Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Capital Markets Day, or the Capital Market Day of Pricer. Nice to see you here, and also the rest of you online. My name is Jonas Guldstrand. I've been on the board since 2017, and I'm standing in for Knut, our chairman that should have been here, but unfortunately got some medical problem and had to attend to it at once. Anyway, I hope we can have a really interesting day, and I'm sure we will. And why? Because we have a really interesting company on a very interesting market. And I believe that some of you have already seen our Q1, that we had a really big order intake, SEK 551 million for a Q1. It's great. We have a lot of new customers.
We have different customers than before: bigger, smaller, but also more width, well spread over the world. So it's stable. We are in a market, ESL, that used to be maybe only small, or actually replacing paper prices in the store. But today it's so much more. Of course, it still has that function, but the signs get bigger. They have colors. They can blink and actually then help to guide the clients. So you can actually sell more by getting attention. You can change the prices. There are funny stories about how some grocery stores change pretty often, and actually that helps them a lot. It also guides the personnel in the store to refill, and so it becomes more efficient. So put those two together: lower cost, higher revenues. Of course, it's interesting for a lot of branches in the world today.
This market is growing rapidly, and we are on it. We are one of the market leaders. We have a technique that is very hard to copy. The competitor's technique is not that hard to copy. We're in a very good position there. I believe we have a really strong development of position and opportunity. I don't know how many of you saw the press release earlier today that we actually published our financial goal. For 2026, we would like to make SEK 4.5 billion. We really believe that we can do that because the market is growing with this position. But also we will have a presentation later on, so I will not go in advance why we can do it. Magnus and his team will present later on.
But not only the headline there, but also that 10% should be recurrent revenue coming back. Not only if you have seen our revenue curve, you can see that it's fluctuating. It's going big orders. And therefore we are aiming to get more even cash flow on that one. So I don't know if I'm going to say more or if I just hand it over to you, Magnus. Yeah, I think so because I can feel that you're all eager to hear more.
Thank you very much, Jonas.
You don't need this one.
No, I have this one.
Thank you.
So thank you, Jonas. Thanks all for coming. So my name is Magnus. I'm the Acting CEO. I was about to say CFO, but that's you, Susanna. You're not acting. So I'm the Acting CEO since February, and together with the board and the management team, we have done a strategy update. So we spent now a couple of months actually working quite intensely together to see where are we today, where do we want to go, and we had this target of a Capital Market Day all the time and that we actually want to go out to the market and say that this is the way we see the market. This is what we believe that we are to grow, and these are the targets that we're achieving for. So this is what we'll present to you today.
It's the result of a pretty intense working with the management team. To make sure that during coffee for you, those of you here in Epicenter, but also for the Q&A session afterwards, we have the entire management team here. At this table, we have Mats, who is our newly appointed head of Europe. We have Jörgen, who is head of production and operations. We have Charles in charge of Americas region. We have Pierre, also newly appointed Head of APAC and Middle East, Africa. On this table, we have Susanna, CFO. We'll make some presentations. We have Cecilia helping out with all the communications, actually arranging this day. We have Chris, our CDO, who will make a presentation. Duncan, our CMO, will also present the market view.
So pretty much any question you have, if we cannot answer it here, then I have a problem, or we have a problem. I do expect that we'll be able to do everything. Looking on today's agenda, I will speak about the result of our strategy update. How is the market developing? What kind of value we are adding? And then concluding the actions that we take and the results that we will deliver. I will have a video on store operations done by Peter Öberg. How does it actually work? We have our Pricer Experience Store in the headquarters here in Stockholm. He will demonstrate a few of the use cases that our customers are utilizing the ESL and also the digital signage for. We will have then Sandeep Unni from Gartner. He will speak about retail trends. It's not only us.
He will speak more widely about what they see in their dialogue with retailers across the world, and he's one of the leading guys at Gartner when it comes to retail tech, then Duncan will speak about the market trend. We will have Chris speak about our products after a coffee break. Susanna, she will do the financial update, and then I will do the summary, and after the summary, we will have Rob van Dal, who is head of store operations at PLUS, speak about it, and there will actually be a video from a PLUS store where they show exactly how they work, why they selected Pricer, what is the benefit they see of actually doing a store digitalization, so that's the agenda, and after this one, we have as much time as you like for the Q&A. I guess we need to leave by midnight.
So I want you to start by picturing the future of retail. I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I've spoken a lot with these guys. And what exactly is it that shoppers want? And what is it that retailers want? So if you spend just 10, 15 seconds and you think about it, how do you see the future shopping? I don't know if you see flying cars and flying shopping baskets. I've had a wild imagination since I've seen it. But when I think about it, I think that I imagine the physical store as the key place for shopping and almost like an arena for an exceptional customer experience where the retailer is actually fulfilling the brand promise, where the shopper feels that I go to this place, it's easy. Whatever I want to buy, I have a lot of things in my mind.
It will be available in the store. There will be apps and applications that will actually make them find what they want in the store and the places they expect them. When they come to the store shelf, the product will actually be available. It's not out of stock. They go to the cash point and the payment is easy. I also imagine that there will be a place where they want to be excited. There needs to be things happening in the store. They want to get inspired. When they actually leave the store, they feel, "I got whatever I wanted to have out of the store. If I wanted low cost, I got low cost. If I wanted premium experience, I got the premium experience. Or the specialty, I got the specialty," but also that they felt that they got something more.
They got inspired, and maybe they came back with a new recipe and ingredients for something new to do. Maybe they found something else. And when standing outside, they feel that maybe they don't want to return immediately, but they know that they will definitely go back to the same store because this is where they feel that they get the most value for the money and that they feel that this was a really fantastic customer experience. So that's what I imagine the future of the retail and the future for the shopper. So then the question is, where are we in this equation? What are we bringing? I think from the value we need to bring, we need to make sure that the shopper in the store, that they feel that it's worthwhile spending the time there, they get what they want.
And at the end of the day, when they leave the store, that they feel that this was really good, this was a good experience, that they feel happy and they feel that this was great. It doesn't have to be like super fantastic, but at least they should feel that this was a good experience. And that experience should actually be better than buying online or buying anywhere else. But if I'm the store owner, of course, I want to make sure that my staff spend time doing the right things, that I have an effective organization where I know that hopefully the mundane tasks are away so my staff can spend time with the customers to direct them, to guide them, to help them. I think this was very nicely done at Best Buy as an example.
And of course, with doing this, they will reduce the cost of the operation. And this is something we have done for a long time. We've been helping retailers to lower the cost and make their work more effective and make sure that the staff are doing things that are more value-adding. But we also want to make sure, and the retailer, of course, also wants to make sure that the shopper, when they're in the store, that they spend more money, they fill their basket with more product to make sure that there will be higher revenue and more profit per customer. But of course, it should not be intrusive. It should be in a way that they feel that there's a true value and that they like it. They're happy when they leave. So I think this is the combination.
The future of shopping has to be the physical store as a place where you get a good experience. There will be a good cost level, and it will be a place for the retailer to actually fulfill the brand promise. Whatever they want to market, they should be able to fulfill it. And we will help them, and we will enable this. And of course, also that they get to shop it to stay in the store, that they get to shop it to spend maybe more than they planned, preferably, so we will do this through enabling a lot of the things happening in the store. Anything from price changes, anything from directing the customer to the right place in the store where they will find the product they're looking for.
We will enable them to make sure that the store is filled and the shelf is not empty when they come there, and should it be empty, that there's actually a direction to an alternative product that they will buy to make sure that they stay. That it's easy to replenish, it's easy to do online orders and fulfill online orders, but also that you can do promotion, that you can do advertisement to increase sales, so regardless of what kind of task you have in the store, our technology is there to enable them, and the way we define this is we speak about in-store communication. You probably saw it in the Q1 report in some of the other communication we've done, and we believe that the enablement we will do is that we will enable any kind of communication across any screen.
It could be the ESLs, our electronic shelf labels, but it could also be a TV with promotions for the store or for one of the suppliers. It could be on a LED strip, or it could be on any kind of screen. It could even be on a smartwatch where we actually want to help direct their staff to do tasks. And this enabling part will be the key thing. This is what we help them. This is what we make them make the money, get the additional sales, and get the customer satisfaction up. And when we were at EuroCIS, one of the big retail shows last week, this is a theme that you can see in quite many places, but I think no one is better equipped to actually fulfill this than us. And our focus is really the core. It's the fulfillment part.
We will enable our customers to be successful and the shoppers to have a good experience in the store. So what are the use cases? Now Peter will do a short video and present it.
Hello, and welcome to the Pricer Experience Store here in the Pricer HQ, Stockholm, Sweden. I will be walking you through some of the use cases which provide value to our retailers around the world and enable a very fast return on investment. The original idea behind electronic shelf labels was to replace the use of paper labels throughout the world, where we would manually change all of the labels with the stores whenever we would have a change in price. Today, with our cloud-based Pricer Plaza solution, we are able to instantaneously change the price of our products for our retailers on one store or all stores throughout the chain. This enables our customers to have less problems with incorrect pricing. They have a larger productivity for all the workers, and we enable very fast or instantaneous changes of price.
Another functionality that has seen a lot of use is the use of the LED flash within our product. This enables the employees to be guided by our flash in the store to find the products that are placed with an online order. When they scan the product, the LED flash will stop, and the next product to be picked will start flashing. With this technology, we can see a very fast picking speed on the retail stores. And the interest for this functionality has improved quite a lot with the advent of COVID and the change in shopping behavior throughout the world, moving more towards online shopping. The LED flash is also used for replenishment. Imagine, for example, a DIY store with screws, where the only difference is packaging. It's just minor details of the articles.
By scanning the barcode, the ESL will start flashing, and the employee will be able to restock the shelves in no time. Not only is this a huge time saver, but we're also ensuring that the correct product is placed in the correct position on the shelf. The latest addition to the Pricer portfolio is content on all types of screens. Digital signage creates an enhanced customer experience and real business value for any type of store. With a dynamic system, content can be created for any types of screens, and the content can consist of local promotions or central campaigns, or why not an inspiring recipe at the correct location in the store.
