Investor Presentation throughout recorded presentation, investors will be in Listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and they can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated in the right corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives in the meeting itself. However, the company can review all the questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to CEO Russ Singleton. Good afternoon to you, sir. Good afternoon and thank you Alexandra. Good afternoon to everybody that's made time to join us on this presentation and hear about our H1 results. By means of an introduction, I'm Russ, I'm the Chief Executive, and I'm joined by Nick Lowe who's our Chief Financial Officer. We've both been with the company a fair while and obviously we're delighted now to talk to you about our results. Journeo is about intelligent systems for transport networks and infrastructure. If there's any new investors or potential investors listening, what we're about is providing sort of fully integrated solutions, sort of end to end in those networks. We've delivered good results for H1, very strong results. Got a growing opportunity pipeline. We also have an acquisition pipeline which we've been working through over the last few years and as some of you will have seen, we recently completed an acquisition at the beginning of this month of Crime and Fire Defence Systems and we've been building the senior leadership team and backend software systems to create an organization that's capable now of working at a much higher rate, much larger footprint in the market and we've been investing considerably in our research and development and what that's doing for us is, as we put in there, it's helping us to increase our profits, delivering an 11% operating margin and a strongly growing pipeline. If there's anybody that's not familiar with us, we have four operating companies at the moment. Our Fleet Systems business is really about fully integrated services end to end in public transport and some selected areas of the freight market. We have our Passenger Systems which is really about information delivery to members of the public from transportation applications. Infotec is the market leading rail passenger displays business in the UK and we have Journeo A/S in Denmark which was formed from the acquisition of MultiQ Systems in September 2023. We have a growing and wonderful list of end users and customers that we work with, and that's growing both geographically and segmentally. At the moment we have 31,000 assets connected to our cloud platforms on a concurrent basis generating a recurring revenue. We've got about 30% or over 30% of the UK bus network onto our cloud platform. Two million journeys a day, reliance on the Infotec information systems. I won't go through all of this, but there's just over 200 in the company prior to the acquisition. I'll hand over to Nick to run through summary of the interims. Okay, so yes, it was a very, very pleasing set of results. At the headline level, revenue decreased by 4%. As we go into the segments, we'll see why that was. We had £3.4 million of revenue from a contract with the U.S. MTA in H1 last year, which we didn't have in H1 this year. If we remove the effect of that for us, on a like-for-like basis, revenue actually up by about 10%. Gross margins were good, very good. We were up 3% across the group. As we'll see later on, we were up in every segment in the group. Overall, gross profit actually increased by 3% to £9.2 million. Despite the drop in revenue, we had small uplift in overhead, just inflationary. Overall, adjusted PBT stayed level at £2.8 million. EPS was down at 12.51p. The reason for that is the effective tax rate; we had a very, very low effective tax rate last year. We still have a low rate this year because of the benefit of R&D tax credits, but that's the reason for the movement in EPS. Cash was phenomenally strong. At the end of the half, we had £18 million. Obviously, we spent some of that since the half on the acquisition, but we still sit with just over £9 million of cash today. We spent about £1 million on R&D in the half. We capitalized some, we expensed some, but capitalization is matched by amortization. Basically, £1 million did pass through the P&L. The PBT is after the writing off of £1 million of R&D in the half. Onto segments. Fleet Systems had a stunning performance, up 46% for revenue. It's gone up by about two and a half times revenue has in the last three years. Gross profit was good. 65% amount was driven by 3% uplift in margin as well. Really, really strong performance from Fleet. The contribution level it delivered was £1.6 million, which is three times up on what it did in the same period last year. Passenger Systems, again, very good performance of 17% on revenue, £6.1 million. Margins were 2% up. Overall, GP was up by 21% and that delivered a profit or bottom line, about £600,000 for the group, which is about 50% up on last year. Infotec. This is where we had a drop in revenue. As I said earlier on, we had £3.4 million of revenue from the U.S. contract in H1 last year, nothing in H1 this year. Moving forward, we won $5.2 million of POS with the same customer in H1, which we will get probably up 40% of the revenue at H2 this year. I expect we will have