Good morning and welcome to the RANPAC Holdings Corp 4th Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session. To ask a question, you'll need to press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Sarah Horvath, General Counsel. Please go ahead. Thank you and good morning, everyone.

Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that we will discuss forward-looking statements as defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including those discussed in our press release and the risk factors identified in our Form 10-K and our other filings filed with the SEC. Some of the statements and responses to your questions in this conference call may include forward-looking statements that are subject to future events and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. RANPAC assumes no obligation and does not intend to update any such forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, all of which speak to the company only as of today. The earnings release we issued this morning and the presentation for today's call are posted on the Investor Relations section of our website. A copy of the release has been included in a Form 8-K that we submitted to the SEC before this call. We will also make a replay of this conference call available via webcast on the company website. For financial information that is presented on a non-GAAP basis, we have included reconciliations to the comparable GAAP information. Please refer to the table and slide presentation accompanying today's earnings release. Lastly, we'll be filing our 10-K with the SEC for the period ending December 31, 2024. The 10K will be available through the SEC or on the Investor Relations section of our website. With me today, I have Omar Ossily, our Chairman and CEO, and Bill Drew, our CFO. Omar will summarize our fourth quarter results and issue our outlook for 2025.

Bill will provide additional detail on the financial results before we open up the call for questions with that i'll turn the call over to omar thank you sarah and good morning everyone thank you for joining us today we finished 2024 on a really positive note as we built on the large enterprise account momentum from the third quarter and delivered our best quarter of the year and second best quarterly revenue in the history of rampac we experienced an outstanding e-commerce led holiday season in north america which drove double digit volume growth across the organization in the fourth quarter and pushed us to double-digit volume growth for the year as well. I'm pleased with the way our team has executed this year and the way we have delivered on our key goals going into 2024. At this time last year, I shared a number of key developments we expected to occur in 2024 and that 2024 would be an inflection year related to our business. We said enterprise accounts, which we have been referring to as strategic accounts, would ramp up beginning in Q2. They did, driving double-digit volume growth for the year in a challenging environment. We said automation was going to have an inflection year. It did. We grew automation revenue by more than 40%, and we expected to grow another 50% in 2025. We said CapEx would step down meaningfully as our major investment cycle is behind us. It did. It declined by 40%, and we got back to the mode of generating cash. We delivered by half a turn and refinanced our term loan. We plan to pay down a portion of our term loan in 2025. We opened up our Malaysia facility to start serving the APAC market, reducing our production and logistics costs to serve the region. We are in ramp-up phase there and excited about what this platform can bring. We set our solution set and execution differentiated us in the marketplace. We just got validation of what we have built by the largest e-commerce company in the world, choosing to economically align themselves with us. I will speak more about that later on in the call. Lastly, we hit the midpoint of our top-line guide and the higher end of our adjusted EBITDA guide. Our goal is to do what we say we're going to do, and that is the state of mind of our team at Rampak. overall i believe what we have delivered in 2024 sets the foundation for a really exciting 25 and next chapter in rampax evolution with the noise of covid and our major investment cycle behind us i and the team are laser focused on execution and growth we have a best-in-class platform in areas with major structural tailwinds in sustainability and automation You couldn't draw it up on a piece of paper much better. Now it comes down to execution. We have to deliver. As we get into our quarterly results in more detail, I wanted to provide an update on our constant currency presentation. In our release, you saw our statement that we're moving away from the fixed rate constant currency presentation of $1.15 per euro, which we have done since the company went public in 2019. While we believe this made judging the performance of Rampak over a longer period of time easier for investors by removing the noise of currency fluctuations related to more than 50% of our sales from our results, we're adjusting the way we report our results and discuss our performance to be more consistent with how others report FX impact. As such, the adjusted EBITDA and constant currency changes we discuss and report today are at the reported rate of 108 rather than 115. We will do our best to bridge the gap in our new reporting to our previous guide, which was at 115 versus the reported results. In the release, we provided a table showing what our guidance going into 2024 would have been at the 108 average rate for the year, as well as what our fourth quarter results would have been at the 115 fixed rate so folks have an apples to apples comparison moving on to our results we experienced our sixth quarter in a row of volume growth and second quarter in a row of double digit volume growth consolidated net revenue increased 17 on a constant currency basis for the quarter