Softcat Stock

Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us today. We're going to be discussing the acquisition that we announced yesterday by Softcat of GDT and also give you an update on our current trading as well. I'm Graham Charlton, Chief Executive of Softcat, and I'll start by talking about the transaction, the strategic rationale around that.

And then I'll hand to Katie Mecklenburgh, our CFO, who will take you through some of the structure, funding and financial aspects of the deal as well.

We'll have plenty of time for Q&A after all of that, too. I think most of you know the company very well and have had a chance to look at the presentation deck that we put available online and a chance to digest that afterwards. What I'm not going to do today is walk through all of the slides individually. We'll light on a couple of key ones, which will allow me to explain the reason that we've taken this step, some of the key aspects behind it as well.

So, if we could turn to the first slide, please. We'll use this one to set the step that we've taken in the acquisition in the context of our strategy because, of course, the important thing to appreciate is that this is not a change in direction for Softcat. This is an acceleration of a path that we've been on for a long time now. And this slide is the best way that we can capture our strategy on a single page.

And we very deliberately start with why, as you all know, our people and our culture are the most important thing about Softcat and they have been the driving force behind our success, and that's an important part of the steps that we are taking today as well. But in recent times, the next slide we used, I think, last year in our full-year results presentation to lay out as succinctly as we can the direction that we are now taking. So, we're very clear within this about that what we do for whom, where and how we do it.

And within the where and within the ambition that we have to provide a leading global offering, we've been very explicit about the interest that we have in the U.S. market for some time now. And that interest is entirely customer-led. As our business has grown, become broader, more complex and capable for larger customers, the demands from those customers to do work for them in international markets has grown and grown, particularly in the U.S.

And so for 5 or 6 years now, we've been building capability there and looking at the market in what I previously called a no-lose effort because by looking at the market, becoming familiar with providers there and how that market operates, the similarities and differences to the U.K., it's informed the organic build that we've been doing there anyway.

And we've always been very clear that if and only if we found the right target, one that met a very high bar of criteria that we set, then we have the ability to act and accelerate as well. So some people have asked me during the course of the last few days, why now? It's not a question of timing.

This is a question of having found the right group of people with the same operating ethos, a very similar strategy that wants to join forces with Softcat and be part of this vision and ambition that we have for the future. And so we have these 4 growth engines within our strategy. And the combination with GDT materially strengthens all of them. In the sales side, we get a scaled, capable, proven sales team on the ground in the U.S. able to serve our customers across the U.S. and the broader Americas.

Within the broader offering, GDT has a strategically important deep capability in a very, very relevant part of modern infrastructure. Their depth of networking and data center capability complements Softcat's own. They have carrier-grade integration center that they own and operate and bring a level of architecture and delivery capability that we do not have.

On the operational excellence side, this is something actually that we weren't looking for within our criteria, but the Bangalore operation that GDT has built and established over the last 5 years gives us an access to one of the most exciting technology talent markets in the world.

And once we've spent time with the GDT team out in Bangalore, which is 250 people with about 180 of those working on the service delivery side, right from architecture through implementation and into the managed service side and also 60 people on the business operations side.

Once we've seen the way that team has been built, the integration it has with the U.S. offering, the affinity it has for the GDT brand and culture, it was something that we realized that even if this acquisition didn't go ahead, it was something that we, Softcat, if we ever wanted to achieve our true potential, would need to try and replicate in some regards as well.

And so that talent center in Bangalore, those 250 people is something we can invest in and continue to build to serve not only the U.S. market, but our U.K. and Ireland customers in time as well. And then special culture, I've already alluded to this. But again, we've been clear that we would only ever make an acquisition like we did with the business that we bought a few years ago in the U.K. around data services, Oakland.

The affinity of operating ethos and culture has been a key factor in this deal. And that combination that we did with Oakland and the 70 people from that business, which has gone fantastically well over the last 2 years, there's a very similar feel about this deal. The strategy that GDT has is exactly the strategy that Softcat has been pursuing over the last 20 or 30 years to broaden its offering, look after customers, but it's like we do that through starting with a focus on our own people.

When I first met the GDT leadership team in Texas, it reminded me very much of walking into the Softcat senior leadership team for the first time 11.5 years ago. You could tell this was a group of people who enjoyed working together. We're enjoying winning together. There was no politics at play. There was a real feeling of team spirit.

And the more that we've spent time with them, and I'll expand on this probably more as well in the Q&A, but we've been -- we've known GDT for 4 years. I first met their CEO, Sean, 4 years ago as he was taking up the role back in New York on some market research that we were doing. And we could see the strategy that they were laying out, and we followed their story since.

And when we proactively engaged with them back in January or February, and we met the broader team, there was an immediate excitement on both sides about what we could build together. And we've worked very closely with Sean, his leadership team, and layers of management over the last 6 or 7 months, building the joint value creation plan that we think our businesses can now execute together.

So, we have gotten to know their people in real depth over that time. And the ethos that they have around people, care for people, care for customers, and doing both of those things to drive a successful business, there's a strong resonance between us on the cultural side. So we're really excited about all of the aspects of the deal for that reason. And so if we move on to the next slide, I'll summarize, therefore, what we think GDT brings to Softcat.

So they bring a highly capable leadership team with that cultural alignment that I've mentioned. They, the leadership team and the broader business have a proven track record in the U.S. market. They bring deep networking and data center skills that they've applied into an established customer base across the upper mid-market and enterprise corporate segments.

They have terrific partnerships with key vendors such as Cisco, NVIDIA, NetApp and top-level accreditations across them and other vendors. And I've mentioned the business or the operation in Bangalore, which provides us with access to a talent market and helps create across the 3 service centers that we'll now have in the U.K., the U.S. and in Bangalore, an ability to provide 24/7 service delivery and support to our customers.

And so to summarize what the combination brings to all parties, if we turn on to the next slide, we think that this is a combination that's so complementary that we end up with a stronger Softcat, a stronger GDT. And together, we provide an offering to customers that neither business can replicate in isolation.

