Good morning and welcome to the Oxford Metrics plc preliminary results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged, they can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated in the right corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question raised during the meeting itself, however, the company can review all the questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to note the following call. I'd now like to hand over to CEO, Imogen O’Connor . Good morning.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you, Alessandro. Welcome to Oxford Metrics fiscal year 2024 preliminary results. Thank you for taking the time today to join us at this IMC meeting. Firstly, for those of you who are new to Oxford Metrics, I will take you through who we are and what we do, and the applications and markets we are in. Zoe, our CFO, will take you through the financials and the factors influencing the performance. It's back to me for an update on where we are today, our progress, and how we're well-positioned to capitalize on the growth opportunities ahead. Lastly, our outlook and priorities for fiscal year 2025. I'll take it as read that you have read this safe harbor statement. Thank you.
Oxford Metrics is a global smart sensing and software business that uses vision and other sensing technologies to derive insights into real-world applications. We listed on the AIM market in April 2001, originally established in 1984 as a management buyout from Oxford Instruments. Oxford Metrics has several subsidiaries, Vicon Motion Systems, the original business that was established in 1984, our motion capture company, and lately Industrial Vision Systems, our smart manufacturing company, and more recently post-period end, we acquired The Sempre Group to strengthen our smart manufacturing offering. Here are just some of our customers. The first three columns, mainly the Vicon customers that we've had for over 40 years, and lately the smart manufacturing companies that have joined our portfolio since the acquisition of IVS and Sempre.
Across the markets we serve, customers include our major sportswear manufacturers, automotive, aviation, and aerospace companies, research institutes, hospitals, global tech brands, medical device manufacturers, games companies, visual effects, however, as in location-based entertainment providers. Some recent customer stories include Can we move to this video slide, please, Alessandro. Saucony Shoes. The Vicon technology has been used to improve sports performance and reduce injury since the early 1990s. The Saucony Human Performance and Innovation Lab uses their Vicon system to analyze and improve athlete performance and their shoe development with Olympians such as elite marathon runner Malindi Elmore. PING is one of the world's leading golf club manufacturers and have been using motion capture for over 14 years to help improve golfers' performance.
Vicon technology aids the club fitting process by carrying out a full analysis of the golf swing at high speed, looking at how the golfer interacts with the club. Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the U.S. is helping to unlock the next wave of research innovation in small autonomous drones and robots. The robotics engineering department use their Vicon system to track tiny robots who are learning to navigate complex environments at speed and scale to tackle real-world challenges from pollination to autonomous search and rescue. Next slide, please. Also, a video. Thank you, Alessandro. Moving to IVS. This is a well-placed inspection system delivered by IVS. The system here is automatically checking for inclusions, cracks, gray level, colored particulates, and surface inspection in the final inspection process of blood sampling well plates.
In this example, each individual tablet, and by tablet we mean a painkiller, is being inspected by eight cameras on all sides to confirm it is complete, ensuring there are no chips, surface damage, inclusions or other defects. Any issues are automatically captured, and the faulty tablet is rejected, ensuring right first time products. Next slide, please. Now I'd like to introduce Sempre, our post-period end acquisition, strengthening our smart manufacturing offering. The Sempre Group are metrology specialists who sell a portfolio of products to help manufacturers with measurement, lean efficiency, and quality control. Using a range of sensing technologies, software, and services, Sempre improve customers' production processes, yields, and efficiency. They provide customized solutions in the automotive, aerospace, precision engineering, and medical device markets. I will take you through how Sempre and IVS work together a little later in the presentation. Okay.
I will now hand over to Zoe to take us through the financials and factors influencing the performance.
Good morning, everybody, thanks for joining us. On the next slide, you'll see the high-level financials, then we will go through the revenue split by market and geographical distribution. You can see the trends year-on-year and over a longer period of time as well. Just looking at the financial headlines for the business. The group had a really strong H1. Started the year with a large order book of GBP 11.5 million, which was utilized through in the first half of the year. As we moved to the end of the year, through the last couple of months of the year, we started to see that globally, customers were exercising more caution. Purchasing decisions were taking longer, and the academic market slowed down across the U.K., North America, and Europe with some funding delays.
