GreenMobility A/S (GREENM) 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 at the end of the presentation. We are joined by CEO, Kasper Gjedsted. Today's agenda, your annual report, '24 results and of course, a look into '25 and your expectation and what is driving those. So that will be today's topics. As always, there's a box down below where you can ask questions. You're very welcome to do it in Danish. I will try and translate to the best of my ability, but today's presentation will be in English. But for now, I think I'll hand the call over to you, Kasper.

Thank you very much, [ Michael ]. Yes, thanks for taking the time to join this meeting. So after this important notice, I will just give a short introduction to myself. I come from the car rental industry. Well, actually, I started my career with A.P. Moller - Maersk and was there for some years. And then I came to SIXT, which was a very young car rental company franchise when I came in. I became CEO at the age of 33, and we grew that company from DKK 17 million to DKK 100 million net revenue. We were the only international car rental company that was profitable in all of the years of the financial crisis. So after that, I joined Avis. Avis was a much bigger company, much more complex. It was a company that had 5 years of consecutive losses in Denmark, 10 years of consecutive losses in Sweden. And we turned that company around in 18 months. It took us 18 months to turn all those losses around to the biggest profit in the company's 50 years history. And we went from 2,300 cars a year -- buying 2,300 cars to 5,000 cars to 6,000 in only 2 years. So it was a massive turnaround there as well. Then I went abroad with my family and internationalized a software company, and then I came home. And almost right after we came home, I started with GreenMobility and I've been here since March of '23, so 2 years exactly. And it has been quite right. When I came home and when I started in GreenMobility, we had already guided on a result that would be profitability in 2024. I just want to take you a little while -- I want to take you back on the history on GreenMobility and just give you a short introduction to who we are here and then also the history of the company because for those of you who doesn't know us, we are a car sharing company. We have 1,400 EVs, electric vehicles in our fleets, and we save a ton of CO2. We actually have a very comprehensive ESG report. I really encourage you to read it because it gives a lot of good information on where we stand on the environment and ESG in a general level. We have today more than 100,000 trips per month. And therefore, we have become an inevitable part of the infrastructure of the cities that we are in. And we are in 2 cities today. We are in Aarhus and in Copenhagen. But the story of GreenMobility is actually -- well, let me just give you an overview of our fleet here. Sorry about that. Our core fleet is comprising of the Renault Zoe’'s. It's a very nice suburban car, city car, it has a relatively big battery for its size. That's the core of our fleet. Then in addition, we also have what we call premium cars that are -- have a better range and are more comfortable to ride in. And we also have cargo vans of varying sizes. But with regards to the history of GreenMobility, it was a typical case of what I call Blitzscaling. It was -- we had an aggressive international growth strategy. It was in the years where there were low interest rates, there was easy access to capital on the financial markets. And we opened a lot of international markets, and it was going very, very fast. And that was basically just following the rule book of the time. Everybody told start-ups just to grow, grow, grow. And in the future, you will probably reach a balance between the burn and the earn rate that you have. So -- no bad things said about that because that was just following the rule book at the time for a company like ours. But then as probably many of you know, the world changed almost overnight. We saw a war in Ukraine that actually led to higher energy prices and higher inflation and it went very fast. And that higher inflation went to higher interest rates. And for a company like ours, higher interest rates was not very good because we had a lot of cars financed. High interest rates also meant that the access to capital on these financial markets was becoming very much more expensive. And we just saw a high cost structure. And because there was so much growth, we also saw a lack of processes and a lack of focus because there was a lot of markets to focus on. So the result was that we had a high burn rate, a very high burn rate, and that was also quite evident from the annual reports that we -- that you can see from the earlier years. And if you want to use a picture on that, we were a bleeding patient. And that was the situation when I came in, in 2023. So what do you do with a bleeding patient when he goes into the emergency room, right? The first thing you do is to stop the bleeding. So that was one of the first things we did. We wanted to go from a high-cost structure to a low-cost structure. And we also at a relatively early point in time, we found out that it wasn't sustainable with these international markets. So we actually decided to close the majority of the international markets to stop the bleeding basically. And then we could also move the cars and the vehicles from these international markets to the Danish market where we could see that they could obtain a bigger revenue per car. So there was a lot of sound business logic to those decisions. We also decided to embark on a different strategy in terms of how we finance the car or -- well, the risk on the cars on the residual value. So all cars that have come into our fleet after our start, we don't see any residual value risk on those cars. And then we could start because now all of a sudden, we could start to focus on much fewer markets. Then we could also start to focus on building processes, optimizing processes and also use data to a much, much higher extent than we had done before. And the result is what we see in the annual report of 2024. So the result of all of these major changes that we spent a lot of time on, a lot of focus on in '23 and '24, we can really see that those results -- the results bear fruit. We had a guidance on our revenue on our continuing operations of