NCC Group plc (NCC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. We have a complex set of results to share with you today. There is quite a lot of information to provide you. You've actually got in the data, I think, 12 months for the year ending May '24, the stub period over the summer ending September. And then as a further comparator, another 12 months to the year-end September '24. So quite a lot of data to share with you, which Guy will talk through as we go into the number. I'm going to start these results actually by a huge thank you to colleagues within NCC. It has been an incredibly busy period. They have done an incredible amount of work and have delivered incredibly well on our journey to transform the business. So a huge thank you to everybody involved from the business for their efforts. So in terms of my session, I'm going to very quickly cover a little bit just of who NCC is. I appreciate quite a lot of people see a lot of companies. I just want to sort of reset a few messages in terms of who NCC are. I'm going to update on our strategy and progress to start with just some of the excellent progress we've made over the period actually. And then I'll hand over to Guy for a deep dive into the financial results and the numbers. I'll then conclude by our outlook for FY '25 and the reasons that we are confident in our medium-term goals. So in terms of NCC. This is a fantastic business. And again, just to pay tribute to colleagues, an incredible business in terms of the technical depth and breadth and commitment from colleagues across our business globally. We've got 2 fundamental businesses to support our mission to be that global leader and a deliver of digital resilience for our clients. And those 2 business, which is our cyber security business, which is a services business focused on supporting our clients to manage the complex threats which they're facing today. And our Escode business, which is the world's leading provider of escrow services and a trusted third party. We see there's multiple growth drivers across both elements of our business. It's driven by the ever-increasing risk that we see from the cyber environment, the evolving threats, both geopolitically, but also the rapid adoption of new technologies, the digitalization of operations. And on the escrow side, it is about ensuring operational resilience and being that trusted third party and the holder of key digital assets for our clients. I think as you go through, hopefully, the reporting, you'll see that we've actually delivered very strong recurring revenues now, changing the mix of our business. So strong financials, improvements in our EBITDA, and we are a very cash-generative business. So very strong and as we'll go into -- as a result of some of the decisions we've taken over the last 12 to 18 months, a far stronger business with a flexible balance sheet, which gives us optionalities in the future. So a great business, very proud of what has been achieved. And when I talk about our goal to be that global leading provider of cyber resilience services, we've got 4 core pillars. And it really is about building to become that full service life cycle delivery of cyber services and the global leader of escrow services for our clients. And in short, in cyber, just to make it really clear what we do, we respond to clients' breaches. We fix the underlying vulnerabilities that resulted in those breaches. We manage our clients' environment around cyber security, and we can test literally anything. We are the world's leader in Technical Assurance Services, and that is absolutely something that we hold on to. So to deliver our strategy, there are 4 key pillars. And we've talked about these previously, and I think in terms of reiterating the message, we have a strategy. We are executing. We can control what we can control, and we are doing what we said we would do. So our 4 key pillars are clients absolutely at the heart of everything we do. We want deeper client relationships, being able to take a suite of services that are relevant to them at the point in the market where they need support. We've got -- we're building capabilities to support those clients. And I think we've made great progress in building some of those capabilities, whether that's diversifying our capability portfolio and building new ones, and we'll talk about some of those in a second, whether expanding ones that we already had to meet market demand. And a great example of that would be our regulatory testing team, which has grown, which has doubled in the period, and we have plans to further double again. We're launching new services around AI, which is absolutely critical to our clients. So we're building those capabilities, which are relevant for the market. Importantly, we have a global team, which -- and we're delivering globally. And fundamentally, that means making we bring the very best of that technical talent we have globally to our clients irrespective of where that client is based and irrespective of where that talent is based, the very best of NCC for the very best of our clients. And we're delivering globally by bringing all of that together and putting the systems in place to ensure that we get not only the insights and the ability to execute and moving those resources to the right client, but also the right MI to be able to manage the business effectively. And finally, investing in those 2 great brands we have, the 2 great stories, our cyber security business and our Escode business delivering escrow services. We've set our strategy. We have been executing for the last 18 months, and we've made great progress. So just to give you some of the headlights from that journey that we are on. We've made good progress, as I say. We can control what we control, and I'm really pleased by the execution mindset within the business and what we've been able to do. We've demonstrated that we can get return to growth for both Escode, but also our cyber security business. We have a far more focused cyber security business as a result of the divestments we've made over the last 12 months, and Guy will touch on some of that as we go through the financial numbers and an update on those. That gives us a very strong balance sheet and optionality in the future. We've dramatically improved gross margins, and that's been through a clear focus on how we price, price better using our global delivery model, fundamentally important, better utilization and a far more commercial mindset within the business. I think if we put all of that together, it makes us a far more resilient business than we were 18 months ago, so which is very, very positive. And I hope when we talk about the progress, and we've shown some of these comparators and a lot of data, which I'm hoping you get to go through, but a dramatic improvement in our gross margin and also our adjusted EBITDA. So good progress, more to do, as always, but very pleased with the trajectory. So let me just now hand over to Guy to go into some of the financial numbers in a little bit more detail.

