Hello, and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you joined the AI and Technology Conference. Our next presentation is from Pinewood AI . Please note, you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking "Book a Meeting" in the top toolbar. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Ollie Mann. He's the Chief Financial Officer of Pinewood Technologies Group , which trades on the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol PINWF and on the LSE under the symbol PINE. Welcome, Ollie.
Thank you, John. It's great to be here today and great to see so many people. What I'm going to do to start with is just give an overview of Pinewood, what we do, and our history briefly, and then we can get into some of the detail on the company. Pinewood's got an automotive retail ecosystem. If you go into any car dealership in the world, they'll have one of these systems. Most of these systems are called dealer management systems or DMS. Pinewood's a bit different to that. Pinewood's got not only the DMS, but typically a dealership will have 10 or 15 add-on products. Pinewood covers all of that. It's a big differentiator to our competitors. Just a brief overview of Pinewood's history.
Going back 25 years or so, Pinewood was bought by a group called Pendragon, which at the time I joined back in 2005 was the biggest group in the U.K. It had about 400 dealerships, and Pinewood was a division of Pendragon. For a long time, Pendragon was a customer of Pinewood, along with a number of other U.K. and international customers. Two years ago, Lithia bought 150 dealers at the time that Pendragon had. That was a big moment for the group. From that moment, from January 2024, Pinewood's been run as a standalone software company. That's really been huge for us. It's unlocked the market. Previously, when we were trading as Pendragon, our main competitors in the U.K. didn't really want to consider putting the system in, and that's completely changed now. I'll take you through in a minute.
We've signed a couple of the big groups in the U.K. Marshall and Lookers, in the last 12 to 18 months. Another big thing that's happened this year, there's been a lot of things going on for us, but in March, we bought Seez , the AI automotive company, which is one of the market leaders. Now, a lot of our competitors, pretty much all of them have AI capability, but we're the only one now where it's completely embedded in our system. I'll take you through that in a bit on how that differentiates us from our competitors. Just a few stats off this page. The big thing for us is that we've got really low customer churn. Less than 2% is huge for us. It's a really sticky system. Customers like it, and they don't want to change it.
Less than 2% is really key for us. Another big key metric for us is our recurring revenue streams. Typically, around 85%- 90% of our revenue is recurring. The non-recurring piece is if we have a new customer and they do some implementation work or there's some transactional costs, like where we have video enhancement, sound enhancement for customers. The majority of it's recurring, which again gives us really good visibility going forward on our financials. Here's just a few key points from Pinewood in terms of what sets us out from the competitors. A big thing for us is being 100% cloud hosted. Most of our competitors are either on-prem hosted or self-hosted. Being 100% cloud hosted from a functionality point of view, that's huge, but also from a security point of view. We're Microsoft hosted.
We are looking at being dual hosted in the future, so potentially with AWS as well. That just really does set us apart. We have long-standing customer relationships. We now have five of the top 20 groups in the U.K. It's worth pointing out we're not just a U.K. group. We're also in 35 other countries now following the Seez acquisition. Shortly, it's going to the U.S. with Lithia, which I'll take you through in a minute. The key thing for us is, as I said, most of our other systems out there will need 10 to 15 bolt-on systems to do what a dealership needs to do. We don't need that at all. We have one version of the truth.
The key thing for that is it means that the people working in the dealerships, and if you break it up into vehicle sales, the sales executives, they don't have to deal with four or five different systems, and likewise the technicians. If you've got a technician being charged out at several hundred dollars an hour, if they have to navigate between four or five different systems, it doesn't sound like much, but if you add that up, a few minutes an hour makes a big difference. For us, our USP is we can help increase efficiencies, but also increase productivity in the dealerships we operate in. This just gives you an overview of our global reach now. You can see on the left, we go all the way from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, all the way down to Australia and New Zealand. We've truly got a global reach.
