Pricer AB Aktie

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Pricer First Quarter 2026 Earnings Presentation and Q&A session. We are today joined by CEO, Magnus Larsson; and CFO, Claes Wenthzel, who will present the first quarter and take questions. With that said, I hand over the word.

Thank you very much, Hjalmar. I'm extremely happy to do the presentation here today together with Claes. Now I'm in London, we're at the -- I'm at the Retail Tech show. It's a 2-day show. It's been very interesting. So I'm doing it now from my hotel room. So I hope it's okay. Claes, next slide, please.

So Pricer in brief, our vision. Our vision is to be the preferred partner for in-store communication and digitalization. And I think what we will see in some of the presentations today is how we actually -- or our presentation, how we're moving in that direction. We see a lot of traction with Plaza. We actually -- I haven't updated all the stores that we won in the quarter on this slide, but it's been quite a few. We have now more than 55 million labels active -- from active customers that we manage from Plaza. So we have seen very good progress, especially on Plaza now in this quarter. So next slide, please.

So Q1 highlights. What are the highlights? It's, of course, as always, a mix of fantastic things and some things that are a little bit less fantastic. I think the first thing I'm really happy to state is that we have had good run rate business in almost all markets, and it's been fueled by a stable growth of order intake from our existing customers and some new customers as well. We haven't had any of those major groundbreaking deals this quarter, but we have had a continuous flow that has been extremely positive.

And we can see that one of the companies, as you will see from the CEO word in the report is that Canada was a little bit less, but that's from our point of view, so it's also expected. We have had a really good deployment with Canadian Tire. They are now almost fully deployed within their own brand or own banner. And we have good discussions moving on further, but this was expected. So Canada is still very hot.

I would also like to highlight the growth that we've had in Scandinavia after the shift from resale mode into direct sales mode, we can now see the full effect of this change. We have had really good order intake on the Scandinavian market. So we speak about Sweden, we speak about Norway. We can also see that we have improved profitability on these deals. So it's been something. It took a little bit longer than I was hoping for. But now when we have it in place, it's really, really good. We have built -- we have always had a relationship with these customers that we sold through our resellers, but now we have a different kind of relationship where I see that our chances of doing more business, helping them to be more successful with new products, it's definitely and has definitely increased.

From a financial performance, we delivered the highest gross margin since 2020. And we can actually see that even though we had a slightly lower net sales in the quarter versus last quarter, we delivered gross profit that is actually higher in absolute terms than we had last year. And it's, of course, connected to this gross margin. We have continuous strong cash flow. We have improved our cash position, as you will see in Claes' presentation a little bit later. And we turned our net profitability from loss last year Q1 to a profit this year.

In the quarter, we also announced that the exclusive supply agreement that we have with Carrefour has been terminated. It will result in lower volumes with Carrefour. But also as a reminder, when we look at the potential impact, last year, the contribution of Carrefour to our gross profit was, as I put it here, mid-single digits. And we do expect that for this year, the impact will only be low single digits. So it will be very low expected impact.

One thing that has also been very positive is that when I look on the -- especially the French independent stores in France specifically, we have actually had a very good order uptake in this quarter compared to last quarter. It's actually been very good. And it's something that we can see also continuing after the announcement that our exclusivity has been changed. Why is this positive? Of course, it's positive because we sell more. But above all, it's positive because Carrefour is targeting to transfer somewhere around 50 stores every single year from owned and operated to Carrefour or to a franchisee set up. So we will continue to work with the franchisees in France, just like in the other markets where we have a relationship with Carrefour. So it's been a very positive sign. And next slide, please, Claes.

So the retail industry insights and macro trends for those of you that have been regulars on this presentation, you've seen this slide. I will now speak a little bit about Sobeys and about Avenue. So Sobeys will be very much about Area 1, actually, the strategic digitalization of the stores, which is one of the key reasons why we are engaging with them, and they are engaging with us and we work together. The other one would be the evolution of the in-store experience, which is really the Avenue track. So let's go to the next slide and talk a little bit about Sobeys still.

So as you might know, we have now signed an agreement together with JRTech and Sobeys for the deployment of 300 to 350 stores. It's a USD 51 million agreement, so we actually have an agreement and the order intake we will take continuously quarter-by-quarter. So there will not be a $51 million order, but we have a commitment on this volume to be delivered over the coming 18 months.

And I think it's good to go back to actually the history. Back in June, we announced that an undisclosed Tier 1 grocery retailer ordered 50 stores. Actually, what they did was 50. And from their point of view, it was 50 pilot stores. They really wanted to validate the performance and the value, but also set it up to see, can we industrialize the deployment in a way that would make sense to us. And after a couple of months, we continued the discussion, which led to the order that we announced December '24 of deployment of 5 million ESLs. So from our point of view, it's like the first deployment wave. The first one was a pilot store wave. So this is the first real deployment.

So of course, it's extremely positive now that we are agreed -- that we have agreed to now do the next wave, big wave of the deployments. Sobeys have 1,500 stores, give or take, it's pharmacies and it's mainly -- but it's mainly groceries. A lot of different formats. Some of them are owned by Sobeys, and also the orders that you see on this slide, some of them are franchisee based. So on top of this last year, we did a lot of the franchisees, and we still -- a lot of interest also from the franchisees. So that's not included in this agreement that we have. They have, of course, the right to utilize this agreement, but it's not part of the $51 million.

Discussing with Sobeys, they have an interest to do this as fast as possible. So it will -- the deployment speed will very much be connected to the ability to deploy in the stores that will sort of be the limiting factor. But when we speak to the executives of Sobeys, they are very clear. We want it done as fast as possible. So let's see how fast this will go. Then next slide, please, Claes.

Pricer Avenue, I've talked a lot about it now. We can see some more traction. We are now doing the official -- we have started the official deliveries and installation of the newly launched Avenue. We had the first stores installed. For those of you living in Stockholm area, you will find stores in Stockholm now with Avenue. We are working together with the store owners. We are working with some of their brands, which has been a really key point. We do not want to launch Avenue as just another beautiful ESL because it is a beautiful ESL. To us, this is about merchandise. We want to make sure that any of our customers using Avenue, they should make more money. That's the entire objective of Avenue, not to only beautify the store. It should be a tangible business.

And of course, then we need to have a proof point. So now in Q2, I think it will be in May -- sorry, in June. June, we will do A/B testing now. So we have one store with -- we have ESLs. And then we have one store with Avenue to actually be able to see what is the uptake in sale we get when we do merchandise on Avenue. So this will be a very important test. We will do more of those to also be able to go to our customers and listen, you should really do Avenue because it will help you get more customer attention, you will get more sales, and you will be able to sell this now to also your suppliers. So we are focusing also much of these discussions on the supplier in the fast-moving consumer goods world.

And finally, of course, I said that it's a beautiful ESL. And it has been recognized now by GOOD DESIGN. It's a prize from the Chicago -- I won't even bother to try to pronounce it, Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, and the Metropolitan Arts Press. It's one of the old and really prestigious awards programs. And we have been a winner now in the category, Green Products. When we were now awarded this time, it's also Polestar, the Swedish car were also given the price from the GOOD DESIGN. So it's one of those prizes you really want to have.

And maybe now it's time for Claes. I think it's -- your next slide is -- the next slide is yours.

Yes. And as you can see here, sales are down SEK 40 million compared to last year. But if you take into account that the U.S. dollar is down compared to last year with about 10% and the euro about 5%, we are -- we should otherwise have been on the same level as last year.

And one other and maybe the most important thing here is, of course, even through sales are down 8%, the gross profit is higher, and that is due to the better margin, which is an effect from Plaza and also a better product mix. And we also took a decision now in April to cut the cost and we will, from the second half, save about SEK 17 million per year related to this cost cut we've now just been doing.

Then if we look at the cash flow. We had a strong cash flow in the quarter with an EBIT of SEK 11 million. We achieved an operating cash flow of SEK 53 million and increased our liquidity with SEK 33 million in the quarter. So now we have SEK 341 million in cash. And then, of course, we have the bond of SEK 300 million, but we also have unused credit facilities of SEK 150 million. So we have a strong balance sheet now and we have good control over our operating capital now.

And then if you look at the sales and the gross profit, you can see it's similar compared to a quarter ago. But then you should also have in mind here, the currency effect we now had in the first quarter for about SEK 38 million, SEK 40 million on the top line.

I think then, Magnus, summary.

All right. Thank you. So summarizing the quarter, strong financial performance. We have had stable order intake from our existing customers, but also from new customers, but not without one of those groundbreaking large deals. We had a net profitability turnaround and of course, a very good gross margin. So I would, of course, like to see more sales. But at large, I'm really happy to be able to present this today.

Looking then at the geopolitical situation, there is still a lot of macroeconomic uncertainty on the market. It continued to actually impact customer near-term investments. But also what we see is that the customer interest and the customer engagement, it is growing in the North American market. And it's actually not only Canada. We also see, as you will see in the report, a lot of positive discussions on the U.S. market. There is simply more interest on the market right now. So that feels positive. And then I'm hopeful to see now that I hope that this will be a tangible change.

And somehow, it's also now with the agreement and the win with Sobeys. To me, it's also a sign in this direction, and we see that what we do with Sobeys, it's creating traction. It's creating a whole lot of interest from other customers that might not have started the ESL work or that want to now modernize and do it a larger scope.

As mentioned by Claes, we have done a strategic operational review. And then of course, that's prudent for a company. So we've been looking at what can we do to fine-tune our OpEx levels or adopt our OpEx level. And that actually was the result of our operational expenses that are actually not SEK 18 million, but SEK 17 million. And with the official delivery and installation of Pricer Avenue has started with the first stores installed.

So that's pretty much summarizing the quarter. So I think now, it's over to the Q&A. So I hand it over to you, Hjalmar.

All right. That's great. Thank you so much. Let's get started right away. I was thinking maybe we could address the revised reporting segments. Could you just elaborate a bit on this? Do you feel that this better reflects the underlying business? Or is there a reason for the sort of restating the geographical mix that you report through?

Well, the product mix is, of course, important, but as we also said before, we expect to be better on our procurement. So we don't want to make a forecast, but we think it's a good margin even if the volume has not been very, very high.

Okay. Yes. And then we have a question here on the line from -- which is regarding the Plaza revenue recognition. Could you elaborate a bit on how this revenue is recognized? And what is sort of like driving the -- maybe the volatility between quarters here? Is there a setup inherent in the Plaza revenue that makes it difficult to evaluate sort of quarter-on-quarter growth? And how should we view the sort of revenue that you generate?

