Earnings Call: H2 2025

Jun 30, 2025

Summary

FY2025 revenue was £157m and adjusted profit £48.3m as AUM ended at £22.6bn. Management introduced a 50% minimum dividend payout and expects ~£6m of annualized transformation savings, while seeing a more favorable backdrop for active management.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Liontrust Asset Management PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged, and they can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the top right corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the first poll, and I would now like to hand you over to CEO, John Ions. Good afternoon to you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Liontrust Asset Management full year results presentation. With me this afternoon to my left is Stephen Corbett, Head of Investor Relations, Mark Hawtin, Head of Global Equities. I am John Ions, CEO. Billy Averill, Finance Director, and Simon Hildrey, Marketing Director. A broader team than usual because I felt it would be good to go a little bit more in-depth into some of the reasons we have optimism going forward. Liontrust, as you will know, is very much a specialist active asset management, seven strong investment processes with clear investment philosophy and that process that captures that. The presentation today will touch first of all on some of the highlights of the results, then we will go into a case of why we feel that the investment background is looking more favorable going forward. Some of the enhancements we have made on the sales distribution side. Simon will cover some of the marketing side, then drill down further into each of those seven distinct investment strategies, and Billy will touch on the financials. Then we will be more than happy to take questions. It should take about 35 minutes. If I go into the highlights. Obviously, it has been a more challenging year for the industry, and Liontrust has not been immune to that. Assets at the year-end, so there is GBP 22.6 billion and around that level as we speak today. Still means a profit before tax of GBP 48.3 million, and we maintained the dividend for the full year commitment we made at the interim period to pay the final dividend of 50p and 72p for the year. To later on the changes we have made to the business transformation program, which will generate roughly GBP 6 million of annualized cost savings, and also the new capital allocation policy, which will be changed in dividend payment of 50% payout ratio, which we feel better reflects the business and supports it in terms of moving forward with its growth objective. I think relatively, if I hand on to Mark, who will outline why we feel the outlook for active management after several disappointing years now looks more favorable. Thanks, John. Thank you very much. This first slide shows you the trend of American exceptionalism that has driven significant index share gains over the last 15 years. This has been a great deal of what has driven relatively easy market gains overall, and therefore a much better passive investments environment to the detriment of active managers. In fact, over the same period, the mutual fund market in the U.S. has gone from very little in assets to over half of the mutual fund market. There has not been an ideal environment for the active investor. At the same time, as that huge increase in the U.S. share of the world equity market going from 47% to 68%, U.S. GDP as a share of world GDP has remained pretty flat. This has been a reflection of valuation increase, but also a reflection of some of these companies that began their lives in the early 2000s and have become some of the biggest companies in the world today. Such that on this slide, as you can see, the weight of the largest seven companies in the S&P, at 29% currently, a touch off its high, but at the highest levels that we have seen in terms of concentration for almost 100 years. You would have to go back to the Industrial Revolution to find a similar level of concentration. Passive flows have helped drive this. It has been relatively easy to push money into these few names and generate perfectly respectable equity returns without having to think beyond that. That narrow focus of investment, of course, comes at the expense of many tens of thousands of other equities globally that really look very cheap. This next slide shows that same performance of the U.S. equity market in terms of the alpha that it has generated for the world index year by year. There are only three years prior to this year that we are in now where the U.S. has underperformed the world index. Again, making that push to passive into U.S. an easy call. The question really is, has the U.S. outperformed for long enough? If it has, then you probably do not want to be passive. In those years where the U.S. market has outperformed, we have also tended to see U.S. dollar strength. In the years it has underperformed, it is dollar weakness. We are in a dollar weakness year this year, and a couple of numbers that I think make this point very interesting. In sterling terms this year, the S&P is down 4% at the half year point. The FTSE 100 is up 7.5%. The DAX in Germany is up 24%. Already you can see that the opportunity set outside of that small group of American names, when active investment becomes more powerful, can be really quite polarizing and generate very significantly different return levels. Three out of seven of the Magnificent Seven are down this year. Two of them down quite a lot. Tesla and Apple are down 20% in sterling terms, down over 25%. The opportunity set is clearly changing. This next slide shows the correlation over the last 30 years between the U.S. dollar and the out or underperformance of the U.S. equity market. When the U.S. dollar strengthens, the equity market tends to perform much better and outperform world equities. Again, if we're heading into a period now where the U.S. dollar becomes weaker, where the