Future plc (FUTR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. It's a real pleasure to be here to take you through the Future Full Year Results for 2022. I'm delighted to be here to present these to you. And as you can see, we've had another outstanding year, growing our revenues and earnings versus last year while continuing to be incredibly cash generative. So let's look at those highlights in a little more detail. We've achieved these record results as a consequence of our diversification strategy. Future is a specialist media company, which has shown once again its ability to meet the needs of its audience. We continue to deliver strong organic growth, have absorbed what has been material headwinds and costs and added additional value to the group via thoughtful acquisitions that accelerate our strategy. Our ability to outperform the competitors in these tough markets underpins the quality of our business, and I look forward to updating you more about this in a moment. However, first, Penny will take you through the details.

Thank you, Zillah, and good morning. So it's a pleasure to be here to be able to present another great set of results. So first, just starting with the highlights on Slide 6. It's particularly pleasing that all 3 levers of our growth have continued to contribute to this year's performance. That is our organic growth, the platform effect and, close to my heart, the M&A. They've all continued to deliver. So in the year, we've grown profits with profit -- with EPS growth of 24%. Our operating profit increased 39% year-on-year, and revenue is up 36% on a reported basis. Our operating profit margin has increased by another percentage point year-on-year despite the inflationary environment and the initial dilutive impact of M&A, a real testament to the platform effect. And we continue to be highly cash generative, with cash conversion of 98% in the year and leverage at the end of the year at 1.48x EBITDA, demonstrating our ability to delever quickly. And finally, we continue to pursue accretive M&A. In the year, we completed 4 transactions and 1 further small acquisition since the first of October. So just on Slide 7, these results continue to add to our track record, with strong additions to all of our 4 key metrics. On the top left, you have revenue. Top right, you have adjusted operating profit and margin. On the bottom left, you have EPS. And on the bottom right, you have free cash flow. So let's now just dive deeper into the results, starting with the P&L on Slide 8. So revenue of GBP 825 million is up 36% year-on-year, and that translated to a gross contribution of GBP 609 million at a 74% margin. The margin decline of 2 percentage points mostly is due to the change in mix with the higher proportion of magazines following the Dennis acquisition. We continue to invest in sales, marketing and editorial in '22 to drive Future revenue growth. And so our gross profit increased year-on-year of 30%. As we scale, our operating leverage means that the overheads don't need to grow at the same rate as revenue, with a 14 percentage increase in admin costs helping provide the operating margin increase of 1 percentage point year-on-year. The strong adjusted operating profit growth of 39% translated into 24% growth in EPS, with the interest of higher -- interest dilution and tax. So just going to Slide 9, we'll spend a bit more time looking at revenue. So we divide our revenues into -- by revenue stream into Media and Magazine and then also by geography. So Media, which represents 65% of the group, grew organically by 5%, driven by the strong performance in advertising, partially offset by the lower affiliate revenue as we cycle through the COVID-boosted prior year number. Magazines, which now represents 35% of the group, declined by 2%, benefiting from easy comparators driven by COVID and a better mix with more revenue from subscriptions, which also improved the gross contribution. Media gross contribution remains high at 80%, and part of the driver of the high Media gross margin is the mix of revenues from the U.S., which is now 39% of the group, and that grew organically 7%. So looking at geographic diversification on Slide 10. In the chart, you have Media revenues in the left-hand bars, with U.K. in blue and then the U.S. in the red. And then on the right-hand side, they have the Magazine revenues, again, with the U.K. in blue and the U.S. in red. So on the left, you can see that the U.S. Media revenues are almost the same as the U.K. Media revenues, although the opportunity is significantly greater, with the digital advertising market in the U.S., 7x the size of the U.K. Overall, the U.S. is only 39% of the group's revenue that has very strong characteristics and, therefore, opportunities, has a faster growth profile, with 77% of the revenue coming from Media versus 57% in the U.K. And the Media revenue growth is faster than in the U.K., 8% in the U.S. versus 1% in the U.K. in '22. And this has been consistent for the past couple of years, evidencing the effective strategy of leadership. So we've covered geographic diversification. So looking in a bit more detail at diversification by revenue stream on Slide 11. We have 3 primary revenue streams, which each represent about 1/3 of our revenue as digital advertising, e-commerce affiliate from both products and services and then consumer direct monetization. In Media, we know we have outperformed the competition. The bar charts on the right-hand side show the like-for-like growth in calendar Q3, which is our financial Q4 for Media, which is notably ads and affiliate. And so the deep red bar represents Future overall growth of 3%, and then in pink, you have the Future U.S. growth of 13%. And then the gray, which shows a decline, is the competitive set that we track. So this chart evidences our effective strategy and the ability to execute even when the macro is tough. Advertising for us has been incredibly resilient, growing organically 7% across the year despite lower user growth. This is a benefit of the mix change with greater premiumization in the U.S., with organic performance of plus 10%. And with video, with its high yield now representing 14% of advertising revenue. Affiliates were down 6% in the year. Importantly, we've seen an improvement in half 2, and strategically, the U.S. has, once again, been stronger. We've continued to make progress on diversifying our revenue, both in products and also in services. In products, new categories and verticals performed strongly. And in services, Go.Compare continue to improve the mix of non-car insurance revenue by about 5 percentage points. The quality of our audience, combined with our data and focus on execution, provides competitive advantage in challenging markets. So just moving on to Slide 12. The third main revenue stream is Magazines. In the second half, we saw a return to the normalized trend, with revenue declining organically by 8%. Around half of the Magazine revenues are now in subscriptions, which provide greater resilience to the portfolio, which grew overall 6% on a pro forma basis. So we've covered geographic diversification and also by revenue stream, so the final element of diversification is by vertical on Slide 13. So Zillah will spend a bit more time running through our strategic objectives. But as you know, one of our core strategies is diversify the business through the growth in the target verticals. The chart here shows the revenue in FY '21 on the left and FY '22 on the right, organized into the 4 main content vertical, that is, GETs , Games, Entertainment & Technology; LKN, which is Lifestyle, Knowledge & News; W&S, which is Wealth & Savings; and then last but not least, B2B. At our Capital Markets Day earlier this year, we laid out the opportunity for the newer verticals of LKN and Wealth & Savings. Pleasingly, in the year, we've made great progress on this objective, with an increasing mix from these verticals as we build out the portfolio. GETs was resilient, with just a 1% decline year-on-year, whilst the other verticals grew double digit. The diversification really helps us lean into the market