Good afternoon, everybody. Good morning in New York and in the US. This is the second of our calls on the first H1 2022 results. I'm joined by Scott. I'm in Cologne. Scott and Mary are in London. Wes is in. Where are you, Wes? You're in Seattle, aren't you? Seattle.
Yep.
Chris is in Boulder, Colorado. Those of you know where Boulder is. DJ is in Rhode Island. Thanks, guys, for getting up in the middle of the night for this call and the previous one. With that, we've got a presentation. It's on our website. There are seven sections plus Q&A. The first we'll take through the content practice. Chris through data and digital media, and DJ through tech services, and I'll just come back briefly for a summary on where we are in the outlook. Over to you, Mary.
Thank you, Martin. Hello. Thank you for joining us today. I'd like to start with the financial highlights for the first half. Strong top-line momentum continued with gross profit net revenue of GBP 375 million, up 28% on a like-for-like basis. This is ahead of our full year target of 25% set out at the beginning of the year, and continues to be well ahead of underlying market growth. Like for like gross profit net revenue growth for each quarter was 35% in Q1 and 23% in Q2. The latter against a very strong prior year comparator, which is reflected in the two-year stacks of 67% for Q1 and 88% for Q2. Operational EBITDA was GBP 30 million, reflecting continued investment in hiring for expansion, which ran ahead of gross profit net revenue growth.
This resulted in a lower operational EBITDA than predicted, which was down 41% on a like-for-like basis. Operational EBITDA margin also reflects this dynamic and was 8% versus 17% like-for-like in the prior half year. We are taking significant action to manage costs, including a break on hiring as well as discretionary cost controls. These are having the desired effect and will support our profit delivery in the second half. Adjusted profit before tax was GBP 15 million and adjusted earnings per share were 2.1 pence. We finished the half year with net debt of GBP 136 million, below the guided range due to improving working capital management, and leverage was 1.2x . Turning to the next slide, I'd like to update you on the work we have been doing on the finance team, processes, and controls.
We held a full debrief with PwC in May. Our action plan, which is well underway, addresses the areas for improvement we discussed at the full year, and the half year review process has been much smoother. The senior hires we made, including the Group Financial Controller, the CFO for the content practice, the Finance Transformation Lead, and the Group Treasurer, have created a much stronger team which is working well, and we continue to build out the junior levels. Investment in financial processes and controls has been protected. We have reviewed and redesigned our processes and controls for revenue and cost of sales recognition, and the revised process was in operation for the half year close. We continue to carry out significant work on improving our financial controls and processes, and while we have made good progress, there is still much to do.
We'll give you another update at the full year. Moving to the income statement. Revenue grew 60% on a reported basis to GBP 446 million, with like-for-like growth at 31%. Reported gross profit net revenue of GBP 375 million grew 59% or 28% like for like. This highlights the continued strong underlying momentum of the business in addition to M&A activity. We have secured two new whopper clients. These are clients which generate over $20 million of revenue per annum, both of which will be fully operational in 2023. This brings the total number of whoppers to eight. Reported operating expenses of GBP 338 million grew 71% or 43% like for like.
This reflects continued investment for growth, including in whoppers and in specific business areas such as the Metaverse and the Unreal Engine. Within Data & Digital Media, we have also invested in media agency of record capabilities, data, and CRM. Some of this investment in growth was ahead of revenue growth and greater than expected, which has impacted our operational EBITDA for the half year and our expectations for the full year. Operational EBITDA for the six months to June was GBP 30 million, down 12% on a reported basis and 41% like-for-like. I have given you a breakdown of adjusting items in the table on the left-hand side. You can see that GBP 70 million is investment in M&A and future growth, while a further GBP 24 million relates to amortization of acquired intangibles.
Finally, the increase in net finance expense is driven by the euro term loan, which was put in place in August 2021 to fund the greater scale and ambition of the group. This provides us with long-term secure financing. Looking next at our three different practice areas, Content, Data & Digital Media, and Technology Services. My comments here are all on a like-for-like basis. Our largest practice, Content, grew strongly, up 26% as we continued to outperform the market. Content's operational EBITDA margin reflects hiring, running ahead of gross profit net revenue growth. We are addressing this through tighter headcount controls, which will result in an improvement in practice margins in the second half. Data & Digital Media gross profit net revenue grew 23%, also ahead of the market, with strong growth from the media activation and performance business.
