STV Group plc

Thanks very much for coming. Good to see you all. I hope you're all well, and thank you very, very much for joining us today. So in a moment, Lindsay and I will talk you through our results for the full year 2023, provide an update on our financial and strategic progress, as well as a sense of the outlook for 2024 and details of our refreshed growth strategy and three-year plan. As usual, we'll also show you some highlights of what's been another year of big event TV across STV and STV Player. But first of all, let me hand over to STV's chair, Paul Reynolds, for some words of introduction. Paul.

Thank you, Simon. And hello, everybody. There's a lot of news for you today about our progress in 2023 and our plans for 2024 and beyond. And not least the news that Simon has decided to move on to Pastures New in early 2025. Simon has been and is a first-class CEO, as I'm sure you'll agree. His impact in this business has been profound and we wish him all the very best in his new role, which incidentally, he cannot specify what that new role is today. However, having said that, we believe the leadership transition should be a smooth one. Simon will continue as SDV CEO, driving the implementation of the new plan through 2024. And meantime, the board is beginning its succession planning, and we'll update you on that when we have some news to give. Okay, to the business. 2023 has been a year in which SDV has continued to execute its diversification strategy. All the while dealing with the ongoing macro economic uncertainty, which has led to prolonged weakness in both the advertising and program commissioning markets. But we now have a more balanced business across broadcasting, streaming and production and STV showing itself to be a much more capable business, capable of navigating the uncertain times than what we were when we were simply a traditional linear broadcaster. That's the change. Over the last few years, we have invested to build strong growth businesses in the STV player and in the STV studios that are now each contributing very materially to the company's success, as you can see in the numbers today. And alongside these three growth pillars, terrestrial television does continue to have huge relevance and be the foundation of the business because as was demonstrated by the impact of the recent STV drama, Mr. Bates versus the Post Office, which I'm sure many of you have seen. And Simon will talk a bit about those foundations a little later. So it's the combination of these enduring strengths and the new opportunities that makes all of us at STV excited about the future. Well, having laid strong foundations with an excellent senior leadership team in place, the board and I remain confident that we have the platform to deliver profitable growth for your shareholders in the years ahead. And much more about this now from Simon and Lindsay. Back to you, Simon.

Thank you, Paul. I obviously appreciate those very kind words. It has been a huge privilege to lead STV and to serve STV shareholders. We've made significant progress transforming the business into a modern media company led by content and streaming. But with STV's latest diversification targets achieved, it does feel like the right time to start to hand over the baton. We have a very strong leadership team in place, as Paul says. The strategy is clear and delivering. And we're today setting out further ambitious new targets for profitable growth. And of course, I'll be here for a while, as Paul says, to ensure an orderly transition. And we'll be giving the role everything I've got. I can assure you of that until I leave. So 2023 has seen us continue to accelerate the delivery of our successful strategy, and in a tough market, we increased total SDV revenues by 22%, more than offsetting the expected declines in linear advertising revenue. Our studio's revenue and operating profit trebled last year on the back of a standout year for our production business, and digital revenue and operating profit also grew strongly. Collectively, that ensured 75% of STV's earnings came from outside traditional broadcasting last year, well ahead of our 50% target and clear evidence of our successful transformation. On screen, our audience position remains very strong. 2023 was another record year for SDV Player with streams up 28% and we were the most watched peak time TV channel in Scotland for the fifth year in a row. We never tire of saying that. Stretching our lead over BBC One and actually recording the largest viewing share lead over ITV since records began. We did see an expected group operating profit impact of 22% due to the weak linear advertising market and rising costs, both of which are starting to ease somewhat as we move into 2024. Total advertising revenue was down 12% for the full year, again as expected, but the start of 2024 has been more encouraging, with Q1 tar expected to be up around 5%, with big events like UEFA Euro 2024 still to come in the summer. The UK's economic outlook remains hard to predict, of course, but history tells us that advertising markets bounce back decisively as economic prospects improve, and STV is very well placed to benefit when that happens. Notwithstanding the future of the ad market, we are, of course, a much more balanced business these days at both the revenue and profit level, thanks to the strength of our streaming and studios businesses. To accelerate that shift, we are today setting out a refreshed strategy and stretching targets for the next three years to deliver the next phase of profitable growth and more on that new plan later. And it's against that backdrop that the board is recommending a final dividend of 7.4 pence per share, taking the full year to 11.3 pence in line with 2022. Right then, over to Lindsay to delve deeper into the financial results.