Softcat is stronger because our U.K. and Irish customers get immediate access to the fulfillment capabilities and capacity in the U.S. and the broader Americas that GDT brings. They bring a deeper level of infrastructure and networking capability that fits right in the heart of areas where we already operate, but bringing incremental parts to that offering.

And they have vendor relationships that are in common with ours. And immediately, we're a stronger business for our partners that we're already working with. GDT gets immediate access to the Softcat vendor relationships. I mentioned that GDT are building their capability and broadening their offering. They've been doing that very successfully over the last 4 years under the ownership of HIG.

And we are the perfect owner to help them with that effort, whether it's vendor relationships or on our broader IT solutions offering. The path they are on is the one that Softcat has been treading for the last 20 or 30 years. So moving into new vendor relationships, creating new service offerings, creating new sales motions is something that we have been doing for a long time now, and we can help GDT build their offering in exactly the same way.

And of course, the U.S. customers get the benefit of Softcat's fulfillment capability in the U.K. and Ireland, Europe and the Eastern Far East that we've been building that capability in as well. And together, we can provide for large and complex customers with international needs one of only a handful -- we're one of only a handful of providers now that can do true global fulfillment around deep capabilities across the whole span of modern infrastructure.

And of course, all of this is underpinned, as we've mentioned a few times now, by the alignment of culture, the people-first ethos that we have and the customer-centric nature of our operations. So very happy to take more questions on all of those aspects later in the Q&A.

But for now, I will hand you to Katie, who will talk through some of the financial aspects of the deal.

Thank you, Graham, and good morning, everyone. Importantly, GDT brings increased scale and value to Softcat, enhancing our U.S. proposition and allowing us to improve our global relevance and delivery capability. On a U.S. GAAP basis, in the current financial year to December '26, forecast gross profit is expected to be circa $240 million and adjusted EBITDA around $80 million. And the group is strongly cash generative with a structurally similar cash conversion to Softcat. We also note that the accounting policy used by GDT and their U.S. peers differs from Softcat's with the core difference relating to revenue recognition on multiyear contracts.

When this change is applied to GDT, it will have the effect of lowering GP and EBITDA growth in FY '26 and increasing the growth rates over the next few years with the impact washing through over a circa 3-year period. Our policy more closely aligns profit with cash. As you'll see on the right, the acquisition of GDT will provide us with greater networking and security capabilities while retaining strong incumbent positions in public cloud and data center and workplace.

And while the U.K. will remain the core focus of the business, the acquisition provides greater diversification with a fifth of the combined business in the U.S. I'll now touch on the financing and structure of the deal. Softcat will pay a confirmed purchase price of $1.05 billion or GBP 785 million in cash on a cash- and debt-free basis with normalized levels of net working capital.

The consideration will be financed through cash on the balance sheet of GBP 100 million, new debt facilities that include a GBP 100 million term loan and an expanded RCF of GBP 450 million. And in terms of the margin, it is circa 100 bps over SONIA when leverage is below 1.5x. There has also been a successful equity placing via an accelerated bookbuild of circa GBP 350 million, representing less than 10% of the issued share capital.

The business will continue to deliver organic growth across both the U.K. and the U.S. with the GDT acquisition expected to deliver in the range of high single-digit to low double-digit underlying EPS accretion in the first full fiscal year of ownership, assuming a completion during FY '27 and a medium-term tax benefit.

On closing, we anticipate net debt leverage of 1.3x with a clear pathway to below 1x by July 28, in line with our new target leverage range of 0.5 to 1x. Our capital allocation policy is not changing. We will continue to prioritize organic growth and maintain our progressive ordinary dividend policy with any excess cash once we're at a net leverage range, then allocated to strategic investments or returned to shareholders.

And we've also announced a trading update, which I will run through next. Softcat continued to trade well during the fourth quarter, delivering broad-based growth across technology areas and customer segments. As a result, the Board now expects to deliver high-teens growth in full-year underlying operating profit, up from mid-teens previously with gross profit growth moderately above this.

The group also remains strongly cash-generative with FY '26 cash conversion expected to be towards the top end of our guided range of 85% to 95%. Softcat operates in a significant and growing market and continues to invest to drive future market share gains. Looking ahead and excluding the contribution from GDT, the Board expects to deliver high-single-digit underlying operating profit growth in FY '27.

I'll now hand back to Graham to summarize.

Thank you, Katie. So yes, hopefully, very clear rationale for why we're taking this step, something that we've talked about for a number of years now. As I mentioned in the opening comments, it's not a question of timing. This is a question of having found the right group of people that we think can accelerate the path that Softcat was already on with the capabilities, but also the cultural outlook and ambition that matches our own.

We are both experiencing strong growth, have good momentum in our business. So this combination is coming from a position of strength, and we're bringing together highly complementary businesses as well. So we're very excited about the future, both on the Softcat side and the GDT side of this combination and looking forward to a long and successful future together in a market that we think is as exciting as any in the world to operate in right now. So looking forward to taking your questions as well. We'll hand it over to the lines.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is coming from Joe George from JPMorgan.

Congratulations on the acquisition. A few questions from me, please. Firstly, just on GDT. On the 30% gross profit growth rate through 2026, you touched on the U.S. GAAP to IFRS conversion. But is there anything else for us to strip out or add back there? I'm just trying to get a sense of a normalized gross profit growth for this business. So it would be great to get your views on that, please.

And then secondly, just on GDT. Graham, could you just maybe expand on exactly what attributes of GDT stood out and cleared that very high bar that you set for acquisitions? And then the last question is just on the organic side of the house. The FY '27 guidance for high single-digit EBIT growth, I guess it's in line with the usual outlook, but also I'm aware that we're kind of growing off a larger base of FY '26. So can you talk about some of your assumptions built into the guide, particularly relating to larger deals, component pricing, supply chain, that sort of thing? That would be great.