So what are we doing then to enabling the future? And this has started to be some of the bulk of the strategy work that we did. We will continue to provide retail-grade appliances. To do a shelf label is about building something that should last in an environment that is pretty harsh. There's a lot of people, a lot of traffic, a lot of interest. There might be bumps and drops. And we also want to make sure that we have something that will help the retailers. If you want to flash to say, "Hello, I'm here, come and deliver something or pick me," it has to be sub-second. If you want to do it, you want to know that you can do it and price update immediately. You don't want to wait. You want to know that you actually managed to do the update.
You want to make sure that it will last. If you place a shelf label run on battery, it should last for a long time, for a very long time. Yet you should give the possibility to retailers to actually use it actively. We want them to use it as much as possible. We want them to update the displays, pricing information on stock, information on the product, whatever it might be. We want them to flash it, to use it for picking, for promotion, for highlighting. It should be all the time. And then it has to be retail-grade. It has to be something that is built to last. And also here, I feel that our product is the best on the market due to some of the choices that we've done. If we install it, it will work, and it will work for a long time.
That's why our customers select us. We will also base what we do on cloud-based software. It could be just cloud-based software that we work with our customers, or it could be as a SaaS solution. Of course, we prefer a SaaS solution where we get the recurring revenue. We have historically done primarily hardware sales. As you could see from the financial figure announcement when we speak about recurring revenue, we will now gradually start moving from hardware only into something that is recurring, more software-based and cloud-based. I want to be able to give our customers. We want our customers to be able to enable, disable functionality, whatever it might be, with the help of the software. Then we have this great infrastructure in place, the ESLs and the displays. We believe that the future is technology-agnostic.
We are in a unique position as Pricer to actually be able to offer the customer the best potential or possible technology based on use cases. If you have a store, a big store where you have a lot of products, and you want to make sure when I update the price, it's updated. When I want to flash it, it starts flashing immediately because I want my pickers to find it as soon as possible. Whatever you need, it has to be available, and then it requires a certain kind of technology. We have been using IR. In other solutions, if you do outdoor, that will require a different kind of technologies. When we work with our cameras and Shelf Vision that you will see later, it's another combination. It's a combination of different kinds of technologies.
Today, we are really the only vendor in town that can actually do this. This will be a requirement. If you want to be successful with the retailers of the future, we have to be able to give them this freedom. We have to enable this. This is a benefit we have that no one can actually match right now. It might sound like I'm full of myself, and to a certain sense, I am sort of full of what we do because I do believe in it. I think we will do it better than anyone else. The fourth point is partnership. We need to work in partnership. It will be a really important point. With our customers, we spend a lot of time with them. We advise them. We guide them. We discuss in transparency.
When we speak about how they use it, we want to engage. We want to discuss, "What are you doing? How will you do it? This is what you will get out of it." This is why we win large contracts, and these gentlemen here will be able to say that this is actually one of the reasons why customers place their trust in us, because they know that what we say will happen and that we actually work in a transparent way. We work in partnership, but we also do it with our suppliers. Equally important, we do it with ecosystem partners. We believe that the future of retail is of cooperation.
We do the enabled part, but there are many other different parts where we should probably not engage, at least at not this point of time, because we know there are other people that will do it well. We give the freedom to the customer to choose and build the setup that they want. And of course, we work through retailers. Our strategy is direct sales. It's partnership sales, reseller sales. It's depending on the market. Once again, it will have to be Pierre, Charles, and Mats and their teams, of course, and our customers to say, "How should we address the market?" We see that there is a clear value in working with resellers as well. Now there will be one more video. I certainly hope that it will be working. It's Sandeep.
If it's not work, Peter, we can call and ask him to come, but he cannot bring the Experience Store. Sandeep is on a flight, so it will be more difficult, so I'll keep my fingers crossed.
All right. Hello, everyone. Thank you for having me on today. My apologies. I couldn't be there in person or even live virtually, but we thought we'd get a bit creative and pull together a quick recording where I wanted to take the opportunity for the next 15, 20 minutes or so to give you a view of some of the key trends and themes that we are hearing from the retail industry. In particular, I'll spend some time on the ones that I think are in the intersection of your product portfolio and how you can think about evolving your value proposition going forward. So just to kick it off, as we all know, the last 24 months have been grueling for the retail industry. It should be no surprise to this audience that as an industry, retail has had a widespread and profound impact from the global pandemic.
And even as the industry is slowly emerging from its aftermath, we are now navigating historical macroeconomic headwinds that most retailers likely have never faced in unison, whether it be the historical inflation rates, supply constraints and volatility due to war and lockdowns, unprecedented labor shortages, and so on. So the question is, how do they become agile in facing future threats and disruptions in a resilient manner? And the answer is pretty simple in that to do so, they must change. And I'm not talking about just pruning and tweaking of existing technology or processes or business models, but really more wholesale, root and branch type reform, really to the extent of initiating internal disruption, I should say, proactively to make those structural changes needed for retail businesses.
Now, with that backdrop, what you see in this slide here are some key retail trends that we have categorized by four key industry functional themes that also align with major core topics covered in Gartner's retail research agenda. Now, I won't go through them line by line, but you see, for example, even traditionally untouchable domains such as merchandising are realizing the need to go through a once-in-a-lifetime transformation to move towards consumer behavior hierarchy models rather than the traditional product hierarchies. The transformation of the store, whether it be through the empowerment of frontline workers or as an intelligent hub for unified commerce execution through in-store automation for operational efficiency, through the rise of scale of store-based fulfillment, all of these are already well in flight and really beginning to drive a much-needed refocus on margin and operational performance metrics.
We'll be spending more time on these store-specific themes in upcoming slides. Unified commerce is now the number one modern retail strategy. The reason is that it allows retailers to keep pace with new and emerging consumer expectations and provide the consumer with the continuous experience as they browse, transact, acquire, and consume, regardless of touchpoints. We know that consumers expect a unified experience as they cross between online and offline and expect their shopping experience to serve them whenever and wherever they desire. For the last several years, retailers have been slow to adapt to this approach, partly due to the complexity and the high cost of implementations involved.
The problem has been that traditionally, most multi-channel retailers have separate systems developed for each channel that often duplicated cost centers, whether it be inventory management or consumer data, ERP, and other back-office systems, order management, e-commerce, point of sale. All these systems are usually not well integrated with each other. What that did was it created data silos gathering redundant data, limited data as these core systems were not able to communicate with each other. We think that to successfully deliver unified commerce, retailers need to build interconnected systems driven by the need to create that unified approach I described in their business architecture. That unification is not just about a unified front-end, the consumer-facing systems and technologies that can deliver one view of the customer.
I think it's equally important that there is a unified back-end as well that retailers must invest in that now can deliver that one view of the retailer, so if there's one thing that the pandemic has revealed, it is how incredibly reliant both retailers and consumers are on the work of store associates and how important they are in servicing consumers safely as well as effectively. The ability to perform work duties in a flexible manner and deliver excellent customer experiences are now a critical competitive differentiator more than ever, and in reality, in many instances, associates simply don't have the technology or information necessary to quickly pivot and operate successfully, and not only does this contribute to a poor consumer experience, it also generates a less attractive work environment for high-quality associates who, frankly, expect to have the tools and information necessary to do their jobs well.
So I think to support store associates, retailers can and should utilize the power of edge computing in the store. And let me explain why. Edge computing enables near real-time observations that can improve a lot of the centralized processes currently and allows these associates insights into both customer actions as well as inventory status at the store location level. Now, why is that important? And really, that's because the power is now shifting from traditional headquarters processes to the physical store in multi-channel retailing. And there's an urgent need for improvements in both labor and inventory management to support that execution of unified commerce from the store. And what that means is retailers are now really fast-tracking implementations in a number of AI and automation technologies to enable store associates to perform more intelligent store execution.
Think about technologies like RFID or computer vision or electronic shelf labels, smart shelves, robotics, mobile, where the compute and processing are increasingly moving to the store edge, which will augment and support the store associate. Now, speaking of automation, of course, it's played a significant role for retailers over the past several years, spanning from automated warehouse operations to software, pricing, even payments. However, more recently, what we are seeing is retailers are viewing in-store automation as a means to really sort of reshape their business model and overall value chain, and not only is it done to increase profitability and operational efficiency and also to improve data insights through automation in the store, we're also seeing this happening with a view to driving more experiences both for associates as well as for the consumers.
Three primary use cases and technology have emerged in the last 12 months or so. The first one is in the area of smart checkout. We're seeing that smart checkout implementations continue to expand. Retailers are offering customers a quick and convenient experience, especially implementations in the small-format grocery store or convenience segments and so on. The next one is store-based micro-fulfillment centers or MFCs, which has really been fueled by that online commerce activity, which has really created unprecedented demand for execution of unified commerce fulfillment through BOPIS or curbside processes in the store. A semi-automated store-based MFC has the potential to quickly scale up the profitability of fulfillment and picking processes compared to the incumbent, which is often manual, labor-intensive store or warehouse models.
And then lastly, smart shelves, where I view electronic shelf labels to be part of, is really underpinning the overall store digitalization initiatives for retailers and significantly improving automated execution and efficiency in a number of store activities like out-of-stock replenishment or pricing execution or online fulfillment, inventory management, and so on. And then this leads into the need for the excellence in fulfillment operations across the retailer's physical and digital assets by utilizing real-time analysis and reconfiguration of their inventory, their labor, as well as processes. And it's really become a top retailer priority. I mean, this is something I hear recurrently in my discussions with retailers. Something I think we've all experienced as consumers. We have Gartner research from 2021, for example, that showed that nearly 57% of retailers highlighted BOPIS as the most important fulfillment method they're employing for digital commerce.