That resulted in a GBP 41.5 million revenue. That's about 6% down on last year and a gross profit of GBP 27.6 million. Gross margins stayed resilient through the year and actually increased year on year by 1.6%. That is reflecting the cost of goods returning back to more normalized costs with, following the supply chain constraints of the previous years, there were higher priced components that came out of scarce components that were purchased. They've all now been utilized, so we've returned back to a more normalized cost base. In addition, we also managed to increase some customer pricing over the year and some price increases went through. That gives us a good margin of just shy of 67%.
Statutory PBT is obviously lower with that lower sale at GBP 2.8 million, and the adjusted PBT is at GBP 3.7 million versus prior year of GBP 7.5 million. The items that go through on the adjusted level are amortization for acquisitions, share-based payment, and M&A acquisition costs. They are all on a like for like basis of previous years' adjusted PBT as well. Earnings per share is down to GBP 0.0296. The balance sheet remains resilient, with a large cash balance of just over GBP 50 million. Capitalization of R&D in the year was GBP 3.1 million. That is up GBP 1 million on the previous year, reflecting that GBP 2 million of that number is the Markerless, so that's the new technology that gets launched later in financial year 2025.
The balance of that capitalization cost is other products that will come through in financial year 2025 as well to add growth into the business. Inventory at half year was at GBP 9 million. There's been lots of work around inventory to bring that number down to GBP 7.7 million, and we will continue looking at working capital and our inventory to optimize through financial year 2025. We've remained with a progressive dividend policy, increasing it by 18% to GBP 0.0325. Just taking you through that profit number in a little bit more detail, working across from left to right from the three, you've got the adjusted PBT of GBP 7.5 million of the previous year, working through to the GBP 3.7 million of this year.
Obviously, that reduction in that sales volume that we've just seen of that 6% down, giving us a sales volume profit decrease of GBP 1.5 million. We see that GBP 0.4 million increase due to the gross margin increase. Operational costs, they did increase year on year. GBP 2 million of that, though, is associated with the IVS operating cost. That's the new acquisition made November 2023. We've got GBP 1.6 million additional operating costs. That can be broke down into GBP 0.8 million relating to our new facilities in Oxford for Markerless. GBP 300,000 was a new IT system. That's the new ERP system to help improve the efficiencies within the business. As it's a cloud-based system, it is expensed rather than capitalized. There was also some additional increase for inventory provision of about GBP 300,000 as well.
We had that increase in the profitability because of additional R&D capitalization. GBP 700,000 impact from FX. That's predominantly U.S. dollar to sterling. With the high cash balance, we've received more interest with the higher interest rates that were in play last year.
Okay. Thanks, Zoe. What I'd like to take you through now is the recent history of Vicon, to put some context around the recent results. If we look at this slide here, and the fiscal year 2017, 2018, and 2019, the Vicon business was trading under normal operating, normal trading patterns and customer buying behaviors. Our general lead time for our products, somewhere between ex-stock and at an outlier, 10 weeks, but ex-stock, four, six weeks or so. Customers' buying behavior was on a fairly quick cycle at that time. As we ended into COVID in 2020, you can see the contraction there, and that was very much affected by the U.S. going into contraction very quickly after lockdown. At that point, we weren't seeing any particular supply chain issues. However, during 2021 to 2023, Vicon was severely affected by supply chain challenges.
Therefore, we had to ask for the first time for our customers to change their buying behaviors, and effectively ask them to get into a queue. We were unable to confirm delivery dates in the vast majority of cases. In order for them to secure their products down the line, they did enter into this with us and placed orders. The effect of this was the group built a significant order book for the first time in its history. At its peak, GBP 24 million, which was then followed the following month by landing the largest order in the group's history of just under $7 million. During that period of time, we were fulfilling orders as we were receiving components from the field, and in a lot of cases, those components were at a premium price. We come into 2024, the supply chain situation is easing.
We still have an order book, and we start to return to the trading patterns observed in 2017, 2018, and 2019, where customers' lead times have come down, and we return to a pipeline operation or an opportunity forecast situation. The other thing to note about the Vicon business is that it's a very Q4 weighted business. In fact, September, historically, over a number of years, has proved to contribute significant levels to the year's performance. The trend of the customers' buying behavior returning to pre-COVID behaviors continued as we went through H2. We saw coverage of our sales pipeline to the end of the year as in evidence in August. Really, those extended buying cycles and pipeline timing shifts and delayed decision making really developed into September.
Unfortunately, the conversion rate of pipeline into revenue during September was not seen at the required levels to deliver the full year number.
