dotdigital Group Plc (DOTD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Dotdigital Group plc Full Year Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question received in the meeting itself. However, the company can view all the questions submitted today and publish responses whether it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Milan Patel, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.

Thanks, Alejandro. And once again, thank you all for attending today's full year results presentation for the year ended 30th of June 2025. In terms of what we talk about today, I'll go through the business overview. For the newer investors, it will give you a bit more color around the business. For the people that have joined us in the previous presentations, I'll summarize some of the slides and pick out the bid staff change. Tom will go through the business model and the financial performance, along with our ARR model, recurring revenue streams, and you get a lot more color around the growth within those. Then he'll hand it back to myself, and I'll take you through some of the strategy update and with all tech companies, what we're doing around AI, what we feel the use cases are and how we will continue to evolve that through the product road map that we have. And finally, I'll take you through the outlook. So just turning over to the overview. On the next slide, you will see a video of what the product does, but there are some very strong growth or growing opportunities from a market driver perspective. In today's world, it's all about personalization. It's about one-to-one personalization really understanding who you're speaking to and making them centric to the marketing strategy. So what we see is 86% of CMOs or head of marketing, say, in order to get really good and strong personalization, they are willing to pay more for it. In terms of other areas from a behavioral perspective from the market, we've continued to see customers stroke marketing strategies evolve to use lots of different channels in connecting with their end recipients for customers. Not only is it about the customer acquisition but also around the retention. And other areas we've seen is about rationalizing their tech stack, being able to learn one platform, about having lots of different point solutions, being able to aggregate that data then to help with the relevancy and targeting to drive that return on investment. But for us, it's about creating the right content whether it's through the use of AI or content that you're trying to produce from the drag and drop editor that we have to the right customers and being able to segment on your data at the right time through same time optimization and through the right channels. And for us, it's about providing all these different channels that you can communicate on. If I look at the company itself, we've continued to embed AI, making it easy for customers to get started but also continue to use AI to drive efficiencies. And we operate within 150 countries as well as having 500 employees across EMEA, JPAC and the U.S. So just looking at the last 12 months from an overview perspective, strong financial year results and outcomes. We've continued on that sustainable growth, both with profitability coming through as well as that top line growth from an organic standpoint. In terms of regions, whilst it is a difficult macro environment, we've got to work harder for the deals, but there has been growth across all 3 regions. And it's pleasing to see that the international market are continuing to grow very strong, close to circa 20% in the last 12 months and strong cash generation. In terms of organizational enhancements, as these international regions come to scale as well as the business from a scaling perspective, we continue to invest in technology, use of AI within the business to drive operating leverage, we can invest -- which we can invest back into sales and marketing to drive future growth, but also over the last 12 months, we've really focused our investment around the international regions. And as part of a scaling business, we are underway in terms of recruiting a Chief Revenue Officer that can really bring alignment of processes and technology across the continent. From a product standpoint, I'll leave that as we go into the detail, but lots happening on that front, integration of the acquisitions, lots more around AI features and agents that we've built to help our customers drive efficiencies and better ROI as well as some of the newer products that we've been building like the loyalty platform. So that leaves me from an overview perspective to say we're continued -- sorry, we're confident in the continued growth, strong recurring revenues, strong financial position, no debt in the business. We've continued to invest and seeing the fruits of the investment across the international regions and an expanding addressable market. Here, whilst I can talk about our platform, I think sometimes it's nice to see the platform in a video and how customers are using it. So let's now play the video. [Presentation]