U.S. retailers like Target have taken it a step further, and they've really exemplified the strength in store-based fulfillment execution. They're fulfilling over 95% of their overall sales from its stores. We expect this trend to remain sticky, necessitating retailers to really profitably scale their fulfillment execution processes, often through AI and automation technology. Now, the problem is that several studies have shown that stores generally have much lower inventory accuracy rates. It hovers anywhere from 65%-70% to under 90% compared to a warehouse or distribution center, which often has 99% plus accuracy. The cost of in-store picking also tends to be much higher. It's typically one and a half to two times higher than picking from DCs or fulfillment centers for a majority of retailers.
To combat this, retailers must continue to reassess and really redesign their physical locations and incorporate technologies for improved store inventory visibility through automation. Now, I wanted to bring this full circle and wrap up today's session with a couple of next steps recommendations that, as a leading provider, you should perhaps consider taking with retailers as they're evaluating technologies like smart shelves. Traditionally, when it comes to smart shelf and ESL solutions, as you well know, it was all about pricing execution and bottom-line-driven business case, where clearly, I think we're seeing the narrative shifting now for smart shelves to be more of a strategic technology that underpins a store digitalization and transformation initiative for retailers.
I think it's critical to provide retailers with that phased roadmap view, that deployment plan, where they have a line of sight to multiple use cases in the store where the solution can now add incremental value. Secondly, we still hear about concerns of CapEx from retailers that's still considered a barrier when it comes to adoption. And my view is that one of the reasons for this caused concerns is probably a lack of a comprehensive business case that's enabling retailers to see the value and help them justify implementation. I think that as the vendor partner, it's important to quantify a variety of benefits that your solutions can provide, as well as provide flexibility in pricing models through subscription pricing or leasing models or other such OpEx-based models that can lower that barrier of entry for retailers.
Then lastly, I see a huge potential for the convergence of ESL solutions with computer vision tech as well as digitalized shelf edge for contextualized display-based advertising and consumer engagement. So the question is, how can you capitalize on this opportunity to build your Shelf Vision portfolio by engaging with your retail clients to identify and prioritize those CV-enabled use cases, whether it be on the shelf or across the retail store, to augment the traditional ESL solutions and really expand your value proposition as a strategic store digitalization partner for your retailer. And with that, I wanted to thank you once again for the time and opportunity. I hope this was helpful, and I wish you the best. Take care.
Speaking about the view on retail tech from Gartner.
So then, of course, we as a company and as a management team, we need to condense this into what do we believe, and those will be my next slides, so clearly, Gartner, they see a growth. They see a need for the in-store digitalization. You heard Sandeep speak about computer vision. Chris will speak about that one as well. We speak about doing commercials and then advertisements. Yes, we will speak about the signage part, which will be an important part, and of course, he said that the ESL business is fundamental. Electronic shelf label is fundamental in this entire process, so I will first speak now about the market trend that we see and then about the market events or triggering points.
What we can see now is that more and more of the customers we speak with, the big retailers, they are moving ahead with store digitalization. They might be done with it. They want to make sure they look at the way they do the logistics part. They look at the way they do the system. They look at the way they work with the point of sales, how they work with PDAs. They work with everything. And as they do this, as they focus on how to be more efficient in the store, we know that the dialogue will come to us or they need someone that will actually be able to do what we do to help out with the in-store communication. Because at one point of time, they need to communicate with the staff, with the shoppers, and also with the brands.
So here we can see that in many markets, this has been done. Netherlands is a good example. We know that a few years ago, this started, and now we can see that pretty much all big retailers, they actually have an ESL system deployed or are busy deploying it. We see other markets where it's just in the starting point. They know they've done it. They made the initial steps. They might have done all the steps in other fields. The next step is actually moving ahead with the products and solutions that we can provide. In some markets, they have not yet started, and those remain into the future. Addressable market, not now. Maybe not in two years, maybe not in three years, but they will come. Another thing we see is the convergence between electronic shelf labels and digital signage.
We haven't spoken about digital signage before, not very much. We have had some products before. Now we have a portfolio. Digital signage is basically the ability to do promotions, advertisement on any kind of screen in a store. If you go to a store today, if you go to ICA today, you see that the point of sale, they have a store TV on a Maxi store. Good example of digital signage. It could be on the racetrack, on one of the corners, you will see a screen showing a promotion for something. It could be that you see a LED strip with some videos and then a promotion for a product. This is happening, and we can see that the convergence is happening right now. We see an increased demand, a very high demand now from both new customers saying, "Can you offer this one?
This is something we absolutely need." Because they now see that with the help of the modernization and digitalization that they've done, that they want to address both the efficiency part and actually informing the customers through the ESLs, but also that they want to be able to sell advertisement, want to utilize the fact that they have a lot of people in the store, want to build on the relationship with the consumer packaged goods providers, and now the systems are converging. From a digital signage point of view, historically, I mean, these companies, they come from maybe marketing. They come from retail background.
They are good in conveying this story to tell the retailers, "If I put this video here, if I put this sign here, this is the return you will get in sales." But they have not had the relationship maybe with the store IT in the same way, so just getting access to the and the pricing has been a challenge. We have that access, and that's what retailers realize. I had a meeting last week with the CDO of a pretty big retailer, and we spoke about a strategy. I gave him a hint on what we're doing on the product side, and he said, "We're doing this right now.
This is something we see as a massive investment, and you should absolutely be part of these discussions." Because when we come and we say that we, as one of few, as the only one that actually have the full merge of these two different kinds of products into one solution, and we also have the capability to help out through different kinds of partnerships with the content creation and discussing content with the marketing people, with the business people in retailer, that's extremely appealing. So we give them both the knowledge and understanding of the marketing side, but also the IT and the store operation side. So what we bring is something truly unique. It's not only about putting just a picture on a screen. It's about the way you do it and the message you convey and the way you sell it to the retailer.
What exactly will they get out of this one? And then to have everything integrated in the same system is, of course, a key thing for them. Insights into action. Just like an online store where they monitor every step you take on Amazon or anywhere else. They know exactly what you've been looking at, what you put back, and what you had in your shopping basket. They pretty much know everything. That's something that retailers in the physical store would like to achieve as well. And we believe that we should help them with the right kind of insights. If we take the Shelf Vision camera, where we have a camera mounted on a shelf, we do the Gap Detection. We want to tell them that with the highest certainty in the market, we will tell you if you have a gap or not a gap.
And we will do it immediately. And we will send you an alarm that you can take the right kind of action to rectify it and make sure you replenish or you change the facings or you decide to promote another product. But we should make sure that we enable this one. And we give them with the highest accuracy on the market this information. So that would be the insight. There is a gap into action that they would do. And here we can see that there are a lot of dialogues with many customers. I think in all markets now, what they're asking about, we have one big retailer in one country said that we've been thinking about ESL, but we haven't decided yet.
But if now combining your Shelf Vision camera with ESL, if we can get the accuracy up with the help of your ESLs, we will do it, no doubt. So here, I think the combination has been also something that makes them think that they know they want this information. Because what do they want to do with it? If there is not a product on the shelf, they know that the shopper might actually leave the store. In worst case, they will never return because they found another store that they like better. So they want to make sure they keep the shopper in the store for as long as possible, and they make sure they get what they want. And that's where they see the benefit of having our solution. And then another trend is, of course, cloud and SaaS. It's been growing quite fast.
I think most customers now, I guess I'm right, are asking for a SaaS solution or a cloud solution and not a PC somewhere in the basement of the store. So I mean, these are some of the four key trends that we see. And this is happening. This is now. If we then look at the events, so what is triggering? So if we have all this, why should I actually make the investment in a solution from Pricer now? I put this one here, very much thanks to you, Charles. You were actually one that made me see the importance of the four-color ESL. It's a market-changing event. It might sound silly adding one more color because we do three colors. Now we add one more.
But actually, what it means is that we enable retailers to do proper promotion in many other markets in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and probably several other markets. If you want to do promotion, if you want to do it in a grocery store, you need yellow, and you need red, and you need it combined. And this is something that's now available on the market. This is something we're now producing. And actually, we're way better than anyone else on the market to do it because it requires a lot of power. In our solution, we are the most energy-efficient one. So unlike maybe a competition that can actually use it as a promotion ESL or shelf label, I want to be quite careful where to place them. We can sell them and say, "This is a generic standard ESL.
You should use them as much as you like." Because we know that with the power we bring them, they can actually use it. They will be able to do their promotions, and they will be successful. But above all, it's opening the market. In the go-to-market plan that we'll present, the SEK 4.5 billion, that we'll do 2025, not 2026, 2025, 4.5 million. We see that some of these markets, U.S. market as an example, is being unlocked by four-color. We are having pilots now with big retail chains where they say that this has been one of the things that have stopped them from doing ESLs before. It's not that they haven't had the possibility or the need for it, but without four-color, it's not been interesting enough. And that is now changing. So that's a trigger point. Staff availability is another trigger point. It's been difficult.
In certain markets, almost impossible to find staff. The salaries for the staff, if you find them, have been increasing, and once again, on the U.S. market, you go to a restaurant, you see staff wanted. You go to a store, you see staff wanted. You go to a Walmart, and you will just realize there's only a few of the tills open because they do not have enough staff, and there will be long lines of shoppers with the trolleys to actually leave the store. But there is no staff that will actually be able to take the payment, so here, we are actually able to solve this problem. We are able to help them to actually take some of the basic administration and make sure that they don't need as many staff to do this work. Clearly, something that's also pushing for the use of our technology.
Inflation, I mean, I really hope it's not a trend. I hope it's an event, and it will stay an event, and it will gradually pass sooner the better, but we can see that this has been a clear trigger, and I think I've communicated this before. We see with some of the store chains that we work in, especially with the independent store owners, the entrepreneurs that are with a specific brand, but they operate the store so they don't have to wait for the big retailer to make their decision, that the sales increase has been immense. If they have the money, they will do it. With the amount of price changes they have to do right now, some of them say to us that, "I have no option. I would, of course, like to have a payback," and we do give them a payback.
