A2Z Cust2mate Solutions (NASDAQ:AZ) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

0:00 Welcome to the A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp. Second Quarter twenty twenty six Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Please note this event is being recorded.

0:31 I would now like to turn the conference over to Simon Saravieczki, Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you, operator. Before we begin, please note that today's call will contain forward looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual to differ materially from those projected. Please refer to our earnings release as well as our filings with the SEC for discussion of these risks. A replay of this call will be available shortly after its conclusion. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO, Mr. Gotti Graves, Chief Executive Officer of A2Z. Thank you, Simon. Good afternoon and thank you for participating in today's call to discuss our second quarter progress and our business outlook.

1:18 Our team executed well in the second quarter resulting in sequential revenue growth of 78% and we continue to drive commercial adoption of our platform and Smart Card solutions.

1:29 Key takeaways from the quarter included the strong positive momentum in our deliveries, which reached nine fifty Smart Cards, nearly doubling from first quarter levels and bringing to 3,350 the number of units that have been delivered to date. We brought an important new customer on board, Hastok, a 50 store home goods retail chain in Israel and have already made a partial delivery to them. We also expanded our partnership with Super Sapir, a large and growing supermarket chain based in Israel with over 70 stores. Our dedicated manufacturing facility in China came online in the second quarter, significantly increasing our delivery capacity and shortening our lead times. We introduced our next generation connected in store commerce platform.

2:15 And we secured a $30,000,000 line of credit with Bank Lehomme to provide funding to support our future growth. These accomplishments demonstrate significant progress across our organization and underpin our confidence in delivering 10,000 SmartCards by the end of this year and at least 19,000 by the end of twenty twenty seven, Keeping in mind that the 19,000 is based only on our current orders and does not take into account additional new orders or increases from existing customers between now and the end of twenty twenty seven. I'd like to spend a few moments reviewing our business proposition and the opportunity set. Our platform builds on our smart card technology to help retailers digitize the in store shopping journey through connected shopper engagement, retail media and operational intelligence.

3:05 Shoppers benefit from a more convenient shopping experience, while retailers gain new tools to improve store operations, reduce checkout friction, strengthen loss prevention and generate new retail media revenues. In the first half of this year, we delivered Smart Carts to two retail customers: Yochananov, a major supermarket chain in Israel with over 45 stores nationwide and Hastok, which, as I mentioned before, is a 50 store home goods retailer, the largest in Israel. Earlier this week, we expanded our partnership with Super Sapir, a large and growing supermarket chain in Israel with over 70 stores. In light of their expansion and recent purchase of stores from Carrefour Israel, Super Sapir placed a follow on order for 4,000 additional carts, bringing their total commitment to 7,000 units, with deliveries starting in the third quarter.

3:57 Later in the second half, we will also be delivering to Toys R Us in Israel and the Red Pirate, two prominent toy retail chains. These wins have put us at an inflection point on the cusp of larger scale rollouts. During the second half of twenty twenty six, we expect to grow our Retail Media revenues as we accelerate cart deliveries. As we scale the business, we have taken several actions to support future growth. First, and as I mentioned, our dedicated Chinese manufacturing facility came online in the second quarter and expands our capacity while reducing lead times and production costs. Next, we are in the process of rolling out our newly completed connected in store commerce platform, marking a major evolution from a product centric offering to a unified enterprise platform for modern retail.

4:45 With this launch, we have restarted delivery of new cards to our largest customer Yohananov under their agreement to take 5,000 cards. We believe the new features will attract further interest from other potential customers. We expect to see our SmartCards in at least two retailers outside of Israel within the next six months. Third, we are shifting our spending towards deployment, sales and marketing. Gadi Levine will speak more about this in a moment. And speaking of Gadi Levine, we are pleased to have Gadi take over the role of CFO. Gadi has significant experience with more than twenty five years of executive financial leadership across publicly traded companies. I look forward to working closely with him. Gadi will also speak more about our new $30,000,000 credit line with Banque L'Ome.

5:33 I would just like to say that we believe this represents an important vote of confidence in our business prospects, which we appreciate. To sum up, this was a strong quarter for us with deliveries up in line with our expectations and a path forward to continued growth. Now, will turn the call to our CFO, Gadi Levine to provide a fuller financial review. Gadi?

5:55 Thank you, Gadi, and thank you everyone for joining us. I am pleased to join on my first conference call as CFO. I've long admired A2Z's leading edge technology platform and solutions, and I'm excited to step into this leadership role. Today, I will review our financial performance for the second quarter of fiscal twenty twenty six. In the second quarter, we made meaningful progress on both the commercial and operational fronts, accelerating smart card deliveries to a growing client base while taking deliberate actions to enhance our focus on commercial execution and customer expansion.

