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Nicholas Wiles: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our interim results presentation this morning. We're going to adopt our usual format, starting with me giving an overview of our performance in the first half. Rob can then cover the financials, followed by an update on the delivery of our key growth projects and then a first half business review. Rob is going to update on our progress in working with Nile, on our long-term organizational framework. And then finally, an update on our outlook and the Q&A. And with that, turning really to the first half and an overview of actually our first half. And I think despite an uncertain market background, the performance of our underlying business has remained in line with our expectations. We've continued to grow our PayPoint core estate with new business in key areas such as housing, local authorities, government departments, FMC brand campaigns and in Love2shop business. I think progress has been good. We've accelerated growth in our digital payments platform. We've taken further actions to strengthen our card processing platform and its capabilities. And in parcels, we've strengthened further our key carrier relationships, all of which is very much consistent with the long-term objectives we set out for the business earlier this year. In the first half, we have encountered 2 specific challenges, which have impacted performance. Firstly, the financial terms of our new commercial contract with InPost Yodel have had a greater impact than we'd anticipated and with the additional volumes we would expect to come through not yet materializing, and that's rather been compounded by what's now the well-publicized disruption to parcel volumes and service in our network from the InPost Yodel internal network and operational harmonization plans. It's taken some good work and collaboration between the 2 businesses but it does now feel that we're through the worst of the operational disruption and we expect our volumes to recover through the course of November, which, as you know, is really a key trading period for the business. Secondly, in OBConnect, the first half of this year has seen slower growth than we had anticipated and some consolidation after a strong performance last year. I think this is largely due to the overall opportunities we'd hope to see from the verification of pay opportunity and uptake in Europe being rather disappointing with the team, I think, doing a really good job in response by pivoting the new business pipeline and opportunities to other areas alongside what we're doing in terms of discussions already underway with several jurisdictions and corporates to replicate the success of GetVerified in New Zealand. And while the OBConnect business will not grow at the rate we expected in the current year, I think it's fair to say the foundations and capabilities of this business remains strong and our growth in the second half will still be stronger than the performance we saw in the second half of last year. So I think overall, our confidence in the opportunities that OBConnect brings to our business is undiminished. Its technology platform and capabilities remain important to our long-term digital ambitions as a business. More positively, we've made significant progress in the first half in the successful delivery of several major projects, which are key to our long-term growth. We've launched bank local services with Lloyds Banking Group and with the expectation of further banks to join this service in the coming months. We've launched Royal Mail Shop and branding across the Collect+ network following the strategic investments in Collect+ by Royal Mail. And we've accelerated the Love2shop partnership with InComm Payments. Each of these projects required detailed planning and execution, and now the focus is very much shifting from the rollout to the actions required to accelerate consumer adoption. Turning now to our summary of the financial performance of the business. Overall, as I said already, a resilient performance across the key financial metrics. And by division, net growth in each business with the exception of Love2shop, where the impact of the anticipated changes we've made to our accounting treatment have resulted in some changes to the timing of revenue recognition on the expiry of cards which has resulted in a greater weighting to profit recognition in the second half. In terms of our growth plans, we should not let the specific challenges we've experienced in the first half deflect the business from the long-term growth plans we announced earlier this year. Delivering GBP 100 million underlying EBITDA remains a key financial milestone for the business. And while we're making meaningful progress towards this target in the current year, it is going to take a little longer to achieve. It was always an ambitious target to be delivering it in this financial year but it remains a key milestone for the business. We still believe a combination of our business mix today and the delivery of our key growth projects will deliver consistent net revenue growth in the range of 5% to 8%. And in the meantime, we're developing an organizational structure for the long term to support this accelerated growth. And maximizing returns to shareholders through strong and consistent earnings and cash generation. For the current year, we're on track to deliver more than GBP 90 million to shareholders through a combination of ordinary and special dividends and share buybacks. I'll now hand over to Rob, who will take you through the numbers. Rob Harding: Thank you, Nick, and good morning, everyone. I'll start with the key financial highlights. Net revenue of GBP 84.7 million is marginally up versus the prior half 1. There's a revenue breakdown on the following slide, which shows PayPoint segment revenues are up 2.9% but this is dampened by Love2shop revenues down 9.6%. As Nick said, this is timing in nature, and we fully expect this position to unwind in the second half to give year-on-year growth for the Love2shop segment. Underlying profit before tax of GBP 25.7 million is down 4.5% that being a combination of flat revenue plus a 2.3% increase in overall costs. And I'll cover the cost deltas in a few slides. Reported profit before tax of GBP 19.9 million is after GBP 5.8 million of deductions to underlying numbers, including GBP 2.6 million of amortization of acquired intangibles and GBP 3.2 million of exceptional items, of which GBP 2.6 million relates to legal costs in respect of claims against PayPoint and the remainder is reorganizational costs. Underlying EBITDA of GBP 37.3 million is broadly flat versus the prior half with GBP 1.2 million of lower profits being partly dampened by higher depreciation and amortization. On earnings per share, diluted underlying EPS of 26.7p is 2.6% down versus the prior half. And finally, on this slide, net debt is down 3.2% to GBP 84 million for the first half. And again, I'll cover this in more detail shortly. This slide breaks down the net revenue into a little bit more detail. As I mentioned previously, PayPoint segment revenue is up 2.9%, with e-commerce revenues of GBP 8.6 million, providing growth of 7.5%, and that's driven by transactional volumes increasing 20% to GBP 74.3 million. Payments and banking revenue grew 4.4%, and that's driven by the inclusion of GBP 1.9 million of revenue from OBConnect. And in shopping, growth in service fees of 8.4% to GBP 11.6 million was largely dampened by cards, which is a combination of both lower process volume and sites impacting revenue and ATMs revenue down, reflecting a reduced demand for cash across the economy. For Love2shop, 12 months ago, I explained the half 1 numbers included revenue brought forward from half 2 into half 1, and this was following changes to expiry dates on some of our products. For this year, we've made further changes to the expiry date of some of our products but these changes will benefit the second half year. And therefore, this revenue drop is all timing in nature. Overall, with billings growth of 4.6%, up versus the prior half 1, we expect year-on-year revenue growth for the full year. This slide is really a graphical view of the revenue growth I highlighted on the previous slide and how this revenue growth contributes to underlying profit. So from left to right on this chart, shopping revenue is up GBP 200,000, e-commerce revenues up GBP 600,000, payments and banking GBP 1.1 million and Love2shop revenues down GBP 1.8 million, which I've said is timing in nature. I'll cover costs on the following slide but these have increased GBP 1.3 million half-on-half. And therefore, on the right-hand side of this slide, these movements result in an overall profit of GBP 25.7 million. On costs, this slide breaks down the GBP 1.3 million increase that I mentioned, most notably is the inclusion of OBConnect costs of GBP 1.8 million following the majority stake we took in this business in the second half of last year. We've also seen additional depreciation and amortization of GBP 500,000 and GBP 500,000 in respect of financing costs. Offsetting these costs is a GBP 1.5 million reduction in people and overheads, which is the continuation of strong cost control discipline across the group. So these factors result in a GBP 1.3 million increase in costs of GBP 59 million. Next on cash generation. We had a GBP 24.2 million of cash generation from operating activities in the half which is down GBP 4.3 million versus the prior half of GBP 30.7 million, and that delta is primarily working capital in nature. Further down the cash flow statement, we have tax of GBP 4.6 million, CapEx of GBP 10.9 million, which has increased by GBP 1.5 million half-on-half as we continue to invest in systems' modernization, a GBP 10.4 million payment in respect of the legal settlement, a one-off payment to the pension scheme of GBP 1.5 million. And then we have the GBP 43.5 million cash in from the part disposal of Collect+, along with a GBP 13 million outflow for shares bought back in half 1 and GBP 13.9 million in respect of dividends. This gave an overall reduction to net debt of GBP 13.4 million for the period to GBP 84 million. Very briefly on balance sheet. Net assets for the group of GBP 102 million are GBP 4.7 million higher than the March year-end position. And the key drivers of the swings are obviously half 1 earnings of GBP 14.9 million, the proceeds of GBP 34.1 million net following the ID investment in Collect+. And we've actually used these proceeds to subsequently distribute a special dividend of 50p per share, and that resulted in GBP 34.5 million going out in the second half of this year. Alongside that, the 12 for 13 share consolidation reduced our share capital by circa 5.3 million shares. Other key balance sheet movements are the dividends paid of GBP 13.9 million and the share buyback of GBP 30 million. And similar to the prior half on the share buyback for accounting purposes, we've provided for the full GBP 30 million commitment in these balance sheet numbers. Lastly, before I pass back to Nick, on the left-hand side of this slide, we continue to invest in the business to drive future revenue streams and improve operational resilience and efficiency. We've increased the interim dividend by 2.1% to 19.8p, while targeting a cover of over 2x and along with the buyback targeting leverage ratio of 1.2 to 1.5x. For this financial year, the business is on course to generate over GBP 90 million of shareholder returns through a combination of the ordinary dividend, the special dividend and the GBP 30 million share buyback. On the right of this slide, we expect net debt to increase in the second half, driven by those ordinary and special dividends and the share buyback, plus up to GBP 25 million in respect of CapEx for the full year. And with the second half spend, we fully expect to stay within the target leverage ratio of 1.2 to 1.5x. I'll now pass you back to Nick. Nicholas Wiles: Rob, thank you. And now really turning to the progress in the delivery of our key growth projects in the first half. I think as a business, the standout achievement of the first half has been the launch of multiple projects, both enhance our consumer proposition and establish important partnerships that strengthen the long-term prospects for the business. Firstly, as I said, we've launched PayPoint BankLocal into our retailer network, enabling cash deposit or withdrawal with Lloyds Banking Group, the first of our high street banking partners. Secondly, we've launched Royal Mail Shops and a strategic investment into Collect+. And finally, we've taken further steps to accelerate our partnership between Love2shop and InComm Payments for the merchandising of the Love2shop gift card across multiple retail channels. Turning now in a bit more detail to each of these. On successful launch of BankLocal service in August, I think, was a major achievement for the business, involving a group-wide collaboration. Lloyds Banking Group are the first high street bank to use this service, enabling their customers through our network to deposit cash via both app and card. In terms of success to date, we've seen a rapid adoption of this service from Lloyds Banking customers with the strength of our network delivering genuine convenience for cash banking services. Consumer and press feedback has been positive. And as we've seen with other of our services, as the pattern of transactions becomes established, we see strong demand for the service outside traditional opening hours and a weekend. And in terms of what next, I think following the strong start and early adoption, our focus is now very much on further developing our cash banking services in the second half with the next phase of work focused on driving consumer awareness through a variety of channels, accelerating our SME banking solution and those plans [ succeedly ] can launch in Q2 of next year and engage further with other high street banks for our range of cash deposit solutions. Overall, we expect to make significant progress in the rollout of our cash banking services over the next 12 months. Turning now to Collect+. The investment by Royal Mail into Collect+ announced at the end of September was a really important strategic step in our partnership with Royal Mail. The partnership strengthens the positioning of Collect+ as the leading out-of-home network and will enable the future expansion of further Royal Mail services into the network. It will enable further investment in both our consumer service proposition and our retailer network support as the partnership adds to our existing carrier relationships as part of a carrier-agnostic network. The launch of Royal Mail Shop in the Collect+ network reflects our confidence in the strength of the Royal Mail brand and the opportunity to enable for consumers a broader Royal Mail services, including postage as well as collect, send and return parcels throughout a growing portion of the Collect+ network. The rollout of Royal Mail Shops is now really gathering pace with 3,000 stores already branded Royal Mail Shop, which, as I said already, enables a wider range of over-the-counter postal services, including stamps. And by the end of our financial year, this number would have increased to at least 8,000 sites. To support this, there is an extensive consumer marketing campaign already underway with more planned over peak and into 2026 as we increase consumer awareness, drive more footfall and volume into the network. And as we look into the second half, as I said already, it's important to ensure that we have at least 8,000 sites branded and live for the full Royal Mail over-the-counter service by our year-end. We need to be taking the necessary steps, again, as I said already, to increase consumer awareness and uptake of these services. and we do launch our self-service kiosk in the first quarter of next year. And I think this is a really important time to accelerate the pace of our partnership with Royal Mail and to accelerate the consumer adoption of these services through the Collect+/Royal Mail Shop network. And now turning to our continued progress with InComm. Our partnership with InComm established just over a year ago, has been a really important step in us delivering a strong new sales channel, enabling the sale of Love2shop physical gift cards through the major high street retailers. Sales through this channel have continued to grow strongly ahead of the peak sales period in the run-up to Christmas, and we benefited from a combination of growing consumer recognition of the brand and increasing availability of our cards through these additional high street retailers. We've also seen the benefit of further rolling out the Love2shop card into our PayPoint retailer network with growth through this channel from our refreshed merchandising now up by more than 50% during the course of this year. I think with the next stage of this multichannel approach being the launch of the Love2shop Digital Mastercard in the early part of next year, enabling spend via digital wallet in-store and online, the further expansion into more high street retailer gift card malls in 2026 and more gift pegs in each of these malls and also the launch of MBL brands such as Greggs into the InComm Payment mall itself. I think we can really see this partnership is now building strong momentum which is combining the merchandising expertise and distribution channels and the reach of InComm with an outstanding multi-redemption gift card product and product innovation from Love2shop. Now turning to our business review. And firstly, in shopping, we've seen continued growth in the first half in each of our product estates with the exception of the Handepay card estate and have shown growth and some solid financial performances from the underlying business areas. We've seen continued service fee growth. And while card merchanting net revenue and process value are marginally down, I don't think this fairly reflects the continued work to strengthen the operational foundation of this business. The improvements to the quality of our card proposition and the increased focus on profitability per merchant. We also saw another strong performance from our partnership with YouLend with funding advances up by over 50% in the period. In our FMCG activities, we continue to work with a growing number of consumer brands with 16 campaigns delivered in the first half, a strong pipeline of opportunities for the remainder of this year. And in our ATM business, after a challenging period, we're seeing early signs of our recovery plan delivering results as we better manage the ATM estate and use our data to optimize individual site performance. In e-commerce, overall, a positive half for Collect+ with both net revenue and parcel transactions showing growth in terms of really all the key call-outs. As I described earlier, we launched the first phase of Royal Mail Shop, branding into the network and enabled over-the-counter Royal Mail services in over 2,000 locations. And as I described earlier, we have encountered some operational challenges from the internal harmonization of InPost and Yodel which in the period has impacted both volumes and service in the second quarter. We think the action we've taken in partnership with InPost has now stabilized this and we expect volumes to recover during the key peak period. More broadly, we continue to work hard across the wider carrier portfolio to maximize volume and performance with each carrier and support consumer adoption of out-of-home as we continue to grow the Collect+ estate. In Payments and banking, the key theme in this business has been the continued growth in our digital and open banking activities. And with the growth we are now seeing, we expect to arrive at a point soon whereby digital revenue will exceed revenues from our cash payment channels. Specific highlights from the first half have been several important new business wins, particularly in housing from a strong and well-balanced overall new business pipeline, good work to strengthen further our relationships with our existing clients with a number of upselling initiatives and several important client wins for our open banking activities. Our first half digital revenue does include a latent contribution from our majority-owned OBConnect platform. And finally, in Love2shop, as Robert said already, the adoption of a more prudent accounting treatment in terms of the timing of revenue recognition from the expiry of cards which we announced, I think, at the time of the acquisition, has resulted in a timing impact to the headline performance of the business which will be unwound in the second half of the year. Operationally, the business continues to perform well. I've already described the progress in our partnership with InComm [Audio Gap] position for our peak trading period. In Park Christmas Savings, we expect to deliver a flat performance for the year after some good work through the year to support our agents and strengthen the saver proposition as we already turn our focus to the 2026 savings campaign. And in MBL, we've had an outstanding first half with a doubling of process value, which reflects the growing reach of this business and its brand partners. And with this, I'll now hand over to Rob to give you an update on our organizational framework project. Rob Harding: Thanks, Nick. In our FY '25 results, we announced a key target was establishing a framework to deliver greater automation and agility. We've now recently completed Phase 2 of this project, supported by now an independent consultant to identify how we can drive this automation agility across 3 key processes: onboarding, customer support, and billings & settlement. The outcomes from this phase are a clear articulation of the target future state for each of these 3 processes, including key outcomes for each, which you can see from this slide. For example, for customer support, we're driving customer self-service capability in response to high-volume, low-value calls. Additionally, for each process, we've set out the benefits from moving to the target future state with financial benefits such as an additional revenue or lower costs and other benefits, for example, improved customer service levels or satisfaction levels. Preliminary estimates have identified at least GBP 2 million of operational profit upside from moving to the desired future state with a potential to grow this figure further through the next phase of work. And this includes identifying technical solutions and external providers to support the shift to the target state, along with the costs associated with this transition. We expect this next phase of work to be completed in advance of our full year results announcing June '26, followed by implementation commencing early in FY '27. I'll now pass you back over to Nick to cover our outlook. Nicholas Wiles: Thanks, Rob. So turning to our outlook for the year. After a resilient first half performance and despite the impact of the 2 specific challenges that I've already described, the Board remains confident in both delivering further progress in the current year and achieving our medium-term financial goals. We're executing our key projects well, and we do expect these to have a meaningful impact on our long-term performance. In a number of areas, our focus has already shifted to coordinating plans to support the accelerated consumer adoption of these projects, and there's more to come in this area. Look, the current trading environment is not an easy one. Consumer confidence is weak and household budgets remain tight. However, as we enter our most important seasonal trading period for a number of our businesses, we are confident in the plans we've made to execute well and our early signs continue to be encouraging. We remain confident in the growth opportunities we have as a business and that we have a strong platform from which to deliver continued strong returns for shareholders. As we said already in the current year, we're on course to generate returns to shareholders of over GBP 90 million. through a combination of our ordinary dividend, special dividend and share buyback program. And today, we've announced -- declared an interim dividend of 19.8p, which is an increase of 2.1%, and which is consistent with our dividend policy. And with that, we're very happy to answer questions. Operator: [Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Michael Donnelly from Investec. Michael Donnelly: Can you hear me okay? Nicholas Wiles: Yes. Michael Donnelly: A couple for me, please. First of all, can you tell us a little bit more about what Nile are likely to be doing in the next phase. So that's what the expected costs. You've disclosed the costs in the first half, which is really useful. But the cost of benefits and the cost savings that are likely to come through from their work in '27, '28? And then secondly, thanks for the update on RM and IDS. Is it possible to talk a bit more granularly about the trajectory of RM volumes since the IDS investment? Or should we be modeling -- maybe forget second half this year and model a ramp-up more into '26 rather than seeing the benefits -- the