So as you can see from the video perspective, there's lots in the platform, lots of use cases that can solve lots of ways of using AI and orchestrating your campaigns. I think the video brings out to life more of the platform than I can even talk about. There's so much depth and functionality within the platform. So if we look at the evolution, we've continued to spend around about 12% to 13% of revenues in R&D and kept up with how the market continues to evolve with the functionality and the platform that we've built. Over the last 5 years, we've become more multiproduct. We've entered new segments, new channels as well as really looking at use cases as well as things like AI coming through real-timeness within the platform from a personalization perspective, being able to orchestrate across all your different channels. But at the heart of our platform is the customer data and bringing that easily into the platform and really using that to drive relevancy and targeting. So this is a chart for the people that are -- have continued following the story and have attended the presentation previously. The logos haven't changed. We, obviously, with the depth of the platform and the all-in-one nature of the different products that we have available have also seen an increase in enterprise customers coming to Dotdigital. We are very much focused in that mid-market, but also solve the use cases of the enterprise customers that are rolling us -- our platform out across different territories, across different brands to have a single view on how their marketing is performing. In terms of what makes us different, we own the delivery infrastructure, we have flexibility in the channels and delivery of those channels and the different countries that we can send to as well as AI being embedded at the core. We have a 15-year plus track record of really building functionality both in AI and machine learning and being able to use that data to really drive a better experience. Depth and flexibility whilst we saw the video, there is a lot more functionality differences within the competitive landscape. We have an all-in-one product that is able to really aggregate data across use AI across these different product sets and closely net user interface that allows you to learn one system instead of having to learn lots of point solutions. Very much an extensive partner ecosystem, whether it's agency partners that are building websites on e-commerce platforms, whether it's CRM implementers. And more recently, we've gone into ERP solutions that is really bringing business system information and marrying that up with your CRM as well as your e-commerce in one place. The integrations that we've built, making it very easy for customers to bring data in, you don't need to know much of data structures, data hygiene. We do all the heavy lifting behind the scenes. And equally, whilst you have technology, we have a world-class customer service and people within the organization. And very much a trusted brand. We've been around for 25 years. We've got experience and we know the market, which paves way for innovation. So I'll pass you over to Tom to talk through the business model and financial performance.

