Auction Technology Group plc (ATG.L) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

First off, good morning, and welcome to the 2025 full year results presentation for ATG. I'll start off by taking you through our results highlights and then hand over to Sarah to detail our financial performance, then I'll be taking you through our strategic update. First slide that we're going to move to is how ATG creates value. So before I get to the highlights, I'm just going to explain for those of you less familiar with the company, how ATG creates value. ATG creates -- ATG connects 16,000 professional sellers of unique and valuable items with buyers from around the world. We operate across 2 sectors, Arts & Antiques and Industrial & Commercial, facilitating the sale of goods worth over of $12 billion annually. In these sectors, we operate 10 curated online marketplaces using our proprietary tools and technology. Collectively, we list over 26 million items annually. In fiscal year '25, we hosted over 99,000 auctions and generated 85 million bids. Our newly acquired Chairish business now adds an additional 1.3 million items available on a buy-it-now basis. The scale of our curated inventory, combined with the scale of our buyer reach creates a symbiotic cycle, often referred to as the network effect, whereby the inventory attracts more buyers, which in turn attracts more sellers, driving a positive flywheel effect that keeps customer acquisition and retention costs very low. We offer a full suite of value-added services around the core transaction, which enhanced the marketplace experience for sellers and buyers. This includes digital marketing, atgXL for cross listing of inventory across multiple marketplaces simultaneously, ATG Partner Network, which gives reach beyond the ATG buyer network, atgShip for shipping and atgPay for payments. The combination creates value for buyers and sellers and increases the revenue per transaction for ATG. With the acquisition of Chairish in August of 2025, ATG is now active across both the auction and listed curated markets for A&A, which expands choice for buyers, reach for sellers and commercial opportunity for the company. Go to the next slide. I also thought it would be good at this point to give everyone a reminder of the investment case for ATG, a business that we believe is considerably stronger now than it was just 1 year ago. We operate within a large and growing secondary goods market, which is underpinned by a structural shift from offline to online and which has significant untapped mass consumer e-commerce appeal. We have a leading position in each of our verticals and geographic markets with significant room to grow the conversion rate and take rate in both auctions and list format as we execute our plan. We have proprietary and scalable technology, which enables us to drive incremental volume at a very low marginal cost, which means we have potential for significant operational gearing. We have proven we can expand our take rate through the offering of value-added services, and there's still more to come on this front. We have a very cash-generative business model, which is underpinned by the high margins typical of 2-sided marketplaces. And finally, we are a clear ESG winner as we play a key role in the acceleration of the circular economy, and benefit from growth in that economy due to rising demand for high-quality used goods. In terms of our results for the year, our year was characterized by good revenue growth, which was in line with guidance, combined with strong cash generation, but also by headwinds that impacted profitability. Our revenue was up 9.2%, and excluding Chairish, on an organic basis, it was up 4.4%. We had strong growth again in value-added services, up 16%, excluding Chairish, and we increased our marketplace take rate again, growing from 4.5% to 4.8%. Our conversion rate was stable at 27% with both Arts & Antiques and Industrial & Commercial, holding that metric stable. Growth in this metric is an important focus for ATG. And while we've proven we can grow value-added services, what is more exciting now is the promising signs from the work we have been doing on LiveAuctioneers, where actions we took helped drive growth in bids and lots sold, both of which gradually should feed into conversion rate. That said, across the year, we experienced headwinds that impacted profitability with our adjusted EBITDA down 4% to $77 million. This was due to a combination of revenue mix, the growth of lower-margin value-added services versus higher-margin services as well as the inclusion of Chairish for 2 months performance-related pay and investment in marketplace fundamentals. We flagged in our October trading statement that we would take a noncash goodwill impairment, and this is approximately $150 million, which related to prior acquisitions. Our strong cash generation showed through with adjusted operating cash of $74 million and a 96% conversion rate, up from 82% in the prior year. We successfully executed on our product and technology road map, improving the bidding journey for LiveAuctioneers, changes here played a key role in driving a 10% increase in bids. The improvements focused on marketplace basics. We improved our search capability, added personalized alerts, rolled out an AI-driven recommendation model, helping buyers discover lots that better match their interest. We also used AI to take advantage of our new unified taxonomy, which now classifies over 99% of items accurately, powering even more relevant results. I'm pleased to report that our plan for Chairish is on track. The addition of Chairish extends our opportunity into the listed market with an expanded inventory of 1.3 million items worth over $2.6 billion. It also increases the scale of the ATG audience, adding 4.5 million monthly buyer sessions and over 12,000 additional sellers. We are very confident in delivering the synergies we set out. We have already delivered $4 million in run rate operational synergies and are on track for the remainder. And with that, I will pass over to Sarah to run you through our financial performance.

