Yougov (LSE:YOU) — Half-Year Results

0:01 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the YOUGOV Half Year Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time using the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Just please simply type in your questions at any time and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself, but the company will review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we would like to submit the following poll. And if you would give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most

0:32 grateful. And I'd now like to hand over, if I may, to CEO, Stefan Shakespeare. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Thank you very much everybody for coming along, and we're very excited and happy to present what we think are a terrific set of half year results. The the key highlights are that we have made a bumper revenue, 298% up reported figures. Underlying basis, 25% up in terms of revenue. Adjusted profit also extremely high. It's up 33% in reported numbers, and the margin is also slightly increased. We'll hear more about all of that in a moment, of course.

1:28 The key, thing for us to try and get across is that we have a very clear strategy, goes well beyond our four year, five year plans into the future, and that we are investing the entire time in that long term strategy.

1:45 And so we will be seeing we think we will continue to see this kind of momentum going forward. That's what we're experiencing at the moment. And we have invested ahead of the curve, which allows us to bring down the increase in spending in the future, we believe, which will have a a a positive effect on the margin. But above all, we are continuing to invest in our long term growth. We have developed second phases of our self-service system, of our ratings, of our profiles, products, all of which, help us to sustain our innovation and our lead in the market, on the in these areas in the coming years.

2:33 I'd now like to hand you over to the CFO for details on the numbers, and that's Alex McIntosh. Hello, everybody. Still checking off mute. Just continuing from Stefan's message. Very pleased, to be reporting, very significant growth on the half of f y twenty one. This is, the background of this has been throughout the pandemic continuous growth each reporting cycle. So this is, this is really speaking to the sales momentum that we've been talking about for the last, six months, twelve months, where we've been, really investing in a new sales team, really going forward with our product first strategy, brings in line custom and our data services division. And then Sunny will pick up that in a moment. On a reported basis, 28% growth. On an underlying basis, adjusting for 6% of the revenue has come from some recent acquisitions that we've made, and we've also had an FX drag of of 3% on those numbers. We're very pleased to report the chart at the the bottom right. We'll show you all divisions are growing.

3:41 We don't have a country, sort of, segmentation note in this presentation, but all geographies are also growing. So we're seeing growth right across the the organization. The group continues to be very well diversified in terms of the sectors that we are, selling into. Technology remains, our our biggest, sector, and has been and has has showed continued growth in the period. We've also seen some

4:09 very good growth from media agencies. There was a a question mark we've had over the last couple of cycles. Would we get would we see some of the agencies distress, throughout the pandemic? That's that has not been the case. We've actually seen considerable expansion across some of the clients there. A couple of other sectors just to call out, financial services, sports, and retail sectors, we've seen some significant wins in those spaces. Only sector which has come off a little bit, but one of part of that is seasonal. We had a a cyclical, rather. We had a an election in f y in the first half of f y twenty one in The US, which obviously did not repeat into this half. And we also had a a little bit of switching around on on government work. Pleased to say, we continue to show good growth across the sectors. In the period, we've we've managed to increase our our margin by a point from 13% to 14%, primarily driven by the custom research division, which has seen some significant improvement in margin, particularly driven by, the work we do, in The US technology sector.

5:13 This is really focusing on repeatable high margin custom tracking work, which has been a, an objective that we have been, as I very clear, we are, we are seeking to grow that part of our business quite substantially. And, we've had some small, investments in the data products team, which is which is a slight temporal decline in in the margin. But overall, pleased to be growing top line at the same time as investing and also improving profitability.

5:46 Very good cash generation for the period. Last year, we had, from cash from operations was 18.5. This year, it's 30.9. A big part of that is really focusing on working capital management. In the period, we spent £25,000,000 on two acquisitions, Link, a Swiss based acquisition, and Resonance is a a technology acquisition, which, gives us a a fantastic capability in the activation space. We continue to invest in panel, and our internally developed, our internal technology development at £8,100,000 in the period. And to make the point, we continued, to we continue to pay the dividend, and each year, we seek to increase that in line with operating profit growth.

6:34 With that, I'm gonna hand over to Sunny. Thank you, Alex. Apologies. I'm slightly hoarse, so I may be sipping water every now and again. Broadly, as you will recall, we we stripped the business, as Alex also explained, into three divisions. In data products, we've continued the strong momentum we saw in the second half of the last financial year into the first half of this financial year. We have underlying growth in the period in question of 32%. As you may recall, we actually restricted the sales teams at the beginning of the last financial year into new business and account management teams, and we continue to see those benefits in this financial year. At the start of this financial year, we also appointed a new CRO, and we're very pleased with the start he's made.

