Hi, welcome to this Investor Day's presentation with StrongPoint. With me today I have the CEO, Jacob, who is going to present the business. With that, I'll leave the word to you, Jacob.
Thank you so much, and thank you everybody, and apologies for not being present in Stockholm. This will have to be from my office here in Oslo. We had some technical problems here. Can you hear me?
[Foreign language]
Perfect. Okay, I'll continue then. Thank you, Henric. Sorry for not being there in person, but we'll do this online with Teams today. Let me first just start out by giving a short glance at StrongPoint. We are approximately NOK 1.4 billion company. Somewhere between 1/3 and a 1/4 of the revenue is recurring revenue. We'll get back to that. We serve predominantly grocery retailers. 80% of the revenue we have is from grocery retailers. We are approximately 500, a little bit less than 500 people now, spread across nine different countries, and we have our own development team to support us on developing the software that we then, again, give to customers that we have. In general, our purpose is to make grocery retailers more efficient and sustainable. Now, I said we are operating in 9 countries, and that's just part of the story.
Number one is that we are in these nine countries you see here, Nordics, Baltics, Spain, U.K. and Ireland, where we have our own full local support. That means everything from sales to installation to service, and then to support. Beyond these nine markets, we also serve customers from, I want about to say, down right to New Zealand, up to Iceland, typically with software that we provide. These are the nine countries that we are currently fully present in. What does StrongPoint really do? Well, we try to tackle five very common challenges for grocery retailers. Those are not just challenges, these are also opportunities, of course. They range from e-commerce fulfillment, leveraging and using the store or the vicinity of the store for e-commerce fulfillment.
We help stores protect versus theft, which is a concerning and rising, unfortunately, I should say, trend in many of the markets we operate, mainly or principally, also in the U.K., where that is a major issue for grocers. Number three is store efficiency. We like to say that efficiency never goes out of style. You can choose to let that efficiency be spent on more customer interactions or lower the cost, again, giving lower prices to consumers. Store efficiency. Number four is pricing and promotion. How can grocery retailers efficiently change prices and optimize for prices and promotions? Lastly is cash handling. However digitized we are in Norway and Sweden, cash is still a very important part of business that needs to be handled, both here in the Nordics, but not least in the other markets that we operate.
When we talk about StrongPoint, I think it's important to recognize the legacy that we have. The legacy is that we are a Nordic and Baltic company. When we're looking at the top 10 customers we have in that region, it's pretty much covering all the grocery retailers that we have in Norway, that we have in Sweden, and that we have in the Baltics. The thing is that when we engage in a relationship with these customers, which we have been doing now for 40 years, we over time develop trust, and with that trust comes also the ability for us to sell in more solutions. One thing is trust and being able to deliver these critical solutions for the grocery retailer, but it's also about the more solutions we provide to customers, the better the opportunity is for those solutions to communicate together.
I'll give a concrete example. In Sweden in particular, where we have a number of grocery retailers using our in-store picking solution, which is a very efficient solution, we believe the world's fastest and best. The opportunity to go from only having order picking in store to allowing electronic shelf labels to flash and increase the picking speed is one such example. You're raising the value of both those solutions to also last mile delivery, meaning grocery lockers, creating a sort of seamless experience for the grocery retailer to do picking and then last mile delivery. We believe that both the trust that we get from serving these customers over time, but also the solution or the wide solution that we offer to customers enable us to deliver more solutions. With these top 10 customers, we're on average serving them with 4.7 solutions.
That's in the traditional StrongPoint markets. I wanted to also talk a bit about one of the solutions that we are very proud of, and that is our Order Picking solution that is developed out of Sweden for customers that we're now also seeing the value in taking internationally. We believe that kind of not by accident, but because we in Norway and Sweden don't really have low-cost labor, that means that any time you sort of introduce a solution that is utilizing the store staff, that needs to be very efficient. In the Order Picking solution that we have developed with customers in Sweden, we've come to realize it's actually the world's fastest. Not just us realizing that, but we're starting to get some very, very exciting customers outside the market that we typically serve.
Last quarter, we announced that we added Iceland Foods to our list of customers that are now trialing our solution and is about to roll that out after a proof of economics or proof of value solution. We're already in with Sainsbury's, which is the second-largest grocery retailer in the U.K. with an e-commerce business which is just extremely big, NOK 60 billion approximately there. We have Carrefour in Belgium that was super fast in implementing our solution, and Sonae MC that is actually the largest grocery retailer in Portugal. All these examples here are delivering on our promise and belief that we actually have the world's most efficient Order Picking solution, which is extremely difficult when you operate in a market which is growing very, very rapidly. Out of all the segments in grocery retail, e-commerce is growing the fastest in most markets.
