Savills plc (SVS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you very much, firstly, for coming in and those also for joining us online. So it gives me a great deal of pleasure to start by giving you the highlights. So good morning to all of you. And here is a presentation of our preliminary results for the year ending 31st December 2024. As you all know here, today's presentation is hybrid. Welcome to those attending in person, as I said, and please enjoy your coffee. And it's also great to have you back in Margaret Street, which is our global headquarters. Thank you also to those attending on webinar, assuming the technology continues to work. In line with previous years, I will present the highlights, which you'll see on this slide as well as an overview of the market on sentiment and activity before handing over to Simon, who will take you through a detailed review of the main financial performance of our segments in the business. I will then conclude with a brief update on the strategy for growth and the business development that we've undertaken during the year before finishing with our summary and outlook for the current year. We will then, of course, invite you all any questions you have, whether in person here or online. As a recap, when I look back at the half year results last year, I highlighted that we were sensing the beginnings of a stabilization, so probably difficult word these days, following a rapid market recalibration with the beginnings of a recovery in confidence. And whilst this did carry into the second half of last year, the market does continue to be overshadowed, as we all know, by major geopolitical and economic uncertainty. Rules are being rewritten around global security, trade tariffs and the likely effects on economic outlook. And I'm sure all of you in this room here today will agree that these are elevated risks. We can only, therefore, control the controllables, focusing on our core strategy for growth, maintaining our secure financial footing and looking for the themes of recovery in anticipation of a return to more normal and stable conditions. As ever, our focus within Savills is to continue to provide the best possible advice we can to all our clients worldwide, look after our global workforce and continue to maintain our strict discipline for cost control. So let's move on to the highlights on this slide in front of you. I'm pleased to announce that -- please come in. I'm pleased to announce that the group concluded 2024 with a significantly improved performance, taking into account the uncertain macro conditions I've highlighted earlier. The balance and diversity of our business allowed us to increase group revenue by 7.4%, 10% in constant currency to report annual revenues of GBP 2.404 billion. The benefits of this improved revenue also drove underlying profit to GBP 130.4 million, a 37.6% increase and a 40% increase in constant currency. The key drivers, as you'll see on the slide, of this improved performance include a recovery in our global transaction revenues, up 13%, reflecting the gradual recovery of transactional volumes across both the commercial and residential sectors in our key markets. We also benefited from robust growth from our less transactional businesses, totaling an aggregate of 64% of our total revenue with annualized growth overall of 5%. And our net cash position at the year-end has increased to GBP 176.3 million. And in light of this improved performance across the platform, we are proposing an aggregate dividend distribution of 30.2p per share, an increase of 32% on 2023. This reflects our continued confidence in our resilient business model. Turning to that resilience. Putting this in context and looking at the 10-year revenue growth we've experienced, I want to just highlight a couple of key observations. Firstly, we've obviously maintained over the entire period an annualized growth rate of 8%. And the vast majority of that growth is actually organic as opposed to M&A activity. In addition, the chart clearly highlights the faster growth of our less transactional revenue, which now totals over GBP 1.5 billion per annum, equaling the size of our total group revenue in 2016. This, as many of you know, has been a deliberate core strategy, reflecting the improved quality of our earnings. Finally, the chart clearly highlights the turbulence in the markets that we've all had to live through really since 2019, the Brexit year. It's also neatly coincide my appointment as Group Chief Executive. Timing is everything. Moving on to themes recovery. Rather than look back as a rearview mirror on what we saw last year with market sentiment now almost changing daily, I thought it would be useful to look through to the main themes of a recovery as a backdrop to the core elements of our future growth strategy. The continued turbulence has made equity raising for direct real estate funds pretty challenging, particularly for Core and Core plus products with more focus on value-add returns as well as debt and infrastructure. Against this uncertain backdrop, sectors like the residential and living sectors continue to perform well. Investors, in many cases, remain underweight to this sector, and this should give more opportunities going forward. Occupational markets are also starting to recover, but are sensitive to costs, whether localized labor costs or direct real estate costs, and there will be a continued drive towards greater efficiency. Indeed, occupier activity is gathering greater momentum, catalyzed by the stalling actually come in of development activity, meaning options on the medium