Synectics plc (SNX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the Synectics plc Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions]. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself, however, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish our responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Amanda Larnder, CEO. Good morning.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Amanda Larnder, CEO of Synectics, and I'm pleased to have with me Paul Williams, our CFO, who joined us in August last year. Today, we will present the full year results for Synectics for the year ended 30th of November 2025 as well as a strategic update. And in terms of content today, I'll run through a brief overview to start. Paul will then take you through the financial performance for the year. And then I'll come back on to provide an update on the business and its strategy, why we're repositioning the business and then what that means for FY '26 and future years. So I'll start with a very brief overview for anyone who doesn't know the business. Synectics provides intelligent cybersecure, security and surveillance solutions that protect people, infrastructure and assets around the world. We work in highly regulated industries where security, reliability and regulatory compliance are paramount. We add value to these industries by detecting threats, preventing losses, ensuring regulatory compliance and improving operational performance. We have 2 complementary business units, Synectics Systems, which develops and delivers proprietary technology-led solutions globally. The first of which is Synergy, our intelligent security and surveillance software. And then secondly, COEX, our specialist cameras engineered for the hazardous and extreme environments in oil and gas, marine and renewable energy. Our second business unit is Ocular Integration, which is an independent security systems integrator delivering solutions to end users in the U.K. and Ireland. For security reasons, we can't name all of our customers, but some of them are listed here. And you can see that we've got some really great names on this list. So we've included some more information on our products and markets in the additional information slides that will be saved at the back of the deck. FY '25 was a year of robust delivery with results ahead of our initial market guidance. Revenue grew 22%, EBITDA 36%, and we ended the year with a record cash balance of GBP 14 million. This performance was supported by the successful delivery of a significant gaming contract in Southeast Asia, which shows our capability to deliver these large-scale mission-critical deployments around the world. Synergy DETECT, which is our advanced AI detection tool was named winner in the surveillance Innovation category at the Benchmark Innovation Awards, and that shows the progress that we're making in our AI-led product offering. Importantly, alongside delivering to our customers, we reviewed how Synectics can achieve sustainable growth in the years ahead, and we've now set the direction to be able to do that. FY '26 will be a focused transitional year where we will continue to execute the transformation that we've started, and we'll continue to invest in the business in line with our strategy. We then expect accelerating growth and strong returns from FY '27 onwards, driven by both revenue growth and operating leverage, and I'll provide further details on that later in the business update section. We recommended an increased total dividend of 5p per share, showing the Board's confidence in the strategy that we're now executing. And with that, I'll hand over to Paul to take us through the FY '25 numbers.

