RWS Holdings plc

So I'm Ian, the CEO. I'm joined today by Kendi Davis, our CFO. Also in the room today are Julie Southern, our chair designate, Jane Hyde, our company secretary, and Andrew Pickup, who hands up IR and strategy for us. Looking forward to talking to you today. We're going to follow a similar format to previous presentations. I'll start off with an overview. I'll then hand over to Candy to go through a financial review. I'll then come back with a deeper dive into our strategic progress and our divisions. We'll then touch on current trading and outlook and then we'll go to questions. I think you're all pretty familiar with the makeup of the group, but just as a reminder, we are a unique world leading provider of technology enabled language content and IP services. We are very well diversified with many leading market positions. We operate in a large and attractive market. In many ways we are defined by the very high quality clients who choose to work with us over very long tenured relationships. We have a unique delivery platform combining mature technologies with very experienced people. and truly global reach, covering some 32,000 in-house and freelance linguists and thousands of colleagues supporting them. We offer 24-7 delivery on a global basis, which is crucial for the sorts of clients that we serve. And the business has always been run prudently, with strong cash generation, low levels of debt, maintaining the flexibility to invest both organically and in bolt-on acquisitions. What we do is help our clients to grow by ensuring that they are understood anywhere and in any language. And we do that by helping them to create, to collect, to transform, to analyze, to launch and manage content. And that content can come in any form, text, image, audio, video. And historically we would have said that we don't spend as much time creating content as we do in the other stages that you see on this chart. But increasingly we find that we are helping clients to help to originate content, to facilitate the development of their AI platforms, to help them with truly transforming content to be relevant in different cultural contexts. So increasingly, we are a capable organisation across this content value chain. Now, I think there are probably two key exam questions we need to address today. One is the performance on growth, why we haven't grown in the first half of the year, and why we believe that we will start to grow again in the future. And secondly, the question of AI. Is it a net risk or a net opportunity for the group? So I want to hit those two topics head on. It's been a tough 18 months, very challenging macroeconomic background. I don't need to spend time explaining the reasons for that. But what that has meant for our businesses is that in language services, we've seen spend reductions across many of our clients in regulated industries. We've seen legislative changes and regulatory bottlenecks that have hindered our ability to grow in life sciences. And in IP services, as I think you all know, the arrival of the unitary patent, which actually went live on the 1st of June, has also presented that division with headwinds. But we think many of those are transitory and that we will work our way through them. But in the immediate period, what that has looked like for us was slower client decision making, lower levels of activity, and a greater focus on cost through competitive tendering processes and through quite challenging pricing discussions in some areas. Now, of course, we haven't just sat there and watched. We've done a number of things to mitigate the impact of those trends. We've been driving an initiative on sales effectiveness, which we started in our IP services division about a year ago. And we've recently extended that across all of our divisions. We've been working hard on efficiency and we are confirming today 10 million pounds of cost reductions which will impact in this financial year and a further 25 million of cost actions that we are starting to take right now which will deliver through the course of FY24. We continue to leverage technology to drive efficiencies within our operation, especially through our language platform, the LXD, and I'll touch more on that in a second. And we are continuing at full speed with the transformation programs that we announced last year, which were all about delivering a more efficient operating platform for the group. And if there's a change there, what we've been doing within that overall transformation program is focusing on those aspects of those projects which can deliver earlier access to margin benefits. And we'll talk a bit more about those programs as we go through. Now, in terms of AI, we talked extensively about this at our Capital Markets Day last year. And I think we were very open that our industry has faced a long-term downward trend in cost per word. as a result of leveraging technology. And that trend goes back many years from the advent of translation management systems, translation memories, and more recently, neural machine translation and AI. That is not a new trend. Our strategy was very conscious of that when we launched it last year, and that's why we put so much emphasis behind our language platform and behind using AI within that platform. However, we also talked about how AI is a source of growth. And