Welcome to the Cerillion Full Year 2023 Results Webinar. All attendees are in listen-only mode, and at the end of the presentation, there will be the opportunity to ask questions. At any stage, please type a question using the Q&A button. This webinar is being recorded. I now hand over to Louis Hall, Co-founder and CEO, and Andrew Dickson, CFO. Louis, over to you. Thanks very much, Tamsin, and good morning, everybody. Welcome to the presentation, and thank you for your time in joining. So very quickly, for those of you who haven't met us before, I'm Louis Hall. I founded Cerillion way back in 1999 as an MBO from a company that was then called Logica, a big U.K. software services business, what we used to call a software house. We had 8,000 people at the peak and was very big in government and all sorts of bespoke software contracts. So, Andrew Dickson, CFO, also on the call. He joined us in 2022, so been with us nearly two years, replaced the CEO, who's now retired. So, that's us. Moving on, so what I'm gonna do is speak first of all about what Cerillion is and what we do, and then I'll come on to highlights of the results for 2023. I so appreciate there are quite a few people on the call who have not come across Cerillion before. So looking at what Cerillion is, where we are, what we do, we're essentially a provider of what we call BSS and OSS software to telcos all around the world. Telecoms is a very globalized business. The standards are the same in every country that telecoms exists, so you know, we're able to deliver the same software solution to telecoms customers in whatever country. And we do have a global customer base of around 80 customers in, I think, per the diagram, up to 45 different countries. We're headquartered in London. We have about 100 people, just over 100 people now. We have operating bases in India, where we have about 210 people today, and in Sofia, in Bulgaria, where we have around 30 people. So those are my operating bases. Looking in detail at what we actually do. What does this mean? What do we do? So we provide the software, the enterprise software there, so BSS and OSS software is business support systems, operating support systems. But essentially, this is the software that sits between telecoms businesses, network infrastructure, and their customers. So this software does everything from enabling telcos to define the products that they sell to those customers, and typically, these days, those are bundled products, where telcos are selling a mix of broadband service, fixed wire to the home, mobile, and TV packages. So that's what we call Quad Play in the industry. So defining those products is quite complicated. We have sophisticated software that does that, which then connects to the sales software that allows telcos to sell to those customers, whether that's online, with customers buying, selling themselves or buying products online, or through mobile apps, or through call centers, these are our CRM systems, or through retail outlets. So, you know, where you see high street shops offering a mobile service or whatever. We also then have the software that connects those services to the networks. Once they've been sold, we have to get those customers onto networks, and we have a workflow engine that manages that quite complicated process and the order in which those things have to be done. Once customers are on the network, we monitor their balances with a complicated real-time charging engine that charges overage when customers are over their balances, allows them to make calls or not, if they're within their balance, depending what kind of package they're on. At the end of whatever the billing period is, we generate bills, we collect payments, we manage receivables, we deal with what happens when customers don't pay, and so on. So this is a vast range of software that touches most departments of a telco, and as I said originally, enables telcos to monetize the investments they've made into their network infrastructure. And we do this through a set of product modules that can be sold separately, but mostly in our case, sold most of them together. These modules are all designed to work together from day one. Our strategy is very much that we provide one product, the same product to every customer. We have one product. We don't have multiple versions for different types of customer or different customers, and that's a key differentiator for us. So the traditional vendors in our market provide different solutions to different types of customers, and they've tended to provide quite heavily bespoke solutions, albeit built from some kind of product framework. But that approach involves a lot more services, it's a lot higher risk, it's a lot more expensive, and it takes a lot longer to implement. So in Cerillion's case, we're providing this solution as a service, software as a service, and typically today, we're providing the whole software to service wrapper. So we're providing customers a subscription service where they pay a quarterly fee to have access to all the software. But we're hosting that software for them. We're managing that software, so operating the system for them. We're providing support and maintenance and so on, all within that wrapper. As well as that, we're also providing the services to put those solutions into service in the first place. So