Ingenta plc ($ING)
Earnings Call Transcript · May 7, 2026
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Operator
OperatorGood afternoon, and welcome to the Ingenta plc investor presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I'd just like to submit the following poll, which I kindly ask you submit your responses to. I'd now like to hand over to CEO, Scott Winner. Scott, good afternoon.
Gregory Winner
ExecutivesGood afternoon. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us here today, and we're going to talk you through our financial -- our final results from 2025 and talk you through where we're heading and what we're doing. First, let me do a quick intro. So I'm Scott Winner. For those of you that haven't followed us for a while, I've been CEO since 2018. I have a very diverse background working in a lot of fields, but I have been working in and around publishing and technology for several decades and continue to do so. Jon, do you want to give yourself a quick intro?
Jonathan Sheffield
ExecutivesYes. Hello, everyone. My name is Jon. I head up the finance team. I've got a remit on HR and internal IT. My background is in audit and assurance, and I've had -- lastly I had roles in the retail and software businesses.
Gregory Winner
ExecutivesOkay. So Jon and I are going to turn our cameras off while we run through the presentation, and I will be back on for the Q&A part. So let me talk to you about Ingenta. If you haven't been following us, we've been around for about 45 years. And really, we've been focused on providing technology solutions and services into information and content providers. Now this space is changing a lot, and we've been changing with it over the past 4.5 decades. But really, what we focus on is software and services dedicated to mission-critical aspects of the industries we work in. So our software is always necessary and needed. And so we want to make sure we stick to software that a company needs and that we play a critical role in that. It allows us to get with customers and keep them very sticky. Now our products are focused on -- over the course of my tenure as CEO, we focused our products and being able to handle the simplest end of the spectrum and the most complex end. And you'll see when I start talking through some of our customers, we actually have customers at both ends and all the way through the middle, and we continue to try to expand in all aspects. We really are here. We recognize that in our industries, our customers really just want to produce good content, no matter sort of who they are. So whether that's an association or the United Nations or those types of groups, all they're worried about is doing is putting their content out into the world in the best way possible. And we want to allow our customers to do that. So our services are really dedicated to keep the noise out of their system as much as possible related to our software and keep us instrumental in what they're doing for that. So let me talk a little bit more. I'll talk through the high-level numbers, and then Jon, of course, will talk through more detail later in the process. You can see we have some very sticky customers. Many of us -- have been with us average of 19 years. We've had some longer. We naturally have some very short customers, some very, very new customers as of this year and just some customers that stick around with us. And this is partially because we're mission-critical, but also partially because of our services and what we provide is really -- we have really good solutions because they've been developed over such a length of time. And so we continue to have that sticky customer base. You can see we have a lot of recurring revenues. Now this is both because we operate as a Software-as-a-Service business primarily now, although we have some long-term customers on a different model. So we have a lot of recurring revenues from that as well as recurring services. So we have customers who ask us to do things like host their solution -- host our solution for them fully. And so they pay us to do that on an ongoing basis with long-term agreements. You can see we've had a really strong cash balance sheet of GBP 4.7 million and with an EBITDA of 20%. So -- and that EBITDA is really driven off of 2 things. So naturally, the software piece of it, it's very high. On the services piece, it is a bit lower and 20% is where we'd like to at least keep it, and that will go up the more business we can take on. So let's talk about who we work with first before I go into exactly what we do. So we've always traditionally been involved in paper publishing. Back in the day when we first started, we were paper publishing, whether that be journals, books, all aspects of publishing. And we played a multitude of roles in that field. As you can see, that market is still growing. It's a growing market, has been a growing market for several hundred years. We expect it to continue to grow, but it's a slow growth market. You can see we're playing more and more in digital publishing. In fact, one aspect of what we do is really digital distribution of content, and that's growing faster than publishing. And then we also are now playing in music pretty heavily. We have several music customers. We have several media customers, and we are looking to expand to start getting into gaming. And gaming naturally is a very high-growth market. Now for what we do, and as I talked about it, we think it's slightly slower growth in the whole gaming market as a whole. So we try to adjust those figures down to what seemed reasonable from what we're doing. But in these markets, I mean, we really want to maintain a focus on what we do. And as a result