Pinewood Technologies Group PLC

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our H1FY25 results presentation. I'm Bill Berman, CEO, and I'm joined today by my partner and CFO, Ali Mann. This has been another half of great progress for Pinewood AI, delivering on the strategic objectives and positioning the business for accelerated growth. Ali will take you through the headline financial shortly. But before that, I'm going to take you through an overview of the strategic and financial progress delivered in the period. We have grown our revenue by over 20%, driven by strong growth among our customers and successful upselling in our existing customer base. Our new user experience has played a significant role with positive feedback to date. On top of this, our product suite has been significantly enhanced, and a number of new products, such as our new data and analytics offering, Automotive Business Intelligence, has been launched. A key milestone in the period was the acquisition of SEAS. The automotive AI company, in March of this year, In the six months since then, we have made great progress bringing Seas into the Pinewood Group and integrating the two tech stacks to significantly enhance our AI capabilities. In addition, Seas has grown to standalone business by over 500 rooftops since it became part of Pinewood AI, with new entries in North America as well as the UK. Those stores will be fully implemented by year's end. The North American market is a core pillar of our strategy and ambitions. Buying Lithia's share of the North American JV in July represented a fundamental step in establishing a platform to maximize our impact in the market. We are on track to pilot the Pinewood platform in Q4 of this year in two Lithia stores before commencing the full rollout in the first half of 2026. I'd now like to hand it over to Ali to take you through the financial review.

Thanks Bill. Good morning everyone. We delivered strong revenue growth of over 20% to £19.6 million. This was driven by a number of factors, including revenue from the UK Lithia dealerships, for whom we implemented the Pinewood AI platform during the second half of 2024. In addition, we have successfully implemented the system for new customers in a number of geographies in the first half of 2025, as well as increasing vertical sales into our existing customers. Gross profit of £17 million was 17.2% up on last year. The slight gross margin dilution was expected. and reflects SEAS gross margins being slightly lower than the legacy Pinewood AI business. The key profit metric that we use both internally and externally is underlying EBITDA. In the first half of 2025, this was £7.9 million, up 14.5% on the first half of 2024. Our recurring revenue of 85.7% underpins the financial result. The slight drop from last year reflects the mix, with revenue from SEAS now included. Finally, our net customer churn of 0.3% highlights how much customers value the Pinewood AI platform and how integral it is to their businesses. Moving on to slide 7 where I'll talk through the key movements in our cash flow during a period. During the first half of FY25 we generated £8.5 million of cash from operations. Other key movements in cash included £0.5 million of bank interest received in the period and £10 million received from Lithia for the settlement of a tax debtor. Our total development spend in the first half of the year was £6.7 million of which we capitalised £5.2 million. There was also an additional £0.1 million of PPE capex. We expect development spend for the whole of 2025 to be just under £14 million and for there to be a gradual increase in this over the next few years. The consideration for the SEAS acquisition was £32.9 million, of which £25.7 million was cash and £7.2 million was consideration shares. Alongside the SEAS acquisition was the equity raise that we undertook in March 2025, where we raised £34.1 million of cash. All of these movements led to an end of June 2025 cash position of £30.3 million. On to slide 8 and the end of June 2025 balance sheet. The key balances on this are closing shareholders funds of £80.1 million with the main driver being the March 2025 equity raise. We now have £31 million of goodwill on our balance sheet with the increase in goodwill reflecting the SEAS acquisition in March 2025. Some of this goodwill may be reclassified to separate intangible assets following a purchase price allocation exercise. Other intangible assets of £22.7 million cover the capitalised software asset, which has grown as we have increased resource levels and development work in the period and incorporated the SEAS development team into the group. Finally, we have £30.3 million in cash. In addition to this cash, we also have a £10 million RCF facility, which remains undrawn. On slide 9 you can see the non-underlying items. Firstly, we had £1 million of transaction costs relating to the equity raise and the SEAS acquisition. We also had £0.7 million of restructuring and transition costs in the period. Our share-based payment charge was £1.4 million in the first half of FY25. And finally, our share of the JV result was a £1.3 million charge in the period. Moving on to slide 10 and our updated guidance. As a result of buying Lithia out of the North American JV, we expect a short-term accounting impact in the second half of 2025. Prior to the JV buyout, Pinewood AI recognised 51% of software development for North America as revenue and profit. This no longer applies after the buyout. As a result of this, we expect to have 1.3 million less revenue than previously forecast this year. In addition to this, Marshals have asked us to move the start of their implementation back to Q1 2026 from Q4 2025 to align with other projects they are undertaking. We still expect to complete the majority of the Marshals' implementations during 2026. As a result of these two items, we expect our FY25 underlying EBITDA to be 15.5 to 16 million pounds. Neither of these two items have any impact on our medium or long-term profitability. Looking ahead, our previous guidance for underlying EBITDA in FY27 was a range in the mid to high 30 millions. We are updating this with guidance for underlying EBITDA in FY28, which we expect to be in the range of 58 million to 62 million pounds. This is underpinned by strong visibility from existing contracts and a significant pipeline of opportunities, including our five-year contract with Lithia to roll out the Pinewood AI platform across North America. As a reminder, this contract is expected to generate an estimated $60 million of revenue per year by the end of 2028. I'll now hand back to Bill to run through the operating highlights and strategy.