Thanks, Simon. And hello, everyone. As usual, I'll just start off by walking through the key financials for 2023. Total revenue of £168 million was up 22% on the prior year, with growth in digital and studios more than offsetting the declines in linear advertising, demonstrating the benefit of the strategy that we've been progressing to diversify the business over the last few years. Total advertising revenue at £97 million was down 12% on the prior year, with national advertising down 16%, feeling the worst effects of the high interest rate and inflationary environment we were operating in throughout 2023. Regional advertising was down 9%, with digital revenues continuing to grow, up 6% to just over 20 million. VOD advertising on the STV played as the biggest component of digital revenue, and it was up 7% year on year. Studios revenues for the year were £67 million, more than double the prior year and benefiting from six months of Greenbird following our acquisition of that business in early July. And as guided, our adjusted operating profit for the year was £20 million, down 22% on the record prior year as a result of the national advertising market and cost inflation pressures across the business. Adjusted operating margin at 12% was slightly higher than the position at the half year, but almost 7% down on 2022. This trading performance combined with higher interest costs resulted in adjusted EPS of 28.2 pence. Net debt was 32 million pounds at the end of December in the middle of our guidance range with the equivalent net debt to EBITDA on a covenant basis of 1.2 times against a covenant maximum of three. Moving to the group P&L, where you can see how these highlights pull together into one page. We've also set down the reconciliation from the adjusted to statutory result, which is impacted by the accounting for high-end television tax credits for the last time in 2023. The new government regime came into force from the 1st of January, 2024, and from that date, all contributions towards high-end programme production must be treated as a contribution to operating cost, so our adjustment will fall away. We set ourselves a cost savings target for 2023 of two and a half million pounds and achieved it. And I'll talk about that later in the strategy section as continued cost control and operating efficiency are going to be a key part of our growth plan for the next three years. On interest, around £900,000 of the increase is due to the higher base rate in 2023, with the balance driven by our higher average net debt, particularly across H2 following the Greenbird acquisition. The margin we pay under our facility was the same across both years. In terms of the adjusting items, the amount in relation to the new ITV deal is as we guided at the half year. The amount on Greenbird is a combination of diligence and advisory costs of £1 million, again as guided, with some integration costs and an accrual for the first earn-out payment due to the founders, based on 2023 EBITDA, this last element being £900,000. Turning to advertising revenue, the table on the left shows the first half, second half split for each of national, regional and VOD. And you can see that there was a slight improvement in linear across the period, albeit broader macros continued to have an impact, particularly on national. The VOD H2 performance was impacted by the strong comparators with the World Cup in 2022. I showed a rolling average chart for national in this presentation last year, but I think it's important to reiterate that when you look through the market shocks and recoveries of recent years, this line is pretty flat. That's not to say that we don't acknowledge there's a structural shift happening, but there's no cliff edge in this picture. In terms of the regional market, our team continues to bring new customers to STV and the growth fund continues to support old and new customers alike by making TV advertising affordable. We've talked for some time now about the different dynamics between our core customer base and the Scottish Government. Looking across the year, Scottish Government was down 38%, with the rest of the business down only 1%, an excellent performance in the current climate, particularly when set against national. Now, I know you'll all be keen to know how advertising has started in 2024 and the picture is improving slightly in the first quarter. Visibility remains limited and Easter moves from April to March this year. But as you can see from the charts on the page, there are signs that the linear market may be stabilising. 2024 will be a year of transition for our digital business as commission becomes payable to ITV on our national VOD sales for the first time. Therefore, going forward, we'll share with you the pre and post commission growth rates so you can track actual underlying performance year on year, but also reconcile to the revenue we'll recognise in our accounts. The top chart shows revenue by category in Q1 from 2020 to 2024 and excluding the record year in 2022 you can again see the flat to slightly down performance over the period in national advertising. The regional performance continues to be impacted by Scottish Government in 2024 with campaigns across February and March cancelled following the budget at the end of last year. Outside the government, the core business has started the year very strongly, currently looking to grow by around 6% to 8% in Q1 year on year. The chart at the bottom shows total advertising revenue by month from January 2020, and if you look closely, you can see a slight incline in the line at the start of this year, with Q1 currently looking to be up around 5% before commission and 2% up after. This next chart shows the profit impact of the various revenue points I've talked to, as well as highlighting Greenbird's