Participants

Sara Horvath; Executive Vice President, General Counsel, Company Secretary; Ranpak Inc

Omar Asali; Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer; Ranpak Inc

William Drew; Chief Financial Officer, Senior Vice President; Ranpak Inc

Greg Palm; Analyst; Craig-Hallum Capital Group

Ghansham Panjabi; Analyst; Robert W. Baird & Co

Troy Jensen; Analyst; Cantor Fitzgerald

Presentation

Operator

Good morning and welcome to the Ranpak Holdings 4th quarter 2024 earnings call.
(operator instructions).
I would now like to turn the call over to Sarah Horvaths general counsel. Please go ahead.

Sara Horvath

Thank you and good morning, everyone.
Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that we will discuss forward-looking statements as defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including those discussed in our press release and the risk factors identified in our Form 10K and our other filings filed with the SEC.
Some of the statements and responses to your questions in this conference call may include forward-looking statements that are subject to future events and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. Ranpak assumes no obligation and does not intend to update any such forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, all of which speak to the company only as of today.
The earnings release we issued this morning and the presentation for today's call are posted on the investor relations section of our website. A copy of the release has been included in a form 8K that we submitted to the SEC before this call.
We will also make a replay of this conference call available via webcast on the company website.
For financial information that is presented on a non-gap basis, we have included reconciliation to the comparable GAAP information.
Please refer to the table and slide presentation accompanying today's earnings release.
Lastly, we'll be filing our 10K with the SEC for the period ending December 31, 2024. The 10K will be available through the SEC or on the investor relations section of our website.
With me today, I have Omar Asali, our Chairman and CEO, and Bill Drew, our CFO.
Omar will summarize our fourth quarter results and issue our outlook for 2025. Bill will provide additional detail on the financial results before we open up the call for questions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Omar.

