Asmallworld AG (ASWN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. I am Zain Richardson, the Chief Executive Officer of ASMALLWORLD, and I would like to welcome everyone to this earnings call for the first half of 2026. We will be live streaming these results via Zoom while also sharing some accompanying slides to add further detail to our half-year report, which will be published early this morning on our website. This presentation and the recording of the call will be available at asmallworldag.com. [Operator Instructions] So just suffice to say, I am now nearly 18 months into my role as Chief Executive Officer of ASMALLWORLD. And I wanted to really share with this group, but as the team know, I'm very proud of the progress we've been making on our transformation journey. In terms of the agenda for the morning, today, I'll be sharing an overview of our H1 2026 performance across our key metrics that we share in each of our earnings calls. I will then cover some of our key initiatives and the strategic priorities for the business and give an update on our progress against them since we last shared as part of our end of year 2025 report and presentation. I'll then go through the segment reporting to show how those segments have been performing and then looking at the consolidated financials and financial statements for the business for the first half of 2026 in comparison to the same period last year. I'll then share our outlook for the full year 2026 from a financial perspective, and then we will close with some time for some brief Q&A. So with that, I'll move us to the overview of our H1 2026 performance. In terms of some highlights for this audience, I would say that our strategic transformation is well underway, and we've been able to accelerate in 2026 in multiple different ways, both in terms of broadening our core offering, both in memberships and services as well as more importantly, strengthening our profit-generating capabilities across the business. A couple of key highlights. We grew our member base relative to H1 2025 by 23%. And at the end of June 2026, we stand at just under 135,000 members within our member base, which is fantastic to see. As I've shared before, this member base is a mix of free and paid tiers across our different business units, and we continue to grow both the free and the paid side, and we're excited for that growth and the opportunity it presents. We continue to accelerate our growth in -- particularly in our services business. As I've shared on previous earnings calls, we had been very heavily concentrated in the membership side of the business and a strategic priority of mine and the Board has been to really diversify that revenue base and also cost -- sorry, excuse me, profit opportunity across both memberships and services. And we've seen great progress against that, specifically in our travel business, which saw over 3x profit growth year-over-year since 2025. Continuing in that vein, we developed and launched a new global paid concierge service with the strategic aim of both diversifying our membership offering, but also increasing our revenue streams for each member that we serve. And I'll share more in the presentation of our progress so far with that service and what that means for the business. And then as you know, we -- our focus has really been about diversifying and broadening our ecosystem of travel partners, both the partners that we use as suppliers within our travel business, but also those travel partners that provide benefits, access, currency status, et cetera, to our membership portfolio. And we were successful in launching 2 new global travel partners, which I'll share more of. And I'm pleased to share that we are at signature point on 2 more, which I'll be thrilled to share in the coming weeks. Moving on to the KPIs. So what are the key performance metrics for the business. As I mentioned at the start of this presentation, we are on a journey of transformation. I'm very pleased to see that the execution of that transformation has continued to deliver growth in EBITDA over the half year since I joined at the end of half year -- in the middle of half year 2025. We continue to also grow our member base, as you see, 23% growth in membership and 11% growth in our EBITDA versus half year 2025. This was against a backdrop of a discontinuation of noncore projects, together with obviously the conflict in the Middle East impacting some of our membership sales. So you'll see there a 37% decrease H1 2025 versus H1 2026 in our top line revenue. To explain this and give more context, at the end of 2025, we took a hard look at our different business activities and our revenue streams. And we asked ourselves, what really makes sense for ASMALLWORLD to be doing as a business? What matters most to our members and what will allow us to accelerate our transformation journey and increase long-term sustainable profitability. As you will have heard on previous earnings calls, since joining the business in 2025, I have gone through a process of identifying noncore activities where low to no margin projects product services has accumulated over time in the business, which were taking organizational focus and also were not accretive to margin in the short or long term. So there were some difficult decisions. I think I'll get into that in more detail in the presentation. We exited projects that I understand had believed to have great potential in the future for the business, but we were a drain on resources and were not appropriate for the business size and position that we are in today. We also took a strategic review of our technology platforms and people and also personnel across the business. So what does that mean? That means that we made conscious decisions to exit businesses that were supporting our top line revenue, but long term, a drag on both gross and operating margin and ultimately, EBITDA. So what you'll see and then will come through in the financial section of the presentation is that we have taken a business that was around 4% EBITDA in first half of 2025, now over 8% in 2026. And again, my focus is, as I say, to continue this transformation journey, and I'll share more in the presentation, while also continuing to ensure that the business is profitable and sustainably profitable for the long term. Now looking at some of those key initiatives, which have driven the results that we've seen today, which we are proud of, as I say, to grow EBITDA significantly against the backdrop of declined -- a lower top line revenue base is something that as a business is not easy and something that we are, as a whole organization, very proud of being able to drive. As I mentioned and as I've shared since I joined the business, my focus with ASMALLWORLD, I've been