Thanks, Amanda. I will just start off by walking briefly through. The results for the Systems and Ocular business, looking at the individual businesses. As Amanda mentioned, the Synectics Systems business had a strong year in the year -- financial year 2025. Revenue growth of 21% to just over GBP 43 million, up from GBP 36 million last year, predominantly driven by the leisure and hospitality sector and the large casino contract that Amanda mentioned in the overview. A little bit of a decrease in revenue from the energy sector. We had some delays on a number of oil and gas projects. Those projects, it's important to note are still very much within the pipeline. It's just a timing issue, which is somewhat typical of that particular sector. Strong contract wins in the year in renewable energy and some additional casino resorts and a large extension to an existing customer support agreement sort of really give us a degree of confidence in the company's growth strategy, in particular, that sort of sector focus and the benefits of that starting to come through. We were particularly pleased with the renewable energy contracts coming through as well. Gross margin overall improved 9 percentage points to 50.3%, driven by combined impact of a number of factors, the significant casino project, a little bit of competitive pressure in the marketplace, particularly around hardware and some higher-margin support agreements that we've secured during the course of the year. So sort of a moving basket of factors impacting the margin there, but overall, pretty steady on the previous year. Strategic investments that Amanda will talk more about shortly, particularly around go-to-market and some of the senior leadership team that we've been making in the systems business will enable us to deliver greater value to customers and with more efficiency and a greater scale going forward, those investments are playing a little bit into the EBITDA figure overall. So adjusted EBITDA growing 28% to GBP 9 million with margins slightly higher at 21% for the year. So overall, a really strong performance for the Synectics business, the Systems business. Moving on to Ocular, the systems integration business. Ocular is a little further ahead in terms of its strategic refresh than the systems part of the business that back end of '24, early '25, there was a significant amount of work done on Ocular's positioning and it's introducing more sector focus and making some investments in the go-to-market capabilities. And we've seen some strong results as a result of that coming through in 2025, which is really encouraging. So revenue growth of 24% to GBP 26.4 million, particularly strong in the transport sector, particularly on vehicle with key wins with Stagecoach in particular, and Bus Eireann. And also in the critical infrastructure sector as well driving growth through with National Grid and West Midlands Police as well sort of increasing their activity. Gross margin overall just fell slightly by 1.5 percentage points down to 27.7%. This really is just reflecting a slightly different mix of sector projects, particularly around critical infrastructure as we've increased our work in that sector, we typically see slightly lower margin for those types of projects. So we're just seeing that basket of different sector focus elements coming through and impacting on the gross margin. Overall EBITDA growth, 22% up to GBP 2.3 million, pretty much in line with revenue growth. Overall margin on EBITDA just slightly lower at 8.6%. Notable with the investment that we've made in the go-to-market capability within Ocular, we've seen a really strong increase in qualified pipeline of opportunities actually increasing by more than 100% over the course of the year. So again, we're very encouraged by the progress that Ocular have made and are sort of looking forward to continuing strong performance there. In terms of how that rolls up then to the overall group performance, looking at the income statement here, we see the overall group revenue is up 22% to GBP 68 million. And as you say, the growth between the 2 sort of operating divisions is more or less the same. Solid year performance, largely driven by the sort of non-repeating casino project, which contributed about GBP 12 million worth of revenue in full year '25. So that was a significant impact on the top line from that project that was delivered successfully in the year in Southeast Asia. Overall margins, pretty flat on a gross margin perspective, increasing in line with revenue from a profit point of view, margin broadly flat. And again, sort of a little bit of a moving picture underneath there with the increase in profitability in leisure and hospitality, offset a little bit by Critical Infrastructure coming through. So just some underlying movements, but broadly equaling out. In terms of EBITDA, an