Hello, everyone. This is Magnus Larsson speaking. I'm the President and CEO of Pricer. With me today, I have Claes Wenthzel, our CFO, to give the presentation of the fourth quarter 2024. I would like to also apologize for my voice. I seem to have contracted something on my vocal cords, so I hope I will not end up coughing. If I do, then I will just ask Claes to help and fill in for a little while. Starting with the vision, as I always do for those of you that normally follow the presentation, we have done a lot of work on our strategy. We actually have now a strategy that has just been approved by our board. I will start with a small tease. We made a change to our vision. Our vision is to be the preferred partner for in-store communication and digitalization.
Some minor changes, but rather than retail's first choice, we believe that the way and the path we're on, being the preferred partner for communication and digitalization, is the very right spot for us to be as a company, but of course, also for our clients, our customers, and our partners. Looking at Pricer in brief, for those of you that haven't followed us for a very long time, Swedish company. We were founded in the early 1990s. We have roughly 200 employees. You will find us in 70-plus countries. Our big ticket driver is our ESLs, the shelf labels. We are clearly a leader on the market. We're a strong number two, with more than 350 million labels deployed to date. Out of those, we have some 5,000 stores actually connected. We have 5,000 stores connected with almost 40 million labels on Plaza.
It has been a major growth on the Plaza side, as you could also see in our report. Plaza, that's our subscription service for the management system of our in-store environment. We have had a year of transformation. We can say that we started, when I started as CEO, actually pretty much three years ago, we started to look at how can we restart growth, how can we re-kick it to make sure it happens. The first target was to actually get the go-to-market strategy in place and to achieve growth. The next phase was to actually strengthen the balance sheet. The third one was transformation of the company. In December 2023, we announced a cost-cutting program of SEK 50 million.
That was really to make sure on a transformation program, but that's also to make sure that we would be able to grow the company without actually scaling our costs the same way as we scale our net sales. That has been a very successful transformation, as you can see from our Q4 and our 2024 figures. We are now moving phase IV, which will be a focus on doing long-term and profitable growth of the company. You could say that we closed our third phase, the transformation, by recording the highest EBIT, the highest net profit, and the highest order intake for the year and ever in the company history. What were the events of Q4? I would like to lift the fact that the retail chain group, S-Group from Finland, it's the Finland Cooperative, they placed an initial pilot order with us in 2023.
They made a very large rollout where you can see also positive impact on our net sales in 2024. They chose then to do another more than 100 stores to place the order for the continuous installation, which we are now busy deploying. I was extremely happy to get that one because it was also a clear sign of the recognition of good cooperation, good performance, and a very good solution installed at their stores. We could also communicate that we expand the framework with Canadian Tire. They plan to have 80% of all the stores deployed with ESL by the end of 2025. We have a good and active discussion with Canadian Tire. Sobeys. Just before summer in 2024, we announced that a North American Tier One grocery player placed an initial order of SEK 90 million. At that time, we could not actually name them.
I'm happy to be able to announce that we could announce the SEK 485 million order from Sobeys. It is continuation. We will start the deployment of these stores in the April-May timeframe. We have had a very close cooperation with Sobeys, but also direct with our partner, Geratech. I think finally for Q4, it's worth mentioning the refinancing of the TURINVEST bond that we have, which has been replaced by a public and traditional bond with Nordea trading on the Swedish market. Very good. In general, on the 2024 program, we mentioned the cost reduction program fully implemented early Q3. We could see it had the effect we expected. It's been a lot of work, but it's also been a lot of work that made Pricer fundamentally better and a different company compared to before. Our production facility in Germany, we have full production.
We do three-color, we do four-color label, we do two different sizes. I am very happy to see that after it took a little bit longer to get it in place, but we can see now once we have it in place, it is clearly a competitive advantage. Finally, I would like to also highlight the order intake once again. It is the highest ever order intake. We have had two quarters in 2024 with near SEK 1 billion order intake each. I hope that we can see more of this. I will not give any forecast, but we can see that we are having good traction with several of our customers. It feels really good to start the year with a very strong backlog and order book to be delivered mainly in 2025. I also want to speak about Pricer Avenue.
I have alluded public a little bit before that we were to make a big announcement at the NRF show. The announcement is Pricer Avenue. It started a few years ago when me, our head of technology, and a few others of our peers, we started to discuss what would the future of ESL look like. We were pretty sure it should not look exactly the way it had been looking. The look and feel of an ESL has been pretty much the same for the last 20 or 30 years. Thick plastic frame, some different sizes. You can virtually not tell if it's a Pricer or it's a label from a competitor. We know we wanted to do something differently. We have a legacy where we have been the best on the market to help our customers do savings, to address their operational cost and lower it.
