Ocado Group Plc

Good morning, everyone. Very good to be with you here today to talk about FY25. And FY25 was a year of real tangible growth for Ocado, but one that also saw the business mature in a number of important ways. and while we've seen robust growth in the business and good progress across most of our global operations, we also work to help some partners address a number of key challenges in their early network decisions. This included constructive engagement with our partners in North America, as they made decisions to close sites in areas where demand had not evolved as initially expected. And in fact last year we reflected that a number of our partners were looking at a small number of sites which required a different strategic approach. And while the decisions made in North America to close were difficult, it does reflect a mature approach with those partnerships and putting them on a stronger foundation for long-term and sustainable growth. With exclusivity now having ended in North America, we've begun the journey to re-engage in many of the commercial opportunities available in that very large, world's largest grocery market. And Tim will reflect on this and Ocado's approach to re-entering the wider global opportunity as Ocado moves into this next phase of commercial growth. So I look forward to hearing more about that soon. I've now been chair for just over a year and during that period I've spent a lot of time engaging closely with a range of stakeholders and reflecting on what I've learned, I remain still very excited about the significant opportunity that remains to solve a range of business issues across the omnichannel journeys of our retailers. And Ocado itself is still a business that has a huge breadth of talent, a unique and world-leading technology platform, a visionary leadership team, and a scale commercial relationship with many of the leading retail brands around the world. I've enjoyed getting under the skin of these issues over the past year, and while recognizing that executing in a competitive and ever-changing world is challenging, I do believe Ocado is well positioned to take advantage of the significant global opportunity, both with current and future partners. I particularly value the time spent with many of our Ocado partners including counterparts at Coles, Ocado Retail of course, Kroger and of course our JV partner M&S. This engagement gives a tremendous window into the strategic thinking of our partners and in particular a depth of understanding on how some of the world's most successful retailers think about their own long-term success and growth. Today you'll hear from Stephen and Tim about progress we're making towards the key priorities that we laid out at the half year. First of all, our core priority to turn cash flow positive later this year with full year cash generation in FY27. the measures that we're taking to drive continued growth and greater efficiency with our partners, and lastly, how we're reconfiguring key parts of the business to make sure we're well set to take advantage of the renewed and significant global opportunity. So over to you, Stephen.