No, I think we report it the same way all the time. And you can see in the notes exactly how much sales we have in Plaza. One thing that also is affecting Plaza is, of course, we have a base cost for Plaza, and that is also getting better now when we are increasing the volumes of Plaza. So the margins from Plaza also increased. So it's not only related to the volume.

I think actually, we can add one thing to that one is that's actually that we -- sometimes, you could see it in Q3, you also see it in Q2. We have had very large rollout of Plaza to Tier 1 grocery retailers in the Nordics. Some of the installs that were done in Q4 were actually not invoiced until now in Q1. So there is some element that was a retroactive invoicing, which might then add temporarily, give a little bit of a spike. It's not a major thing, but we had it in Q3, and we also have it now in Q1. So that would explain some of the...

But that's small numbers. It's less than 10% of the Plaza sales.

All right. Yes, that's great. Fair enough. And then on the gross margin, I mean, you mentioned the drivers here. Could you say maybe whether it's mainly the product mix? Or is it the shift then to direct sales approach and the Nordics driving this? Maybe elaborate a bit on sort of like the sustainability of the gross margin on these levels, but of course, they are very impressive and strong. So what was sort of like driving the gross margin that we saw in Q1?

I think it's been a combination. One is, of course, we've been working continuously with the sourcing. You have a fair -- you have an effect also on the Plaza that we can see. It's a bigger chunk. I would like to say, it's also fair that some part of pricing power as well that we actually have a good position with our customers, and we are able to keep our pricing and actually defend our margins.

So we've been working actively with that one as well. And of course, we have made some changes on our product families. So we actually took an old one totally out. So we can see that we get higher volumes also with what we have and I think that has also actually affected the margin.

Anything you'd like to add, Claes, to this?

It's a lot related to the type of products we are selling, but it's also related to the customers and also customers buying different type of products. So if you sell to one specific customer, the margins might be much lower compared to others. So that's also a part of the mix, products and the customers, but most difference between the customers are actually the products.

Yes. Yes. Did you see any impact on the gross margin sort of from maybe sourcing, shipping costs and increased maybe input prices? Or is this something that we could maybe expect going forward? I mean there's been some recent discussions on these topics, I guess.

There is a lot of indirect cost in our cost of goods sold, and freight is a part of it. But still, it's a small part of our total cost of goods sold. So it will go up and down.

We have actually also been working actively with the way we do the transportation. So we have historically done more air freight than we do right now. So with the balance sheet that we have right now, we have the possibility to actually then do the shipping. So of course, we see the effect of the transportation cost. But as Claes said, it's not been a major driver yet. So let's see about the future.

Yes. And then on the product mix and maybe the market mix, we received a question regarding the -- like the previous Sobeys order that you've installed during 2025. Were there any installations connected to this order in Q1 as well? And are you finished with this -- with that order in terms of installations?

We are finished with that order. And actually, we got additional orders in Q1 that we are deploying right now. So nothing of the ones that we -- that they committed to now was actually delivered in Q1 that will start pretty much now.

Okay. And then I guess, you spoke some on the sort of like upside that you see within Sobeys. You mentioned, of course, the total store network of 1,500. Do you see additional upside here if everything goes well, I mean, now following the new sort of deal or the agreement that you see here? Could you elaborate a bit on this?

I'm an optimist. I always see upsides. But I would say, yes, there are tangible upsides.

All right. Yes. And then also, you mentioned some positivity regarding to North America, Canada and the U.S. Could you elaborate a bit on this? Is this in terms of pilot installations or is it more maybe leads or discussions that are carried out at a sort of lower or higher level?

It's a combination, actually. So we see more incoming interest. We are also maybe working a little bit differently. We have just also now strengthened the team with a very senior and good head of sales that will be responsible for Americas. So it's a welcome addition to the team. But we see more interest on the customers, and that could be in discussions. It could be in fact that they come to us. But of course, we also have a select list of customers where we are engaging with them proactively. It's also on the pilot side, but it's also deployment of some of the orders that we received back in Q4.

And so all in all, there are many signs. And of course, they all have to be nurtured that we need to make sure that we will take them into real opportunities. But I think the positive thing is that we do see more activity. And it started in Q4, and it's continued. So maybe this will be the sign of a turnaround. So let's see.

Yes, very clear. And then we have another question on the line here. Could you explain the spikes in prepaid expenses and accrued income during the first quarter that we saw now both in 2025 and in 2026? Is this just a general seasonal pattern? Or are there any other drivers of this effect?

Can you specify exactly what does it mean?

No, I mean, I guess, just general comments on sort of the level of working capital, I guess, for the first quarter. Do you feel that there's anything noteworthy here? Or is it just -- are we just seeing a general seasonal pattern?

No, it's not a real seasonal pattern. What can vary a lot is, of course, if we make a lot of invoice at the end of the quarter, then the accounts receivables will be higher. And then, of course, we build up inventory. We expect to have a lot of delivery in the coming 6 months. That's the effect we have, and that is the same all the time. But the timing is not really seasonal. It's more how we expect to deliver the products out to the customers.

All right. Yes, that's very clear. And then we have a question on the line regarding the U.K. market. Could you give us some comments on the current activity here, the pilots or the potential pilots that are running? What sort of feeling are you picking up in the U.K. market currently?

It's familiar, it's the same as before. We see a lot of interest. We see a lot of engagement. But over the last year, we could see a few real deals that was made on the market, but that the actual deployments was extremely slow. We could see people that started doing and retailers that started doing something, but they haven't taken it further. But now when we discuss with them and we had a lot of those meetings yesterday, as an example, we see the interest is still there. And then they are trying to find a way forward. They are looking at how should we do it, what do we really want. They might have done pilots with us or with someone else and say, okay, what's the next step?

And then they're probably in a phase where they're also learning a lot. But I still see the very clear path that there will be digitalization in the U.K. But it's a little bit slower than we could see last year, and maybe it's connected to more of the macroeconomic rationale. But it's -- I heard from the people organizing now the exhibition that they expect a record number of participants. So certainly not anything wrong with the interest in the market and we -- it's been really packed in both. So I'm still positive to the U.K. market, but it's been developing slower than I was hoping and expecting.

Yes. And then we have a question. I guess this is on the competition that you face in Canada. Could you elaborate a bit on sort of like the competitive environment that you see here? Are you facing the same competitors that you do, maybe if we compare it to Europe or Scandinavia? And what are sort of like the characteristics of competing in Canada?

We do competition just like in Europe, it has increased in Canada. We are well positioned on the market by having Canadian Tire with pretty much all the stores now deployed with Pricer, looking at what we've done with Sobeys and then what we've done with METRO and other groups. Of course, there will be, when it's time for someone to modernize or they want to expand, there will be a lot of competitors that will both go to our existing customers and try to price them in. But so far, we've actually been able to stay in all the accounts and even expand our business.

But I can see that the competitive environment is increasing a lot in Canada. But so far, we are in a really good position and we have credibility in the market and our partner, JRTech has a lot of credibility in the market, which I think has really helped. And that's why I was thinking a little bit about pricing power. So we are in a position where we've been actually able to defend our margins also when winning new large deals.

All right. That's super clear. And then we have a lot of questions on Avenue actually and sort of like the competition that you face here. Can you sort of describe the sort of like, I would say, that the functionality maybe in general on the Avenue compared to competition. And maybe if you can give us some -- maybe some KPIs or some soft values that you received from customers or through collaborations where you run pilots now. Anything would be useful.

So we don't really -- I don't intend to sound arrogant, but we don't really see any competition because what we do with Avenue, the ability to do merchandise the way we can do by putting the ESLs together, none of our competitors have that ability, and it's very much due to the form factor of the ESL with our very thin frames on the sites where you have all our competitors have more of this clunky, bulky, old type ESLs. They cannot convey the merchandise space the same way.

So when I look at our competitors and why they're using the powered rail, there is only one purpose, that is to make sure that the batteries doesn't die. Whereas the purpose for us to do a powered rail where we also have communication is to really create the ability to do merchandise in the store to make sure that instead of video, instead of anything else, that we use what they already have, they get the best of breed in terms of efficiency from the ESL, the Avenue ESL. But then combining them, we create the space where they can actually improve the shopper experience, improve the sales to the shopper, but also sell it to the suppliers.

From the KPIs, I would say it's -- that's why the A/B testing will be so important. It's been more soft feedback. We have fast-moving consumer goods companies that are very happy with the cooperation. We see the response from the ones now deploying in the store. They said, it's really great. But it's not tangible enough. I don't want to sit and just say, people like it. They do. But that's not what I want to use when I sell it. I want to tell them that if you do Avenue, we will help you increase your sales, and this is the way you can get more money paid or ask for more money from your suppliers. So it's still to come. We need to quantify the benefits, but we clearly see that there is a lot of interest.

Yes. And then one question there on the Carrefour nonexclusivity announcement that we saw previously. Have you made any revisions or any changes in your sort of like perceived impact from this, maybe now that the dust has settled a little bit? Do you still have the same view on the potential here? I mean you spoke about it and with regards to the independent stores as well, but maybe if you could just reiterate that and share your thoughts on this matter.

I would say the view is still the same. We have seen a really good order uptake with the franchisees in France. Now of course, we need to see was that just something temporary or will it continue. So it's too early to say, but we have had positive traction.

We see now also in Italy, which was Carrefour divested the Italian operation to a company called NewPrinces. Here, we have good discussions with NewPrinces. There is a lot of opportunities. They are divesting their operations in Romania. We will be ready now in -- during autumn. And also here, we expect to continue and then be able to develop the work together with them. When Carrefour had their strategy presentation 1.5 months ago, they also was quite clear with their ambition to -- they put it that Belgium and Poland, their operations there, it's up for strategic options. So in essence, they're looking at the potential divestment of them. And also here, we are very well embedded in Belgium and have a very good relationship.

So for these countries that have been spun off, we continue the business. So there, we have no Carrefour effect. So it's primarily France and Spain. And Spain, we only had a very small installed base. So our focus will be on France. And we'll do our very best to make sure that we continue to sell to the franchisees. And with Carrefour's ambition to take their hyper supermarkets move more into franchisee space. Well, let's see how it goes, but we haven't done any revision so far.

Yes. Okay. Thank you very much. All right. I think that concludes the Q&A session. So thank you so much, Magnus and Claes, for answering our questions today. And I'll leave it to you for any concluding remarks.

