Bytes Technology Group plc

Good morning and welcome to Bytes Technology Group, our full year 2026 financial results. I'm Sam Mudd, the CEO, and I'm joined today by Andrew, our CFO. I'm going to begin with a quick introduction to the business for those of you that are new to us, and then I'll hand over to Andrew who'll provide the financial review, and then he'll be handing back to me for the full business review. Bytes Technology Group is one of the largest providers of software solutions in the world, and we operate under two brands, both of which have a rich heritage in their markets. Bytes focuses on the private sector, and Phoenix focuses on the public sector. We have a huge diversified customer base, and we have more than 200 vendors that we represent, with Microsoft being one of our most strategic vendors. On the right, you can see that we've been delivering strong growth over the last year or so, and we have good cash conversion and consistent capital returns to shareholders over the last five years since IPO. Looking at today's highlights and starting on the left-hand side, firstly, we've made good strategic progress and implemented intentional organisational change and improvements which were needed to expand our services and streamline our customer focus. We believe these enhancements will drive our growth and enable us to stay ahead of the wider transitions that we're seeing in our industry today, and more on that later. Suffice to say, we will continue to evolve as an organisation as the landscape changes. And secondly, we have delivered good cash conversion and consistent capital returns of 74 million to shareholders in the last year. We're confident that despite growth being temporarily impacted in H1, H2 has showed movement back to recovery, including strong growth with Microsoft as we annualize the incentive changes. And thirdly, the full year 27 momentum, we enter 2021. the new financial year, with good sales momentum and expect a return to high single-digit to low double-digit growth, gross profit growth. The sector alignment is progressing well, and the teams that are moving are looking forward to being a part of the dedicated businesses and focus on their respective sectors. Now let me hand over to Andrew. He'll give you the full details on the numbers.

Thanks, Sam, and good morning to everyone. I just want to apologize for my head cold and for those that are on the webcast. I didn't reach anyone by hand, so hopefully I haven't spread it further. So thank you for joining the presentation. Our headline numbers, we increased gross income or GRR by 11.5%, driven by software and services sales. Gross profit grew 2.5% to £167.3 million, impacted by the Microsoft incentive changes. as well as the segmentation in our private sector sales teams. Operating profit of £62.7 million was 5.6% lower than in the prior year, however, in line with our guidance from October. This reflected both the lower than planned growth profit growth and the ongoing investment into our future. We will provide more detail on the next slide. We have a strong financial position with cash conversion remaining above 100%. We've also delivered further growth in our returns to shareholders with a 2% increase in ordinary dividends together with the share buyback program completed in November of 25, bringing back the total cash return to shareholders to £74 million. Our net customer numbers were broadly stable year on year, resulting in a 2.4% increase in GP per customer. This comprised new customers contributing around £5 million to GP and a renewal rate of 99% from existing customers. Starting with the headline numbers, gross invoice income, GRI, grew by 11.5% with public and private sectors growing broadly in line with each other. Gross profit, or GP, growth of 2.5% comprised of public sector growth of 7.4% and private sector decline of 0.3%. GP over GRI this year was 7.1%, a reduction of 0.7% from the prior year. This reduction reflects the impact of the Microsoft incentive changes, effective from January of 25. Microsoft remains our largest vendor and continues to contribute 30% of our GP. The incentive changes that impacted us impacted the private and public sectors differently. remain the primary program used to fulfill the Microsoft public sector requirements. As we invoice the customers, the reduction in incentives does not impact the GII, but reduces our GP. For the private sector, enterprise agreements are recognized only in the rebate. Therefore, our GP to GII remains at 100%. Part of the mitigation for the reduction of incentives is to move our customers to a Microsoft CSP program, On a like-for-like basis, we make more gross profit, but as we now invoice the customer, our GP to GRI margin reduces. I have given detail on the administrative costs, which increase 8.5% to highlight some of the key changes in our cost base and to help with your modeling. Salary costs increase 17% year-on-year, driven by headcount growth, and this includes strengthening of our senior leadership roles and annual wage increases. Average headcount growth was 12%. Over 40% was annualised hires made in FY25, with less hiring this year. We capitalised £1.8 million of our employee cost