increase in adjusted EBITDA of 36% up to GBP 8.5 million with the impact of that casino project coming through and offsetting some of the strategic investments that we're making in the business coming through. So overall margin uplift to 12.5% and an increase in adjusted diluted EPS to 28% (sic) [ 28p ] from 21.7p. So overall, a really strong year, I think, within both Ocular and the Systems businesses. Looking slightly beneath that, the revenue and the order book profile. I shall dwell on this chart too much. Just noteworthy that the -- there is a significant spike in first half '25 revenues. The casino contract was delivered largely across the first half of the year, so we can see that impact coming through. We'd expect that mix of timing between first and second half year to sort of revert back to its kind of like normal profiling as we go forward. So we will see that coming through at the interims with a little bit more balance towards the second half of '26 in terms of revenue profiling. From an order book perspective, the order book we enter the year with in terms of exiting '25 and into '26 is strong and robust and pretty much where it was when we entered '24 if you take account of the large single contract that was in the order book at that time. A little bit of delay on some of those oil and gas projects that I mentioned earlier, again, just makes up a small amount of that, but those are not gone from the pipeline. They remain very much in sight for full year '26 delivery. In terms of the sector split, again, we can see here the sort of the spread of sector revenue streams from both the Systems business and Ocular. The transport piece was significantly -- was up, largely driven by Ocular in terms of contracts with Bus Eireann and Stagecoach across the year and also with Systems in terms of Berlin public transport as well with a good opportunity there. Energy sector is slightly down. Again, that's just in the Systems business. And again, just a little bit of a delay on some of those projects that we would have expected to have seen in '25 now sort of moving out a little bit into sort of '26. Critical Infrastructure, an uplift there, driven predominantly by Ocular, again, with some strong activity with National Grid over the course of the year, pushing the revenues from that sector up. And then on the leisure and hospitality side, the systems business and the contract that we delivered across the course of the year for the large casino is impacting that. In terms of adjusted EBITDA, we can see here the bridge running from full year '24's EBITDA at GBP 6.3 million to GBP 25 million at GBP 8.5 million. Largest single contributor, clearly, the gross margin coming through, predominantly driven by that large contract. The additional -- some additional investment that we're making in staff costs and on the overhead side as well, impacted a little bit by some inflation. We are quite highly geared in terms of operating costs and the balance towards the number of people that we have, and Amanda will talk a little bit about how we're addressing that going forward through the strategic sort of transformation that's taking place in the business. That will -- means that we typically -- we'll see sort of some element of inflation coming through on staff costs, and you can see that included within those numbers there. A little bit of additional spending on R&D coming through in additional capitalization impacting the numbers and a tidbit of FX at the end. So there's a sort of a blend there, but you can see the impact coming through from that additional investment, a little bit of inflationary pressure and a large slug of additional gross margin coming through. From a net cash perspective, the cash generation within the business was really strong across the year. We've ended the year with a record cash figure of just over GBP 14 million. This is coming, as we can see, largely there from additional operating cash flows coming through. We had a little bit of an improvement on working cap performance across the year, just around sort of timing of some of those payments around that large contract in particular. A little bit of additional CapEx going through and some GBP 1 million worth of share purchase going through across the year, noting that, that is in relation to share buybacks for the Employee Benefit Trust, which was largely driven by the state of the former Chief Executive and Chair of the company. Dividend payment going through a little bit of non-underlying change there in terms of some of those investments that we're making, and we pushed through the year and end up with GBP 14.1 million. So we have a robust balance sheet overall with net assets of just under GBP 44 million or just over --just under GBP 44 million. I think -- and that's it in terms of the full year '25 update. Thanks, Amanda. Back to you.

