Kainos Group plc (KNOS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Richard and I are here in Belfast, and we'd like to welcome you to this presentation, the full year results for Kainos for the 12 months ended 31st of March 2025. So some quick housekeeping points just in advance. The presentation from Richard and I will take about 35 minutes. During the presentation, your connection will be muted. And at the end of the presentation, FTI will moderate a Q&A session. We are recording this broadcast, and we will publish the recording on the website later today. I'm very conscious that the last update back in November was provided by Russell. I'd like to take this opportunity to place my thanks and that of all our colleagues here in Kainos for Russell's leadership during his time as CEO and his significant contribution to the company over his 25 years of career here. In terms of what we'd like to cover off today, I'll start off by giving you a kind of brief business overview. I'll hand over to Richard, who'll take you through the detailed financial performance over the last 12 months. I'll take those numbers and talk about, I guess, the context of those inside each of our divisions, and then we'll finish off by looking at the next year and beyond the year as well before starting the Q&A session. When I look at this slide, I always think that our divisions operate in great markets. So the markets are large, they're growing, they're international. They support strong margins, and we have well-established positions inside these markets. While this year has been challenging for our services divisions, we see several opportunities for us to turn to growth and have those charts moving in the right direction. So we work with some amazing organizations. We are proud of the work that we do for them and the long-term nature of our relationships. Today, we work with almost 1,100 customers from across the globe. And I do mean the globe, over half of our customers are now based outside of the U.K. In terms of the results we're announcing today, we are pleased to be announcing a set of results that are in line with our revised guidance. Fiscal '25 was another very strong year for our team in Workday products. We closed the year at GBP 73 million of ARR, and we have a clear path to achieving our GBP 100 million ARR target during calendar 2026, and we're confident of reaching our long-term goal of GBP 200 million of ARR by calendar 2030. For our Services division, it's been a difficult year with revenues dropping by 7% in Digital Services and by 12% in Workday Services. And against that backdrop, we are pleased to report improvements in quarter 4, particularly in Digital Services, where we delivered an 8% improvement in revenue compared to our performance in quarter 3. Despite this improvement, we made the difficult decision during quarter 4 to undertake a restructuring exercise, which resulted in 190 colleagues leaving Kainos. We deeply regret that, that restructuring was necessary. The restructuring allows us the opportunity, the financial capacity to invest in the growth areas of our business. That's product development, focused international expansion, AI and the new partnerships. We're also seeing some staff-related cost increases during the course of the year ahead, pay rises, rising national insurance contributions and some planned recruitment later in the year. And on the topic of our AI investment, our AI revenues grew by over 60% in fiscal '25 and now account for more than 20% of our digital services revenues. Each of these charts tells an important story about our business. On the left is the breakdown of our existing versus new customer revenue. Our existing customer business levels dropped in fiscal '25 as existing customers cut back on their spending. That drop was a result of the economic environment for our customers rather than any satisfaction issues. Our NPS, or Net Promoter Score climbed 58 to 70 during the year. You will recall that our rating of 70 represents an excellent customer service. We were also able to secure a high number of new customers during the year, up almost 18% and as I said, almost 1,100 customers in total. And revenues from these new customers grew by 85% to GBP 68 million. So while our overall revenue performance is disappointing, this new customer acquisition is a very strong and positive place to be and provides a great platform for the year ahead. The middle chart describes a well-balanced business across the 3 sectors. Health care grew during the year with reductions in spending from our commercial and public sector clients. And on the right, our international revenues were at similar levels to last year and now represent over 41% of total revenues. The driving force in our business is our people and their energy, their expertise and their experience. There is no doubt that it has been a challenging year for our colleagues, but they have remained focused on delivering to our customers, and that's reflected in the Net Promoter Score figures I just mentioned. Our employee engagement has remained high throughout the year as demonstrated by our high employee retention rates, the favorable scores we're receiving on our internal surveys and on platforms like Glassdoor, and