Pinewood Technologies Group PLC (PINE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody. Good morning, everybody. I have to stand up here. You have to participate. So good morning. Thank you, everyone. What do you guys think of the video? All right? Thanks, Reese, appreciate that. Call out to Kim Costello, our Chief Marketing Officer; and Maverick, our marketing company that helped put that together, but that really is the DNA. You saw the double helix there. That really is the DNA of our company. For most of you, I think you know me, but those that don't, Bill Berman, I'm the CEO. Obviously, I'm not from here. I'm from a land far away, California. I've got a story past. I've been in automotive retail for over 30 years. It's a lot more than 30 years, but I'll just stick with 30 because it sounds better. And when I was in university, actually was studying to be a lawyer, and I -- my minor was turned, which turned into a second degree, which was in computer science, which today would be more like coding. Didn't want to do either one of those 2 and fell into the car business. No one goes up trying to sell cars unless you're a parent's name is on the top of the building, right? So fell in the car business and loved it. But early on, I knew that technology had to be part of the solution of where automotive retail was going. And the first company I worked with was on a system called Reynolds and Reynolds. And shortly after I've gotten to management, they switched to a system called ERA, which was a product that Reynolds and Reynolds had. And this was the first on-prem server-based dealer management system that existed pretty much anywhere in the world. And since I was the only one who could spell computer every time there was a problem, I had to go out there and fix it. and they would send tapes out and you'd have to do updates and backups and all this different stuff here. And then ultimately, I got them to give me the codes that fix the minor coding errors and design and kind of coded out forms and stuff like that as a little side hustle within the automotive dealers that were in the street there. But what I realize is just how antiquated these systems were, and this was back in the late '80s and early '90s. The crazy thing now is those systems are still the core systems that operate pretty much worldwide when it comes to the automotive technology stack. After we sat here and spun Pinewood out of Pendragon and partnered up with Lithia for North American JV, we went with this. I can tell you, after 30-plus years in automotive retail, I've never been so excited to do something. We get to have some fun with my team over here, build something incredible. And hopefully, for all of our investors and our shareholders get a great return on all of your investment, your faith and your trust in us. And we really appreciate that and value that. So as we go, agenda for the day is pretty simple. We're going to give an overview and introduction of Pinewood. We're going to go over the strategy piece, which we'll go into a little bit more detail. Kim will come up then and go over our brand positioning, pinewood.ai. We'll do a financial outlook, which Ollie will take. We'll get into Q&A, and then we'll have the breakout sessions. And what I'd really ask, and I know everyone's got busy schedules. But if you have 20, 30 minutes after we do the Q&A., we have 2 rooms set up just outside here to actually show our wares and show you what the product actually does. I think Ollie and I spend more time trying to explain what the product really is, I think it would be advantageous if you guys have time to go out there and look at it. So today, myself; Ollie Mann, my partner and CFO; and Kim will be going over marketing. We have Kieran and Steve, our CTO and our Chief Commercial Officer, Steve will be up here for a Q&A and to answer in-depth questions when it comes to the technology stack and kind of on some of our future plans. And the things that we're going to cover. We're going to talk about what automotive retail ecosystem landscape really is, whether that's here in Europe, North America and beyond. We're going to go a little bit in how our customers receive us and what they're saying about us. And I think everyone saw the Marshall announcement earlier this week, and that should be a testament of the quality of our product. We'll talk about what our immediate focus is in opportunities within our existing markets, really talk about the real opportunity that exists in North America. And then once again, Ollie will sit here and go over the financial outlook and forecast. So what is an automotive ecosystem or landscape. Traditionally, this would be called the DMS system. We're much more than a DMS system. A DMS system, a dealer management system traditionally represents an accounting platform, an accounting system that facilitates back-office accounting can build out financial statements, record new used vehicle sales, aftersales and as such. We are so much more than that. First, we are the first SaaS cloud-based pure automotive ecosystem in Europe. We have a leading tech stack. We're built on Microsoft and cloud hosted on all of our products. We're in 21 countries, which very few can say off of operating system, one code. So we're not in 21 different countries with 21 different systems that we're trying to manage simultaneous to this, and we have over 34,000 users. And after the announcement earlier in this week, you can add up over the next couple of years what that will go to and the real opportunity there. These products and especially our product is a very sticky product. We have incredibly low churn. So on a net churn basis, over the last several years, we're less than 2%. Even if you threw COVID into there and some of the disruption there, if you go over 5 years, it's less than 3%. If you go out 10 years, it's back to less than 2%. So our customers love our product, they stay with our product. More times than that, they're actually increasing the number of licenses and the number of products. We have a very strong reoccurring revenue stream where 85% of our revenue is reoccurring. And depending on how we grow that number can even go up. We have an incredibly talented workforce that are completely dedicated to building the best technology stack and the thing here. And the real challenge, and we'll go into just a little bit more detail, we already partnered up with the top 50 OEMs worldwide. So pretty much if you can think of an OEM that exists out there. We already have interfaces and integrations with them. The only exception to that would really be some of the new EV companies that are coming out of China and the such, but like BYD, [ Huang ] and all these different ones, we already have integrations with all of them. So as soon as they come up, we're able to build with it. And they actually prefer our tech stack because it's a modern tech stack versus something that's a little bit antiquated to the marketplace. This is a really telling slide. So if you look at the 70% of dealerships, dealer users are not satisfied with the data of the operation of their system. I think the number is actually a lot higher than that. And especially if you went deeper into it. This number came out from a company called Cox Automotive out of North America. They are the largest -- they have a little bit in the core systems, but they sell third-party layered apps. They own Manheim auctions, AutoTrader, Kelley Blue Book, all these great companies, they have a great tech and data stack, all disparate systems, unfortunately. But basically, this says just about everybody can't stand and can't really maximize their operating system that they're currently on. If you go into Europe, you've got several key players out there. You got Keyloop that used to be part of CDK Global, originally based in Illinois. Now they have an office here. They are a worldwide player of Constellation Software out of Canada. Nextlane, which used to be Imaweb, which is kind of a DMS consolidator. They bought several small companies in different parts of Europe. It's a completely fragmented market. As an example, if you go into Germany, they have 20 different tech stacks that exist within Germany alone. I don't think any one of them has more than high single digits market share. and it makes it very, very difficult for OEMs and us as the retailers to be able to operate. If you go into North America, a little bit different of an opportunity. You've got 3 big players there right now, CDK Global, Reynolds and Reynolds, the company I was talking about a little bit earlier, Dealertrack, which is owned by Cox Automotive, a little bit smaller player and a newer entry into the market, Tekion. Those top 3 though, CDK, Reynolds and Reynolds, Dealertrack, they have about 80% market share. And they're almost -- those dealers are almost held hostage, especially if you're a midsize to a large dealer group there because the pricing cost of change is hard. The dealers have found workarounds. But I don't know if you have saw, but there was a recent cyber incident with one of these companies. We won't poke out who that is, but it was the biggest of the 3, might be the first one on that list there. And the 40% of the dealers in North America were offline for 21 days. These are all built on old tech stacks. The example I gave on Reynolds and Reynolds early in my career. These tech stacks go back into late '80s, early '90s. They basically layered UI and UX over the top of them. It's basically green screen technology. All these things are self-hosted because you can't put it up on the cloud because of the tech stack. They have vulnerabilities that a cloud-based system, a system like ours doesn't have, and the market is ripe for disruption right now. And the dealers there pay just an exorbitant amount of money. We got some work done that ollie will go into. But on average, in North America, the average dealer pays anywhere between 250 to as high as $300,000 a year for their automotive tech stack. So when we get into the opportunity in North America, you can think what that is. But even within that, our system provides actionable insights. You get one version of the truth. I talked about the security of our tech stack. Efficient digital processes, and we give modern customer journeys. And that's what you'll get to see if you go into the breakouts. We can absolutely walk you through how a customer can engage with us, whether that's online, whether that's in store, over the phone, via chat, whatever and however you want to be able to communicate with the dealer. Our system also allows dealers to operate with 1 version of the truth. I know that sounds like doesn't that everybody happen. That's not the case. Most dealerships have anywhere from 5 to upwards of 15 different systems that they're operating on simultaneously to handle different facets of the business, trying to aggregate all that data, multiple entry points. I'm trying to come in. The data doesn't ever really ever match up. We're the only 1 that's 100% cloud hosted, highly scalable and secure. I just talked about the recent -- and we won't do the acronym for that company. But you can see that recent cyber attack that happened in North America, which is kind of really a big bang moment, a real kind of opening the door for a company like ours to be able to penetrate into North America. And then we have deep and long-standing relationships with our customers as well as with our OEM partners. And I already talked about our churn rate is less than 2%. And once again, we have an amazing team that have developed all this. The real thing here is this kind of bottom piece if you look on here, and this is a product that was built by car people for car people. One of the unique things about our product, and this is really important, this wasn't a bunch of really smart tech people that came up with a good idea and trying to build something and -- outside of a system and then try to bring it into and figure out what it was. This was born out of retail. This was a product that was developed in the early days under Pendragon. We were able to test and pilot, utilize the different systems, find best practices. As Steve and the team took the product into different parts of the world, we're able to pick up great opportunities and ideas out of Scandinavia, out of Asia, out of Africa and the such and continually build this product, but it was all with the input of dealers. And with the input of OEMs, not operated in a vacuum. And that really is a differentiator to us in the marketplace. If you go on to the example I gave with Tekion in North America, good company, cloud-based, similar to us, bunch of smart people, though, but once again, they built it in a vacuum and you can see by the quality of the product. And then this is what our customers are saying about this. And you guys can look on this, this will be online there, you can see it. But when you got people like Aviral, and most people in the industry know who [ Aviral Palmer Banik ] is. She is an icon in this industry and in this particular space. She's moving all of her Marshall stores onto the system, and we're going to be doing some different things with that company, and hopefully, over the years to come. They're looking at this as a way to move their business into the future. We just put the Jardines business onto the system, Neal Williamson, long-term Jardine thing, he's is now the Regional President for Lithia U.K. We put 2,500 users on in a near matter of months. We could have done it in a lot less time. It went on seamlessly. So We put on 42 dealerships, 2,500 users, multiple layered apps, no outages, no hiccups, no nothing, no lost sales, if anything, things already went up. And they're already starting to see the advantages of being able to use our product to sit here and become more efficient, more productive and with a -- lower overall cost of operation. And just to give you an example of that, when we put our system in, they had 28 disparate systems that they were having to operate to be able to manage their business. If you take out the 8 or 9 that were from the OEMs, that put them down to roughly 19, they're down to 4. But every 1 of those systems had a cost that was associated with it. The amount of money that we saved in between that and being able to restructure some different aspects of the business actually almost paid for the total price of the product on an annualized basis. Now we're going to go into our strategy. Our strategy is pretty simple. It's 4 pillars. First pillar is the opportunity we have in the U.K. with our existing customer base and some additional vertical sales through there. Next, Ollie will take everybody through our international opportunity, but once again, focusing on the markets that we're already in and how do we get deeper ties and be able to grow that. Product and vertical sales, this will be a really important piece. We'll actually go over this twice, partly within the U.K. context, partly within opportunities in other parts of the world, but especially in North America. And this is basically developing and constantly evolving the product, new opportunities and then being able to sell that to our existing customer base. And then lastly, and probably the most exciting piece of it is the opportunity we have in North America with Lithia. But all of this will be under the foundation of our capital allocation, our capital structure. And the kind of the way that I look at in Pinewood, it's like a 20-year-old startup that's got a great product, a great customer base, an incredible track record and reputation, cash flow positive and has a good balance sheet. So we have no debt. We've got cash on the books. We've got a great customer base, and we've got a great path going forward. Jumping into it in U.K. and Ireland, this is a pretty telling slide. One of the challenges we had when we were part of Pendragon is a lot of the other large groups, some of them were public, some of them were private equity or a different ownership, some were owned by groups out of North America is some of the bigger groups were not really inclined to sit here and work with us, not because they didn't like the team, not because they didn't realize the product was the best product, they didn't want to work with us because we were a competitor. We were selling cars against them. They didn't want to sit here and give money to somebody that could utilize that to maybe get more market share and as such. So while being part of Pendragon really helped in the early days and help build the product and get us to a certain point, it started to be a challenge for us to go forward. Now with that going away, we have a real opportunity. So if you look at here in the top 20, currently with the announcement of Marshalls, we have 5 of the top 20 on dealer groups in the country. This is our most well-developed market. It's the place where we have the highest market share. We have nearly 30% market share. It poses a great opportunity to us. You saw what we did with Marshalls. In a perfect world, every year, we'd like to see here and try to be able to chip away at that top 20 and be able to bring those on here. People are already seeing what we've done with Jardines, they knew what we did with Pendragon, it's really opening up the doors and starting conversations for us. But this is a huge opportunity for us. Then in addition to that, Obviously, if you then go -- expand that out to the top 100, we have additional opportunities in there. Now we've always done really well in the midsize groups. We've done -- decent small groups are a little bit harder to do with doing 1 or 2 stores. That's a long road to hope, but we have a real opportunity in this. We have a new vision of the product that you guys will be able to look at today if you go into the breakouts and be able to see that opens an opportunity. We've strengthened and reinforced and added to our sales and our marketing teams to go out there with a concerted effort to go really engage and drive the business. For the last 20 years, we pretty much operated off a word of mouth. We had a great reputation. People came to us, customers were pulling us in. We need to be a little bit more aggressive in -- with a good go-to-market strategy, which Kim will go over in a little bit, but that's part of where pinewood.ai comes into. And then I talked about this, and like I said, this is 2 pieces within that the 4 pillars. But this is the vertical sales within our existing channels. So the dealership comes on, they go with our core system, which normally consists of, obviously, all of the back-office accounting, CRM, almost everybody takes 90-plus percent. Our Tech+ tool, which is our aftersales tool, is 88% adoption rate. But you get into a couple of these other things. Chatbots, which is a product we just recently bought to market. We've got 25% of our dealers on that right now, a huge opportunity to be able to grow that vertically through there. F&I Menus is in beta right now, but that is a product that's going to be able to come out as well. F&I Menus, kind of a derivative of a process come out of North America, but with some of the FCA challenges, and the different things to -- GDPR and to work with guided sales and as such this is a great product that dealers are asking for. Once again, it's in beta, it will be coming full in. Document storage, you can look at business analytics, so building BI reporting stuff. These are all things where we have different levels of penetration within our current customer base, but we haven't fully penetrated that, and these are great opportunities. When we get to North America, I'll show you the size of what that market exists out there. It's actually greater than the core system marketplaces. And these are things that we continually can develop. And every year, every 18 months have an additional product to be able to sell through our existing channels. And then in development, we have equity mining tools which help customers get out, maybe you're in a PCP or 2 years into a 4-year. But now you're in a position where the value of the car versus what the price of a new one would be with the current incentivized programs might be a good time to be able to switch using our database as well as and this would be something to be powered by some AI capabilities to be able to go to market and engage with that customer before they were even in the marketplace, before maybe they even knew they wanted a car. Used vehicle management systems kind of tied into what we've done in service and then digital retailing.

