ME Group International plc (MEGP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the ME Group International plc Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, we would like to submit the following poll. And as usual, if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I'd now like to hand you over to Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Vladimir Crasneanscki. Vlad, good morning, sir.

Thank you very much. Good morning, and welcome to the ME Group 2026 Interim Results Presentation. My name is Vladimir Crasneanscki. I'm Deputy CEO. Unfortunately, Stephane Gibon is unable to attend. I'll start with an overview of the first half of our 2026 financial year. I'll then provide a brief reminder of our business, our key activities today and the continued evolution of our business mix. I'll then talk about the financial performance and our key geographic regions, followed by an update on our business areas. And to conclude with, we'll look at the outlook for FY '26. So turning to a summary of the first half of the year. I'd like to start with a recap on our trading update issued at the start of June. As we said then, the Group's performance in the first 5 months of the year was as expected. However, during April, we saw a softening of revenue primarily within our photobooth business. We believe this is largely due to lower consumer sentiment and travel due to the conflict in the Middle East. In addition, the Board has decided to focus on operational revenue, which is recurring as opposed to equipment sales, which resulted in lower revenue from equipment sales, particularly in Continental Europe than in the first half of 2025. I'm pleased to say that we have seen a return to more normalized trading with trading in May, which was 11% above May 2025, although this has remained below our initial budget set at the start of the financial year. We are on track to meet revised profit before tax expectations for the year of between GBP 69 million and GBP 74 million. In terms of highlights, I'm pleased to report that we have continued to make strategic progress during the half. Vending revenue grew, driven by a more than 16% increase in revenue from Wash.ME operations. Excluding the April figure, this would have been above 20%. EBITDA increased by 7.1%, supported by strong laundry growth, and we installed nearly 500 laundry machines in H1 and are on track to install a total of 1,300 net laundry machines in the year as a whole. We secured our largest ever single client deal with ASDA in the U.K., and we have the ambition to roll out up to 700 laundry machines on ASDA sites. We also have an exciting trial underway with Aldi in Austria, the first trial we've ever secured with Aldi. And we are pleased to renew multiyear contracts with state transport operators in France, which together represent more than GBP 9 million worth of revenue. Shareholder returns remain a key focus for the Board. And since the launch of our share buyback program in March, we have acquired shares to the value of GBP 4.5 million. And the interim dividend will return GBP 13.5 million to shareholders. I will now provide a brief overview of ME Group and the evolution of our operations. ME Group is a leader in the automated service equipment space aimed primarily at the consumer sector. We operate more than 49,000 machines across 16 countries, spanning 3 key regions: Continental Europe, which is our largest region, followed by the U.K. and Republic of Ireland and then Asia Pacific. We have long-standing and well-established key partnerships with high footfall site owners. As you can see on the right slide -- right of the slide. This includes well-known brands in addition to brands already mentioned, such as Morrisons, MFG, Transport for London, Shell and Tesco and with Carrefour and Intermarché in France. The Group has 2 core activities, photobooth and laundry operations. While historically best known for photobooth, laundry has been a key and growing part of the business in recent years, supporting diversification of our machine estate. Our ancillary activities include printing kiosks, children's rides, photocopying services and food service equipment alongside our newest product, which is the dog wash. These activities are often co-located with our core activities, leveraging existing site owner relationships and benefiting from maintenance by our dedicated field engineers. A key point here to note is that all of our machines are serviced by the same engineers, which gives us tremendous operational efficiency. We will talk more about these activities in more detail later in the presentation. We have a significant competitive advantage across our key markets with a dominant market position and high barriers to entry. Innovation remains at the heart of the business and our 100-plus strong in-house R&D team innovates to diversify our machine estate to meet the needs of consumers today. We have a dedicated focus on return on capital, and we aim for a typical payback period of approximately 18 months for laundry machines and photos. Our success is underpinned by the key strengths of the business and our operational leverage. As a reminder, here are our key components of our growth strategy as we continue to reinvest cash generated to drive growth and enhance shareholder returns. On this slide, you can see the different types of products that sit across our core ancillary activities. And onto the evolution of the business mix, we are on a journey to diversify our operations and business mix, and this slide illustrates the changing shape of our