7:20 We recorded double digit growth across all geographies with The US and Mainland Europe recording the highest growth. The US is obviously incredibly important for our business given the the number of large international clients that are based there and their spending. The syndicated product subscription rates are prioritized by the new business sales teams, and the new account management teams are driving strong renewal rates. Pleasingly, we have also seen the average contract lengths rising on the back of multiyear contracts. We did see a slight decline in the margin, dropped down from 33 to 32%. This is as planned. It follows an investment that we've made into into improving the customer experience of the syndicated products, and we do expect this to come back to historical levels over the next twelve months. Moving on to data services.

8:07 Data services, we saw strong growth in the largest market, which was Mainland Europe as well as Asia. There was flat growth sorry. We were flat in The US, and we did see a slight decline in The UK. Not all markets have grown as we expected. The UK was particularly hit by a decline in public sector, and and we saw a nonprofit, appetite dampening. If you recall back twelve months ago, The UK was in a very different place. There was different types of spending that were happening, and we are seeing some of our clients, switching their budgets from what was tactical work into strategic work. However, we're also seeing some of these clients come back and and commissioning work across a variety of geographies using our data services in other markets. We do expect acceleration in the second half of the financial of the financial year, and we're already seeing some recent contract wins where this this type of work is bundled with our fast turnaround projects and with syndicated work.

9:02 We did see an improvement in the division margin. This is a continuation of the back end integration work that we've done, particularly with the Synnexes for data services and for custom research, which are helping deliver ever greater efficiencies. Onto the third division, custom research. Very pleasing. We saw an acceleration in growth for custom research in the first half of year. This was driven by three key aspects. The US has performed very well for us, particularly in the tech sector. We are in a very ripe moment on the West Coast. We have a strong talented team, and our offer really resonates with the technology clients based over there. We also saw a broad based growth across all sectors in The UK. Part of this is a function of having a large custom sales team. So when these sales guys are going out, invariably, they're also able to pick up good custom briefs.

9:56 And, of course, there was a contribution made from the acquisition that we made in Switzerland, Link. We're very pleased with how that's progressing. They've been with us since the start of the the calendar year. We've had we've had a dedicated integration team working with with our Link colleagues and and the propensity of particularly multinational clients in Switzerland gives us a unique opportunity to tap into that that we've not had before. We continue to drive sales using our connected data proposition, and we're seeing this particularly bearing fruit with our sector and account management teams to help us win ever larger projects. Off the back of the, of the operational benefits we've been leveraging, so the operate operating leverage benefits, and our contribution from our West Coast Teams, we are seeing the margin improve to 19%.

10:45 And finally, on to ESG. We've managed pleasingly to make significant progress across all ESG fronts this year. In environment, we we are committed to monitoring and reducing our emissions relative to the size of our business. We're able to do this in a number of ways, including proactively reducing our carbon emissions by limiting business travel. We're now using a 100% renewable energy in our LinkedIn HQ, and we're also exploring renewable sources in other global offices. And we are making progress on eliminating single use plastics across all of our operations and suppliers. On the social front, we remain committed, this is our, obviously, our reason to be, to making people's opinions heard for the benefit of the wider community. We're doing that through a number of ways, but making sure our panel is accessible and representative is the number one thing we can do, and we've taken steps to to improve that onboarding experience to ensure that we appeal to a complete cross section of society.

11:42 We've expanded our mandated UK pay gap reporting, and we have now included voluntary reporting on the ethnicity pay gap in The UK. We have a DNI council, which oversees all DNI initiatives internally, including the development of a DNI road map through workshops through workshop workshops with an external consultancy. And pleasingly sorry. Unhunted governance, we conducted an internal audit of corporate partnerships, memberships, affiliations, and we've implemented a new procedure for tracking and evaluating potential partnerships. We're revising and enhancing our supplier approval process. We've introduced a supplier code to ensure that, we only work with suppliers who value who share our values and practices. And pleasingly, we are also the winners of the AIM Corporate Governance Award in October.

12:32 Stefan, over to you.

12:38 Sunny? Okay. Is it Alex? So Sorry. I'm just waiting for the slide. Thanks. Our focus remains on delivering sustainable and profitable long term growth. As I have said at the beginning, we very much have a key year coming up, and Alex will show you soon how we intend to meet the targets that we set ourselves. But they are steps in the road to a longer term strategy, which is about becoming a true platform company. So we expect to see our top line growth continue at at current rates, and we will control our costs now because we have invested ahead of the curve. And so that sort of gets you to where we might be going with with our targets.

