Pinewood Technologies Stock

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our H1 FY '26 results presentation. I'm Bill Berman, the CEO, and I'm joined today by our CFO, Ollie Mann. The first half of 2026 saw strong strategic and operational progress alongside continued growth. Our teams continue to deliver and drive the company forward, including in North America, where the rollout of Pinewood.AI platform is gathering momentum. In August, we announced a recommended acquisition by Ridgeview Partners. The acquisition was approved by shareholders last week and is expected to complete within the next month. I'll expand on that shortly. Ollie will then take you through the headline financials in a few minutes. But before that, I'm going to touch on the strategic and operational progress from the first half of 2026.

In the first half of 2026, our key priorities have been: first, progressing on our North American product and development work; Secondly, continuing our system implementation with Lookers as well as various other customers throughout the U.K. and Europe as well as Porsche Japan. Thirdly, working closely with Marshalls that we move near to starting the rollout with them in 2026. Lastly, in addition to selling the core system, selling our expanding suite of products to both existing and new customers. And our North American development work has continued at pace throughout 2026, both on the all-important OEM integrations, but also to ensure that the system being rolled out is the best-in-class offering in the U.S. and Canada.

We have been working closely with Lithia's team to ensure we hit our target rollout start in Q4 of 2026. We are on track to do this, and this is a testament to the hard work by both the Pinewood and Lithia teams. In the U.K., we have continued the system implementation of the Lookers' dealers and expect this to conclude in the first half of 2027. We have also been laying the groundwork with Marshalls to ensure that their system implementation gets off to a smooth start with that work well underway. Our product and development teams have developed some excellent new products in the last few years, alongside the AI products we acquired with the Seez transaction last year. We are now seeing the benefits of that work as we increase our sales across existing customer base as well as new customers.

One of the strongest proof points of the value that customers place in the solution is churn. In fact, we actually had negative churn through the first half of 2026 with increased system usage from our existing customer base. In mid-August, we announced a recommended offer from Ridgeview Partners to acquire the Group. The cash offer of GBP 4.48 represented an attractive premium and provide Pinewood.AI with access to deep technology expertise, long-term capital and partner with a strong track record of helping software businesses scale. Given how supportive our shareholder base have been over the last few years with a firm belief in the growth opportunity for Pinewood, particularly North America, we felt it was important that we had a chance to continue to be involved in our journey.

With that in mind, shareholders also had the opportunity to roll some of their stake over into the post-transaction business. We are delighted that so many shareholders took up that option and will continue to be part of the next chapter of our journey with us. Following the successful shareholder vote last Friday on the 25th of September, the deal is now expected to complete between the 9th and the 23rd of October.

I'll now hand it over to Ollie to take us through the financial review.

Thanks, Bill. Good morning, everyone. In the first half of FY '26, our underlying revenue grew by 18.4% to GBP 23.2 million. This increase was driven by a number of factors, including the positive impact from new customers, upsell to our existing customer base and having a full 6 months of contribution from Seez, whereas in the first half of FY '25, we only had 4 months' worth of Seez revenue following the acquisition of that business at the start of March 2025. Underlying gross profit of GBP 19.8 million was 16.5% up on last year. The gross margin rate of 85.3% fell slightly as expected and reflects Seez's gross margins being lower than the wider Pinewood business.

Underlying EBITDA, which is our key profit metric, was up by 11.4% to GBP 8.8 million in H1 FY '26. We have maintained our recurring revenue at around the 85% mark with a marginal drop from last year. The majority of our nonrecurring revenue is from new customer system implementations. Our net customer churn was negative in the first half of the year, meaning usage from our existing customer base on a like-for-like basis actually increased in the period, which demonstrates the importance of the Pinewood system to our customers.

On Slide 8, you can see the movements in our cash flow during the first half of 2026. During H1 FY '26, we generated GBP 1.9 million of cash from operations. The reduction from GBP 8.5 million in the first half of FY '25 was due to the increased investment in our North American operation, which is shortly due to become revenue generating once the first Lithia U.S. dealers go live in quarter 4 2026. The capital expenditure figure of GBP 8 million in H1 FY '26 includes GBP 6.4 million of capitalized development spend. In the first half of 2026, we completed the buyout of our final reseller, which was based in the Netherlands for GBP 3.3 million. We have now bought out all of the resellers that we had. These movements were the primary drivers of the net decrease in cash of GBP 10.4 million, leading to an end of June 2026 cash position of GBP 23.9 million.

On Slide 9 is the end of June 2026 balance sheet. There were closing shareholders' funds of GBP 198.9 million, with the main driver of the increase from the end of June 2025 being the July 2025 North American JV buyout. We now have goodwill of GBP 54.9 million on our balance sheet due to the buyout of Lithia's share of the North American JV, the Seez acquisition and the South Africa and Netherlands reseller buyouts. Our intangible assets balance of GBP 166.2 million primarily arose through the North America JV buyout and Seez transactions, with the majority of the balance relating to the North America customer contract. Most of the tax liability we have relates to the U.S. JV buyout and will unwind as the intangible assets are amortized. Finally, we have GBP 23.9 million in cash. In addition to this cash, we also have a GBP 10 million RCF facility, which remains undrawn.

On to Slide 10, where we have the non-underlying items for the first half of FY '26. There was a GBP 0.3 million debit to revenue relating to the amortization of the Global Auto Holdings warrants. We had GBP 9.1 million of administrative expenses in our North American operation in the first half of the year. As guided previously, these costs will be treated as non-underlying until the Pinewood system is installed in 20 North American dealerships. As we start our system implementations for Lithia's North America dealers in quarter 4 2026, we will start to offset these costs as our North American revenue grows. There was a GBP 2.8 million credit relating to net fair value gain on the Lookers warrants. Our share-based payment charge was GBP 2.2 million in H1 FY '26, and there was a GBP 4 million amortization charge relating to intangibles arising on acquisition.

I'll now hand back to Bill to run through the operating highlights and strategy.

Thanks, Ollie. Most of you will be familiar with this slide, which sets out Pinewood's key strengths and what sets us apart from our competition. As I mentioned earlier when talking about the first half of 2026, our customer churn is extremely low with customers generally only leaving us if their organization is bought out by a larger group using the competing system or if a customer goes out of business, with both of these happening rarely. I've spoken previously about the importance of being 100% cloud-based with one code base, which is still unusual in our industry. Our customers all being of the same version of the system whenever they are in the world is a big advantage for us.

From a security point of view, it's much more secure being a cloud-based platform than being hosted or using on-prem servers. Additionally, we are able to release software updates in a controlled manner, keeping our customers fully informed about any updates in the system functionality. The majority of our revenue is reoccurring and generally covers around 85%. Our customers pay quarterly in advance for the majority of their products. The main part of revenue that is not reoccurring is an implementation income, which we charge to new customers and some existing customers for one-off pieces of work. Having a fully embedded AI offering with multiple AI products sets us apart from the majority of our competitors.

In addition to our AI products being fully embedded, they are also available to new customers on a stand-alone business without the main platform. While we continue to innovate and recruit new talent, our expert, experienced workforce underpin what we offer. We have 40 years' experience in the automotive industry, a large portion of which has been part of an automotive retail group. We have a unique team, many of whom work with us both in the software and auto retail industries. Finally, our partnerships with the OEM partners are central to our success. We have excellent relationships with our OEMs all around the world, and our market-leading technology means that our integrations with them are seamless in the benefit of all of our customers.

I'll now take you through the progress we made against our strategy during H1 2026. We have made good progress on the Lookers' implementation in the first half with a number of important brands for Lookers now operating on the Pinewood system. The combined Pinewood and Lookers team worked together really well on that rollout. We continue to work closely with Marshalls on finalizing preparations for the rollout, and we're in a good position to start that immediately. In our international markets, we have recently signed a contract with our first German group and have more expected to follow in the next several months. In Japan, the Porsche rollout is going well. We expect to begin the Japan Volkswagen implementation in the second half of 2027.