exceptionalism of that currency versus the rest of the world, its reference point is maybe beginning to change, that could also be a key dynamic in promoting the opportunity for a diversification both outside the U.S. market and within the U.S. equity market itself. My final slide. These are some numbers produced by Goldman Sachs in December of last year. The U.S. equity market has more concentration, higher profitability, and a higher level of valuation than it has had pretty much for all of the last 100 years. For me, as a portfolio manager, that represents risk. It's why we've seen this tremendous run. The first of two bars on the right-hand side represent the performance of investing GBP 1,000 over the last 10 years. You had a 13% compound return, very healthy return. Goldman's expectations of those returns are going to be significantly less for the U.S. market in the next 10 years, 3% in fact, and that's in dollars. Your GBP 1,000 would only generate you GBP 345 in that situation. That's probably not enough for most equity investors. It certainly won't be enough for most wealth managers. This is really the reason why I think everything is setting up for a significantly better backdrop for active management, because active management is going to be what is needed for wealth managers and equity investors to generate the type of equity returns that they have come to expect. Thank you, Mark. There we can. In that looking forward in building for growth as an investment case, why we believe that this seven very strong active investment strategy we have will become much more appealing to clients. We're moving on towards distribution and what we're doing there. How are we getting this message across to our client base? We've, if you like, de-channelized quite a lot of the distribution groups here, and that's more a reflection of the evolving landscape that is taking place with a lot of M&A activity going on in the wealth management space. What we have now is larger pools of cash handled amongst fewer people. So effectively be able to pass a wholesale institutional and even with our international is to have one standard platform that the business operates across. It allows us to be much more data-driven in the execution of those plans and allows us to upgrade the message going out to clients. What we find with this smaller number of larger people, it becomes more consultants driven and therefore data we provide to them has to be much more timely and detailed than it has been in the past. This plays well to Liontrust very much in a well-documented and detailed investment processes. We can clearly see, we'll see where and how that plays out alongside the brand and the strength and the positioning of the business a bit later on. It's all about activity, the operating platform that we've built the business on, and that allows us to be much more paced, much more timely with the data we have. To give an example of that, to sort of how we know what clients want and how we deliver that. Let's go to the next slide, Stephen. You'll see in the last quarter, there was 1,082 meetings take place. Numbers went right. Of those, 85% of those meetings were what we classify with our tier 1 or tier 2 clients at top level. Within that, 70% of those we targeted with the active decision makers there. So it's very much a data-driven approach, giving market intelligence, timely reporting and digital enhancements there. So 47 client events, of which 682 clients attended on the other side of that. Our annual investment conference was attended by 300 people. A sustainable conference attended by around 80 people. Recently, even though with the week of outflows of money out of the U.K. equity market only a couple of weeks ago, 60 of the top fund buyers in the U.K. for a U.K. Economic Advantage presentation at the Mansion House. So it's very much showing that Liontrust still has that ability to target the right clients, get the message in front of the right client, even though we've gone through a weaker period in terms of flows. I think with that change in market sentiment that Mark has already alluded to, that very clear explanation of the processes which Stephen will go into, aligned with the brand that Simon is now going to move us forward with. Thank you. As with any company, the brand is really important in terms of reflecting the awareness, knowledge, engagement that our clients and potential clients have with us. I think a few stats from independent research show that we've managed to maintain a very strong high profile brand, both with professional intermediaries and retail investors. If you look at brand familiarity amongst financial advisors, we're second, and we're fifth amongst wealth managers. We're consistently in the top 10, named as the best asset managers in the market by professional intermediaries. When it comes to advertising recall, we're third unprompted amongst professional and second amongst retail investors. This, we believe, puts us in a very strong position going forward. Second point I want to raise is about the perception of the investment teams. Research shows that clients and potential clients still rate our investment teams very highly. Amongst retail investors, we're still number 1 for Sustainable. Amongst professional, we're market-leading for Sustainable, second U.K. equities, and first for both European equities and Multi-Asset. Our one investment trust, only one investment trust, we've managed to narrow the discount quite significantly, and our engagement with retail shareholders is shown by the fact that we had well over 100 investors at a recent retail investor event. On service obviously is very important both to retail investors and to professionals, and we put a lot of store by the level of service that we provide. Indication of this is the white labeling bespoke service that we offer financial advisors for Multi-Asset. One of the documents was rated as the second-best document under consumer duty by an