Reach H2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
March 4, 2025

There are 8 speakers on the call.

Operator

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us here today for the REACH PLC twenty twenty four full year results presentation. It's good to see so many of you here face to face and welcome those joining us on the webcast. I'm joined by our CFO, Darren Fisher, who will as usual take you through the financials, and then I'll give an overview of the drivers of our good performance in the year. We'll both answer any questions you have at the end, and I'll assume that you've already read our disclaimer. When we spoke back in July, we reflected on how our solid set of results demonstrated that Reach was operationally and strategically building an ever growing understanding of its audiences.

Operator

We explained that we have a strong commercial relationship with advertising partners and a committed focus on efficiency, and that we were confident not only for the six months ahead, but for the path we had set the business up underpinned by the customer value strategy. The full year results we're presenting today justify this confidence, and I'm pleased to be able to say that our delivery in 2024 was ahead of market expectations. Now the year was not without its challenges, namely an unfriendly macro environment and the continued dominance of the platforms. But the operational plans we put in place created value and continue their transition to more resilient digital business. Our strategy is all about attracting a large audience who we can get to know, who we can tailor our content to and who we can target higher value advertising to.

Operator

To do this takes expertise, a theme that I touched on at the half year results, but it is worth repeating. Expertise in creating engaging content and optimizing our digital and print assets and in managing our costs, as well as building knowledge of our audience to effectively marry their content preferences with advertisers who have products that will appeal. It has not only helped us deliver the results and highlights you see here in the table, but also a U. S. Expansion that has grown significantly.

Operator

A central content hub that in a short time has more than doubled the average page views of its team members and the studio that works with the titles to provide high quality multi platform content and has grown total social video views by 12%. It has been a real year of progress, progress that has seen digital return to growth. Progress as our data led revenues, which are more resilient and higher yielding performed robustly And encouragingly, our growth levels in the final quarter were helped by a return to page view growth, up 6% in Q4, as we use the data to serve audiences with articles that they wish to read. We saw a 19% yield growth and data driven revenues growing to account for 45% of overall digital revenue. As expected, print continues to be structurally challenged, but we continue to see outperformance against the volume decline in circulation and advertising.

Operator

Performance has also benefited from the difficult decisions we took in 2023 on costs, a decision we planned and implemented early, which enabled to significantly improve margin of 19%. This approach allowed the business to become accustomed to the new operating model before the start of 2024. Finally, an operating profit of million, up 6% versus last year is significant, not only in it being ahead of expectations, but also because it helps us sustain our commitment to an ad funded free to access news model. Because many households in The United Kingdom and families are simply not in a position to pay or subscribe to news. Our titles and our journalists are the windows to the world, their guide in navigating the misinformation and untruths on social media, and most importantly, their voice to those in power.

Operator

News is not and never should be a luxury. And I'll now pass over to Darren for the financials.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Jim. Good morning and thank you all for joining us. I'm going to take you through the financial results for 2024 and then share my thoughts on 2025. To summarize, this has been a good year. And this is in spite of the uncertain macro climate.

Speaker 1

We have delivered strong financial performance, returned our digital business to growth, improved profitability and managed cash effectively. Our experienced operational teams have continued to deliver our customer value strategy and have managed to deliver solid circulation and advertising performance without losing any focus on cost and cost management. Let's take a look at the full year highlights. I'll talk more about these numbers over the next few slides, but I'd like to highlight a few of the key operating metrics by way of a summary. As a sign of our strong digital performance, 45% of digital revenue is now data driven, up from 43% last year.

Speaker 1

Operating margin increased to 19% from 17% in 2024, underpinned by our ongoing track record of managing our costs. Cash generation remains strong with cash conversion of 105%. And recognizing the importance of dividends to our shareholders, we have maintained a total dividend of 7.34p per share. Before I present the financial results, let me remind everyone that in 2024, we moved to reporting on the standard calendar basis from previously reporting our print business on a April fiscal basis. This means that there is an additional week in 2023 comparative period.

Speaker 1

For reference, I've included a table summarizing reported and like for like variances, which can be found in the appendix on page 29. But please note that throughout this presentation, I'll refer to like for like percentage movements unless otherwise stated. The overall revenue decline was $30,000,000 across the period or 4.2%. Digital returned to growth with revenues of million, an increase of million or 2.3%. Print, which remains the main driver of the overall revenue performance declined million, which is 6%.

Speaker 1

We've continued to carefully manage our cost base and adjusted operating profit for the period was $102,000,000 6 million dollars ahead of last year. Adjusted operating cash flow improved by $15,000,000 to $107,000,000 And as I mentioned before, our cash conversion remains strong of 105%, albeit some working capital inflows will unwind during 2025. We ended the period with a $40,000,000 net debt balance, which is after paying $59,000,000 of pension contributions and $23,000,000 in dividends. Now turning to revenue. Digital revenue grew 2%.