while our product works out of the box on day one, and customers can get access to that immediately, we have to populate that system with their products, with their workflows, with their business processes, and so on. And those can be quite large projects that will often take 12 months or longer to complete. And, you know, will involve multiple millions of dollars of services effort. Okay, so what is the market? So our market is telco businesses, but all kinds of telco businesses, and there are lots of different kinds of telcos. So there are the traditional BT-type telcos that you see replicated all over the world, but there are also MVNOs, what we call Mobile Virtual Network Operators, who don't have a network, but have a brand, and they're able to sell other network infrastructure owners or operators, network capacity to their own customers. There are messaging businesses, there are power companies that have got telcos within them and so on. So there's a vast range of different types of telco out there, not just your traditional network operators. We tend to look at the market in terms of these two main groups. There's a sort of tier one, as in the biggest telcos in the world, and the larger tier twos, and then tier two and tier three. We're increasingly winning business with the larger Tier Twos and Tier Ones. When we first started out, most of our customers were relatively small, but a big progression in Cerillion in the last five years has been the ability to break into some of these larger accounts. Traditionally, we've worked in the Tier Ones. We have had Tier One customers, but we've worked in niches, so we've supported, you know, one of their brands, but not all their brands, or we've worked with one of their properties, or we're in a multi-site operator, like Liberty Global, for example, but have not worked across all of their territories. I think what's interesting is that the contract we announced a couple of weeks ago with a Western European Tier One is an example of Cerillion doing all of the brands in that country for that Tier One operator. So that's another progression on our ability to work with the larger telcos in the world. That's very important from our point of view because the industry prices subscription for this kind of software and license fees, if you like, on the basis of the number of end customers that telcos have. So a telco with 1 million customers pays 1 million times x subscription fee a quarter. A telco with 2 million customers pays 2 million times x a quarter. So that's quite a significant material difference. We also have some customers in other verticals still, but this is not a particularly large part of our business. So for example, our network inventory products is sold into power, water, gas, and so on. And we also have some customers in, I think this is like financial services, healthcare, and so on, where we're providing a subscription, a pure subscription billing service, but this is a very small part of our business these days, so one we don't tend to major on. From a sales point of view, we have a direct sales team. These days, most of our business is direct sales. That's just the way the market's gone. Telcos increasingly want to buy from the vendors, not the integration partner or whatever. But we do work with Nokia quite closely because Nokia don't have all of the modules in the bundle that you need to have to address the BSS, OSS market. So we support Nokia in some of their markets, particularly the deal we signed with Nokia recently, where we're providing the software for the new capital, the new Egyptian capital, the new Cairo, if you like, working with Orange and Orange Business Services through Nokia. And that's a good example of a deal where partners are still important in that particular Middle East region. It's very difficult to do business as a small company, Nokia enables us to get into that market. So as you can see from the logo wall, there's a very broad range of customers, all kinds of different telcos up here. You know, some big, some small, some you'll have heard of, some you won't have heard of. So you've got Proximus here in Belgium, for example. They're the BT of Belgium, where we support their challenger brands targeted at mainly the sort of the youth market. A good example of tier one, we're in a niche. You know, we're in a niche in Three in the UK, for example. Norlys down here, probably not many of you will have heard of Norlys. They're now Denmark's largest power generator, electricity provider. Also, now the largest internet broadband and TV services provider in Denmark. So they've gradually been buying up telco brands, initially starting out from having a business built around their fiber network that they had running around the electricity network. So now expanded that to become the largest provider of internet and TV services in Denmark, and we're supporting them in consolidating all of those brands onto a single Cerillion platform. So that's a telco that wasn't really a telco until quite recently, but it's become quite a major telco. In the interest of time, I won't go into more detail, but you know, the point here is very broad range of telcos. There's lots of opportunity in this market because there's all kinds of different telecoms businesses that we can work with. Just on this slide, very briefly, I won't