Focusrite plc

the people, that would be fantastic.

Okay, wonderful, very good. Okay, so John, could we load up the deck for us please here? We're gonna use a little bit of PowerPoint on this to kind of help guide us through. This, if you've followed us in the past or whatever, this is sort of an updated, if you will, half-year results thing. We're not gonna take you through our half-year results, so please don't fall asleep. But we thought we'd use this, because it's a good guide to explain to some of the new people about what the company is and the portfolio and stuff like that. Next slide, sir. One more. We don't need to read all that junk. Please get rid of those pictures. All right. There we go. Great. So I think to start off, what I'll tell you is the company, basically, you can see we've expanded. These are our core brands that you have. There's Focusrite, Focusrite Pro, Novation, Amplify, Atom Audio, which is a new one from July of last year, and Martin Audio, which is a new edition from December of this year. So I'll give you a little bit of context about what the brands are and what we do. Perhaps just a little short history lesson. The company was founded back in the 80s. Back at that point in time, the way anybody created audio for any kind of event or content, whether it was for music or for a documentary or a TV show, was very, very different than it is today. Computers were really, the only thing they were used for in the recording world was to bill clients. They weren't in the control room. They had no place in there. It was all analog mixers and tape machines, big giant pieces of gear, big facilities that you went in to do this kind of thing. Focusrite's beginnings were in building one of those components in that workflow, and that was the very large mixing console that stood in there. It was considered one of the largest, highest fidelity analog mixing consoles at the time. And what was very interesting is really right when the company was getting started with that, it was becoming very evident uh that the entire world of content creation not just for audio but everything was about to go through a radical change and this change was really the digital transformation that took place computers storage everything was starting to come into its own where it was now actually becoming a viable alternative to replace things like tape machines and analog consoles the real big win being obviously that when something's in a digital format There's a million different ways you can manipulate it. You can have a lot more artistic control. There's different things on quality as well on that. And so the company quickly recognized that and thought the future is not really giant analog mixing consoles. It's actually all the kit that's going to surround this new workflow in this digital medium. And so what Focusrite endeavored to do was to take everything they learned about that really pristine, very expensive, high quality audio path and start to bring that into the gear that was gonna start being used to record any type of audio. And that was really the foundation for the company was building things like audio interfaces and outboard gear that did specific task really to host and support this digital age that was coming. And that was absolutely the right move because as you probably all know, what happened in a very, very short amount of time computers went from being something that was in the accounting office to being the thing that was actually the centerpiece in the studio. It was the thing you recorded on. It was the heart of the system, if you will. And it really democratized things because once laptops became as inexpensive and as powerful as they were, it enabled a whole myriad of new people to get that same quality, not only in a recording facility, but in their house. And that's what really kind of made the entire thing explode, if you will. so um that that was sort of the the humble beginnings if you will the company and from there we've been on a really interesting journey of kind of taking those those point solutions and really building on our strategy there so if we could go back to that um first slide that slide that we were just on thanks on there so i'm gonna try to give you just a broad overview of what these different brands are and and what they do and then uh i'm gonna try to be brief and then after that the the The big thing is we've got some guys here who are going to show you how this stuff works in real time, which is a hell of a lot more exciting than listening to me talk about it. So we'll start with Focusrite. So audio recording equipment. If you look at that picture on the presentation, you'll see that little red box on the table. That is one of our Focusrite products. It's called an audio interface. That particular series is called our Scarlett interface, which is probably one of our best-selling products that we have. Basically what that little box does is you can see that you can plug all different types of audio into it. So in this case, this particular woman is playing a guitar that's going into the audio interface. She's also singing. So this little box allows you to record two things at one time. It'll take her signal and digitize it and then through different types of connectivity that we have, in this case USB, it'll send the digital signal into her laptop or computer where there's some software on the other end that will be capturing that. so that she can record what she's done, she can go back, she can augment it, she can add more tracks, she can do a whole