Slides
Page 1
H1 FY26 results 27 August 2026
Page 2
2 Important Information The forward-looking statements included in these materials involve subjective judgement and analysis and are subject to significant uncertainties, risks and contingencies, many of which are outside the control of, and are unknown to, Appen Limited. In particular, they speak only as of the date of these materials, they are based on particular events, conditions or circumstances stated in the materials, they assume the success of Appen Limited’s business strategies, and they are subject to significant regulatory, business, competitive, currency and economic uncertainties and risks. Appen Limited disclaims any obligation or undertaking to disseminate any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements in these materials to reflect any change in expectations in relation to any forward-looking statements or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based. You should monitor any announcements by the company lodged with the ASX. Nothing in these materials shall under any circumstances create an implication that there has been no change in the affairs of Appen Limited since the date of these materials. Organisation structure is subject to change. No representation, warranty or assurance (express or implied) is given or made in relation to any forward-looking statement by any person (including Appen Limited). In particular, no representation, warranty or assurance (express or implied) is given in relation to any underlying assumption or that any forward-looking statement will be achieved. Actual future events and conditions may vary materially from the forward-looking statements and the assumptions on which the forward-looking statements are based. Given these uncertainties, readers are cautioned to not place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Appen disclaims all liability and responsibility (including without limitation, any liability arising from fault or negligence) for any direct or indirect loss or damage which may arise or be suffered through use or reliance on anything contained in, or omitted from, this presentation. Appen Limited ACN 138 878 298 – Level 8, 1 Market Street, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia All amounts are in US$M unless stated otherwise. Some amounts may not add due to rounding. Underlying results referenced in these materials are a non-IFRS measures used by management to assess the performance of the business and are calculated from statutory measures. Non-IFRS measures are not subject to audit.
Page 3
3 Agenda Results Overview01 H1 FY26 performance02 Strategy & operational update03 FY26 outlook & guidance04
Page 4
H1 2026 Results Overview Ryan Kolln
Page 5
© 2024 proprietary & confidential $119.9 million revenue in H1 FY26 Appen China breakout growth ongoing Appen Global turnaround progress continues 5 H1 FY26 highlights Technology strategy delivering benefits Expanding EBITDA Strong cash balance remains • 80% growth on H1 FY25 • Annualised revenue run-rate exceeding $175 million in June • Further positive outcomes delivered during Q2 • Outside of our largest client, Q2 revenue grew 65% on Q1 • 17% growth on H1 FY25 • +$5.3m EBITDA vs a loss of $2.2m in H1 FY25 • 4.5% EBITDA margin • $44.7 million (A$64.8 million) at 30 June 2026 • ~$12m annualised cost out identified in Appen Global • ~70% to be executed by end of Q4 FY26, remainder by Q1 FY27 1.Converted at 30 June 2026 exchange rate of 0.6894
Page 6
Financial performance Justin Miles
Page 7
7 H1 FY26 profit and loss snapshot Commentary • Revenue increased 17.5% to $119.9 million, reflecting accelerated growth for Appen China, and the continued turnaround of Appen Global • Appen China revenue increased 80.4% to $76.2 million, predominately driven by generative AI related projects • Appen Global turnaround continues, with revenue down 26.9% to $43.7 million. There has been progress throughout the period, however growth in new areas has not yet offset a reduction in traditional work • Small decrease in gross margin % reflects a change in customer and project mix. China margins traditionally lower versus rest of Group • EBITDA improvement of $7.5 million reflects revenue and gross margin growth, prudent cost management, and operational leverage within Appen China H1 FY26 H1 FY25 Change Group Revenue 119.9 102.1 17.5% Appen China revenue 76.2 42.2 80.4% Appen Global revenue 43.7 59.8 (26.9%) Gross Margin1% 36.7% 37.0% -30 bps Underlying EBITDA2 before FX 5.3 (2.2) nm 1.Gross margin refers to revenue less crowd expenses. 2. Underlying EBITDA excludes restructure costs, transaction costs, and acquisition-related and one-time share-based payment expense.