a member since 2007. I know the potential this business has, and I know what the opportunity looks like. And together with my team, I know how to build that differentiated profitable growth engine, which ASMALLWORLD can be. The 4 areas here you see on the slide are not new to those individuals who've joined me on previous earnings calls. But what you'll see is some of the renewed focus in those different areas. So what I'll do is I'll briefly go through what those 4 strategic priorities are and why. And also then I'll dive deep into each one of those and share some highlights on how we are making progress and have made progress in the first half of 2026 against those strategic priorities. First one is around accelerating scale. What does that mean? That means that we need to grow as a business, but not only grow our total member base, which we have been doing, as you saw in previous half year and annual reports, and we have grown our member base significantly. But more than that, the strategic focus now for the business and has been since the beginning of the year is scaling our paid memberships and services and ultimately driving share of wallet. What does that mean? We know where our members are traveling, what they're searching for, what their needs are. And I want ASMALLWORLD to be that trusted brand for luxury travel and lifestyle services that our members come to not just to get recommendations, but to book either themselves or on their behalf, and we've made great strides against that objective, ultimately, to be I hate to use the word one-stop shop, but the walled garden as tech companies talk about, but these are the analogies I use with my team to say we should be offering an amazing service, best-in-class product and the most convenient way to book for those different services and products they're looking for. And as I said, we're making great progress against that. We need to continue to expand our product and partners. When I joined the business, there were 2 key membership partners in terms of currency, and that was Emirates and Lufthansa Group Miles & More. As you know, I've consciously focused on expanding that portfolio of strategic partners to increase relevance and resonate with more members with more member needs across the globe. but also this means allowing us to tap into ecosystems of other high net worth individuals to offer our particular membership services and products, and I'll share more about that in the slides that will follow. So the key objective here is to make sure we don't want to, and we don't need to become Expedia. We are a curated platform for the best of the best, which we, through our own expertise, but also through the 20-plus years of member sharing recommendations, requests, discussions, we know what our members want and need, and we can go out and secure those particular partners, benefits access experiences that no other platform or business can today. Third point here, continue to grow within travel services. So the travel business, we know, and as many of you know, my background is in luxury hospitality and travel. We know that, one, this is something that our members love to do. And on future calls, I can share some of our consumer insight work that we completed about members and how frequently they travel because even for some of our team, we're pleasantly surprised at both the frequency of leisure travel, but also the size of spend on those trips, which is very exciting for us. Why is that exciting? Because we believe and we know because we see it in the data that ASMALLWORLD is perfectly positioned to be that service partner to find for our members the best of the best experiences and the travel they want to go to around the world and we paid commissions by our supply partners where we have -- where we are preferred partners with all of the best consortium hotel brands, cruise companies in the world to give whether it's upgrades, credits when they stay, other really unique benefits to our members when they travel. So not only can we provide the best of the best, we can also provide those unique benefits when our members book with us. So this is tapping into that point I raised earlier about driving share of wallet. So that's why we will continue to grow in travel services, number one. But also number two, it is fundamentally higher margin and it's scalable. So our ASMALLWORLD Collection, which is a self-booking closed user platform where members can book our VIP rates with certain hotels. that has great scale potential, and I'll share some updates on some of the great improvements we've made on that platform in addition to, obviously, our managed travel business. Lastly, prioritize profit. It's a no-brainer, obviously, that we should always be prioritizing profit. But important to say, this was a very important -- it was very important to me when I joined this business and I start to look at how we operate, how we make money, where we spend that there was a huge opportunity in terms of driving operational efficiencies within the business. And so this strategic priority of prioritizing profit is really the filter through which we say, is this something we should be doing or not doing? Is this something we can credibly deliver to our members at a quality level and also do it profitably. And this filtering and this front-of-mind objective is critical for us both myself, but also for all of my team as we think about all of the opportunities that we have on the table. And this fourth priority around operational and efficiency and driving profit has been one of the key drivers or reasons why we took that long hard look at some of the projects and initiatives that were revenue drivers, but ultimately low to no margin ultimately on the gross and net side, which could ultimately end up becoming loss-making for the business. And then most important for me and most exciting for me actually across all of these initiatives is a cross-organizational project and program of work, which is about unifying our data, transforming our technology and accelerating AI across the business. Internally, we call this Project Atlas, and it touches every part of the business. I'll share more later in the presentation about our progress in this area. But as some of you will know, when I joined the business, having been a member of ASMALLWORLD for nearly 20 years, that is very exciting to me that we have for many of our members, nearly 20 years' worth of data on discussions they've interacted with, questions they've asked about where they should travel, bookings they've made, bookings they haven't made, but they've tried to make. So this is really an exciting part for me and this acceleration investment in technology to transform the business and accelerate growth is critical, and we've