That's our sweet spot. There's no one on the market that actually does it better right now. One area that I really wanted us to focus on is the shopper experience. Above all, how can we help our customers make more out of the ESL? How can we make them monetize from the ESL in a different way than just the efficiency? This was sort of a very key thing for the development of Pricer Avenue. How can we make the shelf a full merchandise space that they can either promote their own brand or where they can use it to promote a brand, other suppliers, and get paid for it? To date, there is no solution on the market that can actually do both until we launch Pricer Avenue. We had three fundamental principles.
We wanted to have a nice-looking design because we felt that we wanted to actually be able to recognize people to recognize this is a Pricer label, but we do not want to take the limelight away from our customer brand. It is important that you should see it is a Pricer, but you should still focus on the customer's message. We wanted this sign to be nice. The second thing, we wanted to have modularity. You should be able to grow with the system in a different way. You should be able to choose, should I have it battery-operated? Should it be light harvesting-operated? Should it be connected to the main grid or just a battery pack? That was another one. We had the sustainability. How can we make a solution that is more sustainable?
Also here that has been embedded in the entire concept of Pricer Avenue. We also see that there is more to come. With this form factor that we have done now, which used to actually variously frame around the ESL and put some other technology at the bottom, there is a lot of place for a lot of cool sensors that we can actually add. If you want to have a sensor that feels movement, if you want to have illumination so you can actually light up the products, or if you want to have a different protocol to communicate with the world, that can be easily fitted. It is adopted to make sure it is placed. The benefit of having this very small, thin frame is that if you slide two ESLs together, you can actually build something we call a floating canvas.
In fact, you can add as many ESLs as you like and make one large ESL out of it with one conveying message. We are looking at actually combined with this, we have communicated a totally different rail system as well, which you can actually light. You can communicate it and it actually carries power. We will be able to do communication on the rail. We will do it on the ESL. We are actually turning a dead shelf space into a full merchandise area. This is something when we presented it at the NRF show, all major grocery retailers immediately spotted saying, "Wow, you created a totally new way of communicating with our shoppers, but also allowing us to present our brand and our customers' brands or suppliers' brands." It is a totally new thing. We have received a massive customer interest.
We communicated that we are planning to do pilots in the third quarter this year with selected customers. There are quite a few that's now asked for a pilot and that we should be able to produce in factory or standard factories as of Q4 for deliveries. I will stay a little bit with Avenue. We had the NRF exhibition, and that's where we actually launched. We did a very different launch compared to the way we were launching products before. We basically kept all information close. There were very few people that had a complete picture on this. It was a massive launch at the NRF. There was a massive interest.
I can say out of all the years that I've been working with sales since basically since the 1990s, this is the launch and this is the event where I've had most positive feedback on a specific product ever. We had customers coming saying that this is fantastic. You are really positioned as the number one innovator on the market for ESLs. We had competitors coming saying that this is fantastic. Great. Well done. We had suppliers, we had partners, but there was a massive interest. We actually got a call from a Tier One retailer afterwards. We've had some interaction, but we haven't had any business.
He said, "This was by far the most interesting announcement and product on the entire event." He is asking now to meet with us to discuss with his technical team to say, "Can we do something jointly?" We presented some of our partnerships. We have changed the way we work with partners. We will work with very few ones. In this case, we have selected Visual Art that we have been working with before on digital signage and retail media. We have added Focal Systems, which is a leader within in-store AI and computer vision solutions. We are working much closer together with Google. Now we are available on their marketplace. Being available on the marketplace with Google does open a whole lot of doors, especially since Google helps us to actually open them.
What we want with these strategic partnerships is that when we add their premium solution, we add our premium solution. That one plus one should not be two equal to. It should be three or four or higher. We will actually work closely. We'll do a very deep integration on these partnerships to make sure it will be clearly customer value-adding. As part of our strategy work, we have also come to the conclusion that we will work much closer to customers on important markets. We will either go direct or have a very close direct touch model. One of the consequences you can see is that actually we are building our own team on the Nordic and Baltic markets now during spring. We see it's a market where we believe that we have the chance to increase ourselves compared to today.
