RWS Holdings plc

Right. Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us either in person or online for the RWS full year results for FY23. I'm Ian Al Mockadam, the CEO, and I'm joined today by Candy Davis, our CFO. I'm going to kick off with some highlights. I'll then hand over to Candy to go through the financial review. I'll then come back to do a review of our strategic and operational performance and then close with a statement on current trading and outlook before we go to questions. Now, I think you're all pretty familiar with who we are. We operate in a large market in which we are a market leader. We are characterised by the long-term client relationships that we form, often with market-leading players across a range of different sectors. We deliver services and products to them thanks to our unique platform, which combines proprietary technology with deep expertise in our industry, and we are capable of delivering service on a truly global scale. something that's particularly important for the sorts of clients that we work with. We run the business quite prudently. We have a model that is cash generative. We have a net cash position and a progressive dividend policy. Now we use that technology and human expertise to support our clients to create, collect, transform, analyze, launch, and manage content. This helps them to grow by ensuring they are understood anywhere and in any language. And the content that we work on can come in any form, text, images, audio, video. Now, I think as you all know, it's been a challenging year. We faced a number of market headwinds, but I think a key message from the results presentation today is that all of the initiatives that we've kicked off over the last couple of years have helped in a difficult market context. So our results do reflect lower activity from a number of clients, but we have seen an improvement from H1 to H2. We've seen remarkably strong client retention and good new business wins, and importantly, 100% win rate on our large global technology clients, a number of whom ran tenders this year. We've taken action on our cost base, taking £25 million out of our cost base. That will be the full year run rate impact in FY24. And our language platform, the LXD, is doing exactly what we hoped it would do, allowing our services businesses to leverage their scale and, as you'll see, protecting the gross margin. We've continued to invest in our platform, in those growth initiatives, in our transformation agenda through the down cycle because we believe all of those things are the right things to do. And our growth initiatives are continuing to contribute to performance. So some £20 million of incremental revenue have resulted from the growth initiatives that we started either last year or during the year we've just reported on. And in terms of our technology business, of growing importance to the group, good growth in SaaS license revenues, and SaaS has now become a tailwind, having been a headwind for the group in previous periods. And as you know, if you attended our AI teaching a few weeks ago, we're very positive about the opportunities for AI in this industry. And we've recently launched an exciting new linguistic AI product called Evolve, which I'll talk more about later on. And we've continued to invest in inorganic growth as well. where we think it's sensible, having added two exciting businesses to our portfolio this year, Propylon, which is in the structured content management space, and SD Communications, which gives us access to a wide range of African languages, an area of growth for many of our clients. And both of those acquisitions are doing what we expected they would do. In terms of the financials, I don't think there are too many surprises on this chart because we've sort of trailed them pretty well, I think. So revenue reflects those market headwinds offset by the growth initiatives that we've been pursuing, which Candy will show you the breakdown of in a second. Gross margin has been protected by our pricing actions and also by the language delivery platform, and I'll talk more about that later on. And then if you go maybe down to the bottom row there, I think just pull out a couple of other things. CapEx, slightly lower than we guided to. That's really just a function of the phasing of our transformation programs. And we've maintained our progressive dividend with a final dividend recommended of 9.8 pence, bringing the total for the year to 12.2 pence. And with that, I will hand over to Candy to take you through more detail on those numbers before I come back with the operational review.

