Good afternoon and welcome to the Journeo plc full year results investor presentation. Throughout the 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. Just simply type in your questions and press Send. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll, and I would now like to hand you over to CEO Russ Singleton. Good afternoon to you, sir.
Good afternoon, Alex, and welcome to everybody that's joining us to hear our FY 2025 results. Thank you for making time. I'm Russ. I'm an engineer. I'm the CEO of the company, and I'm joined by my colleague on the left, who's Nick Lowe, our Chief Financial Officer. We've both been with the company a fair while now. We're both shareholders, and around the board, we've got about 4% of the company. We're really pleased with the results for FY 2025. Journeo has been developing quite stably over the years. We're now a leading sort of intelligent systems providers in transport, and recently through the acquisition of Crime and Fire, we've moved into critical national infrastructure. The results for 2025 were in line with the broker's forecast, very strong.
We increased our revenue, our profit, the cash generative. We've improved margins across the board in the group. We acquired Crime and Fire Defence in September last year. We've got an increasing sales opportunity pipeline, and we're well-positioned for further growth, both organically and through acquisition. We'll go to these details a bit more later, but revenue was up, gross profit was up, adjusted profit before tax was up, and so was the cash. For those that perhaps are new to our story, we really are a sort of technology-based systems integration company. We build solutions in basically down to these sort of five marketplaces, which are predominantly integrating services or bundling up aggregated services.
We provide information systems, and that can be on the acquisition, the filtering, the processing, and the outbound delivery. More recently now, we have an infrastructure protection business that deals with both visual, cyber, and physical security threats. Our fleet systems business is the sort of core of the original business that Journeo has turned into, and that is a specialist provider of integrated solutions on board buses, trains, coaches, and trams. It's really all about sort of an IoT approach, linking the subsystems on the vehicle and then providing information out to the operator, whether that's the actual fleet operator, the local authority, or potentially things like British Transport Police and other stakeholders. Our passenger systems business is really about the delivery of information into the streets, bus station, bus shelters, and some railway stations.
There we design and manufacture a lot of the solution ourselves. Infotec is the market-leading rail displays manufacturer. It's on about 80% of the U.K. network. It's on about 1/3 of the underground. More recently, it's moved into the United States and also into Denmark. Journeo A/S is our Nordics business where we've combined Journeo Denmark, which came as a result of the acquisition of MultiQ in September 2023, and also Journeo, our Stockholm-based business. That is a provider of all of the solutions that Journeo Group has. We made some recent announcements about Campost wins there. Crime and Fire is the infrastructure protection business that we acquired in September last year.
We have a growing list of partners and with customers, and we're really proud to have these people on there. These are obviously some of the larger ones, but we're equally proud to be working with smaller operators or smaller physical sites. As we sit here today, we've got about 35,000 connections concurrently to our cloud-based platforms. We're on about 30-odd% of the U.K. bus network for our cloud-based systems. We've got just under 300 people actually now in the company. This was at the end of the period. What I'll do now is I'll hand over to Nick to run through the financial results.
Okay. As Russ said, a good set of results. Revenue was up 11% year-on-year to GBP 55 million. Gross margins increased again, so we got another 2% out of gross margins, moved them to 40%. As you'll see later, we had an uplift across all segments of the business. Gross profit actually increased by 23% to GBP 21.8 million. Adjusted PBT was up 13% to GBP 5.7 million. If you remove the impact of the acquisition, we increased 8% to GBP 5.4 million, which is where we expect it to be. Diluted EPS was down slightly at GBP 0.2383. There's two strong reasons for that.
The smaller part of it is that there were some new shares issued during the year, from the acquisition of Crime and Fire and some options exercised. The largest part is that our effective tax rate in 2024 was exceptionally low as we had some brought forward tax losses and some over provisions. The tax charge in 2025 was a more normal position. That's the key reason that the EPS actually dropped slightly. Cash was good, very good. Close to GBP 12 million, down GBP 2.3 million year-on-year, but that's after we spent GBP 10 million on the acquisition. True operating was actually about GBP 8 million uplift in cash. We always state our R&D numbers, so we spent about GBP 2 million in the year on R&D. Fundamentally, that all passes through the P&L.