between DKK 120 million to DKK 130 million. Our revenue ended in DKK 120.5 million, so that was at the very upper level of the guidance, a 72% growth rate compared to 2023. And we have on our P&L, our guidance was DKK 2 million to DKK 12 million, and our net profit ended in DKK 9.7 million. So also a very big improvement compared to early on, the net loss in '23 was DKK 25 million. So a very big improvement on that parameter as well. So we fully lived up to the expectations to our guidance, and I'm very satisfied with that. On our EBITDA, also from our continuing operations, we saw our EBITDA in 2023 was DKK 5.2 million. But in '24, we have changed that to DKK 35.8 million, also a tremendous increase -- improvement of our EBITDA. So yes, the patient survived, the operation went very well. And I think the highlights of 2024 is that we actually managed to execute on the strategy change that we made. It was a major strategy change closing all of these international markets and moving the cars to the Danish market and focusing on that. But I really think that it bore fruit for us. And I think we can see that in the results that you can all see in the annual report here. I also think it's very positive that we now have positive operational cash flow. It was also one of our targets to have an operational cash flow, which was positive. But it has obviously also cost a lot of money, to be honest. It has cost a lot of sweat, but it has also cost a lot of money to move all of these cars and refinancing them and closing all of the markets. So we have seen a negative P&L effect from the discontinued operations of DKK 27 million. Now the good thing about that is that we don't expect any material impact in '25 from the closed markets. So that chapter is, so to speak, that is closed now, and we don't see -- we don't foresee any material impact on '25 from these closed markets. And then in December, last year, we also made a capital increase of DKK 15 million from existing investors. And that means that we have reestablished a positive equity now. And I think that's also a very positive sign for us. But we're not done. We're not done at all. This was step one, stabilizing -- operating on the patient, stabilizing it. And now it's time to build muscles on this guy, this young guy or girl. And we still have a lot of things that we need to do and a lot of opportunities. And that's one of the most exciting things about being in this company. That's all of the opportunities that we really, really can start to focus on now. So in general, we want to become an even bigger role -- have an even bigger role in the urban transportation. I think we are a very important part of the infrastructure in Denmark now in Copenhagen and in Aarhus and abroad. And we want to make that an even bigger part of the infrastructure. But with 100,000 trips, I mean, it's 100,000 trips every month, 100,000 plus every month, then we have thousands and thousands of people in the population that rely on our services now. And I think that gives us -- there's a big responsibility along with that. It also gives us access to the municipality, which is, by the way, Copenhagen municipality, we have a very good relation to them. This is our biggest market now on top of Aarhus, of course, but we have a very good relationship with Copenhagen municipality. We have a good cooperation with them. And they also see the idea of promoting car sharing. I'll give you an example. So last year, they gave us around 400 parking lots that we could use for our cars. And we could actually take those parking spots and point to a map and say where we want to have them. And this year, we're getting an additional 600 parking spots. So we have parking spots around the city, which are dedicated to our cars and no private customers can use those parking spots. So it's -- I think we have a very, very good cooperation with the municipality on this one. And that also helps us, of course, to reach more target groups by giving easier access to our products. I think we have underinvested in our technology. I mean we are a technology company. But now that we are starting to build muscles and sharing the results that we are doing, I also think it's time for us to invest more in it. So that's what we're going to do in -- before summer here, we're going to introduce a brand-new platform. The current one that we have is a little bit old fashioned, if I may be so kind to it. The new platform will give us a lot of opportunities. Both on a customer experience point of view with a lot of good new features on it. I'll give you a few examples. If you want to have a van, for example, today, you really have to look for it on the map among 1,000 cars. In the new platform, you can sort the car types. We have a rate of functionality coming up where we will notify you when there is an available car in your area. If that area is sold out, you can set up a rate of functionality. You'll see more discounted cars in specific areas. And from our point of view, from the back end, we will also have an opportunity to be much more professional in terms of revenue management, for example, something that you take for granted today in companies like ours. It's actually something that we don't have in a very sophisticated way now with the old -- a little bit old type platform that we have. With the new platform coming in before the summer, we'll be able to do revenue management on a much more professional level. Why should a car cost the same on a Monday at 11:00 a.m. when everybody is sitting at the offices, not a lot of activity compared to Friday afternoon when it's raining, everybody wants to get home at the same time or to restaurants at the same time, why should it cost the same there. So it's something where we can really, really increase the efficiency, but there's also up sale opportunities, a lot of other good stuff coming with that one. We're also introducing new products. You tend to think about car sharing business as these short-term trips that you take from point A to point B in the city. I've inserted a couple of maps here. It's just to tell you that we are changing that. We're changing that behavior, so you don't just use us for the 20- or 30-minute rides within the city. The map to the left where you see the entire Denmark, that is taken at around 8:00 p.m. in the evening on Christmas Eve last year. And it almost lights up the map