we look forward to building on that engagement in the year ahead. We continue our journey to net zero with our emissions and the Scope 1, Scope 2 and full Scope 3 emissions reducing by a further 15% over last year. We know that the technology sector has a significant gender and balance issue and our strategy continues to operate around 3 strands: developing the careers of women already in Kainos, attracting female talent to Kainos and to encourage more young people to pursue a career in technology. We have made progress across all 3 areas in the past year, but I would highlight our activities that focus on encouraging young women to consider a career in technology. Last year, we engaged with 3,000 young people across our various outreach programs, 49% of them were young women. So a great start and encourage them to think about their careers in the future. I'll now hand over to Richard to take us through the financial performance for the year.

Thanks, Brendan. I'm starting with the group income statement as always. Clearly, a disappointing performance over the year for digital services with the declines that Brendan mentioned in public sector and commercial, partially offset by strong growth in health care. Public sector revenue was down 9% from last year, but sequentially, we saw a 2% improvement from H1 to H2. Commercial revenue fell further in H2 and was down 32% for the year. While this is really very disappointing, I would point out that this represents just over 10% of digital services revenue. Healthcare revenue grew 14% for the year and also grew 15% sequentially from H1 to H2. Although we don't disclose separately, I would like to call out our North American digital services business performance. Although relatively small, it grew from GBP 5.2 million to GBP 8.9 million in the year, which is an outstanding performance. In terms of gross margin for digital services, it fell by 2% compared to last year. A number of factors in that, the biggest one being we had overcapacity for pretty much most of the year, which meant that utilization fell by about 3%. Contractor numbers remained low, but has largely been flushed out in the previous year. And finally, we did more work through partner organizations this year, particularly in defense and health care sectors and using partner organizations reduces gross margin. Overall, contribution margin fell from 29% to 25% as a result of the revenue and gross margin declines I've talked about already. In terms of Workday Services, revenue in EMEA saw a decline of 15%, largely as a result of more competition in the marketplace. Americas saw a decline of 9%. But if we remove the black line comps, this decline was only 1%. And if we look at it in constant currency, there would have been a very slight growth. Gross margin also fell here and fell by about 3%, again, largely because of overcapacity in the business. And contribution margin fell from 55% to 52%, again, driven by the lower revenue and gross margin and the fall in direct expenses was not large enough to offset those factors. In terms of Workday Products, revenue growth was 24% over last year. This was 26% in constant currency. And clearly, the majority of this business revenue is now denominated in dollars. On top of that, we saw very strong revenue growth or strong revenue growth in all 4 products, which is excellent to see as well. Revenue also grew 8% from H1 to H2. That statement shouldn't be surprising. I went back to check and since 2015, when we started recording this separately, we've had 22 half years of sequential revenue growth in the products business. Gross margin fell about 2.7% that usually happens when we introduce new products. In this case, more services work was required for EBM. Typically, over time, we see margins improve on products as they mature. And direct expenses increased 19% overall from last year. Product development grew 24%. All of that was expensed to the P&L. I know that you're all aware of that, but I still like to say it. And sales and marketing increased by 24% also included GBP 5.2 million for built on Workday. In terms of contribution, it fell slightly from 28% last year to 27% this year. We always indicated that built on Workday would depress contribution margin initially, and we expect the benefits of that deal to come in the later years of the agreement rather than the first 3 years. Central overheads fell by 5%, largely as a result of tight cost control in this area and finance income rose substantially with good cash generation and higher interest rates. In terms of adjusted profit, we continue to be consistent and adjusting for share-based payments and acquisition-related costs. This year, we're also adjusting for restructuring costs. Apparently, according to IFRS, these are not exceptional items. However, the first time it's happened in my 14 years at Kainos, so I consider it to be lower [ Kainos ] exceptional. In terms of taxation, our effective rate increased 2%. That was largely due to an increased element of our business being in the United States. We think that level is sustainable as an ongoing effective tax rate. It's worth noting that though the employers' NIC increase will not go through this line, it will cost us approximately GBP 3 million next