Thanks, Bill. Now we're on to International. As Bill said, we've got a great business. We're in 21 different countries. So what we've done is we've said, look, we continue to build in those countries, if there's opportunities there, fantastic. But what we really want to do is build scale. So we've picked on 2 or 3 different areas in the world. And Asia Pacific is the first one. Japan is the focal point here. We've got a team -- local team in Japan. We've got a great relationship with Porsche, VW Audi. In the next 6 months or so, we should be signing a contract with them to roll out the product in Japan. And that's just the starting point. We really see this as a key market in the Asia Pacific region. We don't just want to stay with Japan. The other areas that we're currently present in is Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, particularly where we're looking at is the big dealer groups. Porsche again, VW, multi-country groups. So really where we can get to scale. And I think we called this out a little bit in the half year report. We said we really want to focus on building that and sort of maximizing that scale and perhaps not going to some of the smaller countries where we have previously building on those bigger dealer groups. Next, we've been -- really exciting, probably once in a generation opportunity. A lot of the German and German-speaking countries, particularly Austria, Switzerland as well, they've got systems, they're coming to end-of-life phase. So they've been in for 20 years, they're -- literally the next year or 2, they're going to have to change the system. So we've been approached by a number of groups saying, look, we're in the mix, the last 2 or 3 providers to provide the system. So we've been spending a lot of time with these groups. Steve and the team, we meet shortly, he's been out to Germany. We've had them here. So really exciting prospects here. And these groups are huge. So we've set 20,000-plus users. Typically, there's a number of these groups, there's 3,000, 4,000 users in them. So it's something we're actively looking at. And we've not called out in here, but we've got a team currently in Sweden and Japan. So likelihood is we'll build a team out, German-speaking team in Germany. It won't be run from the U.K. We'll have the U.K. support like we do with Sweden and Japan, but have a German-speaking team to build up that market. And then finally, internationally, we've had about 15 years we've been in South Africa. We've got a reseller agreement, which we don't have with new customers now. We don't go to market this way. However, it's a really successful setup we've got there. They're really good partners with us, and there's a real opportunity here. We've got a big customer base, a big slice of the market, but there's a couple of 2 or 3 big groups here. And what we can do is we can use the work we're doing in the U.K. and the U.S. as well and pull that into South Africa. So it's a real opportunity here in the next 2 or 3 years, and we've got a real commitment, both ways here. So we're looking forward to working with our reseller, Pinewood South Africa and growing that business over the next 5 to 10 years.

