A2Z Q2 2026 Earnings Call - Revenue Jumps 78% as Chinese Manufacturing Ramps and Backlog Accelerates

Conference Operator: Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Simon Saravietzky, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Simon Saravietzky, Investor Relations, A2Z: Thank you, operator. Before we begin, please note that today’s call will contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual to differ materially from those projected. Please refer to our earnings release as well as our filings with the SEC for discussion of these risks. A replay of this call will be available shortly after its conclusion. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to our CEO, Mr. Gadi Graus, Chief Executive Officer of A2Z.

Gadi Graus, Chief Executive Officer, A2Z: Thank you, Simon. Good afternoon, and thank you for participating in today’s call to discuss our second quarter progress and our business outlook. Our team executed well in the second quarter, resulting in sequential revenue growth of 78%. We continued to drive commercial adoption of our platform and Smart Cart solutions. Key takeaways from the quarter included the strong positive momentum in our deliveries, which reached 950 Smart Carts, nearly doubling from first quarter levels and bringing to 3,350 the number of units that have been delivered to date. We brought an important new customer on board, Hastok, a 50-store home goods retail chain in Israel, and have already made a partial delivery to them. We also expanded our partnership with Super Sapir, a large and growing supermarket chain based in Israel with over 70 stores.

Our dedicated manufacturing facility in China came online in the second quarter, significantly increasing our delivery capacity and shortening our lead times. We introduced our next generation Connected In-Store Commerce Platform. We secured a $30 million line of credit with Bank Leumi to provide funding to support our future growth. These accomplishments demonstrate significant progress across our organization and underpin our confidence in delivering 10,000 Smart Carts by the end of this year and at least 19,000 by the end of 2027. Keeping in mind that the 19,000 is based only on our current orders and does not take into account additional new orders or increases from existing customers between now and the end of 2027. I’d like to spend a few moments reviewing our business proposition and the opportunity set.

Our platform builds on our Smart Cart technology to help retailers digitize the in-store shopping journey through connected shopper engagement, retail media, and operational intelligence. Shoppers benefit from a more convenient shopping experience, while retailers gain new tools to improve store operations, reduce checkout friction, strengthen loss prevention, and generate new retail media revenues. In the first half of this year, we delivered Smart Carts to two retail customers. Yochananof, a major supermarket chain in Israel with over 45 stores nationwide, and Hastok, which, as I mentioned before, is a 50-store home goods retailer, the largest in Israel. Earlier this week, we expanded our partnership with Super Sapir, a large and growing supermarket chain in Israel with over 70 stores.

In light of their expansion and recent purchase of stores from Carrefour Israel, Super Sapir placed a follow-on order for 4,000 additional carts, bringing their total commitment to 7,000 units, with deliveries starting in the third quarter. Later in the second half, we will also be delivering to Toys R Us in Israel and the Red Pirate, two prominent toy retail chains. These wins have put us at an inflection point on the cusp of larger scale rollouts. During the second half of 2026, we expect to grow our retail media revenues as we accelerate cart deliveries. As we scale the business, we have taken several actions to support future growth. First, as I mentioned, our dedicated Chinese manufacturing facility came online in the second quarter and expands our capacity while reducing lead times and production costs.

Next, we are in the process of rolling out our newly completed Connected In-Store Commerce Platform, marking a major evolution from a product-centric offering to a unified enterprise platform for modern retail. With this launch, we have restarted delivery of new carts to our largest customer, Yochananof, under their agreement to take 5,000 carts. We believe the new features will attract further interest from other potential customers. We expect to see our Smart Carts in at least two retailers outside of Israel within the next six months. Third, we are shifting our spending towards deployment, sales, and marketing. Gadi Levin will speak more about this in a moment. Speaking of Gadi Levin, we are pleased to have Gadi take over the role of CFO. Gadi has significant experience with more than 25 years of executive financial leadership across publicly traded companies. I look forward to working closely with him.