Thanks, John-Paul. Morning, everyone, and it's a pleasure to be with you for my first set of results at ATG, and I'm looking forward to catching it with many of you on our roadshow over the coming weeks. I'm pleased to report that ATG had a strong year end to the year on revenue, while, as John-Paul mentioned, we did experience some headwinds on profitability. Revenue was $190.2 million, up 9.2% on a reported basis and 4.4% on a reported organic basis. Growth in the second half of the year accelerated over the first half due to momentum in value-added services, especially shipping. Adjusted EBITDA was down 4% to $76.8 million and our margin at 40.4%. These were impacted by revenue mix, the inclusion of Chairish for 2 months and performance-related pay. The margin of 40.4% was down 5.5 percentage points year-on-year. And excluding Chairish, our margin was 42.7%, so well within the recently revised guidance of 42% to 43%. Adjusted diluted EPS was $0.379, down 2% due to the lower pretax profit. Our cash generation was strong with an adjusted operating cash flow up 12% to $73.7 million with a continued high conversion rate of 96% versus 82% last year, and that was supported by working capital. Our net free cash flow post interest and tax was up 15% to $45.5 million. And as we said in our trading statement, we came in slightly better on net debt than guided in August with net leverage at 2.2x and net debt at $174 million. And importantly, we do continue to expect leverage to be well below 2x by the end of '26. If I now turn to group revenue. And the first point to note before I get into the numbers is some housekeeping around definitions. The first point to note is that we are now aggregating our operating segments into 2 reportable operating segments, A&A and I&C. And then secondly, the group has reviewed the Total Hammer Value metric known as THV in the ordinary course of business, which, as you know, is based on third-party reporting as it covers items not sold on our platforms. And that's resulted in a reduction in the overall market sizing. We'd be happy to take questions on either of those in more detail in the Q&A session. If I go back to the numbers, we saw a slight growth in underlying THV at 1%, with GMV stable at $3.3 billion and conversion rates broadly stable at 27%. As I've already mentioned, we saw a growth rate of 9.2%, which reflects a successful execution on atgShip and continued momentum in other value-added services. Looking at the components of growth in terms of contribution, 0.8% came from commission and fixed fees, 3.9% from value-added services, which saw almost 26% growth in the year and importantly, also $4 million of sequential growth in Half 2 over Half 1, which supported a stronger Half 2 for the group. 4.8% came from the consolidation of Chairish for 2 months, while the 2 months were broadly representative of average months from a revenue perspective. And real estate was a minor drag of 0.3%. And then finally, our marketplace take rate was up to 4.8%, driven by the growth in value-added services, which is increasing the monetization per transaction. If I turn to our divisions now and starting with A&A, THV grew 3%, which was a modest improvement over the first half growth rate. GMV increased by 1%, and we had a broadly stable conversion rate of 16%. Take rate increased by 0.5 percentage points to 10.3%, breaking the 10% level for the first time. A&A revenue grew 5.4% on an organic reported basis including Chairish by 13.7%. The organic growth was mainly driven by value-added services, especially shipping with the successful mandating of offering shipping on LiveAuctioneers, and commission revenue grew modestly. We saw positive early lead indicators from our marketplace investment on LiveAuctioneers, with good growth in bids and lots sold. And in 2026, our focus has expanded to focus on actions to drive average lot value in addition. And John-Paul will talk about this a bit more shortly. The integration -- sorry, on the previous side, the integration of Chairish is going well with around $4 million of synergies realized to date on a run rate basis and we're on track to deliver the full $8 million of operational synergies by the end of financial year '26, so that you have a full run rate in '27. If I then turn to I&C. I&C continues to deliver consistent performance and strong seller loyalty. THV was broadly flat at $6.9 billion ex real estate, with the stabilization of used asset prices in many categories. GMV declined slightly by 1 percentage point to $2.5 billion, while conversion rate was broadly stable at 36%. Within this, we saw good performance on yellow and gray iron assets, which account for the majority of our GMV. Revenue grew 2.9% on a reported basis, driven mainly by value-added services. That's primarily through increased marketing penetration. And as a reminder, shipping is concentrated in A&A. Commission was slightly positive. Seller loyalty continues to be strong with over 90% of our GMV on proxy bid coming from sellers who've been with the platform for more than 5 years. If I now turn to the full P&L. As I previously covered, revenue up 9.2%, gross profit is up 1% and the gross margin down 5 percentage points to 62%, driven by that change in revenue mix as well as increases in software amortization, people and technology costs. Reported admin expenses were up almost 20%, and that included $10.2 million of exceptional costs relating to Chairish, $4.1 million of Chairish overheads for the 2 months and a $2.8 million increase in people-related costs. On an adjusted basis, adjusted admin expenses increased by 9.3%, which is far more aligned to the rate of revenue growth. As we flagged previously in our recent trading update, there was a noncash goodwill impairment charge and this totaled $150.9 million, primarily relating to previous acquisitions in A&A $142.6 million, and then a smaller charge for auction services of $8.3 million. The impairment was driven by a higher discount rate, macroeconomic factors and the impact of lower profits announced in August, which have led to the group's market capitalization being well below its net asset value. Net finance costs were down 17% due to interest rates post our refinancing and a lower debt balance partially offset by $1 million of related one-off costs for the refinancing. Tax, we saw a credit of $1.2 million, and the adjusted effective tax rate was 17% compared to 19% last year. And then as I've previously covered, our adjusted