Just taking the revenue numbers and looking at that across our different markets. As you can see there from an engineering and an entertainment point of view, they were both down on previous years. We were seeing that academic slowdown I referred to on the previous slide in the engineering market, and it resulted in about 7% decrease on the year. From an entertainment point of view, that was a larger decrease of 23%, impacted by the ongoing slowdown of the global games industry and content creation contraction. From a life sciences point of view, that was really flat year-on-year, even though we had that slowdown, in particular in the U.S. on the academic front. The smart manufacturing, our new division, that had IVS for 11 months in it. GBP 2.9 million of revenue was earned through IVS.
The end of year number was slightly behind where we were expecting, but it is mainly due to customer delays and some orders got pushed out to Q1 of FY 2025. One of the examples of one of the customer delays is that the customer just pushed out the delivery and the install. It was a Spanish customer, and the factory was cleared. We are expecting most of those delayed orders to be shipped in Q1. What was very reassuring with IVS was the healthy order book at the end of the year and the growing pipeline, and we have received a further £1.3 million worth of orders in this financial year to date.
Splitting the Vicon revenue only across the geographical destinations, you can see that both U.K. and Europe saw increases year-on-year, with the U.K. having the largest ever state-of-the-art virtual production studio complex, and that order did span both years. Europe also having success with the Gran Canaria studios, one of Europe's largest virtual production stages. When we look at North America and Asia Pacific, both were down year-on-year. North America, 7% down, and Asia Pacific, the large gap at 35% down. Predominantly due to that ongoing games contraction, and also 2022 was a very large comparative, which you will see more details on the next slide. There was success stories in Asia Pacific still with the Thailand university upgrade to the new Valkyrie camera. Taking that same data, but looking at it over a longer period of time.
We've looked at it from 2017 to 2024. You can see the purple and pink is that North America and the Asia geography. As we look across all of those different territories, we do have a positive CAGR over this period that is from about 6% up to about 13%. When we look at the business overall, it's an 8% CAGR over this time period. One of the questions we get a lot is around the cash balance at just shy of GBP 47 million as at the end of November. That balance now reflecting the Sempre acquisition and the share buyback scheme. The share buyback program was launched in the middle of October and is for up to GBP 6 million. To date, we've now expensed that GBP 1.3 million through that, and we would expect that to continue over the next few months.
We do review it regularly. As previously said, we continue our progressive dividend policy with our 18% increase this year. That'll cost the business in cash about GBP 4.2 million. We continue with R&D investment. There'll be some further investment to Markerless before it's launched and some more new products, all to generate growth in that Vicon business. We look at our M&A program, and we've allocated as a minimum GBP 15 million-GBP 20 million to progress through with the M&A. All of those will ensure that the company remains debt-free over the next period. I joined the business in the first of July. I've worked across the business, across the divisions.
I worked with IVS, worked with Sempre now they're on board, but also across the Vicon and the different departments within there, and of course, alongside Imogen, looking at what costs we can save within the business, how we can be more efficient, how we can get the business more agile, and invest into the business for growth. We've executed GBP 1.2 million worth of cost savings in the last probably six weeks, maybe eight. Predominantly that is head count, but there is some overheads as well. We are streamlining our operations. We've introduced a new IT system which will really help with our efficiencies. We're ensuring that we have tighter cost control measures in place. Looking at our working capital. As I already said, that inventory was high at half year.
We've got it down for year-end, we're looking at how we can just use our working capital more efficient and optimize that inventory. Some of those cost savings we will reinvest into the business for growth. One of those areas is restructuring with the group. We have created a smart manufacturing division, and across the Vicon division and the smart manufacturing division, we will change the management structure so that we have senior managers in those divisions that are really geared for the growth on both. One of the other areas we're looking at is the revenue models. As we've seen on the previous slides, the Vicon business historically is fairly bumpy on occasions, and a lot of the business comes in that last quarter. Looking to how we de-risk that and different revenue models.
Both IVS and Sempre will provide some of that, but also the Markerless, the new technology Markerless is launching. That will be partially CapEx deposits up front, but also moving to that annual recurring revenue over a three-year period.
