Circus SE (CA1) Earnings Call Transcript

Hello, everyone, and happy welcome to another quarterly update call today with some news on how we developed the company and the business and the rollout over the last couple of weeks and months with some updates also how we're progressing, given also the adjustments that we made in the last quarterly update which was not necessarily only raise around positive news, we really decide to slow down the growth. I think today, it's quite the opposite where we can really show great progress. As a quick reminder on this format of the call, we have started to structure this call called Surface Insight as an operation update call. Always around the whole element that there's a lot of interest in how operations are evolving. It's not an earnings call, right? So there is no active participation from our new CFO, Christian today but really more operational, a deeper dive, so it's easier for everyone to understand our business, the KPIs, the operational metrics that we are focusing on to really drive the success and the growth of the new technology and the business overall. To get things started today, it's a bit of a kind of a special occasion. So today, our CA1 is celebrating its first birthday. When we think back nearly exactly 1 year ago, so we actually not even exactly yet, so end of October a year ago, we launched operations at REWE end September last year, we launched operations with Meta. So 1 year ago, we were really starting at basically 0 right, really understanding the dynamics of operational business with all these ups and downs, a lot of you have come by already and seen the technology either at REWE or at the launch event at Meta or other customers to date, but really a great reflection on what has happen and what we have achieved over the first year of commercial operations of an entirely new category and technology that is right now really about to shape and grow from our perspective. When we look today and how the customer perception is, which from our view is one of the most important elements, do customers law of robotic made means. That is the base personal stands above everything in terms of revenue growth, reliability of the infrastructure. And that's really something that we can today mark as proven definitely. And it doesn't matter if it's a REWE store, its Mercedes-Benz location, if it's with the German Armed Forces, we see great adoption. We see thankful customers that today get served with great meals at a great price and an exceptionally high availability 24/7 across the locations. And we look at the ratings that we gather from like right now a year or first operations where good momentum day with 4.4 or 5, which leaves a good room and enough room to improve. And when we think about the first year of operations, there's definitely always room to improve given the really young nature of the technology. But one thing that we've definitely proven is that the market and the timing is right and that customers are not scared to get food served from a robot. It's kind of the opposite that they love it and that they see the true benefits of the technology which when we look into other robotic industries, autonomous driving, humanoid and so on are still very much driven by fear and driven by relation, but [indiscernible] industry a frontier that we discovered and right now really building. To give you a full overview of where we stand today in terms of our operational KPIs, and I think that's something that gives a very good overview of how the company has developed right now really 12 months into the business of operational deployments post right now a few years of R&D and really getting the unit to perfection. We are operating today across 8 countries, including our recent launch in the OE. We have built a significant footprint across the European continent, are not only impactive in Germany anymore and really targeting also the whole Central European market. We see massive growth opportunities in other markets. It obviously also includes the U.S., the Asian market, right? There's a lot more for us to grow. For now, our decision has been really focused on a market where AI adoption and appetite for new technology is exceptionally high, which is the UAE as a great market to grow beyond our European base. And obviously, building on all opportunities within Europe with customers we are already serving our customers to serve over this quarter that has right now been started and the next year and the next years. That overall makes us to date already the biggest operator of an autonomous fleet of fully robotic-based systems. New production on a robotic base is something that is fairly new, and this is something where we have spent a lot of time to really build the scalable foundation, which right now is really paying off in our speed. We are not necessarily there at a point where we want to be. Yes, we would love to grow faster. Yes, we would love to have more deployments, but that always comes at the trade-off of high cost of deployment and high cost of growth. So we're trying to really fight the perfect balance of speed in growth and deployment. So we really have time for iteration cycles and to adopt. We're serving today 19 enterprise customers across our 8 countries, this will grow towards 30 counts towards the end of the year. Each of our customers or every single customer has the potential to grow far beyond its current potential. We are still at a point where we haven't changed the dynamics of our growth and sales strategy. We're targeting enterprise customers that can always grow with us in a double or triple digit area. So all customers we're serving today are really the starting point of each account, where it's all about really making the customer happy that is using our technology and making sure they can grow with us over time and get their complex operations on the food side results and change entirely to our technology and grow with us along the way. Which also means that over the course of next year, yes, you will see multiple accounts to be added. But the core focus also looking into the next year, we'll definitely line also advancing existing accounts and making sure we really push to push on follow-on orders, international rollouts with customers we already won and deployed to today. On the fleet side, that gets us to 33 systems status quarter date with a ratio of 1 to 3 CA1 worth where there's a clear differentiation on the CAA being more of a market entry product, which make just sells and turns faster. And the CA1 with a higher complexity, obviously, also a much higher revenue integration component. That gets us to roughly 1/3 growth quarter-over-quarter, which I think is already a good slight view on where we stand in terms of deployment pace we're just really much accelerating right now quarter-on-quarter. When we took the break over the course of summer, really understanding where we want to and can improve and achieved a lot on that end, which right now is already reflected in the reliability of our technology which was the hardest thing to achieve probably over the last years