Thank you. So turning to the numbers in more detail, revenue is down 2% year on year. This includes a small benefit relating to the acquisition of Fonto, which took place in March 22. as well as Propylon, which was completed in July 23. On an organic basis, revenue declined 3%. We're reporting a revenue decline at constant currency of 6%, and we'll provide more details of that on the next slide. Gross margin year on year was down at 46.3, 40 basis points down on the prior year. This reflects the softer activity levels seen amongst a number of clients in life sciences and regulated industries, which has impacted mixed negatively, and the more competitive dynamics in other end markets. largely offset by pricing, FX and further efficiencies being driven through the LXD and the divisions. Admin expenses before adjusting items of 216 million as a percentage of gross profit increased year on year by 300 basis points to 63.5%, predominantly due to the lower revenue and thus gross profit realised in the year. Investments to accelerate growth were largely offset by savings, the bonus release and FX gains. We recognised 13 million of FX gains in the period, largely relating to forward FX contracts, which has helped to mitigate the FX impact experienced across our cost base. Please be aware the majority of this gain has been recorded in the corporate segment, so the underlying adjusted operating profit numbers in the divisions reflect the underlying cost of running that business. The net result is adjusted profit before tax of £120 million, running at 16.4% revenue, which is within the range of market expectations. There were a number of adjusting items, £131 million in total, which are detailed in the accounts. The most material and noteworthy is the non-cash exceptional goodwill impairment charge of £62 million, taken against our technology division, which is formed of SDL, Iconic, WebDunia, Fonto and Propylon acquisitions. This has arisen as a result of the macroeconomic challenges experienced in the last year and the higher cost of capital due to increasing market interest rates. The other adjusting items include amortisation of acquired intangibles of £39 million relating to the past acquisitions of SDL and Moravia, exceptional items considered one-off in nature encompassing integration, transformation and restructuring costs of £23 million, Acquisition-related costs of 5 million, including propylon and Fonto contingent consideration and transaction fees, and share-based payments are just under 2 million. The reported tax expense of the year was £16.8 million, which, excluding the effective tax rate impact of the non-deductible impairment charge, results in a headline ETR of 32.6%. This represents an 800 BIPs increase from the full year 22 rate of 24.6%, which is primarily due to a rise in the UK tax rate from 19% to 25%. an increase in non-deductible acquisition and exceptional expenses, as well as non-recurring prior year tax credits recognised in full year 22. Once we have taken account of all adjusting items, such as exceptionals and amortisation of acquired intangibles, the adjusted effective tax rate is 24.6%, up from 23.6% in full year 22. This adjusted tax rate is derived from the group's jurisdictional mix of profits, and the increase from prior year is primarily due to the 3% increase in the UK blended statutory rate of 22% for full year 23. This is consistent with earlier guidance and expectations. Finally, adjusted EPS came in at 23.3 pence per share, down 12% on the prior year. And as Ian has mentioned, the board's approved the final dividend of 9.8 pence, being a 3% increase on last year's final dividend and bringing the final dividend to 12.2 pence, an increase of 4% over last year, supporting the capital allocation policy of a progressive dividend. So looking at revenue in more detail, and this slide shows the drivers of the revenue variance from full year 22 to 23. Language services reported a decline of 4%, whilst a constant currency that is 7% below last year. As previously highlighted in the half-year trading statement, we continue to see reduced activity from some of our clients as they've adapted their priorities to changes in their end markets. We continue to win new business across the division, and we've seen some strong results in our growth areas of e-learning and data services. And Ian will cover more later on in this presentation. In regulated industries, revenue fell 6%, which at constant currency equates to a decline of 9%. This contraction is due to the previously communicated loss of a major CRO client. and softer trading conditions with a number of life sciences clients, partially offset by good growth in both linguistic validation and the finance and legal services segment. On a reported basis, language and content tech grew 8%. The organic reported growth of the division adjusting for Fonto and Propylon was 3%. In organic constant currency, the division declined slightly at minus 1%. SAS revenues achieved excellent year-on-year growth at 23%, and now represent 34% of total licensed revenues in the division. Q4 grew year-on-year on the back of a large government deal, and SAS, as Ian mentioned, is now providing a revenue tailwind to the division, given its recurring nature. In IP services, the decline in revenues of 2% and 4% on a constant currency basis was in line with our expectations as patent filers waited until the launch of the unitary patent to decide whether to file UP or European patent. Following the UP launch in June, the Q4 revenue grew year on year as Euro file orders increased. And as you can see, the fully FX impact has had about 4% impact on our top line results in the year, down from 8% at half year, as the pound strengthened against the dollar in the second half. And as I said, Ian will discuss more of the business performance later in the presentation. So, moving to the net cash bridge and cash conversion. Net cash flow from operating activities came in at £107.5 million. Cash conversion for the year was 74%, below expectations set at our capital markets day, but consistent with our half-year guidance. Please note, we changed our definition of cash conversion last year, so it's now free cash flows before exceptional cash flows divided by adjusted net income. So any payments made related to restructuring or indeed any acquisitions 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. So the decline year on year, which is now 93%, as opposed to the 110% reported in the annual report, was driven primarily by the timing of tax payments and continued investment in R&D and the group transformation programmes. Total cash at the end of September 23 was at £76.2 million and net cash after loans and borrowings was £23.6 million. The net cash