contribution to the group's 2023 results and the impact of both cost inflation and savings. At the start of the year, we had a 2.5 million cost saving target, which we said 50% would come from year-on-year savings and 50% from cost avoidance, and that the year-on-year savings would offset broadly half of the inflationary pressure on the group. I've already confirmed that we hit our target for the year and you can see here that the last green bar, our savings, is about half the size of the orange bar next to it, our inflationary increases. Just a few words now on each of the divisions and starting with studios where the division has recorded a strong financial performance with revenue, profit and margin all increasing year on year and all benefiting from the Greenbird acquisition. Our largest production to date criminal record for Apple TV Plus was delivered over the summer and is available to watch now if you haven't seen it. It's brilliant, very gripping and is currently in the top five global shows for Apple. So definitely worth a watch. Secondary sales also performed strongly in the year and with the bank of returning series and the IP library we now have as an enlarged business, this revenue stream at high margin will be one of the drivers of overall margin improvement in the division going forward. This next slide is as much to help you with your models as anything else, but there are a couple of points just to pull out. Firstly, the table on the left breaks down the cash paid to date and the future cash flows expected in relation to the transaction. You can see that the first earn out amount of £900,000 is payable in the first half of this year, and the second earn out is payable in the first half of next year, based on performance of the business in 2024. Then in the table on the right, you can see a breakdown on a pro forma basis of the full year Greenbird Group results and the very similar picture to our existing business in terms of first half, second half weighting. This is particularly pronounced in 2023 as the distribution revenue earned in the second half was slightly higher than expected, but the overall shape is one we'd expect to continue. Moving to digital, and there's really a very simple message on this slide. The division has continued its good first half performance to the end of the year with revenues up 6% and costs down 1%, driving a 16% growth in operating profit and a margin of 49% for the full year. Looking forward, I'd expect the divisional margin to come back a little from this level as our commission payable to ITB kicks in and we continue to invest in content. The picture for broadcast for the full year is very similar to that reported for the first half. Costs are down £3 million or 4% year on year. Our agreement with ITV means that our contribution to the national programme budget moves in line with national advertising revenues. Therefore, the 16% reduction in revenue year on year drives an equivalent percentage reduction in our cost. And for 2023, that was a saving of around £6 million. This therefore means that the rest of the cost base increased by around £3 million, which is mainly due to the inflationary impact of energy and staff costs that hasn't been offset by other savings. Broadcast is the largest division in terms of people and footprint, and so bears the majority of the group's cost increase in these areas. Looking forward, we'd expect profitability in the division to improve as linear advertising comes back, and we'll continue to look at ways to save money in order to protect margins and profitability. As always, the cash flow slide is a busy one. Our operating cash conversion was much higher in 2023 than the previous year, as programmes have worked through the system and monies have been collected from commissioners. We're showing a small working capital cash outflow for the year, but this is the net of the unwind of last year's outflow, a smaller outflow for 2023 programme production, as well as the balance sheet impact of the payments to ITV in 2023. And on those, we get an in-year cost saving on our programme contribution to ITV, but the cash saving doesn't come through until the following year. Across the last three years, our operating cash conversion has been strong at 107%. The production financing provided to two cities for blue lights was repaid in full in the first half and at the end of the year we had a separate third party production facility in place for a green bird commission of which three million pounds was drawn down and which will be settled when the programme delivers in May. While this third party debt is included in our overall group net debt, you need to think of it separate to the group facility when considering leverage and headroom. And there will likely be more of these facilities going forward as we continue to scale the studio's business. Net debt under our 70 million RCF at the year end was just under 30 million with an equivalent leverage of 1.1 times on a covenant basis and including the production financing, our net debt was 32.3 million with a leverage of 1.2 times. Lastly, a few words on pensions, where the accounting deficit of our defined benefit schemes has reduced to £55 million, down 13% on the prior year. This is principally due to updated mortality assumptions, reflecting latest data available, along with contributions paid to the schemes during the year. Asset valuations have also increased year on year. Our next triennial valuation is due at the end of December 2023 and work's already started on that. We expect to conclude discussions in the second half of this year. Right, to give you a break from the talking or listening, whichever one it is, here's our 2023 showreel, and then Simon will take you through the strategic update and our new three-year plan.

