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.

Pretty cool. Thanks, John. All right. So I hope that gave you a little bit of an overview. As you can see when I was talking about at the beginning, you saw some things on the table over there that probably look somewhat familiar, some things that had piano keys, black and white keys on there. So there are a lot of people that do electronic music that are keyboard players or they want to have something that has that type of input. But then the grid controllers like the launch pad and stuff like that, also a very familiar thing for electronic musicians. They look very foreign to a lot of people that are typically a guitar player and stuff. But really, when you think about the idea that you're basically launching clips and combining them in interesting ways to come up with your final product, something like that really lends itself to the workflow and how you actually create stuff. So that's a quick tour of Amplify and Novation. Will, are we about ready for, you need another minute. I'll just, I'll wing it over here. That's great. Very good. John also mentioned that, you know, the fact that it's a very modular approach, and that is very true. You know, for most of the people that are creating electronic music, if you ever see their studio, this looks like a huge mess and there's just wires everywhere. And the reason is, is because people typically, they don't replace things. They actually add to, to actually have more things that are sound generating or give them more capability. And so along with that is really the requirement that these things work really well. So all of our products not only are designed to work inside our ecosystem, so things like Circuit that can actually create sounds of their own, or what we do with Amplify Studio that can control things and you can add to, but all of these products actually work really well with other brands, other competitors, everybody, because that's just the nature of how these type of things are done. in here and so uh with that you know it's a wide complement of products the novation brand uh really goes every from you know price ranges of around 99 us dollars up to about 2 000 uh to for our flagship synthesizers so they definitely serve different parts of the market but it is a huge expansive a group of people that are that are creating this kind of music The other thing just I want to point out is a lot of times when we talk about electronic music, people will believe that it's not as hard to do or it's easier to create than people who are maybe more traditional instruments. That's actually absolutely not true. The guys that are the well-known DJs or the electronic musicians in the world, they've absolutely invested their 10,000 hours into the craft on here. Let's see. How do your products compare in terms of ability to integrate versus peer? So hopefully I answered a little bit of that. I think the great thing about the audio industry and the community is their standards. So you don't see everybody coming out with their own protocol to hook things up. There's universal standards, things like MIDI, another thing called CV that sends all the data out generically so it can go to everything else. Pretty much every manufacturer in the world adheres to these standards. So an artist is pretty much guaranteed if they buy one of our boxes or products that has that connector on it and they have a competitor box or somebody else's, they will be able to connect the two and use them in tandem with no problems on there. Regarding the new base station model being released, can you give a bit more detail about NPD product lifecycle and ties to bands and musicians? Yeah, so one interesting thing is the product lifecycle on our products is a really wide expanse. So most of the products that I would say that kind of live under the $500 product range, we tend to refresh those every three to five years. And there's a couple reasons why. First off, they're more consumer oriented. So there is a, it's looking old and tired, it needs an update. But really, the other thing is, is because we have such a huge R&D team, even when we release a product, there's a whole bunch of features and things that we wanted to get into that one that we just couldn't, because we ran out of time. So there's always a backlog of things that we're doing. And then a third one that a lot of people don't think about, but it's actually really critical, and it's sort of outside our control, It's the connectivity standards that are out there with computers. So if you could imagine if we had stuck with our original Scarlett interface from eight years ago, and it was an original box squared USB connector, and everybody's going out and buying brand new shiny laptops with USB-C, and we're comparing specs, they would probably look at ours and go, well, that's old. I don't want that. What's the thing that's new that has the same kind of connector as me? It sounds sort of silly, but it's actually really true. And of course, there's technical advantages to that as well. I mean, it's not just a different shaped connector. You know, things like USBC, Thunderbolt, they have a lot of advantages, especially for anything with media and content creation. They're faster, which means you can do things quicker and more efficiently as well. So there's a lot of reasons to do that. In terms of how we deal with bands and musicians, we have a pretty wide approach on here. Now, the thing we just did that I think Mr. Blaine is talking about is... We took one of our existing very well-known synthesizers called the Bass Station that's been out, a real standard in the synthesizer world for a lot of people in pop electronic music in terms of the thing that generated and made all the bass sounds, electronic bass sounds. But we worked with a very well-known artist, who actually is really into our gear and had some really interesting ways that he wanted us to upgrade that box to do some interesting things to really help him in terms of his sound and unique personality. And so we did that and we just launched that yesterday. So that was sort of breathing life into a product that's been around for a while. So that was one interesting way where we partnered with an individual that was pretty well known in the industry. But if you go and you look at a lot of our ads, we do on occasion, we'll pick a big tour with Martin Audio and talk about that, a big rock and roll tour. But, you know, we really go more with the lifestyle type of thing that the people that are actually I think that customers can resonate with. So, you know, like the girl I showed you in the photo, people like that who are, I think, more in line with who a lot of our customers are. They're people that want to create audio or create music and they're doing it in their house and they're not well known. And they may just be doing it for their own personal enjoyment or they may aspire to to take that and actually have it become something either more important or a bigger part of their life in there. And so a lot of our stories and the artists that we deal with tend to have that sort of journey. They're not huge stars. I mean, we deal with some of those for sure. But the majority of the people that we're talking about are people that I think our customers and most of who we look at as our audience can really self-identify with. I know. Okay, Will, are you ready?