EBITDA was down 4% and adjusted diluted EPS down 1.8% due to the lower pretax profit. Turning to cash flow. The ability to generate strong consistent cash flows is a key strength of the group. It provides flexibility, enables the funding of growth and importantly, enables the paying down of debt and deleveraging. Adjusted operating cash flow was up 12% to $73.7 million with another year of high conversion rate at 96% compared to 82% in the prior year. Included a $12.1 million inflow from working capital, primarily due to accruals for exceptional costs and returning to more normal accrual levels for performance-related pay. Free cash flow generation post interest and tax was $45.5 million, up 15% year-on-year. We do expect a continuation of these positive trends and this puts us in a strong position to delever well below 2x by the end of financial year '26. We wanted to help you with the key building blocks for our guidance for 2026, which, just to reiterate, is in line with current market expectations. And here on the slide, we've set out revenue and adjusted EBITDA margins and the key drivers. So taking revenue first. Organic revenue will be primarily driven by the continued rollout and uptake of atgShip on A&A as well as uptake from our AMP marketing program. And just to come back to shipping to give you some numbers. In March, we had around 500 auctioneers onboarded on atgShip versus over 1,000 at the end of September. Revenue will also be supported by growth in fixed fees through targeted pricing actions and then by the continued investment in conversion rate on LiveAuctioneers, and we have good line of sight on all of these actions. For the avoidance of doubt, the guidance is not reliant on market recovery or conversion rates outside of a very modest improvement in LiveAuctioneers. Other drivers only have a modest net contribution and weighted to half 2 rather than half 1. And of course, we remind you that Chairish will be consolidated for full year in FY '26 versus only 2 months in '25. Turning to adjusted EBITDA and margins. The adjusted EBITDA will be driven by a few factors. Firstly, the benefits of operational synergies as the integration of Chairish continues. We've achieved $4 million of operational synergies to date and are on track to have a full $8 million run rate benefit in FY '27 as previously communicated. We will action cost savings identified across the group and have been doing so. These are largely housekeeping changes focused on operational efficiencies, such as third-party spend, restructuring of bonus costs and some head count savings. Additionally, there are 2 areas which will be dilutive to margins whilst driving absolute EBITDA. They are the impact of consolidation of Chairish and the mix impact from the continued faster growth of value-added services, and to be clear, these are factored into our guidance. I'm going to turn now to capital allocation. And we will carefully manage our balance sheet, including retaining a prudent and appropriate level of liquidity headroom and leverage. For 2026, our key focuses are twofold: firstly, organic investment, including targeted development spend where we believe it will give us the best return and drive conversion rates. And then secondly, to delever the balance sheet. Our strong cash generation, as I've said, will allow us to delever to well below 2x by the end of fiscal '26. In the medium term and only when we reach circa 1.5x leverage, the Board will consider the best use of excess capital, including shareholder returns. And to be clear, further M&A is not required to deliver our strategy, although it could help accelerate it. I've been with the business for 6 months now, and so I just wanted to share some thoughts with you on how I found the business and my priorities for financial year '26. I think I've discussed with many of you, I think there are some things we can do better, and I definitely believe there's an opportunity to simplify and improve our operational KPIs over time as well as focusing more on forward-looking metrics. Currently, there are probably too many KPIs and some of which don't focus on areas we can control. A key strength of the business is the healthy level of free cash flow generation, which, as I mentioned, is important to provide flexibility to support investment and to enable the rapid paying down of debt. In addition, I'm impressed at the passionate capable team and the focus on collaboration and curiosity from a values perspective. Overall, I think the group has exciting prospects with the opportunity to improve the buyer experience and to, over time, drive GMV and conversion rate, which will flow into revenue and margin. Turning to my immediate priorities for FY '26. Firstly, to prudently balance investment with cost control and to delever the business; to deliver on Chairish and extract full value from the acquisition; and then finally, to simplify the ATG story and messaging, and further develop KPIs underpinned by improved commercial finance, better insight and more data-driven decision-making. And all of this leads to an absolute focus on delivering the guidance for financial year '26. So to summarize, just before we go into the guidance, we've got a good business with exciting prospects, which can be enhanced through the work that the team are doing, and this gives us confidence in the longer-term opportunity. And then finally, I'll turn to outlook and the technical guidance for '26. So we are guiding to 4% to 5% revenue growth at constant currency and pro forma for a full year of Chairish. And this equates to growth of 28% to 29% on a constant currency reported basis, including the additional 10 months of Chairish. Given the importance of shipping to the top line this year, we do expect revenue growth to be more heavily weighted to half 1. We're guiding to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 34.5% to 35.5%. And to be clear, this guidance is in line with current market consensus for revenue, EBITDA margins and EBITDA. In terms of the more technical areas, we expect an interest cost of around $12 million, non-acquired depreciation and amortization of circa $13 million and an effective tax rate of 19% to 20%. Share count is expected to be 123.4 million and CapEx guidance around $13 million. And then finally, we expect exceptionals in the region of $5 million relating to the remainder of Chairish integration costs. And with that, thank you for your interest, and I'll hand back to John-Paul.

