Gamma Communications plc (LON:GAMA)
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Earnings Call: H1 2023

Sep 5, 2023

Andrew Belshaw
CEO, Gamma Communications

Okay, good morning, everybody. I think we're live. Welcome to Gamma's first half results. If you were expecting to see somebody else's first half results, unfortunately, you're in the wrong place. But please do make yourselves at home, and hopefully everybody's got a drink, and yes, welcome. So we've had a pretty good first half. Obviously, I'll be presenting. Bill, who's Gamma's CFO, will come and present as well in a moment. What we're gonna do this morning is I'm just gonna give you a little bit of a rundown of our business update. Bill will then come and talk about through the financial highlights. Then we'll revisit Gamma's strategy, some of the market trends that we're seeing, that's hopefully a little bit helpful for understanding where Gamma might go in the future.

We'll touch on ESG, we'll touch on the outlook, and then hopefully we'll move to Q&A in around about 40, 45 minutes, and, hopefully we'll be done by about 11:30 A.M., just to, set some expectations on the timing. So in terms of our business update, it's fair to say we're very, very pleased with the first half. We think we've had a very good, first half to 2023. Gamma continues to be a growing business. We continue to be a business based with, recurring revenues, and recurring margins.

We continue to be cash generative, and most importantly, we continue to be very important to all of the businesses that we serve, whether they're the large enterprise customers, we'll come on and talk about some of those in a moment, or whether they're the many, many small businesses in the U.K. that rely on Gamma's services, to be able to provide the services that they provide to their customers. We've expanded our capability in our enterprise space, so again, we've got a slide coming up on this a little bit later. We've bought a business called Satisnet that gives us cybersecurity capability. We're very excited about that. We're very excited about what that's gonna mean in terms of increasing the revenues and the margins that we can make from some of those larger businesses.

As well as our U.K. business continuing to do very, very well, our European business has also grown by 8% in the first half compared to the first half last year. A little bit aided, if we're honest, by foreign exchange. But we are now beginning to see traction in Europe. So as some of you who've followed us for a while know, we got into Europe four, five years ago. It's taken a little while to get moving, but we're seeing it moving now. And Europe is increasing its revenues based on things like unified communications, and particularly things like Operator Connect, which enables Teams. And finally, as Bill will come on and talk to you in a moment, we end the year with a very strong cash position.

So we generated a lot of cash in the half, and we closed out the year with cash. So, we think we're in a very strong position to explore the opportunities going forward. I won't spend too long on this slide, because I'm just sort of stealing Bill's thunder, and Bill will come in a moment and talk about the numbers. Again, as you see there, all of our sectors have grown pretty close to double-digit growth. Overall, we've achieved 9% revenue growth, half on half. Bill will talk to it in a little bit more detail, but it's fair to say that we've slightly changed the way we're describing the business.

So historically, if you remember, we used to talk about our direct business in the U.K. and our indirect business, and we sort of said most of our direct business is actually selling into enterprise and public sector. Most of our indirect business is selling into small business. So we now cut the business into, we call Gamma Business, helpfully, which is dealing with small and medium-sized companies, and Gamma Enterprise still deals with all of those large enterprise and public sector. And that means there's about sort of GBP 13 million of revenue that's just moved from one segment to the other. But just to conclude, the first part, we've had a very good first half. Revenue's increased. We continue to do very well.

I'm gonna hand over to Bill now to explain the first half in more detail, and then I'll come back and talk about the future and some of the opportunities we see. Thanks.

Bill Castell
CFO, Gamma Communications

Good morning. As Andrew said, I'm Bill Castell, the Chief Financial Officer. I'm gonna spend some time taking you through about 10 slides. Some of the analysts and others will recognize the slides we go through. It's a pretty standard affair. But if we go straight on to the first, this is the six-box grid that summarizes some of the key financials that you'll see in the RNS. Needless to say, if there's a number you need to remember, it's really 9%. You're gonna hear me say that a number of times throughout the presentation. But you can see our revenue grew 9% to GBP 256.2 million for the six months. That flows through to an adjusted EBITDA that was also up 9% at GBP 56.5 million.

The adjusted EPS figure was actually up 5% to 37.5p. Always look at the footnotes. As you can see at the bottom there, given the tax rate change that happened between 2022 and 2023, I think everyone's aware the U.K. corporation tax went to 25% in April of this year. On a like-for-like basis, at a constant tax rate, that actually EPS would be up 11%, is the equivalent like-for-like figure. If we go down to the bottom row here, if you can see in the bottom left here, very strong, cash generation again, and I'll talk a little bit about that when I go through the cash flow statement, but that was up 15% to £57.1 million for the six months.

