Gattaca (LSE:GATC) — Financial results for the year ended 31 July 2025

0:02 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the GATTACA PLC 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 we'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet company platform. Before we begin, we would just like to submit the following poll. And if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I would now like to hand you over to CEO, Matthew Ragg. Matthew, good morning, sir. Yeah. Good morning. Hope you're well. You're well. And good morning, everybody. Thanks for your time today. We'll take you through the a bit of an introduction to to the organization for those that don't know us. I know you've heard the performance as well in the last financial year.

0:58 Just what by way of introduction, so Matthew Ragg, CEO of GATTACA. I've been here a while, twenty four years come January, starting as a trainee, working my my way up as CEO role. Oliver and I succeeded into our positions three years ago, three and a half years ago, and I've been leading the transformation of the business since then. During that time, there's yeah. I've worked in every job fee and been part of the management board for for over ten years as well. So know the business well, know the sectors very, very well, and know the markets, what we're doing. Oliver has been with us seven years now, so he succeeded CFO at the same time. And I'll let him give a little bit more introduction to himself when we we go on to the financial part later rather than me doing that on his behalf.

1:46 Quick introduction to us that don't know us, GATCA PLC. So history very much in the staffing market. We've got extremely strong heritage in the engineering and technology space. If you look at some of the key stats around us, we're just under 400,000,000 turnover, just under 400 people within the organization. A market cap today, which has changed a little bit, we're around about $27,000,000 Probably important to point out that $15,700,000 of cash in the bank, about 55%, 57% of our market cap in cash. And a dividend of 3P, which is an average of 50% of PAT across the cycle. So we see a bit of a view, a headline of what we're about. How we're set up as an organization.

2:39 We've recently just pulled together all of our historic staffing brands into the powerhouse, is MatchTech. MatchTech's a very, very famous staffing company, certainly within The UK market. We've equally, as of a few months ago, acquired Infosec People, which is a specialist within cybersecurity and is building response teams both to prevent and resolve cyber attack issues, an area that we feel is going to be very much in demand and very important to our customer base. There are staffing organizations. And within that, we offer three major areas of outsourcing where we are designing, building, and running all of the recruitment activities for organizations and running on their behalf.

3:25 We have solve, which is things like recruit, train, deploy, where we are developing talent ready for the future. So taking people who are currently underemployed and giving them extra training, enable them to access more specialist roles, and then recruit, which is on a permanent basis, contract places, and exec search. And as an organization, about 75% of what we do is in the contracting space, providing specialist labor for specific time frames, normally an average of over nine months assignments for those people. And then on the government side, again, looking at experienced qualified personnel rather than early careers individuals. In the recruitment market, we do that across five major sectors. Our largest is infrastructure, so major water, highways, rail programs, big capital investment programs, long project cycles needing different skill sets across different phases of that design build, maintenance and decommissioning.

4:27 The energy market is one we have significantly invested in over the last three years, predominantly around renewables, nuclear and a major upgrade with power and transmission network within U. K. Market. We hold a very strong position in the defense marketplace. It's one of our biggest sectors and major or prime supplier to a huge number of CMODs, major organizations or supply chain. We then have technology supporting digitally orientated businesses across a range of different marketplaces. And then finally, mobility, which is aerospace, automotive and maritime. And within that, the skill sets that we supply, invariably, they have a link back to STEM.

5:12 But fundamentally, they're engineering and technology organizations and then everything they may need from their designing and building the product through to their business support, their commercial, their procurement, their HR, or their sales functions as well. And we will do all that under the MatchTech banner with the Inversec business being the recent acquisition to purely focus on cybersecurity and response plan. Another part of the business which we've been gradually growing over the last ten years is GATTACA projects. This is an engineering and technology consultancy business. So it's not a recruitment business at all. It is delivering engineering outcomes for organizations, specifically around engineering design and project management where the companies, instead of looking to build a project themselves or borrow resource to be able to do it, they are looking to actually buy the service themselves.

6:02 Clearly, as an organization, we have great reach into sectors and a really good knowledge of where the skilled talent pool is. This was an opportunity for us ten plus years ago to build a capability which is delivering those outcomes. We run that as a separate public organization. As far as the market, we are predominantly UK focused now. We do do international business. We've got set up in Iberia and Canada, and we do a lot these days since COVID from The UK to other international locations. Within The UK, we've got a strong position. We're less than about 1% of the total staffing market, which is reportedly around about sort of $40,000,000,000 spent. But within the sectors we're focused, we're around about 5% of the market share.

