Reach plc

Hello everyone and thank you for joining us here today for the Reach plc 2024 full year results presentation. It's good to see so many of you here face to face and welcome those joining us on the webcast. I'm joined by our CFO Darren Fisher who will as usual take you through the financials and then I'll give an overview of the drivers of our good performance in the year. We'll both answer any questions you have at the end, and I'll assume that you've already read our disclaimer. When we spoke back in July, we reflected on how our solid set of results demonstrated that Reach was operationally and strategically building an ever-growing understanding of its audiences. We explained that we had a strong commercial relationship with advertising partners and a committed focus on efficiency. And that we were confident, not only for the six months ahead, but for the path we had set the business up, underpinned by the customer value strategy. The full year results we're presenting today justify this confidence. And I'm pleased to be able to say that our delivery in 2024 was ahead of market expectations. Now, the year was not without its challenges, namely an unfriendly macro environment and the continued dominance of the platforms. But the operational plans we put in place created value and continued our transition to a more resilient digital business. Our strategy is all about attracting a large audience who we can get to know, who we can tailor our content to, and who we can target higher value advertising to. To do this takes expertise, a theme that I touched on at the half-year results, but it is worth repeating. Expertise in creating engaging content, in optimising our digital and print assets, and in managing our costs, as well as building knowledge of our audience to effectively marry their content preferences with advertisers who have products that will appeal. It has not only helped us deliver the results and highlights you see here on the table, but also a US expansion that has grown significantly. A central content hub that in a short time has more than doubled the average page views of its team members and a studio that works with our titles to provide high-quality, multi-platform content and has grown total social video views by 12%. it has been a real year of progress. Progress that has seen digital return to growth. Progress as our data-led revenues, which are more resilient and higher yielding, performed robustly. And encouragingly, our growth levels in the final quarter were helped by a return to page view growth up 6% in Q4, as we used our data to serve audiences with articles that they wished to read. We saw a 19% yield growth and data-driven revenues growing to account for 45% of overall digital revenue. As expected, print continues to be structurally challenged, but we continue to see outperformance against the volume decline in circulation and advertising. Performance has also benefited from the difficult decisions we took in 2023 on costs, a decision we planned and implemented early, which enabled a significantly improved margin of 19%. This approach allowed the business to become accustomed to the new operating model before the start of 2024. Finally, an operating profit of £102 million, up 6% versus last year, is significant, not only in it being ahead of expectations, but also because it helps us sustain our commitment to an ad-funded, free-to-access news model. because many households in the United Kingdom and families are simply not in a position to pay or subscribe to news. Our titles and our journalists are their windows to the world, their guide in navigating the misinformation and untruths on social media, and most importantly, their voice to those in power. News is not and never should be a luxury. And I'll now pass over to Darren for the financials.

