Welcome to our 2023 Capital Markets Day. My name is Tim Breedon. I'm the chairman of Apax Global Alpha. I've held that position since the IPO in 2015. I'm joined today by Ralf Gruss, Salim Nathoo, Roxana Mirica, and Anders Meyerhoff from Apax. They'll give you a go through the portfolio. They'll give you some insights into what's happening, the market environment, and why we think the company offers good value at the moment. I'm also pleased that we have Alyn Franklin, CEO of Alcumus, one of Apax's funds portfolio companies. He's with us to share his behind-the-scenes perspective of their journey with Apax. Format is the same as last year. Presentation is scheduled to wrap up about 5:00 P.M. I hope you will join us for canapés and drinks on the terrace. Thank you very much. Over to Ralf. Thanks, Tim. Welcome everyone. My name is Ralf Gruss. I'm a partner at Apax. I'm also a member of the investment committee for Apax Global Alpha. Most of you will obviously be familiar with AGA. Let me just set out, you know, why we think the company offers attractive value for shareholders. Here we are. A couple of reasons for that. You know, first of all, you know, AGA offers shareholders access to a portfolio of companies that you can't buy elsewhere. These companies are mostly private businesses. Many of them operate globally. They operate in the core Apax sectors of tech, services, healthcare, and internet consumer. Second, the portfolio of companies that AGA is invested in is performing well. If you're back to the end of the last quarter, the March quarter, LTM EBITDA growth was 15.6%. Third, this is important in the current volatile markets backdrop, the investment strategy of the Apax Funds is an all-weather strategy. It focuses on operational improvement and does not rely on tailwinds of financial markets. My colleague, Salim, is gonna talk about this in a lot more detail later on today. Fourth, I want to highlight the robustness of AGA's balance sheet, which is further enhanced and strengthened by our portfolio of predominantly debt investments. This portfolio helps AGA avoid a cash drag, while it's always generating income to support the dividend and produces additional returns for the company. Which is the last point added to this page, you know, underpinning the attractive value proposition for shareholders. AGA has a dividend policy paying out 5% of NAV every year to its shareholders, and therefore, you know, provides in addition to the capital appreciation that you have from the private equity investments, a constant stream of income coming back to you as a shareholder. Now, the proof of this value proposition is always obviously in the numbers. AGA has set itself a target of generating a 12%-15% return over the cycle. Now, I'm pleased to report that AGA has delivered towards the higher end of that range over the last five years, and that's despite of the recent market volatility. If you look at the returns over the last five years, the returns were close to 80% in total, which translates to a number close to 14%, 13.8% on an annualized basis. Since IPO and in line with the dividend policy that I've just described, AGA has returned more than EUR 400 million in dividends back to its shareholders. All in all, we believe that AGA has an attractive proposition for shareholders. It has delivered strong compounding returns and has an attractive dividend yield. We'll spend the day today discussing, you know, why we are confident that this will continue going forward. Before I do so, just a quick reminder how AGA is structured and set up. The best way to think about Apax Global Alpha or AGA, is that it exists to provide shareholders with access to the portfolio companies invested in by the Apax private equity funds. Since IPO, AGA has consistently made commitments to new private equity funds that were launched by Apax, and this has led over time to a greater diversification in the portfolio across fund vintages and the four sectors that the Apax funds invest in. AGA now has private equity holdings and funds, which are at all stages of the investment cycle, from investment through the transformation phase and then to the realization phase and exit. Through these funds, as a shareholder, you currently participate in the value creation potential of 79 portfolio companies. As I've already mentioned, AGA's performance is testament to the strength of Apax private equity investment strategy. Let me take a step back here. Apax has been around for 50 years now. In fact, we just celebrated our 50th anniversary last year. Going back to 1972, 50 years ago, you know, three visionary individuals in the U.S., the U.K. and France, came together to lay the foundations of what Apax is today. Our firm's distinctive approach to transformational business building can be traced back to these roots, and as we help companies to grow, so too, have we grown. Today, we have a team of about 180 investment professionals around the world, and we also have a group of 28 functional experts that work with portfolio companies and deal teams to further help that operational transformation journey of our portfolio companies during the investment horizon. Since its formation, Apax has not only supported transformational growth in companies backed by the funds, but has also navigated a range of extraordinary periods, including the 1970s energy crisis, the dotcom bubble, the global financial crisis, and most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. It is this depth of expertise that gives us the confidence that the funds and their portfolio companies will also thrive in the current volatile market environment. As you can see on the page here, our strategy has delivered strong returns. In the last year and a quarter, private equity exits have delivered a 2.9 x realized gross money of invested capital. We have complete confidence that by deploying our distinctive approach and with our expert dedicated team, the Apax funds will continue to perform strongly for many years to come. Again, you know, Salim will talk more about the investment strategy later, and I don't want to steal his thunder here, but let me just briefly summarize the headlines as to what that investment strategy is. The way we refer to the strategy is, we call it mining hidden gems, which effectively means we are looking for a diamond in the rough. By focusing on coveted categories within our four core sectors, and again, these sectors are tech, services, healthcare, and internet consumer, we are able to identify opportunities for the funds to invest in what we would call a hidden gem. A hidden gem for us is an unpolished company that isn't yet the final product, and where business improvement can help create a company that is inherently more valuable at exit than at the point of investment. Once the funds have invested in that business, the hard work of value creation starts, this is not done by hoping that market tailwinds will support the business, but it is focused on operational improvement that will ultimately drive the value of the business. Let me show you on the next page how the focus on business improvement is driving value in the portfolio companies. What you can see here on the page is the total value created of full exits out of the buyout funds in AGA's private equity portfolio. The way to read this chart is that 100% on the right is the total equity value generated by the buyout investment during the respective fund's ownership period. Where is the value coming from? The vast majority is from operational impact. In fact, looking at the numbers, 84% of total value creation is linked to operations of the companies. The biggest driver is EBITDA growth, followed by re-rating of valuations, you know, which is called the multiple alpha on the page, and operational cash generation. EBITDA growth is obviously, you know, the growth in earnings and the acceleration of the flight speed of a business. What do I mean by multiple alpha? What the multiple alpha here describes is the relative multiple rewriting of the portfolio company between entry and exit when compared to its peers. It's not market beta, which is outside the box here. You know, market alpha is a relative measure to the peer group and indicates that because the portfolio company has become a better business during the fund's ownership, markets are valuing it more highly when compared to its peers at exit. Why does this bridge matter? It is important because nobody's really able to control what happens outside of the red box, market beta. What you can do is to try and control what's inside the red box, meaning that even if the markets stay flat, we are still able to focus on value creation by pulling those levers that are sitting within the red box. Even if the markets were to contract and go down, the Apax Funds investment strategy is set up for value creation that can offset that to a certain extent. Again, I will pause here and hand the discussion on investment strategy over to Salim in a moment, but before doing this, I want to take the opportunity here to address a few questions that came out of the perception study that was commissioned by the board later last year. First of all, I would like to thank those of you who contributed to this report, and I hope that this will help bridge any question marks or misconceptions about the fund. The questions that came back as part of the perception study were mainly around the five topics highlighted on this page here. Let me go through them one at a time, starting with the main differentiators. What sets AGA apart? For me, the answer to this question ties back to AGA's core value proposition and why we think shareholders should invest. Firstly, AGA provides access to the hidden gems I just talked about. Mostly private companies, and many of them were acquired in control buyouts, shareholders can't really buy this portfolio elsewhere. It's a portfolio that currently consists out of 79 portfolio