term are actually reduced and people are seeing localized shortages, particularly affecting prime offices and prime industrial and logistics. Whilst this is leading to some green shoots of rental growth, we still have a backdrop of high build costs and increasing obsolescence with continued hesitancy around decision-making. So turning to investment market activity. Looking back to last year, whilst global annual investment volumes did increase by 10%, they are still 25% behind the 5-year pre-COVID average. And the total for the year was somewhat rescued by a strong Q4. Before that, it was slightly subdued. The shape of the recovery has varied across various regions and is market specific with a sectoral focus, as I mentioned, on beds and sheds or living and logistics as well as hotels, a very strong year for them. But confidence also improved in the previously unloved office sector, particularly during Q4 in major markets. And it's good to highlight that London regained its crown as the top cross-border destination for international capital. In fact, this is already driving yield compression across some of the prime sectors. With cautious but progressive improvement in risk sentiment, we are seeing more activity from opportunistic investors seeking deeper discounts on mispriced assets, and this is driving greater portfolio and M&A activity, something we'd like to see more of during the course of this year. Okay. On to occupational markets. Well, office leasing volumes continue to improve on the year, up 8% in Europe, 14% in North America, with the APAC region experiencing significant regional variations, but all regions still significantly below pre-COVID levels of take-up. That said, office vacancy rates have now generally stabilized across a number of markets, except perhaps secondary office supply where there's still elevated levels of availability. A polarization to prime offices continue. Many of you will leave to hear, I'll hardly reference work from home as a major influence in the market, even in North America. And this is clearly evidenced by the strong rental growth we're seeing in cities like London, New York and Dubai. The elevated level of take-up in industrial logistics experienced really immediately post-COVID has moderated, which we expected, but it is picking up again in the main markets across Europe, more of a demand normalization, as I said, whilst prime retail demand in key world cities is also improving as the cities return to life. Retail demand also remains focused on a number of emerging markets as retailers look for first-mover advantage in these developing economies. On to residential. Whilst I mentioned earlier the resilience of the sector, many market segments still remain adversely affected by the much higher cost of debt, its effect on affordability as well as some of the markets are experiencing now a shortage of supply. In the U.K. mainstream market, national transaction volumes rose 8% year-on-year, but still are 8% below pre-COVID average. Prime sales above GBP 1 million were also up 8%, with prices rising by 0.6% in London with a marginal fall in prime country prices. And across the international markets, it was a mixed picture and challenges in some markets like Mainland China, down 10%, whilst in Hong Kong, there was a bounce back with sales volumes up actually 17% year-on-year as that market started to recover. So looking at the APAC region as a whole, market recovery was strongest in Sydney and Tokyo, stabilizing in Singapore. Whilst closer to home, we're also seeing price increases in markets, including Madrid, Barcelona and Amsterdam. I will now hand over to Simon to take you through the financials. Thanks, Simon.

Thank you very much, Mark. Good morning, everybody. Fantastic to be standing in front of real people again rather than a blank screen, which is a huge relief. I think the summary of what you've heard on the overall results for the year is that in markets that were a long, long way from fully recovered, what you begin to see is the real operational leverage in this business. The fact that we significantly increased margin and profits on our 7% revenue growth, 10% constant currency. And indeed, currency did cost us GBP 2.5 million. There's a currency schedule in the appendix of this pack, if you're interested. Underlying EPS growth just over 20% as we had a higher tax charge in this year, and it is a one-off, primarily associated with some prior year deferred tax adjustments that went through in this period. But what you should expect to see is a tax rate that hovers somewhere between 30% and 32% or so as we look forward. You'll have also read about the extension of our restructuring program from the previous year. And this was during what was an extraordinarily volatile year in respect of expectations around forward interest rates. I can't remember a year in which those expectations moved around so much and in both directions during the period. So what we were doing was keeping open our assumptions and refreshing them through the year, and we made some additional changes, particularly focused on those markets that were a bit more compromised than the rest of the world, so namely particularly Germany and particularly Mainland China, for which a provision of GBP 17.2 million was made in 2024. And there is another GBP 3.5 million to come through in the first quarter of this year. It's all done, but for accounting reasons, we couldn't reflect it in last year. So just to warn you in advance of that. And this is one of the primary differences between statutory earnings and our preferred and consistently