Okay, so you can see it was another big year on screen, and 2024 has started with a real bang. Mr Bates versus the Post Office. I mean, if anyone questioned the ongoing relevance of terrestrial TV before that, show was on air then they certainly don't anymore i don't think we've also got the rugby six nations in full swing plenty more to come including euro 2024 football from germany not to mention lots of new sdv studio shows like this one blue light series 2 coming to bbc one very soon Here's a reminder of our diversification strategy. And as you know, three years ago, we announced ambitious targets to quadruple our studio's revenue and double the size of our digital business by the end of 2023. And I'm delighted to say that we exceeded those targets. The one we didn't hit was the 20 million broadcast target in Scotland due to the linear advertising downturn as expected. But overall, we have comfortably achieved our key diversification metric of delivering at least 50% of our operating profit from new growth areas by the end of last year. In fact, we achieved 75%, way ahead of plan and an illustration of how far we've come in the last five years. For context, in 2018, non-broadcast earnings were only 18% of our total. This slide tells you that five-year diversification story more visually. The pie chart on the far left shows that in 2018, nearly 80% of group revenue came from traditional broadcasting with a small minority from our fledgling studios and digital businesses. Fast forward to 2023, and not only are our group revenues nearly 50% higher than in 2018, they are also much more balanced with less than half now coming from traditional television. The operating profit journey on the right two pie charts has been similarly transformative to the point where last year, each of our three divisions contributed materially to our profit base, setting us up well for the future. It's true that last year's weak linear advertising market had a particularly negative impact on our broadcast profitability, and we would expect that to improve. But even if 2023 had been a more normal year for broadcast, that 75% non-broadcast earnings figure would have beaten the 50% target we set. Operationally, we've also laid very strong foundations over the last five years, overtaking BBC One to become the biggest channel in Scotland, reinforcing our leadership in Scottish advertising by attracting a critical mass of new SME clients year in, year out through our STV Growth Fund, accelerating streaming growth on the STV Player and rapidly scaling up STV Studios in terms of new commissioning wins and returning series. But now it's time for us to evolve our strategic objectives to reflect how viewers and advertisers are increasingly behaving. Audiences don't really pay attention to whether they're watching live or on demand anymore. As you all know, they just want access to the best content when they want it. And likewise, advertisers are increasingly buying video advertising across platforms. We will therefore move away from expressing our objectives as digital or broadcast or studios and instead speak about content, about total audiences, about monetisation and the organisation we need to become to make the best of each of these opportunities. Our refreshed strategic objectives are therefore to accelerate our UK and international studios growth, drive streaming growth and maximize total STV viewing across both broadcast and digital, maintain our advertising leadership as well as growing new profitable revenue streams and modernize and simplify our business for a digital first world. And I'm going to take you through our priorities in each of those areas before sharing our new financial targets and KPIs. Firstly then, content and our studio's business had a huge year in 2023. This is how it looks today. Now 24 creative labels across scripted and unscripted following the transformative acquisition of Greenbird Media last summer, up from nine labels and a step change in terms of scale, creative firepower and profitability. We want to record 58 new commissions or recommissions in 2023 and produced and delivered 68 series, despite how challenging the commissioning market has been as a result of the weak economy. That's real evidence of the resilience that scale gives you. And it's down to the 30 plus returning series we now have in our portfolio that provide predictable revenue and profit, even in a temporarily contracting market. As a result of our growth, we're now the number two nations and regions production company in the UK, nearly trebling our revenues to 67 million and increasing our operating profit nearly fourfold to 5.2 million. We were also very proud to have been awarded Production Group of the Year by our peers at the prestigious Edinburgh Festival TV Awards last year. But it's on screen that matters most, obviously, and our drama slate in particular shows how far we've come in the last few years. We're now seeing real success across our three drama companies and being trusted to make new high-end series for the best in the business, whether that's Criminal Record for Apple, which launched globally to huge acclaim in January, or Screw Season 2 for Channel 4, Blue Lights for BBC One, which is about to hit our screens again, or our latest win, which was announced just a few days ago, a glossy new adaptation of the Amadeus story starring Will Sharp of White Lotus fame. Our organic growth in SV Studios has been strong, as you know, but our recent acquisitions have really accelerated progress and underscored the benefits of our investment strategy