in relation to our project to modernise some of our IT systems. In FY27, this £1.8 million of employee cost will be expensed now that the projects are complete. Commissions and bonuses are down 0.4%. Within this, Commissions have trended broadly in line with GP growth, with bonuses, which are driven by targets, reducing. In FY27, we expect bonuses to be just over £2 million higher based on our full year guidance. Social security costs are up 20% due to the increased national insurance contributions effective from April 25, which has now been annualised. Share-based payments are down 85% due to lower profitability. impacting the level of investing of our performance share plans. We would expect share based payments to be around £1 million for FY27. Other administrative expenses increased 23% driven by investment in systems to improve employee and customer experience, travel and entertainment as we encourage our teams to connect in person with both our customers and our vendors. amortization will increase from the development of our IT systems, which we've developed over the last two years. With this last component in addition to the returning developer salary costs and higher bonuses, we expect 4.5% of cost normalization in FY27. Turning to our income analysis, on the left, we see GRI and GP for the full year, split by both our service types, as well as public, private sectors. The public sector GP growth rate was ahead of the private sector, where the realignment of the sales resulted in an adjustment period in H1. Momentum improved in H2, however, against the tougher comparator. In the public sector, GP was more heavily impacted in H1 by the Microsoft incentive changes, H1 being the peak of the Microsoft renewal period. Growth rebounded in H2, Microsoft incentive changes resulted in a lower software GP growth in GRI. Microsoft GP returned to double-digit growth in H2 and remains around 50% of the group. Services grew strongly on the top and the bottom line, driven by continued investment in our offering and strong customer demand. The services margin was driven by both mix and cost efficiencies. OP to GP margin was higher in H1 than in H2 due to higher commissions rates in H2. These one sales targets are exceeded and also head counts phasing. Turning now to our cash flow bridge, we capped last 4.1 million pounds of software development costs in the year. And this relates to the two IT platforms. One to provide a marketplace gateway for our customers so that they can seamlessly purchase products in line from a range of our vendors. And the other is to enable us to improve our operational processes around customer order processing. The marketplace platform is now complete with a cumulative CAPEX of 3.4 million pounds. We started amortizing it in H2 FY26 at an annualized rate of 0.4 million pounds. The second platform is expected to go live earlier this year. The combined asset, 7.6 million pounds at year end, and this results in an annualized amortization of around a million pounds. Cash conversion continues to follow the same cycle that we've discussed in the past. And as a reminder, we tend to see lower cash conversion in H1, followed by a very strong cash conversion in the second. For the full year, using operating profit as our denominator, we had a cash conversion of 105%. After tax, and returning 74 million pounds to our shareholders, we are left with a cash balance of 98.6 million pounds at year end. Looking towards our balance sheet, and this, I hope, will provide more context of how we think about our cash balance. We look to maintain a strong balance sheet for two reasons. Firstly, large gross payable balances at year end are inherent in our business models, and working capital outflows in H1 align to our seasoned seasonality around GRI due to the Microsoft and public sector year-ends. Secondly, we operate in a negative capital environment, which was around $80 million at year-end. Taking both of these into account, we seek to remain a relatively strong level of cash on our balance sheet and remain debt-free. Moving on to a reminder of how we think about allocating our capital for maximising value creation to our shareholders. Sam will pick up more on the first point here in a moment, but in summary, there's a strong market growth for the software solution that we sell. Investing in our organic growth through sales and technical people in order to drive customer growth remains our key priority. We are committed to returning between 40% to 50% of our post-tax adjusted profits to shareholders via ordinary dividends. I'm therefore pleased to announce that the Board has approved a final dividend of 7 pence per share, bringing the full-year dividend to 10.2p. That represents a 2% increase on FY25. Selective value accretive M&A remains an opportunity in our industry, and we are actively monitoring opportunities by yet to find something that ticks our strategic quality and valuation criteria. And finally, we return excess cash back to our shareholders. In FY26, we completed a £25 million share buyback and are launching a new 25 million pound buyback today. This while maintaining our working capital requirements. With that, I'll hand back to Sam.

