Zaptec ASA (ZAP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to Zaptec and our presentation of the financial results for the second quarter 2025. My name is Kurt Ostrem. I'm the CEO in Zaptec. And together with me, I have our CFO, Eirik Haerem and together, we will take you through the financial highlights for the second quarter. The headlines for this quarter and this presentation is that Zaptec is delivering according to plan. Already in the previous quarter, we said that the second quarter will be even stronger than the first quarter, and we have increased our revenue and our gross margin compared to the first quarter this year, and that gives us a stronger EBITDA, but not only compared to the first quarter, but also compared to the second quarter last year, we have increased revenue, gross margin and EBITDA. At the same time, we have a strong order intake and a solid backlog visibility for the rest of 2025. During the quarter, we have scaled up new product deployment, and we are ramping up the sales in major markets. We have shown that our inventory is approaching a normalized level, and this, in total, have given us a significant positive cash flow and strengthened our liquidity during the second quarter. Now Eirik will take you through the numbers.

Yes. Let's firstly look at the financial highlights before we dive into a bit more detail. The revenue in Q2 came in at NOK 383 million. That's a 13% increase compared to the same period last year and also up from Q1. We had a strong order intake of NOK 445 million, increasing our backlog of firm orders to NOK 567 million at the end of Q2. We increased the gross margin to 41%. We spent NOK 112 million in OpEx, leaving us with an EBITDA of NOK 44 million, equivalent to an 11% margin. So I'll leave it to you, Kurt, to dive a bit more into the details.

Yes, and the revenue for the second quarter ended at NOK 383 million, this is a 13% increase from the second quarter last year, and it's important to notice that the second quarter last year was a really strong quarter. It was, in fact, the strongest quarter in the entire 2024. So that shows how strong this quarter is because the second quarter 2025 is the strongest second quarter ever for Zaptec, but also the order intake was increasing by 30% compared to the second quarter last year. And that leaves us with a backlog of NOK 567 million at the end of the quarter. And this gives us a great visibility for the sales in the upcoming quarters in 2025.

So let's go into the gross margin in a bit more detail. The gross margin increased by 2 percentage points compared to the same period last year and also compared to Q1 this year. The growth in the gross margin is driven by a couple of key factors. One is that we started to realize lower cost of production in the charges delivered during the quarter, and the second factor is product mix. We now have started to deliver Zaptec Go 2 in a higher volume, and Zaptec Go 2 has a higher margin compared to Zaptec Go, and the sum of these two effects contributed to the increased gross margin. When we look ahead, we expect to deliver a continued strong gross margin. Okay. Let's look at EBITDA. NOK 44 million EBITDA in the second quarter is a record quarterly EBITDA for Zaptec. You can see that the EBITDA increased with 29% from Q2 last year, and this demonstrates the scalable business model we have. We are now able to grow EBITDA at a higher rate than our top line. I'm going to also show you the LTM EBITDA development. As you can see on the graph, the LTM EBITDA has been growing steadily over time. This demonstrates that we're able to drive EBITDA over time and to create value. As we move forward, we expect to continue to increase EBITDA and that this graph will increase to -- will continue to increase. This is driven by the strong order backlog and exciting sales pipeline, the continued outlook for strong gross margin and that we have control of the costs.