Thank you, Adam, and good morning, everybody. Hope you're all well. Thank you for joining us at today's For year 25 results, I'm going to take you through the financials. Next slide, please. Oh, sorry, I've got this here, haven't I? Okay. Here are the headlines. So good financial progress across the board, really. Revenue grew, grew revenue by 12%. I'm going to take you through the logistics and the tech solutions growth shortly. We had strong adjusted EBITDA growth of £66 million to £178 million. The underlying cash flow, if you exclude the legislative credit, was a £213 million outflow. But if you were to take that into account, underlying cash flow would be £113 million better driven by that receipt from the letter of credit. I should say up front, by the way, on the closure fees from the four site closures and on the letter of credit, the accounting is not straightforward. It mostly impacts fiscal 26 and future years, but we've included in the appendix a couple of charts that show you how it all works for when you come to do your modelling. So I just wanted to make that open up front. The retail, sorry, the underlying cash flow to the credit talks about that. Liquidity. Finished the year yet again with healthy liquidity of £700 million or so of cash and the access to the revolving credit facility. This has been bolstered further by the £279 million inflow that came in post the year end. So we're sitting on very good cash balances today. It does mean, and I'll get into it when we look at our debt chart shortly, if we approach our debt maturities, there's optionality there. Certainly in the first instance, the £350 million convertible bond that's due in January 27, we can pay out of cash, which we'll see our gross debt number starting to come down. Important factor for us, particularly when you see the trend in interest costs. Yet again, we achieved our guidance for revenue, margin, and cash flow targets and hit all of those. There's probably nothing more I'll say here, so I'll take you through the detail now of each business. Here's the statutory chart getting you to your earnings before tax of £403 million, a positive number, but benefiting, of course, from the big adjusting item of the valuation of Ocado Retail at the stake of our 50% in Ocado Retail when we deconsolidated the asset and M&S took over consolidation. As a consequence of that, we took our value that we put in at one and a half billion pounds or so, half of that, and then we adjust for the assets that are on our balance sheet to get to that adjusting item's income. A couple of other call-outs. Tech Solutions revenue growth, I'll go through that. Logistics, 11%. I think it's probably worthwhile calling out the finance cost line. A 48 million pound increase in our interest costs. As I've mentioned earlier, there are plans to address that debt and gradually reduce that gross debt level. I'll get to that shortly. So Accordo Group adjusting items. Here is the key item up there at the top that I talked about, Jones Food. If you recall, went into administration last year. We wrote off those assets that were consolidated on our balance sheet. We were the consolidating company. The Kroger of lesser credit, the pre-fiscal 25. So whilst the cash was received in early this year, sorry, last year, in fact, there is an accounting recognition of the revenue in related to prior periods, which is an adjusting item in a prior period. You'll see at the chart at the back how it works. It's not straightforward. the organizational restructure. That is not the costs of the restructuring that we're about to do. We did a relatively small amount of restructuring, principally in G&A and in technology in the first half of this year. So there's a small amount in there. The rest is pretty straightforward. So tech solutions. Well, you know the business model, grow the average number of live modules. On that point, and we'll come to it shortly, that's probably the key number in respect to becoming a cash flow positive business, full year fiscal 27, turning cash flow positive in the second half of 26. 121 modules today, driven by the growth there is driven by new sites going live. We've got around six sites going live over the next couple of years, but also drawdowns in existing sites. Those are the two drivers of that growth in modules. The quicker we grow our utilization of those sites, fill their capacity, the more modules and CFCs that are ordered going forward. That's a key metric for us. Recurring revenues make up the bulk of that revenue, that £444 million, growing by 7%. And as you'd expect, that's in line with the growth in average number of live modules, but also the fees that we get, as you'll see shortly, per module that are indexed every year to local inflation. The non-recurring revenue, a material increase in non-material revenue by £41 million, but there's lots of noise within that number. A lot of it that's in there is around the Morrison's fee that we got when they exited their five modules out of Erith. I think there's about £17 million or so there. And then there's about a £15 million number in respect to the closure fees as well. So you'll see that detail check later on in the pack in the appendix. Other than that, contribution margin for tech solutions, an improving contribution margin of 72%. Of course, the revenue does benefit from those items that I mentioned, but we've also included a potential decommissioning provision in there in respect of those site closures. So just to make sure that we've balanced it out, that we haven't taken all of that benefit directly to contribution. There is some provision in there as well. These are the expensed items of the technology spend and then support costs. That's the G&A cost that exists, but it's also the partner-facing teams as well. As you'll see shortly in the slide, it's sales team, but it's also G&A corporate overhead type teams. Okay. left hand chart showing the progression of average live modules. Now clearly as we approach 26 and 27, we are going to be hindered in 26 by of course the sites that have closed. in recently that were part of that 121 number. We make that up by the sites that go live, we also make it up by Ocado retail drawing down on further modules as well, which they will do, self-evident, we're going to show you shortly where they are on their capacity, but as they're growing as strongly as they are in another year, we've grown 15% revenue growth. And that's driven by volume as well, that's a volume-driven growth. Better revenue per module, I talked about that, that progression, indexation playing a part there, drives our recurring revenues. That's the maths. So here you go, go live of CFCs and drawdowns to drive the growth following the resets. Here on the right hand side, we call out the CFCs we expect to go live over the next couple of years. And again, there's some bullet points there that just reinforce my earlier comments around module drawdowns and the importance of those. We expect by fiscal 27 to be at least 125, and we're targeting over 130. But for the purposes of the modeling of cash flow positive, this range does the job. We expect we can go further than that, but let's get there when we do. That's our ambition. Okay, direct operating costs. We expect those to benefit further going forward, but you can see the progression here. continued efficiency in the operations, we do think we can get to these being below 25% and therefore an over 75% contribution margin. Technology spend, you can see how it's declined in fiscal 25 to a total across CapEx and P&L costs of £248 million. We will be seeing shortly in the guidance that we give for fiscal 27, again the cash flow positive, we're looking at around £100 million or so reduction in that spend over the next two years. We have made it very clear for quite a while that the last five or six years has been a peak investment period for us. If you recall, we launched those reimagined innovations in January 2022, and now they're going into the market. With our partners taking those, Ocado Retail in the UK, Kroger in the US and so on, ordering them and seeing the productivity gains that Ocado Retail is already benefiting from. So it's a natural part of our evolution as we expected for this technology spend to start to wind down. SG&A costs will reduce further as we focus on a leaner operating model. You'll see that in the mixed area of SG&A costs that we've actually, I know it's split in a first half, second half split, we'll show it a little later, we've actually put an extra £6 million into partner-facing sales teams, and G&A costs have come down by the same £6 million. So whilst it's flat year-on-year, the mix has changed quite significantly, and we'll continue in that direction. Again, that number we're expecting there to be about £50 million lighter in 27 versus where it is currently today in fiscal 25. That gets you to your £150 million of cost savings. According to logistics, okay, 11% growth in revenue. Orders, again, it's volume-driven growth, as you might expect. So what would I call out on this slide? Pretty reliable EBITDA number that we're generating. EBITDA has grown a little year over year. Some of that, I should say, is down to TSAs that have rolled off, that we provided to Ocado Retail that we're now charging for as those transition services agreements have concluded. So we're getting more profitability out of the business. Each year's growth of 8%, orders per week up 10%, in line with revenue growth. UPH, again, we're going to see a chart in a while that shows that UPH progression, really important part of the business model and the investment case for Ocado, which is the productivity our technology can bring to warehouses, drive down labour counts and drive down labour costs where the labour is becoming more expensive and more scarce, a really important part of our investment case. And going through those metrics, there you go, you can see the progression in UPH. Luton has had a peak of 318 UPH recently. We averaged 289 with fiscal 25. And then DPA, pretty steady at around the 21 number, 21.5 this year. So just close to 22 drops per van per eight-hour shift. Got a retell. Another really strong year for Ricardo Retail, revenue growth at 15%, strong growth in our customers and growing our market share in the online grocery market. 15% revenue growth, gross profit up by 14%. Across these cost lines, you can see the operational leverage coming through as well. With the revenue growth of 15%, CFC costs up just 7%. Service delivery, that was hit hard by UK labour inflation, but also by the national insurance changes that kicked in over the last year or so. Utility costs flat year on year. Support costs, you can see, growing by just 8%, and marketing costs growing by just 3%. So good operational leverage in the business model. What else? I think I've pretty much highlighted the key things there. The underlying EBITDA margin, if you were to add back the £33 million of Hatfield fees, is now a 3.8% number. We expect those Hatfield fees to reduce as Ocado Retail orders more modules. There is a credit system in place that as they place more, order more modules for every three ordered, roughly there's around a two reduction in the Hatfield fees number, which is a 13 module count for that business, for that, sorry, that warehouse. Carter Retail, structural and volume-led sales growth. Orders per week, so it's a volume-driven growth, not a price-driven growth. 13% growth in orders. Average basket value up slightly at 1.3%. And I think you'll be familiar with these trends. Okay, again, customer growth. now comfortably over 1.2 billion, 1.2 million, sorry, basketing items, stable, and utilization. There's the chart, the important one for us. We like that chart because it means they're going to be ordering more modules and CFCs shortly. Watch this space on that one. So our cash flow, when you put this all together, this is from an EBITDA basis down to a cash flow basis. In fiscal 25, there's our EBITDA basis. The cash received into contract liabilities, that's the cash that actually came in. We deduct then, of course, the amount that was recognized through the P&L account, which is part of the EBITDA number, and because that's the non-cash item, we take that out. The working capital movements we benefit from, there's the interest payment line that I highlighted earlier, £46 million increase in that cash outflow year over year. CapEx, pretty much in line with last year. CapEx is principally the CFCs, of course, the MHE, but also our technology spend. OAI CapEx, that's related to McKesson. Lease liabilities, no movements there, and nothing to write home about in the other line. And then finally, the proceeds from the letter of credit of £113 million getting used to that underlying cash flow of £100 million. Net cash inflows, when we take into account the final receipt from AutoStore, from that settlement that we concluded, agreed with them around three or four years, three years ago now, that's the final payment that's now come through. On our financing, we actually paid, we paid down less debt than the amount of debt that we'd raised and benefiting with 58 million pounds on the balance sheet, which you see today. Other items, you may have read that we've sold our stake in Paneltex, which was a very small £400,000 investment, and we've got back comfortably our money back from the valuation of that sale, which is around a £20 million sale or so. And we own 25% of the business. Okay. It's the outlook for the year ahead. or the next couple of years. This goes back to my earlier comments. We have guided for quite a while that we'd be heading towards 20% of recurring revenues. When you do the math, this is the 250 million pounds or so that we spent across CapEx and P&L spend in fiscal 25, declining about 100 million pounds to 150 in fiscal 27. Tim will be talking more about that during his pack. Other than that, I will then move on. CapEx has been waiting to reimagine. So as you can imagine, you can see the composition of the capital items in fiscal 25 in the pie chart at the top there. And then there's more commentary around the 26 and the 27 targets outlook. The cost that we are taking out of the business of 150 million pounds in aggregate, that will be an exercise that is commencing now. The key events will be in March, and then later in the year as well there'll be another event. We'll just see how that progresses over the course of the year. It will take place, I should have said it will conclude by the end of November. There'll be progressive reductions over the course of the next six months. There's a better way of framing it. Lowering and leveraging our SG&A costs remains a key focus for us. This £50 million of costs come out of this area. You can see the trend has been a downwards trend. You can see the shift there between the blue and the green bars around partner-facing teams and corporate functions. I think I've pretty much commented on this dynamic already. There's the £150 million, putting it all together. Again, just reinforcing that point. And summarising the key building blocks to be cash flow positive for the full year 27. Live modules of 125 to 130 plus. I've explained the drivers of those. That will generate a contribution of around £400 million with a cash contribution of Circa £3 million per module. Total tech spend and SG&A spend will be around £250 million. From around, you can see the £400 million in fiscal 25, that's the 150 saving. And then we get a variety of other net inflows, including upfront receives from partners. We typically get about £34 million a year from, £30 to £40 million a year from those. Logistics cash inflows, the business that generates cash for us. Take off our lease costs and then whatever the movement is on working capital from year to year. Net interest costs, we've modelled £80 to £100 million, but hopefully there'll be opportunity there to reduce that, given our strong liquidity, and as I said, when we look at our debt stack and options to address some of that debt. We've concluded here in the final bullet there'll be sufficient cash flow to be cash flow positive and to fund circa 10% module growth. So one could argue that if we did a 15% module growth in fiscal 28 versus 27, we wouldn't have the cash flow. We might not be cash flow positive because we're putting the capex in. That's a high-quality problem, I think. We'll cross that bridge when we get there. That would be the only reason why we wouldn't hit our target if we had some big orders for delivery in 28 and 29. But I think both Tim and I would actually welcome that. Okay, managing our debt maturities, and I've talked about this. You can see here, by the way, the £56 million convertible bond due December 25, we paid that off, if you recall, just after the year end. The £500 has gone away. This is the one we'll be targeting out of cash, the £350. And there may be opportunities as we look through with our cash balances to look at those other three debt items that we've got as well. So I think you can pretty comfortably expect our gross borrowings number to start to come down quite significantly, which would be good news. So summary guidance, tech solutions, revenue of around £500 million and adjusted EBITDA margin of around 30%. Logistics, more of the same. No great surprises in there. We're going to be having, somewhat perversely, a £200 million outflow in the year that we turn cash flow positive. A lot of that is driven around the timing of our cost reduction, the activities that I talked about, the sequencing over the year. You get the full year benefit in 27, but you then see a partial year benefit in fiscal 26, which explains a lot of this dynamic. CapEx will be around £250 million. And those are all the key numbers of our guidance. And that concludes it. There you go. I'll just repeat those messages. Good management of our balance sheets. I think we've been pretty good and proactive there on debt management. Strong financial performance in 2025. Cost and capital discipline becoming a key theme for the organisation. And again, the core priority is to turn positive during the second half, but it's backed up by a very robust plan as well. Thank you very much. Tim, over to you.

