Hi, and welcome back to ABG Investor Days. My name is Alice Beer. I work as an analyst here at ABG, and with me today I have Magnus Larsson, CEO of Pricer. So with that, Magnus, please go ahead with the presentation.
Thanks a lot. Happy to be here again. Happy to see so many of you. A few familiar faces, so thanks for coming back from last time. Today I will speak about Pricer. It will be, for those of you that don't know us, there will be some repetition, and for those of you that do know us, I hope there will also be some news, and if you're not happy with the presentation, there will also be a Q&A at the end, so I think it will be great. I'll skip the agenda. When I started at Pricer a few years ago, it felt that the main focus for retailers, and our main focus, was actually helping them with some of the basics and some of their basic challenges, well, basically reducing the number of staff required to do work to get increases in efficiency up.
But we could also see what were the key drivers? What were the key challenges you would typically face as an investor or as a retailer? Well, one would be inflation. It could be lack of staff. But in essence, we were pretty good in helping them with actually gaining additional efficiencies. But it seems that there are now, and maybe it's because we have the ability to address more challenges, but it's been a very different environment for quite many of the retailers today compared to just a few years ago. One thing that I think we mentioned here is competition. And of course, competition is always a threat. That's the nature of business life.
But what we can see, especially when it comes to grocery retailers, is that the entrance of hard discounters and the very fast growth of hard discounters have created a totally new, different, and actually new challenge for many of the established players. If you've been a successful grocery retailer for quite some years, well, all of a sudden there is a new entrant that comes with a totally different way of packaging and pricing their products. I think one example that we can mention is that last year in discussions with Carrefour, not in France, but one of the other countries, we know that they were planning for fairly large investments in basically digitizing their stores. What happened was that they could see that they were losing out on this specific market. The market share compared to competition was just decreasing.
So they did something that I haven't seen before. They took much of their tech investments that they were really planning to do in the stores to actually improve the efficiencies, but also maybe getting some other benefits out of it. And they actually took it to just use all that money to discount the grocery to make sure that they would push the price level down. Quite unusual that they would do these kinds of changes, but that was a reality. And that's when we started to see that some of them are really stressed from competition. So they will, of course, need to find a way. How can we make sure we stay relevant? How can we make sure that we still attract customers?
What is our proposition to our customers that would make them then maybe accept a price that is slightly higher than what the hard discounters are doing? But of course, we also see that the hard discounters, they need to make sure that once established, they attract more people in their stores. So well, you have the obvious one: lack of staff, cost of staff, inflation. That has been the normal drivers. But we can also see that things like branding are getting increasingly important. When I was at the Retail Tech Show in London this spring, I met with people from both Sainsbury's and from Tesco. And typically, before, first it was the IT people that were interested. Then it was the store managers and store operations people. Then it was business people as it became more strategic.
Now, all of a sudden, also the brand people are involved. And they said, well, we tag a very high value at our brand. So unless we feel that our brand can be properly represented in the store, we might actually not invest because we see that the value of the brand and how it will actually affect our possibility to get a good price from customers might actually be higher than the perceived value of doing a digitalization of the store. Now, I think we'll be able to mitigate both. But I think that's been also a clear driver that we can see more, especially as the really large retailers are pushing forward. So, of course, that cannot be a hurdle to our growth ambition. So that's something that I will speak more about on how we actually address it and what we do.
But I think things like brand will be important and how we can actually help our retailers represent their brand properly in the store. Sustainability. We have new regulations in the European market where retailers will have to report on what they do on the sustainability side and the social side. How can we actually help them? And above all, how can we come with products that will actually not only make them report correctly, but hopefully actually get their sustainability footprint or carbon dioxide footprint lowered? So that's also one thing that will be important in what we do forward onward. We've been really good in looking at the efficiency, but how can we actually help them? And they need help on how can we help them to get new revenue streams or getting shoppers to spend more money while in the store?
Or how can we actually, maybe coupled to the branding, how can we actually make them capitalize from all the money and the marketing money that the CPGs, so the consumer packaged goods companies, so all the brands in essence, are spending in the store? Much has been on print, but there is a wide belief within the retailers that they could actually make more out of it if they have the right kind of tools. So this is basically the challenges they face. And of course, that's what we need to address. And we believe that the solution is store digitalization, as you probably could imagine. And so what we do is, and the position we aim to have, the vision is to be retail's first choice in store automation and communication. So we want to be within the boundaries of the physical store. We're not online.