I want to start by taking a step back and highlight the strong growth market that we're in and why. Firstly, we have only 3% share of a large £82 billion addressable market in the UK software solutions across both the private and the public sector. There's a significant opportunity to grow our footprint with our existing customers as well as winning new ones. And secondly, the overall market is growing strongly. The solutions we sell meet four key areas of structural growth, AI, cloud, cyber and services, and these drive us all interlinked. Our customers want to reshape their businesses with AI. And they need their data and their applications in the cloud to do so. And this is often increasing their cyber attack surface. All of this, adopting AI, modernizing and securing infrastructure to do so, requires more specialist services and experience than ever before. Thirdly, one of our significant growth opportunities and drivers is Microsoft, who remain our largest vendor at 50% gross profit. and remain a strategic partner. They're constantly a cornerstone of IT budgets and this creates a key gateway for us connecting to organisations on their wider technology investments, which in turn supports our growth with other vendors. Let me turn to our strategic pillars and how they enable us to capture and drive our organic growth. We have three key levers of growth. Our people, our vendors, and our customers. And the propositions that we've built from all of these. We're a sales-focused business and our people drive our sales. We have a highly engaged, well-incentivized team who put our customers first and are accountable for their experience with us. We also drive our growth by being a trusted and valued partner to our vendors. And we turn our vendor partners' technologies into wider solutions. The vendors want us to make their technologies relevant and importantly sticky for customers because this drives consumption and this is becoming the dominant revenue mechanism for many of them. The way we do this is through services. Importantly, this trust and ability earns vendor investments in our business and for us to initiate customer activity into new technology areas. And finally, we aim to bring our people and vendor strategies together in the most customer-centric way possible. We increasingly organise how different customers actually buy and what they specifically need. We organise ourselves around that. And this is so that we can provide them with the best mix of support and solutions which are tailored to their needs by their size and their sector. Trust, value, choice and service remain key to our customers and also our ongoing focus. The industry that we're operating in has substantially changed and evolved over the last few years, and if I think back to my three decades in the industry, change has been a constant. There are broadly three transformations ongoing which all create opportunity. Firstly, the way that customers pay for their software continues to move from per-seat licensing to consumption. The shift started with the growth of cloud and customers buying compute and storage, and based on activity levels, not headcount anymore. And this is only increasing with AI and token usage being brought out to market. So it makes it more important than ever to help customers get value from the solutions that they buy. This is also increasing the monetary investment that vendors are giving partners to support adoption and consumption. And secondly, customer demand increases. continues to shift from wanting specific point products to whole solutions. This is driven by increasing complexity of modern IT. The customers need their IT estate to be secure, cost-optimized, and integrated. And this leads to them increasingly needing scalable solutions from us, which are more economic, safer to deploy, and easier to operate than individual point products. This in turn increases the growth potential for those that can advise, integrate, manage and deliver business outcomes for those customers. And finally, these changes together create a shift where customers and vendors need deeper relationships with us. Rather than being seen as a reseller, we're now seen as a partner. And these industry changes don't impact our structural growth opportunities. but they do drive a need for us to evolve in order to stay aligned and be able to capture growth in the medium term. This year, we've implemented strategic changes to align to these transitions. Firstly, customer-led segmentation. Back in March 2025, at the start of the year, we reorganised our BITES private sector sales teams from a single generalist structure to specialist teams. We segmented customers by their organisation size based on their number of seats into enterprise, corporate and mid-market. And our technical specialists moved into the same customer segments as sales. The rationale is that private sector customers need different things from us if they are small versus if they're a large organisation. And vendor incentives are structured differently too, accordingly to size. So this change will enable us to be a better seller and drive growth to customers as the industry evolves. And as Andrew has already set out, the impacted GP growth in our private sector business in H1 was impacted, but it's stabilised in H2. And the effects of the changes have settled into the business and the sales pipeline has returned to normal in H2. In FY27, we move forward with a clean comparator. Moving to services-led capability, services GP grew 38% this year. We're growing in three broad areas. Firstly, using customer vendor investment to help customers deploy and adopt. Secondly, providing managed services to support the customer through the lifecycle. And thirdly, we're expanding services in our portfolio to ensure we can deliver integrated solutions around AI. And lastly, the sector-led go-to-market change announced in March 2026. We commenced this small change where we'll remove the market overlap between our two businesses to make each business a pure play in their sector. A small number of account managers will move within the group, but customer relationships will be unaffected. Bites will focus solely on the private sector, and Phoenix will focus solely on the public sector. This will further strengthen their ability to deliver full, customised, focused solutions and services and allow deeper collaboration on shared services and vendor partnerships. Our people are our core assets, and I'm proud of their energy, enthusiasm and commitment. We increased headcount 7% year on year, and that said, our average headcount increased 12% following the strong H2 growth of last year. This measured investment was focused on sales staff to drive future growth and technical delivery staff to meet the needs of services demand. And within this, we've added new practice leads to ensure we build depth as well as breadth. We fitted out the first of two buildings acquired in FY25 and this adds capacity to existing modern and inviting workspaces. And we have plans to expand our London footprint in FY27. Our culture and engagement remains strong. Our EMPS increased to 62, up from 57. We were placed 14th in the FT's UK Best Employers ranking, the highest in our sector. And we increased the number of £1 million GP sellers. Having just spoken about our continued investment in sales and the increase of the £1 million GP sellers, I want to illustrate that. why we make that investment. You'll see on this slide the maturity profile for successful sellers in the business, and I've presented it here as steps because that's how we coach sellers in the business. Self-staff retention also grows with maturity, which is equally important, and this remains incredibly high amongst our top sellers. Our new sellers open the door in a number of ways, such as our Microsoft expertise, our licensing pedigree, and increasingly our services capability. And they expand from this with additional solutions from Microsoft and other vendors as they gain trust and learn more about the customer environments. And this is an iterative process and our customer requirements are so broad and there are always additional opportunities to go after. As I mentioned, our job is to turn our vendor partner technologies into solutions and we work closely with them to do so. Microsoft remains our largest vendor and our most strategic partner It's the cornerstone of our customer budget. It's also the gateway to the majority of their technology decisions. So covering all Microsoft bases supports our growth with other vendors. But more importantly, it helps us drive value for our customers. We often support collaboration within their organizations where many silos might exist. And I'm delighted the relationship goes from strength to strength. I just got back from visiting the HQ in Seattle only two weeks ago. Our Microsoft GII grew at 11.5% year-on-year, both across the private and the public sector. In H2, Microsoft GP returned to double-digit growth with incentive changes absorbed. And where Microsoft is investing, we are delivering. Our Microsoft services around pre-sales advisory implementation and adoption increased 31%. We've also deepened our relationship with other key vendors this year. We can continue to see growth with AWS in cloud, Flexera in optimization, Sentinel-1 in cyber, and Rubrik and VMware in the hybrid infrastructure space. I'm now going to show you a clip of a discussion I had with Microsoft's UK and Ireland channel lead around our partnership, Nick Hederman. And just before we press the start button, a little fun fact for you. Nick Hederman, he provides over the entire UK channel ecosystem and used to be Steve Barmer's demo buddy. Steve liked working with Nick so much he decided to take him on a tour around the world that lasted many, many years until Steve lost his job and then Nick had to come back to the UK and find a different role. But we work tremendously well with Nick. So on that note, I'd like to just share a brief snippet of the video. There is a longer version of this that we'll provide the link to you with as well. Hi, I'm Sam Mudd, the CEO of Bytes Technology Group, and I'm delighted to be with Nick Hedeman today, who is the Microsoft UK and Ireland channel lead. We have been thriving with Microsoft as a partner, growing over a 40-year period, and I'm so excited about the era that we're entering now around AI. It's reminiscent of the internet era, which, as we all know, was a point in time where pervasive computing started to drive whole new work patterns.

