ITV plc

Good morning everyone and welcome to ITV's 2025 full year results. As always, I'm here with Chris Kennedy, our CFO and COO. I'm going to start this morning with a brief summary of the 2025 highlights and then Chris will talk you through our financial and operating performance in a bit more detail. ITV delivered a good performance in 2025, outperforming market expectations despite the challenging market backdrop. We have transformed ITV and are demonstrably a much leaner and more agile business with a strong digital platform. We have capitalised on numerous growth opportunities as a result and are generating strong levels of cash. We've created two attractive and resilient businesses in ITV studios and media and entertainment. We have successfully changed the shape of ITV and achieved a key strategic target. Two-thirds of our total revenue now comes from studios and M&E Digital. And that really demonstrates the scale of ITV's transformation. Before discussing our results, I wanted to mention the leak in November about potential transaction. As you know, we confirmed that we were in preliminary discussions with Sky regarding the possible sale of our M&E business. We are actively engaged with Sky and we will provide an update to you when we can. The effectiveness of our strategy to diversify ITV's revenue streams is clear in our results with the growth in ITV Studios and our digital M&E business combined with our disciplined cost management largely offsetting a difficult linear advertising segment. In line with our dividend policy, the Board has proposed a final dividend of 3.3p, giving an unchanged full-year dividend of 5p, a total payment of around £190 million. I'll now hand over to Chris to go through the numbers in more detail.

Thank you, Carolyn. Good morning, everyone. ITV Studios continues to demonstrate strong momentum, with total revenue climbing 5% to 2.13 billion. This performance highlights our ability to consistently outperform the broader market. Notably, external revenue rose by 10%, reflecting our successful move toward global streaming partners and the rapid scaling of our digital distribution via Zoo55. The US unscripted business had a good year with a strong slate of deliveries, Love Island US was the most watched streaming TV original season of 2025 in America, greatly increasing the value of the format. Overall performance in the US was down year on year due to the phasing of deliveries and some short-term market softness. We're already seeing good momentum in 2026 and are confident that this year will be much stronger. Our UK and international arms saw 14% revenue growth driven by high demand from both streamers and broadcasters. Adjusted EBITR for studios was 297 million and EBITR margin was 13.9%. The year-on-year change in the margin reflects a lower proportion of catalogue sales in our revenue mix as we previously guided. We remain highly efficient. We delivered £31 million in cost savings this year and continue to leverage our world-class talent and unique IP to drive recurring value. Turning to media and entertainment, the highlight is the continued evolution of our digital business. Digital advertising revenue grew 12% to £540 million and total digital revenues were up 10% to £614 million. This strong trajectory is a testament to the success of ITVX, Planet V, and our data-driven ad products. Total advertising revenue fell 5%, better than guidance, with our digital growth providing an important and profitable hedge against double-digit linear advertising decline. We've been incredibly disciplined on costs within M&E. Content costs were down 5%, reflecting an ever more optimised investment strategy. Non-content costs fell by 6%, with permanent cost savings of £32 million and temporary savings of £15 million. This ensured that our M&E adjusted EBITDA margin remained steady at 11.8%, despite the decline in advertising revenue. The balance sheet remains robust. We ended the year with net debt of £566 million and a leverage ratio of one times. Our cash generation remains good with a profit to cash conversion of 65% as expected. And over the three years from 2023 to 2025, cash conversion averaged around 80% in line with our target. This provides us with the flexibility to reinvest in our growth drivers and provide meaningful cash returns to shareholders. Our capital allocation is clear. We reinvest for profitable growth, maintain an investment-grade balance sheet and return surplus cash to shareholders. We've maintained an ordinary dividend of five pence and continue to keep our capital structure under review. A core pillar of our strategy is reshaping our cost base to better reflect viewer dynamics and enhance productivity and profitability. In 2025, we accelerated our efficiency efforts, delivering £63 million in permanent non-content savings across the business. This brings our cumulative permanent savings since 2019 to £253 million. Looking forward to 2026, taking the year as a whole, studios will show good revenue growth, with margin at the lower end of our target range. As is usual, revenue, profit and margin will be weighted to the second half, with momentum continuing into 2027. In M&E, digital revenue is predicted to continue its strong trajectory in 2026. We anticipate Q1 tar to be down around 2%, which is better than we expected. And looking forward to the rest of the year, we have a strong schedule of sports, being the only commercial broadcaster of the expanded FIFA Men's Football World Cup and the new Men's Rugby Nations Championship, both of which will boost ad revenue from Q2 onwards. Finally, you can find detailed planning assumptions in the appendices in the slide deck. Thank you. Carolyn, back to you.

