Welcome everybody to this investor presentation. Welcome. Just apologies right away if my voice is a bit rusty, it's because of these guys. All Norwegians would know why. The Nordic team, Bodø/Glimt, pride of Bodø. Just of course very, very pleased about that. Apologies again if the voice is a bit broken today. We have a very insightful, we hope, this exciting agenda today. With me to go through this agenda, I have, or we have, Roy Horgan. Roy is the CMO but also the MD of UK and Ireland for Vusion. I know that many of you are very excited about and curious about the partnership we have with Vusion.
We will be talking more about that then, and Vusion of course, being represented with Roy will talk more about exactly Vusion itself. We'll talk today about sort of overall market, the partnership, e-commerce, and our strategy, and then we'll leave time in the end for Q&A. We try to wrap everything around 1.5 hours. Also for the Q&A session, we have Marius Drefvelin, our CFO, here in the front with a tie as a proper CFO. I want to start with not a history lesson, but just a little bit, you know, what we've heard in the market and how we are trying to move ahead, right?
If we look back to 2020-ish, you know, StrongPoint was a company that had not only retail technology, but also a cash security business and a label production business. All very different kind of businesses than retail technology. We took the decision back then to be a pure retail technology company. I think we were both patient, but also we should say lucky with some of the timing. We went out to Russia. That was not because of our geopolitical foresight. There was a little bit of luck in that. We managed to divest both the cash security business, which had a very big business in Russia, and also the labels business at an appropriate point in time, which then enabled us to also move into new markets.
We both were and are still in the business of selling hardware, but with attached service contracts, which are very important for us. As you would have seen more and more so, we're more and more trying to sell more software solutions as well. Obviously, software solutions which also have a recurring component in it. We were super proud and are still very proud of serving all the Scandinavian top retailers. With expansion into U.K., Ireland and more so also into Spain, we're starting to serve more and more of these major European grocery retailers as well.
One of the points that we met, at least I met when I was back in 2020 speaking with investors was, well, isn't it a bit risky to just be with principal three customers in Norway and back then four, now three customers in Sweden and two in Finland and, you know, three, four in the Baltics? I mean, it was felt as a risk. Well, certainly now we have expanded the footprint to cover not only these companies, but also grocery retailers in other markets. It's a more of a broad product portfolio we got now with customers. Lastly, we should also talk more about today is we were super fortunate and skillful, I should say, looking at Jørgen, to do the acquisition of CUB back in 2018. That proved to be a absolutely fantastic company.
It was with great humbleness that we sort of realized that this is a jewel that we have to take care of, make it from an on-premise solution to a cloud-based solution, put in the necessary features and functionalities to also be successful internationally, and we've barely started on that journey, but that's been an absolutely amazing journey. So just for all of you, many old investors, a little bit of history in that respect. Now, what's the market like today? I think, whoops, there are three mega trends, if you want, in the grocery space that affects grocery retail. The first is the continued growth of discounters.
You know, for many, many years, hard discounters was not even considered part of grocery business in the U.K., not until ALDI was all of a sudden number five in the market, number four in the market. Whereas these are absolutely amazing companies, and in particular in Norway with soft discounters dominating the market, this is first of all, a very important customer base for a company like StrongPoint. There's also a great push to the traditional supermarkets to do the differentiation versus hard discounters and all the soft discounters. The solution very often is how can you use technology to enhance the customer experience and reduce costs accordingly. The second bit is the growth of e-commerce.
Although most of you at least here in the room are Norwegians and the e-commerce space within grocery is pretty limited, that's not the case in most other parts of the world. E-commerce is the fastest-growing segment within grocery, retail full stop. In the U.S. alone, and I have to double-check the figures, but in the U.S. alone, the growth, at the end of last year was more than 30%. More than 30% growth in e-commerce for groceries in a market which is already very, very penetrated. I like to say this is like the Internet. It's not gonna go away. It's just gonna grow, and we're very fortunate to have solutions that fits exactly this market. The last bit is the digitization of stores.
Certainly with the advent and growth of AI, the question is, you know, how can we utilize all the data points in a store to make the store more efficient? The truth of the matter is, in today's world, the most or the biggest problem for most grocery retailers is out of stock. We have solutions to handle that. The store digitization is certainly also a mega trend that's affecting us, and again, super proud to have Vusion here to also share their experiences with both Walmart and Carrefour. Without further ado, let me do a little bit of introduction of Vusion and StrongPoint's entry into the partnership with Vusion. With Vusion, we have a, what we call a multifaceted partnership. And it's multifaceted in the sense that first and foremost, we are a value-added reseller.
In nine countries where we are present, we have a reseller agreement to sell the entire portfolio of Vusion throughout the market. The second bit of the partnership is what's called ISV, so independent software vendor. Essentially what it means is that Vusion has had the belief that in-store picking is the future, and we've seen the benefits of Vusion solutions and how Vusion can be connected with StrongPoint's order picking solution to enhance the profitability of both the picking solution as well as other infrastructure in-store. We're working together both to promote each other, but also together on a roadmap, and we'll be sharing some of the bits in what that roadmap looks like, so you can get a bit of sense of what it's actually all about.
Now, without mentioning our other partner, I mean, it's no secret that we had a fantastic partnership for many, many years with another company providing electronic shelf labels. When we took the initiative to break that partnership and go with Vusion, there were certainly many questions. If we try to sort of summarize why did we change to Vusion, there's really three reasons for that. Number one, it's not only about ESLs or electronic shelf labels. Electronic shelf labels is one part of the entire suite of solutions that Vusion offers, but we're going from a electronic shelf labels that we've been using in Norway to see around stores to a digitization of stores. We'll talk more about some of these solutions, but I'll just mention, for instance, shelf-edge cameras.
These are shelf-mounted cameras that are able to see, and I say see using both the camera but also with an AI layer to understand, is a product out of shelf? Not out of stock, but out of shelf, which is what matters for customers in a store. That is, as I said, tackling one of the biggest challenges of grocery retailers today, namely shelf outs. We are also with Vusion using their retail media platform. Retail media sounds a bit, a little bit difficult to get a grasp of, but let me give you two data points there. One is most of our advertising money today, unfortunately, I should say, goes across the ocean to the Alphabet and the Meta of the world. If you're in the store, there's actually a fantastic opportunity to monetize on the attention you have from consumers.