driven by 12 volume growth as e-commerce activity drove outsized growth in North America, and automation had its largest revenue quarter ever. 10% volume growth for the year drove 2024 full-year net revenue up 10% on a constant currency basis, with strong acceleration throughout the year as enterprise accounts ramped in North America and automation gained momentum. This put us just above the midpoint of our 2024 guide for top line. Our North America business was the engine that drove top line performance with sales up 36% and volumes up nearly 40%. Full-year net revenue were up 19% in North America, driven by voice fill and automation. On a positive note, the breadth in North America in the fourth quarter improved as end users in our distribution channel saw increased demand as well, which we are hopeful will Topline improved in Europe and AIPAC, but they did not experience the same holiday season strength we saw in the U.S., resulting in an increase of 1% on a constant currency basis. The environment in Europe, particularly post-U.S. election, remains challenged with the larger industrial economies remaining a drag on performance and activity muted somewhat due to uncertainty about tariffs. Cushioning there remains pressured while e-commerce and automation drove top-line expansion. On a constant currency basis, adjusted EBITDA increased 8% for the quarter and 14% for the year, resulting in us achieving the higher end of our guide coming into the year, which was for growth of 5% to 16% on a constant currency basis. While you always want good performance to be more broad-based overall, it was a strong quarter and a positive finish to the year that sets us up very well for 2025. Generally speaking we enter 25 in a better operating environment in North America than we experienced in 24. In Europe things are less robust from a macro standpoint but we are gaining traction through some of our enhancements to the sales organization and cross-selling with our automation equipment to larger accounts. We expect a meaningful growth in automation again in 2025 as we look to make a dent in our goal to get to $100 million plus for automation. In Europe, recent announcements coming out of Germany and whatever-it-takes plan on defense and fiscal spending is encouraging. The input cost environment varies somewhat by geography. Starting late last year, pricing in the U.S. has moved up a few points given the greater demand in the marketplace for craft paper. The North American paper market became increasingly tight in the fourth quarter as the plastic to paper transition and strong holiday season drove longer lead times with the mills. The strength of the demand in North America market surpassed our expectations, as well as I believe the mills, leading to some short-term inefficiencies in areas like freight and logistics that have extended into Q1, temporarily impacting our margin in the short term as we get deeper into 2025 we expect to be able to improve our margin in north america as the market adjusts to the greater demand environment we have enacted internal initiatives to improve margins as we expect to achieve the full benefit of our optimization efforts put in place at the end of 2024 and utilize longer lead times to enhance our planning and runtime in europe the energy markets have been more volatile lately as winter was colder resulting in a greater draw on reserves current pricing on dutch nat gas is around 42 years per megawatt which although meaningfully lower than the peak of 300 has moved up from the mid-20s area from a year ago so far this has not impacted paper pricing meaningfully as pricing for the first two quarters are in line with what we experienced in q4 but if it persists could put some upward pressure on pricing in the back half of 25. Overall though in EMEA and APAC we believe we are well positioned to maintain our attractive margin profile we clode back post COVID. We'll take you through our guidance for 2025 after Bill's remarks but to summarize we're focused on accelerating top line growth this year double digit adjusted EBIT dog growth and working the investments we have made to generate cash and further deliver. we started the year with some good momentum in january by announcing a transformational transaction agreement with our largest customer we are excited to deepen our relationship with the largest buyer of packaging and automation solutions globally and believe this transaction aligns our interests for further growth and expansion in january we also announced an exclusive commercial partnership with rabo a leader in computer and machine vision technology to bring AI to the pack station and provide actionable insights to improve efficiency and reduce waste for our customers. This partnership is an excellent complement to Rampac's growing suite of technology and AI-powered packaging solutions. Through our investments over the last couple of years, Rampac can now provide customers with cutting-edge vision, data, hardware, and robotic solutions to improve warehouse operations. Our vision offerings include Rabo and R-squared Robotics, which has internally developed the decision tower, applying a unique combination of 2D and 3D AI-supported computer vision technology for a variety of tasks, including quality assurance, throughput maximization, and precision void filling. In data, we have pre-Qubit, our proprietary data and cartonization software. This solution uses historical site order data to simulate machine utilization and box fill rates to help customers identify the optimal combination of bot sizes and our machines given their shipping profile. Our hardware and robotic solutions include internal offerings of the cut it, auto fill, and pad it to reduce touches and labor, minimize waste, and offer attractive ROIs to our customers. We also have a strategic partnership with Pickle Robot, the market leader in using generative AI and machine learning to autonomously unload trucks and trailers.