business from a revenue contribution perspective and the significant progress made in laundry in recent years. Laundry now represents almost 40% of Group total vending revenue compared with 25%, 5 years ago. This slide tells a similar story. Laundry is our fastest-growing business area in terms of machine installation spending revenue and for the first time, EBITDA contribution. Wash.ME now accounts for almost half of Group EBITDA compared to 1/3 over just around 5 years ago. Moving on to the first half financial performance. Our laundry operations expansion supported the first half growth. Total revenue was marginally up year-on-year, but at constant currency was slightly down due to an FX impact. As previously mentioned, total revenue was impacted by a softening in activity in April and fewer machine sales. Group EBITDA increased by 7.1% and was up 4.5% at constant currency, driven by a 21% increase in laundry EBITDA. This resulted in an improved EBITDA margin from 34.7% to -- sorry, to 36.9%. Reported profit before tax declined by 3.8% and was down 6.2% at constant currency. This reflected slower-than-anticipated revenue growth, a change in revenue mix to focus on recurring vending revenue with a 14.2% less revenue from the sale of equipment, which is higher margin, but a nonrecurring revenue stream. a higher depreciation charge of GBP 23.5 million and a one-off prior year gain of GBP 1.6 million related to the sale of an office building in H1 2025. This business is cash generative with GBP 38.7 million of cash generated from operations in the first half with the movement driven by working capital. Inventory increased by GBP 8.3 million, reflecting an increase in the demand for machines, consumables and an increased inventory as new machines are deployed. The cash is used to fund our machine maintenance program and growth CapEx. As planned, CapEx rose by nearly 18%, which reflects our strategy to grow our vending estate, and we've invested nearly GBP 15 million in laundry expansion and just over GBP 8 million in photo upgrades. Cash and cash equivalents have been restated for the first half of 2025, showing a reduction of just over GBP 8 million due to an adjustment in the value of cash held in our vending machines as at April '25. The Group remains well capitalized with a strong balance sheet and financial position. Diluted earnings per share was 3.9% lower at 6.48p per share, reflecting the factors talked about above. The Board remains committed to shareholder returns and has declared an interim dividend of 3.6p per share compared with 3.85p last year. The company continues to seek to pay annual dividends in excess of 55% of annual profits after tax, subject to market conditions and business requirements. To date, the company has repurchased shares to the value of GBP 2.7 million as part of the up to GBP 18 million share buyback program launched in March with a further GBP 1.8 million purchased post the half year-end. Once again, laundry was the key revenue driver, contributing GBP 7.7 million more than the first half of 2025 and revenue from photobooth operations was GBP 5 million lower, which reflected softer April trading and the changes to photo ID regulations in Germany, which came into force in May 2025. In total, Group revenue was 0.3% higher than the prior year at constant currency declined by 1.4%. Looking at profit before tax, the performance reflected lower revenue growth than anticipated in the first half. The first half of 2025 benefited from the sale of an office building amounting to a GBP 1.6 million gain, which was not repeated in 2026 and currency exchange rates resulted in a reduction in the contribution to the Group's profits compared to 2025. As expected, amortization and depreciation were GBP 3.4 million higher, which reflected the increase in the number of vending units in operation compared to last year. Lower-than-expected growth did not cover this increase. As a result, profit before tax reduced by 3.8% and by 6.2% at constant currency. Cash generated from operations amounted to GBP 38.7 million, which continues to reflect the highly cash-generative nature of the Group's operations. As mentioned on the previous slide, CapEx rose mainly due to an ongoing investment in laundry operations as well as updates to our photobooth and kiosk estate. Taxation in the period was GBP 5.1 million compared to GBP 10.9 million in the prior year -- in the prior period, largely due to a GBP 4 million tax refund in the U.K. Dividends paid in the period in respect of 2025 amounted to GBP 14.5 million. As a result, the closing net cash position at the 30th of April 26 was GBP 7.5 million. As previously mentioned, 2025 figures for gross cash, net cash and cash generated from operations have been restated due to a reclassification of cash in transit. I will now talk about the performance across 3 core geographies. Starting with Continental Europe, the Group's largest region, where more than half of the Group's total vending estate is located. This region accounts for more than 67% of Group's total revenue and approximately half of the Group's EBITDA. Vending revenue grew by 4.5% and 0.2% at constant currency. As mentioned earlier, the vending performance was impacted by softer trading in April, particularly in photobooths. The performance was driven by growth in laundry revenue with Wash.ME revenue up by more than 12% into the same period in 2025 and nearly 8% at constant currency. 