Omar Asali

Thank you, Sarah, and good morning everyone.
Thank you for joining us today. We finished 2024 on a really positive note as we built on the large enterprise account momentum from the 3rd quarter and delivered our best quarter of the year and second best quarterly revenue in the history of Ranpak.
We experienced an outstanding e-commerce led holiday season in North America, which drove double-digit volume growth across the organization in the 4th quarter and pushed us to double digit volume growth for the year as well.
I'm pleased with the way our team has executed this year and the way we have delivered on our key goals going into 2024.
At this time last year, I shared a number of key developments we expected to occur in 2024, and that 2024 would be an inflection year related to our business.
We said enterprise accounts, which we have been referring to as strategic accounts would ramp up beginning in Q2. They did, driving double digit volume growth for the year in a challenging environment.
We said automation was going to have an inflection year. It did. We grew automation revenue by more than 40%, and we expected to grow another 50% in 2025.
We said CapEx would step down meaningfully as our major investment cycle is behind us. It did. It declined by 40%, and we got back to the mode of generating cash.
We delivered by half a turn and refinanced our term loan. We plan to pay down a portion of our term loan in 2025.
We opened up our Malaysia facility to start serving the APAC market, reducing our production and logistics costs to serve the region.
We are in ramp up phase there and excited about what this platform can break.
We said our solution set and execution differentiated us in the marketplace. We just got validation of what we have built by the largest e-commerce company in the world, choosing to economically align themselves with us.
I will speak more about that later on in the call.
Lastly, we hit the midpoint of our top line guide and the higher end of our adjusted guide.
Our goal is to do what we say we're going to do, and that is the state of mind of our team at Ranpak.
Overall, I believe what we have delivered in 2024 sets the foundation for a really exciting 25 and next chapter in Ranpak's evolution.
With the noise of COVID and our major investment cycle behind us, I and the team are laser focused on execution and growth.
We have a best in class platform in areas with major structural tailwinds in sustainability and automation.
You couldn't draw it up on a piece of paper much better.
Now it comes down to execution. We have to deliver.
As we get into our quarterly results in more detail, I wanted to provide an update on our constant currency presentation.
In our release, you saw our statement that we're moving away from the fixed rate constant currency presentation of $115 per EUR, which we have done since the company went public in 2019.
While we believe this made judging the performance of Ranpak over a longer period of time easier for investors by removing the noise of currency fluctuations related to more than 50% of our sales from our results, we're adjusting the way we report our results and discuss our performance to be more consistent with how others report FX impact.
As such, the adjusted EBITDA and constant currency changes we discussed and report today are at the reported rate of 108 rather than 115.
We will do our best to bridge the GAAP in our new reporting to our previous guide, which was at 1:15, versus the reported results.
In the release we provided, a table showing what our guidance going into 2024 would have been at the 108 average rate for the year, as well as what our fourth quarter results would have been at the 115 fixed rate, so folks have an apples to apples comparison.
Moving on to our results, we experienced our 6th quarter in a row of volume growth and 2nd quarter in a row of double digit volume growth.
Consolidated net revenue increased 17% on a constant currency basis for the quarter, driven by 12% volume growth as e-commerce activity drove outsized growth in North America and automation had its largest revenue quarter ever.
10% volume growth for the year drove 2024 full year net revenue up 10% on a constant currency basis, with strong acceleration throughout the year as enterprise accounts ramped in North America and automation gained momentum.
This put us just above the midpoint of our 2024 guide for top line.
Our North American business was the engine that drove top line performance with sales up 36% and volumes up nearly 40%.
Full year net revenue were up 19% in North America, driven by voicefi and automation.
On a positive note, the breadths in North America in the 4th quarter improved as end users in our distribution channel saw increased demand as well, which we are hopeful will continue.
Top line improved in Europe and APAC, but they did not experience the same holiday season strength we saw in the US, resulting in an increase of 1% on a constant currency basis.
The environment in Europe, particularly post the US election, remains challenged with the larger industrial economies remaining a drag on performance and activity muted somewhat due to uncertainty about tariffs.