with a good 93% uptime across mature systems. We're looking at mature systems and defining them as systems, which are in the mark for 100 days and longer, which is really the time where it's important for us to look into the unit and see how things are going and have the processes evolve the process stable training dynamics and so on, that really the reliability is giving on a daily and weekly basis, and the knowledge sits with the customer and not only with us and the dependency towards the customer. I will dive deeper into that over the course of the presentation. On the revenue side, when you think back about the last quarterly update that we made, not necessarily with the greatest news of really radically reducing our guidance for this year to really make sure we can improve, and we did improve on all the ends we wanted to and took the time to do that. With a lot more growth to come over the next year and years for sure, but already great improvements right now with the targeted guidance that we're very confident in for this current financial year. On the culinary side, what is really much growing right now as a foundation of our data that we are further monetize and leverage over the next years to come is an entire massive pool of primary data when it comes to the perception of ingredients, the perception of every ingredient element in the cooking process, what customers demand, what region and how we can forecast certain supply chain elements. This is something that no company has ever already built before and no company has the data to date. McDonald's might have that on cheeseburgers, but there's no real center pool when it comes to food and nutrition data across markets, across industries. And today, we are in a position where we own and leverage the data from exodus eating in a [ Barrick ] to factory workers in Mercedez-Benz to a rate customer to somebody in the UAE, which really gets a great picture and creates a great opportunity for us to leverage that data and further optimize on culinary offerings, demand forecasting and so on. with right now over 230,000 meals and portions served and over 2 billion data points that we right now already start to leverage to optimize our operational process and supply chain automation further. On a cost base, it's something that I think is very interesting to see on how we are developing and how we're optimizing on our cost base, given the nature of a young deep tech company, we're not profitable yet. But what we're really eyeing on is how to -- even in that intense growth base, optimize our cost structure on a running base when we just compare the Q2 versus Q3, Q2, we made some adjustments to our growth strategy. But at the same time, we also managed to make great adjustments to our cost structure. And when we look at that, that's a 28-- nearly 25% change and optimization on our cost base, while at the same time, nearly tripling our deployment speed, which just give us I think great proof of how we're managing to optimize processes, further automate processes, leveraging really AI across the entire company and build a very clear path towards profitability midterm. The whole like operational KPIs really reflect on that and show where we're improving specifically and what are we pushing the cost down. The cost on our end to date and the price to scale always comes with time to deployment, how fast and how many systems we can deploy in what time and how we can bring more efficiency into the supply chain, which much takes the majority of our operational efforts to make sure everything works perfectly and seamless in the day-to-day operations. On the lower KPIs in the corner deployment time, one of the biggest improvements that we managed to achieve over the right now, the first half of the year where we're really starting to grow across CA1 and CIA deployments. We started from nearly 9 days for 1 system to deploy today with a point where from the point of delivery. So first, we always call wet runs, right, first new service, we have broke 5 days. So within a week, you get a full new infrastructure installed, tested up and running and really onboarded the entire customer, which right now allows us to scale multiple systems at the same time across multiple countries. You've seen that probably hopefully, over our last announcement with a [indiscernible] launch right now with [indiscernible] customers deployment, the launch in UAE, where we launched new CAA systems in Paris in parallel there's a lot going on without right now growing the labor cost internally in the operation teams, but just by driving efficiency and more standardized processes as we grow faster and faster quarter-by-quarter. On the circus pots, a bit of a related metric, which is really the metric and the one thing that we established after our Q2 update and really reflecting back on our first half year of operations. is the start of Circus Pots as our own white label infrastructure ingredient platform so we can really bring a higher level of reliability into the entire operations. And what we learned in the first half year on this new technology is that if ingredients are not right, then the rest will always struggle, right? It's a simple phrase of siding shed out, frankly speaking, which is something that we really focused on a lot, which doesn't mean that right now we're selling tissues, but we need to provide the infrastructure and the platform in the back to make sure that we can guarantee state operations, push our costs down, scale faster as we're building more standards across our entire value chain. Just to give you an overall number and a bit of a rough feeling right, since right now, establishing surface ports as entire infrastructure, basically weeks ago, we have produced and based on order, right, and based on volume from customers over 14 tons of ingredients, which already run through our platform, which we expect obviously to grow massively right now over the next weeks and quarters. The big -- the driver here is that we're right now also starting to making it mandatory to use our pot infrastructure and there were also scaling our recurring revenue streams beyond software into ingredients and all related fee structures. When you look a bit on what happened specifically in Q3, 1 thing that is make hard to quantify, but something that has definitely driven a lot of the efficiencies across the company is our massive efforts to push more into automation of entire company operations and departments, which is not only AI and automation across the robotic systems. But also really into the entire company and the organization on remote incident resolutions, demand supply predictions today where we are already running our entire remote support operations from the Philippines, which we have completely outsourced and which is only possible because the entire processes are right now AI coordinated on the first layer of of communication. So we can really become smarter in understanding incidents, understanding challenges that we need to jump into and optimizing everything on maintenance deployments more proactively. We launched a set