GreenMobility A/S (GREENM.CO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to today's presentation where we have the pleasure to present GreenMobility. To help us through today's presentation and answer questions in the end of it, we are joined by CEO, Kasper Gjedsted. Today's presentation will cover the new strategy plan, including financial targets until 2028. As always, there's a box down below, do feel free to ask a question during the presentation, but we will take the main part of the questions in the end. And do also feel free to ask the questions in Danish. I will try and translate them to the best of my ability. But for now, I will hand the call over to you, Kasper.

Thank you very much, Michael, and thank you to all joining in here this morning. I'm the CEO of GreenMobility. My background is originally from Maersk and from the current industry, I've been with SIXT and with Avis. For this presentation, I'll just take you through who GreenMobility is and where we are today. And then we will talk about our financial targets for '28 and how we are going to reach those financial targets. So GreenMobility is a car-sharing company. It's a very simple product with a lot of technology behind it. If you need a car in either Copenhagen or Aarhus where we are located today, you just swipe on the app and then you go into the car, you take the car, drive to your destination. And you leave the car behind and swipe on the app again to lock the doors, and we're going to charge you're credit card. It's as simple as that. We have around 1,400 electric vehicles in our fleet. The core fleet is the Renault Zoe. It's a small B Group segment car, same size as Volkswagen Polo, more or less. It has a very big battery for its size, actually. So it works very well from an operational point of view. Then we have a premium fleet, which is comprising of the Polestars, some Renault Meganes. We have a cargo fleet, which is working very well for us as well, also EV cargo vehicles. And the latest addition to our fleet is the ID. Buzz, which has a space for 7 passengers or a lot of luggage, for example, when you go to the airport. We have around 135,000 trips per month now, and our market cap is around DKK 500 million. It's almost -- it's up more than 100% this year. And our guidance is between 15% to 17% revenue growth in '25 and 42% to 47% EBITDA growth in '25. We have seen a very good growth rate in the company, and we have also seen a very good development in our EBITDA. But it hasn't always been like this. So just to take you down memory lane very quickly. So I came in, in 2023. That was on the backdrop of a strategy, which I have coined the blitzscaling strategy. It was -- the company was following the textbook at the time where you just had to grow, grow, grow and spend a lot of money on the growth and eventually, you would probably make some money. But the macroeconomic changed almost overnight. We had a war in Europe and Ukraine. You had the inflation coming up. And with the inflation going up rapidly, the interest rates were raising also dramatically. And that was just pure pricing for a company -- a growth company like ours and a lot of other growth companies. So when I came in, it became very clear very quickly that we had to change the strategy. So we did a major turnaround and decided to close all of the international markets and pull down -- pull out the vehicles from the international markets and then focus on the Danish market only. We also did a lot of other changes in this big turnaround because we were spending a lot of money, and we were losing a lot of money. We're going to investments into growth. But we changed that completely. We set out the organization completely different. The operation is completely different. And then we have a laser sharp focus on profitability and on a profitable growth instead of just growing. And that turnaround has worked. The strategy has worked. We are now a profitable company. We already reached profitability in '24 in our Danish operations. So we are today, a very strong -- I think a very strong company compared to early on. And we're still -- we're just getting started, as I say. And that's on the backdrop of that, that we are a strong company today, that we have now presented our strategy, our financial targets for '28, which will continue to tap into the growth targets that we have identified in Denmark. And I'm going to go through all of these growth pockets in a minute. And then on top of that, I'm also in this presentation, I'm going to talk about our ambitions on autonomous driving and the reasoning behind that. But again, we have a very strong performance in '25. We have revised our guidance up 3x during the year. And I think also that has shown in our stock price, which, as I mentioned, is up more than 100% this year. I'm just going to scroll very quickly over this, and I'm just going to make an advert for an arrangement that we have here with institutional investors and analysts. It's on the 27th of November, where we can dive -- take a deeper dive into these numbers. Just headline-wise, we are focused on optimizing the balance sheet, and we continue to bring down asset debt. We do not have operational debt. We only have asset debt here. And I think that speaks in volumes of where we have moved our company to. And we are focused -- continued focused on optimizing this balance sheet, as we also mentioned in this slide. By the way, the slide show here, you can also see from the communication that we sent out to the market yesterday. So again, we're ending up with a guidance here in '25 after 3x revisions of our guidance -- upwards revisions of our guidance in July, September and October, which were based on a better-than-expected performance. We now go from 17% to 13% in the beginning of the year on the revenue and 32% to 42% growth on the EBITDA at the beginning of the year. We are now having a 15% to 17% revenue growth guidance and an EBITDA of 42% to 47%. So that is the situation of the company today. I think we come from a strong place here. We have now stabilized the patient, and we are building muscles every day. And this is on that background that we have now communicated our 2028 targets. And we have like 4 strategic priorities. We have an untapped revenue growth, and we remain focused on being focused on the Danish market. And we do not believe that the time is right for international expansion. We believe that car sharing