volume benefits of the investment come through in the second half? Nicholas Wiles: Yes. Thanks, Michael. Rob, why don't you tackle Nile first, that would be helpful. Rob Harding: Yes. No, as I said, where we are today for each of those 3 key processes that I mentioned on the call, we've got a clear view of what the desired end state looks like and the benefits, and we've talked about 2 million plus worth of opportunities in terms of upside there. The next phase is really about going through the kind of selection process, external suppliers, vendors, et cetera, that will support that shift to that desired future state and the costs associated with that transition. And as a part of that, obviously, we'll be making sure that the business case stacks up, so we make sure that the size of the prize is obviously exceeding the investment required. So really, Michael, the next phase of this is all about identifying external providers technology to help us to move that desired future state and making sure the business case stacks up. And that will take us probably to the end of this financial year, and therefore, we should be getting ready to execute and implement in early of next year. But we're still going through that kind of selection of suppliers and business case development at this stage. Nicholas Wiles: And then just on the second of your questions, Mike. I mean I think the starting point for the Royal Mail investment, which I think we were clear about when we made the announcement on the 30th of September was that a combination of the special dividend, share consolidation and the ramp-up of volume would result actually in the transaction as a whole being earnings enhancing. But I think specific to your point around the ramp-up of volume, I think as we said already, we're growing the network and the rebranding of the network as quickly as we can. We're working really hard with Royal Mail to move as much volume into the network as quickly as possible. We're seeing that ramp-up take shape, particularly since the autumn. And I think the peak period is an important time to see that move further. But these things do take time. And I think we'll see a much more meaningful contribution from the Royal Mail volume when we get into the next financial year. So I think your core sort of premise that we will see a more meaningful impact from Royal Mail volume in the Collect+/Royal Mail Shop network next year. But I mean, the ramp-up is clearly meaningful, not least given the size of Royal Mail in terms of a carrier in the U.K. parcels market. Operator: The next question comes from Joe Brent from Panmure Liberum. Joe Brent: Three questions, if I may. Firstly, there's obviously lots to talk about, but I don't think you mentioned Lloyds Cardnet. Could you give us an update there? Secondly, in e-commerce, could you remind us where we are with the Chinese e-tailers? And thirdly, just following up on Michael's point on automation. It feels like the GBP 2 million will start to impact in FY '27, is that right? And could you maybe give us some indication of the scale of future savings there? Nicholas Wiles: Rob, do you want to start with the automation point, that would be great. Rob Harding: Yes. I think we said that we've got line of sight to at least GBP 2 million here. And I think the question becomes how quickly can we execute and what's the cost to execute. And I think really looking at the full year to give that clear view, I mean, I am hoping to accelerate as much of that benefit as possible in FY '27, [indiscernible] et cetera, we can't pinpoint with accuracy. So I think probably give us until the full year results to get real clarity in terms of if we're going to drop some benefits in, let's be really clear once we've gone through that selection process with external providers, the vendor solutions and gone through that business case development. But I say I'm anxious to accelerate, get any quick wins as possible into FY '27 and drive costs down. Joe Brent: Would the cost of that be treated as non-underlying or be taken above the line? Rob Harding: Yes. We've taken those to exceptionals. So within the kind of restructuring that I mentioned in the exceptionals for the first half, we had about GBP 500,000, GBP 600,000. So that's where we'll be treating the costs going forward. Nicholas Wiles: Cards business, I think, look, we've seen a small fall in the total size of the estate. And I don't think there's a particular reason for that. I think, look, it remains a competitive market. I think our card proposition, and I include Lloyd's Cardnet alongside the EVO proposition as part of that, I think it's stronger than it's ever been. And I think it's really competitive now in the marketplace. I think that our emphasis is increasingly switching from the number of retailers and the number of underlying merchants that we have to actually the quality of that business and importantly actually sort of the revenue that it generates. The acquiring business in the first half was down year-on-year by about 8% in terms of processed volume. And I think that reflects a combination of things, including, I think, a tough retail environment, particularly for our convenience sector. And I think that's probably been our weakest sector actually across our card book, and that's probably where it's been most competitive. I think as we look into the second half, I think we're expecting certainly our sales performance in the second half to improve. I think we've got a really strong proposition, as I said on the street. Our telesales team are performing very well. Our field team are certainly performing well. And I think we've had a number of new additions, new processes there, which I think will really deliver in the second half. So I feel quietly confident that we will continue to make progress in what clearly as we know very well, is a very competitive market. But ultimately, we need higher levels of consumer spend, and we haven't seen that in our estate in the first half. On the Chinese, look, it's a great question. And I think that the Chinese have been relatively slow to create out-of-home choice at the customer checkout for customers using the Chinese marketplaces. They have adopted the out-of-home for returns but we haven't seen them sort of adopt out-of-home at the pace that, for example, we've seen Vinted adopt out-of-home for their principal fulfillment for their own marketplace. We continue to work with the Chinese. And by that, I mean, sort of Shein, TikTok, Temu and ultimately, it's all down to price. And their conversations we're having directly with our carrier partners because we all want to work to move volume from to-door into the out-of-home network channels, whether that's working with InPost to get the choice of locker and PUDO or that's working with Royal Mail to offer the choice of actually the Royal Mail Shops. So I think there's more work to do there. There's clearly a major opportunity because cross-border volume is going to be increasingly important to us, but we haven't yet seen that adoption in the consumer checkout in the way that we need. And that's going to be an opportunity for us into the next year. Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Nick Wiles for any closing remarks. Nicholas Wiles: Look, thank you. Thank you very much, everybody, for joining us this morning. As I say, it's been a robust performance in the first half, some major opportunities to unfold during the second half, and we look forward to updating you later in the year. So thank you. Have a good day.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Colby, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to the Veeva Systems Inc. Fiscal 2026 Third Quarter Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to withdraw your question at any time, simply press star, one again. I'd now like to turn the call over to Gunnar Hansen of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Gunnar Hansen: Good afternoon. Welcome to Veeva Systems Inc.'s fiscal 2026 third quarter earnings conference call for the quarter ended October 31, 2025. As a reminder, we posted prepared remarks on Veeva's Investor Relations website just after 1 PM Pacific today. We hope you have had a chance to read them before the call. Today's call will be used primarily for Q&A. With me today for Q&A are Peter Gassner, our Chief Executive Officer, Paul Shawah, EVP Strategy, and Brian Van Wagener, our Chief Financial Officer. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements regarding trends or strategies and the anticipated performance of the business, including guidance regarding future financial results. These forward-looking statements will be based on our current views and expectations and are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ materially. Please refer to the risks listed in our earnings release and the risk factors included in our most recent filing on Form 10-Q. Forward-looking statements made during the call are being made as of today, November 20, 2025, based on the facts available to us today. If this call is replayed or viewed after today, the information presented during the call may not contain current or accurate information. Veeva Systems Inc. disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. We may discuss our guidance on today's call, but we will not provide any further guidance or updates on our performance during the quarter unless we do so in a public forum. On the call, we may also discuss our non-GAAP metrics that we believe aid in the understanding of our financial results. A reconciliation to comparable GAAP metrics can be found in today's earnings release and in the supplemental investor presentation, both of which are available on our website. With that, thank you for joining us, and I'll turn the call over to Peter. Peter Gassner: Thank you, Gunnar, and welcome everyone to the call. We had an excellent Q3 with strength across the business and results above our guidance. Total revenue in the quarter was $811 million, and non-GAAP operating income was $365 million. Veeva AI is a major initiative for Veeva Systems Inc., and we are making excellent progress. We think Veeva AI can be significant for customers, the industry, and Veeva Systems Inc. We are also executing well and delivering significant innovation across all product areas, including Vault CRM, Crossix, clinical, and safety. We'll now open up the call to your questions. Operator: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. Your first question comes from the line of Saket Kalia with Barclays. Your line is open. Saket Kalia: Okay, great. Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions here. And appreciate the prepared remarks that were posted. Brian, maybe I'd love to start with you and maybe just hit one of the points in the prepared remarks kind of head-on. Where I think we said that 14 of 14 top 20 customers are expected to migrate to Vault CRM, and so six are potentially opting for other solutions. Now there's clearly the potential for a win back, as we said, but maybe the first question is, how do you sort of think about the size of the revenue that might be at risk from those six customers on the CRM side? And how do you think about the timeline of that potentially, you know, kind of transitioning? Brian Van Wagener: Saket, I'm not going to size it, and there is potential for a win back as you said, but maybe taking a step back, CRM is about 20% of total revenue today, down from about 25% two years ago. And that's because other product areas have been growing. In the shorter term, these are multiyear projects that we understand will take a long time to execute. But no impact is expected this year and likely nothing material for next year either. Longer term, we don't expect any impact on our 2030 goals. It's a diverse business, and that means there's a lot of paths to get there, and we're still on track. Saket Kalia: Got it. Got it. That's super helpful, actually. Peter, maybe for you, on the other side of the business, I'd love to talk about R&D a little bit with you. Of course, one of your competitors talked about winning back a top 20 on the EDC side. I was wondering just since we're all together, can you just talk about that? And maybe just comment on kind of the state of the union in that EDC market in terms of the competitive landscape and your pipeline for further market share gains? Peter Gassner: Yeah. We did have one customer that said they were gonna go back to their previous provider. Now they're still a broad clinical customer for us, and even in the EDC area. So we'll just have to see how that goes. That's not a trend I see. I think we're still trending very well in clinical, and we have a number of opportunities in the pipeline for EDC both with large sponsors and with CROs because most customers are looking for an integrated solution across clinical operations and clinical data because it just makes sense. That's how you drive efficiency, and efficiency is the name of the game. This particular customer has more of an integrated architecture of their own. For example, they have a custom CTMS solution and a variety of other things. So at this point, it was a sort of a more a decision that was something that we don't see repeating in other places. Now, and also the thing that I'm very excited about is our innovation in clinical, our generation innovation in clinical that we have in the kitchen. That will help the life sciences companies bridge between sponsors and all the way out into clinical research sites. And also really help in patient recruiting over time. So the future is very bright in clinical. This one, honestly, a bit of an aberration. Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Joe Vruwink with Baird. Your line is open. Joe Vruwink: Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to dig a bit more into the CRM topic. Obviously, attrition carries an implication on revenue over time, but I sit here today, and I think commercial subscription revenues have been raised by about $60 million year to date. And then every Vault CRM customer you're retaining now has the opportunity to add service center and marketing automation and Veeva AI. So how should we think about all of that netting together? And, I mean, is it the case where, ultimately, you're netting out and there's an increment here? I think the market is focusing on kind of a lost value to Saket's question, but how to think about the offsets in the equation over the next five years? Peter Gassner: Yeah. Hey, Joe. So, you're absolutely right. I think there's been a lot of focus on, you know, what there is to lose. I think there's a lot of potential in what we've created, the innovation that we delivered. In some of the areas that you mentioned, like service center and marketing and patient CRM and some of the new products. But then also in AI. So, yes, each customer that we retain, we have the potential to sell a lot of these products and new innovations. And I expect that over time, those customers will adopt more broadly the CRM suite, all the add-ons that are part of that. We're starting to see some of that happen already with some of the customers who've committed to Vault CRM starting to add additional products on. So that's really good. I think we'll also have the potential to win some of these customers. We've talked about that in detail. So, yeah, I feel good about the upside as much as there is some potential attrition from some of the customers that we've got and decided to do something different. Joe Vruwink: Yeah. And this is Peter. I'll just add in. We've focused on the top 20 because that's how we do some things when we talk to the 400 customers. So it's pretty distributed in what we do. So our CRM business is very healthy, our win rate and our conversion rate is very, very strong and stronger in the smaller market because not the smaller customers, they don't have this appetite for a custom build. It's just not the risk they want to take or what they want to do, and they get a lot of other products to Veeva. Also, on a side note, while we did have 20 of the top 20 customers, 20 of the top 20 were our customers in some fashion for CRM. Two of them were mainly IQVIA customers. So, you know, that's not to say that we're not gonna gain some new customers here. Right? And that can be significant as well. Bottom line is what you should take away is, during the business is healthy, and it is an important part of Veeva Systems Inc., but it's not the major, it's not the largest part of Veeva Systems Inc. anymore. That's for sure. Joe Vruwink: Okay. That's great color. Thank you both. Maybe one on Veeva AI. You know, you had a few summits within the last quarter. I think you've also been making rounds on forums gathering feedback from your customers. I guess what stood out to you both in terms of, I'll say, reception, but then also maybe any pushback or things where you walk away and you have more, you know, you need to work on, you know, coming out of this initial experience with AI? Peter Gassner: Well, I think our customers are, you know, they're looking for practical solutions now. Right? They're looking for solutions that can add value, you know, rapidly sort of getting out of this experimentation phase. And they want to use partners where partners can help them. They want to use Microsoft where Microsoft can help them. They want to use Entropic where Entropic can help them. And they know where Veeva Systems Inc. can help them is helping to automate industry-specific applications with AI. That deep domain knowledge and the business process consulting around it. So how do you enable insight generation in CRM through your field team by the use of compliant free text? Okay. That's a very specific thing. How do you dramatically increase the efficiency of safety case processing for adverse events? Okay. That's very specific. So that's what they're looking to us for, and that's what we deliver. That's what we specialize in. In terms of what they would like, they're, you know, just like everybody else. We can, you know, can this be robust and proven and working tomorrow? You know, for all cases. And so they just want us to go faster, but there's really rampant alignment on directions. Veeva Systems Inc. is setting out to do exactly what they want Veeva Systems Inc. to do. We just have to get there. And the customers also have to be able to adopt and do that change management work. Which is, that's not easy either. That's not gonna happen overnight. That's one of our advantages is we have a great business consulting team. So we have that integrated together. Our product team, our selling team, and our business consulting team deliver AI value. That's gonna be more holistic than others, and that's how you're gonna have to do it in industry-specific solutions. The customers are not gonna want to knit together consulting over here and software over there and AI over here. They're not gonna want to do that over the long term. Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Brian Peterson with Raymond James. Your line is open. Brian Peterson: Thanks for taking the question. Peter, maybe a follow-up to your last answer. But as we think about AI and how that will impact your products going forward, do you think that we'll see more of a monetization in terms of commercial where we've already kind of seen some of that today, maybe more broadly in software? But I'm curious, what do you think that opportunity could be in R&D where it seems to be more of an opportunity of innovation? Any color on how to think about that opportunity from AI? Peter Gassner: I think it'll be not exactly, but broadly, you know, even across the board. So, with some areas, a bit more than others. Safety, I think it's a big opportunity to reduce the amount of labor needed also in certain areas of the clinical. In commercial, it's more about insight generation and market advantage. And in terms of, you know, faster insights. In regulatory, it's, again, it's about speed. So the value is probably similar across all areas, but the way it's gonna be implemented is differently. So I'm just gonna focus on insight and agility. Some is gonna focus on, hey, humans don't need to do that particular work anymore. Brian Peterson: Got it. And maybe, Paul, a follow-up for you. I think there's been some debate broadly on AI and how that may impact sales reps or like how efficient sales reps could be. Like, as you talk to some of your customers, like, how are they thinking about the size of their sales force with the implementation of AI? Like what do you think that looks like going forward? Thanks, guys. Paul Shawah: I mean, we have seen some of the reductions that have played out over the past couple of years that we have talked about. We've kind of predicted roughly about 10%. It ended up being a little bit less than that. The way to think about it is the customers that they're calling on, the HCPs, the number of doctors hasn't fundamentally changed. You still need people. You need a base level of sales reps to build those relationships, cover those doctors, deliver the information, the service that they need. So I think the industry is cautious and thoughtful about making significant changes or adjustments. So I think there is a lot of potential for productivity gains and effectiveness gains, but I think it will likely be stable. At least for the next couple of years. We're not hearing of any, you know, AI-related reductions. It's more related to specific, you know, ramping up for launches or ramping down because of a pipeline challenge. But I think that's normal course of business. Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Alexey Bogalis with JPMorgan. Your line is open. Alexey Bogalis: Hello, everyone. Thank you for letting me ask a question. Peter, I have my first question. Maybe I appreciate the comments you made in prepared remarks that you have not observed material change to customer buying behaviors, but could you double click on the demand environment and financial health of the pharma end market? Peter Gassner: Right. Yeah. So the industry overall is pretty healthy. We've had a bit of chaos in the environment with tariffs and other things and certainly conflict, but the industry has gotten, I guess, used to that. And so I'm seeing no changes in the end market. Then the science is still rapidly evolving. Right? So there are many, many uncured diseases that are seriously affecting people's quality of life. You know. And, you know, the death of a child or a young parent. Right? That happens. And the industry is working hard to be able to cure some of those things. And there's demand for that. So I'm pretty optimistic about the industry overall, and pretty steady right now. Alexey Bogalis: Thank you, Peter. And a very quick follow-up on the comments. First, congrats with another commitment for Vault CRM. So you suggested that you're looking to win another four out of the remaining six undecided. Do you have any verbal indications from those clients already? Peter Gassner: No. I, you know, I wouldn't get—we'll probably let you know when we've been notified. We'll let you know in general, but we won't get into the, you know, fine-tune of that. Okay. You know, we have some things that we think and we have some things that we think we think, but, you know, we won't get any more fine-grained than that. Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ken Wong with Oppenheimer. Your line is open. Ken Wong: Thanks for taking my question. This first one for Paul. Crossix again called out as a pocket of strength. Any way to help put a little context around it? Was that consistent with Q2? Just starting to normalize, level off? How should we think about the kind of the Crossix dynamic? Paul Shawah: Yeah. It was in line with our expectations. You've seen nice outperformance of Crossix in the first couple of quarters of the year, and we expected that to continue to play out. The measurement business is very stable. And we've continued to perform well there. And then audiences, which can be a little bit more variable, has also delivered really nicely. So yes, Crossix continues to be a nice growth driver. And we expect it to be that. Although there may be some variability, we expect that to be a nice driver over the next several years. Ken Wong: Perfect. And then Brian, 115 customers live on Vault CRM, including, you know, I think some top twenties, kind of in the motions. How should we think about when you might see some gross margin tailwind as you start to work off of the Salesforce royalties? What's the right time frame for something like that? Brian Van Wagener: There are some puts and takes in the short to midterm there, Ken. So you recall that in the next couple of years, as we have other customers going through their migration, there are some customers where we have both the Veeva CRM on Salesforce royalties and the AWS hosting costs. So we'll see some customers rolling off, some that have a mix. So I would say a modest headwind actually over the next year or two. But pretty immaterial in the grand scheme of things. You can see that the gross margins on subscriptions were essentially stable, slightly up year over year. So not a significant impact over the next couple of years, and then it starts to roll off a few years from now. Operator: Your next question comes from Stan Berenshteyn with Wells Fargo Securities LLC. Your line is open. Stan Berenshteyn: Yes, hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Well, first, a follow-up on Crossix. I'm just curious, given the regulatory focus on direct-to-consumer advertising, have you seen any changes in where audience targeting is happening on the platforms? Is it changing at all? Peter Gassner: Yeah. Stan, I would say—and I can take that one for her. I think the thing that when I was listening about Crossix to know is that digital overall, digital marketing spending is going up. Both in consumer and in HCP because there's better digital avenues to reach people. And you're seeing that with things like open evidence and proximity's new AI offering. Right? So there's increasing effective use of that channel. And then with Crossix specifically, what's going on is as that channel gets more important, measurement and audiences and optimization get more and more important. That's one thing. And Crossix is becoming more of a standard. So there's really a compounding effect of the excellence that we're developing in Crossix. You know, Crossix will be, you know, that's gonna be a well-growing business for us. You know, you should think of that as a well-growing business for the foreseeable future. You know, three, four, five years type of thing. This is—we put some serious innovation in Crossix over the past years. We've invested heavily in the data network. Because that's a data network that we share with Compass. Compass and Crossix share that data network. So it's—they're just becoming more important, not less important. The other—you'll see maybe regulations around consumer TV ads. But overall, digital is growing. It's a very effective means to meet people, and you need to measure and optimize that. And that's what Crossix does. Stan Berenshteyn: Very helpful. Thank you. And maybe a quick follow-up on your sales pipeline. I'm curious, a couple of comments here. First, I think historically, Peter, you called out safety and regulatory as potentially having a little bit less of a predictable sales cycle, maybe a bit longer than usual. Any changes there from customers in the sales pipeline on those products? And then maybe related to this, I'm just curious are you seeing anything coming from the IQVIA partnership? Any clients potentially coming through that pipeline? Thanks. Peter Gassner: Yeah. For safety and regulatory, especially in the large companies. Those are usually long sales cycles. Customers know they're making ten-year decisions plus. So these are very serious ones. So I don't see any change there. We have a lot of momentum in the safety area. That's one thing I would say. And then the AI and safety can kind of be a game changer as well. So that might drive a little faster adoption there. And in terms of IQVIA, it's been great having that partnership. So, you know, revenue impact takes a while to see on these partnerships. But the positive customer experience is really heartening. I think it's, you know, giving IQVIA the current a little spring in their step, this partnership with Veeva Systems Inc. is certainly giving Veeva Systems Inc. a spring in our step. This partnership with IQVIA is a very positive macro-level trend for the business, especially on the commercial side. Two big macro-level positive trends for us on the commercial side, or three, are this increasing investment in digital and AI. You see Crossix taking advantage of that, and you'll see other things from Veeva Systems Inc. over time. Right? Where a lot of our revenue and our future things will come as it relates to digital. The IQVIA partnership, making the interop more easier. That will help our data business. That will help our software business. And then the freedom that we're getting to develop our solutions without having to worry about the Salesforce platform and the limitations. All of these things are really gonna be unleashing us on the commercial side. And then for IQVIA on the clinical side, that's been great too. Just more customer confidence in Veeva Systems Inc. and IQVIA can bring solutions to our joint customers. Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Dylan Becker with William Blair. Your line is open. Dylan Becker: Hey, gentlemen. I appreciate it. Maybe, Peter, starting with you too, if we kind of think about the service strength you entered at this as it relates to business consulting, but maybe the need for change management that you're seeing and kind of the strong services outlook, how that or how you maybe think about the implications of that maybe driving more kind of wall-to-wall broad-based platform in the future, the role that business consulting can play in driving kind of the broader platform momentum over time, whether that's commercial or R&D? Peter Gassner: Yeah. If you look at Veeva Systems Inc. at a very high level, you know, where we started, pharmaceutical CRM. Built on salesforce.com. Myself, and my neighbor in our front yard. You know, my, you know, our front yard, which we joined. So there's two people and one product. Right? We have 7,000 people and a lot of products. The way—and now we have software that basically reports directly to me. We have the data business. Reports to me. We have a consulting business. And that consulting business reports to me. So that's how we're building the industry cloud for life sciences. These three working together, which is a lot of skills we have and capabilities we have to have in Veeva Systems Inc. We have to be an excellent consulting company. We have to be an excellent data company. We have to be an excellent software company. And we have to manage the interplay of those three things. But that's what our customers want. They would rather have Veeva Systems Inc. be the general contractor and fit this together. Sometimes I would talk to customers and I would say, well, if Veeva Systems Inc. has 100 things, the nice thing is you might buy one thing today, but you can be assured that that one thing five years from now will fit into all the other Veeva Systems Inc. things that you have. Versus if you buy 100 things from 100 different vendors, those 100 things are moving in 100 different directions, and you'll be replacing pieces and parts forever. So that's what we're bringing, a more comprehensive solution across data software and the consulting, the operating models. So that fits together for life sciences. I guess that's why I think sometimes people underestimate what we'll end up doing for life sciences. It's a pretty significant thing, and it's not anything that any other vendor has ever tried to do for an industry so far. So that's why we're pretty excited about what we're doing. Dylan Becker: Certainly. That makes sense. And maybe you just got teased, this, and so I'd be remiss if I didn't kind of double click on the momentum and safety. I know you called out another top 20 customer, and I think another top 20 go live there alongside the fact that it's maybe the opportunity that's most ripe for labor disruption, I guess. I know these are still long-term decisions, but how do you think about kind of the innovation you're delivering to the safety space and how met with receptivity from a decisioning perspective as you have kind of more of these proof points and validation points at market? Thank you. Peter Gassner: I think safety is really excited about our architecture and how we're doing not only the core safety processing, but the AI that sits on top of that. And the analytics go along with it, the analytical application. So people think that's good. People are very hesitant to change their safety systems. It's such a core system, and it's been so complex. So we're still in the early customer phase of that. I'm hopeful that in, you know, we'll get into the middle majority phase here in a couple of years, and then we'll have the late adopter phase. I'm just very optimistic on it. But gosh, people don't change these things very, very fast. They just don't. Because it's such a critical area, and there's not a lot of push from above the safety teams. Because it's such a critical area, and they've got it. So, you know, we just have to wait for the right time, and then every project has to be successful on that. That's really what we're focused on. It's probably surprising. It would be surprising to many people how complex a global drug safety system is. When you're coordinating with all the health authorities around the world, all the constantly changing regulations. I mean, just to give you an example, there's a lot of special functionality for vaccines. That you need and over-the-counter medicines, you know, each therapeutic area has its own things, and each country has its own thing. So it's complex. We spent, I guess, it's getting close to, what, eight years or so building this thing now. So, that's a real competitive moat. Operator: Your next question comes from Tyler Radke with Citi. Your line is open. Tyler Radke: Yes. Thank you very much for taking the question. Peter, just going back to the top CRM, 20 customers there. You referenced that this was, like, kind of a unique customer kind of one-off example. I was wondering if you could just sort of elaborate on it. Is this something specific to their negotiations or discounts that they'd be getting with another vendor? If you could just sort of talk through that and then maybe the time frame on when you think you could win them back. Peter Gassner: Yeah. I think, you know, when we say customers, specific situations in a very large, there will be individual people, and there'll be dynamics in between people. And there'll be how those people feel and where their cultural alignment is. You know? Sometimes logic is only part of it. So that's what I was referring to. There's no particular pattern there. It's just customer-specific, you know, humans. Right? And some, like, would just say, I just want to try something new. Right? I just want to try something new. We may think that's logical or not logical. Right? Some people want to go with something that's proven. And some people would just want to try something new. So you got all those kinds of dynamics going on. Then in terms of the win backs, you know, you never know when that happens. Usually, it comes with, honestly, executive turnover. Right? An executive turnover. Somebody has a different idea. Also, it can come sometimes, you know, vendor not delivering. You know, the current solution not delivering or project failure, and then it can come in a hurry. It might come in one year. It might come in ten years. You know? But in general, these will be more of a custom build type of thing with Salesforce. And those, you know, on the outside, those could have a ten-year lifespan. But they might only have a one-year lifespan. So just have to see how that goes. I do have a lot of confidence that the building is really—it hasn't proven to be the way forward for most things over the years. And so that's what gives me a lot of comfort. But, again, I don't want to over-index on that. We're just talking about these top twenties for transparency. Our CRM business is very healthy. You know, we're winning some top twenties that we didn't have. We're losing some that we had, and we may win them back. But overall, you know, the business is good. Tyler Radke: Yeah. And for sure, over 100 customers live is a good proof point. Maybe, Brian, just on the margin side, it looks like hiring ticked up again a little bit this quarter relative to kind of the trends we saw last year. Help us just understand, you know, where those heads are focused and then anything you would call out in terms of how to think about margin expansion into next year? Brian Van Wagener: Yes, absolutely. So the two main areas that we're hiring are in our product and then in our services team. You heard us speak to some of the services hiring coming out of Q2 with the large class for our college development program. So we're continuing to invest in the services business, both core professional services and business consulting, continuing to invest in the product. And there was some impact on the services margin in particular in this quarter. But we're really pleased with the overall performance of the business. And as those new hires start to ramp and build the projects, that will wind itself down over time. Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Charles Rhyee with TD Cowen. Your line is open. Charles Rhyee: Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. Peter, obviously, we're continuing to, you know, get these wins in Development Cloud. We started start-up and study training. For these clients, you know, I guess in Development Cloud, among the top 20 biopharma, what's the average number of these Development Cloud products do they have on average? And where would you see as the tipping point? Because if I recall a couple of years back, you know, there's an announcement that Merck was gonna move to sort of a full deep environment over time. Just to get a sense of what you would consider someone being sort of a full Veeva on the development on the R&D side? Like, what does that look like? Peter Gassner: Yeah. And as it relates to Merck, there was a strategic partnership we announced. There was not really that they would use Veeva Systems Inc. everywhere, but a strategic partnership that we announced. Now, in terms of Development Cloud, I, you know, I don't have any particular figures to share with you in terms of percentages or number of applications. It depends on the area. So in the ETMF area, we actually have 20 out of the top 20. Now that have selected us. That's really important. We can use that standardization to drive AI and industry standardization and help the industry and help the regulators. That's, you know, that's going on there. And then newer areas such as RTSM for the randomization and trial supplies management. We don't have any top 20 that has selected us for an enterprise standard yet. Or an ECOA, you know, nobody yet because those are quite new and safety, just a few. So it just depends. We have a lot of, you know, we have definitely more opportunities to go in Development Cloud than we've consumed now. So surprisingly, it's still in the early days of Development Cloud for two reasons. One is these are super important systems that take time. You can't change them out all at once. You put them in most of them, and you keep them for fifteen years. The other is we're adding more applications. So RTSM is new. ECOA is new. The whole area of quality control limbs is brand new. We just had our first early adopter in the top 20 for two manufacturing sites. So it's a lot more to do. I guess it's still early, surprisingly. These things take time. Charles Rhyee: That's helpful. Thank you. And just a follow-up there. Someone had asked earlier about, you know, one of your competitors kind of won back an EDC client, but, you know, what does the overall competitive landscape look like currently? Because it seems like one of your other main competitors in development in R&D seems to be focused a little bit elsewhere in healthcare. Just curious how you're seeing the overall competitive landscape kind of shaping up currently. Thanks. Peter Gassner: Yeah. We certainly have competitors in each area. You know, there's competitors specific to randomization and trial supply management. There's competitors specific to regulatory and clinical operations and EDC. But we don't really have a competitor that's trying to do an overall Development Cloud like we're doing. So I feel like we just have to execute really well, excellence in each area, concentrate on our integrations, and leverage our account partnership. So we have to compete with ourselves. To push ourselves for excellence, for humbleness, for great hiring. The advantage that we have is we have a core platform that's used across all these applications. So we can really invest in the platform. And there's commonality in the platform. And we have first-mover advantage. We had this idea back in early 2012. And, you know, and so you have a lot of core capabilities around it. If you are a competition as ourselves, we have to execute and continue to improve and stay humble. Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, due to time allotted for questions, please ask to limit yourself to one question. Thank you. Next question comes from the line of Craig Hettenbach with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Craig Hettenbach: Yes. Thank you. On Crossix, before the acceleration this year, I think the business has grown roughly kind of low to mid-teens. You talked about some of the drivers that are driving growth above that. Do you think in the next couple of years it reverts back to kind of that mid-teens level? Or do you think some of these drivers can kind of sustain stronger growth in the next few years? Brian Van Wagener: Hey, Craig. This is Brian. Overall, we are really pleased with the progress of Crossix. Growth has been very healthy there for the full year to date. It's a large market with a long runway for growth. Both in the measurement business and in the Audiences business. We're not going to break out a specific long-range growth rate for each to grow, and it's executing very well right now. Product area, but we think there's still plenty of room for that business. Operator: Your next question comes from the line of David Hynes with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open. David Hynes: Hey, guys. Thank you for taking the question. Paul, maybe you could talk a little bit about how you're balancing go-to-market initiatives on the commercial side of the business and maybe how you see it evolving over time. I mean, obviously, Crossix is doing really well. I have to think CRM migration is kind of front and center of your mind right now, especially as kind of these last top twenties make their decision. You tempered expectations around cross-sell during this migration period, but you have a ton of new products. Right? Service center, campaign manager, patient CRM. Like, when do you lean in on those products a little bit more with the top 20? And just maybe talk about kind of how you balance all this and see it evolving over time. Paul Shawah: Yeah. David, it's a good question. And maybe higher level, we have dedicated teams in each of these areas. Dedicated strategy teams and product teams, and they're all focused on their different areas. So they're able to move, advance the product forward, advance customer discussions forward. In some cases, there's dedicated sales teams. So it's not, you know, we don't necessarily have to kind of just focus on one thing and not focus on something else. We're able to kind of focus in multiple areas. But you're correct. Right? The migration thing is the transition of customers over to Vault CRM. That is creating, in some cases, it's slowing things down. In other cases, it's actually creating opportunities for us. We're seeing as customers are making that decision, they're looking at their data. And maybe it's time that we switch out our customer reference data because Veeva Systems Inc. has better data in this area or their master data management with network and Nitro are now becoming opportunities. As they're going through the migration, they're thinking about, they're thinking more broadly. Because there are more pieces of trying to get to broader efficiencies, and they're able to get there as they adopt commercial cloud. We're able to focus in multiple areas. It does create openings for us to continue to expand in each of these areas. And, as you heard, there's kind of some stable businesses, and there are other areas that are growing a little bit faster. We're going to continue to drive and push in each area. Because we can add a lot of value when they put all these pieces together. Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Andrew DeGasperi with BNP Paribas. Your line is open. Andrew DeGasperi: Thanks for taking my question. Wanted to ask the top 20 CRM question. Different way. Particular, how it relates to your 2030 targets. I know you mentioned that it doesn't impact your capability to reach it. I was just wondering why is that the case? Is it because you either the sort of low expectations is mostly tied to a very small number of clients that have decided to go a different way, like one or two? Or is it a factor of you have these other Vault CRM customers that are smaller, the 100 plus that you've listed that could be also contributing and offsetting some of that potential weakness you would see in that business? Brian Van Wagener: Andrew, this is Brian. I'll take this one. When stepping back, there are a few things, some of which you touched on. One is that the top 20 is certainly not the entirety of the CRM. And you heard Peter speak to the fact that the overall business is very healthy. Got enterprise customers, SMB customers. We still expect to win. The vast majority of customers are to retain that. We will have the opportunity to win some of these customers back, and we think that's likely to come through. Then the third and probably the biggest one is that this is a diverse business. It's not only a CRM business. CRM Suite is about 20% of total revenue today. So the other 80% is continuing to perform really well. It's growing well. There were always multiple paths to 2030. And so when we step back and look at the progress that we're making, we feel very good about the progress and how we're tracking out to the 2030 goals. Peter Gassner: Yeah. That way to think about it is the commercial is a part of the business. Right? Our total addressable market and clinical is even a bit bigger than that. And then there's quality and safety and manufacturing and other things. And then inside of the commercial, the CRM suite is a part of that. It's certainly not the majority of it. It's the minority of the commercial area. And we have to see how things, you know, play out. It's not unforeseen that Crossix can be as big as the whole CRM suite by 2030 as well. Right? That's, you know, it's a good business, the CRM, and it's a strong business for us, but the CRM suite itself and the number of field ops and things, that's not a growing business. That's kind of a stable business. That's where Veeva Systems Inc. started, but it's not our determinant at all for 2030. Operator: Your next question comes from Jeff Garro with Stephens. Your line is open. Jeff Garro: Yes, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. Want to ask about the comments in the prepared remarks on the Quality Cloud opportunity expanding. Is that expansion by reaching new customer types or more of a reference to product expansion? Just any further remarks on specific drivers of your success in quality and with labs and CDMOs would be helpful. Thanks. Peter Gassner: Yeah. I'll take that one. This is Peter. It's, yeah. Quality is one of these areas where we can reach a lot of customers, a lot of different customers. CDMOs, you know, other regulated, highly regulated services, industries that are close to life sciences. Our success has been we have three main core products all on a common platform. We have the quality documentation, which is used mainly in test. Manufacturing for Engineering Europe. Standard operating procedures and your changes around that, your quality management system for, you know, deviations and kappas, etcetera, and your GXP training. Your validated training environment. So we're the only vendor that has all three all in a common platform. So that's what's really driving a lot of the growth. In addition, we have some new products there, batch release and computer systems validation. And we're very excited about LINZ. We announced that early customer in LEMS, the laboratory information management that's used to test the medicine as it's being manufactured. And that's a growth area because there's, you know, new manufacturing plants being built. Because of a variety of reasons, let alone, you know, political reasons, etcetera. So new manufacturing plants being built, and the medicine and the manufacturing of these medicines is becoming more expensive and more complicated. And there are two main solutions used out in that area, and they're both, you know, on-premise hosted solutions that are not modern. Critically important, but not modern. So we have a real greenfield opportunity there. If you look at life sciences, they will generally, they will research and find a molecule. They will run clinical trials. They will commercialize the product. But along the way, before they put that medicine even in the first human, they have to manufacture it. First in a small volume, and then in a large volume. And so that manufacturing area is critically important. You're manufacturing something that's gonna be either ingested by a human or put right into their bloodstream. So it's super important how you do that. So that's a great growing area for us. Quality in the manufacturing space. Operator: Your next question comes from Jailendra Singh with Truist Securities. Your line is open. Jailendra Singh: Thank you and thanks for taking my questions. I