of being around for 45 years, our focus has had to expand. So as we've always worked in the paper publishing world, those -- our customers have changed. And we're talking world-class publishers like Sage Publishing, McGraw-Hill, they're our customers. And we continue to shift and expand our focus. So we've taken on more and more over time to the point where we actually were doing a lot of digital publishing just through the nature of our growth. In fact, we also had some music, some minor pieces of gaming at those customers and some elements of media as people went to animated books, those types of things. So what we see really is the whole market is converging into sort of the global media market, which is a very large market, continues to expand greatly. And all of these things are slowly coming together into sort of one market. Their models are becoming very similar, like book streaming is going on now, like music streaming has, like video streaming has. And so there's a lot going on in these markets. You can see there is this sort of convergence that's going on with the various groups. And then there's also a lot of consolidation going on. So in these fields, the barriers to entry are lower than they've been ever, and they continue to get easier. And so people are able to spin up very small music companies, very small publishing companies very, very quickly. And so those companies spin up and then they continue to grow and they continue to grow. And the ones that are successful get subsumed into large organizations. So large organizations buy them up, which gives us -- if we can start at the bottom end and get more of those, we can get introduced further and further up the chain, naturally some risk that something will change dramatically there. But what's great about these, there's also sort of an evergreen cycle to these that there's more people continuing to evolve and need low-end solutions as well as grow to high-end solutions. And because our products can handle from the very small to the very large and with different models, it allows us to tap into all aspects of those markets. I was just talking about some of this, but I want to again stress how important that continuum is because people really do -- ideally, because we also have some revenue share models going, we will be getting into the low end, get a little bit of revenue share and grow with our customers. And our products have been geared to be -- have a configuration layer where you can configure them to be simple or you can configure them to be super complicated depending on whether you're a McGraw-Hill or you're like a British Small Animal Veterinary Association. So you can go from those different groups of people. The solutions are not tied to specific content. So one of the principles that's been in place since before I was even CEO is that our solutions are content agnostic. Now when we originally thought that we thought they were agnostic in terms of whether you're doing book publishing, journal publishing, article publishing, whatever you were doing. Over time, that's grown to whether it's digital, whether it's media, whether it's video, it doesn't really matter because a lot of the same principles are applied across those markets, speaking back to the convergence that's happening. And our solutions really support the specific needs of those customers regardless of the content, which has allowed us to do the expansion that we're starting to do now and hoping to grow more rapidly into some of these new markets. Our solutions do focus on what we also recognize is while we're a critical part of our customers' technology ecosystem, if you will, we also focus on all of our products have a real solid integration layer, and that's critical to what we do. The more we can tie into what our customers do, the more sticky the business is, the more value they see in our products, the more reach we have into these customer organizations. And we have customers where we have no integration, very small ones. And then we have some of our largest customers up to 120 integrations with some of our systems with outside systems. And I know that sounds like a lot, but we're talking about some global entities that have that level of integration across everything that they do. And we know it's critical for us to be a part of that. And that allows us to really focus on being like a best-in-class for what we do and integrating with everything that they do. So I've talked around the products a lot, and I talked about the markets, but let me talk about really what our products do. So some of our oldest products are long-term products that have been around really allow customers, it used to be called things like order to cash, those types of things, but allow customers to really manage their business in terms of selling product. And so that allows them to go from managing orders all the way through to receiving payments. And you can imagine it gets quite complicated with back orders and those types of things. So it has a lot of almost like mini but publishing-specific ERP-type functionality in it. And we have systems in place that do that. They continue to have customers expand and continue to have customers integrate and have more services related to that. Now those systems, we don't see as high growth as some of the other things that we do, primarily because it's a high competition field, now whereas our systems are very specific to what publishers do, this doesn't translate as well to what music publishers do or music labels do. And so it's really a little bit more limited in terms of its reach, in terms of adjacent verticals, but it is very critical to the customers, as you can imagine, their