Pinewood Technologies Group H1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
September 24, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Strong H1 FY25 with 20% revenue growth, 17.2% gross profit increase, £7.9 m underlying EBITDA (up 14.5%), 85.7% recurring revenue and net customer churn of 0.3%.
  • Positive Sentiment: Acquisition of Seez completed in March, integrating AI tech stacks and expanding Seez standalone deployments by over 500 rooftops in key markets.
  • Positive Sentiment: North America push accelerated by buying out Lithia’s JV stake, piloting Pinewood AI in Q4 2025 and full rollout H1 2026, targeting $60 m ARR from Lithia by end-2028.
  • Positive Sentiment: Medium-term outlook strengthened with upgraded FY28 underlying EBITDA guidance of £58–£62 m, underpinned by signed contracts and a robust pipeline.
  • Negative Sentiment: FY25 guidance trimmed by £1.3 m in revenue due to North America JV accounting changes and the Marshall Motor Group implementation delayed to Q1 2026, affecting short-term performance.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Pinewood Technologies Group H1 2025
00:00 / 00:00

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Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our H1 FY 2025 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 our 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, have been launched.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

A key milestone in the period was the acquisition of Seez, the automotive AI company, in March of this year. In the six months since then, we have made great progress bringing Seez into the Pinewood Group and integrating the two tech stacks to significantly enhance our AI capabilities. In addition, Seez has grown its standalone 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 America market is a core pillar of our strategy and ambitions. Buying Lithia Motors' share of the North American joint venture in July represented a fundamental step in establishing a platform to maximize our impact in the market.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

We are on track to pilot the Pinewood platform in Q4 of this year in two 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.

Ollie Mann
CFO at Pinewood.AI

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 UK Lithia dealerships, for 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 Seez's 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.

Ollie Mann
CFO at Pinewood.AI

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 seven, where I'll talk through the key movements in our cash flow during the period. During the first half of FY 2025, 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.

Ollie Mann
CFO at Pinewood.AI

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 eight and 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.

Ollie Mann
CFO at Pinewood.AI

Some of this goodwill may be reclassified to separate intangible assets following a purchase price allocation exercise. Other intangible assets of GBP 22.7 million cover the capitalized software asset, 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 a GBP 10 million RCF facility, which remains undrawn. On slide nine, 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 2025, and finally, our share of the JV result was a GBP 1.3 million charge in the period.

Ollie Mann
CFO at Pinewood.AI

Moving on to slide 10 and our updated guidance. As a result of buying Lithia out of the North American joint venture, we expect a short-term accounting impact in the second half of 2025. Prior to the joint venture 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, Marshall have asked us to move the start of their implementation back to Q1 2026 from Q4 2025 to align with other projects they're undertaking. We still expect to complete the majority of the Marshall implementations during 2026. As a result of these two items, we expect our FY 2025 underlying EBITDA to be GBP 15.5 million-GBP 16 million.

Ollie Mann
CFO at Pinewood.AI

Neither of these two items have any impact on our medium or long-term profitability. Looking ahead, our previous guidance for underlying EBITDA in FY 2027 was a range in the mid to high GBP 30 millions. We are updating this with guidance for underlying EBITDA in FY 2028, which we expect to be in the range of GBP 58 million-GBP 62 million. This is underpinned by strong visibility from existing contracts and a significant pipeline of opportunities, including our five-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.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

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 we'll 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 by the 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.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

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 one 2026. With the acquisition of Seez 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 standalone basis in many of their markets to maximize the impact of the great brand recognition they have built up over a number of areas.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

At the same time, we have started to integrate the cutting-edge AI technology of Seez with the Pinewood Data Stack. Only six 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 integration work and new AI products that will cement Pinewood's position at the forefront of auto AI providers. Moving on to slide 14 and an update to our recent system implementations. As mentioned at the beginning of this section, our team has 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.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

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 Jardine Motor Group in 2024, where they have seen improved productivity and increased efficiencies. We are looking forward to starting the Marshall 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 dealers started in September and will finish in Q1 of 2026.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

