Robert Walters plc ($RWA)

Good morning, and welcome to Robert Walters' Full Year Results 2025 presentation. [Operator Instructions] And I'd like to hand over to Toby Fowlston. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our full year results presentation webcast. I'm Toby Fowlston, Chief Executive, Robert Walters, and I'm joined here in London today by David Bower, our CFO. This is the third set of full year results Dave and I are delivering as a management team, and there's no question that 2025 was another challenging year. It's demanded a lot from people right across our business, but as a management team, we are clear that our people have responded well to that challenge. You will leave today's presentation with a clearer sense of how we've continued to implement self-help measures and also how we focused on ensuring balance sheet strength. Along with the market opportunity that remains significant and early signs of recovery in select markets, we continue to have high conviction in the opportunity ahead of us. Now turning to the agenda today, I'll hand over to David shortly to walk through the 2025 financials and an update on our actions regarding the balance sheet. I will then share more of our thinking on why, despite the tough backdrop over the last few years, we continue to be encouraged about the market opportunity ahead of us and also cautiously optimistic about the early signs of recovery in certain markets during the second half of 2025. I will then update you with more detail on why we believe we have an operationally stronger business today, before I offer an insight into how we're thinking about the changing world of work. We'll be sure to leave time at the end to open up for questions. But as we begin, let me highlight our key messages for today. Firstly, Robert Walters continues to play in a significant market with long-term growth drivers, and we have positioned the business over the last 2 years, in particular, to serve these markets as well as possible. Secondly, markets have, of course, been challenging for much of the last 3 years. We, therefore, continue to enact self-help measures on our cost base and apply a sharp focus on balance sheet strength to position us robustly in the face of still overall volatile markets. Thirdly, whilst our markets are cyclical in nature, there is growing evidence that certain hiring markets are in the early stages of recovery. Fourthly, we've made good progress becoming operationally stronger over the last 2 years. We are organized into 4 service lines that cater for the full suite of solutions needed by hiring organizations and we remain obsessively focused on the key drivers of business performance that are critical to delivering our medium-term targets. And lastly, whilst the pace of change in the world of work will likely continue to accelerate, not least due to artificial intelligence, we feel positive about the opportunities that will present for our fundamentally relationship-based technology-enabled model, and particularly in the mid- to senior salary range in which we operate. So I'll hand over to David now for a review of our 2025 financial performance and an update on balance sheet actions.

