Pinewood Technologies Group H1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
October 2, 2024

There are 6 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Pinewood H1 FY24 results presentation. I'm Bill Berman and with me today is the Group CFO and my partner, Ollie Mann. I will begin with a short summary and a reminder of the Pinewood business model. Oli will then take you through the financials for the first half of FY twenty twenty four before I run through an operational review and strategic summary. If there are any questions, we'll be happy to take these at the end of the presentation.

Operator

In the first half of FY twenty twenty four, we had a great start as a standalone SaaS business, achieving double digit growth in both revenue and gross profit. The priority for us in the 1st 6 month period has been the system rollout in the XJardine Motor Group, Lithia UK stores. Based on our customer feedback, we are happy that these have been best in class SIB system implementations. Our teams have really excelled and gone the extra mile trying to make the implementations at every Lithia dealer a seamless and positive experience. We expect to conclude the rollout to Lithia UK stores in December of 2024.

Operator

We are keen to expand our market penetration throughout the rest of the UK market. And as a result of this, we have restructured our UK sales teams to allow us to maximize our UK market penetration in the short and medium term. We should start to see the results of this in FY 2025. Our largest opportunity for the group is the North American market, which has been opened up for us by our partnership with Lithia Motors. In the first half of FY 2024, we started the discovery and planning stage of our rollout into North America.

Operator

We will share a lot more of this detail as well as our other aspects of our long term strategy at our upcoming Capital Markets Day on the 24th October in London. Next on Slide 5, for those of you that do not know Pinewood, we'd like to give you an overview of our system and our business. We are a software as a service or SaaS group and our product is 100% cloud based, Azure hosted, highly secure automotive retail ecosystem. Our system is used in automotive dealerships in 21 different countries and is used by the vast majority of the employees in those stores where our system is installed. Our system covers all aspects of the customer journey, the front of house reception team, the vehicle sales team, the service technicians, and the back of house accounting team.

Operator

Uniquely, we have a cloud based system and have been installing our system in automotive dealerships for over 20 years. No other automotive ecosystem provider has this combination of technical architecture and automotive experience. We offer omni channel sales and service products that allow our customers to effectively operate off of a single platform. Our system is multi tenanted and the same version is used by all customers, whichever country in the world you are located in and it's language agnostic. We have very high levels of customer retention and have partnerships with 50 OEM brands worldwide, many of whom are long standing partners.

Operator

We're continually evolving our system, which is powered by our product and development teams out of a total of 263 people. All of our developers are based in the UK. We have sales and implementation teams in Sweden, Japan. We have partners in South Africa, the Netherlands, and the Middle East, with the rest of our team based in the UK. I will now hand

Speaker 1

the call over to Oli to cover the numbers. Thank you, Bill. Good morning, everyone. I'll start with the statutory underlying income statement. In our first set of half year results of the standalone SaaS business, we have no discontinued operations.

Speaker 1

In our comparatives, we do still have the dealers and leasing business sold to Lithia within discontinued operations. In the first half of FY 'twenty three, as this was before the Lithia transaction completed, there are still intercompany revenue and gross profit amounts that have to be stripped out of the numbers on a statutory basis, which is the reason for the very large year on year increases in continuing operations, statutory revenue and gross profit. For transparency, we have split the PLC costs and legacy U. S. Motor business operating costs out within the underlying operating profit.

Speaker 1

I'll move on to the next slide where we include the intercompany revenue and gross profit, which enables us to give a much better comparison between the first half of FY 'twenty four and FY 'twenty three. On Slide 8, the continuing group performance for the first half of FY 'twenty four is compared to the first half of FY 'twenty three. You can see that revenue increased by 11%. Key drivers for the revenue increase were a 3.6% increase in user numbers for the first half of FY 'twenty four, up selling products to existing customers and the impact of our inflation linked price rises. The vast majority of our cost of sales are our Azure hosting costs.

