SMS messages. Secondly, put charges on people's phone bills. That's the raw core technology, connections we have with the mobile operators. We then have built a layer of, a product layer on top of that, which we give to our clients so they can create and run campaigns. They whether it's competitions, as you will see or hear in particular on radio, work with over 90% of the commercial radio broadcasters in the U.K.
If you look at anything on pretty much on TV, so Ant & Dec on Britain's Got Talent through to services on Channel 5, where they're sort of saying, "Enter these competitions or text in and speak with your comments," we are the technology behind those five-digit codes you hear and see in those formats, all the way through to the likes of charity, and we are the dominant provider of these services for the charity sector. No doubt many of you are tuned in to Red Nose Day last Friday. It's become a really powerful part of their donation piece where you can simply text 10, 20, 30, and 40, and you can donate directly to the charity through SMS. Fonix are running all the services in the back end of that. Why is it important?
We are in effect an aggregator. We aggregate the fragmentation of all the mobile operators who are obviously independent businesses into one place. We provide incredibly powerful technology for high throughput. We're dealing with live broadcasts, so there's thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of people interacting in very short spaces of time with giving each one of those users a journey that's that fits whatever they're trying to do. We are aggregating that data to report on in real time for our clients so that they can analyze and potentially send unique messages back to users depending on what they're doing and what they've done in the past with that particular business, and all of this sits within Fonix. Of course, reporting that information back to our clients.
For example, the presenters and the production team on things like Comic Relief can talk about how much they've donated. Any moment during the evening, when you've got something like Global Radio running the big campaigns such as the Cash Call, which they're currently doing on Heart and Radio X and Capital, where they're giving away GBP 500,000 in a week, they are at 5:00 P.M. closing the lines and behind the scenes, aggregating all the data of all the entries. Our platforms ensure that it's all been done fairly, everybody's in the pot. A winner is picked fairly, and that's fully auditable. The user can be contacted, and that user can then in essence be taken back by the broadcaster on air to be celebrated as a winner.
You can imagine it looks lovely, or certainly sounds lovely and sounds straightforward when you're listening to Heart at 5:00 P.M. on your journey home. In the background, all hell's breaking loose, to be blunt, and in a good way, because they wanna make sure it's a fantastic end to what's been an amazing promotion for the week. We are the providers of that, and we have built a fantastic reputation over the last 10 years of being a really powerful part of the client's direct consumer engagement. SMS is ubiquitous, it's frictionless, it allows consumers to do something impulsively. It's usually super low spend, you know, GBP 2 type stuff, GBP 2.50. We don't get caught up in cost of living crisis. This is outside and clearly defined under Ofcom regulation. It's not regulated by the Gambling Commission.
This is seen as prize draws, and there's a big market for that. We are very powerful in this position, and we've grown the business for years. We've become a dominant player in the U.K. as I go through this presentation, we'll talk about how the fact that we've now started to export this business into other markets and also look at how adjacent product sets start to fit within what we do and how we're investing in that.
Hi, I'm gonna just take you through kind of a whistle-stop tour of some of our business model fundamentals, just so you have an understanding. I'll touch on the historic financials at a high level so you can see how we've grown. Beyond that, we're gonna really focus on our strategy going forward so you have an understanding of where we're going. Just to understand some key metrics about our business. The most important growth metric for our business is gross profit. Revenue, to be honest, is a slightly meaningless number. A significant proportion of what we do is with mobile networks, and we partner with mobile networks, and we facilitate transactions on the consumer's phone bill. We're seen as an agent of those networks.
We have to incorporate in our revenue for accounting reasons, the profit that those mobile networks may make, and it can vary for lots of different reasons. If we could get away with it, gross profit would be our revenue. It's the margin that we make from transactions. We're a very transactional-based business. We take a percentage of any payment that a consumer makes, and we mark up any messages that our consumers send to those consumers, and that's our gross profit. That's why it's very important to us. We're a highly profitable business. We have pretty much always been profitable, certainly in the last 10 years, and we tend to focus on things that will make a return to us in the sort of short to medium term. We don't really take long bets.
We focus on niches where we recognize we can build a significant moat in either our IP or in relationships or other dynamics. We look to become the market leaders in that segment and then make sure they make high returns to us. That's the sort of nature of our business. We generate high amounts of cash. We are a dividend-paying business. We pay out at least 75% of adjusted earnings per share on a progressive basis. If you look back at our dividend-paying history, you'll see it's consistent. We've always increased our dividend year-over-year. We've often paid out more than 75%. Last year, we paid out over 100%. We made a special dividend because we had some excess cash.
Even the additional 25% we retain, we are a very cash generative business. We are a capital-light business. We don't really have any significant capital expenditure other than our product, which we amortize quite quickly over three years. As a result, every couple of years, we often have an opportunity to distribute some excess cash on top of this dividend policy. If we're looking at our business through the lens of gross profit, about 80% comes from the Media segment. That's largely TV and radio customers. On top of that, we have about four or five% from charities. We have a similar amount from sort of telecoms industry. We have a similar amount from the enterprise messaging sector. There's a whole range of different sectors making up the other 20%.