made good progress in the half year. Firstly, looking at accelerating scale. I wanted to share some key updates around our membership development. When I joined the business last year, we had 3 core membership products across a couple of different partners. We had also been building the free tier, which had launched at the end of 2024, and that has supported a strong pipeline of member growth. What's great to see is we go through -- we have strict verification processes to make sure that any free members who join before they can truly access the platform, they go through a verification process. We really -- we've seen significant growth in the verified free members in particular, which is obviously a very strong indicator that they have in terms of engagement with the platform that they have -- that they are looking to ASMALLWORLD for opportunities to engage with our services, memberships, et cetera. However, most importantly for me and for the business overall, we have now refocused since 2025 on the revenue-driving paid memberships. And for that, we have conducted in the first half of this year, a complete overhaul of our back-end tech architecture. We've moved away from completely static memberships whereby you would go through one particular user flow with one particular membership. And as you see on the slide here, we have launched a strategy which will allow for more flexible memberships and to increase customization. The first phase of that is around add-ons, as you'll see at the bottom of the slide there. So if you purchase one type of membership with one partner, do you want to add XYZ from another partner, whether it's concierge service, miles, et cetera. And we started to test those incremental add-on pieces. We're deep in the work on the next phase of starting to really customize the flexibility both for our own platform, but also for external partners to really make the memberships as flexible as possible. Ultimately, there's several reasons for this. Firstly, this allows us to know what sells. We can have a view and we can look at engagement and we can look at clicks, et cetera. But ultimately, what really matters is what will people open their wallet for. So this is great from that standpoint. It also allows us to add new partners quickly and allows the business to add new partners quickly to the platform in a way that historically, it required a whole tech build to build a new membership variant. We also, as I mentioned, on the B2B2C side, which is critical to -- as we scale the business, -- as many of you know, at the end of last year, we signed a partnership with Klarna, the large financial services company, whereby their top-tier members get ASMALLWORLD Premium membership, which we're seeing increasing traction, which is fantastic. So we've seen 3x growth in our Klarna paid members during the period. But what this new flexible membership bundling work that's now underway will allow us to, regardless of the partner, whether it's Bank X in Italy or real estate company Y in Chile, we can create customized bundles of memberships with tapping into our incredible roster of benefits, savers, access, currency across the travel and lifestyle ecosystem in a way that nobody else can and build bespoke packages of memberships that will be -- will allow those particular institutions to drive loyalty among their members by offering these benefits. As I mentioned earlier, we launched our ASMALLWORLD Concierge business, which was a strategic decision to expand an area of the business that actually some people know, some people don't know that we've been operating for over 20 years. Our business unit called World's Finest Clubs has been around for over 20 years, and it has been securing restaurant and dining restaurant and nightlife reservations for its members, our members, as I say, for over 20 years. Our ASMALLWORLD Concierge business was launched very recently in Q2, building on that expertise from our World's Finest Clubs membership model, but also using the commercial structure, our positioning and our operating model that we've learned over that time as well as, of course, leveraging our existing travel supply partners. So whether that's hotels, whether that's rent -- car rental companies, DMCs, private jet organizations, et cetera. But again, it's early days, but we have -- I'm excited to share that we have already booked several hundred thousand euros worth of travel for the first joining members. The focus for this business is to move away from a single revenue stream. Our World's Finest Clubs is a subscription -- like our other memberships is a subscription-based model, whereby you pay your subscription and then our team book your restaurant and nightlife reservations during your membership year. Moving and adding a concierge service to this allows us to take a greater share of our members' wallet for them to trust us with other needs that they have in their day-to-day lives, obviously, getting the impossible to get dining reservations, which we saw being able to get first week dining registration reservations at the hottest new Italian restaurant in a brand-new hotel in London that I'm sure many of you are aware of, beach club reservations, but also help planning that birthday getaway or car service to a work trip. This unlocks more areas of spend that we know our members need and trust us to deliver as well as obviously opening up other higher value commission streams for the business. The exciting thing for me is that we have, as I mentioned before, 20 years of transactional behavioral preferences data, obviously, alongside 20 years of user-generated discussions, recommendations on which the original ASMALLWORLD business has always been based which allows us to not only be a concierge platform that is recommending what everybody would do on TripAdvisor or an AI bot, which only has access to public sources, would likely recommend the most generic thing to do. We really have that ability both on knowing our members, having like-minded members, having shared with us their preferences, behaviors and bookings. And this really positions us perfectly against the backdrop that we all know and are seeing of AI slot hallucinations to not only provide curated and trusted and authentic recommendations but also because of our travel business, we can also complete those bookings with our long-standing supplier relationships to get the best services and the best rooms, upgrades, et cetera, for our members, but also at the highest commission levels because of our relationships. We're very excited about this part of the business. I mentioned about accelerating our growth of our strategic partner portfolio. So expanding what the benefits our memberships come with and what are the status levels, access currency that members can access as part of their membership. So I just wanted to share here on the -- a little bit of the time line of ASMALLWORLD's journey in terms of its partner portfolio. So Miles & More, with Lufthansa Group, which is still one of our largest partners in terms of our memberships with Miles & More, started in 2018. 