Speaker 1

We have a number of ongoing initiatives to minimize these costs while ensuring that we have the hosting capability we need for the system. This continued focus on hosting costs led to a gross margin improvement, with gross profit increasing by 12.4% compared to the 11% revenue increase. As expected, our costs have increased year on year as we have invested in the business across a number of areas to ensure we are in a stronger position as possible going forward. Again, as expected, our underlying profit before tax reduced from £4,600,000 to £4,000,000 due to this cost investment. Underlying EBITDA marginally decreased by just £0.1 million to £6,900,000 Slide 9 shows the non underlying items for H1 FY 'twenty four.

Speaker 1

There were £1,000,000 of 1 off transaction costs in the period. These primarily related to the Lithia transaction that completed on the 31st January 2024 and were costs incurred as a result of the share consolidation and transaction dividend that occurred post 31st January 2024, stock exchange costs for issuing new shares and adviser costs that were received post transaction completion. The share of losses from the JV with Lithia was £300,000 The £4,300,000 of non underlying interest receivable was interest earned on cash held while the group was finalizing the GBP 358,000,000 dividend to shareholders that related to the Lithia transaction. On Slide 10, you can see the balance sheet position at the end of July 2024 compared to the end of January 2024. The majority of the group's assets and liabilities were sold to Lithia at the end of January 2024, with the cash being received from Lithia on the 1st February 24.

Speaker 1

This is the reason for the large receivables and shareholders' funds balances at the end of January. The GBP 9,700,000 investment is the GBP 10,000,000 investment in the North American JV with Lithia, less GBP 300,000 which is our share of JV operating losses in H1 FY 2024. The GBP 14,900,000 of other intangible assets relates to capitalized development costs. Within the receivables balance of £16,600,000 the largest balance is £9,900,000 receivable from Lithia U. K, which relates to historic tax losses that they will be able to utilize and reimburse Pinewood as the tax losses are utilized.

Speaker 1

The payables balance of £9,700,000 is made up from a combination of trade creditors, accruals and VAT creditors. There was £13,000,000 of cash at the end of July, which was before our $4,200,000 investment in the AI company seized, which equates to approximately £3,100,000 I will now hand back to Bill, who will cover the operating highlights and the strategy update.

Operator

Thanks, Ollie. Next, turning to Slide 12. Operational highlights for H1 FY 2024 include our double digit growth in both revenue and gross profit. At the end of July 2024, we had approximately 27,000 users in the UK with the remainder of our 34,300 users being our international customers. Our international expansion continued in a selective manner as we are keen to ensure that our international growth is now targeted on areas where we can generate the best return on investment.

Operator

The Lithia UK system rollout is approaching completion and we're very pleased with the way these implementations have gone. Customer feedback is extremely important to us and the reaction we have received from the Lithia teams following their system implementations has been very positive. Our UK sales team has been restructured in the first half of the year to put us in the best possible position to maximize our UK market penetration. We should start to see the impact of this as we move into FY 2025. We have started the discovery and planning stages of our system rollout in North America.

Operator

I'll talk about this a little bit more detail shortly. Finally, in September 2024, we made a $4,200,000 investment in an automotive AI company, SEAS. Seized provides AI chatbots for automotive retailers as well as suite of e commerce and omnichannel products. The commercial strategic partnership with seized will bolster Pinewood's product offering as the company prepares for expansion into the U. S.

Operator

Market alongside Lithium Motors and it offers Pinewood exclusive distribution rights to the seized products in the U. S. Market as well as with existing customers. On to Slide 13 and our strategy. We're going to do a full strategy update during our Capital Markets Day in London on the 24th October 2024.

Operator

This will include running through all the key areas of our long term strategy out to 2,030 as well as the financials associated with this. The strategy update on the Capital Markets Day will include the discovery work done by a subject matter expert consultant on the North American automotive market. On Air looking forward to sharing all of this with you on the 24th. On to Slide 14, our strategic partnership with Lift Air remains key to creating access to the extremely lucrative North American market. Following the discovery work that we have undertaken in conjunction with the expert automotive market consultant, we are now starting to engage with North American OEMs.

Operator

Once we have a liaison with a number of key OEMs on technical requirements, we'll be able to start the development work needed for the North American market in Q4 of 2024. We then anticipate piloting our system in a number of Lithia stores in the second half of twenty twenty five with the Q1 of 'twenty six before the full North American system rollout starts during 2026. A key point to highlight is the size of North American opportunity. Although Lithia are the largest automotive retail in the world, they represent just 1.5% of the North American market. So there's the huge potential to claim further market share in North America on top of the Lithia system implementations.