is still in its early adoption phase. And therefore, we are convinced that we can grow the revenues organically with an average rate of between 8% and 12% per year and grow the EBITDA at a rate of 12% to 16% per year towards 2028. And as mentioned, our balance sheet has strongly improved, and that's why we will consider options for capital allocation, including share buybacks. And our aim is actually to be able to redistribute cash when solidity is about 20%. I'm coming back to why it's 20%. And then the last of our 4 strategic priorities is that we want to bring autonomous driving to Denmark. So that's the 4 main strategic priorities. So how are we going to deliver this growth? Well, I think we have identified a lot of pockets of -- revenue pockets that we can tap into. We have a little bit of tailwind from the growing population in Copenhagen, which is our biggest market by far, where we can see a forecast of almost 5% population growth. And that's important to us because the more people who are living in the city, the more potential customers we have. We're also tapping into a market that we haven't -- which is not saturated yet. We have 555,000 families without any cars -- households without any cars. And we have 86,000 families that have 2 cars for private use. I'm a good example of that. We had 2 cars, but now we only need 1 car after we move to an area where GreenMobility is serving that area. If you look at Copenhagen Airport, they have the highest passenger numbers ever this year, and we have a limited market share among international visitors to Denmark. That's why we are in dialogue with distribution partners and mobility partners to reach more of these international travelers because we have a better product than the current car rental companies have from Copenhagen Airport. Our parking lots are right in front of the terminal. You don't have to wait for a bus to get a car -- rental car from us. And the time it takes you to go and rent a car with our competitors in the airport, the old-fashioned car rental companies, you are already at the destination with a GreenMobility car because you can walk straight from the terminal, get into the car and drive. Then this year, there has also been a change in law, whereby 17-year-olds are allowed to drive. We are making a product for the 17-year-olds, it's something with insurance and so on. But we are making a product for them as well that will also increase the potential customer base with 14,000 new customers in Copenhagen alone. Then we are going to come up with a new platform. And one of the things about that new platform is the dynamic pricing technology, which when it's finally phased in, has a 5% to 15% opportunity of revenue growth there as well. And then we have all of this new technology. I'm going to talk about the new technology that's also going to help us towards our goal of 8% to 12% organic growth. I'm very, very technology-focused. This is one of the big and main contributors to our turnaround is that we have actually digitized a lot of this company at a very early stage when I came in, and we're continuing to do that. So we are launching our next generation app in '26, Q1, hopefully, famous last words, but we have a very high-quality level before we want to introduce something new to our customers. We have updated a lot of the cars with safety and security measures. So now we have actually forward and rearward-looking cameras. We have smoke detectors, vaping detectors in the cars. We have damage detectors. And that both have a preventive effect because if you know there is a camera in the car, if you know there is a smoke detector, if you know there's a damage detector, you tend to report your damages or you don't smoke and you don't vape and you don't drive so hazardous as you've been used to. We can see that in the numbers already now. So it has a preventive effect. We're also getting better for -- on the documentation for invoicing of damages, for example, or invoicing of smoking, something that we couldn't do before, which could lead to a very bad customer experiences because back in the days, we could actually charge customers for damage that they did not do because we're not inspecting the cars after each trip. And then we have our next-generation app, as I talked about, and there's just a lot of good things about that app. I think we are way behind on the app situation here. I mean, it's working, and we have a good growth and -- but there's so many more opportunities if we're utilizing the next-gen technology from an app perspective as well. And then lastly, I just want to share with you that we are putting sensors -- or not we, but companies putting sensors in the parking spots that have been allocated for GreenMobility. I know there's a municipality election today. But so far, we have 1,000 parking spots. And in all of those parking spots, the parking sensors are installed. And that means that in our new app, the customers will be able to see if those parking lots are available or not before they even start their trip. So there's also a good customer experience improvement on that one. And then already from me starting here almost 3 years ago, we started to leverage AI. I mean I think we were one of the first companies to do that. And across the whole organization, and I really mean this. Across the whole organization, everybody is using AI tools in their everyday work. This is one of the primary drivers why we have been able to increase our revenue with 29% in the first half of the year without adding new staff. It is one of the primary drivers for that. So we have AI across the board. It's AI-enabled pricing algorithms. It's the AI car placement to fit demand patterns. We know exactly where the cars should be located, and we'll get the customers to locate them in the right places through another system that we have. We have it in finance where AI is automating a lot of functions. I think there were 8 people in finance before, I think. And now we're down to 3, right, with the revenue, which is considerably higher. We have chatbots. About 95% of our Q&As of people calling in or writing us is actually answered by an AI robot. And we are answering immediately, right? They don't have to wait for someone who's there, and they don't have to sit in line. So with all of these resources that are being freed up, we can grow more and we can focus on more strategic development activities. I think that's one