80% comes from media and broadcast, and particularly in international markets, that tends to be 100% of our gross profit. We are a very cost-effective, highly operationally leveraged business. We are only 57 people today, and that represents over 80% of our cost base. We are very sort of efficient in the way we operate, and as we've expanded internationally, we've been able to maintain that cost effectiveness. We don't really have to put substantially any new costs into new markets when we're going live. We, as I said earlier, target niches where there's a strong recurring element of income to it. 99% of our income is of a repeating nature. It's not subscriptions.
This is transaction-based income, but it tends to be either transactions that are repeating with consumers on a daily basis, a weekly basis, monthly basis, or in the case of things like charity telethons, it will recur on an annual basis. Here's just a quick snapshot of our historic performance. On the left-hand side, I have our financials from H1 of this financial year. As you can see, we have about nearly 90% of our income comes from the U.K., but we've got a growing segment in the rest of Europe. Rest of Europe is growing really strongly, 24% growth in the first half of the year. That is currently Ireland and Portugal. We've been live in Ireland since about 2022.
We went live in Portugal in September 2025, and that is now starting to grow quite quickly for us in the background. That's a new market that we just launched in. When we come to look at the next couple of slides, you'll see there's been several other territories we're exploring at the same time. U.K. continues to grow strongly at 6%, but we've also got other new markets growing much more quickly because we're new to those territories. As you can see on the graph on the right-hand side, this is looking at half year on half year on half year. We've always had growth in our business year-on-year. There is an element of seasonality in our business. That's why you get the dips every other line.
That's the nature of working with media broadcasters who tend to skew their schedules towards the first half of our financial year. It's particularly the period running up to Christmas where they run certain campaigns that perform very, very strongly, and that's likely to be consistent into the future as well. We're then gonna just talk about our growth strategy.
Yeah. Hopefully that gives a good overview as, from a business perspective. I think, you know, just to finish on that, you know, you can see that we are fundamentally very much a profit-oriented business, and we'll talk about that again in a moment. We have only 57 staff. We can grow the business from a leverage perspective super easily. We could double the amount of GP through transactions, through further client growth without really putting any more people in. Of those staff, half are in our sort of development team, so we are building products and features to continue that. I'm gonna touch about that, this in terms of where we're heading now. It's really focused into two core areas. As Michael said, nearly 90% of our business comes from the U.K.
All of our core software, our obsession about managing the really mature market like the U.K., where there's good single-digit growth, and we see further growth coming down the line is where we will ultimately always keep that core strength going. We can export all of these things into everywhere we're going because we're so focused on what we do. On the rollout from an international perspective, Michael mentioned Ireland, which went live in 2022. Back in sort of 2021, we could start to see the U.K. was maturing. The DNA within our business is a growth company, albeit we do spit out significant dividends as a company. We are debt-free, so, and with a light cost base, we do generate cash. We are growth. In our DNA, we're growth.
We like to be growing. We like to see what we can do next. We started to explore once we started to see the U.K. was probably gonna move from being a double-digit growth over in the fullness of time into a single-digit growth business, that we could export this. Having gone live in Ireland in 2022, it was a natural first step for us. We had some friendly telcos we could liaise with, some broadcasters we could liaise with, and the regulation fitted in that market for us to go and run prize draw services for TV and radio companies. That's been a success, as is depicted in the fact that it's sort of nearly 20% of our GP. We have invested modestly in time and energy, one head in particular, on exploring where else we go.
Again, Portugal came along with those ingredients. We look for three things. Regulatory perspective, it's not gambling. Secondly, do the telcos, you know, can you work with us on this stuff? Believe you me, there are many markets in the world where the telcos don't because with all due respect to some of the telcos, they're quite antiquated in fundamentally what they do, and it's hard to navigate the big organizations as they are. They don't necessarily offer commercial terms that allow us to foster a partnership relationship down where we wanna give the majority of the money to the broadcasters so they can run high-value services. Portugal did have those hallmarks. We've gone into that market.
We estimate that there's about EUR 30 million-EUR 50 million worth of transactional value there at the moment, largely through telephony, not SMS. That is a bit like the U.K. was 20 years ago. There wasn't really an incumbent. There was one incumbent, but not very focused in this stuff. They ran these services, but it was almost a sideline to what their core business was. We saw an opportunity to go there and do this, and we've done that. We've gone live, and we're really excited by the prospects of what can be done in that market. We are only 5 months in, but we are seeing great opportunity.
We think in the fullness of time, you know, from a GP perspective, there's probably GBP 1 million-GBP 2 million worth of GP that we can address in that market. What does it cost us to go into that market? Some opportunity costs insofar as our dev team have had to integrate to 3 mobile operators out there. Naturally, some flying time from the people within the Fonix team in London that need to get out there to meet the telcos and do some sales to the broadcasters and what Fonix are about. Finally, we've actually just put a country manager in there.