This is a combination of our legacy customers and also the Seez customers. Seez is the AI company that we partnered with and bought back in March. We've really got a global reach here. Look for us, nowhere is off-limit. I think that's the key thing to say here. A really big attractive market is the U.S., which we're just moving into, but you can see we're not present in South America or large parts of Africa, large parts of Asia. What we're looking at is to get into every single part of every continent in the world. The key thing with our system is the system is the same system in the U.S. as in Canada, as in Australia. There's not multiple versions of the same system. That's one of the reasons for us we managed to maintain our system with actually a relatively low number of developers.
We've got a couple of hundred developers and product team. If you compare that to some others who run into the thousands, that's a real differentiator for us. This just sets out for North America. The deal we did with Lithia back in January 2024, they agreed to put our system into all of their U.K. dealers and all of their U.S. dealers. The U.S. is the biggest market in the world by far. We just break it down here into different segments, but you can see the first five bars there, the auto dealers. There's around 48,000 in total. Around 20,000 of those are franchise dealers, so new car dealers effectively, and there's around 28,000 independent dealers. All of those are addressable and potential customers for us. Then you've got that non-auto bar there, the 31,000.
That is primarily commercials, RVs, power sports, boats, and our system's being used today in all of those areas. All of this market is addressable. With a $9.3 billion total addressable market, that's a lot to go after for us. These are just some of the key highlights we've got from the first half of the year. We had our half-form results out in September, back end of September. Like I said, acquiring Seez has been huge for us. We acquired it as a standalone company in its own revenue streams. More than happy with that. It's great. It's got a reach all around the world. Really, the real reason we bought Seez is to partner with them and embed the Seez AI technology onto the Pinewood Data Stack.
The hundreds of millions of transactions that we have and embedding that Seez technology on top of it has already been huge for us, and it sets us out apart from everyone else. Everyone's got an AI offering. Typically, it's layered on top or API. It's pretty clunky. You can't get into every single transaction. The key thing with Seez is that we can get into every single part of the system. When we did the Lithia deal back last year, when we sold the dealerships to Lithia, we set up a JV or joint venture with them. It was pretty much 50/50 split, 51/ 49. That was for structural reasons, the way the deal was structured. We recently bought Lithia out of that, which made a big difference to unlocking the U.S. market. Lithia owning that 51% was a blocker for us in terms of addressing other U.S.
customers and Canadian and Mexican customers. That's gone away now. Alongside that, we also signed a deal with Lithia to roll out across the North American side. We've called out there that ultimately, by the time the rollout finishes in 2028, that will bring in $60 million of revenue. For reference, this year will be at low 40s in pounds, probably high 50s in terms of dollars, millions revenue. It's going to double our revenue by the time those Lithia stores are on. At the moment, we're piloting right now. That started this week in a couple of Lithia stores in the U.S., and we'll be beginning that full rollout into those Lithia stores in the first half of next year. Again, just a few numbers for you. I won't go through all of these.
I know not everyone likes the numbers, but we've tried to make it by its size and can pick out the key ones. Like I said, the key thing is that recurring revenue. Most of our revenue we've got is coming back in, so we can see what's coming. Just under 86% there. That customer churn, which is pretty much zero. For us, that's great. We take a lot of pride in looking after our customers, making sure they're happy, evolving the system. A lot of it is we evolve it as we think, but then we take the customer feedback on board, and that really helps to keep that customer churn at a really low level. In that bottom right box there, our margins. Historically, our margins have run at mid-40s. Our EBITDA margin, just over 40% for this half. That was part of the Seez acquisition.
Seez are around break even at the moment. They're a bit moving swiftly into profitability in the second half of this year going forward. Longer term, we see that margin being around mid-40s. Back in October 2024, we had a capital markets day. Some of you may have seen that. If you haven't, if you look on our investor relations part of our website, it's laid out there. There's actually a video of Bill and myself laying out the strategy. There's also a slide deck you can go through. These are the four key pillars that we laid out back at that CMD. The U.K. and Ireland, we said, "Look, we want to sign two big top 20 groups," which we've done. We've signed Lookers and Marshall . We started the Lookers rollout back in July this year. That's going really well. Marshall is starting in Q1 next year.
