Thank you, Evie. Welcome everyone.

Thank you for joining, and delighted to be leading this, my first retail webinar as CEO. I'm going to start just by saying how the agenda overall will work here and the points that we're going to cover.

I'm going to give some introductory remarks and talk a little about the highlights from our financial year 2025, the investments that we've made, and the key takeaways, talk a little about the executive team, and our business model. I'm then going to hand over to Brad, who will talk in more detail about the specifics of our performance through 2025.

Brad's then going to hand back to myself and my colleague Ian to talk through our fundamentals of our buy-and-build strategy, acquisitions, and the organic growth model, after which we'll talk about some of the fundamentals, and finally, some time for Q&A. One of the key takeaways that we'll talk about is undoubtedly that FY '25, 2025, has been a disappointing year, but the fundamentals are intact.

In that context, it probably makes sense to have a chat about what are the fundamentals. What is Judges Scientific, and what is our business model?

Evie, if you can move us to the first slide, please. First slide, please.

Next slide? Judges Scientific is a buy-and-build group in scientific instrument markets.

Sorry, if we can go back to slide two? If we can go back to slide two, please?

Thank you. Yeah.

Judges Scientific is a buy-and-build group in scientific instrument markets. The important aspects to realize here are that we're founded on three pillars of shareholder value.

That the markets in which we play and the businesses that we seek to acquire all benefit from long-term drivers. Long-term secular drivers or underlying growth drivers.

This particularly relates to long-term demand for scientific instrumentation and scientific techniques for academic research, and how those techniques in academic research inevitably find their way into commercial applications and industrial applications, both in terms of research and processes. We also benefit from a large deal pool, a large potential pool or pool of potential companies available for acquisition.

Typically, we might deal with companies that are founder-owned. A founder has led the company for a period of time, perhaps they've reached a stage where they want to retire, and at that point, they're looking for opportunities for how they can divest the business.

The other pillar of our shareholder value is low capital use. We specialize and target businesses that have a foundation of low capital use.

We absolutely want to focus on businesses that are very high return on capital, high cash conversion. Together, that then allows us to generate cash and repay debt.

Together, those things have compounded shareholder value. Moving down the left-hand side, another key aspect of our strategy is we have an extensive and well-diversified customer base globally.

In customers in university, in industry, and in other research and compliance roles. Our diversification is broader than that.

We're geographically diverse. More than 85% of our revenue is exported.

We're also diversified in the context of the scientific techniques that we invest in. We are agnostic in our choice of scientific techniques.

We have a broad base of capabilities within the group. Our strategy is a buy-and-build strategy.

People might think of it as serial compounding. It's based on acquisitions and organic growth.

We seek to acquire businesses into the group that meet the criteria. We'll talk a little bit more about that later on.

Then to invest in those businesses to amplify their strengths and to help them grow, and help them grow in the long term. We always acquire businesses in the context of holding onto that business forever.

We never acquire a business in the context of exiting that business, but we intend to invest in that business and have it become part of our organic growth portfolio. Through the execution of that strategy over the last 20 years, we've achieved 25 acquisitions, a total dividend distribution of 9.8 times the 2005 admission price, 19% CAGR on total revenue, 7% CAGR on organic revenue, 23% CAGR on total EBIT, and 8% CAGR on organic EBIT.

Next slide, please. We have an experienced management team, and there's also been some recent additions and investments in that management team.

If I go down the right-hand side first, we were joined recently by Rick Armitage as our Group Acquisitions Executive, bolstering and expanding our acquisitions team. I should also say here with the planned succession, David moved to a non-executive chair role, but he also continues to assist us on acquisitions.

It was always David's superpower, and it's something that absolutely he wanted to remain involved in, and we wanted him to remain involved in that aspect of what we do. He remains as part of our acquisitions process, and Rick has further bolstered that.

We also welcomed John Dunn as a Portfolio Chief Executive. John joined us from Halma, and he chairs a portfolio of our companies, as does Ian Wilcock, our Group Commercial Director.

Mark Lavelle, who stepped down from the PLC board after our AGM last year, remains with the company and is working centrally, particularly focused on operational excellence. I'm here with my colleague Brad, as Chief Financial Officer.

Okay. Next slide, please.

I want to highlight here the key aspects and key takeaway messages for our presentation today. We've had a disappointing FY '25, despite a strong start, but as mentioned, the fundamentals remain intact.

We had a strong start in Q1. We delivered a Geotek coring contract as expected.

That contract was delivered and executed well. That happened in Q1.

We also, in Q1, benefited from strong order intake. However, the situation changed slightly in around March, where restrictions in US federal funding started to be introduced.

There were really two layers to this. The first context was around uncertainty.

There started to be conversations about specific universities, and beyond that, specific areas of funding and which projects might be funded or not. That had an almost immediate impact on us in terms of previously budgeted projects, and projects for some discretionary spend being held.

Subsequent to that, we then saw the real impact of funding cuts. The funding cuts started to be seen in terms of longer-term projects being put on hold or canceled.

Really, the restrictions in US federal funding is the key and material impact for our 2025. We saw a significant downturn in orders in Q2 and Q3.

Beyond this, though, we did see some geographic and market diversification that partly mitigated the US impact. We saw some growth in Asia, we saw some growth in parts of Europe, and we also saw where there was resilience across the group, it was with those companies that had some exposure to industrial applications—we'll talk a little bit more about that later on—and also those companies that had delivered new products recently.

That really focuses us on where we can make a difference. We are very mindful that there are certain things, like the US's approach to federal funding or the geopolitical climate, that we cannot influence.

We can focus on controlling the controllables. By controlling what we can control, we better navigate those things that we can't control.

The things that we want to highlight are investing for growth in talent, investing in innovation, operational capacity, and operational improvements, and working directly with those companies that were experiencing some product-specific and product line challenges. We also, as I mentioned on the previous slide, invested in management team and the planned succession, with Rick joining us, with John joining us, and with David's move to non-exec chair and my appointment.

The key takeaway is that despite it being a challenging year, a disappointing year, and despite this being the second successive year of disappointing results, the underlying fundamentals remain intact. We have a portfolio of strong exporting companies in global niches that maintain solid margins.