Thank you, Jim. Good morning and thank you all for joining us. I'm going to take you through the financial results for 2024 and then share my thoughts on 2025. To summarise, this has been a good year and this is in spite of the uncertain macro climate. We have delivered strong financial performance returned our digital business to growth, improved profitability, and managed cash effectively. Our experienced operational teams have continued to deliver our customer value strategy and have managed to deliver solid circulation and advertising performance without losing any focus on cost and cost management. Let's take a look at the full year highlights. I'll talk more about these numbers over the next few slides, but I'd like to highlight a few of the key operating metrics by way of a summary. As a sign of our strong digital performance, 45% of digital revenue is now data-driven, up from 43% last year. Operating margin increased to 19% from 17% in 2024, underpinned by our ongoing track record of managing our costs. Cash generation remains strong, with cash conversion at 105%. And recognising the importance of dividends to our shareholders, we have maintained a total dividend at 7.34 pence per share. Before I present the financial results, let me remind everyone that in 2024, we moved to reporting on the standard calendar basis from previously reporting our print business on a 445 fiscal basis. This means that there is an additional week in 2023 comparative period. For reference, I've included a table summarising reported and like for like variances, which can be found in the appendix on page 29. But please note that throughout this presentation I'll refer to like-for-like percentage movements unless otherwise stated. The overall revenue decline was 30 million across the period, or 4.2%. Digital return to growth with revenues of 130 million, an increase of three million, or 2.3%. Print, which remains the main driver of the overall revenue performance, declined 32 million, which is 6%. We've continued to carefully manage our cost base and adjusted operating profit for the period was $102 million, $6 million ahead of last year. Adjusted operating cash flow improved by $15 million to $107 million. And as I mentioned before, our cash conversion remains strong at 105%, albeit some working capital inflows will unwind during 2025. We ended the period with a $14 million net debt balance, which is after paying $59 million of pension contributions and $23 million in dividends. Now turning to revenue. Digital revenue grew 2%. This included a strong fourth quarter, supported by the success of our more seasonal activities, such as the OK Beauty Box Advent Calendar and affiliates over the Black Friday trading period. Print revenue comprises circulation, print advertising, and other print. Circulation declined by 14 million, or 3%, to just over 300 million. As a reminder, we still sell on average over 600,000 newspapers a day. I've said this before, and it is worth repeating. We have a highly skilled and experienced circulation team that optimizes this revenue stream by carefully managing the cover price increases. They have a number of levers available to them. Promotional activity, such as promotions with a national trust, optimizing pagination, and managing availability, so that cover prices can offset the majority of the 17% volume decline. Print advertising revenue, which was down 13.5%, continued to outperform volume trends buoyed by retail and entertainment. This shows the continuing attractiveness of our readership and the print format to advertisers. Now turning to digital in more detail. This slide should be familiar to you. This is a lens we put on the business to highlight our customer value strategy. Across the whole of our digital estate, we have traded our digital assets more effectively to drive high yields, which are up 19%. We think about digital revenue in two component parts with different characteristics. Firstly, the strategic revenues, or data-driven, which form our customer value strategy. These data driven revenues are much higher yielding and are on average nine times more valuable versus our open market mass scale advertising. These are shown in turquoise blue and have grown 7% despite being partly affected by the industry backdrop. This growth was supported by direct advertising where we create value through our data and the continued diversification of our revenue streams into areas such as affiliates and e-commerce. As this graph shows, these revenues are more resilient and therefore sustainable, and so it's reassuring that these continue to represent a growing part of our revenues, having increased from 43% to 45%. Secondly, non-data driven revenues include our audience variable elements, such as our mass scale open market programmatic advertising. Over the year, we've seen two material headwinds ease, which have benefited these more volume dependent revenues. Through the use of data and in-house technology, we have seen improving trends in audience and page views following the decline in referral traffic. Also, after a long period of decline, open market prices have stabilized. As a result, this segment declined 2%, outperforming the volume impact it is inherently more vulnerable to. The momentum at the end of the year and over the important Black Friday trading period is encouraging. Jim will talk more about the customer value strategy in his section. We've continued our disciplined approach to managing our cost base, which remains important to position the business for the long term. Operating costs reduced by 6.5%, well ahead of the 5 or 6% target we set ourselves. This reduction is the cumulative impact of the decisive and early cost initiative taken in 2023, where we were ahead of the market in making these difficult but critical decisions, alongside some unwinding of newsprint inflation. Looking at the constituent parts. Labor costs reduced by 3%, net of the self-funding bonus, reflecting the cost reduction and restructuring programs we have delivered. Headcount reduced by 13% year on year. To achieve these savings, we have transformed the way we work and allocate resources. Newsprint costs reduced by 28%. This is due to reducing volumes and the unwinding of inflation. We've negotiated more long-term contracts to secure these savings into 2025. Production and sales costs include marketing and direct cost of sales. Appreciation and amortization, which relates to our print sites and internally generated assets, is broadly known as prior year. I've already covered the revenue and operating cost movements, so the main thing to note on this slide is that we have maintained our targeted investment in growth areas. We continue to expand our footprint in the US, roll out a new website platform across our portfolio of websites, invested in our B2B proposition, and Yimbli, our new e-commerce marketplace. The $35 million efficiency savings delivered during the year mainly relate to labour cost actions and restructuring taken at the end of 2023 and reducing our uncommitted contribution spend. Adjusted operating profit for the period of $102 million is up $6 million. With the work we have done to resolve our historical, pension and legal issues, we have a really clear picture of our cash allocation requirements. This slide illustrates the cash generated from our operations and where it has been utilised. Let me step you through the graph. Overall, we have seen a cash outflow of $4 million over the period. Adjusted cash from operations was $126 million. Our largest commitment is the agreed funding arrangements with our pension schemes, which total $59 million, excluding payments made into escrow and secure bank accounts. As a reminder, the majority of these pension commitments are on 2028, where we will see a material improvement in cash generation. In recognition of how important the dividend is to our shareholders, we paid $23 million, as we did in the previous year. We paid $9 million settling historical legal issues, leaving a remaining provision of $9 million. Restructuring outflows of $16 million, the majority of which relates to completion of the cost reduction measures undertaken in 2023. Capital expenditure of $12 million is in line with our normal levels of spend. The main parts of other include $7 million of net lease payments, $4 million of vacant property costs and $4 million of interest. We've completed the 2024 plan for property disposals, including sites in Birmingham, Glasgow and Newcastle, which have generated around $15 million in sales proceeds over the period. We closed the year with a cash balance of $21 million, a net debt of $14 million, with a revolving credit facility drawn to $35 million. Cash generation was strong, with $105 percent of our profits converting to cash, underpinned by strong working capital, which does include some timing differences, which I expect to unwind over the course of 2025. We have completed the refinancing of our banking facilities. We have in place a 145 million revolving credit facility with a four year maturity to December 2028, including an option to extend by up to one year. The financial covenants are unchanged. This provides material headroom to our current debt position. Our