotic had 12 fully operational systems and 35 systems in the process of deployment. These numbers are up from 10 and 33, respectively, at the end of the prior quarter. And they're up from seven and 17, respectively, at the end of the year-ago quarter.

The company continues to focus on decreasing the time it takes to install a system because this is a key factor in growing revenue. Ernst said there are two main ways the company is currently shrinking the overall deployment time -- through increasing outsourcing and streamlining its deployment processes.

When Symbotic first became a public company (June 2022, via a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC), it took about 2.5 years for it to fully deploy a system, per Ernst. Now, management expects deployment time to be less than 22 months on systems it's beginning to install. Moreover, the company's long-term "audacious goal" is to get total deployment time under six months.

2. Total addressable market in the U.S.

From the remarks of CEO Rick Cohen:

Today, Symbotic systems are moving goods at a rated capacity of more than 400 million cases per year, and we are currently in the process of deploying additional capacity rated to move another 1.6 billion cases annually. This compares with the annual total U.S. addressable market of over 500 billion cases moved per year.

The numbers Cohen provided suggest Symbotic has a long runway for growth in the U.S. alone. Let's run through the numbers.

Combined, the company's systems that are fully operational -- there are 12 of them -- have a rated capacity to move more than 400 million cases per year, per Cohen. As we don't have an exact number, let's use 450 million cases as an estimate. (It seems likely someone would say "nearly 500 million cases" if the actual number were north of 450 million but less than 500 million.) This would mean the company's estimated penetration rate of the U.S. total addressable market (TAM) is less than 0.1%.

Cohen noted that once Symbotic's systems that are in the process of being deployed -- there are 35 of them -- are fully operational, they will add a combined rated capacity to move "another 1.6 billion cases annually." This will bring the company's total rated capacity to move about 2.05 billion cases per year. That equates to a penetration rate of approximately 0.4% of the U.S. TAM.

Moreover, Symbotic also has plans to expand internationally, in part through its GreenBox warehouse-as-a-service joint venture with SoftBank. This partnership involves GreenBox, which will provide AI-powered supply chain services to customers, ordering approximately $7.5 billion of Symbotic's systems over a six-year period beginning in fiscal 2024 (which started on Oct. 1).