Welcome to today's event, where we have the pleasure to present GreenMobility. To help us through today's presentation, we are joined by CEO Kasper Gjedsted. Today we'll cover your Q1, not so many figures, but I think a lot of details on what you are doing operationally, and with all your technologies. I think we will also focus in on a little bit on that and look a little bit ahead on that in this presentation. Everybody, you are very welcome to ask questions down in the box down below. We have already got some good questions in, but do feel free to ask during this presentation, and I will take the questions in the end. For now, I think I will hand the call over to you, Kasper.
Okay, thanks, Michael. Hello, everybody. After this important notice, for those of you who haven't met me before, I've been with GreenMobility since 2023, so almost two years exactly. I started in March 2023. I have a background, a background from the car rental industry, the traditional car rental, car rental industry, where I've been doing turnarounds, you know, and growing those, those companies. With Sixt, we grew it from 17 to 100 million plus in revenue. It was the only car rental company in Denmark that was profitable throughout the financial crisis. It became a great company. It still is, by the way. I went to Avis and did a turnaround after five consecutive years of losses in Denmark, ten consecutive years of losses in Sweden.
We turned that around in 18 months and made the biggest profit in 50 years. We are trying to do the same with GreenMobility here. For those of you who do not know GreenMobility that well, we are a car-sharing company, or a very modern car rental company, if I may. We are in Copenhagen and Aarhus. We used to have an internationalization strategy, but as a part of this strategic change we made, towards the goal of being profitable, we have now focused our entire operation on the Danish market. We have more than 100,000 trips. We have around 1,400 vehicles, and we save a bunch of CO2 and congestion in the cities that we are in. With regards to our fleet, our core fleet is the Renault Zoe. It is a relatively small, polo-sized, electric vehicle with a relatively big battery and a good range.
On top of that, we also have cargo vans, also electric. All of them are electric. We also have some what we call premium cars for the longer drives. If you have more passengers, you prefer to have a little more comfort. We also have the Polestars and the Renault Mégane. You rent the car from your app or from our app. No need to go to a rental company. You just go to the street where the car is located. You swipe, you drive, you go. In 2024, we ended, and I was standing here. It was not more than, I think it was actually a month ago today, but where I presented the 2024 results on our continuing operations.
We had a guidance of between DKK 120 million and DKK 130 million on the revenue side, and we ended the year with DKK 129.5 million. At the upper level of the guidance there. We saw a magnificent growth of 72% growth compared to 2023. If we continue into the Q1 revenue here, we still see a good growth, 36% growth rate, going from DKK 21 million, DKK 24 million to almost DKK 20 million, DKK 33 million Danish crowns in revenue for Q1. We obviously are satisfied with that. Compared to our guidance, it might seem a very high revenue growth here. I remind you that a big portion of the revenue actually comes from the more cars that we have inserted versus Q1 2024. Please bear that in mind.
Again, we need to also have an uptake on that car, on those extra cars that we have inserted, and the uptake has been really good. On the EBITDA level for 2024, we also improved that, as you can see from this graph. We had EBITDA of DKK 5.2 million in 2023, and we ended the year with DKK 35.8 million in EBITDA in 2024 on our continued operations. Quite a significant improvement, and I think it tells a lot that we have been successful with the whole transition of the company here. If you continue to Q1, we can see that we still have an improvement of our EBITDA, 84% up from DKK 3.8 million to DKK 6.9 million in Q1 if you compare the two quarters.
That is also, I think, a good indication that our strategy is working, that our operation is strong, and is becoming stronger and stronger. It is actually therefore I want to take you through some of the many activities that we do in a while. Because what is it that we do? Why, why are we so significantly better on the revenue and on the EBITDA level? We are able to find more customers and find more customers that are spending more with us. I think that has been, you know, one of the big challenges. Could we do that? Would that be a market when we are placing that many cars into it? It seems like there has been a very good uptake from the market and the extra cars that we have placed. We are also doing things differently.
We have, you know, from a car-sharing perspective, we have a lot of commuter customers every day, you know, going to and from work, short trips, going to and from sports, whatever customer journey you can, you can imagine. It is primarily shorter trips. What happens then when all of the customers are on Easter vacation, for example? All these short trips that you normally do, do to and from work, what I call the backbone of our trips, the bread and butter, the commuter trips. What do we do then to utilize the cars? We do not want them to stand there without making revenue. In those periods, we are actually transforming into a more, what we call a traditional car rental company, even though we have a much better, of course, product and it is much easier and all that.