a stronger H2 than H1 for Infotec. Within that, gross margins were up to 45%, which meant that GP didn't decrease by as much. Overall, we still had a good contribution out of Infotec at about £400,000. Journeo A/S, our Danish business, again, the headline level revenue was down at £1.5 million. Similar to Infotec, we'll have a stronger H2 from Journeo A/S. The benefit we have, Journeo, is the recurring revenue. Journeo makes a profit just from its recurring revenue. Because we're predominantly recurring revenue, in H1, we had a gross margin of 61%. The £1.2 million drop in revenue actually only resulted in the drop of the bottom line by £100,000 overall. Although it dropped, it was less, and we'll have a strong growth too. Fleet Systems and Passenger Systems did very well. Infotec and Journeo A/S will deliver a stronger H2. In H1, recurring revenue was 16% of the group; in H1 last year, 13% of it. We're up about 15% for recurring revenue. Roughly 40% of it is SaaS and the balance of 60% is more your traditional maintenance. That SaaS is the element, as we said before, that is growing probably from about 10-15% two or three years ago, up to 40% of total recurring revenue now. Contract wins. We have an announcement threshold of £1 million for contract wins. Anything below £1 million, we don't announce. What we have here is success across the business. We have multiple contract wins in the different segments. The first two, Stoke and Cardiff, are in Passenger Systems and they're principally hardware contracts, but with a recurring term of revenue for three to five years. The third and the last are the $5.2 million of orders from the U.S. for Infotec, which is why we will have a stronger H2 from Infotec. $5.2 million across the two. The fourth one is a three-year frame First Bus. That's the estimated value at £10 million. There's a two-year option on it. Ultimately, we would expect £15 million plus from that contract over the five years. The £4.2 million is from Alstom, so that's within Fleet Systems for rail. The £4.2 million is a hardware delivery. What we will also have after delivery VAT is a recurring income of £400,000, which isn't part of the £4.2 million. There's additional future recurring revenue to come from it. Operational highlights. Russ Singleton has touched on most of these already, but we had our first carbon reduction plan for the group in H1. We are now integrating all the business systems from the acquired business in our own business. We have a new CRM system across the business, a new software development platform, and as Russ said, the Senior Leadership Team was strengthened at the end of last year and into this year. Okay, thanks Nick. I really want to just sort of bring this back now to what it is that Journeo is trying to build. What we're looking for really is to align ourselves with some of the well known megatrends that have been discussed really from the sort of original concepts of smarter cities where you have these themes of urbanization, climate change, shift in economic power, demographics, and also the technological breakthroughs. Journeo has really started in the public transportation gathering market share both in terms of the onboard bus, train, coach, and the tram, but also in the active street furniture about delivering travel information and disruption information to members of the public. As part of that, we're seeing now obviously increased congestion that's driving all sorts of developments in terms of dynamic traffic light signaling and some of the highways. The ITS developments from a climate change, we've seen moves to decarbonize public transport and also commercial service vehicle propulsion from diesel to either electric or hydrogen fuel cell. These are, if you like, inflection moments where the previous sort of locking that suppliers and customers have had are breaking and some of the very large or dominant players are finding it quite difficult to move in these transitions. These are opportunities for Journeo to come in with a potentially disruptive solution at much lower cost base. It's that kind of tactic that we've been deploying that's been driving significant part of our growth now. Inside, if you like, from the transportation point of view, what we're seeing is some very significant government backing through things like the bus service improvement plan, but also the city regional sustainable transport settlements. Phase one, there's £5.7 billion that was allocated in 2022 which started to come through really towards the end of 2023 and 2024. That runs till 2027 and they're now committed to a phase two of that which is £8.8 billion and that will run from 2027 to 2032. We are seeing lots of programs to pedestrianize inner parts of city centres and town centres, create park and ride systems where they've got fully off grid bus shelters, signage, lighting, different sort of road surfaces, these sorts of things along with the traditional zero emission vehicles, some of which may become autonomous. A wonderful opportunity there for a business like Journeo. Our strategy really hasn't changed. It's all customer applied research and development. We would love to do ivory tower based speculative R and D, but at the moment we don't have time. We talk to our customers, we try to understand their needs