Thanks, Zoe. As we scale, with the period end of FY 2024, we've reviewed our forecasting methodology also. We need to make sure that our forecasting is reliable as the business scales, and we draw more companies into the group through the M&A program also, we have consistency above all. We now have a lot of historical performance and phasing, which is valuable data, which we'll continue to use. The biggest change that we've moved to the evidence-based MEDDIC system, that means the salespeople must evidence why they assert an opportunity that's a certain stage and a close date, which gives a lot more robustness to the forecast. In addition, lead generation contribution from our growth marketing system, which is now fully in place in Vicon.
Very importantly, for the revenue target visibility, the coverage is obviously provided by the invoice sales we have and the order book or orders in hand, also the visibility from that weighted pipeline from the MEDDIC methodology. Very importantly, tracking the conversion rate of opportunity to order out the door. It was clear that the pre-pandemic historical forecasting method needed to be enhanced, and we have done that already within the business. Oxford Metrics of today consists now of two divisions. The Vicon motion capture company serving those three main global markets, where we have the markerless technology ready to launch very soon, and building out this new division in smart manufacturing via IVS and post-acquisition of Sempre. The Sempre acquisition was earning enhancing with clear commercial and technical synergies with IVS.
The smart manufacturing division has different customers at different revenue models and markets to the Vicon motion capture division, which is a deliberate move to help to diversify the group's revenues. With this growing group, as Zoe said, we're in the process of restructuring the management levels to optimize and position for future success. The synergies in the smart manufacturing division since bringing Sempre into the group, we're aligning the capabilities of these two companies for growth. In sales, we have more people selling both companies offerings with dedicated regional resourcing. In products and markets, the expansion of IVS technology to better serve the markets that Sempre have brought into the portfolio. Group services providing bandwidth and introduction of growth marketing without significant cost increases. In R&D, we have identified two cooperative product opportunities with the IVS IP helping Sempre to win more.
In management as part of the group structure reorg already mentioned by Zoe. I'd now like to talk about the opportunity and threat of AI to the technology within the Oxford Metrics group before we move on to the growth opportunities. By AI, I mean generative AI text to video. In this video, I'm showing the latest text to video AI renderings that are possible. Later as the video rolls forward, you'll see Vicon motion capture, and I hope it will be very clear what the difference is. Text to video, generative AI tends to be very headshot, straightforward, turning left to right, not multiple characters, not complex movement, not things like gymnastics or sports moves. This is now the Vicon section. As you can see, the level of complexity, direction, nuance. This is animation and creation at its highest level.
This is what Vicon is used for. Text to video, I'll talk a little bit about how we feel it fits into the pipeline in the next slide. I'm hoping you can see from the video that the two things at the present time look, and the outputs look very, very different from each other. How do we see generative AI fitting into the entertainment industry, particularly? If you take that video, the start of the video was at the left-hand side diamond, and as we went through, we didn't see any markerless in there yet, but towards the end of it, where you saw the Vicon motion capture, that's the dark blue diamond at the very far right. In the creative process, there's a lot of stuff called ideation or storyboarding. That's where the animator or the creative has an idea.
You saw in that video, they even have sketches, the old-fashioned way of doing it, actually drawing the characters out. Generative AI could be used to help speed that process up by just using a text to video tool as we saw in that video. What we see is that would be used very quickly to come up with an idea that then moves along the chain and then uses the Vicon markerless system to then ideate it to a more complex level, more nuanced, more intent, more emotion, more like the final product. The thing we need to remember about motion capture is that the stage where the outputs for games, the films, the TV are being done are usually busy, expensive to use, and are not used in the ideation stage at all.
The way we see AI fitting is at the beginning of this process, then you advance through the Vicon pipeline as the creative process advances, as the project advances. We do keep a very close eye on this technology, we do talk to our beta program customers in markerless to see how they're using it, they all see it in the same way as we've discussed here today. Then we have to also talk to the use of generative AI in other markets we serve, certainly life sciences. I think gen AI may be a difficult sell there because patients' movements are unique to them, they are related to the underlying pathology, and treatment is being prescribed from the motion capture.
I think it would be difficult for a text to video tool to be able to replace motion capture as it stands today in life sciences. We do feel it's possible that AI techniques in some form, such as classification, which we use in our IVS IP, could be used for classification of movement and movement disorders. We're positioning the business for future success. The motion capture division, Vicon, will be stimulated by new products and will continue to grow through our previous investment in sales, marketing, products, and customer success. The commercialization of the markerless technology in the final stages of beta program are going well, and we'll be launching the first 2 versions of this technology within fiscal year 2025, with revenues to come, including ARR.
