AutoStore Holdings Ltd. ($AUTO)

Good morning, and welcome to AutoStore's Q1 2026 Update. My name is Hiva Flaskjer, and I'm the Investor Relations Officer at AutoStore. I will be moderating today's meeting. I'm joined here today by our CEO, Mats Hovland Vikse; and our CFO, Paul Harrison. We're standing ready to walk you through this quarter and answer your questions. As usual, we would like to remind you of our disclaimer with regards to forward-looking statements. It can be read here at your own convenience. Now moving on to our agenda. Mats will begin with an overview of our operational performance and our strategic progress. Paul will then present the financial results in detail. We'll follow with a live Q&A session, and you can submit your questions via the webcast player or ask your questions directly via Teams. The link and information are available on our website. After this Q&A session, Mats will round off with some final remarks. And as a reminder, all financial figures are stated in U.S. dollars. With that, let's get started. Over to you, Mats.

Thanks, Iva. Good morning, and thank you all for joining our Q1 update. Over the past few months, I've spent quite a bit of time with customers across Europe and North America. And what I hear is broadly consistent and constructive. First of all, it is clear that we live in a world which is incredibly hard to predict, and all businesses need to assume that this will just continue. Against such a world, I'm hearing that it's more important than ever to build an end-to-end supply chain that has the resiliency and flexibility to thrive in a world of uncertainty. Supply chain is a strategically important area for all companies moving goods, and it's just getting more important with this backdrop, which is also reflected in those conversations. What we bring to market, which is market-leading robotics and software and how we are doing that with our refreshed strategy, i.e., moving closer to customers with a high pace of innovation, resonates well with how these businesses are thinking, and that's also showing through in our results and what we're bringing to market. If we look into our numbers, we are reporting a good start to the year today. Revenue came in at a solid $166 million with an order intake of $179 million. Profitability remained strong with a 73% gross margin and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 44%. Cash flow conversion was 82%, which really underlines the strength and cash-generating nature of our business model. Moving on to the business overview. In March, we had our spring product announcement. This one was primarily focused on the launch of our new software platform as well as new and exciting AI capabilities. I'll come more back to this in detail later. First, taking a step back, AutoStore holds a clear position as the global leader in a market that is still in its early years. Our scale is unmatched. And as of Q1, we have almost 90,000 robots across nearly 2,000 installations. Central to our success is our land and expand strategy. And in Q1, we saw 55% of revenue coming from existing customers who are either expanding their existing sites or establishing new ones. In the quarter, we also added 25 new customers, bringing the total to more than 1,300. As we've talked about before, our commercial strategy is focused on building deeper relationships with strategic customers, and these numbers here reflects the importance of that. If you then look to the right side of this page, you'll see that our financial profile is highly scalable with industry-leading profitability and cash generation. This slide here shows our broad customer portfolio across a diverse set of end markets. In the quarter, momentum remained strong, and we saw continued positive development across several segments, including retail, 3PL and industrial, and we saw an increased demand for our high throughput solutions. Now a year ago, we presented our product strategy, which is structured around 4 clearly defined pillars. Since then, we've delivered 3 separate product announcements, each directly advancing these initiatives across these pillars. Most recently, we announced our core software platform and AI capabilities, which is just further strengthening our product offering and the value proposition to our customers. I'm very pleased with the progress that we've made and the consistent execution against the strategy that we communicated a year ago. These milestones here demonstrate our ability to rapidly translate strategic priorities and customer feedback into tangible product outcomes and value for our customers. And the product that we have released and the direction that we're on has been very well received by our customers and the community overall. Not only are we seeing good initial traction, but it's also clear that we have increased our addressable market by now being able to help our customers address new types of use cases. So with that, let's now dive into our spring announcement where AI, cloud and data were in focus. In this release, we announced CubeVerse, AutoStore Intelligence and VersaAI. CubeVerse is our new unified cloud and data platform that connects all of our applications, our AI capabilities and integrations into a single ecosystem. Embedded in this, AutoStore Intelligence acts as an AI layer that uses proprietary models to optimize operations, predict issues and deliver measurable performance improvements for our customers. This is a significant step forward. We now have the platform and AI layer to turn decades of data into intelligence that just compounds with every new robot that we deploy. This is delivering real-time insights, actions and continuous improvements for every customer at every site. And let me remind you that we have almost 90,000 robots deployed at almost 2,000 installations across the world, which is just giving us billions of data points from live operations. No other player in our segment has this insight. So if you take a step back, our world-class hardware amplified by software platform and AI, creates this compounding competitive advantage, one that just deepens with every deployment and widens with every customer. This is what we call intelligent fulfillment. So now before I hand over to Paul, let me show you a short video that talks to this. [Presentation]

