Ingenta (LSE:ING) — Full Year Results

0:01 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the INGENTA PLC full year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the q and a tab that's just situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and public responses where it's appropriate to do so, and these will be available via your investor meet company dashboard.

0:32 Before we begin, I would just like to submit the following poll. And if you'd give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. I And would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from INGENTA PLC. Scott, good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon. Thank you everyone for joining us to hear more about INGENTA and our financial results. We're gonna start with a quick introduction. So I'm Scott Winter. I'm CEO. I've been CEO since 2018. Over that course of time, we've implemented a company wide re rationalization and transition into who we are today. So I'm excited to tell you about how all that's come to fruition and where we are today. My background, even though I started as a technologist, it sort of cuts across all aspects of business management at this point, technology, product management, project management, sales. So you can imagine it's quite broad experience.

1:24 John, did you wanna give a quick intro?

1:26 Yep. Sure. So my name is John Sheffield, and I head up the the finance team at INGENTA. My background's in audit and assurance, lastly, at PLC, and then I've had roles in retail and software. My remit at INGENTA is obviously the finance section, but also HR, internal IT, and a bit of account management.

1:48 Okay. Thanks, John. Let me dive into the meat here of the presentation. So INGENTA, for those of you that don't know us, we've been around for forty five years. We've been providing technology solutions to information and content providers during that time frame. In the past, we would have called that publishers, but we do more than publishers now. So whereas we've been very instrumental in the publishing industry and working with publishers of books, journals, articles, newspapers, various what we used to be as paper products, but are now obviously all digital products as well as paper in some cases. Two, we've also broken into media markets and music markets, are also publishing similar content.

2:34 As a company, what we focus on really is mission critical software to solve the the industry problems. So we do really focus on creating the core elements of solutions for our customers that they need to drive their business. So whereas not all customers go with us, the customers that do go with us, we play an instrumental role in what they do. We are a key part of their solution out to the world, and that's what we focused on during that entire, forty five years, and we've continued to refine how we do it. Our products themselves, we work with customers from very small to very large. And so our customers our products have to create solutions that can be implemented simply and can go from there, or they can deal with all the complexity of some of the mega corporations that we do with.

3:24 And so from a and then from a services perspective, what we've realized is all the publishers we work with, whether they be music, a book, a journal, they care mostly about publishing good information out to the world, good content out to the world. And so over time, we've evolved to take on more and more services related to the peripheries of that. Our services are really around anything that has to do with utilizing our software. It does everything from performing regular operational tasks of monthly runs of various things to actually resolving data integration problems or hosting their their software solution as a whole in whatever environment we wanna host them in. Now some of our solutions are software as a service, so we naturally host those. Others, we have on premise solutions due to our our history, really.

4:15 So this is a high level view of us as a company, and John will get into more detail later to give you more on the finances. But we do have very long standing relationships as a company. You can see our top 15 customer. Their average duration is twenty years with us. So as it's an average, some of them live as longer, some of them live as slightly shorter, but the average is twenty years. So that's quite a relationship. It's part of us being mission critical, us working on things that they need to exist as a business and developing and evolving those relationships over time. So a very long standing relationships with high recurring revenues. We have we have shifted to software as a service as a company. We shifted a couple of years ago, and now our recurring revenues are about 80% and continue to stay around that levels.

5:05 And we have a very strong balance sheet, as you can see, of 2,700,000 cash, and we continue to be a cash generative business cash generative profit making business. And our EBITDA margins are about 20%, which we are evolved to get to there, you know, really with a business like ours with some services and some software, that's about the right target for us. We not only that. So that really represents a stable base of who we are as a customer, but we are expanding opportunities in current and faster growth verticals. Even though our own growth vertical or our old growth vertical was good, we continue to be able to expand into faster growth verticals. And we've made real progress with that this year, and you'll hear us say it a lot. We have we're our IP management project.

5:54 Our IP management product in music and media is in five countries right now.

6:02 So let's talk a bit about the market and why why these markets. The publishing market's growing. It's continued to grow. It's grow for those who've heard me speak before, it's a great market to be in. It's grown for hundreds of years, continues to grow. We're trying to only reflect the portion of the market that we think affects software, so it's not as fast as you might think in some of these spaces since the overall markets are growing faster, but there is continued growth in book publishing, in digital publishing in all its formats. There's continued growth. And gaming, of course, the the actual gaming market, it's grown much faster. We we try to balance that number with what we think it goes to software again. And music, as you can see, they're all fast growing markets. We have offerings in these spaces, and we continue to do that. The nice thing about these markets too is there is elements of convergence.