of the reasons why our -- a lot of the projects that we have been doing is because we are so efficient. We are around 12 people in the headquarters now, 12 people to handle this revenue. And we're not going to be more than that. So this is something we definitely do. And speaking about technology, I want to talk to you about why we want to bring autonomous car sharing to Denmark. So from an economic point of view, it makes a lot of sense. If you take a self-driving car, it drives between 22 to 26 trips per day compared to our current trip rate, which is around 3 to 6 trips per day. A car like this makes 80% fewer damages, minimum 80% fewer damages than the average car. This is based on data from the U.S. That means that the cost for operating a fleet like this compared to our current fleet is significantly lower because we can lower our damage cost. And we can reduce the cost to insurance because if you have fewer damages, the insurance premiums goes down considerably. And we even see the data from the U.S. is also saying that customers are willing to pay more for trips in these cars. And we have -- I think the other part of this is that we have the best cards on the hand to be successful in Denmark. With this GreenMobility, nobody has a better foundation than GreenMobility for operating a fleet of autonomous vehicles. We have the operational excellence. We know how to handle 1,400 vehicles, electric vehicles already, check. We have the data. So one of the things that we can see about autonomous vehicles is that it's becoming more and more commoditized. We're seeing new entrants coming in with technology, which is developing very, very rapidly. Just 5 years ago, you needed special signings in the cities. But after the introduction of the AI chips and the very fast chipsets from NVIDIA and the way that AI is being put into these cars, these cars are so much more intelligent in how to see their surroundings and how to interpret different situations in their surroundings. And that is being commoditized because the LiDARs are the same, the software are the same, the chips are the same. So we will see more and more entrants coming in now. And the entry barrier is much, much lower than it used to. And that's a benefit for us because if it's being commoditized, GreenMobility is sitting with the right cards on hand because we know where the customers are driving. Now the customers -- with a commoditized technology, the customers are becoming the most valuable asset, right? So we know where the customers are driving. We know when they are driving. We know how much they are willing to pay. We know their sex. We know basically everything about their mobility patterns. And that is worth a lot of money. I talked about a gold mine of data before, and this is something that we can be really sitting on a gold mine of data in terms of self-driving cars. I think we will have a special on this one, Michael, maybe a little -- maybe in a month's time or so, maybe even before, where we can talk for hours about this. So we have all these strong customer relationships, we can communicate to the customers, and the customers like us. And we have the political insights. We have a very good relations with the municipalities, with the parliament as well. And there's a very big understanding and welcoming feeling around this technology when we speak to politicians around it. And then before I sum up everything, I just want to talk about the capital discipline because I think it's also relevant to a lot of you who's watching here. Even though I talk about self-driving cars, 99% of my time I spend with our current business because we have a strong business. We have a profitable business, and we can build that out. Autonomous cars is not something that will be tomorrow. It's not as far away as a lot of people think, but it's not something that will impact our results, one. Two, they will not overtake our entire fleet overnight. It will take time before this area, this space for autonomous vehicles are being expanded to go beyond our current zone. And a lot of our customers are driving in other parts of the current zone that we have, so outside of Copenhagen. So we will have a lot of years where we still need the current model where people have to drive themselves, sit behind the wheels before autonomous vehicles will take over. That's when we are going to continue to be a profitable company with a good growth rate. And our capital base is sufficient to drive the average revenue. We do not go and ask for -- the investors for more money. I think we have a good and strong capital base now to support this growth rate of 8% to 12% and the EBITDA growth at 12% to 16% per year. But obviously, when you have excess cash, you need to decide what to do with that. And we intend to return excess cash. We can redistribute cash if our threshold of equity ratio is 20%, and that is exceeded. And why 20%? So we want to keep all strategic options open as to our growth. And one part of that is to be able to grow our fleet. And we're obviously talking to our financing partners around that. And what they have said is that they expect our equity ratio to be above 20% in order for us to obtain sufficient financing of [indiscernible] vehicles going forward. So that is where the 20% is coming from. We want to keep the 20% above 20% before we can redistribute cash because we want to secure the strategic option of growing our fleet. And to grow that, we have to have it 20% above because we are financing all of the cars through external partners. To sum up, GreenMobility is now stabilized. We have a profitable business with good growth rates, and we are focused on selected efforts in our financial targets of 2028. We have identified the pockets of revenue growth that I've been running through with you here. We are going to -- we have deployed and we will deploy new technology. This is a technology-driven company. We will continue our operational excellence. This is a high-volume, low-margin business. You have to be very, very sharp on your costs. If you know this recipe, you can make a lot of money, and I think we've proven that. And we will have excess capital, and we now have the opportunity to redistribute that cash if the threshold of the equity ratio is 20% or above. And then we are also having the muscles now to prepare ourselves for the self-driving cars, which we will see within the near future. So yes, that was the sum up.