Operator

Turning lastly to Slide 16. In terms of outlook, we've had a good start to FY 'twenty four with a lot of focus on the system rollout in the ex Jardine Group with the UK stores. All of our associates that have been involved in this rollout have done a superb job, really going the extra mile and trying to make it as smooth as possible. There are only a handful of stores left to go on to our system now. We're in well progressed discussions with a number of potential new customers from both the UK and internationally.

Operator

And although there are some challenges in the broader economic environment, we do not see these as having a material impact on trading to our relatively sticky customer base. We expect underlying profit before tax for FY 2024 to be in line with our current market expectations. Thank you very much. Ali and I will now take any questions.

Speaker 2

Thank you. We will now take our first question from Damindu Jayaweedra from Peel Hunt. Please go ahead.

Speaker 3

Hi, gents. Hopefully, you can hear me. I just had a question on the fees investment that you've done. The more I read about the kind of the deal opportunity and what's happening in the automotive industry, the more I feel like there is a role to be played by Genai in terms of helping reps do better conversion on a sales funnel or people giving people a better experience on the workshop side. Could you kind of explain what ZEISS is?

Speaker 3

I know what they do? I mean, you gave a high level view and how that will fit into your existing products over the kind of the longer duration? And also just kind of as an aside, am I overthinking the impact potentially chatbots and Gen AI can have in its current form? Obviously, they've been around for a long time now, but in its current form can have on the experience and therefore the value dealers will get from their customers.

Speaker 4

That was a lot of questions in one. But first off, I don't think this is Bill. I don't think you're overthinking it at all and you've already touched on some key components. So first off, Sees is a Dubai based company. To your point, they have been around a long time.

Speaker 4

They are generative AI, not getting too much into their business. They have a unique tech stack that they call an agent in Iraq system, which is, I would consider superior to any of the other similar type products that are on the market and that we feel will over time integrate within our systems very well. Initially, to your earlier point, there is a definite opportunity when it comes to AI chatbots, improving both the front end, the sales journey, whether that is engaging with a customer online or after hours and being able to facilitate a certain part of the transaction that way or conversely the same thing in after sales, whether it's just initial question answering or scheduling. On a go forward basis, we look to be able to integrate some of the C's type technology into our systems and take them even maybe to a higher level, let's say, whether it is building equity mining tools and using a single database, using their type of a product to sit here in real time, be able to value a customer's potential trade in, say the car's in for a service or somebody that we have a long term relationship, be able to balance that off the current market, incentives that might be out there from the OEM and maybe be able to give the customer a better offer on a brand new car that we wouldn't have access to if it wasn't for this type of technology.

Speaker 4

So we feel highly positive about the investment in them. They're a fast growing company. We're already starting to test and pilot their chatbots in our existing customer base. And we'll have more to talk about that later in this year and probably the 1st part of next year. And then we look to do more with them.

Speaker 4

But you will see more and more systems having to use AI, especially generative AI, not language based, but generative AI to senior and further their products.

Speaker 3

Thank you very much.

Speaker 2

Thank you. And as there are no further questions on the phone line, I'd like to turn the call back over to Henry for any webcast questions. So with you, Henry.

Speaker 5

Thanks. Yes, we've got one from Kieran Donnelly at Berenberg. There are three questions. Can you provide any color to your comments on the conversations with new customers in the U. K.

Speaker 5

And internationally? How progressed do they? The second question is, with respect to North America, can you give us an insight into how early conversations have gone with OEMs? Have they been receptive? And lastly, how will Pinewood's offering be differentiated relative to incumbent DMS providers in North America?

Speaker 5

Okay.

Speaker 4

So this is Bill again. So if we start off with going after some of the larger groups within the U. K. And maybe even to Europe, we are in advanced discussions with several large groups. The good and the bad of a system like ours, the systems are very sticky.