Thank you, Chris. As you know, our strategic vision is to be a leader in UK advertiser-funded streaming and a diversified and expanding global force in content. Our strategy is familiar to you, just to summarise it in three key pillars, expanding studios, supercharging streaming and optimising broadcast. So let's turn first to expanding studios. ITV Studios has built a unique and leading position in the global content market. It has three core competitive advantages and value drivers. Its world-class talent, who are producing some of the most successful shows around the world. Second, its global scale and diversification are creating a strong platform for further growth. And three, its unique and valuable IP library, which combined with Zoo55, its digital studio, maximizes the monetization of our IP globally. And this is underpinned by a culture of cost discipline. All of this ensures the business is well positioned to continue to grow ahead of the market and drive attractive margins. So let's take these value drivers in turn. First, ITV Studios culture. It's entrepreneurial and offers creative autonomy and it's backed by global distribution and resource. And that attracts and retains industry-leading talent. This is a position we continue to enhance through strategic acquisitions, talent deals and partnerships, and that delivers both creative scale and revenue synergies. Most recently in 2025, we acquired Moon Age Pictures in the UK. They're the producers of The Gentleman for Netflix and also Plano in Spain, the producers of Suspicious Minds for Disney+. So the success of this strategy is really clear, I think, from the creative output. And other recently acquired labels also demonstrate the success of this strategy. So Rivals by Happy Prince for Disney+, it's returning for a season two. Skyscraper, live for Netflix by Plimsoll, which saw Alex Honnold's free, solo, quite terrifying ascent of one of the world's largest, tallest skyscrapers in Taipei. Our track record on retention is really, really strong. In the UK, where we do the majority of talent deals, about 75% of our label MDs and creative leaders stay with the business post-earnout. ITV Studios also has a formidable portfolio of world-leading brands and formats through our established scripted and unscripted labels. Love Island is now in 28 markets. It continues to expand with successful spin-offs such as Love Island Games and Beyond the Villa. Squid Games, the challenge, was Netflix's biggest reality competition and has been recommissioned for a third series. ITV Studios is constantly refreshing its portfolio with new formats like Nobody's Fool and Celebrity Sabotage, both of which launch on ITV this year and have already started to sell really well internationally. They're original shows. ITV Studios also has a strong slate of high-quality, returnable, scripted brands that demonstrate incredible longevity. Line of Duty is an example. Gamora is another example. And there are newer brands like Ludwig and Vigil, which have all been recommissioned. So the global content market remains large and attractive. It's expected to grow about 1.5% to 2% this year. ITV's resilience, though, comes from having a diversified portfolio by geography, with 59% of revenue generated internationally, by genre, with 32% of revenue from the scripted, and by customer, with 28% of revenue from the growing streamers, where we have a proven track record of success now. We have deep strategic relationships with every major global content buyer, which combined with a very strong pipeline of new and returning hits ensures that we capture a further share of the key growth areas, which are scripted and unscripted commissions for streamers and IP distribution. Now, a significant driver of our long-term value is our unique IP library, which now exceeds 100,000 hours of content. ITV Studios adds thousands of hours of content every single year and licenses this to over 350 customers globally. That scale allows ITV Studios to maximize the monetization of its IP, and we already generate £400 million of high-margin revenue through our global partnerships business. Most recently, this is through Zoo55, a key area of incremental growth. Zoo55 distributes ITV Studios IP across three areas. Social video, where we had over 24 billion views across 200 plus social channels globally last year. Fast and abled platforms, where we have partnerships with multiple partners such as Samsung, Tubi, Zumo. And viewing here has been up 28% year on year. And the third is games and gaming, where we've got 40 games live at the moment across 19 of our brands, and that is going to continue to expand. And some of the key brands we distribute include Hell's Kitchen, River Monsters, The Graham Norton Show, Come Dine With Me, Love Island, and there are hundreds more. So as you'd expect, we are leveraging AI to deliver content more effectively and efficiently. For example, using it for subtitling, content selection, and curation. Overall in 2025, Zoo55 generated over 47 billion global views, which was up over 30% year-on-year, and that drives double-digit revenue growth. ITV Studios is on track to achieve £120 million of high margin digital revenue from ZOO55 by the end of 2027. So the combination, this particular combination of talent, scale and quality IP ensures that ITV Studios remains a very attractive and resilient business and it delivers high quality earnings. As a creator, owner, producer and distributor of IP, ITV Studios captures the full value of its world-class content from initial idea to global delivery. Around 60% of its revenues are recurring. This is coupled with studios diversified revenue streams and low risk production model. Remember where we only produce programmes once they have actually been commissioned. Together