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 represents, 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 piloting Pinewood AI in two of Lithia North American stores in Q4 of this year, ahead of the full rollout starting in H1 of 2026. Finally, we are making great progress recruiting our North America team with a number of key roles already filled.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

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' strong regional presence there.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

This follows us buying out our Middle East reseller in August. 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 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. Our FY 2028 guidance of underlying EBITDA between GBP 58 million-GBP 62 million is underpinned by strong visibility from existing contracts. This includes a $60 million contract with Lithia Motors North America, as well as a 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

Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask an audio question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please also ensure the change of function is not activated in relation to signal reach equipment. That is star one for questions. Our first question this morning will be coming from Alex Short, coming from Berenberg. Please go ahead, the line is open, sir.

Alex Short
Alex Short
Equity Analyst and VP at Berenberg

Morning, Bill, Ollie. Just a couple of questions from me, please. Firstly, on the quite exciting FY 2028 guidance, obviously this is underpinned by the Lithia contract to a significant extent. Can we expect that $60 million of revenue in FY 2028 to come at a similar margin to what the company has historically achieved? 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 Seez and the add-on products? One for Ollie. We obviously saw a fairly material GBP 2.3 million working capital inflow in H1 2025. Is this a sign of things to come? Should we expect a greater proportion of customers to be paying upfront in the coming years? Essentially, how should we think about working capital dynamics and cash conversion going forward? Thank you.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Good morning, Alex. This is Bill. I think that's like six questions, but I'll start off with the first half and then let Ollie take the second part. As far as our call out for 2028 of the $50 million-$62 million and kind of how much of that is baked in and in the margin that represents for North America. On a high level and on core 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 to North America, there'll be additional costs that are only North American-based. Initially, the net margin will be lower. The gross margin will be still in the 90+% range. On the net margin, it'll be lower than that initially.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Once we get the full implementation done with Lithia Motors 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.

Ollie Mann
CFO at Pinewood.AI

Yeah, Alex, nice to, good question. You're right to call that out on the working capital. You're completely right. As we grow over the next three or four years, that working capital impact will increase in a good way. Almost all of our customers pay quarterly in advance. As our customer base grows, the benefit from that will grow. You know, as you get into 2026, 2027, 2028, there's going to be sort of $7 million or $8 million a year of benefit from that working capital inflow. That's a good question. Good call out.

Alex Short
Alex Short
Equity Analyst and VP at Berenberg

All right, thank you very much, guys.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Thanks, Alex.

Ollie Mann
CFO at Pinewood.AI

Thanks, Alex.

Operator

Thank you for the question, sir. Next question will be coming from Roger Phillips, calling from Investec. Please go ahead.

Roger Phillips
Roger Phillips
Equity Analyst at Investec

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Going back on that $58 million-$62 million of 2028 guidance, to what extent, what kind of assumption have you made about conversion off your pipeline in terms of what is required there 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 in 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? 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 where you would expect that to trend, please? Thank you.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Terrific. Roger, on the first part, looking forward to the $50 million-$62 million, by and large, most of that is contracts that are already signed and within the pipeline. Marshall, Lookers, Lithia, the business we're getting out of Japan, plus our normal historical growth rates that we have into there. This isn't a really aggressive target for that point in time. 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 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.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

To that extent, we would look at any and all of our 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 a joint venture like we did within North America or things along those lines would be definitely something that we considered and looked into.

Ollie Mann
CFO at Pinewood.AI

Yeah, hi Roger. On the net revenue retention, yeah, 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. Layered on top of that, we've got our annual price increases we put through, which are typically based off CPI. If that's on average running at 3% or 4%, you get that natural increase there. We would see that being positive going forward for the foreseeable future. Is that okay, Roger? Anything else at all for you?

Roger Phillips
Roger Phillips
Equity Analyst at Investec

No, that's great. Thank you very much, guys.

Ollie Mann
CFO at Pinewood.AI

Thanks, Roger.

Operator

Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, once again, if you have any questions or follow-up questions, please press star one. We now move to Carl Smith of Zeus Capital. Please go ahead.

Carl Smith
Equity Research Associate Director at Zeus

Hi, morning. Two questions from me. The first is on gross margin. Do you think this can get back to 90% at a group level? What sort of levers can you pull to get that back up? 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 2026 or a bit later?