Thank you, Mats, and good morning. It's really exciting to see our product road map unfolding. Data and insight are what truly sets AutoStore apart. And now with insight driven by these AI capabilities, our value proposition becomes better, and our competitive advantage is stronger than ever before. Now let's move to the financial highlights on the next slide. Q1 reflects a strong start to the year and continued momentum since Q2 2025. Of course, we are mindful of the turbulent world we live in. But as Mats has noted, it does see customers strengthening their supply chains, and that is where we play an important role. Also, our sharpened operational focus drives revenue and order intake in key segments as well as stable, high margins. I would add that as you look at these numbers, the impact of movements in FX on both sequential and year-over-year growth across key metrics is not material. And before we move to the next page, let me remind you about the natural quarterly variations we see in our business. However, if you step back and look at the trend line, you'll see that we're clearly on a good growth trajectory. Looking at order intake, we reached $179 million in the first quarter, which is a solid number following a very strong quarter 4. And what is positive in our new commercial model is that we are securing longer-term commitments. What that means is that the order intake we see now includes projects scheduled for 2027 shipments. I'm happy to see that retail, 3PL and industrial all contribute positively. And with that, our order backlog closed at $571 million, another record high. Moving on to revenue. Revenue was $166 million in quarter 1, showing very significant year-over-year growth. Looking at the geos, Europe once again remained solid, whilst North America delivered strong growth, 25% in this quarter. It was also pleasing to see a positive performance from Asia Pacific. The standard segment delivered steady growth, and we also had a meaningful share of high throughput projects landing in Q1 from both Europe and North America. Okay. Let's move to margins. Gross margin came in at 73%, which reflects strong operational discipline. At the same time, we're not immune to the price increases we're seeing across various input costs. And these will weigh somewhat on gross margins over the course of the year. But with the resilience we've built into our supply chain, I do not envisage this having a significant impact on that high gross margin. Similarly, our EBITDA margin was stable and strong quarter-on-quarter at 44%, a reflection of our efficient business model and investments in long-term growth initiatives. Finally, let's have a look at our balance sheet and financial position. In quarter 1, we continued to generate strong operating cash flow with a conversion rate of 82%. Working capital increased mainly due to a rise in receivables, reflecting higher volumes and some normal seasonality. Investment activity remains stable with the majority related to new product development. And as a result, net debt decreased to $136 million at the end of Q1 compared to $180 million at the end of Q4 '25. That corresponds to a net debt ratio of 0.5x, reflecting a very strong balance sheet. So with that, I'll pass back to Hiva, who's going to lead the Q&A.

Thank you, Paul. And as always, as usual, let's start with the questions from Teams. [Operator Instructions ]. And let's see who has raised their hands. I believe, Luke, you are first in line.

I've just got a couple of questions. The first is on aluminum prices, which I know have risen significantly over the last 12 months. Can you just give us an idea when you say that there might be some impact on gross margin, but some mitigation from your supply chain, can you give us some quantification around the impact given some of the historic impacts that we've seen have been relatively significant? And then as a derivative of that, are you considering raising prices to your customers to help mitigate against those rises? And then the second thing is, just can you give a bit more color on the conflict in the Middle East and how that's impacting either demand or supply chain management through March and April?

