Pricer AB

STO:PRIC B

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q1

[Magnus Larsson, executive]

Thank you very much. My name is Magnus Larsson. And I'm delighted to be here to do my first quarterly results and the first quarterly results together with Susanna.

[Susanna Zethelius, executive]

Yeah. And I'm Susanna Zethelius, the CFO of Pricer since August last year.

[Magnus Larsson, executive]

So today when we go through the first quarter, we will speak a little bit about the market and we'll speak about the actions and next step that we foresee for the coming quarters and for the year.Next slide, please. So Q1 report highlights. I'm really happy to announce that we had a solid and very good growth of both revenue and order intake versus Q1 2021 and this despite the challenging market conditions that we've seen. It's the best revenue we had in the Q1 ever. And it's actually the second best order intake that we've had also since we started reporting. So it's extremely promising to see this growth. But on the flip side of the coin, of course, we've seen the cost increases on the market. It's something we communicated already last year. Though we've seen increases on components, on production and on transport. And of course, this have had an impact on the product margins. But all in all, very good sales, very good order intake on the first quarter.And if we look at from where did this order intake and this money come, we've seen extremely strong growth in the Canadian market. It's actually been across several customers, not only with Canadian Tire, which has been the largest one. And we can see a continuously strong growth in Canada and North America. We announced one and a half years ago, I believe, the rollout of PLUS. And we did close the 270 stores to get with PLUS. And this year, they announced a merge with the Coop, the Coop in the Netherlands.And since then, we have received now an order to equip 80 stores with ESL during 2022 and as they change to the PLUS format. And we've seen a good take up of the project, and it's now ongoing. So this is something we expect to complete also now during the year. Additionally, we've seen really good growth in the Swedish and Italian market or even strong growth, whereas the more traditional markets have shown a continuously high demand for our Pricer solution. So all in all, from a sales and order intake point of view, a very good quarter.Next slide, please. So what are the things that happen on the market? The market situation has created a pretty great inflation in quite a few of the different markets where we're acting. We can see that this is now driving the need for ESL take up. In dialogue with a pretty big retailer having a hypermarket, we realized that from a normal frequency of something like 500 price updates a week, they have now ended up to close to 2,000 price updates. And again, it's on a level where they say it's almost unmanageable. So doing this with paper labels is not really an option any longer.And here, we can see that pretty much across all markets where we're active, there is a real interest and it's a tangible interest in ESL solutions to actually just address inflation, which is sort of coming back to one of the original reasons why Pricer was founded 30 years ago when there was a very high inflation in Sweden. And now once again, we'll come back to saying that this is still driving business and will continue to drive business.We've also spoken previously about the digital transformation. How stores are actually working with their in-store processes, with how they connect the back-office applications, they look at everything they can to really optimize and get more efficiency in the store. This is continuing as well. And I think the merge between PLUS and Coop in the Netherlands has been one example why we can see that the system they built up for PLUS is now being quickly adopted also in the Coop stores. And in order to do this, they require a system, an ESL system, that is providing flexibility, that is energy efficient and that's reliable. And then that's pretty much a sweet spot for the Pricer solution.Another thing that we're seeing now a pretty strong trend in is that many retailers in food, but also do-it-yourself electronics, but now I've seen an especially strong growth on the food side is in different kind of digital solutions to enable communication or engaging -- the possibility to engage with the shoppers in the store over different kind of screens to generate additional sales, to get traction to work together with the vendors as well, their suppliers. So a different kind of digital signage solutions is requested from existing customers and from new customers.We have a camera solution, the Pricer ShelfVision. It's based on the Pricer patent. We have a number of pilots now where we can see that based on the live action that we actually help customers increase the availability on the shelf of the products. We do gap detection, we can communicate that we see now a gap for this specific product. And the retailer has the possibility to then decide should we replenish if we have it on stock, should we redirect and actually then with the help of the labels then say that use this product instead. And we can see above all there is tangible results that is increasing the shelf availability of product and also then it will affect the customer retention in the store.So instead of going and asking for a product, realizing it's not there, they'll leave for another store. Now with the help of the ShelfVision the retailers manage to actually keep the customers longer in the store. So this has also created a real interest from a lot of customers, both existing one, but there's a lot of customers coming to us and say that Pricer we are really interested in what you can do with the camera. And it will be a driver for quite a lot of opportunities now into the future.Finally, we also see an increased demand for a different kind of in-store technologies, retail technologies in the Asia Pacific market. For us, it's in some of the existing markets with new customers, but also on new marketing countries. So it will be exciting and interesting to see where we actually end up with this.Next slide, please. Then what were the figures? You probably have seen it in our report already, but the order intake was the almost record high SEK551 million. We had a net sales of SEK466 million, so the strongest Q1 ever. And operating profit of minus SEK9.7 million, which gives us a margin of 2.1%. And if you look at the specific margins or markets, we have had really good growth in the Americas market. We can see also a 21% or 22% growth on the EMEA market. Looking at APAC, we see a decline. This does not mean there is lack of interest on the -- but it's reflecting the fact that some of our APAC customers they were stocking up during the autumn 2021 and that was delivered in the first quarter of 2022 now. So here, we do expect to see additional growth more than you see here.So having said this one, I'd like to hand over to Susanna to speak a little bit more in depth on the figures.

