International Workplace Group plc (IWG) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and thank you everyone for joining us this morning for our 2025 results. Overall a very good year both financially and operationally and strategically we continue to roll out the plan that we set out over the past years. I'm going to take you through briefly exactly why that matters, in particular in these volatile times with geopolitics at play, with the AI question that everyone keeps asking. So what is our business going to be about over the coming years? When I started IWG, there were different times. There was before the internet, that was before, that was a time when mobile phones weighed quite a few kilos. But the idea then was simple. It was about giving people access to great workspace, great work tools. And even though I started with one centre, it was about doing it better than anything else they can get on the market now that morphed into doing that wherever and whenever they want it and that is the business we have today so that's me so when you look at today we've got a business more relevant than ever in this changing world. What's very, very clear is that customers, so companies, want to rent, not own. They want to be capital light. They don't want to invest in facilities, fit out furniture for long terms. They really value an asset like activity. And I'll give you a quick example of this. This is one of the largest tech firms in the world, big customer of ours. I made the mistake when I was on a conference call with the CFO saying, well, I'm sure cash flow is not your problem and you're probably not interested in being capital light. He said, no, absolutely the opposite. We are very interested in being capital light. We want to spend every last dollar on data centers and AI. We don't want to spend any money on anything else. So we're abs...