We wanted to do the solutions that would actually help a retailer make more money through being more efficient, but also improve shopper experience to get a recurrence of the shopper they want to come back, but also help them find new revenue streams. So those are the three main areas. And in this process, we want them to say that to make this happen, we believe that Pricer is really the best player on the market to help us achieve at least parts of this transformation and to achieve this. Who are we? We're Pricer. We're founded in Uppsala in the beginning of the 1990s. To date, we have deployed somewhere around 25,000 stores. Out of those, we have more than 3,500 stores connected. And so it's through our subscription service, Pricer Plaza. And why do we want to connect it?
The first reason is that we want to have the recurring revenue. We want to make sure that from each and every store, we actually get an annual payment for the services that we deliver. But above all, if you look at us in competition, if you look at the other figure we have on top, we have deployed. This is figures from, at the end of 2023, more than 300 million labels. If you combine that, it's in a premium position in the stores everywhere. It's an IoT device. If you combine that with actually the stores connected, that gives us a totally different possibility to work with customer success. How can we actually go back to these customers? We know what they do. We know what they need. We can actually develop new functionality.
And we have done a lot of functionality over the years, but we've been very generous. And much of it has actually been given away free of charge as part of the standard software. Now, we changed the software we have on the Pricer Plaza. So the ability to actually capitalize from the work that we've done, we have in the platform now. We can switch on or we can switch off, which should be pretty obvious, but we didn't have that. So this is now giving us the possibility to go back to our customers and say, "If you want this feature that will generate this revenue for you, well, we will be able to actually help you.
If you want to partner with this company within computer vision, well, we actually have a deep integration as well, which will give you a definite added value compared to what you could do if we would use this as a standalone. So that ability we also get. Through the data, we see it would also help us to go back and say that, listen, we believe that you should now upgrade your system, or you should invest in, maybe you want to have these kinds of displays for grocery. We now have six color labels or displays at this size. You should actually equip your store. So we're trying to reverse that one.
In the strategy that we're actually right now finalizing, moving into the domain of customer success to actually maximize the installed base, which is actually a real, tangible asset that we have, will be one of the key things. I'll do it like this. So if we look at our customer base, some might call these blue- chip type companies, but I thought it would be good to also give you an idea of what we have and where we're at. So with Carrefour, it's one of the leading grocery retailers globally, based out of France. They have six main markets in Europe. Then they have Brazil, Argentina, and Latin America. But then they have a lot of franchises in other parts of the world. We have an exclusive contract with Carrefour that we won last year.
We are working very close with Carrefour to, of course, address as many markets as possible. Very strong foundation in France, but nowadays also in Belgium and Italy. We have started entering the Spanish market. Romania, we have good coverage. Poland, where they have also big operations, we haven't done anything yet. We see that halfway through the contract that we have right now, there is still a lot of upside on this customer. There is still a huge interest from their side on actually moving on and equipping as many stores as possible. They are also fans of going from in-store servers to the Plaza subscription. In France, the logic is that they want to move from their own operated stores more into franchise stores.
So when they do that move, they want to make sure that the store is connected so they still have the ability to get visibility to what's actually happening in the franchise stores, but also do centralized pricing and build things in a different way. But they also want to collect the data. So during the contract negotiation, that was probably the easiest test when I said, well, I want all your existing stores to move to Plaza as soon as possible. And they said, great. That's actually what we want to do as well. S Group. We won them last. It's a Finnish cooperative. It's a co-op. It's a cooperative like Coop. They're part of actually the Coop Nordic Group, the biggest retailer in Finland. We got a frame contract last year.
They also made a commitment on top of that frame contract of delivering 300 stores, which we now almost deployed faster than expected. And we got the second order of another more than 100 stores that were communicated. And we know that they are looking at what should the consecutive phases look like because they have 1,000 stores roughly. Brico Dépôt, it's do-it-yourself. They're part of the UK do-it-yourself giant Kingfisher Group. So here we have Brico Dépôt, Castorama. And of course, we try to expand also into the UK within the Kingfisher Group. Canadian Tire, of course, extra happy to mention them today since yesterday we could announce that after a lot of and fairly painful waiting, what we know would happen is now being communicated. They will accelerate deployment that they've done on ESL so far.
Actually, their intention is to cover all their stores working in the formats that we are addressing with ESLs to at least 80% of every single product in the store. So when you could see the Q2 report, you could see that sales in North America was actually declining versus our plans and versus last year. It's been Canadian Tire that's been in a waiting mode because what they've done now is that they are a franchisee organization with a lot of dealers where the dealers can do whatever they want. Not really, but when it comes to installing Pricer or not installing, they can do what they want. We have an exclusive contract, but it's their choice to do it. So, in order to not force anyone to make a change, what Canadian Tire has done, and this is actually why it's been taking a lot of time.
