S4 Capital plc ($SFOR)

So if you could take your seats, please. Okay. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's midday. The appointed hour. Okay. Thank you. All right. Good morning. Well, good afternoon, actually, technically. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Annual General Meeting of your company. We have a quorum, and I have pleasure in declaring the meeting open. I'm joined here in person by Colin Day my left, who's Chairman of the Chair I should say, of the Audit and Risk Committee. Alina Kessel, on my right, a nonexecutive director, just joined us this year; and Rupert Walker, another Non-Executive Director, Senior Independent Director on my right. Miles Young is ill today. He was going to join us, but we wish him well, but he may be listening remotely. Also joining us remotely are Radhika Radhakrishnan, who's our CFO. Now Radhika tripped up on a paving stone in, I think it was high gate high street, won't be a high gate school. We are suing Harringate Council. Well, I should say contemplating suing Harrignate counsel, but she's okay. She does not have a broken nose, I think. That's the latest news, but she's very bruised and that's why she's off camera. She doesn't wish to be seen in her current condition, but we wish her a speedy recovery. She's our CFO; and Singh, I think, he is in Dubai, he is Chairman of the Nomination and Remuneration Committee, and he's on the call as well. Scott Spirit, our Chief Growth Officer; Rick, who's our President of Google business; and Bonnie Preece, our EVP and Group Account Director who handles Amazon also with us online. And we'll give you a business -- Scott will give you a business and client review and Rick will talk about our work for Google and Bonnie will talk about our work for Amazon and show you some examples of what we are doing with AI at the moment with those clients. As you're aware, this is a hybrid meeting, which enables our shareowners to participate either in person or virtually, and I'm pleased to welcome those of you joining us in person today, and we continue to value the participation by those of you who are joining us remotely. So before providing an update on the business and current developments, I would like to take this opportunity to explain some minor housekeeping matters and how the formal business of meeting will proceed and how you'll be able to vote on the resolutions proposed in the notice of the Annual General Meeting. Please make sure that your phones are switched off. or switch to silent mode. I would also like to remind you that we do not allow photographs to be taken or the meeting or the meeting to be recorded or transmitted outside of our own platforms. The fire exits are behind you. The notice of the Annual General Meeting was sent to all share owners on the 12th of May 2026 and at the same time was made available on our website. I would, therefore, like to ask your permission to take the notice of the meeting as read. Okay. All right. We should be taking a poll on each resolution, and I now propose formally that each of the resolutions are set out in those of Annual General Meeting is put to the vote of the meeting. Resolutions 1 to 15 are proposed as ordinary resolutions and require a simple majority of the votes cast, cast in favor to be passed. And Resolutions 16 to 20 are proposed as special resolutions and hence require at least 75% of the votes to be cast in favor. You will notice that all the directors are standing for reelection, with the exception of Alina Kessel on my right, who having been appointed during the year as required by the company's articles of association to stand for election to the Board. Alina adds a significant industry experience to our nonexecutive ranks, and we welcome her, and I hope you will join all of us in welcoming Alina to the Board. All resolutions at our shareowner meetings are decided by poll and our registrar shares -- registrars is present as scrutineer for the poll, and will count the votes at the end of the meeting. The directors are unanimously in favor of each resolution and recommend that you vote in favor. On a poll, each member present in person, by corporate representative or by proxy is entitled to one vote for every share held by them or the share owner whom they represent whatever the case may be. A person entitled to more than one vote need not use all his votes or cast all votes he uses in the same way. All shareowners, proxies and corporate representatives here today should have been provided with a poll card on arrival. If you don't have either of these, please raise your hand and a steward will assist you. All got poll cards. Okay. Please fill in the full name and the rest of the shareowner in block capitals. If you are a third-party proxy or corporate representative, please write your full name in the space provided. In addition to that, the person or company you have been appointed to represent. If there are 2 or more persons representing a joint holding, the person whose name appears first on the register of members should complete and sign the poll card. Their votes will be accepted to the exclusion of other joint holders. Please indicate your vote for each resolution by putting across in either before or against or vote withheld box. Please note that a vote withheld is not a vote in law which means that the vote will not be counted in the calculation of votes for or against the resolution. Please ensure you sign your poll card and hand it to steward as you leave the room. For those shareowners joining us virtually via the online platform, once voting is declared open, the voting icon will appear on the navigation bar. Clicking on this icon will display the resolutions on your screen together with the voting options for or against and withheld. Simply select one of those options to cast your vote. If you change your mind, you may select another option. You can amend your vote as many times as you wish until the poll closes. Your vote will be recorded when the selected option changes color and a vote received message appear. There is no final submit button as voting is live. I will close the voting once we have concluded the Q&A section. I will give you a clear prompt later in the meeting to warn of the closing voting. The poll is now open. We will also take the opportunity for general business questions and discussions from the floor and from online. Online voters can start submitting their questions now using the online meeting platform, which we will address later in the proceedings. If you wish to ask a question, please click the messaging icon on the navigation bar. Then type your question into the ask a question box at the top of the screen. When finished, click the send button to send the question. Now I'd like to turn to the meeting and bring shareowners up-to-date on current developments, which are in line with the statement on trading that was released to the market this morning at 7:00 a.m. I won't go through the headlines because the headlines are covered in the text, so I'll just start to read through the text. Throughout 2025, this last year, our trading reflected the continuing impact of increasingly volatile global macroeconomic conditions, heightened by tariff negotiations and increased geopolitical risks. Clients remain cautious amid all this uncertainty, with technology clients representing almost half of our revenue continuing to prioritize capital expenditure on expanding AI capacity over operating expenditure. Technology Services was affected in the first half by a reduction in one of our larger relationships and longer sales cycles, although this impact was reduced as the year progressed. Despite this challenging backdrop and usual seasonal weighting to the second half, Liquidity and cash flow improved significantly year-on-year, driven by disciplined cost control and strong working capital management, which resulted in a substantial reduction in net debt over the course of the year. Performance strengthened in the second half that of last year, supported by the phasing of new business wins and expanding relationships with major enterprise clients. We secured a number of new and expanded relationships during the year, including Asana, Amplifon, Samsung, Square, NCS, Apella, Visa, Cinemark and HelloFresh, alongside continued expansion with major clients such as General Motors, Amazon and T-Mobile. We also continued to see encouraging adoption of AI-related capabilities across creative, across media, across technology and marketing transformation assignments, including implementation of AI across elements of clients' marketing supply chains. Market conditions in the first 5 months of this year of 2026 have remained challenging, if more so with clients generally cautious given continued geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty. However, trading has been in line with our expectations. We continue to see growing opportunities as clients increasingly focus on implementing technologies such as AI, to drive efficiency and effectiveness. We expect clients to remain cautious in the near term amid increased macroeconomic uncertainty, including shifting tariff dynamics only yesterday or today actually, we've seen more of those. And the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East, which -- both of which don't look as though coming to end in the short term. We continue to have confidence in our strategy, in our business model and in our talent base. And supported by our scaled client relationships and strong momentum across our new go-to-market propositions, we believe we are very well positioned to achieve sustainable long-term growth. For 2026, we expect like-for-like net revenue to be within the current consensus analyst range of between GBP 632 million and GBP 663 million, down low single digits compared to 2025 levels. Operational EBITDA margin, our operational EBITDA margin is targeted to improve by at least 100 basis points, mainly reflecting the annualized benefit of the 20 to 25 cost actions that were taken. We continue to expect 2026 year-end net debt to be between GBP 60 million and GBP 90 million. We target medium-term leverage of under 1x EBITDA, a pro forma 12-month operational EBITDA and expect to be close to net debt-free next year here, which will provide even more significant capital allocation opportunities. While the macro environment remains uncertain, we see growing opportunities as clients become more selective about growth geographically and increasingly focused on implementing technologies such as AI, blockchain and quantum to drive efficiency. Since our last AGM in June of 2025, our company has reduced the number of months in the company to around 6,200. That is down 12% compared to around circa around approximately 7,000 at this time last year, and 2% lower than our year-end figure of about 6,350, reflecting the continued focus on utilization and billability. We maintain a disciplined approach to managing our cost base and continue our drive for margin improvement through greater efficiency through utilization, billability and pricing. The company's capital allocation policy remains dividends first, debt repurchase second and share buybacks third. As previously announced, the company has continued to repurchase its term loan B at a discount with EUR 85.2 million repurchased to date. This reduces the term loan B outstanding to EUR 289.9 million with a targeted reduction to EUR 250 million. The Board plans to implement a 50% dividend payout policy out of adjusted basic earnings per share over the medium term. And the first step will be the payment of 1.1p dividend, both for the interim and final dividends for 2026 if financial targets for 2026 are achieved and of course, share owners approved, not the interim, but the final. This reflects our commitment to deliver consistent shareowner returns. We remain committed to the core pillars of our ESG strategy. Those are people fulfillment responsibilities of the world and one brand. We continue to enhance our external reporting, our reporting tools and our government processes to support greater transparency to strengthen the effectiveness of our reporting and ensure compliance with evolving global regulatory requirements. The company also intends to appoint Christian Jul as an independent Non-Executive Director of S4 Capital plc subject to the Board's approval at the next Board meeting, which I think is scheduled for Miami at the end of July. Christian served as Global CEO of Group M from 2019 to 2024, before moving into the role of President, Corporate Development at WPP. He previously served as CEO of Essence. And before that, was a long-time Razorfish leader. He is known for driving digital transformation for data-led media and AI innovation across WPP's Global Media business. In summary, we are focused on 3 main areas: first, top line growth, where we are making some progress, but not sufficient. Second, on margin improvement, where we are progressing, but not where we ultimately want to be, and finally, improving liquidity where we have made very significant progress. Effectively, we are halfway through our AI-driven turnaround with a more -- with the more significant half to come. So that's the statement. We've now got a presentation for you. It will go for about 30 minutes if you can tolerate that, and then we'll go to Q&A. So we've got several sections. We've got the introduction, which I'm just giving you now. Radhika will give us a trading update that Section 2. Scott will give us a business and client review, and then Rick will cover Google, our work for Google, and Bonnie will cover our work for Amazon, and then we'll go to Q&A and then we'll have the proxy vote. So Radhika, over to you.

