Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the LTG trading update for 2021. My name is Claire Coley and I will be supporting the session today. Before we get started, I'd like to go over a few items so that you know how to participate in today's call. Our Chief Executive, Jonathan Satchell, and Chief Financial Officer, Kath Kearney-Croft, will give an update on company performance and provide information on the balance sheet restatement. We will then answer questions. You may send in your questions at any time during the presentation, typing them in the questions pane within the software. When it comes to the Q&A, you'll be unmuted and invited to ask your question to members of the board directly. We will announce you by name and then your line will be open to ask your question. In the event that we have a poor connection or cannot hear you, we will look for your typed question in the control panel. For now, let me please hand you over to our Chief Executive, Jonathan Satchell. Claire, thank you. Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning, which is not quite the morning that we were expecting it to be. We've been looking forward very much to sharing our audited results with you, and of course, we're unable to do that this morning. It's been a fairly interesting time over the last couple of days, and you'll appreciate that we needed to choose to provide you with as detailed a trading update as we could this morning because of the weekend's events where we found that we needed to make this balance sheet restatement, but only on a presentational basis. I'm sure that you are as concerned as I was when I first heard of this, and I will be very clear with you that one of my total aims from this morning is that you will leave with far less concerns, and we will lay those for you. To that extent, we've chosen to structure this morning so that Kath Kearney-Croft, our CFO, spends time first of all on the balance sheet matter. We'll take some questions from you at that point, and at an appropriate point, we'll then move on, putting that behind us and start to talk about what we can among our trading update. Naturally, our disappointment is that we can't share everything with you today. That will have to wait for a week's time, but we will do what we can within the constraints of the trading update that we've announced this morning, which is very exciting, and I look forward to being able to provide the additional detail next week around margin progression in GP Strategies and so on. For now, we will work within the constraints of the trading update and do what we can this morning. Let me hand over to Kath to talk about the balance sheet. Morning, everybody. The balance sheet point is purely a balance sheet presentation point. There is no impact to the P&L, no impact to cash or net assets or to future revenue. The 2020 net down will reduce trade receivables and contract liabilities by about GBP 7 million each. This will result in a zero impact to net assets. It's related to a technical IFRS 15 point about around the point at which you can recognize a trade receivable or a current or a contract liability. It doesn't change the reality that contracts have been signed and invoices have been issued. It's just the point at which you're allowed to recognize those on the balance sheet. As I said previously, just to reassure you that there is no impact on P&L, cash, net assets or future revenue. With that, I think we will open up to any questions that anybody has related to this point. We don't currently have any questions, but if you do have a question, please place it in the questions pane. We'll wait for a couple of seconds. Okay. We haven't had any questions come in, so if we move onwards and, I'll hand back to Jonathan. If you do have any questions that you would like to ask, please do put them in the questions pane and we will come back to them in the second Q&A of the session. Claire, thank you. As you know, 2021 was a pretty significant year for the group, particularly with regard to a number of acquisitions, and I wouldn't want the transformational acquisition of GP Strategies later in the year to overshadow some important acquisitions that we did earlier in the year. I'm gonna come on to a strategic review to the extent that we can, shortly. Before we move into that, I'll ask Kath just to talk to the financial highlights. Perhaps just to say to you, what we've done here is chosen to give you as much detail. Our audit was in an extremely advanced state, rather curtailed at the weekend by needing to look into the balance sheet matter. We are effectively giving you very detailed numbers that reflect what we believe that you will see on the 3rd of May. Without further ado, Kath, let's talk through those numbers, please. Okay. Reported revenue is up 95% at GBP 258.2 million. This is a combination of 8% organic growth, with content and services coming back strongly, as expected, to the 2019 levels, along with the benefit of acquisitions. If we look at the sectors, the information that we're able to give at this point in time, organic growth of software and platforms of 2% masks the strong growth in Breezy and Rustici. If we exclude the higher churn from customers with less complex needs in PeopleFluent, then the organic growth was in the mid- to high teens%. Content and services revenue bounced back to pre-COVID 2019 levels as expected, and with organic growth of 25% and also the initial contribution of PDT since the acquisition in Q1. If we look at EBIT, so EBIT is up 36% and with group margins in line with expectations following the acquisition of GP and the rebound of content and services. As expected, there was a material improvement