But they say, "Right now, I'm sort of without option because it takes too much time to print the paper, put it on the shelf, then we forget something, and there will be the wrong price, and it will be the hassle to the customer." And they say, "We simply cannot manage." So without mentioning any names, I can see that we see at least two different chains in two different countries where the independent stores, the entrepreneurs, they placed almost double as many orders this year until today than they did for the entire last year. So it's a very clear trend. We also hear the big retailers that said that, "Yes, we believe in ESL. We will do it. We are looking at the right time." Now we get the feedback, "The right time is now." They tell us that we have to now start.
Then I don't know if this is a good title, but I somehow like it anyway. First mover marketing mission. What we see, I mentioned Netherlands. And Netherlands 2018 had pretty much no ESL coverage at all. There were people that bought it. There were stores with ESLs, but there were quite few. Then in 2019, we had the Ahold Group that decided to do nationwide in Netherlands. We will do ESL. 2020, then PLUS decided to follow. 2021, Jumbo decided to follow. And now PLUS is also doing the Coop stores. So all of a sudden, it went from pretty much no market penetration at all to very high market penetration in just three years. And what we've seen is when you have a key retailer in a specific market, when they decide to do the first deployment, all of a sudden, they ignite the market.
And then we see that the rest will follow because they realize they cannot lag behind. They have to do it. And we see that we are in the tipping point in many markets now. We see that we've passed the tipping point and that interest and the ambition to actually deploy something is now growing quite fast. Also very important for the figure that we are presenting and the underlying data on this go-to-market plan. So combining the trends and the events, we see that the growth of the market is accelerating. And we believe that the combination of the trends and the events is actually the driver behind decisions to invest now, next year, year after, and for the coming couple of years, or coming five years or more. Now we've done the plan for until 2025. But in our go-to-market plan, we actually look longer.
We see continued growth. We see that major markets with a very low degree of coverage and low degree of store digitalization, they are now reaching the event horizon for those interested in black holes. It's the point where the gravity is so strong that the light cannot escape. So we're reaching that point where they have no choice. They will have to do retail tech. They have to digitize, and they have to get the ESLs in place, so think about that. We are reaching the event horizon in some of these markets. I've been told I cannot say a lot of superlatives to describe the growth I see in this market, and I probably should avoid it, but we see that there is a huge opportunity.
I also think, and we think that the merger of the ESL or the convergence of ESL and digital signage will be a key thing. There are two really big markets that will create a very big market. We think that we are very well placed to actually address this market. It's now. My final slide before I hand over to Duncan. Are you getting tired yet? Should I continue? I guess I continue. What are we doing to capture this market? To make sure we can actually reach the SEK 4.5 billion 2025, to make sure we do a 10% recurring revenue. From a Pricer point of view, these are pretty bold targets. Of course, we stand there with confidence to tell them we have done our plans. We spent a lot of time, of course. We've been doing the product strategy.
What are the products that customers need, and how should we deliver them? We've been discussing from a production and operation side, can we do this? Yes, we can. We have spent a lot of time doing the go-to-market plan where we look at the sales, how we engage the market, how do we believe that the market's addressing. We're speaking with the likes of Gartner. We've done a lot of internal discussion. We've been doing models, and we will reach this target. The first thing we're doing is that we're strengthening sales. We are creating three strong regions as of July 1st. Charles has been driving the Americas region for quite some time, and now he got the company of Mats and Pierre. So July 1st, we'll have this organization in place. Focus where we will invest further to make sure we actually reach the numbers required.
We will increase the agility also of the service delivery and the development of products. We have done a lot of good work, but I want it to be a little bit faster, and I want to make sure we get more interesting products out in a faster way because we have the capability, so what we will do is we will establish what I call edge sites, so we will run development and services out of the headquarters organization, but we will see we will add then site offices, additional sites for Pricer where we will have people then working with this one, so we're investigating right now on which markets we will actually have those, but this is something that will happen. With the volume comes the requirement to actually do cost-effective production.
So we, of course, believe that supply leadership is a key thing, and that's what we strive for, to make sure we produce in a smart way. And you've seen the announcement that we're now building a factory together with Zollner down in Bavaria. It will be up and running in Q4. Right, Jörgen?
Yes.
Yes. And what we have here is a cookie-cutter model where we actually own the IPR or we own the production facilities. We can take this and we can place it in a market of choice. Of course, it does take time. But we see that the way that things are developing, this is a very appealing thought, and it's something that would be appreciated by our customers. It gives us, of course, a lower cost because it's automated.
It's not fully automated because we still require less than a handful of people, but we do not require 100 people. It's a factory that can run 24/7. It takes down the lead times. Since we're actually available in the market, sure, we still need to have the components, but when we're done with production, it's addressable. It's available for the near market in Europe, or it could be in the U.S., or it could be elsewhere. And of course, it will also reduce the carbon footprint instead of flying ESLs or taking them by boat. It will be much shorter distances that they will have to travel to the customer. We will also look at new business models because, of course, moving into a 10% recurring revenue target will require a lot of work from our side.
So here, the focus is, of course, making sure that all Pricer customers, that they have recurring revenue set up where they actually use the Plaza SaaS product from our point of view, that we add new appealing services both within the Plaza framework, but it's signage, the Shelf Vision camera, and new products as well, that we also are open to cooperating with third parties to make sure that we can offer their services within the framework of Plaza, like App Store or Pricer Mall is the name we've used. And of course, this way, we will increase the flexibility. I want to have models where we do the subscription model, but it could also be consumption-based. So we tell them that this is what you did. We know based on the discussions we've had, this is actually the subscription. It will include this much.
But if you want to do more, you want to update your display or your prices 10 times a day, well, maybe then you pay per update. If you want to do specific promotion, maybe you pay per time you use it for promotion. So we need to build it, and we are actually looking into how this is done. It's part of the development. But to make sure that we have a business model that would allow this because it will be very clear for the customers that they can link it to their success in sales and to the utilization. So these are the key activities. And when it comes to communication, I will repeat it in the summary, but we will continue to communicate.
And we will follow up on the actions and where we are with these things you see here, how we will sell more, how we will work with the agility to increase it and get the throughput up with the supply, and how we will work with the business model. So I think this is the starting point of a long and interesting journey. So having said that, I will hand over to Duncan. Is it coffee time now, or is it Duncan time? Duncan time.
Thank you, guys. Sir? Thank you. Thank you very much, Magnus. As it says, my name is Duncan Potter. I haven't spoken to many of you in the past. Hopefully, I'll get to do that many times in the future. So what I'd like to cover now is what is actually the market for ESLs? So how is it developed? What's been going on?
And then how do we actually think about this in the future? And where do we think about this kind of thing in the future? So the ESLs have been around for a very long time. They're actually about a 30-year-old technology. From our perspective, the company was founded in 1991, as many of you know. And they've now started to become something that provides not just price management, but a huge range of services for retailers, for customers. And with computer vision, or what we call Shelf Vision, actually potentially starting to actually provide services for brands as well. So these are the brands that are represented in the stores. There is a lot of money that flows from the brand to the retailer to make sure that they get preferential positioning, this kind of stuff.
But now we're actually in the position to be able to provide services to them as well. There have been many, many waves of adoption. One of the challenges that we have all the time is going back and actually saying, "Okay, well, these are not your parent's ESLs. These are new. These are very different in the services that you can use with them." And that's why when Sandeep is talking about how it is that you need to discuss this, we talk about use cases all of the time. And hopefully, eventually, you'll get to see the video from Peter, which actually shows you a few of the use cases.
But one of the things that you will see with the video from Rob van Dal at PLUS that we'll show later on is he actually lists off a lot of the use cases that PLUS practically use all these things for. And you may have seen some of the videos that we've put out from Carrefour, from people like Système U in France, and from many others about how they actually use this. This isn't just about pricing anymore. This is about really making stores very efficient and, when combined with display, really about some very exciting concepts around consumer engagement. We've had many, many trials over the last 30 years. Some of them have been successful. Some of them have been implemented. Some of them have been taken out again.
Part of that is because it really didn't meet the number of use cases. We're now very confident that we're actually starting to see that point where those use cases are having a fundamental effect. It's really moved the payback period from sort of a four- to five-year payback period down underneath about two years in many cases because of the efficiency, the gains that we can see. What that means is that's the kind of where people actually start to see gains very quickly. Combined with the longer battery life that we have within the product, a much more effective business case. Now, you'll hear me talking about ESLs, and I just wanted to note this. During some of the other presentations, we will refer to them as labels and displays.
I'm talking about ESLs here specifically because Electronic Shelf Label is the way that these products are described in the standard market measurement from people like Gartner, Forrester, and others. So that's why you'll actually see that I'm using that term. Okay. So where are the ESLs installed now? We've been selling these for many years. So where are they actually mostly installed? So I'm not sure if you can read this, but this bar here, this is France. France is absolutely the leading country for the deployment of ESLs, and they have been for really about the past 20-25 years. And there are many reasons for that, which I'll go into a little bit later. But France has dominated this space.
And now what we've started to see is that Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, and New Zealand have also seen widespread adoption, and they're starting to get to a point of fairly high or reasonably high penetration. The U.S. and China are enormous markets, as you can imagine. They do actually have a significant installed base. But when you actually look at the potential penetration, in other words, how many of these are implemented versus the size of the potential market, they're still relatively low in terms of their penetration. And we'll talk a little bit about what we believe comes next. And then we've got countries like Italy, Canada, Germany, Sweden. They do have an installed base with some level of higher penetration in some cases and in certain segments, especially within grocery. But there's still a lot of room for them to grow.
We're now starting to see some of them accelerate because of the market conditions that Magnus talked about earlier. Now, let's talk a little bit about what traditionally has driven ESL usage and what we expect to see in the future. Traditionally, we've been competing with the paper label. We haven't been competing with other ESL manufacturers necessarily. We've been competing with the paper label. Paper label is simple for people to use. They understand the concept. It's been around forever. It's relatively reliable. It's got incredibly long battery life, if you like. But the challenge that you have is every time you want to change a price, you have to change the label. And so it becomes not just the cost of the label itself, but it becomes really a factor of labor cost.
