Hello, you're watching Proactive London. I'm joined by Jonathan Satchell, the Chief Executive of Learning Technologies Group. Good morning, Jonathan. Good morning. So Jonathan, you're out with your 2023 trading update this morning, and the commentary says, "Resilience, given the macroeconomic conditions of last year," and it looks pretty much in line with expectations. Yes, indeed. Now, of course, those were expectations that we did downgrade last year, unfortunately, and it was a tough year, as it has been for many organizations out there. But I'm delighted that we defied the cynical expectations of the market, that we would have 3 profit warnings in a row, and after 2 unfortunate downgrades, we delivered robustly on what we said we would deliver in that revised expectation. And I'd just call out an outstanding performance from our 5,000 staff across the world. Last year was a pretty turgid year, I think, for businesses everywhere, and I think it really ably demonstrates the resilience of our model. If you look at some other organizations that are high quality and they operate in a similar space to us, a London-based great business called Mind Gym, for instance, they were 22% down on their H1 revenue last year. And we were only a couple of percent down, and it's a reflection of the long-term contracts and the infrastructure that we provide to learning and talent development, very large multinational organizations and governments across the world. And that was as stable as a rock. Some of our transactional revenue, like others, was less stable and suffered some decline. But as I've always said, the mix in this business delivers great resilience and causes me to feel that we have a very solid foundation. And cash for the period also came out ahead of expectations, Jonathan. Take us through that. Yeah, I mean, well, perhaps first we should talk to margins, because margins generate cash eventually, and this business has always had very good cash conversion. On the margin point, we had a slip-up in H1 last year. Our GP Strategies transformation had gone exceptionally well in 2022, and as we merged LEO into our GP content business in H1 last year, we suffered some difficulties with that. We were open with the market about that, and we said that come sort of May, June, July, we would start to see significant improvements, that we gripped the problem. I saw a modest improvement in July, a substantial improvement in August, and it then followed from there. What I'm most delighted about is that we said it was a blip, and this would not interrupt the margin transformation journey that we were on with GP. 2 years ago, I predicted that GP would exit 2023 at circa 17% margins, and it jolly well did. So we're really, really pleased about that. That issue that we had is well and truly in the rearview mirror, and hopefully, the market will recognize that. Yes, when you make good margins, that turns, of course, into profit, which should turn into cash. We generated a very, very strong amount of cash, particularly in the H2 of last year. It surprised me how much. We also call out, we have about GBP 20 million better on net debt expectations than consensus, about GBP 79 million compared to GBP 99 million. We should make sure that we understand the FX implications of that. Our loan is in dollars, and obviously, we quote our net debt in sterling. We enjoyed the fact that sterling became stronger against the dollar towards the end of last year, 1.27. And so we had about GBP 9 million FX tailwind to that number, but there was about GBP 11 million or GBP 12 million of genuine extra cash generation than we expected, and that creates optionality for what we now choose to do. I mean, you do highlight your strong balance sheet in the statements, Jonathan. How do you put that to use? Well, it's interesting, isn't it? I'd say we've had our sort of wings clipped for the last couple of years. We've been heads down, initially just focused on transforming GP. That is broadly complete. There'll be some further improvement, but it's not a... I wouldn't call it transformation anymore now, it's business as usual and trending upwards. And we were never going to make acquisitions in 2022, but we would have done last year had the market been different and the debt backdrop been different. I think now, given our a phenomenal deleveraging, and by the way, that's continued in January, because we've enjoyed the proceeds of the sale of the non-core business, Lorien. That's about $20 million, and our cash generations continue to be very strong this month. So, I feel very comfortable about our leverage, and it does begin to open our minds to what we'll do next. In answer to that, we've got a number of options to consider, from further debt repayment, potentially share buyback, to further acquisitions, and we're always going to be looking for the right acquisition opportunities. The coincidence here is that I think we're beginning to see a capitulation in the market, where valuations are finally aligning with the new normal that we savagely have all found is happening to our public businesses. Therefore, acquisition opportunities become much more interesting to us, and we can finance them. Well, Jonathan, you said that strong cashflow generation had continued into January. How does 2024 look for the company? I certainly feel it's business as usual, stable, so we carry what we did last year into this year. It would be way too early for us to predict that we can start to return to substantial revenue growth. I want to see what Q1 looks like. We're going to announce our results in April, and I look forward to giving a much more well-informed guidance then. And I think similar to many other companies, it's just we're just in a wait-and-see mode. But I'm not looking over my shoulder at more difficulties and a further downturn in our performance going forward. But we may not see an upturn this year. We just need to wait and see. Well, it sounds very positive. We look forward to speaking to you in April when those results come out. Thank you very much for the update today, Jonathan. Thank you, Ty. Jonathan Satchell, Chief Executive of Learning Technologies Group.
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