opportunity. As for example, we're seeing huge demand for our personal finance content and money saving suggestions, which is really reinforcing for us the value of diversification strategy. So just moving to profitability. You're all way familiar with this slide, which breaks down the drivers of margin progression. So as the business grows, we benefit from the favorable revenue mix, with higher organic growth from our Media segment, which drops through at a higher gross contribution margin. So it's about a 15 to 20 percentage points differential in gross contribution margin from these 2. The platform effect means that sales, marketing and editorial costs don't need to increase proportionately to sales, but we continue to invest in these areas in order to drive the Future organic growth. And then finally, we don't need to scale our overheads to the same extent as revenues. So overheads, as a percent, decline, and we focus on efficiency to drive further operating leverage through the use of technology and our location strategy. FY '22 has also seen continued margin expansion, with a 1-percentage-point progression year-on-year. So the table on the left provides a bridge to explain the movements. It's an exceptional performance given the challenges we faced, demonstrating the power of the platform to create value. Just walking down the bridge, Dennis and GoCo, both diluted the margin by combined 2 percentage points. Like all companies, we're not immune to inflationary pressures. Increasing costs reflect inflation in salaries and magazine cost of sales, which reduced the margin by 2 percentage points or in cost by about GBP 15 million. In salaries, we've had an increase in the region of 6% versus the 2% we'd normally expect. And in Magazines, we've seen a surge in print and paper pricing due to their energy-hungry nature. So we've had an impact there. However, Media, our largest segment grows faster than mags and has the greater gross contribution, as I touched on, which has driven the 1-percentage-point improvement. And then finally, the benefit of the platform drove an outstanding 4-percentage-point improvement, with a focus on efficiency of our cost base using the center of excellence model and our leveraging of technology where possible. The margin expansion is only one element of the profit drivers. On the bar chart on the right, you can see the overall adjusted operating profit growth of 39%, broken down into the constituent parts. So you can see here, we've seen double-digit growth from the organic business, an additional 10% contribution from the platform effect and also 18% contribution from the acquisitions. We're really pleased with this result. On Slide 16, I thought it would be helpful just recognizing the current macroeconomic environment to cover a little more how our strategy and business model create natural mitigations to these headwinds to position us for market outperformance. So in the columns, you can see the challenges faced by all or most companies, which you'll be more than familiar with: uncertain consumer outlook and lower audience engagement; the lack of product innovation and the supply chain shortages; and then, finally, cost inflation, most notably on salaries and magazine cost of sales. However, and I hope today's presentation is evidencing for you, our strategy and business model help us mitigate these challenges: our cost agility, and I'll cover this in a bit more in detail in a moment; and the diversified nature of our content, both from a content, geography and revenue mix perspective; and then finally, the nature of our audiences who are passionate with high intent and, combined with our reach, first-party data and the leadership positions, help us create value for our clients. So I just wanted to touch on our cost structure and explain its agility on Slide 17. So we have 3 main categories of costs representing GBP 0.5 billion. So cost of sales accounts for around 40% of the costs. Sales and marketing, editorial account for another 40%, and the overheads account for the balance of around 20%. It's important to understand how these costs move and our ability to control them to give confidence in our ability to continue to grow profit. So firstly, we have costs that move with the revenue, and they're entirely variable, so the cost of sales and sales commissions. We then have the semi-fixed costs, i.e., costs where we need to make a decision on the return on their investment. As we look to this year, for example, we're rebalancing the investment across the portfolio to where the opportunity is greatest, taking a more cautious view on the outlook before we invest by increasing our investment hurdle rates. And lastly, there are more structural levers, such as our location strategy. Over the last 2 years, as a result of acquisitions and auto investment, we've added over 1,500 heads. So post pandemic in the new normal, we're making sure that that's operating efficiency and in line with our operating model. The agile cost base means that we're confident in our ability to continue to add to our track record. So just moving to cash flow on Slide 18 and our strong cash performance in 2022. So we generated GBP 267 million of adjusted free cash flow, converting profit at 98%. The working capital outflow is a result of the change in mix and improving payment terms to some key partners. We remain capital-light, with CapEx representing 1.5% of revenue, and exceptional items relate predominantly to the integration costs for acquisitions. Interest has been higher year-on-year, reflecting the cost of debt used to fund the acquisitions, and we expect this to increase further in 2023. And then tax paid was also higher due to the timing differences. By design, we're highly cash-generative, capital-light business, and it's a great focus of ours to continue to ensure that profits convert to cash. So just to run through our net debt on Slide 19. We closed the year with our leverage at 1.48x EBITDA, below our self-imposed target of 1.5x despite spending over GBP 400 million on acquisitions, evidencing the group's ability to delever quickly. Following the increase in our RCF in May, we've also secured a new term loan facility of GBP 400 million, which provides us with firepower for the next 5 years. We now have GBP 900 million of facilities at competitive rates, providing liquidity and balance sheet firepower for the medium term. This provides us with the opportunity to continue to deliver on value-accretive acquisitions whilst retaining our prudent leverage target of 1.5x EBITDA, which brings me nicely on to capital allocation on Slide 20. Our approach is to focus on organic growth and then, where appropriate, to leverage our strong cash flow to create value M&A. The Board regularly reviews our capital allocation to ensure it's effective and creates the greatest value for stakeholders in the long term. The combination of organic growth, platform effect and value-enhancing M&A will enable us to achieve our growth target of operating profit 25%, which we believe is a sustainable target over the medium term. And as you can see in the past 3 years, we've outperformed this. We continue to see good opportunities, and we're expecting to be able to continue with acquisitions and particularly think the more challenging market will start to offer well-priced opportunities over the next 12 to 24 months. Certainly, my team is continuing to see a ton of inbound opportunities. So finally, turning to Slide 21, we look to the outlook for FY '23. We believe we are well placed for continued modest profit growth and outperformance in a challenging market. We're confident in our agile cost structure and the business model. We'll continue to generate good cash flows and, combined with our strong balance sheet, enable us to continue to invest in growth, including in acquisitions as opportunities at attractive prices arise. As always, we remain cautious, and we will provide updates as the year develops. The long-term opportunities for the business, supported by our successful strategy and the flexible business model, mean that though we remain excited about the future ahead.

