Good afternoon and thank you and welcome everyone and welcome to Braemar's 2026, '25/'26 full-year results. My name is James Gundy and Grant Foley is CFO, but as you know from presentation, Grant will be taking over my place as I step down.

To start the presentation, I'd give a little short intro on where we were and where we are today from when I took over five years ago. Just quickly, when I came into the business, I had a very clear vision of simplifying the business, reducing the debt of the business, and building out the securities business which we built into in 2017, which to complement our present shipbroking space.

You can see from this chart, which is in front of you, where we were in 2021 at 8- £83.7 million revenue then. Now we're at 135.6.

Below that, you can see the chart showing percentages of 27% investment advisory, which is sale and purchase and finance, 44%, and you can see risk advisory, which is the securities business, has risen by 785%, we're proud of that. The underlying operating profit from '21 to '26 has gone from 7.7, which is £13.2 million, and the net debt, as you can see, has been hugely reduced.

In fact, Grant will tell you a bit later on that the net debt going into the beginning of March fell into a cash positive position. Okay.

I can fittingly say the business is totally transformed, and it's a business now that we can say that we fully understand, and we brought it back, as I said, to very much the basic model. You can see the margins very much improved.

The revenue per head has increased from '21 at £233 to £350. We've increased our global footprint across the world.

We've gone from 14 offices now to 19 offices. We've expanded into some really crucial parts of the world, especially in the US.

We opened up recently an office in Cape Town, South Africa. The forward order book, which is an important part of our business, it helps us to budget when we come to the start of the year, that's moved from $43.4 million to $72.5 million.

I think Grant will mention to you a bit later on where it is at present day. On the next slide, the most important thing about this slide which I'm most proud about is the fact it's more equilibrium as opposed to in one sector.

The previous in '21, it was majority chartering. Securities was 4%, S&P and finance 26%.

As you move towards the right-hand side, you can see how we're now more equal, where we've grown securities business to 21% of our business, S&P is 24, and the chartering is 55%. Okay.

Thank you, Grant.

Thanks, James. I'll talk through the financial performance.

FY '26 saw a resilient financial performance in line with expectations. Revenue at £135.6 million was 4% lower than the prior year, and that decrease was really driven by weaker chartering rates, particularly in the first half.

We did see an improvement in rates and activity as we entered the second half, and you can see here the split of first half, second half revenues with a 12% increase from the first half to the second half reflecting those improvements. Underlying operating profit, at £13.2 million, was 21% lower than the prior year, and that was really driven by the lower revenues that we saw coming through.

Underlying operating profit margin was down to 10%, which reflects the operational leverage in the business. As we grow the revenue, we saw like that operational leverage coming through.

As the revenue did improve in the second half, you can see quite clearly there that the first half margin was 9%, but as revenues improved, that grew quite quickly to 11% in the second half. Now, as James mentioned, the forward order book remains strong at $72.5 million, and although it's lower than the prior year, which reflects a decreasing chartering forward order book, pleasingly, that has grown since the year-end and is now just under $78 million at the end of April.

The board is recommending a final dividend of 4.5 pence per share, which takes our full-year dividend to 7 pence per share. That's unchanged from the previous year and in line with our capital allocation framework that we launched last year.

Net debt at the year-end was £2.9 million, which is as expected and in line with our usual working capital cycle, and we returned to a net cash position shortly after the year-end in March. If we move on now to the the income statement, as I said, revenue down 4%, really driven by that weaker in weaker chartering revenues, which was rate-driven and we'll come on to that.

Operating expenses remained well controlled, a decrease of 2% in the year, mainly due to lower bonus costs on the back of those lower revenues. As I said, underlying operating profit margin of of 10%.

Underlying earnings per share, 24.23 pence, which is 23% lower than the prior year, and the full-year dividend of of 7 pence per share. If we look at revenue now in a little bit more detail, total revenues £135.6 million, which were £6.3 million or 4% lower than the prior year.

Chartering revenue was 16% lower than the prior year, reflecting weaker chartering rates in the first half, particularly tankers. Tankers was £9.6 million lower than the pro- previous year.

Investment advisory increased by £2 million, and as James said, that's mainly our sale and purchase and corporate finance divisions, which is 6%. Asset values remained strong throughout much of the year, which helped that activity.