go into detail, but what we're trying to show here is the value of the base on an ongoing basis. So if you look at customers that we won before 2016, this is the revenue that's still being derived from those customers over subsequent years. And in the early years, with a new customer, there's a lot of implementation work going on and migration to different bases and so on. That all sort of calms down, and we go into business as usual mode, where we're providing the services wrapper to operate the system for the customer, et cetera. But over time, that will build again as you know, more new projects come on stream for those customers. So existing customer base, very important. I'll come back to that when we talk about the highlights from this year. Moving on, so I'm conscious of time. We do have competition, obviously, and the competitive landscape, we break out into these three main areas. So we compete with what we call the large independent software vendors. So Oracle, for example, have a product suite in this space, and then what we call network equipment vendors, so that's Ericsson, Nokia, and the two Chinese vendors, ZTE and Huawei. ZTE and Huawei are not in our markets right now in our main markets in Europe and North America. So all the reasons that we're all aware of, telcos in Europe are racing to get out of their technology, and that's not only making the market less competitive, it's also creating opportunity to replace the Chinese vendors still. So that's a positive for us. Nokia are a partner, so not really, don't really compete with us. And so the only player in this space that's really competition in a true sense is Ericsson. Ericsson do have a product suite in this area, and although it's a bit of a beast, they do have a very strong customer base on the network side, so they are a competitor. And then there are some smaller independent software vendors, more around our scale, but they tend to be targeted on the emerging markets, or specific segments of the market, rather than the whole breadth and depth of the market and the larger players. So that's a quick summary of competition. Why do we win against these people? So we win against the larger ISVs because we have a one product fits all approach. It works out of the box on day one. As I said earlier, we're not offering a bespoke solution, which is much more expensive and takes longer to implement, and the larger independent software vendors do have that approach. And that does give us an advantage in many scenarios. And similarly, against the network equipment vendors, well, mainly Ericsson, we have a product that we've built from scratch to work together from day one. The Ericsson product set is put together through multiple acquisitions over a period of time, and again, is a bit of a big beast to implement. Takes a lot of bespoking to get it to work in a particular customer situation. So again, we have that advantage. So it's time to market, it's cost of ownership and flexibility to upgrade the solution going forward. We're also well covered by the telco community analysts, particularly Gartner, rate us quite strongly. So we consistently score well with these analysts, and that obviously helps RFPs make their way to our door. Right, I'm going to jog back now to the highlights for the financial year. Apologies for racing through this, but I'm conscious we've only got 35 minutes. So, the key points about financial 2023, first of all, we were able to grow our top-line revenue by 20%, and that maintains the pattern we've seen, the trend we've seen for the last three years of moving from a company growing at 9% or 10% to a company growing at 20%, or 20%+. And that's been driven really by our success with larger customers, winning larger contracts. And I think the reason for that is twofold. One is that the software-as-a-service approach that we champion, that we're the forerunners for in our market, is gaining more ground and is seeing more acceptance from larger and larger telcos, but also we're gaining credibility by winning more larger deals. So if we win the next largest deal, that gets the next largest deal, if you like. So I think those are the main factors there. Earnings are up significantly more than 20%, so our Adjusted PBT, sorry, Adjusted EBITDA was up 32%, Adjusted PBT up 41%. And the main reason for that is that this year we had a much higher license content in our revenue, much higher software content overall. License, sorry, software as a portion of revenue was 54% as opposed to, I think, about 37% last year. And that was driven by higher license content and revenue. We'd had a few new customers who are being implemented over the year, and in that year, we're then recognizing some of that license revenue because even though we're signing five-year subscription agreements, typically, we have to take the license revenue upfront once the software is made available to the customer. But that's just a restriction of IFRS 15 accounting standards, which would be different under U.S. GAAP. Also, we're particularly pleased that the sales pipeline also grew by 16% in the year, GBP 243 million, which is a new record high for Cerillion. And I know that there's been talk about downturns in telecoms and technology software in general, but I guess we can only report what we're seeing. We're not really seeing that. And I