The GBP 5.7 million adjusted PBT is actually after writing off GBP 2 million of R&D. Into the segments, Fleet was a good performance. Revenue was up 3%. Margin was up by 2%. We actually increased gross profit by 9%, GBP 7.3 million. As a contribution from Fleet, we are up 17% to GBP 3 million. Very strong contribution from that business. Passenger performed phenomenally well. Revenue was up 33% to GBP 12.7 million. Strong gross margins at 49% meant gross profit moved up 39% to GBP 6.2 million. The really pleasing bit from Passenger is that it delivered a bottom line of GBP 1.5 million, which is just almost 7x what it delivered last year.
Infotec revenue was down to GBP 8 million. The reason for that, it's exactly as we expected, is that we had a contribution from the New York contract in 2024 that we didn't have in 2025. What we did do during the year was win $10 million of new orders with the same customer, and the vast majority of that revenue actually falls into 2026, so we expect or will see a significant uplift in revenue in Infotec this year. Margins were good, up to 42%, which meant the gross profit was GBP 3.4 million. As a bottom line, it still delivered just shy of GBP 1 million. Journeo A/S, so our Danish business, again, revenue was down slightly at GBP 3.6 million. This was predominantly lower margin work.
Actually as a contribution, the business maintained gross profit of GBP 1.9 million and actually increased the bottom line very slightly. Again, we expect more from that business entering this year, and we've just announced a contract which will help that. Crime and Fire we acquired in September, so this is four months trading. We had revenue of GBP 7.4 million, gross profits of GBP 3 million and a small contribution of GBP 400,000 for the period. Recurring revenue, we say it's year-over-year, so we had another uplift. We had a 10% uplift year-on-year to GBP 7.7 million.
It's 14% of the whole revenue for the group, and SaaS sits at roughly 40% of the total proportion of recurring revenue. Next slide is historically, we've listed all of our RNS for contract wins. We had 13 announcements during 2025, so we've summarized it here. What the slide ultimately shows is that we've won business in all segments of the group. It's not all been focused in one segment. The announcements are across different segments of the business, and that helps what we've carried forward into 2026.
Okay, thanks, Nick . Basically, we just wanted to really share this slide with you. This is effectively why we're here. It's why we've put our own money into this business. It's what we firmly believe. There's some really strong trends occurring in various parts of the world. What we're looking to do is to align the sort of the design of our solutions so that as these megatrends start to be impacting both in different countries and different market segments, we've got the solutions right at the sort of cutting edge, ready to go. On the other side of that, we then look for market drivers that are going to enable these new systems to actually move into sort of revenue generative reality.
If I just go through, there's actually an extensive list of these megatrends, but we just lifted these five out. There's rapid urbanization, that's really, you know, people moving more sort of from rural centers into to towns and cities. You get the mega cities emerging. That's driving up congestion. It's changing the demand for passengers, but more importantly, it's actually putting greater demands on the utilities in and around the cities. You've got the climate change and scarcity of resources and the move towards zero emission vehicles and the use of renewables. We see a lot of the sort of infrastructure around the towns and cities, particularly on the information delivery, needing to be off grid and in some cases, actually generated back to the grid. You then got the shift in economic power.
That is really manifesting itself now where China are a long way ahead in electric vehicle production and the battery technology in particular. You've got the demographic and social changes, and also then the technological breakthroughs with some amazing developments in artificial intelligence and also in solid state battery technology for renewables. So we have been aligning ourselves with some of these. It comes from a sort of a well-known theme of the smarter cities, and these are an extract of that. Then on the other side of that, we look then for what's actually gonna make the change. Where's the inflection point and what do we need to do to align ourselves with that? So I've listed three here. The first one is the City Region Sustainable Transport Settlements, a bit of a mouthful there.
The government put GBP 5.7 billion in to enable mayoral authorities to sort of build future transport solutions. That's very recently been added to by GBP 15.6 billion of funding that runs after the initial fund ends, so from the period 2027 to 2032. In total, there's around GBP 20 billion or so, and we're seeing that being applied now through the Bus Services Act towards franchising. We believe that that's going to operate as a market driver out to 2032 and beyond. The Bus Service Improvement Plan, which is really aimed at sort of local transport grants, GBP 2 billion or so has been pledged previously to that, and we've seen sort of first phases of that coming to an end.