Thank you, Mike, and good morning to everyone. So as Mike said, complicated set of numbers. We've got a 16-month period as well as some of the changes in our accounting measures going on. There are full details in the appendices on the 16-month audited figures and the 12 months at the end of May. I'm not going to talk to those. I'm going to try and talk to a clearer story around 4 things in the next few minutes. So firstly, how do we deliver against our financial framework imperatives for 2024 and the stub period? What were the financial performance in our 6 months -- sorry, our 4-month stub period, excuse me, over the summer? How that resulted in what that meant for our P&L for the 12 months to the end of September and what that performed compared to the prior year? And finally, I want to talk and touch on what our financial imperatives of our financial framework for FY '25 is at the end. So first of all then, our financial framework, which we put in place for the stub period and also for the previous 12 months to that. Really strong performance across all areas. It's lovely to see all the green ticks on there, as Mike says, testament to the work that the business has done and everything that's been achieved. So from a market perspective, we saw a return of growth in cyber security through the 12-month period to the second half of last year and also into the stub. And we maintained our momentum in Escode and also saw a real enrichment of our mix overall as a result of Managed Services growth. And then in terms of control of the controllables, as Mike spoke about a few minutes ago, step change improvements in our gross margin and our EBITDA over the 12 months, and that's in spite of making sure that we invest into new capabilities of C&I to enable for future growth and our Manila facility. From a balance sheet point of view, we're in a transformed position. So along with all the operational changes going on, we've clearly executed on 2 disposals, which will, when they complete, will leave us in a very different position from a balance sheet point of view early next year. If I talk now -- I'm going to talk through a few slides on the 4-month performance over the stub. So this is the group income statement. The bottom right-hand side of these slides, there is reconciliations against our old measures. They're there for transparency because I appreciate there's an awful lot of data to take in this morning. I'm not going to talk through them. I'm going to stick to the left-hand side and talk through what's been going on in terms of our new measures. A couple of points to note before we go into this slide. So we do have seasonality in the business in both of our businesses and divisions. There is less time material work over the summer period. So it will be a simplification to turn to multiply the 4-month period by 3 to get to a standard annualized number. The second thing that is worth noting is that we announced the disposal of our Crypto business back in August, our DetACT Crypto business for a consideration of EUR 77 million. We expect that to yield GBP 62 million of cash when it completes. That's going through final statutory regulatory approvals, and we expect that to complete in the new year. But the Crypto is in the numbers for -- obviously, it is in our reported numbers in the stub period, okay. So overall, very strong performance on revenue, 6.6% growth on a constant currency basis. Our gross margin step change by 6.5 percentage points. You'll see where that was driven from in a couple of minutes when I talk about the 2 individual businesses. Overheads were broadly stable. And as a consequence, our EBITDA jumped forward by -- well -- [ fivefold ] increase up to GBP 9.5 million. That dropped through down to an adjusted EBIT, which moved from a loss of GBP 5.2 million into a profit of GBP 2.3 million. So a really strong step forward in our performance. Let's look at the revenue bridge first. So what happened from a revenue point of view by areas, and these are the slides we talk very consistently about, so you'll see the same format from our previous set of results. So Cyber saw an increase of 7.6% at constant currency. That's a GBP 5.9 million block in the second column, that was largely driven by our UK business and our Asia Pac business, which grew at nearly 16%. We saw a rate of decline in North America continue to shorten, but we saw a small decline in there, driven predominantly by TAS. I'll show you a breakdown of the TAS performance in a couple of minutes. Escode continued to grow. So that's now 7 consecutive quarters of growth and it grew over the stub period. And we faced foreign exchange headwinds, mostly in the translation of U.S. dollar back into UK from a revenue perspective of GBP 1.7 million across the group. So a robust performance across both divisions. Taking Cyber Security. So on these slides, you'll see the market performance from a revenue perspective on the left and the P&L on the right. I'll talk about the capabilities breakdown on the next slide. So from a trajectory point of view, we grew by 7.6%, as I mentioned a couple of minutes ago. And you can see that we saw that was driven by the UK, which saw a strong year-on-year growth, the deterioration I mentioned a minute ago in North America and Europe grew pleasingly by 7.6%, well that was predominantly driven by the Crypto business, which we will be disposing of. What did that mean for the P&L? So from a P&L point of view, we saw the gross margin percentage jumped from 26% to 35.5%. Mike talked earlier about control of the controllables. That is about getting our utilization as well as our pricing back to really good levels. And we also saw relatively short buying cycles in the summer period, and that helped us drop through and gain some margin efficiency. And that meant as a result, we saw that 9.5% improvement. Our overheads were up by GBP 700,000. And as a result of all of that, our EBITDA for the cyber business went from a loss of GBP 5.5 million to a profit of GBP 3 million, which was really pleasing to see. So a really strong stub performance in our cyber business. How does that break down by capability? So very similar to the story we've spoken about stub for some time. So TAS, a small reduction of 3.6% at constant currency growth in the period. As Mike has mentioned, we've seen some quite big changes within TAS within the mix over time. Mike spoke about our kind of high-end capability, particularly in our Red team, which has doubled in the last 12 months and will double again. We've now established some really strong credentials and capability in AI testing, which leaves us in a good place for the next 12 months. Consulting was stable. The new leadership is in place. It takes time to get new leadership in place and to enable them to build out their teams. We are now seeing a stronger pipeline come in place for consulting. Managed Services was, of course, the super staff. So that continued to benefit from very strong wins from the first half of the prior year and saw an improvement of 45%. We would expect to see that normalize back to kind of more regular levels going forward. But clearly, on 90% ARR, that leaves us in a really strong position for the future and means that as a proportion of cyber security revenue it hit 29% in the stub period. DFIR decreased, so that's Digital Forensics and Incident Response of 999 or 911 service. That is largely driven by the fact that there was a super strong period in the summer last year, driven by an awful lot of ransomware attacks and the kind of the sales in that area will very much reflect what's going on in the ransomware area. If I touch now on Escode. So constant currency growth for the period in the stub was 2.9%. You can see there that was driven by the UK, which performed very strongly. North America was flat and Europe saw a small decline. In terms of performance on contracts and verifications, contract growth was down slightly at 4.1%. We'll talk in a few minutes about the 12-month period, which I think is more instructive. But we now have seen 7 months -- 7 quarters of sustained growth, and that's driven by verifications performance being really strong. Client retention was 95%. We do see, and it's important to note that 4 out of 5 of every endpoint contract which falls off our books is a consequence of that piece of software becoming redundant as clients reduce their numbers of contracts. Our kind of enrichment in that business is all about more enterprise sales. We spoke about Doha Metro, for example, at the Capital Markets event previously. And Mike will talk about another new example later on when he comes back to strategy about more enterprise sales in that area, driving -- also driving contract growth and also verification performance. Overall, adjusted EBITDA for Escode grew marginally up to GBP 8.1 million off the back of the 0.5% revenue growth, okay. There have been investments into gross margin, which have gone into particularly our sales capabilities for North America and Asia Pac, and they're beginning to yield some real good -- some nice looking pipeline opportunities in the next 12 months. Okay. If I now look at what does that mean for the 12-month period, think of? So actually, how does the 12 months to the end of September look like as a consequence of all of the work that's gone on? How does it look in both areas of the business and what is our platform as we go forward on the next phase of our transformation? So overall, we saw revenue increase by 1.7 percentage points. So that's 3.5% on constant currency. Our adjusted EBITDA led forward threefold from GBP 9.1 million to GBP 27.5 million, which you can see down here. So what drove that material improvement because while sales revenue improved despite some foreign exchange headwinds, actually, there's some real efficiencies through the P&L. So firstly, gross margin has absolutely step changed by 4.5 percentage points. I'll come to the drivers of that being cyber in a couple of minutes. Our overheads stepped – [indiscernible] they stepped down slightly. Share-based payments were broadly the same and our D&A was flat. So some real efficiencies in the