Now a little bit on the figures. We just delivered our Q1 results. I thought for the convenience of the audience, I'll go very quickly through some key figures from there. One is revenue. It's a flat revenue that we are delivering in Q1, and as you can tell from this chart, it's been relatively flat the last few quarters by and large. I think what is important to recognize in this aspect is this point here, that we're constantly working to increase the quality of the revenue we have. Growing our recurring revenue base, both with service contracts, which typically follows hardware installations, whether that is with CashGuard solutions, with click and collect lockers, with Vensafe solutions, or whether that is in growing licenses.
In licenses here we have, of course, our Order Picking solutions, which is the key driver behind this growth, but it's also recurring revenue from electronic shelf labels. The recent decline that you see here is fundamentally because of the exit we did of the partnership with Swedish electronic shelf label provider Pricer and changed that to a French company called Vusion, which is the by far dominant player in the electronic shelf label and digitization of store markets. We certainly want to grow that, but as of January 1, we lost the recurring revenue from Pricer and are now working to grow that with Vusion whilst all the other parts of recurring revenue is and has been growing. If we look at EBITDA, it's fair to say we had a very tough 2023 and into 2024.
We initiated, as you can imagine, with sort of flat top line. Although recurring revenue had been increasing over this period of time, we had to take down the cost base. We have now been running with positive EBITDA that we of course should. We're not where we want to be at all. It's a point in the right direction. We will continue to be cost-conscious and cost-prudent whilst working on increasing the quality of the revenue that we have to increase the gross profit that we as a company have to work with. I would like to just take a little bit of a, not historic setback, just to put StrongPoint in perspective beyond just the last few quarters.
We have been, as a company, growing nicely and steadily, in parts because of acquisitions that we have been doing, but we've been doing that in a very cost-efficient manner, enabling us to pay dividends for many years on a consecutive basis. 2020, the year of the COVID, was very much a booming year for retail technology and not least StrongPoint, it should be said. We did, I think it's fair to say, do a few targeted investments that we're not yet seeing the full potential of. I think it's important to see these figures in that context. Let me explain a little bit what I mean by that. Number one is the e-commerce software that we have, Order Picking, that came from an acquisition we finalized end of 2018.
We very quickly realized that this was a fantastic solution and have been and are investing in the product team and the product itself to make that internationally viable. Although we're growing that very nicely, it's also a fantastic gross margin. It also has a big product team attached to it, right? That's an investment that we're doing and really believe in. Second, in 2022, we also acquired a company called Air Link Group Limited in the U.K. and Irish market. Whereas the acquisition is something else, we knew that when we did the acquisition, we would have to invest in product people on top of Air Link Group Limited, which was an engineering company. We would have to invest in the personnel enabling us to sell the solutions that we have and are now offering to the U.K. market.
We've had some great success with new customer logos, but we're not yet there where we want to be in terms of profitability in the U.K. Needless to say, we're very hopeful for that profitability to start really ticking up as we're maturing in the U.K. market with a very good product market fit that we see in that market. Thirdly is cash automation. We have a unique cash management solution called CashGuard Connect that we have been working on for many years. It's proven more difficult to get out in, not to get out in the market, but get finalized, in part because we had a joint venture partner that went bankrupt. We have been monitoring and handling that illiquidity situation of our joint venture partner to hopefully be able to take this product into the Spanish market and beyond in not too long.
It's been a lot more difficult than what we anticipated initially. Lastly, it should be said, we actually have our own point-of-sale solution that were developed out of the Baltics. Baltics have super strong position with all the grocery retailers, both on the point-of-sale, the POS solution side, as well as self-checkout. The decision to invest in a new point-of-sale solution for all Baltic customers is also something that we hope and believe we can benefit from in the other markets that we serve. Did we, in retrospect, invest too much, too quickly? To be seen. All I want to make sure of here is that you understand that there are investments that have been done and are ongoing to ensure that we get the profitability back on track and where it should be.
To round things off with StrongPoint's strategy in short before going into why invest. Well, as I said, we make grocery retailers more efficient and sustainable. That is our purpose. We're seeing over and over again that customers choose our solutions because they're the fastest, the best solutions in the market. Internally, we talk about three pillars, and we're not afraid to talk about it externally either. One is making customer intimacy our core differentiator. We, of course, want the 4.7 solutions that we have with our top Nordic and Baltic customers to be 5.7. We also want the U.K., the Irish, and the Spanish market to move from not serving customers at all or serving them with one or maybe two solutions, to serve them with four or five solutions.