Fundamentally, our expansion strategy in the, what I'd argue is the smaller markets, being population and opportunity size compared to the U.K., we've put in a country manager and the rest is run out of the U.K. The tech team, the finance, the operations, the client servicing, all the skill set can be run from London, and we can export that modestly with one or two people going into each market and organically grow that as the opportunity grows. We finished a third pilot, which is very embryonic at this stage, in Switzerland, where we have delivered for a radio group out there, a set of pilot interactive services. Interestingly enough, 10.8 million people, good GDP, regulation fits. The Swiss haven't run these services for over 10 years.
That was because for all the services we focus on, and I suppose peers from a PLC perspective, the likes of a Boku and a Bango, that use mobile payments and interactive services for major brands. There is, in days gone by, been sort of the uglier side of, if you like, premium SMS, which was things like Jamster, Crazy Frog subscription ringtones, and dodgy subscription services and alerts, which unfortunately, in less well-regulated markets, and even in the U.K. up until about six or seven years ago, were rife. I'm sure many people were caught up in that sort of stuff over the years.
That is not our focus, but a lot of the telcos have been nervous in some of the early emerging markets for us, or they've experienced this stuff and therefore they've not focused on it. Fonix's approach gives them real comfort that there is high value, dependable, sustainable, long-term vision services that they can really embrace this stuff with. We are hopeful that in the Swiss market we can expand that.
If we consider the Irish market's got just under 6 million people, Portugal has 9, Switzerland has 10, we sort of take this sort of view that actually there are a number of national broadcasts in the likes of Switzerland which we could work with, and they, in the world of advertising revenues being squeezed, which we know is happening, especially for commercial broadcasters, along with fragmentation of viewing figures, etc. , we have an opportunity to allow our broadcast clients to have a direct consumer engagement strategy with something that's ubiquitous and super frictionless and a bit of fun. It generates data so they can engage with the consumers on a direct one-to-one basis, and frankly, generates revenue. They can monetize those audiences through prizes and stuff, competitions and stuff like that.
We've become a very important commercial line for some of our broadcasters that we work with. It is significant for them. We are entering into a fourth European market over the course of the next 12 months. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that it's in France. We have announced our Head of France two weeks ago. That's just with the obvious need to have a local presence in a non-English native speaking market, where culturally we need to address the telcos and the broadcasters more locally. We're really excited by that. That's a much bigger opportunity. There is circa EUR 100 million worth of business out there today with a couple of incumbents providing that.
We are seeing the same sort of hallmarks we've seen in Portugal and Ireland and to some degree Switzerland, where it hasn't been the focus of those incumbents, and there's an opportunity for us to use Fonix's expertise and all the experience we've learned over the last 10 years to create fantastically high profile, high production value, high quality solutions which deliver much more ROI, which are way more appropriately received by consumers and the broadcasters. I think that French market has a EUR 5-10 million GP potential for Fonix to go after, which we're really excited about. Then finally, of course, you know, we are, as Michael said, only 57 people.
That alone is a lot to go after for the next three years and addresses probably somewhere in the region of, given that we're gonna nudge towards a GBP 20 million GP this year, there's probably a good GBP 15+ million in those markets alone to go after. We are looking at other markets. There are other markets across Europe and the world where all of those ingredients exist. We've got some international clients who have media or radio groups, TV groups in other parts of the world who are interested in supporting Fonix should we have the capability of doing and running services in those markets. We feel it's a very simple strategy from an international perspective, but one that we feel is really tangible and we can go after. That's track one, the second track being product.
I'm just gonna give you a sort of a quick summary of what these products are. Just to set the context, these are new revenue streams to us on top of our incremental business, and international strategy is probably our primary growth driver at the moment. Product strategy is a secondary growth strategy that we're running in parallel, particularly in the U.K. market, and we're experimenting with our existing customers to build out additional revenue streams for them. Most of these revenue streams are coming from online channels that we don't currently operate in today. The first one is PayFlex. PayFlex is effectively a payment recovery mechanic for failed SMS transactions. A lot of our income comes through text-based transactions. A user texts a number.
We can get up to a 10% failure on those requests to a mobile network, particularly as you go up higher and higher price points. That's because a mobile network might have business logic in place that says the user's on a corporate handset, or they have a spend cap in place, or they have a bar on their handset they can't transact. Those users at the moment or in the past have not been able to transact at all on the service. We've created this mechanism to offer them an alternative method to pay. We're getting up to 25% conversion on those, on the offers, the alternative methods that we provide to the user.
By the end of the year, we think it will be generating something like half a million pounds a year run rate to us just from our U.K. customers alone, with the potential to expand either internationally or with some in some other sectors that we're not currently deploying it. That's PayFlex. CompsPortal is an online channel to engage in broadcaster competitions. We run the SMS broadcaster competitions for the vast majority of broadcasters across the U.K. and in Ireland. Lots of those businesses have an online channel which is done through sort of a marketing agency-esque business. We estimate there's something like GBP 1-2 million worth of GP through online transactions that are going through other providers at the moment.