DDM's operational EBITDA margin is down versus an exceptionally high prior half year. It also shows the impact of investment in growth and will benefit to some extent in the second half from the cost management measures we've implemented. Technology Services, which from mid-May includes the significant combination TheoremOne, delivered very strong growth. Gross profit net revenue was up 89%, with a healthy operational EBITDA margin of around 36%. TheoremOne has performed well in its first four months with the company. Central costs grew as guided, reflecting investment in finance, legal, and assurance to support future growth, as we mentioned at the full year. From a regional perspective, we grew strongly across the globe. While the Americas remains our biggest region at 74% of the mix, EMEA was the fastest growing, up 36%, with Americas up 26% and Asia Pacific 28%.
Moving to cash flow on the next slide. CapEx of GBP 10 million includes the fit out of our new unitary offices in Buenos Aires, New Delhi and London, as well as investment in IT infrastructure. Interest paid includes payments on the term loan, which was not in place in the first half of last year. We have improved our performance in working capital with an outflow of GBP 8 million, compared to GBP 19 million on a smaller base in the prior year. Net, this resulted in a cash outflow of GBP 2 million. The cash spend on combinations was GBP 126 million, including 4 Mile and TheoremOne, as well as payments relating to prior year activity. This takes net debt to GBP 136 million, which is below the expected range, and we continue to focus on cash management.
Before I conclude, I thought it would be helpful to cover our guidance for the full year. We expect continued strong top-line momentum across the practices and are targeting gross profit net revenue growth of 25% like for like, supported by a strong pipeline. We are seeing the benefit of our brake on hiring and controls on discretionary costs, and these will improve profit delivery. As previously guided, we expect the year to be weighted to the second half and the fourth quarter in particular, due to natural seasonality and our trajectory this year. We continue to expect a net finance cash charge of about GBP 16 million. Our guidance for cash contingent consideration is GBP 57 million for the full year, with GBP 21 million due in the second half.
In summary, our revised targets issued at the end of July remain unchanged, with expected gross profit net revenue growth of 25% and expected operational EBITDA of approximately GBP 120 million. With that, I will hand to Scott for the market and client update.
Great. Thanks, Mary. I'm gonna cover an update on our clients, progress that we're having there. I'm also going to give some insight into how we're thinking about our top-line growth opportunity in 2023. Finally, cover off some of our more recent mergers. I think you're all familiar with our twenty squared client plan, which is our ambition to build large scaled relationships with clients and to have 20 clients of more than $20 million in annual revenue. We launched this back in 2020 when we had Google and one other NDA'd tech client. In 2021, we expanded that to six, adding BMW, Meta, Mondelēz, and HP. As we stand in 2022, we know we've added an additional financial services whopper.
We have a new fashion and luxury client, which is on the run rate and will be a $20 million plus for the full year in 2023. We have five additional clients, two in technology, one retail, one media, and one telco, who are tracking to potentially become whoppers this year or certainly next year. Then we've identified a further 14 existing clients, where we see the potential for them to expand organically to this level in the next few years. It's really exciting to see these client relationships blossom, particularly as we expand the touch points and services across our practice areas. Eight out of our top 10 clients are now working with us in an integrated fashion across two or more practices versus two at this point in 2020.
When you look at our clients from a portfolio perspective, you'll see that technology continues to dominate with over 46% of our H1 revenues coming from this sector. Vast majority of our revenue here is with large, profitable tech companies such as Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, HP, Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft and others, which are under NDA. These companies themselves continue to grow at significant rates and are, in many cases, both partners and clients for us at S4. We anticipate continuing to be overweight tech going forward, but we have diversified our client base somewhat as a result of new business wins and merger contributions in sectors such as financial services, fashion and luxury, FMCG, and auto. Given our consistent market leading top line growth, it's not surprising to see that our large client relationships continue to scale.
