Restore plc (RST) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to Restore plc's Capital Markets Day. My name is Sharon Baylay, and I am the Chair of Restore. For those of you who I haven't had the chance to meet yet, perhaps I can take just a few minutes and introduce myself. I've been on the Board of Restore plc for the last 7 years and participated in the evolution of the business over that time, both as Risk Committee Chair and our Senior Independent Director. When Martin Towers communicated to the Board his intention to retire, I was delighted to accept the Board's invitation to take on the role of Chair. And we've worked together to enable a seamless transition in the chairmanship. I am delighted to be leading the organization into this next period of transformational growth. Restore plc has a very strong history of governance, and I am also pleased to confirm that Jamie Hopkins will be stepping up to be our Senior Independent Director, with Susan Davy continuing in her role as Audit Chair. We have already kicked off a process to recruit a new NED to join the Board, and I look forward to sharing an update with you on that in the near future. Today, Charles, Neil and some of our executive leadership team are going to take you through the most recent and current update on the business as well as dive more deeply into 3 key areas for us: our Restore Document Management, Digital and Technology business units. In addition, we're also sharing with you for the first time today, our ESG commitment, Restoring the World. The Board and the leadership team feel very strongly about how we can support our customers in their ESG strategies through the services that we provide for them as well as what we can do ourselves in how we conduct and manage our own business. I know how important this is to many of our shareholders, and I look forward to discussing this with you all more in detail in due course as well. Strategically, I can attest to the fact that Restore plc is in the best shape it has ever been. My longevity of tenure on the Board assures me of that fact. Charles and Neil have significantly upweighted the composition and the skill set of the senior leadership team at Restore over the last 2 years, and the Board recently held our own strategic off-site to discuss a number of key initiatives to continue to drive forward and double the size of the business. But to do so whilst building sustainable value for our shareholders and in a manner that's totally aligned to our purpose, our values, our people and culture and the world within which we work. We will continue to be obsessive about our customers, and how we serve them. Health and safety remains the #1 priority at Restore plc. It's what we open every Board meeting with a discussion about. We've built very strong foundations from which we can now fast forward with our plans. And you'll hear that we'll be going into FY '22 with incredibly strong business performance and momentum. I will conclude with my own few words of thanks to acknowledge the great work that Martin Towers did for us as our Chair. It is my intention to continue that great work, and I'm looking forward to working closely with the Board, Charles, Neil and all our colleagues, and I remain available to all of our shareholders should you wish to connect with me. I will now hand you over to Charles to commence our Capital Market Day presentation.

Thank you, Sharon Baylay. I'm also delighted we'll be working much more closely together over the coming years to really grow the business. And I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Martin Towers for his stewardship of the business over the last few years. Martin has made a real impact across the whole business and personally has helped me greatly and has been an excellent chair. And we wish him well going forward. I know he will take a keen interest in the growth of the business. And thank you for joining us today in this virtual capital markets presentation again like we did last year. And I do hope we can do this in person next year or indeed a hybrid live webcast given the significant interest we have in the business in Europe and the U.S. In the last couple of years with our Capital Markets Day, we have tended to go broader across the whole business with the strategy. But I know from the hundreds of discussions, there is much more knowledge about the wider strategy. So the objective this year is to go much deeper into focus areas. Given 3 of our business units have undergone significant change and transformation this year, I thought it would be a good idea to focus on them so you can fully appreciate the changes and the aspiration for these markets. And also, we've been working for over 9 months on a new ESG strategy, including bold net 0 targets, which I would like to take you through. So with these objectives in mind, let's go to the agenda. I will do a very quick overview of the business for those new to the business and then take you through our new ESG strategy and net 0 commitments. Nigel will give an update on records management, Mark will take you through Restore Digital. Athena will provide an update on Restore Technology and Neil will do a finance and current trading update. I would ask that you submit your questions as we go through the presentation via the video platform, and we'll have time at the end to go through them. I wanted to give you a brief update on the excellent momentum of the business in the last 9 months. And Neil will do a fuller trading update later in the session. In summary, we are having an excellent year and expect to deliver record revenues and profits. On top of this, I'm delighted with the progress against the strategy across all business units, which is about growing, but also transforming, whether it be investment in customer experience, sales or a focus on cost and efficiency. All business units have really delivered against what we set out for them for the year because you don't get results like this without everyone contributing. We have growing momentum each year throughout the year in all the markets we operate in, and our run rate revenue is growing each month, and we are now at GBP 255 million which is 19% above pre-COVID levels and run rate EBITDA of GBP 74 million. We saw in the second half of 2020, the business really bounced back. And this has continued all throughout this year. And the reason is the critical nature of the services we provide. Businesses and public sector want and need every day of the services we provide for them to operate, and this is only set to grow as we really come out of COVID. We are winning in the market across all business units, and you will hear more about that in this session. I'm delighted in the changes