Auction Technology Group plc

Welcome to ATG's half-year results. We're very happy to be able to speak to you today about these results, and we feel really good about them. Becky, if you can go to slide five. So just kind of setting it up a little bit, I think before diving into this slide, One of the things we feel best about as we come to these results is just as we exited December, there were three big questions out there we felt about ATG that all the investors were posing us. And one was on the art and antique side, how procyclical would you be? Would you be able to grow off the really incredible growth that you saw during COVID? Or would you see a reversal in your volume or people moving back offline once they were able to go attend auction houses? The second big question was around the industrial commercial group and people saying, okay, well, are you going to see the volume that will compensate for the fact that asset price inflation may be a little bit less? And then the third point that people were looking at was would the ATG pay, which was being launched onto proxy bid, receive a good response and would there be good adoption or not? And I think one of the things that we're most happy about as we come to these results is the fact that we think we've addressed all three of those questions while strengthening the business and increasing the competitive moat around what we do. So We'll cover that in a little bit more detail between Tom and me coming up. But for now, just on this slide, this is for the people who are less familiar, maybe for the first time on this call. What does ATG do? Well, we are unlocking the value of the curated secondary goods market and accelerating the growth of the circular economy. And the key thing, the key way that we do that is we connect bidders from around the world to auction houses around the world. We work with several thousand, about 4000 auction houses connecting to bidders in 160 countries around the world. Those auction houses are listing 10 to 12 billion per year that we help facilitate the sale of over 20 million items per year. And we connect them to bidders who are generating now with our acquisition of estate sales dot net over 270 million web sessions per year. Those for those auction houses. The key reason bidders come to us is because we offer the best selection of specialized and unique inventory. They come to us for the convenience because they can bid on dozens of auctions at any given time. And they come to us because of trust, because everything that we sell on our site is listed by an expert auctioneer and in a curated format. And auctioneers come to us because of the technology that we provide for the cost savings and operational efficiencies. But more than anything, they come for the bidders because those bidders help generate higher asset sale prices for the consignors. So that's kind of the essence of what we do.

Go to the next slide.

So these are one of those happy slides where it shows everything up and to the right. But the key reason that we wanted to do this was because the big questions about ATG way back were, could we grow during COVID? People wondered. Then when we grew, people said, could you grow on top of that exceptional growth? And then they were saying, well, now that COVID's over, could you grow again? And I think what we like to show is that whether you look at an organic basis or through the acquisitions we've made, it means that we are in fact growing and you can see that that GMV is going up. In terms of the revenue growth, you can see that, again, it's not just translating into volume of what's being sold, but that we're actually growing revenues as well. And we're growing organically. But again, with our seventh acquisition, which is a core part of our story, that's accelerating that growth even further. And then finally, we were able to do that despite this uncertain economic macroeconomic backdrop while improving our financial profile.