13:26 Both of those things, of course, are highly relevant to our long term productivity as well because controlling those overhead costs can only be done through automation, can only be done through standardization. And that is what we mean by a platform that the processes of using our data, accessing our data, and using our data have have become become so standardized and so automated that we can then drive more and more into a self-service, probably not in a pure sense. I mean, most of our research remains things where researchers help our customers. But the more standardized we make it, the better and more efficient that help can become and the more our clients can do for themselves. And that's what we mean by growing our technology in order to become a true platform company.

14:20 The things that were in the strategic plan of the the the four year plan that we are now in the last second to last year of is developing YOUGOV Direct. That is now launched in six of our key markets, and we are actually updating that platform, make going to version two of that platform that will be launched in August. The all of that is integrated with the YOUGOV cube. That means that self-service is now can now access the entire panel that we have, not just a part of it. Our global presence has, of course, significantly increased The first phase of of the platform has was the fusion project, which brought everything together in terms of our member bases, as I say that, like, so that it can be accessed together by self-service and other services.

15:23 And indeed, we're we're on that second phase of collaborate and direct, are these self-service pieces that matter to us in the future. Crunch has also developed further, functionality, and analytical tools of the kind that we have, which are specialized for market research datasets. Ours are industry leading, and enable you to do things with our data that you can't do with other people's data, even were to be as good and rich as ours is, which, which, of course, it isn't. And the YOUGOV Cube continues to grow. We've just added, very important datasets to it, like behavioral datasets, like what people are watching because of this comes through, of course, with the changes in what's expected by people and indeed by by legislation from the from GDPR and so forth and by the changes with Apple, there's it's harder and harder for people to get information that we can get because we take we take advantage of the fact that people under GDPR and under the the infrastructures that the big platforms have built can port their data to us, get paid for it, and we can then use it in a very clever and new way. And so all of that goes to significantly enhancing the the the power of our data.

16:52 The CENEX has further broadened our expansion, and I think this is where Alex and Sunny take over. Alex, probably, to tell you about how Senex and other ways that we've improved our our functionality in the back in the back office. Hi. Next slide, Hannah.

17:24 Yeah. I'll I'll let me just pick up on on Senex because it really is around, how we, put more standardization into the group. It's required quite a lot of investment in a number of areas in order for us to, yeah, essentially create enough scale within the organization to absorb our anticipated growth. And so, Helen, if you just move on to the next slide. Just to remind everybody of our management targets, which, underpin, fit two, which we we sought seek to double revenue group revenue, at the same time as doubling the group adjusted operating margin. And we are, we we are, setting those targets, fundamentally to achieve an adjusted earnings per share growth of in excess of 30%.

18:14 In

18:17 may not surprise you. We've had a number of questions in this in this reporting season around, are we gonna hit those targets? It just to remind everybody, FY twenty three concludes on the 07/30/2023. And so we are we are getting close to. Next year is the last financial year of the, of the plan. We are stressing these are our our management targets. We don't have, guidance on FY '23 in the market yet. We will be coming out in October this year, with guidance. But we thought it would be useful to have a a form of qualitative bridge, if you will, some actual numbers on this just to show the shape of our business, what we need to do from a top line perspective, but also in in the next couple slides, what we need to do from a a cost perspective.

19:02 And we've always been very clear the plan was never linear. This is we have these long term plans so that we can make decisions and make investments that not, just for the short term. Make the point. Stefan said it's about a sustainable creating a sustainable growth, platform for, for us to realize our long term ambitions. The, sales momentum we've been pointing to, really has now starting to come through, and you you'll see in these slides, from the f y twenty one, those are actuals. And from f y twenty one onwards, these are, what we need to achieve for the, for FY twenty two. As long as we are maintaining our existing growth trajectory, that will get us in line with our FY twenty three, revenue targets. And so, we feel we've we've put in place the right steps, and the right teams in order to try to deliver it. But clearly, we still have to go deliver that that revenue.

20:00 But just to give you, just a an overall flavor for it, this is not fundamentally a hockey stick that we need to to achieve. It really is about building and sustaining momentum, which we have done. We have three areas that we invest in, panel technology and headcount cost. This is just showing you where we have put money in from f y nineteen at the beginning of this plan, through to what's, what the overall, scale of our f y twenty two overheads will be. Quite a lot of, the investment has gone into increasing the number of heads in the group right across the piece. We do make the point, really looking to increase the amount of standardization we have in the group. And over time,

20:46 standardization currently is SYNNEX, its core functions, finance, HR, governance. But, increasingly, we look to use technology to automate as much as the organization as as we can do. The group looks very different in f y twenty two than it did in f y nineteen. Significant number of heads, significant, increase in the scale of the teams, and all that really, to to as we mature as a business, put in place more more professional functions that we didn't have at the beginning of plan, like an in house legal team, really with a view to helping things like contracting with YOUGOV to make it much easier. And we have lots of examples of that across the different teams. The most significant investments we've been making, really building out the sales team, and you can see the impact of that is is is now coming through.

