Good morning, and welcome. You've got Daniel Quint here, my CFO, and myself Albert Ellis, CEO, and welcome to Staffline's first-half results presentation for 2026.

Before we begin the formal presentation, we thought we'd like to share a lovely video that showcases some of the fantastic work our people are delivering across the business, and the positive impact they make every day. Before we start, we're going to run this short video, and thank you.

At Staffline, we don't just deliver recruitment services, we simplify them to keep your workforce agile and your business moving forward. With scalable expertise, proven solutions, and seamless delivery, we help you find the right people wherever and whenever you need them.

We bring together technology, data, and flexibility to streamline your recruitment, cutting complexity and delivering results and peace of mind through one trusted partner. From fast, flexible temporary staffing to permanent hires and RPO, we go beyond recruitment to build workforce solutions that work harder for you.

Our added-value services enhance your resource management and technology, helping your business run smarter and faster. That's why the UK's leading brands across food and drink, manufacturing, aviation, and logistics choose us.

National scale, local agility, and solutions tailored around you. More than a recruitment company, the home of good work.

Thank you. We'll start the presentation now, and we're kicking off with a well-known slide if you've been following us, which is really setting out the strengths and the benefits of the group.

One of the questions that we're asked all the time is how do we manage to grow the business whilst there is a real recession in recruitment as you know. It's all about the scale and the reach of the business.

We always use this slide to demonstrate the scale and the reach. Our client base is a sort of blue-chip FTSE 100 type client base, and they want partners that can equal them in scale and expertise.

The other reason is, on the left-hand side you'll see our annualized revenue is our exposure to essential goods and services like food distribution, food manufacturing, public sector, local government. We've got lots and lots of stable sectors and essential services that are required whatever the GDP figures might be that month.

On to the results quickly, and I'm not going to go through them in detail, but just pick out a few highlights. The gross profit is up 13%, I think that's the fastest acceleration of gross profit we've had in some time, and this has been driven by temporary worker hours lifting over the course of the spring and accelerating through the summer.

The permanent fees in Ireland are up 33%, I think that's a record. Part of the story is that in Ireland, and this is in particularly the Republic of Ireland, we've had an exceptional performance in permanent placements.

Also, as I said, good exposure to public sector, essential services. Then, of course, in June, we've had very good weather, and this has driven consumers acquiring food and drinks to stay at home and watch the World Cup.

We've seen that accelerate all the way through June, but in fact, the last week in June was the highest year-on-year temp hours that we've seen to date. Then, of course, you know about our cost-reduction program, which we implemented at the beginning of 2025.

That was in the response to the tax increases, et cetera, that were implemented at that time, and really those are yielding margin benefits now. We're seeing year-on-year benefit from that big cost-reduction program.

Finally, Daniel's going to take you through some of the exciting things on the balance sheet and particularly the outcome with the share buybacks.

Thank you, Albert. Good morning, everyone.

I'm just going to take you through the detail of the financial performance for the first half of the year, and it's really been quite a significant and stellar first half of the year. Just to to delve into some of these numbers a little bit more, you'll see that revenue was up 15.2% year over year, and that is really as a result not just of the activity delivered in H1, but the work done over the last 12, 24 months of growing the business both in Ireland and in GB, increasing our footprint that when times have required use of temporary working force solutions for our customers that really has enabled us to amplify our delivery.

You'll see the hours up 10.8% and then through to gross profit, 13.3%, as Albert has already indicated, probably the strongest gross profit period growth we've had, really contributed not only by the hours in GB, which we'll spend a little bit more time talking about, but the permanent fees in Ireland have really come on in this period, 33.3% up, and have driven a a a great performance to the bottom line in in the Irish division. Finally, as importantly, is, of course, a continuing laser focus on costs across both divisions, both businesses, that has allowed our gross profit to operating profit conversion ratio to improve from 10.0% to 13.9%.

That is a an incredible increase in H1, and something we're very proud of, but very, very focused on continuing. That, alongside the gross profit and revenue increases, has allowed operating profit to increase to £5.2 million, which is an increase of 57.6% for the first half of the year.

Finally, as I'm going to come onto in a moment, tight control of of working capital, which we did invest in in order to drive that growth, but focused control of that driving a reduction in financing and interest costs, allowed profit before tax to increase to £2.9 million, which is an increase of 383.3%. These four financial stats for me really exhibit the the delivery of the business operationally and then delivering into the financial numbers.

Really great activity. Just a final comment on these, you might have seen the ONS retail numbers for June, which were up 4.2% compared to June last year.