Thanks, James. Let me just kick off on the first one, then I'll hand over to Graham for the second and then maybe come back. So the simple answer is there are no one-offs in the GDT FY '26 numbers. So we'll have the complexity of moving it on to our own year-end and under our own accounting policies, but nothing else to call out.

Yes. And thanks as well, Joe, for the questions. On the attribute side, in summary format, capability, cultural alignment, scale and established nature of their business, the Bangalore operation, as I mentioned as well, and also the ambition of the management team and the company. So on the capability side, we knew that any target that we look at in the U.S. would have a narrower range of capability than Softcat almost by definition. I've talked many times about how I think our capability is broad and deep as anyone in the global market, certainly for customers in the U.K. and Ireland.

And we've been establishing that business over 34 relentless years of organic growth and building that offering. So we knew we'd be starting in a narrower set of capabilities. But the capability that GDT has is profound and it's in the right place, and we can build from there. It's got high relevance to modern IT infrastructure. They have already, over the past 4 years under the management team that's in place, been pursuing that strategy of broadening out.

They've added compute, storage, and security capabilities, and we can accelerate that as well. So strong capabilities in the right place, building out from there. The Bangalore operation, the access to talent is a huge plus point in the deal for us, met the team, spent a couple of days with that team out there, love the culture of that team, the way it's integrated with the U.S. So that was a fact that once we've seen it, as I mentioned, we couldn't unsee it.

The potential that gives to Softcat for us to realize our ambition over time is really very exciting. The most important point was that cultural alignment as well though, like I said, this is a team of people who enjoy working together, got great momentum, reminds me of Softcat in many, many ways. And we know those people now, having worked with them very closely over the 6 or 7 months. So that was an absolute gating factor.

We had to find a group of people who are excited to join us, shared that care for people in their culture, and had huge ambition. And also the established scale. So again, I talked previously, there's a couple of logics that you could apply to Softcat acquiring in the U.S. One says, start small, you've not done it before and build around it.

That creates an awful lot of single points of failure and effort and also doesn't make you scaled and relevant in what is the biggest market in the world until a lot of time and effort has passed. So what we've acquired with the scale and track record of GDT is not just a leadership team, but a broader management team with real depth with established customer and vendor relationships with an established brand built around capability and engineering.

And we can put wind in the sails of that already very successful operation. I mentioned a few times that the management team are very excited to join Softcat. We're very excited to join forces with them. I know the reaction in both businesses yesterday was terrific. The broader teams are really excited about what we can create together now on a global scale. So the ambition and scale is also a big factor.

The practical points as well like them being they operate coast to coast, which is a terrific first step to be able to take. But the fact they're based on the east side, largely based on the east side of the U.S. was something we needed so that there's overlap in the working day as well because while we don't intend to crash together and integrate the businesses, we do want to work very closely and build deeper collaboration over time to drive value out of the joint value creation plan that the 2 teams have built over the last 6 or 7 months of working together.

So those are the key factors. They were laid out, and we've been looking at them for 5 or 6 years, and they've met the bar and added other things in there that we weren't even really sure that we needed and wanted. But once we saw the GDT operation, we knew that it was exactly the right fit for us.

Shall I answer the third question. So Jake, we'll give more color when we do the results in October, so just under a month's time. But clearly, you're right, we have had brilliant growth for the last couple of years, both on the base business, but supplemented by a couple of those extraordinarily large deals.

We don't have anything of that scale in the current FY '27 pipeline, but those deals that we've referred to recently above GBP 0.5 million of gross profit that we continue to get really strong growth in and a great trajectory there. So we're sort of confident of that number. We've seen great base business performance as well as those extraordinary deals in FY '26. So yes, confident in the number, but we'll give you more color in October.

Next we'll be going to Charlie Brennan of the Jefferies.

I'm actually just going to ask a couple of clarifications, if I can. You've referred to the difference in accounting a couple of times. I guess you won't have finalized the full accounting detail. But can you just give us a broad sense of the magnitude of the benefit from multi-year deals in the latest period? And I guess following on from that, I haven't heard you articulate what you think the forward-looking normalized growth rate is going to be for GDT.

And then on a separate topic, I guess you said you're not going to integrate the businesses, so it doesn't really matter. But I'm under the impression that U.S. sales commissions are typically much more generous than they are in the U.K. Do you think that's a problem for the culture integration? And do you have any plans to harmonize those commission structures going forward?

And just very lastly, apologies, you referred to the management of GDT a couple of times. Can you just talk to the incentives that you're putting in place? I guess share-based payments are perhaps more common in the U.S. Should we assume that there's a share-based comp implication of incentivizing the management to stay going forward?

As let me kick off. And you're right, Charlie, we have not yet managed to work through the accounting policy. We're going to need to go contract by contract. So what we have done is sort of estimate -- but worst-case condition that we think and we imagine this is prudent, but the number that we've used, and we've used it in those EPS numbers that we've given as well, is a GBP 10 million reduction in FY '26, that's GDT's FY '26, but then that will sort of smooth over the next 3 years. So you see a decline in the '26 growth rate and then an increase in out a couple of years. And as I said, it kind of washes out in that time period. So clearly...

Does that drop all the way through? So it's GBP 10 million less on gross profit and GBP 10 million less on EBITDA?

That's an EBITDA, gross profit number is slightly different just you net of commissions, but you can say GBP 10 million on both. It won't be far wrong. And as I say, at this point in time, it's an approximation. So yes, we will obviously give more information when we've had a chance to work through all of the details. In terms of how we're thinking about sort of that medium- to long-term growth rate, so you'll be very familiar with the Softcat growth formula of low double-digit gross profit growth, high single-digit operating profit growth. Make complete sense.

We're less than a 5% market share in a growing market and therefore, being able to have that headroom to invest to build future market share has been one of the things that has absolutely underpinned our long-term success. And if you think now about the big business, it's as relevant as ever before. We have now a larger addressable market, a smaller market share. And therefore, that formula, we will now apply to the larger business as well, so a bigger base.

