ZOO Digital Group plc

Hello and welcome to Zu Digital's interim results presentation for FY26. So whilst you're all reading this disclaimer, let me just say that if you are watching this presentation live, then we'll have time at the end for a Q&A session. We'll aim for about 30 minutes presentation and we'll have up to 30 minutes of Q&A. At any point in the presentation, you can submit a question in writing, and you can do that through the questions tab. There should be a questions tab on the right side of your screen. So just go in there, tap away, and then we'll try and get through as many of those as we can in the time that's available. So just quick introductions for those who haven't met us before. I'm Stuart Green. I'm the CEO. I was formerly the CTO and took the current role in 2006. I am a large shareholder in the business, having invested my own capital over the course of several years.

Hi everyone, my name is Rob Purcell, I'm the CFO and I actually only joined in August 2025, so slightly less tenure than Stuart. I spent 15 years operating as a CFO in technology businesses and I've worked in a combination of both private and public companies.

So quick recap for those new to the story, what we do is provide both technical and creative services mainly to video streaming companies and content producers to take their content and make it available for global audiences. And on this slide, you see some of the streaming platforms that we target in terms of where the output of our work goes. We are tech-enabled, and that's a key thing that sets us apart. So, all of what we do for our customers, we do through technology that we've created that makes us very efficient and very scalable. We are what's referred to in our industry as an end-to-end vendor. So, as I say, there are some technical things and some creative things. We can do everything that's needed to get original content and make it available on streaming services in any languages that our customers may require. Our previous financial year ending March 25 was characterized by being a period of transition for many of our customers who have gone through strategic reviews and have realigned their businesses. And in the course of that period and until recently, we have gone through a process of restructuring our cost base to ensure that we can deliver profits and generate cash in our business. So after a period that's been somewhat subdued over the last couple of years, we're now seeing signs that our customers are coming back and are ready to start ramping up again. And there are early signs, but we feel that there are kind of green shoots there. And we are in a very good position, we believe, to be able to capitalise on that and to grow the business going forward. So what we do then, just to elaborate on that just a little bit, is that our work begins usually when a new program, say a TV series or a new feature film has been completed and it's made by a production company. And our work ends when we submit the final deliverables into one or more streaming services. So what's sandwiched in the middle there, which is the scope of what we do, is divided between two areas. We refer to them as localization services, which are predominantly creative processes to adapt things to different languages and cultures. And in the other area, media services are mostly technical things that we do to make sure that that content will play properly on whichever target platform or platforms it's targeted for. And as I said, we're an end-to-end vendor, so we can take care of everything that's needed in that process. And those two headings that I gave you there are really categories of a whole range of different things. And on this slide, you see the variety of different individual services. that we actually deliver to our customers. So this is a complex area. These are very specialized things. We're at this position able to do all this because we've made investment over many years. We've developed technology, bespoke technology that helps us to do this in a very efficient and scalable way. What our customers need from us and indeed other vendors that we compete with are set out on this slide. The first two of these are absolute necessities. So firstly, vendors who service these big buyers, to work on this very high quality and expensive content must, in the first instance, do an incredibly good job. So they must deliver to a quality and to standards that are very high and exacting. And in this regard, Zoo performs exceptionally well, and I'll elaborate on that a little bit in just a second. We receive awards, so on the top there you see an award that we received from Netflix for being their best performing partner in the Americas in 2024. Secondly, you have to be able to do that to incredibly high standard of security to ensure that there's no chance of the content that you're working on behalf of customers leaking and going into the wrong hands. And here again, we perform at a high standard. We are classified as a gold standard. under the trusted partner network, which essentially is a framework for assessing the security undertakings that a particular vendor observes. So those are the two can-must-haves, and we perform very well on both camps. And it takes a while to demonstrate to customers that you have that capability. So this is not something that happens overnight, you know, it happens over a period of years. which means that the barriers to entry for new entrants are very high. The next three items on this list are what we see as being the emerging requirements and in some cases the change requirements that we're seeing customers now have as they have come out the other side of this period of this fallow period as it were, and as they look to the future and the kind of partners that they want to work with. So the first thing is that increasingly they're looking for partners who are technologically advanced, are progressive in the use of tech, and in this regard, as a tech-enabled business, is very well positioned. So the fact that we are embracing AI, for example, in our workflows is something that is seen very favourably by customers. Next, as I mentioned, we are an end-to-end vendor, that means we can do everything, and that is increasingly sought after by customers who want to simplify the supply chain. So, where in the past they may have had many vendors to cover these services, what they now want is very few vendors, but each of which has to be able to do everything. So the fact that we are an end-to-end vendor and there are very few of those in the market, again, positions do very well. And then finally, our customers want things faster. They want us and other vendors to be able to turn around projects much more quickly because That's dead time for them. Once they've finished the title, ideally they'd just like to get it up on the platform. But the work that we do stands in the way of that happening. So the quicker that can be done, the better for them. And this is an area where we excel, particularly through some recent innovations that we call Fast Track, which we'll elaborate on more in just a moment. So by all of these requirements, Zoo is incredibly well positioned, we believe, in the market. I mentioned that the quality is a key absolute requirement and something we've done in this set of results for the first time, and we'll do it in each half results going forward, is that we are publishing a quality metric. This is not a measure that we've taken ourselves, it's actually based on measures that are supplied to us by a subset of our customers. So some but not all of our customers report to us, either every month or every quarter, their own measures of the quality of the work that we've done. And we basically combined those to arrive at a weighted score. And as you can see in the half, we achieved 99.9%. So that's based on measures that are accounted for by customers who together were responsible for 58.2% of our revenue in that period. So the remaining The remaining amount of that was basically what we did for customers who don't have such rigorous programs to measure this performance. So the takeaway here is that hopefully this gives you the evidence and the reassurance that we are performing at the very highest standard. And we believe that these scores put us at the very top of the league table in terms of vendors who deliver these services in the industry. But more importantly, as we'll come on in a moment, talk about the cost reductions we've implemented in the business. What was absolutely critical to us as we went through that exercise was not compromising on those top two essential requirements that I covered previously. And as you can see, with scores of 99.9%, we certainly achieved that. So with that, I hand over to Rob to cover off the results.