That's 15%, which allowed us to have a cash balance for the end of June, gross cash of GBP 123.5 million. Gamma is not a levered business. I think everyone's aware of that. We do have a tiny mortgage as a result of the German acquisition, HFO. That's a Euro-denominated mortgage of around GBP 1.8 million, which is the debt that we hold. So that's why you get a net cash position of GBP 121.7 million. I will be going through in more detail around IFRS 16 and other adjustments that I know some people also like to make, and I'll give more disclosure on that coming up. That all leads to a progressive dividend policy, up 14%.

So this time last year, it was 5p, it's now 5.7p, so up 14%, and continuing with this idea of one-third, two-third, policy going forward. So pleased to say that that's at double digit, 14%. If we go next, income statement, as I said, you look on the right-hand side, you'll see the 9%. Recurring revenue remains strong. Gamma is a strong recurring revenue business. That was up actually at 9%, slightly up on the 89% this time last year. As you can imagine, since our revenues grow at 9%, our gross profit grows at 9%, and adjusted EBITDA grows at 9%, our margins are pretty stable throughout the period at 51% of the gross margin level. Overheads did grow by 9%.

When you take into account FX in the Euro and also some of the small adjustments we did in Europe before, that actually comes down closer to 8%, and in the U.K., we had overhead increases of 7% with the inflationary environment. We did benefit a little bit 'cause of the cash balance, 'cause of the interest income. That all flows through to a PBT, you can see on the slide, of 13% growth and adjusted PBT of 12%. So strong double-digit growth down at the PBT level, led by pretty much 9% at the top half of the income statement. If I go through the segments, as Andrew said, we renamed this business. Used to be called Indirect.

This is our channel business with over 1,500 channel partners. It represents around 65% of our revenue overall, and it covers that SME market, the 250 employees and below. Strong growth, that was double digit at 10%. You can see on the tables, sorry, the graphs on the top right, the constant growth that we've seen in this business. Driven by UCaaS, gross profit increased 8%. There was some inflationary increases that we just passed through in the connectivity space in particular, and that's why gross profit was 8%, not the 10% revenue growth. But gross margin stayed broadly consistent at 53%. Andrew will talk more. He, you know, he didn't steal my thunder on the financials. I won't steal his thunder on the products.

He'll talk a little bit more about Phone Line+ and the opportunity that we've seen there. And then also, I've talked a number of times when we've presented previously about the price rises that we put in at the beginning of the year. That supported this business, its growth, and that 10% revenue was supported by price rises. Enterprise, formerly known as Direct, this covers the large corporate sector. Again, Andrew will talk about some of the renewals and big wins that we've had in that sector, and public sector as well. This, similar to the Gamma business, you know, not quite double digit, but again, that number, 9%, on the revenue growth, and was bolstered a little bit by hardware sales as we gain new customers.

Often upfront, you have quite a lot of hardware sales, and then the recurring revenue comes thereafter. And that's why the gross profit was at 6%, still a healthy gross profit number. I've said a few names there. You've got the Home Office and the mobile, you've got Lidl store network, you've got the NHS Smart Agent, which is our contact solution with Amazon, but you'll, well, you'll hear a lot more about that from Andrew shortly. And then finally, Satisnet. Andrew mentioned it, and there is a slide coming up. Just to remind people, that was purchased in August. We're obviously looking at numbers to June, and therefore, those financials are not included in here. Although it's immediately earnings enhancing, it, you know, we don't think it's a meaningful...

That's not what is leading our change to guidance this year. We think it will start really positively contributing in 2024 onwards. Moving on, Europe. Revenue growth in Andrew's figure showed 8% on a constant currency basis. This was 3%. Gross profit headline, a very high 17%. Once you adjust with currency and the small reclassification we did at the back end of last year, for a like-for-like basis, it's actually 7%. So you had revenue at 3%, and a like-for-like basis in constant currency at 7%. Solid German and Spanish business performance. I've got a slide coming up next, which we'll go into more detail on that. Then Netherlands is a more mature market, and Andrew will start talking about the opportunity there.

We have had already an Operator Connect and see going forward in that voice enablement with Microsoft and Operator Connect. Gross margin variation is actually, is explained more on the next page, and it is really because we've seen the revenue, growth that we have seen, is more in the higher margin UCaaS products than the more traditional lower margin business, including Epsilon, which is our German mobile connections. This is a page that I constantly show just to give you a bit more of an understanding.

For those who haven't seen it before, the page on the right-hand side here is a table that looks half and half at our revenue, and this is in Euros, so this takes out the currency aspect, and just looks at the progress on what we call the UCaaS, which is the growth engine going forward, and then the traditional and Epsilon. Epsilon, again, to remind people, I've just mentioned it, is our German kind of resell mobile business, a lower margin business on that side. When you look a bit at it, overall, we've seen, and this is looking at the H1 2023 versus H2 2022, a good 8% growth on the six-month period just gone versus the prior six-month period.