This really is evidence of those ONS numbers coming through to our business and delivering on that. Now coming through to some of the the financing areas, as I just mentioned, net finance charges have reduced by £0.4 million from £2.7 million to £2.3 million as a combined effort of both our tight cash control as well as the lower interest rates, which started to filter through 2025.

I think there were a reduction in August and then in December 2025 and now fixed at 3.75% Bank of England rate since December, which has benefited us compared to last year. The tight cash control of both our credit control teams and the operators supporting them has really enabled us to deliver that.

Now, net debt has has gone up by £8.9 million, and that is, and I'll come onto the next slide, a large chunk of that as a result of the late May throughout June spike in the hours. As you'll see a bit later on, we Albert has already spoken circa 11% for the whole half, but circa 16% for June and 18% for the last week, that drives that little spike in net debt.

This is valuable investment in the growth of the business. Of course, you look at our financing headroom, we still have nearly £46 million of headroom in our facilities and our covenants.

We have our leverage covenant at 0.5 times when the covenant cap is four times, and interest cover with our our floor cover being 2.25 covenants and we're at 18.6, significant firepower for continued growth in the business. Now just to touch on the net debt in a bit more detail, and this is a 12-month presentation, from the 30th of June 2025 to the 30th of June of this year 2026, and really strong trading cash flow of £16.2 million, and then I've just highlighted in that dotted box there the £4 million specific working capital investment in the hours growth that we saw in the last half of May and the first and the and remainder of June, that required that investment, but it's certainly paid off as the numbers have illustrated.

Finally on the right-hand side, in the 12 months, we did receive our last portion of deferred consideration from the sale of PeoplePlus, which was sold in February 2025, and we have also purchased £4.9 million over the last 12 months of share buybacks. Now just a little bit more reflection on the share buyback program.

We've spent the last three years, we launched share buyback programs in August 2023, and I thought I'd just I'd just reflect for a moment the benefits to the group that those programs have given, and to more importantly to shareholders, current shareholders. We have reduced the shares in issue by £49.8 million since August 2023 49.8 million shares, apologies, since August '23, and that is 30% of our original ordinary share base.

That has been accretive to EPS by 32% after tax and after interest, a full 32%, also supporting, obviously, the operations of the business and the performance of the business have also contributed to the share price, the share price that has gone up circa 50% as of this morning, probably closer to 60%. I think it's a really interesting illustration of the deployment and the capital allocation strategy of the group over the last three years of how it has delivered accretive benefits to EPS.

That concludes the the finance section, and I'll hand back to Albert to take us through the operational review.

Thank you, Daniel. I'm just going to start with a brief outline if you haven't been following us or you just wanted some clarity on our strategy so that it brings it all together for you.

The main pillar of our strategy is to maintain the incredible market share we have and to increase it, indeed win more business. It's all about market share, it's all about economies of scale.

I think in the sort of current economic climate around the world, you've seen some of the large recruiters retrenching from certain geographies where they haven't got scale, they've said they want to focus on markets sort of high potential with high market share. This is indeed being our strategy for five years.

We believe in market share, we believe in dominance, and we believe in sharing the benefits of the economies that come from market scale with our customers and our strategic partners. Second to that, whilst we do have a very strong focus on blue collar, we have actually broadened the portfolio over the years, and so we're very active in increasing our share of permanent fees.

Managed services business is doing well, you would have seen that in the RNS, and we have niche white collar sectors where we're doing recruitment at the white collar level. Broadening the portfolio is really an important part of the strategy.

A number of years, we identified Republic of Ireland as a strong economy in which we were very small, and over the years, and I'll show you that, we have invested in that economy to great effect, and that's been a terrific success by the team in Ireland. Finally, as Daniel has said, we're very focused on capital allocation, on using our capital wisely, on talking and debating about how to get the best returns to our shareholders.

Now we've put in a slide here just to remind you of the quality of the customer base that we have. It's household names, blue chip, listed companies, well-capitalized, very little if no bad debt exposure, and actually with a constant stream of demands and requirements.

The thing about recruitment is that really to get economy of scale and to provide quality at a price that customers are interested in, you've got to have a stream of requirements, you've got to have a demand that's constant so you can apply resources to it and amortize the cost of those resources over multiple assignments. These customers do this for us, and we're very proud to be their key labor supplier.

We place them in there just to give you an idea of the sectors they're in, whether it's third-party logistics outsourcing, supermarkets, automotive supply chains, automotive manufacturing, and indeed consumer goods. We've also in recent years been looking at the aviation, and the security industry, and that's also been a good growth market for us.