approach to capital allocation remains consistent with previous years. We have resilient profits, sustainable cash generation, and a strong balance sheet, which remain our priorities as we continue to reduce our financial obligations. As I've already mentioned, we have pension funding obligations, which are around 60 million per year in the near term. These commitments are detailed in the appendix. And we continue to recognise the importance of dividends to our shareholders. Before handing back to Jim, I'll share my thoughts on 2025. We expect the macro environment to remain uncertain. Nonetheless, we expect digital revenue to grow. I'm sure a lot of businesses are talking to you about the changes to national insurance contributions. These place a small drag on our cost base. Before any mitigating actions, we expect total labor costs to increase by approximately 2% on an annualized basis. During the year, we expect to reduce total operating costs by 4% to 5%. These will be achieved through further operational efficiencies, reduction in newsprint volumes, as well as other general input costs such as energy. The working capital inflow of $4 million we saw in the year mainly relates to timing differences, which I expect to unwind over the first half of 2025. In terms of uses of cash, capital expenditure will be similar to 2024. Ongoing pension contributions will be around 60 million in line with agreed pension contribution schedules. In addition, as communicated in our R&S in January, a one-off payment of five million will be made to the West Ferry printers pension scheme in relation to the correction of a historical procedural issue. The remaining HLI provision of nine million is expected to be settled during 2025 and into 2026. Finally, I'm pleased with our strong performance in 2024 We had a 2025 mindful of market conditions but in good shape and are confident with the group's outlook. I'll pass back to Jim for the strategic update before we go into your questions. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Darren. Darren will join me in answering questions at the end of the presentation. I would now like to take you through some of the activities and progress we have made and the key areas that have helped contribute to this year's results. It's quite pleasing to be able to present this slide today. On the left-hand side, you can see this is the outlook that I presented to you at the start of 2024. And I want to share it today, not actually to crow about it, but just to underline that we've maintained a steady course over the year. And basically, we've delivered what we said we would. This is a key list of all the achievements, and as I said at the start of the presentation, simply the operational plans that we put in place to deliver our customer value strategy are essentially highlighted here. We're growing our digital business, we're building our own known customer base, and we're monetizing that relationship for the benefit of our advertising partners and their shareholders. And all the while, we're making our audience's interaction with us better and more engaging. We've continued to tackle cost and efficiency, and of course, we'll continue to focus on this area. But with one eye on the future, we are closer to 2028 when our financial obligations around pensions ease and more of our profit is available to the business. So what has supported this performance? Now, this slide isn't new. The graph illustrates the trends in yield or value per page view, as well as the trends in page views looking even further back to when we introduced our data-led approach. You can clearly see the diversions between essentially data-led revenues and the programmatic revenues, which demonstrate the value that our data-driven approach has delivered. The turquoise bars represent the data-led revenues that have driven the value over this period, emphasizing the greater value of the strategy versus a reliance on only the open market. This is another slide we've shown before, which highlights the mix of our digital revenues over the last three years. Here you can see the breakdown of our yield, measured as revenue per thousand pages, with our digital revenues broke down even further. Now, while of course I want to highlight the growth of the revenues we're getting from our data-driven customers, it is worth mentioning that our programmatic advertising revenues, where the market determines the price, has seen a stabilization in yields. This is certainly encouraging, but I'll reserve further judgment on whether it's a long-term trend until we see more evidence. From our data-driven revenues, we can see a growing yield thanks to a higher value, more effective advertising that we're able to offer our partners. We can also see a growth in e-commerce and affiliates, which is certainly encouraging for the business. And this chart gives evidence and conviction to our strategy and the more sustainable income it can provide. It's important because sustainable income supports our journalism and justifies our commitment to an ad-funded news model. It's useful to remind ourselves of just how strong and sizeable our digital asset is. With the UK and Ireland's largest commercial news publisher, a publisher with an online monthly audience of 34 million built around 120 brands. Together these brands have a place in the digital lives of nearly 70% of the UK population. But what you won't have seen in this slide before is the growth and performance of our US audience and social activity. Our US operation has continued to grow every month, with our three brands there who have made real headway. We're encouraged that already in less than two years, we have grown our US audience to 30 million, which is on a par with many of the more established brands. On social media, we recently hit the milestone of 100 million followers as we continue to focus on our studio output and the growing demand for video. And as we continue to better understand different audiences and distribution channels, we will continue to invest in this area. Engagement is important as it means more time spent on our platforms and channels. Encouragingly, we are growing page views per visit as our greater knowledge of our audiences allows us to tailor news and recommendations to their preferences. This important metric has grown by over 8%. It's important because over the year we saw that data-driven page views were nine times more valuable than its programmatic equivalent. And at the same time, we're attracting more people to sign up to receive our news. We now have 9 million people signed up to get content directly to their devices via WhatsApp, newsletters, or push notifications. These customers are important because they have a large degree of control over what content we serve them and when. At the half-year, I touched on the fact that some of our readers had raised issues on the user experience of our websites, and we explained how we're acting on that feedback. At the time, we had begun testing a new website platform with the Liverpool Echo, one of our most well-established local news brands. The results were encouraging. We have since rolled out the platform to our Manchester Evening News platform, Birmingham Live, Daily Record and Daily Star sites. From a user perspective, the rollout has gone well with page loading speed tripling and a reduction in ad buffering. We will continue the rollout across our online portfolio with most of our digital estate due for completion by the end of the year and then in Q1 26 and we will complete the Daily Express portfolio. Finally, we continue to look to grow our overall audience, and we continue to look at increased scale through a number of initiatives. In particular, we've seen the benefits of a data-driven approach in maximizing the audience driven from referrers, both in the US and UK. And for example, Google Discover has been a valuable source of growth, growing 6% over the year. However, we recognise the importance of diversifying our social and distribution channels, which is why we have focused on the direct channels I have mentioned, such as newsletters and WhatsApp. Improving trends in audience and page views have also been supported by our AI-powered content recommending tool. Some new editorial structures we have put in place and, of course, at its core, our brilliant content, all of which I'll come on to. I'd like to take a brief moment to talk to you about some of the work we're undertaking to make us not only more efficient and effective in our operations, but also to improve our advertising offering. I'd like to first look at how both our newsrooms and commercial teams are using AI as a tool. But first, a health warning. Please remember that our guiding principle on AI is about making our operations more efficient and effective, but not at the risk of undermining the quality of our content. Our journalists and experienced editors continue to determine our news content and what the reader sees, overseeing every story that is published. Where it does help our editorial teams is in supporting content generation and distribution. For example, it speeds up editing for house styles when tailoring a piece for different sites across our portfolio. The