Speaker 4

These systems are not changed out often. And to be able to facilitate this type of a transition from a let's say, an older tech stack into our new tech stack, takes a little bit of time to be able to work out the systems, the processes, run out the existing contract terms on the existing one, reshape systems and processes within a large group. So these sales aren't made on the same day, but we're in advanced discussions with several large groups within the UK. And hopefully in the weeks months to come, we'll be able to announce some opportunities that they exist that way. As far as North America, we've kind of gone down 3 fronts on that.

Speaker 4

We've engaged with several mid and large sized groups on the customer side of the business that are eager to get more information about us and even to go down our pathway. If you saw what happened last year earlier this year with CDK and the major outage they had for nearly a month taking the systems offline, it really opened up opportunities within this marketplace. Conversations with the OEMs are in their early stages, but so far they've been very positive. We've had absolutely no pushback from any of the OEMs. And now we're also engaging with different third party layered systems and apps that we will be integrating with through APIs to be able to enter the market.

Speaker 4

Things like tax, title licensing, finance and insurance portals that communicate with the bank. So, so far all the conversation has been very positive. I would say we're very happy with the way that's going and really look forward to breaking into the North American market next year. And just Oli here, just the final bit on the proposition difference between

Speaker 1

us and others in North America. Typically in North America, go into a dealership, there's 5 or 6, add on 6 systems or layered apps that are used, plus 3 or 4 other systems. So there might be 10 or 12 windows actually open at any one time for a dealer. Our system's completely different in that most of the functionality is within the core system. So the efficiency that brings, economies of scale, there's huge benefits there.

Speaker 1

So that's a key difference for us in terms of us and incumbents in North America. Bill referenced CDK there, also Reynolds and Reynolds, Dealertrack, just the comparison there. Next one, please, Henry.

Speaker 5

Great. Next one's from Harvey Robinson, Pamio Liberum. Relative to other software as service stocks, you have a higher gross margin. Can you explain more?

Speaker 1

Yeah. I think, historically, we sort of referenced in the call, our cost of sales is essentially our sort of hosting costs. Because the way we've built our system gradually over the years, it's been built in a very efficient way. The architecture is best in class, and that means that we can minimize those costs. Our teams spend a lot of time making sure that the system is maximized to its full potential.

Speaker 1

If we lower that cost too much, it impacts the customer performance, which is paramount to us. But I think it's basically a function of how our system's set up, 100% Microsoft Azure hosted, which is different to most others out there. There's only 1 or 2 others out there that's set up in the same way as ours. The vast majority in those major incumbents we've talked about, the bill set in the US and the UK, they're not set up in the same way as us. So agreed, if you look at their gross margins, they're significantly different to us.

Speaker 5

Yes, a couple more. So we've got 2 from Andy Wade at Jefferies. Firstly, what ongoing development work has been required for the APAC market? How significant is this opportunity for the group? And then secondly, have there been any surprises, good or bad, as you've been executing the Lithia U.

Speaker 5

K. Implementation? So this is Bill.

Speaker 4

I'll go in reverse order. On the Lithia U. K. Rollout, we're not surprisingly, we had virtually no issues. I think both our team as well as the Lithia U.

Speaker 4

K. Team headed up by their CEO, Neil Williamson, have done nothing but a spectacular job in supporting us. And our team is supporting them in the rollout. We've had virtually no issues. The few minor things that have popped up, which are inherent, were quickly addressed.

Speaker 4

And when talking to them, they seem very happy with the progress and already starting to see benefits from being on our system versus their incumbent system. So that went extremely well as we've gone out there.

Speaker 1

In terms of APAC, look, there's always some development work needed when we go into a market. However, we do reference this in the statement saying that what we are doing increasingly is being really targeted on our international expansion. So Japan's a core area for us. There's other core countries out there. What we're doing is we're making sure we get to scale in those countries.

Speaker 1

What we don't want to do is go into a host of other countries, has to do a lot of development work for not a big prize. So there's been a bit of development work. It's going well. Japan is the focus of that. We'll share a lot more color on this at the Capital Markets Day in 3 weeks' time.

Speaker 5

Next one from Oliver Tipping, Peel Hunt. Costs were higher due to investment for growth, including increasing the headcount. How much more cost growth is required to get the business ready for the anticipated growth stage? And then question 2, user growth was 3.6%. Is this likely to ramp up alongside the lithia rollout?