Thanks very much, Penny. Another set of terrific results, which is a direct consequence of the ongoing focused application of our strategy. I think that makes our eighth consecutive year of profit growth. Moving to Slide 23. Our ability to sustain such a consistent track record of year-on-year growth is enabled by our strategy, which has positioned us for continued outperformance. And I wanted to just take a moment to look at this slide in a bit more detail. Very simply, at Future, we have 2 primary objectives: first, to grow relevant and valuable audiences. And the key here is to grow the right audience. As we know, not all users are equal. Secondly, we look to diversify and grow monetization, in other words, to ensure that we continue to have the products that meet the changing needs of our users. More on both of these in a moment. We have 3 strategic enablers that we believe are true competitive advantages: one, our expert, specialist content, and that creates operational leverage through its evergreen nature while meeting our audience needs; secondly, our operating model that enables agility and flexibility, which are essential in operating in an industry in constant change with diversified revenue streams; and finally, our proprietary technology, which is unique in its end-to-end nature, and this really helps to underpin the operating leverage. These enablers are then underpinned by 3 core pillars that power the execution of our strategy. The first of this is sustainable growth. This is table stakes for us. And as Penny mentioned, when we say growth, we've been growing profits and cash, not just revenues. And then there's the platform effect, which is truly unique to Future and embodies how we create value across the portfolio. And finally, value-creating M&A. We are focused on identifying opportunities that truly create unique value and accelerate our strategy. Underpinning all of this is how we behave. We've been building our business to be -- to deliver sustainable returns for the long term, and a core part of that is the initiatives captured within the framework of Our Future, Our Responsibility, which encapsulates our ESG-focused work. Future strategy delivers. The track record slides that Penny shared with you are evidence of this, and we're just as excited about the ability to continue to deliver this success over the medium term and continue to grow our business as we are proud of our past achievements. Future's diversified business model is what enables it to, even in these most uncertain times, be able to grow profits and market share, outperforming the competition as a result of the execution of a proven strategy. So moving on to Slide 24. I want to spend a little bit of time this morning focusing on our core objectives and how we performed against them over the year. As you can see on Slide 25, 1 of our main objectives is to grow valuable relevant audiences, and we've been exceptionally successful in doing this. Increasingly, we look to create a more diversified audience strategy, ensuring we create our content, where the demand is highest and that we pivot our proposition as consumer interest change. As a consequence of this, we grew our audience overall in FY '22 to just over 0.5 billion in reach, with the growth coming from our newer channels. And the chart on the left-hand side reflects our increased focus on diversification and broader reach while the chart on the right-hand side highlights the strategic shift we've been making to increase the sources of our online users while ensuring we remain disciplined around delivering high-value intent content. During '22, as Penny described, we grew our organic advertising revenues 7%, while our underlying online organic users shrunk 5%. Our ability to grow revenues even when there's a declining audience is a direct consequence of our focus on ensuring we have the most valuable and relevant users. And whilst we expect audiences to grow from a prepandemic level during 2023, the macro consumer headwinds, notably in consumer tech where the wider market has shrunk 13% in the last year, coupled with our ongoing focus on high-value content types, means we expect to see some ongoing audience decline during 2023. Our focus on quality evergreen content, growing your audience channels, pivoting investment to demand while increasing our diversification all serve to underpin the value and sustainability of our audience. On Slide 26, you can see that it's the quality of our audience that makes them so valuable and resilient. And I thought it would be helpful to draw this out a little more to help explain how we can grow revenues even when audience is declining. Generally, our audiences have high intent. They come to our sites with a purpose, and as we increase our use of data and analytics, we're able to increase the monetization and yield per user. Our data capabilities, combined with the large first-party data set that we have, allow us to target readers further up the value chain, creating more meaningful segments. On this pyramid, you can see our most valuable audience is our B2B audience. We're truly finding the right person is what matters most and not volume, while at the bottom of our pyramid are our largest, mostly new sites that lack some of the endemic characteristics of our higher-intent consumer brands and are, hence, are less valuable. A great example of our strategy in action driving higher-value audiences to intent content has been our fastest-growing organic site this year, The Money Edit. We grew this audience using an e-mail newsletter strategy accessing the [ LAM ] database, which was part of the GoCo acquisition. Ultimately, where we want to grow our audiences, we also want to ensure that we are growing the most valuable and relevant readership. On Slide 27, I wanted to deep dive the value of podium positions within the markets that we operate. If we have both high-intent, endemic audiences and also podium positions, then that enables us to drive premiumization across our yields as we have the most relevant and valuable users for our advertising and retail partners while also being able to deliver scale given our absolute reach. In this more challenging consumer market, we've typically seen a flight to quality in terms of advertising spend, with advertisers rationalizing their spend with the partners who they truly meet their needs. For example, this Christmas, we've carried online M&S's key awareness campaigns, winning the largest share of their digital ad budget as a consequence of our influential female audiences across the women's and homes brands in the U.K. During 2022, we made excellent progress with our strategy to reach 1 and 2 in the U.S., growing 3 percentage points. We have not only maintained our leadership positions, but in many instances, this year, we've grown our market share. For example, in consumer technology space, not only are we the #1 media brand in the market, we're 1.7x bigger than our next competitor compared to 1.3x in 2021, demonstrating the value of our content and our ability to outperform the competition even in a tougher market. In our gaming vertical, where we hold the #1 brand in PC gaming, during the last 12 months, we've launched unique events, including the PC gaming spotlight, which ran this month. These events offer unique opportunities for advertisers to reach their target audience in a different format, this event being video first, while also adding new ways for us to monetize our reach. In our less mature divisions of Lifestyle, Knowledge & News, we made significant progress in Fashion & Beauty, which, as we highlighted at our recent Capital Markets Day, is a strategic driver for the group. Our increased market share is a consequence of both organic and inorganic investments, which I will talk more about later. Our second strategic objective is to diversify and grow our monetization, ensuring we're not relying on any one vertical or format, and we've been very successful with this over the last few years. So on Slide 20 (sic) [ Slide 28 ], you can see we have 3 primary revenue streams: affiliate, which includes both affiliate commissions on products as well as emissions on services, and in 2022, this accounted for around 1/3 of our revenues; advertising, which predominantly is online advertising and accounts for around 36% of our revenues; while direct consumer monetization is around 31%, of which around half is recurring subscription revenue. As you can see, our revenue areas are really well balanced, with no one revenue stream overly dominant in the portfolio. Within these revenues, we have additional diversifications, be that by audience type, ranging from B2B to home furnishings, and diversification of location across the U.K., U.S. and Australia. And we've created new technologies and data capabilities to allow us to increase our monetization per user, ensuring we're leaning into our areas of strength. As you can see on Slide 29, the diversification of Future's revenues has been working well in our consumer portfolio. On the top left-hand side of this chart, you can see our audience is split nearly 1/3 each across our verticals, with Wealth & Savings accounting for 26% of our consumer audience; Lifestyle, Knowledge & News, 1/3; and games, ents and technology just over 40%. This creates a natural content hedge. During the pandemic, we saw a lot of traffic spikes around homeworking and entertainment, while today, the focus of our audience is much more around what is the most cost-effective electric blanket and how to cook Christmas dinner for under GBP 50. The middle pie chart highlights that the consumer revenue mix is distributed 1/3 each, with less reliance on ads and a bigger mix of consumer direct. This equal weighting of our 3 primary revenue streams serves us exceptionally well in a market where consumer spending is more challenged, and we are able to pivot where budgets are. While our geographic split protects us around a deeper recessionary pressure in any one market. During last year, our fastest-growing geography in terms of audience and revenues was the U.S. This only represents 36% of our revenue mix, underpinning the material opportunity over the next few years as we increase share. The example on the right-hand side brings out the diversification strategy to life. As I mentioned a moment ago, we launched The Money Edit last July. With the initial traffic driving source being by the legacy [ LAM ] newsletters, during October, this site had its best ever month, reaching over 1 million users, with half of that audience having originated from newsletters. Month-to-date in November, we've seen a further month-over-month growth of 40%. We are monetizing this audience through a combination of high-yielding advertising campaigns and affiliate service commissions from articles like, should I switch