And just to add on what Ollie was talking about, going into these other countries over the last 15 years now is what's gotten us to the ability to be able to go into North America. Steve pointed out the other day that I was think, it was Porsche, for example, had 200 different systems, DMS' or version of systems worldwide that they're having to try to integrate with. That's incomprehensible. There's no way to be able to manage to that. And in this particular example, they wanted to get down to 5, and we want to be one of those 5. But you can't be 1 of those 5 operate if you only operate in 1 country or 1 geography. You got to be able to be scalable and be able to sit here and work in multiple different countries. So having relationships in this particular example with Porsche or what we're doing with some of the German brands in Germany and the such, has really opened up the doors for that because OEMs more and more are wanting to consolidate down and get to a handful of preferred vendors to be able to sit here and facilitate the online journey, their journey with the customer as well as traditional retail journey. So the international piece, while might not be quite as financially lucrative as maybe North America might be is a key piece that allows us to go into North America. So I touched upon this a little bit and we went through this about how it represents within the U.K. and our existing customer base. This really plays out big as we get into North America. And I'll show this slide in North America, but the third-party layered apps, which would -- all these things would be considered in a North American context actually have a higher total addressable market than the core systems actually do by a significant amount. And this is where all the real functionality comes from in North America. The real unique part of our software is when we get to go out there, we get to sit here and incorporate this into one system. So rather than if you wanted to go into F&I menus for example, where you have to go outside of the core system which is already outside of the system that you use to desk the dealer or figure out the financing options, which is outside of the lead management tool and then manually -- well, some of that data might transfer over, but then manually put the rest in and then go through a whole bunch of boxes and then present it to the customer and the customer says, yes. Then you've got to try to push it back into -- back through that same process into there, losing data connectivity all the way through there and then having to re-input it. It's clunky, it's time-consuming, it's not efficient. It's a terrible customer journey and it's incredibly inefficient. We -- on our products in building these tools, these are built into our core systems. So it's basically like turning an on and off switch to be able to access that type of a piece. So if someone want to do that F&I menu, you just work the deal, you hit the next step in the process, and then you can build the F&I menu and do it right there in front of the customer. And once again, this could be online. This could be on a mobile app. This could be -- we don't like paper, but if the dealer wanted to do on paper, they could do it that way, however they want to integrate with it. But these are minimum requirements that we have to be able to accomplish and be able to do at scalable levels in North America. And we already have all those where it says, yes, with the equity mining tool used vehicle management tool, digital retailing, we will have those by the time we go live in North America, but all of those will also be opportunities to be able to sell vertically within our existing channels with our existing customer base. So AI. Now pinewood.ai, I'm sure everyone came into this. I don't think Philip Noblet here from Jefferies. So I'll pickon a little bit. When he saw the first version of this strategy, he just like shook his head and thought it was a fad. And then he saw the automotive intelligence piece. And Philip hates everything. So for Philip to say something is brilliant, that carries quite a bit of weight with me. But when we went into it and realized AI is transformational in this industry and then in this business and these tech stacks. This isn't a nice to have. This isn't we'd like to have. This is a have to have. And one of the great things about our system is we have this great data stack -- and whether that's in aggregate over a geography or at an enterprise level with large dealer group or even down to a single store, we've got the best data stack that you could possibly want. Whether it's trying to engage with customers, predict future trends, value used vehicles and as such. What AI does on this, it sits here and puts an engine on top of that because AI doesn't have data, it extracts data and then basically sits and calculate it in different ways that current tech stack and programming can't do and gives us more actionable tools. So when you go into things like chatbots that can sit here and help and basically facilitate an online transaction without a human being involved, that's where this comes into. And AI would then engage with that data stack that we have and other data resources that we can attribute to it and bring it in and be able to facilitate that. We looked at this in the next slide, I'm going to talk about build by our partner. We found somebody that was subject matter experts in this with Seez based out of Dubai. We made an investment with them, and we're going to be partnering with them and co-developing several products. Right now, on a collective basis, we're selling their chatbots to our existing systems. Today, we're piloting them and testing them, but ultimately, we'll sell them through our U.K. international stores. We have exclusivity rights within North America on that particular product as well. But the real opportunity with Seez or maybe if we do something in house or others is how do we utilize that? How do we partner with that to sit here and take our tools to that next level. This is a good example of something. So if you use North America 3 years ago, chatbots did not exist. That 80% number was from a month ago. My guess, it's probably closer to 90% right now. Everybody now has AI-powered chatbots in North America, and they are facilitating a fair amount of the transactional processes. For the most part, they're on the sales side of the business, but they're now starting to go into the aftersales piece, too, helping with scheduling and redirecting customers. Most customers engage with dealerships after 5, on the weekends, when the dealerships are closed and chatbots are being able to sit here and basically give a human experience without having to pay someone to do it. much more accurate, much more knowledgeable and much more efficient, and customers seem to really like it. But those are the types of opportunities that we're looking for in that. And then I touched upon this, do we build? Do we buy? Do we partner? So if you go into North American context, we go into their tax title licensing, incredibly complicated in North America. The great thing about Europe here, [ VAT's ] 20% is built into the price. Ollie and the guys in the back office have to figure out who to write the checks to, but that's about the extent of that thing here. North America taxation is incredibly complicated. It changes by what ZIP code you're in, if you're buying a truck, the weight can have a higher tax, if you're using it for business is got a different tax, if you're using it for personal use, it's going to different one. It's the same thing with license and registration. But what if you live in California and you buy a car in Oregon. Oregon has 0 sales tax, but California does, do you pay the California. It's just incredibly complicated. I know the team could sit here and build an incredible tax table, probably better than anything that exists in North America right now. It's only going to cost millions and millions of pounds to do it and take exorbitant amount of time and is ever changing, and there's no real value in that. That would be an example where we find a good company, and we partner. And we've already engaged with 2 or 3 in North America to be able to facilitate that. Then you have things like -- we were talking about with like Seez, an investment there. That right now is a partnership. That's where they have a tech stack and something that we don't have today, could we build it? Yes. Could we build it quick enough to be able to utilize it in near term real time right now? No. So that's a good one to partner with. Now after we get into it, we may look at it and go, hey, listen, maybe there's a different structure or a different way to look at it ultimately and then we go that way with it. We've looked in North America at different small DMS providers and looked at maybe they've already got a customer base, maybe they have some integrations with some of the OEMs that we don't have, and maybe this is a quicker go-to-market strategy, and we've engaged with them. We haven't found anyone that was that appealing yet or really contributed to that, but we look at that. But we want to sit here and deploy our capital to sit here and grow our opportunities in our business more than anything else.