Thanks, Luke. I'll start with a couple of comments there. Yes, we are seeing a significant increase in aluminum costs. And as I say, that will have a bearing on our gross profit for the balance of the year. But we have spent a lot of time really since the Russian-Ukraine situation, diversifying our supplier base, which gives us the opportunity to take advantage of competitive dynamics that exist across our procurement activities. So when I -- if you want to frame this as I look, based on what we know today at the balance of the year, we still expect our gross margin to start with a 7. That hopefully gives you some quantification. Mats will maybe comment on prices. Just a quick comment on the Middle East. We do a relatively small amount of business in the Middle East, but I will say that, that business continues to be delivered. So modest impact on our overall P&L, but no significant disruption to orders that we have in that region.

Luke, maybe first to add on your first question, Luke. We have learned a lot since we were in a similar situation a couple of years ago. And based on those learnings, we've taken some very clear actions on the operations side of the business, diversifying our supplier base, how we work with them, what type of agreements we have in place, et cetera, et cetera. So based on what we're seeing now, we don't see a need to pass this on to customers because we're able to, at least with the current visibility, have pretty limited impact, as Paul was saying. But as we've done before, we have tools in our toolbox, should this reach a level where we see the need to do so. But that's just something that we'll observe and follow as we move forward. If you think about the situation more holistically on what's happening in Middle East and the disruptions that's causing globally, I think when we speak to customers, I think they're operating with this mindset that there is uncertainty. There will be unexpected things happening globally. And more important than ever, you need to build that robust supply chain and robust operation that can handle these different shocks. So I think we're in a period of time where customers are living through those types of situations and trying to build resiliency to handle it even better in the future. But of course, it impacts prices, it impacts the consumer, et cetera, et cetera.

That's great. And just to be clear, there's no significant surcharges expected on the pricing side from what you're saying.

Not with the visibility we have today.

I believe, Eirik, you're next one up.

Eirik from DNB Carnegie here. Three from me. I guess first one is for Paul and just kind of housekeeping on the FX impact, particularly on orders because you don't think -- I think, explicitly disclose that in the report. We calculate ballpark 8% to 12% organic growth adjusted for FX tailwind. Is that kind of ballpark in the right range on orders?

Order intake actually on a constant currency basis is slightly above reported, Eirik. But across the key metrics, revenue is absolutely disclosed, as you see in the quarter 1 report, it really isn't significant to these overall growth numbers we're talking about.

Okay. That's clear. My second question is on capital allocation and kind of in light of the numbers presented today. Any updated thoughts here on the buyback potential? You're at 0.5x net interest-bearing debt to EBITDA given what sounds to be a decent rest of the year. How should we think about the potential for a bit more active capital allocation?

Look, it is, as you say, it's a strong balance sheet, and we talked before about our priorities, organic potential for M&A to complement our strategy. And yes, we take and consider at a Board level returns of cash to shareholders and continue to do that. So something the Board debates. Something [indiscernible].

Okay. That's fair. And then lastly, can we get an updated number on the share of recurring revenue? And also kind of how we should think about this number in light of some of the new product launches you've made over the last 6 months or so?

So around about early to mid-teens and proportion of our revenue base is recurring or reoccurring in nature, that includes spare parts and around about half of that relates to kind of software and AutoStore-as-a-Service, Eirik.

Okay, perfect.

What we have released and what we are releasing, you're right, kind of more and more value sits in the software and the AI that we're applying across that portfolio. As you remember, we also released the Essentials Package early in the year where we're providing kind of a nice commercialization wrapper for all those innovations. So it's clearly a focus for us to, a, bring value to customers through that part of our product portfolio and, b, to then monetize that using that Essentials wrapper, which is over time building a better recurring revenue into the business.

That's great color. And if I can follow up on just briefly on that. I guess that's kind of opt-in for the end customers if they want that Essential Package or not. Can you give any indication of kind of the uptake or the penetration of the Essential Package or other opt-in software solutions kind of beyond the router software?

So the Essential Package follows as a standard into the new sites that we sell. And as you know, you need to operate with our core software and that portfolio to have it operating. If you look at those additional software applications that we can offer on top of that, which is kind of CubeAnalytics and some of those products there, we are seeing very strong uptick, both on the new sites that we're selling, but also existing customers are adding those applications into their portfolio. So I'm very happy with the development we've had there in the last 12 to 18 months.

