Autostore Hldgs Reg S

Good morning and welcome to Autostore's Q2 2026 update. My name is Hiva Flaskjer and I'm the investor relations officer at Autostore. I'll be moderating today's meeting and I'm joined by our CEO Mats Hovland Vikse and our CFO Paul Harrison. They're standing ready to walk you through this quarter and answer your questions. As usual, we would like to remind you of our disclaimer in regards to forward-looking statements. It can be read here at your own convenience. Moving on to our agenda. Mats will begin with an overview of our operational performance and strategic progress. Paul will then present the financial results in detail. We will follow with a live Q&A session and you can submit your written questions via the webcast player or ask your questions directly via Teams. The link and information are available on our website. After the Q&A session, Mats will round off with some closing remarks. And as a reminder, all financial figures are stated in US dollars. With that, let's get started. Mats, over to you.

Thanks, Hiva, and good morning, and thank you for joining our Q2 update. We've delivered a very strong quarter here with revenues of 192 million and order intake of 218 million. This is a performance that reflects the significant strategic progress that we've made across the business. In addition to that, we've also continued to see positive market trends. Customers are showing more confidence and we also see a greater focus on building resilient and flexible supply chain, which is just getting more and more relevant in this current environment. And we're no exception to this ourselves. And you see the benefits of our own strengthened supply chain in our continued strong gross margin of 72%. Adjusted EBITDA margin was also very strong at 45%. And then against this backdrop and with improved visibility into our backlog and expected conversion, combined with the fact that we're further into the year, we have today provided full year revenue guidance of around 700 million. This momentum supports further investment in our commercial, product and technology capabilities. And while these investments are expected to slightly moderate margins in the second half of the year, we remain well positioned to deliver strong profitability while investing for the future. Overnight, we've also announced our agreement with Amazon. This is an agreement that establishes a global framework for supplying to Amazon. And whilst there are no purchasing commitments at this time, we're very pleased to continue to develop deeper relationships with our strategic customers. Also, we announced a share buyback program today, just reflecting the confidence we have in our business, our strategy, and our long-term opportunities. And Paul will share more details on this in a moment. So let me now walk you through some of the key developments that underpin our confidence in the business and also the opportunity ahead. So one year ago, we outlined three key priorities. One is to strengthen our product offering. We wanted to deepen engagement with our key customers and building a larger recurring revenue business. We've made progress against all three of these commitments. Looking at product and innovation, we have significantly reduced time to market, launching 14 new products and features over the past 12 months. These innovations have expanded our addressable market through solutions such as AutoCase, while also increasing the value we deliver through software and AI. With close to now 100,000 robots deployed across 2,000 installations worldwide, we have access to just billions of data points from live operations. And this proprietary data set is one of our strongest competitive advantages. This is what provides the foundation for an increasingly intelligent software and AI capability that's just compounding with every robot that we deploy and then enabling us to deliver better insights, better optimization, and greater value to customers over time. We've also strengthened customer engagement across the install base and we're seeing increasing traction from our land and expand strategy. At the same time, we continue to leverage our partner network to scale efficiently and we've now sold into 68 different countries. And lastly, we continue to broaden recurring revenue streams with software embedded in every system sold and Autostore as a service now providing additional flexibility for our customers. But I think what is particularly encouraging is that this progress is now increasingly reflected in our key operating metrics. If you look at this page, we now have 2000 sites globally. Order intake was up 36% in the first half and revenues grew 63% in the same period. And importantly, we have achieved this while continuing to invest in future growth. Our total operating expenses have increased as planned as we invest in innovation, our commercial capabilities, and in expanding our product portfolio, just further strengthening the platform and our position. And while we're pleased with the progress that we've made, we still believe that we're in the early stages of capturing the opportunity in front of us. And we just continue to see that these strategic priorities are the right focus areas. Then looking ahead, we see a clear path to sustained profitable growth and long-term value creation. And behind this confidence lies several key pillars. First, we operate in a large and still significantly under-penetrated market. The majority of warehouses globally remain unautomated, and we continue to believe that automation adoption will increase over time. Second, within this attractive market, we believe Autostore holds a unique competitive position. We have a market-leading technology platform with the largest install base and a customer value proposition that's characterized by rapid payback. Third, our go-to-market model allows us to combine this scale with customer intimacy. We continue to deepen engagement with customers directly whilst also leveraging our partners to expand our reach and support our land and expand strategy. And finally, we continue to invest in innovation. We have now expanded our offering through new products, AI, software capabilities, and solving adjacent use cases, just increasing the number of opportunities where AutoStore can create value for customers. And we won't stand still. But importantly, all of this is then underpinned by attractive profitability, strong cash generation, and disciplined capital allocation. And taken together, we believe this provides a clear path to long-term value creation. And one of the strengths of Autostore is the diversification of our business. We serve customers across several end markets with no single vertical representing a significant share of revenue. We're also fortunate to work with many leading global companies just demonstrating the relevance of our solution across a wide range of industries and use cases. And while we've already built a highly diversified business, we still see significant opportunity to deepen our presence across these end markets and expand with both new and existing customers. And it's always nice to end with a nice customer story. QLS is a good example of how our innovation efforts are translating into customer value. The installation that you're about to see utilizes newer capabilities such as the Flex Spins, which is enabling the system to accommodate a wider range of inventory and customer requirements. So before handing it over to Paul, please have a look at this video.

At QLS we work with fantastic brands from fashion to electronics. With the AutoStore system we can serve all those customers exceptionally well with high quality and as a result get the orders to consumers homes as quickly as possible. QLS originally started out as a parcel carrier for other companies and when we got to know them they had already taken their first steps into fulfillment. AutoStore was the right match.