want to follow-up on the MAX environment question earlier. You did note in the prepared remarks that the guidance raise is driven by improved visibility into Q4. Can you elaborate on that? Is it stronger renewal activity, up momentum, or new logo wins? And related to that, we have seen some good clarity for the pharma industry in recent months with all the discussion with the administration. Do you get a sense based on your conversation that we could see a potential up in client buying trends in the coming year or so? Brian Van Wagener: Hey, Jailendra, this is Brian. I'll take this one. So, I think really good execution coming out of Q3. We had some earlier timing of deal closure than we expected that contributed to some of the outperformance in the quarter and the raise in Q4 and therefore for the full year. Overall, I think broad strength across the business. On the commercial side, we saw Crossix continue to perform well, but also the SMB commercial side had stronger performance in the other areas of our commercial business. Strong performance in R&D, which tends to be more predictable, but we saw strong performance in R&D. And then strong performance as well in our services business and really across professional services and business consulting. So we're very pleased with the momentum coming out of Q3 and what we see coming into the quarter. I think beyond that, we'll factor that into our guidance for next year, which we'll release following the fourth quarter here. But feeling good about the execution of the business as we enter the final quarter of the year. Operator: Your next question comes from Steven Valiquette with Mizuho Securities. Your line is open. Steven Valiquette: Thanks for taking the question. So I guess for me, my primary question was also going to be on your comments about the unique customer-specific factors driving a few less of the Vault CRM wins. See you talked about that already. But really my quick follow-up question is, since it sounds like it really is truly scattered across these customer-specific factors, are there any learnings for Veeva Systems Inc. from all of this, either on, you know, Vault, CRM, product design or on pricing or it even not really change anything going forward? On the go-to-market strategies just in the back of all those? Thanks. Peter Gassner: It's a good question on the learnings. Yeah. We did, you know, look through that. No. I think, there's, you know, we did things the way we wanted to do things with customer success in mind, and we've gotten our top twenties live. And, you know, I guess we thought more customers would, you know, 90% of customers maybe would put weight on that, and some customers didn't. They just, you know, it's they just wanted to try something new. So no particular learning. I would say there's a lot of enthusiasm around the Veeva Systems Inc. team, product and services team because, you know, it's kind of distracting to try to resell all those top 20 customers all at once, right, in a very short period time, and you're competing with a product that doesn't really exist yet and a lot of promises and things like that. That's kind of distracting a little bit, but we're largely through that. So now, you know, we used to have 18 out of the top 20. Now we're maybe gonna have 14 or so. And now it's back to business as usual and really focusing on those customer success. But with a difference. Now we are entering the age of AI. You know, probabilistic computing. To really drive and change what a CRM system can do. So that's giving people a lot of excitement. This, you know, the Vault CRM of '26 and '27 and '28, that's not gonna be, like, the CRM of 2022 and 2023. So that's where the real excitement is. Operator: Your next question comes from Gabriela Borges with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Gabriela Borges: Hi, good afternoon. Thank you. For Paul and Peter, I wanted to get your thoughts on the risk that the CRM market becomes more competitive over time. For example, could the large competitor that has six out of the top 20, could they use that as a beachhead to expand their presence with time with the road map that will improve over time? Or, for example, the 14 that have committed to Veeva Systems Inc., could they be thinking about the structure of the ecosystem changing? So for example, a year from now or three years from now, could they consider competition? So maybe just give us a little bit of a sense of your conviction on long term and how Veeva Systems Inc. can continue to have the dominant position that it has in the event that the competitive environment does change more structurally on the commercial side. Thank you. Paul Shawah: Yeah. So, as we think about other areas in commercial, there are generally separate decisions from CRM. You know, the people who make decisions around Vault CRM are generally different than commercial content and Crossix data cloud. We've actually done something unique, and we've connected all of those pieces together. One of the reasons we moved to Vault CRM is to make it feel more like Development Cloud. So when you buy into Veeva Systems Inc., you have these really mission-critical areas. Crossix. You're seeing how important that is. Commercial content, that we have all plumbed up together. So we create a lot of value. So I think the customers that do decide to buy into Vault and Veeva Systems Inc. will get additional value. The synergy of having everything on a common platform where they know everything is just gonna work together. We've made a long-term commitment to life sciences. I think what we're seeing Salesforce is, you know, kind of just entering. They have a very new product in the CRM space. They don't have everything that we've talked about. All of the other software products, commercial content, Crossix business, all of the data assets, what Peter has talked about earlier with business consulting. So we're building just something that's fundamentally very different than what Salesforce is trying to do. I think that's a very significant competitive advantage for us, and I think that's why we feel really confident about our long-term market position. Because, one, we're gonna have a better CRM and a CRM suite area, but it's all gonna be connected together. And building the industry cloud, bringing all of those pieces together. So feel good about the competitive position. I'm happy with where it's shaking out. Obviously, you love to win every customer. But we're executing well, really across all the commercial. Operator: Your next question comes from Tucker Rumors with Jefferies. Your line is open. Tucker Rumors: Hi. Thanks for taking my question. So my question revolves around the development of AI agents in the clinical suite. I just want to get a sense of how soon you think you could develop some clinical AI agent, for example, you can give, and how can Veeva Systems Inc. monetize that in the future? Thank you. Peter Gassner: Yeah. We have, we've published our road map around our agents. We're gonna have agents in literally all of our software applications as we get through 2026. We started this year. We'll have them in commercial. And CRM and commercial content. Next year, in roughly the first quarter, April, it'll be in safety and quality. And then through the end of the year, we'll have agents in clinical operations. And then, by the end of the year, clinical data management. We think it's one of those potentially transformative areas in clinicals. It's our largest single opportunity, the clinical business. There's a lot of potential to just streamline a lot of core processes, ePMF, you know, when you just intake a document and scanning through that, making sense of that with an agent, as an example. Just replacing core human labor with agents. So a lot of potential for productivity. That's just one example, but I think we see that pretty consistently across the broader clinical area. So super excited about AI because we've actually accelerated our agent road map. And we'll have it in, like I said, virtually every application area as we get through 2026. Operator: Your next question comes from the line of David Larsen with BTIG. Your line is open. David Larsen: Hi. Just going back to these top 20 biopharma clients. Can you maybe—I just have a tough time believing, like, with your R&D capabilities, if you have 20 of the top 20 on your electronic trial master file platform, that's where all of the R&D flows out of. Like, did these four already sign with Salesforce? Did they just sort of verbally tell you they're gonna go with Salesforce? How sort of final are those decisions? And then we keep saying, may win them back. Like, how would that work? Is there a trial period they have with Salesforce? Thanks very much. Peter Gassner: I'll take that one. So in terms of the—this is around the CRM product. Right? We announced the Salesforce ones that particularly around our CRM product. And, if I just reiterate, that's about 20% of our business today. Two years ago, it was about 25% of it. We're not gonna give a direction of what percentage of our business it would be in 2030, but you could, you know, that's gonna be significantly less than 20%. So it's a minor part of our business that's nothing to do with our clinical business. Right? Nothing to do with our clinical business. And then in terms of the win back, how does that work? Well, you know, when you roll out a pharmaceutical CRM system, you'll do it by region, and might have a failure in one of those implementations. So you might say, well, okay. I'm not gonna use Salesforce in that other region. I'll go over to Veeva Systems Inc. Or you might have a failure in your first region, and you're gonna say, well, I'll cancel that overall. Or you might have an executive change. And they might have a different idea of what they want to do. But, also, you might run with that system, sort of a more of a custom build system for three years, five years, seven years, and then you feel like, okay. That's run at the end of the life. We have a custom system, and the industry has moved on. And we want to move back onto a more industry-standard system. Because with Salesforce, very open platforms, so the IT team sometimes can build exactly what they want. And the system integrators kind of feed into that as well. So you end up with a very custom system. So it's not—this top 20 things had nothing to do with the bulk of our business, clinical. And the win backs happen over time. As they naturally would. Operator: Your next question comes from Sean Dodge with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open. Sean Dodge: Maybe just on the Veeva basics. Offering you rolled out, was about, I think, a little over a year back. You had a release a few weeks ago that there are about 100 clients that have selected that. I guess just wondering how we should think about sizing the longer-run opportunity for Veeva Systems Inc. in that part of the end market. Obviously, R&D budgets for small biotech are small, on the other hand, are a lot of them. So just maybe kind of thinking about does that have the potential to be a real needle mover for Veeva Systems Inc. at some point here soon? Peter Gassner: It's a very important thing for Veeva Systems Inc. because it helps the smaller end of the life sciences industry. And that's critical. So, for example, it's a very important thing in the clinical side for our larger. Because when they need to evaluate an acquisition, and that acquisition is using Veeva Basics in the clinical area. They're gonna be much more organized and much easier to automate. So Vault Basics helps the Veeva Basics helps the industry grow overall. That's gonna help Veeva Systems Inc. In terms of how significant it can be, it's not gonna be the significant part of our revenue driver. It's, you know, it's a part of the overall ecosystem. We have 100 customers now. It's—I don't know where that ends up. But it's not impossible that we have a thousand customers on basics over time of the different offerings. So, you know, it's a great business and more than anything, it's the right thing to do. Giving a professional solution to these small biotechs that in the unlikely event that their business really takes off and their molecule really takes off, and they're gonna be the next Pfizer. Okay. They don't have to change systems. They can just graduate from basics right in place and get enterprise Veeva Systems Inc. So super excited about the innovation that's happening in Veeva basics. Operator: Thank you. No further questions in queue, I'd like to turn the conference back over to the CEO, Peter Gassner, for closing remarks. Peter Gassner: Thank you, everyone, for joining the call today, and thank you to our customers for your continued partnership and to the Veeva Systems Inc. team for your outstanding work in the quarter. Thank you. Operator: This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.
Agata Wiktorow-Sobczuk: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the earnings call for the third quarter of 2025 of Polsat Plus Group. Can we please move on to the next slide. We will begin with the presentation of our results delivered by Andrzej Abramczuk, President of the Management Board; Maciej Stec, Vice President for Strategy; and Katarzyna Ostap-Tomann, Chief Financial Officer and ESG Officer. [Operator Instructions] With that, let's move on to the presentation. Andrzej, the floor is yours. Andrzej Abramczuk: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome on the conference regard of the results for the third quarter of 2025. Thank you for joining us today. Here is our agenda. First, I will share the key highlights of the quarter. Next, we will review operating and financial results in detail. Finally, we will summarize and move to the Q&A session. Let's begin with the key highlights for the quarter. Let's start from the telco segment. In the B2C and B2B service segment, our new multiplay offer is performing above expectations. Since its launch in June, 11% of our customer base has already migrated to this offer. Additionally, bundles with the 3 or more services are gaining strong momentum, sales have nearly tripled. Average revenue per user also showed consistent growth, up 4% year-on-year. Turning to the Media segment. This was an exceptional quarter for the sport. We broadcast the Volleyball Nations League and the World Championship, and we strengthened our portfolio with premium rights, including Formula 1, Bundesliga, UEFA Conference League and European League. This investment strengthened our position and driven audience engagement. However, the concentration of major sport events in the one quarter results in the visible increase in content cost. Looking ahead, we secured exclusive right in Poland for WTA tour tennis from 2027 until 2031, a great addition to our support offering. In the Green Energy segment, we are coming to an end to develop investments. The Drzezewo wind farm has been completed and the commercial launch is planned for early 2026. Also, in the third quarter, we carried out our major maintenance on one of biomass unit. The energy market remains challenging with low energy price. Let's take a quick look at the number. In the third quarter, revenue was PLN 3.4 billion and EBITDA amount PLN 766 million. ARPU per B2C customer exceeded PLN 80, up 4%. Our multiplay customer base surpassed 3 million and continue to grow, supported by the success of our multiplay strategy. Like I said, our reach programming and sport offer are very popular with the viewers. And in the third quarter, audience share rose to 22.7%, up 1 percentage point. Green energy production reached 237 gigawatts and was lower year-on-year due to the scheduled maintenance of the biomass unit. Overall, this quarter delivered solid operating performance, especially in B2C, B2B and media, but at the same time, we faced certain challenges. Let's now to the more detailed review of our operating results. Maciej, over to you. Maciej Stec: Thank you, Andrzej. I'm pleased to share the operating results from each of our business segments. I'll begin with the Media segment, focusing on both television and online performance. Could we move to the next slide, please? In the third quarter of 2025, our viewership figures and position in the advertising market remains strong. Polsat, our main channel, was the market leader with a 7.3% audience share, while our thematic channels collectively reached 15.5%. Altogether, TV Polsat Group achieved a total audience share of 22.7%, marking a 1 percentage point increase compared to last year. The TV advertising and sponsorship market in Poland was slightly softer in the third quarter, declining by 2.6% year-on-year. The reason behind this is that last year, there were major sporting events that took place in Europe, the Olympic Games in Paris and the UEFA Euro championships in Germany. Our advertising revenue followed a similar trend. However, in real terms, this was only PLN 8 million lower than in Q3 2024. As a result, our market share remained stable at 27.6% in Q3. Let's move to the next slide, please. Given the seasonal nature of the media business, it's important to assess our results over a longer period. Over the first 9 months of 2025, we delivered strong audience figures. Our group's total audience share rose to 22.4% year-on-year with our main channel Polsat accounting for 7.4% and our thematic channels contributing 15.1%. These achievements are in line with our long-term strategy. Turning to the advertising market for the first 3 quarters of 2025, the sectors performed as we had anticipated with growth rates in the low single digits. We outperformed the market, increasing our advertising revenue by 1.7% to PLN 981 million, which resulted in a market share of 28.2% for the 9-month period. Let's move on to the next slide. We consistently maintain a very strong position in the Polish online media market according to media panel data. In the third quarter, Polsat-Interia Group was the clear leader among Internet publishers in Poland, achieving the highest average monthly number of users, 20.5 million and a total of 2 billion page views during the quarter. What's important, Polsat-Interia Group is also a market leader in the mobile category, holding the top spot for 3 consecutive months in Q3 of 2025. These results demonstrate the strength and stability of our digital platforms, and we will continue to strengthen our position in the online media segment. Can I get the next slide, please? Our autumn programming schedule delivered strong results, combining popular entertainment formats with major sports events. Flagship shows such as Dancing with the Stars, newly acquired format of Millionaires, Your New Home, Your Face Sounds Familiar, attracted large audiences, while premium sports broadcast further strengthened our position. This quarter, we broadcast several exceptional sporting events. Notably, we earned matches of the Volleyball Nations League, including 12 games held in Poland, where our national team won the competition. We also covered the men's and women's Volleyball World Championships in the Philippines in August, September, where our men's team won the Bronze Medal. These Volleyball events are a vital part of our programming, supporting viewership and confirming our leadership in sports broadcasting. However, they also led to higher one-off content costs during the third quarter. Additionally, we have recently expanded our sports rights portfolio, acquiring rights to major events such as Formula 1, Bundesliga and the UEFA Conference and Europa Leagues. These investments contributed to higher content costs, especially when compared to last year when our cost base was lower as we no longer held the rights to the UEFA Champions League. Overall, as a result of these initiatives, our audience share rose to 22.7%, confirming the effectiveness of our programming strategy and the strength of our diversified content portfolio. However, this quarter's results were affected by increased content costs. Next slide, please. Let's now look at the B2C and B2B services segment and its performance in Q3 2025. Next slide, please. We continue to see strong performance in our multiplay offering, supported by the new offer introduced in June 2025. As Andrzej has already highlighted, customer interest in our new multiplay packages is very high, and we are successfully moving customers to this offer. At the end of the third quarter, more than 3 million customers were using our multiplay services, representing 53% of our total customer base. Over the past year, we grew the multiplay base by 41,000 customers, again, thanks to the continued effective upselling of our services. Our multiplay customers account to 11 million RGUs and increased over 1.1 million year-on-year. This growth was also driven by the new multiplay offering and strong demand for bundles consisting of 3 and more services. Importantly, churn remains low at 7.4%, which reflects the strength of our multiplay strategy and the value it brings to our customers. Let's move to the next slide, please. Our strong multiplay performance is closely linked to the overall growth of our contract services portfolio. In the third quarter, we delivered more than 13.3 million contract services, representing a 2% increase compared to the previous year. Mobile telephony continued to be a key driver of growth with 195,000 more services provided than last year. We also observed as a key driver, demand for Internet services, adding 207,000 mobile and fixed connections year-on-year. The pay TV base continues to face pressure, but this is partly offset by the growing adoption of IPTV and OTT solutions, which help us maintain a competitive position in the pay TV segment. Next slide, please. As a result of our consistent long-term execution of the multiplay strategy, we continue to see growth in ARPU per B2C customer. In the third quarter, ARPU increased by 4% year-on-year and reached PLN 80.3. This progress was driven by solid sales of mobile and Internet services as well as the consistent execution of our multiplay approach. I would like to highlight that for the first time, our average revenue per customer has exceeded PLN 80. This is a clear evidence of the effectiveness of our strategy. We are also observing a constant rise in the number of services used by each customer with an average of 2.36 RGUs per customers at the end of the third quarter. This result demonstrates our successful upselling and bundling efforts. As Andrzej mentioned earlier, sales of packages with 3 or more services have almost tripled since we introduced the new multiplay offer in June. This not only shows strong customer interest in our new offer, but also proves that there is further potential to increase the saturation of our customer base with additional services in the future. Let's move to the next slide, please. In the prepaid segment, we maintain a high stable base of 2.41 million services despite operating in a highly competitive and challenging market environment, which I underline quarter-by-quarter. ARPU in this segment increased by 3.4% year-on-year, reaching PLN 18.4. This growth was supported in part by the launch of new and attractive pay TV packages on Polsat Box Go, Polsat Lovers, Premium and Premium Sport priced at PLN 20, PLN 30 and PLN 50, respectively. Each package builds on the previous one, offering flexible access to up to 180 TV channels, including 24 premium sports channels, a wide range of exclusive sports broadcast and a rich VOD library. I'm confident that this new offering, together with our continued efforts to increase the value of prepaid customers will help us further grow prepaid ARPU even in the face of the market challenges. Next slide, please. In the B2B segment, we continue to maintain a stable customer base of around 68,000. I would like to underline that the B2B market is very demanding, and we operate in a highly competitive environment. Our main objective in this area as in all other segments is to increase customer value. ARPU per B2B customer increased by 2.1% year-on-year, reaching almost PLN 1,550 per month. This growth demonstrates our commitment to providing high-quality services tailored to the specific needs of our clients and to building strong long-term relationships with our business customers, which ensures continued resilience in this segment. Next slide, please. Let us now turn our attention to the Green Energy business. The next slide, please. In the Green Energy segment, production in the third quarter was 21% lower year-on-year, amounting to 237 gigawatt hours. This decrease was mainly due to scheduled major maintenance on one of our biomass units, which continued throughout the quarter and significantly reduced output. Such maintenance is routine, occurring every 8, 10 years with the other units expected to undergo similar work in around 5 years. Despite this temporary reduction, total green energy generation for the first 9 months of the year increased by 15% year-on-year, reaching 830 gigawatt hours. This growth was driven by the expansion of our wind energy capacity and our largest wind farm, Drzezewo has now been completed and is currently generating energy as part of its technical commissioning. It's