You can see that EUR 18.7 million is actually significantly higher than the 16.9 year-on-year as well, so that would be double-digit UCaaS revenue growth year-on-year, as well as the 8-point sequential growth, 8 percentage point sequential growth, on that side. The story is one of Spain, high performance. You can see that 18% growth. That is supported by the Neotel acquisition. If you recall, that was the business that we bought down in Málaga in Spain, a UCaaS business, heavy also on CCaaS in relationship. Even without that, so the underlying business pre the Neotel acquisition was up 6%, so the underlying pre-Neotel business is also growing. Germany, a healthy 8%.

And then Netherlands, as we said, there's been a trend that it's been more challenging with a more mature Dutch market, but we see an opportunity there in the Operator Connect that I mentioned previously. Traditional revenues, so looking at the bottom, so this is looking more at kind of broadband DSL and in-country mobile has actually it grew slightly 1%, so stopped the trend that we've seen previously, so it's stabilized. And then Epsilon, although you see year period-on-period, it's minus 9%, this is constant with what we've seen previously. We're at EUR 14.1 million for H1 2023. If you look at H1 2022, that was at EUR 14.2 million, and we would expect the similar kind of profile for H2 2023 as previously.

And overall, you know, that leads to a kind of flat, six-month period, but actually up, you know, year on year, the 43.8 versus the EUR 42.4 million . So hopefully that gives you a bit more disclosure, on the country performance, and it really is that kind of revenue, 8% period-on-period, double-digit year-on-year UCaaS growth that is allowing us to have improved margins, in the year, because that's a higher margin business, than the mobile and traditional business. If we move from the P&L down to the balance sheet, Andrew's covered this, I've covered this. Strong cash position, net cash. You'll see in a second when I go through cash flow, that actually has been working capital improvements.

So as we've grown the business, our trade receivables and others have not grown in line, so that's helped the working capital position. And IFRS 16 liabilities at the bottom there, if you were to include those, you'll see that those have been declining as well as we actively manage our property portfolio. Contingent consideration decreased to GBP 4.5, so that's what we have left on the balance sheet. This is, as I say, before Satisnet, which you'll see in note 12, our disclosure, that there is a contingent element of Satisnet, but the GBP 4.5 is pre that, and that's come down over time as we settle the payments related to the Mission Labs acquisition in 2021.

This is a slide I put in last time and, as we increased the CapEx, and I do have a guidance page at the end of this presentation, where I'll reiterate many of the guidance I gave previously. And this looks at capital expenditure on the table on the left-hand side and the development costs on the other table. Capital expenditure, you can see on there, has gone up GBP 2.7 million this time last year, so we've moved from GBP 7.8 million- GBP 10.5 million. Interestingly, actually, it's slightly down on the last six months, so the six months ending December 2022, which was at GBP 12.9 million. So our GBP 10.5 million for this half, it's lower than the last six months.

You can see that the largest segment of that capital expenditure, CapEx, is our development costs, as we continue to develop our platform. Again, Andrew will go into a bit more detail around that. That is the capital expenditure, so that's what's on our balance sheet. That's the CapEx, GBP 10.5 for the half. What we also disclose is our research and development costs, which takes that CapEx element, which is again repeated on the top right of the next table, the GBP 7.8, but also looks at the expense of what goes through our P&L in respect to research and development. That is once the products are up and live, there's obviously ongoing maintenance costs and other development costs, which are not capitalized, but put through the P&L.

And again, that was similar to the prior six months at 8.4, and was up from 7.6. That's the P&L element. Overall, the total R&D was 16.2 million GBP for H1 2023. That is up from 13.2 million GBP this time last year. So cash flow. You heard me mention previously in the first page, the 57.1 million GBP. That actually related to a cash conversion of 101%. I'm sure there's questions as soon as something goes over 100%. That improvement normally, as I said, we reiterate the guidance, we are normally over 90%. It is over 100% because of working capital improvements during the period.

As you go through this, you will also see that, another determinant of our cash position is our tax. Although the tax rates went up, our tax cost for the six m onths was GBP 5.3 million on that side. That compares to GBP 7.4 million this time last year. That's a result of an R&D tax credit that came through. It meant that we had a lower tax cash outflow in the first six months. The CapEx, as I've just discussed, is in line with the previous page. We did pay continued consideration, that's why the number's now back down to GBP 4.5 million, the Mission Labs, and we have GBP 4.5 million pre the Satisnet deal outstanding.

So in conclusion, on guidance, you'll see in the RNS, and as Andrew highlighted, we had previously guided to a range, and that range was GBP 110.4 million- GBP 117.2 million pounds at the adjusted EBITDA level. We are now guiding to the top half of that range. That range was consensus that we compiled. We're now guiding to the top half, so the midpoint is GBP 113.8 million, so we're guiding to GBP 113.8 million-GBP 117.2 million; that is our guidance going forward. Similarly on the adjusted EPS, previously, we talked about the range from the analyst community being 70.0p, so 70p to 77.0p, and it's similar to adjusted EBITDA; we're now guiding to the top half of that range.