decreased £48 million in the year. Significant outflows relate to the acquisitions of Propylon and the deferred consideration payments for Fonto and Iconic, £31 million in total. The increased investments as outlined at our CMD in line with our strategy investments reflected there with the capex of £40 million. the dividends of £46 million, tax and the share repurchase of £19 million, which is there in the last building block. For information as is typical, lease liabilities of £33.5 million are not included in these figures. Moving to the balance sheet. The balance sheet remains strong, and when comparing to September 22, there are two main changes, being FX revaluation and the impairment charge to Goodwill. The goodwill decreased 84 million due to the impairment charge of 62 million. Movements in the dollar relative to the pound between September 22 and September 23 created a 35 million difference, partially offset by the acquisition of Propylon 13 million. The closing rate of the USD to GBP last year was 1.117, whereas this year it was 1.220. Intangible assets also decreased by 26 million, the additions of 37 million and the Propylon acquisitions of 12 million being more than offset by amortization of 57 million and the FX revaluation impact of 17 million. Networking capital decreased slightly, primarily driven by lower revenues and FX revaluation. And net cash, I spoke to on the previous slide, so I won't repeat myself there. As a reminder, however, we currently have a committed facility of $220 million, of which approximately $155 million remained undrawn as at the 30th of September. Moving to our key KPIs, which Ian introduced in our year-end presentation last year, and calling out a few that we haven't already touched on in the financials. So as you can see, NPS metric grew whilst repeat revenue declined slightly, reinforcing the strong client relationships and satisfaction that RWS maintains, albeit in a challenging macro environment. The cumulative incremental revenue from our defined growth initiatives now stands at 25 million, with continued progress in data services, e-learning, and linguistic validation. 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 23% over full year 22, and as such now represent 34% of the license revenue reported in language and content technology, compared to 29% this time last year. Development spend of 11.6 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 at 5.5% of revenue is slightly lower than the investment profile indicated previously, as we have re-phased some initiatives to full year 24. The full year 23 spend is a combination of the continued investments being made in our software development, as well as the transformation programmes, of which I'll provide a little more colour in a moment. And finally, from a people perspective, our college engagement score has fallen from 69% to 61%, no doubt impacted by the external challenges we experienced this year and the difficult decisions we had to take in response. Nevertheless, our current level of voluntary attrition has reduced since last year to 11.9%, probably reflecting the more limited external opportunities due to the broader macroeconomic environment, but also more positively, perhaps recognition of the more positive longer-term attraction of working here at RWS. It's also worth noting that the percentage of women in senior leadership continues to improve, having increased further to 39% this year. Ian will talk to ESG later in the presentation. So, a quick update on the transformation programmes focused both on the top line and the cost base to deliver both growth and efficiencies across our divisions and functions. The main takeaway here is that we continue to move forward on all initiatives. We have resequenced some of the delivery timelines within the finance and IP services programmes as we look to deliver both technology and organisational change. As reported at half-year, our first programme, Highlander, which was the global transition to a single collaboration platform, was completed on time and on budget, enabling seamless cooperation and communication between teams. The Language Experience Delivery, or LXD programme, continues to progress well, with a number of staged migrations of both tools and services taking place until the end of 25. We continue to make progress migrating volumes into the LXD for life sciences and language services and since the year-end IP services migration has also started. The IP Solutions Programme will deliver integrated digitally driven client propositions and efficiencies through a portal for IP renewals, connecting IP filing and IP renewals to encourage cross-sell and replacement and consolidation of our IP filing fulfilment systems. The first key deliverables are due to be implemented towards the end of 2024. 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 earlier in the year, and the associated restructuring program is nearing completion. Delivery of the new platforms are scheduled to take place in a series of releases through 2024 and 2025. We launched phase one of our new shared service center last month, providing financial operational service to two of our largest areas of the group, and last week rolled out phase one of our Microsoft Dynamics HR system. So, a reminder of our capital allocation policy. With a strong balance sheet, net cash position and a committed facility, with over $150 million remaining undrawn at year-end, we continue to apply a disciplined approach to our capital allocation. Firstly, our consistent commitment to business-as-usual spend ensures the ongoing maintenance and improvement of core operations, supporting stability and operational excellence. We continue to make strategic investments aimed at accelerating organic growth, underscoring our dedication to expanding market share, seizing new opportunities in higher growth, higher margin areas, and leveraging cutting edge AI capabilities, fostering a sustainable long-term value for our stakeholders. Rewarding our investors, we prioritize returning value through regular and progressive dividends, reflecting our confidence in our financial health and commitment to delivering consistent and tangible returns. You have heard, of course, that the dividend this year will be a 4% increase year-on-year at 12.2%. Our growth strategy extends beyond organic avenues, and Ian will talk to our M&A priorities shortly. So finally from me, just to say that earlier this year we initiated a share repurchase programme of £50 million, demonstrating our belief in the intrinsic value of our company. We've completed to date approximately two-thirds and look to continue the repurchasing up until the AGM towards the end of February next year. And with that, I'll hand back to Ian.