21:35 The CENEX team is about being able to absorb work and fundamentally now being able to absorb inflationary, salary pressures that we may be facing. But do make the point it's about being able to have a scalable research operation business, which can deliver in a in a risk free way.

21:54 Couple other areas where we've also been investing, the panel, increasing the number of panels, over the last eighteen months has been a driver of revenue growth for us. We don't seek to invest the same rate in the way that we have been, and we'll be looking to shift some of that traditional, spend that we we we typically use advertising through Facebook or Google as other panel companies do, in order to to recruit panelists. We are increasingly using chat as the method of of, having a much lower cost, but at much more engaging way of of recruiting people. And we're continuing to invest in, our technology teams, and we'll seek to do that into, next year as well as we get ready for the growth plan that will then come after f y twenty three.

22:44 And just the the three things that we're trying to achieve next year. One is maintain the gross margin, improve our operating profit margin by, really focusing on on mix. The the more that we sell of syndicated products, the more that we sell of of custom trackers, we'll see, we'll see the margin benefit of that coming through. And then clearly, maintaining, central costs and reducing the amount of investment we make in central costs as a proportion of sales. We've had to increase, investment in that in the in the early years to get ready for this growth. And you make the point, a lot of this is risk management, but we don't need to continue, growing at the same rate.

23:32 And over to Stefan on this slide. Thank you, Alex. I've I've suggested that that our momentum has been continuing. We have a a good sight of of our future revenue, and we believe that the revenue the positive sales momentum is continuing and, of course, is building on our syndicated data products and a lot of repeat business and growth in our client base as well. So the building blocks are in place, and we are really focusing on getting the most out of investments, bringing them together, making them work together in a more effective way, and extending them as we build, as I have frequently said, a real platform business.

24:24 That is the intention, especially as we go beyond this financial plan into the next one, which we'll look forward to sharing with you in the not too distant future, but we do have a very clear way forward. We don't see any, imperial imperial material impact from COVID nor indeed from the Russia Ukraine conflict. We do have some we we do have an affiliate company there where we've basically wound up most of what we do. And and, you know, it's it's not a big part of our business at all, so it's not not having a material effect. We are very confident about the the future of the company. It it all fits very much to plan, and I'm sure you have lots of questions.

25:20 So this ends the presentation, and we can go on to the next stage. Thank you very much. That's great, Stefan, Alex, Sunny. Thank you very much indeed for updating investors this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please

25:31 do continue to submit your questions using the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. But just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted already, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with copy of the slides and the published Q and A can be accessed via your Investor Meet company dashboard. Guys, I will bring back up your cameras because I know you're quite keen, but also I'm mindful of bandwidth. So if I do see any corrections there, I will address that. But hopefully, we get you all on screen. Sunny, as you can see on the right hand side of your screen, you've received quite a few questions from investors today. So if I may just hand back to you to read out the questions and give a response where it's appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

26:10 Thank you. Stefan, question from David c. How recession proof is YOUGOV?

26:18 Well, it's hard to tell until we see the nature of a recession, of course, because, you know, which parts of the industry parts of the of the markets of our markets does it hit. But I feel that the the knocks we've received from, obviously, COVID and also earlier suggests that we're pretty resilient. People need information when things are bad, and they need information when things are good. So, undoubtedly, when we're in a growth phase when the market's in a growth phase, that's better better for for us. But I think we've demonstrated that we're pretty consistent even as there are changes in the economy. Increasingly, of course, we are having multiyear contracts.

27:06 We are creating

27:10 data flows that are being integrated in people's way of working. And, of course, the value of trackers, which is the biggest increase, whether that's a data products trackers, the productized trackers, or whether it's the custom trackers, are all designed to give continuous measurement over the changes that happen in the market. And therefore, those things, I think, are very resilient and and give us a a very strong baseline. Thanks, Stefan. Alex, how sticky are customers in the data products business? How should we think about the sec sorry. This is a question from Brandon. How should we think about the segment's performance around KPIs like client retention, dollar net retention slash expansion, LTV, CAC, time to breakeven, etcetera?

28:00 Can you say that one, Alex? Yeah. Hang on.

28:07 Let let me start with the net dollar retention rate because it also then leads it it it sort of falls off from Stefan's answer on how resilient are we are as a business. When we started trip one, not not to be too boring and take us back too far, most of the business was ad hoc by nature. Most of the custom business, we had to sell, the book of business every year. Data services, it's very fast turnaround research work. Very little of it is is contracted. And and we had a a nascent data products business, which we had huge confidence could become a significant growth driver for the business. Every year, even though we're growing, we seek to secure more of our revenue earlier through the data products business, which is about 95% of it is sold on an on at least an annual subscription basis. We we have a small part of the business, which is data slices as a way of getting people into using the data to to then move them into a subscription business.