[Susanna Zethelius, executive]

Thank you. So a couple of more comments on the financials and starting with order intake. So Q1 was our second best order intake quarter ever, like Magnus said. We've seen acceleration in order intake. This has been driven primarily by further rollouts in all very large markets for us. And one customer to mention, like Magnus already did, is PLUS Retail in the Netherlands. PLUS started to rollout our solution in their new stores after the Coop merger. There's an order backlog of SEK464 million. We expect that backlog to be rolled out in Q2 and Q3.Next slide, please. Moving on to net sales. The current market conditions have made delivery and thereby also revenue timing slightly less predictable for us. And despite this, we see a revenue that is up 19% versus Q1 2021 and giving us our highest Q1 revenue ever. On the slide, you can see the top three contributors when it comes to net sales. If we instead look at growth versus Q1 last year, the top three markets is Canada, Italy and also Sweden.Next slide, please. So gross profit and gross margin. The transportation and component costs, they remained on high levels. This is putting continued pressure on our gross margin. So it was 18% in Q1 versus 24% last year. It's important to keep in mind that we have a three to six months delay between the increased component cost levels and the margin impact for us. We're having continuous discussions with our customers to flow cost increases onwards in the extent that is possible in order to counteract this trend.Next slide, please. And then moving on to operating profit and operating margin. The main reason for the decrease in operating profit is obviously the reduction in gross margin that we've seen. Also, the strengthened U.S. dollar gives us a negative currency impact in the quarter of around minus SEK10 million. So combined, this gives us an operating profit of minus SEK10 million in the quarter versus SEK17 million a year ago. And finally, the cash flow situation. The ongoing challenges that we've seen in the logistics situation has put pressure on our working capital for the past months. We are working hard to mitigate this. Primarily, we're reviewing our supply chain to optimize flows and improve inventory turnover.And with those comments, I would like to hand over back to you, Magnus.

[Magnus Larsson, executive]