So we have this program called the Microsoft Cloud AI Partner Program, which is very rich and has a number of different capabilities within it, from solution designations and specializations, right the way through to partner programs that we can collectively take to our joint customers to really help those customers to accelerate their technology usage and adoption. And I know that you're capable at leveraging those programs and plenty of great examples, and maybe you can share some of them.

Yeah, no, we use that funding. to really take customers to the next level of either envisioning or seeing the art of the possible, the technology and what it can do to drive the benefits back into their business so that their utilization of the features, the functionality, are elevated to the next level. And that comes back to customers that might have a license or they might have bought into a technology, but they're not truly using it to its full potential. So that funding drives it to that level. So Nick, as I think about the 40 years journey we've been on, I just want to thank you because I think the growth ambition that Microsoft have had has certainly been part of our ambition and we've in parallel gone on this journey. But it's not just a Microsoft conversation all the time, is it? And I know you have some thoughts around that.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think you do a very good job of using the Microsoft platform as a starting point with all of your customers. But in certain customer situations, there may be additional third-party technologies that are required to complement that. Yeah. you not only have the capability to lead with Microsoft technologies, but also think about the complementary technologies from third parties that you can bring into the conversation.

Yeah, and I think Microsoft, you know, their maturity of embracing that wider ecosystem and involving them in conversations and co-sell motions, again, you are absolutely outstanding at driving that. And our sellers, you know, embrace this. And again, it's part of, the reality of the complex world of IT that we're all operating in, right?

And one of the really cool things that will happen more and more now in this new agentic era is some of the technologies you may be building for yourself internally may end up becoming IP that you put into our marketplace and we take to customers together. So that ecosystem of some of the third-party solutions that complement Microsoft technologies may change. over time be coming from you directly, which is really quite a nice thought.