Our overall margin, just below 20%, was perhaps a little disappointing by our own measures, but it's still a solid result. We have a robust cash conversion enabling a rapid repayment of debt, and our 10% increase in dividend.

I'd also reconfirm that our strategy remains unchanged. We have confidence in our long-term demand drivers: the long-term requirement for scientific instrumentation and scientific techniques in academic research shifting into commercial and industrial applications, we believe remains solid.

We are committed to our disciplined acquisition process, and we are committed to our structured, decentralized organic growth methodology, all of which we'll talk about more later. Next slide, please.

I'm now going to hand over to Brad, who will take us through our performance review.

Thank you, Tim, and hello, everyone. We could move to the next slide, please.

Let me take you through the results for the past year. As Tim's already touched on, it's disappointing for us again that we've had challenging and difficult trading results.

We started the year quite well. The Geotek coring expedition had a solid order book, gave us confidence for the year.

Then, unfortunately, the effect of the US academic research funding cuts bit, and it progressively degraded our performance throughout the rest of the year. Let's look at the results.

Total revenue is up 9% to £146 million. This was a combination of total organic revenue growth of 6% plus a full-year contribution of our 2024 acquisitions.

Going back into the organic revenue growth for a moment, on a like-for-like basis, and that's if you strip out the coring expedition, which we had in '25, but didn't have in '24, then like-for-like organic revenue growth was only 2%. Behind that was a drop in order intake, which was disappointing for us.

As we said, we started the year quite well. Q1 was quite a good quarter for us, but then, ongoing decline afterwards.

Overall, the adjusted operating profits were flat at £28 million. Positive support for that from the Geotek coring expedition, and in fairness to Geotek as a whole, a good recovery from the whole business.

If you strip Geotek out from these results, the rest of our organic businesses went back by a third, which was a disappointment, and we'll see this illustrated a bit better in my bridge later. We move from profits to cash generation.

The group has a strong track record of generating good profits and turning those profits into cash. We generated £33 million of cash from operations, a cash conversion of 118%.

We've kept our discipline in this area for more than the past two years, and we've also been able to reduce overall levels of working capital. This cash generation serves to support our policy of providing shareholders with progressively increasing dividend returns.

This year, we're proposing a final dividend of 82.3 pence per share, an increase of 10% on the prior year, which, if approved at the AGM, will provide a full-year dividend of 115 pence per share. It is our second year running of minimum dividend increases as a consequence of the disappointing trading.

The cash generation has served to enable us to invest £7 million in CapEx this year, to pay £3 million in corporate taxes, distribute £7 million to our shareholders, and, in line with our buy-and-build strategy, also enable us to acquire the remaining stake in our subsidiary Geotek's Brazilian business, and still reduce our net debt. An adjusted net debt at the end of the year was down £8 million to £43.6 million.

We had gearing of 1.5 times at year-end, significant headroom on our covenants, and still a strong balance sheet position. Looking out to '26, and we still have a tricky trading environment.

We start this year with a lower than preferred order book and with order intake which is not buoyant, and with global geopolitics, as they are, weighing heavily on the economic outlook. Whilst we have the first positive signs out of the US and the first steps to restore the hiatus in the research funding, we are yet to see the funds flow, and consequently, any formal green shoots of recovery.

Therefore, the guidance that we provided shareholders with in our January trading update still stands. Moving on to the next slide, please.

I'm just going to pick up two things on here. One, Tim touched on just before, our margins, which have declined, and it's disappointing.

Whilst we've managed to grow revenue, costs have grown at the same rate. That's really an effect of a certain amount of investment in head office costs in line with the succession planning that Tim talked about before, but also a number of our businesses investing for growth, which, unfortunately, didn't come.

Consequently, we took some actions later in the year to adjust that, but the effect of those adjustments have not had a material effect on the '25 results. We also have material adjusting items.

Just want to talk about those for a moment. The largest component, £10 million of that, is the non-cash amortization of the intangible assets we recognized when we acquired businesses.

There were two other material items to talk about this year. The first relates to our 2024 acquisition of Rockwash.

That came with a significant earn-out, which, when you acquire a business under the acquisition accounting rules, you have to make your best estimate for how much you think you're going to have to pay for that earn-out. We did that, and at the end of 2024, we had an acquisition payable of £2 million.

At the same time, when you do that, you also have to increase your goodwill and intangible assets, and so we had a further £2 million that was in line with that £2 million of payable. Now, during 2025, it became apparent, and we'd have seen the first signs of that at the half year, that Rockwash's performance may not get them an earn-out, and it turned out that actually no earn-out was payable.

Consequently, we've reversed an acquisition payable of £2 million with a credit into adjusted items of £2 million. At the same time, we've also impaired those assets, the goodwill and intangible assets that were created as a result of creating the payable.

We've also had a £2 million debit. Overall, no net effect in the P&L and no cash effect either, but something worthy of note.

At the same time, we have also recognized a £2.3 million impairment to the group's goodwill for its investment in Armfield as a consequence of the prolonged period of underperformance. Then moving on to the next slide.

Just to take everyone through the graph, and there are three lines on it, as I always explain: a red line, a black line, and a green line. The red line is our internal sales budget, which we set once a year as part of our budgeting process.

The black line is our trailing 12 months of orders, and the green line is the last four months of orders annualized. The end of the graph is the middle of March this year.

What are we looking for? We're looking for, ideally, for the black line to be at least touching the red line by the end of the year, such that we have had sufficient orders with which to satisfy our sales budget.

Ideally, for the green line to be tracking the red line so we have optimal operational capacity. Now, if you look at the graph and take you back to the middle of '24, you can see that we started building momentum in orders.

You look at the green line and, to a degree, the black line, that kept rising up. Actually, the first quarter was good, and we were still going well, but when you got to the end of Q1, it turned.

Then it tumbled. It only started to improve during Q4, although if you compare the size of the Q4 on the green line to what it was at the end of '24, there's a big difference.

This is why, where we've explained it in our results, that organic intake was up 4% at the end of the first half, by the end of August it was flat, and by the end of the year it was -6%. Whilst we've had areas of decent performance, both in China and in Europe, these certainly they're not able to offset the significant effect of a near-on 25% drop in North America.