6:53 So ultimately, all these markets are converging into what people call the global media market. And it's the same thing with our book publishers. Even when we were just doing books, we were doing more than just paper books. We were doing paper books, digital books, audio books. Some of them have animations in them, particularly in the children's area. They have various things, various music associated with them. And so even from the book world alone, the book world's slowly evolving more into media. And many of the media markets have already taken on parts of books. And you see this sort of the full realization in gaming where often in games, you will see the the media aspects, the gaming aspects, the book aspects, and even some clips from films in them. And so all these markets are coming together into what's sort of the global media market with very little differentiation and and very similar artists working in all of them.

7:46 And in all of these markets, the barriers to entry have been lower than ever. So they continue to have very few barriers to entry, and that will continue to go down. And so what you see is an evergreen crop of new customers from our perspective, that there are new people spinning up in each of these spaces regularly. And as they spin up, they become more some of them become more successful, and they get consumed into larger organizations all the way up to the sector behemoths. And what we've done as a company is we've positioned our products and what we're doing so we can work with them as they're just entering till the time they get absorbed into larger organizations, which, of course, creates our entry into larger organizations as they grow. And so we we want to get with them and stay with them on that journey. Again, all of these markets target long term growth, and no one considers that any of them will start to to falter.

8:43 Our product focus, I've said this a few times, but it really does allow customers to start small and grow with us. And that's critical to our success over time, and I'm gonna go through some some case studies and some examples of where this actually worked very well for us. So we do address customers of all sizes. We are content agnostic. What that means is we've always focused on knowing our customers had a pride a broad portfolio of product that they wanted to distribute, and we've had to handle it all. And so what that's done over time is led to solutions that are very adaptable to new markets. So whether it's a book, a song, a journal, they all can be reflected. We can capture the right metadata, calculate the right royalties, and do the right distribution pieces of it because we've already done it, and we've been doing it for years. And we're continuing to use that knowledge to drive how we move forward.

9:36 The other thing we've done as a product is we've recognizes we've recognized that we are a part of a larger system in each of our customers, that they have other systems they need to integrate with. And what people really tend to want now is best in class solutions for the elements that that solution addresses rather than give me one solution that does everything average. I'd rather have really good solutions that all talk together. And so all of our solutions are focused on integration and alignment. And from that perspective, I mean, we've had some of our largest customers, we have over a 100 integrations. Some of our smallest, it's one. And so it can run the gamut of what they integrate with, but the integration mechanisms are in place, and it's a recognized part of how we do product development.

10:23 So I've mentioned it a couple times. Again, we focus on mission critical solutions and solutions that customers must have some solution for in order to exist. And they've run the the spectrum that you see below. These are the how we've categorized our products, really. So they we have products that manage orders, project products that manage the payments related to those orders. We have products that do distribution and get content out in the world, particularly digital content distribution. I'm gonna deep dive on that, so I won't spend too much time on it now. And then we have products that also help you manage what this this talks about the licensing of assets. So you're licensing your assets. You're trying to get the IP that you wanna distribute, and then you have to distribute it, and then you have to make your royalty payments on them.

11:11 And, really, what INGENTA does as a whole is really help businesses recognize the value of their own IP. So as they're looking at their intellectual property management, they can come to us to help them in various aspects of getting the value out of that intellectual property, and that's really what we do. So I'm gonna deep dive a little bit into what we call our content division or digital distribution. So we have our INGENTA Connect product that you can want it today. Anyone out there can log on to INGENTA Connect, see our product there. It is it's been around for a couple of decades. It is one of the largest scholarly platforms in the world. It distinguishes itself by publishing scholarly content, meaning well researched peer reviewed content. We get a large user base, and we have a large amount of content on that platform.

12:02 And from that perspective, there are very few other people that have such a large aggregation out there, and we have all sorts of relationships with libraries and various groups that use Injunct Connect quite regularly to do their research. And so it exists out there, and customers can come on us as small as a single issue of a single journal because it's very low cost to get on the platform, and then they can grow with us. And this is what I'm talking about when we work from the very small to the very large. So what we've done is you can work on INGENTA Connect. You can grow. There's a couple ways to grow on INGENTA Connect to add features as a customer of INGENTA Connect, and then you can grow to the point where you really feel like you need your own site, where you're gonna have your own site with all of your content on it. But what's important for most of our customers is to keep that connection to INGENTA Connect. So even when you have your own site where you're distributing your content through your own site, we will index your content back on INGENTA Connect. So you keep some of the INGENTA Connect business. And as customers get on to the new platforms, they also have far more flexibility in how they manage their business models, different ways they wanna make money, different subscriptions, methodologies they wanna use, different integration points, and you get all the flexibility, all the branding that you want, and you also get the benefits of still indexing on INGENTA Connect.