Thanks, Bill. Now we're on to a really exciting bit on to North America. So just taking everyone back a few months, the first stage for us here was the discovery phase. So what we did is we engaged with the top tier auto expert consultant who we're preferred not to be named, were one of the top 2 or 3 in North America. The key things for us were, what do we need to operate in North America, what the product features, integrations that are needed. We thought between us and Lithia, we have a 99.5% of the answer but that is to make absolutely sure there's nothing we're missing there. A key thing for us going forward is how can we go to market most effectively. As Bill said, the U.S. is a country, but it's actually 50 countries in reality, you've got 50 different types of tax. This is a huge base. Where do we -- how do we get to scale most quickly is key for us. So we engaged them to say, what do you think looking at us, looking at Lithia, how we're set up. And Lithia, the first stage in that, we've got obviously multiple, multiple other groups to engage after that. So it's not all focused around them, but obviously, that's the starting point. So that's a real key piece for it, which Bill will take you through in a minute how we're looking at that. And finally, really, we said there are stats out there on market size in the U.S., but what we ask them to do is get really, really deep on this, say, what is the addressable market, what can we go after there because there various numbers out there, we had some I think when we did the transaction with Lithia, but we've gotten to a really detailed piece of work, and we'll take you through that in a few minutes, which is a really interesting bit. So the output of this -- these are the key things that we need to do. So the development work, the discovery phase is done. We're exactly, if not slightly ahead of where we wanted to be in terms of timing for North America, which is great. We've started to engage with OEMs. So Steve and his team are talking to the OEMs already. And the key things we need to do with those OEM integrations and most of the OEMs, most of the integrations are different in North America. Not all of them, some of them may have worldwide integrations, but the vast majority have North America specific integrations, which we need to build. Finance integrations, finance is huge in North America. Finance houses there, it's used throughout every dealership. So that's a key part. And as Bill said, tax title licensing, do we want to build out ourselves? Probably not. It could take a few years. So it's looking at those integrations. And then those third-party layered apps. Every dealership group has them, every group is different, and there's some core ones -- the auto is one that used over there. Our used vehicle management tool is a key one. So we're going to need to build some integrations there. But as we said, the OEM integration and great engagement is underway, and the development work is in literally matter weeks away from starting. So we're in a great place there with North America. I'll hand back to Bill for the pilot stage.