in the sales teams over the last 12 months. We have a much more focused, structured and talented team. And coupled with improving operational delivery and excellent customer satisfaction, we have very good win rates. The 7 acquisitions this year with a total investment of GBP 85 million across 4 business units are largely integrated. Even the 2 most recent ones have made good progress in the last few weeks. And the synergies we expected from the deals and the core profits are in line and performing strongly. Especially the acquisition of EDM in May, which was a sizable deal. Overall, this shows clearly the very good execution by the whole team. I'm very happy with what the team have done so far, and I know we will finish strongly. Also, we know this is all about consistency over time. It's one thing delivering record profits, but we are working hard and have real momentum, as Neil will describe, to have an even bigger 2022. And now on to the overview of our markets and growth strategy. Now you've seen the market size and the strategy in the last 2 years. And -- the last year, we gave you more insight into what this strategy will drive with this profit road map over the medium term. About the markets, all the markets are growing and all of them still have significant fragmentation, so opportunity for acquisitions. We have moved our share up from 11% to 13%, which might sound small, but on a large market, this is significant. And importantly, Restore Digital has doubled in size and now #1. And Restore Technology has tripled in size in the last few years and now #1 also. So good momentum in very attractive markets. Our growth strategy is clear on 3 priorities. We are focused on organic growth at a level above normal market growth. So our markets are growing in aggregate of 3%, and we are driving for 4% plus. Acquisition growth across all of our markets is significant, as I've mentioned, and we can still drive further scale in all our business. And third, we are targeting a gently rising margin of between 20 to 40 basis points each year coming from improving our product mix, but also from driving down our costs. And 1 particular area is property costs, which is the second largest cost in the business, which Nigel will talk to. Putting this all together with record profits this year, you can see on the -- we are on the right strategy to double the profits from this year's base which will mean delivering a business with around GBP 450 million to GBP 500 million of revenue and profits in excess of GBP 150 million. This is very significant growth, and I know we have the right strategy and team to go for this goal. You can see we have made excellent progress this year, and we have momentum in the market. This means growth in all business units and specifically today, Nigel, Mark and Athena will take you through how these 3 business units can grow significantly. I would now like to take you through our new ESG strategy, which I know is of keen interest, not just to the investment community, but our customers and employees who you will see have been doing an amazing job with things that we haven't shown you before. Before I talk about the new strategy and commitment, it is important to understand on what the foundations we are building from. It is fair to say that we have not done a good enough job showing the investment community, and I think our customers, all the great work. You saw in our annual report from last year an improved transparency, describing how we improve our business internally and also externally, which is helping our customers in their supply chain, which we are part of. You can see with the environment, we already have a significant amount of our electricities from renewables. We operate a 0 landfill objective in Technology, which we'll expand on to other business units. And we're already trialing and investing in electrification with new vehicles and renewables with our solar power in some facilities. With social, we are a regional employer with over 2,600 staff and growing. I would point out that very few staff are in Central London. And with this regionality comes engagement in local communities, providing semi or high skill jobs. We pay significant tax, both business rates and corporation tax, and have a very straightforward company structure that goes along with this. So very committed to paying our fair share in the markets and communities we operate in. We have improved gender diversity in the last 2 years with much, much more to do. And with governance, we adopt higher standards than we are required to with our listing and have the highest accreditations we can find to underpin the operations of the business. Now this really is a high-level fly-through of what we do, but you can already see Restore has very strong ESG credentials. But we want and can do more. We think that this is good for the climate. It's good for the communities we are in and good for business. So what is the plan to do more? To set the scene, we have, as I said, been working on a new ESG strategy for over 9 months and certainly at pace since May this year. A lot of work has gone into this from across the whole company. And we knew from the outset we needed help. So this is the first time I have brought in external consultants at this level. And with this help, we have engaged a wide group of stakeholders, from suppliers, staff, customers, finance community and investors. So a very broad input on what we can do better and what does good look like for Restore. We have developed a strategy which is comprehensive in nature, but a strategy that is focused on the things that matter to us, because materiality is key. And the areas we can change and make an impact with. We certainly back this with actions, as you would expect from myself and the team, with specific KPIs. And I would say where we don't have a KPI, we will be working on generating one. We have titled it Restoring our World because for us, it is about improving the balance in favor of the planet and communities, rather than the other way around in favor of us. And given we have either a #1 or #2 position in the markets we operate in, we also have the potential and obligation to be game changers. We think it's the right thing and also a good business to up the ante, so to speak, in some markets, which maybe haven't done enough in the past. Now we don't have time to go into each of the 3 areas of our planet, which is the environmental focus; our people, more a social focus; and our business, which has more governance. But you can see a summary of the objectives and actions in this presentation in the appendix and even more information on the company website. And as I said, this is a great start for us in a more