Thanks, Sarah. Now I'll run you through our strategic update and our priorities for the year ahead. And I just wanted to say at the beginning as well that we still believe ATG has an incredible opportunity ahead of us and the progress made this year makes realization of our ambition even more achievable. So what is our ambition for ATG? For people less familiar, I wanted to quickly walk you through our strategy, which leverages a well-trodden marketplace playbook, which then enables us to benefit from a typical marketplace profile. Successful marketplaces have 3 key levers that they really focus on driving. It's scale of audience, both on the buyer and the seller side, conversion rate and take rate. ATG has scale in both seller audience and buyer audience in each market in which we operate. In fiscal year '26, we will offer over $14 billion in inventory via 16,000 sellers to buyers around the world. With this as a base, we then are focused on driving conversion rate, which we improve through simplifying how sellers list and reach their target audiences and by making it easy, safe and familiar for bidders to explore, find and buy what they want. Around this core transaction, we then monetize further via value-added services. This is an area where we have executed well and which now generates $49 million of annual revenue ex Chairish, up from virtually zero 4 years ago. The playbook in turn drives our marketplace profile, which is characterized by strong margins and cash generation and high drop-through. Additional structural drivers include favorable seller, buyer and regulatory trends around the circular economy. If you go to the next slide. While we faced headwinds in 2025, we successfully executed against critical product and operational priorities. In fiscal year '25, our goal had been to execute a mandate of atgShip, to expand digital marketing sales and to grow commission revenue via GMV. In the year, we more than doubled atgShip revenue with especially strong growth in the second half after mandating it on LiveAuctioneers in April. We grew digital marketing as well with a focus on our I&C group. In the year, we launched new marketing package and acquired new sellers. We increased average marketing spend per auctioneer by 15% on proxy bid and by 16% on Bidspotter. Headwinds from the broader macro economy impacted GMV. That said, we executed on key strategic product improvements that help drive critical KPIs that indicate we are increasing our relevance to both sellers and buyers alike. We also made progress on systems efficiency via consolidation and we continued the proxy bid upgrade. If you move to the next slide. Key improvements to the LiveAuctioneers buying experience is something that we wanted to look at. So we took specific actions to enhance the buyer experience in LiveAuctioneers. Specifically, we upgraded our search capability and launched an AI recommendation model, which better surfaces the products buyers are looking for. We also reduced friction by implementing auto approvals for returning bidders, improving new user onboarding, introducing suggested bid amounts to improve the likelihood of one of our bidders winning and reducing the number of steps in the bidding and registration flow. We also improved trust signals by launching purchase protection and by expanding insured shipping on atgShip. Additionally, we expanded the use of notifications, SMS alerts and e-mail prompts to tell bidders exactly what they need to know at the right moment, helping them stay in the buying flow, deepened commitment and increased likelihood they will follow through and participate in the auction. If you go to the next slide. With regards to AI, we embrace the power of AI with a focus on how we could leverage it in search and recommendations. We launched an AI model to auto categorize lots, which increased lots categorized to 99%. We created an AI model, which identifies similar items to support more relevant recommendations. And recently, we launched an AI model, which estimate sell-through probability and expected price, which establishes the groundwork for potential use in inventory evaluation and more tailored lot recommendations. If you go to the next slide. The goal of the different actions we've taken in the others is to drive a better experience and in so doing to increase our conversion rate. One of the things I wanted to show you, as you can see on this slide, is some of the promising early signs of our work on LiveAuctioneers. This includes the work I discussed previously on improving search relevance, reducing friction in the bidding journey, adding trust signals, such as reviews, enhancing notifications and recommendations to increase