If we go back and look at the graph for the last couple of years and you compare the black line with our sales budget, you may be forgiven for thinking we've been a bit optimistic with our budgeting, and in fairness, the consequence of that is that for 2026, we've had a reset. Consequently, why, at the start of this year, our budget was aligned with the trailing 12 months of orders.

As we go into 2026, we have a lower than preferred order book, and orders year-to-date are behind the same period in '25. However, it is fair to say that the '25 comparative had no effect in relation to the US academic research funding cuts.

Moving to the next slide, please. Moving on to the bridge, and this reconciles between 2024 and 2025 profit contribution of our businesses before central costs, they're the two big blocks at either end of the graph, and reconciling between these, we have a big block of organic growth.

A large part of that is the Geotek recovery, which included coring expedition, but also growth at six other companies, including five that achieved a record. At the same time, there was a sizable drop from decline at 12 of our companies.

This included a couple of our businesses with end-market-specific challenges and a couple of our businesses with challenges in relation to products. Ian will talk a little bit about what we're doing to address these in a short while.

The effect of the US federal cuts cut across both the growth and the decline, with it exacerbating decline and reducing the growth. Then the final block is the full-year effect of our prior-year acquisitions.

Moving on to the next slide. Just going back to cash flows for a moment.

Now, we had a good cash generation this year. Cash conversion was 118%, which, on the face of it, was a little bit down on the prior year, but the prior year was inflated by the fact that we had advanced payment for the coring contract.

If you regularize this, cash conversion this year was actually 136%, compared with 104% last year. It's clear our discipline on both cash conversion and also helping look at how we can reduce the higher than desired levels of working capital is working.

We've gone down to 16% this year, but the goal for us is to reach 10%, and that's 10% of annual revenue. If we do that, we can release up to £8 million of cash, which is a significant opportunity for us.

Lots of focus will continue on that, and Ian will also talk a little bit about some of the things we're doing to help release some of that over the coming couple of years. Net debt continued to drop, and we finished the year with a leverage of 1.5 times, compared with 1.7 times the prior year, with significant headroom on our covenants, significant borrowing capacity, and the continued strong support of our group of banks: Lloyds, Santander, and HSBC, who this year have replaced Bank of Ireland in the banking group, and we're delighted to have them on board.

Moving on to the next slide. I won't dwell too long on the return on total invested capital, or ROTIC, other than to say it's a key measure for us.

We start on the left-hand side when we acquired FTT and we paid nearly five times, we start around 20%, and growing ROTIC thereafter requires improved financial performance and/or acquiring businesses at lower multiples. You can see, as you go across the graph, when we acquired the bigger businesses, GDS, Scientifica, in the early teens, and we paid six times, well, they were big deals for us back then, and when we also acquired Geotek in May '22 and paid seven times.

The smaller deals minimally affect ROTIC now. Whilst we managed to increase our ROTIC for the year-end by 1.3% to 17.8% at year-end, we still have a long way to go and big improvements in our financial performance for us to be able to achieve our long-term target, which is 30%.

Moving on to the next slide, please. I won't dwell on this slide other than to say diversification works for us.

What I mean by that is in a year where we suffered significantly in the US, the group has still managed to deliver earnings that are more than two-thirds of its previous record. At the same time, it's clear to us that we could and should be better diversified, particularly in our exposure to industry.

Again, I keep giving Ian something to do, he'll be talking a little bit about what we're doing to address this. Moving on to my last slide.

This slide summarizes some key financial statistics about the long-term success of this group. Revenue, profits, and earnings per share have all grown strongly over our history, and we continue to have long-term high-quality CAGR: organic revenue of 7% with associated EBIT growth of 8% over 19 years.

Dividends have grown strongly over the life of the group, and we're proposing an increase of 10% to the full-year dividend. The compound growth of the dividend remains above 20%.

The group's continued focus on cash generation serves to protect it in times of challenging market conditions, enables us to rapidly pay down acquisition debt, and supports that progressive dividend policy. On that note, we'll pass back to Tim to talk through the growth strategy.

Thank you, Brad. Great.

Ian and I, principally Ian, I have to say, will talk through the growth strategy. I'll talk us through the acquisition side, then hand over to Ian to talk about some of the organic initiatives.

Next slide, please. Our buy-and-build strategy, as we mentioned before, split across acquisitions and organic growth.

If we move straight to acquisitions on the next slide. The headline here is strict discipline.

If I talk through some of the attributes of our target businesses and emphasize what that means for us. What makes a target business for Judges and the Judges model?

We are looking for strong exporters in global niche markets for scientific instruments and techniques. I think important to emphasize that we are somewhat agnostic about what the exact scientific techniques are.

We have a broad diversification of techniques within the group. We're also looking for cultural alignment, a focus on innovation, a focus on entrepreneurialism, openness, and frugality in how the business is managed.

We ask and expect the MDs of our businesses to lead those businesses as if they are the owners. We are looking for the owners of businesses from whom we are acquiring to also be leading those businesses figuratively and literally as if they are the owners.

We also look for robust margins. That demonstrates differentiation and pricing power.

We look for businesses that generate sustainable EBIT and cash flows at high return on sales. A key takeaway from there is that we are focused on high-quality businesses.

We are not focused on turnarounds, for example. Deal parameters: we pay 3 times to 7 times EBIT, more typically we pay 4 times to 6 times according to size.

We have flexibility in our deal structure. What we mean from that is we include things like earn-outs where that's required.

There have been some occasions where former owners have also bought back into the business in some context. It's important that we allow some flexibility in the deal structure to make sure that we can unlock deals.

We're funded with cash and debt, borrowing up to 3 times EBITDA, 3% to 8%. In 2025, we finalized the acquisition of our minority holding in Geotek Brasil.

Geotek Brasil is the Brazilian-based services part of the Geotek business. An 18% minority share that was not acquired at the time that we acquired Geotek was acquired last year for £1.9 million, plus excess cash and an earn-out up to £0.7 million.

That's low risk for us. It was a business that we knew and understood, and has been immediately earnings enhancing.