6:50 There's about 52,000 employees of STEM personnel within The UK. We don't work with all of them, but we do work with a large percentage of the medium and larger organizations. So I hope that gives you a bit of a feel as to who we are and what we're about. Part of the reason to invest in us and apologies. Just my my eyesight is not what it was when I started this job a few years ago. Really, we've got an excellent reputation. The brands have been around for a very long time. We're forty one years old as an organization. We've run some major programs. We've been involved in nearly every major engineering technology program, certainly within The UK over that period of time and very, very well known in that marketplace. I think the MatchTech brand, in particular, in recruitment is famous.

7:40 The acquisition of Infosec was very much about buying a very famous organization in its very specific niche and adds to that. And really, we have a reputation of delivering, which is so important in our marketplace. Having the right team in place, having the right skills is fundamental for anyone's business success. And we're very focused on partnering. Our service offering, outsourcing it all the way down to recruitment, actually, enables us to bring customers in who just need help once, one time with a permanent hire, but then take them on an evolution journey to the point that we can end up actually running their entire recruitment function. And that gives customers a great level of expertise and capability and therefore agility for a single provider and helps them to be winner.

8:30 I think from our strategic priorities, since Oliver and I took over three years ago, we've been really, really clear on focus. The business needed to improve, and we had a really clear focus around what we need to do on that. And that has really paid dividends. The market in which we serve is not a particularly buoyant market at the same time. There's lots of press around staffing, hiring, lots of listed peers reporting tough conditions. I think for us, we were on a rebuild. And really, over the last three years, it's just been a continuation of what we needed to do anyway, and hence why we're in a position to be posting improving performance results. I think certainly around our investments, what we've been doing is reducing the number of geographies we focus on, reducing the number of sectors we focus on, and really being specific about what clients we want to work within those markets, and then looking to have a whole suite of services that we work with. And that obsession around the marketplace, I think, is key. We're also a people business that helps people to work with people. And over the last three years, we've been really building the culture in the organization to the state.

9:43 It's we're still even last week, we were we hit a new record level of engagement in organization. We've been winning in the water. We've got a really great business with a very good feel to it, a very engaged workforce, lots of people with a long tenure as well and pleasing over the last three years. Up to over 60 boomerangs of people who had left us in the past during some of our tougher years who have been coming back and want to be part of the exciting future. So I think from a strategic priority, absolutely clear on what we're to be doing and equally building an environment where people are motivated, engaged, well trained, well taught and working well together as a team, which we've invested a huge amount in our tech stack over the last five years to help them be even more successful, but it is also about people working really well as a team, not the technology replacing how to go about it.

10:35 And I think we've built to last. We've been around for forty one years. We've experienced some really good times. We've experienced some tough times. No business is linear. We certainly felt that. But we have also proven our robustness even in some of our more tough years coming through with still a really solid market share, good customer base. And I think we've got the investments we've been making really over the last five years of complete global tech stack overhaul, which is now really fully embedded into the organization and has enabled us to bolt on some very cool products now to help us go even faster. Really great legacy, real good clarity of who we are and what we're about puts us in a good position. Adding Slack, obviously, fiscal stability. I mentioned the cash position. We're in a position at the moment to be able to invest in growth as we grow our contract numbers, which we've been doing now over the last two years. That requires cash, which we have access to. And equally, we've been proactive in looking at bolt on acquisitions to make us go even quicker and be even better. And we're in a position to be able to do that without putting ourselves at any level of risk at all.

11:44 So a little summary on our performance. I think it's been a tough year in the market. I think despite that, it's good to see that revenue is slightly up. NFI has been slightly down. On the whole, that's down to a few very specific reasons, which Oliver can touch on later. But good to see that we are seeing contractor growth. We've seen perm stability, which we certainly haven't been impacted as much of a decline as the rest of the market seem to have faced. And we've seen that kind of improving performance. NFI per sales head is a real key metric for us. We've seen a good step forward on that over this year. We want to both maintain and add scale on heads, also maintain and continue to improve that, which is key.