So thanks, Hjalmar. Thanks for hosting. I'm very happy. It's been, in many aspects, a good quarter. I would, of course, like to see some more sales, which anyone, all of you listening would also like to see. Very happy to get the agreement in place with Sobeys. I think it's proving that we are doing things the right way, that we have a position that is strong. And we will, of course, do our very best to build on that position.

The traction we get with Avenue with the feedback also now at the exhibition, we see that the interest it generates is just growing. So I hope that there will be more exciting Avenue news during the year. So thanks a lot.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Pricer Fourth Quarter 2025 Investor Presentation here at DNB Carnegie. My name is Hjalmar Jernstrom, and I'm joined today by CEO, Magnus Larsson; and CFO, Claes Wenthzel. Welcome, guys. And during the presentation, questions can be submitted live and we will address these during the Q&A session.

With that said, I hand over the word to you.

Thank you very much. Hello, everyone. Really happy to be here. My name is Magnus. I'm the CEO of Pricer. And with me today, as mentioned by Hjalmar, is Claes.

So let me jump straight into the presentation. For those of you who haven't been paying too much attention to Pricer before, but are tempted to join the call. This is the very quick Pricer in a brief slide. So our vision is to be the preferred partner for in-store communication and digitalization. This is something that, of course, is spot on for what the physical retailers with physical stores are aiming to do now. We aim to do it the best and be their preferred partner. I will come back to a few customers that actually have selected us as their preferred partner later in the presentation. In essence, we have sold or delivered close to 400 million of our labels. We have done way more than 28,000 stores. And today, we have more than 6,000 stores on our SaaS service Plaza. We have close to 50 million ESLs connected, which, of course, gives a lot of opportunity to future sales.

Looking at Q4, the first thing I would like to highlight is that we've seen a positive trend during the second half versus the first half. When I compare it now Q3 and Q4 together, we have a net sales that actually increased 20% compared to the first half, which has been, of course, very, very positive. We have seen a good intake -- order intake momentum in Q4. It's actually the highest in the year. We have been awarded with 5 new customer contracts in Q4 in the U.S., in Netherlands and in Norway. But also more importantly, what we can see is that there is a clear and tangible increase in the customer engagement basically across many markets, but it's from RFQ processes. So basically, they come to us to actually buy stuff to proactively being discussing digitalization and the way forward. Very, very positive development.

Looking at our financials, you will see that we have had a major decrease in our inventories. As you might remember, and I know Claes will speak more about it, we had an excess inventory when we came into 2025 that we have now dealt with and it's been sold. So it's been contributing to our strong positive cash flow. But it's, of course, also affected our -- it's not, of course, but it has affected our gross margin due to the sale of this excess inventory. All in all, we have a year of full year profitability. We have a good EBIT. We have an EBIT margin of 2.9% on the adjusted side, and we have a net profit for the full year.

So why does our customers buy from Pricer? There are quite a few trends that affect the behavior from shoppers, the behavior of our customers and retailers. And I will show you 5 examples now on the 2 coming slides. And you can see that one key driver has been the drive for strategic digitalization in the physical store. Now with AI being a very large thing, it also spills over to quite a few of the physical retailers. They see all the benefits they can do utilizing AI tools. But in order to do that, they really need to make the store physical or digital. So it's not only the fact that they want to address the operational cost, which is still a key driver. But it also what kind of gadgets, sensors, ESLs do I need in my store to actually be able to operate in a different way and be more efficient using also the AI tools.

So we can see this is a quite new trend, but we can see that especially, I think, on the U.S. market, this has been a driver for some of the recent customer dialogues that we see. It's from the hyper and supermarkets, but also down to convenience stores where they want to see how can we be more effective. So what am I talking about? What are the key customer wins? The first one I'd like to speak about is the deal we got with IBM Federal and with DeCA, the Defense Commissary Agency. So that's actually the U.S. Department of Defense. It's their stores that they have for the armed forces. So in the U.S. and outside Continental U.S., they have in all the Army bases, they have the commissary stores, sorry, what they sell grocery to the serving staff and everyone working at the Army base.

So this is a really big thing in the U.S. We've been vetted as a supplier by the U.S. Department of Defense or Department of War as they also are referred to. It's hard to pass that threshold. So we're extremely proud of this win. We have a planned deployment of ESLs in 57 other stores outside Continental U.S. and we have a potential of modernizing all the stores in -- it's like actually 178 ones in the U.S. market. We did receive the first order in December, and we're continuously planning together with IBM Federal on the rollout of these stores. But also in the U.S. market, having DeCA as a reference and also the fact that we've been vetted by Department of Defense is a big thing.

The second one is also an American customer, Merchants Distributor store, we call them MDI. It's a wholesale grocery store distributor. They actually sell everything from groceries, wholesale, but they also do technology. They help their members to buy whatever they need to their stores. So we are -- we have an exclusive agreement with them now. We're the only potential supplier. They have 600 members. But across those members, they have 3,000 different locations or stores in 17 states. They are really active. They want to make this happen. They see the clear benefit for their members. So it will be Pricer Plaza. It will be 4-color ESLs. First orders received now in December. And above all, it's a brand-new Pricer customer. And of course, we hope to see them grow together with us during '26 and into the future.

If we look at Europe, we decided to go for a direct sales model on the Nordic and Baltic market. We announced Norgesgruppen, we announced Coop Norway in October and November. If you look at Norgesgruppen, they have roughly 1,800 grocery stores. They're #1 on the Norwegian market. We are a current supplier of in-store communication and digitalization, but it's a new direct customers. So we're really happy for this engagement. We had the Coop management team over last week. We spent 2 days discussing what is the future, what are the road maps, what are the key things we're going to look at into the future. They have both do-it-yourself stores and they have grocery stores, and they have more than 1,000 stores. So also here, a new direct customer.

But so here, we have an existing customer, PLUS that we won back in 2000. They've been using their system a lot and felt that it's working so good that they wanted to really upgrade it to have the most recent version of what we do. So they will buy our 4-color labels. We'll start with 100 stores this year, and we do another 165 stores in 2027. So we're basically modernizing the entire setup. But also part of this deal is the buyback of the existing labels. There will be a TED Talks on this and then positive effects when we are at the EuroShop event in a few weeks' time. But in essence, we're going to take their labels back. We will refurbish them, and we will resell them to give them a second life. So from a sustainability point of view, a very good business, but also from our point of view, also very good business.

And before handing over to Claes, I would like to speak a little bit about Pricer Avenue and Pricer Avenue at the NRF show in New York. So now second week in January, we had the NRF show in New York. It's a massive retail event or retail tech event where everyone that's someone on the tech market are participating. So we now do the commercial launch of Pricer Avenue is now commercially available. We do expect the first stores to be deployed now during Q2. It's, I call it here a low-volume deploy. So we have a limited number of labels. And once again, it will be quite exclusive.

So we will agree which stores will be allowed to get it. They will focus on using it for the high impact zone. So basically where they have high-value products or where they have high churn products, but areas where they see that they really want to do whatever they can on the merchandise and the promotion side. So we'll be very exciting. We'll be very exciting with also the necessary discussions that we're going to have with the suppliers that want to use this for promotion. We had a number of pilots. They were pilots for also for us to get both feedback in terms of how well does it work in the store? Do we need to make any changes to it. But also, of course, to get the customer feedback. And here, we've got a lot. So it's been embedded now in the commercial product and future releases of the commercial product.

One additional thing that we launched is a new model, brand-new model to Pricer Plaza called designer. It's a tool made to actually design this extended label, but it's now also -- will be available for all our ESLs. In fact, with the designer tool, you can do pretty much what you want. We will treat any screen as a canvas, so it could be to paper, it could be paper tag, it could be billboards, it could be televisions, it could be obviously be Avenue and also ESLs. And we had some people passing by our booth from a company that typically works with paper and paper publishing. They were delighted to see the tool and said, this is something that we should have. And since everyone is moving more into the publishing direction, I think it's extremely positive.

And you can also see on the picture here what Pricer Avenue looks like in real life when it's actually working. So this was maybe not talk of the town in New York, but it was definitely the talk of the NRF. We also had a TED Talk together with the Technology Officer, Rob Smith of Coop of East England, where we spoke about in-store shopper engagement and how we can actually increase that impact with the help of Avenue. But I guess, enough of bragging and promotion and over to the hardcore figures. So Claes.

Yes. Sales slightly down in Q4 compared to last year, but at the same level in fixed currency. Gross margin decreased in Q4 with 1.5% unit compared to last year as it is negatively affected by sales of the excess inventory we had in the beginning of the year. Operating profit was SEK 19.8 million, and that has been impacted by the one-off cost of SEK 4.5 million in Q4, which is related to VAT back to 2022 and 2023 in Canada.

And if you look at the cash flow, our operating cash flow for 2025 is SEK 180 million, which is more than SEK 100 million better than last year. And cash flow has a large impact from the reduction in the inventory. What is also important and what we are a little proud of is that we do not have any net debt anymore, and we have available cash of more than SEK 450 million at the end of the year.

Good. So let's wrap up then before we move into the Q&A. So once again, I want to highlight the strong order intake in Q4. It is the highest in 2025. We have a book-to-bill that is actually above 1. So we have had more orders than net sales, which, of course, anyone in a company, you want to end up in that situation. On the other side, on the flip side of the coin, we still see this uncertainty on the market. The geopolitical situation, the macroeconomics makes it a bit hard to really predict the future. We can see that there will be a near-term impact on investments with retailers. But we also see all the ongoing dialogues and the increase in dialogue. So the question is when they will actually place the order? Will it be now in '26? Or will it be in '27. But the amount of discussions has been very, very positive, and it's actually across the market.

And maybe I shouldn't say it, I will say it anyway, we can see an increase on the U.S. market. It doesn't mean that we will -- you will see it commercially yet. But it's very positive to see that it's actually picking up. Commercial launch of Pricer Avenue, we do expect installs in Q2. We will be selective. We want them to really make a splash when they are installed. We want it to be clear benefit also to the retailers. So they said that this was a really good investment and that they're happy to share it. We do believe that the increased customer engagement that we see that it will create new opportunities in the second half of 2026. Of course, opportunities will come earlier, but hopefully, there will be some tangible outcome as well.

It's a bit too early to say, but we are positive given the changes in dialogues that we see, more interest, more incoming interest. More customers are actually looking to make larger investments, and they're running through official procurement processes. But also having said all this, it's important to remember that we have a large number of long-term customers that is generating repeat businesses across the markets in pretty much all the areas, we have a lot of customers just working with the system, doing continuous investments. But the flip side is also on the positive flip side is that we can see that they are also looking at -- many of them are looking at the next generation. They want to go for color. They want to do Avenue. So we see that as soon as they feel that the uncertainty is shifting, I believe that there will be quite a lot of interest in modernizing existing Pricer setups.