We believe our innovation in this area has created real differentiation for us, and that is the feedback we are getting from our customers we believe we are the future of end-of-line packaging automation with that here's bill with more info on the quarter thank you omar in the deck you'll see a summary of some of our key performance indicators we'll also be filing our 10k which provides further information on rampax operating results overall net revenue for the company in the fourth quarter increased 17 year over year on a constant currency basis driven by exceptional volume growth in North America and increased automation sales, bringing full-year net revenue up 10% on a constant currency basis. For the quarter in the Europe and APAC reporting division, combined revenue increased 1% on a constant currency basis, driven by better automation sales, bringing full-year net revenue up 3% on a constant currency basis. North America had its highest net revenue quarter ever, driven by 39% volume growth and increased contributions from automation. Net revenue for the quarter was up 36%, which brought the full year net revenue in the region to growth of 19%. The momentum in North America is excellent, as our execution with enterprise accounts continues to deliver results and positions as well for further volume growth in 2025. Gross profit increased 21% in the quarter, as reported gross margins of 39.4% for the quarter improved 170 basis points versus the prior year. Improved margins were driven largely by lower COGS depreciation and improved profitability in Europe and APAC as input costs remain favorable. Excluding depreciation, gross profit increased 5.3% year over year due to the mixed impact of lower margin enterprise account revenue in North America. We believe we can improve the margin profile of this book of business in 2025 as we get more efficient with our operations. SG&A, excluding RSU expense, was up 1.5% versus prior year at $26.2 million. controlling our spend and leveraging our gna investments remains a top priority we saw some of the savings initiatives we implemented in q3 begin to flow in the fourth border and we expect to keep our spend tight as we focus on maximizing profitability and cash flow generation we've invested a tremendous amount in personnel and additional products over the past few years particularly as it relates to automation we are at a point now where we expect to leverage those investments and better absorb our fixed overhead at roughly 30 million in sales automation remained a meaningful drag on our profitability being a negative 7 million contribution to adjusted EBITDA for the year we are expecting substantial growth in 2025 in automation which would put us a little under break even by year end which is a key milestone for us to hit as that business scales further and gets to 60 to 100 million in top line we expect that business to contribute a high teens to 20 adjusted EBITDA margin with minimal capex needs this would meaningfully improve the overall capital intensity of our financial profile and drive our adjusted EBITDA margins on a consolidated basis back to the mid to high 20% area overall, which is our goal. As a result of the improved sales volumes and improved gross profit in the fourth quarter, adjusted EBITDA improved 8% in the quarter on a constant currency basis, implying a 24.1% adjusted EBITDA margin. This brings the full year's results to up 14% on a constant currency basis and a 22.7% adjusted EBITDA margin for the year, which is a 90 BIPs improvement over the prior year moving to the balance sheet and liquidity we completed 2024 with a strong liquidity position and refinanced credit facility we had a cash balance of 76.1 million and no drawings on our evolving credit facility bringing our reported net leverage to four turns on an ltm basis our recent peak for leverage was 5.7 times in the june quarter of 2023 and we have been steadily de-levering since with the goal of growing adjusted EBITDA and getting back to generating cash. Our next target is to get to between 2.5 to 3 turns of leverage, which we believe we can achieve in the next 18 to 24 months. Our steady progress and improving performance enabled us to refinance our term loan in December with a new syndicated seven-year term loan B facility. Our new facility is all USD, so we continue to utilize cross-currency swaps to hedge our capital structure. These swaps replace our USD exposure with euro exposure, reducing our currency risk as it relates to debt service and also enable us to save on interest expense by swapping our SOFR exposure with Eurobor saving us roughly 130 bps on the hedge portion annually. One thing to point out as it relates to currency is that outside of our cap structure which we hedge through cross-currency swaps our exposure is largely translation as our revenue and production costs in the regions we operate are largely matched in local currency particularly in the U.S. and Europe. Our CapEx for the year was $33.1 million, a reduction of 40% from 2023. We finished our Malaysia plant in August and have begun ramping our production there. This marks the end of our multi-year investment cycle. As we've been saying, we now have a fully invested world-class digital and physical infrastructure. Related to CapEx, I want to speak briefly on tariffs. The environment around this is obviously uncertain, but I wanted to share that from a paper sourcing perspective, we see minimal impact as we source locally in our production areas. From a converter standpoint, we continue to work on ways to limit and mitigate potential impacts. In our CapEx plans for the year, the impact of the current tariffs of China increased our spend by roughly only a million dollars in 2025 compared to what it would have been in 2024. One area I wanted to provide some additional color on as well was the accounting impact of the Amazon Lawrence Omar mentioned. As you see us report in 2025, there will be some noise related to the revenue associated with amazon as the value of the warrants are recognized for folks who aren't familiar with these types of transactions we will need to reduce a portion of our revenue from amazon with the value of the warrants over the life of the deal that means each period there'll be a non-cash decrease to our reported revenue figures which will flow down through the income statement to gross profit adjusted ebit.net income you will see the impact of this clearly in the statement of cash flows where it gets added back in as well as in the footnotes where we'll break out the value for the period we wanted to flag this of the reported gap figures and adjusted EBITDA will be impacted by the value of the warrants. When evaluating our performance, we recommend looking at our income statement figures on a pro forma basis, adding those revenue offsets in to get a true sense of the cash flow performance. While the reporting optics are a bit confusing at first, we believe this deal sets a great alignment for meaningful incremental growth in cash flow for Rampak with the upcoming years. With that, I'll turn it to Omar.