13:23 So it's a real natural growth cycle, and what I'm showing here are three actual examples of people who are on INGENTA Connect and migrated to their own site over the past, like, eighteen months. So they continue to do that migration. We continue to see people get bigger and more traction on INGENTA Connect, and then wanna talk about advancing to something else.

13:46 So when they advance to other things and it looks like some of these did not render quite correctly in this presentation. Sorry about that. But these are some of the entities we've worked with for their own sites. The UNI library is one of the people that we provide the site for them. They're a division of the UN. We work with quite a few NGOs, some of which you would see on there if the the picture is rendered correctly. And then we're currently in process of launching an intergovernmental marine group site, and

14:24 distribute that content. We work with one of them is a Research for Life, which I'm gonna go into more detail on, which is a charitable organization trying to get real scholarly content into the hands of the people that need it the most. And then we work with professional associations quite regularly, like NCTE is the National Council of Teachers of English in The US. So they have a lot of content they wanna distribute into the world as well as membership benefits, membership packages that they they use to get money, give you ways to donate, that type of thing. And so that that goes through one of our sites as this, like to a flavor for what we do here. The two over on the right, annual reviews, which is one on the bottom on the right, is a well known scholarly publisher that's been in The US for about as long as we've been around, and they put they're very well known, well respected, put a lot of content out there. They've just gone live in the beginning of this year in January with their new site with every all of their content and their decades of history of published content on it. And then the one above that is Noble Magazine, which is a scientific magazine, which is our first foray into the magazine world, really. It's it's essentially leveraging the same base platform, but with a new skin on top of it to just make it give you more flexibility in terms of advertising, how you're gonna manage your content so that it looks it's a little more user friendly, a little less oriented like

15:54 a journal. And so I highly recommend going to Noble Magazine. It's actually quite an interesting site too. They have a lot of interesting content. Again, we don't get to produce the content. We just get to distribute it to the world. So that's our role. These are all sites you can go to. You can validate. You can take a look at, see what we do. And that's from our content distribution platforms. Well, let me talk about Research for Life a little bit more. So you can see what Research for Life does here. They're really focused on providing institutions, governments, various organizations within low and middle income countries with online access to really well researched information. What what the world has right now is a a plethora of noise in of things that are published that are not well researched, things that are not valid for consideration as far as these groups consider. And they really a, their real aim is to get the right information to people, the real information, the real scientifically validated information into the hands of the people who need it, whether they be institutions of learning or institutions of government.

16:59 And what they really are is an association of associations. So they're an association of the five associations listed at the bottom, which are they're five very geographically diverse organizations, huge amounts of just diverse content, and they really needed a way for people to get to the information. So in their current the state, whenever they first started talking to us, they were having trouble with people really migrating or finding the information they needed because you had to click from site to site to site and try to find things. And it's not even those five sites because many of those associations at the bottom are associations of other entities. So to get to the actual information was was difficult. It took people a long time. And whereas their goal was to get it into their hands and effectively they were doing that, they weren't doing it as efficiently or as effectively as they like.

17:50 And so what we ended up happening was we proposed an MDM to edify platform to bring together all the content, and it'd be a single site, a unified search, seamless user experience, whereas we'd recognize where things came from. We are still gonna get the content in the hands, and we can provide all the links out so that you can actually go from our site to wherever you were gonna go in in via the other methodology. So we've kept it's sort of like this nice central hub of all of the information with all of the connections that are necessary to get to all of the organizations and any other research they may have. And so that's the the site we provided. It was a relatively long project for us. It was a ten month project, as you can imagine, working across five different associations, getting agreements, and took quite a bit of time. But the bulk of the time is actually spent on getting agreements on how we configured, how it would look and feel because of the the way the association works. And as a result of that, it was necessary to leverage the framework that we put in place when we work with large entities. We have a real time project tracking with visibility so that anyone working on the project can see where any deliverable is at any time. We take all the contracts, break them down to deliverables, trace them from the beginning to end on a real time tracking dashboard that's available to the people working on the project. It helps keep us on task, keep them on task, and keep decisions flowing, which is really what we need is the decisions flowing at the pace we need to continue to to to continue to configure and get the platform

19:22 launched. And it really did it does go off our standard based platform. This is really just a customized configuration of that base. And then you have to do all the content loading, data loading, user profile loading, all of the data elements to get it up to to snuff with where they were today. You do have comprehensive search and user profiles, you know, unified logins across sites. It's multilingual. Many of our sites are, and we've done things in numerous number of languages. But everything from English to Arabic, I guess, is what we've done. And we have sites up and running in Qatar, and the UN site has a multitude of languages on it as does the OECD site. Each of these sites, you know, is multilingual and has to be in the world we live in today. And we use AWS, so we have world class hosting monitoring security, all aspects of that for the actual hosting platforms for each one of these. Now this is actually deployed as a platform as a service, meaning that they have their own version rather than they're going on a multitenancy software as a service.