We brought our Netherlands reseller out in March of 2026, which means that we have no longer any other resellers. Our product suite continues to develop at pace with a number of products that our teams have developed over the last 2 years, now available to sell to customers along with the market-leading AI offerings we now have following the Seez acquisition last year. The final pillar of our strategy, North America is, by some distance, the largest automotive retail software market in the world. We are now on the verge of having the Pinewood system live in the United States by the end of 2026, which will be a huge achievement. We're just beginning of our story in North America. We have hugely ambitious plans to firstly implement the system with Lithia and Global Auto Holdings North America, but alongside this to grow our market share as quickly and as aggressively as possible.

Finally, on to Slide 15. In the U.K., we will continue to work alongside the Lookers team to continue the rollout in the first half of 2027. We look forward to starting the Marshalls rollout imminently. With the Pinewood platform about to go live in the U.S., we are entering an exciting period in the company's history. We could not have a better partner to launch there with the Lithia team, and we look forward to growing our market share in the U.S. and Canada shortly thereafter. The acquisition by Ridgeview Partners will also accelerate our growth trajectory in all markets, but particularly in North America, where there is a significant addressable market.

Thank you to all the members of the Pinewood team for the continued hard work in driving this forward. We'd like to thank all of our shareholders for the support after the last 2 to 3 years, and realize that many of them are rolling their stake to the continued journey with us.

Thank you for joining us today. We welcome any questions.

[Operator Instructions]

First question is from Andrew Wade from Jefferies.

A bittersweet moment, but I guess congratulations on a good job. Two questions from me. First one, in terms of Lookers and also the U.S. pilot stores, any feedback you can give us sort of interested across the board, whether it's from a dealer level or whether it's sort of from further up the chain. Just I suppose more interested on the Lookers side of things, how they're viewing -- the dealers are viewing the implementation, how it's changing their lives and so on? Is it making things easier? Is it making cost savings possible? So that's the first one.

And then the second one, following the U.S. JV buyout, have you had much in the way of further conversations vis-a-vis future U.S. partners?

Andy, so yes, bittersweet, I'm sure somehow you and I and Philip and the whole team will still be engaged for the years to come, but I think it's a pretty high time for the company as a whole.

[ hindsight ]

Yes, absolutely. especially Philip buying. But as we go forward, I can tell you, I'll kind of start with your second question and kind of tie it into your first one. We've had lots of conversations with lots of the large medium-sized groups in North America. We did NADA this year. In addition to kind of winning best booth and best new entrant, we had a tremendous amount of engagement with various dealers of various sizes out of Canada and the U.S., and they're very impressed with the product. I can tell you on a Lithia sense as we get ready to roll out later this year, first stores with them in North America, we have done deep testing with them, both in Sandbox, but in live actuated stores. and let them see the product and the U.S. team has been really impressed. And they saw the same benefits that Lithia U.K. and even the prior Jardine stores as they came out of the platform in '24 saw as well.

So real positive things coming out of North America. I can't really speak for other customers. I can tell you the Lookers rollout has gone very well. They have been great partners. They're liking the different products that we bring into it. They're looking into putting the AI products in starting later this year and into next year. And they have seen the same type of results that Lithia U.K. saw as well. I can't get much deeper into that. You'd have to ask them more specifically because they've got other things in the docket on their end, but they've been great partners. I think the biggest thing I can say with Lookers, Andy, is their leadership and management teams in the U.K. have been incredibly supportive and help roll things out. But even at the next level up, they took their warrants and rolled it into equity and are staying on as a shareholder in NewCo. And I thought that was a great testament. They could have taken some money off the table, and they decided to put that back into the company and continue on the journey with Pinewood.

Thank you. We have no further questions. With that, we will close the call. Thank you for listening.

Thanks, everybody.

Thanks, everyone.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our FY '25 results presentation. I'm Bill Berman, CEO, and I'm joined today by our CFO, Ollie Mann.

2025 was our second year as a stand-alone AI embedded automotive technology company, and I'm really proud of the progress we've made in that time. The past 12 months have been particularly significant for us due to a number of key transactions and important operational milestones.

Ollie will take you through the headline financials shortly. But before that, I'm going to take you through an overview of our strategic and operational progress delivered in the period. We have grown our revenue by 30%, driven by strong growth among new customers, successful upselling to our existing customers and the revenue added from our Seez acquisition in March 2025.

In July 2025, there were 2 events that were key to Pinewood's future. Firstly, we bought Lithia out of the share of the North American joint venture. This removed the competitive overhang that existed and risked impeding our growth prospects in the key market. Secondly, we signed a long-term $60 million contract with Lithia to implement our system in all their U.S. dealerships across the U.S. and Canada. Meanwhile, we've been carrying out testing on the system in North America, which is progressing well.

The largest piece of work that we have been focusing on is the North America OEM integrations and is progressing as planned. Almost all of our OEM partners have now been engaged with and integration work is on target. Another key milestone in the period was the acquisition of Seez, the automotive AI company in March of this year. Since then, we have made great progress bringing Seez into the Pinewood Group and integrated the 2 tech stacks to significantly enhance our AI capabilities.

The contract we signed in March 2025 with Global Auto Holdings included Lookers, one of the largest auto dealerships in the U.K. The system rollout with Lookers started in July 2025 and is progressing well and on schedule. It is due to complete in Q4 of 2026.

I'll now hand over to Ollie to take us through the financial review.

Thanks, Bill. Good morning, everyone. We delivered strong revenue growth of approximately 30% to GBP 40.5 million. This increase was due to a number of factors, including the impact from new customers, upsell to our existing customer base and the revenue added from our AI acquisition, Seez.

We also saw the impact of FY '25 being a 12-month period and FY '24 being an 11-month period. Gross profit of GBP 34.7 million was 23% up on last year. The gross margin rate of 85.7% fell as expected and reflects Seez gross margins being slightly lower than the legacy Pinewood business. The key profit metric that we use both internally and externally is underlying EBITDA.

In 2025, this was GBP 16.4 million, up 17.1% on FY '24. Our recurring revenue of 83.2% is a key metric for us. The slight drop from last year reflects the mix with revenue from Seez now included. Our net customer churn of 2.5%, while higher than FY '24 is still at a very low level and highlights how much customers value the Pinewood platform.

A new metric that we've introduced is total contract value. This is the amount of incremental annual recurring revenue from signed customers that have not yet started their Pinewood system implementation. If the customer is partway through their implementation, the revenue included in total contract value is just the element from dealerships not yet implemented. Our total contract value of GBP 64.5 million on top of our existing revenue will deliver us the majority of our FY '28 EBITDA target of GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million.

On to Slide 7, where I'll take you through the key movements in our cash flow during the year. During FY '25, we generated GBP 6.5 million of cash from operations. There was a significant gain of GBP 60.8 million on the buyout of Lithia's share of the North American JV that was noncash. Other key movements in cash included GBP 1.1 million of bank interest received in the period and GBP 10 million received from Lithia for the settlement of a tax debtor.

The capital expenditure figure of GBP 11.4 million in FY '25 includes GBP 10.5 million of capitalized development spend. During the year, there was a net spend on acquisitions and reseller buyouts of GBP 13.5 million. This was made up of GBP 26 million spent on the Seez acquisition, GBP 2.5 million spent on the South Africa reseller buyout, offset by GBP 15 million of cash received as part of the U.S. JV buyout. Alongside the Seez acquisition was the equity raise that we undertook in March 2025, where we raised GBP 34.1 million of cash. All of these movements led to an end of December 2025 cash position of GBP 34.1 million.

On Slide 8 is the end of December 2025 balance sheet. There were closing shareholders' funds of GBP 204.2 million, with the main driver of the increase from the end of 2024 being the March 2025 equity raise and the July 2025 North American JV buyout. We now have goodwill of GBP 51.5 million on our balance sheet due to the buyout of Lithia's share of the North American JV, the Seez acquisition and the South Africa reseller buyout.

The increase in our other intangible assets from GBP 16.3 million to GBP 168 million was driven by the North America JV buyout and the Seez transactions with GBP 125 million of the year-end balance relating to the North America customer contract. The majority of the tax liability we have relates to the U.S. JV buyout and will unwind as the intangible assets are amortized. Finally, we have GBP 34.1 million in cash. In addition to this cash, we also have a GBP 10 million RCF facility, which remains undrawn.