Right. Thank you, Candy. So just start with a reminder of the structure of the group. So we have four operating divisions, as you see along the top there. Maybe a couple of things to point out on this chart. You can see the revenue splits, FY22, FY23. As expected, language and content technology is becoming a larger portion of both the revenues and the profits of the group, which again is in line with our strategy. Our language experience delivery platform, where we combine the use of in-house language specialists with a very large network globally of freelancers, and where we deploy our own AI and other translation management technology to drive productivity, is increasingly supporting all three of the services divisions. We now have one supply chain management function, so all of the freelance relationships are being managed by the LXD now, allowing us to leverage our scale. and increasingly the volumes have been migrating in line with plan from the various divisions. So that unique platform is really doing what we hoped it would. Candy's touched on the progress that we're making with our support functions as well. I think the only other comment I want to make to this slide is we are in the process of merging our language services and IP services divisions. So from a future-looking perspective, our next set of results, we will report those two as one division. The thinking there is that if you think about the other services divisions, they are very client-oriented. They're organized around industries, whereas IP services are very much organized around a range of offerings. And increasingly, we think being organized around industry groups is the right way to go to market to enable us to be able to cross-sell all of the products and services that are relevant to any one client. So that's a process that is in play right now. If I go through now the various divisions, starting with our largest language services. So here, as you heard, we had a 7% organic decline in constant currency, driven by reduced activity as clients adjusted to those challenging conditions in their own markets. We did, however, have success with all of the retenders with our global technology players, some really exciting new client wins, and we saw the positive effect of growth initiatives like Train AI, which I'll talk more about in a second. Operating profit declined reflecting that top line revenue reduction, slightly unfavorable language and client mix and was then partially offset by effective cost control. And up the top right there you see the actions that we've taken which we think sort of supported these results. So our growth levers are working and helping contribute to revenue. The volume transition in EIG through to the LXD is going in line with plan. We've obviously taken other cost actions in light of the poor trading conditions. And in the next quarter, we'll be launching what we used to call Go Global, a new on-demand technology-enabled platform targeting in particular small and medium-sized enterprises with a very automated, user-friendly offering. So again, very much delivering in line with the investment program we set out last year. Just a reminder on train AI, we talked a lot about this at our Investor Day, but this is all about data collection, annotation and validation to train AI engines and increasingly a wider range of services tailored specifically at generative AI applications. We're seeing amongst our client base increasing focus in leveraging AI across their operations in particular, but not solely with our technology clients. Our right to win here is it's a very large market and growing. We've been doing this for a number of years, working with many of our tech clients since about 2016. So we've built a real capability to do this. And in FY23, in line with our plans, we relaunched this service under the Train AI brand. We've already secured several encouraging multi-million dollar contracts, and we see good momentum going into So in FY24, we just continue our sales and marketing efforts, and we're going to continue investing in the technology platform to allow us to take on more work here. So very much an exciting initiative, well-timed given the increasing interest in AI, and anyone deploying AI needs accurate data to train those engines. Turn now to IP services, 4% organic decline in constant currency, really due primarily to the launch of the unitary patent, offset by decent performance elsewhere in the business. Post the unitary patent launch in June, we did see an expected increase in Eurofile orders, which was encouraging. And we've also seen some nice new wins. Again, one of our growth initiatives in this division was to focus more on patent attorney sales, And that has worked quite nicely. We're also seeing some encouraging progress in China. Operating profit reflects the lower revenues offset by progress with pricing and pretty effective cost control. So here, management actions, the growth levers, patent attorneys, pricing progress, and now as we go into the new year, this division will start to benefit from the full deployment of the LXD. Turning to regulated industries, organic revenue declined by 9%. This was, as previously flagged, due to reduced activity in the life sciences space and in particular delays in the regulatory stage of the product pipeline, and also now really worked its way through the numbers, the loss of a major CRO client, which we've again talked about previously. This was partially mitigated by linguistic validation, another one of our growth initiatives focused on the clinical stage in the life sciences space which is performing well and as Candy mentioned good performance in the finance and legal segment of this division. PBT again reflects the declined revenues and the cost actions that we've taken. So here, you know, our linguistic validation growth lever really helping the results here. Greater volume translation into the LXD, including our largest life sciences client who's now being supported by the LXD. and ongoing cost reductions. And just a reminder again on linguistic validation, this is a range of services that we offer targeting the clinical trial face in the life sciences value chain. It's used for a range of clinical outcome assessments. We've got a good right to win here. We've been providing this service for many, many years. We have existing client relationships, and this is an area that is growing despite the bottlenecks further down the product value chain. In 23, we've made a number of incremental improvements through investment, reducing turnaround times, delivering technology improvements to improve process efficiency, and expanding a relationship with one of our most important clients here. So as we move into 24, there's good momentum again behind this service, and we will continue to blow ahead with sales in this area. Last but by no means least, language and content technology. Here, constant currency revenue declined by 1%, impacted by a higher than anticipated proportion of SaaS revenues. We had good new logo wins across a range of sectors, including defense, government, software, infrastructure, and verticals. SaaS, as we already talked about, is now, as we expected, and slightly ahead of our expectations, an increasing percentage of the license revenues in this division, giving