The average revenue size of our top 10 clients has grown 80% to almost GBP 20 million. For our top 20 and top 50 client segments, the reported revenues have grown 70% year-on-year. The table shows we've more than doubled the number of clients with H1 reported revenues of GBP 10 million or more. We have 57 clients in the GBP 1 million-GBP 10 million bracket versus 35 this time last year. Illustrating the progress, as I mentioned earlier, that we've been making with our twenty squared client plan. Moving on from clients, I wanted to give you some insight in how we're thinking about 2023. We're just kicking off our budget process now, as are our clients, so we don't have any concrete projections for guidance as yet.
We should be in a position to give more precise clarity in November when we report our Q3 numbers. That said, we are well aware of investor questions around our view of growth in 2023, so we wanted to address why we remain optimistic about our ability to deliver significant market leading top line growth despite the macro dark clouds, which we're all aware of. We've described the various addressable markets we operate in before, and these continue to be very attractive in 2023, according to various projections. Digital Media spend is a key market for us, and while analog media will be flat next year, global digital spend will continue to grow at almost 10% in 2023.
In fact, our own analysis of various analyst estimates for the top eight platforms' advertising revenue growth in 2023 is 13% growth, which is actually an acceleration on the 10% they're expected to deliver this year. When you focus in geographically, we see that predictions for U.S. digital media spend are almost 2.5 percentage points higher than the global average. Remember, 74% of S4's revenues are in the Americas with the U.S. by far our largest market. Our data practice is perhaps more correlated with the growth of data services associated with cloud platform penetration. The top three cloud platforms will grow 30% in 2023. As you'll hear from Chris later, our C360.Monks provide services and systems integration around marketing technology platforms.
Their revenues will grow almost 20% in 2023 to $80 billion, with services widely assumed to be a multiple of that. Our tech services revenues are driven by spend on digital transformation and IT services. These enterprise spends are multi-year budgets with less volatility and exposure to economic cycles. Digital transformation spends are projected to grow 17% next year. Finally, when you look at market sizes, Ad Age reports the top ten agency holdcos reported revenues of $110 billion in 2021, and the top twenty-five agency networks had revenues of $72 billion. What's more, global consulting revenues were almost $1 trillion projected in 2022, and IT services revenues are projected at $1.3 trillion this year.
Suffice to say, with our pure play exposure to these high growth markets, we believe S4 will continue to deliver strong top line growth. Finally returning to our clients, as we're nothing without them. This is an edited view of our major client relationships, given we are increasingly covered by NDAs and can't talk publicly about many of our relationships. Our client base of high quality, strong growth companies reinforces our confidence in our ability to grow at market leading rates above the growth of our addressable markets as we continue to take share and drive our land and expand strategy. Finally, we completed two mergers in H1, one with 4 Mile, an analytics company which joined the Data & Digital Media practice, and the second one, TheoremOne, which you'll hear a lot more about later from DJ, which joined our Technology Services practice.
After the end of the first half, we also added XX Artists, which is a highly awarded social media and influencer agency, which joins our content practice. Just a reminder, the stock component of the completion payments for TheoremOne and XX Artists was priced at GBP 4.25, which was the undisturbed one-month VWAP price pre-audit delay. As we mentioned in the statement, combinations remain a key part of our growth strategy. However, for the time being, we are focused on organic growth and maximizing value from our existing business, where the organic momentum remains very strong. With that, I will pass you over to Wes, who can update us on the content side of things.
Thank you, Scott. Hey, everyone. Happy to share some highlights from H1 for content. Although the very first highlight isn't just about content, I think it also speaks to our broader ability to integrate and operationalize our services across teams. For the very first time in our history, we hit the Forrester Wave, not one, but two. We are on the Marketing, Creative, and Content Services Wave and the Global Marketing Services Wave. I think this is mostly a confirmation of our positioning. It speaks to a strong offering, strong performance in market, strong strategy. If you look at the marketplace and where big, especially global brands are heading, that translating to growth. We're expanding our biggest strategic clients or so. whoppers, in some cases, we're adding a whole whopper on top of what is already existing scale. We're also making headway, the growth there.