Thanks, Toby, and good morning, everyone. I'll turn first to a summary of our 2025 financial performance. For the turbulent backdrop for global trade policy, particularly at the start of Q2, with geopolitical tensions and still relatively tight monetary policy, some 2-plus years to [ address ] peak to the top of the previous timing cycle, client and candidate sentiment remained cautious throughout 2025. This impacted our net fee income, which declined 14% year-on-year in constant currency terms, a reduction of GBP 47 million. The continued focus we have applied to all elements of our cost base as well as progress on our initiatives to achieve material annualized structural cost savings to fully benefit the P&L in 2027, saw us offset over half of that fee income impact. However, we continue to be mindful of ensuring our core fee earning platform remains strong, and hence, not all of the fee income reduction was offset. Included in operating costs were redundancy costs of GBP 4.4 million taken above the line and relates to actions which will help further position the business to execute to a higher level. In summary, therefore, we reported an operating loss for the year of GBP 14.9 million and a loss before tax of GBP 19.6 million. The Board was unanimously of the view not to propose a final dividend further to its decision earlier in the year not to declare interim dividend, and showing as a stronger balance sheet as possible to enable the group to execute its operational and strategic objectives in the near term was top of mind. And the Board's view was it was best supported by a nil distribution. So let's now turn to consider our cost actions in 2025. As you can see, 3/4 of our operating cost base relates to people in 2025 and efficiencies here drove the majority of the GBP 27 million reduction in operating costs. The average group headcount reduced by 15% year-on-year. This mostly drove the GBP 21 million reduction in fixed staff costs, whilst we also saw cost reductions from structural actions across our business partner functions. We again saw lower variable compensation, consistent with the trading result, but we're pleased to still appropriately reward those of our fee earning teams that met or indeed exceeded their team-based targets for the year. We continue to control non-staff costs tightly through 2025, with this portion of the cost base falling by GBP 4 million. In the early months of 2026, we've continued to apply scrutiny in this area with all our teams focused on ensuring spend is either directly fee-generating, ultimately cost reducing or ensures our regulatory compliance. Our 2025 actions meant we exited the year with a monthly cost base run rate below GBP 24 million. And so far in 2026, we've seen this trend lower still. Let's turn now to look at the profile of cash in 2025 and our balance sheet actions more widely. There was negative free cash flow of GBP 14.6 million over the year. When combined with the payment of 2024's final dividend in May 2025, this meant net cash broadly halving versus the 2024 closing position. So well below the GBP 50 million target of our capital allocation policy. I would note the following. Firstly, our GBP 50 million target was chosen with the top of the cycle in mind. With a downturn that has now been 3 years in duration, the efficacy of that is brought out with the balance sheet remaining in a supportive position for the business. Secondly, and a related point, the 2025 closing net cash position remains sufficient to run the business with, for instance, the working capital required on the temp book not at the peak level seen in the post-COVID surge. That said, and with the precise timing when the majority of hiring markets will move back into growth still uncertain, there has been a real focus throughout the business while further optimizing cash. In particular, whilst the sufficiency of our cash resources across the group remains solid, one perhaps less well understood element of our capital structure is that we operate with a consistent net debt position in the U.K. compared to our overseas markets, which retained positive cash reserves. Some of the key drivers of this U.K. position are brought out in the two charts on the bottom of the slide. Firstly, with the U.K. states, our corporate center contributing to losses in recent years, as shown on the left-hand chart, and secondly, the fact that the group invoiced discount facility could only be accessed by the U.K. businesses, and has therefore never been more than 50% utilized at the year-end date, as shown on the right-hand chart. Clearly, this financing does not give the flexibility required for our international business mix, where, in essence, we had to retain sufficient overseas cash reserves to fully fund the local working capital requirements across our international markets. We're therefore working on the introduction of local financing facilities in certain markets which will reduce the reliance on the U.K. to provide funding across the whole group. And in addition, we are also stepping up our internal measures to optimize our cash holdings. As a Board, we remain mindful of the importance of a strong balance sheet that enables the execution of the group's priorities, both the near-term operational priorities and also the medium-term strategic objectives, where the opportunity set we have ahead of us remain significant. So I'll now hand you back to Toby to update you on how we view these.