structured way, and we will be doing more work to enhance the plan. Now I would like to expand more on our planet part of the strategy and what our ambition and plan is. The top 4 focus areas we wanted to focus on are on this page. The first 3, we have very detailed plans. And for our plans around waste, we have started to work on it, but we have much more work to do. So frankly, we're just being honest about where we are with progress. So no greenwashing with the Restore team. For net zero, we have an ambitious plan to be net zero by 2035, and a 50% reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030. More about this on the next page. We will adopt and publish a detailed TCFD paper next year in the annual report, which is us adopting best practice early. We have adopted an external accreditation of our net zero delivery with the use of Planet Mark. All 5 business units are now certified each year. And this is audited with recertification. So a real commitment delivery and external benchmarking. Waste is a key area for us, as I said. We do a reasonable job here because our business doesn't produce hazardous waste, but we do produce general waste, and we need to work a much more detailed plan. I would say myself and the team are particularly focused on the use of plastics in the business amongst other waste streams. So more about that in the coming months as we do more work, but a real focus. Now to go deeper into our net zero plan. First of all, our philosophy is about net zero, not just being carbon neutral. We think being carbon neutral is a good stepping stone, but our focus is about eradicating carbon emissions. We also think that net zero is also a solid first step, but we also want to be thinking about becoming over the coming 1 to 2 years about how we can also go into deficit in the future and start to recoup the carbon we have produced in the past, but this will come into focus once we bring forward our net zero goals. We know our footprint in detail, as you can see. And this has really been an exhausting exercise by the team. We're also using 2019 as a base being a high year for emissions, so no soft targets. In summary, and this may be no surprise to you, for the Scope 1 and 2 emissions, it's the electricity we consume in our various facilities which make up 33% of the carbon emissions; and diesel we consume powering our 500-plus trucks and vans and various plants in our facilities, i.e., forklifts and JCBs, et cetera, which make up 62%. So that's 95% of the emission in 2 areas. It does vary heavily by business unit on the right-hand side of the page, as you would expect. So I expect some business units will be net zero well before 2035 and provide net zero-backed services to customers. So we know what drives it, and we know where it is in the business. So now to the plan. Well, with electricity, we have already sourced from renewables 80% of our electricity, which is great news. And this isn't offset but from renewables. And in some cases, it costs us more, but this is the right choice. We would like to be at 100%, but some of our facilities cannot source renewables in the way the markets work. But we do, however, want to be 100% as soon as possible from renewable sources on a much bigger electricity usage. We are trying to drive it down with new technologies, i.e. lighting, heating changes, et cetera, but such is the growth of the business, ultimately, the power we consume will grow, but sourced from renewables. From our fleet, it is all about diesel consumption in trucks and vans. We do offset 95% of the emissions from this spend today with the arrangement with our fuel supplier, which does increase our costs. So we could claim carbon neutral for the fleet. But as I said, our rallying cry is to get rid of the emissions. We are trialing 9 vans and trucks in various business units today with encouraging results, and we will order another 15 to 25 in the next 9 months and expect this to increase quickly. We would go faster, but it is all about the range, especially for the larger payloads in the business. In addition, 65% of the company car fleet is hybrid or electric and electric is fast becoming the default choice before we need to mandate it. Also, we're investing in electric plant, i.e., JCBs, forklifts, et cetera. So it is in all forms of plant that consume diesel. You could say, with this plan, why 2035 and not earlier? First, I would point out that in our markets, this is well ahead of other competitors that have made a commitment. The technology point is we see the last 10% as the challenge over the coming years. With our growing usage, remember, we have over 500 trucks and vans now, but this will grow to over 1,000. And it is the smaller proportion of the fleet, which is the larger HGVs, for which there is currently no glide path for a solution in the next 10 years. It does seem with our discussions with the truck manufacturers that it seems to be pointing towards hydrogen, and we are assuming that this technology matures and becomes widespread for us to hit this plan. We're also using scale more to reduce the reliance on larger vehicles, but there will be some need in the end. So it is a bold plan, and we are taking some risks, but risks we feel will work out. And finally, about waste. As I said, we need to do more work to understand what we produce in detail. But the work so far, we have confidence in reducing our waste 10% each year on a growing business, but more about that next year. So overall, with a focus on our planet and specifically net zero, we have a bold target of net zero by 2035 for Scope 1 and 2 emissions. And I do hope I can stand before you in the next 12 to 18 months' time and look to improve on this. I would like to thank the whole team who have been working on this not just the last 9 months, but working behind the scenes over the last 5 years doing the right thing. You have made good progress to build on going forward. So we have a bold plan with actions and KPIs. We will be transparent in reporting our progress, however that falls. It is embedded in the business and will be a standing item in each business unit, like we report financials each month. And clearly, it will be a regular topic at the Plc Board, with its own ESG subcommittee. And finally, we also see this as doing the right thing, but also a huge opportunity for the business. We can change our products to differentiate us in the market and provide services to help customers reduce their impact in their supply chain and grow our business at the same time. And I'm sure we will explore this more in further updates. Now I would like to now hand to Nigel Dews, the Managing Director of Records Management to take you through the exciting growth strategy for RM.