whole business depends on it. And so we have those types of systems, and that's where it says this is where it's calling managed orders up through payments. And then one of the areas that once you do all that is really get into product distribution. And now when we say product distribution here, we're actually talking about digital distribution of content. Although we do some integration with things like warehousing systems and print on-demand providers when appropriate, it's really getting your content into the world. So when I mention customers like I will talk about later like Research4Life or United Nations or any of the customers that we're working with, they are really trying to get whatever they produce out in the world with the farthest reach possible. And we have 2 solutions for that. One is our Ingenta Connect platform and one is our Edify platform, which I'll talk more about. Ingenta Connect being the lower end of the market and Edify being the higher end of the market, but they're really geared around getting content into the world. And it's critical for people who do things like professional associations, NGOs, government organizations, those types of groups who are all about putting their content in the world. And that's what our product distribution solutions do. And then the exciting piece on the right 2 bubbles of this is really in processing, we used to call it contract rights and royalties. So what it is? It's a suite of products that allow you to go from, I want to secure a right to securing it through a contract. The contracts are template-driven, created. There's some AI aspects being introduced, but where they can actually generate a contract from the system and then they can all the data around that contract is captured at that point in time. And then they can process that through selling rights to other people or paying royalties. Now this area has become very exciting for us because this is the area that we've already introduced into music companies, into media companies. We see more traction there, an awful lot of potential for growth, and we're starting to achieve it, and we're continuing to expand that now with some of our investment in sales teams to really try to grow more in the adjacent verticals as well as our current sweet spot vertical. And we're making progress. And so it allows them to secure the rights, but sell the rights and manage that. So if you secure rights -- a good example would be if you secure rights for a book to publish it in English, but you might have no business or no interest in doing it in, say, Asian markets in another language, you can sell that rights to somewhere else, someone else for them to do it as long as you have the global distribution right. And it allows you to track that and manage that and import your revenues from that, so you can still figure out how royalties are paid. And then it really calculates down to the royalty level. The other reason why it's critical and these systems are becoming more important are because of the micro transactions that go on in the world. Our systems are geared because they've been built to handle the largest publishers in the world. They've been geared towards high volumes of data, and that's where they can process huge immense revenue files and continue to process them quickly, elegantly and all the way through to all the roll-ups, roll downs to calculate the royalties of everyone involved. And that's what our systems do there. And we -- like I said, we continue to see expansion in that and particularly in our new markets. Overall, though, everything that we're doing -- and you can see why I say it's mission-critical, everything that we're doing is allowing customers to gain value from their intellectual property. And so the whole end-to-end is everything that they try to do with intellectual property, we try to help them to do -- to achieve the highest benefit because what they care most about is producing that intellectual property. So let me talk a little bit more. I mentioned Ingenta Connect on the last slide. Ingenta Connect is one of the largest, if not the largest, scholarly collection of articles and information in the world. It's been around for about 20 years. We've produced it. We continue to have about 130 publishers. It gets many millions of visits a month, and it contains an immense amount of content. And it really is there for the lower end of the market. It actually has 2 ways that it's being sold. So it is at the lowest end of the market. We are very small, like if you want to spin up a journal tomorrow, I highly recommend you give us call. And we can get you set up to go and distribute your journal through Ingenta Connect. Two benefits from that, you already will have a user base and you will be placed alongside some of the world's best journal publishers. And that allows you to sort of get that visibility into what they're doing or what your customer base and get your customer's visibility into what you're doing. And so that's our Ingenta Connect platform. Like I said, it's really geared towards the lowest end. But the other thing that we also do there is we will index content. If you're a large publisher, you're hosting your content somewhere else, but you want it visible on Ingenta Connect, we do that for a fee. And we allow your content to be indexed on it, meaning the key elements of data are known about the content, but not the content itself. And so you can do that and link out to another site once they find the content on our site. And so that's our very smallest end, and you can see it goes from the smallest to the largest. And what we are showing in this is there's 3 customers that have been on Ingenta