YouGov plc

Good morning, everybody. Thank you for coming. And thank you for coming at my first one back. And I hope that it won't be too long before we see the rates of growth we've had before. We're at 388, 389 million at the moment, at 16% margin, with 8% increase in reported, in adjusted EPS. And, sorry, in reported EPS. And the key thing here is that we're showing stable growth. Now, stable growth sounds a bit of a contradiction, but actually it represents the two things we're trying to do this year. One is to return to stability. And that means fixing things. And the other is to invest in growth. So we're not seeing yet the kinds of leaps that we have had in the past, but we are investing for that very, very thing. And just to remind you of that story of YouGov's growth, there's a huge graph before this which shows something like 10 years of growth. And we've just come off that. And we need to be reminded that this is fundamentally a growth company. And it's a growth company because we have always been led by innovation. And when we stop innovating, we go flat. But we are back on the road to innovation, something that I will show you in the second half of this presentation when I talk about a new methodology that we have produced. So in the last year, we've had some good successes, which is the stabilizing part that I've been talking about. We have continued rollout of ID verification on panelists. We spent quite a bit of effort focused on removing fraud from panel. This is something that has been bedeviling the industry as a whole. I think we're a long way ahead of everybody else. partly because of our historical asset of a well-embedded panel and partly because we have been using the latest techniques and I think we pretty much lead the pack on the reliability of our data. We've invested in our cube-powered products, especially on the data science side. In a couple of days, we'll be announcing a new addition to the team, a very important addition, someone who has led an important team for 10 years at Nielsen, really representing the seriousness with which we're taking the data science side and growing that to create the technology the richness and the reliability of the entire cube data. We've also established on the client services side a team that specializes in selling and educating clients about the value of our connected data, our data products, and we've continued our program of updating our dashboards, including putting AI into those to help with discovery. And finally, for this section, we have done a pretty good job, I think, of integrating Shopper. It's a major job that was, and it has been successful, and Shopper is actually doing... a little better than our expectations were, so that's a pleasant change. So with that, I hand over to Alex.

Thank you, Stefan. I just want to do a quick overview of our lines of business. I just want to point you to the stacked charts on the top of the screen. We've gone from $335 million to $389 million. Revenue for the year, you'll see the biggest contributor to that. We've got a full year impact of shopper coming through. On an underlying basis, you'll see the two divisions, core YouGov, growing at 1%. I think we're going to specifically point out data products. We've turned that from a decline in the last period to growth. It's a lot of investment and a lot of focus that's going into getting us back on track. It was a key driver of our performance for the previous reporting periods. It's definitely referenced in terms of those double-digit growth years. And I think you'll see the beginnings of growth. and evolution of things that we're doing in that space. I think we're pleased to see we've had renewal rates normalizing back up to 82%. The couple of wins in the media agency space, that may be a little bit of a surprise. People are saying we are seeing a little bit of weakness as well, but it does go to show when we have high-quality data, there's still a demand for that, and we had a significant win in the retail space as well. In our research division, a bit of a mixed bag in performance. We've seen some headwinds coming from our government sector and our gaming sector. Gaming's been a long-term decline for us, but we saw some real strength and demand in our academic technology and financial services sectors. Shopper, just referencing what Stefan said, on an underlying basis, we don't have this in our numbers, but if we were to look at it on a trailing 12-month basis, it's grown by about 4%. So we're pleased with the way that has performed. I want to make the point there's a period of coming off the TSAs under the sale from NIQ. We're now off the majority of those, a lot of heavy lifting, getting control of the finance systems, et cetera. And so it's been a period of lots of, in a way, disruption, moving systems, et cetera, but we're really pleased with the way the teams have continued to perform. You'll see our profit on the bottom of the chart has increased from 49.6 to 60.7. Big driver to that is the contribution of Shopper, obviously, but