12:37 I think we've seen solid growth in our infrastructure and energy sectors, of which there is much required work to be done. Equally, we've seen stronger market positions held across our other sectors as well. Defense, as I said, is one where we've got a very strong position. The lack of growth in that, it's probably one from an investor point of view, one with its shipments going gangbusters right now. There's been a lot of uncertainty whilst the government goes through a defense strategic review this year, which has created a little bit of slowdown, which we've exited the year nicely on. Equally, we had a couple of positive extensions which impacted the NFR, which means we don't have a concern about that at all.

13:25 Contract NFI, down 2% year on year, but I'd say good growth for the year. Contracting numbers have grown throughout the year and continue to grow into this year. Perm, a little bit down. But interestingly in perm, historically, we were very weighted towards the commercial skill sets of HR procurement and finance sales and digital skill sets, and that was a larger percentage of our perm capability. Over the last two years, we've been building a perm capability in energy and infrastructure in particular. So though we're flat, the shape of where that's coming from has changed, and as we're now starting to see those other markets come back a little bit and continue to mature our capability in those as well. We did see a smaller part of the business, but a more significant percentage drop in our statement of work, GATTACA projects business, purely related to the defense spending review on that one. We've actually managed to increase our client concentration during that time frame, which gives us a better platform for greater growth, but that certainly did impact that NFI number this year.

14:33 From PBT, up 12%, which is pleasing to see. And so solid cash position, that has shifted a little bit. Oliver can touch on the data, but it has shifted a little bit compared to last year, but all for controlled reasons, which is good. On the slide. Our strategy that I mentioned earlier, we've been really, really focused on this. External focus is now our biggie. When we started three years ago, it was very much about the culture and the cost rebalancing. We had a lot of things to do around our cost model, and we needed to really rebuild a positive culture in the organization. We have taken a huge amount of actions around cost rebalancing from a cost reduction point of view. That's now shifted a bit. So our major focus, external focus, is about being obsessive about those markets, obsessive about those customers, really improving what it looks and feels like to work with us as an organization and looking to grow market share in those sectors with the customers that we're targeting.

15:31 And we're really starting to see that come through at the moment. More engaged, building more loyalty both on the client also on the candidate side of things is super important. And it's a big part of why we have unified our staffing go to market so that we can really work closer with our candidates and our contracts and our clients to be more famous, to give greater service, to give greater experience via that. From a culture point of view, I obsess about this. I'm proudly obsess about this. This is super important. We have got a great tech stack. We've got great customer access, but we are a people business. And it is about how engaged, how motivated, how capable are your teams. I'm really proud to say that we're in a really good shape on that one. We've won a few awards on that now and recognized for it. And as I said, that continues to improve.

16:24 And what's been really interesting for me to see over the last eighteen months of whilst we've been continuing to improve our engagement, the overall peer group comparison engagement is dropping. We've got a real gap increase now, which is great and something that we will continue to obsess about. And we've really improved retention in the organization. A lot of that now is raising our standards. Probably most of our attrition is people early in the stage where we're trying to get them to a level of performance. But if the industry in the role is not for them, that's fine. Whereas where we were a few years ago, there's probably a lot of very capable people not being in the organization. So we've got the right type of attrition now and continue to look to get that in a good position.

17:14 Operational performance, let's say, the key part here is increased NFI per head. That's good from a productivity point of view. It's good from a shareholder point of view. It's also great from a staff point of view. The increased NFI that they can produce means increased commission for them, which means they are more successful. Their lives are better. So it's a win win win for all. And we continue to look to improve that both on their maturity, their capability, their focus, but also the tooling that we're providing them. And a lot of our improvements around AI and automation in the last couple years have been around kind of back office or customer processing. We're now starting to shift into that competitive advantage, market focus, go to market client engagement to help our consultants to win even more, which is great.

18:01 And then we've got the acquisition of Insect that we've done since the beginning of this new financial year, but that's going well. We plan to have that integrated before the end of our half year one at the end of January, and we'll update on that as we hit half year. I'd say cost rebalancing, that has now shifted. We'd managed the estates. We'd looked at huge a amount of costs that we can remove from the organization. We continue to do that. We're in a good lean position, but now it is making sure that it is rebalancing and it's investing where we need to. The investment in the enhanced go to market, the investment around the tools, the investment around headcount is all the next steps for us. As far as sector overview, I'd say infrastructure is the biggest part of our organization.