Speaker 5

Or is this the peak?

Speaker 4

So this is Bill. Let's go. I'll go in reverse order. No, that's the 3.6% is not the peak. Part of this is just starting the lithia rollout did not begin until May and really didn't get to full run up until July, August and now through September.

Speaker 4

So we will continue to see additional growth both on the user count revenue. Going forward, we're going to be talking about revenue a little bit more than just user count because as we build additional products that we can sell vertically through our existing channels, things that will benefit our customers to a great level, whether it is being able to get higher productivity through sales people, more efficiency through the shop or being able to run a leaner business and still get the throughput, we're going to be focusing more now on revenue growth versus just user growth. We'll still keep user growth out there, but the real driver going forward is going to be on the revenue side.

Speaker 1

And just on the cost, yes, we have invested across the business. So in a few different areas, sales and marketing, and our development team, most of which we capitalized, but some of which we do expense. And also on our implementation teams, there's been a step change in cost, which we signaled early as expected. Most of that step change is done now. So that is getting to a normalization point.

Speaker 1

There will still be the main thing that we've got coming is the branding work, which we're just touching on now. But in terms of the team, we're in a really good place. Bill and I are really pleased with where we are across the business. We've got a great team, really low turnover. We've got we had a few gaps, which we filled now.

Speaker 1

So there's been a step change. There's a little bit more to come, but I think we've we've done most of that in terms of the the cost increase there.

Speaker 5

Great. We have 3 from Karl Smith and Zoos. First, can you go into more detail on the restructuring of the U. K. Sales team?

Speaker 5

What changes have been made? Question 2, do you think the implementation and sales teams are the right size now? Will you be looking to make headcount additions in any other parts of the business? And finally, has there been an increased focus on cybersecurity to customers following the CDK global cyber incident earlier this year. So this

Speaker 4

is Bill. If you talk for the first part, basically the restructuring of the team was is to make it a little bit more robust, add additional resources and headcount into there. So the earlier point I made about selling vertically through existing channels to build sales systems and processes to be able to show customers the different opportunities that exist through our vertical sales channels as well. As far as the growth within the team, that's going to be constantly ebbing and flowing, but I think on a go forward basis, especially with the additional development work that needs to be done with North America. As we start to build teams for North America into next year, whether that's sales, marketing, implementation teams, you will see additional headcount and growth go through there as well.

Speaker 4

So really, you kind of have to bifurcate out existing business model with U. K. And the existing markets we're in and growth opportunities within there. That will be one kind of stream. And then on the other side would be as we build teams to go into North America.

Speaker 4

But I think you will constantly see an ebb and flow in our staffing, but it will all be based either with additional customers coming on board or to invest like in North America to see if you're going to be able to break through that.

Speaker 1

I think just to tie back to the previous question on costs, so most of that headcount increase have been developed, most of which will be capitalized. And also just to call out, which I think we have done in the past, North American for North America, we recharged the JV. So from an underlying PLC cost point of view, just tying back to where we were before, we think we're not a 1000000 miles away from where we need to be. But as Bill said, yeah, that headcount will keep increasing primarily through the developers. And Henry, so what was the cybersecurity question?

Speaker 5

The final question was, has there been an increased focus on cybersecurity from customers following the CDK Global Cyber Intelligence?

Speaker 4

Listen, cybersecurity, security just in general, is always top of mind with our customers. We're not going to give our secret sauce and lay out everything that we have, but we would say we have best in class security systems built in. Once again, the way our system has been developed over the years, being cloud based on Microsoft Azure and such, gives us added protection that others might not have if they're self hosting or maybe on a less secure cloud based. But it's always a top priority for us. It's always a conversation we have with the customer.

Speaker 4

We feel that for us, it's a brand proposition for us and it's key in our DNA, the way that the system has been built over the years. So it's going to continue to be, I think, to the point of what happened in North America with CDK. I think it will be top of mind, maybe even more so. But we feel we're in a good place in that. But we're always constantly looking at that testing in our systems and adding additional layers of security to prevent what happened with CDK happening to us.

Speaker 5

Next one from Roger Phillips at Investec. Is there any guidance on how you expect U. S. JV losses to develop over the next 3 years? Or is it too early to say given the exact nature of development work that's now being established?