P&L, some very strong and really good efficiency gains within our overheads, but also within our gross margin, which we committed to. The result of all of that meant that our adjusted profit after tax was GBP 16.3 million and our basic earnings per share on our new measures jumped from 0.6p to 5.2p. That does include Crypto and DetACT businesses for last year, of course, because they were included in those numbers for that period of time, and they will drop out going forward once the disposals are complete. So a really big step change. Let's look at the revenue bridge. So we continue to face foreign exchange headwinds. They totaled GBP 5.8 million. But really pleasingly, we saw a GBP 9.4 million increase in cyber over the 12-month period. That's 3.7%, driven largely by the UK and particularly by our Managed Services performance. No surprises here. We saw a relative decline in North America reducing, and I'll show you what's happened to TAS performance on the capability slide in a couple of minutes. So you can see the stabilization in that area. And Escode over the 12 months delivered constant currency growth of 2.8 percentage points. So some really strong consistent performance in the market going through a period of an awful lot of change internally as we've been executing our strategy. So let's talk about the 12 months of cyber. So the revenue, again, on the left-hand side by market and what we can see here is, I guess, the first thing I draw attention to is solid. These are each individual half, so half 1 '23, half 2, '23, et cetera. You can see real strong growth in the UK, driven by Managed Services, as we'll talk about in a minute. Stabilization in North America. So we saw a big step down from one half, one to half 2 in FY '23, and we've been broadly holding consistent with that level and some modest and pleasing increases in Europe of 11.8%. Okay. Going to the P&L. So what does that mean? And so going to the P&L, a really big improvement in our gross margins up to 37%. We've always spoken about actually our medium-term goals about aspiration of getting cyber to an EBITDA percentage in the mid-teens is underpinned by a gross margin of around 36%, 37%. That was a super performance driven by a really strong second half. Overall, our overheads, there was a modest increase within cyber itself, but it resulted in the EBITDA in cyber jumping up to GBP 26.1 million, so just under 10%. We obviously are pushing towards -- we really believe our medium-term aspirations of mid-teens EBITDA are very deliverable. It's worth noticing that the gross margin performance is really driven by a step change in the utilization. So the utilization was up to 66%, up from 59%. That now includes all of our Manila colleagues and the establishment of our Manila business. So there's been a slight sort of fallback in -- I would have spoken about 70s in the past. So 66%, including Manila, we're very pleased about our core markets of the UK, North America, Asia Pac delivery capabilities has been delivering in the 70s. So that's really good performance. Very happy with that. If we go to the capabilities. So on the left-hand side, you can see TAS, which in the full year saw a 15% decline on a constant currency basis, but you can really see the stabilization through the last three halves, okay. So 52.9%, 52.9%, 52.8%. So the mix within that business changes as Mike has talked about, its a more higher-end work, but a stabilization in that area, and we believe -- we absolutely believe in the future for that business. Consulting implementation was broadly stable year-on-year. As I mentioned earlier on, we have built out our capability and brought some new teams. They've taken some -- that takes time to recruit and bring those people in to get them their teams in place, and we're now seeing some pipeline build in that area. So we're very confident about our strategy there. From a Managed Services point of view, we have now seen a massive step up over the last 12 months. As mentioned earlier, I don't expect to see the same level of sequential growth, but we'll hold the gains that we've got and remain in growth going forward. Digital Forensics over the year was up 1.3% with strong growth in the first half and some decline in the second half, reflecting the broader environment. Other service is predominantly our Crypto and DetACT businesses. So obviously, we'll see that line drop back once the disposal is executed and completed. So that's Cyber, the last 12 months. Let's talk about Escode, finally for the 12-month period. So some solid performance here as well. So overall constant currency growth of 2.8%, driven by growth in the UK and North America, 5.7% and 1.2%, respectively. What was really nice to see in the second half of the year, if we think about our business, so we sell contracts, then we do verifications on those systems. So contract growth in the second half of the year was flat. So that's a consequence of -- yes, there was some shrinkage, but effectively a 95% retention rate, which is an improvement on the actual number of contracts we have, but there been some good wins and that we've -- that Mike again will mention in a couple of minutes as well as some price increase benefits that we've seen through. So overall, flat a verification step forward by -- from GBP 11 million in the second half of the prior year to GBP 12.1 million, and that really helped drive our overall growth of 2.8%. Gross margin stepped back by 3.1 percentage points. As mentioned before, that is as a consequence of some of the investments that we've made from a sales point of view as well as some foreign exchange headwind in terms of converting some of our North American gross margin back to the UK. And from an overhead point of view, there was a modest increase of GBP 300,000, but that meant that our adjusted EBITDA was GBP 28.4 million or 43%. So really solid consistent performance, and we're well set in Escode as well. What does this meant for our net debt and what's going on our balance sheet? And we will be obviously in a transformed position once the Crypto disposal executes, but these numbers are obviously pre-crypto because the GBP 62 million expected inflow has not come through yet and will come through early in the New Year. Our cash conversion was just under 97%, which is really strong. So that really helped our net debt move from an opening position of 57.5% to a closing position of 45.3%. You can see the outflows there. It's worth noting, obviously, we've maintained our dividend at GBP 14.5 million, and we expect to continue to do so. And we have a very good kind of set of facilities from a banking point of view, which is secure until the end of December '26, okay. So what does this mean for kind of the next 12 months? What are our focus areas? We presented the financial framework that we had before. And many of those things are still live because there's no demonstrable change in our strategy that Mike spoke about. We're really confident we've got the right strategies, the right businesses. We're building out the right capabilities in the right areas, and we're set well to gain on to kind of capitalize on our market opportunities. So I'm not going to talk through all this, but I'll talk through the key areas that are our focus. So obviously, sustainable revenue growth for all those, those focus areas remain absolutely the same kind of enriching the quality of our revenue in the business and our growth. The first new area is about our pricing. So now that we have Kantata, our scheduling tool in place, we can start to measure for the first time our project profitability, and this really helps with our pricing decisions we're making as well as we've been much more sophisticated about how we respond to client needs, also supported by the fact that our global delivery model with Manila as well as our existing fantastic talent globally around the world means that we can be very, very tailored to what a client wants and needs rather than giving them what we want them to have. Efficiency for growth, this is all about -- the third column is all about how we find further efficiencies within our cost base to kind of fund and fuel our growth and drive our profitability. So the first is it's no secret. We have different levels of profitability in each of the marketplaces. I've spoken about that before, far more than the levels of different profitability between capability services. So our focus area there is now that we've globalized our resource base and we have Kantata. It's how we start to bring our, say, our North American profitability or our European profitability back up to the same levels of efficiency as you see in the UK. So that's going on that journey as a consequence of those changes that we've made. There will be some stranded costs as a consequence of our disposals. So we're clearly very committed from a shareholder value point of view towards eliminating those. That's a new area of focus. And then finally from a capital deployment perspective, we used to call this kind of reducing net debt but we don't have any net debt. So this is all the first area is that once we complete it, making sure we have the appropriate levels of liquidity and debt facilities so that we can fund growth. We think this is a fantastic time to be at NCC. I think there's some good opportunities and we'll make sure we've got the right levels of firepower to do the right levels of accretive opportunities as and when they arise and there will be things which we can bolt into our existing business as and when they arise and accretive for shareholders. So that's the kind of focus to make sure that we can still execute on our strategy. So look, overall, I think it's been a tremendous year. We're really proud of the results that we've delivered. We're well set for the future and I would just like to say thank you to many of you struggle with the amount of data you've had today. I'd like to say thank you to all of our finance teams and our auditors as well who've done an amazing job getting all our sets of comparators and getting us through audit and the budgeting process as well. So thank you to them. With that, back to Mike.