So that's pretty much everything, Hjalmar.

All right. Thank you. Yes. So let's start off with some Q&A. So I got some prepared questions, and then we got some on the line as well. But I think it's very interesting. And let's start with what you mentioned, this clearly increased interest among customers also across markets. Could you describe what phase of the process that you see this increase? Is it that new customers are reaching out for an initial contact? Or is it as far as ongoing evaluations? And where do you see this hike in interest?

It's a combination. We can see that, especially if I take the U.S. market that I spoke about, there were quite a few dialogues that we had back in '24 that were sort of paused during '25. We can see that some of those are coming back. They are gaining certainty. They feel that it's necessary to move ahead. But then there are also brand-new customers that are coming and it's inroad. They get in contact with us and said that we would be interested in a dialogue. So that has been very positive. We see also that the formal processes that has also been something we see in Europe. There are more formal processes now where people say, we are planning for an investment. But we have also seen customers that have made the a selection and said that now we're going to go with supplier X, but nothing really happens.

So it's been a very odd year in that sense that we have seen -- we have been selected in processes and nothing happened. We've seen competitors being selected and then yet again, nothing happens, which makes it quite difficult to assess the situation. And I think one of the points I missed is actually that it's still very hard to predict the business, and we do expect lumpiness to continue. And I think it's also fair to say that there might be -- could be similar seasonality this year as we had last year. It's hard to say, but it could be good to mentally prepare for it at least.

Okay. Thank you. Yes, that's very useful. You mentioned also on the order intake, of course, supported by PLUS, but also the merchant distributors and IBM Federal that you spoke of. Could you -- like these -- in specific, these 2 U.S. customers, are these -- are the orders substantial to the Q4 order intake? And what could we expect going forward in terms of the ramp-up with these counterparts that you're expecting?

I say it was not substantial in Q4. With the IBM Federal, we are planning. So we do a continuous planning. So we have a very good idea of where we will land until somewhere mid-second half. But we are continuously planning. So now we have done quite a few stores planned. Order intake will come as we receive them quarter-by-quarter. With MDI, we had a first order, and there is quite a lot of discussions ongoing now for different stores. So since they work through their members, there's -- they are having other internal exhibitions. They're pushing it. Their local IT team is actually driving it because they want to make this happen. So there it will -- once again, it will be something, I believe, will be growing even I would be happy to sell to all the 3,000 stores, but I don't think that's very likely, but we do expect to take a chunk of this volume.

And considering then the reach that you can achieve if we speak of the MDI, for example, what is the size or what is the potential in the stores? Are these smaller stores? Are they supermarkets? Are there hypermarkets as well? Like how is the split?

They have a mix, but there's quite a lot of stores that are pretty much like supermarkets or very large convenience stores. But would almost be on the level that we would consider maybe not supermarkets, but almost in Europe. So it's a mix.

And staying on the U.S. market, do you see any pressure maybe from trade turmoil relating to, I mean, trade-related issues that prohibits you from -- or maybe it's a headwind to business in the U.S., but you mentioned the strength there. So I guess you're not seeing that or...

We haven't seen it really. So I mean the dialogues are starting again. So -- it might be that they feel a bit relieved that they feel that, okay, maybe the tariffs are now -- this is the levels where we'll see the tariffs. I think one big thing has been the fear will they increase further. But I think it's also been the drive to digitize. They really want to digitize the store to make it like a digital asset or the physical store. And I think maybe we're looking at the way they allocate the CapEx investment, probably more now on digitizing the physical store and doing the online presence, which they -- many of them have. So I -- at least I hope that we will see shifting budgets.

Yes. All right. Sounds promising. Let's jump to Europe then. And if we speak on France, for example, what signals are you getting here from customers? Are you picking up anything? And maybe if you can give us an update on the renegotiation of the Carrefour agreement, which, of course, is to be renegotiated this year.

Yes. So if I start with Carrefour, it's ongoing. Typically, what we have experienced during every process with Carrefour is that it takes some time. Typically, they will spend in Q1 and then maybe a little bit into Q2 for the supplier selection. So there is a lot of meetings, a lot of discussions. So we will see basically into Q2. But of course, I feel that we're having good discussions.

On France in general, we see that our customers, they are having challenges with profitability. That also goes for Carrefour. But we also see that especially the business that we have, we have a very solid business with a number of retail chains through their franchise stores. So the franchise owner, we have a hunting license for a number of different chains in France. We have a team that's out every single day and then selling. And here, we can see that we have a very solid run rate of -- on the field sales activities. And then what you can get when you -- when we win Carrefour, we will get an increase of the orders from their own operated stores. When we won Brico Depot or METRO in France a few years ago, we can also see that you get this immediate impact but it's limited during the time of the deployment. But the field sales deployment that we have a very good and solid run rate business.

Okay. Yes. And then on the switch then to the direct sales approach in the Nordics and Baltics. Here, you mentioned that you have not really reached the full impact yet maybe. Could you describe this process more, maybe how much it is currently impacting order intake? And how can we expect maybe the ramp-up of this conversion going forward?

I have a positive view on the Nordics now. We have the team in place. They're fully up to speed. We have all the contracts in place, and we are selling. We have a field team now in Sweden. It's a fairly small one, but they are immensely effective. So we can see that there is a lot of activities. So from that point of view, I think that the year has been starting well.

Yes. Okay. Yes. Let's jump to some questions then on the line. First one is like you mentioned the possibility then to reuse the three color ESL or the legacy products. How would you describe the market for this product? Is it possible to find a buyer for these products? And is the commercial sense in maybe reusing these and distributing to other customers? And what is your sort of current view of that market?

So we have done it or we are doing it continuously. But what we can see is that many customers, they want to go for a new ESL, they want the latest. But then also, there are customers where they might actually have installed since before and they -- some of them, they are struggling with profitability, but they feel they would want to upgrade from an old generation from black and white to something more. And there, by doing the refurbishment, basically, we take the ESL, we would clean it, we upgrade the software, we feed new batteries and then we sell it.

Well, it will be a good deal for them because they get a good label at a good price, and we get the profitability out of it. It's better profitability than, of course, on the revenue side, which is limited. But the idea of actually being able to take it for another cycle it feels very good from a sustainability point of view, but it's also good from a business point of view.

And I interpret then that it's mainly then replacement orders.

I would say then there are markets where we're customers are interested in buying refurbished labels where typically you can imagine that the purchasing power is much less, but they might not really be in our spotlight either for where I want our salespeople to go. But clearly, there is business opportunities for this also outside our existing customers.

And then we have a question on the line regarding technology and maybe technological lead, the technological position. I mean it happens so much with all the R&D spending in this market. So how would you perceive your current technological position then compared to peers? I mean, if we evaluate items like signal reliability, energy consumption and so forth.

We are -- our technology that we use, we are still by far the most efficient from an energy point of view in terms of responsiveness. We're by far the best energy consumption the same. But on the other hand, we should also see that standardization and radio is and there is an ESL standard based on radio. And I do appreciate standards. I think it's something that will drive the mass market forward, and that's, of course, interesting. So I've said before, and I will say it again, we believe in -- it's more important to speak about how the system is actually used or what protocol it is. So it's -- of course, we are looking at where should we be, what are the investments we'll need to make. So I wouldn't exclude that there will be a radio solution. I've been talking about it before. And it's an interesting area, but we also see the benefit that we'll bring to the market. So I think that maybe the future would be a combination, at least for us, where we bring the best of both worlds.

Second aspect is, of course, what we do with Avenue, which is really perceived as innovative from customers, from our ecosystem players, also from competitors, where we know they are looking very actively at what we do from a form factor point of view, the way we actually have done the setup of Avenue, the way we can actually enable it to -- for additional IoT devices and functionalities. We had an innovation zone at the NRF. So we had the normal plastic rails, but it's been disturbing me a bit is for Avenue that we still have paper inlays, but now we actually had e-paper inlays. So we just demonstrated a very basic version where we're constantly changing the color. And this we had -- I think every single competitor came there. We had the ying people coming in there saying this is what we should do.

So I believe that there is still much more to do, and we are really in the front now when it comes to innovation and taking ESL from this plastic display to shelf communication. And there is no one close to what we do right now.

Yes. And then we got a question maybe on the topic of Avenue. Do you expect Avenue sales to be margin accretive? I guess, if that is compare maybe to 4-color label systems or yes, similar systems that you offer, is a typical installation then for the Avenue expected to be margin accretive going forward?

We -- our expectation is that if we do it right, that we will give them one more tool. With ESL, we deal with operational efficiency. You will do that with Avenue as well. But with Avenue, we also give the possibility to increase the size of the shopper basket through promotion, but also the ability to sell the space to CPGs or people that do basically suppliers of food and grocery stuff and/or wine, that kind of supply. So yes, we will ask for a higher price. We will expect to get a clear premium for selling this because we also expect to deliver much higher value to our customers. So it should really be a win-win-win.

Yes. And then on the maybe general development of the recurring revenue, are you satisfied with the current growth rate? And maybe could you remind us again of the setup of the recurring revenue with Plaza and so forth.

So being satisfied is a very strong. I'm happy for the development. Would I like more? Absolutely. It is going really well. This year, we have converted a lot of stores from our on-prem service to Pricer Plaza for customers that, for whatever reason, want or have to stay on-prem, well, then we have changed that to subscription service. So if they want the latest version, it's only through subscriptions, also if it's in a PC. I think the development has been good. This year, we're planning to migrate more stores. And of course, almost every single store that we win are Plaza customers. We are now adding modules to be able to also increase the price of Plaza when we sell it. The next step will, of course, be to see, okay, how can we find more adjacent software functionality that we can actually sell a stand-alone. But right now, we're working a lot. We're connecting new stores or existing stores to Plaza, new stores to Plaza and then see how can we actually increase the price of what we do.

Yes. And then if we jump to Canada and the Sobeys rollout of deliveries, we have a question here, whether you expect the same level of sales in 2026 compared to 2025? I guess that also includes then the initial larger order rollout, but also you mentioned, of course, the strength in the Canadian market, so maybe potential follow-up orders. Can you give some color on this?

Since we don't give forecast, I cannot answer it specifically, but we have a positive outlook. We have a good dialogue and relationship with Sobeys. They've been very happy with the deployment. And there is a lot of interest, and we do expect to continue our deliveries to Sobeys, but I cannot go into any details on exactly how much that would be in money.