We have now built a product to compete in that space, and we're on a journey to roll out across our customer base or persuade our customers to switch to our service. We've already launched it with one small media customer in the U.K. Hopefully, over the next few years, we'll move into that space a bit more, and it's a very, very compelling offer when we go into international markets as well. Then the third product offer, new product that we're focusing on, which is probably the one we're most excited about as a business, is what we're calling our rich messaging project, product, which is really RCS messaging. For anyone who's not familiar with RCS messaging, think of it as the sort of the next evolution of SMS messages.
It's like we can already reach something like 75%-80% of users in the U.K. It's automatically enabled on Android and iOS devices without the user being even knowing, although they can choose to disable it if they want. What that means is we can send images, videos, buttons, and online payment requests to a user through their messaging app. It comes through the same application as your SMS message, but it's a much richer experience to the user. Allows us to do much more complex things, allows us to do much more complex sells. Traditionally, we are often promoting things like cash giveaways via SMS, which is quite easy to articulate in a text message, in a 160-character message.
The ability to offer house giveaways or car giveaways or holiday giveaways should become available to us when we can start to send richer messages to the user 'cause it's those are aspirational products that don't communicate so well in a plain text message. Alongside that, we can offer multiple calls to action to a user, so they can be offered multiple price points. We can also offer them an online payment mechanic like Apple Pay or Google Pay alongside the traditional carrier billing payments that we offer. That's really exciting for our existing customers. The U.K. market for broadcaster competitions is something like GBP 250 million, but the wider prize draw competition market in the U.K. is about GBP 1.2 billion if you include the likes of Omaze, BOTB, 7days, Performance Street Car Giveaways.
There are lots and lots of businesses in this space. We currently don't really do any transactions with those businesses. We do a lot of SMS marketing to their own asset, website assets, but we'd like to get into the space where we can start to actually transact with those businesses as well. We'll give you a random mathematical example. If we were to do GBP 20 million worth of expenditure in that GBP 1 billion market at 5% take rate, which isn't unknown for our industry, that would be a GBP 1 million GP to us. We're very excited about the opportunity it presents in just the niche that we focus on in the U.K., and a gain, like all of our products, this is very applicable going into international markets.
The RCS messaging channel is. It's developed by Google, but it's monetized by the mobile networks across the world, so we can connect via Google to any network across the world if we want to. That's the sort of summary of our product. There's an executive summary of how we've sort of all the points that we've just made here, but I'm conscious that we've probably got some want to save some time for Q&A. Maybe best to move straight to that, David.
Okay. You can use the time as you wish. It's not a problem.
Okay. Well
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think the key summary I'd really like to ensure that people understand is that, you know, I think from a PLC perspective, we're a super cautious organization. We always have been. We've sometimes been moaned at by some of our investors that we are not bullish enough. The reality is we haven't ever not delivered on expectations. The guidance in the market is something we obsess about. We've got a very sustainable revenue model and a very forecastable revenue model. We have, with really good visibility, and understanding of what we're gonna do, across all of our clients, across all our markets, and we feel we've got a very clear expansion plan from here today onwards, both from a geographical and a European and a product perspective.
I think realistically that's probably the key summary here. We're cash generative. We are debt-free, and we are very much a business that is focused on what we do, and we know where we're going.
I think we're done, David.
Very good. Excellent. Thank you both, Michael and Rob. I know instantly that you are a popular presentation because I've had lots of text messages while you've been presenting. As you can see, we've got a huge number of questions to get through, which is not a problem. You're the last presentation today, so we'll go as far as we can all the way through them if your time permits as well. The first one: Who do you consider your largest competitors, and why do customers choose you?
Great question. So the short answer is, because we need to integrate to all the mobile operators, you tend to only be competing with other businesses that have that capability. And over the last 15 years, there are two sort of routes that most of our competitors have gone down. One is they've either focused heavily on payments, so like a Boku and a Bango that've gone really down into payments and sort of left the messaging side. Or they've gone down into the messaging, that CPaaS strategy, the likes of IMImobile, Infobip, Twilio, Sinch, et c., and they go after messaging. We ...
One of the things we knew back when I started the business in 2014 was there was a gap in the market, in particular for this space, with a real focus that mobile number you can do both with. If we get the products and services right and go into the right verticals, the rest is being underserved. There are competitors in each market, they tend to be smaller providers that tend to try to sell a variety of services. Selling into broadcasters, as I'm sure you can imagine, is hard. It takes a long time. They're enterprise-grade businesses. They're thinking about scheduling, brand, all the bits and bobs you'd imagine they would, and it's hard work.
A lot of our incumbents we see in every market or competitors in every market. They run other stuff that's much more easy to run, so that sort of wholesale messaging or more content-based premium rate services, as I sort of mentioned earlier, which are easy to turn on and easy to get going. To name one or two would be hard, but there are some privately owned ones in each of the markets we go into. Because we are specialty. The U.K . market for interactive services for broadcasters, and we are fortunate to have been here to do this over the last 10 years, is the market leader probably globally because Ofcom regulated the hell out of it back in 2009. If you remember, there was a whole scandal for dodgy voting and all sorts of government.