Good afternoon, everybody. Sorry, I can't be there in person. As Martin mentioned, I had a bit of an untimely fall. With that said, I will start with the 2025 full year financial highlights. So despite global macro economic pressures and ongoing client caution, strong cost and working capital management improved the operational EBITDA margin, and reduced year-end net debt well below the targeted range. Net revenue was GBP 673 million, which was down 10.8% reported and 8.4% like-for-like. Operational EBITDA was GBP 81.2 million with a margin of 12.1%, up 70 basis points year-on-year. Adjusted operating profit was GBP 74 million and adjusted EPS was 5p versus 5.2p in 2024. Free cash flow rose to GBP 86.5 million up GBP 48.7 million year-on-year, driven by improved treasury management and tighter working capital discipline. Our year-end net debt fell to GBP 86.9 million which was 1.1x operational EBITDA, below the GBP 100 million to GBP 140 million target range and well below the GBP 142.9 million at the end of 2024. Subject to shareowner approval, the Board proposes to pay a final dividend of 1.1p per share, an increase of compared to the prior year. I'm now going to move on to the first quarter of 2026 and the latest outlook. Performance in the period has been impacted by the volatile global macroeconomic conditions and ongoing client caution. Despite these pressures, the annualized impact of the 2025 cost-out actions and the continued strong focus on working capital management has resulted in the Q1 operational EBITDA, meeting our expectations. Revenue was GBP 164.8 million, down 7.5% reported and 3.7% like-for-like. Net revenue was GBP 149.2 million, down 8.9% reported and 5% like-for-like. Quarter end net debt was GBP 111.8 million, down GBP 33 million from GBP 144.8 million at 31st of March 2025 and GBP 45.6 million like-for-like. Leverage improved to 1.4x pro forma 12-month operational EBITDA compared to 1.7x this time last year. The company also repurchased its term loan to be at a discount with a total of EUR 85.2 million repurchased to date. The outstanding loan now stands at EUR 289.9 million with a target reduction of EUR 250 million. Our full year 2026 like-for-like net revenue is expected to be within the current consensus analyst range of GBP 632 million to GBP 663 million, down low single digits compared to 2025. We continue to target full year operational EBITDA margin to increase by at least 100 basis points. We expect the proportion of operational EBITDA generated in the first half of 2025 to increase first half 2026 to increase compared to the first half of 2025, reflecting the annualized benefit of the 2025 cost actions. We continue to target year-end net debt to be in the range of GBP 60 million to GBP 90 million, reflecting our continued disciplined approach to balance sheet strength with a medium-term leverage target of below 1x operational EBITDA. The Board will approve an interim dividend of 1.1p and recommend a final dividend of 1.1p subject to shareowner approval if performance and liquidity targets are met. I'm now moving on to the next slide regarding capital allocation. Our capital allocation priorities are maintained from the year-end. We have established a clear capital allocation priorities, focusing on delivering shareholder value through first dividends; second, targeted debt purchase -- repurchase and third, share buybacks. The Board will implement a 50% dividend payout policy out of adjusted basic earnings per share over the medium term, subject to financial targets being met. And with that, I will hand over to Scott Spirit for the market update.