18:50 That's growing 5% this year. Defense, as I said, a slight dip back but for really known reasons. And we've exited the year strongly on that and expect to see good demand. Energy is pleasing to see the growth starting to come through. We've made good investment into that marketplace. And really, that has set up for a good number of years of future growth, energy resilience, energy security, energy provision, and the inefficiency of the actual network clearly has huge amounts, let alone all of the work that needs to happen from an infrastructure, defense, and an energy point of view across the nuclear space, there's huge amount of opportunity there. Mobility has been a tough market. I'd say that is made up of aerospace, automotive and maritime.

19:41 Sickly, those latter two have been particularly impacted. The automotive market has had some challenges, equally, say, marine aerospace. There are huge airframe orders around the world, but the supply chain is still recovering from the COVID impacts, a huge amount of pressure on that. So our position is solid, but that decline really is three or four major organizations in that sector. We've had a downturn in hiring demand. Digital tech and commercial, again, these are the more permanent biased sectors within our business. And like the whole market, has seen a slowdown, increased number of interview processes, less confidence from both candidate and client to make a move, and that has impacted that. But we've seen that bottom out, and we're we're seeing slight improvement across that.

20:40 From a labor market trends, it's not nice reading as far as the overall trends as far as I know ONS data doesn't necessarily always get the positive tag that it used to. But there is is has been a drop in demand in across the wider labor market. Unemployment is increasing. Job flow is is also decreasing. And if we take the graph on the right hand side of the the REC KPMG report, that now has been by far not the deepest downturn, but by far the longest downturn. Quite annoyingly, think that that started literally the month, so Oliver and I succeeded in the role three and a half years ago. And in part, that probably speaks to where we are as a business and why we're able to improve in this market is the reality is we were on an improvement job anyway.

21:29 And we've just been focusing on self help from the get go and making sure that we were getting better irrespective of the So though the market is subdued, we can still see there's plenty of market opportunity for us to be going for and capturing over the years ahead, even if it doesn't significantly pick up. This graph on the left hand side is on the right is kind of where's our vacancy flow. As you see, we haven't seen there's some ups and some downs, but we haven't seen a significant notice of either huge

22:00 negatives or huge positives around vacancy flow across the organization. What we have seen is better conversion of opportunity to fill, and that speaks to the increasing tenure of our workforce, increasing capability of our workforce, and a better focus on what types of business we want to be doing and what types of services we're doing. And importantly, that chart on the left hand side, those boxes at the bottom, the black and the green ones, point to the months where we saw contracted growth. So great to see that the majority of months we've seen our membership base, our contractor community increasing month on month. And that's a real key metric for us is are we keeping more people in their work, redeploying them elsewhere and adding to the contractor growth. And that now over the last sort of two years has been a good, consistent, positive growth across the organization.

22:53 And perm really, yeah, the job flow down the job number of fills, if you compare it to a number of years ago, is impacted by actually the average value of placement has been increasing significantly as we go up the value chain and work on higher skill positions, higher salary positions, which have a higher return and really speak to the specialists and the capability that we have in the market. I'll hand over to Oliver to take you through the financials. Thank you, Matthew. So if, we go forward into the financials, Matt has talked about the the the sector detail here and some of those movements year on year and the drivers behind. I think overall, that 3% decline in contract in in overall continuing NFI was was really driven by a few key reasons.

23:45 First being that in August 24 August 24, so the start of of of FY '25, we saw a noticeable decline in the utilization in our contractor base, which which really was more contractors taking their summer holidays and not and not submitting time sheets and and working for that for that sort of summer period last year. That was that was more than than those previous years coming out of COVID in 2223, and really, really was a start the year off with a with a little bit on the back foot.

24:21 We have those key account renewals that Matt talked about within the defense sector and also within GATTACA projects and that statement of work business. We have the end of a large project driving that that decrease year on year from '24 to '25. There's a large project ended in '24, and that market that GATTACA projects operates in really is very dependent on some of that, like, government defense spending and delays in decision making around around large large projects getting going has has led led to that decline year on year in GATTACA projects. Added to that, perm remains challenging, but consistent through through '25. And, certainly, as we've we've exited '25, we've seen 0.75 now of of consistent perm with with some slight growth starting to come through. So we're feeling hopeful that that that market's bottomed out, and we can we can start to see that coming back.