also the amount of cost that we took out at the beginning of the year. I referenced that at the beginning of the financial year. We announced that we had pressed the button on 20 million pounds of annualized savings. Because of timing, we realized about 70% of that in the year. Just moving to a geographic analysis, a bit of a mixed bag in terms of performance. Europe, you'll see as year-on-year growth is 0%. Part of that has been some headwinds that we've had within Switzerland and Germany. We're starting to see some improvement coming into the second half on that. In the UK, which has historically been a strong driver for us, a lot of disruption going through the redundancy programs. We started that on the 1st of August 2024, lasted about three months. And so it was inevitable that we would see a slowdown in performance there as we went through the consultation process. But we've ended the financial year really strong. Good trajectory going into the financial year. Areas of growth for us has been America's. It's always been our big focus. We'd like to see that growing at a much faster pace. But 3% on an underlying basis is broadly in line with how fast the market has grown. And just a small point, HPAC continues to grow by 2%. This chart, which is looking at our sector, we take out shopper in this because it's so skewed to FMCG and retail, but we continue to be very well diversified. Technology remains our largest segment, and that's a combination of technology using our data, but also using more traditional market research type services. Good contribution from banking and insurance. Travel and tourism is picked up again. Retail, I mentioned academic, coming through in research. Let's make that point again about shopper. Just moving on to our cash conversion and our cash capital expenditure. For the year, we remain about the same cash conversion ratio as the previous period. We've had a bit of working capital outflow to do with – we've had a bit of accrued income increasing. We've also seen panelists redeeming more points this year. That's in part – we're running a lot of surveys, particularly in America, off the back of the U.S. election. CapEx is down slightly. You'll see we've spent a little bit less on panel development. That's not necessarily we haven't been getting more panelists. We've been a bit more efficient in our conversion, and we'd like to see that improving over time. And we've kept our investment in technology expenditure roughly flat. That's not to say we haven't increased the amount of people in our technology teams. We have been spending a little bit more time on maintenance, and I think when we get to the latter parts of this presentation, you'll see some of the things that they have been working on, which will drive some more performance into FY26 and beyond. We end the year in a robust balance sheet position. We started the year with a 240 million loan facility. We paid 36 million euros of that down in the year. We have a 40 million euro RCF, which currently 24 million is drawn. We made an adjustment to our amortization schedule in terms of payments. We negotiated a particularly aggressive for us. We wanted to delever as fast as possible, and we took the loan. We're not trading at the same level as we were before, so we've reduced our payments to 20 million euros for the next two payments, 20 million in FY26, 20 million in FY27, just so that we have the headroom to continue investing in the group. And again, we really want to get ourselves back into this growth trajectory, but I'm going to make the point we've remained well within our loan covenants throughout the year. Just moving to current trading and outlook, you'll hear us talk about investing. It's particularly important for the group that we are taking on this market. We used to be the challenger brand, and we certainly see we have a right to win a number of spaces. So we've got a clear set of execution priorities that we have around panel and product innovation. We've got some investments that will be really focused on data science and product development people, which are important. moving us toward our SP3 strategy of being more of a platform business in the way that we go to market, the way that panelists and our clients consume data. And we're starting to invest in Shopper. And the idea around Shopper is to get their capability expanded in the markets they're currently in, filling out more of the European map, and over time we'll be looking at how do we invest into getting Shopper into the U.S. For our trading currently has started in line with expectations. I think for FY26, expect to see modest improvement in revenue and margin. And that's after making some key investments, particularly in data scientists and technologists. But I think we start the year. I think there's a lot of compelling opportunities for us. I know it's a slightly challenging macro environment, but we're certainly seeing some good opportunities from clients coming into the financial year. With that, I'd like to hand back to Stefan. Stefan?

