Reach (LSE:RCH) — Half Year Results

0:00 Good afternoon, and welcome to the REACH PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and could be submitted at any time via the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. And I'd now like to hand you over to Piers North, CEO. Good afternoon,

0:30 sir. Thank you very much, Lily, and welcome everyone. And thank you for joining on this Wednesday afternoon if you're in The UK, for the REACH half year presentation. A quick introduction. My name is Piers North. I'm the chief executive of REACH. I took over this role in March of this year, and I'm delighted to be leading the organization and talking to to to you today. I am conscious that some of you may have seen the full presentations at half years. So So today, what I would propose is we're gonna compress down the messaging a little bit, abbreviate the slides. I will talk through kind of where we are as a business at the moment, where we see the future, our future priorities, how we've kind of the highlights of of the half years before I'll hand over to Darren for, again, a quick summary of the financials of the half year. And then, of course, we will take as many questions as we can.

1:23 So moving on. I guess, firstly, I wanna start by reminding that we have a very strong media business at REACH. I've inherited a company that is in a good position both from an audience and a financial point of view. I think sometimes the strength of our business is somewhat overlooked, but we remain a significant player in The UK media market. And that's, of course, both over our legacy print titles, but increasingly in a digital space. We reach over 70% of The UK population. And increasingly, we're obviously starting to explore opportunities beyond our shores in The US where we currently reach 10% of what is obviously a considerably larger digital population. In fact, once you take out the tech platforms in the BBC, we are leading the pack in terms of audience reach in digital from a publishing point of view. And that's obviously something not only are we very proud of, but I think it obviously speaks to the potential opportunity for further monetization going forward. We benefit from a broad brand portfolio.

2:23 This is increasingly important in the digital web as whilst it can lead to challenges across managing multiple domains, sites, and apps, it does also provide some kind of mitigation to headwinds in the marketplace from a traffic point of view. And we leverage our network, whether that be our national scale or our local relevance for our for our advertisers. And increasingly, we'll leverage our network for our consumers as well in terms of populating content. We've made good progress over the last couple of years around our data strategy. At that same time over that period, we've navigated big macro headwinds from COVID to the Ukraine war and also changes in the referral mix. But we are in a place where we are going to build on and I'll talk more about the priorities, but we're building on a solid foundation of bot both not only audience reach, but kind of data depth.

3:10 And that's always underpinned, and Darren will talk more through this from a financial point point of view. We have strong financials as as a business, and that is something that we are proud. We have market leading operating margins, and managing our costs and all of our, operating models is is critical for us as we maintain our profitability going forward. So in truth, what we have at the moment when we look at the present, we have a strong business and a business that we can build some foundations on. And the choice really in the hundred days that I've had since I've been in this role, been talking to people about how we can accelerate digital. We know at two percent digital revenue growth, you know, that is not what we're satisfied with, and we believe we can do more. The challenge for us is what are we gonna focus on on the basis that we can't do everything? What are we gonna focus on to kind of accelerate that digital growth?

3:57 So, really, what's happened in the last hundred days, I've worked with the management team here and working groups across the business to see where where should we focus, and we've narrowed it down to three important areas. So I just wanna talk through very briefly what they are. Unsurprisingly, we're starting with audiences. We wanna connect with our audiences better, and that is in both our existing audiences but new audiences as well. We're gonna focus particularly here on video. Video is already part of our business, but we need to accelerate both the output that we produce and also, obviously, the revenue that flows from that. Video is high yielding. And importantly, when we look at our off network growth along the soci amongst the social channels and also our partners such as MSN, video is critical to that. So for sure, one re one thing we're gonna concentrate on is video. Beyond that, clearly, it is making sure that we continue the growth in The US to make sure that we grow that business on a profitable basis, which it is at the moment, and that we continue to expand our footprint over there, as I said, which is currently around 10% of the of the population.