Cushioning there remains pressured while e-commerce and automation drove topline expansion.
On a constant currency basis, adjusted EBITDA increased 8% for the quarter and 14% for the year, resulting in us achieving the higher end of our guide coming into the year, which was for growth of 5 to 16% on a constant currency basis.
While you always want good performance to be more broad based overall, it was a strong quarter and a positive finish to the year that sets us up very well for 2025.
Generally speaking, we enter 25 in a better operating environment in North America than we experienced in 24.
In Europe things are less robust from a macro standpoint, but we are gaining traction through some of our enhancements to the sales organization and cross selling with our automation equipment to larger accounts.
We expect a meaningful growth in automation again in 2025 as we look to make a dent in our goal to get to $100 million plus for automation.
In Europe, recent announcements coming out of Germany and whatever it takes plan on defence and fiscal spending is encouraging.
The import cost environment varies somewhat by geography. Starting late last year, pricing in the US has moved up a few points given the greater demand in the marketplace for craft paper.
The North American paper market became increasingly tight in the 4th quarter, as the plastic to paper transition and strong holiday season drove longer lead times with the mills.
The strength of the demand in North America markets surpassed our expectations as well as I believe the mills, leading to some short-term inefficiencies in areas like freight and logistics that have extended into Q1, temporarily impacting our margin in the short term.
As we get deeper into 2025, we expect to be able to improve our margin in North America as the market adjusts to the greater demand environment.
We have enacted internal initiatives to improve margins as we expect to achieve the full benefit of our optimization efforts put in place at the end of 2024 and utilize longer lead times to enhance our planning and run time.
In Europe, the energy markets have been more volatile lately as winter was colder, resulting in a greater draw on reserves.
Current pricing on Dutch net gas is around EUR42 per megawatt, which, although meaningfully lower than the peak of 300, has moved up from the mid-20s area from a year ago.
So, far this has not impacted paper pricing meaningfully as pricing for the first two quarters are in line with what we experienced in Q4, but if it persists, it could put some upward pressure on pricing in the back half of 25.
Overall though, in EMEA and APAC, we believe we are well positioned to maintain our attractive margin profile. We clawed back post-COVID.
We'll take you through our guidance for 2025 after Bill's remarks, but to summarize, we're focused on accelerating top line growth this year, double-digit adjusted EBITDA growth, and working the investments we have made to generate cash and further the lever.
We started the year with some good momentum in January by announcing a transformational transaction agreement with our largest customer. We are excited to deepen our relationship with the largest buyer of packaging and automation solutions globally and believe this transaction aligns our interests for further growth and expansion.
In January, we also announced an exclusive commercial partnership with Rabo, a leader in computer and machine vision technology, to bring AI to the Pack station and provide actionable insights to improve efficiency and reduce waste for our customers.
This partnership is an excellent complement to Ranpak's growing suite of technology and AI-powered packaging solutions. Through our investments over the last couple of years, Ranpak can now provide customers with cutting edge vision, data, hardware, and robotic solutions to improve warehouse operations.
Our vision offerings include Rabo and RSquared robotics, which has internally developed the decision tower, applying a unique combination of 2D and 3D AI-supported computer vision technology for a variety of tasks, including quality assurance, through maximization, and precision void filling.
In data we have pre qubit, our proprietary data and cartonization software. This solution uses historical site order data to simulate machine utilization and box fill rates to help customers identify the optimal combination of box sizes and our machines given their shipping profile.
Our hardware and robotic solutions include internal offerings of the cut it, autofill, and pa it to reduce touches and labor, minimize waste, and offer attractive ROIs to our customers. We also have a strategic partnership with Pickle Robot, the market leader in using generative AI and machine learning to autonomously unload trucks and trailers.
We believe our innovation in this area has created real differentiation for us, and that is the feedback we are getting from our customers.
We believe we are the future of end of line packaging automation.
With that, here's Bill with more info on the quarter.