bunch of different types of editing and correction and things like that to make her final product. So Focusrite really, the mainstay of the Focusrite brand is all about these audio interfaces. They came in different shapes and sizes. Again, this one allows somebody to record two things at one time. If you were gonna record more than two things at a time, we have ones that can do that. So they just kinda scale up, if you will. in that capacity. The next brand is Focusrite Pro, which you're gonna hear about too in the demonstrations. Pro, the basic, the hardware, essentially does the same thing. It basically takes audio in different formats, digitizes it, but the difference here is, These solutions are really designed for enterprise and professional customers. The basic idea here is that once something is in the digital domain, you can actually route many, many channels of it over a long distance without any signal degradation. So for broadcasters, for people who are doing things where they're recording a live concert event and they need to actually record it in a studio far away. You can do these kind of things. Professional musicians who need to make sure that if they bring their kid into a studio that they can interface with anything. We have all the different connectivity standards. The basic idea is here you can say yes to everything. The reason that we have this brand separate out really is because we're talking to a whole different type of customers here. We're talking to people that are professionals and facilities that pretty much wake up every morning and they make their living off of creating audio for different types of content. So we have a lot more direct touch with the customers. We work through a different channel. And because of that, we actually use a different sales force. We have different marketing. It's just a very different language, if you will, that we speak. The next brand is called Novation. Now, you'll see that we actually talk about Novation being a series of hardware and software that's really about electronic music. Why do we actually break out electronic music from regular, standard music? Well, the big difference is that electronic music, if you think about it, all the different formats and ways and genres that it has, the genesis of it is very different. So as with a Scarlett interface, a lot of our customers are songwriters or singers or keyboard players or whatever, and they pick up their instrument or they sing and that's how they start their idea. A lot of electronic musicians, what they do is they're not actually picking up an instrument per se, they're actually using little loops or samples that are commercially available or interesting sounds they found or things that they pick up from old records or whatever. They use all these different little sounds that they combine in interesting ways to come up with their final product. And the interesting thing about that is that when you think about it, the rules of engagement are very, very different. So you don't really need to know music theory to get into electronic music. You don't really have to be able to sing or play an instrument. And so it's heavily democratized, the whole art of music production and audio creation, if you will. And because of that and because of how widespread that's been, if you think about it, the type of instruments or controllers and things that people use to create this kind of music would look very different than a standard person like you see on the screen. And so the Novation brand is really dedicated to those type of artists that are creating music in that way. The next one is Amplify. Amplify is our software division. Up until recently, they've been 100% dedicated on making iOS apps. We've had them going for twofold. Number one, the iOS platform has really matured and become so widespread and so powerful that it's a great device to give people sort of a first immersion into electronic music. So our team has developed some really great apps where you can download for free and have just a go at making electronic music in different styles and genres. And for some people, it's kind of fun. They do it once or twice, and then they put it away. But we've had about 17 million people download these apps. And for a material number of them, this has been sort of the spark that's made them want to learn more, where we're able to then introduce them to the rest of our brands, and that's begun their whole music-making journey. More recently and a bigger part of our strategy is we sort of took the team that was working on the iOS apps and they're still doing that, but we've brought on more engineers and we just released our first cross-platform music creation app for Mac and PC to really enable not only electronic musicians, but really all beginners who just want to be able to open the box and pick up their guitar or something and start making music real easy. And Amplify Studio is our solution to that. It's our 1.0. There's a lot of things that we want to add to it, but it's really great to get it out sort of out into the world and see how it's been received, which is quite well so far. The next brand that we have is one of our acquisitions. When we've talked about expansion in our growth strategy, we've talked about how we believe there's a lot of opportunities and growth still in our core markets. So we continue to innovate and look to disrupt our core markets like the audio interface market and the electronic music market. But one thing that we realized was that there is a whole ecosystem