4:58 We're also gonna spend time deepening our brands. Our brands online in the chase for audience is always a risk that they become diluted. We need to make sure we can chase both the scale in terms of their sufficiencies and content, but also make sure that the brands themselves resonate in what is obviously a crowded online space. The second pillar, which is equally important, is making sure that not only do we carry on the good work that we've had building up our first party dataset for our audiences that are on our own platforms, but we need now to start thinking about how we can make that data work harder, especially in the space of AI. For our data at the moment is built very much for advertisers to interrogate, and that's always gonna be important part of what we do. But we also need to think about internally, how do we leverage our datasets for internal AI work to optimize and improve our workflows and get the most out of all the content and the audiences we create.

5:49 AI is obviously a hot topic. You'd, you know, you'd be forgiven for thinking that many investor needs to talk about AI, and that's unsurprising. It's transforming not only obviously our sector, but other sectors as well. We feel we've already lent well into that model across our editorial and our commercial. Our editorial has obviously used its proprietary, Guten, technologies to help create content, and it's important to note that our these are our tools for our journalists. They're not it's not the be all and end all. It is always a human plus machine in the way that we create our content. That is the way we add value, and that's the way we differentiate ourselves. But it is helping improve that baseline, productivity to make sure that we can focus on the stories that really matter rather than the legwork. It's also helping on things like translation. I talked about The US. We're looking to see how Mantis scribe can help on Spanish translation for the Spanish market. We create fantastic content around our sports. We need to make sure that that reaches, the biggest possible audiences.

6:48 We're also increasingly using it or seeing commercial. We've had Mantis, our proprietary AI tool, which has helped around brand safety and targeting, and we wanna do more on that. How do we build on top of that tool, take it out to more partners to monetize that technology? But importantly, I think it's also what we're making efforts to make sure that we expand AI outside of what I think people would view the traditional scope of AI in our business as a media organization, editorial and sales. There's a huge amount you can do in our technical department as we look to scale up and move quicker into some of the priority areas. We need our tech and our coding to be done quicker. It can help with everything from HR through to our data analytics. We analyze a huge amount of audience and add data every single day. At the moment, it's relatively labor intensive. It's human led. How can AI help us interrogate large data sets in a real time basis?

7:38 So across the board, AI is gonna be an increasingly focus for our business to make sure that we can get the most and drive that digital growth. The third thing I wanna talk about is diversifying revenues. We've made some steps already on ecommerce, whether that be affiliate links or indeed our own beauty box. We've launched our own marketplace, which is increasingly scaling across the board in terms of sellers on our wanting to reach our audiences. But we could do more in this and, obviously, both across those existing ecommerce channels, but increasingly, is one area that we haven't really played in, and that is what people would call subscription or reader revenues. And now is the time for us to explore that more fully. We have, as we said, a significant 70% of The UK population. But at the moment, in a way, we're a pyramid without its top. We need a place where we can take our users and have direct relationship with them, offering them both subscriptions types of content or podcasts, but also products and services beyond that. We have a huge portfolio of our business from Mirror Books to Mirror Archive.

8:40 How can we allow people to access that as well as offers and discounts from partners and and indeed our own ecommerce? So we absolutely wanna explore that more. This is obviously an increasingly well trodden path. It's important to say I do not envisage our business being a dominated digital subscriber business. The bulk of our digital revenues will always come through advertising or advertising relating activities. There is an element where we need to find a way to to have that direct relationship with consumers. That will be a feature of what we're doing. In terms of what you can see next, as I said in the half year results, we will trial this in q four on one of our bigger sites, not the biggest, but one of our biggest sites, really to get the technology up up and and running. Running. We have the infrastructure in place. It just needs we have call centers and the like. We just need to make sure that it's set up.