I believe, Tintin, you're next one.

First one, are you able to share more about the success in North America? So color on is that existing new customers, any changes in win rates? Any notable changes in the competitive landscape there? And then secondly, on -- just an update on AutoStore-as-a-Service, 3PL clearly still remaining strong. What's happening with the proposition there? Clearly, Q1 last year, it felt like a lot of people were interested in it. Is it to do with the macro environment? Just give us a color where you're at with that?

Maybe I'll start and you can chime in, Paul. But very happy to see the performance that we've had in North America because you'll remember earlier in 2025, we talked about reallocating resource into the region because we are seeing such a strong growth opportunity there. If you look into the numbers, it is a mix as it is globally. We're seeing the existing clients we have coming in and buying new sites as well as extending existing sites. And there, we are seeing different momentum in those discussions because of the new commercial model that we have applied where we are deepening those relationships and having different types of discussion now than what we've had in the past. On the new logo acquisition, we're also progressing quite well also on the -- both on the order intake and revenue side, but also if you look into some of the leading indicators across the pipeline, we're having a fairly good traction in terms of new logo acquisition. The competitive environment in the region is roughly the same as we see globally, which is largely unchanged versus how we've talked about it in the past, and we're seeing that our win rates remains very, very strong.

Yes. And then AutoStore-as-a-Service, Tintin, one deal concluded in quarter 1, around about $5 million in Europe. So that tells you that this remains very much a feature of our business, appealing as you implied there are to certain -- sort of certain key verticals, an important tool, therefore, in our lockers, so we continue to offer it. We continue to have a number of interesting conversations with potential customers about it.

I believe, Martine, you're next.

Congratulations for really good results. I think a lot of my questions got answered, but I have some as well. And I can take them one by one. You have -- you further increased the order backlog conversion rate. How do you see the trend developing to 2026? Was there any like in the sales space, was there any like larger orders affecting that?

I think it's returned to broadly the historic average when you look at recent quarters. I wouldn't point to sort of anticipating a sharp increase in it as we look for the rest of the year. And just as I mentioned in my comments, just keep in mind that we, of course, start now to take in deals for 2027 into the backlog as well as you think about that conversion. But good to see it back up to that historic average.

I think more kind of broadly, we're seeing now customers making commitments, following through on those commitments and having kind of a normal sense of urgency against that. So no special things impacting conversion as such. There will always be a lumpiness in those numbers because of the business model we have. And that's a fundamental feature of our model, and that should also be expected as we move forward. But overall, I think there is kind of a natural good conversion rate, which is something that we focus on coming back to when you now look at the numbers.

That's good. And on the gross margins, you answered the aluminum part, but was there anything other particular affecting like in the product mix that we should be aware of?

Yes. Look, my comment was not intended actually to be confined to aluminum, and we're mindful of the potential for a broad increase in input prices and energy costs. And take my comment, please, when I was presenting the slide as covering a broader sort of take on input costs than just aluminum.

Got it. And a little bit follow-up on Tintin's questions regarding the split on the order intake. Would you say that this -- the region split on sales reflect on the order intake split? And was there any like significant larger order this quarter that we should be aware of in the order intake?

I think we talked, if you go back to quarter 4 about a number of sort of long-standing high throughput debates coming to conclusion in terms of order intake. We didn't see that same feature in quarter 1. So no, I wouldn't point to anything sort of abnormal in the quarter 1 order intake.

Martin, I think, you're next one.

It's Martin from Citi. So the question is just coming back to North America. So obviously, there's a lot of movement on tariffs. And just trying to work out whether the new tariff situation is better for you than perhaps people might have feared a year or so ago. I mean obviously, there are these new Section 232 tariffs, which presumably impacts the aluminum grid that you sell into North America, but just trying to understand what the impact is there. But overall, are your customers now feeling that tariff certainty is now resolved and that's sort of releasing pent-up demand that might have been sort of on hold from last year?