think possibly that's because in a downturn, you know, if you look at where our software sits, telcos, if they're looking to sweat existing network infrastructure assets more, whilst they slow down on new investment, then it's back to this software there to do that. You know, how do we rebundle the services we already have to customers in a more creative way to drive more revenue from what we already have invested in? So relatively small amounts of spending over here, compared to hundreds of millions GBP or billions GBP over here on the network side, can help with that process. But equally, when you enter a OpEx reduction cycle and looking to cut costs, consolidating multiple brands onto a single platform is a great way to do that in terms of saving on your IT costs, because if you've got, you know, five different vendors in there, all with their own platforms, that's massively more expensive than having one vendor with all the brands on the same platform. But that's one thing we are known for, and have a lot of experience of doing that. So that I think is helping us. So that's that. Also, in terms of the existing customer base, we're also really pleased that we saw a big uptick in sales to existing customers in 2023. So sales to existing customers were up by 85% to nearly GBP 31 million. And that, so that demonstrates the strength of demand in the existing base, as well as increasing pipeline of new business opportunities for new customers. So I think that's really important, and that was a mix of renewals of subscription agreements for new terms, additional services to migrate more bases of different customers, additional services to do different integration into new network upgrades, and so on. So a very broad range of different things, but, you know, very strong demand for existing customer base. And then finally, for me, I think if you do the maths, based on the disclosure we've given, with the order book we now have, so although our order book was flat at year-end, at GBP 45.4 million, we signed a new customer contract a couple of weeks ago, with a Tier One customer, who I referred to earlier, in Western Europe. That EUR 12.4 million contract added into our backlog, and sort of whatever else has happened between end of September and last Friday, our backlog is now up to GBP 52.5 million, so significantly ahead of last year now. With that backlog in place, with the potential to sign some renewals for existing subscription agreements that isn't in backlog, as it's not signed yet. Some managed service contracts that will need to be renewed this year, plus obviously the strong amount of business we would see from the existing customers. The analyst view is that we're about 70%-75% covered in terms of 2024 revenue. So I think we're in a pretty strong position going forward. So I'm now gonna crunch the time again. I'm now gonna hand over to Andrew to go into some more detail on those numbers. Thank you very much, Louis. So, as Louis has said, FY 2023 was another very strong year for the group, with record performance across most of our KPIs. So here you can see a list of our KPIs, that we reported over the past few years. Starting at revenue, at the top left-hand corner, you can see that up to 2020, the business was growing at around 10% a year, and then we reached an inflection point, and since then, the business has been growing by at least 20% in each of the years. Looking at the graph over to the right-hand side, you can see that one of the drivers behind that has been the increase in recurring revenue that we have seen, over time. So from 2018 up to 2023, the recurring revenue run rate has actually increased by 28% a year. So overall, much faster than the overall growth in revenue. One of the key drivers of that in 2023 was the increase in the managed service run rate, that you can see in the graph on the right-hand side there. And that is because a greater number of customers are taking up that service, which is clearly very, very beneficial for us and is really why, over time, Cerillion is becoming a much higher quality business. Louis already talked about the new orders and the backorder, so you can see the backorder would have been flat, year on year. But taking into account the impact of the new deal we signed a few weeks ago, the backorder increased up to GBP 52.5 million. In terms of net cash, you can see net cash increased again in 2023, increasing by 22%, up to GBP 24.7 million, and I'll talk about cash generation in a bit more detail in a later slide. In terms of adjusted PBT and adjusted DPS, you can see these increased by a much faster rate than revenue in 2023, so adjusted PBT was up by 41%, and that just demonstrates our high operating leverage as the incremental revenue drops through to profit at a very decent rate. And finally, on this slide, you can see continued progression in terms of our dividend policy, with the total dividend for the year up to 11.3 pence per share. So So this slide shows more of our financial highlights. As Louis said, revenue for the year was up 20% to GBP 39.2 million. You can see that this was mainly driven in the table by the increase in software revenue, which in 2023 accounted for 54% of total revenue. So this was really driven by a higher element of license revenue recognition during the year. You can see the benefit from license revenue in