Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Good morning, everybody. Good morning! I have to stand up here. You have to participate, so good morning. Thank you, everyone. What'd you guys think of the video? Very nice. Right? Thanks, Reese. Appreciate that. Call out to Kim Costello, our Chief Marketing Officer, and Maverick, our marketing company, that helped put that together. But that really is the DNA. You saw the double helix there. That really is the DNA of our company. And for most of you, you know me, but those that don't, Bill Berman, I'm the CEO. Obviously, I'm not from here. I'm from a land far away, California. I've got a storied past. I've been in automotive retail for over thirty years. It's a lot more than thirty years, but I'll just stick with thirty 'cause it sounds better.
And when I was in university, I actually was studying to be a lawyer, and I had my minor, which turned into a second degree, which was in computer science, which today would be more like coding. Didn't want to do either one of those two and fell into the car business. No one grows up trying to sell cars unless your parent's name's on the top of the building, right? So fell in the car business and loved it. But early on, I knew that technology had to be part of the solution of where automotive retail was going. And the first company I worked with was on a system called Reynolds and Reynolds, and shortly after I'd gotten to management, they switched to a system called ERA, which was a product that Reynolds and Reynolds had.
And this was the first on-prem, server-based dealer management system that existed pretty much anywhere in the world. And since I was the only one who could spell "computer," every time there was a problem, I had to go out there and fix it. And they would send tapes out, and you'd have to do updates and backups and all this different stuff here. And then ultimately, I got them to give me the codes to fix the minor coding errors and design and kinda coded out forms and stuff like that as a little side hustle within the automotive dealers that were in the street there. But what I realized is just how antiquated these systems were, and this was back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The crazy thing now is those systems are still the core systems that operate pretty much worldwide when it comes to the automotive technology stack. You know, after we sat here and spun Pinewood out of Pendragon and, you know, partnered up with Lithia for a North American JV, and went with this, I can tell you, after 30-plus years in automotive retail, I've never been so excited to do something. We get to have some fun with my team over here, build something incredible, and hopefully for all of our investors and our shareholders, get a great return on all of your investment, your faith, and your trust in us, and we really appreciate that and value that. So as we go, agenda for the day is pretty simple. We're gonna give an overview and introduction of Pinewood.
We're gonna go over the strategy piece, which we'll go in a little bit more detail. Kim will come up then and go over our brand positioning, Pinewood AI. We'll do a financial outlook, which Oli will take. We'll get into a Q&A, and then we'll have the breakout sessions. And what I'd really ask, and I know everyone's got busy schedules, but if you have, you know, twenty, thirty minutes after we do the Q&A, we have two rooms set up just outside here to actually show our wares and show you what the product actually does. Oliver and I spend more time trying to explain what the product really is. I t'd be, you know, advantageous if you guys have time to go out there and look at it.
So today, myself, Oliver Mann, my partner and CFO, Kim will be going over marketing. We have Kieran and Steve, our CTO and our Chief Commercial Officer. Steve will be up here for a Q&A and to answer in-depth questions when it comes to the technology stack and kinda some of our future plans. And the things that we're gonna cover: We're gonna talk about what automotive retail ecosystem landscape really is, whether that's here in Europe, North America, and beyond. We're gonna go a little bit in how our customers perceive us and what they're saying about us, and everyone saw the Marshall announcement earlier this week, and that should be a testament of the quality, of our product. We'll talk about what our immediate focus is and opportunities within our existing markets.
Really talk about the real opportunity that exists in North America, and then once again, Oliver will sit here and go over the financial outlook and forecast. So what is an automotive ecosystem or landscape? Traditionally, this would be called a DMS system. We're much more than a DMS system. A DMS system, a dealer management system, traditionally, it represents an accounting platform, an accounting system that facilitates back office accounting, can build out financial statements, record new used vehicle sales, after sales, and the such. We are so much more than that. First, we are the first SaaS, cloud-based, pure automotive ecosystem in Europe. We have a leading tech stack. We're built on Microsoft and cloud-hosted on all of our products. We're in twenty-one countries, which very few can say, off of one operating system, one code.
We're not in 21 different countries with 21 different systems that we're trying to manage simultaneous to this, and we have over 34,000 users. And after the announcement, earlier in this week, you can add up over the next couple of years, what that'll grow to and the real opportunity there. These products, and especially our product, is a very sticky product. We have incredibly low churn, so on a net churn basis over the last several years, we're less than 2%. Even if you threw COVID into there and some of the disruption there, if you go over 5 years, it's less than 3%. If you go out 10 years, it's back to less than 2%. Our customers love our product. They stay with our product.
More times than not, they're actually increasing the number of licenses and the number of products. We have a very strong recurring revenue stream, where 85% of our revenue is recurring, and depending on how we grow, that number can even go up. We have an incredibly talented workforce that are completely dedicated to building the best technology stack. The thing here, and the real challenge, and we'll go into this in a little bit more detail, we already partnered up with the top 50 OEMs worldwide. So pretty much if you can think of an OEM that exists out there, we already have interfaces and integrations with them.
The only exception to that would really be some of the new EV companies that are coming out of China and the such, but, like, BYD, you know, Huang and all these different ones, we already have integrations with all of them. So as soon as they come up, we're able to build with it. And they actually prefer our tech stack because it's a modern tech stack versus something that's, you know, a little bit antiquated to the marketplace. This is a really telling slide. So if you look at the 70% of dealerships, you know, dealer users are not satisfied with the data or the operation of their system. T he number is actually a lot higher than that, and especially if you went deeper into it.
This number came out from a company called Cox Automotive, out of North America. They are the largest, they have a little bit in the core systems, but they sell third-party layered apps. They own Manheim Auctions, Auto Trader, Kelley Blue Book, all these great companies. They have a great tech and data stack, all disparate systems, unfortunately. But basically, this says just about everybody can't stand and can't really maximize their operating system that they're currently on. If you go into Europe, you've got several key players out there. You've got Keyloop that used to be part of CDK Global. Originally, based in Illinois, now they have an office here. They are a worldwide player. Constellation Software out of Canada. Nexlane, which used to be Imaweb, which is a DMS consolidator.
They bought several small companies in different parts of Europe. It's a completely fragmented market. As an example, if you go into Germany, they have 20 different tech stacks that exist within Germany alone. I don't think any one of them has more than high single digits market share, and it makes it very, very difficult for an OEMs and obviously, the retailers to be able to operate. If you go into North America, a little bit different of an opportunity. You've got three big players there right now: CDK Global, Reynolds and Reynolds, the company I was talking about a little bit earlier, Dealertrack, which is owned by Cox Automotive, a little bit smaller player, and a newer entry into the market, Tekion.
Those top three, though, CDK, Reynolds and Reynolds, Dealertrack, they have about 80% market share. And they're almost those dealers are almost held hostage, especially if you're, a mid-size to a large dealer group there, because the pricing cost of change is hard. The dealers have found workarounds, but I don't know if you ever saw, but there was a recent cyber incident with one of these companies. We won't point out who that is, but it was the biggest of the three. Might be the first one on that list there. Forty percent of the dealers in North America were offline for 21 days. These are all built on old tech stacks.
The example I gave on Reynolds and Reynolds early in my career, these tech stacks go back into the late '80s, early '90s. They've basically layered , UI and UX over the top of them. It's basically green screen technology. All these things are self-hosted, 'cause you can't put it up on the cloud because of the tech stack. They have vulnerabilities that, a cloud-based system, a system like ours, doesn't have, and the market is ripe for disruption, right now, and the dealers there pay just an exorbitant amount of money. We had some work done that Oli will go into, but on average, in North America, the average dealer pays anywhere between $250,000 to as high as $300,000 a year, for their automotive tech stack.
So when we get into the opportunity in North America, you can think what that is. But even within that, our system provides actionable insights. You get one version of the truth. I've talked about the security of our tech stack, efficient digital processes, and we give modern customer journeys, and that's what you'll get to see if you go into the breakouts. We can actually walk you through how a customer can engage with us, whether that's online, whether that's in store, over the phone, via chat, you know, whatever, and however you want to be able to communicate with the dealer. Our system also allows dealers to operate with one version of the truth. I know that sounds like, doesn't that everybody happen? That's not the case.
Most dealerships have anywhere from five to upwards of 15 different systems that they're operating on simultaneously to handle different facets of the business, trying to aggregate all that data, multiple entry points, trying to come in. The data doesn't ever, really ever match up. We are the only one that's 100% cloud-hosted, highly scalable and secure. I just talked about the recent, and we won't do the acronym for that company, but, you see that recent cyberattack that happened in North America, which is really a big bang moment, a real opening the door for a company like ours to be able to penetrate into North America. And then we have deep and long-standing relationships with our customers, as well as with our OEM partners.
I already talked about, you know, our churn rate is less than 2%. We once again have an amazing team that have developed all this. The real thing here is this bottom piece, if you look on here, and this is a product that was built by car people, for car people. One of the unique things about our product, and this is really important, this wasn't a bunch of really smart tech people that came up with a good idea and tried to build something and outside of a system, and then try to bring it into and figure out what it was. This was born out of retail. This was a product that was developed in the early days under Pendragon. We were able to test and pilot, utilize the different systems, find best practices.
As Steve and the team took the product into different parts of the world, we're able to pick up great, you know, opportunities and ideas out of Scandinavia, out of Asia, out of Africa, and such, and continually build this product, but it was all with the input of dealers and with the input of OEMs, not operated in a vacuum, and that really is a differentiator to us in the marketplace. If you go on to the example I gave with Tekion in North America, good company, cloud-based, similar to us. Bunch of smart people, though, but once again, they built it in a vacuum, and you can see by the quality of the product. And then this is what our customers are saying about this, and you guys can look on this.