independent consumer duty panel, and we are rated as fourth best for client service amongst financial advisors. In terms of engagement, we produce regular, clear content that is engaged by our client base. Over the last year, over half a million views of our investment fund manager videos, and we are also rated as fourth best for communication. Finally, understanding clients. John talked about the physical presence that the sales team has with clients. We also digitally understand clients through their behavior and through their interests, and we work in terms of providing a personalized and more bespoke service based on those interests and the content they want to see and when they want to see it. We believe this will increase engagement and understanding of Liontrust going forward. Yes, Simon. You've heard about the investment case for the distribution and the strength of the brand. Over the next page, you'll see the teams that we have, the seven distinct investment teams who have all this agency, which Stephen could drill down through each of the teams and where we see them and how they're positioned at the moment. We have a stable of 50 funds across seven investment teams, all active funds delivered through investment process. Looking at the teams in turn, you can be assured of that breadth and the styles and the opportunities backed by that strong brand that Simon mentioned and taken to market by our investment process specialists and distribution. We heard from Mark, Head of the Global Equities team, a highly experienced team managing funds across emerging and developed markets, including global long short, global long only, U.S., LATAM, EM, China, Japan, India, and Russia, which is currently closed, obviously. 10 funds with GBP 1 billion of assets under management. The GF Global Alpha Long Short Fund was transferred to Liontrust in the earlier year, and it has a 10-year track record under Mark Hawtin. This adds another alternative fund to our stable, and it's one that's delivered over 13% year to date and is taking flows. The Cashflow Solution grew their AUM last year by GBP 650 million, taking total AUM to over GBP 3 billion for the team. This high conviction, high active share investment process was delivered throughout the cycle. The European Dynamic Fund has grown from GBP 300 million to GBP 2 billion over 3 years. The strategic equity fund is now at GBP 264 million from GBP 100 million a year and a half ago. The newly launched Long Short Pan-European Fund has raised GBP 346 million this year. Investment in Europe is getting more attention and the funds offered by the team are well-positioned to capitalize on the opportunities there, especially for European Dynamic, a fund which has outperformed its benchmark in 9 of the last 11 years. The Economic Advantage team are one of the most respected U.K. equity teams in the market with their 27-year track record and team of seven. The headwinds facing U.K. equity since 2022 have been very well documented. I think we will share them on this call. But specifically for the team, the headwinds have been threefold: size, style, and sector. They're naturally skewed to mid and small caps. That's the size. The style is one of growth and not value, and not owning banks being the sector headwind. This has meant that performance has been challenging. The Economic Advantage funds play that crucial quality growth role for investors in those balanced portfolios, and you see what we regard as the hallmarks to quality in the Economic Advantage fund here, and this is specifically for the special situations fund. Each of the five funds the team manage are a basket of world-leading businesses with those barriers to competition. They're difficult to replicate, and what we're seeing already is corporates and private equities beginning to appreciate that value, with four companies being taken over so far this year and three others subject to a bid. We have set our stall to be quality grade for the EA funds, and we continue to play that crucial role for investors. The Sustainable Future team, we believe investing in sustainability is to be a long-term mega trend. While performance from 2022 to 2024 for all sustainable funds in the market has dented retail demands, there remains an expectation for corporations to be investing responsibly for themselves. In the shorter term, we see increased demand from institutional investors, think corporates, endowments, charities, and improving retail sentiment. In the U.K., ESG is embedded in our education system, and it's backed by government. Those institutional investors require funds with pedigree and process. We've been pioneers in this space for 22 years, an unbroken 22-year track record with these funds run by Peter Michaelis, underpinned by their clear process. We've 10 of those teams' funds being awarded SDR labels by the FCA recently. They've got a broad range of funds. They've got single strategy funds, managed funds, and fixed income funds. They serve various parts of the market. The IFAs get serviced through the managed funds, the single strategy funds, the solutions from wealth managers and fund managers, and of course, those fixed income, and of course, institutional investors through both the funds and segregated accounts. These are all avenues into what is a very large and addressable market, particularly in Europe. Looking at the global fundamental team, they manage GBP 1.8 billion, with GBP 1.2 billion of that being in the Edinburgh Investment Trust. The trust has now been managed by that team for five years. Strong performance, as Simon mentioned, with the discount narrowing to 6%. Very stable share register and certainly a potential mother hen for other trusts looking to scale. The team also manage an income fund and U.K. equity funds. The experience in managing funds, investment trusts, and segregated accounts. Again, positioned to capture opportunities should they come their way. The Multi-Asset team, as Simon mentioned