RWS Holdings plc

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the RWS full year results for 2024. Thank you all for joining us today. I'm Ian Al Mockadam, CEO, and presenting alongside me today will be our CFO, Candy Davis. I'm also pleased to welcome Ben Fass who's here in the audience today. Ben is our CEO designate. We commenced our handover last week and Ben will be taking over from me on the 6th of January before I leave at the end of January. Ben's here observing today so we've promised that we'll take the questions but I know he's looking forward to saying hello to everybody who's present today and indeed to engaging with our shareholders once he takes over next year. So welcome to Ben. In terms of the format for today, very similar format to normal. I'll start with some opening remarks. I'll then hand over to Candy to take us through the financial review. I will then come back to go through the strategic and operating review, looking specifically at our individual business units. I'll close then with some comments about current trading and outlook, and then we'll go to questions. So just a bit of an introduction. I know many of you are very familiar with RWS, but for those who are a bit newer to the story, who are we? We are a unique, world-leading provider of technology-enabled language, content, and intellectual property services. We're well diversified with many market-leading positions. We operate in a large and fragmented market with some clear structural demand drivers. We've built a unique platform combining human expertise with proprietary language and content technologies. And we are a very well established provider of AI-led solutions, something I'm sure we will talk a lot about as we go through the presentation. The business has an attractive financial profile, we're cash generative, we have low levels of debt, a progressive dividend policy which we're reinforcing with today's announcement and we retain the ability to invest in selective acquisitions to enhance our footprint and our capabilities. We've built a rather unique capability in managing very large communities of people, which originated in our core language business with a very large network of language freelancers, but today also now includes a very large community of AI related data annotators and validators. Again, something we'll touch more on as we go through. We have an enviable client profile, some 8,000 corporate clients across 106 countries. We tend to work with market leaders over very long periods of time. We get to know their products, their businesses, their target customers really, really well. And we're proud that 83 of the world's top 100 brands trust us as their supplier. And that is because we deliver very high levels of customer satisfaction. In fact, today we're reporting our highest ever NPS score of plus 48. Content is very much the raw material that we operate with. And that content, of course, as you'll know from your own lives, comes in many forms, in text, in images, in audio and video formats as well. And we help our clients to create, to collect, to transform, to analyze and engage with that content, and to launch and manage it through its lifecycle. Why are they interested in doing that? Because it helps them to grow their businesses. The content we help them with helps them to win new customers. It helps them to retain those customers and deliver great customer experiences to them. It allows them to do that whilst maintaining regulatory compliance in an increasingly regulated environment. And increasingly, the tools that we offer help our clients to both sort of create huge volumes of content, but also to make sense of that content that's coming back to them from their customers. So that is very much the essence of what we do. And that's all underpinned by our purpose of unlocking global understanding. Turning to the headlines for the year, we're very pleased to announce that we returned to growth in the second half, driven very much by our AI-led solutions. The group grew by 2% on a constant currency organic basis in the second half, with two of our divisions, language services and IP services, delivering growth for the full year and our other two divisions showing significant improvement in the second half with language and content technology returning to growth in the second half and regulated industries making a meaningful improvement. We've got increased traction from a pivot towards our growth initiatives, the investments we've been making and I'll show you a slide on that in a second. And in FY24, the incremental revenue from some of those growth initiatives that we've been investing in was 28 million pounds, which compares to 20 million in the previous year. AI-related products and services now account for 25% of the group revenues. They are profitable, just below group average margin. And amongst them, Train AI, our data services, data training offering, has done really well in FY25 with good momentum into FY25, sorry, in 24, with good momentum into FY25. And we've started to expand our customer base of that offering beyond our West Coast technology clients who remain a very important buyer of those services. We launched High, our digital self-service platform, in the summer of 24. We've continued to make progress with shifting our license mix towards SaaS, with now 39% of our licenses being SaaS licenses. We recently launched a collaboration agreement with AWS, which will see us both doing joint marketing, but also working together to develop new AI-led solutions. And of course, in the year, we launched Evolve, our most sophisticated language localization tool, which has both delivered some significant wins in the year, but is also helping to drive internal efficiencies. Reflecting those efficiencies, our gross margin improved to 46.9% in the year, with our language delivery platform, the LXD, providing an increasing source of competitive advantage, not just for language localisation, but also in the delivery and in the creation of some of the AI solutions that we've been building. Our performance also reflects the investments that we've been making in sales effectiveness over the last two years which have supported that return to growth as we've gone through this year. We've also made good progress with our transformation programmes having now completed the re-platforming of our HR systems onto a common group platform and the first phase of our new finance ERP system went live just after the end of the financial year. In terms of the financial headlines, I'll touch on a few of these and I'll let Candy obviously go into more detail. Revenues were 718.2 million. That's down 2.1% on a reported basis, but flat on a constant currency basis. And as I said, if you look at the performance over the last two years, On a constant currency basis, we've gone minus 7, minus 5, minus 2, plus 2. So showing, I guess, four halves of sequential improvement now and supporting that sustained return to growth. Gross margin, as I said, up 58 basis points, which is encouraging given some of the headwinds that we've faced and I think demonstrates that the efficiency actions and the LXD and the focus on trying to get pricing where we can have all contributed. In terms of adjusted PBT, 106.7 million, down 11%, and Candy will go into the detail on that in a second. In terms of capex, this was always going to be the peak year in our investment programme, so capex at 6.4% of revenues was in line with our guidance, and we would now expect that to start to drift downwards as we go into FY25 and beyond. In terms of dividend, the total dividend for the year is 12.45 pence, that's up 2% and in line with our progressive dividend policy. Now, we've added in here a couple of charts to help you understand a little bit more what's been going on in terms of the shift in the mix of our business over the last few years. We will talk about the individual business units in a moment. But we thought it was helpful to look across the business and to see the impact of the investments that we've been making. So in the green box are those growth initiatives that we announced back at our Capital Markets Day a few years ago. They now together represent 35% of the group revenues. They are growing well, as you can see from the bars, and they actually combined or operating at above group average gross margin. They include our forward-looking propositions, linguistic validation in our life sciences business, our AI-led propositions like train AI, evolve and high, and also our other software solutions and some of the more recent additions in our IP services business where we've been expanding the range of solutions to our clients. The blue box is the rest of the business, some 65%. And in here are our other localization revenues, some of our other IP and regulated industry services. And in that box as well, we are leveraging AI wherever it's appropriate to drive efficiency and support growth. And as you can see, the contraction in that blue box has reduced in the year. And we think with continued improvement to some of those cyclical headwinds that we've been facing, we can see a path back to growth for the blue box as well. But hopefully this shows how meaningful those investments have been and how well we are doing in positioning the group to be successful in an AI environment. And we're really quite pleased with the progress that we've made here. I've talked before in terms of our language localization business of trying to have a solution to meet every type of customer need. And this picture shows that we now believe that we have that, thanks to some of those investments. We're great believers in what we call genuine intelligence, the combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence to to provide reliable solutions to our clients. And what this chart shows you is at the top of this chart, some of our most specialist localization solutions, which still today rely on very specific subject matter expertise from experts in particular fields, who are often linguists, but also people have scientific or other degree backgrounds. And at the other end of this chart, you see LanguageWeaver, our neural machine translation platform, which for clients for whom a machine-only response is good enough for certain applications. And we believe that over time, we will see clients using more than one of these solutions together for different use cases, always with that combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence in mind. And with that, I will hand over to Candy for the financial review before I come back in a few moments.

