Autostore Hldgs Reg S

Good morning and welcome to Autostore's third quarter 2024 presentation. My name is Hiva Florskjær and I'm the head of investor relations at Autostore. And I'll be moderating this webcast today. As usual, I'm joined by two members of our executive team, Mats Hovlandvikse, Autostore CEO, and Paul Harrison, our CFO. We would like to remind you of our disclaimer with regards to forward-looking statements. It can be read here at your own convenience. Moving on to our agenda, Mats and Paul will present the quarter's operational and financial development. And as usual, all financials are stated in US dollars. We will be hosting a Q&A session right after the prepared presentation. And you will be able to post written questions in the webcast player starting now. Similar to the last few quarters, you'll also be provided with an opportunity to log on to the Teams webcast via Teams link and ask your verbal questions directly to the management. You can find the Teams link available on our IR webpage. After the Q&A, MOTS will round off with some final... Good morning and welcome to Autostore's third quarter 2024 presentation. My name is Hiva Florskjær and I'm the Head of Investor Relations at Autostore. And I'll be moderating this webcast today. As usual, I'm joined by two members of our executive team, Mats Hovlandvikse, Autostore CEO, and Paul Harrison, our CFO. We would like to remind you of our disclaimer with regards to forward-looking statements. It can be read here at your own convenience. Moving on to our agenda, Mats and Paul will present the quarter's operational and financial development. And as usual, all financials are stated in US dollars. We will be hosting a Q&A session right after the prepared presentation. And you will be able to post written questions in the webcast player starting now. Similar to the last few quarters, you'll also be provided with an opportunity to log on to the Teams webcast via Teams link and ask your verbal questions directly to the management. You can find the Teams link available on our IR webpage. After the Q&A, Mats will round off with some final remarks. And with that, I'll hand over the word to you, Mats.

Thank you, Iva. So, looking at the highlights, our financial performance is consistent with our recent capital markets day communication. Revenue came in at 144 million, which is slightly above the guided range of 135 to 140 million. Order intake was 144 million, down slightly year over year and on par with the previous quarter. Looking at the profitability of our business, we continue to pose strong margins with gross margins of 73.5% and adjusted EBITDA margins of 46.8%. And while we remain focused on profitability, we continue to invest in long-term growth. For 2024 as a whole, we reiterate our revenue guidance from the CMD at 575 to 600 million. Then turning our focus to operational highlights, I am pleased to announce the appointment of Keith White as the new Chief Commercial Officer. Keith comes in and adds valuable experience to our team with a proven track record of leading go-to-market organizations and growth at businesses such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft. So Keith will be a very strong addition to our management team. Also, back in September, we released several new products, including an expanded 18-level grid, which increases storage density by up to 12.5%, a multi-temperature solution, which includes a frozen section, and a motorized service vehicle. In addition to that, we announced several developments within this Cube control software, which altogether improved the overall efficiency of our system. Going forward, we will release our products with this biannual cadence. So I mentioned the Capital Markets Day. So let me also take this opportunity to give you the key highlights. On the day, we talked about the contraction that we've seen in the market in the last couple of years. This market remains challenging as we stand here today. And we have delivered well relative to that market, but not relative to our own ambitions. And whilst we can't control the market development, we are taking actions on a micro level to drive growth. And these actions are designed not only with our long-term strategy in mind, but also to drive stronger performance in the current market. So now lifting our focus, we are unwavering in our confidence that the market will return because of the secular growth drivers resulting from long-term e-commerce adoption, warehouse automation penetration, labour availability and just rising labour costs. Within this attractive market, Autostore is uniquely positioned to continue to gain share. And at the CMD, we talked about market growth expectations, our financial profile, our product and approach to innovation, and also our multiple ways to win. And all of this makes me very excited about the growth opportunity we have in front of us. And I do encourage all of you to watch the CMD recordings and material that we have on our webpage. But for now, let me play a short video that sums up the day. Thank you.

We were trying to find what's the right solution for this. Automation can be incredibly expensive. Automation deployed that doesn't work is even more expensive. And so for us, it was important that we found a tried and true complement to our supply chain. And so we got on planes and we flew to Europe. We went to visit multiple sites. We looked at cranes. We looked at AGVs. And then we found auto stores. Now think about this timeline in front of you though, over the course of three years, we actually deployed eight auto stores. So remember they talked about the ability to scale this technology, the ability to implement it with speed. Like I was talking to my team, if you think about this from the time we wrote a PO to the time the system was up in most cases, 12 months or less, that's incredible. You can't do that in other systems.