A2z Cust2mate Solutions Corp. (AZ) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Welcome to the call.

Good day, and welcome to the A2Z Customate Solutions Corp. 3rd Quarter 2026 Financial Results. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Simon Saroviecki, 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 or actual results 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. The 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. Guy de Graus, Chief Decker Officer of A to Z. Thank you, Simon.

Good afternoon, and thank you for participating in today's call to discuss our third quarter results and our business outlook. This was another quarter of positive momentum for our company, reflecting increasing customer demand for our product, efficient ramp-up of deliveries, and the completion of the acquisition of Hedia, which we expect will be a driver of considerable incremental growth for our platform and retail media business. Key takeaways from the third quarter included our deliveries more than doubled sequentially to reach 2,000 smart carts, surpassing our total deliveries for the entire first half of this year. Total revenues increased to $10.9 million, of which smart cart revenues more than doubled sequentially to $9.6 million, reflecting growing deliveries across multiple customers. We expanded our partnership with Hastock, Israel's fast-growing home goods retail chain, with a new in-store retail media agreement. And we acquired Hedia, a leading Israeli retail media company that accelerates the growth of our retail media business. Our third quarter sales performance has put us on track to achieve our goal of delivering 10,000 carts by the end of this year, and it reinforces our expectation of delivering at least 19,000 carts by the end of 2027, which is based exclusively on our current backlog. Our outlook does not take into account any additional orders from new or existing customers between now and the end of 2027. We are very pleased with the expanded orders we are getting from our newest customers following their initial deployment of our smart cards, clearly indicating the value of our product once in store. We have also seen increased demand from existing customers and greater interest from potential customers since the launch of our next generation connected in-store commerce platform. This platform represents an important step in our evolution. Moving beyond SmartCarts to a broader, integrated solution that connects the entire in-store shopping journey. It brings together an enhanced shopper experience, personalized engagement, retail media capabilities, and actionable shopper insights, all supported by our unified technology platform. We took a major step forward in our retail media strategy with the acquisition of Hedia, a leading Israeli in-store retail media company, generating approximately $20 million in annual revenues. Hedia brings established relationships with leading Israeli retailers and major international brands, including Unilever, Kimberly-Clark, Procter & Gamble, Nike, and Henkel, along with comprehensive capabilities in retail media sales, campaign planning, and execution. By combining Hedya's commercial capabilities and advertiser relationships with our connected in-store commerce platform, SmartCart Media Inventory, and Shopper Insights, we are building a more comprehensive retail media offering. This combination creates opportunities to expand our retail media business, introduce new integrated advertising solutions, and generate additional revenue for both A to Z Customate and our retail partners. The Heddy acquisition closed in early October and is expected to add approximately $5 million in revenues in the fourth quarter and be immediately accretive to our business. We are working closely to integrate our two organizations and expect to drive synergies beginning next year. International expansion is at the heart of our long-term growth strategy, and it's a top priority for our management team as we close out 2026 and move into 2027. We remain in advanced stages of discussions with international grocery chains outside of Israel, and our teams are working closely with them on system architecture, integration, and logistics. We expect to deploy custom-made smart carts in two international retailers in the first quarter of 2027. As you may know, a U.S. competitor plans to exit what was a non-core business for them in mid-2027. This could provide a boost for us as we believe our platform is the most advanced available in the market. More to come on this, but rest assured that we are focused on expanding internationally and we have the infrastructure in place to do so efficiently and effectively. With our next generation connected in-store commerce platform, differentiated technology, and expanding manufacturing and deployment capabilities, we are well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity to support international growth. 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 I will turn the call to our CFO, Gadi Levine, to provide a fuller financial review.