Speaker 1

This included a strong fourth quarter supported by the success of our more seasonal activities, such as the Okay, Beauty Box Advent Calendar and affiliates over the Black Friday trading period. Print revenue comprised of circulation, print advertising and other print. Circulation declined by $14,000,000 or 3% to just over $300,000,000 As a reminder, we still sell on average over 600,000 newspapers a day. I've said this before and it is worth repeating. We have a highly skilled and experienced circulation team that optimizes this revenue stream by carefully managing the cover price increases.

Speaker 1

They have a number of levers available to them. Promotional activity such as promotions with the National Trust, optimizing pagination and managing availability, so that cover prices can offset the majority of the 17% volume decline. Print advertising revenue, which was down 13.5%, continued to outperform volume trends, buoyed by retail and entertainment. This shows the continuing attractiveness of our readership and the print format to advertisers. Now turning to digital in more detail.

Speaker 1

This slide should be familiar to you. This is a lens we put on the business to highlight our customer value strategy. Across the whole of our digital estate, we have traded our digital assets more effectively to drive higher yields, which are up 19%. We think about digital revenue in two component parts with different characteristics. Firstly, the strategic revenues were data driven, which form our customer value strategy.

Speaker 1

These data driven revenues are much high yielding and are on average nine times more valuable versus our open market mass scale advertising. These are shown in turquoise blue and have grown 7% despite being partly affected by the industry backdrop. This growth was supported by direct advertising, where we create value through our data and the continued diversification of our revenue streams into areas such as affiliates and e commerce. As this graph shows, these revenues are more resilient and therefore sustainable. And so it's reassuring that these continue to represent a growing part of our revenues having increased from 43% to 45%.

Speaker 1

Secondly, non data driven revenues include our audience variable elements such as our mass scale open market programmatic advertising. Over the year, we have seen two material headwinds ease, which have benefited these more volume dependent revenues. Through the use of data and in house and technology, we have seen improving trends in audience and page views following the decline in referral traffic. Also after long period of decline, open market prices have stabilized. As a result, this segment declined 2%, outperforming the volume impact it is inherently more vulnerable to.

Speaker 1

The momentum at the end of the year and over the important Black Friday trading period is encouraging. Jim will talk more about the customer value strategy in his section. We've continued our disciplined approach to managing our cost base, which remains important to position the business for the long term. Operating costs reduced by 6.5%, well ahead of the 5% to 6% target we set ourselves. This reduction is the cumulative impact of the decisive and early cost initiative taken in 2023, where we were ahead of the market in making these difficult and critical decisions alongside some unwinding of newsprint inflation.

Speaker 1

Looking at the constituent parts. Labour cost reduced by 3% net of the self funding bonus reflecting the cost reduction and restructuring programs we have delivered. Headcount reduced by 13% year on year. To achieve these savings, we have transformed the way we work and allocate resources. Newsprint cost reduced by 28%.

Speaker 1

This is due to reducing volumes and the unwinding of inflation. We've negotiated more long term contracts to secure these savings into 2025. Production sales costs include marketing and direct cost of sales. Depreciation and amortization which relates to our print sites and internally generated assets is broadly along with prior year. I've already covered the revenue and operating cost movements.

Speaker 1

So the main thing to note on this slide is that we have maintained our targeted investment in growth areas. We continue to expand our footprint in The U. S, roll out a new website platform across our portfolio of websites, invested in our B2B proposition and Yimbly our new e commerce marketplace. The $35,000,000 efficiency savings delivered during the year mainly relate to labor cost actions and restructuring taken at the end of twenty twenty three and reducing our uncommitted contribution spend. Adjusted operating profit for the period of $102,000,000 is up $6,000,000 While we with the work we have done to resolve our historical pension and legal issues, we have a really clear picture of our cash allocation requirements.

Speaker 1

This slide illustrates the cash generated from our operations and where it has been utilized. Let me step you through the graph. Overall, we have seen a cash outflow of $4,000,000 over the period. Adjusted cash from operations was $126,000,000 Our largest commitment is the agreed funding arrangements with our pension schemes, which total £59,000,000 excluding payments made into escrow and secure bank accounts. As a reminder, the majority of these pension commitments are one in 2028, where we will see a material improvement in cash generation.

Speaker 1

In recognition of how important the dividend is to our shareholders, we paid $23,000,000 as we did in the previous year. We paid $9,000,000 settling historical legal issues, leaving a remaining provision of $9,000,000 restructuring outflows of €16,000,000 the majority of which relates to completion of the cost reduction measures undertaken in 2023. Capital expenditure of €12,000,000 is in line with our normal levels of spend. The main parts of other include $7,000,000 of net lease payments, $4,000,000 of vacant property costs and $4,000,000 of interest. We've completed the 2024 plan for property disposals including sites in Birmingham, Glasgow and Newcastle which have generated around $15,000,000 in sales proceeds over the period.