Thank you, Bill. The past couple of years, in 2024 in particular have laid the foundation for the next chapter of rampac we are executing and following our plan some of our key accomplishments include we re-architected the it system and now have world-class technology driving our decision making and providing insights we won enterprise accounts with more to come and have economically aligned ourselves with the largest e-commerce player in the world we concluded our investment cycle and got back to cash generation mode. For our next chapter, our goal is to deliver the following. Automation at scale. That means 100 million plus in sales in the next few years. Two, we have incentivized our largest customer to provide us with hundreds of millions of incremental spend and deepen our relationship with them. Three, we are focused on getting leverage to 2.5 to 3 times. Our goal is for our cash structure to not be a topic of discussion for enterprise account wins and the lower leverage profile will enable us to go further on offense and scale the business five as we get closer to our target leverage profile we will have a lot more options on the menu related to capital allocation our share price does not reflect the platform we have built and the momentum of this business i look forward to being able to go on offense especially when our shares are under pressure. Regarding guidance for the year, on a constant currency basis, we are forecasting net revenue growth in the area of 5 to 11 percent and adjusted EBITDA growth of 5 to 16 percent, calculated by translating 2025 forecasted metrics and an exchange rate of 1 euro to 108, which represents the average exchange rate of 2024, which results in a range of 387 to 409 million in net revenue and 88 to 97 million for adjusted EBITDA this guidance reflects the expectation of a reported non-cash net revenue and adjusted EBITDA reduction of between 3 to 5 million in 2025 related to the recognition of foreign expense against amazon revenue so even though there may be a bit of noise this year as we absorb the impact of the first year of our new economic arrangement with our largest customer overall we feel great about the strategic and economic nature of this deal for reference our prior method of reporting constant currency at a 115 exchange rate would have been 400 million to 425 million in top line and 92 million to 101 of adjusted ebitda from a more general standpoint our expectations going into 2025 are of a normalizing operating environment in e-commerce as the consumer and labor market in North America remain resilient. We saw improving trends from the fourth quarter continue into the start of the year in this area, which is encouraging. Industrial activity is expected to remain lackluster globally until businesses get more confidence in the operating environment and adjust to the new norms post-election. We expect to achieve mid to high single-digit volume growth in pps building on the momentum of 2024 and recognizing that we lap a tough comparison in the second half industrial automation remains a mega theme in an environment where labor costs and other rising inputs pressure margins our solutions deliver real savings and efficiencies minimize costs and waste we are forecasting automation revenue to be up more than 50 percent in 2025. Our forecasted growth and adjusted EBITDA of 5 to 16 percent reflects the contributions from the expected top-line increase and improving margin profile. We expect that capital expenditures will be between $36 to $38 million as our major investment cycle is complete, enabling us to focus on cash generation and deleveraging and taking into account current loans on tariffs, which obviously are dynamic we expect to generate roughly 20 million in cash in 2025 at today's currency levels which provide us with the ability to pay down roughly 50 million of debt to help lower our interest burden and gross leverage profile generally speaking outside of the specific enterprise account activity driving pps and automation performance that we are keenly aware of we believe this guidance is somewhat conservative and reflects a continued somewhat challenging near-term backdrop in Europe. Expanding our presence in Asia-Pacific was a key accomplishment in 2024 and sets us up well to grow in the region. As that factory ramps, lead times to get products to key markets such as Japan, Korea, Australia significantly reduce, and we have the opportunity to reduce our freight and logistics costs, making us much more competitive in the region. Local paper sourcing is further upside. I'm excited about that as we have identified more local mills that could provide us with well-priced paper relative to what we currently source in Europe. Thank you all again. At this point, we'd like to open the line up for questions. Operator?