29:07 So

29:09 to be very blunt, you could you could assume most of it a 100% of that is is a recurring revenue model. And we don't publish our renewal rates, but typically averages high seventies to to low eighties in terms of renewal rates. And so that's why we we continue to the point to you. The more we can build sales momentum in the data products business, the more we'll have the operational leverage and sort of benefit and also this the the resilience of that business model helping the group sort of manage any any knocks and close that we we we may face. The custom business has been, to make the point, significant driver to margin, focusing on tracking work where we can get clients to contract with us for a while.

29:56 Within the industry, it's typical if you do a large tracking project to have up to three years of of of that being contracted by the client. About a third of our business now is a recurring has a recurring nature to it in custom, and we wanna drive that as as much as possible. The reason we wanna drive that is we we can capture margin through using panel and using technology. But most importantly, we can standardize that research flow so that we can do that very easily for clients. Yeah. And clients spend a significant part of the research budget on on custom trackers. We see a high alignment with that in the data products business, which has that ultra recurring profile. Data services is is will never be a subscription model. We we do sell credit banks to clients, but it's done draw down on a on a per usage basis.

30:48 Think of it. It's it's it's essentially it is a service. Clients come to us when they need questions running. We try to run that as efficiently as possible. Really, what we wanna have, the data services part being highly aligned to custom trackers and to data products so the clients are actually using them in conjunction is is where we'd like that to be so that it becomes part of an overall service of to use it rather than subscription.

31:16 Thank you. Alex, another question from Brandon. I'll maybe take this, and the guys can can jump in if they if they want to add anything. You've noted that you have industry leading retention and recontact rates for your panel. How do these compare versus large peers like Denata and Teluna? Why is your panel engagement better, and what is stopping your competitors from replicating this? So so, Brandon, it's they have different business models essentially, and it starts off with very different business models. They sell sample. So a client will come to them and just requires access to that sample. Sometimes the client will have a prescripted survey. Maybe the clients use their own software, A company like ours may require sample if we don't have a particular panel in a particular area.

32:02 The business model is very different. These guys need that panelist for that one survey. They are obviously paying more attention to retention, and it's it's it's something that I think that every company in our space is looking at, obviously. However, they need to make money off that person the first time. Once that person has taken a survey, then quite frankly, if they then leave the panel, the person has done what they required that person to do. We need that person to stay. We cannot serve that person a poor experience or a bad survey. So that's why we place a great store in making sure that our surveys and our

32:38 panel team ensure that our panelists are looked after. Sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we do. We have lots of surveys going out, and sometimes there may be a question that creeps through. We take that very seriously. And because someone's sitting down and giving you their attention, the first time you mess up, they may not may not come back a second time. And we pay a lot of money for these people to join. So, essentially, the original business model of our company versus the panel companies was slightly different. And so we we need these people to stay. Why is

33:10 your why is our panel engagement better? For all the reasons that I kinda touched upon there, we've invested in that from the get go. So we've invested in making sure that people and researchers understand that our panel is the USP of our business. We have syndicated data going back, in The UK back to 2005. We actually still have panelists who've been with us since 2000 in The UK. And you can only do that by ensuring that you deliver a consistent, interesting, varied experience. There's only so many surveys people can take about dishwashing powder. And if you tell them that the survey is going to be ten minutes and it takes forty minutes, then they probably won't come back. So that's it in in the broader sense. Stefan, anything else you'd like to add? I think you're on mute.

33:50 Is you know, people have asked about this as well. We we we're also making it more and more varied. We give people a real sense of mission that they're adding to the public data that they see in the in the media and that there there's a value to what they do. We've included chat now in many places, which also increases the variety of of interactions. All of that adds to the stickiness, I think, of of being with us. And, yeah, it's as as Sunny says, the importance of it is what makes us try harder, I guess. Thanks, Steph. Alex, question for you. Resonance and Link look excellent additions. Do you see further bolt ons this year?

34:35 We are, yeah, we are always looking, yeah, at at the market, look at who who is doing what, what are our competitors doing. I wanna make the point fundamentally, our plan isn't is an organic one. We we don't assume that we make our numbers by by making acquisitions. We're not a buy and build strategy. But, clearly, where we can find bolt ons that help accelerate either move into a new sector, getting us to new geography, or a piece of technology really helps us, we will, obviously, also look to bring that in the group. I just make I'll just make a point. We continue to monitor monitoring opportunities, and it is likely that we'll see future acquisitions. Thank you. So I have another question regarding panel from David. What is your vision for the size of the panel? Is current size about right or looking to significantly scale it?