Connect for quite a few years. And in the past couple of years, they went from Ingenta Connect to our Edify platform. So they've grown, they have achieved success. And so for that, they decided they wanted the more premium version of our platform. And those are 3 very real examples. I like Discover, Johnson Matthey and Bentham. They have both indexed their content now on Ingenta Connect and gone forward on a premium version as well. So let's talk about the premium version. So the premium version is our Edify Suite. I think I've mentioned a few of the groups that we work with here. There are a few. And you can see it's a combination. It's kind of a large combination of people who are putting knowledge-based content into the world. So we don't really haven't been involved in distributing like fiction. We distribute -- tends to be science related, scholarly related, association related, largely because those requirements are very high for those types of information, and they're very complicated in all of the integration you need to do, like if you publish an article, you need to have the right citations. And you need to be able to track the citations and links and anyone you reference out, you're going to want to track that as well as scholarly scores, peer review, data collections. It's a very complex field. And so we tend to work with people who are trying to put that level of content in the world. You can see groups here like the British Small Animal Veterinary Association is one of our sites, Microbiology Society. So those are some of the associations we work with. And then we also work with larger journal publishers like on the right, there is Annual Reviews, which is one of our larger customers, and they publish hundreds of journals a year, and they do that through one of our sites now as well as we've now broken into magazines, at least science-related magazines, which you can see in the Noble Magazine, which is actually quite a nice site. And it's also interesting content if you ever get the time to go look at Noble Magazine. It's quite interesting, and you'll be looking at one of our sites at the same time. So one of the easiest ways to see what we do is you can visit any of these sites and just see them. And that's what we do. We put that content into the world. So that's our content distribution piece that I mentioned earlier. Here's a case study of a very large, so Research4Life is a very large nonprofit organization that tries to get scholarly information to underprivileged areas of the world. And so they worked with hundreds of publishers as well as multiple groups, and you see those groups listed down there at the bottom, Hinari, AGORA, OARE, ARDI, GOALI. These are groups that are dedicated towards getting information into the hands of people who need it. And when we first started talking for them, they were a lot more of a concept than a reality in terms of actually doing that. So they had a lot of ideas, and they were doing it through very disconnected means. And so what we really solved the real challenge here was how do I bring all of this information together from all of these different associations and publishers and get it into the hands of the people that need it. And so it's right up our alley. That's what we do. And so we delivered a unified Ingenta platform to do that, and it really brings all that content together. People can go to a single site, find everything that they can get access to. They're not out searching the world to try and find it. And it really keeps all the connections there and really actually gives Research4Life more of a presence in the world in terms of everything that they do because not only do the people who use the site get benefit from it, but they're constantly aware of what Research4Life is bringing to them. And so it kind of helps the organization as a whole as well. It was a very -- it was a relatively fast project given the scope and scale of it. It took about 10 months for that project to run end-to-end. It was delivered on time. And we actually have a very good system for tracking and managing projects so that we knew it would be delivered on time. And frankly, the slowness was due to the sheer number of parties and the decision-making from those parties to exactly configure the system. But we did deliver that unified platform. It's out there now. Again, you can go look at it. It actually has a lot of free content on it, and you can go look at that site and see how complex it is and everything that it brings together and to perform at that global scale. Part of the reason they trusted us was because we do it for very large organizations. I think I mentioned some of the large NGOs. And it is -- that is a very complex area and continues to be complex. And we do it using world-class tools to do bot management, DDoS attacks, all of that and get managed alerted, and we have lots of systems in place to do that at a level that is expected for these types of groups. This is a snapshot of some of the site, and you can see from the quote there that they're very happy with us in what we've delivered for them. And you can see just from this -- even from that one screenshot, you can see that they're saying they have over 200,000 resources. And actually, they have more than that, but it depends on how you count resources. So it's an interesting site, and it was delivered, like I said, relatively quickly for the scope and scale. And from our perspective, it is on our standard platform that is just configured for them. So let me switch over a bit to the IP management offerings that we have. And I think I talked about this a little bit. I talked about how you're doing that contract rights and royalties