Absolutely. A small segment of the bigger video. I'd like to now talk about our services and where they come into the technology lifecycle and where we partner with vendors to provide those services. Pre-sales, we provide advisory to identify gaps and opportunities which help customers shape decisions before they buy. A great example is the cybersecurity space where our customers are currently trying to answer two questions. One, how do we adopt AI safely? And two, how do we actually trust our environment? We offer governance, risk, and compliance assessments to help them answer those two questions and create priorities for their security position. We help them design and deliver the solutions, which means, from a delivery point of view, helping customers deploy and adopt the solution which drives the consumption. And post-sales, We can provide the support around customer solutions or even manage them. And these services are often the linchpin in helping customers achieve their desired business outcomes. And this is what sits behind the 38% services GP growth that we've reported. It's just not one thing. It's our capability across the technology lifecycle. Roughly one-third of those services are pre-sales professional services, which are project-based, and two-thirds are post-sales managed services and reoccurring. I want to talk a little bit about AI now. The fact that AI will drive growth across all of our customer technology spending, and we're well positioned to benefit from that. We're seeing the start of these trends already. AI drives our customers to need cloud infrastructure for compute, storage and governance for data, and networking and connectivity for access. And this all needs to be secured. And I'll talk about how we bring all of this together on the next slide. But importantly, this need for an integrated solution means that we are positioned well as a major Microsoft partner with frontier firm status with deep services capability. Many of our customers have the compliance, the identity and access and the security foundations for AI in their existing Microsoft state. So our existing relationship with them around Microsoft is often the start of that AI journey and expansion. Our work with the NHS is a prime example of how we're expanding an existing customer on AI and how the market changes. I mentioned earlier that we have become more customer-centric, providing more services to deliver wider solutions at scale to win more business like this. We work with a number of NHS trusts across the UK. Their technology needs are becoming more complex, and by having more specialist sales teams focus on the public sector and on healthcare, this allows us to support them and that complexity. In 2025, we partnered with NHS England to deliver over 80 tailored workshops to a range of NHS trusts and to inform and assess their AI use case opportunities. This has led to the largest global Microsoft-funded rollout where we are helping them with envisioning, deployment, and adoption of Copilot to several hundred thousand employees in 2026. Having a more specialist customer-centric sales team that understands our customer needs, it makes us, as a partner, deliver the services and solutions and not just simply be a reseller around point products. This is what our clients need more and more from us in the AI era. The complexity of AI adoption, the governance, the integration, the data readiness, the security considerations, is precisely the kind of complexity our customers pay us to navigate. And this slide outlines the different aspects of what we provide on AI. The mistake we see repeatedly in the market is organisations chasing AI outcomes without the foundations to run them safely, secure them, or realise the value. So when a customer is faced with a challenge like deploying a secure AI-driven agentic solution, This isn't just an AI task, it cuts across multiple disciplines, and it is where a collaborative, cross-practice approach to create one solution really matters. We follow a simple life cycle of advise, build, and secure. We advise customers on where AI can create the business value. We build scalable, production-grade platforms, not just proof-of-concepts that stall. and we secure it by design, embedding governance risk and compliance from day one. Around that core, our AI practice consultants, they design the models, the agents and the workloads, the infrastructure. Consultants build the landing zones and the platforms that they run on. And the cloud and security and governance risk and compliance teams ensure that this is safeguarded for trust, compliance and resilience. And adoption and change management training make sure the value actually lands with the users. This result is repeatable, enterprise-grade AI delivery aligned to Microsoft's frontier firm vision, trusted by customers, and scalable as the demand accelerates. So to summarize, I've outlined how we're well positioned to take advantage of the growing IT market, especially as AI becomes more ubiquitous across businesses today. We carried out our strategic changes with the private sector change bedding in during H2 and now beginning to show clear positive results. The Microsoft incentive changes are now annualised and our partnership continues to offer a gateway to new vendors. In FY27, we expect gross profit growth of high single digit to low double digit. Operating profit, we expect to be broadly flat, absorbing the approximate £4.5 million of cost normalisation we discussed earlier. And medium term, our ambition is unchanged. We want to expand our wallet share with customers, capture the structural demand in our market. And finally, I want to touch on the announced board and executive committee changes. The board has decided to split the currently combined roles of CFO and COO, held by Andrew, to support our next phase of growth. Andrew will be standing down as CFO once a suitable replacement has been appointed, at which date he will step down from the board. And thereafter, he will remain in the group and transition into the COO role. I'm grateful for Andrew's five-year contribution as CFO to the group and board member, and we're pleased that we will be retaining his long-standing knowledge into the business and it's the operational experience. Thank you. We'll take some questions now.

Morning, guys. from . Couple of questions for me. In terms of your services portfolio, what is the market for potential both on M&A in terms of your services gaps that you're looking at, or is the intention to sort of kind of partner, work with existing partners and maybe choose from that sort of kind of range of partners you have? Secondly, in terms of the non-Microsoft vendors, obviously with Microsoft having grown double digit in the second half and overall second half GP growth being closer to 5%, then the non-Microsoft vendors obviously perform closer to flat. Now, clearly there's the pull forward impact from last year that's probably not flattering those numbers. So if you could give us a sense of the underlying performance of the other non-Microsoft vendors if you remove that impact.

Sure. Okay. Let me talk a little bit about M&A. I think we've been very transparent around the fact that we're selective and very careful about any potential candidates we might consider, and we've been active over the last two years, thinking about how we accelerate on organic services capability. So let me be clear. We think about the core areas that I've referred to throughout this presentation, security, AI, and cloud as being those core areas that our customers are creating demand for services around. ongoing investment and that continues with technical heads coming into the business, the practice leads that I've talked about and obviously dedicating ourselves around the Microsoft Frontier Partner Program and other vendor initiatives such as the Broadcom pinnacle area where we've got capability. We look at the partner ecosystem and to your point, Tin Tin, the partners we work with where you have obviously, proximity and familiarity and trustworthiness in terms of their capabilities. So, for sure, that's a community we provide over and we work with closely, you know, as well as providing our own direct services. So, yes, that's certainly a community of potential targets and, you know, we think about The most important attribute is would it fit into the portfolio and, you know, give us that acceleration. And secondly... cultural fit. That's probably in fact the primary piece of consideration. When you think about the last acquisition with Phoenix into the group, highly successful and great fit, we will be looking for something that is adjacent to our core capabilities and that would at a cultural level come in and be additive, not a distraction. So I think that answers that question. In terms of Microsoft growth and non-Microsoft vendors, You're right, the pull forward in FY25 was clearly one of the reasons why the non-Microsoft vendors didn't perform as strongly. I think there's also another explanation. When we moved into the mitigation era around Microsoft incentive changes, on the private sector side, we had the big push around EA to CSP conversion. and that required an awful lot of dedicated management time, intentionality, and we know that for that period of time, probably the first half of FY26, meant the attention came off the non-Microsoft vendors. So I think that's the other explanation as well as the pull forward. We resumed business as usual back into H2, and I'm delighted to see that momentum and a lot of the awards and accolades and the growth get back to what we would expect for non-Microsoft vendors. It's a really key part of our strategy, Tintin. So it's not an area we want to neglect, and I hope a lot of the presentation today spoke about the cross-fertilization of if you're deep with Microsoft, it does enable you to have those other additive conversations with other vendors and co-sell. Marketplace, of course, is another route to market to bring in those non-Microsoft vendor discussions.