Thanks, Holly. I'll now take you through the progress we've made against the strategy we set out at the Capital Markets Day last year. On the UK and Ireland front, we started the Looker's implementation in July and August of 2025 and will continue in October once we get through the key plate change month of September. The combined teams have done a great job in the initial stages of the rollout and we are confident they will continue to do so when we start work next month. We continue to extend our network of Porsche dealers globally with a successful installation in Canada during May. enabled by development of new internationally deployable manufacturer interfaces. We are pleased to announce agreement with Porsche Japan to commence implementation of the Pinewood system in all their Porsche centers in the country of Japan. This builds upon significant product development attuned to retail operations in Japan and the establishment of a nationally focused installation and support team. We look forward to the Porsche Japan rollout starting at half one 2026. With the acquisition of SEAS has transformed our vertical sales channels and allowed us to approach a much broader customer base, as well as enabling us to generate additional revenue with short lead times. We also continue to expand our range of products that we can sell to both existing and new customers. Moving on to slide 13. Bringing the SEAS team into the group in March of 2025 following the acquisition was a key moment for us. We have continued to run SEAS on a standalone basis in many of their markets to maximize the impact of the great brand recognition they have built up over a number of areas. At the same time, we have started to integrate the cutting-edge AI technology of SEAS with the Pinewood data stack. Only six months in, we have made some significant progress with a number of fully integrated tools now operational as part of the Pinewood AI platform. This is just the beginning and we're hugely excited about the roadmap of integration work and new AI products that will cement Pinewood's position at the forefront of auto AI providers. Moving on to slide 14 and the update to our recent system implementations. As mentioned at the beginning of this section, our team has done a great job so far in the Looker's implementations, working inside the Looker's team to ensure the Pinewood AI platform rollout goes as smoothly as possible. This started in 2025 and will continue for the rest of 2025 and into 2026. We are pleased that the Lithia UK team are seeing the benefits of having Pinewood AI in all of their dealerships. This follows a successful implementation in the XJardine Motor Group in 2024, where they have seen improved productivity and increased efficiencies. We are looking forward to starting the Marshalls implementation with them in Q1 of 2026. Slide 15 sets out the strong foothold we have in North America and the scale of the opportunity in front of us. Having now bought Lithia out of their share of the North American joint venture and signed a contract with them to implement the platform in their North American dealers. We're now well placed to sign further customers in the U.S. and Canada. The rollout of SEAS chatbots into the Lithia North American dealer started in September and will finish in Q1 of 2026. With 20,000 franchise dealers in North America, the size of the opportunity is huge, with a total addressable market over $9 billion. We think that Pinewood AI is in a prime position to start to grow their share of the North American market. On to slide 16 and the progress we're making towards our North American pilot. We have now engaged with the majority of the OEMs that Lithia represent, as well as third-party layered app providers that will need to integrate with us, and the integration work is progressing well. We'll be piling Pinewood AI in two of Lithium North American stores in Q4 this year, ahead of the full rollout starting in H1 of 2026. Finally, we're making great progress recruiting our North America team with a number of key roles already filled. Moving on to slide 17 and the progress in our key growth markets. We are primarily targeting the geography set out in our strategy at the Capital Markets Day last year, Japan, Southeast Asia, Central Europe, and South Africa. Last week, we signed a contract with Porsche Japan to roll out the Pinewood platform across all of the Porsche dealers in Japan. The full rollout is expected to start in the first half of 2026. We have ongoing discussions with a number of European customers, most of which are based in Central Europe. We have fully integrated our South African business into the group, following the buyout of our South African reseller, and are looking at routes to grow the business through both new and existing customers. Finally, we are also engaging with a number of potential customers in the Middle East, capitalizing on C-Strong regional presence there. This follows us buying out our Middle East reseller in August. Finally, on to slide 19. As we have set out, we have made significant progress with our strategy. Our priorities in the UK are the Lookers and Marshalls implementation, as well as adding further customers from the UK top 100 dealer groups. Our international expansion will be focused on the key geographies that we have identified, North and South America, Central Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia, and South Africa. Finally, our FY28 guidance of underlying EBITDA between 58 to 62 million pounds is underpinned by strong visibility from existing contracts. This includes a $60 million contract with Lithium North America, as well as significant pipeline of opportunities. Lastly, I'd like to thank both the Pinewood AI and C's teams for their hard work and dedication. Thank you for joining us today. We welcome any questions.

Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask an audio question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Please also ensure that your new function is not activated in order to let your signal reach your equipment. That is star 1 for questions. Our first question this morning will be coming from Alex Short, colleague from Barenburg. Please go ahead. Your line is open, sir.

Good morning, though, Oli. I just got a couple of questions from me, please. Firstly, on the quite exciting FY28 guidance, obviously this is underpinned by the Lithia contract, so things can extend. Can we expect that $60 million of revenue in FY28 to come at a similar margin to what the company has historically achieved? And in terms of the visibility from existing contracts, could you perhaps quantify or elaborate a little bit more on this with respect to the cross-sell, up-sell opportunity around SEAS and the add-on products? And then one for Ollie. We obviously saw a fairly material £2.3 million working capital inflow in H125. Is this a sign of things to come? Should we expect a greater proportion of customers to be paying up front in the coming years? And essentially, how should we think about working capital dynamics and cash conversion going forward? Thank you.

Good morning, Alex. This is Bill. I think that's like six questions, but I'll start off with the first half and then let Ollie take the second part. As far as our call out for 2028 of the 58 to 62 million and kind of how much of that is baked in and in the margin that represents for North America on a high level and on core business, the margins coming out of North America will be either at or exceed other geographies that we have in the world. Initially, the expansion of North America, there will be additional costs that are only North American-based. So initially, the net margin will be lower. The gross margin will be still in the 90-plus percent range. On the net margin, it will be lower than that initially. But once we get the full implementation done with Lithia and additional growth opportunities outside of them, we will get and exceed the current margins we have right now. As far as the balance sheet and that stuff, Ollie?

Yeah, Alex, that's a good question. You're right to call that out on the working capital. And as we grow over the next three or four years, that working capital impact will increase in a good way. You're completely right. Almost all of our customers pay quarterly in advance. So as our customer base grows, the benefit from that will grow. So, you know, we're looking as you get into 26, 27, 28, there's going to be sort of

seven or eight million a year of benefit from that from that working capital inflow so yeah that's a good good question good call out all right thank you very much guys thanks alex thanks alex thank you for the question sir next question will be coming from roger phillips calling for investec please go ahead hi guys uh thanks for taking the questions um going back on that uh 58 62 million um of 2028 guidance to what extent What kind of assumption have you made about conversion off your pipeline in terms of what is required there in terms to hit that? Or is it all just entirely based on what you see today in terms of what you've got to roll out for the next couple of years in terms of existing customers? That's the first question. Second question is, in terms of the South African and Middle East transactions, are there more sort of channel transactions like that to happen across the group that you would see over the medium term? And then finally, I may have missed it in the results, so apologies if I did, but could you take a stab at net revenue retention and where you would expect that to trend, please? Thank you.