automated process we have put in place as part of this work means we can now upload and distribute a story much more quickly. Outside of generative AI, we have seen and been already using and developing AI-powered tools for a number of years. For example, driving in-house recommender tools, which have ultimately supported an increase in click-through rates and page views per session. AI has also been significant in the development of a proprietary ad tech platform, Mantis, which we not only use internally, but now also offer as an external publisher as a B2B proposition. As many of you will be aware, we offer Mantis to our advertisers both to support contextual targeting, but as well as to ensure brand safety. This slide also touches on the need for our teams to have the right structure and tools to be agile and respond to the changing nature of the news cycle and also customer preferences. I've mentioned the benefits we've already seen this year from our content hub, which was firstly there to improve our allocation of resources and to reduce duplication of content. The content hub has, in its short time, more than doubled the average page views from its team members. Our studio launched last spring and has made real progress in working with our titles, as well as with our partners to provide high-quality, multi-platform content that works both editorially and commercially. We have increased our social video views by 12% year-on-year and importantly have grown revenue from direct social video buys. The studio has allowed us to produce impactful work like the video content for the National Lottery or our specialist programmes around the Euros and the general election. We will be strengthening our offer in the year ahead with new podcasting and video facilities not only in London but in Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. The development of e-commerce and affiliates was something we identified last year as having potential. 2024 proved to be a year where we started to see the opportunities become more tangible with non-advertising revenue, including e-commerce and affiliates, both growing steadily. E-commerce grew strongly with a fine 39% year-in-year growth increase in revenues. Our OK Beauty Box continued to perform well with the advent calendar in particular was a big success selling out before December. We also launched Yimbli, our e-commerce platform, in a year and now have over 15,000 products available and you can expect to see more of this development throughout the year. Affiliates grew strongly with a 50% year-on-year growth and a particularly good performance throughout Black Friday. We've put a strong senior team in place to focus on attracting third-party business. This is because of our Mantis platform, and they have delivered, making good progress in adding revenue, signing partnerships with our publishing groups, as you can see here on this slide. We believe that there is more to play for, and the team has been tasked with more of the same in 2025. Our advertisers value both our digital and print platforms. However, with digital, we have the ability to use our knowledge of our audience to make our advertisers' campaigns more effective. Mantis, as you're aware, gives us a significant advantage in targeting the right customers for our advertisers. Tesco have chosen to partner with us for a number of years. In the campaign highlighted here, they came to us to help them target areas of the country where they wanted to further compete. With the help of our geographical and contextual advertising, we were able to help them plan more effective ad campaigns, reaching people in the right areas interested in the right content and topics. This work had measurable impact for Tesco, as you can see on the slide, with click-through rates three times the industry average. Alwyn, the national lottery operator, sponsored a series of Vox Pops produced by Reach Studio, asking people across the UK, what would you do if you won the lottery? The campaign reached a large regional audience using our brand's social media accounts and generated 5 million views. And finally, we come to Sky, which ran a national and local campaign to raise awareness of their English Football League coverage, which had just become available to watch on Sky Sports. All of these three cases reflect the benefits of the customer value strategy and the simple logic of getting the right content to the customer. These examples illustrate why a data-driven page view in 2024 was worth nine times more than a programmatic equivalent. Now let's turn to print, which I think, well, we think remains slightly misunderstood. We can't escape from print structural decline, but it is still a valuable part of our business. It is a product that has loyal customers who still value us with over 600,000 copies sold daily and one that advertisers find very effective. So we'll continue to work to maintain this popular product and its considerable revenue stream for as long as possible. While the overall income decline of 6% here cannot be denied, it's important to bear in mind that that figure is well ahead of the 17% decline in volumes. And this has been a fairly consistent performance for years, making this a very reliable income source. The demand for print will continue and the challenge for us will remain to manage the value exchange with our readership. Our teams continue to carefully match the necessary price increases with added content and strong promotions. We invest in availability so our readers are able to find the product in the local shop up and down the United Kingdom. Our teams have also utilised interest in special events to produce one-off publishing products which drive additional revenue. And as I said, print advertising outperformed volume decline in part thanks to the fact that certain sectors, particularly food retail, continue to value the effectiveness of this format. Lastly, we have delivered a 28% light-for-light reduction in newsprint costs through a combination of volume and savings. As I said earlier, our journalism is important, and it's why I want to turn to it now. It's a window to the world, an ear to people's troubles, and a voice for their issues and concerns. But it's also a friend and a companion in all of their interests and hobbies, and I want to celebrate where our journalists excelled, covering the lighter side of life from Taylor Swift to the Euros. I also want to call out the podcast that found new and often entertaining ways to shed light on familiar topics which we saw around our general election. But you won't be surprised to see that on a more serious note, here in this slide, we've also highlighted just a few examples of how our titles continue to support their communities. Like the Manchester Evening News helping to raise money that needed money to save the iconic Salford Lads Club. The Liverpool Echo campaigning as it has for over 35 years to ensure that the victims of Hillsborough are not forgotten and the lessons learned are acted upon. Something we saw come through in September as the Prime Minister announced the Hillsborough Law. The Express likewise saw a three-year-long campaign come to fruition in 2024 with their assisted dying campaign, sparking a political debate and a historic vote last year. And the Mirror sticking with a decades-old cold case to uncover new evidence around the murder of Jill Dando, which produced an award-winning piece of video journalism. Finally, the vital role that our titles play in society was made particularly clear over the summer following the tragic murders in Southport and the resulting riots which our journalists were the first on the scene to cover. In an increasingly noisy world with disinformation that's allowed to flourish on social media, our titles represent the best of what trusted news brands mean to this country. Our titles, national and local, provide a valuable and irreplaceable service to their communities, and I take real pride in the hard work of our teams as they continue to serve their audiences' trusted news in ever more engaging ways. So after that quick tour of the actions we've been undertaking, you'll not be surprised to hear that in the back of a good performance in 2024, we're very much looking forward to a similar approach in 2025. Our strategy has made us more resilient, sustainable, and we continue to prioritize growing our audiences and progressing with our revenue diversification. We will continue to maximize our print product, both for its loyal readers and for its cash-generative qualities to fund our digital growth. and efficiency will remain a constant as we look to drive strong margin. Despite our good progress, we are taking nothing for granted and are alive to the uncertain macro environment and the dynamic media backdrop. I've been keen to remind the teams that a good 2024 is no guarantee of a good 2025, even though we are in line with expectations for the year. And that is why our mantra is about operational delivery, day in, day out. So before I hand over for questions, I would like to thank every member of the team at REACH for delivering this strong performance in 2024 for our readers and our stakeholders. Thank you, and now over for questions.