And typically, what we've seen is those countries that have adopted ESLs have high labor cost plus usually at least one other factor. So how does that work in France? Well, typically in France, what it is, is very high labor cost. It's also punitive fines for having a discrepancy or a difference between the price that's at the shelf and the price at the point of sale. And French consumers are very well educated. They know exactly what they should be doing. They know how to report a difference. They know what benefit they can get out of it. And those fines are extremely high.
So where we see very strict, very high fines for consumer protection, then typically what you'll see is you'll see adoption of a technology like ESL because saving yourself three or four of those fines per year justifies the implementation of an entire range of ESLs alongside all of the other benefits and labor costs. So what you've got here, this graph is showing it's difficult to read, but what it shows is in retail, the estimated hourly labor cost. This line is the USA as the benchmark, but Denmark, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Sweden all have extremely high labor costs. And they are the countries that we've actually seen the highest adoption of ESLs as a percentage of the available market. France is by far the highest in terms of penetration. Norway is right up there as well.
And then we've seen places like Iceland and Sweden and others starting to really adopt this technology. So no surprise there. But if we look forward to where do we think the next level of growth is going to come, then typically what we have to do is we have to look at some other macroeconomic factors. And what might those be? Well, the first thing that we did is we looked at the estimated penetration of ESLs within grocery. So this is a basic set of mathematics that we took Gartner's own statistics around what's called their IoT Forecast Database. They do a 10-year forecast for technology like ESLs. We're part of the IoT universe, if you like. So we looked at penetration. So this is the 10% line. Almost every country, apart from these ones here, is really sort of below 10%-20%.
These may well be overstated depending on the calculation, the way that you do the calculation. But what we also did is we looked at their sophistication and IoT maturity. So this is taking the entirety of what we see in the Internet of Things type of endpoints, the devices that people have deployed within those countries, and made a calculation of how mature we think they are and how open they are to the deployment of these kinds of devices. And what this does is it clearly indicates that with the very mature countries, we expect to see higher levels of growth. It doesn't exactly line up, but it's pretty close. So what that gives us is it gives us a way of saying, "Where is it that we should think about investing? How is it that we should be thinking about the growth in these markets?
And what are the other things that we should now be looking for in those markets that are going to be the ignition points that, again, Magnus was talking about?" And then as we get down here, what we've got is other countries that we want to watch. We think that something fairly soon is going to be happening in these countries. As volumes go up, prices presumably will come down a little bit. And there are a whole range of other countries to watch, places like Brazil, Argentina, Chile, all have very well-developed technology, other technology. We've started to see them adopt. We've got lead customers happening in those areas. And then other markets in places like Malaysia and Thailand, we believe, at some point are actually going to be taking off.
May not be within this three-year scope, but certainly five, seven years from now, certainly something that we need to watch, so where do we think this growth is actually going to come from, so the first thing that's going to happen is that some of these larger second-wave countries will absolutely see broader adoption. If we look at what Charles and his team, for instance, have already achieved in the U.S., it's absolutely tremendous. I'll talk a little bit more about some direct numbers in a few minutes, but places like the U.S. and Canada, maybe the U.K., Germany, Spain, and Japan have all seen major RFPs in the last year, couple of years. We're expecting to see a fair amount of adoption there.
Markets like the U.K., which have had virtually no presence, or they had a little bit of experimentation a few years ago and stopped, we're now starting to see the next wave of adoption and being taken very seriously. There's much more serious RFPs becoming available, and that gives us the thought, gives us the positive view on some of these markets. Technology is also easing and driving adoption. We've already talked about four-color ESLs. If you're interested in seeing a four-color ESL, we actually have some down on the.
I'll turn around later.
Those of you who are familiar with ESLs, this is not your parent's ESL. Your parent's ESL would have been black and white, a little bit grainy. It would have looked okay compared with what was around. But this is spectacularly good in terms of what it is that we can actually now use. Again, they're on the table if you'd like to come and have a look. This is based on the latest generation, and this is what we refer to as a four-color ESL. They're brighter. They have more reliable colors. They have higher resolutions. We're actually putting images and pictures on there. And clearly, then the power of our infrastructure is to make sure that these are being adopted, sorry, being updated very quickly. It also drives adoption in very promotion-focused countries.
Not all countries, not all retailers are the same in the way that they deal with things. And even in different environments, what we find is that the type of promotions that people want to run and what people have got used to are very, very different. There are big changes, for instance, going on in the U.K. about what kind of promotions people want to run. In fact, Tesco, for instance, have specifically banned certain types of promotions because it doesn't fit with the way that they actually want to treat their consumers. And then unified commerce. So when we're talking about unified commerce, those of you who are familiar with the nomenclature in the retail market know about omnichannel, online and offline. Unified commerce is when you bring all of those various pieces together to be a much more sort of significant integrated system.
We'll get even more sophisticated. So it's not just about online and offline. It involves things like loyalty, personalization, and then the use of dynamic pricing. We're already starting to see this behavior all over the place. We're getting very used to the whole idea of dynamic pricing. You got used to it online. Now we're starting to see that being transferred into the store. What does that mean? It means a lot more changes to the pricing going on in the store. And then obviously what that means is that's great for us. The more changes, the more promotional that's going on, activity that's going on, the better we get to see it. So when we start looking at this from a market growth standpoint, what it means is that these are the countries that we're looking at in terms of do they have the right environment?
Do they have the right level of maturity? Do they have some other ignition point that's actually starting to happen? Now, these numbers are taken pretty much from. They're based on the Gartner IoT number, but this is how, just to give you an example, this is how difficult it is to actually map this out. Gartner's numbers are probably the best that we've found in the market so far. I've looked at pretty much all of the reports. Some of them are laughable. Some of them are reasonably accurate for a time, but one of the challenges that we see in this market is when you have a big deployment, it actually distorts the numbers. Now, give me a second. I actually have some notes here to give you some idea.
But for instance, if you look back at our 2020 results and you compare that with the published market statistics that were around at that point, it means that Charles and his team would have delivered about 184% market share, which is absolutely awesome. By the way, I have to say that the winner, I think, was in Pierre's domain at the time. The winner just in terms of sheer size was when we actually delivered through Carrefour, we delivered into Romania, we ended up with 389% market share. Now, of course, that's not real. Clearly, the base that we're working off there is smaller. But the point that we're saying here is that we are now starting to look through these countries for these ignition points.
One or two major retailers who are actually starting to deploy this, starting to publicize their success, and starting to change the way that they actually think about store operations, not just in terms of pricing, but in terms of the way that they actually work, and what that does is that gives us these distortions that then happen within the market with these rollouts. Best Buy is a very good example. Canadian Tire that we announced a few months ago, or an ongoing result that we announced a few months ago. Excuse me. The work that's been going on in New Zealand, for instance, again, one of Pierre's major countries, and even work that we've done in the Middle East in places like Egypt.
All of those are looking at sort of trigger events that could potentially actually then drive further adoption through competition, through acceptance of the technology, and then confidence in the technology as we go forward. So what do we expect to see? So we do believe that the ESL market will accelerate. We think that the numbers that we're playing with at the moment are relatively conservative, as indeed they should be. There's nothing worse than completely mis-set expectations in terms of growth. So they'll accelerate. And this is really based on broader adoption in that growth, that middle section of countries that I had colored in yellow. Growth in the mature countries will slow because we're reaching a saturation point, but that's not necessarily a bad thing from our point of view because we are very well placed in those countries.
We're extremely well placed in France. We're extremely well placed in places like Norway, and to some extent, Belgium as well, as you'll see later on with the video that we show you from Rob. But what that means is that these markets will start to focus on replacement and on value-add. So these are countries that already have been experimenting with very large numbers of use cases, and they're now starting to realize the ongoing value which we can then deliver. It also means that it's very acceptable in that market. It's very well understood. The technology is very well understood. And that gives us potentially shorter and potentially more profitable sales cycles. So adding things like SaaS adoption, data analytics, and more focused integration becomes something that really helps in those markets. So this isn't just about rising with the tide.
The market grows, so we grow too. This is about making sure that what we have is really good selling going on in those countries to make sure that what we're doing is taking advantage of that profitability opportunity. The larger countries, such as the U.S., China, the U.K., Spain, and Germany, we'll see accelerated growth. We've already started to see specialist use cases. Best Buy is a fabulous example. The work that we're doing with Amazon is another one. They're proving the business case. And what that's doing is starting to lead to broad adoption along with the other technology issues that we see. Let's just say a few words about digital signage. Digital signage, we are in the game of digital signage already. We are part of that. Yes, if you want the video, I'll send you the video.
But what we can see at the moment is that these ESLs, sorry, digital signage and ESLs are likely to converge, which means that it's going to really open up new opportunities for us. The digital signage market is dominated in a completely different way from where we see ESLs. That's a great thing for us. It basically means that we've got something to propose, something else to propose, and base our offering on. The digital signage market, if you look at it in terms of endpoints, no surprise here is that the U.S. is by far the biggest market. It's used all across retail. It's used in food distribution. It's used absolutely everywhere. Very sophisticated approach. But now it needs to be. It can be extended further down into being right down at the shelf edge. China, as you can imagine, is growing fast.
It's actually not the biggest market for digital signage endpoints. The U.S. is by far the biggest. The second biggest market is the U.K. And it's bigger than China. Who would have thought the funny little country that I was born in has something that's bigger than China? But a huge opportunity for us there. It also means that their focus has very much more been on consumer communication and promotion than price management. So why does this get so important? Well, if we start to think about some of the other things that are going on, for instance, I'm not sure if you've had an opportunity to look at what Carrefour are doing with their Flash Stores. But one of the things that we now start to think about is how do we integrate all of these various pieces together? And then how do we drive things like personalization?