Thank you, Charles. I would like to take you through how the Records Management business in the last 12 months has had significant growth and investment and going forward, what our plans are to drive even more growth for Records Management and the wider business, with a big focus on improving margins over time as we scale and rationalize our property portfolio. So revenue run rate this year is around GBP 109 million and growing. With service activity improving and storage increasing with another year of positive net boxes, that's more boxes coming in and onto shelves than going out in destructions and permanent retrievals. This is an encouraging run rate of 14% compared to 2019. This year, we are operating in 54 sites, which includes new locations in Shoeburyness, Sherburn in Elmet and Hartlebury. We've also added a freehold site in Sittingbourne, where our most recent acquisition, The Document Warehouse is based. And what we've seen this year is a meaningful change in service with over 10 million scan on-demand images sent to customers instead of them taking a physical delivery. This is still concentrated on a small selection of customers but is growing as customers continue to develop their hybrid working models. We are seeing activity levels continue to increase as customers adjust to a more permanent way of working, most customers that we have spoken to favoring a return to the office with some element of homeworking. What's interesting also is the doubling of public sector project spend this year compared to 2019, driven mainly by 3 events. So firstly, customers taking a Scan On Demand service, either to support their digital strategy or support remote homeworking. And a good example of this is Land Registry, which I'm going to cover later in the presentation. Secondly, new box intakes. So what we're seeing is customers are making decisions to free up space and cut down on their estate footprint. And thirdly, more requests are coming through for file content review to support compliance and decision-making. This type of work typically includes cataloging, data capture, maintenance of records, all of which are helping customers with destroy or keep decisions. I'm pleased with the progress we've made on growing our media customer base with 25 new tape storage customers this year. That's a 79% increase on 2019, and with over 100 new prospects in our pipeline going into 2022. And we've added over 2.1 million boxes across our 3 acquisitions and onboarded over 500 new customers from these acquisitions. I'd now like to take the next few minutes talking about how we're winning in the market and delivering consistent organic growth. So the unvended market, so this is where customers don't have a current supplier. So items are currently held on site or a held in a place where the customer manages themselves, for example, a self-store or a lockup type facility. So this market is dominant for us this year with 132 of the 154 customer wins coming from the unvended sector. We're also winning in the vended market. The vended market is where customers have an existing supplier, and we are winning as more organizations look to consolidate suppliers that can provide national coverage with a locally delivered service. And another great example of how we're winning in the market. At the start of this year, we had some terrific news when we were awarded a GBP 9.5 million contract with the Department of Work and Pensions to audit and consolidate 27 million files held at their site in Heywood. This is the biggest contract win in our history in terms of contract value versus time. And we're delivering the service over a 20-month period, which we started in June, and I'm delighted to say it's going extremely well. We're also doing more work with 1 of our large NHS customers, West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust. Over the past 3 months, we've taken in more than 300,000 live patient files. This is notable because the Trust now hold all of their patient files with us. And we see this as a potential landmark moment because many hospitals keep live patient files on site as they see outsourced providers as an overspill and mostly for inactive file or semi-active file storage. So what we're doing is showing customers it is rarely cost-effective for them to store files in-house. And this is the case with West Herts. They've been a long-time Restore customer but have only held their inactive and semi-active files until now. What we're able to demonstrate is that we have a unique solution for NHS customers, saving them time, money, resource and includes the benefit of our automated ordering system. And what Trust particularly like about us is how we enable them to transition to a digital solution over time, getting the physical right first, which we know is massively important, rather than trying to implement a big bang approach to scanning, which is unlikely to work for them. All through the public sector, we are winning more boxes than ever before. We've won 50% more boxes so far in 2021 than we did in 2019. A very clear indication that we are winning in the market is when we compare new customer boxes coming in. So this excludes existing customer normal growth which is what we describe as BAU, versus boxes leaving us through permanent retrievals. This net number for 2021 is a 133% improvement on 2019. More boxes in, less boxes out. As well as building a strong pipeline of opportunities for 2022, through our recent acquisitions, we've onboarded over 500 new customers. And we're already seeing new project requests from these newly acquired customers. And on organic box growth, we continue to aim for 1% to 2% growth each year. To try and visualize what this level of growth looks like, it's actually equivalent to 150 double-decker buses worth of boxes. And we think that this is quite something. So moving on to market trends. So market trends right now are very positive for us, with customers continuing to create physical records across public and private sector. And on digitization, we see digitization positive for us because customers are clear in wanting their records management provider capable of doing both physical and digital. And a great example of this is Land Registry, where our service was mostly physical and now we're moving to digital by scanning thousands of images each month on a scan and demand basis. And being able to do this makes it extremely easy for Land Registry to do business with us, not having to seek another supplier, which would undoubtedly add complexity and delays into their process. The trend on flexible working is very interesting, too. I mentioned earlier that we have seen this year that most wins have come from the unvended market as both existing and new customers look to change the use of space and in some cases, downsize their office footprint. We estimate the unvended market opportunity is worth between GBP 50 million and GBP 100 million in the U.K. So we have a lot to go at. And on sustainability, we are aiming to deliver a green storage solution as we have a direct pathway to achieve net zero carbon emissions. And we see this as an important benefit not only for us, but for customers, too, in helping them with their own carbon reduction targets. And on site consolidation, we've made excellent progress this year on our property consolidation. The first thing to understand is we are consolidating but also growing. You can see we have 22 million boxes on shelves and organically, we expect that to rise in the next 8 years to around 25 million, plus acquisitions, which will likely mean this is at least 30 million boxes. But let's stay with organic for the moment. As we grow and as we consolidate, we are naturally becoming more efficient. So just a quick reminder on our 3 main consolidation KPIs. Buildings reduced by 50%, box density improved by 25%, property costs reduced by 25%. And so this year, we've added around 1.8 million boxes, equivalent to 7% capacity, with EDM, The Document Warehouse and our new Heywood site, to give room for organic growth, consolidation and acquisitions. We've also exited Paddock Wood moving 200,000 boxes to our Rainham site. And so going into next year, we'll see us moving to our new Heywood site and exit our old Heywood site as well as exiting Ipswich, Bolton and Middlesbrough. So in total, around 500,000 boxes, plus we have other site exits penciled into our project plan in the near term. So we are making good progress on our property rationalization plan to decrease costs. So moving on to my final slide. And before I hand over to Mark, it's on acquisition opportunity. So as well as our laser focus on organic growth, we will continue to make acquisitions that deliver synergies and improve margin. We are currently in 17 active discussions and tracking over 110 potential targets. And it's worth noting that many of the customers we acquire through acquisition will have the benefit of improved storage environments, our commitment to net zero and a wider, better range of services available to them. And our experience tells us that when we acquire customers, there are excellent opportunities to upsell and to cross-sell. So in closing, a year of strong growth, investment and delivering the strategy, which we will continue to build on and take with us into 2022. And with that, I'd like to hand over to Mark Horrocks, MD of our Digital business unit.

