Reach PLC (RCH) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us today, either online or in person. My name is Piers North, I'm Chief Executive of Reach PLC and welcome to our half year results for 2026. I will assume you are familiar with our usual disclaimers, but they are here if not. So this morning I'm going to run through our performance highlights for the first half of the year and then as usual I will pass to Darren Fisher our CFO for the financial details. Then I will come back and I'll take a closer look at our current strategic progress and explain more how we're viewing the current online market and how we see the opportunity in it moving forward. So let's take a snapshot of the year. To put it mildly, this period has continued to be characterised by significant external change. The media, and obviously publishing in particular, the landscape is evolving rapidly, and we face notable shifts in how our digital content is discovered. Most notably, the low referral volumes, which saw our on-platform page views decline by 40%. However, against that backdrop, I am reassured by the resilience we've shown, including being on track to deliver on our expectations for the year. We've been able to partially mitigate this stark browser page view decline, as well as grow our priority areas, which means that our digital revenue declined 11%. Again, when on-platform page views, which has traditionally been our single biggest driver of our revenue, declined by a much higher number. The priorities that we set out to navigate the market, connecting with our audiences, accelerating the use of technology and AI, and diversifying our revenues have driven positive, tangible results, excluding our local business direct revenues grew 6%. supported by the quality of our video content and the succe...