2022, the business added Emirates and also took a 10% stake in Global Hotel Alliance, which is their large program is DISCOVERY. They had not -- that then plateaued. I joined the business in 2025 with the mandate from the Board to really accelerate our roster of strategic partners, both on the benefits and currency side, but also on the distribution side. And so we've made great progress with the team in the last 18 months since I joined. So as you know and as we've shared, we added Cathay Pacific to expand our reach in Asia in 2025. We added Turkish Airlines at the very, very end that we launched at the beginning of 2026, which has been great, particularly given challenges with some of the Middle East corridors of travel. And then we added several distribution partners, but obviously, the most significant was Klarna, which is both a distribution partner in terms of Klarna members having access to our membership portfolio, but it's also an acquisition channel for ASMALLWORLD because those top-tier Klarna Max cardholders do automatically get ASMALLWORLD Premium as part of their benefits. So we -- as I said earlier in the presentation, we are seeing great growth in the number of ASMALLWORLD Premium members that are coming to us directly from Klarna. We were thrilled to announce in the first half of 2026, a global partnership with Marriott Bonvoy, obviously, largest hotel company with greatest range of hotel product available. So now our members can purchase memberships with ASMALLWORLD including various denominations of Marriott Bonvoy points, and we can help them recommend where to spend, which obviously helps us, in particular, in the North American market. We also signed a partnership with The Bicester Collection, which is a luxury retail company operating 13 villages around the world, serving many million -- I think I believe it's 50 million customers annually. So we have built a partnership around their very top tier spender, their top 2% and our top-tier members as well and also a mutual recognition and top-tier Bicester members get ASMALLWORLD Premium membership and then our top-tier ASMALLWORLD members get benefits when they go to any of The Bicester Collection, luxury retail, Villages, personal shopping, et cetera. So an exciting new partnership vehicle for us to drive both, obviously, sales of our memberships, but also acquisition into our portfolio. As I say, I've got -- we are very far into discussions with 2 new global strategic partners, which I will be excited to share in the coming weeks. What's been very exciting, and I'll share more with our -- in the section about technology is some of the enhancements we've made for Miles & More memberships, in particular, have generated some of the great sales we've had this year. Thirdly, I shared that travel is a continued focus in the business, both growing the Travel Services segment, but also building out that pipeline of future growth within the business. The most important value for our travel business is it's scalable. It's required by our members. We know that there is a high level of resilience to high net worth travel spend. There is redirection at times of challenge as we have seen with the conflict in the Middle East. We've seen slowing growth in terms of the value of our stays H1 2025 versus H1 2026, so up 6.5% in terms of stays in the value of the stays in the period, which is, as I say, low, largely due to that disruption. But at the same time, as I mentioned earlier in the presentation, the Collection, which is the self-booking tool for exclusive rates and inventory at a curated collection of 2,000 hotels, so not every hotel. We're not trying to be a Booking.com on Expedia. Every hotel that sits on our platform is required to provide benefits to our members without cost when they stay with them, be that free breakfast, be that credits for the spa, be that late checkout, early check-in, et cetera. So in addition to continuing to curate the portfolio and look at which destinations are trending for members and which -- where we see an opportunity to add new product, We, in the first half of 2026, made a strategic decision when we saw the growth in luxury all-inclusive. And this is -- historically, that was sort of a contradiction to say luxury and all-inclusive. However, we have seen in recent times, a real emergence of all-inclusive in the luxury space done in a certain way, which is increasingly attractive to our members and to luxury travelers. So we made a strategic decision to invest in adding all-inclusive properties onto our platform. And we believe we are the first platform of this type to be able to offer luxury all-inclusive where members can book at those particular hotels. Obviously, that means that greater choice for members in terms of what type of whether they want. stay just the room, half or indeed all-inclusive, but also from a business standpoint, obviously, each -- the daily rate at all-inclusive properties because it's all included substantially higher than typical rooms. And so we expect this will drive significant future commission growth. On commissions, this has been a commission tracking and processing has been a focus for the business in the first half of 2026. We've introduced new tools, systems and processes in order to identify bookings that happened, commissions have been paid, where they've come from paid, not paid, et cetera. So an extensive piece of work and new automation tools that will allow us to both find, chase, track and reconcile those commissions has been implemented in the first half of -- and results are extremely promising, as you see on the slide. The results so far means that we've had a 2x growth in the commissions which have been paid versus the same time last year for our Collection because they're all well and good to drive growth in bookings, we need to make sure, obviously, we are then subsequently paid when the stay happens and we're making great progress there. Then thinking about travel agency operations, we have seen over 2/3 growth in the revenue from our adviser booked to travel. And when I say adviser book travel, I mean that's where somebody is in contact with a person, a travel adviser travel design on our team across one of our membership businesses and has booked travel, be it flight, be it cruise, be it safari, et cetera. This is a fast-growing part of the business as well in addition to the online part of the business. And we focus this part of