my bank account. While Slide 30 highlights the broader macro diversification across the group, with our high-intent, highly valuable B2B audience. This is currently 8% of our total revenue, growing at 12% organically in 2022. This business generates revenues in the same way as the consumer portfolio across ads, affiliates and premium content. And by its nature, this audience is far smaller than the consumer portfolio and much more valuable. We've been building our B2B business across the group since 2018, and our recent acquisition of IT Pro from Dennis helped to grow our lead generation capabilities. While the SmartBrief and Media brands are largely focused in the U.S., which last year accounted for 80% of these revenues. Moving on to Slide 31. A core part of our strategy is to acquire businesses where we believe we can create unique value. And we've continued to successfully execute on that over the last 12 months. As you can see on Slide 32, we have completed 5 acquisitions, allocating over GBP 400 million of cash, while maintaining a prudent approach to leverage on our balance sheet. The acquisitions we've undertaken have all represented ways for Future to accelerate its strategy, bringing a combination of new content or new capabilities to the group and ideally both. Take the acquisition of Dennis completed 13 months ago. This has really turbocharged our wealth strategy while also adding subscription capabilities and materially increasing the mix of recurring revenues within the wider portfolio. While Who What Wear, acquired in June of this year has enhanced our content capabilities, enabling us to increase our leadership position in the U.S. in the women's fashion and beauty, while also increasing our knowledge around consumer e-mail monetization. We continue to be as disciplined as always, looking for acquisitions that meet our financial hurdles and our strategic goals. And as a consequence, Penny's team reviewed 23 deals last year for each 1 that we completed. A number of you have asked over the last few months about the pipeline, citing pricing and my succession as a reason why we might not be able to execute on transactions with the same momentum as we've seen over the last few years. And I really hope this slide underpins that we've been as busy as ever. And with Penny's expanding remit as Chief Finance and Strategy Officer, she will ensure there's a seamless continuity and execution of our M&A strategy during next year, regardless of any leadership changes. While the new facility she and the team secured earlier this month have added material additional firepower to our balance sheet while still operating in a fiscally responsible manner. Moving on to Slide 23 -- 33, sorry. One of the areas that makes Future truly successful is what we call the platform effect. And I believe this is a critical differentiator in our business. The platform effect is, in essence, the outcomes of the combination of our operating model, proprietary tech and discipline and rigor around how we approach investments, be that organic or inorganic. And I think Slide 34 really brings to life how this works. This chart lays out the value we've created since 2018, and evidence is that through truly unique opportunities and focused execution, we've been able to create meaningful returns. In 2018, the group EBITDA was GBP 21 million. I'm going to pause here for a moment. Only 5 years ago, we were GBP 21 million of EBITDA, and today we're GBP 294 million. During the last 4 years, we have acquired GBP 128 million of EBITDA at a total cost of GBP 1.4 billion. And consequently, to get us to the EBITDA we generated this year of GBP 294 million, we've created over GBP 145 million of additional EBITDA. This GBP 145 million is a combination of the core underlying organic growth and the platform effect where, through targeted investments, we're able to deliver revenue and cost synergies while bringing new capabilities and skills to the wider group, which creates the operating leverage. We've more than doubled the acquired profits over the last 4 years, delivering an EBITDA CAGR of 94%. We believe this value creation model is repeatable and clearly effective given the strong track record. However, it's really easy for me to provide a chart that outlines that we grew 94% CAGR over the last 4 years. But the critical thing is how do we do it. Not actually sure it's that easy to produce those charts either. And on Slide 35, I'm hoping to explain how the platform effect actually works. So you can have the same confidence as I do and the ability of the business to deliver the long-term sustainable growth that Penny described earlier. This slide outlines our progress in the high-value homes and women's lifestyle vertical. We identified 5 years ago that we wanted to increase our audience diversification to a more female-orientated market. However, we had no internal editorial expertise in these areas. And that's a critical requirement at Future. Through a combination of acquisitions to increase our expertise, coupled with organic investment, we've transformed into the #1 publisher of homes content in the U.K., just outside the top 10 in the U.S. while in our women's vertical, we've gone from no presence to the top 6 in the U.S. Targeted strategic acquisitions have brought content expertise and new capabilities to the group, for example, social monetization. While the development -- deployment of our affiliate technology and hybrid ad platforms have materially increased digital monetization. It's been really great to see the significant success the homes portfolio have seen over peak trading. And in case you're wondering, I think every home in the U.K. bought an air fryer last weekend. The cost synergies achieved from the acquisitions have allowed us to reinvest new brands and content expansion. For example, Fit&Well, Real Homes, PetsRadar and My Imperfect Life are all organic launches. And it is the combination of Future's existing technology capabilities, coupled with acquired strategic skills that is where we create unique opportunities for Future growth. Our success, however, is not limited to the women's and homes verticals. More recently, we identified a strategic opportunity in Wealth & Savings. And on Slide 36, you can see how we deployed the same playbook as I've just outlined. We acquired GoCo Plc and Mozo in Australia, bringing skills into the business around affiliate commissions for services and high-value content around savings. We then use the Future model around efficient technology to create a white label voucher business, which has now been deployed across our Media brands and to rebuild the PCW tech to create a modular solution that's repeatable. The rich first-party data from these customer groups have supported our ability to deliver increased advertising yields. We've achieved all of our initial strategic rationales with the PCW acquisitions, and we're truly delighted with the performance of Go.Compare, increasing the mix of non-car insurance revenues by 5 percentage points this year. Such was our conviction in this area, we then acquired MoneyWeek and Kiplinger as part of the Dennis acquisition, adding increased content and media experience while also helping to strategically evolve our revenue mix so that we have a higher proportion of recurring revenues in our subscriber base. Using the Vanilla website platform, our SEO cost centers of excellence and leveraging our existing advertising teams, we've been able to grow revenues across these brands. Finally, the cost synergies achieved allowed us to self-fund investments and increasing headcount and content, including new channels on existing brands and totally new site launches. For example, we recently added financial advice content on The Week. Moving on to Slide 37. Over the last few slides, I hope I've given you a better understanding of how we deliver our strategy and the truly unique impact of our platform effect. Penny earlier walked you through our approach to capital allocation, where she outlined how we believe the business can sustainably deliver 10% profit growth from the organic portfolio, 10% from targeted M&A and a further 5% from the platform effect. What this slide looks to do is underpin where we see those opportunities coming from in the consumer portfolio. We've proven over the last 5 years that growing our market share and size and technology has created operating leverage and this has been achieved through a combination of targeted M&A and organic growth. We believe we have lots of headrooms to grow further in our new verticals, with homes and women's having a large variable audience in the U.S. that we can realize over the next few years. We have lots of capacity for further growth in wealth, driving value from affiliate services, high-value subscriber audiences and growing new content areas. Worth also pointing out on this slide is that it illustrates only our B2C opportunities. And as I highlighted earlier, we have a great B2B business, and Penny's team see as many opportunities there as well. And it's a consequence of this, coupled with our brand leadership that gives us the confidence in the 10-10-5 plan, which is a nice segue into where ourselves today. Moving to Slide 39. We have delivered another exceptional set of results, adding once more to our track record of profit growth. Our diversified model is perfectly pitched for a challenging macro backdrop, ensuring the business can lean into areas of demand as consumers and client needs change. For example, our focus on savings and wealth is perfectly timed for a more cost-conscious time. Our business model has repeatedly proven itself resilient and scalable, delivered continued margin growth even in high inflationary periods we find ourselves. Our exceptional cash generation, coupled with our prudent approach to leverage means the business is exceptionally well positioned to continue to invest in growth, both organically and via M&A opportunities. And as a result, we could expect to continue our track record of profit growth into 2023. Now before I move to Q&A, I wanted to just answer a question that I've had a lot recently regarding my decision to retire from Future. As you will have seen from this presentation, Future is a brilliant business with a clear market opportunity. And it's well placed in the shifting landscape to grow over the next few years. Now there's never a good time to leave our business and it was a very hard and difficult decision for me to make and one that I did not make lightly. I believe the Nom Comm have appointed headhunters, and a search is underway. And regardless of the timing of that particular change, what I do know is that the business is in great shape, with strategic momentum and a great management team to deliver on the longer-term plans. We'll open it up to Q&A. Gareth?