us that sort of repeat revenue quality that we've been aiming for with that initiative. We had a very strong H2 for LanguageWeaver, our neural machine translation platform. We saw increased bookings in SAS for Trados. And we obviously had the Propylon acquisition. So adjusting operating profit did decline here, mainly driven by the license mix and some of the planned investments that we've been making. But here again, management actions, the transition to SaaS, the migration of older platforms onto Trados. If you remember, in addition to Trados, which is kind of our market-leading translation management platform, we also have a number of legacy platforms that we acquired with SDL. Part of our plan was to migrate off those platforms. That's going well. We've migrated over 100 clients now onto the Trados platform with more obviously planned over the next two years. Made progress with pricing, quite good progress with pricing in this division. And I'm going to talk about Evolve in just a second. Just a reminder on AI, we obviously did a whole day on this not long ago, but we are kind of excited by the developments of AI in our industry. We have enterprise-grade products, we have a great data creation and validation capability, deep expertise both of developing AI platforms going back some 20 years, but also in partnering with leaders in this field. an enviable client set who are innovators in this area. We're seen as an attractive partner of scale with a responsible attitude towards things like data quality and cybersecurity, and we are already making money out of AI. I guess a lot of people are talking about it. We're very focused on... real tangible things that we can sell, that we can use to drive growth and to drive efficiency. And we've used these set of headings before, exploring AI, building AI, using AI, and here we've just given a few examples of what these mean in practice. Our tech services capability is basically consulting and advisory capability that we have. One example of work that they've done is for a government agency here where the client wanted to explore AI-powered conversational analysis. This was a six-month project using a mix of natural language processing, machine learning, and speech-to-text. The outcome was we delivered time-saving and risk reduction benefits for this client supporting their digital transformation. In terms of train AI, a fairly typical example of a project here for a large global technology player, in this case who wanted to fine-tune one of their generative AI models, improving the usability and safety of that model. This was a three-month project, some 32,000 hours of work with some over 200 domain experts deployed to work on that project, improving the relevance of adverts and reducing vulnerabilities. The outcome was the client was able to deploy that large language model and we have won other projects off the back of that piece of work. In terms of LanguageWeaver, I want to touch briefly on Evolve. At our AI day, we talked about the potential of combining neural machine translation and larger language models together to deliver better linguistic AI outcomes. We've now launched a product or an enhancement to LanguageWeaver that we call Evolve. And this basically takes the process from translation through to quality assessment of that translation by a machine through to doing some of the post-editing that would previously have been done by a human being. So this is a very significant advance and a real demonstration of the power of being able to combine AI expertise with linguistic expertise together to develop products that are safe, secure and can be deployed at scale. It's in beta right now. It does two language pairs only. It will be expanded quite rapidly through the course of the year. We're piloting it with some of our most demanding clients right now who we've been partnering with on this, and we're quite excited about its potential as we go through this year. And last but by no means least, Trados, which is one of our core products here, is increasingly AI-enabled. We launched a connector earlier in the year, enabling Trados Studio to connect with large language models. And we've also introduced a co-pilot self-help facility, which is AI-enabled as well, with more to come. So tangible progress, real products with real client benefits that are really supporting us as we move forward. Couple of final slides for me on M&A. Nothing has changed is the basic message on here. They are the same priorities that we've had for the last two years. Attractive localization assets, focused acquisitions in the technology space, and focusing on also data annotation or that train AI space. Same screening criteria. And we continue to see a lot of opportunities in the pipeline. So we'd hope to continue with a prudent approach to this as we go through the year that we're now in. And last again, lastly, just on ESG, this is something that is incredibly important to the clients that we work with. Increasingly, they will screen their suppliers based on their commitments to ESG. It's also incredibly important to our people and I know to many of our investors. So we've continued to make progress here. We've now submitted our science-based targets submission for validation. and we're really committed to bringing down the carbon emissions. We're making continued contributions to the societies and communities that we work in through the RWS Foundation, through our campus programs, and through the policy we have, which allows colleagues to take a number of days every year to volunteer for a range of good causes. And then finally, in terms of how we run the group, we've continued to make progress, strengthening our board. We obviously had the transition of Julie Southern taking over as non-executive chair a couple of months from Andrew Brodie. and, as you can see there, a number of other important initiatives to continue to strengthen our commitment to good governance. And all of that has been recognised, we're glad to say, with another silver medal from EcoVardis, with our score increasing and us performing very strongly in the industry group that we're in. Lastly, just in terms of current trading and outlook, growth initiatives are increasingly supporting revenue. We've seen that improving trend in OCC revenue reflected in these results from H1 into H2. We're really largely through, we think, the transition to the unitary patent in IP services. We're now seeing a SaaS tailwind in the tech division, and we've continued to win sales. good new business. We're excited about the potential of our AI offerings. We're making good progress with our transformation program and our latest acquisition, ST Communications, is off to a good start. Overall, we do continue to operate in some challenging end markets with some temporary headwinds. However, we also see opportunity arising from that as we are able to help clients with some of their challenges in those markets. And we also think we're in a relatively strong position compared to many of our competitors. We've got the benefit of £25 million of cost actions that we've taken now impacting in FY24. And overall, there's no change to our guidance. We're trading in line with expectations at this point in the new year. And with that, I'll turn to questions. Thank you. Callum.