Gadi will also speak more about our new $30 million credit line with Bank Leumi. I would just like to say that we believe this represents an important vote of confidence in our business prospects, which we appreciate. To sum up, this was a strong quarter for us, with deliveries up in line with our expectations and a path forward to continued growth. Now I will turn the call to our CFO, Gadi Levin, to provide a fuller financial review. Gadi.

Gadi Levin, Chief Financial Officer, A2Z: Thank you, Gadi, and thank you everyone for joining us. I am pleased to join on my first conference call as CFO. I have long admired A2Z’s leading-edge technology platform and solutions, and I am excited to step into this leadership role. Today, I will review our financial performance for the second quarter of fiscal 2026. In the second quarter, we made meaningful progress on both the commercial and operational fronts, accelerating Smart Cart deliveries to a growing client base while taking deliberate actions to enhance our focus on commercial execution.

Customer expansion. My financial commentary will focus on sequential comparisons, which we believe are more meaningful at this stage than year-over-year comparisons. Second quarter revenues of $5.9 million were significantly above the $3.3 million reported in the first quarter of 2026. Smart Cart revenues rose to $4.4 million from just $2.5 million, as we nearly doubled Smart Cart shipments sequentially from 500 units to 950 units, including the initial delivery to Hastok, as Gadi mentioned. Gross profit was $2.5 million, reflecting a gross margin of 42.6%, compared to gross profit of $100,000, reflecting a margin of just 4.2% in the 2026 first quarter. The increases were due to higher unit volumes and the shift to more efficient manufacturing in our facility in China, which came online in the second quarter, and which translated to lower production costs.

As production ramps, we expect to continue to realize meaningful economies of scale from our new Chinese manufacturing facility. With this facility in place, we have adequate capacity to fulfill existing and future customer orders. In addition to improvements in our manufacturing capabilities, our operational hubs in Panama and Bulgaria remain an important part of our global deployment strategy. During the quarter, we made further progress in establishing the infrastructure, processes, and capabilities that will support regional deployments and customer service as rollout activities continue to expand. Operating loss was $7.6 million in the second quarter of 2026, compared to a loss of $8 million in the first quarter of 2026. Net loss was $7.3 million or $0.16 per share in the current quarter, compared to a loss of $8.3 million or $0.18 in the prior sequential period.

Moving forward, we expect to find operating expense savings from an organizational realignment that is already underway. This initiative was designed to accelerate commercial growth as we leverage our next-generation Connected In-Store Commerce Platform, which is now entering commercial deployment. As part of the realignment, we will be reducing our use of external consultants and subcontractors as we internalize functions we previously outsourced. In addition, net headcount is expected to decrease 10%. These actions reflect our increased focus on deployment and customer-facing functions. We expect the realignment to generate savings of approximately $7 million annually once it is fully completed in the fourth quarter, while preserving our delivery capabilities and core technical and customer support functions. Ultimately, these actions will sharpen our focus on commercial execution and our sales efforts. Turning to our balance sheet, we have continued to strengthen our financial position.

As of June 30, 2026, we have $43 million in treasury and working capital of $55 million. We also have the new $30 million credit line with Bank Leumi, of which we have used just $2.2 million. The Bank Leumi credit line is an important tool to provide the financing we require as we scale the business. The credit line will be used to fund inventory and underscores our progress and success as we build on cart deliveries. As Gadi mentioned, we view this as an important validation of our business model and our early execution. We continued to act on our $20 million share repurchase program in the quarter. As of June 30, 2026, we repurchased 919,000 shares for a total of $5.8 million. In July, we repurchased a further 147,000 shares, bringing the total to approximately 1.07 million shares, which we have now canceled.

We continue to opportunistically buy back shares as part of our disciplined capital allocation strategy. We expect cart deliveries to grow sequentially over each of the next two quarters. This will be weighted towards the final quarter of the year, as the month of September is a seasonally slow period impacted by the holiday calendar in Israel. We continue to deliver on our backlog and expect to broaden our revenue base over time. Before turning the call back to Gadi, I am pleased to announce that A2Z has engaged Advisory Partners Group, a New York-based investor relations firm. This partnership underscores our commitment to enhancing investor accessibility and growing our presence in the U.S. market. With that, I will turn the call back to Gadi.