Now onto the individual results, starting with GB, which is everything excluding Ireland and Northern Ireland. Look, this is where temporary hours have really rocketed, 10% year on year.

It's all organic growth, that's our strategy, that's our mission. The full-year benefit of our strategic partnership that we concluded last year in May, you can look that up, with one of the UK's largest logistics providers, where we have about 2,000 temp drivers, security, and warehouse operatives, the full year benefit of that will come this year, and we'll start lapping those increases around about August, we'll see that strategic partnership in the comparatives.

Look, the key segment that we've seen most of the growth is where supermarkets and large retailers have outsourced their labor and their distribution and their warehousing to third parties, like DHL, like Culina, like GXO, and these companies are providing outsourced services, and we're providing the labor element. That's been a key element of organic growth for us and one of the drivers of our success.

Then of course, we've got the resilience of the sectors, logistics, food, and supermarkets, as I've said before, and not only that, but our managed service specialists, Datum, which provides consulting, audit services, particularly around labor and the management of labor in the construction industry, they've had a record six months. Along with Brightwork and Omega, which is Scotland and our engineering business, who have stabilized after a tough period with the white collar recruitment market in the last few years.

Finally, this business has done extremely well, increased revenue by 16%, gross profit by 14%, you can see the margin has gone up, and the operating conversion from gross profit to operating profit increased from 17.9% to 18%. That's a super-efficient business, and it benefits from scale, excellence in delivery, and of course, as I've said before, the flight to quality.

Now we've got a little graph here, which we love, which tracks our hours over a number of years, and you can see the green part of that, the top part of that graph. You can actually see Easter, the Easter spike, Mother's Day spikes, and then you've got the gradual increase in the spring, culminating in well over a million hours a week in June.

That really kicked off with the hot weather. People obviously staying at home, entertaining at home, hospitality, barbecues, et cetera, and then watching the World Cup.

We saw significant increases in the World Cup. The World Cup's not going to go on forever, indeed, it's finished as we speak now, but that windfall was a good period that we were able to supply and generate quite a lot of activity and benefit from that period.

Terrific June, and indeed it continues a little bit into July because the hot weather is continuing. Now onto the next slide, just wanted to put this in.

Apologies, it's just a small boast on behalf of the team at Recruitment GB to say well done, some real big industry recognition there from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, five short-listed categories for this year. Crossing fingers that we do well in that, but to be nominated is a real honor, and the team deserve every amount of recognition that they get through that.

Now onto Ireland, which has had a stunning six months, doubling operating profit compared to 2025, revenue up to almost 10%, margins stable, slight increase in margin, but generally stable, and operating profit doubling with operating profit conversion from gross profit to operating profit almost doubling from 11% to 20%. 20% in the industry, if you're not au fait with the recruitment industry, is a very high conversion rate.

This business is run extremely well by the team there who are very experienced and have been there for a long time. The change in the mix is interesting.

We love permanent recruitment in Ireland, it's white collar perm recruitment, it's good margin, but it's also cash generative, and it helps fund the Recruitment GB business, because that has quite a significant requirement for absorbing working capital, and so Ireland provides a lot of the cash for that. Record results from the Republic, I've mentioned that as part of our strategy.

We love the Republic of Ireland, it has a balanced budget, it's got a healthy physical situation, it is a strong economy, as and GP is up 12%, that's record. We've expanded our office network there, we're increasing our head count, and we're winning material contracts.

Done to the Republic. The stability is also through a sector focus.

Each division has a sector focus that provides stability and resilience, and in Ireland it's around public sector, health and social care, local government, and also security, the security services in both Republic and the North of Ireland, where there's a constant stream of demand and there's headroom in terms of requirements. Good.

Just a lovely graph demonstrating the strategy in the Republic of Ireland in particular, where we've had real good growth in permanent recruitment, but this is actually overall in the island of Ireland how our team have grown their gross profit over the years. That's in the recent times been really driven by additional large mandates for multiple perm placements.

Daniel's just going to give you some thoughts on what's very important to us, which is our environmental, social, and governance area, and he'll take you through that. Daniel.

Thank you, Albert. Providing access to work in a sustainable manner is absolutely critical for us.

It's critical for our customers, critical for our employees, and critical for our temporary workers, and it's absolutely fundamental to what we do. Whether it's training hours which we provide, or actually providing good work for workers and also lowering our emissions, but I just also put on here, just to the bottom left of the slide, a few of the items that we've been short-listed for.