response. We launched in the UAE. And one thing that we haven't really talked about that much and I can only talk about that limited today is something that you basically didn't see yet, right? We started the first batch of launches with REWE, Meta and with the German Armed Forces. Right now, the German Armed Forces already operates 2 systems, and they have added a CAA system with a bigger press event coming next week, actually, and have already signed one contract extension with them as they're happy on how the sorters adopted to that structure. Where we're right now growing on that and on the defense side are already in an active tender process for the next location with the German Armed Forces which by DNA is not the fastest industry to work in, but I think something where we have shown great proof that we went into that industry fast. And we went through that industry fast to stay there and right now growing on first cases and extending beyond the pilots, not only in defense but also on the commercial side with right now more news to come on the metal side, not only for the German entity of metal but also beyond that to new countries. And the same thing on the REWE side for everyone who's deep into the numbers now. We started with a pilot case which was aimed towards 6 to 8 months. Right now, we're celebrating 1 year of operations which I think already gives you a good feeling that there is no intention to right now end the pilots, and we will have some bigger news on that over the course of the next weeks how that forecast on retail integration of Food robotics will continue. On the fleet side, to give you a few insights, and I think something that has been heavily requested, how right now the structure is and how we're scaling across the different industries that we're targeting and how the overall fleet is growing. One thing that I think is clear to everyone is that our growth even for the next years will always be backloaded towards the third and fourth quarter. Simply because there's a certain exponential growth as we really rapidly improve and evolve in the speed of deployment, speed of production, speed of winning customers. And that has been driving growth always towards the second half of the year. When we look at the fleet today, there's a good 1 to 3 ratio between the C1 and CIA. We will close the year right now as a management target with 19 CA1s and beyond 40 CIA on the CAA side as we're just starting production, there might be a bit more and we're pushing to outperform ourselves in the plants right there. What is interesting is the dynamics of the CA1 and the CAA, where the CAA is the cheaper and the smaller product, which obviously sells faster and deploys faster or need as a standard plan and we can start running the system, but it also creates great market entry opportunity for us and a much faster way of adopting to a new technology where we have right now lag customers starting with the CAA. And then advancing towards negotiations and deployments on the CA1 side and planning a whole kind of structure and phases of deployments towards full autonomy starting with smaller system and growing to the bigger independent of the fleet size on the revenue share side, 85% of our revenues are coming from the CA1, which is still the unbeaten flagship of our operations, which will also continue to be that case. But on a fleet size that allows us to grow fleet much faster across more countries, more industries and more use cases. On the fleet distribution, we've always aimed for a very broad distribution and broad industries of our technology, which I think also gives a great proof on the standardized use of our technology and the demand across industries when we look at the share right now, region and hospitality remains the biggest one. That's where we started. That's where we come from. That's where an upselling metric is also the strongest business case for a lot of customers we're serving today. And that's also where the CAA comes from. So just also by that acquisition and right now, joint synergies of the fleet, that is really the biggest share to date. Health & Care, right now, one of the faster growing use case industries right now with the launch of [indiscernible] clinics, a lot more things coming on the health side as we're also diving deeper into a personalized nutrition and supplement based nutrition on the CAA infrastructure. Defense and public sector, our youngest sector and a sector that we just start deployments with this year, already making 90% of our entire fleet and also rates sector where we see massive demand and a ton of negotiations, just by DNA, that sector remains to be slower compared to others, where retail, health care and office catering remains to be the faster ones when it comes to closing and implementing new technologies. When we take a bit of a deeper look into customer deployments and basically really proving the case of standardized technology that works across different industries. I think right now, we're just 12 months of getting our technology in the field, we have really proven that the technology is ready to be adopted and there is a mass demand across sectors. We are focusing on enterprise customers and have won some of the most relevant and biggest companies probably in the world and across our sectors and that ranges from, for example, the deployments that you can see with Mercedes, Secura, Meta, more to come on that end. The start of the German Armed Forces, the add-on with the Ukrainian Armed Forces and one of the federal ministries that we're serving today to police stations and on [indiscernible] universities and a lot more to come in that sector. [indiscernible] and hospitality where we're counting the largest share of accounts today and we're just jumping deeper into also hospitality and hotels with 2 orders actually right now as we speak in deployment in the German market, where it's a great opportunity for hospitality and hotel businesses to upsell customers with me offerings they're not serving today and increasing their revenue per customer depending on the bet they already provide and give a better experience to every customer at space within their facilities. On Health & Care, you can see palm trees, which is something that we haven't -- except the UAE, we don't really have had to get, right? One thing that you can see here is a modified version in Tama Group location, Tama Group, one of our largest customers when it comes to the CAA deployments. Where they're using our technology to serve customers within their SPA facilities, an account that has been growing with us over the last years and where -- the technology is directly integrated. So you can just, as a guess any chip card and get a fresh bring out, and we're diving deeper on the CA side into the care sector [indiscernible] clinics right now with the C1. So all industries are basically right now live with both kind of systems. And when we think about why that whole demands even constantly growing and that also across industries, across markets from UAE to the German market to the U.S., Asia the end-to-end. That really comes