Pearson plc

Good morning everyone and welcome to Pearson's 2025 interim results. Today we will host a presentation followed by a Q&A session. There will be two ways to submit your questions. If you'd like to ask your question personally, please use the numbers that are displayed on screen. These lines will be open following the main presentation. Alternatively, please type your questions into the questions tab at the top right of the screen and we will address them in turn at the end. And with that, I'll hand over to Omar.

Thank you, Alex. Good morning. It's a pleasure to be with you again today. I've been looking forward to it. As well as hearing from Sally and me, we'll be joined later today by our colleagues Art, Tom, Vishal, Sharon, and Tony for Q&A. Now, we're very aware that the external world has changed significantly since our prelims in February, so I wanted to first provide a view of the market dynamics that are relevant for our business and our perspective on these. I'll then move on to an update of the strategic and operational progress that we've made so far this year. Before handing over to Sally, we'll give you an overview of our interim financial results. And then we'll open up as usual for your questions. But before we get going, let me first outline the key takeaways. Firstly, our strategy remains unchanged and is now well established across the organization. The two seismic trends of demographics and AI that we outlined this time last year are playing out exactly as expected. And in a world where AI is decreasing the half-life of skills, we have a vital role to play in shaping the future of learning. We're building medium-term growth engines for the company, for example, by gaining momentum in our enterprise business, while in parallel innovating to ensure our products and services continue to lead the way in the world of learning. Secondly, Our execution is going to plan, and I'll share some proof points with you today. And thirdly, when you put together our strategic clarity and the progress we're making with our execution focus, it only strengthens my conviction in Pearson's medium-term trajectory. And we're also on track to deliver a full-year financial performance in line with the expectations we set out in February, with phasing playing out precisely as anticipated. I now want to step back for a moment and consider the environment we're operating in. You all know very well it's been evolving quickly, offering both opportunities and market dynamics to address. I'd like to highlight two overarching points. Firstly, each of these dynamics influences only a small segment of our business, and we understand them deeply, which is a source of strategic advantage. And secondly, our diversified portfolio means that we benefit from market growth overall while being resilient to sub-segment trends. So I'd like to start with the U.S. federal government. Our only material direct exposure is through PDRI, which faces some near-term pressure from hiring freezers, which we expect to continue into the second half of the year. However, PDRI's focus on merit-based hiring aligns exactly with the goals of the new administration and its long-term relationship with the Office for Personnel Management positions us well for future opportunities. With the Department of Ed, our core offerings are well aligned with the administration's priorities on outcomes and accountability, and we're ready to support mandates to upskill and develop a future-ready and AI-embedded workforce. While some disruption cannot be ruled out as changes are implemented, we've seen no meaningful impact on our businesses so far, and we are prepared to move quickly to take advantage of emerging opportunities. For a bit of context, federal funding accounts for a relatively small proportion of total funding for K-12 and higher ed, and the latter includes grants for research universities where Pearson's exposure is small. On migration, the market backdrop is materially unchanged and is baked into our PTE guidance for the year. The medium-term outlook for PTE and ELL as a whole is undiminished, supported by demographics and our team's strong operational track record of taking market share. Beyond ELL, international mobility has minimal impact, including in the US, where less than 2% of university students are international. So overall, we remain resilient and are well positioned to take advantage of potential opportunities So, now I want to move back to our strategic framework that I shared with you last July, which hopefully you're familiar with, and that includes our why, our what, and our how. First, our purpose has never been more relevant. Every day, we see people advancing their lives through learning, demonstrating the power of education and skill development. Yet, at the system level, our recent research highlights the huge costs persistent and widespread skill gaps at key career and learning transition points. These have a very real economic impact, totalling over $1 trillion a year in the US and £96 billion a year in the UK. This represents a massive opportunity to ensure that learning keeps pace with the rapidly changing demands of the workforce and supports economic growth. Second, our what? We are a global leader in assessments and verification. And we're implementing our strategy to drive performance in our core businesses, realizing execution synergies, expanding into larger and faster growing adjacent markets, and building scale in our medium-term growth vectors of early careers and enterprise skilling. I look forward to telling you more about our progress against all of these shortly. Finally, our how underpins our strategic priorities, focusing our internal capital allocation process on higher growth opportunities, unlocking innovation to deliver better learning outcomes and more efficiently and embedding a high performance culture top to bottom through the organization. I'm