35:29 So for the business that we've that has been our core, which is with data products and then, you know, surveys on top of that, there is an optimal size, and we're sort of at the optimal size. I mean, we always want the the American panel to be bigger because there's always more work coming, and we're not ahead of the curve there. We're we're just just struggling to keep up. But, basically, we have decent sized panels for the work that we are used to doing. What is changing now, especially as we start to invest in self-service, but also as we look at activation, which requires larger numbers, we we are looking to create a second tier of of panel that is not paid, that is entirely taking part with us through chat and through enjoying what they're doing, so that we can use that as a test bed for activation and indeed, be it's part of an act a new activation product.

36:34 It's part of new activation products that we're building for the future. We are looking to expand panel significantly in in this at this new level. We are not looking to expand traditional panel in the same way. That moves with the size of the business. And as I say, of course, you'll consider we we consider to we we continue to want that to grow, but it that isn't looking for any step change in growth. But we are looking for something significantly different in the in this new tier of of sort of YOUGOV participation. Thank you, Stefan. Alex, how would you describe the key aspects of YOUGOV's moat? And maybe Stefan may may add something there as well.

37:23 I I think a panel is a big thing. The amount of time and energy that goes into how YOUGOV runs a panel, we we just don't see anybody else in the marketplace doing that. We have always been pretty clear. It's the key driver for for how we're able to do the types of things that we're able to do. The data products that we are able to build through that panel are much bigger and much deeper and more granular than any of the competitor sets. Being able to recontact panelists also gives you something that's very powerful, whether it's being able to refine the science of your political polling by being able to go back and and and calibrate models, through to if, if if we're trying to see something in brand index, actually being able to go and survey the people that have responded in a particular way so you can get the what what's behind, that trend.

38:20 That gives clients, a significant research capability, which helps them drive their business better. I think one of the historic barriers to entry of really going for large contracts in this industry has been geographic scale. And so I I'd say I think that this is more how do not how do we defend ourselves, but but ultimately, do we start competing with the very giants of of the industry. Having offices in lots of countries all over the world has been how Unilever has has kept spending so much money with with and and GFKs. That geographic capability and having to have local presence is beginning to go away. And so, yeah, our investment in panel and clients being much more comfortable, not having, local level servicing has meant, we've been able to chip away at the the big guys' notes, so to speak.

39:14 And now you'll see that in some of the numbers that we're going through in our revenue growth rates. We're starting to be able to have increasingly large relationships and and and and pitch for larger work with big multinationals because of that. Then having those clients secured secured through long term deals, through product subscriptions, that creates a that in itself creates a a more defensible business for ourselves to be able to obviously fend off anyone who's who's coming into the market. So Okay. Thank you, Alex. Stefan, anything to add or okay with that? No. Thank you. I'll move on to the next question. We otherwise, we will be short of time. Question from David c.

40:00 Stefan, is YOUGOV a beneficiary of the recent privacy changes made by Apple? If so, how should we think about quantifying the potential benefits of this? And I and I and I hinted or I began to say something about that previously that that it it's definitely true that the privacy rules and the expectations of being able to own your own data or I don't suppose anybody really thinks about it in quite those terms, but they will increasingly in the future, does differentiate us from others in that we can do more without you know, this goes back to the panel again, and I've talked about the kind of data that we can get from from those from those systems.

40:47 And everybody wants to get closer to consumers. Consumers. They wanna get closer to their market. They wanna understand change faster, and they have greater difficulty in doing that as they as the dig their ability to to attract people using old methodologies gets reduced. And that's where we, of course, do have an advantage, and it adds to what Alex was saying just now now about the moat, about the defense that we have to challenge, is that nobody else has who knows? Maybe they're right, but nobody else has sought to repeat what we've done and and and or to copy that. We've had two, for example, two imitators that that imitate different parts of our business.

41:38 Neither of them have panel. And so the quality of what they can do is much lower. Those who do have panel don't create, data products out of it, of any, that that are impressive. And so it it it feels to me as if the rest of the industry isn't rising to the challenge of these of the new technology, of the new expectations of technology. And yeah. And and that is where there is upside for us in the future. We can do things, and we can create new products quicker because of the way that we are structured and because of our zero party relationship with our panelists, which is a a close relationship, which is a productive and creative relationship in many cases.