like a Christmas Tree, right? The cars are everywhere in Denmark. And the map on the right side where you see Zealand, that's a weekend day, that's a Saturday in September, where you see where our cars are driving, and they are also driving everywhere. So we are moving towards extended use of our services to a much higher degree than we have done before. We're selling many more packages than we have done before. And with packages, I mean these packages, you can buy 1 hour, 3-hour packages, 24-hour packages. We've even extended it up to 30 days. So you can have a car for a month at a time now with us. And thereby, we are morphing -- at certain times of the year, we are morphing more into a car rental company and taking the car rental company's customers on top on the -- what we call the commuting customers with short terms. And I think there's a lot of opportunity in utilizing our existing fleet by adding new products to new customer groups and by selling more to the existing ones. From the operational perspective, we also -- today, we are running a much more efficient operation than we have done before. We have made some significant changes. We're also utilizing IT to do that. We have developed a product internally here, which is called free mobility. Free mobility is actually where we are asking the customers to move the cars for us so that the cars are positioned better for revenue. I'll give you an example, if a car is positioned in one of the suburbs, we know exactly that car takes on average, let's just say, in that position, it will take 18 hours before it's being picked up by the next customer. But if we can move that car into the city center, for example, we know that it will be picked up within 3 hours. So we need to move that car in to optimize our revenue. And up until now or until I came in, we were spending a lot of man hours on that and man hours are expensive, right? So instead, we are asking the customers so they can actually do it directly in the platform. To pick up that car, you can drive it for free. We even give you 10 minutes on top of this, if you just want to place that car for us in the city center. What we can see now, it's been a big success. What we can see now is that customers are actually doing that for us, and it's customers that would otherwise not have taken the car. So we can see some real improvements now that we can really focus on the Danish market. We can see some real improvements on the operational part of the business as well. As I also said before, we have -- from a tech point of view, we have also been running with some of these sensors where we can actually detect damages real time. We are now going to install that across our whole fleet. It has been running in hundreds of our cars. Now it's going to go in all of our cars. So over the summer here, you will see that all of our cars will have these sensors that can detect if a customer is making a damage in real time. If a customer is making a damage, he or she will be notified by an e-mail and a text message and one of our guys -- and we will ask them to make a damage report instantly. And one of our guys and girls will actually take one of our cars, drive to the car that has been damaged to document it. So we will now be able to document the damages being made by the customers. Because this was actually an Achilles heel in the business model we have for all car rental -- excuse me, for all car sharing companies that you weren't able to document all damages being done to the car. We are able to do that now. And as I mentioned, during the summer, all 1,400 cars will be equipped with this sensor. And on top of that, we're also going to install cameras, forward and rear-ward looking cameras in all our cars that are connected to AI software. So they can actually detect smoke. So you can actually see smoke through the AI modeling. They can see smoke if you smoke in the car, if you vape in the car, we can see it. We can charge the customers. We don't want them to smoke in the car. But if they do, we are now able to charge that specific customer who is doing that. We're also able to document the damages on top of the sensor damage. We're also able to document the damages being done. And we're also able to document that people are throwing trash, leaving trash after them. We don't want that because it's a bad customer experience, and we are not in the car after every trip. So now all of a sudden, we can actually detect if there's trash in the car after each trip, and we can charge the customers, and that will obviously also have a preventive effect. So we believe that there will be a better customer experience from this and also better profitability to our company for it. But we're going to use a lot of technology. We're going to invest a lot in technology to improve our whole operation, our whole business. But also not just technology. We're also using our brains a little more, right? So we want to do operations much more efficient than we are doing before. We are gathering the cars. Well, the customers are gathering the cars in hubs for us. We have a big hub in DTU. There's more than 100 cars going to DTU every day. We have the airport. There's also a lot of cars going to P7 at the airport every day. And it just makes much more sense to clean the cars there, to service them and maintain them where the cars are actually gathered instead of before we had our staff going from car to car to car all over the city. It's much more efficient to have these hubs. So a lot of things that we are doing in order to operate much more efficiently here. And now with the results that we have here in the annual report of 2024, we also have a better chance of negotiating with our current financing partner and with new financing partners on the financing of the cars. Because, obviously, there was a risk in dealing with our companies before that has been diminished substantially. And that's why we're also going to go out and negotiate with our financing partners on lowering the cost for financing. So there's a lot of opportunities in all aspects of the company and a lot of development going on and a lot of execution on that, and it's just super exciting. That brings me to the guidance of 2025 here. Our expectations for '25 are revenue growth of between 7% and 13% and an EBITDA growth of between 20% and 40%. And that pretty much sums up what I wanted to say.

