Pinewood Technologies Group PLC

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our FY25 results presentation. I'm Bill Berman, CEO, and I'm joined today by our CFO, Holly Mann. 2025 was our second year as a standalone AI-embedded automotive technology company, and I'm really proud of the progress we've made in that time. The past 12 months have been particularly significant for us due to a number of key transactions and important operational milestones. Holly will take you through the headline financial shortly, but before that, I'm going to take you through an overview of our strategic and operational progress delivered in the period. We have grown our revenue by 30% through my strong growth among new customers, successful upselling to our existing customers, and the revenue added from our SEEDS acquisition in March 2025. In July 2025, there were two events that were key to Pinewood's future. Firstly, we bought Lithia out of the share of the North American joint venture. This removed the competitive overhang that existed and risked impeding our growth prospects in the key market. Secondly, we signed a long-term $60 million contract with Lithia to implement our system in all their U.S. dealerships across the U.S. and Canada. Meanwhile, we've been carrying out testing on the system in North America, which is progressing well. The largest piece of work that we have been focusing on is the North America OEM integrations and is progressing as planned. Almost all of our OEM partners have now been engaged with and integration work is on target. Another key milestone in the period was the acquisition of Seeds, the automotive AI company, in March of this year. Since then, we have made great progress bringing Seeds into the Pinewood Group and integrating the two tech stacks has significantly enhanced our AI capabilities. The contract we signed in March 2025 with Global Auto Holdings including Looker, one of the largest auto dealer trips in the UK. The system rollout with Looker started in July 2025 and is progressing well and on schedule. It is due to complete in Q4 of 2026. I'll now hand over to Ali to take us through the financial review.

Thanks, Bill. Good morning, everyone. We delivered strong revenue growth of approximately 30% to 40.5 million pounds. This increase was due to a number of factors, including the impact from new customers, upsells for our existing customer base and the revenue added from our AI acquisition seeds. We also saw the impact of FY25 in a 12 month period and FY24 being an 11 month period. Gross profit of £34.7 million was 23% up from last year. The gross margin rate of 85.7% fell as expected and reflects Steve's gross margins being slightly lower than the legacy Pinewood business. The key profit metric that we use both internally and externally is underlying EBITDA. In 2025, this was £16.4 million, up 17.1% on FY24. Our recurring revenue of 83.2% is a key metric for us. The slight drop from last year reflects the mix with revenue from SEAS now included. Our net customer churn of 2.5% while higher than FY24 is still at a very low level and highlights how much customers value the PrimeWood platform. A new metric that we've introduced is total contract value. This is the amount of incremental annual recurring revenue from signed customers that have not yet started their PrimeWood system implementation. If a customer is part way through their implementation, the revenue included in total contract value is just the element from dealerships not yet implemented. Our total contract value of 64.5 million pounds on top of our existing revenue will deliver us the majority of our FY28 EBITDA target of 58 to 62 million pounds. On to slide seven, where I'll take you through the key movements in our cash flow during the year. During FY25 we generated £6.5 million of cash from operations. There was a significant gain of £60.8 million on the buyout of Lithia's share of the North American JV that was non-cash. Other key movements in cash included £1.1 million of bank interest received in that period and £10 million received from Lithia for the settlement of a tax debtor. The capital expenditure figure of £11.4 million in FY25 includes £10.5 million of capitalised development spend. During the year, there was a net spend on acquisitions and reseller buyouts of £13.5 million. This was made up of £26 million spent on a feed acquisition, £2.5 million spent on a South Africa reseller buyout, offset by £15 million of cash received as part of the USJD buyout. 