Pricer AB (publ)

Hello, everyone. This is Magnus Larsson speaking. I'm president and CEO of Pricer. With me today for today's Q3 presentation, I also have Claes Wenzel, and we have Cecilia Wienel, who's actually helping out with facilitating your questions for later. Very happy to be here today and do this Q3 report. And as always, for those of you that watched our reports before, I would like to start with our vision. to be a retail's first choice in in-store automation and communication and i think that as you might have seen we got an announcement from the s group it's an extended order it's more than 100 stores that they plan to deploy before summer and then once again to me that's also a sign of being retail's first choice now they we've been working together for for a full year we are almost done deploying their 300 initial stores and really happy to have this additional order um It's one way of showing the retail's first choice. I think that in discussions with them, we have managed to be the first choice in quite many different ways. From the initial engagement where we looked at the opportunity, we analyzed their needs, from the procurement process and eventually into actually being awarded the contract. But then constantly during the entire work together, the engagement, the overcoming things that doesn't work, fixing it, addressing it, and at the end, creating a very successful deployment in the S Group stores, improving the work for the S Group store staff, but also for the shoppers in their stores. So for those of you who don't know us that well, or that used to know us, where are we? A Swedish company. have deployed more than 300 labels, electronic shelf labels. We have a SaaS service that we call Plaza. We have more than 3,500 stores connected and some 25 million labels connected through Plaza. But all in all, 25,000 stores with more than 300 labels makes us a leader in the retail space. Looking on the market, so which market are we in and what's happening on the market? When we look at retail technology and when we look at the space where we're in, the store digitalization, and especially the shelf labels, it's a market that's been dominated by a relatively few number of countries and markets contributing to the growth and a very strong growth on the ESL side. We see that a lot of things are happening now to actually increase the speed of the market, but still, the penetration rate, as we view it, is somewhere around 10%. So given the interest that we see, it's still a low number showing that there is a huge market opportunity ahead of us. And why does people wish to actually do the digitalization? Well, there is clearly a need to create efficiency. There could be many reasons. It could be lack of staff. You need to do more with less staff. It could, of course, be to create a competitive advantage that you can actually do more with less staff. But it could also be that you want to improve the customer experience or that you want to unlock unpenetrated revenue streams. How can we get more in the shopper basket? Or how can we make sure that we actually help our retailers tag into revenue streams from the CPGs, from the suppliers? They have Coca-Cola, Unilever, et cetera. We're in the middle of our strategy work. But we can also say that, as communicated before, the markets that we believe are highly strategic, combination of high growth potential, but also that we have the ability to serve them well, we look at the UK, we look at Central Europe, it could be Germany, it's quite a few other countries, Spain, US and Australia. We have historically spoken about Japan. We believe now that these are the key markets that we focus on right now. Let's see if this will once again change after we're done with the strategy work. But we see massive potential in these markets. And we see also a lot of untapped potential. And we see a very high need from these retailers in these markets. When you digitize a retail store, I can see there are a lot of companies that feel invited to participate and they want to be part of this. And some retail tech solutions can be built easier than others. But what is really hard is to build something, build technology for the store environment that actually meets the criteria of the store environment. They have to be durable. They have to make sure they're easy to manage. You have to make sure that there is a high reliability and that they will actually stay for a long time and that whatever service you want to get out of them that they are responsive and available. It sounds fairly easy, but it's really difficult environment. From the shoppers banging stuff with a customer card, the environment, the technology environment, and that's something that we've managed to do really well. When we look into the future, what solutions are coming? We see a huge interest in any kind of solution that can reduce carbon footprint. Well, working more effectively, printing less paper, clearly does this. But we also believe that with what we provide and the solution we will provide into the future, having a clear sustainability, that we address it in a way that will actually help them reduce their carbon print, I think will be one key criteria. Very much in Europe, but we see the very same thing also in the North American market. Retail media is another area. The idea of being able to communicate in a different way in the store to actually do advertisement and promotions in a new way and capture new revenue streams. That is also creating a lot of retailer interest. And I think there is hardly any event of exhibition or keynote presentation where retail media is not mentioned one way or another. Once again, one of those areas where we can see there's a lot of untapped potential, but might still be in the early phases. So clearly something to be engaged in, but it might not actually give us the large revenues this year or next year. But clearly this is in some very early foundational years. The market is taking off. I think I covered it a bit. On the digital transformation, we also see that retailers that now engage in the transformation, they want to make sure that this investment, if they now decide to do the point of sales, they have done the back office and the ERP, they have done the ESLs. Having done all this, then I think the question is, what's next? How can we actually add tech in the store that will make the online presence and the physical presence get closer together? Can we add different devices? Can we add gadgets, engines, things that are online and connected that will add visibility to the store, visibility to the shelves that can actually detect motion? You lift something. If you go to the online platform and you actually check a product out, the supplier of the platform will clearly know that this customer was looking at this product, which has been hard in the store. But if you attach a motion sensor to, let's say, a mobile phone in a mobile phone store, well, then they can quite easily see which products are popular and whatnot. So we see that this merge with the omnichannel and both the online and the physical presence and actually try to do something is something that will generate a lot of opportunity into the future. Cost reduction, operational efficiency, that's clearly driving it. But also the technical advancements. We see some markets that have been late bloomers, they are now ready. They have done the initial investments required to actually digitize their source. We see that in the UK, we see that in North America or US as an example. They weren't really ready before, but now the readiness is in place. On the market status, so what's happening right now? Of course, we see a lot of interest in ESL across several markets, but we've also seen that some of the retailers that have now made a large investment but they're not fully deployed that they now actually aim to actually do a full deployment and in the report we mentioned that we now expect orders from one of our large customers as they plan to not fully deploy deploy all their stores they've had a partial deployment some stores without dsl some with partial deployments but now their target is to to actually improve store efficiency and to work different way with price management they will actually now by Christmas next year have all stores deployed with ESLs to actually make sure that they have an environment and a setup where they can fully benefit from all what the digitalization can give them. They were really happy for what they did in a number of stores. Now want to do it fully to reap all the rewards. We see a lot of actions in North America in general, US and Canada. we see a lot of action in the retailers in UK. Here, most of the tier one and many of the tier two retailers within several areas, grocery, do-it-yourself, home electronics, and actually quite a few other areas are now looking at or planning for an ESL deployment. So a lot of interesting discussions that will happen and business that will happen over the coming year and years. You've seen our result. It's, of course, very pleasing to report it today, but it's the effect and the result of a lot of work. You could say that we started a transformation back in 2022 with the formation of a new management team. We changed the go-to-market plan. So in 2022, we got the growth of the company started, which had somewhat stagnated. 2022, 2023, we were strengthening our balance sheet. We did a share issue last year. And at the end of the year, we communicated actually the cost reduction corporate program, but also the start of the transformation. Today, we can announce that actually in Q3, we have reached the full effect of the cost savings program. And the transformation is something that is part of the daily life at the company. We've done a lot of work. There is still a lot of work to be done, but we have done so much that we can say that we will not end up in the same situation as we did before, where we add resources to actually compensate for processes that might not work as good as they should. So we have a structure. We are working continuously, but we have actually laid the foundation. We laid the platform to actually move into the future, which would then take us to phase four, where of course we want to increase the speed of growth and we still want to continue the operational excellence to make sure that we deliver competitive growth at the high profitability. And I think that's probably a good segue over to you, Claes. Yes.