repeat buying and broadening shipping availability. The result of this work has been positive. We increased bids in the year 10% year-over-year. We increased lots sold by 9% year-over-year. And we increased lots purchased per winner by 8% year-over-year. The reason this has not yet had its full effect on GMV is because of the pressure on average lot value, which has been impacted by the overall macro picture in the U.S. Driving bids, lots won and average lot value are a major focus for ATG in 2026, and we have a plan to execute against this. Move on to Chairish. As you know, we completed the acquisition of Chairish in August. I wanted to set out the acquisition rationale and why it advances ATG's strategy. Marketplaces succeed, as I said before, based on the 3 drivers of audience expansion, conversion rate and take rate. Chairish expands our audience of sellers by over 12,000 and expands our audience -- buyers by over 4.5 million sessions per month. It creates the potential for offering bidders, who lose at auction, a set of items that are available immediately, creating a truly differentiated product offering that we believe can drive conversion rate and provide additional growth for our take rate via value-added services. We have robust high confidence operational synergies, combined with revenue opportunities, which make the acquisition accretive in fiscal year '27. In these first few months of ownership, we have already delivered an operational synergy run rate of $4 million against our $8 million target. On revenue synergies, we can now offer our technology and value-added services to Chairish, especially digital marketing, where Chairish is underdeveloped compared to ATG. As noted at the start, Chairish expands our audience, it adds new buyers, and it enhances the network effect. Beyond this, it strengthens our competitive position, transforms the A&A value proposition and creates an additional lever to drive conversion rate on LiveAuctioneers. The combination creates a differentiated product relative to our competitors. In terms of strategic priorities for fiscal year '26, we have a clear set of strategic priorities. We intend to build on areas where we already have momentum to hit the guidance for the year. We are also enhancing the ease of selling and buying on our marketplaces to gradually grow conversion rate and GMV and to further expand take rate. Specifically, our priorities for the year are as follows; number one, we will drive atgShip with the benefit of the shipping mandate annualizing during the year; second, we will continue to drive AMP, which is digital marketing, on both Arts & Antiques and I&C as well as implementing modest fixed fee price rises. These areas drive the vast majority of our guidance for the year. Beyond this, we will continue to focus on the conversion rate work we have been doing in the second half of '25 to drive further improvements in bids and lots won. We will address average lot value, and we will continue to integrate AI to improve the speed of innovation, our operational efficiency and the buyer experience. And with Chairish, we will execute on the plan to generate $8 million of operational synergies by fiscal year '27. Beyond this, we will seek to expand our network effect by listing Chairish inventory on LiveAuctioneers, and by connecting Chairish and LiveAuctioneers bidders to both listed and auction inventory. So to summarize what we've tried to say today, we have a well underpinned plan to deliver fiscal year '26, driven primarily by atgShip, further progress in AMP and modest listing fee increases. We'll continue to improve the experience for the marketplace users, focusing on enhanced discovery, trust and ease of use. We are already seeing an uplift of leading metrics, and we'll be focused on building on that in the year. We will be disciplined in our financial management and continue to generate strong free cash flow with a focus on reducing leverage to well below 2x by the end of fiscal year '26. We'll deliver the Chairish operational synergies and develop the revenue synergies. We have already delivered meaningful operational synergies and are on track for our commitments in 2026. The revenue synergies are in development and are key to a differentiated ATG offering. The opportunity for ATG is an exciting one, to take advantage of an expanded addressable market, to improve on marketplace basics, to continue to grow value-added services and take rate, and to grow our buyer and seller audience. All of these opportunities increase the number of levers we have to drive our growth in the short, medium and long term. Thank you for listening today, and we are now ready to take questions. Gareth?