Thanks very much, Radhika, and good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining the meeting today. So I'm going to share some of the dynamics that we're seeing in the wider market. And then I'm going to share some specifics on our client relationships before I hand over to Rick and Bonnie to cover our Google and Amazon relationship specifically. As you can see, digital marketing continues to increase at significant rates, whilst overall advertising spend is growing at around 5%, meaning analog spend continues to decline. The revenues at the top platforms continue to grow in the high teens, significantly outpacing the growth in the market. One thing to bear in mind here is that around 80% plus of their revenues come from small and medium-sized businesses and they continue to expand their market share there. So their growth is not necessarily being driven by the kind of enterprise clients that we target at S4. The technology services market continues to have lower market growth compared to recent historical double-digit growth. 2025 had just over 5% growth. And whilst enterprises continue to invest in areas such as cloud and AI, the outlook for 2026 continues to be subdued. This next slide charts the comparison between agency revenue growth at the main public holding companies and advertising spend and GDP growth. Digital spend now represents 70% of the total spend. And as I mentioned in the previous slide, is growing at high single-digit rates, meaning analog is in decline. Agency growth dipped to almost 0% in 2025 and is decoupled from advertising spend and GDP growth. And one explanation for this is the continued pressure from clients to maintain their media spend, but to put pressure on what they call nonworking spend, i.e., agency spend. This has been particularly the case with technology clients. And the next slide looks at the relationship between CapEx spend and sales and marketing spend at the major tech companies, Amazon, Meta and Alphabet. As you know, historically, almost half our revenue has come from this sector. And prior to 2022, marketing spend at the top platforms regularly grew at 20%-plus rates annually and has now essentially been flat since then. On the other hand, CapEx spend, particularly on AI infrastructure, has ballooned in the same period, growing over 133%, and this trend is expected to continue, with the hyperscalers already announcing plans to increase their CapEx spend over 70% in 2026. And just last week, Google raising $85 billion in equity ahead of another significant increase in spend in 2027. The tech companies are unsurprised leading the charge on adopting AI and their marketing workflows and leveraging it to achieve more or the same for less. Our commercial focus remains on our clients and returning the company to growth. Overall, our scale client relationships remain strong and resilient. We've seen some spend declines, but we've also seen growth in additional scope at half of our hoppers, and that's clients that represent $20 million of revenue or more, of which we now have. We continue to have strong exposure and partnerships with the technology sector despite marketing spend in this sector being under pressure, it's important for us to maintain these relationships as they inform our product and AI strategy and leadership position. 2025 saw some important wins and expanded remits, many of which were from existing clients such as Amazon, T-Mobile and others. We're also seeing early progress from our focus on evolving the business model away from time and materials towards what we call a talent and machines model based on asset-based or subscription-based approaches. In terms of growth, we continue to simplify and evolve our go-to-market messaging, and we're seeing this resonate particularly in the areas of orchestration, real-time brands and AI. We've also invested in sales operations using AI to drive collaboration on pictures. This has resulted in a stronger new business performance and a stronger pipeline. Our AI solution, Monks Flow, continues to develop and win awards for its leadership position, and it's at the heart of all our major pictures and opportunities. And whilst we continue to focus on the tech sector, we're also making progress with the vertical specific offers in areas such as auto and FMCG. We have a compelling client list of some of the world's leading and most innovative companies. And 8 of them, as I said, are Whoppers, that's revenues of GBP 20 million plus, which remains a differentiator for a company of our scale. Most of our direct competitors have a more fragmented client list with smaller relationships. As you can see, we continue to be skewed towards the tech industry. And despite the ever-increasing amounts they commit to CapEx, we are seeing budgets start to stabilize here. We continue to see significant opportunities for new business particularly driven by our AI tools and capability. This is especially so in the automotive sector, where we've recently won assignments from major manufacturers in Japan, South Korea, China and India, and so category establishes itself as an early adopter of AI at scale in reaction to the existential pressure from Chinese EVs and AVs. We see similar opportunities in financial services, where we've seen an uptick in pipeline and wins as financial institutions move beyond pilots and concerns around AI governance to full-scale adoption again reflecting an essential threat this time from the new fintech platforms. In FMCG, we continue to build on the traction of winning real-time brands and orchestration partner engagements with 2 leading U.S.-based global clients in 2025, and one of these client relationships has expanded internationally. We're engaged in several scale pitches in this category, and there are strong -- these are strong relationships that help us attract talent on them. Finally, declining spends overall have had a negative effect on the average revenue size of our top 10, 20 and 50 clients. But this is primarily driven by reductions in spend rather than lost business and is starting to stabilize. And with that, I'd like to hand over to Rick, who's going to expand on our Google relationship.

