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

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our H1 FY '25 results presentation. I'm Bill Berman, CEO. And I'm joined today by my partner and CFO, Ollie Mann. This has been another half of great progress for Pinewood.AI, delivering on the strategic objectives and positioning the business for accelerated growth. Ollie will take you through the headline financials shortly. But before that, I'm going to take you through an overview of the strategic and financial progress delivered in the period. We have grown our revenue by over 20%, driven by strong growth among our customers and successful upselling in our existing customer base. Our new user experience has played a significant role with positive feedback to date. On top of this, our product suite has been significantly enhanced and a number of new products, such as our new data and analytics offering, automotive business intelligence has been launched. A key milestone in the period was the acquisition of Seez, the automotive AI company, in March of this year. In the 6 months since then, we have made great progress bringing Seez into the Pinewood Group and integrating the 2 tech stacks to significantly enhance our AI capabilities. In addition, Seez has grown a stand-alone business by over 500 rooftops since it became part of Pinewood.AI, with new entries in North America as well as the U.K. Those stores will be fully implemented by year's end. The North American market is a core pillar of our strategy and ambitions. Buying Lithia's share of the North American JV in July represented a fundamental step in establishing a platform to maximize our impact in the market. We are on track to pilot the Pinewood platform in Q4 of this year in 2 Lithia stores before commencing the full rollout in the first half of 2026. I'd now like to hand it over to Ollie to take you through the financial review.

Thanks, Bill. Good morning, everyone. We delivered strong revenue growth of over 20% to GBP 19.6 million. This was driven by a number of factors, including revenue from the U.K. Lithia dealerships, whom we implemented the Pinewood.AI platform during the second half of 2024. In addition, we have successfully implemented the system for new customers in a number of geographies in the first half of 2025 as well as increasing vertical sales into our existing customers. Gross profit of GBP 17 million was 17.2% up on last year. The slight gross margin dilution was expected and reflects these gross margins being slightly lower than the legacy Pinewood.AI business. The key profit metric that we use both internally and externally is underlying EBITDA. In the first half of 2025, this was GBP 7.9 million, up 14.5% on the first half of 2024. Our recurring revenue of 85.7% underpins the financial result. The slight drop from last year reflects the mix, with revenue from Seez now included. Finally, our net customer churn of 0.3% highlights how much customers value the Pinewood.AI platform and how integral it is to their businesses. Moving on to Slide 7, where I'll talk through the key movements in our cash flow during the period. During the first half of FY '25, we generated GBP 8.5 million of cash from operations. Other key movements in cash included GBP 0.5 million of bank interest received in the period and GBP 10 million received from Lithia for the settlement of a tax debtor. Our total development spend in the first half of the year was GBP 6.7 million, of which we capitalized GBP 5.2 million. There was also an additional GBP 0.1 million of PPE CapEx. We expect development spend for the whole of 2025 to be just under GBP 14 million and for there to be a gradual increase in this over the next few years. The consideration for the Seez acquisition was GBP 32.9 million, of which GBP 25.7 million was cash and GBP 7.2 million was consideration shares. Alongside the Seez acquisition was the equity raise that we undertook in March 2025, where we raised GBP 34.1 million of cash. All of these movements led to an end of June 2025 cash position of GBP 30.3 million. On to Slide 8. At the end of June 2025 balance sheet, the key balances on this are closing shareholders' funds of GBP 80.1 million, with the main driver being the March 2025 equity raise. We now have GBP 31 million of goodwill on our balance sheet, with the increase in goodwill reflecting the Seez acquisition in March 2025. Some of this goodwill may be reclassified separate intangible assets following a purchase price allocation exercise. Other intangible assets of GBP 22.7 million cover the capitalized software assets, which has grown as we have increased resource levels and development work in the period and incorporated the Seez development team into the group. Finally, we have GBP 30.3 million in cash. In addition to this cash, we also have GBP 10 million RCF facility, which remains undrawn. On Slide 9, you can see the non-underlying items. Firstly, we had GBP 1 million of transaction costs relating to the equity raise and the Seez acquisition. We also had GBP 0.7 million of restructuring and transition costs in the period. Our share-based payment charge was GBP 1.4 million in the first half of FY '25. And finally, our share of the JV result was a GBP 1.3 million charge in the period. Moving on to Slide 10 and our updated guidance. As a result of buying Lithia out to the North American JV, we expect a short-term accounting impact in the second half of 2025. Prior to the JV buyout, Pinewood.AI recognized 51% of software development for North America as revenue and profit. This no longer applies after the buyout. As a result of this, we expect to have GBP 1.3 million less revenue than previously forecast this year. In addition to this, Marshalls have asked us to move the start of their implementation back to quarter 1 2026 from quarter 4 2025 to align with other projects they're undertaking. We still expect to complete the majority of the Marshall's implementations during 2026. As a result of these 2 items, we expect our FY '25 underlying EBITDA to be GBP 15.5 million to GBP 16 million. Neither of these 2 items have any impact on our medium or long-term profitability. Looking ahead, our previous guidance for underlying EBITDA in FY '27 was a range in the mid to high GBP 30 million. We are updating this with guidance for underlying EBITDA in FY '28, which we expect to be in the range of GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million. This is underpinned by strong visibility from existing contracts and a significant pipeline of opportunities, including our 5-year contracts with Lithia to roll out the Pinewood.AI platform across North America. As a reminder, this contract is expected to generate an estimated $60 million of revenue per year by the end of 2028. I'll now hand back to Bill to run through the operating highlights and strategy.