the business really on higher-margin experiences. including Safari and Luxury Cruise. We are relatively new in this space in the last 3 or 4 years. However, we continuously win Virtuoso Awards. So Virtuoso, as many as you know, are the largest consortia and affiliation of luxury travel providers globally. And in the first quarter -- in first half in the second quarter of 2026, we were awarded the Top Producing Cruise agency in Continental Europe, which was fantastic to see. And at the Virtuoso Awards last week, we've won another award for our production revenue produced in the cruise category for our members and with our suppliers. So we know, obviously, with the launch of many of the hotel brands now moving into the cruise space, this is an increasingly relevant category and whereas many luxury travelers would not ever have considered a cruise as a vacation option. This is changing completely, particularly with the movement of the hotel brands into the cruise and yachting space. And so the fact that we are already recognized as both top producers, but also experts in the space means that we will continue to double-down on this to drive revenue going forward. And then lastly, the -- I mentioned around profitability. So I think some of the key messages here in terms of what we've been doing to focus around profitable growth and long-term profitable growth for the business versus just top line perspective, there's kind of 3 areas. One is obviously cost management and cost discipline. Second one is around commercial focus, ultimately to grow that top line. And then the last one is around simplification and focus, again, around focus. So as I mentioned earlier, we have conducted a strategic review in the first half of 2026, both in terms of headcount, teams, how teams work together, how teams collaborate, but also our technology investments. This led to an over 20% reduction in headcount cost, which you'll see in our annual report. But more importantly, that delivered better integrated teams, closer collaboration and better position to help us accelerate that transformation. So fewer layers, better direct contact between different teams and better focus and prioritization of what we work on. We also, as I mentioned, discontinued low-margin projects that had been in the business for a long time and to really focus the business on margin accretive activities. So as I said, one of the filters around can we deliver this credibly and a quality level, do our members want it? And then can we do it profitably? And there are many instances where there was something that -- and I said to my team, no sacred cows in this. We need to take a really hard look at what makes sense for the business and what we ultimately can do profitably. And that led to some decisions whereby we exited certain projects and activities within the business. ASMALLWORLD has always had cache and mystique about it. It's one of the reasons, I think, probably honestly, why I joined back in 2007. However, it has not had the strongest focus on sales and marketing. So as part of the work in the first half of this year, I created a new business development team and their focus is on obviously adding new partners, which they've successfully done, but also really push external distribution opportunities. So where -- which partners can we plug into and offer them our portfolio of memberships, both stand-alone or integrated into their own member benefits or customer base, and we've seen great results so far. I also restructured the marketing team, and we hired a new Head of Marketing, who joined 1.5 months ago from a start-up D2C background, which we're very excited about, again, with a focus on really charging that commercial engine because we know we have a great member base who are super engaged and we've got great products and services to offer. It's a case of how do we communicate that correctly, both internally and externally and make sure that our members are educated about the different value propositions that we have in the business and make it clear for them. And then on that, which is important is we -- when I joined the business, I found a complicated business with multiple business lines, multiple activities. And as I said, I took a hard look at what we were doing, did it make sense for the business generally, did it make sense for the business right now? And we made decisions with the Board on exiting unprofitable projects in order to obviously improve our margin, but also more importantly, to give time and bandwidth and focus back to the teams to make sure that we were prioritizing and focusing the business on what really matters. We have exited some hospitality projects while also retaining contractual upside in terms of incentive fees and payments that will be made in later stages of those contracts, which we have negotiated as ASMALLWORLD, we've retained them. So exiting from the short-term cost and sort of resource strain, but also retaining that future upside when the project is underway. And then also consolidating teams and business units to reduce those silos I mentioned. So we have -- we had and we still have separate businesses. But my view is without getting too matrix, we need to reduce the silos and unnecessary complexity, and there's been great progress against that. Now thinking about our technology, and I mentioned about data unification, analytics and automation. So I shared that we have a project called Project Atlas, which is a cross-company program of work, and this is really, firstly, defining our data and make sure we understand it and where it lives, creating a plan of how we unify it across different parts of the business in order to integrate AI and ML tools that will help us process things more quickly in order to drive a better member experience and also cross-sell, upsell and provide better revenue but obviously both save on the cost, but ultimately scale our revenue as well. And most importantly, of course, future-proof the platform going forward. So in the first half of this year, we've had key sort of stage gates or milestones in that process. First was obviously an audit. So we looked at our existing technology estate, where do we function today, where does data lie across different parts of the business, where would we need to connect, what data is not connected. We looked at -- we did deep dives by function, not just on the commercial and member side, but also looking at the operational side of the business, finance, et cetera. And then we also identified key off-the-shelf automation tools that could really help us save time or increase revenue most quickly. So one example of that, as I mentioned, about automated commission tracking and processing for Collection. We tested that. It's integrated. It's working