6:35 My financial commentary will focus on sequential comparisons, which we believe are more meaningful at this stage than year over year comparisons. Second quarter revenues of $5,900,000 were significantly above the $3,300,000 reported in the first quarter of twenty twenty six, And Smart Cart revenues rose to 4,400,000 from just 2,500,000 as we nearly doubled Smart Cart shipments sequentially from 500 units to nine fifty units, including the initial delivery to HUSTOK as Gaddy mentioned. Gross profit was $2,500,000 reflecting a gross margin of 42.6% compared to gross profit of $100,000 reflecting a margin of just 4.2% in the twenty twenty six first quarter.

7:25 The increases were due to higher unit volumes and the shift to more efficient manufacturing in our facility in China, which came online in the second quarter and which translated to lower production costs.

7:39 As production ramps, we expect to continue to realize meaningful economies of scale from our new Chinese manufacturing facility. With this facility in place, we have adequate capacity to fulfill existing and future customer orders.

7:55 In addition to improvements in our manufacturing capabilities, our operational hubs in Panama and Bulgaria remain an important part of our global deployment strategy. During the quarter, we made further progress in establishing the infrastructure, processes and capabilities that will support regional deployments and customer service as rollout activities continue to expand.

8:20 Operating loss was $7,600,000 in the second quarter of twenty twenty six compared to a loss of $8,000,000 in the first quarter of twenty twenty six. And net loss was $7,300,000 or $0.16 per share in the current quarter compared to a loss of $8,300,000 or $0.18 in the prior sequential period. Moving forward, we expect to find operating expense savings from an organizational realignment that is already underway. This initiative was designed to accelerate commercial growth as we leverage our next generation connected in store commerce platform, which is now entering commercial

9:00 deployment. As part of the realignment, we will be reducing our use of external consultants and subcontractors as we internalize functions we just previously outsourced. In addition, net headcount is expected to decrease 10%. These actions reflect our increased focus on deployment and customer facing functions.

9:23 We expect the realignment to generate savings of approximately $7,000,000 annually once it is fully completed in the fourth quarter, while preserving our delivery capabilities and core technical and customer support functions. Ultimately, these actions will sharpen our focus on commercial execution and our sales efforts. Turning to our balance sheet, we have continued to strengthen our financial position. As of 06/30/2026, we have $43,000,000 in treasury and working capital of $55,000,000 We also have the new $30,000,000 credit line with Bank of which we have used just $2,200,000 The Bank LUMI credit line is an important tool to provide the financing we require as we scale the business.

10:11 The credit line will be used to fund inventory and underscores our progress and success as we build on cart deliveries. As Gudi mentioned, we view this as an important validation of our business model and our early execution. We continue to act on our $20,000,000 share repurchase program in the quarter. As of 06/30/2026, we repurchased 919,000 shares for a total of $5,800,000. In July, we repurchased a further 147,000 shares bringing the total to approximately 1,070,000 shares, which we have now canceled. We continue to opportunistically buy back shares as part of our disciplined capital allocation strategy.

10:56 We expect cart deliveries to grow sequentially over each of the next two quarters. This will be weighted towards the final quarter of the year as the month of September is a seasonally slow period impacted by the holiday calendar in Israel. We continue to deliver on our backlog and expect to broaden our revenue base over time.

11:17 Before turning the call back to Guddy G, I'm pleased to announce that A2Z has engaged Advisory Partners Group, a New York based investor relations firm. This partnership underscores our commitment to enhancing investor accessibility and growing our presence in The U. S. Market. And with that, I will turn the call back to Gadi G. Thank you, Gadi.

11:40 Looking ahead, we are at an inflection point. Deliveries, order activity and backlog are all pointing in the right direction and there is strong interest in the marketplace. We believe we are well positioned to capture a large share of an emerging market and continue to expand adoption of our connected in store commerce platform and smart card solutions, which provide retailers, shoppers and other stakeholders with a differentiated platform for shopper engagement, retail media and in store intelligence. We look forward to providing a further update on our progress next quarter. Operator, let's now open the line for questions.

12:17 We will now begin the question and answer session. Our first question today comes from Dan Kurnos with Stonix. Please go ahead. Great, thanks. Good afternoon, I guess morning for you guys. First of all, a phenomenal quarter print guide, real acceleration in the business. I think it's fantastic to see the progress you guys are making.