Thank you, Ian. Okay, so turning to the numbers in a bit more detail. Revenue is down 2% year-on-year. This includes a benefit relating to the acquisition of Propolon, which took place in July 23, and a smaller adverse impact from the sale of Patbase earlier this year. On an organic basis, revenue declined 3%. Excluding the impact of currency, however, we're reporting flat revenue year-on-year, having delivered that plus 2 in the second half. I'll provide more details in the divisional breakdown in a moment. Gross margin expanded 60 bps to 46.9%. This reflects further efficiencies being driven through the LXD and broader restructuring across the group, more than offsetting the cost of inflation and the currency headwind as the pound continued to strengthen against the dollar and euro. Admin expenses before adjusting items of £224 million increased year-on-year by £8.5 million, reflecting the sustained investment being made behind growth initiatives, a full year of costs associated with Propylon and the lower level of gain recognised from our hedging programme. These costs were partially mitigated by the group restructuring and ongoing cost control efforts. We recognised 5 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, although that does compare to a £13 million gain in the prior year. The net result is adjusted profit before tax of £106.7 million, running at 14.9% revenue. Excluding the impact of FX, the adjusted PBT and margin are in line with the prior year. There are a number of adjusting items which are detailed in the accounts. We recognised a £30 million income relating to the sale of PatBase. There's also a non-cash exceptional impairment charge of £22 million relating to the write-off of some historic IT investment and an updated market valuation of a property asset. The other adjusting items include amortisation of acquired intangibles of £41 million relating to the past acquisitions of SDL and Moravia. Exceptional items considered one-off in nature, encompassing integration, transformation and restructuring costs of £4 million. Acquisition-related costs of £7 million, including proper non-fonto and SD-COMs, contingent consideration and transaction fees, and the share-based payments of just under £3 million. The reported tax expense for the year was £12.5 million, which results in a headline effective tax rate of 20.8%. The divestment of the Pat-based business was treated as tax-exempt under the UK Substantial Shareholding Exemption. Once we've taken account of all adjusting items, such as exceptionals and amortisation of acquired intangibles, the adjusted effective tax rate is 24.9%, up from 24.6% in full year 23. This adjusted tax rate is derived from the group's jurisdictional mix of profits, and the rise largely reflects the full year impact of the increase in the UK rate change to 25% from the blended rate of 22 in the prior year. And this is consistent with our earlier guidance and expectations. And finally, adjusted EPS came in at 21.6 pence per share, down 7% on the prior year. So looking at the drivers of the revenue variance from full year 23 to 24, The full year 23 OCC revenue adjusts the reported revenues by adding pre-acquisition proper loan revenue, subtracting the predisposal PAP-based revenue, and restating these numbers at the full year 24 FX rates. So year on year in that organic constant currency, revenue was flat. And the group's sustained performance of growth initiatives, notably data services, train AI, linguistic validation, were up at 4%, and a slight net price increase of £0.4 million was offset by a reduction in underlying volume and mix of 4%. From a divisional standpoint, language services reported a decline of 1%, whilst at constant currency it grew 3%. Our data services AI-led proposition, TrainAI, performed strongly with enterprise clients, and we continue to win new business across the division. Whilst we've also seen an encouraging pickup in the second half, we continue to see reduced activity from some of our EMEA clients, as they have adapted their priorities to changes in their end markets. In regulated industries, revenue fell 10%, which at constant currency equates to a decline of 7%. This contraction is primarily due to the softer trading conditions and spending cuts in life science, as well as one-time events in our finance and legal section in folio 23, which was partly offset by double-digit growth in linguistic validation. The second half saw a slowdown of the decline to low single digit. On a reported basis, our language and content technology division grew 4%. The organic growth of this division, adjusting for Propylon, was a decline of 3%. And in organic constant currency terms, the division declined slightly at the minus 1%, with the second half recovering and delivering two quarters of growth. Language Weaver performed strongly throughout the year. In IP services, finally, the 2% decline in reported revenues, but 3% growth on a constant currency basis, was in line with our expectations. Increase in revenue included filing, as well as renewals and research, especially in China. And we disposed of PatBase in May 24. Excluding PatBase, the reported revenue was flat year on year. And Ian will discuss business performance in more detail later in the presentation. So turning to the net cash bridge and cash conversion, cash generated from operations came in at £74.3 million after tax and £95 million before tax. Net cash decreased £36.5 million in the year. Operating cash flow before movements in working capital came in at £128.6 million after accounting for £8 million of payments related to the deferred consideration for Propolon and Fonto. We had a working capital outflow of £33 million during the year. £10 million relates to the restructuring announced and provided for last year. The other £23 million relates to several moving parts. Firstly, the timing and phasing of some projects and deals and the associated revenue recognition. A change in our supply chain management, namely the shift to direct sourcing from third party agencies and other procurement activities. A reduction in accruals reflecting lower levels of sales commissions and overall spend, including taxes and social security. And we've seen a recovery in our trade receivables since the half year. As we continue to work on