Yes. All right. No, that's fine. And then we have a question then on the gross margin impact from the inventory reduction. Is this mainly then from maybe sort of a proactive pricing towards customers? Or is this mainly relating then maybe to FX impacts on the inventory? Could you give some -- maybe some granularity on this?

You mean the difference in margin in Q4 compared to Q3?

From the excess inventory.

The gross margin impact from the excess inventory and whether this is a result maybe of then reducing prices to the customers in order to reduce inventory or are they right otherwise?

It's 2 things. One is that when this was brought up, it was too much higher U.S. dollar rate. So that is one negative impact, of course, when you sell it out. The other one is that to get rid of it all now before the year-end, it was also done to a lower price.

Yes. Okay. And we have a question also from the line on the current levels of inventory. Or do you feel that you -- I mean, considering your best guess on the outlook going forward, do you feel that you have excess inventory right now? Or are you on a more sort of like a level that you are satisfied with your best guess and on the outlook?

Now at the end of the year, we do not have any excess inventory. But of course, we can always have a more optimal level of inventory. But this is, of course, also must be related to the orders we have and that we will deliver the coming quarters.

And I think actually, we -- what we have done this year is also that we have ended one of our large product lines. We sold off all the ESLs from that product line, which means that we are producing fewer varieties now. So we have a standard family and only one standard family, which means that we will not build more stock the same way or have to build the stock the same way as we did before. So by nature, we should not tie as much capital in inventories as we were forced to do before.

Yes. Okay. Then we have quite a lot of questions actually on the U.K. Do you still hold the view that U.K. is sort of like a hot market right now? I mean we see some activities in the market. If we look at it in a wider perspective, there is some CapEx investment going on, but you also previously mentioned, of course, a lot of valuations being carried out. What would you say is the current state of the U.K. market?

Some mixed feelings actually because there is a lot of activity. It is a hot market. But we also see customer wins, whether it's a winner announced and then they are selected, but nothing really happens. But so we have the procurement processes. We have a lot of inbound interest. But still, we don't see all of that materialize, which is a bit odd really. But there is a lot of interest clearly. But we haven't seen and even people being selected, but not that there are any real deployments as a result.

All right. All right. I think then we have addressed all the questions on the line and also my questions. So thank you so much, and I'll leave it to you for any concluding remarks.

Thank you very much, Hjalmar. Thank you very much for joining our quarterly presentation. I hope you found it interesting. I look forward to come back in with the Q1 presentation back in April, I guess. So until then, thank you very much.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Pricer's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Presentation here at DNB Carnegie. My name is Hjalmar, and I work as an analyst, and we are joined here today by CEO, Magnus Larsson; and CFO, Claes Wenthzel. Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you very much. And we have a lot to speak about. So let's get started right away. The floor is yours.

Excellent. So thanks, everyone, for joining. We're going to present now our third quarter for 2025. It's myself and Claes as mentioned by Hjalmar.

And as always, let me just start with Pricer in a brief for those of you who don't know us since before. So our vision is to be the preferred partner for in-store communication and digitalization. We work within retail tech. We are a leader within retail tech, and we have been around for nearly 30 years or actually more than 30 years, and we have to date 28,000 stores sold across the world. Looking at market development and the Q3 highlights, of course, the first thing I want to lift is that we managed now in Q3 to have the best net sales so far in this year for a quarter, SEK 598 million.

It's better than both Q1 and Q2. We had a very great increase in our recurring revenue. Why is that? So it's partly due to all the SaaS services we sell through Pricer Plaza. But we've also changed our business model and our pricing model for all software services, also older installs to subscription model only. So even if you, for whatever reason, are not able to actually connect your store to Pricer Plaza, you will still need to renew the software for your installed base or your installed server and the new pricing model is recurring.

So basically, as of now, we are in principle only recurring when it comes to software sales. And this is why you can see the almost 50% increase in recurring revenue in this quarter compared to last quarter. You will also see that it's a quite high increase versus Q2. It's almost 20% increase versus Q2. This is one of the drivers behind the margin improvement. We're on 23% now for the quarter. And it's, of course, partly part of the recurring revenue, but it's also product mix, and I think Claes will speak a little bit more about it in detail.

One of the highlights for me personally is, of course, that we, with our EBIT result, managed to -- it's a positive result, and it's actually not only for Q3, but with the result of Q2, we take the entire result for the full year into positivity. So I'm super happy for that. Something I'm a little bit less happy with is, of course, the order intake, which was bleak now in the quarter.

We could see that there are many different reasons, but the key reason is the fact that there is still a lot of market uncertainty affecting the retailers' decision to invest. We have quite a few customers where we know there is a project they want to deploy, they want to get started with, but it's being pushed into the future. So we haven't lost them, and we do expect that there will be -- there will be -- the orders will actually come at a later stage.

But it's clear, it's not only ourselves, we see it also for our competitors that this unwillingness to invest is affecting the market growth at the moment. Then on the Nordic side, as you probably know, if you followed us, we have been moving from a partnership sales model in the Nordic and Baltic market into a direct sales market approach. Since August, we have a full team in place. We can actually see that we're now getting traction on the order side.

You don't really see it in the Q3 report, but I expect that it will be visible as of Q4 and forward on. And one first example of this new direct [ modes ] is that we got a direct frame agreement this week with Norgesgruppen, who is the -- one of the leaders on the Nordic market, but also then in Norway. Obviously, for those of you that are Nordic, that we announced a couple of days ago.

So it's a frame agreement we expect to serve all the stores over the coming couple of years. One thing I would like also to speak about is that we have another customer. It's one of the largest Nordic customers. that we have. They now had their first store on Pricer Plaza and they have an ambition to actually do all their stores as soon as possible. So there will be a couple of hundreds by Christmas and then some more by beginning of next year. So it's a very clear trend also in the Nordic market for Plaza and connecting your stores. Looking at the organization and for those of you that will look more on the OpEx side of our business, we have invested over the last couple of months and quarters in our organization, in the commercial organization very much on the marketing side, on the sales side, on the product management side, all the parts of the organization that will actually help us build the value proposition of today, but also the value proposition of tomorrow and that will more in a larger extent, also engage with our customers directly.

This has generated a lot of positive traction. Once again, not visible this quarter, but hopefully visible in the quarters to come. And as mentioned, the fourth quarter has started well from an order intake point of view. What are we actually solving? We've been looking at different industry trends and the macro trends. And today, I'd like to focus on two of them. One, our customers come to us, often it is to help them with improving the operational efficiency in the store.

But it's also increasingly more on the in-store experience, how can they make the shoppers buy more, how can they actually get additional revenues from CPGs, so the brands. So I've got two examples. If you think about the operational cost pressure, I would like to take our customer SOK in Finland and the partnership that we have forged with them since 2023. It was a pretty long sales process, but we got a contract during autumn 2023, which we announced to the market. They started with 15 stores in 2023. And by today, they have -- we have deployed more than 6 million labels across 450 stores.

So this is way above the initial discussions we had with them, and we will continue to deploy additional stores. They have some, I think, around 1,000 stores in total. Why did they select us? Well, the key reason was to get the operational efficiency in place, but it was also to improve the work environment for the staff and especially looking at replenishment and picking online orders. So they wanted to make sure there would be less time spent, but it would also be easy for the staff.

And they can see now that when they did the pilot, they said, well, there was basically only one choice. You're the only one with a solution that works for us as we need. But it was also now we can see afterwards when they started to do employee engagement service that they have an increase in positive answers on the work environment. They can also see that it's faster to actually get an employee fully productive in the store. And I'm really happy for the cooperation and as Jarko Mäkkinen, the Head of Development at SOK says that Pricer has proven to be the partner that they wanted, acting as an extension of our own team. And of course, we feel the same way. It's very inspirational customer to work with.

Here -- so this is very much on the store operational side. And if you're more interested in this case, I think you will have it now or it will come very soon, a video actually from SOK where they speak about why they selected us. The next thing would be then addressing the in-store experience. Price Avenue is a product that we conceptually launched in New York in January at the NRF event. We have now come to the place where we are starting pilots.

So yesterday, we actually had our first Pricer Avenue aisle live. It's in a store north of Stockholm. It is very much a store where we will let our engineers just verify that everything is working as it should. But if you want to see it, you should go northwest of Stockholm and see if you can like locate the store, it's really nice. What you also see on the picture here is what we call the floating canvas.

This is something unique to Pricer. It's a patented way of doing. And actually, we're the only one with the current look and feel of the general ESL on the market where you can do it. We -- unlike everyone else and unlike our old models, we have not made our thin so -- frames are so thin on the ESL that you can easily then build a picture over 2 ESLs or over 3 or 5, any -- actually, any number of ESLs you want, you can build the merchandise in the promotion area.

So we're going to do in addition to what we just installed in Sweden, we will do pilots more of a commercial nature in Finland, in France and in the U.K. now during October and November. So there will be more updates on this, but we can see there is a huge interest in Pricer Avenue. And I think it's also fueled by the fact that there's no one else on the market that is actually doing it this way. So having done now the [ shameless ] marketing of Avenue, I hand over to you, Claes.

Yes. Q3 is the best quarter for this year. You see we have a strong gross margin and gross profit, and we see effect in our production cost now from the weaker U.S. dollar. We have had a negative currency effect compared to last year with about SEK 10 million, which affected our EBIT of course. So -- but still, we have a return on sales of 6.5% for this third quarter.

If we then look at the cash flow, the operating cash flow for the first 9 months is positive and SEK 16 million. Cash flow has been affected by the high accounts receivables and has actually increased by SEK 120 million in the third quarter. So this is just -- it's a timing effect, and that will be, of course, a positive effect from this now in the coming quarter. Then if we look at the order intake, it's, of course, weak, as Magnus said, but the backlog now when we go into the fourth quarter is higher than last year. On the sales side, it is the best this year, and it's SEK 598 million. Gross profit, it's also the best for the year with SEK 139 million. And even then the total result is, of course, the best for this year.

Good. Thanks, Claes. So going to the summary. Well, as I mentioned, the geopolitical situation is still affecting retailers' decision to invest. They believe in digitizing the stores. They are digitizing the stores, but we can see a lot less activity on the market. And I know, of course, there are questions, is the market growing? Yes, we believe that over the coming couple of years, there will be a massive growth. But we can see that this year and actually last year, we had poor growth in the market. If we look at the top 4 players, I would say that we had a standstill in the market last year, and there will probably be something similar here as well.