pleased with the progress we've made over the last 18 months and, as you know, this is a process of continuous improvement. These factors together drive the medium-term guidance I outlined this time last year, which we reiterate today. Let me turn now to our ongoing strategic and operational progress against our four priority growth areas, starting with driving performance in our core business. All five business units have demonstrated core performance improvements, executing upon the focus areas we outlined at full year results. And that reflects a combination of strong commercial execution and excellent progress in developing and launching innovative new products and services. In assessments and qualifications, we see continued execution focus through customer wins and renewals across VIEW and US student assessments, expanding our customer set in clinical with the first statewide adoption of our digital offering, and further international expansion for UK and international qualifications. We're on track to launch new VIEW customers, ServiceNow, the Association of Social Work Boards, and last month launched Salesforce, all of which will support faster growth in H2. From a product point of view, we've successfully launched a Pearson skilling suite and introduced further AI enhancements in US student assessment with the write-up platform. In higher education, we're building upon the successful monetization last fall of our study prep tool, previously called Channels, with an expansion into international markets. We continue to introduce innovative technologies in our products, including our new Go Deeper functionality in our AI study tools, which we developed using nearly 130,000 student queries. Our research continues to show that our AI study tools are helping students with their learning, including the development of new cognitive skills and higher-order outcomes, in particular when AI capabilities are built directly into the flow of study. In virtual learning, spring saw positive enrollment and retention trends, and we completed the rollout of our new enrollment platform and improved our new student acquisition capabilities. Career academies will be fully embedded across the whole network for fall back to school, and we're on track to open two new schools in H2 for a total of 42 by year end. These factors support sales in H2 and a platform for accelerated growth over the medium term. In enterprise learning and skills, Vishal and team continue to build momentum with their enterprise approach as we strengthen our global enterprise sales teams and have landed new wins with HCL Tech and Google Cloud. These wins, coupled with pipeline activity, strengthen the conviction we have in the growth potential for our enterprise opportunity. Vocational qualifications continues to demonstrate strong execution with international growth in BTEC and new contract wins, including apprenticeship courses with the UK Ministry of Defence and T Levels in Health and Science. And finally, in English language learning, PTE continues to show strong operational performance and we're further advancing our offerings through our new Pearson English Express test, while expanding our relationships with governments and institutions around the world. We've also won institutional clients in LATAM, building upon recent strength in the region. Meanwhile, for educators, we've launched our smart lesson generator that draws from Pearson's massive array of English content and will cut down the hours that teachers take to plan lessons, freeing them up to concentrate on coaching students in the classroom. I'd like now to take a moment to step back and discuss our progress in the foundational operational improvements we're making in the business. Firstly, we're transforming our revenue operations capabilities under the direction of our recently appointed Chief Business Officer, Nassim Toufaha. This is a set of processes and systems that will, over time, give us improved visibility and leverage on the activities that drive revenue growth from targeting through to enabling and incentivizing sales teams. By using data to better make prioritization decisions, we will develop a stronger, more resilient commercial engine and one that can quickly and effectively scale and deliver results in our competitive markets. Secondly, we're now taking a modern marketing approach under our Chief Marketing Officer, Ginny Ziegler, where we expect to see near-term improvements in output and cost efficiencies in activities such as branding, social media, and events. And thirdly, as we discussed before, we're focusing on driving a performance culture a foundational aspect of which is bringing clarity to our performance expectations across every single role in the company. To this end, we've reduced what were 1,600 roles down to 140 roles, enabling a circa 80% reduction in the number of job families and job categories, facilitating better performance management. In addition, through our focus on continual improvement, we have reduced headcount year over year, optimizing our spans and layers, resulting in quicker and more effective communication and decision-making across the organization. And finally, AI-driven simplification is progressing at pace as well. For example, we've reached over 40,000 customer interactions with our AI-powered service agent since its very recent launch. And AI content development tools have cut translation times from 18 months to less than three, accelerating speed to market internationally. This progress adds to my confidence in our medium-term guidance for faster growth and margin improvement. Let me turn now to our progress on unlocking synergies across the businesses. You will recall we identified three buckets of execution synergies and we've made significant progress already, starting with product and service bundling. Our new brand facilitates the simplification of our product