Pricer AB (publ) (PRICB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, everyone, to this audio call to go through the highlights from the financial report that was released earlier today. So overall, I'm very pleased with the development in Pricer. So both from an ongoing business perspective but also in terms of our new product innovations, such as the ShelfVision solution, where we continue to build additional value on top of our solid platform. As the transformation of retail continues to accelerate and in-store operations become more data driven, I believe Pricer is very well positioned to capture our fair share of the smart retail market going forward. The next slide, please. So with the 74% increase of our quarterly net sales compared with Q1 of last year, we can conclude that activity remained on a high level also moving into 2021. And excluding currency effects, the underlying growth was even higher at 91%. We noted strong growth in several geographical markets, particularly with regards to the small and medium-sized customer projects. And these small and medium-sized customer projects represents a significant part of the business for Pricer, and it also provides a good balance to the more irregular revenue streams from larger customer projects. In the first quarter, we continued deliveries to our large ongoing customer projects according to plan. And the rollout with PLUS Retail in the Netherlands was successfully completed according to the schedule during this quarter. And they are, by the way, a very happy customers that now have the full chain of stores running on Pricer Plaza. We have several active framework agreements in Canada and Norway and from which we noted a high inflow of orders during the first quarter. And I'm particularly pleased to see the progress in these accounts as there are no minimum commitment. But where high customer satisfaction and a solid value creation from our solutions, they did provide great business opportunities for many years to come. And to mention a few words on the development with Carrefour, it's also progressing according to plan. So we continue regular supply to France and Belgium, where we have significantly installed base already. And in parallel, we have installed pilot stores in several other countries with the intention to define use cases and ensure adequate system integration. On the negative side, we can conclude that there are increasing challenges with regards to supply of components and on the logistics side. But fortunately, we'll work with long forecasting periods with our suppliers, which has granted us a steady supply. But prices are going up and lead times are generally getting longer. But on the transportation costs, they stabilized somewhat during the first quarter but only to see a renewed and acceleration following the stop industry of [ Canal ]. The next slide, please. So starting off with the net sales. So we managed to reach almost SEK 400 million or SEK 393 million to be precise, which is then 74% higher than last year. The largest contributors were France, Canada and the U.S. But as we mentioned earlier, there was a good distribution of a large number of customers in several geographies. The next slide, please. Moving on to the order intake. I believe this figure, in particular, reassured many readers of the report this morning. The strong momentum in the market remains and order intake for the first quarter reached SEK 443 million, which is 19% higher than the first quarter of 2020. We note the stability in the order intake level over several quarters, which is quite unusual from a historical Pricer perspective. And it's partly an effect of a broader customer base contributing to the order intake, but it's also a result of having several framework agreements in place that generate more steady inflow of orders. So France, Norway, Canada contributes the most in the first quarter. I'd like to highlight again that order intake was distributed over many customers and many geographies. We ended the first quarter with an order backlog of SEK 550 million, which is an increase compared with the year-end of approximately SEK 50 million. And partially, this increase is a consequence of the longer lead times from order to delivery. The next slide, please. The gross profit increased as a result of the top line growth, but gross margin declined compared with Q1 2020, although it remained in line with the 3 most recent quarters. Our gross margin is primarily a consequence of the products and contract mix delivered in the period, but there is some additional pressure right now caused by the challenging situation in the supply and logistics chain. Next slide, please. And then the operating profit increased as well as a result of the higher gross profit. And we got a slight improvement in the operating margin year-over-year. We have increased our market presence to support the growing demand, which in combination with a continued high pace of product innovation and product development drive higher operating expenses. Next slide, please. And the cash flow from operating activities was negative in the period, and this is primarily a result of changes in working capital. And as we have previously communicated, there are many timing effects in the cash flow, why it should be analyzed over time. And the cash position at the end of March was SEK 190 million. And then the Board proposal to the AGM as communicated in February is to pay a dividend of SEK 1 per share in 2 equal installments. The next slide, please. So in summary, we can conclude that the financial results from the first quarter was higher than the corresponding quarter of last year on all key metrics. The size of the backlog, combined with a high activity in the market, indicates the continued strong momentum also going forward. However, we do expect some continued pressure on the gross margin from the supply chain and logistics challenges that remain beyond our control. But overall, our view on the market and Pricer's position in the market remains positive. The next slide, please. So leaving the financials behind and looking at the business development side of things, I'd like to remind us all that the paper label continues to be the most widely adopted solution to display price and product information at the shelf edge across the world. However, it is becoming increasingly challenging for this analog paper label to compete with the digital label. And this is the most important growth driver for the ESL industry. And in addition, the ongoing pandemic has forced retailers to rethink [ old shoots ] overnight. And the ability to do more with less has got an entirely new meaning over the last year. So the need for automation and modern system support is greater than ever before. And keeping up with the speed of digitalization is now considered a critical success factor within retail. So in addition to digital shelf labels, there is a general increase in demand for smart retail solutions to support improved in-store efficiency and also an enhanced customer experience. And this stretches well beyond the price and product information displayed on the shelf edge. So for example, empty shelf, one of the biggest and most costly challenges for a retailer and particularly so within the grocery segment. And Pricer's new ShelfVision solution with a battery-powered camera, it introduces eyes in the store that enable automated real-time insights with regards to the actual status in the store. And we believe that this presents an important growth opportunity for Pricer going forward. And the end-to-end capability of the Pricer solution where the camera interact with the digital label makes this particularly attractive as it supports further use cases. There's some competing solutions, for example, from track and focal systems. And our ability to provide retailers with real-time insights to make better decisions faster and then also supporting them with execution of prioritized tasks in the stores, it will become an increasingly important differentiator for Pricer in our customer dialogues going forward. And in addition, we have the ambition to broaden our solution offerings by adding more software capabilities on top of our cloud-based platform, Pricer Plaza. And as customers are looking to utilize the ESL system for additional use cases, we intend to support them on this journey. And alongside our own development efforts, we will consider acquisitions and partnerships as complementary ways to accelerate this development. So all in all, I'm very pleased with the progress in Pricer. We can conclude that the unique capabilities of the Pricer ESL system with regards to speed, capacity, reliability and scalability, it will become increasingly differentiating in the future. And unified commerce and data-driven stores would grow significantly. And we have a very interesting position right at the core of this development. So thank you for listening, and we will proceed with questions.

[Operator Instructions] And we have no question at this point. So no questions, so I'll hand it back to speakers.

Okay. So -- well, thank you, everyone, for listening in. And should you have any additional questions going forward, please do not hesitate to reach out. You can always reach us at [email protected].