around the things that we do that we weren't participating in. And so we started looking at what are the natural extensions? that we should do. Well, we knew from a lot of data collection that a lot of people that were getting into creating any kind of audio, one requirement is they need to hear it back. It's pretty straightforward. And so the idea of investing in or acquiring a company who was very well known for their studio monitors made a lot of sense. And we looked at a lot of different brands and we were really looking for somebody who'd been on a very similar journey to us. In other words, that's what they do. They get up in the morning and they think about, how do I make the best reference speaker or studio monitor out there? And they were not only looking about, you know, how do I build it today, but where is this technology going? What do I do? And Adam really checked all the boxes on that. So we were really happy to actually, that was our first big acquisition back in July of last year. And it's been great having them on board. They're based in Berlin. They have a portfolio that really complements our entire line from the beginner all the way through the pro. And that business has done incredibly well with us. And as soon as we closed on them, we learned of a company literally right down the street from where we were based here in High Wycombe called Martin Audio. We'd known them for a very, very long time. Martin Audio was a little outside of our sandbox, if you will. They were all about the installed and the live sound part of this. So whereas we are typically focused on the creation of the content, Martin was very much focused on the reproduction of music and audio and things like this. But From our growth strategy, we had always agreed that not only would we look at complementary things, but we would always look at other verticals that were in the audio industry that we felt like had really good growth history, that would be a good investment for us to actually be able to sort of spread our wings this way. And from knowing Martin and the group there and finding out that they were coming up for sale, we endeavored to work with them and we closed on bringing Martin into the fold in December of this past year. so in total those are those are the brands sort of a brief history and sort of what we do if you will now what i'd like to do um with that kind of fresh in your mind i'd like to turn it over to our demo artist and have them take you through the products so you can actually see firsthand how some of these things work what they're designed for the person they're designed for in mind and just to get a feel for you know what our products are all about so john i think you're going to start us off on here and take us through some of the Novation products and Amplify products.

Absolutely. Thank you very much, Tim. So my name is John. I'm a content creator here at Focusrite and Novation. And what I'm going to do is walk you through both the Amplify and some of the Novation product lines to give you a bit more of an idea about who they serve and what you can do with them. The first thing to note is that, as Tim mentioned, Amplify, up until recently, have been solely focused on iOS. The iOS apps are freely downloadable. There's three, and just to give you a brief overview of those, they sort of range up in complexity from... Open it up and you can start hitting pads and hearing sounds instantly. Really, really good for beginners. You can actually plug in one of the launch pads that you see here on the desk to your iPad and start hitting and hearing sounds straight away, record that, share it with your friends. It's really, really nice. The next step up from that is going to be essentially just giving you a little bit more control. So Blocks Wave, you can start to record your own sounds in and you can start to manipulate them in slightly different ways. And then the final app, which is Groovebox, is probably what's going to be more focused towards someone like myself. I make electronic music quite a lot. I want a little bit more control. I want to make my own drum patterns. I want to make synth patterns and whatnot, make patches. I'm able to do all of that inside Groovebox, and that's really powerful for taking it on the road. I could plug in one of the little keyboards that we see here, can plug in most of the items that you see on the desk here to control that. So it's a really, really powerful solution. What we've also done, as Tim mentioned, is expanded into the Mac and PC market. So what you can see on my screen just here is Amplify Studio. Now, what this is going to do is take that idea of sort of inbuilt sounds and really put it into the hands of the customers so that you can get started straight away on desktop. One of the best things about this is that when you grab a product, you're generally going to be buying one of these products to use with a piece of software called Ableton Live. Ableton Live is absolutely fantastic. It's used by the pros and it's used to make dance music. It's quite intimidating to open up Ableton Live and start there straight away. So this really nicely bridges the gap. So if we jump in and have a look here. What you've got on the left hand side is sound packs. Now I can come through here and say, I want some drums. Let's have a listen to these. Nice. I can drag that into here and then I can start having a listen to all of the things in here. And I've built this up really simply by clicking and dragging as I just did. Awesome, so that was really quick