Thank you, Guy. So just as we said, we'll give you a little bit of an update on areas of focus as we go into FY '25. And again, just to reiterate, we've set a strategy. We are executing against the strategy. That is our focus and will continue to be. So I'm going to deal with cyber first. We talked about the 4 pillars. The first one is obviously around our capabilities. We have made investments in building new capabilities, 2 which we've highlighted are digital identity, fundamental underpinning anything to do with digital transformation and operational technology. The merger of IT and old age analog systems, manufacturing, et cetera, where there is significant cyber risk as a result. Two areas, we've now hired the team, the leadership for that team. They've built their team. That takes time. Obviously, they are far more consultative by nature and background and the sort of organizations they have come from. It takes time to get them in. We've now done that. The pipeline that they are building is excellent, and we're really excited about the opportunities around that. We now have to obviously execute against it. The second area is obviously improving and continuing to improve the profitability of our technical Assurance services, particularly in North America. Guy talked about the change and the tilt in that business so that we have a greater mix and a high focus on what I'd call the high Assurance components of it, very technical, very strategic in terms of impact, particularly around regulatory testing. That is growing significantly. As Guy mentioned, we doubled it this year, and we'll continue to invest growing that going forward. What is really positive is also about the way we are expanding some of our offerings in North America and obviously focusing on ensuring that we are more profitable in a very complex market, particularly given the cost base over there. Underpinning that is, of course, our global delivery approach. And we talked about not only opening offices in Manila but we've obviously got resources in Iberia, UK, Asia Pac and North America, getting those to work together effectively to ensure that we are optimal in terms of how we price an engagement but also how we execute. And I think what we haven't really talked about is the fact that we've also this year, deployed the systems to underpin that global delivery. Kantata is the name of the system. Very pleased that literally, I think last weekend, we went live with the last geography, which was the Netherlands. So for the first time ever, we have a single view of our global resource base. Whilst that's important, what we're able now to do is also build upon that to actually get the sort of MI that gives us the insights into how we're delivering for clients and the individual profitability by project, an incredibly important point as we start to take the business on to the next stage. And finally, continue to invest now in areas where we see client demand, quite a lot of change going on. We're expanding our propositions to actually respond to what is a very dynamic market. A concrete example of that is actually a proposition around AI Assurance. So many clients, and I'm sure reflected by organizations in this room, are deploying AI. Deploying AI securely is actually a huge challenge. There are very few organizations with the technical depth and breadth that can provide Assurance over those AI deployments, and we have launched a proposition around that. So it's incredibly important and a very, very exciting and interesting area. And we've got some really groundbreaking projects already underway in that space. And of course, optimizing and using these evolutions in technology to drive greater use of data in ourselves but also automation, particularly in the areas of Managed Services and also the delivery of our Technical Assurance offerings to make it more efficient. So continue to invest now and to adapt and change the organization quite dramatically. Moving on to Escode. It is really about maintaining momentum. We've had a great trajectory and a great run, and we want to continue to that. And we set out a strategy at the Capital Markets event and there's no change to that strategy. So just to reiterate a couple of those areas. Firstly, it's about markets. Continue to actually expand in markets where we have a good footprint already, North America, UK, but also into new markets, for example, into Asia Pac. And we've invested now in a team in Australia, starting to see the pipeline come through on that. So starting to see growth, which is very positive. The second area we talked about at the Capital Markets event was around new verticals. We've always been historically incredibly strong in regulated industries such as financial services. We have seen a significant opportunity in critical national infrastructure to ensure operational resilience. What is really pleasing and we talked at the capital market events about the Doha Metro example, we've seen further momentum being built in the critical national structure with, for example, the likes of a multiyear contract with HS2. It is about 11 contracts over, as I say, over several years to give operational resilience as a trusted third party. So very positive, very good to see that trajectory and proof points within the execution of the strategy. And of course, that is a great example of an enterprise level client, which is our area of focus because not only is it important from an escrow services point of view, but also allows us to add on verifications and the value-added services that we can. So really important from that approach. And of course, continue to drive operational efficiencies. Guy has talked about that. A key focus for us internally is being able to ensure that we are an efficient operation and address many of the sort of the legacies of the past and take out some of those overheads. So importantly, the outlook. It's been an incredibly busy 18 months and I would echo what Guy said, and I think he said it upfront, very proud of how the team have delivered over that period to deliver the results that we're talking about. And actually, the confidence that gives us for our future projections and our medium-term ambitions. We've simplified the business dramatically. We've divested businesses, which put us in a very strong position, which gives us optionality in the future. We've broadened our capabilities dramatically. The sorts of projects we are winning at scale in enterprise clients, you've seen some of the examples from a client perspective on the slides. I would recommend going to the website, if you haven't, which has been updated. It has case studies. You can see the sort of clients we are engaging with. They are marquee level clients and really impressive in terms of the projects we're delivering. So very positive with that and we continue to evolve, broaden our capabilities and our value proposition. We've dramatically improved our processes internally. We talked about the MI that we're now able to see the level of operational efficiency that has been driven within the business and that continues to be a significant level of focus for us. And we've now got a strong balance sheet, which I'm very, very pleased about. So despite whatever the governments around the world want to do and the market conditions, we can control what we can control. And we are doing, I think, a very positive job in executing against those. So we expect to deliver profitable growth across the business in the coming financial year with flat single-digit growth across both Cyber and our escrow businesses with a group adjusted EBITDA improvement. But we are confident in terms of our medium-term goals, and I think we've delivered the proof points to demonstrate those remain achievable. And to reiterate, those medium-term goals, our mid-teens revenue growth, mid-teens adjusted EBITDA percentage and maintaining that global leadership in our escrow business with low single-digit growth. So thank you very much for listening through that. I will hand over to questions.