I am indeed.

Okay, great. I tap danced as long as I could.

That was all killer and no filler. That was wonderful.

All right.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Will Holt. I'm the head of product for Focusrite and the Focusrite Pro range of products. So looking after product strategy, what we bring to market, how we go about doing that. What I'd like to do today is to talk to you about a combination of the Scarlett range of interfaces, as well as the Claret, the Red range of interfaces, all the way through to our RedNet audio over IP system. So to give you a bit of insight, what is an audio interface and why do I want one? Well, Tim mentioned earlier the idea of a Scarlett and how it's used for recording music, and fundamentally that is the main aim of the audio interface, is to take audio from a format that is in the analogue domain, such as the output of a microphone, the output of a guitar, take it into the interface, make it a bit louder first of all, then convert it to a digital signal which our computers can record and then we can manipulate in that digital domain. And then taking everything and doing it in reverse so we can get it back out to a set of speakers so that, as again Tim mentioned earlier, we can hear it either over the speakers or over headphones. So in terms of who's using the products, it's largely musicians who want to record their music. So starting with the Scarlett range, we have our introductory product at about $110. That's the Scarlett Solo that you see up here. Now the Scarlett Solo, as I say, very high quality input and output device, and it has a fairly straightforward role. Let's take the microphone and plug it into this input here. And let's take our guitar and plug it into this input here. And now I can record really high quality signals from my instruments and maybe record my voice as well. On the rear panel, I can output to my speakers. So a couple of connectors there. It's a bit hard to see in the dark because it's black on black. But there you go. You've got the two connectors there. And then I've got the level controls on the front panel. So for $110, I can get going really quickly with a really high quality recording. The Scarlett range comprises, as we see here, we've got these five interfaces in the rack. We've got a sixth one behind me. And they scale both in terms of inputs and outputs and obviously, as a result, price. So we go from $110 at the Scarlett Solo through to $500 at the top end for the Scarlett 18i20. Now, why would we want more inputs and more outputs? Well, if I want to record more instruments simultaneously, then I'm going to need to have more inputs so that I can get them onto separate tracks inside the software. So let's say I want to record my guitar and voice simultaneously. Well, I can do that on the Scarlett Solo because it has a mic input and it has a guitar input. But if I want to record, for example, my piano in stereo with two microphones, I'm going to need two microphone inputs so I can go up through the range to the 2i2. As I need more and more microphone inputs, for example, let's say I want to record some drums, I might want the 18i8 down here, which has four microphone inputs, and then I can start to record my drum kit. All the way through to the 18i20, which you see on the desk here, which has eight microphone inputs, as well as a host of digital interfaces that allow us to bring in lots of channels, so I can record my whole band simultaneously. So as we see, the quality starts at very high with the Scarlett Solo. And what we're actually scaling as we go up through the Scarlett range is we're scaling the quantity of channels that we can get into and out of the computer. So that's a really brief description of the core interfaces themselves. Now, beyond the core interfaces, we offer two studio bundle packs as well. They include a microphone, as you can see on the end here. This is the Scarlett Studio microphone. And that's a high quality condenser microphone, we call it, which is perfect for recording vocals and acoustic instruments like guitars, pianos, for example. So again, with the product, I get the Scarlett interface, either the Solo or the 2i2. I then get my microphone and I also get a set of headphones, which ordinarily I'd be using, but I'm on my in-ears today to make it easier for us to communicate in the room here and for you to see me. But yeah, we'd get the Scarlett studio headphones as well, which are included in the pack. Again, high quality set of headphones that give me decent isolation from the outside so that what's coming back on the speakers or on the headphones in this case doesn't get picked up by the microphone. So straight out of the box, I'm able to record my voice or record my guitar straight into the Scarlett and hear it back on my headphones. And that's the hardware side of what we do. So two interface studio packs with the Solo and with the 2i2. That's the hardware side of Scarlett, but then there's the software side as well. So there's two core elements to the software that we provide. Well, probably more like three, actually. There's the control software interface. So we have here Focusrite control, which you'll see on my screen if we switch over to that. So we can see that we've got control of our input settings, we've got control of how our outputs are configured as well, and I can actually start to set up custom mixes in here, bringing in channels into this, start building up what looks to be a mixer, get the different levels in here, and you can see I've got control over each of those. I'm then able to set up a mix for my headphones. So that's the control side of the software and how we tackle that side of things. Beyond control, there's also obviously the need to be able to record those signals. So we provide a software application called Pro Tools First. I'll just give you a quick glimpse of that. That's a mixer view that we'll see on the screen just in a moment. Again, looks like a traditional mixer, but in software. And if we look at the edit view, you can see I get some waveforms here and you can see all of the channels that I've recorded, which I'll give you a bit of a demo on in a minute. That is a third-party software that we provide a license for. We also do that for Ableton Live Lite software, so the software package that John mentioned earlier for people who want to get more into the electronic music creation side of things. So two possible options for the music creation side. And then finally, we have plugins which are provided. So a plugin, you could consider that maybe as an effect or as a processor for the sound. And we add those into the package so that we can enhance the sound that has been recorded. So what we'll see here when I bring those up is the Focusrite Red 3 and also the Red 2. So an equalizer. kind of like you'd have on your hi-fi to be able to control the bass, middle, and the treble, but then also a compressor, which gives us some control over the actual signal level itself in a dynamic fashion. So those are the three broad parts of the software that we offer. We also provide an enhanced subscription to the Amplify Studio package to all of the customers of those interface products too. So that's the Scarlett range, which I'll come back and give you a hands-on demo in just a minute. But before we do that, I'd like to talk about the Claret range of interfaces. So over on my right hand side here I've got a couple of the products from the Claret range. So the Claret range is another range of USB interfaces, so again they connect to the computer with USB. But this time the quality is another jump up from the Scarlett's. So they have an even higher quality microphone preamplifier and they have even higher quality digital to analog and analog to digital converters. So those converters, their job, as I say, is to convert from analog to digital. And it's not possible to make a perfect one. It's against the laws of physics. But what we can do is we can get better and better if we have more and more precise control over the components that go in and make them tighter and