Perfect. So, Roger, on the first part, looking forward to the $50 to $62 million, by and large, most of that is contracts that are already signed in within the pipeline, Marshalls, Lookers, Lithia, the business we're getting out of Japan, plus our normal historical growth rates that we have into there. So, this isn't, you know, a really aggressive target for that point in time and, you know, with, you know, a little bit of a tailwind and a couple other large, you know, contracts hopefully that we can bring forward in there, there's more of a potential, you know, for upside to that. As far as what we've done in kind of the Middle East and South Africa, to the extent we can, we always want to control as much of our front-facing interactions with our customers. To that extent, we would look at any and all of our kind of resale agreements and the ones that we feel that we could handle to a more direct pathway. We definitely look into that. That said, if we went into a part of the world where maybe culturally, language-wise, we might not be the best qualified to do that, we'd look for more of a partnership to be able to facilitate that. I'm not a big fan of the reseller model, but JV like we did within North America or things along that lines would be definitely something that we'd consider to look into.

Hi, Roger. On the net revenue retention, the short answer is we expect that to be positive. Our customer churn is historically between 0% and 2%, and we certainly see that continuing. And then layered on top of that, we've got our annual price increases we've put through, which are typically based off CPIs. So if that's on average running at 3% or 4%, you get that natural increase there. So look, we would see that being positive going forward for the foreseeable future. Is that okay, Roger? Anything else at all from you?

No, that's great. Thank you very much, Gus. Thanks, Roger.

Thank you, Richard. Ladies and gentlemen, once again, if you have any questions or follow-up questions, please press star 1. We'll now move to Carl Smith of Zeus Capital. Please go ahead.

Hi, morning. Two questions for me. The first is on the gross margin. So do you think this can get back to 90% at a group level and what sort of levers can you pull to get that back up? And then the second question, would you be able to give a sort of indication of the total time to implement the Lookers and Porsche Japan contracts? Should we expect those to be fully implemented by the end of H126 or a bit later?

So on the margin piece, good morning, Carl. We haven't talked in a little bit. On the margin piece right now, that's going to ebb and flow a little bit. First off, 90% margins are definitely on the hot side within this space. And a lot of that's going to depend on how much growth we get out of C's direct consumer sales outside of the Pinewood platform as they sell in geographies where Pinewood doesn't exist yet. So that will ebb and flow. On the core pinewood business, we will be at or be able to exceed that type of a margin. When you start to combine, there will be a little bit of a pullback, but it won't be demonstrative in any type of way. As far as the rollout timings with Japan, Marshalls, Lookers, and as such, Marshalls and Lookers, we look to have those fully done by the end of next year. We will be starting the rollouts in Japan in the end of this year, first part of next year. Those will probably be slow rolls, just the way that market is set up and established. And that'll probably take us into mid-2027 right now, the way that they've kind of laid that piece out with. So, you know, Marshall's Liquors will go through all of 26. Japan will sit here and start at the end of this year and roll us into the mid-27. And then we'll be starting with Lithia, just to go to the next evolution of this, on a full rollout schedule, you know, mid-26 and extending into 2028.

Thank you. I just have one follow-up question. For FY28 and the new targets, are we expecting the full $60 million of revenue in 2028 from Lithia, or is it 60 million by the end of 2028.

Yeah, Carl, hey, it's Ollie. Yeah, so the $60 million is the exit ARR. So we wouldn't expect, as things stand, the full 60 in the year. You know, if Lithia decides to push things forward, that's possible. But yeah, as things stand, as Bill said, if we finish in, say, mid-28, for example, yeah, you'd get a very good proportion of the $60 million, but not all of it in 28, but it would be the exit ARR. So you'd get all of it going forward from there.

Yeah, thank you. Thanks.

Thank you for your question, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, as a final reminder, if you have any questions or follow-up questions, please press star 1. We do not appear to have any further audio questions. Jack, I'd like to turn the call over to you for any questions submitted by webcast. Thank you.