Thanks, Milan. It's great to be talking to everyone today. I want to start by talking through actually the financial and commercial models to make sure that we bring to the front the drivers of shareholder value. So this view that we're looking at now isn't different the majority of SaaS companies. But I want to talk to walk through each line by line. So from a revenue perspective, whilst there's different business units and so on within our business we fundamentally tracked the revenue by 3 core lines: contracted recurring, repeating and nonrecurring. We'll talk about each of those in a bit more detail as we go through the deck. But the takeaway from this slide is very much that both recurring and repeating revenues were 94% of total group revenues in the most recent fiscal year. The contracted recurring, which in its own right is 80% of those group revenues carries a 90% -- more than 90% gross margin. That's the area of the business we're focused on. That's the area where there is value for shareholders. We dropped that back down another level to look at the forward-looking contracted ARR. So that is the contracted recurring revenue recognized in previous years on a forward-looking basis. We can see that, that there's -- the CAGR across the previous 4 years has been 13%. Certainly the core valuable part of the business, it's been growing 30% per annum for the last 4 years. On an organic basis, that is 9%, and we'll have a look at that in a bit more detail on the upcoming slides, too. That in turn will flow through to cash generation, strong free cash flow of our high-margin recurring revenue business. And that free cash flow has enabled us to make 2 meaningful acquisitions in the last couple of years and return funds to shareholders, but in the way of dividends that we've done for a number of years. So to move on a little bit and have a look at those revenue lines and the margins, but equally looking at them alongside the core business segments that we operate within the business. So on the top part here, we're seeing the revenues. So these numbers are, again, for FY '25. On the left-hand side, the 3 buckets on the left-hand side are our core CXDP business and related business lines, as I stated there. So that is the core CXDP, that is fresh relevance, that will be Social Snowball. Obviously, we acquired it at the very back end of FY '25. So it has no meaningful effect on this particular numbers, but that will fall within that. The darkest salmon-colored piece -- solid piece that the majority of that segment is the contracted recurring revenue. That is the contract recurring revenue that is contracted on a fixed value basis under recurring contracts. The slightly smaller but solid, slightly lighter salmon or pink segment represents equally contracted recurring revenues, but that are volume based. They are volume-based where our customers exceed contracted minimums within their annual or monthly usage and begin paying overages. We're comfortable calling that recurring on the basis that typically what happens the following year, those volumes recur or the customer upgrades and commit to a higher level of volume usage, that volume typically being message volumes or number of contacts. You will also see a smaller [indiscernible] of a diagonally shaded box. But in that view, that is our nonrecurring element of that business. So that's a traditional sort of software implementation, software consulting, sponsorship that we clearly don't include an ARR by virtue of its nature. So those -- that business line as a whole when dropping through to the gross profit level, as you can see in the sort of second set of bar -- or second bars there, drives gross margins of 90%. Again, that is where the value of our business is. Those gross margins from that business like account for 97% of our group level gross margins. That is the area of business we should be focused on and are focused on. Now just a word on the section to the right on this slide. So the standalone API-only transactional messaging CPaaS business line. This is what we described on the previous slide is repeating revenues. They are repeat -- typically repeatable in nature, but we don't include them in the recurring segment. As a reminder, these are heritage revenues that were acquired with our acquisition of COMAPI back in 2017, COMAPI enabled SMS messaging. We took that technology and embedded it within the core CXDP area of the business and enabling customers in that segment to send value-add marketing messages that carry a higher margin. But we still have the segment of API-only customers that do not touch the CXDP whatsoever and those customers carry a low margin of approximately 15% across the portfolio of customers there. This segment accounts for that remaining 3% of gross profit at a group level. It's not the area of the business we are proactively focused on. We keep it. It generates over GBP 1 million of bottom line profit to our numbers each year. It is also the business segment in which the customer that we announced was not renewing or we were not renewing them because of a requirement for us to enter into that contract should we have chosen to on a loss-making basis. We chose not to renew that. We announced that on the 25th or 26th of June. That customer was GBP 4.4 million of annualized revenues and had about GBP 0.7 million revenue impact in FY '25. That particular customer carried about a 5% gross margin. So again, a bit of noise for the top line, but frankly, no impact to the bottom line. So to drop down another level and look specifically at the forward-looking ARR. So this is the -- from the core CXDP business, and this shows the fixed value part of the contract, and that some color with the volume-based elements of contracts, the smallest layer at the top and see the 4-year CAGR. Again, we stated this previously being 13% or 9% on an organic basis. In the more recent years, you can equally see the impact of the Fresh Relevance acquisition in 2024 and the impact of the Social Snowball acquisition just before the end of FY '25. Equally of note, you can see that actually Social Snowball has an element of fixed value and an element of volume base there. So now to look a little bit at our trading highlights, some of which over the previous few years, but more focused on FY '24 -- or FY '25 versus FY '24. At a headline basis, we see our group revenues growing at 7% on a constant currency basis. 8% recurring revenue growth, again, on a constant currency basis, 32% adjusted EBITDA margin. And whilst mentioning EBITDA, I'll just draw your attention to the chart on the right-hand side. You can see that very consistent with previous years. Equally, what's drawn out in this slide is like many SaaS businesses experienced during those COVID impacted years of '21 and '22, slightly enhanced margins as operating expenses were lower as there was no travel and marketing and other related costs in those periods. You will actually see that margin profile drop through at each and every margin level that we call out as a business. And again, that drops through to free cash flows. We'll have a look at that in a bit more detail as well, that GBP 13.9 million for FY '25. So to look at the income statement, in particular, we talked about revenue a lot, revenue growth being 6% on an actual currency basis, 7% on a constant currency basis. Equally in that first bullet, we're referring to the impact of the previously announced nonrenewal of the loss-making CPaaS contract that had a GBP 0.7 million impact in FY '25, annualized run rate of GBP 4.4 million, but at very low margins, as we previously talked about. We've talked about the high concentration of recurring and repeating