year. Moving on to the balance sheet. In terms of fixed assets, they fell by about GBP 7 million, largely due to the sale of land to Queensland University in August '24 that we had talked about previously. Goodwill and intangibles fell by GBP 1.8 million, largely due to exchange rate movements. And then in terms of trade debtors and WIP, they fell largely due to better cash collection. If I look at the 2 of these together and call them lock-in days, they fell to 57 days. Again, I went back to look at this, and this is the best level we've had as a listed company. In terms of liabilities, deferred income grew, but the big increase was the provision at year-end for restructuring costs. Most staff left under this process in early April, so we had a provision of GBP 5.2 million at the 31st of March. In terms of cash flow, cash conversion was technically 112%. But I think a fair way to look at this would be to exclude restructuring costs. In this case, it would still be a pretty impressive 103%. It's worth talking about general changes in our cash flow dynamics. Historically, we've always guided towards 85% cash conversion, but this has improved in recent years. Partially it's about reduced services revenue growth. Partially, it's just about better cash collection, but mainly it's about the cash flow dynamics of the SaaS business becoming a larger element of the overall Kainos Group. We now think that a cash conversion of about 95% is possible. In terms of cash at the year-end, it had increased by about GBP 8 million over last March. That was despite GBP 22.8 million in shareholder -- in return to shareholders by the 31st of March. And if we then move on to talk about the capital allocation policy on the next slide. I want to talk broadly about the principles that we apply. The first thing, most important thing is we're going to be able to grow the business organically. Both services and products are cash generative. We've always been able to grow products from cash flow of that business. The bigger constraint has always been staff and ideas. We're getting better ideas coming through the Workday relationship, but we will always need to have staff to execute on those. Just to be clear, we would be prepared to invest cash if necessary and opportunities were available. We have done targeted acquisitions in the past, we would consider in the future, and we need about GBP 25 million of cushion for working capital shocks. We're clearly way above that. We've always had a progressive dividend apart from the early days of COVID, when we paused for a short period of time, and we intend to maintain overall dividend growth this year. Within these principles, we feel that we've been able to return cash to shareholders through the share buyback, and we will be running another share buyback starting today. Finally, when Brendan talked to me about coming back into the business, my first thought that there were going to be lots of jokes about getting the band back together. And the obvious example is [ Oasis ]. But the more I thought about that, there are some differences. And they will be watched by about 1.4 million people. I think there's about 40 people on this call. And Kainos doesn't believe in price guiding its customers. But probably most importantly, Brendan and I have never actually hated each other. However, I'm not looking back in anger. I'm happy that the band reunited. Brendan?

Richard, thank you very much. Moving to looking at our divisional performance and really taking some of the figures that Richard has mentioned and giving a degree of color around that. We've mentioned the great performance by the team in Workday products with both a very strong growth in revenue and in ARR. I think what's really pleasing about this to us is that it's been across all of our products. So our established smart portfolio, that's test, audit and Shield have all grown, and we now have over 550 customers using at least one of our smart products. Employee Document Management, or EDM has been our most successful product launch with over 50 customers already signed up. And on the topic of new products, we are planning to launch our next product, Pay Transparency at the end of this year, which will align with the upcoming EU Pay Transparency Directive, which comes into force in 2026. Given the opportunity for our Workday Products division, we're maintaining a high level of investment, both in terms of product development, but also in terms of sales and marketing capability. And the figures on the slide, I think, give a good indication of our investment stance. Revenues are up 24%. Investment is also up 24% as well. We've referenced several times on the call already built on Workday. And just to recap, back in June of 2024, Workday announced a new built on Workday program as part of our marketplace for partners. And this program allows partners to develop, to sell and to deploy products that enhance or augment the core Workday functionality. Alongside this program, we announced an enhanced partnership deal with Workday, which is an annual investment of $10 million for Kainos. Under this partnership, the Google Workday sales team are incentivized to sell Kainos product. Simply put, we're looking for 3 activities from Workday as part