Bear in mind, even Norwegian consumers are on average 3.5x in a store per week. When the giants like Walmart report that 20% of their net profit comes from retail media, and that's a very growing business, it's worthwhile keeping an eye on what's happening there. There's a bunch of other things. I'll leave that to Roy. You know, we're moving from a ESL partnership to a partnership which includes ESLs but also so much more. Second thing is just de facto, a much broader footprint. We have been guilty as charged over many years in introducing electronic shelf labels to Norway and Sweden with a different provider than Vusion, but it was really just in those two countries.
The partnership with Vusion illustrates that we are able to also sell in all nine markets, and not just on paper in all nine markets, but de facto in all nine markets. The set that we have with Vusion is unique in that sense that we have, you know, great expectations about what we can achieve also outside Norway and Sweden, where the market is more characterized by replacements of electronic shelf labels rather than growth of electronic shelf labels. We should all bear in mind that, you know, whereas Norwegians and Swedes, we think that the entire market is already fully penetrated, but that's just in the Nordics. U.K. is just getting started. Spain hasn't even started. There's so much more market to grow with, and we hope to do it with Vusion.
Then the last bit is the e-commerce partnership we have. The term local e-commerce is actually a term that at least we picked up from Vusion, which talks about how do you leverage the biggest asset that a grocery retailer have or retailer have, namely the stores themselves. How do you leverage that into also an e-commerce fulfillment platform? Vusion was looking for that, to be honest, over many, many years, asking us to please change sides, to put it like that. Eventually we took that step, and we're just truly happy about the work together to get local e-commerce flying. I'll talk more about that in a second, but before that I'll give it to you, Roy, to talk more about the Vusion. Many here do not know that much about Vusion and secondly, about your views on the StrongPoint partnership.
Great. Thank you very much. Thanks. Yeah, my name is Roy Horgan, and I have two hats. One is from a group perspective, marketing and communications, but also from a market perspective, the U.K. and Ireland. That hopefully allows me to be qualified 'cause I know what happens on the ground and not in theory, which helps. Sorry. Yeah. The reality, the Vusion actually. I started a company in 2014 on data analytics, and at the time, Vusion had a company called bought, it's, it was SES-imagotag that bought a company called imagotag. They were an investor of mine. At that time, 2014, it was in the region of, you know, EUR 80 million.
Now we're at $1.5 billion. You can just see 30% annual growth year-on-year. There's been a couple of inflection points there. I think the onslaught of Wi-Fi in store changed everything, and embedded Wi-Fi, so embedded IoT. I think we don't see ourselves essentially as an ESL company. We see ourselves as an IoT and data business. That's what we see ourselves as, and it's proving to be true. We've had a couple of, I suppose, our key disruption in innovation was this technology called EdgeSense. This basically is a rail, and we've basically connected the rail to Bluetooth. We're going to Bluetooth, right?
We've... Typically, the technology embedded in these labels was a type of Wi-Fi, proprietary, sticky, but hard to interoperate with different devices. We rolled this technology, EdgeSense, out to Walmart, and we have fitted right now about 2,500 stores, and we'll have the rest of them done by the end of this year, into next year. That's just the start. Any analysts in the room, they think that the story with Walmart finishes when you stop fitting the stores. It's not true. It only starts because then we enable services like computer vision. I'll talk about Walmart in a second.
Also geolocation services like picking, fulfillments, task management and moving the stock in terms of, you know, geolocation of store. The biggest challenge actually retailers talk about in terms of their stores is they don't know what's in their stores. When you can tell them what's in their stores, when it's on their stores, and if you can improve the metrics, then you enable stuff like better picking rates, quicker picking rates, quicker baskets. It's interesting, and this is what we're starting to see. The total return on investment is massively improving because we're no longer just talking about replacing paper with digital paper. We've actually unlocking a whole range of different business cases, which has proven to be true.
Typically what we do when we start to talk to retailers, we have a project called value assessment, and we start to look at where we think their business case potential is. It's back to those basic things in terms of pricing and taking labor out of the store. Nobody's ever gonna pay you for adding cost to their business. It's about taking costs out. We look at that, then we look at efficiencies. One of the joys of this partnership with StrongPoint and not only the fact that we work with StrongPoint on, you know, we're rolling out, and I have it in the next slide, a number of retailers at the moment.
In one particular retailer who was using their picking solution, StrongPoint's picking solution, overnight they accidentally turned on the pick by light and we saw a 20% uplift in the pick rates. Actually one of the largest compliments we got was there was a challenge with it. It went down overnight for one weekend and the retailer rang us and said, "We've a real problem because we've taken all the labor out of the store that we had, so we need it working," because it was giving them the efficiencies. They already saw the benefit of this.
When a retailer is ringing you for those problems, although you don't want them, then you know that they see value in the solution. So really it's a case of, it's back to what Jacob was saying in terms of the real end game here is, combining a number of technologies to give that confidence in terms of what's on the shelf, what's in the store, and also using other technologies like computer vision for closed loop attribution. What that means is you know it's on the shelf, you know where it is on the shelf, you know what's been picked in the store, and then you can unlock stuff like retail media.
That's where stuff like the cameras comes in because you give the retailer the confidence to present data back to their CPGs and their FMCG suppliers. The U.K., this is where StrongPoint have been invaluable to me in terms of the U.K. because we now have the Co-op, we're at a pace of 80 stores per week. StrongPoint are rolling this out with us, and it also, it's all ultimately, and again in terms of Asda and Morrisons are some of the brands that we're working with StrongPoint on, and others.
Ultimately where we see this as getting really interesting is when these are rolled out, then the real fun starts, because that's where we can really add value, and it's all about adding value. Not just in grocery, we see it in terms of a whole range of different applications in terms of DIY and home improvement, so on, forecourts. The reality here is it's all about operational efficiency and improving the profitability of the retailers and their colleagues in store. Yeah, this is an interesting one because, you know, Walmart surpassed Amazon in terms of their e-commerce last year, and you see their numbers growing in a market that is, you know, struggling somewhat, and their metrics are getting bigger and better.
Even last month, Walmart specifically called out Vusion as a core technology in terms of their e-commerce strategy and their in-store strategy because the colleagues in store have adopted it. They started to see the benefit of this because the difference between a technology to change prices and an infrastructure for picking is when it comes to picking, it has to work on time every time. You can't, you know. This was the real step change in terms of Bluetooth. It's because we had a technology designed for absolute scale at speed, and then that interconnectivity between the colleagues' devices. It's basically the efficiencies that they're seeing now to the point where they have turned it on with third-party pickers.