Again, it's great to have two groups that size. We're not stopping there. We're talking to a lot of other potential customers in the U.K. and Ireland. Once Lookers and Marshall are on, we'll probably have around 40% market share. We want to keep going there and see where we can get to in terms of that market share. Our international markets, we're in 36 countries now. What we've done here is say we've targeted the main areas. We've got Japan there. We've signed a big contract with Volkswagen and Porsche. In Scandinavia, historically, we've got really good customers there. We're looking to add to that, Dutch, which is Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. We're talking to a number of potential customers there. We've bought out our South African reseller. South Africa is a really important market to us.
Buying out the reseller, we had a number of legacy agreements where we'd have a local reseller, and broadly, they'd take half the revenue. We'd take half, and they'd deal with the customers locally. We're going through a process of buying those out so we can grow those aggressively and take control there. The third pillar is a really important one for us, products and vertical sales. Historically, for Pinewood, if you go back five or six years, it was fairly limited what our products and vertical sales were. We've really ramped that up the last two or three years, both from a number of products we've developed in-house. Data and analytics is a real key one for us. We can sell to customers. There's embedded reporting. There's a lot of reporting out there in the U.S., particularly where it's joined onto the DMS.
It's not actually part of the system. You get timing delays. There's issues with data quality and accuracy. All of that goes away with our embedded data and analytics reporting. The really key one here is Seez, the AI capability that we've brought. A lot of people think AI is just chatbots. It's really not, and it's moved on hugely from even where it was six or nine months ago. The new products out there, Sales AI, Service AI, they mean that your customers, you can really make a big difference for your customers and the people in the dealership. For example, on sales, our Sales AI bot will deal with all of your customer inquiries. If you've got a sales exec today that has to come in at 8:00 A.M. and go through all of the inquiries that come in overnight, our bots will do that.
They'll get back to the customer immediately. Most people, me included, would probably look at a car at 9:00 P.M. These bots will have a conversation with you. If you want to sell your car, if you want to do trade in parts, exchange in the evening, finance your car, all of that you can do. That's been huge for us, and it continued to be a key part of our strategy going forward. The last and possibly biggest or most important pillar here is North America. The North American market, as we've seen, is huge, that $9.3 billion market. Buying out Lithia out of their share of the JV has opened that up for us and signing that contract with them, the $60 million contract. We do also have a contract with Global Auto Holdings, which we signed back in February this year.
There's 18 dealers there that have been signed up, and we're talking to a number of potential customers in that U.S. market as we speak. Also, on top of that, we can go to market with the Pinewood ecosystem. With the Seez chatbots, that's really a great route into the market. As we say here, the Seez chatbots are currently being launched into the Lithia stores as we speak. A typical lead time to get the Pinewood system in would be three to six months. It can be quicker. We can do it in a few weeks if customers need it. With the AI products, this can be done in a day or two. It's all done remotely. That's a really key thing for us and a real key route into that North American market. It's not just the DMS market we're addressing.
It's also all those add-on products, but also the AI functionality, which we can get into really quickly and aggressively. Talking about Seez, we've had a really positive start. We've been together six or seven months now. As a standalone business, the revenue generation has been great. Moved into break even, which is ahead of expectations. The key thing here is the integration work. We're probably a third or a half of the way through the journey with that, but we're ahead of where we thought we'd be at this point. It just means that for potential customers, Seez customers, they don't have to be on the Pinewood system. They can be on one of our competitors, whether it's CDK, Reynolds and Reynolds, Dealertrack in the U.S., and they can have the AI capability.
What we're showing to customers is if you have the Pinewood system as well, it gives you that extra level of functionality. We think this is going to be a real key selling point for us going forward. In terms of the U.K., we've talked about Lookers, the Lookers implementation. Lookers is one of the top five groups in the U.K., really prestigious, big dealerships. We've had a really good start to that. Great working between the teams. It couldn't be going any better. Lithia U.K., when we did the deal with Lithia back in January 2024, there were around 42 of their stores that weren't on the system in the U.K. We did that between May and November last year, really successful. The highlight of that was their Audi franchise. They had 14 dealers that we put on over one weekend.