Risk advisory or our securities business performed very strongly, increasing by 29% to £28.8 million, and this was really driven by increased levels of volatility in the period and the launch of our UK organized trading facility, which is building out our infrastructure for our securities business so we can continue to grow that. In dollar terms, revenues were just 1% lower, but we we saw a a movement in the FX, the sterling, because our our revenues are are dollar-denominated, in dollar dollar terms, it was just 1% lower.

Overall, I think this revenue performance clearly illustrates the benefits of our diversified revenue streams and how that is increasing resilience and delivering more sustainable revenues. As I said, operating costs remained well controlled, reducing by £2.7 million.

Staff costs were £2.7 million lower, really reflecting lower bonus costs. We continued to invest in key hires, which is important for our our future growth, and that was £0.5 million.

T&E, travel and entertainment, was £0.7 million lower, and that was really a reduced spend across the business, and there's a shipping event that happened the prior year which which was inflating the costs. Office costs were £1.2 million higher.

We have some surplus space in our London head office which was previously sublet. That's now vacant, and we're actively looking to sublet that, and that will then that will then reduce that cost hopefully in the in the coming period.

Just looking at liquidity, the group continues to generate strong cash flow. £12.1 million operating cash flows of £12.1 million for the year.

During the year, we paid dividends of £1.6 million. £2 million of shares were purchased through our share buyback program that we announced last year, and £4.1 million of shares were purchased for the employee share ownership plan.

£2.6 million was paid to settle the outstanding convertible loan notes that we had on our balance sheet, and that was the final payment in respect of the NAVES transaction that we completed some time ago. In addition, the provision that was held on our balance sheet relating to the independent investigation of £1.9 million was settled and paid in the period.

As I said, net debt position at the end of the year, £2.9 million, £0.4 million higher than a year earlier, and we've shortly returned to a cash positive position. To summarize our financial performance, so as I said, a resilient revenue performance with significant improvement in the second half as we saw rates and activity improve.

Improvement in revenue per head to £350,000. Reduction in operating profit margin for the year, but it's important to look first half, second half where you see that move from 9% to 11%.

The forward order book continues to be strong and continues to improve, net debt broadly unchanged, and a full-year dividend of 7 pence, unchanged on the prior year and in line with our capital allocation framework. James and I will now just talk about what we're seeing in the market.

Moving on, obviously a lot is happening with regards to the war in the Middle East and its impact on the business. If we look at this slide and we look at the impact that we're seeing on tankers.

If you look here, you can see this darker line here is the the traffic that goes through the Strait of Hormuz. You can see that once hostilities commenced, the the the those passages, the traffic through the Strait drops to almost from from round about 45, 50 a day on tankers to almost zero.

Now, what we saw in that period as well is that the rates for that route have increased dramatically. However, that's really irrelevant because the rate isn't a true measure because no you can't fix a ship.

Whilst rates have have increased, you can't actually fix a ship. Now offsetting that, what we've seen as the conflict has continued is is this green, these lighter green line here, which is transits to the US Gulf.

What we're seeing is more ships move towards the US Gulf, and they are then they're taking on on on cargoes and then they're servicing other parts of the world. What we're seeing is new routes being established that were historically being serviced through the Middle East.

A lot of that's coming out of the US now, we're now seeing routes going as far as the US to Australia or West and East Africa, which would have typically been serviced out of the Middle East. We're seeing that side of activity.

We've seen rates increase globally given what's going on. Broadly for us at the moment, because we are well diversified and we have a strong US business, we're seeing a net neutral from a revenue perspective.

What we're losing on the on the fixtures that we would have been seeing in the Middle East, we're gaining on what we're servicing and fixing in the US. We're broadly seeing a revenue-neutral picture for the first two months of the year.

If we look a little bit further on, there's clearly some short-term uncertainty, but once the Strait reopens, we do believe that it will present opportunities. We're now almost three months into the conflict, and as I've said, we're seeing lower Middle East or reduced Middle East fixtures offset by increased fixtures elsewhere at higher rates.

We're also seeing those new trade routes established, which I've just mentioned, and that's really trying to meet that demand that was being serviced from the Middle East. You're seeing you're seeing that demand being serviced from different places.

Now once the Strait reopens, we believe there'll be significant global demand that will need to be met, and we expect that strategic and commercial oil reserves will need to be replenished, they definitely will need to be replenished, and much of that tonnage, the ships to to do that, are likely to be in the wrong location geographically. If we look further ahead, we do believe that this situation will take some time to resolve itself.

