Robert Walters plc (RBW.F) Q3 FY2025 Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to Robert Walters Q3 Trading Update Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the call over to David Bower, CFO of Robert Walters. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our Q3 2025 trading update. I'm David Bower, Chief Financial Officer. And here with me is Toby Fowlston, Chief Executive. As we begin, I'll make a few remarks regarding performance at the group level before Toby touches on trading in our service lines and the wider market backdrop. As ever, we'll then be happy to take any questions you may have. Unless otherwise stated, all net fee income percentage movements are in constant currency terms. Looking first at group trading during the third quarter. Net fee income was down 12% year-on-year, a slight sequential improvement compared to the second quarter and with fees in September down 9% year-on-year. As Toby will touch in more detail in a few moments, the overall group results continue to represent a blend of quite marked differences in performance across our geographic portfolio. In particular, we saw a notably better year-on-year performance in Asia Pacific, our largest regional segment by net fee income and an improvement in the U.K., whilst Northern Europe remained challenging. Furthermore, it's worth highlighting a slight contrast between our 2 largest service lines. In specialist recruitment, fees were down 10% year-on-year, a sequential improvement on the second quarter and indeed the first half. Meanwhile fees declined 22% in recruitment outsourcing. Whilst this is a sequential slowdown from the first half, it reflects the nonrenewal of certain client contracts with fees from continuing clients being more stable year-on-year. In terms of activity levels in specialist recruitment, interview volumes grew quarter-on-quarter, particularly in Asia Pacific and the U.K. Turning to Consider Group costs, headcount and productivity. Here, we are taking the right actions to drive a return to profitability in 2026. Over the quarter, our cost base reduced compared to the first half run rate to now sit around GBP 24 million per month. And we made further progress towards delivering at least GBP 10 million of annualized structural cost savings by 2027, particularly through positive steps on our finance function transformation. Group headcount as of 30 September reduced by 3% versus the half year position, with this rate of reduction mirroring both our fee earner and non-fee earner populations. Looking ahead, whilst we will continue to be highly selective in replacing natural attrition, we believe fee earner levels are broadly appropriate for the current market conditions. Meanwhile, work remains ongoing to relocate appropriate non-fee earner activities into our global business services hubs. We remain resolutely focused on the importance of fee earner productivity to our business model. And you will recall this is the most material of our 5 building blocks to our medium-term conversion rate target of 16% to 19%. As such, we were encouraged to see continued growth in overall productivity in terms of group net fee income per fee earner, which was up 7% year-on-year in the third quarter. Within this, in our specialist recruitment service line, it was also pleasing to see volume productivity in terms of perm placements per perm fee earner up 8% year-on-year. Sustaining these improved productivity improvements is a key focus for our teams as we close out the year and look ahead to 2026. Turning briefly to the balance sheet. We closed the third quarter with net cash of around GBP 27 million. As communicated at the half year results in July, the Board will review the potential to reinstate capital returns to shareholders at the time of our full year results in March 2026. So with that said, I'll now hand you over to Toby to take you through trading in our segments and the wider market backdrop.

Thanks, David. Good morning, everyone. I'll make a few comments on our specialist recruitment service line in our 4 regions before more briefly turning to Recruitment Outsourcing and Talent Advisory. Looking first at Asia Pacific specialist recruitment, net fee income was flat year-on-year, a clear improvement versus quarter 2 in the first half. This better performance was broad-based. Japan was down 2% with continued good trading in temp, whilst we saw further stabilization in temp volumes in both Australia and New Zealand with total net fees down 4% and 8%, respectively, in those markets. Meanwhile, Southeast Asia grew 1%, underpinned by Malaysia. Now turning to look at Europe. And as David mentioned a few moments ago, conditions here remain challenging. In France, where a new political uncertainty is, of course, well publicized, we saw a sequential slowdown compared to the first half with quarter fees down -- sorry, with quarter 3 fees down 24%. We have recently put a new leader in our French business and are pleased with the early action that they've taken to drive an improvement in performance. The Netherlands continue to navigate short-term turbulence from the enforcement of self-employment legislation and Belgium remain challenging. Looking at external market indicators, Spain is a relative bright spot in Europe, and you will recall, we installed a new leader a year ago, and our actions to drive better performance in that business continue and the fees were up 1% year-on-year. Turning to the U.K. Here, our specialist recruitment service line was up 6% on the prior year, the first quarter of year-on-year growth since the end of 2022. The good performance was led by London with fees up 23% year-on-year, and both perm and temp fees grew, and there were notably strong performances in our core specialisms of accounting and financial services. Conditions remain more muted in the regions. However, fees were broadly flat year-on-year, excluding the impact of office closures and the absolute level of quarterly fees has been stable through 2025 to date. In Rest of the World, specialist recruitment fees were down 26% year-on-year or 18%, excluding the impact of office closures. Our largest market, the Middle East, was down 10% year-on-year. However, in absolute terms, fees were flat to slightly up for the fourth consecutive quarter. In the Americas, where fees were down 43% year-on-year, we continue with corrective actions to improve our performance. And just as a reminder, Rest of the World accounts for just 5% of our specialist recruitment net fee income. Turning to Recruitment Outsourcing. Fees were down 22% year-on-year, behind where we tracked in quarter 2. And as David mentioned earlier, this was driven by the nonrenewal of certain clients, which in quarter 3 annualized, where we had fee contribution from those clients last year. Excluding the impact of this, fee income was more stable year-on-year, which is where the service line has been trending so far this year. We've made real progress in improving our customer proposition in outsourcing, and this was underlined by the launch of an expansion of a perm volume hiring partnership with an existing customer shortly after the quarter end. And I want to congratulate all of our colleagues involved for that significant win for our business. In Talent Advisory, where we support organizations through the provision of market intelligence and talent development advisory services, we continue to be encouraged by the market opportunity as seen through our lead flow. This provides us with great momentum as we progress through the fourth quarter. So as we conclude then, just a few words on how we see the market backdrop. As seen from our trading, there was clear improvement in a number of our Asia Pacific markets and a return to growth in U.K. recruitment. However, with the exception of Spain, the larger European markets remain challenging. There are signs of external hiring market indicators, which point to sustained improvement in a select number of hiring markets, though overall conditions globally remain fragile. And as such, our planning assumption continues to be that any recovery in hiring markets will develop very gradually. That being said, we continue to execute against our disciplined entrepreneurialism strategy and are highly focused on continuing to take the right actions to position the business strongly. And on that note, we'd now be very happy to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] We will now take our first question from Tom Callan of Investec.