as well, they provide solutions to IFAs in this fast-evolving market and this regulation environment. It's increasingly popular amongst IFAs for two principal reasons: suitability and client risk profiling. Outsourced multi-asset simplifies the advice process for IFAs and meets regulatory demands. Secondly, doing the investment bit so IFAs can focus on the financial planning and those client relationships. The team we have here are very actively different. They're reaping the benefits of enhanced display to the Multi-Asset team process over the previous few years. Very strong performance. They offer a first-class level of service and client engagement and are very open and communicative with the IFAs that are utilizing their resources. They like to form partnerships with IFAs and offering that right level of service. The portfolios and funds have delivered very strong performance, and we look to capitalize on the opportunity set out in the market for them at the moment as a result of their quality, and the IFAs seeking solutions to their problems. Finally, Global Innovation. The Global Innovation team manage GBP 840 million across their three funds, global dividends, innovation, and technology. That's an income fund, a growth fund, a pure tech play fund, all being global. The teams have a highly distinctive investment process, investing in disruptive innovators. The fund is differentiated to peers in the IA Global sector. Only 41% of the innovation fund portfolio is not owned by the 50 largest funds. They are not reliant on the Magnificent Seven companies, finding a more compelling end of innovators lower down the market cap spectrum. With a low crossover to other funds in the IA Global sector, our innovation funds can add genuine diversification for investors with extremely strong performance. This dynamic and bright team are making inroads into what is a very large addressable market. What we see from briefly digging deeper into those seven investment teams is the scope of opportunities in the product range. Marrying this with our brand that Simon touched on and with the distribution team that John talked about, they have that opportunity to take a lot to market. You see, the seven special investment teams focus exclusively on active management, offering exposure to undervalued segments that can deliver alpha in a low-return environment. Strategies that have over 80% active share on a benchmark agnostic. As a house, we tend to have a bias towards small and mid-cap growth companies, but we give a strong slate for it and fundamentals. Again, ideal for that world can we see. Now, obviously, with Economic Advantage and Sustainable Investing, remember, there's the two bigger blocks which have been more challenged. If I look at the Economic Advantage, the U.K. team, we've got I think there are only four funds left now in the small company sector that are in excess of GBP 500 million. If we look down at those specific four funds, three of them have moved more mid-cap and value and one, which, no worries, it is still very much in that small mid-cap growth sector. All of these things are important, though again, when we were talking to clients at the Mansion House conference recently, I would not be going that people are going full circle on U.K. equity, but certainly that deep revaluation of U.K. equities downwards and the opportunities set, the pickup in bids and activities we have seen. You think about how our clients use our funds, they tend to blend them with others to get that move that clients output me to. In the institutional space, the fact that we have a higher portion of our small caps in the AIM side is appealing because the AIM stocks actually fit in with the unquoted allocations for the local authorities which the Mansion House is driving. Look at the Sustainable, because again, the focus maybe on the retail side where we have moved away a bit from a big drive behind sustainability. Struggled more performance-wise and an ability to hold. We have got a larger, the large exception company, obviously all carbon emitters not there under that small mid-cap buy it. Short term, if you think post patient base and people's focus more towards those small mid-caps and very much as Stephen was alluding to there, the drive from institutions still to allocate to Sustainable. Two very challenging areas for us here, Steve, but very much when we work with the teams looking to make sure that our processes adhered to and the companies that own through that building that want to moving forward. On the other side, the Cashflow Solution European Dynamic back to what Mark mentioned earlier, that sort of outperformance of Europe, that drive there. There has been GBP 650 million in this calendar year of net inflows in there and the pipeline there, certainly from institutions now where people are screening and those numbers, we have had incomings bump a lot internationally where that is really incoming inbound built from databases where investors looking to allocate internationally have seen the numbers there. We have either Australian superannuation fund last week and that is coming from an inbound, but then we have a team internally who has probably done 2.5 hours of meetings with them before they guarantee me in that team. The pipeline of inquiries from there, the strong numbers, with the Global Innovation team that is in there is 3 years behind it. Very much in that top quarter are Mark's team, excellent performance across the balance fund, the hedge fund up 10% year to date, the multi-asset portfolio where we put a new risk modeling tool in place for that outsourcing to the intermediate marketplace years ago, that is starting to generate stronger numbers. Across the group we are beginning to see elements of optimism. The marketplace where, if you like, price discovery or research starts to get rewarded in a low return environment gives me much stronger ground for optimism. There's been strategic repositioning, but also