tighter tolerance. So as we go up the ranges, we are able to provide an even higher quality in terms of the signal performance that goes into and comes out of each of those boxes. So the Claret range, we have three core interfaces. We have the two pre, the four pre, and the eight pre, starting at $439, going up to $1,000. We also have a microphone preamplifier, which lives in that range as well, of eight channels, so that we can add in to our additional devices to get those extra channels to record even more microphones simultaneously. so someone who's using the claret range again they're quite likely to be a musician recording at home but they're probably spending a higher level of their disposable income on the hobby they maybe have been playing music and recording music for a lot longer and they may be starting to think about generating some level of revenue from from their hobby so maybe recording their their friends local bands possibly having a small dedicated space in their house rather than it being maybe a corner of of their living room for example So that's the claret range. Then we go through to the red range of interfaces. And that's again another step up, both in terms of quality, but also in terms of the functionality that we get on that range as well. So the red range of products really is targeting the professional user. And that's both in terms of a professional individual who's running a small recording studio perhaps in their home, or quite likely sometimes in a dedicated facility, maybe a single room that they rent out as part of a larger building, for example. right the way through to some of our commercial facilities where they're running multiple rooms and they need to connect signals between different places. So the red range, you see it on top here, I've got the red 16 line. We currently have four products in that range. There's the red 4 pre, the red 8 pre, the red 8 line and the red 16 line, which comprise that range. And the key thing that's obviously different with them immediately when we look at the rear panel is that instead of using USB to connect to the interface, they actually use Thunderbolt. So Thunderbolt is Intel's sort of next, well, I say next generation. It's been around for probably eight or nine years at this point. but it's an externalised version of PCI Express, if you remember the cards that slotted into desktop computers. That's a very high speed connection, which means we can get a much faster time from the sound going into the box, into the computer, back around and coming back to the musician. when we're recording, we really want that time to be as short as possible. It can be quite disconcerting if you hear an echo come back on your voice or your guitar if that is quite a long time later. I see there's a couple of questions coming in. I'll just have a quick... Look down competition versus various product categories And falling prices will probably come back to that one at the end. I think in that regard Sorry, if we just got a shot of the top of my head there while I was looking at the screen yeah, we'll come back to that one just at the end and I'll carry on going through the physical product side of things for now and So, yes, the Red Range. So it connects over Thunderbolt, which is a very high speed connection. It's always disconcerting. I'm sure if you've been on a Zoom call recently where you hear an echo coming back while you're talking, it can make it really difficult to carry on with your sentences. And it's no different with music. You fall out of the groove. So having that faster and faster as possible, we're able to get better performances from the musicians involved. And another key part of the Red Range is it connects into something called Dante. Dante is a digital audio network. It uses standard networking technology, standard Ethernet cables, standard Ethernet switches, and allows us to create networks which can span across a facility and sometimes even further with an audio network. And that takes me nicely onto RedNet. So RedNet we see in the rack behind me here. I have three of our microphone preamplifiers, RedNet MP8R, and these are actually being used today as part of the setup for doing the stream to you here. So we have some of our microphone preamplifiers behind me. There's signals going across an Ethernet network to a mixing console, which is just over this side of the room here. And it's then being fed to each of the presenters today over a pair of headphones, which is fed from one of our smaller interfaces there. So RedNet is really aiming at the commercial facility and the broadcast and live sound industry itself. So, what are we doing with it? We're essentially taking lots of channels of audio and being able to send it to lots of places simultaneously, but with very high quality, and crucially, again, as I mentioned before, very high speed, making it better in terms of that listening experience for the musicians. So some customer groups that fall into the product range for that. We'd be talking about educational recording facilities where they have lots of rooms in the studio that they need to tie together and be able to record from multiple places. That's been a really key part of the business for RedNet over the last seven or eight years. Beyond that, we have post-production facilities, so where film and television goes to be mixed in terms of the audio. And we have many facilities in Hollywood and also in Soho in London in particular, where our products are being used to tie together those multiple places, multiple rooms within the environment. Also broadcast, so Tim mentioned that earlier, broadcast being a key part of the market for us. We have customers like NBC Television, NBC News in the United States, BBC in the UK, using these as part of their facilities. The new installation in Cardiff, the BBC, has I think somewhere around 45 or 50 of our small interfaces called RedNet X2P that give us a couple of microphone inputs and a couple of speaker outputs and headphone outputs. You can kind of think of it like the Scarlett 2i2 for the network. So, as we see there, that's a couple of different industries. There's a couple of others to mention as well, like Live Sound. So, I talked before about this MP8R mic pre, and that's actually been out on tour with a number of key bands, most prominent of which would be like the Foo Fighters, for example, where on one of their recent tours, the vocals for Dave Grohl and for the drummer Taylor Hawkins went through RedNet MP8R and they chose it because of its supreme audio quality and it gave it a level of clarity that they weren't able to get from the mic pre's in their existing system. We've also had a lot of systems in use on festivals like Coachella, like British Summertime Festival in Hyde Park, which happens to be alongside the Martin Audio MLA system as well. And also at Glastonbury, for example, where a lot of the stage recordings have been done through RedNet to bring through lots of different signals from multiple sources into one location to be recorded to computer. So that's just a handful of the environments that we find RedNet in. The products themselves, they range from a $400 interface at the small end for doing headphones, which is what we're using today, through to at the high end of the price range on our rack mount products, about $3,500 for a 16-in, 16-out analogue line box. And typically a system will be modular, so they'll build up from a smaller system to a larger one. I mentioned the BBC has 45 or 50 of these in Cardiff. We have universities that have upwards of 65, 70 devices on their campuses and the likes of CCTV in China using over 100 devices in their audio networks as well. So you can see how it can scale from a pretty small setup like we've got in the room today where there's probably about six or seven different devices through to a very large system that spans across a whole campus or facility. So that gives you an idea of RedNet, what it is, and how it's used. And at this point, I'm going to give you a brief demo of how someone might use one of the Scarlett interfaces to