today, we're very clear that the net impact of AI on our business is a net opportunity. Why is that? Well, we believe we are really well positioned to help our clients through the whole AI journey, from exploring how AI can help them make their businesses more productive, to helping them build AI platforms, to helping them deploy solutions for language and content management through the software products that we acquired through the SDL merger. And if you care to look today on our website, we've refreshed it recently with a number of examples of the sorts of things that we're able to do here. rws.com forward slash AI. You'll find some case studies and further details. But to give some color to this, we are already completing projects, helping clients to look at different AI platforms and how they can deploy them within their businesses, whether that be for content management or other purposes. For many years, we've been helping clients to develop large language models, voice assistants, et cetera. And I'll talk more about how we're building on that as we go through this presentation. So in many ways, AI is built into RWS and we embrace the opportunity to work on it further. Before I hand over to Candy, let me just touch on the headline results. Revenues of 366 million in the period. Gross margin broadly flat, which I think does demonstrate that our model is working, that we're able to match through the LXD supply to varying levels of demand across different language pairs. PBT reflects trading conditions, but also the investments we've been making in some of those growth initiatives. In terms of capex, 6% exactly in line with guidance reflecting the impact of our transformation programs ramping up. Interim dividend of 2.4 pence per share in line with our progressive dividend policy. Cash conversion has moved year on year, and that is almost entirely due to the increased spend on our transformation projects, and return on capital exactly within the range of guidance that we've given previously. Overall, we think these results show continued strategic progress, and we are maintaining the guidance we've given previously. I'll now hand over to Candy, and then I'll be back shortly. Thanks. Which button is it? Thank you.

Thank you, Ian. And now turning to the numbers in more detail. So revenue was up 2.5% year on year. This includes a small benefit relating to the Fonto acquisition, which took place in March 22. Organic growth excluding Fonto is 1.6%, whilst we're reporting a revenue decline at constant currency of 6.8%. I'll provide more details, including the divisional breakdown, on the next slide. Gross margin, as Ian's mentioned, was broadly flat at 45.7%, and this reflects the softer activity levels seen amongst a number of clients in language services and RI, which has impacted mix negatively, and the more competitive dynamics in other end markets, largely offset by pricing and further efficiencies being driven through the LXD. Admin expenses as a percent of gross profit has increased by 410 basis points, partially due to the planned front loading of investments to accelerate growth and partially due to the lower revenue and thus gross profit realised in the first half. We've recognised 8.6 million of FX gains in the period, largely relating to forward FX contracts which has helped to offset the FX impact experienced across our cost base. Please be aware that this gain has been recorded in the unallocated corporate segment, which means the divisional adjusted operating profits reflect the true underlying cost of running the business, whilst the group as a whole has benefited from some offset. The net result is profit before tax of 54.4 million, running at 14.9% revenue. It should be remembered that for RWS, profit as a percentage of revenue is typically lower in the first half than second half, and with the cost actions being taken, we expect to see the full year in line with current market expectations. There are a number of adjusting items which are detailed in the accounts. These include acquisition costs of 1.5 million, largely relating to Fonto contingent consideration, integration and transformation costs of 3.5 million, amortisation of acquired intangibles of 19 million, relating to the past acquisitions of SDL and Moravia, and share-based payments of just over 1 million. Reported tax expense for half year 23 was 7.8 million, an effective tax rate of 27.2%. This 100 bps reduction compared to last year is primarily due to a US R&D tax benefit recorded this year that wasn't recognised in the comparative period. Once we've taken account of adjusting items such as exceptionals and amortisation of inquired intangibles, the adjusted effective tax rate is 24.4%. The increase from the comparative 23.7% is primarily due to the increase in UK tax rates from 19% to 25%, giving rise to a 22% UK blended rate for the full year 23. This is also consistent with our earlier guidance and expectations. Finally, adjusted EPS came in at 10.6 pence per share, down 11% on the prior year. The board has approved an interim dividend of 2.4 pence, which is a 7% increase on last year's interim dividend, supporting the capital allocation policy of a progressive dividend. So turning to revenue in more detail, this slide shows the drivers, the revenue variance from first half last year to the first half this