revenues that give us predictability, give us the ability to invest with confidence in future years and be able to run at margin levels that we have full control over. One of our key performance indicators, as we continue to sell to higher-value customers, and we continue to deploy more functionality and our customers continue to grow is our average revenue per customer. That increased 8% on a constant currency and normalized basis when compared with the previous year, very much heading in the right direction. Particularly pleasingly was the strong international growth. These are investments that we've made in over the last best part of a decade. And we now see these coming to scale and starting to pay off. Our international revenues now equate to about 33% of our group revenues. And last year, they grew at 20%. And we expect growth to continue at levels approaching that. We don't necessarily expect 20% every year from each region, but certain levels approaching that going forward. Gross margins, we've talked about, 80% on a group basis, but 2 very different business segments within that. Exceptional costs I'll just touch on. They were broadly consistent year-on-year. The vast majority and that's certainly the vast majority of cash exceptional items related to the 2 acquisitions we made in terms of advisory costs and integration-related costs within there, but relatively consistent year-on-year. And as you'd expect, with the scale in business admin and operating expenses growing at a rate lower than our revenue is growing at, which is certainly good discipline and good to see. Now to move on and just mention our sort of financial position. I won't dwell on this slide for too long. Good trends in our net working capital -- net working capital trend there. Just touch on a couple of things there sort of taking away from some of the noise of things that happens within the balance sheet. But specifically, receivables management has improved significantly in the -- throughout the second half FY '25. And the other thing that's happened -- is starting to have an impact is the number of customers who are paying us annually in advance or quarterly in advance, and therefore, creating a deferred revenue balance and/or contract liability. Again, we'll talk about this in a bit more detail on the cash flow slide. But as a reminder, the cash balance is reduced because, of course, we spent $20 million on acquiring Social Snowball at the end of FY '25. Cash position is more than sufficient for us to continue proactively on our M&A journey for sensible type acquisition targets that we'll talk about again in a bit more detail. So let's talk about the cash flow in particular. Firstly, actually, I'll draw your attention to that free cash flow chart on the top right-hand side. And again, you can see -- if we -- if you normalize 2021, 2022 on the basis, there was some COVID-19 related noise in that to 20% in each year. You can see that actually the margin profile that we saw in adjusted EBITDA just flows through on a free cash flow basis. We'll call out the free cash flow presented here is prior to the exceptional items. Again, I mentioned it on the previous slide, but the vast majority of our cash exceptional items are acquisition related and those acquisition costs are treated as exceptional on the -- within the P&L or income statement. So we're just doing the same here from a free cash flow perspective. Some of the analysts treated that way, others treat it as an exceptional outside of -- sorry, within free cash flow. Either way, we're coming out of a number of GBP 13.9 million there. And just to talk about the acquisition of Social Snowball again, you can currently see the acquisition, the $20 million, equating to GBP 14.4 million, grew when netted off of some cash acquired coming through on that cash flow bridge. Just as a reminder, there's a further maximum of $15 million during -- or potentially due to contingent consideration in August '26 and August 27 should certain growth and profitability targets be achieved. And you can, of course, see the dividend paid out last year coming through that to net negative change in cash of GBP 6 million after those financing and other items. So long-standing approach to capital allocation. This hasn't changed, but it may have been presented in a slightly different way this year. Firstly, we look to reinvest in organic growth. As the operating leverage comes through, which it does, we look to reinvest it in other areas that are driving higher growth rates. We've seen that starting to come through in the investments we've made in the deeper and broader international growth. We continue to do that. Product enhancements with a focus on AI, security and functionality and equally in our partners, both technical integrations that we typically build and own ourselves, Milan will talk about that later, and our hub community of advocates. We pay a progressive ordinary dividend. You've seen that for many years. Those of you who have been with us on this journey. We're proposing 1.21p per share, which is -- has increased in line with EBITDA, 10% increase as it has done in previous years. We talked a little bit about our M&A journey to date. And from a strategic investing perspective, we'll continue on that journey but some of those things that we have done historically, Fresh Relevance and Social Snowball across the last 2 years are being shown there. In terms of future options, and these are always annually considered by the Board, what uses there may be for excess cash. We will consider special dividends. We will consider purchasing shares to satisfy employee share awards. So we're fairly likely to pursue that route, and we will consider share buybacks. To date, we've considered the M&A, it'd be our best opportunity of further shareholder value, but we will consider things -- other options as we go forward. So in terms of some of the key financial points just to take away, I was delighted when I came into the business 7 months ago to obviously, on the research reading up to it to be coming into a business with in excess of 50 years successful delivery of baseline financial metrics of this quality. Now I won't read each of these margins out. You can see them there. But whilst there's been some periods that have been noisier than others. That is the fundamental profile of the business, and that is where it's been operating and delivering for a long time. In addition to that, we see our core business contracted ARRs. We've talked about growing at 13% over a 4-year CAGR and accounting this software element of that actually accounted for 95% of the group gross profit. Our U.S. and JPAC region, the investments we've made in there over the last decade of paying off starting to come to scale. They're growing at circa 20% and now account for more than 30%, 3% actually of group revenues. We've also entered the high-growth influencer marketing segment at the end of the year with the Social Snowball acquisition. That is a segment of the marketing industry more broadly, that is growing far quicker than the industry itself. We've managed to acquire a business that's within that growing quickly and continues to grow post acquisition. And I'm very pleased to report this. But as of the reporting date, the annualized growth rate of the ARR we acquired is in the region of 50%. So it's going pretty nicely so far. And whilst we are -- it's not easy to win new business and to grow business, there's still long sales cycles that are not necessarily lengthening, but the long sales cycles. We're very confident in achieving the market expectations that are out there for this fiscal year. With that, I'll pass it back over to Milan.