This will be online there, you can see it. But when you got people like Avril, and most people in the industry know who Avril Palmer-Baunack is. She is an icon in this industry and in this particular space. She's moving, you know, all of her, you know, Marshall stores onto the system, and we're gonna be doing some different things, you know, with that company, you know, hopefully over the years to come. They're looking at this as a way to move their business into the future. We just put the Jardines business onto the system. Neil Williamson, a long-term Jardines thing here. He's now the regional president for Lithia UK. We put 2,500 users on in a mere matter of months. We could have done it in a lot less time.
It went on seamlessly, so we put on 42 dealerships, 2,500 users, multiple layered apps, no outages, no hiccups, no nothing, no lost sales. If anything, things already went up. They're already starting to see the advantages of being able to use our product to sit here and become more efficient, more productive, and with a lower overall cost of operation. Just to give you an example of that, when we put our system in, they had 28 disparate systems that they were having to operate to be able to manage their business. If you take out the eight or nine that were from the OEMs, you know, that put them down to, you know, roughly 19. They're down to four. But every one of those systems had a cost that was associated with it.
The amount of money that we saved them between that and being able to restructure some different aspects of their business, actually almost paid for the total price of the product on an annualized basis. Now we're gonna go into our strategy, and our strategy is pretty simple. It's four pillars. First pillar is the opportunity we have in the UK with our existing customer base and some additional vertical sales through there. Next, Oli will take everybody through our international opportunity, but once again, focusing on the markets that we're already in and how do we get deeper ties and be able to grow that. Product and vertical sales, this will be a really important piece. We'll actually go over this twice, partly within the UK context, partly within opportunities in other parts of the world, but especially North America.
This is basically developing and constantly evolving the product, new opportunities, and then being able to sell that to our existing customer base. Then lastly, and probably the most exciting piece of it, is the opportunity we have in North America with Lithia. But all of this will be under the foundation of our capital allocation or capital structure. And the way that, you know, I look at in Pinewood, it's like a twenty-year-old start-up that's got a great product, a great customer base, an incredible track record and reputation, cash flow positive, and has a good balance sheet. So we have no debt, we've got cash on the books, we've got a great customer base, and we've got a great path going forward. Jumping into it, in the U.K. and Ireland, this is a pretty telling slide.
One of the challenges we had when we were part of Pendragon is a lot of the other large groups, some of them were public, some of them were private equity or had different ownership, some were owned by groups out of North America. Some of the bigger groups were not really inclined to sit here and work with us, not because they didn't like the team, not because they didn't realize the product was the best product. They didn't wanna work with us because we were a competitor, and we were selling cars against them. They didn't wanna sit here and give money to somebody that could utilize that to maybe get more market share and the such.
While being part of Pendragon really helped in the early days and helped build the product and get us to a certain point, it started to be a challenge for us to go forward. Now, with that going away, we have a real opportunity. So if you look up here in the top 20, currently with the announcement of Marshall, we have five of the top 20 dealer groups in the country. This is our most well-developed market. It's the place where we have the highest market share. We have nearly 30% market share. It poses a great opportunity to us. You saw what we did with Marshall.
In a perfect world, every year, we'd like to sit here and try to be able to pick, you know, chip away at that top 20, and be able to bring those on here. People are already seeing what we've done with Jardine. They knew what we did with Pendragon. It's really opening up doors and starting conversations for us, but this is a huge opportunity for us. In addition to that, obviously, if you then go, you expand that out to the top 100, we have additional opportunities in there. Now, we've always done really well in the mid-size groups. We've done decent. Small groups are a little bit harder to do with doing one or two stores. That's a long road to hoe, but we have a real opportunity in this.
We have a new vision of the product that you guys will be able to look at today if you go into the breakouts and be able to see that opens an opportunity. We've strengthened and reinforced and added to our sales and our marketing teams to go out there with a considered effort to go really engage and drive the business. For the last twenty years, we pretty much operated off of word of mouth. We had a great reputation. People came to us, customers were pulling us in. We need to be a little bit more aggressive and with a good go-to-market strategy, which Kim will go over in a little bit, but that's part of where Pinewood AI comes into.
And then I talked about this, and like I said, this is two pieces within that four, the four pillars, but this is the vertical sales within our existing channels. So a dealership comes on, they go with our core system, which normally consists of, obviously, all of the back-office accounting. CRM, almost everybody takes 90+% . Our Tech+ tool, which is our after-sales tool, is 88% adoption rate, but you get into a couple of these other things. Chatbots, which is a product we just recently bought to market, we've got 25% of our dealers on that right now. Huge opportunity to be able to grow that vertically through there. F&I Menus is in beta right now, but that is a product that's gonna be able to come out as well.
F&I Menus, a derivative of a process come out of North America, but with some of the FCA challenges, and the different things to GDPR and to work with, guided sales, and as such, this is a great product that dealers are asking for. Once again, it's in beta. It'll be coming full in. Document storage, you can look at business analytics, so building BI reporting stuff. These are all things where we have different levels of penetration within our current customer base, but we haven't fully penetrated that, and these are great opportunities. When we get to North America, I'll show you the size of what that market exists at there. It's actually greater than the core system marketplace is.
These are things that we continually can develop, and every year, every eighteen months, have an additional product to be able to sell through our existing channels. And then in development, we have equity mining tools, which help customers get out. Maybe you're in a PCP, you're two years into a four year, but now you're in a position where the value of the car versus what the price of a new one would be with the current incentivized programs might be a good time to be able to switch, using our database, as well as, and this would be something that would be powered by some AI capabilities to be able to go to market and engage with that customer before they were even in the marketplace, before maybe they even knew they wanted a car.
Used vehicle management systems, t ied into what we've done in service, and then digital retailing.
Thanks, Bill. Now we're on to international. As Bill said, we've got a great business. We're in twenty-one different countries. So what we've done is we've said, look, we continue to build in those countries. If you know, there's opportunities there, fantastic. But what we really want to do is build scale. So we've picked on two or three different areas in the world, and Asia Pacific is the first one. Japan's the focal point here. We've got a team, local team in Japan. We've got a great relationship with Porsche, VW Audi. In the next six months or so, we should be signing a contract with them to roll out the product in Japan, and that's just the starting point. We really see this as a key market in that Asia Pacific region.
But we don't just want to stay with Japan. The other areas that we're currently present in is Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand. Particularly where we're looking at is the big dealer groups, Porsche, again, VW, multi-country groups, so we really where we can get to scale. W e called this out a little bit in the half-year report. We said, you know, we really want to focus on, on building that, maximizing that scale, and, and perhaps not going into some of the smaller countries where we have previously, building on those bigger dealer groups. Next, what's been really exciting, probably once in a generation opportunity. A lot of the German and German-speaking countries, particularly Austria, Switzerland as well, they've got systems, they're coming to end of life phase, so they've been in for 20 years.
They're literally, the next year or two, they're gonna have to change the system. So we've been approached by a number of groups saying, "Look, we're in the mix, the last two or three providers to provide the system." So we've been spending a lot of time with these groups. Steve and the team will meet shortly. He's been out to Germany. We've had them here. So really exciting prospect here, and these groups are huge. So we've said 20,000-plus users. You know, typically, there's a number of these groups. There's 3,000-4,000 users in them, so it's something we're actively looking at, and we've not called it out on here, but we've got a team currently in Sweden and Japan, so the likelihood is we'll build a team out, German-speaking team in Germany. It won't be run from the U.K.
We'll have the U.K. support like we do with Sweden and Japan, but have a German-speaking team to build up that market. Then finally, internationally, we've had for about 15 years, we've been in South Africa. We've got a reseller agreement, which we don't have with new customers now. We don't go to market this way. However, it's a really successful setup we've got there. They've really good partners with us, and there's a real opportunity here. We've got a big customer base, a big slice of the market, but there's a couple of two or three big groups here, and what we can do is we can use the work we're doing in the U.K. and for the U.S. as well and pull that into South Africa.
There's a real opportunity here in the next two or three years, and, you know, we've got a real commitment both ways here, so we're looking forward to working with our reseller, Pinewood South Africa, and growing that business over the next five to 10 years.
And just to add on to what Ollie was talking about, going into these other countries over the last 15 years now is what's gotten us to the ability to be able to go into North America. Steve pointed out the other day that I was thinking it was Porsche, for example, had 200 different systems, DMS or version systems worldwide that they're having to try to integrate with. That's incomprehensible. There's no way to be able to manage to that. And in this particular example, they wanted to get down to five, and we wanna be one of those five, but you can't be one of those five if you only operate in one country or one geography. You gotta be able to be, you know, be scalable and be able to sit here and work in multiple different countries.
So having relationships, in this particular example, with Porsche or what we're doing with some of the German brands in Germany and such, has really opened up the doors for that. 'Cause OEMs more and more are wanting to consolidate down, get to a handful of preferred vendors to be able to sit here and facilitate the online journey, their journey with the customer, as well as traditional retail journey. So the international piece, while might not be quite as financially lucrative as maybe North America might be, is a key piece that allows us to go into North America. So I touched upon this a little bit, and we went through this about how it represents within the U.K. and our existing customer base. This really plays out big as we get into North America.
I'll show this slide in North America, but the third-party layered apps, all these things would be considered in a North American context, actually have a higher total addressable market than the core systems actually do, by a significant amount. This is where all the real functionality comes from in North America. The real unique part of our software is when we get to go out there, we get to sit here and incorporate this into one system. Rather than if you wanted to go into, you know, F&I Menus, for example, where you have to go outside of the core system, which is already outside of the system that you use to desk the dealer, figure out the financing options, which is outside of the lead management tool, and then manually...