Our smart manufacturing division continue to work with The Sempre and IVS synergies to grow those two companies as stronger together, whilst also continuing our M&A program in this exciting and vast area. The power-up is still there. It's anything that could accelerate the other three components to our growth strategy, and that's also keeping an eye on M&A more in the motion capture space. There's some interesting IP in the markerless area, particularly. Our outlook. Trading in the first months of the financial year has started in line with expectation and continuation of the normal or the pre-COVID buying pattern seen from our customers in the Vicon business. The group has made clear operational progress in 2024, getting markerless ready for launch and establishing our new growth area in smart manufacturing.
Our Vicon division has started the year with a good spread of opportunities across all main markets, and this pipeline of new products in addition to markerless being released throughout the year. The Vicon pipeline has seen improved activity in the academic area, particularly in the U.S. The entertainment market remains mixed at present. Markerless is in its final stages and ready to realize those revenues, and smart manufacturing division has made a strong start to the year with those additional GBP 1.3 million of orders contributing to IVS's healthy order book. Sempre also has a good pipeline, and we are already seeing sales synergies with IVS opportunities.
The group enters fiscal 2025 with strong balance sheet and a current cash position of just under GBP 47 million, providing us the flexibility to build out our smart manufacturing division by our targeted M&A program as we seek to extend our capabilities in yet more areas and capture more of this important growth market. With a continued focus on cost and efficiency, actively reallocating resources to high-impact areas, we are well-positioned to capitalize on the growth opportunities, setting the business up for success in 2025 and beyond. Okay. Thank you. That concludes the presentation section of the meeting. I'll now be able to take any questions.
Perfect. Imogen, Zoe, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions, and you can do that just by using the Q&A tab that sits right on the top right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to read the questions that have been submitted today, I would like to remind you that a 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 a large number of questions throughout today's presentation. Imogen, if I could just hand back to you to read out the questions and your response to it's appropriate to do so. I'll pop you both on at the end.
Yeah, that's fine.
Yeah.
Great. Yeah, no problem. That's all right, Oscar.
Over to you, Imogen.
Sure. Just having a quick. Okay. All right. Thank you. We have some pre-submitted questions, so we will hit those first. "FCI Group recent acquisition of InspecVision, is this a direct competitor?" Sempre actually have the agreement to sell InspecVision in the U.K. and Ireland. It is not a direct competitor, it is actually part of the group, in terms of Sempre. The acquisition came through, we made sure that we were communicating with the new owners to ensure everything was going to be remaining the same, and thus far it is. So far, no issues there. "Will we be affected by the U.S. tariffs?" Good one. Until we really see the detail of that, we do not know. We are already taking action in terms of planning for various scenarios of how that tariff might look.
We obviously have a U.S. operation out there, we do have options to be able to mitigate for any U.S. tariffs should they apply to our products and our markets. "Why have the administration expense increased by 47%?" Sure.
As we sort of touched on this with the gross profit chart earlier on in the presentation. When you look at the admin costs, they have gone up about just over GBP 4 million. GBP 2 million of that is all IVS costs, that is a new acquisition, of course it would push that up. The other can be split with the GBP 700K of FX, GBP 300,000 of increased inventory provision, GBP 300,000 ERP new system, and then there is GBP 800,000 which is the new facilities for markerless. In all, about GBP 800,000 of that is one-off costs, we would not expect to see those repeat.
Okay. "Could you give us an update on M&A activity?" Sure. The M&A conversations continue. We have a range of sizes in active conversations, some sort of in the sort of IVS size and some a bit bigger. We have actually removed the GBP 3 million-GBP 9 million revenue cap on our previously stated criteria. We are talking to sort of larger companies. I feel that we needed to become a credible buyer in the smart manufacturing space in the Sempre Deal has certainly helped us with that. The know-how that Sempre have brought to the group really also helps with qualifying in and out on M&A. Also we have actually walked away from a couple of deals, although, in a lot of cases hit a lot of our criteria for a good add to the group.
On one we had to walk away because of price, and on the other, unfortunately with the technology, didn't really feel that the technology would have a long-term place in the area of smart manufacturing that we are targeting, i.e. top end, hard problems to solve, highly regulated quality compliance. Lawrence, please can you break down the components for the GBP 1.2 million annualized cost savings?