Now the store, from a secure layer, can deliver third-party pickers geolocation and routes in the store. Where we're ultimately going is even on the picking, if a picker can turn back on themselves because they know that the planogram is in real time, maybe we're starting to model now that we can save about 15% of the steps in store by just having real-time geolocation. In the pick routes, we make them dynamic, and this is where it can get even better. That's where, and then moving to agents and using that Bluetooth to connect to headsets and devices and glasses.
This is where again with StrongPoint and what I particularly loved StrongPoint's innovation is they're connecting our cameras to their picking app, so then the picker can see with confidence that the product is on the shelf or not on the shelf. Then they can, we can reroute them to where it actually is in that store or it's an non-pick. Ultimately, retailers like Walmart and now Carrefour are trying to get to a place where their metrics is about the perfect basket. You know, the more perfect baskets they deliver to their customers, the more competitive they are and the better they are in terms of their NPS and service and profitability in terms of savings.
Again, this was recently launched, and it's now part of their capital markets plan for 2030, in terms of how we ingrain a range of technologies to unlock the potential of the connected store. Ultimately, I think it has on so many levels, on a from a core technology perspective, from a partner in terms of helping us in terms of roll out our technology to stores, to which I'm most excited about because we've so much potential. It also is the reseller as well because it allows us to have more coverage and a partner that understands and knows and can explain the technology in the right way. I've been at this a while, and very few partnerships work quickly.
They're typically hard, and they take a lot of time and investment. I think this has been probably the easiest partnership that I've experienced. It's a combination of I think we have the same values, the same ethics, the same culture. We're technology-driven. We're problem-led. We don't point fingers. We work on solutions and together it's been really, you know, a valued partnership and yeah. I'm pleased to be here today, and thank you for your time. Thank you.
Thank you, Roy. Don't leave just yet, Roy. I mean, there's lots of things, right? If I were to sort of ask you to cut through everything.
Mm.
What are you most excited about when it comes to sort of retail technology and what's happening out in the space?
Honestly, what I'm most excited about is the potential. Well, we can see the potential of putting everything together. Well, like, you know, it's mobile phones were interesting to a point, but what the sea change was when you had geolocation in there, and then you unlocked huge potential because you couldn't have Uber or you couldn't have Deliveroo or you couldn't have any technology ultimately until you had geolocation.
Once you've unlocked that geolocation, suddenly there's a whole industry that pops up that you can enable, and then the coupling that with our capabilities in terms of agentic AI and agents, it's all I care about right now is our ability to reduce friction, and this reduces friction between the customer and the colleague and the colleague and ourselves. That's what I'm excited about because I only see upside here. In the next, you know, I only see potential for us, and I think we're in a great space.
Yeah.
We're in a great space.
There's obviously, as you said, right, lots of potential as a value-added reseller, but you also alluded to the fact that, you know, together with the joint capabilities we have in e-commerce, we could do magic.
Mm.
Hopefully.
Yeah.
Now, these aren't typical Norwegian and Swedish investors, and sitting in Norway looking at grocery e-commerce is kind of a non-event because.
Yeah
It's not really happening. With your sort of background, the areas you cover, what can you say to sort of investors? Because, like, the market here is not predominant in Norway as such. It's internationally. What's this to say about the Vusion and StrongPoint partnership in that respect?
Yeah. Well, look, in big population centers, like say for instance, the U.K. is an interesting one because they have big boxes, right? And they have, you know, it's this very small country with a massive population, and, you know, that's where you see huge potential in terms of e-commerce because you have the infrastructure, you have the population, you have the proximity. What you don't have is great execution, and you have clogged up roads, right? You have to be able to deliver in a very short period of time with confidence and use your existing infrastructure. If you look at other markets, like we're starting to see amazing things happening in, like, France and in Turkey, for instance. In a lot of emerging markets. The U.S. has been phenomenal.
You have a lot of regional grocers, as you know, in the U.S. that you know are dominant in their region. Again, it's just about reducing friction. That's it may not be in, like, I'm from Ireland, right? We have the same type of demographic and population as you have and it's quite dispersed. It doesn't work that well in Ireland, but in the U.K., France or Germany, it does.
Okay. Everything is positive.
Uh-huh.
What about challenges? One or two big challenges that sort of.
Yeah
... you see for-
I think that the largest challenge we have is that retailers in their own businesses think in silos. They're not connected. They talk about, you know, digital transformation. They talk about, you know, Look, these are big transformational projects, so this is where it's really challenging. It's because what you have to do is you have to bring the whole organization with you. That is a challenge. The way we kind of have worked on it is we work at, hopefully at a C level. You know, the CEO, him or her have to get it. If they do, then it can filter down.
Mm.
Then you have to go back up again, and it filters down. The reality is you have to sell. This is a strategic sell. It's a long sales cycle. They'll have an infrastructure there that they've had for years, like they've had in France or here in the Nordics.
Mm-hmm.
Didn't realize that either they've picked the wrong technology, so Carrefour obviously had no problem with their existing provider. What they had is a challenge because they couldn't fulfill their objective in terms of digital transformation. After three years of that contract, they decided to move to Vusion as a result. I think we'll see more of that. It is a case of it has to start at the very top.
Thank you so much, Roy. Roy will be here also afterwards. For, at least for those of you showing up in person, there will be-
Thank you.
more opportunities. Thank you so much, Roy.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Jack.
I will round it off. You basically touched upon some points when it comes to sort of the joint roadmap going forward, and I'll try to make these things more concrete so you can get a sort of a sense of what's coming. You mentioned the first one, Roy, which is the sort of shelf-verified order picking. I'll double-click on that in a second. We can also say that, you know, what we are already showcasing, or have showcased at, among others, NRF, the retail forum in New York, was also what's called the pick-to-tote optimization. Basically what it means is that you're picking the items on the shelf and putting it in the appropriate basket or tote, and when you're doing picking, you want to do several orders at the same time.
Eight, maybe nine or 10 orders at the same time. What our customers do today is they pick an item, they scan the item, and then they need to scan the bag, or most of them do scan the bag to make sure that you put it in the appropriate bag. You don't want to get it in the wrong order. Now, with Pick-to-Tote, the ESL, first of all, will help indicate with a flash what item to pick, and then the tote or the basket itself will also flash with the same kind of color. It's becoming a sort of very difficult to make any mistakes.