record some music. So you're not quite as talented as John was with the synth playing over there, but what I'm going to do is grab my guitar, give you a really brief show of how you'd go about recording that, and I'll show you a few tricks that you can use to then build up the song using nothing more than my guitar and the interface. And I'll also have a bit of a Blue Peter moment where I show you one that I made earlier, because we're obviously a little bit limited on time, but I can show you what I did in about probably an hour and a half, two hours, a couple of weeks ago. So at this point, I'll grab the guitar, and I just have to be a little bit mindful of my lapel mic, so don't bash it. guitar, otherwise it won't sound very nice for you. OK, so what we're going to do is we're going to take my guitar, which I've plugged in with a cable here. So if you see, I've just got a standard guitar cable that I've plugged in. And this is just a small electro-acoustic travel guitar. That cord is then going into the 18i20. So if I did what I said I mustn't do, which is catch the mic. So we come across here, and I've got the cord plugged into, in this case, the 18i20, because it's nice and conveniently on the desk. but I could have used any of these interfaces up here. And in fact, when I was doing this at home, I was using the Scarlett 2i2, which is, as Tim mentions, one of our best-selling products. That comes in at about US$159. So to give you the context of how that was recorded and what you're about to hear, could all have been achieved through, and in fact was through, this Scarlett 2i2 interface there. Okay, so having plugged in, I play a chord. And what happens is we see it show up as a little signal on the front panel. Now, it's a bit small for you here, so we won't see it there, but this is on the hardware. But what I can do is adjust the signal level until it gets to about the right point. When I come across the Pro Tools, I'm going to just close out the red plug-ins. And I'm just going to go to the end of my timeline over here. And we're going to put the cursor here so that we can play in from that point. I'm just going to check that we're getting the guitar. So I should see now on the left-hand side of the screen when I play, we'll get a bit of a green signal going up. And you should now hear my guitar coming through on the stream. Okay, so we see that we've got a good signal level. Next what I'm going to do is just click the record enable button over on the left-hand side there. And then I'm going to hit record. And I'm just going to play a few chords and you'll see what I'd be able to build up pretty quickly. Okay, so just a few chords just to hear what we've got there. Now what I'll do is I'm just going to give it a quick edit so that we take off the very beginning of it. And then I should be able to come up here and just click on loop. And then what's going to happen when I play it back, just turn it off input monitor so we don't hear the guitar coming through anymore, we should hear what I recorded. And just to prove that I'm going to take the guitar off at this point and pop it down. Okay, so if I go across to my mixer now, then what we see here is I've got a channel in for the guitar, and we should hear it just loop back. There we go. So I've got a channel here for my guitar now. I was a little bit different in the way that I played the signal level when I was playing the guitar. I strummed a bit harder in some cases. So we're gonna bring up the compressor. And I've just added it. I've probably put a bit too much on in all reality, but what this does is it just takes away the really loud bits and makes them a bit quieter, so it's a bit more consistent in signal level. Now it sounds a little bit bassy, so I'm just going to open up my EQ. I'm going to make some changes on it here. And hopefully you can hear that over the stream, but we've taken away a little bit of the bassiness to the low end of that sound. but it still sounds like the guitar was recorded in a box. There's no sound, there's no room sound to it. So I'm going to just close this and add some reverb to it. So I open up my reverb and I'm just gonna add that on. And it's a bit difficult to hear the reverb exactly, but if I press stop, you'll just hear a little bit of a tail perhaps. And I've added a delay to give it a bit of echo. So it's fairly subtle, and as I say, you may or may not hear it on the stream. Now I mentioned that I'd do a bit of a Blue Peter moment, so let's go back into my session here. I'm just going to click play, and what we'll hear is actually a bit of recording I did a couple of days ago. And I've done a similar sort of thing. So I've got the guitar on there, I'm then playing back. You can even hear the mistakes that I recorded into it too. Now, I mentioned that everything I'm doing is just going to be with the acoustic guitar that we saw there. I didn't have a bass guitar on hand, so I was actually able to record this bass line with the guitar and then I pitched it down by an octave to make it sound more like a bass. As I say, complete with the mistakes in there too. And, put a little bit of a lead line on there. Again, using a distortion plug-in within the application. but all again recorded from that same guitar. I wanted to add a bit of piano to it, so I plugged my digital piano in, just recorded the output of that. You can start to see how that there for that little chorus has probably taken me about 15 minutes to get to that point, adding a few little plug-ins onto things. I'll just turn it down a bit so you can hear me a bit better. And then what I was able to do is taking the microphone from the pack as well, I can start to add vocal lines to it as well. And in fact there's about 13 or 14 different vocal lines all layered up if I start to undo all of them. And you can start to hear how you can really layer up something quite thick in not a very long amount of time at all. I'm just going to fade that out there. So that gives you an idea of what you could achieve with one of our interfaces with the included software. And the only two additions really to the pack that I needed to make were my guitar, which of course I already have, and the cable for that too to be able to connect it. And yeah, just really quickly able to just layer up a few of the different sounds here. Now just before I conclude there's a couple of other things just to show you which are behind me here We weren't using them specifically for the demo today because we're we're sending it all out through the through the internet to you But were you in the room you'd have been able to hear this through our Adam audio monitors that we've got behind me here so we've got Both sides, we've got the S2V, we've got the T5V above it, so that's their entry level in the T-Series, kind of similar to the Scarlett customer that would take those studio monitors. And we've got the S series there as well, which is used probably in the more professional end of the market. What we don't have, because it's kind of run out of space on the table, was the A series, being the most popular series, I think, at the moment with the Adam Audio range. And that's going to be used, again, with some of the Scarlett customers and some of the Claret and Red customers too. And then finally, just over my shoulder, we've got a couple of the Martin audio speakers here, which we typically use for our events actually inside the building and have done for a few years now since before they became part of our family as well. And these speakers are great for us because they connect onto that same audio network, which means that we can connect them into the mixer that we're using today, the microphone preamplifiers in the RedNet range and the rest of the devices out there. So hopefully that gives you an overview of the Focusrite and the Focusrite Pro product ranges, a little bit about the customer groups and who they're aimed at. And yeah, at this point, I'll probably hand back over to Tim and to Jeremy to take us through the remainder. And there might be a couple more questions for us to have a look at.