We'll talk through the key attributes of the deals through those green dots at the bottom. We buy high-quality businesses.

As I say, we don't focus on turnarounds. We look for high quality in the attributes that I mentioned above.

Also, we buy businesses that are for sale. The owners have come to a conclusion that it's time for a transaction, and that is the deal pool within which we look.

Deals can be characterized by long incubation. Although a lot of the deal flow that we look at is inbound, we also do develop relationships with potential companies and potential sellers, but some of those could be a decade or more in terms of incubation before the seller comes to a conclusion that now is the right time for them to sell.

Crystallization is notoriously erratic. What we mean by that is that we can't always be certain around when the seller is going to decide that it's the right time for them, when the process is going to work out, or exactly the timing of this.

We absolutely do not look to target ourselves with one deal a year or achieving a particular deal. That's an important attribute in the context of this next circle.

We aim to do deals. It's a fundamental part of what we are and who we are.

We need to do deals, but not any specific deal. We must always have the opportunity to walk away.

We don't tend to focus on very specific areas of technology that means, for example, there's only three companies and we have to acquire all of them, or we don't put ourselves in a situation where we can't walk away from a deal. We aim to do deals, but not any specific deal.

David, over the last 20 years, built Judges a reputation as an honorable acquirer. We are very conscious that we do lots of deals, but generally speaking, the people from whom we acquire are going to go through one deal, maybe two, but typically one deal in their lifetime.

This is a process which is stressful. This is a process to which they're not used to.

We see it as vital that we have an honorable approach to that process. We don't chip.

Whatever we agree in the heads, subject to not finding anything materially different through our diligence process, that's the deal that we honor, to provide that certainty to the seller. The model then is to generate cash, reduce debt, and repeat.

I'll now pass to Ian on the next slide to talk about our organic growth strategy.

Okay. Thanks very much, Tim, and hello everybody.

This slide really covers our model, and I'm not I'm sure everyone on the slide on the call is not familiar necessarily with our model, but the key word is decentralized. I'll explain what that means in a minute.

The left-hand side is talks to our kind of framework and structure of the of of the business. The right-hand side is more about our culture and our growth ambitions.

We're a decentralized group, which puts considerable autonomy and responsibility and indeed trust on the individual businesses, 20-plus businesses that we have across the group. Really starting on the the top left-hand side, strong leadership teams, that model only works if we do indeed have that, strong leadership teams.

We we spend a considerable degree of time focusing on our on our leadership, on leadership skill sets. 20 2025 has actually been a bit of a year of change for us.

We actually changed out seven of our MDs for different reasons, and please please don't take away the impression that we're a hire-and-fire group, that's absolutely not our culture at all. For different reasons, MDs changed.

We changed seven, and whenever this happens, it's an opportunity to bring in additional capabilities and so on. Not just MD, all of our businesses will have strong leadership teams covering finance, sales and marketing operations, engineering, and so on, all of the disciplines you'd expect.

So, 2025 has been a year of considerable talent recruitment, and I think we all believe that we now have the strongest leadership teams we've ever had in our in our businesses. Focusing on the middle the middle circle there, robust governance and financial controls, of course, a decentralized group only really works if you do have some controls.

Of course, you've got your usual financial controls, as you would expect in any in any business, but we also make sure we have a a rigorous set of controls, particularly around export control, for example, and the training there. Cybersecurity is obviously a big theme for us, and making sure we're we're up to to speed on that, doing that correctly.

More recently, for example, we've implemented an AI best-use policy partly to, if you like, set a set a floor in terms of our minimum standards expected so we've got responsible use, but also frankly a more focus on best-case examples of where you can get growth using AI. I should also stress, though, that the the the whole, whilst there is robust governance and financial controls, we do aim for it to be as light touch as possible.

We do not want to encumber our businesses with overarching processes and systems. Indeed, in the center, we do not have the resources for that anyway.

We are deliberately a an asset-light business, and have a small center. All of our resources, as much as possible, are out in our businesses.

If the left-hand side is working correctly, there's a good autonomy and accountability to the center. We can now focus on the right-hand side, which is really about our growth culture, and how do we aim to do that?

The top right one is leveraging group-wide experience. We we have incredible people across our businesses in all of the disciplines I've mentioned.

One thing we've made good progress on in '25 is is creating communities and leadership groups in all these disciplines. We have a a really maturing sales leadership group taking our top sales directors, looking at best practice there.

Could be, for example, looking at training, could be looking at CRM pipeline management, and so on. We do the same in operations, particularly looking at things like working capital, which I'll I'll talk about a little bit later.

It could be an engineering around recruitment best practices, patenting, patenting best practices. These these communities have been tremendously successful in in sharing best practice, creating almost like a self-starting community amongst themselves.

Our businesses are all small businesses. It can be a little bit lonely, I guess, in time, it's creating these wider communities and that they're really self self-starting.

Through that, then, we can, the middle point, we can also promote excellence, we we, of course, in our roles, we see some tremendously interesting strategies and and projects that we do, and then we we really try to promote some some some excellence across the group. One of the things we've done quite recently is looking at application of AI for growth, and we've had a number of projects across the group, for example, an AI service engine in one of our businesses to hugely improve customer service and knowledge management within within the business.

Another one focused on business development to enable us to rapidly move into a new vertical market using existing technology in an area we were less familiar with. That was that was very exciting.

The bottom right is encouraging ambition. I'm going to talk a little bit later about that, but that really talks to our strategy process.

We aim we task the businesses to come forward with ambitious strategies, which will double EBIT in usually three to five-year kind of time frame, and I'll but I will talk about that in a little bit later. Next slide, please.

We we've listened to requests over the years for a little bit more detail of individual businesses. We have talked about Geotek in the past, but we thought we'd we'd lift the lid a little bit and and and pick up some some themes to explore.

Now, the first one of these is identifying certain long-term growth drivers, and my colleagues have already mentioned that we've had good success in '25 in selling to industry. In fact, that's one of been one of the the bright spots of the year in in otherwise been quite a difficult year.

Here's three businesses which has done really well in taking core scientific techniques, often which have been developed in an academic environment, and applying them to to business. We all know the the industrial market is much larger than than in academic market, there's huge potential.