739 net new laundry machines were installed in Continental Europe in the last 12 months, and laundry now accounts for more than 34% of vending revenue in the region. Our photobooth remain the largest contributor to revenue and more than 800 next-generation machines were installed in France in the period and Photo.ME revenue grew only marginally and was down 4.1% at constant currency. This reflected the previously mentioned slowdown in trading in April and also the year-on-year performance in Germany following regulatory changes introduced in May 2025. Trading in Germany has stabilized. Notably, and this is a very key point, when you remove German photobooth operations in the region, Photo.ME revenue, vending grew by 5%, demonstrating the stability in this market outside of Germany. Due to the challenges mentioned, operating profit reduced 4.9% and 8.5% at constant currency. We were pleased to renew 2 important partnerships with state-owned transport operators in France, which were a 5-year contract with SNCF and a 7-year contract with RATP. Together, these represent GBP 9 million of revenue for the Group. U.K. and Ireland revenue increased by nearly 9% and 23% at constant currency, contributing 18.4% of total Group revenue. Again, this was driven by a strong laundry performance with vending revenue from Wash.ME up nearly 1/4 at GBP 32.2 million, and this performance reflects the strength of our Wash.ME operations and continued expansion. We installed almost 400 net new laundry machines in the first half, including at Shell and Morrisons sites. The performance of photobooth continued to be impacted by the winding down of a large low-margin U.K. contract, which finished in April '25, although the nature of this contract meant it had a limited impact on profitability. The performance of our higher-margin laundry business helped to deliver a 2% increase in operating profit in the region, which contributed more than 21% of total Group EBITDA. Total revenue in Asia Pacific declined by 13.2% due to a combination of factors. Firstly, a 9.1% decline in the value of the Japanese yen. At constant currency, total revenue declined by 5.8%. Secondly, there are 268 fewer machines in operation in the region compared with the prior year period. Additionally, demand for photobooth services was lower than in the first half of 2025. In the longer term, we expect this market to be smaller due to external factors. As a result, operating profit reduced by 10.3% and by 2.6% at constant currency. Now I will turn to the business review, starting with our core activities. While the business mix continues to evolve significantly, photobooth operations still account for 2/3 of our machines, while vending revenue declined by 6.2% and by 6.8% at constant currency, the performance can be largely attributed to the previously mentioned challenges in Germany. As a result of these factors, average revenue per machine was lower at GBP 2,549 for the half year. In addition, fewer photobooth machines and services were sold compared with the first half of 2025, which resulted in revenue being 6.4% lower period-on-period. We continue to invest in our photobooth operations with CapEx of GBP 8.2 million, predominantly focused on the rollout of next-generation photobooth in France, which requires less maintenance and delivers higher turnover. As a result of the above, EBITDA was 8% lower, which delivered an EBITDA margin of 34.4%. At constant currency, EBITDA was down 9.5%. We plan to install approximately 200 next-generation machines per month in the second half. Laundry remains our fastest-growing and highest margin business area. Vending revenue increased by more than 16%, and the average revenue per machine improved by more than 8%. This reflects the larger mix of machines being installed in key account locations. Vending revenue increased by -- sorry, we continue to invest in expansion with CapEx up 3.5% and almost 500 machines added to our laundry machine estate. This led to total laundry EBITDA growth of 21%, delivering an EBITDA margin of 51.2%. We are delighted to secure a new partnership with ASDA in the U.K. This is our largest ever single client deal, giving us access to ASDA's excellent high footfall sites across their supermarket and petrol estate. We installed our first laundry machine on site in Birkenhead in June. And in the longer term, we ambition to install up to 700 laundry machines with ASDA. Since the launch of our new Wash.ME App available primarily in France at the moment, but will come to the rest of the country by the end of the year, there will be more than 100,000 downloads as consumers look to benefit from real-time laundry push notification, payment via the app, information on local services and the loyalty scheme, enabling users to access discounts. We plan to roll the app out into additional geographic markets during the second half. Laundry expansion remains a key focus and is second half weighted. As a whole for the financial year, we have ambitions to roll out more than 1,300 laundry machines. On the next couple of slides, I will talk about our ancillary activities. Print.ME operations consist of high-quality digital printing services, mainly located in France. Total revenue declined 4.9%, largely due to the previously mentioned reduction in the sale of machines, while average revenue per machine during the year increased 1.5% to GBP 2,389. For the same reason, EBITDA was slightly lower at GBP 1.9 million, and the business area delivered a 32.8% EBITDA margin. During the half, we installed a further 240 machines and have continued to roll out an upgrade program to install new Speedlab printing kiosks in France. The new Speedlab kiosk offers enhanced functionality, improved