Page 8
8 Group financial performance Group revenue ($M) Group Gross Margin1 % • $119.9 million revenue for H1 FY26, up 17.5% on H1 FY25 • 36.7% gross margin for H1 FY26, down 30 bps on H1 FY25 • Small decrease reflects a change in customer and project mix Group underlying EBITDA2 before FX ($M) • $5.3 million underlying EBITDA before FX for H1 FY26, a $7.5 million improvement on H1 FY25 • 4.5% EBITDA margin for the half, with a Q2 margin of 6.7% 1.Gross margin refers to revenue less crowd expenses. 2.Underlying EBITDA excludes restructure costs, transaction costs, and acquisition-related and one-time share-based payment expense. 102.1 119.9 0 25 50 75 100 125 1H25 1H26 -2.2 5.3 -2.5 0.0 2.5 5.0 7.5 1H25 1H26 37.0% 36.7% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 1H25 1H26
Page 9
9 Appen Global: solid progress made Appen Global revenue ($M) Appen Global EBITDA ($M) • Q2 FY26 revenue reflects growth from expanding projects with leading AI labs. Outside of the largest client, Q2 FY26 revenue grew 65% on Q1 FY26 • $43.7 million revenue for H1 FY26, down 27% vs H1 FY25 due to lower volumes from traditional work, not yet fully offset by growth in new areas • Traditional work currently stabilised • $4.5 million underlying EBITDA loss (before FX) for H1 FY26 reflects the continued turnaround, with improvement throughout the period • Capturing cost efficiencies via AI enabled operations remains a focus for Appen Global • Incremental ~$12 million in operational efficiencies have been identified, with ~70% to be executed before the end of FY26 and the remainder in Q1 FY27 31.6 28.2 26.6 41.4 19.9 23.8 0 10 20 30 40 Q1 FY25 Q2 FY25 Q3 FY25 Q4 FY25 Q1 FY26 Q2 FY26 -1.1 -2.5 -0.8 10.2 -3.1 -1.3 -4 -2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 Q1 FY25 Q2 FY25 Q3 FY25 Q4 FY25 Q1 FY26 Q2 FY26
Page 10
10 Appen China: 80% revenue growth and expanding margins Appen China revenue ($M) Appen China EBITDA ($M) • $76.2 million revenue for H1 FY26, up 80% on H1 FY25 • Appen China exited the quarter with an annualised revenue run-rate growing to over $175 million, up from $144 million at the end of Q1 • The sustained growth demonstrates the strength of Appen China’s relationship with Chinese model builders • $12.1 million underlying EBITDA (before FX) for H1 FY26, up 316% on H1 FY25 • 15.9% EBITDA margin for H1 FY26, up from 6.9% in H1 FY25 • EBITDA margin improvement driven by a greater mix of higher-margin generative AI projects and capturing operating leverage 18.6 23.7 28.6 32.0 34.9 41.3 0 10 20 30 40 Q1 FY25 Q2 FY25 Q3 FY25 Q4 FY25 Q1 FY26 Q2 FY26 0.8 2.1 3.3 4.3 5.2 7.0 0 2 4 6 8 Q1 FY25 Q2 FY25 Q3 FY25 Q4 FY25 Q1 FY26 Q2 FY26
Page 11
11 Profit and loss summary 1. Gross margin refers to revenue less crowd expenses. 2. Employee expenses per management reporting. Excludes direct project workers included in gross margin calculation (i.e. crowd expenses). 3. Non-cash expense. Excludes acquisition-related and one-time share-based payment expense. 4. All other expenses included in underlying EBITDA before FX. 5. Underlying EBITDA excludes restructure costs, transaction costs, and acquisition-related and one-time share-based payment expense. 6. Underlying NPAT excludes after tax impact of restructure costs, transaction costs, acquisition-related and one-time share-based payment expense, and amortisation of acquisition related intangibles. H1 FY26 H1 FY25 Change Revenue 119.9 102.1 17.5% Gross Margin1% 36.7% 37.0% -30 bps Employee expenses2 25.9 25.5 1.4% Share-based payments expense3 0.8 0.3 215.6% Other expenses4 11.9 14.1 (15.6%) Underlying EBITDA6 before FX 5.3 (2.2) nm% Underlying EBITDA6 3.7 (2.8) nm% Underlying NPAT7 (4.2) (12.2) 65.7% Statutory NPAT (4.4) (19.3) 76.9% Commentary • Revenue increased 17.5% to $119.9 million, reflecting accelerated growth for Appen China, and the continued turnaround of Appen Global • Small decrease in gross margin % reflects a change in customer and project mix. China margins traditionally lower versus rest of Group • Decrease in employee and other expenses in Appen Global offset by additional expense from the Appen China division to enable the delivery of strong revenue growth • Decrease in expenses achieved by the Appen Global division through technology innovation and automation • Underlying and Statutory NPAT improvement reflects improved EBITDA as well as decrease in amortisation