And that's how we're thinking about it and really excited about being able to deliver on that. In terms of the short term, the next couple of years, we're going to plan prudently around mid-single-digit operating profit growth, gross profit just slightly ahead of that, to make sure that we have got the absolute focus to make sure we set everything up for the future. Those numbers are the GDT numbers for the next couple of years, and that's the way that we're thinking about it, a good, prudent assumption.

And I'll pick up on the other 2, Charlie. Can you just clarify the third one? Was it solely around sales commissions? Or was there a broader aspect to it as well?

No, just sales commissions, I'm guessing there's a higher payout ratio in the U.S. How are your U.K. salespeople going to feel about that? And do you think over the medium term, you need to harmonize those onto the same commission stream?

So we've mentioned that the management team, we intend to retain all of the people and the operating structures that exist in both businesses. So we're not going to change the way either business operates. The beauty of this is that both have a structure that works in that local market. And what we're going to do as we build the businesses together is retain the operations that work in those local markets.

So the earnings potential that our people have in GDT in the U.S. and in Softcat in the U.K. is profound. They've got a great chance to earn good money for good performance on both sides of the fence. So we don't see the need to change the way that they operate. There will be new mechanisms that we put in place because the way this creates value is by centralizing and creating shared services where and only where it creates value.

So there'll be evolution to those schemes as there always is within our business, our business never stands still in the way that we do commission schemes or anything else for that matter. So there will be evolution and a chance for us to innovate that operating model as we go forward. But we're not intending to harmonize the 2 businesses onto one common set of operating rules. Then you asked about management incentives.

We thought very carefully about retention and incentivization because, as I've mentioned a few times now, we want to retain all of the people in GDT. That's the leadership team, the management team and everybody else. And so the structure that we have for our leaders and managers and people in Softcat will enable us to put in place a very attractive earnings opportunity for people in GDT as well.

For our leadership team, there is a strong stock-based element to that, and we've got some good mechanisms within that, that we can use for GDT too. So that will be over the short-, medium- and long-term horizons as well with different aspects of those schemes applying, as you might expect.

And just for our modeling purposes, should we assume that you'll take the cost of those share schemes through the P&L as you currently do? Or should we assume that they're big enough that you'll call them out as perhaps separate line items?

So Charlie, within sort of the base -- the historic financials, there was the GDT scheme. And then -- so we just will replace that with a Softcat scheme, the quantums will be roughly the same magnitude.

Next question will be coming from Tintin Stormont of Deutsche Numis.

First on GDT. Historically, they delivered minus 7% GP growth in '24, then flat in 2025. And obviously, on the basis -- on the same basis, they're now on track to deliver 30% GP growth in calendar '26. Can you just talk about what has changed the trajectory? And I guess, a different way of asking some of the similar questions that was asked already. What's the assumed GP growth rate in FY '27 and FY '28 that you're making implied by the high single-digit, low double-digit EPS accretion in FY '28?

And then just secondly, I'll just ask it now. Prior to the more recent contribution of large solution deals in Softcat, there was strong diversification at Softcat with no one customer accounting for more than 2% of GP. What's the current concentration -- customer concentration like at GDT on that $240 million of GP in 2026? And finally, an integration question, not on comp, but obviously, you're making significant investments in your CRM and HR systems as well as AI tools. Could you comment perhaps on sort of kind of the level of sophistication of the systems within GDT and if there's anything that you're doing on that side of things?

**** Okay. Thanks, Tintin. I'll have a go at a lot of those elements, but I'm sure Katie will top up on a few, particularly on the go-forward guidance. So H.I.G.'s owned GDT for the past 4 years. H.I.G. acquired a mature, very capable and scaled business around networking capability into telco carriers. The strategy over the last 4 years has diversified what was a large and cyclical business into something with more sustainable growth pathways. That is what appeals to us.

And as we know very well, when you bring in cohorts of new account managers and broader offerings, broaden offerings, you need time to develop customer intimacy and trust in those new offerings and you build strong growth, but off a very low base. So in the work that we've done to look through the top-line P&L numbers, we can see evidence of customer growth, GP per customer growth, broadening revenue streams underneath what were some big comps in the legacy business in the '23, '24 years.

So, you get a profile that looks -- well, as you've described, which is flat, to then increasing and strong growth in more recent times. But our diligence work, both around looking at the metrics under those numbers, but also the commercial due diligence with customers and their partners shows how strong the sustainable growth pathways coming through have been.

And we see that in our business. It's a pattern we recognize. And so we are very confident in the growth that they are delivering and how we can build upon that. And I'll maybe just pause slightly as Katie talks about how we think about that going forward, and then I'll come back on some of the other points.

Sure. Thanks, Graham. So in, as I said, for GDT for the next couple of years, we are taking a prudent approach, and we're going to plan at mid-single-digit operating profit growth with gross profit sort of slightly above that. Hopefully, that makes sense.

And on customer concentration, I mean, GDT is a narrower and smaller business than ours, as we've said. And so there is a degree more customer concentration, again, because of the history that, that business has had, too. But it's not wildly different to Softcat's customer concentration. I think GDT's top 10 customers account for something like 30%, 35% of gross profit. The equivalent number for Softcat is about 15%. They have 700 customers.

We have 10,000. So customer concentration, we're entirely comfortable with, and we're very excited about the growth potential in that existing customer base as we broaden the offering, but there's a whole ton of new customers that we can help them work into as well. On the systems side, they're in very good shape. So the due diligence work we've done there has shown they've got modern systems in place. We do not need to carry out any remedial work or heavy lifting integration. They've got a good modern contemporary base of systems to work from.

Next question will be coming from Bharath Nagaraj of Cantor Fitzgerald.

Hope you can hear me -- broadly speaking, could you talk about why you think this is the right timing? I appreciate that you said it's not exactly about the timing, but in the context of the ongoing debate around ROI on the AI data center CapEx, given that we've already seen a few years of large CapEx deployments?