Thanks, Paul. So I'd like now to take you through a brief business and strategy update. As I've mentioned during the year, we took the opportunity to review how we can drive sustainable growth within the business moving forward. As Paul mentioned, the business is currently quite highly geared. Our current business model of a project-led delivery and relatively limited route to market means we have to invest a lot of bespoke effort from our own resources, which increases costs at a disproportionate rate and limits the repeatability and scalability of revenues. Currently, we have to increase our cost base to both sell and deliver those increase in revenues. The exception to this, I'd just say, is where we deliver very large-scale projects as we did in FY '25, where the sales and engineering cost of delivering one project is much reduced compared to the amount of cost that we need to incur to deliver the same amount of revenue through many average size contracts. So in order to achieve sustainable growth and increase operating leverage, we'll be transitioning to a scalable product-led and partner-enabled business model during FY '26. Results in FY '26 reflect this transitional execution phase. And then from '27 onwards, we expect to see the benefits of these changes in increased revenues and operating leverage, resulting in double-digit revenue growth and operating margins. To execute this transition, we've defined 5 clear priorities, which form our 5P transformation strategy: Product, Partner-led growth, Market Presence, Productivity and People. And I'm going to talk briefly through each one of those now. Product is the foundation of our strategy, and we're transitioning from bespoke delivery to repeatable insight-led solutions. We've developed a new road map aligned to market demand, and we're integrating customer and partner feedback into our product strategy. We're prioritizing our product investment to those that have the biggest, most important impact. A key project already underway and making good progress is the synergy deployment simplification, which is critical to enable our systems integrator partners to be able to install and maintain synergy without increasing our delivery resources and costs. Currently, as shown on here, an average synergy deployment can take up to 20 days to install, configure and test. And that makes it difficult for our partners to deploy and means we have to rely predominantly on our own engineering team. By the end of '26, we'll have reduced this time to 4.5 days. And longer term, we're targeting deployments that take less than 1 day. And this is a really big positive change for us. Importantly, it will enable our partners to implement synergy, which they can't do easily at the moment. It reduces dependency on our engineering resource and therefore, improves margin and allows scalability. This is one of the key drivers of operating leverage in FY '27 and '28. At the same time, we're continuing to invest in core platform capability, including analytics and AI enhancements, cybersecurity, cloud and then sector-specific features. We can't scale globally through headcount alone. and partner-led sales and distribution is key to expanding our route to market and enabling scalable implementation and therefore, expanding our growth model. During the year, we launched a new partner program for systems integrators. As part of the new program, we're professionalizing our relationships with partners. So we're developing sales and technical training for them. We're bringing in incentives such as volume-based discounts and generally improving how we work with our partners to enable them to sell and deliver synergy. Importantly, as synergy becomes easier to deploy, partners will be able to sell and install independently. And therefore, in the second half of 2026, we'll be looking to expand our network to bring in new systems integrator partners. So this is how we'll increase revenue through partners without proportionate increases in internal sales and delivery costs. Commercial execution is an important change that's currently underway. We're improving our sector focus, establishing a unified global proposition and enhancing our sales methodology. Marketing is a key part of this, and we're building a digital-first data-led marketing capability under new leadership, focusing on demand generation, brand visibility and pipeline quality. In terms of new markets, we're making good progress on our entry into the UAE with a partner already onboarded and a growing pipeline. We've also won our first contracts in the renewables sector. Both of these markets will be key priorities for us as there is expected to be significant investment in these in the next 5 years. Productivity is about being able to build efficiency into the business. In FY '26, we're developing an operating model, which will give us clarity on priorities and direction and help us convert our strategy into revenue more quickly. This, for example, involves removing complexity from our processes, strengthening our data visibility and embedding more consistent ways of working across the organization. Alongside this, we're applying AI and digital tools in targeted controlled use cases. That currently includes examples such as market research, product development and improving the bid process. We've already seen some really positive results, improving productivity from these use cases. As part of our new operating model, we'll identify where automation and AI can improve scalability, speed and the quality of our decision-making, and then we'll look to implement appropriately at the time. The objective here for us is how we deliver more value without proportional increases in effort and ultimately cost. As we move towards a more scalable business model, we need the right leadership, capability and performance culture to be able to support that shift. Over the last year, we've created a new leadership team in Synectic Systems, bringing in dedicated product, commercial and operational expertise aligned to our transformation. In addition, our new Marketing Director joins us in a couple of weeks. And then becoming a living wage accredited employer is part of our commitment to building a workplace where people want to be, which is essential if we want to attract and retain the capability required for long-term growth. So that's a summary of our 5P strategy and how we're repositioning the business for the future. FY '26 is about embedding this change to drive performance in FY '27 and beyond. And that's why we paused market guidance over the last few months. As the strategy is evolving into a larger transformation, we wanted to ensure our forecast and our messaging going forward reflect the evolving business model and the strategy that we're now executing. So with this context, Paul will just briefly take you through our updated outlook.