measured underlying measure of earnings per share. This trading performance allowed us to make a significant increase in the dividend, as you've just heard, supported by the strong net cash position at year-end, which we'll talk a bit more about that in a moment. So let's turn now to where we actually made our money. This is actually the last time you will see this form of the geographic segmentation of our business. As from this year, we're moving to an EMEA basis, which is in line with some revised Board and management structures we put in place last year. So the 3 segments from here on will be Europe, Middle East and Africa, EMEA; Asia Pacific; and North America, respectively. And we will, of course, continue to call out any individual country impact on performance in future commentaries. But this does, to some extent, also help us with comparison with some of our peers who still report on a geographic basis, too. A proper comparative will be provided at the half year and the year-end. But in the meantime, you can actually simply add together the 2 left-hand columns of this chart. So it's not overly exciting from an analyst perspective. A back to trading. And after the volatility of the last few years and with very, very variable levels of recovery in our markets, it's really gratifying to see a return to green arrows across the board on this slide as every top and bottom line improved during the year. And indeed, points to note, our U.K. business broke the GBP 1 billion barrier for the first time in its history. North America turned back into profit. Continental Europe and the Middle East materially reduced its losses as anticipated, whilst a number of its major markets were obviously, as you know, still quite challenged. And Asia Pacific returned to growth even in the context of continued challenging markets in Greater China. We were also this year, delighted to take a controlling position in our Indian business, which was consolidated from August 2024. It's relatively small numbers to date, but we've got very high hopes for this over the next 5 to 10 years as a growth engine of our Asia Pac business. So how did we make our money? We know where we made it, but how do we make it? I should really entitle this slide Operational Leverage in Action. You can see the significant growth in profits in the transactional side of the business. This is despite many of the core markets still remaining very subdued, as I've mentioned already. Our less transactional businesses, Consultancy and Property Management performed well. And you can see that there was indeed some operational leverage in the consultancy business as we saw all but a couple of our individual service lines come back into a growth phase. And finally, Savills Investment Management had what we would hope and expect to be its [ Nadiyyah ] as less capital was generally allocatable to our core investment style with markets particularly focused more on the value-add end of the investment spectrum. So let's move straight on to the segments. Starting with the commercial transaction business. On a global basis, a 15% increase or in absolute terms, GBP 86 million increase in revenue gave rise to a near GBP 33 million increase in profits as the incremental revenue flowed through at about 38% margin. That is the operational leverage I was talking about. The explanations for performance of each of our businesses is set out on the slide, but I draw your attention to the impact of trading improvements in Continental Europe and the Middle East region, supported by the effect of restructuring in Germany and France, which led to an approximate halving of losses in the region during the year. Likewise, in North America and APAC, we returned to profit in 2024, the latter being driven for the most part by our ex Greater China elements of the APAC region, where we saw increasing strength through the last quarter of the year. And so in a world where markets such as the U.K. were still only marginally above COVID levels of transaction volume and others were still well below, we're pleased with this performance. One point I should make here is that in the early days of developing our international residential network, we have yet to break out the results of that business into the residential segment. This will happen in 2025. But for now, the financial impact of this strategy, which was particularly actually net P&L investment in the Middle East as we grew that business substantially during the year, sits within the SME segment on this page. So let's turn now to our Residential segment. Overall, the growth in profits, U.K. profits was offset by the Asia Pacific business falling into loss for the year, and this was absolutely down to slow Mainland Chinese and Singaporean markets, partially offset by some significant transactions in Hong Kong and improvements in other parts of the APAC region. In the U.K., secondhand sales increased 13% on the back of a more attractive mortgage market, perhaps a bit more stable in the second half of the year. And at that point, I should say, greater stability in forward interest rate expectations. On the other hand, development sales of new homes reduced by some 13% on top of the reductions of 2023, and this did necessitate a little bit of a further rightsizing of our team in this sector in advance of future growth coming back. We've started the new year well. However, it is fair to say that both fiscal change this April and broader geopolitical concerns are likely to have an impact on the market in the very near term, but don't change the fundamentals of it as we look through