terms of the margin, so the gross margin up to 78.6% and the Adjusted EBITDA margin up to 46.2%. So clearly, any incremental license revenue drops all the way through to profit at pretty much 100%. So that's very beneficial in terms of increasing our margins. At the same time, there was some increase in operating expenses, so operating expenses increased by 17% on a reported basis, albeit after stripping out the impact of unfavorable FX, operating expenses increased by 12%, so well below the increase in revenue that we saw. In terms of our cost base, we continue to manage our cost base very closely. We have invested in heads during the year, so overall head count increased by around 10%, but we've actually continued our strategy by focusing on recruitment in India and Bulgaria versus the UK. And by so doing this strategy, we've actually managed to minimize the increase in the average cost per head. So that has increased well below the level of inflation, overall. Finally, you can see net cash up to GBP 24.7 million, which has enabled us to propose a final dividend for the year, bringing the total dividend to 11.3 pence per share. So the next slide looks at cash generation in a bit more detail. The table at the top shows a reconciliation of profit through to free cash flow. I guess the thing that stands out here is that there has been an increase in working capital during the year. This has been driven by a higher level of accrued income on the balance sheet, which is due to the higher proportion of license revenues that we recognized. So to explain that, the way we recognize our license revenue under IFRS 15, license revenue has to be recognized upfront, once it's been installed on the customer's systems and the customer is able to benefit from using it. But typically, the customer will pay for the license revenue on a straight line basis over the term of the contract. Therefore, when we recognize the license revenue, we typically have accrued income being recognized on the balance sheet, which then unwinds over time as the customer pays it. In terms of the other balances, they're pretty much in line with the prior year. There has been some increase in tax paid for the year, and that is due to the increase in the tax rate, which I'll explain on the following slide. But really, the graph at the bottom, which shows a reconciliation from opening net cash to closing net cash, just demonstrates that overall free cashflow was significantly higher than the cash outflows on dividends, lease payments, and a very small amount for unfavorable effect. In terms of the detailed income statement, a couple of additional points to note here. First of all, is that we continue to invest in R&D. So over the year, we invested around about 11,000 days into R&D. This was up by over 20% on the prior year. We did capitalize GBP 1.1 million of development costs in line with the accounting standard, but that was broadly offset by the amortization charge, which was GBP 900,000 during the year. In terms of depreciation and amortization balance, you can see there was a fall from last year. This really reflects the fact that amortization of acquired intangibles became fully amortized at the half year, hence, there was a smaller, slightly smaller charge in FY 2023 versus FY 2022. And again, looking forward to 2024, we would expect the amortization, depreciation and amortization charge to be again GBP 400,000-GBP 500,000 lower. Finally, as we anticipated, there has been an increase in the tax rate during the year, so this increased from 14.2% up to 19.7%. This was driven by the increase in the UK corporation tax rate, from 19% up to 25% from the first of April. The next slide looks at the balance sheet in a bit more detail. I think the key point here is that the balance sheet remains incredibly strong. You can see net cash there of GBP 24.7 million. To reiterate, we do not have any borrowings at all. These were repaid a couple of years ago. Over the period, there was an increase in our assets, our net assets balance of 38%. Finally, as expected, there has been an increase in accrued income. You can see that within the receivables lines. As I explained before, this was due to the high proportion of license revenue that we recognized during the year. This should unwind in future periods. Finally, the detailed cash flow statement. Again, this demonstrates continued growth in net cash. Net cash increasing from GBP 20.2 million up to GBP 24.7 million, despite the increase in working capital that we saw during the year. I think the main points have already been covered, so I wasn't planning on saying anything additional on this slide. Back to you, Louis. Thank you, Andrew. So really, just to summarize, I think, you know, the record back order book we now have does give us a lot of visibility looking into 2024, particularly with this new contract, new customer win, very early in the new financial year. And again, looking at the pipeline, new customer logo pipeline, it has increased and is still growing. So we're positive about that in terms of potential prospects for more new logo wins, and we have a very strong existing customer base that we expect to drive more demand as well. So I think, all in all, as Andrew said, we're positioned on balance sheet and cash. We're pretty well placed for 2024, achieving consensus forecasts