Some of that data might transfer over, but then manually put the rest in, and then go through a whole bunch of boxes, and then present it to the customer. The customer says, yes, then you've got to try to push it back into, back through that same process, into the DMS, losing data connectivity all the way through there, and then having to re-input it. It's clunky, it's time-consuming, it's not efficient, it's a terrible customer journey, and it's incredibly inefficient. We, on our products in building these tools, these are built into our core system. So it's basically like turning an off and on, an on and off switch to be able to access that type of a piece.
If someone wanted to do that F&I menu, you just work the deal, you hit the next step in the process, and then you can build the F&I menu and do it right there in front of the customer. Once again, this could be online, this could be on a mobile app, this could be. We don't like paper, but if the dealer wanted to do it on paper, they could do it that way, however they want to integrate with it. These are minimum requirements that we have to be able to accomplish and be able to do at scalable levels in North America. We already have all those where it says yes, with the equity mining tool, used vehicle management tool, and digital retailing, we will have those by the time we go live in North America.
But all of those will also be opportunities to be able to sell vertically within our existing channels, with our existing customer base. So AI. Now, Pinewood AI, I'm sure everyone came into this. I don't think Philip Noblet's here from Jefferies, so I'll pick on him a little bit. When he saw the first version to this strategy, he just, like, shook his head and thought it was a fad. And then he saw the automotive intelligence piece, and Philip hates everything. So for Philip to say something's brilliant, that carries quite a bit of weight with me. But when we went into it and realized AI is transformational in this industry and in this business and these tech stacks, this isn't a nice to have, this isn't we'd like to have, this is a have to have.
One of the great things about our system is we have this great data stack. Now, whether that's, you know, in aggregate over a geography, or at an enterprise level with a large dealer group, or even down to a single store, we've got the best data stack that you could possibly want, whether it's trying to engage with customer, predict future trends, value used vehicles, and such. What AI does on this, it sits here and puts an engine on top of that, 'cause AI doesn't have data, it extracts data, and then, basically sits here and calculates it in different ways that current tech stacks and programming can't do, and gives us more actionable tools.
When you go into things like chatbots that can sit here and help and basically facilitate an online transaction without a human being involved, that's where this comes into. An AI would then engage with that data stack that we have and other data resources that we can attribute to it and bring it in and be able to facilitate that. We looked at this, and in the next slide, I'm gonna talk about build by our partner. We found somebody that was subject matter experts in this, with Seez, based out of Dubai. We've made an investment with them, and we're gonna be partnering with them and co-developing several products. Right now, on a collective basis, we're selling their chatbots to our existing systems.
Today, we're piloting them and testing them, but ultimately, we'll sell them through our UK international stores. We have exclusivity rights within North America on that particular product as well. But the real opportunity with Seez, or maybe if we do something in-house or others, is how do we utilize that? How do we partner with that to sit here and take our tools to that next level? This is a good example of something. So if you use North America, three years ago, chatbots did not exist. That 80% number was from a month ago. My guess is probably closer to 90% right now. Everybody now has AI-powered chatbots in North America, and they're facilitating a fair amount of the transactional processes.
For the most part, they're on the sales side of the business, but they're now starting to go into the after-sales piece, too, helping with scheduling and redirecting customers. Most customers engage with dealerships after, you know, after five, on the weekends, when the dealerships are closed, and chatbots are being able to sit here and basically give a human experience without having to pay someone to do it. Much more accurate, much more knowledgeable, and much more efficient, and customers seem to really like it. But those are the types of opportunities that we're looking for in that. And then I touched upon this: Do we build? Do we buy? Do we partner? So if you go into North American context, we go into their, you know, tax, title, licensing. Incredibly complicated in North America.
Great thing about Europe here, you know, your VAT's 20%, it's built into the price. You know, Ollie and the guys in the back office have to figure out who to write the checks to, but that's about the extent of that thing here. North America, taxation is incredibly complicated. It changes by what zip code you're in, if you're buying a truck, the weight can have a higher tax. If you're using it for, you know, business, it's got a different tax. If you're using it for personal use, it's got a completely different one. It's the same thing with license and registration. But what if you live in California and you buy a car in Oregon? Well, Oregon has zero sales tax, but California does. Do you pay the California? It's just incredibly complicated.
I know the team could sit here and build an incredible tax table, probably better than anything that exists in North America right now. It's only gonna cost millions and millions of pounds to do it and take exorbitant amount of time, and it's ever-changing, and there's no real value in that. So that'd be an example where we find a good company and we partner, and we've already engaged with two or three in North America to be able to facilitate that. You have things like we were talking about with, like, Seez and investment there. That right now is a partnership. That's where they have a tech stack and something that we don't have today. Could we build it? Yes. Could we build it quick enough to be able to utilize it in near-term, real time right now? No.
So that's a good one to partner with. Now, you know, after we get into it, we may look at it and go, "Hey, listen, maybe there's a different structure or a different way to look at it ultimately," and then we go that way with it. We've looked in North America at different small, you know, DMS providers and looked at maybe, you know, they've already got a customer base, maybe they have some integrations with some of the OEMs that we don't have, and maybe this is a quicker go-to-market strategy, and we've engaged with them. We haven't found anyone that was that appealing yet or really contributed to that, but we'd look at that. But we want to sit here and deploy our capital to sit here and grow our opportunities and our business more than anything else.
Thanks, Bill. Now we're on to the really exciting bit, on to North America. So just taking everyone back a few months, the first stage for us here was the discovery phase. So what we did is we engaged with a top-tier auto expert consultant, who prefer not to be named, but they're one of the top two or three in North America. The key things for us were: What do we need to operate in North America? What are the product features, integrations that are needed? We thought between us and Lithia, we had 99.5% of the answer, but that is to make absolutely sure there's nothing we're missing there. A key thing for us going forward is: How can we go to market most effectively? As Bill said, the U.S., it's a country, but it's actually 50 countries in reality.
You've got 50 different types of taxes. This is a huge place. Where do we, how do we get to scale most quickly? It's key for us. So we engaged them to say: "What do you think, you know, looking at us, looking at Lithia, how we're set up?" And Lithia, the first stage in that, we've got obviously multiple, multiple other groups to engage after that. So it's not all focused around them, but obviously, that's the starting point, so it's a real key piece for it, which Bill will take you through in a minute, how we're looking at that. And finally, really, we said, "Well, there are stats out there on market size in the U.S.," but what we asked them to do is get really, really deep on this. Say, what is the addressable market? You know, what can we go after there?
Because there's, you know, various numbers out there. We had some , when we did the transaction with Lithia, but we got them to do a really detailed piece of work, and we'll take you through that in a few minutes, which is, it's a really interesting bit. So the outputs of this, these are the key things that we need to do. So the development work, the discovery phase is done. We're exactly, if not slightly ahead of where we wanted to be in terms of timing for North America, which is great. We've started to engage with OEMs. So Steve and his team are talking to the OEMs already. And the key things we need to do are those OEM integrations. Now, most of the OEMs, most of the integrations are different in North America. Not all of them.
Some of them may have worldwide integrations, but the vast majority have North America specific integrations, which we'll need to build. Finance integrations. Finance is huge in North America. Finance houses there, it's used throughout every dealership, so that's a key part. And as Bill said, tax title licensing, you know, do we want to build that ourselves? Probably not. It could take a few years, so it's looking at those integrations, and then those third-party lead apps. You know, every dealership group has them, every group's different, and there's some core ones. You know, vAuto is one that's used over there, and used vehicle management tool is a key one. So we're going to need to build some integrations there.
But as we said, the OEM integration and great engagement is underway, and the development work is imminent, literally a matter of weeks away from starting. So we're in a great place there with North America. I'll hand back to Bill for the pilot stage.
And then when you look at North America, not like Oli's example there, it's like 50 different countries. Actually, it might be more like 60. The opportunity is very unique and specific. So there's two things that we're going to basically use to sit here and say: How do we start and how do we break into the market? So we have Lithia as our partner, which is great. Largest retailer in North America, 320 dealerships. Just to give you an example, though, 320 dealerships, they're large stores, too. That's less than 1.5% share of the total new vehicle volume that they represent, even though they're the largest. These are the states that they currently operate in at the highest scale.
So these would be the states that we would go to and look at first. These states actually, and these geographies actually overlay where most of the population is and where most of the other dealer groups and opportunities we go into. Some are easier to break into others. Texas and Florida are not quite as complicated as you'll get out of California or you'll get out of the Northeast, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, and the such. We'll look at that. The other piece is, and this is something we're going to be doing parallel to everything else we're doing, but it is getting those OEM integrations. We're hitting all the OEMs simultaneously. Some will come online quicker than others.
As we get OEMs online, then we'll overlay that to this, and they'll be able to use this to partner with Lithia to go at it. But you can see the density of dealerships that Lithia has in these markets. The adage, you know, fish where the fish are, this is where their stores are, this is where the opportunities are. If you can operate in these geographies, this sits here on the locks, probably 95% plus of the total addressable market as you get into North America. And while this looks like a busy slide, and there's a lot on there, this is a redacted version of everything we're working on and going to market with. You know, the first thing we have to do is just get the product to be North American specific and viable.
Something as simple as, you know, there's part exchanges don't exist there. You have to use the word trade-in. So there's just simple things on language and nuances that go that way with it. We have to get the integrations with, you know, the OEMs. We need to get integrations in with different key parties. Oli talked about earlier, finance institutions, tax title and licensing, and such. We've got to be able to sit here and be able to facilitate all that day one. We don't have to have it all done, but we have to be progressing to it. We have to, how do we differentiate ourselves as we get into the market? So we already have, and there's only one other truly cloud-based system.
They are nowhere near as mature of a system as ours is, or as operationally viable. They're still in a testing phase as they go out into the marketplace, but we have to make sure we get one chance to do this. We have to do it right. There's no margin for error. We have to set up a commercial strategy, and you know, Kim's gonna go through some of that on her piece. You know, what are our contracts gonna look like? So the U.S. has got a myriad of different contracts. You know, small, medium-sized groups normally do three years. Some of the larger groups do five years.