20:22 As a result, Research Life now has this future proof high performance scalable system to deliver their content globally across these complex organizations. And the users themselves are benefiting tremendously just from the improved features, the look and feel, how do we get to content, and how do we find what we need. And you can see this is the result of it. You can see the site. You can see the site structure at its full. You can go on it. You can search for whatever you want. You can find it. They're saying 200,000 resources. It's actually quite a bit more than that depending on how you measure a resource. And, I mean, I've just done a search here on autism. As you can see, it's brought together 125,000 journal articles. So you have access to that level of highly researched content with different recommendations, different ways to see most recent and and relevant content to you.

21:13 And, as you can see, is very pleased with what she's gotten here and what she's gotten as a platform that'll service them now and into the future and allow them to actually achieve their vision of this digital distribution.

21:29 So let me dive a little bit in in the other direction, which is around our IT management suite. So this is the suite that helps you manage getting rights to things all the way through to paying royalties, whether that means you sublicense rights out. I mean, at the high level, that's what's interesting about this space is the high level, it's very easy conceptually. From a practical level, it's very difficult to do it. You can see some of the entities we work with at the bottom of this. Sage is a good example. Sage Publishing, McGraw Hill, Cambridge University Press, all interesting entities we've worked with for years in providing this information to them. As you can see, the dashboards look like an internal system because it is an internal system. It is web hosted, but it's still in for internal purposes. And so it's really data driven, giving information out, and you can see it can produce royalty statements.

22:20 What I should mention is some of the the newer customers for this platform, which is Revolver Records, which I'm gonna do a deep dive into that into the that music business that's one of the music customers we have. Like I said, we have music and media customers in five countries now. And so Revolver Records is one of them. The other one I'm gonna mention is WildBrain, and WildBrain is an interesting customer. They manage such brands as Teletubbies and Strawberry Shortcake and part of Charles Schultz. So when you think about INGENTA, I always say that what's what's amazing and sort of interesting and exciting about working at INGENTA and helping drive this organization is we work with everyone from the Teletubbies to the United Nations, and we genuinely work with them all. And we expect it that to expand. And so let's talk about revolver records. So they're an independent record label. They've been in The UK for about forty years. They have really five labels within revolver records, and there is some complexity to how they manage their contracts as it relates to their contracts, their royalties, and really the allocations of royalties to labels, but our software has been able to do that because we've able to do it for very large entities.

23:30 They went through quite a process in deciding what they wanted to do here. What they were doing was they were trying to do it via multiple spreadsheets. They're very difficult to calculate, huge investments of time to get through this. I mean, they were getting, all of the data feeds for their sales and trying to manually calculate royalty statements via spreadsheets. And even though they had a spreadsheet system to do it, the world is shifting, which makes it even even harder. So when you start talking about shifting world in music, with all the streaming revenues, what you end up with is many millions of micro transactions. And you end up with huge datasets that you now need to digest in order to figure out who gets paid what royalties. And it just becomes a burden that it's very difficult, not possible, to manage via spreadsheet because just due to due to the sheer volume, you end up with all sorts of slight inconsistency in calculations largely due to rounding or whatever is happening on the spreadsheet.

24:28 And you end up with a question mark as to have we paid everything correctly and have you know, when people ask questions, can we validate it? And that's their ultimate goal is to pay everyone correctly and to be able to have to be able to validate, to be able to authenticate, and really justify what they paid and how it is correct. And, naturally, with a system that complex, it's very difficult to train an onboard staff. And so what we showed them was the INGENTA Concord Suite. They wanted to replace all their manual efforts and figure out a system that could do it. We showed them how we could do it in their space as well as how we've done it in other spaces. And it's really contract driven driven where the contract itself defines how the calculations and all the parties. And then once you get the data in, it just calculates.

25:16 And it doesn't matter if it's millions of rows that it's calculating. It is still calculating and getting to the the right numbers, and we've proven it over and over again. We've proven it with very large entities over and over again that the software works very well. And it's from that perspective, you get something that's easy to find, what what solution easy to find what how you got to the solution and easy to validate and to back it up in time. And even if you've made an error, you can just correct that error and recalculate, and you'll get the real numbers. If you made an error in one of your rules, you can try trace back to that via this method, which would have been much harder in the other method. The other thing we recommended to them is that they use our aperture solution, which allows them to provide visibility to royalty statements.

