Pinewood Technologies Group PLC

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our H1FY26 results presentation. I'm Bill Berman, CEO, and I'm joined today by our CFO, Ollie Mann. The first half of 2026 saw strong strategic and operational progress alongside continued growth. Our teams continue to deliver and drive the company forward, including in North America, where the rollout of Pinewood.ai platform is gathering momentum. In August, we announced a recommended acquisition by Ridgeview Partners, The acquisition was approved by shareholders last week and is expected to complete within the next month. I'll expand on that shortly. Ali will then take you through the headline financials in a few minutes. But before that, I'm going to touch on the strategic and operational progress from the first half of 2026. In the first half of 2026, our key priorities have been, first, progressing on our North American product and development work. Secondly, continuing our system implementation with Lookers, as well as various other customers throughout the UK and Europe, as well as Porsche Japan. Thirdly, working closely with Marshalls so we move near to starting the rollout with them in 2026. Lastly, in addition to selling the core system, selling our expanding suite of products to both existing and new customers. on our North American development work has continued at pace throughout 2026, both on the all-important OEM integrations, but also to ensure that the system being rolled out is the best in class offering in the US and Canada. We have been working closely with Lithia's team to ensure we hit our target rollout start in Q4 of 2026. We are in track to do this, and this is a testament to the hard work by both the Pinewood and Lithia teams. In the UK, we have continued the system implementation of the low-cost dealers and expect this to conclude in the first half of 2027. We have also been laying the groundwork with Marshalls to ensure that their system implementation gets off to a smooth start with that work well underway. Our product and development teams have developed some excellent new products in the last few years, alongside the AI products we acquired with the CE's transaction last year. We're now seeing the benefits of that work as we increase our sales across existing customer base as well as new customers. One of the strongest proof points of the value that customers place in the solution is churn. In fact, we actually had negative churn through the first half of 2026 with increased system usage from our existing customer base. In mid-August, we announced a recommended offer from Regu Partners to acquire the group. The cash offer of £4.48 represented an attractive premium and provide Pinewood AI with access to deep technology expertise, long-term capital, and partner with a strong track record of helping software businesses scale. Given how supportive our shareholder base has been over the last few years, with a firm belief in the growth opportunity for Pinewood, particularly North America, we felt it was important that we had a chance to continue to be involved in our journey. With that in mind, shareholders also had the opportunity to roll some of their stake over into the post-transaction business. We are delighted that so many shareholders took up that option and continue to be part of the next chapter of our journey with us. Following the successful shareholder vote last Friday on the 25th of September, the deal is now expected to complete between the 9th and the 23rd of October. I'll now hand it over to Ali to take us through the financial review.

Thanks, Bill. Morning, everyone. In the first half of FY26, our underlying revenue grew by 18.4% to £23.2 million. This increase was driven by a number of factors, including the positive impact from new customers, upsell to our existing customer base, and having a full six months of contribution from SEAS, whereas in the first half of FY25, we only had four months' worth of SEAS revenue following the acquisition of that business at the start of March 2025. Underlying gross profit of £19.8 million was 16.5% up on last year. The gross margin rate of 85.3% fell slightly as expected and reflects Caesar's gross margins being lower than the wider Pinewood business. Underlying EBITDA, which is our key profit metric, was up by 11.4% to £8.8 million in H1FY26. We have maintained our recurring revenue at around the 85% mark with a marginal drop from last year. The majority of our non-recurring revenue is from new customer system implementations. Our net customer churn was negative in the first half of the year, meaning usage from our existing customer base on a like-for-like basis actually increased in the period, which demonstrates the importance of the Pinewood system to our customers. On slide 8, you can see the movements in our cash flow during the first half of 2026. During H1 FY26, we generated £1.9 million of cash from operations. The reduction from £8.5 million in the first half of FY25 was due to the increased investment in our North American operation, which is shortly due to become revenue generating once the first Lithia US dealers go live in Q4 2026. The capital expenditure figure of £8 million in H1FY26 includes £6.4 million of capitalised development spend. In the first half of 2026 we completed the buyout of our final reseller which was based in the Netherlands for £3.3 million. We have now bought out all of the resellers that we had. These movements were the primary drivers of the net decrease in cash of £10.4 million. leading to an end of June 2026 cash position of £23.9 million. On slide 9 is the end of June 2026 balance sheet. There were closing shareholders funds of £198.9 million with the main driver of the increase from the end of June 2025 being the July 2025 North American JP buyout. We now have goodwill of £54.9 million on our balance sheet due to the buyout of Lithia's share of the North American JV, the SEAS acquisition and the South Africa and Netherlands reseller buyouts. Our intangible assets balance of £166.2 million primarily arose through the North America JV buyout and SEAS transactions, with the majority of the balance relating to the North America customer contract. Most of the tax liability we have relates to the USJV buyout and will unwind as the intangible assets are amortised. Finally, we have £23.9 million in cash. In addition to this cash, we also have a £10 million RCF facility, which remains undrawn. On to slide 10, where we have the non-underlying items for the first half of FY26. There was a £0.3 million debit to revenue relating to the amortisation of the Global Auto Holdings warrants We had £9.1 million of administrative expenses in our North American operation in the first half of the year As guided previously, these costs will be treated as non-underlying until the Pinewood system is installed in 20 North American dealerships As we start our system implementations for Lithia's North America dealers in Q4 2026, we will start to offset these costs as our North American revenue grows. There was a £2.8 million credit relating to net fair value gain on the Looker's Warrants. Our share-based payment charge was £2.2 million in H1 FY26 and there was a £4 million amortisation charge relating to intangibles arising on acquisition. I'll now hand back to Bill to run through the operating highlights and strategy.

