S4 Capital plc

Good afternoon from London, or good morning in New York, wherever you are. I'm joined in London by Radhika, CFO, Scott Spirit on my right, Chief Growth Officer, and John Benoit, Chief Operating Officer on the extreme left. We have Bruno Lambertini, who runs our marketing services business from Miami. I think he's still in Miami. Thanks for getting up relatively early this morning and for being with us on this call. And Wes Tahar is in Amsterdam. So we're going to cover the results. Radhika is going to cover the results for the first half of 2025. And Scott's going to talk a little bit about what we see going on in the market and with clients. Wes is going to cover artificial intelligence and its impact on our business currently and in the future. And then I'll just do a brief summary and outlook before we take any questions, if there are any. So, Radhika, over to you.

Thank you, Martin. Good morning, good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. I will start with the financial headlines for 2025. Performance in the first half was impacted by volatile global macroeconomic conditions, tariff uncertainties, and larger tech clients, which represent almost half of our revenue, continuing to prioritize capital expenditure on expanding AI capacity. Net revenue was 328.2 million, down 10% on a like-for-like basis and 12.7% on a reported basis. Operational EBITDA was 20.8 million, delivering a 6.3% margin in the period. Adjusted operating profit was 16.4 million and adjusted earnings per share was 0.2 pence compared to 1.2 pence in the prior period. We closed the period with a net debt of £145.9 million compared to £182.9 million at 30 June 2024, an improvement of £37 million. The month-end average net debt for the period improved by £52 million, about 27%, from £196 million to £144 million. The company generated 16 million of free cash flow in the first half of 2025, reflecting strong focus on working capital management. Leverage was two times performer 12-month operational EBITDA versus 2.2 times this time last year. Moving now to the income statement. Revenue of £360.4 million down 11.9% like-for-like and 14.7% reported. Net revenue decline reflects the general client cautiousness given the wider challenging macroeconomic conditions. We continue to have a disciplined approach to cost management. Personnel and operating expenses were reduced by 11.2% and the number of monks at the end of the period was around 6,900, 4% lower than December 20 at 24. A cost reduction plan is being actioned in the second half of 2025 to align our personnel cost to revenue ratio down from 76% towards the industry averages of 65%. Operationally, EBITDA was 20.8 million with a 6.3% margin, down 190 basis points like-for-like and 170 basis points on a reported basis. Finally, net finance expenses, which mainly relates to the long-term loan, increased primarily due to adverse foreign exchange movements, partially offset by the reduction in the interest rate. Looking at our two practices now, marketing services and technology services. We reorganized into two practices at the beginning of the year, 1st of January, with marketing services reflecting the legacy content and DDM practices. My comments here are all on a like-for-like basis. Net revenue in marketing services was 299 million, down 6.4%, reflecting the timing of new business wins and ongoing client cautiousness. Technology services was 29.2 million, down 35%, reflecting longer sales cycle and reflecting the revenue reduction by a major client, although this will cycle out in the second half of this year. From a regional perspective, the Americas, which includes technology services, was down 9% and accounts for 79% of our revenue mix. EMEA declined 13% and Asia Pacific declined 15%, accounting for 16% and 5% of the mix, respectively. Moving on to operational EBITDA by practice, on the next slide, again, my comments are on a like-for-like basis. Marketing services operational EBITDA was 28.5 million, down 14% with a 9.5% margin. The revenue shortfall was partially offset by the reduction in the number of months and other cost efficiencies. Technology services operational EBITDA was 2.6 million, down 57% with an 8.9% margin. This was primarily impacted by longer sales cycles for new business. And as I previously mentioned, the revenue loss from a key client, which will cycle out in the second half of this year. Moving to the next slide, we continued to maintain a strong balance sheet with sufficient liquidity and long-dated maturities. We ended the period with net debt of 145.9 million and improvement of 37 million from 182.9 million as at the end of first half 2024. Leverage is two times against 12-month pro forma operational EBITDA, an improvement from 2.2 as at 30 June 2024. There is headroom against the key covenant of 4.5 times pro forma operational EBITDA. The €375 million term loan matures in August 2028 and the €100 million RCF remains undrawn, €80 million of which facility extended to February 2028 on the same terms. I'll now move to the cash flow side. There was a working capital inflow of 19.2 million in the first half of 2025, compared to 4.2 million in the prior half year, reflecting the strong focus on working capital management. Capital expenditure of 2.1 million is primarily related to IT equipment. Interest paid includes the lower cost of our term loan, while lower tax paid reflects our performance in 2024. Restructuring and other one-off expenses include 6.3 million of restructuring payments and finance transformation projects of 2.6 million. Free cash flow rose to 16 million compared with 3.1 million in the first half of 2024. We can now move to the net debt bridge slide. Net debt, as I mentioned before, was 142.9 million as of 31st of December, which translated to 160.4 million at the closing exchange rates. The group generated 16 million of free cash flow in the period, contributing to the closing net debt position of 145.9 million, which is two times leverage against 12-month pro forma operational EBITDA. Turning now to the guidance for the remainder of 2025. Full-year like-for-like net revenue is now expected to be down by mid-single digits. However, we continue to target like-for-like operational EBITDA to be broadly similar to 2024. We expect a stronger second-half performance with a greater weighting than in the prior year, enhanced by the impact of new business revenue, including wins already secured and further incremental cost reductions which are currently being actioned. We forecast a net finance cash charge of around 29 million and an effective tax rate of 30 to 32 percent. Our expectations for net debt for the year end is in the range of 100 to 140 million as we continue to focus strongly on cash flow management. As net debt is reduced and falls below 100 million, our capital allocation policy will return cash to share owners through a mixture of dividends and share buybacks. With that, I will hand over to Scott for the market update.