Thanks, Scott. Hi, I'm Rick verse the Google business here at Monks. We've had a great, long relationship with Google that continues to grow as they add new products and services. That relationship, 13 years is amazing. I think equally amazing is we have the good fortune of working on 13 different products in their portfolio, they have 1 billion-plus users. And in fact, 5 of the products that we work on and services in their portfolio have now 3 billion active users a month. So that's Search and Android, Gmail, Chrome and YouTube. So just massive brands growing business. As we look at just a double-click into that, the kind of the 4 dimensions of our relationship with Google, as we have marketing and media, certainly the bulk of that on our marketing business, we actually, as part of that have 300 embedded Monks inside Google's marketing organization. And on the media side, we do planning and buying, and then a big part of that is also our reseller, our GMP business. At the top there, from a partnership standpoint, this is really driven by AI-enabled production services. So this is where we're co-selling to Google advertisers, helping drive performance of their media spend through AI-enabled production. So this is a growing area of the business for us. And then that fourth piece is our technology practice. And there's a number of aspects to that, but that is early access to Google's technology. We have an advisory group, so we're giving them feedback on those products. And in some cases, we're co-developing AI marketing solutions alongside Google. So great to have that seat at the table. After a year-long exhaustive vetting process that we went through, we were fortunate in the fall to be named 1 of 3 AI partners, marketing partners for Google. So that was a great achievement and a significant unlock for the business, especially as we look going forward. And that's given us a lot of access. So the line that we hear a lot is from our clients is that everyone is either working with Monks or talking about working with Monks. So great momentum in the business, across really a thriving growing landscape of products and services. And so I wanted to just give you 4 or so examples here across a variety of services that we support Google on a variety of work to kind of give you a flavor of that. So with the first one, Google Android, I'm sure you're familiar with it. That's their open source mobile operating system. So in this case, they brought us the challenge as they released a new operating system. And so I'm sure you're familiar with the annual reveals, so top executives on stage keynote presentations generate a lot of press coverage, they really challenged us to create a complementary moment. So for the everyday users to really understand the power of the new operating system as they release it, how do we tell that story. So our solution was a show. We created the Android Show designed for the everyday user with content that's aspirational and approachable and viewed by millions of people at the same time. And that content was filled with familiar faces, kind of simple how-tos and demonstrations for everyday users, and we got a great response from the marketplace with it. So the approach has taken off a bit. We have our Annual Made by Google event that Google produces each year. This past year with Jimmy Fallon, that was a broadcast event, and we actually extended this concept to create physical experiences on site, so guests could experience the technology live. We've since gone on and we've created new variations of the show. So we have the Android Show XR addition, and we just completed the Android Show IO Edition in 2026. So a great new format, leveraging our content and creative capabilities. The next one is Google Pixel. So Pixel phones, this is a business we support in countless markets around the world, the variety of work that we do on this business is everything from direct marketing or CRM to in-store displays with the devices. In this particular case, Google came to us and really challenged us, their market position for this device is all about AI, it's core. That's a fundamental differentiator for Pixel. AI powers their countless unique one-of-a-kind signature features of the device. So we really needed an opportunity ways in to educate and encourage consumers to leverage that getting users to kind of really see and experience the power of the device. So we launched extensive Museum partnership program, we called this Reimagine the Masters. And so using Google Pixel tools, in partnership with popular museums and of course, consumers working together, we use the device and the AI capability of the devices to reimagine famous works of art of the -- famous works of art and in partnership with the museum. So reimagined are actually appeared on display in the museums themselves, users were encouraged to create their own versions of the art. And then we use that repurposing billboards throughout the city, so that we could display Pixel in partnership with these amazing consumer innovations on large screens throughout the city, where the program ran. So we've got a great response participation from a consumer standpoint and really a great bringing interest and excitement around the work, the art itself in the museum. So we're continuing to extend that program. Our next one is Gemini, specifically around Gemini Social. So this is a business we support in 15 countries around the world that's seen significant growth, as I'm sure you've seen with somewhere between 800 million and 900 million active users just on the app itself. With this one, the challenge is really -- we talk about real-time branding at Monks. This is a great example of that, where the innovation around Gemini and the news coming out and new usage occasions for Google's AI, it's changing on a daily basis. So Google is looking for a partner and a solution that could keep pace with that. so on kind of a day in, day out basis. So we built an always-on newsroom, kind of an editorial studio. And that was to translate product updates and to kind of foster co-creation with users. So literally, we start on a Monday with an insight, a new discovery. We use an AI-enabled workflow and then we're delivering creative work out on Friday. So this is day in, day out, every week, and we're using this model across a number of businesses. So out of that comes big things and small things and a lot of really fun work. So imagine your giraffe with a selfie stick or certainly maybe your dog with a selfie stick. We built a campaign around time-lapse photography, so using your imagination, the user's imagination or things like beard virtualizers, so lots of fun work. So this is an ongoing real-time model ongoing campaign that really tries to demystify the technology a bit and features demos and even picks up on consumer trends and how they're using the technology and then we amplify that. So again, we're using this working model across a number of areas of the business. And then the last one, Google Fi Wireless. This has been a great journey for us over the course of the last year. This is Google's wireless service. It's a challenger brand, certainly small but growing. And as a challenger brand, they've got to build awareness and they've got to differentiate the service. But while being outspent in the mobile wireless category pretty significantly, so really needed to break through. So we -- in this case, we handle everything from strategy all the way through media with performance in marketing and then we're optimizing the creative. So this is an end-to-end workflow that we're replicating again, a number of brands across our Google business, again, using Monks Flow. So what we did here was we created a campaign, and we really needed to achieve 3 things with it. So we had to translate the invisible benefits of wireless service, how do you tell the story of speed, if you will. We need to translate those invisible benefits into high-impact visuals. We built a new workflow specifically around the Google Fi wireless business using Monks Flow, including our AI-generated human-curated commercials. And the third piece was we need to deliver this campaign in an entertaining way that really needed to cut through. So that's our Spokes-animal campaign. So imagine a Beaver that communicates built-in security and bees that are all about speed during peak times and even our gees that are global -- represent global coverage and in 200 markets. So these are full AI spots, and here's just a few examples of the spots that we created. [Presentation]

