Keywords Studios plc (KWS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Here we go to pump it up. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to our Capital Markets Day. And I have to say a big thank you for the investment in time that you're putting with us. We know it's a big afternoon. It's good to see people in the flesh, I have to say as well, welcome as well to the ones who are online around the world. And more importantly, welcome, and thank you for also having been on the journey with us. Many of you have been on the journey for many years all the way since 2013, if I'm not mistaken. So thanks for that. We have a pretty packed and ambitious agenda, as you would expect from us. First of all, Jon and myself were -- will probably level playing field to share where we are at as a story at Keywords right now, including the very latest development. We'll then spend a bit of time going through the last 6 months and what we have been up to. Also a chance for me to discover the business, to discover the team, but also we've been in action pretty quick. You'll then see quite a few of the 5 work streams that we've been talking about pretty much since day 1 and how we're igniting growth with those. In the room today, you have a lot of Keywordians. So you'll get the chance, hopefully, to meet them. Some of them will be on stage with us as well to share the story. And you even have a couple of clients that we're very privileged to have with us as well. Jon will do a session with Nuno on M&A. You may have seen as well an acquisition that we announced overnight. And then we'll wrap it up by sharing what that means in terms of financials and in terms of growth model overall. So jumping straight in, those are the key themes that we'd like to touch on throughout the afternoon today. And I hope you'll be as excited as we are about each of them. The first one is we are a market-leading position as a go-to provider of technical and credit solutions. We'll try to really bring that to life fully. You'll then get to see through some numbers as well, what our reach -- how much our reach has been extending over the past few years in terms of breadth and global services that we have. We'll touch as well on the track record that we have on both organic growth and acquisition, which I think you know us for. And how much we are well placed into the buoyant video Good game market as well with a few adjacencies we'll touch on as well, I think, without getting too far away from our core. Then we'll spend the bulk of the time on going through those type of work streams and the strategic priorities that we have defined, really strategy into action before closing on the ability to deliver sustained compounded growth and giving -- probably sharing some guidance as well as we see it for the years ahead. So if I take the very first one, a few numbers to bring it all today, we are the #1 into our space. We have 8 service lines now across -- full end-to-end across the different services that we have. I'll go through them to share the very latest development that we have seen there. We're in 23 countries with 70 studios. I got a chance to visit about 30, 35 of them by now. A lot of great entrepreneurs around the network. We just reached our 11,000 Keywordians. When I joined, as a reference only a few months ago, we were 9,500. So we've been growing quite strongly also on the talent front, covering 50 languages. You'll hear from my localization team shortly. We serve 23 of the top 25 publishers. We're very proud of that, including all of the mobile -- top 10 mobile partners. Then Jon and I will do the exercise to share a bit more about the TAM as we see it. We operate in the $200-plus billion market. We see our market specifically has been roughly $35 billion, of which $11 billion is being outsourced right now, but growing pretty fast. We'll share a bit more details about that. And then as you know, we are roughly EUR 0.5 billion sales with a very good cash generation and flow-through in terms of profitability. I think this one, I won't spend too much time. You've seen it at the year-end, but I think it's worth emphasizing, 37% growth year-over-year last year, of which 19% was organic. You have seen 56% year-over-year improvement in terms of adjusted PBT, reaching 16.8%. So partly favored as well because of COVID, less travel, as you know, but well north of the 15% that we are targeting. This one, I'll spend a bit more time on. Those are the 8 service lines that we effectively cover. If I start on the top right, you get to see our game development capabilities, which interestingly is fairly new within Keywords. We have only really started to invest in this over the past 3, 4 years in earnest. We now have about close to 20 studios in that range, 1,500 engineers. I think that's really a very strong strength that we can leverage more. We've announced services with about 2,000 artists across the globe with some very big names in terms of studios that I think some of our clients can probably testify about. We have then an audio service, which is where the magic of bringing the emotions of the voice and the voice actors into the games really comes to life. You've seen a few in the video at the entry of the studios we have, including one here in London called Liquid Violet. We then have a set of postproduction services from functional testing. Some of you were with us on the road a couple of years ago in Montreal, where you're going to see the scale of those operations, if you remember, I see a few heads nodding, but also Localization and Localization testing, again, covering 50 languages. And more recently, we have had some recent additions to the family, especially in terms of marketing services, some studio heads, including founders of the studios in here with us. We have about 8 studios now mostly in London and in L.A. But also, you'll hear from a bit later today from the team of how much this fits with our player support capabilities. At the end of the day, that's really where the rubber hits the road and where we get to spend time and meet the players at a fairly massive scale. I was touching on the scale and the reach that we have. As you can see, 23 countries, 70 studios. But why does this matter in the first place? And I think first of all, it matters because that's what our customers are expecting from us. That's what our customer really favor to be able to have an authoring where we can be co-located, we can be located very close to where they are geographically. But at the same time, if they want to have the flexibility to deploy resources very rapidly around the world to be able to do that. And I think the flexibility on an onshore-offshore model is also very compelling for many of our clients. It also matters because we are all hunting for talent and having the ability to have anchors at many places around the world allows us to be -- to have that proximity to be close to them, to really understand the local school, the local university, the pool of talent and to be able to really tap into those. This one is one that -- I think it's fair to say many of us are very proud of. We have the chance to serve the who's who in the industry. Again, 23 of the top 25 publishers, the top 10 on the mobile side, you recognize all of the names in here. But what we have said more recently has also been how many are starting to work with us on multiple service lines. We now have 130-plus clients among the 900 we have that are using 3 or more of our service lines. If you were to do the same in the top 10, you'll see most of them using 6 or more of our service lines right now. We also don't have a strong dependency on individual customers. The top 5 account for roughly 30%, including with some of the recent consolidation that we see in the market right now. And probably the most important one to me is what you see at the bottom right here is -- and that's really important in terms of quality of earnings, but more importantly, in terms of relationship with our clients. We see more and more sticky relationship, where we have very high level in terms of repeat businesses. Part of it is due to the nature of the relationship that a studio had with our clients, with our partners. You'll hear from -- about that a bit later. Part of it is also where we have some preferred supplier relationships now that are starting to build up. An example of that would be, in many cases, we don't necessarily know which title we're going to work on a studio level, but we know that we're going to be land up whenever a new title comes up in terms of testing, for example. Now -- in addition to that, we looked -- we did analysis recently to look at how much purely evergreen do we really have. And we see an extra 30% to 40% of Evergreen businesses, mostly into mobile. An example of that would be also the work we do with Fortnite and Epic, where we have been with them, one of our studio called high-voltage software, 130 devs and artists and we've been with them pretty much since inception from 2017 at Fortnite itself. And one thing we're really investing on and you'll see some examples of that, hopefully, today is how do we really embed ourselves into the workflows of our partners? How can we really be true partners in that. When you take all this in, we estimate that we have about 80% of the revenues we have from one year to the next, that is recurrent. Now I'll spend a bit of time on this one because this one is one that really is close to many of our hearts, I think, I'm speaking on behalf of many of the Keywordians here and certainly matters to me a big time for the future. We are a responsible business. We are proud to be but we have much more that we want to keep investing into that as well. We have an ESG committee that is in place, led by Georges Fornay. We have Jon, myself, as part of that committee something we take very seriously. We have 5 key pillars that you see on the left-hand side. And probably the most important one ultimately is the one at the rate up there in terms of people with our 11,000 Keywordians, including the DNA agenda. A few to make it more tangible. You may have seen recently our rating moving from BBB to A, but we still have a long way to go on that. I'm sure it's going to take years, but that's an investment we want to make. You may have seen as well that we have joined an organization called Women in Games. And I see Trina Marshall within the audience, sorry to pick on you Trina. But Trina is one of our ambassador as part of Women in Games. Overall, they have 500 ambassadors around the world, we all recognize we have to do much more as an industry overall. And Trina kindly invited me to an event a couple of weeks ago, where I got to join in for 3, 4 hours. It was striking to see 5, 6 of our female leaders really stepping up, sharing their carriers, the evolution as well and in influencing quite frankly, the industry more broadly as part of that. So expect us to see much more investment in that one, certainly. We're also investing into our group environmental policy. We are still early to be very candid. Right now, we're at a stage where we have set up the type of standard we want to get it. But then we are benchmarking each of our 70 studios around the world to see where we're truly at. And I would expect next year to see more progress on that front. And one that I think many of us are really very sensitive about is the last one, the hardship funds that we're investing in, I mean, we had invested into relocation in New Orleans when hurricanes happened, many of our teams jumped in India when we had to put vaccines in place when there was really no effort done for COVID in a proper way. And more recently, even closer to home to some extent to all of us is the crisis in Ukraine where many of our teams stepped in, we doubled the hardship funds. But even more importantly to me than the fund was to see how much we mobilized with our Polish office with our Romanian office to be the open jobs for Ukrainian refugees. We had talent. So it's also a good business to do, but really to bring that together in there. Now I promised to share a little bit more about the TAM. So we said a few numbers at the year-end, but we view the market overall being roughly $240 billion. You may have seen Sony's announcement with Jim Ryan fairly recently sharing those numbers. We see this growing at roughly 5%, depending on the estimate, you see 5% to 8.7% CAGR. Here we took IDG as a source and converge very closely to what we've seen at other places. If you double click on that in our space, very specifically, we see it as being $30 billion. That's all the content servicing provisions that really happen in that space, of which $11 billion right now happens from third-party or outsourcing partners like us, knowing that I hate the term, I really want to be seen as a studio partner at the hip. Overall, if you look at that, we see a roughly 10% CAGR happening in terms of that latter number, bringing the market of $35 million to effectively $48 billion over the next few years to 2026. And you can see, more importantly, an increasing part of that being the part that really comes into that type of world as many partners are starting to think more strategically about how do they want to work with partners like us. A little bit more details about that. We looked at it per service line. And what you see on the middle one, for example, you've seen audio in general across the industry, already hitting 70% being done by external partners on that front. On post production, you see a bit less, but starting to get it close to the 50% range, which makes a lot of sense. If you are running a set of studios individually where would you really want to be in player supporter into post production to a large extent when we have the capabilities to deploy the muscle globally that I was hinting to earlier, the ability to have much more flex and probably also more cost efficient. And then more recent for us on Games Dev where we have done massive investments where the bulk of the spend also is, you see roughly 17% coming there. But you'll see -- we'll share some structural trends that showcase that we expect this to increase quite a bit over the next few years. Now what drives this? And that's -- ultimately, it's really about content. It's really content, content, content. And where you see -- I forecast and many are forecasting an explosion in that space. Part of it is driven by the new consoles, by the streaming platforms that you see in the market, constantly evolving. You may have a question about COVID. Was it just a blip during that time? We don't think so. And we see all the evidence going the other way around right now. A good reminder and maybe a data point that is important to keep in mind is the gaming industry is the cheapest form of content on a permanent basis. So when you think about discretionary spending from users also having to share with the Netflix to have to share with the football assignment, et cetera. Actually, this is the most efficient way as well to really get into entertainment as a player or as a person at the end of the day. Also, the AAA consoles, the PC games, the next-gen consoles more and more complexity. You've seen some announcement from Apple probably overnight as well, getting more and more capabilities and generating more and more quality content in there. I think they're also below those top 3, there are also some probably more certain ones. And the first one to me are really good to appreciate by spending quite a bit of time with our customers is how much more complexity there is within getting a game to market. We're talking about it with James that you'll hear about later today, but often, it takes now 300, 400, 500 people to get a AAA game over the time. It wasn't the case a few years ago. You could do it with 50 to probably 150 people. It takes a village now to really go and build that in a proper way. At the same time, we're also seeing a very strong growth in GaaS, in Games as a Service or games that never ends. Again, you've seen Sony talking about it quite strongly and powerfully a couple of weeks ago. And maybe the best illustration that Jon and I put together on this, that is quite simple is for those a bit less familiar with GaaS is a few years ago, you would have titles that are getting ready for Christmas effectively ship and then everything is lined up for that big peak and then you come back the next season. Versus now times are really changing, where you get games that effectively never ends, you need more and more content to get them on. You have more and more management of it through micro transactions, which completely changed the behavioral pattern as well and the monetization. And even, I would say, the ability to pass on pricing to some extent in a more subtle way. But this results in much more content being needed fundamentally. And beyond that, you'll hear later on about the investment we're making in live apps across platforms, which we do a lot of quite naturally. And I don't know. And if you see on the complexity piece, if some of you got a chance to play around with Unreal 5, you'll get probably a sense and the Matrix Awaken, you probably get a sense of how much realism we can start putting into those games and beyond effectively in there right now. So if I step back, we estimated that we are #1 into our space. In the space we were just describing, we have roughly 3x the size of the next basically into the space, but it's still very fragmented, and you have many that are more specialized into their own research. Now what I'm taking away from this graph is much more important than that. It's more that we are still only 5% of that $11 billion we're talking about. So that gives you a sense of the runway that is ahead of us to really go and build and invest into the platform to do something quite special over the next decade. And on the right-hand side, equally important is also the fact that we are probably the only one that have a full end-to-end offering. This doesn't come easily. This has been probably 10 years in the making with M&A with proper investments, the quality of the assets, you'll hear about that from Nuno a little bit later. But that's a very special position to be on. So on that note, I'll pass on to Jon to keep us going.