Page 12
12 Cash flow summary Commentary • Cash balance of $44.7 million (AUD 64.8 million1), despite the decrease a strong balance remains • Cash flow used in operations impacted by timing of customer receipts, annual payments during the period, and working capital required to support strong Appen China growth • Cash flow from operations in H1 FY25 was positively impacted by the receipt of a payment from a major customer in the first week of January 2025 versus December 2024 as scheduled • Cash used in investing activities $1.9 million higher compared to H1 FY25, due to higher investment in product development and new facilities for the Appen China division • Cash used in financing activities of $2.7 million reflects lease payments • Cash used to fund operations and capex H1 FY26 H1 FY25 Receipts 107.3 122.1 Payments and other (110.0) (109.2) Cash flow - operations before interest and tax (2.7) 12.9 Net interest 0.3 0.4 Taxes (1.7) (0.1) Net cash used in / from operating activities (4.1) 13.2 Cash flows – investing activities (9.2) (7.3) Cash flows – financing activities (2.7) (2.4) Net cash flow for the period (16.0) 3.5 Opening cash balance 59.8 54.8 FX impact 0.9 2.6 Closing cash balance 44.7 60.9 Cash flow reconciliation Underlying EBITDA 3.7 (2.8) Net working capital (6.4) 15.7 Cash flow from operations before interest and tax (2.7) 12.9 Underlying EBITDA cash conversion nm% nm% 1.Converted at 30 June 2026 exchange rate of 0.6894
Page 13
Strategy & operational update Ryan Kolln
Page 14
AI building blocks 14 AI model performance is driven by bespoke, real-world data Public data Synthetic dataReal-world data Largely exhausted, already captured in existing models Provides little ability to differentiate Reliant on other models to produce Does not solve new or novel situations Can result in model collapse Unique data that enables new AI approaches Brings real-world human expertise and reinforcement learning environments to improve and evaluate models Compute Data Algorithms Abundant and commoditizing Open and largely commoditised Scarce, and the source of lasting differentiation
Page 15
15 Appen creates data for leading model builders Client requirements Description of task Expertise requirement Data quality rubrics Volume of data required Task duration Data for leading AI Appen research and delivery experts Internal workforce and project management platform Data annotation platforms Expert workforce marketplace Expert Global workforce Proprietary software stack Tier 1 AI labs B2C and B2B tech Vertical specific AI Robotics Neo Labs
Page 16
16 A global expert workforce built for Generative AI 1M+ Workforce 100+ Domains covered 24% Masters or PhD level education 200+ Countries and cultures 500+ Languages and dialects Domain expertise across industries Thousands of verified experts in each domain Computer Science Linguistics Math Statistics Biology Chemistry Psychology Economics Finance Law Health Science Nursing Engineering Accounting Music Business Consulting Graphic Design Marketing Data Science
Page 17