Speaker 1

We closed the year with cash balance of $21,000,000 and net debt of $14,000,000 with revolving credit facility drawn to 35,000,000 Cash generation was strong with 105% of our profits converting to cash, underpinned by strong working capital, which does include some timing differences, which I expect to unwind over the course of 2025. We have completed the refinancing of our banking facilities. We have in place a $145,000,000 revolving credit facility with a four year maturity to December 2028, including an option to extend by up to one year. The financial covenants are unchanged. This provides material headroom to our current debt position.

Speaker 1

Our approach to capital allocation remains consistent with previous years. We have resilient print profits, sustainable cash generation and a strong balance sheet, which remain our priorities as we continue to reduce our financial obligations. As I've already mentioned, we have pension funding obligations, which are around $60,000,000 per year in the near term. These commitments are detailed in the appendix. And we continue to recognize the importance of dividends to our shareholders.

Speaker 1

Before handing back to Jim, I'll share my thoughts on 2025. We expect the macro environment to remain uncertain. Nonetheless, we expect digital revenue to grow. I'm sure a lot of businesses are talking to you about the changes to National Insurance contributions. These place a small drag on our cost base.

Speaker 1

Before any mitigating actions, we expect total labor cost to increase by approximately 2% on annualized basis. During the year, we expect to reduce total operating costs by 4% to 5%. These will be achieved through further operational efficiencies, reduction in used print volumes as well as other general input costs such as energy. The working capital inflow of $4,000,000 we saw in the year mainly relates to timing differences, which I expect to unwind over the first half of twenty twenty five. In terms of uses of cash, capital expenditure will be similar to 2024.

Speaker 1

Ongoing pension contributions will be around $60,000,000 in line with agreed pension contribution schedules. In addition, as Communicate now harnessed in January, a one off payment of £5,000,000 will be made to the Westferry Printers' pension scheme in relation to the correction of a historical procedural issue. The remaining HLI provision of £9,000,000 is expected to be settled during 2025 and into 2026. Finally, I'm pleased with our strong performance in 2024. We did 2025 mindful of market conditions, but in good shape and are confident with the group's outlook.

Speaker 1

I'll pass back to Jim for the strategic update before we go into your questions. Thank you very much.

Operator

Thanks, Dan. Dan will join me in answering questions at the end of the presentation. I would now like to take you through some of the activities and progress we have made in the key areas that have helped contribute to this year's results. It's quite pleasing to be able to present this slide today. On the left hand side, you can see there's the this is the outlook that I presented to you at the start of 2024.

Operator

And I want to share it today, not actually to crow about it, but just to underline that we've maintained the steady course over the year. And basically, we've delivered what we said we would. This is a key list of all the achievements. And as I said at the start of the presentation, simply the operational plans that we put in place to deliver our customer value strategy are essentially highlighted here. We're growing a digital business.

Operator

We're building our own known customer base and we're monetizing that relationship for the benefit of our advertising partners and our shareholders. And all the while we're making our audiences interaction with us better and more engaging. We've continued to tackle cost and efficiency, and of course, we'll continue to focus on this area. But with one eye in the future, we are closer to 2028 when our financial obligations around pensions ease and more of a profit is available to the business. So what has supported this performance?

Operator

Now this slide isn't new. The graph illustrates the trends in yield or value per page view, as well as the trends in page views looking even further back to when we introduced our data led approach. You can clearly see the diversions between essentially data led revenues and the programmatic revenues, which demonstrate the value that our data driven approach has delivered. The turquoise bars represent the data led revenues that have driven the value over this period, emphasizing the greater value of the strategy versus our reliance on only the open market. This is another slide we've shown before, which highlights the mix of our digital revenues over the last three years.

Operator

Here you can see the breakdown of our yield measured as revenue per thousand pages with our digital revenues broke down even further. Now while of course, I want to highlight the growth of the revenues we're getting from our data driven customers, it is worth mentioning that our programmatic advertising revenues where the market determines the price has seen a stabilization in yields. This is certainly encouraging, but I'll reserve further judgment on whether it's a long term trend until we see more evidence. From our data driven revenues, we can see a growing yield, thanks to a higher value, more effective advertising that we're able to offer our partners. We can also see a growth in e commerce and affiliates, which is certainly encouraging for the business.