Gareth Davies from Deutsche Numis. Kick off with 3, maybe from me. The first, on the current trading comments, you sort of mentioned October being in line with consensus. I wonder if you can just give us a little more granularity, particularly on I&C, because I know September was also an important month for I&C, just how that played out and how October started? Secondly, you talked throughout about conversion and some of the specific initiatives on the A&A side that are going to help conversion there. On the I&C side, it doesn't feel as though there's as much focus on that at the moment. Is that simply a function of you continuing to move proxy bid onto a new platform? Or are there sort of puts and takes in there that we need to be aware of that just make it more difficult to have explicit influence, just understand that conversion point on I&C. And then the final one, just from an AI perspective, you talked quite a bit about tools and efficiencies. Taking a step back, I just wondered if you can frame sort of how you feel you sit and the advantages you've got as the world sort of shifts to agentic AI and your positioning there and broader points?

Sure. So maybe Sarah can take the first one, and I'll do the next two.

Yes, sure. So in terms of current trading, we've obviously said that we've had a robust start to the year in the first month, and there's not a lot more color we would add, as you'd expect at this point other than to say that it doesn't change our consensus further. For our guidance for the year, and we remain comfortable with that. So I won't give any more detail on that, as you wouldn't expect, reading into one month. I&C, I let you talk and I'll maybe add.

Yes. So within I&C, as you kind of pointed out, the focus for I&C right now really is upgrading to the new technology, the upgraded version. And once we do that, then we do believe there's lots of innovation that we were going to be able to do, but we're not going to be innovating to try and change those things until that upgrade is complete because we'd be doing it on an old tech stack that we would be using in the future. So that would, we think, be an inefficient use of the money. That being said, we've still made progress with atgXL, which is much on I&C and coverage there has grown, for instance, from about 10% of timed auctions to about 30%. So there are things that we can do. I think selling digital marketing as well is a way by which we reach more bidders, and I think we can continue to act to drive conversion rate there. But as you point out, the vast majority of our effort right now for driving conversion rate is focused on LiveAuctioneers. And until we've completed the upgraded Proxibid, there will not be significant efforts placed on that.

Just for reference, are you giving a sort of time line on when you hope to complete that migration?

We're still -- we've made good progress this year. There's certain customers that, we hope over the course of the year, will begin using the new seller portal in the new platform, but that's going to be something we communicate more over the course of the year as we see that. In terms of AI, and I guess what you're saying is, is that in the grand scheme of AI, are we kind of a net winner in this? Or how will it play in our world? And we definitely believe AI is going to be a big positive for ATG. And we see it in a couple of different ways. So whether it be the operational efficiencies where our European operations team is already starting to use it to improve the way that we respond to customers, the speed and then it also reduces the number of people we need. So we haven't had to hire more people as we've improved that service quality. On the Arts & Antiques side in LiveAuctioneers specifically, we've used a combination of open AI resources to create models that allow us to use text and image to recognize the lots that are being categorized within ATG and therefore, have higher coverage of our categorization. We used to have about 4 and 5 categories. Now it's about -- it's 99%. And that improvement in categorization is something that will power better search results. We've also been able to create a digital footprint essentially by seeing both the image and the text that an auctioneer writes, and that will help us refine the search that we're able to present to a bidder. And those are really key. So for any business, that would be important. But when you look at ours and where you see 24 million unique SKUs and, say, 15 million, 16 million of those being in the Arts & Antiques side, no buyer, no matter how avid they are, is going to parse through that number. So the better that we can recognize, not just the type of item they're looking at, but even the styling of it based on the image that AI is helping us to match to our results, the much more accurate search results we'll be able to present and that should lead, again, we believe, to gradually higher conversion rates. And then where do we sit overall though, I think the other part is that there's lots of articles out there now that talk about how AI should benefit marketplace leaders. And the key reason for that being that when somebody starts typing in search results in the future around where can I find a unique or specialized item at auction or just simply a used curated item, there'll be the eBays that will show up, but we should be the marketplace that shows up for the category in which we operate. And I think that's something that we're able to build on. We have the scale, we have the history, we have the relevance. And so we believe that from that as well, we should be a real winner from AIs with casual bidders particularly. So next question. James?

