NAHL Group Plc

Good afternoon and welcome to the NAHL Group Plc investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to James Sorales, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.

Thank you Lily and good afternoon everyone. I am James Doraleous, I'm CEO of NAHL Group and I'd like to welcome you to NAHL's interim results presentation. This covers the six months to the 30th of June 2025. We released our interim results on the 24th of September and we're going to give you a bit of an overview of those results today and try and answer your questions. So with me here today is Chris Hyam, the Group's CFO. and we're going to work through the presentation which should be on your screen now and it's also available in the investor section of our website. That's www.nahlgroupplc.co.uk I'm going to take us through the highlights for the first six months of the year and for those of you who are new to the business I'll give you a short introduction into who we are and what we do. I'll then hand over to Chris to present more detail on our strong growth and profitability and cash generation Then we'll dig into the results of each of our two trade-in businesses in more detail, and we'll finish with an outlook. There should be plenty of time for questions at the end, and in fact, I can see that we've already had some questions come through. So if you do want to submit a question, please do so, and we'll try to answer as many as we can. So without further ado, let's get started. So first of all, I'm pleased with NHL's solid performance in the first half The Group's delivered a performance in line with the Board's expectations, with strong growth in profitability and cash generation, as well as a reduction in net debt to a 10-year low. Revenue for the Group was in line with the previous year at £19.2 million, and profit before tax increased by 289% to £1.9 million, which included an 89% increase in the operating profits for our Consumer Legal Services Division. Basic earnings per share was up 3 pence, and that was up over 300% on last year. And cash generation remained very strong, buoyed by the growth in cash from settlements in NAL, with free cash flow up 119% at £1.5 million. This allowed us to reduce our net debt to a 10-year low of £5.6 million. That was down from £7.1 million at the start of the year. If I look at the operational highlights for our three divisions, well, in our consumer legal services division, the turnaround of our personal injury business continues. I'm pleased to report that lead generation has stabilized after a challenging year in 2024. I mentioned that underlying operating profit was up 89% to 1.6 million pounds, and 1.4 million pounds of that came from our personal injury business, which was double what it did in the first half of 2024, having rebounded well in the year. Our interagent law firm, National Accident Law, or NAL, is having a strong year. NAL settles 1,648 claims in H1, which generated £5.3 million of cash. That was 33% more than last year. The business also delivered a 57% increase in average settlement values, which we'll talk more about later on. As I said earlier, the lead generation has stabilized after a challenging year last year, and the team have effectively managed inquiry acquisition costs to under-historical levels, saving £1.3 million in marketing costs. In total, the business generated 6,552 new inquiries, and a total of 2,200 new inquiries were passed into NAL, which we estimated will be worth £2.9 million in future revenues and cash by maturity. Turning to our Critical Care division then, and revenues, operating profit and cash from operations all increased in the first half, and the business maintained its strong operating profit margins at 31.5%. I'm pleased to report that our expert witness services continue to experience high demand, and in case management services, while the market has been more challenging, but the management team have taken several steps to address these challenges and we're monitoring progress with these closely. One of these initiatives that I'm particularly excited about is the launch of a new proposition called Bush & Co Kids which is designed to deliver outstanding child-focused support for our younger clients and I'll expand more on that later in the presentation. So those are the highlights so far in 2025, and before I hand over to Chris to talk through the results in more detail, I thought I'd provide you with a brief recap of who we are and what we do, particularly for those of you who are new to our business. Well, NEHL is a leader in the UK consumer legal services and catastrophic injury markets. We help people who've had an accident or suffered medical negligence that wasn't their fault to get their lives back on track. In our 30 year history, we've helped over 1 million customers access over a billion pounds in compensation by providing legal support and rehabilitation services. We provide services and products for individuals and businesses through our two divisions which we call Consumer Legal Services and Critical Care. In Consumer Legal Services, we're one of the UK's leading providers of personal injury advice, services and support. And we have a strong heritage in this market. We've helped more people injured in accidents in the UK than anyone else. Through our trusted brands, National Accident Helpline and Underdog, we guide accident victims through the steps of making a personal injury claim. We triage those claims, and for those that we think have legal merit, we either process those claims in our own fully integrated law firm, National Accident Law, or we pass them to one of our panel of specialist third-party law firms, or to our joint venture, which is called Your Law, for Processing. Distributing claims to the panel provides us with access to quick profit and cash flow, with firms typically paid in 30 days. However, appetite for this service has declined over the past 10 years due to regulatory pressures on law firms, which ultimately led to us launching our own law firm in 2019. And if we process these claims ourselves in national accident law, then we achieve higher levels of profit, but with a longer working capital cycle, as the claims take an average two to three years to process. and the joint venture helps us to balance those two extremes. Also in this division, we operate a small but profitable property searches business called Searches UK. Now in our other division, Critical Care, our push and go business is a market leader in expert witness reports, immediate needs assessments and case management rehabilitation services in the UK. We support children, young people and adults who are in a catastrophic injury or clinical negligence. And Bush & Co. deals with the most serious injuries, often leading to life-changing disabilities. And these include acquired brain injuries and spinal cord injuries, with claim settlements exceeding £500,000 and usually into millions. We also launched an award-winning care proposition in 2021, which is growing rapidly and offers peace of mind for customers who directly employ nurses and carers. This happens generally after their claim has settled.

So those are our two trading divisions.