25:23 What we've exited 2025 with we go into early twenty six is really positively, we're seeing some momentum in positive contractor numbers, both in terms of our actual contractor base growing, which which through h two was up 3% and has continued to grow into the first few months of f y twenty six. We've also seen increases in in timesheet values as we're getting more valuable contract placements through, and that that's driving up the weekly timesheet value. So so that trajectory out gives us a we could start some confidence into the new into the new financial year. I won't dwell on this slide. It's it's what we've already covered. If we move forward to talk about underlying PBT, overall, we saw 12% growth in in group PBT from 2.9 to 3,300,000.

26:17 The decline in NFI was, offset by some good positive savings in admin costs as we've continued that focus on cost management, which we've had throughout the last the last three years and looking at all areas of the business of where can we optimize operational efficiency and and output both in with regards to our consultant and sales productivity and efficiency, but also with our back office and support function productivity, both from a people point of view and from a third party spend point of view. The decline slight decline we saw in interest income, which which has been driven by two two key factors that are affecting that for us of decline in interest rates and the the the money that we're getting on deposit and the the the reduction in the cash balance that that we saw reported.

27:14 As I look at as we look at admin costs, the biggest big savings have come from the the lower headcount base that we've had through the year both in in sales and in and in support. Within support functions, there has been a conscious effort to to increase efficiency as the business has become more tech enabled and and reduced in size to run a more efficient operational back office function. Within sales, there's been as the market's been challenging, that's there's been a lot of performance management focus. I think as we look forward into f y twenty six, we're actively trying to grow our our sales headcount through the year, and we would expect that that the there is a net investment in sales headcount through f y twenty six, and we we increase our our spend there.

28:13 Going to sort into the third party spend, we've got we've seen lower property costs, lower IT spend, lower bank charges as a result of that nonrecourse facility being being closed and lower depreciation costs offset by an increase in the bad debt provision charges that we've we've taken. Where this is a a year on year bridge, we have some net credits in the bad debt charge in f y twenty four, which which haven't been repeated in f y twenty five where we have seen a, increase our debtor balance, which naturally feeds through into just the formulaic expected loss provision and a couple of specific client client bad debts that we've taken.

29:04 But, overall, that that reduction in admin cost was the results of intentional activities around our cost base, both in the sales side but more more so in the in the support side. So we move on into the net cash bridge. Net cash went from 20.7 to 15.7 across across the year. The the first bar is there was a £2,000,000 reduction associated with the closure of our nonrecourse invoice discounting facility. So we're now only operating a traditional recourse based invoice discounting facility with HSBC. There's been no reduction in the absolute limit of that and availability of borrowing that we have. That remains

29:54 that that remains there. But that that nonrecourse facility, which had been taken out sort of in in 2020, 2021, we were was was more expensive and burdensome on an admin administrative basis. So where we where we didn't see the benefit anymore, we, we we stopped that. The impact of that is there is too many reduction in reported cash. Moving across into the, trading and operational items, obviously, the the the profits and the the non cash items there, bump it, moving it up. Through the year, we had a purchase of treasury shares for the EBT, so purchasing to into the EBT to settle potential future, upwater to staff.

30:50 We paid £1,100,000 of dividends in the period. That was last year's 2.5 p dividend, the full year dividend for last year, was all paid as a final, and this year's one p interim dividend. In addition to that, the the key movement down in in cash in the year is offsetting those increases is the movement in trade and other receivables. Two element the key element of that is the increase in in debtor balance that that we saw in the year, particularly at the year end. That that debt balance increased as we started to grow our contractor base. DSO through the year has been pretty flat. It was down half a day at forty two and a half a half days, so we're not really seeing much of a movement in in DSO, and the aging of our our debtor book remains remain remains good and very pleasing with with very little overdue.

