Pricer AB (publ)

Thank you very much. A strong report today, so there's a lot to unpack, so I'll leave it to you right away.

Excellent. Thanks a lot, Hjalmar. So, thank you everyone for joining today's call. It's a very hot day in Stockholm today. Let's see if we manage to make the summer heat a little bit higher after this presentation of the second quarter. I'll leave it up to you. Our vision is to be the preferred partner for in-store communication and digitalization. That's what we work with, that's what we speak to our customer about, and that's actually what has been helping us with or generating today's results. I will dive straight into the Q2 highlights. And for those of you who have read the report, you can see that we have had really good commercial traction in a few of our markets. Canada, very strong, but also good growth in the US, in Scandinavia, in the Pacifics. I will come to a little bit more in detail. But one of the things, one of my takeaway, I did some digging into our archives and I realized that this is the first quarter since 2024, where actually we demonstrate growth in both net sales and order intake. So to me, this is a very positive sign that we're moving in the right direction. Another very positive aspect of what we've done is that we can see that the net sales of Plaza Our SaaS solution grew with 35% quarter-on-quarter, and we added actually more than 500 stores in Q2, and we were actually doing much more than 500 stores in Q1 as well. So as you could see from the previous slide, and I'll flip through it very fast, we have added more than 1,000 stores only this half year. So it's been quite a success. From a financial point of view, We are zooming in on historically high price levels of the gross margin. Our gross margin reached 28.1% compared to 19% in Q2 last year. So it's been a major growth. It's actually a major growth versus Q1 this year. And Claes will speak a little bit more about the gross margin later on in the presentation. We continue to show strong cash flow. We have a net cash position, so we're not in debt. The adjusted EBIT margin at 7.1% versus minus 2.8% in Q2 last year. So all in all, a very strong financial performance. Another thing that I really want to speak about is innovation. We have spent a lot of time, actually more time than money, on innovation. We're avenueing the way that we wanted to reshape ESL and the way you look at ESL as the first step. It's been... success. We have had the first commercial orders of Pricer Avenue in the quarter. We have done independent AB testing that really shows that Pricer Avenue generates shopper attention, shopper interest, and above all, it actually does increase sales when you do promotion. So all in all, it's a Q2 that we're extremely happy with. Of course, we see that there are always things that we want more of, actually most of it. But at large, we're super happy with this report. If we dip a little bit more into the order intake, we had a growth of 13%. We landed at 568 million SEC this quarter. We have a growing backlog. We have a positive book to build. which means that we can see that the company is growing from an order point of view, from a backlog point of view. The performance in America, we had a lot of orders from Sobis for the phase two installations. We have also started to install, but we'll see there will be quite intense work during autumn. We received continuous orders from IBM Federal for the deca, so the army stores. But we also start to receive orders from small but tangible increase in orders from new customers. It's with some of the announced partners that we have like MDI. But it's also some new ones. We have a small but new customer in Alaska, Alaska Hardware. But we see more of this, and I think above all, we start to see a mindset change on the market. We start to have more discussions on future digitalization. We see customers making plans, setting budgets, and some also starting to invest. And, of course, after a year where we've seen maybe not hibernation, but it's been very slow, and after the tariff discussion after the start of the war in Iran, it's nice to have seen some positive movements on the market. So this is something we definitely see on the North American market. We have a continuous commercial traction also in Scandinavia. MOVE FROM PARTNER-LED SALES TO DIRECT SALES HAS BEEN VERY GOOD. WE HAD GOOD TRACTION ACTUALLY WAY BETTER THAN LAST YEAR, BUT ALSO BETTER THAN COMPARED TO OUR OWN PLANS, SO IT'S BEEN VERY POSITIVE. WE HAVE HAD SUCCESS ON THE FIELD SALES IN SWEDEN, WE HAVE HAD SUCCESS ON KEY ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT, AND ABOVE ALL, WE ARE WORKING MUCH CLOSER NOW TO THE LARGE RETAILERS AND LARGE RETAIL CUSTOMERS THAT WE HAVE ON THIS MARKET. The Pacific market was really slow last year, but we now see a rebound. So we had good order intake and also invoicing on the Pacific market, and we see an increased interest both in Australia and in New Zealand. So at large, it's actually very positive development. And the order intake trend is now moving in the right direction, as you can see from the graph. So what else is happening? Retail industry insights and macro trends. I wanted to focus on the one that's been highlighted, market growth and strategy or strategic digitalization, but also tech transformation and personalization. I will speak about Avenue and I will speak about AI. The first one, so we did this AB testing. It was done by an independent third-party company called Retail Academics. This is what they do. They investigate behavior in stores. That's really what they focus on. We were working across three UK stores. We had 23 unique brands. We had Coop of East England's own brand, but then we had quite a few well-known brands. Pringles is one of them. And we had 66 different products. The real question was, what is the impact of Pricer Avenue versus the traditional ESLs