Then when you look at North America, I like ollie's example there is like 50 different countries, actually, it might be more like 60. The opportunity is very unique and specific. So there's two things that we're going to basically use to see here and say, how do we start and how do we break into the market. So we have Lithia as our partner, which is great. Largest retailer in North America, 320 dealerships. Just to give you an example, the 320 dealerships, they are large stores, too. That's less than 1.5% share of the total new volume that they represent, even though they're the largest. These are the states that they currently operate in at the highest scale. So these would be the states that we would go to and look at first. These states actually, and these geographies actually overlay where most of the population is and where most of the other dealer groups and opportunities we go into. Some are easier to break into. Others, Texas and Florida are not quite as complicated as you'll get out of California or you'll get out of the Northeast, New York, Maine, Massachusetts and the such. So we'll look at that. The other piece is, and this is kind of something we're going to be doing parallel to everything else we're doing, but it is getting those OEM integration. So we're hitting all the OEMs simultaneously. Some will come online quicker than others. As we get OEMs online, then we'll overlay that to this, and then they'll be able to use this to partner with Lithia to go at it. But you can see the density of dealerships that Lithia has in these markets, the old adage, fish where the fish are, this is where their stores are. This is where the opportunities are. If you can operate in these geographies, this sits here and unlocks probably 95-plus percent of the total addressable market as you get into North America. And while this looks like a busy slide, and there's a lot on there, this is a redacted version of everything we're working on and going to market with. The first thing we have to do is just get the product to be North American specific and viable. I mean something as simple as the part exchanges don't exist there. You have to use the word trade-ins. So there's just simple things on language and nuances that go that way with it. We have to get the integrations with the Oems. we need to get integrations in with different key parties, Ollie talked about earlier, finance institutions, tax title and licensing and such. We've got to be able to sit here and be able to facilitate all that day 1. We don't have to have it all done, but we have to be progressing to it. We have to -- how do we differentiate ourselves as we get into the market. So we already have -- and there's only one other truly cloud-based system. They are nowhere near as mature of a system as ours is or as operationally viable. They're still kind of in the testing phase as they go out into the marketplace, but we have to make sure, we get one chance to do this, we have to do it right. There's no margin for error. We have to set up a commercial strategy and Kim is going to go through some of that on her piece. What are our contracts going to look like? So the U.S. has got a myriad of different contracts. Small, medium-sized groups normally do 3 years. Some of the larger groups do 5 years. There's one company that's doing month-to-month because they figure, once they have you in there, the cost of change is high. We've got to look at that and figure out what's the best way to do it or maybe it's a hybrid approach. But also how we write our contracts, how do we engage with the customers. We'll be deploying pilots in testing hopefully in the second half of next year. Kieran and his team are already sitting here writing code and doing certain things that need -- that are North American specific to be able to be ready for this. We already engaged. We've got several ins with several OEMs to be able to do this. But we're going to start piloting and testing, hopefully, middle to end of next year. And then as we go into '26, we'll start to build sales teams, marketing teams into '25, into '26 and start to -- these are long-cycle sales. So from when you engage with a customer to when you present to when you get a contract and you actually deploy can be anywhere from 9 months to 18 months. The bigger the group, sometimes the longer that road is. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but we need to start middle of '25 so that we have an order bank to sit here as we finish getting Lithia rolled out to be able to go on with their -- once again utilizing that prior slide of the key states to go into with the key OEMs. And then how do we scale into North America? And once again, like I said, Kim will go over some of that. But we're going to look at it and have full sales teams, full marketing teams, will probably do a small amount of development, actually support teams in the such, call desk and all that stuff. We'll need to be North American-based as well. And just because of the size of the geography, we probably have multiple offices to be able to facilitate that. But this is the key slide. So if you take the U.K., which is the second largest market in Europe when it comes to automotive retail. The rough tech stack here that everyone dealers -- once again, is not quite as mature as the tech stacks you get in North America. Here selling 2 million new -- 8 million units to 10 million units a year is about GBP 150 million to GBP 200 million a year worth of total spend. It's hard to give the exact number, but that's that way. If you go into North America, and you look right here, this 2.4 million, that's just in DMS. That is just in the base core accounting platform that currently exists today. CRM is another 1 million -- sorry, $1 billion that goes on top of that. Our system already has a CRM built into it. These other systems you're going to pay for something outside of it. But the real piece right here is this $3.1 billion in third-party layered apps. All that functionality I was showing you before, CRM, desking, chatbots, equity mining tools, F&I menus and the such, all go into that $3.1 billion. That $3.1 billion though has a lot higher margin than you get on the other 2 combined. And that's where the real opportunity and the real money ultimately made is. Most of the real big tech companies in North America aren't messing with this. They're going off of the incumbents on this, even though they're dated and insecure and antiquated systems, and they're going into this. We'll be one of the only pure players out there that can facilitate all of it incorporate it into that single system. Now I know when you say single system like, well, yes, that's -- why isn't it like every other businesses like that. Automotive is not. It is large amount of disparate systems all trying to aggregate data, all trying to put in very clunky, very antiquated systems. But in addition to that, you got to think, it doesn't matter if it's a car or a truck and SUV, could be a plane, a boat, an RV, -- you've got another $2.8 billion in non-auto that exists out there, too. And a lot of those systems I was talking about, Reynolds and Reynolds, CDK, Dealertrack and numerous others. And this piece here is a lot more fragmented or in this business as well, too. So if you go into aggregate, -- you've got $9.3 billion total addressable market in North America. If you go back to what I was saying, there's roughly 20,000 new car franchise dealers, so not even considering this. They spend between $250,000 to $300,000 a year. Lithia's got 320 stores. We're going to start rolling out their stores sometime first, maybe second half of '26 at the latest, but probably first half, the run time to get those stores on. If we -- after we get them on, put 300 to 400 stores on a year, which no one's ever done we'll be capable of doing it. But if we did that in 5 years, we have somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 stores, we'd still be in the low single or mid- to high single digits on market share with a runway that goes on for perpetuity. And those incumbents don't have a way to compete with us because the only thing they could do is throw away their system and start from scratch, possibly find somebody that they feel they can do what we do and go out there and buy it. This would be a slow burn on them. None of them are publicly traded, none of them really have access to big funds that are privately held or private equity held, really opens up an opportunity for us as we go forward. And then we're not going to throw out the math here, but I told you what the average spend per store is and you can look at how the stores go on to there and what that opportunity is. It is absolutely incredible what the overall opportunity exists out there.

Actually, Bill Well, if you asked the question, is this really addressable. The answer is absolutely, yes. Commercial vehicles, most of our dealers in the U.K. cell vans. These are vans, they're transit vans, small vans. So our system, it already operates on this. So sure, motor bikes as well. So it's not what potentially this is a bit of a stretch. This is definitely viable. This is the core as Bill said, but this is definitely an area that's addressable in terms of that U.K., U.S. market. It's absolutely huge. So in terms of outlook, I think most of you will have seen the RNS we put out this morning. So we've updated our guidance for FY '27. When we did the transaction with Lithia last year, September '23, we had the GBP 27 million. We've upgraded that to GBP 30 million, which we're confident in. It's the right thing to do. We've got the Marshalls deal, the underlying business as well isn't a great place. So it's great to get that out there. And that's underpinned by high double-digit revenue growth in our organic business, but also we're looking at selective M&A. As Bill said, there is the buy, build, partner and we're continually looking. Bill will touch on capital allocation in a minute. But what we don't want to do is sit on our cash, we want to put that to good use and grow the business as well as we can.

And then I touched upon this a little bit earlier, but when it comes to our capital allocation, how do we grow our business? How do we reinvest it, building new products, getting new functionalities, being able to go into new markets, i.e., North America and as such, that's what we're looking to see here and deploy our cash. We wanted to use it to accelerate growth, to create additional value for our shareholders and our investors and obviously, our team overall. But we're looking -- like I said, this is a 20-year-old startup. We've got a great opportunity, cash in the bank, got a great strategy, an incredible team, and I think an incredible path going forward. And then just in summary, we've hit all of this, but -- we have a highly secure ecosystem, and we have a unique global deployment disparity compared to everyone else. We have an advantage that nobody else has when it comes to that, which is a real neat competitive advantage, and it actually is what opened up North America for us. Talked about it, it's a 20-year-old startup. We have got a unique proposition, top of the market product and a great team to go out there and do it. And then our strategy is focused around optimizing performance, build better products, okay? Go out there and conquer new markets. And obviously, on this one, on North America. And listen, I got to call it out to Lithia and the partnership. They've been great shareholders. They've been great on the JV. They're excited about this. Their CEO, Brian Deboer sat here in the strategy meeting when we walked him through some of these opportunities in the North American strategy. His exact words were, this is not a Lithia solution, this is an industry solution, and we're fully behind you. And that's great to have from a company like that. And so great partners we have there.