And when you've seen a reduced order intake, is that they are actually changing some of the fundamental store processes because they've seen the benefit of what we've done. So that's why they want it in all stores. So they said, as of basically somewhere in the fourth quarter next year, they're making two major changes to the way they operate on a global or on a headquarters level and a corporate level. The first thing is that they will change the way they plan the stores. They call it planograms. It's sort of the outline of the entire store. It's been based on paper tags. Now, it's going to be based on ESL instead. So that's a small change, but it's a good change. The even bigger one is that today they do, over every large holiday period, they do a two to three or four weeks price stop.
They're not increasing or decreasing any pricing. With this change, they said, well, you do as you want. You can do paper. You can do ESL. But as of this date that they specified internally in Q4, we actually reserve the right to change prices any day we want, even on Christmas Day or during Easter or Thanksgiving, which makes it virtually impossible for any of them to stay on paper. Here, we were hoping to be able to see the order intake in Q3. Now there will be a focus on Q1 and Q2, but the volumes will be attractive. Very happy that we finally got the announcement out. Finally, Best Buy, just to sort of complete the picture of the markets that we address. Home electronics, it's the largest chain in North America. We have 1,100 stores.
Whenever they buy a store, or they open new stores, they would go to our sales. So this is a little bit, like I said, this is the sweet spot market for us, hypermarkets, supermarkets, do-it-yourself stores. Actually, I would add pharmacies as well. Canadian Tire is like a general retail, but the massive scale. So that's the key formats. Home Electronics, well, that was really good because they had a clear idea of what they wanted to do. They wanted the large displays they could use in discussion when they had a customer in the store to help them close the deal in the store with all information available on the screen, instead of customers going home to check what's the price online. I guess I'm running out of time if I continue at this speed, so I will speed up a little bit.
The market is taking off. You've heard me. If you listen to my presentation, you heard it for a long time. And I will still repeat it. We see the U.K. market. We see the U.S. market, to mention two really large ones, where all the signs of a fast-growing market are in place. In the U.K., every single large grocery retail, all of the top ones, tier ones, are talking about now doing deployments and are planning their budgets or are starting to do pilots and trials. And here we have a lot of good dialogues. Doesn't mean that we will win them all, even though I tried to push that to our salespeople. But we're in the race, and we are having good dialogue.
U.S. will probably be, I think that the U.K. market will be clear uptake faster, but the U.S. is happening, especially after the announcement of Walmart building 2,500 stores or 2,300 stores. Unfortunately, not with us, but we're aiming for the next retailers on the market. I think I'll stop at that. What else? We have done a long transformation, and we've tried to divide it up in phases. The first one, when I started as an acting CEO, was to get the sales going again, to start the growth of both order intake, but of course, more importantly, on the net sales. So that was the focus in 2022. But there were also other things that were visible in that our cost level was way too high.
If I looked at the cost that we have for staff in 2022, I realized that for the amount of money I need to recruit two staff, VusionGroup, who's one of our main competitors, they could recruit three staff. If I looked at our partner, StrongPoint, they could actually recruit four staff. So clearly, something was off in our cost. But I also realized that we don't have to have the capability at that point of time to address it. The next thing was really to strengthen the balance sheet. We set up a bond, a private bond, and then we did a new share issue. So that was really the focus in 2022 and then 2023.
On top of that, to improve profitability, we spent a lot of time on actually working with how to improve the gross profit that really reached the rock bottom at the end of 2022. Then we were down at just about 15%, and now we've been zooming in around 22%. And that's been a combination actually of working with the R&D team, working with the product team, working with the sales team, working with the procurement team, working with the manufacturing team. So there's been a lot of different activities that has led to this gradual increase of profitability. And I hope that we're not done yet, but of course, I cannot give any commitments since we don't do forecasts.
On the obligation or the bond that we set up last year, you might also have seen that this Tuesday, we are actually communicating that we are aiming to set up a public unsecured bond. That is work ongoing. The intention is then, of course, to refinance the existing bond. I've seen and understood that there's a lot of questions on what is actually the cost to do this. It's 101% of the bond price that we need to pay, plus, of course, administrative costs to actually do that. That would also mean that with a public bond, there will be more regular covenants. We see that there will be a lot of opportunities out of this. We would also increase the RCF, so revolving credit facility, a lot.
So we see that combined then with the transformative actions that we've done, getting our cost structure in the right place. So the target that we set to actually decrease our cost baseline with SEK 50 million, which was what we communicated in December last year, we reached the last milestone and reached the point we wanted to be at in the beginning of Q3. And we are continuously working with our transformation internally to avoid that we end up in building costs again in a way that it's not good for the company. So you could say that phase four now will really be to achieve operational excellence and make sure that we take the right steps now into the future. Let's see what time it is. How much time do I have left? Roughly enough?
Roughly five minutes.