Almost unheard of in terms of other systems being changed, but we did 14 dealerships in one weekend. It just gives an idea of the potential for the size and scale of what we can do. Last but certainly not least, Marshall . Again, a very big group, probably similar size to Lookers, one of the bigger groups in the U.K., certainly top 10 on the verge of top five. We're ready to go with those guys in quarter one next year. Really excited, really good relationship with them, and looking forward to doing that in quarter one next year. In terms of the U.S. market, we've covered some of these, but I think the key part here is the Lithia deal is just the first step here. Lithia, we've got 300 dealers. There's 20,000 franchise dealers in the U.S. and Canada.
Lithia is just, even though it's the biggest group, biggest worldwide group, it's only 1.5% of the U.S. market. There's huge potential there. We get asked all the time, "What's your aim? Is it 10%, 20%?" Look, we're going to go as big as we can. If we can get to a 20% share in the U.S. market, that's great. Lithia is the springboard, but we're not going to wait until Lithia is done. We're talking to other customers as we speak, and we want to get that order bank built up and get those U.S. implementations going as soon as we can. Like I said, the Lithia rollout will start in the first half of next year, and the current timeline is that will run until 2028. As always, that's at the customer's request, not ours.
If customers, including Lithia or anyone else, say, "Look, we want to go quicker," within reason, we can go as quick as customers want. We're in a great place there. As it says on the last bullet there, we're in a really good position to grow our share of the North American market. That's not only the DMS legacy system market there, but also the AI market where we're making big strides already, and our AI chat Sees products are making big strides. The pilot that we're doing is in great shape. We actually started this week. Alongside that, we've been out there recruiting a team. We've got a really strong team in the U.S. already.
In terms of our global locations, we've got London, Birmingham in the U.K., Dubai now, South Africa, and now most recently in Florida, Fort Lauderdale, which is where the majority of our team are based. Got a really strong Ops Director, a Head of Training and Implementation, two great hires that are going to set us in really good stead. Actually, the really important part of the team is the people that are going to be on the ground in the dealerships. We've got eight to ten really strong people already who are going to be going into the stores, the first couple of stores we've got there, and rolling the system out. They're going to be supported by our U.K. team, but ultimately, we want this to be a U.S. team on a standalone basis.
As we move into next year with the Lithia stores, that will be a U.S.-only team, and that will go as we start to roll out across Lithia. Just talking about some of our other markets, Japan has been a really interesting one for us. We signed a deal with Porsche back in September last year. We more recently signed a deal with Volkswagen. Really, really big deals there. It's a really interesting market, and it's a springboard really to get into the rest of Asia, and not only the Japanese market, but the rest of Asia. We're also talking to a number of other European customers, particularly in Central Europe. As I said in the past, we've had very strong links with the Nordics, so Scandinavia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark. We're actually looking at moving more into Central Europe as well.
Those countries, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, where there's a number of opportunities there. A lot of the dealerships there are on systems that are coming to end of life. We're being approached by them to say, "Would you be interested in pitching here?" Of course, we would. We're talking to a number of customers there. Just the last couple there, South Africa, following that reseller buyout. The really key thing there is the team we've got there. It's a great team down there. We're looking at moving some of our resource down there. We've moved some of our contact center down there. Great, great team. Finally, in the Middle East, we had a reseller there too. We've bought them out recently. It just opens up the market for us and means that we've got an opportunity to grow our market share there. Thank you for letting me take you through that.
That's been great. What I'm going to do now is actually run through some of the questions we've got. It's great to see we've had some questions come in. I'll start to run through those. I've got one here saying, "Why should potential customers choose Pinewood?" As I said, it's a sticky product. You have to convince customers. It's not an easy decision. The big thing for us is those operational efficiencies and gains in productivity we can bring to car dealers is huge. As an example, in the U.K., when we were with Pendragon, as was back in 2021, because of the Pinewood system, we were able to centralize finance. We had three to four dealership accountants. At the time, we had around 160 stores, almost 500 people. We actually took 200 people out as we centralized that finance team.