so far. The Greenbird acquisition performed ahead of guidance in H2 2023, as Lindsay said. We're on track to deliver at least £900,000 a year of synergy savings, again ahead of our initial guidance, and those newly acquired production companies have strong momentum coming into 2024. We said last September that we expected drama producer Two Cities to be the first of our minority investments to consolidate, given the strength of its pipeline. And so it has proved. We moved to a majority position in January this year and confirmed that £55 million of future revenues have already been secured, including an almost unprecedented two-season recommission of Blue Lights by the BBC for series three and four, even before series two has hit our screens. We expect two cities to be materially earnings enhancing for STV Studios in the short term. And this clearly vindicates our strategy of acquiring initial minority stakes in producers with a view to moving to majority control only in success. On the right of the slide, you can see all the remaining minority investments we have in the Studios Group, providing significant option value for us over the next few years. The larger minorities range from 25% to 40% stakes, and it's these companies that are most likely to move into meaningful profitability over the short to medium term. In simple terms, what this does is give STV an exciting de-risked M&A strategy that should allow our studios business to scale even more rapidly than the purely organic route. We will in effect be able to evaluate our M&E targets from close quarters before consolidating these businesses in success. This chart introduces a new way of tracking the success of STB Studios in the years ahead, which we hope will provide significantly improved visibility for you and the rest of the market. Given the number of returning series in our portfolio and the drama commissions that have been secured, we already know that as of today, March, 2024, we have 87 million pounds of secured revenues for delivery over the next three years. That's over £30 million higher than this time last year and £60 million higher than two years ago. Our intention is to use this secured revenues metric to update the market regularly to give us a clear sense of our progress. Sharing a longer term view is also a more reliable and hopefully more useful metric than in-year guidance because delivery dates can often be changed at the behest of the commissioning broadcaster and slip into different years as a result. On the right is another very important metric for us and for you, and that's the studio's margin, where our target is to get to 10% as soon as we can as the business scales. Encouragingly, you can see clear progress there too, moving from loss-making when we started on this journey to 5% in 21 and then 7.7% last year. As we've said before, we're very focused on the international growth potential of our expanded studios division, using our much expanded catalogue of returning series to drive production revenues, format fees and secondary sales outside the UK. That is a big part of the growth strategy, creating valuable IP that we can then exploit around the world. And we are making encouraging progress on that front. The chart on the left shows how we're filling up the international distribution funnel. In 2021, we added an additional 154 hours of new shows into our catalogue, which means they're now being sold internationally, either directly by us or via a third party distributor. In 2022, that number rose to over 300 hours and last year rose again to over 500. And that's why we're expecting the proportion of international versus domestic revenues to grow over the next few years, as we illustrate on the right of the chart, whether that's via international formats or production revenues or commissions from international streamers like Apple or Netflix or others. Below, you can see a few of the shows we're excited about from an international perspective right now. So from Lego Masters, which has already been sold to over 20 territories, including the US and China and South America and right across Europe, to our new entertainment and reality formats, the Fortune Hotel and the Underdog, coming to ITV and Channel 4 respectively this year, both of which are being actively developed for the US market. And to finish on studios, and I really hope you're getting a strong sense of our excitement and our ambition here. We have a clear vision and strategy and our target is very deliberately both UK and international success. Turning now to our new audience objective to drive streaming growth and maximize total STV viewing across both broadcast and digital. And a reminder that despite Netflix and Disney Plus and Amazon, broadcast channels and their streaming services still dominate video viewing to the extent that the average Scot watched five times more broadcasted content on a TV set in 2023 than they did SVOD content. Nearly three hours a day for broadcasters versus 37 minutes for the likes of Netflix and Amazon, etc. And this is increasingly how we need to measure our performance. STV's total audience across STV and STV player versus everyone else's total audience, not just the terrestrial players, but all the video competitors, including Netflix, including YouTube. We can now measure this. And on the left is what it looks like for peak time audiences in Scotland right now. with STD's audience way out in front, nearly double the size of Netflix and Channel 4, nearly four times bigger than YouTube across the whole of 2023. Our goal here, of course, is very much