Thank you very much, Bertrand, and it's great to be here today, particularly to be here in person, which is absolutely fantastic. So just moving on to this chart. This chart really just shows how Keywords has grown and developed over the last 8 years since the IPO from a EUR 16 million revenue business with 370 people, 4 service lines into the business it is today, with 8 service lines giving us that full end-to-end capability across the content cycle, over 10,000 colleagues, I need to update my notes, it's 11,000 apparently. But over 10,000 colleagues giving us global coverage across 23 countries. And it also demonstrates the power of the platform and how it's been built out through M&A. And this, together with the organic growth has delivered an impressive 47% revenue CAGR over this time. And this chart demonstrates the strong financial track record with a revenue CAGR of 36% over the last 4 years, with over 10% organic growth each year, and that translates into a profit CAGR of 39% over that same period. So a very strong track record of financial delivery. And this chart shows the importance of M&A in building out Keywords into the platform that it is today. It's been a very methodical process that we've been through of building out each service line to get them to a position of scale, get them to a position of global reach, and then we move on to the next one. And the graph on the left-hand side shows that since the IPO, we've effectively acquired EUR 300 million of revenue. But importantly, that's created the platform that's allowed the business to deliver EUR 200 million of organic revenue growth over that time. And that translates to an average of over 15% a year. And on the right-hand side of the chart, it really shows the track record of delivery that we've had with over 56 acquisitions plus the one we did today. So 57 since the IPO, and that averages out at about 5 to 10 acquisitions also each year. And this chart sets out how we approach M&A, and we have a session a bit later with Nuno to take you through the way that we approach this in a little bit more detail, but it's a pretty well-oiled machine. We do all of our own origination and at the same time -- at any time, we probably have 90 or so opportunities that are on our long list that we're looking at. But we're very selective on the ones that we target, and we have a very disciplined approach in terms of how we take a business from due diligence right the way through to the integration process. And this delivers a very, very compelling long-term value creation opportunity, allowing us to build out the platform, which in turn drives the organic growth and at pretty attractive valuations. And just building on the chart that Bertrand presented earlier, I think this has created a fantastic platform to build on. We are the clear market leader with none of our competitors able to offer the full suite of services at scale and globally. We're fortunate to be operating in a large and growing industry and with a TAM of $11 billion that's forecasted to grow even strongly driven by this continued and meaningful trend towards increasing use of external providers to help deliver content. We're very, very proud to be working with the who's who of the industry with all of the large publishers. And those relationships are getting more and more sticky and more and more embedded into their working arrangements. But from an investor perspective, with the picks and shovels of the industry and whilst we absolutely love it when our customers' games are successful, we're not quite as exposed to that hit or miss risk that you sometimes associate across the industry. And as I said, we have a very strong track record of delivery, and I think this creates a very exciting opportunity for us to build on over the next few years. So with that, I'm going to pass back to Bertrand.

Thank you, Jon. I think I'll just pause a second on this one because that's an important one. And a lot of what is on this data are really the reason why I joined in the first place. And I think because of that platform that we have in our hands to build on. And I got the chance to spend quite a few hours with Andrew Day before starting. And we talked about a lot of topics. We talked a lot about what is really on that side. As such, he had a lot of really good advices were going forward. But what really stuck with me, and I shared that with a few of you, I have a poster of this next to my computer at home. And it's supposed to stay -- was actually the wisest advice from Andrew, which is don't mess it up. And I think it's actually very wise. There is really strong relationship. There's really strong brands that we have. There is really strong coordination that has happened and really a lot of talent across the batch. This being said, I think we also -- I'm discovering in space, the type of opportunities that we have. And that's why we are going to spend the bulk of the afternoon to share about. But the first one is really about our strategic customer relationship. You'll see, I think we are -- we have a great position, but we're still very tactical and could really bring this to the next level. The second one is all about technology. To some extent, I don't want to grow to 22,000 talents to double the revenue over the next x number of years. I really want to make sure that we do that with the right technology investment, but also really on behalf of our clients, I can be more efficient about that. You'll hear a prime example of something we're doing with Microsoft in that type of setup. Some of you have heard me talk about One Keywords. And this is something close to my heart. I believe we have an incredible network of entrepreneurs within Keywords. This is something I want to protect. We have a few of them, a few of us in that room and put myself into there. But at the same time, how do we increase collaboration to make the best of that platform together. We'll talk a lot about talent today and how can we think on the longer-term horizon to really tap into that talent that all of us are trying to effectively get close to. And Jon will do a small section about adjacencies. And as I said earlier, I don't think we have to depart much from the gaming DNA that we have. And to some extent, we already do -- work in some of the adjacencies. It's a question of how much do we want to accelerate that. And finally, we'll spend a bit of time of how the M&A is supporting effectively all those activities. So I'm just going to shift gear a little bit and to go on this picture, which is an important one to me, this is -- and I think many are affected in the room. But this is a journey we started really in earnest on the third of January, where we started those 5 work streams. But to do that, we mobilized about 50 to 60 of our leaders across Keywords. And we assigned 10 to 12 of us each to 1 of those 5 work streams I was alluding to earlier. And you'll see what you're going to see later on, it's really the work of the team. We worked on biweekly sprints. I think it's fair to say that's been intense. On purpose, we put team leaders on each of those work streams by norm that we are coming from a different standpoint and different point of view, some from the studios, some from the functional lines, some coming from the sales team, some coming from a very different starting point. It has been electric in a positive way, but I really also got the chance to get to discover the team as we're doing this. And this picture that you see here on the wall is from May 3, where effectively after 5 months of work, we ended up actually getting a summit for 3 days, including our Board, very transparently joining us and being participants to that exercise with all came together, and where we brought each of the recommendations, including budget, including the PMO with in place, and we made a few hard choices as well to make that happen. Now at that summit, I wanted to share a couple of slides that we shared when we started at summit in that event. And we had the 3 graphs you're going to see next plastered around the world, big time. So you could not -- I think it's fair to say you could not ignore them. And the first one was really about the voice of the customer. Personally, I got the chance to visit about 30 of our studios. More importantly, I met as well, 25 -- most of the 25 of our top customers at different levels, at CXO level, at CEO level. Again, you have some today with us. I got the chance as well with many of us to go to GDC to DICE to really get a reality check and also to hear from some of our investors along the way. But this one to me is really important. And essentially, the core of it, I won't go in details, but you can sense that there is a real strong appetite for partnering. A lot of it is driven by complexity that I was alluding to earlier. And the part is just coming to the point where we cannot do it all along. So where are their partners -- we have that end-to-end offering where we can do something more systematic together. We did the same with the studios. I really wanted to understand not only by going on premises, but we've got some surveys out as well to understand what do our studios really have in mind. And overall, I have to say there is a buzz around the studio when you walk around. There's really something very, very special that I haven't seen in many spaces before, but we don't do everything right. There are some places where some are asking us to say, look, how can you remove some of the red tapes where you are constraining some of the growth we could have. We have heard it in space at different places where we can better organize ourselves also in terms of platforms. How can we really have the platforms to get the visibility. How can we realize the power of Keywords that you're talking about, but how can we really get the visibility of what's going on and raise that collaboration. We did the same with our employees. And I'm proud to say that we have -- we measure NPS regularly. So the employee Net Promoter Score, we have a score that has moved from 22 to 42 over the last year, which I think is a massive, massive jump, but we still have a lot to go after. For example, clearly, salaries, packages, the way it's even presented is something that is really top of mind, especially as you would expect in an inflationary world like this. I'm sure we'll talk about that more. But it's much more than that. A lot of it is really about career path. How do we make sure that you give us chances to leverage the global network that we have? How can we have geographic experiences? How can we move from one service line if we have an engineering bend to game development potentially? How do we plan for that? And there was another piece that came very strongly in terms of feedback from the team was, look, Bertrand, we also need to get a sense of purpose, where we have it across Keywords before, but how do we have more -- something that brings us all together and this is a good moment to do that. That brings me to the next one. And that's something we did as well as at that summit with one of the teams. And there is a word that we're using and lists with the global marketing directors in the room, and it's probably going to take me on that because we're still playing with the word, but I'd like to call it for now we're game-makers, and proud to be game makers. And I generally believe that I had sort of an epiphany when walking around with Jon at DICE in January, if I'm not mistaken. And I got to realize when meeting many of our partners, many of our clients, I didn't know what relationship exactly we had. I was still discovering the business. But how many are relying on us to get the games over the line. How many actually are really relying on the type of resources and the partnerships and the technical ability and even the store leadership to be able to get that done. And actually, I think it's very rare because when you think about this, how many companies can truly say that if they disappear, if they weren't there, the ecosystem might be quite different. When you think about that for a minute, I think there's really something profound there. And I think we have a chance -- we're only at the beginning of that journey. We have a chance to really create something special in that space. Now -- some of you may be familiar with the famous flywheel that -- from Jeff Bezos from 25 years ago, where on a napkin in a bar he wrote actually pretty much the flywheel strategy of Amazon, which he still comes back regularly with. We did the exercise to also look at what could be a flywheel. Do we even have one? Many companies don't. I think we have. I think we have something quite compelling here. First, we have a strong offer that has been built over the last decade plus, we have seen the type of service lines, the end-to-end proposition. That in its own right attracts the best clients, attracts the best title, which is not a given, we don't take that for granted with longer-term relationship which in its turn attracts some of the best people in the industry and the best targets as we have seen overnight. People get a choice of where they want to work. And many really want to work in a world where supplies is so much shorter than demand, of which company do they really want to work on. And they want to work on the good titles. And then we want to make sure that we have that platform that I'm talking about with Jon to make sure that we are not just a collection of individual studio that it really comes together, which then reinforce the offer. And you can see, hopefully that wheel spinning, but that's our job. Our job for us in the room Keywordians is those type work streams and M&A, how do we use this to invest to really get that wheel flying faster. On the right-hand side, you see the emphasis on strategic partnership, how do we really embed those long-term partnerships truly joining the hip. On the left-hand side, that's why I'm so passionate about technology and One Keyword is how do we have that so that we truly have a platform here. On the bottom, you see the investments that we'll talk about this afternoon at length about talent, talent, talent and capabilities. Likewise, also with some of the adjacencies we're looking to and deploying our balance sheet and our M&A capabilities to be able to circulate that. But I'll come back on that wheel, but I think it's a bit conceptual, but I think it's really an important one, and I don't think everybody gets something like that. Now this is the -- before really digging into it, this is probably the agenda for the rest of this afternoon. Those are the 5 work streams I was referring to. By the end of that summit, each team came up with 3 recommendations, no more than that. That's probably as much as we can show. Many are not rocket science. Many are going to be business as usual fairly quickly, but it was a matter of focusing, picking our battles, putting the right resources, putting the right leadership behind but to be able to really go after it. We have also put proper PMO, proper resources, proper investments behind to make sure that we can make that happen. We have also taken a 3-year approach so that we are not constrained by just going from one year to the next, where are there places where we need a longer period of time to really go and make a difference basically in those. But again, that's going to be the menu for what's after. So on that basis, taking a breath, we are ready to jump into each of the slides, and I'll start to kick off, and I'm seeing the first one, which is those strategic partnerships. So to talk about that I'm just repeating a slide that I just went through. And as you can sense, we're very proud of that. We're very proud Jon mentioned it as well to work with the who's who is in the industry. We are proud of how many are using multiple of our service lines. But if I'm really honest, when I digged into it, I realized that we have quite a few gaps on that picture. And I'll start with the bottom, where we did the analysis with one of the workstream teams to look at it title by title. And then we stepped back and look -- we looked at it for the top 25 publishers one by one. And taking the example of Elden Ring, which we are very proud, I mean, to have contributed to, you can see 5 of studios stepping in, in those with Bandai Namco. Actually, there are quite a few gaps in there. We didn't contribute in terms of game development. We didn't play in terms of player support. We didn't help on FQA versus we knew that this was coming based on the work that we're doing in art there. So there were some white spaces there. At the same time, if you go under the hood, there was a lot of high fighting on all what we could have done -- we have done together, but it wasn't easy. A lot of resources really mobilized at very last minute with some sacrifices in other studios. We could have also extended to create less frustration from some of our clients to really make sure that we can extend those resources -- valuable resource for the long term afterwards. So that's why we started to look from tactical to more strategic. What else could we do? And that's why we are passionate about that, about how do we secure those resources for a longer time? How do we plan better on that? How do we think about a more cross-line and studio collaboration? When we did the map of the top 25 cross service lines, we have quite a few white spaces, player support being an example of that, that we're now properly taking on. You'll hear from James a bit later today about how can we think differently instead of just thinking the next title whether it's Bloodhunt, whether it's Elden Ring, how can we think all the horizon to 2026. It's a very different way of thinking. It means opening up the pipeline. It means a certain trust to be able to really trust us as well to discuss that. And then when we can come up with solutions that use the best of Keywords more broadly, and Trina has been one of the architects of that. What I go to appreciate by talking to some of the CXO and CEOs is also that actually there are many more ideas that we don't even have right now. Where -- how can we think from a QA point of view to take the next full chunk across 10 of the studios that they have or 20 of the studios that we have. You'll hear an example with Microsoft, where we are codeveloping a platform and localization together that we can then use across other publishers afterwards. And some are even asking us to think about M&A in a different way to be able to serve them on the back of that. And I think this is a great time to do that. It's a great time because we've earned that trust over the year. I think we have a quality offering. We have a certain platform. And more importantly, because it touches into the natural entrepreneurship of our guys within the studios and ultimately, it's what clients are expecting from us. So -- to bring that to life, I bring 2 customers. One of them is -- doesn't need much introduction. I'll come back to Jon right away. And then another one afterwards, that I'm very proud to have with us that I would want to make sure that you get to really know them because I think they have to something very, very special. But the first one, we'll start with John Doyle, the creators of League of Legends franchise incredible since 2009. They have clearly grown a lot since then. You'll hear some of the titles we'll be working on, including as well ARCADE as an hybrid model between films and games that is quite special. So Mike and myself -- Mike was actually in L.A. with John last week, and we worked very closely with him for years and just asking a few questions about our relationship right now and how he sees that evolving. [Presentation]

