NAHL Group Plc

Good morning and welcome to the NAHL Group Plc investor presentation. Throughout today's recorded presentation, attendees will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand side of your screen. Before we begin, I'd just like to submit the following poll, which I kindly ask you to submit your responses to. I'd now like to hand over to CEO James Sorales. James, good morning.

Good morning, Jack. Thank you. And good morning, everyone. Yes, I'm James Doralis. I'm the CEO of NHL Group. And I'd like to welcome you to our final results presentation. And this covers the financial year ending 31st December 2025. We released our results on the 7th of May. And we're going to give you an overview of those results today and try to answer your questions. Sat next to me today is Chris Hyam, the Group CFO, and we're going to walk you through a presentation which should be on your screen and is also available on our website. That's at www.nahlgroupplc.co.uk. So we'll take you through the highlights for 2025, 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, who is going to present a financial review, including more detail on our strong growth in profitability and cash generation in the year. Then we'll go into the business review and we'll dig into the results of each of our two trading divisions in more detail. And finally, we'll finish with an outlook. I'm sure there'll be plenty of time at the end for questions. In fact, I can see that we've already got one question come through already. So if you do want to submit a question, then you can do so at any time and we'll try and answer as many as we can at the end. So without further ado, we'll get started and turn to the financial highlights. And I'm really pleased to report a strong set of results of 2025 with a very significant growth in profits and cash generation and a further reduction in net debt. The group grew revenues by 3% to £40 million and we delivered a very strong 260% increase in underlying profit before tax to £5 million, which included an exceptionally strong performance in our consumer legal services division. Our free cash flow was up over 50% to £3.9 million, and that was largely driven by growth in settlements in our law firm. And that meant that our net debt reduced by 55% to £3.2 million at the end of the year. And that's a 10-year low in our debt. Now, we'll return to some of these numbers shortly, but I wanted to share some of the operational highlights from across the divisions too. In consumer legal services, and this includes our personal injury business, the division increased revenues by 4% to 23.8 million pounds and underlying operating profits, for they were up by 118% to 4.4 million pounds in what was a very strong performance. The group's fully integrated law firm, National Accident Law, or NAL, as I'll refer to it as, had another good year and there are clear signs of its growing maturity. 4,276 new inquiries were placed into NAL. That's slightly lower than the previous year as we sought to balance the working capital demands of the business. But we estimate these new inquiries will be worth 5.8 million in future revenue and cash. NAL settled 3197 claims in the year and the average revenue per claim settled was actually higher than 2024. And these claims generated 10.7 million pounds of cash from settlements. That's up 26% year-on-year. And National Accident Helpline generated 13,389 inquiries in the year. And that really reflects the lower levels of demand from our panel of third-party law firms, and also our prudent work in capital management. Inquiry numbers were actually fairly consistent throughout the year, and the cost of acquisition, so the CAC, or as we call it, the cost per inquiry, or CPE, that remains broadly in line with historical norms. Turning to critical care then, 2035 was a somewhat challenging year for Bush & Co due to the review that the board conducted into the future ownership of the business, which understandably proved to be quite a distraction to the management team. Revenues increased by 2% to £16.3 million and importantly 43% of these revenues were from recurring revenue sources linked to case management and care service. Profits were flat, but the business generated £4.5 million of cash from operations. Within Bush & Co, Expo Witness Services had another strong year, growing revenues by 9%, and Bush & Co Care Solutions continues its strong growth trajectory, with revenues up by 21%. Completely, the new year, 2026, has gone off to a solid start, and the team are exploring several exciting initiatives to deliver meaningful growth over the medium term. So those are the highlights for 2025 and before I hand over to Chris to talk through some of those results in more detail, I thought I'd provide a brief recap of who we are and what we do for those of you who are new to our business. Well, NHL 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. and in our 30 plus year history we've helped over a million customers access over a billion pounds in compensation by providing legal support and rehabilitation services. We provide services and products to individuals and businesses through our two divisions which we call Consumer Legal Services and Critical Care. And in Consumer Legal Services we're one of the UK's leading providers of personal injury advice, services and support. We've got a really strong heritage in this market. In fact, we've helped more people injured in accidents in the UK than anyone else. And through our trusted brands, which include National Accident Helpline, 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 ourselves in our own fully integrated law firm called 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 Law Together for Processing. And distributing claims to our panel, well that provides us with access to quick profit and cash flow with firms typically paying in 30 days. However, appetite for this service has declined over the past 10 years because of regulatory pressures on law firms and market consolidation as well which ultimately led to us launching NAL in 2019. And if we process those claims ourselves in NAL, then we achieve much higher levels of profit, but with a much longer working capital cycle. These claims can take over two years on average to process. And the joint venture really helps us to balance those two extremes. Also in this division, we operate a small but very profitable property searches company called Searches UK. In our other division then, Critical Care, Bush & Co., is a market leader in expert witness reports, immediate needs assessments and case management rehabilitation services in the UK. And this year, Bush & Co celebrates its 40th year in the industry. We support children, young people and adults following a catastrophic injury or clinical negligence. and Bush & Co deal with the most serious injuries. So these often lead to life-changing disabilities, including things like acquired brain injuries and spinal cord injuries. And claims in this part of the business, claims settlements, usually go into the millions. We also launched an award-winning care proposition in 2021 that's growing rapidly and offers services for customers who directly employ nurses and carers generally after their claim has settled. So those are our two trading divisions. We also have a centralised shared services division which provides strategic leadership and support with funding and governance. And over the years we've built an inclusive and supportive culture with a strong focus on employee engagement and that really helps us to recruit and retain top talent across the UK. We're really proud to have been recognized externally for this culture having been awarded the gold standard by investors and people and included in the best small companies list in recent years. So hopefully that should give you a good overview of who we are and the progress that we've made so far this year and I'll now hand over to Chris who's going to take you through a review of our financial results. Thanks James.

Okay, I'll start with the P&L. So we generated revenues of £40 million in the year and that was an increase of 3% over the prior year and both divisions delivered top line growth. Consumer Legal Services grew by 4% and the Critical Care division grew by 2%. We saw a strong growth in underlying operating profit which increased by £3.4 million or 85% to £7.3 million and that growth was primarily delivered from the personal injury business which generated an underlying operating profit of £4 million and increased to £2.4 million on the prior year. The profit increase was driven by strong case processing performance in NAL, our wholly owned law firm, alongside reduced marketing costs as we brought enquiry generation costs back in line with historical norms following what was a turbulent year in 2024. We also placed fewer enquiries into NAL during the year, which has a beneficial effect on the P&L in the short term, but does mean we have a smaller book of work that we're working going forwards.