to stay number one. And on the right, what we're also seeing as streaming grows, obviously, is the reach of STV Player growing as a percentage of total STV reach. We connect with 3.35 million people each month. That gives us a huge Scottish audience and a big competitive advantage because we can convert those STV viewers to be digital viewers on STV Player. On top of that, STV Player also gives us an opportunity to reach new users, of course, particularly as it's available outside Scotland. You can see on the chart that STV Player already makes up 37% of our total STV reach. And within that number, 14% of our reach is people watching STV Player only rather than STV the channel, suggesting these are new viewers to us. And again, that is something we will track carefully going forward. As I mentioned, our recent hit drama, Mr. Bates versus the Post Office, is a very good example of how viewing is changing. It had a big overnight audience, as you would expect, but that audience then grew very quickly on STV Player as the public and political storm blew up around it and turned the drama into a must-watch for virtually everyone. All in all, nearly 40% of all its viewing has been via the STV player so far. And that isn't actually just a one-off. The chart on the right shows you the way audiences are now watching with more than half of all STV player viewing in 2023, either preview or catch up. And as a streamer, we have to be agnostic about when people want to watch. Just get them their shows whenever they want them. Looking at our digital performance then in a little more detail and STV Player has once again seen strong growth against all the key metrics in 2023. As you know, the simple goal here is more people watching more content for longer because we know this translates into greater financial success. At the end of the year, we reached 5.7 million registered users, in total up 17%. Active users were up 20% across the year, and VIP users, those people who watch the most SDV content, up a further 33%. That helped drive a 28% increase in streams and a 25% increase in online consumption, all of which translated into a strong financial performance in the digital division. And finally, on this chart, you can see that we therefore surpassed all our three year targets that we set ourselves to double the size of our digital business by the end of last year. And what was behind that growth? Well, more big shows than ever is the simple answer. There were 18 programmes that generated more than a million streams on STV Player last year, up from 12 shows the prior year, driven by drama consumption, which was up a third last year, courtesy of titles like Unforgotten, Payback and The Hunt for Raul Mode. And of course, content is king. You've heard that plenty of times, but it is not everything. It's a big competitive advantage for us that viewing is rapidly migrating back to the screen in the house where STV does best, the TV set. Connected TVs were 68% of STV player viewing four years ago. And now that figure is 86% and growing. And that's why our digital team spends so much of its development time focused on upgrading our apps on the major connected TV platforms. And last year, we launched new and updated apps on Sky Q, on Apple TV, Google TV, and on Amazon Fire TV, all with the aim of improving our user experience and our prominence on the big screen. And the even better news there is that guaranteed prominence for SDV Player on all these platforms is on track to be set down in law by the UK government's media bill, which is making its way through Parliament at pace now, having reached the House of Lords. We're also keeping up the digital momentum in 2024. Streams are up 22% so far this year and the half one program lineup is strong. New drama like Trigger Point and Breathtaking, Celebrity Big Brother, which launched on STV just last night, and the Euros in the summer, of course, which will be huge, no doubt. The next area of focus for us under our newly refreshed strategic objectives is the effective monetization of all of this viewing. And here, our goal is to both maintain our current advertising leadership in Scotland and grow new profitable revenue streams. On the left-hand side, you can see that despite the likes of YouTube and TikTok, broadcasters and their VOD services were still responsible for 83.5% of all video advertising seen by adults in 2023. And for 16 to 34, that number is 54%, still significant. The terrestrial players are way ahead of the competition on this front. And within that, STV is actually way ahead of all the other terrestrial competitors in Scotland. The graphic on the right shows the top 500 commercial audiences in Scotland in 2023. The 486 blue boxes are STV. You can count them if you like. The 14 green ones are our nearest commercial competitor, Channel 4. And it's this scale and the huge expanse of clear blue water between us, frankly, between us and our rivals that gives us our USP with advertisers in Scotland. A year on from announcing our new partnership with ITV on streaming and on digital advertising, things are progressing very well and on plan. This is a long-term partnership until the end of the decade, as you know, and the early commercial impact has been very positive so far. We said that the rationale for outsourcing digital advertising sales was to benefit from ITV's scale and their pricing power as UK market leader, as well as their significant investment in new targeted addressable advertising. And we're already seeing these benefits come through clearly in our numbers. The chart on the left