worth mentioning that energy production in the first 9 months of 2025 was noticeably affected by weaker weather conditions. Nevertheless, wind energy continued to be the main driver of growth. Production from wind sources increased by 56% year-on-year in the third quarter and by 73% for the 9-month period, reflecting the positive impact of our new capacity. Can I have the next slide, please? EBITDA in the Green Energy segment amounted to PLN 175 million for the first 9 months of 2025, representing a 14% decrease year-on-year. In the third quarter, EBITDA stood at PLN 52 million, 37% lower than the previous year. This decline was primarily the result of scheduled major maintenance work on the biomass unit, which significantly reduced production during the quarter. And the comparison to last year is impacted also by an exceptionally strong base driven by higher contracted prices and more favorable supply terms for biomass energy. Ongoing low market energy prices also continued to affect profitability. The completion of the Drzezewo wind farm doubled our installed wind capacity to 289 megawatts. With this project, we have reached our target capacity in wind energy, combined with stable energy prices going forward, this positions us to strengthen EBITDA in the coming period. This milestone marks the final stage of our investment program in renewables. Ladies and gentlemen, before I hand over to Kacha, I would like to very briefly summarize our operating performance across segments in the past quarter. In Q3 2025, our Media segment achieved excellent viewership results with a 22.4% audience share in 9 months of 2025. We maintained a strong position in the advertising market with a 28.2% market share and ad revenue growing by 1.7%. The third quarter, the financial results of the Media segment was affected by higher one-off content costs due to new sports rights and major volleyball events. In the B2C and B2B services segment, multiplay continues to drive growth. Over 3 million customers now use multiplay services and ARPU per B2C customer exceeded PLN 80 for the first time. The commercial momentum of our multiplay offer is very good, supporting our operating results in the coming quarters. Prepaid and B2B segments remain resilient with growing ARPU supported by attractive offers and tailored solutions. In green energy, we completed the Drzezewo wind farm, reaching our target wind capacity and finalizing our renewable investment pipeline. The operating and financial results of this segment were heavily impacted this quarter by the renovation of the biomass unit, which is a one-off event. I expect that going forward, EBITDA will improve on the back of higher wind capacity, providing that energy price remain at least stable. Still, I would like to signal that reaching our strategic EBITDA goal in 2026 is going to be challenging, and I would rather anticipate a result in approximate PLN 400 million next year. That said, please remember that our renewable energy projects are long-term, 30 years investment, and this is how they should be analyzed. Kacha, please, come on, the floor is yours. Katarzyna Ostap-Tomann: Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Can I have the next slide, please? Before moving to a detailed discussion of financial results, I want to emphasize what Andrzej and Maciej have already mentioned. In the third quarter, we faced several one-off events. In the Media segment, we had higher costs from the new sports rights and major volleyball events. In the Green Energy segment, we carried out a major overhaul of one of our biomass units. These factors had a clear impact on our Q3 results. Revenue declined by 4.1% to PLN 3.4 billion. Adjusted EBITDA reached PLN 766 million, primarily impacted by higher content costs this quarter. We closed the quarter with a net profit of PLN 57 million. Free cash flow for the last 12 months adjusted for green energy investments was PLN 860 million at the end of Q3. I would like to signal that in the full year 2025, Free cash flow may be around PLN 600 million to PLN 700 million. Net debt-to-EBITDA stood at 3.54x, slightly lower than at the end of 2024. However, I expect this ratio to rise in Q4 or Q1 2026 due to the upcoming payment for the renewal of the 900 megahertz frequency reservation pending the regulator's decision. Can I have the next slide, please? Here, you can see a detailed breakdown of revenue and EBITDA by segment. Revenue was significantly impacted by lower results in the Green Energy segment, driven by several factors. First, we recorded lower energy sales due to weaker market prices, reduced production volumes caused by the biomass unit maintenance and a strong comparative base in Q3 2024 when we had exceptionally favorable biomass energy contracts. Second, there were no revenues from hydrogen bus deliveries in this quarter as these are scheduled for Q4. Revenue from buses is recognized on the same principle as in the real estate at the time of delivery to the customer. These revenues will fluctuate depending on the delivery schedule. In the B2C and B2B services segment, the main reason for the revenue decline was weaker equipment sales. This reflects a general market trend as customers replace phones less frequently, which reduces overall device sales. Turning to EBITDA. The impact of content cost in the Media segment is clear. This quarter includes cost of new sports rights, which Maciej presented in detail and significant costs related to global prestigious volleyball events, which were compared against at a very low base last year when Champions League costs were no longer present. I want to stress that a large part of these costs related to volleyball events are one-off and will not repeat in the coming quarters. EBITDA in B2C and B2B services was affected by lower margins on equipment sales and higher costs, including network and employee-related expenses influenced by last year's inflation and increases in the minimum wage. Maciej has already discussed the reason for the EBITDA decline in the Green Energy segment. Next slide, please. Our adjusted free cash flow after interest and development CapEx in the Green Energy segment was PLN 860 million over the last 12 months, which I consider a very good result. Interest costs remain a key factor that puts pressure on free cash flow. We are already seeing savings on interest costs due to the interest rate cuts, but please remember that these reductions are reflected in our results with some delay and will continue to lower our debt servicing costs in 2026. I also want to highlight telco frequency reservation payments. PLN 645 million relates to the renewal of the 2,600 megahertz band in Q4 last year and the 700 megahertz block. We are still waiting for the regulators' decision on the terms for extending the 900 megahertz reservation. After that, we do not expect further renewals for several years. Finally, development CapEx in green energy is gradually declining as we are now at the final stage of these investments. Next slide, please. On this slide, we show the breakdown of capital expenditures by business segment. In the TMT area, which includes both B2C and B2B services and the Media segment, we operate under a CapEx-lite model. The CapEx to revenue ratio stood at 8% in both the third quarter and 9 months of 2025. CapEx in this segment mainly relates to Netia's fixed network and IT. As mentioned earlier, development CapEx in the Green Energy segment is almost completed. In Q3, CapEx in this segment was PLN 113 million and PLN 420 million for the first 9 months. I still expect elevated spending in Q4 due to the settlement for the execution of the Drzezewo wind farm, after which our development investments are essentially over. Can we go to the next slide, please? My final slide, as usual, covers the group's debt. As mentioned earlier, net debt-to-EBITDA ratio, excluding project financing, was 3.54x, including all group debt together with investment loans for renewable energy projects, the ratio was 4.03x. The debt structure and maturity profile remain unchanged. In Q1 2026, we resumed scheduled principal repayments on the term loan maturing in 2028. The bonds mature in 2030. Please note the weighted average interest cost, 7.3% based on the repo and the balance sheet date. This rate is steadily declining with interest rate cuts. Recall please that at the end of 2024, we reported 8.3% and this will have a positive impact on our free cash flow going forward. That's all from me today. It was a challenging quarter financially, but I want to emphasize that much of the pressure came from one-off factors that will not repeat in the coming quarters. Thank you for your attention. And now I hand over to Andrzej. Andrzej Abramczuk: Thank you, Kacha and Maciej. Our results to the third quarter in line with our expectations and were under impact of the several one-off events. Firstly, the Media segment was higher costs related to the sports right and secondly, in the green energy, scheduled maintenance of biomass unit reduced production. On the positive side, our new multiplay offer continue to perform very well. It supports ARPU growth and will driven retail revenue in the coming period. We also had a strong start at the autumn programming schedule, combined with robust sport offering, this delivered excellent viewership has strengthened our position in the advertising market. Finally, we completed the Drzezewo wind farm, this doubled our installed wind capacity and marked the end of capital-intensive investment phase in renewable energy. This brings us to the end of the presentation, and we will now take your questions. Thank you. Agata Wiktorow-Sobczuk: Thank you very much. We have a couple of questions that you have posted in the Q&A panel. So thank you for those questions. And I will read them as they were posted. The first 2 comes from Nora from Erste. I have 2 questions, please. Could you please elaborate on the technical costs? Will these continue to rise after the third quarter of 2025 due to network rollout expenses? If so, approximately until when? Katarzyna Ostap-Tomann: As far as the technical costs are concerned, it's not only the rollout cost, rollout expense that we have there. We also have wholesale network access, which is -- which we use for our fixed line in Plus. So this is -- basically, these are the 2 components of the rising rollout cost -- the rising technical costs. As far as rollout is concerned, it will rise during 2026, definitely because we are expanding our 5G network. Agata Wiktorow-Sobczuk: And second question, what is your expectation for EBITDA in 2026? Do you expect positive year-on-year dynamics in retail? Katarzyna Ostap-Tomann: As far as EBITDA for 2026 is concerned, we are finishing at the moment our budget. So I won't be able to give you the specific details of what we expect for the consolidated EBITDA. We'll do everything that we can to have positive dynamics in the TMT segment. Agata Wiktorow-Sobczuk: The next question comes from Bojan from ODDO BHF. Could you please provide a bit more details on your additional financing you've taken during the third quarter, type of debt volume, interest rate tenure? Katarzyna Ostap-Tomann: So we're talking of the financing of Drzezewo wind farm, which was completed in August. It was a term loan with the consortium of 3 Polish financial institutions. It was PLN 874 million plus revolving loan of PLN 56 million and a small amount for recuring VAT. It's taken for 15 years at a variable rate. Agata Wiktorow-Sobczuk: Three questions from Ali from HSBC. Can you talk about the multiplay additions? How much of this is new customers versus the existing subscriber base? And can you comment on the margin dilution impact from multiplay and how you offset or think about this? Maciej Stec: Okay. When we talk about multiplay additions, in fact, it doesn't matter because it's included in our ARPU, which we report because you have dilution inside and growth also inside. So our ARPU in third quarter of 2025 increased by 4%. And first time, it was more than PLN 80. When you take a look at our new offering, it's more concentrated on total check per subscriber because in our new offering, you choose 2 services out of 4 basic services and you pay PLN 80. Then you add another service for PLN 30. So in fact, it's a very simple offering, which builds the ARPU and you can easily upgrade your offering. So first check is PLN 80. Next check is PLN 110. For 4 services, it's PLN 140. That's what we mentioned in the presentation. With new offering, we observed that we have more contracts done for 3 and more services. And in fact, it's 3 and 4 services. We observed in our offering -- in our data now that we triple such a transaction. So in fact, it's included in our ARPU, so you can develop your model according our ARPU easily. Agata Wiktorow-Sobczuk: If energy prices were to remain at current low levels, what kind of EBITDA would the division generate in '26, '27 versus previous expectation, PLN 500 million. Katarzyna Ostap-Tomann: It would be more or less PLN 400 million with the current prices. Agata Wiktorow-Sobczuk: Margins in B2B and B2C continue to be challenging, revenues decline and inflationary cost growth. Could you give us any color on how you expect that to evolve over the next couple of years? Katarzyna Ostap-Tomann: As far as the B2B and B2C margins for the foreseeable period are concerned, they are obviously challenging. But as Board of Directors, we do everything in our capacity in order to maintain the margins for the foreseeable future. Maciej Stec: And that's what I presented in the B2C and B2B segment. When you take a look at the offering, so 53% of our base has 2 or more services. It means that 47% has only 1 service, which is important. So we can -- we have space here just to grow. But the second is more important when you take a look at saturation of RGUs per our multiplay subscribers is only 2.36 in the third quarter of 2025. In basic offering, we have 4 services and additional services, we have 3 or 4 more. So in total, we have 6 to 8 services just to sell to the households. So there is very big space and very big potential just to grow, especially with this new offering, which I explained previously, it was like that first, you pay PLN 80, PLN 110, PLN 140, PLN 170, PLN 200. So you can operate for the whole family and even your friends. So this is very easy just to upgrade our offering and you can choose your services in a flexible way. Agata Wiktorow-Sobczuk: A follow-up from Nora. One more question, please. Does the reduction in recurring EBITDA in the Green Energy segment to PLN 400 million in 2026 also apply to subsequent years? Katarzyna Ostap-Tomann: Look, it depends on the cost of energy. Actually, I'm sorry to say that I'm not a fortune teller to tell what the prices of energy will be in the subsequent years. The only thing I can tell you if the prices will maintain the level from today, I estimate future EBITDA is PLN 400 million. This is pure mathematics. Maciej Stec: Yes. And this is for 2026 because we have outlook for 2026 because now we are contracting 2026 now. 2027 will be contracted on the base of next year energy pricing, and this is important how it operates. So you need to understand there is a delay with our revenues in this segment. Agata Wiktorow-Sobczuk: And a question from [indiscernible]. Should we expect adjusted EBITDA to decline in the fourth quarter of 2025? What level of free cash flow should we expect in 2026? Katarzyna Ostap-Tomann: As far as EBITDA is concerned for the whole 2025, the comparable EBITDA will be a bit lower than 2024. So that's more or less my estimation. As far as the free cash flow is concerned, it really depends on the working capital and mainly this depends on the cost of capital. So for 2026 at the moment, I won't be able to give you an estimate. Agata Wiktorow-Sobczuk: And a follow-up from Bojan. Could you please give us a bit more clarity on workforce costs till the year-end and also implications for 2026? Katarzyna Ostap-Tomann: In 2025, we have suffered an increase in workforce costs. This was partly to -- mainly this was due to the factors that we do not control. The increase on the minimum wage, that's the first thing. The other thing is still the press of inflation or impact of inflation on the workforce cost. So basically, what we expect in 2026 is lowering -- I mean, not lowering workforce cost, but lowering the increase. So the impact will not be so high in 2026 because we see both inflation and the press on the wages a bit lessening right now in the fourth quarter. Agata Wiktorow-Sobczuk: That was the last question that we have. So thank you from my side for joining, and I will pass over to Andrzej. Andrzej Abramczuk: Thank you, Agata. Thank you, Kacha and Maciej. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for the participation in our quarterly conference. And let's see when we presented our yearly results. Thank you. Katarzyna Ostap-Tomann: Thank you. Maciej Stec: Thank you very much. Bye.
Nicholas Wiles: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our interim results presentation this morning. We're going to adopt our usual format, starting with me giving an overview of our performance in the first half. Rob can then cover the financials, followed by an update on the delivery of our key growth projects and then a first half business review. Rob is going to update on our progress in working with Nile, on our long-term organizational framework. And then finally, an update on our outlook and the Q&A. And with that, turning really to the first half and an overview of actually our first half. And I think despite an uncertain market background, the performance of our underlying business has remained in line with our expectations. We've continued to grow our PayPoint core estate with new business in key areas such as housing, local authorities, government departments, FMC brand campaigns and in Love2shop business. I think progress has been good. We've accelerated growth in our digital payments platform. We've taken further actions to strengthen our card processing platform and its capabilities. And in parcels, we've strengthened further our key carrier relationships, all of which is very much consistent with the long-term objectives we set out for the business earlier this year. In the first half, we have encountered 2 specific challenges, which have impacted performance. Firstly, the financial terms of our new commercial contract with InPost Yodel have had a greater impact than we'd anticipated and with the additional volumes we would expect to come through not yet materializing, and that's rather been compounded by what's now the well-publicized disruption to parcel volumes and service in our network from the InPost Yodel internal network and operational harmonization plans. It's taken some good work and collaboration between the 2 businesses but it does now feel that we're through the worst of the operational disruption and we expect our volumes to recover through the course of November, which, as you know, is really a key trading period for the business. Secondly, in OBConnect, the first half of this year has seen slower growth than we had anticipated and some consolidation after a strong performance last year. I think this is largely due to the overall opportunities we'd hope to see from the verification of pay opportunity and uptake in Europe being rather disappointing with the team, I think, doing a really good job in response by pivoting the new business pipeline and opportunities to other areas alongside what we're doing in terms of discussions already underway with several jurisdictions and corporates to replicate the success of GetVerified in New Zealand. And while the OBConnect business will not grow at the rate we expected in the current year, I think it's fair to say the foundations and capabilities of this business remains strong and our growth in the second half will still be stronger than the performance we saw in the second half of last year. So I think overall, our confidence in the opportunities that OBConnect brings to our business is undiminished. Its technology platform and capabilities remain important to our long-term digital ambitions as a business. More positively, we've made significant progress in the first half in the successful delivery of several major projects, which are key to our long-term growth. We've launched bank local services with Lloyds Banking Group and with the expectation of further banks to join this service in the coming months. We've launched Royal Mail Shop and branding across the Collect+ network following the strategic investments in Collect+ by Royal Mail. And we've accelerated the Love2shop partnership with InComm Payments. Each of these projects required detailed planning and execution, and now the focus is very much shifting from the rollout to the actions required to accelerate consumer adoption. Turning now to our summary of the financial performance of the business. Overall, as I said already, a resilient performance across the key financial metrics. And by division, net growth in each business with the exception of Love2shop, where the impact of the anticipated changes we've made to our accounting treatment have resulted in some changes to the timing of revenue recognition on the expiry of cards which has resulted in a greater weighting to profit recognition in the second half. In terms of our growth plans, we should not let the specific challenges we've experienced in the first half deflect the business from the long-term growth plans we announced earlier this year. Delivering GBP 100 million underlying EBITDA remains a key financial milestone for the business. And while we're making meaningful progress towards this target in the current year, it is going to take a little longer to achieve. It was always an ambitious target to be delivering it in this financial year but it remains a key milestone for the business. We still believe a combination of our business mix today and the delivery of our key growth projects will deliver consistent net revenue growth in the range of 5% to 8%. And in the meantime, we're developing an organizational structure for the long term to support this accelerated growth. And maximizing returns to shareholders through strong and consistent earnings and cash generation. For the current year, we're on track to deliver more than GBP 90 million to shareholders through a combination of ordinary and special dividends and share buybacks. I'll now hand over to Rob, who will take you through the numbers. Rob Harding: Thank you, Nick, and good morning, everyone. I'll start with the key financial highlights. Net revenue of GBP 84.7 million is marginally up versus the prior half 1. There's a revenue breakdown on the following slide, which shows PayPoint segment revenues are up 2.9% but this is dampened by Love2shop revenues down 9.6%. As Nick said, this is timing in nature, and we fully expect this position to unwind in the second half to give year-on-year growth for the Love2shop segment. Underlying profit before tax of GBP 25.7 million is down 4.5% that being a combination of flat revenue plus a 2.3% increase in overall costs. And I'll cover the cost deltas in a few slides. Reported profit before tax of GBP 19.9 million is after GBP 5.8 million of deductions to underlying numbers, including GBP 2.6 million of amortization of acquired intangibles and GBP 3.2 million of exceptional items, of which GBP 2.6 million relates to legal costs in respect of claims against PayPoint and the remainder is reorganizational costs. Underlying EBITDA of GBP 37.3 million is broadly flat versus the prior half with GBP 1.2 million of lower profits being partly dampened by higher depreciation and amortization. On earnings per share, diluted underlying EPS of 26.7p is 2.6% down versus the prior half. And finally, on this slide, net debt is down 3.2% to GBP 84 million for the first half. And again, I'll cover this in more detail shortly. This slide breaks down the net revenue into a little bit more detail. As I mentioned previously, PayPoint segment revenue is up 2.9%, with e-commerce revenues of GBP 8.6 million, providing growth of 7.5%, and that's driven by transactional volumes increasing 20% to GBP 74.3 million. Payments and banking revenue grew 4.4%, and that's driven by the inclusion of GBP 1.9 million of revenue from OBConnect. And in shopping, growth in service fees of 8.4% to GBP 11.6 million was largely dampened by cards, which is a combination of both lower process volume and sites impacting revenue and ATMs revenue down, reflecting a reduced demand for cash across the economy. For Love2shop, 12 months ago, I explained the half 1 numbers included revenue brought forward from half 2 into half 1, and this was following changes to expiry dates on some of our products. For this year, we've made further changes to the expiry date of some of our products but these changes will benefit the second half year. And therefore, this revenue drop is all timing in nature. Overall, with billings growth of 4.6%, up versus the prior half 1, we expect year-on-year revenue growth for the full year. This slide is really a graphical view of the revenue growth I highlighted on the