Yeah. Let's see here. Can we pop this back up in the chat? It was also the question about the competition, was it? Oh, yeah. Can you talk about the components? Yeah, so Harry's question about competitors. In every one of the product categories we have, we have a different set of competitors. The competition is robust. There's a number of people that make audio interfaces in each one of the different markets. There's a number of people that make synthesizers, a number of people that make different types of controllers. What sets us apart? Well, first off, I think we have to attribute some of it to our brand recognition. The fact that we've been in this business for so long and we have this heritage that comes from this really high quality legacy product portfolio, that really resonates with a lot of our customers. They want to have part of that sound or that legacy in what they do. So that's part of it. But I think the biggest piece really is when you go, and obviously you can't do this, it's one thing we can't do virtually, but if you were able to walk into a music store right now and pick up one of our products, and you could choose any of them, one of our keyboards, one of our audio interfaces, and you were to pick up ours in your left hand and our competitors in your right, you'd be able to notice some pretty marked differences really quick. Our production and build quality is second to none. And I not only say that just as the CEO of the company, but our customers think so as well. If any of you guys know how NPS scores work, our NPS scores for the Focusrite group are around 72. That's incredibly high. Most companies aspire to have something in the high 50s. And it's something that we continue to stretch goals to actually increase every year. How do we do it? Number one, our failure rates for most of our products are less than .01%. So they work, and people actually, that's important to them. The second biggest thing is that no matter which of our products you choose, whether it's one for a beginner or through a professional, we spend an inordinate amount of time on the out-of-box experience. So if you're brand new to this and you've never bought an audio interface before, If you were to open one of our competitors' boxes, you would open it and get basically presented with a whole bunch of little manuals, with a whole bunch of software, and basically something that says, thank you for buying our product, good luck. Our approach is, you plug it into your computer, there's a little icon that shows up, and you double click on that, it takes you right to our webpage, it knows the serial number, it knows the model number, and we ask you some very basic questions. What do you want to do with this? Are you a guitar player? Are you a podcaster? What are you doing? And based on those simple answers, there is a incredibly highly refined journey that customers are taking through to get them up and running, install the right software, expose them to the right tutorial content so that they're up and running and have the information they know. And more importantly, there's a bunch of stuff that they probably don't need to know and don't care about, and we make sure that they circumvent that. And what that does is when you look at the feedback from our customers, they'll talk to you about the quality, they'll talk to you about the Focusrite brand, they'll also talk to you about how quickly they were up and running and how easy it was. And the same holds true for professionals. The RedNet products that Will talked about, professionals don't have time to take one of their boxes, integrate it into their workflow, whether it's a broadcaster or a post-production facility, and have to spend hours to figure out how it integrates or why it's not working. They expect it to work right out of the box, and that's something that we spend an enormous amount of time on it. And it sounds very simple, but to be honest with you, it's one of the main differentiators for us, is we spend a lot of time thinking about that. When you look at our tagline across the company, it's about removing barriers to creativity. And that's really true for not only the beginners, for the people at the top end of the market as well on there. And so I think from that, hopefully I've actually answered both of those questions about differentiation on there. And those are the big things that we really focus on. And we find that when we do that, when we really think about the customer first and whether you're a beginner and the pains you're gonna go through and the frustration you're gonna get or the professional and the job you're up against, making that whole thing easier to do is really one of the big differentiators for us going forward.