year. Language services has reported growth of 1.4%, while at constant currency this is 8% below the period last year. As previously highlighted in the half-year trading statement, we continue to see reduced activities from some of our clients as they have adapted their priorities to changes in their own markets. We continue to win new business across the division and we have seen some pleasing results in our growth areas of e-learning and data services. And Ian will cover this in more detail later in the presentation. In regulated industries, reported growth was minus 1%, while at constant currency this equates to a decline of 9%. This retraction is due to the previously communicated loss of a major CRO client and softer trading conditions within a number of life sciences clients, partially offset by good growth seen in both linguistic validation and the finance and legal services segment. On a reported basis, LCT has grown 13%. The organic reported growth of the division excluding Fonto was 7%. Once again, we achieved excellent growth in the proportion of SAS revenues with 29% of new revenues in the division being SAS. This dynamic suppressed the constant currency revenue growth of minus 2%, although, of course, for the longer term, SAS revenue is more valuable given its recurring revenue. In IP services, trading remains on track for the year, with a positive impact from our sales improvement initiative. The decline in revenues of 6% on a constant currency basis was in line with our expectations as clients continued to delay the granting of patent applications in order to benefit from protection under the unitary patent. As you can see, the FX impact in the period has had circa 8% impact on our top line results in the period as the dollar strengthened against the pound. And Ian will discuss business performance across all the divisions in more detail later. Turning to the cash bridge, operating cash flow before working capital movements came in at 60.2 million. Cash conversion in the first half was 85%, in line with expectations, and once again demonstrating the strong cash generation of the group. Significant outflows relate to dividends, tax, the final purchase consideration for Iconic, and the increased investments as outlined at the CMD, in line with our strategy for investment. Please note that our definition of cash conversion is free cash flows before exceptional cash flows divided by adjusted net income. So any additional payments made relating to the newly announced restructuring or indeed any acquisitions that may arise in the second half will impact our net cash balance but will not impact the cash conversion metric as this focuses purely on the underlying business activities and not those considered one-off in nature. Total cash at the end of March 23 was 76.3 million and net cash after borrowings was 57.8. Even after the incremental investments and the final dividend paid, this is a net increase of 19.6 million from the net cash position at half year 22. For information as is typical, lease liabilities of 38.5 million are not included in these figures. As a reminder, we currently have a committed facility of $220 million, of which $194 million remain undrawn at 31st March. So moving to the balance sheet, which remains strong. And when comparing to September 22, there's only limited change other than the FX revaluation. Some points to note are the goodwill decreased by 39 million due to the movements in the dollar relative to the pound. The closing rate of the US dollar at 30 September was 1.117, whereas at March it was 1.239. Intangible assets also decreased by 25 million, the additions of just over 20 million being more than offset by amortization of 27 million. and the FX revaluation impact of 19 million. Networking capital decreased in the first half, primarily driven by lower revenues and FX revaluation. So now to our key KPIs, which Ian introduced in the year-end presentation in December, and calling out a few of the key ones we've not already touched on in the financials. As you can see, both our MPS and our repeat revenue metrics remain high and fairly stable, reinforcing the strong client relationships and satisfaction that RWS maintains. The cumulative incremental revenue from our defined growth initiatives now stands at 11 million, with continued progress being seen in linguistic validation, e-learning, and data services. We continue to see a shift in our license models to SAS, linked to the increased R&D investments in our products. SAS revenues grew 29% over the half year, and now represent 33% of the license revenue reported in LCT, compared to 28% this time last year. Development spend of 12.5% is in line with our strategy to invest behind our organic growth and continue to meet our clients' evolving needs through the right range of solutions with increasing AI-based functionality. CapEx 6.2% of revenue is also in line with the investment profile indicated last year at CMD. The spend year to date is a combination of the continued investments being made in our software development as well as the transformation programmes of which I will provide a more detailed update in a moment. And finally, from a people perspective, you can see our current level of voluntary attrition has reduced since September to 12.5% and the percentage of women in senior leadership positions has