Good afternoon, and welcome to everybody that's joining us on the platform. My name's Russ, I'm the Chief Exec, design engineer, being with the company since 2013, and my colleague on my left is Nick Lowe, he's our Chief Financial Officer, very experienced FCA, joined the company back in May 2017 as our CFO.

Really, here today to talk about our first-half results, which are very good. If there's anybody on the platform that doesn't know much about Journeo, we are an intelligent systems provider working in transport, transit, networks, and critical national infrastructure, with a common theme of technology, cyber protection, and safety and security.

Our first-half results are good. Revenue is up significantly, profits up, we're cash generative, we've got an increase in the sizable sales opportunity pipeline.

In the first 6 months, we've been strengthening the management team to prepare ourselves for further growth, and we also have an active M&A program. The way that our business has been organized historically has been in the individual brand silo base, but as we've got larger, we actually wanted to provide a clear line of sight through our organization for the benefit of our customers.

We're organizing ourselves internally along these three nodes: an integrated systems, where we design and deliver and support safety-critical onboard systems for bus, coach, and rail applications; we have the information systems teams, which are about design, manufacture, installation, and management of passenger information systems and digital out-of-home systems, and that includes the software that acquires the information, processes it, and then ultimately displays it, and that's for bus, tram, transit, and rail; and more recently, since the acquisition in September last year, we have the infrastructure protection, where that really is an end-to-end infrastructure protection systems business for nationally significant infrastructure projects and sites of critical national infrastructure. Our intention as we go forward is that we grow the business through these, future acquisitions will sit within these nodes or actually at the intersections on the diagram, and they will share things, common areas of HR, finance, treasury, marketing, and research and development, but they will retain their very sharp domain expertise.

This slide really is just a snapshot of the people that we work with, and we're equally happy to work with, very large airports or fleet operators, but equally, we're very pleased to work with small operators with one or two coaches, that sort of thing. We have a span of customers ranging from US-based OUTFRONT Media company, Skånetrafiken in Sweden, and airports at Heathrow, Dublin, Gatwick, Stansted, etc.

In terms of KPIs, we've got 35,000 assets now connected to our platform on a concurrent basis. We currently handle about 2 million passenger systems a day, passenger journeys a day.

That will rise to 3 million shortly, following the award for the Boston Massachusetts Transit Authority systems, where they have about 880,000 passengers a day. There's currently around 300 people employed directly in Journeo.

I'll hand over to Nick to run through the financial results for the first half.

Okay. As Russ said, it was a very, very good half of the group.

Revenue was up 53% year-on-year to £37.6 million. Pure organic basis, revenue was up by 30%, so, again, organically very, very strong as well.

Group gross margins were up by 1%, so that meant the overall gross profit was up 57% to £14.5 million. We had some overhead investment in the half, in terms of flowing down to the bottom, adjusted profit before tax, still strong, was up 10% to £3 million, and we followed that into EPS as well, where we were up at 13.6p per share.

Again, Russ mentioned cash. We are very operationally cash generative.

Taking a straight year-on-year comparison, cash was down by £5.4 million, but we did invest £10.7 million in the Crime & Fire acquisition, our true cash, removing that, actually increased by £5.3 million from a year ago. We invest heavily in R&D.

We spent over a million in the half, vast majority passes through the P&L, our adjusted PBT of £3 million is fundamentally after writing off the majority of the R&D spend. Segmentally, if we start with infrastructure protection, this is the new segment following the acquisition of Crime & Fire in September last year, it delivered £10.6 million of revenue, which is 27% total group revenue.

Gross margins were good, very good, 45%, which delivered £4.8 million gross profit. Overheads in this segment are a little heavier, and that actually accounts for the vast majority of the overhead increase in the group on a year-to-year comparison.

Overall, the result was a contribution of 6%, which is just over £600,000. As we move forward with this segment, we expect it will hit, I guess, the margins we have across the rest of the group, we expect a double-digit bottom-line margin for this as we move forward.

Information systems, a phenomenally strong half for revenue. We were up 40% year-on-year to £13.9 million, which is now 36% of group revenue.

Gross profit didn't increase by as much, we were up 12% to £5.3 million, as margins dropped. The margins were down 10% from last year.

Several factors behind it. The key ones are the mix of product we delivered.

We had a number of new product releases, which ultimately have a lower margin on the initial production run of them, and there was some supply chain. Margins will come back in H2.

They won't come back to 48% in H2, but they'll be much better than H1. We'll see margins back to the normalized 48% for next year.

As a contribution, it's delivered £1.2 million to the group, very, very good contribution. Integrated services, it was a little behind last year at revenue, 2%, and that flowed to gross profit, which was also 2% lower.