Thank you, Nigel. I'm Mark Horrocks, Managing Director of Restore Digital. I've been in the role since January 2019 and with the business since April 2016. I'm delighted to be able to talk to you, not just about the tremendous growth of the business over the last 18 months, but also about the opportunity going forward to significantly further grow the business. Restore Digital is a national digital transformation business, focused on business-critical documents and information management services. We have 10 processing sites with a good north to south spread for national coverage. We have over 750 permanent staff. And to give an idea of our digital operation scale, we're currently hosting over 2 billion document images within our cloud-hosted systems. Over the last 12 months, the underlying business has recovered from the 2020 impact of COVID and we're now almost back to 2019 levels. With the combination of this return and the significant acquisition of EDM Group, we've grown from underlying revenue of GBP 21 million to an anticipated 2021 exit run rate of over GBP 46 million. This means that since 2016, we've grown the business threefold from revenues of GBP 14 million. This is through a combination of organic sales and acquisitions. This exceeds our previous Capital Markets Day plan which was to achieve revenues of GBP 41 million by 2024. Sales momentum is strong with a growing pipeline and significant recent investment made in growing the team as we target higher organic sales growth going forward. We've appointed a new sales director and have strengthened both the business development and inside sales teams. We are now particularly focused on cross-sell of services to other business unit customers, upsell to existing customers and new logo sales. The EDM integration is complete from a management teams and facilities perspective, with some operational process standardization to complete over the coming months. This acquisition addresses these key strategic areas for Restore Digital: an immediate capability improvement; an increase of 10x in scale in process outsourcing, specifically in digital mailroom and omnichannel communications; a traveling of cloud-hosted systems revenue and the expansion of our digital transformation capability; and the addition of decision automation systems, expertise and solutions capability. Customer response to the acquisition has been very positive, and the combination of experience and expertise will make Restore Digital a disruptive force in the market. The change in services mix adding significantly to our process outsourcing and cloud-hosted systems revenues will elevate our profit margin to mid-teens and set a platform for growth and margin expansion over the coming years. Our strategic objective is to achieve revenues of GBP 75 million to GBP 80 million with a high teens profit margin over the next 5 years. This slide provides an overview of the core services provision and our split of current run rate revenues across them. I'll go into a little more detail on some of them. Digitization, at GBP 18.5 million, is currently the largest element of the business. We run highly efficient and scalable operations, which ensures that we win in a competitive marketplace, taking market share from competitors of all sizes. We have developed particular expertise in large and complex projects. Cloud at GBP 7 million, where we host large-scale, highly secure document and workflow management systems for our customers. This is a service enabler to our digitization, consulting, process outsourcing and business process automation services. Consulting at GBP 3.6 million: working closely with customers to understand current business challenges and then implementing digital transformation initiatives to optimize their processes. We sell consultancy and the combination of software and hardware solutions typically for use both in-house and in our outsourced model. Process Outsourcing, GBP 8.4 million. Digital mailroom and related fulfillment services. This includes outbound and inbound omnichannel business communications, classifying and routing information to operational teams to enhance output and workflow, bringing significant efficiency gains. This is particularly important in the developing hybrid home and office work environment. These services are, in some cases, extended into complex process automation and decision-making, which contributes another GBP 2.5 million of revenue. This is a young and fast-growing technology-based area of the business. This slide gives examples of some of the services mentioned previously. In digitization, just looking at 2 sectors, health care and education. We can see the scale of what we undertake in delivering these contracts, extremely high volumes of records processed all to the highest quality standards and to strict SLA. Customers choose us because of this scale, our ability to manage complexity at scale and because of our proven track record. Consulting in record preservation in the nuclear sector where we manage and collate vital data extracted from historic records. We've worked in close partnership with our customer to design, build and deploy a large-scale information collection systems and digitization services, which helps them to achieve their key objectives in knowledge and information management. An example of our process outsourcing capability is the inbound digital mailroom service that we provide to a nonministerial government department. We process over 35,000 mail items per day to complex SLA structures and challenging processing targets. Our systems deliver high levels of automated document processing and classification. The benefit to our customer has been a significant reduction in operational complexity and in cost. These are long-term contracts that are awarded to us because of our demonstrable experience and our proven track record. And lastly, in the automotive sector, we've delivered AI-driven digital transformation and automated decision-making. This is a pure software play using all our own IP and systems. It's deployed to 360 dealerships. The service has enabled a 66% growth