The result of that is what you can see on the picture to the right here. This is a picture of Zealand and a picture of our cars on Zealand in southern Sweden, Thursday last week during Easter. Everybody was off, but, you know, people decided to use our cars to go wherever they wanted to go, summer houses, picnics, whatever. It really shows also the transition that we are going towards here, a much bigger utilization of the cars for more purposes than people have been used to before. I am also really, really happy about that development in our company. We have been, in my world, underinvesting in technology. Our platform is not up to date.
That is why it was important for me that we are updating our platform, you know, the customer-facing platform, but also the backend of the platform. I am happy to say that we are coming out with a new platform for the customers, and for the backend, before summer. It has a lot of improvements to it from a user experience, but also from potential earnings and revenue, ex, potential. You know, we can start doing revenue management in a way that we have not been able to do before. Why should a car cost the same on a Friday afternoon when it is raining and everybody needs a car compared to, you know, a Monday at 10:00 A.M. when everybody is sitting at the office? Does not make sense.
Current technology does not allow for what I call a simple thing, which is, you know, a more sophisticated revenue management. A lot of, a lot of good new features for the customers as well. You know, it is much easier to find the cars, much easier to sort the cars, and so on and so forth. It has been very important to me and to us that we are really, you know, giving the customers an even better journey starting, you know, online and much better upsale, potential for us. You know, we also work on a lot with our operations. One of the Achilles heels, when you do this model of, you know, car sharing is that we do not inspect the cars after each rental. That means that, you know, a customer can drop trash.
The next customer may not see it or might accept it and doesn't tell us about it. The third customer who actually cares about that gets a very bad experience. Now we don't know which of the four going-to customers we can charge for the trash, all the smoking, all the damage that they have made. Technology is also gonna change all of this. What we are doing is that we are installing smoke detectors across the whole fleet. We're gonna install cameras. We're gonna install, you know, damage detection, software and hardware in the cars. Let me show you that because it actually means a lot. I think it means a lot for our profitability and our ability to make money and, you know, profit.
but it also shows, and that's, you know, just as important because it's so correlated that we can get some much better customer experiences if we can start to prevent people from smoking, or at least, you know, that is my hope that, you know, when people are aware that we have these smoke detectors and that we will actually charge them for smoking in our cars, then it doesn't make sense for them to smoke, right? I brought this one. This is a smoke detector. We'll put it in the car, and the first 100 cars have already been installed. The rest of the fleet will be, in, they will be installed in the rest of the fleet before summer. It's very simple. There's a lot of AI and there's a lot of software behind it.
What it does is actually it's measuring the concentration of particles in the air, and we are getting an alarm. As soon as it measures the particles above 200, then we are getting an alarm. We are contacting the customer and saying, you know, we're sorry, but you smoked in our car. You have to pay, pay up. That was the smoke detectors. I don't like that this is a revenue driver for us because I call it toxic revenue. I much rather prefer that this has a preventive effect because I want to improve the, the, the customer experience.
Even though we are driving revenue with this because we now are charging people who are smoking in our cars, I would much rather have that, you know, the slap over the finger, which is a financial slap, of course, that that would lead to a better customer experience because now we are preventing people from, from smoking. I've talked about, I've talked about it before. We are getting damage detection across the entire fleet. That has also started now. We have another box that we have here, a small box that will, that is also detecting the anomalies in, in, in the vibrations of the car. Here again, we are getting knowledge about or data about a damage that occurs instantly.
If you, you know, are involved in a damage, be it small or large, the large one we normally find, but the smaller ones, like the example that we have here, we do not normally find them because we do not see the car every time it has driven. The next customer is probably not on, you know, there is a risk that he or she is not reporting that damage to us. Now we can actually do that. We can actually see that damage in the second that it is made. We can, you know, contact the customer automatically and say, hey, you made a damage to a car. Please, you know, fill out this damage report.
I think that also, I mean, that is for sure a revenue driver because before we have had to pay up some of these damages ourselves because if, you know, we couldn't find the customer who made the damage, who should we blame? It's also a better customer experience because sometimes, unfortunately, the wrong customers have been blamed for the damage because we didn't know which customers caused the damage. So it's a much better customer experience. It gives a lot, a lot more confidence in the product, when you drive it. You don't have to worry about you getting blamed for a damage that you haven't done, which is one of the, you know, I think, big barriers to a lot of people when they are renting a car, even though they're only renting it for 10 minutes or 30 minutes.
