S4 Capital plc

So welcome to Q1 2025. So on my right, we're here in London, Mary Basterfield, our outgoing CFO, and on my left, our incoming CFO, Radhika, and on Mary's right, Scott Spirit, and on Radhika's left, Jean-Benoît Berti. So we're here in force. We've got a presentation on Q1, which covers a trading update from Marion, and Scott will cover market momentum, client analysis, business momentum, and I'll come back with a brief summary and outlook, and we'll take any questions if you have them. So with that... Over to Mary.

Thank you, Martin. Hello, and thank you for joining us today. The macro environment remained challenging in the first quarter. Net revenue of £164 million decreased 12% on a reported basis, or 11% like for like, with continued caution from clients and a reduction in activity from one key technology services client already disclosed. Operational EBITDA for the quarter was in line with our expectations. It benefits from cost reductions made as we continue to align our resources with activity levels. We maintain our full year guidance on a constant currency basis, with target net revenue and operational EBITDA broadly similar to 2024. We continue to take a disciplined approach to cost management, including headcount and discretionary costs, with a focus on utilisation, billing and pricing. We expect performance to improve in the second half with a greater weighting than the prior year, aided by the phasing of new business revenue and our traditional seasonality. Net debt at the end of March was 145 million, or 1.7 times operational EBITDA. This compares to 206 million at the end of March 2024. Our full-year net debt guidance remains 100 to 140 million. Moving to the next slide, let's take a look at first quarter net revenue by our new practice structure and region. My comments here are all on a like for like basis. Marketing services net revenue was down 8% at 148 million with ongoing client caution and large technology clients prioritizing AI expenditure over marketing. activity with GM, Amazon and a key TMT client continues to ramp up. The practice remains focused on efficiency, utilisation and billability to improve margins. In technology services, net revenue decreased 37% due to the already announced reduction from one key client and longer sales cycles for new business. From a regional perspective, net revenue in the Americas declined 11%, driven by technology services. EMEA was down 16%, reflecting lower activity in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany. And APAC reduced 11%, with slower demand in Australia. I'm pleased to welcome Radhika. We've been working closely together in the last week and I will continue to support her through the handover. And finally, I'd like to say how much I've enjoyed working with Martin and the team and have learnt a lot in the last three years. And as I move on, I wish the company all the best for the future. Thank you very much. I'll now hand over to Scott.