to the medium and beyond. Our operational Capital Markets business also had a good year. That's mainly but not exclusively the bed sector, living, student, et cetera. And it performed well despite several transactions shifting into 2025 from the back end of last year. So let's turn to our less transactional service lines, starting with Property Management. Globally, 5% reported growth, which was 7% in constant currency and double-digit growth in the profit line. In the U.K., both contract wins in FM and PM were enhanced by greater revenue from energy sourcing and sustainability advisory work on our portfolio. And in addition, both the lettings business and our rural management portfolio performed well during the year. In Continental Europe and the Middle East, growth in the markets referenced in this slide was outweighed by the assumption of costs in advance of revenue in respect of a very significant contract win, pan-European win, I should say, in our German business. And we won't see revenue really coming from that until probably the second half of this year. And finally, in APAC, it was a combination of really 3 things that produced 1% revenue growth, but an improved 6% bottom line growth. And those were labor shortages in Hong Kong having an effect on cost at certain times in the year, a reduction in activity in the Macau leisure industry for pure economic reasons, and reductions in revenue in Mainland China as we restructured the business there. And that restricted the revenue growth but improved our profit performance to 6% in constant currency. Just to give you an indication of what we've done in China over the last 18 months, we've closed 5 regional Tier 2 and 3 city offices and reduced the size of a further 3. So it's not an insubstantial exercise that's been going on there. So overall, a good result despite some difficult markets. Turning to Consultancy. You can see 8% nominal revenue growth at 9% in constant currency, which is within our normal expected range of high single to low double digits in any given period from this portfolio. In the U.K., we saw growth in most of our service lines, perhaps with the exception of the leisure industry and the social housing consultancy, the latter being particularly affected by hiatus as it always is, around the U.K. general election. Meanwhile, project management grew nicely for us on the back of increase, as Mark referenced earlier, green fit assignments associated with the sustainability piece that we've talked about and retrofitting assets on behalf of landlords. In Continental Europe and the Middle East, the countries named on this slide and in particular, a surge in consulting activity in Saudi Arabia contributed to a significant increase in profits from the Middle East and consultancy or from the Continental Europe and Middle East and consultancy business. I'm looking forward to being able to say EMEA, by the way. And in APAC, market-related volume reductions had a negative effect, particularly on the valuation element of our consultancy businesses in Hong Kong and Mainland China, which was partially offset by the strengthening of activity in Australia, Japan and even Taipei during the period and the initial part of the consolidation of our Indian business. Finally, North America reduced its losses to near breakeven through growth in the project management side of our business, but that was offset by a reduction in activity temporarily in Life Sciences and Technology in that part of the market. So final, the segment is -- the final segment is Investment Management. As I indicated previously, we were anticipating that this would be the hardest year for Savills Investment Management and through the difficulty of deploying new capital into core style product, which reduced both transaction fee revenue. And at the other end of the spectrum, the difficulty in realizing value in that market reduced performance fee revenue, too. The result of this was that the 2024 base management fees, although slightly reduced on valuations in the portfolios, represented 86% of our total revenue in Investment Management, which is an all-time record. It's never been as high as that before. But it just does show there is a resilience in that business that allows us to make money even in really difficult times for that. We continue to grow the asset management business in Germany and in Italy, in particular. And we launched 2 new pooled funds during the year: one, a pan-European whole loan fund, which is expected to reach something around the GBP 300 million, GBP 350 million mark on its second close next quarter. And the other, Simply Affordable Homes, which is our first foray into the affordable living space, and it achieved its first GBP 125 million in commitments, which will be invested, I suspect, by the end of next quarter, at which point we'll be out on the raise again for the second tranche. During the year, we extended last year's restructuring exercise given the circumstances that Savills Investment Management is facing with a view to putting the business on a good footing in the current environment, but also positioning us well for recovery as that occurs over the course of the coming periods. So having been through the drivers of our operating performance, let's take a quick look at the dividend distribution and a few words about cash. Starting with the dividend. You can see the progressive increase in the ordinary dividend component, which is supported by our less transactional service line performance. The big difference this year is the significant increase in the snappily entitled Supplemental Interim