management. And this isn't quite as exciting, and there's no place you can go see it because it's a very internal system that calculates royalties for customers and really tracks and manages all of the rights, make sure they're not violating rights and at the same time, making sure that they do their due diligence in getting people paid. And you can see some of the scale of customers we have using this solution. You see McGraw Hill, Sage Publishing, also a huge global organization. But you also see some of the more newer organizations there at the bottom, Revolver Records, which is a long-standing record company in the U.K. that is using our solutions, and I'll talk about them more in the next couple of slides. But we also work with interesting groups like WildBrain. And whereas you may not know WildBrain, WildBrain is a company out of Canada that manages such brands as Teletubbies and Strawberry Shortcake and they own 60% of the Charles Schulz estate. And so they're using our software to calculate rights and royalties for that, which, as you can imagine, is quite immense. Now I will say in WildBrain, we have a small piece in WildBrain that we're working to expand regularly because they're quite a large company and continue to grow. And this is where this solution seems to be taking off in multiple industries, and we continue to expand into those verticals. So let's talk a bit more about Revolver Records. So Revolver Records has been around about as long as we have. They have had a presence, a strategic presence in the music industry. And they were using a lot of various ways to calculate their royalties, but a lot of it was spreadsheet based, a lot of manual intervention. Their royalty statements were very difficult to calculate and manage because they have a relatively large portfolio with complex royalties and just keeping all that straight in spreadsheets was very difficult. They did deliver royalty statements and payments, but they really had a lot of energy to do it and then a lot of energy to support questions and answers. And really, they wanted to make sure they were legally defensible should they ever be challenged, which I don't know that they ever have been. But still, they need to make sure whatever they're doing is legally defensible as well. And this is where we went and talked with them, and they were one of our earlier music customers, but they implemented our Conchord solution, which is a solution that is producing or has software. They're on a multi-tenancy platform and Software as a Service to produce rights and royalty statements by accepting these micro transaction files that they get from all their music distribution in the world. And it really allows them to calculate royalties in minutes compared to what took weeks before. So they used to do quarterly royalty runs and they used to take weeks. In fact, anecdotally, they were spending so much time calculating royalties that they really didn't have time to look at expanding their music portfolio, and now they do. So that's an exciting development for them, and we actually know they've grown as a result of being able to look outward as opposed to inward. And they also use our Ingenta Aperture solution. So Ingenta Aperture is a solution that sits on top of this platform, but it sits on multiple platforms, but it allows the publishers or in this case, a music company to decide what information they're going to share to the outside world and how they're going to share it. And it takes that information and makes it visible. So in this case, what they're doing is artists have the ability to log in, get their portal, get their statements, get some idea of how their music is doing and continue to look at things as they go. So it increases visibility, reduces questions and traffic to Revolver Records. And like I said, it was a very quick implementation. In this case, I mean it takes minutes for us to put somebody on our platform, then it takes time for them to get their data in. So it's really just literally minutes to let them sign up for this multi-tenancy scalable cloud-hosted platform, and then they have to expand what they do there. Now we also offer sets of services to help them with that, like if they want to get their whole product portfolio in, we can work with them as part of our services arm and get their products in. Like I said, they were really absolutely able to deliver highly accurate royalty statements in a few days. And before it literally took them weeks, and they often had questions afterwards and we do adjustments and have actually made their own financials more complicated. And now that's gone away from this side of things because it's all done, calculated. They know it's right. They know exactly how it is and they can query their system anytime they want to figure out exactly how this all got calculated. And you can see Paul Birch there. He is the Head of Revolver, and he was excited to get the solution. Actually, he's mostly excited to grow his IP portfolio. The solution was fine, but now it gives him the ability to look at growing his portfolio. He actually can look at setting up more complex deals. So whereas before he was somewhat limited because they had to be able to operationalize that into calculating royalties. Now he can actually set up more complicated contracts, more complicated calculations because it's all handled by the system and the system tracks it all. And so that's partially another reason why they've been able to grow. So I've touched on a bit about who we are. I've touched on our markets, and I've touched on our solutions. But let me turn it over to Jon now to talk to you more about the financials. Jon, do you want to take it over?
