Good morning, and welcome to the Brave Bison Group PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated in the right-hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press Send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all the questions for today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Oliver Green, Chairman. Good morning to you, sir.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for dialing in to our Investor Meet Company presentation. I'm Ollie Green, Executive Chairman of Brave Bison Group PLC. Joining me on the call today is Theo Green, our Chief Growth Officer, and Philippa Norridge, our Chief Financial Officer. Our presentation today will last around 20, maybe 25 minutes, and we'll have some time for questions at the end. We'll be covering everything from our financial results for the first half of the year and outlook, as well as progress more generally across the business, so for those of you that are new to the story, Brave Bison is a digital advertising and technology services company. We work with global businesses like New Balance and KFC and Currys, and we charge them a fee for carrying out a range of different services.
We employ just over two hundred full-time staff across the U.K. and Europe, and importantly, we operate as a single business. Our integrated approach allows us to connect the dots for our clients across the holy trinity of content, media, and technology. So Brave Bison has four business units or verticals, and we work really hard to cross and upsell across these different areas. Brave Bison Performance is our digital media practice. It's here we buy digital media on behalf of our clients across platforms like Google, Meta, and TikTok, and we do this for a number of global and national brands. Companies like New Balance, ASOS, and Currys are all existing clients. Social Chain is our social media and influencer marketing practice.
Here, we create social content and run campaigns for customers like SharkNinja, which is a new client, LinkedIn, which is another new client, and Holland & Barrett, which is a client we won last year. Brave Bison Commerce is our digital commerce practice. We consult, architect, build, manage, and support e-commerce platforms for enterprise-level retailers like Winparts, Primark, and MKM Building Supplies. The Brave Bison Media Network is our social publishing business unit. We own and operate hundreds of channels across platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. We run franchises for sports federations like the PGA Tour and US Open, and we also own our own channels, such as The Hook and Slick on Snapchat.
We are pleased to report our H1 results for twenty twenty-four being in line with where we anticipated being at the half-year point. We also have significant momentum going into the second half, which means that we are now confident in exceeding our previous expectations for the full year. I'll go into some more detail in the numbers shortly, but two key headlines are that we have delivered 20% growth in our adjusted PBT and 17% growth in our adjusted earnings per share year on year, showing the success of our approach to integration and our focus on operational excellence in driving margin across the group.
So our focus for the last six months has really been twofold. The first is operational excellence, and the second is business growth. Operational excellence is the practice of implementing new systems and processes to increase the profitability of our operations and improve client and staff satisfaction across the business. Business growth involves increasing revenue by expanding engagements with existing clients, winning new clients, launching new capabilities, and making acquisitions. We're really pleased to announce a record 15 new business wins in the last six months with some global brands like SharkNinja and The Travel Corporation. These companies have chosen to work with us because of our differentiated proposition and our slick delivery. Part of our proposition for customers is how we leverage the power of artificial intelligence to deliver excellent results.
Earlier this year, we launched AudienceGPT, a media planning tool that uses artificial intelligence models to create marketing personas for the purpose of media planning. We've also brought to market a new consulting proposition for enterprise clients called Future Fit. This sees us work with senior C-suite stakeholders to build custom solutions, pulling from each of the capabilities in our business units. Live events has also been a big driver of growth this year. We've thrown four events so far, with more planned, spanning Social Chain, Brave Bison Commerce, Brave Bison Performance, and the Media Network, and we're gonna talk more about this today as we go forward. On the back of a better-than-expected first half, we've upgraded expectations for the year ahead.
Cavendish are now forecasting GBP 4.4 million of EBITDA and GBP 3.6 million of adjusted profit before tax for the current financial year. Brave Bison Performance, in particular, has performed well for us, as has Social Chain, which has shown better-than-expected profitability. These two business units performing well has offset some softness in other parts of our business. We're particularly encouraged to see our cash balance rising. Cavendish are forecasting net cash of over GBP 9 million at year-end, which gives us significant firepower and flexibility to grow the business next year.
Our net revenue has stayed relatively flat on the previous year at GBP 10.1 million. A significant factor in this has been the decision not to renew a number of loss-making or low-margin contracts, which existed within the Social Chain US operations. If we exclude the impact of this, the remainder of the business has delivered 7% year-on-year growth. Our adjusted PBT for the half year period increased to GBP 1.8 million versus GBP 1.5 million in the first half of 2023, an increase of 20%. This represents an increase in adjusted PBT margin as a percentage of net revenue from 15.2% to 18%, which falls within our medium-term target of 18%-20% margins. The drivers of this increase are twofold.