Yes. Well, let's have some Q&A, Kasper. The first one, when do you expect this new IT platform to be launched in 2026? You mentioned '26 in your in your release. So can we give a little bit better time line than that?

I expect it to be in Q1, right, famous last words. It's -- I think it's pivotal for me that we are getting it, but I don't want to compromise on the quality of it. And what we have seen so far from our supplier is that the quality -- I actually thought we were going to have it early on this year. But we just said the quality is not good enough, and we don't want to jeopardize the current good development that we see in the company with a bad quality product. But we are getting very close. I'm following this very, very near, of course, and we are getting very close, and I'm confident that we can do it in Q1. And it has a lot of benefits, Michael. It's -- the reason why I'm following it so close is that the current platform that we have, that's good. And I mean, it has brought us to where we are today in terms of the profit margins that we have, the improvements in EBITDA and the revenue improvements. But with the new platform, we can do so much more. There's radars in it. There is much more visible pricing. We can even see the car groups. We can sell more packages. We have the whole back-end situation with the yield management that I talked about. We have some other pricing opportunities and a lot of operational advantages over the current one. So I can't wait, but I'm not going to jeopardize our operations by bringing in quality, which is not sufficient.

Okay. Then the next question was actually why this 20% was chosen as a criteria, but I think you explained that very nicely that this is where you get your -- the best -- you can get the loans. So is that how we should understand it? You say you don't need capital. That's capital from investors, I understand. It's because that if you want to have a bigger fleet, then it's all going to be financed through leasing or financial partners. Is that how we should understand this?

Yes, that's how you should understand.

Okay. Perfect. Then there's a question here. What do you need to succeed to take you to the high end of your range of revenue in this period?

Well, obviously, we need to -- if we want to go to the high range here, it's -- we have to be successful with, I think, most of our identified activities like the growth projects, the platform, the dynamic pricing, the technology implementations, sensors, smoke sensors, the cameras, the new products for the 17-year-olds and the inflow of international travelers. So I can't make any guarantees, obviously, that we're going to succeed in that. But I can guarantee that we have executionable plans for all of these projects. So it's not just something that I've put on a piece of paper, it's actually executionable plans. So that's...

So it's more to land in the high end, you need a high success rate of all the initiatives; and the lower end, maybe some of them cannot be as successful as you expect.

Yes.