Speaker 5

Are the receivables payables for H124 at relatively normalized levels? And then lastly, what US market share do you conceptually think you can win from dealer track on a 3 to 5 year view?

Speaker 4

Also, I'll start with the latter half of that, and then Oli can touch on the first half. I wouldn't look at us comparing against Dealertrack per se. You've got 3 big incumbents right now, CDK, Reynolds and Reynolds and Dealertrack. They have about, say, roughly 80%, maybe a little bit higher than that penetration between them. And then you have a relatively newcomer coming to the market, Techheon, which is probably the system that's closest to us.

Speaker 4

And they're about our size and scale right now, but obviously just U. S. Focused. For us, when we put the 320, 350 ish lithium stores on, at that point in time, we would have roughly 1.5%, maybe as much as 2 per share at that point in time. To look at the North American market, there's in excess of 20,000 dealers today.

Speaker 4

So if we put on 400 dealers a month, which nobody's ever done, it'd be I'm sorry, 400 dealers a year, which nobody's ever done, and that'd be a Herculean task. In 5 years, we'd have 2,000 rooftops on there and we'd be at roughly 20% share. So and that's not necessarily our target, but it's a big market. It's a market not just on rooftop size, but just on the spend that dealers make that's multiple times greater than what you find in Europe. And this is why we find it so lucrative and the partnership with Lithia so important being able to break into North America.

Speaker 4

We feel we have a superior product. We've got a great partner with Lithia to be able to test pilot and be able to break into the market. And then for us, the way we're looking at is kind of how fast can you run downhill. So really excited about the opportunity is great.

Speaker 1

We've got some, Oli here, we've got some really interesting stuff to share at the Capital Markets Day, particularly around the size of the prize in North America. Now we've had some work done previously, but it's exceeded our expectations in terms of what there is to go after there. So that we're looking forward to sharing that in 3 weeks' time. Roger, just on your other question on receivables and payables. From a payables point of view, yes, we're pretty much at a normal steady state run rate.

Speaker 1

The receivables, that £9,900,000 tax receivable, that will gradually unwind over the next couple of years. So as Lithia use those tax losses, we'll get those back. So, yeah, that'll unwind. So that will go down to broadly £7,000,000 But yes, apart from that, I think we're in a pretty stable state with the balance sheet. The deferred income at £6,000,000 or £7,000,000 also is around where it typically is.

Speaker 1

And the final question, I think, was on US losses. So as we move into 2025, those will increase as expected. Primarily, we'll be growing the sales and marketing teams in the US, and look, we're doing this in conjunction with Lithia. At some point in time, once the rollout starts, that will flip into the underlying result. So look, there will be an element of increase in 2025, still relatively small.

Speaker 1

But as soon as the income starts to come in, that will draw off any costs in there. So again, we're comfortable with that. We can can go through that in more detail again at the Capital Markets Day.

Speaker 5

A couple of questions from Ian Robertson of Progressive. Can you give me an idea of the nature of the upsell? What's the difference between the most basic and the full bells and whistles? Further to that, what level of product have you has gone into Lithia U. K?

Speaker 5

And what level of product will you go into Lithia U. S. With?

Speaker 4

Not an easy question to answer. So the way we look at our system and the way we're describing it is an ecosystem where you can facilitate an entire transaction, whether it's from the sales side of it all the way through a part exchange into being able to arrange financing to being able to schedule a service appointment online and be able to track the progress of the work through an app and be able to push it through. As far as Lithia U. K, they mirrored the product portfolio that the old Penn Dragon stores were on. So they have probably 75% to 80% of our products current into the system.

Speaker 4

As we test and develop additional products, Lithia kindly has allowed us to be able to use them as kind of our test bed, our incubator and go with it from there. There really isn't a base system without these additional functionalities and might not be the best example, but it'd be kind of like utilizing Microsoft's Office portfolio where you go in there, there's multiple different things in there. You might not use PDFs, but it's there. And if you need to turn it on, you can turn it on. And that's the way our system is.