We don't see the tariffs itself limiting conversion as such. So I think that in itself gives an answer to part of your question. If you look at the recent changes, we're seeing that. Yes, some mix shifts in [ better ] but not meaningfully changing the position, and that position is one where I think customers has now gotten used to a world where you operate with a tariff level and across the value chain, you solve for that and drive towards conversion. So no, I don't see that meaningfully impact our ability to do business in North America and the customer seems to have adjusted.

And if I could just have a follow-up unrelatedly, one of the features that seems to be seen in the industry at the moment is this desire for flexibility and scalability just because of end market uncertainty. And obviously, you've got a very flexible solution. I don't know the way you measure this if it's sort of number of robots per order or just simply size of individual orders. But are you seeing more customers wanting to sort of start small with an option as part of your land and expand to sort of upgrade relatively quickly? Or is that not really a feature that we should be sort of thinking about?

Look, even historically, that has been a feature of how our customers are implementing AutoStore because there is no need to try to look into the crystal ball and guess what your volumes is going to be 5 years down the line and scale your system based upon that, you do actually build for the demand that you're seeing today and kind of what you have in front of you and then you scale over time. So I think looking at the numbers, it will be even clearer once you start seeing extensions come in, in future years. But it's clearly a big topic as we discuss with those customers because you're trying to solve for a situation where you should expect your business to look different 1, 2, 3 years down the line. And that's also how we're designing those systems and designing those conversations that we're having.

Tim, I think, you're the next one up.

So the first one is about your AI capability, you just seem to detailed. And I just want to get like a brief idea how much more value proposition that AI can help in terms of like your order size? I mean if I look at the historical number of the order value is probably like [ $2 million, $3 million ] on average. And how much AI can help in terms of boosting this number in terms of the value that we can get from the platform? And also if you develop the AI capabilities, are you develop all these things in-house? Or do you consider partnering with some of the third-party solutions, which can further enhance your capability on that?

I think an important feature with AutoStore Intelligence that is that we're applying those proprietary models across the portfolio. So we're creating customer value in different ways. Two of the areas that we highlighted in the spring product release was one in the CubeControl software, which is kind of the routing software and the logic that drives efficiency. And by creating those customized configurations through AI based on those real individual site situations, we have seen quite meaningful performance increase on sites that has high throughput, high robot density where kind of that optimization challenge is the hardest. And as that creates customer value, of course, over time, that will also show through in our ability to monetize that. The second example that we got through was through CubeAnalytics, where we're now able to move from just providing data to actually providing insights and predictability and telling the customer what to do with what the data is telling you. So again, as we provide more customer value, that will over time improve our ability to monetize and improve those metrics that you just mentioned, Tim. And when you look at partnerships, we are building proprietary models in-house, and it's important for us to have those capabilities. But of course, there's a lot of exciting things happening out there. So we are building the right sets of partnerships as well. For instance, across AutoStore Intelligence, we have partnered with Databricks to make sure that we're able to bring the best of breed out there. And on VersaAI, we've also built partnerships to make sure that we're applying the right set of AI and the right vision systems to those products so that we bring the best possible solutions out there to the customers.

Got it. Very helpful. And my next question is about your go-to-market model. I think you have been increasing your resources or input into the sales force or like -- to get closer to the end users. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why you have like an improvement in terms of the conversion, in terms of revenue from the order backlog. How do we think about the further inputs this year or going forward? Are we going to increase more resources in terms of sales, in terms of, let's say, the capability to try to enhance further conversion -- that means if there's any implication in terms of margin on that front?

So look, we have made some targeted good investments, both in our commercial part of the organization and in our product part of the organization against that strategy that we've talked about. As you say, those investments have yielded good returns for us. And as we see those investments also producing a good business case going forward, we will continue to make those investments because it's giving us the results that we're able to present here.

Next one up is Petter, I think.

Yes, sure. Two questions from me. You have discussed the geopolitical uncertainty and I obviously understand that, that creates some uncertainty. But have you observed any, call it, tangible shift in consumer behavior in recent weeks? Are they becoming slightly more cautious? Or is it more or less business as usual? That's my first one.