And thirdly, worries -- recent worries regarding how resource-intensive the data centers are, why do you think this is the right kind of timing for it, especially given the growth rates have been a bit lumpy as the previous person mentioned? And secondly, could you provide some color on the medium-term tax benefits that you mentioned? And also any color on the broad split of software, services and hardware for GDT?

Okay. Thank you. On the timing, why is now right? And I think you're talking particularly about the market forces as well. So yes, there's a lot of debate around what's happening with the AI build-out. Now that means an awful lot of different things to a lot of different people. So just break the market down slightly. Clearly, a lot of what's been badged as AI investment. And by the way, where AI starts and stops and where infrastructure and classic infrastructure starts and stops is a very gray area.

What we do is provide infrastructure. That infrastructure now has to be capable of running AI tools as well, which means there's more complexity and more capacity needed in it, but it's still the same product. So the AI build-out is another way of saying there's huge demand for infrastructure, which is what we do. That demand that is newest is being built by the hyperscalers and there's a very particular kind of data center. And that's where the volatility is and might be in the future.

Neither Softcat nor GDT are exposed to the hyperscaler market. Beyond that, you have the Neo clouds, which is a new and interesting area of demand and both Softcat and GDT target and have success in that space. But the area that we are both Softcat and GDT most interested and capable for is enterprise infrastructure. That is the most nascent and building and sustainable area of demand.

And that is really just another way of saying our customers need better and bigger infrastructure into the future, and we will be the ones to build it for them. So that sustainable growth in enterprise infrastructure, which we see in structural growth for the long term is where both Softcat and GDT play.

And so the timing of this combination from that perspective couldn't be better because this is happening at a time when modern infrastructure has to be diversified. It has to be hosted in different locations, the public cloud, on-premises. Those on-premises locations have to be in the best location internationally, which brings all sorts of considerations as well.

So creating a combination like we have with deep capability to implement, design, and manage infrastructure from end-to-end from the device to the cloud, whether it's in a publicly owned shed or on-premises, how to connect, secure it, and network it. That is what we do, and we can now do it anywhere globally. So the timing of the combination from that point of view, we think, is really excellent.

You also asked, I think, within that about software hardware services split. I'll let Katie come to the tax benefits in a minute, but I think you also said about software hardware services. And so just take the opportunity to touch on that. GDT's business looks very like Softcat's business in that regard. The splits are somewhat different, but that's just because their offering is narrower than ours, and we've got a diversification and dilution to some elements as well.

So on the services side, GDT's GP is about 25% services, ours is 15%. Theirs is concentrated in professional services, architecture and managed and maintenance services. We have a slightly smaller business in the professional service space because of the nature of the 2 -- the difference between the 2 operations. Their hardware is 45%, ours is more like 35%. Their software is 25%, ours is more like 50%. But we think about our offering in the same way.

Customers don't ask us for software or hardware. They ask us for infrastructure. They ask us for networking, for data center, for security. And both GDT and Softcat think about that offering in exactly the same way, which is a customer needs solutions, and that's a combination of software, hardware, advice and support, and that's what we provide. So the mix that we deliver to customer is an output of meeting the requirements that they have. And that's how we build our offering, not by targeting software or hardware. We target delivering solutions that work around the right advice.

I'll let Katie maybe talk about the tax benefits.

Yes. So the acquisition will bring a tax asset. We still have, as you'd expect, quite a lot of work to do on that at this point in time. But it's that tax asset is a key part of the EPS range that we've given. So when we have had a chance to work through it all in more detail, we'll give a little bit more guidance on it.

Can I just ask a follow-up. In terms of NVIDIA, what kind of products are you reselling exactly just so that I understand better.

Sorry, I couldn't hear it. In terms of which area?

In terms of NVIDIA, what are the products that GDT are reselling?

Okay. So GDT like Softcat work with NVIDIA directly, but also through other OEMs. So their InfiniBand product and so on is something that they will work directly with NVIDIA around like we do. But equally, the NVIDIA chips and products are in the other OEM providers, too. So our partnership with NVIDIA is around technical resource services and capability to represent their technology and its broader ecosystem within a range of the solutions that we provide. So yes, similar relationship with NVIDIA, both within Softcat and GDT.

Our next question coming from Andrew Ripper from Panmure Liberum.

A question for Graham. Can you just spend a bit more time trying to bring to life for us the value creation plan and give us a sense of the -- I guess, the priorities in order of magnitude of the potential benefit from both, I guess, customer synergies, either U.K. into the U.S. through the stronger offering or U.S. into U.K. non-U.S. and vendor synergies and leveraging India, which is most important of those sort of 4 in terms of sort of realizing the potential of the deal?

Andrew, yes, thanks for the question. It's a really good one. And it's -- you've touched on some of the more immediate priorities that we have within that value creation plan. Certainly, and I mentioned when I was talking about the combination saying we immediately have access to the fulfillment. And that's an obvious place to start. So we -- this combination is, first and foremost, driven by our desire to be more capable for our customers in the U.S. So it is a priority for us to make sure that the way we can collaborate around sales efforts for those international customers is one of the first priorities that we'll tackle.

Today, we get about 2% of our gross profit from operating in the U.S. That part of our business can grow at a materially quicker rate than our broader business for many years as we deploy that new capability and find the ways to build capacity into that as well. We're doing work to quantify the reverse opportunity, but GDT operating in that upper mid-market and enterprise space in the U.S. means that they do have a lot of customers with operations across the U.K. and into Europe, too.

So we think that multinational sales opportunity is a material benefit and could be low single-digit percentage point share of our businesses into the future, which is quite material on the base that we start with. Customer synergies, there's not a lot of customer. There's almost no customer overlap between the 2 businesses right now. So we don't have the headache of any integration problems there, but we do have the benefit of finding the opportunities that we've just talked about.