Yeah
It got regulated out. Now, a lot of people go, "Oh, crikey, it's a tough market to be in." Well, it is. You know what? It's so highly regulated, if you're running services for that, you've got an incredibly good confidence base of doing this properly, where to go from. We've built that up from there, and we have been the supplier focused on that. When we wander into Ireland, Portugal, Switzerland, other markets, none of the incumbents are thinking about this. Yes, there are competitors, and we do compete, but we are really specialized in this space, and that's tends to cut us apart from most of our competition.
Yeah. The more it's regulated, of course, once you're in it, the less number of people are gonna try and get into that market.
Yeah, there might be a question on this. Don't forget as well, we also handle the cash on behalf of the client. The mobile operators pay us, we reconcile the payments from the mobile operators and pay the clients. It runs through our balance sheet. For those of you on, I'm sure there's a question on it, like how much cash do you actually have, there's a lot of cash flowing through our business. If you're a small, privately owned incumbent, your broadcast clients need super confidence in the fact that there's a lot of financial governance going on in the background there. Being a PLC has really helped Fonix, and I don't think there are many PLCs that we compete against in this space. They're usually smaller, privately owned companies.
If all of a sudden you're in, you know, France and you're a broadcaster thinking, "I'm gonna put EUR 40 million through this company. Can I trust it's gonna be okay?" You know, I think Fonix can give that credibility.
Yeah. Just to warn you, the quicker you're answering the questions.
I know.
The more that are appearing. It's unbelievable.
Sorry.
No, don't. It's good, and the investors love asking questions. I'm gonna ask the next one. David says, "Does Fonix have bridgehead clients already trading in the new European markets that you're targeting?
We have a couple of multinational clients in our existing portfolio, particularly Bauer Media. It's a big radio network. Bauer has businesses across Europe. They have a presence in Ireland, they have a presence in Portugal, both where we're present. They have a lot in Scandinavia, and a few other markets, Poland, for example, or across Europe. We're always talking to them about other markets, and we would hope that we obviously have a strong partnership with them already. Over time, we would have the opportunity to pitch to the respective business managers in each of those markets. It's very much a pitch to every territory to win the business, and that's, which is a fair approach, so that's what we'll look to do.
In other markets, we have found sort of referrals through mobile networks or through our customers might know other people in other markets. It's a very tight market, the sort of radio and TV broadcasters, in that there's a handful of providers in each market. Across Europe, they're quite well-networked. In fact, a lot of our team are at Radiodays Europe in Latvia this week, meeting everyone, sort of the leading people in that sector.
Yeah. Great. Now, Julian wants to know, over what time frames do you expect your international expansion to show up in the revenue and ultimately profit?
Yeah, I can probably answer that one. Ireland was our first market. I would say last financial year, Ireland was something like 12% of our GP, so it's making a meaningful contribution already. We launched Portugal in September. Portugal's got the potential to be a similar size to Ireland, sort of GBP 2 million in the longer term. That's what we're aiming for. It won't do all that in year one. We'd hope to be doing sort of half a million GBP in our first year in Portugal, so that's sort of the trajectory, somewhere between that range is what we're looking for in the next 12 months or so. Switzerland, we've just gone live with a pilot, but it will take some time.
Similarly in France, we are working on propositions and relationships at the moment in that market. We're making very good progress. Our expectations internally is sort of towards the end of next or second half of next financial year. In next calendar year, we would be looking to make, have a contribution from France and Switzerland, so take a bit longer. It is possible we will have some meaningful revenue coming up to Christmas this year from them, but we really can't say. We trade off the back of our customers, so we don't get fees from any contract. Signing a contract doesn't really mean anything to us. We have to persuading the customer to run services and then scale them, which takes some time.
Yeah. Just out of interest, I mean, you mentioned Omaze and others.
Yeah.
Now, could you effectively be in a position to create your own draws, where you obviously get a house or something attractive and say, "Right, we're gonna run one ourselves"?
I mean, I guess we could. We have all the capabilities to do that, but we're not a marketing business. I think we're very much a provider to the companies that have audiences. Then we do work with some of those guys too. You know, our capability of being integrated to the mobile operators, integrated to payment systems, providing that robust sort of engagement platform and payments platform for those services, there's always a danger you become poacher gamekeeper. It's not really in our skill set. I think there is an art into that performance marketing that perhaps, w e are not, that's not really where we've come from.
Just to add to that. We see lots of opportunity in what we're already doing, and that's what we've got a good plan of what we wanna do. We're gonna execute on that. What I would say though, in the U.K., and in Ireland as well actually, anyone can run, any business can run a prize draw competition. The regulation allows a quite broad spectrum of different businesses to do that. That's how Omaze operate in the U.K. In many other territories across Europe, we see this in Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, France, and a couple of others, the regulation that allows you to run these services is actually ring-fenced to media publishers or broadcasters, so TV, radio, and print.