So let's start, look at the sales and the gross margin development. Large orders. customers has a big impact on each quarter. And the lack of growth is due to few large orders or customers. That was buying last year. Despite of that, we have very strong and good growth in the rest of the market. Throughout the period, not only in Q3. If you look at the gross margin for the whole period now, it's 21.3%. It's almost 5% units higher than a year ago. The reason for this is, of course, a product mix, but it's also better cost of goods serves. Then if we go to the next slide, looking at the last 12 months for EBIT and net profit development. And as you can see, we have earnings growth in EBIT since the first quarter of 2023. But the effect is much stronger now in 2024 when we have increased the gross margin and we also have the effect from our cost reduction program. The next slide is our P&L. And here is a A few interesting things down at the bottom. You see, of course, the cost reduction effect and the higher margin effect, but also on the financial items, we can see much better development compared to a year ago. And a big part of this is related to that we have reduced or amortized our factoring totally. So we have saved financial costs related to that with 8 million crowns for the whole period. And now also, when we get out of Q3, we will, going forward, have a more normal tax situation. We have had a lot of losses in the Swedish company, and that's why we have had such a low tax cost now the first nine months. Then if we go to the next slide, the cash flow from operations, and as you can see here, We expect to have higher sales now in the fourth quarter, and that's why we have increased our inventory. Another big impact on the cash flow is of course the amortization of all the factory, which is close to 170 million. So that explains the situation now. So when we come out of this year, we will not have as high inventory as we have at the moment.