companies held across four sectors and several fund vintages. These businesses tend to operate globally and in coveted categories in the four attractive sectors, as mentioned before. It's an attractive and diversified portfolio of companies that is performing well, which is transparently valued, and which is set up for future value creation. Second, the Apax funds deploy an all-weather investment strategy, which is well-suited to generate alpha. Again, I already touched upon that. AGA is therefore attractive for shareholders that agree with our view that long-term value creation is not only achieved by sticking with the core principle of creating a diversified portfolio across sectors and fund vintages, but importantly, can only be achieved through the hard work of business improvement over time. Third, AGA has a robust balance sheet, which further strengthened by a focused portfolio of debt investments to avoid a cash drag and generate additional returns. The income on the debt portfolio also contributes to the dividend policy of paying 5% of NAV annually. For those of you who are more familiar with AGA strategy, you will know this portfolio is referred to as the derived investments, which nicely leads me into the second area that, based on the perception study, might require some clarifications. What are the derived investments? Simply put, today, this is essentially a portfolio of debt investments. Why does this sit in AGA? Well, first of all, you know, private equity commitments are made upfront when new funds are brought to the market, and once they start investing, capital calls into these private equity funds can be lumpy. To manage this, the company needs to have sufficient liquidity available to meet those calls. Now, one way to manage this would be to hold cash. However, and as you can see on the left-hand side, where we've included a chart mapping the performance of the debt portfolio in AGA against the index, but also cash, we don't believe this offers good value for shareholders. The other alternative would be to rely on leverage to backstop these commitments. We believe this would add additional undue risk for shareholders. The fund should try and minimize these structural types of risks for investors. The debt portfolio in AGA also has the benefit of providing robustness to the balance sheet, which in turn provides comfort to the board when making sizable commitments in new Apax private equity funds. As I touched upon already, the portfolio also generates recurring income from the interest paid on the debt investments. Again, another advantage of having this within AGA, as this cash income can be used towards the dividend, which is paid to shareholders twice a year. Last, and not to forget, there is some real alpha generation from this part of the portfolio as well. On the chart, you can see not only, you know, the cash returns over the last five years, but the chart also plots the returns generated by a levered loan index. As you can see, the returns from investing in AGA's debt portfolio has nicely outperformed that index as well. I'm sure someone will ask, "So, you know, why does this make up 30% of the invested portfolio, and could this be smaller?" The answer to this question is, possibly. You know, when the board makes new commitments to private equity funds, it considers various scenarios, including more stressed ones, where no distributions are coming back from the private equity portfolio for an extended period of time. It's these types of analysis that drive the sizing of a commitment to a new private equity fund. Therefore, you know, the amount of capital expected to be held in debt investments is more a residual of this initial allocation decision, rather than a day-to-day management activity. The amount invested outside of private equity is a function of calls and distribution, value generated in private equity. That's what's really driving it, and as I said, not a day-to-day allocation decision. Let me move to the next point that came up through the perception study, which is valuations. Obviously, valuations are important, but in particular, in times, tougher market times, you know, the market perhaps puts NAV under even greater scrutiny and wants additional comfort and reassurance that the valuations are up-to-date and robust. What I want to do here is to be really transparent how AGA's portfolio is valued, and I'm hoping that this slide gives you a sense of the robustness of the approach and the methodologies used in valuing the portfolio. On the left-hand side, you can see the adjusted NAV of AGA broken down into components, and for each component, you know, we're showing, you know, what the valuation methodology is that has been used to value that part of the portfolio. As you can see, you know, the largest part of the portfolio is valued using earnings or cash flow multiples. Now, to derive a value, comparable company multiples or transaction multiples are being used, and we favor this approach over other valuation methodologies because its objectivity and transparency, and for example, like, you know, we're not using DCF or similar methodologies to value the portfolio. The second pillar represents the part of the portfolio that is valued using a public share price. Now, at the end of March, you know, about 9%-10% of AGA's adjusted NAV is valued using a public share price. You know, where a public share price is used for valuation purposes, it's always the last available price at quarter end. There can be some volatility because it's like a single point in time at quarter end, but it's a direct market reference. Third, there is a small group of portfolio companies in the portfolio that are valued based on revenue multiples or other approaches. I mean, these companies are often companies that are investing in growth, and therefore, earnings multiples are less relevant or other methodologies are used where the funds have invested in more structured investments. Moving on to the derived investments, which I explained is predominantly and largely debt by now. You know, for those debt positions, there are either broker quotes available or can be used to derive the valuation. Again, it's a transparent mark-to-market driven approach, which is being used here to value that part of the portfolio. In addition to cash and carried interest reserve, the adjusted NAV also deducts accruals made for any performance fee payable on the derived investments and outstanding capital call facilities. The adjusted NAV is really the fully loaded number here. As you can see, and hopefully, you know, the charts describe this, it's a very transparent valuation methodology that is used here across the various components in the portfolio. Of course, the real proof of the robustness of valuations happens at exit, so when the portfolio companies are being sold. Therefore, another data point to substantiate the robustness of valuations is the track record of uplifts you can see on the next page. Looking at this page, the Apax Private Equity Funds have a history of generating significant uplifts when selling portfolio companies. In addition to our deal teams being experts in transacting businesses on exit and extracting full value for portfolio companies, in my view, there are two other, you know, main reasons, you know, for this consistent pattern of uplifts. You know, the first is the valuation approach, which, you know, as we've just discussed, is, in my view, a robust and conservative approach to valuations. Second, it comes back to the Apax Funds investment strategy, you know, which focuses on alpha generation and achieving that re-rating at exit due to the transformation of a company, that the company has undergone, you know, during the Apax Funds ownership. Turning back to the page here and the numbers which speak for themselves, but nevertheless, I'm going to talk you through them. Global buyout funds, you know, these are the funds, you know, since Apax Europe VII that are shown on the page here, they've consistently generated uplifts between 20% and 50%. I said before that the investment strategy deployed by the Apax Funds is an all-weather strategy, able to deliver also in more challenging markets. To evidence this, on the right-hand side, you know, you can see the exits broken out since the start of 2022, you know, when markets really became a lot more choppy. On average, these deals have delivered an uplift of 17%, which I would argue is very good, especially against the market backdrop. As you can see, you know, some investments have been more successful than others, but again, I think this is something that you would expect from a portfolio. The one outlier here with a negative uplift was Shriram Finance. Just briefly on that's an investment which sat in the Apax VIII Fund. It's a non-bank finance company focused on the micro-enterprise segment in India. You know, the deal underperformed expectations, and that was linked, you know, in part to unforeseen regulatory changes in the Indian government's demonetization effort, but also the COVID-19 impact or the impact that COVID-19 had on Shriram Finance's micro-enterprise customer segment. That said, let's take a step back again and look at the bigger picture. You know, more than half of the exits since the start of 2022 were achieved at uplifts in excess of 30%. All in, a consistent pattern of uplifts, which also hasn't really changed during the recent volatile market environment. On to the next one, which is fees. Again, a point that came up in the perception study. We often get asked how fees are charged and what the level of fees are. Let me give you the answer. To make the important point first, there is no layering of fees within AGA, and investors only pay a fee once, and there are no fees charged on cash. For the private equity portfolio, other than for some very small legacy commitments, fees are paid at the level of the Apax Funds, and there are no fees at the