in the last year we've focused more as well on the tactical cost management and maybe with the operating model, Rene. Yeah. Thanks, Sean. Maybe I'll spend a few minutes talking about our operating platform. One of our strategic objectives is to have an efficient, scalable, and reliable operating platform for our fund management teams and our operations team. Maybe I'll talk a little bit now about some of the recent developments that we've made to our operating platform. Through the course of the year, we implemented BlackRock's Aladdin system. Aladdin is a front office-based order management system for fund managers to use and a portfolio management system to support those fund managers in managing their portfolios. It's a leading system in the front office, and putting that into Liontrust allows us to gain the efficiencies of using the technology platform that's been developed by one of the world's largest asset managers. Alongside that, we've strengthened our partnership with Bank of New York Mellon, who provide a lot of our outsourced services. We've taken additional services from them in the front office. They now support us in running the Aladdin system as well as implementing their data solutions. They will provide a data backbone for the business where all our outsource data comes into one place. The other two elements that we've done during the year, we've outsourced the production of our factsheets and regulated documentation. Again, adding scalability to our operating platform. We transfer out four people. That's actually taking a service from a firm called Broadridge. It gives us immense scalability in our ability to deliver factsheets and other regulatory reports. The last element that we changed our operating platform was a more recent change. We've outsourced our trading team. In the past, we've carried out our trading in-house for our funds. That has also been transferred to Bank of New York. Again, a new provider of what they call buy-side solutions. They now provide us 24 hours, six days a week trading facilities for our fund managers. When orders come into Aladdin, they're automatically registered to Bank of New York. Follow. We've got that strong platform, that's fine. Basically, it's been that we only want to do the things inside of Liontrust where we can add value. Be it the financial side, distribution, or the brand. It's key for us to have all our data in one place and that operating platform now that helps us to, A, to deliver cost efficiencies but also business efficiencies. Perhaps Rene can go a bit more on the full year results. Yeah. So maybe I'll start by talking about a summary of the financial results. The business remains in good financial health. We have a strong capital position. Surplus capital in our business is just under GBP 60 million at the end of March. Even after you've taken into account the dividend that we're due to pay in August, we'll have surplus capital after foreseeable dividends of close to GBP 25 million in the business. Moving on to the results themselves. We had GBP 157 million of revenues, which includes GBP 3.6 million of performance fees, with a gross revenue margin of 60 basis points. That has come down a little bit from the previous year, which was 62 basis points, but pretty much in line with our guidance to the market that we would expect our revenue margin to reduce by one or two basis points per year. That led us to an adjusted profit of GBP 48.3 million, which is down from the previous year. Really a reflection of reduced AUM over the period. Our operating margin was just under 30%. Again, down from last year, partly a reflection of the lower when compared to last year performance fees, which do give a little bit of a boost to operating margin. That has led us to being able to pay a second interim dividend of GBP 0.50 per share to shareholders. If we go to the next slide. The next slide shows you a reconciliation between statutory profit to adjusted profit through some adjustments. I'm not going to dwell on this other than just refer to the professional services line, which includes the cost of the business transformation services, which we talked about previously. Moving on to the next slide, we have the adjusted income statement, which just shows you in detail the flow from revenues cost to adjusted profit. A few things to pick up from here. Our cost income ratio is up slightly. When you look at our cost side, a high amount of remuneration is linked to revenues, so will deflate as revenues deflate or come down. The reason then there's a fixed cost in there for other staff, which is not linked to revenues. That will lead sometimes to a small uptick in the compensation ratio. Still, it's been up by just over 1%. Moving to the next slide. We've got our capital position. As I mentioned earlier, we have GBP 75 million of capital after regulators' deductions. Our regulatory capital requirements are GBP 80 million, so that gives us a surplus of GBP 57 million. When you take foreseeable dividends into account, which are due to be paid in August, we have a surplus of GBP 26 million. So less than it was, but still in a healthy capital position. I'll now move on to our new capital allocation policy. You will have seen in our results, we announced a new capital allocation policy. It's probably worth just talking a little about the background as meant that we've put a new capital allocation policy. If you look at our amount of dividends that we paid out in the last year, we paid out GBP 0.72 of dividends, or we paid out GBP 0.72 of dividend on earnings of GBP 0.57. So we've got a payout ratio of 127%. We also did a share buyback during the period, which is equivalent to 14% of our earnings. So for FY 2025, the financial year just gone, we paid out over 140% of our earnings that we made during the year. Not a position that we can sustain for very long. That has led us to put in place a new capital allocation policy, which combines investing in the