Operator

And this chart gives evidence and conviction to our strategy and the more sustainable income it can provide. It's important because sustainable income supports our journalism and justifies our commitment to an ad funded news model. It's useful to remind ourselves of just how strong and sizable our digital asset is with The UK and Ireland's largest commercial news publisher, a publisher with an online monthly audience of 34,000,000 built around 120 brands. Together these brands have a place in the digital lives of nearly 70% of The UK population. But what you wouldn't have seen in this slide before is the growth and performance of our social activity.

Operator

Our U. S. Operation has continued to grow every month with the three brands there who have made real headway. We're encouraged that already in less than two years, we have grown our U. S.

Operator

Audience to 30,000,000, which is on a par with many of the more established brands. On social media, we recently hit a milestone of 100,000,000 followers as we continue to focus on our studio output and the growing demand for video. And as we continue to better understand different audiences and distribution channels, we will continue to invest in this area. Engagement is important as it means more time spent on our platforms and channels. Encouragingly, we are growing page views per visit as a greater knowledge of our audiences allows us to tailor news and recommendations to their preferences.

Operator

This important metric has grown by over 8%. It's important because over the year we saw that data driven page views were nine times more valuable than its programmatic equivalent. And at the same time, we're attracting more people to sign up to receive our news. We now have 9,000,000 people signed up to get content directly to their devices via WhatsApp, newsletters or push notifications. These customers are important because they have a large degree of control over what content we serve them and when.

Operator

At the half year, I touched on the fact that some of our readers had raised issues on the user experience of our websites, and we explained how we're acting on that feedback. At the time, we had begun testing a new website platform with the Liverpool Echo, One of our most well established local news brands. The results were encouraging. We have since rolled out the platform to our Manchester Evening News platform, Birmingham Live, Daily Record and Daily Star sites. From a user perspective, the rollout has gone well with page loading speed tripling and the reduction in ad buffering.

Operator

We will continue the rollout across our online portfolio with most of our digital estate due for completion by the end of the year. And then in Q1 twenty twenty six and we will complete the Daily Express. Finally, we continue to look to grow our overall audience and we continue to look at increased scale through a number of initiatives. In particular, we've seen the benefits of a data driven approach and maximizing the audience driven from referrers, both in The U. S.

Operator

And UK. And for example, Google Discover has been a valuable source of growth, growing 6% over the year. However, we recognize the importance of diversifying our social and distribution channels, which is why we have focused on the direct channels I have mentioned, such as newsletters and WhatsApp. The improving trends in audience and page views have also been supported by our AI powered content recommending tool, some new editorial structures we've put in place and of course at its core, our brilliant content, all of which I'll come on to. I'd like to take a brief moment to talk to you about some of the work we're undertaking to make us not only more efficient and effective in our operations, but also to improve our advertising offering.

Speaker 2

I'd like

Operator

to first look at how both our newsrooms and commercial teams are using AI as a tool, but first a health warning. Please remember that our guiding principle on AI is about making our operations more efficient and effective, but not at the risk of undermining the quality of our content. Our journalists and experienced editors continue to determine our news content and what the reader sees, overseeing every story that is published. Where it does help our editorial teams is in supporting content generation and distribution. For example, it speeds up editing for house styles when tailoring a piece for different sites across our portfolio.

Operator

The automated process we have put in place as part of this work means we can now upload and distribute a story much more quickly. Outside of generative AI, we've seen and been already using and developing AI powered tools for a number of years. For example, driving in house recommender tools, which have ultimately supported an increase in click through rates and page views per session. AI has also been significant in the development of a proprietary ad tech platform Mantis, which we not only use internally, but now also offer as an external publisher as a B2B proposition. As many of you will be aware, we offer Mantis to our advertisers both to support contextual targeting, but as well as to ensure brand safety.

Operator

This slide also touches on the need for our teams to have the right structure and tools to be agile and respond to the changing nature of the news cycle and also customer preferences. I've mentioned the benefits we already seen this year from our content hub, which was firstly there to improve our allocation of resources and to reduce duplication of content. The content hub has in its short time more than doubled the average page views from its team members. Our studio launch last spring has made real progress and working with the titles, as well as with our partners to provide high quality multi platform content that works both editorially and commercially. We have increased the total social video views by 12% year on year and importantly have grown revenue from direct social video buys.

Operator

The studio has allowed us to produce impactful work like the video content for the national lottery or our specialist programs around the euros and the general election. We will be strengthening our offer in the year ahead with new podcasting and video facilities not only in London, but in Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. The development of e commerce and affiliates was something we identified last year as having potential. 2024 proved to be a year where we started to see the opportunities become more tangible with non advertising revenue, including e commerce and affiliates both growing steadily. E commerce grew strongly with a fine 39% year on year growth increase in revenues.