Thank you, Stephen. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Right, let's move on. I'm going the wrong way. Okay. Right. So we've had a good year in a number of ways. So I think one of the key metrics is that first one is that's the international CFC volume growth of the 26%. So we just want to keep helping our clients to grow. We're helping them to grow more and more. And we want to see that number continue to grow. And the compounding effect of that will lead to more and more drawdowns of modules that are available in existing CFCs as well as demand for future CFCs. Just again, to give you some idea of scale, we shipped 72 million orders across the whole of the OSP platform last year with more than a 98% fulfillment rate, 0.7% of average OSP waste. And then we saw quite a lot of efficiency coming into the platform last year. We got across the platform to a 21 DPA on a weighted average basis across all of our clients. We saw an average of a 10% improvement in CFC productivity across our clients. And as Stephen mentioned before, in the financial year, we achieved 318 UPH in Luton and since the end of the financial year have got into the 320s. The metrics keep getting better, and to put it into context, that 318 UPH, that means that a 40-item order is fulfilled using less than eight minutes of human endeavor compared to about 75 minutes to do the same thing in a manual operation picked in store. So as you know, we've been busy working with our partners on partner success. That's the one area that Stephen outlined where we've been spending more money, improving our partners. We thought we'd pick a couple of examples just to show you not just what the equipment is capable of doing, but how we help our partners and what kind of results we achieve. So this is one warehouse. where we've been working closely with one of our partners. Again, because of part of confidentiality, I won't get into exactly who they are. Please don't ask me. But this is an international warehouse. This is a combination of... Two things. This is a combination of new software and operational advice. In this particular first example, this is DP8. So this is deliveries coming out of that warehouse. And we helped over an eight month period to get a 34% improvement in the number of drops per shift. To put it into context, actually the top of that graph is 25 DP8. So actually it's higher than the UK. The UK is not the standout performer on DP8. We have achieved greater results in some of our international warehouses. And so this is not a question of somebody who is extremely poor becoming less extremely poor. These are actually quite impressive numbers and are significantly ahead of our partners' expectations. If we choose a UPH example, here is a UPH example. It's a five-month period that we went in and helped a partner inside their warehouse. We improved their labour productivity by a third in just five months. That is a combination of better operational processes where we're helping partners in their planning and in their operations, as well as a rollout of some of, an early rollout of some of the reimagined kit into that building. But so quite meaningful results in short periods of time. We brought back in Lawrence Heaney, who used to run a significant part of Cardo Retail for many years, and he's leading our partner success efforts, working alongside Nick de la Vega, who's come in to run our revenue sales and partner relationships. So significant progress in those areas. In terms of CFC's driving growth, here are some comments which I won't read them out, I'll let you read them yourselves from some of our newer partners, Alcampo, Ocean Polska and Coles, who all have opened warehouses recently, who are all seeing strong growth in their sites ahead of the wider online markets that they operate in, are achieving incredible NPS scores from their customers. What we're seeing is if you take an existing geography where you have existing store-based operations and move them into a warehouse, you can see not only enormous pickups in NPS, customer satisfaction generally, but you can also see 30% to 50% growth beyond the market and beyond your baseline in a very short period of time. from the better performance, better availability, better fulfillment, fresher goods that arrive from putting those volumes into the warehouses. I think obviously we've spoken a bit about the warehouses that have closed. You need to put volume through warehouses. These are examples of retailers that have got some volume from store-based operations. Putting that volume into warehouses makes enormous sense. So historically, we built warehouses that were designed to largely do fulfillment from order today, deliver tomorrow. We've talked before, we talked at Reimagined about inventing new software that would enable these warehouses to be used for order today and deliver today. We have been rolling out that software during the course of the year. We are still in the early stages of rolling out that software. It is currently available for rollout with all of our partners, and we expect it to be in the vast majority of warehouses before the end of the year. It's currently deployed in nine CFCs. we've seen the earliest deliveries from order to delivery of 73 minutes. Now, 73 minutes is not an impressive number for speed of delivery of an online grocery order. You can do that in 10, 15, 20 minutes, but from microsites with 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 SKUs in them with efficiency levels that are really, really poor. This is an order processed in a large-scale Ocado CFC with extremely high productivity, as we spoke about before, with ranges of 20, 30, 40, 50,000 SKUs available to those customers. And it is not costing anything in productivity to achieve that. And that order is being delivered in a scheduled eight-hour route. but we are able to get the last from the customer ordering it to delivering it to as little as 73 minutes for a full basket order. We have seen in the first warehouse we rolled this out in days where we're achieving 40% same-day deliveries in an international CFC. We think this is a game changer, and we look forward to the rollout of this across the rest of the network and our partners continuing to work with it and increasing the amount of capacity that they have for same-day ordering, which largely addresses that large shopper universe of people who want to shop online but find it hard to plan, where they'll be able to take advantage of the big ranges, the hypermarket prices, and same-day delivery. We also spoke at the half year about aggregators. So we have now integrated aggregators into our platform for the first time in the past year, enabling customers who order groceries with our partners, but from wider platforms. So from aggregator platforms, those orders are going through, and then those orders are processed either in Ocado CFCs or using Ocado in-store picking software in the client stores, making significant efficiency compared to having multiple apps and multiple pickers in those stores. And these changes really reflect the evolution of the online grocery market where in some markets significant amounts of volume are going to aggregators who don't process orders themselves or don't have stores or warehouses themselves. But now our platform is flexible and those orders can get pushed through it. It has enabled Morrisons to increase their aggregator coverage in the UK to a further 100 geographies. It's enabled Monoprix to roll out to 22 further cities in France with one of the global aggregators that they work with. So let's just talk a little bit more about the evolution of the platform. If we went back to 2018, there's a little graphic here that described largely the platform that we sold to our early partners. We had a largely next-day service. Partners were expected to operate OSP webshops and take 100% of the orders across OSP web and mobile. And they were processing those largely in warehouses at an average of a six-module size for home delivery in vans, either directly or via spokesites. It was a narrow but successful approach to the market that had served us extremely well here in the UK for a number of years. But the market's changed and the market continues to evolve. And today, shoppers expect to shop online with total flexibility across different platforms, lead times, and shopping missions. And retailers need and want to meet those expectations without incurring the high costs associated with the traditional fulfillment. So where are we today? Today, our platform supports all different shopper lead times from sub one hour, one to six hours, remaining same day and next day deliveries. We support bringing orders into our platform through managed fulfillment, where the clients run their own front ends, through the OSP webshop that continues to evolve and deliver a market-leading experience, as well as mentioned before, through aggregator sites as well. We can process those in in-store fulfillment over a thousand stores live through our new store-based automation that can range from four to five thousand square feet attached to a store up to about 17,000 square foot potentially unattached to a store. In two to ten module sites for large scheduled delivery businesses, in micro-fulfillment centres, as I said before, from about 4,000 to 17,000 square foot that do not need to be attached to a store if they don't want to, as well as in manual warehouses or third-party DCs. Serving all the different customer missions and all of them with the best economics. And then in the last mile space, we're working today delivering orders to customers using couriers, lockers, customers collecting it, home delivery and home delivery via Spoke. It's incredible amount of total and evolution of the platform to total flexibility for our existing global partners and future global partners. It is the product of a very large and busy R&D period for us as a business, but we've now deployed most of this evolved platform for our partners worldwide with strong results. with our exclusivity rolling off in multiple markets we're focused on bringing these benefits back to some of the world's most mature grocery markets for the first time in years as we move into this new commercial phase we're also taking steps to realign our business to better serve our global customer base and focus on new prospects opportunities with the biggest value But I wanted to start by reflecting on the scale of some of our commercial footprint today, as I think it's sometimes underestimated. Most of you are aware of our global grocery partnerships worldwide. They remain the core revenue driver for our technology solutions business and the partnerships where our technology is most fully deployed. However, our commercial footprint does extend more broadly into the wider logistics, CPG and retail sectors, primarily driven by our growing AMR business. Today, our technology is live in 127 warehouses and more than 1,000 stores worldwide with 70 commercial clients and partners. We've got more than 17,000 bots live on grids around the world, as well as 431 on-grid picking arms, that number growing probably daily, and more than 2,500 Chuck AMRs. And we're