Hello, and welcome to the Equity Raise conference call. My name is Alex. I'll be coordinating the call today. If you'd like to ask a question at the end of the presentation, you can press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to remove your question, you may press star followed by two. I'll now hand it over to your host, Stephen Bird, Group Chief Executive. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thank you for joining our call at short notice. I'm now in a position to update you on our plans to recapitalize and deleverage the business, which will provide the platform for future growth. On the call, I will refer to the investor presentation published yesterday. This is available to view on the investors section of our website. I'll start by giving you an overview of the challenges we've seen this year. I'll then update you on current trading and outlook before Andrea takes you through the key details of the equity raise. I'll then conclude with a summary before we go to analyst Q&A, and please understand that we are limited in what we can answer.
Before we start, you will have seen the most recent announcement about our new chairman designate, and I'm extremely pleased that Stephen Harris has joined our board, and I'm looking forward to working with him. For those of you looking at the slides, I'm now turning to Page 4. 2023 has been an exceptionally challenging year for the group, with three main headwinds. First, the macroeconomic backdrop has led to weaker consumer confidence and customers delaying purchases. Second, concerns amongst our retail customers regarding the global economy, high interest rates, and their working capital levels has led to destocking. And third, on Slide 5, the unprecedented and unforeseen impact from the writers and actors strikes on our business and the cine scripted TV industry as a whole.
Although we're pleased to see that the actors strike has now come to an end, the length of the combined writers and actors strikes has significantly weakened our 2023 performance. The Milken Institute estimated that the economic impact of the strikes has surpassed $6 billion, and the pain spread to multiple industries, including, of course, ours. Although the writers strike started in May, our business was impacted from March, when some productions were frozen as people waited to see if the writers strike went ahead or if it will be resolved. The strikes lasted much longer than expected and had a much wider impact geographically because the actors also went on strike at the beginning of July. We've also seen more of the group's customer segments affected than we expected, including independent content creators.
Anyone who is involved with the cine or scripted TV production has seen their business impacted. In addition, the strikes meant that the sales of some of our new product launches were delayed. We're watching closely to see how quickly productions will fully restart, and we're confident, confident that when they do, the group will benefit from a significant recovery in revenue, although any positive impact on the remainder of 2023 is expected to be limited. Turning now to Slide 6. Given the headwinds the business has been facing, we've been focused on controlling what we can. We acted quickly to implement a number of self-help actions to reduce costs in the short term, as well, as well as longer term restructuring to take full advantage of synergies following acquisitions. We've also protected the business to ensure we are well positioned to capture the recovery when it comes.
Our banks have been supportive and have agreed to reset interest rate covenants again, and this demonstrates their confidence in the group's future prospects. In October, we sold the Lightstream business, and we're in the process of selling the Amimon Medical business, although geopolitical issues could make this more difficult. The results of the self-help actions in the first half delivered year-on-year savings of GBP 9 million and leave the business better placed for when demand returns. Turning now to current trading on Slide 7. Since I last updated you at the interims, both strikes have now ended, which is great news. Unfortunately, they are having significantly more impact on the company in H2 2023 than in H1. Although these events are beyond our control, they are incredibly frustrating for everyone involved. We believe that the destocking impact in consumer retailers is over.
However, specialist distributors may remain concerned about high interest rates and levels of working capital, and therefore, a further period of destocking is possible, although at a much lower level than we've seen so far. As a consequence of the strikes, the destocking and the challenging macroeconomic environment, trading in Q3 was weaker than expected, particularly in our creative solutions division and to a lesser extent, in production solutions. These two divisions have the most exposure to the cine and scripted TV segment. The weaker trading resulted in an increase in leverage from 2.9 times at the 30th of June 2023, to 4.2 times at the end of September.
Although we continue to take self-help actions, these are not sufficient to deleverage the balance sheet, and having reviewed all the options, the board decided that an equity raise was the only viable option for the group. This will reduce leverage significantly, enable us to pay our outstanding term loans in full, and give us sufficient headroom to deliver our organic strategy. Turning to Slide 8, you can see that we have announced our intention to raise funds through a placing and open offer structure, and I'm pleased to confirm that our major shareholders are supportive. In particular, we have received irrevocable undertakings from Alantra and Aberforth, our two largest shareholders, confirming their intention to vote in favor of the proposed resolutions at the general meeting. Together, these undertakings cover approximately 31% of our share capital, and we are grateful for their support.
The board has decided that GBP 125 million is the right amount for Videndum to raise to meet both the financing requirements and to ensure that we have sufficient capital to navigate the current difficult market conditions. The fundraising will provide us with the platform to capture the post-strike recovery and continue with our exciting new product developments, which are vital to delivering our medium to long-term growth targets. On slide 9, I'd like to remind you of our strategy. Our purpose is to enable our customers to capture and share exceptional content, and this is what guides us. Our strategy is to focus on the content creation market and to look for areas where we can grow organically, improve our margins, and over the long term, to possibly resume M&A.