Needless to say, many of these market reaches are very much bigger than the existing core markets of StrongPoint. That is a huge potential there. Customer intimacy is, we believe, our core differentiator. Secondly, out of all the babies and children we have in terms of solutions, there is one child that stands out, and that is our Order Picking solution. We're not afraid to say that we want to dominate grocery in-store fulfillment with this solution. This is what we have, the most efficient in-store Order Picking solution there is in the world. Our Swedish and the Baltic customers are experiencing a 220-240 units per hour picked, whereas the best performers in the continent are about or below 200, and if you go to the U.S., it's even half of that again.
A part of that is, of course, you have larger stores, if you take the U.S., larger SKU range. According to the data analysis that we've been doing, we certainly have a place to play when it comes to increasing the efficiency massively across both Europe and the U.S. on Order Picking. Thirdly, it is to drive efficiency also internally, not just externally, but also internally through a strong culture. Being cost-prudent, being smart in how we operate, being nimble and are able to operate fast on any customer inquiries is also something that needs to ingrain the culture you have in StrongPoint. Our dual vision, as you can then understand, is number one is to be recognized as the top solution provider for grocery retailers. We have such a strong position in certainly the Baltics and in parts in Scandinavia or the Nordics.
That is the position we want to have in all the markets we serve. Secondly, we believe we can make Order Picking solution, our Order Picking solution, the leading in-store order fulfillment solution worldwide, at least if we talk about the European and North American markets. That is StrongPoint strategy in a nutshell. I know Henric has some questions to me, but let me just round off by, why should you invest in StrongPoint? The three reasons. Number one is that in our core markets, traditional markets, the Nordics and Baltics, we are profitable, and we have a stable foundation in these markets. It should be said, as an example, just in Q1, we renewed our contract with CashGuard to the largest grocery chain in NorgesGruppen.
I think that it's telling because in a market like Norway and like Sweden, where cash is a very small fraction of the total volume that goes through payment solutions in grocery chains, there's still a need to handle cash. If we look across the Nordics and Baltics, we have a profitable and stable foundation with well in excess of 10% EBITA delivered in these markets. Secondly, what we are attempting to do, and well on the way to doing, is to replicate the part of the model that we have in the Nordics and Baltics into the larger, call it new StrongPoint markets. U.K. most prominently, I should say. It's a very competitive landscape in terms of grocery retailers. We have started serving Sainsbury's. We started serving Iceland with our Order Picking solution.
We do also shop fitting work for most of the grocery U.K. retailers, and we believe there is a big potential to get more of the Order Picking and e-commerce portfolio we have to get more of the theft prevention solutions that we offer, as well as cash management solutions there, replicating the success we've had in the Nordics and Baltics to these markets. Thirdly, it is really about growing our e-commerce software globally. I had the privilege last week of being in Charlotte, North Carolina, in what's called a grocery tech event. Coming home from that event, I feel more inspired than ever about the opportunities that are in the U.S. and not least the ability and the reason to succeed in the U.S. market with StrongPoint solution. I feel more strong about that than ever. There you go.
Those were the few slides I wanted to take you through, and then I'll leave time for Henric to ask any questions.
Thank you, Jacob. Firstly, you touched a little bit upon it, but could you, in simple terms, explain what changed when you moved from Pricer to the Vusion partnership?
Yeah. Let me elaborate a little bit more on that answer, because I think it's important to recognize. Pricer has been a partner of StrongPoint for many years. I think in effect 15 years and even more. We have been for many years the largest partner of Pricer. We took the initiative in December of last year to end that partnership, not because it was a bad partnership, but because we see much bigger potential with Vusion. We canceled the agreement with Pricer. That had a six-month notice period, so that came into effect first on the sales side in the summer of 2025. At the same time, we introduced the VusionGroup partnership.
In January 1, 2026, that was the last date for when we have recurring license revenue from Pricer, and this is in the order of magnitude of NOK 50 million gross profit that is taken away. If you do the math, then you get to 12.5 million NOK recurring revenue from Pricer that is taken away. Short-term, it's a little bit of a pain, but obviously also now having started to see the VusionGroup partnership come to life with, amongst others, a big deal we announced in the Baltics with Coop Estonia, more than 100 million NOK. That will also trigger a buildup of recurring revenue. Of course, that won't happen overnight. It'll take time.
The prospects with a company like VusionGroup, which have ballpark 50% of the electronic shelf label market in the world, and that also has a very promising digitization portfolio and digitization solution offering to grocery retailers. Being an independent software vendor to VusionGroup with our e-commerce portfolio makes us very promising about what that partnership can give. As I said, short term in the Q1, it was a tough swallow. In that case, pleased to see that we maintained the profitability levels on same as last year.
All right, perfect. Thank you. Looking at the time, I think we have to wrap up, but I appreciate you taking the time, Jacob. Thank you.
Thank you.