Thanks, Amanda. Yes, as we said there, the key for us was to be able to build our forecast internally around the strategy work that was evolving towards the back end of last year and significantly to make sure that the new leadership team that we've been bringing into the business was able to participate in that process. So that -- there was a little bit of a delay running through that. However, we have emerged with forecasts that we've now got some confidence in. And we can sort of set out here. We wanted to set out here what we expect that shape to be going forward from '26 through to '28. So overall, for '26, the combination of what we've been discussing here has, in particular, with the non-repeating casino contract sort of disappearing into the rearview mirror in full year '25. We're expecting to see overall revenue drop about 10% compared to that high watermark around that contract. But however, within that, we have got some underlying growth coming through in the forecasting of around 10%, which will offset a portion of that, but not all of it in 2026. We expect to see a little bit of gross margin impact of those reduced revenues sort of falling through, in particular, the sort of higher-margin casino contract and as some of those more traditional sectors for us come through, we'll see a little bit of degradation on gross margin over 2026. In terms of overhead, we'll see about an GBP 800,000 impact overall from sort of -- from the strategic investments in our leadership team and our go-to-market capability and some of those strategic initiatives that Amanda walked through. We see that in '26 with not a significant impact overall as that's being offset by some nonrepeating costs and investments that we made in full year '25. So overall, that feeding through, you can see on the chart below there, feeds through to a sort of a mid-single-digit adjusted EBITDA expectation, EBITDA percent expectation for 2026, reflecting what is, as we said, a transitional year, setting up the business for sort of scalable growth with improving revenue quality as we go forward. We sort of follow that chart forward into '27 and '28. We are expecting strong momentum exiting full year '26, driving sort of positive financial impact and starting to see the return on those investments that we're making in 2027 coming through. In terms of what we expect to see from a revenue perspective, we're expecting double-digit revenue growth coming through in '27, some limited inflation coming through on the overhead cost base with, again, some impact from some of those investments, particularly in the leadership team as we sort of built that team out across the second half of 2025. So we'll see a full year impact of that additional investment flowing through in '26 to take us through to an adjusted EBITDA position in '27, which is kind of returning towards what we think is sort of double-digit EBITDA level. And in terms of percentage terms, sort of higher than the underlying EBITDA percentage in 2025 if you allow for the significant gaming contract going through. In terms of full year '28, we expect to see further acceleration of revenue growth, a little bit more investment coming through in the go-to-market piece and again, some inflation in that cost base as we start to look at the balancing that operating leverage through and starting to see some improvements coming through across the year alongside that stronger commercial performance. So that's the sort of shape in terms of that outlook across '27 -- '26 through to '28. In terms of capital allocation, we wanted to sort of clearly set out here the fact that with a strong sort of debt-free balance sheet, we have -- with a record cash balance, we have some optionality around how we fund the growth strategy going forward. We're expecting to spend just over GBP 3 million in terms of the cost of those strategic investments across 2026. A little bit of that will, as I mentioned, will impact through to EBITDA. The rest of that will sort of -- will run through as either non-underlying costs or CapEx according to accounting standards. We will support some additional investment in Ocular’ premises. They have considerably now outgrown their current site. They have a lease event arriving at the back end of this year, and we will support them to invest in their premises to continue to support their underlying growth going forward. Our final dividend for full year '25 recommended at 5p per share, just up 11% from the full year '24 number. And we continue to be committed to providing a progressive dividend policy even through '26, where we can just see that transitional impact going through. We are exploring sort of products or strategy enhancing bolt-ons where appropriate, we will use any available surplus cash over and above that, which we need to support near-term operations and those strategic investments we've discussed. So where we see a particular opportunity to enhance our product and accelerate our strategy in a particular -- with a particular technology capability, then we will look at those actively. And similarly, we would also -- we are also sort of considering the use of a limited share buyback to support the requirements of the Employee Benefit Trust going forward. for -- to support those long-term incentive plans for the leadership team and the staff in general. That is the plan in terms of capital allocation across the business going forward. And I think that's back to you, Amanda, for a summary.