On to Slide 9, where we show the non-underlying items for FY '25. There was GBP 4.6 million of costs related to FY '25 acquisitions. Most of this expense was legal fees related to the North America JV buyout and the Seez acquisition. Following the buyout of Lithia's share of the North American JV in July 2025, we have incurred GBP 4.2 million of costs in our U.S. subsidiary.

As guided previously, these costs will be treated as non-underlying until the Pinewood system is installed in 20 North American dealerships. Our share-based payment charge was GBP 3.6 million in FY '25, and there was a GBP 4 million amortization charge relating to intangibles arising on acquisition. The final item to call out is that there was a one-off gain of GBP 60.8 million that we recognized on the North American JV buyout.

On Slide 10, it's confirmation that our current FY '28 guidance is unchanged. This is underlying EBITDA of GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million in FY '28. Approximately GBP 50 million of this figure is covered by existing customers and signed contracts. In terms of FY '26, 2 of the 3 analysts that cover us released notes following our recent business update on the 25th of March 2026. The consensus of their FY '26 underlying EBITDA numbers was GBP 21.3 million. We expect underlying EBITDA for FY '26 to be in line with this.

I'll now hand back to Bill to run through the operating highlights and strategy.

Thanks, Ollie. I thought it would be helpful to take the opportunity to remind everyone about the fundamental strength of Pinewood.AI and what sets us apart from our competitors.

Firstly, being 100% cloud-based with one code base is extremely unusual in our industry. Our customers are working on the same version of the Pinewood system, whether they're in the U.K., U.S., Europe, Asia or anywhere in the world. This gives us a number of big advantages. From a security point of view, it's much more secure being in a cloud-based platform than being self-hosted or using on-prem servers.

Additionally, we are able to release multiple software updates a week during customer working hours with no disruption at all, which is certainly not the case for the majority of our competitors. Our customer churn is incredibly low with customers generally only leaving due to M&A or network consolidation. The majority of our revenue is recurring and is generally around 85%. The main part of our revenue that is not reoccurring is implementation income.

Another key differentiator from our competitors is having a fully embedded AI solution as part of our customer offering. Although having an AI offering is now standard, in most cases, it is a layered app on top of the system or basic API. What we have achieved with Seez is very different from this and is a fully embedded AI offering across our entire system, whether you're in vehicle sales, after sales or back office accounting.

With margins being squeezed across the auto retail industry, what we can offer with our AI-powered solution is incredibly powerful. While we continue to innovate and recruit new talent, our experienced workforce underpins what we offer. We have 40 years of experience in the automotive industry, which has made a huge difference in us developing the system we have today.

Finally, our deep integrations with our OEM partners remains key to us. We remain committed to being among the best partner for OEMs through our cutting-edge technology and our ability to adapt to the ever-changing auto retail landscape.

I'll now take you through the progress we've made against our strategy during 2025. In the U.K. and Ireland, we started their Lookers implementation in July 2025, and we'll continue the rollout through 2026 when we expect to be completed.

The combined Pinewood and Lookers teams have done an excellent job on the rollout. At the request of Marshalls, we have moved the start date of their implementation from Q1 2026 to the second half of 2026. This is so they can align their timing of the Pinewood rollout with a number of other projects they are working on. In our international markets, the Japan Porsche implementation started successfully in December 2025 with the first dealerships going live.

We look forward to getting all the Porsche Japan dealers onto the Pinewood system and then starting the Japan Volkswagen implementation. We continue to be in discussions with a number of potential Central European groups. The buyout of our South African and Netherlands reseller is now completed, and we are delighted to welcome their teams into the Pinewood team.

These acquisitions enable us to fully control our sales and customer service functions in these markets and put us in a stronger position to drive our continued growth in both regions. The acquisition of Seez in March 2025 has made a huge difference to our customer upsell offering as well as diversifying our revenue streams.

The Seez team put a huge amount of focus into the rollout of Seez products into the U.S. and U.K. dealers as well as growing their wider customer base. The final pillar of our strategy, North America is comfortably the largest automotive retail market in the world. And I'll take you through our progress on this on the following slides.

On Slide 14, we set out our expansion plans into the North American market and the progress we have been making. With 20,000 franchise dealers in North America, this is comfortably the largest market in the world with a total addressable market of over $9 billion.

We think we are in a strong position to scale across the U.S. and Canadian markets. As a reminder, we now have a significant foothold in the key market following the $60 million contract signed with Lithia to implement the Pinewood system in all of their dealerships in the United States and Canada.

Testing on a number of areas of the system in the U.S. is well underway with the full rollout expected to start no later than in 2026. The largest piece of the development work that we have for North America is integrating our system into all the U.S. and Canadian OEMs. We have now engaged with the majority of the OEMs that Lithia represent and integration work is well progressed with a number of these. We are targeting to have the majority of the North American OEMs integrations completed by the end of 2026.

Having now bought Lithia out of their share of the North American JV, we are well placed to now sign further customers in the U.S. and Canada and have a number of leads on our official U.S. launch at the February 2026 NADA conference that we are now currently working through.

Moving on to Slide 15 and an update to our recent U.K. system implementation. Our team have done a brilliant job so far on the Lookers implementations, working alongside the Lookers team to ensure the Pinewood platform rollout goes as smoothly as possible. It started in mid-2025 and will continue through 2026. We are pleased that the Lithia U.K. team are seeing the benefits of having Pinewood.AI in all the dealerships, and we continue to work with them to help drive their business forward.

We are looking forward to starting the Marshalls implementation in the second half of 2026. The Marshall and Pinewood teams have worked together extremely well in the planning phase of this project. We continue to expand our range of products and offer all of these to our existing customers to help them drive their business forward by both increasing productivity as well as increasing efficiencies by using the Pinewood products.

On Slide 16, we set out our progress in our priority growth markets outside the U.K. and the U.S. We set out some key geographies in our strategy at our Capital Markets Day in 2024. Japan and Southeast Asia, Central Europe and South Africa. The Porsche Japan rollout started well in December 2025, and we are working well with the Japanese Porsche dealers to work through the rest of the implementations during 2026.

Once the Porsche dealers are completed, we will move to the Volkswagen dealers in Japan. We have ongoing discussions with a number of European customers, most of which are based in Central Europe. We have fully integrated our South African business into the group following the buyout of our South African reseller in mid-2025, and we are looking at different ways to grow our revenue streams in South Africa. We bought out our final reseller in the Netherlands in February 2026, and we're currently in the process of integrating the team into Pinewood.

To wrap things up on the operating highlights, I just want to repeat some of the characteristics that make our market so compelling. All car dealerships need not only a DMS, but also layered apps associated with it. At Pinewood, we offer all of this, and we are in a position to offer car retailers all the software they need. Our average customer tenure is 15 to 20 years is a testament to how embedded our system is within our customers' work streams. Switching DMS is a long process and works in our favor for existing customers. But for potential new customers, we offer something no one else does.

Being part of an auto retail group for over 25 years has given us a competitive advantage over everyone else, something that no amount of money or investment can replicate. In addition, our now fully embedded AI features differentiated us from everyone else. We are in a unique position to help our valued customers navigate a time of increasing demanding environment from a security and compliance viewpoint. Pinewood.AI offers something no one else is capable of providing.

Finally, on to Slide 19. In the U.K., we will continue to work closely with the Lookers team to manage the rollout through completion in Q4. We are also looking forward to starting the Marshalls rollout later this year. As we've talked through, we have made significant progress in North America on both OEM integrations and on testing the system in the U.S. The opportunity in North America is considerably larger than any other part of the world. So scaling here as quickly as possible remains a top priority for us.

Finally, our FY '28 guidance is unchanged at an underlying EBITDA of GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million, which is underpinned by our strong visibility from existing contracts, including the $6 million contract with Lithia North America as well as a number of other signed contracts. Thank you, all members of the Pinewood team for driving us forward as a group.

Thank you for joining us today. We welcome any questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question this morning is coming from Oliver Tipping calling from Peel Hunt.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

I've got sort of 3 different questions. The first one relates to -- I think you said Lithia is going to sort of go live in terms of revenue at some point in 2026. So I just wanted to understand exactly how far through the capital investment being made to make that product sort of fit for market in North America we are and how we expect sort of CapEx to move over the next 2 or 3 years? And are there any tools internally you're using that's improving your development efficiency?