and easy to do. You can also dive in and get a little bit more control, and you can also control this application again using the launch pads, the launch keys, which I'll come on to in just a moment. So with Amplify Studio, what you can see here on my screen is the premium version. So you can download this for free, you can use it for free, you can get free sound packs. But we also offer subscription models which unlock a little bit more functionality and they also unlock an amazing library of sounds that we've got in-house producers working in London adding to this every week. So there's constantly going to be new sounds coming out that fit your genre. And you can explore the genres on the left-hand side and find stuff that wouldn't necessarily fit into your genre, but you can sort of put it in there and it makes some really, really unique outcomes. So a really, really fantastic tool, as I say, to bridge the gap between the really sort of intimidating to start with professional software and the iOS apps that you might have got started with. So that really nicely bridges the gap from going from the Amplify stuff to the Novation equipment. So, Novation makes hardware for electronic music producers primarily. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to switch over from Amplify Studio, which I have here. Let's close that down. And I'm going to fire up Ableton Live. And whilst I'm doing that, I'll just give you a quick talk through some of the stuff that we've got on the desk here. One of Novation's most popular product lines is going to be the launch pads that you see just on the screen here. What these are is a hands-on controller for Ableton Live, which is music-making software, as I say, for dance music producers. Once you've come home from a long day of work, it's really nice to be able to get hands-on with your music making as opposed to continuing to look at a screen. And it really puts the music making at your fingertips as opposed to just being sort of mouse and keyboard, which, yeah, it's a lot more inspiring doing it this way. So what I'm going to do is show you Ableton Live. I've got a set loaded up here, sort of Blue Peter style. And I'll show you how we can sort of control bits and bobs using the Novation hardware, which really does make it a great experience. So you can see all the little clips that I've got on screen. They're just pieces of audio. So that could be a baseline, that could be a drum loop. And you can see that the colors match up with what's going on here on the launch pads. It might be a little bit of a stretch, but what I can do is sort of play my music from here. Awesome. So, as you can see, I get loads of control here. I can play in drum patterns, I can play in bass lines, melodies, whatever I want to do here, which makes these a really, really powerful addition to Ableton Live. Let's stop that. So, The Novation product line then caters for some more advanced electronic music makers, probably like myself. One of those introductions I'm going to make is the circuit. So that's what you can see just here. And it's a standalone box that you can take anywhere or leave in your studio. We've seen people making songs on buses, trains, planes, all kinds of places with the circuit, which is great. You can just plug your headphones in and you're good to go. One of the really interesting things about the circuit is the amount of functionality we've added to it after release through firmware updates. There's a user initiated Facebook group, which has got over 13,000 members. They had loads of feature requests for us. We dived in, listened to them, implemented them, and the advocacy for this product has been like nothing else we've ever seen. It's been really, really fantastic. What I've got going on the circuit at the moment is just a little drumbeat. So if I play that, I can then show you how we would integrate this with some of our other hardware. What you see here is the Novation Peak. This is one of our flagship synthesizers, really, really quite advanced, and you can make absolutely any sound that you can think of with this synthesizer. Really, really cool. What I can do is I can plug in one of our flagship keyboards, which you see just over on the left-hand side here. I can play the Novation Peak with that and just have a jam. So I'm not going to subject you to any more of my keys playing. But one of the main things about electronic music makers that use this kind of equipment is they don't just use one piece of equipment or one brand. They want all of their equipment to talk to each other, whether they're buying something from us or from different manufacturers we use standards like midi that can talk to everything so something like the circuit can control a couple of different other pieces of equipment all come back into the software so it all really nicely sort of handshakes with each other and that's something that we really focus on especially in the sl mark 3 that you see here you've got so many inputs and outputs on the back to control whatever you've got in your studio So that's a sort of whistle-stop tour of everything in the Novation range that I have on the desk here. If you do have any questions, then the chat is the place for those. But yeah, hopefully that gives you a nice little overview there. So if we do have any questions in the chat, let's have a look at those. Okay, so yeah, at any point, if you do have any questions, feel free to fire them into the chat. But yeah, I'll hand back over to Tim and Jeremy, and thank you very much for your time.