All right. Thank you, Klaus. So let me summarize the third quarter. And as always, this will probably be a little bit of my bragging slide, so I hope you'll excuse me. Despite the fact that order intake was just slightly above last year's Q3, we have seen very good order intake in the French market. We've seen it in the Pacific market, we've seen it in the Nordic market, we've seen it in the Benelux market, and also, gladly enough, the US markets. But it's been offset by a decline on the Canadian market. If you look at this different market, in the Pacific, we've seen a very strong growth over the year. There has been a focus on, especially the four-color label, where we've been successful, both in New Zealand, but increasingly also in Australia. Our partner in this region, they pretty much only sell four-color labels, which is, of course, also contributing to our good profit. In the Nordic market, it would be easy to say it's the S Group that's been driving it. Sure, they've been very successful, but we've also had an increase in orders, both for Sweden and for the Norwegian market. So here we can actually say that it's been something not only thanks to one customer, but actually three different markets. And the US market, it's of course very nice to see that we are growing this market. It's still from a number that is low, but it's a very clear growth and it's a major growth compared to last year. And just like the order intake has been affected by Canada, we can see that the market in terms of net sales, France, have impacted also the result. If we would actually exclude France from the figures that would compare the quarters, there is no France in Q3 this year or last year. The growth in net sales is 37%. Driven by a Nordic market, once again, very strong net sales in the Italian market, driven by both partners and a lot of direct sales. Benelux market is kicking back, which is nice. Once again, it's not only all the countries in the Netherlands, but it's actually both in Belgium and the Netherlands that we see this growth. And just like for the order of intake, US is actually growing on the sales side as well. So at all, at large, even though I'm not happy that net sales were less than last year, we can see it has been very specific market affecting this one. And now the other markets have been healthy and growing very strongly. On the gross margin, as Klaas mentioned, we had a gross margin over the year of 21.2%. Please help me, Claus.

3%? Yes, 21.3% now.

And in the quarter, we had 22.1%. And of course, this, together with the corporate cost-saving program that had the full effect in Q3, which you can see on the opus figures, has, of course, helped us to get an EBIT margin above 10%. Net profit, 47 million. And of course, I'm very happy to be able to report this after 2023. That was fairly grim. So I feel that as a company, we are on the right track. We will deliver good profitability and we will deliver growth in the year. Finally, why should you invest in Pricer? I know that a lot of you on the call that you have invested. And you have expectations, of course, on the work that we do. And there are some of you that are considering investment. So why should you actually invest in ourselves? Well, we are a leading company in retail tech. We are well known on the market. For our customers, we are known for bringing the best ROI to them compared to our competitors. We are moving now from SaaS first. to a SaaS-only platform, which of course will be a way for us to capitalize from the installed base that we have. We have 25,000 stores sold. We have 3,500 stores connected. I want to connect as many of the stores as possible. Every single connected stores give us a wide opportunity to actually do a lot of upsells on different kind of SaaS solutions and services. The market. is about to take off, or I would actually say it's taking off. We see that there are a lot of reasons for a retailer to invest in digitalization. In many of the critical markets, they have done their homework. They have the basics in place. They have the trigger points, lack of staff, or they need to remain competitive, or they want to look better than competition. They want to work smarter. They want to really take the omnichannel approach and see how much can we digitize the physical store, they are all ready to actually do something. And as I mentioned before, we see North America and UK now really making headways into the future. We have a momentum on the financial performance side. The transformational work is kicking in, but it's also progressing well. We have a clear improvement in gross margin, and then actually we have a good control of our operational costs. You can see an improvement through the entire P&L cash flow on the balance sheet. And least, but of course not least, we have a really good pipeline of leads and opportunities for 2024 and 2025 and actually further on. So these will be the three key reasons to invest in Pricer. So having said that, I would be happy to invite you all for a Q&A session. So Cecilia, do we have any questions? We do. Excellent.

A lot of them. So we'll see how many we can handle.