Thanks, David. Next month, we'll mark 3 years with me serving the role of Chief Executive. Now the group today looks very different to back then. We have reorganized our business to better serve our markets with the appropriate solutions and we are clearer than ever that this market opportunity remains significant. Now we bring that out on this slide. In aggregate, we size our addressable market at over GBP 60 billion in net fee income terms. We, of course, as you know, have a strong track record in perm specialist recruitment, which remains our single largest market opportunity. In addition, though, we have been developing Outsourcing and launched Consultancy and Talent Advisory to enable us to go to market as a total talent solutions provider. We've been focused about the segments of the Talent Solutions market in which we want to play and where we have a right to win. Now we set out the key evidence on how we think about capturing the market opportunity on this slide, thinking first about that opportunity in perm. And whilst we believe the direction of travel for many hiring organizations will be towards greater flexibility and therefore, possibly a little less perm in their overall workforce mix, it will likely continue to be the key engine of our group for years to come. The global market for hiring professionals on a permanent basis is highly fragmented, with staffing industry analysts quantifying just a 7% share for the top 10 players, of which we are a part. Though the medium-term outlook for the market overall remains cyclical, we see a clear opportunity to grow share in perm given the highly fragmented landscape. In terms of our Specialist Recruitment business as a whole, comprising both perm and temp, over 70% of net fees are derived from 8 hiring markets, which are shown on the slide. Whilst we continue to be excited about the long-term opportunities we have in many markets globally, we're naturally focusing resource and attention on these 8. Now thinking about our future addressable market, our initial estimate is that an additional market opportunity of at least GBP 10 billion exists in Consultancy and Talent Advisory, broadly evenly split between the two. And I just want to share a few words on both of these. Firstly, Talent Advisory. We launched this business 2 years ago. It is in the early stages of development, but the relevance to clients has been proven, not least seen in 2025 net fees almost doubling on the prior year. We're currently focused on improving operating model here, such as the business can be scaled as efficiently as possible, and I'll share more detail on that shortly. Secondly, we have our Consultancy offering. This was launched in 2022, solely in the U.K. and solely to clients of our Recruitment Outsourcing business. Given the international reach of our client base, we see a clear opportunity to grow the U.K. and offer Consultancy in markets outside of the U.K. as well. So our market opportunity is significant, and we have a clear and focused strategy we are following to deliver it. And that strategy is summarized on this slide, and it really comes down to two organic growth features and the five building blocks of operational improvement and margin rebuild and four core strategic enablers, which are in blue at the bottom of the slide. I'll leave you to study it in more detail later on. However, you will become very familiar with it as we'll keep returning to it every 6 months to update you on how we're progressing the delivery. At the beginning of the presentation, I mentioned that we feel cautiously optimistic about the early signs of recovery in certain hiring markets, particularly over the second half of 2025. So let's turn to look at that now. You'll remember the list of 8 specialist recruitment markets where we're focusing resource and attention given their materiality to our business. In three of those, the U.K., Spain and New Zealand, we feel the evidence points to market recovery being on an increasingly firmer footing. First, consider the very recent performance in the long-run context, as shown on the top row of charts on the slide. Here, for the specialist recruitment businesses in each of those three markets, we've shown our own long-run trading performance trends, benchmarked to the 12-month period ending June 2019. This gives a baseline free from the COVID trough and the post-COVID surge. In the context of persistent decline since peaking in the 2022 calendar year, stabilization and inflection in our trading performance recently looks meaningful. This potential inflection compared to history is, of course, also showed up in our nearer-term performance trends, as you can see in the charts on the bottom row, with these markets returning to positive year-on-year net fees growth territory as the second half of 2025 progressed. It has also been pleasing to see growth trends continuing in these three markets over the first 2 months of 2026. It's important to say that we believe the green shoots of stabilization and recovery are apparent at the whole industry level in these markets also, as brought out on this slide. Our view is that whilst not a completely perfect indicator, job vacancies are the best proxy for labor demand. The charts on the top row show how job vacancies have trended in each of the U.K., Spain, New Zealand. And again, that theme of stabilization is well brought out. Now these signs of inflection also underscore our view that whilst much longer than any downturn really seen before, the causes of the weaker hiring market for the last 3 years remain largely cyclical in nature. And as a fund manager put it just a few weeks ago following our quarter 4 trading update, if something structural was the overwhelming course, you'd expect the broad shape and quantum of trading performance to be more or less the same everywhere, but it is not. And you see that clearly in the chart on the bottom left, where for comparison, we show our trading performance for our three most material Northern European markets sat at the end of 2025 versus the pre-COVID baseline, and stabilization has not yet shown up here. So just taking a step back to consider how our broad growth is becoming in the Specialist Recruitment portfolio overall, 2025 saw an improvement in the second half compared to the first, with 1/5 of the portfolio in growth in the second half, double the level of the first half. Again, encouragingly, we've seen this broaden out a little more in the first 2 months of 2026. So what does all this mean for the year ahead? As noted in our results statement, trading over the first 2 months of the year has been in line with the Board's expectations, albeit in what tends to be the seasonally lighter part of the year. We are cautiously optimistic that recovery is increasingly well trenched in the U.K., Spain and New Zealand. However, this still represents a minority of the portfolio with conditions in Northern Europe, in particular, remaining comparatively muted. Overall, we are mindful of the backdrop for hiring markets globally, which remains volatile. Therefore, the Board's planning assumption remains for 2026 group net fees to be slightly below 2025 as guided at the time of our quarter 4 trading update in January. And on this slide, we've also summarized various points of more technical guidance, which I trust are clear. Now many of our strategic actions over the last couple of years have been about ensuring that as the market becomes more supportive, we have an operationally strengthened business able to capitalize as much as possible. And we absolutely believe we've made good progress on this over the last year with the business today more consistently executing at the level required. So let's now turn to