Thank you, Gadi, and thank you, everyone, for joining us. Today, I will review our financial performance for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 and discuss our outlook for the year. In the third quarter, we continued to accelerate our commercial deployment. We significantly increased smart card deliveries across a broader customer base while continuing to execute on our organizational realignment to sharpen our commercial focus and drive a more efficient culture. Shortly after the quarter end, we completed the acquisition of Hedia, which, as Gadi G mentioned, adds an established commercial engine to our retail media strategy. Similar to last quarter, my financial commentary will focus on sequential comparisons. At this stage of the business, year-on-year comparisons are not particularly meaningful, given A to Z's shift from a startup to a commercial stage company. Total revenue for the third quarter was $10.9 million, up from $5.9 million in the second quarter. Smart cart revenues was $9.6 million, more than double the $4.4 million we reported last quarter. We delivered 2,000 smart carts in the third quarter, up from 950 in the second quarter, bringing cumulative deliveries to 5,350. Importantly, deliveries were spread across a broader base of customers. Deliveries to Yohananov continued following the rollout of our new connected in-store commerce platform. Suda Sapir is now live and began initial deliveries under their expanded commitment of 7,000 cards. At Hastock, we continued to deliver against their original order, and in August, they placed a follow-on order for an additional 1,050 cards, Expanding their total commitment to 3,050. With SuperSupply and now Hastock, two customers have expanded their orders post-deployment. We believe this demonstrates the value our platform delivers once it is implemented in store. Our dedicated manufacturing facility in China supports the higher delivery volumes this quarter and provides the capacity we need to fulfill our current backlog. Gross profit totaled $3.7 million, up from $2.5 million in the second quarter, driven by higher revenue. Gross margin was 33.4% compared with 42.6% last quarter. The sequential change reflects the delivery of lower-margin, earlier-generation carts to one customer during the quarter. We expect to work through the remaining legacy inventory by year-end, after which our product mix will shift to new generation cards. As production scales, we expect to benefit from improved manufacturing efficiencies and economies of scale. Operating loss narrowed to $6.8 million from a loss of $7.6 million in the prior sequential quarter. The organizational realignment we announced last quarter remains on track. We have maintained our delivery capacity and core technical and customer support capabilities while reallocating resources towards product development, sales, and marketing. Some of the benefit of the organizational realignment is reflected in the third quarter results, and we expect to reach the full quarterly run rate of savings of approximately $1.75 million in the fourth quarter, representing $7 million on an annualized basis. Third quarter net loss was $6.6 million, or $0.15 per share, compared to a loss of $7.3 million, or $0.16 per share, in the second quarter of 2026. Now, turning to our balance sheet. We ended the quarter with $30 million in Treasury and $42.3 million in working capital. These figures do not yet reflect the Hedia acquisition, which closed in early October. As a reminder, at closing, we paid approximately $8.4 million in cash and issued 833,333 restricted common shares to the sellers. Approximately $7.1 million of the cash consideration was funded through a term loan from a commercial bank in October. Our credit facility with Bank Lumi continues to fund inventory as we grow, and we had drawn $3.5 million at quarter-end and a further $1.2 million in early November to bring the total to $4.7 million. Before turning to the outlook, I want to take a step back and walk through the economics of our smart cards. Our contracts typically span five years and consist of two components, hardware and services. Hardware revenue, generally $4,000 to $4,500 per cart, is recognized upon delivery. Customers pay up to 30% of the purchase price up front and the remainder over the term of the contract. Since those payments are deferred, we record that portion of revenue at a discount and recognize the difference in interest income over the contract term. The result is that reported revenue leads cash collection, particularly when deployments accelerate. We fund the timing gap partly through borrowings, which are repaid as receivables are collected. Services revenues, which include software maintenance and support, is approximately $6,000 per cart over the term of the contract. The revenue is recognized as earned on a monthly basis at about $100 per month. Now, turning back to our outlook, we continue to expect cumulative deliveries of 10,000 smart carts by year-end, which implies 4,650 deliveries in the fourth quarter. This step-up reflects broader deployment across a growing customer base, supported by the capacity of our manufacturing facility. We also continue to expect second-half smart cart revenues of approximately $25 million, excluding head-year revenues. By the end of 2027, fulfilling our current backlog would yield 19,000 cumulative smart cart deliveries. Beginning in the fourth quarter, our consolidated results will include Hedia adding an established revenue-generating retail media business alongside our growing smart cart operations. As a result, we expect retail media to represent a larger share of our revenue going forward. We are pleased with our results this quarter and remain on track to achieve our long-term targets as we continue scaling smart cart deployments. With that, I'll pass the call back to Gadi G. Thank you, Gadi.