I think a lot of you might have had that in your backhead when you're renting a car in Mallorca or wherever you're renting it, right? This is a better customer experience. You can actually trust it. We know exactly when this event was happening. You know, we are going out to photograph the car right after if you don't do it yourself. The car is actually blocked until it's photographed, by either yourself or by us in the event of a damage. I think that's also something that will really improve our operational efficiency and also the revenue coming from this and all this else, of course. The last of the major digital improvements is also that we are in a big amount of cars.
We are also installing cameras forward and we were looking at cameras, dash cams. This is not just regular dash cams, of course. This is AI, AI-driven dash cams. These dash cams, they can actually recognize if you have left trash behind. They can, they can also recognize again if you've been into an accident. They can even recognize if you're smoking or vaping, you know, just from AI algorithms. So I'm also seeing a lot of opportunity in that, especially, you know, from the prevention point of view. It's just evident that you really have to be stupid if you want to, you know, break our terms and conditions as we can document pretty much everything now, which we haven't been able to before. So I'm actually seeing a big improvement from an operational side.
Now, quantifying the effect of that is not something we're able to do now because we really have to run an extended test of all of these technical, technological improvements. It is definitely something that will have a positive impact. We keep our expectations for 2025, which is a revenue growth of 17-13% and an EBITDA growth of 20-40%. Again, I remind you that the growth that we see in Q1, which is traditionally our lowest performing month because, you know, not as many people want to go to, you know, the beach in January, or to, you know, the summer house or wherever they want to go, or they are just staying more indoors. By the way, they have less money in January than in February than the rest of the year because they spend them all on Christmas.
There is a seasonality factor in this. Q1 is normally, and the growth, as I said before, is primarily coming from the fact that we have inserted more cars compared to the same quarter last year. Of course, I'm happy to see that there has been a good uptake in those cars that we then have placed in. We are not expecting the same growth rates for the rest of the year.
Shall we jump into some questions, Kasper? Yes. You have turned the business around, and it looks like the new strategy is working, but the share price is still low and it has limited, shown this turnaround. Can you explain that? How do you explain that is, is kind of the question?
Yeah, I think that's a fair and very important question. I take it actually very seriously. I'm a shareholder myself. I have the same question, to be honest. I think over the past year here, we have really executed on a significant turnaround, and I think we have been successful in doing that. We have been going from huge, huge losses to almost DKK 10 million in profit in a 24-hour continued business. We have improved our EBITDA with a six X, right? We have streamlined our operations. We are continuing to streamline our operations. We have much more focus on the business now because we have one market, you know, Denmark to focus on instead of a lot of international markets.
I think we have, we have actually proven that this revised strategy has worked. You know, the fundamentals of the business are stronger than ever. You know, the markets are not always moving in sync with the operational improvements. Unfortunately, there is a certain delay. I would also say, particularly in this current environment that I think we all are aware about, there might be a, you know, a degree of caution or a lack or even bigger delay in the recognition. I just gotta admit, it takes time for rebuilding, you know, investor confidence. That's what, that's where we are because especially after years of restructuring or underperforming, that has been the situation of this company. It takes time. That said, I really believe that this value will be recognized.
My job is to stay focused, have full focus on the operation and delivering consistent good results, delivering on our promises, on our expectations, and just, you know, continue to have a transparent communication with the market. If we keep executing and, you know, keeping our promises, at least in theory, our share prices will eventually reflect the underlying strength of this business. I think what you can see from 2024 and the remarkable, I think it's a remarkable turnaround of the company and also that we are actually continuing that into 2025 here, the first quarter. The catalyst that I've just been talking about, the many, many, many activities that we are doing, and we still have a lot, a lot of things to do.
I think we are on the right path to showing that not only, you know, not only profitability, but to show a really, really strong performance.
Perfect. I think that was more than just a political answer that you will let the market. Thank you very much for that, Kasper. In your Q2 announcement, you are showing revenue and EBITDA growth in the figures, but not the bottom line. Can you explain why you haven't shown the net result? Do you expect that GreenMobility is already profitable on the bottom line now?
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, in our Q1 communication, I mean, we emphasize the revenue and the EBITDA growth, because these metrics best reflect the underlying operational performance. That is really, really where we are on the short term, really focusing on improving the business because on the longer term, you know, we could also go in and talk about the financing and so on. It takes a little longer than the low hanging fruits from the operational improvements that we see here. I think this is in line with what a lot of other companies do. I think it's pretty standard. I'm afraid you'll have to wait for the half year result before we can discuss the net result.