Thanks, Vedika, and thank you for joining us, everyone. In the past two years, we've had some challenges which have impacted both our growth and our margins. In 2023, the tech companies unexpectedly pulled back aggressively with significant redundancies in cost cutting, addressing their overexpansion post-COVID. Meta referred to this as their year of efficiency, and others followed suit. Sales and marketing expenditures were reduced across the board, having historically posted strong double-digit growth. This approach to cost discipline continued in 2024, driven by their strategy to invest significantly in CapEx, primarily hardware and software related to artificial intelligence. In 2024, the hyperscalers Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft increased CapEx investment 56% to almost $250 billion. And this meant further pressure on operating and marketing budgets in 2024, with Amazon Flat and Google and Meta both down. This affected our competitors too, but given we have almost 50% of our revenues in technology, it had an outsized impact on our ability to grow. The relationship with Mondelez ended in 23, and in 2024, First American, a tech services client, saw very significant pressure on their business, given higher interest rates, and as a result, decided to ramp down the work streams they had with us. High interest rates and economic uncertainty led to client caution, which impacted our project-based business, especially our ability to win new remits locally. We paused our M&A strategy in 2022 after 30-plus transactions in five years, the scale of which posed some challenges for us from an integration perspective and a need to focus internally. And finally, with declining revenues, despite cuts and cost controls, our staff cost ratios remained in the high 70s versus an industry average of 65%. And the challenges we've had with our revenue trajectory have made it difficult to align costs with revenues. The first half of 2025 has continued to be challenging, but we've been addressing these issues to rebuild our foundations for growth and have seen progress which makes us more optimistic moving forward. Firstly, the pace of tech client spend cuts has slowed. Whilst the investments in CapEx continue to grow at a significant pace, The operating expense cuts I mentioned earlier have stabilized, with the declines in sales and marketing expenditures moderating towards the end of 2024 and stabilizing so far in 2025, particularly at Google, our largest client, as they start to invest in differentiation for their AI products in a highly competitive market and illustrate some ROI on their CapEx investments. Second, we continue to innovate our product. We originally launched our AI platform, Monks Flow, at CES in January 2024. And over the course of the past two years, we've continued to innovate, win awards, bring onboard partners such as NVIDIA, Adobe, and Runway, and implement at scale with existing clients such as Google, BMW, SC Johnson, and Amazon. We've also developed and started to convert a specific AI-focused sales pipeline, and there'll be more of this later from Wes. Thirdly, with client wins. The Whopper client losses are mostly out of our comparables, and we've had a stronger pipeline and new business performance recently. Starting with General Motors a year ago, we've had regular cadence of significant wins, including T-Mobile, Amazon, PIF, and more recently, a leading US-based FMCG, which we will announce soon. Whilst the overall number of monks has declined, we have continued to hire and increase talent across country regional management, capabilities growth and client leadership. Talent who are now driving those new business wins. We've also made hires with an operational focus on the optimization of pricing, utilization, billability and improving our margins and getting staff cost ratios in line. Finally, on centralization and cost control. From an integration perspective, the mergers are all now fully integrated, and we go to market as a single brand, Monks. We have centralized key functions such as finance, legal, HR, and IT, and the company operates on the same platforms such as Slack, Salesforce, Workday, and Google Workspace. Our migration to a single ERP is well underway and will be completed in early 2026. We've simplified the business around marketing and technology services. We have a clearly articulated organizational structure based around geographical leadership and capability expertise. We have and continue to implement cost controls with the goal of getting our staff cost ratios in line with those industry averages. So overall, with positive new business trends and some stabilization in tech company spend, continued progress in our AI product offering, and a strong focus on cost, we anticipate an improved performance in H2. We reiterate our EBITDA guidelines for 2025 and are set up well for 2026. From a client perspective, we have a really compelling client list with some of the world's leading and most innovative companies. In 2024, nine of them are what we call whoppers. That's with revenues of $20 million plus, which 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 have a significant presence in the technology industry. You can also see the GM win has positively impacted our auto share, and other recent wins have been in telco, financial services, and FMCG. These are strong relationships that help us attract and retain talent to work on them. The continued softness we're seeing in technology client spend, 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. With that, I'll hand you over to Wes, who will update you on our artificial intelligence initiatives.