Thanks, Ollie. I'll now take you through the progress we've made against the strategy we set out at the Capital Markets Day last year. On the U.K. and Ireland front, we started the Lookers implementation in July and August of 2025, and will continue in October once we get through the key plate change month of September. The combined teams have done a great job in the initial stages of the rollout, and we are confident they will continue to do so when we start work next month. We continue to extend our network of Porsche dealers globally with a successful installation in Canada during May, enabled to buy development of new internationally deployable manufacturer interfaces. We are pleased to announce an agreement with Porsche Japan to commence implementation of the Pinewood system in all of their Porsche centers in the country of Japan. This builds upon significant product development attuned to retail operations in Japan and the establishment of a nationally-focused installation and support team. We look forward to the Porsche Japan rollout starting in half 1 2026. With the acquisition of Seez, it has transformed our vertical sales channels and allowed us to approach a much broader customer base as well as enabling us to generate additional revenue with short lead times. We also continue to expand our range of products that we can sell to both existing and new customers. Moving on to Slide 13. Bringing the Seez team into the group in March of 2025 following the acquisition was a key moment for us. We have continued to run Seez on a stand-alone basis in many of their markets to maximize the impact of the great brand recognition they have built up over a number of areas. At the same time, we have started to integrate the cutting-edge AI technology of Seez with the Pinewood data stack. Only 6 months in, we have made some significant progress with a number of fully integrated tools, now operational as part of the Pinewood.AI platform. This is just the beginning, and we're hugely excited about the roadmap of the integration work and new AI products that will cement Pinewood's position at the forefront of auto AI providers. Moving on to Slide 14, an update to our recent system implementations. As mentioned at the beginning of this section, our team have done a great job so far in the Lookers implementations, working inside the Lookers team to ensure the Pinewood.AI platform rollout goes as smoothly as possible. This started in 2025 and will continue for the rest of 2025 and into 2026. We are pleased that the Lithia U.K. team are seeing the benefits of having Pinewood.AI in all of their dealerships. This follows a successful implementation in the ex-Jardine Motor Group in 2024, where they have seen improved productivity and increased efficiencies. We are looking forward to starting the Marshalls implementation with them in Q1 of 2026. Slide 15 sets out the strong foothold we have in North America and the scale of the opportunity in front of us. Having now bought Lithia out of their share of the North American joint venture and signed a contract with them to implement the platform in their North American dealers, we are now well placed to sign further customers in the U.S. and Canada. The rollout of Seez chatbots into the Lithia North American dealer started in September and will finish in Q1 of 2026. With 20,000 franchise dealers in North America, the size of the opportunity is huge, with a total addressable market of over $9 billion. We think that Pinewood.AI is in a prime position to start to grow their share of the North American market. On to Slide 16 and the progress we're making towards our North American pilot. We have now engaged with the majority of the OEMs that Lithia represent as well as third-party layered app providers that will need to integrate with us, and the integration work is progressing well. We'll be piling Pinewood.AI in 2 of Lithia North American stores in Q4 this year, ahead of the full rollout starting in H1 of 2026. Finally, we are making great progress with recruiting our North America team, with a number of key roles already filled. Moving on to Slide 17 and the progress in our key growth markets. We are primarily targeting the geographies set out in our strategy at the Capital Markets Day last year, Japan, Southeast Asia, Central Europe and South Africa. Last week, we signed a contract with Porsche Japan to roll out the Pinewood platform across all of the Porsche dealers in Japan. The full rollout is expected to start in the first half of 2026. We have ongoing discussions with a number of European customers, most of which are based in Central Europe. We have fully integrated our South African business into the group, following the buyout of our South African reseller and are looking at routes to grow the business through both new and existing customers. Finally, we are also engaging with a number of potential customers in the Middle East, capitalizing on Seez's strong regional presence there. This follows us buying out our Middle East reseller in August. Finally, on to Slide 19. As we have set out, we have made significant progress with our strategy. Our priorities in the U.K. are the Lookers and Marshall's implementation as well as adding further customers from the U.K. top 100 dealer groups. Our international expansion will be focused on the key geographies that we have identified, North and South America, Central Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia and South Africa. Finally, our FY '28 guidance of underlying EBITDA between GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million is underpinned by strong visibility from existing contracts. This includes a $60 million contract with Lithia North America as well as significant pipeline of opportunities. Lastly, I'd like to thank both the Pinewood.AI and Seez teams for their hard work and dedication. Thank you for joining us today. We welcome any questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question this morning will be coming from Alex Short calling from Berenberg.