42:24 Thank you, Stefan. Question from Andy. Great results and good to see all divisions growing. Which geographies and sectors are growing the fastest, and are there new geographies or sectors you would like to target? Andy, I'll I'll take that question, give the guys a little bit of a break. So very, happy to report, that The US is growing the fastest. That has been consistent with our strategy and our investments over the years. It's also where, obviously, as I as I said, where the large contracts sit. So when clients buy in The US, they tend to buy across, multiple geographies and across multiple divisions. And so we're we're we're pleased that that is obviously growing, fastest, and we've seen great uptake of our services, particularly in the tech sector in The US. So pleasing to see that continue.

43:09 In terms of new new geographies, we built out the panel significantly, added 15 geographies over the course of the last eighteen months, and that was really driven primarily by client demand, partly in The US and partly large clients in Mainland Europe. So our coverage is pretty extensive now. If there are markets where we lack panel, we will assess that on a case by case basis. However, we also have to balance the fact that going into a market and building a panel is a significant investment, and we feel confident we are covering the majority of the major geographies in which our clients ask for our data products. So no geographies necessarily to target. However, there may be a a significant opportunity that we may look at. In terms of sectors, broadly, our our, offer, as I said, has resonated very well with with technology. We're expecting a strong, comeback from sports and, sectors that were impacted particularly by the pandemic.

44:05 We also believe that our offer and our data, resonates strongly, with public sector, and there are potentially further inroads we could potentially make into into health aspects. So not talking about pharma in terms of the health sector, but more about, health for the public sector. So we we have a broad representation across the major sectors in which we wish to operate. No significant plans to add further headcount to strengthen a particular sector at this moment in time. So I am just gonna scroll up, guys. There's some earlier questions. And if I go to question about talent, Stefan, if if if you would like to take this one. With the direction of travel, it sounds like you will be competing for in demand talent. How has the last couple of years impacted staff retention, and how do you compare to the wider industry in staff churn and retention strategies?

44:58 Yeah. So, of course, we've been affected by the same forces as everybody else. And we had the the the churn that happened particularly in the six months ago or so. I can't remember what the exact timing of it, but it hit everybody and it hit us as well. And that's a lot of that's natural. It was it was it was it a follow from from from years of not so much change in as much as we have figures, and we only have them in The UK that we're that we're confident about. We have actually done better in our industry compared to others in our industry. And so, yeah, we feel pleased about that. We don't feel pleased that there's been churned, but we feel pleased that we seem to be doing better than others, certainly not doing any worse. The area, of course, of difficulty, really, is in the technology and data science areas.

45:57 We were, recruiting top technologists, all over the world, you know, from places like Peru, previously, and most of the big users of technology talent weren't were not doing that, and that gave us an advantage. Now they are. Now everybody's recruiting everywhere, and that is a pressure. Fortunately, we have a a a a strong core of peoples that that have the institutional knowledge that are very solid YOUGOV, and that that means, I think, good things for us. People believe in the mission. That's our strength in recruiting. It's not like you know, we're obviously not gonna compete in terms of remuneration with the likes of Google and Facebook and and Amazon and all those people, but we can compete on something that is significant on the section of our talent on the talent base we wanna recruit, which is that you're doing something with us that is inherently a social a social value. It we don't add on.

47:10 You know, we talked about ESG earlier on. We don't add on ESG as something that we're supposed to do because that's what companies are supposed to do. The social mission of what we do, what what we contribute, what we do in terms of giving people a voice, in terms of making sure that communications work and that people influence the world they're in, these are massively important things in in in in our mission. It's it's what defines us, and it does mean that we have, I think, more stickiness than perhaps others in our industry. Thanks, Stefan. Alex, question for you. I know we've talked around this quite a bit, but a question from Brandon. Your subscription business, data products, has an impressive track record of strong, consistent growth.

47:56 Looking back over the past few years, what has been driving the majority of growth? How should investors think about the mix of growth between new subscribers, pricing, and existing subscriber penetration slash expansion? Let me take one step back and just talk generally about the how people buy research. Typically, a new client starts small with you in our data services business. They could be $912,100 pound initial project that will run with you, and then you establish credibility and and then you build from there. That's that's one of the reasons why it has been historically very difficult to compete against the very large clients is there is quite a lot of incumbency effect within the the organization.

48:44 So data products is no different. A client will try you in one geography. Typically, you're you're in order to grow an existing client, we sell on an enterprise basis, not sort of sort of proceed basis for now. Yeah. The the really, the only way you you expand that relationship is they take other products or they subscribe in more countries. So the growth has been coming initially, it was coming from from new clients, just new logos in in lots of places. Now we're starting to see, growth is expanding within the obviously, still getting new new logos coming in, being able to expand the existing client base that has really, increased dramatically in the last couple of years as we've increased the panels. So more data being collected in US and UK, which are the two biggest market research markets, has meant we can, offer more, more data in particular sectors.

