Robert Walters plc (RWA) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us for our 2025 half year results presentation. I'm Toby Folston, Chief Executive at Robert Walters and joining me is David Bauer, Chief Financial Officer. By the end of this morning's presentation, I'd like to take you away three key messages. Firstly, whilst the external environment our business operates in remain challenging during the first half, we focused on decisive actions to drive efficiency and improve our performance. with around 70% of the fee income impact offset through lower costs and growth in overall fee earner productivity. Secondly, clients' needs are changing and we are adapting our business to support them. Talent landscape continues to evolve rapidly and so organisations need talent partners with a full suite of solutions. This is a key factor behind our service line diversification and we continue to develop interim management, workforce consultancy and talent advisory as future growth engines for our business. And thirdly, whilst the trading headwinds across the sector have been longer in duration than perhaps anyone expected, we are further positioning the business for long-term growth with continued conviction in our strategic plan. Over the first half, we continue to see early traction in our initiatives and that further adds to our confidence. In terms of our agenda today, I will briefly run through our first half trading before David presents the financial review, as well as an update on how we view capital allocation moving forwards. I will then return to update you on the progress we've made on developing our growth drivers. And as usual, we'll leave time at the end for questions. So let's take a closer look at trading and firstly the market backdrop. Macroeconomic uncertainty constrained client...