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad.

To withdraw any questions, press star 1 again. our first question will come from greg palm from craig hallam please go ahead your line is open yeah good morning uh thanks for for taking the questions and you know congrats on on doing everything you said you were going to do at the start of the year thank you greg good morning let's start with amazon if if we could and wanted to get a little bit more color on kind of how you view 25 in terms of the ramp up of the commercial agreement and specifically are you able to give us some color on you know maybe revenue expectations for this year relative to what you reported in 2024?

Yeah let me start and then I'll ask Bill to chime in. So we continue to ramp up nicely with Amazon. As you know, Greg, in our business, the second half of the year is always a lot more important than the first half, given seasonality and holiday activity, etc. So right now, we're actually doing quite a bit more with them across different facilities in the U.S. We're also expanding our dialogue outside of the U.S. in Europe and in Asia Pacific with some of their, you know, facilities there, and we're expanding dialogue, you know, across our different offerings, not just in PPS, but in automation, in cold chain, etc. I'm expecting as the year goes on that we will continue to ramp up activity with them. So I'm honestly expecting a very busy year for us with them, and we feel that we're pretty aligned given the strategic deal that that we got together um i'll let bill maybe talk a little bit about scope as you know uh throughout the year we may move more and more towards an asset light model with them uh where basically the cost of the paper and the paper buying is not part of the calculation around warrants and and and revenue so that's something we continue to work and there'll be a transitional period for that, you know, in the upcoming months and quarters. But Bill, I don't know if you want to add anything about scale.

Yeah, sure. So I think from a volume perspective, right, we're expecting to continue to grow meaningfully with Amazon, you know, we're expecting double-digit volume growth there in a number of different areas. We think that there's really good opportunity to continue to expand with them in North America, as well as other parts of the world. So we're excited about deepening the relationship there. And as the relationship evolves, there's other areas within our product portfolio that we can expand into.

And when you talk about an evolving relationship with them specifically, should that translate into a higher install base or is the thought that you're going to continue to sort of refurbish existing machines in the field?

Honestly, I think our hope and expectation is both. We continue to increase our footprint with them. The dialogue, to be quite frank, Greg, is around very, very sizable opportunities. You know, we're not ready to sort of report any numbers per se, but the dialogue is expansive. It's around a lot of opportunities. It entails increasing PPS and both new as well as refurbished equipment. It entails more consumables, frankly. It entails even some new areas that we want to enter that we believe we can help them with. And we can help them, hopefully over time, we can build scale in some of these new opportunities. So I feel like the level of activity and dialogue is very robust uh let us see how the next few months go and when we have something more definitive to report um you know we will report back i will say that we've been talking about enterprise accounts as you know for a number of quarters um and as evidenced by frankly q3 and q4 we were surprised to the upside with the level of activity and volume that was needed to satisfy some of those accounts, and that includes Amazon and other customers, and we're hoping and expecting that that trend will continue in 2025, and we think we can actually win more enterprise accounts in 2025. So we're quite, in North America, we're quite encouraged with what we're seeing, Greg.