13:06 And also, I want to say welcome to Gaudi L. Hopefully, my questions will not be confusing. I'll try to clearly telegraph who I'm trying to get the question to. But

13:18 first my first question is, if you guys could please just I know you gave color on sort of the cadence, but if you could give us a little more granularity on how to think about Q3 versus Q4, especially considering the September calendar. And then you mentioned in the press release that Retail Media is also starting to ramp. So if you could give us at least some color or flavor on how to think about the retail media component of the $25,000,000 in revenue expected in the back half of the year, that would be a great start. Thank you.

13:52 Yes. Thank you. That's I'll take that. This is Gabi G. Dan, thank you. Good afternoon. Yes, good morning here. So the cadence will be weighted in the fourth quarter. We have a high holiday season coming up and in the supermarket chain world, this is the most important part of the year. So we will be weighted considerably in the fourth quarter, but we are confident that we will hit our target for the end of the year.

14:26 The Retail Media, we do expect Retail Media revenues to carry on picking up. The more cards we have out there, the more inventory we have to sell, the more cards we have out there, the more personalization we get, the more valuable the inventory we can sell. But we believe that we'll be hitting $25,000,000 at least in revenue, even just from smart cards. We think that the retail media could even be in addition to that. But retail media will start picking up. The majority will still be, of course, from the smart cards. Okay. And then, I guess maybe just from a my follow-up will be just from a higher level. We've been doing this for a long time, Gotti, G. And all of a sudden, we're really turning the corner here.

15:18 First question, what drove the acceleration in the business? And if you could give us more color on this next gen platform? We've heard about a Gen four card out in the market as well. Just any other color on sort of what's driving this final uptake because it looks like you guys are really making the turn here. So we everything is falling into place. We spent a lot of effort in our new platform, which is a combination of new and efficient and aesthetically pleasing hardware. It includes super efficient charging walls where we can have 100 control panels charging on a three yard wall. It includes a lot of ergonomic features on the hardware.

16:03 It includes special unique proprietary fraud detection modules and other matters, which are very important for the retailers and includes a sleek and improved interface for the shoppers, making the shopper experience even better than it was before. So that's one element, helps us. The other element, of course, is our Chinese facility, which manufacturing facility, which allows us to manufacture at scale the cadence, which we define and of course, helps to bring down our unit costs. And all that together with our clients being now able to accept delivery of more cars has led and fed into this excellent quarter, and will lead and feed into the excellent second half, which we expect to come.

17:01 Dan. It's Garry Lavinia. I'll just add, firstly, thank you for the comments at the beginning. Look forward to working with everybody. In addition to everything that that Gadi g said, you know, besides for delivering the the costs that we delivered and achieving the revenues that we've we've achieved. And as Gadi mentioned, we also spent the last six months, getting this facility up and running. But in the background, we've also built up inventory and you can see that on our balance sheet. So I guess that's another answer to your question about why we think we're now ready to start significantly scaling up and meeting these targets that we've been talking about. That's super helpful.

17:47 Massive revenue upside in the back half of the year and Gaudi L bringing $7,000,000 of cost saves is a huge bonus. So well done, guys. Thanks for the questions. Thank you. Thank you. The next question comes from Greg Gibas with Northland Securities. Please go ahead. Great. Good morning, guys. Congrats on the quarter. And likewise, Gabriel, welcome to the team and look forward to working with you here. As to maybe follow-up on what you just kind of spoke to before, how does kind of the revenue cadence compare with maybe deliveries in the back half? And how would you expect Retail Media performance to perhaps compare to just Smart Cart revenue as a whole?

18:40 So maybe, Gary, g, before you maybe just add some more on the Retail revenue, let me just add some color to the revenues and and how we calculate revenues and how that works. So, you know, we have the commercial terms with with each customer is is different. There's a hardware component, a subscription component and other services. But broadly, if you look even at Q1 and Q2, for every cart that we deliver in the first year, we're recognizing anywhere between $4,000 and $4,500 per cart in the first year. And then of course in the subsequent years, we have retail media and subscriptions and stuff and that and that can be as much as 1,200 or $1,500 over the following five years. So if you consider that we believe that we're going to meet the target of 10,000 carts delivered by the end of twenty twenty six, that leaves us with around 6.566 costs for the second half. And if you multiply that out by 4,500, you're getting north of 25,000.

19:50 So we're pretty confident that we could meet that number and that's kind of how we're looking at it. Gadi, maybe you want to just add some more color on the retail? Yes. So as I said, the retail media revenues will grow as our installed base grows both on as I said, both on the fact that when you have more cards, you have more retail media inventory, you simply have more transactions going on. But it's more than that. It's our ability to the more calls we have, the more transactions we have, the more data we have, the more ability we have to give real value and conversion, which in the end is the heart of why retail media is so much more valuable than regular media, because you are a combination of advertising at decision making point and have giving a personalized location specific targeted advertisements, which bring value to the shopper, which is converted at a much preferred rates to regular media.