There's one company that's doing month to month because they figure once they have you into there, the, you know, it, you know, the cost of change is high. We've got to look at that and figure out what's the best way to do it, or maybe it's a hybrid approach. But also, how do we write our contracts? How do we engage with the customers? We'll be deploying pilots and testing, hopefully in the second half of next year. Kieran and his team are already sitting here writing code and doing certain things that are North American specific to be able to be ready for this. We've already engaged. We've got several ins with several OEMs to be able to do this. But we're gonna start piloting and testing, hopefully, middle to end of next year.
And then, as we go into 2026, we'll start to build sales teams, marketing teams into 2025, into 2026, and start to... These are long cycle sales. So from when you engage with a customer, to when you present, to when you get a contract and you actually deploy, can be anywhere from, you know, nine months to 18 months. The bigger the group, sometimes the longer that road is. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but we need to start middle of 2025 so that we have, you know, an order bank to sit here as we finish getting Lithia rolled out, to be able to go on with their, once again, utilizing that prior slide of the key states to go into with the key OEMs. And then, you know, how do we scale into North America?
Once again, like I said, Kim will go over some of that. We're gonna look at it and have full sales teams, full marketing teams. We'll probably do a small amount of development. Actually, you know, support teams and such, help desk, and all that stuff will need to be North American-based as well. And just 'cause of the size of the geography, we'll probably have multiple offices to be able to facilitate that. But this is the key slide. So if you take the U.K., which is the second largest market in Europe when it comes to automotive retail, the rough tech stack here that every auto dealer is playing, once again, it's not quite as mature as the tech stacks that you get in North America.
Here, selling, you know, two million new, eight million used, so 10 million units a year is about GBP 150-200 million a year worth of total spend. It's hard to get an exact number, but that's that way. If you go into North America, and you look right here, this 2.4, that's just in DMS. That is just in the base core accounting platform that currently exists today. CRM is another million—sorry, billion, that goes on top of that. Our system already has the CRM built into it. These other systems, you're having to pay for something outside of it. But the real piece right here is this 3.1 billion in third-party layered apps.
All that functionality I was showing you before, CRM, desking, chat bots, equity mining tools, F&I menus, and the such, all go into that $3.1 billion. That $3.1 billion, though, has a lot higher margin than you get on the other two combined, and that's where the real opportunity and the real money ultimately made is. Most of the real big tech companies in North America aren't messing with this. They're going off of the incumbents on this, even though they're dated and insecure and antiquated systems, and they're going into this. We'll be one of the only pure players out there that can facilitate it, all of it, incorporated into that single system. Now, I know when you say single system, that's why isn't it like every other business is like that? Automotive is not.
It is a large amount of disparate systems, all trying to aggregate data, all trying to put in very clunky, very antiquated systems. But in addition to that, you got to think, it doesn't matter if it's a car, a truck, an SUV, it could be a plane, a boat, an RV, you've got another $2.8 billion in non-auto that exists out there, too. And a lot of those systems I was talking about, Reynolds and Reynolds, CDK, Dealertrack, and numerous others, and this piece here is a lot more fragmented, are in this business as well, too. So if you go into aggregate, you've got $9.3 billion total addressable market in North America.
If you go back to what I was saying, there's roughly 20,000 new car franchise dealers, so not even considering this, they spend between $250,000-$300,000 a year. Lithia's got 320 stores. We're gonna start rolling out their stores sometime, you know, first, maybe second half of 2026 at the latest, but probably first half, the runtime to get those stores on. If we, after we get them on, put 300-400 stores on a year, which no one's ever done, we'll be capable of doing it. But if we did that, in five years, we'd have somewhere between 1,500-2,000 stores. We'd still be in the low single or mid to high single digits on market share, with a runway that goes on for perpetuity.
Those incumbents don't have a way to compete with us because the only thing they could do is throw away their system and start from scratch, possibly find somebody that they feel that can do what we do and go out there and buy it. This would be a slow burn on them. None of them are publicly traded, none of them really have access to big funds. They're privately held or privately equity held. Really opens up an opportunity for us as we go forward. And then, you know, we're not gonna throw out the math here, but I told you what the average spend per store is, and you can look at how the stores go on to there and what that opportunity is. It is absolutely incredible what the overall opportunity exists out there.
Actually, Bill, as well, if you ask the question, is this really addressable? The answer is absolutely yes. Commercial vehicles, most of our dealers in the U.K. sell vans. These are vans, they're transit vans, small vans. So our system, it already operates on this, so sure, you know, motorbikes as well. So it, it's not, well, potentially, this is a bit of a stretch. This is a definitely viable, you know, this is the core, as Bill said, but this is definitely a, an area that's addressable in terms of that U.K.-U.S. market. It's absolutely huge. So in terms of outlook, most of you will have seen the RNS we put out this morning. So we've updated our guidance for FY 2027. When we did the transaction with Lithia last year, September 2023, we had the £27 million.
We've upgraded that to GBP 30 million, which we're confident in. It's the right thing to do. We've got the Marshall deal. The underlying business as well is in a great place, so it's great to get that out there. And that's underpinned by, you know, high double-digit revenue growth, you know, in our organic business. But also, we're looking at selective M&As. Bill said there is the buy-build partner, and we're continually looking. Bill will touch on capital allocation in a minute, but what we don't wanna do is sit on our cash. We want to put that to good use and grow the business as well as we can.
And then I touched upon this a little bit earlier, but when it comes to our capital allocation, how do we grow our business? How do we reinvest it, building new products, getting new functionalities, being able to go into new markets, i.e., North America and the such? That's where we're looking to see here and deploy our cash. We wanted to use it to accelerate growth, to increase, create additional value for our shareholders, and our investors, and obviously, you know, our team overall. But we're looking... Like I said, this is a twenty-year-old startup. We've got a great opportunity, cash in the bank, got a great strategy, an incredible team, and an incredible path going forward.
And then just in summary, we've hit all of this, but we have a highly secure ecosystem, and we have a unique global deployment disparity compared to everyone else. We have an advantage that nobody else has when it comes to that, which is a real neat competitive advantage, and it actually is what opened up North America for us. Talked about it, it's a twenty-year-old startup. We've got a unique proposition, top of the market, product, and a great team to go out there and do it. And then our strategy is focused around optimizing performance. Build better products, okay? Go out there and conquer new markets, and obviously, on this one, North America. And listen, gotta call it out to, you know, Lithia and the partnership. They've been great shareholders. They've been great on the JV.
They're excited about this. Their CEO, Bryan DeBoer, sat here in strategy meeting when we walked them through some of these opportunities in the North American strategy. His exact words were, "This is not a Lithia solution. This is an industry solution, and we're fully behind you," and that's great to have from a company like that, and so great partners we have there.
Hi, everybody. I'm Kim Costello. I'm Chief Marketing Officer. So why are you hearing from me today? 'Cause you normally don't hear from chief marketing officers at a Capital Markets Day. You're hearing from me because we feel that our brand identity and positioning is key and cornerstone to what we're doing. Pinewood AI means more than just one thing. It obviously is a play on artificial intelligence, but it means automotive intelligence. It's also a call to action. When you go and you look at global markets, .co.uk is not something that's utilized in a lot of other markets, especially in the North American market, which we are going to be going into, as Bill and Oli spoke of. So we really wanted to make sure it did what it said on the tin. .ai is our new website. It is up live today.
If you scan your QR codes on your name badges or outside, you'll be able to get all the materials that you're seeing here today, and they're hosted on our investor site. So why do we need? Aside from that, why do we need a new brand and a new distinctive position in the market? We're going into this with a different outlook. We are not, as Bill and Oli talked about, one of our competitors, that's old, outdated technology. We are coming into this as a partner with our customers. We want to help unlock value, drive growth, and increase our partners' revenue, both from a dealer perspective and an OEM, OEM perspective.
We wanna be able to help our customers take their data, sync it up, and be able to make decisions at an enterprise level down, and being able to drill down to individual salespeople and individual technicians, to help really unlock that value for the customer, or really unlock the value for our customers. Automotive intelligence, it allows our customers to have a single view of the end user, the end buyer. That is something that's pretty basic in a lot of different industries. As Bill and Oli referred to, it's something that the automotive industry has not been good at. With our system, you have one customer record. You can follow that customer throughout their life with your company, so not just at the individual dealership, but throughout the entire dealership enterprise.
So if you have multiple, we'll use a Lithia UK that has hundreds of dealers, you can go ahead and follow that customer in everything they do. You know the true value of your customer, unlocking that customer lifetime value. That helps you make better decisions. It helps you unlock and grow your revenue. We're a system, as we said earlier, born out of the automotive industry. Being a part of Pendragon allowed us to beta test a lot of things. I've sold cars. I've typed on our competitor systems in the U.S. We have multiple people that have sold cars in our company, and they work closely with our OEM and dealer partners. This is a unique selling proposition. Nobody else in the market can say this. This allows us to understand what our customers need and to create real-time solutions.
Again, that is something that's very unique to Pinewood. We have four key principles that we base our system on. We are a tier one technology provider. AI, again, automotive intelligence, as well as artificial intelligence, is at our building block, and you can see that with our investment in Seez that we talked about a little bit earlier. We are future-facing and future-proof. We're looking to grow. We're not looking to stay stagnant. We're not looking to sit here and just add to our product. We are looking to build and expand our product, and we are a full end-to-end solution. That allows us to be secure, and it allows us to have our customers stay within our ecosystem. They're not popping in and out. They're not trying to tie the data together.