So hopefully, that gives you a sense. And for example, right, we have an ABR, an annual business review, coming up this summer, where we're sitting down with Jon and with his management team to really open up the portfolio and look at whether it's Valorant, whether it's League of Legends, whether it's new titles coming up, and how can we organize more solutions around that. So on that note, I'll play another video while asking to James to join us on stage from Sharkmob, but I'll let Fredrik do the talking to introduce you, James, if it's okay.

Hello, everyone. I'm Fredrik I'm CEO and Cofounder of Sharkmob, game development company out of Sweden. I just wanted to take some of your time to tell you about our history. So we were founded about 5 years ago. And we're already 350 people. We worked out of 2 studios, 1 in London, 1 here in Malmo, Sweden. And we recently released our first game called Bloodhunt, and that was something that we celebrated together with some of the Keywords companies that we work with. So we have a great collaboration, not just with more traditional art outsourcing, but also co-development of the game and marketing assets like video trailers and such, it wouldn't really been possible for us to make this journey without a partner like Keywords. So we really appreciate all the help and all the support that we got from you guys over the years. Looking into the future of what we have in our pipeline, we have a couple of new games that we already started to work on even though we're fully acquired and part of the Tencent Group, we still need to have that collaboration with Keywords moving forward. So we have plans to work together over the next couple of years on those different projects. I do hope we meet soon again in real life -- and that's all. It was a real pleasure to meet you in San Francisco. I do hope we meet perhaps at Gamescom. And James, my colleague and Managing Director of the London studio. He's there with you today. to give you more information or answer any questions that you might have on Sharkmob. So good luck, guys, and hope to see you soon.

James, that's the best of intro I guess, from Fredrik.

Yes.

So maybe a good place -- first of all, thank you for spending time as well with us today.

Pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

And we got the chance to visit the new studio that James is setting up in there we were the first visitor, I think.

You were, indeed, we moved into our new office that you saw just up on that screen in Covent Garden last Monday. So yes, both Ron and the team are the first people to come and welcome us to new space.

It's pretty impressive space. It's 50 people right now plus the Tencent team coming in as well.

Yes, 50, 55 of us right now, 20, 30, Tencent people and room for about 300. So we've got a lot of growing to do over the next few years.

So those are the ones to watch by the way, just saying -- but part of the Tencent family as well more broadly. James, do you want to share a bit more maybe about -- congrats for Bloodhunt as well, amazing start. A bit more about Sharkmob overall, maybe putting something into it and maybe the nature of that relationship over the coming years.

Yes, of course. So Sharkmob is a company was really set up to be a next-generation developer of very, very high production value video games. Most of the team in Malmo originally came from massive entertainment known for the division, part of Ubisoft and -- when we started the team in London, it was very similar things. We wanted to make very large, very ambitious, very high production value games, which is what we spent most of our previous careers doing. As Fredrik mentioned, Sharkmob is actually a very young company. It's 5 years old, released its first game, Bloodhunt not too long ago. We're just over 18 months old as a London company, growing reasonably quickly. But the partnership with Keywords has been hugely important to us for many reasons. But I think 2 big ones. I think you mentioned earlier, Bertrand, that the AAA games these days take 400, 500 people. I've seen teams scale into the thousands now. And alongside that, we're growing a new team from the ground up. We never wanted to be a company that was 500 people big in a single studio. We -- and we didn't want to scale so quickly that we couldn't keep tight control over -- control over the way we develop our culture, and we want to onboard people properly. We want to scale in a sensible way. So in terms of both scale of our outfits and the ability to scale quickly for the games we want to produce as Fredrik mentioned, we've got 3 games now in some stage of development. We needed to partner up with people and Keywords has been a perfect partner for that for many reasons that I'm sure we'll dig into.

I want to stay on Bloodhunt first for a second. Like we have relationship with d3t. We have the founder of d3t team in the room as well with Fire Without Smoke. In your previous seat, you worked as well with Gobo. Do you want to share a bit more maybe give us a hint of how Bloodhunt is doing as well?

Yes. So Bloodhunt say it's a very new game. It's been out for a matter of weeks is proving to be quite successful, more successful than we predicted, which is always good. And I'd say Keywords has really been an extension of our internal development team on almost every front. You mentioned a few of them there, but I probably can't count the number of individual Keyword studios around the world that have been involved in creating Bloodhunt across, I think, pretty much every service line, if not all of the service lines. And that's something that we expect to continue doing for our future projects. We're already in conversations about the next few years and what that might look like. I think I've been in games for over a decade now and working in code of partnership has always been part of the way we work. But it has drastically become a bigger part of the way we work. And Keywords is making it much easier to do that kind of work than it previously has been for certain.

That's the nice things to what -- the ambition that is ahead of us as well. Now you have -- another -- we're talking about the 2026 time frame, Fredrik was talking about in the next couple of years and the truth is really next 4. You've 2 big titles, maybe a hint, James is a big fan of vampire. So probably gives you a sense of the type of games, if I may, that I can...

Yes.

But how do you see that evolving now? Because the complexity you're talking about is going to be exponentially bigger probably over the next few years together.

It is indeed. I'd say Bloodhunt while it's been a success for us is -- it's quite a small project compared to what we've got coming up -- what we've got coming down the pipeline. We have 2 more games in development, 1 being led out Malmo, 1 being led out of London. They're going to be big projects. And I say that even with relative to the big projects that are already out there. And we are, as a new studio, as a new company in London, we're looking at our hiring plan, our growth plans for the next 5 to 10 years. We've had to do that when we're looking at the office space to say we've just moved into a space, 40,000 square foot. So we have to put a lot of thought into how is our team going to develop. And so it's been important to us over the last kind of 12 months in particular in London, but also in Malmo to think about what's our team structure look like? Who do we hire internally? Who do we partner up with? How do we partner up? What's the scale of those arrangements? And I know we've been having a lot of those conversations since we started our partnership together. There isn't really any other company that I can think of in the world that can offer that level of looking down the road across every service line and trying to work out how we best tailor a kind of partnership solution to delivering a project.

And it's going to be a journey together, right? The one thing that you've been talking about is like there are teething issues when you get to that type of scale. One of the things that -- one of the architect is in the room that have -- those integrated solution architect or integrated solution producers, which is almost mirroring the producers basically within Sharkmob. How do you find the discussion so far?

Indeed. It's been hugely useful. I mean, I think over my career, I've worked with 2 people in this room as key partners; one, Blandine over there, Paul here in the front. And they've been incredibly valuable partners, not only to the companies I've worked with, but to me, personally in terms of helping us solve development problems along the way. One kind of very recent story, something that I don't think would have been possible in the world of games, 3, 4 years ago, probably not kind of more than a year or 2 ago. We had a request come across our door just a few months ago, we've got a milestone for one of our early projects, it's in concept, many PowerPoint presentations and trailers at this stage. We have a milestone next Tuesday, and we had a request put across our door just before GDC. So we're talking mid-March that there's a new requirement when we go through our gates, it would be nice to have a game trailer, 1 or 2 minutes of footage in the engine that we're building in that looks like the game we're looking to release in 4, 5 years that shows what the game will play like in 4 or 5 years and are actually making the game. As this problem came up, we just happened to have lunch with Paul on the same day. So I mean, our Art Director, Ben, were complaining about this a little bit and trying to work out how we solve this problem. And Paul took it upon his holders to try and find a solution within Keywords. I think came back 2 days later, day later with trailer farm to lead the way in terms of crafting the trailer, but environment art support, character support we're looking at localization support. And I say this happened within a couple of days. I didn't think that was going to be possible. We have at least had to have gone around 4 or 5 different studios, spun of 4 or 5 different teams, manage 4 or 5 different teams, 4 or 5 different contracts. And in reality, I don't think it would have happened. And I'm quite happy to say that we've got this milestone next week, and we've got a pretty special asset that we're going to share that. So thank you to Paul and then Keywords for making that happen.

That's why he sits on the first seat.

Exactly. And I can just look him while we have the conversation.

Okay. I have another one for you as well, which is about -- you're part of Tencent as well as overall. Some investors might be wondering, what does it mean for the relationship whether it was hinting to it as well -- can you share a bit more especially you're very close to them now?

Indeed, yes, and it's interesting to see Riot to have space as well, there are another part of the Tencent family. So there are a lot of game studios now who are part of the Tencent family. Tencent to their credit is very supportive, but relatively hands off in the way we operate and the way we create our games. However, they've done a really good job of connecting the various studios and companies that work within the organization. So we do talk with Riot, we do talk with Funcom. Tencent has started running both U.K.-based but also global conferences with the various game studios. So we do share learnings. We do pass on tips. We do talk about our successes and failures. And different Keywords Studios is definitely a big talking point within the Tencent family and see Riot, obviously, very pleased with the work that they've been doing with Keywords, we're in a very similar place. And we will continue to share that within the Tencent family. And like Keywords, I expect the Tencent family is going to continue growing over the next years.

As part of the investment and strategic partnership as well. And maybe one last one, we could be here or there.

Yes, indeed.

I'm enjoying it. I can I'm seeing the time of that. But -- just one last one. If you were in the shoes of the investor analyst community as well, like how would you think about us? How would you think about Keywords in that type of set up?