20:52 So all those things will start feeding in and retail media will start growing considerably as we have the cards out. And we do expect that it'd be once again to be more weighted to Q4 than Q3. We'll gradually grow through Q4 and then through the years to come. So we're still in the coming quarters, the revenues from the cards will still be the major part we expect of our revenues, but Retail Media will keep on growing. That's great. Very helpful. And if I could, as a follow-up, wondering if you could speak to just the overall growth pipeline or your outlook for incremental contracting from new customers, how that's trending? And perhaps if you're willing to speak to high level prospects in North America given your earlier commentary?

21:43 So as we said, we are in advanced negotiations with clients abroad, and we also have expectations for increased purchases here in ISA. So this will be the example of a considerable increase from 3,000 to 7,000 in their orders. So we both expect our existing clients when they see the value our carts bring that they would increase their orders and to have clients abroad. So we've openly said that we expect to have at least two clients on board, two deliveries in store, at least two clients outside of Israel within the next six months. This includes clients in The Americas and in Europe.

22:28 We're continuing our discussions in The States as well. We hope that they will be coming on board as well soon. But we expect both increased as I said, both increased deliveries and orders from our clients, existing clients and to start having carts delivered to clients abroad within the next six months. Got it. Thanks very much. Congrats again on the progress and strong results. Thanks, Greg. Thank you very much. The next question comes from Giuliano Bologna with Compass Point. Please go ahead. Afternoon or good morning on your side. And congrats on the significant progress you're making so far. It's great to see.

23:16 As a first question, I'd be curious when you think about the capital needs or hopefully no capital needs going forward. I'm curious if where you think you're funded from a capital perspective and if there's any need for capital as you build out a lot of deliveries and scale the operations from here? And then along the same lines, I'm curious when you look forward, when do you think the platform would inflect to free cash flow positive? Hi, Giuliano. Thanks for the question. So I think as we've mentioned, we we have $43,000,000 in treasury at the moment. So that's our our cash and cash equivalents and our investments in financial assets. And we also have this very important credit line from Bank Loomi to the tune of $30,000,000 and to date, we've only used around 2,200,000.

24:09 So we have quite a big runway in terms of our balance sheet. We've also spent the last six months building up inventory. You can see that on our balance sheet as well. So a lot of the deliveries that we're going to do in the second half of twenty twenty six are actually already paid for. And then add to that the corporate realignment, we think that that's going to significantly reduce costs specifically in R and D and other areas as we focus more on the client facing side of the business. So we think we have a pretty decent runway and we're with a healthy balance sheet.

24:56 Maybe I can also just add in a couple of things. So the credit facility from Bank of New Media is not a one off. When we grow and increase our client roster and add clients to who are using our cards and when we have increased orders, we can both get increased facility to cover those orders and to have a new facility from other banks around the world. So the model, which we've always spoken about having regular bank finance to finance our manufacturing and deliveries is a model which is perfectly scalable and transferable all over the world. So that facility is not a one off. We have no need to raise capital. We do not see a need to raise capital.

25:45 When the inflection point of when we become cash positive, more our retail media starts kicking in, which is has digital software returns, it will bring the date earlier. But in any event, we have no need to raise any money. That's very helpful. Then as a follow-up, obviously, great to see the 4,000 additional Smartbad order from Sapira Group. I'd be curious if you have any insight into what's driving that order, if it's kind of just an expansion of the relationship or the first phase if the first phase was successful, so they want to expand it further out in the network. And then related to that, I'm curious if that could be a good proxy for kind of the evolution of a lot of the relationships that you currently have in order that you have on the platform?

26:37 Yes. So I'll take that one. So it's a combination with them of seeing our actual solution in the stores. We're going live with them later on this month and starting our deliveries. So it's a combination of seeing our actual product and seeing the value that it brings. And yes, the combination for Sapir in particular of their extensive expansion. But other clients are also expanding. Johananoff, as we know, is a major client of ours and is also expanding their stores. So yes, I think, obviously, not something we can guarantee, but we 100% expect that clients who have seen our carts, who have seen our carts in action, have seen the value they bring, will expand the purchases to eventually cover all their needs, full requirements in the store.

27:41 Very helpful. Congrats on the great results and I will jump back in the queue. Thank you. Thank you very much. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Gaudi Grauss for any closing remarks. So thank you all for participating wherever you are around the world. It's very much appreciated. We've had a great quarter, and we look forward to being able to continue to give additional information on the great quarters that we hope are coming. Thank you all very much. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.