and looking into 2025. I think we're well placed for continuing the trends. Thank you very much indeed, Louis. So if any of you have a question, click on the Q&A button and type your question in. And, first question: Can you tell us more about the Tier One telco that you've just won? Yeah, good question. So, we're not allowed to disclose, unfortunately, the name of this one. There's pretty strict confidentiality around that, and it's often the case with larger telcos. They want to see, you know, project delivery before they're prepared to go on record. So, I can't reveal the name, but it's a Western European telco that is across mobile and fixed wire, and initially, the contract is to deliver the mobile solution, well, to deliver the solution to migrate mobile. There will be more work to do in the future on delivering the fixed wire, migrating the fixed wire business. There's a very tight timeline for this one. They're in quite a bit of a hurry to get this implemented and to market. We are replacing one of the large ISV vendors that had a much more bespoke solution. So I think it's important proof point to the fact that, you know, that the SaaS model is preferred over the traditional bespoke model. So that that's a positive. But yeah, we're very excited about it and work's already started. We're already well into this project. Fantastic. And does it cover both its mobile and fixed networks- Yeah. or just mobile? Yeah, I was just saying that initially, that we're doing mobile, but then we're expected to follow immediately afterwards with the fixed wire migration. So the initial implementation will put the solution in place to cover both fixed and mobile, but they'll migrate the mobile base first, and there'll be another sub-project to migrate the fixed wire base, which will get underway, probably in early 2025. Tremendous. Thank you. Can you give us a feel for the mix of customer types in the pipeline? There's a very wide variety. I mean, we've got, you know, big ones, small ones. We've got traditional network operators, MVNOs, MVNEs, yeah, a really broad range. And then that's one of the great things about our market, that there is just such a diversity of telcos, and we're able to work with any of them, whether it's wholesale, retail, whatever. Great. Thank you very much. And the questioner here says, "Thanks for your presentation and congratulations on these results again. Could you please comment on capital allocation and how you intend to use your net cash going forward? Yeah, I mean, there, there was a slide in that on the presentation, which we didn't actually get to at the back of the presentation. But essentially, the... You know, first of all, it's really important as we work with larger customers to have-- Oh, here we go. You'll, you'll be able to find it. There we go. So, so these are the main areas we look at in terms of capital allocation. On organic growth, we're, we're not, we're not really seeing a need to, to invest, you know, cash into that, in that we're expensing most of that growth, all that growth really at the moment. So although, although we do capitalize some R&D, we, we amortize about the same amount each year, so you know, that, that's pretty much neutral. We added more sales resource last year, but again, we covered that in the operating expenses. Dividend policy is still to pay a third to a half of free cash and dividends, and I think we're now up to that level this year. It has taken us a little while to get there. We have grown the dividend again, and we are now paying about a third of free cash out in dividends, so that's obviously important. And then on the strategic side, yes, we are still looking at M&A opportunities, and the strategy that we follow there is to look at product businesses that would sit alongside our existing product set. So we're not looking to buy overlapping businesses, but businesses that have products that we could upsell to existing customer set that we don't have today, and that would also bring on board a new set of telco customers that we could upsell our existing product set to. However, the challenge we have is that we do have quite strong margins now, and if we're trading on a 46% EBITDA margin, there aren't many businesses out there that are at that level. So the problem then is that you're inevitably gonna dilute your own margin by making an acquisition. So that's not a prohibitor as such, but it is a challenge, and it's a factor in our thinking when we approach these opportunities. But, you know, at some point, we will find the right business at the right price that's generating the right margins, and we will get there. And obviously having cash on the balance sheet is important for that. It means we haven't got to raise as much debt as we would do, or potentially as much equity capital as we would need to do. But as I was saying right at the beginning, a big consideration for us as we work with larger telcos is there is a need to demonstrate a strong balance sheet. So if you're a telco, quite a large telco, you know, betting your business on the fact that we can deliver, which is where we're at, we are very strategic in these accounts in terms of software we provide. It's important that they see we have a strong balance sheet, and I think that is a factor. So it doesn't mean to say we need all of that cash on the balance