The second question is that broadly my understanding is the U.S. is built on a per rooftop basis. in the U.K., there's a larger per user element. So I was just wondering what the rough split was for the Lookers and Marshalls deal between per rooftop and per user.

And then lastly, I noticed that there was a court case. It wasn't involving you guys, but Asbury and CDK went to court about their switch to Tekion, and they won that court case. Tekion and Asbury won that court case. Do you think that precedent will make it easier for you to win share in the U.S. in the future from the sort of incumbent North American suppliers?

So Ollie, I'll kind of go in reverse order. So we really can't comment on somebody else's lawsuits and stuff like that. What I can tell you about that is -- and obviously, if you would assume the ruling is -- they're going to go at it again. So they're going to appeal it. But at the end of the day, the dealer owns their data. We manage our dealerships that way as well.

So in our case, dealerships data is their data to do what they want, and we allow them to facilitate whatever they need to do on that piece. As far as being able to open it up, just because you have open access to the data that doesn't necessarily mean it's in an easily digestible way to move over.

We have created technology more specifically through our AI offerings to be able to facilitate that real time, whether we're pulling from a dealer group's data cloud on their own data stack or directly from a different core system DMS provider. But I do think going forward, you're going to see more and more open data stacks and as such.

On the pricing models, obviously, it varies greatly by which part of the world you're in. Europe still goes primarily off of SaaS-based pricing. All of our pricing is going to be going to a rooftop and modular basis over time. And there's multiple positive reasons for that. Some things are just specific to a brand, and there's no way to actually charge it out on a per user basis, OEM integrations, certain updates, certain facets of it.

A lot of AI functionality wouldn't be charged in a typical SaaS pricing. So it would have to be a rooftop charge. And one of the key metrics that are key attributes that we bring into the marketplace is being able to help dealers reduce their cost. And oftentimes, that is by automating certain non-revenue-generating noncustomer-facing processes, and it is such lowering a per user count. And it would be counterintuitive to sit here and continue with a per user basis when one of your key tenets is to try to reduce the number of users that exist that way.

As far as -- we're not disclosing the exact amount that we spend in one market for development. But I'll just keep in mind that we are on a single code base. And oftentimes, things we do for one market transition and go into another market. and/or it can just improve the current functionality to the system that exists today.

So we've got some great accounting platforms and different things that we've used -- that we found up in the Nordic countries and that we use in different places of the world, dynamic accounting and as such. There's lots of different tech solutions in North America and the ways of doing business that we could -- we would think would help other parts of the world, and we'd like to bring that over.

Obviously, going into North America is a big endeavor. So while our CapEx has grown to us, we've just replatformed over the last 24 months. We've now put hyperscaling in. We've got all the certifications in progress with the U.S. OEMs. That would be something specifically that would represent North America. But say that piece, I think our CapEx is going to be pretty much where it is with the exception of being opportunities to go into new markets and/or investments into new and more dynamic products as we go forward.

Next, we go to Damindu Jayaweera of Peel Hunt.

Sorry, Peel Hunt is asking too many questions probably. The thing I wanted to ask you, Bill, is that, obviously, I think you guys have done the right thing by making that Seez acquisition at the right time. It's interesting to see Keyloop loop also making or trying to make a similar acquisition or has done so in Motortech.ai. And so obviously, everybody is kind of trying to move towards AI, embed AI.

I was listening to your Full Throttle podcast when you were over in the U.S. for the NADA conference. In there, obviously, you were kind of reiterating the fact that you don't want to do what everybody else is doing, which is just putting chatbots on top and the AI has to be embedded deeply. And when you look at your product page, I saw there's a nice video about how Seez DNA is going to permeate through the full product stack.

The thing that slightly kind of confused me not listening to you, but listening to Jay at Tekion is in their NADA conference, it almost felt like he was playing down kind of Whizbang AI functionality, and he was trying to talk to the core of the single truth, the security layer, trying to move from -- trying to preserve the importance of system of record I kind of remembering, but I'm just trying to get to how you are trying to position Pinewood when you are talking to potential target opportunities when everybody is just talking AI, AI, AI all the time from Nextlane to even the constellation assets.

Yes. So listen, I can't really going to comment what any of our competitors would say out there. I can tell you this, the one thing in automotive, whether it's on the retail side, the tech side or the OEM side, of things -- the best of ideas are often replicated.

I will say this with Jay, I completely agree on system of record and the core data stack that goes along with that and the importance of that. To -- the statement that you made maybe are different things here. I look at AI being able to utilize that core data stack and then being able to do new and exciting things with it.

So the one thing with a platform like ours is without having to have a plethora of layered apps and disjointed data stacks and disjointed functionality and having 20 windows open simultaneously and to the best state possible having the fewest number of non-OEM integrations to be able to facilitate a smooth and easy transaction for both the customer and the dealer, I think, is a real differentiator.

Where I see AI coming into it is AI is going to be able to do things like a system of record, a core enterprise-level accounting platform. Even as simple as ours is to operate, they still could be very complex. And we've already embedded our AI into that.

And now the AI can answer questions for a user and be able to show you how to use the system. Where I see -- I'm starting to use AI is being able to do predictive indexing, being able to help a customer be able to schedule an appointment to maybe get the car service, but be able to do it in a way where not only do we -- does the shop have the availability on the side of individual writing up the service adviser and as such, but also being able to make sure that we have a technician that's available that has the appropriate skill set to work on that car.

Oftentimes, appointments are made because there's an hour open in the day, but that technician might not have the qualifications to work on an electric vehicle, for example. I'm starting to do things like that. Do predictive indexing to engage with the customer when their car is going to need their next servicing or being able to directly when it comes to recalls and as such without having to use phone rooms and operators and humans to see here and try to facilitate things like that.

I can see it being able to sit here and assist the customer journey. But at the end of the day, that core data stack, that system of record, that enterprise-level accounting platform with full integrations into the OEMs is the nucleus for everything. And any AI is only going to be as good as the data that it has access to.

And to your earlier point, that's why I'm not quite as big of a fan of the layered apps approach and sitting on top like a chatbot because at the end of the day, they're pretty similar and they're accessing the same data streams when you have a data set like we have and the plethora of information that goes along with that, it really changes the operations and the value proposition that AI can bring. But AI is going to be additive. I do think it will be transformative.

And I think you're going to be pretty wow by what's going to come out over the next 12 to 18 months when it represents to that with Pinewood and Seez.

I just have a follow-up question. So obviously, your biggest opportunity is the U.S., but I'm also really interested in the European opportunity you have. I think you've always talked about the fragmented nature of the European market. There are a bunch of products that are coming to end of life. But now as you described, AI is actually making use of these tools a little bit more easier.

So the learning curve of adopting a new piece of software might be easier. Then on top in the last couple of months, obviously, people are seeing scary headlines about cybersecurity. So do you feel like the ability for you to probably run harder into the European market is now stronger than it was 12 months ago.

I mean you obviously bought in Netherlands the Dutch distributor. And I know you have hiring plans in place from Germany. Just some commentary around kind of competitive landscape and if it's become easier in your head to crack the European opportunity?

Well, I don't know if I'd say easier, but the demand coming out of Europe, Asia, Africa and South America is growing exponentially day by day. OEMs are looking to go about things in a different way. Several franchises that -- sorry, several OEMs that we've engaged with have talked where they have upwards of 200 different OEM integrations, and it's just impossible to manage all those effectively.

OEMs want fewer integrations into DMS systems, and they want more advanced systems that are out there. Cloud-based systems like ours are definitely appealing to them. So they want fewer. They want people that can sit here and operate on a worldwide basis.

And to your point about -- and we call it assist that's built into our system where you can really just ask the system how to operate itself is a big differentiator. Our system is also language agnostic. So you can work multiple languages within a single dealer group even within a single store.

So yes, I do think that. I think into the example that you bring, the European market is very fragmented. You have lots of local players in there that solutions are built specifically for a geography, and I just don't think those are going to stand the test of time. And I think you're going to need -- kind of like you've seen with consolidation within the retail network within dealers, I think you're going to continue to see consolidation within the tech stacks that the OEMs are going to be willing to integrate with.