look at that in a bit more detail. Following our action midway through 2024, where we consolidated all our services behind the single Robert Walters brand, those services are now easier for our clients to access. So let me explain why I believe the business is stronger today, spotlighting each of our four businesses. Starting with Recruitment Outsourcing, which is on a much sounder operational and commercial footing today than it was 3 years ago. Our key actions over the last few years have been to reduce our cost to serve, focused our product set in the areas where we have truly differentiated expertise and adopt a more robust stance on pricing at renewal. All of this as an underpin for returning the business to profitability. With regards to the latter, essentially tougher negotiating of renewal on contracts that weren't working for us, that has necessarily meant some client contracts have not been renewed. And that dynamic was a key driver of our 2025 headline trading performance, with net fees down 15% in reported terms. But this approach has enabled us to focus more on our core profitable return clients, and the trading performance with these clients was much more resilient with net fees down just 5%. And with the business exiting 2025 with 95% of net fees derived from these retained clients, that gives a further base than we've had in recent years. Importantly, though, the actions we've taken have enabled us to start competing strongly for new business, and it was really encouraging to see the fruit of that towards the latter part of the year in an expanded perm volume hiring partnership with a large enterprise Asian financial institution. Historically, we've been supporting that client with their perm hiring needs in the Asia region only, but the expansion of the contract will mean servicing their hiring needs globally, tripling annual contractual hiring volumes to go from hundreds each year to thousands. And whilst we continue to see the annualized impact of lost clients, particularly through the first half, the team have a good pipeline of opportunities they are going after with energy. I want to turn now to our less -- two less mature service lines Insolvency and Talent Advisory. Firstly, Talent Advisory. So as a reminder, this service line supports the growth of organizations through provision of talent market intelligence, talent development and future of work consultancy. As I mentioned earlier, we are refining the operating model so that we can scale the business as efficiently as possible. And a really clear example of this is in lead flow management. As you can see from the chart on the left-hand side, we generate brand new leads for our Talent Advisory offering through three main sources: Firstly, internal referrals from other service lines in the group; secondly, our own marketing, predominantly by our digital channels; and thirdly, direct sales by our regional client engagement lease. The balance of other reflects clients currently on subscriptions and therefore, not brand-new in the same way. And the most valuable source of leads in terms of net fees continues to be internal referrals and particularly those in the Specialist Recruitment business. Our recruiters are talking every day to the thousands of clients we work with, continually uncovering their talent challenges. This clearly highlights the rationale for being a total talent solutions provider. That said, though, we were finding the range of quality of those leads could be quite broad, meaning some inefficiencies for Talent Advisory colleagues in having to triage leads more than was optimal. So to remedy this, we focus on how to improve the lead qualification process, essentially all the necessary steps to making sure we're focused on the highest quality opportunities. A big part of getting it right begins at the top of the funnel. And this looks like making sure that colleagues in other areas of the business have a sufficiently clear understanding of the Talent Advisory service offering, so that they can recognize the key buying signals in conversations with clients and then help their Talent Advisory colleagues make an assessment of buying intent. A recent highlight here was our Global Collaboration Day last month, which saw our people connect with over 4,000 clients on one day, securing over 1,500 future client meetings in the process. And hopefully, the photo on the slide of our colleagues in Shanghai on the day helps give you a sense of how our teams really came together in service of our clients. Now of course, we have more to do to perfect the Talent Advisory operating model, but we've learned a huge amount over the last year. And as you can see from the slide, our efforts continue to support good performance in the conversion of client proposals to contracted projects. Turning to our Consultancy offering, which meets the flexible hiring needs of our clients, often in technology, by deploying our own permanently employed skilled consultants into their organizations. Our actions have continued to drive positive momentum in all the key metrics for this business. 2025 saw a 25% year-on-year increase in average consultant volumes. Bench costs already low in '24, fell further in '25. Our consultants became more embedded with clients with the average assignment tenure more than doubling year-on-year. And putting all of this together and with trading strong, net fees overall were up 20% and net fees per consultant grew by 12%. So as commented earlier when speaking about the market opportunity, since launch, we have operated Consultancy solely in the U.K., but there was a clear opportunity to offer in other markets, not least because our clients with their global footprint are asking for it. The necessary first step is increasing awareness of the Consultancy offering and hence, we've broken it out more formally as a full service line in our marketing. Now Consultancy accounted for around 2% of group net fees in '25, but it is growing well, and it taps into some of the key megatrends such as talent shortages that will continue to shape the world of professional work for many years yet. Now let's complete our view of our strength in total talent solutions offering by looking at Specialist Recruitment. This was 83% of group net fees in 2025, and therefore, our operational improvements here will likely move the needle the most for the group as a whole over the short term. Moving to fee earner productivity. As you can see from the chart, volume productivity represented by perm placements per perm fee and per month has begun trending positively year-on-year. And this is clearly where we need to be. However, given placement volumes fell for a third year in a row in 2025, the improved volume productivity in the second half was really about keeping the decline in placement volumes at a level slightly better than the decline in fee earner headcount. And as we move through 2026, with fewer headcount across the group broadly in the right place, we're seeking to improve the quality of that volume productivity growth, driving positive growth in placement volumes on the existing headcount. And we have markets that are already doing this, with year-on-year growth in quarter 4 volume productivity, underpinned by placement volume growth in the U.K. and Spain for instance. The improved position on volume productivity was also helped by rationalization of the number of low billing senior managers. The message is very clear. Those who aspire to lead teams of fee earners must lead by example when it comes to billing. The second area to touch on where we're executing on a higher level than a year ago is our portfolio management. Now as a reminder, we use our 4-box model, which you can see on the