sheet, but it is important to have a reasonable amount of cash available. Great, thank you very much. And last year, Note 3 expected 75% of GBP 37.4 million, orders contracted, not yet recognized in the next 12 to 18 months. This year, 45% of the GBP 36.7 million, so GBP 16.5 million in the next 12 months. Not quite a like for like, but it suggests a much higher reliance for 2024 on new contracts won and booked in to hit targets. Yeah, I'll just say, it is almost like, but we've changed the period that reduced the percentage to make it more accurate. So because it, for the analysts, it's better because they can do their math more easily. But Andrew, do you want to cover that? Yeah, sure. So, so you're absolutely right. If you take the 45% off the 36.7 million backlog, we sort of, you know, saying that around GBP 16.5 million of revenue we expect to be recognized, that's in the backlog as at the thirtieth of September. Of course, there's some extra things we have to add on on top of that. So first of all, is the impact of annualized support and maintenance revenue. So that was running at GBP 8.6 million, oops, sorry, GBP 8.7 million as at the end of the year. So we would expect that sort of level of support and maintenance revenue to be recognized, potentially higher than that as we win new contracts. On top of that, we've got the impact of the contract that we signed a few weeks ago. So we expect to generate a significant amount of revenue from that contract. And then there's a couple of other elements on top. So first of all, our accounting policy is to recognize term license renewals when the contracts have been signed. So clearly, the fact that those hadn't been signed as at the end of the period meant that it wasn't in the backlog. But we do fully expect a certain element of licenses to be renewed, and therefore that revenue should be recognized during the year. And finally, there will be some impact from a similar perspective on managed service revenue, where those contracts would have been coming to an end at the end of the year. We fully expect those to be renewed, and hence, there'll be some additional revenue from renewal of managed service contracts as well. Great, thank you very much. Just a reminder, if anybody does have a question, click on the Q&A button. At the moment, we have no more questions, but I'm very happy we've got a little bit more time if anybody has a question. I think you've talked about this a little, but I will ask this question. Can you talk about the relatively big increase in working capital due to the increase in receivables? Where does this come from, beyond just increasing sales? Yeah, so the increase in accrued income is really tied to the way we have to recognize our license revenue. So we have to follow the accounting standard, IFRS 15, revenue recognition. And under that, it means that we have to recognize license revenue upfront, when the license has been installed and the customer is able to benefit from using it. However, the customer will typically pay on a sort of straight line basis over the term of the contract. So what that means is when we recognize license revenue, we typically see an increase in accrued income on the balance sheet, which then unwinds over time as the customer pays for it. Great, thank you very much. You also covered this, but the questioner obviously would like you to talk about it. Excluding the new EUR 12.4 million contract with the new European telco, your backorder book was flat for the year at GBP 45.4 million. Since this is usually a good pointer to where your revenue's going, what made it remain flat year-on-year? Is it just timing of contracts? Yeah, absolutely. That was down to contract timing. So the deal that we announced a couple of weeks ago, EUR 12.4 million, with the European tier one. But that was actually—that was really won in financial 2023, but we had a long contracting process, and to actually get a contract signed that drifted into the start of the new financial year. What we did do, as I was saying earlier on, is we published in the results our backlog as at last Friday, when the results, the last business April results came out, and it was back up to... It was up to GBP 52.5 million, which is a new record, a long way ahead of the GBP 45.4 at the previous year end. So if you look at the position today, as Andrew was saying before, that new contract will obviously play into backlog this year. And because this is a customer that's in quite a big hurry, you know, quite a good proportion of that revenue will get recognized in 2024. Backlog effective at the start of the new financial year is not flat, it's ahead. Great. Thank you very much. And is consolidation in the telecom sector a risk to you, so that some of the clients would get acquired by larger Tier One telcos, and that would terminate the agreement with you? There is some consolidation going on, but there's also deconsolidation going on. So if you look, for example, at, you know, Zegona, a U.K.