driving further efficiencies across working capital, we do expect to see an improvement of 10 to 15 million in full year 25. Cash outflow from M&A relates to the acquisition of ST Comms, which took place in October 23. Other significant cash outflows relate to increased capital investments, as outlined at the Capital Markets Day in 2022, tax payments of £20 million, dividends of £46 million, as well as the completion of the £50 million share repurchase programme, with £30 million in this financial year. As you can see from the bridge, we received £25 million during the year relating to the sale of PatBase, and have since the year end received the final £5 million owed, as planned, in November. Total cash at the end of September 24 was 61.5 million and net debt after loans and borrowings was 12.9 million. For information as is typical, lease liabilities of 27.1 million are not included in these figures. Cash conversion for the year was 51%, an improvement from 30% at the half year, following the focus on receivables and stabilisation of the Finance Shared Service Centre. On a full year basis, the decline versus prior year was a result of the peak in investment and transformation and the working capital outflow I just spoke to. With CapEx back to more normalised levels and an improved working capital, we expect to see free cash flow and cash conversion to improve in full year 25 and beyond. So looking at the balance sheet, which remains strong. And when comparing to September 23, there's not much movement. The two key movements being the FX revaluation and the impairment charges. Goodwill decreased by 38 million pounds due to the movements in the dollar relative to the pound between September 23 and September 24. The closing rate in 23 was 1.220, whereas this year on the 30th of September, it was 1.338. Other non-current assets also decreased by £60 million, the additions of £46 million being more than offset by amortisation and depreciation, the FX revaluation and the impairment charges. The impairment charges in IP services relate to an updated market valuation of a property asset of £10.5 million following a portfolio review and an impairment of previous IT investment of £11.7 million after a change in the transformation approach. The group has a $220 million revolving credit facility, which matures on the 6th of August, 2027, after triggering the option to extend maturity by one year. With only $100 million drawn, as at the 30th of September, 24, and an additional $100 million of uncommitted accordion, we have further flexibility as we continue to grow the business and seek selective acquisitions to enhance the group's capabilities and geographic reach. Due to its worldwide geographical footprint and reach, RWS trades in a sizeable number of currencies. The US dollar constitutes the largest currency exposure, representing two-thirds of our revenue and a third of our cost base, while the euro represents about 20% of both our revenue and cost base. As a result, currency management remains a priority, and to minimise the group's exposure to currency fluctuations, we hedge 50% of our net surplus cash flows at the beginning of each fiscal year. sorry, financial year. The table on the left hand side illustrates the sensitivity against the US dollar and euro and the gross impact on top line and bottom line for full year 25. A weakening of the pound versus dollar by one pence would drive an increase in the gross revenue and adjusted operating profit of 3.5 million and 2.2 million respectively on an annualized basis. However, the net impact on adjusted operating profit would be halved due to the hedging in place. Now to our key performance indicators, and calling out a few that we've not already touched on in the financials. As you can see, our net promoter score metric grew to 48, with clients highly rating RWS's quality, reliability, overall value, and partnering, whilst repeat revenue remained strong at 95%, reinforcing the strong client relationships and satisfaction that RWS maintains, albeit in an ongoingly challenging macro environment. We continue to see a shift in our license models to SaaS, linked to the increased R&D investments in our products, and gross R&D spend in our LNCT division was 33.8 million, in line with our strategy to invest in our organic growth and offer the right range of solutions with increasing AI-based functionality to continue to meet our clients' evolving needs. Total capex represents 6.4% of revenue, with spend being a combination of the continued investments being made in our software development, as well as the transformation programs. As previously guided and Ian mentioned, this year is expected to be our peak investment year. And finally, from a people perspective, our colleague engagement score has remained stable at 61%. Our current level of voluntary attrition has reduced since last year to 10.6%, and it's worth noting also that the percentage of women in senior leadership positions continues to improve, having increased further to 42% this year. So looking at business transformation briefly, we continue to make solid progress in a number of areas, having launched the Evolve, High, and other generative AI products, shifted to a single Microsoft platform, and continue to focus on simplifying and optimizing the group's operating model. I'm pleased to report that since the year end, we've completed the last phase of our transition to our global finance shared service center. And as Ian mentioned, we have just gone live with the first release on our ERP system in IP services. In addition, we continue to drive forward the transition of clients to our newer SaaS-based Trados enterprise platform. And clients were informed of end-of-life plans earlier in the year, with almost a third of them having migrated already. IP solutions will go live in the new year with a portal providing a digital channel to allow customers to instruct on their patent renewal activities. And looking ahead, we'll continue to complete the existing programs and look to new opportunities to drive the business forward by harnessing AI-driven opportunities both for our clients and internally. We also plan to embark upon a group-wide legal entity rationalization program to further simplify our operating model. And with that, I'll pass back to Ian.