Perfect. No indication on whether you are profitable. You don't wanna give that. What, what on a yearly basis, is it possible that the bottom line will also be profitable?
We haven't guided on anything else, but take a look at the development in our revenue, in our performance in 2024 and do the math, right?
Check. There was also a question. You guide on EBITDA and it could be a little bit wrong to guide on EBITDA because you are a business that has, of course, leasing cost, you have depreciations, you have interest cost. I guess it's the question the same to that question because it's you where your focus are right now and it's where your target. It's the same question, but I agree with the person asking that, of course, that you should also look at these other things. If I understand you correctly, that's a little bit longer term. You can turn around the interest cost and the depreciation than the operational side. Is that how we should answer and why you measure that?
The short answer is yes to that. I can confirm that it takes longer. It's more stable because we have a linear and a conservative depreciation of our car values, and the effect of that just takes longer than the short term effects of changing a lot of things as you can see in the operations and on the top line here.
There is a question about the debt to IFO, and how much you pay down that in the month. You have not given that in the Q1. Do you have any ballpark of that you can give us?
No, that's very specific. I mean, I'm happy to check it. I think there might be a note in the annual report about it, but let me get back to whoever asked the question. It's a good question, but let me get back to that.
They will send you an email. Then there's a question about how many cars do you now have in Copenhagen and Aarhus, and what is the revenue per car in Copenhagen?
The revenue per car we are not, we are not publishing. We have around 1,200 cars in Copenhagen, around 200 in Aarhus. We are changing them, you know, depending on seasonality and so on. It is, you know, rough numbers. For the revenue per car, we are not, you know, publishing that.
Perfect. There is a question. How much is the new IT platform costing? Have you seen that already in your results? Have you expensed that in your P&L?
Yes. How much it's costing, I can, for obvious reasons, I can't tell that, because I'm not allowed to do from a contractual reason. It's not gonna cost us more than we are spending on IT today. We are doing it in a, I would say, a more intelligent way. We are, you know, asking our suppliers to deliver more than they have been doing before. We have a much bigger impact on what they're delivering than compared to before. What we are getting is actually for the same cost, we are getting a better product. I guess it's better negotiation and tougher negotiations with our suppliers that has given us that result.
Perfect. The development in your active customers in first quarter also, you did not give us an exact number, but can you give us some ballpark on, are you seeing more active customers coming in?
Yeah, you know, with a growth rate of, you know, about 30%, you, we, it's, it's clear that we have, we are getting more customers in. So our customer base is growing. It was what I also mentioned in the beginning. I'm happy to see that we have set in, inserted more cars, into, into the markets here, but there has been a very good uptake and it's not just the same customers who are driving more. We are adding customers. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to, you know, to fill out all, all of the ex, extra cars that we have inserted into the market.
Perfect. Is the strategy about 35 big cities in 2025 postponed or totally dropped? I think you can answer easy on that problem.
Yes. So, we, what we have said is that we are focusing on the Danish market.
Yeah. Perfect. Let's call it dropped, is that, that, I don't think that would be totally wrong. Has there been any changes to the competitive situation? You know, I think we, we, it's always interesting to follow that. I think you have a pretty good overview because you can follow whether they apply for parking licenses and so on. A little bit also on the Bolt purchase, I think, was a, it was the taxi market. Can you talk a little bit about the competitive situation, whether it has changed or how you are looking at the competitors out there?
Yeah. If you take the direct competitors in terms of car sharing companies and so on, we do not see any big changes. It is not like anyone has applied for hundreds and hundreds of parking spaces. That is the direct competition. If you look at the acquisition from Uber and from Bolt in the Danish, excuse me, the Copenhagen taxi market, we have seen some very aggressive campaigns where it was Uber who was, you know, running with 80% discount to customers. 80% discount is not a sustainable business for them. Obviously, we could feel it in the very short term when they were running these campaigns, but it seems like it has sort of, you know, damped off.
It was, you know, a way of the, for them to, and I think a clever way for them to go into the, to the market and, you know, say, hey, we are, we are back. 80% is definitely not sustainable from an economic point of view. If you look at the metrics, Michael, it's easy to see that the taxi market, the Uber, the Bolt's taxis, on the metrics point of view, they cannot compete with us because you have the factor of a chauffeur in those cars.
Even if they have went in on the market, it's still under the old, it's on the taxi meter, right? There's nothing changed. There's no legal changes. They are running a taxi service in Denmark with the high prices as always. Is that the.