Morning, Gareth Davis from Deutsche Neumis. Three on digital from me, maybe to kick off. First, encouraging momentum in terms of audience and page views in Q4 as you're looking into 25. Is that a sort of, are we on a level playing field now and are you sort of relatively confident we can grow from here or are there sort of external factors that you're still very mindful of that could impact that audience trend and the page view trend? Secondly, the 19% yield sort of growth stands out. Exing out kind of, if we were in a stable programmatic environment, What's the confidence you can grow that again this year? And are there any kind of one-offs within that 19% we need to be a little mindful of where you've had specific campaigns, et cetera, that may not repeat? And then finally, just e-commerce and affiliate revenue. It's becoming sort of decent size in absolute terms. How biased to Q4 is that? And again, when we're thinking about the digital revenue trend through 25, do we need to be mindful of that through Q1, Q2, Q3? Thank you.

Thanks, Gareth. Q4 2024 was exceptional. There was quite a lot of activity going on. There was obviously pre-election activity going on in the US. There was quite a lot of entertainment activity going on. And that basically came through in quite a significant amount of advertiser spend, as I spoke about food retail. So Q4 was a standout. But we're in line with the current trends and plans, Gareth. So we took a print view of 2025. Our audiences are coming through as expected, so there's obviously no current concerns about that performance, but bear in mind this year we don't have a Euros, we don't have a UK general election. I am sure the news agenda will give us some, basically... fuel and mill to the grist, as you've already seen, so hopefully that will continue. But we've taken a fairly prudent view for growth for 2025, so it's steady as you go on audience with no concerns at the moment, Gav. The 19% yield was partly on the back of Q4. Bear in mind, Black Friday was an excellent result for us as an organization. There was a lot of consumer advertising spending because at that point, I think it was 43% of our revenue was data-led, which grew to 45. We basically got the multiplication effect of that spend. So you've seen that 19% yield growth continue. It all really depends on the wider macro environment, Gareth. So if we continue to see spend, and we continue to see brands looking to sell product through our affiliates and e-commerce platforms, then with 45% data-led, then we should be seeing double-digit yield. But we are at the mercy of the consumer macro environment. That's always the case with reach and consumer-facing businesses. Do you want to add anything to that, Dan? No, that's right, yep. And then e-commerce and affiliates, we're just at the start. So we've got 9 million registered users. We've got an audience of 32 million, of which 45% deliver data-led revenues. You would be asking questions why we don't do e-commerce and why we don't do affiliates. So as you see the data-led grow and the audience grow, we would expect e-commerce and affiliates to basically trend there as well. But I would add on an absolute term, it's just the beginning. So it's still a fairly shallow lake for e-commerce and affiliates, but the early signs have been positive, but it's still the start of that. So it's not the time to get too excited about it. It's promising and it's steady.