Okay, great. You know, lastly, you pointed out that you have a lot of European exposure today um that's i think recently been you know quite a big headwind i and and you mentioned kind of the the whatever it takes some of the proposed stimulus over there i mean it's obviously too early to know what will happen but is it you know are you seeing you know do you think you could see green shoots are you are you getting any feedback i'm just trying to get a sense of whether this ends up maybe potentially being a source of strength at some point so so so europe as we all know has been a challenge it's a very big piece of our footprint it's a very important

margin a very important sorry business for us with very attractive margins um if you look at our guide and i'll just make a bit of of comment around our guide um you will see i our our guide for 25 is has a little bit of a broad range in it and i would argue has a little bit of conservatism in it and that conservatism is largely driven by the macro picture and by europe and uncertainty around europe so we reflected that in our numbers because frankly what i'm seeing inside the business and what i'm seeing with some of our customers is a lot more bullish than our guide but we tempered it given your question about europe the last couple of days the announcements from germany around stimulus around defense around whatever it takes are very very encouraging we're hoping it's early days we're hoping that will translate into economic activity into more confidence at ceo level that type of activity can be very important for us europe is a very important market germany in particular is a very important market for rampac so i'm quite encouraged but it's early days um and then you'll see the reaction whether it's in the euro the last couple of days, whether it's in, you know, a number of basically announcements around hopefully a slightly better macro backdrop. All these things will be helpful. And then, of course, there is the biggest question around geopolitics and around potential peace. And if all that transpires, that's going to be a very significant, you know, tailwind for us. So it's not reflected in our numbers. We're watching things closely. We are talking to our team constantly on the ground. Let's see how the next few weeks, again, these are very fresh announcements. Let's see in the next few weeks what transpires on the ground. But these early signs are pretty positive, Greg.

Yeah, that makes sense. All right, I'll leave it there. Thanks. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Gansham Punjabi from Baird. Please go ahead.

Your line is open yeah thanks operator good morning everybody um morning on the mid to high single digit volume growth expectation for 2025 um yeah how does that break down in terms of contribution from paper versus automation and also what are you forecasting for e-commerce versus the industrial end markets because i understand the amazon sort of relationship expansion etc but you know comparisons will be tougher uh especially north american e-commerce in the back half of next year or 2025.

Sure. Let me start with just some commentary, Gansham, and then I'll have Bill maybe walk you through a bit more precise numbers. We continue to see attractive sort of backdrop in e-commerce. Amazon by far is the biggest, but as I stated, we are winning other pretty sizable enterprise accounts that we think will ramp up in 2025, and that will drive part of the growth. So in addition to Amazon, we're expecting more and more activity and ramp up in volume with other sizable accounts. Amazon themselves, we believe there are a lot of opportunities that we can enter, and frankly, even other geographies where today we are not active. So it's tough, you know, beyond the current business that we have with them. We think there's actually, despite the tough comp that you refer, we think there's quite a bit of growth opportunity there. On the industrial side, our forecast has been a little bit muted, frankly, more just given the macro backdrop and given what we're seeing out there in the marketplace. So we have not ascribed huge growth on the industrial channel, frankly, globally. And then the last piece in automation, you know, the size of our business. We expect that in 2025, we will deliver north of 50 percent, 5-0 growth. And that's part of our growth algorithm. So these are sort of the pieces that are coming together that we feel will drive the numbers that we outlined. But Bill, do you want to add any color?

Sure. Yeah, Ganshan, just for the building blocks, if you think about the volume, the automation contribution, et cetera, the way that we were trying to break it down was for PPS volume growth to be in that mid to high single digits, so at the low end and the high end of the range, with automation contributing called three to five points, right, at the low to high end. And then we've got two to three points really of kind of what we would call price mix headwind with, you know, a point of that being the Amazon warrants. So that's how you get to kind of that 5% to 11% constant.

Okay, that's perfect. And then going back to 4Q, you know, EBITDA margins come in where you thought they would, you know, 17% core sales growth versus the 8% on EBITDA growth. Yeah, just give us a little bit more color on that.

Sure. Just to be blunt about where we are, the growth surpassed our expectations. So we knew that we were winning business and that we're going to ramp up. We tried to do the best forecasting we could. We tried to basically have our team and our physical footprint ready for meaningful growth. and growth ended up being a bit bigger than we expected. And frankly, that meant we were not as efficient as we wanted to be. Our top priority was instead of focusing on efficiency, was focusing on a good customer experience as we're onboarding and wrapping up with customers. And that meant some pressure on gross margin. It meant, frankly, a little bit of added resources, et cetera, in our G&A to make sure we're fulfilling, you know, customers' expectations and hopefully surpassing that. I expect now that we have a better handle of, you know, that growth, and I feel we have a better handle of the expectation from where we are here going forward, you will start seeing more and more efficiency from us, and that will be reflected in the margin profile. Right now, the top priority at Rampak is driving growth and making sure our customers are happy. And we believe over time, as we normalize, you will see more of that growth flow into both gross margin and EBITDA margin.