Looking ahead, we are pleased with our progress to date. Deliveries, order activity and backlog, all are pointing in the right direction, and there is strong interest in the marketplace. We believe we are well positioned to capture a meaningful share of an emerging market. With smart card deployments accelerating, supported by our direct manufacturing capabilities and a sharper commercial focus following our organizational realignment, we are confident in delivering the fourth quarter sales step up implicit in our full year 2026 guidance. And our next generation connected in-store commerce platform and smart cart solutions together with our significantly expanded retail media capabilities set the stage for future growth. We appreciate the dedication and commitment of our staff and the loyalty of our customers, and we look forward to providing further updates on our progress. Operator, let's now open the line for questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw the question, please press star, then 2. At this time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question will come from Dan Cornus with Stonex. Please go ahead.

Yeah, great. Thanks. Good, I guess, late night for you guys. Good evening for us here. So, Gadi G, a couple things here. First, just, it's kind of been going around, or hasn't been lost on people that you guys now have a bunch of open positions and listings that are out there. And in your prepared remarks, your language was very clear around integration and advanced stages of all of this stuff. So I don't know if you can talk to what that means for ambitions or upcoming contracts, but kind of link all of that together for us. That would be a great starting point, and I have a couple more for you.

Well, thank you, Dan. Good evening. Before carts can be operational at the retailers, a lot of work goes into preparing. Preparation. So, for instance, you have to do integration with the retailer's legacy systems, and there's multiple legacy systems that you have to deal with, payments, POS, promotion engines, etc. The smart carts themselves, the features are customizable, configurable to meet each retailer's different needs. So, our teams work closely with the retailer to prepare the smart carts, and that's what we've been doing to make sure they will be ready for delivery in Q1. And, you know, we are, as any company, we are dynamic. So we are looking to engage with the right people before we go ahead. So select positions are always available. And as you can see on our site, we are looking to employ select positions.

And then I thought you put out a pretty eloquent note online about caper shutting down. I didn't mention them by name in the release, but we all know who it is. I'm just curious how you view that, you know, in terms of an opportunity, obviously a very different product they were bringing to market, but just kind of your opinions on, you know, what that might mean for shots on goal for you guys and kind of the visibility of smart cards throughout the industry.

So, yeah, we didn't mention my name, but everyone knows that CAPER has exited the market for their own reasons. And as we've mentioned many times, we believe in our strategy of having carts designed to be deployed at scale in the supermarkets, which we believe is the only way forward to create value. So CAPER's exit has definitely created a significant market transition and I think a unique opportunity for us. We are proactively engaging with a broad set of former CAPER customers. We initiated discussions with key retailers, and we're positioning ourselves as we believe to be the leading long-term smart card platform for the market. Early conversations indicate that retailers are actively reassessing their smart card strategies, and we definitely believe that we are well positioned to convert that disruption into meaningful opportunities. Our objective is not simply to replace existing deployments, but to establish ourselves as a strategic partner of choice for retailers investing in the future of connected shopping.

Super helpful. And last one for me, you know, this is kind of your opportunity, I think, to talk about the acquisition a little bit more, sort of what Hedia brings to the table, why you made the deal, how it accelerates the retail media strategy, just anything you can give us on sort of the uniqueness of the asset and really what they add that's incremental that helps accelerate the business for you guys.

Thank you. So, there's various aspects, in fact, numerous aspects where Hedja provides us for strategic synergies and ability to accelerate our business. So, first of all, this allows, the Hedja acquisition allows A to Z, a customate Hedja group to offer both retailers and advertisers a complete end-to-end retail media solution, in-store retail media solution. And this is important. It allows us to have control of the entire digital landscape in a store from digital screens, end caps, digital end caps, ESLs, video rails, and of course, our carts. This significantly strengthens the value proposition we provide to retailers, advertisers, and anybody else in the ecosystem. Hedja also has been in in-store retail media for a long time. They have established long-term relationships with advertisers. This allows us to accelerate demand generation for in-store retail media, which is a nascent and growing business. And this will allow us to sell at more profitably our smart card media inventory.

Wonderful. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Dan.

The next question will come from Giuliano Bologna with Compass Point. Please go ahead.