Yes. So to briefly summarize, we're repositioning the business for scalable, higher-quality growth. Our priorities there are continuing the transformation that we started, our synergy deployment simplification and product innovation. And then our growth enablers, strategic partnerships, commercial discipline and operating leverage will drive the sustainable growth and longer returns. So thank you for listening. That's the end of our formal presentation today. So I'll hand back over to Lilly.

That's great. Thank you very much for presentation. [Operator Instructions]. I'd like to remind you that recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via investor dashboard. As you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Amanda, could I please ask you to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

Yes, we'll do. Thank you. Okay. So a number of questions submitted. Could you explain your competitive advantage and how you're planning to sustain this in the long run? There's probably a number of areas of competitive advantage, but the most significant one for us as a business is -- or our main area of competitive advantage is our position in highly regulated mission-critical environments where reliability of your solution and compliance with some very stringent regulations create high barriers to entry, meaning we only have a really small handful of competitors globally. We continuously develop our solutions to meet these strict requirements for the industries that we serve. And one of those as an example recently is so cybersecurity, cyber assurance in the form of the NPSA guidance in the U.K. caps. That's extremely important for critical national infrastructure customers in the U.K. And as far as we're aware at the moment, we're the only company who's nearly completed that accreditation for on-premise security and surveillance solutions. So we'll sustain that, obviously, through continued product innovation to ensure we remain at the forefront of those regulatory requirements. Next question, how are you using AI to cut costs? I think we've probably answered that already. And obviously, we'll continue to build out AI as part of our new operating model. What I would say there is, obviously, it's very important that we roll AI out in a careful and considered way, considering governance, data, et cetera, and ensuring that we've got the right data behind what we're trying to do. Paul, did you want to take -- we've got a couple on share buybacks, so general.

On share buybacks. Why are you not actively buying back shares at this level? What are your other immediate capital allocation priorities? The answer to that, I think we dealt with that in the presentation itself in terms of just a walk through the capital allocation priorities. And regarding buyback, in particular, then yes, we may well consider that as we look to firm up the levels at which we would consider that. But clearly, with the share price where it is, it would be a relatively sensible thing to look at for sure.

Okay. So I got quite a long question, sorry, just reading it. So why did we repeat a number of times in the CEO, the Chairman and the CFO's report about the GBP 12 million contracts, is the first part of that question. So I think on that one, key messages about the performance of the business do tend to get repeated to an element in each of those reports. The one-off contract was a material part of our FY '25 results. As we've explained throughout the presentation as well, it had a very positive impact on margins for the year-end, and I think we felt it appropriate that it was highlighted appropriately. And then the second part of that question is, are the Board buying shares themselves. So yes, some of the Board members, so 2 of the nonexecs in recent couple of weeks, and then I have also just bought some shares as well now that we're out of the close period. So yes, the Board are looking at buying shares themselves. Are you aware of the pending EU AI Act? And are you prepared to deal with its obligations? Does it [indiscernible] with any new opportunities or costs? So yes, we are aware of the EU AI Act. The EU for us at the moment is our smallest market. We are doing quite a lot of market research and understanding globally at the moment as we're directing our sector focus. And as part of that, we're picking up the EU AI Act and what compliance we would need or the compliance we would need to roll out our AI offerings and facial recognition, et cetera, with Europe. We are quite used, as I guess, I highlighted from the regulatory compliance. We are a good -- we're very used to dealing with many different regulations and being able to comply with those. So we'll do so accordingly. How do you see the war in Iran to affect the company, in particular, in the Gulf? So in the immediate or at the moment, obviously, we're just a week into that. We've had no direct impact as of yet, other than an employee of ours, who couldn't travel there. We -- the sector that we're strongest in at the moment in that area is oil and gas. And what we do tend to find is during times of volatility or certainty that particularly the large capital-intensive projects in that area can be delayed. So they have to go through long approval processes for the whole of the project as it is anyway. And then you tend to see if this carries on, what we might start to see is those approval processes have to go back to the beginning and start again, at least that's what we've seen in similar times in the recent couple of years. The other areas that we can see sometimes impacting, of course, maybe speed of supply chain as well. As obviously, we've mentioned, we're also focusing on the UAE as an area going forward. We haven't -- we've obviously not yet seen any impact or any change in what the UAE are planning to do with their tourism infrastructure investment, but obviously, we'll be continuing to watch that closely. Are there any research notes from brokers coming out? There has -- there was one that came out last week that I think went to clients of the broker. What Paul had tried to talk you through on his slide, particularly showing the graph was the forecast that the broker has put in the research note. Paul, did you have anything to add to [that].

Other than to just point out that those charts are to scale, so you can sort of track from year to year to year what the relative impacts of those financial sort of investments that we're making and some of those growth assumptions coming through are going to be. So we've tried to set that out as clearly as we could.