level of AGA. The fees paid at the level of the Apax Funds are the same that other limited partners who are investing in these funds are paying. As shareholder, you can therefore take comfort from the fact that this level of fees has been agreed independently with professional and institutional outside investors. In fact, as AGA is typically a sizable investor in each of the Apax Funds, it benefits from the same discounts made available to other large investors investing at similar size. To put a number here, if you look across the Apax Funds commitments in AGA, the management fee currently stands at 1.3% of commitments, and in addition, there is carried interest payable. Again, any carried interest payable is accrued for by AGA and reduces the adjusted NAV of the fund, as we discussed earlier when going through the valuations. On the derived investment side, briefly, AGA pays a management fee plus a performance fee if the return hurdle is met. Following the IPO, we had agreed a reduction in both management fee and performance fee with the board of AGA in 2020, and the 1% management fee you can see on the slide here is that and reflects the reduced fee that had been agreed. The last point of the perception study that I wanted to address is the discount. To be frank, this is an area of frustration and one we share with the majority of the sector. As you can see from the chart on the page, though, AGA has twice closed the discount. The first time was in 2020, just before COVID hit, and the second time in 2021. Unfortunately, over recent months, the discount has widened again, similar to what we are seeing happening across the listed private equity fund sector. As you would expect, the board remains and is focused on this topic, and we have a regular dialogue with the board and the company's broker. One initiative launched by the board is to actively take steps to diversify the share register in order to enhance the liquidity and, excuse me, to enhance the liquidity in the shares. This includes targeting new investors, but AGA has also engaged RMS Partners, an investor engagement consulting firm, to work alongside Jefferies, the company's broker, to improve coverage of small and mid-size investors. The board has also commissioned additional research to enhance research coverage and information that is available to AGA in the market. Work is also ongoing to relaunch the website, and we, as Apax, are investing to expand the IR, the IR services we are providing for AGA. I also want to touch on buybacks here. Buybacks is something that the board considers from time to time together with the broker. However, there is no evidence that shows that buybacks effectively help to close a discount. Instead, buybacks, in our view, reduce the risk or half the risk that they are reducing the liquidity in the shares, and therefore risking a wider discount level in the long run. As a last point on mechanisms that are aimed at closing the discount, I should also point out that AGA's dividend policy is tied to NAV per share rather than the share price. It therefore provides support to the share price from an increasing yield if the discount widens. As you can see, addressing the discount and taking action is front of mind for the board. There is no silver bullet, though. More fundamentally, again, stepping back, we remain firm believers in the quality of the portfolio and the value AGA offers to shareholders. As the fund continues to grow, the track record continues, and with the broadening of the shareholder register over time and all the other initiatives I just discussed taking effect, we hope to see a narrowing discount over time again. AGA has already managed to do it twice before. With that, I hope I've managed to address some of the key perception gaps investors have raised, and I hope I haven't missed anything. If I may, I would hand it over to Roxana. Roxana leads our capital markets team in Europe. She will talk to you exactly about what the last question was about, financing markets, and what the impact is that we are seeing, you know, from the current environment on the buyouts that the Apax funds do. Roxana, over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Ralf, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm here to talk about the debt markets, which, as you all know, have been relatively challenging for the private equity world over the past 18 months. I'm also here to tell you that Apax is in great shape for a couple of reasons. One, as Ralf was explaining, the underlying performance of the portfolio has been strong, and two, the way the portfolio has been managed from a risk perspective, has been adequate. Overall, portfolio is in good shape, giving you the spoiler already. There's four themes to tackle the market context and also where Apax is positioned within that market. Number one, what is happening with interest rates, the single largest driver, and what does that mean for debt costs? Answer is yields have doubled. Two, what are leverage implications for new deals? I think you'll learn through these stages, it doesn't actually move the needle for new Apax buyout investments. Three, is financing available for new deals? Absolutely, 100%. Fourth one, what does this all mean for the existing portfolio? Again, we're in great shape, and we'll touch on a few data points that hopefully will prove exactly that. Interest rates have gone up a large amount over the past 18 months, right? What if we were sitting here at the beginning of 2022, middle of the fairway buyout, single-B credit would be about 4% in Europe and closer to four and a half, 5% in the U.S.. Sitting here now, you will finance a new money LBO at around 8% for similar credit, and probably closer to 10% in the U.S.. Two things that compose that yield. One is obviously the base rates that have gone from negative to 3.5 and above in Europe, and closer to five in the U.S.. Two is the spread, the credit spread. You'll notice this is actually a proxy from the secondary market, so the traded loans. Spreads haven't actually moved that much, right? Which means the market's view of credit risk has not changed a whole lot. Again, if there's any debt geeks in the room, I'm happy to cover how that compares to historical averages. Again, this is actually quite an important fact. Spreads have widened maybe 50- 75 basis points maximum at the peak over the past 18 months. You might ask, "Okay, a company that has, let's say, the same amount of cash flow, double the debt, double the debt cost, does that mean leverage has halved for new investments?" Twofold. We'll split this into what are we seeing in the market, and two, what does that imply for Apax? In the market, I'll give you example to keep it a little more tangible. If you are looking at financing a high-quality business, let's take a software, high growth, high cash flow conversion business, and you're looking at this at the beginning of 2022 or even in 2021, the leverage available in the market was seven turns and above. Now, if you're looking to finance the same business today, what the market will offer is somewhere in the 5.5%-6% range. Leverage has not gone down commensurate with the way cost has gone up. Why is that? That's because so debt investors are comfortable reducing the amount of cushion between a company's earnings, cash earnings, and the interest bill that they're paying. Previously, if you're a loan investor, CLO investor, let's say, you'd be looking for 2.5-3x coverage, interest cover, as we call it, whereas now investors are more comfortable in the 1.5-2, because they believe existing earnings are a lot more honest and robust compared to the where they were perhaps in 2021. Now, what does this mean for Apax? The good news is, you will have seen this in historical materials, our weighted average leverage across the private equity portfolio is 4.7 turns, right? If I'm looking at the deals that we have looked to finance in the past couple of months, they're ranging between 4.5 and 5.5. What that will tell you is there's actually not a whole lot of change in the leverage of our private equity portfolio. Salim will talk through the implications of that from a valuations perspective. It's important, again, to remember that, given the profile of our investments, again, more high growth investments, buy and build, where we keep dry powder for future acquisitions that might be debt funded, the average leverage across the portfolio is low, and it's unlikely to change despite the changes across the broader industry. Financing availability, we've had this question a lot from LPs, and I'm sure everyone's read in the newspapers that debt supply was constrained, certainly if we're, if we're sitting here about a year ago. The single largest saving grace to the financing environment over the past 18 months has been private credit. Private credit, whether you call it direct lending or hedge funds or any other sources of capital out there, we're sitting on about $1 trillion of liquidity when rates started rising and where banks were stuck holding a bunch of debt that they couldn't sell, right? Again, to put it into context, most of the debt dislocations historically were happening because people didn't know what to do with the credit risk or didn't know how to assess it. This was different. This was very much a dislocation that was caused by rises in base rates, right? If anyone had the capital available, they were very happy to deploy it at much wider rates than they were before. If we take the private credit, in particular, this is a segment of the market that's typically servicing the small end of the middle market, right? They would typically have access to smaller companies that may be less resilient through the cycle. All of a sudden, they found themselves with an opportunity to invest in the large buyout space at higher rates than they were before, and they absolutely embraced that opportunity. If you're looking to