Hello there. Very good afternoon. You're watching Proactive London, and Jonathan Satchell is joining us here, the Chief Executive from Learning Technologies Group. Because you have forecasted organic revenues will be no less than 7%. We're gonna talk about that in more detail. What exactly is driving that as well, with total sales up 92% to GBP 254 million? Jonathan, take it away. Hi, Katie. We Of course, the big aspect of that growth is the incorporation of 2.5 months of GP Strategies in our results at the end of last year, and that being a business that was twice our size when we bought it, clearly had a large contribution to our revenue growth. If we boil it down to the individual components, I'm sure investors will be most interested in how core LTG was doing before those acquisitions. The core business actually performed really well. We did what we said we were very much hoping for and predicting for, which is our Content & Services business, which declined quite badly during 2020 when the pandemic first hit, recovered all of that decline. It got back to 2019 levels, which we were hopeful for, but I'm delighted it's actually happened, and it shows the robust nature of that recovery. Indeed, at the moment, we're seeing a continuation. We won't see the same level of growth naturally off this higher level, but we're seeing the continuation of the sales pace that we have seen for the last five quarters. We're very hopeful about that division of the business. Our Software & Platforms division performed in the same stable way as it had through the pandemic, so that continued to grow modestly to mid-single-digit growth. We're very comfortable with that division. It is a solid, very reliable, very resilient part of our business. We still look for adding further SaaS revenue through acquisition as and when appropriate. We made four acquisitions last year, although GP is gargantuan compared to the others, it's important not to forget the three businesses we bought at the beginning of last year, which were Reflektive, Bridge, and PDT Global. Reflektive, Bridge both came in actually as loss-making. I'm delighted to say we reported at the interims that we had turned that situation around. They had become profitable by the end of the first half of last year, and indeed, they delivered very profitably in the second half, and Bridge was growing really nicely. PDT Global adds great capabilities. It already was a highly profitable business and continues to be, and adds great capabilities with regard to diversity and inclusion training and consulting. We see great opportunities there. Of course, we come on to the big one, which is GP Strategies, announced in the summer of last year, an audacious deal on our part of taking a business off the New York Stock Exchange at $500 million compared to our somewhat half of that revenue. It did suffer from relatively low margins. We've always made it very clear that we had studied it carefully, and we believed that we could assist it with its operating efficiency without in any way diminishing or damaging the front end operations of the business. I hope that investors can see the confidence that we have about that from this announcement today. Not only have we seen a swifter advance of margin improvement than we had expected. We didn't expect it to happen after mid-October when we bought the business. We thought it would take until early this year before that started to come through. I pay tribute to the GP Strategies staff who've been very collegiate and very cooperative and embrace the changes that we're making. I just have to say that there are more opportunities than we realized with that business, and we're really excited because it has exceptional relationships with its customers, and we're just assisting with making sure that it operates in the most optimized fashion. There's a lot more runway to go there. All right. I can tell you're excited about that one, GP Strategies. They're going through the details and the four acquisitions, of course, in total. Do you think there'll be more on the cards coming up, Jonathan? There will. Not for the moment. We literally have nothing on the radar right now. We've said that we'll be quiet while we focus on a very big acquisition and transforming and then subsequently integrating it. I would imagine we'll start to tickle a few deals along, as it were, in the second half of this year. Whether we'll see anything done this year, I just don't know. We certainly have the financing firepower because that's the other thing that is worth noting. I don't like being in lots of debt. We borrowed $300 million to do this deal. I don't sleep easy until that delevers very quickly. I'm really pleased to say that our net debt position came in some 20-odd million, 25 million GBP below the consensus estimate. We're really happy with cash generation. Of course, when our business is as complicated as it is, with a number of accounting moving parts, with a number of acquisitions coming in each year. I can appreciate how investors find it difficult perhaps to follow the numbers, the line of the numbers through each year. Cash obviously becomes a reasonably good proxy for how we're performing. I hope they will be heartened by that substantial beat on net debt. Let's move on and talk about some macroeconomics, because inflation is something that we talk about a lot here. It is. How is this impacting you in regards to sort of staff leaving and so on? You know, of course, we got two things there, haven't we? General inflation in the economy, and we are- We're trying to do our very best not to pass all of that on to our customers. We have some clauses in our contracts which allow us to pass on price increases in certain situations, not in all. We also have to be very conscious of making sure that we maintain our margins. We are not concerned about that. It's just that we have to be assiduous and diligent. In terms of what I would term the Great Resignation or something, that's what it's being called in America, we are seeing it, not so much in other parts of the world, but definitely in America, there is. We're seeing a moderate increase in our staff attrition, and we're certainly hearing that it's people who are either choosing to leave for lifestyle reasons, the pandemic has caused them to rethink how they want to live their life, or they're leaving for, frankly, big pay raise reasons. We don't have you know an intention to respond to that in a way that we just increase pay willy-nilly because we don't think that's appropriate. We believe that we have an overall compensation package, including all of the other ways that we develop our talent, in an appropriate way that works. What we're doing is we're using this as an opportunity to just look at where we place our labor and our resources, because do bear in mind now, we are a truly global business, so we have optionality in that situation. We don't always replace in the territory by which somebody resigns. The other thing I'd say to you is- While I wouldn't wish for it, the interesting thing about the Great Resignation is that it's actually good for our business because you're in a situation where what we're doing is focusing on workforce transformation and assisting our customers in handling the challenging needs of developing and retaining their talent. If you have lots of movement in your workforce base through resignation, new hires, and so on, that is creating more demand for our services. From that perspective, it's maybe not a willing one, but a healthy one, a healthy environment for our business. Well, Jonathan, good to catch up. Thank you very much indeed. From Learning Technologies Group here on Proactive today. Thanks, Katie.
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