The midpoint is 73.5p, so we're now guiding to 73.5p-77p. Those were as of September. I've noticed a lot of analysts have already come out with their guidance, and that was as of close last night, that range, and clearly, the analysts will update accordingly their ranges. The U.K. corporation tax, I've said it previously, has increased from 19%-25%, which gives us a blended rate of around 23.5%. And CapEx expected range is still the 22-25, realizing that this half obviously was slightly lower than the last six months as I went through, but we're still guiding to the same end of the range, the 22-25.

And finally, although cash conversion's at 101%, you know, over the short and medium term, we're guiding still to over 90%. Clearly, we've more than matched that this time round at 101%, but this is a highly cash generative business, a highly recurring revenue business, and a very good first half. And with that, I will pass over to Andrew, who will give an update on strategy and market trends, and look forward to any Q&A you might have later on.

Andrew Belshaw
CEO, Gamma Communications

... Cheers, Bill. Thank you very much. So, you all right? Good. So I hope you agree, really good first half, all things considered, and I suppose the obvious question is: where does Gamma go next? We put this slide up at the full year results, back in March, so you may remember it. And taking over as CEO a little bit over a year ago now, we sat down, and we thought, "What are the strategic priorities for Gamma over the next sort of four, five years?" And we came up with these four pillars. The first one is, look, overall, we want Gamma to be the leading UCaaS provider in Western Europe. That's where we want to go.

If you are a business of any size, small business, large business, who do you come to, to buy unified communications? You come to Gamma, and that's very much our aim and our ambition. And in order to do that, we need to build a common product set. So where we've been acquiring businesses around Europe, we've got a sort of patchwork of different products, and we've already started putting that common product set in place. So things like CircleLoop, which is our digital-first product designed for micro-businesses, that's now launched in the U.K., and the Netherlands, and Germany. At the other end of the spectrum, things like our Operator Connect product, so this is where we're voice-enabling Teams, which again, is probably more for enterprises.

So if you're a large enterprise, and you're using Teams, but you want to use Teams to make and receive phone calls, you're effectively using phone numbers, you need something like Operator Connect, and Gamma can now do that for you across the whole of Europe. So very much we're on this path of whatever we do, we recognize we need to do it across Europe. But not only that, moving on to the orange pillar, we also need to be able to do it through multiple routes. So in the U.K., as you know, we have a wholesale model. In Germany, it's more of a dealer model. In the Netherlands, it's a bit of dealer and a bit of wholesale. In Spain, we've got a franchise model.

Whatever we sell, we need to be able to reach customers however they want to come to us, whether they want to come direct or through partners, and different people will approach us in different ways. We also called out enterprise. For years, I think Gamma was perhaps seen as a company that provided services to small businesses, and we did a bit of enterprise on the side. We're now doing over GBP 100 million in enterprise, and I'll show you some of the logos in a minute, and I'll show you how we're investing in that business. And we want to take that enterprise business across Europe. The fourth pillar, you know, which is the most important, is none of this can be done without the 1,800 fantastic people that we have working for Gamma.

My job, Bill's job, my executive team's job is to engage those people. There's a massive war for talent out there, particularly in the STEM space, and we need to recruit and retain the fantastic people that we've got. So that's just a reminder, hopefully, of the priorities. So how are we actually gonna grow the business over the next few years? We've shown you this slide before. Everybody tells me they quite like it. It's identical to the one you've seen before, so if you're thinking it looks very similar, it doesn't look very similar, it's the same. But the point that we're trying to demonstrate is how we deal with price erosion in our market. Because we're in telecoms, you're telecoms analysts, you know that price erosion has historically been a feature of the market.

And what we started doing two, three years ago is saying: Look, we've been selling our Horizon Cloud products. On the left-hand side there, our list price for our core Horizon Cloud seat, so this is a hosted PBX product, enables you to make and receive calls within and outside of your organization and, you know, has a number of features on it around call divert, all of those standard features you would expect to see. And our list price is around about GBP 8 per user, and we've been quite open that over time we've seen that price eroded down. We don't quote an ARPU, just as a reminder. The moment I tell you what the ARPU is, I have 50% of my customers on the phone telling me that I'm paying more than the other 50%, so, we don't do that.

But the list price is GBP 8, and that has been eroded over time. So what we did is we launched a number of bolt-on products. They're not separate products, they're products that enhance the features that are available to you on Horizon. So things like Horizon Collaborate enables you to make and receive video calls, to set up video conferencing. Teams integration does what it says on the tin. It enables you to integrate with Teams if you want to use that for your video conferencing, and as we'll see in a moment, that's becoming quite popular. Call recording, again, does what it says on the tin. And Horizon Contact, which has the highest, ARPU of all of the bolt-ons, enables you as a small business...

So we're not trying to compete with an Avaya or a Genesys, but if you're a small business and you need some contact center functionality, so you're dealing with customers via email, via social media, WhatsApp, you can use Horizon Contact. And what we've been doing is selling more and more and more of those bolt-on modules to our new customers, to our existing customers, to pull the ARPU up, and I'll just sort of show you how that's playing out when we give you some volumes, and all of these were in the RNS that went out first thing this morning. So on our core Horizon product, we're up to 777,000 cloud seats. So if 9% was Bill's number, maybe 7's my number, I don't know.

But we're now up to 777 cloud seats, so hopefully you can remember that. So that's a 3% increase from December, and we'll come back and talk about that increase in a moment. But for the purposes of understanding what's going on with ARPUs, all of those bolt-ons, so collaboration software up 4%, Teams integration, unsurprisingly, up 29% from a reasonably low base, but you know, Teams integration is becoming quite popular. Voice recording, 13%; Horizon Contact, 27%. So all of those bolt-ons are growing more quickly than the core product, and what that means is the ARPU is being lifted, or what we call the notional ARPU, based on those list prices.

I think if you throw all of that into a spreadsheet, which I've done, because I used to be in finance, and I quite like that sort of thing, you'll find that actually the notional ARPU grew by 1% over the course of the last six months. That's offsetting the price erosion that we're seeing just because we're in a very, very, very competitive market, and it's enabling us to keep our ARPUs level. I'm sure some of you are gonna ask us in the Q&A about our Horizon volumes, because our Horizon grew a little bit lower in the first half of 2023 than it's been growing for the last couple of years. We inevitably just tell you what the net additions are.

We don't kind of split out the gross additions, so that's how many seats we're actually selling, and then obviously, we have some churn that comes off the base as well. What we saw in the first half of the year was our gross additions on Horizon were fairly consistent with what we've been seeing for the last year or two. What we actually saw increasing, which is why maybe we closed out the half with slightly fewer seats than we'd have liked, is our churn increased. Now, when we talk about churn, we all think, "Oh, crikey, that's going to another competitor." The vast majority of that churn isn't. How do we know that? Because the one thing we can track is phone numbers.

And we can see where the phone numbers that are no longer on our system are being, what we call, ported to another provider, or whether they're just disappearing and going back into the phone number base, and we can see that the vast majority of them are going back into the phone number base. So what's going on? Well, a combination of that, which is fact, and a combination of anecdote, talking to partners, is saying that there are a whole bunch of partners, that have, you know, as you'll be well aware, many of our partners have been consolidating and buying other partners, and they keep a bit of a stock, and maybe they've been reducing that a little bit, and that's caused a few seats to come off.

And also a lot of our end users, and I think we kinda called this out two to three years ago, you have businesses that are now re-signing contracts that were originally signed pre-COVID, and maybe those businesses are a little bit smaller. So maybe you've got a business that did have a contract for 30 seats, it now only needs a contract for 25 seats 'cause it's just sort of contracted a bit. We don't see that as, as, as a massive problem. We see that as a temporal thing, but it's really just to explain why maybe the Horizon seats in the first half weren't quite as high as they should have been. We would expect that to recover.

As I say, the growth adds are very, very strong, and that sort of, consolidation, you know, is, is, is very much a sort of temporal thing. The final thing I just want to pull up on this slide is, PhoneLine+, and today is a very special day in the telecoms industry, which is a nice thing. There is something that you have been able to do for the last 50 years that you cannot do today. And when you get to my age, there's probably quite a lot that you've been able to do for the last 50 years that you find yourself increasingly unable to do. However, I've taken up Pilates, it's all fine. What you're no longer able to do is order a single line from BT.

So for those of us who remember, you know, maybe buying your first home or whatever, and one of the first things you'd do is get hold of BT and get a copper line put into your house. You can't do that anymore. BT has now put single line copper products on stop sell as of today. They're gonna support the existing base for the next two years until the end of 2025. So if you've got one, don't worry, you can go home. It's still gonna work. But by the end of 2025, it won't. And essentially, what BT are doing is they're closing down that copper network, and that's gonna inevitably save them some money. They've put an awful lot of money into fiber, as we know, so, you know, there's a fiber network replacing it.

But you will need to think whether you're a consumer or whether you're one of about somewhere between three to five million business users, we think, taking a single line. It depends who you talk to, and it's sometimes a bit confusing. If you're a home worker, is it your domestic line? Is it a business line? But there's a big number of very small businesses, so maybe businesses with one, two, three, four employees, that are still taking single lines from BT. And what we've done is we've produced a product called PhoneLine+. It's less feature-rich than Horizon. It's got a lower price point than Horizon. So the Horizon list price was just about GBP 8. The PhoneLine+ list price is around about GBP 4.

And what it enables you to do is just if you're a small business, just to make and receive calls, you can take that as a digital product. Now, we sold 8,000 seats. Most of that is new customers coming in. We're not yet seeing enormous amounts of customers coming because of this digital switch off. But come they will, because there's three million people at least out there, who have to do something. Now, many of those will go to BT, inevitably, so please don't put three million in your spreadsheets.

But we are very confident that we can take a large chunk of that market, working with our channel partners, going to these small businesses and just saying: "Look, what are you doing on 2025?" And if you follow Gamma on LinkedIn, and you follow some of our people on LinkedIn, you'll see we are increasingly campaigning and increasingly, letting people know that they're going to need to do something by 2025, and wouldn't it be great if they worked with Gamma and our partners, to come and buy PhoneLine+? So we see that as, as a big growth opportunity for us, over the next couple of years. Voice enablement.

So for those, again, who've been following Gamma for quite a while, we talked about SIP trunks, and then we said, "Oh, SIP's getting a bit complicated," because now, SIP's supporting Microsoft. So what do we mean by voice enablement? Well, in the old days, when you had a hardware PBX on your premises, which for those of us who've been around a long time, you'd plug each individual phone extension into your hardware PBX, and that would enable you to make calls within your office, extension to extension, but you'd have, like, nine for an outside line, so you'd be able to phone people outside of your organization. And you did that originally using something called ISDN, and then SIP trunking came along, and we essentially voice-enabled those hardware PBXs.

We said, "Look, if you want to use your hardware PBX to speak to people outside of your organization, come and buy Gamma SIP." And there was a trend for people moving away from ISDN to buy SIP, and when we floated back in 2014, SIP was growing, and, and Bob, who was our CEO at the time, and I said to people, "Look, there'll be a time when that market begins to slow down." And that's what we're seeing now. So on the left-hand box there, Gamma's now got about 1 million SIP trunks in the U.K., but that's now flat. That's static. So in terms of those ISDN lines, the vast majority of them now have, have moved to SIP, and we see that flattening. However, what we didn't foresee necessarily back in 2014 was the other things that we could voice enable.

So I talked a little while ago about Teams, just going over to the far right-hand side. So Teams, you're familiar with Teams, you're familiar with what it does, and it's a fantastic tool for conferencing and contacting other people within your organization. If you want to use Teams to make and receive calls to normal phone numbers, in other words, you want to use Teams to phone my mobile, you can do that, but you need to voice enable it. And how do you voice enable it? You come to somebody like Gamma, and we can sell you a voice enablement service. And as you can see on the right-hand side, that's growing, and it's growing quite fast. So just in the first half of this year, we've grown 11%.

Interestingly, in the first half of this year, what we haven't had is any kind of large deal. So again, those of you who've been tracking Gamma for a while, back in 2022, we had just one Teams deal with the Department for Work and Pensions. There was 100,000 seats coming on in one go. We haven't had those kind of big six-figure deals in the first half of this year. So that growth is kinda more sort of run rate growth, so, you know, I think, quite encouraging. What we can also do is other products are available. So there are other people out there offering communications products that don't have a network, in the same way that Microsoft doesn't have a telecoms network, and they need somebody like Gamma to voice enable them.

So the middle box is just saying, for people who've got a Cloud PBX, so, you know, companies we support, people like 8x8 and Vonage in the U.K., Gamma can provide a SIP service, that essentially voice enables those. And again, you'll see that that's growing, and for the first time, the Microsoft number is bigger than the other third-party number, which probably doesn't come as a huge surprise to anybody, that Microsoft is beginning to take on that market. So hopefully you can see that SIP trunking, we said that would flatten. Traditional SIP trunking is flattening. However, Gamma's capability to voice enable other people's solutions is a growth area. It's a growth area for Microsoft, in particular. It's a growth area for other third-party products.

One of the things we've talked about before is, over time, those SIP Trunks on the left will probably migrate to one of the other products, onto the one of the two right-hand boxes, or possibly migrate onto Horizon Cloud PBX, and all of those other products have a higher gross profit per user than standard SIP trunking. So again, we see that as a growth area for us. So it's not a bad thing that that SIP market is slowing, and what we need to do is migrate those users over time onto higher GP products. So that's the U.K. What's going on in Europe? Well, as Bill said, you know, we're pretty pleased that the European revenue is now beginning to increase.

It's increasing because of UCaaS, and the UCaaS revenue is increasing sort of faster than maybe some of that traditional business is decreasing. Cloud PBX only up 1%, so we've got 163,000 seats now on Cloud PBX in Europe, and as I mentioned earlier on when we were doing the strategy slide, that's across multiple different platforms. The vast majority of that growth is in, well, actually, more than that is grown in Germany. Spain is a little bit flatter. In the Netherlands, we've actually lost a few seats. That's again to do with channel partner consolidation in the Netherlands, and also the fact that we are increasingly focusing on Microsoft Teams enablement. So maybe we'll just move straight over to that right-hand side box.

So Microsoft Teams enablement in Europe, from a very small base, is up 500%. So maybe don't, certainly don't put 500% and compound that in your model, 'cause that, that way, madness lies. But we now have 6,000 users across Europe, where we've launched things like Operator Connect and Microsoft Teams Direct Routing. So basically, it's companies using Teams that want it voice-enabled, and we've basically gone from selling very, very little of that to 6,000 users. Most of that is actually in the Netherlands. And again, for those of you who've been tracking, I think something like 5,000 of the 6,000 is in the Netherlands.

If you've been tracking Gamma for a while, you know, since we bought the Dutch business 5 years ago, we've never had a half where we've put 5,000 Cloud PBX seats on. So Operator Connect is taking us into a new market. It's enabling us to put more customers on more quickly, and we're quite excited about it. So on the one hand, certainly in the Netherlands, Cloud PBX performance, very, very, very saturated market, very competitive market. That's been tough. Teams enablement, we think we're doing very, very well, and we think we can get ahead of the market in a similar way to the way we've done in the U.K. We talked on the strategic priority slide about the importance of enterprise.

It probably wouldn't be a Gamma presentation if we didn't stick a logo slide up, so let's talk about some of the enterprises that we're working with. As you know, we talk a lot about Microsoft, but Amazon is also a very important partner of Gamma's, and we sell, we have customers that are buying Amazon Connect, and Gamma sells a product called Smart Agent, which enhances the user experience around Amazon Connect, and we sold that for the first time to Shawbrook Bank, so quite pleased about that. We had a re-sign from E.ON, who've been a customer for a while. So again, hopefully you see that Gamma working with Amazon, we can go into some of these really quite large enterprises, and enhance the experience that they have working with Amazon.

On the Microsoft side, so again, Pitmans have taken Operator Connect from Gamma for the first time. Baillie Gifford, on the left-hand side, they've renewed their Microsoft contract or their voice enablement contract with Gamma. And then finally, just before I move on from this slide, we don't talk about mobile very much these days. Gamma now has over 100,000 mobile users on the network, and I think we sort of quoted that number for a long time. Working with our partner Three, we also now resell EE as well, particularly into the enterprise space. So we've won the Home Office mobile contract, and also Enfield Council. So again, particularly in that public sector space, we're doing quite well actually, with our mobile offering, which is important.

These are all U.K. businesses. I could have stuck up a logo for Chevron, which is one of our large customers in the Netherlands. I could have actually put Amazon on there, which is a customer of ours in the Netherlands, as well as being a partner. So before I move on from enterprise, it would be remiss of me not to talk a little bit about Satisnet. So we bought a business called Satisnet, and why did we buy Satisnet? Essentially, many of our customers in that enterprise space have been saying to us for a while, "Gamma, thank you very much indeed for supplying our network. That's great. Can you now secure our network?" And that's not really something you wanna undertake unless you know what you're doing.

So we bought—we had a look around actually about businesses that we could be working with that would bring that capability into the Gamma Group, and we kinda came up with Satisnet. And I guess why did John, who was the—well, still is the CEO and the founder and the owner of Satisnet, want to work with Gamma? He has an ambition to take what he can do into larger businesses, potentially larger businesses across Europe, but he needs Gamma's help. He needs Gamma's balance sheet. He needs probably our Rolodex. Sorry, for those of you who've been around for a long time, of businesses that we can take the new capability into and upsell, and we've already had one win with Reed. I mean, I think we bought the business two to three weeks ago now.

We've already got Reed, who's one of our existing Gamma customers, that's now taking cyber, and we've got two or three in the pipeline. So again, when we come back in six months' time, we'll probably have a nice logo slide on existing Gamma customers that have taken this technology. As with any new thing, I've taken a number of years just to get my head around all of the acronyms that are involved in communications, and now we're into cyber, there's a whole bunch of new acronyms. So we have this thing called the National Institute of Standards and Technology. They have the Cybersecurity Framework, and what we've tried to do is articulate the things that we can provide into our enterprise customer base.

And by the way, we'll be working out how we can productize some of those things to put them through the channel into the small and medium-sized base, but that will take us a little while to do that. Essentially we do four very simple things. The first thing we do for our customers is a gap analysis. So where are you on your security? Where do you want to be? What tools have you already got? What tools do you need? And we work with an organization called Tenable, and we resell some of their software. So we can just help customers understand how far away from where they want to be, they already are, and then inevitably, we can help them get there. So we can do what we call front-end analysis. So how vulnerable are you?

Penetration testing is a service we can offer, and then we can help you at the back end. So we run a SOC, so there will be for the SOC service that Satisnet provide, there will be a customer called Gamma that goes onto that inevitably as well. You know, which is very helpful for us, and the other thing we can do is offer people compliance as a service. So again, we've bought a business. It's got 50 people based in Luton working with some fantastic customers already, but we plan to expand very much what's both the scope, and that might be organic, that might be by doing further acquisitions in this space, and also the size of businesses and indeed, the location of businesses.

I've already had Gerben, who runs our business in Benelux, he phoned me the other week and said, "Look, I've got two customers who are really interested in talking to Satisnet based in the Netherlands." And obviously, this stuff kind of travels internationally, you know, much more easily than some of the communication stuff. So I ought to say something about what we're doing to create an organization that engages our people, because it is genuinely important, and it is something that I want to do and that I need to do. I think we put up our brand and culture slide. Last time we talked about some of the values that we're now rolling out across the group. Not there was anything wrong with Gamma values, but we're a very broad family.

We've brought a lot of new businesses into the group, and we just wanted to articulate a common culture. We now have values champions across the group. So we ran, and we will be running every quarter now. We're asking people to nominate their colleagues, who they think are particularly living the Gamma values. For the first time, you'll see on the top left there, there's Callum receiving his award from Mr. Bill Castell, and doesn't he look very excited? I can actually remember interviewing Callum some time ago now, when he came in as a grad, and he's sort of been part of the Gamma family, I would guess, for almost 10 years, doing a fantastic job in our billing team.

In the top right, Hylke, who's based over in the Netherlands, he was another one of our values champions, and doesn't he look pleased with his bunch of flowers? But they don't just win a bunch of flowers. Money is involved, so, it's definitely worth having. We've also launched our You Belong groups, so we now have groups of people who are interested in LGBT community or people interested in early careers. And they're just groups getting together to feedback to me, and the board, and the executive team about what Gamma can do to make our organization more engaging for those groups of people. So, you know, that's all working very, very well.

So I think, you know, the culture of Gamma continues to strengthen and improve. Quick update on ESG. This man looks like he's about to fall down a hole, as he concentrates on his mobile phone while he's working, walking down the street, and stuck to the floor. So we talk about communications with the conscience. As I've said many, many times, I think ESG has been very important from Gamma, you know, all the time I've been involved with Gamma for the last sort of 15, 16 years. We were the first company or first telecoms company to introduce Green Minutes, and we've been sort of offsetting carbon on our network, I think since about 2007, 2008.

If you're interested, particularly interested in ESG, we have a fantastic small team who are doing loads and loads of work in this area and churning out lots of data and lots of reports, and you can get all of that on the Gamma Comms website at ESG section. I think we're particularly pleased, we've been awarded our A minus. Hey, I always like to get an A plus, but we've got an A minus from the Carbon Disclosure Project for some of the stuff that we're doing with our suppliers. And as a reminder, we plan to be carbon neutral by 2042. That includes what we call Scope 3. So that's some of the carbon generated by our suppliers, which is a bit harder to control.

In terms of our own carbon, so Scope 1 and 2 will be neutral by 2030. So, thank you for your patience. Gamma's business outlook, as a reminder, you know, depending on which analysts you read and who you talk to, I think we're generally thinking that the world's gonna be a happy place next year. But whatever that happens in the macroeconomy, Gamma continues to have a very robust and proven business model. Our revenues are recurring, and I probably should have said, the revenues from Satisnet are largely recurring as well. It's a managed service business, not a project business. So apologies for not mentioning that as I went through. We remain very cash generative, and we've got a very strong balance sheet. So whatever happens in the macro over the next 12, 18, 24 months, we're feeling very positive.

In terms of drivers, you know, Cloud PBX penetration in the U.K. is still less than 50%. There are still more people in the U.K. that have hardware PBX than have a Cloud PBX, and we see that as a growth area. In Europe, as you know, in Germany, still 90% of people have got a hardware PBX. It's a fantastic opportunity for us, and we're managing the ARPU by selling some of those bolt-on products that we explained earlier. There's a couple of migration opportunities. So we talked about PhoneLine+ and the PSTN switch-off. That's gonna be a two year opportunity for us while the PSTN runs out to 2025. But also, I mentioned that SIP trunks hardware part of our business that's largely flat. Those customers, we think, over the next few years, will move to other higher...

I need to- not say higher margin in percentage terms, but higher GP per user, products than they're currently on. Satisnet acquisition is quite exciting. You know, it takes us slightly out of the communication space, still managing networks and, and providing security around that. So we're not kinda going all over the show. We're, you know, very focused in the acquisitions we're doing, but it takes us into a new space, an adjacent space, and enables us to upsell and cross-sell into our enterprise customers.

We continue to look for M&A opportunities, and that might be adding to routes to market, it might be adding to new geographies, it might be like Satisnet, bringing us a new, capability, and we continue to, to bring that common product strategy and put more and more of our products, across Europe, and we've got a Satisnet, Operator Connect there as being one that's been particularly successful. I think with that, I will probably go and have a sit down and hand over to Q&A.

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