Because it's seen as a mechanism outside of gambling regulations to allow those businesses to fund their operations. It's a sort of funding of the press. In other markets, in the fullness of time, I guess we could say to someone, a broadcaster in France, "Have you seen how successful giving away a house is in the U.K.? You're the only people that can do it in that market. How we could help you sort of evolve a format that doesn't exist today." That's quite probably far down the horizon that we might consider that.
Yeah. Looks like there's lots of opportunities. It's picking the low-hanging fruit, as they say, I suppose actually.
Yeah.
Now someone in the audience wants to know, "Thanks for talking to us. Are you part of the Global ITV Birthday Draw?
That's a good question. Good knowledge as well.
Uh.
Just short answer is, and blunt answer is no. We work with both ITV and Global in everything we provide to them. We provide some stuff for The Birthday Draw for them, but they are running that independently.
Okay. Really interesting presentation. I often hear of the big half-million prize draws on the radio and wonder about compliance. Does an independent body ensure that the voting and the selection is fair?
It's a good question as well. Actually, no, there isn't an independent body. In another, in Portugal it's different, and each market's different. In Portugal, it requires a policeman to be at the winner pick, believe it or not, for every winner pick. The policeman signs off that it was done fairly. In the U.K., it's super well-established, the processes, and is highly regulated by Ofcom. The rules and regs are explicitly clear, and they can be investigated at any time. There is no requirement to have an independent body to validate it. You are dealing with, as I said, a super regulated area where there are massive brands. Global are a massive brand, and their brand reputation is everything. The robustness and the validity of those winner picks is essential.
That's basically it. Some of our other clients actually do get an independent body to come in and audit their services at least annually to just check for processes and pragmatism that it's been done properly and spot any potential weaknesses.
Yeah
It's sort of, yeah, that's how it's done.
We run the winner selection for some businesses or several businesses, and we do have a number of clients who pay for the likes of sort of big auditors to come in and check that the technology is robust and no one can sort of work their way around it, and it's from that perspective super well managed.
Right. Now, the next one's regarding the 57 staff members, and I know I wanted to ask something about that as well. They say, "Only 57 staff members is surprisingly lean. How many staff work on acquiring new clients, and how easy is it to switch provider to you and vice versa?" And I'd also add, with 57, it's quite a tight ship. How is your churn? Do you lose key members of staff, or are you able to wrap yourself around them nicely?
Well, I can answer that. For the 57 staff, just under half of them work on our product team, so that's development, design, etc . There's a lot of investment going into product. We've been doing that for sort of 10 years or so. There's been a big IP buildup.
Yeah
Over the period of time, which we're very, very proud of, and we've built strong relationships. Of the remaining half, I could probably say a quarter of the businesses are commercially oriented people. They are people focusing on partnerships, relationships, other sort of commercial dynamics of our business. About the remaining quarter is sort of back office. We're processing lots of transactions. We have a relatively big finance function disproportionate to the rest of the team. We have got a customer care facility for if any consumers want to find out about transactions on their bill, et cetera. That's the kind of rough makeup of our business. In terms of the... What was the second part to the question?
That was about retaining clients, so I'm happy to cover in that one. The easy to move. I mean, just to finish on that as well, this feeds into the retaining clients. We aren't a business that charges our clients any money, right? If you think about it, we're a transaction. We work very hard to get in there. We try to demonstrate that this can be value accretive for those organizations as far as they can make money out of it. At the point that we work very hard, as Michael says, to maximize that, because going live is great, but it's meaningless. Going live and it's just about making money doesn't serve Fonix. We have to make sure the clients, it works really well for them, and they build confidence.
They feel like that they've got a partner that's helping them, is there to answer operational queries, build confidence they can do more. That takes ages, years. You know, our average contract length, we announced I think last week. Was it last week? If you look at our PR, you know, we've just extended our contract with ITV into its 10th year. We've been working with the likes of Bauer and Global since 2000. This, that's coming up for 10 years this year. We are heavily embedded and so to, so, but it's all about performance. We are working so hard to optimize work and products and features to grow their capability to do more, to work on operational support, to make sure it's good for consumers. And that entrenches you in those clients.
On the flip side, therefore, if our clients wanted to move, it's 'cause fundamentally we must be doing something really wrong. That probably is a question that leads to the question no doubt will come back. Well, does that mean it's really hard to win business? The short answer is, well, it will be if the client's doing a really, really good job, if the supplier's doing a really good job. What we're finding, I've blown our trumpet a bit, being a global leader in this, I suppose. When you go into other markets, we've got so much experience technically, operationally, security-wise, robustness, policies and procedures. When we deliver that to a broadcaster, they generally haven't seen it before.