31:46 And then aside from that, there's no other real key movements in that in that cash bridge to talk about. We retain a strong cash balance with surplus cash of 15.7, an average average balance through the through the period of 11 to 12. I will now hand back to Matt for the outlook for '26. Yeah. So so what are we expecting? We're not banking on a sudden market recovery. I think it's been a long subdued market, and we're assuming that same from a point of view that could well continue. I think when we did this update last year, we did it two days before the budget.

32:32 So this time, we're about five weeks before the budget, so we need to see what impact that has on business confidence. But we're not banking on that recovering at all. That being said, we still see there is good growth potential. We've done a lot of solid work, I think, over the last two, three years to focus on the right markets, focus on the right services, focus on the right customers and have a really great team. So we're going to be very much making sure that, that goes and gets us NFI growth rather than decline no matter what the market conditions. I think our strategy is the right one. We're obsessing about the right things, making sure that we're a really great business for the people we've already got in the organization and that we're a really good home for future staff or bolt on acquisitions.

33:20 We will look at that. We have looked at lots, and we've only applied one. We're being particularly fussy and making sure that it's something that makes us better and has a really great cultural alignment, and we'll continue to look at that. And that goes the same, frankly, for every hire into the organization is that they will make us better and have a really good cultural fit. And as I we are comfortable with the

33:46 expectation of consensus on the market, which is a will be a 20% increase in our PBT this year. And we're pleased with how we've started Q1, and we'll continue to focus on the right things to get as good a performance as we possibly can during this financial year. That concludes the presentation. So over to questions, I believe. Perfect, guys. Matthew, Oliver, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this morning. 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 team take a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted already, 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 dashboards.

34:38 Guys, as you can see there, we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation this morning. And thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. But guys, at this point, if I may just hand over to you just to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so. And if I pick up from you at the end, that would be great. Thank you. Yes. Lovely. Okay. Well, I'll take these. I'll love a Q and A. The more challenging, the better. But so we've got a question from Andrew. You mentioned infosec integration is progressing well. What's the timeline for full operational migration? And what characteristics are you targeting for future bolt on acquisitions? So I think, yeah, it is going well. I think in part, there was we did a huge amount of work upfront. The level of DD and amount of time spent with their leadership team before even having a deal concluded was extensive.

35:28 I love my business. I'm very proud of what we do, and I'm very paranoid about ever doing something which harms it. So getting the right acquisitions is key. That meant really from day one, we were well ahead of the curve, and I expect we're already on all the internal systems that team moves across to our sales tool platforms from December. And I'd expect in January that, that migration is completed and enables us then, therefore, to be taking that new capability out to our customer base effectively from the new year. We don't plan to lose the infosec brand. It's relevant. It's very pertinent. It's well known. And that will be something that we will continue to leverage and seeing that as part of match tech on the way forward. Characteristics for future ones.

36:19 Hey, I said I think I said I love my business, which I do, but culture is hugely important. So, yes, there are some sector and skill and service offering requirements, but frankly, we know what sectors we want to be, and we know what skills and services we want to do. So as long as they're in the grid of what we're focusing on, anything's possible, and we will look at all. So really, it comes down to cultural fit and all these businesses where we can really see that we can help them go quicker and that they will make us better as an organization. So it it is a people industry, so we're looking for really great individuals that we feel we can really be working with over the years to come to help them be more successful. Hope that gives you an answer for that, Andrew. Mark, the market is barely valuing the business above the net tangible assets, I agree, at the moment. If this really is a great business, as you claim, why wouldn't you be buying back shares as fast as you can at current levels? Yeah. Good question. We have done some buybacks over the last two, three years.

37:19 We've done 1,500,000 In total. Equally, we do want to be in a position, Mark, that we can be investing in our contractor growth and investing in acquisitions and investing in headcount growth. So, yes, we do have cash. We don't want to be flipping with it. Equally, we want to make sure it's building and creating the greater shareholder value. And I think it's probably fair to say that whilst we've been doing those buybacks, we've seen share price increase during a period of time and then drop back down again. So, yeah, we have done some. We're not close to doing more in the future, but we see there's a better value generation that we can create with using cash in slightly different ways.