Gadi Graus, Chief Executive Officer, A2Z: Thank you, Gadi. Looking ahead, we are at an inflection point. Deliveries, order activity, and backlog are all pointing in the right direction, and there is strong interest in the marketplace. We believe we are well-positioned to capture a large share of an emerging market and continue to expand adoption of our Connected In-Store Commerce Platform and Smart Cart solutions, which provide retailers, shoppers, and other stakeholders with a differentiated platform for shopper engagement, retail media, and in-store intelligence. We look forward to providing a further update on our progress next quarter. Operator, let’s now open the line for questions.

Conference Operator: We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster.

Our first question today comes from Dan Kernoz with StoneX. Please go ahead.

Dan Kernoz, Analyst, StoneX: Great. Thanks. Good afternoon, I guess morning for you guys. First of all, phenomenal quarter, print, guide, real acceleration in the business. I think it’s fantastic to see the progress you guys are making. Also, I want to say welcome to Gadi L. Hopefully my questions will not be confusing. I’ll try to clearly telegraph who I’m trying to get the question to. My first question is, if you guys could please just. I know you gave color on sort of the cadence, but if you could give us a little more granularity on how to think about Q3 versus Q4, especially considering the September calendar. Then you mentioned the press release that retail media is also starting to ramp.

If you could give us at least some color or flavor on how to think about the retail media component of the $25 million in revenue expected in the back half of the year, that would be a great start. Thank you.

Gadi Graus, Chief Executive Officer, A2Z: Yeah. Thank you. I’ll take that. This is Gadi G. Dan, thank you. Good afternoon. Yep, good morning here. The cadence will be weighted in the fourth quarter. We have a high holiday season coming up, and in the supermarket chain world, this is the most important part of the year. We will be weighted considerably in the fourth quarter, but we are confident that we will hit our target for the end of the year. The retail media, we do expect retail media revenues to carry on picking up. The more carts we have out there, the more inventory we have to sell. The more carts we have out there, the more personalization we get, the more valuable the inventory we can sell. But we believe that we’ll be hitting $25 million at least in revenue, even just from Smart Carts.

We think that the retail media could even be in addition to that. Retail media will start picking up. The majority will still be, of course, from the Smart Carts.

Dan Kernoz, Analyst, StoneX: Okay. My follow-up will be just from a higher level, we’ve been doing this for a long time, Gadi G.

Gadi Graus, Chief Executive Officer, A2Z: Yep

Dan Kernoz, Analyst, StoneX: We’re really turning the corner here. First question, what drove the acceleration in the business? If you could give us more color on this next-gen platform. We’ve heard about a Gen 4 cart out in the market as well. Just any other color on what’s driving this final uptake, because it looks like you guys are really making the turn here.

Gadi Graus, Chief Executive Officer, A2Z: Everything is falling into place. We’ve spent a lot of effort in our new platform, which is a combination of new and efficient and aesthetically pleasing hardware. It includes super efficient charging walls where we can have 100 control panels charging on a 3-yard wall. It includes a lot of ergonomic features on the hardware. It includes special, unique, proprietary fraud detection modules, and other matters which are very important for the retailers. It includes a sleek and improved interface for the shoppers, making the shopper experience even better than it was before. That’s one element which helps us. The other element, of course, is our Chinese facility, manufacturing facility, which allows us to manufacture at scale, at a cadence which we define, and of course, helps to bring down our unit costs.

And all that together with our clients being now able to accept delivery of more carts has led and fed into this excellent quarter and will lead and feed into the excellent second half, which we expect to come.