from the perfect timing that we still have, and that is really unchanged and probably also impede the dynamics of growth of such a kind of new technology, which is always hard to adopt and hard to get into the market. When we look at food service overall, the labor shortage just is growing costs continue to increase. At the same time, automation is still below 4%. And that's really where we are tackling that metric and really driving automation and there was also less -- a lower dependency on labor costs and solving a massive labor gap at the same time which are all metrics why enterprise customers starting to work with us today, even though the technology is so new and so fresh in the market. And in that sense, our core mission and our core kind of values that we are working on from a technology perspective remain completely unchanged since day 1. It's all about affordability of food. It's about availability, serving meals through robotic technology, 24/7 to every human and it doesn't matter the age doesn't matter the country. It doesn't matter the income and doing all of that on autonomous level. And that right now has, for the first time ever transitioned right now beyond Europe for us. We have, as management selected, the UAE as a great great region to grow as one of the fastest region to adopt to new technologies and build really future-oriented infrastructure. Now where labor cost is not necessarily the core driver, but availability, hygiene and a constant scalable infrastructure is and that's where we're very happy to -- on the launch in the UAE, which we right now realize with a distribution partner in the area, which we were working very close with and a great momentum right now to grow. We've already managed to establish an entire regional supply chain. We're serving meats like Chicken Biryani and similar things. So also implemented local a local culinary setup together with Royal catering as we're a leading partner, a leading catering company in that region, serving everything from the Army to catering facilities to government buildings which gives us the perfect market entering a strong partner, where we can go hand in hand to right now scale within that sector and within that market. It's an early deployment for sure, but it's also, I think, a very promising deployment to show. And we definitely believe this region to become one of our most dominant within the next 2 to 3 years. On the logistics side, and how this is possible to deploy, we spend a lot of time to optimize our entire supply chain process, everything on the deployment side. And not only with complex deployments like the Secura that you can see in the picture, but also to make sure that the technology is developed and kind of patent owned with the [ Munich ] right now, produced globally and can also be shipped and deployed globally with ease and as and on optimized cost. We started last year with air as our first kind of logistics channel, which is expensive, right? And there, it seems easy, but there's a lot of complexity that comes with right now building up multichannels when it comes to when it comes to real to air. And that's something that we have achieved to date. So what we did over this year and where there's also a lack of count employments in Q1 is where we switched to more of a multichannel strategy on deployment and shipments of our technology and systems. So today, when we compare air and rail and other channels, that pushes our logistics cost and deployment costs down by up 8% which is a massive improvement, and we don't really rely on a single channel on logistics anymore and then it's up kind of the customer to the market to the case, which kind of channel we're using. But right now, maximum flexibility to scale into basically every country that you can manage. The scalability comes with the second element, and that element is reliability, and that element is uptime. And that's something that is probably one of the most asked question and something of the most demanded insights in these sessions to see how we perform. And to dive a bit deeper into that slide because I think it explains a lot on what is going on in the company is that we're right now achieving a very stable far beyond 90% reliability and uptime across our mature systems. And that's something that you can see in black where we started in January with a good 70%, and that was kind of the hard go-to-market pace to really improve on stability, trainings, supply chain, ingredients, maintenance networks which all is complex to build and there is a certain effort when there's no blueprint for what you're doing. And right now, I think we have shown a great growth curve and a great stability across all units or systems as they mature more. What you can see is on the new systems deployed, as soon as we started to deploy more systems in June, this is where we saw not the best KPI performance, which is also where the very core, the decision comes from the slow down on our growth. I think we've communicated a lot of detail on that before, but I think that gives a good insight on how we also managed to kind of turn the ship around on that end and take the time, take a hard cut and all the consequences that come with it but really making sure that we can grow even better and even stronger after that one cup. And what you can see here on the fresh systems that we're installing that -- where we launched fresh systems with a good 55%, 57% uptime in June and have been really struggling with operations and to really have the training, the supply chain stable running right now across August, September and an even better performance that we already see in Q4. The new systems run much more stable and onboarding is much easier, trainings much easier, which all comes down to the pots better trainings, for still onboarding, deployment, reliability, optimized manufacturing and testing processes so all that coming together is kind of reflected in that metric, which is all what is about that you really get a reliable technology. They're not only more reliable than chef, but really it's always up and running when you want it, and we're working very hard towards achieving that and getting back to the 100%. The second metric, which is going to kind of as the second most important metric when looking at how we're developing from an operational perspective is the handling time and how much you have to interact with the system on a daily basis. We want that to be the absolute minimum, and we want that getting down to a few minutes a day. So the similar amount of interaction that you have with the coffee machine should be the case for autonomous new production, even though you prove hundreds of needs on a daily basis. And there's still a path to go. But also here, it's great to see where we started in February, where you had to spend a good in like 3, 4 hours in a constant and have a constant view on the machine to really make sure everything is up and running. -- we really improved a lot right now month-by-month as we optimize on our operational processes. Today, and with an average on Q3, we're averaging in a good 1-hour 47 