Just one for me, please. Clearly, good to see that improvement in perm placements per consultant per month year-on-year up 8%. I just wondered if you could give us a bit more color on what drove that improvement specifically and also what the Q-on-Q movement was and how you also see that metric potentially improving further from here with all the back-office improvements and stuff that you're currently undertaking, including making use of AI?

Tom, I'll take that. Yes, absolutely. I mean, we're pleased with the progress. I think fundamentally, it reflects the operational focus that we're insisting on from all of our teams. And that's been driven through all of the monthly reviews that myself and David are doing them. And notwithstanding a lot of our markets, we are anywhere between 1%, 2% or 3% of the overall market share. So the market share opportunity is significant. Quarter-on-quarter, our net fee income per fee earner was up 7%. So we're seeing good sequential momentum there. In terms of, I guess, where we see it going, it's probably just worth reminding us that in terms of the 16% to 19% conversion rate, which we looked at as a medium-term target that we set, the midpoint of that range only assumes volume productivity of about 1 perm placement per fee per month. And that's mainly just in line with the historical average pre-COVID, and it's about 9% above the 0.92 that we're at in quarter 3. So in terms of ambition beyond that, as you know, during the '21, '22 hiring boom, we were doing near 1.3 per placement per fee. But in a way, that probably wasn't sustainable. So I think medium term and when we're back in the mid-cycle from a point of view of end markets with our initiatives with Zenith and AI improvements, this should give us greater capacity to deliver that sort of productivity in a much more sustainable way.

And we'll now take our next question from Sanjay of Premier Liberum.

A couple of questions from me. First one on outsourcing, where you've seen a couple of losses, but what sounds like a good win. If we go back to the CMD and the kind of actions you were taking to improve the business operationally, can you just give us an idea of where you are on that track? And the second question on the threat of AI in terms of the jobs market. Can you give us any indications in terms of your exposure to entry-level jobs?

Sajay, I'll take the -- it's Toby. I'll take the outsourcing point and then David can touch on the AI question. But when I go back on outsourcing maybe 2 years ago and what we have progressed over that time, obviously, we've had a change in leadership, as you know. We really rightsized the various product offerings. There were more than 15 different product offerings. So we've dramatically reduced that. We've looked very closely at what we see as being long-term sustainable, profitable partnerships. So we feel like we have that business in much more better shape than perhaps previously. So the demand is still there from clients. We're very excited about the new win, and that's just been launched. So we'd start to expect to see some material gains from that during the course of 2026 and 2027.

Sanjay, It's David. Yes. So with regards to AI, I think it's probably worth distinguishing between sort of like when we talk to our clients, the SMEs and larger sort of global enterprises, the vast majority of hiring is done by SMEs. And they are currently because they haven't got such deep pockets and the technology necessarily within them, they're probably using it less than the global enterprises. So we hear a lot about it, but that's coming really from the global voices of the big enterprises. The book of hiring is done by SMEs. That said, we're not complacent. There's clearly a lot going on. We're seeing AI enabling people to apply for a lot of jobs simultaneously often while they sleep. But equally, that means that our clients are inundated with applications. So we're seeing a significant requirement for us to help them navigate all those CVs and all those applications. And then specifically about sort of the entry-level jobs, our business is sort of core sort of white-collar professional qualified individuals. So we're not really operating at that sort of entry-level role. And therefore, to the extent that AI is taking those entry-level roles, that's not a significant impact on us at this stage. So we're not complacent, but for now, we're not seeing it as a big impact on our business. And certainly, where we are in the cycle, it feels much more of a confidence for clients and candidates in the macro cycle than a structural shift from AI at this point.

There are no further questions in queue. I will now hand it back to the management team for closing remarks.

Thank you. Well, thanks, everybody, for joining this morning and look forward to speaking to you in early January with our Q4 trading update. Have a good day.