How do we actually allow a shopper to be presented with a personalized offering? We tend to sort of freak out when it's, that's pretty invasive. What about all of these things, and I can tell you from a marketing standpoint, there are four letters that struck fear into most marketing people about five or six years ago called GDPR, which are the General Data Protection Regulation that were implemented in Europe and then adopted almost everywhere else in the world in some form or another, but what Carrefour have done, one of the reasons behind what Carrefour have done in terms of using Meta technology, in other words, avatar technology, is to be able to protect consumers so that consumers can then just implement as much information as they allow as much information as they're comfortable with.
So now what we're starting to see is digital signage, ESL with all of the capabilities that we're talking about, integrated with other techniques, which actually then give us the possibility to present personalization, not just in terms of personalized pricing, but in terms of personalized information as well. So if you just start to think of that as an example, that's one of the elements that starts to deliver on the vision that Magnus was talking about earlier. Why do we want to play in this market, and what are the advantages we have? You can't build an ESL system and implement an ESL system without being integrated with the ERP, the thing that actually manages the operation of a retailer. This is where all of the product information is kept. This is where all the price management goes on.
We are integrated closely with that in every retailer that we sell to. It's part of the investment that you do. We have to be there as part of it. It's very difficult for the display, the creative guys who are dealing with marketing, they're not dealing with IT. They're dealing with marketing to get access to the things like the ERP. Nobody wants to spread that information out to somebody, a creative agency. They want to deliver it to a trusted partner like Pricer. So from that point of view, by providing the level of integration that we have with the ERP, then what we do is we integrate that with the digital signage capability.
All of a sudden, we are right in the middle of all of that capability: process efficiency, driving process efficiency and availability, delivering differentiated consumer experience, and leading the way into things like personalization and the future of the way that we actually want to do, the way that we want to deliver, enhance consumer experience. It is very important to what it is that we're doing, an enormous market opportunity. We don't have to get 100% market share to deliver on the plan that Magnus has talked about. What we have to do is we have to make sure that what we are doing is delivering on the integration with the digital signage content systems so it becomes primarily an integration and software value-added play. That is why we believe this is going to be so important to us.
So in summary, ESL and price management still create the critical foundational piece for smart retail. You've heard Sandeep talking about it. We've talked about it earlier in terms of the vision. And now what we're doing is confirming yet again that it is really a critical foundational platform for smart retail. ESLs and associated displays have demonstrated their value throughout the COVID pandemic. When Sandeep was talking about BOPIS, for those of you not familiar with it, you might know it as Click and Collect or Buy Online, Pick Up in the Store, B-O-P-I-S. That's what he's talking about. We were, in many cases, those of us potentially outside Sweden, were asked to do this, not just by the retailers, but by governments actually saying, "Do it this way." And that led to an enormous amount of growth in that kind of technology.
We've seen specialist uses such as Best Buy with their omnichannel focus or their unified commerce approach. They've proven the business case, and they've proven that they can differentiate themselves. This is one of the most successful electronics retailers in the world anywhere. They're really, really good at it, and they're using this technology. Amazon is also rolling out ESLs alongside its Just Walk Out technology because they have to communicate the price at the shelf edge if people are just going to walk out. It's not part of that system itself. It is distinct, but they have to be able to communicate. So from that point of view, we're seeing all of those things going out. And here in Sweden, Lifvs, the staffless stores, the frictionless retail specialists actually use our ESLs for exactly the same thing. They use ESLs in their staffless stores to communicate with their customers.
Our experienced users are continuing to find and work with us to develop new use cases. You'll hear Rob talking about some of these. If you want any more, please come and find me. We have lots and lots of use cases that we are publishing on the website. You'll see that many of our customers have driven these use cases themselves, come back and said, "Could we potentially do this? Could we do that? Could we do the other?" We get that level of communication all the time. Hopefully, that gives you an idea of the market, what's going on at sort of the market numbers level. If you've got any further questions, please don't hesitate to ask. Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you, Duncan. So I think now it's time to take a break. Make sure you can keep your energy levels up. So for those in Stockholm, there's coffee, water, some, I guess, bullar to keep your sugar level up. So is it now a 15-minute break, Cecilia? For you online, please enjoy. Come back refreshed. See you soon.
So here we are. So this is me, Chris Chalkitis, as I mentioned. I will do an update on our product portfolio. I will talk about technologies and trends that influence our product portfolio and kind of tie back to what Magnus and Duncan have been talking about and what, from a platform perspective, actually influences our product and product decisions and our strategies going forward. Displays and labels are key in our in-store communication. Actually, Pricer has delivered retail-grade devices for the past three decades. So this has been an important part, making robust and functional devices that work in very tough environments. We have actually delivered over 250 million devices all over the world. And actually, 90% of those 250 million was delivered in the past decade. So we've seen a tremendous growth that actually is continuing.
But with this, I would like to step back even further where we kind of started and show why labels and displays actually fit together. So when we started, we developed something called an ESL, a label based on LCD technology. We also call it a segment display. What's interesting with this was, of course, it gave the flexibility of price updates and was kind of revolutionizing this whole industry, as we've been talking about. One of the important factors was that you could do the price changes and updates, and it kind of obsoleted the paper labels. But one thing that was actually not as good as a paper label was the flexibility in terms of changing the layout and design. Actually, when we started, you had to, at an early stage in the development process, together with the customer, decide on how it would look in your store.
So when you place it there, you need to do the design. And that was before the development process. And afterwards, you put that in the store, and the product lived for many years. So in many cases, it developed good flexibility in terms of price updates. But when it comes to display and layout, somewhat less flexibility. So this was really the first stage of our ESLs and labels. When we came into the next stage, the introduction of graphical displays, it gave the possibility to do later stage design capabilities, more flexibilities. So now you didn't have to, before you bought the labels, actually decide what the layout and how it's going to look in the store. And you can actually change it while the labels are in the store, update it. That created, of course, a new way of communicating with shoppers.
But it also made it much more flexible for the store owners and retailers. However, it did add extra complexity into the solution. We now not only needed to do price updates, but we also needed to provide new layouts and new designs to the ESLs. And for this, we developed specific tools like an ESL design tool. The next phase was really the introduction of color into our ESLs with one accent color, specifically red. And that gave us the possibility to do additional things with our labels, promotions, talking about sales prices and highlighting information on the products. Yet again, that introduced another capability for our customers to communicate with the shoppers in the store. And it also increased the complexity of the system because now we wanted to do more updates, more changes, and keep everything attention-wise.
At the same time, we see that digital signage is making a growth into the retail industry, and as it started, it was on big, large TV screens going back some years. What we now see is what Duncan said, is it's being displayed on many different types of devices. So not only TV screens, but you have these LED bars and other types of screens in the store where digital signage actually is entering. When we now start to see a blurring between the ESLs and labels compared to the digital signage, we are introducing larger types of ESLs. We talked about the four-color ESLs, and as I said, the digital signage is shrinking and doing different types of displays.
So it's really blurring the border between what's an ESL and what's a digital signage in the market, basically converging and creating the need for a single solution to handle both. So you don't want to be locked into one environment for one type of communication message. You want to enable communication through all the display areas that you have in the store through a single system. You want to be able to inform the shoppers with price updates or promotions. But you also want to influence the shoppers by buying more and doing commercials. This has a very interesting effect on our solution and our systems. As I've been talking about, the increased complexity for handling all of these types of different data streams, content, it blends together to create a rich in-store communication platform.
When we deploy this into retail, we're building systems and partnerships to enable all of this mix and a true rich in-store communication platform. It's really part of Pricer DNA. We have the knowledge and the information of putting things up in stores that communicate with the shoppers. So it's really an important part of where we're heading with these types of products and blending the environment, making it simple for the people that are using our systems to communicate. This is one technology trend. The other part I want to talk about is our Shelf Vision. So I will start this with looking at a video to give you an insight into how Shelf Vision works. Cool. It gives you a short insight into what we're doing with our Shelf Vision and our shelf label cameras or shelf cameras.
What I wanted to do is dig down a little bit deeper into what are the drivers for this. Why are we seeing, but not only we, us, but our customers seeing the need for Shelf Vision AI solutions, so at the heart of it, it's really about improving the customer experience, the shopper experience, making sure that they have as good an experience when they enter the store as possible. What we want to achieve is to give our customers the possibility to see what's happening in the store in real time without having staff all over the store everywhere at all times. Doing this with technology will enable us to lower the amount of staff that needs to go and do mundane tasks like checking how things are. One of the important components about this is what we call out-of-stock solutions or out-of-stock products.
Actually, we call it gaps, identifying gaps in the shelves. We have found, or whenever we see a gap in a shelf as a shopper, we are pulled into a decision that is often not a positive experience, but rather a negative experience because we're actually coming to the store to buy something that's not available at the place where it's supposed to be. That leaves the customer to make a number of decisions. So I'm standing here, and I now need to make a decision. Should I buy another product? Should I choose another brand? Should I postpone my purchase? Or should I, worst case, go to a different store and buy my product? So these are all negative customer experiences that we want to limit as much as possible. And looking at this, actually, three-quarters of the out-of-stock is dependent on store activities and store processes.
Only about 23% of one-quarter of the issues are found actually dependent on the supply chain part, which is great news for us because that means that the last 50 meters of the supply chain is what needs to be fixed for 75% of the cases, and that's exactly the part where we, with our Shelf Vision products, want to come in play, so what do we do? We actually do analysis, so we take a picture and look at that picture with our AI technology and see what's amiss at this picture, what's not correct with it. We do this analysis, and we create triggers and actions for our customers to take so that they don't need to watch what's happening in the store specifically. One example is to go into your store, you want to buy your favorite cornflakes, and it's no longer there.
Your brand of cornflakes is not at the shelf where it's supposed to be. Shelf Vision has identified that the cornflakes are gone. It now has sent a trigger to the store and the store staff to go and replenish and put the cornflakes on the shelf again. Now, that's one of the triggers that we can generate. We can do other triggers as well. So looking at the stock level, we might not actually send the staff to refill because there's no stock.