Perfect. I want to focus on. You will be able to see this. This is a little bit bragging on the progress that we've done. We can see that from an EBIT point of view, we set the financial target of reaching an EBIT of 8% or more than 8%. That's a long-term target. We are progressing in the right direction. But what I really want to speak about is this slide before we do the Q&A. I spoke about the challenges that a retailer faces, and there are many things that we need to do. This is something that we've been thinking about for quite some time. You see a lot of different investment areas here. Of course, we need to have the salespeople. We need to have the attractive commercial proposition. We need to do our supply chain and procurement properly.
Of course, we aim for SaaS first to make sure we can capture all these recurring revenues and attached revenues. But if we look at our basic, the largest area of sales, which today is the electronic shelf label, we were part of actually setting and defining the way an ESL looks like and the way it's actually sold. So whatever you see, it's the same. It was part of our foundation. But does that actually help our retailers to build and represent their brand properly in the store? We have asked quite a few of them, and they said, well, it's hard. And given what we've been, my discussions in London with Sainsbury's and Tesco's brand people, the journey that we started two years ago to see how can we do this differently have now ended up in like a concept car.
So it was a totally deconstructed ESL. It was wild, and we made some printouts of it. And it was very inspiring. And the way we did it was very different to before. Earlier on, it was very much R&D-driven innovation. Now we had an industrial designer working together with our head of technology, Chris, and they came up with something. And we realized that this is probably not the end game, but what we could do out of that one is that we actually set up a new foundation for the next generation ESL. And that's something that we will now launch at the retail event in New York next year at the NRF show. And the concept, which I would die to actually present now, but I have to wait until January, it's based on three key principles. The first one is design.
How can the new setup that we do and the new generation ESL help retailers in a totally different way than before represent their own brand? And we also want to make sure that if you look at what we do, you should be able to see it's a Pricer setup without stealing the limelight from the retailer. But that has been really key. How can we make them do the advertisement they want of their own brand, or if they want to use this space to actually do it for Procter & Gamble or Unilever or Coca-Cola? That was the ambition. The next thing was modularity. How can we make sure that we build something where you get a choice? I want the bigger screen. Well, typically, you would have to buy a new ESL. But what if we have a different way of doing that?
That would also ease the way we do the supply and production, where we need actually less components and less variation because we build what we do on a lot of common things, where actually some things are easily replaceable. What if you want to change? I want to have it battery- operated, but to actually do it differently, I want to be able to use solar cells, or I want to connect it through a shelf system to the mains power. Well, typically, you would actually have to totally change the ESL or the system. Well, that is sort of also part of the modularity concept that we are now looking to present. And finally, how can we actually do something tangible on sustainability, which would be more than saying we're actually helping a retailer to be sustainable because there's less printing and it's digital?
We've been looking at what are the materials that we can use. And as you might have seen from press releases over the last years, we've been looking at corporations with Epishine doing solar cells, but also PaperShell making composite material of cellulose. And we see that it's still early phases, but there start to be tangible ideas of how we could actually implement this in our product line into the future. I'll leave that as a teaser. There will be a lot more in January on this concept. We have made a sneak preview with one of our largest customers, and they were delighted and immediately wanted to see how can we actually do this because they realized that what we present is more than a price system.
It's more than something that creates the efficiencies they want to have in the store, but it could be something that would actually be able to let them capture the additional revenues that they would like to do.
All right.
Is there any time for a question now?
Not really. We'll do one quick question.
Yes.
We have discussed previously inflation as a big driver for growth, and growth has been a bit lumpy this year. What would you say is driving the market growth right now?
I would say the key things for market growth is that during the last couple of years, retailers became aware that we need to do something. And I think inflation was driving a lot of the investment decisions, which if you had a frame agreement, the franchisees, they could, of course, make a very fast decision.
But for the large corporation, that meant that they started to really look at the process. They started to allocate people. They were allocating budgets, and that's a slower process. Then, of course, lack of staff has been triggering like after Brexit in the U.K. market. But I think mentally changing that we want to do this. And I think at the end of the entire digitalization story, many of them see that it's not only, of course, the ESL, even though we think that's the most important part, but they see that we want to have cameras to see is there anything on the shelf or not. We want to have thermometers in the U.S. FDA. They are now imposing as of 2026 new regulations for measuring the temperature from factory into the shelf of grocery. They want to have different kinds of sensors.
They want to have electronic locks, and everything is part of the digitalization strategy. So I think they made up their mind, and now we can see that they are marching quite fast for a retailer that would still be slow to other markets. But we can see it's determination, and there are real, tangible plans to make it happen. So I think that's what we see behind the driver.
Sounds fantastic. Well, unfortunately, we are out of time, but thank you, Magnus, for your presentation, and thank you to everyone who is listening in.
Thank you very much.