Gadi Levin, Chief Financial Officer, A2Z: Hey, Dan, it’s Gadi Levin. I’ll just add, firstly, thank you for the comments at the beginning. Look forward to working with everybody. In addition to everything that Gadi G. said, besides for delivering the carts that we delivered and achieving the revenues that we’ve achieved, and as Gadi mentioned, we also spent the last six months getting this facility up and running. But in the background, we’ve also built up inventory, and you can see that on our balance sheet. And so I guess that’s another answer to your question about why we think we’re now ready to start significantly scaling up and meeting these targets that we’ve been talking about.

Dan Kernoz, Analyst, StoneX: No, that’s super helpful. Massive revenue upside in the back half of the year and Gadi L. bringing $7 million of cost saves is a huge bonus. So well done, guys. Thanks for the questions.

Gadi Graus, Chief Executive Officer, A2Z: Thank you.

Gadi Levin, Chief Financial Officer, A2Z: Thank you.

Conference Operator: As a reminder, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. The next question comes from Greg Gibas with Northland Securities. Please go ahead.

Greg Gibas, Analyst, Northland Securities: Great. Good morning, guys. Congrats on the quarter. Likewise, Gadi L., welcome to the team and look forward to working with you here. To maybe follow up on what you spoke to before, how does the revenue cadence compare with maybe deliveries in the back half? How would you expect retail media performance to perhaps compare to just Smart Cart revenue as a whole?

Gadi Levin, Chief Financial Officer, A2Z: So maybe, Gadi G., before you maybe just add some more on the retail revenue, let me just add some color to the revenues and how we calculate revenues, and how that works. We have the commercial terms with each customer is different. There is a hardware component, a subscription component, and other services. Broadly, if you look even at Q1 and Q2, for every cart that we deliver in the first year, we are recognizing anywhere between $4,000 and $4,500 per cart in the first year. Then, of course, in the subsequent years, we have retail media and subscriptions and stuff, and that can be as much as $1,200 or $1,500 over the following five years.

If you consider that we believe that we are going to meet the target of 10,000 carts delivered by the end of 2026, that leaves us with around 6.5, 6-6 carts for the second half. If you multiply that out by 4,500, you are getting north of 25,000. We are pretty confident that we can meet that number, and that is kind of how we are looking at it. Gadi, maybe you want to just add some more color on the retail?

Gadi Graus, Chief Executive Officer, A2Z: Yeah. As I said, the retail media revenues will grow as our installed base grows. As I said, both on the fact that when you have more carts, you have more retail media inventory, you simply have more transactions going on. It is more than that. It is our ability to the more carts we have, the more transactions we have, the more data we have, the more ability we have to give real value and conversion, which in the end is the heart of why retail media is so much more valuable than regular media. Because you are a combination of advertising at decision-making point and have giving a personalized, location-specific targeted advertisements which bring value to the shopper, which is converted at a much preferred rate to regular media.

All those things will start feeding in and retail media will start growing considerably as we have the carts out. We do expect that it will be, once again, it will be more weighted to Q4 than Q3, and we gradually grow through Q4 and then through the years to come. We still, in the coming quarters, the revenues from the carts will still be the major part we expect of our revenues, but retail media will keep on growing.

Greg Gibas, Analyst, Northland Securities: That is great. Very helpful. If I could, as a follow-up, wondering if you could speak to just the overall growth pipeline or your outlook for incremental contracting from new customers, how that is trending, and perhaps if you are willing to speak to high-level prospects in North America, given your earlier commentary.

Gadi Graus, Chief Executive Officer, A2Z: So, as we said, we are in advanced negotiations with clients abroad, and we also have expectations for increased purchases here in Israel. Sapir is an example of a considerable increase from 3,000 to 7,000 in their orders. So we both expect our existing clients, when they see the value our carts bring, that they would increase their orders and to have clients abroad. We’ve openly said that we expect to have at least two clients on board, two deliveries, so at least two clients outside of Israel within the next 6 months. This includes clients in the Americas and in Europe. We’re continuing our discussions in the U.S. as well. We hope that they will be coming on board as well, soon.