increased, bounced back a little bit to 39%. So a very brief update on our transformation programs. The main takeaway here is that we are progressing in line with expectations. We're pleased to report that the first program, Highlander, which was the global transition to a single collaboration platform, has been completed on time and on budget. And I'm pleased to say that we're now all benefiting from easier collaboration and communication. The LXD programme continues to progress well, with a number of staged migrations, both of tools and services, taking place until the end of 25. As you can read on the slide, we're making progress migrating volumes into the LXD for life sciences and language sciences clients, and the planning for the migration for IP services is well underway. The IP services programme focusing on delivering efficiencies, both internally and for our clients, is due to be delivered towards the back end of 24. And as previously communicated, the finance and HR programmes are focused on simplifying and optimising the group-wide operating models and platforms. The new target operating models were announced in April and the associated restructuring programme has been initiated. Delivery of the new platforms are scheduled to take place in a number of releases throughout 2024. And now, a reminder of our capital allocation policy. On top of our business as usual maintenance, we look to invest to grow. We continue with our progressive dividend policy, and we look to acquire for further growth. And this creates a virtuous circle for building future value. You have heard that the Board has approved an interim dividend of 2.4 pence, reflecting the 7% increase over prior year, and Ian will talk to M&A in a few slides' time. Finally, from me, due to the Group's strong cash generation and balance sheet and current share price, the Board has decided to initiate a share buyback programme of up to £50 million. The Group has substantial headroom under its existing facilities, even after taking into consideration this proposed buyback payment of dividends in line with policy and the capital to fund its organic growth and acquisition strategy. And with that, I'll hand back to Ian.

Right. So a quick reminder of the structure of the group, which basically hasn't changed. We have four operating divisions. I'm going to go through each of them in turn. You can see there the revenue shifts. Not much to say there. Slightly more from a language and content technology. And just to remind our language experience delivery platform is our language platform. And we are in the process, as Candy has said, of migrating more work from the services divisions into that platform. And that's where we combine the use of some 1,700 in-house linguists with just under 30,000 freelancers and the use of our own translation management and AI tools to drive productivity. We think that platform is unique in our industry. Going through the divisions one by one, starting first with language services. A reported level, as Candy said, revenues were up 1%, but on an organic constant currency basis, down 8%. As we've already commented, client retention and satisfaction levels remain very high. but we have seen softer activity across a range of verticals. And we've also seen, in this division in particular, more competitive procurement-driven tender processes, particularly in the technology sector. Having said that, we're very pleased to report that we've had a very successful renewal with one of our largest clients, a three-year renewal there, and we've also seen some positive outcomes since our last trading statement on a couple of important tender processes. So we're now feeling much calmer about that than we were a few weeks ago, although you can never be completely calm. We've also seen very encouraging progress, as Candy's already mentioned briefly, with data services, which I'll talk more about in a second, and also with our e-learning initiative. And I think with data services in particular, again, we've won a couple of really quite exciting new pieces of work with some of our existing clients, which are relatively small in their first packages of work, but are a foot in the door for what we hope will be further growth as we move forward. And we are seeing significant investment amongst our existing client base in the areas of developing AI and large language models. Operating profits down, and here gross margin was down slightly, reflecting our ability to balance with the LXD supporting increasing volumes in this division. But overheads drove a big chunk of the deterioration here, as we weren't able to fully recover inflation, and we've also been making investments in those growth initiatives that I've mentioned. If I turn now to AI and a bit more of a deep dive into data services, which was one of the initiatives we talked about last year, what's the need here? Well, organizations are increasingly deploying AI to better engage with their customers and users. That's social media, voice assistance, face identification, predictive outcomes, et cetera. And those AI models require huge quantities of data to learn and improve quality in every form that data can come. And those successful models require accurate data. What's our view of our position here? Well, this is a large and growing market. We estimate about two billion