26:03 So from that perspective, the customers can see or the artist can see their royalty statements. They can log on to a portal, see the royalty statements, see how they're doing, see whatever information that Revolver Records wants to make visible to them, and they can get access to that information as as often as Revolver wants to publish it to them. And so they have decided that they did fully implement both of those. That's where the or because they went with our software as a service solution rather than a customized solution or custom configured solution. They had extremely rapid onboarding. They were set up in a matter of hours. It did take them time to get their rules and the various parts of the contracts in the system. In fact, they contracted with us to help them do that and make sure that they get through all

26:52 the appropriate information. And they did have to do some do a parallel run. I think their plan was to do a lot more parallel runs, but because it was so easy in our system, they just decided that after the first one, just to keep with us. And once they're a 100% certain of of that that correct setup, then they implemented Aperture so that the customers could see it and manage their own royalty statements and see what's going on with the royalty statements. Already said that it was set up on the multitenanted solution. Was immediately available. There's limited features, but they have selected some features, some additional features, and they can upscale features to the point where they can get to a very customized configuration and and and evolve to their own platform, which some of our larger customers would do. And as you can see, Paul Birch is happy with how he's been able to increase the visibility, get more accuracy, and get, you know, more more efficiently get statements out there.

27:48 So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to John to talk about talk you through more of the details of the financials before we get to the q and a portion. John? Thanks, Scott. Right. So in this section, I'd wanted to look at the financial performance and trends over the last few years. The table here shows a selection of measures, but I wanted to really concentrate on three core items. Revenue growth underpinned by strong recurring revenues, profitability, and cash generation. So on the first one, revenue growth, that's really been driven by our content vision, so the website distribution platforms. And then the key areas here have been NGOs, which Scott talked about, and scientific and trade publishers.

28:34 So previous slides, you saw Research for Life. That was a a good example, and the UN was there. And I think one of the slides that didn't render was OECD. So big well known names, and we're looking to really progress in that segment.

28:48 In terms of deal sizes, we had an announcement last year where we we got two new deals. They were worth 2,000,000 over five years. So they're like, gives you an indication of of what you can get from this kind of business. So before I move on, I just wanted to talk about commercial because although it hasn't, moved the dial in the same way, and Scott's mentioned it, it it is now live in five countries. So it's really building up a base for for future growth, and some of those guys will grow with us and and become bigger customers.

29:20 The recurring element of the revenues. So the earlier slides show we're about 80%, and that's pretty normal for us because we we do software and services. That that's part of our part of our business. INGENTA aims to be a business partner. So not just maintenance, but we'll do operational services. So when we talk about operational services, it's our customers don't want to really get involved in technology if they can avoid it. So we'll help them. We'll do reporting services. We'll do periodic routines like month end closes. We'll do IT management, posting. All those kind of things are are also recurring revenues for us if if that's what they want to contract for.

30:02 And all in all, that that reinforces the sticky nature of our revenue and the the stat at the start of this the deck that said, you know, on average, they're twenty years tenure for for our top 15 customers. Profitability was the the next bit. And for those that are unfamiliar with our recent history, we went through a transformation phase a few years back. And what we looked to do there was remove silos in the business, remove loss making contracts, all with the aim to to make ourselves

30:33 more efficient, but importantly, improve the the service levels that we offer our customers. And we're now more product agnostic and and can be really consistent across the board in how we how we serve them. So that's driven a, basically, a 20% EBITDA margin at the moment, and we think we've got a good structure now with room to grow so we can add business on much more easily than we could in the past, and it's it's put us in a good position for the future.

31:01 The last bit was cash generation, and this is obviously a a byproduct of operational efficiency. That always helps. And Scott mentioned we are mission critical, so our services and offerings are really valued. There's little history of default, so we know that the the revenues will come through. And another thing to to mention is, and we'll go into it in a bit bit more detail later, we don't currently pay tax. We've got losses that are shielding us from tax payments. We've got no debt to service either, so it doesn't eat into our our operating profits. So what we've done with the with the cash we generated, I think there's too many things to talk about. So one is we've developed and implemented new products. So the the venture that Scott mentioned of going into the, the music business with the Concord product, that that's something that we built and developed and and got out there. Aputure, another product that we're we're building to to go out to to customers. We've we've used the funds for that.