Vendor synergies are profound because, as you know, the vendors operate common schemes worldwide. They do so through individual jurisdictions in different countries, but the schemes they're operating in are similar. And increasingly, because of the trends that we've alluded to, vendors have global schemes that are particular for partners with international capabilities, and there's not many of those. Because we are the biggest or one of the biggest providers to our vendors, which covers the whole span of vendors, because we're the biggest provider in the U.K. for them, we get global attention.

We are on their global advisory boards, and we now have significant scale and capability in the biggest market that they have in the world. So our leverage with vendors, our ability to collaborate with them, share data with them, work on customer opportunities with real scale and capability, that will be transformed by this deal over time.

And then I think you mentioned the India operation, too. This will be an immediate priority for investment. Also, GDT are already continuing to build and develop that operation. The know-how that we have across a broader services range can be applied to that investment. They already have very well-established mechanisms to create pods that are dedicated to customers within their service operations. It won't be very difficult for us to extend that mechanism to working for customers in the U.K. like they do in the U.S.

But equally, what we want to do here is make sure that there's stability and continuity. So with all of these things, we'll look at the right phasing and pathway to turn on some of these streams. But we are spoiled for choice in how to create value. And now as the businesses come together, that value creation plan will have a dedicated team built around it, and we'll start to knit together the businesses where we can create value most quickly. But you've hit on some of the key priorities for us there, and there's real value to be found in the short term.

Just to elaborate on the vendor point, if you took something like Cisco, which I think is GDT's biggest vendor one of your top 3 or certainly used to be. How -- in terms of sort of the economics, is it a sort of softer benefit? Or is there a hard economic benefit from being more important to Cisco?

It's a mixture, but it's more the former. So a lot of the benefits we have from the strong relationships with the vendors is how we work together on the customers' behalf. So how we prioritize the allocation of resources to opportunities given the relationship that we have and the opportunity that we have together. So the rebate schemes and the other co-funding schemes that they operate are standard.

But particularly on the co-funding side, though, the stronger our opportunity together, the more investment we can place to create new skills and build capacity and teams. That soft power, as you call it, has real material benefits. But it is more that than it is access to new rebate schemes. We're very well qualified on that quantitative front already.

Andrew any other questions?

Yes. Just got a quick follow-up for Katie, just a quick one. Just going back to Slide 26 and the historical financials for GDT. Just the conversion rates really sort of stepped up in '26. Can you just elaborate on sort of the last 3 years? Was there quite a lot of investment going on in '24 and '25 that depressed the conversion rate?

Andrew, I guess the core reason is just that operating leverage with the growth in gross profit, just like Softcat and it's a trend that we're really familiar with ourselves, it just drops down. So yes, they've been investing since H.I.G. took over, but the biggest driver of that leverage increase is just more GP off an elevated cost base, but obviously one that doesn't grow nearly as fast as gross profit.

Next question will be coming from Balajee Tirupati of Citi.

Congratulations from my side as well. Two, if I may. Firstly, if I can ask one question on the strategic consideration behind the deal. How much of it is a reflection of view on seeing next phase of growth coming from larger enterprise investment in AI, including in security versus your need to expand outside of the U.K.?

And the second question is on trading. Looking at your 2026 trading as well as 2027 outlook, you had earlier flagged some demand pull in on account of memory shortage anticipation. How much of that has continued in the fourth quarter? And as you look for 2027 outlook, what impact you have factored for the possible pull-in in 2026 and likely shortages?

Thanks, Balajee. So how much growth do we see coming from larger enterprises and AI? As I mentioned in an earlier question, we do think that's a really exciting and very sustainable growth trend that will be in our market. But it's really important for us to emphasize that what we're not doing with this acquisition or any part of our strategy is stepping away from the mid-market as well. And I think AI build-out in the mid-market is equally exciting.

So there isn't -- I know we like to try and put labels on things, but I keep dissolving them back into the reality, which is infrastructure is evolving at pace. It's getting bigger. It's getting more complex. That's being driven by the demands of hungry AI applications, but many other things as well, such as data security, sovereignty, and lots of other things.

So whatever label you want to put on it in whichever segment of our customer base, we're excited about where IT infrastructure is going. There isn't honestly an industry in the world that I'd rather be working in, in terms of the growth opportunity, and the interest levels and the importance to societies and organizations in the future. So it's a great place to be, whether it's AI build-outs in enterprise or it's security considerations in the public sector or whatever it might be, there's a whole bunch of conversations and problems that our customers need our help with. And GDT sees it in exactly the same way.

And as I mentioned, we're building the capability to support customers across all segments with all sorts of demands across that. But yes, the AI build-out in enterprise-grade organizations, I think, is going to be a very strong growth factor over the coming 5 and 10 years. And you asked about the memory shortage within that. We certainly saw that create stimulus and demand in the early part of this year. It's ongoing. The supply and pricing situation has settled down. That's much more stable now.

So I think the net impact of that during our second half is fairly neutral, and we'd expect those conditions to persist through next year. But of course, it's one that we have to keep an eye on because it's a dynamic situation. But new supply beginning to come on stream from some of the big suppliers has been probably surprised a little bit on the positive on the upside as this year has gone on.

So we're in a more stable situation there right now. But yes, I'm sure there'll be news flow on it and will be. The good news for us is with the breadth that we have, we're very, very well placed to help customers when those puts and takes appear in the market. And so we can give them good advice and support them moving around with their needs if that supply and demand situation starts to spike again.

If I may ask also a follow-up on GDT side. You have shared some of the financial profile of GDT. Would it be fair to think that most of their growth comes from existing customers? And do you expect the new go-to-market initiative in the U.S. to build a customer acquisition motion?

So just let me start with the numbers. So they've grown the customer base by 5% CAGR over the last 4 years fairly consistently. So I think it's fair to say the growth is coming both from new customers, but also building out that share of wallet with existing as well.

Yes. I mean we, Softcat, get the vast majority of our growth in any 1 year from our existing customers. The new customers that we're winning then grow with us over a long period of time. So the new customers we win in any 1 year is underpinning future growth pathways. And that's exactly the same for GDT. Their balance is slightly different because they're a less scaled business than us, both in terms of offering and customer base. But that's why it's so exciting as well because we know where they are.