You can basically pick the item, put it exactly in that tote, and that might sound like a small thing, but that one second saved for every single SKU you put in a basket, it's hugely valuable for any grocery retailer. That's coming. EdgeSense geolocation, you said it, right? You know, the difficulty with electronic shelf labels is that they haven't been able to geolocate exactly where are items. Still, whereas we have the, and we can still say this, you know, the best and most efficient picking solution there is in the world. The biggest thief to efficiency is walking. Walking between the SKUs you're supposed to pick.
Now, with geolocation, we're able to take that geolocation and positioning of SKUs, principally because of EdgeSense, but take that geo-positioning, put today's data of what are the items to be picked on top of that, run a linear programming, and you have the most efficient way of going through the store to pick it. Hugely valuable to reduce the labors in store and increase efficiency. Much more. That's to come. I will first and foremost now just double-click on what does shelf-verified order picking mean. This is what a camera looks like, a shelf edge camera from Captana, which is part of Vusion. Basically, you're attaching it on the shelf, looking over to the other side of the shelf, being able to spot what are on the shelf.
When you do that, and you run with our order picking data, you're able to see what is not on shelf that is going to be picked. Imagine a picker going to pick an order or several orders, and you realize that this item here is supposed to be picked, but it's out of stock. I'm sorry, out of shelf. It's out of shelf. Then the system would automatically trigger a message. Well, is this item in stock? Because if this item is not on shelf but in stock, it's either gonna be on a top shelf or it'll be in the back room. You can actually refill the shelf, and you can fulfill the order to get a perfect order as you set away. If it's not, you can automatically send a substitution.
The last thing you want to do is send the valuable employee time or employees to a store, a shelf, which you know is out of that specific SKU. It's just a small example, but yet sort of so impactful when you look at how these technologies come together and create a much better business case than that one specific technology in itself. Okay, we'll leave it at that with Vusion now. Now, I do have to sort of cover a little bit more on grocery e-commerce. I wanna start with just the markets. If you've been following sort of the grocery e-commerce penetrations, they have been growing steadily, even in Norway, by the way. You know, they've been growing steadily, right?
U.K. in the last few years has been going from 10%-11% to now being closer to 14%. U.S., as I said, growing massive up to 15%. France going from 7%-8% a few years ago back to 10%. That kind of penetration is one of the most massive moves you see in the grocery retail sector. What is also very interesting to see is not only the growth, but also the how the fulfillment shifts. A few years back, the big discussion was, should I be leveraging the stores to do in-store picking, or should we be investing billions of NOK or USD into large automated fulfillment centers? The biggest advocate for the latter has been Ocado.
They were hugely successful in selling their customer fulfillment centers, or CFCs, to the likes of Kroger, Sobeys, Casino, Auchan, even ICA. Now we're seeing the backlash, right? Just at the end of last year, many of you would have seen that Kroger announced the shutdown of many of its CFCs. It's a massive write-off of the investment. Same with Sobeys in Canada. Even in the U.K., where Marks & Spencer have a partnership with Ocado, there's been, you know, huge disputes about having delivered upon the contract. What we're seeing now is going from the sort of large customer fulfillment facilities, which are large, they're capital-intensive, they're inflexible, and also inflexible when it comes to delivering the biggest growth within e-commerce of all, namely Q-commerce or quick commerce.
You're just simply not able to deliver an order in 15 or 30 minutes if the fulfillment center is far, far away. It has to be used in the stores. This really boils back into what we have believed in all the way along, namely the biggest asset of grocery retailers is the store. If you think about the noise, I should say, and excitement around these in, these CFCs and similar technologies, bear one thing in mind, that's all been coming from startups, right? It's never been an incumbent that have been doing that. There's a reason for that is that the stores are the most valuable asset, and you can utilize that store much, much better.
This is where we believe we are very well-positioned, one, with the in-store picking that we talked a lot about, but also when it comes to deliveries, grocery deliveries. Again, in Sweden, you know, more than 50% of all e-commerce orders are being picked up in stores with grocery lockers. It's a massive reduction in costs for the last mile delivery that we hope to see also in other markets. As I said, quick commerce, what we're experimenting with now is not only fulfilling quick commerce orders with our order picking solution, but also using quick commerce lockers. Quick commerce lockers that doesn't have to be temperature controlled because the orders by definition are quick. You're within the sort of temperature zones or time zones that is needed to fulfill the orders and deliver them in a safe manner.
There's also an added benefit to the solutions we're offering. Then lastly also, we are a proud partner of Utetorg. We're seeing that, well, first of all, we have installed the first three temperature zones, Utetorg with chilled, ambient, and frozen. With a sufficient high enough penetration, at least we believe that in certain markets and certain areas, you will see that you're using micro-fulfillment centers attached to stores to alleviate the picking in the store itself. We believe, at least, that we're very well set up to tackle and handle the e-commerce opportunities there are in the future. Okay. Now we're going to talk a little bit about markets. We are at StrongPoint in nine different markets, and we also have a product division that spans over many geographies delivering internal projects.
If you have been reading our quarterly reports over the years, you would probably have heard that, you know, our legacy markets, Norway, Sweden, and the three Baltic countries, they've been doing quite okay. We have a fantastic position, both in terms of the products we deliver and getting the scale to deliver profitability. Then we have the other markets. Now, I want to talk a little bit about that. The U.K. here, I mean, at the end of the last year, I mean, profit-wise or EBITDA-wise, I mean, certainly not at the level where we believe it has the potential to be. This is a big market. This is like ten times bigger than the Norwegian market with a great product market fit. That's kind of important.
Not only a big market, but the product market fit is so good, not only on the e-commerce sides and electronic shelf labels, but also when it comes to theft prevention or self-checkout. We'll talk more about that. That's why we're talking so much about the U.K. with this market we have big beliefs in after our acquisition of ALS back in a few years back. Ireland and Finland, we just have to be honest. I mean, these are markets that are, they're good markets, certainly not as big as the U.K. market, and are not delivering the kind of profitability we want. These markets have to grow or go if I'm being just very honest.