It allows them to open up their mind that they can put 30%, 40%, 50% on their business. We have one of our clients back in 2000, sort of, well, in the late 2000s, that late sort of between 2016 to 2018, 2019, was doing less than 5% of what it's doing a year. We've taken them on that journey. We see, for example, in Portugal, we've got a client there at the moment. We can see we can probably help them double the size of their business by providing better consumer journeys and better formats of promotions. We get a helicopter view of the good, the bad and the ugly, you know? Some of our clients run services, they think they're gonna be great, and they bomb.
We've experienced over the last 10 years of terrible competitions that lose money. We see other people trying to do that. We go, "No, no, don't do that." I think we've earned that reputation over the years and earned that experience. Yeah.
I'm just gonna answer. I'll add to this quickly 'cause I can see lots of questions down the chain asking about competition, et cetera.
Yeah.
That's an industry. Rob's been in this industry about 25 years. I've been around it for probably about 15 years. We've been here for a while. If you went back 10 years in the U.K., there were quite a lot of people in this space. Roll forward today, there aren't lots of competitors, and we've won the vast majority of our U.K. contracts from incumbents over the years. We now pretty much have a very strong position in the U.K. market. I can't think of a major broadcaster we don't work with. Over those 10 years, those other providers are not still around. A lot of them have sort of moved on and do other things now. There are very few. I can only think of, like, one business in the U.K. that's in our space actually.
If I look at Ireland, when we went into Ireland, there were two incumbents. We displaced both of those incumbents. They've now left the market as far as we're aware. We don't see them actually trading in the market at all. When we went into Portugal, there was one incumbent who's still there today, but over the course of time, we'd hoped to take a very strong position in that market as well, 'cause we have so much more in terms of economies of scale than they can compete with. In France, there are two established businesses. Again, there's competition, but we'll take the same strategy we have in other markets. In Switzerland, there is no incumbent. Like, those services don't exist today.
We, from that perspective, it makes it a little bit easier to have to pick up new contracts.
Great. Now, Rebecca wants to know, can you talk a little about who your larger shareholders are, and also how many shares each of you own?
Yeah. It should be documented on our website. I suppose the breakdown would be that Will Neal, who was the founding investor, along with Richard Thompson and myself are major individual shareholders. Will has about 20%, Richard under Starnevesse has about-
7%
7%. I own about 6%.
Yeah
Which takes us to sort of over, you know, 30-something, 32% or something like that. The management team have some equity, and there's share options obviously around that too. From the institutional investors, we've got a real mix because we are growth, we're income and we're everything in between. We have some IHT and we have some income and we have some growth. I couldn't tell you how that's split as amongst the rest. But
Yeah, I mean, if you looked at our website, you'll see, but Investec's a big and Rathbones a big holder.
Charles Stanley.
A big holder.
Yeah.
Uh, uh,
They hold them among, across multiple funds, so yeah. Hopefully that answers that question.
Yeah. One from someone regarding what proportion of the radio entries are people entering by phone for free? Could this grow over time as more people cotton on that you can enter for free?
Yeah, I mean, I can't tell you that because, if we were to know that, we wouldn't be able to share that. I think it's an important part of the regulatory requirement that consumers are given that. Where there's not a skill base in the U.K., you have to offer a free route. ITV offer a postal, the other guys offer a combination of online or phone calls. Obviously people that know about it for free do it for free, and it's a choice that consumers make. Does it grow? In my experience, the percentages tend to settle down of the entry levels and people get used to the way they do it.
I mean, the broadcasters all have to promote the free route on equal prominence and they try. They do that. They don't hide the free route.
Yeah.
If you went onto any of their websites, you'd see in clear terms, ticket number.
Yeah
This is the number you call and they read it out on there all the time. The reality is reading a 10-digit number on air versus here's a short code to text. There's a lot of friction involved and consumers are willing to pay the extra money to have a convenient way to enter.
Yeah.
Yeah. At some point I'm gonna, I just see the questions growing and growing and growing. I think we-
It's 3:15 P.M. We've unfortunately got a hard stop.
Yeah. Let's bring.
We'll do our best we can.
Yeah.
We'll bring it to a hard end. We could have done a two-hour show just with you guys, I think.
Oh, that's very kind.
One thing that I can do, and I'd love to do, and I'm not biased in any way because I don't currently own any shares in Fonix. I'd love to have you at one of our physical shows 'cause I think you're gonna be flooded with investors who would really love to chat with you for a long time, but judging by the questions.
Mm-hmm.
I'm happy to pay for you to have an exhibition stand at one of our shows if you'd like to come along.
I'll record that, David.
Yeah, you can record me.
Do you want us to try and rally through some of these questions?
Yeah.
I can do a really quick one.
Yeah. We'll go.
Yeah. The one about the Make Me a Winner online site, we don't do that today. There's another business that does that, but we've built a CompsPortal product to try and compete in that space. In the fullness of time, we'd hope to be playing and winning that business.
You can imagine that's an adjacent market that we would want to address from getting clients with what we do, asking us whether you can do more than just the SMS. For example, Soccer Aid charity donations, we do the online donations too. For Channel 5 we run the competitions portal. They've only just launched it. It's actually in its infancy, but we're running that for other clients.