Julian here from Investec. Just 2 questions from me. First one, within the consulting business, a slight pullback in the 4 months because the team have been built up, pipeline to come through. Does that mean we should expect a nice sort of margin pickup in that business? Is there a big bench basically that is waiting to be active based on that pipeline conversion and that could act as a nice tailwind for yourselves as that converts over the next sort of 12 months? And the second question is in terms of what's left post the disposal, disposal seem quite high margin. If you look at the underlying sort of business post disposal, it seems as though EBITDA is around sort of high single digit margins. And if you look at that, within that, one would assume the North American TAS business will be at the low end of that. That seems like quite a low place to be for North American TAS. Question is, do you think you have to do some remedial actions there? Or is it all about the change in mix moving up the value curve? Or does something more concrete need to be taken to get what seems like quite a low-margin business up?

So let me start on the consulting. I think it's important the change in mix within the consulting business, historically, our consulting services have been very heavily compliance driven, so quite transactional by nature. So what we've been doing is building the right leadership team in the areas where I think there are greater opportunities because of market dynamics, whether that's transformation-type projects or there are scale technology implementation opportunities to go after. So there is a change in mix between the two. And obviously, one has been more challenging in the current environment, and we are building the second. So we see significant opportunities. We have not built a huge bench strength. We're not starting with a lot of resources waiting. We are very much going for executing the market first, build a pipeline, prove that we can do it before we start hiring behind it. The great thing having Manila is we are able to turn that recruitment tap off because the delivery model for some of those areas are far more hybrid in terms of location than, if you like, some of our traditional compliance type activities. So that's why we see, I think, a significant opportunity in it.

I'd say, take North America from a margin point of view and TAS, there's a well-publicized shift in spend in North America generally in terms of tech. There was a post-COVID bubble where we were in a world where there was a supply shortage. So that meant that our focus of the business is very much around making sure that we could develop and have trained and have enough people to be able to do that work. And this is a people business. This is not a software business. It's about clients having confidence in our colleague who is doing work for them and knows them and can see the quality of their work. There's been a shift to whereby it's not a supply-constrained market over there now. It's just about consultative selling rather than as opposed to making sure that it's about supply, it's about better-quality engagements. And yes, there is definitely a piece of kind of how we reshape our kind of our pyramid, right, over time. But at the same time, we mustn't lose our clients in the meantime. So you've got to make sure that we continue to deliver for those clients and kind of go on the journey with them that delivers both value to them and improve value to us.