They don't have the benefit of that size of the U.K., but we certainly have at least the opportunity to build customer relations like we have in the Nordics. We have Spain. We've been in Spain for many, many years, principally with CashGuard. CashGuard is still alive and kicking in Spain, but despite having a great agreement with Alimerka, which is one of the regional grocery retailers in Spain, the general grocery retail market in Spain has not picked up on automating cash handling. As many of you are very well aware, we are developing a very unique closed Loop Cash Solution that we believe will be that trigger to make cash automation make sense also in Spain. It's also a big market with many other of our products with a potential. We have what we call product.
We just have to be honest that, you know, for many products that we have, we are superb in one or maybe two regions, but not across all nine countries or beyond. Right? So when we talk about how great we are with click and collect lockers, you know, we're absolutely great in Sweden, but we haven't seen that kind of penetration at least yet in other markets. That needs to happen to get sufficient volume on the investments with doing those in those solutions. If you look at self-checkout, you know, we're the market leader in the Baltics. If you want to do anything with self-checkout, you come to StrongPoint in the Baltics. But still, when you come to Norway and Sweden, despite the great customer relations we have, those are not our self-checkouts what you see out there.
When you're annoyed about the self-checkout experience, it's not because of StrongPoint. We're starting to get in there with our use of AI scales, but we're not nearly where we can be. The priority for the product is we need to get our products more into the other markets. I'll mention one more, and that's Vensafe. A very well-known market or product here in the Nordics, but it's not well-known elsewhere. That is despite, in particular in the U.K., theft being a huge issue, you know, beyond what you can believe in Norway. It's a huge issue with theft, and it's a huge issue of how do you actually in a safe and an efficient manner deliver tobacco or vape, which is a big thing in the U.K..
We have many proof of concepts, as you would know, in the U.K. that we believe could be the right way to tackle these challenges. We need to get volume on our own solutions. Lastly, I mean, even though we're successful, we could say, in Norway, Sweden, and the Baltics, I mean, there's no time to sort of relax. We need to continuously rejuvenate. I mean, even though we did a fantastic agreement just the other day with the NorgesGruppen on CashGuard, showing that cash automation is not disappearing anytime soon. I mean, nobody really believes that cash usage will grow massively. It just won't. We need to also get out in the market, that we are in the market with new solutions, both our own, but also third-party solutions that makes us stay relevant.
That is kind of key for us in these geographic markets. We updated also this slide that we shared earlier. You know, what does the market opportunity look like in a market where, you know, we're very well penetrated in the Nordics, extremely well. I mean, we serve everybody with one exception. But even if we do that, there's not all the solutions that we have in yet. Far from. We need to do a better job in getting across to the markets the solutions that we offer.
You know, you could argue that we're a bit slow sometimes, but you know, if you look at retail formats that have been an integral part of the Baltic way of replicating the experience that you have in the Baltics, I mean, that's something we also started with last year in both Norway, Sweden, and Spain and U.K. to come as part of building that customer intimacy. Of course, the big, big markets are Spain and U.K. Those are just tremendous markets. Even people in the grocery industry in Norway and Sweden might not have heard about half of the retailers, certainly in Spain, but maybe also in the U.K. These are big, big markets, and we have products which are right for these markets, and that's what we're trying to chase.
Now, if you look at the revenue base of StrongPoint, you can basically divide it in three buckets. You know, one is the recurring business that we all love, recurring business with service agreements, license agreements. We also do some rentals that, you know, are principally recurring revenue that serves us very well. We also have what we like to call repeat business. You know, a lot of the solutions we offer have some kind of hardware component. There is a wear and tear to those products. With customers being happy with, for instance, Vensafe solution, it's also very likely that you replace these every once in a while, or CashGuard every once in a while. We should also be aware that we have a big portion of new sales, and we need to have that growing our business.
You will also then, having been many of you investors for many years, see that, you know, the spikes between each quarter can be quite significant. They will continue to be. Let's not fool ourselves. We are still a project-based company to a large extent, working all the time to grow this bit. We want to grow the recurring bit. Okay, we're getting to the hour. I want to round up but two things. One is sort of StrongPoint's overall strategy and direction, and in the end, some conclusionary remarks before we get on to Q&A. When we look at StrongPoint, I try to sort of say, why is StrongPoint out in the world? What is StrongPoint's purpose? It can be boiled down to making grocery retailers more efficient and sustainable. That's what we do. Do we have customers outside grocery retail? Absolutely.
Those are great spillover effects. If you're able to serve the grocery retailers, we believe, with a level of professionalism and not least velocity of transactions, you can serve any other retailer. Focus is grocery retail, which is by far the largest market in terms of retail technology. Approximately 75% of all grocery retail tech is spent in grocery retail. We differentiate between three kind of strategic pillars to get there. One is what we call to make customer intimacy our differentiator. The difference between StrongPoint and many of the companies that might surface as a competitor is that we're not going there with one solution. It's kind of boring for a CEO to know that if you have one solution to sell, they kind of know what the agenda is. We're there to solve the issues of the grocery retailer.
Having a broad portfolio with own and third-party solutions offer us that kind of ability. The second one is within order picking, and I'm using a little bit of a un-Norwegian kind of word, to dominate. I truly believe we have the opportunity to dominate in-store picking with the solution that we have and with the partnerships that we're creating. Lastly, to drive efficiency. We can't only expect our customers to be efficient. We have to be efficient ourselves. The way we do that is with a lean, transparent structure and a very strong culture. I'll double-click on all these three in a second, so we can go a little bit in more detail on those. Looking ahead like, you know what is StrongPoint's vision, then, you know, we have a dual vision.
A dual vision that says, you know, we want to be the top recognized partner for any grocery retailer in the markets that we serve. In those nine markets, if you have any kind of opportunity or challenges, should say, that involves any kind of technology, the name that should pop up in your head is StrongPoint. We are there already in many markets, but we are not there at all in those nine markets yet. The second bit is for Order Picking to be the leading in-store fulfillment solution worldwide. Now, this is a little bit daunting to sort of use these words, so I'll try to explain how we got there. Firstly, on customer intimacy, how can we make customer intimacy our core differentiator?
I think if you start with the markets that we have been in the longest and are most mature, so Norway, Sweden and the three Baltic countries where we serve all major grocery retailers. You start looking at what do we serve these customers with. You get to an average of 4.7 solutions. 4.7 solutions, which means you're not only buying CashGuard, but you're getting the Vensafe. You might get the Click and Collect locker. By the way, the order picking makes sense to have as well, 4.7 on average. We believe that this happens for at least two reasons. One is when you first deliver a solution or a product and it works in a high velocity environment, and you do repeatedly deliver on that over time, you're getting the trust with grocery retailers.