It allows that data to free flow, and again, allows our customers to make those enterprise solutions. This is our competitor set as we see it. As you can see, with the new branding, the proposition, we clearly stand out, stand out from our competitors. We are future. We are not looking backwards. We are looking forwards. Our go-to-market strategy for the U.S. As Oli and Bill touched on, the U.S. is a behemoth. It is not one market. North America market is not one market. 50, 60, depends on how you cut it down because of the different codes, laws, taxation in each of those states. So what we're looking to do is go to North America with a really unique selling proposition, right? It's exposing the limitations that are in the current DMS that we talked about a little bit, the lack of customer centricity.
We all know that customer is key. If we can help our customers unlock their customer's value, we are an integral part of what they do day in and day out. We do this through an inside-out mentality. As I said, because we are born and designed out of dealerships and out of car people, we know that we need to connect real-time data, and therefore, we can give a connected customer journey. We know that we can offer superior customer insights, and therefore, our dealers can have personalized conversations with their customers. We know that a customer-centric culture equals a customer-centric experience on the other side, and the thing that ties that all together is the Pinewood system.... So how are we going to take on the U.S. market that is so large? We're doing a competitor deep dive.
As Bill and Oli mentioned, we are ahead of where we wanted to be, right on track, slightly ahead. We're looking into what our competitors are doing. We know what they do well, we know what they don't do well. We're talking to customers that utilize their products. We're connecting with pilot partners, and we're connecting with thought leaders. We're not just thinking we know everything. We're going in and asking the right questions, hosting the right focus groups, doing the right things to make sure we are getting the best information possible and can create the best product. We're planning our strategy, what we like to call a stealth strategy. It doesn't make sense to go in and take on the U.S. market all at once. Strategically going in and implementing and deploying our system, that's how we're also marketing. Right?
I don't have a budget that's comparable with some of the, some of the competitors out there. So I've got to be really cautious and really tactical on how we make noise. I'm really lucky because I'm one of the few CMOs in this space that actually has a product that's incredible. I have a team that has built an amazing product. Me and my team, we get to shout about that. That's huge. Why is marketing so important with this? I like to look at Microsoft, which we all know is a great example. So you take Bill Gates when he started Microsoft, incredible product. If you take a look at the share price, it's fine. You have Steve Ballmer that came in, took over, again, a big product, tech guy. Share price really didn't move much, continued fine.
You look at Nadella, when he came in, share price skyrocketed. What was the difference with that? The product, still great, still developing, still cutting edge. The difference was the culture and the marketing that he layered in over that. He was one of the first tech CEOs to really understand what culture and marketing can do and how that equates to their customers, and then how it equates to their share price. That's what we're looking to do, and we think with our go-to-market strategy, with our unique proposition, with our unique selling points, that we can do that. We are a best, best-in-market provider. We just need to make sure that we shout about it. Word of mouth is not good enough anymore, and we're going to go in, and we're going to go in strong. Thank you.
Thanks. Oh, you got volunteered.
We have some microphones. If anybody has questions, both myself and Nancy will come around the room and just wave, and I see one. I'm coming, I'm coming. Just keep in mind, I am in stiletto heels, so it's going to take me just a second to get to you. So if you wouldn't mind just saying your name, where you're from, and then your question.
Perfect. Yep, thanks. Kieran Donnelly from Berenberg. A few from myself. J ust in terms of North America, in terms of competing with the incumbents, are you going to focus purely on functionality, or are you going to compete on pricing as well?
North America, and the slide I showed you when you show the total addressable market, the nice thing is, is there's not a direct apples-to-apples comparison because so many of our products can be built into that. If you take what the normal tech stack cost is for a dealership, that $250,000-$300,000, and say you took that off by 20% on that same tech stack that we sell here, that would be a 40%-50% increase in our price that we currently are able to get here. So we could be able to price below market.
We haven't finalized what our pricing is yet, and we have those unique pricing opportunities when it comes to the various different functionalities and different capabilities that we're going to produce, and like Kieran and his team are going to develop over the months and years to come. So we can go into there and provide a better price, better platform, okay, more secure and more consistent platform. The one thing, too, and I touched upon it a little bit, and I want to make sure this gets out there, is our system gets rid of multiple other systems that they don't have to do anymore.
So if you take a Lithia, they're paying this much for their core DMS system, but then they're having to pay this much more for a CRM to be able to manage it, and then something else to be able to cleanse data between these different pieces. And the example we gave with Jardine here, where they had all these disparate systems, and off of the core system that they were operating on, they needed those. When our system came in, just about all of those went away, except for the factory integrations. So it's a long answer to a simple question, but we can price significantly higher than we are here, have a much higher margin than we currently have here, provide a better product. But once again, back to that, being able to be more efficient, more productive, and a lower overall cost of operation.
And our system also allows for, you don't need quite the staffing model that you need in a traditional dealership. The old systems facilitate a lot more manual input, a lot more people to be able to do the same amount of work, and that goes away, too. So when we get to go sell the product, it's a great value proposition to be able to go in with.
And just in terms of the incumbents, obviously, they probably see you guys coming into the market. They've got a couple of years probably to prepare. What do you think they can do in the interim to try and , compete away some of those advantages you have?
You know, you've got Tekion, who's just come out there. They just announced that they're piloting with Asbury, which is one of the consolidators in North America. T hey're one of the top eight. T hey're in the six or seven range right now, but they're continuing to grow, just like Lithia is. You've got us now with the partnership with Lithia on the JV going into North America. You know, one of the large incumbents is, you know, private equity-owned. They just had that big data breach. They've got bigger problems than to worry about me and what we do. And like I said, even if we put 300 stores a year, it takes a long time before that really sits here and chips away at them.
Gives great value for us, and great roadmap, but it really doesn't necessarily affect them. There are larger, other, big one, is privately held, have some tax issues and, and some different things here. They're cash cows. They're generating money. I don't think they're looking at us seriously. You know, by the time we're to size and scale and affect them, I'll just be candid, there'll probably be a new guy or gal running it, so I don't know if the current people in there really care. I don't know. But I can tell you this: they can't easily replicate what this team has built, like I said, to do it, they'd have to throw away everything they have, start over, and there's no additional pricing strength they can get from that.
So unless they go buy somebody, and go that pathway, don't really see necessarily an opportunity. Will they respond? Maybe. But the only thing they could respond on is price, and we're always gonna have an advantage just off of the way Kieran and the team have built the tech, the tech stack.
Probably a good segue to introduce the team, actually. So Kieran Kelly is our Chief Technology Officer, and Steve Meadows, our Chief Commercial Officer. These guys have been at Pinewood for twenty years plus, and they are responsible with the the wider team who did the demos earlier for a lot of what you see today. So, they've got a lot to, we've got a lot to thank them for.
And maybe final one for Ollie.
Sure.
Two parts, just in terms of the outlook, can you clarify that that excludes the North American opportunity?
It does. We're not quantifying that yet, so we've... you've seen the size of the market now. We know the pilot will be second half of 2025. We're saying actually roll out in 2026, but we're not at the stage where we can. We can do some high-level math. I'm sure you guys will go away and do the same thing, but that doesn't include North America. So that 30 is the underlying business, plus anything recent that's happened in the last nine months, like Marshall.
Perfect. Then final one, just in terms of that underlying growth at FY27-
Sure.
Can you just give us an understanding of the breakdown between pricing, upsell, and new logos to, to get to that target?
Sure. W e, again, we're not splitting out, calling out specifically, but our half-year results is a really good benchmark on where we're going, so our revenue is up by about 11% for the half year. Users are up 3.6%, so in the past, the remainder of that would have been purely through pricing, but Bill's talked about the product upselling. That difference between the 11 and the 3.5 is, you know, broadly half of its pricing, so annual price increases, which are linked into inflation, but the other half is product upsell, so the way we're looking at it, and certainly is that product upsell is gonna increase over time.
We'll still keep in the inflation price rises, so, you know, whether it's two, three, four %, whatever, that will be fairly constant. But over time, the percentage of that, revenue driver, that's products, will increase from North America eventually, but actually, as we develop those products, we're lifting those into the UK, into Asia, South Africa, Europe, so that will increase over time.
Perfect, thanks.
Thank you. All right, who's next? Just say who you are and where you're from.
Hello, I'm Ollie from Peel Hunt. So we've heard a lot about the total addressable market and medium-term, long-term opportunity. If we're talking about right now, what do you guys view as your limiting factor for growth? Is it the ability to roll out as quickly as you'd like? Is it the go-to-market or the marketing team's budget spend? What's your constraining factor?
I'd say the only. Let's g o in reverse order. North America, we've got to get the product ready for that market. So we have to engage with the OEMs. So right now, the factor that's slowing us down from going even faster is just being able to engage with them. They're not always, you know, Johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to phone calls or emails and the such, so that would be the factor there. Our growth in Japan is more- once again, virtually none of it is on us. It's getting the contract signed, doing the behind-the-scenes work and being able to go out there. We have the sales team to be able to facilitate it. We have the marketing team to be able to do it.
Kieran and his team have the ability to sit here and, you know, lever up and, you know, increase, you know, if we need to do any bespoke coding or anything like that. Really, that's no real limiting factor. When it comes to, you know, existing markets in, say, the UK, you know, these are sticky products, and they're long sales cycles. Even when you engage at a high level with a customer, and even if you close to having a deal, just engaging with them, doing the, you know, the prep work behind before install is what takes most of the time. But I'd say the biggest thing with existing markets that we're in is just the sales cycle.
But some of that, that's not money doesn't fix that necessarily, and, and more people doesn't necessarily fix that. But if there was something that, that came to it, back to, when I was talking about capital allocation, then if we needed additional resources or, we needed additional people to, to, you know, write up, additional code, then we'd quickly move on that.