this ensures ITV Studios drives growth ahead of the market at attractive margins and delivers strong cash flow. I'm now going to turn to media and entertainment which includes our pillars of supercharged streaming and optimised broadcast. We have completely transformed M&E into a strong and resilient streamer and broadcaster with a very disciplined cost base, well positioned to deliver profitable digital revenue growth and strong cash generation. It leverages its compelling position and value drivers, which include wide reach in the UK, leading platforms in ITVX and Planet V, an extensive first-party data set, and deep and established relationships with advertisers and commercial partners. We are really pleased with the success of ITVX and Planet V. Since its launch in 2022, ITVX has built incredible momentum, delivering 25% CAGR in total streaming hours and 16% CAGR in digital advertising revenues. PlanetV, our first-class addressable advertising platform, allows brands to target audiences by leveraging an extensive first-party data set of over 40 million registered users. Now, that can be augmented, of course, with third-party data from our partners like Tesco and Mastercard for really granular targeting. It is a powerful engine for growth, bringing in over 1,500 new advertisers to ITV since its launch. Digital advertising now represents 31% of our total advertising revenues. With this momentum, digital advertising revenue is outperforming our original plan when we launched ITVX, which is fantastic news. And given the strong performance of ad-funded streaming and our focus on profitable growth, we have, as you know, pivoted our digital strategy by doubling down on AVOD and deprioritizing subscription video on demand. Therefore, it's going to take slightly longer than initially anticipated to reach the overall £750 million digital revenue target. Importantly, this has saved significant incremental content and marketing spend. As a result, as this slide shows, we reached break-even two years earlier than planned, recouping our entire investment in ITVX four years earlier than projected. In doing so, we've created a profitable ITVX platform with attractive growth prospects. So building on the foundations of our strategic investments in ITVX and Planet V, we are now competing effectively for a greater share of the 9.5 billion online video advertising segment and attracting new to ITV advertisers. We're expanding our digital reach through strategic partnerships, the SME strategy and through commercial innovations. Our YouTube partnership, for example, is successfully extending reach with over 40% of ITV's content viewed on the platform coming from under 35s. Our YouTube sales team continues to grow from partnering with eight brands at launch to 800 today. We've recently agreed a major deal with BannerJ to sell all their advertising around their YouTube content. We've also added new partnerships with TikTok and expanded our relationship with Disney Plus to include their content on ITV1's peak schedule. With our SME strategy, we're removing barriers to entry for TV advertising, simplifying the buying process and leveraging AI to produce cost-effective advertising. We're making good progress towards the launch of our self-server advertising platform in collaboration with Sky, Channel 4 and Comcast Universal Ads, which we will be testing later this year. And in a first of its kind in the UK, we launched picture-in-picture ads, which you might have seen in the Six Nations. This drives incremental reach and value with sensitivity to the viewer experience. We're also increasing our inventory and can now do targeted advertising on our linear channels on the Sky and Freely platforms. And if that weren't enough, in addition, we're leveraging our brand, IP and first party data to drive profitable non-advertising digital revenue. We've just launched the birthday draw. You might have heard the ads for that all across global radio. And it's a partnership with Global for one million cash prize. We're also evolving ITV WIN into a premium destination, bringing scaled competitions to audiences with new games. So it's early days for both of those, but we expect these two initiatives to drive double-digit growth and interactive revenues. Now, finally, to our third pillar, which is optimised broadcast. We continue to demonstrate our strength and resilience in delivering mass audiences. In 2025, ITV delivered 91% of the top 1,000 commercial audiences. To reinforce this value, we're collaborating with Channel 4 and Sky on Lantern, an outcomes program to clearly measure the effectiveness of TV advertising. We have a fantastic slate for the year. focusing on drama, entertainment, reality and sport, and we optimise our spend and deliver the most valuable audiences for advertisers. We're significantly increasing live sports. We're the only commercial broadcaster with the rights to the Men's Football World Cup, as Chris said, which includes 19 more matches on ITV, a 60% increase. In addition, we have the rights to all England men's rugby games this year. In summary, we're really confident we will continue to create value for shareholders. With the profitable growth of ITV Studios and the M&E digital business underpinned by strong cash generation, we will continue to deliver attractive returns to shareholders. None of this, of course, would be possible without ITV's unique blend of creativity and commercialism, which is fueled by the talent and commitment of our people. And I just want to take a minute to say how proud we all are of what we do, the work that's done in ITV, but especially how proud we are of our colleagues. And we're incredibly grateful to them for their hard work and achievements. Thank you. We're now ready to take your questions.