Shall I take the prices one as well? Also, is falling prices an issue for each generation of the product, more for less? No. Within the past two years, well, there's a couple of things. Firstly, we're not the cheapest. We're more expensive than many of the competitors. And secondly, within the past year or two, we've actually increased prices. Particularly either where our costs have gone up and we want to protect our margin or where a new generation of product is a significant technological advance over the old one and we feel that a higher price is entirely valid and those prices have stuck. So the demand has been maintained, we've continued to sell product. Perhaps another signal of that is that the gross margin of the group at the time of the IPO in 2014 was of the order of 39. And in the first half of this year, first half of this financial year, it was of the order of 46%. So that's an indication of that.

MR. Very good. Can we go back to the presentation? I think we – if we could – I'll tell you when to stop, John. Go ahead again. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this like this again. This were our half year results You know you can see how we've done.

I think the bigger thing is on the next slide if you don't mind Just if I may actually sorry to interrupt it So a couple of things particularly for people that don't know us Let's just concentrate for a moment and the graphs on the right hand side so up from from FY 09 to 19 that is basically speaking all organic so going from 9 million revenue to well 83 out of that 84 was organic and then in the last year we've bought two businesses one Adam and the other one Martin that we've discussed and in essence the only thing that we're going to be discussing on the numbers really is half one And the trading update that we gave on the 14th of September. So nothing else. But in principle, we did discuss the fact that the revenue was going to be 129 for the full year FY20. We're going to need a bigger y-axis there for that. And then the EBITDA. EBITDA is an important measure for us. We feel ultimately that if you're going to sell a product, you might as well make a profit. And if you're going to make a profit, it might as well convert to cash. Otherwise, there doesn't seem much point. And so when we were talking about the trading update that you can see on the slide there, we discussed the revenue. We discussed the stronger gross margin. We discussed the fact that EBITDA was ahead of market expectations and we discussed the fact that we've got a net cash balance at the end of FY20. So having borrowed some money to buy Martin, we've paid it off. Probably about two years ahead of schedule, I suspect. So that's sort of general ballpark. So those are the things that we discussed that were important. Good. Join us.