Hi, everybody. I'm Kim Costello. I'm Chief Marketing Officer. So why are you hearing from me today? Because you normally don't hear from Chief Marketing Officers at a Capital Markets Day. You're hearing from me because we feel that our brand identity and positioning is key and cornerstone to what we're doing. Pinewood AI means more than just one thing. It obviously is a play on artificial intelligence, but it means automotive intelligence. It's also a call to action. When you go and you look at global markets, .co.uk is not something that's utilized in a lot of other markets, especially in the North American market. which we are going to be going into, as Bill and Ollie had spoke of. So we really wanted to make sure it did what it said on the tin, .ai is our new website. It is up live today. If you scan your QR codes on your name badges or outside, you'll be able to get all the materials that you're seeing here today, and they're hosted on our investor site. So why did we need -- aside from that, why do we need a new brand and a new distinctive position in the market? We're going into this with a different outlook. We are not, as Bill and Ollie talked about, one of our competitors, that's old, outdated technology. We are coming into this as a partner with our customers. We want to help unlock value, drive growth and increase our partners' revenue, both from a dealer perspective and an OEM perspective. We want to be able to help our customers take their data, sync it up and be able to make decisions at an enterprise level and being able to drill down to individual salespeople and individual technicians to help really unlock that value for the customer -- or really unlock the value for our customers. Automotive intelligence. It allows our customers to have a single view of the end user, the end buyer. That is something that's pretty basic in a lot of different industries. As Bill and Ollie referred to, it's something that the automotive industry has not been good at. With our system, you have 1 customer record. You can follow that customer throughout their life with your company. So not just at the individual dealership, but throughout the entire dealership enterprise. So if you have multiple -- we'll use a Lithia U.K. that has hundreds of dealers, you can go ahead and follow that customer in everything they do. You know the true value of your customer, unlocking that customer lifetime value. That helps you make better decisions. It helps you unlock and grow your revenue. We are a system, as we said earlier, born out of the automotive industry. Being a part of Pendragon allowed us to beta test a lot of things. I have sold cars. I've typed on our competitor systems in the U.S. We have multiple people that have sold cars in our company and then work closely with our OEM and dealer partners. This is a unique selling proposition. Nobody else in the market can say this. This allows us to understand what our customers need and to create real-time solutions. Again, that is something that's very unique to Pinewood. We have 4 key principles that we base our system on. We are a Tier 1 technology provider. AI, again, automotive intelligence as well as artificial intelligence is at our building block. And you can see that with our investment in Seez that we talked about a little bit earlier. We are future-facing and future proof. We are looking to grow. We're not looking to stay stagnant. We're not looking to sit here and have -- just add to our product, we are looking to build and expand our products. And we are a full end-to-end solution. That allows us to be secure and it allows us to have our customers stay within our ecosystem. They're not popping in and out. They're not trying to tie the data together. It allows that data to free flow and, again, allows our customers to make those enterprise solutions. This is our competitor set as we see it. As you can see, with the new branding, the proposition, we clearly stand out from our competitors. We are future. We are not looking backwards, we are looking forwards. Our go-to-market strategy for the U.S. As Ollie and Bill touched on, the U.S. is behemoth. It is not one market. North America market is not one market. 50, 60, depends on how you cut it down because of the different codes, laws, taxation in each of those states. So what we're looking to do is go to North America with a really unique selling proposition, right? It's exposing the limitations that are in the current DMS that we talked about a little bit, the lack of customer centricity. We all know that customer is key. If we can help our customers unlock their customers value, we are an integral part of what they do day in and day out. We do this through an inside-out mentality. As I said, because we are born and designed out of dealerships and out of car people, we know that we need to connect real-time data, and therefore, we can give a connected customer journey. We know that we can offer superior customer insights, and therefore, our dealers can have personalized conversations with their customers. And we know that a customer-centric culture equals a customer-centric experience on the other side. And the thing that ties that all together is the Pinewood system. So how are we going to take on the U.S. market that is so large? We're doing a competitor deep dive. As Bill and Ollie mentioned, we are ahead of where we wanted to be, right on track, slightly ahead. We're looking into what our competitors are doing. We know what they do well. We know what they don't do well. We're talking to customers that utilize their products. We're connecting with pilot partners, and we're connecting with thought leaders. We're not just thinking we know everything. We're going in and asking the right questions, hosting the right focus groups, doing the right things to make sure we are getting the best information possible and can create the best product. We're planning our strategy, what we like to call a stealth strategy. It doesn't make sense to go in and take on the U.S. market all at once. Strategically going in and implementing and deploying our system, that's how we're also marketing, right? There's -- I don't have a budget that's comparable with some of the competitors out there. So I've got to be really cautious and really tactical on how we make noise. I'm really lucky because I'm one of the few CMOs in the space that actually has a product that's incredible. I have a team that has built an amazing product. Me and my team, we get shout about that, that's huge. Why is marketing so important with this, I like to look at Microsoft, which we all know is a great example. So you take Bill Gates when he started Microsoft, incredible product. If you take a look at the share price, it's fine. You have Steve Ballmer and took over, again, a big product, tech guy, share price really didn't move much, continued fine. You look at Nadella when he came in, share price skyrocketed. What was the difference of that? The product, so great, still developing, still cutting edge. The difference was the culture and the marketing that he layered in over that. He was one of the first tech CEOs to really understand what culture and marketing can do and how that equates to their customers and then how it equates to their share price. That's what we're looking to do. And we think with our go-to-market strategy, with our unique proposition, with our unique selling points, that we can do that. We are a best -- best-in-market provider. We just need to make sure that we shout about it. Word of mouth is not good enough anymore, and we're going to go in and we're going to go in strong. Thank you. We have some microphones. If anybody has questions, both myself and Nancy will come around the room and just wave and I see one coming. Just keep in mind, I am in stiletto heels. So it's going to take me just a second to get to you. So if you don't mind just saying your name, where you're from and then your question.

Ciaran Donnelly from Berenberg. A few for myself. I guess just in terms of North America. I guess, in terms of competing with the incumbents, are you going to focus purely on functionality? Or are you going to compete on pricing as well?