business, inorganic opportunities, and where we have incremental excess capital, share buybacks. If you move on to the next page. The next page sets out our capital allocation policy. The priority is to make sure that we have sufficient cash in the business and sufficient regulatory capital. After that, we'll pay out 50% of our adjusted diluted earnings as a dividend to shareholders, split approximately one-third across the interim and second interim dividends. We then allow for any investments that we need to make in organic investments and inorganic investments. If there's any excess capital, then we'll look to return that to shareholders through share buybacks. Steve. Over the past year, as I said there, we've focused both on tactical cost management and strategic repositioning. We streamlined our operations, reduced non-essential costs, and completed the integration of BlackRock's Aladdin platform and Bank of New York's Data Vault. Strategically, we've expanded our international footprint, particularly with government operations in Switzerland, the Middle East, and Asia, and we've enhanced our investment offerings with new fund launches. Steve, report please. Our stocks and funds in active management are up on day. We are looking to enter into a period where that price discovery, little metal research, starts to get rewarded and plays more to the seven distinct, strong investment processes we have. It gives us cautious optimism on the outlook going forward. The strength of the brand, the power of the distribution, especially having gone through two very challenging years in terms of flow profile, is testament to the core strength of the business. I think on that note, we can probably turn it around for questions. Okay. Thanks for the questions that have been sent in. To kick off, how are management aligned with shareholders? Management, we are aligned with shareholders. Vinnie and I are both equity holders in the business, and we have numerous performance targets from flow profitability and fund management performance targets. Yeah. John and I hold between 30% of the equity between us. We have been buying shares this year. We both bought shares in January and February. When you look at how we are remunerated, those scorecards are very much linked towards how the business is performing. Great. On to you here, I think, Vinnie. When do you see large recurring adjustments ending? Yeah. We have probably seen larger than what we have seen in previous years before in the last year, which has been mostly due to our business transformation program. We have taken the opportunity over the last 18 months to invest in the business. So that has been in terms of the allowances that we have talked about, the outsourcing our trading, implementing PayFort. The background work is behind us. We would expect the adjustments that are related to professional services to reduce more to the long-term trend. We would not expect to see the same level of adjustments going through in FY 2026 and beyond. You have left room for buybacks. How might they look? Obviously, people ask about timing. We cannot comment on that. How might they look? Moving to the new allocation policy, it is there to support the growth, the organic and inorganic growth of the business. It is a 50% payout ratio, so it is still be looking at having the manners talk at sort of earnings, maybe a 10% deal on a code share price next year. But what we said, that is the minimum. Having done a smaller buyback this year of GBP 5 million end of March, all of the tools available to us are there. Dependent on where we execute with sort of what we would believe to be excess capital allowed to be returned to either high levels or buyback back to clients. What we have not wanted to do is put too many restrictions on, as you said, the minimums of that, because it will become a bit like the sustainable position we have with the dividend by the business is driven more to maintain the payout at the dividend level rather than to invest in the future growth opportunities for different businesses. Yeah. That is part of the reason why we set the minimum to payout ratio of 50%. We recognize that asset management is a cyclical business, so profits will vary with the cycles. So it is a minimum payout ratio, not a target payout ratio. Simon, there is a question on brand here. We are scoring very credible second and third or fourth in things. How do we get to one, it says? Well, we are one for sustainable, so we will continue to strive for that. I think it's a very, very credible result given the competition we've got across the industry. Well, we are consistently well above. Consistently market leader. Yeah. Great. I think that kind of rounds up. We've combined a number of questions here, and that kind of wraps that up. I think back to- Thank you. That is great, Stephen. Thank you, John, for addressing all those questions from investors today. The company can review all questions submitted today, and we will publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. John, before I redirect investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to the company, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments? Thank you, everybody, for your time. We are well aware it has been a challenging period, but hopefully there is a more positive on the environment for active managers going forward. We have a strong suite of products and fund managers supported by a strong brand and leading distribution team. We continue to focus very much on the active asset managers and looking forward to reclaiming that sort of position we were in, and to capitalize on the opportunities we have ahead of us. So thank you very much for your time. That is great, John and team. Thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the board can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Liontrust Asset Management PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation and good afternoon to you all.