17 Examples of how Appen supports its customers 01 LLM training data Supervised fine-tuning, RLHF and preference annotation, chain-of-thought trajectory labeling, pre-training data production 02 Multimodal data Text-to-image annotation, aesthetic scoring, video labeling, embodied intelligence data 03 Speech and audio Text-to-speech collection, ASR evaluation, dialect and multilanguage audio across 60+ languages 04 Domain expert annotation Medical, scientific (PhD-level maths and biology), legal and financial 05 Model evaluation LLM and vision language model benchmarking, GUI agent eval, search quality 06 Computer vision and physical AI Autonomous driving, robotics, smart home, AR/VR, embodied AI 07 RL environments Data and environments to support reinforcement learning training techniques 08 Off-the-shelf datasets Pre-built dialect, minor language, image editing, company data and coding repository sets 09 Platform and tooling On-premise annotation platform deployments and SaaS licensing for enterprise AI teams
Page 18
18 Appen’s services now include highly engineered datasets for LLM training DATASET CATOGORY EXAMPLES INCLUDED SCALE AVAILABLE STATUS Audio catalog for speech models Real-world and simulated call-centre / dictation audio, 15+ languages ~200k raw hours across 58 language/domain lines EXISTING Reinforcement learning tasks & validators RL tasks, verifiers and agentic trajectories for enterprise domains >10 task categories — software engineering, healthcare, support NEW Code repositories Production commercial codebases with full commit history, PRs and metrics >500 repositories, >500k commits captured Book corpuses Text and academic corpora — training sets, journals, course textbooks ~10 LLM-training sets, ~20 academic journal corpora Enterprise data for agent training Full operational data estates — Slack, GitHub, CRM, email, financials ~25 enterprise datasets, including full codebase access Other standalone datasets Multimodal sets — STEM Q&A, medical dictation, SOAP notes, infographics >1m Q&A pairs; >1.2m images NEW NEW NEW NEW
Page 19
19 Dedicated operations to cover major AI markets Regions covered Customer segments Technology and operations Demand drivers GLOBAL CHINA USA Europe China Japan Korea Hyperscalers Foundational AI Vertical AI Chinese big tech Foundational AI Vertical AI Dedicated operations and technology stack Dedicated operations and technology stack Expanding AI capabilities New customers New data modalities Expanding AI capabilities New data modalities International expansion
Page 20
20 Ongoing Opex focus within Appen Global Appen Global Opex1,2 Commentary • Appen Global technology roadmap continues to deliver operational efficiencies in the business • Approximately $12 million in incremental annualised cost efficiencies identified and will be executed over the remainder of FY26 and Q1 FY27 • ~70% planned to be executed by the end of Q4 FY26 and the balance by the end of Q1 FY27 • There has been no operational impact of cost out executed to date 1.Employee expense and direct project workers included in gross margin calculation (i.e. crowd expenses). 2.All other expenses are all expenses included in underlying EBITDA before FX less employee expenses. 22.2 19.7 17.7 14.7 14.4 12.5 11.1 11.4 11.2 8.1 - 10.0 20.0 30.0 40.0 H1 FY24 H2 FY24 H1 FY25 H2 FY25 H1 FY26 Employee expenses All other expenses
Page 21
FY26 outlook & guidance Ryan Kolln
Page 22
22 FY26 outlook & guidance The Company remains confident on the AI data market, and the potential for Appen to meaningfully contribute to the development of leading foundation models. The Company continues to see positive signals on LLM related growth including from Appen Global and Appen China customers. We remain highly focused on driving technology led efficiencies across our operations. As in previous years, Appen Global revenue continues to be mostly derived from project-based work and seasonality skews revenue to H2. Considering this, Appen reaffirms the following FY26 group guidance: Revenue of $270 - $300 million; and Underlying EBITDA (before FX) margin of ~5-10%
Page 23
Appendix
Page 24
24 Appendix 1: Appen operating and reporting segments Appen ChinaAppen Global This segment represents all operations outside of the China Group. All project types and data modalities Corporate unallocated costs are not included in this segment (listing fees, directors fees etc. that are not applicable to operating the segment) This segment represents the China Group operations and includes China, Japan and Korea customers. All project types and data modalities