Ollie, just on those OEM integrations as well, even though they are different in North America, we've got those relationships with those 50 OEMs, which is huge for us. So it means we've got an in with the vast, vast majority of those, and even the ones where we don't, say, General Motors, we've got the contact with Lithia, so we've got two or three different ways to get into those OEMs. So, you know, Steve, you know, even though he doesn't look it, he's been here a long time, and so he's got the relationship and his team with the vast majority of those, which is key for us going forward. And as Bill said, that's the priority the next six months or so.
Certainly the technical platform that we're on is massively attractive to the manufacturers who want to control things from the center from a consumer perspective. So they want you guys, as consumers, to be controlling your car experience through their apps and through their tech platform. And that means moving away from a whole lot of national stuff that is historically there with the legacy providers. So we've got big support from the HQs to try and drive this.
Ultimately, as you're right, there is a constraint in terms of how quickly can we realize revenue by getting dealers in and on board, but that is entirely cash positive in that the time that we're going to be selling, the consultancy that we need to do to get these guys converted over is all chargeable and all an enabler, and we can bring people from dealer groups into our team to accelerate that.
Thanks.
You're welcome.
Hi, Andy Wade from Jefferies. Could I ask just a little bit about, Tekion and sp-
Sure
... specifically how you guys differ? You mentioned that they're nowhere near as mature or operationally viable, but they are signing up-
... some dealer groups-
Mm-hmm
Aren't they? So interested in how they're managing that, if it's not that operationally viable, and then interested in your bit of compare and contrast with where you're at, and how much might they be able to move on in the next two years, say, and as a result, may you lose some competitive ground as a result of that?
So they're ahead of us on the factory integrations 'cause they've already done that part. So, that's the piece we need to catch up on. Several of the OEMs have worldwide integrations, so there might be only a minor tweak. So some of those we can move quickly with. You know, Tekion, like anything, and this goes back to being part of Pendragon, where we were able to test and model. They can only test and model in an actual dealership. Initially, when they were rolling out stores, they had as many stores coming off as were going on. And it's just a learning system. It's great tech. The people running it are great. It's a large organization. T hey're viable, and they will be, you know, one of the players.
But the market's vast, so I don't look at them as us versus them. I look at the two of us against CDK, and Reynolds, and Dealertrack, and the such, 'cause that market is so huge. So I don't think it's like for like when it comes to that. As far as the maturity, you know, we've been SaaS-based, you know, for twenty years. We've been cloud-based for twenty years. We've operated on this system, even farther back than that, but the current system, you know, for twenty-plus years. You know, that company came into existence in 2000 and, I don't know, technically, 2010 or something like that, but they didn't really start doing. Actually, no, sorry, 2016.
So they've got eight years in, and they just don't have the same, you know, worldwide experience that we have. You know, we've got terabytes and terabytes of data. We've done tens of millions of transactions. They're just not there yet. So on the maturity piece, we've just got a proven track record. They will, they'll get there at some point in time. And once again, their product is good. If anything, it actually is a benefit to us. They've already cracked the door. They've already started to, you know, disrupt that marketplace, and, you know, sometimes it's better to be the second mover than the first mover.
Andy?
There's a lot more success stories on the second mover than there are on the first one.
Andy, a real good indicator is the number of developers we've got. So we've got about 150 developers, which is absolutely what we need today, and we're scaling that up as we speak, and that's increasing, but that's exactly right for us today. Tekion, look, it's private, but it's certainly four figures, whether it's 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 'cause they're trying to get to the point where we are today. You know, ultimately, we might have 250, 300, whatever the number is, as we go into the U.S., but it's certainly we will not need 1,000 developers, and Kieran is not shaking his head, so we're happy on that. But that gives a bit of an indication on where we are, product-wise.
You know, we're, as Bill said, twenty years in there. S even, eight years into the process.
Also it's extremely helpful to have someone as well-resourced and strong on marketing, making the same message that we're making. We were doing it sooner, and they've done an amazing job of opening the doors, as Bill said, to get manufacturers and to get the larger dealer groups conscious of security risks, of the advantages of cloud, of the advantages of a single system driving process. If ultimately their fulfillment is a limitation, then absolutely, we're there to take advantage of that.
Thank you for the presentations. Two, three, so I'll go one by one, if you don't mind. I completely agree with you when you said that the sales cycle is being long, but once you get the contract and you are at the dealer, how long does it take for the Pinewood software to get into and obviously have the, all the old data from the old systems coming over to our,
I can have Kieran talk to that, but it's not long at all. In certain instances, we can connect directly with the old system and pull out of that way. If that provider doesn't wanna play nice, like I said, I'll have Kieran go into more detail. We can basically download it and then put it into our system and clarify it. Best example is what we did with Lithia UK, the ex Jardine stores. The incumbent, you know, we weren't able to link directly in with them. We were able to pull and extract data. We did it over a weekend, and the stores literally operated all the way up. They closed on Sunday. Monday morning, they turned on, and our system was up and running.
Thank you.
But we can go through the-
Yeah
... complexities of-
Yeah
-data transfer.
It's an area where we're strong. It's also an area where we could get a lot better as well. And with you know the introduction of AI technologies into that specific aspect, we can really crunch that, make it super quick, drive the quality up as well. So that's the underlying message as well. What we're trying to get across today with AI is, we're at the start of our journey, but we can enhance every step of our journey, all the way through the product, all the way through development, all the way through speed of delivery and quality. But in that certain scenario, definitely, we could make that even better than it is today.
Thank you.
J ust to say that the where we are today is probably twice as fast as any of the incumbents in the UK. So three months from the point of order through to fulfillment isn't unusual. We're coming from a background where mergers and acquisitions happen, and as Bill says, potentially over a weekend, we can do that same job if we're focused in on it. So one, there's movement in consolidation as dealer groups move networks around, but most clearly, a three-month timescale is pretty normal for us-
Thank-
... which is a lot faster than the guys we're competing with.
Thank you. So all our revenues are currently from the UK, is it?
No.
No.
Ollie?
It's about 80% today is UK, if you look at, you know, whether it's users or revenue, but, you know, broadly, about 80% of our user base or customer base is UK, which is where we started. But, you know, over the last five to eight years particularly, we've gone into a lot of overseas countries, and a lot of that is OEM driven. We've got really, really strong relationships, which a lot of it's from these guys, but, you know, with a lot of the premium brands, we've talked about Porsche, VW, Audi, a lot of the other ones. They've said to us: "Look, come into, come into our countries," and there's a lot more scope.
As you move out of Europe and North America, there's a lot more scope into Asia, where OEMs can mandate, and they say every dealer has to have the system in here, whereas you can't have that in the UK, North America. So that's the model that's been followed generally over the last five years.
Thank you. And how is the pricing? Is it based on a fixed annual fee? Is it based on volume or transaction value or?
The pricing model is two-tiered. You have a traditional SaaS-based pricing model. You know, software as a service, so it's on a license-based basis for users. And then on those vertical products I was telling you about, those are normally charged on a rooftop basis. So we talked about a DMS on there. You know, that one, we charge GBP 165 a month for perpetuity per rooftop. The core licensing to be able to facilitate anything, whether it's sales, service, or back office accounting, there's a different price for that, but that's on a licensing basis, on a per-user basis.
Cool. Promise you, this is the last question. In terms of obviously, we're trying to go to Japan, North America, huge markets, what's the marketing sales budgets, and do we have the cash to do so?
We haven't put those out yet, but absolutely, we have the cash to do both. Going into Japan and see if we can go in more detail, right now, we're being pulled in by the Volkswagen Group. We don't need to do any marketing on that right now, to Ollie's point here. We're not there yet, but we will be soon. That's gonna be mandated by the OEM, so we don't have to do much there. That's gonna be mainly implementation and any bespoke coding that needs to be done for that marketplace. As we go into North America and we get in the first part of next year, then we'll start laying out budgets when it comes to marketing. You know, Kim and Ollie both talked about it.
It's a big country, lots of geography to cover. There will be a marketing budget that has to go on top of that. But once again, we've got good cash flow right now, good position where we're at. The JV funds all the North American development and marketing. We both can sit here and put additional resources and funds into there. So we have more than enough to sit here and drive the development work. And then as we start to do sales and marketing, we'll start to chip into that. That'll be the initial basis. In a perfect world, by that time, we will be in a position to be able to sit here and start to drive revenues, and then reinvest that to continue to grow.
Thank you. Speak to you later.
Carl Smith from Zeus. Following the Marshall's deal, are there any other opportunities to work with the wider Constellation Automotive Group ? I know cinch doesn't have dealerships, but, you know, there's BCA and everything. There's integrations you can do and things like that.
We can't get deep into conversations, but definitely, you know, the nice thing about Constellation is, while they are owners of one of the larger, you know, dealership groups, you know, We Buy Any Car, BCA, cinch, and the such, you know, definitely we've had conversations about different opportunities over time. None of it's come to, you know, a head yet or anything like that, but, we're gonna continue to engage with them. A s after they see the work and, how good the product is, as good as Marshall, it could possibly open up other opportunities within that group.
The other question is about Auto Trader. So they are pursuing trying to take more of the car buying journey themselves. Are you competing with Auto Trader in the UK, or are you collaborating with them?
No, that goes back to the partner basis. Kieran and Steve, and Steve, they've been talking to them. You know, we're in a place right now where, hopefully, at a future state, the piece that they're trying to do online, it has to stop because they can't process a deal through the system that's in the store because that's proprietary. Like, so they can't sell a car through the Pinewood system, for example. But, you know, we're talking about them, about linking the two systems, so as it comes into ours, it comes into theirs, it can flow right into ours, for example.
So we don't look at them as competitors, we look at them as partners and somebody that we could co-develop certain products and maybe even give us another competitive advantage into the marketplace. Great company, great people running it, and what they're trying to do. Actually, we can complement what they're doing or vice versa.