And I think interestingly, the North American business, which was predominantly all Technical Assurance services, very technical projects. What we're seeing is a change in mix in terms of what clients are buying. So our consulting business in North America is growing incredibly positively. So I think that just goes to show -- it's not only a change in mix in terms of how we deliver Technical Assurance services, but actually it's the mix of offerings within that overall market. And we're starting to make, I think, a good trajectory on that. And in particular, if you remember, we had a huge change in buying approach from -- huge tech clients in North America. And we've pivoted to grow or focus really a lot more on the more -- I wouldn't call it mid-market because there's some huge clients in the mid-market U.S. but non-tech so like life sciences, legal and professional services. And again, we're seeing more than double-digit growth in some cases in those verticals.

So just a quick follow-up to your comment there on, in terms of pivoting and in terms of way you're trying to drive the TAS business. So should we see that the consulting business is going to act as a potential funnel to drive some of the TAS upsells? And so you need to get that working and then TAS could then benefit?

When I talk about the goal to be a full-service cyber security company, that is exactly that, but it's not just for TAS. For me, the goal of the consulting business is to establish a set of relationships, get greater insight to clients' challenges and then to bring in all of the capabilities behind that. Great example is our relationship with TikTok, for example, where it started off as a consulting engagement. Now we've gone through a full service and where all of our capabilities are engaged with that client as a result of the start point, which is consulting. So that's why it's so fundamentally, it moves really from a transactional test at point in time to actually a more trusted adviser, more sticky, more strategic in terms of impact, but that's a shift. And I'm delighted, frankly, with the progress we've made, but it isn't a quick fix. We're not launching a product here.

It's Andrew from Panmure Liberum. I've got a couple as well. I'll do them one at a time. First thing I want to ask you is just in terms of the organic revenue growth momentum in Cyber, 4-month stub period was really good, plus 7.6%. Can you help us bridge that figure to your full year guidance for FY '25 being flat to low single, assuming that's true of Cyber as well as total group? I appreciate on Managed Services, obviously, you're having some big contract wins that are annualizing now. But can you maybe give us a sense of what you mean in terms of lengthening sales cycles and what that means for the revenue outlook for the next 9 to 12 months?

So I'll do some of the data... So data-wise, without giving a whole lot of data, right. So we've seen increasingly stable and good order opportunity creation across the business. We saw that through the spring and through the summer. And what we saw in the summer is that converted quite quickly into the diary and effect of that, that helped drive probably a better performance expected in that period. What we've definitely seen since as many consulting businesses and some business have seen [ since the autumn ] is just the lengthening of that cycle, procurement -- effectively procurement process is just taking longer. And actually, I think we'll talk in a second, I think we've got some really strong kind of data points looking forward in terms of opportunities. You're right, Managed Services will start annualizing against a number of big wins in the last 12 months. So I would expect that kind of to grow in the next 12 months, but at a lower level. And I expect the other areas to be kind of flat, maybe a little bit of decline in North America, we'll see how that pans out. But that's broadly that we're not expecting a sea change in the other areas right now based on what we see in terms of buying patterns. We might have a different view in a couple of months' time.

So I think we have to be honest about the macro environment in some of this. We had a very strong stub period, but we are not immune from changes within government budgets, whether that's North America, UK. And without a shadow of doubt, and I think this is reflected far more broadly than us. There was a cooling and a sensitivity, shall we say, both pre-budget, post budget in the UK and also indeed in North America run up to the elections. That manifests itself in a couple of ways. Firstly, I would say, if you're in the public sector in any changes to budget, they get reviewed. And we have a large public -- UK public sector focus and business and it's doing incredibly well. Of course, with people pause that causes the [indiscernible]. We're not seeing it go away. It's just naturally there is a delay in terms of decision-making and that is reflected in North America as well. To give some proof points just in terms of where we are seeing, if you like, trajectory. Interestingly, globally, in November, we have seen a 36-month high in terms of quote creation. That gives us some confidence. Now of course, it depends upon clients, therefore -- but still ensuring that they are spending, what procurement cycles they've got to go through, how wary they are in terms of the macro? But in terms of co-creation, that's really positive. To break that down, in the UK, we have seen a 20-month high. And if you include some of our largest deals, and again, to your point, Andrew, the -- some of the deals now are large binary deals because of Managed Services. If you exclude even those, we're at a 16-month high. So again, I'll give you some positive indications of the future. And in North America, we've seen a 30-month high in co-creation versus prior year in November. So again, not without challenges and I can control what I can control, but I don't run the government, maybe next year.

Okay. And then just thinking about cost and adding costs still around sort of GBP 90-odd million just seems to be quite a high number to me. Can you sort of talk about where you are on the operating model? And obviously, the note to the accounts references more restructurings to come this year. What are you going to change in the next 12 months?

So the transition of the business is -- and by the way, there's no implied implicit or explicit criticism of what we were two, three years ago and what [indiscernible]. The evolution of NCC as a business has been something that's been created effectively from an Escode business plus a number of acquisitions globally in different places in the world from a cyber perspective out of boutiques with organic growth on top of that. They grew up with different processes and operating -- slightly different operating models in each market. There is no doubt that -- and then we have effectively a few years ago, then implemented some top systems, but on top of some different levels, different types of processes in different areas of the business, right. You can't change all of that overnight. It's about actually how we work in harmony together and have standard ways of operating. So for example, in areas of finance now, where we essentially were running -- we had kind of had a different way where we're operating our North American finance team inside the UK team. That's now been -- the team has done a brilliant job of bringing that together. We're faster, better, more visibility, more business support, and that's now more efficient as a consequence of that. And there are more opportunities to do that. We've taken action over the last 12 months on closing and taking an impairment on a number of offices globally where we just are not going to see the same -- kind of same levels of return to work. And actually, that office base also probably reflected a very different employment colleague base that we had a couple of years ago. So there's a number of different things that we want to do. At the same time, we're a people business. We need to maintain our focus on clients and make sure we keep delivering to them. But yes, would we like to do more and to make life easier and more efficient for our colleagues and enable them to spend more time doing value-added work and being more client-centric? Of course.