estate, helping customers navigate our offerings more effectively, enabling increased bundling opportunities. We're also starting to lead with Pearson Research, grounded in real-world experience, which will improve our share of voice on key topics facing the future of education and learning. Secondly, we've improved product discovery and development under Tony Prince's leadership. We've implemented a single product management tool company-wide and migrated over 600 projects. This now gives us a real-time holistic view of product development, enabling better prioritization and ROI tracking. And lastly, our strategic partnerships. We now clearly distinguish between transactional vendors through to strategic relationships, unlocking new value. And we've made progress against two key categories. I've talked to you before about our new relationships with Microsoft and AWS, and I'm pleased to confirm we've now added a third with Google Cloud. These are long-term strategic partnerships where we can enable revenue growth alongside cloud transformation and unique go-to-market and innovation opportunities. We're working with our partners' amazing strengths across enterprise, higher ed, and K-12. And these partnerships are developing as planned, and we're starting to see commercial benefit. For example, Amazon has selected us for the integration of our learning products to support their workforce development. We will bring you further updates across these relationships as we progress. We've taken a similar approach to optimizing professional and technology services. We're consolidating from many dozen vendors down to a select group of service partners, unlocking cost savings and also ensuring better outcomes through a deeper 360-degree partner relationship where they are invested in our success, of course opening up balance of trade opportunities as well as joint go-to-market activities. I'm pleased to announce our first services partnership with HCL Tech, a leader in tech transformation services, and a company of over 200,000 people who we're supporting in their own upskilling journey. So look out for more announcements in the coming months. Now, moving on to how we're expanding in targeted markets. As I mentioned earlier, we've established a new internal capital allocation process that allocates investment dollars towards faster growth segments. As I shared last year, we're targeting growth in near-adjacent markets where we have a smaller presence today and believe we're well-placed to take advantage of a larger 80 billion plus market opportunity that grows at a faster rate than our existing core markets. One example is our recently announced partnership with McGraw-Hill, which will unlock go-to-market opportunities in the formative assessment space. Another is how we've operationalized our district K-12 sales team in higher ed, onboarding over 70 sales professionals to take advantage of strong growth trends that we see in college and career readiness programs. And finally, we've successfully launched our test prep capabilities in Pearson VUE that we expect to contribute to growth in H2. We're also redirecting investment into innovation. Through Dave Treat and his teams, we're investing in relationships that promote and scale AI and immersive learning, partnering with third parties like Meta, Google XR, and Vue Technologies to explore what the future of learning may look like. We have created a dedicated research and innovation space here in 80 Strand, where we showcase our latest product solutions to partners, investors, and other stakeholders. These investments help shape future products and keep Pearson focused on customer-driven innovation. Finally, I want to share an update on our progress with our medium-term growth factors. In early careers, we help people develop job-ready skills as they transition from school or university. We have businesses that are relevant in this theme already today. Think of virtual schools and its career offerings. CertiPort from Pearson VUE, and our nascent Career and College Readiness K-12 offering in Higher Ed. And to these offerings, we've now added eDynamic Learning as a core pillar of our early career strategy. We brought eDynamic Learning into the Pearson team because it's a leader in career and technical education and has a track record of delivering excellent strong growth and profitability. The integration of its capabilities with our scale creates a powerful engine to deliver job-ready skills for the next generation of workers at the exact moment AI is transforming their career paths. Turning to enterprise skilling, I've spent time engaging with many CEOs and I hear a common theme. Leaders are grappling with how to better understand the actual skills of their people in a world where skill signals are opaque and at the same time we're seeing a declining half-life of skills. This makes it pretty difficult to lead people on a learning path that is fit for a future workplace but must make heavy use of AI technologies. The Pearson story and our ability to assess and verify human skills resonates with these CEOs. Now, on the back of this diagnosis, the opportunity for Pearson lies in helping enterprises build the capabilities they need for talent planning, talent sourcing, and talent development in the AI era. We're actively addressing these needs, and we will continue to give you updates on this in due course. Now, before I hand over to Sally for a deeper look at our first half financials, let me summarize. You'll have picked up from our discussion today that there is a lot of progress underway at Pearson, and I'm really pleased with what we've achieved over the past 18 months. It positions us well for the current year and our medium-term outlook. And I look forward to updating you in the future on further progress as we continue to build a better business and deliver improved learning outcomes for more learners. Sally, over to you.

