The Sage Group plc

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Q1 Trading Update call for the Sage Group. Your speakers today will be Steve Hare, Chief Executive Officer, and Jackie Carton, Chief Financial Officer. After a short presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, you'll need to press star 1 and 1 in your telephone. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Hare. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, and good morning to everyone. And as always, thank you for joining us. I'm really pleased to be joined this morning by Jackie Carton, who's a new CFO, as you know, started on the 1st of January. And without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Jackie, who's going to talk us through the Q1 performance, and then we'll open up for some questions. So over to you, Jackie.

Thanks, Steve. Good morning, everyone. So I'm pleased to say that SAGE has made a strong start to the year. with growth strengthening across our key regions. As a result, total revenue for the group increased by 10% to 674 million. In North America, revenue grew by 13% to 304 million. That was driven by strong performance from Sage Intact and was supported by continued growth in Sage 200 and Sage 50. In the UKIA region, revenue increased by 10% to 194 million. This reflects further rapid scaling of Sage Intact and strong growth in Sage Accounting and Sage 15. And in Europe, revenue increased by 7% to 176 million, with good levels of growth across our accounting, HR, and our payroll solutions. I'll turn now to the performance drivers. SageBiz of cloud revenue grew by 15% to $574 million. This reflects good strategic progress and continued investment in our cloud and AI-acquired solutions. Within this, quite native revenue grew by 24% to $253 million, supported by continued strength in new customer acquisition. And quite connected, that has also delivered good levels of growth driven by both existing and new customers. For courier revenue, that increased by 10% to $675 million and reflects continued momentum in ARR. This includes subscription revenue growth of 12%, which takes subscription penetration to 84%. And on an organic basis, total revenue for the group increased to $673 million, with growth accelerating to 10%. And finally, turning to the outlook. Underpinned by a strong first quarter, we reiterate our guidance for the full year. Organic total revenue growth is expected to be 90% or above, and we expect operating margins to continue to trend upwards at FY26 and beyond. So to conclude, SAGE has made a strong start to the year. We're executing our strategy. We're continuing to innovate across our platform. And in turn, this is driving efficient, sustainable growth for our stakeholders. Thank you very much. Steve and I will be delighted to take questions.