and their wants and what their challenges are, and we apply our R and D to solving real life problems or next generation problems. Our goal 12 months ago was to take Journeo from what it was then, which was just under £50 million revenue, to £100 million in a sort of three year time frame with double-digit operating margins. The way that we're going to get there is through a mixture of organic growth and acquisition. The organic growth, as Nick's just demonstrated, is very strong organic growth. There are opportunities for consolidation in the marketplace, which we are considering, and obviously acquisitions are something that we've been active on now for a couple of years or so. We're also focusing on the quality of our earnings through very specifically targeting the recurring revenue. That doesn't have to be pure SaaS. What Journeo is, is we're sort of like an end-to-end business where we provide literally from a consultancy right through to the managed services, and we want to be with the customer for a long journey. We don't mind having a point of entry where we'd provide maybe just a slight taper of our solutions through any maintenance or through SaaS, right through to the full consultancy. We found now, as a result of this kind of technological platform that we've built, that we're able to enter adjacent markets where our core capabilities can actually lift the performance of businesses in those adjacent markets. That's really been informing our M and A targeting. We have about 30 businesses in our M and A pipeline at any one time and six of them at various stages in completion. As a result of the acquisition of Crime and Fire Defence Systems, we're now well on the way to the £100 million, both revenue and market out. The acquisition of Crime and Fire Defence Systems really does align with our strategy of taking our core capabilities into adjacent markets, and it strengthens our offering and broadens our reach. It's given us an opportunity to differentiate the acquired businesses through our deep expertise whilst retaining their domain expertise and their intellectual property and their unique cultures. In due course, the group will change its reporting into these three categories. We are expecting the revenue as we hit the £100 million revenue in the next 12 to 24 months to be broadly equal. Typically, £30 to £35 million in each of the three segments. Our integrated services business is where what we're delivering is effectively peace of mind to the customers, that the systems are monitored through remote monitoring and we use machine learning and AI for predictive maintenance where we are providing that service. The information systems is both the image acquisition and the modeling of data broking to be able to deliver a kind of coherent messaging, whether it's transport, it's disruption, or it's actually logistics displays into the information services divisions. Our infrastructure protection clearly is now based on the acquisition of Crime and Fire Defence Systems. What that's about really is protecting initially the critical national infrastructure that they have, but also those sites that Journeo has. We have Hinckley Nuclear Power Station, which is very complex park and ride systems, and we have similar park and ride systems at seven international airports and shortly to become extended into our first overseas airport in Copenhagen Airport where we've signed a framework contract. Our acquisition pipeline is now firmly targeted at the intersection of this Venn diagram. We are looking at businesses that, for example, will provide more of the solution in an infrastructure protection for the benefit also of the transportation networks market or similar businesses that are in the information services delivery that will take us beyond transportation. We've got examples of that at the moment in the U.S. where we're providing, for the first time, platform displays which is not a media related sale into the New York City subway. We expect to see more of this in the U.S. and we will shortly open up Journeo Inc. based in the U.S. If I talk a little bit now about Crime and Fire Defence Systems, the business that we've known for 12 years, it's been in our acquisition pipeline for just over two years and it was actually number three in our list. When we entered 2024, there were two acquisitions that were ahead of it and then for various reasons we withdrew from one of them and we lost one of them because we were unable to complete pre-budget. So Crime and Fire moved to the top in February this year. It's a business that we like very much indeed. It specializes in physical and cyber protection of critical national infrastructure. Predominantly that's around National Grid gas and National Grid electrical systems. It also is protecting other critical national infrastructure sites where connections come into the UK. It has a full raft of certifications and it's a business that's actually been growing strongly. It's been established over 25 years. It deals with most of the large utilities working in actually very challenging and dangerous environments where there's significant barriers to entry. Its range of capabilities spans from consultancy and design, where it's working with the security services and the critical national infrastructure agencies, and