The strategic inventories will probably be replaced gradually, and possibly countries will actually look to increase their reserves to to build increased energy security. There's also the potential, yeah, depending on what an a reopening of the Strait looks like and the terms of that, that owners may may remain cautious and they may want not want to use the Strait, so that could lead to a change in trading patterns, and that's likely to increase freight costs from longer voyage times and more ton-miles.

Overall, once it reopens, we believe it will be positive. Looking at rates during the year.

No, just quickly, just adding on to what Grant said, I'm sure you have a few questions at the end of this presentation regarding the Hormuz, etc., what's been going on there, we can answer those questions more in depth then. On this slide here, on slide 16, you can see our Braemar Index.

The Braemar Index is something we do every presentation, and that shows you where the global shipping fleet, that's everything, as I said once again, from containers to tankers to dry cargo, and you can see where the average is at present. The market's still looking strong, just re-emphasizing the fact that we are in every market.

We're not a singular broker whereas is in certain markets; we are in all shipping and chartering markets. The Braemar Index for tankers, although I think you're seeing as Grant who's said in the results, the first half of our year was more difficult as the rates were lower, especially in tankers, but the back end of the year, our financial year, the market, you can see, especially going into the conflict, you see the market rates moving back up again.

The Braemar Dry Index, speaking to the analyst only yesterday, the outlook is looking very strong for dry. We're seeing some strong numbers on the capes and throughout the business.

Dry cargo market isn't so affected with the conflict in the Middle East. It's only really fertilizer on the ships that are really is the big impacts there, but everything else can be sourced elsewhere.

That's positive as well. We have a big business in Australia and dry cargo as well as London.

Right, going on to slide 17, the demand side still looks very positive. The global GDP, you know all about that, that's still an upward trajectory.

The China industrial growth still looks positive. We saw that, as far as iron ore imports there, and oil demand is still very strong.

Yes, they're maintaining their oil exports as far as products concerned, using their refineries products within the country, and the oil index is still showing a positive growth there. We had to emphasize once again, and I think it's important to see the fact that shipping as far as global goods is move 80 85%, you can see it's really a big indicator of some of these graphs.

Right, this is one that just shows you a little bit about the global fleet, you can see the global fleet is growing. Once again, that helps us having multiple desks covering all markets, but the situation with when back in 2006 it was probably more unique as far as what ships were being built, more driven towards tankers and dry cargo, as we move on into these last couple of years, it's more driven by containers and LNG over and above those sectors.

The fleet is aging, that's undoubtedly. The uses would indicate max 15 years of age, but ships go on longer, moving towards more 20 years of age, but the fleet is aging compared with what's coming in.

Newbuilding order book on the right-hand side, you can see is still down from the highs of 2000 before the financial crisis, but the fact is it has to be replaced. We have a big newbuild department as big S&P department, we need to be able to see who's involved in all those transactions.

Pass back to Grant for the strategy.

Thanks. I'll give a strategy update.

We made good progress on our strategic framework that we launched last year during the course of FY '26. We said that we were going to hire 10 new brokers, senior brokers.

We actually hired 16, and that's across all parts of the business, all of our shipbroking businesses as well as our risk advisory businesses. We said we'd expand into one new jurisdiction, and we opened our first office in Africa, and that really does expand our geographic and strategic reach.

We focused on efficiencies. We employed a Global Head of Tanker Operations, and during the course of the year, we reduced headcount, we centralized the claims areas, and we implemented 24/7 coverage to really improve service and response times.

We said that we'd aim to complete a transaction during the course of the year, and we evaluated a select number of complementary transactions. Now, we focus on opportunities that will really create sustainable value for our shareholders, and whilst a select number did go through to due diligence, no transaction was completed in the year.

That's really because we give a very strong discipline and rigor to the transactions that we evaluate. We are very firm.

We've got lots of good opportunities going in organically in the business, and when we look at transactions, it really does need to ensure it's complementary and create shareholder value. Whilst we didn't complete a transaction, we remain well positioned to capitalize on the right opportunity, but come back to that point, we maintain discipline and a rigorous approach to what we look at.

In line with our strategic framework, we've now set new targets for this new financial year. We've maintained our hiring target of 10 new brokers in the year.

We will continue to build resilience and diversification across the group, and we will establish a new securities desk, and we have plans for that, and that's really building on the infrastructure that we've put in place over the last few years and how we can bring these desks on board. Our focus on efficiency continues, and we're embedding AI across the business.

We're initially focusing on areas where it can bring real productivity and efficiency gains in some of the corporate support functions and in some of the shipbroking areas where there's perhaps more manual tasks that we can initially automate using AI. Finally, as I said, we remain focused on completing a complementary transaction during the year.