There's a question about France and Switzerland. Is it too much? I wouldn't say no.
No. We are small and we're careful here. Don't forget the fundamentals of the connectivity as in going too quickly. The fundamentals of the connectivity to telcos, setting up entities, it's relatively like for like. Yes, there's different languages. Our big challenge is managing the stock market and their H1 versus H2 versus year- on- year 'cause we're doing, they're big step changes and they don't necessarily flow so smoothly, but we are, you know, we're only doing the modest ones to go into the right markets where there's really tangible opportunity.
The next one was about do you envisage offering other payment methods as well? We're always looking to add more payment methods.
Yeah
As we innovate on behalf of our customers. For some, lots of services now you can do Apple Pay, Google Pay, et c. They've asked, "Do you expect to take more margin?" We absolutely have the conversation. If we're driving innovation at our cost, we will be quite frank with our customers saying we need to take a bit more, and we do that. It's an opportunity for growth and don't really see that new payment mechanics as a competition. The next question's asked about a share buyback. We would love to do a share buyback. We just did one today, well, yeah, today.
Yeah, today. We've seen one.
Oh, you've seen one today. Please read some. At the moment we have a concert party in place, which makes a buyback difficult. We've done one today because, or yesterday-
Because we could.
Because someone in the concert party had sold down some shares, so it created an opening for us to buy those back for a period of time. We'd probably only do a further buyback if we could get whitewash approval, and that would mean distributing probably a bit more or buying back a few more shares than we have at the moment. Probably sort of GBP 3 million would be of that ilk. We've got GBP 10 million worth of underlying cash of our own at the moment. I think maybe if that grew a little bit more, sort of 20% more, maybe we'd be in a place to do a buyback on top of that and do the whitewash procedure.
Mm
that we need to do.
I think given the share price, and a lot of you guys are probably seeing that, we are mindful of, you know, delivering our numbers and trying to help boost that, 'cause we feel a little bit battered by what's gone on in the macroeconomic environment, and we haven't missed our numbers.
There's probably about 90% of the companies on the market that feel the same way.
I know.
Yeah.
Well, you know what? Right now, to be blunt, we run our business like a private organization that happens to be on the stock market. Hence why we like making money, we wanna grow the company, and we're conservative in our costs. You know, we're not gonna hire 100 people for some maverick idea. We believe in our business and it can be scaled sensibly with modest investment, and we're really excited by that.
Yeah.
And we-
We like founder-led companies because they tend to be really sensible with how they operate and how they build a company.
That's nice.
Yeah.
Someone's asked about a FY 2030 gross profit scenario. I think there's someone, some analyst who spits the numbers out saying there's potential to sort of double the size of our GP, which it was their numbers, but we can definitely see a route to do that. They've asked how they will know whether they're on track to do that over the next couple of years. I would say probably at the moment our expectation is a lot of that growth's gonna come from international markets, so us talking about progress in new markets, particularly somewhere like France and maybe Switzerland as well, will probably be a good indicator of where we are feeling we're making progress.
Yeah.
'Cause we take the approach that when we go into a market we wanna own that market. If we're winning a customer there, maybe the timeline can stretch out a little bit, but we will absolutely keep going until we have every major customer to own in that market.
Mm.
Uh-
I'll read it, I'll read out the last one because you'll like it. "Great presentation. Thanks so much. Previously a shareholder and now tempted again." So that's good. You're winning back some previous shareholders.
Well, thank you very much.
Yeah.
We hope we've tempted you enough.
Yeah. Anyway, look, guys, thank you so much.
Yeah.
Yeah
for coming on the show. We've really enjoyed having you, and as you can see, the audience have too. Do take me up on the offer to come and have a stand at the
Yeah. Sounds good, David, and thank you, everyone, for your time. Appreciate it. It's the sun is shining, albeit it's freezing outside.
Yeah. Thank you.
All right, guys. Bye.
Thank you. To everyone in the audience, you're always obviously welcome to come to our physical shows as well. We'd love to see you. They're so popular because you get the chance to speak to the management teams as opposed to obviously hoping your questions will be asked. Although on Mello, we always try and ask your questions, as you've seen. There you go. There's an offer for you to join us. The next show is in Birmingham, Wednesday the 22nd of April, and it's an all-day show, and it'll go on well into the evening. We'll all be chatting away in the bar afterwards no doubt as well. Mello is a big community and everyone enjoys being, spending time together and sharing their war stories or even sharing, obviously, hopefully the successes too.
There's a list of a few of the companies that are gonna be joining us at the show. You never know, Fonix might be with us as well. Thank you for coming today. There's no results roundup. Unfortunately, two of the people who were gonna join us are actually not well. Thankfully, not meningitis. It's one of those situations where somebody can't speak at the moment. Actually when I joined the show today, I thought I wasn't gonna be able to speak. I couldn't get through with my audio. Anyway, all's well that ends well. Thank you for joining us. We'll have another show I think coming up next week. Do join us again. Thank you. Bye.