Page 25
25 Appendix 2: Balance sheet Commentary • Cash balance of $44.7 million (AUD 64.8 million1), despite the decrease a strong balance remains • Receivables and contract assets combined increased $14 million predominately due to timing of customer receipts and strong growth of Appen China which has a longer collection cycle compared to Appen Global • Current liabilities $7.4 million higher mainly due to an increase in contract liabilities aligned to the growth of the Appen China segment and timing of trade & other payables • Non-current liabilities $4.8 million lower due to a decrease in lease liabilities and deferred tax liabilities Jun 2026 Dec 2025 Cash 44.7 59.8 Receivables 37.7 36.5 Contract assets 30.7 17.9 Other current assets 9.8 8.5 Non-current assets 30.6 29.8 Total assets 153.5 152.5 Current liabilities 54.8 47.4 Non-current liabilities 5.7 10.5 Total liabilities 60.5 57.9 Net Assets 93.0 94.6 Total equity 93.0 94.6 1.Converted at 30 June 2026 exchange rate of 0.6894
Page 26
26 Appendix 3: Investment in product development Commentary • $7.6 million investment in product development during H1 FY26. Overall spend is reducing due to technology led efficiencies and does not reflect a reduction in product development activities and output • ~74% of spend capitalised, up on FY25 due to increased effort on development vs. maintenance as well as reduction in overall spend. 6.3% of revenue reinvested in product development • H2 FY26 investment in product development expected to be contained within existing product and engineering spend • Appen remains committed to the development of industry-leading products and tools to deliver high-quality data for our customers, including supporting generative AI Investment in product development¹ Product development (exc. amortisation) as a % of revenue FY24 FY25 H1 FY26 1.Product development relates to investment in engineering to ensure our AI data platform and tools support our clients and their use cases, drive efficiencies and scale. These amounts exclude amortization expense. 74% capitalised 26% expensed 8.3 7.5 2.0 11.3 11.5 5.6 19.6 19.0 7.6 8.4% 8.2% 6.3%
Page 27
27 Appendix 4: Reconciliation between statutory and underlying results 1. Underlying results are a non-IFRS measure used by management to assess the performance of the business and have been calculated from statutory measures. Non-IFRS measures have not been subject to audit. Underlying EBITDA excludes restructure costs, transaction costs, and acquisition- related and one-time share-based payments expense. 2. EBIT is defined as earnings before interest and tax. 3. EBITDA is EBIT before depreciation and amortisation. Half-year ended Half-year ended 30-Jun-26 30-Jun-25 $000 $000 Underlying net loss after tax (NPAT)1 (4,204) (12,240) 65.7% Less underlying adjustments (net of tax) Amortisation of acquisition-related identifiable intangible assets (191) (6,266) Restructure costs (59) (705) Transaction costs 0 (46) Acquisition-related and one-time share-based payments - (6) Statutory NPAT (4,454) (19,263) 76.9% Add: tax benefit (29) (21) Add: net interest income (23) (33) EBIT2 (4,506) (19,317) 76.7% Add: depreciation and amortisation 8,110 15,511 Statutory EBITDA3 3,604 (3,806) nm% Add: underlying adjustments Restructure costs 59 903 Transaction costs - 66 Acquisition-related and one-time3 share-based payments - 6 Underlying EBITDA1 3,663 (2,831) nm% Net foreign exchange gain 1,673 681 Underlying EBITDA excluding FX 1 5,336 (2,150) nm% Statutory diluted earnings per share (cents) 1.67 (7.31) Underlying diluted earnings per share (cents) 1.57 (4.65) % Statutory EBITDA/sales revenue 3.0% (3.7%) % Underlying EBITDA/sales revenue 3.1% (2.7%) % Underlying EBITDA before FX/sales revenue 4.5% (2.1%) Change
Page 28
© 2024 proprietary & confidential 28 Thank you