We believe that we have the chance to increase our margin. Making this position now, making this change right now feels very good. Having said that, I think it's a little bit less marketing, a little bit more financials. Claes, over to you.
Yes. If we start to look to the left side, the order intake and the sales. The order intake has been very good the whole year. It is the strongest order intake ever. We are up 13%. When it comes to invoicing or net sales, we are a little bit down. This is mainly related to that we had a couple of big customers that were buying or where we were invoicing a lot in 2023. If we take that away, the growth of the rest of the companies or the customers has been very good.
If you look at the gross profit, we have had stable growth each quarter. This is due to better product mix, but also good procurement. If we go to the next slide, where we show the EBIT development rolling 12 months, this is the highest result ever in the company. All quarters have delivered a strong EBIT. We have now an operating margin of 7.4%. If we look at the next slide, which is the P&L, the margins are, as I said before, up a lot. It depends on, of course, the product mix, the customers, but also lower prices and good procurement. That combined with that our cost is down as much as SEK 73 million compared to last year and more than SEK 30 million the fourth quarter. Our result, both net and operating result, is up SEK 180 million.
If we go to the next slide and look at the cash flow and the cash iteration, we have a good cash position now after the new obligation. We also have the new bond. We also have a new trade facility set up with Nordea now in the beginning of this year. That is SEK 150 million. The cash flow has been affected that we took away the factoring we had last year. That has affected the cash flow with SEK 169 million. We have higher inventory now than we expected, and that is due to some pushed sales. I said that we do not expect the inventory to grow as much as the sales the coming year. I think that's the most important thing when we look at cash flow.
Thank you very much, Claes. Going forward, what are we focusing on?
We will clearly continue to focus on profitable growth. We have restored profitability. You can see it in the result of 2024. You can see it in all the quarters. We need to make sure we do it also with a clear growth of sales and net sales. I want to make sure that when we leave the year, that you can say that this has been work well done, also on the sales side. We want it to be profitable. Here, of course, the product mix will have a clear importance. I will cover it a little bit. We will win in choosing markets. There will be prioritized market segments. We have a very strong position in Canada. I would argue that with the announcement of Sobeys, if we're not number one yet, we will be number one this year.
It's focused on the U.S. We will invest in the U.S. market in additional resources to capture all the opportunities where we're currently in discussions, but also all the upcoming ones. We will invest in the U.K., and we will invest in some of the countries in Southern Europe. From a segment point of view, we will focus on our sweet spot. It's the hyper and supermarket. It's large pharmacies, especially North American ones. And it's a do-it-yourself. It's a market with enormous potential and where we see that our ability to win and our hit rate and our win rate is high. We are streamlining our efforts. Of course, if someone has a hard discount or someone with an electronics store want to buy from us, we will do it.
We are also looking very much now on how to, in a proactive way, face the customers we want to win. We will spend more time on that than we have done before. It has been very important to really look at the segments. We will spend more time on the sales organization and more money on the sales organization. We will look at moving from product to solution sales. That is something that is ongoing, but we will work more with it. We will move into the area now with 5,000 connected stores and more to come. We will move more into what is called by software companies as customer success, but also more on upsales to really make sure that we get as much money as possible out of existing customers. I do not want to leave any money on the table.
I think there's a lot of opportunity here to both get additional sales, but also to, of course, sell products with higher profitability. We will create a market-leading solution portfolio for in-store solutions. We will broaden our portfolio. Pricer Avenue will, of course, be a spearhead product. It's now positioned us as the most innovative on the market. We just launched the third-generation ESL and Pricer Avenue. We'll capitalize on that one. It gives us a lot of opportunities to look at merchandise, merchandise solutions, but also IoT solutions with the help of all the sensors that we can add. We will look on add-on plus applications. We will focus on the partnerships that we have announced. Of course, we will do more on our own R&D.
Also here, just like we're looking at making investments within sales, we are looking at making investments also on an R&D side to really make sure we capture the traction that we have on the market. Having said that, I would like to open for Q&A. We have Cecilia Vinell here facilitating. Cecilia, do we have any questions?
Yes, we do. First of all, can you comment on anything on the OpEx growth heading into 2025?
Claes, that one for you.
We do not make any forecast, but of course, there is inflation. We will increase our employees a little bit. We will have higher costs, of course, next year, but not any huge things.
I think maybe we can add that what we have done during the transformation is that we have changed the way we work.
There are a few processes that we've changed. We do not expect our OpEx to grow at the same pace as our net sales and profitability. We do not need to add people the same way to get the results that we want after the transformational work.