Now there's GBP 2.3 billion of funding. This is for non-mayoral authorities to gain access to this funding through the 2025 to 2030 period. Through the Crime and Fire Defence business, we've seen U.K. government committing to increase core spending on defense from 2.3% of GDP out to 3.5%, by 2035. What that says to us is that, by building our solutions so that we can enable some of these mega trends to be applied and aligning this with our local authority, PTO and defense or security-based customers, we can actually enable some of these funds to be drawn down and these projects to take place, and that is driving our growth.
Our aim is to take Journeo to GBP 150 million revenue, at least double-digit operating margins, and we're going to continue to do that through technology-enabled growth and also through acquisition. Our business is growing strongly organically, as Nick's already demonstrated. We've seen an increase in our recurring revenue and also the SaaS component within that. We have an active M&A program, where obviously we just completed the acquisition of Crime and Fire, and we have a raft of other acquisitions that we're working through. Some of them are into adjacent markets such as Crime and Fire, but some of them are also consolidation opportunities. We're also working pretty actively in adjacent markets, both in the U.K., North America, and also in continental Europe.
I really just wanted to spend a few moments introducing Crime and Fire because it's relatively new to us and there may be people with us now that don't really know about Crime and Fire. Crime and Fire is a well-established business working in utility protection, particularly the critical national infrastructure. We acquired it in 2025 in September, and it's got a team of about 72 permanent staff and a similar number of contracted staff. It works predominantly throughout the U.K., and it has all the certifications and approvals that you need to work in these very dangerous sites where high pressure mains gas, super grid level electric distribution, and also some of the defense-related sites. It's got sort of four legs to the business.
It has its own products, its own intellectual property, things like the Map Vault and Campost, where over the years it's improved some of the designs to the point where now it has third-party inquiries for some of the products, which historically it's only designed for itself. It does its own in-house design, which it has to, because of the nature of the security. There are BS 7858 SC and DV cleared people within the team. It has a network of installation engineers, and they're working throughout the U.K. It also has a construction department, so some of the physical security systems can be quite large if they're protecting a gas treatment site or reservoirs and these sorts of things in quite hostile environments.
The reason that we want a Crime and Fire in our business is that we've been building Journeo essentially from what was a fleet services business, integrated services. We then introduced the passenger information systems piece, and some of the work that we've been able to secure has been at the intersection of those sort of, the two circles on the left, where things like airports, they've actually wanted a mix of the onboard long stay car park or staff busing car park technology linking into the bus shelter, actually then into the airport escalator adherence. Through the airport escalator adherence, we've been asked if we could interface then with things like the perimeter intrusion detection systems and the access control of very secure places, another example of things like nuclear power stations.
We started talking to Crime and Fire many years ago, about integrating those skills into our business, and they in turn started to talk to us. Could we provide remote access services so they can remotely monitor some of their visual systems? Could we run some of our, particularly our analytic tools in real time for their systems?
Yeah.
It took a long time, but we actually came to the conclusion that this would actually be the sort of third circle in the Journeo Group offering. In September, we closed that acquisition, and that now means that this is now what Journeo Group looks like. We have our core capability right at the center of this, the shared resources of, actually it's people like Nick and I and the M&A, the exec team, we have HR, research and development, marketing, and our group IT, cyber security. Then we have the domain expertise, very specific focused domain expertise in the integrated services business, which is ostensibly anything that's moving, all the IT systems, where we bundle up the hardware, the software, the installation services.
On the information side, this is predominantly where a lot of our artificial intelligence led solutions are going, and the infrastructure protection. The infrastructure protection is relatively new to us, so at the moment the impact in our growth plan is yet to come. That's actually why we wanted this inside our group, and we're pretty confident that this can take us through the GBP 150 million revenue with at least a 10% net operating margin. What we've been doing with Journeo is we've been increasing our opportunities, our like funnel of opportunities. We've been increasing our capability at the same time as reducing risk.
It's all about assurance, making sure that the systems are working, whether that's through the remote access services for onboard vehicles or indeed whether it's through remote health monitoring for displays in bus shelters, in railway stations or out in the street. In 2024, the business looked like it does on the left, where we had Infotec, Fleet, Passenger and Denmark. In 2025 we added on the Crime and Fire business, and our go-to-market for 2026 now looks like this, and we're really confident that we can take this thing forward. The business now has a qualified sales opportunity pipeline north of GBP 200 million. The actual funnel is much, much larger than that. Through this we are starting to see now synergies.