right-hand side of the slide, to drive how we think and act about 28 countries in which we offer specialist recruitment. In 2025, our portfolio actions were focused on the left-hand side of the grid. And at the bottom left, we concluded that a rational path to a more competitive position was not open to us in Brazil and Canada and hence, we closed our operations in those countries. In the top left, a couple of examples to give a bit more flavor. In the U.S.A., we consolidated our footprint around two hubs, the East Coast and Texas in order to further optimize our internal controllables and accelerate that business towards profitability. In Spain, the leader there, externally recruited to head up our Southern European region, and the second half of '24 has refocused performance around the recruitment sales funnel. And this has begun to drive a more detailed and rigorous approach by our fee earners on the levels of activity required at each stage of the funnel in order to attain our targeted volume productivity. The overall market in Spain is definitely supportive, but our controllables are also much improved to ensure we're taking advantage. And it's worth noting that from time to time, we will, of course, need to show up in our internal controllables in markets that have historically sat in the top right box. A good example here is Japan, where as we noted at our quarter 4 trading update, we've implemented actions to improve our performance in perm. This clearly remains a key area of focus with slightly better trading in January and February, albeit still early in the year. So with the time we have left, I just want to turn to look at how we're thinking about technologically driven change in the world of work. The length of the downturn in hiring markets witnessed over the last 3 years has more recently given rise to a debate about whether it's due to structural or cyclical factors. Our view, clearly informed by much of what we've shared already today, is that the downturn remains largely a cyclical one. That said, we are not complacent about the likely pace of change in how professional work is done in the future. And we're also engaging with the subject of how hiring for professional work may need to evolve as a result. Now of course, AI is the key driver of change right now with some of the very recent advances in the capability of agentic tools, in particular, underlining this. And whilst much has already been said by others on the topic, we just wanted to very briefly set out how we're approaching this whole area with the changing world of work. On speaking to clients regularly, our view is that though the pace of change in the world of work continues to accelerate, we feel positive about the opportunities that will present for our relationship-based technology-enabled business model. And why do I say that? Well, I say it because we believe the professional work will ultimately continue to have human relationships at its core, and that's what we're hearing from our clients. The AI revolution, whatever that looks like precisely will need AI conversant people with crucially uniquely human skills to deliver it. This is also reflected in objections of organizations like the World Economic Forum who estimate that by 2030, there will be net job creation of 78 million roles due to AI. And we're also beginning to see it in the data right now, with Indeed recording a marked increase in the proportion of roles on their platform mentioning AI in the job description, as you can see from the chart on the middle of the slide. So whilst from a low base, it is very noticeable in the context of the last 6 years, and as an example, if you've not heard, of a forward deployed engineer [ before ], and you're interested in how AI adoption in the world of work might unfold, it's to be successful, I'm fairly certain that by the end of this year, you almost certainly will have heard of that [indiscernible]. So our belief is that professional work will ultimately continue to have human relationships at its core and that's become even more true, the further along the seniority spectrum you go. The ability here to communicate with impact and lead with clarity and empathy and collaborate with others as well as share resilience and adaptability of what truly sets the best talent apart. Skills that at least for now and probably forever, can't be reduced just to hard and fast rules that a machine can learn. Our market position, particularly the mid- to senior end of the spectrum, where we operate, will continue to mean we have a vital role to play in organizations finding the professional talent they need to thrive. Now salary levels are obviously a good guide for that and looking at our U.K. recruitment business, in 2025, the average salary for all of our perm placements was GBP 71,000 and this rises to GBP 85,000, if looking at just London, which is almost 60% of our U.K. recruitment business. So we are not complacent about the likely pace of change in the world of professional work, and we are also engaging with the subject of our hiring for professional work may need to evolve as a result. Now we do not pretend to know the future with certainty. We suspect a wider range of outcomes as possible than is often acknowledged. As an example and certainly what we hear from clients regularly is that AI has clearly enabled an incredible boom in volume, particularly on the candidate side of hiring markets in the form of a huge increase in job applications for vacancy, which many hiring organizations are now having to deal with. And what we continue to hear is that clients have a desire to shift towards reintroducing more rather than less human input into the process to better get at the real truth. On the candidate side and perhaps more certainly entry level of professional work where we don't particularly play, we sense a similar desire. Now admittedly, how that plays out remains a matter of debate, and what we're more sure of, though, is that nonautomated human skills generally become more, not less important, in an AI-enabled future for professional work. And we're sure the best way to test those unique human skills for organizational fit remains trusted advisers who really and deeply know their clients and their candidates, human relationships and deep trust. Now AI will continue to benefit us as an organization, has already been since 2023, where we began experimenting and validating use cases for large language models. And this scaled more widely across the business in '24 and freed up over 10,000 hours of fee earners' time in the quicker generation job adverts as well as a prompt library to support everybody's activities such as candidate outreach. So looking ahead, we are proceeding with a thoughtful, open mind, critically guided by the lens of what supports quality relationships for our fee earners with their clients and candidates. So in conclusion, 2025 was another challenging year, but it was a year in which we focused our strategy, took difficult decisions and moved to execute with greater consistency than before. In the face of the third year of tough trading conditions, we enacted self-help measures and took actions with balance sheet strength in mind. The market opportunity that remains ahead of us is significant with our total talent solutions offering, placing us strongly to convert this opportunity over the medium term. And though we continue to anticipate near-term caution in our markets, growth is becoming more broad-based, and the long-term outlook remains attractive. Thanks to everybody for listening. And David and I'm are happy now to take any of your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question this morning is coming from Thomas Callan of Investec.