I think we have line of sight on about 13 now. Some of that is because of the collaboration between DDM and Technology Services and Content. Some of that is just because we're sort of landing and expanding with the existing service ranges. Our positioning in the market also means we regularly land new blue-chip logos across the globe. A lot of that is about future growth. It takes a bit of time to go from land to expand, but I do think it bodes well for our 20 squared promise or our 20 whopper client promise. It's not just about growth. We're delivering some really great work, very high quality. Another first in our company, we got named a top 10 creative company globally by Cannes Lions. What's interesting here is if you look at the list, we are by far the company with the smallest headcount.
It just speaks to the amount of great work our teams are doing. If we talk about the work, we can go to the next slide. I think our model always is making sure our clients deliver on what's needed today, and what's needed today is quite specific. I think especially our agility and our ability to get our clients to market quickly with what they need has been really important over the last six months. We're also working to make sure our clients are leaders in what comes next. We've talked about Web3 and Metaverse before on these calls. I wanted to use this opportunity just to highlight some work to showcase that our teams really are at the very cutting edge of what's happening out in that landscape. Some quick call-outs. For Logitech, we organized the Song Breaker Awards in Roblox.
At the moment of launching was the biggest Roblox build of all time. Ended up with more than 6.5 million visitors in a two-week period. Very successful. Really interesting platform. We're actually launching some really fun Roblox stuff over the next few weeks as well. Keep an eye out for that. Also wanted to call out Vault Art Space. Apologies. Vault Art Space, which is a full-blown NFT primary marketplace for Gucci. I think if you think about NFTs as a space and then a luxury premium company like Gucci and a combination of those two, I think it really speaks to the quality of our team, especially at the strategic levels. Then wanted to call out the Post Malone exclusive VR album experience for Horizon Worlds called Twelve Carat Toothache. Really amazing piece of work.
If you have an opportunity to check it out, please do. I think it elevates the sort of entertainment VR experience and culture experience quite a bit. Lots of overlapping stuff here, Metaverse, VR, Web3, NFTs. Rest assured, our team is operating at the very highest level at the nexus of all of those things, which is exciting. With that, I'm gonna hand over to Chris.
Thank you, Wes. Talking a little bit about data and digital media, off the back of a very strong growth in margin results in 2021. Our investments in the first half of 2022 in expanding our data and digital media practice, as well as investments in onboarding significant long-term clients, they're all yielding results, towards our goal of creating foundational long-term enterprise clients, where we become an embedded long-term partner. We are working very closely with our content and tech pillars to nurture and expand our collective relationships within whoppers and all opportunities, including progress in servicing Dell, Molson Coors, Pernod Ricard, Walmart, Hewlett-Packard, Netflix, LinkedIn, Unity Technologies, T-Mobile, Mondelēz, Meta, and Amazon.
You'll hear these logos over and over again as joint wins across the company. This is the unitary promise being delivered into our client base. Our growth within these brands has been a testament to our disruptive integrated model, promising seamless end-to-end capabilities with subject matter expertise and automation beyond just traditional and digital marketing demands. We have a deep and growing knowledge of new wave virtualization, Web3, Metaverse, and VR, which Wes just talked about, and new modes of digital consumer behavior that need to be woven into a consumer journey that our clients have to get a handle on.
A perfect example of this type of disruptive work is our recent onboarding of Unity Technologies, a leading platform in the 2D, 3D, VR, AR gaming space. We are very excited to be their first ever global media AOR, responsible for media strategy, planning, buying, and measurement. This new expansive engagement is built off the back of our strong content relationship with Unity, proving out our land and expand model across our pillars. More traditional brands are looking to revamp their digital strategies and approach with our new model. We've successfully won and onboarded and launched a top global beauty brand with a successful hiring and onboarding over 60 FTE to ramp them up. We did it in less than 8 weeks, which is no small feat in a very competitive market for talent.
To which our investments in recruiting and talent hubs are paying off with the rapid talent scale capacity in order to onboard these major wins in a short cycle. We are off and running with that client and implementing new media strategies with a focus on incrementality for their brand, as well as new market and product line growth. This global media AOR win is not an isolated growth story for us. We are seeing more and more clients begin to think about their media and consumer data strategy in an increasingly interconnected way and blurring the lines across the consumer journey wherever that consumer may spend their time.