Then we would actually communicate the message onto our labels or displays saying, "Sorry, we're out of this product, and it will be available tomorrow." Even more, tying it together with digital signage is that you can tie it with any promotions that you're doing for this cornflake brand so that you pause that promotion activity in terms of not creating additional demand until you have restocked it. All of this can be done automatically with the solution. So building these AI solutions, nothing is perfect, unfortunately, not humans, not machines. So one important part is the precision that we do. When we analyze this analog real world and want to make it digital, we need to have as good precision as possible.
This is the trust that we need to build with our shoppers or with our staff because we don't want to send them on wild goose chases saying, "Well, in aisle five, the cornflakes are out, and when they get to aisle five, there's plenty of cornflakes," or, "They go to the wrong aisle." So we need to build trust for the system and for our solution. And Pricer has actually a patent for enabling higher precision and quicker analysis, cheaper analysis of how products are placed on the shelf and identifying them. We can do more than just gap detection on our Shelf Vision solution. We can use it for planogram. We can use it for identifying analog promotions like shelf talkers. And we'll see a number of new use cases coming up in the future.
That's why it's important to build a solution where you can add on continuously without having to do hardware upgrades, but only software. All of this is part of what we call the Algorithmic Retailing, so digitalizing what's in the physical store, getting all the data points so that our customers can make the right decisions and get the right triggers to act upon. All in all, that's what we want to achieve with Shelf Vision. It's a new, very interesting industry that's happening, and it kind of ties back to what Gartner was pointing at. Next part, when it comes to decision-making, we make a lot of decisions that impact us. Our customers make a lot of decisions that impact us, and there are technologies that impact all of us. I believe that Pricer is uniquely positioned to offer a truly agnostic solution.
We are the only ones that have the capabilities to run optical wireless solutions, radio solutions in an environment that is mixed. We always believe in supplying the optimal solution for the use case or for the customer. That's critically important, and for us, the optical wireless solution has offered the best responsiveness, the most energy efficiency, and it's really the one that is capable of reacting quickly to any actions that need to happen. With the market changing, with all of these new technologies coming in, we're seeing new needs emerge. So, for example, if we take our camera, this is working with an optical wireless network, but it's also working with a radio network. So it has the combination of both technologies in there because we want to be able to feed data upwards in the system.
So we're really looking at what environment we are putting our solution into. New needs come continuously, so with displays, with digital signage, with cameras, but also new environments that we emerge upon. So, for example, if we want to run outdoors, there's sunshine all day. That is not optimal for an optical solution. Or we want to communicate over long distances. There are also some challenges when it's for communication. Or, as I said, for the camera, to uplink high amounts of data or do video streaming. So we really need to take a look at all of these technologies. But one important part is standardization, so being open and working with standards. For all maturing markets, we're seeing that standards are becoming a critical part for enabling vendor interoperability and democratizing the implementations, basically.
So one of the standards that we are looking a little bit deeper into, that is probably going to be released this year, is the Bluetooth ESL standard. That has the potential to do that, to democratize and enable an open environment, an interoperability environment. Still, we believe that technology takes time to develop and mature. What actually ties everything together is that we need to have system support for all of these technologies. So, from a customer perspective, it shouldn't really matter how we're communicating to the devices or what's being communicated to the devices. From a customer's perspective, they should be able to use what is optimal, most cost-effective, has the best battery lifetimes, the highest reliability in their situation. And we're building systems to cater for that. Talking about systems, I think Magnus talked about it.
One clear trend is really moving everything from the basement up into the clouds. Now, this is nothing new or nothing spectacular in terms of industry. I mean, we've seen it all over and for a long time. But it's happening at a very high pace within the retail industry at the moment. What's more interesting is that this comes with a new change of business models, so basically enabling SaaS type of solutions where you subscribe to a service. And this will drive our recurring revenue. So moving some or all of the functions up into the cloud enables us to deliver new capabilities. Our product for this is Pricer Plaza. We are growing the number of stores and customers into the solution.
I talked a little bit earlier about complexity, and I just want to paint the picture of how this also changes the complexity of what we're delivering to our customers. So before, when we had the small server in a basement in a store, that server kind of handled 30,000 labels in a fairly large store. We're doing updates once per week or once per day for this particular store. What we're now doing, and the way that we have increased the complexity, is that now we have not only one store, but we have a full set of stores, number of chains, and number of customers that we put into this. So taking that customer's basement server and now combining that with all of his stores, we're now talking about updating hundreds of stores for this customer with millions of labels.
With all the new use cases that we're adding with cameras, in-store displays, click and collect, the number of communications also grows and the use cases grow. We add complexity on two axes. The system becomes much more complex and much more capable of doing a lot of things. The trick is to not expose that complexity to our customers. We don't want to overwhelm our customers with the complexity. We want to keep it as simple as possible, even simpler than before. Tying that together, making sure that they have the control and the capabilities to monitor all of the stores, see what's happening, to do the device management of all those millions and millions of devices that need to be managed, to do software updates, keeping things alive, making sure that it's the latest stuff that you have running, making sure it's secure.
I mean, that's a critical point, making sure that everything is running as securely as possible and creating content, making sure that all your promotions, all your price updates, everything is going out to where it's supposed to be going to at the right time. These are very complex systems, but we don't need to make it complex for our customers. We take over a lot of that responsibility when we're moving stuff into the cloud and offer it as services, so that's all part of our service and service delivery as a platform when we're moving customers from on-prem into the cloud, either partially or fully, so just to summarize this short part, is we believe that labels and displays, large, small, all converge into one single platform where you will communicate with the shoppers in the store.
This will give us the rich shopper experience that we're looking for and our customers are looking for, improving the customer experience with Shelf Vision and our AI solution and cameras. That is also extremely critical for moving forward and removing staff from mundane tasks and offering the correct triggers at the right time. We are uniquely positioned to get the best technology out there, so we are not locked into one solution. We will look at all technologies at all times and make sure that we are offering what's best at this point of time, and finally, recurring revenue. Our software, our services, our growth is happening in the type of services that we're delivering from a software perspective, growing our ecosystem of use cases and functions. With that, I would like to thank you and bring Susanna on stage.
Thank you. Let's see if you can hear me. You can hear me? Yeah? Now I can hear myself as well. So hi, everyone. We're approaching the end of the day. I hope you have some energy left. You're allowed to stand up if you want. So my name is Susanna Zethelius, and I'm the, let's see, let's click past this. So that's me, not on the picture, but my presentation. I'm the CFO for Pricer, and I will give a short financial update. I thought, just to kick it off and make sure that we're all on the same page, I'll take a quick look at the Q1 numbers, the latest published financial figures. So we heard a bit from several of the previous speakers about positive trends in the market, and this is something we really saw in Q1.
We had our second-best order intake ever, which also Jonas mentioned. We also had a very strong figure on the net sales. It was our best Q1 net sales ever. Looking at the distribution between the markets, we saw healthy growth in the EMEA region, growth in several countries, for example, Sweden and Italy. In the Americas region, that was also positive versus the same quarter last year, and that was largely driven by continued rollout of Canadian Tire. APAC, there was a slight decrease, which was mostly due to timing effects. So very positive on the sales side. However, on the margin side, we have seen challenges. They started last year. It's the pressure coming from transportation costs, increased component costs, and together with negative currency effects in Q1, that gave us a decrease in operating profit versus last quarter.
This was Q1, and with that, I'll move on to talk a bit more about the financial targets. I expect you have all seen them. We have decided to set two financial targets. The purpose of setting these targets for us is to be able to provide clear guidance internally as well as externally about what are our main focus areas. The first target is SEK 4.5 billion of revenue 2025. It's a clear commitment to accelerating the growth pace. The second target, 10% recurring revenue in 2025. We see a need to accelerate and shift part of our business model in order to achieve more recurring revenue. Why? Because recurring revenue gives us better predictability and stability for the revenues, but more importantly, it will also improve our margins.
And taking a closer look at each of these targets and starting with the revenue target, so SEK 4.5 billion in revenue 2025, and this will be achieved through organic growth. If we look at the past five years, we can also see a clear growth trend. We had a CAGR of 21%, so it's actually just increasing that trend. And we believe that we are well positioned to do this. We've heard also from Magnus and other speakers that if we look internally, we have expanded the number of markets that we're in. We have broadened our customer base. And for the past few years, we made a technology shift, like Chris has been talking about. A couple of years ago, we were experts at delivering hardware, and now we're also able to provide great software solutions to our customers. That's internal factors.
If we think about the external factors, they've also been mentioned. We have the inflation pressure. We have the shortage of labor for our customers, and that, together with changes in technology, will mean that more and more markets will reach this tipping point or what was it? First market ignition.
Ignition.
Yeah, yeah. Something like that. Looking at where we believe this growth will come from, the strongest growth we see coming from the Americas region. We're present already in a number of markets in North and South America. We have a few big rollouts that we can show, Best Buy and Canadian Tire, and we believe that more will come. So the single most important market for us, we believe, will be the United States. It's critical for us to succeed there in order to reach the targets. However, it's hard to predict the exact timing of when we will have the breakthrough in the U.S. If we look at EMEA, we also believe that the growth will continue there as well.
There are a few mature markets like Norway, like France, but there are other markets where opportunities to grow are more like the U.S., where penetration is lower, and we believe that those markets will take off, for example, U.K. and Ireland. Also, the APAC region, we see similar potential to grow. And moving on to talk a bit about the second target, 10% recurring revenue in 2025. And to give a comparison, that number for 2021 was 2%. And again, why do we want to have this? It's to get the predictability and the stability in the revenues, but more importantly, to improve the profitability. And we believe that in 2025, a significant portion of our profit will come from recurring revenues. And what does recurring revenue mean for us, and where will it come from? Well, it will be software, of course.
We made significant investments in software for the past few years, and that has enabled us to start moving our customers to cloud. Our target is that all customers, in some way, will be in the cloud environment going forward. Then we're also expanding our software portfolio. We have several solutions that are ready to take to the market or are already on the market. It's Shelf Vision. It's digital signage. It's geo-positioning, to mention a few. And this subscription model will not be limited to software, but it will also be comprised of services, and in some cases, also ESL, in particular for smaller customers. So to summarize a bit, we are going to focus on profitable growth. In order to achieve this growth, it will also mean that we will need to invest.