CoolLED would be a kind of poster child for that for us, taking a a core scientific technique, in this case, LED for LED illumination, traditionally for fluorescence microscopy, which is a core technique in spatial biology and in life science, firstly applying it to automated fluorescence, this is in a diagnostics world in industry, but then taking it to a completely new area, which is semiconductor inspection. Then that's, an exciting growing theme for us.

The other two businesses, Dia-Stron and Scientifica, also have very strong industrial sales as well. All three businesses are trading at a at a record, so that that was a real bright spot for us.

The next slide, please, really talks about specific challenges we've had. Now, we've alluded in the past in communications to specific product-related issues we've had in some businesses, we thought we'd lift the lid on that a little bit.

The three businesses in this case we're talking about are listed there on the left. Our first one is Fire Testing Technology, which is a kind of fire science business.

It looks at, as the name would imply, testing materials to certain standards for use in in often in buildings. Market leaders for many years.

Business ran into certain product obsolescence problems, increased competition. That's caused us to actually need to accelerate some investment in that in that space to to recover what is otherwise a very strong strong business and and strong brand.

It's a multi-year project. We're right in the middle of it, but it is it has caused, financial performance issues and and and so on, but it's it's something we're we're absolutely focused on at the moment.

The second one would be Armfield. It's a slightly different product-related challenge, but nevertheless equally serious.

Armfield has many products it sells, equipment for education in academic university environments largely, and also food science, food technology. Coming out of COVID and and the period after that, traditionally, Armfield's outsourced a lot of of its manufacturing, ran into numerous supply chain issues and suppliers exiting the market.

It caused this to find a lot of new suppliers, caused this a lot to require to insource a lot of stuff, and of course, because it's so many products, it's actually been a multi-year multi-year project which we are still in the thick of, have made some good progress in '25, and continue to do so. It but it has been an area of big focus for us.

The final one, Scientifica, which is a slightly different example, it's again, it's a product-related example. Our ideal Judges product, if you like, is a product which sells in a niche, has a strong market share and technological advantages in the in the niche, and, enables us therefore to, to get pricing power and so on.

Where we do not have that, and and we we recognize, came to recognize in one of the Scientifica products what was not didn't have those characteristics, we looked at a number of options, and in the end, we decided to exit that particular market. Obviously, had to take some cost and and run through that in 20 in 2025 as well.

We did it, of course, respectfully, with a with a view to, looking after existing customers for a for a certain period as well. It's also worth pointing out, actually, that both Armfield and Scientifica are our businesses with some of the most exposure to the US and the US academic market, so that that hasn't helped the whole picture for the these two businesses.

Next slide, please. This slide looks at the disciplined ambition, and how do we set the right culture so that we, we get the business to really focus on growth.

Obviously, it stems from having the right leadership in in in there in the first place, that I've talked about, but once we've got that, we then absolutely encourage a a a focus on on where the growth markets are, where the growth opportunities are. We do that a number of ways.

We have an annual strategy process about to kick off actually in in towards the end of Q2, and here we look at, as I've alluded to, we want them to put together plans which will double EBIT in three to five years. They need to take a very market-intimate view.

Obviously, that comes from a knowledge of where the opportunities lie in the market. It also comes with a discipline of focusing on the right areas and not too many areas.

We in in in the process, we have what's called key strategic initiatives, no more than six, preferably fewer, and these are the key things a business is going to do over multiple years, which is going to deliver that growth. We then monitor these on a on a monthly basis with the management teams.

The other thing we're doing this year, which we'll talk about I think in future communications, is really focusing on innovation, how we measure innovation. Innovation is obviously the lifeblood in in in for future growth.

There is indeed a strong correlation between those businesses which have done well in in 20 in 2024, '25, and their ability to consistently deliver products to the market, which will take market share, and indeed the reverse. We're going to become full of vitality index, which will be a measure of the percentage of revenue coming from new products or margin from new products, and that's something we will we will communicate in in in future future future communications.

Then the final slide from me. I think I've saved the best for last, which is the improved working capital performance, everyone's favorite topic.

Brad's already alluded to the fact we made some progress in '25, but not as much as we would have liked. We are targeting another £8 million improvement in working capital, and and a lot of that will come from better inventory management.

Once you Pareto it out, it's really about half a dozen of our businesses which have got the biggest challenge. Complex set of reasons.

If it was that easy, we would have already fixed it, I guess. Some of it is around procurement maturity and and procurement teams, some of it is around ERP, MRP systems and the correct use of them, or indeed having them in the first place.

Some of them is around sort of working working progress processes and and so on. It's a complex set of challenges in these these half a dozen or so businesses.

Here we are leaning on our operations network, which I talked about earlier. Actually, but also this is something that Mark's working on.

We're taking our top operations leaders in the group and helping with task force basically to help these half a dozen businesses to really focus on best practice, to help them drive the working capital where they they wanted to be. We expect to report on some progress on on that throughout the year.

Okay. I hope you appreciate a bit of a deep dive into some of our businesses, some of our challenges and opportunities.

I shall hand back over to to Tim.

Thank you, Ian. Great.

If we can move to the next slide, please. I'm going to bring the presentation to an end just by by talking about the the outlook and investment case, and then we'll move into into Q&A.

Firstly, the outlook, if we can move to the next slide, please. The summary points here for 2026.

I think it's fair to state the obvious, geopolitical turbulence continuing into 2026. Acknowledging that those things there's clearly things that we can't control, and in many cases things that it's unclear yet what the full outcome of those would be, but significant levels of turbulence continuing into this year.

We'd also highlight that uncertainties remain around US federal funding. Since since our January update, trading update, the US Congress has approved the next round of of the 2026 budget for US funding of scientific academic research, and that funding was restored to prior levels there or thereabouts.

We see that as really positive news, insofar as the opposite would obviously have been very negative news news. At the moment, there remains uncertainty around how that how the funding will actually flow.

The positive is that it's it's been it's been signed, it's been signed into law, and particularly that there was very strong bipartisan support for that for that bill, which is something that isn't heard of particularly often at the moment in in the US. We do see that as a long-term positive indicator that the US does want to return to some sense of normality in terms of funding fundamental scientific research as a core driver of of of societal growth and improvement.