Thank you, Tom. Now I'll go through the strategy update. This visualizes the purpose, the mission of our business and the organic strategy. The organic strategy is centered around 3 pillars, whether it be geography, whether it be around product, whether it be around partners. But for us, it's about creating value for all of our stakeholders. And within the company, we pride ourselves on the values of collaborate, open, diverse and enjoy what we do. So going back to the core organic growth pillars. We've been continuing to -- as we go through the detail, you'll see we've been continuing to grow, both from a geographic standpoint, being able to grow within the partnerships that we create, whether they are strategic partners or the wider ecosystem around agency and tech partners but also spending the R&D dollars that we do really monetizing that within the existing customer base and really solving the use cases of larger value customers. So whilst we have 3 organic growth pillars, we also have 3 pillars to our acquisition. I won't go through the individual, I guess, strategy points of how these core pillars work, but expanding geographical coverage, buying market share and consolidating is an area that we look at. Deeper functionality within the core marketing suite or core products that we have and then acquiring new products that help from our product vision of becoming more all in one, which really helps our customers consolidate their tech stack. So if we look at the growth, and Tom mentioned, 1/3 of our revenues are international, and we continue to see that increasing. This shows the journey we've been on from an international perspective. Even if we look at the 10-year CAGRs or 5-year CAGRs into the international regions, they are very strong. In terms of some of the opportunities and our growth focus and how we focus ourselves and marketing dollars within the international region, it's very much commerce focused. But we also see strong outside of commerce, companies choosing us to help deliver results when they're speaking to communities and white space verticals like not-for-profit, sports and government within the international regions where we play strong as we look forward. But not only do we have that, we have the newer technologies or products that we've built, whether it be loyalty or integrated into the platform from an acquisition that we've done previously, things like web personalization and more recently, the influencer management platform. And for us, our GTM focus or go-to-market focus is around direct marketing activities as well as working with partners to really drive the positive responses and why customers choose us. In EMEA, we've seen good levels of growth partly impacted by the low-margin contract that Tom mentioned earlier in the presentation. But if you look at the 10-year and 5-year CAGRs, we've continued to deliver and circa 10% organic growth. In terms of -- within the EMEA market, we have very strong brand awareness and we work with all verticals. Our largest customer representing from a gross profit perspective, around about 1.5% of our group revenues, top 100 customers representing about 17%. So we like that diversified mix of customer types. Newer channels and opportunities to increase ARPU or ARPC expansion are areas like WhatsApp. That recently launched in April. We're seeing strong volumes of growth in messaging through that channel, but also demand building from a pipeline perspective. Other areas from a product perspective, whilst currently, our loyalty platform is in beta, that will be in general availability in the new year. And we're starting to see the fruits of the investment that we've made around that too. If we look at JPAC, Far East Asia grew 40% in the period. And we continue to see a growing demand in mobile-first channels within the Asian market, but also strong existing client growth and new logos that have been won in Australia and New Zealand. So whilst we talked about some of the white space verticals, new products, web personalization, as I mentioned earlier, from a go-to-market perspective, at the start of this year that we really started selling it into the international regions. And we'll continue to look to partner, expand Asia through partners and localized solutions, but also create direct marketing activities around the core areas of focus with our marketing activities. So from a product perspective, we will go into a lot more detail, but a couple of stats to pull out. We're starting to see that increase in platform adoption around AI functionality that we've been building, as well as use of agents to really drive autonomous as well as recommendations of what to do next within the marketing strategy. It's also pleasing to see from a WhatsApp perspective, some of the -- one of the newer channels over the last 12 months, we've added into the platform, seeing strong open rates and return on ad spend across that channel. And quite -- also important for being recognized as leaders in 12 G2 categories within our space shows how our customers are reviewing our platform and proposition. So let's touch on Social Snowball. What was the rationale? It certainly extends our capability from a platform perspective. It also adds the influencer and social networks as a channel to consume information and allow our customers to really do more of that product placement, brand placement through influencers and affiliates. Broadening the TAM, or total addressable market, it is a fast-growing sector and also really increase the exposure within the Shopify ecosystem and continues to deepen our U.S. footprint. So in terms of consideration, Tom has talked about that in more detail. So post acquisition, strong growth from the Social Snowball platform. Back and middle