38:07 Another one from Mark. Can you scroll back up a little Yeah. In these results, she said the board is optimistic about the prospects of the group. However, the executive management team don't seem keen to own much equity in the business while aren't the exec board willing to back the optimistic view of their own money. I love that one, Mark. Yeah. I certainly have made a couple of dips in over the last eighteen months. My shareholding isn't massive, but when I'm in a position to be able to do that, I certainly have been doing that. And, yeah, for us, I see it as a key part. We've actually really increased across the organization the percentage of our workforce as well, which has been having some shareholding too. That's, I think, is for somebody who's been here a long time, I've really seen that as part of the offering and part of the the commitment.

38:56 I think that shifted from around about sort of 17% to almost 30% of the organization also have it. So, yeah, I think it's a fair comment. And certainly, when I've had the position to, I have. I won't speak on Oliver's behalf. But, yeah, certainly take your point on board. Andy E, well done, gents. Couple of questions on nonorganic growth from your talks with potential vendors. Do you think that bolt ons to core sectors will more likely consist of teams rather than buying whole businesses? And does Infosec now give you critical mass in cybersecurity? Thanks, Andy. Yeah. I think the bolt ons really is about adding greater capability. I think we're very openly talking about growth as an organization, and that can be a hire, it can be teams and it can be businesses.

39:47 And we are being very proactive on all fronts. We're in a great position, I think, to be able to do that. Historically, as a group, our hiring methodology was reasonably one dimensional, and I'm one of the benefactors of it, of hiring a trainee who doesn't know much about the industrial sector and training them up into being a very knowledgeable consultant. That we're really good at that. We'll We're continuing to do that. But we're also being far more proactive now and have a dedicated program around hiring people with a lot of experience in the sectors that we focus on who want to be part of an organization with multi services, which has got really good momentum. And from a acquisition point of view, yeah, that is sometimes filled out acquisition of a business, but also looking at teams which either aren't part the core offering of others.

40:40 All of that is about finding the right people. So we continue to do that at pace. And does Infosec give you critical mass? It gives us a really good, strong capability. It's a really good team. It's got great case studies, good, very relevant market and customer concentration. But we're by no means maxed out there. And part of our plan certainly is to invest in the capability and grow scale of that capability over the years ahead. We see it plays really nicely to our very niche focus, solving real problems for organizations. Huge amount of what we do is with customers, either in national critical infrastructure or with a very key focus around governance and security.

41:27 And this clearly is an offering and a capability, which is going to be important to any board, any leadership as to how they protect their business. So, yeah, we see opportunity to do that. Next one is probably for me. Following the end of the nonrecourse facility, do you have any off balance sheet debt? So simple. No. No. And at the moment, we are not using the, the recourse facility that we've we've gone after. We're generally, only dipping into that occasionally at peak points during a during a quarter, but but but normally just funding, trading out of the the cash balance that we hold. There's nothing we lost on that. Yeah. Next one was from Sanjay. Balancing the areas where you'll be investing in headcount with areas for further cost savings, how should we think about the cost base for f y twenty six?

42:22 So I think, for f y twenty six, as we go in there, I think within the the people cost base, we would be expecting to invest in our sales headcount. We've got a a focus on sales headcount in those chosen sectors, looking to grow our sales headcount by somewhere between around 20 to 25 heads through the year on a on a on a net net basis as as exit with more than we took in. I think, obviously, as as as we all suffer and as we all as we all bear, we've got the natural inflationary costs on our on our people, which which we're not immune to. We've got full year impact of ENAG affecting affecting staff costs, that will also increase our our staff cost. We'll be looking we continue to look for efficiencies in in in support functions and just make sure we're we're as lean and efficient as and operationally efficient as we as we can be there.

43:23 And then as we go into the sort of the sort of overhead costs, I think we always look in at in third party spend, what we what we have, what we spend on, and what we're getting value from versus what we're not getting value from, which has led us in the in the past and continuous leaders to reassess those those products. But, broadly, I'd expect third party spend to be fairly consistent year on year. We haven't got any big ticket items like we like we addressed last year around office space where we where we had underutilized office space that we could remove or IT spend where we where we just had too many licenses on certain certain platforms we've taken out, some of those things. But but we'll continue to look at that that stuff and try and, make sure that we're funding investment through being efficient elsewhere.