Okay, thank you.
I would just add, if you look on our website, it shows our partners, and Auto Trader is prominently listed on there as one of our top partners.
T hanks. Just looping back on North America . In terms of the current JV structure, do you think at some point you guys would have to be majority owners of that JV to avoid some of the similar issues you had previously as being part of the Pendragon Group?
So I can't speak for Lithia, but I've made my thoughts known to them, which is exactly that. At some point in time, and not in the too distant future, the structure needs to be changed. Ultimately, we'd like to own it in its entirety. I don't think it needs to be a JV forever. And they're not resistant to that in any way, shape, or form. They realize that there's limitations with the current structure. I'm sure they'll ride it through to a certain point. Once again, I can't speak for them, but I can say what I said earlier, what their CEO said in an open group, that this is not a Lithia solution, this is an industry solution.
They still, you know, are a large shareholder for us and great partners, so I don't see them ever standing in the way from the business being able to grow.
Hi, Dylan Deschamps from Samson Rock. Just on the twenty twenty-seven target, you talked about selective M&A opportunities. So just curious if there is any M&A assumptions to reach that target or if it's purely organic.
There's no M&A in there, so that's purely organic. It's current business as it stands today. So likewise with North America, that would be incremental on top of that, on top of that number.
Okay, and then on Germany, so you talked about the generational opportunity in the next two years. To what extent did you reflect that into your 2027 outlook, or is it upside?
T here's a very prudent assumption on there, and look, that you can see there's 10 or 12 moving parts here. So particularly on Germany, Germany's probably the one where, of all of them, you know, we're at the earliest stage, there's some very, very prudent assumptions in there on Germany, particularly. You know, most of the other parts are already established. Asia Pacific, more so certainly South Africa, UK. So Germany's a very very small slice of that part there. We think this is probably to help in the overall, we think we're very comfortable with the GBP 30 million number, if that helps, in terms of the... You know, we're comfortable. We've stacked it up and gone through it, cuts it a few different ways.
It involves Kieran going through the tech side, Steve from the commercial side. You know, can we scale out? We've had a few questions, you know, have we got the capacity? Certainly, the key thing for us is actually we work at the customer speed. So, on all those fronts w e're happy with that.
Okay, thank you.
Hi, it's Ian Robertson from Progressive. Can you just clarify two things? First of all, you say you're built on Microsoft. What exactly does that mean? How deep down does your code base go? Have you built the whole CRM bottom up? And also, on this nine- to 18-month sales cycle, what's the evidence of that? How many things have you sold in the U.S. before that you can say, "That's how long it's going to take for a full stack sale?
So I'll take the second part, and I'll let Kieran take the first part. That's the sales cycle that we've seen selling within the UK. And that's the sales cycle we've seen when we've sold throughout other parts of the world, and it's pretty standard throughout there. From when we first engage, to being able to get a contract, to being able to actually install. Most of those limitations are on the dealer side. In certain parts of the world we've gone into, there's been some OEM where they're trying to figure out what they want to do, or where they're actually mandating this or pushing this down. We have to give them time to be able to facilitate that part of it.
There's no limitation on our side from if someone wanted our product tomorrow, you know, we could roll out in a really short period of time. We'd need to get into there, see what the systems they have, obviously, get the data transference over and stuff like that. We could do it in weeks, you know, not necessarily months. Most of the drag time in that is, you know, you might be starting off with an owner or a CFO or something of a business, but you got to go through the different layers to get down to the different people that actually have to, you know, operate on the system. So once again, you know, most dealers haven't ever changed their core system. They're on that system.
If you've operated on more than one system, it's because you worked at two different stores. So these are big decisions, and it's a challenge breaking into it, but once you're in, you've got a customer basically for life. O ur average life cycle is 20 years, on our customer. So all of that's off the experience that we've seen, over the last 20 years, from engagement to install.
Thank you.
On the Microsoft question. F irstly, we build everything ourselves, every aspect of the DMS platform, which we're going to rename, obviously. You know, the accounting system, the stock management, CRM, the whole shebang, it matches the workshop, the sales. It's all Microsoft technology. It's all hosted on the Microsoft Cloud. We use Cloudflare as well as our perimeter defense system. But it is. We're a Gold Partner with Microsoft. It's been Microsoft all the way since 2001.
That stands out against some of the Microsoft platform products, for example, Dynamics, Navision, et cetera, where we've seen either dealer groups or other software organizations take that platform ERP layer and then do a level of work to make it customer friendly from a manufacturer point of view. Having taken on board a company called Ebbon-Dacs about 10 years ago, there's just not enough margin in that space if you don't own the IPR behind it. So for us, being able to modify the product is one thing, but also we're not paying 40% of our license fee over to a third party just to be compliant on the accounting or elsewhere. So it really gives us some deep ability, both price-wise, but also flexibility on the product.
Hi, my name is Dinar Torresco. I had a question for Kieran. You mentioned your product is 20 years old, right? And technical debt always adds up. So how do you keep?
I t's 20 years old, the product itself. But we've always had a-- we've always been a PLC. We've always had to grow, grow, grow, you know, for you boys... which is great. But we've always had a healthy internal battle inside of, you know, fixing the roof while the sun's shining and, you know, making sure we're turning over that stuff that's too old, always adopting the latest technology. And it's, you know, it's not easy, but we've had a healthy relationship with that over the last 20 years. So the product itself is 20 years old. It's got that heritage, if you like, maturity. But we're constantly turning the code base over so that we can, you know...
Bill might have mentioned a few times today that it's secure, which we're really proud of. We don't want to tempt the cyber gods, obviously, but you know, we have to always adopt, adapt, constantly moving forward.
As an example, we'll have multiple updates per week sometimes, and sometimes be real time, but it'll be simultaneously across the world. It's very different, and I'm not going to... nowhere near to the level of expertise as Kieran, but we don't have to wait until midnight to run things like some of the groups or the middle of the night. You know, they're continually, it's continual product involvement.
Yes.
It's one version of the product.
It's not multiple versions.
I t's one version of code over, you know, multiple repositories and things like that. It's one stack. So one of a couple of the key things are, it is 20 years old, the product is. We've turned it over multiple, multiple times. We've been cloud mature for about eight years, which is, you can still screw it up in the cloud, don't get me wrong, but, you know, we've probably gone through two or three iterations of revamping all of that stuff. But in that world, there's no CapEx, you're not ordering servers, and you're not dealing with, you know, firmware and hardware that can fail all the time.
And most importantly, probably, we've got the core people who built the system from the technical side and the product side, over that 20-year space, and with a whole load of new people, you know, coming in, biting at our ankles, trying to improve stuff as well. So we've got, you know, good balance all over the place.
... I had a follow-up questions, because you mentioned, is it a single version of the code? Or because you mentioned you had to roll out a few things to South Africa, or is it one?
I t's one single version of the code. S o we've got, you know, a global deployment model. We're in twenty-one countries. We're, you know, distributed over multiple data centers all around the world. So we're deploying every day nearly, maybe three or four times a week. You know, we can ramp that up, we can ramp that down. But at the same time as well, we've always had that premise where we always wanna deploy, we always wanna roll out new features, but we always wanna do the architectural work under the bonnet as well. Not break anything, not break the growth, not break the user experience. So we've just been, like, turning that one code base over.
So we don't have one for Japan, we don't have one for the Netherlands, one for the UK, we won't have one for America. It's all just one customizable system.
Okay, so one code base, but multiple in deployments-
Yep.
-for data , per country or so I had one more question. I know you mentioned, cloud wasn't there twenty years ago, right? So-
Yeah.
but you mentioned.
What degree of cloud nativeness is your product?
Sorry, say that again?
What degree of cloud nativeness-
Well, we're-
Classify your product.
We used to run our own data centers. We've migrated to the cloud, where we just, you know, reprovision virtual machines and things like that, and then over time, we've gone to, you know, pure cloud-native systems, our platform as a service, you know, function, things like that, but what we really wanna do is achieve cloud-agnostic layering, so that we can have, you know, a multi-cloud platform, which is really easy to say and really, really hard to do, but that's where we want to get to, so and the key thing is as well in the cloud is we just keep it simple. You know, you run your own data centers, you can do whatever you want.
You can buy different servers, different hardware, different vendors, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When you move to the cloud, you learn discipline really straight away, and cost management, and obviously security, so we're always adopting, you know, keep it simple, go with the patterns of what we should be following, so that when we can onboard people as well, it's much more natural for them to slot into those ecosystems. And so we've got that bigger goal as well of being multi-cloud as well, and you can only do that if you're doing cloud-native patterns.
You scale up and scale down?
No more questions.
Good morning, George from Zeus. I just had a quick question on aftercare. So after a network of dealerships has been embedded, what is how labor intensive is the aftercare? And if I'm a salesperson sat in one of these dealerships, what if I've got something wrong going on with my machine, how is the contact? How do you keep customer satisfaction h igh?
That's probably best measurable by the support desk volumes, and i t's very clear once you go through the first hypercare stage of maybe two or three months of learning, change management, et cetera. It drops down to, from a ticket point of view, the majority of questions are knowledge and learning. So 70% historically has been, "How do I do this?" for a new employee, and you may get one, well, probably less than one call per person, per user, per month. So our support desk, whenever people visit, it's just like: How is this so small?
It's small because this product is stable, the user base finds it easy to operate, and frankly, we've done a model in terms of the countries that we've entered, where we can now predict where the spikes are as we implement, and then we can see where they fall into a standard call basis. It's less than one call per person per month once people have been on for a while.
And you'll be able to see, if you go in the breakout room, that experience, so, be able to see the system, which is pretty cool.