Dividend, otherwise known as the transaction dividend, which is supported obviously by the increase in profits that I've just been talking about and the operational leverage. It's very heartening to see the impact of our bifurcated dividend policy come through on the upside now, having had to experience it for all of us the previous year on the downside with a significantly positive impact on our overall distribution. And this was obviously helped too by our cash position. which you can see from this slide reflected an operating cash flow of just shy of GBP 118 million compared with a negative GBP 5.5 million last time out. And this is where you really see the beneficial effect of -- on working capital of our incentive structure in a period when profits start to rise. It should also be noted that we spent less on acquisitions during the year, primarily down to the timing on some exciting things in the hopper at the moment. What that acquisitions number does hide, it masks the fact that we did have the deferred consideration payment on DRC Capital, our debt investment manager of GBP 34 million in September, but that was in working capital as that had been provided for through the life of that business in the 6 years or so since we bought it 5 years. Without that, the working capital position would have actually been positive to the tune of about GBP 25 million. So very clearly showing the impact of our working capital in a rising market. We spent a bit more on CapEx in 2024 as we upgraded and executed a major ERP program in North America and also upgraded and particularly with a view to sustainability, a number of the offices in our network around the world. Basically, every other item on this cash flow bridge was consistent with underlying performance. I've already been through the shareholder distribution element of our cash allocation policy. The remainder is directed towards value-enhancing business development, as you would expect. And we've got an exciting pipeline of potential transactions in the offering across the field really from occupier services, consultancy, international residential agency and indeed asset management. And we expect at least some of those to come to fruition during 2025, which with the recent renewal of our up to GBP 450 million revolving credit facility, which is totally unutilized at the balance sheet date, we comfortably have the financing in place to deliver on those. So with that, I'll hand you back to Mark to talk further about business development.

Perfect. Thank you. Just before I look forward, what I think it is worth doing is just reminding ourselves of where we are a snapshot of today. And it's important to see also not just the split between our less transactional and transactional businesses. But I think it's to highlight really the geographic mix in more detail on the right-hand side of this slide and also markets where we're seeing the fastest growth geographically, these future growth markets, which I've highlighted here, which we deem as critical when providing clients with coverage in these markets. Simon has referenced it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, India actually is the fastest-growing market you'll see, where we started almost scratch 6 years ago and now have a full service office operating out of 10 offices with over 800 staff. The next, again, reference is the Middle East region, very strong momentum across the whole of the Middle East, particularly in residential, while Singapore has very much now established itself as our principal hub in Southeast Asia. Vietnam has grown into a market-leading business in all segments, now employs over 2,700 people and 78% of its revenue is generated out of property and facilities management, a very good keel on the ship. Perhaps quite a surprise to some of you, Simon has referenced the U.K. has now achieved over GBP 1 billion of revenue, and it is our largest geographic business. But it is still experiencing one of the strongest growth rates of all our businesses, certainly not reaching maturity. There are plenty of opportunities to develop this business and new service lines indeed. Finally, future growth markets. Well, certainly North America, where we still remain relatively small to our competitors, but also markets like the Philippines, where last year, we set up an organic start in Manila. And I'm pleased to announce we've just completed the acquisition of KMC, a market-leading real estate advisory business based in Manila with 200 staff. So moving on to our global strategy. Whilst, again, the core components of this, you will have seen at the half year and prior year, the core components obviously will stay similar, but we've got to continue to refine and develop this to reflect the market challenges we're now seeing and look for the opportunities as well as our clients' needs. So within Investor Services, our primary focus here remains on developing our market-leading property and facilities management businesses, mainly across EMEA and APAC, building on our reputation as the premier supplier of services in this key area. With that recovery underway in capital transaction markets, we've also maintained and grown our platform and continue to expand in many key markets with comprehensive services, both around equity and debt. Within Investment Management, as I highlighted earlier in the themes of recovery, the focus has turned now towards more value-add and infrastructure funds where we're developing our platform further. And across project management and consultancy services, there's an enormous amount of opportunity to