Operator: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Skillcast Group PLC H1 2026 Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, and they can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to CFO Richard Steele. Good afternoon.
Richard Steele: Thanks for the introduction, and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining and expressing interest in Skillcast. I look forward to giving an introduction and update on our business. I am joined by our CEO, Vivek, who will be here to help and answer questions at the end. I am going to be running through, as CFO, the major part of the presentation today. Here are our financial highlights for the six months ending 30 June 2026. We are pleased to show another period of double-digit revenue growth. Our subscription revenues lifted 15% on the same period last year to GBP 7.4 million.
Richard Steele: Total revenues were up to GBP 8.2 million, and our total revenue growth was 10%. Our ARR, annualized recurring revenue, was up 14% to GBP 14.5 million. 90% of our revenues are now recurring revenue. Our gross margins lifted 1.6% to 77.7%, and our EBITDA grew 48% to GBP 1.0 million, and a margin of 12% from 9% last year. We continue to build our cash reserves, going up to GBP 13.6 million of net cash and no debt as at 30 June 2026, GBP 2.1 million more than last year, and increased our free cash flow by GBP 700,000 in the period.
Richard Steele: We increased our dividend, as per our policy, in line with subscription growth by 15% to 0.232 pence per share. Our Rule of 40, the SaaS metrics that looks at adding the ARR growth and the EBITDA margin together, was 26% for the period, 6% below the H1 last year due to lower ARR growth. Thank you. I just gone. I cannot actually see how I can move the slides at the moment. Thank you. That is one.
Richard Steele: In terms of our H1 2026 ARR breakdown, as I said just now, we grew that by 14% to GBP 14.5 million. Our total client numbers, excluding the smaller clients that distort the metrics on our self-serve CoreCompliance platform, grew 6% to 1,250. Our average ARR per client also increased by 7% to just over GBP 11,400, and our net retention remained at 100%, in line with last year. The variables, the factors within the net retention were we had 5% price rises that most customers accepted within the period compared to 3% last year. We did have slightly higher churn of 9% rather than 7% the year before.
Richard Steele: While slightly disappointing, there is no one factor that is particularly driving this, and it is nothing that is causing management any undue concern. Net retention is also supported by our product upsells, and the graph on the right. On our CoreCompliance plans increased their representation of total sales by total ARR by 78%, so up to 15% of total ARR, and we believe there is still a long way to go on this upside trajectory. I just now want to talk about some of the strategic and operational progress we have made during the period.
Richard Steele: Our major focus, and something we are very proud and excited about is how we have developed our products, which have all been developed in-house over the last 25 years with the adoption of AI. Just to remind you all, in 2025, we launched our first AI product, and that was called Ask Aida. Aida is our generic username for any of our AI products within our courses and technology.
Richard Steele: We launched that as a compliance assistant that provides instant access to trusted compliance guidance within the product. Any training course you are doing or any of our RegTech tools you are looking at, there is an ability to ask a chat assistant any questions on any of the content or anything about the course or tools that you want and get an instant response. Just after the end of the half, we launched in July our next tool, which is called Edit with Aida. This is a tool that enables our clients to effortlessly customize our trusted compliance courses in minutes.
Richard Steele: We are really excited that within two months of launching, by the end of September, 15% of all clients were using this tool and had used this tool. We feel this is a really exciting tool to support our business and explain the rationale why clients should carry on using a proven trusted provider to supply their compliance needs. Later this year, we are going to launch our next product, which is called Learn with Aida. This is a conversational learning tool, so it is taking the Ask Aida assistant and making it much more interactive.
Richard Steele: The AI tool within the courses will ask the learner questions about the course and make those questions specific to how the interaction with that learner is going to help them build understanding and confidence in a controlled environment. It would also enable greater knowledge retention of the courses. Later this year, we are also going to launch Translate with Aida, which is an AI tool within any courses. The compliance manager or the L&D manager is able to translate any of our courses into any other language using AI. On the roadmap for next year, we are excited to launch Create with Aida.
Richard Steele: This is taking our AI Edit with Aida to the next level, where rather than editing an existing course, it will let you build courses from scratch using secure sources. All of this, all of our AI, I have to remind everyone, is within a secure environment. It can only look at documents and sources of information that you choose. We also hope to build on our extensive dashboard reporting with some AI analytics and insights to support learners and managers.
Richard Steele: As well as adoption of and development of our AI products, we have maintained and excelled with our customer service. Every client in our organization has a dedicated human customer support representative. They still do use AI to enhance their productivity, but we know one of our USPs is the fact that there is always a human being that can talk to any clients if need be on any issues they may have. We effectively kept our headcount the same, 1% more than last year, and this is something we feel we can continue doing in the near future.