Morning, guys. Callum Bassey from Barenburg. Three questions for me, please. So firstly, can I just ask on progress on pricing initiatives across the group? So where are you at now across the different divisions in terms of being able to put through price increases? And then from that, do you have a view today on what you're expecting for pricing and the gross margin FY24? I'll go one at a time.

So why don't I take the first, you take the second. So I think on pricing, I think similar picture to this year, most likely. So we had the best, we made the best progress in our technology division, where I think that sort of annual expectation, you know, of license reviews is sort of more established. We also made good progress in IP services, a division that previously, you know, we'd had to do some work in to get there. So that's encouraging. I think we continue to see some cost-focused headwinds in parts of language services and in regulated industries. So I think we're more cautious in the short term about price increases in those divisions. Although I think what we have done now compared to two years ago is established a greater focus on pricing across all of the divisions. And each of the divisions goes into the new year with a pricing plan that they will seek to execute on. You know, some headwinds still, but, you know, despite that, we made progress last year and we'd expect to make some progress this year as well. Candy, do you want to pick up on that?

Sorry, so the second question was?

The second question, I'd say just for the group overall, do you have a view on pricing being plus 2%, plus 3% next year? Do you think the gross margin will be flat or kind of decline slightly again?

So pricing will be very marginally accretive next year. So whilst we will be taking it in technology and IP services, a little bit in RI, we probably expect to be more challenged on the language services division. So overall, it will be a very small incremental to the top line. In terms of gross margin, we do expect that to be slightly accretive because we're guiding too flat on the adjusted PBT and we have some additional overhead costs and investments.

Thank you. And then second, given commentary on some of the end markets, it sounds as if there'll be a slight H2 weighting to profits next year. Do you have any approximate guidance for the H1 and H2 splits in FY24?

We haven't really given any at this point.

But definitely second half waited, given the way some of those things are playing through.

And then last one's quite specific, but can you just explain in slightly more detail the decision for the 17% discount rates in the technology division that causes the goodwill impairment. If there's any more, Carly, you can give that, it'd be really helpful.

Yeah, so, you know, obviously all of the WAC rates have increased because of increased interest rates. In particular, with the technology division, we then need to look at the overall risk that's perceived in the overall tech sector. And then in addition to that, we have higher forecast growth rates that play out in our discounted cash flow against quite a volatile history of against forecast. So the combination of that drives for a larger discount across technology. Thank you.

Any other questions? Katie.

Thanks. Katie Cousins from Short. Just wondering if you could give any more colour on the re-tendering processes, how those conversations have gone. Have you seen a change in contract lengths, overall pricing there, and also who are you competing against?

Yeah, so I think this is principally focused in that technology division, the EIG part of language services that... I think we'd flagged earlier in the year that as part of the cost-driven restructurings that a number of clients in that space were conducting over the last year and a half, we were facing some out-of-cycle re-tendering processes as procurement got involved and we're trying to pursue some cost reduction initiatives. I think the good thing there was we basically retained all of those client relationships. And whilst we did have to give a bit on pricing, we were also able to agree in some cases some changes to the way we delivered the service, which allowed us to protect the margin broadly. So there wasn't really any change to the scope of work as a result of those tenders. And I think they do reflect the fact that even through a down cycle, we do have, you know, very strong relationships with those clients. And often our operations are quite embedded in their own activities. So that gives us some stickiness. No, I mean, no real change, I don't think, to the competitive lifecycle. They tend to partner consistently. principally with big global players in our industry. One or two of them do also have a policy of trying to embed smaller local suppliers as part of their ESG activities. And I don't think any of that has particularly changed through this retendering cycle.