when you do promotion? So in two stores, we had Avenue, and in one store, we had our regular ESLs. And of course, we got full access to the sales data or retail academics got it, but they also did interviews with shoppers. And it was in a level where you can say that the statistics is correct from a statistical point of view. And what is the result? Well, Shopper identified promotions 43% faster with Pricer Avenue. And that's the entire idea. You make a promotion, you want people to see it. 90% of the people that were interviewed, they stated that the promotion and the setup with Avenue actually increased their interest to purchase. And of course, the best part was that we could see tangible and statistically verified sales increases. So when we looked at all the 23 brands and the 66 products, we could see 2.2% sales increase. It doesn't sound like an awful much, does it? But the thing is, if you're in this world, if you're actually selling what we call fast-moving consumer goods, depending on the assortment, depending on the product that you sell, an increase of... Thank you very much. But if we then say, if we took it from more like a general picture with a price or avenue price, if we had an inspirational picture, this figure raised to 3.8%. If we added the brand logo, like you can see here in the Pringles picture, it was almost 5% sales increase. These figures are something that our retail customers want. This will be an immense help when we go out and sell Avenue. We can tell them with Avenue, you get all the benefits from the traditional ESL, but we will also, unlike anyone else on the market, help you with real sales uplift when you do campaigning. This has also led to a situation where we're now engaged to a different way than before with the fast-moving consumer goods companies, because we have something that can help them sell more in the same store, same setup, but just sell more. So this has been really good and the fact that we now have the test done by an independent third party will also be extremely helpful. Something we've also been working a lot with is our own AI platform. We've been working with AI since 2024. And more recently, our team has now spent a lot of time basically building our own tools and our own way of working. So you could say that we have an internal platform that is now We built it, applied AI infrastructure. It's agnostic from an agent point of view, which means that we can work with Gemini or we can work with Anthropix and Claude or we can work with pretty much any agent we want. So if we want capacity, we can actually use the agent that adds most capacity. If we want low cost, we can use that one. Something that actually impressed me quite a lot is that we have built our own way of training the AI. It learns through self-reflection, but it also adds to external multi-model data, whatever that means. That actually means that we can train it with YouTube. There is a lot of clips from really skilled engineers where we can actually take that and use that as a part of the process to train our AI. And we now look at the projects on the software side that we've actually done since we started to implement this project or this Pricer AI at full. We've seen that we now go up to more than 10 times the capacity in development. So as a next step, what we're doing now is actually we take this platform, we will also use it on our internal processes to see how can we improve corporate functions. same logic we have same kind of interfaces but the agents will use help us to be more efficient internally and the next step is we we have 60 million ESLs connected how can we actually use that in a different way. How can we give more power to our customers to adopt the way they work with Plasa? Here, one potential will be to see how can we use our platform to actually embed it in our tools and our products that we have customer facing. So that will be also part of the future setup. So we think with this platform that the team has built, and they've done fantastic work, we have something price-specific that we can use to improve internally, but also that we can have to improve the customer experience and the way our products are being used. So I think you will hear more and see more about what we're going to do with Pricer AI into the future. I think I'm done with the shameless selling, so Klaus, will you take the facts?

Okay. Yeah, so let's look at our P&L then. As you can see, our sales grow 8.5%. But if we exclude the currency effect, it was close to 10%. This was 9.9%. What also is very impressive for this quarter is, of course, the very strong gross margin. And that is driven by three things. It's low production cost. and it's also the customer mix and the product mix, but it's also a strong increase in the plaza sales. We also took a one-off cost of 9 million in this quarter, which we'll save on an annual basis. We'll start now in July, 17 million per year. And adjusted for the one-off cost, we have an EBIT of 34.5 million in the quarter, which is a margin of 7.1%. And then if you look at the cash flow, we continue to have a strong cash flow. As Magnus said, we have no net debt. We have 336 billion in cash, which is net cash of 36. But we also have available unused revolver credit of 150 million. So we have available cash for almost half a billion at the end of this quarter. As you also can see, the inventory has gone up. with more than 100 million now in the first half of the year. And that is, of course, for the upcoming sales. We have a higher inventory level now than we normally should have, so we can expect the inventory to go down during the rest of the year. And then if you look at the net sales and the gross profit development, the interesting thing here, of course, the very strong increase in the ruling 12 months gross profit. And yes, in this quarter is up more than 10% compared to last quarter ruling 12 months.