Thank you, Omar. And good morning, everybody. We have delivered another solid performance in the first half with sales up 2% on an underlying basis in line with the guidance that we set out at PLIMS in February. Adjusted operating profit was also up 2% underlying to £242 million. Adjusted earnings per share were down to 24.5p, with the positive underlying trading performance and a reduction in share count due to the share buyback more than offset by FX headwinds. Our balance sheet remains strong, driven by another good cash performance, enabling continued investment in the business, as well as increased shareholder returns, with the $225 million acquisition of eDynamic Learning and the £350 million share buyback, which is expected to complete in H2. Reflecting our performance and confidence in the outlook, we're proposing a 5% increase in our interim dividend to 7.8p. At the beginning of the year, we announced that workforce skills would evolve to become enterprise learning and skills, incorporating our IT pro business, which was previously in higher ed. The comparative figures for H1 2024 have therefore been restated to reflect the modest financial transfers between segments, resulting in a £22 million sales and £6 million profit moving from higher ed to enterprise learning and skills. The full year impact of this is now expected to be £45 million of sales and £12 million of profit. Walking through the key elements of business unit sales performance. Assessments and qualification sales grew 2%, with strong growth in clinical assessments and UK and international qualifications, partially offset by declines in Pearson VUE and US student assessment. The view decline is due to the pause in a contract delivered in 2024 and recommencing in H2 2025 and headwinds in PDRI. Virtual school sales declined 1% as expected due to the final portion of the impact of the previous school losses. Enrolments for the 2024-25 academic year increased 5% in the spring semester on a same school basis and grew 7%, including new school openings. We have also seen favourable retention trends in the first half. Higher education sales grew 4%, with IA growth of 21% and 3% growth in US digital subscriptions. We continue to see good monetization of our study prep tool, formerly known as channels, and ongoing engagement with our AI study tools. English language learning declined 3% in line with our expectations, with our institutional business impacted by a strong comp period in H1 last year. And Pearson test of English was flat, performing well against the tough market backdrop. Enterprise learning and skills grew 4%, with another solid performance from vocational qualifications, and enterprise solutions building momentum during the period. Turning to profit. Group adjusted operating profit grew 2% on an underlying basis, driven by operating leverage on that sales growth, partially offset by inflation. For each business unit, assessments and qualification margins reduced to 21% due to the margin on sales growth being more than offset by prior year cost phasing and inflation. Virtual learning margins increased to 16% driven by cost phasing, partially offset by trading declines. Higher ed and enterprise learning and skills both saw margin improvement driven by sales growth. And English language learning margins were adversely impacted by sales phasing. Free cash flow was again strong, up £129 million from last year to £156 million. Given similar operating cash performance with good working capital management offsetting the impact of FX and the receipt of the state aid recovery. The state aid amount is £97 million on the tax line and £17 million on the interest line. Net debt has decreased by £0.2 billion from June 2024 to £1 billion at June 2025 driven by free cash flow partially offset by dividends and that shared by VAT. Turning to the outlook for the remainder of the year, we are where we expected to be at the half year point and we're on track to deliver on the expectations we set out at prelims in February. Let me walk you through this by business unit as a reminder. Assessments and qualifications will grow low to mid single digits in 2025. Growth will be H2 weighted in particular to Q4 due to new and renewed contracts, including Salesforce, which launched last month, as well as the build of our new test prep business. Virtual learning will return to growth in H2 and for the full year, Driven by enrollment increases, partially from new school openings for the 2025-2026 academic year. The previously announced school losses will cease to be a headwind in H2. Higher education growth in 2025 will be higher than in 2024 as we build on the successful results of our sales team transformation and product innovations, particularly using AI. English language learning full year growth will moderate versus the 8% delivered in 2024 due to the PTE business which is expected to decline in H2. The business unit growth will be H2 weighted in particular to Q4. Enterprise learning and skills will grow high single digits in 2025 with vocational qualifications seeing solid growth and the addition of those new contracts for enterprise solutions which you've heard about. Growth will increase quarter on quarter in H2, supported by those recent customer announcements and pipeline activity. Turning to profit. Market expectations at the beginning of the year for adjusted operating profit were £656 million at an FX rate of 1.23. Subsequently, of course, there's been a significant move in the US dollar rate, so I thought it'd be helpful to remind you that every one cent movement in the dollar equates to approximately £5 million of adjusted operating profit. Now, I'm not going to try and forecast FX rates, but if we take the actual average FX rate for H1, which is 1.31, and assume the recent spot rate of 1.32 for the rest of the year, then the average FX rate for the full year would be about 1.32. So that would mean a 9 cent movement of FX, which reduces adjusted operating profit by £45 million down to £611 million, which is about where consensus is at the moment. The announced acquisition of eDynamic Learning has recently closed with consideration paid of 225 million pounds, dollars, sorry, at a 13 times adjusted EBITDA. We do not expect this to have a material impact to 2025 group guidance given near-term integration costs and the acquisition accounting for deferred revenue which impacts the first 18 months sales recognised. eDynamic Learning has a highly attractive financial profile with strong margins and cash flow and a track record of delivering good growth. We expect this acquisition to be supportive of our medium-term guidance. In terms of interest and tax, we continue to guide to circa £65 million of interest costs with a 90% to 100% free cash flow conversion, plus that state aid payment. Our tax guidance is unchanged at between 24% and 25% ETR. So, in summary, we're pleased with the performance we delivered in H1, which is in line with expectations. We remain on track to deliver our 2025 outlook with known business unit dynamics in place to support stronger growth in H2. And we finished the first half of the year in a strong financial position, driven by another excellent cash performance, supporting continued investment in the business, as well as increased shareholder returns. And with that, I'll hand back to Omar.