This is probably the most important slide in this presentation. This shows the strong EV sales growth in Europe in the second quarter. As you can see, the growth in plug-in vehicle sales in the second quarter was increasing by 27% compared to the second quarter last year. And as you remember, Zaptec had in the same period an increase in order uptake by 30%. So this shows that we are following the market and above the market increase, and this slide also shows the great potential in the markets since major markets like Germany and United Kingdom have a really high increase in sales of plug-in vehicles in the second quarter. This is really positive for Zaptec going forward. We will now take you through how we execute on our strategy. First of all, we build on success in our core markets, and then we also accelerate the rollout of new products and new features to meet the demand in the market and the new regulation coming up for our industry. We expand in major markets and all the time we optimize our cash flow. When we look at the core market, we see that the monthly Zaptec installation is now approaching almost 20,000 installations each month, and if you look at the last 12 months, we see an increase of 9% when it comes to Zaptec installation. This is really important because this shows that all our deliveries have been installed and not ending up as an inventory within our distribution channels, and we are ramping up the production of a new product, both the Zaptec Go 2 and Zaptec Pro Eichrecht. As you can see, we're ramping up slowly, and this is deliberate because safety and quality is the first priority for Zaptec. We don't want to rush the production ramp-up. So we risk to deliver products we get in return. So we have successful ramp up slowly, and we have now a steady production for 6,500 units of our new products each month. But we have higher capacity. So if needed, we can ramp up even more very quickly, and we expand into major new markets. When we look at major markets like the Benelux, France, U.K. and Germany, we saw an 84% growth in the second quarter compared to the second quarter last year, and we are building new partnerships for the future in these major countries. In this picture, we show the partnership we have together with Octopus Energy and BYD in U.K. Octopus Energy will deliver a BYD car with a Zaptec charger and free energy for charging this car for lifetime for a price of GBP 299 per month. This is a game changer in the sales of EVs in the U.K. and they plan to launch this bundle in the fourth quarter, and this will have a positive impact for Zaptec going forward in the U.K. market, but we have also gone into other major partnerships in this market during the second quarter.

Okay. So let's look at our cost base. We have, over time, last year, 1.5 years, stabilized our OpEx spend. As you can see on the graph, we have been spending from around NOK 100 million to NOK 120 million. As we move forward, we continue to focus on increasing sales to grow in the major markets. We also focus on innovation to stay competitive in a fast-moving EV charging business. In the second quarter, we had a somewhat higher OpEx compared to the second quarter last year. That said, we have control, and we anticipate a stable OpEx development going forward, and we believe now that we are rightsized to be able to drive the top line significantly without adding many new employees. Okay. Over to our inventory situation. We have now, for the fourth consecutive quarter, reduced the inventory. In the second quarter, we reduced the inventory by NOK 68 million. This is according to our plans and also as communicated earlier to the market. We are now approaching the target level of around NOK 200 million to NOK 300 million in inventory, and we expect this normalization to happen during the second half of 2025, and then last but certainly not least from my side today, let's talk about cash flow and liquidity. We delivered a strong cash flow in the second quarter, driven by profitable earnings and by the inventory reduction. We added NOK 139 million in liquidity, bringing the total to NOK 466 million at the end of Q2. We had a net cash position of NOK 166 million, and in sum, we now are in a robust liquidity situation to navigate future uncertain market situations, if that's to occur. Looking ahead, we expect to continue to build a higher liquidity, also boosted by the normalization of the inventory.

And to summarize the second quarter, we have increased the revenue. We have increased the gross margin, and we have increased the EBITDA compared to the second quarter last year and compared to the first quarter this year. At the same time, we have a really strong order intake, and we have now a solid backlog visibility for delivering the rest of 2025. We are scaling up our new product deployment, and we are ramping up the sales in major markets, and we expect a higher impact from the sales in the new markets in the second half versus what we saw in the first half, and the inventory is now approaching a normalized level, and in total, we have a significant positive cash flow, and we have strengthened our liquidity during this quarter. So what about the outlook for Zaptec? First of all, and most important is that the European EV market growth is expected to continue. This is the main driver for the sales in Zaptec, and Zaptec have proven that we maintain a solid position in our core markets, and we have a really robust order backlog, provides operational stability going forward, and we have a momentum in building sales in the Benelux, U.K., Germany and France. So the continued outlook for Zaptec is profitable growth, and we are really positive about the upcoming quarters and the rest of 2025. And I want to thank you all for supporting Zaptec, and thank you for following our journey. I look forward to meet you next time.