What remains uncertain at the moment is the timing, how those funds will actually be dispersed through the various fund-granting bodies like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and in terms in turn, how that funding will find its way into grant applications. There remain uncertainties around around that funding situation for us.

You will have seen from the order book chart earlier, after a strong Q1 last year, we had a much weaker Q2 and Q3, a little bit of recovery in Q4, but still lower than ideal, the result of which was that we brought forward into 2026 a lower than desired order book: 15.7 weeks. Year to year-to-date, order intake is 17% behind the same period last year.

As Brad mentioned earlier, it's worth reminding that that is relative to our strongest period last year, and it's also worth mentioning that it's still early during the year. At 17%, it could be a couple of instrument orders or a stocking order from an OEM or a distributor that could shift that percentage by a few points either way, but it's still behind where we would like it to be.

All of this reinforcing for us that the key thing that we need to do is control the controllables. There are various things that we just don't have control of, like the geopolitical turbulence, but if we control the controllables as best we can, then we stand a much better chance of navigating those things that we can't control.

For us, restoring performance is key. We reiterate we have confidence in the long-term drivers, and the business model is intact.

We think, in the long term, that underlying demand for the types of products and services that we provide will will continue to grow. There will continue to be demand for scientific instrumentation, servicing academic research, and growing into commercial and industrial applications, we believe remains solid.

Our business model, a disciplined acquisition disciplined acquisitions and our organic growth model remains intact, and we remain committed to it. Our 2026 guidance is for earnings per share between 200 and 250 pence.

That remains unchanged prior update in January. We'd also like to remind that, at the moment, we believe the next Geotek coring expedition is expected in early 2027.

In other words, the 2026 guidance does not include a Geotek coring expedition. I'll move on to the next slide now, please, which is the final slide, reminder of our investment case.

I think the key things to remind here, the business model, three pillars of our shareholder value: the long-term drivers, the large deal pool, and the low capital use. Those remain the same, and remain intact.

We have a robust business model that we pursue with discipline: earnings-enhancing acquisitions, we are diversified by geography, and diversified by application, with that agnostic approach to the businesses that we acquire. We've delivered dividend growth of 10% plus for 19 years, a CAGR of 21% since 2005.

With that, I'll bring the presentation to an end, and we'll move to our Q&A. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Evie. It is something that we have been discussing and discuss on a regular basis, but I will hand over to Brad for that question.

Yeah. Thanks, Tim.

It's quite clear that we understand that the share price is lower than it has been for some time. When you actually do the maths and you look at the return you get for a share buyback at the moment, the consequence, especially in a year where we expect our performance to go backwards given the circumstances that we've already communicated to the market, what doing a share buyback program would do for us would be to increase our leverage, take us much more highly levered, and therefore add quite a significant cost to our interest, such that, for any reduction or improvement you get in context of the savings you get by reducing dilution, the impact on earnings per share is actually less than that you get for dilution.

That at the moment, unless our share price was substantially lower than where it is at the moment, it actually isn't very good value for shareholders, particularly if you're comparing the use of that capital compared with completing on an acquisition, which gives you a much better return on your money, particularly on average that we get 20% return on our money when we acquire a business. Appreciate it's a very reasonable question to ask.

If we were in a period where we really didn't foresee the ability to complete acquisitions, then I think share buybacks may become a more pressing question for us. As it stands at the moment, we feel it's not the best use of shareholders' funds.

If I maybe layer something on there as well, I assume the point around tax efficiency is regarding potentially a choice between dividends or share buyback. We're also very cognizant that our shareholder base will include many different people and institutions with different demands, different requirements.

We wish to continue to provide our shareholders with a means to generate income without having to sell down their shareholding.

The context of that question, if it's intended in a long-term view, I think, yes, we are still finding good businesses to buy. We don't see it as something which is getting harder in a sort of sustained or systemic way.

I think what we would highlight is the current environment is challenging. We are looking to acquire high-quality businesses with owners who wish to sell, but they may not wish to sell off the back of a poor year, if there's been a poor year, or they may have a particular number in mind, and that number in mind may imply a higher multiple or a higher valuation if they're not performing at their best at the moment.

What we're tending to find is that sellers are patient, and we need to be patient as well. While there may be opportunities to acquire lower-quality businesses, that's not our strategy.

I I think clearly, there are the the various geopolitical risks that that that we've mentioned, which and the the main risk there, I guess, is the the unknown. I should highlight, and I wonder whether it might be a question, but our direct exposure to the Middle East is not very much, around 2% of revenue.

In that sense, there is there's not a huge a huge risk to the group as a whole in that respect, but it does rather depend upon the extent to which that conflict grows or escalates or or what the knock-on effects are. For sure, that's a that is a major concern for us.

The other major concern is obviously the the timing associated with the the return of US federal US federal funding, and and our exposure to that. I guess I'd also highlight the the the requirement, we talked about focusing on controlling the controllables and helping those businesses who are experiencing some some challenges to get those fixed.

The longer that takes us, the longer that that's that goes on for, is is some degree of risk as well. Ian, Brad, do you want to add anything else you'd want to highlight in that?

I think it's pretty comprehensive. I think I maybe just add, with governments around the world potentially under financial stress, there might be a question on academic funding more generally, not just in the US.

Obviously, we hope that's not the case, but we don't know. Obviously, more than half of our end-user customers are in academic institutions.

That's a very good point, Ian. Of course, we know that the UK government is also talking about funding associated with some fundamental research.

If that's theoretical research, perhaps we're less directly impacted by it, but it's clearly an example of a government making a choice of where it wants to deploy its limited set of funds to, and so, yeah, that is a wider risk for us as well.

Brad, do you want to take that?

I think that it's a stretch to think that the US will not recover. The question is about the timing of it.

I would challenge that theory to say that the US understands, as the consequence of signing in the bill and with cross-party support, that investment in R&D in the US is what has made that economy great for the best part of the last 100 years. I don't believe that anyone across government as a whole, and that's a strong statement for me to make in fairness, really believes that we shouldn't do proper research.