Just a couple of questions from me, please. Firstly, on the quite exciting FY '28 guidance. Obviously, this is underpinned by the Lithia contract to a significant extent. Can we expect that $60 million of revenue in FY '28 to come at a similar margin to what the company has historically achieved? And in terms of the visibility from existing contracts, could you perhaps quantify or elaborate a little bit more on this with respect to the cross-sell/upsell opportunity around fees and the add-on products? And then one for Ollie. We obviously saw a fairly material GBP 2.3 million working capital inflow in H1 '25. Is this a sign of things to come? Should we expect a greater proportion of customers to be paying upfront in the coming years? And essentially, how should we think about working capital dynamics and cash conversion going forward?

Alex, this is Bill. I think that's like 6 questions, but I'll start off with the first half, and then, I'll let Ollie take the second part. As far as our call-out for 2028 of the GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million and kind of how much of that is baked in and the margin that represents for North America, on a high-level noncore business, the margins coming out of North America will be either at or exceed other geographies that we have in the world. Initially, the expansion in North America, there will be additional costs that are only North American-based. So initially, the net margin will be lower. Gross margin will be still in 90-plus percent range. On the net margin, it will be lower than that initially. But once we get the full implementation done with Lithia and additional growth opportunities outside of them, we will get and exceed the current margins we have right now. As far as the balance sheet and that stuff, Ollie.

Yes, Alex, it's a good question. You're right to call that out on the working capital. And as we grow over the next 3 or 4 years, that working capital impact will increase in a good way. You're completely right, almost all of our customers pay quarterly in advance. So as our customer base grows, the benefit from that will grow. So, yes, we're looking as you get into '26, '27, '28, there's going to be sort of GBP 7 million or GBP 8 million a year of benefit from that working capital inflows. Yes, that's a good question, good call out.

Next question will be coming from Roger Phillips calling from Investec.