minutes across all systems gives great proof on the optimization that we've done. And that means to serve hundreds of meals a day, all we need is one person below 2 ops, which often today with new customers, is covered by the existing staff already. So there's basically 0 new add staff to right now run a fully autonomous kitchen continue environment. Yes, we continue to support that. We continue to support the rollout overall, and we continue to really care and be hand and work hand-in-hand with the clients to make sure that we can further learn and improve that. One metric that has improved right now rapidly as well is the [indiscernible] rate, everybody who has tried our systems in the first month has definitely experienced things on like dispensing idea, not coming out all the kind of things that happen in a very early phase of a new technology. It's something where we are right now around 1% failure rate, which is something that is acceptable for given the phase and the maturity of the technology but something that we're further improving to really make sure every meal that is coming out of the system is perfect, delicious and at the right temperature at the right nutritious profile, everything you can imagine to really make our pulling their intelligence even stronger and even better. But as the last but not least, what you can see here is also the massive improvements over the course of August and September, which is really where we start to take in slower on the growth for a certain period of time, implemented parts, implemented new processes and that right now, on saving like 20, 30 minutes a day. That is also the fact of pots and a white-label infrastructure platform for the ingredients, which is really much driving efficiency and higher scalability, reliability of the system. And on the consumer side, as a second metric, which we're always looking at, and I think which is very interesting to see, we don't necessarily always know the retention because we don't collect consumer data from the customer on a personalized base. But what we can see is how fast customers approach the system and how fast they place on get them. Today, we are a medium time 19 seconds. That means you go there, you pick what you want, and you get it within seconds. And that is the entire process from a start recession at the robot to have more order placed with the waiting time that [indiscernible] right now around 5 to 7 minutes, really get a fresh meal based on your preferences out of a fully autonomous system. But something that is a great proof of how we manage to find also the right menu and the right fit of an audience to what they're requesting and further improving that we always match the right trend based on our culinary data of what customers want and to really make the decision process super easy and create a great match of what a customer expects -- our systems and the technology of all. The whole foundation of that to get some insights on where we're improving right now on the software and hardware level is and will always remain the surface OS without right now diving into every feature, and we've done a couple of live demos on that one is the growth along the entire supply chain. So what we have today and what we right now established over the last quarter is, for example, a product called Tracy, where right now, with a simple skin of an ingredient package, you can basically being package, you can basically track the entire supply chain of the green, you can see where it comes from. You can see the attrition values. You can see when it goes bad and retrack everything, which goes far beyond the robotic system itself but really to make sure that we have an entire intelligent supply chain end-to-end from buying the ingredient to putting the ingredient into the robot to serving it to a customer. And on that base, further optimizing the demand prediction as a base, optimizing culinary control and also a central unit control where right now, we're in the process of also integrating the CAA into our fleet. So you have a single interface where you can manage best case hundreds of systems that you run in control. It doesn't matter if you want, the CIA or CAM to come. On the supply chain, on the pod side, I've shown a few of the packages before. That is really the biggest driver that right now makes our entire ecosystem complete. Right now, handling time down roughly 78%. You right now live with only 30 SKUs, which from our perspective, is not enough to really cover a full holistic menu. We started with our most prominent categories, pasta, badges, adding rigs, adding more elements to the entire structure. But that right now is the big driver on the recurring piece and something that we have established in rapid time, not only within Europe, but also already live with that setup in the UAE and right now across all countries. And nearly already all customers, including the deep on sector. On the CIA, the games product to the family and something where we're right now building on top of the success that the Ibs team has built over the last years. What we're right now doing is focusing more on most prominent sector, which is everything when it comes to performance attrition, the overall health and care sector. Right now, we start to work also with powders. So right, we're not at the point anymore where we're dealing with fresh or frozen ingredients but also with powder basis, so we can have things like protein much creating agony boosters, all kinds of things you can imagine to really drive personalized solution at TAP and not only on a blender or pot base which further right now increases the use case for us. And there will be a lot of great news and deployments where will a be able to explore it and b, which really will give a great proof of how things are used for athletes, for sports centers, wetness facilities, everything where today, you if even still have a guy standing there with a blender try to mix some stuff to [indiscernible] So we are making that entirely scalable infrastructure to really serve not only main dishes and meats, but also the entire nutrition for your day-to-day around. You can see a bit on the one picture. We started volume production already, which is rapid speed. It took us, I think, good 3 months right now to set everything up, shift the production and use synergies that we have with our own supply chain with our own suppliers so right now, given the success of production over the CA1, we can directly leverage the knowledge that we already have the supply chain and all the production knowledge to boost that product further. Currently, with the first batch of 10 right now, life in production. That's a picture that's a few days old and more to come. And as we're right now scaling that system, in right now aimed 3-digit range already in the next year and take care of new deployments just from a CA as it is a product that is obviously scaling much faster in this incredibly easy to scale and implement. On the CM side, the most complex product for sure that we've had to build, and I think through brown-baking product where we continue to