shows that our digital brand count was up over a quarter last year, broadening our revenue base and reducing repetition for our audience. STV's performance has also been underpinned by our launch on Planet V, the UK's second largest programmatic advertising platform after Google, which has enabled fully addressable advertising at scale on STV Player for the first time. And as Lindsay said earlier, 2024 has started in positive fashion with VOD advertising revenues up an estimated 12% in the first quarter. This next slide shows the current picture for Scottish advertising, where we remain the market leader by some distance. Total regional advertising was down 9% for the full year, significantly outperforming the national advertising picture. Within that, outside Scottish government, SME advertising was only down 1% for 2023. which was pretty remarkable in the circumstances that we were all in at the moment. You can see that our regional brand count continues to build back steadily and was up a further 6% in 2023. We saw some declines in spend in the motors and technology categories last year, as you'd expect. We were impacted by some business closures as well, but we also saw gains in airlines and travel, retail, finance and household equipment, which stood us in good stead. Encouragingly, we saw big gains in regional VOD advertising in 2023 as well, up 17% over half of our local brands are now taking VOD alongside spot advertising, up from a third in 2022. And across the bottom, you'll see our Advertising Growth Fund continuing to do its job in a tough market, making TV advertising more affordable and generating a healthy influx of new advertisers, the vast majority of whom go on to become repeat clients. And 2024 has started reasonably positively too. SME advertising is up around 6% to 8% for the first quarter and regional VOD up over 30%. So reasons for optimism. But as I say, it really isn't just about advertising. Our plan is also about growing new profitable revenue streams and leveraging our existing strengths in new ways and in new markets. Here are a couple of examples on screen. STV Player Plus is our ad-free subscription version of STV Player, which costs 399 a month. What we've done in 2023 is roll it out to all platforms and that helped us grow both subscriptions and revenues at a really healthy rate. It's already profitable and we see significant scope for growth, including by bundling SDV Player Plus with other pay services. And in Scott Pulse, we now have Scotland's largest online research panel with over 40,000 people signed up. We use it to conduct research about SDV programs and services, but it's also a fast growing B2B service conducting research projects for companies right across Scotland. Last year, over 130 surveys for 77 different brands with revenues and profits growing very quickly. And by promoting Scott Pulse on STV, as we do regularly, we have a tried and tested way of building that business for the medium term. Our fourth strategic objective is about modernizing and simplifying our organization for a digital first world. And a key component of that is making sure we're as efficient as possible. So I'm going to hand back to Lindsay now to take you through the comprehensive work we've been doing on our cost base. Lindsay.

Thanks. An important starting point for our discussion on costs is that around 65% of our cost base is variable with revenue, unique for a broadcaster and a virtue of the mechanic through which we pay ITV for the national programme budget and our revenue share approach to acquiring third party content for the player. The single largest areas of spend within the group are people, the payments to ITV, and programme production. This last segment can vary from one year to the next with the volume of programme activity underway, but as the studio's business steadily grows, it will become a larger proportion of the whole. I mentioned earlier that we'd hit our cost-saving target of £2.5 million in the year, and this slide breaks down the main areas where that's been achieved. The larger elements are pensions, where we've significantly reduced the PPF levy and other admin fees, and there's also a benefit to depreciation as capital expenditure has been slowed down in light of the wider macro backdrop. The balance of savings has been cost avoidance and some small year-on-year savings as we've sought to deliver our growth strategy in more efficient ways. Cost savings and operational efficiency have been an important part of how we've run the business for the last five years, but we believe that a different approach needs to be taken now, given the prolonged downturn in linear advertising that we've seen. So rather than looking at in-year savings each year, we've undertaken a comprehensive review of our cost base over Q4 and are setting ourselves the target of achieving a run rate of a further £5 million of savings per annum by 2026. We'll not achieve this until 2026, but have clarity on the main areas where we believe Scope exists to do things differently, and we'll make changes over the course of the next two years in order to hit that run rate. The main areas of focus are shown on the slide. The first relates to property, where we'll be looking at how best to maximise the value from our offices in Glasgow through subleasing additional space, and we'll also look at options to reduce our office footprint across Scotland and the rest of the UK. We'll also look to identify outsourcing or partnership opportunities to drive efficiencies, as well as consider whether there are invest-to-save options