William Drew

Thank you, Omar. In the deck, you'll see a summary of some of our key performance indicators. We'll also be filing our 10K, which provides further information on RAMA's operating results.
Overall net revenue for the company in the 4th quarter increased 17% year over year on a constant currency basis, driven by exceptional volume growth in North America and increased automation sales, bringing full year net revenue up 10% on a constant currency basis.
For the quarter in the Europe and APAC reporting division, combined revenue increased 1% on a constant currency basis, driven by better automation sales, bringing full year net revenue up 3% on a constant currency basis.
North America had its highest net revenue quarter ever, driven by 39% volume growth and increased contributions from automation.
Net revenue for the quarter was up 36%, which brought the full year net revenue in the region to growth of 19%.
The momentum in North America is excellent as our execution with enterprise accounts continues to deliver results and positions us well for further volume growth in 2025.
Gross profit increased 21% in the quarter as reported gross margins of 39.4% for the quarter, improved 170 basis points versus the prior year.
Improved margins were driven largely by lower COGS depreciation and improved profitability in Europe and APEC as input costs remained favorable.
Excluding depreciation, gross profit increased 5.3% year over year due to the mixed impact of lower margin enterprise account revenue in North America. We believe we can improve the margin profile of this book of business in 2025 as we get more efficient with our operations.
SGA, excluding RSU expense, was up 1.5% versus prior year at $26.2 million.
Controlling our spend and leveraging our G and A investments remains a top priority.
We saw some of the savings initiatives we implemented in Q3 begin to flow in the 4th quarter, and we expect to keep our spend tight as we focus on maximizing profitability and cash flow generation.
We've invested a tremendous amount in personnel and additional products over the past few years, particularly as it relates to automation.
We are at a point now where we expect to leverage those investments and better absorb our fixed overhead.
At roughly $30 million in sales, automation remained a meaningful drag on our profitability, being a negative $7 million contribution to adjusted for the year.
We are expecting substantial growth in 2025 in automation, which would put us a little under break even by year end, which is a key milestone for us to hit.
As that business scales further and gets to 60 to 100 million in top line, we expect that business to contribute a high 10s to 20% adjust the margin with minimal CapEx needs.
This would meaningfully improve the overall capital intensity of our financial profile and drive our adjusted IAA margins on a consolidated basis back to the mid to high 20% area overall, which is our goal.
As a result of the improved sales volumes and improved gross profit in the fourth quarter, adjusted EBITDA improved 8% in the quarter on a constant currency basis, implying a 24.1% adjusted EBITDA margin.
This brings the full year's results to up 14% on a constant currency basis and a 22.7% adjusted dot margin for the year, which is a 90 bits improvement over the prior year.
Moving to the balance sheet and liquidity, we completed 2024 with a strong liquidity position and refinanced credit facility. We had a cash balance of $76.1 million and no drawings on our revolving credit facility, bringing our reported net leverage to four terms on an LTM basis.
Our recent peak of leverage was 5.7 times in the June quarter of 2023, and we have been steadily delivering since with the goal of growing adjusted EBITDA and getting back to generating cash.
Our next target is to get to between 2.5 to 3 turns of leverage, which we believe we can achieve in the next 18 months to 24 months.
Our steady progress in improving performance enabled us to refinance our term loan in December with a new syndicated seven-year term loan facility.
Our new facility is all UFD, so we continue to utilize cross currency swaps to hedge our capital structure. These swaps replace our USD exposure with Euro exposure, reducing our currency risk as it relates to debt service, and also enable us to save on interest expense by swapping our sulfur exposure with Eurobor, saving us roughly 130 bits on a hedge portion annually.
One thing to point out as it relates to currency is that outside of our cap structure which we hedge through cross currency swaps, our exposure is largely translation as our revenue and production costs in the regions we operate are largely matched in local currency, particularly in the US and Europe.
Our CapEx for the year was $33.1 million a reduction of 40% from 2023. We finished our Malaysia plant in August and have begun ramping up production there.
This marks the end of our multi-year investment cycle, as we've been saying, we now have fully invested world-class digital and physical infrastructure.
Related to CapEx, I want to speak briefly on tariffs.
The environment around this is obviously uncertain, but I wanted to share that from a paper sourcing perspective. We see minimal impact as we source locally in our production areas.
From a converted standpoint, we continue to work on ways to limit and mitigate potential impacts. In our CapEx plans for the year, the impact of the current tariffs on China increased our spend by roughly only a million dollars in 2025 compared to what it would have been in 2024.
One area I wanted to provide some additional color on as well with the accounting impact of the Amazon Lawrence Omar mentioned.
As you see this report in 2025, there will be some noise related to the revenue associated with Amazon as the value of the warrants are recognized. For folks who aren't familiar with these types of transactions, we will need to reduce a portion of our revenue from Amazon with the value of the warrants over the life of the deal. That means each period there'll be a non-cash decrease to our reported revenue figures, which will slow down through the income statement to gross profit, adjusted the net income.
You will see the impact of this clearly in the statement of cash flows where it gets added back in, as well as in the footnotes where we'll break out the value for the period. We wanted to flag this as the reported GAAP figures in the just will be impacted by the value of the warrants.
When evaluating our performance, we recommend looking at our income statement figures on a pro forma basis, adding those revenue offsets in to get a true sense of the cash flow performance.
While the reporting optics are a bit confusing at first, we believe this deal sets a great alignment for meaningful incremental growth and cash flow for Ranpak with the upcoming years.
With that I'll turn it to Omar.