Okay. Thanks. 80% of strategic transformations fail, what steps are you taking to reduce execution risks and make sure Synectics is in the 20%? I guess there's a couple of things here. Synectics has some very good foundations. We're not starting from a business that is in a dire situation. It's a well-performing business. What we're looking to do here is change that to really drive some scalable growth. One of the most important things for any transformation is people and leadership. And we've brought in a new team to drive that transformation through. And we're working through very carefully with our people, what that will involve for everybody going -- how everybody can support that transformation and help us to build a better business. And I think then finally, we're working with a very experienced consultants who are specialists in AI and automation, enabled business transformation as well as in high-performance leadership and great culture. So we're working through at a steady pace throughout the rest of the year. We're not trying to rush the transformation. So what we really want to achieve is a way to a successful future for the business going forward. Do you want to answer the next one, Paul, on the outlook?

There's a number of questions that sort of come in and talk about confidence in the outlook. With this one, I would just sort of reinforce that as a business, we've spent a lot of time over the last few months working our way through the strategy and looking at the financial implications of that with the leadership team and the new leadership team that are coming on board and have come on board with regard to how that gets executed. The -- we clearly set out to put forecasts into the market that are -- that we can achieve and we can overachieve. So that's clearly the aim. We are confident in the numbers that we've put together. And we're confident that we can deliver against those with some upside as we go along the way if the strategy is executed well. And from what we can see, we're starting to make some good progress with that underneath, and we can start to build that story as we go forward and report regularly back into the investors and to the marketplace how we're doing. So that's very much the intention. We needed to build this story to put it there in the marketplace, and then we can start to sort of tell the investors how we're progressing as we go forward with that. So I think that's the key there. Yes, we're confident in what we've put together.

And just to add to that to pick up on a point of one of those questions as well, adding to the confidence in those numbers when our revenue typically relies on the order book at the start of the period. And that's exactly right. And that is one of the key things that we're looking at here with various initiatives and with significantly expanding our route to market with a completely different systems integrator partner network is how do we change that direct sales-led shorter-term order book into something that means we can look out more to the future. And so obviously, we've gone through, we've built our initiatives and what we're doing into those forecasts. Sorry, I just jumped on. How good are the executive at taking feedback from the rest of the company? Do you take feedback from your software development team and act upon it? When was the last time you took constructive criticism and how did you use that to improve Synectics? Well, a lot of what's gone into the 5P strategy has come from feedback from people within the organization over the last 12 months. In fact, that's been the biggest driver of -- particularly of what we've been doing is really understand people's views of how we can improve the company, not only of our employees, but also from our customers, from our partners as well. And as we move forward into this process and as everybody becomes more involved across the business, that will be a really important factor of what we're doing to change the business moving forward. Another one about the confidence, so I'll skip past that one. Given the low market cap, are we worried about a takeover? No. I'm not worried about takeover. We have some very supportive institutional investors who understand the story of the business and understand what we're looking to do here. So on that basis, no, I'm not worried about takeover. And how have your underlying -- last question now is how -- have your underlying markets evolved over the past 12 to 24 months? I think we've got a slide on market share in the additional information at the back of the pack, and that was actually -- is near enough the same as the one that we put in last year's pack and showing our small share of those markets. So I think the first thing to say here is that we operate in extremely large and growing markets with the geopolitical uncertainty and a lot of things happening in the market at the moment, those markets are growing at quite considerable rate tends to be averaged between 10% to 20%. As I said, that's partly due to the geographical landscape. It's also partly due to the technology that's out there. So AI, cloud, edge also driving increase in those markets. So very -- very good markets for us to be operating in and growing markets at the same time as well.

Amanda, Paul, thank you for answering all those questions you can from investors. And of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to the company, Amanda, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments?

Yes, sure. Thanks, Lilly. I'd just like to say thank you for everyone who's joined us today and will listen, really appreciate that. We've delivered a strong year in terms of financial performance, but while also setting a clear direction for the future. And this is about building a more sustainable business, and we look forward to updating you on our progress as it develops. Thank you.

That's great. Thank you for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. It's going to take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Synectics plc, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation and good afternoon to you all.