Thank you. Sorry, just one more if I can. Just in terms of the merged divisions going forward, is there any change in the internal focus there? Because I think I remember you appointed Daniel Bennett, was it, in 2022?

Correct. So Daniel's just left, having done a good job, actually. And, you know, I having guided IP services through that transition of the unitary patents. And it's very much the result of work with Daniel that we concluded that actually merging these two divisions was the right thing to do moving forward. And it is very much a client-centered decision. It just doesn't make sense to have you know, part of the services organization structured around a set of products and then the rest organized around industry groups, because we think fundamentally that knowledge of a client's industry, that ability to present services and solutions mindful of the demands of that industry is the primary driver for how we should organize. And of course, what we want to do increasingly is cross sell, you know, the right combination of solutions to those clients, be they technology platforms, be they e-learning, be it train AI, whatever. So this is another step in the direction. And I think there'll be a continued evolution over the next few years as we further move in that direction.

Brilliant. Thank you.

Any other questions in the room? Over there. Yes, sorry. Would you like the mic?

Thank you. Hi, it's James Lock here from Peel Hunt, and sorry if my questions are quite high level. I don't know the business that well, but I know the topic. Clearly, you think GenAI could be a net beneficiary to you, and I agree with that. So I've got three questions. Hopefully, the first one's a quick one. I've heard from other content transformation and creation companies that some of their top clients have banned them from using GenAI in the short term. for fear of IP protection. But their sentiment is that over the long term, they expect to use services such as yours or theirs more than they've done because of Gen AI. So the first question is, are you hearing those same things? Secondly, one of the elements of the bare thesis for Gen AI being a negative to your type of business is if we assume the outsourcing doesn't decline is rate, let's say a margin. But the pushback that I'd agree with is whilst price per hour or price per item, say, reduces, your ability to do more, hence volume should go up. And if you're doing with less humans, maybe your margins are protected as well. And that was something that you flagged in there, and SDL talked about it quite a lot previously. Is that still a fair conclusion? And if there's any productivity metrics, such as revenue per employee, things like that that you could quote, that would be quite interesting. And finally, what's the pricing model around train AI? Very short.

Great. OK, so you're right. I think anyone should be cautious about putting any important content into freely available generative AI tools. And we certainly ban that use within RWS and we advise our clients to do the same. You know, if it's at all sensitive, you shouldn't put it into one of those tools. You're effectively sharing it with the world. That said, there are ways to deploy that technology securely. So Evolve, the proposition that I just mentioned, is an example where we've taken a large language model, we've deployed it within a secure environment that we've sourced in that case from AWS. And then we've trained it ourselves. And I think, you know, for a long time, our AI propositions, LanguageWeaver, one of its key selling points is that it can be securely deployed either on the cloud or on premise, particularly important for some of our government clients. So they're able to secure their data, train the engines without fear of giving the data away. So I think that is a really important consideration. I think lots of organizations are have had to come to terms this year and rewrite their policies around data protection to make sure that their teams aren't putting content into those tools that they shouldn't be. In terms of the rate volume, I think you're absolutely right. There's been a long-term reduction in cost per word in this industry as different types of technologies over the last 20 years have assisted and enabled greater productivity. But our view is that, you know, A, you have to embrace that. And that's why the acquisition of SDL was quite important. And the language delivery platform is quite important because that gives us the ability to maintain a competitive cost per word. But we do think there'll be that expansion linked to the explosion of content, of volume, which should make this a net opportunity. We have to actively engage in the market to deliver that. I think that what we are very clear on is the sit back and watch approach will not work. That will lead to a decline. But if you get out there with the right solutions, you can take share leveraging that greater automation. In terms of pricing model, I mean, the projects in Trane AI are priced on a project basis based on the number of man hours that we would expect to deploy based on the client needs. So they're all quite bespoke. They tend to be quite large projects. So, you know, a million, two million sort of price tags per project. And, you know, as we've seen so far, one project can tend to lead to follow-up pieces of work as well. So I hope that answers the questions. Any other questions in the room? Any questions online?

So our first few questions come from James Beard from Numis. His first question is regarding services repeat revenue rate. Can you expand on why this declined from 99% in FY22 to 95% in FY23? And where would you expect this to trend to in FY24?

I'll take that one first. So I think it's basically just a function of the calculation. So I think that calculation is basically revenue in the year from the same clients that we had last year. So it's down a few percentage points. But I think that just reflects the fact that some of them have spent less. So they're still there. We haven't lost them. But their revenues in the year have been, in some cases, quite a bit lower. Hopefully that answers that one.