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

On the margin piece, good morning, Carl. We haven't talked in 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 hot side within this space. A lot of that's going to depend on how much growth we get out of Seez' direct to consumer sales outside of the Pinewood platform as they sell in geographies where Pinewood doesn't exist yet. That'll 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'll be a little bit of a pullback, but it won't be demonstrative in any type of way.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

As far as the rollout timings with Japan, Marshall, Lookers, and the such, Marshall and Lookers, we look to have those fully done by the end of next year. We will be starting the rollouts in Japan at the 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. That'll probably take us into mid-2027 right now, the way that they've kind of laid that piece out. Marshall and Lookers will go through all of 2026. Japan will start at the end of this year and roll us into mid-2027. We will be starting with Lithia just to go to the next evolution of this on a full rollout schedule, mid-2026 and extending into 2028.

Carl Smith
Equity Research Associate Director at Zeus

Thank you, Alex. I just have one follow-up question. For FY 2028 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?

Ollie Mann
CFO at Pinewood.AI

Yeah, Carl, hey, it's Ollie. The $60 million is the exit ARR. We wouldn't expect, as things stand, the full $60 million in the year. If Lithia decides to push things forward, that's possible. As things stand, as Bill said, if we finish in, say, mid-2028, for example, you'd get a very good proportion of the $60 million, but not all of it in 2028. It'd be the exit ARR, so you'd get all of it going forward from there.

Operator

Thank you. That's your question, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, as a final reminder, if you have any questions or follow-up questions, please press star one. We do not appear to have any further audio questions. Jack, I'd like to turn the call over to you for any questions submitted by webcast. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. We have a question from Oliver Tipping at Peel Hunt. He asks, does the Marshall Motor Group delay have any knock-on impact on your ability to execute on other contracts during FY26, or do you have the capacity to execute all other contracts as planned?

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Group is always going to be primarily rolled out in 2026 from the get-go. 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 Marshall as we go into 2026. 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 standalone team for all the U.K. business. It's a separate team, as well as Japan, South Africa, and the such. We've got a really dedicated and experienced team in the U.K., and they will be handling the Marshall and Lookers rollout through 2026.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Great. There are two questions from Andy Wade at Jefferies. The first one you've touched on already, Bill, but he asks, to what extent does your FY 2028 EBITDA guidance underpin by existing contracts, including the Lithia U.S. rollout? 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?

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Oh, okay. On the first one, we kind of touched upon that. By and large, our target for 2028, between GBP 58 million and GBP 62 million, is primarily based on our current pipeline of business and traditional growth rates. This isn't a stretch target necessarily for us. It's not a light layup either, but it's not a stretch target. 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 in coming. We've been working on that, localizing the product for Japan with Porsche, Volkswagen, and Audi and the such. 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.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

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. These were years in the making. I don't necessarily think they were 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. In the U.K., it kind of hampered us from growth in certain areas. I think that also kind of layered into Europe as well, where we didn't have the time, the money to necessarily be able to go after that.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Now that the shackles are off, so to speak, I think we're going to see a tremendous amount of growth out of Europe, as like we've seen here in the U.K. and Japan and the U.S. as well.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Domindi from Peel Hunt has a few questions. I'll ask them one at a time. The first one is, I saw that there's a job ad 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?

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Only to be able to notice that and look that piece up. It's not, you know, open to the marketplace. We're working on a large opportunity that we have in the German market. Once again, we're looking to kind of fill some gaps in back to, you know, how do we look to go into other markets where either culture or language-wise, we might not be the subject matter experts. 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. If you're going to be in Europe, you're going to go after, you know, the biggest one. It's kind of like being in North America and not looking at the U.S. We're going to go after it in a big way, and we're staffing up accordingly.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

We're pretty well progressed with some conversations there with a couple of the OEMs as well as some large dealer groups. Hopefully there'll be some good stuff to announce in the future.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Sticking with the topic of job ads, Domindi 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?