So that gives you a little sense of the work we're doing. Again, lots of visuals. I know a lot of work in a very short period of time there. But all that work you saw is AI-enabled Monks Flow driven. Most of the imagery, except our, the show of content that we created uses AI tools and models, in some cases, we're using creators and consumers to create that content. But few companies in the world have a seat at the table that we do at the moment with Google, and we're incredibly proud of the relationship we have with them. So with that, I'll pass it on to Bonnie to share a little bit of the work that we're doing for Amazon.

Thanks, Rick. I am Bonnie Preece, and I lead the Amazon account for us globally. I'm really excited to share our work with you today. It's been a fantastic relationship for, frankly, the past 8 years. We've been growing this relationship across many of the sub-brands at Amazon that I will talk you through today as well as across 40 markets, and we have over 200 dedicated Monks on Amazon with a large portion of those actually embedded at Amazon. How do we do it? We work across all of the pillars at Monks, something I'm incredibly proud of. You'll see that it's each Monks of among core pillars is something that we implement for Amazon today. So the breadth of the work is equally impressive. And again, you'll see that in some of my examples as I take you through those. But it's really exciting to see massive creative production, the media piece that we do with them as well as partnerships and ads that we talk about quite often with our relationship with AWS, and then finally, we're growing the tech services piece right as I speak, and I just couldn't be more excited to see how this team continues to grow. With that, we're going to play a reel and I'm excited to share the work with you. [Presentation]

