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Shares in this FTSE 250 transport tech stock have further to travel

The road is only half the job for the drivers of Europe’s 9mn trucks. The rest is paperwork. From toll payments and fuel receipts to route planning and tax refunds, the average journey involves around 30 separate administrative tasks, a time-consuming burden that falls heavily on fleet operators. 

Roughly 90 per cent of the continent’s hauliers are small businesses, still reliant on paper trails and patchwork software. Inefficiency is the norm in the €300bn (£261bn) commercial road transport market, something that Wag Payment Solutions (EWG), trading as Eurowag, has stepped in to fix.

Wag Payment Solutions bull points

  • Predictable recurring software revenue

  • Surging free cash flow generation

  • Discounted tech sector valuation

The Prague-headquartered company, which floated in late 2021 and is part of the FTSE 250 index, is best known as a tolling and fuel payments software provider, but is repositioning itself around a more integrated platform. At the heart of this shift is Eurowag Office, which brings together fuel payments, tolling, fleet management, navigation and financial services.

Instead of juggling multiple providers, the aim is for truck drivers to be able to manage an entire journey – and its associated admin – in one place. The company claims the platform can cut administrative tasks by up to 50 per cent and lower operating costs by up to 10 per cent by digitising and automating processes.

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An integrated platform also opens the door to higher-margin cross-selling and the upselling of adjacent services, driving up average revenue per user (ARPU). Importantly, it shifts the model away from predominantly transactional revenues, such as fuel payments, towards a more predictable, recurring subscription base.

Once the majority of customers migrate to the platform by the end of 2026, Eurowag plans to roll out new subscription pricing tiers that bundle software, financing and transactional services together. Management expects subscription revenues to eventually reach around 60 per cent of the total revenue mix, up from 24 per cent currently. 

The main risk in moving customers from multiple legacy systems to a brand-new operating system is churn. Fleet management software is used by dispatchers for hours every day, so a forced or clumsy transition could push them to leave. To prevent this, management is taking a careful, phased approach to migration to protect customer satisfaction.

Eurowag is migrating customers in batches of up to 500 and deliberately delaying the rollout of new subscription pricing to avoid overwhelming users with both workflow and cost changes at once. Around 35 per cent have already moved to Eurowag Office, ahead of the group’s 30 per cent target, with user satisfaction improving.

The rollout of the new subscription bundles will start at the end of this year, paving the way for full scaling and monetisation to start to show in 2027. Early pilots are encouraging, with subscription trials in Romania and Poland leading to volume-per-truck increases of around 30 per cent and 15 per cent, respectively. 

As well as recurring revenue, the strategic upside is “higher wallet share, higher volume per truck and lower churn”, says Gautam Pillai, an analyst at Peel Hunt. “The behavioural evidence is compelling.”

Wag Payment Solutions bear points

  • Sensitivity to fuel shocks

  • Aggressive R&D accounting practices

  • Lengthy road to monetisation

In parallel, Eurowag’s partnerships with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as Volvo Group (SE:VOLV.B) and IVECO Group (IT:IVG) act as a massive, low-cost distribution channel for the new platform, with the cockpits of their latest truck models fitted with onboard Eurowag units and displays.

Julian Yates, an analyst at Investec, says the opportunity here is to “drive conversion to paying customer subscriptions and to open up the Eurowag Office platform to the additional capabilities through negotiations with the OEMs”. The company says the manufacturers that have signed up so far together make up around 51 per cent of the European truck market.

“If the company can successfully build critical mass onto Eurowag Office and successfully monetise it, this potentially creates a platform that can enable the group to move to another level of industry leadership, ultimately positioning itself as the industry’s digital marketplace,” Yates adds. 

Eurowag Office is designed to structurally lift margins and cash generation by creating significant operating leverage and accelerating invoicing cycles. That said, the company isn’t there yet. It will continue investing throughout 2026 in onboarding, platform stability and customer support to smooth adoption across its installed base. 

The uplift is expected in later years. Deutsche Bank estimates that cash profit (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, Ebitda) margins will rise from 39.9 per cent this year to 41.6 per cent in 2028. Much of this depends on shutting down legacy systems, which should remove duplicate costs. At the same time, incremental revenues from cross-selling should fall through “at low marginal cost”, said Pillai.