of 17% in diluted earnings per share following the significant 36% improvement in adjusted EBIT. The board is expecting to propose a GBP 0.7 final dividend. This would take the full-year dividend to GBP 1 and reflects a dividend cover of 5 x. As we had announced in the trading update in January, the net debt is GBP 141.4 million, in line with the expectations at that time. With that, I'd like to hand over to Jonathan to take you through the strategic highlights. Okay. Thank you. So as you can see, we've seen sustained momentum within the business. I'm particularly pleased by what I've been saying to you, I suppose throughout 2021, which was that we would see that bounce back from content and services. I'm pleased to say that we, whilst the growth rate is coming down because the comps are going to obviously be much more much stronger in 2022 to 2021, we're still seeing sustained growth in our content and services division. And that will be very interesting as we bring that more closely aligned with GP's content and services capability, forming the largest e-learning custom content production capability in the world, which is a very exciting prospect. From a content and services perspective, we feel very excited and see continued momentum. Regarding our software and platforms businesses, yes, let's talk about PeopleFluent. That is a business that, as you're aware, we have had some revenue decline. I wanted to give you a little bit more, and again, we'll give more color next week, but I wanted to give you what I can this week about that. Please appreciate that when PeopleFluent arrived as the circa $95 million revenue business into the group four years ago, we broke it into three component parts. VectorVMS, Affirmity were two brands that we broke out and created, and they sit elsewhere in the group. And then PeopleFluent is the core software product, which is a learning and talent management system. The PeopleFluent software product is still suffering from challenges where some large organizations are choosing to unify their ERP and software systems, so they're putting everything onto one system, Workday being a prime example. We do see some churn because of that. Where we're much more defensible is where we're in a situation where very complex functionality, PeopleFluent is an extremely powerful package, where customers use that deep functionality in the software. They justify very easily why they don't have one unified system because it doesn't have the functionality capability that they need to run their part of the business. We're doing a lot of analysis at the moment that shows us where we do suffer churn, where low levels of complex functionality are used compared to where much deeper functionality is used by our customers, and we see very low churn. That gives us some comfort about a shallowing out of the churn rate. In fact, we saw an improvement in our retention rates from 2020 to 2021 of about 2%. That's one thing to be aware of. We also saw some improvement in new sales and upsells in 2021 compared to 2020. It wasn't enough to completely cover the amount of lost contracts that we had, and that's why we still had a revenue decline. I would remind you also that while I believe that we will continue to have some modest revenue decline in PeopleFluent, it now represents about 8% of our overall group revenue. Clearly, that's been massively diluted by the arrival of $500 million of GP Strategies revenue. I just hope that additional color gives you some context. All of our other software businesses are growing. Our Breezy business is our outstanding star, still growing in the 70%. You know, if you want to look for truly sustained growth across a long period of time, then our acquisition of Rustici in 2016 stands out. It still grew at about 30% last year and probably will this year, maybe not quite 30%, obviously, with law of large numbers beginning to apply a little bit. We are truly thrilled with that business. It's almost at four times the revenue we bought it six years on. Pretty astounding. I hope that gives you some comfort around the Software and Platforms Division mix. We've got GP Strategies, and this is where I'm frankly disappointed because I do want to give as much additional detail as I can. We've given you in our first trading update the fact that GP Strategies outperformed our expectations in the final 10 weeks that we owned it in 2021. You will see that margins were better than we thought they were going to be. There were a couple of better-than-expected low-hanging fruit where frankly, we didn't do anything very clever, but it had a better effect than we thought it would. Then there was some better revenue growth than we were expecting and some gross margin improvement faster than we were expecting. That trend has continued into 2022 such that we're very satisfied with Q1 performance. We were always expecting Q1 to be a lower margin quarter because that was the quarter in which we started the whole major restructuring process. That is now complete, and the business moves forward in a shape that we designed it to be in conjunction with the senior executive team of GP. We've worked really well together. It's actually now that the two senior executives from GP Strategies are on the executive board of LTG, helping us to run the business overall. We will provide greater guidance about where we expect margins in GP to progress over this coming year. As I've always said to you'll see a Q1 uplift in Q2 uplift from Q1 when we've performed the sort of major margin change, and then there'll be a gradual grind higher, as I've described it, through to an exit run rate margin at the end of 2022, which will be substantially higher than the average