experience and drive stronger revenue per machine. The increase in CapEx reflected the ongoing investment program. Other vending operations consist of profitable ancillary activities, including food service, vending equipment, children's rides and photocopier services. There are almost 6,500 machines in operation at the end of the first half, around 90 fewer machines compared with the prior year. The revenue performance and EBITDA reduction was due to a GBP 1.5 million reduction in the sale of machines. EBITDA margin was 57.9%, up from 53.8% in H1 2026 (sic) [ 2025 ]. Vending revenue was only down GBP 0.4 million or 7.7%. However, at constant currency, it was only down 3.8% due to a high proportion of machines located in Asia, where FX dynamics are more favorable. We launched a new machine and service in the period, a dog wash machine, and these machines, which leverage our rapidly growing presence in the laundry services market are easily installed alongside the laundry services and enable dog wash owners to wash their dogs outside of the home. So far, we have installed 200 machines in France and the U.K. In the U.K., the first machine is in Newquay, if anyone wants to go and visit, and it's proving popular with customers. Moving to the outlook for the full year. We are pleased with the continued positive progress and expansion of our laundry business. And by the financial year-end, we plan to have installed 1,300 net Wash.ME machines. As mentioned earlier, while trading from November to March was in line with our expectations, trading in April was more challenging, particularly for our photobooth businesses. Encouragingly, trading patterns in May were more normalized. In May, total revenue was 11.1% higher than in May 2025 and with Wash.ME up almost 26% and Photo.ME up just under 2%, and this trend has continued. As a result, the Group is on track to meet the Board's revised 2026 full year expectations and deliver profit before tax of between GBP 69 million and GBP 74 million. Our focus on innovation and diversification will see the new Wash.ME App rolled out to all major countries where we operate laundry machines. Our business is in a strong financial position, and we remain confident in the long-term growth strategy. Thank you very much for listening. We will now take questions.

Perfect. Vlad. That's great. If I may just jump back in. [Operator Instructions] Just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted already, just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can all be accessed via your investor dashboard. Vlad, as you can see there, we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation this morning, and thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. But Vlad, at this point, if I may just hand over to you to address those where appropriate, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

Great. Thank you very much. So the first question is, do you have any data or estimate on how Wash.ME customers overlap with traditional laundromat users? More broadly, is Wash.ME primarily taking share from existing laundromats, expanding the market or serving a different customer use case? How does management size the remaining addressable market across existing geographies? So great question. When we initially launched the Wash.ME launderettes, we -- back in 2011, 2012, we considered this product was really going to be suitable for campgrounds. But we saw that the demand was significantly larger than that. And in fact, many consumers going to the campgrounds even if they weren't staying there to use the machine. So as we test it and as we install more and more machines, we discovered that the -- our users of the machines are much broader than just ex-laundrette users. So to give you a bit more insight on that, last year in the U.K., we ran a survey on all of our laundry machines, and we found that only 40% of our customers were ex-laundrette users. 60% were people who are not using laundrettes prior to using our machines. So whilst we do capture a portion of the launderette market, we also serve many customers who weren't using laundrette before. And that's fundamentally because our product offers things that laundrettes can't. Firstly, many laundrettes don't have that 20-kilogram drum with the large capacity. Also, many laundrettes don't allow you to put your laundry in there and then leave and go shopping. With our machines, when the consumers use the machine, the machine locks. And we send them a text message 5 minutes before their laundry is about to be done, which allows them to go and shop with confidence waiting for their laundry to be done, which is obviously a benefit for our consumers, but also a benefit for our site partners. Now in regards to the sizing of the remaining addressable markets across existing geographies, -- we're looking to replicate what we've done in Ireland, where we have over 500 units for roughly 5 million people, a ratio of 1 to 10,000 across the markets that we operate in today. And as a reminder, we operate across 16 different laundry markets. We believe that we have the scale to install significantly more machines than we have today. We set the target in the market to have 20,000 machines in operation by 2035. We're on track to do so. We currently have 8,000. So we are at the beginning of this journey rather than at the end. We describe ourselves that we are at the bottom of the slope at the mountain rather than near the top. So the next question is, what is holding back faster expansion in Germany? Is the constraint mainly commercial