seeing keen interest in initial orders for our new case handling product, Porter, case handling AMR. So as we move into a new commercial phase at Ocado, we're building on strong widespread relationships with many recognized and leading worldwide brands. We're also making changes to the structure of our technology solution segment. Stephen has already talked through our progress towards reaching a steady state cost base that we flagged over the last few years. We've made significant strides towards our full year 27 targets over the course of the last year, and we continue to track towards those targets as we move out of this peak development cycle and into a steady state R&D phase. The structural changes that we're making support these goals and make sure our business is properly geared towards our priorities, namely a renewed and focused go-to-market strategy, a simpler operating model, Investment concentrated where we see the clearest path to value creation. One of the first key steps is the consolidation of our commercial divisions, meaning Ocado Solutions and Ocado Intelligent Automation are now operating as a single point of sales and account management under the new leadership of Nick de la Vega, who joined us as Chief Revenue Officer at the end of last year. This change also reflects an overall shift in our approach to new commercial opportunities with a more targeted approach to the most valuable opportunities and primarily within sectors where our expertise is most needed. Taking the example here, which shows in the blue areas of the grocery supply chain where our technology has been traditionally deployed, in the CFCs and delivery to homes. One of the key lessons we've learned from the market engagement of OIA has been that there's significant opportunity to go further up the grocery supply chain and the CPG supply chain. We see significant opportunities to expand into those areas, both case replenishment for stores and wider distribution networks, both where AMR products like Chuck and the New Porter solution can bring significant capital-light productivity improvements. Our AMR products are already deployed in upstream CPG supply chain environments, and we see a positive opportunity to build on this business supported by a single, more simple commercial structure. We believe that opportunities like this will bring significant added value and optionality to our core OSP business, enabling us to grow an attractive new revenue stream in our tech solutions business alongside our core automation and fulfillment assets. Our solutions are very deployable in the case fit market for store replenishment. We highlighted this next piece in the half year, but I think it's really important that we continue to focus on it, which is about bringing the right fulfillment for the right market. To be successful today, retailers need to do careful network planning to make sure they deploy the right solutions in the right places at the right time in their development of their e-commerce journey. But we have a full toolkit to address those different opportunities. It's a framework for future growth, and it underlines some of the decisions taken in recent months. We can do everything from low-density solutions where you use manual pick-in-store with world-leading efficiency using our software. We can do manual pick-in-dark stores. As we mentioned, store-based automation before. We're going to focus on that in a moment. Micro-fulfillment centers as well as the large automated CFCs. The critical lesson that we've learned is that you do not buy a large-scale CFC unless you have a business to put through it. They are not a profitable asset if you don't use them. But if you do use them, they're great. So moving on with a little bit of focus on a CFC to start with. So a CFC can range from about 150 million of annualized sales to over 500 million in capacity. 500 million is approximately what we refer to as a six-module CFC. So if we take a six-module CFC as an online case study, it can do about 480 million of annualized sales in a standard sales pattern with kind of similar metrics to an Ocado retail business. Today, to build a six-module CFC requires both upfront fees and retailer capex to put in things like fridges beyond a standard developer spec shed of about 50 million pounds of investment. The benefit of running that at 480 million of sales compared to doing this in store is somewhere in the region of 30 to 40 million pounds a year. meaning it is a one to two-year payoff asset. These buildings are amazing if you can use them, and that really is the key lesson. Some of the buildings in North America were not being used, and those retailers working with us have made the decision to close them. Where these buildings can be used and you have an existing business or you can rapidly grow into these buildings, they are amazing. significant improvements for the same volume going through them. As I mentioned before, they deliver a far superior customer service, driving up significant NPS, resulting in significant uplifts as well in sales. So if you go into a building where you've got, say, recent examples, we built some three-module sites. We've launched a three-module site recently. We've got another one in build at the moment. If you've got one or one and a half modules of business from your store pick to go into that facility, by the time you go into it and see the uplift and you've got strong growth, you're in a very good position to drive to. full capacity and see significantly quick retailer cash payback. These have been a, these principles have been a key in the engagement with all partners at the moment and are reflected in those new CFCs that we're building. And this kind of thing is reflected as well in some of the CFCs that have opened with Coles, for example, putting significant volume into their new CFCs in Melbourne and Sydney in the year that they've opened. And you saw the positive comments from Leah just before. If we move on now to the other end of the spectrum, which is store-based automation. Here's a nice little visual of our store-based automation sites with their external pickup ports. The same robots operating on grid, the same on-grid robotic picking. The one new piece being the external ports, a small development that we are engaged in at the moment. Store-based automation is a phenomenal product if you have a lot of customer pickup direct from store. because you can process these orders really quickly and really efficiently compared to in-store. It's a phenomenal product if you have a lot of gig-based direct-to-customer deliveries from drivers picking up one, two, or three orders. They can also interact from those ports, and those products can also be picked incredibly quickly from order to delivery. It is even more important if you're doing ultra-short lead time delivery because when you pick ultra-short lead time orders in a grocery store, the effective pick rate drops by about 70%. because you're no longer able to batch and pick in the zones. You have to run around and pick a smaller order across the whole geography of your store for a single customer. And the pickup to doing it in our machine will be comfortably into a number above double-digit percentages in terms of efficiency improvement. Now, If you take some markets, we take a market like the US, for example, eight years ago, the average store was doing $1 to $2 million of sales. These machines wouldn't work sensibly. to do one to two million of sales. But markets have grown dramatically. And so here's an example of the sites that we've been talking to retailers about in the last few weeks that we've been able to speak to retailers in the North American market. And we're seeing significant enthusiasm for this product across every conversation that we've had with retailers in that market. Typically, sales in store could be anywhere from 5 to 40 million online. I know that 40 million sounds like a large number. There are people who are interested in sites of those size. That's also a particularly relevant size for the French market, which is a 90-plus percent pickup market. But if we take a case study of a store with $12 million of sales, that's a fairly common size. That's 10% to 15% of a store that does $80 to $120 million of store-based sales, now doing 10% to 15% online. The full retailer upfront fees to us in CapEx would amount to about $2 million upfront, we estimate, with a greater than $1 million a year operational improvement. This ignores the improvements in NPS. This ignores the benefits of increased capacity, which is suffering in a number of the larger stores and busier stores in these retailer networks. This is just pure labor savings, predominantly labor savings in these facilities, meaning that retailer cash paybacks of two years are quite possible in this space. across all of the stores across markets that are doing 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, $25 million, which in many markets now is the kind of average. If we look at the U.S., for example, when we entered into our exclusivity arrangements with Kroger eight years ago, the U.S. grocery market was $30 billion in size. Next year, we're not ready to roll out store-based automation in mass scale at the moment. We're looking to do a few handfuls of sites at the moment to prove all the different points around the costs and the execution. But by 2027, when we would look to roll out in scale, the US grocery market is estimated to be eight times the size it was in 2018. This is why when people rolled out what they believed were microsites eight years ago. They tried to roll out one site to cover five to 10 supermarkets worth of volume. It created incredible complexity that doesn't exist today because today each of those sites now needs eight, 10, $12 million Ecom sales from the singular site. But also the difference today is that we can build these things in a fraction of the space that was being used with a fraction of the labor that was being used because of advances like our incredible AI-powered pixels to action on grid robotic PIC, which today is doing more than 50% of the PICs in Luton across a 45,000 SKU range. Globally, since we entered into a number of exclusivity arrangements, the global market has more than doubled. And so we are super excited about reentering a number of markets where we're having some very interesting conversations with a large number of grocers and keeping Nick in his new role very busy. So in summary, we're reentering markets with a tech solutions business with a simpler operating model, with a focused commercial operations, and a strong R&D base. We're seeing strong interest in a massively evolved solution set with massively more flexibility, a wider fulfillment tool set, and world-leading shopper outcomes. Our partners are seeing robust underlying growth, strong year-on-year improvements in operational performance, and we have learned important lessons. We now have stronger foundations of our key partnerships and clear pathways to deliver disciplined, sustainable growth worldwide. And on that, we'll start taking questions. Well, Tintin knows I can't handle as many as two at once, so I forget what they were.