Maybe 2 on affiliates. Sorry, Gareth Davies from Numis. Maybe 2 on affiliates and then 1 on costs. So you've touched on the kind of changes of what consumers are buying. Can you just expand a little bit more on those comments in terms of what you're currently seeing through Black Friday and kind of how you're pivoting to address that opportunity and where the sort of risks are? Secondly, on the comparison side, presumably, that shift away from car insurance is mainly other insurance categories at the moment, how confident are you, you can start to expand into the kind of more generic financial products in the current financial year? Or is that really a '24 story? And then the final one on costs was, can you just confirm what your cost inflation -- underlying cost inflation assumption is? And then what -- are there any specific pockets of saving that you're targeting that can offset that? A useful slide on the variables, et cetera, but just that specific.

Great questions. So we start off with Black Friday. It really was all about air fryers and the partners in electric blanket that costs [ 4p and an electric one ], which is cheaper than Tornier central heating on, so I bought that from my mom, which will make her happy. But really, the whole ethos of Black Friday over the last 4 days or so has really been around saving yourself costs in the longer term, so buying products which are going to lower your running costs, less indulgent product purchases and less big consumer electronic purchases. We saw last year a lot of spend still chasing PS5s and the consoles, which we've seen in the previous year as well. And we saw last year some spend still in some of the larger consumer electronics. This year, we've seen that as a much softer market. As I said, the market shrunk itself 13% in terms of audience reach. What we are seeing in the wider consumer sentiment that's worth calling out is that outside of these events, the basket is down. And so we and our cautious outlook are basically expecting that to continue over the next few months and are assuming that -- what we're seeing is about a 10% shrinkage in the basket. So when we get the audience, we get better conversion, we get better click-through rates. But fundamentally, people are spending less. And therefore, we're seeing -- also seeing less people on the site, which is one of the reasons for the headwinds we potentially see in our audience numbers. In terms of the PCW mix, we have been delighted with the performance of Go.Compare. And for those of you who didn't pick it up when we mentioned at the Capital Markets Day, the rebranding of GoCompare.com to Go.Compare is really subtle but quite important for us. One of the key levers in that acquisition was to deliver efficiency in our marketing spend, and one of our big marketing spends is we have to pay Google PPC for our own brand name. So you type GoCompare, we end up having to own and pay for GoCompare.com. By changing the name to Go.Compare, we cut out Google, and we go straight to our site. So we see that as a real opportunity for marketing efficiency and, in fact, one of the areas in which we can see efficiency in 2023. In terms of -- I haven't answered your question, but I'm going to, Gareth. In terms of the revenue spend, the revenue mix, what we have seen predominantly is about 20% growth in other insurance areas within the portfolio. So really strong growth in that side of things. The reason why I wanted to call it The Money Edit is we are now starting to monetize better from that traditional financial products. And so with The Money Edit, we've been monetizing bank account switching, and we've also just launched our credit card switching proposition, both in the U.K. and in the U.S. It is worth calling out, we have a business in Australia called Mozo, which is also PCW, and that is on fire, just now predominantly monetizes through personal finance. And so we continue to keep the learning exchange going between those 2 teams as well to kind of drive those e-comm services. Penny, cost.