So I think it's a challenge, Klaas.

So let's start with the gross margin. Yes. So this person understands that the gross margin is affected by plaza sales. Can you tell us something about the development of gross margins on labels during the quarter?

Should you take it, Claes, or should I take it? You can take it.

I mentioned a part of it, of course. It's related to cost of goods also for the direct material related to your seller. But Claes, of course, has an effect.

And we can add that we have worked a lot with the cost baseline, which means that we have actually managed to reduce our COGS. across all labels and label families, which have actually increased the gross margin. But we have also been quite successful in actually changing the product mix. So we are able to sell labels where we can actually charge a higher price and get a better gross margin. So it's been a combination, actually improving the legacy and getting more of the high margin labels sold.

Thank you. And the cash flow, what is your opinion on the cash flow moving forward, considering the discontinuation of factoring on one hand, but the build-up of inventory on the other hand?

Yes, it's exactly what I said during the presentation. We have a high inventory now and we do expect this inventory to go down during the fourth quarter. which of course will have a positive effect on the cash flow.

Thank you. And on the recurring revenue, what has caused the recurring revenue for Q3 to grow less year on year than previous quarters?

That's a good question. Do you have an immediate answer, Claes? I would say it's probably seasonality.

It's affected, of course, also on how much new sales we've done during the quarter.

So we have new customers, but if we have, for example, some of the orders that we receive, there's been a lot of sales to existing customers that already have Plaza or is planning to do Plaza. When we do new stores, so the 100 new stores for The S Group as an example, the stores that we're deploying for the North American retailer that we announced in June, they're all on Plaza. So you can say that virtually all the stores that we deploy are on Plaza. So we do expect that they will continue to grow quarter on quarter. And it will probably be a little bit different in the growth. I'm not sure it was a really great explanation, but it's at least an attempt.

And on the margin, should we think of the current margin reflective of a normalized product mix moving forward?

It's hard to say. You see the margin is strong now in the quarter, but it's a little bit less than the quarter before. So it has a lot to do in the product mix for each quarter. But of course, we have as a whole a much better margin now compared to a year ago, and that will continue. But making a forecast now on exactly what level the forecast will be, we will not do that.

And here's a question that refers to the 4.5 billion that we have talked about previously. So sales hasn't developed in line with the 4.1 million for 2025. Have you lost potential contracts due to higher price?

I think if I start with a 4.5 billion, we... We, of course, even though we don't communicate around that any longer, we do keep track internally. I think I have communicated before that we're seeing that in the US market, that was a big chunk of the expected revenues. We did not have the traction that we wanted. That's one of the reasons why we made the changes that has been done on the North American market. We've seen, and what I communicated last year, we see a 12 to 18 months delay in the sizeable business maybe because it takes time to actually build it the way we want so that would actually explain it have we lost deals to hype to high prices i think when we lose a deal we lose it because we haven't been able to articulate the value or it could be that we actually work on a customer where it would be hard for them to actually uh it might be that their use cases that one thing they want to do um where they're not ready, they're not willing to make the investment or fully utilize all the opportunities. And so I would say that the sales and the selection of the customer is probably a bigger attribute. Sure, we have lost customers on price, but above all, we have won a lot of customers actually at the way higher price than the market. we see that if we spend enough time with the right customers and we do the proper engagement, we earn the right to sell at the higher gross margin and a higher market price than competitors. And this is generally actually acknowledged by our customers as well.

Thank you, Magnus. And cameras, previously you have talked about cameras. Do you still sell them?

We do not sell cameras. We were looking at the camera that we were offering the market. We were looking above all at the market. We were quite far in discussions with Carrefour, just like our competitors. In that discussion, it became clear that they did not see the ROI. We haven't seen any major camera deploys, so we decided to pause the investment and wait and follow the market. And when the time is right, when we see that there starts to be traction, then we will re-engage on the camera side. We have a product, we have software solutions. We haven't developed it, so we would need to actually do some investments, but we have the basics in place. But still, to date, we have only seen one larger deployment, and I think it would take a little bit more to really show that, yes, there is a market that people are willing to invest in. But it is an interesting area. And I see that it's adding value. So here is clearly what is the cost versus actually the benefit we get out of it. And at one point in time, I think camera will be one of many elements in the retail store.

Thank you. And the factory in Germany, how is it doing?