That's great. And the next question is, what are your current expectations for wage and non-labour inflation in FY24?

Yeah, good question. I think we were quite restrained on pay in FY23 because of the trading conditions. And also we were obviously reducing headcount. So it was a tough year. We do expect to make modest pay increases in FY24. In this year, we've announced, you know, for a portion of our population, we're making, you know, lowish single digit pay increases in January. And we'll keep that under review. We do see, you know, obviously the wage pressure sort of moderating somewhat. And as we pointed out, the, I think, you know, the trends that we're seeing have affected our whole industry. So I think it's very notable that our attrition rates have actually come down during the course of this year. So I think colleagues are seeing that we're investing in the future of the business. And whilst they're not necessarily that happy about the fact we've had to be quite restrained on pay, I'm sure they're not. But I think we've made that judgment in order to protect the long-term sort of viability of the business. So hopefully as we move through this year in growth returns, we can we can get to a more sort of competitive market rate of pay. I think on other costs outside our sort of direct employee costs, I think we've been very well timed with our initiatives around the supply chain. So the fact that we now have a centrally managed supply chain, not just for our linguistic specialists, but also for all other categories of spend, means that we're leveraging our scale much better than we used to, And that's helped us to manage any inflationary cost pressures elsewhere in our cost base.

Great. James's next question is, based on historic cycles, how long do you think the regulatory phase bottlenecks you've talked to in RI might persist?

It's hard to say because I'm not sure there's a direct precedent, but I think what our clients are guiding us to is to those bottlenecks starting to unwind as we get into the next calendar year. I think we've started to see that in one or two cases, but it's fairly modest and we're being quite cautious. So our own plan assumes that's an H2 weighted improvement in our own sort of financial calendar in our financial year, so from April onwards.

And can you quantify the headwind from SAS in LCT in FY23 and expected tailwind in FY24?

Candy, do you want to try that one?

So, yeah, I mean, it actually was a tailwind. So it was, yeah, it pretty much turned. So it had almost no impact at all for the group in the full year. But it was, yeah, almost 1% in H2. So having been almost a 1% headwind in H1, it became an almost 1% tailwind in H2, making it flat for the year.

The next question comes from James from Barclays. He asks, can you discuss the changes to revenue growth and EBITDA margin assumptions in your impairment assessment and put them in the context of your Capital Markets Day targets?

Yeah, so with the technology, The impairment model needs to look at your future discounted cash flows and, you know, across the group. And just to remind you, we have within that CGU, there's a number of previous acquisitions. You've got SDL, WebDunia, Fonto, Iconic, Propylon, et cetera. Some of those more recent acquisitions have no headroom. They were valued at fair value very recently. So you have those cash flows coming through. We're still reflecting those at the business case that we acquired earlier. So in terms of the longer term growth rates for the technology division, we have probably pared it down a couple of percentages, but that for the impairment assessment is needed to be done because there is a greater weight on external evidence that is applied under the standard as opposed to your own internal forecast. So because of our internal forecasts and having not hit them in the last year, there's less evidence that we will be able to support our forecast. So the impairment model brings it down slightly. which explains it. It's the maths within the impairment model that brings the growth rates down as opposed to management's belief of what we can deliver on the technology division.

Thank you. He also asks, what feedback have your divisional account managers given on the centralisation of supply chain management in the LXD out of the divisions?

That's a great question. So I think the reality is we've been quite cautious about how we've deployed that because our clients are obviously just very concerned about quality of service and timeliness. And so what's been really great about that transition is we've kept to our plan, we've migrated some of our biggest accounts now into the LXD and we've had no kind of material issues in that transition. So I think we've really proven the model So it's working for our clients, which is obviously the most important thing, but it's also helping us to leverage our scale as well. So I think that that program is on track and will continue with the big focus on IP services, which was the division we were most cautious about initially with that transition because of the very specific and highly skilled nature of the work we do in IP services. But we're now very confident that we can continue with that transition in IP as we move through into the year we're now in.

James's final question is, what share of IP services revenue was Eurofile at the end of FY23?

Ooh, Candy, have you got that breakdown?

Let me see.

Somewhere in the book.

Somewhere in the book, yeah. Hang on. Eurofile. It is... I've just got to do the maths here. It's about 30%. Eurofile was about 30% of total IP.

Great, thank you. And can I just check if there are any further questions from the room? Nope. So over to you, Ian, for closing remarks.

Okay, well, thank you all very much. I appreciate you coming today. I hope that was useful. We'll be here for a few minutes if you've got any other questions. Thank you and have a good day.