Omar Asali

Thank you, Bill.
The past couple of years in 2024 in particular, have laid the foundation for the next chapter of Ranpak. We are executing and following our plan. Some of our key accomplishments include we re-architected the IT system and now have world-class technology driving our decision making and providing insights.
We want enterprise accounts with more to come and have economically aligned ourselves with the largest e-commerce player in the world.
We concluded our investment cycle and got back to cash generation mode.
For our next chapter, our goal is to deliver the following.
Automation at scale. That means $100 million plus in sales in the next few years. 2.
We have incentivized our largest customer to provide us with hundreds of millions of incremental spend and deepen our relationship with them.
3, we are focused on getting leverage to 2.5 times to 3 times.
Our goal is for our cash structure to not be a topic of discussion.
4, enterprise account wins and a lower leverage profile will enable us to go further on offense and scale the business.
5, as we get closer to our target leverage profile, we will have a lot more options on the menu related to capital allocation.
Our share price does not reflect the platform we have built and the momentum of this business.
I look forward to being able to go on offense, especially when our shares are under pressure.
Regarding guidance for the year, on a constant currency basis, we are forecasting net revenue growth in the area of 5% to 11% and adjusted EBITDA growth of 5% to 16%, calculated by translating 2025 forecasted metrics. And an exchange rate of EUR1 to EUR108, which represents the average exchange rate of 2024, which results in a range of 387 to $409 million in net revenue and 88 to $97 million for adjusted EBITDA.
This guidance reflects the expectation of a reported non-cash net revenue and adjusted EBITDA reduction of between $3million to $5 million in 2025 related to the recognition of foreign expense against Amazon revenue.
So, even though there may be a bit of noise this year as we absorb the impact of the 1st year of our new economic arrangement with our largest customer, overall, we feel great about the strategic and economic nature of this deal.
For reference, our prior method of reporting constant currency at a 115 exchange rate would have been $400 million to $425 million in top line and $92 million to 101 of adjusted EBITDA.
From a more general standpoint, our expectations going into 2025 are of a normalizing operating environment in e-commerce as the consumer and labour market in North America remain resilient.
We saw improving trends from the 4th quarter continuing into the start of the year in this area, which is encouraging.
Industrial activity is expected to remain lackluster globally until businesses get more confidence in the operating environment and adjust to the new norms post-election.
We expect to achieve mid to high single digit volume growth in PPS building on the momentum of 2024 and recognizing that we'll have a tough comparison in the second half.
Industrial automation remains a mega theme in an environment where labour costs and other rising inputs pressure margins.
Our solutions deliver real savings and efficiencies, minimize costs and waste. We are forecasting automation revenue to be up more than 50% in 2025.
Our forecasted growth and adjusted EBITDA of 5% to 16% reflects the contributions from the expected top line increase and improving margin profile.
We expect that capital expenditures will be between $36million to $38 million as our major investment cycle is complete, enabling us to focus on cash generation and deleveraging and taking into account current loans on tariffs, which obviously are dynamic.
We expect to generate roughly $20 million in cash in 2025 at today's currency levels, which provide us with the ability to pay down roughly $50 million of debt to help lower our interest burden and gross leverage profile.
Generally speaking, outside of the specific enterprise account activity driving CPS and automation performance that we are keenly aware of, we believe this guidance is somewhat conservative and reflects a continued, somewhat challenging near-term backdrop in Europe.
Expanding our presence in the Asia Pacific was a key accomplishment in 2024 and sets us up well to grow in the region.
As that factory ramps, lead times to get products to key markets such as Japan, Korea, Australia significantly reduced, and we have the opportunity to reduce our freight and logistics costs, making us much more competitive in the region.
Local paper sourcing is further upside. I'm excited about that as we have identified more local mills that could provide us with well priced paper relative to what we currently source in Europe.
Thank you all again. At this point, we'd like to open the line up for questions, operator.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

Greg Palm, Craig Hallam.

Greg Palm

Yes, good morning, thanks for taking the questions and congrats on doing everything you said you were going to do at the start of the year.

Omar Asali

Thank you, Greg. Good morning.

Greg Palm

Let's start with Amazon if we could, and wanted to get a little bit more color on kind of how you view 25 in terms of the ramp up of the commercial agreement and specifically are you able to give us some color on, maybe revenue expectations for this year relative to what you reported in 2024?