of the sales agreement. The first is [ leader ] generation. The second is sharing intelligence about the market. And the third is about sponsorship during the sales closure process from Workday. We're very much still in the mobilization phase. The opportunity for Kainos is for us to engage with over 1,200 Workday sellers. At the moment, we are actively managing opportunities for about 30% of the total workforce -- sorry, total sales force. So great progress over the last kind of 9, 10 months, but we're obviously keen to get closer to that 100% contact with our sales force. And our experience over the last few months is that we are achieving quicker sales closure. We're seeing improved sales conversion, and we're seeing stronger prices, particularly for deals over GBP 250,000 in value. So I think I would stress it's too early for us to say this is a long-term trend, but it's a really encouraging start to the built and Workday relationship. And the final part of the built and Workday agreement is that Workday will help us identify new product opportunities. That is those ideas that the customers have asked for, for Workday, they have assessed as being too small for them to build themselves. And pay transparency is a great example of that. That was an idea Workday came to us and recommended that we build. So this part of the arrangement for us is really exciting. We believe that we can increase the number and the pace of new products that we can bring to market. That could mean perhaps 1 new product every 9 to 12 months rather than the current pace, which is 1 every 15 months. And as part of all the Workday announcements, we announced a new long-term target to achieve GBP 200 million ARR by calendar 2030, and we remain confident that we can achieve it. Looking at a case study for our Workday Products division. OU Health is the largest health care provider in the state of Oklahoma, handling over 1 million patient visits every year. They have been a Workday HCM and financials customer since 2019, and they now use our Smart Suite to help automate their Workday operations. For us, the case study is typical of kind of the characteristics we see over many of our Workday product customers. So often, the customer is live on Workday for a period of time and is looking for automation to reduce their manual effort. We find that Smart Test can reduce the manual effort for the twice yearly major updates from Workday and Smart Test can also reduce the effort of the daily operations and weekly test events that all customers undertake as well. And finally, Smart Audit can reduce the effort needed to undertake daily audit checks. You can see on the slide the significant savings that OU Health have achieved by deploying our Smart Suite. And that's a common theme across many of our Workday products customers. It's been a challenging year for our Workday Services business with revenues down 12% or as Richard mentioned, down 8% if you exclude the discontinued services linked to the Blackline acquisition. There are 2 things going on in our Workday Services market. The first is that there are more partners in the ecosystem. And the second is that there's a change to the size of the deals in that market as well. First, the number of partners. The number of partners globally has increased from 60 to 114. That covers advisory partners, deployment partners, application managed services partners and staffing partners. And that has increased the competition for new contracts and created some pricing pressure on new and on renewal deals. The second is the size of the new deals coming to market. Our market intelligence indicates that while Workday are winning the same number of net new customers, about 50% of those are now in the SMB segment, that's organizations that are up to 3,000 employees in size. That means naturally, the projects are smaller. Our planning assumption internally is that both of these trends will continue into the future. The impact of these trends has varied across both of our markets. In North America, the impact is more muted. Revenues are down 1% if you exclude the Blackline impact. In Europe, the impact is more pronounced. Revenues are down about 15%, and that's roughly split about 10% to do with pricing pressure, about 5% to do with volume. And while that's all kind of quite sober news, our view is that despite these changes, it's still a great market for us to be in, great customers with strong daily rates. And we believe that we can get back to growth in our core markets. That's across a number of different factors. 