I don't believe that that is a long-term event, maybe not even a medium-term event, but

the question is in the next few months to year or so whether it starts coming back to the rate that we hope it should come back to. I'm not sure I could call it a new normal.

I think we have an expectation that our businesses produce high-quality equipment for markets that need their equipment, and that we shouldn't be expecting that the expected performance for '26 to be our norm, and I don't think we should strive for it either. I think it's also worth adding, just re-emphasizing, Brad, that the guidance we have put out for '26 does not assume a recovery in the US.

I know you said that, but just to re-emphasize that point.

Absolutely clear, Ian. That's why my expectation is that this is not the new normal.

It's a base we build from.

Thanks, both. Yeah.

Agreed. Our guidance, 200 to 250, was based on no recovery in the US and no coring contract, but we absolutely wouldn't regard that as the new normal.

I was just going to say, I think the second part of that question, Ian covered that earlier in the presentation. The first part, well, if you compare our results, or predicted results, for this year coming to last year, the flat answer to that is that we shouldn't expect '26 to be a year of a return to organic growth, unfortunately.

However, what we do believe, and I said this earlier, is that, fundamentally, the conditions over the medium and long term exist for us to be able to continue to grow at least the long-term CAGR of 7% that we've done over the last 19 years. There's no one across our team that believes any differently, but we do know that every so often there can be moments when we have a hiatus, but we need to work very, very hard to try and avoid that.

Great question. The way I'd answer that is come at it from a couple of points of view.

The majority of companies that we've acquired are clearly UK-based companies, with the exception of an acquisition in the US and an acquisition in Switzerland. It will be incorrect to think of us as a solely UK-focused acquirer.

We recognize that we need to raise our profile, and so it's something that we absolutely want to do is to raise our profile for acquisitions certainly in the US, certainly in Europe, possibly wider than that as well. We absolutely would consider acquiring businesses outside of the UK.

The fact that the businesses that we have acquired, thinking about Lucléo and Bossa Nova, have been synergistic bolt-ons, I'd say is actually rather coincidence than anything else. It's not that that's our focus for acquisitions outside the UK.

Where I might say that there might be an area for us to consider is, would we, if we were looking to acquire somewhere outside the UK as a standalone entity, would that be a completely new market, or would there be something which is at least some sense of synergy with a market that we already have some involvement in? That might be a consideration, but probably not a limitation.

We're absolutely interested in acquiring overseas.

I think the simple answer to that is yes, we generally see a higher level of competition from Chinese companies. Ian, do you want to layer a bit more on that?

I think I'd answer that in two ways. One is, certainly within China itself, there is a lot of innovation going on.

There's some very competent competitors. Not that we fear that, in many ways competition is good.

The best of them, they are increasing, approaching the world market. Whilst we should be cognizant of that and appreciative of that, I actually am confident that, with the relentless focus on innovation that I've talked about and the agility that our businesses have, and that market understanding, I think we can come through that.

We see that actually as something we need to deal with, obviously, and in fact, I alluded to with the Fire Testing Technology business, that is, in fact, one of the reasons why that product update and that investment we need to do is a direct response of the Chinese situation. It doesn't overly worry me, but it's certainly something we're cognizant of it.

I think the simple answer to that is yes, there is activity, there is outreach, and response as well to inbound inquiries. We are ongoing conversations with a number of opportunities.

I'd highlight the points that I raised on my slide earlier. This is notoriously erratic in how it progresses.

We are pleased that we have that additional bandwidth, and it is allowing us to move through and sift through opportunities quicker. Rick is providing an excellent level of outreach, of investigation, and of triage in some description, which is proving very effective for us.

I acknowledge that, other than the Geotek Brasil, there was not an acquisition closed last year.

That's okay. You may have missed the short summary in the acquisition note that explains that what we're doing with that acquisition is we're actually paying it over 60 monthly installments.

It is a long-term payable that we have. That's why you won't have seen the amount going out.

We owe it, and we're quite happy to acknowledge that we owe it and it's an acquisition payable on the balance sheet, but we haven't yet settled it all because we're paying it over five years. Additionally, there is a potential earn-out of up to £0.7 million, and that will be payable based on next year's performance.

If they achieve the maximum, then we'd be paying that in 2027. That would be a lump sum.

Hope that answers your question.

Noted. I have to say, I'd have to take guidance on what the historical was, because my understanding was the historical was closer to 5%, and it moved to 10% for a period of time.

It's moving the 5% back down to where it was historically. The question is certainly noted, and that's a conversation that we would be having with our Remuneration Committee.

I think, if I may, I'll take that one initially, but then also Brad, Ian, please come in. I think the points I'd make there is that there were several examples during the year of actions that were taken on cost.

For example, right at the beginning of the year, there was some restructuring in Scientifica after we exited the product line, some costs associated with that, but also costs coming out of the business. Then throughout the year, there were actions taken on headcount that resulted in some restructuring costs, but a reduced headcount.

I'd also mention that correspondingly, there were some investments, and we've mentioned already some of the investments in R&D and engineering effort required at companies including FTT, and management capability, management bandwidth, generally investing in talent across the group, and particularly where there were growth opportunities. We did take action, but we acknowledge though that there was an increase in the overhead that closely matched the revenue increase.

I would add a little bit to this, which is, firstly, that the issue in relation to the US came out at the end of Q1, when we'd had a pretty good first quarter. It becomes an emerging issue, which we originally thought wouldn't be as significant, and maybe that's our naivety, but when we were at the year-end results last year, we did explain that we thought it wouldn't be that significant.

It took time before we realized it was bigger than perhaps we thought it would be, and for the fact that it was prolonged. The second thing I would say is, which is an easy thing for us to do, which is to say, well, if your revenue is not going to be as high, then you should cut a requisite amount of costs.

I think an important thing for us to say is we're not a sort of slash-and-burn type organization,

and

we certainly don't have the aggressive mindset about short-term cost-cutting that you would find in a US corporate. We think that's important, and for good reason, because we're trying to build for the long term.