It's not just about headcount and cost reduction, which helps. It saved a few million pounds, which is great, but it actually brings a lot of control. Having all of the financials done in one central service center means that you can have everything in one place. There's a huge amount of control as well as big cost savings there. As well as that, the really interesting bit for dealerships is the productivity piece. I talked about technicians. If you can save a few minutes an hour for a technician being charged out at, like I said, several hundred pounds, that makes a huge difference to productivity and how much money a dealership can make. Likewise, on sales, if you can take away some of the admin burden that sales execs have, a lot of it is dealing with customer inquiries, invoicing.
If we can take that away, which we've shown time and time again, and if you can take out one, two people and maybe reinvest in another part of the business, that is a key selling point for us. We can demonstrate that from what we've done for some of our big customers already. Next one we've got here. How long does it take for dealers to change their system? It varies. A typical, a big group, the ones I've talked about, Marshall , Lookers, probably six to nine months, 12 months at a stretch. That's from first conversation with the CEO or owner to actually the first dealership going live. Normal would probably be six months.
Occasionally, we have a group that gets bought out and they want to put the Pinewood system in quickly because their other dealers have Pinewood and they say, "Get the system in as quickly as you can." It can be done in a few weeks, but typically it would be a few months. On the flip side to that, with the AI capability we talked about, that's a couple of days, a day or two. Whether it's the AI chat, which is otherwise known as AI chatbots, or our Sales AI, Service AI, that's a day or two. That really is a quick implementation. That's huge for us. We've got another question here. Do you expect to structure additional relationships similar to Porsche Japan? If so, in which geographies? As I said, certainly there's nowhere off-limits for us. The key thing for us is size and scale.
We'd look at everything. If someone came to us with two or three dealers in an obscure part of the world, would we be interested on the face of it? Probably not initially. If it's a big market, we talked about Germany, potentially big markets in South America, we're certainly interested, but nowhere is off-limits. A key thing to call out is a lot of these overseas markets that we're in is through our really strong relationships with the OEMs, the manufacturers. In a lot of cases in Asia and outreaches of Europe, the OEMs have come to us and said, "Look, can you put the system in these dealerships?" They can actually mandate what system goes into the dealers, which isn't the case in the U.S. or the U.K.
A lot of our relationships with those premium OEMs are really strong, particularly the likes of Porsche, VW, Audi, Mercedes, a lot of those premium OEMs. We've got another one here, similar to what we've had before. How do you differentiate your platform from competitors? I think just to add a little bit more color to that, I think from a tech stack point of view, we're pretty different. The only competitor that's got a similar tech stack to us is Tekion. They're making great strides in the U.S. market. I would say the key difference between us and Tekion is we have that 20 years experience being part of an auto retail group in Pendragon. That's the reason we've got one version of the system with a couple of hundred developers.
If we need more at some point in the future, we can certainly add to that easily, but we don't feel that we need to do that, and we can grow at the pace we need to do with that size. Techion, a great company. They've been going for nine or 10 years now, probably at a slightly different point in the journey there in terms of system evolution. What else have we got here? Let's see. How many stores can you implement at once? Great question. I think the most we've done in a weekend is 14. What our internal aggressive plans are, we're saying, "Look, with the U.S. market, if we can put on 400 dealers a year, if we can do that for 10 years and get 4,000 dealers, that's a 20% market share." 400 dealers would be a big, big ask, and that's just over 30 dealers a month. That's certainly doable based on the fact that we've done 14 in one weekend. We think that's the kind of thing we're looking at. If we can get to the point of putting 40 a month on, so 450, 500 a year, that's what we're setting the team up for in the U.S. We certainly don't want to be in a position where we've got customers asking, we have to push them back. We want a position where we can get the customers in as quickly as possible in the best and most efficient way.