What is your plan to replace your existing fleets of Renault Zoe and what will be the impact on your financials?

So I think we have a very good long-term plan for our fleet. The Renault Zoe is our workhorse right now. I have one at home as well. I actually bought one for my wife before I even started the position here, not knowing I got the position, by the way. It's a very, very good car. It runs for more years than we first anticipated. And we are going to -- you can look at it as like an airline company. They're not changing their fleet overnight. They're changing their fleet gradually. And the same is what we are going to do. So we will start a change of fleet, but it will be very, very controlled and in line with our residual values and all that. But for now, I can say that the workhorse, Zoe, it's a very good car for the purpose because you don't have a lot of smaller cars with a very large battery that Zoe has. And with a large battery comes more opportunities for long trips, the cars can run longer between every stop for charging and so on and so forth. So I think we're very happy about it. We also hear it from the customers that they're very happy about the Zoe. So we'll see the Zoe in our fleet and also in the years to come, but we will gradually change them to something new.

I guess this, of course, can be dynamic. But if I hear you correct, we should actually expect this to be the workhorse of your fleet until maybe in this strategy period. Is that kind of your feeling? And I know it can change dynamic. Zoes can certainly be worthful and you can buy cheaper cars. You can't tell anything about that. But you do feel comfortable that Zoe is the workhorse of your fleet also for this foreseeable future, you have guided us on now.

I can say that the Zoe will definitely be -- we will still have Zoes in the fleet in 2028, but not all of the ones that we have today. So there will be a gradual exchange to newer cars.

Then there's -- how do you see the competitive situation in this period?

So when we're working with the models here, we put in the same competitive situation as we have today, which is actually a tough competition that we have in Copenhagen. I mean we have a lot of competition. We have Hyre, which is owned by the Volkwagen Møller Group in Norway. So it's a Norwegian company with a very strong mother. We have KINTO, which is owned by Toyota. We have GoMore. We have the buses, we have the trains. We have the metros, government subsidized, by the way. So I think that's what we have sort of taken as the competitive situations in the models -- in financial models that we have worked with. And I don't think that's going to change. I think maybe some will pull out because they don't make a lot of money, some of them, but we haven't taken that into consideration. It is a tough competition, but it's only good that -- it's only good for the customers that we have tough competition and it's keeping us on our toes every day.

Then there's a question about the platform. Is the new platform developed in-house to secure your future, meaning, I think here in the question in this line that if you have an external platform, can someone actually just go and copy your model and a little bit about how the IT platform is developed and how you secure that this is proprietary for you?

So it's actually a hybrid where we're developing some and we have external companies to help us develop it. These platforms are more or less a commodity today with the development of -- with the AI development and on all of the advantages that we have in software development, the software is going faster and faster. So with the commodity being said, it's not something that is going to set us apart from our competitors because it's more or less -- more or less looks like our competitors' platform, also from a back-end perspective. So it's not really what sets us apart, and it's not something where anybody in Europe, and we have competitors in Europe with 20,000 cars in the fleet and much bigger companies. It's not something where they have identified something which really sets them apart from us, for example. So I don't think it's a big problem with proprietary and the rights and so on. I actually think it gives us some huge advantages. We are -- as I said, we are a very small organization. We want to keep our costs low. And if we -- by using external companies that is also selling this to other companies, other car-sharing companies around the world, you're sort of splitting the cost with the rest of those customers. So it makes a lot of sense for smaller companies like us to work on a hybrid model.

So your competitive strength is lying in your customer base, your data, you're filling into it. And I guess, also your car fleet management. I think if I wanted tomorrow, I could probably buy an app cheap, but I'm not sure I could manage a fleet of 1,000 cars and build that up. Is that how we should see it?

Yes. So I think we have a lot of differentiators still on competitors, but I think our cost base is second to none, like probably in Europe. So it's very, very difficult to beat us on that one. We are super efficient. More than any one -- any of our peers, I can see that around Europe. So we are super efficient. We are also going to -- getting all of the benefits that some of our international competitors are having. We are getting the same and will go to the same level when we have the new app, which can help us tremendously.

Perfect. That was the last question. Thank you, Kasper, for taking us through your new strategy and financial targets until '28, and thank you for the audience listening in and asking questions. May everybody have a nice day.