One of the items, actually, Recruitment GB had been short-listed for is work around modern slavery that the business is doing in Scotland, which is really, really important and extremely valuable, and then other areas of social value contribution that the business makes to the communities in which it works, the businesses who are our customers, and making sure that we are delivering in a sustainable manner. Now to the outlook.

Good. Everybody loves the outlook.

Sometimes we should maybe start with the outlook, but it's got a natural cadence to the end of the presentation, I'll simply state you've heard it already in the presentation, we've had a very strong start to FY 2026, obviously with the end of quarter two temp hours rising as they did up to 16% in June, that continuing into July. The momentum continues, we're very confident about that.

Of course, the weather's continuing to support those supermarket sales, and we've got strong pipeline conversion. We have had in the last six months some tremendous wins, and we're extending that and expecting to win more.

We've had actually six major re-tenders and secured existing relationships during the period, and so the new business and market share contract wins has been continuing at high levels. Finally, all of that said, trading is at the top end of market expectations, and so we're absolutely delighted to be able to bring that to you.

Before we leave, engine for growth is quite important to us. We always look through the current ups and downs of the business, the natural trading rhythms and the natural cycles, and what we're interested in is making sure that we have strategic partnerships for the long term, blue-chip customers, as I've presented earlier on in the presentation, household names, well-capitalized, with a strong, consistent level of requirements.

That's important for us, that's part of our strategy. It provides resilience, underpins numbers, and it keeps people in work, particularly our temps.

We focus on temp workers, because with the current environment, particularly with the current administration, on employers' rights bills, higher minimum wages, et cetera, it will look like, in my view, that we might go back to a situation where I saw a couple of decades ago where companies were quite nervous about hiring permanent staff and they focused on temps, because they can keep the temp worker force quite flexible. Then Daniel's described the tremendous work he's done on the finance.

Once again, the engine for growth is our focus on our customers, but we're also looking to the risks, and Daniel's done a fantastic job on interest. Doing a tremendous swap that protected us from the rise in interest rates, and now doing a collar that protects us from unexpected spikes and rises in interest rates for a long time, for years, in fact.

Always maintaining sufficient headroom in our facilities to grow the business. Then we've just got a note on the side there, obviously to remind you, that we've reduced equity by 30% in recent years, and that's been a tremendous result.

With that, thank you very much for watching, thank you for attending, and we're happy to answer questions, any questions that might come up. Daniel will lead the Q&A.

Open to the floor for Q&A.

Thank you. I will just go through the questions and deal with them out as we go along.

The first question is, "What are the prospects for a dividend?" Many of you who have followed our journey over the last number of years will have seen and I covered it in the presentation that we are very focused on a particular strategy of capital allocation.

As I mentioned, we have made significant share buybacks and reduced shares in issue by 30%, at the same time as also investing in growth, and therefore investing in working capital. We never say never, we always keep everything under observation and under decision processes, but at the moment the current trajectory will most likely be our current trajectory of capital allocation, working capital investment where growth is appropriate and we can get the right return, and share buybacks, but we'll continue to monitor that as we go forward.

The second question is, "Please may I ask a question relating to working capital funding? What is the average cost of facilities throughout the year including fees?

Thank you." That question, the answer to that is, and it's in the public domain, the cost of our facilities when we're at the leverage we are, is SONIA, which is just beneath Bank of England base rate, Bank of England base rate is 3.75%, I believe SONIA is 3.72%, 3.73%, and then 1.5% margin on top of that at our current leverage levels, so that will be therefore 5.23% of the facilities of the draw-down requirements, which vary from week to week and month to month as you might expect due to the seasonality of the business.

Hopefully that gives you some insight into the underlying cost of the financing. Next question: "What sort of share buyback are you thinking about going forward?"

That's a really good question. Many of you will know [coughs] that our top shareholder currently owns 29.98% of the business, they have no intention of acquiring the business, and therefore, we are currently reflecting on the strategy regarding share buybacks going forward.

No decision has been made, and that is currently under review. Next question is, and, Albert, something maybe for you, is, "What is the AI strategy in Staffline?"

It's something that Albert and I speak a lot about, actually, and I know Albert has some thoughts on that, over to you, Albert.

Yes, very good question, very topical. What we've seen is we've been implementing a digital program for some years now, many years, in fact.

We've got one of the most significant and highly-scaled digital programs in the industry, in the blue-collar sector, and this is handling all the processes, and there are many, the right-to-work, the shifts logging in, logging off, facial recognition software. We've used all the digital tools to provide efficiencies on the front line.

