Good morning, and welcome to ICG Enterprise Trust's half-year results for the six months to 31st of January, July, excuse me, 2026. As you'll hear over the next 15 minutes or so, it was a six-month period demonstrating growth across multiple investment areas, with positive net portfolio cash flow and selective investment.

Our portfolio companies continue to perform well. We've realized assets above carrying values, and we've returned capital to shareholders through both dividends and buybacks.

Today, portfolio manager Colm Walsh will take you through the half-year performance, the activity in the portfolio, and how we are positioned for the current environment. The slides and the results announcement are available on our website.

We'll leave time for Q&A at the end. You can submit your questions at any point using the Q&A box on your screens.

With that, I'll hand over to Colm.

Thanks Martin, and thank you everyone for joining this call. Let me just take a few minutes to outline our investment strategy, particularly for newer shareholders, but also just to recap for existing shareholders as well.

Broadly speaking, we aim to deliver private equity returns whilst managing risk through a focused investment strategy. Firstly, we focus on buyouts.

That's to say profitable, cash-generative companies. Typically relatively mature companies, but companies which have scope to grow.

Secondly, we invest primarily in developed markets, and in terms of private equity, that's North America and Europe, where we believe that the depth and quality of the managers available in those markets is the strongest. Thirdly, we focus on mid-market deals.

That's companies with enterprise values approximately of between $250 million and $2 billion. They're big numbers, but small by public market standards.

We think, though, that companies of this size offer a particular sweet spot. They are companies which have the ability to be transformed into market-leading companies.

Finally, and really critically, we partner with top-tier private equity managers. Managers with proven track records, experience through cycles, and a really strong institutional framework.

Put together, that gives us a diversified portfolio of resilient companies with a more consistent return profile, where performance is less cyclical, less seasonal, more resilient. Moving on to the next slide, what has that delivered in practice?

Let's just take a quick look at the data. On this slide, a little bit technical, we plot ICG Enterprise and our peers on a risk-return graph.

Simply the NAV per share total return against the standard deviation of those returns. It's not a standard industry measure, but we think it's a useful way to illustrate how ICG Enterprise compares with peers from a portfolio construction perspective.

Since January 2020, ICG Enterprise ranks first amongst its peer group, delivering sector-leading returns per unit of risk, or thinking of it another way, sector-leading returns on a risk-adjusted basis. We also rank first over the last 10 years.

For us, the critical point is not just about the absolute level of return, but it's the balance of return and risk. That's very consistent with our approach, our resilient growth strategy which I've just talked about, delivering strong returns, but also at the same time managing risk.

Moving on to the next slide, we show that this strong risk-adjusted return performance is supported by a diversified vintage exposure. Around 23% of the portfolio is in the older vintages, that's 2017 to 2020, 31% in newer vintages, 2023 to 2025, and what you see here is that 41% of the portfolio is in the 2021 and 2022 vintages.

Now, that's to some degree what you would expect. You'd expect the three- to five-year-old vintages to be a high percentage of the portfolio, given that they're in the growth phase, and typically before they are likely to be realized.

A really consistent question in recent quarters has been about our thoughts on the '21 and '22 vintages. It was a period of very high levels of activity, and that's particularly in the context of market volatility in some of the sectors like tech and software that were especially favored in those vintages.

16 of our top 30 companies are from those vintages, but as you can see from the logos, it's a very diversified portfolio, and it's substantially underweight what a typical private equity portfolio for those vintages would have looked like. We invested in the likes of theater operators, retirement home operators, mortgage appraisal providers, a very wide range of themes and underlying external growth factors.

Even in the four software investments listed, they're typically in subsectors of software that are resilient and defensive. For example, Ping Identity provides cybersecurity solutions.

It's actually a subsector of software that benefits from the secular trend that is AI. We also have a number of these, such as Precisely, which have downside protection within the structure.

In other words, we're not just investing in common equity, we invest in a structure which offers downside protection, which is very much part of the heritage and DNA, if you like, of ICG. When we look through the headline vintage, as I say, we see a very diversified group of companies.