49:41 Having the same data being collected consistently in lots of countries, has been a driver for renewal, period. Clients taking more countries. Yesterday, we launched, a new global, profiles product, which is a a standardized version of profiles. Profiles is available in lots of countries, but this is a slice of that data, which is is consistent in 43 markets. That will mean we we will have new clients coming in, subscribing to more countries at at the beginning, but also being able to expand the client base with with more countries is particularly particularly important. Going back to the the question on which countries and and which geographies are important, actually having multinational capability for your large multinationals we already have a relationship with is a is a significant driver for for growth. So you'll see The US has been our our biggest growth geography, but some of that is because we're selling multi country subscriptions into those US clients.

50:41 Thank you, Alex. Question from Brandon. Brandon, I think Alex has answered the first part, which is in terms of the cross selling opportunity for YOUGOV. Second part of the question is, how should we think about current penetration amongst clients and progress since the reorganization? Very quickly, we still have headroom. We are relatively small compared to the giants in our industry. Some of our larger clients, we are obviously getting into significant, spends with their market research department. However, we are not the, we do not have all of the market research budget with with more than a potentially handful of large international clients. So there's still lots of opportunity, particularly in The US, particularly with those West Coast clients.

51:29 We are getting better, and we are becoming stickier. That's the number one thing, making sure that renewal happens. And then over time, expanding out our connected proposition across their research budget, and they become comfortable and understand the ways in which they could leverage our data products. Alex, one more question regarding pricing escalators from Brandon. Do subscription contracts have any embedded pricing escalators to adjust for inflation? If not, do you typically raise prices to fair, or do you intend to adjust prices to compensate for inflation? Yeah. Being frank, we've had so over the last few years, growth has really come through from from new logos and selling new subscriptions. As our Salesforce, it gets embedded and becoming more much more sophisticated around our pricing strategy is is is something that that is coming.

52:22 Sometimes, we don't have automatic price escalators. One of the things that we do watch out for is often clients ask us for discounts if they want that split for multi years. And so in that, we're we're we're we're actively pushing against that so that we we obviously don't have a as the price that's an impact that's coming through from that. We've we've been doing quite a lot of work in the last year. This is a it's a balance between automatically lifting prices, but also having a pricing strategy that allows you to get through a contract and procurement very quickly. We're we're not automatically increasing prices because of inflation, but we are looking at how do we maximize the the number of countries we can be selling into with with pricing strategies.

53:10 Thank you, Alex. I think this is the final question, and then I'll pass over to Stefan for final remarks. I'll take this question. It's a question from David. Is the size of your sales force a key driver of revenue growth, and what does a typical day for a member of your sales force look like? So I'll start with the first first question. As Alex said, actually, of the key drivers is having our products available across multiple geographies, particularly with regards to The US. It's one of the reasons why we expanded the, the panel, significantly, and then it's also having the relevant questions for that particular sector. We've invested in sec sectoral expertise, and we now cover the majority of our sectors that our clients are interested in. There is an equation between the number of people who are going out and speaking to clients, but it's not the key driver of our revenue growth. In terms of this typical day, different types of salespeople. So we have, the new business team, and we have the account management team.

54:04 New businesses, probably the area you are you are asking. Those guys, so we have SDRs, which are the inside sales guys. These are the guys that are following up on the leads. So we have a a marketing team. They pass over any incoming inquiries. That goes to the SDRs. They prequalify those, and they then pass those over to our sales teams. And depending on the request, obviously, there's many ways to to eat your cake, if you will. And so there could be something where they have to involve the client service team, something's a bit more complicated, or or or potentially it's a client requesting a meeting, and then our team will go. They'll present. They may take case studies, particularly relevant for the sector, and then, so on and so forth. Obviously, you can imagine there's whole shades of gray on that day, but that's it in a in a in a in a broader sense.

54:53 Stefan, I'm going to ask you for closing comments, please. Thank you very much, Sunny. Thanks for Alex's help on this, and thank you all for being here. I hope that you, see a company that is on a mission, that has a strategy and a plan. We are very driven, and we think we have a long way to go to fulfill the the full value of what we've already created, let alone what we're creating along the way. So this is a a good period for us, and we look forward to seeing you again and and and and, hopefully, I noticed about half the people on this call are investors, and I hope that you get good value from us in the next few years as we as we become fulfill our ambition of becoming as we have sometimes said before, the Bloomberg of market research, that remains our long term our long term play, our long term mission, and good to have you on board for that. Thank you. That's great, Stefan, Sunny, Alex.

56:01 Thank you very much indeed for updating investors this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do not close this session as we will now automatically redirect you. In order that you can provide your feedback so the management team can really better understand your views and expectations. This only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of YOUGOV PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That concludes today's session. So may I wish you all a very good afternoon?