Yes. So 2 elements, which is, as Zillah touched on the marketing efficiencies that we're seeing. So we are definitely seeing a reduction of marketing spend in this year, both from brand PPC and also across our subscriptions portfolio. And then secondly, cost for us is really strategic discipline, which we practice every time we do an acquisition. I highlighted in the presentation that we have added around 1,500 heads over the course of the last 2 years, which has sort of more than doubled the headcount, and so we're just rebalancing around doubling down on our location strategy in the center of excellence model. So for example, in January, we're about to open our new hub in Cardiff as a new sort of lower-cost location. So really just rebalancing where we spend and focusing on some of the technology efficiencies.

It's Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. I just got 3 questions as well, please. The first is on advertising. Obviously, everyone is a bit concerned about advertising going into the new year. But your -- Future has always done well in the direct advertising side. And just some color on to your thoughts of what's going to happen, especially Aperture, which has been great for that part of the business. The second is any color on or thoughts on the core Go.Compare insurance business going into the new year. And the final one is just we've obviously had 2 quite important Google algo changes recently. And we're hearing some publishers that are having some impacts from that. So how it's impacted Future, any color on that would be great.

Sure, brilliant. So first up, ads. I think you're quite right, Jessica. We have outperformed the competition. I think Penny's slide nicely demonstrated that during the second half of this year, and it is absolutely down to the quality of our audience. We have really quality, high-intent, endemic audiences. And using the Aperture data that we have, which enriches -- every time we do an acquisition, we bring more data points into that, really helps us ensure that we help advertisers find the person they want to find but also having the scale to get those campaigns away. And that was why I used the M&S example, one of the reasons why we won that campaign. In the U.K., we would not have won that business 2 years ago, so a real demonstration of kind of where we're seeing different advertisers come to the market. I wish I had a crystal ball that could tell you what was going to happen in the next 6 to 12 months. It's hard at the moment to tell you what's going to happen in the next 6 weeks. And I think that's reflected in our cautious outlook about what we see in 2023. I think it's fair to say from our perspective, we believe that while we haven't been seeing Future through major recession, we have seen Future through the start of the pandemic, which felt a little bit like a major recession at that point in time. And we performed exceptionally well during that period, and what we saw was that flight to quality of our first-party advertising and our segments around that. I think just to pick up the point we were making about targeted investments, what we do also think because we want to make sure that as we spend our money thoughtfully over the next 12 months, we focus on creating content where we believe we can drive recurring revenues. So focusing more on evergreen, which is probably one of the reasons why we think some of the audience softness might come through in the next 12 months to coming out of some of the kind of more pop-type content that has proliferated a little bit through the last 24 months with our acquisitions and doubling back down on content, which continues to deliver returns through the longer term. In terms of the core Go.Compare, and thank you for getting the name right, we have to pick that up internally as well. The Go.Compare business, it's also quite hard to predict what's going to happen there because it's been quite a volatile year in the general car insurance market in terms of the rate of exchanges this time last year. And certainly, pricing remained quite tight as a consequence of that. I think it's fair to say we think that there's an increasing volume in the market just now, and we certainly are entering into the next few months more positive than we were 12 months ago. However, it is a volatile market. And therefore, I think our general outlook is just be one of being a bit more cautious, being able to come back with a surprise on the upside rather than the other way around. And I was smiling when you say Google had 2 algo changes because in my last count, I think it was 12 this year and certainly 4 during October. So Google has been pretty busy just now disrupting itself, and as we know, media fundamentally is a disruptive industry. I think the way we've built our business model is to make sure that we're protected against that, and we do that in a number of ways. First of all, we've got multiple brands in each of our verticals. What we tend to find is when Google makes algo changes, some brands fall out of favor, some brands fall in favor, and that was one of the pivots we made about 4 years ago to have more than one brand in any one vertical to protect ourselves from that. What you'll typically see, for example, is TechRadar and Tom's Guide swap rankings all the time, and that's certainly going on just now. The second key point for us with regards to that was as we think about Google, what we thought more about was we wanted to own more of the sources of our traffic. What we really tried to outline today is the significant developments we've made there in terms of direct-to-site, e-mail newsletters and social traffic, which means that we're not depending on any one platform or any one source of traffic for our growth going forward. And we think as we go forward in the next 5 years, that's a really important part of our diversification.

It's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I've got 3, please. So just on the guidance of modest profit growth, can you say what FX you're setting that at? Because that's moved around a lot recently, probably a bit of a variety in consensus. And any sense of what consensus has for FY '23 on FX, so we can make that comparison. Second question, so on the outlook, you're referring to volatility and uncertainty driven by macro. I think you mentioned just a minute ago, 6 weeks, Zillah, but can you give us a sense of how much visibility you have on particularly digital advertising and the e-commerce commissions and whether you've seen any clear signs of weakness there yet? Or what you're baking into your guidance is just what you're expecting what you can see? And then you're clearly planning your costs with a cautious approach to macro. So if the -- those volatile revenue streams are better or worse than you expect, do they drop through this year at a high percentage level? Or do you keep on varying your costs through the year upwards or downwards?

Do you want to do the first one?