Thank you. It's Fiona Orford of Williams Medicine. Just a couple, really. First of all, can we hear more about the US expansion? What are you doing to drive that, and where's the goal? And the second is on the revenue diversification. Can you tell us more about your ambitions in terms of things like video and podcasts? Thank you.

Well, the architect of the U.S. expansion is just sitting two to your right there. So he came up with the master plan. It's really quite straightforward, actually. We're going to put journalists in the U.S. Some will have a soft left of center view. Some will have a soft light. Some have a harder right view. And then we've got the Irish diaspora. So we looked at the data. and we looked at the scale of the North American market and we thought we could maybe do something here if our content was good enough. And our content was good enough. So we started off light touch, maybe with a dozen or so, mainly British and Irish journalists. And we decided if they got the right signals back, if they were writing content, we got a response. We would put Americans in, and things like, despite, I've met a few English sports fans who say they like American college football, but they don't really know it. So we found US journalists and put them in, and they started creating an audience. And then you find things that were on the ground during the Trump assassination, they were close to it. And they were at the events with regard to the pre-election stuff. And they were writing in a language which connected with their American audiences. And I don't think it's any surprise that we now have a customer base of 30 million, which I think is fantastic. So from that couple of dozen, mostly British and Irish natives, we now have 50 journalists. Would you say, David, the vast majority are now Americans? Who are now Americans writing American content for an American audience. An interesting thing about it is that because... us and our North American, I think we're still friends with Americans, our North American cousins, are still interested in the same thing, whether it's BAFTAs or Oscars or Liverpool Football Club and obviously NATO and the war in Ukraine. You have this 24-hour news cycle. So we now have an office in New York. We have a patch in Los Angeles, David, in California. And we have obviously London. And we have this 24-hour news cycle. And that's paying off. The other thing which is important about the US is that we have a slightly different commercial model. So we use referrers. So here in the UK, we build a relationship with our customers, and we like people to come to our sites. In the States, we're trying an experiment by using MSN, Apple News, and Yahoo. That is a significant amplifier of our content. I mean, if you can do a deal with MSN and Yahoo, you actually build an audience right away. The challenge is it needs to be big because you get a smaller share of the revenue. But so far, that's worked, and that's been good. So we're very proud of what the team have done in the US. Video. 100 million social followers. Clearly, we need to have our own capabilities to produce high-quality video. And I'm not saying that handheld video production by a journalist, which they have been doing brilliantly for a couple of years, isn't good enough. But to walk into a studio which is state-of-the-art equipment, to invite whether it's sports stars or politicians to a studio which is soundproof and confidential, is clearly a requirement. All of our large sites now have those studio capabilities. I think every one of them now, David, isn't it? Yeah, every one of them. So London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. Glasgow were actually one of the first to take it forward with their old firm content. But actually having a studio creates a different type of quality content. That's probably a requirement when you now have 100 million followers. So we're committed to that for vid and podcasts.