improve further and further and to build something that is not only on a prototype level but really serves the purpose of soldiers in their day-to-day, which is not only about a container with a cooking robot inside, but also everything that you need in terms of features around it. That goes into the area of an integrated generator, solar powered roof panels platforms, so you can really cover the area around it. light modules, shock absorption, right? So there's a whole stack of features that goes beyond the scope that we're already serving. And that is something that requires time and requires effort and a very close relationship with the defense partners that we've already built up. We're working in very close exchange with our active accounts on that. We completed the first concept or type right now a few months ago, and I think a couple of you probably saw that already in our headquarters in Munich. And right now, started with the so-called shelf production, which is kind of a custom-based framing that we're right on developing integrated generator, as mentioned, like energy components, shock absorption covers and so on. So that really -- we're not only getting kind of C1 in a box, not really getting grades new level and the whole revolution of a field kitchen, which then will scale beyond defense operations into overall disaster leave and more related cases with a lot of things to come there. We are right now planning to launched the first system that will get out with a lot more prominent event to come or the first half of the next year. We have shifted a few things on that to really much focus on the products that we have today and improve on that first before we're going to crazy on additional products, but continue to develop on the C side. Last but not least, kind of the known phase of our portfolio of autonomous physical AI systems, where we're constantly evolving on the C1 side right now, for example, with updated booking profiles, gotten stations to really make sure we can work with a better heat distribution, shorter cooking times avoid pot burns, even high temperatures that some reads require. So we're constantly optimizing on our technology. They find new patents and making sure we're keeping our pioneering and right now also from a technology perspective, market-leading position and at the same time, making sure that the remote interaction with the system and the infrastructure works well across every country. As mentioned, we are running international teams for international fleet which not only allows us to bring the cost down, but also will allow us to rerun every system 24/7 and also have the perfect support for every imaginable case in the middle of tenant. We will be active right now over the next weeks on a couple of conferences. We share some more news when it comes to additional new deployments. Right now, with the great fees that we're closing the year with of, I said, right, roughly 19 C1s over 4 CAAs, really scaling the fleet -- there will be a couple of munis also related to the locations right now that we will be active in with London right now and being quite present on our end. We obviously [indiscernible] coming up in that region and share more about our progress. And I [indiscernible] share more on the view ahead into 2027, which we have been very quiet on. But coming from a very simple thing that as Albert-Einstein says, a stupid man is only man who does the same mistake twice. So we're really making sure that the plans, the guidance, the deployment structure for the next year is more reliable and more basic customers and country oriented. So we can give a lot more detail on the overall scale across systems, across different regions, across sectors and customer base over the quarter to come. So over the course of Q4, obviously, there will be more insights right now already in the plans with Christian as a new CFO, who has just joined. And for that, thanks a lot for listening, and thanks a lot for joining in. There's always a constant invite that stands for everybody who's joining. If you haven't explored or tried food from one of our systems yet at the very end, the taste remains the most important. And we're always very happy to host you here. But we have a system here in Munich R&D center and headquarters. So always happy to welcome anyone where launches on me. Thanks for joining. We'll update the deck of the transcript after and I'm very happy to take more questions on the operational side of things now. Think there should be a box right now, and you can submit questions if you want.

I'm just getting the first questions. Give me a second to read. So first question that came in. Do you provide performance guarantees to customers for C1, especially for uptime, what are main reasons for downtime. It's super interesting question. So on the one side, yes, there's a guarantee for the system, which also comes as a guarantee from Celestica on the overall produced unit. On the uptime stability, yes, most of our contracts include that where we guarantee a minimum uptime of 80%. And that is something that I think is very fair and we should achieve that which doesn't mean that customers necessarily can cancel contracts when we don't achieve it, but there are certain rules which were against our recurring fees. So if a unit is not performing or not working at all technically, that you don't have to pay for software that should run it and should do exactly that. So there is a financial risk for us. But right now, when you look into the performance metrics, that's nothing that is a reality, and that's also nothing that is right to calculate on a daily basis, right? So then [indiscernible] becomes active, that really goes on over a certain time. And main reason for downtime, 2 things, which is food and people, honestly. You can really build a robot to perfection and 100% uptime in the lab. As soon as you go out to the market, that's where you really see and explore the things that will go wrong. And there's always a ton of things and things that we have never thought about and never thought about that, that could even be an issue. So that's where we come from with the ports to make sure that the input has certain standard and quality, which at the very end, leads to a higher reliability and stability of the system. And the second thing is to basically hold hands for the first weeks of deployment and really make sure that the training and the onboarding of such a new technology works seamless and can be handed over to the customer. I'm just going to the next, how many employees are you now? And how many do you expect to grow? We are around 85 FTEs right now with right now a handful of people who joined through the [ Albert ] acquisition. It is nearly exactly the same amount of progress we have been last year and the year before. Right now, the shift between operations, R&D, tech ops, so like we are always making sure that we reallocate the resources where they need it most. But we don't expect to write or massively ramp up our teams. So I think with a definitely very strong growth expected within the next year, might crack 