Going back on that GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million of 2028 guidance. To what extent -- what kind of assumption have you made about conversion of your pipeline in terms of what is required there in terms to hit that? Or is it all just entirely based on what you see today in terms of what you've got to roll out for the next couple of years in terms of existing customers? That's the first question. Second question is in terms of the South African and Middle East transactions, are there more sort of channel transactions like that to happen across the group that you would see over the medium term? And then finally, I may have missed it in the results, so apologies if I did, but could you take a stab at net revenue retention and the way you would expect that to trend, please?

Terrific. So Roger, on the first part, looking forward to the GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million. By and large, most of that is contracts that are already signed and within the pipeline. Marshalls, Lookers, Lithia, the business we're getting out of Japan, plus our normal historical growth rates that we have into there. So this isn't a really aggressive target for that point in time. And with a little bit of a tailwind and a couple of other large contracts, hopefully, that we can bring forward in there. There's more of a potential for upside to that. As far as what we've done in kind of the Middle East and South Africa, to the extent we can, we always want to control as much of our front-facing interactions with our customers. To that extent, we would look at any and all of our kind of resale agreements. And the ones that we feel that we could handle to a more direct pathway, we definitely look into that. That said, if we went into a part of the world where maybe culturally, language wise, we might not be the best qualified to do that, we'd look for more of a partnership to be able to facilitate that. I'm not a big fan of the reseller model, but JV like we did within North America or things along that line would be definitely something that we consider and look into.

Roger, on the net revenue retention, yes, look, the short answer is we expect that to be positive. Our customer churn is historically between 0% and 2%, and we certainly see that continuing. And then layered on top of that, we've got our annual price increases we put through, which are typically based off CPI. So that's on average running at 3% or 4%. You get that natural increase there. So look, we would see that being positive going forward for the foreseeable future. Is that okay, Roger? Are you -- anything else to talk from you?

No, that's great.

[Operator Instructions] We'll now move to Carl Smith of Zeus Capital.

Two questions for me. The first is on the gross margin. So do you think this can get back to 90% at a group level? And what sort of levers can you pull to get that back up? And then the second question, would you be able to give a sort of indication of the total time to implement the Lookers and Porsche Japan contracts? Should we expect those to be fully implemented by the end of H1 '26 or a bit later?

So on the margin piece -- Carl, we haven't talked a little bit. On the margin piece right now, that's going to ebb and flow a little bit. First off, 90% margins are definitely on the high side within this space. And a lot of that's going to depend on how much growth we get out of Seez's direct-to-consumer sales outside of the Pinewood platform, as they sell in geographies where Pinewood doesn't exist yet. So that will ebb and flow. On the core Pinewood business, we will be at or be able to exceed that type of a margin. When you start to combine, there will be a little bit of a pullback, but it won't be demonstrative in any type of way. As far as the rollout timings with Japan, Marshalls, Lookers and as such, Marshalls and Lookers, we look to have those fully done by the end of next year. We will be starting the rollouts in Japan in end of this year, first part of next year. Those will probably be slow rolls just the way that market is set up and established. And that will probably take us into mid-2027, right now the way that they've kind of laid that piece out with. So Marshalls, Lookers will go through all of '26. Japan, we'll sit here and start end of this year and roll this into the mid-'27. And then, we'll be starting with Lithia, just to go to the next evolution of this on a full rollout schedule, mid-'26 and extending into 2028.

I just have one follow-up question. For FY '28 and the new EBITDA targets, are we expecting the full $60 million of revenue in 2028 from Lithia? Or is it $60 million by the end of 2028?

Carl, it's Ollie. Yes. So the $60 million is the exit ARR. So we wouldn't expect some -- as things stand at the full $60 million in the year. If Lithia decides to push things forward, that's possible. But as things stand, as Bill said, if we finish in, say, mid-'28, for example, yes, you'd get a very -- a good proportion of the $60 million, but not all of it in '28, but it would be the exit ARR, so you'd get all of it going forward from there.

[Operator Instructions] We do not appear to have any further audio questions. Jack, I would like to turn the call over to you for any questions submitted by webcast.