Jonathan Sheffield
ExecutivesYes. Thank you, Scott. All right. So as Scott said, in this section, we will take a closer look at the results for 2025 and some of the underlying trends driving those numbers. So here, I wanted to boil it down to 3 main areas. So revenue performance, profitability and cash generation. So first up is revenue. So as outlined in our earlier results release, the group is increasing its efforts and investments to grow revenue, and we're doing this in a number of ways. So first up is investment in sales and marketing teams to boost next-generation software sales. But also equally as important is expand our service offering to the existing customer base via account management activities. So you can see here in the numbers that although the top line growth was fairly modest, it did mask some of the successes that we achieved during the year. So the main success was in our Commercial division, which grew revenues from GBP 7 million to GBP 7.5 million over 2025. And this growth was achieved via the account management activities I mentioned to really get as much as we can from our base. So we were expanding our reach in 2025 to deeper into our customer groups, finding things that we weren't doing and putting forward attractive plans for the customers to take. So these service expansions included additional recurring revenues to support operational activities and also to manage IT infrastructure needs. As we've said before, our customers aren't really -- IT is not their main thing. They don't want to be doing that. But if we can take it off them, then -- and it's a good price, then there's opportunities for us to work there. And you can see on the second line of the table that the recurring revenues boosted up from GBP 8.9 million to GBP 9.1 million over '25 because some of these deals have got a recurring element to them. Unfortunately, at the same time as this, the growth was offset by the exit of a couple of customers on some older software products. And this was most notable in the Content division, and we'll look at that later in the slides that are coming up. So another factor that held back the growth was the difficulty we had basically enacting the sales and marketing plan because the sales personnel, the skills we are looking for and the geographical coverage was difficult to find, and that delayed our plans to really move forward with the sales and marketing strategy. So the second theme was profitability, and we are looking at this in terms of adjusted EBITDA, with the adjustments being made to remove unrealized foreign exchange and profits on disposal. And I think this gives a better picture of the underlying performance of the business. So unrealized FX is driven from some of our historic intercompany balances. It's noncash. It doesn't have any real impact to the business, but it's best to take it out to look at how we're doing. So from the table, you can see EBITDA came back from 2024 from GBP 1.8 million to GBP 1.6 million. And we'll look at that again later on in the slides, but the key driver here was the investments we've started to make in sales and marketing to help drive future growth. And the third headline I wanted to draw out is cash generation. And you can see from the table, the free cash flow increased to GBP 1.7 million, driving cash reserves to GBP 4.7 million at the end of 2025. And this cash generation has allowed the group to pay a full year dividend of 4.5p per share, which is up 10% on the prior year. And the cash reserves are always available for investment opportunities as they arise. But in the interim, we're holding a float in liquidity funds generating 3.5%. All right. So the next slide is just looking at development areas and going into a bit more detail on some of the points I've talked about earlier. So there are a number of activities underway, but the key strategic aim is to build some sales momentum. And we've adopted a balanced approach here, encompassing the service expansions. So we've got lots of useful products and services around hosting, around operational management, so taking off month-end routines, day-end analysis, reporting, we're offering that out to the existing base to try -- to really try to boost our revenue. And it has helped us certainly in 2025, and we think there's further opportunities as we move out into 2026. So in 2025, what we did, we've recruited a marketing director who strengthened our digital outreach and he's built quite a strong funnel of sales opportunities that now can come up to the team to try to work through. Unfortunately, the efforts to recruit a sales personnel, as I mentioned, have been more protracted and they took until the second half of '25 to fill the positions. But unfortunately, these didn't work out. So that search is still ongoing. And I think it's a slight difficulty finding the people with the software, Software-as-a-Service experience with some quite specialist knowledge in what we do in terms of publishing and royalties in that area of the business. But there's people out there, and we will look to get them on board as soon as possible. So currently, the sales efforts are being covered internally, but they're supplemented with contract resources, and that's working. So we've got some stuff coming through. We are going to be releasing news fairly shortly about some sales wins. It's just taken us a bit longer than we had hoped and planned for. All right. So next, we'll move on to a bit more detail on the financials. So the first slide is to revenue analysis. So this shows the relative split of our commercial and content revenues, highlighting the growth in commercial, which I talked about and also the slight fallback in the content business. So our focus remains heavily on the English-speaking world where we've got the skills and the resources. But it shows that U.S. market still remains small. We really want to