Thank you very much, Mary. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining the meeting today. If we take a look at the current market dynamics, then clearly we're in volatile times, and this is driving caution and uncertainty from clients. In terms of market momentum, the challenges we've seen with tech companies reducing their marketing expenditures persist. They continue to prioritize CapEx investment, particularly AI spend, over OpEx and marketing spends. In Q1 2025, Google's sales and marketing expenditure was down over 5%, and Amazon's CapEx was up over 75% year on year. They'll spend over $100 billion this year. If you look at the four hyperscalers, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, they'll spend a combined $330 billion this year, up almost 40% on 2024. Whilst tariffs don't directly impact our business, there are second-order effects given the significant impacts they may have on some of our clients. It's a fluid situation and too early to give accurate projections, but it certainly adds to the uncertainty our clients are facing and clearly creates a challenging environment. We've already seen analysts pull back their forecasts for marketing and technology spend in 2025. That said, we have maintained our guidance based on the business momentum that we see. From a revenue perspective, whilst we've continued to see pressure from certain technology companies and are still lapping the impact of the first American business in tech services, we have had a strong start to the year with new business, including a recent win which should double the size of one of our existing Whoppers in the TMT sector. As we discussed in March, we're also anticipating the ramp up of our GM and Amazon business in H225. We continue to attract excellent talent, which will help us drive our growth agenda forward, including a new chief growth officer for our tech services business who started in Q1 and has already expanded the pipeline. And of course, as per last week's announcement, Radhika joins us as CFO and Nervik Singh joined us as a non-executive director. From a margin perspective, our COO, JB, discussed in detail the three pillars he's focused on in March, starting with increasing discipline around the predictability of our revenue and allowing for more effective recruitment and resourcing, and then a series of initiatives around productivity and profitability to drive margin improvement. As a result, we maintain our guidance of net revenue and operational EBITDA to be broadly similar to 2024 on a constant currency basis. We have a really compelling client list with some of the world's leading and most innovative companies. In 24, nine of them were what we call whoppers with revenues of over 20 million US dollars. And this is a differentiator for a company of our scale. Most of our direct competitors have a much more fragmented client list with smaller relationships. As you can see, we continue to be skewed towards the tech industry, but wins such as GM, which should scale to a top three client this year, are changing that profile. There are strong relationships that help us attract and retain talent to work on them. The continued softness we're seeing in technology client spend and the first American decline in our tech services practice have had a negative effect on the average revenue size of our top 10, 20 and 50 clients. But this is primarily driven by reductions in spend rather than lost business. I have a few slides on the momentum we're seeing in three areas of our business, which are giving us confidence despite the challenging macro environment. Firstly, we have great traction around the go-to-market propositions that I discussed at our last earnings presentation. Real-time brands, orchestration, glassbox media and digital transformation. Today I'm going to zoom in on real-time brands. The idea behind this proposition is that we exist to bridge the gap between brand strategies and media effectiveness in the real-time world. As consumers, we're already at peak media consumption capacity. Our brains and the media platforms we use have evolved to help us navigate the cognitive overload we experience daily. How and when we engage provides feedback and allows the platforms to optimize our experience. We see more of what we engage with and less of what we don't. Our real-time approach adapts this for the process of enduring brand building across platforms. We examine what drives the decision to engage with a brand. It's a combination of familiar attributes that cue recognition and identity and the contextual variables that reflect relevance and novelty. Our job is to work with the client to identify combinations of strategic, creative and media dimensions that deliver the optimal brand experience for their consumers. We create better connections in the moment and drive brand familiarity over time. And in a continuous loop, we gain insights from these connections and apply them to the brand experience over time and across their ecosystem. We concept and produce multidimensional creative. These are big ideas that connect every day and everywhere to be effective. They are multicultural. The brand values are reflected through culture-informed experiences. They're multi-moment. The expressions are designed for moments of captive attention. They're multi-outcome. Content is aware of its role and optimized for results. And they're multi-touchpoint, ensuring relevance by designing for native channel behaviors. All of this adds up to real-time brands, creating recognisable and relevant connections for more channels, places and moments, maximising the value of each opportunity to connect with your audience, growing smarter and more effective with interaction. This has led to our latest major win, which will contribute to our second-half performance, and once it ramps up, in a full year, double the size of one of our existing TMT Whopper clients. Two other clients which are also driving our second half performance are Amazon, where we have significantly expanded our existing relationship, and GM, which we won last year and which continues to scale and ramp up. They're also both great examples of clients working with monks to leverage artificial intelligence for meaningful results. With Amazon, we've built an agentic AI workflow with them, which has significantly reduced campaign development time and cost per assets, meaning they can make their budgets work much harder. With GM, we are building a completely new approach to marketing and content development for them. Leveraging Monk's Flow and technology from partners such as Adobe, NVIDIA, and Runway, the initial results are exciting, and watch this space for future developments. The third area I want to highlight is our burgeoning presence in the Middle East, where we have almost 100 monks across our office in Dubai, our regional HQ in Riyadh, and our regional production hub in Cairo, recently opened in June. A strong local, regional and international team, led by Omar. In the past three years, we've built a strong, sustainable business with an enviable client list and a particular strength in servicing local clients. Examples include PIF, where we have a strong strategic partnership, working for PIF themselves and many of their portfolio businesses. For PIF, we have built their social presence into a strategic asset across multiple platforms, developing an always-on narrative, amplifying events, deepening engagement, and elevating their brand. For Neom, from developing the first page of their website to building their data infrastructure, we continue to develop their social presence on their master brand channels to deepen engagement with global and local audiences, including investors, talent, and future residents. And for Kadiya, we have developed a state-of-the-art experience center for investors and visitors, bringing the city to life with immersive designs and technology. In addition, we've built their corporate website and set up their social media ecosystem over the past couple of years. We're excited to also be kicking off seven entertainment ventures strategy scope this month, along with more exciting new work to be disclosed soon. We are confident the Middle East will be a growth engine for us, not just in the H2, but going forward. And with that, I'll hand it over to Martin for the summary.

Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Mary. So just a brief summary. Net revenue at about $164 million was down 12%, reported an 11% like-for-like, reflecting ongoing caution from clients and the expected reduction in activity from one key technology services client. Net debt of 145 million, implied leverage of 1.7 times EBITDA versus 206 million last year at the same time in March of 2024. And that reflected an ongoing focus on working capital management and tight cost control. Under the unified Monk's brand now, we are reporting as two streamlined practices, marketing services, which includes content and data and digital media, and secondly, technology services. The macroeconomic environment is becoming increasingly challenging as a result of the US-imposed tariffs and significant volatility and uncertainty in global economic policy, which remains. However, having said all that, we maintain our targets for the year on a constant currency basis, with 2025 net revenue and operational EBITDA expected to be broadly similar to 2024, with expected improvement of performance in the second half. with greater weighting than in the prior year, and as usual, aided by the phasing of new business, particularly as Scott referred to, to GM and Amazon, and a key TMT client, which we have considerably expanded. The 2025 net debt target is a range of £140 to £140 million, as opposed to the target for last year, which was £150 to £190, with a medium-term leverage objective of 1.5 times EBITDA. We maintain our focus on margin improvement through greater efficiency, greater utilisation, billability and pricing. And we continue to... capitalize on our prominent ai positioning as you've heard from scott and seeing mult and we see multiple initial ai related assignments and new business opportunities finally we remain confident in our strategy in our business model and in our talent which together with scale client relationships position us very well for growth in the longer term So with that, we'll take some questions. We usually don't get questions on our U.S. call, but we'll see whether there's anybody out there who wants to ask a question. I'm following the questions this morning.

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