Hi, it's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I've got three, please. So first of all, I think we've probably all seen the impact of Gen AI on our own search activity on Google. So have you started to see any impact at all from Google users getting stuck in an AI answer before they ever get to results and therefore don't click through to your content? Or how are you thinking about that? Second question, I guess a crucial part of your equity story is the reduction in pension and cash top-ups from 2028, as you flagged. Can you talk about the confidence that we can hold on that guided schedule? Is that set in stone now as far as you're concerned, or is it possible that the sands could shift again a bit on that journey to not having a cash top-up? Third question, given that you came in better, certainly, than I expected on net debt in 2024, did you give any thought to a small buyback in 2025? Yeah, I think two and three and all.

Great question on Jenny, I think actually is there a risk that people get stuck in an AI loop? Yes, there is. And which is one of the reasons why we need to get closer to our customers. So everyone who's searching on Google or any other search engine at the moment, you'll now see It's roughly about at least a third of the page is degenerative AI, and then you get the list below it. I think it's really important that publishers and journalists get close to their readers. So if there's something that you are particularly interested in, which is important to you, which you find engaging, you know where to go to, which is why we have 9 million, essentially, subscribers on WhatsApps and newsletters. Other folk will decide that I'm going to pay $6 or $9.99 a month for a Times or a Telegraph subscription. So I think that is really, really important. The customer value strategy was not delivered or put together to basically fight back against generative AI. It was there to fight back originally against cookies, but it just happens to turn out that it helps us deal with this generative AI loop, which is one of the positives, which is why that 43% to 45% data-led revenue is a really important metric, Nick. So to answer to your question, yes, it is a concern, but we have a way of approaching it. So we make sure our content is out there, but we'll continue to do that. I'll leave the next two to Darren. Darren, is that okay?

Yeah, of course. So on pensions, the... The current contribution schedules we have, they are contracted, so they're in place based on the last training evaluation. They were all contracted on the basis that that would get our pension schemes to fully funded, so that would bring it to an end, which is what we've been saying consistently over the last year or so. In terms of is there any potential change, well, we have another training all coming up, which starts next year, which will complete in March 2027. That will mean we'll have to go through that contracting process again, so things could change based on performance of the schemes. What I would say, and clearly I continue to monitor the performance of the schemes, they are all tracking in line with what our expectations are. at the moment in the context of those current schedules that we have. So I'm as confident as I can possibly be. Your second question was about the – sorry, your third question was about buyback. Is that right? Yeah. So our capital allocation is clear. We talk about being a dividend-paying company, assuming obviously that it's a board-approved requirement, but that's what's in our capital allocation model. From time to time it comes up around whether to do buyback or not, but I would honestly say we haven't seriously considered doing those – At the time, at least, anyway.

It's Jonathan Barrett from PAMUS. I guess I've got just one question, albeit it's a bit wide-ranging, so bear with me. It's really picking up on what you discovered through 2024 with the efforts you made on content, improving the content, improving the marketing of the content, and to Nick's point about generative AI positioning and the brand recognition that you're getting within younger audiences online. How do you feel that's evolving now? And have you learned any lessons from 2024 that help you map out the next sort of two, three years in terms of product evolution on content and distribution?