Thank you, Candy. Right, so we're going to start looking at the business units and just a reminder of the group structure. We report four business units and you can see how the revenues have adjusted very slightly between the two years. They are all supported one way or another by our language experience delivery platform. Just to remind you what that is, that is where we manage a lot of our language delivery. So in there are some 1600 full-time linguists. This is where we manage our large community of freelancers, that 40,000 population of freelancers for language. And it's also now where we also manage that community for supporting our train AI data services work as well. So we're very, very skilled at sourcing and deploying you know people with different types of skills to support the packages of work that our clients send us and obviously by combining fixed and variable cost we aim to manage the margin as tightly as we can and we leverage our own technology within the LXD so the LXD is one of the biggest users of Trados of Language Weaver and our colleagues in the LXD work with our development colleagues to develop those new products and those new releases. So Evolve as an example, our linguistic AI solution that we launched this year was developed with the support of our in-house linguists who are helping on an ongoing basis to train those models and to expand their capabilities. So the LXD we think is truly unique in our industry and is a real increasing source of competitive advantage for us. And then below that you see our other support functions, a more typical structure there, and we've talked already about the improvements we've been making to our finance and HR systems and shared services. If we now go through the divisions one by one, starting with our largest division, language services, which is about 46% of group revenues, here we're very pleased to report 3% organic growth in constant currency for the full year, driven by growth in particular in train AI with our West Coast technology clients, but also benefiting from recovering other parts of the language services business as well. Here we've had some significant wins with Evolve, that linguistic AI solution we've talked about before, which is also supporting the efficiencies underpinning the delivery of clients across language services. We've had new client wins in a range of segments, including technology and e-commerce, and we're making very good progress in Asia in the past year in this division in particular. Hi, our digital self-service platform was launched in June. Relatively small in terms of scale, but very significant, we think, in terms of completing that range of localization solutions. And we had a very nice win with a large global bank for Hi this year, where the bank is going to embed Hi within their mortgage approval process for customers who have a need to translate documents as part of their application. And I think that's a very good example of how That kind of self-service solution with a human in the loop to check quality with the confidence of security around the way that data is handled is a source of future competitive advantage. Adjusted operating profit here was flat versus FY23, driven principally by changes in service and language mix and offset by some of those cost actions that Candy's already mentioned. And it was nice to see the organic growth momentum building through the year with minus two in H1, sorry, plus two in H1 and plus three in H2. In terms of FY25 focus, we'll be continuing to focus on building out those AI enabled growth solutions. And also enhancing our ability to support multimedia content. We're seeing an increasing portion of our mix being oriented towards video in particular. Something we can serve, but where we see an opportunity to improve our capabilities and our internal systems. So that will be a continuing focus for us. If we turn then to regulated industries, and to remind you, about 80% of this business is with life sciences clients, and about 20% is with clients in the finance and legal segments. This is a division that's faced some tough headwinds, going back to FY23, where the Inflation Reduction Act, in particular in the US, had a meaningful impact. impact on our life sciences business where a lot of our work historically has been linked to the life cycle of launching new products and a lot of our revenues in that business are at the regulatory stage of the launch of products which was particularly badly hit by that change in legislation. We'd expected to see some recovery as we came into FY24 and at the half year we'd had a pretty tough start with minus 12%. It's therefore very pleasing to report that in the second half we've delivered minus 2% and so we are now starting to see some of those volumes that we thought would come back returning and we're also seeing the impact of some corrective actions that we've been taken in terms of management changes and strengthening our sales force and also some cost actions. What's pleasing here is that linguistic validation, which was one of the growth initiatives we announced a few years ago, which is all about work at the clinical stage of the product life cycle in life sciences, has continued to perform very strongly with double digit growth on an organic basis in the period. And as Candy mentioned briefly earlier, the finance and legal segment here had a surge of work in FY23 linked to some PRIPS regulations, which we did not expect to replete in FY24. So it faced that sort of year-on-year headwind. And it's also still adversely affected by a lack of transaction activity, which does drive demand from that group of clients. So we would hope to see some recovery there as we go into FY25. The lower operating profit here reflects the top line decline, the adverse currency impact partially mitigated by the increased use of LXD and some other cost actions. So as we go into FY25, clearly the focus for us is to get this division fully back to growth, building on the momentum that we've started to build in the second half, and we will be continuing to realign a cost base here wherever we can to support the margin. Turning then to language and content technology, here we've reported revenue at constant currency declining by 1%. But as you can see there, it was minus 4 in H1 and plus 3 in H2, representing the recovery that we expected to see when we reported at the mid-year. What we've seen here is very good performance. In fact, extremely strong organic growth performance from LanguageWeaver on your machine translation platform. A very encouraging and strong performance from Propylon, the business we acquired last year. And we've also won our largest ever language weaver contract and had in the second half a significant contract win for our content technology business with a large life sciences client. And it was that content technology part of this division that was causing us a little bit of pressure in the first half where we were seeing clients taking a bit longer to make decisions. So it's very pleasing to see some of those deals getting cemented, in some cases right up to the wire, the last day in the period, as sometimes happens in this part of the business. And as we've already mentioned, that long-term focus we've had on shifting the license niche towards SaaS is continuing to make good progress. And unlike a couple of years ago where that