Yes. So I alluded to this in kind of an earlier answer, but I genuinely believe that Keywords is unique in this idea that as a game developer, I can come to you with almost any creative staffing specialism problem, and you are likely to have somebody within your portfolio that can solve that problem. Or more importantly, you can pull together 2, 3, 4, 10 different teams who can help solve that problem. Prior to Keywords being where it is today, that would have been a huge amount of work to find all of the individual areas of support. And as mentioned earlier, getting those teams contracted, manage getting the process into a place where it works effectively, getting the relationship to a place where the teams can collaborate well is a huge amount of effort, and it takes a lot of time. This year, last year, Keywords, I say, is uniquely in a place where we can come to you and solve those problems very quickly, very effectively. And I don't see -- I don't see any other company in this space that is anywhere close to being able to deliver that level of service -- so that's to me the unique nature of keywords that makes it a very special company.

James, thank you very, very much. Thanks for spending the afternoon with us. I know how busy you are, but James will be available. We'll have a break after the tech section, and then there are a few cocktails, which it goes very well...

Looking forward to meeting you there. Thank you.

Thank you very much and thank you for the partnership as well. So I'll just close this section just with one thing that James was alluding to as well. We also need to make a few adjustments and a few investments to make sure that we can take on that type of level of complexity and demand and two of those here on the map. You see Blandine, but we are going to invest more into client partnerships. So really being the trusted adviser across this partnership, but also being able to know all the service lines and the type of solutions that we have inside out on that. I think, Blandine, I don't know where you are, but just wanted to point to Blandine as well, talk to her. But Blandine is exceptional and knows that inside out and where we're going to make more investment there. Another one is the one we were just talking about, which is those integrated solution producers and architect. I'm pointing to Trina Marshall, who is really -- we joined at the same time as I did and was had a massive impact within the firm right away and pushed us a bit with some discomfort to be honest, to set up 3, 4 of those roles, partly with some frictions in terms of being able to scale to the next level and has added some, I would say, tremendous success so far. We're still early with probably 4, 5 of those. Those are rare breed of individuals. So if you know some great talent, we'll take them very happily because he needs the right EQ, the right IQ, he needs to be truly at the service of our clients, he needs to understand and handle the complexity and being able to package those type of solutions very, very quickly. But I would expect to see us investing much more across the top 25 relationship in those type of areas. So in conclusion for that section on the strategic partnership, I think there is a clear appetite as you can probably sense -- you've heard it from a couple of stories, but I think that's appetite. I'm hearing it from everywhere across the top publishers. I think the timing is really right because we couldn't have dreamt of that if we didn't have as James was alluding to it, if you didn't have the full end proposition to be able to take that on. And it will require some investment, moderate investment, but to make sure that we can effectively tap into that. So on that note, I'll tee off the second one around, obviously, a topic very close to my heart, probably my background on technology. And then we'll take a break after this section before moving on to the other one. So -- in terms of technology, I'll touch on 2 of the 3 recommendations that the team came up with. The first one is I'll open our own internal kitchen. I'll give you a bit of a sense of the good, the bad, the ugly of where we have more to fix to be able to really go and scale to the next level. And secondly, I'll pass on to a team who has been driving a project, as I mentioned, with Microsoft to drive more automation across localization with a goal being to do that across all of our service lines. So let me take this one on before passing on the baton. But this is a very open sharing of where we sit. When we looked at our own kitchen, the own architecture that we have, and I have to say, it was a lot of good work happening from our IT teams, but fairly complex. We had about 14 different projects that were ongoing, many different level of scalability. And the major miss probably to me was great IT team, but it was not necessarily being picked up by our business teams. And so we had a mismatch where the tech team was to figure out what to do, what kind of architecture to do. And then we got to realize, gosh, for an 11,000 people team, we have some gaps here. We -- for example, how can we really operate at scale and we make it work because we have the right basis. But how can we operate at scale without having the right workforce management system, where we know at any point in time what has been allocated, where that's not been allocated so that when we're on the road, you know what we can promise, what we cannot promise short term and long term. We want this to be -- we want an additional traditional asset management in place so that each of our assets have the right depository with the right metadata behind so that we can also do -- use it where it makes sense. We want this to talk to a sales force engine so that -- which we have deployed, but how do we make sure that the connections are really strong. Once you have this, how does it talk to a forecasting system in NetSuite or Intacct Reddit to make sure that we can have the right plans in place and the right visibility at any point in time. And you can sense I'm a bit tough on ourselves. But there are some where we are very well advanced on the finance side. Jon's team has driven actually something substantially which are really simplifying our life and even night and day compared to even 5, 6 months ago. But there are some areas where we have some work to do. So I would expect us to see some investment on that to make sure we have the basics in place. It doesn't mean the full 14, we went back to really the basic of 1 needs to be in place to operate and to really get that collaboration going. Beyond that, I wanted to talk about automation, and that's why I'll pass on to Mina and to Tony, who are here also on the front line. Mina has joined at the same time -- we joined together, right? We're in the same cohort. And Mina runs a localization business, which is a EUR 100 million P&L across the globe. And I have to say, Mina has a very strong tech band that has already put to use very strongly. Tony came to the family 2 years ago with the acquisition of KantanAI. And if I am really candid, Tony is like, this has been an incredible acquisition, but it was subscale in the way we're using it across the broader set of the network. So Mina and Tony found each other and they've looked at a very specific client and Microsoft, one of our top-tier clients where on localization, we had -- there is a particular deal that we had not won since 2017 while being pitching for it a couple of times. And part of it was also because we couldn't even fulfill the level of demand that you require from a linguist as part of that. So I'll let them tell the story of how they found the solution for that problem.

Thank you very much, Bertrand. And hello, everybody. My name is Romina Franceschina, and I'm Service Line Director for localization services. Now just in case for those of you that may not be familiar with our discipline, localization services is the art of taking an asset in our case, video games. And translating that content into multiple languages, making the cultural as well as genre-specific adaptations that are required for the product, then we feed for the market. Now at the beginning of this year, we were approached by Microsoft, who were looking for a partner that would help them make their localization processes smarter. They are a very mature buyer of localization services, I'm sure you understand that they've been localizing their products for quite a long time. And when they approached us, they had a really specific list of requirements. They wanted a system that would allow them to process a lot of content fast. But equally important for them, it was the fact that they wanted the system to be simple and easy to deploy. Interestingly enough, one of the key things for them was they didn't want to invest their own resources to developing this. So for them, it was important to find a partner that would already bring in all the expertise in localization services, and they would take their priority list and run with it and develop the solution together with them. At that point, Tony and I knew that we were perfectly placed to fulfill that brief because had 2 key elements within the Keywords solution. We have best-in-class technology. But equally importantly, we have a very extensive team of workflow experts that can bring all of that requirement together. So why would a traditional workflow not be suitable for a Microsoft solution. There is a very simple answer to that scalability. When you think about the volumes of content, we know that it's impossible -- it's very difficult to bring in enough human resources and also linear type of workflows tend to use multiple technologies in the solutions so it gets really difficult to scale. So what we did for Microsoft is we took their list of priorities, and we brought together key people within our organization. We brought together our developers, our workflow experts as well as our talent managers. We took the model and we simplified, we striped it apart. We worked on 3 main categories. The first thing that was very important was to make sure that end-to-end, there will be a single technology driving the workflow through. This protein, the simplicity and the access to data that Microsoft was very interested in. The second aspect that was very important to take into account was automation. When you are talking about volumes, you need to make sure that you're automating as many of those low-value tasks as you can. Again, we eliminated waste and equally importantly, we reduced risk. And the third element for us that was really important was to make sure that we could safeguard all of those high-value tasks that are best serviced by human experts. So the experts in the loop, people that would make sure that quality is built into the process of localization. Now it may sound counterintuitive to work on automation like this. The interesting thing is working on this type of solution opens up new avenues of revenue for Keywords because the reality is our clients have a lot more content to produce, and it would not be physically possible and financially possible for them to treat those volumes with the traditional workflows. So we know that the investment in this solution is absolutely critical for us and for our clients. Now we are really proud of the solution that we built. So Tony will give you a quick sneak peek of what it is that we're doing for Microsoft.

Okay. Thank you very much Romina for that introduction. Hi, everybody. My name is Tony O'Dowd, and I'm Head of Research at Keywords' Localization research labs. And my job is to embed AI into the localization process. And really, the sub objective of that is to make AI the norm for Keywords rather than the exception. So we've got quite a broad stroke of ideas and objectives and so on that we have to achieve. Now the high volume translation service for Microsoft brought together 2 key technologies that we have developed as part of KantanAI. One was a neural machine translation system. And the second was a very flexible workflow system called KantanStream. And by bringing those technologies together, we were able to reduce the time to process files from Microsoft from ours in sometimes days down to minutes and seconds, okay? So the first job hit the project KantanStream 3 weeks ago, within 8 minutes, the job was picked up by one of our experts in the Lupa translators and was delivered back to Microsoft 24 minutes later. Okay? Now that doesn't sound like too big a challenge to do in 1 for 1 file. But of course, remember, we have thousands of these files coming in up to 30 different languages. And in fact, this particular project from Microsoft covers 15 game titles that we have previously never worked on in 31 languages and they want every single file that they send to us return back in less than 48 hours. And at the moment, after 3 weeks running the system for them live, we're now returning 97% of the files back in less than 48 hours, unbelievable level of automation. One of the things that we've got that makes this possible is that we actually embed our systems directly into the content management systems that are used by Microsoft. So we go way upstream directly into our clients. And this positions us in with tremendous powerful position that we're now part of their development pipeline. And what we do is we extract that content at lightning speed, 24/7, 365 days of the year, and we delivered downstream to the translators that need to get the work done very, very quickly. And it's the time difference between the extraction of content and the delivery to the translator makes all the difference in the world. And this is where the system is so unique. So what we've got here is we have a new system that brings speed, scalability and simplicity to a rather complex workflow of game localization. The translators are actually part of a community. So everybody has heard of these new ways of working. Uber is a community of drivers. What we've actually done in Keywords is we've now built a community of both professional editors and professional reviewers. And we actually manage that community on our platform. So we curate them, we vet them and we onboard them automatically. And as soon as the job comes in from Microsoft, that community is notified automatically that is a job available. So we can now work 7 days a week, something we couldn't do before. We can now work in any time zone in the world so we can follow the zone. We can actually implement an FTS strategy. And the great thing about this is our community of translators can work any time, any place, on any device because this system that you're looking at here works on every single platform. It's not restricted to win those platforms. It works at Macintosh platforms. They can even actually work, believe or not, on their mobile phones, okay? So now we have this great capability to reach out and distribute these jobs. Another part of our solution as well is that we're using extensive AI to make this a reality. So what are we doing in terms of using AI? Well, the first thing we can do is not only can we pre translate content now for our clients. We can actually determine the quality of that content. How good is that machine translation? How good is that translation memory? If it's a very high quality using our AI systems, what we can do is we can send it to the reviewer rather than send it to a post editor and then the reviewer. So we're taking out 1 step in the process. And that 1 step in the process, believe it or not, represents about 50% of the cost of the entire process. So by using AI, we have the ability to squeeze more efficiencies out of the process and the actual financial efficiencies are quite significant. The other thing that we can do as well is one of the briefs that Microsoft gave us was that they wanted total transparency in the way we're running the system. They wanted to see who was working on the files, when they're working on the files and how good they are working on the actual file content. And we gave them a dashboard just similar to this here, where they can actually see who's actually translating right down to the individual string within a game, okay? Now why are we building that type of data? Well, believe it or not, the next-generation AI systems that we've got to build needs that level of data modeling, so we can actually start building recommendation models next year. And we can actually pick the best translator for the content that's coming in for our clients. So we're already thinking a year ahead that we have to build the data models today in order to stay ahead of the market in a year's time. And the final thing about our system as well is that we couldn't do this without these experts, these editors and reviewers. And what we've actually done for them is, we've built an entire new translation service for game localization. So when they actually load up the game and start working on it, they see not only pre translations of every segment in the string, they also get all the glossary hits, and they also get various other information that makes it super efficient to actually work in our environment. Now the great thing about the solution guys is it's sticky for our clients. Once our clients apply this, it's incredibly difficult for our competitors to come in and take that business away because they don't have systems that we're developing here today. We're unique in that sense. So KantanStream, we were looking in the sense that we already had a workflow system. But in order to get KantanStream ready for Microsoft, we have to do extensive extensions to it. Now because we already had a workflow system that's very modular, it's cloud-based. We have about, at the moment, 300 servers running this platform believe it or not. So it just gives you a sense of how extensive this platform is. Microsoft gave us 6 weeks to embed it in their development cycle and go live. And the actual data we went live was Wednesday, 3 weeks ago. And so far, we've processed about 1,000 jobs on the platform. Quite an incredible achievement considering that we had no live test of the actual solution. We had to go straight into production in a live capacity. Thank you very much.