office has now been integrated and the integration is now complete between Social Snowball and the Dotdigital platform. And we continue to look at product road map and really developing out further features that will really help both brands match with influencers and drive the return that the influencers create. So how does this all fit together? From a product suite perspective, it's having these different product types adding to our ARPC as well as larger value customers that come on board from day 1, but also looking at the underlying foundation being able to connect all the data into one place across the products, providing a better user experience, learning one system and making sure that our AI functionality works across these products and the data is enriched across all of these into one commonplace for data visualization. You can see some of the use cases. I won't go into too much detail the different road map themes, but it's a continuation of R&D around the 4 different products that we have. So a lot of tech companies are talking about AI. And for me, we've been building AI for the last 15 years. Obviously, more talked about and used now than ever said before. But it's quite important for me to look and ask from a product team perspective, what are the different use cases? What is AI being useful? What is it doing? So what we've seen customers use AI for is really looking at content production, content review, creating campaigns, being able to make it easy for the AI agent to go away and help you with the templates, make it fast to market. Looking at personas and targeting -- extending the channel reach as you start to use more channels, building once and having AOI then convert it into SMS, for example, optimizing segments to drive a better return on investment, really predicting what's happening from machine learning perspective and really personalizing at scale. So I won't go through this, but this shows some of the functionality points around AI and how AI agents really help our customers drive efficiencies and better return on investment. So that goes to what we've recently launched, things like AI translations, lots of customers are now starting to use that. Things like subject line optimization, seeing higher open rates. But we look at AI and building on the AI around 4 quadrants or -- sorry, 4 pillars of the quadrant. AI that helps content creation and really streamline that, AI around personalization, to really drive a one-to-one personalization at every touch point, the end recipient or customer has with the brand around the strategy, analytics and optimization, understanding what the campaign reporting is telling you, spotting trends and helping you do things better. And data is only as good as -- sorry, AI is only as good as the data that you bring into the platform, and AI around data management. So this year, we've increased the allocation of investment in R&D towards AI and have dedicated teams working on it. Here's what you can see, some of the results and successes of our customers using AI within the Dotdigital platform and each one has different reasons for using AI and areas of the platform that they use it within and the returns that they are getting. Some are monetary, some are to get better engagement. So going to partners. We've got -- or increased the amount of partners globally to over 1,000 now. and within the strategic partnerships, very much focused marketing strategies as well as customers using one of our strategic partners from an integration perspective. So strong growth in e-commerce, strong growth in CRM and some of our newer partnerships that are being unlocked with bringing ERP data with CRM data and e-commerce data to one place. So looking ahead, a strong growth engine. As Tom mentioned, strong recurring revenues, but also we continue to see that ARPC growth, new products like personalization being sold into international markets, the addition of influencer management or playing within the influencer marketing space as well as our loyalty product that will go to general availability very soon. We've continued to see international expansion. We've talked about the growth rates, but also some of the white space opportunities that we have as we go into FY '26. We started off by talking about the market drivers. Marketeers are seeing higher returns on investment from digital marketing channels. They can measure the return and talk to their customers and a very scalable model, no debt, strong profit -- profitability as well as strong recurring revenues. We talked about our ARR model, and now that's been growing and we continue to explore acquisitions that help drive adjacent technology to the platform, which in turn expands the ARPC of customers. So looking at that, for us, we're very focused on expanding the usage and adoption of the platform, launching new innovative features and products, growing our customer base globally and scaling efficiently. So that just leads me on to the investment case, strategy around the 3 organic growth pillars, whether it be geographic, whether it be product, whether it be around our partners, complemented with M&A., a scalable platform, all the way from small businesses that are graduating all the way up to larger enterprise that are using across territories, across different brands, strong growth in industry entering a market of influencers, which is growing faster than the core, which expands our total addressable market. Being independent, it allows us to be very agile, allows us to innovate and continue to adapt to the market. Experienced management team and strong growth prospects from an outlook perspective. Thank you for listening to our strategy and what we've achieved over the last 12 months. We will now turn to questions.