Operator

Our Okay beauty box continued to perform well with the advent calendar in particular was a big success selling out before December. We also launched Yimblay, our e commerce platform in a year and now have over 15,000 products available and you can expect to see more of this development throughout the year. Affiliates grew strongly with a 50% year on year growth and a particularly good performance throughout Black Friday. We've put a strong senior team in place to focus on attracting third party business. This is because of our Mantis platform and they have delivered, making good progress in adding revenue, signing partnerships with our publishing groups, as you can see here on this slide.

Operator

We believe that there is more to play for and the team has been tasked with more of the same in 2025. Our advertisers value both our digital and print platforms. However, with digital, we have the ability to use our knowledge of our audience to make our advertisers campaigns more effective. Mantis, as you're aware, gives us a significant advantage in targeting the right customers for our advertisers. Tesco have chosen to partner with us for a number of years.

Operator

And the campaign highlighted reaching people reaching people in the right areas, interested in the right content and topics. This work had measurable impact for Tesco, as you can see on the slide with click through rates three times the industry average. All with the national lottery operator sponsored a series of Vox pops produced by Reach Studio asking people across The UK, what would you do if you won the lottery? The campaign reached a large regional audience using our brand's social media accounts and generated 5,000,000 views. And finally, we come to Sky, which run a national and local campaign to raise awareness of their English Football League coverage, which have just become available to watch on Sky Sports.

Operator

All of these three cases reflect the benefits of the customer value strategy and the simple logic of getting the right content to the customer. These examples illustrate why a data driven page view in 2024 was worth nine times more than a programmatic equivalent. Now let's turn to print, which I think we think remains slightly misunderstood. We can't escape from print structural decline, but it is still a valuable part of our business. It is a product that has loyal customers who still value us with over 600,000 copies sold daily and one that advertisers find very effective.

Operator

So we'll continue to work to maintain this popular product and its considerable revenue stream for as long as possible. While the overall income decline of six percent here cannot be denied, it's important to bear in mind that that figure is well ahead of the 17% decline in volumes. And this has been a fairly consistent performance for years, making this a very reliable income source. The demand for print will continue and the challenge for us will remain to manage the value exchange with our readership. Our teams continue to carefully match the necessary price increases with added content and strong promotions.

Operator

We invest in availability, so our readers are able to find the product in the local shop up and down The United Kingdom. Our teams have also utilized interest in special events to produce one off publishing products, which drive additional revenue. And as I said, print advertising outperformed volume decline in part thanks to the fact that certain sectors, particularly food retail, continue to value the effectiveness of this format. Lastly, we have delivered a 28% light for light reduction in newsprint costs through a combination of volume and savings. As I said earlier, our journalism is important and it's why I want to turn to it now.

Operator

It's a window to the world, an ear to people's troubles and a voice of their issues and concerns. But it's also a friend and a companion and all of their interests and hobbies, and I want to celebrate with our journalist excelled, covering the lighter side of life from Taylor Swift to the Euros. I also want to call out the podcast that found new and often entertaining ways to shed light on familiar topics, which we saw around our general election. But you won't be surprised to see that in a more serious note, here in this slide, we've also highlighted just a few examples of how our titles continue to support their communities. Like the Manchester Evening News helping to raise money, the needed money to save the iconic Salford Lads Club.

Operator

The Liverpool Echo comparing as it has for over thirty five years to ensure that the victims of Hillsborough are not forgotten and the lessons learned are acted upon, something we saw come through in September as a Prime Minister announced the Hillsborough law. The Express likewise saw a three year long campaign come to fruition in 2024 with an assisted dying campaign, sparking a political debate and a historic vote last year. And the Mirror sticking with a decades old cold case to uncover new evidence around the murder of Jill Dando, which produced an award winning piece of video journalism. Finally, the vital role that our titles play in society was made particularly clear over the summer following the tragic murders in Southport and the resulting riots which our journalists were the first on the scene to cover. In an increasingly noisy world with disinformation that's allowed to flourish on social media, our titles represent the best of what trusted news brands mean to this country.

Operator

Our titles national and local provide a valuable and irreplaceable service to their communities. And I take real pride in the hard work of our teams as they continue to serve that audience's trusted news in ever more engaging ways. So after that quick tour of the actions we've been undertaking, you'll not be surprised to hear that on the back of a good performance in 2024, we're very much looking forward to a similar approach in 2025. Our strategy has made us more resilient, sustainable and we continue to prioritize growing our audiences and progressing with our revenue diversification. We will continue to maximize our print product, both for its loyal readers and for its cash generative qualities to fund our digital growth and efficiency will remain a constant as we look to drive strong margin.

Operator

Despite our good progress, we are taking nothing for granted and are alive to the uncertain macro environment and the dynamic media backdrop. I've been keen to remind the teams that a good 2024 is no guarantee of a good 2025, even though we are in line with expectations for the year. And that is why our mantra is about operational delivery day in, day out. So before I hand over for questions, I would like to thank every member of the team at Reach for delivering the strong performance in 2024 for our readers and our stakeholders. Thank you.