Absolutely. And really quick note about Kantan. As Tony said, we went live on the 18th of last month. And unlike you -- John, I keep track of how many projects we've done for them. You could lose track of employees. I can track on projects. And the funny thing -- or the best part of this is the fact that the initial feedback from Microsoft has been absolutely fabulous. So we spent around 5 minutes celebrating the launch, and then we moved right back into development mode, and we're working on the next set of priorities of Microsoft. Now again, the beauty of Content is they were brought into the Keywords family because they have an incredibly unique approach to machine translation. But what we're doing with the technology today is, we're stretching it to deliver efficiencies. And those efficiencies are absolutely indispensable for us to be able to partner with our clients and deliver the work that they need. So thank you very much. And Bertrand, over to you.

Thank you, Romina. Thank you, Tony. Thank you both of you. I think this was only just an idea in January, I think it's fair to say based on the technology you've been developing for years. So really impressive. I love the fact that it's life and the feedback that is coming away. I think the thing that strikes me on that example is also that when you think about it to SaaS, it's really a translator as a service to some extent. Tony made the point very eloquently, which is embedded into the workflows. That's something very sticky as we're talking about that earlier today. Our job now is not to stop there. Our job is across each of the service lines. And actually, that's the job of each of our service line leaders is how do we drive that? How do we have that mindset everywhere? How do we automate systematically? And it's starting to be motion already. We have -- you'll hear from Mathieu Lachance a bit later today from Canada is starting to leading our testing capabilities, is starting to think very differently, and we have an acquisition that is in the goal that may help us accelerate that. You'll hear as well. I mean if you were to hear about a Player Support piece, we already have a partnership with a company called Helpshift, where we are starting to go to market in a true symbiotic way as well together. So the job is really how do we do exactly what you just heard, but how do we do the 10x over the next 3 years across each of the service lines. So in short, I think to take this away, we have prioritized the work that we want to do in our own internal kitchen, internal capabilities so that we can really not only dream about platforms would really make it happen at all levels at our touch points without adding any complexity to the entrepreneurs on the contrary to remove many of the bet tapes away. 10x automation, how do we do that everywhere? It's -- their job, it's part of the job description if you're a business leader, within Keywords. Innovation, I'll touch on it later today. I'll just introduce Jamie Campbell, who is here in the room. Jamie, used to run up to very recently, is passing on the baton game development practice. He was the founder of d3t, one of our most successful studio and game development, running -- building a 1,500 people team, and has decided to go and run innovation for us across each of the service lines. So I'll share a little bit more about when it comes to organization in that, but very grateful for Jamie to take that on, but that will be a quarter back to be able to make all this effectively happen. And maybe 1 last 1 I wanted to close on this section is this doesn't happen if you think 1 year. So somehow we need to take the thinking as well about how do we think 2, 3 years, while creating the right urgency and the type of mobilization that I think Tony and Romina demonstrated today. So on that note, we'll take a break before getting to the next Workstreams. If you want to restart to Tony and Romina, they are happy to give you a demo as well of the platform very openly as well, and we'll see each other in at 3:30. Okay in 10 good minutes. So thank you. See you shortly. Okay. So we'll keep a whistle to go through the Workstream. Number 3 is about One Keywords. So you've heard me talk about One Keywords a lot. And I'll share few more thoughts about that. But frankly, I hope you get to see what One Keywords really means through the examples you saw there. Even look at Romina and Tony coming together, the way they came together, with the client and shape that with quite a few of our studios as well helping behind quite a few of our teams, that to me is really One Keywords. When you look at those Workstreams and the way they came together, the 50, 60 leaders mobilized with many of the teams playing a role into that. To me, that was really One Keywords into action. That's the type of culture that we want to keep shaping. We've had some interesting and difficult challenges as 1 of the discussions that we have had, that we didn't shy away from. Typically, every organization, whatever business you need to have, you have a point of view about how sales to be organized, to be globally, should be local. We have had those discussions. We are reshaping incentives. We are making sure that we can operate more as One Keywords as well together as part of the stream. That's also One Keywords to me. But what I wanted to do in this next section is to go a bit more specific and share specifically the organization that we have been evolving, John and myself over the past few months. And we announced it on May 3, after a lot of work with those 50 leaders and I'll say very transparently what we have come up to. Maybe a few guiding principles. First of all, you'll see I wanted to simplify -- to take that moment to simplify the nature of the service lines we have. Many of you are familiar with our service lines. We have about 8 to 10 depending on how you count. Clients are getting confused in some places because of the variability that we have across those. So we thought that as we keep growing and keep expanding our services, this was a good moment to bring that together. We also wanted to amplify the voice of the studio. When I joined the [ 1ST SUMMIT ] before joining officially in October, and it was the top 30 leaders across Keywords being there for 3 days. And 1 thing that stuck with me was that -- there was actually no studio at present at all. Yes, we had the service heads being there, but with no studio. This cannot be right in an organization where ultimately we have really operated for the entrepreneurship of a studio. So you'll hear us talk about the construct we have put in place called the hubs. Clearly, I couldn't get 70 leaders to join the leadership team on top of the 30. But I think we've found an elegant solution to do that by some of the larger studios representing others as well. Key to us was also to retain the entrepreneurship. I think that's what makes us magic. I know it sounds a bit high level, but if you have been following Keywords over the years and part of the advice from Andrew Day was the entrepreneurship we have is really what makes it very special. I consider myself as an entrepreneur as well. And I think that's something we absolutely wanted to keep on making sure as well when we look at the span of controls that we don't add complexity to that and we don't add professional managers. And finally, we wanted it to reflect the 5 Workstreams. So I was talking about the service lines and something that might be of interest to all of you is, you can sense, we're going to start talking now about create, globalize and engage. Create is effectively bringing art and give development together. You'll hear about a new leader for that area very shortly. But I think this is a composition of about 25 studios and it makes eminent sense when you look at it. From a current point of view, more importantly than anything else. And also internally, when you look at many of our game studio 30%, 40%, 50% of the capacity is really around art. So this will enable us to collaborate much more and I think to deploy muscle much, much more. Globalized is a mix of many of the postproduction services that we've had there. You've heard about localization, but also functional testing. Those are pretty big teams with less about the essence of the studios themselves, but how do we really build it up for scale in the [indiscernible]. With an asterisk there, we have put M&A for reporting purposes in there, but in truth, we have a very strong leader, we'll share a bit more about M&A later today by John. And thirdly, one that is -- so the first to have roughly $200 million P&L. The third one is roughly $100 million by putting marketing services and player support together. And I'm quite excited by that one. You'll hear from Tony a little bit later today. This is the potential to me to be a mini Keywords in its own right. And you might think about the support as being more a postproduction piece with high volumes, but truly, it's where the inside about the customers really come in. That's where we get a lot of the insights that can help develop the open world, develop the games if we capture that very early. I think it fits very nicely with the marketing propositions we've been building over the past few years. So in terms of org itself, I think, hopefully, not a major surprise, but I wanted to take that time to really reshape the organization in a way that can build for what we have been describing. On the left-hand side, you see Mike Wallen, Chief Commercial Officer with in the room. Mike, is there? And Mike's job is really to find ways to create incremental revenue but also to help shape some of the strategic partnerships that we've been talking about. So it's a twisting the nature of the job. But I really wanted to make sure that the voice of the customer was at the top table as well. Then I'll come back in more details on the Chief Studio Officer, Raul. John has very kindly agreed to step in at interim on top of what it does day-to-day as well. We have reinforces team on the CFO side, especially on the financial side. And openly, we have opened a job search effectively for that role. John is on point. I'm fairly close as what to that area. It is the advantage as well for me to get to really know the business inside. That's where a lot of the action really happens to get close to the 10,000, 11,000 that we have, but that's where the P&L really is. So I think we're jointly fronting that right now. I'll come back on that right way. Then a new role that we have set up recently led by Nicolas Liorzou is our Shared Services. So fairly common in many organizations. But I would say Nicolas 1 of the toughest job in the organization. His job is really to build a machine to make sure that we're serving the studio. And really when I talk about 10x to make sure that we can make that happen. The way I described job spec is Nicola, you're in charge of effectively serving the studios, so your customers are really the studios to about any confusion, but at the same time with a few nonnegotiables. So in terms of infosec, cybersecurity, type of data transfer and some -- the platforms that need to be in place. We then have the CFO offices, including M&A. You'll hear about Nuno, who was referred to a few times already, but I think it's a very world-class team. Then no surprise to you, the 5 Workstream being represented through tech. We just talked about it. And our Chief Culture Officer, which is something new, but as part of shaping One Keywords, I wanted to make sure that we put even more muscle in that area, and we grouped a few functions together. So all I have left to do on this one is to call on a few colleagues and we'll go back on the CEO, CSO. And I'll start with Ashley Liu with probably somewhere on screen with us. Ashley is a leader for Create, again, a 200 million P&L. Ashley comes to us since 2016 as the founder of Mindwalk, one of our Key Art Studio. In 2018, she took over art overall. She even ran marketing more recently. She's an incredible entrepreneur and she's really an engineer at the core. So John and I ask her to step up and to take probably one of the biggest functions we have, which is create game development and art effectively together. So Ashley, I don't know if you're here, but Ashley is in Beijing, Chinese, Canadian, but working from home at the moment. Ashley, you want to take it over?

Yes, I will. Thanks, Bertrand. I don't know how big I am on screen right now, but I'm really big. I apologize for that. Something that I've been used to for the past 3 years. It's a shame that I can't be there with you. Hopefully, at the next CMD, I will be able to meet some of you in person. So I'm really excited to be able to take on this new role. As like Bertrand said, it really speaks to my standouts. Despite the fact that I just started our studio some 20 years ago, my crowd has always been the engineers in the needs. And it is really in this crowd, but I'm the most comfortable. So now 6 years into Keywords, in over 20 years in the gaming industry, I've never seen as much potential for this industry and the company as they do now. As we all know, we are well into the next console cycle. Our clients are raising the quality bar to deliver bigger and better experiences to their players. They are also continuing to invest in their already released IPs, driving for that long tail player engagement. Both of these factors are driving up demand. And as the largest service provider in this industry, Keywords is well positioned. So when we looked at how we organize ourselves for that growth, it was evident that we should combine arts and game development service lines for the following 2 reasons. First, as Bertrand mentioned before, Art has always been the most significant part of most game development projects, typically around 30% to 50%. When we were separate, we lost some of that possible synergies. Furthermore, our clients are asking less for just our services. And over the past few years, our service line has been pushed to take on more of what I call [ visual co dev ]. Hence, it made a lot of sense to combine these 2 service lines. The merger will also allow studios to feel more confident to take on bigger projects, knowing that they now have 20 sister studios behind them. The second reason is that there are many similarities on how we manage, recruit and retain studio talent between these 2 service lines. You be surprised how comparable our artists and engineers are. There's a lot of overlap in terms of processes, workflow, tools, skill sets between art and game development. The similarities that we can implement structures that are applicable to both, thus gaming efficiency on scale. However merging these 2 service lines left us with over 20 studios, now 1 more across 4 continents to manage. And we know that number will grow fast. Hence, we needed to simplify the structure and we did it by organizing our studios regionally. We have created what we call hubs, 7 hubs to be exact, and they are led by our regional directors. These regional directors promoted from their studio head roles will continue to manage their own studios. They will be the first in line to resolve issues outside of normal operations within their geographies. They're asked to find synergies and strategies to assist in the growth of studios in their regions, and they're asking body to serve in leadership philosophy, 1 that is opposite of big bosses. The team were also assisting our M&A efforts, the structure, let's the individual studios retain their autonomy and stay true to their entrepreneurial DNA, but gives them the support when they need it. Hence, in this formation, we can take full advantage of the Keywords platform, but keep our agility so to capture the content demand title wave that's here and coming. And back to you, Bertrand.