It's not a concentrated bet on any single investment thesis or any single secular trend, and we think that supports the resilience of our long-term growth. Moving on to the next slide, and turning to the period, firstly, I want to frame the discussion with three key points.

Firstly, our portfolio performance, which strengthened in the second quarter, with growth across a range of companies. Secondly, exits continue to anchor our strong returns.

We had 24 full exits in the half-year period, and collectively those investments generated a 3x cost return. Finally, whilst macro events post-period likely will extend a period of slower sector-wide activity, ICG Enterprise has a robust balance sheet, and that gives us significant flexibility.

Let's go through each in turn, moving on to the next slide. Whilst the first quarter's return was relatively flat, we saw a 3.5% portfolio return on a sterling basis in the second quarter.

Some of the key contributors to our second-quarter portfolio growth are shown on the slide, but just to pick up on a few: Ambassador Theatre Group and Excel, some of our largest exposures in our top 30 companies, were both marked up to the expected sale price. In fact, that makes Excel our largest underlying company exposure.

Brooks Automation is benefiting from demand for semiconductors. This is, if you like, a kind of picks and shovels business.

It benefits from the derived demand for semiconductors without being exposed to the much more volatile demand cycle for those semiconductors. That AI-driven demand continues to support strong growth, and in fact, Brooks has recently filed for an IPO in the US.

Greenix, again illustrating this trend of having a very diverse range of companies, Greenix is a provider of pest control services, and that continues to report strong EBITDA growth. Everything from semiconductors to catching pests, it's quite a broad range of activities.

What we think is really encouraging is that breadth of that growth, and how our portfolio is tapping in to a very wide variety of long-term growth trends across multiple different sectors and multiple different business models, multiple different geographies. We also received, as you can see on the slide here, significant liquidity from two of our top 30 companies in the period, that's Curium and Udo, and we're expecting approximately £70 million of additional proceeds in the coming quarters from two further large exits: Excel and Ambassador Theatre Group.

Our approach of investing in high-quality, market-leading companies has seen in recent periods a number of successful exits from our larger exposures. You would have seen that reflected in our results for last year as well.

Moving on now to look at our balance sheet, that realization activity leaves our balance sheet in a good position. At the 31st of July 2026, we have £190 million in terms of total available liquidity, and we had net debt of £66 million.

That's against a portfolio which is almost £1.4 billion, really strong coverage. We believe that positions us strongly, with one of the lowest gearing ratios in our peer group.

Financial flexibility, we think it's really important in this environment. It's a core strength of ICG Enterprise.

It gives us the ability to continue to invest in high-quality new investments, to maintain vintage diversification, which will support in turn our long-term growth, but it also gives us the resources to continue to enhance shareholder returns through buybacks and through dividends. Moving on now to activity in the half-year, and over the next few slides, I'm going to run through what we've seen in the portfolio over the last 12 months.

As a reminder, we break down the investment lifecycle into four phases. Firstly, we make commitments to new funds, alongside our US and European managers, a mixture of old and new.

Second, we're called for capital, or we invest directly into portfolio companies. Thirdly, those companies go through a period of value creation.

We like to partner with managers, as a reminder, that have multiple different levers to create value, and in particular those that have significant operational expertise. Finally, and obviously very critically, we and our managers exit businesses, thus generating proceeds.

The cycle repeats, proceeds come in, we then have to redeploy into new commitments and new investments. Starting with phase one on the next slide, commitments.

We made £104 million of new fund commitments during the six months. Most of that was alongside managers already in our portfolio, long-established managers where we have long-standing relationships.

Good examples being Gridiron, TJC, formerly known as The Jordan Company. We've also added some new managers to our portfolio.

You can see the logos here for SkyKnight and Archimed. Perhaps not household names, but in both cases very highly sought-after managers that had very competitive fundraisings, and where not everybody was able to secure an allocation.

They have very significant domain expertise, and both managers also have the potential to generate significant co-investment deal flow. A really critical part of our co-investment program is partnering with the best managers.

Moving on now to this slide about deploying capital, our new investments. We invested £65 million in the period.

That's lower than recent years, but that's consistent with the point I made earlier, that we have remained highly selective, and that activity is obviously relatively light in this market and below our five-year trend. The largest company investment was a business called Pharmacy2U.