Operator

And now over for questions.

Speaker 3

Good morning. Gareth Davies from Deutsche Numis. Three on digital for me, maybe to kick off. First, encouraging momentum in terms of audience and page views in Q4, as you're looking into 'twenty five, is that sort of are we on a level playing field now? And are you sort of relatively confident we can grow from here?

Speaker 3

Or are there sort of external factors that you're still very mindful of that could impact that audience trend and the page view trend? Secondly, the 19% yield sort of growth stands out. Exing out kind of if we were in a stable programmatic environment, what's the confidence you can grow that again this year? And are there any kind of one offs within that 19% we need to be a little mindful of where you've had specific campaigns, etcetera, that may not repeat? And then finally, just e commerce and affiliate revenue, it's becoming sort of decent size in absolute terms.

Speaker 3

How biased to Q4 is that? And again, when we're thinking about the digital revenue trend through 'twenty five, do we need to be mindful of that through Q1, Q2, Q3? Thank you.

Operator

Thanks, Gareth. Q4 twenty twenty four was exceptional. There was quite a lot of activity going on. There was obviously pre election activity going on in The U. S.

Operator

There was quite a lot of entertainment activity going on. And that advertising spend as I spoke about for retail. So Q4 was a standout, But we're in line with the current trends and plans, Gareth. So we took a print view of 2025. Our audiences are coming through as expected.

Operator

So there's obviously no current concerns about that performance. But bear in mind, this year, we don't have a euros. We don't have a UK general election. I am sure the news agenda will give us some basically fuel and melted the rest as you've already seen. So hopefully that will continue.

Operator

And but we've taken a fairly prudent view for growth for 2025. So it's steady as you go on audience with no concerns at the moment, Gav. The 19% yield was partly on the back of Q4. And bear in mind, Black Friday was an excellent result for us as an organization. There was a lot of consumer advertising spend.

Operator

And because at that point, I think it was 43% of our revenue was data led, which grew to 45%. We basically got the multiplication effect of that spend. So you've seen that 19% yield growth continue. It all really depends on the wider macro environment, Gareth. So if we continue to see spend and we continue to see brands looking to sell product through affiliates and e commerce platforms, then with 45% data led, then we should be seeing double digit yield.

Operator

But we are at the mercy of the consumer macro environment. That's always the case with the reach and consumer facing businesses.

Speaker 4

Do you want to add anything to that, Dom?

Operator

No. That's right. Yes. And then e commerce and affiliates, we're just at the start, right? So we've got 9,000,000 registered users.

Operator

We've got an audience of 32,000,000 of which 45% deliver data led revenues. You would be asking questions, why we don't do e commerce and why we don't do affiliates. So as you see the data led grow and the audience grow, we would expect e commerce and affiliates to basically trend there as well. But I would add on an absolute term, it's just the beginning. All right.

Operator

So it's still a fairly shallow week for e commerce and affiliates, but the early signs have been positive, but it's still the start of that. So it's not the time to get too excited about it. It's promising and it's steady.

Speaker 5

Thank you. It's Fiona, offering to Williams from Edison. Just a couple really. First of all, can we hear more about The U. S.

Speaker 5

Expansion? What are you doing to drive that and what do you think the what's where's the goal? And the second is on the revenue diversification. Can you tell us more about your ambitions in terms of things like video and podcasts? Thank you.

Operator

Well, the architect of The U. S. Expansion is just sitting two tier right there. So he's the he came up with a master plan. It's really quite straightforward that.

Operator

So we're going to put journalists in The U. S. Some will have a soft left or center view, some will have a soft right, some of a harder right view. And then we've got the Irish diaspora. So we looked at the data and we looked at the scale of the North American market and we thought we can maybe do something here if our content was good enough and our content was good enough.

Operator

So we started off light touch, maybe with a dozen or so, mainly English, British and Irish journalists. And we decided if we got the right signals back, if they're writing content, we got a response, we put Americans in. And things like, despite I've met a few English sports fans who say they like American college football, but they don't really know it. So we found US Journalists and put them in, and they started creating an audience. And then you find things that were on the ground during the Trump assassination that were close to it and they were at the events with regard to the pre election stuff.

Operator

And they were writing in a language which connected with the American audiences. And I don't think it's any surprise that we now have a customer base of 30,000,000, which I think is fantastic. So from that couple of dozen, mostly British and Irish natives, we now have 50 journalists. Would you say, David, the vast majority are now Americans? We are now Americans writing American content for an American audience.