Absolutely. Thank you, Tintin Stormen from Deutsche Numis. Two questions. If we look at that graphic that you showed, the manual pick in store, manual pick in dark stores, and you look at the level of activity in terms of pipeline and trying to speak to customers, Where is it sort of kind of busiest? Where is all the activity happening? And Stephen, for you, for those types of potentially new sales, how should we think about the revenue models? Is it more upfront fees or are we still thinking about the recurring fee as a percent of the capacity? That was actually one question. The second question was just a modelling one on Hatfield fees, just in terms of how do we anticipate that 33 million to come down over the next couple of years to 2027.

Let me just try and – I might answer yours as well. Go ahead. I thought you might. The first initial interest from retailers in SBA is actually around their biggest sites, their busiest sites, where a number of retailers have maxed out capacity. So their kind of first focus is, oh, wow, can you do something that gives me more capacity in those locations? The brilliant thing about that is if you do that, it's going to simultaneously show them how much economically better they are and what better experience they deliver to shoppers. So when you look at the estate, there's an amount of the estate that is just some things needed because they're maxing out capacity. And then there's the vast majority of the estate where once you realize what these things are capable of doing, you'll realize you've got a two-year payoff. And most retailers won't turn down a product with a two-year payoff that also gives them increased customer shopper outcomes and increased capacity. So there's a lot of interest. markets are evolving and growing fast. And the more it moves to the shorter lead times, the more attractive the product is versus the manual alternative. I've tried to explain that before with the pick speeds. Globally, 180, 200 type pick speeds, if you're aggregating orders and segmenting pick walks and stuff like that, those drop to like 60 if you're running around frantically trying to get something ready for a courier in five minutes. In our store-based automation products, those will be picked at over 1,000. A human pick endeavor will be over 1,000 UPH because humans will be doing half at over 500. Okay, so just massive increases in efficiency. In terms of the fees on those sites, largely, we don't expect to have any significant outlay if we roll out that product. So the upfront fees should cover the majority of our investment into those sites, meaning that for a retailer, they're likely to have, as a percentage of sales, a higher upfront outlay, but as a... it's a much more phased, you know, because you roll out store by store where you need it. So as a function of where you need it, as we showed before, it's got a two-year payback. So attractive on both sides. Our ongoing fees are likely to be slightly lower than our ongoing fees on the OSP product because we're not amortizing and financing as much equipment. And we'd aim to make a similar percentage of sales contribution to our R&D, SG&A, profitability. The Hatfield fees have got a split that's just about 60-40. So 60% of those fees will amortize over time as the equivalent amount of volume is taken down in new sites. And 40% of those fees will remain until the end of the Hatfield lease.

Hi, I'm August Diebel from JP Morgan. Maybe just on the rollouts and ramps for your partners, we've seen some delays in Korea and Japan. Can you just talk a little bit more sort of like what's going on? Obviously you don't want to like split hairs, but obviously we had delays with Kroger and then a different outcome than we maybe thought. So you just can tell us a bit more what actually happens there. Yeah, that's the first question.

So look, they're slightly different scenarios. One is Japan. Japan, we're opening three warehouses in a contiguous geography. So in fact, so long as there are sufficient number of live modules, the exact timing of when the third site goes live is not hugely important because the volume is being done in site one and site two Site3 isn't needed from a volume basis on that date, but it's about appliance building programs and about the timelines that they give us. We can get in and build very quickly. I think we speak about the fact that we built a warehouse from scratch and went live in 12 months this year from a Greenfield site. So it's really just about when those handovers to us come. Sometimes those programs are set up and For whatever reason it is, it can be an internal reason, our client, or it can be an external reason to do with zoning or permissioning or something like that. Those projects sometimes we can't be sure at this point exactly when they're going to go live. In Korea, actually the first site is in Busan. The second site is in Seoul. Seoul is a bigger, more developed market. So we'd like to see that site live as early as possible, but we think there's a chance it's going to roll into next year. So we'd rather be transparent about that. We are with the client in store pick and we are now seeing good growth on that platform and excited about the first launch later this year in Busan.