It's James Lockyer from Peel Hunt. Just on Chairish, it looks from the outturn that maybe Chairish did a little bit better than you might have done. But it'd be good to understand, has it started to grow at the top line, given historical trends of being flat? And has it helped you drive those synergies quicker? And if you could breakdown what those $4 million of initial synergies were, people, marketing, et cetera? And then secondly, on the capital allocation, given where your share price is, could you give a bit more color around why you are focused on debt repayments first versus share buyback? Is your cost of debt higher than your cost of equity, for example? And/or are you holding off committing to a share buyback to be more flexible around M&A in FY '26? And then just as a follow-up on the AI question. A lot of investors are wary of people just using AI for AI washing terms. It would be good to understand in the initial stages if you're doing it, are buyers engaging with AI recommended items actually bidding more frequently? Or is it just increasing your page views at this moment?

Maybe Sarah can do the first two and I'll take the last.

Sure. So on Chairish, first of all, in terms of the $4 million of synergies delivered to date, they are mainly people-related synergies, which I think we said at the time, we had good line of sight to in the early stages of owning the business, so primarily people and sort of effectively people leverage across having a small-scale business. In terms of run rate, I think we've said that the performance of Chairish has been in line with our expectations since acquisition. And to give you kind of roll forward into '26, we also said that we would expect the majority of the focus in the very short term to be on integrating the business and delivering those operational synergies as opposed to being overly confident on revenue synergies. And so we actually said we were not building in revenue synergies until '27. So that does not mean we're not focusing on them. Of course, we are. But I think we've previously said that we will prioritize the operational synergies, and that was where we would expect the majority of the movement in the financials to be in '26.

If I can just follow-up on some of the key points you said. You think now it's a scale business. Can we assume that's back office people or is it including market people? How should we think about it?

It's primarily back office, primarily back office. And then you'll remember from when we talked in August, there's 3 real areas that, that $8 million relates to. A big chunk of that is people. There is some optimization of marketing costs, particularly where we know that there is low return on investment, and then there's some optimization of payments. So they are the three things we talked about. And we always said the first one to deliver would be on the people side. In terms of your question on share buybacks, debt repayment. So I guess just to reconfirm on the capital allocation, we are saying that very clearly for '26, our focus is on organic investment, which generates the highest returns and on debt repayment. And we always run our capital allocation, clearly based on the data and the facts and the mathematics of it all. And we are confident they are the two right focus areas for '26. Once we get below that 1.5x, as we've said, that's when we would then consider -- the Board will consider alternative options, and we would run the math on it at that point. But we are not expecting to do any M&A in the next 12 months.