As you can see, it's really exciting work. It's a really fun team to be a part of. So this takes you into the subcategories of the sub-brands that we work with at Amazon. You'll see here there's 24 of these. It is quite impressive, the breadth of the work. As you may know, Amazon is very segmented. So these are all different clients. Many of these are in different markets around the world. And so the breadth is strong, and it's a big portion of the strength of the relationship and how we continue to build the relationship. We get into each one of these categories, frankly, by recommendations from another client in another category. In fact, we just got one this week in the grocery category. So continuing to grow and earning the trust of these clients is how this business keeps growing. So with that, I would love to share with you our mission. How do we make this work? You'll hear Amazon often talk about raising the bar. They talk about raising the bar when they're hiring their employees. They talk about raising the borrower will doing great creative. We can go to the next slide. When they're raising the bar that's what we have to do as Monks. That's what we have to do as the team. We have to raise the bar internally. So when I talk about recruiting the team, I'm always pushing that we have to hire the best creatives in the world. They have to sit alongside, they have to be embedded with those Amazon creatives and constantly raising the bar. And so it's how we manage the team, and we hold ourselves very accountable to this and very proud of how we do that. So with that, we will go on to getting into the work itself. I'll start with the media piece of the work. This is mode. This is actually -- we are in housing with Amazon. So we are embedded at Amazon doing the media work with them. It was -- Amazon came to us a few years ago, frankly, again, based on one of our current relationships and said, "Could you bring -- build an in-house team rather than constantly using their AOR and media." And they wanted to build it themselves. So we are a part of that team. It allows us amazing access to the data, to be able to learn, to be able to implement, to be able to grow this business. And frankly, we're being asked to do this across other different sub-brands that Amazon recognize the benefit of being able to in-house while still using an agency with the expertise. That brings us to the next piece of the work, then North America stores work. So when we talk about North America Stores, we were talking about Amazon.com digital storefronts. This -- if you shop on Amazon, and if you've been on the app, you've seen our work. That's us, right? We are building out all of the social channels, all of the digital, all of the display ads, everything you see on amazon.com likely came from our team. How do we do that? Well, we get to advertise to over 300 million active shoppers and over 2.5 billion views a month. Some have called this the second largest advertising platform in the world just due to all of the eyeballs that get to see it. We're incredibly proud of how we get that done. Then we'll go to our work with AWS. This is very recent. We won this in the last year. We identified as their Tier 1 creative vendor partner. Last year, they decided they wanted to consolidate all of their agencies, and we were fortunate enough to win the position of Tier 1. So with that, we're starting to grow our business with AWS on the creative side. We've already had the ads and partnership side, and now you see us on the content side. So we've developed our first couple of campaigns with AWS with many more and a lot of growth to go. I'll show you the next slide will take us into one of those campaigns. So this is Kyro. This is our friendly ghost. As you can imagine, and Kyro is helping us build out AWS' genic IDE. It's their AI-powered code editor. They love working with us because of our AI experience, that we can apply while doing the creative side of the ads. And so just our expertise here has really led us to be very successful with this team. And you'll see Kyro everywhere. He's going quite social, and we're really proud of him. Now on to sustainability, something that we don't hear often that this team works on. Frankly, sustainability is where we started our relationship with Amazon, dates back to about 2019, and we created the climatepledge.com. This is where you see us doing our platforms work. We're building out their platforms for all of the Climate Pledge websites, the sustainability websites, and even last year, they asked us to take their very long document and turn it into an interactive site where you could learn everything Amazon has done for sustainability rather than just having to read about it. This relationship is fantastic. It has grown rapidly over each of the 8 years and continues to be one of our favorite pieces of business. Then on to Twitch. As you can imagine, the team loves working on Twitch. We have a lot of fun here. We get to work on branded assets. We get to work on venue signage. We get to go and actually do the experiential work at Twitch Con. So again, great breadth of work with these clients, a very fun client. Keeping up with Twitch is probably the hardest part because they are very fast. They are exactly what their brand is, but it inspires the team every day to be a part of this business. Now I'll go into our Global Studio model. Global Studio model is, again, an extension of Amazon. Amazon has its own in-house creative agency, and we embed our team in with that creative agency. We've been a part of that team for about 3 years. And a couple of years ago, they came to us and said, "We are ready to centralize. We want everything to go through Global Studio." Great opportunity to get those consistent branded assets always to be raising the creative bar and to be able to do this globally. So we've been building out the Global Studio model with them over the past couple of years. So how do we do it? We do that across each one of like I say, like our specialty is right, you'll see us create the ads. You'll see it see us create the consistency. You'll see us across markets, pulling all of this off in an incredibly consistent, efficient manner and also comes from the work that we're doing via AI. So the studio level craft at global scale is what I've been hitting on. This is very important to Amazon's Chief Creative Officer, so we ensure that everything looks consistent. You find that across the Amazon campaigns you see today. You shouldn't recognize a different sub-brand, a different location, it should feel like Amazon. You always have that Amazon smile that comes with it, and you'll see this in the creative on the next slide. So you can see this, this is multiple sub-brands, multiple countries, so multiple languages and it all feels the same. That's a very important part of our jobs and again, how we hold that consistency true globally for Amazon. Again, you've seen the commercials same thing that consistency rings through. You can feel it in these ads as you -- when you look at this ad, you know it was Amazon. [Presentation]

So this is the work that we just started last year in Japan. Again, Global Studio came to us. They said, "Are you ready to do this in Japan?" We said, absolutely, we built out a team. We did fantastic work as you can see, in doing a TV spot for them, and they loved it. A lot of this is AI-generated work. And the best news is, after it was done, this was meant to be a 30-second spot. The client loved it so much. They asked for it to be a 60-second spot. Generally, you would have had to go reshoot that. We didn't have to. You'll see in these upcoming slides, we were able to take the content that we had already shot and via AI, turn this into a 60-second spot. We're incredibly excited about that and the client was thrilled as you can imagine. It was a very quick turnaround, which generally would have taken a complete reshoot. So you'll see here, again, pulling this footage that we already had. We were able to add this to the 60-second shot with, again, that consistency coming through. So social, of course, is never not afterthought. Something I'd love about being a part of Monks. We are so connected with the content we're creating while we were creating the TV spot, of course, the social was right there alongside again, look at the consistency. It's fantastic here. Amazon has a brand that they very much focus on save the every day, right? We all get that when we order from Amazon every day. You're always trying to save whatever you -- whatever your problem is at that moment. And again, you see each one of these, we're saving the every day. Whatever the challenge that person was having today, they can solve it through Amazon. So finally, I'm going to leave you with 3 things. How are we successful with Amazon? We're successful with our deep embedded relationships. As I mentioned, we have earned trust with our clients. We work across so many sub-brands. We get so much opportunity to be recommended to other clients. Our relationships are fantastic. We're in person with our clients. Often, I encourage our team to be working from the Amazon offices around the world and that shows in our relationships. Move at the speed of AI. I love these clients. They push us so hard. If Monks comes out with the press release and says we have a new AI tool, our Amazon clients expect that to be implemented on their work immediately. So we're constantly moving at the speed of AI with them. As you can imagine, Amazon is very fast in the AI world, but they don't mind. They would like us to be faster. And so as quickly as we can move, we move together. And then finally, work as a family. The team Amazon at Monks is a family. We pick each other up. We work really hard together. We have a lot of fun together. It's an exciting client and can be a challenging client and something we're really, really proud of. And you can see it come through in all of the work. So thank you for taking the time with me today. I'm going to pass it back to Sir Martin.