The GBP 1.2 million, a couple of a million of that is annualized headcount, and the rest is overhead. That, travel and systems and software licenses that aren't needed. General sort of overheads for the business that have just been reviewed and can be taken out without any impact really.
Okay. Please could you outline the remaining steps to bring Markerless to market? Yeah, sure. The beta program is now in its final stages. The beta customers have the final product to test. We have deliberately, because you get one shot at bringing new technology to the market, we want to get it right. We've made sure that we've established the value of the product in the customer's minds. It's also allowed us to have a little more time discussing the commercial model, again, making sure that ARR piece is landing well. The next phase is to get ready for the public launch, finalize that last view of testing to make sure that the product is exactly as it should be. Remember, we need to remember that Markerless is going to be a program of launches because it's not a one and done.
It's a machine learning product, so its capability will grow over time as we use more and more data to answer more and more end-use cases. You need to think about when the launch happens, there will be further launches over a period of time. We will also be working with the life sciences market, to get the product ready for them over the coming months and years too. Okay. How does the order book this year compare to last year? Because our customers in the Vicon business have reverted back to the buying pattern seen pre-COVID, because the supply chain challenges have eased, then Vicon has gone back to having no order book or no significant order book at all. That's how it was for years from that fiscal 2019 and backwards.
The order book was unusual, exceptional, driven by the demand and the supply chain issues of actually shipping goods out the door. The order book for Vicon is very low compared to the GBP 11.5, but it's normal levels. The order book for IVS was good for the size of the business, and the visibility there is very good, and it's a different revenue model for them with sort of contractual and project deliveries as well. Two questions, please. Are we seeing any signs of the longer decision-making process changing for better or worse? Should we expect any catch-up sales or they've actually been lost? The larger economic events of entertainment market and academic funding kind of slowdowns, in some cases we see, again in the U.S., increased activity as we expected. Entertainment remains mixed. We have some customers who are going very well.
We have other customers, unfortunately, who the story isn't quite so great. I'd say that we see some moderate signs of improvement, but we want to see this happening over a longer period of time. We're taking a prudent view of that at the present time. I think we've answered that second bit. A low number of months for the Markerless launch. Reasonable for the cost saving. Cost saving is already realized, right? It's potential here. Sempre have only been in the group for just over a month, a couple of months, just under a couple of months. The first thing we wanted to do with those guys is get the commercial synergies going, get them selling more, because that's an easy win.
As part of the restructuring and the divisional structure that we're going to put in place, that will be part of looking at all the other areas will be part of that. Further details you can provide on the upcoming Vicon products. In terms of the Vicon products, we're targeting areas, where we see the ability to unlock upgrades and unlock new business. A couple of products for the life sciences market, on the software side, which will drive upgrades. We have a product specifically for the virtual production market in entertainment that is not in contraction from our perspective. There's one general product which will be useful for every customer, and that will also help them to move forward with upgrading their existing system. We're doing as much as we can to unlock business from our existing customer base, which is very big.
Also it makes us, certainly on the life sciences side, more competitive. The timeline from market launch to first sales, we're expecting to be relatively short. The pricing model is set to be attractive to customers. We obviously have beta customers in play, an obvious thing to do there is to ask them to pay for the systems that they have. We are expecting the timeline to be relatively short there. The forecasting methodology includes an upgrade to a top-level CRM system. We do have one. We use Salesforce as a CRM and have done for a number of years. The MEDDIC methodology is the thing that we've actually worked on to change with that evidence-based opportunity weighting. What level of inventory are you targeting?
I think we're targeting sort of areas around where we ended the year, for financial year 2024. To maintain that level and bring it down should we need to, it's all about ensuring that we've right-sized it for the forecast. Giving an absolute number on it will depend on where they ask for what's required from a forecasting point of view. At the end of the day, we're looking at around about GBP 7 million at what we're looking at with our current forecast.
There's another batch of share buybacks envisaged. We constantly review the buyback at the board level, we review the cash balance and its use and its allocation regularly by the board. It is a topic that remains a live topic. Okay. All right. Well, thank you, everybody. I think that concludes the Q&A session. We will get back to any of the other ones that we can afterwards. I'd like to thank you all very much for taking the time to be with us today. Thanks very much, Alessandro.
Imogen, Zoe . Thank you very much for updating investors today. For feedback from investors, once closed this session, as you know, you'll automatically be redirected 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, which will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team at Oxford Metrics plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, good morning to you all.