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

If you looked at my thing here, I talked about, you know, one of our new things here, which is, you know, our Automotive Intelligence, you know, BI platform. What we've done in 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 and the reporting capabilities into that. As we further grow those capabilities and the such, this will be an additional revenue stream that will be able to offer up to our customers. We had built something similar 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.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

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. This can go from a single point store to a platform level to enterprise level as well. Even with customers that might be in multiple countries, they'll be able to slice and dice the data accordingly. This is primarily for additional revenue stream and a new product that we're bringing to market.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Domindi'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 Techion. I always think you combined with Techion can disrupt the incumbent giants across the world, but I wasn't expecting to see Techion in the U.K. Is there much to read into that?

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Techion's been in the U.K. for quite a while. Prior to Inchcape selling the retail business, they had done a lot of work with them. Techion's a great tech stack. I think there's a lot of similarities between the two. 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. I think we're going to be able to benefit from that. A lot of the incumbents worldwide, this is a great market, and it's where I live and where we're going after. Obviously, I'm from the other end, and I think the team over at Techion and the team here for Pinewood, there's more than enough for all of us.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

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 there.

Operator

Thank you very much, Jack. Yes, a question just came in. It's going to be from Ian Robertson of Progressive Equity Research. Please go ahead.

Ian Robertson
Equity Analyst at Progressive Equity Research Ltd

Hi, guys. I'm just looking at two things. First of all, when the U.S. product is launched, is it going to be a pan-European, pan-U.S. product from the get-go, or will you require further work to adapt to different states, different ways of doing things as the years go on? Looking out to this guidance, you've given a guidance range of 6%-7% variation across it. That's pretty tight. Looking at the top line, your own targets for the revenues for that for 2028, can you give us an idea of how big the variation is there? Looking forward, how much visibility do you have on the customer acquisition cost for 2028, 2029 in the U.S.? Is it really going to be much different to Europe or internationally?

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

I'll take the first part. Good morning, Ian. I'll have Ollie take the second part. The product that we're going into North America with will be agnostic to state and/or province. Whether it's a product for Mexico, Canada, or the U.S., we're agnostic to that, both on the language front. 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. 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. There are third-party companies that we can embed into our system for tax tables and such like that. Yes, the product will be agnostic to state, geography, and that goes for all of North America.

Ollie Mann
CFO at Pinewood.AI

Yeah, hi Ian, it's Ollie. On your question, I think we've touched on the sort of certainty of that 28 number. As Bill said, there's a pretty high % of that 58-62 that is signed contracts. We've got to deliver, but that's their signed contracts. We've got the same certainty on the revenue as we do on the EBITDA. If you want to steer on the revenue, our historic EBITDA margins have been sort of mid-40%. There's a little bit of dilution this year, but looking medium to longer term, if you look at that sort of early to mid-40% EBITDA margin, you get a good idea on where we're seeing the revenue land at. You can just backsolve that and get an idea of where we think you think the FY 2028 revenue is going to be at.

Ollie Mann
CFO at Pinewood.AI

I think your final question was on the sort of acquisition cost for the U.S. and is that going to be significantly different. 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. We don't see a significant difference in terms of cost-wise for the UK, for the U.S. One of the earlier questions, Bill said, from a margin point of view, we think the U.S. is going to be at least at that sort of mid-40% EBITDA margin. We don't see a significant difference in that for what we see in the U.K. or for the rest of the world.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Thanks.

Ollie Mann
CFO at Pinewood.AI

Great. No, thanks Ian.

Operator

Thank you so much for your questions, Mr. Robertson. As we have no further audio questions, I'll turn the call back over to Bill for any additional closing remarks. Thank you very much.

Bill Berman
CEO at Pinewood.AI

Thank you everybody for joining. 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. A great thank you to them, and thank you everybody for your time this morning.

Analysts
    • Bill Berman
      CEO at Pinewood.AI
    • Alex Short
      Equity Analyst and VP at Berenberg
    • Company Representative
    • Ollie Mann
      CFO at Pinewood.AI
    • Ian Robertson
      Equity Analyst at Progressive Equity Research Ltd
    • Roger Phillips
      Equity Analyst at Investec
    • Carl Smith
      Equity Research Associate Director at Zeus
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