Ocado sure its bet on US will pay dividends

Ocado has spent a decade transforming from British online supermarket into global technology business. It did not invest millions of pounds and years of effort into building a platform just to “deploy it on a little island”, its co-founder Tim Steiner once declared.

Almost 4,000 miles from that island, a nondescript warehouse on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio, contains one of the ripest fruits of this rebirth: a largely automated facility, with robots at its heart and humans at the fringes, that the FTSE 100 company hopes to replicate the world over as retailers retool for the digital age.

It is half past six in the morning and hundreds of contraptions akin to Star Wars’ R2-D2 are collecting goods for Kroger, the American grocery giant. The wheeled, cube-shaped bots whir quietly across the top of a grid, dropping their tentacles into towering, 21-box columns. An item, once retrieved, is ferried to a tunnel of 46 “pick stations”, where each online order is collated.

Kroger’s fulfilment centre in the small city of Monroe officially opened last April, nearly three years after an exclusive deal with Ocado was announced. In a high-viz jacket with “Ocado USA” on his back, Luke Jensen, the man directing the group’s march overseas, roams the site of its first step into the world’s largest economy.

The warehouse is divided into two grids known as “hives”, one for ambient stock and the other for chilled, where Kroger’s employees work hand-in-hand with Ocado’s bots. Staff furnish each hive with designated boxes of identical items and sell-by dates, ready to be whizzed to a pick station, where more staff are standing by.

Ocado, which has a market value of £8.4 billion, was founded in 2000 by three former Goldman Sachs bankers, including Steiner. Shares rallied by 170 per cent in the early months of the pandemic, as lockdowns demonstrated the potential growth of the online grocery market, but later reversed these gains amid a wider tech rout and disquiet around the steep capital requirements of its strategy.

Sceptics question the pace of success. Ocado has not turned a profit since 2016, they point out, and posted a pre-tax loss of £176.9 million in the year to November. Investing in tomorrow comes at a cost today. In the past decade the group has spent £2.7 billion in capital expenditure, according to Exane.

Jensen, who plans to visit three countries in a matter of days, is tight on time. In a conference room dangling from the ceiling of the Monroe warehouse, overseeing the bots as they work, the chief executive of Ocado Solutions declines to comment on “any specifics” when it comes to profitability.

“You need to make the differentiation between projects and the totality,” he says. “A lot of analysts pick apart” the business model — whereby Ocado spends heavily to establish facilities and develop technology, and makes money from fees and taking a slice of clients’ sales. But Jensen, 55, maintains it will prove lucrative. Its international division is in the red, but “more advanced projects, and our more advanced clients, are providing us with a profitable contribution” to the wider business.

Whether Kroger amounts to a “more advanced” customer is one of those specifics. There are “a lot of things at different stages” in the partnership, under which three facilities — in Ohio, Groveland, Florida, and near Atlanta, Georgia — are up and running, with half a dozen expected to go live this year. So far 16 have been announced.

In May 2018 Kroger had said it would “identify up to a total of 20” sites for fulfilment centres in three years. Has the timeline slipped? The initial “estimate” of 20 amounted to a “joint commitment”, based on how many sites the companies believed they would need to ensure decent coverage across the US, Jensen says. It is the early, tentative steps that cause uncertainty on timing, he adds — like choosing sites and obtaining planning permission — before construction begins, typically taking about two years once spades are in the ground. “Of course, the market has grown substantially since that time, so actually, as you look forward, more capacity will be needed than was anticipated in 2018.”

By the end of this year, Ocado’s footprint in America will “look very different”, Jensen claims. “In 2020, we didn’t have anything live yet. In 2021 we had this facility [in Ohio] and Florida live; two dots on a map. And over the course of 2022, you’re going to start to see across the country those dots appearing and starting to paint a picture moving towards national coverage.”

As Ocado extols the benefits of patience to investors and analysts, it continues to sell the speed and efficiency of its technology to possible customers. The average order in Monroe, for example (about 50 items, split across two ambient tote boxes and two chilled), typically takes only 15 minutes of labour to prepare. Kroger employees stock the hives, staff the pick stations and load frames with about 20 boxes; each van carries four frames, or about 20 orders, to homes and stores. Innovations unveiled this year mean that, in future, picking and loading will be automated. This will purportedly halve the labour time.

Such complex systems take years to research and build, but Jensen insists that retailers are willing to wait. “Everybody in life wants everything cheaper, faster,” he acknowledges. The company is on the case: a new generation of bots will be swifter to make and lighter, and able to operate on grids that will be quicker to install. “Potentially we’ll be able to divide by three the grid erection time that’s required.”

Grocers are “in a rush” as they look to expand online, but engaged in a “long haul” game, according to Jensen, who compares the rollout of automated warehouses now to the investment in superstores of previous decades.

His own haste is explained, in part, by the pandemic. Ocado has nine partners outside the UK and wants more. Covid turbocharged digital retail demand, pushing online up boardroom agendas but limited international travel.

Building relationships with prospective clients became “more difficult” without physical meetings and in-person demonstrations. With restrictions eased, Jensen’s schedule is a “horror” for the next six months. “We of course don’t give any specific guidance, but we’ve now got active discussions under way in multiple countries and I’d anticipate a number of those to come to fruition.”

Pitching involves talking up its own proposition and down the alternatives. Others might be quicker and cheaper to set up, but Ocado argues they become less appealing over time. Those preparing digital orders in existing supermarkets incur high labour costs and offer less variety, Jensen says.

“The numbers do not really add up.”

At the centre of its stall sits the promise of an increasingly automated future, replacing workers with robots able to tackle the “more basic” jobs. A packed car park in front of Kroger’s site in Monroe underlines the company’s reliance on human labour. Ocado, with 2,750 staff in its research and development arm, is trying to curtail this.

It might have branched out, but the company refers back to its British roots when pursuing business, reminding grocers that it has been — and to some extent, remains — in their shoes. Ocado only owns half of its UK consumer-facing operation, now a joint venture with Marks & Spencer, which it uses as a “sandbox” to test technology. “As a business, it’s a great proof of concept.”

Years spent delivering orders for Waitrose, before switching to M&S in 2020, offered unrivalled insight, says Jensen. “No other technology company serving the retail industry was born as a retailer. We were born as a retailer, so we have had to crack the problems first-hand.” They still do so.

Ocado’s expensive attempt to power the industry’s robotic future has so far led to it being granted about 550 patents for its technology. The ingenuity of its dream has been called into question over recent years, however. Ocado has been locked in a legal dispute with AutoStore, its Norwegian rival, which accused it of infringing its idea of using robots on grid-like structures. Lawyers for Ocado, which is in turn suing AutoStore for infringing its patents, have compared the case to Ford attempting to sue Tesla for making cars.

An American investigation ruled that Ocado will not face an export ban on its technology. The acrimony has not slowed down the firm’s activities with existing partners nor affected courting potential customers, says Jensen.

Ocado’s solutions — from warehouse bots to delivery software — amount to a unique suite of tools for supermarkets, he asserts. He likens its ambition to Microsoft’s Office computing software, which achieved a level of ubiquity “nobody else” could match. Ocado seeks similarly “enormous benefits of scale”.

Before it has clinched these benefits, it continues to spend prodigiously. “We’ve structured our model for that to be structurally profitable,” Jensen says. “So that’s all I’ll say on profitability.”

With that, he departs. A breakfast meeting with Rodney McMullen, Kroger’s chairman, awaits. Ocado’s ability to win new business will rest on its ability to keep existing customers happy.