it does the design. It has the capability then to project manage and install these installations, which can be quite basic where they are civil engineering sites in remote locations, but because of the nature of them they are highly secure. It has some of its own products that it's developed over those 25 years, which again differentiate them from anyone else. These have a potential third-party resale overseas. Some of the first tasks that we're doing with this business is actually introducing the Journeo Design Centre to some of those products so that we could get the certifications and the scale of capabilities so they can be distributed more widely. Its customers are the ones that you would expect, some of the very large utilities. It is able to offer turnkey solutions in very demanding environments. It has lots of the clearances, security clearances that you would expect it to have. It's just starting to enter now into doing work directly with the Ministry of Defence. We see this as a tremendous opportunity for Journeo group because we can deploy our research and development, our developers, software coders, and some of our quite advanced networking and cyber skills to assist Crime and Fire Defence Systems as it tackles more critical infrastructure programs and defense-related works. That's the end of the high-speed run through the acquisition. I'll hand over now back to you, Alexandra, to run us through the next stage of the questions. That's great. Thank you very much for your presentation, ladies and gentlemen. Please do continue to submit your questions and you can do so just by using the Q and A tab that's situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. While the company take a few moments to review the questions that have been submitted today, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q and A can be accessed via Investor Dashboards. As you can see, we have received a number of questions both pre-submitted and throughout today's live presentation. Now, if I could hand back to you to read out the questions appropriate to do so, I'll pick up from you both at the end. Thank you. Okay, do you want to tackle number one? Should I do that? Yeah, for that one. Okay. Okay, so number one, good question. Can you please outline how we're managing the scale up and size of the company and the challenges of minimizing complexity, bureaucracy, and cost whilst ensuring customer satisfaction? That's a fabulous question and I wish I could say that we could do all that in one go. The way that we've been preparing Journeo for scale is that over the last couple of years or so we've been investing in the senior leadership team around Nick and I so that we can effectively hand over, you know, key areas of the business to very talented individuals. We've recently acquired a Group Purchasing Manager, a Group Sales Director, Group HR Manager, a Group Head of Software, and on the 1st of October we're bringing in Director of Customer Delivery which effectively is a kind of fusion of CEX role and PMO role. What this is enabling us to do is enable, if you like, the company to scale up in terms of each of those disciplines. We've got an active program to build out a unified CRM system which our new Sales Director introduced. Basically, during the course of this year we've introduced JIRA for software development. Many of you might know this and we have a number of other sort of backend platforms that we are using, particularly things like Peoples for HR. The next thing that we've been doing is we also started an internal business called Journeo Design Center where we've been capturing all of the wish lists from the various sales channels and customers that the group is interacting with to bring them together to try and unify things like operating systems, microprocessors, some of the AI tools, and also some of the cloud and web services systems which we use in a mixture of AWS and Azure to try and get obviously scaling continuous, but also to get much deeper into the development model and also reduce costs. That is working really well. I will say there are challenges with growing businesses. Journeo is a really exciting place to be. There's a lot of things happening at the same time and there's a lot of international potential now for our inquiries which are coming in through our Scandinavian, basically our Swedish and Danish business, but throughout the Scandinavian area also Intercontinental Europe and particularly into the United States. Hopefully that's answered your question. I guess one other thing is we are also conducting continuous net promoter score for customer satisfaction. Okay. Yeah. Okay. There's a question about Outfront Media. The question is the revenue seems to be growing strongly. Are there opportunities to extend these commercial arrangements with Outfront to other North American markets or is it enough to go for New York City? Yes, I guess the key thing is the two orders we have received from Outfront in H1 are different than the original order. The first order is for spares to support the first order. It's not for new trains. Although, again, we've said before there are two potential further or there are two more groups of trains that will be going into service in New York City. The second PO, as Russ said, is totally