Yes. So in terms of FX, in general, we try not to focus on it too much because some years, it's a headwind, in some years, it's a tailwind. And certainly, I think we've seen over the last 8 weeks, it go from [ 1.09 to 1.20 ], so that is quite challenging to forecast. So I'm not sure that there is a particular effect that most of the consensus are using. In general, I mean everything is based on spot, and we tend to be cautious is -- in our outlook. And so we want to make sure that we're kind of comfortable to absorb any headwinds of a reasonable proportion.

In terms of then on the volatility and uncertain nature in the macro backdrop, certainly the last 6 weeks have been quite unpredictable. As Penny just said, FX has been all over the place as have interest rates. And likewise, we take that into the year ahead. I think in terms of digital advertising that we've had a terrific year. We've been really pleased with performance. We've grown strong, particularly pleasing and the performance in the U.S. And certainly, in our Q4, which is calendar Q3, we saw a strong performance there. We're pleased with the performance in Q1. I would be lying if I said to you there's not a little bit of softness in the market, but it's not amongst our core advertising partners. And so I don't fundamentally think Future's at risk there. I think we recognize that some of big [ FANGs ] are cutting some spend. And so there's just a little bit of less money in the market overall. But in terms of the core Future portfolio, our first-party proposition remains strong. Our audiences are highly sought after, and our data segmentation allows us to drive those yields. And so we're pretty comfortable about the top half of the stack. There might be a little bit of yield erosion at the bottom half of the stack as there's just a bit less demand in the market, and therefore, you'll see a little bit more volume. In terms of e-comm and from an -- I want to just add some perspective, we look on a rolling 12 weeks basis, and we kind of monitor those trends, and we look at it every week. So we've got fairly good visibility of what we're seeing just now. In terms of e-commerce, I think the point I was making earlier is probably what we've seen, I think, in the last few months since September, so since maybe things have got a little bit more volatile again, we've seen the basket shrink 10%. And as clear as night as day, you can kind of see it would go from 1 day to the next, which is people just started to buy less when they bought things. And what we also saw, as I said, was just less people looking to buy things. So we've seen a spike around Memorial Day in the U.S., which was in September -- Labor Day, I always get them mixed up, the September U.S. holiday. We saw a spike around Prime Early Access. And then, of course, we saw a spike last weekend over Black Friday. And during those 3 moments, you see more volume in the market and more demand. And outside of those, the market is just softer, and we are seeing that softness coming through, which is what we, therefore, reflected in our cautious outlook. Now we've assumed that continues for the whole of the year. We're taking a very bearish view on where we are. I think when you talk to the wider market, people kind of get a sense that as we trade through this first 6 months, things might ease up a little bit in the economy. But we've just said, look, in the absence of better information, let's just be conservative here and flow that through in our performance. In terms of costs, I think what -- I think I'm not quite sure if you're asking us about positive leverage or negative leverage, but I'll answer it both ways, and Penny, maybe you can check in as well. I think -- yes, exactly. And I think that's what -- when I go to bed, I'm in a good mood. That's what I think about, which is that we are really fiscally responsible as an organization, right? It's an unusual period of time. Currencies move [ GBP 0.10 ]. It's our job to absorb that. It's not your job to deal with that, but that means we have to take appropriate action if that gets harder for us rather than softer for us. And we look across our portfolio to make sure we increase our hurdle rates and our investments. We make sure the money we spend is delivering a return for us across the portfolio and things like our operating model. It's been a really core part of our competitive advantage over the last 10 years and one of the reasons we've been able to drive margin. Post the pandemic, we couldn't even get people to come back to the office and so actually kind of like really making sure that we had instilled our operating model around low-cost locations, small hubs with centers of excellence. It's just something that -- it wasn't a battle you wanted to fight last year, if that makes sense. What we wanted to do is get people back in and get people back to work. This year, it's absolutely the right time to have those conversations to start talking about. We don't need to hire more heads into the U.S. We want to hire more heads into Cardiff. And that's what we mean about driving our operating leverage to achieve us to do that. So I think as we take that action, and we will continue to do that, and we'll continue to deploy the strategic model, what we would therefore expect to see is that if we've taken an overly cautious view on revenue, that should flow through disproportionate to profits because we're not going to kind of like switch it back on, if that make sense. But equally, if we continue to see a further step down in consumer spending, then we will continue to take that variable approach. We've got a big part of the cost base, which varies directly with the consumer. Having said all of that, 1/3 -- 1/6 of the revenues is subscribers. We've got a lot of visibility of that. The other half of that consumer direct, which is magazines, has been performing exceptionally well. And I think it's at that price point where if you scan and you can't afford some new clothes or a new TV, you can still afford to buy FourFourTwo, or you can still afford to buy Horse & Hound. So we've actually seen that proved to be very resilient. It's 1/3 of the whole revenues in the group there in that regard. It's a good place to be right in content about wealth and savings just now. It's a great time to have a PCW business. It's a great time to have a PCW business in Australia. And so we really do feel that the work we've been doing over the last 3 or 4 years, which has not been accidental, has served us well for where we find ourselves right now. We didn't anticipate this macro backdrop, but we feel we've built a business which is diversified enough to ride through this rather than just being [ long ] only in tech at this moment in time.

It's Lara Simpson from JPMorgan. Just 2 questions. First is on the outlook for 2023. I'm clearly flagging push to consumer spend, weak macro backdrop but confidence in your ability to outperform in a challenging market. Just wondering if you could give some color on the market expectations that you have. So just trying to understand what the base is that we'll be trying to outperform. And then you'll obviously be having M&A and FX tailwinds, which you've discussed next year. But just trying to understand any color on the organic growth decline next year, just the building blocks around that. And then my second question would be on capital allocation. Clearly, a very strong message on M&A and the pipeline that you've got there. You've now got the balance sheet to support that. But just interested on any comments on thinking around shareholder returns and returning capital cash there would be helpful.

[ I can ] start, and Penny, you pick up. So I think the key message about next year from where we're seeing is we've delivered GBP 272 million of operating profit this year, and we expect to grow that next year. I think what we're seeing is, if you look at it in the round, there's quite a lot of puts and takes going on just now, and we think we're exceptionally well placed to manage those puts and takes in terms of consumer confidence in spending in terms of e-commerce affiliate and potential slowdown in the advertising market. So we believe that we continue to grow the business. We think that revenues overall will probably hold around the same as this year. That is absent any further M&A. We don't forecast M&A because we think it leads you to do the wrong thing. And so it's very important for us to make sure that we buy businesses that, we think, add value rather than to meet consensus in the market and to make market guidance happy. So we are very disciplined around leaving that out. And so I think it's really important to recognize that the growth we're predicting into next year just now is absent any further M&A and absent any of the deployment of the north of GBP 250 million of cash that I suspect we'll generate during the course of next year. Penny, do you want to add more color to that on the capital allocation?