Kasper, let's jump into some questions. There's a long question here. But if you look at you're replacing a competitor that was almost your size, you'll increase your fleet size with 20%, 30% here. Then the calculation says that if you had replaced your competitor fully with new cars, then you had a much bigger opportunity to grow more than 7% to 13% next year. So the question is here, do you feel that you are reaching maturity in -- you might say maturity in the car sharing part of your business? Is that why you haven't 100% replaced the competitor?

No. So I definitely don't think we have reached maturity in the market. I think there's a great potential in terms of the market here that is still expanding. But I think the big difference is that we are going from this hypergrowth model into growth that has to be profitable. And that's the very big difference. And we haven't guided on the amount of cars that we have in the fleet and that we anticipate in our fleet at all. But in the general terms, the growth rates that we are seeing have to be profitable. And we can make more revenue on the current fleet as we do today. We are also going to develop our product from a fleet perspective as well. But on the current fleet, we still have a lot of opportunities, and the market has definitely not been satisfied or saturated now as it is now. And I'll give you a few examples, [ Mike ], if we have the time for it. we have a great product. That's the thing, we have a great product, and we have a product that is -- let's just say, from one of the big segments where we can actually take revenue from. If you look at the old-fashioned car rental industry that I come from, I'm a product of the old-fashioned car rental industry. I've been in that industry for many years. If I compare that to our product today in GreenMobility, we just have a much better product. If you go to the airport, if you arrive at Copenhagen Airport and want to pick up a car rental car from Avis or Hertz or Europcar, you have to take a bus. And if that bus just left when you got to it, you probably have to stand and wait for 15 minutes, okay? Let's say we wait for 15 minutes in a sideways rain. It's always raining sideways in Copenhagen -- and then you go, you have to take 10 minutes to go from the bus stop to the car rental center, and now you spend 25 minutes already. So if you're unlucky, you are the last one to go out of the bus. That means you're going at the very end of the queue because everybody -- the bus has accumulated a lot of passengers going to that. So you have -- probably have to wait 20 minutes more, right? So now you have waited 15 plus 10, 25 plus, 20 minutes. You already spent 45 minutes, then you get to the counter. And then the guy or the girl on the counter has to sell you everything because I taught them to do that, right? So they have to give you a long speech and they have to convince you to buy a lot of things. Probably got to take 10 minutes more for all that. So now you almost spend an hour picking up your car, comparing to going to GreenMobility, which is located in P7, you could actually walk to our cars from the arrival hall in P7 without going outside, picking up the car. And during the time that where you're still picking up your rental car, you're already at the destination with a GreenMobility car. You can already be [indiscernible] in 1 hour, right? That's the time when the car rental company customer has picked up the car and has left the airport, just to give you another example. I'm going to give you one other example, just for the fun event. Because this weekend, I sold -- well, actually, my wife sold a sofa on DBA, right, to somebody who -- and they underestimated the size of that sofa. So the van that they brought from their neighbor was not big enough. And without a doubt, without even me mentioning that I work for GreenMobility. They just said, you know what, I can see there's a GreenMobility car 8 minutes from here -- a GreenMobility van 8 minutes from here. So we are on that level of consideration for our product now where the customer -- a lot of customers, they don't even think about the old-fashioned car rental companies where you have to go to a physical office to pick up a car. And I think that's a tremendous strength, and I think there's a lot of opportunity in that for us.