previous slide and how this revenue growth contributes to underlying profit. So from left to right on this chart, shopping revenue is up GBP 200,000, e-commerce revenues up GBP 600,000, payments and banking GBP 1.1 million and Love2shop revenues down GBP 1.8 million, which I've said is timing in nature. I'll cover costs on the following slide but these have increased GBP 1.3 million half-on-half. And therefore, on the right-hand side of this slide, these movements result in an overall profit of GBP 25.7 million. On costs, this slide breaks down the GBP 1.3 million increase that I mentioned, most notably is the inclusion of OBConnect costs of GBP 1.8 million following the majority stake we took in this business in the second half of last year. We've also seen additional depreciation and amortization of GBP 500,000 and GBP 500,000 in respect of financing costs. Offsetting these costs is a GBP 1.5 million reduction in people and overheads, which is the continuation of strong cost control discipline across the group. So these factors result in a GBP 1.3 million increase in costs of GBP 59 million. Next on cash generation. We had a GBP 24.2 million of cash generation from operating activities in the half which is down GBP 4.3 million versus the prior half of GBP 30.7 million, and that delta is primarily working capital in nature. Further down the cash flow statement, we have tax of GBP 4.6 million, CapEx of GBP 10.9 million, which has increased by GBP 1.5 million half-on-half as we continue to invest in systems' modernization, a GBP 10.4 million payment in respect of the legal settlement, a one-off payment to the pension scheme of GBP 1.5 million. And then we have the GBP 43.5 million cash in from the part disposal of Collect+, along with a GBP 13 million outflow for shares bought back in half 1 and GBP 13.9 million in respect of dividends. This gave an overall reduction to net debt of GBP 13.4 million for the period to GBP 84 million. Very briefly on balance sheet. Net assets for the group of GBP 102 million are GBP 4.7 million higher than the March year-end position. And the key drivers of the swings are obviously half 1 earnings of GBP 14.9 million, the proceeds of GBP 34.1 million net following the ID investment in Collect+. And we've actually used these proceeds to subsequently distribute a special dividend of 50p per share, and that resulted in GBP 34.5 million going out in the second half of this year. Alongside that, the 12 for 13 share consolidation reduced our share capital by circa 5.3 million shares. Other key balance sheet movements are the dividends paid of GBP 13.9 million and the share buyback of GBP 30 million. And similar to the prior half on the share buyback for accounting purposes, we've provided for the full GBP 30 million commitment in these balance sheet numbers. Lastly, before I pass back to Nick, on the left-hand side of this slide, we continue to invest in the business to drive future revenue streams and improve operational resilience and efficiency. We've increased the interim dividend by 2.1% to 19.8p, while targeting a cover of over 2x and along with the buyback targeting leverage ratio of 1.2 to 1.5x. For this financial year, the business is on course to generate over GBP 90 million of shareholder returns through a combination of the ordinary dividend, the special dividend and the GBP 30 million share buyback. On the right of this slide, we expect net debt to increase in the second half, driven by those ordinary and special dividends and the share buyback, plus up to GBP 25 million in respect of CapEx for the full year. And with the second half spend, we fully expect to stay within the target leverage ratio of 1.2 to 1.5x. I'll now pass you back to Nick. Nicholas Wiles: Rob, thank you. And now really turning to the progress in the delivery of our key growth projects in the first half. I think as a business, the standout achievement of the first half has been the launch of multiple projects, both enhance our consumer proposition and establish important partnerships that strengthen the long-term prospects for the business. Firstly, as I said, we've launched PayPoint BankLocal into our retailer network, enabling cash deposit or withdrawal with Lloyds Banking Group, the first of our high street banking partners. Secondly, we've launched Royal Mail Shops and a strategic investment into Collect+. And finally, we've taken further steps to accelerate our partnership between Love2shop and InComm Payments for the merchandising of the Love2shop gift card across multiple retail channels. Turning now in a bit more detail to each of these. On successful launch of BankLocal service in August, I think, was a major achievement for the business, involving a group-wide collaboration. Lloyds Banking Group are the first high street bank to use this service, enabling their customers through our network to deposit cash via both app and card. In terms of success to date, we've seen a rapid adoption of this service from Lloyds Banking customers with the strength of our network delivering genuine convenience for cash banking services. Consumer and press feedback has been positive. And as we've seen with other of our services, as the pattern of transactions becomes established, we see strong demand for the service outside traditional opening hours and a weekend. And in terms of what next, I think following the strong start and early adoption, our focus is now very much on further developing our cash banking services in the second half with the next phase of work focused on driving consumer awareness through a variety of channels, accelerating our SME banking solution and those plans [ succeedly ] can launch in Q2 of next year and engage further with other high street banks for our range of cash deposit solutions. Overall, we expect to make significant progress in the rollout of our cash banking services over the next 12 months. Turning now to Collect+. The investment by Royal Mail into Collect+ announced at the end of September was a really important strategic step in our partnership with Royal Mail. The partnership strengthens the positioning of Collect+ as the leading out-of-home network and will enable the future expansion of further Royal Mail services into the network. It will enable further investment in both our consumer service proposition and our retailer network support as the partnership adds to our existing carrier relationships as part of a carrier-agnostic network. The launch of Royal Mail Shop in the Collect+ network reflects our confidence in the strength of the Royal Mail brand and the opportunity to enable for consumers a broader Royal Mail services, including postage as well as collect, send and return parcels throughout a growing portion of the Collect+ network. The rollout of Royal Mail Shops is now really gathering pace with 3,000 stores already branded Royal Mail Shop, which, as I said already, enables a wider range of over-the-counter postal services, including stamps. And by the end of our financial year, this number would have increased to at least 8,000 sites. To support this, there is an extensive consumer marketing campaign already underway with more planned over peak and into 2026 as we increase consumer awareness, drive more footfall and volume into the network. And as we look into the second half, as I said already, it's important to ensure that we have at least 8,000 sites branded and live for the full Royal Mail over-the-counter service by our year-end. We need to be taking the necessary steps, again, as I said already, to increase consumer awareness and uptake of these services. and we do launch our self-service kiosk in the first quarter of next year. And I think this is a really important time to accelerate the pace of our partnership with Royal Mail and to accelerate the consumer adoption of these services through the Collect+/Royal Mail Shop network. And now turning to our continued progress with InComm. Our partnership with InComm established just over a year ago, has been a really important step in us delivering a strong new sales channel, enabling the sale of Love2shop physical gift cards through the major high street retailers. Sales through this channel have continued to grow strongly ahead of the peak sales period in the run-up to Christmas, and we benefited from a combination of growing consumer recognition of the brand and increasing availability of our cards through these additional high street retailers. We've also seen the benefit of further rolling out the Love2shop card into our PayPoint retailer network with growth through this channel from our refreshed merchandising now up by more than 50% during the course of this year. I think with the next stage of this multichannel approach being the launch of the Love2shop Digital Mastercard in the early part of next year, enabling spend via digital wallet in-store and online, the further expansion into more high street retailer gift card malls in 2026 and more gift pegs in each of these malls and also the launch of MBL brands such as Greggs into the InComm Payment mall itself. I think we can really see this partnership is now building strong momentum which is combining the merchandising expertise and distribution channels and the reach of InComm with an outstanding multi-redemption gift card product and product innovation from Love2shop. Now turning to our business review. And firstly, in shopping, we've seen continued growth in the first half in each of our product estates with the exception of the Handepay card estate and have shown growth and some solid financial performances from the underlying business areas. We've seen continued service fee growth. And while card merchanting net revenue and process value are marginally down, I don't think this fairly reflects the continued work to strengthen the operational foundation of this business. The improvements to the quality of our card proposition and the increased focus on profitability per merchant. We also saw another strong performance from our partnership with YouLend with funding advances up by over 50% in the period. In our FMCG activities, we continue to work with a growing number of consumer brands with 16 campaigns delivered in the first half, a strong pipeline of opportunities for the remainder of this year. And in our ATM business, after a challenging period, we're seeing early signs of our recovery plan delivering results as we better manage the ATM estate and use our data to optimize individual site performance. In e-commerce, overall, a positive half for Collect+ with both net revenue and parcel transactions showing growth in terms of really all the key call-outs. As I described earlier, we launched the first phase of Royal Mail Shop, branding into the network and enabled over-the-counter Royal Mail services in over 2,000 locations. And as I described earlier, we have encountered some operational challenges from the internal harmonization of InPost and Yodel which in the period has impacted both volumes and service in the second quarter. We think the action we've taken in partnership with InPost has now stabilized this and we expect volumes to recover during the key peak period. More broadly, we continue to work hard across the wider carrier portfolio to maximize volume and performance with each carrier and support consumer adoption of out-of-home as we continue to grow the Collect+ estate. In Payments and banking, the key theme in this business has been the continued growth in our digital and open banking activities. And with the growth we are now seeing, we expect to arrive at a point soon whereby digital revenue will exceed revenues from our cash payment channels. Specific highlights from the first half have been several important new business wins, particularly in housing from a strong and well-balanced overall new business pipeline, good work to strengthen further our relationships with our existing clients with a number of upselling initiatives and several important client wins for our open banking activities. Our first half digital revenue does include a latent contribution from our majority-owned OBConnect platform. And finally, in Love2shop, as Robert said already, the adoption of a more prudent accounting treatment in terms of the timing of revenue recognition from the expiry of cards which we announced, I think, at the time of the acquisition, has resulted in a timing impact to the headline performance of the business which will be unwound in the second half of the year. Operationally, the business continues to perform well. I've already described the progress in our partnership with InComm [Audio Gap] position for our peak trading period. In Park Christmas Savings, we expect to deliver a flat performance for the year after some good work through the year to support our agents and strengthen the saver proposition as we already turn our focus to the 2026 savings campaign. And in MBL, we've had an outstanding first half with a doubling of process value, which reflects the growing reach of this business and its brand partners. And with this, I'll now hand over to Rob to give you an update on our organizational framework project. Rob Harding: Thanks, Nick. In our FY '25 results, we announced a key target was establishing a framework to deliver greater automation and agility. We've now recently completed Phase 2 of this project, supported by now an independent consultant to identify how we can drive this automation agility across 3 key processes: onboarding, customer support, and billings & settlement. The outcomes from this phase are a clear articulation of the target future state for each of these 3 processes, including key outcomes for each, which you can see from this slide. For example, for customer support, we're driving customer self-service capability in response to high-volume, low-value calls. Additionally, for each process, we've set out the benefits from moving to the target future state with financial benefits such as an additional revenue or lower costs and other benefits, for example, improved customer service levels or satisfaction levels. Preliminary estimates have identified at least GBP 2 million of operational profit upside from moving to the desired future state with a potential to grow this figure further through the next phase of work. And this includes identifying technical solutions and external providers to support the shift to the target state, along with the costs associated with this transition. We expect this next phase of work to be completed in advance of our full year results announcing June '26, followed by implementation commencing early in FY '27. I'll now pass you back over to Nick to cover our outlook. Nicholas Wiles: Thanks, Rob. So turning to our outlook for the year. After a resilient first half performance and despite the impact of the 2 specific challenges that I've already described, the Board remains confident in both delivering further progress in the current year and achieving our medium-term financial goals. We're executing our key projects well, and we do expect these to have a meaningful impact on our long-term performance. In a number of areas, our focus has already shifted to coordinating plans to support the accelerated consumer adoption of these projects, and there's more to come in this area. Look, the current trading environment is not an easy one. Consumer confidence is weak and household budgets remain tight. However, as we enter our most important seasonal trading period for a number of our businesses, we are confident in the plans we've made to execute well and our early signs continue to be encouraging. We remain confident in the growth opportunities we have as a business and that we have a strong platform from which to deliver continued strong returns for shareholders. As we said already in the current year, we're on course to generate returns to shareholders of over GBP 90 million. through a combination of our ordinary dividend, special dividend and share buyback program. And today, we've announced -- declared an interim dividend of 19.8p, which is an increase of 2.1%, and which is consistent with our dividend policy. And with that, we're very happy to answer questions. Operator: [Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Michael Donnelly from Investec. Michael Donnelly: Can you hear me okay? Nicholas Wiles: Yes. Michael Donnelly: A couple for me, please. First of all, can you tell us a little bit more about what Nile are likely to be doing in the next phase. So that's what the expected costs. You've disclosed the costs in the first half, which is really useful. But the cost of benefits and the cost savings that are likely to come through from their work in '27, '28? And then secondly, thanks for the update on RM and IDS. Is it possible to talk a bit more granularly about the trajectory of RM volumes since the IDS investment? Or should we be modeling -- maybe forget second half this year and model a ramp-up more into '26 rather than seeing the benefits -- the volume benefits of the investment come through in the second half? Nicholas Wiles: Yes. Thanks, Michael. Rob, why don't you tackle Nile first, that would be helpful. Rob Harding: Yes. No, as I said, where we are today for each of those 3 key processes that I mentioned on the call, we've got a clear view of what the desired end state looks like and the benefits, and we've talked about 2 million plus worth of opportunities in terms of upside there. The next phase is really about going through the kind of selection process, external suppliers, vendors, et cetera, that will support that shift to that desired future state and the costs associated with that transition. And as a part of that, obviously, we'll be making sure that the business case stacks up, so we make sure that the size of the prize is obviously exceeding the investment required. So really, Michael, the next phase of this is all about identifying external providers technology to help us to move that desired future state and making sure the business case stacks up. And that will take us probably to the end of this financial year, and therefore, we should be getting ready to execute and implement in early of next year. But we're still going through that kind of selection of suppliers and business case development at this stage. Nicholas Wiles: And then just on the second of your questions, Mike. I mean I think the starting point for the Royal Mail investment, which I think we were clear about when we made the announcement on the 30th of September was that a combination of the special dividend, share consolidation and the ramp-up of volume would result actually in the transaction as a whole being earnings enhancing. But I think specific to your point around the ramp-up of volume, I think as we said already, we're growing the network and the rebranding of the network as quickly as we can. We're working really hard with Royal Mail to move as much volume into the network as quickly as possible. We're seeing that ramp-up take shape, particularly since the autumn. And I think the peak period is an important time to see that move further. But these things do take time. And I think we'll see a much more meaningful contribution from the Royal Mail volume when we get into the next financial year. So I think your core sort of premise that we will see a more meaningful impact from Royal Mail volume in the Collect+/Royal Mail Shop network next year. But I mean, the ramp-up is clearly meaningful, not least given the size of Royal Mail in terms of a carrier in the U.K. parcels market. Operator: The next question comes from Joe Brent from Panmure Liberum. Joe Brent: Three questions, if I may. Firstly, there's obviously lots to talk about, but I don't think you mentioned Lloyds Cardnet. Could you give us an update there? Secondly, in e-commerce, could you remind us where we are with the Chinese e-tailers? And thirdly, just following up on Michael's point on automation. It feels like the GBP 2 million will start to impact in FY '27, is that right? And could you maybe give us some indication of the scale of future savings there? Nicholas Wiles: Rob, do you want to start with the automation point, that would be great. Rob Harding: Yes. I think we said that we've got line of sight to at least GBP 2 million here. And I think the question becomes how quickly can we execute and what's the cost to execute. And I think really looking at the full year to give that clear view, I mean, I am hoping to accelerate as much of that benefit as possible in FY '27, [indiscernible] et cetera, we can't pinpoint with accuracy. So I think probably give us until the full year results to get real clarity in terms of if we're going to drop some benefits in, let's be really clear once we've gone through that selection process with external providers, the vendor solutions and gone through that business case development. But I say I'm anxious to accelerate, get any quick wins as possible into FY '27 and drive costs down. Joe Brent: Would the cost of that be treated as non-underlying or be taken above the line? Rob Harding: Yes. We've taken those to exceptionals. So within the kind of restructuring that I mentioned in the exceptionals for the first half, we had about GBP 500,000, GBP 600,000. So that's where we'll be treating the costs going forward. Nicholas Wiles: Cards business, I think, look, we've seen a small fall in the total size of the estate. And I don't think there's a particular reason for that. I think, look, it remains a competitive market. I think our card proposition, and I include Lloyd's Cardnet alongside the EVO proposition as part of that, I think it's stronger than it's ever been. And I think it's really competitive now in the marketplace. I think that our emphasis is increasingly switching from the number of retailers and the number of underlying merchants that we have to actually the quality of that business and importantly actually sort of the revenue that it generates. The acquiring business in the first half was down year-on-year by about 8% in terms of processed volume. And I think that reflects a combination of things, including, I think, a tough retail environment, particularly for our convenience sector. And I think that's probably been our weakest sector actually across our card book, and that's probably where it's been most competitive. I think as we look into the second half, I think we're expecting certainly our sales performance in the second half to improve. I think we've got a really strong proposition, as I said on the street. Our telesales team are performing very well. Our field team are certainly performing well. And I think we've had a number of new additions, new processes there, which I think will really deliver in the second half. So I feel quietly confident that we will continue to make progress in what clearly as we know very well, is a very competitive market. But ultimately, we need higher levels of consumer spend, and we haven't seen that in our estate in the first half. On the Chinese, look, it's a great question. And I think that the Chinese have been relatively slow to create out-of-home choice at the customer checkout for customers using the Chinese marketplaces. They have adopted the out-of-home for returns but we haven't seen them sort of adopt out-of-home at the pace that, for example, we've seen Vinted adopt out-of-home for their principal fulfillment for their own marketplace. We continue to work with the Chinese. And by that, I mean, sort of Shein, TikTok, Temu and ultimately, it's all down to price. And their conversations we're having directly with our carrier partners because we all want to work to move volume from to-door into the out-of-home network channels, whether that's working with InPost to get the choice of locker and PUDO or that's working with Royal Mail to offer the choice of actually the Royal Mail Shops. So I think there's more work to do there. There's clearly a major opportunity because cross-border volume is going to be increasingly important to us, but we haven't yet seen that adoption in the consumer checkout in the way that we need. And that's going to be an opportunity for us into the next year. Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Nick Wiles for any closing remarks. Nicholas Wiles: Look, thank you. Thank you very much, everybody, for joining us this morning. As I say, it's been a robust performance in the first half, some major opportunities to unfold during the second half, and we look forward to updating you later in the year. So thank you. Have a good day.