It's alive and kicking. It's progressing really well. We are producing three color labels, four color labels, and we have added one more size. And it's full production.

Thank you. And a question about framework agreements. So are customers with framework agreements ordering within the agreements?

Yes, they are. So when we have a framework agreement, I've sometimes been asked, could we quantify what could be the value of the agreement? We prefer not to do that. We prefer to actually base our order intake and whatever data we present to yourselves to be based on facts. So we base it on purchase orders. We know within a certain, if we like, when we announced the S group agreement, it was a framework agreement, but also with an attached commitment that we would deploy 300 stores, or at least 300 stores. Now, when we did the re-announcement, it's the very same thing. But we have several frame agreements with a lot of large retailers, we actually they place orders continuously but if we see when within that frame agreement if you would get orders that that are significantly higher than you could expect then we will actually make a separate announcement on that thank you and the question on market growth do you think

that prices still grow as quickly as the market or even quicker? And what do you think of the growth during the coming years?

I think that we are growing faster than the market on some of the markets, and then we're growing slower on some of them. It's a little bit, as part of the strategy work, we are, of course, now looking at several sources to really assess the market growth. I've had a lot of different So maybe please ask the same question at the Q4 report, and then I will come back with a more definite answer. But my feeling is that in some markets we are growing really well. In some markets, I wish that we were doing more and being more successful. And I mentioned Germany before. We are taking actions. We are actually restructuring the way we work actually to get the growth up. And I remain positive. But what is the speed of the market? It's a little bit hard to assess. We'll come back on that.

And the question to Claes on cash conversion cycle. So the cash conversion cycle has increased significantly. Is this only due to decrease of factoring or are there other drivers behind this?

The main drivers, of course, are better margins.

Actually, I think I can add something on the growth. Yes, I think that we grow fast. I think we grow in line with and actually faster than some of our competitors right now based on what we've seen just to actually make a small addition. But once again, looking at the total market, it's still we don't have enough data yet to give a complete picture.

Thank you. And a question on market share. Do you know or how much do you think your market share is today?

Once again, it depends on how you look at it. But I would say our market share today, or we're actually number two on the market. The easiest way to measure it at the moment is actually to look at the installed base. Then the rest tends to be a little bit more of opinion. I do believe that we're number one in the French market. If you would ask me to prove it, it would be a bit hard. I know that we're not on the market or we're not, maybe we're number five in Germany where I would want us to be a top three. So it's a little bit market specific. But I think the easiest is to look at the installed base. There we are clearly number two on the market.

Thank you. And could you, on a question on France and Europe, the sales in France. Could you quantify to what extent or elaborate on why France was weak in terms of sales?

I can. We communicated in Q2 that we could see that there were delays in orders from a customer. You see now that we actually communicated that we have a growth in orders in France now in Q3. It's the chain customers. One of our French customers, they were delaying investments. And now we can actually see that those investments are coming through. So that's the key reason.

Thank you. And a couple of questions from Swedish investors wondering about ICA, the Swedish large retailer in Sweden. Why they sometimes choose other suppliers?

Well, that's actually a question for ICA.

Yeah, thank you, Magnus. And I think very last one on the, can you tell us more about the higher margin labels you have been selling? Is that color labels or other labels?

It's actually the color labels, but it's the same product family that we also do for three color labels. We call it the power label, and there we can sell it with a better margin. Because we deliver a whole lot more performance. So we can charge a higher price because we add more value on that product family. And when with a four-color, of course, then we add even additional values.

Thank you. There was actually one more. Can you remind us of Q4 seasonality in terms of sales and profit margin?

Seasonality wise, we normally have a stronger Q4 than Q3 from a net sales point of view. From a profitability point of view, it's been a little bit gross margin point of view. It's been a little bit more difficult to assess because we have over the last couple of years constantly been growing the gross profit. So I don't think we can see that we have a specific pattern. Then it would be more coming down to product mix. If the question is, will we take a low margin deal to increase the net sales? Well, if we can actually get that deal in January at a better margin, then we'd rather do it in January.

Thank you. Yes, that was the last question.

Excellent. If there are no more questions, I would like to thank you all for joining us. I hope that you got the answers for maybe not the one you wanted, but at least you got the answers you were asking for, that you feel that we got them covered. I look forward to... present to you again on the Q4 report next year. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.