Richard Steele: We have seen productivity gains as not only as we have developed AI in our products, we have also developed AI tools within our organization to enhance our productivity, both which has enhanced both our cost of sales and our overheads to increase at a slower rate than our sales, thus improving our margins. We are excited at the progress we are making on multiple acquisition opportunities as the main use of our surplus cash. Next slide. Thank you. Just looking at the income statement. As you can see, subscriptions, revenues drove all of the revenue growth up 15% to GBP 7.4 million.
Richard Steele: We saw a reduction of professional services. Our non-strategic professional services revenues fell 22%, and they had fallen 7% in the year before. This is not a complete surprise to us in the current market and in the current world of AI. There are still some people that want to spend lots of money on people like us to actually write bespoke courses from scratch, but it is understandably reducing, and it is something we expect will probably continue to plateau. Total revenues are up to GBP 8.2 million, 10% growth on the year.
Richard Steele: As stated, our gross margin increased by 1.6 percentage points, and this is a factor due to our subscription revenues now representing 90% margin within the subscription business too as well. Our overheads increased by 7% to GBP 5.3 million, and our average headcount increased 3% behind that. That led to an EBITDA of just under GBP 1 million, or 48% up on the year. On that basis, as we know, we always pay dividends, and we said a few years ago that we are going to increase our dividends every year in line with the subscription revenue growth.
Richard Steele: So we are proposing to pay in October an interim dividend of 15% higher than last year of GBP 0.232 pence per share. We retain and continue to grow our balance sheet. It is a fairly straightforward balance sheet. Our non-current assets increased from GBP 0.6 million at this time last year to GBP 1.1 million as we recognized the renewal of our London office lease. Just to remind everybody, we do not capitalize any of our product and tech development. It is always all expense, truly for simplicity. That would have equated to about GBP 0.7 million in the period.
Richard Steele: Our receivables, including trade creditors, were GBP 2.8 million, 4% above 30 June last year due to higher revenue growth, supported by auto renewal terms. Debtor days increased marginally from 52 to 54. GBP 0.2 million receivables relate to Maltese withholding tax, which was paid just after the half in July. Net cash overall has increased to GBP 13.6 million, GBP 2.1 million up on the same time last year. Just to remind, we have no bank debt in the business.
Richard Steele: Trade credits and other payables were GBP 0.3 million lower than this time last year, partly due to the correction and repayment of a VAT payment from HMRC. Deferred income at 30 June was up 11% from the same period last year, driven by 10% higher annual SaaS subscriptions and 27% higher professional services. Deferred income at 30 June was materially the same as at 31 December 2025, due to GBP 200,000 worth of uninvoiced contracts renewals and GBP 0.3 million of overages not being reflected in deferred income at the balance sheet date. In terms of cash flow, apologies.
Richard Steele: There we go. No. There is a bit of a delay on the slides. Apologies. There we go. In terms of the cash flow, we generated GBP 700,000 of free cash flow in the period. This came as we have generated GBP 300,000 more PBT, but we have seen more of that be tied up in working capital in the same period last year. Part of that was the half a million pounds worth of historic Maltese tax item received in H1 2025.
Richard Steele: GBP 0.8 million was due to a lower increase in deferred revenue, partly due to slower ARR growth in H1 2026 than H1 2025, but also due to a higher amount of uninvoiced renewals and overages, and also partly due to a VAT correction received in H2 2025. In terms of our strategy, just to remind everybody of our strategy. Our strategy is to continue to grow our ARR by 15% to 20% per annum, primarily through a combination of new logos and upsell, supplemented by content acquisitions and with continued operational gearing to consistently achieve the Rule of 40 in the medium term.
Richard Steele: We are going to continue to grow our new ARR to attract new logos, both in the FS sector and other sectors, increase our presence and continue to develop our market around self-serve and CoreCompliance and expand into other markets. We will maintain our net retention of at least 100% and continue to expand our ARR from upsells to enhance and premium. We continue, as we have just evidenced, to innovate our product and strengthen our differentiation by developing Agentic AI and non-AI tools to simplify compliance for all our clients.
Richard Steele: We will maintain a PS presence or we will continue to expect that non-strategic area not to continue to grow. We will continue to develop operational gearing benefits to further strengthen our EBITDA margin. We will continue to invest in technology, both owned and third party, to drive further productivity improvements in product development, customer support, and commercial administration areas. We will maintain a strong balance sheet and optionality to support, primarily M&A.
Richard Steele: We will continue to seek and have made progress, we believe, in looking for acquisitions in the digital compliance training sector that could leverage our technology platform and operational infrastructure and provide cross-sell opportunities. Our business model is to digitize, automate, and consolidate. We believe we operate in a large and resilient market with demand growing as companies seek to streamline and automate staff compliance. We believe that we have a high drop-through rate of incremental ARR through to EBITDA.