Taxi service with a chauffeur who needs a salary. That alone, you know, our customers are their own chauffeurs. We do not have that sort of cost in the comparison with Uber when we look at the metrics there. From a price perspective, I think we will, from a price perspective, we will win each time.
Perfect. There is a question with the sensors and digital equipment in the cars. I guess you are equipping, you have not fully equipped them. How much can that lead to in savings for you? Do you have any, have you seen, have you been able to run cases? Have you been able to estimate that somehow on the data you are getting in, or is that a little bit too early?
That is too early. We do not have any conclusions yet. I was surprised how many events we have been seeing in the first week and a half since we had the first, I think, 100 with the new sensor technology here. I was surprised about that. Again, depending on it, I prefer not to have the revenue from people who are smoking. I prefer them not to smoke in our cars. It is what I call toxic revenue, right? It is not a good sustainable revenue. I do not want to charge people for smoking. I would rather have them not to smoke in our cars. If they do, I have to do it because we will have to send out staff to, you know, clean the cars and the car will stand idle and cannot make revenue and all that.
Unfortunately, I will have to do it. It is in the early days and we have not scaled it sufficiently yet. I mean, before summer, we will have the entire fleet with the damage detection boxes in it. We will have around 400 before summer. We will also have around 500 smoke detectors there. I think we will be able to see the results quite fast. We have been conservative in the cases that we, in the business cases that we have made on this. I think I am optimistic about the results coming from this.
The return on investing in capital on these damage sensors and I, so are they very expensive to put in the car or how much did you actually spend on damages last year? I don't know whether you wanna give that number, but I guess it's in the millions, right?
Yes. It is in the millions.
I, you know, to get a feel, okay, it's in the millions and, how much are the sensors costing? Can you give us an idea of the business case here without giving me exact numbers?
Yeah, but we are talking about millions in damages, also that we had to recoup ourself. You know, for every damage that is saved, I mean, it's expensive to make repairments on cars, even though it's small cars, it's just expensive. For every damage that we can, you know, charge the customer that they actually made, I don't like them to make damages, right? But if they made a damage, they have to pay up for it. I mean, they're insured, but up until the deductible that they have. Just like your own car, you have, if you make a damage to your own car, you probably have a deductible with one of your insurance companies. It's exactly the same with us. I cannot quantify it yet. I don't wanna quantify it yet.
I can give it wrong.
And the equipment in the cars, are that heavily expensive for,
I can tell you that compared to our international competitors, we have paid 80% less, 80% less.
You are a good test market, I can hear. That, that's perfect. Perfect. I'll not ask you more. I know it's, are you in line with respect of the private life laws? You know, that was also when I saw this picture. I know it was blocked out, but, the GDPR storage of this data, how, how about that?
Yes. Obviously you have to comply with every sort of GDPR rule there is. It's something that we take very seriously here. We are, of course, also updating our terms and conditions to reflect that. For the cameras, for example, how does that work? I mean, I'm not just gonna install cameras in all 1,400 cars to begin with. It will be a limited test. We already, we have been running a very limited test. The picture that I showed you before, that was coming from the one car that we have actually had tested this in for nine months. For nine months, this car has been running around with a camera in it, an AI-supported camera. It has really shown a very, very good business case based on that one camera.
You know, scaling that up to 1,400 cars, we don't even want to think about that big number because it is a quite substantial number. We need to test, test it gradually. We need to test it, you know, if the business case is holding up and we need to test it from a consumer perspective. I mean, what if for whatever reason our consumers turn their backs to us because there is a camera in the car pointing to the cabin all of a sudden? I mean, it is very, very not, you can't go into a bus, you can't go into a taxi, you can't go into a shop.
I would also be my, you know, sitting in the back of a taxi [crosstalk].
We are taking the quiet, we're taking a little bit of a conscious and easy step on this. We don't wanna ruin our business for whatever reason or see if there's a backlash coming that we haven't thought of. Again, it's a very controlled manner that we do this in.
The last question, then I'll let you off the hook. Any updates on the Belgian trials? Has there been any new court filings, anything on this?
No, it's still, for us, it's still the same. It's running, it takes a little time in Belgium, but there's no big things on that, on that particular case down there.
Perfect. That was the last question. Thank you to you, Kasper, for taking us through your results and maybe a little, little sneak peek into the future with the technology you are installing in your cars. Thank you to you and thank you for the audience listening in. Everybody have a nice weekend.
Thank you.