-based investment vehicle buying Vodafone Spain recently, that's a very interesting transaction because, you know, there's Vodafone divesting businesses and, you know, that again, that it's not all one way. But, you know, sometimes we win in those situations as well. So when Liberty Global bought the Cable & Wireless business a few years ago, we actually got more business in the end in the Liberty Global group than we had to start with. So that was a benefit. But I think there are always different kind of telcos springing up. If you look at the number of telcos that have come out of energy businesses, you know, two of our more recent customers are actually really energy companies. So there's always a new place that the market will go to to find different kinds of competition. So we're not too fazed about that. Thank you very much. You added salespeople in the U.S. this year. Any comments on your intentions there? Well, we've always had U.S. customers, and North American customers. I think we had a view until quite recently, that there were either the prospects in North America were either very big, you know, massive, biggest in the world type telcos, the Verizons and so on, or they were too small, they're typically small rural carriers, and there wasn't much in the middle. I think we've sort of have a different. I think things have changed, and our views changed, and we think there are more varied types of telco to go after now in North America, and we're already seeing more opportunity in the pipeline from that region. The new logo wins as a result of having someone on the ground, and we're going to a lot more shows because we've got people in country compared to what we were doing before. And it's still a vast market, and having people in one place doesn't necessarily solve the whole problem, but it gives us a better access into that market. So we do think that there's more opportunities to come there, and we will win new logos there. Commanders, thank you very much. Is there any consideration of stock buybacks instead of dividends? The only time that we envisage doing stock buybacks, and we've done that before, is to satisfy the LTIPS. The management team have an LTIP scheme, and we're talking about relatively small amounts of equity, but we've bought shares in the past to fund that, because why obviously more equity when we've got all this cash on the balance sheet, and equally, we have save as you earn staff schemes, which require small amounts of equity to satisfy those option agreements. So it's really only for kind of internal share options, staff share options, that we would do share buybacks. At the moment, I mean, who knows what might happen in the future, but we don't really envisage a point at which, in the near future, we'd be doing significant share buybacks. Great, thank you. If anything, we're keen to get more liquidity and to increase the volume of equity in the market rather than decrease it. Thank you. How are bigger competitors reacting to us winning business off them? Yes. Well, you know, I think we're starting to annoy some of the big beasts, and you know, it'll be interesting to see how they react, in particular, this latest one. So I think that it will become an issue, and we probably will see some reaction. I mean, they obviously fight very hard to keep the business and not to be beaten. And, yeah, there's not more I can say on that, unfortunately, but I think we will see some more violent reactions, shall we say, than we've seen in the past, as we keep winning these deals away from these bigger competitors. Do you have a view on how they'll retaliate, whether it'll be price or whether it'll be whatever? I think they always play the price card, and of course, the larger vendors will sometimes attempt to, you know, do cheap up front, but on the basis that longer term, they'll have much higher returns. But it's quite difficult because, you know, they're offering solutions that are very services heavy and they're just expensive, so they're really quite constrained into how far they can go with that. So I think that's less likely. Obviously, there'll be a narrative around, you know, small company, why would you buy for them? Why would you trust a business of this size to provide your most important software layer, et cetera, and all of that stuff? But I think as we keep winning more of these customers, and we're been around a long time, and we keep growing, and the balance sheet's strong, that argument's harder as well. But yeah, I mean, and then, you know, who knows what else might happen in the future? But I think, I think in terms of, you know, trying to buy Cerillion, that's a bit of a challenge because of the multiples that we're trading at, and it's not a no-brainer, even for the larger vendors. But, you know, obviously, that may be something which we see in time to come. You've taken the words out of the questioner's mouth, who wrote exactly the same. "Someone will have to buy us." Thank you very, very much indeed. That's the end of questions. Do you have any closing remarks? Other than to say thank you everyone for joining, much appreciate your attention and, you know, we hope we can keep... Those of you who are shareholders, are very, very pleased to have you as shareholders, and hopefully we can carry on delivering for you. Well, thank you very much for a brilliant performance, and thank you both very much for your presentation. To everyone listening, you'll now be taken to a webpage to give feedback on today's presentation. If you can't complete it now, you'll receive a follow-up email. We'd be really grateful if you could take a few minutes to complete. Many thanks for joining. This is the end of the webinar.