Margins held at 31%. The year-on-year decrease is purely in-year timing, it's not a movement from years, it's an in-year timing.

We'll have a H2 weighting for revenue, which will also then flow to the profit that's delivered for us in H2. Contribution was good, we've had £1.25 million from the sector in the half, so, again, really, really good delivery.

Recurring revenue, we've been stating this for 3 or 4 years now, we were up 6% from last year, less than the overall revenue increase, but currently Crime & Fire doesn't have recurring revenue, hence the increase is less than the group, but it formed 11% of group revenue, which is a very good addition to the group, and SaaS is around 40% of the total that we're now delivering. Cash flow, we are operationally cash generative.

I think in the last 30 months, we've generated £17.5 million of inflow against a profit of around £11 million, we've had a £6.5 million gain over profit in the 30-month period. H1 is the first half for a while where we've actually had a lower inflow than profit.

This is fundamentally a movement into working capital, which actually gives us confidence for delivery in H2 because the investment's gone in ready for what we know we're delivering at the moment. This slide is an overview of the RNSs we've had in the half.

This is any contract or purchase orders that we have announced. We have an announcement threshold of a million pounds, we have a lot of orders we received that don't hit the announcement threshold.

Overall, what we're showing on this slide is we have won work across all segments in the business during the half, which just adds to the confidence of our stronger H2 to come.

Right. Thank you, Nick.

Journeo is growing strongly, as you can see, and we have ambitions to take the current model through to about £150 million revenue, and do that by producing double-digit operating margins. To sort of try and explain how we see that being a realistic sort of medium-term objective, we've been building up our own models for what the total addressable market is, and what the serviceable component of that is.

We do that in terms of the market verticals. There's a rather complicated slide, but this is actually based on company data, it's not from bought-in market research.

It's bottom-up. Across the bus and coach fleet technology market, we think that the installed base in the addressable territories, which are UK, Ireland, Scandinavia, and the United States, where we're currently active, it's larger than this if you include worldwide, but just in those territories, we think the total installed base is between £750 million and £1.25 billion.

Not all of that would be addressable from the product, software, and solutions which Journeo has. We've sort of distilled from the total addressable market what we think actually is an addressable market.

This is not an annual figure, this is what we believe the installed base of that technology is. To work out what that would be worth on an annual basis, then you need to look at the lifecycle of the existing technology, what the refresh periods are, and also whether the market's growing or shrinking.

We'll come onto that next. In terms of the roadside passenger information, using the same analysis, there's roughly 400,000 NaPTAN locations, which are sort of bus stop or theoretical bus stops in the UK.

We're using about 13% number to estimate what the total population for electronically enabled bus stops and bus interchanges are. We've done the same then in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Norway, and also in the United States.

That gives you £600 million to a billion total addressable value. Using then the same calculation on a 5-to-8-year renewal, gives you an addressable market between £150 and £250 million in the territories where we're active.

The same exercise in the airports and airside operations, where they have ground-based or wheel-based inter-terminal transfers and long stay, and crew transportation to the airports, describes about £400 to £800 million. Again, in the territories that we're active in, we believe that's a £75 to £150 million opportunity.

Then in rail passenger information, the same exercise produces between £300 and £500 million, and we think between £100 and £150 million of that is addressable directly with Journeo's offering. Finally, with the utilities and defense, this is based actually on some bought-in market research plus bottom-up data, because we've only actually had Crime & Fire within our group for 12 months, this is partly empirical, but also partly objective through the report.

We've identified between £4 and £5 billion of potential business, and that is predominantly in the UK. The addressable part of that, we believe, is between £400 and £600 million, and we believe that that is realistic over a 5-year time horizon.

This is kind of the big picture that we see when we look out where the opportunities are. There's different challenges with capturing elements of the serviceable addressable market, and it's not the same in each segment.

Some, we will need to invest organically to capture; others, it would be sensible for us to acquire that capability so we can get a faster route to market. There are some very important market drivers providing sort of tailwinds to make this possible, and we've listed just three of them here.

There are many others, but the first one is the Transport for City Regions fund, that's £15.6 billion that's being applied through to 2032. That's really driving the growth in roadside passenger information systems, and the sort of urbanization and decarbonization of public transport in the UK.

There's then £2.3 billion going through the Local Transport Grants, which has a similar impact. It's trying to get people to move out of personal-use vehicles into clean-energy public transport.

Then through the recent acquisition of Crime & Fire, we're now introducing the RIIO-3, which is the 5-year funding program from 2026 to 2031, and there's a baseline value of just over £28 billion, with potential for that to rise very, very significantly indeed. The intention of this slide is not just to present there's a big number and it's actually be relatively intractable; what we're saying, there is a big potential here.