margin for the year. We have supreme confidence that is on track, and look forward to updating you accordingly about that. In terms of other things, the margin, if you like, the operating performance optimization for GP is a very important task. It's a once and done thing. This is on its way and will be broadly done by the end of this year, and mostly in terms of the mechanical aspects done before that. What's much more important to us is it was essential to get it done, but that's a, if you like, an enabler. What's much more important to me and the team is that we have bought a business that gives us unbelievably new access to very exciting market points, both from a customer relationship perspective and also from a capability perspective. Our team is doing well. In fact, they're ahead of our expectation. I didn't think we would have a draft new go-to-market strategy until sometime early June. I saw a first draft of it about three weeks ago, and this is genuinely very exciting. I think we have a proposition for the market which is completely broader and more comprehensive than any of our competitors that also has the delivery footprint that enables us to deliver global strategy in a local delivery manner. We will provide again more detail next week about that, but it is truly exciting and forming very well. Even though we haven't had the go-to-market strategy, we've also got some great examples which we'll be providing to you of case studies where GP Strategies has already been an enabler and worked alongside providing services, consulting, implementation capability and so on, to a number of LTG customers. We're already working together and that that's working absolutely fine. The other thing that of course you will mention, which is a major point that we always need to be aware of, is our security arrangements. We are a foreign owner of an American business with government contracts. We're very respectful of that. I have to say, while in no way dumbing down or diluting the importance of that, we have found that through appropriate collaborative working practices, particularly with the security committee on the board of GP, which we're required to have, which is an independent committee, they have found appropriate ways of enabling us to run the business with the respect and the constraints of not having any access to secure information at all, but enabling us to run the business in an appropriate way. I have to say steady as she goes in that regard. I'm, you know, we are operating thoroughly satisfactory from both our perspective and from, I believe, the U.S. government's perspective in terms of the CFIUS arrangements. If I move forward to look at the other acquisitions that we made, you will of course recall in Q1 last year, it was a fairly prolific quarter. I don't think we've ever bought three businesses in the quarter before. We bought Reflektive, Bridge, and PDT Global. I'll deal with PDT first because that's the different business. It's a diversity and inclusivity training and consultancy business based in the U.K. Unusual for us to buy a U.K.-based business. That has integrated very well with Affirmity. They obviously have complementary offerings. Affirmity is more of a measuring capability for the diversity of a workforce and PDT is more an advisory capability for how you deal with deficiencies within that, the diversity and inclusivity of the workforce. They're both very busy. Some cross-selling has occurred. What's interesting, and this is I find this with cross-selling, you don't always explore the routes that you might find that it will go. Where the real cross-selling opportunity and the exciting opportunity has occurred is within our relationship between PDT and GP Strategies. There are a number of very interesting opportunities there. PDT continues to win significant new contracts, including a multimillion-dollar contract with one of the FANG businesses. You know, we are particularly excited about both the relevance of that topic and where that business can go over the coming years. I mentioned that current trading has started. Sorry, let me just finish with Bridge and Reflektive first. Reflektive arrived into our business. It was a very low-cost acquisition for the size that it was, but it was unfortunately a very loss-making business that had some effect on our numbers and indeed our overall margin for the year. The pure LTG margin was affected by that. We abated that loss and turned it into a profitable business by the end of H1, and it remained profitable throughout H2 and left H2 at a very profitable acceptable run rate. We have that business in the shape and form that we want it to be. It's about flat on revenue at the moment. We went through quite a sort of change process in that business. Certainly, the entire management team was changed. Bridge, on the other hand, was only moderately loss-making. We again turned that loss into a profit by the end of H1, and it is now medium profitable. This is not our highest profit software business, and we have no intention of trying to chase that profitability and that margin at the moment. We are investing in the business for growth, and this is enjoying medium to high growth rates, which is exactly what we expected it to do, and we thoroughly expect that to continue throughout this year and beyond. Do bear in mind that Bridge is the foundation stone of our new talent and learning management platform. It's very well received by the market. It's an extremely modern and very approachable piece of software that is very learner-centric. Both of those are going well, and they're integrated. They form part of the Talent Solutions division working alongside PeopleFluent. We are seeing some