Thank you, Bonnie. A big thank you for giving up your time and to Rick and to Radhika and Scott, and we wish Radhika a speedy recovery. So this is AGM is an opportunity for shareowners to express their views and to ask questions of the Board. We, as your Board are committed to open dialogue with our share owners, and we're pleased to have this opportunity during the meeting to engage with you directly.

We ask that your questions relate solely to the items of business of the meeting. If you do have a question, a microphone is available for your use, if needed, it would be helpful if you could state your name and indicate if you are a shareowner or if you're representing a shareowner, and if so, if you could indicate the name of that shareowner before you ask your question. Any shareowners online via the Lumi system should click on the message icon and type their question in, and it will be read out and answered. So I've got 2 questions online. But before we try and respond it. One of them I'll have a go at and one, I'll sort of try and hand off to Radhika, I'll read it to her. She hasn't had it on the Lumi system, and we'll respond to that. But anybody from the floor? Yes, over here.

Thank you for those examples of what you're doing.

Name?

Sorry Carl Thomas shareholder. Yes. Thank you for the many examples that demonstrate how complex and fast-moving clearly, the industry you work in is. But what I was intrigued by was 1 of the comments I think Scott made in terms of the advancing business model you're looking at in terms of moving from time and materials potentially to, I think, called out subscription and financial assets. Could you -- can you explain or give us a bit more color on that journey?

Scott, do you want to have a go?

Yes, happy to. Thanks for the question. I think -- can you hear me?

Yes. Go ahead.

Yes. Thank you for the question. So I think traditionally, our industry has been at times a material business model like many service industries. If you think about the benefits that AI bring, and I think Bonnie and Rick gave some great examples of that. It really speeds up how much -- how quickly we can create work for clients, makes it much more cost-effective as well. But if you're still charging on that time and material basis, it's obviously not great for the agency world. And I think what we're seeing from clients is as they want us to embrace artificial intelligence. They want to get those benefits around speed and around getting more content for the same budget or less, and they are embracing different types of models because if we stick to times of material, then there's no real incentive for us to embrace AI, right? We will stick to that. The traditional way of earning money. I think what we're seeing when we introduce AI, that clients are open to different types of model. So there are examples of clients that we have where there's a fixed subscription against the scope of work. And then it's really incumbent on us to leverage AI and leverage our talent around the world to deliver that work in a way that's profitable for us. Likewise, on asset-based pricing, we're seeing increasingly clients accept rate cards, which are based on a cost per asset without the time and materials attached to that asset. So these are all new models that we're certainly not the only ones experimenting with them. I think the industry is moving in that direction quite quickly. We get a lot of traction with clients, particularly in the marketers at clients. The challenge is often with procurement departments who obviously don't like to see changes in models. They like to be able to compare apple-to-apple. So we see some pushback there and some delay there in terms of understanding how these models work. But I think this is very much the way the -- I think the agency landscape will work. And I think many service industries will head in that direction.

I'd just add to that, the agencies the so-called holdcos have -- I mean, they're disintermediating their own business. So they have a sort of legacy issue, all of them, let's say, the 6 holdcos probably have traditional creative production ranging from 25% of their revenues at the lowest end to probably about 40%. So we don't. We're basically purely digital or focused totally on digital. And therefore, we're not disintermediating any traditional TV production. The other thing that Scott mentioned is agency's interest under the time materials model is to do things as -- the more expensive, the better and the longer it takes the better, and so it's a completely different way of looking at things. Okay. Fine. Okay. Anybody else? Yes.

Michael, shareholder. I ask a question about how you're looking at acquiring business in Southeast Asia because you're a very North American and European centric. And I think you elaborated a bit about it. I wonder if you could do that again this year.

Yes. I think if we were honest, we would want to say that you've mentioned Southeast Asia, basically, for us is Singapore and Malaysia, throwing probably Indonesia and Vietnam. We'd like it to be stronger, and we'd like it to be more significant. As you look to the future, just thinking about where things are going to go, by 2050, if you look at all the projections, 3 of the top 5 countries in the world are going to be Asia. Won't be Southeast Asia, but there'll be Asian. So you'll have China, India and Indonesia in the top 5, and the other 2 will probably be U.S. and Germany. So the Asian representative, so the question is a good one in the sense that that's the direction where things are going, and I would say I would broaden it, not just the Southeast Asia but Asia Pacific. So anywhere from Japan down to Australia and New Zealand, with a big emphasis on the newer economies. So not so much Japan, not so much Australia and New Zealand, but China obviously cannot be ignored. It's the second largest economy in the world and on its way to being whatever people think one way or another to being the largest, India is on fire, growing at 6% last year, 5% this year, 5% next year. So it's the fastest-growing country that the World Bank monitors basically, and then plate countries like Vietnam, like Singapore and Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand are all offering prospects. So the question is the right one, which is we have to do better in that part of the world. The GDP growth is going to draw it. The -- just related to that, what is really interesting is how well Latin America does. I mean if you look at the holding companies, and ourselves. It's the area where we do see significant -- all see significant growth. And that probably the reason for that is there's a little bit more inflation, and a little bit more -- the system is a little bit probably more -- I'm going to use the word flexible. Flexible in a sense that supply chain pressure is not maybe as great as we see in Europe, even in North America and other parts of the world. So cover what...

Did you not go to India?

Yes. I said India is that after -- I mean, India is the default in a way for China. If you're worried about the Taiwan risk, which we can discuss. But if you're worried about that, India is next on the agenda. And in fact, Norvik, do you want to comment on that? Because you said that if you're still there, you send me a little note yesterday on what was happening in India? Do you want to say something about that?