Thank you. Just a couple of questions from me. On the services GP plus 38%, do you have what that was in public and private services? I assume it's dominated by public, which would be interesting to know. And the second one is more sort of a broader question. Following on a little bit from Tintin in the sense of you've got breadth of complexity or breadth of domain capabilities. Your customers have a much more complex market, as you alluded to. Do you have all the capabilities in place that you require? You should be taking market share versus many of your peers. But do you have a wish list of maybe other capabilities to add into that beyond Tintin sort of services question on sort of thinking vendors, hardware, other capabilities or, in fact, any other restructuring within the business you need to do to maximise your position?

I'll come to the last point, other restructure. Nothing planned. You know, everything that we've talked about has been very considered and, there are no other changes being planned. But to come back to the services growth, we don't provide detailed guidance on the sectors, but I think conversationally we've always been open about the fact that public sector has high demand for partners like Phoenix Bites and lean into us where we have capability and we've got talent There has been an exodus of key technical skills from public sector over the last five plus years, which means that they're struggling to keep up with accreditations and move as fast as the industry pace is shifting at the moment. So we have seen good demand from public sector, but equally we're seeing some very positive signs and great momentum in private. So it isn't all about one sector. In terms of domain capabilities, Have we got it all in place? No. If you think about a matrix of skills across both of our operations, there are gaps. And that's exactly where we look for M&A to potentially fill, accelerate, and to bring new capability into the portfolio. So we know there are areas where we're not completely staffed up within our own internal capability, but we also have a very rich partner ecosystem. So back to Tintin's point, we've partnered magnificently with other vendor partners, and over the years that's been something we're very proud of. So that supplements at the moment. But as you can imagine, the strategy is bringing more and more in-house in terms of building up our capability and those practice teams are getting larger to address the demand.

In terms of building up that capability, beyond services, would you look to other areas of customer attention such as hardware or other vendors? It's just interesting in terms of the thoughts longer term because of your breadth of Specialism is what customers are looking for, as you said.

No, it's a good observation, Julian. Of course, hardware, as we all know, at the moment is precarious. There's demand, but the actual fulfillment and the delays and the invoicing and the peaky sort of troughs, you know, something our peers are having to deal with. So it's an area that we do participate in. We have got some hardware sales. We have partnerships with the likes of Dell. We're a titanium partner and Lenovo and others. So we actually go about it with strategic intent. We tend not to bid for large-scale laptop refresh, kind of this low margin. We're not engineered or built that way. But where we're engaged with the customer on a project and a whole transformation, we've worked very well with the hardware vendors to ring-send, deal, register projects, more server capability is what I'm talking about. And we also have some managed service contracts, which are hardware-orientated. So it's not that we lack... The ability, it's just I think we respect our heritage has always been software solutions. It's what our USP has been. It's what our sales staff are confident to talk about. Could we and would we ever go further into the hardware market? It's something we do routinely think about when we come back to sitting down and talking about strategy with the two operations. So it's never off the table. But at this moment in time, it's not a core theme for us. Okay.

Morning, it's Andrew from Pamela Brim. I've got a couple as well, if that's okay. First one on guidance and thinking about GP growth for this year. I wonder whether you think it'll be H1 weighted and when you talk about momentum having been strong year to date, are you growing double digits today? And then I've got a couple more on AI after that one. Okay.

I'm going to let Andrew take that so I can blow my nose.

Also, Andrew, I should be supplemental on that. The last few years, you know, we've seen the GP margin as percentage of GII come down. Do you think this year it'll be sort of more similar in terms of GP-GII growth rate? So, Andrew, a very interesting question. So I think the growth rate will be slightly weighted towards H1, and this is particularly... because of the Microsoft year-end and our public sector focus, and so therefore we think public sector will continue. The trends that we've seen in the past is maybe higher than the private sector growth. So we see that. And it's not, yeah, maybe 2%, 2.5% difference from the growth rate. So what you end up with in a modelling point of view is probably more 50-50 on the GP basis, right? When you look at the, call it the GP over GII, now that's, Quite a complex question, but I'll try and simplify the answer, is that because our public sector is very much dominated by enterprise agreements, so the more we grow in the public sector space, it looks like, it appears that our GP is shrinking just because we're invoicing one and taking a rather small margin. So what I would encourage to do, and I did it half year last year and we'll probably repeat it half year this year, is split the two businesses into public sector and into corporate and look at the margin declining. Now, saying that, there has been a margin decline this year, obviously, because we've had to deal with the incentive changes. I would expect that to stabilise and start growing because our real focus at the moment, services, higher margins, so focus on that. If you look at cyber, if you look at Azure, public cloud, the rest of the managed services environment, higher margins. So I think you'll start seeing on a like-for-like basis private sector, public sector growing, but acknowledge that it has been a decline in the year. Thank you. And just on the double-digit growth, can you just confirm your double-digit GP growth here today? So our guidance was high single-digit to low double-digit. So coming out of January and February, and why we highlight those two months is because that is where the Microsoft incentives has played through in prior calendar year, and so that is the area that we normalised. Now, we would reiterate, sort of call it... very high single digits and slightly lower single digits for the second half. So I'm not wanting to call anything more aggressive. All right, move on. And then just on, for Sam, on sort of AI, you know, shift to consumption, I've got a couple of questions. First of all, Anthropic announced a couple of months ago a partner program. Have you had any engagement with them yet?