And the second question is just on sort of like we talked about it before and what is your sense in regards to the sort of like urgency at your client base? Because we live in times where technology evolves quickly, both soft and hardware. So why is it now really the time to go to the next step or to wait? I think previously you commented on the analogy of an iPhone. At some point you just have to buy it.

but obviously here there's a lot more at stake so what is sort of like the yeah the kind of like situation where clients are in look I think with most of our clients they say was they're seeing significant online growth we saw 26 percent through the sites and capacity is an issue at places outperforming their competitors in terms of shopper experience and efficiency and cost structures And we keep coming back to the same kind of point. If you've got 50 million of business and it's scheduled delivery and it's spread across a three-hour catchment area, the best way to do that is in-store. There isn't an automated product that will help you to do that well. If you've got $150 million of business or $500 million of business in a three-hour catchment, then the right-sized warehouse is the best way to do that. And the warehouses we would build today are half the size and 75% more productive than one we would have built three years ago. And so they're an ever-increasing attractive option. If you've got a wide geography with not enough density to do that, or you've got more immediacy business and pickup business, if you've got two, $3 million at a single site, don't build store-based automation. It's not going to have a return yet. If you've got $5 to $8 million and you're growing, it's time to start considering building it. If it works as well as we expect it to work and can be built in the size and at the price we expect it to, that means the economics work well for us and work well for our partners, even better for our partners. That's what we have to show in the next 12 to 18 months. It is a question of people aren't wanting to invest in big J curves at this point. People aren't wanting to speculatively say, I think there's going to be a giant market in this place. I have nothing. I'm going to go and build a half a billion dollar capacity facility in this small city. When we're talking about something like, as you mentioned before, in Japan, this is not a small city. We're building facilities in Tokyo, which is something like 40 million people living in the geography of those cities. So that's just an enormous market. But the likes of Calgary, people aren't going to speculatively build a six-module site in Calgary going forward unless they're already doing three or four modules worth of business in their store pick operations.

Thanks. Sarah Roberts from Barclays. So just my first question. The Kroger and Sobeys sites that were closed seem to be in the underperforming category of CFCs that I think you've spoken about before. Just wanted to understand across the wider network, not having to give any details on specific partners, but how many CFCs are still in that kind of underperforming bucket or have those now moved to a level where you're both happy with the utilization? Just wanted to get a sense of any potential further downside across the existing network.

I would say there's very limited downside at this point. I don't want to say there's zero, but there's very limited downside at this point.

Okay, helpful. Thank you. And then on the side of store and automation side, obviously it's a little bit more of a competitive market versus potentially the full CFC model where you are the only player that can do that level of automation. So just wanted to understand how you're seeing yourself positioned in the kind of micro-fulfillment area, a bit of the warehouse automation market, why you deserve to win, and how you're thinking of playing that. That would be really helpful.

Absolutely. Look, I think the key things to make these work and what hasn't been understood before and where people have failed when they've rolled some out and not had the success they wanted for clients is based on a few things. One is just actually their understanding of handling grocery and the variation in grocery, the interaction with stores. and there we obviously are in a thousand stores today as well as delivering whatever we think we said 72 million orders last year across our platform so we've got enormous knowledge that a number of these players just have got next to none when we see people bragging that you know in the last eight years they've had this much volume go through a platform and when we look at it we've done that volume in the last week and a half right so we've got a depth of knowledge number one Number two is retailers want to do this in the smallest possible sites. And cubic storage is the densest storage for the products that you need to store, number one. And we have the solution, and we've spoken about this before, that can get the highest throughput from a square meter of grid, a square meter of processing, because our bots are faster, accelerate faster, deaccelerate faster, and our control algorithms allow them to work in greater density, and our single-space bot patent means that nobody else can achieve the density that we can achieve. So in terms of using the least amount of space to generate the highest potential throughput, we are in the best place. That is significantly more relevant when you're trying to carve out a corner of a busy store in a city than that is when you're trying to put something in a massive warehouse outside a city. our on-grid robotic pick is completely unique and one of the most advanced cases of AI being used in the physical world today. And by having at least 50%, we're at 50% already in sites in Luton, for example, by having more than 50% picked on the grid, at the top of the grid, which is sharing the same airspace as our moving robots. It's an immensely complex technical challenge. It removes the need to put human pick stations downstairs or to put robotic pick stations downstairs, which then take up twice as much space as the human ones did. But by removing that space, we're able to build these incredibly dense sites. So where we have spoken to retailers who have recently built or have been exploring building alternative sites to address the challenge of capacity, we are capable of building similar capacities that they've been talking to in less than half the space and with significantly higher range capabilities. And so we cannot see anything that has the capabilities that we have in this space.

Hi, it's James Lock here from Peel Hunt. Two questions as well. First one, last time you spoke about how you've managed to get Detroit's up capacity by 50% because of some upgrades you've been doing. I think at this time you said you think the entire estate could benefit from 30% over time. It'd be good to understand how that's been going during the period and how you're seeing that benefit your own CapEx and OpEx efficiencies.

So, James, yes, look, we are over the design capacity in Detroit. We are over the design capacity in all of the, everywhere other than ERIF and Dorden, the two oldest CFCs in the UK. All the other ones are operating above design capacity. Continue to believe that we'll see at least the numbers that we outlined to you before we are starting to achieve those They are baked in as part of the plan for UK expansion over the next couple of years and It's kind of what does it mean to a new warehouse It's it's part of why a new warehouse can be only 50% of the size of what we built when we built those warehouses So we're not able to get the full 100% uplift that you theoretically could today if you took the building again and built into it. But we are looking close to 50% in most of those sites in terms of their incremental capacity that they're going to be able to achieve. And the enhanced productivity, which is separately beneficial in terms of reduced labor, also then means that if you can pick half of it with robots and you are picking 50% more, you are actually using less pickers than your original design, which means the outside of the building in the car park still works for you. You need to save some of those spaces for the extra drivers that you're going to have that are now driving that increased volume. So there's a lot of considerations in making those changes. The one site that's most complicated in for us in the UK is Luton because we've got a third party automated freezer in it. And that's the expensive part of building it. Otherwise, it's very capital efficient for us and for Ocado Retail to achieve its next step of growth. and going forwards for clients their capex in a building that's half the size is materially lower their ongoing rent rates and services are materially lower the availability of sites is materially easier closer to customers when you start to build these things in in smaller buildings our space efficiency versus some others is just extraordinary so we were talking to a retailer recently And they said they weren't interested in big warehouses. And we said, no, of course. And in their market, it wasn't relevant, store-based automation. They said, yeah, that is what we're interested in. And we're looking at some sites already. And then they gave us the size that they were looking at. To us, it was a warehouse. To them, it was store-based automation. But it was between 50,000 and 100,000 square foot. And for the volumes that they wanted, we'd have been looking at 10,000 to 15,000 square foot. So we're space efficient.