We aim to operate in defensible niche markets where our premium brands have strong share. We're targeting the high-end professional and B2B content creation market, where we see the greatest potential growth, and we're exiting non-core markets. We use R&D to develop differentiated technology, which gives us stronger pricing power, and it also drives demand, demand for new and replacement products. We believe that control of the manufacturing process gives us a major competitive advantage. Videndum's longer term outlook is positive. And turning to Slide 10, I'll tell you why I'm confident in our recovery. The fundamental market drivers remain attractive, and we don't believe that there have been any structural changes as a result of the current headwinds. Our belief in the medium-term prospects for our markets remain intact.
Even assuming that the macroeconomic environment remains challenging in 2024 and applying some caution, we have a number of building blocks to achieve our potential. First, further strike action is unlikely. Second, destocking will be lower in 2024 than in 2023, and at some point we should start to see restocking. The underlying demand for media is growing, and it doesn't matter to us if it's a broadcaster, a film studio, a streaming company, or an independent content creator. Our equipment is used throughout the process of capturing and sharing original content. In 2024, we expect to capture the usual benefits from the Summer Olympics and Paralympics, as well as the positive impact from media coverage of the U.S. presidential election.
We've maintained investment in developing new products across the group to shorten product replacement cycles, and the next three slides detail the pipeline of multiple growth initiatives across the three divisions to drive the recovery. These include, first, in Media Solutions, we're developing a groundbreaking new Manfrotto video and photo tripod, slim, similar to flowtech. We continue to focus our resources more on the high end. For example, with our Avenger lighting stands, where we're expanding in the United States, and we're also investing in high-end audio capture, which is an exciting growth opportunity for the group. Second, in Production Solutions, our market leading AI speech recognition prompting technology drives cost efficiencies in broadcast TV studios, and we've developed AI autonomous motion tracking software to be used in studios and by sports broadcasters. In May, we launched Salt-E Dog, our sustainable portable power solution based on sodium technology.
This innovation will replace portable petrol generators on productions, which will be banned from sale in California. This is a big opportunity and has been very well received. Finally, in Creative Solutions, we expect sales of our 4K HDR zero delay products and our SmallHD monitors to pick up now that the strike is over, driven by the migration from HD to 4K. Our cine customers are demanding more remote access, and we're evolving our monitoring technology to the cloud so it can be used both on set and remotely. In live production, we expect continued growth in our high-end live streaming solutions, which are being developed with next generation technology, including 5G and ultra-low latency. In summary, we believe that the group's core business will recover well and that our new technologies will continue to drive shorter product replacement cycles.
Now I'd like to hand over to Andrea, who will take you through the key details of the equity raise, which you can see on Slide 14.
Thank you, Stephen. This slide sets out the key terms of the equity raise, which comprises a firm placing and a placing in an open offer, as well as the expected timetable. We are raising GBP 125 million by way of a firm tranche of GBP 75 million and an open offer tranche of GBP 50 million. The open offer tranche will allow existing shareholders to participate up to their pro rata holding. Shares will be issued at GBP 2.67, a 3.3% discount to yesterday's closing price of GBP 2.76. The equity raise is subject to shareholder approval at the general meeting, scheduled for 10:30 A.M. on Thursday, seventh of December. Each director who currently holds shares intends to vote in favor of the proposed shareholder resolutions... and all of the directors have committed to participate in the equity raise.
Further details on this are set out in yesterday's announcement, which is available to view on our website. Now, I'll hand back to Stephen to summarize.
Thank you, Andrea. To summarize, 2023 has been exceptionally challenging for the group, but we're in an exciting market with structural growth drivers, and the fundamentals of the business remain strong. We've got market-leading premium products and exceptional people. We're focused on managing everything that we can control ourselves to reduce costs and preserve cash, while ensuring that the group is well-placed to take advantage of opportunities in our markets. However, as already described, given the challenging 2023, the board has decided to raise equity. This will enable us to deleverage and protect the business and to capture the post-strike recovery and deliver Videndum's exciting potential. With the support of our shareholders and new investors through the equity raise, I'm confident that Videndum is well positioned for a recovery when market conditions improve. We're now going to move on to an analyst question and answer session.
We can only accept questions on the equity raise, as we are restricted on what we can say at this time. Thank you.
Thank you. As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, you can press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to remove your question, you may press star followed by two. Please ensure you're unmuted locally when asking your question. As a reminder, to ask a question, you can press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Okay. At this time, we currently have no questions, so I'll hand back to Stephen Bird for any further remarks.
Great. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. I don't think we've got any questions, so, thank you for your attention, and good day.
Thank you for joining today's call. You may now disconnect.