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 December 2025 cash position of £34.1 million. On slide 8 is the end of December 2025 balance sheet. There were closing shareholders funds of £204.2 million. with the main driver of the increase from the end of 2024 being a March 2025 equity raise and the July 2025 North American JV buyout. We now have goodwill at 51.5 million pounds on our balance sheet due to the buyout of Lithia's share of the North American JV, the SEAS acquisition, and the South Africa retailer buyout. The increase in our rather intangible assets from 16.3 million to 168 million pounds was driven by the North America JV buyout and the SEAS transactions. with £125 million of the year-end balance relating to the North America customer contract. The majority of the tax liability we have relates to the USJD buyout and will underline if the intangible assets are amortised. Finally, we have £34.1 million in cash. In addition to this cash, we also have a £10 million RCF facility which remains undrawn. On to slide 9, where we show the non-underlying items for FY25. There was £4.6 million of costs related to FY25 acquisitions. Most of this expense was legal fees related to the North America JV buyout and the fees acquisition. Following the buyout of Lydia's share of the North American JV in July 2025, we have incurred £4.2 million of costs in our US subsidiary. As guided previously, these costs will be treated as non-underlying until the Plymouth system is installed in 20 North American dealerships. Our share-based payment charge was £3.6 million in FY25 and there was a £4 million amortisation charge relating to intangibles arriving on acquisition. The final item to call out is that there was a one-off gain of £60.8 million that we recognised on the North American JD buyout. On slide 10, it's confirmation that our current FY28 guidance is unchanged. This is underlying EBITDA of £58 to £62 million in FY28. Approximately £50 million of this figure is covered by existing customers and signed contracts. In terms of FY26, two of the three analysts that cover us released notes following our recent business update on 25th March, 2026. The consensus of their FY26 underlying EBITDA numbers was £21.3 million. We expect underlying EBITDA for FY26 to be in line with this. I'll now hand back to Bill to run through the operating highlights and strategy.

Thanks, Ali. I thought it would be helpful to take the opportunity to remind everyone about the fundamental strengths of Pinewood AI and what sets us apart from our competitors. Firstly, being 100% cloud-based with one code base is extremely unusual in our industry. Our customers are working on the same version of the Pinewood system, whether they're in the UK, US, Europe, Asia, or anywhere in the world. This gives us a number of big advantages. From a security point of view, it is much more secure being in a cloud-based platform than being self-hosted or using on-prem servers. Additionally, we are able to release multiple software updates a week during customer working hours with no disruption at all, which is certainly not the case for the majority of our competitors. Our customer churn is incredibly low, with customers generally only leaving due to M&A or network consolidation. The majority of our revenue is recurring, and it is generally around 85%. The main part of our revenue that is not reoccurring is implementation income. Another key differentiator from our competitors is having a fully embedded AI solution as part of our customer offering. Although having an AI offering is now standard, in most cases it is a layered app on top of a system or basic API. What we have achieved with SEEDS is very different from this. It is a fully embedded AI offering across our entire system. whether you're in vehicle sales, after sales, or back-office talent. With margins being squeezed across the auto retail industry, what we can offer with our AI-powered solution is incredibly powerful. While we continue to innovate and recruit new talent, our experienced workforce underpins what we offer. We have 40 years' experience in the automotive industry, which has made a huge difference in us developing the system we have today. Finally, our deep integrations with our OEM partners remain key to us. We remain committed to being among the best partner for OEMs through our cutting-edge technology and our ability to adapt to the ever-changing auto retail landscape. I'll now take you through the progress we've made against our strategy during 2025. In the UK and Ireland, we started their Lookers implementation in July 2025 and will continue the rollout through 2026 when we expect to be completed. The combined Pinewood and Lookers teams have done an excellent job on the rollout. At the request of Marshalls, we have moved the start date of their implementation from Q1 2026 to the second half of 2026. This is so they can align their timing of the Pinewood rollout with a number of other projects they are working on. In our international markets, the Japan Porsche implementation started successfully in December of 2025, with the first dealerships going live. We look forward to getting all the Porsche Japan dealers onto the Pinewood system and then starting the Japan Volkswagen implementation. We continue to be in discussions with a number of potential Central European groups. The buyout of our South African and Netherlands reseller is now completed, and we are delighted to welcome their team into the Pinewood team. These acquisitions enable us to fully control our sales and customer service function in these markets and put us in a stronger position to drive our continued growth in both regions. The acquisition of SEAS in March of 2025 has made a huge difference to our customer upsell offering, as well as diversifying our revenue streams. The SEAS team put a huge amount of focus into the rollout of SEAS products into the US and UK dealers, as well as growing