9:31 So we'll be trialing this over q four. This will help inform technical. It will help us inform how we do it, what what kind of products and services we need to offer ahead of a much fuller rollout in 2026. And to just to bring some of this to life, I did just wanna short, show now a very short ninety second showreel that brings some of these aspects to life. So Thank you. So I hope that show re

11:23 show reel gave you some indication of how we're changing as a business. I think the feedback we get is a lot of the work that we do around video and stuff somewhat goes unnoticed, but we are transitioning our offering to be that more video led, and you'll see more of that in the coming months and quarters. Just very briefly, I did wanna touch on diversified revenues. As you know, in our print business where we dominate in terms of circulation revenues and advertising makes up a small part of our pie, Obviously, in digital, it's the reverse where advertising dominates, but we do want to expand the the non advertising side of our business in digital. You'll see here sort of three priorities I've talked about already. Affiliates, I guess, is the bottom of the kind of another pyramid in a way. This is the the large volume for for for small percentage cuts of transactions, and it's kind of built into our day to day. A lot of our titles are writing stories about subscription offers or whatever else, and we're offering that to our readers as a as a value add. We obviously also do the beauty box. This is a product that we own entirely, very strong engagement rates and churn rate and a nice business that that complements what we do in the entertainment and beauty space. And the third one, as I've talked about, is Yimbley. Yeah. This is a business that is for growing very, very quick on an order basis. It has very excellent reviews from a customer service point of view with with which is critical, and we're scaling both the products and the suppliers that we have on that marketplace where where suppliers are seeing it's another route to transact and

12:53 trade their products. And clearly, obviously, when we come back in the four years, we'll also be talking about subscriptions as I've already said. In terms of advertising, this, as I said, is the bulk of our, digital business and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. And I did just wanna pull out four examples, which I think brings to life some of the priorities that I've already talked about and how we're gonna do, more of in the future. You we will have talked about Tesco before. They're a very important advertiser to us. Tesco in many ways represent our audience. We are mainstream Britain, high street Britain, and Tesco fit fit very, snugly into that into that corner. And we've worked a lot with them across print and digital, but, obviously, this year, the first year, we've matched our data with our own retail data and, again, driving better performance and better targeting. And we can see that as a theme. We'll see that as a theme in our industry going forward. And a lot of the agency changes are built around making sure that data matching, can continue at pace. Again, Boots, another brand that's synonymous with our kind of our our audiences.

13:54 We work with them around a pharmacist first conversation. Again, fitted perfectly well with the kind of mirror mission of taking the light off the taking the weight off the NHS. So, again, perfect alignment with that campaign. And, again, using content, but also Mantis contextual targeting drove significantly better performance than industry averages. But it's not obviously those high street brands. You think of Manchester City as a global brand. They're obviously also very local in their community. So using the Manchester Evening News to drive awareness of things like stadium tours and also their women's football matches. Again, perfect that perfect concept of marrying scale with local relevance and driving, again, better than industry performances. And we've talked about video and how that can be monetized. Delighted to say we're launching a new, football show for the new season called All Out Football. This will be a full magazine video vodcast that lives and it's on YouTube, but it's also cut and clipped

14:49 to be shared across our own network. So if there's a segment on the old firm Derby, then clearly that will be shown on the daily record. Delighted to say that that kind of stuff allows us to to secure sponsorship deals with the like of Sky Bet. So, again, across the board, I hope you can see examples how we start to bring the strategy to life and how we can use some of those priorities, whether it be video, whether it be data, or diversified revenues as well to drive that digital growth that we need. I'll hand over now to Darren just to talk about the financial highlights. Thank you, Piers. And thank you to everybody who joined the call today. We much appreciate your interest. I'm Darren Fisher. I'm the CFO here. I've been here since February 2023. So just I just want to give you a bit of a summary on the financials, bit less detail and perhaps have gone through with the results announcement, but hopefully hitting the headlines for you or the highlights for you.

15:41 Look, I would say, in summary, that we have an overall good performance in the first half of the year. We've managed our decline in revenue to 3.4%, which is a good performance in the context of us being a net declining business at the moment, particularly because our print business continues to be 75% of our overall revenue. They declined overall 4.8%, but this has been supported by two cover price increases to mitigate the circulation volume declines that we see in that part of our company.