And there's a question here about the car rental market. How are you going to target? Is that -- when I go in and I want to go to abroad and I have a rental car, I go to a platform, try and find the cheapest one. Is that one of the ways you're going to target that market because people need to know that this is a solution, not going to the old fashion ones.

Yes. So without going too much in details about that, I can tell you that we are working on different tools where we will become much more visible also, for example, foreigners coming into Copenhagen, so to speak. And again, we are morphing into a car rental company at certain times of year. And I showed you the slide of -- with the map of Denmark. That's taking -- those customers are the ones that normally rent from Avis or Europcar. Those are now renting with us. And there's a lot of more opportunity in that.

Perfect. Then a little bit about the competitive situation. Do you see any changes? And that's also the question, is it a competition that Bolt is buying Viggo. The Bolt is buying Viggo, the taxi company. I think Uber was also coming to the market and buying a taxi company. Do you see that as a competition -- change in competition? And on the car sharing market, is there any changes in competition there?

Yes. So we saw Uber coming in and working together with DRIVR, which is a taxi company, and I think it was yesterday or the day before or maybe today. Bolt is coming in by acquiring Viggo, which is also a taxi company. And I think the most important thing to understand here is that this is the taxi market. So it's taxi to taxi company, it's going to be -- there's going to be a war there, I think. For us, I mean, we can feel it a little bit, not very much, but we can actually feel it a little bit when Uber is giving away their rights because by entering the Copenhagen market, they were giving away rights. They gave 80% discount, on discounted rates. So you could take a car for like nothing. But when they go back to normal without having these introductory rates because it's truly unsustainable with the prices they have there. They're competing with other taxi companies. And no matter how -- if you do the math, a car with a driver will always be more expensive to operate than a car without a driver, which is our case. Because the car with a driver, you have to pay the driver a wage. And you also have to pay the driver for all the time he's not driving with customers, right? And the time where we are standing still, we are basically not -- we are paying financing costs, but we don't have any cost other than that. So we will always win this race in the long run, and we're looking at different customer segments because it is substantially more expensive to use Bolt or Uber compared to GreenMobility, unless, of course, they are giving 80% discount. We see that as an introductory phase.

And you haven't seen any car sharing companies coming. I think last time you mentioned you can actually see it if they ask for a parking license. So you have a pretty good view about that, and you haven't seen anything there.

We haven't seen anything that's going to change the market substantially at all. No, not yet.

And then there's a question about the consumer confidence. I guess if we take a little bit back, I think, at a point of time, you could feel it when the consumer confidence went down, the economy went down. And we must say the consumer confidence has been downward sliding in '24 -- sorry, the start of '25. Have you seen anything in the first data of the first couple of months here in '25 of that?