It will mean that we will need to invest, for example, in production lines similar to the one we're setting up now in Germany, in other target markets during this period. It will also mean selective expansion when it comes to new markets or setting up new offices in order to achieve this growth, but we also need to balance the margin, so that needs to be paired with strict cost control, and when Magnus started here a few months ago, since then, we have implemented a hiring freeze, so in this period, the only recruitments that we made are a few selective replacement recruitments, just to take an example. We're also reviewing the cost base as a whole to make sure that we're best positioned for growth, optimized for the business, and like I said, the margin pressure will continue in the short term.
We believe that the pressured margins on the ESLs will eventually be compensated by the much better, significantly better margins from the recurring revenue side. And looking at the profit side, our target is to come back to historical profit levels. And I mean, for me, with this new strategy update that we're setting and other factors internal as well as external, I do believe that we're very well positioned to reach these targets. So with that, I think I would like to hand over back to Magnus.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I won't spend too much time. In fact, I've only had one slide left. It will be sort of a sum-up, and after that slide, we will have a video by Rob speaking about the store operations, and then we'll do the Q&A session, both for you here but also for you attending online. It's all about capturing the market, so I think we now demonstrate that we do believe in growth. We see a growing market. We see the trends. We see the events, and together, they are creating a perfect storm. It's a market for us to grab if we execute right, if we make sure we have the right product portfolio, and if we do things the right way. I would say we're thought leaders. To me, thought leadership is the key thing.
We are the only one that will actually be able to provide a combination or a blend of the tech-agnostic solution with basically the retail-grade solutions that we've done for a long time to converge ESL, signage, and then with the camera solutions, the computer vision into something that will benefit our customers. Under the name In-Store Communication, we will sell appealing ESLs. We will have the signage, any kind of screen you can imagine, and we will have the cameras. We will all tie them together. This is products that we have today, and these are products that we will develop and that we will do much more out of. And it's all wrapped in a layer of SaaS and services to actually get the profitability up. And we will invest. We will invest to make sure that we grow faster than the market.
We have lost a little bit more than I would like us to have lost. And I think now, with the investment we do in the sales organization, the regions, well, we will actually add resources to Pierre, to Charles, to Mats to actually address the market, to spend more time with our customers to make sure it happens, but also in the product development to get the agility up, in the production facilities to make sure we get the low-cost production. I think we have everything that it takes to actually address the market, to make the most out of it, and really make sure we reach the 4.5 billion SEK, that we get a 10% recurring revenue. We will do a profitable growth. We will invest, but it will still be profitable.
And it will be, I think it will pay back nicely in 2025 when we have the 10% recurring revenue as part of what we deliver to the market. So, of course, I hope that you will join us on this journey. I think we're well positioned to take market share, to be a well-positioned player to get the customer's trust. We have done it already, but there will be even more. We see after the markets like the U.S. market, the APAC market, and in selected European markets, we will be the key guys to actually deliver this and capture this growth. And if you don't believe in me, and I would accept that, that's fine, or the management team, you should probably listen to Rob. Are you ready?
Hello. My name is Rob van Dal, business owner at PLUS Retail. [Foreign language]
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Pretty much, Rob. And that's pretty much what we had from a presentation point of view, so now it's open for questions and answers. And Rob, by the way, is in charge of store operations at PLUS, or PLUS Coop, nowadays under the PLUS brand in the Netherlands. So, please. Yes. Will you help out with the microphone? Oh.
Thank you so much for the presentation, all the participants here. It was very interesting to hear about all the new stuff that you presented here today. I have a couple of questions. Firstly, on the transition that you're seeing where retailers are going from a CapEx point of view into more OpEx, how would you say that that varies between SMBs and the larger retailers?
I think it very much depends on the retailers. We can see that some retailers that have had a lot of cash and they've been quite fond of actually doing paying cash. Sometimes they've actually been using then a lease model. So for those doing lease model, which could be maybe the smaller ones, or actually retailers with entrepreneurs, there I think that the OpEx part could be interesting. I think where we also want to spend more time doing an OpEx model would be for, imagine a chain with quite a large number of stores. It could be hundreds of thousands of stores, but a limited number of ESLs. That would probably be interesting to actually say that instead of just doing an investment, that they would actually do it as a full OpEx.
Charles, you have some pretty good examples, I guess, from the U.S. market here where this could be done.
Yes, we have a lot. The U.S. is a very significant Coop, a very significant Coop distribution way of working because of the number of little towns. So you have Nationwide or CCA or BrandSource or on and on. And we're talking about 30,000, 40,000 small stores that are slowly adopting. We've won two of them, Nationwide and CCA, and are very close to winning another one. So yes, that's exactly where that would be applicable.
Yeah, and I think that would be appealing for them, of course, because they will get an OpEx model, but also for us because the investment compared to the actual gain that you would get is not that high. But then if you have someone bigger that would like to discuss it, of course we will discuss the business model and see if it makes sense. Any more questions? You had a few.
Yes, I do have more questions. Also, you are talking about that your offering is now much broader, and historically, you've both been using direct sales and partners, and according to your presentation, you're going to use both channels going forward, but would you start to prioritize going directly to the customers, given that you're now broadening the offering and that in turn would help upsell opportunities even further?
I think it's a clear benefit to work with partners because they will actually give us more legs and more arms and more heads to address the market. In some cases, the customers will come back and tell us that, "Listen, we want to go direct." And then, of course, we'll pay attention. But I think this balance of direct and partner is important. And we can see that many other partners there are really delivering a direct value where our customers are saying that we see that when we work through your partner, they deliver value in terms of some of the service scope, the way they address us. And then it could also be language. So I think the combination will be very, very important for us. And it could even be within a specific market that you do both direct and indirect sales.
But depending on the area, depending on the setup, in a large market, it could be different. It could also be segment-based that we go direct on grocery, but we know that we have a partner that is specializing in pharmacy, as an example. And that would make a whole lot of sense then to do both. And at the end, it's about the value add that we do jointly and that there's value add that's perceived by the customer. If they feel it's a benefit to go through partners, they will do. If they feel that they would question this value add, they will probably come and say, "Maybe you should go direct.
Thank you. That's very clear. And going back to the source question, would you say that you are part of the guys driving the adoption of the market, or is it something that your customer primarily wants at the current state, or perhaps it's a combination of both?
I'd say it's a combination of both. So we are clearly pushing. We have incentivized the sales team to sell the recurring revenue. So I know if our salespeople are to choose, they would say that, "I want to sell the SaaS solution out of the incentive scheme that we have." When we speak with the customers, when they look at how they want to do the modernization, and as part of this store digitalization, it comes quite natural when they look at efficiencies. Then, rather than having a number of services that they need to maintain, it will become a cheaper solution for them to actually do it SaaS-based. But then again, it's different from market to market. But we are pushing.
Thank you, and as a final question from me before I let anyone else ask some questions. Susanna previously talked about that you want to make the profitability return to historical levels. Were you referring to EBIT margin level or a gross margin level? And how should we think about gross margins going forward? If you have any color on that, it would be helpful.
It's EBIT levels that we look at. I think on the gross margin level, we do expect that hardware gross margin will gradually go down as competition grows, but also as volume grows. But it could also be that we choose to make some investment where we transfer gross margin from the hardware over also to the recurring revenue, where we can see at the end of the day there will be a better profitability over time. So it could be both.
Thank you so much.
My pleasure. Any other questions?
Can you hear me?
Yeah, yeah.
Do you think you will need external finance to achieve this growth for your financial targets?
For any external financing? Should you take that?
Hello? Yeah. I mean, we do see with this revised plan, we clearly see a need to review and reevaluate the way that we're currently financed. So that's what we're doing right now.
Thanks, Susanna. Any other questions?
We have some questions from the audience.
Yeah. With the online audience.
With the online audience. So Pricer has recruited quite a lot of people during the last year. Which parts of the organization have seen the greatest increase?
We have spent money recruiting within the sales side, but there's also been a lot of recruitment within R&D to make sure we have had the necessary resources to develop the Plaza portfolio and to look at the other portfolios, and for example, the Shelf Vision and camera that we have presented today. Those are the two key areas. We have also recruited in some services staff, which is one of the reasons why you can see the service sales in general increase.
How do you ensure that you get paid by customers for the increase in production costs?
We trust on our sales guys here to make it happen. But in essence, it's actually we always try to take the discussion with our customers. They know that the costs are increasing. They know it's difficult to get a hold of components. So there is a general understanding. Are they willing to pay for it? Basically not, but we do whatever we can to negotiate. They are receptive to the argument. Sometimes we actually manage to get a price increase. Sometimes we are not as successful, but it's very much depending on the contract that we have and the setup. But I think that we have quite successfully increased the prices in quite a few contracts that we have today. And of course, it's a tough discussion, but our customers, they buy a lot of grocery or outputs. They know that the prices are going up.
So next question. What do you mean by historical profit levels in terms of EBIT margin?
So Susanna, should you take that or should I take it?
I think we already answered to.
Yeah.
Next question. Do you consider a potential capital increase?
You spoke about different kinds of forms of financing.
I think it's also the same question. So the final question from the online audience is, France is the country with the highest ESL penetration. Could you have an idea about the ESL penetration in France? And this I think should be answered by Duncan Potter.
Yeah, so what I was showing on the screen was some calculated penetration based on total number of SKUs in a market, total number of supermarkets, and it was really focused on sort of the major supermarket market. That doesn't sound right, but it is actually the right way of saying it, so the calculation that we did came out that in France, we're seeing a penetration in that segment of about 45%.
Thank you, Duncan. So no more questions from the online audience. Are there any more questions from the audience in Stockholm?
I'd like to thank you, everyone, for joining here in Stockholm and joining online. Well, should you have any more questions, you know where to find us. Thanks a lot.