cross-selling, for instance, even occurring between PeopleFluent and Bridge, where we're choosing to route a customer towards the Bridge solution rather than the PeopleFluent solution during mid-sales cycle. That's all working as we expected it to. Trading in this year has started well. It has been very strong, and we fully expect that we will be able to provide you with a strong update on in that regard next week. We are very confident about the expectations for the year and are very supportive of analyst expectations as they stand at the moment. You will always appreciate that particularly where we're talking about margin improvements in a business, we are naturally cautious to make sure that we are on track to deliver those things before we get into any situation where we allow expectations to run away from us. We are very comfortable with analyst expectations for 2022, notwithstanding the challenges that exist out there. With regard to acquisitions, we are not looking at the moment. I've said it a number of times recently, but it's fair to say that we are making good enough progress to be beginning to think about opportunities. I don't expect to see any activity at all until earliest the latter part of this year. You might well see that we make some small progress in terms of acquisitions from then on. I hope that gives you an indication of our confidence both in the transformation we're doing at GP, the general overall state of the LTG business, the opportunity that we believe we have within this market, and also, of course, the strength of our balance sheet, which is absolutely necessary to provide us with the firepower that we want to continue this journey. Continue this journey we will. There is still much more to go for from an acquisition perspective. As I've said before, you should expect that will be very focused on software and not services companies, because we believe we bought the biggest and the best services company that we needed. I hope that gives you some sense of direction. Perhaps I'd just before we take questions just finish by saying I do think we're in a very interesting time for the market. You know, we don't evangelize to customers anymore. Not only are they already very aware of the crucial need to develop their talent in an appropriate way that will cause them to want to stay. Retention is a big factor for our customers now. We're all aware of the aspects of the Great Resignation. It is really playing to our strengths that customers are so concerned about the way that they develop and retain their people. Put that alongside all of the other challenges of, you know, new remote hybrid working, the pace of change, the continuing, ever-present need for regulation and compliance, and you end up with a situation where, all of those factors combine to cause very good strong tailwinds for the needs of our services and capabilities. I just come back to that point as to the strategic reason that we put this group together as it stands today. If you think about it, learning is not a sort of one shot and done type situation. We learn in multiple ways. E-learning on its own wouldn't be sufficient, but it's a very appropriate way of transferring knowledge and theory to somebody in their own time, at their own pace, on their own device. You need then to interact with an expert or a facilitator. Of course, we learn something like 70% of everything we learn informally from each other. How do you do that when you're not in the office together all the time as that osmosis disappears? We are spending increasing amounts of time trying to provide feedback to our colleagues in a way that's useful and helpful to their development, and also they're expecting it, so there's a greater demand on people than just doing the annual appraisal. All of that requires technology to support it. Those factors give me great confidence that LTG is well-positioned to capture a really good share of this market globally as we go forward. Thank you for listening and watching so far, and Kath and I are very happy to take any of your questions. Presumably, someone might now have developed a balance sheet question. Very happy to take that too. I'll hand back to Claire to moderate that part. Thank you very much, Jonathan. Just as a reminder to everybody on the call, if you do want to ask a question, the questions pane should be on the right-hand side of your screen. There's a dropdown which says Questions. If you type in your question, we'll be able to open up the lines for you. The first question, we've actually got two from Gareth Davies, one of which is a balance sheet question. We start with that one and then onto the second one. I'm gonna unmute you now, Gareth, and then you can ask your questions to Jonathan and Kath. Yeah. Hi. Hi. Morning, guys. Can you hear me? We can hear you. Hi, Gareth. Yeah, we can. Yeah. Apologies, I didn't manage to work out how to use it to get my balance sheet question in. On the balance sheet, just in terms of the GBP 7 million, is it fair to say that that was revenue, profit, and cash that came through in 2021? It was a contract. The contract didn't go away, it was just simply that it shouldn't have been recognized on the balance sheet at that point in 2020, but it was something that then materialized from a profit and cash perspective in 2021. And then the follow-on questions, I'm gonna cheat slightly and not ask the one on the screen, because it sort of evolved listening to Jonathan. Can you just expand a little bit more on the PeopleFluent and Bridge relationship? It was interesting that you talked cross-sell versus cannibalization or the thought of full integration. Can you just sort of elaborate a little bit around how your thinking is progressing there? 