I think with regards to consumer confidence, I think, it goes -- for us, it goes both ways, right? Because you have the long-term effect of the consumer confidence that goes -- consumer confidence that goes down, you have more people that are considering not having their own car or getting rid of their own car because it's really a high cost just to have a car standing idle for 92% of the time in the city, right? So that speaks in favor of us. That being said, on the short term, if we see a major change in the consumer behavior, on the short term, for a certain segment or some of the segments that we are servicing, those people might tend to take the bike even though it's raining. So I think it goes both ways on the short term and long term.

Have you seen anything in data or you don't want to share that with us here in the start of '23?

If I've seen any...

Any changes, downward trend or something like that together with.

We can measure it like that as it is right now.

And then there's a question, you might already have mentioned it, is there more ways to optimize your fleet cost in '25? Is that primarily on the financing part? Or is there also other parts where you can lower your fleet costs?

Yes. So I think it's a very good question, by the way, but there are definitely ways we can lower our fleet cost. So we have the whole operational optimization projects that we have there by placing the fleet right, by cleaning them differently. I'll give you an example with fleet cost, if you -- from an operational perspective, I'll give you a small example. So before the cars were cleaned in washing [indiscernible] and so on. Now we're cleaning them by hand, we are saving around 15 to 25 minutes per cleaning because we do it by hand instead. Quality is not as high, but it's absolutely acceptable of the cleaning. And we can clean many more cars with the same staff that we have today. So that's optimization on the operational side. Also mentioned the optimization from a damage perspective, both in terms of the preventing of damages by having -- installing cameras that has a preventive effect. People will drive the cars better is our hope. But also from a documentation perspective, whereby we can drive in more revenue from damages, charging more customers from the damages that they have actually made. So that's another aspect to it. And then, of course, we have the -- if you take financing costs as part of that question, I think, we also have a good opportunity this year and the years to come to lower our financing costs substantially. Because we have a different risk profile now with the results that we have delivered for '24.

And then, of course, the big question. When you change a car in your fleet to a newer one, is that also lowering the cost? Are the prices going down on the cars and on the running cost and so on? Is that a trend you are seeing?

Yes, because that's one of the next big wheels that we can turn on, right? So as we see the cars are expiring in our fleet and we need to change them. If you take the Zoe's. The Zoe's for Mr. and Mr. Jensen here, that would cost when we bought it around DKK 280,000, including VAT. If you look at a similar car today from new, it's DKK 180,000 per car. So there is substantial -- and it goes -- probably goes longer on a full battery today. So on a financing perspective, on the way that we are writing them off. There are very fewer damages that we have to pay ourselves and so on and so forth. We are looking into, in my world, a substantial upside on changing the fleet as well. And we'll do that in a very controlled manner in this year and the years to come.

Perfect. And are there any plans to add more cities in Denmark, looking now we have the map here. So are we -- every other city is too small to run this business model?

It's not something we have guided on. But what I can say is that we have actually increased the amount of cities. It's still in the vicinity of Copenhagen. But for example, we have added [indiscernible]. Last year, we added [indiscernible]. We got some support from the EU to test that out, and that actually goes well. So we do it on an area basis, but it has to be something -- as I look at it today, it has to be something that -- where we have the benefits of running a big operation in a city. So we'll see and we will guide on it.

Perfect. And now we get back to the financials. What are the expectations for cash flow and do you expect to raise more capital in '25, '26? So you haven't guided on it, but any indications -- are you allowed to give us any indication on the cash flow and of course, on raising more capital?

Yes. It's a good question. I'm sorry, I have to give you a very boring answer, but I'll give you the answer that is actually in the annual report. So we have sufficient cash resources as we have also written in the annual report. And we can, if needed, we can establish cash and credit facilities. We also have commitment from investors to provide additional financing, if needed. So that's what I can say about that, but it's all in the annual report.

And then on the cash flow, you're now guiding on EBITDA on revenue, but not on cash flow. But any indication about expectations for cash flows?

No, nothing else that we are cash flow positive, and we intend to stay cash flow positive.

I think that were the questions, Kasper. So thank you for taking us through your results, the expectation. And there are many, many, many, you might say, new things that you are going to do this year. So that will be interesting to follow. So thank you, everybody, for watching in, and thank you to you, Kasper, for taking us through this.

Thanks a lot, pleasure.