great. We did the same within HR as many of you know, lots of HR departments and lots of department, any department ends up doing workarounds on Google Sheets, et cetera. We launched certain tools, both in terms of expense tracking, leave tracking, et cetera, that the business hadn't had to automate those, save time across the whole business, make it cleaner, more accurate data. And then very importantly, we had a test of how we might use AI in our development capabilities going forward, specifically for a campaign that we ran with Lufthansa Group Miles & More just before the end of the period, so June and July of this year. So we used AI to build different versions of our pages to introduce a level of tracking of abandoned cart, of webinar lead generation collection and collection of data for webinar lead generation. lots of, let's say, learnings to quickly test of what might matter and what will help us to drive revenue in future campaigns. And we're extremely pleased as was the partner that this was one of the most successful campaigns we've ever run in the history of the company. And this is going back 3 or 4 years. And this was enabled by AI in the development of the campaign marketing and merchandising. So that was a great proof of concept. And so moving into the second phase, we took some of those learnings and then added other proofs of concept in different parts of the business to understand where automation and AI can really accelerate growth on the revenue and profit side, but also dramatically reduce manual processes that we have today. So -- and then also around help in aiding decision-making. So as with every business I've worked in, it's often hard to get access to the right data and trust the data, et cetera. So we've gone through a process to have direct connectivity to our underlying databases into a reporting tool to start to be able to report on member behaviors, business unit transaction reporting, all of those kind of things, which didn't exist in the business before and as a former management consultant and a semi-reform data monkey, being able to access so much of this data in visual format in trend format is huge. And this was a massive undertaking in the second half of -- sorry, the first half of 2026, which will allow us to make -- more quickly make those decisions going forward. And we've also started to connect our CRMs across different parts of the business to really have that. I'm reluctant to say single customer view. We do have that in certain parts of the business, but not everywhere. And so we're on that journey. Next step, second half of the year going forward is around integrating those POCs that have started to work into the core operations of the business. We have a new data model and architecture design that we will start to build out, and we're going to start to integrate other core tools into the business to, again, really use automation and AI, not in the, let's say, way that it's often described in the media in terms of generative or even to some extent, agentic AI, but really use it to accelerate processes within the business to -- and also help decision-making as well as serve our members better. We've restructured the tech team. So we've had a 50% reduction in the tech costs, which some of it came through in the first half of the year and some of it will come through in the second half of the year. And also that will impact our future years amortization charges, which we can go through in the finance section because it was time to rightsize the technology team and also make sure we are best placed to take advantage of the incredible efficiencies and opportunities that automation and AI can provide. But most importantly, allow us to have trusted data at the member level. With that, I'll move on to segment reporting. So firstly, looking at our revenue from our subscription. So as I mentioned, we saw reduced demand from one particular airline partner, Emirates, partly as a result of the conflict in the Middle East, also because of reduction of our sales in one particular membership category. This reduction in this impact when we saw geopolitical events or external factors really underscored for me the critical importance of diversifying our partner base. That's why we targeted and negotiated and launched new partnerships with Cathay Pacific, with Turkish Airlines, now with Marriott and would also be, as I say, adding other partners because being overly reliant on this particular business vertical means that things can change very quickly. There was some compression on EBITDA margin because of the investment to launch some of our new partners, which we believe will improve over time in terms of that return to that 5% -- roughly 5% margin as they start to ramp up. But obviously, as we saw a decline in some of the existing products, we -- there's some still fixed costs in the business, which meant that we had a slightly lower EBITDA margin. As I say, the decrease in the subscription business was also related to some conscious decisions we made to discontinue parts of our business. The services business is really the driver of the transformation across ASMALLWORLD. And I've mentioned this a few times on this call, but also on previous calls that the future of ASMALLWORLD is really about being a trusted brand and service to our members. We will continue to have membership revenue in the business, and that's the way in, in terms of becoming a member of ASMALLWORLD. -- but the future and the long-term profitability and increasing profitability is around once you're a member with us and you trust us and then you see all of the incredible products, partners, services that we can offer you, you dedicate a greater amount of your spend to us, which enables us ultimately to secure that higher margin and higher levels of commissions. So we saw some decline in the top line on our services business. As I said, it's because we discontinued certain hospitality projects, but also decided to end certain long-standing events that were nonprofitable for the business. However, at the same time, we saw nearly a 3x growth in our EBITDA margin for our services business and a huge margin growth, which was expected because we know that this part of the business is higher margin. And as we scale and accelerate here, this is -- this will continue to drive the weighted margin across the whole business, which obviously, as you saw, and you'll see here in the consolidated financials, is significantly higher than it has been for many, many years. So we had a lower sales, as I mentioned, due to exiting lower margin nonstrategic projects, impact of lower sales of some of our Emirates Skywards miles-based products. Our direct expenses reduced by 56%. So obviously, at a much greater reduction than our