So in terms of our customer base, we haven't seen any meaningful shift over the past few weeks in the discussions that we've been. Downstream, how the consumer acts for those different types of businesses, I think there's better people than ourselves to answer. But from our perspective, those discussions has not changed.

Okay. Perfect. And then on OpEx, we have seen some volatility over the last quarters, and it's definitely good to see that costs are moving down now Q-over-Q. So on a broader picture, if you look in Q1, I think the clean cost base are up around 8% year-over-year. Is that a good estimate for the full year? Or is Q1 not, call it, fully representative?

I think if we go back to Q4, I talked about some of the features of the OpEx we reported in Q4 with sort of year-end -- a very strong year-end reflecting in sort of various aspects of our cost base, including compensation. And I said then that we would see it come down in Q1 as it has done. As we look forward for the rest of this year, clearly, the usual cycle in our year, which is in Q2, we'll do the usual salary rounds, et cetera. So that will have -- I'd anticipate some impact on OpEx. And then just back to Mats' point, we're not going to hesitate to bring more resource into the business if we see clear growth opportunities. So I'm not going to encourage you to simply take quarter 1 and extrapolate from that for those reasons.

Okay, two things we're balancing as a business is, one, this is a market that is still just in the early years, and we're very early on the overall adoption curve. And if we can make investments that enable us to, a, maintain the leader in which is going to drive that adoption and, b, help accelerate adoption, we will do that because of the early stage that this market is in. But of course, on top of that and what we're balancing it against is this disciplined approach of making sure that we do the right investments because it is a scarce resource, and we need to make sure that we're making investments that is yielding results and keeping that cost discipline that has created the strong financial profile that we present here today.

Toby, I believe, you're next one up.

Maybe just on the margin side, thanks for the steer on the gross margin dynamics. So still sort of expecting that to start with the [ 7 ]. But if the input costs continue to weigh on the gross margin through the year, as you mentioned, how should we think about the flow-through to EBITDA margin? And what do you see as any sort of key offsetting factors across the OpEx that could allow the EBITDA margin to remain more stable or even improve even if the gross margin trends down a little bit through the year?

Look, I think we -- if you step back from this, we have always seen some variability in our gross margin linked to things like product mix. So I don't think we're in a particularly -- as we look at it right now, a particularly abnormal situation to my earlier comments. And to Mats' comments, we will obviously take gross margin trends into account in the running of the business. But at the same time, they will not -- within the parameters I've set out, they will not see us refrain from putting in the right investment into the business either. So I think just to step back here, I think given the parameters we're talking about at the moment, we're in a kind of normal -- a reasonably normal sort of business situation.

If no other hands, let me just double check. No other hands are raised. As far as I can see, I will check the chat as well. There are no questions. So I believe this concludes today's Q&A session. And I'll hand over the word to you, Mats, for some closing remarks.

Thanks, Hiva. Thanks, Paul. So let me just summarize what we presented to you today and remind you also of some key points. First, we operate in a large underpenetrated market that is supported by long-term structural trends. We have remained focused on executing on our strategy with sharpened commercial focus, improved backlog conversion, and we've maintained solid profitability. And while the environment in early 2026 remains broadly in line with last year, we're in a much stronger position than what we were a year ago. We have a solid foundation supported by a scalable solution that goes across industries and geographies. And with a more customer-centric go-to-market model, we're working closer with customers and just strengthening our land and expand strategy. This also contributes to us being resilient and well positioned to manage the current geopolitical uncertainty with corresponding volatile market conditions while also protecting our profitability. And as you've heard me say many times before, we're not standing still. During the past 18 months, we launched 18 new products and capabilities that's just seen us extending the Cube into adjacent workflows, solving real customer challenges and expanding our addressable market and AI capabilities. As Paul has demonstrated, our highly cash-generative business model results in a strong balance sheet. Taken together, these characteristics give us the confidence in our direction and ability to create long-term value. So I'd like to thank you for dialing in today and look forward to speaking to you again soon.