And ultimately, I think that will help drive opportunities for platforms like Pinewood.AI to be able to engage into there. And more specifically within Europe, you're right, there are several burning platforms, end-of-life, unsupported systems out there. And I think that gives us a huge opportunity.

Now that said, North America, by far, is the biggest automotive retail market, especially on the technology side. So it's going to be a key focus, but we're never going to forget our roots and the geographies we already operate in. And in a perfect world, we want to continue to grow in our key markets close to our head office, the opportunities in North America, but then to be able to continue to grow in Africa and Europe, Asia and maybe even with the timing right, maybe even into South America.

Well done on what you've achieved over the last 2 years. It's great to see a vertical software actually company thrive in the age of AI. Cheers.

I appreciate you saying that. The team has done an absolutely wonderful job. So Ollie and I get to stand upfront, but there's 400 people that are doing the heavy lifting. So I appreciate the kind words.

[Operator Instructions] We'll now go to Andrew Wade calling from Jefferies.

A quick one from me. You talked about sort of competitive moat versus generic AIs in your RNS there. Just be interested if you could flesh that in particular, you sort of talked about the benefits of 20-plus years of experience and you talk about the challenges of integrating with the OEMs.

So if you could just talk a bit more about why that is a challenge and perhaps reference some of the -- some of what you had to go through in the U.S. to get it done to the extent you have out there.

Yes. So Andy, so it's a good question. So the weird thing is you would think that if you integrate with a certain OEM that, that integration would work anywhere in the world. And what you find is that's the farthest thing from the truth. You can be in parts of Central Europe and have 4 countries touching each other and have 5 different integration levels with a single OEM.

And so what you find is like going into North America, we're going to probably end up running nearly 1,000 different integrations to get all of the key OEMs fully integrated. Now lots of them have multiple integrations. So it's not 1,000 different OEMs, obviously, but it can be quite complex. And there is a huge differentiation even in some cases, between Canada and the U.S. So it's not the difficulty of doing it. It's just the sheer volume of work.

Currently, we're pacing to have by the end of this year, 90-plus percent of the volumes that exist within North America have to be fully integrated on the OEM side and already have the certifications. And that really opens up the pathway for us to be able to expand outside of the Lithia deal and add additional U.S. dealers on in a relatively short period of time.

You talked about the moats, and I'm glad you brought that up because obviously, everyone saw kind of the SaaSpocalypse on February 4 with Anthropic and Cloud coming out there and kind of disrupting some of the legal platforms that exist out there. A platform like ours puts us in a really unique position.

You talked about the OEM integrations. That's one of those things where as big of an advocate I am in the company is for AI, I don't see how AI is going to be able to sit here and build OEM integrations. If it's 1,000 integrations for the U.S. to replicate that one worldwide. I also don't see the OEMs open sourcing or letting AI agents come in and start doing integration work.

Having an enterprise-level accounting platform once again that has the integrations with the OEMs that is multi-jurisdictional in 40-plus countries to be able to do that way. These are things that at least in the near to midterm future, there are just things that an agent, an AI agent just isn't going to be able to do.

And we have quite a few moats that kind of work around us and protect us on that piece of it. But there are also competitive advantages as we engage with new potential customers as we continue to work with our OEM partners, and we continue to expand our footprint worldwide.

We do have another question just came in, and it will be coming from Alex Short calling from Berenberg.

Two questions from me. First one, obviously, some really useful new disclosures to help us understand how much of that GBP 60 million target is already underpinned. I guess my question is around capacity and what -- how much Pinewood has around current and future implementations.

So on one side, has the delay to Marshalls made things tighter in FY '27? Or conversely, has that allowed you to get ahead on Lookers and in North America? And on the other side, there's obviously a lot more potential market share out there currently held by legacy peers. Would the company have the implementation capacity in the event of a new contract win, say, in a new region where you need new OEM integrations?

So it's a good question. Not specifically within Marshalls or Lookers, our implementation team that's based in the U.K. for -- at least for the U.K., we're able to flex our capacity and the ability to sit here and put additional dealer groups on.

So while the delay in Marshalls doesn't really change that much, might free up a little bit of resourcing to sit here and go a little bit quicker with the Lookers. But we have other contracts, obviously, besides Marshalls, Lookers going on. So it just opens up capacity on that end.

Normally, the biggest thing that limits the speed that we can do an implementation is normally on the customer side and working around their time lines. In the U.K., for example, you normally don't do integrations in March and September because they're big retail months. So in that case, we might take some of that resourcing in the U.K., maybe move it into Central Europe to help with implementations on that site.

I'd say the one thing as we go forward and we continue to grow our business and our capabilities and our tech stack is how we've started to use AI to help simplify the implementation. So the biggest piece of implementation is actually transferring the first is laying out the accounting stack that the current group is working on.

There are certain nuances to every group in the way they operate. And while not every group has a bespoke platform that we help build for them, but then at the end of the day, there are nuances. But the biggest piece is extracting the data out of their current system or systems and then putting it in. We've just now started to utilize AI to do something that used to take a couple of weeks to do to get it down to taking a couple of minutes to do.

I talked to you about on the call at least about using Assist, our AI agent that's embedded in the platform that's able to help you operate the system where you can be asking a question, how do I stock in this car, and it will give you a detailed pathway to be able to go do that. And in the relatively near future, that same capability, the system will be able to do it for you with a handful of prompts, be able to do it that way.

So it really reduces the training time down significantly on new implementations as well as the way the system has been designed. It's very intuitive. It's all menu driven. And if you've used any Microsoft products in the past, and can read use a mouse and use a menu, you can operate our system in a pretty short period of time.

So we're using our experience, our current tech stack, some of the innovative things we're able to do with the Seez tech stack and get it where implementations can move very, very quickly.

Great. Maybe one more, if you don't mind, perhaps, Ollie. We obviously have clarity around the FY '28 EBITDA target, but maybe you could run through in a bit more detail your expectations for how cash margins trend through to '28 and the sort of CapEx and working capital dynamics around that. I appreciate you don't want to get too specific on the CapEx side.

No, no, that's right, Alex. Good to hear from you. So yes, from a working capital point of view, I think we've touched on it before, as we grow our customer base, we do get an advantage from this because we invoice our customers quarterly in advance. This is for the recurring revenue and the majority of our revenue is recurring. So we will get a benefit from that.

So as we get into FY '27 and FY '28, there will be a significant working capital benefit. So in FY '28, we're talking GBP 12 million, GBP 13 million of benefit there in that year. From a CapEx point of view, I think Bill touched on this. The underlying CapEx or standard CapEx is very much being one code based as is. There is -- exiting this year, we have been doing the OEM integration work with the U.S., which we're in a good place with.

I think we've mentioned that we're anticipating having the majority of that done during 2026 or by the end of 2026, which is great, and it allows us to effectively sign any U.S. customers. So we're in a good place with that. So they will once we annualize the CapEx, there will be a slight tick up for '26 and '27.

But the net impact of those movements is of the GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million underlying EBITDA, we expect sort of high 40s of that to drop through from a net cash position. So we're talking GBP 45 million to GBP 50 million of cash in FY '28.

As we have no further audio questions, I'll turn the call over to Henry Wallers to take any questions submitted by the webcast.

Thanks, George. Yes, we've got 2 questions from Investec with regards to total contract value. So Roger says, thanks for the total contract value metric disclosure. What's the assumption being made on average customer lifetime, please? Presumably, this can end up being many years, if not decades. So what is the cutoff being used?

And then the second question on TCV is, broadly speaking, what's the subdivision of total contract value number between subscription maintenance type businesses and implementation/service business?

Yes. Thanks, Roger, for those questions. Yes, just going in reverse order. So in terms of the split between recurring and implementation revenue, it's all recurring revenue. So we don't put any implementation revenue into that figure. So it's from the contracts, the customers that we signed and they are not implemented. It's just the recurring element of that revenue.

And in terms of a cutoff or lifetime, the assumption is we haven't put a lifetime on it. And the reason being for that is the only time we really lose a customer is generally through M&A activity. So if we've got a customer with, say, 5 dealerships and they get bought out by someone else with 50 dealers who are on a different competitor system, that tends to be the only time that we lose a customer.