Omar Asali

Yes, let me start and then I'll ask Bill to come in. So, we continue to ramp up nicely with Amazon, as Greg, in our business, the second half of the year is always a lot more important than the first half, given, seasonality and holiday activity, etc.
So, right now we're actually doing quite a bit more with them across different facilities in the US. We're also expanding our dialogue outside of the US, in Europe, and in Asia Pacific with some of their, facilities there, and we're expanding dialogue, across our different our different offerings, not just in PPS but in automation, in coal chain, etc.
I'm expecting as the year goes on that we will continue to ramp up activity with them, so I'm H1stly expecting a very busy year for us with them, and we feel that we're pretty aligned given the strategic deal that we got together.
I'll let Bill maybe talk a little bit about scope, as throughout the year, we may move more and more towards an asset-like model with them.
Where basically the cost of the paper and the paper buying is not part of the calculation around warrants and revenue. So, that's something we continue to work and there'll be a transitional period for that, in the upcoming months and quarters. But well, I don't know if you want to add anything about scale.

William Drew

Yes, sure. So, I think from a from a volume perspective, we're expecting to continue to grow meaningfully with Amazon, we're expecting double digit volume growth there in a number of different areas. We think that there's really a good opportunity to continue to expand with them in North America as well as other parts of the world. So, we're excited about deepening the relationship there and, as the relationship evolves, there's other areas, within our portfolio that we can expand into.

Greg Palm

And when you when you talk about an evolving relationship with them specifically, should that translate into a higher installed base or is the thought that you're going to continue to sort of refurbish, existing machines in the field?

Omar Asali

Honestly, I think our hope and expectation is both. We continue to increase our footprint with them.
The dialogue, to be quite frank, Greg, is around very sizable opportunities.
We're not ready to sort of report any numbers per se, but the dialogue is expansive. It's around a lot of opportunities. It entails, increasing PPS and both new as well as refurbished equipment. It entails more consumables, frankly, it entails even some new areas that we want to enter that we believe we can help them with, and we can help them, hopefully over time we can build scale in some of these new opportunities. So, I feel like the level of activity and dialogue is very robust.
Let us see how the next few months go and when we have something more definitive to report, we will report back. I will say. That we've been talking about enterprise accounts, as for a number of quarters. And as evidenced by frankly Q3 and Q4, we were surprised to the upside with the level of activity and volume that was needed. To satisfy some of those accounts and that includes Amazon and other customers, and we're hoping and expecting that that trend will continue in 2025 and we think we can actually win more enterprise accounts in 2025. So, we're quite in North America we're quite encouraged with what we're seeing, Greg.

Greg Palm

Okay, great. Lastly, you pointed out that you have a lot of European exposure today and that's, I think, recently been, quite a big headwind and you mentioned kind of the whatever it takes some of the proposed stimulus over there. I mean, it's obviously too early to know what will happen. But is it, are you seeing, do you think you could see green shoots? Are you getting any feedback? I'm just trying to get a sense of whether this ends up maybe potentially being a source of strength at some point.

Omar Asali

So Europe, as we all know, has been a challenge. It's a very big piece of our footprint. It's a very important margin very important sorry, business for us with very attractive margins.
If you look at our guide, and I'll just make a bit of comment around our guide, you will see our guide for 25 has a little bit of a broad range in it, and I would argue has a little bit of conservatism in it. And that conservatism is largely driven by the macro picture and by Europe and uncertainty around Europe. So, we reflected that in our numbers because frankly what I'm seeing inside the business.
And what I'm seeing with some of our customers is a lot more bullish than our guide, but we tempered it given your question about Europe. The last couple of days, the announcements from Germany around stimulus, around defence, around whatever it takes are very encouraging. We're hoping it's early days. We're hoping that will translate. Into economic activity, into more confidence at CEO level, that type of activity can be very important for us. Europe is a very important market. Germany in particular is a very important market for Ranpak.
So I'm quite encouraged, but it's early days, and then you'll see the reaction whether it's in the EUR the last couple of days, whether it's in, a number of basically announcements around hopefully a slightly better macro backdrop. All these things will be helpful. And then of course there is the biggest question around geopolitics and around potential peace. And if all that transpires, that's going to be a very significant.
Tailwind for us. So, it's not reflected in our numbers. We're watching things closely. We are talking to our team constantly on the ground.
Let's see how the next few weeks again, these are very fresh announcements. Let's see the next few weeks what transpires on the ground, but these early signs are pretty positive, Greg.