We know what they're doing. We've been on that path. It's the same business model. It's a different market. So we've got a team who knows and is credible in that market to execute the strategy that we both recognized and that we've been down. So customer growth and growth in GP per customer is -- are both metrics that we'll be able to drive hard in GDT over the coming decades, let alone years.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have time for one more question, and that question will be coming from Oliver Tipping calling from Peel Hunt.

I'll just keep it to one as we're sort of cutting it fine. Just looking at the U.S. market, it's very fragmented and very competitive. So when GDT meet a customer, what are their key differentiators? Is it the quality of their execution? Is it the capacity of their integration centers? Or is it their global operations that makes them be able to compete on sort of an attractive price point?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Oliver. It's exactly the same as for Softcat in the U.K. It's a fragmented market. There's loads of good competition. And the right to win is based around the same 2 things that we based that for Softcat upon, which is capability and customer service. And what that means is we listen to the customer. We care about getting them a great result. We develop intimacy. We understand their problems. That's exactly what GDT do.

And then we bring the right capability to bear for what they need. GDT's capability is well established. It's highly referenceable. It's deep design architectural capability around networking in the data center and then more recently, compute and storage and some security elements as well. So understanding the customers' needs, providing great service, make them feel that they can trust you and then deliver with great capability, relevant solutions. They do that very, very well, which is why they've developed scale business and are driving the growth that they are now. And that's exactly -- those 2 things have been the foundation of Softcat's growth as well, customer service capability.

We'll turn it back -- sorry, we'll turn the call back over to management team for any additional or closing remarks. Thank you.

Thank you. Just to thank everybody again for their time and interest today. Hopefully, you can hear how carefully we've thought about this step over many years and how the combination of Softcat and GDT, we think, makes Softcat and GDT both stronger, how excited the management teams are about bringing those businesses together, how that's resonated over the past day with shareholders and with our employee base. And we are building something now that we think is truly special in a global market that is one of the most exciting industries to be in, in this modern world. So thanks for your time and attention today. We look forward to keeping you abreast of how -- of the progress we make over the coming months and [Technical Difficulty]

Good morning, and welcome to the Softcat First Half Results for FY '26. I'm Graham Charlton, Chief Exec at Softcat, and I'm delighted today to be able to take you through an exceptional set of results and period of growth for Softcat, and to help me with that, I'm joined by our CFO, Katie Mecklenburgh, who you'll hear from very shortly.

But before I hand over, I'll begin with our usual quick reminder of who we are and the dimensions of our business today. These metrics continue to change quickly as we grow and this latest period has seen an acceleration in that expansion as we've stretched our lead further as the U.K.'s largest provider of IT infrastructure solutions.

We operate across the entirety of the modern infrastructure stack and as well as having the broadest offering, we've also got, by far, the largest and most diverse set of customers in the U.K. And the growth in that customer base has also accelerated in this latest period. Recurring customer count now stands at nearly 10,500. And it's the combined breadth of our offering and the strength of that customer base that is behind the acceleration in our growth. It's also that combination that provides us with such a huge opportunity in the future, and I'll talk after the financial update from Katie about how we plan to seize upon that and how AI is enhancing it in a few very specific ways.

And against that opportunity, we've continued to invest. Those investments have been targeted our own technology, our people and our workspaces. Headcount is now just shy of 3,000. We've relocated the majority of our offices to prime contemporary city center locations over the past few years, and we're in the process of completing the rest of them. We've grown our teams across all areas, again, built leading-edge skills and capacity into those teams, and we've given our people access to a full range of modern applications and tools.

As I said, I'll talk more about our strategy shortly, but for now, I will pass you to Katie, who can give you the detail on a very strong set of half 1 numbers.

Thank you, Graham, and good morning, everyone. I'm very pleased to share with you Softcat's results for the first half of FY '26.

In summary, we have delivered strong growth in GII gross profit and underlying operating profit in the year, all of which are significantly ahead of our expectations at the beginning of the year. This strong performance reflects the strength of our business model and excellent execution in the period. We have also benefited from the sustained investments that we've made over recent years, including investments in the breadth of our offering and capabilities and in improving our internal operations.

Gross profit, which is our key measure of income, grew by 22.6%, reflecting strong underlying business performance, supported by the delivery of previously announced larger solutions projects and a pull forward of some customer orders due to memory shortages. The gross profit growth was delivered by a 3.5% increase in our customer base and an average gross profit per customer growth of 19%.

Underlying operating profit of GBP 93.8 million was an increase of 27.3% versus half year last year and reflects the slowdown of the gross profit over delivery, together with further investment to drive future growth. Underlying operating profit excludes the impact of GBP 8.5 million of nonunderlying costs and I'll run through these items in more detail shortly.

We've also maintained a strong balance sheet in the period with underlying cash conversion of 147.6%, and we've ended the period with GBP 206 million in cash. During the period, we announced a GBP 45 million share buyback program to return excess capital to shareholders, and the Board has approved an interim dividend payment of 9.9p per share. Finally, underlying basic EPS increased by 25.8% year-on-year.

Turning to the summary income statement and starting at the top. Gross invoice income grew by 33.3% to just over GBP 2 billion. This was driven by particularly strong growth in hardware, up 78.7% with services up by 29% and software up by 18.6%. Hardware growth was driven by strength across data center, networking, server and compute sales, supported by the larger solutions projects. However, only half of the large data center projects that we were expecting to complete by the 31st of January is reflected in the period, with the balance now expected to be recognized in quarter 3.

Software growth reflects strength in cybersecurity licensing software and Microsoft CSP deals, while services growth was primarily driven by partner provided businesses in this period. Revenue grew by 53.5% ahead of GII, largely due to a higher share of hardware, which is reported on a gross basis under IFRS 15. Software revenue grew ahead of GII, primarily due to a shift in mix towards higher-margin security licensing. Services revenue growth of 6.9% was behind GII growth reflecting a higher share of externally provided services at lower margin, which are reported on a net basis.