'Cause I think I came away at the half year thinking there was an element of cannibalization from Bridge into PeopleFluent and so it'd be good, your kind of evolved thoughts there. Then relating to that really in terms of software and platforms on a forward-looking basis, is it still a sort of mid-single digit growth business in your view? How should we be thinking about that forward-looking trajectory? Because there was an interesting throwaway comment, which was my original question that Kath made, that if you exclude customers with less complex needs, then your organic was up in the mid-teens, I think was what we said. Happy to take those in a moment, but I'll leave Kath to deal with the balance sheet conundrum first. Yeah. Thank you, Gareth. Yes, the contracts don't go away and it's just around the point at which you can recognize the trade receivable and the contract liability. It's very technical in terms of whether the payment is due or you started the contract. You're correct in that the revenue profit and cash is then recognized as you're rolling into those contracts. I would expect that most of that would have been in 2021. Gareth, I don't know if you. Yeah. Good. Thank you. You can hear that. All right. On your first question about the relationship between PeopleFluent and Bridge, it's fair to say it's evolving. Both businesses are important to us, and they have their place in the market. What I was alluding to was a situation where we had a relatively advanced sales process for PeopleFluent with a long-standing customer where we were proposing a PeopleFluent solution. When Bridge arrived in the early part of 2021, within probably three or four months of them arriving and us getting a thorough grip and understanding of what their software did, we recognized that there were potential advantages to a Bridge solution for that customer. We went to the customer and there's some risk here and said, "Look, we have another product in our portfolio. We think you should look at it. It may not be suitable, but we believe it might." It turned out that it was. Effectively, what we're saying is we're willing to triage customer opportunities. There's these new opportunities as they come through and point them in the right product direction. That's evolved to be honest to a steady state now. We have that triage process. Where we have existing customers, yes. Not overtly, but we are, if you like, scanning the PeopleFluent customer base for those customers that we don't believe are necessarily taking full advantage of the features and functionality of PeopleFluent, and therefore, we believe are more at risk of churning. We are doing. We're therefore saying it's probably worth taking our own risk about causing our customers to think about churning. Because of course, if you go in and say, "We might have another product that could be of interest to you," you are putting that customer in play as to whether they'll look at the market as well, which of course, they're fully within their rights to do. We've chosen to do that in a small number of situations. It's worked reasonably well, and so we continue to pursue, and as I say, and evolve that strategy accordingly. PeopleFluent and Bridge are separate sales teams. They are separate product development teams. They do share some common functions in terms of the way they handle their security and hosting and so on, because that makes sense from a synergies perspective. They are very different businesses in terms of their go-to-market strategy and so on. Reflektive is an interesting one because we have very smart functionality in Reflektive for performance assessment and performance management and feedback. We're actually building that into both PeopleFluent and Bridge so that it's integrated and that can work in both solutions because it is better than their respective versions. Neither of that is a specialist product that's very well-regarded. The other thing about Bridge, just to finish off and talk about the overall activities that we're doing for integrating products is our aim for Bridge is that it will become a really comprehensive learning and talent management solution. If you're gonna do that, then content authoring and a learning experience platform are two important parts of that. As you know, we have Gomo and Instilled, which handle both of those capabilities very well, and they are now well advanced in their integrations into Bridge. They'll all become part of the solution, and you'll be able to buy Bridge in various different forms as to whether you want those switched on or not. Bridge is becoming a more... A broader, more comprehensive product, and its price range will accommodate that accordingly. That I hope gives you a reasonably comprehensive understanding of what we're doing there. You asked about the Software and Platforms growth. What Kath referred to is what we're trying to do is give you a sense of not allowing Epic growth rates in Software and Platforms to impinge upon your sense of what the Software and Platforms mainstream businesses are doing, excluding PeopleFluent. What Kath was saying is that the Software and Platforms division, excluding PeopleFluent in its entirety, was growing last year in the mid- to high-teens. We see no reason whatsoever that growth rate will abate. That growth rate has continued into Q1. In fact, actually, we've seen a slowing of the decline for PeopleFluent in Q1 as well. That's the current picture, and that's what we were trying to give you a sense of separating the numbers for. Perfect. Thank you both. Thanks, Gareth. Great stuff. Okay, in terms of other questions, I am now going to head over to Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. Just going to unmute you now, Jessica. There we go. Morning, Jessica. Oh, hi. Can you hear me okay? Yep, we can. How are you? Yeah. Great. Good. Thank you. I hope you're both well. I've just got two questions, please. The first is, Jonathan, you talked a bit about kind of trading at GP Strategies, and I think I heard correctly that you mentioned there's been a bit of growth in terms of the revenue. I don't know if you meant last year or could you maybe talk a bit about kind of current trading on the top line? Are we expecting a bit of growth in that asset this year? The second one is just on content and services. Similarly, with Gareth's question is just content and services. You know, you've got difficult comps this year, as you did so well in FY 2021. What can we expect in terms of the growth and content and services? Do we still expect kind of mid-single digits in the medium term for that segment? Thank you. Thanks so much. A couple of things on GP Strategies. Yes, I did say very clearly that the revenue came in higher for the 10 weeks than we were expecting. I think there was a little bit of when that revenue was recognized pre-AC or post-AC, so don't necessarily interpret that as being some additional organic growth in GP that wasn't anticipated. But certainly its contribution to LTG was higher than we were originally anticipating by a few million GBP. That was a help. We have always conservatively guided because we thought, you know, we're disrupting some aspects of this business whilst we deal with the fundamental commercial change that we wanted to go through the business. We've always guided to a flat 0% growth during 2022. I think it's fair to say there is some risk to the upside on that. We may well be able to provide a bit of extra color next week. Yes, the GP Strategies business is an excellent sales machine. It has a strong pipeline, and therefore we have every confidence that it will grow in the future. It's just a question of the timing of that you are right to question whether that will happen sooner than perhaps as was originally expected. In terms of comps for content and services. Yeah, LEO is not going to grow at 24% or whatever it was in 2022 for pretty obvious reasons. I thoroughly expect LEO to grow at or better than the mid-single digit growth rate that we've described for you over the medium term. LEO has strong wind in its sails, as does Preloaded, both businesses together. We're very happy with the performance that they carried, the momentum they carried out at the end of last year into this year thus far, both in terms of sales and LEO's been a little bit quiet on revenue recognition in Q1. We normally find it, particularly as, you know, we come back from the new year, there's been a bit of disruption in the way organizations have been operating with the macroeconomic backdrop. I tell you the other thing, actually, interestingly, one of the, if you like, challenges to revenue recognition, just burning through the order book. We have no challenge on the order book at all. We've really strong order book. One of the challenges is because of the Great Resignation, our customers have staff churn. If you've got a subject matter expert or a project manager on an e-learning project and they leave, then that normally causes a pause in the project. We have a team of people that we need to redeploy to something else because they're not able to continue with that particular piece of project work. We had a couple of examples of that in Q1, which had a very minor effect on revenue. The business is still growing really nicely. We'll see H1 growth over H1 last year. I'm just trying to give you a bit more context as to what goes on in those services businesses compared to software. I would thoroughly expect us to see a growth rate in LEO and Preloaded for 2022 over 2021, which is higher than the mid-single digit, but not as much as double digit. To say- Great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The next question we have is from Ben May. Just go to Ben May now. Morning, Ben. Morning. Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay, great. You've already actually answered one of my questions. So, I'll just give you the other. Just in terms of how you plan on reporting GP Strategies going forward, are you gonna have that split out so that we can see the progress made in that business, or will it be included within the overall content and services business? Ben, we're relooking at that at the moment, because as you know, the plan is to integrate the businesses, and so there will be a point at which we will not be able to see the difference between the legacy LTG businesses and GP. We're relooking that with a view to coming out before the interims to give further guidance on that. Okay. We shouldn't expect that next week, but maybe by September-ish. Correct. Yep. Maybe we'll have follow-up. Yeah. Okay. All right. That was it for me. Thanks very much. If I could just augment something Kath has just said there. One of the things that I've been asking for from Kath and her team is, I believe that one of the most important things for investors is to understand the visibility of our revenue. You know, clearly, we all know that we went and bought this gargantuan services business alongside our software, you know, our large software business last year. I did that with very careful consideration alongside the team about what it would do to our visibility of revenue. One of the things that, Kath, I believe we will announce next week is the pro forma joining of SaaS revenue and long-term services revenue. Frankly, the long-term services revenue, they're longer-term contracts than our SaaS contracts. From