It's an operator of an online pharmacy business predominantly in the UK. Really good example of what we look for: an established market position, but a company which has significant structural growth in online healthcare, and alongside a specialist manager that has the right level of sector domain expertise.

This was a £13 million co-investment alongside G-Square, as I said, a specialist healthcare investor. Turning now to portfolio growth, during the period, the portfolio return on a local currency basis was 3.2%.

In this period, FX had a limited impact on the portfolio, and we ended up with a closing portfolio valuation of, as I said earlier, a little under £1.4 billion. Over the longer term, our portfolio return on a local currency basis was 10.2% on an annualized basis over the last five years.

That translates to an annualized NAV per share total return of 8.4%. Moving on to the next slide, which summarizes some of the key financial metrics for the underlying portfolio, portfolio companies remained resilient.

They delivered 11% growth over the last 12 months and 16% growth in EBITDA. That's 11% revenue and 16% in EBITDA.

Valuation multiples remained broadly similar, at 15.8x, and net debt at 4.8x EBITDA. We remain comfortable with these valuation metrics in the context of the portfolio's high revenue and EBITDA growth, and we believe it is reflective of a focus on high-quality companies with strong quality of earnings.

Moving to the fourth and final phase, exits. Realizations in the period totaled £84 million.

As with the investment side earlier, this does reflect a drop from recent years, reflecting the slower market-wide transaction environment. However, two further large exits have been signed, they're not reflected in these numbers, but have been signed, and we expect to generate, as I mentioned earlier, an additional £70 million worth of cash proceeds to ICG Enterprise, subject to closing process.

On that topic, I wanted to expand on Ambassador Theatre Group, which was our fourth-largest company exposure at the 31st of July, and as I mentioned, will likely be realized in coming quarters. We invested alongside our colleagues in ICG Strategic Equity, that's our GP-led secondary strategy, in 2021.

That was, at the time, quite a brave decision, at a point when the live entertainment industry was still recovering from the impacts of the COVID pandemic. Since then, the company has benefited from the strong return of audiences to live theater, and in particular the return of tourism as well.

It's continued to build its position as a leading international venue operator. The business has been sold to a strategic buyer, with approximately £23 million worth of proceeds expected for ICG Enterprise in the coming quarters.

For us, this is a good example of backing a high-quality, market-leading company, and a good endorsement of our diversified approach, and it will be a meaningful exit from our 2021 vintage portfolio to boot. Staying on exits, one of the best proof points for NAV is what a company sells for upon exit.

It's a metric we've tracked over a number of years. You can see the last 12 months, ICG Enterprise Trust completed 60 full exits.

They were executed at a multiple of 3.1x cost, and that's an average 10% uplift to the previous carrying value. That continues the long-term trend of crystallizing strong returns on exits.

On average, exits have been around 2.5x cost, and at a premium to carrying value. We see this as a very good validation of the underlying portfolio quality, and ultimately of our NAV.

To conclude, our priorities for the second half of the financial year remain very similar to what we outlined at the start of the year. That is to say we're going to keep a high bar for new investments.

I think you'll have heard us say that over multiple quarters, but we think that discipline is especially important in the environment that we're currently investing into. Secondly, the byproduct of a strong 12 to 18 months of realizations is a number of our larger positions have been exited, and over time we intend to refresh those larger exposures because we believe that portfolio concentration helps to generate alpha.

Finally, we'll continue to balance long-term and near-term shareholder returns through a combination of investing, through executing buybacks, and also through our progressive dividend policy. All of that, we believe, supports resilience through market turbulence, through change, and should deliver long-term compounding growth for shareholders.

With that, I'm going to pass back to Martin, who's going to host the Q&A.

Great. Thanks, Colm.

We now have about 10 minutes or so for Q&A. As a reminder, please feel free to submit questions via the Q&A box you see on the webinar platform.

A few have come in already, just taking them in turn and grouping them into themes the best I can. Obviously, a lot of questions on realizations.

Colm, what are your approximate expectations for realization activity next six months, given the recent movement in rates?

Anyone who has any certainty over this, I think, is probably making it up. I don't think anyone will be surprised that I'm not able to give an accurate forecast.