Okay, perfect. And then Bill, you know, in terms of the EBITDA bridge for 25, you know, 88 to 97, in terms of how that translates into free cash flow, can you just give us the parameters associated with that?

Sure. So from a free cash flow perspective, you know, Omar mentioned and I mentioned in the prepared remarks that generating cash and using that to pay down debt is a top priority for RANPAC. So there's a tremendous amount of focus on cash generation within the company going into 2025. If you want to do kind of a walk from EDA data to free cash, right, if you start kind of in that midpoint of the range there in 93, 94 million, you know, we're expecting about 36, 37 million of CapEx. Cash interest, we expect to be about $34 million on a net basis, if they say where they are. We expect to have, you know, roughly $4 million or so, $5 million of cash taxes, and then a slight benefit in work and cap to get you to right around that $20 million in free cash.

Okay, perfect. And then just finally, you know, just so I understand it, because it's new for us in terms of the warrant expense, et cetera. So the $3 to $5 million in warrant expense you're embedding for 2025 on EBITDA, that assumes an embedded sales contribution from Amazon. Is that correct?

That's correct. So we have to allocate a portion of our expected sales to that warrant expense.

And so just thinking out to 20, you know, six, would it also be $3 to $5, or would it vary depending on the sales contribution?

It'll vary based on the sales contribution, so hopefully it grows.

Okay. Thanks so much, guys. Thanks for taking my questions.

Thanks, Zancho.

For any additional questions, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Troy Jensen from Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hey, gentlemen. Congrats on all the great news here recently. Thanks, Troy. Good morning. Good morning. Hey, so quick just clarity here. uh automation i think you guys said was 30 million in the quarter and you expect excuse me 30 million in the year and expected to grow greater than uh 52 percent in 25. that's it that's exactly right so our expectation is somewhere let's call it 45 plus for 2025 in top line for automation all right perfect and then is there is there just one or two you know automation products that's driving this growth or is it more broad based is this you know related to some of these products you launched in early January?

Yeah, there's a lot of activity in automation. There's a number of what I'm going to call, let's call it smaller opportunities, a few pieces of equipment here and there. There are a couple of sizable accounts that we have been working with for a number of years. In many cases, Troy, we've installed things in last year and the year before, and we expect to ramp up and provide more automation solutions to some of their other facilities. So it's a mix of some large repeated customers, as well as some of the smaller, you know, orders here and there. There are probably globally close to three or four very large enterprises that are driving part of that growth. Not all of it, but a meaningful part of it. And frankly, that's the nature of the business. If you're not winning with large accounts in automation you know for for e-commerce and for warehouses and fulfillment then then you know I don't think you're a real player in this space the space is a little bit chunky so that's driving part of the growth the good news is in the majority of these cases Troy these are actually existing customers with our solutions installed where we think we can ramp up these are not completely new customers with new orders and new relationships gotcha perfect maybe a couple questions for bill here um was there a 10 customer in q4 or all of 2024 there was so starting in q3

it got close and then q4 there was a 10 customer and then for the full year um there was was okay perfect and then uh just last question uh can you help us out with revenue seasonality in q1 and kind of coming off a strong Q4 and what does it kind of typically seasonally do in the March quarter?

Sure.

So typically there's a step down from Q4 to Q1, right?

And that's been, you know, high single digits, you know, historically and sometimes low double digits, depending on how strong the holiday season. But, you know, the way that the seasonality of the business typically works is Q1 is typically the lowest in terms of revenue contribution, and then it slowly builds throughout the year um so it gets a little bit bigger in q2 then really the second half is where you start to see it ramp up um where you know q3 is the is the you know is the next largest and then q4 obviously with the e-commerce holiday season um by far being the largest quarter for us um typically for the you know this year when we're looking at it um you know we're going to be moving more probably towards a 47 53 um type first half second half maybe a little bit more if you a bigger bigger holiday season got it all right well thanks gentlemen and good luck this year

thank you we have no further questions i would like to turn the call back over to bill drew for closing remarks thank you julianne and thank you all for joining us today we look forward to speaking again uh soon for q1 this concludes today's conference call thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.