Yes, Martin, can you hear me?

Yes.

Yes. I think a lot of the big technology companies are continuing to invest in India, especially at the back end and the back office. We were at the Board in New York, and we went at a meeting with even JPMorgan and they were setting up their entire back end in Bangalore. So it's not just the back end, but I think as Martin's alluded, the market continues to grow at 6% to 7% -- so it is obviously a very, very important market and for us to grow. And I think there's a big opportunity there.

Okay. Anybody else? Okay. If that's all from the floor, I got 2 from Richard William Bushnop,who I assume is a shareholder, or shareowner. The first question, Radhika, if you can hear me. Can you hear me all right?

Yes, I can.

So Richard says, given the strong improvement in EBITDA margin in the second half of 2025 and the depressed margin of the first half of 2025, simple math suggests a strong EBITDA comparison in the first half of 2026. Please comment.

So Richard, your math is correct. However, we -- this time last year, we did a 6.3% margin first half 2025. We ended the year at 12.1%. We've taken significant cost out, and that is also to align ourselves with industry averages of our PC to net revenue ratio. So based on everything, that is why we're guiding the market to say we will be at least 100 basis points for the full year up on the 12.1%, but we do expect -- we haven't done our half year yet. But if everything goes towards our plan, then hopefully, we will be delivering that. So I hope that answers your question.

Yes. And I'd just add to that, Radio, that we do have a seasonal bias to the second half. I mean Net-net, the first half will be better than last year. I'll go on record as saying that. But the there is still a seasonal bias to the second half of the year, basically because the fourth quarter is always the strongest quarter. The first quarter is always the weakest quarter. So okay. So that's one. The second question from Richard Williams Bushnell. We're allowed to take 2 questions from 1 shareholder, which I guess we are. Given this year sees both the Football World Cup and the U.S. midterms, would you not expect revenue growth in the second half of the year? Well, if you went back in time, what we call the mini quadrennial, which is this. We only have the U.S. midterms, you have the World Cup and you have the Winter Olympics as opposed to the Maxi quadrennial when you have the presidential election and you have, I think, the European Cup and you have the Summer Olympics. We used to say that the mini-quadrennial added about 0.5% to ad growth and the Maxi quadrennial 1%. So the drift of your question, Richard, is correct that it's a stronger backdrop. However, I would say that clients remain pretty cautious. I mean the interesting, I think, observation is clients are doing very well. I mean, you look at Q1 for the S&P 500. And it's quite extraordinary how they're growing. Their EPSs are up. But I think going into Q1, the major investment banks were forecasting like 12%, 14% EPS growth. It's come out I think, north of 18%, including the hyperscalers. If you take out the hyperscalers, it's up 14% or so. So that's huge, and it's stronger than Q3 and 4 of last year, which was around 12%, including the hyperscalers about 10% excluding. So they're all doing well. They are getting some price increase. There is some sales increase. They are getting margin increase, however, through squeezing the supply chain. And I think the simple truth is the reason that clients -- and you see it in that chart that Scott laid out for agency revenue versus GDP growth. Advertising as a proportion of GDP has strengthened, but agency revenues basically because of this focus on what they insist on calling nonworking media, I have to point out, it's not nonworking. We work very hard for the money that's included in nonworking media increasingly hard. So it's even more even harder. But there's something going on where clients are being very, I would say, cautious. And going back to what Scott said, on a more optimistic note, that if things were to tighten up in the second half of the year because of inflation, the war in Iran, in the Middle East, and because of natural momentum or the reduction of the natural momentum in the U.S. economy, if that was to happen, that actually is probably better for us. So I can put it that way. Scott mentioned that we see AI transformation where there's existential threats. So in the car industry, Chinese EVs, AVs and financial services, fintech, we're starting to see a little bit in packaged goods, too, where commodity prices are squeezing margins. Colin is nodding because he is the Chairman of a major packages company, and they're squeezing the margins, and they can't get price anymore because they've got price during COVID, and they priced up and they're starting to see some volume threats. You see it in the drinks industry, for example, a company like Diageo actually when the changing in habits, it's true, amongst young people to alcohol maybe. But the fundamental thing is they can't get the price that they got during COVID and post COVID, they're only getting 10%, 15%, 20% price increases per annum. So that's starting to put pressure on them as well. So where we see pressure, we see change. Fundamental fact about the human condition is people don't change unless they have to. So we'll see how it pans out. I mean, I'll put it more dramatically. S4 amongst depends quintessentially on AI transformation. If it happens, we win. If it doesn't, we lose. So we have a vested interest in wholesale AI transformation at scale. That's it. Okay. Anybody else? Nothing else, online. Okay. All right. So with that, let's go to the voting. For those of you voting online, I would like to remind you to cast your vote in accordance with the instructions given at the start of the Annual General Meeting, if you've not done so. The meeting will be concluding shortly. For those of you voting in person, our registrars should now have collected all your poll cards. You collect them? Here we go. If they have not done so, can you raise your hand? Okay. I now propose the resolutions as set out in the notice of the meeting. These are shown on the screen now, together with the proxy votes received prior to the meeting. Can we do that, please? Is it good? Thank you very much. [Voting]

Ladies and gentlemen, the poll is now closed, and the provisional right results are that all resolutions are carried. The results will be available on our website and announced the London Stock Exchange in due course. That concludes the meeting. Thank you for coming along, and we wish you a very safe journey home and don't trip up on any paving stones. And if you're going to do it in the Harring council because they will we'll consolidate the rates. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.