Thank you. To ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your device is unmuted locally. The first question today comes from Annick Maas of Bernstein. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Thank you for taking my questions. The first one is on the advertising market. I mean, your Q4 was better than anticipated. Your guide for Q1 is better. Can you tell us a bit more what the sentiment is in the ad market? Is this coming from across the board? Is it just certain campaigns or advertisers? That's the first one. The second one is on programming costs, which... I guess also the guide is better than what was expected despite owning actually the World Cup rights. So is there something, you know, in there that is AI cost savings or what is really explaining that the program cost savings? Just thinking also ahead how we should therefore think about program costs going forward. And same question for studios. You're guiding to the bottom end of your margin guide because of the revenue mix. I thought production would probably be within your whole industry, the one segment where you can put through AI savings the quickest. So is that so? Or if not, why not? And then maybe just one last one, sorry, which is on studio growth more generally, if you look to the midterm, I guess some of your competitors have been saying that the sort of growth level that you've seen for the last five years or so in the production world, are slightly coming down. Is this something you are seeing or is it that you are taking a share of the others and therefore you can consistently grow better? Thank you.

Okay. On the ad market, I think Q4 was largely down as a result of a pause by advertisers while they waited to see what the budget was going to be. And so it was down year on year and we had expected it not to be like that. So That was the story behind Q4. Q1 is definitely trading better than we thought because, you know, the run rate from Q4 feeds into Q1, if that makes sense. But February was really improved on January and March has improved further, not just on February but on March. So, you know, you're right, it's definitely better. I think that the fact that we have the World Cup... in Q2 and Q3 means that we're having very, very active conversations with many, many advertisers. So, I mean, just to give you an example of that, you know, we have more inventory because we've got 19 more matches, that's 60% more than we had at the World Cup in Qatar. We're talking to about 100 advertisers at the moment, and that is spanning 20 different categories. So we're very actively engaged with a huge number, really, of advertisers. And where we would say the trend really was advertising. You know, the Q4 was down on virtually all categories except one or two. Q1, you know, you'd have seen supermarkets doing well. You'd have seen travel was actually doing very well. Not, you know, let's wait and see on that one. But, you know, there's no discernible trend on categories in Q4 and Q1. Whereas I think... Now, with Q2 and Q3, the range of advertisers we're talking to would kind of indicate that all categories, you know, should be quite active in those quarters. So that is very good news. And I think the other really interesting thing is we're getting a lot more interest in the World Cup from very big global brands. And they're looking really to create high quality content. and very bespoke creative advertising around kind of high-end content, so using players, using teams, et cetera. That's all brilliant for TV because it's the thing TV does best. You can't really do that in any other medium. So that's, I think, really good, and we've agreed a sponsor, and that will be announced. So I think the advertising market, certainly because the World Cup will lift it, should be a strong year for us. Your second question was costs, I think.