Just two questions for me, please. So firstly, just on Outsourcing. You're clearly -- encouraging that you're moving away from lower return contracts, such as the FS 1 in APAC that didn't renew during the year. I just wondered if you could give us a bit of color as to the shape and the extent of the pipeline of opportunities you have in that specific division as things currently stand? And then just on volume productivity as well. Clearly, the U.K. delivered a strong performance there in '25, placements up 11%. I just wondered what lessons, if any, can be learned from that sales funnel focus with respect to parts of Europe and APAC, where volumes are still currently in negative territory?

Thanks, Tom. I'll answer both of those. So just on the outsourcing question, yes, look, we feel good about state of the pipeline. There's plenty of activity happening. It's a mix really of brand-new opportunities but then some good potential expansions as well, which, as I referenced before, is what we launched in quarter 4 with the large Asian financial institution as well. So overall, good pipeline. I mean, we're thinking in terms of holding the top line broadly flat in 2026 for Outsourcing versus '25 given we still have, as I've touched on those nonrenewing contracts and the annualization of that playing through. So continue to remain absolutely focused on returning Outsourcing to profitable growth. Just on the PPH, the placements per fee earner per month in the U.K. and the sales funnel. I mean, basically, I think the lesson we've learned is unsurprisingly is the sales funnel focus absolutely works. It's something that we have really got behind in the business, really driving those productivity improvements that are absolutely critical to our model in the right way, of course. Notwithstanding, we know macro remains volatile. We know, obviously, there's continued caution with some of the clients. I think certainly in the U.K., people -- my sense is that people are sort of starting potentially to move on, cost of living has gone up. People recognize this might need a slightly higher salary. So we are starting to see some of that movement. You saw the REC figures recently as well, and they came out this week. So just much more focused conversations, much more focused around the right productivity -- sorry, the right activity leading to obviously the right outcomes. So really happy to see that in the U.K. and obviously, we continue to push that in other parts of the business as well.