pounds today. We have a long-standing experience in this segment. We've been working with a number of the innovators in this space since about 2016, providing them with data services. We have an established capability, a very large community that support the work of gathering and annotating the data that goes into this activity. And it's a familiar route to market because a lot of the people who are innovating this space are existing clients of ours. We relaunched this proposition under the brand Train AI back in February in line with the plans we set out last year. And the focus here is on data that is sourced ethically with a focus on accuracy, avoiding bias and ensuring inclusivity with privacy and security remaining central to the approach. As I've already mentioned, we've made some encouraging progress with this initiative since we announced it in February. We feel that launch was particularly well-timed given the investments we're all seeing in this space. If I turn now to regulated industries, at a reported level, minus 1%, on an organic constant currency level, minus 9%. Here, as we've already previously talked about extensively, we chose to stop working with a large CRO client about this time last year. That has been a drag on growth over that 12-month period, but obviously that effect starts to unwind now we've reached the anniversary of that. That has been offset by good performance in linguistic validation where we've seen very high single digit growth and also in our finance and legal segment where again we've seen high single digit growth. In that case assisted by the PRIPS regulations which have caused a number of our clients to have to do new disclosures in multiple languages. We have seen though lower client activity than we expected this time last year in the life sciences segment and I'll come to another slide to explain some of the reasons for that in just a second. Here gross margin was a bit more affected by the loss of that CRO client and the headwinds we've seen on growth and we had similar effect here in terms of the impact of inflation and investments on overheads which both contributed to the decline in operating profit it. If I turn now to life sciences, this chart aims to try and explain why we face some short-term headwinds in the life sciences portion of this division. Along the top there, you see the R&D process for bringing new drugs to market, the four stages there. Along the middle, you see how our revenues are typically aligned to those four stages. So what you see is we tend to do more work at the regulatory and launch stages of this process than we do in the clinical and preclinical stages. The one big exception to that is linguistic validation, which was the initiative we have been doing for many years that we again decided to invest more in last year. And what we're seeing in the market is very buoyant demand for clinical-related work. We think the market is up about 9% over the period 21 to 22 in that portion, which is why linguistic validation, we think, is doing very well. At the same time, we've seen some impacts, I think, from the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, which had some material changes on drug pricing contained within it, which has caused, we think, clients to re-evaluate their product launch plans. And we've also seen some bottlenecks in the regulatory process, in particular the FDA. We do think those things will reverse, and the fact that we're seeing very strong activity at the clinical stage is a very good indicator that that work will come through to the regulatory and launch phases subsequently. A little bit hard to predict when, but we remain very confident. And I think the fact that we have very strong relationships with many of the large players in this space and the retention levels remain very strong means that we do believe we are well positioned to benefit from that work as the market recovers. Turning to language and content technology, here, revenues down slightly on an organic constant currency basis, up 13% on a reported basis. Generally, we're pleased with progress here. SAS revenues continuing to grow very strongly ahead of the plans that we had for them. That does, as you all know, I think, bring the headline reported growth rate down but it does point to longer term value creation. We've seen new logo wins across a range of sectors, including defense, government, infrastructure, and software and verticals. We've seen an increase in the bookings rate for LanguageWeaver, our neural machine translation platform, in the latter stages of the first half. And we have new releases of our Trideon content management platform planned for the second half, which we expect to support growth in the months ahead. Margin erosion here, similar themes, a little bit impacted by the SAS mix in terms of the gross margin. And then we are also making investments in this division, as you all know. Last but never least, IP services, where the group originally started. Here, as Candy said, very much in line with expectations and seeing the impact of the unitary patent. So organic revenue down 6%, flat on a reported basis. The unitary patent was finally launched on the 1st of June, and we're actually quite relieved to be able to say that. We do expect to see a backlog of work coming through the business as patent grants move