If we distill that down to something that's actually addressable by Journeo Group, that still is a large number. The key then is to say, within that service addressable market, what market share can we actually capture?

At the moment, the best example that we can give actually is the bus and coach fleet technology market. We believe that there's roughly £25 to £28 million that sort of revenue coming out of that for Journeo at the moment, the lowest level, maybe 10% penetrated.

We believe that there's a £40 to £50 million per annum business for us globally if we can bring some of the new solutions that we're working on, particularly the AI-assisted solutions, into market, because that would be a software product sale that could be sold globally. Now at the moment, we're only assuming that that is sold into the territories that we're active in.

Similarly, we go through the exercise, and we believe that we can take market share or capture it as it grows to generate the £150 million. The way that we're intending for Journeo to move forward now, basically, the guidance at the moment is for Journeo to generate about £80 million in 2027, and we think through a mixture of continued organic growth, very specific targeted acquisition, and some consolidation, driving up the recurring revenue, introducing that sort of maintenance software and services into the other components within the group, and embedding in then the SaaS applications, and also in due course the AI applications, and finally bolting in acquisitions in adjacent markets, we think will comfortably take us past the £150 million revenue mark, generating good double-digit operating margins.

That is our plan. Journeo is well on track to do this.

We've got the capabilities, firepower to do it. We have the bench strength within the management team around Nick and I to do this.

It's really attractive, an exciting time to be doing this. That's kind of a complete sort of overview of the results, and I'll hand it back.

Excellent.

Okay. I can take the first three on the list, I think.

First one, "Congratulations on an excellent half. I notice sales order intake seems to have slowed compared to the same period last year.

I assume that's come from the number of RNS announcements and the value of them." That's just purely down to the number that are over a million.

As I said earlier on, we have a lot of orders that are below a million, and we don't announce them, it's just the pure mix. In terms of if that's where that's come from, the order intake isn't down year-on-year.

We're certainly in a good place with order intake. Next one is a reference to inter-segment sales.

So, "Interim results highlight increased inter-segment sales. Which divisions are involved?"

This is the largest segments are between information systems and integrated services, and this is principally our rail strength within Infotech, which enables us to produce product for our rail customers who sit within integrated services. We have a good level of rail work within integrated services, and we can take advantage of the skills and the accreditations within information systems to provide the product we need and increase sales from that.

Next one is an H1/H2 weighting question. The question is that Cavendish's forecast requires a large re-bit in H2 and H1, absolutely, and why are we confident?

I think, as said, the two key areas why we're confident is information systems margin will come back in H2. We expect revenue to stay strong there, a few extra points on the margin will flow straight to the bottom.

Integrated services, the timing of revenue between H1 and H2, will increase revenue in H2, which will flow to the profit that's delivered for us in H2. Those two factors give us absolute confidence of why H2 outperforms H1.

Thanks. I'll take the next one.

This is a question from someone called Andrew: "What is the plan for dividends going forward?" The dividend sort of question comes up pretty regularly around the board table within Journeo Group.

Our view has been that we've got a better use for growing the business, either investing in some of the organic things we're doing, particularly in North America recently, but also using that to fund an ambitious acquisition program. As Nick explained, we are profitable and significantly cash generative, and so it's something that will remain on the agenda.

At the moment, the plan is to deploy the cash in areas that can grow the business significantly. The next question is: "What skills do we think are the most important in our industry?"

That's a really good question. We're obviously looking for people with high energy and common sense, and people that actually can help us grow the business.

At the moment, we're not like a monolithic structure where we manage all of the processes. What we're looking for is for flair and dedication, commitment from our people to make decisions quickly at the edge to satisfy the customers.

It's a mixture. Obviously, we are looking for technical people, customer relations people, and the sort of overlying thing is integrity, honesty, and common sense, of course.

Really good question.

Another one?

Yes, okay, yeah.

Okay. There's a question around, are we looking at leverage and debt to fund expansion?

Yes, we don't have any debt at the moment. We are now considered more attractive, to look for debt funding from providers now we've had several years of consistent performance.

It is now a good option for us to use if we needed to. As I say, we don't have any yet, if we choose to use it, it will certainly help.

There's one here: "What areas are you focusing on for M&A?" I guess what that means is, if it's areas, the areas that we're looking at are Continental Europe and North America.

If you mean sort of what sectors or segments, then I can elaborate a little bit on that. We're looking for businesses that are a bit like us, that like to do the job well, that have a good track record of keeping their promises, and there's obviously a reason for them actually being potentially for sale.

Crucial what we're looking for is a route to market for what we already have. With Crime & Fire, that was a nice example.

It's what we would describe as an adjacent market opportunity. They have an expertise that Journeo Group didn't have.