But we still see the same interest from our customers. It's painful. It's, of course, something we don't want, but we actually still have the positive dialogues. And I think that's important to remember, especially when you feel frustrated over the lack of sales or lack of results, it will come back. I'm really happy that we managed to return to profitability this year. It's, of course, painful for everyone when you're actually not making money. We have committed in the Q2 report that we will be profitable for the year, and I think we can repeat that commitment to the market.

Clear recovery in net sales. We improved our gross profit a lot versus Q2, but also versus Q3 last year. The Pricer Avenue pilots, I'm super excited to see them in place. The first install looked beautiful. And now when we do them fully for our additional customers, France, U.K., Finland, I expect a lot of interesting dialogues afterwards. The direct frame agreement with Norgesgruppen, very positive. I do expect more frame agreements coming out of the Nordic market within this year.

And I would like to also close with saying that we have a strong position to really capitalize the future demand, the future opportunity. And I believe that with our setup, with our current portfolio, but above all, also with what we do now on the revenue side, there will be a lot of opportunities for us to grow into the future. So please bear with us, there will be improvements.

Thank you so much, and let's dive into the Q&A then. First, on the jump then in recurring revenue, which, of course, is very interesting. You mentioned there that you can also have a recurring revenue setup with sort of the non-Plaza customers, if I got that correctly. Could you just elaborate a bit on this initiative and this pricing?

So what we've done is we see that, of course, recurring revenue is a solid base for us to stand on. And we want to move all customers over to Plaza to get them connected. But we also see that some customers, they need to do the proper planning, they need to do the setup. And if you have almost 1,000 stores, as an example, you need to plan that transformation pretty carefully.

But we do not want to wait for the revenue. So what we have done is that all customers with an old install that will still be installed on a server. We changed the price model and said that now you got the latest version, but it will be a recurring revenue model. So this is the key reason. So all the new softwares that we sell will be sold as a SaaS service. I'm sure there might be some exception, but at large, this is what we do. So this is -- has been one of the key reasons for the impact now in Q3.

Yes. And what does this mean for the prospects of recurring revenue? I mean I know you don't have a recurring revenue target currently, but what is the implications of this? And how much can it grow? I mean, just depending on now addressing also non-Plaza customers?

I think the key growth will come from connecting customers, and we have several projects ongoing. If you take Carrefour as an example, I think we've connected -- I can't recall the exact number, but somewhere roughly 500 additional stores this year. And we believe that all stores that we haven't connected so far, let's say, we have -- we sold 28,000 stores. We have a number of Plaza stores today, but there's probably at least 10 to 15 stores still to actually connect.

And that will, of course, be one chunk of the forthcoming recurring revenues. The other one will be now as we get stores connected and our software team spend more time on developing applications and functionality rather than the basic Plaza functionality, we see that we will also be able to package and sell much more upsells to our customers and new functionalities that they would need to pay for. And we've come to a point now we have the R&D capability fully in place. We have the Plaza fully developed to the extent that we want. But we also have the product team that is now really good at packaging it in a way that will be easy for our sales team to do it. So I see that there are quite a lot of opportunities to actually grow this continuously.

It sounds like a lot of focus on recurring revenue currently then.

Absolutely. It's actually when we communicated internally, it's really the #1 objective is to get more customers and to make sure that every single customer is connected.

Yes. And on the pricing side, you mentioned the Avenue pilots currently running. Could you give us maybe some granularity on the pricing that you're expecting for this model? Is it mainly recurring and -- and what would sort of the margin profile be potentially.

You can see with Avenue, we will see a few different revenue streams. One is, of course, selling the ESL, which, we will not take it on our balance sheet. So we will still sell it as a product, but we will sell the software. We -- with the powered rail that we have in the system, we have a unique setup that we actually do expect that we'll be able to license for people that want to use it and sell it for their own IoT devices or for -- in the stores that we have, if they want to use it, they will have to pay a license fee.

Then we have the ability to do the merchandising. There we're still looking at the price model, but we see that there is a real chance to actually get some increased revenues, hopefully, more than smaller amounts on the merchandise side. That's one of the things that we really want to test now when we do the new stores, France, U.K. and Finland, how can we actually -- how should we work with the merchandise side, especially. But I see, in essence, 3 different kind of revenue streams.

Is it possible to start up selling the avenue already in early 2026? Or when do you expect to maybe see sort of a ramp-up of...

It would be, we will actually have volume or will do small volume production during the first half, mainly because we know that customers that will never go for a full deployment immediately. Typically, when we approach our customers, they want to test it. They test it in one part of the store, then they might do an extended part of the store. But we would say, as of the second half of next year, that's when we're ready to do volumes, and I expect us to do volumes -- it will not be a bulk of our revenue, but I would expect it to be at least on a level where we can speak about it and say it's actually making a difference.

Yes, yes. And then if we move on to the order intake, maybe you mentioned Europe and also one impacting factor being that you're going to a direct-to-market approach here. Could you elaborate just how this is impacting the order intake here in the third quarter and why this sort of like dampens the order intake that you saw in Europe?

There are two key reasons. One is actually Nordic Baltic, where we can see that the transformation from distributor sales to direct sales -- now it's -- since all the Nordic customers know that we were doing this, they've been waiting, which means that some of them, they are waiting to invest, but it also means that some of them said that if they were not in a hurry, they probably took the investment and put it into next year's budget. So it's money that will come our way, but it's more of a timing issue. We can also see when we address franchisees. So now we have an organization in Sweden to do franchisee sales. Here, I see on a daily basis that we get store orders in, but it's coming now, and we got the full team in place at the end of August, but we can see that they're all busy, and we have had several orders, both from a store level until then the frame agreement like Norgesgruppen.

The other one was Carrefour, where we had a very high order intake from Carrefour in Q3 last year. That order we got in Q2 this year, not exactly the same size, but still the large Carrefour order of the year came Q2 this year.

So it's reasonable then I assume to expect some sort of catch-up and maybe not Q4. I mean some -- you mentioned some budgets, they are taking it into 2026. So a gradual catch-up maybe from here.

I think there will be a gradual catch-up. And above all, I think the key message is that there will be a catch-up. This is not lost sales. This is sales that we will get. And we are, of course, in discussions with like Norgesgruppen and others on what are their investment plans for the future. We have a pretty good idea on what will happen and when.

Yes, yes. And then if we move on to the Americas region, could you just give us sort of like the current view of the impact from the tariffs? I mean you mentioned that this has been an issue and of course, maybe an ongoing issue as well. But still, I mean, there is for you some order intake in the Americas, which is sequentially improving even, if I recall correctly. And I mean, maybe this is outside of the U.S., it's Canada, but could you elaborate a bit on the drivers here and sort of like what do you currently see from the tariffs?

Yes, I think we can split it in U.S. and Canada. And if I start with U.S., we still -- there is still a slowness to make new investments. There are discussions. They have started again, but they are quite slow. But we can see that suppliers that actually had a contract in place, we can -- it seems like volumes are actually accelerating to make sure that they get things deployed as soon as possible with the rationale.

We know the tariffs we have today, but we don't know the tariffs of the future. And I think that is the key rationale where you can see there is some acceleration on the market. But I think the key rationale is that we want to digitize. We had the contract. Let's do it now before it will be way too expensive.

But for the rest, we see that there is still cautious. They are still waiting. So there's not a lot -- there are, of course, sales, but not as much as we would expect. It's actually much lower. In Canada, on the other hand, we see a lot of interest. We see that Sobeys deployment, it's progressing extremely well. We see it's catching a lot of interest. So in addition to the order that we got in December, then we're busy deploying it according to schedule.

There's a lot of Sobeys franchisees that are constantly placing orders. We can see that there are spillover effects that we have other customers, we have the Metro Group in Canada as well. And of course, they look at all the new stores with 4 color labels. And we see a lot of incoming interest also here where we do believe that Canada will be a really good market for us over the coming couple of years, both Sobeys, Metro Group, Canadian Tire, they're soon fully deployed, but we have now done the first 4 color orders. So they will gradually start shifting their installed base over more and more towards 4 colors. So that will be continued sales as well, maybe not on the same level initially, but eventually.

And how much potential do you see in the Sobeys store network to grow there? I mean, what is the current like sort of penetration rate and I mean if you gain traction there, what's sort of like the potential that we could see?

I see it Sobeys and with the different formats, they have, say, roughly 1,500 stores. We -- there's still a lot of upside.

Yes. All right.

No numbers, I'm afraid.

No, that's fine. That's fine.

But it is same. I expect more.

Yes. You mentioned then some pilots running -- starting in October and November here for Avenue. Could you elaborate a bit on this? Is this new customers or current customers that...

So it's existing customers, and it's customers where we said that we will only do a few. We will select the customers we want to work with. We want customers where, of course, they will test it in their store environment and see does it work for them? How well do they like it. But we also want to test the commercial model.

We want to make sure it's not just another label. We want to make sure that all the merchandise abilities are in place. We want to make sure that we have either their private brand or that they have another brand they work with as part of the campaign. So they've been -- we've been extremely selective in this process. We will do more promotion around these pilots. That's also been a requirement. We want to talk it and we need to talk about it.

All right. Thank you. Then we got a question on the line regarding the SOK that you mentioned. Could you just clarify a bit? Are you expecting to see additional rollouts here? Or have you already received these orders?

We're expecting to see more. So they've been driving it as a structured process. They've been doing a lot of deployment now with 450 stores, but they still have another more than 500 stores. Different formats still. There's been a focus on the large formats, even though we also won the smaller formats, which we were not certain that we would win. I think originally, they were thinking about having maybe dual vendors, but they decided to just go with us because they were so happy with how things were working.

But we do expect to get more like store-by-store orders into the future more than like a structured. So I don't think we will have a very large PO, but I think we'll continuously have a good run rate business that will be on a good level.

And then on the U.K., I mean, a lot of questions regarding U.K., we know that it is a market with great potential. We see -- we see some deals being made in this market. Could you elaborate a bit on what you're seeing right now sort of like the current picture of the activity in the U.K?

We see a lot of activity. I mentioned many reports that I expect something to happen now during autumn, and I guess it just did. Everyone is looking at it, and we see the investment decisions are either being made or will come within the coming 6 to 18 months, I would say, or maybe as of now and within the coming 18 months, but everyone is looking at ESL. I expect the question to pop up. And yes, we are doing pilots with several of the Tier 1s. So we are in discussions.

Yes, we were also in discussion. We were in final stages of negotiations with one of the large funds that were recently won by a competitor, but we actually said no. There were some commercial conditions that were -- I've never seen before actually. So we said this is unacceptable. So we declined.

Okay. Okay. Then we got some questions on the working capital. Could you maybe elaborate a bit on -- I guess, mainly on inventory. Do you feel that the levels that you currently hold are satisfactory? I mean, or do you feel that they are sort of -- maybe they could lean in some direction one or another if we look forward for the next maybe 2 quarters?

Yes. The inventory level now is higher than we actually expected. So we expect the inventory to go down. From the levels they are at the moment. And also regarding working capital now, also in the quarter, the accounts receivables has increased a lot. And as I said, it's just a timing effect. So that will also change.

All right. Thank you so much, Magnus and Claes, for coming in today and presenting and answering our questions. And I'll leave it to you for any concluding remarks.

All right. So thank you, Hjalmar. Thank you, Claes. Thanks for everyone watching. Thanks for joining. I hope you found it interesting. I hope you got something more out of the call than you could actually read out of the report. I would like to summarize saying that I'm very positive looking at the future, not very happy with 2025, but I see that things are improving. They were improving in Q3. We will make a profit for the full year. We have the dialogues in place to actually make sure that we come back and deliver better into the future. So thanks a lot.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Pricer Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Call Presentation here at DNB Carnegie. I'm joined today by CEO, Magnus Larsson; and CFO, Magnus (sic) [ Claes ] Wenthzel. Welcome, gentlemen.

Thank you very much...

And I figure we start right away, so I hand over the word. Sorry. Thank you.

So hello, everyone. Thank you for having us today. We are here to present the second quarter 2025. With me, as mentioned by Hjalmar, we have Claes. I'd like to start with just for those of you that might not know us that well, Pricer in brief. Founded in '91, we are a leader within retail tech. Our vision is to be the preferred partner for in-store communication and digitalization, highlighting really the collaboration and partnership with our customers, where we believe that we are doing things quite different compared to competition. We are -- from a deployment point of view, we have sold more than 28,000 stores, and we have some 350 million labels that we've sold and delivered, which makes us a clear #2 on the market.

Going into the second quarter, let me start by first stating what I guess is the obvious. I'm not at all happy with this quarter. With the net sales that fell below expectation and where we also have a poor profitability. But of course, there are things that are also positive in the report that I will lift and highlight.

I would also like to start with looking at the market when we are making the -- looking at the future and we're looking at how will the market grow. There is nothing that has changed from what we have predicted earlier that the market will continue to grow. And over time, the growth will be around 15% annually, at least until 2030. This is what we see. We see no reason to actually change that view as well.

We see that there is a real need among the retailers to actually do digitalization of the stores from the hesitation that we've seen in terms of investments now during the first half, it's not a hesitation saying that we will not do anything. It's pushing things into the future, waiting a little bit to see that things are actually getting more clear on the market.

So you could say that the geopolitical situation have really affected us both in Q1 and also now in Q2, as I alluded to, there's a clear risk when I did the Q1 presentation. One thing that has actually developed in a maybe not unexpected way, but we can see that looking at the U.S. market specifically, here, we have had a number of large RFQs or request for proposals and procurement processes that has actually been paused totally. So it's not been won by anyone, but there's been several where they said that we just have to wait until next year. So it's not a lack of interest, but it's the uncertainty so high, reflecting the tariffs that they just simply decide to move the decision into the future.

On the Nordic market, we can see that there has been low activity versus previous years. This was expected. We are now going direct. We have a new company in place in Norway. We have recruited a team of salespeople and delivery people that are all in place as of August 1. We have really positive discussions with all the -- our previous customers are the one that we sold with our distributor before, and they have all confirmed that, yes, we're going to continue with Pricer, and we expect all the contracts to be closed now in August. So very positive development. Of course, here, we see the possibility to actually increase sales and profitability with a new setup.

I would finally like to highlight the order intake. We did actually have a better order intake than last quarter or the quarter in Q2 in 2024. slightly above. But if we actually take out the FX effects, it's actually growth of 7.7%. But more importantly, I would like to highlight the European market where we can see that the order intake now in Q2 is 20% better than the European market were last year in the second quarter and also 9% above the order intake in Q1 this year. So we see a positive momentum on the European market.

Having said that, Claes, do you want to say something on the financials?

Yes. As Magnus said, we are, of course, very disappointed of the low sales and the low gross margin. The low gross margin is, of course, highly affected by the low sales as our fixed COGS has a bigger impact, of course, of the sales because of that. On the cost side, our operating cost includes our reconstruction cost in the quarter for about SEK 8 million. And if you take out that, the cost is slightly lower in Q2 compared to Q1.

Then if we look at the cash flow from our operations, that is quite good despite the low EBIT result. We have a better handling of our working capital. We have taken down our inventory during the period. Net debt now is at the same level as it was in the beginning of the year or at the end of last year, which is quite good compared to the cost and the losses we had during the first half of the year.

If we then look at the sales and gross margin development, we can see that the order intake is up compared to Q1 with about 10%. The backlog now when we go into the second half is SEK 660 million, which is significantly higher than a year ago. And as I said, both gross margin and the gross profit has been affected by the low sales and the bigger impact from our fixed cost.

We have all our production costs in U.S. dollars, and we have very little effect of that now in the first half, mainly because a lot of the inventory that have been sold during the period was inventory booked at a much higher dollar level when we get into this year. But this will have a positive effect during the rest of the year when we see an effect from the lower -- our lower production cost.

And then this slide shows, as you can see, our operating result over 12 months, rolling 12 months. We are now at the same level rolling 12 months as it was after Q2 last year. Now we have SEK 106 million and last year at this time, we have SEK 102 million. And then, of course, the margins are affected.

Yes. Thank you, Claes. So looking at the market, what are the key macro trends and what are the key insights? Well, in addition to the tariffs, of course, being affecting the general sentiment of the market, we see that the market will grow. We see that digitalization of the store is highly strategic. It is something that we do discuss with a lot of our retailers. In fact, we actually discuss it with more customers now than we did before. We have a lot of new discussions very much related to price revenue, but they all go to how can we improve the in-store experience, which is also here as point #4.

The operational cost, we do not really meet any retailer saying that we're happy with our fixed cost and our operational cost. On the contrary, pretty much everyone is looking at how can we actually address it, how can we get more work done by our store staff without actually increasing the cost or even decreasing the cost that they have today. And of course, since we are the masters of in-store efficiency, we do have a really good story here.

Another thing that when you digitize the store, and I would say, after getting the operational cost down, getting the inventories right and getting the on-shelf availability is something that is a clear interest. When we've been doing -- conducting service with the customer, it's one of the key things where there will be investments. So anything computer vision, AI do I have a product on the shelf? If not, how fast can we get it there? Do I have it in my stock. So here, we see a lot of development. And that's, of course, positive for us because here we do have the solution to address it.

In-store experience, how can we make sure that the shopper appreciate being in the store, how can we make them buy more? How can we make them actually buy more high-margin products. Here, we come into the dimension of signage, but once again, something we also address with price revenue.

Sustainability, there is a lot of interest still despite some of the reporting being pushed into the future in Europe. But fundamentally, many retailers want to do good. They want to actually push down the climate impact of their operation. Here, we are in really exciting collaborations with Epishine to use light harvesting, which will be one of the features for price revenue, but also with companies like PaperShell to see how can they use cellulose-based material in our products.

I think I'll jump -- having said that, I'll jump to the next one. So what do we do? Well, I guess many of you know it, but I would like to highlight utilizing and capitalizing from our installed base. We are #2 on the market with more than 350 million deployed by the end of last year. We have a premium position in all the stores where they actually have our labels. So one of the key things from a strategy now, it's to connect all the store. Every single store connected will be an ability for us and eventually you as an investor to get all the benefits of additional sales into the future. It will give us the possibility to upsell software features. It will, of course, give us the recurring revenues, but it will also give us the possibility to very quickly see when is there a possibility to do sales of different sizes, new ESLs.

So this is quite fundamental. Connecting all stores is something we're pushing our sales people to do right now. We have discussions with most of the large retailers now saying if they haven't done it yet, we are now in tangible discussions with several and actually moving from the in-store server to actually something that we have on SaaS.

I realized when I was about to make a presentation to Carrefour, to their management team that we have a fantastic strategy, but we hadn't really done it for the customer, what's actually in it for them. So if I would take the strategy work that we have done and compile it into 3 areas, it would be these 3 ones. And the first one is focus on innovation. I think I've said it before, but we need to be perceived as the most innovative company within our space and not only be perceived, you actually have to deliver on it.

So one thing will be that the work that we have did with Avenue, we target to come out with new additions, new functionality, new benefits of using Avenue continuously. So in addition to the stuff that we will actually launch now and do the pilots within Q3 and later launch, we are looking at the next generation, what do we want to add. We have created an architecture where it will be easier for us to added functionality.

Sustainability will be important. We have a setup, especially with PaperShell, where we believe that things, if they develop as we hope, it will help us to radically reduce actually the carbon dioxide impact of our ESLs. And we will continue to expand and work actively with our patent portfolio to protect our customers, but also to protect ourselves. And here, we have radically changed the way we work with patents over the last 2 years. So anything we do now, we file a battery of patent applications to make sure that what we do is something that we can actually defend.

We also need to continue to develop solutions that will really deliver real customer value and ROI. There's a lot of talks from competition as well on they can do whatever we do. The fact is they cannot. And we need to make sure that it's tangible that the value that we deliver is real. And when they buy something from us, they get a better ROI than buying it from someone else. So it will be about Pricer Avenue. We will continue to deliver ESL system that will clearly outperform competition, but we will also work and extend the partnerships we have with companies within computer vision, AI, retail media, where we bring the market-leading expertise.

And finally, and this is something that we are now doing actually in many different ways. We're building now a customer advisory board where we let our Tier 1 customers meet and see how -- what do they want, how do they use the system. I don't see any of our customers -- other competitors doing it really this way. They seem to be quite reluctant to meet the customers meet. We are quite happy to let our customers meet.

Co-creation of solutions with select strategic customers we are, especially for Avenue in discussion with a new Tier 1 customer where they visit us in Stockholm, they will come back very soon again. And they have a lot of tangible input to Avenue, not only the hardware, but also the software functionality on top of it. So here, we're actually moving quite fast into discussions where they are giving very, very tangible input and building, of course, strengthening our relationship. And now it's time for the summary before Q&A.