that would drive longer-term efficiencies for the group. An example of the latter would be upscaling in-house post-production, where, for a modest incremental capital investment, we can increase the volume of work we do for STB studios, thereby internalising the margin on activity that is currently delivered externally. We previously flagged that there were integration synergy opportunities following the acquisition of Greenbird, and following further work, we now believe we can hit a run rate of 900,000 per annum, up from the 750,000 guided at completion. Not all of this will be realized in 2024, but a good proportion should be. And lastly, we'll look at team structures and discretionary spend to consider whether there are parts of the business where we can organize ourselves more effectively, or areas where we can eliminate or reduce spending. In terms of what this means for 2024, we expect to secure around one and a half million pounds of savings through this programme this year. There will be inflationary costs that will also come into the business, but with inflation coming down over recent months, we expect this to be a little more manageable than it was in 2023. And from an implementation perspective, the project management office is up and running and implementation is well underway. Over the next three years, we'll also continue to invest behind our growth strategy, but we will do so in a focused and responsible way. We expect our M&A activity to be concentrated on increasing stakes in businesses we already have an interest in, and Two Cities was a good example of this at the end of January. Our capital expenditure will be much reduced going forward with current plans totalling around £6 million over the next three years. And separate to capital investment, we'll continue to spend operating cash on our studio's creative teams and content for the STV player. And it's worthwhile noting that the latter will continue to be via revenue share arrangements and so balancing risk and protecting margin. Simon, back to you.

Thank you. Pulling all these strategic strands together then, we are today setting new stretching three-year targets for the group that will make us an even more balanced, profitable and internationally focused business in 2026. We will double studio's revenues to 140 million pounds with a target to achieve a 10% margin. As you know, we will grow our digital revenues by a further 50% to 30 million pounds at a margin of at least 40%. International revenues will be at least 15% of group revenues and 25% of studios revenues, and we'll achieve a further £5 million per annum of savings, as Lindsay just said, by simplifying and modernising our business. These financial targets will be underpinned by new KPIs that are aligned to the refresh strategy. We'll report on these regularly going forward to track progress, and this is how they look. In content, we will continue to prioritize returning series for the reasons you all appreciate. Key to our future studio's growth is generating IP revenues off the back of a show. And to that end, we're setting ourselves the target that 75% of our studio's titles will be generating secondary revenues by 2026. And a quarter of our studio's revenues, as I say, will be derived from outside the UK, whether that's through international production and sales or through commissions from international networks and streamers. Our audience KPIs are about staying ahead of both terrestrial and streaming competitors in terms of total commercial viewing share, growing SDV players' total reach, and then the established digital metrics of monthly active users, streams, and consumption. On the monetization front, we need to stay ahead of the rest of the advertising market by delivering at least 90% of all large commercial audiences in any given year. We want our advertising rebooking rate in Scotland to be at least 60% to ensure we're driving loyalty amongst our customer base. And we need to keep attracting new SME advertisers to TV through our growth fund and are setting ourselves a target of at least 75 new advertisers every year. Finally, we're focused on driving new profitable revenue streams. And as part of that, we're targeting at least 50,000 paying subscribers by 2026. In terms of the outlook, then, while there is clearly still uncertainty in the market, we can report an improving picture. The advertising market is showing growth so far in 2024, with total advertising expected to be up around 5% in Q1, digital VOD up 12% and Scottish advertising down 4%, albeit underlying SME advertising is up around 6% to 8%. We also have live coverage of Euro 2024 starting in Q2, which should, as usual, provide a boost to our advertising performance. In studios, our forward order book is stronger than ever with 87 million of secured revenue as of this month and multiple new drama commissions secured for Sky, BBC and others, some of which have been announced, some of which excitingly have not. And we have a clear cost savings plan in place where we will deliver 1.5 million pounds of savings in the remainder of 2024, rising to an annualized run rate of 5 million by 2026. That's it. Then I'll leave you with the summary and our key messages on screen. But the main one is this, that SDV of today is now a very different business to the one of 2018. More confident, more creative, more future facing with strong growth pillars in digital and studios and a market leading broadcast business. And most importantly of all, a great team who are more than capable of taking the business to new heights over the years to come.