transition was actually a headwind for us each year when we started to put our budgets together, that repeating business is now giving us a tailwind as we go into each new year. So again, we're very pleased with that. And I should say that retention levels in this part of the group have been exceptional. We're seeing very high levels of retention. And this is probably also the business where we get the most pricing on an annual basis. The adjusted operating profit decline reflects the higher proportion of SaaS revenues and ongoing planned investments and some adverse FX impact. So in terms of FY25, we're focused on sustaining that momentum with LanguageWeaver and Propylon, further development and refinement of the technology underpinning Evolve, which is developed by the team in this division, working with our language delivery colleagues. And we'll be continuing to invest in further AI functionality in particular, especially for Trados, our translation management solution, and Tridian, our content technology solution. And then last, but by no means least, IP services were really pleased to get this business back to organic constant currency growth for the full year. As you know, this business was impacted by a risk we'd been flagging for a very long time with the introduction of the unitary patent in Europe, which went live in the summer of 23. So to get this business back to growth, 3% organic growth with a nice drop through to margin is really getting this business back to where we'd expect it to be performing. So Europhile, where the unitary patent applied, has performed very strongly actually with fewer clients than we expected adopting the unitary patent and we've had strong demand from clients in both China and Japan, again reflecting some of the investments we're making in our sales teams in that part of the world. Our IP research segment returned to growth with several client wins and a quite encouraging pipeline of opportunities. And we've also been generally just investing in this business a little bit. And so we've also been expanding the range of product offerings in IP services to help our clients manage patterns through the life cycle, so from patent research to patent translation and filing to renewals and recordals, which is when the title of a patent transfers from one owner to another. And we'll be continuing to enhance that offering and further tech-enable this business as we go through FY25. This is also a business that still has benefits to be gained from the LXD. We transferred the management of the translators into IP services in FY24. And in FY25, we will start to further equip them with the technology we use elsewhere in the LXD, which should further support margin improvement within IP services. The world file segment was a little bit sluggish in FY24, so in terms of FY25, we'd like to see a bit more progress there. We'll be continuing to enhance that lifecycle, and as I said, continuing to transition and gain benefit from working more closely with the LXD. And then before we turn to Outlook, just a comment on M&A, which remains something that we are always looking at. And it's very nice to report the strong performance we've had from Propylon and also from SD Communications, which is a much smaller acquisition in the language space. But both of those acquisitions done recently are performing nicely. And so we continue to monitor the universe for other opportunities. This slide really hasn't changed very much over the years. So we remain interested in localization assets with attractive end market exposures. We're very interested in complementary AI-led capabilities, especially in that multimedia space, and in expanding generally our ability in language processing. We're also keeping an eye out for acquisitions in the data services space to support the organic growth, to complement the organic growth of train AI if possible. And our screening criteria literally haven't changed. It's the same set of words. So do they fit our strategic priorities? Will they enhance the organic growth quality of the group? And then do they meet our expectations in terms of valuations, returns, cultural fit and ease of integration? And then final slide from me, just to look ahead a little bit before we go to questions. So in terms of growth outlook, we talked a lot about some of the tailwinds that we're now seeing, an appetite for AI and specialist solutions, increased use of LXD for client volumes, SaaS license growth. The world does remain challenging, as you'll all appreciate. So we continue to monitor unpredictable economic and political developments. Pricing remains tough in some parts of the business. As you're sure, we got a slight positive from pricing overall as a group. But it is quite a mixed bag across our division. So that's a continued focus for us. And we are still seeing some extended decision-making cycles for software products in particular. balance that a little bit that pivot that we talked about earlier that shift to those forward-looking solutions that we've been investing in is continuing to support that return to growth so we'll be developing further AI capabilities and client solutions to both drive revenue and support efficiency we'll be accessing new sources of growth like expanding those services in IP services And as Candy pointed to, our transformation program has made very good progress and we have further ideas about how we can make the group more efficient moving forward. And I think we've also been making a lot of change over the last few years to our sales and marketing approach. And as I mentioned earlier, I think those changes, that greater discipline, that common CRM platform, a more measurable set of investments in marketing, are all helping us to deliver incremental gains in terms of performance. So in terms of current trading and full year outlook, we expect to deliver modest organic revenue growth at constant currency with growth volumes more than offsetting ongoing price pressure. We're very encouraged by a positive start to FY25. We expect performance to be in line with market expectations for the full year. And we really do continue to have confidence in the long-term growth drivers for our products and services. And I very much hope that this set of results will once and for all lay to rest the concerns about AI. As you can see through this set of slides, AI is supporting growth. It is supporting margin development and efficiency. And the headwinds we've faced have been other types of headwinds, some of which have started to alleviate and others which we hope will continue to do so. So this will be my last set of results for RWS. It's been a real honor to lead our truly magnificent team of very talented, hardworking people around the world. It's the most diverse community of people I have ever had the honor of working with. It's also been a great privilege to serve the truly high quality customers that we've continued to serve. And I would struggle to list any significant client losses over the last few years, something that we were very concerned about when we did the SDL merger a few years ago. And that again is a tribute to my fantastic colleagues. So I'd like to thank you all for your support and interest in the business. I wish Ben, my successor, who is going to be a fantastic leader for this business, every success and with that we'll turn to questions.