We do have a very high level of expectation that Excel and Ambassador Theatre Group will close, which are meaningful exposures in our portfolio. I think the biggest company being Excel, the fourth-biggest being Ambassador Theatre Group.

There's also obviously some potentially good news coming out of Brooks Automation with an IPO. Of course, it's uncertain as to when that actually would generate proceeds in the event that happens.

Aside from that, I think it's always a little uncertain. What I would say, though, is that at some point there will be, I think, a recovery to what we would consider more normalized level of activity, because within the private equity ecosystem, everyone is very aligned to deliver liquidity.

It's a critical feature of managers' fundraising is to be able to demonstrate realized returns. Managers are incentivized to try and raise new funds.

Having had two or three years of low levels of activity, managers are under pressure to deliver liquidity. I do think that it will crystallize at some point.

The conditions are all there. Whilst rates rising is obviously, all else equal, we would prefer rates stayed lower for longer, but I think it was broadly expected.

The financing markets still work well, and I think it's something that people are able to build in to their pricing. Of course, the other thing we're always at the mercy of as well are external events.

If you think about recent years, we've had things like the tariffs in the US, the war in Ukraine, the US-Iran conflict, there's a whole series of external events which often can throw a spanner in the works as well. I won't be drawn on forecasting it precisely, but I do think at some point it will bounce back.

I think we're in a good position with high-quality companies that seem to attract a market even when activity levels are low, and I think we've demonstrated that over recent years.

Great. Thanks, Colm.

A question on secondaries. What are the opportunity sets we're seeing there, and how long do we think it will take us to get to the 25% to 30% asset allocation target?

Yes, it's a really good question. I think in some ways, our current allocation to secondaries is a reflection of both disciplined investing on the part of my colleagues in our secondaries team, which has meant they have lost out on some deals on price, and maybe not deployed as quickly as they might have hoped for, but the other thing is the success of the strategy has meant that there's been quite a high realization rate.

It's a case of having to run quite fast to stand still, as I always think of it. We have taken a number of steps to build up our allocation to secondaries.

We've made commitments to a number of our secondary strategies within ICG. We've also made recently co-investments alongside our LP secondaries colleagues.

The investment activity is building up that allocation. In terms of the opportunity set, it's a market which continues to grow.

ICG specializes in both elements of secondaries, being both the GP-led and the LP-led. We have dedicated teams for both, market-leading teams, and I think what they're seeing is that in a liquidity-constrained environment, secondary solutions are very popular, being increasingly adopted.

The deal flow is good. There's a strong opportunity set, and we think the next few years, particularly given some of the low levels of activity we've seen, should present some significant opportunities.

Great. Thanks, Colm.

Just staying on the theme of secondaries, because a question has come in, can we elaborate on the negative performance from secondaries in H1? Now we should say, it's a half of two halves, if you like, where it was in Q1 which saw the negative secondaries performance.

In Q2, secondaries was positive, but Colm, do you want to give any more color?

I think it's fair to say that some of that contraction is just a series of kind of one-off marking of positions that happened in a particular quarter. What I would guide people on is that the things we invest in, you have to look at over a longer time period.

They don't grow necessarily in a linear way. I would just guide that, yeah, contraction in a given quarter, we obviously want to be transparent and show that, but at the same time, we don't think it's reflective of a broader trend.

It was just a certain number of investments were marked down given some of the market volatility, but as I say, we would guide towards looking at the performance over a longer time period.

Staying on the topics of secondaries and realizations, a question on secondary sales. The question is, are there any plans to make a portfolio sale as you did previously?

Obviously, listeners will know we've done approximately four in the last six years, but do you want to just guide the audience, Colm, how we think about secondary sales?

We, I think amongst our peers, we're kind of pioneers in using secondary sales really as a way to optimize portfolio growth. We have very detailed portfolio monitoring process, and every half-year we go through every single fund in the portfolio, every single position in the portfolio.

We try to triangulate the sort of long-term go-forward returns with where we think pricing is for all of these assets. Typically what we're looking for are funds that we think are highly priced, but offer relatively low go-forward returns.