16:13 We do continue to focus on value for our readers with promotions and offers, offers such as free bets, National Trust and also promotional offers from retailers. So we continue to make sure that the quality of the product is bringing value to our readers to make sure that we are continuing to be able to do those CPI increases as well. The print format also continues to be attractive to the advertisers, benefiting from our scale and reach. Peter spoke a little bit earlier about the digital side of advertising. We still see very good support for our print product on the print side as well. Digital revenue grew 1.8%, with momentum building in the second half year, which is pleasing to see.

16:58 Direct digital revenues was up against a strong comparator with the men's Euros last year and the build up to the Taylor Swift concert. So the direct revenue actually declined by 7%. But within our direct revenue, we have our diversified revenues, which actually grew over the 6%. So we did see some macro headwinds as well on the direct side as we've gone through the first half of the year. Indirect digital revenue grew in the period that was partly contributed to by the growth in our paid views of 6%. We delivered GBP 45,000,000 in adjusted operating profit, which is what I expect it to be, and it's a 17.5% margin, which we see has been market leading, certainly one of the strongest ones in the market.

17:43 This includes the 4.2% reduction in our cost base as we continue to be disciplined in this area. We've guided to 4% to 5%, so we're within that range for the first half of the year, and we continue to expect us to deliver that for the full year as well. Cash generated from operations remained strong at GBP 58,000,000. Cash conversion was 102%. So again, we're continuing to see a very strong cash performance for the business. Really important to us as we continue to have some quite significant uses for our cash. For example, the pension schemes, which pay GBP 32,000,000 in the first half of the year. And also, we continue to pay the dividend of GBP 14,000,000. Net debt of £26,000,000 includes a few one off cash items, just so that you're aware, one of which is the property sale, which is on the use of the cash slide we used in the presentation last week.

18:31 And also we had a tax refund from HMRC of around £5,000,000 Those two things are one off. So when you're thinking about our net debt number of 26,000,000, just be mindful that we've got those two one off transactions which came in as well. That's a really good one to do from covering the summary in terms of key highlights. So I think it's back to you, Piers. Yeah. Thank you, Darren. And I think the full details of all the financials are in the appendix of this presentation as well or online on our investor website. So just before we move to conclusions, I guess, as I close the the, half year results, I'd say we're we're obviously looking to the future. We have our focus on our three priorities. That's connecting, more deeply with our audiences, accelerating the use of tech and AI, and diversifying our revenue streams. And whilst we talk of the future, this is all, as Darren has just outlined, clearly underpinning the presence with a focus on cap on cost and cash efficiency delivering on what we have promised.

19:29 The trends that we're seeing in the market, which there may be some questions about audience behavior, platform changes, rapid adoption of AI, whatever they may be. You know, we definitely see these as opportunities to to to seize rather than necessarily challenges

19:43 to to fear. We've got strong foundations as we outlined in the business. We've got clear priorities. We now have a good strong internal vision, and we're obviously ready to move forward into the back half of the year with with speed and and focus and ambition. So with that, I just wanna thank you for joining us, on this presentation. And if there are any questions, submitted, we will, take them now. Hi, everyone. Darren, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the q and a tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a can be accessed via investor dashboard. Jo, as you can see, we received a number of questions throughout today's presentation.

20:31 And if I could just hand back to you to share the q and a with the team, and then I'll pick up from you at the end. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Let's, let's start. What has the board been doing to boost the share price, which has not moved materially over the last three years?

20:48 Do you want to take that one, Piers, given that you just you just enrolled? Would that be fair? Yeah. So look, management are clearly invested incentivized to create shareholder value. So that's what we're here for. That's what we're always aiming to do. What I would say, certainly in the period I've been here, you know, the things that we've been doing have been all around trying to create that value. Things like we have resolved the historical issues which have been in the business for a long period of time, we now have certainty around things like pension schemes and the phone hacking cases that we've had before. We've delivered in line with expectations and we continue to deliver strong profit cash performances. Along obviously, we're growing our digital revenue while managing the decline in our print business. So from a performance point of view, we've been working very hard to make sure we're continuing to drive the company in the right direction and also deal with those historic issues as well.