in their processing capability while simultaneously reducing cost. We see these transformative automated decision-making systems as a key part of our future service development. All of these services are delivered to the highest quality standards and are underpinned by certification to all appropriate standards. Our analysis indicates a market size of at least GBP 320 million, growing annually by at least 4%. Post the EDM acquisition, we have roughly 14% market share, which allows significant room to grow. The long-term trends are very positive. Digitization will continue as it's a key digital transformation enabler. The government continues to invest heavily in the digitization of NHS records for this reason. The growth in hybrid, home and office working is accelerating digital transformation initiatives and increasing demand for our digital mail room services. Our cloud delivery model is scalable, flexible and secure with the Software as a Service model being attractive to our customers. With regard to market share, our market is still highly fragmented, meaning there is opportunity for further consolidation through acquisition. Our growth strategy focuses on 3 main areas: organic growth, acquisition growth and margin growth or expansion. We anticipate organic growth coming from physical to digital records transformation, consulting services leading to digital transformation and related services, which in turn, drive further cloud and software automation revenues. NHS scanning is a key area for us. Demand is increasing in line with the government's digitization objectives, and we are seen and recognized as a market leader in this area. We expect to capitalize on that position. We are seeing increasing demand for our digital mail room services. It's no longer just an extension of scanning: it encapsulates outbound as well as inbound digital communications and includes records that originate in digital as well as paper form. It is of particular importance to any organization that is dependent on having managed and timely access to the flow of inbound and outbound communications, particularly in the hybrid working model. As a result of the EDM acquisition, our services now go beyond mailroom services and into true digital solutions, where our AI-enabled platforms facilitate rapid and even automated decision-making processes. We will make further acquisitions, primarily for 2 reasons: firstly, in support of incremental service innovation; and secondly, to support our long-term digital product strategy. We see margin opportunity growth in 3 key areas: improving the mix, selling higher value products and services, by standardization of operational processes from the merged Restore Digital and EDM businesses, and through open cross-selling of the higher-margin digital transformation and automation services to current Restore customers. Overall, I'm delighted with the progress of the business, because from the current platform, which has been transformed in the last 12 months, we can see even more opportunity to scale the business with improving margins. Thank you. I'd now like to hand over to my colleague, Athena Ainsworth, Managing Director of Restore Technology Limited.

Thanks, Mark. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Athena Ainsworth and I'm the Managing Director for Restore Technology. It's a pleasure to meet you all, virtually at least. Firstly, I'd like to say how delighted I am to have joined Restore, and to have the opportunity to lead Restore Technology at what is a very exciting time. What I hope to do over the next 12 minutes or so is to share with you why that's the case. And I'll do that by covering 3 main areas. Firstly, I'll explain why the opportunity that we have is both significant and growing. Secondly, I'll share how we've transformed our capability and our size and why that's important. And thirdly, I'll describe how our business model combines scale and efficiency to drive an attractive margin. I'll then wrap up with what we'll be doing to drive growth both organically and through acquisition that will see us outpace the market. So let me start with why our opportunity is significant and growing. As our name suggests, Restore Technology is in the technology business. Specifically, we provide IT life cycle services for personal computing, data center, and networking data center assets. We operate in the technology market where spend is high and growing, typically around GBP 500 million to GBP 600 million or around 6% growth per year. And it's worth pausing to note here actually, that while 6% would be the growth for a normal year, we all know that things have been far from normal recently. So I wouldn't be at all surprised if those growth rates prove to be higher after a period where so much has been on hold. That spend on new equipment means a corresponding demand for technology remarketing and recycling, which is the core business that Restore Technology is in. Now we're already the U.K.'s largest player, but we actually still only have 6% market share. And so an extremely fragmented market continues to represent an opportunity for us. It's also a market that's assured for the long term. And what I mean by that is that the demand for technology certainly isn't going away. Market dynamics such as increasing regulatory and governance pressures, security and data compliance and environmental responsibility only serve to drive more demand for technology and therefore, more demand for technology recycling. And so our position in the market continues to strengthen. I said that we're a business that's already transforming in capability and size and that I'd explain why that's important. Over the last 3 years, we've tripled in size. And the business is now operating at run rate revenues of more than GBP 30 million and growing. So we're a much larger business than we were even just 12 months ago at last year's Capital Markets Day. We're also a more profitable business. The benefits of scale have played a role in that, but so have the synergies and efficiencies that we've driven from integration. The additional scale has also brought