Tony Dammicci: Welcome everyone to the MDB Capital Holdings' Third Quarter 2025 Update Conference Call. Thanks so much for joining us today. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, the formal presentation, I'd like to remind everyone of several important things. Today's conference call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Please remember that statements made on this call and webcast may contain provisions, estimates or other information that might be considered forward looking. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, they're subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You're cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation. Also, please be aware that we're not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Throughout today's discussion, we'll attempt to present some important factors relating to our business that may affect our predictions. You should also review our most recent Form 10-Q for a more complete discussion on these and other risks, particularly under the heading Risk Factors. A press release detailing these results, which crossed the wire this afternoon is available in the Investor Relations section of our website, mdb.com. A replay of this call will also be available later on mdb.com. Your host today is Chris Marlett, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of MDB Capital Holdings. He'll be joined later by George Brandon, MDB President and Head of Community Development. Chris will lead an update on the Third Quarter ending September 30, 2025. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Chris Marlett. Christopher Marlett: Thanks, Tony. Well, welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining today. I saw it was a pretty crazy day in the market. And so it's been a really interesting period in time to navigate these markets. And I just want to thank all of you that have been supporting us and getting behind us, and we've had a really good last few months as our platform takes shape and as our pipeline builds. And so we're very enthusiastic despite all of the backdrop of uncertainty. So well, one of the things I wanted to do today was talk a little -- do a little bit of a different approach to try and help to explain what we do at MDB, why we create value or how we create value and why we went public because I want to remind everybody that we did this for a very specific reason. And there was a big why, if you will, why we went public. But I also want to recognize that so many of you that have believed in us have lived through the stock really going down. And while the stock is down, we've lived through so many different markets before. And sometimes, when you call me where I talk to some of our shareholders, they think that I'm not too worried about things. One, I'm not super worried, but I don't like the stock being down either. So we really are in this together. But I want to also reiterate that we're not changing what we do just because the market's down. What we've done for a long time has worked, and we think it's going to work again despite the fact that times are changing. There's a lot -- fewer small public companies out there. The small public company market has not been really great. And so we're just as excited as we've ever been, even though things are not unbelievable with our stock at this point. So the last, I would say, 2 years has been very challenging because we've had this great historical success, but it's certainly not reflected in the stock today. We've had 28 years of launching big ideas. And we've had really it's an incredible record that really no other firm has really matched. We've never failed at doing an IPO. There's been times that were super tough to get them done. There's good times, there's bad times, but we've been -- we've -- 100% of them we've ever tried, we've done. And amazingly, of all of our IPOs, 100% of them have traded at 2x the IPO price at some point post IPO. So that means that these companies got public. They did well. They had a chance to raise money. They don't all win forever, but we did what we were supposed to do was really launch these companies that have big potential. And so many of them have reached real significance as far as valuation. And I want to remind everybody that we've published sort of a historical perspective of those companies we've launched in the public markets. So we can remind everybody that this can work. And I think that what's wondering -- what's I think lingering in everyone's mind is the whole concept of, is public venture dead? And I think that I'm super excited because I think we're in sort of a whole new beginning for public venture. And I couldn't be more excited about what we have ahead. And again, reminding everybody why we went public. We really -- for 28 years, we only launched what was at 17 companies, so about one company every 18 months. And it was really -- I think a lot of you saw was sort of a founder-led operation led by me and our team. But quite frankly, people look to me for whether or not they should buy or sell something. And that was not something I look forward to, and I really felt like our results have proven themselves and it could be scaled. But we were really constrained by operational bandwidth. So the funding that we did for the IPO was really to put in a team to be able to scale this operation. And so it's been a proven model, but the big question has been, can we scale. And we really -- our goal is to get to 3 to 5 launches per year, which enables people to build a public venture portfolio because buying one company here or there is not really a strategy. It's just -- we're kind of deal salesmen as opposed to helping people to really build a diversified portfolio in public venture. And by doing that, we can bring our impact and our process to more and more companies. So I think the mission is always to build this operational framework, to make this sustainable and a long-term business that survives beyond the initial founders of MDB. And so that is our mission. We're sticking to it. And I think we're making great progress that I think will become very evident very soon. So simply what we've done, and I've talked to this in the past, is really we curate by looking through thousands of ideas. It does take looking through thousands of ideas to find ones that have that asymmetric profile that we believe is so important. And the reason why we've been able to do what we've done historically, you can't just episodically stumble across things. You have to really get out there and our team has done a great job of getting out there and looking through thousands of ideas. I know a lot of you that bring ideas to us get a bit disappointed sometimes because there's such a small percentage of the things that we actually end up getting behind, but we say just keep bringing them sooner or later, you're going to get better at finding one, and we really appreciate all of the companies that are brought to us by our community. It really is an important part of it. And I would tell you that a very high percentage of the things we do are actually brought to us by our community as opposed to us going out and finding them. Then we position them for success, and that's really the hard work, once we curate them, which is equally hard, but positioning them for success and being able to live in the public markets is really where the platform is really been built. And I'll talk to more of that later in the presentation. But I don't think that, that's really apparent to most shareholders today. I don't think that they really understand what we've built and why we have something that really nobody else has. And then, of course, launching them is the things that you see, which is really when they're ready to go public and trade in the public market. So what for the new people in the community that don't really know public venture. It's really this explosive growth potential of venture stage companies and bringing that public market liquidity and transparency that we now call public venture. We used to have an old tagline that we're bringing back, which I think is really something that we forgot about and really is important to understand what the value that we think that we bring in MDB is that we really see value others don't. Most of these opportunities would not be opportunities to any other firm. And I think that our ability to create value from those is really completely unique and not something that these entrepreneurs and inventors can just find anywhere. So it's this -- it's really this transformative magic of transforming these early-stage big ideas into investable public companies with $1 billion-plus potential. And I think that we've really thought about what it is that we do that adds value so that people understand how we actually earn these equity positions or are able to make this a business. When things come to us, they typically are really exciting, big ideas, but they're really underdeveloped without a clear commercial path. And they don't have an IP strategy or a protective moat around them that's completed. And it's kind of a bit unfocused because it's still early, but can be developed. And as a result, they have limited access to growth capital. And after we're done and they're ready for launch, they really have a clear mission as a new category leader, not to say that it doesn't pivot after they're public. It doesn't mean that it's 100% fully baked as a company, but they're really going to be a leader in a particular technology or business category. And they have a comprehensive IP strategy in a protective moat that we're experts now at making happen. And they really are differentiated and they're public ready for the public markets. And so these companies trade and are valued in the public markets as evidenced by our track record. And when they walked in our door, they really didn't have that capability. So I think that, that's what's exciting about what we do and how we create value for shareholders. And talk a little bit about what were -- that underpinning or that foundation for that is really this these integrated components that stand underneath this whole strategy. And I think that when we first went public, we didn't do a good job of communicating. I think a lot of people really believed that we were operating multiple businesses when really -- it's really one business to support this sort of launch of these public venture companies, stage companies. And it's really the foundation that enables us to provide this value that really nobody else can because there's really no PE firm or VC or underwriter that's built to do what we can do. There's -- we are completely unique, and I would say that, that leadership is clear in this category because just like the companies we're launching, this category of public venture there's -- we don't really believe we have any real competition. And so when you look at all of the services, and again, the -- I'll let you guys read this at a later date, but really, all of the things that we do, you do not find at an underwriter or a VC. And ultimately, why I think this is going to be super important. It's not just the companies that we find in academia that might have a great new technology that we have to formulate into a company, but it's also companies that are more developed like you would see with Buda Juice that we'll be soon during the IPO for, where we really help them to really go public, I mean, and be a leader because quite frankly, they can't just walk into an underwriter, and we provide all these services that enable them to get to that public offering much faster. And so we say 2 to 3x faster, that's hard to really quantify. That's just sort of what we believe. But we can take something like Buda Juice from a very early-stage company that didn't think they can go public. And in 6 to 9 months, really get it ready for going public and have it be super well in demand as a result of positioning it correctly. And so I think that's a big part of what we do. The other part of it is that a lot of times these companies are told it's going to cost you $2 million to go public. And that's just not our reality. We have -- whether it's law firms, accounting firms, et cetera, we have the resources to be able to take these companies public for their total all-in cost for going public outside of underwriting fees is usually less than $0.5 million, which is not something that most people or most entrepreneurs fully understand I think that they -- again, there's big misconceptions about what it costs to go public and et cetera. So to remind you how we create value, it's a combination of the fees and equity that is how the shareholders of MDB make money. And so when we transform these companies, there's some companies like in eXoZymes, which we cofounded effectively with the inventors from UCLA, we have to really work hard to position that company and develop that company from putting together the whole team, the strategy, the IP, et cetera, and that's a very time-intensive process. And those companies, we have more equity in a lot of cases, in the case of eXoZymes, we put also $5 million in capital into the company. Other companies like Buda Juice that you'll see, we'll have underwriters warrants and we'll have underwriting fees. And that -- we don't have as big underwriting -- of equity position, but we also didn't spend as much time, effort and capital to get behind it. It was a very different type of situation. But in all cases, with every company that we end up launching into the public markets, we will have an equity component because we want to bet alongside of our investors. We want to make sure that we're completely aligned with investors at all time and we're never going to be a fee-for-service -- traditional fee-for-service shop because we add too much value with this platform to just charge an underwriting fee like many underwriters. So I know there's a lot of confusion in the marketplace with that because everyone is a little bit different. But it's really just a function of how much time and effort it is to do it. And most importantly, it's making sure that we curate something for our investor community that works. That's always the way we think is, it's, number one, it's got to work, and number two, we have to be compensated fairly for what we're doing. And it's what I love about what we're doing now is that we have a lot of flexibility about the big ideas we can launch. But again, what always stays the same is our category-leading companies, whether it's a technology category or a business category like what we're doing with Buda Juice. So our goal from an operating perspective, and I've talked to you before, we have about $10 million in operating expenses, which is really -- in effect, our operating platform is really seed capital for the companies we're starting and launching because we're investing our time and effort to really position these companies for leadership, and that's really an investment in these companies. And I don't think, again, I don't believe that that's well understood. Even some of our biggest investors they say, well, geez, why do you guys get such a big equity position in some of these things. I said because we're providing the value. And I think that a lot of our co-founders and what have you, if you talk to the co-founders, a lot of these companies, I think that every one of these companies that we've launched and have taken public, I'm not so sure they could have gotten public without us. I'm not sure that they would have been public without us. And so I think that, that's where that transformation on the value creation is so evident. So scale is the issue for us. Obviously, the big difficult lift here is operationally how do we take one every 18 months to get to 3 to 5 year. Well, I really don't believe that the curation is our choke point. What we're seeing as far as opportunities are concerned, we have now a very deep pipeline of opportunities. So I'm not really worried about finding enough opportunities. In fact, even though we are going to be doing more companies, I believe that every one of the ones we launch going forward have a better probability of success than the ones we've done historically. And that's a big statement, and I really believe it comes from the fact that we are now -- we've broadened our team to be able to curate more and effectively analyze more, but I also believe we're just better at picking because we've made every mistake in the book. We've created dysfunctional boards, management teams. We've picked the wrong business strategies. We've picked companies that were -- that went public too early. We've -- like I said, we've made every mistake in the book historically, and I can tell you the one thing that we're all acutely aware of is we don't want to make those mistakes over again. The other major -- so the biggest part -- there's 2 -- really 2 big things that really dictate how many of these we can launch on an annual basis. One is our process because it's really standing up those companies and getting them ready to go public, everything from developing their business and IP strategy, but also getting the narrative and getting the team right, those are hard to do. And that's where the community is so important and we want to broaden our community because the bigger our community is, the bigger the influences, the easier it is to put these companies together. We want to be able to lean on our community more to help us find CEOs, board members potential joint venture partners for these companies. And so that community is critical to that process. But also the community is important from the perspective of really investing in these companies. And I think that in good times, it's much easier. We found sometimes in good times, we send an e-mail and we've got 3x over demand for an IPO. In bad times, you call your friends and they cringe when they see the color ID, right? So it's very cyclical depending upon the markets. But we've managed to continue to grow that community and work on that because we know that the more the people are exposed to public venture relative to all the things they can invest in that it just makes sense. And so we just have to continue to build it. George is doing a great job in the team and Tony and all the rest of the guys that are part of the whole community team. They're doing a great job. And every day, we're out there making new friends and it's really quite fun and we're seeing great progress on that front. So I think that's becoming evident as we're seeing the pace really pick up. And I think that we're excited because for the first time really in our history, we're going to be closing -- well, highly likely to be closing. We've received all the funds for Paulex and we'll be announcing the closing on that here shortly. And then Buda Juice, we expect to be priced here in the next couple of weeks, hopefully, if the SEC can hurry up and get back to work and get those comments in. So it will be the first time we've ever done 2 company launches in one quarter. So I'm pretty excited about that. But not just that, we've got a number of other companies in the pipeline, and I think we've got a very active calendar going into next year. So I think that there's 4 to 5 companies in late-stage negotiations. So I really believe we have a shot at making that 3 to 5 launches next year. I'm pretty excited about that. I also think the Microcap is going to make a major recurrence. I'm making a market call here because it's been such a horrible last few years for Microcap. But I'm making a market call that the transparency and liquidity that exists in the public markets is going to become a cool thing again. It was funny. I got a call from a very old friend in Indonesia, a very wealthy guy that has businesses in Indonesia. And he called me up and he said, Chris, I want to go to NASDAQ. And I said, well, why do you want to go to NASDAQ? And he goes, well, he goes in Indonesia, he goes, if I take my company public, I'll trade 10x earnings. He goes on NASDAQ I'll trade 40x earnings. And I was like that's pretty profound. Well, I think that, that's what you're seeing start to have happen is there are so few companies on NASDAQ now, these small companies that have any kind of revenue and earnings that are in the Microcap space are very highly demand. There's very few companies left in the U.S., ironically. So many of them are going to private equity route, the VC route, the PE route. And now you can talk to all the family offices and what have you. Nobody wants to allocate to that sector. But where can they get price transparency, liquidity, et cetera, it's public markets. And so I'm a huge believer that we're probably on the doorstep of really this taking off in a major way and I couldn't be more excited about being in the business at this time. So the third quarter financial update is pretty straightforward. Our goals, as I mentioned, are really to offset our operating expenses with financings. So we've used about $5.9 million for the first 3 quarters. We'll have a fair bit of revenue in the fourth quarter that will send that in the other direction for the balance of the year. And so I expect that we'll have a good fourth quarter, and we'll start to see that we're -- our OpEx are starting to get covered by the number of finances we're doing. In addition, more importantly, we're going to have important equity positions in Paulex Bio and Buda Juice that really give us, all of our shareholders' big equity upside going forward. And as always, we're trying to be very cautious with our OpEx and making sure that every dollar counts. And the team has done a great job. There's been -- the team has really dug in, working hard. I mean everybody on the team is been committed, and it's been a tough slog guys. It's been really tough, but we have a great group of people all across the organization. Everybody is really -- I couldn't be more pleased with everyone's commitment, and we have an unbelievable team as many of you know. And I think that we have significant equity holdings that are really unrecognized in our stock price, which I'll talk about in a little bit. So when you look about -- look at our stock being undervalued, if you take the eXoZymes position, the HeartBeam position and our cash, the market value is significantly higher than the market value of our stock right now. And that comes from, I think, people just being worried that, in fact, maybe public venture is dead, maybe MDB lost their touch and they can't figure it out how to navigate through this market, what have you. It's a commentary that I'm not proud of, but having lived through lots of cycles, I know that it can change and be on the other side of the equation, and we can be trading at a premium to our equity value. So I don't take it personally, but it does hurt because I know a lot of you bought the stock at higher prices. And we're trying to rectify that as fast as possible. And I can tell you the team has dug in to make sure that, that happens. But some things that aren't valued in the stock prices is really patent, which were we've made the decision to spin it out, and I'm super excited about having the first -- potentially, the first public law firm in the United States, and it couldn't be in a better sector, which is patent law, which is a federal practice. We'll talk a little more about it in the future, but I do believe that is an undervalued asset that's not valued at all on our balance sheet right now. And the other thing is we've been contacted by a number of people that want to be in the clearing business or associated with the clearing firm. And so I think there's a lot of potential value in our clearing platform as we move it forward. And so those are 2 assets that I think have significant value that can even be -- we can realize some real significant value. But I want to talk -- touch on a couple of the companies that many of you own stock in and of course, MDB owns a lot of stock in, which is eXoZymes and HeartBeam. I couldn't be more proud of the accomplishments that those companies are making, albeit not necessarily 100% recognized in their stock prices, but eXoZymes is making unbelievable progress and their platform is really going to be transformative. And really, you're going to see this, I believe, in the very near future. that we're going to see a new paradigm in pharmaceutical development enabled by their synthetic biology platform. And you're going to see that in paradigm-changing companies that will get spun out of eXoZymes and we're hoping to -- that gets sort of unveiled here very shortly. It's been a long time coming, but I think we're very close to making that happen. And HeartBeam, it's been a tough road to get through the FDA. But hopefully, we're right on the verge of FDA approval and it's -- it really is a life-changing opportunity in health care in the sense that now you're going to basically have a virtual cardiologist in your pocket at all times. If people carry this around, they're going to be able to get a 12-lead ECG to their doctor or to a cardiologist instantly. What does that mean? That could save millions of lives, millions of lives. And it's never been done before. And I think that hopefully, this FDA approval gets through and we get this product launch because it's a game changer. And both these companies I'm super proud of and I'm super proud of our team for helping get these companies launched. It really is an exciting time, even though it's been a tough market. These are game-changing companies that we couldn't be more proud of. So just to reiterate, we closed 3 to 5 deals a year. We really cover our operating expenses. And then as you can see, the equity that we earn in a company that we cofounded with Francisco Leon, and Miguel, we own a significant part of that. We really helped put together the license at Mount Sinai, and it's been a lot of hard work, but I really want to thank all of