21:44 Also, what I would say is there has been quite a difficult market for a period of time now, even going back when we had the Ukraine war, there's a significant inflation we saw at that time on things like energy prices, which affected our print cost base, Facebook deprioritisation of news, which had a significant hit on our page views at that time, which we had to respond to and react to. And generally, I think the uncertainty in the market, has been around for some time now, macro and also geopolitical, all of those things I think are having some impact on not only our share price, but, like it more generally, certainly around the media planners. But Piers has set out his strategy today, his three the company's three priorities. That's again all about how we look forward and how we continue to look at the ways in which we believe we can drive that value.

22:39 Thanks, Darren. One, I imagine for you, Piers, with the CMA's move on Google and the changing referral dynamics, how are you future proofing distribution? Okay. Yeah. I mean, that's that's a big question, which I'll try to to answer as briefly as I can. For those of you who aren't aware, obviously, that Google have been designating by strategic market status by the CMA on a couple of areas, but particularly around search. I think that is, I guess, gonna happen in the background. It'll be interesting to see what what comes of that. I don't think we're relying on that in the short term. We need to get on and play the ball as it currently lies. The question about referrals, I think, is is is a very valid one. We kinda break our audiences down.

23:23 Clearly, we have our security strategy. That's the audience that comes direct to us, and we we we we nurture that and cherish that, and we work with that. We also have a deliberately a deliberate off network strategy point where our content lives and breathes on other platforms, notably MSN, Apple News, and the like. And we, again, we will continue to as part of our push on connecting our audiences and growing that, that is a big focus for us. But the third one, clearly, you talked to is that audience that is referred to us normally, but not exclusively by by Google. There's been a lot of discussion around what the change of AI overviews is going to do to that search market. It's a it's a long conversation, and it's a it for me, it's a lot more nuanced that, I guess, could be explained away in in in certain publications and online.

24:09 But, clearly, our our plan on referral is to make sure we have a diversified referral pop, whether that be Facebook, Google, Reddit, x, you name it, of all the platforms. So we continue to make sure we we diversify as much as possible, and we'll respond to to any changes in in the in the in the in the macro. But look, we're aware of the changes and the teams monitor it clearly. We did in our update call out of Google update. These aren't necessarily related to AI, although they may well be. We we wouldn't have that visibility. They do happen fairly regularly. And sometimes they're positive and sometimes they're negative. But at the time of writing, we felt it was prudent. But we are now through that that update that that finished a couple of weeks ago. So, you know, these are these things constantly, move and shift. Darren referred to the Facebook changes in '23.

25:00 You know, we respond accordingly. Great. Thank you. A couple here around The US. Can you tell me how big is the opportunity there? And what have you learned, and what success have you seen? Should I take that one? Look. I think we're very pleased with the way The US has gone. We've we've done it in a very prudent manner. We recognize that in an English language market, clearly, temptation, the opportunity is is very large, you know, on the basis that the the online audience is, you know, three x what it is over more than three x what it is over here. So we've progressed very diligently. We we have around 40 to 50 people out there at the moment. We run three of our brands as US versions.

25:49 The focus there is just to continue to grow the audience at the moment. We don't monetize we don't monetize a direct basis out there at the moment, but we are we're looking at that, but we probably need the audience to grow a bit more before then. What we've learned out there is a new operating model. Clearly, that team is 100% digital. They have obviously no print incumbency. So, actually, what we've been doing is learning, especially in response to events, how that team operate and and looking at the lessons that we can bring back over to The UK. The flip side, obviously, is The US can benefit, whether that be Donald Trump listing Scotland to play on his golf courses. We can look at leveraging the content synergies between the those two. Including next year. There are a couple of big events, also most notably the World Cup out in The US. So, again, it's a it's a good footprint for us to to be out there.