[Operator Instructions] We have received questions throughout today's presentation. And I'll start the Q&A session for the first one that read as follows. How are you monetizing WinstonAI? And what impact you expect it to have on ARPC or margins?

Tom, would you like to answer that?

Yes, sure. Sure. Thank you, Edward, for the question. So in terms of monetizing WinstonAI, it's really just aligned with our standard pricing approach. As a reminder, that's two-pronged. So in the first instance, it's the level of functionality you buy based upon the package differentiation. So for the purposes of this, let's call it, bronze, silver and gold. Bronze, you get a very limited access to that AI functionality. Gold, you get the most functionality. The other prong to our pricing is that volume-based piece, which you may well precontract to, that is driven by the number of contacts. If you are then using AI effectively you should be increasing the number of contacts that it increases -- the volume of contract increases the messaging and increases the page views. Hence, that's how we're looking to monetize the WinstonAI side of things, and it is starting to come through. To focus on margins, they won't significantly change. ARPC will continue to grow as those additional levers play out. It has been growing for a number of years. We expect it to continue growing and potentially accelerate slightly. The other piece, of course, with WinstonAI is it will just increase the stickiness and therefore, reduce churn in our customer base.

That's great. We have another question here. The retention of clients is strong. But what trends do you see in customer expansion and average spend per client? And how are you looking to upsell to your existing client base?

Thank you, Alejandro. I'll take that one. In terms of the way how we look at ARPC expansion is in 2 forms. One, horizontal, so selling more of the products. One of the slides that we showed in the presentation was how those products fit together. So from a material ARPC expansion when a customer rationalizes their stack and it adds to those different products, it adds somewhere between 30% and 60% to the ARPC of the core product. And then the second part to that, from a strategy perspective is around what we describe as vertical expansion. And we look at the different channels that they're adding. We also have, from a variable lever, the number of contacts that they're bringing in and how that continues to grow as well as the messaging. And the other areas that we've continued to do is develop out more functionality that creates those package differentiations. So as the customer becomes a lot more sophisticated in their marketing strategy or they want to do more, they will then upgrade through the package.

That's great. Another question on sales here. So how would you reduce the length of new business sales cycle and how long is the average cycle today?

Yes. The average cycle depends on the size of customer that's coming to Dotdigital. So down at the small end, you typically see the sales cycle at around 45 days. If you look at the mid-market, it's generally between 1 and 3 months. And then at the larger end, it's typically between 3 and 6 months. Now in this current climate, the sales cycles have lengthened. And you have to certainly work harder for your deals in terms of selling value. But what we are now seeing is that pipeline building. So if I look at 12 to 18 months ago, we definitely saw companies or brands that were probably waiting and seeing what happens from a macro environment perspective, but it's early signs. However, as the pipeline builds, we can kind of get confidence that customers are now looking around to change technology stacks.

Perfect. The next question we have, why special dividends and share buybacks on the radar? That could be misunderstood and suggest you're not sure on how to deploy cash to chase growth.