Thanks, Ollie. Most of you will be familiar with this slide, which sets out Pinewood's key strengths and what sets us apart from our competition. As I mentioned earlier, when talking about the first half of 2026, our customer churn is extremely low, with customers generally only leaving us if their organization is bought out by a larger group using a competing system or if a customer goes out of business, with both of these happening rarely. I've spoken previously about the importance of being 100% cloud-based with one code base, which is still unusual in our industry. Our customers all being of the same version of the system whenever they are in the world is a big advantage for us. From a security point of view, it's much more secure being a cloud-based platform than being hosted or using on-prem servers. Additionally, we are able to release software updates in a controlled manner, keeping our customers fully informed about any updates in the system functionality. The majority of our revenue is reoccurring and generally covers around 85%. Our customers pay quarterly in advance for the majority of their products. The main part of our revenue that is not reoccurring is the implementation income, which we charge to new customers and some existing customers for one-off pieces of work. Having a fully embedded AI offering with multiple AI products sets us apart from the majority of our competitors. In addition to our AA products being fully embedded, they are also available to new customers on a standalone business without the main platform. While we continue to innovate and recruit new talent, our expert experience workforce underpin what we offer. We have 40 years experience in the automotive industry, a large portion of which has been part of an automotive retail group. We have a unique team, many of whom worked with us both in the software and auto retail industries. Finally, our partnerships with the OEM partners are central to our success. We have excellent relationships with our OEMs all around the world and our market leading technology means that our integrations with them are seamless and the benefit of all of our customers. I'll now take you through the progress we made against our strategy during H1 2026. We have made good progress on the lookers implementation in the first half with a number of important brands for lookers now operating on the Pinewood system. The combined Pinewood and Lookers team worked together really well on that rollout. We continue to work closely with Marshalls on finalizing preparations for the rollout, and we're in good position to start that immediately. In our international markets, we have recently signed a contract with our first German group and have more expected to follow in the next several months. In Japan, the Porsche rollout is going well. We expect to begin the Japan Volkswagen implementation in the second half of 2027. We brought our Netherlands reseller out in March of 2026, which means that we have no longer any other resellers. Our product suite continues to develop at pace with a number of products that our teams have developed over the last two years, now available to sell to customers along with the market leading AI offerings we now have following the SEAS acquisition last year. The final pillar of our strategy, North America, is by some distance the largest automotive retail software market in the world. We are now on the verge of having the Pinewood system live in the United States by the end of 2026, which will be a huge achievement. But just the beginning of our story in North America. We have hugely ambitious plans to firstly implement the system with Lithia and Global Auto Holdings North America, but alongside this to grow our market share as quickly and as aggressively as possible. Finally, on to slide 15. In the UK, we will continue to work alongside the Looker's team to continue the rollout in the first half of 2027. We look forward to starting the Marshalls rollout imminently. With the Pinewood platform about to go live in the US, we are entering an exciting period in the company's history. We could not have a better partner to launch there with the Lithia team, and we look forward to growing our market share in the US and Canada shortly thereafter. The acquisition by Ridgeview Partners will also accelerate our growth trajectory in all markets, but particularly in North America, where there is a significant addressable market. Thank you to all the members of the Pinewood team for the continued hard work in driving this forward. We'd like to thank all of our shareholders for the support after the last two to three years and rely that many of them are rolling their stake to the continued journey with us. Thank you for joining us today.