26:41 Brilliant. Thank you. Darren, can you give me an update on the pension deficit, please? I will move to the pension slide as well. Yeah. So the the pension deficit on an accounting basis is 26,000,000. From an actuarial point of view, the way the schemes look at it is higher, which is why we're still paying quite significant amounts of contributions to the schemes each year. We're currently paying GBP 60,000,000 a year, certainly through to the end of twenty twenty seven, at which point we expect that to decline down to £15,000,000 So those contribution schedules are all set to be able to get the schemes to the funding position that they need to be in. And at that point in time, we'll start to see that cash generation significantly improve as that winds down. So we can certainly see the end in sight. It's really important for the company, obviously, as we move toward that period, that we are starting to really understand and think what that opportunity is for us in terms of having that extra cash being generated and being available to the business to do things like investment and so forth.

27:51 Thanks. And that brings me quite neatly on REACH has has usually been cash generative business, but recently, the pension legacy issues have outweighed the cash generated. When will peak debt peak? And what is the longer term profile for cash generation? Yes. So cash should peak in 2028. So in terms of net debt, I should say, it will peak in 2028. But we will continue to look to run the business in a way where we can continue to maintain our profits and continue to generate the types of cash that you sort of see in the numbers today as you all have seen if you look back two or three years, the sorts of numbers that we've been producing. So cash generation is something we're highly focused on. It's very important to us, and it is something which we'll continue to focus on.

28:48 Thank you. Piers, video is central to the to our strategy. Mhmm. Could you give some idea of where we are today on that and where where you're looking to get to in twelve, eighteen months? Yeah. So we need to both increase the proportion of the revenue we make from video, but also the proportion of effort that we do in terms of generating some of our editorial content. And we need to find ways to obviously do that within the existing cost envelope. But clearly, it needs to become more central to what we do. That's gonna have to make changes to processes, technology. There are a couple of things that benefit us in this space. Obviously, AI massively helps in terms of editing. What maybe was a much more of a labor intensive stroke costly model a few years ago, the ability to to quickly and efficiently crop and edit video and caption, re reprofile vertical to horizontal or change aspect ratios, all of that kind of stuff has become a lot easier. So, yeah, we're gonna it's gonna move from part of what we do. It's not gonna dominate what we do. We're still you know, text is still a very efficient and widely consumed media, so it's not like text is gonna stop. It's it's that mixed economy a bit like the subscriptions model. But we definitely need to move from you know, if it's circa 10% of what we do now, it needs to move a little bit north of certainly north of that to be more a sizable minority rather than a very small minority.

30:14 Thanks. That makes sense. And bringing us on to another kind of big topic, AI adoption. Is there a concern as we increase that, you'll you'll impact editorial integrity or or more simply kind of what safeguards are in place to ensure that that is maintained. Well, clearly, is, you know, that is a that is something we absolutely focus on and want to avoid. Right? I mean, we we do not see our our point being a story tell storytellers connecting audiences in real world authenticity in our communities is dependent us on making sure that we balance the kind of human plus machine element of the future. You know, all of our content is designed to be seen and published, that includes Spanish language. That will not go out without being seen by someone, by a by a person, by a human.

31:03 So, look, integrity and trust is what we we trade off. It's what we trade off really with our local whether that be the Liverpool Echo in Liverpool. But importantly, it's also what we trade off with our advertisers. Our advertisers, know, that I've mentioned seek that authenticity and that trust. You know? And it's also gonna be differentiated. The market is already becoming flooded with pure almost some of it, it's highly fictional content, video content. That is not a space we want to be because ultimately, we have we have that is not our raison d'etre. It's not we talk we've got an internal mission about being pet where people live, and that's both their geographical footprint, but it's also their passions. It's the communities that we serve and that we write about. So, you know, integrity and trust is central to what we do, you know, and and that's not something we want to lose at all.