When you gain that trust, you also gave them the opportunity to bring in new solutions. That's number one. Number two is that many of these solutions talk together. Right? The two very simple examples. One is sort of if you do the order picking in store and your last mile delivery is with lockers. We have a very nice communication between those two solutions that allows for a much more seamless experience from an associate point of view. The value of lockers with order picking is not two, it's 2.5 whatever. Second example is self-checkouts and Vensafe and no other place is this better than in the Baltics.
If you're buying age-restricted items, in particular tobacco products at a self-checkout, well, today you can't really do it unless you have it automated in the sense that you're using the self-checkout, connecting that with the Vensafe, and on top of that, adding age verification, AI age verification tools. This is for real happening in the Baltics. We've challenged the Norwegian Minister of the Digitalization. I mean, if Norway is supposed to be the most digitized world, country in the world, then well, look no further than the Baltics. They are already doing it. It shows that, you know, the value of solutions is just not 1+1 . It's more than the solutions themselves. This is what we want to get here.
We want to go from the Nordic Baltic countries to Spain, U.K. markets with that kind of same mindset, and I think we have the ability to do so. We're starting to see fractions of that happening in with many companies, Alimerka being one of them. We have CashGuard, and then they're using our order picking solution and Click and Collect. I mean, what does e-commerce have to do with cash automation? Absolutely nothing. But it's that gain trust that gives us the ability to work with these solutions that then again, are working together in tandem. The second part of the strategic pillars is order picking. We talked already a lot about it, but the present and the immediate future now is in store fulfillment.
We are fortunate and lucky enough that that trend is moving as we're already have the most efficient solution in the world. We've been moving now from having old Swedish customers into moving that into the, to the Baltics. We have, of course, Sainsbury's in the U.K., which was a big event for us. Carrefour in Belgium, we announced last year. Sonae that many not have heard of, but it's the largest grocery retailer in Portugal. Not only StrongPoint now in Portugal, Bodø/Glimt as well of course, but Sonae is there. We have all the way down to New Zealand, Iceland. You know, this is a true global solution that we are also able to execute and get implemented in completely different markets. The thing is that as every time we add a new customer, we learn something more.
There might be a little bit of an extra feature. We get a little bit more data into how order picking is done most efficiently. The product keeps getting better. In addition to getting better product, we're also getting the best cost to serve because you don't need to expand the existing product team by the same amount to serve a new customer. We have big leverage on that with gross margins that are typically in the very high double-digit numbers, as you would expect from a SaaS-based company. That allows us the best cost to serve. Best product, best cost to serve, which means we believe we have the opportunity to dominate this market going forward. All this is great, but it couldn't be done without people.
We have approximately 500 or 499 if someone asks, and that's for reporting purposes. But not only do we have 499 people across nine geographies, we also have very satisfied and happy people. We're measuring what's called eNPS, so Engagement Net Promoter Score. You know, we are outperforming the peers in the benchmark we have. We have a 36. Last year, we had 36 eNPS, which is 14 higher than the benchmark of companies we compare with. We'll continue strengthening that organization. That'll be absolutely critical also in the Nordics and Baltics, where we have a very good foothold today, but it will be important to continue to develop that organization to also deliver on the new technologies coming into the market. Now, let me see here. Some concluding remarks.
How are we doing on time here, Dominic? We're close to 11, so we'll do the finance , and then we'll leave time afterwards for Q&A. First of all, it's like taking a really long financial perspective of the EBITDA of StrongPoint back here when we had both cash security and labels and what have you. We had a very nice period of steadily increasing dividends payout. We had some amazing year, as many others during COVID. It was absolutely amazing. Then we've had, as you investors would know, we have had two years which were really tough. We had to reduce and right-size the organization. We had to take down some investments. Last year, we were pleased to see that we're moving in the right direction, the right trajectory again.
I have many times reflected on, you know, did we during this period here take on too many investments? Because we have to be clear that, you know, most of the investments that we are doing, we're doing over the P&L, right? It's really just CashGuard Connect and TreeCommerce, our own POS solution that's being put in the balance sheet. Everything else we do on the P&L. Because we have invested and are investing heavily into e-commerce. Do we believe it's right? We absolutely believe it's right. Do we believe it was right here? Maybe not, but, you know, we absolutely believe that long-term it will be right, and we're hoping and starting to see that happen. We did a major acquisition also in the U.K. with ALS.
ALS was in the U.K. and Ireland. We did not buy them because of the products or solutions they had, but we bought them because of the presence and the credibility with many of the grocery retailers in the U.K. We also knew that when we acquired this company, we would have to invest in people, salespeople, implementation people, service people, to be able to deliver these solutions in a credible manner. That's been an investment. It still is an investment to make that happen. We also have been investing and are investing in a cash automation solution, that closed-Loop Cash Solution, that we talked about earlier for Spain and markets beyond. We're also continuing to invest and have started to get them out in the market now, our very own POS solution, so POS solution, point-of-sale solution.
We're doing in the Baltics, where we've had traditionally a very strong foothold with POS. Now we're doing that internally with the hopes of not only delivering that in the Baltics but also eventually over time. I just wanted to be sort of, we're very deliberate on where we have been investing. We're hoping and starting to see some of that coming into effect now, and just leaving behind a year which was a massive improvement from the two years that we had. Final two slides here. Now what are the stepping stones for our future growth? One is the customer intimacy.
The customer intimacy we've built up over now 40 years, believe it or not, in Norway and in Sweden and Baltics over some shorter period of time, is absolutely outstanding. We need to continue strengthening that relationship where we have been for many, many years, and we are replicating that partnership or customer intimacy in the new markets, in particular U.K. and Spain. Secondly, it's in e-commerce. There is a trend now. There is a market opening up that we have to be on. We have proven that last year. We hope to prove more of that this year and the years to come to fulfill our vision of really dominating that in-store fulfillment market. Lastly, we need to scale our own solutions. You know, we can't be happy with being the premier self-checkout supplier in the Baltics.