Yes. Thanks, Ashley, and thanks a lot for that. And I don't know what time it is over there, but probably fairly late. But from Beijing, we'll go to Montreal where we get Mathieu Lachance joining us. Mathieu has joined us as part of [ McGill ]. For those who remember 8 or 9 years ago as part of the testing teams, he has really [indiscernible] progressively owning more and more of the testing facilities overall. I think it's fair to say there's a lot of the scars on his body. Some of you got to see the facilities a couple of years ago with almost 2,500 people in Montreal alone. And then much bigger operations that have grown across the world. He is a true entrepreneur, and now he's taken over the role of globalized as a whole in very close partnership with Romina, who you saw earlier. So Matt, I'll pass it on over to you.

Thanks, Bertrand. Hello. As discussed by Bertrand, we're structuring postproduction services together. This brings many advantages to our clients, to our organization and to our employees. For clients, this moves us -- this move allows us to be more client-centric as game testing localization and audio services are often bought together and managed together from the client side. It allows for better, easier and centralized game project management and client communications. For Keywords, it allows a better and streamlined process, especially for localization as we can have leaders overseeing the whole localization process from translation to voice recording and testing. This brings better quality and lower cost. It also makes it easier for us to apply and leverage tender technology across all of these services, which allows us to then automate more easily and freely our production. For employees, this structure allows for more growth and employment opportunities through easier cross-service trainings and promotions. For these 4 services, apart from our classic aggressive growth, we've had 2 focus over the last few years. One, right-shoring our business; and two, applying new technology. We intend to continue both of these efforts. Regarding right-shoring. 3 years ago, we were very Montreal, Dublin and Milan centric. Now, we have expanded and diversified our work base globally. We implemented a follow-the-sun model that allows us to work around the clock. We have more price point to offer clients. We can move more easily work from 1 studio to another. We've reduced our average cost and were more resilient than ever. Again, it's a win for our clients and a win for our company. Poland, India and Manila are great success stories of this movement, and we're exploring further location to repeat that story again. Our plan is to do so in current existing studios where we already have other services and can leverage existing infrastructure. This means a faster, easier, less expensive and overall safer global expansion. Regarding technology, we're progressively applying automation and AI technology to our production. We're pushing more and more standardized integration of our tools across the world, which allows us to automate work more easily. In the recent years, we've also started leveraging the large amount of data that we have, but also that our clients have for machine learning and artificial intelligence in our business. What Romina and Tony has showed you with KantanAI is one example of these AI capabilities we're expanding into. These efforts increased our employee satisfaction, allow us to reduce internal costs and provide our clients with new and exciting things. Thank you. Back to you.

Thank you, Matt. And then back from -- thanks a lot. Thanks for that. Back from Montreal to London, we have just introduced Tony. We'll see Tony a little bit later today. Tony joined us -- you may raise your hand -- Tony so that people can find you towards, but Tony joined us very recently from WPP, where he had been one of the most senior leaders over there for many, many years. I'm not allowed to say how many years, but he was also the MD of Ogilvy and part of the Global Board of Ogilvy. And then more recently has been orchestrating partnership across the WPP entities on behalf of [ plan ]. So really speaking with the strategic partnership that we talked about earlier. And the last few years has been the CEO of a global partnership at [ Adhoga ], which is effectively the production outsourcing facility from WPP in there. So you'll hear from Tony a bit later because he will come in and share a few first thoughts. I don't think it's totally fair, but he has no choice. He's a few weeks into the job, but a few first thought in terms of M&A and how he sees effectively that service line growing up. Fair to say as well that Tony will work very closely with Fred Arens with this in Tokyo, who we don't have on screen right now, but there's a very close partnership here where Fred has been running, play support and much more across the group. Many of those cross collaboration across service lines is really. And John will mention a bit later today, a fantastic leader that we have based in L.A. called LOD Powers running the M&A business, as we touched on that later. And I already mentioned Tina with really a quarter back on anything on the solution architect joining us fairly recently. So hopefully, that gives you a bit of a snapshot. Part of the intent is to simplify the service line. I think that will allow as well much more collaboration between the teams. A lot of it is really about that entrepreneurial DNA that we have across the group and how do we amplify the voice of the studio, finding the right mix between global and local. I think we find about elegant solution, at least the organization feels at the right place right now, but we'll need to keep working on that. And then I touched on the role of the short services and the spine. And the best analogy for that is if you build a spine that is too rigid, the entire body just doesn't move anymore. If you don't have a spine, it doesn't bring each of the units and the power of what we have really together. So that's it for One Keywords. On that note, I'll introduce you to -- next see for the next session calls. Joe, you want to comment? Come on Joe? Joe has been a part in crime since I started. He was actually the architect of a lot of what you've seen across the 5 Workstream. And I met him for the very first time that Summit that was organized in October. And I sort of co-host in taking that role of Chief Cultural Officer, starting effectively June 1, which includes HR, which is critically important for us, but also PMO, also the cultural agenda that we have more broadly and a few other tidbits. So he will guide you through the next section. Over to you, Joe.

Okay. So thank you, Bertrand, for that. I mean, I am really privileged to join Keywords. I started working with Keywords late last year, as Bertrand mentioned, in the first summit. And we went all the way through to the Summit in terms of the shaping the 5 Workstreams that we've been talking about today. . I'm really, really excited about joining this business at this point in time. It is an evolution of the business rather than a transformation of the business. But the really critical thing, I think, is that -- what we will be looking to do is to really ignite the time that we've already got in the business in growth in there. It really is immense when you think about the time in the business and the opportunities we've got ahead. So in the culture team, what we've done is, we've put all of the elements and the cultural levers together. So all the people aspects, the talent acquisition, the talent development, some of the strategic projects, communication, engagement, some of the responsible business agenda. So it's literally about bringing all those elements together. That's what will drive the cultural change. Now as you are probably aware, like any other business, we're going to face similar challenges. So -- we know that we've got increasing competition for real talent. We know that we're facing inflationary pressures. We know that we've got movements in different locations, which are difficult to handle. So we'll really need to work on our employee value proposition, but we will do that constantly. We'll continue turning that over, continue looking at the options we've got. And in reality, we have to do that because if we don't do that, we won't attract the type of talent that we want to attract, if you think about the people we're competing with. So we really need to keep moving on this and keep moving fast. So when we talk about the talent and capabilities Workstream. One of our early priorities has been to look at the alignment of compensation and benefits with what we're trying to achieve as an organization. So we are midst that work, and we'll continue to make incremental changes through this year in 2023 as we look at opportunities to really align incentives across the organization. The second thing, and John alluded to it earlier, we don't do a great job in some instances about communicating what we actually do from a compensation and benefits perspective. So if you look at competitors, we don't really articulate as well as they do for people either in the organization or outside the organization. So we're doing quite a bit of work in specific locations where we need to do this about how do we communicate clearly our compensation benefits and make adjustments where we need to. So I'm not really going to talk much about compensation. What I'm really going to talk about is the really critical elements of acquiring and developing our talent. These are -- as I go to say, going back to growth, that's the critical thing for us. So what I'm going to do instead of we talking all the time, and I'm going to take it on a very, very quick world wind tour around the world. So we're going to talk about some of the successes that we already have. So we're going to go to Canada to talk about a very successful game development studio growth. We're going to go to Poland. Let's talk about growth in postproduction as Matt was alluding to before. And we're going to talk -- basically, we'll go to India and then come back to actually in the room here, I'll explain how that's going to work to talk about talent development and academies. So first off, we're going to go to Ottawa in Canada. So I'd like to introduce you to Jean-Sylvain Sormany, who leads our Snowed In Studios, who's the head of the studio. He was President and Co-founder of Snowed In, and Snowed In joined Keywords 4 years ago. So he's going to take us on the journey for the Snowed In Studio and the growth since acquisition. Hi Jean-Sylvain.

So when we joined in 2018, our motivation was -- 1 of the motivations we joined Keywords was to grow. We knew there would be challenge and the support of Keywords through business support and what's now One Keywords would be key to the success. At the time of the acquisition, we were 26 as of this week, I'm really proud to say that we just passed the 180 employee marks. Since joining, we also had the opportunity to work on high-profile titles in part because of Keywords. One of the title, you see on the slides for [indiscernible] was introduced through the Keywords business group. Next slide, please. Our strategy to grow was multiple fold, which are all required in order to succeed. First, it's great projects and a very day of work within them. When we are at Keywords to do, there is an unique proposition for our staff to be working on a more larger quantity of titles than typical studios in the industry. We also provide opportunities for a variety of skill sets. And we are proud to say that we have a great studio culture that puts employees first and includes no crunch policy. It makes me very happy to say that our employees seems to love our company. Our Employee Net Promoter Scores and our Best Places to Work awards that we got last years are testimony of it. The support of the group through business solutions and collaborations with other studio were also at core of our growth success. More recently we invested in talent acquisitions with a dedicated resource committed to our growth. This is linked to the specialized recruitment Keywords initiatives. We saw exciting and tremendous results from this initiative, and this is now shared with in Keywords. We have now also embedded presence with college and universities, and we are seeing a diversification of our operations by inviting other service lines to operate in our regions. A lot of those strategies that we've put in place are now replicated also within the group for all the Snowed In Studios. As you can see, since our acquisitions, we've been to accelerate our growth, and there was key moments that were triggered to our expansion phases. It is important to mention that our location is important. We do this in a region that gives us proximity to all America, while being in a city where we don't compete directly with customers for talent, even with the nearby Montreal and Toronto centers. We are now targeting 550 employees by 2027, and we are on track to reach that goal. Back to you, Joe.

Thanks, Jean-Sylvain, and I think it's a really great success story, particularly, obviously, having joined the Keywords family and just how that's gone since that point. So building on the story we've just heard from Jean-Sylvain in the games development, we can also demonstrate this type of growth in other service lines. So we're going to talk about the post-production services, but I'm really going to sort of take us off to a story in Poland. Now unfortunately you're going to have imagine that we're going to Poland because I'm telling the story here. So you're still going to be still stay in the same room, but we're not going to Poland. So I'll talk about post production. Now that team is a pre COVID team, I think, and it's pretty small. Where we are now from a Poland perspective is that we just broke 1,000 people in May this year. So this is a demonstration of just how we can scale post production services. And the team has actually gone from -- it's actually lower than that. It was 40% before that time, but it's gone to over 1,000 in 3.5 years. So what happened in Poland is that they had FQA, now it started in [ Qatar VJ ] in April 2019 was the first time that they really got the team together. But that team quickly and organically grew with strong teams across the service lines. So FQA, LQA play support. They've developed strong partnerships with publishers and the leading universities in the area. They've got a really positive E&PS, a bit like Jean-Sylvain's team they are way up there in terms of scores. It's 1 of the highest -- and the team there is focused on really supporting the global service line. So it's globalization and its utilization of their team, which means that they can support wherever the project is coming from, which gives you utilization, but also importantly, it gives options to clients when they look at how they're going to resource projects. So whilst we've mentioned Qatar VJ here, and Mathieu mentioned it as well, I think, that's not the only example. If you look at the growth story in Philippines, which is huge. If we look at the story in Mexico, it is also very, very rapid. So it's how we're growing scale in these post-production service lines. So now I'm going to give you an example of 1 of our really our sort of talent development and growth initiatives and 1 of the critical ones we're looking at as a result of the work we've done this year. So initially, we're going to head to India. And we're going to hear from [indiscernible], who not only is our Head of the India operations, Head of the Studios there. But, my vendor, you have to say, is the leading line in India in the games industry is -- he advises the government, et cetera. Now let me go to India, there are a number of things that we should be aware of. We already have a presence of 850 people in India. It is also a very, very large active participation in games. All of the global companies or many of the global companies have presence there. So they are working in that area. I think most of us would understand that India has a quality servicing 24/7 mindset that supports so many other industries. So that mindset of service and quality is well embedded in the mindset. And to me, as an outstanding footnote, India has 1 million engineers coming out of university each year. So scale-wise, that's just incredible. So I am just going to show a video from my vendor, who talks about how we're going to use the concept of our Art academy in India that's been developed and translate that to how we can use it in game development.