Operator

An interesting thing about it is that because us and our North American, I think we're still friends with Americans and North American cousins are still interested in the same thing, whether it's BAFTAs or Oscars or Liverpool Football Club and obviously NATO and the war in Ukraine. You have this twenty four hour news cycle. So we now have an office in New York. We have a patch in Los Angeles, David, in California. And we have obviously London, and we have this twenty four hour news cycle, and that's paying off.

Operator

The other thing which is important about The U. S. Is that we have a slightly different commercial model. So we use referrers. So here in The UK, we build a relationship with our customers and we like people to come to our sites.

Operator

In The States, we are trying an experiment by using MSN, Apple News and Yahoo. That is a significant amplifier of our content. I mean, if you can do a deal with MSN and Yahoo, you actually build an audience right away. The challenge is, is it needs to be big because you got a smaller share of the revenue. But so far, that's worked and that's been good.

Operator

So we're very proud of what the team have done in The U. S. Video, 100,000,000 social followers. Clearly, we need to have our own capabilities to produce high quality video. And I'm not saying that handheld video production by a journalist, which they have been doing brilliantly for a couple of years as in good enough, but to walk into a studio which is state of the art equipment to invite whether it's sports stars or politicians to a studio which is soundproof and confidential is clearly a requirement.

Operator

All of our large sites now have those studio capabilities. I think every one of them now, David, isn't it? Yes, every one of them. So London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. Glasgow were actually one of the first to take it forward with their old firm content, but actually having a studio creates a different type of quality content.

Operator

That's probably a requirement when you now have 100,000,000 followers. So we're committed to that for vid and podcasts.

Speaker 2

Hi. It's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I've got three, please. So first of all, I think we've probably all seen the impact of Gen AI on our own search activity on Google. So have you started to see any impact at all from Google users getting stuck in an AI answer before they ever get to results and therefore don't click through to your content?

Speaker 2

Or how are you thinking about that? Second question, I guess a crucial part of your equity story is the reduction in pension and cash top ups from 2028 as you flagged. Can you talk about the confidence that we can hold on that guided schedule? Is that set in stone now as far as you're concerned? Or is it possible that the sands could shift again a bit on that journey to not having a cash top up?

Speaker 2

Third question, given that you came in better certainly than I expected on net debt in 2024, did you give any thought to a small buyback in 'twenty five?

Operator

Great question on Jenny Aynik. Actually, is there a risk that people get stuck in an AI loop? Yes, there is. And which is one of the reasons why we need to get closer to our customers. So everyone who's searching on Google or any other search engine at the moment, you'll now see it's roughly about at least a third of the page is generative AI, and then you get less below it.

Operator

I think it's really important that publishers and journalists get close to their readers. So for something that you are particularly interested in, which is important to you, which you find engaging, you know where to go to, which is why we have 9,000,000 essentially subscribers on WhatsApp and newsletters. Other folk will decide I'm going to pay 6 or 9.99 a month for a times or a Telegraph subscription. So I think that is really, really important. The customer value strategy was not delivered or put together to basically fight back against generative AI.

Operator

It was fight it was there to fight back originally against cookies, but it just happens to turn out that it helps us deal with this generative AI loop, which is one of the positives, which is why that 43% to 45% data led revenue is a really important metric, Nick. So I think so to answer to your question, yes, it is a concern, but we have a way of approaching it. So we make sure our content is out there, but we'll continue to do that. I'll leave the next two to Darren. Darren, is that okay?

Speaker 1

Yes, of course. Yes. So on pensions, the current contribution schedules we have, they are contracted. So they're in place based on the last training evaluation. They were all contracted on the basis that that would get our Hunter schemes to fully funded.

Speaker 1

So that would bring it to an end, which is what we've been saying consistently over the last year or so. In terms of is there any potential change, well, we have another training all coming up, which starts next year, which will complete in March 2027. That will mean we'll have to go through that contracting process again. So things could change based on performance of the schemes. What I would say, and clearly, I continue to monitor the performance of the schemes, they are all tracking in line with what our expectations are at the moment in the context of those current schedules that we have.

Speaker 1

So I'm as confident as I can possibly be. On the your second question was about the sorry, your third question was about a buyback. Is that right? Yes. So our capital allocation is clear.

Speaker 1

We talk about being a dividend paying company, assuming obviously that it's a board approved requirement, but that's what's in our capital allocation model. We from time to time, it comes up around whether to do a buyback or not, but I would honestly say we haven't seriously considered doing those in our Middle East anyway.

Speaker 6

It's Jonathan Barrett from Panmias. I guess I've got one just one question, albeit it's a bit wider ranging, so bear with me. It's really picking up on what you discovered through 2024 with the efforts you made on content, improving the content, improving the marketing of the content. And to Nick's point about generative AI positioning and the brand recognition that you're getting within younger audiences online. How do you feel that's evolving now?