There are, however, a few caveats. Reported Ebitda excludes capitalised research and development (R&D) spending but adds back share-based payments, which makes underlying profitability look better than it is in cash terms.

On a cash basis, margins were 29.7 per cent last year, slightly lower than in 2024.

Capital expenditure rose to €56.5mn (from €46mn in 2024) last year, as the company invested in the development of Eurowag Office. Capitalised R&D also rose to €41mn (€35mn in 2024) but remained below its self-imposed €50mn cap.

This heavy investment has long been a sticking point for investors, as the company has struggled to convert profits into cash. 

But the company appears to be turning a corner and is, as Pillai put it, becoming a “cash machine”. It generated €86mn in free cash flow (FCF) in 2025, double Peel Hunt’s estimates, and heavily supported by tighter working capital management and improved supplier terms. Over the past 18 months, cumulative FCF has hit €109mn.

That cash generation is feeding through to the balance sheet, reducing net debt from €276mn a year earlier to €216mn. Eurowag carries more debt than the typical software stock, but leverage remains comfortably within the board’s target range at 1.9 times Ebitda, down from 2.9 times in 2023.

Management’s confidence in this cash inflection is evident in its capital return policy. The company does not offer share buybacks or an ordinary dividend, a turn-off for income-focused investors. However, it paid a €24mn special dividend last summer and has already proposed a second one of around €12mn.

Through Covid disruptions, the Ukraine war and a weak European economy, the company has delivered roughly 15 per cent organic annual revenue growth since its IPO. However, that performance rests on a working capital cycle that is highly sensitive to fuel prices, a dynamic that has resurfaced following the onset of war in Iran.

When geopolitical shocks push up fuel costs, transport operators face an acute working capital squeeze because they must pay their operational bills within weeks, but typically do not collect cash from their own clients for several months. Counter-intuitively, these shocks often work in Eurowag’s favour.

In these markets, smaller rivals often lack the financial capacity to extend the necessary credit lines to struggling fleets. As a result, operators flock to Eurowag for reliable fuel supply and working capital solutions, resulting in higher volumes, market share gains and long-term customer loyalty. However, it must be careful not to overextend its own balance sheet. 

The shares have nearly doubled over the past year and trade at 18.1 times forward earnings, a premium to the FTSE 250, although this is expected to fall to 13 times by 2028. Despite double-digit revenue growth and enviable margins, the stock trades at an enterprise value of just 8.1 times Ebitda, a discount to other growth tech peers. 

Looking ahead, Investec forecasts a 4.3 per cent FCF yield for 2026, rising to 7.6 per cent in 2027 and 11.5 per cent in 2028. As cash generation builds, debt reduces and platform monetisation scales from next year and beyond, the valuation gap looks unlikely to last.

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Company DetailsNameMkt CapPrice52-Wk Hi/LoWag Payment Solutions  (EWG)£838mn121p135p / 57.0pSize/DebtNAV per share*Net Cash / Debt(-)*Net Debt / EbitdaOp Cash/ Ebitda31p-£204mn1.9 x124%ValuationFwd PE (+12mths)Fwd DY (+12mths)FCF yld (+12mths)P/Sales18-5.40%0.4Quality/ GrowthEBIT MarginROCE5yr Sales CAGR5yr EPS CAGR2.7%9.9%12.2%-38.1%Forecasts/ MomentumFwd EPS grth NTMFwd EPS grth STM3-mth Mom3-mth Fwd EPS change%42%19%-2.4%1.2%Year end 31 DecSales (€mn)Profit before tax (€mn)EPS (c)DPS (p)**202325756.76.460.0202429346.14.630.0202533051.44.780.0f’cst 202636572.27.430.0f’cst 202740287.99.010.0chg (%)102221-Source: FactSet, adjusted PTP and EPS figures. NTM = Next Twelve Months. STM = Second Twelve Months (ie one year from now). *Converted to £, includes intangible assets of £446mn, or 64p a share. **Excludes special dividends of 3p for 2024 and 1.5p for 2025

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