Hello. We are talking about talent, and we'll talk about creation of Talent and what better plays in India to do that. Today, we have more than 850 people across Art, Localization and FQA. It wasn't the case maybe about 7, 8 years back. So we were a small team but with great ambitions. So what we did was we started an academy called In-game Academy for art because that's where the big gap was. Looking at where we are today, I think we are very successful. We have created hundreds of artists. Now looking at the needs of the global games studios of Keywords, we are taking the learnings of the Art Studio and Art Academy and migrating those learnings, framework and the process that we have created to creating courses for creating game depth engineers. And India is 1 of the best places for engineers. We have more than 1 million engineers passing out every year. The only thing that we need right now is to give them the direction that we need to make sure that they become relevant to requirements of a global game studios. So we are working very closely with all the studios in U.S., Europe and Australia to make sure that we understand what the requirements are. We understand what the needs are. We understand what the benchmark of quality and understanding and skill sets are. Within that framework, within that discussion that we are having, we have arrived at a really good framework, which is based on the learnings that we have had in the past 7, 8 years, of how are we going to create and grow this game dev and engineering talent. We're all very excited. The studios and us, we're all working very closely together to give it the sense and the direction which we need to create it into a great training program. What matters is that we create something which is relevant to the studios. And for that, we are not looking at this as a P&L exercise. We are looking at this as a studio-centric initiative, which means that every studio will own their team in India. And if you're owning something, you can give you the direction and the structure that you want, the framework you want. You can create a culture that you want because that's the team, which is going to be your extended team. So even the client relationships, the sensibilities of that can be brought into that team. So we are all very excited simply because we can see the results of what is what we have started doing even now. And that's a great thing, simply because it is telling us that whatever we are doing is working. So what we are working on is a threefold -- I would say, a 3-stage strategy, short term, midterm and long term. We are looking at what we need today, what we need tomorrow and what we need day after. So this will ensure that a growth map that we are talking about of Keywords as a whole and the direction the Keywords is taking is exactly where we are moving because that is something which we are all working towards that create a talent pool, which is really going to be relevant for us today, tomorrow and day after. And we are all looking forward to it. Thank you.

Okay. So that's -- obviously that what we're looking to do is build on those academies and the India story. I'm going to bring us back into the room actually to -- if you remember, I showed it's sort of -- this is a story about India and Poland. We've got Jon Gibson in the room, who leads our Electric Square studios. Hi Jon. And Jon, you joined us in 2018. But I just wonder if you want to pick up on expanding that story and also the other talent development activities.

Absolutely. Thanks, Joe. I'll stand off this side of the stage, so that with the same height. I still think you're tall. I probably am. So the biggest problem based on our Electric Square right now is onboarding new talent, and it's an industry-wide problem. It's not unique to us. So -- we believe the solution to that is academies and boot camps. And I've been told to go over this [indiscernible]. So we believe the solution is academies and boot camps. And that's why Destination India is a great resource for us to tap into. It's going to -- and we're working with them at the moment to find the right sorts of grants for Electric Square because every studio has different needs, every studio has different requirements. So we can work with them to find the right sorts of grads, the best grads for Electric Square. So it's a no-brainer for us to be able to tap into that resource and it's proven really successful already. So we're doing something similar in Dublin, which is -- which we're calling boot camps other than academies. And the difference is, whilst India are providing structured training to graduates in Dublin, we're targeting juniors. So we're looking at people who've already got experience might be in a different sector. It might be that they're hobbyists. It might be that they're endgame does, and we're going to help them make the jump to AAA. So what we're going to provide in Dublin is structured kind of mentorship, on-site mentorship and a kind of structured career path and career progression. Now why is this important? Well, there's this massive deficit of talent in the industry, particularly engineering talent. And again, it's an industry-wide issue. This is obviously going to get worse as consoles get more powerful and development teams -- the requirements of development teams are increasing in size. So our solution to that is to onboard new talent. So that's why we believe it's really, really important. When I first entered the games industry in the '90s, my boss told me the reason he hired me was because play Dungeons and Dragons, and my CV was laid out correctly. So basically, it's because I was a massive debase you knew how to use marks at works. Now it's obviously a lot harder. You need passion, you need skills, you need natural talent and you need luck to get into the industry. So what we want to do is make it easier for those newbies for that undiscovered talent for those people to join the games industry because that's going to allow our business to grow. It's going to be great for the individuals, and it's also going to be great for the industry as a whole. So it's the socially responsible thing we can do as keywords a major player in this sector. Joe, back to you.

Thanks, Jon. Thanks. That's great. Thanks. Okay. So that's our very whistle stop tour. We've actually got lots of stories, but we've got very limited time, but we delighted to talk to you later about any of those other stories. There's so much going on within studios, as I said before, we want to surface. Now Mike and Viz are here. I don't know if there's any 1 to seen them. So I just want to shout out to the team that's ways creative. So that's 1 of our acquisitions that we made in December 2021. And just very recently, they were recognized as 1 of the top 25 customer companies to work for in London. Is that correct?

Yes.

Nice work. Okay. So congratulations on that as well. Okay. That concludes our tool. I'm going to hand back to Bertrand. Thank you.

Thank you, Jon. Thank you Joe for getting us through that. Well done on your first 2 weeks effectively. So I think you got a sense. This is really all about talent, talent, talent. That's the name of the game. That's the way we are on. As you can sense, we're also trying to take a different lens and to take a 2- to 3-year horizon so that we don't all go and fish in the same time. I think the tool was very useful to me, at least to go to a tower where you saw Snowed In and Jean-Sylvain, really building up a team from 20-ish to 180 in the span of 2.5 years. And with the ambition, I don't know if you noticed, but the ambition of getting to 500 in the coming years. And that's really what drives. And I think we have many more entrepreneurs like those and where our platform can really enable that. To me, the [indiscernible] history is a great 1 because we got the sense on myself to meet them very early. It's really a team of entrepreneurs. They were actually challenged by today 3.5 years ago to say it's never going to work in Poland. You won't be able to sell up a team. And they will look at it you that we can put a first team of 20 within by the end of the month. And effectively, the 40 that you saw in the picture and now 1,000 people effectively a few years later. So I think a remarkable story. But it's not just that, as Joe said, it's also in Manila, where we just crossed 1,100, I think it's also in Mexico, but also in conjunction with what we do in Canada in conjunction with what we do in Dublin and others and making the pool really work. And finally, I think I'm big on those academies on the boot camps, as Joe described them, because that's how do we nurture the talent for the years ahead, both juniors and seniors. So a very important topic for us in the years ahead. So on that note, we'll shift here a little bit, and I'll pass on to John to go a slight sideway on the adjacent market.

Thank you very much, Bertrand. Yes. So as Bertrand said, 1 of the areas that we have been exploring is adjacent markets where we think there's a very natural opportunity to either expand some of our current offerings or naturally take our gaming expertise into some other verticals. There are 3 areas that we wanted to cover today. The first is LiveOps, which is really more about expanding our offering to an area we think could be a really interesting growth opportunity. The second is media and entertainment space. We've talked a little bit about that today. And finally, it would not be a presentation from a technology company with at least some reference to the meters. So turning to LiveOps first. I think Bertrand mentioned this in his intro charts. The game development process has really gradually evolved over the last few years into what is often referred to as Games as a Service. Rather than developing a game, monetize it over a couple of years and then release the new version, you're really seeing an increased use of games where the content is just constantly being iterated and developed further. It's been led by mobile, but even AAA content is moving this way. And probably the best example is Fortnite where you just got constant content coming out all the time. We currently work on a large number of these games, but we tend to offer our services as more like point solutions within each of the service lines. I think Bertrand mentioned that we do a lot of the game development content work in high voltage for Fortnite. We've been testing Zinger cards in Montreal for numbers of years, but we don't really pull that together and go to market as a LiveOps offering. And clearly, we can do everything within that content production cycle. We can do the game development, the art, we can test it, we can localize it. And then once the game is up and running, we've got the capabilities with our friends from waste with really strong community management capabilities and obviously, our player support offering to really provide that full suite of services. So we think there's an opportunity to really bring that together to provide a full LiveOps end-to-end service. And to develop this further, we just launched our first LiveOps offering in the U.K. Actually, John has been spearheading that in lively. We've got other pockets within the business where we're already doing this together. And I think this is just a really good opportunity to go to market with a slightly different proposition. So expect to see a little bit more from us on that going forward. The next 1 is media and entertainment. We've talked about this for a while in most of our meetings with you guys. And really what we mean by media and entertainment is the broader TV and film space. This is a bit of a quantification of the market. It's not as big as means, but it's still a large market and it's 1 that's been growing very fast and it's predicted to almost be $150 billion by 2025. This just feels like a very natural adjacency for us. The content production process is not the same, but it is similar. And we're seeing increasing convergence at the customer level. We've also seen the media and entertainment market increasingly using game engine technology in the content production process itself. And this makes it very interesting for us. So if we move on to the next chart, this is what we see going on. So video games has always been right at the top of that technical pyramid in terms of interactive content. And we're seeing more and more of that technology bleeding into the broader media and entertainment space, particularly the use of game engine technology to develop the content. Whether that's at the previous stage, where the engines are being used to render the film or the TV shows before it gets shopped in real life, or in the example of the Mandalorian franchise series, where actually everything you see in the background of that TV show has been rendered by the game engine. It hasn't gone through the traditional filming process subsequently. And we heard from John Doyle of Riot, earlier today with their arcane franchise, which is really blending the concept of TV and games even more. But as well as technical convergence, you've also got areas like localization, where the process is essentially the same, and we're able to cross-utilize our studio infrastructure. And further down the line with the emergence of the Metaverse, whatever that ends up being, we see more and more convergence of more traditional media towards games and even more demand for digital content. So moving now to Dubbing & Subtitling. The Dubbing & Subtitling market, which is essentially what we referred to as localization in games. Again, this is a large market. It's forecast to grow to $4 billion by the end of '25, of which about $1.7 billion is spent on new content, localization of new content that actually makes it a bigger market than the market for localization in games. Led by Elodie Powers, Bertrand mentioned earlier, we've been quietly building out our capability over the last few years. We've been able to cross-utilize our recording studios that we use for games so that we can use that space to localize and do the audio content for TV and film. And it's grown quite quickly. We've now got about, I think, 6 of our locations that have been accredited for example, to work on Netflix content. And it's grown quite quickly into a business that delivered $16 million of revenue in 2021. And we think there's an opportunity to expand that further, either by leveraging the keywords footprint further, so places like Mexico, Brazil, Spain, France, but also, we're looking at some of the acquisition opportunities, a bit like we did with the games to build out that global footprint further, so we can create that one-stop shop for localization within the TV and film space as well. Moving into virtual production, said a bit about this earlier, but we really see virtual production as having the power to disrupt the traditional production model within TV and film. It uses the power of the game engines for previous virtual sets and characters and real-time animation. And again, it's a pretty large market with something like $17 billion being spent on new content creation, of which about 10%, $1.7 billion is being delivered through some form of virtual production. And it's forecast to grow pretty quickly. It's actually forecasted pretty much double over the next 7 years or so. And we clearly have a very strong capability in this space over 2,700 specialists within our create services business who are experts in using game engines in order to deliver digital content. And it's actually something we're already doing. We think quite an exciting opportunity. Clearly, we don't want to distract ourselves in games. And as we said, we're finding it hard to find the talent for games, but we think this is an area that we can naturally move into. So hopefully, we'll see a few more examples. So I'm going to stop there. I'm now going to hand back to Bertrand, who has promised in 2 minutes, he's going to explain exactly what the Metaverse is.