1 is about competing more effectively. That's to do with sales execution to the pricing has to do with the use of automation to streamline how we go about delivering projects. There are opportunities for international growth. We have won customers in Australia, in New Zealand and Mexico over the last few months, and we believe we can grow further in each of those territories. And finally, there is the opportunity to explore adjacent partnerships. We have about 600 Workday Services customers, and we can offer more than just Workday to them. So there are opportunities with IO Pulsora around ESG reporting to do additional work with them. In terms of qualifying the growth that we see going forward in this part of the business, I think we're moving from a double-digit growth that we've seen in the past to more of a single digit, perhaps high single-digit growth as well. And that planning assumption is correct, we have the opportunity to expand our margins as well as deliver top-line growth. The [ Start ] Group is a company that's been around for almost 120 years, but it's been under private equity ownership for the past 10 years. And during that time, has grown rapidly, both in terms of employees and in terms of operating countries. We were appointed to lead the HCM project back in late-2019 and have been with the [ Start ] Group throughout the last number of years. So again, this case study is really typical of things that we see in our Workday engagement. The first thing to call out is it's a multiyear engagement. The first phase of our Workday project is, for sure, the largest part of that project, but the follow-on phases can be quite significant as well. The same thing is a number of modules. Modules grow over time. So often customers will take several modules over several years, that provides us the opportunity to help them deploy those modules. And third, does tend to be either on a divisional basis or on a regional basis. So while the client may go live in a Phase 1 in a certain region is roll out over multiple territories in the years after that. So it is typical that our Workday project can last multiple years. In Digital Services, we had a strong performance in health care, but that was offset by challenges in both public sector and in the commercial sector. As noted at the bottom of the slide, we are really pleased to be reporting an improved performance in quarter 4, recording an 8% increase in revenue over our performance in quarter 3. And while that's pleasing to report, we're also very conscious that 1 quarter does not represent a full year, but it's a good start. In terms of providing more color around each of the segments inside Digital Services, starting with public sector, which is 64% of our revenue in the division. So we believe that we're moving past the immediate impact of the election. I think it's fair to say that the election and the impact it had in terms of delays and on reductions did catch us by surprise. But that's not every department that was impacted and not every decision that was delayed, but there was enough to cause a reduction in our revenues. That revenue reduction is also linked to a drop in our win rate, most notably in our net new win rate. So as a result, we've added further experience to our public sector sales teams that allow us to compete more effectively in the year ahead. I think we're all conscious of the next major milestone for government is the announcement of the comprehensive spending review on June 11. I look forward to the certainty that we will provide to our customers and departments about their spending plans going forward. In Healthcare, which is 26% of divisional revenue, we had a strong set of major wins. I think it's in the public domain that we won the urgent and emergency care contract last year valued at GBP 36 million. More recently, we've heard the announcement from NHS England sorry, from the government that NHS England will be dispanded over the next couple of years. Our assessment is that this is unwelcome news and likely to lead to delays in procurements over that period of time. So that's again, certainly our planning assumption. But in looking at the market activity at the moment, there is a very high level of procurement in the market or coming to the market in the next few weeks. So it's almost as if they're seeking to complete the procurement activity before the reorganization activity starts. That said, we are conscious that our procurement does not equal a contract being awarded. So we're going to stick with our assessment of the reorganization will cause some market disruption over the next 18 months. And finally, in the commercial sector, the declines in revenue have been driven by our top 5 customers coming back in their spending, and those 5 customers are all based in the payments and financial services sector. Through the year, we had sequential revenue declines for each of the quarters. So we've changed the leadership and changed our sales approach. We have a clear focus on AI and automation, although we do recognize it will take time for those changes to have an impact and to get back to sustained and significant growth. Richard has mentioned that our digital services business in Canada has had a fantastic year. Now revenue is just under GBP 9 million, so a small part of the overall digital services business, but it grew by 71% over the course of the last 12 months, when we look at the opportunity in Canada, we see the same opportunities we saw in the U.K. government 15 years ago. And this case study with Nova Scotia Health really talks to the same challenges. Disparate data stores, multiple and separate systems and an inconsistent experience for service users. And Kainos having built the NHS app for England and then the NHS Wheels app as well, we were able to bring that same expertise to Nova Scotia, helping them build their health app as well. The response of the application launched over the course of the