We announced a contract last week for the Danish State Railways, which is a combination of Journeo Design Centre, Journeo A/S in Denmark and Infotec, providing the manufacturing for a new class of displays that are going to be installed on the outside doors of the trains for DSB. We have inquiries from other European rail authorities for these kinds of solutions. That's kind of an introduction to our current three-phase business model and an explanation of our FY 2025 results. We'd now like to take some questions.
That's great, Russ, Nick, 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 review those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation-
No, no, that's fine.
Along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Russ, Nick, at this point, if I may just hand back to you to take us through the Q&A session, and I'll pick up from you at the next. Thank you.
Okay, I'm just gonna...
Okay.
Let me just try a couple.
Okay.
I can take that one.
Okay. Right.
There's a question on the quantity of our forward order book. The follow-up, if we can't say what it is, where do we see the strongest growth coming from? We don't publish our order book at the moment. But in terms of color, where we see growth this year, I guess in order of growth. We will have 12 months of Crime and Fire this year rather than four months. We had GBP 7 million revenue from that last year. It did GBP 17 million in the year pre-acquisition. We will see a full year and good growth from Crime and Fire.
As I said, when we came to Infotec will improve significantly this year. Biggest chunk of that will be through the New York contract, but we'll also see some movement in U.K. rail. Passenger should continue its significant improvement, and Fleet will also improve. I guess in terms of ranking of additions to revenue, I would say it'd be Crime and Fire, followed by Infotec, followed by Passenger, followed by Fleet for the growth this year.
Great.
Yeah. There's a question there, how does Crime and Fire fit with the business? I think we've explained that, so the rationale for why we're interested in Crime and Fire. Next one. Okay, page 39 and page 40 of the recent annual report identify high risks of increased competition on being overtaken by new technology approaches. Please elaborate. That's a really good question, that. Obviously we're scanning the horizon for things that can impact us, and there's some very obvious ones, you know, such as, you know, cyberattacks. With the 35,000 connections now to our cloud-based systems, it would indeed be quite a problem if we were hacked and couldn't deliver because a number of organizations now are relying on this. We've got seven airports that are connected.
Well, actually their mobility systems are run by our portal and about 13,000 buses and trains. It'd be quite serious. We deal with that. We have a team that's working on that, and we are going through the Microsoft Sentinel approach, and we're part of the NCSC. Other risks that we've identified are increased competition. What we mean by that, in fact, and being overtaken by new technology, they're actually sort of one and the same. What we've seen is that the incredible performance of agentic AI is now, we believe, gonna decimate a number of kind of traditional SaaS business models that rely really on the asymmetry of huge data or big data, and a user base that's unable to actually filter that.
We do have an awful lot of data particularly that comes from the real-time information systems on board vehicles. There's always a possibility that there's a new sort of technology solution could come in, a bit like agentic AI is doing right now that could actually take a lot of the, if you like, the software deliverable away. At the moment, we have a policy inside the company that we actually don't use any of the agentic AI tools in any safety critical solutions. We do use machine learning, but we're using fully traceable and predictable outcomes, so we don't have the possibility of things like hallucinations within the service delivery.
The risks are more to do with some amazing new development that could come, that could actually sweep away some of the delivery. We're minded to that, and rather than be fearful of it, our approach is actually to embrace it and adopt it. That's really what we're doing. Okay. Do you want to take this one from Adam?
There's a question around tariff threats impacting our U.S. opportunities. I think so far they've actually helped us. The most likely source of displays outside of us is actually China. The tariffs on us are less than on China. The sort of tariff has not impacted us. It may have helped us.
How we may move around that going forward is we could potentially final assemble the product in the U.S., which would enable us to move around the tariffs anyway. So far, no, the tariffs have not impacted us. The U.S. customer is certainly very pleased with what they're taking from us.
Okay, great. There's one here then, Kevin C. As you say that you're looking for acquisitions with some overseas, have you also considered, excuse me, having in-house startups overseas? Again, that's a really good question, and the answer to that is yes. We have been looking and are talking to a number of overseas potential acquisitions.