Good evening. Congrats on the continued progress in scaling the business. One thing I'd be curious about, thinking about the Hedia acquisition, when we kind of look forward just from a business and kind of a financial perspective, are you planning on running all of your retail media, let's say revenue and everything, through that segment or through that business? Or in a sense, will that business stand on its own and then you'll run retail media separate from that as a line item?

Yeah, so thank you, Juliana, and good evening. It's a bit of both. So whether Hedia is active, which is principally in Israel, we see our retail media business being run jointly with Customate and Hedia. Outside of Israel, Hedia would allow us to tailor our solutions using the experience gained by Hedia, but we would see Customate actually generating, managing, and operating the retail media abroad on its own.

That's very helpful. And then, you know, since we have you and you're kind of, you know, working towards, you know, cooking out retail media, I'd be curious if you have any early examples, maybe not, you know, specific products, but any early examples or data around the performance of retail media and, you know, and how effective, you know, retail media on your smart cards, you know, is and how, you know, just to get a rough sense of how things are performing and how the product offering, you know, should look to potential customers.

Well, it's a little early to come along and say that our initial conversion rates and other metrics are looking very, very positive. It's a little early to give out exact figures on the metrics. But as I said, our initial review of the figures show that conversion rates, adoption, and other metrics are looking very good.

And maybe, you know, one final one, obviously ramping up pretty well, especially with kind of the implied run rate of, you know, 4650 cart deliveries in the fourth quarter. I'm curious, when you look forward, is there kind of an upper bound to, you know, what quarterly deliveries can be, you know, without major, you know, investments? And, you know, how effective do you think you can be at scaling up deliveries and, you know, other geographies and other markets?

So, in the actual cadence of deliveries, there's a combination of our abilities to manufacture, our abilities to deploy, and the retailers' ability to absorb and adapt their stores and their own internal operational efficiencies. As we've said, our manufacturing capabilities for our purposes are more or less unlimited. We can manufacture in any amounts that we need. Our ability to deploy, we've shown that we can deploy multiple stores a week and thousands of stores. We see no issue on our own part in utilizing local partners and local employees to deploy many thousands a month and as many as is needed. For retailers themselves, there's a growth period, so it takes them a little bit more time. Once they get going, though, they can also do multiple stores a week, each retailer. So I think the main cadence would come from how ready retailers are to accept the carts in the stores rather than any restrictions on our ability to manufacture or deploy. That's very helpful.

I appreciate the time, and I will jump back in the queue. Thank you.

The next question will come from Greg Gibbous with Northland Securities. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks, Gotti, for taking the questions. Congrats on the quarter and the Hedia acquisition. I wanted to maybe just follow up on your comments around strong interest in the marketplace. Could you maybe discuss how the pipeline of potential customers has trended and how those discussions are going and, you know, if you're able to provide any progress toward additional contracting to come based on your conversations?

So, conversations and our discussions and our work, as I've said, are intensive and ongoing. We can't give more guidance than we have, but we continue to give the guidance. So, we expect our carts to be available in at least two international chains outside of Israel in Q1. But, as I've said, we are working intensively with retailers and chains outside of Israel to get our carts going.

Okay, fair enough. And I guess one more as it relates to that, like those two international retail customer deployments in Q1, are you able to provide like an approximate number of cart deployments that those could represent both in the quarter and maybe as, you know, the total opportunity with those customers?

And no, we can't provide them at present. We will provide them as soon as we can, but at present we are not giving guidance for 2027.

Got it. Well, one last one, if I could, as it relates to perhaps your integration plans with Hedy, like how much is kind of needed there to get that in position to accelerate the retail media business?

So there's not an overly significant amount of integration which is required. The synergies we see are already coming in related, as I said, to accelerated demand generation, the relationships with the advertisers, the understanding of the in-store, retail media, language, metrics, etc., which gives us extra insights. The integration will come fairly quickly, but it's not a significant impediment. We can already start working on creating revenue-generating synergies immediately.

Got it. Thanks very much.

Thank you.

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Gary Graus for any closing remarks.

So thank you all for being with us. Much appreciated. Your time is much appreciated. And we look forward to our next conference call on our audited financials for 2026. Thank you very much.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.