NAHL Group Plc

Good morning, good welcome to the NHL Group Plc Interim Results 2026 Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and they can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to CEO James Sorales. Good morning.

Thank you Alex and good morning everyone. Yes, I'm James Serrales, I'm the CEO of NHL Group and I'd like to welcome you to our interim results presentation which covers the six months to 30th of June 2026. We released our results on the 30th of September and we're going to give you an overview of those results today and try and answer your questions. Stand next to me today is Chris Hyam, the Group's CFO, and we're going to walk you through a presentation which should be on your screen now, and it's also available on our website, that's www.nahlgroupplc.co.uk. The agenda for the meeting today starts with me taking us through the highlights of 2026, or the first half of 2026, 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 a financial review, including more detail on our growth and profitability and cash generation. Then we'll go into the business review and dig into the results of each of our two trading divisions in more detail. And finally, we'll finish by talking about a couple of transactions that we've entered into post-period end and provide an outlook. There should be plenty of time for questions at the end. In fact, I think we've had a couple come through already. So if you do want to submit a question, then you can do so at any time. I will try to answer as many of those as we can at the end. So without further ado, let's get started. Excuse me. So the Board and I are very pleased with the Group's solid performance in H1. We delivered revenue growth, we increased profit before tax and our cash generation has continued to be strong. We're also able to report progress against the Group's overarching strategy. Highlights include revenue growth of 5% to £18.3 million and we delivered a 31% increase in profit before tax to £2.3 million. Actually, it's important to state now that unless we say otherwise, all the results that we're quoting today are for continuing operations, i.e. excluding the Searchies UK business, which is being held for sale. Free cash flow was again very strong in H1, growing 43% to £2.2 million. That was up from £1.5 million last year. And that meant our net debt reduced by 66% from £3.2 million at year end to £1.1 million at the 1st of June. And this was the lowest level of net debt since the IPO in 2014. So a really important milestone for us and a fantastic team effort by our people across the business. So really pleasing federal results across the group. Now we'll return to some of these numbers shortly but I just wanted to share some of the operational highlights across the divisions too. In our consumer legal services division, that comprises our personal injury business, well the division increased revenue by 7% to £9.9 million and underlying operating profits were up 41% to £1.9 million. We'll talk later on about how we are encouraged with the progress that we've made against each of the four pillars that form the basis of the growth strategy for our personal injury business, but to briefly call out some of the highlights now. Firstly, we've added over 2,100 new inquiries into our wholly owned law firm, National Accents Law, or NAL, which we estimate are worth £2.9 million in future revenue and cash. Secondly, we settled over 1,600 of our clients' claims in the period. This generated £5.7 million in cash from settlements, which was 6% more than last year. And thirdly, at the end of the period, we were processing 6,623 ongoing claims, which we believe should generate over £11.5 million of future cash when they mature. Finally, on our lead generation, National Accident Helpline delivered 11% more inquiries in H1 than prior year. We're investing slightly more per inquiry because they've generated added value for us. If I turn to Critical Care then, Bush & Co has grown its revenues by 3% in the first half to £8.5 million and they generated £2.6 million of underlying operating profits. That's broadly in line with last year. Demand for Bush's Expo Witness services remains strong, and revenues for this service line increased by 11% in the period, and new instructions increased by 22%, guaranteeing a strong pipeline of future reports. The case management market continues to be challenging, and our revenues were down 8%, but management are taking positive action, which I'll expand on later on, including in our exciting Bush & Co Kids proposition, which grew by 6% in the first half. Finally, Bush & Co Care Solutions grew its revenues by 20% to half a million pounds and increased the number of standalone care packages we provided. So those are the highlights for H1, but before I hand over to Chris to talk about the results in more detail, I said I'd provide a brief recap of who we are and what we do for those who are new to the business. So, NAHL is a leader in the UK in 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 years history, we've helped over a million customers access over a billion pounds in compensation by providing legal support and rehabilitation services. We do this by providing services and products to individuals and businesses through our two divisions, which I've mentioned. We call them 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 have a strong heritage in this market. In fact, we've helped more people injured in accidents in the UK than anyone else. Through our trusted brands, including National Accent Helpline, we guide accident victims through the steps of making a personal injury claim. We triage those claims, and for those we think have legal merit, we either process those claims in our own fully integrated law firm called National Accent Law, or we pass them to one of our panel of specialist third-party law firms, or we process them in our joint venture, which is called Law Together. Now, distributing these claims to the panel provides us access to quick profit and cash, which firms typically pay in 30 days. However, appetite for this service has declined over the past 10 years due to regulatory pressures on law firms and market consolidation. And that ultimately led us to launch in NAL in 2019. If we process these claims ourselves in NAL, then we achieve higher levels of profit, but with a longer working capital cycle, as these claims can take over two years to process on average. The joint venture helps us to balance these two extremes. In our other division, Critical Care, our Bush & Co business is a market leader in expert witness reports, immediate needs assessments, and case management rehabilitation services in the UK. And this year, our Bush & Co business celebrates a milestone birthplace, having served its customers with distinction for over 40 years. We support children, young people and adults following 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 and claim settlements usually run into the millions so very complex very serious injuries we also launched an award-winning care proposition in 2021 which is growing rapidly and offers services for customers who directly employ nurses and carers generally in their own homes and typically after their claim has settled. So those are our two trading divisions and 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 employee culture with a strong focus on engagement, and that helps us to recruit and retain the top talent across the UK. We're proud that we've been recognised externally for this culture. We've been awarded the gold standard by investors and people and included in the best small companies list in recent years as well. Finally, just to mention, we also operate a small but profitable property searches business called Searchers UK, which is in the process of being disposed of and I'll provide an update on that a bit later on. So hopefully you should have a good overview now 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 the financial results. Chris. Thanks James.

Okay I'll start with the P&L and as James mentioned in the highlights we had a strong first half overall. Revenues of £18.3 million were 5% higher or £0.9 million higher than the previous year. both businesses that have a growth with personal injury up 7% and critical care business up by 3%. Underlying operating profit increased by 0.4 million to 3.4 million and this growth was driven by the personal injury business which increased its operating profits by 0.6 million or 41% to 1.9 million in the period and this was primarily as a result of continued strong case settlements in national accident law. Profits from critical care were flat at £2.6 million although that does include some investment in headcount in the second half of 2025 which has positioned the business well for growth. Shared services costs were £0.2 million higher than last year and this is largely driven by bonus accruals and we incurred £43,000 in exceptional costs in the period relating to the sales searches you pay.