different. This was for on-platform displays. What we are doing is developing a very good relationship with Outfront Media. It's a growing relationship and they do operate in other North American cities. The relationship's good. There will always be potential there for other stuff. Okay, you probably want to take that one about the R&D spend. Where are we, R&D spend. We talk about £6.20 million spend of R&D. Do customers also contribute to development costs? Yes, they do. I think, Russ, we don't do, sadly, we don't do development that we don't see a market for. We've got lots of developers that would like. Our development is always focused on a sale that we can already see. By default, the customers are often contributing to it because the sale is already there. I'll tackle that one. This is a question from Iver B. How viable is the U.S. operation? At the moment we actually don't have a U.S. operation. As I mentioned to you, we have about 5,500 of our displays at the moment on the first 500 trains that they've replaced in the New York Metro. Our customer has a contract that runs to 2030, exclusive marketing rights for the media on the subway there. As a result of the sort of vandalization that they unfortunately have, they've been collecting the displays and returning them back to us for rework if it's possible to rework them. Obviously, in many cases you can't rework them and they've used up their replacement hot spare displays. We had the $2.5 million order to build another transfer display for replacements. We've had one of our engineers working in our customer space just outside New Jersey for 12 months and we have two engineers now working on rotation. That's really helped both us as the manufacturer, but also our customer triage things and get the displays back into service. As a result of that, this outlet's really led us to the point where we think that if we form a Journeo Inc., a U.S.-based subsidiary, we'll actually be able to supply more directly into the U.S. We'll be carrying out the design of the microelectronics assembly in the UK, but the final products will be commissioned and made effectively in the U.S., which would enable us to supply more into our customer but also into other DOTs throughout North America. At the moment we don't have any cost base at all. It's a profit generator. Given the length that our customer has of its contract and the number of displays that it is responsible for, it will be profitable from day one for us. Hope that's okay. RW's asked for just more clarity on where we talk about full year expectations. The question is, in the pre-close statement on July 29 we said revenue is expected to be approximately £52 million in line with current market expectations. On September 2 Cavendish upgraded the full year expectations to £56 million and £5.6 million PBT. In our statement we said Journeo is on track to deliver another record set of full year results in line with market expectations. What RW is asking, the comp based line is which ones are we referring to? It is the September 2 expectations, which is £56 million revenue and £5.6 million PBT. My question here, would we consider earnings diluted acquisitions? Simple answer to that is no. We do have a number of, particularly in the AI arena, where there's a number of very nice businesses that are pre-revenue, they've got some fabulous groundbreaking technology, but as you might imagine, they have very high valuations attached to them that clearly don't make any sense for us. As I said, Journeo actually is really about the solution. We don't just want to provide part of that, we actually want to be there for the long haul with these customers and build very strong foundations with them. There are lots of opportunities for earnings enhancing acquisitions. We're focusing on them. Hope that answers your question. Okay, difficult to read. Have we got any—what's that one about JDC? Have any generic product. Okay, this is one from Patrick. Are we any generic products being launched from the JDC? The answer to that is no. In fact, generic products is probably a difficult one. We're not making anything that's really just a me too. There'd be no point in us reinventing the wheel. If we can build the solutions that satisfy the customer with things we can buy off the shelf, we will do that. There's no point in us investing in something that's me too. The developments that we carry that are being led by the JDC are all next generation things where they outperform either in terms of brightness, performance, resolution, longevity, power consumption, or recyclable or sustainable nature. The first sort of physical products of that actually have been released. Some of them have actually gone to paying customers in sort of like a paid for beta trial application. Some of them at the moment are so new that we are trialing them and just basically just going through the sort of final shakedown before they move into production. There are several products actually, it's not just one, but we don't actually ever intend to make that generic product. That would be pointless. Okay, you want to drop the table? That one? Yeah. Ok. There's a question. How advanced from the companies at the top of the M&A pipeline, I will assume, is asking how far are we with our discussions with them? I think as