Hi, both. James Bayliss from Barenboek here. Two questions, if I may. Just thinking about gross margin, obviously really nice to see it coming up this year. How do we think about that going forward in terms of the longer-term profile for the group when we consider everything from client focus on pricing, improving volumes, the mix shift within the portfolio, and obviously all the investment you've been putting into the product set and efficiencies in the group? And then the second question is, obviously we had the disposal of PatBase in the year. How does that instruct our thinking around any future portfolio rationalization? Is the message very much build through M&A and organic initiatives? Or could there be other areas of the portfolio where there's a bit of truing up to be done?

Okay. So I think that to the first question, I mean, we, you know, as you've seen, I think the growth initiatives that we've been investing in are very much supporting that return to growth. And I think without those, we would certainly be struggling as a group to grow. So, you know, the key thing is to continue that momentum that, you know, we've seen 16% growth in that green block that I showed earlier in the year. And I think continuing to build momentum there by ongoing investments and sales and go to market with those products is key. But we're also seeing that kind of return to more normal conditions with our other services across the divisions as we pointed to. So in terms of price and volume, there is absolutely a balancing act to be made across those two. We see the most pricing pressure in language services, which tends to be a more competitively intense segment. But we also see real opportunities to grow volume. And that's partly because AI is enabling more content to be created, which requires support from businesses like ours. But it's also because some of the solutions that we've launched like Evolve are enabling us to take share of the market. So we've had a number of situations through the year this year where with Evolve or actually with our other solutions, we've been able to persuade clients who would previously have shared their volume earlier. across a wider range of our competitors and ourselves to put more or all of that volume with us. And there we can offer our clients really good efficiencies at good gross margins. So I think that's the way we think about it. So it's not without risk, of course it's not without risk, but I think with those sort of cyclical headwinds sort of easing a little bit, and with growing confidence in those initiatives that we've had more control over, I think we think that modest organic growth ambition for this year and beyond is reasonable. I think in terms of the portfolio, it is something we look at from time to time. I think we are more focused on acquisitions than disposals. I mean, PatBase was a good bit of tidying up. I mean, that was not even a, it wasn't actually, you know, we didn't have equity in that business. It was a partnership agreement that had been running for many years and it had kind of run its course. So actually we were really pleased to realise that 30 million from PatBase. That was on my to-do list when I took over for my predecessor, Richard, and it took a little while to reach agreement on that deal. We think it was a very good deal for RWS. And we've continued now with PatBase to have a partnership with that organisation so we can still offer our clients the benefit of that solution. And in terms of the wider portfolio, I guess I would point to the fact the group is more integrated today than it was a few years ago, with the LXD very much acting as the heart of the business now, supporting both efficiency and product development. So one would never discount the possibility of a disposal, and I think if we thought that was in the best interests of shareholders, then I'm very sure that our board would take that decision. But clearly we've got nothing else to say on that topic today. Thanks.

Hi, it's David Brockton from Deutsche Numis. Can I ask two questions, please, as well? The first one on customer delivery and then the second one on the medium-term targets back from the CMD. In terms of customer delivery, it's clearly exceptional with no significant losses over the last few years and the progress in the NPS. Can you just touch on... how concerted an effort that's been from the centre, any particular initiatives that have driven that, and where you think we should view that going forward, and perhaps are you being too nice there to customers? And then the second question, just in terms of the medium-term targets, obviously the cycle and FX have got in the way of the delivery of the growth ambition there in the margins. Can you just reiterate or give an update as to what you think this business should be capable of doing over the medium term, and I think it was market growth of 6% and 200 to 300 basis points margin improvement.

I'll take the first one. I'll do a first go at the second one and maybe see if Candy wants to add anything. So on customer delivery, it's a really good question. So that MPS programme is a group-wide programme that we established not long after I joined, and the idea was to... quite independently go to our clients and ask them how we're doing. And as well as asking the typical MPS question, would you recommend this to someone else, we also ask our clients whether we are living our four values. We progress, we deliver, and we pioneer. And we typically get good scores on all of those, but the one that we were noticing we were getting slightly lower scores on was We Pioneer. And we were often seeing comments from our clients saying, we just want you to be more proactive in coming to us with ideas about how we can work differently. So I think the thing that's driven that improvement in the MPS score this year is we've been doing a lot more of that. We've been going proactively to our clients, either running individual workshops with them, or in some cases, sessions in partnership with people like AWS, where we've been showcasing that full set of solutions that we now have and helping our clients to think through the best solution or set of solutions for their needs. And I think just as you've all been asking us about AI over the last few years, Same is happening with all of our clients. Their boards are getting asked, what are you doing about AI? And then suddenly, actually, what's happening is they're often discovering that there's a little localization department they maybe didn't spend much time noticing, which has been using AI with people like us for many years. So actually, the other thing that's happened is a much more receptive audience from a client perspective in looking at those new solutions driven quite often by board level questioning about, well, what are we doing about AI? And that's actually created an opportunity for us having partnerships with a lot of these companies to go in and say, well, actually, we've known you for a long time and here's some ideas you might not have thought of that we think we can now deliver for you, which will be secure, which will be high quality, which will still have that responsiveness that you've always trusted us with, but could also deliver you some savings or some faster turnaround or a combination of the two. So I think that's what's been going on there. And it's really pleasing. I mean, these are really good scores. And I think it gives us a lot of confidence on our ability to continue to do that as we move forward. I think in terms of the medium term targets, and I will hand over to Candy in a second, I think what you're seeing is each of the BU's gradually get back to growth. So I think it's perfectly possible to see those sort of modest, you know, mid single digit type organic growth, you know, type performances be possible with technology. You know, in some parts of the technology business, we've done much better than that. So language was, you know, very strong, double digit organic growth this year. So I think some of that depends on the mix. But, you know, as those other headwinds are starting to alleviate, we are seeing that the products that we've been investing in do have a role and a market that we can serve. So that's a sort of high level answer. I'll let maybe Candy see if she wants to add anything else.

Yeah, I mean, there's not a huge amount more to add. I mean, it's all predicated on what you think the top line will grow, et cetera. And I think you can assume that we'll have an increase on the gross margin expansion a little bit next year, increasingly the years after. And obviously, with ongoing cost control and the amortization profile flattening out after 27, you'll see that adjusted PBT expansion back. But broadly, sort of 100 bps a year, I think, is a reasonable expectation as margin expansion in the short term.

Thank you.

Thank you. Katie Cousins from Shore Capital. A few from me, if you don't mind. First, just on the acquisitions, obviously you've got the headroom to draw down on that further if you want to, but what level of leverage would you be comfortable with if there was something significant there? And also perhaps a bit more colour on your valuation and return metrics. What should we be thinking about there? Also in the statement, you said there's a 7% reduction in offices during the period. Is there more to go there? And then finally, how many clients are using more than one of the solutions? I know that's something that you mentioned that you'd like to increase, but where are we at right now? Thank you.

Do you want to take all of those or?

Yeah, so on leverage, obviously, we have our uncommitted debt facility. We have $100 million drawn at the moment, leaving us $120 million. We've got the uncommitted accordion as well. I think we would probably, with the share price where it is, be looking at a debt deal. We'd go to two, two and a half times combined EBITDA. What was the next one?

Evaluation return metrics.

Yeah, so WAC around 9% at the moment, post-tax. And as we always say, we'd look to exceed returns over three years in the third year. Looking at EPS, those sorts of things. We continue to do it, but very much predicated on looking for a growth target.

and in terms of reduction in offices yes i mean there's still scope we've done quite a lot over the last few years um so we're probably coming to the end of that that that program um uh but yeah i mean there's there's still some tidying up to do this year and some has been driven by when leases sort of expire and we've had the opportunity to either close or resize you know what we need or or relocate but and we did a lot after the sdl merger when we did have you know duplicated footprints in similar locations there's a bit more there's a bit more to do and um uh the final question oh the how many of i wish i had that metric i don't we haven't quite got our systems to the point where we can tell you how many uh clients are taking more than one service but it is increasing and what i can tell you is we um we significantly exceeded our cross-selling target um internally this year and we've done a lot of work to equip our salespeople across the business units to sell, if you like, the full set of solutions that we have. So I think things like Evolve involve our technology team from LNCT working with our language service and regulated industries teams to sell those solutions. And what we are seeing is where we're selling a more tech-enabled solution, that requires a different sales skill set. You're often not just talking to the localization or marketing teams or product development teams, you're also often talking to the technology or CIO that part of the business. So we've learned a lot about that in the year. And we've also started this year with a new commission scheme for our whole sales force. So they're now all incented to sell across the group. And we give them slightly higher commission for selling those more forward-looking solutions that we've talked about. So I think we've made a lot of progress with that this year, and I think increasingly what we'll be selling is tech-enabled solutions combining those proprietary technology platforms that we have with our specialist service, human intelligence-based solutions. One day we'll get to that metric, probably when we've got the whole group on the same finance system, I suspect.

Yeah, looking forward to it. Thank you.

Any other questions in the room? Okay, take some online.

Hello. So we've got some questions from Tom Cullen, Investec. There's a few of them, so I'll just take them one at a time. On pricing in LNCT, what are you seeing in terms of any pricing pressure across that part of the market and within specific product sets? Clearly, it's encouraging that you are winning volumes in this division, but is this coming at the expense of margin?