through the process now. We've seen in parallel actually encouraging growth in the world file segment of IP services, and we are seeing the impacts of the sales improvement initiative that we started last summer, as well as the impact of some of the leadership changes that we've made. The team have been very effective in managing cost mitigation against the declining revenue line here. So very much sort of in line with expectations. Turning back to AI, just to sort of pull it all together, I think a few key points to emphasize. We have well-established products in this space. Language Weaver, one of the original neural machine translation products dating back to the University of California some 20 years ago and acquired by SDL some 13 years ago. Data services, we've been in that business since 2016, really innovating alongside some of the pioneers in the space. And we are increasingly adding AI functionality to our other technology platforms. So for example, we now have a semantic AI search capability within the Tridian content management platform. We have real expertise in the space. We have over 40 AI-related patents. We have over 100 peer-reviewed AI papers. And as we've said already, 60% of the words going through our LXD are translated by LanguageWeaver first. And we use a content analyzer tool within LanguageWeaver, which allows us to scan content, understand what it's about, and that helps us direct the work to the most relevant linguists to work on it. And all of our products are moving forward with developments in this space. LanguageWeaver continues to evolve its quality and the range of languages. We have an enhanced data services proposition, which we've already talked about. We've already implemented a connector within Trados Studio, the world's leading translation productivity tool, which allows linguists to connect to GPT-4 if they wish to. I would emphasize we do not allow our linguists to use that capability due to security concerns, but our philosophy is to allow consumers of Trados Studio who buy that product to connect to products like GPT-4 if they wish to and they feel it's secure for the content that they are using. We continue to look at how we can incorporate large language models into our localization process. There will be secure ways to do that. To do that, we need a hosting environment. We need to partner with a provider of a large language model, and we are currently evaluating several. and then we need data to train those engines and on data we have no shortage of capability both to originate data from our linguists and our community of data AI engineers. So the message here is we are embracing the opportunities, we are mindful of the risks, but we really do think we're well placed to develop with this market. Touching on M&A briefly, nothing really has changed in terms of our focus areas or our screening criteria. I think the key message today is we are seeing a much better pipeline of opportunities than we saw 12 months ago, and we are at an advanced stage with several bolt-on acquisitions, and we'd obviously hope to complete one or two of those over the coming months. On ESG, just really to continue to emphasise that this is important to our investors, is important to the sorts of clients that we do business with, and it's important to all of our people. And we continue to make progress on the commitments that we've made against E, S and G. And on governance, I just point out we've made particular focus in the last few months on health and safety, on whistleblowing through a speak-up programme, and I should just touch on information security. As I think you're all aware, we had a cyber incident a couple of months ago, and we were pleased that the Information Commissioner here in the UK has confirmed they'll be taking no further action off the back of that incident. Final slide before we go to questions. In terms of outlook, as we've talked about already, we expect to deliver an improved second half due to the benefit of some of the client wins that we've talked about and some projects that were delayed in H1. We expect to see further incremental revenues from our growth initiatives. We expect to see that release of backlog of work in IP services now that the industry patent has gone live. We are making good progress with our infrastructure programs as expected with the first major program completed. And we have a strong belief around AI being both a driver of efficiency and growth. Our outlook remains in line with market expectations with a second half waiting to performance. We have seen a confluence of headwinds impacting the group's ability to grow in the short term. However, the encouraging outcomes we've seen on some tender processes are giving us confidence around our guidance moving forward. We're taking cost actions to ensure our cost base remains aligned with our top line to support our margins, and we remain confident in the long-term growth drivers that we talked about last year. We've mentioned the buyback of 50 million, which we expect to initiate shortly. And we continue to see exciting opportunities to invest in our business. And with that, I'll end there. Thank you all. And go to questions. So I think we're going to take questions in the room first. I think there's a microphone, so if you can wait and just say who you are. James, hand up first.