Thank you. There are a few questions on Pricer Avenue and recurring revenue. Will Pricer Avenue allow for a greater share of recurring revenue compared to our ordinary electronic shelf maintenance? Or is that more connected to the increase of price of Plaza?
I think that with the, it's a bit too early to say. It's something that, of course, we wish. It will definitely be generating more solution-related revenues and higher gross profit type solutions. I do believe that there is clearly a possibility to also increase the amount of recurring revenues. What we've done, we have launched a concept.
We plan to have it ready for pilots in Q3 and then deliveries in Q4. We are working on the operational models. We are in dialogue with several customers on what they want to get out of it, what are the benefits they see. Of course, that will also be leading in the way we do the commercial setup. It should be something where they make a lot of money and where we make a lot of money.
This is a question about us having the vision previously being retail's first choice. The person asking this question says that the competitors are growing faster. Can you comment on retail's first choice?
No, we felt that focusing on partnership was more relevant. Of course, we always want to be the first choice for any customer. We really wanted to elaborate on the partnership aspect.
We work in partnership with our customers. We work in partnership with our suppliers and other partners. I think that has shown now over the last years that has also been a really good way for us to win more when we look at what our customers think about it. We have done a customer survey. We had closer to 25 customers returning, both customers that we've lost and customers that we won. We got very, very good feedback. One of the things they really emphasized was our way of working and partnership mode.
Thank you. I know that in the quarterly report, in the CEO letter, you comment on a reseller StrongPoint. There are several questions on StrongPoint. Maybe you can comment a bit on that.
Yes. Is there any specific question I should start with or just start. Yes. Yeah.
We have had some over the last year. Our sales and StrongPoint had a lot of management meetings. I think we could say that none of us was very happy with the result of our partnership and the results of our partnership. I think that this was the expected way forward. We did not communicate on their announcement since from our point of view, it was actually not material, not from an order intake point of view, and it was not material from a net sales point of view. In addition, we do expect that all the Nordic and Baltic customers with the Pricer solution installed, they did select Pricer. We do expect that we will continue to serve them and we will continue to also sell to them.
We see a good future in the Nordic Baltic market, which is why we're actually now choosing to invest on our own.
Thank you. On that note, how do we see the U.K. and how do we plan to take market shares in the U.K.?
Just like before, I see U.K. like an extremely hot market. It's almost past the U.S. when it comes to number of engaged Tier 1 and Tier 2 retailers. I think that all Tier 1 retailers are in discussions. We are certainly speaking with a few of them or most of them. It seems like there are budgets in place. There are plans. Whereas in the U.S., it feels like the lead time is still a little bit longer, so we have time to capture that market.
I do believe that we'll see some bigger announcements on the U.K. market, in best case, towards the end of this year or in 2026. I think that we'll see one or two or three of the Tier 1s making decisions on how to proceed with digitizing the stores. I have a huge belief in the U.K., and this is why we will also invest more in the U.K. market.
There's a follow-up question on StrongPoint and Pricer building a new sales organization for the Nordics. Questions about the cost and when will it be up and running and the rationale behind this. I don't know if that's anything you can comment on.
I cannot comment on the timing or the cost more than we will actually start building the team in 2025. We're, of course, always mindful of cost.
We do what makes business sense. To us, it will make a whole lot of business sense to make this kind of investment. Time-wise, I think that after having had a fruitful partnership with StrongPoint, now it's time for us to go direct. It also feels good.
I think that what we can add there regarding StrongPoint, if we go direct to the customers, of course, we will have a margin on that. If we increase the sales organization, that's something that will be paid by itself with a margin.
Thank you. There's also a few questions on the U.S. and potential import of European goods from Europe. What would be the effect on prices and sales?
If there are tariffs?
Yes.
It's very hard to say, of course, since we don't know if there will be tariffs or not.
I would imagine like this. If there would be tariffs of, say, 10%, I am sure that the ROI that we show a customer will still be appealing enough for them to actually make an investment. They will still make good money. If it's 25%, it's hard to say. Above all, I think it's more about the uncertainty that tariffs could create. If there are tariffs on food stuff, it might actually mean that the retailers would have to discount food to make sure that they still get these sales volumes that they need. Of course, that could affect their ability to invest. We are producing in Vietnam, Thailand, Germany. We have competitors actually doing the manufacturing in some of these markets, but also depending on the Mexican market.