We've invested in the first half in building strong relationships with global media pitch consultants to increase the exposure to brands who are looking for a change in the way they think about e-commerce paid, earned, and owned media. That is adding significant upper funnel activity for our pitch volume. We're having to select and choose the best fits versus having to go out and look for new opportunities, which is a good position to be in. On the next slide, we've got data. In order to be at the forefront of innovation and competition, our clients find themselves reinventing their data strategy from data collection, acquisition, activation, and optimization to power everything from marketing and advertising, as well as product design and supply chain decisioning.
For our data pillar in 2022, we saw a significant injection of our data AOR services or agency of record services for data into our major creative and content relationships. The conversation starts with data subject matter experts helping to decide and help clients guide through their understanding of new opportunities for data collection and activation, i.e., how do they engage with consumers and collect that data and activate it for effective marketing purposes? T-Mobile is a great integrated example, where our content and digital media practices work together to both in-house and create a managed opportunity across that client, making them a whopper for S4. Another great example, Molson Coors. We started working with them in 2021 as they started to take control of their media operations and bringing it in-house.
Molson Coors kicked off building a centralized view of their data sources, which for a CPG or a company that is generally data poor, doesn't have direct relationships with consumers, is an important trend that we're seeing across that entire sector. The industry is recognizing our amazing work. We were just named as a finalist for Best Commerce Agency Services by AdExchanger. This year, our transformations consulting group is involved with two awards, Best Use of Programmatic Digital by Campaign US, and we were nominated as a finalist in the ANA In-House Excellence Awards for Best Media Planning. Our strategic platform partnership strategy is an important channel for our growth and competitive advantage.
This year with Amazon, we've kicked off co-building solutions with them to tie together Amazon Web Services, Amazon Ads, and we are now a go-to-market partner for the Amazon Marketing Cloud. Amazon's entry into media and marketing technology space makes them a massive technology growth partner for Media.Monks, and we are well situated and placed to grow with them. Of course, our current largest partner, Google, we're making significant progress in helping with their go-to-market with their GCP cloud platform, Google Ads, and the Google Marketing Platform tech stacks all being integrated together for their clients, which unlocks a significant amount of value from that platform partnership. Quick couple of beats on our C360.Monks or our CRM practice, which is nascent. It was only launched last year.
They are busy building our brand reputation in the market with a significant presence this year at Salesforce World Tour, Salesforce Connections, Cannes Lions, and of course, Dreamforce, where our team is, as we speak, drumming up new business and showing off our status as a global Salesforce Summit Partner, the highest tier of Salesforce partnership. Our marketing cloud footprint has expanded to account for over half of our global pipeline, and our momentum is not slowing as our enterprise clients look to us for more and more embedded services. One more beat on this. Salesforce has launched their Web3 and NFT Cloud offering, and Media.Monks is a very unique partner and the leading partner in building their go-to-market on that NFT Cloud. We are right now talking about that at Salesforce and building the customer reservoir.
This team is very proud to have won its largest engagement to date with a $7 million deal, which kicked off in the second half of this year with a global CPG company. That is a big win for that team. That's it for Data & Digital Media. I'm gonna hand it over to DJ to talk a bit about our tech pillar.
Thanks a ton, Chris, and good morning, everyone. As we all know, this is the first full half year of tech services as being an offering within Media.Monks, and we're very excited about the growth we see not only in the demand for our services but also how we're able to expand the services across the board and delivering on this unity messaging that we provide our clients. A perfect example is, we've been able to double an engagement revenue over our 2021 revenue by doing exactly what the promise is, offering services across all pillars. This is a very large e-commerce client of ours, inches away from whopper status, again, delivering on the promise of what we're doing here.
We've also been able to be engaged for a major brick-and-mortar brand that has us building a large dedicated e-commerce digital transformation team in Colombia. This is similar to what we have done for Morningstar, where we're executing front-end development centers of excellence. This is now thriving. The first half of this year, we opened up that center of excellence for Morningstar, and it's going gangbusters. About that competitive market, we're still one of the top places for top performers to work and grow. We're very excited about that as we do hire based on the demand, a very, very strong demand we've seen in the first half and for the rest of this year.