T he way Bill describes it, he says: "If you can read and use a mouse, then you can use the system," which is actually true. It's not, you don't need to know... If you use some of the old, older tech, the competitor systems, you do need to know a load of obscure things. You have cheat sheets, and some of the competitors down the side, there's none of that. You literally, it's point and shoot, so it's a huge difference.
Hi, I'm Damindi from Peel Hunt. I had a question on what would happen in an industry when there's such incumbency and some things start to trigger change. So if you take CDK hack as a point where people start to think about, you know what? It's very painful, but we need to start thinking about change of systems. One of the things in other vertical industries, you see is that the incumbents have power over change, so they will refuse to-
Yes
... transfer data for pilots. And I saw that, on, Asbury, Tekion pilot, the court actually has now ordered the transfer of data to CDK. To what extent has, for example, you know, lack of access to data being an impediment to doing pilots for you guys with the competition? And has the mood music somewhat changed, that you, people are more willing to, you know, entertain pilots? And the second thing related to that, in a technical due diligence against the larger incumbents in the U.S., like, what are the the top three things that you will showcase to the technical guys in their due diligence to differentiate yourselves?
On the first page, you're talking about Asbury suing CDK to open up the thing here, and it's not finalized, right? The judge lifted the injunction that had been filed to allow or force CDK to engage with Tekion. Steve talked about this earlier. That's not gonna prevent us from being able to engage with them. Lithia operates on CDK. They buy dealerships all the time. CDK and Reynolds and Reynolds have a they go back and forth quite a bit, so they actually play nice with each other. There's some other smaller, you know, DMS pure play onlys that exist out there that don't play nice, and there's workarounds. The-
... 42 stores we did with Jardine, we did not have a direct link into their incumbent system to be able to do it, and we have ways to work around that. Not get too deep because we don't wanna tell, you know, our workarounds and so to speak, but that's not a limiting factor in any way, shape, or form. When you go to the larger groups and stuff like that, Lithia, for example, has had to build multiple different layers to store data and do different things because it's not easily accessible through their current system. So, they're right now, they go from not counting anything international, but from Hawaii, Alaska, all the way through the continent, they're on 13 different boxes, basically 13 different server farms with their incumbent DMS provider.
None of those 13 communicate with each other. So a lot of these companies are having to build, I won't tell you what I nicknamed it, but they have to build a separate platform to aggregate the data out of these 13 different server farms, 13 different boxes, into a single actionable, form. It, it's so bad that, if you're on one box in, say, Oregon, and a different box in, California, and you want to move a car back and forth, you can't do it inherently through the system. You have to do it manually, like if it was going into a non-Lithia dealer. So they've built big data warehouses, basically, to store all this stuff. So we have access to that. In the Lithia example, most of the large aggregators have built something similar to that.
If you're outside of that, there's different ways that we can work around it. You know, some of the incumbents have been sued for all kinds of things: price fixing, monopolistic things, the not letting data go, and stuff like that. And those are all just defensive measures to buy time. As far as our product and comparing against, you know, the incumbents, first off, it's just look at the examples you've just gave. CDK is literally suing one of the largest consolidators not to let them have access to their own data. That's not a hard sell, okay? That's not a hard conversation to have.
Being down for twenty-one days because of a hack and not having any type of a backup system, these are easy conversations to have to get into there. Now, you have to show that you can function, you can do what they need to do. You have to sit here and obviously sell the proposition, but the incumbents have not ingratiated themselves in any way, shape, or form. You know, initially, I know it sounds silly, but when they had that huge hack, they literally sent Starbucks gift cards to the dealers to give to customers. That was gonna be their solution, and their big give back was they weren't gonna charge them for June because the system didn't operate. Well, no shit.
You couldn't access it, you couldn't do anything, and you're not gonna charge? A nd some of this, and I talked about it a little bit. This is one of those inflection points that, you know, the door's been kicked open. They don't have an easy fix for the data breach or from it happening again. They can't do the things that we currently do. They could, but it would cost them tens of millions of dollars, an exorbitant amount of time, or hundreds of millions of dollars to go buy something or somebody else out to be able to facilitate that, and there's no additional revenue or growth stream. They've already maxed out what they can charge.
I f you look at the pricing model in the U.S. on those incumbents, they charge an arm and a leg for the core system, but with those layered apps I was talking about, and if it's not one of theirs, they actually charge. They call it a third-party access fee, and it can be up to, you know, 25% to 30% of the total fee that you're doing. So if you're hooking on to Xtime, for example, which is an after-sales tool, very similar to our Tech+, and you want that to come into, you know, one of the incumbent stores, Xtime might have a price of $1,500 a month for that product. You know, the incumbent's gonna charge $800-$1,000 per month just to write the API to connect those two.
So we don't have to do that. And, you know, and it might be a couple of hundred bucks for Kieran to be able to write the right security protocols to be able to facilitate that. They've just gouged them. They've given them a substandard product. They've gouged them. They haven't ingratiated with them. It's really you know, I don't think it's gonna be, except for, it's a huge change agent, which in these groups to get 300 stores and throw away a system and start from scratch, but you know, I'm gonna digress. You know, we've gone into Lithia stores now in the U.S.
We haven't told them anything about our product, but just off the questions we're asking, and the disgust on Steve's face when they say something like just seems completely stupid compared to the way our system operates. They're literally asking us, "When, when can we put the system in?" They haven't even seen it. They don't even know what it is. So, you know, don't wanna overpromise it, but the opportunity right now, it, we're just in a unique place and a unique time to be able to take advantage of it.
J ust one quick thing to add to that, because as Kieran mentioned, our background is with responsibilities within a PLC. We come with security standards and the responsibilities that are already there for those larger groups. So when they hit us with their RFIs, requesting information on information security, ready to find surprises, because they're already dealing with small, innovative, providers for different niche systems, we tick all the boxes immediately. So it's generally pretty reassuring. The bigger groups just go: "Great, you've passed the test.
Okay, last one.
Stephen Hartley-Burr from Hartley-Burr Negotiation Consultants. I've just got a quick two questions, please, on the UK growth opportunity. Congratulations on the Marshall deal. Your poor brokers have each had to guess how many users that was and came up with quite different numbers. So if you could help a little bit with perhaps a user count, which is how many of us are modeling the company, and also the timing of when that might start and finish rolling out. As you're nearly done with Lithia UK, it's slightly surprising to see it starting to roll out, based on broker notes, later than straight away.
And the second question is, when you first announced the deal with Lithia, they then, and at their Q3 shortly afterwards, said that three top 10 U.K. dealerships had actively reached out to them, to you. Probably wasn't helpful disclosure, as it wasn't from you yourselves, but your slides here have Marshall ticked off a second member of the top 20 by the end of 2025. Is it fair to assume from that, that Lithia was a bit over their skis, and you don't expect to sign three of the top 10 or 20 anytime soon?
I can't comment on what Bryan DeBoer says. I consider him a friend. He's an industry icon. You know, sometimes, you know, like you said, people might get ahead of their skis. We're in conversations with several people on that list, on that top 20. We're gonna continue to have those conversations. And the opportunity there can exist even past '25 to get several of those. Once again, these are big decisions and big changes. It's not like you're going from a, you know, an iPhone to an Android phone or something like that, right? This is. You're literally gutting your systems, and you have to take a lot of it in faith.
What happened with Jardine and the market seeing a large group being able to sit here and go onto the system in real time without anything blowing up, and starting to see the efficiencies there is really helping us. A s we start to roll out Marshall, that same experience will happen, and that can open up more doors and more conversations. Back to the lead times and the rollout, you know, right now, and right after we sign that deal, we're already starting to do the behind-the-scenes work, look at their accounting stacks and stuff like that. They've grown over the last several years. They have multiple different systems in multiple different stores. We have to help them restructure all that and be able to get through that, and that's a service we provide.
You know, Oli's got nearly 20 years in automotive finance, and as an FD at Pendragon, and to be able to help support that, along with Steve, and then Kieran on the development side of that. So we have to get through those pieces. We have to get the systems that they currently have looked through and everything else. Once again, the limiting factor in this, almost every single time, is the speed and the pace that the customer wants to move at. We started in, you know, May with Lithia. We were ready to start in March. That's when they were ready to do, and they had good reasons for it. There wasn't. They weren't dragging their feet.
There was months where this month they had something else going on in their business, and they didn't do any installs, and we had to work around that. In the UK, you've got March and September, and you'd be an idiot if you tried to sit here and go change a system, you know, in March and September, for example. So we're not gonna be calling out time frames today when it comes to Marshall. As we get deeper into it, you know, that might change. You know, their existing employee count, and even that's sometimes a little bit nebulous, is between 4,000-5,000 people, is what they currently have, but they've got so many iterations going through, they're not sure which goes to this.
Traditionally, 80% of the people in a dealership are utilizing our system. But that's just for the core licensing system, that doesn't count, you know, are they getting the doc solution? Are they using our CRM? Are they using our after-sales tool? Are they using those different pieces? And obviously, that can change, you know, the revenue pieces and the such. So I'm not gonna give Andy, you know, all the numbers there, so he can build a better model. He actually did it right for once, so don't, you know, he was all proud of himself, so, you know, I don't wanna take that away from him.
Black Swan moment.
Everybody, thank you very much. Oli and I, and the rest of the team, we'll be walking around if you have any more questions. We have the two breakout sessions. Please, I'm just telling you, if you see the product, it'll help. You don't have to spend a lot of time there, and we also have lunch available as well. And Kim, what were you pointing at?
There's also in these Chilly's bottles, there are water bottles for you guys to take with the amazing new-
Thank you
... branding of Pinewood AI, just so you don't forget it.
On the breakout sessions, so room one is sales journey, and room three, which is down the corridor and on the left, that's the after-sales or service journey, and as Bill said, we certainly recommend you have a look at one, if not both of those.
Perfect.
Thank you for coming.
Thank you, everybody.
Thank you.