Typically, just to give a bit more color to that, the typical implementation, you'd have three or four people from our team on site. Some of our competitors do this remotely. We always like to have people on site. What would normally happen is probably five or six weeks before the system changeover, there'd be an e-learning process to go through. Everyone on site, whether it's the General Manager, the Sales Leader, the Service Leader, the Sales Executives, the Technicians, they'll all have some e-learning to do. It's all bite-sized chunks. It's three to five-minute bite-sized chunks, kind of YouTube-type clips. There's no half hour, 45-minute tutorials to do. That would go five or six weeks from the system changeover. What we don't want to do is push that out too far, because if you go out two, three months, then people forget what they're learning.
I think with the best will in the world, that's too long. Likewise, if it's a week before, then that's probably not enough time. Five or six weeks before we'll start the e-learning, and then a week to 10 days before the system changeover, we'll get our team out on site. More and more now, there'll be two to three. We're utilizing AI to help the teams learn. Our system now, there's an internal AI bot. If you need to ask it how to do things like, "How do I invoice a car? How do I sell a car? How do I book a job on service? How do I do an RO?" it will actually tell you how to do that. From having three or four people on site, we're moving more to having a couple of people on site because of that functionality we've got.
Those people will be there for two to three weeks, a week to 10 days before the system change, and typically a week afterwards. If there are any questions, and even if you can ask the AI bot, we like to always have someone there, just because sometimes it's always good to have that reassurance for our customers. Let's see, what else have we got? The market was very sticky for a long time. Is there something that's changed to enable you and that competitor in the U.S. to come out and take share? Look, I think there's the incumbents there, and everyone knows who they are. You've got CDK, Reynolds and Reynolds, Dealertrack. Not being cloud-based makes it tough to upgrade the systems. I think what we've come out with and Tekion, as I said, is something different. It's having one ecosystem. It's a one-stop shop.
A typical dealership in the U.S. or Canada has to have the DMS plus the service lane tool, plus the AI, everything separately. The fact that we can offer everything in one place is huge. From a cost point of view, that's one consideration, but that's not the big thing. The big thing for us is that efficiency piece and the dealer experience. Lithia have been incredibly supportive of us, but they're not on their own in terms of wanting the demand for change. We think having a choice there is huge. I think certainly when Lithia were looking to buy us, the fact that we had Pinewood was key.
Looking at buying the whole group, which they did at one point, having Pinewood was absolutely key because not just them, but a lot of other groups are looking at how they can improve that experience, not just for their customers, but for their employees in store. We've got a good one here. Hi, can you talk about the recent delay with Marshall Group contract implementation? How confident are you to sticking to that timeline? We've said we always work at the customer speed. We can't overshare too much about Marshall , but they had a number of internal projects going on that we said to them. They said they'd like us to align to those. We agreed to that. The head of the Constellation Group has come out and said she's happy with that timeline. We certainly are. We're confident of sticking to that timeline.
As with all of these customers, Marshall included and Lithia, Lookers, they've all got finite end dates on their existing contracts, whether it's with CDK in the U.S. or Keyloop in the U.K. Ultimately, that's a good thing for us because it means that you don't want to be going until the last day before that contract runs out. Typically, you want three to six months between having the last Pinewood into the last dealership and then your CDK or Keyloop contract ending. Let's see here. Final question. I think we're almost out of time. Really good question again. What is the competitive environment for your platform? Do you have a global competitor? Actually, the market is really fragmented. We've talked about the U.S. a lot. In the U.S., you've got CDK, Reynolds and Reynolds, Dealertrack, Tekion. Those are the big players there.
In terms of the rest of the world, it's incredibly fragmented. Across Europe, you've talked about Keyloop a bit there in a lot of countries, but in most countries around the world, there's very few competitors with over a 15%- 20% market share. It's incredibly fragmented, which makes it really open for us to go in there. There's very few monopolies out there. That's why I've said nowhere is off-limits, whether it's parts of Africa, South America, Asia, anywhere. We want to look at anywhere we can get into all around the world. Thank you very much, everyone. Really appreciate the time. It's been great doing this. Any follow-up questions, please message me. It's on our contact details or on our website. If you haven't seen it, I'd certainly recommend looking at our Capital Markets Day presentation from last year.
It gives you a great overview of our strategy and also our more recent results from September this year. Thank you very much, everyone.