So we are engaging with a number of new vendors, AI vendors, and, yes, it's an exciting era for us. And, you know, even partners like Google, which have been a significant brand in the IT industry for decades, we haven't partnered as strongly with in the past, but it's something that is changing because of customer demand, and it's all about what do our customers want. So if our customers... feel that it's relevant to their strategy and we believe that we as a business can help provide value and advice around that we will lean in so the answer is yes we're talking to a number of vendors in earnest at the moment.

Thank you and then you sort of mentioned there quite briefly NHS co-pilot rollout but the numbers there 500,000 people I think on the slide that is a big That's a big implementation of Copilot.

It's a big global Microsoft implementation.

Yeah. So just tell us a little bit more about that, can you please?

Yeah.

Particularly in terms of how you make money from it. Yeah.

I can tell you a little bit. So it's part of what Nick and I shared in the video around customers will make their commitment into a technology stack, and then, of course, it's how they enable it. And with certain clients where strategic outcomes are being driven, and let's not forget the NHS is absolutely ripe for huge transformation, way beyond just the Microsoft stack in so many areas, the data and security and so on. But by focusing on the capability and the SKUs they'd already invested in, And moving this into the agent era of creating processes and automating, it's driving the efficiencies that the government have set out and NHS England have set out. So adoption change management skills is what we're talking about here. It's about going in and curating with the teams. how they want to use that co-pilot technology effectively. Obviously, there's been an awful lot of work from Microsoft consultancy to engineer and to drive that co-pilot functionality to serve the healthcare industry in a way that they have established it needs to address certain needs. So our teams, and we're talking about a lot of people, and it's to your point, a lot of A lot of trusts and a lot of licenses we're going to be busy with for more than a year deploying, but we've got metrics and we've got particular targets that we will agree with Microsoft and deliver against over the next 12 months. So it's a very important, highly visible project to Microsoft, and we're very proud to be associated and to be the recipient, if you like, of that business to go and deliver it.

Thanks.

I got a couple of questions and I'll go one by one. First one is for Andrew. Just kind of unbundling the GP guidance for FY27, if I were to think of the fact that the renewal rates went to 99% from what used to be kind of 190% and recovery of that towards perhaps not to the 109%, combined with your usual split between, you know, selling to existing customers versus new customers, is some sort of a normalization of those two numbers is the way to think about, you know, getting back to the kind of high single-digit, low double-digit GP growth rate.

It's a very interesting question. observation and so you're right in the past and ignoring FY26 for a moment is that we've had sort of 110, 112 last year, 109% renewal rates. On top of that we've seen our growth, one third coming from new customers and two thirds coming from existing customers. Now in this year We've had the 99% renewal rate in IE, so our existing customers have shrunk slightly and so all of our growth came from new customers. I would expect that to normalize that because what we're seeing from our bigger vendors is striving for stability within their channel, so I don't expect there's a lot of incentive changes coming down the pike. And so that will mean that as we expand through AI, as we look at E5, E7, there'll be more in tune existing customers so we'll see a margin increase. So I'd expect, let's say, going back to the sort of high single digit gardens, one-third coming from new customers, two-thirds coming from existing.

If I can, sorry, just add to Andrew's point there. One of the key messages I brought back from Seattle a couple of weeks ago, you had all of the VPs of channel incentives, global, Microsoft, and the key message, obviously, the channel needed to know, were there going to be any further... changes and the strategy stability was the key thing. So that was reassuring that all of the major changes we absorbed last year, there are no further ones in the short term to absorb.

And Sam, congratulations on the NPS course going in the right direction. And there are a few more changes to, I guess, to be executed, the Phoenix piece. Could you just remind us about the remaining small changes that you need to do and why they will be less disruptive versus the changes that you had to do last year?

Thanks to Mindy. So in March this year we announced, as I talked about in the presentation, the fact that we had some overlap between Phoenix and Bytes on the public sector area and in fact corporate. Both will now be pure play resellers and In doing so, there will be some teams, the BITES public sector team coming over into reporting at Phoenix. They don't change offices. They don't disconnect from their customers. So, you know, on that basis, it's small change. The teams have already been integrated, self-kickoffs and so on. Some of the events we've been running recently, they've travelled up to York. So we're simulating, if you like, and getting people familiar with the change of the team they'll be joining. Equally a small team on the Phoenix side, private business that will now report into Byte. That will go live on the 1st of July. It's not a big switch point on that date because all of the work we've been going through, a lot of rigorous, management of this and de-risking anything and novating contractors obviously the next stage of where we're at in this process and that is all in hand so by 1st of July the majority of the work will be carried out although some of the innovation will continue beyond that point but we're in good shape for that.