As mentioned, this is a quarter that we're not happy with. We can see that sales and profitability has clearly been affected by the macro geopolitical situation. We have had a slight improvement on cash flow, and I'm happy because we've been actually emptying the overstock that we have had that Claes spoke about. I mentioned the American processes that we've seen several retailers pausing or actually stopping altogether the procurement processes that they've been in and we've been in, not because they do not believe in what we do, but there's too much uncertainty on the U.S. market right now. So they said that, okay, let's continue discussion next year.

What I didn't highlight on the first slide that I sort of wanted to end on maybe not a high, but a little bit more than a high is that there's been some questions on ourselves in Carrefour. And I can just say that the -- out of the growth in sales and order intake on the European market, Carrefour was actually positively contributing. They -- we put the budget in place in December. We got it approved by the Board. We had a pretty positive view, but actually the sales, the order intake that we got out of Carrefour was much higher than we actually planned for. So from a Carrefour point of view, we had a really good order intake now in the first quarter. And this was only Carrefour France I'm talking about, so also from other Carrefour countries.

So having said that, I guess it's time for Q&A.

I figured we could start by touching back on the gross margin here a bit because I mean, you went into the impact from those various factors. But could you just maybe touch back on those and maybe sort of like reflect on whether or not like volumes were the main driver of the gross margin pressure and how much of the gross margin pressure year-over-year was actually from FX that we saw. Maybe if you could just split out those different factors and how they impacted the gross margin in the second quarter.

Exact details, I don't have. But one big impact is, of course, the depreciation related to the whole of the production, all our tools and so are in there, and they are fixed and depreciated over the year regardless of how much we are selling. And we have also everything else regarding inventory handling, rent and things like that. So that, of course, has a big impact. And the other thing, as I said, that will have a positive effect during the rest of the year is that we will have an effect from the lower production costs related to lower dollar.

And looking at the sort of geographical mix, has there been any recent shifts in pricing points maybe that you're experiencing towards your customers, maybe in the market? Is there like a general price pressure? Do you feel confident that you can maintain the pricing premium that you have?

We can see that with this uncertainty in the market, there are less opportunities. And especially in Europe, we have seen that there has been a lot of attention and a lot of push to win these deals and there are fewer deals. Of course, that will impact the sales price. Then it's up to us to defend our position saying that when you actually buy a price solution, you will get much better value. You will get a higher ROI and a better total cost of ownership.

So yes, we see it's tougher because there are less opportunities. But I feel confident that from a margin point of view, the gross margin that you see now in this quarter, this is not, from our point of view, the starting point of the new level of gross margin. We do expect, and I guess you can say that, Claes, a similar level of gross margin this year as we had last year. So we expect to defend our gross margin.

Yes, absolutely.

You have previously spoken on your growth in relation to the market maybe mostly for the previous year. But of course, your own growth targets also align with the market growth. Could you elaborate a bit on how do you feel that you have developed so far this year? Are you losing market share or are volumes down in a similar manner for the sort of wider market? And how do you feel that your position has developed maybe for this year and what we could expect for the full year 2025?

I feel that when I look at ourselves and I look at competition, and I know that it's harder for investors to actually get the figures from our Chinese and our Korean competitors. But when we're looking at their reports, we can see that they did not have any growth in Q1. They were also reporting, especially one of them then extended or a very heavy hit on the profitability. We believe that the market share has been flattish. But when we look at what we do, if we look at our order intake, we see that we are growing from an order intake point of view on the European market. And that's something I don't really see from competition.

So are we taking market share? Yes, possibly. We are at least not losing market share on the market when we look at the order intake and most likely on the net sales as well. So we can see it's generally speaking, the market will probably be -- last year, I said that we believe it's at least it didn't grow more than 5%. It might even be much lower. It seems likely that it's been the same. It might have been negative growth for the market this first half. That's what I would imagine.

Yes. And you mentioned the order intake in Europe and also Carrefour. Is there a reason for optimism here? This is, of course, a very important account for you. But what could we expect going ahead? And what do you currently feel? Is it reason for optimism on that end?

Given our report, I would still be careful by being too optimistic and using strong words. We have a good relationship with Carrefour. We have more than 1,700 stores together with them. They are placing orders continuously, both for their own stores that they have owned and operate, but also for the franchisees. We have good dialogues with them. So we have a good customer relationship with Carrefour, and I expect that to continue.

Yes. Okay. And looking at North America, you mentioned that you see the potential maybe for some additional customers outside of Sobeys in Canada. Could you elaborate a bit on this? Do you feel that there's a positive momentum going on here?

We do. And this feels a bit odd because there's a fairly big difference between Canada and the U.S. where we see a strong interest in investing now this year, whereas in the U.S. market, we see that it's really quiet. When we now start to deploy the Sobeys stores, full 4-color stores really nice. We see interest from other retailer chains and some of them like Metro group, we have since before. But we see there is a renewed interest, and it's within many different formats where we're not active yet and new categories we see from a pharmacy point of view, we start to see more interest from a do-it-yourself, but also within traditional grocery. So I believe that the Canadian market will be a good market for us and possibly a growing one over the coming couple of years.

Yes. And on the Sobeys deliveries, you mentioned some delays. Could you quantify this a little bit? Is the full deliveries pushed back? Or is it just mainly some initial delays that we're experiencing? And what is the current sort of pace of installations of the Sobeys order?

It's been a small initial delay. We don't see any pushback of orders. We don't see any major changes to the schedule. So we have developed a brand-new ASIC that they are taking in use. It's fully encrypted. We're delivering as per plans now. So we expect to continue to deliver the Sobeys orders as we planned.

All right. And looking into France and the restructuring measures, could you maybe elaborate a bit on the progress here? And what could be expected maybe going ahead for the second half in terms of both, I mean, efforts, but also costs, I guess?

Yes. So from the -- we didn't make any announcement on the French restructuring. That's because what we did here is that we want all the markets to really stand strong on their own. And I felt that we -- and as an executive team, we felt that we were simply too many staff given the business that we have had in France and the local profitability. So it was clear. And I think also we did have some inefficiencies. So it's positions that we are letting go. They've actually all left, but we are not replacing.

So I think that now we have the right size for the -- basically delivering the business we see over the coming period of time. The money that we save is something that we've also planned to actually reinvest in other markets. So we haven't done it to actually be more profitable. We have done it to be able to actually release resources to grow where it makes a whole lot of sense.

And you also previously mentioned that you are reviewing the way to market in a wider sense that you try to maybe have a more direct approach on maybe more of a larger scale. Could you elaborate a bit on this? Is there any risk for some traction when you're going towards a more direct sales approach? Or do you think that this sort of conversion can work smooth?

I hope that it will work smooth. And so what we have done is -- and this is something we started already last autumn. We started to look at all the markets to see how do we address them and how well does it work with our resellers. And we realized with some, it hasn't really been working as well. So we are minimizing the work together, and that's also part of selecting which markets we want to be on. But it's also for some of them where we can say that we haven't been happy with the performance. We haven't been happy with -- we believe that they've been trying to get too much overhead or margins on top of it without actually delivering a very clear customer value, which is the fact it wasn't communicated that way, but it was sort of from our point of view, on the Nordic market, we decided that we will need to go direct.

This was also something we communicated with our partner on the Nordic market that we want to do things in a different way. So we believe that this gives us the opportunity on this market to actually improve our revenues and improve our profitability. And we believe that we'll also be able to serve our customers much better. And we can see in the dialogues now that we're having to get direct contact in the Nordic market, we are getting very positive discussions. And there are some input and some new opportunities that evolve that we didn't see before.

But also then we can see in some markets like Canada and the Pacific market, we are very happy with the partners that we have. Here, we're actually strengthening the way we work together. We found a way where their value add is not actually affecting the business. So here, we -- in Canada, we are super happy with our partner and the way they address the market.

Okay. Yes, that sounds great. We also have a few questions on the line. So if we could just touch back a bit on the order intake in Europe. Could you just remind us, is this sort of like a wide growth? Or is it accentuated towards certain markets or customers? What is mainly driving the strong order intake that we see?

You can see a strong order intake on the Nordic market. We have strong order intake on the French market, strong order intake on the Benelux market. So those are some -- where you can really see that they are doing more than expected. But then we're seeing good order intake also or on the level that we expected on the Italian market as an example as well. So at large, it's been a good spread, but if I should name 3, well, not 2, but I would say Nordic and France has been standing out.

Yes. Okay. And then maybe if you could elaborate a bit on the wider impact from trade tensions. I mean, naturally, like you mentioned, there is a cautiousness among U.S. customers here. But is there something additional that you would like to add, maybe some like ballpark outlook, what could we expect looking ahead? Of course, the future is uncertain, but if you were to provide the best guess?

It's very hard to say. In the Q1, I said that the cautiousness that we see that might spill over to Q2 and possibly to the second half, that could still be the case. We -- there is a lot of opportunities, but we see there is some hesitation, orders that we thought that we would get in May, they have still been decided for implementation, but will they come now in August? Or will they be pushed to September or hard to say. So I would say that many customers are still a bit careful. But once again, we have deals where we know that we have won it, but we haven't received any orders yet. And then the question is when will they come?

And then on the opportunity then for recurring revenue and maybe specifically on the installations of Pricer Plaza, could you just remind us of how is the current momentum? And do you feel optimistic maybe looking into 2026 on the recurring revenue side? And what are your initiatives for maybe upselling on existing customers, this service?

So if you look at -- start with the installed base. So we have -- we reported back at the end of last year that we have 5,000-plus stores on Plaza. Now that number is much higher. We have -- with Carrefour as an example, we have converted more than 300 stores from Pricer Server to Pricer Plaza now in the first half. We are in discussion with many of the large customers that we have that are historically on Pricer Server, but now we are planning for the migration. So that will be with a number of retail chains, both here in the Nordics, in Canada, Italy, France and basically on most markets, but some will have, of course, bigger impact than others.

We are constantly working now with Plaza and additional functionality on Plaza. When we work in partnerships, let's say, on the computer vision and AI, we make sure that we have a deep integration where we can actually also charge for the integration. So it's not like just a giveaway. It's something where we can say that when we do this, we will add a price if we do this integration. And then we're looking -- driven by Plaza, we're looking a lot on our design tools where you actually do the design of the ESLs to do something that is market-leading. So -- and of course, this is something that we intend to sell as well.

All right. Thank you. I think that's all on my end, and there are no additional questions on the line. So I'll leave it to you for any concluding remarks.

All right. So thanks for having us, Hjalmar, and thanks to everyone on the call for joining. As mentioned, we are not happy with the result. But of course, we see there are some positives. The order intake growing in Europe, the fact that Carrefour is contributing positively to this order intake. And we look forward to come back to do the Q3 reporting.