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

Thank you. So welcome, everyone, to this presentation of the results for the second quarter and the first half of the year. Next slide, please. Now first, we have a brief overview of Pricer, including the financial development for the past 5 years. And what's the noting is that, the level of net sales that we report for the first half of 2021 is in line with our full year net sales only a few years ago. And before we dig further into the financial details, I would like to talk a little bit about the macro trends in retail and how they provide us confidence in the growth potential of the ESL market for the coming years. So next page, please, #3. So first of all, and perhaps contradictory to what many of you may think, e-commerce is a great market driver for the ESL industry, simply because of the convenience, the flexibility and availability of online shopping creates the bar for a good shopping experience also in the physical store. As consumers get used to finding products easily, having access to extensive product information and so on, they bring these expectations and many more with them to the stores. Pricer recently conducted a study of consumer trends by interviewing 6,000 persons in the U.K., France and Germany. And the study concluded that more than 70% of the respondents get annoyed if there is a price difference between online and off-line. And 60% even said they will shop less at the retailer with price differences between digital and physical channels. And another trend worth noting refer to sustainability and a more conscious life choice. So consumers today expect retailers to take more responsibility for the climate, by, for example, reducing food waste. And in order to attract consumers back to the stores, retailers must respond to these megatrends and many more. And so, investing in digitalization becomes critical to drive consumer loyalty and in the end, also profitability. Next slide, please. So this is where Pricer solutions comes in. So we offer our customers the possibility to do more with less. By automating a labor-intense process, such as price updating. The retailer is no longer restricted by the cost and availability of labor to define how many price changes that can be made or the frequency of the updating, which is, of course, fundamental for aligning pricing off-line and online. And in addition, dynamic pricing on expiring goods can be applied by grocery retailers to reduce food waste. But, of course, our system can provide great value and many more in-store processes than the price updating, increasing the accuracy and reducing the picking time of online orders is another sample. And we have testimony from customers saying that they save as much as 30% of the picking time when being guided by Pricer system. So in essence, we can support retailers in running their stores more efficiently, but we can also provide unvaluable support to improve the shopping experience in stores to gain the customers' trust, confidence and loyalty. Next slide, please. It's worth repeating that thanks to the unique infrared communication protocol between the access point and the label, Pricer has the best-performing ESL system available in the market. The speed, responsiveness, the robustness and scalability of our system is unmatched. Already our competitors have advantages in terms of installation, time and effort. But when it comes to running the system and maintaining it, we are at a clear advantage. And that's why we can call it install and project. Considering the fact that we are fundamentally different from all our competitors, we would not survive unless we had a better solution. We win on performance. But that doesn't mean we can sit back and relax. In fact, quite the opposite. Our difference means that we have to work harder than everyone else to get our message across through the noise. But when we do and the retailer just used to the performance of our system, then changing to competing solution becomes very difficult. Next slide, Page 6. So now moving into the financials. I am pleased that being halfway through the year, we report significant improvement in all key metrics compared to the same period of last year. The growth is generated by a large number of customers across several geographical markets. And it gives strength to the company that we have managed to reduce the dependency on a few customers. We now have a very broad customer base to stand on. The next slide, please. So looking at the more detailed distribution of the revenues for the first half of the year, we can see that Europe is our largest market. And also where we note the highest growth in the period. And although North America is a growth market for Pricer, we have challenging comps relating to the large U.S. customer project from last year. Asia and Pacific, our smallest region, is also reporting significant growth in the period. Next slide, please, Page 8. The second quarter also showed good improvement on all 4 key metrics compared to last year. All is worth reminding that the pandemic had a big impact on the second quarter of last year with delayed deliveries in primarily Southern Europe due to COVID-19-related lockdown. This year, we struggled with availability of components and longer transportation time since then, which is why I'm particularly pleased that we managed to deliver twice the volume of labels during the second quarter this year compared to last year. And we also noted a significant headwind from currency movements in euro and U.S. dollars. We have almost no sales in Swedish krona. So from a top line perspective, our dependency on euro and U.S. dollar is very high. Next slide, please. So net sales in the quarter increased by 35%, reaching SEK 389 million. But naturally constant currency, the growth is nearly 50% compared to the same period of last year. Canada, France and Norway contribute most to the net sales in the quarter, and we see a good contribution from the framework agreements that have been communicated over the past year. As we move into the third and fourth quarters, comps will be more challenging due to the high delivery volumes last year for the large customer projects in the U.S. and the Netherlands. Next slide, please, Page 10. So the order intake reached more than SEK 400 million for the fourth consecutive quarter. The order intake is distributed over a large number of customers in several geographies, again, with good contribution from the framework agreements. The slow small- and medium-sized orders is growing steadily and is now on a significantly higher level than before the pandemic. And this is a consequence of the growth in the market, but it's also a result of our strategy to increase our market presence. The order backlog at the end of the quarter was SEK 563 million, which is marginally higher than at the end of the first quarter. Next slide, please. The gross margin is primarily a function of the product and customer mix delivered during the quarter, and the favorable mix in the second quarter was balanced by the higher cost for components and transportation, resulting in a stable gross margin development, thus in line with the previous quarters. Next slide, please. And the scalability of the business is good, which means that there is a high correlation between net sales and profitability. And while we continue to build for further growth by expanding our market presence and broadening our portfolio of products and services, we increased the profit margin by several percentage points in the second quarter compared with the same period of last year. Next slide, please. The cash flow should be analyzed over time as it is a result of timing effects for incoming and outgoing payments. So we note an increase in the capital tie-up during the quarter, and that's relating to the high production and delivery pace, combined with a temporary increase of the production -- transportation lead time. And at the end of June, our net cash position was SEK 86 million. Next slide, please. So to summarize the second quarter. The trend for in-store digitalization remains strong, and we experienced high activity in several of our important markets. Canada, Norway, Italy and France performed very well and contribute most of our growth in the quarter. And thanks to the framework agreements that have been signed over the past years in combination with the strong underlying demand globally, the order intake has stabilized on a historically high level. Our working capital tie-up increases because of the high delivery activity and combined with the size of the order backlog and particularly as the transportation times are longer than usual. And to prepare for continued growth in the market, we have begun investing in more scalable production solutions, remaining a lean and cost-efficient supply chain will continue to play an important role for our competitiveness also going forward. So next slide, please. So with this, I would like to open up for any questions from the audience.

[Operator Instructions] It seems like we have no questions from the audio. I will hand it back to our speakers.

Okay. Thank you very much for listening in, and I wish you a nice rest of the summer. Thank you. Goodbye.