So we're working on the assumption that most of these customers in the total contract value are big enterprise size level customers, the majority. So the assumption is that they're sort of lifetime customers and there isn't a cutoff. We haven't put a 10- or 15-year lifespan on. Hopefully, that makes sense and answers the questions.

I think that's it, Bill. So good to...

Perfect. Listen, thanks, everybody. Kind of like I said earlier, when I was talking to Andy, I just want to give a reminder that even though Ollie and I could sit here and take the lead here, this is all a testament to the hard work of the 400-plus employees that we have worldwide. And this is probably the oldest start-up ever, and we look forward to even better performance in the half years and the years to come.

Thanks, everybody.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our H1 FY '25 results presentation. I'm Bill Berman, CEO. And I'm joined today by my partner and CFO, Ollie Mann. This has been another half of great progress for Pinewood.AI, delivering on the strategic objectives and positioning the business for accelerated growth. Ollie will take you through the headline financials shortly. But before that, I'm going to take you through an overview of the strategic and financial progress delivered in the period.

We have grown our revenue by over 20%, driven by strong growth among our customers and successful upselling in our existing customer base. Our new user experience has played a significant role with positive feedback to date. On top of this, our product suite has been significantly enhanced and a number of new products, such as our new data and analytics offering, automotive business intelligence has been launched.

A key milestone in the period was the acquisition of Seez, the automotive AI company, in March of this year. In the 6 months since then, we have made great progress bringing Seez into the Pinewood Group and integrating the 2 tech stacks to significantly enhance our AI capabilities.

In addition, Seez has grown a stand-alone business by over 500 rooftops since it became part of Pinewood.AI, with new entries in North America as well as the U.K. Those stores will be fully implemented by year's end.

The North American market is a core pillar of our strategy and ambitions. Buying Lithia's share of the North American JV in July represented a fundamental step in establishing a platform to maximize our impact in the market. We are on track to pilot the Pinewood platform in Q4 of this year in 2 Lithia stores before commencing the full rollout in the first half of 2026.

I'd now like to hand it over to Ollie to take you through the financial review.

Thanks, Bill. Good morning, everyone. We delivered strong revenue growth of over 20% to GBP 19.6 million. This was driven by a number of factors, including revenue from the U.K. Lithia dealerships, whom we implemented the Pinewood.AI platform during the second half of 2024.

In addition, we have successfully implemented the system for new customers in a number of geographies in the first half of 2025 as well as increasing vertical sales into our existing customers. Gross profit of GBP 17 million was 17.2% up on last year. The slight gross margin dilution was expected and reflects these gross margins being slightly lower than the legacy Pinewood.AI business. The key profit metric that we use both internally and externally is underlying EBITDA. In the first half of 2025, this was GBP 7.9 million, up 14.5% on the first half of 2024.

Our recurring revenue of 85.7% underpins the financial result. The slight drop from last year reflects the mix, with revenue from Seez now included. Finally, our net customer churn of 0.3% highlights how much customers value the Pinewood.AI platform and how integral it is to their businesses.

Moving on to Slide 7, where I'll talk through the key movements in our cash flow during the period. During the first half of FY '25, we generated GBP 8.5 million of cash from operations. Other key movements in cash included GBP 0.5 million of bank interest received in the period and GBP 10 million received from Lithia for the settlement of a tax debtor.

Our total development spend in the first half of the year was GBP 6.7 million, of which we capitalized GBP 5.2 million. There was also an additional GBP 0.1 million of PPE CapEx. We expect development spend for the whole of 2025 to be just under GBP 14 million and for there to be a gradual increase in this over the next few years.

The consideration for the Seez acquisition was GBP 32.9 million, of which GBP 25.7 million was cash and GBP 7.2 million was consideration shares. Alongside the Seez acquisition was the equity raise that we undertook in March 2025, where we raised GBP 34.1 million of cash. All of these movements led to an end of June 2025 cash position of GBP 30.3 million.

On to Slide 8. At the end of June 2025 balance sheet, the key balances on this are closing shareholders' funds of GBP 80.1 million, with the main driver being the March 2025 equity raise. We now have GBP 31 million of goodwill on our balance sheet, with the increase in goodwill reflecting the Seez acquisition in March 2025. Some of this goodwill may be reclassified separate intangible assets following a purchase price allocation exercise.

Other intangible assets of GBP 22.7 million cover the capitalized software assets, which has grown as we have increased resource levels and development work in the period and incorporated the Seez development team into the group. Finally, we have GBP 30.3 million in cash. In addition to this cash, we also have GBP 10 million RCF facility, which remains undrawn.

On Slide 9, you can see the non-underlying items. Firstly, we had GBP 1 million of transaction costs relating to the equity raise and the Seez acquisition. We also had GBP 0.7 million of restructuring and transition costs in the period. Our share-based payment charge was GBP 1.4 million in the first half of FY '25. And finally, our share of the JV result was a GBP 1.3 million charge in the period.

Moving on to Slide 10 and our updated guidance. As a result of buying Lithia out to the North American JV, we expect a short-term accounting impact in the second half of 2025. Prior to the JV buyout, Pinewood.AI recognized 51% of software development for North America as revenue and profit. This no longer applies after the buyout. As a result of this, we expect to have GBP 1.3 million less revenue than previously forecast this year.

In addition to this, Marshalls have asked us to move the start of their implementation back to quarter 1 2026 from quarter 4 2025 to align with other projects they're undertaking. We still expect to complete the majority of the Marshall's implementations during 2026. As a result of these 2 items, we expect our FY '25 underlying EBITDA to be GBP 15.5 million to GBP 16 million. Neither of these 2 items have any impact on our medium or long-term profitability.

Looking ahead, our previous guidance for underlying EBITDA in FY '27 was a range in the mid to high GBP 30 million. We are updating this with guidance for underlying EBITDA in FY '28, which we expect to be in the range of GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million. This is underpinned by strong visibility from existing contracts and a significant pipeline of opportunities, including our 5-year contracts with Lithia to roll out the Pinewood.AI platform across North America. As a reminder, this contract is expected to generate an estimated $60 million of revenue per year by the end of 2028.

I'll now hand back to Bill to run through the operating highlights and strategy.

Thanks, Ollie. I'll now take you through the progress we've made against the strategy we set out at the Capital Markets Day last year. On the U.K. and Ireland front, we started the Lookers implementation in July and August of 2025, and will continue in October once we get through the key plate change month of September. The combined teams have done a great job in the initial stages of the rollout, and we are confident they will continue to do so when we start work next month.

We continue to extend our network of Porsche dealers globally with a successful installation in Canada during May, enabled to buy development of new internationally deployable manufacturer interfaces. We are pleased to announce an agreement with Porsche Japan to commence implementation of the Pinewood system in all of their Porsche centers in the country of Japan. This builds upon significant product development attuned to retail operations in Japan and the establishment of a nationally-focused installation and support team. We look forward to the Porsche Japan rollout starting in half 1 2026.

With the acquisition of Seez, it has transformed our vertical sales channels and allowed us to approach a much broader customer base as well as enabling us to generate additional revenue with short lead times. We also continue to expand our range of products that we can sell to both existing and new customers.

Moving on to Slide 13. Bringing the Seez team into the group in March of 2025 following the acquisition was a key moment for us. We have continued to run Seez on a stand-alone basis in many of their markets to maximize the impact of the great brand recognition they have built up over a number of areas.

At the same time, we have started to integrate the cutting-edge AI technology of Seez with the Pinewood data stack. Only 6 months in, we have made some significant progress with a number of fully integrated tools, now operational as part of the Pinewood.AI platform. This is just the beginning, and we're hugely excited about the roadmap of the integration work and new AI products that will cement Pinewood's position at the forefront of auto AI providers.

Moving on to Slide 14, an update to our recent system implementations. As mentioned at the beginning of this section, our team have done a great job so far in the Lookers implementations, working inside the Lookers team to ensure the Pinewood.AI platform rollout goes as smoothly as possible. This started in 2025 and will continue for the rest of 2025 and into 2026.

We are pleased that the Lithia U.K. team are seeing the benefits of having Pinewood.AI in all of their dealerships. This follows a successful implementation in the ex-Jardine Motor Group in 2024, where they have seen improved productivity and increased efficiencies. We are looking forward to starting the Marshalls implementation with them in Q1 of 2026.