finance an LBO or an add-on for an existing company, or even a dividend recap in some cases, you would absolutely find the demand from the private credit market. You'll see here on the right, again, there's not been a single deal where we're looking for financing, where we couldn't find it. The majority, so almost two-thirds of that, came from privately placed unitranche type deals. The commercial banking market has actually been really supportive, particularly on the European side. Now my favorite slide, the one where we get to brag. A couple of data points about the Apax portfolio. We've spoken about the weighted average leverage, 4.7. This relates to existing funds. Again, this was low compared to our peers for the entry period, and it remains, I would say, below average for the industry at the moment. We're pleased that the risk profile has been low historically from a debt perspective and continues to be in line or below our peers. Now, two interesting data points that I'd love for you to take away. If we look at the software example that I was giving you earlier, right? Your software business, very high quality, and you've taken on seven turns of leverage or more. There is no company right now that can service seven turns of debt at current yields, had they not hedged. One of the largest drivers for the health of a private equity portfolio that has leverage on it is there hedging against that portfolio or not? We actually went ahead. We started hedging the portfolio early, probably earlier than the industry average. Just to give you a sense, if you were starting two years ago, you were securing five-year or three-five-year financing at 20 basis points, right? That looks pretty good right now compared to the, you know, more like 10 that, you'd be getting right now. It was well-timed, and we're very pleased to have locked in the rates for three quarters of our portfolio. The other important metric that I think we were proactive about addressing was the maturity wall and the maturity profile of our portfolio. Over 80% of the debt maturities fall after 2027, which does mean we don't have any large looming maturities coming up, and we sleep well at night. Overall, if you triangulate these three metrics, the leverage, the hedging, and the maturity profile, we feel very good about the shape of the portfolio. All of this is thanks to the efforts of the capital markets team. Small but mighty. Why we have a role at the firm? It's fair to say, in the good times, we optimize capital structures, and we proactively deal with things like maturities, hedging, that we were talking about. In the bad times, we're again, trying to see how we can extend maturities, for example, how we can find more, opportunistic or, more creative sources of capital. When things aren't going according to plan, how we can proactively engage with lenders, to avoid a restructuring that's detrimental to the funds. Last but not least, we do make sure the debt turns up through good and bad, which, has been a success, over the past 18 months. A ton of experience, across the firm, and, we're pleased to have supported the broader Apax franchise on this. All right. I'll leave the stage for someone else. Over to Salim, who's got all the interesting points to make. Good. Thank you, Roxana. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Salim Nathoo. I've been at Apax 24 years. Other than AGA, I sit on the investment committees for the main buyout funds, for our growth funds, Apax Digital, and for our impact funds, as well as for our credit SMAs. I've got an overview of what's going on in our different products. What I wanna talk to you today about is, one, how do we see the current macro environment? Two, how are we investing through it, and how's the portfolio doing? Three, why do we think now is actually a good time to invest? I'll perhaps address some of the points that have come up in the questions as well. Oops! We think we have lived through some extraordinary times. This is a chart of the S&P, and the purple line is if you took all stocks with a PE of greater than 25 in 2010, and the gray line is those that were below 15 PE. Of course, the normal rules of investing are, say, buy low, sell high. That just hasn't applied post the GFC. The paradigm has been buy high and sell even higher. Some of that's with good reason. We've seen extraordinary companies, Google, Meta, et cetera, et cetera, come up, Microsoft, that have deserved some of that. We felt it became a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that just because something was going up and it was a good company, you should buy that, and you should just keep holding it, or. That will go on forever. For those of us who study investing history, perhaps a bit like the Nifty Fifty. You know, you couldn't go wrong, possibly, investing things that were going up. Now, of course, this was the public markets, and something similar happened in the private markets. If you had a software business that was growing high single digits, that had a great management team, and had some M&A to do, well, in the mid two thousand and tens, that probably traded for about 15x EBITDA. Great business, and that actually was a good trade. Guess what? That started to go up and up and up, almost to the point where people said: Well, buying a software business of that, any kind of profile, will be fine because someone else will want to buy it at a higher price. Where are we now? We think normal rules are starting to apply more. Some of that froth has been taken out of the market, and that paradigm of, yeah, buy good stuff that's growing at any price, and it will continue to perform, we think has been broken a little bit. This is the S&P, and of course, we all know that big cap tech has come back. If you actually looked at small cap, I think you would see a bigger fall. In the PE world, I think we are starting to see now some question marks raised. Really, are those software businesses worth 25-30x EBITDA? I think the answer to that is, I'm not sure people are willing to pay those kind of multiples anymore. So we think we are in a change of valuation environment. Now, what keeps us awake at Investment Committee? Firstly, geopolitics. Obviously, we saw the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, the decoupling with China, what does that mean? Could it get worse with the Chinese invasion of Taiwan? AI, I'm gonna talk a little bit about generative AI. We do think this is a fundamentally disruptive technology. Now, there's a lot of hype around it, is that threat or opportunity? Of course, it depends is the answer, but we'll talk a little bit more about that. Inflation, I think we might have talked a little about this last year. We were of the view that inflation was going to be stickier and last for longer, and I think that has played out. What about from here? Markets are pricing in the central banks get this under control, and we'll start to see rate declines in 2024, which of course, plays into rates. A lot of you ask questions about interest rates, how high and for how long? That has direct implications for the cost of debt and, of course, for the overall cost of capital. Credit conditions. Are they? Is what we saw with Silicon Valley Bank just a blip? Is it the precursor of something worse? Are we going to see banks tighten their lending? Consumer behavior. So far, actually, the consumer has been relatively robust. If you actually look at the spending, it's been far better than the consumer survey data that you hear. I think we're seeing that. Actually, our B2C portfolio has held up better than you might expect. Then, of course, markets. We saw a very sharp sell-off in 2022 in public markets. Big Tech has come back in 2023. That's not been a broad-based recovery. Then in the private markets, they've been stickier, and this is what we've seen in different investment cycles as well. We saw this in the dot-com boom, we saw this in the GFC, et cetera. What happens is public markets correct far quicker, and then private markets take longer to adjust. There's a mismatch between what buyers are willing to pay, because the buyer says, "Hang on a minute. Look at all this uncertainty, look at high interest rates," et cetera. The seller says, "Yeah, but I paid this in 2021, and I'm not selling this. That's the price you're gonna have to pay." We see a mismatch. Certainly through 2022, I think that's why you saw limited deal volume. As we enter 2023, we're starting to see that gap narrow a bit, and we are starting to see a few more transactions done. I would say the overall environment is still cautious. We'll talk a little bit about what are we seeing in the marketplace, what sort of deals are we seeing? Why invest now? It's an uncertain time, but why invest now? The first thing is, we think our portfolio is strong and well-positioned for volatility, both on the earnings side, but also on the multiple side. The question was asked earlier, well, you know, there's these big discounts, is the market seeing something that you're not, basically? We'll talk a little bit about that. Secondly, we think our investment strategy is exactly suited to these times. A lot of people made great money in the last 10 years by buying exactly that software business, right? That was growing high single digits, that was number one in its space with a great management team, and that the price kept on going up and up and up. Well done. They did very well. Now, you ask yourself, for the next 10 years, will that strategy be as profitable, or is it actually better to buy good businesses at reasonable prices, and then really work hard to create alpha, and then get the benefit of that value creation? We would say the latter is much better suited for this investment environment. Finally, what we notice is that once these buyer and seller gaps do close, actually, these sort of vintages, post-crisis, post-adjustment, post-acrossing-the-chasm moment, are actually very