Some of them we're actually unable to do at the moment because the valuations, particularly in North America or the United States, are much higher than they actually are in other parts of the world too. The business is actually starting to take off in the U.S. We are at pretty advanced stage of taking some office space and actually open up a Journeo Inc. on the East Coast of the U.S. to serve New York City, the MTA and our customer base out there. We've got a team out there now. We've had a service center actually in our customer's premises for about 18 months. We've had Journeo engineering tech support actually in the U.S. throughout that time. That is. I think that answers the question.
Let's have a look. We can go to the next one. Do you wanna take that one?
Sure. There's a question that said, well, we've changed that six months ago we gave GBP 100 million revenue target within two to three years, and we're now six months into that. How are we doing? Is it realistic? Cavendish have forecast for us to hit GBP 72 million this year. Yeah, it certainly is still a realistic target. And as Russ said, we have moved the target on for this year towards GBP 150 million. We are comfortable with the targets that we have stated.
Next one. Are there any plans to be more active internationally, U.S., Denmark or even in the EU? And what is preventing us from doing so? Incumbent competition. Yes, in the U.S., we're gonna do our own sort of small startup. That really is, as everything is in Journeo, it's a customer-focused activity, so it's working with the customer. The customer's asking us to do this. We have the capability to do that. We'll have a U.S. zip code, you know, an incorporated business, so we can offer our customer even greater support both post-sale and also looking forward. In other parts of the world, at the moment, we have an active M&A pipeline with about, I would say, 20-30 businesses in it.
At any one point in time, we probably have half a dozen that we're at various stages of discussions with. We'd love to do more within the EU, and we do have plans to do that. We also do have plans to do this actually in other parts of the world, you know, particularly in South America and Asia, as these new products that have been designed by the Journeo Centre come to fruition. We'll initially do that through channel partners and value-added resellers. That's the plan. We don't intend to be opening up offices in many countries. We'll only do that when we've actually got an established customer base. We're bonded to that customer because we're effectively then part of the supply chain. As everybody knows, it's actually supply chains that compete. I hope that answers your question.
I think we've covered most of those.
Actually, should I take that one? How do you see AI playing a part in cost optimization to 2x your sales? Will the need for headcount increase in areas? Again, it's quite an insightful question. We see AI playing a part across all facets of our business. Actually internally for our SAP, our CRM, our HR systems, and also outbound to our customers, and actually obviously embedded within our systems. We're working on a number of sort of distillation models for the large language models, both on board our vehicles and actually in the street, but also within our CRM, as I've explained. We don't expect to 2x our headcount to 2x our sales.
Where we do expect our headcount to increase is that despite the benefits that things like the IoT and the agentic AI can bring, you actually also do need to go to a site physically because, for example, where you've got a bus, a train or a tram, or in fact some specialist vehicle and military vehicles, hazardous goods vehicles, the technology on board them can fail, and ultimately somebody needs to go to service that. Within Crime and Fire, they have this very significant pipeline of projects coming down framework agreements. To increase that business, what we need to be able to do is to do more projects concurrently, and that will be a function of headcount.
It's not a one for one, but it may be that to double the revenue through that channel, you might need to increase the headcount by, let's say, 30%-40%. We're actually going to use some of the AI tools to do it. This is not jargon. This stuff actually really does work, as I'm sure many of you know. Okay.
I think yours, we are, covered.
Yeah, most of them actually. These are the last.
Yeah.
These are actually all the same questions actually. Think we've done them.
That's great.
Okay.
If I may just jump back in there, guys. Thank you for addressing those questions from investors today. Before we direct investors to provide you with their feedback, which one is particularly important to you and the company, Russ, could I just please ask you for a few closing comments?
I'd really just like to thank everybody for making time to listen to our story. We've been developing Journeo. It's taken us a long time to actually get the platform, the services and the technology right. There's loads of things that we actually want to do in the company to improve it. The aim is to try and do more for our customers to help them get more performance out of the system or reduce the cost of the delivery onto the B2C component, and to really listen and learn to some of these mega trends and these funding streams so that we can actually capture more of the sale and really just enable everybody within Journeo to sort of progress. It's an exciting place to be.
We're doing first of a kind implementations, and we want to do more of it. Thank you very much for making time to hear our story. Really appreciate it.
Fantastic. Russ, Nick, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback, which will help the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.