In terms of your third question, the way that I kind of think of AI is it's one contributor to the overall strategic goal we have, which is to drive more bids and to drive conversion rate. And it's only one component of many that we are using to try and drive that metric. So for instance, one of the things we put in place this year is more personalized alerts. That wasn't AI-driven. But what it was key to doing was we used SMS. When someone saves a lot, we message them when the lot is approaching. We remind them that the auction is coming due. During the journey, we remind them of all the different things that they need to do to get ready to bid because buying at auction is not the same as buying through an e-commerce experience. And so that was something we hadn't done before. Messaging buyers, when you're buying a secondary good, trust is a factor that comes into play. And one of the things we've been trying to do is drive the notion of trust more effectively, so talking about purchase protection where when you buy an auction, it's use goods. Well, auctions are kind of no right of return, typical. But what we have, on behalf of our bidders, is the ability to have leverage with auctioneers who either sell something that's not as described, or where there is a component that's missing like a certificate where it says, "Oh, this is certified. If they don't send the certificate, well, then the bidder can return it," or with atgShip, for instance, we provide insured shipping now. So if the item is damaged in transit, the bidder is covered, if they use atgShip. So these are all elements that we're driving that are improving, we believe, trust and the readiness to bid. And then AI is another component of that. And the key part of that is, like I said, when you have as many items as we have and you have so many different price points from tens of dollars up through tens of thousands of dollars. Our ability to present the right item at the right time to the right bidder, not just based on the price point or they said they were looking for a table, but where they're looking for walnut Rococo style tables. Well, if the auctioneer didn't put that description in and just put walnut table, in the past, we wouldn't have been able to do it. With AI, we now will say, "Oh, that's a Rococo table. We can actually show only Rococo tables to that person or in the future, people like Rococo tables also tend to like this type of table as well, so let's show that as an alternative on the page." So for us, we definitely don't think there's going to be any AI washing for ATG. It's going to be very much based on substance.

I think Alastair is next.

Alastair Reid from Investec. Just one for me, to follow up on sort of Chairish. You've obviously had it in the group a little while now. Interested in any sort of feedback from your auctioneers or customers on the acquisition, the impact on them? Any concerns around whether you're sending the underbidder away from auctions and the like? Just any color there.

Sure. So the reaction we've heard from auctioneers has been universally positive. And I think the key reason is that they see that Chairish operates at a slightly higher price point than the average sale that our auctioneers would be operating at. And on top of that, they see 4.5 million high-quality verified bidders or potential sessions that they can take advantage of. So for them, anytime they can get access to more buyers cost effectively, I think they're happy with that. And yes, so far, it's been all positive.

Will Larwood from Berenberg. Firstly, just maybe taking a longer sort of -- obviously, there's quite a lot of initiatives to drive conversion rate over the next year and into '27. Just wondering if you could lay out what you expect your conversion rate to increase potentially on a yearly basis from the investments that you're making, so slightly? And then secondly, just if you could talk about atgShip and sort of the penetration across the A&A side and what you expect it to be by the end of FY '26? I'm just thinking about potential margin implications if that continues to go into '27.

So I'll let Sarah cover the second. But on the first, I guess what I'd say is, we're not giving midterm views on where our conversion rate is going to move. When you think about what our budget for this year is based on, what I tried to emphasize is that this year, it's based on shipping, digital marketing and modest fixed fee increases. That's where the growth is coming from for the year. If conversion kicks in based on the things we're doing, well, that would be better. When you look at what we're doing within conversion, though, I'd like to kind of take a step back and look at the overall market and you think about it, I think most people in the room would probably agree that if you look out 3 years from now or 4 years from now, is the world going to be more online or less online for the types of things we sell on Arts & Antiques and Industrial & Commercial? And I think it's going to be more online. Most people would agree. And let's say, in the Arts & Antiques, where we're focused on driving conversion right now, you can look at where are the places that, that conversion could go to. And it would either be an auctioneers white label, but auctioneers generally are relatively small businesses, and they can capture some, but they're not going to make -- they're not going to all of a sudden become a single site that takes all of the share. It would be a competing marketplace, but we're multiple times the size of the next marketplace. And we believe we can both out-invest them and bring more buyers in. So we don't think it's going to be another marketplace. And then the third option you have is that it's a new entrant. But so far, we haven't seen a new entrant and there have been kind of 15 years of doing this. There's always a chance that it could be there. Part of the reason that we're constantly investing and leaning into everything from AI to anything else we can do to advance the experience as quickly as we can. But based on that kind of picture, we kind of feel that if we invest appropriately in the marketplace fundamentals, which in the past we've talked about, but we haven't been able to even show a lead KPI that we were able to move it. In the past, we were able to say, look, we've invested in value-added services, and we know that where we've invested, it's moved. Now with the team that we have working on it for the past 6 months, being able to move bids placed and lots won as meaningfully as we have, we're feeling much more encouraged about our ability to drive conversion rate now that we're zeroing in on that. And so while I can't give you kind of a midterm view of where we think it could go, we believe we should be the winner in this online structural shift, and we think we're investing against the right things. In terms of atgShip?