In the first half of 2023, we were in the midst of carrying out the restructuring and integration of Social Chain, so we were yet to see the full benefits of this in the margins. This was largely completed by the start of 2024, so we are seeing the margin improve as a consequence. In addition, we have continued to focus on operational excellence across the whole group, with constant incremental improvements to our operating platform to upgrade our professional services automation tool and improve our processes. This enables us to resource more efficiently with real-time information on current and expected utilization. It also gives our people the tools to manage client projects effectively and within budget, and improves management information to drive informed decision-making. Our net cash is up by 57% year on year.
It is level with the balance at the end of December, FY 2023, which is mainly as a result of GBP 0.9 million of delayed payments at the half year point. This was as a result of contract renewal negotiations on a large client. These negotiations were successfully completed and payments received in the first week of July. The other factor is that the year-end cash balance is always a little higher than normal due to seasonal variations and the fact that in December we will have just received in-platform revenue for the peak Christmas period. We expect our year-end cash balance this year to be over GBP 9 million. On the next slide, you can see the key adjustments during the period and reconciliations back to the statutory profit before tax. Our acquisition costs were minimal in the period at just GBP 33K.
These related to costs associated with the possible offer for the Mission Group, which we were looking at earlier this year. These were significantly higher in the prior year as they included the costs of the acquisition of Social Chain and the associated fundraising. Restructuring costs are also significantly down year on year by 69%. This is a result of the fact that the majority of the restructuring costs relating to Social Chain were contained within 2023. The final costs falling into 2024 were related to property leases, software contracts, and some staff costs. Amortization of acquired intangibles relates to the amortization of customer relationships and brand names acquired as part of recent acquisitions. This has increased slightly year on year due to the 2024 numbers, including a full six months of amortization of the Social Chain acquired intangibles.
There was no impairment of brand name required in the first half of twenty twenty-four, since we continue to see significant inbound leads as a result of the Social Chain brand. Finally, there's an adjustment relating to share-based payments. 143K of this is associated with the directors' long-term incentive plan, redemption of which is subject to performance conditions, including the share price.
We've previously mentioned this, but we wanted to go into a little bit more detail because we have had a really interesting market reaction from a product that we launched earlier this year. AudienceGPT is effectively a media planning tool. We take customer data, and that's the customer data of our clients, often what's freely available online, and we feed it into an AI model like GPT or Llama to create a digital persona. This is then enhanced with language and image generators to create an actual digital person that mimics a real customer. We then use this model to have a conversation. We ask: Where do you like to shop? How often do you use Instagram? Which influencers do you follow? We use the responses from this model to create media strategies.
Now, the insights that we receive from these Silicon Audiences have shown to be indistinguishable from what we see in real life. We don't need to go out and conduct a focus group if these Silicon Audiences can provide us with a number of different strategies, all of which can be pursued on a test-and-learn basis, which enables us to be more efficient for our clients by testing strategies faster, cheaper, and ultimately buying media more effectively for our clients and improving returns.
... So as a management team, we take the promotion of Brave Bison itself extremely seriously, and we now have a 10-strong team that looks after growth and marketing. This team is focused on creating new business opportunities and really building the Brave Bison trade brand. As well as speaking on panels and creating premium content, like white papers, we have our own podcast called Social Minds, and the podcast is really aimed at senior marketeers that are keen to stay on top of latest trends, hear about best practice, and also hear from industry leaders. And last year, we ran the first Social Minds live event in Manchester. And this year, in I think it was February, we threw our first London event at the Everyman Cinema in Broadgate.
The event had over 120 attendees, and we hosted panels and keynotes from a number of global brands like American Express and Oatly, as well as a number of the social media platforms themselves. Pinterest and TikTok were actually on stage as well. Social Minds is a perfect example of how we differentiate ourselves from our competitors. We take an innovative approach to educating and consulting with clients and using those relationships to open doors and start new engagements.
In May of this year, we announced a possible offer to acquire the Mission Group, a marketing and advertising business also listed on AIM. Now, this certainly was a large transaction, and Mission is a bigger company than we are, so it would likely have resulted in a reverse takeover, and there's no doubt that this was an exciting opportunity for us. It was a chance to build scale, it was a chance to build our capabilities, and it was a chance to build our profile as a listed business. However, we do have quite strict standards when it comes to acquisitions. We're diligent, and we have expectations, and we're focused on returns for shareholders, and ultimately, we walked away from this deal because we didn't get what we needed from the target board.