Thank you, Scott. And hi, everyone. I'll spend 10 to 15 minutes on the AI update. As we just heard, we are seeing compression in the traditional parts of the advertising and marketing services business. I think where we differ is a very aggressive focus on the opportunity that AI disruption offers and the strategic changes we're making to our full company. Team size, organizational structure, operating model, because by doing that, we believe we can take full advantage and capitalize on these trends. So, what I talked about earlier, we're in the midst of reshaping our business to be fully AI-enabled. I actually just came out of a session here in our Local office, the current cost reduction exercise is a part of this approach that improves our prospects heading into H2. We also believe it sets us up well for next year as it will allow us to continue to build on our own transformation. That means strengthening even further our new capabilities, scaling out Monk's Flow, which I'll talk about in a moment, and then also the ongoing upscaling of our workforce. If we go to the next slide, we said on day one, slide one of our very first AI update nearly three years ago, that AI changes the economics of advertising. The services we launched then are the key drivers of our new business growth today. So we have our consultancy revenue, which is up strongly year over year, admittedly from a small base, but we expect the interest in this service to continue. We've also added two, to Scott's point, Whopper clients in the last 12 months. where we have both GM and the FMCG mentioned earlier, choosing monks really clearly because of our industry-leading AI offering. And the reason that we are passing first when it comes to that offering is that we believe AI is eating the agency business. We don't believe that's controversial to say it collapses the cost of creativity, collapses the cost of media management. And whether agency leaders admit that or not, clients know that that is true and they want it. We estimate about 65% of the task agencies get paid for currently could be done by AI agents within today's technology. And keep in mind that today is the worst that technology will ever be. One of the most powerful go to markets we've seen is our agencies, the agents go to market with a very clear promise. We're going to help you reduce the cost of the full marketing supply chain by adopting AI quickly and adapting to it from an organizational perspective. We can go to the brave slide. We call this the brave slide, as it takes a certain level of bravery for clients to fully commit to this level of change. But does that do? Which means where do you have people in the lead, but are you offloading more and more manual efforts to genetic workflows? Where do you put people in the loop versus in the lead? And how do you get to mass marketing as a service? We're on that roadmap with quite a few clients now, and we expect that to take two to three years at most. the conversation we have quite often with analysts especially is where does the money go we're seeing it play out in a few different ways so for our most forward-thinking clients they are moving away from paying for time and material the idea that the hours a person spent on something as a good proxy for value feels quite outdated which means we're actively initiating a shift to value-based models. That means annual recurring revenue for our software, output-based billing for our services. And if you look at our current revenue, that's relatively small as a percentage today. We do see that as a way to align our business with the future broader shift of corporate spending, which clearly is towards AI automation and intelligence and away from the human hour. The other areas where we see the money moving is partly in consultative services and partly in system integration. A key part of our strategy here is monetizing partnerships with some of the world's largest technology companies. At the enterprise level, you're talking about the NVIDIAs, the Google Clouds, the AWSs and Adobe's of the world. We're also very well connected to the emerging layer. Think about newcomers like Runway and Booma. There really is no future for marketing services where there's no deep technological expertise and really operating as what I would call a system integrator for the AI economy to get the scaled impact. Both of these, of course, consulting and system integration are core capabilities for Monks, which makes us a change agent and I would say choice for the modern marketer. that is reflected back at the industry reputation level so last year we were the first ever ai agency of the year with adweek this year we are the first ever ai pioneer at the one show We most recently added AI awards from Digiday. If