Member Info for Sangijuelas1

VP, did you copy and paste that from your post the other day?

They seem very similar.

Losses stem from ongoing investment in R&D.

One of the partners who have paused new CFCs is Ocado Retail, which is part of the group so they are pausing paying development fees to themselves.

They are now back over 75% capacity at the existing sites.

Kroger closed spokes they set up and ran themselves. Nothing to do with Ocado as they run the CFCs and managing delivery operations is Kroger's responsibility. The modules at the CFCs will have been drawn down and still have to be paid for by Kroger.

The Walmart article you quote is not representative of the full range of investments Walmart has made across their business in automation. They have invested in and partnered with a number of leading automation companies like Symbotic.

My original point was what are the big UK supermarkets doing to automate in contrast to the likes of the US, Germany, Japan and Korea.

Ocado probably prefer to describe themselves as a tech company as calling themselves a robotics company is probably too narrow. It doesn't really account for their own software packages that they have developed etc

And automation is probably a much better word to use than robotics.

But by keep analysing them as if they were a pure play online supermarket and applying a valuation multiple in line with Tesco's rather than say Amazon's doesn't do anyone any favours.

Endomag was one of the companies I had spotted as a solid sign of value before they started including it in the core.

As with a number of other companies in the portfolio they were working to deliver a solution to a well defined problem in this case, an improved diagnostic device for planning operations for breast cancer and preventing unnecessary ones on lymph nodes.

Turned out a good return on the £9m invested. You could see they were a well performing company as they had finance from mainstream lenders for working capital.

Shame they have to be bought by a US company to continue their growth.

Should get closer to £500m on Solutions for 2024 as 15-20% growth forecast on 2023 figure of £420m.

Some £360m of that was from recurring revenue as in the fees and cut of sales from existing CFCs.

One of the reasons ARM chose to relist on the US market rather than the UK one was the greater depth of knowledge and understanding of it's business they would get from US analysts. No doubt they anticipated the sneering comments they would get from the likes of Clive Black complaining about "enormous losses" whilst making ongoing investment in R&D.

I mean with Ocado is it really that surprising that a high tech robotics company needs to keep reinvesting to stay ahead in an industry with incredibly fast moving developments in new technology?

FT article on the AGM quotes Clive Black from Shore Capital to complain about the incentive scheme.

All well and good but again Clive is very clearly an analyst specialising in supermarkets, with many news items quoting him on the likes of M&S, Aldi and the rest.

Don't think his understanding of building a high growth tech business from scratch will be that great. It would be interesting to know if he could answer fairly basic questions about the Solutions business.

Agreed 100%. I am not bothered in the least about the SP at the moment.

The investments made in tech by the likes of Walmart and Kroger/Ocado makes you wonder what the likes of Sainsbury's and Tesco have been up to.

It looks like Sainsbury's are now going to belatedly make more investment in automation at their warehouses.

I wonder if there is any scope for one of the other supermarkets to pay Ocado Retail to add their product lines?

That seems to be what the partnership with Groupe Casino is looking to achieve. Rent CFC capacity to other French retailers.

Also wonder that maybe Ocado can afford to play tough with M&S because they could swap them out for Sainsbury's or Tesco.

We do have one of the lowest birthday rates and that's one of the reasons why Korea has such a highest number of robots to humans ratio in the world.

The UK has relied instead on cheap labour rather than investment in technology. This could come back to bite the likes of Sainsbury's in future.

The chart here from Global Data gives an idea of where Ocado stands as a robotics company. The analysis is based on the number of patients filed, what applications they cover and what countries filed in. Worth noting that Myrmex, to the left of Ocado on the chart was bought by them in 2022 so they can really be bumped along to a higher score on the right.

The data goes up to 2021 I believe and they will have filed a lot more since then.

Worth noting Boyo how Walmart have filed a few more patents for robots than Ocado, while running a profitable grocery business.

https://www.retail-insight-network.com/data-insights/innovators-robotics-automated-inventory-management-retail/?cf-view&cf-closed

Are you aware of the scale of the data centres Amazon employ for their cloud computing business?

https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-center/data-centers/

Well if you are planning to sell I wouldn't wait too long as it's apparently heading to sub 250!

So on that logic Amazon should stop trying to run an online delivery business alongside their cloud computing services or a video streaming platform?

It's quite easy to cut and paste text from a broker note even if you can't provide a link.

Seen it done countless times on these boards.

Why do you feel someone whose analytic focus is on stocks like Kingfisher, Halfords and Next is best placed to analyse a tech firm selling hardware and software to automate warehouses globally.

They seem like quite different areas of focus to me.

It's like my personal focus is growth stocks mainly in the US as well as unlisted VC funded companies. I wouldn't know where to begin looking at the prospects for a pure retail stock.

To be fair an analyst of UK tech stocks alone would have very little work to do!

Well people are suggesting that Kroger are about to roll back their commitments to Ocado.

The SEC regulated info they are providing to their shareholders confirms they will be continuing to invest in them for the foreseeable.

They are not thinking in terms of 3-6 month business development but planning for the next 20 years.

Also nothing to say about Kroger statement in their latest annual report about 3 weeks ago that they are committed to opening new CFCs.

You keep talking about the spokes closure but are not prepared to engage with counter arguments that for Ocado it's a nothing burger.

From what I can see Kroger set up and ran the spokes to deal with orders from the CFC run by Ocado.

Capacity drawn at the CFC but no Ocado staff or tech at the spokes as it's part of Kroger's delivery ops.

Meant nothing for Rossington and Ocado on the search

Searching Google with the news tab option brings nothing for Paul Rossington although he is often quoted on other companies.

According to TipRanks he didn't make any sell recommendations last week.

https://www.tipranks.com/experts/analysts/paul-rossington

I tend to take what analysts say with a pinch of salt. They will probably get replaced by AI shortly anyway.

Paul Rossington is head of European consumer retail research. For example, last week he issued a buy rating on Kingfisher (B&Q) and covers other stocks like Next.

With this background he may not be best placed to analyse a tech company.

Either way, HSBC couldn't be bothered to send an analyst on the annual results call so they can't be very interested in goings on at Ocado.

HSBC can talk up the competition but the talk in the automation industry has been that warehouses themselves have been slow to automate so their remains a massive opportunity to be exploited.