We're very proud of the fact that we received ISO 27001 certification. This is an important distinction and for us and the services that we provide, especially financial services and e-commerce organizations. It really helps us get out in front of some of our competition. We're very excited about in May, the pairing with TheoremOne. TheoremOne is a very well-respected firm with complementary services in the tech services space for us. We are sharing resources already. Our management is in lockstep and synced with each other, and we're already co-pitching the new suite of these combined services. A little bit about TheoremOne, a very fast growing organization, recognized by Inc. Magazine, very highly regarded.
We have an enormous amount of complementary services. Their team members are the highest caliber along with Zemoga's, and we're very excited that this part of this growing business has the best in the industry, we feel. They came to us with a whopper already in hand in First American, so we know that we're gonna be able to continue expand that, not only in the clients that we already have, but winning the new clients like Globaledit, Philips, Dreamview, and CrowdStreet. We're all very, very excited at increased demand. The outlook is very healthy for Technology Services, and we're very pleased with the traction that we're getting. With that, over to you, Sir Martin.
Yeah. Thanks, DJ. And thanks, Mary, Scott, Wes, Chris, for getting up in the middle of the night as always. Just to summarize, strong top-line growth in the first half of 2022, ahead of full year guidance. That's continued into July and August, continued performance at similar or better levels. Further client conversion at scale, proof of our model. The model is resonating not just as a new model, but in relation to the existing advertising and marketing services model. We made significant progress to our twenty squared goal, up to eight, with a potential another five and another 14 or so that we think have the potential over time to grow significantly.
It's not just companies, a major packaged goods company and a company in financial services are in discussions, increasing the scale there. It's not just in the whopper area that we're making significant progress. Good progress, as Mary outlined, in our post-audit finance and process upgrades, but the work has to continue. I think a lot of the heavy lifting has been done, but there's more to be done. Actions have also been taken to balance and control the cost base in 2022 and beyond as we start to think about 2023. We want to go in with a strong platform for 2023 from a cost point of view. We've improved working capital management. There's more to go there too.
We have sufficient liquidity with long-dated debt maturities for the medium to long term. There's continued momentum in all our addressable markets. We haven't done our planning or budgeting for 2023 and to 2025 or for 2023 in terms of a budget. If one looks at the overall situation, as Scott pointed out, it looks like the prospects for digital expansion and transformation accelerate as we go into a slower GDP growth and clients emphasize activation and performance more, which is very much our strong suit. There's strong growth in existing clients and a healthy new business pipeline. In fact, the pipeline is at very similar levels, if not a little bit higher than last year.
From an ESG point of view, we've achieved carbon neutral status ahead of schedule, and we're making headway across all our E and S and G goals. Last but not least, revised guidance of approximately GBP 120 million of EBITDA remains unchanged. With that, over to you, operator, for any questions, please.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, you can do so now by pressing star one on your telephones. That's star one if you would like to ask a question. We will now take our first question from Tom Singlehurst from Citi. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good morning, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. Apologies, I didn't get onto the call earlier today, so nice to have a second bite of the cherry. The question. Oh, I had two questions. The first one is I just really wanted to pin down the significantly stronger 2H performance comment. I presume you're talking about absolute weighting of revenue, but or possibly profitability. But I was just wondering whether we should also anticipate, and I think mechanically we probably should, a re-acceleration in growth across the back half of the year from the level delivered in the second quarter. That was the first question. Then-
I ducked out. My Wi-Fi went a bit. You said mechanically, you're saying that for the second half, is it revenue?
Yeah.
Profitability? Is that what you're asking, Tom?
Is it absolute revenue or is it growth when you talk about the significantly?
Okay.
Stronger growth performance?
Okay. Okay.
Are you just talking about greater absolute weight of revenue or is it the growth?
It's to answer your question head on, it's weight of revenue. We're skewed to the second half, and particularly the fourth quarter or the last third of the year. It's in terms of rates of growth, as I indicated, July and August continued at similar rates to the first half.
Perfect. That would have been the first half was slightly better than the second quarter. Is that a fair inference?