North America and the slide I showed you when you show the total addressable market. The nice thing is there's not a direct apples-to-apples comparison because so many of our products can be built into that. If you take what the normal tech stack costs is for dealership, that $250,000 to $300,000, and say you took that off by 20% on that same tech stack that we sell here, that would be a 40% to 50% increase in our price that we currently are able to get here. So we could be able to price below market. We haven't finalized what our pricing is yet and we have those unique pricing opportunities when it comes to the various different functionalities and different capabilities that we're going to produce, and Kieran and his team are going to develop over the months and years to come. So we can go into there and provide a better price, a better platform, more secure and more consistent platform. The one thing, too, and I touched upon it a little bit, and I don't -- I want to make sure this gets out there is our system gets rid of multiple other systems that they don't have to do anymore. So if you take a Lithia, they're paying this much for their core DMS system, but they're having to pay this much more for a CRM to be able to manage it and then something else to be able to cleanse data between these different pieces. And the example we gave with Jardines here where they had all these disparate systems and off of the core system that they were operating on, they needed those. When our system came in, just about all of those went away except for the factory integrations. So it's a long answer to a simple question, but we can price significantly higher than we are here. We have a much higher margin than we currently have here, provide a better product. But once again, back to that being able to be more efficient, more productive and a lower overall cost of operation. And our system also allows for, you don't need quite the staffing model that you need in a traditional dealership. The old systems facilitate a lot more manual input, a lot more people to be able to do the same amount of work. That goes away too. So when we get to go sell the product, it's a great value proposition to be able to go in with.

And I guess just in terms of the incumbents, obviously, they probably see you guys coming into the market. They've got a couple of years probably to prepare. What do you think they can do in the interim to try and kind of I guess, compete away some of those advantages you have?

You've got Tekion who's just come out there. They just announced that they're piloting with Asbury, which is one of the consolidators in North America, I think they're kind of on the -- of the top 8, I think they're in the 6 or 7 range right now, but they're continuing to grow just like Lithia is. You've got us now with the partnership with Lithia on the JV going into North America. One of the large incumbents is private equity owned. They just had that big data breach. They've got bigger problems than to worry about me and what we do. And like I said, even if we put 300 stores on a year, it takes a long time before that really sits here and chips away at them. It gives great value for us and a great road map, but it really doesn't necessarily affect them. There are large -- there's -- other big one is kind of privately held, it has some tax issues and some different things here. They're cash cows. They're generating money. I don't think they're looking at it seriously. By the time we're to size and scale and affect them, I'll just be candid, there'll probably be a new guy or gal running it. So I don't know if the current people in there really care. I don't know. But I can tell you this, they can't easily replicate what this team has built. Like I said, to do it, they'd have to throw away everything they have, start over, and there's no additional pricing strength they can get from that. So unless they go buy somebody, and go that pathway, don't really see necessarily an opportunity. Will they respond? Maybe. But the only thing they could respond on is price, and we're always going to have an advantage just off of the way Kieran and the team have built the tech stack.

Probably you could segue to introduce the team actually. So Kieran Kelly is our Chief Technology Officer; and Steve Meadows, our Chief Commercial Officer. These guys have been at Pinewood for 20 years plus, and they are responsible with the wider team who do the demos earlier for a lot of what you see today. So we've got a lot to thank them for.

And maybe final one for Ollie, 2 parts. Just in terms of the outlook, can you clarify that excludes the North American opportunity.

It does. We're not quantifying that yet. So we -- you've seen the size of the market now. We know the pilot will be second half of '25 with -- actually rolled down in '26. But we're not at a stage where we can do some high-level math. I'm sure you guys will do the same thing, but that doesn't include North America. It's that 30 is the underlying business plus anything recent that's happened in the last 9 months like Marshalls.

Perfect. And then final one, just in terms of that underlying growth to FY '27. Can you just give us an understanding of the breakdown between pricing, upsell and new logos to get to that target?

Sure. I think, again, we're not splitting out, calling out specifically, but I think our half year results is a really good sort of benchmark on where we're going. So our revenue was up by about 11% for the half year. Users were up 3.6%. So in the past, the remainder of that would have been purely through pricing, but Bill has talked about the products upsell. And that difference between the 11% and the 3.5% is broadly half of it's pricing. So annual price increases, which are linkedinto inflation. But the other half is product upsell. So the way we're looking at it internally is that products upsell is going to increase over time. We're still keeping the inflation price rises. So whether it's 2%, 3%, 4%, whatever, that will be fairly constant. But over time, the percentage of that revenue driver of that product will increase from North America eventually. But actually, as we develop those products, we're lifting those into the U.K., into Asia, South Africa, Europe, so that will increase over time.

Who's next?

I am Ollie from Peel Hunt. So we've heard a lot about sort of the total addressable market and medium-term, long-term opportunity. If we talk about right now, what do you guys view as your sort of limiting factor for growth? Is it sort of the ability to roll out as quickly as you'd like. Is it the go-to-market or the sort of marketing team's budget spend? What's your sort of constraining factor?

I'd say the only -- let's kind of go in reverse order. In North America, we've got to get the market -- get the product ready for that market. So we have to engage with OEMs. So right now, we're -- the factor that we're -- that's slowing us down from going even faster, it's just being able to engage with them. They're not always Johnny on the Spot when it comes to phone calls or e-mails and such. So that would be the factor there. Our growth in Japan is more -- virtually none of it is on us. It's getting the contracts signed, doing the behind the scenes work and being able to go out there. We have the sales team to be able to facilitate. We have the marketing team to be able to do it. Kieran and his team have the ability to sit here and lever up and increase if we need to do of the bespoke coding or anything like that. So really, that's no real limiting factor. When it comes to existing markets in, say, the U.K., these are sticky products, and they're long sales cycles. So even when you engage at a high level with a customer and even if you're close to having a deal just engaging with them, doing the prep work behind -- before install is what takes most of the time. But I'd say the biggest thing with existing markets that we're in, it's just the sales cycle. But some of that -- that's not a money doesn't fix that necessarily and more people doesn't necessarily fix that. But if there was something that came to it back to -- I was talking about capital allocation, then if we needed additional resources or we needed additional people to write into additional code, then we quickly move on that.

Ollie, just on those other integrations as well, even though they are different in North America, we've got those relationships to those 50 OEMs, which is huge for us. So that means we've got an in with the vast, vast majority of those. And even the ones where we don't, say General Motors, we've got the contract with Lithia. So we've got 2 or 3 different ways against those OEMs. So Steve, even though it doesn't look at, he's been here a long time. And so he's got the relationship and his team with the vast majority of those, which is key for us going forward. And as Bill said, that's priority in the next 6 months or so.

Yes. I mean certainly, the technical platform that we're on is massively attractive to the manufacturers who want to control things from the center from a consumer perspective. So they want you guys as consumers to be controlling your car experience through their apps and through their tech platform. And that means moving away from a whole lot of national stuff that is historically there with the legacy providers. So we've got big support from the HQs to try and drive this. Ultimately, as you're right, there is a constraint in terms of how quickly can we realize revenue by getting dealers in and onboard, but that is entirely cash positive in the time that we're going to be selling the consultancy that we need to do to get these guys converted over is all chargeable and all an enabler, and we can bring people from dealer groups into our team to accelerate that.

Andy Wade from Jefferies. Can I ask just a little bit about Tekion and specifically how you guys differ. You mentioned that they're nowhere near as mature or operationally viable. But they are signing up some dealer groups, aren't they? So I guess interested in how they're managing that if it's not that operationally viable. And then interested in your bit of compare and contrast with where you're at? And how much might they be able to move on in the next 2 years, say. And as a result, may you lose some competitive ground as a result of that.