do more there. And to that end, we're looking to recruit these new sales positions in the U.S. ideally just to really increase our presence and get out there and try to sell as much as we can. So the next slide is also on revenue. It's really just to show the relative growth areas of the business and the base of recurring revenues as we move through 2026. So you can see the recurring revenues remain strong. But as we've talked about in previous releases, we anticipate some level of reduction from legacy software products over time. So the next slide is the income statement. So key points to note here, I think, is the core profitability and also the margin improvements in cost of sales. So we're always trying to get better at cloud deployments, the way we manage it, anything we do, if we can do it better and save some money, we're always looking to try to improve, and that has certainly helped us in 2025. We're doing a lot of customer-driven R&D, so it's always for a paying customer at the end of the day, and it all gets charged through the income statement. You can also see the increased sales and marketing spend. So it's gone up by GBP 400,000 between '24 and '25, and that's really trying to build up and gear up to sell more of what we do. And the other thing I wanted to bring out, we'll go on a bit more detail is the limited taxation of the profits we're making, and that's really because we've got historic tax losses that we're able to offset against a fair amount of our taxable income. The next slide is our balance sheet. So again, no capitalized R&D in here at all. You can see the GBP 1.1 million deferred tax asset, and that represents an estimation, a limited use over a 5-year period. So we would anticipate it being bigger than that in actual value at the end of the day, but that's as far as we've looked out to calculate the GBP 1.1 million, which sits on the balance sheet. You can see the GBP 4.7 million of cash reserves. There's no debt in the business. And we've also got positive distributable reserves in the parent company of GBP 12.9 million, which is supporting the group's dividend policy at the present. And the last slide is on cash flow. And it really just to pull out the clean progression we have of profit to cash. We've got a consistent dividend policy. And as I mentioned before, that's gone up 10% to 4.5p per share for the financial year 2025. And cash usage, again, we are open to M&A activities, but on an interim -- but a bit in the interim of anything coming up, we're putting it into liquidity funds and earning interest on it. So it's not wasted. So I think in terms of the financials, that covers off the presentation.
Operator
OperatorBrilliant. Thank you both for your presentation this afternoon. [Operator Instructions] For your reference, a recording of today's presentation will be available on the Investor Meet Company platform shortly after the meeting has ended. But for now, guys, as you can see, there are a number of questions which have been submitted. Can I please ask you to read out the questions and give your responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.
Gregory Winner
ExecutivesSure. So the first question was what annual revenue did you receive from the legacy contracts in 2025? And what rate of decline occurred in 2025 and what is forecast moving forward? Jon, do you -- you can probably -- I can talk more about trends and then if you could give more specifics on that. We actually didn't see that much decline in legacy contracts in 2025. We had some of our other contracts who switch providers and those type of things. So I don't know what the exact decline was. And the forecast moving forward, I mean, we do always look at the options there. We do have some longer-term agreements, but some of them are shorter term. And so there are options for customers, and we don't always know the detail of what customers are doing as they hold that close to the vest. But from our conversations with them, we've seen some expansion of services and some reductions. So we continue to watch it closely. Jon, can you give more in terms of numbers there?
Jonathan Sheffield
ExecutivesYes. Sorry, I was just struggling to find the question. So this is the first one.
Gregory Winner
ExecutivesYes.
Jonathan Sheffield
ExecutivesSo in 2025, we lost a couple of customers. They were on older products. They were -- you really saw it in the Content division. So it came down by about GBP 300,000, GBP 400,000 per annum. So that's the scale of the losses in '25.
Gregory Winner
ExecutivesOkay. And the next one is with fiscal year 2026 revenue expecting to be broadly in line with 2025, what should we expect to see from the recent sales and marketing investment? And how do you see this improving top line and margin? I'll say a couple of things there. So as Jon mentioned, getting the right sales team has been a difficult struggle, and we have been pushing for that, and we had a couple of false starts. We do several consultants on board now helping with that, that have been with us for a while and continue to progress deals. So I think it will be both quality deals that you'll see, and I think they have higher contribution margins than some of the services-type business, but they're in line with 2025. I will say because our systems are mission-critical, the sales cycle can be longer. It sits at the core of what customers do. So naturally, the sales cycles take a little longer to achieve. Jon, did you want to add anything to that one?
Jonathan Sheffield
ExecutivesYes. So I think in '26, we're looking to more of our key size of deal, which is the GBP 100,000 per annum kind of recurring revenue deal. So that's what we're looking to do. We don't want to go too big with bespoke projects. So we want to turn over as many of those as we can. So that gives you a kind of an idea of the scale that we're looking to achieve from each deal.