revenue reduction, and that is because -- not just because we didn't sell as many memberships, but because those activities that had been driving revenue had been at such a low margin that we were able to reduce those direct expenses associated and ultimately drive both higher gross margin but also a higher net margin. Following our strategic review of technology and people, we were able to reduce personnel and R&D costs by over 20% each, again, to accelerate the growth in the business, not just to save costs, landing at 8.5% or 8.4% EBITDA margin versus 4.9% last year. We saw some creep up in our operating expenses, largely that was due to some extraordinary costs connected to exiting some of those projects in the first half of the year, which we expect to even out in the second half of the year. You'll see a higher amortization charge in 2026 first half versus 2025. This is resulting from the capitalization of our R&D in '24 and '25 related to our membership change and rebranding and the reduction of the amortization period from 5 years to 3 years in 2023. So while we will continue to see a large amortization charge in the coming period, this is obviously a noncash impact on the business. And our financial result, our net negative financial result of 5,000 was really driven by fluctuating exchange rates, but was basically breakeven. Our net result ultimately was driven by a tax provision that we have because our ASMALLWORLD travel business has been so strong that we have to have a higher tax provision within that business. So effectively, we are -- aside from that income tax provision, the business, the EBT or ordinary result was breakeven, which we're very proud of against a significant decline on our top line. Looking at our balance sheet, our cash position improved because of better working capital management and time management of the working capital. Our short-term receivables decreased because we settled some of those balances. We increased some of our prepayments and accrued income because of supply payments that we made, which is related to the higher demand for travel services and events and travel, which is great. And our intangible assets decreased in the period for 2 reasons: one, lower capitalization because of the strategic review of our technology and decision to reprioritize investment in the platform. And so we weren't capitalizing as much this period and also continued large amortization charge. So our intangible assets, which are effectively driven by our tech investment reduced during the period. So -- and then on the liability side, in total, our current liabilities are up versus the end of last year. However, this is driven by the reclassification of our loan, which we have -- which was used in 2022 for the purchase of our stake in Global Hotel Alliance and the this reclassification comes into short-term financial liabilities because it's coming due in March 2027. Just as an update on that, we are in active conversations with several partners and institutions on either the extension or refinancing of that loan before it comes due. So net of that $2.4 million, actually our current liabilities decreased year-on-year -- or sorry, not year-on-year from end of year 2025 to half year 2026. And then in terms of the increase on payables, this meant we had, as I mentioned earlier, a slightly different promotional calendar. And so we had above average balance of payables for air miles in particular, at the 30th of June '26. These payables were then settled in Q3 of 2026. And then short-term liabilities, as I say, were related to the reclassification of the bank loan, but we have continued to, as I say, make improvements and reduce our current liabilities position. On the cash flow side, our net result was negative, as I mentioned, partly due to exiting nonstrategic projects. But as you'll see here, we also had a charge, which we'll get to in the second part of the statement related to our capital increase a few years ago. Our position improved in terms of short-term receivables because we were able to sell more of the receivables that were sitting there on our balance sheet, but this was offset by higher prepayments for future travel arrangements, which means that our operating cash flow actually improved in the period versus half year 2025, which is good to see, again, a further indication that this transformation is on track and working. We had an increase in payables because we had a great promotion and we sold a lot, which is good. But then our liabilities decreased because we recognized -- the recognized revenue from former periods was reduced. And then the second part, the cash flow. So we had lower investment in intangibles because of lower capitalization of development costs as well as, as I said, the strategic review of our technology team. And so we cut some of that team down. So ultimately, our ongoing capitalization charges will continue to be lower. And then we had one extraordinary -- an extraordinary charge related to the capital increase, which was a levy, which came due in 2026, but still landing in a net closing cash balance position higher than 2025, but also higher than the beginning of -- since 2025, beginning of '25, the highest cash position. Moving to the outlook for the full year. So our transformation will continue through the remainder of the year. We are revising down our net sales expectation. You'll see that our net sales for the year -- for the half year were around 6 million. And so we expect for the full year between $12 million and $14 million. This is, as I said, as a result of the strategic reprioritization of business that is margin accretive, not loss-making or even breakeven. We're revising our membership growth expectation upwards. So instead of 135,000 to 140,000, we expect to be between 140,000 to 150,000. So we are not investing heavily in -- we are not investing in our free membership growth, but we can -- this continues to happen, and we're continuing to build that pipeline. So it's great to see that our members are still engaged within the business. And then ultimately, our EBITDA margin will remain unchanged, that guidance that we shared at the beginning of the year. So again, we continue to see a picture where we will continue to work on increasing and strengthening our profit margin and increasing focus, discontinuing things that are not the right thing for the business, making those choices and accelerating the business towards the transformation journey that it's on. With that, I thank everybody for their time. We've got a couple more minutes. And so I will open to questions. Let me hope I can see questions if there are questions.