Speaker 6

And have you learned any lessons from 2024 that help you map out the next sort of two, three years in terms of product evolution on content and distribution?

Operator

Thanks for your four questions, Jonathan. So I'll do it in a very short order. Yes, we have learned lessons. I mean, essentially, everything that we do is an informed risk. There's a bet we have ideas and receive the one.

Operator

The biggest one, I think, is again, we're a content business and our editor in chief essentially is sitting over there. We created the Content Hub, which is a centralization of content producers and journalists who could build up following or become specialists in certain topics of verticals. And as I said to you earlier, I think it was three times more page views of clicks that we get. That worked for us. We brought all of these and there's obviously a change process.

Operator

People are associated with titles and brands, they move into central area, but that content can then be repurposed and republished back out to the brands. So the content hub was a massive learning for us. That's been a huge success and credit to the editorial team for doing that. So and obviously the commercial team are waiting in the wings to monetize all that content and that engagement. So a lot of the revenue upside that you're seeing is due to the fact that we have managed the content much more effectively.

Operator

So that's been that's a bet that paid off and lessons learned about how we can use that. AI AI is a funny thing actually because it's obviously it's quite an overused term. Right? We've been using it for quite a while, you know, and we don't want to actually put ourselves out as some sort of the vanguard of AI, but we use it sensibly within our editorial teams. No journalist or editor will let anything go that might have AI input without them signing off, David.

Operator

That's the case. That will continue to be the case. It is all led by editorials, not led to the chief executive, and it's not led to the management team. But it helps us do things quickly. We're starting to look at it for the right pictures.

Operator

You know, we're starting to look at it and getting tone right. All of our titles use different languages or different types of vocabulary. AI helps us get there. And some of the data heavy stories that could well be what to do at the weekend and might well be something about a sports match where there's quite a lot of incidents. AI can help the journalists write more engaging content, you know, so it's there to support.

Operator

From a wholly commercial perspective, we think we are, if not one of them, because I'm quite friendly with all my fellow publishers, one of the leading publishers in the utilization of AI through Mantis. And we now think that it's so powerful and resilient that we can put it forward as a B2B proposition for a commercial deal. Now you don't put these things into the market unless they've been tried and tested. Now this is the biggest commercial news operator in The UK. It's been tried and tested for us.

Operator

So we now actually sell it as a service to Live Bible, Immediate Media, Nine in Australia, and we want to do more. And what it does is use AI to recommend content based on past reader history, as well as allow publishers to go to advertisers and say, if there is a further escalation in Ukraine, you don't want your content associated with that story, Erto will make sure and you'll contractually bind to that contract to say, Erto will make sure your advertising won't be next to that content. So that's AI, that's the non generative side and we've been using it for some time. So we think we're fairly sort of pushing the boundaries to that one. And the final thing, Jonathan, one of the things we have learned is that you don't get a hundred million social media followers if you can't do video properly.

Operator

Right? So David and his team have now got a hundred million. It would be daft to have that amount of followers and not have the ability to do high quality video, sound, podcasting and podcasting. And next time you come into the office, you will see quite a, I think it probably competes with the best, David, a studio set up. It's taken us, I mean the board have supported us, Darren signed off a capital investment, but it's up there with some of the best studio facilities for UK publishers and we've now got that in all of our main sites.

Speaker 7

This is from Aimamoud. Cost savings. How much opportunity is there for further cost cutting? And do you have a view on when revenues might grow? Is digital revenue able to replace print as stable and predictable?

Operator

I'll start I'll do reverse order and I'll leave the cost to you, Darren. Is that okay? We're not going to speak about the point where digital takes over print because print has a substantial revenue opportunity. Digital is growing, is back to growth, is a positive story. It would be irresponsible for me to give you an idea of when that point is going to be, because again, we are a consumer publisher who rely on the wider macroeconomic environment.

Operator

But I think, safe to say is that we are in a we've returned digital to growth. That's a positive story, and we're doing so much that you've heard about to actually further that growth into 2025. But I think it would be irresponsible to see when it takes over from print. Yes. And on the excuse me

Speaker 1

on the cost side excuse me

Operator

I'm

Speaker 1

sorry about that. On the cost side, there's probably two things to say there. The first one is, look, there is some natural costs that come out of the business. So for example, a good example is on the print side, newsprint volumes come down. So there's a natural part of our cost base that does over time come down.

Speaker 1

In terms of other cost savings, we can always make further cost savings. We'd like to do it in a way which is looking around how we can improve efficiency, how we can change ways of working, those sorts of things. So yes, we can always continue to look at our cost base. And we do have a very strong track record, as I hope you can see, we've been able to do that in a safe and responsible way.

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Earnings Conference Call
Reach H2 2024
00:00 / 00:00