Now, we've said that we want to have £200 million worth of revenues by FY '30, and we continue to have confidence in that target, and we have a clear path to get there. In FY '21, as you heard from James, the business generated £81 million of revenues.

In FY '26, it's generated £136 million. Now if you look how we got there, part of that growth was organic through hiring individuals and teams of people and desks to join the business, and the remainder was from inorganic growth, and it was the acquisitions of Southport and Madrid Shipping Advisors that generated £16 million.

Now how we see the next stage of growth to get us from where we are today to that £200 million, it broadly splits 50/50, in that we will continue to make the hires, we hired the 16 people in the last financial year, we've got a target of 10, and we'll do that for the following years. That quite quickly compounds, and you start to see that revenue come through.

That's part of the growth, and the remainder is through transactions. Now, the market remains very fragmented.

There are opportunities there, but again, we remain focused on doing the right transaction that adds shareholder value. It may be that other organic opportunities come along and so we actually hire more than our target in one particular year if there's desks, etc., available, we're flexible on that, but we have confidence that we can get to that £200 million revenue target.

Just to summarize, we've delivered a robust financial performance in line with expectations, and that's been against a fairly challenging market backdrop in the first half. We've continued to generate strong operational cash flow, net debt broadly unchanged, but cash positive in March.

We've made significant strategic progress, opening in a new geography, expanding our capability, and hiring new brokers. We completed a £2 million share buyback, and maintained our dividend at 7 pence per share in line with our capital allocation framework.

As we look further ahead into the new financial year, we've seen strong momentum in the latter half of FY '26, which has carried into this year, with a strong trading performance for the first two months of the year. The forward order book has strengthened to $78 million.

We've received approval to open our office in the Dubai International Financial Centre, which again is part of the infrastructure to grow our risk advisory or securities business, and we expect our European OTF to be approved in the first half of this financial year. We continue to look at complementary acquisitions.

As you've heard from James, the market fundamentals remain robust, and we're confident in our FY '30 targets. We've built a very strong platform here to support the growth of the business going forward.

I'd also much like to take the opportunity on the call to thank James for all of his work as Group CEO. I think you can see from the first few slides that we went through that the business has been transformed under James's tenure, and it's been great to work with James.

I'm delighted James is staying with the business, just focusing on his shipbroking, and I'm very excited to be taking over in the CEO role, but looking forward to continuing to work with James.

Thank you, Grant. I'd just like to add to that that I've utmost faith in Grant doing a stellar job coming into the role.

For me, it's stepping back into full-time broking, but I've never stopped broking. I've always been on the desk, for me, it's not such a difficult transition.

We wish him all the very best, and that's all to say as well.

Thank you. We'll now go to the Q&A, and thank you for those that have submitted their questions, and if you want to submit a question, please do.

I'll just work through these, if that's okay. First question is, "How are you actively working to become a more sustainable business?"

I think I'll take it two ways. If we look at revenue sustainability first of all, I think you've heard that what we've done over the last few years to make the business more diversified gives us that level of sustainability.

You would have clearly seen here weaker chartering partially offset by strong performances from risk advisory and investment advisory. If you look back a couple of years, you would definitely see the converse of that.

We're not going to start doing anything outside of shipbroking and securities, but that we continue to expand our offering in those spaces, becoming a more diversified and resilient business which will deliver those sustainable revenues. I think if we're looking at sustainability from an environmental standpoint, we obviously work very closely with our clients when they're looking at purchasing ships to ensure that they're doing the right thing for the environment, we have people internally who provide consultancy to help our clients make the right decision when they're investing in vessels.

Next question, "On new CFO, can you give any further update on appointing a new head of finance?" Yes, we're making good progress on that.

We're now down to a very, very short list, and I'm hoping that we'll have that over the line certainly well before the AGM, when I officially step into the CEO role. Next question, "In offshore, with the elevated oil price and perhaps prospects of more exploration activity, would you expect to see more ordering of offshore support vessels?"

I think we can answer that question. You have to remember, first of all, the offshore supply vessels have a lot longer longevity compared also to what we would say the tankers.

We saw an explosion, as in many ships being built before the financial crisis. We saw a layup scenario, we saw a lot of recycling in that market as well.

The good thing is the market is now rebounding and it's in a very strong market, I think the players in that market are actually taking their time to rebound into the S&P newbuilding market. Our desks alone are involved in those deals, and we are seeing it, we would expect that to grow in that market further.