reposition and refurbish obsolete assets for investors and occupiers. And in fact, our worldwide Green-fit project management teams last year were instructed on over 26 million square feet of new refurbishment projects, which is an indication of that demand. Moving on to occupier and leasing services. Our key focus here is on the growth of our mandated accounts from major corporate occupiers. Globally, this part of the business has tripled over the last 3 years, thanks to new account wins. And in line with this, we've also extended the coverage of our consultancy services to provide occupiers with turnkey solutions. With the recovery of the industrial and logistics markets now underway, we continue to organically grow linked primarily to supply chain consultancy to support manufacturers' need for flexibility in a world now of tariffs. Thanks to our very strong reputation in the residential sector, we're growing our wholly owned residential network in the world's prime markets, particularly focused across EMEA and the APAC region. And this is also closely linked to our investor services across multifamily and the living sector. Finally, we continue to explore, evolve and adapt new technology across data analytics and including the use of AI across the entire platform. So now moving on geographically to the U.K. Our overall revenue increase of 7%, as we've referenced earlier, was driven by growth in both property management as well as that recovery in transactional markets, primarily thanks to market share gains. Within Investor Services, our capital markets teams were ranked #1 nationally across all property types last year as well as particularly within the office and retail sectors. As a result of this, we acted on some of the largest transactions during the year, including the sale of M7's retail warehouse portfolio for over GBP 500 million. We also expanded across the Oxford Cambridge, which is obviously a key focus, and that's obviously relating to life sciences. And we also grew our teams in natural capital and renewable sectors and developed our portfolio valuation business with new mandates from LGIM, Federated Hermes and Get Living. In the occupier and leasing services, our industrial logistics team expanded with new teams across the Midlands and Northwest. And our Global Occupier Services platform secured a number of very key mandates from Capgemini, Ministry of Defense, Coca-Cola, et cetera. So lots to go at. And within residential services, we grew our global cross-border teams, consolidated our market-leading position with a 21% market share, over GBP 3 million transactions in London and 27% in the country. Whilst our multifamily and OCM teams, as we call them, transacted over GBP 4 billion worth of capital transactions during the year, also ranking them as clear #1. A good litmus test for showing the continued health of the U.K. residential markets was the last week of last year, in fact, where our prime residential teams in London completed the sale of 3 houses in London SW 1, each for over GBP 30 million during the last week, as I said. So Simon and I were very relieved to see that. Okay. Moving on to Continental Europe and the Middle East. So here, overall revenue growth of 10% was primarily driven by a recovery in transactional revenue, but more weighted to Southern Europe and the Middle East. During the year, we formed a new EMEA Board, which Simon referenced. The main purpose of this is to ensure that we do have a synergistic approach and a coordinated approach to the development of the entire platform. And in conjunction with this, we appointed new heads of Northern Europe, Southern Europe and the CEE regions. Growth within Investor Services was primarily focused on European property management, particularly in Germany and Spain as well as the growth of our industrial and logistics capability. During the year, we acquired a specialist residential property management platform in Spain to support our growing multifamily business. And within Europe, we advised on some of the largest transactions during the year, including the disposal of Quintain Development in Ireland, a key multifamily deal. Within occupier and leasing services, we established across Italy and UAE new commercial leasing teams. And in Italy, we continue to focus also on our global occupier services business, winning new mandates from occupiers, including Epsom, TotalEnergies and Renault. And finally, within Residential Services, we saw an enormous expansion across the UAE, hiring over 100 new brokers during the year and winning some of the most prestigious residential agency instructions within this growth region. We also acquired a prime residential lettings business in Verbier and established new residential sales teams in both Barcelona and Milan. On to the APAC region. Okay. As you'll see from the slide, we saw positive revenue growth driven by that transactional revenue pickup with 23% uplift, but also strong growth across the consultancy services in that region. During the year, we appointed a new CEO for the APAC region ex Greater China and consolidated the ownership as Simon's referenced in India. Transactional recovery was more pronounced in capital markets here, allowing us to grow our market share in key markets, particularly Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. And because of this, the capital markets teams undertook some of the largest deals of the year, including the sale of Goodman's industrial portfolio for over AUD 800 million. Across our Property and facilities management platform, which represents actually 80% of our revenue in this