The last one is thank you for the case studies and thank you for bringing back the focus on Microsoft because Microsoft is clearly making really good progress in AI adoption. Our bills are going through the roof essentially related to co-pilot stuff. Congratulations on your frontier status. I just wanted to understand a little bit more or maybe you can articulate a little bit more Because your MS-related services, I think you said, went up 31% last year. And then you kind of talked about the fact that there is in the services space, which to me feels much more important going forward because of what AI is doing. Because you have, like you rightly said, you have to be ready for AI or the cybersecurity stuff and other things. You talked about vendor funding, managed services, and expanded services. extended services has kind of three components in your kind of services piece. Is winter funding the largest bid that's driving the growth that we will potentially see from services in FY27? And related to that, Right now you have about 25% of staff in technical delivery. Does that staff count need to go up if you are to do more of the MS and expanded services?

Yeah, for sure, Daminda, it does. And one of the things that we didn't talk in depth about is a need for us to also absorb that technology into our own business and to actually drive, you know, the AI, the genetic care, the processes. And it's happening. So we have some of those technical teams actually dedicated to internal innovation and driving agents and making profound differences to some of the teams and how they work. So it's an exciting era. But to your point, the actual headcount around those areas will increase. And that's why M&A is also of interest, because if we can find the right teams to supplement or to get us there faster, then that makes sense, as long as culturally and the strategic alignment is there too.

One last one. Could you just give us an example of actual internal use of AI? I know you rolled out some tools. Maybe just give one example where productivity has actively been impacted.

I hope our competitors aren't listening. One of the most recent ones is Clearly, Microsoft licensing takes an awful lot of time. When you have a customer coming up for a new or if you're looking for a new bid, we have specialists that are looking into customer needs and what SKUs or previous investments they've got and how we can present the right contract, whether it's EA or CSP, to them. But where EA is concerned, this is quite heavy-duty business. pieces of work, hours, days, weeks, and then peer reviewing goes on as well as a final check. And so we have a new agent that's been created for the public sector team called License IQ, which automates that peer review and has removed hours of time from our license specialists. So there's a team of, call it, 15 people who are crazy busy, you know, all peer reviewing, and suddenly now there's been a giant leap of the agent being able to – hunch its way through it and then leaving the final human peer review with just a little bit of, you know, oversight. So there's a significant time-saving advantage. So what do you do with the time back? Well, the licensing advisors can go and work with the customers on the next customer meeting and understanding their needs and getting deeper into strategy as opposed to just going through lots and lots of shopping lists at SKU. So, yeah, there's an example.

Okay, thank you. We've had a few questions online. First question is from Chris Tong from UBS. Do you expect Microsoft 365 price increase to be a material tailwind for results?

So it's too early to say, but some of the customer engagements I've been involved with, some of these were quite a few months ago before the price list, the files came out. It was really interesting how customers were appraising the new SKUs that are embedded into it and saw advantage. So it gave me a thought process that actually if customers are in that right zone of thinking about the future and the AI SKUs and wanting those higher-grade SKUs, areas, then this will absolutely make sense. And by the way, it's Microsoft's first suite in many, many years. I don't know if it's a decade since they launched one. So it's quite interesting from that point of view. But it's, you know, budgets are sensitive at the moment across both private and public sector. So there's got to be some damn good business justification behind it. And that comes back to licensed advisors, sellers, really understanding what outcomes customers are trying to drive and where their strategy sits over the next few years. So it's back to that deeper conversation of if we understand where a customer's going and what their vision is, how we then apply that M365 conversation back into it. It doesn't give you an answer, I guess. Do I think it's going to drive material difference? I hope so.

Thank you. Next question is from Tim Alls from Laurium Capital. Customer NPS is lower for the second year in a row. What trends are behind this and what is being done to improve customer NPS? Customer NPS is actually higher than the prior year.

Yeah, and we're very proud. Sorry, Tim, I don't know if we've not been clear about it, but NPS is extraordinarily high. Very, very proud of the number.

Okay, we'll move on to the next question. It's from Tim Owles again, second question. Please can you talk through the decision not to pay a special dividend for this year? Andrew? So I think we've always undertaken to return excess cash to the shareholders either via special or via share buybacks. We did an extensive exercise towards the middle of last year, particularly after the AGM and our share price coming down to circa £3, and we acknowledge that it was better to return excess cash to our shareholders via a share buyback, and because our share price is still sitting a lot lower than it was last year, we've repeated the exercise. Thank you. No further questions at the moment, so Sam, maybe we could hand back to you for any closing remarks.

No, I just want to thank you all for your time this morning. Looking forward to this year. I think we've got off to a positive start. If I think about the first few months trading, the momentum that we've talked about in H2 of last year continues. And that obviously gives us confidence in our outlook. But we've got a lot of work to do. And, you know, we've detailed some of the areas that we're working hard in. So thank you. And we look forward to coming back in a few more months' time at the end of H1 and detailing more results for you. Thank you.