just a pure visibility, contractual commitment from customer out, they're five to seven years in GP. Our longest SaaS contracts are normally three, maybe a little longer. But of course, the difference is you've got very, very reliable constant margins on your software contract, because really the only variability is your hosting costs and so on. Whereas on services contracts, the variability is huge because you've got different labor inputs, different external cost inputs, and so on. One of the things that we hope will give you a lot of comfort about is that, one, I will make a strong assertion to you, and I think we've the credibility to make this assertion. We're jolly good at making margins, very positive and reliable. They, you know, margins don't move around a lot. You know, when we get them into an optimized state, we run them steady state like that. We're achieving that with GP. We'll have margin predictability and reliability alongside length of contract predictability. We've therefore felt it totally appropriate to look at our revenue in that sense. What we will do next week for you is give you a sense of the pro forma and going forward proportion of SaaS plus long-term services contracts revenue. I think you'll be very positively astonished by that proportion. I had a sense of where that was from the diligence we'd done, but actually it's turned out higher than I expected. I just wanted to give that additional color. We'll obviously back it up with numbers next week. Okay. Thank you very much. I actually do have a follow-up to that, if that's all right. Go for it. Having sort of longer term contracts can be good, but it can sometimes be bad in that if you've priced three years ago and costs are going up, naturally you see a margin headwind on that front. Will you provide some more color next week on some of the sort of inflationary mechanisms in your pricing or how you go about navigating that on those longer term contracts? I'm not expecting you to necessarily give it right now, but do you think that's something that you'll be able to give more color on? Yeah, I'm very happy to give a very short answer now. I don't think we'll be giving sort of specifics in the annual report next week about that. It's certainly not. It's not in there at the moment. It's a point you and I have discussed before then, of course. Let's talk about the relevance where this is important. It's less relevant in our shorter term LEO and PRELOADED style services contracts, okay? We obviously have variable labor inputs, number of days that we have to allocate a particular resource to deliver the job. We do of course have some salary inflation like everyone else, but well within the constraints of our normal expectations of salary inflation. We're not seeing any margin compression at all in those short-term services contracts. In the longer term contracts, as you describe, there are naturally some challenges if you've got if you're effectively pricing seven years out something that doesn't have an escalator in it. There are some contracts like that, it's fair to say. They are relatively few and far between, and they won't continue. Once they are at renewal, they will be renegotiated to include pricing accelerators. Those that do have that, what we're already doing is changing a practice of GP whereby they would actually allow not only salary increases to occur, but also to erode margin. They would promote people within, you know, working on that contract, long-term contract, maybe it's a managed services solution. They wouldn't change their charge out rates so further compressing margin. We are approaching that differently. If a person is promoted because they have more capability, then we approach the customer and see whether the customer wants to make use of that capability in a different way. If not, then that person would move on to a different contract and be backfilled by someone who is appropriately both compensated and also at the level of that role that's required for that customer. We're much more active in the way that we are, if you like, churning our own resources on our own contracts, to provide customers with appropriate level resources for what they're paying for. That has worked very well both for customers and also from a margin protection perspective for GP, and we've been enacting that now for about three months, maybe just at the end of last year, so a bit longer, four months. Yes, it is imperfect, but by no means a challenge that will cause us a problem. Do bear in mind that whilst if we were optimized and, you know, we were another year into this journey, and we still had these inherited situations, I would probably be flagging that in a couple of years' time, we might see some margin compression caused by this situation. I am very comfortable that we are still on a margin expansion journey, and you won't see the margin compression. It might just slightly attenuate the progress that we make. It is only on certain contracts as well. It's probably more color than you were asking for now, but there you go. Yeah. No, I'm always happy to have more than less, but thanks very much for that. That's very helpful. Pleasure. Thank you. Back to the questions. We've actually gone through all of the questions, so don't think there's any more coming in. I think we'll end the call if that's okay. Okay. Thank you very much, everyone, and we look forward to part two. Thank you for your patience in not getting all of the information that we wanted to share with you, and you know, candidly, we're disappointed about that. We will get through this and look forward to providing you with a purely positive update next week. Thank you very much.
Loading workspace