We have to do that in more countries. It'll not only help us on the customer intimacy, it'll also help us on getting the scale on the own solutions we have. With long-term financial ambitions, and these are aspirations, these are a repeat of what we said in the earlier. We need to continue growing our revenue. Bearing in mind, though, that there are differences in terms of quality of revenue. Certainly, SaaS-based revenue is both more valuable but typically also smaller than one big CapEx program that grocery retailers do. Revenue growth is important. That means we are relevant, more and more so for grocers. Secondly, we have an ambition to get to over 10% EBITDA. If you look historically, you will see that that does not come by itself.
We have to do things also different, which we believe we can do with more recurring, more repeat business. Lastly, you know, we've had two years now. We had ambitions, but, you know, we hadn't had the ability in a responsible manner to pay dividends. Obviously, that is also the ambition of StrongPoint and the board to pay, again, dividends. With that, at least for the people in the room, I don't know how you set it up, Dominic, but at least for the people in the room, there's opening for Q&A. I have Marius with me here as our CFO. There's Roy, and there's me, of course. Dominic.
Thank you, Jacob. Just a reminder for the people watching online, there is a button on the right-hand side of your screen to ask questions, and we've also received some questions in advance. To give the people who are here in person priority, you guys can go first. We'll keep the questions to about 15, 20 minutes max. Just wait for the microphone to get to you because otherwise the people watching online will not be able to hear you. In the room, anybody got any questions?
Hi. Jacob, can you tell us a little bit more about your partner strategy? I mean, you have small partners in Ireland, France, Germany, and you are a very significant partner in South Africa. How is your strategy for broadening your partner network?
What Jörgen here is referring to is partners that predominantly now selling CashGuard, right? Just to be very clear.
Yeah, that's probably.
Predominantly, right?
Vensafe.
Some Vensafe. I mean, like, we have some great CashGuard partners in Bullion IT, in French Solution, in CashGuard Ireland. We've still given them a lot of the ability to use the name. Yes, we are seeking other CashGuard partners. The great thing about a product like CashGuard is you're also able to sell that not only to grocery retailers in a big rollout, but also to smaller independent stores, right? We are looking at expanding that sort of partnership. When it comes to other solutions, we have to be, we believe, a bit more, how should I say, careful because Vensafe, as an example, is typically not a product you just put in one store.
You can have a partner that sort of serves for you in a specific market and can do that pretty well. You know, we have done that historically both in Germany and in Benelux. With the retreat of us in those markets, we didn't see the volume in these markets being big enough to handle that. When it comes to other products, you know, we have been doing some click and collect locker sales also in the U.S. All that has been through partners at least up until to date. You know, CashGuard is an example of a perfect product to get out through partners. For other products that need more of a rollout, you should say, we want to be a bit closer to sort of where the action is.
Makes sense. Also you're developing your new POS system. Isn't that a very competitive space? You also had some partners in from Iceland and Vusion maybe. How is that gonna be connected?
We are a LS One or LS Retail partner in the Baltics. You know, Baltics, you know, we're super strong on self-checkout, very strong on point of sale solutions to a much wider market than the retail space. There have been and will be some changes within LS Retail that made us want to both maintain but also strengthen that position. We took the decision some close to two years ago to develop our own POS solution. We're calling it TreeCommerce. It's already been introduced to the Baltic market. Whereas this is predominantly for the Baltic market, obviously, we hope and believe that with the IP and the source code within StrongPoint, we're also able to take that to other markets.
We should be careful because it's a as you said, it's a competitive market, and it's very long sales cycles on that. You know, you're right. I mean, we're doing this predominantly for Baltics with the potential to grow beyond.
Is it cloud?
Of course.
I'll take an order for the customer experience.
All righty then.
Any more questions in the room? Yeah, if you could pass the microphone over. Thanks.
Thank you. I have a question for Vusion. You talked about the geolocation as important. Is it necessary to install the Captana cameras, or is the EdgeSense sufficient?
Yeah. No, you don't need the cameras for geolocation. What EdgeSense basically If I look at a typical store, it's the rail gives you the location of where. The big problem you have in stores is even if you had lots and lots of labels around, it doesn't know where it is on the shelf, right? What the camera does is it allows us, and we're starting to look at this in terms of mapping stores, three stores, but it's each device is Bluetooth connected to the rail, and then you have standalone labels that are also Bluetooth.
Okay. Yeah.
Thank you, Jacob, for a strong presentation. You spent a significant time with a deep dive on e-commerce and with the ambition to dominate the global market for picking solutions. Can you remind us where you are today with regards to the total turnover in picking solutions and perhaps also the number of different customers you have in the picking, well, picking customers you have today? Then finally, you highlighted that the sales cycle is quite long here. Could you also provide an update on the, like, maturity or discussions with different potential customers?
Maybe I can start, and then, when it comes to revenue, et cetera, I'll leave it to Maurice, because I'm so bad at remembering what we have shared externally. You know, when it comes to sort of customers, you would have seen we have, you know, the legacy markets in Sweden. We have Axfood and Coop, right? We used to have ICA, but we lost ICA. They went with Ocado, right? Despite that blip down, sorry, you know, we have been expanding this into the markets of Cyprus, Iceland, New Zealand, Spain, Belgium, U.K., markets.
There's more and more customers coming on. I think, yes, there are long sales cycles. This is, you know, the contract you sign are typically between three and five years. To be honest, if you do a good enough job, then hopefully that is seven, eight, nine, ten years, right? It's very long sales cycles and hence very important to kind of win the deals when the window opens, right? What's happened in the market now is that there's been a number of incidents that have led to this opening. One thing is Ocado and the questioning of, you know, do you really need to invest so much money in central fulfillment centers? Shouldn't you rather use the stores? That's one.
Number two is that traditionally one of the biggest competitors we have had has been, you know, with big grocery retailers wanting to develop solutions themselves, right? Very comfortable for them to invest themselves. We've seen many examples of people doing that and then realizing that they don't get the efficiency. The cost is actually quite much higher than just developing and then finish because you never really finish. You want to integrate with solutions, et cetera. We're seeing a bit of a backlash there. Lastly is the fact that some of the competitors that we had have either pivoted or gone out of business. I'll make, you know, two examples. One is Walmart. Well, of course not Walmart, but Walmart, which is, by the way, hugely successful.