we go to the next slide for some of our work with Headspace, which is very practical, very viable and sellable for our clients. We also just got note of another AI award that's still under embargo, but we should be able to communicate relatively quickly, specifically for Monk's Flow as a technology solution. What this confirms is that we are innovating at a substantially higher clock speed than our competitors in both the agency and the consultancy landscape. And while changing this magnitude is never easy, and I think I can speak for our whole team, that we would like nothing more than to move faster with this change. The markets where we are most progressed in our own transformation are showing positive results. what are positive results significant increasing year of your pipeline and a clear up leveling of our strategic importance to our clients i think that strategic importance is quite interesting to illustrate it members of our team have been the key ai speaker at well over 50 client and entry events since our last session together i think we're broadly seen as the uh the strategic partner that is both very transparent about what's happening and can help you go through that transformation because of two reasons. And this really comes down in a very simplified way to why clients are choosing Monks. One is our agents and one is our expertise. So if we start with agents, We were the first to launch an AI solution for marketers with Monk Slow. We called it Flow for a reason, because we have been very consistent in our strategy that this is about transforming workflows. The importance of this was recently confirmed by MIT. They launched a report that said 95% of Gen AI pilots fail. And why do they fail? Because people were using generic tools, which might be slick enough for a demo, but are way too brittle for enterprise adoption at scale. If we go to the next slide, that's where the Monxflow ecosystem really shines. A large technology client just put Monxflow through a very rigorous testing and benchmarking process, and we're proud to say they are now recommending it strongly to their teams across the globe, which really shows that we are able to not just compete, but beat industry peers, making much more than $300 million plus AI investments. If we go to the next slide, I think another important note for anybody that was at Cannes Lions this year, you'll know we were also the first launch fully functioning AI agents as part of Monxlow across the marketing supply chain, which was easier for us to do because of our focus on workloads. It's made it a very natural evolution. It means that we are now packaging our talent and our machines, we call this a new T&M model, as managed services to deliver faster, better, cheaper and more for our clients. This is a very popular package flow adaptation, which really solves a lot of speed, scale and spend complexities that many organizations still struggle with we have them across the big six but inside strategy and media management performance we're currently in a weekly one cycle uh team is working at a really high velocity if you want to see the next big month flow update we'll be launching that at ces and it will make it easier even easier for brands to move from agencies to agents across the big six inside strategy creative versioning variations and adaptation as sort of the scale push and then media deployment and performance but it isn't just about technology when you think through this from an expertise perspective clients are really looking for two areas of expertise one the expertise to make change happen that means providing our consultative services an ability to identify and prioritize ai use cases then actually model and drive a change agenda across an entire organization We combine that essential capability with deep, deep marketing expertise, which is really required to support the CMO, right? Consultancy or tech alone doesn't really work. We understand the jobs to be done because we spent well over two decades doing them, which makes us the best partner to bring this level of change to bear. When you bring these capabilities together, you get some really interesting outcomes. So what we'll show here in a moment is recent agentic film work for Google Pixel. It showcases the power of Gemini's LLM stack and the VR3 video model. All of these are truly best in class. and the video will show isn't just fully ai generated so all the output you're seeing is ai and it improves our past and kind of value when it comes to ai output a large percentage of the pre post and actual production work was also done by ai agents helped with scripts storyboarding their total thoughts and choices brand alignment etc etc was done with agentic workflows let's look at a quick video