Thank you. The second question was on the case study you gave around, I think it was the 25 DP8 on there, which is significantly better than the UK you mentioned at the time. Why do you think the reasons are specifically that that was better? Was it density? Was it urgency from the clients? Was it just more savvy users? Why do you think it was better than the UK?

we have some uk sites that we operate out of that are between 25 and 30 today um so it's like if you if you carved out that particular site has a geography that more reflects some of the sites that we've got in the uk as in it's got a a small radius around a warehouse doing a lot of volume during the full volume of the warehouse you can do turnaround routes so one of the challenges is you fill the van up let's say in the uk you can fill a van with 22 23 24 orders It's then hard to go above that. So where we do 28 or so, it's because we have bands that are not working a single eight-hour shift on one route. So you have to do things like having six... So in the UK, in one of our sites, we do a lot of six-hour and ten-hour routes. So we do... The drivers alternate three of one and two of the other each other weeks. They do 48 hours, 42 hours, 38 hours, rather than 40, 40, 40. And then we can offload a whole van in six hours or almost two vans in 10 hours. In some geographies, that's hard because the stem times are not there, and we are working on some longer-term regulations. quite complex and clever solutions to that to enable us to break through those numbers. But basket size and proximity and density and things like that come into it.

Thank you.

Is this on? I think it is on. Yeah. Giles Thorne from Jefferies. Tim, there's been a lot of public discussion about a cargo and Kroger and Sobeys. And to my reading, a lot of it is ultimately being quite gentle on Ocado, and most of the blame, if people are looking to apportion blame, has been put at the feet of Sobeys and Kroger. But nonetheless, it would be useful to hear your reflections with hindsight on things that you could have done differently that would have led to a more orderly outcome or a different outcome. And then the second question. Go ahead, Tim.

No, no, go ahead.

Second question is on, I'd like to hear you talk about some of the compromises you've had to make on your innovation pipeline as a result of the cost efficiency program. Are there any bells and whistles that you wanted to build that have been put back up on the shelf and we'll have to wait for another time?

Sure. Look, on the Kroger and Sobeys one, would i like to have built the warehouses that service wanted to build a different sequence so that instead of the third warehouse being in calgary would it would should i try to influence management to build it some somewhere with a bigger dent in a bigger population opportunity um with more density that they already had in their network or something you know did we just accept the orders yes is that in hindsight a bit naive yes could we have We know this because we've been working on it for the last eight years. Could we build warehouses where a client could build a three-module warehouse where a client could turn it on with one module and where economically that is a good warehouse for us even if that client never grows beyond one module? We're there today. We weren't there eight years ago. So eight years ago, we built warehouses. fours and sixes and eights and tens or sevens and tens and we insisted on clients opening them with three modules or four modules which economically we needed them to do because of the capex that we had put into those sites and we even needed them to grow um but in was a big outlay you know it was a big ongoing cost for the clients if they didn't fill them We didn't have a strong enough sense that they weren't going to fill them, and they haven't filled them. And so, hence, they're a drag and a burden. Today, we've got three module sites going live, as I say, with one module down, where the client is already doing one module before we put the spade in the ground in their saw pick operations, expect to be at, let's say, one and a half modules the day the site goes live, and we're allowing them to grow them in quarter module increments. as opposed to having to grow them in one module increments. So we've been aware of the challenges of our early business model, and we've been working on that for the last eight years. We obviously still have to live with the consequences of those early sites and those early decisions. So we need something that is economic for us and our partners, that smaller size. We have it today. We need something that our partners can start with the smallest volume and the lowest kind of fixed outlays. And then can they grow it? And we're talking to clients about doing things in a more flexible way in terms of their charging and how that works with their growth that are massively useful for them and still work for us. So we're learning these lessons. Ideally, We might have built two warehouses in 2018 and three warehouses in 2019. If we could have built the warehouses that we've got in a slightly more linear way rather than kind of pushed up front, then maybe we could have learned some of these lessons earlier and helped our clients. And maybe if some of those seven-module warehouses where they were paying us for three modules had only been a three-module warehouse and they'd been paying us for one, maybe there would have been a growth path to see that filling up and those would still be open. We're not blameless as such, but again, our partners are the ones that need to drive the acquisition of customers. We can help them, and we are helping a number of partners to understand how to best do online marketing, how to best trade an online business, but we need our partners, having made a commitment to a site, to try and work very hard to put volume into that site.

And what does Nick bring that you didn't have before?

Nick's got a huge depth of experience working with technology partners, accounts, clients, just kind of a much greater focus than we've ever had in terms of experience of doing large, complex technology implementations where how to work with those clients to influence them to create the behavior that means we're both successful. I think one of the kind of So combined naiveties between ourselves and our partners would have been kind of their view of we've bought this amazing stuff. And if we just turn it on, we'll have a successful business. And obviously, we've been saying for a while that's not the case. But we still don't have that element of control where even where we realize it, some of our partners have still behaved a bit like that. And we're kind of like he's very good at getting in there and talking through that challenge and trying to get those retailers to realize what they need to do. to contribute towards making their business successful, and not just a view that because we've written some clever code and we've got some gee-wizzy robots, that that means they've got a business. Thanks. And then on the innovation puts and takes. Look, we have that combo at the moment of some of the biggest projects that we did rolling off, reimagined, and the replatforming. which you will have noticed as a, well, I don't know for you personally, but a number of you will have noticed as UK customers, the kind of the move up, the migration to OSP, that e-com migration and mobile app migration that happened in the summer at Ocado Retail was Ocado Retail moving the last part of its business onto OSP. They were the last of the 13 partners. Morrison's in the UK had migrated before. So that kind of catch up of all the tiny bits of things that drive acquisition, retention, frequency, margin, basket, etc. are all in OSP and it's an onward journey from here. As well as having got live in 11 markets with payments and currencies and regulations and laws and all that kind of stuff. Together with the rollout of reimagined. And efficiencies are coming through with AI in terms of not just coding but testing and various things that mean that our overall productivity per person is significantly improving. What's not on the list is... Hard to say, but the more speculative stuff is not on the list. The core things that we want to do to deliver store-based automation, to deliver the growth in existing facilities in the UK in particular, to do a supply chain, and we talked about this at Reimagined called Orbit. Continued work on helping our clients attract and retain and make it easier for shoppers to shop. Continued attention on making it easier to run the platform for our partners and the rollout of short lead time orders. All these things are still in there. Everything that we really, really need is in there. We are going a little bit slower on some of the other opportunities to deploy our kit in other logistics supply chain scenarios. We have got continued spend to enable it to move up the grocery supply chain, but we could go faster on some of those points. And we may choose to in the future if we start to do some significant contract wins in those areas. So there are some things that are like show and tell, like we're doing those a little bit slower, where maybe if we did them a little bit faster, we could then show something and maybe win some business. But it's a very tough process. We're being very rigorous on it. But we expect to get a significant amount of innovation in terms of features and functionality coming. And probably 27 will be a record year for us in terms of innovation. 26, we've got some... I wouldn't like... I think it would be naive to say we're going to have a record year in 26 because of the disruption of actually going through the reduction in size, but I expect by 27 we'll be back at a record level of innovation. And the amount of change in the platform that we have achieved with this with all these amazing people in the last few years is incredible. And I tried to outline that in that slide before. It's the flexibility of the platform. It's not just the flexibility. It's the intelligence of the platform and so many different things it can do today. We have done so much innovation in that time period. It's amazing.

Hi, William Woods from Bernstein. I suppose the first question, historically you've been quite cautious on the ROI and the RRC from smaller sites. And I don't think that was just capacity, I think that was operational complexities around the ability to store certain levels of skew, breadth and depth, duplicative picking, decant complexities, all that kind of stuff. Have you worked out those operational issues? And if it does work, why haven't you built a one module site, for example? And I'll come to my second question in a second.