partnerships, regulation, permitting, unit economics, operational capacity, consumer behavior or a deliberate capital allocation choice? And over the medium term, do you see Germany as a capable of reaching a scale comparable to France? Excellent question. We absolutely do see it as a key market for us and an area of really exciting growth for laundry. They've currently got just shy of, I believe, 350 machines in operation. And what they are following is a very, very typical pattern and pathway. It's something that I experienced myself when I came to the U.K. 4 years ago to help run ME Group U.K. The first -- we always say in ME Group, the first 1,000 machines in the country are always the most difficult ones because when you talk to retailers, there's still a little bit of confusion over what these machines do and if people are actually willing to wash dirty laundry in their car park because they're not so used to the machine. I'm talking about site partners here. And so the first 1,000 are always the most challenging because you have to convince the site partner that, yes, this is a product in demand. Yes, this is a product that will work for them and will bring them real tangible additional profit as well as additional footfall. And we experienced this in the U.K. ourselves. Once we have installed the first 1,000, it all became much easier from there. What is encouraging in Germany is that we have many accounts in Germany, but we've already had successful rollouts within other countries. So for example, we have a strong rollout program with Aldi in Austria, and that's really helping to facilitate conversations in Germany. And additionally, there's some crossover with petrol retailers in Germany with -- there are many companies operating in Germany that are also operating in the Netherlands, for example. So there's some good crossovers. We really believe that Germany rightfully should be the largest laundry market we have in Continental Europe. The results on the machines are strong. It's the pace of rollout that we're really focusing on at the moment. And the ways that we increase that are more key account deals, faster installations using different installation partners, larger commercial teams, more commercial focus. And these are all things that we've been doing over the last 12 months. So are we on track to achieve 1,300 laundry installations for the current financial year? What is the long-term ambition? And how many washing units could the company realistically install in the long term? Well, I've answered the second half of that question a bit earlier. In terms of installing 1,300 laundry installations for the current financial year, we've installed 500 in the first half. Remember, we are second half weighted in regards to installations normally anyway because lots of retailers don't want us to install machines on their sites in December as there are some work that you have to do to install the laundrettes. And therefore, December being the golden month, they prefer us to install outside of December. So we get an additional month in essence in the second half of the year. And additionally, this year, for those of you who lived in Western Europe and the U.K., you'll remember that January and February were very cold and this was particularly true across Continental Europe. When the weather is very cold, it takes longer for concrete to set, which means the concrete pads take longer to be ready to have the machine installed on top of it. So we did have some challenges around January, especially in those freezing periods in France and Germany, but we feel that we're on track to deliver 1,300 units this year, especially with ASDA that is now really grabbing pace in the last year's installations. Can you please speak about pricing? What is the -- what is the company policy on rising prices for its vending machines? And when can we expect an increase in prices across the 50,000 machines in operation? Well, as many of you will know, we operate quite a decentralized management structure in ME Group where we look to allow local country managers to determine pricing across their countries. And this is just so we can be really flexible for the demand of the market and reflecting inflation you might see in specific geographies. We have not increased prices significantly over the last 2 or 3 years. We do have the ability to significantly increase pricing, especially in the photobooth division, where customers typically come back to the machines once every 5 or 10 years. So often, they don't remember the last price they paid on the machine and that sale -- that very infrequent sales cycle is useful. We do have the ability to increase prices. And obviously, we'll be informing the market when we do so moving forward. But currently, there are no concrete plans to do so. So why you cut the dividend when your financial position is relatively strong? Well, the dividend is determined by our long-term policy, which is we pay 55% of our profits as a dividend. And obviously, as the profit is a little bit less than last year, mainly due to that GBP 1.6 million sale of a building last year, the dividend naturally decreases in line with that earnings decrease. We have a question. Thanks for doing this. It means a lot to a private investor like me. My pleasure. Is the situation in Germany likely to change to allow booth to be used for official documentation? So great question. In Germany, our photobooth can still be used for official documentation for everything apart from the passport where the passport has been captured by the live