100, but we're also very much in love with lean organizations. So with all things that are working right now, against scaling headcount on the AI side, we'll probably balance and keep the headcount very, very lean. On new regions, for example, the UAE right now, we have 2 people who are supporting us there on ground, which is one person for supply chain and culinary and one for technical service and maintenance, but on a fairly except the cost base, and the rest is always realized with partners on ground who stay with us on a distribution partnership base. So just to the quick ones first. When we start operations in the U.S.A. Honestly, I was already off to. I think the opportunity there is massive. We're right now seeing that the dynamics of autonomous full production is very different there. We are right now and if you're following the market, to capital around EUR 650 million from Google Ventures, EUR 1.7 billion with 2 really renowned enpreneurs who are kind of tackling and dipping directly into our market with a bit of a different approach, but and still in R&D mostly. So we want to leverage the position that we have and have to grow globally as fast as we can. And honestly, for us, it's a question of capital and focus, right now, we see great momentum in Europe, and we also see great momentum with the OE. That's the focus for now. U.S. is on the plate, but we don't have an exact date for. Yes. [indiscernible] not attending any of the conferences a good point. He will tell a few depends on the meetings honestly. There's a few where I'm just as a [indiscernible] there's a few where we do one-on-one and we will definitely join. How do you see the competition with Good Vibes that recently opened application live and gas station in the area. Honestly, I love every new system from any kind of competitor that right now is getting to the market. One of the hardest things to achieve for us is make a adoption and b even realizing that our kind of technology works, taste will work reliability in the market. There is like a $1 trillion opportunity, and that will not be one by one player. So honestly, I love every player right now that's getting into the market and increasing the dynamics, which obviously gives us a good platform to show where we're better and where our system maybe make more sense or pricing is more. So how many C1s can surface plus for a month now. If you think back about Q1 into Q1 on our growth strategies will be adjusted a bit over the year. We have the capacities to ramp right now up to 16 CR1 per month technically. That's not what we're doing, yes, given the volume for the year. So the peak that we have in building is right now in parallel with the capacity of 8 and rightly, we make sure that we're leveraging that out always with right now roughly half of systems in production. Right now, currently, there's, for example, 3 in production and 3 in production preparation. So what we make sure is that we're trying to keep it very steady and flat. What we don't want a production is that -- now we produce 10 at the same time. And then the next batch, we want to improve something, and the team needs to stop production. So Nick comment, from just from a labor structure and a plan for Celestica, that's not ideal. So we're trying to be very even across different months and quarters, which is right now a good a handful of units that we are running and prepping losing maybe a bit related prospects of working with REWE. How can ensure that the required production volumes are secured production volumes is something that honestly speaking, probably is one of our smallest challenges in growth, given Celestica as a global partner with the right production in Asia and make a lot more factories that we can access to rescale to hundreds and thousands of systems on an annual basis. And that's something where we are very confident that we can always meet the scale of customer orders. But for us, most important to really make sure that the entire infrastructure also like in the back works, that's something that we have been focusing on for this year. Let me go through a few I've recently introduced the success, what has been the initial customer reaction and acceptance what feedback you're receiving valuing operating time and ease of use. So the whole idea on the past is to create companies press reality, where everything you have is kind of a pot that you plug it -- we're not exactly there yet, and there will definitely be a next-generation next generation of the pots. Right now, it's still back that into filing. So there's still like tiny last step missing that we want to improve on. so that is more like a tetra park plug-in as it. So it can be further improved. The overall acceptance is super high right now. We changed already across [indiscernible] right now shifting to it. [ Buses ] running on it. So make the core clients are all running on it already and shifted the entire setup. Every customer that is new will by default be running on that structure, which for customers who have something existing might be a bit of a shift but everybody realized that test makes their life easier instead of kind of right now trying to experiment with their own ingredients and on recipes with the system that has already a defined standard and is there to do exactly that. Our customers, mainly our customers who best case don't want to deal with food at all or not specifically. So we are making their life just more easy given the [indiscernible] Related to the pots, where you're producing the Circus pots. Circus Pots right now are produced in Germany and in Belgium also through the history with the Avis acquisition and UAE is produce to as well. So there's a ton of questions. We won't manage to go through all. I just trying to go talk down basically and I think, yes, one of the -- one thing -- one question that pops up my time. Can you give us insights on financing dilution and so on. So the short answer here is, for us, it's not necessarily about equity. It's about the more diversified working capital structure. Right now, we have raised 2 capital rounds last year. And both have been pure equity, one of EUR 20 million one is EUR 30 million. And just also honestly speaking from my own perspective, as the largest shareholder to date, there is no active interest in maximizing dilution, yes, not at all. So we're right now getting a lot better on and where multiple things are right now will be introduced pretty soon is on the working capital side, debt more financing partners, stronger partnerships on the leasing side. This is all something that we weren't even able to do last year. We had to really refinance half our production sometimes from expensive equity which is just not an idea setup as it's not really cash flow and friendly. So that is something that we're looking on most on how we can re-diversify and have more options on the bond side different finance and leading partnerships that we reopening. And does that mean we will never raise equity again. No, it doesn't. And when we look right now into the dynamics of the market, from my personal opinion, the company right now, given what we're doing, giving the customer base, giving our growth and stability, the valuation of the company, I think can be questionable when you compare it to other players, specifically in the U.S., which are reaching EUR 5 billion to EUR 7 billion valuation pre-revenue pre-product right? And that is something that we are right now looking into on how we can boost on that, so we can definitely optimize on the valuation and the share price and not get into a situation where we would raise equity at such a valuation. [indiscernible] The location for -- if somebody wants to know that down is Marina Bay -- Marina Square and Abu Dhabi and it's open daily. So you can just walk by and grab a meal there. And maybe because there's a question also on the U.S. market. So what we are doing and what we feel is the leanest strategy to enter the U.S. market is through customers and kind of U.S.