Slide 15 sets out the strong foothold we have in North America and the scale of the opportunity in front of us. Having now bought Lithia out of their share of the North American joint venture and signed a contract with them to implement the platform in their North American dealers, we are now well placed to sign further customers in the U.S. and Canada.

The rollout of Seez chatbots into the Lithia North American dealer started in September and will finish in Q1 of 2026. With 20,000 franchise dealers in North America, the size of the opportunity is huge, with a total addressable market of over $9 billion. We think that Pinewood.AI is in a prime position to start to grow their share of the North American market.

On to Slide 16 and the progress we're making towards our North American pilot. We have now engaged with the majority of the OEMs that Lithia represent as well as third-party layered app providers that will need to integrate with us, and the integration work is progressing well. We'll be piling Pinewood.AI in 2 of Lithia North American stores in Q4 this year, ahead of the full rollout starting in H1 of 2026. Finally, we are making great progress with recruiting our North America team, with a number of key roles already filled.

Moving on to Slide 17 and the progress in our key growth markets. We are primarily targeting the geographies set out in our strategy at the Capital Markets Day last year, Japan, Southeast Asia, Central Europe and South Africa. Last week, we signed a contract with Porsche Japan to roll out the Pinewood platform across all of the Porsche dealers in Japan. The full rollout is expected to start in the first half of 2026.

We have ongoing discussions with a number of European customers, most of which are based in Central Europe. We have fully integrated our South African business into the group, following the buyout of our South African reseller and are looking at routes to grow the business through both new and existing customers. Finally, we are also engaging with a number of potential customers in the Middle East, capitalizing on Seez's strong regional presence there. This follows us buying out our Middle East reseller in August.

Finally, on to Slide 19. As we have set out, we have made significant progress with our strategy. Our priorities in the U.K. are the Lookers and Marshall's implementation as well as adding further customers from the U.K. top 100 dealer groups. Our international expansion will be focused on the key geographies that we have identified, North and South America, Central Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia and South Africa.

Finally, our FY '28 guidance of underlying EBITDA between GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million is underpinned by strong visibility from existing contracts. This includes a $60 million contract with Lithia North America as well as significant pipeline of opportunities.

Lastly, I'd like to thank both the Pinewood.AI and Seez teams for their hard work and dedication.

Thank you for joining us today. We welcome any questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question this morning will be coming from Alex Short calling from Berenberg.

Just a couple of questions from me, please. Firstly, on the quite exciting FY '28 guidance. Obviously, this is underpinned by the Lithia contract to a significant extent. Can we expect that $60 million of revenue in FY '28 to come at a similar margin to what the company has historically achieved?

And in terms of the visibility from existing contracts, could you perhaps quantify or elaborate a little bit more on this with respect to the cross-sell/upsell opportunity around fees and the add-on products?

And then one for Ollie. We obviously saw a fairly material GBP 2.3 million working capital inflow in H1 '25. Is this a sign of things to come? Should we expect a greater proportion of customers to be paying upfront in the coming years? And essentially, how should we think about working capital dynamics and cash conversion going forward?

Alex, this is Bill. I think that's like 6 questions, but I'll start off with the first half, and then, I'll let Ollie take the second part. As far as our call-out for 2028 of the GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million and kind of how much of that is baked in and the margin that represents for North America, on a high-level noncore business, the margins coming out of North America will be either at or exceed other geographies that we have in the world.

Initially, the expansion in North America, there will be additional costs that are only North American-based. So initially, the net margin will be lower. Gross margin will be still in 90-plus percent range. On the net margin, it will be lower than that initially. But once we get the full implementation done with Lithia and additional growth opportunities outside of them, we will get and exceed the current margins we have right now.

As far as the balance sheet and that stuff, Ollie.

Yes, Alex, it's a good question. You're right to call that out on the working capital. And as we grow over the next 3 or 4 years, that working capital impact will increase in a good way. You're completely right, almost all of our customers pay quarterly in advance. So as our customer base grows, the benefit from that will grow. So, yes, we're looking as you get into '26, '27, '28, there's going to be sort of GBP 7 million or GBP 8 million a year of benefit from that working capital inflows. Yes, that's a good question, good call out.

Next question will be coming from Roger Phillips calling from Investec.

Going back on that GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million of 2028 guidance. To what extent -- what kind of assumption have you made about conversion of your pipeline in terms of what is required there in terms to hit that? Or is it all just entirely based on what you see today in terms of what you've got to roll out for the next couple of years in terms of existing customers? That's the first question.

Second question is in terms of the South African and Middle East transactions, are there more sort of channel transactions like that to happen across the group that you would see over the medium term?

And then finally, I may have missed it in the results, so apologies if I did, but could you take a stab at net revenue retention and the way you would expect that to trend, please?

Terrific. So Roger, on the first part, looking forward to the GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million. By and large, most of that is contracts that are already signed and within the pipeline. Marshalls, Lookers, Lithia, the business we're getting out of Japan, plus our normal historical growth rates that we have into there. So this isn't a really aggressive target for that point in time. And with a little bit of a tailwind and a couple of other large contracts, hopefully, that we can bring forward in there. There's more of a potential for upside to that.

As far as what we've done in kind of the Middle East and South Africa, to the extent we can, we always want to control as much of our front-facing interactions with our customers. To that extent, we would look at any and all of our kind of resale agreements. And the ones that we feel that we could handle to a more direct pathway, we definitely look into that.

That said, if we went into a part of the world where maybe culturally, language wise, we might not be the best qualified to do that, we'd look for more of a partnership to be able to facilitate that. I'm not a big fan of the reseller model, but JV like we did within North America or things along that line would be definitely something that we consider and look into.

Roger, on the net revenue retention, yes, look, the short answer is we expect that to be positive. Our customer churn is historically between 0% and 2%, and we certainly see that continuing. And then layered on top of that, we've got our annual price increases we put through, which are typically based off CPI. So that's on average running at 3% or 4%. You get that natural increase there. So look, we would see that being positive going forward for the foreseeable future.

Is that okay, Roger? Are you -- anything else to talk from you?

No, that's great.

[Operator Instructions] We'll now move to Carl Smith of Zeus Capital.

Two questions for me. The first is on the gross margin. So do you think this can get back to 90% at a group level? And what sort of levers can you pull to get that back up?

And then the second question, would you be able to give a sort of indication of the total time to implement the Lookers and Porsche Japan contracts? Should we expect those to be fully implemented by the end of H1 '26 or a bit later?

So on the margin piece -- Carl, we haven't talked a little bit. On the margin piece right now, that's going to ebb and flow a little bit. First off, 90% margins are definitely on the high side within this space. And a lot of that's going to depend on how much growth we get out of Seez's direct-to-consumer sales outside of the Pinewood platform, as they sell in geographies where Pinewood doesn't exist yet. So that will ebb and flow.

On the core Pinewood business, we will be at or be able to exceed that type of a margin. When you start to combine, there will be a little bit of a pullback, but it won't be demonstrative in any type of way.

As far as the rollout timings with Japan, Marshalls, Lookers and as such, Marshalls and Lookers, we look to have those fully done by the end of next year. We will be starting the rollouts in Japan in end of this year, first part of next year. Those will probably be slow rolls just the way that market is set up and established. And that will probably take us into mid-2027, right now the way that they've kind of laid that piece out with.

So Marshalls, Lookers will go through all of '26. Japan, we'll sit here and start end of this year and roll this into the mid-'27. And then, we'll be starting with Lithia, just to go to the next evolution of this on a full rollout schedule, mid-'26 and extending into 2028.

I just have one follow-up question. For FY '28 and the new EBITDA targets, are we expecting the full $60 million of revenue in 2028 from Lithia? Or is it $60 million by the end of 2028?

Carl, it's Ollie. Yes. So the $60 million is the exit ARR. So we wouldn't expect some -- as things stand at the full $60 million in the year. If Lithia decides to push things forward, that's possible. But as things stand, as Bill said, if we finish in, say, mid-'28, for example, yes, you'd get a very -- a good proportion of the $60 million, but not all of it in '28, but it would be the exit ARR, so you'd get all of it going forward from there.