Greg Palm

Yes, that makes sense. All right, I'll leave it there. Thanks.

Omar Asali

Thank you.

Operator

Gancham Punjabi from Baird.

Ghansham Panjabi

Yes, thanks, operator. Good morning everybody.
Morning. Omar, on the mid to high single digit volume growth expectation for 2025, how does that break down in terms of contribution from paper versus automation? And also what are you forecasting for e-commerce versus the industrial and markets because they understand the Amazon sort of relationship expansion, etc. But comparisons will be tougher, especially North American e-commerce in the back half of next year or 2025.

Omar Asali

Sure, let me start with just some commentary Ghan and then I'll have Bill maybe walk you through.
Through a bit more precise numbers, we continue to see attractive sort of backdrop in e-commerce. Amazon by far is the biggest, but as I stated, we are winning other pretty sizable enterprise accounts that we think will ramp up in 2025. And that will drive part of the growth. So in addition to Amazon, we're expecting more and more activity and ramp up in volume with other sizable accounts.
Amazon themselves, we believe there are a lot of opportunities that we can enter and frankly, even other geographies where today we are not active.
So it's tough, beyond the current business that we have with them, we think there's actually, despite the tough comp that you refer. We think there's quite a bit of growth opportunity there. On the industrial side, our forecast has been a little bit muted, frankly, more just given the macro backdrop and given what we're seeing out there in the marketplace.
So, we have not ascribed huge growth on the industrial channel, frankly, globally. And then the last piece in automation, the size of our business, we expect that in 2025 we will deliver north of 50%, 50% growth, and that's part of our growth algorithm. So, these are sort of the pieces that are coming together that we feel will drive the numbers that we outlined. But Bill, do you want to add any color?

William Drew

Sure, yes, just for the building blocks, if you think about the volume, the automation contribution, etc.
The way that we were trying to break it down was for PPS volume growth to be in that mid to high single digits, so at the low end and the high end of the range with automation contributing called 3 points to 5 points right at the low to high end, and then we've got 2 points to 3 points really of kind of what we would call price mix headwind with, point of that being the Amazon warrants.
So that's how you get to the kind of that 5% to 11% cons.

Troy Jensen

Okay, that's perfect. And then going back to 4Q, the EBITDA margins come in where you thought they would, 17% core sales growth versus the 8% on EBITDA growth.
Yeah, just give us a little bit more color on that.

Omar Asali

Sure, I'll be, yes, just to be. Blunt about where we are. The growth surpassed our expectations, so we knew that we were winning business and that we're going to ramp up. We tried to do the best forecasting we could. We tried to basically have our team and our physical footprint ready for meaningful growth, and growth ended up being a bit bigger than we expected, and frankly, That meant we were not as efficient as we wanted to be.
Our top priority was instead of focusing on efficiency, [Gan] was focusing on a good customer experience as we're onboarding and wrapping up with customers, and that meant some pressure on gross margin. It meant, frankly, a little bit of added resources, etc. In our G and A to make sure we're fulfilling, customers' expectations and hopefully surpassing that.
I expect now that we have a better handle of, that growth, and I feel we have a better handle of the expectation from where we are here going forward. You will start seeing more and more efficiency from us, and that will be reflected in the margin profile right now. The top priority at Ranpak is driving growth and making sure our customers are happy, and we believe over time as we normalize, you will see more of that growth flow into both gross margin and margin.

Troy Jensen

Okay, perfect. And then Bill, in terms of the EBITDA bridge for 25, 88 to 97 in terms of how that translates into free cash flow, can you just give us the parameters associated with that?

William Drew

Sure, so from a free cash flow perspective, Omar mentioned and I mentioned in the prepared remarks that generating cash and using that to pay down debt is a top priority for Ranpak. So, there's a tremendous amount of focus on cash generation within the company going into 2025.
If you want to do kind of a walk from the data to free cash, right, if you if you start kind of in that midpoint of the range there in $93million, $94 million. We're expecting about $36million, $37 million of CapEx cash interest. We expect to be about $34 million on a net basis if they stay where they are.
We expect to have, roughly $4 million or so, $5 million of cash taxes, and then a slight benefit in work and cap to get you right around that $20 million in free cash.