Journeo Group did have financial horsepower, research and development, software capabilities which Crime & Fire didn't have. By bringing them together, Journeo Group is able to offer Crime & Fire's customers additional capabilities, and Crime & Fire is able to bring the safety, security, and defense accreditations into our group to complement the ones that we already have, for example, in rail and at nuclear power stations and airports.

Obviously, I can't mention any of the names, but the businesses that we're looking at are predominantly in Continental Europe and the United States.

This one. There's a question of: "When do we expect a similar profit margin for infrastructure protection?"

We will move towards a similar group margin next year. We are investing and spending time with the business at the moment.

H2 should be similar to H1 in terms of margin, but next year, as we get the combined power of the group and increase at the top, then we will move towards a double-digit margin within infrastructure protection.

Should I take the next, number 3? The question here is: "Where do we see the biggest potential for international expansion?"

We actually see a lot of potential actually in a number of territories, but at the moment, the territories that we're not active in. At the moment, we see the biggest potential actually in North America.

We will shortly be incorporating Journeo in the US, and taking a small number of employees, US citizens. That will happen during this year.

Our intention is to basically build on the work that we've been doing in New York for the Mass Transit Authority with our partner OUTFRONT Media to do something similar following the recent contract award for Boston Mass Transit Authority. We want to provide a closer service to the MTAs and other transit authorities, and bring in all of what Journeo has to offer essentially into the US and then North American market through sort of building on that from 2027 to 2028.

I think there was one question, the fourth question: "In what timeframe do we expect to reach long-term targets?" At the moment, we're aiming on a sort of 3-year timeframe.

Try to scan through the questions.

Some of them are duplications, aren't they?

There's that one about the ARR growth. Do you want to take that one, Nick?

It's partly covered by what was said before, but do you want to pick that one up?

Yeah. All right.

"Good to see the ARR growth. Can you explain how sticky your services are to the customer?

Is it a case of once implemented, they're forced to stay with Journeo?"

We don't like that as a tactic.

They're not forced. We've certainly been sticky.

We are growing the number of connections we have to our SaaS platform consistently,

and

as we do more hardware installs, it drops to the SaaS installed base. We are certainly continuing to move that forward.

Our strategy, just to sort of elaborate on that, is we actually, right at the heart of the business, we see ourselves as an agnostic systems integrator. We see our job is actually to unlock customers from proprietary lock-in.

We see this actually across the piece. This actually, I think, is one of the reasons that customers come to us, because when some new application or technology comes into the market, it can be quite difficult to integrate it or assimilate it into the existing estate because of the lock-in nature of the sort of legacy systems.

We adopt an open standards approach. We are very flexible and agile in our development.

The way that we tend to look at the ARR is we actually want customers to want to stay with us, not to make it difficult for them to leave us. I understand the question, but our tactic is to try and give a really good user experience, great value for money, so that customers actually want to come to us.

That certainly is driving a lot of our growth at the moment.

There's a new question, right at the bottom. As a rule, do we report every new contract when over the value of £1 million in all segments?

Yes, we do. We increased the threshold 3 years ago, our threshold used to be half a million and we were making a lot of announcements, hence we moved the threshold to a million, and we do.

Every win over a million is announced.

Good question here: "Most of our solutions appear to target the land-based transport sector. Have we considered sea, water-based markets such as ferries and water buses?"

The answer is yes, we have, and actually through a number of channels, actually. We've looked at the real-time information systems between the ferries and the ferry terminals, because they don't seem to work in the same way that real-time transport systems work on land.

It's not the same in each country. The US is different to Continental Europe, which actually is different within Continental Europe, and it's different again in the UK.

We did some formative work, it actually didn't turn into a contract, with CalMac Ferries up in Scotland, where they were looking to put real-time or equivalent real-time systems at the ports, the ferry terminals on the islands to give a predicted arrival time. For those of you that follows the ferry situation in Scotland, that became protracted, but we do hope that that might resurrect itself.

Now with the sort of improvements in satellite communication, as also the weather tracking systems, it wouldn't be accurate to the minute or second, but it would be able to give an indication of arrival time on the islands, and that would obviously extend to the Indonesian and the Greek islands. It is on our radar, and also should mention that Crime & Fire have been approached about improving security on shipping.

I can't say any more than that, but that also is a potential area for them to get into. Okay.

Do we have... They are all now these are...

Okay. First, I'd like to thank everybody that's joined us and taking time out of the day to listen to us.

We are grateful to you. Journeo is actually on a journey.

We're not the finished article by any means. We are growing very strongly.

We actually are trying to make a difference in the areas that we operate, through apprenticeships and training. We try to put something back into society.

Our aims are to become the sort of de facto provider of the solutions in the markets where we operate. We're really serious about it.

We like what we do, and we would like to do more of it. Thank you very much for your time.