[Operator Instructions] We do not appear to have any further audio questions. Jack, I would like to turn the call over to you for any questions submitted by webcast.

We have a question from Oliver Tipping at Peel Hunt. He asks, does the Marshall's delay have any knock-on impact on your ability to execute on other contracts during FY '26? Or do you have the capacity to execute all other contracts as planned?

Marshall is always going to be primarily rolled out in 2026 from the get-go, so moving from Q4 to Q1 really doesn't make that much of a difference. I think that gives us the position to actually better serve Marshalls, as we go into '26, so this will have no negative impact. We definitely have the resourcing to be able to handle all the implementations we have. North America is a stand-alone team. For all the U.K. business, it's a separate team as well as Japan, South Africa and as such. So we've got a really dedicated and experienced team in the U.K., and they will be handling the Marshalls and Lookers roll out through 2026. .

Great. There are 2 questions from Andy Wade at Jefferies. The first one, you've touched on already, Bill, but he asks, to what extent does your FY '28 EBITDA guidance underpinned by existing contracts, including the Lithia U.S. rollout?

And his second question is, why do you think progress in Japan has been more rapid than in Europe? How confident are you about getting deals done there?

Okay. So on the first one, we kind of touched upon that. So by and large, our target for 2028 between GBP 58 million and GBP 62 million is primarily based on our current pipeline of business in traditional growth rates. So this isn't a stretch target necessarily for us. It's not a layup either, but it's not a stretch target. And with a couple of other things that we're working, we think we can get some growth on that as well.

While the Japan thing seems like it's moved quickly, it's been a long time coming. We've been working on that localizing the product for Japan with Porsche, VW and Audi and as such. So I think because of the work that the team has done, with our team based in Tokyo, we've gotten ourselves to a place here. I think it's just the timing of when each one of the contracts, Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche, independently of each other, just happened to coincide in a kind of a short period of time. But these were years in the making. So I don't necessarily think they're moving that much faster.

If you go what's happened in Europe and even in the U.K., once again, we were a little -- well, we were severely inhibited by the prior ownership structure being part of Pendragon and an automotive retailer. We're kind of hidden in there. So in the U.K., it kind of hampered us from growth in certain areas. And I think that also kind of layered into Europe where -- as well, where we didn't have the time, the money to necessarily be able to go after that. Now, that the shackles are off, so to speak, well, I think we're going to see a tremendous amount of growth in Europe, as like we've seen here in the U.K. and Japan and the U.S. as well.

And Damindu from Peel Hunt has a few questions, and I'll ask them one at a time. The first one is, I saw that there's a job add for a bilingual program manager for Germany, could you provide some commentary around how you are scaling your talent as you seek to expand into places like Japan?

We need to be able to notice that and look that piece up. It's not open in the marketplace. We're working on a large opportunity that we have in the German market. And once again, we're looking to kind of fill some gaps in back to how do we look to go into other markets where either culture or language wise, we might not be the subject matter experts. So we're looking for staffing into that.

There's a great opportunity in Germany. It's the largest economy in Mainland Europe, and it's a place where we only have a handful of customers right now. And if you're going to be in Europe, you're going to go after the biggest one. It's kind of like being North America and not looking at the U.S. So we're going to go after it in a big way, and we're staffing up accordingly. So we're pretty well progressed with some conversations there with a couple of the OEMs as well as some large dealer groups. So hopefully, there'll be some good stuff to announce in the future.

And sticking with the topic of job ads, Damindu says, I can see there are a number of ads for data engineers and senior business intelligence analysts. Are some of your customers starting to leverage more of the data and become more data driven?

If you looked at my thing here, I talked about one of our new things here, which is our automotive intelligence BI platform. So what we've done, and one of the new products we've developed in conjunction with Seez, is being able to embed BI reporting within our core stack, with a large amount of AI driving some of the functionality of the reporting capabilities into that. So as we further grow those capabilities and as such, and then, this will be an additional revenue stream that we'll be able to offer up to our customers.

So we have built somewhere in the Pendragon days that sat outside of Pinewood, where Pinewood kind of was the engine and drove a large part of that. The team has taken that and really elevated it, and now, we have an embedded reporting stack that is able, in real time, to give you a complete in-depth deep dive into your business at any point in time. And that can go for a single-point store to a platform level to enterprise level as well. And even with customers that might be in multiple countries, to be able to slice and dice the data accordingly. So this is primarily for additional revenue stream and new product that we're bringing to market.

And Damindu's final question, he says, lastly, I saw Hartwell Automotive Group has become the first dealer in the U.K. to partner with California-based technology provider Tekion. I always think you combined with Tekion can disrupt the incumbent giants across the world, but I wasn't expecting to see Tekion in the U.K. Is there much to read into that?

Listen, Tekion has been in the U.K. for quite a while prior to Inchcape selling the retail business. They have done a lot of work with them. Listen, Tekion is a great tech stack. I think there's a lot of similarities between the two. And the market -- the worldwide market is huge. I think there's more than enough for both of us to succeed. We look at the work they're doing in North America, and they're breaking down a lot of barriers, and I think we're going to be able to benefit from that. And I think a lot of the incumbents worldwide -- listen, this is a great market, and it's where I live and where we're going after. And obviously, I'm from the other end. And I think the team over at Tekion and the team here for Pinewood, there's more than enough for all of us.

Great. There are no further questions on the webcast. So I'll hand back to the conference call provider, as I believe there's one other question that's come through on that.

Yes, a question just came in. This is going to be from Ian Robertson of Progressive Equity Research.

Just looking at 2 things. First of all, when the U.S. product is launched, is it going to be a pan-U.S. product from the get-go? Or will you require to further work to adapt to different states, different ways of doing things as the years go on?

And then looking out to this guidance, you've given the guidance range of sort of 6% to 7% variation across it. That's pretty tight. Looking at the topline, your own targets for the revenues for 2028, can you give us an idea of how big the variation is there? And then looking forward, how much visibility do you have on the customer acquisition cost for sort of 2028-'29 in the U.S.? Is it really going to be much different to Europe or internationally?

So I'll take the first part, and then, I'll have Ollie take the second part. The product that we're going into North American will be agnostic to state or province. So whether it's a product for Mexico, Canada or the U.S., we're agnostic to that, both on the language front. So the system will operate in Canadian French as well as Spanish and various other languages that are -- where business is transacted within the U.S.

And as far as the states, the biggest difference there is in taxation and licensing, and most of those are done outside of the core operating systems. So there's third-party companies that we can embed into our system to -- for tax tables and as such like that. So yes, the product will be agnostic to state, geography and that goes for all of North America.

Ian, it's Ollie. Yes. So look, on your question, I think we've touched on the sort of certainty of that '28 number. And as Bill said, there's a pretty high percentage of that GBP 58 million to GBP 62 million that is signed contracts. So look, we've got to deliver, but that's the signed contract. So we've got the same certainty on the revenue as we do on the EBITDA.

I think, if you want to steer on the revenue, our historic EBITDA margin has been sort of mid-40s. It's -- there's a little bit of dilution this year. But looking medium to longer term, I think if you look at that sort of early to mid-40s EBITDA margin, you get a good idea on where we're seeing the revenue land at, so you can just back solve that, and you can get an idea of where we think the FY '28 revenue is going to be at.

And I think your final question was on the sort of acquisition costs, wasn't it for the U.S., and is that going to be significantly different. Look, we think -- our go-to-market strategy is going to be very much aligned, whether it's U.K., U.S., Asia, rest of the world, but we don't see a significant difference in terms of cost wise for the U.K., for U.S. And I think one of the earlier questions, Bill said, we -- from a margin point of view, we think the U.S. is going to be at least at that sort of mid-40s EBITDA margin. But -- so we don't see a significant difference in that to what we see in the U.K. or for the rest of the world.

As we have no further audio questions, I turn the call back over to Bill for any additional or closing remarks.

Just thank you, everybody, for joining. And like I said, at the end of the initial thing here, at the end of this day, it's not about Ollie and I. It's about the team, both for Pinewood and Seez and the incredible work that they've done. And just a great thank you to them, and thank you, everybody, for your time this morning.