the light's not on your side but the colors just pop pixel gets those just right seeing everyone's real beauty the way you actually see it framing the perfect shot for that blink and you miss it moment capture it all the big stuff the small wins and everyday life google pixel

Thank you. Well, it's interesting, depending on the size of our clients' organization, this type of soul can save them millions, tens of millions, potentially hundreds of millions, while still delivering at the highest creative standards that our industry expects. And that combination of agents and expertise is why clients trust Monks, to help them navigate the most important shift they've seen in their business for perhaps a generation. And I'll end with a question that's driving all of these efforts. Do you think the future of media marketing and advertising involves more AI services and spending or less? Our belief is very clear, and it's driving every decision we make. And with that, I will hand it back to Sir Martin.

Thanks, Wes. Thanks, Radhika, and thanks, Scott. So just a brief summary before we take any questions. First, on net revenue in the first half of 2025, it was down 12.7 in reported currency and 10% like-for-like. For the full year, 2025, our net revenue is expected to decline by mid-single digits on a like-for-like basis, primarily due to the macroeconomic uncertainty around tariffs as well and continued client caution. From an EBITDA point of view, in the first half, we were at 20.8 million, which was in line with expectations, and we maintain our full-year target EBITDA for this year, which is expected to be broadly similar to 2024 on a like-for-like basis, driven by the phasing of new business revenue that we've mentioned and further incremental cost reduction actions which are being implemented. Wins such as General Motors, Amazon, T-Mobile, PIF and a leading US-based FMCG company that we will announce shortly are expected to ramp up in the second half of 2025, supporting a greater second half weighting this year than usual. Free cash flow in the first half was 16 million versus 3 million, just over 3 million in the first half of 2024. And we maintain our 2025 target net debt range of 100 to 140 million pounds. The company paid a first time final dividend of 1p per share for last year on the 10th of July. and that amounted to just over £6 million and the board will consider an enhanced final dividend for 2025 if the second hour performance and liquidity targets are delivered. As Wes has gone through, we're seeing our AI initiatives produce even more effective and efficient solutions for our clients and this capability is driving significant new business opportunities for us and broadened relationships with our existing clients. We maintain a disciplined approach to managing our cost space and continue to focus on greater efficiency, on greater utilization, billability, and pricing. And finally, we remain confident in our strategy, in our business model, and in our talent, which together with the scale client relationships position us very well for growth in the longer term. So with that as a summary, have we got any questions?

Thank you, sir. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind and want to withdraw your question, please press star 2. And please ensure your lines are unmuted locally, as you'll be prompted when to ask your question. So again, to raise a question, please press star 1 on your keypad.

No questions, operator? Okay, thank you.

We seem to have no questions coming through, Mr. Martin.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thanks, everybody, for joining us, and we will see you for our third quarter in a couple of months. Thank you very much.