benefits for our value proposition, and that has resulted in a strengthened services portfolio. We now provide secure and environmentally sustainable services across the technology life cycle. A portfolio that spans pre-life, mid-life and end-of-life enables us to capture opportunity at every stage of the technology life cycle: At the beginning of the life cycle, when technology assets are prepared and deployed; during the life cycle, when the assets need to be managed, updated or moved; and at the end of the life cycle, when they're decommissioned, remarketed, recycled or destroyed. This means that we can now address even more of the market opportunity that you see on these slides. The extended portfolio we now have has brought the added benefit of enabling us to engage with clients earlier, which in turn generates us more assets for end-of-life remarketing and recycling. So increased scale and capability has brought us benefit. It's also brought benefit to our business model as that scale and efficiency combines to drive stronger margins. As a U.K. business, with U.K. operations, we're now in 7 sites across the country with a national fleet serving more than 18,000 clients regularly, processing greater than 1.3 million assets securely and diverting tonnes of IT equipment from the waste stream every year. We're renowned for delivering to the highest standards and accreditations, which sets us apart and makes us the preferred choice in the market. As I've explained, all of this is really important when we consider that it's the volume of clients and the resulting volume of assets that is the fuel for our business model. We generate revenue from both collections from clients, the upstream, and from onward remarketing and recycling, the downstream. Around 40% of our end-of-life revenues comes from collections, which includes services such as cloud, data center relocations. The remaining 60% of the end-of-life revenue is generated through trade remarketing and e-commerce sales once the assets have been processed. These services attract some of our highest margins. So it goes about saying that both upstream client services and downstream customer services are key to our business model. At this point, it's probably also worth making mention of our plans to scale, digital and e-commerce. Digital platforms and e-commerce already play a key role in many aspects of our business, from tracking assets through the recycling process to resale of the assets at the end of the process, but it has the potential to do far more as we scale further and build capability. The investments we're planning will be focused on digitizing more of our processes and delivering an enhanced digital experience for our clients. We will also be extending the digital experience to our downstream customers, making it easier for those customers to also buy products through e-commerce and for us to optimize the resale price. So whether you are a mid-market client wanting to buy remarketed laptops for a new team or a large trade customer needing to provide hundreds of assets for a key project, Restore Technology will be the natural and preferred brand to choose. Hopefully, that explains the opportunity, the business and the commercial models that drive our performance. Before I wrap up, let me give you a flavor of how we'll be capitalizing on all of that to drive both organic growth and growth through acquisition in the years ahead. Firstly, in simple terms, it starts with our ambition. Our ambition, and I think pretty realistic ambition, is to triple the size of our business again over the next few years to become a GBP 100 million technology life cycle services company. To do that, we will be plumbing growth through all aspects of our business: sales through to operations. We will become even more focused on our client opportunity. We'll be targeting the acquisition of new clients and the growth of existing clients across both commercial and public sectors. We'll also be using digital and e-commerce to help us maximize our coverage and range of clients and do so profitably. This will keep those asset volumes that we talked about high and also maintain our strong margins. As well as expanding our direct client relationships, we'll also be extending our scale with the channel. This means we will complement the services of resellers with our own pre, mid- or end-of-life services as appropriate to the individual partner. We will also extend the services of technology companies and other types of partners such as leasing companies. These areas of focus combined will have us working with more clients and more partners in a way that will see us take share and outpace the market's 6% growth very achievably. The other major growth opportunity for us is to continue acquiring in the way that we have been. Over the last 3 years, we've made 9 acquisitions, 3 substantial acquisitions this year alone. These businesses have brought us great value and contributed significantly to the performance and resilience of our business, something that has become increasingly important as we've all faced the challenges that we have over the last 2 years. Our acquisition strategy is key to realizing our plan to triple our business in size again over the coming years. We know there are over 200 U.K. companies for us to consider, many of whom we've already engaged with. We have around 20 in discussion and about 10 being actively considered for offers in the next 3 months. When opportunities line up that are right for us, we act quickly. Those that we move forward with will further expand our scale, our capability and our coverage and are certain to result in skills, efficiencies and accelerated growth that we've seen to date. I trust that you can see now that this is a terrific business, which has really transformed in the last 18 months. We have a great opportunity with a growing but fragmented market, and we have exciting and bold plans to lead the U.K. life cycle services market and make a huge contribution to the performance of the group in the years ahead. So thank you. And I'd now like to hand over to Neil Ritchie. Neil?