-based customers that we already have. And we right now, I mean the most enormous meter and there's a couple of companies who operate globally. I mean hospitality gives a lot of great examples on the health side as well that we build up accounts in our already active regions and then basically scale with them towards more markets and more countries. Which makes it a lot easier for us to scale because we're not starting from 0 with new accounts and new structure, but can already really build on top of some existing relationships so that is right now the plan and there's great negotiations on that already. Also a great question, when will there be the new version of the CA1. We're not reinventing the wheel every time. And it's similar to, I think, a car, I would say. So when there is a new models coming out, it's not that they really throw everything away and are building a new car from scratch. There's a constant way of optimizing, which is much leaner and a much more modern approach, I would say. And that is something that we're doing. So if you just compare the 2 units behind me, there's already probably 10 differences. Not every element is visible, and that can be the angle of cooking stations the newer systems don't have a back window anymore because it's lighter and not necessarily because often in front of the wall, right? So we're constantly doing refinements and right now are technically at a 4.5% already not a version 4 anymore, and we'll continue to do so. There probably will be a new generation at some point, but that only makes sense to really scale when there is a different production volume, which also allows to use different materials and reinvent more elements, but there is R&D constantly ongoing. Great question. I was off that. The challenge of humanoids. If humanoids become more stable and robust, if that is not something that would take over. We believe it's exactly the opposite. And right now, a few minor robots, there's a ton of hurdles, right? And it's the same with autonomous driving where the technology might have been already ready 5, 10 years ago, but it's also a matter of regulation of acceptance of approval in different regions, which really will be a massive hurdle for humanoids to escape depending on the technical capabilities. And what we have today is a system that is trustworthy, it doesn't matter if a small chart or [ grandma. ] Everybody loves it ever comes and tries to it's not scary to approach. It's certified from highly perspective from a CD perspective, it's scalable and the easiest fact here, we don't need legs for cooking. It will never be as efficient to run a humanoid in a large-scale kitchen environment where it's all about volume and space efficiency. So we do have the arms, but we make sure the entire environment around it also matches what the arms are doing, and you don't need to run around, find the right plan. And that's where the human form is not necessarily best in scale from our perspective. There's ton more question. Next one here is biggest obstacles right now. Biggest obstacle right now is really growing the ecosystem further, which means not only the pots and deployment and so on, but for example, thinking about service and maintenance. And we right now in mind discussions also with like really large known enterprises who operate make thousands of service technicians globally. To train them on our systems. Because right now, typically a fee technician and a third-party company that we would unity hire to do that in different regions. And they've never heard about it couldn't go but necessary. So that's something where we make sure that also the knowledge how to run our system, how to operate our system and there's a great knowledge transfer and a scale knowledge transfer, which is something that just comes with a lot of effort. But that right now is really the biggest that we are not getting at a point where we need to build up hundreds of people globally to train and onboard and deploy the systems, but we have partners, we can do that with. And there's a couple of longer financial questions. We will make sure that we answer all questions and put them into the transcript as well. And some might also need to make financial check and I am not necessarily [indiscernible] to answer. I think maybe one because I was also asked multiple times, the last one. On the bond structure with [ Finicity, ] which is very interesting one. So we structured the first bond with [ Finexity ] earlier this year, which has been great proof of alternative financing for us. And I've just shared the stage with the CEO, Paul earlier this week on the Capital Markets Day, which really shows the gap of financing for a company like [ Asko ] we're not profitable bankable. We just managed to onboard the different leasing providers right now a couple of months ago, basically as we start to scale -- but see there's demand for production prefinancing for working capital to really make sure that we can improve on the economics. Yes, we can always order one robot by one robot, but we will never get great economics on a system that we order so there is a certain bit that it's required to get to profitable production economics, which at the very end is working capital that's required to do so. And [indiscernible] been a great support on that. And right now, there's also plans to extend that. That's what I can say already. We have signed already a framework up to EUR 50 million. We don't want to write now extend to EUR 50 million directly than necessarily, but we make sure that we extend that across the portfolio and across our customer base and can really offer better, easier ways of financing compared to the leasing structures that we have in place today, which goes kind of hand-in-hand paying off the customer. There's a lot of great questions. We make sure to answer all of them. It's across topic. Yes. I'll sit later today and make sure I answer all of them as we already be on the time and probably some of you have a hard cut on that. Thanks a lot, everybody, for joining and tuning into a quarterly update call. We will share everything on the website, and you can probably find the latest on money. Thanks a lot, and have a great weekend.