their wider customer base. The final pillar of our strategy, North America, is comfortably the largest automotive retail market in the world. And I'll take you through our progress on this on the following slides. On slide 14, we set out our expansion plans into the North American market and the progress we have been making. With 20,000 franchise dealers in North America, this is comfortably the largest market in the world with a total addressable market of over $9 billion. We think we are in a strong position to scale across the US and Canadian market. As a reminder, we now have a significant foothold in the key market following the $60 million contract signed with Lithia to implement the Pinewood system in all the dealerships in the United States and Canada. Testing on a number of areas of the system in the U.S. is well underway, with a full rollout expected to start no later than in 2026. The largest piece of the development work that we have for North America is integrating our system into all the U.S. and Canadian OEMs. We have now engaged with the majority of the OEMs that Lithia represents, and integration work is well-progressed with a number of these. We are targeting to have the majority of the North American OEM integrations completed by the end of 2026. Having now bought Lithia out of their share of the North American JV, we are well-placed to now find further customers in the U.S. and Canada and have a number of leads on our official U.S. launch at the February 2026 NADA conference that we are now currently working through. Moving on to slide 15, an update to our recent UK system implementation. Our team have done a brilliant job so far on the LOCERS implementations, working alongside the LOCERS team to ensure the Pinewood platform will go as smoothly as possible. It started in mid-2025 and will continue through 2026. We are pleased that the LitV UK team are seeing the benefits of having Pinewood AI in all the dealerships, and we continue to work with them to help drive their business forward. We are looking forward to starting the Marshalls implementation in the second half of 2026. The Marshall and Pinewood teams have worked together extremely well in the planning phase of this project. We continue to expand our range of products and offer all of these for existing customers to help them drive their business forward by both increasing productivity as well as increasing efficiencies by using the Pinewood products. On slide 16, we set our progress in our priority growth markets outside the UK and the US. We set out some key geographies in our strategy at our Capital Markets Day in 2024. Japan and Southeast Asia, Central Europe, and South Africa. The Porsche Japan rollout started well in December 2025, and we were working well with the Japanese Porsche dealers to work through the rest of the implementations during 2026. Once the Porsche dealers are completed, we will move to the Volkswagen dealers in Japan. 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 in mid-2025, and we are looking at different ways to grow our revenue stream in South Africa. We bought out our final reseller in the Netherlands in February of 2026, and we're currently in the process of integrating the team into Pinewood. To wrap things up on the operating highlights, I just want to repeat some of the characteristics that make our market so compelling. All car dealerships need not only a DMS, but also layered apps associated with it. At Pinewood, we offer all of this, and we are in a position to offer car retailers all the software they need. Our average customer tenure is of 15 to 20 years is a testament to how embedded our system is within our customer's workstream. Switching DMS is a long process and works in our favor for existing customers, but for potential new customers, we offer something no one else does. Being part of an auto retail group for over 25 years has given us a competitive advantage over everyone else, something that no amount of money or investment can replicate. In addition, our now fully embedded AI features differentiate us from everyone else. We are in a unique position to help our valued customers navigate a time of increasing demanding environment from a security and compliance viewpoint. Time with AI offers something no one else is capable of providing. Finally, on to slide 19, in the UK, we will continue to work closely with the Lookers team to manage the rollout through completion in Q4. We are also looking forward to starting the Marshalls rollout later this year. As we've talked through, we have made significant progress in North America on both volume integration and on testing the system in the US. The opportunity in North America is considerably larger than any other part in the world, so scaling here as quickly as possible remains a top priority for us. Finally, our FY28 guidance is unchanged at an underlying EBITDA of 58 to 62 million pounds, which is underpinned by our strong visibility from existing contracts, including the $6 million contract with Lithia North America, as well as a number of other signed contracts. Thank you all members of the Pinewood team for driving us forward as a group. Thank you for joining us today. We welcome any questions.