Thank you. We have a question from Oliver Tipping at Peel Hunt. He asks, does the Marshall's delay have any knock-on impact on your ability to execute on other contracts during FY26, or do you have the capacity to execute all other contracts as planned?

Marshall is always going to be primarily rolled out in 2026 from the get-go, so moving from Q4 to Q1 really doesn't make that much of a difference. I think that gives us the position to actually better serve Marshalls as we go into 2026, so this will have no negative impact. We definitely have the resourcing to be able to handle all the implementations we have. North America is a standalone team. For all the U.K. business, it's a separate team, as well as Japan, South Africa, and the such. So we've got a really dedicated and experienced team in the U.K., and they will be handling the commercials and lookers rollouts through 2026.

Great. There are two questions from Andy Wade at Jefferies. The first one you've touched on already, Phil, but he asks, to what extent does your FY28 EBITDA guidance underpinned by existing contracts, including the Lithia US rollouts? And his second question is, why do you think progress in Japan has been more rapid than in Europe? How confident are you about getting deals done there?

Okay. So on the first one, we kind of touched upon that. So by and large, our target for 2028, between 58 and 62 million, is primarily based on our current pipeline of business and traditional growth rates. So this isn't a stretch target necessarily for us. It's not a light layup either, but it's not a stretch target. And with a couple other things that we're working, we think we can get some growth on that as well. While the Japan thing seems like it's moved quickly, it's been a long time in coming. We've been working on that, localizing the product for Japan with Porsche, VW, and Audi and the such. So I think because of the work that the team has done, You know, with our team based in Tokyo, we've gotten ourselves to a place here. I think it's just the timing of when each one of the contracts, Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche, independently of each other, just happened to coincide in kind of a short period of time. But these were years in the making, so I don't necessarily think they were moving that much faster. If you go what's happened in Europe and even in the U.K., once again, we were a little – well, we were severely inhibited by the prior ownership structure being part of Pendragon, an automotive retailer. We were kind of hidden in there. So in the U.K., it kind of hampered us from growth in certain areas, and I think that also kind of layered into – Europe aware as well, where we didn't have the time, the money to necessarily be able to go after that. Now that the shackles are off, so to speak, I think we're going to see a tremendous amount of growth in Europe, like we've seen here in the U.K. and Japan and the U.S. as well.

And Damindi from Peel Hunt has a few questions, and I'll ask them one at a time. The first one is, I saw that there's a job ad for a bilingual program manager for Germany. Could you provide some commentary around how you are scaling your talent as you seek to expand into places like Japan?

Only to be able to notice that and look that piece up. It's not, you know, open the marketplace. We're working on a large opportunity that we have in the German market. And, once again, we're looking to kind of fill some gaps in back to, you know, how do we look to go into other markets where either culture or language-wise we might not be the subject matter experts. So we're looking for staffing into that. There's a great opportunity in Germany as the largest economy in Germany. in mainland Europe, and it's a place where we only have a handful of customers right now. And if you're going to be in Europe, you're going to go after the biggest one. It's kind of like being in North America and not looking at the U.S. So we're going to go after it in a big way, and we're staffing up accordingly. So we're pretty well progressed with some conversations there with a couple of the OEMs as well as some large dealer groups. So hopefully there will be some good stuff to announce in the future.

And sticking with the topic of job ads, Damindu says, I can see there are a number of ads for data engineers and senior business intelligence analysts. Are some of your customers starting to leverage more of the data and become more data driven?

If you look at my thing here, I talked about one of our new things here, which is our automotive intelligence BI platform. So what we've done and one of the new products we've developed in conjunction with SEAS is being able to embed BI reporting within our core stack with a large amount of AI driving some of the functionality of the reporting capabilities into that. So, as we further grow those capabilities in the such, and then this will be an additional revenue stream that we'll be able to offer up to our customers. So, we built something similar to the pin dragon days that sat outside of Pinewood, where Pinewood kind of was the engine and drove a large part of that. The team has taken that and really elevated it and now we have an embedded reporting stack that is able in real time to give you a complete in-depth deep dive into your business at any point in time and that can go for a single point store to a platform level to enterprise level as well and even with customers that might be in multiple countries. to be able to slice and dice the data accordingly. So this is primarily for additional revenue stream and new product that we're bringing to market.