But we expect both increased, as I said, both increased deliveries and orders from our clients, existing clients, and to start having carts delivered to clients abroad within the next 6 months.

Greg Gibas, Analyst, Northland Securities: Got it. Thanks very much. Congrats again on the progress and strong results.

Gadi Levin, Chief Financial Officer, A2Z: Thanks, Greg.

Gadi Graus, Chief Executive Officer, A2Z: Thank you very much.

Conference Operator: The next question comes from Giuliano Bologna with Compass Point. Please go ahead.

Giuliano Bologna, Analyst, Compass Point: Good afternoon or good morning on your side, and congrats on the significant progress you are making so far. It is great to see. As a first question, I would be curious when you think about the capital needs or hopefully no capital needs going forward. I am curious where you think you are funded from a capital perspective and if there is any need for capital as you build out a lot of deliveries and scale the operations from here. Along the same lines, I am curious, when you look forward, when do you think the platform would inflect to free cash flow positive?

Gadi Levin, Chief Financial Officer, A2Z: Yeah. So, Giuliano, thanks for the question. I think, as we have mentioned, we have $43 million in treasury at the moment, so that is our cash and cash equivalents and our investments in financial assets. We also have this very important credit line from Bank Leumi to the tune of $30 million. To date, we have only used around $2.2 million. So we have quite a big runway in terms of our balance sheet. We have also spent the last six months building up inventory. You can see that on our balance sheet as well. A lot of the deliveries that we are going to do in the second half of 2026 are actually already paid for. Add to that the corporate realignment.

We think that that’s going to significantly reduce costs, specifically in R&D and other areas as we focus more on the client-facing side of the business. We think we have a pretty decent runway, and we’re with a healthy balance sheet.

Gadi Graus, Chief Executive Officer, A2Z: Maybe I can also just add in a couple of things. The credit facility from Bank Leumi is not a one-off. In other words, when we grow and increase our client roster and add clients who are using our carts, and when we have increased orders, we can both get increased facility to cover those orders and to have a new facility from other banks around the world. The model which we’ve always spoken about having the regular bank finance to finance our manufacturing and deliveries is a model which is perfectly scalable and transferable all over the world. That facility is not a one-off. We have no need to raise capital. We do not see a need to raise capital.

When the inflection point of when we become cash positive, the more our retail media starts kicking in, which has digital software returns, it will bring the date earlier. In any event, we have no need to raise any money.

Giuliano Bologna, Analyst, Compass Point: That’s very helpful. As a follow-up, obviously great to see the 4,000 additional Smart Cart order from Sapir Group. I’d be curious if you have any insight into what’s driving that order, if it’s kind of just an expansion of the relationship or if the first phase was successful, so they want to extend it further out in the network. Related to that, I’m curious if that could be a good proxy for kind of the evolution of a lot of the relationships that you currently have and orders you have on the platform.

Gadi Graus, Chief Executive Officer, A2Z: Yes, I’ll take that one. It’s a combination with them of seeing our actual solution in the stores. We’re going live with them later on this month and starting our deliveries. It’s a combination of seeing our actual product and seeing the value that it brings. Yes, the combination for Sapir in particular of their extensive expansion. But other clients are also expanding. Yochananof, as we know, is a major client of ours and is also expanding their stores. Yes, I think obviously not something we can guarantee, but we 100% expect that clients who have seen our carts in action, have seen the value they bring, will expand the purchases to eventually cover all their needs, full requirements in the store.

Giuliano Bologna, Analyst, Compass Point: Very helpful. Congrats on the great results, and I will jump back in the queue.

Gadi Graus, Chief Executive Officer, A2Z: Thank you very much.

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

Gadi Graus, Chief Executive Officer, A2Z: Thank you all for participating, wherever you are around the world. It’s very much appreciated. We’ve had a great quarter, and we look forward to being able to continue to give additional information on the great quarters that we hope are coming. Thank you all very much.

Conference Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.