44:19 Okay. Next one. Mark, what do you see behind the forecast increase to PBT if you don't see a recovery in your market conditions? Yeah. Think the market for me hasn't really shifted in the last two, three years. It's been the same, and yet we've gone from a breakeven business to where we are now, and that's about our own momentum. And we've got solid momentum at the moment, so we will continue and focus on ourselves and our customer base and being as good as we can and knowing every opportunity and see where that takes us. So yes, we do equally as a business which has a large focus on contracts. You are adding numbers throughout the year, which gives you an exit rate, which is far higher than the entry rate, and that will carry us into next year, which will create extra value anyway.

45:04 So yes, we at this time, we see no reason to have a concern around that being able to get to that consensus. And I think there's one above that. Oliver, can you just scroll it up? Sorry. Oh, yeah. How do you perceive competition from direct recruitment platforms such as LinkedIn or people like AI solutions? What are you doing to adapt to these threats or take advantage of opportunities? The technology is changing. Technological changes allow. Sorry. That's that's early for me. Yeah. I think it's a really key point. I think our market has always been one which is having new tech coming into it over decades. There are definitely some very cool platforms out there that offer different options to customers and candidates and adds complexity to it.

45:53 I think to a certain degree, we have the ability ourselves anyway to have a greater reach and find people, which a lot of these platforms enable you to identify or engage. But a lot of our customers, a lot of our candidates are also looking for that reassurance. And and there is almost a, I I I view, kind of inflection point of technology is going to make everything a lot busier. How do you actually see through that? Who do you trust? Who do you go to? Who do you know? And we've got a very famous business and very famous brand to enable that. So for us, it's about leveraging that technology as much as we possibly can. We've made big investments. We will continue to make investments in making sure our teams have great tools, which offer a great customer experience and a great competitive advantage, but also not forgetting how important humanity is and human conversations to have with someone moving a job or someone considering bringing a new member into the team. There are extra aspects to that which technology could, in theory, give the transaction, but that doesn't cover everything. So for us, it's about having the best tool people in our business with the best tech but not ignoring the fact that we are a people business that works with people and that we've got to make sure that that human part is really, really key.

47:15 Acquisitions from a set to come with risks that core teams leave as soon as lockups end and take customers with them. How have you mitigated against this? Yeah. I won't go into specific details, but you are right. It is a risk within any kind of very people centric business. That can be the case. We clearly, as I said, have spent a huge amount of time with this team prior to the deal being done to make sure it felt right for us and right for them. And I think we're all genuinely excited about where we can take this. Equally, the deal structure and the teams involved, there is a long term growth opportunity for them rather than this isn't a founder of a business looking for their retirement pot. It's a team at the beginning of their career journeys who can see that we can help them go even faster. So, it's a really fair point, and it certainly factors into the conversations that we have when we're looking at possible bolt on acquisitions.

48:18 I believe you'll be presenting at Mello London in November. Does this represent a step change to more engaged IR with individual investors? Yeah, it does, Mark. It's probably something we've considered or I've been spoken to about over the years. I think it's all about timing, I think we have had a lot of work to work on the self help and getting the business into a good place and having good structure and focus and momentum, and we're in that place now. So it is a moment where we feel we're in a better place to be taking our position out to the market. We fully appreciate that as a category or as a sector. Most of the market is not talking good news, and that has an overall impact on the entire market's interest to investors.

49:11 But we think we've got a great business. We're happy to share and talk about every aspect of it and let investors judge themselves as to whether they feel that that's an opportunity for them. So, it is a step change for us. I believe That is that was all the questions. Yeah. Absolutely, guys. If I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for being so generous of your time then addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this morning. 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. But Matthew, perhaps before now, just really looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. I If could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that would be great. Yeah. Yeah. Well, firstly, thank you for taking the time and the interest to learn a little bit about us.

50:01 Not always easy to try and explain forty years or, for me, twenty four years in one presentation. But certainly, if there's anyone who would like to know more, feel free to reach out to us. I think we know now that we've got a business which has got good focus, good structure, plenty of market growth to go at. So we don't need the market to bounce back. But, yeah, more than happy to for people to reach out directly and just thank you for showing the interest. That's great. Matthew, Oliver, thank you once again for updating investors this morning. 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 the management team can really better understand your views and expectations? This may take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'd be greatly valued by the company.

50:49 On behalf of the management team of GATTACA PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session, so good morning to you all.