And to Mindy's final question, he says, lastly, I saw Hartwell Automotive Group has become the first dealer in the UK to partner with California-based technology provider Techion. I always think you combined with Techion can disrupt the incumbent giants across the world, but I wasn't expecting to see Techion in the UK. Is there much to read into that?

Listen, Techion has been in the UK for quite a while. Prior to Ingecape selling the retail business, they had done a lot of work with them. Listen, Techion's a great tech stack. I think there's a lot of similarities between the two, and the worldwide market is huge. I think there's more than enough for both of us to succeed. We look at the work they're doing in North America, and they're breaking down a lot of barriers, and I think we're going to be able to benefit from that. And, you know, I think, you know, a lot of the incumbents worldwide, you know, listen, this is a great market, and it's where I live and where we're going after, and obviously I'm from the other end, and I think the team over at Techion and the team here for Pinewood, there's more than enough for all of us.

Great. There are no further questions on the webcast, so I'll hand back to the conference call provider, as I believe there's one other question that's come through on there.

Thank you very much, Jack. Yes, a question has come in. This is going to be from Ian Robertson of Progressive Equity Research. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. Just looking at two things. First of all, when the U.S. product is launched, is it going to be a pan-European, pan-U.S. product? from the get-go, or will you require further work to adapt to different states, different ways of doing things as the years go on? And then looking out to this guidance, you've given a guidance range of 7% variation across it. That's pretty tight. Looking at the top line, your own targets for the revenues for 2028, can you give us an idea of how big the variation is there? And then looking forward, how much visibility do you have on the customer acquisition costs for sort of 2028, 2029 in the US. Is it really going to be much different to Europe or internationally?

So I'll take the first part, good morning, and then I'll have Ollie take the second part. The product that we're going into North America will be agnostic to state or province. So whether it's, you know, product for Mexico, Canada, or the U.S., we're agnostic to that both on the language front. So, you know, the system will operate in, you know, Canadian French as well as, you know, Spanish and various other languages that are – where business is transacted within the U.S., And as far as the states, the biggest difference there is in taxation and licensing, and most of those are done outside of the core operating systems. So there's third-party companies that we can embed into our system for tax tables and such like that. So, yes, the product will be agnostic to state geography, and that goes for all of North America.

Hi Ian, it's Ollie. Yes, so look on your question, I think we've touched on the sort of certainty of that 28 number, and as Bill said, there's a pretty high percentage of that 58 to 62 that is signed contracts. So look, we've got to deliver, but that's their signed contracts, so we've got the same certainty on the revenue as we do on the EBITDA. I think if you want to steer on the revenue, our historic EBITDA margin has been sort of mid-40s, it's there's a little bit of dilution this year but looking medium to longer term I think if you look at that sort of early to mid 40s EBITDA margin you get a good idea on where we're seeing the revenue land at so you can just back solve that and you can get an idea of where we think the FY28 revenue is going to be at. And I think your final question was on the sort of acquisition cost wasn't it for the US and is that going to be significantly different? Our go-to-market strategy is going to be very much aligned whether it's UK, US, Asia, rest of the world but we don't see a significant difference in terms of cost-wise for the UK, for the US and I think One of the earlier questions, Bill said, from a margin point of view, we think the U.S. is going to be at least at that sort of mid-40s EBITDA margin, so we don't see a significant difference in that to what we see in the U.K. or the rest of the world.

Thanks. Great. Thanks, Ian. Thank you for your questions, Mr. Robertson. As we have no further audio questions, I'd like to call back over to Bill for any additional or closing remarks. Thank you very much.

Just thank you, everybody, for joining. And like I said at the end of the initial thing here, at the end of this day, it's not about Ali and I. It's about the team, both for Pinewood and SEAS and the incredible work that they've done. And just a great thank you to them. And thank you, everybody, for your time this morning.