So, yeah, I mean, I said the YouGov story is growth through innovation. That was the promise that we made at Capital Markets Day in May 23, and the strategy that we put out there is the one that we are following. We're back on that road to growth, I believe, certainly on that strategic road. And that involves these five things, the renewed commitment to increasing visibility and quantity of public data. As you will see in a moment when I demonstrate the importance of public data to us, that is something that drives our reputation, our trustworthiness, our panels and a lot of other stuff. And it's something that that we are highly committed to and we have increased our spending on. Innovation around panel recruitment and management of panel. We are changing the panelist experience. Again, you will find always this emphasis that we have on public data, on panel, creating data that creates products that are good for clients. This is all part of a flow. And the way that we treat our panelists and the way that we get data from them is being enhanced. We're accelerating the execution of becoming a data platform. More and more of our dashboards are now containing AI and better ways of utilizing our data. Custom research is a huge part of what we do. The degree to which custom research is aligned with our platform is the degree to which our success, our strategy is working. Those two things being aligned is absolutely critical to us and we've been putting energy into that. There are aspects of the custom research offer that are not so aligned. We need to bring everything in line and AI is helping us to do that. And of course, something that we'll be focusing on in a moment, in fact, in the next slides, is the innovation in AI that is massive for us leveraging the value of the assets that we've built. So, that is the broad strategic view. You've heard it all before. There's nothing new in there other than that we're updating all of that with AI and we're coming at it with renewed enthusiasm. Now, YouGov in the age of AI is the big question that anybody would ask. And we, I believe, I hope I'm going to show our company that is ideally suited to use this moment, this historic revolutionary moment for our growth. Because we are all about talking to real people. And the essence of the use of AI is real people. It is building extra value out of the real people in order to get even better data products, even better value to clients. And that is something I'm going to come to several times because... We think that our industry has maybe gone a bit wrong in some areas. There are so many wonderful things that AI can do. Replacing humans isn't really the job of a market research company. There's lots of great things that synthetic data can do to get more value, to make it easier to do things like add testing, and there are lots of places where that really works well. But remember, the vast majority of spend from our clients is in measuring change. That's what people are interested in. And change cannot be extrapolated. Extrapolation is the assumption that things will be the same. Every time you use synthetic data, the underlying assumption must be that things are the same way you're extending it to. That is the definition of synthetic data. It's extrapolation. And extrapolation tells you what you already knew. It extends it. but it doesn't tell you where the surprise is coming, and that's why people buy tracking data, because they want to know what's changing that they don't already know. If everything is going the same next month as last month, then it's all nice, but that data isn't very interesting. It's when the change is not what you expected, and that's not going to come from synthetic data. So we are actually very interested in synthetic data. As you know, MRP has been a very big part of our success in accuracy and getting more value out of our data. So we are actually pioneers of synthetic data. And it has fantastic value. There's nothing against that. But the vast majority of the market research spend is in tracking change. And change, you need real people. And real people are the basis of everything we do. So, a data company focuses on the flow of data across four things, people, data, process and output. And for this to work, we have developed over the course of 25 years, three major assets. First of all, YouGov has the best panel. We don't have the best panel in every single country. I wouldn't want to pretend that, but in our major markets where we have our strong panels, we have the best panel. Everybody knows we have the highest re-contact rates. We have the highest levels of representativity. We have the engagement that keeps them there for a long time so that you can build layers and layers of data. It's by building layers of data from engaged panels that you get the second big asset, which is that we have the best data. And it's the best data because it is single source, it is connected, and it is always recent. It's always being updated. Every single day it's updated. Recency, representativity, and genuineness, which should be a given but isn't these days, are the things that make great data. To have that, you need good panel. That gives you the best data. and I'm putting there that it's also across different areas, so demographic data, things about the people, what they're thinking, attitudinal, behavioral, passive data, that's part of that. Qualitative is the bit that's going to be a big new piece, which I'm talking about in a moment, added to quantitative. The third area is our incredibly strong brand. And it's always good to have a strong brand. But for us, it is key. It is a key function of what we do. Because strong brand yields better panels and builds trust amongst clients. And I have two examples here that I want to just run. And according to YouGov, a big deal, 70% of Americans believe that