That's unfair. Okay. 2 minutes for the Metaverse, ready. So part of -- I mean I know there's a lot of hype in the sector, but I think we really have an opportunity here to play our role in a proper way without breaking the bank of taking too much of a massive risk. I think there is a very nice definition of the metaverse about the drum. The metaverse doesn't exist, you're talking about gaming. I think it's very true. When you talk about web 3, it's really everything that is happening from the gaming environment. From all that gaming DNA that Jon effectively brought to life. And if you go back, so we are not planning at all to play in the infrastructure side. There are actors who have much deeper pockets as well, and those are risky propositions. But we are really planning on leveraging or at least exploring to leverage the service nets we have. When you look at each of them, they just fit naturally. At the end of the day, if you want to create a space in what you need game development. You need artists that's probably a much bigger scale than we have ever even seen before to be able to do that. Hence, the point about technology earlier. You'll need to think about QA very differently. You need to think about QA, live QA based on the type of volume and dimensions you'll get there. Look at what we do in place support player engagement, it lends itself perfectly for that because you need those interactions real-time with the players, understanding where the VIPs had to guide them through the experiences and an end. In truth, we're already getting a lot of approaches and pulled quite naturally through different of those logos that you see on there, but also several brands reaching out. We have had a recent example with Prada and Ubisoft were as part of the game, we create an entire store presence in there. But it's also big retailers. There are some coming to us with 60 million SKUs, thinking about how do we get ready for that space. How do I even digitalize those assets for when we effectively happens before even knowing what the answer of what it could be afterwards. So absolutely no means do we want to pay in the architectural piece, but we want to play in the space where we -- at the very least, we ought to be thought leaders to be able to help the publishers, to be able to help non-endemic gaming brands, to navigate from that when they knock at the door. So the first step is to look at the consultancy agency type of approach. But we're seriously looking at how do we bring a few of the elements we have across those service lines to create sort of a meta studio, which includes some production and some development capabilities behind. So I think we'll be totally remise not to explain -- to at least explore them in the proper way. But again, we'll venture in that with the proper stage games. So 2 minutes for you, John. So on this, I think the recap of this section, Live Ops seems to be a very natural one. And you've seen there's already a studio that we went live on at GDC, thanks to Tony's help called Lively. But it's at the very core of what we do. And actually, we absolutely don't want to miss that boat. We are perfectly centered to be able to take that on, again, listen to Jim Ryan and how much of a move they're making to Live Ops. It's a big part of the business at the very core of our business going forward. And the rest of what you're seeing, I think what I'm proud of so far is we've been very diligent not to go too much left, too much right. The things we have seen in terms of M&A in dubbing and subtitling, things we've seen in virtual production, we already do those today. It's just that we do those at a subscale level based on customer demand, but the customer is really coming very strong at us. So we just have to think now of how much do we want to accelerate, how much do we put the focus on those. And there are plenty of things on which we have passed. When we looked at that stream at first, we had an incredibly long list of things we could do in learning, e-learning, capabilities into the military that you could do for simulation purposes, and the list is very, very long, but I think we've taken a disciplined approach to get going and to put the right food step basically in that area. So on that note, I'll pass back to you, Jon, to go through M&A, before we go on a session on closing.

Fantastic. Thank you, Bertrand. Right. We showed you this chart earlier, so I'm not going to dwell on it, but it just demonstrates how important M&A has been to the way that we built out our platform. So we wanted to spend a little bit of time today just trying to outline how we approach M&A and some of the areas that we're looking to focus on going forward. So with that in mind, I'm going to be -- this is the shortest sort of stage performance in the world because I'm going to hand straight over to Nuno Lopes. Nuno joined the business I think about 4 years ago. He leads all of our M&A origination. And I'm going to let him introduce himself, but I think he's responsible for at least 30 of our acquisitions. So arguably has an amazing impact on shaping the business into what it is. So I'll hand over to you, Nuno.

Thank you very much, Jon. When the CFO gives you kindness and generosity, you take it. And so I'm going to take the very kind words of Jon. Well, I'll start by talking to you about how we see and think of M&A at Keywords. And it's probably with this M&A vertex that has really a foundation layer that looks at why we do it, what we target, and why we target it, and lastly, what we're looking for. On top of that, we add a foundation of process or a layer of process, if you will, that goes from origination up to integration. And this results into what is the execution of our M&A program. So if I take you on a little bit of a journey with me and start by why we do it. It's for a number of reasons. All of that is somewhat interconnected. And starting by, we do it because it is a very effective tool to execute on building the Keywords platform. Now part of that exercise of building the platform is adding capability, it's adding talent, technology, relationships. And when we do that, we're accelerating growth profitably. And now as we grow larger and larger, there's also a driver for us to acquire to strengthen our market and leadership position. And ultimately, we do it because with the knowledge that we have of the landscape, we see the opportunity to deploy capital at valuations that are very attractive. Now if I move on to the second block of that foundational layer. And if we look at the service lines that we've heard today from Bertrand and Jon, and even some of the adjacencies that Jon referred to a moment ago, and even the components within the service lines, there's a few dimensions that we look at. We look at capability, we look at geography, relationships, technology. And each of them has more or less significance depending on the service line or the component, but ultimately, we look at these because we want to target expertise. We need access to talent and talent pools. We want capacity so we can serve and execute at scale. We want reach. We want to be able to reach into clients, whether existing ones or new ones, and we want efficiency, so we can deliver more, better and faster. And so as you've seen today with the acquisition of Forgotten Empires, game development and marketing, as you've heard from Bertrand and Jon, are going to be very much the focus of our execution in the coming times. And transversely, technology across the business. Now last block of that layer, what are we looking for? It's really a triumvirate of requests. The first one is culture. You've heard Bertrand today talk to you about the One Keywords Spirit. That's what we look for. We look for studios and people who can embody that One Keywords Spirit. We want that entrepreneurial mindset, combo but ambitious, sharing the same values that we do. Second one is quality. Well-established reputation studios, strong pedigree teams, people who have been exposed to high-profile titles and clients, repeat business. And lastly, performance. We want growth, we want profitability. We want teams with track record of delivery. We want people who are ambitious in their growth plans and they're really after taking the brakes off the studio. And you're all sitting there and we want Keywords to perform. Our clients expect us to deliver quality and our people expect us to preserve the culture that we've been building. And this is why we're only as strong as the next studio that joins Keywords. Now I'm sure you are all very eagerly waiting for some numbers and I don't want to disappoint. So to give you an idea and remind you that this is indicative, we have a long list, as Jon mentioned, today of about 90 opportunities that we've identified in the market. And this comes out of our own effort of origination, screening the market, the knowledge that we have of the landscape, Studios at Keywords that work with other studios and referred work to date. Forgotten Empire is a good example of that. And there are others, Wicked Witch in Australia is the same. And from there, we have about 30 opportunities at one point whom we are engaged in assessing. And this trickles down to 10 roughly opportunities that we have where we're having advanced discussions and ultimately, three opportunities at one time we're in due diligence stage. Now all of this, when it's said and done, we have delivered about 5 to 10 studios joining Keywords every year, translating into about EUR 50 million to EUR 100 million spend. And the screening process or the origination process, it's really driven by strategy, not emotion. It's built together with the service life with a very disciplined and methodical approach. Now the last block on that process lays really about the end-to-end of it. Starts at origination and ends at integration. And it starts at origination with very close relationship with the targets. We forge trust-based relationships. We expose them very early to people who have joined Keywords before, so they know what they're going or walking into. It's about the execution, a team that has been together for a long time, a very repeatable process, very well-established discipline, where we even start integration or thinking about that. And ends at integration with dedicated resource to onboard the people that come and join Keywords, so we can carefully strike this balance about preserving the entrepreneurial DNA of the studios that come and join Keywords, while allowing the Keywords spine, that you've heard Bertrand mentioned before, to absorb those support function, so we can set foundations to scale the studios up. So it's really about a Keywords experience for the people that join and it's this methodical and disciplined approach that has allowed us to have its very high LOI to completion ratio. And so I'll probably end here and leave it to Jon. Thank you, everyone.

He says it's not an emotional process, but we do high five a bit when we manage to execute on the transactions. And actually, we've mentioned it a couple of times, but really delighted to announce our latest acquisition of Forgotten Empires this morning. So really high-quality studio, game development studio, about 70 engineers. And they specialize in real-time strategy games. They've also got some really interesting Live Ops experience. So just in case they're listening, I wanted to send out a big welcome to Ryan Bert and the team and welcome to the Keywords family. So moving on. We put this slide up before. As Nuno mentioned, we are focusing on game development. You've seen a lot of activity there. But we're also looking to build out our marketing capabilities. And I think Bertrand stole my line, but I genuinely think that this marketing could be a mini Keywords. It's got the same sort of service line verticals within there. So I think it's a really interesting opportunity to build that out. So I'm going to hand over to Tony who, as Bertrand said, recently joined to lead our Engage service line. And Tony is going to spend a little bit of time talking about what his within-a-week plan is.

Thanks very much, Jon. I think we're getting tight on time. Now the good news is, there's a new boy with only 5 weeks in, I haven't got a whole lot to say. So hopefully, I can make up a little bit of time. And that's obviously the practical joke, the service line for the new boy comes at the end, you've got no time. So yes, 5 weeks in, not very long at all. But it feels like home to me, and I'm delighted I joined after really quite a lengthy time at WPP. And the reason I'm so excited is not just the opportunity of the whole Keywords, which I saw, but particularly the opportunity we have within the Engage service line. The chart you saw before, we've obviously combined marketing services with player support and research into the combined Engage unit. Why? Because it kind of makes sense. I mean, we've touched on that, you would want them sitting together in the way that we put them together. And there are obvious synergies, as both Jon and Bertrand mentioned. But I think what excites me is the combination of these units or disciplines allows us to give a much more holistic marketing offer to our clients. And I think that's a holistic marketing offer that they need. And I think it's one we're very well placed to deliver. So I'm just going to make 3 observations. We haven't really determined exactly how Engage works, but 3 quick observations in 5 weeks. We've got amazing studios and brands. We've got incredibly talented people, a lot of the brands we know, they're world-class brands. And that's a fantastic starting point. Great leaders and fantastic people, over 2,000 people around the world. I think most critically, though, we have deep vertical gaming expertise, and I think that is critical as we move forward. The quality of the work is really strong. I've been doing this for a long time, and I'm really impressed with the quality of work I see. You've seen some of it, you'll see some more. Spoiler alert, video at the end. The work is great. And you'll really see the creative quality of the thinking and the delivery. The third point I'll make is, whilst being highly entrepreneurial, the studio leaders are also highly collaborative. They want to work with each other to get the expertise which each brings. And I think what Engage will do is really kind of make that collaboration work easier. So I'm really excited about that. We move on and tell where we're looking. If you kind of -- this chart shows the end-to-end mark-ons development cycle, if you like. How do you go from kind of go-to-market strategy through to always-on brand activity. And clearly, we are very well represented in certain areas. We've got huge content development, origination, delivery skills. And I think we've got great pockets in other areas. We've got strong PR, we've got community management. I think it's very interesting, Waste has been referenced before. What we're doing with Waste is integrating that team with player support and they're producing some really interesting work. And I think we want to build on that. So we've got pockets of other work, really strong content. I think [indiscernible] Bertrand said, it's all about content. So I think in the area that's been pretty important. We've got a lot of talent, but we clearly need to build in these other areas, and we've highlighted some of those in blue. And to Nuno's point, what we're going to do is obviously look at those companies that fit our overall operational and cultural requirements, but obviously play specifically in these areas that we're short in, but also they must have games expertise. I think that's our DNA, that's what differentiates us from the competition, and that's where we should go hunting. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time going through all of these. We've also covered some opportunities that Metaverse with throw. Clearly, we're interested. Live Ops, we've talked about virtual production. Clearly, those are areas we will be interested in. I think just a couple of others. I think in terms of influence and marketing, that's really important for our clients. So we are looking for players there. I think the key area there, they need to be players that are scalable. Some of them are, we need once that are scalable. Also, they need to have a platform that can help us automate and also provide live dashboard feedback to how those assets are performing. So we're definitely looking in that area. Data and analytics, it's huge. It's a huge area. I think the opportunity for us is to find specialists who are rooted in games who can help us with the initial primary research through to post-campaign analytics. So we'll look at that. So quick speed stop for me, trying to make up time and new. What I would say, I agree, mini Keywords, Engage, I think, the opportunity to give clients an end-to-end marketing solution is huge. I think we can do it better than some of the traditional marketing groups, and I know a bit about some of those. So really looking forward to it. I can't wait for week 6.