We have a question from Oliver Tipping at Peel Hunt. He asks, does the Marshall's delay have any knock-on impact on your ability to execute on other contracts during FY '26? Or do you have the capacity to execute all other contracts as planned?

Marshall is always going to be primarily rolled out in 2026 from the get-go, so moving from Q4 to Q1 really doesn't make that much of a difference. I think that gives us the position to actually better serve Marshalls, as we go into '26, so this will have no negative impact. We definitely have the resourcing to be able to handle all the implementations we have. North America is a stand-alone team. For all the U.K. business, it's a separate team as well as Japan, South Africa and as such. So we've got a really dedicated and experienced team in the U.K., and they will be handling the Marshalls and Lookers roll out through 2026. .

Great. There are 2 questions from Andy Wade at Jefferies. The first one, you've touched on already, Bill, but he asks, to what extent does your FY '28 EBITDA guidance underpinned by existing contracts, including the Lithia U.S. rollout? And his second question is, why do you think progress in Japan has been more rapid than in Europe? How confident are you about getting deals done there?

Okay. So on the first one, we kind of touched upon that. So by and large, our target for 2028 between GBP 58 million and GBP 62 million is primarily based on our current pipeline of business in traditional growth rates. So this isn't a stretch target necessarily for us. It's not a layup either, but it's not a stretch target. And with a couple of other things that we're working, we think we can get some growth on that as well. While the Japan thing seems like it's moved quickly, it's been a long time coming. We've been working on that localizing the product for Japan with Porsche, VW and Audi and as such. So I think because of the work that the team has done, with our team based in Tokyo, we've gotten ourselves to a place here. I think it's just the timing of when each one of the contracts, Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche, independently of each other, just happened to coincide in a kind of a short period of time. But these were years in the making. So I don't necessarily think they're moving that much faster. If you go what's happened in Europe and even in the U.K., once again, we were a little -- well, we were severely inhibited by the prior ownership structure being part of Pendragon and an automotive retailer. We're kind of hidden in there. So in the U.K., it kind of hampered us from growth in certain areas. And I think that also kind of layered into Europe where -- as well, where we didn't have the time, the money to necessarily be able to go after that. Now, that the shackles are off, so to speak, well, I think we're going to see a tremendous amount of growth in Europe, as like we've seen here in the U.K. and Japan and the U.S. as well.

And Damindu from Peel Hunt has a few questions, and I'll ask them one at a time. The first one is, I saw that there's a job add for a bilingual program manager for Germany, could you provide some commentary around how you are scaling your talent as you seek to expand into places like Japan?

We need to be able to notice that and look that piece up. It's not open in the marketplace. We're working on a large opportunity that we have in the German market. And once again, we're looking to kind of fill some gaps in back to how do we look to go into other markets where either culture or language wise, we might not be the subject matter experts. So we're looking for staffing into that. There's a great opportunity in Germany. It's the largest economy in Mainland Europe, and it's a place where we only have a handful of customers right now. And if you're going to be in Europe, you're going to go after the biggest one. It's kind of like being North America and not looking at the U.S. So we're going to go after it in a big way, and we're staffing up accordingly. So we're pretty well progressed with some conversations there with a couple of the OEMs as well as some large dealer groups. So hopefully, there'll be some good stuff to announce in the future.

And sticking with the topic of job ads, Damindu says, I can see there are a number of ads for data engineers and senior business intelligence analysts. Are some of your customers starting to leverage more of the data and become more data driven?

If you looked at my thing here, I talked about one of our new things here, which is our automotive intelligence BI platform. So what we've done, and one of the new products we've developed in conjunction with Seez, is being able to embed BI reporting within our core stack, with a large amount of AI driving some of the functionality of the reporting capabilities into that. So as we further grow those capabilities and as such, and then, this will be an additional revenue stream that we'll be able to offer up to our customers. So we have built somewhere in the Pendragon days that sat outside of Pinewood, where Pinewood kind of was the engine and drove a large part of that. The team has taken that and really elevated it, and now, we have an embedded reporting stack that is able, in real time, to give you a complete in-depth deep dive into your business at any point in time. And that can go for a single-point store to a platform level to enterprise level as well. And even with customers that might be in multiple countries, to be able to slice and dice the data accordingly. So this is primarily for additional revenue stream and new product that we're bringing to market.