I think specifically content costs. So you're right, last year we didn't have one of the big men's events. And we've obviously got the FIFA World Cup, as Carolyn said, and we've also got the new Rugby Nations Championship as well, which runs Q3 and then into Q4. So really a strong slate of sport all the way through from Q2 to Q4. And we have managed that within the overall envelope of content. And that happens in several ways. There's some self-help in there. We did a reorganization of daytime and soaps, which completed at the end of the year. The new schedule started 1st of January. That saved us some money on those shows while maintaining exactly the viewer experience as we had before. In fact, with the power hour and the soaps, that was viewer-led. People were saying, we don't want to watch an hour of the same soap. We'd like two half-hour episodes. And that's worked really, really successfully. So we've saved some money there, and that's enabled us to reinvest elsewhere in the schedule as well as affording the World Cup. And longer term, the team have just got – they get better and better and better every year using the really granular – viewer data that we've got through itvx now to inform windowing decisions acquisition decisions commissions we can see how a show growth grows and also making the marketing a lot more effective as well so all of that means that i think you asked about you know where do we think that content cost will go longer term we're really pleased that we've held it at the plus or minus the same level ever since the launch of itvx because we've absorbed a lot of inflation in that yeah exactly and so that's what we're looking to do going forward whilst continuing to grow that viewing on itvx

And then on your studios question, we'll take it in three parts because you asked a margin question, you asked an AI question, you asked a growth question. Let me kick off on the AI question because I think you're right. I think AI obviously lends itself very well to studios. And I think the first thing to say is our fundamental belief is that we use AI on creativity only to enhance and augment it. but we then use it in a very very strategic way where we integrate it in everything we do end to end so it's a very integrated way of working in studios and we've had quite a lot of experience already now because we've been doing this probably for the last 18 months to two years where we had we started with having a what we called a skunk works and now actually it's kind of embedded in all the labels so whether that is tools for R&D, research and development, or pre-production, or post-production, or editing, or production planning, and indeed marketing, we're kind of using it for the whole end-to-end process in studios. And what we try and do there is that, of course, there's efficiency gains. We use that to offset inflation. and then try and bank some of that. And then we use productivity gains to get people to do more interesting things, for instance, in development to try and get more shows in. So the more resource we free up, we actually reuse that in a higher value kind of function, if that makes sense. So that's what we're doing on AI.

And then studios, you talked about the margin guidance and we've guided for bottom end. Our studio's business has industry-leading margins. We are the best in the business. And the team have to work really hard at that. Last year, they made £31 million of cost savings. That came from some quite difficult decisions around label reorganizations in some geographies. At the same time, we're refilling the pipe. So we've made full bolt-on acquisitions, and those take some time to integrate the back office. So... So the whole strategy is around maintaining the margin within that 13% to 15% range. It will go up and down depending on the mix of business we do in the year and where we are in the cycle, but very pleased with the level they're at. And the whole point about studios is we want profitable growth, and that means maintaining the margins within that range.

And in terms of growth, you know, we see the market growing. So it's a very big market. It's 230 billion pound market. It's growing at about one and a half to two and a half percent, according to Ampere. And, you know, our goal really is to be ahead of market growth and to take share. So that continues. That continues to be part of our strategy.

And you've seen that we've done that consistently over the last eight years, consistent growth on a compound average basis over the course of that period without growing the market. And we'll continue to take share.

Okay, great. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Our last question today comes from Julian Rock of Barclays. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning. My first question is on the World Cup. Based on previous editions, can you give us an indication of the impact, are there millions of pounds or percentage? Second question is impact of AI on the cost basis. I know it's early days, but we reported this morning, so that within five years, they thought they could serve 50 million euros thanks to AI, which is about 3.5% of the operating cost. Any indication there? And then the last question is on your linear inventory, where are you in terms of that inventory being sold digitally or programmatically so it can be included in the kind of new platform, AI platform that all the agencies are developing? Thank you.

Okay. So on the World Cup, we don't guide for the uplift for individual tournaments, but you'll have seen performance on 25 versus 24 where we had the FIFA Men's World Cup. You can see the categories that... outperformed when we have those so as Carolyn said we're really looking forward to the rest of the year with sport it should give us an uplift and it should bring the whole advertising market in the UK up with it but we don't give the the exact tournament by tournament guide on that.