good times to get in. What about the underlying portfolio? What are we seeing? The first thing to note is that performance has been relatively good. I'd say very good. 19% LTM revenue growth, 16% EBITDA growth for the last 12 months. The portfolio really is holding up on an operational basis. Not of course, not every company is doing that kind of performance, but on average, that just shows the robustness of the portfolio. Inflation somewhat helps here. We have been able to show, our portfolio has been able to pass on pricing rises in many occasions, and so that's actually helped your nominal growth rate. That's... we've been able to offset cost increases, and so margins have been relatively stable. I will say, if we look forward, probably we are seeing some slowing. It feels a slowdown, but not a meltdown in the economy, and probably a bit softer on B2B than B2C, which might be a bit counterintuitive right now. Still, as we look at it, a robust portfolio. I think you've got to look at what sort of companies are we investing. We're not doing the very deep value stuff, right? That is trouble and you're buying dirt cheap. We are investing in good sectors with long-term tailwinds, but ones you have to do work for. You know, first thing to say, we haven't just picked one sector, right? We've diversified across four sectors and geographies, which provides some portfolio diversification. Our companies have limited cyclicality. We aren't doing industrials, chemicals, things like that. We've deliberately chosen not to do that. We're looking at businesses which are really sticky with their end customers, hard to rip out, software, tech services, things like that. We're doing things with underlying growth. Yes, if the macro slows, growth will slow, but you've always got that tailwind from underlying growth. Roxana talked about the capital structures. We're only 4.7x levered, so the questions around cost of debt are perhaps a little less relevant to us than the market. You know, where's the market levered at? I would say at least a turn higher than that, so nearer 6x. It really does affect us a bit less than the overall market. Finally, we're looking at businesses where we believe we've got multiple exit options ahead of us, so we can sell to a strategic player. We're not reliant on IPO, or we're not necessarily reliant on selling to another sponsor. Overall, a portfolio that we think is well-positioned to weather these turbulent times. Now, what about multiples? You know, Ralf talked a little bit about how we're marking the portfolio. If you look at AGA's overall multiple, it's come down. It's come down from 23.2x- 17.2x. What's interesting is, a lot of that 23.2 was in public stocks, and the reason for that is that we used the very hot IPO markets in 2020 and 2021 to float stuff, and we actually managed to monetize quite a lot at that point. Now, we knew that the markets might well come down, but we were willing to take that risk because it was a great time to monetize some assets. What's happened is now the public stocks are a much smaller proportion of the overall portfolio. They were 25% in 2021. That's now down to 12%, and so the volatility and the contribution from those public stocks is far less. Now, the private marks have come down from 18.4x- 16.2x. You could say, "Well, how are you marking those? Are those super aggressive?" What I would point to are just the facts. We've sold quite a lot in 2023. You know, three specific exits: MyCase, Boasso, Kepro. Those were all done post-Ukraine. They were all done at markups to what we had in our unaffected valuations. On the public side, we had Duck Creek, which we floated it in 2021. Great stock price. Stock price came down, but guess then what happened? Vista came and took the company out, a great premium. We are able to show that we are able to monetize even in these tough times. We would say, of course, there's a risk, the multiples go down, but these are market multiples. These are not sort of our choice, arbitrary choice of what's happening, you've got to believe the market's got it completely wrong, if you believe that the discount overall is justified. How are we investing? We talked to you before about the hidden gem strategy. The first thing we're doing is we're investing in growth sectors of the economy, basically, stuff that people will want to own, and the companies will grow on an underlying basis. We aren't in the deep value segment. There are players who do that. What that means is, one, you can really increase the value of a company, and two, you've got multiple exit options. People will want to own it, when it comes time to exit. We invest in our four core sectors: tech, healthcare, consumer internet, and business services. The second thing we're trying to do is not go for the easy to understand, fully polished business that everybody gets. That software business I referenced, right? That's very easy to understand. Now, that's a great business. The problem is, everyone gets it, and so guess what? The price gets bid up and up and up. When prices are going up, that's great, but the problem is, of course, when markets correct, as they've done, that just makes it much, much tougher. What we're looking for is maybe the number two or three in the space. Maybe it's got a great product or service that customers really value. It's extremely sticky, but it's weak at sales and marketing. Maybe it's a bit subscale. Maybe you've really got to bulk it up. You've got to do something and work hard in order to increase the value, which is the third aspect of the strategy, which is all around mining value, and we'll talk to you about how we do that. The benefit, of course, of doing all of that is that if you get it right, you can not only get very fast earnings growth, but you can get multiple expansion. You get the double whammy, and that's how you make your three or four Xs. It's quite a distinctive strategy. We're not going for the highest quality business at the highest price, and we're not going for deep value. We're looking for good companies and good sectors, but ones where you've really got to do some work, and it's the pattern recognition from having invested in these sectors for over 20 years, together with our operating excellence team, that allow us to be able to execute this strategy. How has that shown up? Overall, we have been able to grow earnings extremely quickly. We've managed to accelerate EBITDA growth by 1,500 basis points, and about half that's revenue growth and half of that's margin improvement. On the bottom, you see what I'm talking about. Apax VIII, we bought our companies at an average of 22% discount to the comps. That wasn't because we got bargains, because, you know, we somehow managed to find something that was extremely cheap and obvious. It was because the companies needed some work, we worked extremely hard to improve those companies, and when it came time to sell, we were able to sell at a premium to comps. You've been able to not only get the benefit of that very fast earnings growth, but significant multiple expansion, and so be able to make money. Similarly, we've seen that with Apax IX and Apax X, at least on the buy side, we've done what we said, we bought at a discount to comps. We think that even if the value of the market comes down, because you bought at a discount to comps-... You'll still be able to make very attractive returns because of that margin of safety you've got by buying at a discount to comps and investing in companies with significant earnings growth potential. We're gonna just show you a video in a moment of how this happens in practice, and how do we do this? We've got our four sectors, and then each of those teams will have some subsectors they identify. They really build up deep knowledge of these subsector areas. An example we're gonna show you is online marketplaces. What does that enable you to do? The first thing is, you know where to look. Why? Because you've done 10 of these or 20 of these investments before. You're on the boards of these companies. They're telling you who the good competitor is, and you know who the bad competitor is. When you've got in there, you've got a great playbook. You've got a great calling card with the management team because they say, "Okay, you've done this before." You don't have to talk about EBITDA and, you know, financial metrics. You can really talk to them about their industry, how you've done it before with comparable companies, and how you can improve companies. On the due diligence side, you know what's signal and what's noise. You know what the three or four key questions are, what to look for, what to look for in the data. You don't just blanket, you know, and just ask random questions. You've got a network of advisors you can bring in to help with due diligence, who are specialists, not just McKinsey, Bain, BCG. That hopefully makes you a better investment decision. Finally, you've got a better approach to adding value. You know what the levers are. When we do an investment, we will have a plan of what we are going to do with the deal, when we sign the deal, then that gets better and better and better the more you do it. Let me show you a quick video to bring that to life. We all know what marketplaces are. They've existed for hundreds of years. The online marketplaces that have been the cornerstone of our investing activities over the past 20 years, online venues where buyers and sellers meet, the objective of the venue is to catalyze a commercial transaction. Typically, we've been focusing our efforts over the past two decades in online venues for used cars and for real estate, and more recently, we've broadened out our area of investing activities. As we've been on this journey, making these investments, we've had a front-row seat to both changes in the industry as things went from print to online, as they're going deeper into the transaction today, but also have built up the right