A couple of questions, and I'll read them out, and then I'll go through them. So first question is, can you elaborate on what businesses were discontinued? Yes, I can. So we had some large -- a couple of different areas. One, within hospitality, there were management contracts and asset management -- so management of hotels and asset management contracts on behalf of owners that we had signed in previous years, which were generating -- some of them were generating retainer fees, some of them were not. They had baked in future incentive fees into the contracts, but those were obviously connected to the development of those hotels. So that meant there was great upside in future years for those particular projects, which we have retained in the exiting of those arrangements. But in the short term, was a drain on both cash and profit and also organizational focus. Then on the event side, we -- you'll see that we had in the last 3 or 4 years, a flagship weekend in Saint-Tropez in the summer. We decided not to do that this summer. It had not been a profit generator in the business in recent times. And we have been rethinking how we approach flagship events generally within the business because they had been viewed historically in the business as a marketing expense. And so I think that I've been to them, and I think they are great ways to bring the community together. However, I've been in many businesses and I've led marketing teams in many businesses. And when something gets labeled a marketing expense when it's not making a profit, there's sometimes a disconnect there. So that was one of the things that I said, let's revisit and sort of let's go back to first principles and say, what are we trying to achieve with our flagship get together? How do we want to bring our members together? What do we want to do? So for the winter, we're starting from, as I say, from the drawing board and rethinking that for our members. So those were a couple of different examples. There are many, many others, but those are a couple of different examples of projects that take a lot of organizational focus after cross-functional coordination without immediate short-term sort of profit generation. Free offering -- no, the Free offering will continue. Advantage was not designed. So the question was, was Advantage designed to replace Free. No, Advantage was designed to be the sort of space between Free and Prestige, Prestige being between EUR 3,000 and EUR 5,000 depending on the benefits you elect. And then obviously, our Free tier is free, and then Premium is EUR 79. So Advantage is -- was designed to sit in the middle. In the short term, we won't be discontinuing the free tier because as I say, it's building that great pipeline of members to move into our paid tiers. Next question. Strategy to move -- can you explain the strategy to move from -- into services from subscriptions? I think those of you who have joined me on these previous earnings calls would say that this has been a focus of mine since I joined the company. One, it is around diversification of revenue. As you saw, if you are purely focused on the revenue from subscriptions, depending on what you have as your components within that membership, there is some concentration risk. More importantly, as I mentioned in terms of World's Finest Clubs being a membership business, whereas ASMALLWORLD Concierge is a membership business, but also a services business because of the other revenue streams. So the other reason to pivot or to diversify into services is because this gives us the chance to service our members in more aspects of their lives and ultimately drive share of wallet, both from the member, but also from the partners we work with, increase our -- ultimately increase our profitability and drive future profitability because it's usually higher margin than the memberships we sell. And then also, I think your question is around does it relate to B2B, 100%. So the services revenue includes partnerships where we provide services to partners. So we have a large partnership with UBS, Swiss financial institution. We have other partnerships with other financial institutions in terms of services we provide to them, and that will continue to expand because it gives us that scalability on our cost base and allow us to tap into the great products, status levels, currencies, et cetera, that we have in our portfolio, negotiate with our partner to be able to provide to those particular B2B partners. Can you explain your plans to finance short-term financial obligations? What I can share there is that we are -- like I said, we are -- we do have negotiations underway about extending our existing loan that we have with our bank today with the remaining GBP 2.4 million, and we're having discussions about a revolving credit facility that will sit with that. One thing to note that you will see also in the annual report is we were successful in encouraging, let's say, Global Hotel Alliance in which we are a shareholder to declare a dividend this year, so after the period close after the half year. in July, the dividend was declared by Global Hotel Alliance, which will be $500,000. $400,000 have been paid in August, and we expect another $100,000 to be paid in October. So from a cash flow and working capital standpoint, we are in a good position now with both the cash generated by the business, but also the other cash generation sources we have, but we are continuing to look at that going forward. And then lastly, yes, some of the working capital numbers were impacted by lower sales in the first half because obviously, the benefits of memberships versus some of the services revenue is that we get the cash as soon as the membership is paid. Whereas with our services, it's often we get paid commissions after the fact. So I mentioned earlier in the conversation that we've invested in tools and processes for commission tracking and chasing and payments because they happen once the trip that we booked takes place. So it's effectively creating a future pipeline of cash flow. And so we've got much better at that. So that's another reason to create that balance in terms of cash or future cash flow. And then last question, look at growth beyond 2026. So I won't comment on growth beyond 2026 for the purposes of this conversation. But suffice to say, we continue to expect profitable growth in those future years. '26 is about continuation of our transformation, and we look to continue to leverage those incredible assets we have within the business be it our partner portfolio, the data we have in our members, our stickiness and love that we have with our members and indeed the brand and the platform. So with that, I will thank everybody for joining me today. I really appreciate, as you see, you'll -- on the website, this recording will be shared after the closing. And I wish everybody a fantastic day. Thank you.