If every time you have what you believe might be a short-term hiccup, and you slash your costs, you damage your culture and you damage your long-term outlook. I think the other side to this is also that we've taken and challenged our businesses about taking the right steps as a consequence of not having a successful year as we hoped we had last year, and on the back of the fact that we had a tougher year for us in '24 as well, and I think we took prudent decisions as a consequence.

Now, I would note one other thing, which is that, if you read our accounts carefully, you'll note that we haven't ever, certainly during my 11 years of tenure, ever recorded exceptional items for restructuring costs. We haven't done so this year either.

We treat those costs as a cost of doing business, and such that those costs go through our trading P&L. Part of the reason we also have slightly higher costs is the effect of the cost of making those changes is also in our trading P&L, not separated out like a one-off item.

I think just to add to that, Brad, I think, to some extent, that hides the fact that several businesses did go through some difficult restructuring with all the costs for that. A lot of that was mid-year, for the reasons you've just said, has to go through the P&L, and we are only seeing the benefit of that this year from an overhead standpoint.

Yep.

Thanks. Great questions.

I'll address them in order. The customer base for these pressure coring expeditions is relatively small.

Historically, this has been related to country-sponsored expeditions, and those sponsoring countries have been Japan, China, India, and the US. What I mean by that is that the overall landscape here is relatively small in terms of the people and the organizations involved in this, and we are well known in that landscape, and well established, and know and understand what's happening and the people involved in there.

There are conversations ongoing all the time. We hesitate to call it a pipeline, because what always remains unclear is the exact timing of these things.

Geotek really doesn't have a say in the timing. It tends to be dictated more around seasonal issues, depending on for which country and which location this is, and these are major projects, major undertakings involving multiple activities, multiple projects, the hiring of a vessel, and so forth.

They tend to be a long lead time and with some significant uncertainty in the timing. Our knowledge of and conversations with the people involved in this sort of ecosystem gives us a good degree of confidence in that sort of regularity of those expeditions.

The second point, I'll respond to, but I'll say very openly that it's rather speculative. Our sense of high oil prices or correlation with the oil price or a correlation of the realization of how sensitive the world is to certain restrictions, for example, the Straits of Hormuz and who has control over that, would beg the question, well, is that going to accelerate countries who are currently reliant on that to take a look at alternative arrangements, whether that means a faster transition to wind power, for example, or other green energy technologies, or whether that means investigating alternative hydrocarbons.

It is the case that the methane hydrates that form the basis of these coring expeditions are vast resources of alternative hydrocarbons, and so, yeah, it's rather speculative. We just don't know, and these things would take many, many years to develop.

It could be that if the oil price stays at a sustained high, and if the volatility in that particular region remains the case, then that could be a long-term driver for that.

to extend the words for all of the other viewers, the the comment is in relation to capital projects within the group, and this is we're coming to the end of what I think has been almost a sort of four-year, what feels a bit like a four-year project, the number of our businesses moving and either us funding a new building acquisition and its subsequent refurbishment or something similar to that. The last one of our businesses that are in the middle of the final steps of their move, their building will be ready, I think, at the within the next few weeks.

As it stands at the moment, we have no large capital projects that I can see on the horizon, such that that should mean that a couple of million less a year will be spent on on CapEx for the foreseeable future. Hope that helps answer.

I'm glad to say that this was the only scheme we had. It should be, within the next month or two, no longer on the group's books.

I'm glad to say that we've been able to secure and guarantee the future of all of the pensions within the Armfield defined-benefit pension scheme, and there are no other defined-benefit pension schemes within the group.

do you have that number to hand?

I don't have that number to hand. It's a very good question.

Around 85% of our group's revenue is instruments, spares, etc., and around 15% is services, of which a large chunk of that relates to services that are outside what you've just mentioned. Some of the maintenance revenue would be quite low, maybe 1% 1% to 2%, something like that, a few percent for spares.

What I can't really give you much of a clarity on is the sort of replacement instrument cost, because I just don't have the detail for that, unfortunately, at the moment.

I would say we are cognizant that's an area that we can probably improve on. We're conscious across our group we have businesses that have been selling instrumentation to their end users for decades, a significant installed base.

An opportunity to increase the level of service and service-related revenue through value-added services is absolutely something that we want to look at improving across the group.

The simple answer is they're all done by HQ. There might be examples and situations where a subsidiary suggests or brings an acquisition to us, that's happened on a number of occasions, but that the actual implementation or development of the running of the acquisition process is something which is done at a group level, but there are also some cases where the acquired company is from a structural perspective, is acquired by one of our other group companies.

It's essentially the acquisition process is run by group.

If I may, I'll respond initially to this, and then Ian can I get your views as well. I think the context I like to frame this in is by saying why it is that we challenge the companies in that way, so that the strategy plan process asks the companies to respond to the challenge, "How would you be or become a business that doubles in size every three to five years?"

As the question says, that implies 15% to 25% growth a year, which is higher than our historic normal. I think in that context, what we're implying there is that continuing to do as you were, delivers high single-digit growth.

If you're planning and attempting, trying, and investing in growing significantly higher than that, 15% to 25%, then you are, by definition, doing something very deliberate about it. It's that deliberateness that we're seeking to capture there in the planning process, asking the companies to work iteratively, in a sense, to try and identify what are the few, and Ian mentioned earlier, four to six, potentially most impactful initiatives that they could work on to deliver a higher level of growth above the underlying growth, and then what do they need to do to turn those initiatives into actions?

Ian, anything to add on that?

I'm not sure I've got much to add other than just to emphasize that, yeah, it gets them to think big and not sort of incrementally. I think that's really the key message, to get across the ambition that they should be looking to drive.

We mentioned earlier our revenue exposure to the Middle East, excluding Israel, is maybe a couple of percent at the moment. In that sense, the direct material impact for us is not huge.

Where there is uncertainty is how long this goes on for and what it might mutate into, and whether it turns into a much larger issue in terms of an energy challenge, supply chain challenge, and as I say, how long that goes on for. In that sense, I'm not sure we're in a position to give a definitive response on that about how big that could be.

Thanks, Evie. Thank you.

Final closing remark is to thank everyone for attending. I hope this was useful.

Thank you to Ian and Brad for your contributions as well.