That means that you sometimes sell things that aren't poorly performing funds, they might even be very strongly performing funds, but we think that maybe a lot of the growth has already happened. We go through that exercise.

You'll have seen in previous years we've made sales. What I would say is that we continue to do that, and I think what we won't do necessarily is sell at the same time every year.

We will only sell if we think it makes sense. That's an exercise that's constantly going on, and I think it's probably fair to say you can expect to see future secondary sales when we identify value.

I think we're in a really good place to be able to do that because we work very closely alongside, as I said, those dedicated secondary teams who are very close to the market, pricing funds all the time, and therefore a very strong source of market intelligence to guide that process for us. We think the sales we've made have been really successful, not just, obviously they've raised liquidity, but the main thing is they have given us additional resources.

We've effectively traded positions where we thought there were relatively weaker go-forward returns, allows us then to deploy both into new investments, but also to fund our shareholder return programs as well.

Great. Thanks, Colm.

Moving the conversation along to growth, the question is, can you give an indication on what organic EBITDA growth was across the portfolio? You'll see we reported LTM EBITDA growth of 16%.

If you can

This is very difficult to track, because it's not uniformly disclosed by all of our managers. I don't think we can provide a precise number on that.

It's something we do obviously when we're monitoring the portfolio. We do try, especially in a higher interest rate environment, it's important to make sure that platforms are growing organically, but I can't provide a precise average.

What I would say, though, is that that focus on companies which have strong underlying growth trends means that most of our companies have organic growth which exceeds GDP growth, for the simple reason that they're not just relying on fluctuations in economic demand. There are underlying trends driving their growth, things like AI, but we haven't got a precise number.

Super. There's a question on vintage exposure: how do your current valuation multiples compare by vintage?

We don't release this in the RNS, but if there's any color you can provide, Colm, on how the valuation multiples compare by vintage?

We don't disclose this, but I'm happy to discuss it because it is something we track. The valuation multiples did tick up from 2020, 2021, but they've So I would say that the 20 As you might expect, 20 So 2020 is not a significant exposure for us, but '21 and '22 they're broadly in line with where our average is at the moment in terms of entry multiple.

One thing, though, is that it's a bit of a blunt instrument because it does very much depend on the mix of companies we're investing in. I think we felt that when we took each individual, particularly co-investment decision, one of the things we always look at is how does that valuation compare to other data points, public market comparators, recent private transactions, and in each case, we felt that the valuation was merited by prevailing market conditions.

Even if you think those valuations we might have bought into quite a toppy market, one of the other disciplines that we always have when looking at deals is to heavily sensitize the exit multiple. Even though I'd say the average '21 entry point was around 15x, '22 was 15.5x, but we sensitized all of our larger exposures to be able to cope with much lower exit multiples than entry multiples, just to give people comfort.

More recently, I'd say those valuation multiples have trended down slightly, the 2024 vintage, for example, was 14x. Not a massive change, but there is, I suppose, some evidence that it's ticked down.

You really have to see that in the context of mix of sectors and companies we've invested in as well.

Great. Then the final question I see is on uplifts: how do you feel about the exit premiums you are achieving?

It's around about 10%.

I would say some of this is a mix effect as well. What we tend to see in lower activity environments is a higher proportion of exits that go to secondary, like GP-led secondaries, single-asset continuation funds, which structurally have a lower uplift.

Sometimes it's easy to look at that chart and think, oh, the uplifts are going down, but sometimes it just reflects the modality of exits. To give comfort on that, Ambassador Theatre Group and Excel both had pretty significant uplifts when they were remarked their likely exit proceeds.

That's largely reflection, again, of being sold to strategic buyers. That mix, if you've had more strategics, more financial buyers, you tend to get bigger uplifts.

I would say it's, yeah, it's very much function of mix. Also, even a 10% uplift is still, particularly given the underlying discount the shares trade at, we still think is very supportive of the overall NAV.

Super. Thanks, Colm.

I see no further questions online. If there are any follow-up questions after this webinar, please feel free to contact the email address that you see on your screens.

Otherwise, with that, Colm, thank you very much, and thank you all for joining today.

Thank you, everyone.