enrollment system in Germany, which I don't mind saying is more expensive and has caused problems. I refer you to look at some articles in Bild around the problems they've had with their official system. That situation has stabilized. So we saw the drop in volumes, but it happened late July, August last year, and it's been stable since then. We are currently in the process of getting 2 different machines certified by the German regulators. I don't mind saying that we have experienced delays in that, which is disappointing from a regulatory perspective, but we're anticipating certification in the near future will allow us to reenter the passport market, which should be positive for us. Your updated guidance bakes in a softer market of April, which has recovered. So to what degree of conservatism is built in for the full year as this current trading normalizes, it would be hard not to top your guidance range? So great question. And obviously, when providing guidance in the middle of April, it's quite hard to estimate for the rest of the financial year. We have been conservative with the estimate we put out for our guidance for the end of the year. And as mentioned in the presentation earlier, whilst May's trading was significantly better than last year, so 11% better than last year, it actually still does not meet our budget that we estimated at the start of the year that was relating to the guidance that we put out into the market. So you can see that there is a bit of a tail on this headwind in regards to the photobooth business. And we've been very conservative with our guidance for the full year. And whilst we're seeing trading is improving, we're still worse than what we had budgeted for at the start of the financial year, but within the tolerances that we put for our revised guidance. So we feel confident on delivering on our revised guidance. And if there are any positive surprises, of course, we'll be informing the market if there are any. Aldi, is it a country-by-country possible rollout? Well, look, we are -- we just finished our trial with them. So that's 25 laundries installed in Aldi, which is a great trial. Obviously, we will be pushing the benefits of that trial to the wider Aldi Group and discussing that on a country-by-country level, and it represents a really good opportunity for the group. So given the strong fundamentals of ME Group, but relatively small market cap, is there a strategy to try and attract broker sell-side research coverage to expand ownership? Yes, of course, we are trying to get more coverage of the story -- of the ME Group story in the market. We still think we represent a really attractive opportunity to investors, especially at these current prices. With our dividend alone, there's a fantastic yield for investors. This is a company with no debt, strong growth opportunities, as I said, stable dividend. So we anticipate that there's a really good story to cover with ME Group, and we certainly think there's a lot of room for growth. Can you please confirm if there were any changes to commercial terms on your major contract renewals in H1? Of course, every contract is different. And actually, what's really positive about the 2 renewals were we were able to insert new machines into those contracts. So for example, those contracts were signed a while ago before we had our updated printing kiosk, for example, before we had the AI photobooth, before we had the dog wash, before we had some of the key cutting machines. So we're able to install more machines with those 2 key accounts. And there were no significant changes to the commission rate as far as I understand on those 2 key accounts. But I'm also unable to divulge exactly what commercial terms on those. I'm sure you can understand. So can you discuss the slowdown in trading in April in more detail? Yes, absolutely. So we started to identify a decrease in revenues towards the end of March, very end of March. And of course, we run our months from the 21st to the 21st. So this was technically in our April month basically. And what we saw was a drop in consumer demand, primarily for our photobooth product, especially concerning Continental Europe. Now I've always said that I've said on these calls before, ME Group is resilient to macroeconomic downturns, but we are exposed to travel. And of course, as consumers decided to either delay travel or go on domestic holidays, we experienced a slowdown in the volume of passport customers essentially. And in fact, you can see some of this mirrored in other companies like On the Beach or, for example, WH Smith, which also suffered in April. We also discussed with our partners who are the authorities for passports. So for example, in the U.K., that's HMPO, His Majesty's Passport office and in France, it's ANTS, and they confirmed to us that their April passport figures were lower than what they had expected and driven by consumers canceling travel or putting it off. And in fact, a lot of that was caused by aviation companies announcing they were going to cancel flights in the summer. And what ANTS and HMPO told us was that consumers were very worried that they would book flights in a hotel, the flights to be canceled and they'll be left in the hotel. So -- that did happen in April, obviously, significantly better in May. But it's a very rapidly changing situation, as I'm sure all of our attendees in this presentation have seen over the last 7 days. So we've been very conservative in our year-end figures, and we will continue to monitor the situation as we move forwards. How much surprise was the decline