We'll now go to Sanjay Vidyarthi of Panmure Liberum.

Just following up on the U.K. I mean it feels like even if the market is stabilizing that you're probably outperforming the market quite significantly, taking account of what some of the peers have been saying as well. I mean how much of that is about sectoral exposure and any shifts you've made there? And do you think you are taking market share? Or are you seeing some capacity maybe putting out of the market?

Yes, I'll take that. I think it's a little bit of market and a little bit of self-help. I think on the self-help side, sort of what I touched on a minute ago to Tom's question and that sales funnel. I think on the market side, I mean, we had growth year-on-year, quarter 3, quarter 4. We've got obviously a good team in the U.K. It's well managed. I think U.K. labor demand has definitely been stabilizing since late spring '25. We've had obviously the REC data out this week. I think perm placements index is at the lowest rate of contraction since March '23. So despite of the headlines, there are some signs of positivity, also I think there's been a bit of consolidation. I think there's -- the really change into the recruitment market is not a hard one, but the ability to scale is obviously a lot more challenging. And I think my sense is that talking to people, obviously, things have changed in the U.K. I think this year alone, I was reading there's about 1.8 million mortgage holders. They were due to roll off fixed rate products in 2026. So if you think about that, the majority of those are rolling off a 5-year fixed rate, which when secured in '21 would have been when interest rates were at rock bottom. So I get a sense people are sort of not going to sit around and they're going to make moves now, particularly if they're anticipating a greater sort of living costs as well. So I think it's -- as I said, it's a mixture of things, a bit of market and a bit of self-help.

Okay. Understood. And just following up on Japan, where I guess perhaps you've been underperforming the market slightly and the self-help is starting to come through. Can you talk a little bit exactly how that sales funnel is kind of manifesting itself? Are you looking to broaden out your client base? Or is this about pushing harder with the existing clients?

It's a bit of both. I'd break Japan into two parts. So our temp business is performing very, very well in Japan. As you heard from us in our quarter 4 trading performance, perm is where we perhaps had a bit more of a challenge. Now I think we're directionally and it is early days, a bit more positivity going to this year, but we've had to step back and recognize as more competition, candidate scarcity is increased in Japan. So that ability isn't really a job flow issue. It's more the ability to have the strength of relationship with clients and candidates in a market where most candidates are getting 4 or 5 job offers. And the number of job vacancies is about 1.7, 1.8 per candidate in Japan. So that's probably one of the highest levels we've seen. So yes, we've got a broad range of clients. We're going to continue to do more of those clients, always looking to bring in new client mixes. And that sales funnel is really looking at the core components which, if done properly, ends up in a better conversion of interviews to placements.

[Operator Instructions] We will now go to Steve Woolf of Deutsche Bank.