I'm Damindu from Peel Hunt. I have three questions and I'll probably go one by one. First is on Managed Services growth into more regions, especially U.S. Mike, you talked about kind of the consulting as a go-to-market motion. And obviously, it's landing more of the larger deals, which are more binary. So I assume that's one spoke of how you could possibly push Managed Services into U.S. But do you think you need to also start to think about inorganic options? Or is there an organic way to grow it?

Yes, very fair question. So I would say, clearly, inorganic is an option in North America. I would caveat that quite heavily as always. North America is a long way away. The multiples we tend to see in North America, particularly Managed Services business are significant. Whether it's therefore the right way to deploy the capital for the most return, I think we'd have to be very, very wary of it would have to be the right deal, but it's definitely an option. But whether there's a way of accelerating growth, say, in the Nordics or closer to home, where we have the central mass, we have the management team, et cetera, I think it's something that we'd have to -- but it's definitely an option.

Actually, just to add on to that, I saw the other day that the ex Fox guys have set up the MDR business a while back. So I assume there is actually quite a lot of appetite for Managed Services businesses in Europe. So you're basically implying is shouldn't just look at U.S.

Exactly that way. Again, it's where is the most return for the capital we can deploy. And with all of the management and what I think we're very cognizant of is history and how challenging it is to acquire businesses and acquire and fit it into and integrate effectively. So we would have to go into its very wide open.

The second one is on the new services you launched like digital identity and OT and obviously, big growth areas. They typically associated technology companies or software companies, and I think partnerships have been quite important for you guys, Microsoft included. Is that going to be part of the strategy like those things will be aligned to some product partnerships?

Absolutely 100%. So to give you concrete examples of that, one of the first things the team when they landed and the individual who came and joined us, I won't say where they came from, that wouldn't be appropriate. But they have a long track record, not only setting up their own business, but also actually leading it for global SIs. And one of the reasons they've landed and been doing -- and obviously, we're now -- we've been investing ahead of the curve there is they've been setting up some of those partnerships. So we've got relationships now with the likes of SailPoint, obviously a clear global brand, and in the digital identity space with Dragos, which again is that's our public knowledge in the OT space. So absolutely key to us. And again, just to sort of try and bring it alive what that -- those capabilities are there to do and service our clients, it really is clients will buy a product, but they won't drive value from just buying a product. You've got to integrate the product, sort out your processes, ensure it works effectively. And that's where our wrapper sits around that with the right methodologies, with the right technical expertise to make that product work effectively and partnering with the vendors to do that. So that's why it's an exciting area.

And the last question is probably the most impressive thing you guys have -- you guys have done a lot of impressive things, but the most impressive thing is probably what you've kind of done with the structural margins, the gross margins of the business includes things like the Kantata smart pricing, the global delivery model. It's nice to see that 66% utilization for the TAS business and the CS business. Obviously, utilization is something harder to control. But just on a medium-term view because you're actually talking to medium-term guidance, what's the achievable utilization? Is that higher than that 66%?

If Kevin were here from [indiscernible] I think you probably talk to kind of mid-70s in a market and in a team, if you're running at mid-70s, and it depends a little bit by team, right. You kind of -- that is the kind of -- that's a perfect level. You start heading north of mid-70s it becomes very draining on colleagues. I mean this is quite deep involved work, like people need time, a little bit of time to decompress and they need time to train and do all those sort of things. So you kind of -- ideally, I get we have everything into the mid-70s, but I don't think you're going to see a point whereby actually if Manila is developing and growing and that's at 50%, you can't compensate by running Australia and the UK at 90%, right, if that makes sense. So you can move on. There is lots of structural opportunities within margin that are about more than just utilization, right. So it's about actually the structure of our team, the structure of the pyramid that were of our teams about having the right resource base at the right levels. It's about actually utilizing the global elements of -- and we might be selling a piece of work in the UK and getting it delivered out of Holland because that's the right skill base or -- we've got a very strong team based out of Madrid. So there's plenty of ways that we globalize that work, and we globalize the thinking about pricing upfront and the thinking about what we offer to the client upfront to really maximize the opportunity to get great margins, but also improve the win rate as well and actually open up more opportunities at the same time.

Because I get passionate about this one. So this is where I get terribly operational. So there's 2 things I'd say. Firstly, the -- when we're in growth phase, to your point about the growing new things, you can't be running at 80% utilization because you've got to train the people up, get them going. So there is always that balance. So as we are changing the business fundamentally in terms of capability mix, there will be variations. So our very mature offerings will be running at 78%. Our newer ones will probably be much lower than that. So I think that's really important. I think the second thing is the importance of moving away from that whole day rate thing, which I know everybody has heard me sort of go on about so often is something I found very uncomfortable. So we are looking really hard at what that pricing -- intelligent pricing looks like. And I'll give a concrete example. Literally last week, Guy and I do deal reviews for anything over a certain size. And it was really positive to see on a deal review, we had -- it was led in Asia Pac. The technical expertise came from the Netherlands and the pricing intelligence piece to build and operate the model for the very large deal was -- and I would say this was a finance colleague, was up in Newcastle. So it was a truly global team operating together to go after an opportunity. And that was, to me, just like tick, right. We're getting somewhere by seeing that happen. So that's why I don't know if we'll win it, by the way. That's a totally different thing, but it was great to see.

Can I squeeze in one last. Just having watched the demo of Kantata, I don't know, demos and reality are slightly different. The demo actually demonstrated that you could see project profitability as you price, is that deployed?

So Kantata is now live in all of our markets from a time sheeting point of view, the -- we can see cost rates. We have not automated all of the -- I think it's going to be a few months until we fully automated all the project profitability components of that, yes, that takes a lot of time, a lot of effort. We're candidly, not going to wait for that. So we're doing some work and having a couple of colleagues can help us start doing some of that manually, but using the Kantata feed information, whereas in the past, we wouldn't have had a single source of information to go to Kantata to get it. So I'm not going to pretend for a second that it's optimized. But actually, we do now have a single version of the truth to use as a data point to start using these things. We won't let perfect be the enemy of good.