Now, AI is slightly different. Obviously, it's moved on from automation and digital efficiencies, and in that scenario, we're using one of the recognized products to help us recruit, to help us find labor, particularly maybe in geographies where it's not so easy, where there isn't a plentiful supply of labor, to reach out into communities where we might not have had a presence before.

The consultants are using this as a tool, as all recruiters are at the moment, to improve their own efficiency and their own hit rates, their own successes. That's where we are.

We're still looking at whether there's a bigger play for AI, and we're certainly trialing it with one of our big clients, where we've got automation on a much larger scale, to see if we can drive more efficiencies, lower costs, and share the benefits with that client. That's a recent initiative, and actually, very encouraging results from that.

Yes, like everybody, we're watching how the fast-moving market and how the fast-moving sector of AI is moving, but we're also monitoring it to see how we can leverage it, not just have it as a luxury, but to see how we can make ourselves more efficient, reduce our costs, and more successful.

Thank you, Albert. Next question, a bit of a similar one to one previously, "The company's done a great job of clearing up loose shareholders with buybacks.

Moving forward, I'd very much like to see a dividend policy. Share buybacks actually shrink the company's capital, and I believe that both existing and new shareholders might find a dividend attractive."

I've given an answer on dividend policy already. Everything is kept under review, but in the near term, the capital allocation policy followed thus far will be maintained, but everything will be kept under review as we go through the coming weeks and months.

Next question is, "What impact might the new government have in terms of higher government spending, and presumably, no increase in tax on labor?" Just before I hand over to Albert on that just to talk about the tax point, there's been obviously a lot of noise regarding the increases in national minimum wage, as well as the increase in employers' national insurance that occurred in April 2025, and which we have worked very closely with our customers to manage, as one of the important pieces of our relationship with our customers, that both our GB and Irish divisions have managed so well.

I think it would be surprising if we saw any more employment tax, and I'm hopeful of a reduction, but I'll pass over to Albert to give his views.

We can't predict what a new administration is going to do, but at the end of the day, I think the old administration had implemented various initiatives, which are going through consultation at the moment around employment rights and around the national insurance increase. Both have been highlighted by senior business leaders in the UK as having a dampening and chilling effect on the labor market and recruitment market.

We've got record graduate unemployment, I think a further push into reducing confidence is unlikely. I think we might see that there's going to be some support for graduate recruitment in particular, and also entry-level recruitments, young people getting into work, whether they're graduates or not.

I think we might see some support for that, maybe the worst is behind us. There was certainly a reaction to the national insurance increase, demand reduced, and people's packages and people's wage growth moderated, there was a real impact, and I think that's probably a one-off, and so hopefully we see a little bit more supportive policies in the labor market going forward.

Thank you, Albert. The three more questions, the first two are about dividend payments and share buybacks, I'm not going to repeat the answers I've given already.

I hope that's okay with those questioners. A final question is, "Are there any larger potential contracts in the pipeline like the large logistics win in May 2025?"

Before I hand over to Albert to both answer that a bit and conclude, I'll just give a moment and just give you my final comments as this is the last question. What I would say is I know we have a strong pipeline, certainly in our current customers where we believe we're going to win extra footprint hopefully in the not-too-distant future.

Just before I hand over to Albert to finish answering that question, I would like to thank all our management team and the people that work across the entire business, specifically both the CEOs, but from my perspective the FDs of the divisions, Ben De Luca, Brandon Harper, and all their teams, their management accounts, credit control, and payroll teams for such a fabulous performance in the first half of the year. Albert, just to hand back to you to maybe just finish answering that question and for some final comments.

Yes, thank you for Daniel for thanking the team, I echo your remarks. Look, I think it's very clear that we've got a strong pipeline.

We can't comment on material wins in advance, certainly before they are concluded, we wouldn't be able to do that, but we've got a very strong momentum going into the second half. We've got lots of opportunity, but I will say this, slightly different to winning one-off, large contracts, which is we have plenty of opportunity in all of our customers to grow our market share, and we're doing that at pace.

We do have opportunities to take more market share. The sector for supplying blue-collar labor is weak.

The participants and our peer suppliers are not financially as strong as we are, they're not listed, and so it's weak competitive landscape, and therefore our opportunities are definitely very real and they are near-term. We're very confident as we go into the second half that we're going to see a continuance of our market share gains, and that I'm talking about in our existing relationships and our existing customers.

With that, thank you so much, and thank you especially to my two right-hand people, my CEOs, Frank Atkinson and Tina McKenzie. This is our best set of results for some years, the momentum is clear, the business has taken off, and those two chief execs deserve my praise.

Thank you so much for that, and thank you to Daniel, and thank you for listening.