32:00 And secondly, we've also supported our shareholder return. So we've got a progressive dividend policy, and we've also done targeted share buybacks over the years, which we'll come on to a bit later as well. So this next slide is really about the the future plans and how we will wanna move forward, and I and I boil this really down into two two core aims. So we want to support the revenue growth that we've started to show over the last few years and also continue to improve our operational efficiency. So on the the supporting the revenue growth point, we're looking now and have invested in additional sales expertise in content and IP space, which we see as the the drivers of growth.

32:46 So the the resources and people we've brought in there have been tasked with, first of all, building an engine so we can convert the smaller SaaS deals and get them on board much quicker and easier, but also helping to build our pipeline of larger deals. And these these people have got contacts. They've got expertise, and and they can help us maneuver through the sales processes, which are undoubtedly gonna be a longer and a more difficult process for the bigger deal. So and that's why we brought them in, and we look to make progress there. The other thing to do to support the revenue growth is is refining our marketing approach. And, really, that's moving away from the traditional going to trade fairs and events, and it's really trying to maximize Google and email targeting.

33:35 One good thing Scott mentioned that, you know, with IP alone, we're now in five different countries. You know, UK, US, Canada, India, Colombia. We've we've got a really wide reach now, and it and it helps you to leverage the the capability of of the web that you can really get out there. You can reference it, and we know we can do it remotely because we've been doing that for many years now, and that's all good good for the future. The other bit was enhancing operational efficiency. So these are all incremental gains. We're always learning, trying to make things better. And one of the things that is a benefit of some of our customers now being willing to commit for, you know, multiyear deals three, five years are are not uncommon now. We're we're able to look into some of the advantages of AWS and preferential rates if you prebuy capacity for years in advance. You know, if we got a guaranteed contract, we can go and prebuy capacity, and we'll get a a a better rate, and we should be able to improve margins that way as well.

34:38 The other policy we're continuing on is is trying to retire physical IT infrastructure. We still got old servers and kit. Once they go out of support, we'll we'll look to to move them on and and transition more fully over to the cloud, and that saved us money in, you know, data center rent, rack space, power, maintenance contracts. And at the same time, our service will become a lot more robust. You know? I think it's very hard to be AWS in that that level of resiliency, so it it's all good for us to to move over in that direction. So the next few slides are are just a bit more of a breakdown on the finances. The first one is gonna be the the revenue breakout.

35:26 So I think what I wanted to to go over here was really our simplified structure and and how we're presenting ourselves. We've really got a content arm and a commercial arm. So the content is all about the websites and the content distribution, and the commercial arm is about back end IP management. And Scott's gone over those and given you a couple of case studies on on what we're doing there. You can see here in the graphics that the growth has really been driven in content, and we've mentioned that was the NGOs, the scientific and trade publishers where we've got some traction. And another thing for people who've been on previous calls, we've we've note we've known for a long time that we're underrepresented in The US market, and we've done well in '23. We've we've pushed out and got more business in The US, annual reviews being one of them and, you know, a key player in that market, and that that's really good for us.

36:21 The other thing on the the regions, although the the rest of the world hasn't moved, I said earlier that we we haven't had a business in India, Colombia, Canada. All those things are expanding out, not with big ticket numbers yet, but we are now operating in in more territories than we have before. And then you can also see the stable recurring base, you know, the 80%. We'll always do a little bit of project work. Customers want to do projects, and, you know, we're happy to do that work for them. This next slide is the income statement. I think we've covered off peripherally a a lot of this stuff. So I think the the key messages here that I wanted to go over was the progression of the underlying EBITDA.

37:08 So all the the improvements we've made to make ourselves more efficient is is paying dividends, and you can see that coming through. You also see there's there's no debt servicing. We're not having to spend money on on interest. And probably more importantly at this stage is the taxation line where we're not paying tax. We've got £20,000,000 of tax losses. We're utilizing that against the the profits that we've made, and that's why you're seeing a tax credit going through the income statement as we build up a a deferred tax asset, which you'll see in later slides. And I guess the the ideal bit at the bottom is the the earnings per share growth. So that's driven by the efficiency, but also the targeted share buybacks that I've mentioned before, and we'll show a little bit more on that in another slide.

38:02 So on the balance sheet, I think the the key bits to to mention here is there's no capitalized r and d. It's all expensed through in the year incurred. You can see the current £1,600,000 of deferred tax asset, and it's important to say that only represents a a five year estimate. We we don't go beyond that at this stage, and it and that's the value that we think that it can generate for us over that period in tax savings. And, again, yeah, no debt, and any leases we've had are now being fully paid off in 2024. So the last slide on the financials is is the cash flow. So we've got the solid cash generation. You're seeing there's no debt servicing or taxation outflows eating into the into the generated operating profits.