Thank you very much. So next slide. So now we'll summarize -- and not only summarize the quarter, but maybe do it a little bit more forward-leaning. To start with the first point, I've spoken a little bit about the need for in-store digitalization or actually quite a lot about it, and it's growing. And we can see that the interest in Pricer solution and the ESL solutions in general is growing. It's growing in pretty much every market -- all markets where we are at. We can see that this is creating a demand. And it's creating a very clear demand for our solutions, and we of course believe that we are positioned to take a lot of this demand.It's the inflation that is driving the need to actually digitize, but it's also the idea that to do the digitalization of the store and all the processes. I spoke to one of our resellers and they said that it used to be that if you want to sell a hypermarket, the time to close the sale could be one to one and a half year. Now they said, now during this year, they can see it's going down to up to, let's say, two months instead. So here, the inflation has clearly pushed for driving the market. But we also see that more and more retailers are getting ready to digitize what they do and to move on. So here, we're having a lot of interesting discussions and we can see there is a clear demand for this kind of solutions.So what should we do with this demand? So we believe that we are in a position and that we'll put ourselves in a position where we should take this growth or we should enable this growth or we should make sure that we actually grow faster than the market. We together with the management team, we have -- and the board of course, we've been working on the strategy, strategy update to say what are the things we should do to now make sure that we get the chunk of the market share and the sales that we want. It's a strategy that will be very focused on growth. And it's a strategy that we will very soon present to yourself and to the market.And then to give you an idea of what it is, it will be surrounding or it will be revolving around in-store communication. So what is that? This will be really the mantle piece. It will be at the center of what we're going to do for the coming couple of years. It will be about enabling our retail customers to engage and communicate with their shoppers, with staff, but also with the suppliers to enable the store process efficiency, and this is something that we have done quite a lot before. But it will also be revolving around increasing sales.So -- and the ambition here is that we should make sure that we have all the communication channels in a store. We should provide retailers with this. So in essence, you can say we want to be able to communicate effectively over any screens you will find in a store that could be an ESL, it could be a television, it could be an LCD screen, it could be a LED screen. But as mentioned, we will come back to with an in-depth presentation on the strategy.And that brings us to the next topic, it's the communication. And I feel that we need to focus on communicating more frequently to make it easy for our customers, to our owners, to potential owners, to our Pricer staff. What is the goal of Pricer? Where do we want to go? This will be part of the strategy. It will be a very clear goal. And this is where we're going to reach. There will be steps defined on how to reach this goal. And there will be also financial targets set defining what this goal is. And we will communicate on a regular basis on news, on our strategy execution, and hopefully, on fantastic customer collaborations and wins. But we will communicate more frequently and we will give you the chance to actually decide the staff, our customers, the investors, owners that do we believe in what Pricer is presenting? Do we feel that this is a journey we want to join? So we're going to invite you to this journey and make sure that you can travel with us. And we want to make sure that you feel that you should be able to make an educated choice. So this is the communication that we will be starting.We are now planning a market -- capital -- Market Capital Day.

[Susanna Zethelius, executive]

Capital Market Day.

[Magnus Larsson, executive]

Thank you. A Capital Market Day where we will present this. So we will set the date for this and then send invites very soon. And at those days, there will be a presentation of the strategy. Why we believe we will be able to be successful and how we will actually do it. So that will come. And then of course, we'll crown it with some tangible targets that you will be able to follow.And then maybe a final comment on the rest of the year. So if I reflect and if we reflect on how the year has started. We do anticipate the growth to continue in 2022. As a caveat, it's of course difficult given the conditions and the world circumstances to say exactly what the year will eventually look like. But we see there is an interest in the market. We see there is a need. And we see that we have the capability to address it. Then of course, we need to make sure that we are able to also deliver. So all in all, I have a very positive outlook on the year. And I think it will be an interesting year from a sales point.I think that was pretty much what I had on my mind right now.

[Susanna Zethelius, executive]

Yeah. So handing back over to financial hearings to see if there's any questions for us.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] There currently seems be no questions from the phones at this time.

[Magnus Larsson, executive]

All right. Then I would like to take the opportunity to thank all of you that's been dialing into this financial hearing. I would of course also like to say a big thank you to all our fantastic and inspiring partners and customers that have helped us to achieve this growth. To our staff, you guys are amazing. And of course, finally, to all our owners, the small owners, the big owners, the major owners, all the shareholders. So a big thank you for your trust in Pricer. So having said that, thank you very much. Thanks, Susanna.

[Susanna Zethelius, executive]

Thank you.

[Magnus Larsson, executive]

Bye, bye.