Depending on what tariff or if there will be a tariff on the Mexican market, that could, of course, have a huge impact also, which might or might not be to our benefit from a competitive point of view.
Thank you. On Pricer Avenue again and the gross margin. Is the gross margin on Pricer Avenue similar, higher, or lower than our normal ESLs?
We can put it like this. We intend to position it as a premium product. We are unlocking the ability to actually get the operational benefit, but also to get the benefits associated with actually selling merchandise space in the store, which is a very big spend and very big wallet at the retailers.
Another follow-up question on the U.S. Are you considering opening some production facilities in the U.S. due to Trump's decisions?
It could be an opportunity.
We haven't planned it yet, but yes, we are looking at the potential.
Here's a question on the advantages with Pricer systems. A potential customer, why would they choose Pricer system and not the Vusion system? What are the differentiations?
I think the key thing is the reaction time. Infrared light ensures a fast reaction time. There is no disturbance interference from a technical point of view also. We can simply, if we want the label to flash, we can make it flash within subseconds. Whereas from a radio solution, it would be harder to do it. It will not act the same way all the time. That's one. The other one is the battery life. Our sweet spot customers where we have a tendency to win is the stores with very high density, supermarket, hypermarket, do-it-yourself, to name three.
We also want to find the customer that wants to use the system. They should really embrace digitalization. We want them to do frequent price updates. We want them to do frequent template updates. They should have a Halloween template or an Easter template. They should work with campaigns. They should use the display a lot. They should use the label to direct the staff as well to actually use the flash to help them find the product when doing replenishment or picking online orders. That time saving, which could be from 5 to 30 seconds per pick, is a major case of the ROI model, which is why we actually are able to demonstrate really good ROI for our customers. This is also the key reason why we're able to sell at a higher price.
As I mentioned before, our target is that the instruction to Matsu, our Head of Commercial, is that we should, in average, always be 10% higher or more on the price side.
Thank you. Question on France. What are you expecting from customers in France this year?
We expect, of course, to continue to sell. I'm still quite certain that we are number one on the French market, so we have a lot of customers to serve. Focusing on selling more to existing customers, there are still a lot of stores actually without labels, but there are also a lot of stores that's moving into the need to actually buy new labels. We will look a lot, since we have such a large installed base, how can we work with upsells?
If I would say one priority area, I would say upsells, selling more to existing stores and making sure that as many as possible are connected. Every single connected store will have a very high value to us. It gives us the opportunity to get recurring revenues, but above all, also to do upsells. We see that there is a lot of interest for some of our partnerships with, for example, Focal Systems. I believe there will be some business there as well.
Thank you. You mentioned Southern Europe as one area of interest. Why South and not markets like Asia or India?
We see that on the Asian market, there is not really the kind of growth that we would be interested in. You might actually be able to do something in one country, but it is still comparably small. New Zealand, Australia is different.
I've called them the Pacific. For Asia in general, the volumes have been comparably low. We don't really see other competitors addressing those markets very aggressively or very actively either, possibly with the exception of Japan. India, it's a market with future potential, but right now, there's no commercial potential because to make the ROI work in an Indian store, the price of the ESLs would have to be much lower.
Thank you. Another Pricer Avenue question on batteries. One of our advantages is the long battery life, but if we remove batteries, are we not losing the competitive edge then?
I think with Pricer Avenue, we're gaining a competitive edge because actually we're presenting something new to the market that doesn't exist.
We can see that with the VusionGroup winner Walmart, that there is an acceptance for powered rails, whether we like it or not. Actually, we choose to embrace it, and we found a way of taking the rail and making it into something different. I spoke of modularity, so you can even start with battery if you like. We have actually built the Pricer Avenue ESL like a sushi. You have the display, it's very thin, and then you can connect it either directly to the rail and get power, or you have a small battery pack. If you actually choose the battery pack and then you want to increase the size of the display, you keep the battery pack and you just get a larger display, which is also then moving really well or working very well with the sustainability part.
No, I believe with Pricer Avenue, we did open a totally new potential revenue source, and we created a lot of interest. I think we managed to establish a competitive edge that competitors do not have yet. I might actually add that we have submitted a lot of patent applications from everything from the design to the way we do the communication to the way the rail system is working. Mechanics, software, the whole lot.
Thank you, Magnus, and thank you, Claes. These were all the questions.
Thank you very much. Thanks for everyone listening in to our quarterly presentation. I hope you found it interesting, and I do look forward to do the Q1 presentation later this year. Take care. Thank you very much.