I just have a couple of quick questions probably. The first question is on Managed Services. I want to understand or what I've seen, I think is am I right in thinking that Managed Services actually didn't grow that much from -- sequentially from one period to the next. And while it grew significantly year-on-year, I'm just wondering if there's anything in there such as any sort of churn or customer churn there. And then secondly, just really quick -- I've got some quick questions on FX. Obviously, there's been a massive swing in the U.S. dollar that's going to be a benefit to your second half. I just want to know to what extent you've sort of factored that into your expectations.

So on the second we've not, right? So I don't think we've factored very much -- I haven't made any assumptions around kind of any tailwinds on FX, so headwinds better than a tailwind, right. So if that happens, that would be nice. In terms of Managed Services, yes, there's some sequential kind of growth from period to period on an underlying basis, but not as much -- it's just as a consequence of lots of big -- a number of big wins in the first half of last year, less big wins, much fewer big wins in the second half of last year. It's not a consequence of actually it's lots of wins. But if the underlying question is, have we lost a load of things in the meantime, and therefore, there's churn, no, I can't point to any material level of churn.

I can't give you actual churn number. And if I did, I'd be -- I'd have to correct myself probably, but I do -- I know we did talk about at the Capital Markets event. So we can dig some more data. But it's not out of industry norms.

We're not -- we haven't seen a sudden -- we've not lost a number of big clients.

In fact, actually, just again, just to talk about operational processes, we have invested significantly in Net Promoter Score, client surveys. So actually, our client satisfaction is improving. So we're not seeing a churn.

It's worth noting on Managed Services that there was a load of big wins in the first half of the year. That takes effort to again get stood up.

That's true.

The team have then got to focus on. There's a team that's only so big from a sales and delivery point of view and then got to actually make that work and get it stood up. So the focus shifts, if that makes sense. So it's not -- some of it is not a surprise that you then end up with a kind of lumpy elements of kind of sales wins over time.

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Tintin Stormont from Deutsche Numis.

Just a couple of questions for me. Just in terms of this coming fiscal year, how should we think about the performance in terms of half 1 and half 2 splits? Obviously, sort of kind of slightly different comparator periods. And then secondly, just in terms of the lengthening sales cycles that you're seeing, Mike, I appreciate you talked about some of the government stuff. But if you look at where the longer decision-making is coming from, is it pretty evenly spread in terms of sectors? Or is it some specific customers? Is it a handful of customers you've dealt with before? Just trying to understand sort of kind of how widespread it is, the change in behavior? And the last forecasting one modeling one, sorry. Guy, I think without the sort of kind of disposed businesses, the revenue number in September '24 is about 305 million. Could I have the adjusted EBITDA number, please?

Yes. So very quickly, so just on that point, so you're right, it is gbp 305 million. I'm going to double check my spreadsheet. I definitely nodding. So the -- excluding the disposal business is GBP 305 million and the adjusted EBITDA is GBP 42.1 million. That's after GBP 1.8 million of share-based payments per our new measurement, okay. So that question. In terms of the half 1, half 2 split, we're expecting revenue to be pretty consistent between the 2 halves for total group. And then from an EBITDA point of view, I'm kind of expecting a kind of a weighting towards the second half, not enormous sort of GBP 2 million, GBP 3 million improvement sequentially half-on-half.

Okay. But for the revenue to be more evenly distributed?

Yes.

And on the -- if you like, the buying behaviors, it's pretty universal. There's no obvious, if you like, hotspots across various verticals that we're seeing. It's pretty consistent. I think the challenge, some projects are being challenged from procurement functions. Some are just going through further hoops. Some are just going through further rounds of discussions, procurement challenge, presentations, but it's fairly universal. But very -- but we're not actually seeing huge cancellations in existing projects or anything like that. It is purely procurement cycles.

Our next question comes from Martin O'Sullivan with Shore Capital.

I just had 2, if I could. Firstly, could you just give 1 or 2 examples of new business wins resulting from the expanded global capabilities where you've won work that you wouldn't have been able to bid on previously? And secondly, with cyber budgets clearly coming under pressure to some extent, how are you prioritizing resources internally, in particular, sales and marketing to optimize your growth opportunities?

Great questions. So new business examples. We're obviously focused very much on -- well, some of the Managed Services pieces are great examples where we've got a hybrid delivery model. In North America, we've got tech clients where we have been able to put forward a hybrid delivery with effectively a rate card with global options for them, which has given us frankly, we would never have even bid on it before because we couldn't get to the price point. There's an FMCG, so that's fast-moving consumer goods. I'm not sure that's my definition of somebody else's. FMCG client where we are delivering Technical Assurance work, so effectively pen testing using the global model, but actually really interesting as well, some very high-end AI assurance for them, which is coming out of our Iberia business. So that's -- I think that's a really, really good example. In terms of prioritization, it varies by market. So in North America, it is really very -- we've got an established footprint as always, in those large tech clients. So the focus of our sales and marketing team is very much in the verticals that are not tech. So as I talked about, the likes of legal and professional services, financial services. Health care is a really big one for us, which we've seen quite significant growth as a result of the regulations in that space. So that's been one key area of growth for us. In terms of the UK, we've been focused around driving our Managed Services and looking at driving opportunities in that. But also in terms of the marketing focus, it's been around some of our new capabilities like digital identity. Some of our alliance partners for example, Dragos has been a good example of how we've teamed with them to take propositions to market. So it does vary by market.

I think on the based of that and time, I'd like to thank everybody for coming along in December. And hopefully, that was useful. And if we don't see you before, have a great Christmas. Thank you.

Thank you.