Yes. So just in terms of the capital allocation. We think -- we certainly think the long-term return of cash to shareholders that some businesses follow is a brilliant strategy. It's not currently our strategy, and we continue to see that there is a ton of opportunity for us to grow out the diversified verticals. And so we continue to review it. But right now, we think that there are opportunities to continue to grow the business for the long term, and that will provide, over the long term, a greater return for shareholders. I think just in terms of the market, obviously, the cost of capital has increased, and so we've reflected that in our investment hurdle rates. And so the real kind of key executional factor will be to make sure that we continue to buy great businesses but at good prices, which provide value accretion for shareholders over the next 12 to 24 months.

It's Johnathan Barrett from Panmure Gordon. I'll go with 3 questions, if that's okay. First of all, just on semi-fixed costs. You've given this last year [indiscernible] which is very helpful. Could you just perhaps give us the component values for marketing, PBC and the freelance settlements and give us a steer on just how much you've already baked in, in terms of reducing those to date? So what your run rate level is going to be through this year. That's the first question. And then secondly, just on the tech audience, I think you've talked about the market being down 13% on use of -- users, just to make sure I understand that correctly. Can you give us your comparative for that? Just so we -- that's contextualized, please. And perhaps talk about the 2 other main areas and what you think the audiences will do for the market and for yourselves. Just give us sort of a feel for that. I think you're fairly bullish on the savings side. And then thirdly, last question is away from sort of the volume issues of activity, are there any behaviors you're picking up on from advertisers that give you some idea of how this thing may evolve in 2023, please?

Do you want to do the first one?

Yes. So in terms of the first question, so marketing is just over GBP 100 million of our spend. I mean the key thing for us is that we have an ROI model and so we continue to kind of tweak up, tweak down depending on actually what is the return that we're seeing, the change in trend on what we're delivering. In terms of base assumptions, we're assuming sort of circa 10% reduction in marketing spend, but we'll continue to tweak depending on how the market is trending.

Brilliant. And then in terms of our tech audience, so as you said, the comScore market shrunk 13% last year, and I think that was definitely a consequence of PS4 -- PS5s, sorry, demand and console releases. There was a lot of people the previous year looking for that audience and also the pandemic in terms of a lot of people are looking for laptops, home office equipment in the previous year, so you saw ongoing declines against that. The third element in that market that's really worth pointing out is the ongoing issues in China around ongoing lockdowns and the product shortages as a consequence. It's not been a particularly big innovation here. There's not been a lot of new products in the market. There's nothing new in the market. There's not a lot to write about. And so it is our expectation the market will continue to be follow-on with that during the over the next 12 months. We don't see the stock and chip shortage problem, particularly improving materially over the next -- certainly in the near term. And that's what we're hearing from our advertising partners and the endemics who we work with around that. And so we expect that to flow through in the market. I also think that there was a lot of brought-forward spend in 2019 and 2020 around laptops, home desk, et cetera. So I think go back 24 months ago, home desk was one of our biggest selling items at Black Friday. I think we sold like hardly any material number this year. So I think that cycle just needs to kind of get back into normal because prior to that point, that was a very routine annual cycle, and I think we're kind of still seeing some dislocation in that. In terms of our performance versus last year, I actually don't have -- I think it's about 10% down in tech in terms of audience. But there is in the back of the deck, the brand-by-brand analysis of our top 10 brands. And you can see that, for example, TechRadar was down, but Tom's Guide was up. And that underpins that point around what we find sometimes is that one brand falls out of favor, another brand gets a bit more popularity. And so what we tend to do is you see the terms that we think are valuable, the articles swap between our brands. But we would expect -- I mean I would expect to see a minus 10% decline in tech over the next 12 months. We're taking a very cautious view on that, but it's -- from our perspective, we think that's the right thing to do given the visibility that we see just now and given where we see the trends. However, we see a very different proposition in the Lifestyle, Knowledge & News portfolio and in Wealth & Savings portfolio, with both of those verticals growing. And so we've been very pleased during last year to see the growth that we achieved in those 2 verticals. As you can imagine right now it's great to football site. There's lots of audience there just now, and we've seen amazing performance in MoneyWeek following that acquisition in terms of audience growth and then obviously, also The Money Edit. I did mention in the update around making sure we create content which is truly valuable. And so for example, one of the decisions we made was actually to change the editorial strategy of The Week U.S. And that has made that site decline about 35% this year, but that's a much more valuable audience. And I think one of the disciplines at Future is we don't chase headline numbers, we chase valuable recurring revenues, which is valuable recurring profits. And so we actually made some changes to that team during the course of this year. We're actually making better money from that audience. But at a headline term, for example, that would be an example of where we are, making sure that we are going after the valuable, sustainable audience rather than the audience we've inherited from some of the acquisitions that we've acquired. On the situation around advertising. I wish you about what's going to lie ahead. I think the thing that I see if I take a step back from a macro backdrop perspective is that the biggest change in the advertising for me is the absence of free money. So if you go back over the last 24 months, 36 months, there was a lot of money in crypto. There's a lot of money in the unicorns. And they were -- there's a lot of football covers right now, have been worrying about who's going to sponsor their shirts. That's all gone. And so that money has come out of the market. And unfortunately, that wasn't particularly the money that we were taking at Future. So that's not particularly impactful to us. But if you ask me about what I think is the biggest change in the market and where do we hear the change in dialogue, it's that money that's coming out. And that's why I think if we were being conservative and realistic, what that means is there will be more volume in the market at the lower end, and there'll also be less demand, which, therefore, I think will drive down yields at the right bottom of the stack, which is why it's really important that we have proprietary premium audiences, direct relationships with our clients, so we can go out and sell to the direct underlying agencies and why our model becomes a source of advantage in this next 12 months. But that's where I think you'll see more of the weakness come through. Mate, I think we're out of time. I think that's gone past 10:00. Thank you very much for your time today. Cheers.