Well, we've given you the like for likes, 34 and 23 for Q1 and Q2. We've given you the two-year stats and the three-year stats.
Perfect. The next question was.
Just so you-
on cash flow.
Just so you've got them, the two-year stats for Q1 was 67%, and for Q2 were 86%, and the three-year stats were 88% and 95%, I think it was.
Perfect. Makes sense. The net debt I think you said was at the first half was GBP 135.
Right.
For the full year, GBP 130 million-GBP 170 million, but there's only GBP 20 million of contingent consideration, and I would have naturally assumed because of the weighting of the business, more cash flow in the second half, seasonal working capital inflow. What am I missing in terms of the net debt/cash flow?
Yeah, Mary. Mary?
Get that, get the debt up.
Yeah. We said we expect to range from GBP 130 million to GBP 170 million for the year end. A couple of points to remember. Firstly, our cash tax is weighted to the second half. Secondly, we have GBP 21 million, as you correctly point out, of contingent consideration, but also there's the first payment on XX, which fell into the second half as we completed very early in July on that deal. Finally, we do expect some working capital outflow driven by the growth of the business in the second half, which results in the GBP 130 million-170 million guidance.
Got it. Perfect. Then one final one, and it's more just for my own understanding more than anything else, around how the revenue model works in terms of passing on inflation. If you've got employees who are allocated to a particular account and their wages are going up, is it mechanically being passed on? i.e., is your revenue, you know, really, truly sort of time plus materials or is it sort of loosely benchmarked time plus materials, therefore it will take a bit of time for wage inflation to be sort of caught up?
Well, I mean, I think the direct answer is mixed. There are some. We do have some contracts that go for two or three years, but that I would say is at the smaller end of the spectrum. Most of our contracts are not long-term contracts, they're more. I think Wes coined the phrase retainer by design. When we talk about land and expand, we build relationships on the back of continuous projects. I mean, Wes, do you wanna expand a little bit on pricing and wages et cetera?
Yes. I think there are three types of work. There are the typical retainer contracts where we have managed to have the conversations about rates going up with pretty much everyone. I've been able to implement some. Some are a bit slower, so you have slight delays depending on the speed at which the process runs. You have more time and material based work that tends to be a bit easier because we upped our rates the end of last year, middle to end of last year. In our time and material business, that's already sort of phased in. Your project-based work, which tends to also be quoted and scoped against those high rates. It's not perfect across the board, but we've managed to hedge against that relatively well.
Okay. Chris, DJ, do you wanna add to that?
Oh, go ahead, DJ.
Well, with regards to managed services and tech services, those are the contracts that tend to be a little bit longer. Morningstar, for example, we do have language in those contracts, some of them, that allow for an increase to cover inflation. You know, we try to get that in as much as we can when we have contracts that are lasting several years, of which we're seeing more and more, as you know, tech services becomes part of the general offering. We do cover that in the longer contracts.
Chris?
You know, I'd echo Wes and DJ's commentary there on how we're proactively passing that through. My only additional note would be on the long-term infrastructure. We are implementing and continuing to invest in what we call a deal desk, which makes sure that large engagements are commercially sound before they go out and get stamped and approved. If there's any exceptions to the standards that we've got in place, then that will be escalated and brought to finance. That'll be brought to other parts of the business, so we'll understand how to swallow that engagement appropriately into the financials. I think we're buttoning that up relatively quickly. I'd say we probably started work on that a couple quarters ago. It's a point forward.
I think we've got a decent controls mechanism in place to be able to handle both transitory and permanent inflation.
Okay. Mary, do you wanna add anything to that or not?
No, I think the gents have covered it. Thank you.
Okay. Anything else, Tom?
That's great. Thank you very much. No, I think that's it. Yeah, congrats on the results.
Thanks.
Nice that there's no big surprises.
Okay. Operator, any further questions?
Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephones now. There are currently no more questions. I will turn the call back to your host for closing remarks.
All right. Well, thanks everybody for joining us and thanks to my colleagues, again for disturbing their sleep, I guess. All right. Thanks very much. See you everybody soon for the third quarter. Thank you very much for joining us.