We've opened offices now, we have offices in offshore in Singapore, London, and Houston.

Thank you. Next question, "You've made good progress on hiring new brokers, but can you talk about departures and staff turnover generally?"

I think I can start the question. Look, we're in a high-margin business, it's a broking environment, it's a people's business, and being a business that is very much in the limelight at the moment, what we do see is outsiders trying to break into new markets, and we have seen that.

At the same time, I can tell you now, from my ACM Shipping days when we were very much one-dimensional tanker market, the first thing I said when coming into the actual seat of CEO was to build our breadth, remove ourselves from non-core business, move into higher-margin business, and protect the business from what we would say, being attacked in one market. What we can sit here and say is, yes, we've lost some people, but, B, we've rehired very quickly on the back of those losses, and the fact it's amazing how we see the market consolidating more and more, that we feel we can attract.

Because we have such diverse business across all sectors, and those desks, there's a lot of cross-fertilization of those desks, we're attracting people. Also on top of that, we've got a young talent running the business who are attracting other talents as well.

For us, I think we're in that positive what we're trying to do here.

I'd add that there was some staff turnover in the earlier part of the year, and that seems to have settled then in the latter part of the year. We are, as James said, attracting established talent as well as a strong pipeline of new talent.

You have to understand, it's not just chartering we do. You look at our business now, we were 4% in securities, we're now at 20% in securities.

When you might ask about chartering people, we're growing securities, the revenue stream is growing across the business.

Thank you. Next question, "How disciplined will you remain around leverage and return thresholds when evaluating M&A opportunities, given the fragmented market?

Are valuation expectations becoming more reasonable as macro uncertainty increases?" Look, I think that everything always depends on the type of transaction, how you structure it, the free cash flows if you're getting the synergies, particularly on a revenue perspective.

If we look back at our US transaction that we did a few years ago, there were clear revenue synergies by being part of a larger group. There's a lot of things that we consider.

Would we consider increasing our leverage targets slightly if we thought that it was the right deal to do and there was good, strong free cash flow to reduce that quite quickly? Yes, if it delivered sustainable shareholder value and it was a complementary fit.

We're quite flexible around that. Now in terms of the valuations, we haven't seen any adjustment at the moment, but as we're early days and we may see that in the coming period.

"With widespread interest in the shipping space as of late, including rumors of ICAP looking to acquire Braemar/IFCOR for a very high multiple, are you seeing increased institutional interest in our shares, which are clearly undervalued?"

I start there?

Yeah. Look,

one thing I have been saying for a very long time is the fact that, and I said it again today, is that we will see consolidation. I think you can see from this presentation very clearly that, yes, we've very much gone into that IDB world ourselves.

We've branched out and the breadth of the business into other sectors. There's only so many brokers you can have on one particular desk, the importance is to grow into new sectors.

We only heard about the rumors of this. Are we seeing the fact that we do know our shares are undervalued, very much compared to what we think the value of the business is worth, but at the same time, we know that the small-cap market has been undervalued for some time, that obviously our job is to build the business up, to move above the £100 million to show more interest to institutions.

We have big institutions involved in the business. We know the other big institutions,

so... I'd add to that, we've obviously just announced our numbers today.

We've got a good roadshow over the next week or so where we're meeting institutions. I think our equity story is clear and what we've delivered over the last five years, I'm hopeful that we'll have a positive roadshow.

It's only rumors and market say. ICAP, as far as I know, haven't come out and said anything about it or denied or confirmed or said anything, it's just market rumors as far as we're concerned.

Thank you. That's the last of the questions, unless anyone has any other questions, please feel free to...

Perfect. Thank you both for answering those questions.

Before we ask investors to share their feedback, which I know is important to you, James, if I could just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that would be great.

This feels a bit strange. It's my last one to be doing this.

It's been great. At the same time, I want to thank you for taking time listening to our presentation.

I think you can see it's a very robust set of figures, and I'd like to think you can see now the business has built out its breadth. It's a completely different business to what it was five years ago.

We know what we want to do, we know what we want to achieve. That is the key factor.

I also want to wish, once again, Grant all the very best going forward. Thank you once again.

Thank you.

Brilliant. Thank you, guys, once again.

Ladies and gentlemen, can I ask that you don't close the session just yet, as you'll now be automatically redirected to a page to give your feedback, which helps the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation.

I wish you all a good afternoon. Thank you.