Thanks for your four questions, Jonathan. So I'll do it in reverse order. Yeah, we have learned lessons. I mean, essentially, everything that we do is an informed risk. It's a bet. We have ideas, and we see if they work. The biggest one, I think, is, again, we're a content business, and our editor-in-chief is essentially sitting over there. We created the content hub. which was the centralization of content producers and journalists who could build up following or become specialists in certain topics or verticals. And as I said to you earlier, I think it was three times more page views or clicks that they get. That worked for us. We brought all of these. And obviously, it's a change process. People are associated with titles and brands. They move into a central area. But that content can then be repurposed and republished back out to the brands. So the content hub was a massive learning for us. That's been a huge success. And credit to the editorial team for doing that. And obviously the commercial team are waiting in the wings to monetize all that content and that engagement. So a lot of the revenue upside that you're seeing is due to the fact that we have managed our content much more effectively. So that's a bet that paid off. And lessons learned about how we can use that. AI... AI is a funny thing, actually, because it's obviously, it's quite an overused term, right? We've been using it for quite a while, you know, and we don't want to actually put ourselves out of this as some sort of the vanguard of AI, but we use it sensibly within our editorial teams. No journalist or editor We'll let anything go that might have AI input without them signing it off, David. That's the case. That will continue to be the case. It is all led by editorial. It's not led by the chief executive, and it's not led by the management team. But it helps us do things quickly. We're starting to look at it for the right pictures. We're starting to look at it and getting tone right. All of our titles use different languages or different types of vocabulary. AI helps us get there. And some of the data-heavy stories that could well be what to do at the weekend and might well be something about a sports match where there's quite a lot of incidents, AI can help the journalist write more engaging content. So it's there to support. From a wholly commercial perspective, we think we are... if not one of them, because I'm quite friendly with all my fellow publishers, one of the leading publishers in the utilization of AI through Mantis. And we now think that it's so powerful and resilient that we can put it forward as a B2B proposition for a commercial deal. Now, you don't put these things into the market unless they've been tried and tested. Now, this is the biggest commercial news operator in the UK. It's been tried and tested for us. So we now actually sell it as a service to Ladbible, Immediate Media, Nine in Australia. and we look to do more. And what it does is use AI to recommend content based on past reader history, as well as allow publishers to go to advertisers and say, if there is a further escalation in Ukraine and you don't want your content associated with that story, our tool will make sure, and you'll contractually bind to that contract to say, our tool will make sure your advertising won't be next to that content. So that's AI, that's the non-generative side, and we've been using it for some time, so we think we're fairly, we're sort of pushing the boundaries to that one. And the final thing, Jonathan, one of the things we have learned is that you don't get 100 million social media followers if you can't do video properly. So David and his team have now got 100 million. It would be daft to have that amount of followers and not have the ability to do high-quality video, sound, podcasting and vidcasting. And the next time you come into the office, you will see quite a... I think it probably competes with the best, David. a studio set up that's taken us, I mean, the board have supported us, Darren signed off the capital investment, but it's up there with some of the best studio facilities for UK publishers, and we've now got that in all of our main sites.

This is from Aymah Mood. Cost savings. How much opportunity is there for further cost cutting? And do you have a view on when revenues might grow? Is digital revenue able to replace print as stable and predictable?

I'll do it reverse order and I'll leave the cost to you, Darren. We're not going to speak about the point where digital takes over print because print is a substantial revenue opportunity. Digital is growing. It's back to growth. It's a positive story. It would be irresponsible for me to give you an idea of when that point is going to be because, again, we are a consumer publisher who rely on the wider macroeconomic environment. Safe to say is that we've returned digital to growth. That's a positive story, and we're doing so much that you've heard about to actually further that growth into 2025. But I think it would be irresponsible to say when it takes over from print. You know, typically the costs.

Yeah, and on the... Excuse me. On the cost side... Excuse me. I'm sorry about that. On the cost side, there's probably two things to say there. The first one is, look, there are some natural costs that come out of the business. So, for example, a good example is on the print side, newsprint volumes come down, so there's a natural part of our cost base that does, over time, come down. In terms of other cost savings, we can always make further cost savings. We like to do it in a way which is looking around how We can improve efficiency, how we can change ways of working, those sorts of things. So, yes, we can always continue to look at our cost base, and we do have a very strong track record, as I hope you can see, of being able to do that in a safe and responsible way.

No more questions? Thanks very much for the continued interest. Meeting over. Thank you.