The first one is what we can build today compared to what anybody could build five years ago is dramatically different. The lighter weight bots, the third generation lightweight bot, can be deployed in a different way to the older, heavier bots in terms of safety and crash barriers and stuff. And then the space savings that might be one or two grid spaces in a huge site is not massively relevant when you make it a tiny site is massively relevant. the weight going through the grids as a result of the bots and at that weight accelerating at the same speed and therefore the forces that need to be offset and what you need to do in the floor space is relevant so if we built these three or four years ago we need to start piling underneath supermarket floors and stuff so there's just differences like that the on-grid robotic pick taking up at least 50 today and moving towards 70 or 80 percent of the picking again simplifies the whole process the remote The remote monitoring operations of our grids and our on-grid robotic PIC, which we centralized into facilities in Bulgaria, in Mexico, and in Manila, mean that we can run multiple sites, the reliability of the robots, and therefore not needing to have live on-site engineers at every site permanently. There's a whole host of these reasons why this is viable now and we couldn't have built with our infrastructure five years ago. Now, the people that did try and build things with different infrastructure five years ago just didn't have the process knowledge, didn't have the automation with the right throughputs, too much capital, too much labor, too much space. And they didn't succeed at what people wanted. But I think it's important to understand two things have changed. That's the supply side has changed what we're able to do. But if you think back, because at one point we were going to get killed by a company, because there's been loads of companies that over the years everybody's said we're going to get killed by. And one of them at one point was a company called Takeoff. And Takeoff was the microsites company. And they went around to the person that we didn't sell our OSP to and sold every one of their competitors one, two, or three of those sites and said they were going to sell them each 1,000. They did sell them one, two, or three. They never sold them the 1,000, and they eventually went bankrupt. The sites were, as I say, from a supply side, they were too big, they weren't efficient enough, and the process flows just weren't good enough, the output wasn't strong enough, et cetera. But the demand side was different too. Because the demand side at the time was to make this site viable, you need a $10 million site or a $20 million site, and you're doing $1 or $2 million a store. So they were trying to do a mini version of our centralization. So they kind of didn't have the benefits of our centralization, and they didn't have the benefits of being where they needed to be, because they were only actually where one store was. Whereas because the US as a market will have grown by the next year ninefold in that time, those $1-2 million sites are now $9-18 million. And so now you can have one of these things at each location. So the offsetting disadvantage of taking a $600 million site and splitting it into 60 can be offset by the advantages of being in that local geography, leveraging existing assets of that retailer and being able to do pickup in 30 minutes or in five minutes in store and being able to do ultra-short lead time deliveries and working with the gig economy drivers that for a whole variety of reasons are significantly cheaper in the US than a unionized labor force driving your own vehicles.

Do you not think there's an issue with holding a certain number of SKUs? Could you hold the whole SKU range of a store?

This is your second part of the question. We probably ought to take this offline if you want to, but We have a lot of experience of moving product and understanding how this can work. We've come up with some very good ways of doing this where the significant majority of the velocity will be in the automation. There will be some stuff that is not in the automation, but our automation allows you to do a robotic merge. So you're not doing one of these things where you've got some pick from here, some pick from there, some pick from there, and then humans need to try and marry that up and then deliver it somehow to a customer because the whole thing will be merged by robotics in our machine. But also, we do carry already multi-skew totes in our machine, so we can carry expensive ranges. We can replenish those ranges alongside the store replenishment for things at volume. We can replenish those ranges through batch picking in the store, but not for the specific customer, like keeping a single item of each SKU in the store. in the automation, but not through an optimized pick walk on a batch basis. And we can merge in the rotisserie chicken and the sushi at the point of handing it over to the customer. So we are working through all of the challenges that we are well aware that have been encountered in this space. Today, people want to look at merging prescriptions from other sources, merging, general merchandise. Our grid and some of our patents around our grid process, ones that we didn't license to our competitors in the cross-licensing, are very important here and enable us to do things that drive, we think, unparalleled efficiency. We need to deliver it all. There's nothing that we're trying to deliver that we see as rocket science, as in on-grid robotic PIC, is rocket science, and obviously it's not Starlink, or SpaceX, whatever, but it's very, very, very complex. We've done the heavy lifting, because we have that technology. There's just stuff we need to do around building up those processes, leveraging other things that we do, like we already do store pick, so we know about optimized store pick. We just need to bring some of those bits together in the next year, build the first few prototypes for our clients, hope and believe that they'll be successful as we want them to do and then believe that there's an opportunity for thousands and thousands of them.

Great, thanks. And then just the second one was just on that prototype. Have you got a prototype that's working today that's delivering the economics that you put on the slide? Or is this still a little bit theoretical? And when should we get to a point where we can see one?

It's probably, it's on a spectrum. So you're kind of outlining two things, something nobody's ever built and something that's live and working in the exact size and format with all the pieces of equipment. I don't have that, but I'm also not here. I'm here. Okay, I've got grids and bins and robots. I've got on-grid roboting PIC. I've got early, you know, prototypes working of dispatch ports. I've got the software that runs the robots around. I've got the software that does the store PIC. I've got software that does consolidation. So we've got... and can illustrate most of the components we can show small sites that we built small sites but they were ten thousand square foot they weren't four thousand square foot we've got and built we've got robots now running around in freezers right so we've got robots in chill robots in ambient robots in freezers we've got and tested robots moving between temperature zones which is that which is an important part of this and to come back to your other question So we're kind of, we're here, we want to be here before we, I don't want to sell thousands of them until I'm there, right? Because I don't want to take the responsibility of delivering thousands of them that we might not be able to hit the price targets and therefore we'll need more capital or we might not have the returns or whatever it might be. And we want to clear up those process flows when we're dealing with Couple of dozen sites not when we're dealing with a thousand live sites, right? We don't to be deploying three sites a day at the same time as trying to make the first one work, right? Your first question is why not a one module site and there are people who are looking at sites that are not Probably two-thirds of a module There's a point where There's some things that you can do when you miniaturize that will only expand to a certain size, and then when they expand to a certain size, some of the costs double. So, for example, if you can run a single grid with a single maintenance area, and you can have a part of those robots running into a chilled area, you can eliminate a whole maintenance area. That works to a certain size, and at a certain size, it just isn't feasible anymore, and I need to have two grids. At that exact moment, I need two maintenance areas. I need two wireless controllers controlling my bot fleets. I need more grid barriers and stuff like that. There's a cost uplift. And so there is this kind of area between the biggest of the... micro store-based automations and the other sites where you kind of get into an area where you can see an increase in cost but it's not really worth it for the increase in volume you rather have two of these than one there and then you get to a point where no I'm going to take that does that make sense it's kind of so we model an enormous amount of data around what is physically feasible to be built and we are talking to retailers for Standalone sites, attached sites, ranges from 10,000 to 50,000 in the grids. Throughputs from $8 million to $50 million. Sizes from 4,500 square feet to 17,000 square feet. Different use cases, right? Different peak hours, different amounts of customer interaction, courier interaction, right? We've designed lots of different examples and we're very good at simulating them and understanding what throughput should be available out of them. We just hope to build a few that are good examples. One of the challenges at the moment is actually saying no to a few people who want something that we could build but we don't think that's the thing that we need to have thousands of and we'd like to build a few of the ones that ultimately we believe there will be thousands of to show that concept to the world in a real live 100% operating environment.