As always, we're mindful of costs, and we've managed to keep abort costs from this potential transaction to just GBP 33,000.
I think there are a number of reasons to be excited about the business today. But to summarize, our results for the first six months of the year were ahead of last year, with adjusted profit up by 20%. The full year is now expected to be ahead of expectations. Our balance sheet is still very, very strong, with net cash forecast to be over GBP 9 million at the end of the year.
We have a winning customer proposition, and our platform for M&A really has never been stronger, given all of the integration that's gone on over the last eighteen months, and all the investment that has been made into frameworks like Future Fit, our new consultancy offering, as well as just the general marketing and building of trade brand that has happened to the business. I think we're now gonna move on to some questions.
Yes. Thank you very much for your presentation. What I'll do is I'll just bring your cameras up to full screen. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab, which is situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. But just while the company take a few moments to view the questions that have been submitted today, I'd like to remind you the recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. As you can see, we have received questions throughout today's presentation, and Oliver, if I could just hand over to you to share the Q&A, that'd be great, and then I'll pick up from you at the end.
Sure. So the first question is about the underlying growth in the various business segments that we operate in. I think the first thing to say here is that we do operate in a growing market, right? We're in a very sort of exciting marketplace. Digital commerce, digital media, social media is a really sort of sweet spot to be within the sort of ecosystem of digital marketing and advertising. I think that where we are as a business is when we acquire a new business, it does take at least twelve, if not eighteen to twenty-four months to really embed that into our business. And the focus on the team...
of the team is really in optimizing for profitability, making sure clients are happy, looking at ways of working and systems and processes, and making sure that we embed all of those into our business. So I think that in the medium term, you know, we are looking for double-digit organic growth. I think that the environment is a little bit tricky at the moment, and some brands are still a little bit cautious. That's not to say that we aren't having traction. We are, and as you can see, we won more new clients than ever before in a six-month period, which is fantastic. But I think that there is some caution, and brands are still looking for even more return, and some pitches are taking a little bit longer.
But now that we've integrated Social Chain, we look forward to hopefully reporting, you know, more growth at over the next twelve to eighteen months.
So there's a question here about AudienceGPT and Scribe, which was another AI tool that we launched last year, and how clients have responded to these tools, and what are our future plans for expanding AI-driven solutions within Brave Bison. So I think that the potential of these new generative AI models is enormous for our profession, and it's the next big jump for our industry. And I think that what we're seeing is that the field is sort of dividing into the kind of businesses that would like to see what's possible, and the kind of businesses that perhaps have their head in the sand.
I think the reality is, when you show up to a pitch, and you are saying, "Not only am I gonna do everything creatively, that I previously did for you, but I'm also gonna use this nascent technology to superpower your results even further," that's really, you know, a main differentiator from a lot of the crowd. The reality is, both of our tools are actually for us. They're not really for the clients. They're ways in which we can work better, and we can work faster, and we can model more effectively, and give more certainty to the people that we work with.
I think there's definitely a big difference between a Software as a service business that sells software on a license, and a business that uses all of the technology available to it in a way that its clients can't really do for various different reasons, and brings that to market. I think it's important that we differentiate. We're not a software business, but we are a technology-enabled services business, and that does help us beat some of our competitors to some of the more, more exciting and progressive work out there.
There's quite a few questions on how we managed to win so many clients in the first half, and also why clients choose us over competitors. I really do think our proposition to new clients is really quite unique. If you think about the broader market, there are sort of a number of options for clients. Some clients might choose to go and work with a very sort of large network agency, and lots of those network agencies really prioritize legacy media. They've done deals with lots of different companies, whereby they can buy media on television or radio at very cheap costs, and as a result, they try and pass that on to clients. They're also very complex in their structure.
They don't tend to be integrated, and they have lots of different P&Ls and lots of different trade brand names, and clients, as well as sort of ultimately getting pushed sort of more legacy media, don't really get a sort of connected offering. They don't get a team of people to work with that sits across all these different possible digital channels. The other way that clients can buy is they can contract with a number of different independent businesses, so they might have one social media agency, they might have one agency for all of their Google spend, but what this creates is even more complexity, and there already exists a very, very large amount of complexity in the market. If you think about today's sort of marketing ecosystem, you've got new channels, new trends, new platforms, new products.