region, we experienced strong growth in Singapore, where what we call our IFM business grew by 20%, thanks to contract wins. We also expanded our project management capability across India and acted for a number of major international corporates, including SAP, Boeing and AstraZeneca on new facilities in India. Occupier and leasing services allowed us to develop also LCA, which is a leading supply chain consultancy in the region, based in Malaysia. And we also strengthened our office leasing capability in both China and India, as I've already mentioned. And beyond that, we also acquired, say, KMC in the Philippines. Across residential services in the region, we continue to grow our prime business across the Eastern Seaboard in Australia, a hot market, with a particular focus on Melbourne and Sydney as well as Hong Kong and Vietnam. Our North American business is heavily weighted, as I think many of you know, to the office sector. And here, we saw a good level of recovery in a number of key markets, including New York, Chicago and Houston, allowing overall revenue to increase by some 7%. We experienced faster growth in Global Occupier Services as a result of new mandates with revenue here up 27% and our project management consultancy grew its revenues by around 11%. During the year, we appointed a new Global Head of Global Occupier Services and Enterprise Solutions and continue to grow the platform, thanks to large account wins, including Cortica, HubSpot, Sumitomo Corporate, amongst many others. As part of this growth, we also onboarded a further 20 specialist brokers in Minneapolis, expanded our office tenant rep teams nationally and again, particular focus on New York, Miami and Atlanta. Business wins during the year, including advising Louis Vuitton on its new headquarters in Madison Avenue, acting for the Los Angeles County on its 1.4 million square feet acquisition of the Gas Tower company as well as JPMorgan Chase on the acquisition of 250 Park Avenue in Manhattan. Our project management teams also successfully advised major clients, including [ Greenboro, Baxter ] and Convene on multiple projects. And we also completed the new headquarters for Walt Disney Company in New York, totaling some 1.2 million square feet. Across Canada, growth also continued, and we appointed new teams in both Toronto and Montreal, focused primarily on industrial and logistics. Okay. Finally, Investment Management. Simon has already highlighted the anticipated revenue decline here, in line with the overall industry, driven by a reduction in the performance fees as well as our conscious decision to safeguard the deployment of capital until such times as markets have recalibrated. And whilst capital raising in the sector remained difficult, we made good progress last year, raising over EUR 2 billion of new equity for a range of products, broadly in line with the previous year. Of paramount importance, bearing in mind current turbulence was the maintenance of our strong performance across all discretionary products with 68% of our assets under management outperforming their 5-year target. Moving on to business development. We successfully raised new capital across all our main fund products in logistics, living, debt and also natural capital and won significant new equity mandates across a number of sectors, including prime offices, build-to-rent, forestry and logistics. Our strategic alliance with Samsung Life also continues to progress well with anchor capital provided now being deployed this year. And in line with the strategy to enhance our bench strength, we recently appointed a new Global Chief Investment Officer. So moving on to summary and outlook, always a challenge in this sort of market. I am pleased with our improved performance during 2024 due in a significant part to the increased transactional revenues. However, headwinds continue. And whilst most markets were in recovery as we entered 2025, ongoing geopolitical uncertainty and economic weakness continues to affect sentiment. Most transactional markets continue to recalibrate, and this is leading to greater liquidity and investor appetite. And the recovery of our transactional revenues has been very much leveraged by our deliberate strategy to maintain our transactional bench strength through difficult times to accelerate growth and take market share, as you've heard, in most of the active markets. In addition, the strong balance of our business towards the less transactional or more recurring income continues to underpin our performance with continued growth here. And thanks to that diversity and our strong balance sheet, we are able to continue to advance our growth strategy, which I've highlighted in the areas and sectors that we are focused on. Indeed, we're already seeing positive returns come through from previous investments in the platform, including the new markets we've referenced, India, Middle East, and these will have a greater role to play going forward. Clearly, the events of the last week has shown how fast assumptions about the world can change. So it's extraordinarily difficult to predict the near term. But I'm glad to say we started in line with our expectations with very strong pipelines across the main markets in which we operate. Finally, thank you. Firstly, to our clients worldwide for their loyal support and the same to our shareholders. And last but not least, to our global workforce for the dedication and commitment they give to serving our clients to the best of their abilities. That now completes our presentation. No fire alarms. Thank you for attending today's presentation.