38:53 The controlled capital expenditure as we try to move towards the cloud and not buying physical equipment and kits. And then, I guess, those last two well, middle two lines in there, you can see that the cash generation being used to support the shareholder return. So our progressive dividend policy. So in 2023, the dividend has increased 19% to 4.1p per share. And you also see in prior years, we've done targeted share buybacks. So the big one being a 2,200,000 buyback in 2022, and they've all helped to to boost the earnings per share of of the shareholding base. And also the the the cash that we're generating, there's always the option to use some of that for for smaller acquisitions as we look to grow, and that's that's something we're we're looking at all the time. You know? Can we bolt things on that will help our products to to really grow and move forward?

39:50 I think those were the the key bits I really wanted to go over on the financials. So I think now we can kinda head back and and go to the the q and a. Perfect. Scott, John, if I may just jump back in there, and thank you very much indeed, for your presentation this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the q and a tab that's situated on the right hand corner of your screen. But just while the company take a few moments to review those questions that were submitted already, I would just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a can all be accessed via your investor dashboard. Guys, as you can see there in the q and a tab, we have already received a number of questions throughout your presentation this afternoon. And thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions.

40:36 But, Scott, John, at this point, if I may just hand to you guys just to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so, and then I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you. Sure. Okay. Well, thank you for submitting questions. And if you have more, please do ask. We we try to cover everything, but we know we can't cover everything in this short amount of time, so questions are helpful. So let me start with the first one. The results mentioned the possibility of acquisitions. What sort of targets is the company considering? If no deals are forthcoming with the company, consider further buybacks or tender offers with the excess cash. So as it relates to acquisitions and targets, we've reached out in a pretty broad way to acquisitions and targets. Our ideal target would be a customer in a very adjacent functional space.

41:24 So it marries well with our portfolio, ties in with our sales cycle, ties in with our sort of integration cycles and development in the line with our purpose. You don't always find those companies. We would we have looked at direct competitors in some of the spaces, smaller, albeit, or underperforming direct competitors, and we've looked at a few others there. We have worked with a couple of different consultants to try and target and to start conversations for us and continue to do so as appropriate to try and make sure we're aggressively looking at what targets we would like to get in there. There are spaces that we don't do, like, tied to the IP product. We don't do the payment processing, as an example, tied to the content product. We don't do the content production life cycle and the tools associated with that, and other people do that.

42:10 So we looked at some of those. That would be sort of the ideal, but we would look at targets in other areas as well. We're not really considering targets that don't align with our product or strategy, so we kept them aligned with that. And to the point of new deals are forthcoming with the company, consider further buybacks or tender offers with the excess cash. Yes. We do. We under under because we've been profitable, we have been cash generative. We have had cash buildups happen, and the board regularly considers the best way to return value to shareholders, whether that be through buybacks or aggressive dividend policies or, you know, building up even more depending if it looks like an M and A is imminent. And I think all of those options are on the table. I mean, we tend to align with an aggressive dividend policy. It's easier to manage, easier to distribute than a buyback and tender offer is. So I expect those to continue.

43:01 The next one, provisions have increased year on year. What are these and why the increase as that goes to detailed financials? John, do you wanna talk about Yeah. Sure. So what we've got, we've, as I think, we've we've talked about before that there is some legacy business in in the estate. And it's profitable business. It's good for us, but some of them some of those legacy systems need a bit of technology work. But it's it's worth us doing, and that's what it's relating to. Just some technical work to to move to new versions of servers and that and that kind of thing for software where the customer has got a perpetual license. Okay. The next one, what medium to long term growth in error is the company targeting?

43:49 I think what we would say is that the percentages we see now, we expect to continue. The more we can build up the lower end of the portfolio, the more you'll see that recurring revenues start to shift up a bit in percentage. But what tends to happen is the smaller business would shift that percentage up, but then the more smaller business have, the more we get larger business, which has larger implementation projects working with customers. It is critical to make sure those implementations are successful so we always will have some element of it that's not recurring. I don't know that we've set a specific target for ARR in that sense. John, is there anything you want to add to that? No. There's not not real targets. I think most of the contracts have have got a AWE. You know, those well, RPI, those kind of let levels of inflation built into them. Okay.