It's a difficult job to do, and having three or four agencies, all with different strategies that compete with each other and are not joined up, creates even more complexity. And so Brave Bison is a third option that is one of connection and agility, where we're small enough to care, but we're big enough to deliver, and our capabilities sit across creative and content in social, in Social Chain. We have audience analysis and media planning and buying in Brave Bison Performance, and then Brave Bison Commerce is thinking about the technology platform and the customer experience.
And so within our business, we're able to think about sort of big brand ideas and creating brand awareness, all the way through to actually driving traffic to websites and apps, as well as actually expertise around optimizing those digital experiences for conversion to maximize revenue. So our offering to advertisers is one of connection; it's one of agility. I think our capabilities are very modern. I think that our delivery models have been optimized, and as Theo says, they're almost always technology-enabled. We offer quite a sort of remote way of working for lots of our staff, and as a result, we're able to get the best talent.
So we've really reengineered what it sort of means to be a services business, and we've thought exactly about where clients need help both across consultancy all the way through to execution, which I think is really important, because more and more so, we're having very sort of strategic, very consultative conversations with senior stakeholders at client organizations, and we're actually charging for that, and then we're actually delivering results through execution, so it's that sort of hybrid consultancy agency model that I think is really interesting about Brave Bison, and we're also sector-agnostic. You know, we work in travel, we work in B2B, we work in D2C. There are so many sort of sectors that we build up experience in and then share those experiences and those learnings with new clients that might be in different sectors.
We've had a question about whether we're considering a share consolidation in order to take the share out of the penny stock range. It's something that we've discussed a number of times, and we've spoken to a number of people to get advice on it. We've had some quite conflicting advice. Some people say that it's a great idea, some people think that it can harm the share price in the short term. I think as a result, it's something that we would certainly consider at the stage of doing another transaction, but it's probably not something that we would do as a standalone item.
... There's a question about, sort of, shareholder returns and the share price, not advancing and us not paying a dividend. That's actually not true. Over the last sort of three, four years, our share price has advanced. When Theo, myself, and Philippa joined, sort of it was in April two thousand and twenty, the share price was around, sort of one pence, sort of moving around one to 1.2 pence. And as of today, it's sort of, you know, significantly over two pence and did reach three last year.
In terms of a dividend, you know, that's something that we have thought about and discussed, but we think we can actually create more shareholder value by putting that back into the business through some kind of bolt-on acquisition. So we absolutely are focused on the creation of shareholder value. And to remind shareholders, myself and Theo are the second biggest shareholders in Brave Bison. So much of our incentive and so much of our remuneration is about increasing the share price, and so it's something that we think about and talk about, you know, every single week.
And we really are committed to increasing shareholder value, but we think that we can do that by growing the business, by using the cash that we generate for bolt-on acquisitions and sometimes for more transformational stuff, like we thought about with the Mission Group. There's a question about acquisitions. Are we planning on being acquisitive in the short to medium term? Yes. As Theo mentioned, we really are sort of quite selective, and we have a quite a clear mandate as to what good looks like.
When we look at a business that we're thinking about buying, we look at everything from the sorts of clients it works with, the sorts of markets it operates in, the capabilities, and whether or not they're new or sort of complementary to our existing service offering. We also think long and hard about the integration. Because we're a little bit bigger now, we have to think about how things connect with one another. When we were sort of, you know, thirty people in two thousand and twenty, it was very easy to think about how businesses come together because we didn't have critical mass in our existing business.
We feel as though we do have more of that now, and so we have to think quite strategically around, "Okay, how will these two teams come together?" We're fairly confident around some of the sort of back office solutions, the IT, the finance, the HR. Usually, we get very confident about marketing, but when we think about the integration of teams, that does take some time, and we're really sort of. We need to get clear around how we're gonna make a success of the acquisition and of the integration, which I think we've done for all of the four acquisitions that we've done to date, and so things do take time.
But we're hopeful that in the near to sort of medium term, we will find something that we think fits, and I'm sure we'll be able to use our existing cash balances to acquire it. There's a question about medium-term organic growth targets. I think we've always said that our sort of underlying space is growing at around 10-15%, and I think that that would be a great target for us to think about in the sort of more medium term.
I think that's it for questions.
Yep. Perfect. Thank you very much for answering the questions from investors. Of course, the company can review all the questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. But just before redirecting investors to provide you their feedback, which is particularly important to you all at the company, Oliver, could I just ask you for a few closing comments?
So on behalf of the whole board, I would like to say thank you for all of shareholders' support. We look forward to updating everyone with hopefully more progress, at the end of the year. So thank you very much.
Thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session? As you know, we automatically redirect it to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Brave Bison Group PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.