Trainline Plc

Thank you. And good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us for our full year results presentation. I'm Clare Gilmartin, CEO, and I'm joined this morning by Sean McCabe, our CFO. Good morning. First, let's get through the disclaimer. And now, unimportantly, to the agenda for today. As an introduction, I'll discuss the key highlights from what has been a very good year for Trainline. and importantly, address upfront the impact from COVID-19 and how we've responded to the situation. Sean will then take you through our financial performance for the year. And after that, I'll discuss our longer term strategic priorities and how we're delivering against each of those. We'll then hand back to the operator for questions. So turning first to the exact summary. As I said, we've delivered a strong financial performance in the year exceeding the expectations that we set out at IPO, whilst making also significant progress against our strategic priorities. We have, of course, since experienced the impact of COVID-19, to which we at Trainline responded quickly and decisively and have sufficient liquidity for the foreseeable future. Longer term, we continue to see the same structural tailwinds for the business. And in fact, in the shorter term, there's potential for further opportunities for digitization. As a result, we are continuing to advance our growth strategy and we feel very well positioned for the future. So turning first to the financial highlights for the year, where we've delivered strong growth, we grew group net ticket sales by 17% year on year, We increased revenue by 24% and EBITDA by 62% to 85 million, both ahead of the expectations we set at the time of IPO. While operating cash flow increased 39% to 59 million, contributing to a large reduction in net debt following our IPO last June. On strategic highlights, we made good progress against our strategic priorities. We continue to enhance and improve the user experience, increasing conversion rate across our consumer business by more than 20%. And our app now has a 4.9 star rating in international as well as in the UK. We continue to build demand, growing acquisition and customer engagement with average monthly visits up 19%. And we made particularly strong progress growing mobile app usage with app share of transactions for UK consumer up 10 percentage points to 76%. We have further optimized revenues, expanding the revenue we generate from net ticket sales in both the UK and Europe through the addition of new streams like advertising and insurance. And we positioned Trainline for Business, or T4B, for future growth. Our global API platform is up and running with its first B2B clients integrated, and we sustained our high retention rate for white label clients. Moving on then to the impact of COVID-19 in FY21. In the first quarter of this year, travel restrictions and the resulting declines in transport use across our markets have had an unprecedented impact on trading. Passenger numbers have been down more than 95% in the UK with similar declines across Europe. In response, we've taken quick and decisive action to ensure the wellbeing firstly of our people, swiftly transitioning all of our teams to working from home with very minimal disruption to our business. And we supported our customers and carriers through a period of uncertainty, managing over 1.7 million inbound customer requests for journey changes and refunds, over four times the normal level. We also worked to mitigate the impact on our business, significantly reducing our cash burn down to 8 to 9 million pounds a month, And together with our liquidity headroom of 150 million, this means we're well placed to weather an extended downturn if required. And as I mentioned earlier, well positioned to return to growth as travel restrictions lift. Likewise, governments in our markets have indeed been quick to step in and assist the travel industry. Across Europe, governments have introduced a range of measures to support the wider economy, as well as sectoral support for travel companies and rail carriers. In addition, the UK government has introduced emergency measures that have allowed rail franchises to temporarily shift to a management contract model in place of traditional franchising. So whilst operators continue to run the trains, the revenue risk and reward sits with the government. We have welcomed these measures given the reassurance they give to the industry and to customers. So looking to outlook on COVID-19, post-COVID-19 for the industry, with government starting to lift lockdowns and ease travel restrictions, the industry is now setting out plans to resume full train services. For example, the UK government is planning gradually to ramp up services in May and aiming to get to 100% timetable by the end of June. SNCF in France have announced plans to have 20% of high-speed trains running in May, increasing to 100% by the summer, and full service running on regional trains by June. And in Germany, Spain, and Italy, carriers have already begun a phased ramp-up. Now, of course, it's still early days, but the resumption of services will be a key milestone towards the industry getting back on its feet. There's less visibility on how quickly volume returns, and there's likely to be implications for consumers and industry in a post-COVID world. However, we see Trainline as very well positioned to cater for what will likely be enhanced customer and industry needs in this recovery phase. To give you some examples, a greater need for social distancing likely increases the need for e-tickets as people will be less willing to queue in a station or touch a ticket machine and more advanced purchasing. Likewise, the need for clear and accurate on-the-go travel information is likely to increase too. And if customers become more price conscious, through the Trainline app, they can find the best prices for their journey, a function of features that we've introduced like split save and price prediction. Given our technology, industry expertise, and strong relationships, we'll be well-placed to meet these evolving needs. I'm now going to hand over to Sean to talk you through our financial performance in detail.

Thanks, Claire. And good morning, everyone. So before we run through our financial performance for the year, let me just give you a quick reminder of each of our business units. First of all, our UK consumer business, which sells tickets on behalf of all UK rail and coach carriers to customers worldwide. Our international business does the same, principally for carriers in Europe. And train line for business, T4B. It's currently a UK focused business, providing rail and coach booking solutions for travel management companies, large corporates and small and medium sized enterprises. Trainline for Business also provides the white label online retail platform that many of the UK's largest rail carriers use.

As Claire mentioned, we delivered strong growth in FY20.