in April trading? Is there much precedent for this type of decline variability in trading within recent history of the business? Do you monitor trading daily, weekly, etc.? We monitor trading daily. All of our machines are connected by telemetry. But because there's a cash element in the machine, there's always a cutoff. So it's an estimate rather than a precise figure. We track it daily, and then we consolidate all of the figures at the end of the month for the month prior. Is there a precedent? Yes, absolutely, and that was COVID. And I think COVID is actually a very, very useful precedent for this because in COVID, obviously, we saw volumes decline significantly with the decrease in travel. But as you can see, those customers did not disappear. They came back once COVID was over, people started to travel again. And this is why we were not overly concerned by the April results because this is an absolutely temporary headwind. These customers will get their passports renewed, will travel again. It's just a matter of when and not if. So I think it's quite similar to the situation we encountered in COVID. So I think I've answered some of the questions on April. I've got another question here over Germany, but I think we've answered that. I'll answer it anyway. Will Germany be an ongoing headwind to the Group's photobooth business and how much of the annualized photobooth revenues from Germany at its new base level? So in Germany, we saw the decrease immediately when it happened in end of July, August, and that's stabilized. So that does not move from then until now. So that will annualize out in this July and August. And hopefully, as we get our booth certified, we'll be able to increase that revenue over time as well. In the dog wash, how do the CapEx and revenue unit dynamics vary from the main laundry machines? Well, as it's still under trial, I can't divulge exactly what the unit economics are, but I'd be happy to delve more into it once we have a basis of understanding of those machines. Remember, we're still very much in a trial period. The way to think about it is more than photobooth less than laundry, but the machines are very cheap for us to produce. So you're looking at roughly the same price we pay for photobooth, which is really encouraging because the revenues are stronger than photobooth. Of course, this is -- we're still under 6 months old for the oldest machine in the field today. So we're still very much in a trial period, but the signs are very encouraging. And what's so positive for us is that it is a very easy machine to cross-sell because the utilities can be connected to our laundry machines, it means that the installation costs are really limited. And of course, we have 8,000 -- more than 8,000 laundries already in the field. So that offers a really good basis to go and cross-sell that product to our existing site partners and add a new service to their sites. Is the decline in dividend just a reflection of the temporary lower profit? Yes, absolutely. I've already explained that 55% of our profit is our dividend policy. That has not changed. Have you looked into my suggestion of running food vending machines at gyms? If so, are you planning to sample this market segment? I know we've had a question in the past. I still think it's a very good idea. But food vending is not one of our areas of expertise. And if you think about ME Group more widely, very rarely do we vend a product. We vend a service. We prefer to vend services, firstly, because it's higher margin. But secondly, because you also don't have the struggles with stocking and stocking machines. As far as we can see it, the gym vending machine market is relatively saturated, and it's really outside our area of expertise. We prefer to vend services. And certainly, you can probably see in the last couple of years, we've really shifted focus away from the food division much more into our bread and butter higher-margin businesses such as the laundry division. So when will the Wash.ME App roll out in the U.K.? We are pushing very hard to do so at the moment. With the Wash.ME App, we do have to make a minor upgrade to the hardware of the machine so it can communicate with the app. So we've been going through that upgrade program now in the U.K. We are absolutely determined to have this app launch in all of our geographies by the end of the calendar year. In the U.K., we're targeting before the end of the financial year, which is end of October. So it's a real priority for us. We see great take-up in France with a real enthusiasm by our site partners for this. So we will -- we are pushing this as quickly as possible in other geographies. And yes, hopefully in the U.K. by the end of this financial year. So photobooth demand will continue shrinking as new processes and better mobile telephony replace their need. Has a full decommissioning being factored into finances or could that create later? Or are the other photo uses still encouraging demand? So I love this question, and it's a key question. If you go back to the slides, and I won't ask them to put it up now, but you can see the photobooth revenues increased over the last 5 years significantly. And I think this is a really key point. I've been doing the IR for this company for a couple of years now. In fact, I remember in 2017, when the selfie system was launched in the U.K., which allowed consumers to do their passport photos on their phone. Fund managers predicted that the photobooth business will go to 0 in the next 2 years. They've been predicting that for 17 years. I think the key point here