No, I mean, just as a little fact, you know, on sport, the reason we've really focused on live sport is, you know, in 25, when there wasn't a Euros or a World Cup, our reach of sport on ITV1 was 46.2 million people. which is fantastic and we would expect to exceed that in terms of our reach obviously this year because of the rugby and the football we've got all the racing it's a really it's an unprecedented uh year for sport for us and then julian on the ai question i could you repeat it i didn't quite pick up what the question was there

So, you know, everybody's saying that AI is going to transform our lives. You know, every company is going to generate more revenue and they're also going to save a lot of costs. And we reported this morning said that in their view, AI would allow them to save 50 million euros within five years, which is three and a half percent of their operating costs. So I was wondering whether you already have sized the potential efficiency gain from all those wonderful AI things we're all going to do all the time.

Well, I think... The way we look at AI is exactly how you described it. Where can we use it to augment creativity? Where can we use it to increase revenue and create new revenue streams? And on the flip side, how can we use it to create efficiency so that the same number of people can do more with their AI tools? On the efficiency side, it absolutely fits into our long-term cost-saving program. We've demonstrated that we are relentless about the efficiency within the organization. We've taken out a huge amount of cost over the last six years. We'll continue to do that. It's a multi-year program, and within that, AI will obviously help with the next leg of that program.

Because we integrate it. We build it into the continuous cost improvement program. So it's something that we task ourselves with. But it's not always about, you know, there's a net cost saving, but then there's also an offset against inflation. There's an offset against other costs because cost of production is going up. So we just look at it in a much more integrated way. And I missed the company actually, Julien. Did you hear who the company was? No. Who was saying that they would do the 50 million? It's just interesting for us.

Sture, the German outdoor company.

Okay.

I mean, there will be significant savings, but in studios in particular, we're very focused on how we can... you know release resource to do more stuff that will generate more hits i mean that's the kind of philosophy in studios which is why you know we will gain efficiencies and we will net off inflation but we also want to reinvest in in in say making sure development is stronger yeah i mean i think it really is i hate to use the phrase but it really is in the dna of itv this everyday efficiency you know if you look at m e non-content costs were down five percent last year

And that is a lot of hard work by a lot of people across a whole range of initiatives. There aren't big set piece efficiency programs. It's baked into people's every day.

I think the third question was linear inventory.

Yeah, so last year we had, we finished the year 30% of the linear inventory could be, was capable of having a targeted ad within it. By the end of 26 we're looking to bring that up to 50%. Obviously we will not be using anywhere near 50% for the targeted industry, targeted advertising. Because we can now make the choice both for advertisers and for ITV about what is the best use of that inventory. Is it better to use it for a targeted ad or is it better in a mass reach campaign? One of the reasons we've got you know, we've doubled down on sport, is that those big live audiences are more valuable than ever. So, you know, we would not be doing a targeted ad in the World Cup because that is the only place an advertiser can get the huge audience that we attract. So over the course of this coming year, you will see coming out of ITV Commercial a few more ad products where they will be, they've already developed them in conjunction with advertisers and they're releasing those to do that targeted advertising in live streams.

My question was not about targeted advertising, it's more being able to buy linear advertising on digital. a digital platform, right, because all the agencies are developing those AI platforms that they're going to give to their clients where clients can buy across media at a click of a button. And so if TV is not on those platforms, some clients will be lazy and maybe de-emphasize TV. So it's more on whether you can buy digitally the linear advertising.

Yeah, understood. And absolutely, the commercial teams are really engaged with the agencies, both on the buy side in terms of buying linear inventory, but also doing the outcomes work, launching the lantern in conjunction with Sky and Channel 4 to give measurability, all of the work we're doing to demonstrate the value of TV products Because if those models are rational, TV should benefit because we have the highest ROI of any media. So absolutely, we're working with them.

Is that what you meant, Julián? Thank you. Yeah, good. Okay.

Yeah, it was not only working with agencies, but that, you know, your linear inventory can be both at the click of a button on those platforms alongside Google and Meta and, you know, not only IPv6 or Target, the whole inventory.

So I suppose that goes to the distribution strategy and our distribution strategy is to be in as many places as possible. I think we've got something like 98% coverage now of all platforms with ITVX and then a bit lower than that for channels. But our strategy is to be in as many places as possible on the right commercial terms. which then allows us to benefit from their reach and our inventory. Thank you. Thank you. We have no other questions at this time, so I'd like to hand back to Carrie for closing remarks. I just want to say thanks very much for joining us today, and we know it's a very busy day out there, so thanks for your time. Bye for now.