So they're ahead of us on the factory integrations because they've already done that part. So that's the piece we need to catch up on. Several of the OEMs have worldwide integrations so there might be only a minor tweak. So some of those we can move quickly with. Tekion unlike anything, and this goes back to being part of Pendragon where we're able to test and model, they can only test and model in an actual dealership. Initially, when they're rolling out stores, they had as many stores coming off as we're going on. And it's just kind of a learning system. It's great tech. The people running it are great. It's a large organization. I think they're viable, and I think they will be one of the players, but the market is vast. So I don't look at them as us versus them. I look at the two of us against CDK and Reynolds and Dealertrack and as such because that market is so huge. So I don't think it's like-for-like when it comes to that. As far as the maturity, we've been SaaS-based for 20 years, we've been cloud-based for 20 years. We've operated on this system even farther back than that, but the current system for 20-plus years, that company came into existence, I think, in 2000 and technically, I think, '10 or something like that, but they didn't really start doing -- actually no, sorry, 2016. So they've got 8 years in, and they just don't have the same worldwide experience that we have. We've done -- we've got terabytes and terabytes of data. We've done tens of millions of transactions. They're just not there yet. So the maturity piece, we've just got a proven track record. They will. They'll get there at some point in time. And once again, I think the product is good. If anything, I think it actually is a benefit to us. They've already cracked the door. They've already started to disrupt that marketplace. And sometimes it's better to be the second mover than the first mover. There's a lot more success stories on the second mover than there are in the first one.

Andy, I think a real good indicator is the number of developers we've got. So we've got about 150 developers, which is absolutely what we need today, and we're scaling that up as we speak, and that's increasing, but that's exactly right for us today. Tekion, look, it's private, but it's certainly 4 figures, whether it's 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 as they're trying to get to the point where we are today. Ultimately, we might have 250, 300, whatever the number is as we go into the U.S., but it's certainly -- we will not need 1,000 developers -- and Kieran's not shaking his head so I think we're happy on that. But that gives a bit of an indication on where we are sort of product-wise. As Bill said, 20 years in there, I guess, 7, 8 years into the process.

I think also it's extremely helpful to have someone as well resourced and strong on marketing, making the same message that we're making. We were doing it sooner and they've done an amazing job of opening the doors, as Bill said, to get manufacturers and to get the larger dealer groups conscious of security risks, of the advantages of cloud, of the advantages of a single system driving process. If ultimately, their fulfillment is a limitation, then absolutely, we're there to take advantage of that.

Thank you for the presentations. Two, three, so I'll go one by one, if you don't mind. I completely agree with you when you said that the sales cycle is being kind of long. But once you get the contract and you are at the dealer, how long does it take for the Pinewood software to get into and obviously you have all the old data from the old systems coming over to kind of our...

I can have Kieran talk to that, but it's not long at all. We can -- in certain instances, we can connect directly with the old system and pull out of that way. If that provider doesn't want to play nice -- like I said, I'll have Kieran to go in more detail. We can basically download it and then put it into our system and clarify it. Best example is what we did with Lithia. U.K., the ex-Jardine stores, the incumbent, we weren't able to link directly in with them. We were able to pull and extract data. We did it over a weekend. And the stores literally operated all the way up. They closed on Sunday. Monday morning, they turned on and our system was up and running. But you can go through the complexities of...

it's an area where we're strong. It's also an area where we could get a lot better as well with the introduction of our AI technologies into that specific aspect. We can really crunch that, make it super quick, drive the quality up as well. So yes, that's the sort of underlying message as well what we're trying to get across today with AI is we're at the start of our journey, but we can enhance every step of our journey all the way through the products, all the way through development, all the way through speed of delivery and quality. But in that certain scenario, yes, definitely, we can make that even better than it is today.

I think just to say that the -- where we are today is probably twice as fast as any of the incumbents in the U.K. So 3 months from the point of order through to fulfillment isn't unusual. We're coming from a background where mergers and acquisitions happen. And as Bill says, potentially over a weekend, we can do that same job if we're focused in on it. So one, there's movement in consolidation as dealer groups. We've moved networks around. But most clearly, a 3-month time scale is pretty normal for us which is a lot faster than the guidance.

So all our revenues are currently from the U.K., is it.

No. Ollie?

It's about 80% today is U.K. If you look at whether it's users or revenue, but broadly about 80% of our user base or customer base is U.K., which is where we started. But the last 5 to 8 years particularly, we've been going into a lot of overseas countries, and a lot of that is OEM driven. We've got really, really strong relationships, which a lot of it's from these guys. But with a lot of the premium brands. We've talked about Porsche, VW, Audi, lot of the other ones. They said to us, look, come into our countries. And there's a lot more scope as you move out of Europe and North America, lot more scope into Asia where OEMs can mandate and they say, every dealer has to have the system in here, whereas you can't have it in U.K. North America, so that's -- the model that's sort of been followed generally over the last...

And how is the pricing? Is it based on a fixed annual fee? Is it based on volume or transaction value or.

So the pricing model is 2-tiered. So you have a traditional SaaS-based pricing model in Software-as-a-Service. So it's on a license basis for users. And then on those vertical products I was telling you about, those are normally charged on a rooftop basis. So we had -- we talked about a dock storage system on there. That one we charge GBP 165 a month for perpetuity per rooftop. The core licensing to be able to facilitate thing, whether it's sales or back-office accounting, there's a different price for that. But that's on a licensing basis on a per user basis.

I promise you this is the last question. In terms of, obviously, we're trying to go to Japan, North America, huge markets. What's the marketing sales budgets? And do we have the cash to do so?

We haven't put those out yet, but absolutely, we have the cash to do both. Going into Japan and Steve we can go in more detail, right now we're being pulled in by the Volkswagen Group. We don't need to do any marketing on that right now to Ollie's point here. And we're not there yet, but we will be soon. That's going to be mandated by the OEMs so we don't have to do much there. That's going to be mainly implementation and any bespoke coding that needs to be done for that marketplace. As we go into North America, and we get in the first part of next year, then we'll certainly announce budgets when it comes to marketing. Kim and Ollie both talked about it. It's a big country, a lot of geography to cover. There will be a marketing budget that has to go on top of that. Once again, we've got good cash flow right now, good position where we're at. The JV funds, all the North American development and marketing. We both can sit here and put additional resources and funds into there. So I think we have more than enough to sit here and drive the development work. And then as we start to do sales and marketing, we'll start to chip into that. That will be the initial basis. And in a perfect world by that time, we will be in a position to be able to sit here and start to drive revenues and then reinvest that to continue to grow.

Carl Smith from Zeus. Following the Marshalls deal, are there any other opportunities to work with a wider Constellation Automotive Group, sort of I know Cinch doesn't have dealerships, but there's BCA and everything is the sort of integrations you can do and things like that.

We can't get deep into conversations, but definitely, the nice thing about Constellation is while they are owners of one of the larger dealership groups, we buy any car, BCA, Cinch and as such, definitely, we've had conversations about different opportunities over time. None of it's come to a head yet or anything like that, but we're going to continue to engage with them. I think as they see the work and how good the product is as good as Marshalls, it could possibly open up other opportunities within that group.