advisor network, the right set of internal tools, and the right experience. We've seen where the industry is going. We've executed on it. We have a playbook, and we can help businesses as they take that next step in their evolution. When you've lived through investing in these businesses, sitting on the boards of these businesses, working with the management teams of these businesses over 20 years, it means that our experience allows us to have developed an incredible network of executives around the world. Consumers today, they care about convenience, they care about sustainability, they care about transparency. The role of e-commerce, the role of the internet, and the role of online marketplaces, in particular, it's about: How do I provide that transparency? How do I provide that comparison? I think the tailwind that online marketplaces have is still, As generations of consumers are going up, that's only increasing, that those requirements are only increasing. There's a tailwind that sits behind online marketplaces, which fits perfectly with consumer behavior and consumer patterns. Apax has now done 13 deals in the online classified space, which I think is both more deals than any other investor has done, and we've also put more capital to work. Trade Me's a deal we did back in 2019. It operates New Zealand's leading marketplaces for cars, houses, jobs, and general goods. Our thesis there was the same as it's been for most of our online classified investments. It was really to invest in people and technology so that we could accelerate growth. One of the things that has really impressed me with Apax is the level of deep expertise that they have in our particular sector. Just by having that experience, having invested in businesses like ours before, and knowing what that space looks like more generally, they're able to come in and, again, just ask the right questions and focus on what's actually important and what will actually drive the performance of the business. We're blessed in terms of a forward pipeline and looking at online classifieds. Our experience, our advisor network, all the capabilities that we've built are great and will continue to let us do, you know, a ton of transformational deals in the traditional B2C, automotive, or real estate subsectors. I think what we've also seen is, over time, those capabilities have enabled us to expand the opportunities. If you look at the last two deals that we did, KAR Global in the U.S. and Pickles down in Australia, they're really helping what were traditionally physical auction marketplaces to move to the online auction marketplaces, taking that same, you know, offline to online or physical to digital shift that we've helped enable in a number of other allocations, and using our expertise and our resources to help them to do that, both more quickly and with less risk. Great. That hopefully brings it to life for you, in terms of what is a subsector and how do we make it work. We talked about investing in coveted categories and the benefits that gives you, but what about value creation? Other than the experience gained through doing multiple deals in the same subsector, we have an operating team of 28 people, and this is quite differentiated in the industry. Some PE houses have said: What we want is a generalist executive who can go in and help a company. We don't think that works. What we've done is recruit functional experts who are experts in their area, for instance, digital acceleration. That's quite a scarce skill set today. You can imagine pretty much every business needs that skill set, basically. We've got experts in ERP transformation, in how to use AI and so on. Each portfolio company can access the resources they need on a case-by-case basis. We don't have a one-size-fits-all approach to these things. This team of 28 people is recognized by our CEOs, and Alyn maybe can talk to you a little bit about his experience of working with them as something quite different from other PE houses. Wanted to briefly touch on generative AI, I think you'd have to have been asleep as to not have read about ChatGPT and what's going on in this space. I think the Apax house view is, this is a truly disruptive technology. Is it as big as the impact of the internet or the smartphone or bigger? Time will tell, but it's somewhere on that scale. This is something that if you're a business and you ignore it, you're gonna be in trouble, pretty much whoever you are. There are three things that we're looking at. One is, what does it mean for our investment strategy? Should we actually avoid some companies or invest in others because they're gonna be hit or hurt by AI? In fact, at investment committee, we turned down one business services company because of the impact of AI. We thought it's unknowable, but we thought it was gonna be a major headwind over the next five years, and certainly when it came to exit that company, we thought that was going to be a real problem. We set up a working group with all our sector teams involved, a couple of investment committee members, we are really on the leading edge of understanding what's going on. In our portfolio, we have three companies that are really at the front edge of implementing this with companies. We've got Thoughtworks, we've got Faculty AI, a U.K.-based AI company, Fractal Analytics as well. We're tapping all of their knowledge in order to be really thoughtful about what does this mean for each company, et cetera. It's really hard. Of course, we're trying to predict things that are three, four, five years out. The second is, well, how can it help our portfolio? There are a lot of use cases about how AI can absolutely help our portfolio, Seth and his team of 28 operating professionals are coordinating our CEOs and getting them plugged into what the latest is on benefiting the company. The third is, internally, how can we use AI better to make investment decisions? Maybe I'll be disrupted in time by generative AI. But certainly, in the next few years, we're going to be using this for our teams, with due diligence, helping query the great amount of data we have here and just improve efficiency. Maybe I'll skip this, I think, in the interest of time. Cat, what do you think? Yeah, fine. I just want to bring it all together with how we've been able to do this, and I think this is a really interesting company. MyCase, the software business, it was a carve-out out of a bigger software business. It was a bilateral transaction done in 2020. Kind of at the top of the market, maybe a few months later. It's in the legal software space. It was a company that was unloved in this sort of bigger software conglomerate. It didn't have great management. It had some great products. It didn't have great go-to-market. It hadn't really done M&A, it was the perfect sort of carve out, hidden gem, that we talk about. What did we do? We brought in a great management team. We did four acquisitions, we improved go-to-market, we completely accelerated top-line growth. Well, last year, after Ukraine, we managed to sell this for 3.9x money and 118% IRR. I wish I could promise you every single deal will be like that, 118% IRR is quite rare. There, on the bottom, you can see the re-rating strategy. We bought at a discount to comps. Why? Well, because, you know, it didn't have a great management team, the go-to-market was weak, et cetera, but we were able to sell it at a premium to comps, even though the overall market had declined materially because it was post Ukraine. That is a perfect example of the Apax strategy in action. Finally, is now a good time? History will say, post these crises, post the dotcom crash, the sort of 2001, 2002, 2003 vintages were excellent vintages in private equity. Similarly, the 2009, 2010 vintages were excellent vintages. If history repeats itself, will 2023 full be great vintages, question mark. Actually, once things correct, it's actually not a bad time to get in. Finally, what are we seeing? I will say our pipeline is better than we've seen in some quarters. I'd say three main types of deals we're seeing, public-to-privates. Boards are now far more reasonable than they were two quarters ago. The last 12-month share price is much lower. They're getting pressure from public investors saying, "If you get a good premium, take it." The second are carve-outs. We've got some really interesting opportunities there in Apax wheelhouse. Finally, sponsor sales, but where the sponsors generally genuinely need to return liquidity to investors because they're coming under pressure saying, "Show me some realizations." where that's the case, you have an opportunity to get in at a much more reasonable price. I would say we do have a decent pipeline right now. It's not, it's not completely flooding, and we want to be cautious in this environment, but there absolutely are deals to do, and you can see they're geographically mixed and indeed, by sector. With that, thank you, and I'm going to hand over now to Alyn and Anders, who can talk about how this really works with one of our business services investments, Alcumus. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. I'm Anders Meyerhoff. I'm a partner here at Apax. I've been here for about a decade. I help lead the day-to-day efforts within our business services team. Within business services, there are a few business models that we really like to focus on. One of those, we have termed density-driven businesses. What is a density-driven business? That's a business that as you get bigger and more dense in a core market, you create a real right to win. You create bigger barriers to entry and more value for your customers. It's a business model we've been focusing on for probably the past 15 years. We've had a lot of successful investments. In Europe today, we have three investments. One is called Safety-Kleen, another Toi Toi, and the latest is Alcumus. Why did we invest in Alcumus? There's really three core reasons. The first one, it's a fantastic market. We'll talk about each of these in turn. A lot of secular tailwinds, a lot of white space. It's just a great neighborhood. I think the second reason, it's a great business. It's got a fantastic market position, a great brand. And then the last reason we invested, and I try not to say this too frequently because he gets a big head, but we've really got probably the best management team in the world, in this space, running it for us, which allows us to. Just gives us confidence to capitalize on that opportunity. Without further ado, we'll probably turn it over to the man to actually talk about the industry and the business itself, Alyn Franklin, the CEO of Alcumus. Maybe to kick it off, Alyn, you can tell people a little bit about your journey to become CEO of Alcumus and how you got here. Yeah. Thank you for the kind words. That is the first time I've ever heard you say that, so I'll be writing that one down later. Yeah, look, nice to be here. Nice to see you all. Yeah, my journey, a potted resume, which does add context to how I'm sitting here today. Economics graduate, chartered accountant with Arthur Andersen, corporate treasurer with Bank of Ireland, sales, Molson Coors, Wincanton, sort of commercial finance director. Every business I've been part of, it had some sort of disaster or calamity. When I made a big leap in my career in my early thirties to become divisional finance director of a company called Connaught PLC, if that rings a bell to everyone, the pattern continued. Within 12 months of joining that, I realized what I'd actually joined wasn't all it seemed to be as according to the stock market. I was in the middle of that implosion of a business, right in the center of it, helping to break it up. The reason that's relevant is because the very final bit of that business that we took into private equity ownership to save it from the ashes is the business that acts as the cornerstone of Alcumus today. We sold that to Better Capital in a very distressed state, February 1st, 2011, in and out of administration. We started the rather painful turnaround process in a very distressed environment. Bit by bit, I stepped into the role of CFO at that point, so Chief Financial Officer. Five years later, we exited that business, five long years, I must say, to Inflexion, to combine with what Alcumus, the backbone of Alcumus is today. Fast-forward to April or May last year, after a very successful journey with Inflexion, we exited to Apax, and in that time, I'd made the leap from CFO to chief operating officer to chief executive officer about five years ago. Worn many hats. I probably class myself as an expert in what not to do. I've seen a lot of things go wrong. You know, you learn a lot of errors about what not to do, and somehow you start getting it right, I suppose. Aside from the professional side, we're all human beings, so married, two children, 19 and 21, still on the payroll. Wife, definitely still on the payroll. Now, two quasi fur babies in terms of dogs. Rugby and cricket fan, mostly a spectator, but not always, still hanging on in there. Maybe more of a Formula One fan than I'd like to admit. Anyway, that is me in a nutshell. Thanks, Alyn. Alcumus is a very unique asset. It's often not the easiest for people to understand. Maybe in your own words, you can try and help everyone in the room understand what Alcumus is, what it does, how it provides value to- Yeah ... different parts of the EHS ecosystem. Yeah. You learn there are niches within niches within niches, right? Alcumus certainly falls into that category. Look, we're a provider of technology-enabled services, first and foremost, and we provide those to organizations of all sizes, literally all sizes, from the largest multinationals in the world through to sole traders. We deal with over 3,000 sole traders, okay? One-man bands. We really get out of bed every morning. We've got 50,000 customers in that full range, and we get out of bed every morning to help create a safer and more sustainable world. That's what drives us. We deliver that, and we try to deliver that through our supply chain compliance solutions, okay? On the one hand, through to third-party compliance audits, UKAS-accredited audits, and then on to advisory services.... A full suite of offerings there in terms of capabilities, and the subject matter we specialize in historically has been health and safety and quality risk management. That's our space. Historically, that's what we're famous for, but increasingly over the last three or four years, spreading that into the CSR and ESG agenda as people have become more and more aware of their obligations in that space, which is no news to anyone these days. That's what we do. I guess just to bring that to absolute reality and try and get you an anchor point, when you head out of here later, look on the back of a handful of vans. Hopefully, you will see a SafeContractor badge. That is part of what we do. That is what we are most famous for, and SafeContractor is a supply chain compliance accreditation scheme. What does that mean? Think about a large organization. Let's take Mighty or Barclays Bank, someone with a big property portfolio. You have a big, complicated supply chain. If you were an organization of that type, you would be amazed the lack of transparency that exists through the supply chain. We are providing that transparency, that visibility, and we are putting each of those contractors and suppliers through an audit to a specified standard in order that the next time Mighty or Barclays or whomever wants to place a piece of work with a supplier, they can choose someone who is SafeContractor accredited and know that they meet certain standards. That's what we do. We're creating an interface between a buyer, typically a large organization, and a supplier, more often than not, a much smaller organization. The burden from the large buyer onto the smaller supplier these days is more and more significant. Think about ESG burden and all those sorts of things. It's really growing in terms of the tax that's on those smaller suppliers. We look to take that pain away. We help responsible buyers find and connect with responsible suppliers. By forming that connection, we start to create a network, okay? We're helping people access work, place work, and ensure that they are mitigating risk in the process, and that's the density that Anders was talking about. Very, very good pedigree, 50,000 customers, as I said, many of them in this particular part of our business. Good density in the U.K., 35,000 customers in the UK and 15,000 customers across Canada. That density really starts to work for us. As that grows, you know, that network effect really compounds. We're all van spotting later. One of the most exciting things about your business, Alyn, at least that we find exciting, and I'm sure these folks find exciting, is the financial statistics. Growing high teens, low 20s, organically. Again, great market, great company, and incredible margins, 40%+. I think most CEOs would kill to have any one of those statistics, and your business has both. Maybe you can help us understand a little bit why. Yeah. Um, and then, you know - Yeah. Talking a little bit about the budget for next year, why that's going to continue. I think I'll go back to my earlier comment, being an expert in what not to do. I have spent a tremendous amount of my time in my career trying to turn around businesses that were never going to be great. Never, ever. You almost get caught in a trap of, "It's a red number, make it black." Certainly, the accountant in me definitely is programmed that way. Actually, it's just a better decision to cut your losses and back your winners, right? Certainly, if I look back, I spent a lot of time trying to turn around businesses that were losing GBP 200,000-GBP 300,000 a month. A great job is break even, okay? Where's the value creation in that? Actually channeling your energy to something that's got much more scope is. It's easy to say, it sounds obvious now, but you do get caught in that. Over time, we've really chiseled Alcumus to have a very, very strong and scalable operating model. Being able to deliver increasing demands of clients to increasing numbers of clients in a way that doesn't break your business model is a really important way that we set ourselves up. Remote delivery, application of technology, and so on, and your commitment to the customer, working really hard on that so you can scale and you get the unique economics, but also the commercial mechanism that you then apply by actively killing one-off income, literally just saying goodbye to it. As painful as that sounds, when you've got red numbers, budgets to hit, commissions to pay, just ruthlessly pursuing a commercial model that says, "This is all about visible recurring income, and cash up front, clean balance sheets, no crazy credit terms, simplifying your business." We've worked really, really hard on that, being pretty tough with customers. I think, you know, being a part of a business or a number of businesses that have hit financial distress, seeing what can happen if it goes wrong, really has driven the DNA of the business to, you know, down that path. Today, extremely visible business. You know, we trial, you know, With 50,000 customers, you try something into that base, you will get an instant reaction, and you can respond quickly to work out whether that was the right thing, and you keep pushing or you draw back. Bit by bit, then you're making better and better, more informed decisions. Those margins remain healthy. There's nothing that's going to, you know, make those evaporate. Because of the heritage of the business, we're good at what we do. We've got a strong brand name. You know, we've got price control. Commercially, relatively aggressive, not trying to overcook it, but, you know, by delivering a good service to customers, the propensity of