Will we see chats or questions if they come in? All right, great. This one's, ah, hey, there's one right there. Has COVID impacted the way you think about the business opportunity as you use new original markets? Are there significant gaps? Yes, I think is the answer there. COVID has been very interesting for us. As we talked about in the trading update, it was a mixed bag. Obviously for Martin, whose business is in the live sound sector and in the install sector, the business fundamentally stopped. for a period of time in late March, February and March. Now it has, as we said in the trading update, we were seeing some early signs of recovery. The great thing about Martin, one of the things that really was keen for us to acquire them was not only the big rock and roll tours and things like that they do, that's a lot of fun to talk about, but the mainstay of their business and a large part of their focus on their R&D is on the installed market. So the house of worship, the theater, Corporate AV, that type of market, which is a really growing market. And those are the areas that we've seen come back. Obviously, as we talked about in the trading update, the home products have really performed incredibly well, as we've seen individuals who are on lockdown and musicians, a lot of our existing customers who are augmenting their kit and doing things that way. So how has it really made us think about the business operationally? I think it's, the way I'd answer that, I think it's really validated a lot of our assumptions in terms of our strategy going forward. We've talked a lot about our go to market routes, about how we started off traditionally using nothing but traditional distribution. And as time has marched on, we've embraced a lot of the larger e-comm players. Amazon is a reseller of ours. There's a number of sort of big continental players across Europe that we maintain a reseller relationship with. We've also developed our own e-comm store inside. and really pointed that really at the places that we felt like were underserved and that we wanted to have more of a direct interaction with the customers. And so to have all that sort of poise those relationships there, it was very interesting when, you know, literally within a couple of weeks time, all the brick and mortar music instrument retailer shops throughout the world closed. We didn't really miss a beat. All of the guys that had the strong econ players, the Amazons, the Tomans, the Sweetwater Sounds of the world, they picked up the slack. So people were able to find our product, which was really good on there. I think it also helped verify in terms of when we think about, you know, I think most of you know that a lot of our products are made in China. Well, one of the things that we had been looking at about a year and a half ago was, well, how do we actually, how do we mitigate any potential risks for that? And this was even before the ideas of tariff wars were coming up. We were getting to a point where we had enough scale where it made sense and it seemed like a viable part of our sort of risk assessment to think about having a manufacturing in another area. It just so happened to coincide with what was going on with the US and China tariff wars. So when we were able to open up a Malaysian plant, to do a lot of our Focusrite production, that seemed like a really good thing to do. And from there, what happened was that it gave us scale to actually have two different things. So when parts of China were cut down during COVID, we had Malaysia that was able to be going on. and carry on production on there. We've also had the mentality that we don't want to deal with a lot of contract manufacturers. We want to deal with a select few that we think are high quality ones. But as importantly, we're important to them. We're a big part of their business. So what that meant was is when this whole thing happened and suddenly there was a huge rush for components. Components were in shortages everywhere, because it wasn't just audio interfaces that were experiencing a boon. All type of things in the house, homework. And there was a lot of competition for this. We were able, through the relationships we had with our contract manufacturers, to acquire not only the parts that we needed for our existing forecast, but as we saw demand doubling and tripling for some months, we were able to actually pick up components for that, which was a pretty unique position. And our contract manufacturers worked really hand in hand as a partner with us on that. So, you know, things like that really helped us validate on there. In terms of operational, I guess the other big thing was, is we obviously in a very short amount of time went to a work from home environment. Now, we'd already made some investments there. We'd put our entire support team on a new 8x8 system. So literally, when we shut the door here in the office, or all the offices, all the guys in our support worldwide were able to go home and plug in and handle customer support calls to the same level. We were sort of at that point sort of in looking at, you know, what do we do in terms of new buildings? We were sort of busting at the seams here in High Wycombe. So I think the work at home thing, it's definitely had its ups and downs, but overall our employee base has done incredibly well with it. Using Zoom, things like that have worked well. We talk about the fact that, you know, in terms of our product roadmap, we didn't really have anything come off the rails. The things that were supposed to be delivered, they still were delivered. on that so you know operationally i think this has given us sort of a real world test to see you know maybe a headquarters or a place where people come every day is not the new norm maybe there's more of a central hub that people come in in different shifts and things like this the idea of people working at home i think we've got a good um a view on where it works well and where it doesn't And then the last one for us on the marketing demand gen side, you know, we saw within about two months time all the trade shows that we normally attend, which is usually a big deal in our industry, you know, where first they were delayed, then they were canceled, you know, and as time marches on, literally as it stands right now, we don't really have any of the big trade shows that our industry counts on that are happening for the majority of next year as well. So that has really given us license to think about, well, those things are not cheap to do, number one. So how do you actually reuse all that bandwidth and some of those resources and dollars to do things, doing more social media things? How do you do something that still has more of a direct customer touch? And I think our teams have done a really great job with that, with a lot of the onboarding sessions and tutorials and things we've done, not only with just our internal staff, but also with a lot of artists as well. Those have done incredibly well and have resonated really well with our customers. So there's a lot about that in terms of on the demand gen side that I think we're taking to point on there. Hopefully that answers that question on there. Do you have any exclusivity with regard to the use of the Dante technology? No, we do not. We're one of many licensees for it. Where we differentiate ourselves on that is where most of our competitors build a point product. So Will took you through all those different products that we make on there. There's a lot of companies that have like for like those individual products. But one thing he did have time to show you on there is the thing that glues all of our Dante products together is our RedNet control software. This is he made it look really easy, it's not. Also, it attaches to people's IT systems, which means a lot of the audio people at universities and facilities get a lot of flack from their IT guys because now you're putting something on their network. So we've made the control software that really glues everything together, gives a really easy user interface, but has all the security and checks and things in there that the IT people want to see. That's a really big differentiator. And then we also, we talked about like these little boxes that we have here. So over and beyond the sort of big rack mount pieces that do the main parts of the integration, we spend a lot of time fleshing out the entire workflow and think about things. Well, you know, for this type of thing, boy, it'd be really nice to have a little headphone box. We're one of the few manufacturers that actually thinks holistically about that and puts it together. Good. Video interface? Sorry, I didn't see that one. Oh, a video interface ever become a market of interest. We've looked at it. Adante actually has a video compression algorithm, and it's something that we look at. But quite honestly, those worlds are still very separate. As many people as thought that the world of audio and video production were going to come together and all be done by one person, that simply has not materialized. Plus, just like audio, the video world has a myriad of different protocols and there's a lot of standards and things like that. So the biggest thing for us is to make sure our audio plays well no matter what format and things they're using. And so by talking to the audio engineers and ensuring that they can say yes to anything, we're good. For now, it's more of a watching brief for us on if we would want to ever integrate video into our products. Jeremy. You're going to get me to cover it now. No, no, no, not this one. Can we jump back to the presentation for a minute? Let's see. Okay, so was there anything in the trading update that we wanted to share?