44:41 So I like the business, but I haven't invested yet due to muted revenue growth. Can you talk about the growth prospects for the business? Sure. First, I recommend you invest, but I would always recommend that. But let's talk about the growth prospects. So one of the the nice things about INGENTA is it's a highly stable company that's been around for a long time, is cash generative, is returns cash to investors. So that's the great aspect of it. And we are continuing to do new efforts, new ventures, new verticals. Those growth prospects in the long term are unlimited, I would say. When you start talking about getting into these markets that are equivalent, if not larger, to the publishing market as a whole. There are loads of entities you could get into that you could accumulate. Even just getting a a portion of the market share would have our company grow dramatically.

45:31 The timing is the question, I guess, on that. Whereas we always can continue to pursue, you know, larger deals in the tried and true business, really building up the base in the new verticals to get those. So they tend to be smaller deals, which gain new introductions, slightly large deals, and on up. I think there have been growth projections put out there for next year. And as we we get those projections, we'll continue to release them. So you want the information. The next one is the company said they're struggling to recruit suitable salespeople. What are the barriers that have made this tricky? So what's made it tricky for us in recruiting suitable salespeople is we actually cover a breadth of customers, customer types, and product lines. When I talk about we cover everything from Teletubbies to the United Nations, that that sort of requires, at the highest level, salespeople with quite a breadth of sales experience across all sorts of areas, which tends to happen at very large companies as opposed to companies of mid or aim listed size companies like ourselves.

46:37 And so it's really getting the salesperson that can cut across all of that and get sort of that from a leadership perspective. And from the individual sales perspective, I think we probably had the challenges that every company's had with employees lately. I mean, the next question is, has the company struggled to retain key staff as well as recruit new team members? We haven't really had a problem getting new people or retaining key staff. Our key staff has been with us. Some of our key staff has left due to retirement after being with us for a very long time. So that does happen. At least that's well planned. We've been able to get new team members relatively quickly, but to get highly qualified new team members has been the struggle. And to really educate them and get them up to speed has taken time, and it really slows down the cycle that we would like. But we have targeted more working with consulting groups in the sales and marketing area, particularly, so that we get well knowledgeable staff. They cost a little more, but they they're well knowledgeable. They can hit the ground running in many of them because of our reputation over the years is already aware of us. And so they already have somewhat knowledge from it, and we're hoping that it'll accelerate the growth quite dramatically.

47:44 This has been something we've implemented this year, so we'll see the results in next year, really. We are seeing a very active pipeline, I will say that, as a result of the the aggressive marketing efforts we've been doing and the new team members. The next one is how are you prepared for potential regulatory changes in the publishing and content management industry? What impacts do you foresee these changes having on your business, if any? I mean, I'm not really sure which potential regulatory changes this is referring to. There's a lot going on. If this is the AI type question, the generative AI question, what's gonna happen there? There's significant, I expect, regulatory changes that'll happen as it relates to generative AI and how it's used and managed, all of which will probably help us as a solution.

48:32 There's also regulatory changes positioned particularly in music around I don't know if they all go through, but around how visibility into data and how that could help artists where artists feel like they're underpaid. And as those happen, it would actually foster people to buy a solution like ours, so that could help us as well. There's continued pushes around privacy in various areas, little less so in The US than in some other areas of the world, which have some effects on us, and we continue to keep up with those. I expect you'll also see different regulations happen as it relates to just overall security, and this is where working with partners like AWS has been helpful to us where you're working with AWS, and there's many really robust products already work with AWS, which you can just buy them and turn them on immediately to start to better protect and secure your offering into the world.

49:28 So I'm not sure if that covered the regulatory changes that people are thinking about here, but there are are gonna be continuing regulatory changes. And we keep up with those. You know, we've been connected to those areas for quite some time. And because we work with players like the United Nations, we're very aware of regulatory changes over time. So that's really the list of questions that we had. Absolutely, Scott. John, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this afternoon. And, of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended just for you to review to then add any additional responses, of course, where it's appropriate to do so. And we'll publish all those responses out on the platform. But, Scott, perhaps before really just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that would be great.

50:25 Sure. I do want to thank everyone for taking the time to look at INGENTA. I just wanna stress really, I mean, we've been around a a long time as a company. We've weathered lots of storms. We've gone through our own transformation over time. And in my time, in the six years that I've been CEO, go down six years, we have really transformed this company and really positioned it for the future. So we've kept all the best of the stable base, and now we're looking to really advance from here and grow from here. So we do offer this nice mix of stability and potential, And I'd just like to remind investors that, and I think our results prove that out. So, hopefully, we'll see that in the numbers, and they'll see that in the future as our strategies continue to work. So thank you again, everyone.

51:12 Perfect. That's great. Scott, John, thank you once again for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that management team can really better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of INGENTA PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good afternoon to you all.