So on LNCT, we've actually done pretty well with pricing. So I think that's probably... I think it certainly is the part of the business where we actually find it relatively easy to get pricing every year, especially when you're doing those sort of SaaS annual renewals. I think there's a sort of expectation that there's some kind of pricing... conversation to be had. And we've got a very good sort of pricing and renewals team in that part of the business. So I'd say that's the area where the pricing pressure is the least. And then it's kind of as you would expect. So I think IP services has got a lot better at pricing over the last few years. It's not straightforward. It is more competitive, the whole business is, but we get a little bit of pricing there. It's been tougher in language services, for sure, where we have had to give pricing and then hopefully try and offset that with some of our efficiency initiatives and use of the LXD and things like Evolve. And regulated industry has been pretty tough as well, to be honest. the general pressure on that segment over the last couple of years. We've seen a lot of clients cost-cutting, some of our big pharma clients have been cost-cutting, and so that's made pricing in that environment particularly difficult. But it also means customers are receptive to some of those newer solutions where we can offer them more competitive pricing. with a commitment maybe from their side to give us more volume. So it can be a win-win at a decent margin for us, even if we have to give some pricing away, if we can deploy that full suite of AI and technology-enabled service.

Thanks. On the next one from Tom, on the growth focus areas versus established services chart flagged on page eight of the presentation, is there a long run target here in terms of where growth focus area revenues can get to as a percentage of the overall group?

We have not set a specific percentage for that, but I guess obviously we expect that to continue to shift. So I think we had an arrow upwards on the chart. That's probably as much guidance as we're going to get on that for now.

What percentage of regulated industry's divisional revenue does linguistic validation represent? I don't think we normally give that.

Don't think we normally give that. It's modest but growing, I guess. Is that fair?

Yes. Moving on to the next one. On the political landscape in the US, is the re-election of Trump a net positive for the business?

Might turn that question back to the room. We could have a long discussion about that. What can I say? Obviously, a lot of what we do is linked to global trade, right? You know, we're helping our clients take their products and services to market and make their devices work in different languages and et cetera. So I think anything that assists trade generally is a good thing. Anything that might hinder it could be bit more of a challenge but I do think that's offset by the the significant diversification that we have as a business and actually one of things I've thought and we never got round to doing what I've been here is I think you know we could probably write a very interesting thought piece on what we see through our mix of languages in terms of which parts of the world are doing more or less business with other parts of the world and that's definitely shifted over time. So I guess from memory, probably less focus from US-based businesses on selling into China, but conversely, very rapid growth in demand from clients in China who are very active in selling elsewhere in the world. So I wouldn't dare to try and predict what the new president's policies will do to us all, but I would draw a lot of comfort from the resilience and broad diversification that this business has.

And we've got one further question from Citi online, which is, what are growth, Sorry, what are growth drivers for full year 25 for each segment? And how much contribution do you expect from the investment initiative?

Gosh, that's quite a broad question. Let me have a go. So I think you've got those, I mean, in a way, you've got those themes that we've talked about, which kind of cut across the business units increasingly. So if you look at language services, you know, train AI has played quite a role in language services this year, we would expect to be selling train AI to a wider group of clients within language services and possibly in regulated industries as well as we go through the year. So I think train AI is a very important theme for growth increasingly across the business. I think that growth in demand for AI-led solutions, we would expect, I guess, in language services to see more clients taking those more AI-enabled solutions, things like Hi, things like Evolve. And that should help us with the pricing piece as well. So as we've said, we can offer more efficiency effectively. hopefully take some share of volume whilst also giving clients a bit of a price incentive to take those products for some time. I think in regulated industries I mean the key things to look at are you know do we see a continued recovery in that regulatory stage work in life sciences and we've always thought that we would do and the reason we believe that is first of all we're seeing a lot of activity at the clinical phase of of the product pipeline. And if people are developing products in principle, you would expect they will want to launch them and monetize them at some point. And we've started to see some of that. But I think the pace of that recovery will determine, I think, how quickly we get that life sciences vertical back to growth. And as we mentioned, for finance and legal, I think, to be honest, we need a bit more deal activity to help that portion of regulated industries Get back to growth and I think with IP services You know as I said, I think it's in it's in it's in reasonable shape I guess ultimately what drives that business is investment in innovation You know with with with a very diverse group of clients across a range of and verticals seeking to get protection for their their proprietary IP and And I guess there's reasons, I think, to be quite positive about that. And I also think, I mean, I think we've talked about this before, I think IP services, there had been some underinvestment in IP services, I think, historically. And that is not a criticism because I think when the group was diversifying quite rightly into life sciences, into enterprise services with the acquisitions of Moravia and the extension into those segments, which was absolutely the right thing to do if you were facing the unitary patent risk you know 10 years ago and wondering what to do about it but I think the consequence of focusing on diversifying in those other areas meant that IP services didn't perhaps get the same level of investment that it perhaps could have had otherwise and I think we've been rectifying that over the last few years which is you know why I think you know that team that business is is very different now to what it was a few years ago. It's got a really strong management team. It's increasingly benefiting, as we've talked about, from the LXD. It's got a wider product offering. It's got through the unitary patent risk that is now no longer staring us on our risk register. So I'm really positive about IP services. I think the team there have done a really, really good job in the last two years to weather a pretty tough transition in terms of the introduction of the UP. Any other questions? Anyone else in the room? No? Well, thank you all very much. Thanks for coming.