Good afternoon. For those I've not met before, I'm Neil Ritchie, I'm CFO for the group. You've heard today the strategy for the business from Charles, Nigel, Mark and Athena. Now I'll turn to sharing the latest trading update before recapping on the strong financial foundations of the group and Restore's substantial investment capacity and its high acquisition growth potential. So looking at a summary of the trading update we issued this morning on the next slide, you'll see that we have provided a trading update for the 10 months to 31st of October. The summary from today's update is that the business continues to grow in line with our expectations. Our organic momentum is good, and our acquisitions are being well executed. In particular, I draw your attention to the updated revenue run rate, which based on the 3 months to the 31st of October, has increased to GBP 255 million. This is a 19% increase in scale over the pre-pandemic period. We have also reported that since our last trading update, we've acquired The Document Warehouse in Records Management. And this morning, we confirm that we've also acquired PS Solutions Limited, a small bolt-on acquisition for Restore Datashred. This takes our year-to-date acquisition investment total to GBP 84.8 million, which together provides a combined annual revenue of GBP 46 million and an EBITDA of around GBP 10 million before synergies. I think this shows the strength of our capital deployment this year and the significant transformation that you've heard from Charles and the MDs today. In terms of the business unit performance, Records Management continues to show consistent organic growth and is forecasting another year of net box growth of between 1% and 2%. The integration of the transformational acquisition of EDM by Restore Digital is progressing well with an annualized synergy of at least GBP 2.5 million identified and being delivered. In Datashred, the business most impacted by COVID-19, activity levels have continued to improve gradually and that business is currently at 80% of pre-COVID levels. In Restore Digital, our expansion has been rapid and demand is proving very strong for the services that this business provides. And finally, Harrow Green continues to be busy with strong regional demand and particularly high demand in London. Moving on, I wanted to pause and reflect on both the track record of consistent and profitable growth of the group and also consider the strong recovery that we are seeing. You can see the history of consistent growth on the chart and I've added the analyst consensus to show the predicted track out to 2023. And I would note the analyst forecast are essentially organic only and that these really supports our previously stated expectation of around 4% organic expansion per year. I've also highlighted the current run rate on revenue of GBP 255 million on this chart. And you can see how it'd be reasonable for this to translate into the analyst consensus for revenues of more than GBP 290 million by 2023. So as we stand today, the business is larger, with latest run rates of GBP 255 million; it has the opportunity of further COVID-19 repair, particularly in Datashred; and has substantial opportunity for acquisition growth and margin development, which I'll come on to shortly. Before I do that, I just wanted to reflect also and remind us of why this is such a great business today. First of all, the business has a very high proportion of fixed and highly contracted income. We work across the majority of FTSE 100 and have experience in operating in both private and public sectors. We have a balance of related but discrete businesses, and we don't have a particular sector exposure. This strong commercial platform generates strong free cash flows of more than GBP 30 million a year. And as such, with this strong cash flow and a strong balance sheet, we have substantial capacity to invest. On this next slide, I've set out our capacity to invest in the acquisition opportunity. The blue chart illustrates what we call our virtuous investment circle. Our annual cash flow generation is GBP 30 million more, as I've said, which over a 5-year period gives us GBP 150 million to invest from the cash generation of the business. Our strong profitability and balance sheet provides headroom in debt of GBP 150 million over a 5-year period, whilst maintaining modest leverage ratios of between 1.5x and 2x EBITDA. We can deploy this capital into highly attractive markets to acquire highly accretive businesses, realize substantial synergies that in turn generate more cash back into the cycle. So to summarize, over a 5-year period, the business can generate at least GBP 300 million of financing capacity from its operations and debt at reasonable leverage. In terms of capital deployment, the chart on this slide shows how this might be deployed across our sectors and the typical returns we might expect. The first row of the chart reminds us we have highly addressable markets with fragmentation, opportunity for market share growth and the opportunity to realize value and synergy from the combinations. The second row on this page sets out the typical pricing for acquisitions across the sectors. We typically pay between 1.5 and 3x revenue or 5x to 8x EBITDA. I've then translated that at the bottom of the page into potential returns, assuming average deployment across the business units. For example, with GBP 300 million of capital deployment it'd be reasonable to expect a return in revenues of GBP 167 million at margins of at least or better than generated today. So Charles talked about growing revenues to GBP 450 million to GBP 500 million. And you can see with consistent organic growth plus the acquisition opportunity across all the business units, we have a substantial opportunity and a plan to deliver on the ambitious goal. So summing up, we've navigated COVID-19 well. We're coming out of 2021 larger, stronger and growing. As we said on this final slide, the investment case is clear, and we think it's compelling. We have solid foundations today with long-term organic growth potential. We're #1 or #2 in the markets. We have high-quality customers with long-term relationships and high levels of customer satisfaction and retention. The business model is grounded in high levels of contracted and recurring revenues with attractive operating margins. And we have a strong acquisition opportunity with fragmented markets, market share opportunity and a track record in closing and integrating acquisitions with strong returns. All this builds to a business that has a competitive advantage through scale in sectors that are increasingly compliance-led, increasing the barriers to entry. And finally, we have a strong management team with a demonstrated delivery of results. So with that, I'll hand back to Charles. Thank you.

Thank you, Neil, and also Athena, Mark and Nigel for the detailed update on the growth trajectory of these business units. I hope the detailed plans we have been through gives you more insight as to the momentum in the business and our ability to deliver on the significant growth strategy for the company. Thank you for your time today.