Let's just look through it. So 129 million up from 84.7. So it includes a full year of Adam. eight months of Martin and 23% of organic growth in Focusrite. OK, so that's all pretty clear. The gross margins. So last year's gross margin was roughly 42 and this year is higher, as we're pointing out there. And as a result, EBITDA is ahead. The net cash I've discussed already. and repayment of assistance received under the coronavirus job retention scheme. That's a point that's written there already. And then probably the final point is full year results announced in late November. So that's a process where the fun audit process which we're going through at the moment that I'm sure a lot of you know.

But happy to answer questions on anything? Well, I was just going to say, I mean, the last statement for me, basically, I think just to give you an idea of where we see opportunity. First off, we absolutely believe there's still a lot of opportunity in our core market. So the number of people that are creating audio at home, whether it's music or podcasting and stuff, continues to grow. So we believe there's a lot that we can do. A big part of it is making sure that we maintain our share in the ones that we have a major stake in. And we continue to grow that and all the ancillary things as well. The things that we're doing to participate more in the whole value chain. So obviously we acquired Atom Audio. The Amplify Studio that we're doing, the fact that we've now got a software platform we can build upon to be sort of that first immersion for anybody that's creating music or any kind of audio and have a subscription service for things like content and all that is very embryonic, but early days, something we definitely want to build off of. We talk about expansion. There's a number of things that we've done over the course of this year in terms of geographic expansion. We continue to invest more in Latin America. We went from basically having a guy who was a contractor who lived in Southern California who went there every once in a while on our behalf. Now we've got four people, two in Mexico, two in Brazil, that are our full-time employees working there. APAC, the same thing. We've had an office in Hong Kong. We now have a team running that out of Australia. We've been doing a lot in terms of our localization for our websites and building up our support there. So there's a lot that we see for geographic expansion. Every time we invest more in local people and local marketing and things like that, the return on it is quite material. So we will continue to do that. And then the other one is the expansion through M&A. So, you know, we certainly don't feel like we're done with that journey. There's a lot of other areas of interest for us, both on the hardware and the software side that we're looking at. Not in any process right now, but we've got a full-time guy, you know, that that's his job, and he's very, very busy. Phil, it's nice to see Phil on the call. Awesome. It'd be nice to hear his comments on the future of Focusrite. Phil, can you unmute?

Hi. Yeah. Hi. How are you? Welcome everybody to our show. I wasn't expecting to speak. The future of Focusrite. Well, we've got great organic growth opportunity with our existing brands and also, of course, M&A opportunity. This is something that's very much on our agenda to find great businesses that fit our profile, really, that suit our market, that are complementary with the brands we already own. So I see the future of Focusrite continuing to develop. We have a great three-year plan for our existing brands. And as I say, we look to complement that with further acquisitions in the coming years. I don't know, Tim, if you want to elaborate on that.

Yeah, no, I think you pretty much nailed it, Phil. Again, the central theme for us, regardless if it's the Focusrite brands or Adam and Martin Audio, is really about removing barriers to creativity. And again, that's from beginners to professionals. And I think what we've learned on this journey is that if we really focus on that, that making sure that we're bringing highly differentiated things that are easy to use and that really solve problems for our customers. Things like the NPS scores, the increases in market share, and then naturally the revenue and the EBITDA and all the bottom line things, they naturally occur on there. So everything that we do is very much centered around there. Everything has to obviously hit an ROI, but those are the type of things that we're looking at. You're not gonna see Focusrite Venture out of the world of audio. You know, we're not going to start suddenly making, you know, video game controllers or something. That's not what we do. It's not what we're passionate about. And we don't believe we need to. We think that the things that the market that we're in, there's plenty of opportunity for growth on here, both organically and through more acquisition.

And then Phil also added a comment for everyone, which I'm not sure whether you can all see it. For a window on our world, there is a virtual trade show, AES, which is the Audio Engineering Society, going on this month at aesshow.com.

Tim, Jeremy, Phil and team, I'd like to say on behalf of Investec and all the guests on the call, fantastic presentation, fascinating. Look forward to following you over the coming weeks and months. Thank you very much.

Excellent. Thank you. Appreciate your time. All right. Have a great day, everyone. All right.

And you guys.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.