them to buy more is significant, and that's where certainly those margins then come as your average transaction value starts to rise. That's it. Ruthless on the operating model, ruthless on the commercial mechanism, and making sure you're extracting all the value, as much of the value as you can, because we spend all the time adding the value to customers. You've got to take it out as well, and getting that balance right has been really important, and we obsess about that. That's great. Thank you. I guess changing gears a little bit, thinking about Apax as a partner, and getting the brutal honesty. That's why you were nice to me. You know, maybe you can talk a little bit about what partnering with Apax has added to you that you might not have if you'd been a family-owned company or a public company, or even with Inflection, as you mentioned previously. What is it that we've been able to bring to the table that's been supportive? Yeah, I mean, if I'm allowed to, I might just start right at the beginning in terms of us. We went through a sale process, a proper auction. We ran that auction properly, you know, all above board. I know myself and my management team were very, very keen that Apax were to come out on top. You know, that was a choice for us. Whilst we had, you know, obviously, the fiduciary duty to make sure this is sold at the right value, we really wanted to make sure we ended up in a home where we felt we'd forged a good chemistry with the people that we'd met, and knowing that the team that we were dealing with would then become the people that sat on our board. That continuity was critical. I know I've been in the private equity world for 13 years now. Good, bad, indifferent, awful. Some excellent. Get there, maybe. You know, having our eyes open to that being was really important, and so we were delighted when that happened. That's the first thing to say. Then I think the second point, being part of the sort of larger cap private equity house, it's just a bit more calm, if I'm honest. You can just think a bit longer term. There's no less scrutiny, there's no less drive for results, but far less short-termism. Ability to sort of back some winners, invest, get behind it, not worry necessarily about a quarterly result here or there, or the eventual optics of when we sell. Run the business properly, get in behind with high conviction, those areas you think are going to work, We will take that decision together. That has been a breath of fresh air, Really, really pleased with that. I think also appetite around M&A. You know, the world is a very large place or a very small place, depending on your outlook. Actually, it feels like a small place with Apax. Our reach, our ability now. You know, if you think about everything we do, it does resonate in every other sort of relatively mature economy. What's the constraint? Right? It's our own ambition, right? We've now got the means to be able to reach into those territories, That certainly is something we'll explore. That's been super helpful. I think they are the key themes that jump out from my perspective. That's great. Thank you. The U.K., your home market, hasn't exactly been the easiest place to operate over the past year and a half. Maybe it makes sense to talk a little bit about how that's affected the business, you know, your employees, and how that's affected them. Also the customers. You know, you've got customers of all different sizes. How you've been able to manage through that, because it hasn't been the easiest for most companies. Yeah. I think, I mean, go back, you know, between the turmoil of the last 12 months and COVID and so on, we've always known we've had a resilient business. If we go back to the crash of 2008 and look at all of our, all the data, with 50,000 customers on a subscription basis in a regulatory driven environment, we are extremely resilient. I think even in the depth of COVID, when the first lockdown hit, you know, we measure cash receipts every day, right? You could see as it was tailing off, as we were approaching lockdown, on the day it was lockdown, I think we took GBP 4,000, and it was properly panic stations at that point. How long can we last? Within a week, it had bounced. It had bounced back. I think as the headwinds were gathering towards the back end of last year, I know we were having discussions about, you know, what do we think the exposure is, and I just didn't see that there would be. I didn't see that there would be. It's really interesting how resilient the business is given we're dealing with a number of sole traders, a lot of them in construction-related trades. We all know the construction market can ebb and flow, but actually we don't see that. We don't see the volatility at all. Part of our theory on that is, in a world where work is more scarce to find, actually you need to differentiate. What do you need? You need an accreditation, you need a certification, you need credentials to prove you can win work other than on criteria based on price. We're also dealing with a higher quality strata of those smaller businesses, because many businesses couldn't pass our accreditation. We think that gives us a real resilience, and always connecting compliance with a competitive advantage means that I think, you know, that message gets through, it resonates with our customers, and we look after our customers. We listen to them. It's a high-touch relationship, very resilient, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Again, very bullish. We generally put our foot down through a crisis. You generally get on the front foot, everyone's back on their heels. That is a time to push, recruiting, for example. People lay off. There's good stuff in the market. Labor markets are tight. That is a challenge. When you hit those bumps in the road, that's the time to pounce in many respects. I think from my perspective, watching the way you've been able to manage the pricing discussion with your customers, without it having an impact, subscription rates, or retention rates, as you've been evolving over the past year, has been really impressive. I think it shows the resilience of the business and that, you know, density-driven business model. People need the service. Yeah. We probably have one more, and then we open it up for questions. Just thinking about looking over the horizon, it's a really dynamic industry. There's a lot of different places you can take it. What's the biggest opportunity? What's the most exciting thing for you? Where you wanna go, where you wanna take it? You know, if we all look out a few years, how's it gonna look really different and special in a few years? Yeah, we've got so many axes for growth, right? If you think about being that interface between a buyer and supplier, think about everything a buyer will need to know about its supply chain. That is forever growing. you know, my running sort of theory 18 months, two years ago, was actually, you know, a buying organization is gonna want to know what the general quality stats in its supply chain. That's already arriving, let alone, you know, Scope 3, everyone knows around that. We are providing an interface between buyer and supplier. That interface is going to broaden. That is a growth runway, because what we will do is spin up new modules, new questionnaires, new forms of verification and accreditation, and that is a monetization opportunity. The regulatory landscape is going to drive that. That's just an extension of our services. That's one axis of growth. Stepping into new territories and really filling up boots and building that density is a clear another avenue that's going to drive that. Currently looking at M&A targets across Europe. We've obviously planted the flag in Canada. That is a great stepping off point to continue the infiltration across that territory and then taking on the U.S. in the most sensible fashion possible. That geographic expansion makes absolute sense to us. It's a very fragmented market. There are a lot of smaller targets out there. There's no big Goliath. It may be that a transformational acquisition comes along. We'll wait and see. If it doesn't, we're gonna plow our own furrow. It'll be fine, but a combination could really transcend us. You've got a geographical extension, you've got the product extension, right, is going to drive a significant amount of growth. We work hard on product-market fit, getting the product-market fit right, making sure that is always delivering what our customer needs are, and that unlocks a data angle as well. Monetizing the data is also, I think, the third thread I would pull on. We are, if anything, we are spoiled for choice with growth avenues. Back to what I said earlier, choosing your winners and not spreading your bets will be key. Very, very desirable place. Great. Thank you. I think we probably need to turn it over to Ralf in a second, but huge thank you, Alyn. I'm sure everyone here thanks you for the amazing performance as well, and for taking the time to share with everyone. Brilliant. Nice to see you all. Thank you. I think we got two minutes left, so we are right on time, so I'm gonna keep this short. I wanted to thank you all for coming. Hopefully, you found it interesting, you know, and overview on, you know, how the fund is positioned, you know, what the investment strategy is, you know, the strategy, you know, to access these hidden gems, you know, as we just heard about here in the presentation. You know, companies that, you know, realistically, you know, you can't buy elsewhere. Our strategy, you know, which we believe is all weather, you know, that drives value through, you know, different and, you know, volatile market conditions. All of that is done, you know, off a balance sheet, which, you know, is robust and, you know, can support the commitments that the fund has made in addition, you know, to paying a regular dividend. With that, I'd like to conclude that Capital Markets Day.