Thanks for the detail in the pack today. It's really a -- description is really helpful. Just a couple for me on my side, just to delve a little bit more deeper into the Consultancy business and what the services they're offering there. Is it sort of construction of your companies, your labor force maybe needs over the next sort of 4 to 5 years, is that the element that they're going from? Secondly, just a return to that, the U.K. and the strength of those recovery and those indicators. Are there -- have the roles changed, particularly at all with that? I'm obviously conscious of London being such a financial district, so just any thoughts you can add to the U.K. recovery. And then thirdly, you've exited a couple of the rest of world markets. I wonder whether there were any others that might be on the cusp or in your thoughts at this point? Are there any thoughts you can give around that? And then finally, just regarding the AI and the tech and the augmented human relationships, et cetera. Where are you, tech-wise within the business? I have noticed, obviously, CapEx is down this year. So just to get a sense of where your investment is at this point for that CapEx.

No problem. Steve, I'll take the Consultancy and U.K. question. I'll let David say a few words on Rest of World and the AI tech point and CapEx. So on Consultancy, I mean, look, really, it's about greater choice to clients. I think clients -- what we're hearing from clients at the moment is their challenges are far more complicated, right, than they've been in years gone by. We're seeing clearly skill shortages particularly with the AI advent and an acceleration of technology. So that service essentially enables us to go into, and I touched on the U.K. really, we used our outsourcing clients as our -- sort of our entry point in because we're sat on site with those clients. We really know them well. We understand their challenges. And we found an opportunity to sit with them and say, "Look, we think we might have a more suitable solution for you". And that was really how we started to scale Consultancy. And that's just really started to gather pace because I think right now, clients, what we're hearing from many clients is, we don't necessarily want to make permanent hires. We don't want to hire in permanent project teams. We want the flexibility of resource. And we manage that bench risk ourselves. And as you heard what I said earlier, obviously, we've reduced that risk as well. So we're really happy and confident, and we believe that Consultancy opportunity is going to continue to grow and not just in the U.K. Specifically on the U.K. itself, we -- no, not really. I mean, we fundamentally -- I mean, our tech business last year in the U.K. performed very well. And actually as much as there is a lot of legitimate noise around AI replacing jobs perhaps at the more repetitive junior level, we're also seeing that creation of jobs. And that's playing nicely into what we do in terms of recruitment within that technology sector. Our Legal business has performed well. So we haven't -- we've just really doubled down the areas that we know, and there continues to be demand in those areas. So really, accountancy, legal and technology.

Steve, it's David. So taking your third question, the market exit. So look, we've got a 4-box model. We continually sort of look -- use that to assess the current and future prospects for various markets. It wouldn't be right to sort of say who's -- is there anybody -- any market in the bottom left and at risk, but this is something we will continue to look at. We will retain that discipline. And if we don't see a strong attractive market where we can control the controllables and take share, then we will take the action like we took in 2024 and '25, since we introduced it, around either exiting a market completely or consolidating our footprint within a market to try and get some more competitive advantage. And then in terms of AI as, obviously, talked about before. We have our own secure environment that we use, our consultants use, which are effectively helping them become more operationally efficient and effective. And as Toby took on in his prepared remarks, really freeing up their time to have more human interaction with the client, with the candidate. So that's how we've been using the AI so far. In terms of CapEx, we've obviously finished the deployment of our new CRM system during the course of 2025. So that's now scaling down in terms of CapEx requirements. So I would see a significantly lower CapEx number going forward off the back of the completion of our existing technology stack.

[Operator Instructions] Okay, we do have a follow-up question. This one is coming from Steve Woolf of Deutsche Bank.

Sorry, just another one. Just in terms of restructuring charges, David, as you pursue the forward-looking cost savings, I think it's GBP 4.4 million in this year. Are you expecting any big numbers in this year just to get a feel for what might be in our estimates?

Yes. So look, we're not expecting any significant amount in the current year. Obviously, I think given where we're seeing markets generally, we're planning on having a broadly stable sort of fee earner headcount base. We are going through the transformation programs that will inevitably have some element of restructuring cost around it, that will be not as significant as 2025. And I'd say with market conditions where we're seeing them, we'd probably see a relatively stable headcount and therefore, wouldn't expect too many restructuring elements in the coming year.

As we have no further questions at this time, I will turn the call back over to Toby Fowlston for any additional or closing remarks. Thank you.

Thanks, everybody. Thanks for your time, and look forward to speaking to you in April. All the best.