31:53 Brilliant. Thanks. There's some concern in The UK around UK market demand. Where do you see The UK advertising demand currently? And any other further details in the outlook here would be really helpful. So I think at the moment, we see that there's there's lots of the The UK ad market is a little bit hard to pin at the moment, but I think our general view is it's fairly in line with where we'd expect it to be come sort of July. We didn't have a big event. We had obviously the women's euros, but that's not quite as big commercially as men's euros. But nevertheless, around the women's euros, certainly, when there was success for the lionesses, you know, we saw the the the demand come in. The hot weather obviously helped in terms of some of you know, we're obviously very strong in food retail. So that that early summer, obviously, it's a bit bit different now, but the early summer certainly helped. So I think we would our general view on the current outlook is roughly where we'd expect it to be. In terms of looking forward, it's hard to get a huge amount of visibility into q four.

32:54 But at the moment, we don't we don't see, I would say, neither champagne popping nor sort of frustration and banging fists. I think it's somewhere in the middle. Brilliant. Thank you. Can you give us some indication around the sort of appetite for M and A? And specifically, did we take a look at National World? Darren, do you want to take that one? Yes. So M and A is on our capital allocation priorities. It's there because I think we need to acknowledge the fact that we will keep an eye on the market. That doesn't mean we're out in the market now actively doing anything because we're not. But obviously, we will always be alive to those sorts of opportunities that may be there that can accrete value for the company.

33:43 Obviously, as we move toward that '28, as I said before, particularly just from a cash point of view, that also would help if we were looking to do something at that point in time. National World, we weren't looking at that at the time that it was taken off the market. Thank you. And a technical one here, Darren, do you plan to hedge your retirement obligations exposure to interest rates? So all of the schemes are quite mature. They have all got to a point where they are de risking because they want to get to a point where they can safely achieve their fully funding ambitions and then go in ultimately to a buy in, buy out and wind up. So they all hedged against, to a great extent, the risk that they have.

34:45 Here's one for you. You've been with the business for ten years. What do you think and you've just done your first roadshow. What do you think is misunderstood by the market about this business? How long you got? That's a good question. I think people underestimate the kind of resilience that we have as a business, the kind of core foundations of of what we do. I think there's probably still a perception that we're a print business, which obviously from a revenue perspective, we are. But from an operational point of view, it's very different. So I think it's a kind of reputation thing more than anything else. And, look, I've been working when I was chief revenue officer. We would be engaged with clients all the time and seeing the transition from a from a skeptical client and advertiser who didn't really necessarily know who we are or what we did to them being able to prove that we can deliver results from. Obviously, that is something that that experience is something that I want to bring to to the role of CEO. So, you know, that kind of resilience and underlying strength, I think, is probably something that is slightly misunderstood.

35:47 And where do you want the business to be on a three to five year view? Well, clearly, the objective has to be getting this business back to top line growth. Alright? And that is why, you know, whilst the focus, the the talk, and the priorities is around accelerating digital, best you know, print is gonna play a part in that, but the best thing we can do for print is to accelerate that digital growth. And at at circa 2%, you know, that's that's it it needs to be faster. So, you know, my hope is that by the time you get to that three to five year period, you've got digital growth that gets you back into top line growth. And as Darren has outlined, in 2028, 2029, it's a very different point of view from some of the obligations that we have on our cash. So, you know, that that is why, I guess, the, you know, the the sort of summit upland view, the ambition that I wanna get to.

36:34 Brilliant. Thank you. And before we move to any closing comments, are there any further questions you would like to come through? If not, we'll hand over to closing remarks, please, Piers. Yeah. Look, know I don't wanna add too much to what I've already said, but just again, you for joining us today and thank you for the for the questions that came through. I hope you've got a sense of kind of where we are currently as a business, but also the priorities going forward. Clearly now, as we go into sort of the the second half of the year and into q four, the the key is to execute and start to build on that momentum. And I look forward to updating you in the March full years on some of the progress that we've made.

37:23 Pierce, Darren, thanks for updating investors today. Now please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This may only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of REACH PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.