last 12 months has been absolutely fantastic. Doctors are absolutely delighted with it, talking about improvements to patient safety. And for those who are using the app from patients in our service users, great feedback as well. And the crossover from the U.K. to Canada is not just in health, but in government as well. We're also working very closely with the register of Motor vehicles in Nova Scotia to provide driver licensing and testing services and vehicle registration services as well, areas that we know well from our work with DVLA and DVSA here in the U.K. And whenever I think about the opportunity in Canada, I'm also reminded that many government services are provided at a state level, such as the register for motor vehicles, which is a state body. In Canada, there are 11 states and most have a greater population, greater needs than that we have in Nova Scotia. I've mentioned the increase in work that we're doing in -- related to AI and really just focusing on the blue box here in the screen that really talks to that increase over the past 12 months. It's been a very strong growth of 61% from a very strong base and now at GBP 41 million accounts for over 20% of all revenues in digital services. It's not, I guess, an overnight surprise to us. I mean we've been building our AI work over a number of years, and that's really reflected in the information that's published by U.K. government about where we sit in that supplier hierarchy. Over the course of the years from 2018 when we started tracking this information, we're the fifth largest supplier of AI services in the government after the likes of Microsoft and Palantir. And thinking about the GBP 41 million from last year, there tends to be some large contracts. So I think everyone is aware that we won a contract with the Ministry of Defense just before Christmas just for GBP 50 million. That's a good example of the large types of engagements. But as you can see from doing 88 new projects in the year, there are also quite a lot of smaller projects as well. We see some themes across those smaller projects. First, in terms of value, they're typically up to about GBP 250,000 in value. I guess the second theme is that customers are still experimenting with the AI technology, but they're moving very quickly from experimentation into focused deployments. So they often are trying to address one single part of a business challenge or business opportunity rather than solve the entire system for them. So very focused on doing something. And they're also then kind of looking at learning lessons from that first deployment to work out how they can apply that across other parts of the organization. I think it's a very intelligent way for them to do it because AI is advancing so quickly that a choice you make around technology in January could well be outdated by the end of the year. To bring the conclusion -- sorry, bring the presentation to a conclusion, really, we see significant opportunity for all 3 divisions in our markets. Yes, the last 12 months have been difficult for our service division, but we still see significant opportunities there as well. As we mentioned, we believe we've moved past the immediate impact of the election delays and the labor government is committed to the use of technology to improve public services and to improve the public sector. In that environment, we do have to compete more effectively as we're doing less, not more and focusing on the areas that we will win that will undoubtedly continue to see our AI revenues grow quickly. The U.K. market continues to be the key market for us, but there's also significant opportunity in Canada and in both public sector and health care, and we expect to see significant progress over the next couple of years. Our Workday services market has evolved, and we need to respond to those changes. We obviously believe that our significant product knowledge, our delivery reputation and our innovation capability will allow us to compete more effectively in this market. Over term, we wish to expand geographically. We've mentioned Australia, New Zealand and Mexico, where we have won customers in the last 12 months, and we wish to widen the services that we offer to our 600 Workday Services customers. And to repeat, our planning assumption is that we're moving from a double-digit growth market to a single-digit growth market, and that provides us an opportunity to evolve our business and to increase our business margins. And for Workday products, it's very much a case of the continued momentum towards our GBP 100 million and GBP 200 million ARR targets. Transparency in the second half of this year is a key milestone for us. And looking further out, we want to build further products and use our Builder Workday partnership to increase the number and cadence of the new products we bring to market. In summary, I've always been excited by the opportunities that exist for Kainos that's true today as it was in previous updates that I've shared. And despite the challenges of last year, I'm really optimistic about the future and about the year ahead. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen and I'm going to pass over to someone to handle the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions].