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Earnings Call: H2 2021

Mar 24, 2022

Andrew Taylor
CEO, Gamma Communications

With that, in terms of business update, listen, I think overall, we're very happy with our performance through the year. Andrew will go into a bit more detail in terms of the specific results, but I mean, given the circumstances, I think an excellent financial performance through the year. Again, very happy with how our business units performed. Again, we'll go into a bit more detail on that in a second. By all means it wasn't perfect, but I think, in context of what was quite a challenging year, in terms of the economic and the business market implications, I think we've delivered a strong set of results across all of our channels.

We've made really good progress in terms of the execution, not just in terms of our shorter- term operational commitments, but also around the execution of our sort of long- term strategic objectives. Really good progress on that, and I'll touch on that in a bit more detail in terms of specifically what we've been doing on the technology and product side of things. Overall, in terms of the marketplace, I think we've seen normal low levels of churn. We've seen robust output, and we have seen a really positive contribution from those new products and services that we took to market. They're beginning to make quite a meaningful contribution to our performance, both on the product side and on the financial side.

We haven't really seen any change in terms of price attrition in the market either. Sort of normal types of levels based on what we talked about at the half year. I think that's generally sort of positive news. Just as a final point, I mean, you know, we've just been getting on and executing, I think, really well at pace against each of those objectives that I'm gonna talk about later. Very consistent message in terms of what we talked about at the half year. Overall, just to touch on the business unit performance, and Andrew will go into this in a bit more detail. Overall good growth across the piece. Direct is sort of slightly flattered because and we messaged this at the half year.

There's some inorganic growth within our Direct business. At the half year, we talked about how in the second half of 2020, we had a slower sales performance during that period because of lockdowns, frankly. If you can't go and meet customers, and you can't talk to them about buying stuff, then you know the orders are generally a bit slower. We suffered from that through 2021. That means that you know the growth in direct organic growth was a bit lower. I think it was around 2 or 3% based on what we would normally have expected.

On a positive point, as we came out of that period through 2021, we've had a very strong sales performance, not just in Direct but also in Indirect. I've got a couple of slides that touch on that. I think going into 2022, we enter 2022 with a very robust contracted backlog based on the sales performance through H1 and H2. In 2022 we had a particularly strong performance on direct sales in the second half of 2021, actually. We'll touch on that and I'm sure Andrew will go into that in a bit more detail. As I say, sort of low levels of price attrition, low levels of churn, and sort of very positive product both on attachment rates.

I'll touch on that in the next couple of slides. If I just flick over. In terms of our overall product performance, but looking specifically at UCaaS. Listen, I think when you look at this period-on-period and year-on-year, we think it's an excellent performance. We're either growing with or I would suggest ahead of the market. In the U.K. we just continue to churn out very strong gross adds, very strong net adds. You know, churn is at normal low levels, so we just manage around that. Our net adds across our cloud products was very strong at 15% growth. If you remember back to the half year, what we do is we combine our U.K. Collaborate and our U.K. Horizon numbers together to provide an overall U.K. cloud number.

The actual Horizon net adds were about 12%-13%. Collaboration grew at 36%. Overall, 15% growth. In Europe, consistent with our first half performance, we delivered a strong second half at 12.6% growth. Andrew will touch on the overall performance of our European businesses. What's really pleasing is the work that we've been doing on our cloud growth strategies, the partner proposition that we're taking across the European markets. That's certainly delivering results. Similar to what we talked about at the half year on SIP. Our SIP performance is really strong. It's a bit lumpier based on previous years, you know, because we're selling Microsoft Teams as part of our SIP product.

We're selling more SIP, more voice infrastructure to some of the cloud players that come into the U.K. market. You know, some of our customers are like Vonage and 8x8. We're providing higher levels of sort of voice SIP to some of those customers. We're doing slightly less SIP into on-premise PBXes because as more companies and more partners move things to the cloud, they're doing less on-premise. It's a bit lumpier than what we'll be used to. Notwithstanding that, a sort of very, very strong position. On the Microsoft Teams direct routing side, you know, I think we have carved out a very strong position in the U.K. marketplace.

We're definitely in a leadership position and as well as bringing in a very predictable level of run rate SIP trunks every week, every month, every quarter, but also bringing in some very large sort of strategic deals on the Microsoft Teams direct routing side. I think one of the ones that we quoted in the RNS was around a major deal we won with central government. It was for the Department for Work and Pensions, and that was a managed Microsoft Teams deployment of over 100,000. It was about 110,000 seats, so that's pretty significant. That's not included in these numbers, I should say. That was won just at the back end of Q4. Very happy with how things are going across the cloud side, cloud and across SIP and Microsoft Teams.

Just if you can see that sort of bottom right-hand box, I mean, I'm struggling to see here, attachment rates for Collaborate against new Horizon sales was 20%. I think that's pretty good in anybody's book. Actually the Horizon Contact CCaaS product that we took to market in Q1, that is performing very well. We've got a steady run rate of new business coming through there on a weekly and monthly basis, and we're seeing an attachment rate of about 10%. We've got 4,000 agents sort of year to date using Contact, but the attachment rate of new business is 10%, and I don't think we've seen that type of success in any product, any other product that we've taken to market through the channel. I think we're in a pretty good place there.

I should say, I haven't mentioned the details here, but our mobile broadband and Ethernet products all grew quite well during the period. There was net growth across every product in the portfolio. Overall, really pleased with the product performance, and as you know this is a leading indicator for us in terms of you know how the market's doing, how the channel is performing, and it's a leading indicator I suppose to our financial performance as well. Sort of just to touch for a second on the market side of things. In previous calls I've talked a bit about the impact of the pandemic and those structural changes that we saw happening in the market that we believe were real indicators for future long-term growth.

I think what we now acknowledge is that this acceleration of growth towards the cloud is now solidified into what we see as long-term sustainable trends, and that's, you know, driven by the move towards more flexible and hybrid working, both in terms of home working, but also how organizations need to organize themselves to provide cloud services to their employees and then how they will use them when they're working in the office and at home. But also driven by the connectivity, whether it's the fixed or the mobile connectivity that enables those solutions. We think these are now long-term, well-established and solidified trends in the marketplace. This piece around how users are going to use those applications and those services, whether they're in the office, whether they're at home, whether they're on the move, it's been a big focus area for us now.

What I would say is that the demands that come from end users and customers we've seen increasing, you know, over the last sort of two and a half years as a result of the COVID and they're now sort of here to stay, which I think is a good sort of positive statement. I apologize if it's stating the obvious because we're all sort of living and breathing this ourselves. Just to touch on, you know, some of the core foundations that I actually talked about this when I joined Gamma over four years ago, and I just wanted to sort of reinforce the point that, you know, there's some good reasons why Gamma has won in the market and will continue to win in a market which is going to continue to grow.

We've always had a big focus on product and technology. Historically, we've sort of became famous in the U.K. channel for pulling all that together and delivering it in a way that's really efficient and really easy for both our channel partners and for end users to consume. That continues to be a main reason why we win and why we will continue to win. Our network quality, it's very much by choice that, in the U.K. and in Europe, when we've acquired businesses in Europe, we've actually acquired businesses that have got a clear perspective of the cloud and a shift to the cloud.

Also they all have networks because we believe that network element, being able to provide good high quality of service when a customer, when an end user uses your applications is really important. Having that reputation for network quality, we think is a key reason why we win. I've talked a lot in the past about the digital platforms, the digital enablement, whether it's how we enable partners to consume our products or how we enable direct customers to deal with us and do self-serve. This is a big part of why we are successful and also how we enable partners and end customers to be more competitive through the training that we do around our products and whether it's their salespeople or their operational people.

There's a lot of effort and a lot of capability around those digital platforms that drive a key reason why partners and end customers use us. That commercial agility in the people side of things, I think continue to be very important. How we go about doing a job, how we go to market, and how we're very flexible, open, around how we do deals both with end customers and with channel partners. As you know, we've talked a lot in the past about how Gamma's focus on margin is really important, and that just has continued in the four years that I've been here, and that is a big focus for us.

Although we're flexible and agile commercially, you know, we're one of those few cloud businesses on the planet actually that's worked out how to do this and how to make money while we're doing it. I think all of these are the reasons why we continue and will continue to win in the market. Just to highlight, not to go into any detail, but just to highlight some of the key customer wins that we've had in 2021. On the left-hand column, just split across direct and indirect to Europe, what some of our partners and key customers look like. We've had a really strong year, as I said early in terms of some key wins that we've had across all three segments.

It's actually also been a very strong year for the recognition that we've received both within the wholesale and direct channel, but also on the direct side. I've just highlighted some of the awards that we achieved through 2021. Overall, a pretty good performance on the sales side, and really happy with how we're entering 2022 in terms of contracted backlog, and sort of perspective on sort of normal run rates on the product side is, you know, into Q1. With that, and I'm sure you've probably got some questions, we can just hold them and we can deal with them at the back end. I will hand over to Andrew.

Andrew Belshaw
CFO, Gamma Communications

Andrew, thank you very much indeed. Right. Let's go through the 2021 financial highlights. The slide that by now is familiar to you, and it's probably time for a new slide. It's probably time for a new CFO. Obviously this is the last time I'll be doing the financial highlights. But I'm not going anywhere. I will be back at the half year and all future results presentations, probably taking tea and coffee orders from you or something like that. I don't know, but I'm sure they'll find me something useful to do. The 2021 financial highlights. Firstly, we quote the adjusted metrics.

It's worth saying because we had the profit from The Loop in last year's sort of statutory numbers, things like PBT, EPS, they all seem to have gone down a lot, and that does seem to be panicking a few retail investors as far as I can tell first thing this morning. When you take The Loop profit out from last year and you look at the adjusted numbers, everything's looking pretty good. We'll break it down a little bit more in a moment. Obviously, you've got a full- year of Spain and Germany that we bought kind of partway through the year. Revenue up 14%. I reckon around 6%-7% of that is organic. Adjusted EBITDA 21%. EPS 25%. It's all looking pretty good.

We're very, very proud of those numbers. Let's dive into the detail a little bit more. Recurring revenues are still around 89%. That's a little bit lower than it's been historically, but you'll remember we've got the German Mobile business that's not recurring, and we'll talk about that in a moment. It's called Epsilon. It's all kind of spot commissions that we get from selling mobile deals, and that just pulls the recurring revenue piece down a little bit. What to say about COVID? People tell me COVID was so last year and we should stop talking about it, but equally it is still affecting us.

Direct had a particularly slow H2, and I think we guided to that because we'd sort of said during 2020, what was happening is we weren't out doing an awful lot of sales activity. We weren't winning business at that point, and that was the business that should have been coming on in 2021. Actually direct had a relatively slow second half of 2021. Also we managed to keep the overheads under control in 2021. I'd love to say that's fantastic overhead management from the CFO, and it probably is. But also there was a lot of stuff we just couldn't spend. Travel was very low.

We weren't going to conferences, so that meant partly travel, but also we weren't kind of paying for large stands at trade fairs and all that sort of stuff. That's going to come back in 2022. We do anticipate seeing some of that kind of overhead coming back. Most of the OpEx growth was really just share-based payments and development spend and the rest of the OpEx was pretty static. What else to say? Probably just kind of going forward, it's worth just sort of saying a few things on OpEx. As you know, three-quarters of our overhead is people.

That's a big number, and wage inflation is becoming a bit of a thing in a way it sort of hasn't been for the last four or five years. I know you know this, and I know everybody else is talking about it. I'm not quite sure what that means for us going forward. I think what it does mean is we've probably seen more pressure on our overheads, and I've spoken to many of you individually this morning. Revenue and GP, I'm very comfortable with going forward. Overhead, I can just see a few headwinds on that, not because we're gonna spend more in the sense of doing more, but the people that we employ, and particularly in the software development area, we are seeing a bit of wage inflation in that area.

Really difficult to quantify quite early in the year. I don't know if it's gonna get better or if it's gonna get worse. Who knows? Just to flag that. The other thing to flag going forward is probably tax. As you know, you're well aware, we get out into 2024, that tax rate's gonna go up from sort of 19%-20% up to sort of 24%-25% just because the U.K. headline tax rate is increasing. So when we're modeling out, you know, over the next sort of 2-3 years, you just need to bear in mind. Unless Rishi says something tomorrow to the contrary, which he may do, but I doubt the U.K. tax rate is going up.

Let's get into each of the individual business units. In Indirect, probably not an awful lot to say. The you know, the Indirect channel, as we sort of said at the time, apart from at the very beginning of COVID, wasn't hugely affected. You can see there all the graphs kind of just nicely go up, half- on- half. Revenue grown 9%. That's entirely organic. We didn't buy anything that's added to the Indirect revenue channel, and it's SIP and Cloud PBX, and as Andrew said, it's all of the you know, the new things where we're getting things like Collaborate and Horizon Contact have got decent attachment rates, and that's driving the revenue in those areas quite nicely. The recurring revenue in indirect stays around sort of 93%-94%.

Margins, you know, again, we've been guiding that margins will flatten in this business just as the mix flattens, and that's happening. If you look over the last sort of 12, 18 months, margins have been around sort of 52%, 53%, 54%, and we would anticipate that carrying on. Direct is as I've always said, so we no longer sort of split out the SME part of Direct. It's not really that material. Direct is all driven by enterprise and public sector, and a lot of the new logo wins that Andrew highlighted on the slide a few moments ago. This isn't entirely organic. Mission Labs is in here.

It's not desperately material, but the organic revenue growth in Direct is only around sort of 2%-3% when you correct it for the Loop that was in last year. It's not in this year. Mission Labs wasn't in last year. It is in this year. As I say, I think the growth is around 2%-3%. The reason that's a little bit lower, as we say, is it's that sales effort in 2020 that meant we weren't kind of winning new business in 2020, and meant we didn't put it on in 2021. As we go into 2022, you know, back end of 2021, moving into 2022, the pipeline has grown and grown again, and we're expecting a very good 2022. What could stop that?

Well, again, we do need to just kind of call out this business to do with hardware Indirect. One of the first things that we often do, particularly if it's a data deal or data form as part of the deal, is we need to go and install hardware routers on customer premises. Depending on the make or model of router that we need to install, they can be quite hard to get hold of purely because of the global chip shortage. What you end up doing is probably paying a little bit more for slightly better routers that we can get hold of because it's better for us to do that than let stuff drift to the right.

If we really can't get hold of routers that do the job for us, projects drift to the right. Direct, as we sit here, we're comfortable, and we're confident, but there is just that sort of risk that we can't get hold of hardware and some of the deals that we've won, they just begin to drift to the right, and that means we obviously can't start billing until everything has been installed. Again, margins sort of high 40s%, and we don't sort of see that particularly changing going forward. Europe, I'll say a little bit more about Europe, and I've got another slide. I've just kind of flashed this up. Obviously all of the European growth is largely inorganic.

As I said before, we had a full- year of Spain and Germany in 2021. Trading EBITDA for the year was GBP 9.4 million. That grew quite a lot in the second half for reasons that I'll come onto, and I wouldn't take that second half, GBP 5.3 million, as necessarily the run rate going into H1. Why is that? Let's just have a look at the next slide, where we've tried to split down the European revenue, and break down a little bit more what's actually going on in Europe. Now, hopefully you can see that. It's relatively small on my screen, I should say. I've just had new glasses.

I've got my varifocals in 'cause I'm now of that age where I need varifocals, and I'm struggling to see it. If I keep looking down at my notes, that's just an eyesight issue. What would I say about European revenue? Well, probably the first point to pull out is actually that line about halfway down the slide where it says Epsilon just underneath traditional. Epsilon is our mobile business in Germany, and we earn revenue by going out selling a mobile deal. We take commission from the MNO, and then we pay the vast majority of that commission to the partner that's done the deal with us, and we make about sort of 15-20 points margin on it.

As you can see, because it's spot revenue, it's gone GBP 14.7 million second half of last year, GBP 12.1 million, back up to GBP 15.2 million. I wouldn't say it's seasonal. I wouldn't necessarily say, you know, it's all sort of driven towards the second half of the year. I think it just fluctuates depending on when people are buying mobile phones, and that means it's actually quite difficult to model. Now, as I say, the margins on that are quite low, but actually that sort of 12 in the first half going up to 15% in the second half, that's obviously another GBP 3 million. You can do that in your head. 15%-20% margin is about GBP 600,000 of GP, and that just goes straight to the bottom line. There's no associate overhead associated with that.

You know, going back to what I sort of said on the earlier slide, maybe the second half run rate for EBITDA for Europe isn't what we'll see in the first half this year. GBP 600,000 of the EBITDA we had in the second half of 2021 was just driven by that sort of, you know, supernormal revenue or possibly supernormal revenue in Epsilon. We'll probably split that out going forward. It makes life a little bit harder to model. That's the sort of first thing to pull out. Second thing to pull out is UCaaS revenue in Europe is slightly different to the U.K. In the U.K., as you know, we bundle calls. We go out, we sell a seat, that's the revenue.

It's pretty easy to model. In Europe, they go out, they sell a seat, that's great, they get the revenue from the seat, but then also they get call revenue on top of that. That can fluctuate a lot, particularly in times of COVID when people are in the office, they're out the office, and calling patterns change quite quickly. What you're seeing actually in all of the European countries to a greater or lesser degree, and particularly in the Netherlands where revenue's kind of gone backwards, is we're selling more seats. You know, as Andrew said earlier on, we sold 13% more seats or sorry, at the end of 2021 we had 13% more seats than the beginning of 2021. We're getting more seats on, we're getting more seat revenue.

What we're not necessarily getting is the call revenue, and that just kind of fluctuates around, and you know, you kind of see over the period you're getting growth if you compare 2021 to 2020. Particularly in the Netherlands, as you can see, that revenue where it's GBP 4 million second half of 2021, was GBP 4.3 million second half of 2020, that is call revenue. The actual seat revenue has increased and what's pulled it down is people just making fewer calls. Again, you know, that's another feature. I would just sort of say in passing, you know, Netherlands has actually had a pretty strong year. It's doing very well in mobile. It's multi-tenanted business. If you remember, we bought a business called Nimsys, and that's doing very well.

The Schiphol business is beginning to pick up as air travel picks up as well. You know, the underlying Dutch business is okay. Number of cloud seats is growing. But just optically, you've got that UCaaS revenue kind of coming off. Germany again had a very good year. We've talked about Epsilon, number of cloud seats increasing, SIP trunks is increasing and, you know, over time we'll see that come through in the revenue. Spain, again, you can see the UCaaS revenue increases then slightly comes off again just because of its call volume. The other thing just to call out in Spain is, you know, we had a couple of businesses, so Comsm edia and VozTelecom Andalucía that the Spanish guys bought before we acquired the Spanish business.

They weren't doing so well throughout 2021. Those businesses are now just beginning to pick up again a little bit. They were a bit of a drag on Spanish growth in 2021, but kind of growing into 2022. What does all of that mean? I think it means fundamentally, guiding and therefore modeling Europe is gonna be a little bit harder. Epsilon is gonna kind of move around a little bit. As we put more seats on in Europe, and we are putting more seats on in Europe, and as that rate of seat growth increases, which it will do in Europe, as we said at the Capital Markets Day, it may take a little while, but it will increase, you will see that European revenue begins to grow.

Hopefully that's a bit more of a sort of granular look at the revenue. Hopefully that's helpful, just to kind of explain what's going on throughout the European business. Just move on to the balance sheet and I haven't got very much to say on the balance sheet or the cash flow other than to say our balance sheet remains very strong. Cash just under GBP 53 million, net cash just under GBP 50 million, which is, you know, very similar numbers to the ones that we had this time last year. If you feel contingent consideration should come off net cash, that's in the bottom right-hand corner of the slide. If you feel the IFRS 16 liability should come off as well, we give you that number.

I think, you know, by the measures I would use, net cash is around about GBP 50 million. As you know, we keep that on the balance sheet to fund M&A. Cash flow, probably just to sort of talk about a little bit about guidance. Cash conversion, this is adjusted EBITDA turned into operating cash flow, was 94%. I think historically I'd sort of said that was gonna be between 85%-90%. Sorry, that was between 80%-85% when we moved to IFRS 15. It's been creeping up to 85%-90%. I think I've been sort of hinting that we'd probably change the guidance to 85%-90%.

I think, you know, we have enough data now that clearly that is the sort of level of cash generation, and clearly in the last year we've done really well getting it over 90%. Maybe we're guiding it to 85%-90%, possibly even a little bit higher in some years. We're pretty happy with cash conversion. Tax is a bit lower in the year just because of the quarterly installments and when they fell and the QIPs regime just changing. CapEx guidance I'm not changing. We're spending GBP 16 million-GBP 18 million at the moment, and I would see that happening for the next few years barring acquisitions.

Just on M&A there, in the year we spent GBP 40 million on Mission Labs, paid about another GBP 6.5 million deferred consideration. Going forward we've got about GBP 13 million to pay. That's undiscounted. Some of the figures you'll see in the accounts are discounted 'cause that's what you have to do these days, but that 13 million is our best guess at a cash figure. We think about GBP 6.1 million of that's paid in 2022, and the rest of that is largely payable in 2023. Tiny bit payable in 2024. I think that is me done. I shall hand you back to Andrew to talk about strategic planning and what we're gonna do with all of that cash. I think you might be on mute, Andrew.

Andrew Taylor
CEO, Gamma Communications

I'm back. Can you hear me?

Andrew Belshaw
CFO, Gamma Communications

Yeah. When I say I think, I know.

Andrew Taylor
CEO, Gamma Communications

Okay. I just need to get control of the. Hold on a second. I need to. I think you still have control, Andrew. I don't have control of the deck.

Andrew Belshaw
CFO, Gamma Communications

Can you not take back control? I think if you hit the button at the top of the screen.

Andrew Taylor
CEO, Gamma Communications

It doesn't allow me to take control. Why don't you just flick through?

Andrew Belshaw
CFO, Gamma Communications

Okay. Sorry about that. Not sure what's happening.

Andrew Taylor
CEO, Gamma Communications

What I wanted to do in this section, we're sort of slightly behind schedule, was just a bit of a reminder on where we are in terms of our strategic priorities, and in particular the progress that we've been making on the product side, building on what we talked about at the Capital Markets Day and at the half year. These continue to be, I suppose, the strategic priorities that are driving our Execution as a business. We did undertake quite a bit of work actually over the last 12 months, looking at both testing and validating our planning hypotheses and also the market data that was supporting our strategy work back in 2023. We did a big piece of work on that. We developed a five-year plan, a new five-year planning horizon.

The good news is that we think that these objectives are valid and looking forward to 2026, which is our new planning horizon. Andrew, if you flip the slide, we've got a very clear view on sort of where our priorities are. There's an enormous amount of detail underneath this, so I'm just keeping it at very high level. I mean, this is all about us building a strong and sustainable position in both the UCaaS and the CCaaS, the cloud contact center market, with a continued focus on SMEs. It's not that we don't also cover the requirements of enterprise and public sector through our direct activities. Overall as a business, we're completely strategically focused on building a sustainable UCaaS and CCaaS capability targeted at that SME market which is really our core market.

What's slightly changed, I would say, over the last 12, 24 months compared to previously is this real focus that we have on the end customer, the user of the service, and a lot of the product development and product marketing. What we do is designed around ensuring that we've got products, surprisingly, that users will really be able to use well in a business environment. A continued focus on that and of course, both solidifying and broadening our routes to market.

A good example of what we've been doing on this over the last couple of years is opening up that digital channel, a new digital channel, on the basis that we believe in the future, end users and businesses are gonna consume these products digitally over the web, as opposed to coming directly or through indirect partners. It's a, it's a new route to market, which isn't new in other market segments, but in our segment with the products that are consumed are quite complex. We see this as a key area for the medium to long- term, and it's actually delivering some pretty positive results. If you go back and look at the product results slide that I presented earlier, I did specifically mention it, but we're making good headway in that area.

A big feature and a big focus for the business over the last couple of years and moving forward is how we help our existing customers transition to our full UCaaS and CCaaS propositions in the business. You're seeing some of that with the new products that we've launched and the cross-selling and upselling that we're doing to existing customers through partners and also directly. That's a big feature for us as we develop new technology and new products.

There's a very clear and exciting transition for our existing customers, and we're doing all of this built around our group operating model to ensure that our people in the company today and new people that join the business organically or perhaps inorganically through acquisition, that we've got a very clear way of working and a very clear operating model, and that's what we've been implementing over the last sort of 6-12 months across the business. There's some very clear priorities for the business moving forward based on those initial 2023 strategic objectives. Andrew, if you just flip over. Not to dwell on this, but this is just a reminder of the focus that we have in terms of adding software platform capability to the existing network strengths.

This has been something that we've been very focused on over the last years. You know, building that capability from the center out towards those core products that we're actually taking to market, and then both the devices and the channels that we use to enable those products to be consumed. Just really to reinforce that. Andrew, if you flick. Again, just a reminder, you know, we're covering multiple business segments through multiple channels with multiple products and services. I mean, you could sort of turn this sort of slide on its head as well, and it would say the same thing, yeah. A big focus on SME, enterprise and micro, addressing those business segments through very different channels.

Then a really exciting set of UCaaS, CCaaS and connectivity products and services that we target into those different channels. If you're really interested in this stuff, if you look back at our Capital Markets Day, there's some good slides that sort of support this and break it down into a bit more detail. We're really happy with where we are from the product side, the direction of travel, and how we're addressing those channels, both in the short- term, but also this is about building strong foundations to deliver medium to long-term growth. Andrew, if you flick over. This is a bit of a historical slide now. Building on what we said in H1. Really good progress. We had a bit of a drift around Collaborate 2.0.

We'd planned to launch that into the market in Q4. That's now gonna be launched in March. There's been a lot of testing internally within Gamma and also with partners and customers. We've just launched it fully throughout Gamma, so we're really excited about it. During 2022, you know, we will be embedding that both across our existing customers and also selling it into new customers that come onto that Collaborate platform. So it's a real strategic initiative for us because it provides that user interface for all of our products moving forward. Andrew, if you flick over, and a big focus in 2022, just building on the work in 2021, around new products that we're taking to market with, I suppose, two or three key messages here.

One, we've got a big focus on building on the work that we did in 2021 and ensuring that we're executing against a feature and a product roadmap against those products that we've already launched. Horizon Contact and PhoneLine+ are good examples of that. Secondly, around taking new products and services into new geographies. It's something that we talked about some time ago. In Q2, we're gonna be taking Operator Connect into the Netherlands. Then in Q3, we're planning to take Telsis, which is our cloud contact center solution, into Spain. Then we're gonna be launching a digital product Circle into Germany and the Netherlands.

Those of you who have been working with Gamma for quite a long period of time, you will recognize how sort of critical some of these deliverables are because this is what we've been working towards in the background, so we're really quite proud of where we are. A lot of work around execution during the sort of next 9, 12 months. We've talked about mobile a bit in the past. We have completely deployed a new MVNO platform last year, and through H1 and H2 this year, we're gonna be migrating all users over to the new Gamma Mobile platform, and we're very pleased with how this has launched into the market.

The cross-selling and upselling that we've been doing, in particular in direct, has been really impressive, and we haven't talked about some of the big wins that we've had in the deck here, but we've had some very big mobile wins. I think, and I hope that the decisions we made historically on mobile and partnering with Three are gonna come good in the medium to long- term. The short- term signals are positive. Andrew, if you flick over to ESG. Over to you.

Andrew Belshaw
CFO, Gamma Communications

Okay. Thank you very much. I was gonna say, I won't say much about ESG. There is much to be said about Gamma's ESG journey, and particularly on the E, the environment. We've done an awful lot of work this year. Really just to pull out one or two bullets 'cause we haven't got time to go through all of them. We are now committing to be net zero by 2042. The Annual Report, which went on the web this morning, has got sort of three or four pages explaining how we're gonna do that. I won't kind of go into all the things that you would expect me to be talking about, but I won't run through it now. We will be TCFD compliant by next year.

We proAably are this year, but we sort of timed out getting the annual Report out, so we didn't have time to get the audit done. But we kinda think we're compliant. We're not allowed to say we're compliant until we've had the audit done, but which we will get done, very shortly. Probably not much else to say on there. Lots and lots of good stuff going on. Governance, you know, as you know, we've always sort of tried to apply the main market code, even though we're sitting on AIM. If you do have anything else on ESG, we can maybe pick it up on Q&A. I shall hand back to Andrew, and I'll keep doing the slides given that.

Andrew Taylor
CEO, Gamma Communications

Yep. Thanks, Andrew. Next one. Yeah, it's the last one. Listen, just in summary, in looking at our outlook. Listen, I think for me, we've had an excellent year. You know, it's been mixed because of the market and the impact on the economy and the business segment as a result of COVID. I think we've traded very well through that. It's not been perfect. There's been small parts of the company, Andrew highlighted some of them, that have struggled a bit, just as a result of lockdowns. But I think given the business model and given our product performance as a key leading indicator, I've been pretty amazed with how we've traded through both 2020 and 2021, actually.

Really happy with how we're executing on our own IP technology and product strategy. I think we made great progress in 2021 in terms of new products to market, and we've got some big milestones in Europe, and 2022 is about, you know, sort of building on that strategy to enable these European markets to be able to deliver the growth that Gamma's delivered over the medium to short-term. I think we're building really strong technology foundations there as part of a journey, foundations that will enable us to deliver long-term growth, long-term shareholder value growth in the future. I think the structural changes that we've seen in the market are favorable. Sort of despite, you know, the potential for some economic headwinds, as a result.

As a result of what's going on in Ukraine, you know, we just have to wait and see. We're not feeling that at the moment as a business, but we feel very positive that the structural changes around the market are in our favor. We're in a growth market. We believe it's gonna continue to grow. The question is how fast is it gonna grow? I think we're in the right place, and we're feeling pretty positive. We've had a good start to 2022. When I look at the product performance as a lead indicator, we've followed on that strong performance from 2021 into 2022, so that is good news.

It's a good leading indicator, and we just have to keep our heads down and do what we have done in the past and sort of deliver strong results coming into 2022.

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