Troy Jensen

Okay, perfect. And then just finally, just so I understand it because New for us in terms of the warrant expense, etc.
So, the $3million to $5 million in warrant expense you're embedding for 2025 on EBITDA, that assumes an embedded sales contribution from Amazon, is that correct?

William Drew

That's correct. So, we have to allocate a portion of our expected sales to that warrant expense.

Troy Jensen

And so just thinking out to 26, would it also be 3% to 5% or would it vary depending on the sales contribution?

William Drew

It'll vary based on the sales contribution, so hopefully it grows. Okay.

Troy Jensen

Okay, thanks so much, guys. Thanks for taking my questions.

William Drew

Thanks.

Operator

Troy Jensen, Cantor Fitzgerald.

Troy Jensen

Hey, gentlemen, congrats on all the great news here Recently.

William Drew

Thanks, Troy. Good morning.

Troy Jensen

Good morning.
Hi, so, quick, just clarity here, automation, I think you guys said was $30 million in the quarter and you expect, ex excuse me, 30 million in the year and expected to grow greater than 50% in 25.

Omar Asali

That's exactly right. So, our expectation is somewhere, let's call it 45 plus for 2025 and top line for automation.

William Drew

All right, perfect. And then is there just one or two, automation products that's driving this growth or is it more broad based? Is this, related to some of these products you know in early January? Yeah.

Omar Asali

That's there's a lot of activity in automation. There's a number of what I'm going to call, let's call it, smaller opportunities a few pieces of equipment here and there. There are a couple of sizable accounts that we have been working with for a number of years.
In many cases, Troy. We've installed things in last year and the year before, and we expect to ramp up and provide more automation solutions to some of their other facilities. So, it's a mix of some large repeated customers as well as some of the smaller, orders here and there.
There are probably globally close to 3 or 4 very large enterprises that are driving part of that growth, not all of it, but a meaningful part of it. And frankly that's the nature of the business. If you're not winning with large accounts in automation, for e-commerce and for warehouses and fulfillment, then, I don't think you're a real player in this space.
The space is a little bit chunky, so that's driving part of the growth. The good news. Is in the majority of these cases, Troy, these are actually existing customers with our solutions installed where we think we can ramp up. These are not completely new customers with new orders and new relationships.

Troy Jensen

Got it. Okay, perfect. Maybe a couple of questions for Bill here. Was there a 10% customer in Q4 or all of 2024?

William Drew

There was, so starting in in Q3 it got close and then Q4 there was a 10% customer and then for the full year there was.

Troy Jensen

Okay, perfect. And then just last question, can you help us out with the revenue seasonality in Q1? I mean, kind of coming off a strong Q4 and what does it kind of typically seasonally do in the March quarter?

William Drew

Sure, so typically there's a step down from Q4 to Q1, right, and that's been, high single digits, historically and sometimes low double digits depending on how strong the holiday season.
But you know the way that the seasonality of the business typically works is Q1 is typically the lowest in terms of revenue contribution, and then it slowly builds throughout the year, so it gets a little bit bigger in Q2. Then really the second half is where start to see it ramp up where you know Q3 is the next largest and then Q4 obviously with the e-commerce holiday season by far being the largest quarter for us.
Typically for the, this year when we're looking at it, we're going to be moving more probably towards the 47, 53 type first half, second half, maybe a little bit more if you have a bigger holiday season.

Troy Jensen

Got it. All right, well, thanks, gentlemen, and good luck this year.

Omar Asali

Thank you so much.

Operator

We have no further questions. I would like to turn the call back over to Bill Drew for closing remarks.

William Drew

Thank you, Julianne, and thank you all for joining us today. We look forward to speaking again soon for Q1.

Operator

This concludes today's conference call.
Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
And we're now in private. Have a great day everyone. You're welcome.

William Drew

Thanks Julian. Take care.