our investors that believed in us to get behind the launch of what could be a really game-changing company. So it was a long time coming. But again, it was the fortitude of our team and the belief from our investors that are making that launch possible. And I want to thank everybody that participated in. So really in summing up, I think that I want to remind everybody, we really have, in my mind, the only real public venture platform. And we have such a unique team of people. We have such a unique process that I believe is going to give life to lots of meaningful companies. And by being a shareholder, Obviously, in tough markets, it doesn't really matter that you have access to the deals. A lot of people have access to the deals. But in a better market, like I think is coming along, as a shareholder, you're going to have preferred access to each one of these opportunities to invest in. That's, I believe, an important reason to own MDB. And again, our proven execution historically, and I think our momentum is a great reason to start thinking about owning the stock if you don't own the stock already. And we have a lot of hidden value. Our economics are scaling as we get more companies through the pipeline. And I think we really have a moat around our business. They're just, I think, we are in a class unto ourselves in what we do. And so I think that, that gets recognized by companies looking to go public or looking to be positioned as a market leader. And I think that the timing couldn't be better to be a shareholder. I think that hopefully, we're seeing some shifts in the marketplace and people coming back into public venture. So as Tony said, our model has proven, the machine is scaling and the window is opening. So with that, I want to thank everybody and open it up for questions. Tony Dammicci: [Operator Instructions] And at this point, I'd like to welcome George Brandon, MDB's President and Head of Community, who will facilitate the Q&A session. So George, welcome and take it away. George Brandon: Okay. Chris, first question you're going to get it on every conference call. Can you give a little bit of your philosophy on when shareholders could expect to see a dividend, a little of your philosophy on eXoZymes. Obviously, that's performing really well. When would you think we would -- there would be a distribution? What's your philosophy there? Christopher Marlett: Yes, philosophy is we want to see that the company is out and really there's a developed market for the stock. And we don't want a dividend to get in the way of the development of the company. And so right now, the volume is pretty low in eXoZymes and what have you. And I think it's really just a matter of once the company's business model and execution is really clear. There's a broader market for the stock. It would make sense to do a distribution. And so I can't make any predictions, but I think our philosophy is to make those distributions when the company is broader ownership and more trading volume. George Brandon: So a question to follow up on that. If -- as Obviously, eXoZymes is going to be raising money. However, they're going to do that, whether it's a spinout or a new technology. Do we expect MDB, do our shareholders expect to retain the same percentage of ownership as they raise funds? Or how do you see that working out? Christopher Marlett: No, any time you buy a public venture company, they're going to need to raise more capital. and we as shareholders are going to be diluted. Obviously, the better the company does, the less dilution that we suffer. But yes, there's always dilution as companies raise more money and -- but we always work to make sure it's as little as possible. George Brandon: Let's move over to HeartBeam. Look, we're hoping, as they've said on their conference call, they expect to get FDA approval you can look at their balance sheets, how much cash to have. How do you see that playing out, and what do you see MDB's role in and around that? We certainly have right of reverse refusal on funding, just a question on that. Christopher Marlett: No. Listen, I think I think that the philosophy of the Board of the companies has been -- we have to be able to tell people what's going to happen with the FDA before we do raise more money. And I think that, obviously, the FDA is dragged out a little bit longer. But I think we're hopefully at the finish line here. And after you take the uncertainty of FDA approval will be the first 12 lead, first carrying your pocket 12-lead device ever approved by the FDA, which people understandably are skeptical that, that would happen. And so I think, hopefully, that happens. And then I think we take that off the table. And now it's just makes it a lot easier for an investor to make a decision whether they want to invest or not. George Brandon: Got it. Look, we did a whole slide on kind of why I think the stock is where it's at and what's in the portfolio. But the question is, hey, look, we talk about creating value. For those that did the IPO at 12, we're down here in 340 or so. What's your thought on why we're trading where we're at. And I know this is just -- you don't have a crystal ball. You can't see into the hearts of those who own your shares. What's you're kind of -- doing this for a long time, what -- if you were to summarize that -- those reasons, what would they be? Christopher Marlett: Well, I think that the #1 reason is the market for Microcap has been pretty bad. There haven't been -- hasn't been a great space. That's probably the #1 reason. Number 2 reason is that people are -- because of that, people are saying, well, does MDB lost it? Do they have the ability to pick good stuff anymore. Do they matter anymore? And that's a totally legitimate thing. I think the other part of it is now we're getting into -- you're tax selling and people can sell stock and offset their NVIDIA gains with their MDB losses, right? And so I think there's bound to be some tax loss selling. And I think it's -- every one of these companies that we quasi modeled ourselves after at some -- they went -- they would trade from big discounts to big premiums depending upon how people felt about the company at the time. So one of the great companies in the public venture launch business was Safeguard Scientifics back in the '90s, and they would go from trading at a discount to trading at a premium of their liquidation value pretty regularly. And that's just -- it's kind of like a holding, sometimes you get a holding company discount, sometimes you get a holding company premium just purely based on how people feel about you at the time. George Brandon: Yes. Here's a question on -- you made comments on you're bullish on the Microcap market. Certainly, I'm out there. I was at a conference with Keiretsu yesterday in Philadelphia. A number of the companies basically pushed back ongoing public early as the expenses of that. You talked about it a little bit more. Can you give a little bit more color of what makes you think that, that the cost of being public, whether accounting and legal, regulatory, is trending in a way that's positive for more listings. Christopher Marlett: Well, I think that it all comes down to how they're valued in the market. So right now, the companies that are profitable and growing in the Microcap sector are trading at big valuations. They're trading at last time we looked 1.15 PEG ratio. So if they're growing at 35%, they're going to be -- or 30%, they're going to be trading at 35 or so times earnings. And that's higher than what private equity firms are going to pay or and so it just makes sense for them to go public to raise additional capital and -- or if shareholders need liquidity or what have you. So we see it as that -- and there's very few of them out there when we did the screen of companies making a $1 million or more, growing at more than 10% and under $300 million in market value there was 34 companies. If you screen for foreign companies, we just did a foreign screen, and we had like 4,000 companies that fit that. And that's why a lot of these companies are going to want to come to NASDAQ. And they are you're going to see I think a delusion of these companies coming to NASDAQ. And I think we also have an opportunity to find some leaders in foreign markets that want to come public in the U.S. The other aspect of it is what's happened in the private equity, private debt and VC markets has been really amazing to watch. If you look at VC activity today, the big VCs, what are they doing? They're funding these big unicorn AI companies, they're putting in $100 million at a $5 billion valuation. And they're not doing anything like -- they're not putting $3 million or $4 million in a promising medical device or a biotech company right now. And even the ones the big VCs that are still doing the life sciences, they're writing $100 million checks for these opportunities, which we think is just crazy because we don't think that writing a $100 million check for an early-stage company makes a lot of sense. And I think that that's shown in the performance of these funds. And so I think that the investors are not going to be funding these funds much more, whether it be private equity, private debt, what have you, these things, we're now seeing in the private debt market. Companies that they had their debt marked at par. And next day, it's 0. And if you have publicly-traded debt today, you get marked every day. And I think that investors don't want -- they want the transparency and liquidity. I'm in these -- I'm in one of these men's kind of networking groups where we talk about investments. And if you were -- in these groups 2 years ago, they were all talking about these private equity deals we're getting into, I can get you into it, what have you. I can tell you right now, they're not talking about it at all, and you've been going to the Angel conferences and nobody wants to put money in private deals anymore. So I think that -- I think we're going to see a dilution of companies who want to go public. And it's just -- we couldn't be better positioned. George Brandon: So little -- look, I think a little confusion in our history has been big ideas, mostly deep tech. We're still looking at deep tech and doing deep tech technology, big ideas. But the comment here or the question is, but yet our next big idea is a juice company. And one of your questions are, are fruit juices popular now. Can you delineate a little bit. We've got the venture side, we're competing against venture using public venture. But then against private equity to take the best and the brightest from private equity, such as Buda because Buda had a bid from private equity, and we're taking that deal. Can you kind of delineate deep tech versus some of these private equity deals? Christopher Marlett: To be 100% transparent. I mean Buda was a friend -- the CEO is a friend, and he was telling me the story about his company. And we were paying out and sort of pulled together, and he's telling me about it, and he's considering you in private equity. And I said ratio, I think you're a leader of a new beverage category, right? Fresh juice is in less than 5% of markets in America for a reason, you're going to be able to bring this fresh juice to every supermarket in America. I said that's a new category. And anybody that's had pasteurized juice versus fresh juice knows the difference, right? And so it's a category leader, number one, if it's not a category leader, we are not taking it public. That's number one. It will never -- it's usually a technology category. Then you marry the management expertise at the Board level and at the investor level at Buda, these guys created fresh. There's a moat. There's a moat around it, right? These guys know how to do it. You're not going to see PepsiCo go into this business anytime soon. If they're going to go into it, they're probably going to go in it because they buy someone like Buda. So the guys that pioneered fresh, which is now going to be a monster category because anything that's not fresh you can buy from Amazon now. So the reality is that we're launching a category leader with a moat around it in our mind, okay? It's not an actual note like we have with IP with all of our deep tech companies. But there's going to be companies like that, that we can launch that belong in a public venture portfolio, somebody was real funny. There was another -- I won't name the name of the company, but there's another company going public in the, let's call it, the food category that is doing $200 million in revenue. It's backed by private equity type folks, but it's losing a lot of money, right? And it's going public at $1 billion valuation. It's big, right? And so we have a small company, no one thought, geez, these small companies shouldn't go public, but it's profitable. If it's profitable when it's small, just think what happens when it's big. It's like when it gets big, it's going to be even more profitable. And so it's an extraordinary business opportunity. And again, that's what we do is we curate these extraordinary leaders, and that's what our team is doing a great job of doing. George Brandon: Yes. So these profitable companies, this question doesn't apply to it. But can you just give kind of a back of the envelope, when you do a big idea and what you've done in the past, how long it typically takes those companies after they've IPO-ed to establish themselves economically. What have we seeing? Christopher Marlett: Again, I encourage everyone to read the paper that kind of gives a back story on all the companies we've launched historically. But some of them developed very quickly. The stocks do very well quickly, depending upon if it's the -- it captures people's imagination right out of the chute. Some of them take longer. And it's just -- it's really tough to say. And a lot of the things we're doing in biotech, the valuation metrics have nothing to do with revenue. It's all around clinical development. And in some cases, it's revenue that will drive the valuation. But again, it's just -- it's the asymmetric returns that we're looking for. And I think we're old enough. You and I have been doing this for what, 40 years now. So we know when we see it. And we're -- we know what has asymmetric return potential, and we focus in on it. George Brandon: I'm not so sure I know when I see it, which is why I'm asking the question, so I can't answer. So, can you give us some clarity on the PatentVest spinout? What timing one -- best as you can tell, what's the potential over time revenue-wise? And what kind of market value do you think we can see? And how has that been now going to look to shareholders? Christopher Marlett: I'm not going to make any predictions on market value, but I think it could be -- other than to say that it could be seriously substantial. And here's why. So currently, the practice of law, there is not a lawyer you will meet in any practice of law. That isn't completely concerned about how AI is going to have an impact on their business. I can tell you that everything we do from drafting contracts to getting advice now is happening realtime with AI. And I can tell you that law firms are going to have a big, big dent in their revenue line from AI. So when you think about the disruption that's going to occur and how the practice of law is going to change, it is going to be a massive disruption. And I don't think anybody really disagrees with that. The interesting part about what we did, either we were smart or we were lucky is by believing that the ABS program in Arizona might be a great way for nonlawyers to be in the practice of law to align our interest with the clients and specifically focus on IP law because IP law is -- IP prosecution about a $25 billion a year business. that has not been a great business for the major law firms. But it's a $25 billion of your business that is a federal practice. So whether it's litigation or patent prosecution, it's a federal practice. Why is that important? It's because the -- a lot of the states and the lawyers in these other states don't want to lose business to an ABS law firm. But because it's a federal practice, you can -- anyone can practice patent law in any state. So the reality is, is when you look at what ABS represents as an opportunity, when you marry AI and the ABS platform patent law is by far the best business to be in if you're going to be in Arizona with these ABS law firms. And in fact, now you've got people like KPMG and other major consulting firms figuring out, hey, we need to start an Arizona law firm. I can tell you that -- and then now you marry AI with this and our ability to take PatentVest and put Agentic technology or large language models on top of our existing patent data, we have the ability to provide unparalleled support for those, I call them in imprimatur attorneys. So now if you're an attorney that wins in the court room, you're an attorney that really knows patent strategy, you now have the ability to do what you do even better, more efficiently, more importantly, efficiently. So you could see a patent litigation, a patent litigation that would normally cost $10 million to get to trial costs $5 million if managed properly. What does that do? It completely changes the economics around litigation. It also changes the economics of whether a firm can take something on contingency or not and align their interest with their clients. That's a game changer. We are going to be at the forefront of that, and we're going to be a leader in making that happen in the field of IP law. And that's what's so exciting. And we're having discussions with, I would call it, these imprimatur lawyers that -- where they see the ability to partner with PatentVest or join PatentVest to basically participate in the disruption of patent law. And so it's a big, big deal. George Brandon: Look, we got about 5 minutes here. And the questions are piling up. I'm not going to be able to get to all of them, but I'll try to answer them privately, if I can. I guess one of the questions here does MDB need more robust investor relations efforts to address enterprise stock given the value of eXoZymes and beat and the other positions in our portfolio. And... Christopher Marlett: Yes. I would tell you, yes is the answer, but it's not -- I think it's upon us to go tell the story more. So we've been heads down. We're not -- we don't have a very deep organization, people-wise, we're very efficient. And we've been really focused on just launching new companies and really keeping our heads down in a really difficult environment. And to some extent, I feel like you're pushing on a string when people don't want to buy Microcap stocks anyways. But I think that, yes, we need to get out and tell the story more broadly. We went to our first Microcap Conference, the LD conference -- LD Micro Conference. It was great. I went and saw people I haven't seen in 20 years. Unfortunately, the people buying Microcaps the average age was older than me. And so I think that a new generation of investors are going to start to get involved hopefully in this space. And I think that it was great. I got up and gave a presentation. We have, what, 20 one-on-one meetings, George and I did. It was great to talk to people, and I think we need to do more of that. Selectively, I do spend most of my time working with these companies to get them launched. But we do need to spend more time out talking to people. And Investor Relations, what I've found is have a great business, communicate it well and communicate it often. We're trying to do a better job of communicating it well. We're doing a better job of making it a good business. It's been a great business historically. It's been a really bad business the last few years, and communicating it often, we're working on so... George Brandon: So we've got about 3 minutes here, Chris. But a question -- I get it a lot out there on really eXoZyme, we really thought that we would have a few deals in the bag here. And where we're at right now, and I know you feel very comfortable with the management there and where they're going and the opportunities. Can you talk a little bit about when you kind of, one, why you think it's taken longer than what we had originally anticipated? What was kind of the shift there? And two, why do you think it's -- we got a bright future ahead? Christopher Marlett: I think it was a pivot that probably wasn't communicated as clearly as it could have been. And the pivot was you're out talking to people that want to make new molecules in pharma and other businesses. And they can give you a fee-for-service business where they'll pay you some amount of money to get started and you can spend a lot of time talking to them. If you look at the other Symbio companies and provided services or enzymatic people like Codexis and others, the business models were pretty challenged. And we came to the conclusion that we can make molecules that other people can't. So is it a better business model to launch new companies based upon that? Or is it a better business model to do fee-for-service and try and get license fees from other people. And we decided it's better to launch companies that have a ton of value. So we have 2 platforms that we think we can launch out of eXoZymes that have $1 billion market value potential. So in other words, every company that we launch out of MDB we believe, has $1 billion market cap potential. We have 2 more that we can launch out of eXoZymes that we believe have that, that are massively game-changing. And so there was a pivot. What does that mean? Now it's get those companies stood up and then those companies will go and do license agreements and partnering after they've developed a bit more. And I think that that's been the shift that hasn't been communicated. But I think Michael is doing a great job and the team at eXoZymes is doing a great job of positioning the company for success. I think it's going to become fairly apparent, fairly soon. George Brandon: Actually, I don't know if people are aware, but our former partner Lou Basenese did a great interview with Michael last week. I think it came out a couple of days ago. It really kind of goes through that what you just described in 30 minutes. I think they did a pretty good job explaining it. So that's an asymmetrical upside on those 2, whether it's cannabinoids or NCT. That's -- you're about ready -- we're closing in the process of just closing and announcing in Paulex. Can you talk about -- this last the question, we're out of time after this, Chris, but elevator pitch, why is that asymmetrical? What do you like about it? How much we're going to own of it? What's the game plan going forward? Christopher Marlett: It's super simple. This pathway that has been focused on by the folks at Mount Sinai and others, which basically takes breaks off of being able to produce beta cells is -- we've got a drug that we believe is the best drug for this pathway to enable beta cell production. It's quite frankly, if you can reinvigorate beta cell production and produce insulin. It's the biggest thing going. So the asymmetric upside is -- it's super straightforward. It's a $40 million post-money valuation after Phase Ib, which should be about a year, we start producing beta cells in patients. I'd be shocked if -- it's got to be a multibillion-dollar valuation. So while it is a bit risky, the upside -- you get paid with the upside. And I mean, it's significant. And we've got an unbelievable team. These are the guys that made prevention worth $2.9 billion in the sale, and we get to partner with them again. And I'm not saying that this is going to be the only drug. We might have another drug come into the pipeline, but these are the kind of guys that can execute clinically. One, they've got great pickers. They have the ability to pick something great. And number two, they have the ability to execute, get it through trials and get it to success. So we're super excited to be partnered with Francisco and Miguel. We think that they're superstars and we own a nice chunk of this company. I think it's going to be 6 million or 7 million shares. So I don't know if... George Brandon: What's the timeline on it, Chris, how long we got to wait to figure it out? Christopher Marlett: I think don't quote me exactly, but it's -- we'll be in the clinic next year, and we'll start to get clinical results pretty quickly. George Brandon: Well, with that, that's the last question. I didn't get to all of my, tried to reply specifically if you didn't hear the answer to your question, hopefully, there's a reply in your Q&A. Appreciate all the questions, very great questions. And I'm going to throw it over to you, Chris, to close it. And Tony, you can take it from there. Christopher Marlett: All right, everyone. Well, thanks again for hanging in there. It's been a great time. The team has done a great job at MDB, we're slugging it out to make this a big success. So we're excited for the future. And we want to thank you for being here and hanging in there and being part of the community. So thanks again. Tony Dammicci: And thank you, everybody, for attending today's presentation. This will conclude today's conference call.
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