is we do have a regulatory moat. We, in many markets, communicate the photos directly to the regulator. So for example, in France, if you take photo, we send that photo direct to the regulator as well as printing out the photo for the consumer at the booth, and we give the consumer a code. This allows the consumer when they do their passport application, to put in their code and that photo is retrieved from secure server by the regulator. That means that the photo is in a closed loop system, which absolutely guarantees its validity and accuracy. One of the biggest risks in identity today is a risk called the morphing risk, which people can subtly manipulate the photo, especially using AI to allow more than one person to use a passport. Our system totally deletes that risk and avoids it. And it's why you see the incredible reticence across Europe to change passport regulations because fundamentally, if you change it to something like a selfie system, you got a less secure system and a more expensive one as well. So one of the key areas of investor misunderstanding is that the photobooth business is actually very, very stable from a regulatory perspective and has a regulatory moat. And we're very honest with investors. We always say the photobooth business is a cash cow, and we utilize those funds to reinvest in our other fast, high-profit business, which is the laundry business. We expect the photobooth division to remain relatively stable over the next 10 to 15 years. But obviously, in 10 years' time, this company will look very, very different. And obviously, we will be a full laundry company at that point. The only other thing I'd say on that is I'll just recall a really important thing that I said in the presentation, and this is key. If you take out Germany from Continental Europe, photobooth revenue increased by 5%. I think that demonstrates again the stability of our business and Continental Europe is the most important market for our photobooth division. Would water shortage restrictions be a threat to your operations? Great question. At the moment, absolutely not. Those restrictions tend to be more on private individuals rather than businesses. And obviously, we tap into the water supply for those businesses. If they turn off the water at a Morrisons supermarket or an ASDA or an Intermarché and Carrefour, then of course, it will be impacted. But I would imagine that things would have to get significantly worse for that to be a reality. And I imagine that businesses will be the sort of last resort for any water restrictions, but we certainly haven't heard of anything like that across Europe, and I don't see it as a significant risk. Can you explain the working capital movement? How much is timing expected to reverse in H2 and how much is due to growth? Well, it's a bit of both. So we always are a little bit worse off in terms of cash position at the end of H1 just because we just paid the dividend, which is true this year. And we always recoup in H2. So H2 is much more treasury-positive. We have had additional costs this year that have impacted our cash position that we didn't have last year. So for example, we've had the elevated share buyback program. We've also invested more into machines. Now it's, of course, we've installed more machines, but also we're keeping more inventory on stock. So last year, we had sort of a month of inventory. We've increased that to 1.5 months, roughly 2 months. And the reason for that is we have really big rollout programs coming up. So we're front-loading a little bit. And that's because the key accounts that we work with are very demanding on pace. So we'd rather have more machines on stock to be able to guarantee them the numbers every month than be a little bit tighter with that supply chain movement. Recently, ME Group invited offers/suggestions presumably for a possible sale of the business or a partnership offer. There was no outcome to this as far as we know. Is this on the agenda long term? Could you throw some light on this, please? So this was a strategic review that occurred last year. And I will say that the news was leaked, which led us to having to put out an RNS, which informed the market of the strategic review and progress. So I would not -- there was confusion amongst investors. That was not a strategic review saying, please come and we're inviting offers. It was rather reflecting the fact that the news have been leaked elsewhere, and therefore, we had to inform the market. That process lasted too long, in my opinion, at least, and it was frustrating being in a closed period. And what I can say is that moving forward, I think that period is behind us. And we're very much focused on delivering the numbers this year and improving the share price in the public markets. I think that answers the questions on the strategic review. I think we've answered most of the questions. Of course, if you have further questions or you don't feel like I've answered one of the questions in enough detail, please feel free to send us an e-mail. We're more than happy to share with you more information. I would just like to thank all of you for your attention, and I hope everyone has a great rest of the week.

Perfect. Vlad, if I may just jump back in at this point. And thank you very much indeed for being so generous with your time then addressing all of those questions that came in this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback. On behalf of the management team of ME Group International plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good afternoon to you all.