Yes. So from a special dividend and buyback -- share buyback perspective, that is a lower priority. For us in this first instance is to invest back in organic growth. So we take that steady balance of a disciplined approach of driving 20% plus operating margin and working to a double-digit organic growth. So we used our cash there. We have, obviously, over the last 2 years, done 2 acquisitions from an adjacent technology perspective. So that is the second part of priority. There is a little bit in terms of -- we are paying dividends in line with adjusted EBITDA growth. So that's a little bit of a return of cash back to shareholders. And then we may do some share buybacks to satisfy share options opposed to set a share buyback program -- a material share buyback program. So it's not that we don't know what to do with our cash. We very much do, but it's -- if we feel there is excess cash over and above that, we would return it to shareholders.

That's great. Next question here. How the Social Snowball fit alongside the rest of the product portfolio? What's the cross-sell potential?

Yes. So if I kind of go back to what does Social Snowball do, it allows our customers or brands to manage, whether it's influencers, affiliates, so URI would purchase something. They've given us a personal discount code, or are driving activities by offering free products to whether it's affiliates, stroke influencers. How does it fit? Well, it continues on that journey of the different channels that brands can communicate on with recipients, with their customers as well as what you can see when you are posting to social media, there is better engagement rate, and it's another channel for consumption of content, whether it's product placement, whether it's brand awareness. All of that data comes back into the customer data platform. So one, it's enriching the profiles that you already have, but it also helps us identify anonymous profiles and bring that to the fore.

What will the impact be on blended gross margin and EBITDA in FY '26 from the GBP 4 million non-renewing customer?

Tom, would you like to take?

Absolutely. And good question. But in short, nothing of any material note. If anything, marginally increased, but not to a material degree. As a reminder, that particular contract is very low margin. And yes, it's no real impact to the -- as we go through things, certainly not a negative impact in any way, shape or form.

Perhaps time just one final question before we ask you for a few closing comments, Milan. Who do you see as your major competitors?

Yes. The competitive landscape changes across the different segments of customers or prospects that we're trying to attract. So down at the smaller end, you've got MailChimp, which is where the customer is looking to graduate to a more sophisticated product. In that kind of small business to up lower midsized businesses, especially in the e-commerce space, we typically would see Klaviyo in that deal. In the mid space, we sometimes see Emarsys looking back at the kind of competitive landscape slide. And then at the upper midsize and large enterprise space, we would typically come up against either a Braze or a Bloom reach.

That's great. As I did say, we are approaching the hour. So thank you very much for answering all of those questions from investors. And of course, the company can view the questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. But just before redirecting investors to provide with their feedback, which is particularly important to you both. Milan, could I just ask you for a few closing comments?

No problems at all, Alejandro. Thank you again for attending today's results presentation. There was a lot there to consume. We've gone a lot more detailed in our presentation around the business model. But if we look at the last 12 months, there's continuous performance against the sustainable growth strategy that we have, producing those 20% plus operating margin, 30% plus EBITDA margins and continue to grow. Across talking about the organic growth pillar, whether it's around geographic, we've seen more revenues diversify outside of the U.K. and acceleration in terms of growth in those markets, and we continue to invest. From a product standpoint, lots has been happening over the last 12 months, whether it's around the new channels that we've launched. We've talked about WhatsApp in that as well as integrating the personalization capability -- or fully integrating the personalization capability within our product and newer products in terms of what we've launched both organic build like the loyalty platform or acquiring adjacent products like Social Snowball in a fast-growing market, which expands our TAM. If we look at some of the strategic partnerships, today, you'll see the introduction of integrations we've made into ERP, but also some of the strategic partnerships that we already have in the integrations around e-commerce platforms is performing very strong and also within the CRM space. So that's all 3 of our organic growth pillars pointing in the right direction. In terms of the market drivers, we're seeing more and more coming through in terms of rationalizing stacks, which makes it more cost effective, both from internal efficiency perspective as well as driving a higher -- connecting all the data to drive a higher return on investment. If I look forward, we've got strong recurring revenues, strong cash balance for future opportunities, whether that's investing back in organic growth or future acquisitions. And we see good momentum, which gives us confidence in the FY '26 outturn. Thank you very much all.

That's great. Well, Milan, Tom, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback and all the management team can better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team of Dotdigital Group plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.