Gregory Winner
ExecutivesOkay. The next one is you mentioned several late-stage sales proposal and deals are expected to land. Can you give a sense of the potential size and if any, are strategically important? We'll have an interesting 2 things to announce, I will say, coming up. Some of them are strategically important. We are working with a large university system now. And so that has the potential to expand greatly. Some of the potentials that are very late stage are quite large, but they're also over long periods. So some of the deals look like 5 to 7 years long. So it's good from a stability sense, but their individual contribution per year may be relatively small. What we really see is we're going through the cycle of building the business and year-over-year, we'll continue to build and increase. And so that's what we're looking to do. And like Jon said, we actually are targeting midrange because those close faster. At the same time, we're doing the long work for the larger deals and pushing those through. Now naturally, some of our deals as their NGOs are very tender related and you are submitting to RFPs, we have a strong RFP pipeline as well that continues to produce multiple proposals. Normally, every other week or so, we have proposals going out the door for relatively large strategic deals that have been through a tender. And hopefully, we'll be able to land more of those as we go forward. Anything you wanted to add to that, Jon?
Jonathan Sheffield
ExecutivesNo. I think we'll also -- we're hoping to also announce some further expansions in the older legacy products as well. They're not -- they're certainly not dead. There is legs in them. People still want the products, and there's money to be made, I think, still there. I think the one we talked about in the release was that we're getting into a significant customer in an Australian territory, which we hope to announce shortly as well because that should be reasonable revenue from that one.
Operator
OperatorPerfect. Thank you both for answering those questions. Before we ask investors to share their feedback, which I know is important to you, Scott, if I could just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that would be great.
Gregory Winner
ExecutivesSure. So I did want to thank everyone for coming and listening to what -- we did just get a couple of more questions. I'm not sure. Let me just quickly run through them. Are we seeing tougher competition, which areas are seeing the pipeline grow fastest? So the pipeline is 2 things. As I mentioned in what some of our legacy products do, there is very intense competition. So it's not really our focus area in new sales in that area as there are very large providers in that. But from what we do in the content space, we actually see some weakness in our competitors, and we're trying to leverage that. Some of the customers I mentioned, we've taken recently from some of our largest competitors and continue to push those forward. And in the IP space, I will say we continue to be reviewed against competitors, and we've been told multiple times that our solutions are more robust. So there is competition, but we have a good offering. So I expect that to continue to happen. And then we had one more. How do we expect advances in AI to affect cannibalize your business, i.e., clients replacing your services with AI-generated solutions? I think to AI generate our solutions as a whole would be very complicated because of 40 years of knowledge that have gone into those solutions. And so I don't think we're easily replaceable, like you're not going to get to the point where AI just gets a bunch of contracts and calculates royalties nor would you want to do it. From the content provider space, there are lots of opportunities for us to leverage AI to do what we do better, and we are putting AI in multiple areas in our platforms like helping them reconcile sales, as an example, in some of our platforms, we have some prototypes going there and really tagging content better is another example where it helps people find the content they need on your site better.
Operator
OperatorGreat. Thank you, Scott. I'll just hand back to you for some closing remarks before we wrap up.
Gregory Winner
ExecutivesSure. So thank you, everyone, for joining. As I just always like to talk about our business in 2 ways. We are a highly stable business that have been around for a very long time and really making sure that your money is in safe hands and cash generative. And we continue to take that part of the business very seriously and continue to expand that out. At the same time, we're starting to provide opportunities that you would normally get in a start-up where they're like, I'm going to enter this new market and I'm going to do these things. Rather than just saying it, we're actually doing it. We have music customers. We have media customers. We're continuing to get into these markets and expand, leveraging 45 years of knowledge. And that is not something you find every day. And so that's really what I love about the company, both has been around stability with the opportunity. And that's what we try to bring together in what we do. And we take both sides of it very seriously and focus on really delivering value to our customers in what they do. And so with that, I will thank you all for attending, and I'll see you on the next one, I guess.
Operator
OperatorPerfect. Thank you both once again. Ladies and gentlemen, can I ask that you don't close the session just yet as you'll now be automatically redirected to a page to give your feedback, which helps the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. I wish you all a good afternoon.
For developers and AI pipelines
Programmatic access to Ingenta plc earnings transcripts and 32,000+ others is available through the
EarningsCalls.dev REST API. Plans from $24.99/month — full transcripts, speaker segments,
full-text search, and the recently-added /api/v1/transcripts/recent polling endpoint for ETL pipelines.