Speaker 4

These aren't additional functionalities that are outside of our system. These are built in. And based on a dealership's structure, need, desire, their own systems and processes, we can either modify and turn these different products on or off based on their need. What we're finding more and more is customers are liking our unified ecosystem, liking having a single kind of view of the truth of the customer, one data stack and then being able to utilize the different functionalities we have within a single ecosystem to be able to operate off. So as we go into North America, we see more and more dealers probably going down pathway.

Speaker 4

That said, I mean, Ali described this earlier, the systems that exist in North America are primarily accounting based systems and then they have different functionality that has either been layered on top of that through acquisition through those companies and or third party layered apps that have been developed completely outside and then have APIs that push and pull data through and are completely different tabs, different URLs that you're trying to function through. And it gets quite cumbersome. If you go into a US store, you can find somebody in the sales department having 10 plus windows open, trying to utilize different functionalities through these different systems and pushing through. I describe it like Frankenstein, a bit of this, a bit of that. It works, but it doesn't work necessarily as efficiently, smoothly.

Speaker 4

It doesn't give the customer the best experience possible. And we feel our system sits here and gets around those things with a unified ecosystem that we present.

Speaker 5

Last one from Tom Lykett, Canaccord Genuity. Is there any big bang event in the industry that could accelerate a change in existing systems towards Pinewood? You mentioned these are sticky systems that can be slow to swap out. The second question, are you able to break down the 11% revenue growth? You mentioned 3.6% increase in users, but can you split out what is existing from what is new?

Speaker 5

So I'll take the first part and Oli can

Speaker 4

take the second part. I don't know if there's going to be a big bang within the OEMs, but I constantly see the OEMs and the different systems evolving. If you take Europe, for example, it's a very fragmented system. You take a country like Germany, I think there's an excess 20 different DMS systems, no real market leader. It's very difficult for an OEM to sit here and have that many integrations to be able to communicate with the customers the way they like, how the dealerships operate in a kind of a consistent and unified manner in relation to the end user.

Speaker 4

So maybe not a big bang, but I could see over time OEMs limiting the number of DMS, layered apps, ecosystem providers that they will engage with. I feel that the team has put us in a good position with that on building great relationships with OEMs. But equally important, having a state of the art top quartile system that facilitates and can do what the OEMs are looking for. So I just see over time being the market consolidating down on the number of DMS ecosystem third party layered out providers, and I think we would benefit from that highly.

Speaker 1

And just in terms of the revenue growth. So historically, that was primarily through the user growth in our inflation linked price rises. Increasingly, this upselling, the functionality of your products that Bill was just talking about is playing a part in that. So don't split the 11% exactly, but you've got the 3.6% there in users. And it's becoming a more and more meaningful part of the remainder.

Speaker 1

That upselling functionality and products is becoming a more and more meaningful part of that. So broadly speaking, you can split it into 3. It's not quite an even split, but we think it's not a 1000000 miles away. And over time, that's just going to get more and more important in the UK, internationally and in the US as we move into there.

Speaker 4

Well, thank you, everybody. Lastly, from Holly and myself, we'd just like to thank the entire Pinewood team. If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't be where we are today and really looking inside what the future holds for the company. Thank you, everyone.

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Key Takeaways

  • In H1 FY24 Pinewood achieved double-digit growth in both revenue (11%) and gross profit (12.4%), driven by 3.6% user growth, upselling of additional products and inflation-linked price rises.
  • The Lithia UK system rollout has been deemed “best in class” by customers, is on track to finish in December 2024, and has prompted a restructuring of the UK sales team to boost market penetration in FY25.
  • Pinewood’s largest growth opportunity lies in North America via its Lithia partnership, with discovery and planning underway, Q4 2024 development, H2 2025 pilots and a full rollout in 2026 beyond Lithia’s 1.5% market share.
  • In September 2024 the group invested $4.2 million in AI provider Seize to integrate generative AI chatbots and e-commerce tools, securing exclusive U.S. distribution rights and bolstering Pinewood’s product ecosystem for the North American expansion.
  • Despite increased investments in development and staffing, Pinewood expects H2 FY24 underlying profit before tax to be in line with market expectations while continuing to optimize Azure hosting costs to sustain high gross margins.
A.I. generated. May contain errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Pinewood Technologies Group H1 2024
00:00 / 00:00