They had white labeled or put aside their picking solution into what was called Walmart Commerce or Walmart Labs. That solution was sold to many grocery retailers. Suni was one of those. Obviously when Walmart then folds that business, an opportunity emerges to sell that solution. Second example of that being Wynshop, a U.K., sorry, U.S.-based company, was recently acquired by Instacart. We have experienced that many of Wynshop's customers are not too happy about that. Because typically the reason you went with Wynshop was to not be in the hands and fate of Deliveroo or DoorDash, the Bolts and the Doors of the world, you know, because they typically then own the customer data. They wanted to own it themselves and had Wynshop.
When the acquisition happened of Wynshop, we're seeing many customers exploring opportunities outside that closed Instacart society. There are some triggers. There's also big trends, as we talked about, for the growth of e-commerce. Now, Marius, what do you want to share on numbers?
I'd like to share more if I could. But to answer your question on recurring revenue on order picking, we are not sharing that specifically, as much as we would like to. Why are we not doing that? Well, the simple answer is it's kind of sensitive to the few new customers that we've had so far. We definitely have a plan to come out with the ARR SaaS-based order picking only figure. But also to your benefit, there's this business model is not necessarily subscription-based. It's based on usage. It's based on a fee per order. Yes, it's recurring. However, it will go slightly up and down during a month.
For instance, there could be low seasons or low months where there are, you know, smaller amounts of orders. Usually you have two kinds of SaaS-based business model. You have the subscription-based, and you have the usage-based, and we have the latter. To give some more perspective, Jacob shared a slide on recurring revenue. We have south of NOK 400 million in total recurring revenue. 60% of that is service agreements, 35%-40% the residual relates to license revenue, about NOK 130 million. A good chunk of that relates to this order picking. That has been pretty flat up until 2024, and then we have for the last 18-24 months seen a significant uplift on the back of the Sainsbury's contract. Our ambition is definitely to share this, but it's a customer sensitivity issue as well.
Just looking at a question online before we continue in the room. Actually, also directly to you, Marius. In recent presentation, you've highlighted the dividends multiple times. What do you see going forward?
Yeah, it's a question that comes into my email several times. Jacob did touch upon that. Up until 2022, we have been paying dividends. What that figure did not show was that up until 2022, we also had net cash, okay? We had a very good cash position. For the last few years, having to fund these operational deficits and the investments on the CashGuard Connect project in Spain, which has been significant, we have changed the situation from having net cash to net debt. Paying dividends with external debt, obviously right now is not something we can do or would like to do. First and foremost, it's a matter of getting back to positive net profits, positive cash flows, and then it's our ambition.
We will stick to the ambition, but there's always a balance between whether to reinvest and capitalize on everything Jacob has talked about today compared to the dividend policy. First, we have to really get our head above water, not just on EBITDA but on the really, on the bottom line, the net profit after tax. Then this is a continuous discussion. We will talk more about that as soon as we feel that we have, you know, some more visibility.
Any more questions from anyone here in the room? Are you ready with the microphone?
Thank you. If I'm allowed to ask you a question, Roy. You chose to partner with StrongPoint, and I believe much of the reason behind that was the e-com solution that was presented today. If I may ask you, why did you in Vusion choose to partner with StrongPoint instead of trying to develop a similar product yourself in-house?
I think you need the other mic.
Yeah. I think the best companies in the world should focus on what they can be the best in the world at. While, you know, we've taken some very big bets on IoT and digitalization of shelves, computer vision, and our next one was data, and the ability to monetize the shelf through retail media. Sometimes it's better to partner than to build. I think we found a partner that could be more than just e-commerce. I, as I said, they've been invaluable. We're installing 80 stores a week at the moment in the Co-op, and StrongPoint stood up there. They were able to scale, and they have expertise. There's multifaceted and now, as I said, the reselling solution.
Ultimately, what's the hardest thing about a partner is to educate so they understand your business. We're going in terms of providing the signals for e-commerce, and StrongPoint understands what to do with those signals. That's really the rationale behind that.
Any more questions in the room? I think there was someone else that was asking. No more questions in the room? I'll take one more question then online. If you have asked a question in advance or online and we don't get to you, we'll try to answer you by email as well. What do you believe will be the next major investment area for grocery retailers in the Nordics over the coming years?
I guess that goes to me then.
It's you, Jacob, yeah.
I mean, like, in general, right? Sure, Norwegian population and everything is, you know, we're very digitized, but there's a reason why we're digitized. I mean, we have, compared to the likes of U.K., I mean, a very, call it expensive low-cost labor. I mean, we don't really have a low-cost labor, which means that any kind of automation you can do in store to reduce the labor cost is very, valuable. I think what you're seeing now, with, digitalization of store that sort of Vusion represents, you know, fits very well to that. You know, we were, to take a longer perspective, in Norway, we were the first in the world to have, TOMRA machines, also principally because of, legislation, but also because of labor.
We're the first to sort of have the Pick to Stores because you needed to automate warehouses. We're the first in the world to have the ESLs at scale because it cost a lot of money 10 years ago to go around and change. I think it's now, it doesn't make sense there are people going around and seeing if a shelf is filled or not, and we can digitize that, and we can not only digitize, we can use it. I think, you know, we'll see a lot in the digitization space and with that, the benefits of AI to follow this. I think that would be the answer.
Okay. Any further in the room? Otherwise, we'll take one more online. Otherwise, we'll call it a wrap for the day. Okay? Looking ahead, are there any countries or markets where you see meaningful sales traction and expansion potential where StrongPoint does not yet have a presence?
Yeah. I mean, there's of course some dreams. I mean, if you look at where we've had some traction already, but where we don't have a presence, and we'll be very careful about sort of how to think about the presence is of course the U.S.. I mean, we have been selling lockers, grocery lockers to the U.S.. Traditionally, there's also a market which is, you know, have a relatively high e-commerce penetration, have been growing rapidly, but still is very inefficient compared to Europe. That's of course a big dream, but we wanna be sort of very careful before moving in into such a market. Beyond that, there are other markets, obviously in Europe that are both big and super interesting. France is one of them.
I'm looking at you. You're Irish, but you know, still, it's a French company, right? They had a super strong presence in France that have also a very good product market fit to what we're doing. But right now, I mean, we're first and foremost focusing on the nine countries we are, and then we'll have to see how it evolves, but there are many markets that could be interesting.
I think we'll call that a day. For the people here, we can stay here for a little bit longer, but for those joining us online, this will be the end. Well, thank you very much for joining us.