Russ said, we've always got a number of discussions ongoing, and we would like to be in a position to do one early next year. We are at a good stage in discussions with multiple potential acquisitions. Okay, got it. Really difficult. Oh, there's another one. Yeah. Are the MOD opportunities magnified by the RAF break in this year? The answer to that is yes, definitely. This obviously would be through the Crime and Fire Defence Systems business. They have the security clearances to do that sort of thing. Discussions are actually underway not about that specific location, but other sort of military bases. As you can imagine, following Surprising Norton, I think following that there's a lot of work going on now to harden up. They call it PIDS, Perimeter Intrusion Detection Systems, and both from a physical point of view but also from a cyber and drone point of view. There's a lot of work going in here and this is actually something that the JN D team will be working on very closely indeed with the Crime and Fire team over the next 12, 18 months or so. Okay, I think probably got time for one more. Can I just scroll down? I think this question really is. Okay, so from James. Good question. We've been doing well, winning business in the U.S. of late. How important could the U.S. be for Journeo? Oh, and our reputation for opening more doors over there. That's a really, really good question, James. What we know is under the Biden administration, they talked about $3 trillion spend in transportation infrastructure. Also, that would include the highways, the systems in the U.S. in the sort of downtown areas. There are a lot of metros, but the public transport, because the geographic size of the place, tends to be more sort of intercity and track. We believe there's a tremendous opportunity for the suite of capabilities that Journeo possesses and a number of the acquisition targets actually we've been working on have been businesses in North America, mainly in the U.S. but also in Canada. It is difficult moving into the U.S. market. It's very big, so you need to be very focused at the moment. The way that we're going about that is that we're doing this very, very closely with our customer who are embedded within the New York City, sorry, the MTA, but they are active in a number of other cities. It's a $2 billion media marketing specialist business and we're talking to them about programs in other metro areas. This is really why we're going to form the Journeo Inc. shortly, so that we've actually got a U.S. foothold in order to then start to capture some of the—it goes back to that slide about the sort of megatrends. They equally apply, slightly different emphasis in different countries, but they equally apply in terms of the congestion. Maybe at the moment the U.S. has a different view on the decarbonization, the climate change, but nevertheless, the public transport and the infrastructure, particularly in the highways infrastructure, is something that's set to grow very strongly and Journeo is in a good position to catch a target of that. We're probably out of time, actually. Do you want to take any other? There's one question and can't get an exact answer. How much of the growth to $100 million is organic versus acquisition? We can't put exact numbers on it. It will be both. I guess we've already demonstrated we've done a good chunk of the organic growth already, but there is more organic growth to come. Particularly, there's more to come back from Infotec, there's more to come back from Denmark, so it will be a mix. Yes, we're well on the way. I said our goal was to get to the $100 million with double-digit margins, and we're well underway now to do that. I think probably hand back to you then, Alessandro. That's great. Thank you very much for answering those questions from investors. Of course, the company can view the questions submitted today, and we will publish the responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before we do, we redirect investors to provide you with their feedback. That's particularly important to you both. Russ, could I just ask you for any closing comments? It's just a summary that at the moment where we are in our development, we still can see a lot of things that we want to do to strengthen the positions that we have in our core markets, and we are doing that. We've created a fully scalable cloud application that's now transcended from public transport in terms of the own vehicle, now actually into the active street furniture and the information delivery systems, and we're now going to be taking that into areas within the critical national infrastructure and in due course defense related markets. These are all applications that are not unique to the UK, so they're things that could be scaled either directly through startups or through third party resale in other territories. We see now some really attractive growth areas, particularly in North America and also in parts of Asia for some of the things that the group has developed. Thank you very much for making time to hear our story. We are grateful to you, and we've enjoyed answering your questions. That's great. Thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. Part of the management team of Journeo plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation.