Earnings Call: H2 2025

Oct 14, 2025

Good morning everybody. Thank you for coming and thank you for coming at first. My first one back, and I hope that it won't be too long before. We see the rates of growth we've had before. We're at $388.389 million at the moment with a 16% margin with 8% increase in reported EPS. The key thing here is that we're showing stable growth. Stable growth sounds a bit of a contradiction, but actually it represents the two things we're trying to do this year. One is to return to stability and that means fixing things. The other is to invest in growth. We're not seeing yet the kinds of leaps that we have had in the past, but we are investing for that very, very thing. Just to remind you of that story of YouGov's growth, there's a huge graph before this which shows something like 10 years of growth. We've just come off that and we need to be reminded that this is fundamentally a growth company. It's a growth company because we have always been led by innovation and when we stop innovating we go flat. We are back on the road to innovation, something that I will show you in the second half of this presentation when I talk about a new methodology that we have produced. In the last year we've had some good successes, which is the stabilizing part that I've been talking about. We have continued rollout of ID verification on panelists. We spent quite a bit of effort focused on removing fraud from panel. This is something that has been bedeviling the industry as a whole. I think we're a long way ahead of everybody else, partly because of our historical asset of a well-embedded panel and partly because we have been using the latest techniques. I think we pretty much lead the pack on the reliability of our data. We've invested in our cube powered products, especially on the data science side. In a couple of days we'll be announcing a new addition to the team, a very important addition, someone who has led an important team for 10 years at Nielsen, really representing the seriousness with which we're taking the data science side and growing that to create the richness and the reliability of the entire Kube data. We've also established on the client services side a team that specializes in selling and educating clients about the value of our connected data, our data products. We've continued our program of updating our dashboards, including putting AI into those to help with discovery. Finally, for this section, we have done a pretty good job I think of integrating YouGov Shopper. It's a major job that was and it has been successful and YouGov Shopper is. Actually doing a little better than our expectations were. That's a pleasant change. With that, I hand over to Alex. Thank you, Stephan. I just want to do a quick overview of our lines of business. I just want to point you to the stack charts on the top of the screen. We've gone from £335 million to £389 million revenue for the year. You'll see the biggest contributor to that. We've got a full year impact of YouGov Shopper coming through on an underlying basis. You'll see the two divisions, core YouGov growing at 1%. I think I want to specifically point out data products. We've turned that from a decline in the last period to growth. It's a lot of investment, a lot of focus that's going into getting us back on track. It was a key driver of our performance for the previous reporting periods that Stephan referenced in terms of those double-digit growth years. I think you'll see the beginnings of an evolution of things that we're doing in that space. I think we're pleased to see we've had renewal rates normalizing back up to 82%. A couple wins in the media agency space. That may be a little bit of a surprise, people saying we are seeing a little bit of weakness as well. It does go to show when we have high quality data, there's still a demand for that. We had a significant win in the retail space as well in our research division. Bit of a mixed bag in performance. We've seen some headwinds coming from our government sector and our gaming sector. Gaming has been a long-term decline for us, but we saw some real strength and demand in our academic, technology, and financial services sectors. YouGov Shopper, just referencing what Stephan said on an underlying basis, we don't have this in our numbers but if we were to look at it on a trailing 12 months basis, it's growing by about 4%. We're pleased with the way that has performed. I want to make the point as a period of coming off the TSAs under the ownership, under the sale from NIQ, we're now off the majority of those, a lot of heavy lifting, getting control of the finance systems, et cetera. It's been a period of lots of, in a way, disruption, moving systems, etc. We're really pleased with how the teams have continued to perform. You'll see our profit on the bottom of the chart has increased from £49.6 million to £60.7 million. Big driver. That's the contribution of YouGov Shopper, obviously, but also the amount of cost that we took out at the beginning of the year. Reference that. At the beginning of the financial year we announced that we had pressed the button on £20 million of annualized savings. Because of timing, we realized about 70% in the year. Just moving to a geographic analysis. Bit of a mixed bag in terms of performance. Europe, you'll see as year-on-year growth is 0%. Part of that has been some headwinds that we've had within Switzerland and Germany. We're starting to see some improvement coming to the second half on that in the UK, which has historically been a strong driver for us. A lot of disruption going through the redundancy programs. We started that on August 1, 2024, lasted about three months, and it was inevitable that we would see a slowdown in performance there as we went through the consultation process. We've ended the financial year really strong. Good trajectory going into the financial year. Areas of growth for us have been Americas. It's always been our big focus. We'd like to see that growing at a much faster pace. 3% on an underlying basis is broadly in line with how fast the market has grown. Just a small point, APAC continues to grow by 2%. This chart, which is looking at our sector, we take out YouGov Shopper in this because it's so skewed to FMCG and retail. We continue to be very well diversified. Technology remains our largest segment, and that's a combination of technology clients using our data, but also using more traditional market research type services. Good contribution from banking and insurance, travel and tourism has picked up again. Retail. I mentioned academic coming through in research. I want to make that point again about YouGov Shopper. Just moving on to our cash conversion and our cash capital expenditure for the year. We remain about the same cash conversion ratio as the previous period. We've had a bit of working capital outflow to do with. We've had a bit of accrued income increasing. We've also seen panelists redeeming more points this year. That's in part, we're running a lot of surveys, particularly in Americas off the back of the U.S. election. CapEx is down slightly. You'll see we spent a little bit less on panel development. That's not necessarily. We haven't been getting more panelists. We've been a bit more efficient in how we in our conversion, and we'd like to see that improving over time, and we've kept our investment in technology expenditure roughly flat. That's not to say we haven't increased the amount of people in our technology teams. We have been spending a little bit more time on maintenance, and I think when we get to the latter parts of this presentation, you'll see some of the things that they have been working on which will drive some more performance into FY26 and beyond. We end the year in a robust balance sheet position. We started the year with a €240 million loan facility. We paid €36 million of that down in the year. We have a €40 million RCF, of which currently €24 million is drawn. We made an adjustment to our amortization schedule in terms of payments. We negotiated a particularly aggressive, for us, we wanted to delever as fast as possible when we took the loan. We're not trading at the same levels we were before, so we've reduced our payments to €20 million for the next two payments: €20 million in FY26, €20 million in FY27, just so that we have the headroom to continue investing in the group. Again, we really want to get ourselves back into this growth trajectory. I want to make the point we remain well within our loan covenants throughout the year. Moving to current trading and outlook, you'll hear us talk about investing. It's particularly important for the group that we are taking on this market. We used to be the challenger brand, and we certainly see we have a right to win a number of spaces. We've got a clear set of execution priorities that we have around panel and product innovation. We've got some investments that will be really focused on data science and product development people, which are moving us toward our SP3 strategy of being more of a platform business in the way that we go to market, the way that panelists and our clients consume data, and we're starting to invest in Shopper. The idea around Shopper is to get their capability expanded in the market. In the markets we are currently in, filling out more of the European map, and over time we'll be looking at how we invest into getting Shopper into the U.S. Our trading currently has started in line with expectations, I think, for FY26. Expect to see modest improvement in revenue and margin, and that's after making some key investments, particularly in data scientists and technologists. I think we start the year, I think there's a lot of compelling opportunities for us. I know it's a slightly challenging macro environment, but we're certainly seeing some good opportunities from clients coming into the financial year. With that, I'd like to hand back to Stephan. Thanks. I mean, I said the YouGov story is growth through innovation. That was the promise that we made at Capital Markets Day in May 2023. The strategy that we put out there is the one that we are following. We're back on that road to growth, I believe, certainly on that strategic road. That involves these five things: the renewed commitment to increasing visibility and quantity of public data. As you will see in a moment, when I demonstrate the importance of public data to us, that is something that drives our reputation, our trustworthiness, our panels, and a lot of other stuff. It is something that we are highly committed to, and we have increased our spending on. Innovation around panel recruitment and management of panel. We are changing the panelist experience. Again, you will always find this emphasis. That we have on public data. Panel, creating data that creates products that are good for clients. This is all part of a flow. The way that we treat our. Panelists and the way that we get. Data from them is being enhanced. We're accelerating the execution to becoming a data platform. More and more of our dashboards are now containing AI and better ways of utilizing our data. Customer search is a huge part of what we do. The degree to which customer search is aligned with our platform is. Is the degree to which our success strategy is working. Those two things being aligned is absolutely. Critical to us, and we've been putting energy into that. There are aspects of the custom research. Offer that are not so aligned. We need to bring everything in line, and AI is helping us to do that. Something that we'll be. Focusing on, in a moment, in fact, in the next slides, is the innovation. In AI, that is massive for us. Leveraging the value of the assets that we've built, that is the broad strategic view. You've heard it all before. There's nothing new in there other than that we're updating all of that with. AI, and we're coming at it with renewed enthusiasm. Now, YouGov in the age of AI. Is the big question that anybody would ask. I believe, and I hope. I'm going to show our company that is ideally suited to use this moment, this historic, revolutionary moment for our growth. Because we are all about talking to real people and the essence of the. Use of AI is real. People, it is building extra value out of. The real people in order to get even better data products, even better value to clients. That is something I'm going to come to several times because we think that our industry has maybe gone a bit wrong in some areas. There are so many wonderful things that AI can do. Replacing humans isn't really the job of a market research company. There are lots of great things that synthetic data can do to get more value to make it easier to do things like ad testing, and there are lots of places where. That really works well. Remember, the vast majority of spend from our clients is in measuring change. That's what people are interested in. Change cannot be extrapolated. Extrapolation is the assumption that things will be the same every time you use synthetic data. The underlying assumption must be that things are the same way. You're extending it to that. That is the definition of synthetic data. It's extrapolation. Extrapolation tells you what you already knew. It extends it, but it doesn't tell you where the surprise is coming. That's why people buy tracking data, because they want to know what's changing that they don't already know. If everything is going the same next month as last month, then it's all nice. That data isn't very interesting. It's when the change is not what you expected, and that's not going to come from synthetic data. We are actually very interested in synthetic data. As you know, MRP has been a very big part of our success in accuracy and getting more value out of our data. We are actually pioneers of synthetic data and it has fantastic value. There's nothing against that, but the vast majority of the market research spend is in tracking change, and change, you need real people, and real people are the basis of everything we do. A data company focuses on the flow of data across four things: people, data, process, and output. For this to work, we have developed over the course of 25 years three major assets. First of all, YouGov has the best panel. We don't have the best panel in every single country. I wouldn't want to pretend that. In our major countries, markets where we have our strong panels, we have the best panel. Everybody knows we have the highest contact rates, we have the highest levels of representivity. We have the engagement that keeps them there for a long time so that you can build layers and layers of data. It's by building layers of data from engaged panels that you get the second big asset, which is that we have the best data. It's the best data because it is single source, it is connected, and it is always recent. It's always being updated. Every single day, it's updated. Recency, representivity, and genuineness, which should be a given, but isn't these days, are the things that make great data. To have that, you need a good panel that gives you the best data. It's also across different areas: demographic data, things about the people, what they're thinking, attitudinal, behavioral, passive data. That's part of that. Qualitative is the bit that's going to be a big new piece, which I'm talking about in a moment, added to quantitative. The third area is our incredibly strong brand. It's always good to have a strong brand, but for us, it is key. It is a key function of what we do, because strong brand yields better panels and builds trust amongst clients. I have two examples here that I want to just run. According to YouGov, a big deal. 70% of Americans believe that. We've had a hell of a. Couple of weeks, I did get. Some exciting news this weekend. According to a new poll from YouGov. Which is a serious polling site. They were before this. I am more. Popular than the President of the U.S. Remember the guy who keeps saying I have no ratings? That makes two of us. They polled more than 1,000 people. I lead Trump by 16 points. I'm at plus 3, he's at minus 13. The importance of that for us is Trump says that assuming you know what YouGov is, and if you don't know what YouGov is, the name still implies it's an authority. That phrase, according to YouGov, is incredibly prevalent in the media. It is what we want. You know, you used to say Google is to. Google, according to YouGov, is our talisman. As it were for this. Meltwater tells us that we are the most quoted company in the world's press. There are over 1,000 mentions about us, of us, of our brand every single day. The total number is not small. There are 385,000 mentions in the last year for the YouGov brand. You can imagine this is a value in itself. We are also ranked number two. This one and the last one are coming from independent research. We are ranked number two for aided brand awareness globally among research buyers, and amongst those switching to the last one, we are the most trusted market research provider. Even when we're not the most famous, we're just number two, we are the most trusted. Anybody, I think, in the industry would say who is the most likely. To get a result, right, it's YouGov. These are really fantastically important assets. The strong brand is strong reach. We have 4,000 active clients now. All of those active clients are obviously people that we can talk to and people we can show our new product to. You could say this slide is a massive strength. It's also in some ways an indicator of we've got a hell of. A lot more asset than we've managed to convert to value. We know what to do. This is a massive asset. This stuff, you can't create this quickly. This trust, this reach, this visibility, and all of it will feed into the new products or the new methodology that I'm going to show to you. What changes about all these assets in the age of AI? It is a revolution that's happening, but for us, it's very much an evolution because everything that AI allows us to do is an enhancement of assets we've already built. Our mantra from Andrew Ng, who was the founder, co-founder of Google Brain, really fantastic quote. For us, it's not who has the best algorithm that wins, it's who has the most data. Other people say, oh, most data isn't the best data or the best insight. All of that stuff just emerges from the quantity of data. Genuine human data at very high scale creates good data, it creates good insights, it all flows from that. There's no shortcut to the value of really large-scale data. That is what the whole world is turning on. While other people are trying to cut out the real sources of this, trying to say, hey, we can make more money by not bothering all these humans, we're saying, no, it's all about the humans. It's all about the number of people talking to you. How much do they talk to you? How much do they give you? That's what AI lets us do. AI enables us to do data collection and discovery at scale. Data collection, actually you didn't need AI for until now, but we're talking today about qual data. Qual data is a different type of data. It's a type of data that we haven't done much with. It's a type of data that is the Cinderella, if you like, of the industry. People do this as a good way of getting insights, of brainstorming and so on, but you can't base big decisions on qual data because it's touchy feely stuff. Right. It's not stuff that you can create a measure out of. That changes when you have AI to first of all use the background data to choose the right people to talk to and to know what to say to them. Then to take all of this unstructured data that's produced by interviews held by AI and turn those into data. That the clients can actually use. It's not enough to be interesting. Not enough to be good for a brainstorm. It has to be things that you can use and base decisions on. We are now doing thousands of interviews driven by AI on a daily basis. I'm showing you one example of this now. I'd love to really, you know, we're not doing any demos here because you can't really demo this stuff. I'm going to show you this one thing, which is a snatch of a conversation, and I'll just probably can't read it, so I'll read it out to you. It says, I've noticed you've given top ratings to quite a few music artists recently. Everyone from Rick Astley and Hall and Oates to 50 Cent and Pussycat Dolls. They each got five stars out of five from you. What shaped your views on these artists given they span such different musical styles? This is a question that the bot came up with that was not based on a prompt of us asking them about anything in particular. They have the background data, the panelists, they were definitely told to talk about music, but they got the bot. The bot found something interesting in the data to turn into a question. The answer is, I grew up listening to and appreciating music from different genres and eras. Bot comes back and says, what first got you into such a wide range of music? My mum, school friends, going to gigs and music channels. Which one of those, which one do you think had the biggest impact on. Shaping your taste in music? Music videos in the 90s and the noughties. It goes on and it can go on as long as you like, but you've taken previous data, turned that into a relevant question that's targeted to this person. They know that you're listening to them, they know that you know something about them and that's why they're here by the way. It's not creepy when we do it, it's creepy when Google or Facebook or whatever does it. Because you didn't ask them for. You didn't come there for that. You come to YouGov to be listened to. This is listening to you and it's responding to you and it's getting you in a conversation and it's coming up with an insight and that can be used, built on in lots of different ways. Now we're not doing one of those, we're doing literally thousands of them. Thousands that would cost you. You could never imagine the cost of just this $20,000 conversation study that we're doing previously. It is a very low cost. I'm not going to tell you what the costs are now because we'll have a Capital Markets Day before too long and we'll go through all the things, our expectations and things. I'm just showing you a new methodology. This is huge scale at low cost. It's automated, customizable, configurable, continuous data collection. Only YouGov can do this. Nobody else has the combination of things that this requires. This requires large connected data. Imagine that bot going into the two or three thousand things we know about a typical panelist and being able to use that and find the interesting things there to maybe open up a discussion or to look for the particular thing that the client wants. Maybe the client is only interested in their supermarket habits. The bot goes into there and finds anything it can find about supermarkets and takes that as its starting point. Only YouGov can do that because nobody else has the range of connected data with live panelists now. Nobody else. Only YouGov can do the scale of continuous questioning. Not asking 100, 1,000, we can do 20,000, we can do 100,000 interviews a day and we can do them at this scale because we have highly engaged panelists and they come back. Of course there's a lot of churn, but our stable panel is with us over time and we can build up a relationship and we can build up. All of that data. This is our right to win. It is the assets built over 25 years, the best panel connected at scale, the strongest brand. Now adding the AI, all of that comes into something that is unique to us. This is a slide that attempts to encapsulate just in one picture what we're talking about and really what we're adding. Over here on the left hand side, we have the world of things, the entities. YouGov, as you know, covers over 20,000 brands and products. In our tracking, when you combine BrandIndex and ratings, it's more than 20,000. We say that because it's a. Changing number and ever growing. It's musicians, it's TV shows, it's media products, it's supermarkets, it's brands, it's consumer goods. Everything that you can think of that is in that commercial world that you might want to track is in our database, is in our cube. It's all being processed through all. Of these people's heads. That's what's happening here. They're living their lives and they come into YouGov and they ask questions and they become obviously noughts and zeros, and that creates a line. That's BrandIndex. BrandIndex was the first, is still the only reliable daily measure of brand strength. It goes up and down. You really need to know that. You need to know. A lot of companies put this stuff into their risk. For example, Bank of America, it's embedded in their risk modeling. It's part of their understanding how news flow affects their accounts. New accounts opened and accounts money taken out and so on is predicted by reaction to news flow measured by YouGov. What this doesn't do is it doesn't tell you why something's gone down here. You might know why, there might have been some incident and you know why already. In which case you might want to know, okay, how does it bother people? Who does it bother and why? Or maybe you have no idea. There's a trend line. You say, I don't know why it's going down. What this new data does, of course, as you've guessed already, is it gives you the why, not the what. I can't remember if I mixed up what and why, but this is the what's happening. This is the why it's happening. It's in here, the way people are talking about your brand. You can be very specific. You can say, have you heard anything about Tesco lately, people to try and prompt that? Or you can just say, what do you think about Tesco? Or which is your favorite supermarket? You can decide how you want the prompt to go and generate these conversations. Then you can find out, how are people talking about you? You can do several things. You can compare and contrast things within the data and within this data. You can also take all the previous data that you've had, because if you're a BrandIndex customer, we'll have a bank of sort of background hum data as to know what the normal conversation is like and you can compare the normal conversation about you to the conversation happening today and find out what is it, what's driving this change. There's going to be a huge amount of value in this that we have yet to discover. This is like a whole new treasure chest. Just so you know, it's not abstract after this. I can't demonstrate it to you here, but after this presentation this goes up online. At the end you'll find two links. One is to about 20 transcripts and the other is to the functional output. Now it is an output for one study. All the buttons don't work the way. I mean, it's showing you how it would work, but it's specifically around one study. You can play with it and see because if you have all of this vast data coming along and you don't have a way that it turns into something usable, then that's interesting, but no good. Obviously, there's a lot going on there and really it's delivering real value to clients. It gives the why and the what else to the what that we've already done. It's automated, customizable, targetable, and actionable. That is to say, it is really a custom thing as well as a product thing because you can turn it onto anything. You can have a single study from it or you can have it on all the time. Its scale reveals the long tail of new information. It isn't just the things that you, and this kind of runs into the next thing, it isn't just the thing that you thought you wanted to know. That's the known unknowns. That's what a survey is. You know what you are trying to find out and you write the questions for that. This is the unknown unknowns, the long tail. The stuff is, you know, what are people talking about? How are they talking about these things? Does somebody, maybe one person in that conversation, come up with something anomalous? The AI will surface that and you can find out things you didn't know. The last bit, all those first four things are of course happening already. This isn't just a plan, this is actual delivery. The last part, the alerts, we have not got to and that's something we're prioritizing. The idea is as this flows along and you're getting actually just open-ended questions just to pick up the continuous hum of chatter, by the way, not the same as social listening on social media, because the whole point about our panels is they're highly representative. They represent. All the subgroups of a population, and they represent them fairly. When you get this hum, you find out what people are actually talking. About, not what's on Twitter or whatever it is. That's not necessarily. Those are not the same things. You get, you look for the, across this entire horizon, and you will get alerts to say, hey, here's something you might look at, something that was unexpected. This significantly enhances the values to our data products. I should have actually said to all of our outputs, because you can do. This to a single survey if you want. This is not simply a new product, although it will exist as a product. You'll be able to do just a study of this based on conversations, but it enhances every single data output we have. Everything that we do that was a what becomes a what and a why. That's why this, for us, is a major revolution. It is going to, I think, have as much importance to us, the call. Side, as the quant side. That's what's new. We've got these three dimensions: the sheer quantity of data, the recency, the daily collection, and we've got this massive range. Nobody else has the range, nobody else has the quantity, nobody else does the daily collection. You can say, well, you add. up all these assets and you add up the stuff that I talked about. Before, about our reach and our trustworthiness and so on, you may ask yourself, why. The hell do you only make £388 million? I do think there is a. Massive gap, and that's something that we really have to address, how we do better at teaching people the value of our data. That remains something that we're, that we have ideas about, but that we're working on. The last thing about this slide, this data is ideal for processing and analysis by AI. I've said that AI, I think, is great for some things and not so great for others. This is right in its area of strength. Taking large amounts of unstructured data and turning it into something meaningful is what it does. Like magic. It's like what we first saw. ChatGPT talking, you can't really work out how it is. It isn't really the algorithm, it is the sheer quantity of connected data. Right. We already have our first paying client. I have to say, it's a tiny, tiny alpha version of this, but very good. We already have engineered into the system, into BrandIndex, that if you want a daily collection or an occasional collection of open ended data, you can trigger that and you get that every day. The version we have now is. Simply one question: why did you say that? You've given Tesco or whoever it is. Is a good rating or a bad? Rating, and it comes up and says, why did you give us that rating? That adds up to a really useful, continuous little bit of insight that we add to. The BrandIndex subscription, and that's just had its first subscriber. It's only been out, we've only been talking for a couple of weeks. We have a lot. Clients lined up for further discussions there. What we're obviously really talking to. The question becomes a. Conversation, and that will be engineered in. It'll be ready by Christmas. Just the last couple of points, we've talked about one very important use of AI, but we're using it across everything we're doing. It's helping us with fraud detection, and I think that we will be the leaders in genuineness of data. It allows us to do new types. Of data collection at scale as we've seen. It does data analysis for us, it does discovery and interactivity on our dashboards. Finally, it also is being used, we're working with a couple of LLMs to turn our data into usable things in search and so on so that. The public side of our data is inserted in its best possible form inside the infrastructure of search. Because we are a trusted source of data, we want to maximize the value of that data. Everything that we do, everything that we do for ourselves, our proprietary data is available for free in top line form. That doesn't in any way hurt our products, I believe, because you always want the detail. No marketer just wants the top line. The public is interested in the top line, like Kimmel, like the president. It's valuable. It's used almost always in its top line form. The more that that's available, the. More, it teaches about the data that we have. All of these things add up to YouGov becoming an AI-driven data company built on real people for all society. I said at the end, when you look at the end of this presentation later on you'll find two links, one's transcripts, one is to the interface. It is obviously in a curtailed form. There's also a video to watch that's being added and we're ready for your questions. Thanks, Will Loward from Berenberg. Firstly, if you could provide some color on the visibility for the top line in FY2026, obviously we've got the key renewal period for data products in November and December. That would be great if you could share a little bit more detail on that. Secondly, in regards to pricing more generally, how you're thinking about that in FY2026 and potentially beyond. Finally, do you feel there's anything further that you need to do from a commercial point of view? There's obviously been some change over the last, say, 18 months or so, particularly on both the CPS side and the. Data Products side, thanks to the pricing. I'll take the first two. I'll start on visibility. I want to point to a couple of things. I'll pick on the UK. We've got Wilt as the UK CEO here. We ended the year quite strong, in particular building momentum into the second half in some of the markets that in the first half had underperformed. We go into the year, and we have talked in the past about our backlog. It's a committed revenue that we have coming into the year. We came in 3% higher than we were last year. We're just a shade under 45% this year. We were up 41% last year. We're seeing that backlog increasing, so we've got fairly confidence on a sort of good, good performance in the first half. We're not talking. I'll make this point again, expect modest growth. We're really looking at how do we continue doing a lot of work that's happening under the hood. I think we're moderately pleased with that. Obviously, it shows some strength coming into the year, particularly with the macro environment. I think looking forward to the renewal season for us, that's typically clients take a data product renewal from January 1, and so November and December for us are key months to make sure that we're getting on top of that. We've amended the way the team structure works. We have a dedicated data product team, back to the old model of a team that's really incentivized and focused on those renewals, getting the renewal discussions early. I think having some interesting things to talk about, new developments in particular around this capability that Stephan's pointed to, shows we should be garnering more interest in that. We're quietly confident on that. I'll do a little bit on pricing. FY2025, we didn't touch it. There was a lot of change going on in the teams and in particular getting ourselves set up for changing some of the incentive structures on August 1. It's very hard to change incentive structures mid-year. We are now putting through, it's a relatively small thing, but we are pushing through inflationary price increases. That's something that we hadn't pushed in the last 18 months. That's when we just started, and again coming back to our peak renewal seasons. But we. We should see some of the benefit coming from that. I'll pass to you on further. Just one thing I wanted to say about prices. You may have some more to say. I just wanted to say that there's something in the. In one of those slides that I could have expanded on, I thought we already spent a fair amount of time. Time on it, that one of the. Outputs of a data company is a data lake with API/data lake offerings or an API. We haven't done a lot of that. We have in fact got a number of clients who just take a feed of the entire cube. If we're a platform company, we— Won't be always just thinking of selling this product and this project, and you have to come in at this high. Level or you don't get anything. In fact, it should be the opposite. You should be able to buy exactly the bit you want in any slice or any form that you want. If I just want one question, and one that's always been possible on omnibus, but it should be possible for all of our data, and I think this. is quite a big project. This is not something we can deliver. The API/data lake bit. Is available now, but it always involves some extra work and something, but a real front end to that that says I want just this particular data should be the way that we allow clients in, and part of maybe how when I said there's a big gap between all of our assets and what they're. Buying is make it easy for people. To buy any bit that they like. There's no reason for us to say you have to have a very big subscription to BrandIndex. You can ease your way into. When we've sometimes tried. To do little data slices, it's been very, very successful. It's just we haven't wanted to do that, and that is a bigger project that isn't an overnight thing, but that is definitely what a platform company would. Do. To sell data at lots of different levels. Further changes to commercial team, yes, I. We have put a very large, not bounty, we've put incentives in place to make data products get more prominence and hurdles that you have to hit before you make money on selling custom to sell products. We have a dedicated team that does nothing but products. It's a small team but it will grow. This is really the change in our commercial, in our sales approach and they haven't been, it hasn't been a massive, hasn't been as somebody said, we're having an overhaul or whatever. It's not an overhaul, it is an evolutionary change to our system. We've done well, we want it to be better and we've made, as I say, some significant changes including putting product as the number one thing we're trying to sell and making it impossible not to sell product if you want to get sell custom as well. The two things are so aligned that it is a matter of how you incentivize. You know when you're selling one you can sell the other, but it has to be that you have to sell subscriptions first, otherwise you're not going to be a data company. Hi, morning, it's Lara Simpson from JP Morgan. My first question was just to come back to the P&L. You did $61 million operating profit, which was really in line with expectations, but you clearly have benefited from sort of lower central costs and then some delayed spending in Shopper. Can you just talk a bit around the margin pressure you saw in data products and research? Clearly, profitability was a bit weaker there. Where are you investing, or is it sort of slow realization on the cost optimization side? You've obviously outlined increased investments into technology and data science. Can you just outline, sort of quantify those investments, and maybe just give us some line on sight on exactly where they'll be going? Yes, on DP. It's a very simple answer. We acquired Yabble at the beginning of the year. It was a loss-making entity when we bought it, loses about just a shade under £3 million. That's been completely allocated to the Data Products division. The margin pressure is purely as we're ramping up the activity, ramping up the integration, ramping up Data Products. The capability behind this is in part driven by Yabble's application. We expect to obviously see some of the revenue growth coming from that to help absorb some of that cost that's going into the business. In terms of the investments, we're budgeting around £4 million. There's a question mark on how fast we can bring that. It is about headcount, and as Stephan pointed to, we have a new hire coming in as our Head Data Scientist, and so it'll be primarily focused on platform technology, which will support product depending on the types of activities. Because Stephan is correct, this could be applicable to customers as well. Once we make a bit of progress, I'm just going to repeat what Stephan said. We'll come up with a Capital Markets Day to really flesh out what that looks like in terms of where we see the growth rates going, coming, and where we see that landing. For now, it'll probably be even spread between the two because we're going to see some applications that are applicable to both of the lines of business. Perfect. Sorry. Just another question from me was around the balance sheet. You've obviously closed at 1.7 net debt/EBITDA, maybe slightly higher than what I think some were expecting. You've obviously pushed back some of the payment terms. It feels like there is more sense of urgency to deleverage post-CPS. Obviously now you're investing a bit. Yeah. Can you just talk about sort of balance sheet expectations over the next 12 to 24 months and how we should think about that new deleveraging as a priority going forward? It is still a priority. I mean, for us, it's really, we have to be careful. Careful is the wrong word. We do need to make sure that we have capacity to invest. We do see some clear opportunities for us as we start to go out to the market talking about some of this capability. If we can see some revenue potential there, then of course you'll see us being much more aggressive in terms of being able to go for a market. In terms of deleveraging, we've taken it down to €20 million. €20 million for the next two years. Expect that to come down, albeit at a slower pace. We do expect to have deleveraging happening and on the other side of that, we're trying to significantly increase our profits. We're trying to achieve both where we'd like to see some significant movement over the next two years and that deleveraging at the same time making sure we're getting into that growth trajectory. Thank you. Morning. Jessica Pott from Peel Hunt. I've got three, please. The first is can you comment a little bit on the custom, the sentiment for custom research, you know, amongst your client base? I mean, data products slowed down, but also custom research. The second is on Shopper, the Shopper segments and the investment going in. What is the key focus for Shopper over the next 12 months? I mean, you've talked about broadening geographies and you've talked about products, but which is the main focus? The final one is just on the new innovations that you've showcased. How does that change the way that panelists are monetized, are paid by going into this form of interaction? I'll start with the last one because I remember it, and the second one I remember too. It fundamentally changes our relationship to panelists, and we're changing the structure of panel. We've already talked in the past about having a core panel that can do a lot more, called YouGov Plus. We know that, by the way, people who are doing a lot more are not giving us worse data, they're giving us better data. It isn't like there's a professional survey taker that somehow gives you worse data. They give you better data that's more aligned with reality, in fact. There is a core panel that we will talk to more and that we can rely on more. We are also now recruiting people not on the basis of any cash rewards whatsoever, only on the basis of participation. This is a good way of actually making sure they're not frauds in the first place as they come through the system. More importantly, lots of people want to take part just for the sake of participation. If you give them large, boring surveys, that's not going to help you very much. If you give them these conversations, they will. We know that they enjoy them. Not everybody wants to talk forever, but lots of people do. We have not only interesting surveys that are contributing to public data, but we can have these conversations. Actually, they will also do market research surveys. They will do. In any case, a lot of. The things they notice and talk about is a form of unprompted market research. These are sort of two ends, and there are things in the middle which is like our regular panel, which we don't interfere with because it's worked so well. We're doing lots of things in. Panel and changing the relationship at different ends of that range. The second bit was shopper, and there are, yes, two things, more countries and changing the product. We've invested in the receipt stuff, which is a form of, it's not entirely automated, but it's less onerous than scanning your shopping. Always remember that the old style here of actually scanning your shopping gives you a level of detail that no other methodology does. That's why even that old style methodology of shopper is incredibly valuable and retains its clients and grows its clients actually, because it goes down to the SKU level. But also we're doing passive data collecting and we're looking at other forms of doing that. That is also something that will drive our entry into America with this behavioral data. I think that's the aim as we add more types of behavioral data in there. There's a mix of ways we're looking forward. I don't remember the first question. In appetite, we're seeing a little bit of a mixed bag, I think, in some of our clients. We're seeing and having seen some good wins in data products in the financial year coming into this year. We are seeing some pressure in media agencies, and we should anticipate that's going to be a bit of a struggle for us. There is an element of doing a fair amount of custom research for that sector. On the flip side of that, we're starting to see more opportunity to pitch for larger things as well in the U.S. I think to one degree it depends on what country you're in. It also depends what sector, and it's a pretty obvious statement. I think we should still see some progress within the custom team coming into FY2026 besides macro, and to come back to some of the points that Stephan's making, it is around the measurement. It's people looking for more tracking opportunities. We like that there's a lot of visibility in IT, and I think the U.S. team has been working pretty hard to uncover some significant opportunities here. There's a couple that we're working on in the UK as well. It's difficult when you're in the summer months; not very much happens with client decision making. I think when we come into our Q2, we'll start to see some of that potentially unlock, and we'll see some decisions made from clients. I think that there's a change. Happening as well in expectations of clients. They're expecting something new from AI, and they've been holding back, I think. Because they're saying, what's this amazing. Stuff going to deliver? So far, it's delivered essentially toys, the things that you get. People are not paying for those things. They think they should be there because it talks back at you and stuff like that, but it doesn't give you data that you're going to make decisions on, not for the majority of the market. I think, obviously I would say this, that our use of AI goes to the heart of what they are looking for. I think this is what they've been waiting for. I think they've been waiting for something that is new and yet that they can rely on and that tells them something they really need to run their businesses. That hasn't happened from AI yet. I believe this is the start of that. Hi, it's Hai from UBS. Thank you for taking my questions. I have a couple on data products and then one bigger picture, please. On data products, you haven't mentioned category view this time. I know you mentioned that you want that to be the way going forward, but is there a bit more of a tangible timeline on when you're expecting it to add into the 95% of customers you haven't monetized from? My second question on data products is just a bit deeper on the margins perspective. Yabble brought the margins down, but without Yabble, from the numbers, it would be 35% margins, right. What were the drivers in there? Was that the cost savings and is that going to be continued? Where do you see the margins going forward? Essentially with Yabble, and deep into that, when do you expect Yabble to break even? The third question, the bigger picture, is you mentioned the LLM potential monetization. How big of an opportunity do you see that is and how aggressive are you pursuing it, given the data quality that you have? Do you think monetization opportunities are there? I'll do the two outside ones. I think the monetization of our data is potentially high, but it may be zero. I can't give you a. Better answer than that because should they want it? Of course they should, because the thing that those models need is recency and trustworthy sources. That's what we do. Are we of sufficient scale for that? I don't know. We are going to scale it up, but I couldn't possibly say something about that on the first question. Category view didn't go well. We launched it and the feedback was, we like what you have, but you're missing things that we need. I'm afraid it was dropped at that point. There was no going back to fixing those things which are highly fixed. We are doing that. That is now with Joe Razza, our Head of Product, who's working on that as one of the things he's doing. It very much ought to work and actually we have a good way of bringing it back, which is, I'm not supposed to talk about it, but I mean we want. To apply it to a new category. That doesn't have very good tracking, and that category is AI, so we'll be seeing before long a variation of category view for that sector. I would say that AI companies are definitely buying from us now. I have investor relations said I shouldn't mention that it's our fastest growing sector because it goes from so small to something quite large. We have made our first seven-figure sale to one of the LLMs, and we think that there is a need for our data by then. I'll pick up on the data products margin. A couple of things moving the margin around, Yabble is one of those. Another is the cost reduction program. We've also had changes in the level of capitalization that we have, and a lot of our developers are focused towards the data products. I think coming back to when do we expect Yabble to break even, a lot of that depends on the pace that we can get these particular products out. I want to make the point, repeat the point that Stephan has made. You've got a difference in the way that clients are approaching AI products, and some people are finding they don't want to pay for them. They see this as a hygiene factor of having summarization, etc., built into your tools. We're really looking for ways that we can monetize that, and again, we'll update more concretely when we come up with Capital Markets Day, but we do think we should be able to get that being a positive contributor fairly quickly. Where do we see margins growing? I think there's a couple of things we'd like to see evolving. One of those is just referencing back to what Stephan said around data slices, having clients be able to come and self-service their own delivery of data. Obviously, that would be delivered at a high margin. It's a repackaging of existing data, but we're also focused on data partnerships. It's evolving the way that we, the market that we point to, the set of users that we point to. Primarily, we are still talking to market research buyers. I think clearly you can see there are opportunities for us to go beyond market research buyers, particularly the LMs. A lot of people are doing data deals with LMs, and we already have a relatively small, we call it data activation, but it's data that goes into marketing campaigns. That's part of Shopper's investment area. We've also been not investing. We make a few million pounds in the core YouGov business around that. We can see that also accelerating the more clients are using AI tools for their own campaigns. It's a clear space for us to be putting data into that. As the use of that data evolves and the sophistication of clients using data for their own AI models, we see that certainly moving up into 40% and beyond, but the pace of that is still to be determined. Thank you. Good morning, it's Jonathan Barrett from Panmiers. I guess I've got three questions. First of all, thanks for the interesting presentation on the AI interviews. I wondered if you could just walk us through the model for that, the commercial side of that. What sort of volume of interviews do you need for this to be useful? What's the cost of that? How do you commercialize it? Is it a case of bundling with other products that you were already selling? Is that an uplift? Is it just a question of clients expecting more value for money and you end up with the same pricing? Obviously at the moment you're saying you're getting inflationary price increases through, but that sort of implies that volumes are flat. Is that what's the driver there? Does this drive growth in actual customer numbers or does it simply enhance the value of the sale to existing? If you just walk us through that. Second question, you've said a few things around this so I'm just going to try to round it up a bit about data activation being used clients and the more general issue of predictive work that you can do. Obviously you've talked a lot about historic data, the what, the why, flagging, what's going on. You know, can. You move in that direction? Can you build your own Personas for those purposes? Are you getting any commercial interest from clients? If you could wander into that side of the equation as well. Thirdly, very simple question. I Think. Yeah, obviously we're wandering into this AI period. You're back in the hot seat, Stephan. Are you really just the CEO for this AI period? In other words, the company needs someone experienced like you, who's been in the business for a long time to see through this and you don't want to take risks. That's sort of a difficult question. I think it's just an open question for you too. I think we're all keen to understand that. Thank you. On the first one, the business model, in some ways it's early, maybe. Too early to have been talking about. It is because there is so much work to do as to how far does this go? What kind of other interviews can you do? How can you use the prompt? You know we are at an early stage of that. The reason it's legitimate to talk about it today is because we've sold and we will sell a bunch of subscription add-ons from the alpha version, and the methodology is one that is ready to be used tomorrow. I mean we have lined up in the UK, I'm looking at, will 5 or 10, I don't know how many clients, four clients always inflate. We have lined up four clients that are very excited to want to use this, and it is active and it will be able to answer their questions now. If you came along afterwards and wanted to, representing a brand or whatever, wanted something, we would do it, we could run it today. It is not a methodology that requires engineering other than what we've already got. It builds on every asset we have. It's putting together things that we've already been doing. We've run 20,000 interviews. They are very low cost. It depends on whether you're paying the respondent or not paying the respondent. If you're not paying the respondent, you can imagine that one of these sections is going to be less than $0.20. Right. For just, I'm talking about that bit of the cost. This engineered part isn't a high cost thing. BrandIndex isn't a high cost to collect. I can only give you very broad indicators of the numbers involved. I don't know if it's 20,000 interviews per day or 5,000 will do, or it depends how many countries we're in and so on. It's legitimate for us to talk. About it because we are selling it now in some version, and more versions over the next weeks. It isn't in plenty of place where I can give you a business model for it. $20,000 per day. Just to be clear, that's what we intend to do and that's what we've just done, and we're looking to see what does that yield. Is that something we could have got just as well with 5,000 or 3,000, or did we need 80,000 or whatever? It depends, I say, how many countries you do it in. We've done it in a way that allows us to come up with conclusions, initial conclusions about all of those things. The beauty of our system. Experimentation is incredibly simple and incredibly interesting from the get go. The second part was. Predictive. Predictive, yeah. Prediction is hard because prediction is extrapolation really. Unless you know, you can't know what's going to happen, change something. I think prediction is about extrapolation and tracking, and you know, we've done with MRP. I mean the best thing, the best. Measure of prediction is something real and that is totally visible. We are the best predictors of elections. There's no question we do. It is in many, many countries. We had just had three MRPs in Australia, Germany, and Spain, which were bang on. As have been the many previous elections, bang on in market research terms would be within 5% or 10%. For elections, it's like 1% or 2%, and that is our average. That's a prediction of sorts, but it's assuming that people, what they say, are going to do soon. Long-term prediction, I don't see how you do it from what we do. If there's a predictive model that somebody has, I think they would use us as opposed to us doing that stuff. As an aside, you may remember with the Trump election, one of the hedgeys known as the Trump whale made large amounts of money on betting on Trump and praised the quality of the data that he had. That data was ours, that was a client of ours. He went on to eventually say we would not have used it the way he used it, our data. It's a good example where we'll supply the real data, and if somebody else is better at doing that, that's their job. It's not our job. Our job is to provide the best, most accurate real description of things now, and we know how to do that. By my personal stay, I'm here to make sure we're back on track as the growth company we were in the sort of nine or ten years that we were growing at double digit year after year. Obviously, I'm not staying for that period, but I'm staying to the point where we feel, hey, we're back on track now. That could be just the end of this year. I think our expectation was a year and a half, something like that. I've just gone the half year. If it was two and a half years, it's too long because I should have made bigger success by then. I can't say. I mean, it could be three years, but it's more likely to be a year or so. There's really no point in deciding that right this second. We've got at least six months to see what happens before we have to start making a planning decision on that. I don't know if that's. Are you there for handling the AI thing right now? I mean. Yes. Everyone's got this headache on the horizon, or it's right there right now hitting you? Yeah. No, I just. Depending on who you are, what industry you're in. All right, thank you. Yeah. Hi. Steve Lishti from DB News. Just a few on data products. I guess in the second half, in my head we had three things that you needed to do, which is Category View, the AI, the user experience tools, and AI tools, which I thought was Yabble. Just talk us through. You kind of alluded to Category View didn't happen. Can you just talk us through on the other two? Then going into fiscal 2026 now, have we still got those three to get the benefit from, plus the qual stuff that you're putting into and launching into BrandIndex? Is that the way to think about it? Can we do that first of all? Yeah, on Category View, it's exactly what we should have been doing. We should have changed the product once we realized what it was they wanted. They wanted more questions. They wanted two things. They wanted more questions around specific. Use in that sector. were more sector questions and they wanted more. They wanted historical data that we had. I've tried to avoid going back over what didn't happen and should have happened in my periods. We had a Head of Product that came to us and decided not to make Category View, not to go back to it, not to fix it, just to move on. I think that was wrong. We've picked that up. Of the three things, it's not our number one because it already had been dropped. We're definitely doing Category views, as I just mentioned, and reviving it in a new area. The other two. Yabble obviously is a major contributor to the product that we were just looking at, the summarization, the working out what the data means, and so on. The other part was, I think, the interfaces, and those have been improved, and there will be continuous improvement. I think that those three things, the category view is the one that didn't happen but is going to happen. Do you think that the four things that I said, that is repeating those three original plus the qual stuff, are the key drives for DP into fiscal 2026? Yes, yes. I think you were asking as. Jonathan, I think you were asking was this a separate product or an add-on or just making it more attractive. I think it's a major new type of data, which means it will be deployed as an enhancement to existing things which you can pay for, or it can be used on its own. I can't go further than that because I don't know how we will engineer some of these things or what order we will do it. Number one is it's an enhancement to BrandIndex that you pay for, which I think would make BrandIndex a more exciting product to sell and to buy. It would mean that existing users who are interested in this data are likely to be early buyers of it. That would be the beginning, and yeah. The AI tool, and I suppose we should put in a fifth one actually, which is the more focused sales team as well on the product side. You've got the five things. If you took those five things and I think about fiscal 2026, between the first half and second half last year, you did about 1% growth in DP in the first half and 1% in the second half, give or take. How do you think that should flow through first half, second half? Is it kind of more of the same in the first half and then acceleration in the second half? There are so many moving parts here. I'm so optimistic that you shouldn't probably listen to me anyway. I think that we will have a Capital Markets Day. I know you're going to ask for these updates and we will have that as soon as we have the next stage of concreteness around this. I would like it to be very soon, but I can't promise it until I have a little bit more customer feedback. The last question, just in terms of the overall profitability, profitability of the business, given you're putting in the investment that you talked about this year, you will roughly give or take £30 million when we between the halves, if consensus is now low to mid-60s, how should we think about the profit flow through first half to second half? I think these investments will take us a bit of time to come through. I think we will start to see those coming in, really, Q2, Q3 of our year. As you project that for both going into the latter half year with a higher cost base, of course, the thing that we're still working on, and not to rehash this too many times, we could see an acceleration of client adoption around these things. For now we're being fairly conservative in terms of we just can't predict what the uptake will be. It's been very client dependent, so the main factor will be how fast can we find people and employ them within these data science teams. We've already made some progress in terms of getting a leader. Thanks. Hi, it's Jessica from Peel Hunt. Can I just have one follow up, please? About the new products, obviously you're doing a lot of testing for clients in the UK who are interested. Is the process now to deploy it to these initial customers, get feedback, reiterate? When do we get to the point, I guess, is it more second half of this year or are you really envisioning FY2027 of when you could possibly do a full launch of the products? I'm assuming that whilst you're doing this testing, you're holding back a little bit on kind of ensuring it's all your customers and deploying it to all your customers. If you, which you do know the business, you'll know how. Easy it is for us to do. This is because we do at least 20,000 surveys anyway every day. By surveys I mean interviews. We can add this to the end of every single survey and say, would you like to talk about anything that's on your mind now? We will add it to every single survey as just a final sign-off question and they can tell us what a shitty survey it was or they can tell us they'd like to do some. I'd like to chat a bit. Some of these people talk about their divorce, they talk about their football team. In the first few thousand that we had, the variation in those are incredible. People want to talk now. What proportion? Every single survey that we run, we will ask them if they want to talk some more. It's really easy for us to set this up. We have a prompt that allows them to talk about anything they choose or to choose one of the things that we put in there so they actually can use it the way that they want. It sort of pre-sorts itself as it's going through. It's unbelievably simple and rich in its product and enhances user experience. It isn't a cost for this because we're not going to pay people except when we want them to talk about something really boring. That's the bit about being a panelist. Sometimes you have to talk about your use of OXO cubes or something, and that's not what most people want to talk about. Nobody ever wants to talk about an insurance brand. You have to pay them for that. You do have to do that sometimes. You don't have to pay them to talk about music or about their lives or whatever. That gives you a lot of background information that you can then divert when you need to and offer extra incentives. What I'm saying is that this will be very quickly engineered to the. Entire. Running of surveys that we do, and we'll be able to do, create products of it, I believe, all over the place. It will not run out for a long time of ideas. There are so many things to try, but it just sits there as something people want to do anyway. I should say just. Last thing, we have had a box at the end of surveys for years which nobody reads. We realized we had 10,000 comments coming in a day, every day that were ignored, that nobody ever looked at. We still don't know what they said. I mean, it's a very bad thing. That kind of triggered this. I have a question that's come in online. It's from Jonathan Cohen from Zipline Capital. Jonathan's question is SP3 called for $500 million of revenue, excluding M&A and CPS, and 25% operating profit. Is that still what you're aiming for, and is that what you're guiding to in the medium term? Yeah. You know what I'm going to say to that? I'm going to say that we will have a Capital Markets Day and we will remodel everything for that. It's impossible for me to say that now, but I will say that we are a data company that is incredibly ambitious to be the world's number one supplier of opinion data everywhere. That's what we can do. It's incredible that we haven't done more in that sense because you see what's there. It's all engineered, it's all there and we just haven't done enough. Our ambition remains huge. Our execution has not been good enough and we are doing quite a lot. We haven't talked about this, but we're doing quite a lot. The board has been very active in helping improve execution at YouGov. We have board members that are actively involved. We have new board members. Nobody's asked about the board members, but you'll have noticed we've had some very high quality board members. A couple from Silicon Valley, a couple from very good experience in UK PLCs, one of them from Kantar. We have high involvement now from the board in pushing for better execution. My answer to that to Mr. Cohen's, and he's been an interesting contributor in comments. I totally agree that we are pushing that. We are a data company that should have very high ambitions and we will give you a more realistic steer on. That. At the Capital Markets Day that we'll have, we'll have it as soon as we can, as soon as it's ethical for us to do it. In other words, that we have enough actual information, concrete information, to base it on. Great, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Cohen, for the question online. We don't have any more online, so unless we have any more from the room. Thank you very much.