Richard Steele: We offer extensive content and GRC tools and four subscription plans. We have market-leading client support with in-house content and technology. We have an established infrastructure and headcount in place to support growth. We have AI and non-AI technology embracing culture to maximize our productivity to support all that. In terms of current trading and outlook, we see and are confident the GRC market remains strong. We have had a very encouraging early reaction from our adoption of Edit with Aida, which was launched in July, with a 15% client take-up, as already mentioned.
Richard Steele: We are excited about launching Learn with Aida this half. We expect ARR in H2 to grow at similar levels to H1 2026 in absolute terms. That will have a slight impact on the year-on-year growth rate due to a stronger growth in H2 last year.Professional services, we will continue to serve as and when there is an incoming need, but we do have limited visibility of that. We expect our EBITDA to continue to grow and benefit from operational gearing and enhanced productivity from AI. We continue to expect full-year revenue and profit to be in line with expectations.
Richard Steele: Thank you for listening. I think I now hand back and we will open the floor to questions.
Operator 2: That is great, Richard. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the top right corner of your screen. While the company take a few moments to view those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you the recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and a published Q&A, can be accessed via our investor dashboard. Richard, Vivek, if I may now hand back to you to take us through the questions. I will pick up from you both at the end. Thank you.
Richard Steele: Thank you. The first question, which was pre-submitted, is, "Can share buyback be an option to generate much needed shareholder value? Oil and gas companies reward shareholders, why can't you?" Absolutely it is an option. It is probably not an option we are focusing on in the short term. As stated, our priority is to use up our surplus cash to look at acquisitions. We believe, while we cannot say too much now, we believe we are making significant progress in that arena. Obviously, if that does not happen, we will have to address the cash in other ways.
Richard Steele: The second question is, "Is the company taking proactive steps to improve the short-term share price?" We are maintaining our focus on what we can control in the short term, which is driving our revenue and improving our sales as much as possible. We believe by doing that, the market will recognize the efforts and the strength of our business model. "Can the company improve visibility by doing interviews?" Very good question. Thank you for that. We will certainly take that on board and consider that. Just to remind everybody, we regularly attend the Mello investor events that are held twice a year.
Richard Steele: Our broker and nomad, Cavendish, also have a research portal where we have research on it, and we have also got a video demonstration of our tech stack and our products on that, just to remind everybody. The next question is, "With GBP 13.6 million in net cash representing over 35% of your market cap and the share price trading at a deep discount to your fair value of 90p, what is the specific timeline for deploying the capital?
Richard Steele: If earnings accretive M&A opportunities do not materialize in H2, will the board consider the structured share buyback to support the equity value?" Absolutely. Similar question to what we have had. Yes, we are aware that we have got a significantly large cash balance. In the short term, we will be looking at, hopefully spending this on M&A. If that does not happen, I am sure sometime during or by the end of 2027, we will have to come up with other ways. Share buyback may be one option, but also a larger dividend could be an alternative option.
Richard Steele: We are very well aware of liquidity particularly on the AIM market and within our stock overall, and we are aware that a share buyback could sort of negatively impact that. What are you doing to attract new investors? Again, we do a roadshow twice a year with our in-house broker.
Richard Steele: We do attend retail investor events like Mello to attract retail investors, and we will consider doing more like-minded events for that. What would an attractive acquisition need to offer in terms of strategic fit and ARR growth to justify the valuation and any near-term EBIT dilution? The type of acquisition we are looking for is a content acquisition. We any acquisition. What we are really looking for is buying revenue or buying ARR to support and leverage our cost base. That could be within our own sector, or it could be with adjacent sectors.
Richard Steele: It could be a GDPR training provider, it could be a provider in the public sector, it could be provider in a health and safety sector or other sectors where there is digital compliance training and where perhaps there are owners that are looking to retire or to de-risk or have not been able to keep up with the advance of technology and so are concerned about their future and they are looking to get out that way.
Operator 2: That's great. Richard, if I may just jump back in there, as you have addressed all those questions from investors today. Richard, before we direct investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments?
Richard Steele: Vivek, do you want to take that one?
Vivek Dodd: Yes. Thanks. Is my mic on?
Richard Steele: Yes.
Operator 2: We can hear you.
Vivek Dodd: Yes, thank you. Sorry I haven't been speaking very much because I'm not feeling very well today. Thanks, Richard. I would like to thank everyone who has been attending today, joining us for this call. Just like to note that we are on track to deliver growth and increase profit margins in 2026. Beyond that, we expect the growth of the GRC, the demand for risk and compliance solutions to stay strong and for Skillcast to play a big role in that by helping our customers to adopt AI to enhance employee compliance experience, to reduce costs, and to reduce risks.
Vivek Dodd: This will enable us to continue growing our ARR, improving margins, and delivering shareholder value in the medium and long term.
Operator 2: Fantastic. Thank you both once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback, which will help the company better understand your views and-