And Damindu's final question, he says, lastly, I saw Hartwell Automotive Group has become the first dealer in the U.K. to partner with California-based technology provider Tekion. I always think you combined with Tekion can disrupt the incumbent giants across the world, but I wasn't expecting to see Tekion in the U.K. Is there much to read into that?

Listen, Tekion has been in the U.K. for quite a while prior to Inchcape selling the retail business. They have done a lot of work with them. Listen, Tekion is a great tech stack. I think there's a lot of similarities between the two. And the market -- the worldwide market is huge. I think there's more than enough for both of us to succeed. We look at the work they're doing in North America, and they're breaking down a lot of barriers, and I think we're going to be able to benefit from that. And I think a lot of the incumbents worldwide -- listen, this is a great market, and it's where I live and where we're going after. And obviously, I'm from the other end. And I think the team over at Tekion and the team here for Pinewood, there's more than enough for all of us.

Great. There are no further questions on the webcast. So I'll hand back to the conference call provider, as I believe there's one other question that's come through on that.

Yes, a question just came in. This is going to be from Ian Robertson of Progressive Equity Research.

Just looking at 2 things. First of all, when the U.S. product is launched, is it going to be a pan-U.S. product from the get-go? Or will you require to further work to adapt to different states, different ways of doing things as the years go on? And then looking out to this guidance, you've given the guidance range of sort of 6% to 7% variation across it. That's pretty tight. Looking at the topline, your own targets for the revenues for 2028, can you give us an idea of how big the variation is there? And then looking forward, how much visibility do you have on the customer acquisition cost for sort of 2028-'29 in the U.S.? Is it really going to be much different to Europe or internationally?

So I'll take the first part, and then, I'll have Ollie take the second part. The product that we're going into North American will be agnostic to state or province. So whether it's a product for Mexico, Canada or the U.S., we're agnostic to that, both on the language front. So the system will operate in Canadian French as well as Spanish and various other languages that are -- where business is transacted within the U.S. And as far as the states, the biggest difference there is in taxation and licensing, and most of those are done outside of the core operating systems. So there's third-party companies that we can embed into our system to -- for tax tables and as such like that. So yes, the product will be agnostic to state, geography and that goes for all of North America.

Ian, it's Ollie. Yes. So look, on your question, I think we've touched on the sort of certainty of that '28 number. And as Bill said, there's a pretty high percentage of that GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million that is signed contracts. So look, we've got to deliver, but that's the signed contract. So we've got the same certainty on the revenue as we do on the EBITDA. I think, if you want to steer on the revenue, our historic EBITDA margin has been sort of mid-40s. It's -- there's a little bit of dilution this year. But looking medium to longer term, I think if you look at that sort of early to mid-40s EBITDA margin, you get a good idea on where we're seeing the revenue land at, so you can just back solve that, and you can get an idea of where we think the FY '28 revenue is going to be at. And I think your final question was on the sort of acquisition costs, wasn't it for the U.S., and is that going to be significantly different. Look, we think -- our go-to-market strategy is going to be very much aligned, whether it's U.K., U.S., Asia, rest of the world, but we don't see a significant difference in terms of cost wise for the U.K., for U.S. And I think one of the earlier questions, Bill said, we -- from a margin point of view, we think the U.S. is going to be at least at that sort of mid-40s EBITDA margin. But -- so we don't see a significant difference in that to what we see in the U.K. or for the rest of the world.

As we have no further audio questions, I turn the call back over to Bill for any additional or closing remarks.

Just thank you, everybody, for joining. And like I said, at the end of the initial thing here, at the end of this day, it's not about Ollie and I. It's about the team, both for Pinewood and Seez and the incredible work that they've done. And just a great thank you to them, and thank you, everybody, for your time this morning.