Gross profit grew by 22.6% to GBP 269.9 million. This exceeded our expectations at the start of the year and reflects broad-based strength across our portfolio of technology solutions and customer segments. Gross profit growth was particularly strong in our corporate segment during the period with both enterprise and small and medium businesses growing strong double digit, with public sector growing high single digit.

On a product basis, hardware, software and services all grew double digit. And by technology area, growth was driven by continuing customer demand, the cybersecurity solutions alongside extensive growth in data center and networking supported by the largest solutions projects.

In workplace, GP growth is more modest, reflecting continued improvement in demand for client devices and the impact of Microsoft incentive changes, which we have now annualized. Overall, gross profit as a percentage of GII, declined by 120 bps year-on-year, primarily due to the impact of larger solutions projects at lower margin, while gross profit per employee grew 15% year-on-year.

Moving slides, please. Underlying operating costs grew behind gross profit growth. Commissions and other variable pay grew broadly in line with commissionable gross profit while wages and salaries grew by 15.4%, driven by average headcount growth of 10.5% in the period. This was 7.7%, excluding Oakland, and average cost per head growth reflecting an annual pay increase of 4% and the continued increased mix of specialists. We expect full year headcount growth, including Oakland to be low double digit.

The growth in underlying operating costs also reflects the impact of the step-up in employees' national insurance contributions together with investments in our internal IT team, data and digital capabilities and increased costs associated with office moves to larger sites.

Underlying operating profit grew by 27.3% to GBP 93.8 million ahead of gross profit and as a result, the underlying operating profit to gross profit ratio improved to 34.8% from 33.5% last year.

In the first half, we incurred GBP 8.5 million of nonunderlying costs. These include system implementation costs of GBP 7 million relating to the new cloud-based sales and HR systems, which despite being one-off development costs cannot be capitalized. In addition, there is a GBP 1.5 million charge relating to the acquisition of Oakland, which consists of contingent consideration of GBP 1.2 million and GBP 0.3 million of amortization of acquired intangibles. We now expect FY '26 nonunderlying charges at the bottom of our GBP 20 million to GBP 25 million guided range, with the majority relating to the sales and HR systems implementation, as we continue to build our foundational platform for Softcat data, digital and AI transformation journey.

After deducting non-underlying costs, statutory operating profit was GBP 85.2 million, an increase of 15.6% year-on-year. Net interest income from the period was marginally lower year-on-year at GBP 3 million. This reflects an increase in interest income due to improved cash management more than offset by the increase in interest costs from the new office lease liabilities.

And lastly, the effective tax rate increased by 60 basis points due to an increase in nondeductible expenses, resulting in profit after tax growth of 13.9%.

Turning now to our customer base and portfolio offering. Our growth continues to benefit from the diversity of our customer base and the breadth and depth of our customer offering. On the left, you can see the latest customer segmental view of our business, which remains very well balanced. The public sector and enterprise segments of our business together account for just under half of gross invoiced income with small and medium businesses accounting for the balance.

The middle chart shows the range of our activity between our traditional technology resell business and our services offering. And on the right, you can see that we continue to generate well balanced income across all areas of our technology portfolio, stretching from the cloud and data centers through networking security and end user compute. The diversity of our customer base and comprehensive breadth of expertise, product offering and services remain a key strength of our business, and this underpins the sustainability of our growth model and our opportunity to further scale.

Moving slides and on to our customer metrics. The chart on the left shows the growth in our total customer base and growth in average gross profit per customer, which demonstrates our ongoing ability to acquire new customers and sell more to existing customers. During the period, we grew our customer base by 3.5% to more than 10,400 customers with net new customers added across all of our segments. Gross profit per customer over the last 12 months grew by 19% to GBP 52,200, reflecting progress throughout all of our technology towers.

The graph on the right shows the growth of customers with whom we have an established trading relationship as measured by customers delivering at least GBP 1,000 of gross profit each year. These customers tend to buy across more technology areas and the greater range of vendors, enabling us to transact higher levels of gross profit. In this cohort, there is a more balanced profile between customer growth of 5.7% and GP per customer growth of 16.5%. The longer tail of transactional customers continue to represent an important source of future growth for us, but our established customers account for over 99% of the group's current gross profit.

Now turning to cash. Underlying cash conversion was 147.6%, reflecting continued good working capital management, together with a timing benefit of a GBP 42 million customer prepayment. Excluding this upfront customer payment, underlying cash conversion would have been 102.4%, still ahead of our target range of 85% to 95%.

Depreciation and amortization stepped up year-on-year due to the recent investments in offices and internal technology, while CapEx halved during the period reflecting lower spend on new office fit-outs compared to the prior year. Cash tax was slightly lower year-on-year due to phasing. And in the period, we have returned GBP 95.4 million of cash to shareholders, reflecting GBP 73 million via the FY '25 final ordinary and special dividends, together with GBP 22.4 million of the GBP 45 million share buyback that we announced in January and that subsequently completed on the 13th of February.

Thus, we ended the first half with a cash balance of GBP 206 million, an increase of GBP 65 million year-on-year.

We continue to expect cash conversion to be towards the lower end of our guided range of 85% to 95% in FY '26 due to the cash outflows related to implementations of the sales and HR systems.

This next slide covers the interim dividend. The Board has recommended an interim dividend of 9.9% -- 9.9p which is up 11.2% year-on-year and is in line with our policy of paying out 1/3 of the previous year's ordinary dividend as an interim in the current year. As a reminder, our full year dividend policy is to pay out between 40% and 50% of profit after tax on an annual basis.

Finally, after the period end, we established a new revolving credit facility of GBP 15 million. This facility is undrawn and reflects the maturation of our liquidity management approach, providing the group with the flexibility to maintain our operating cash flow through a combination of cash on hand and available credit lines.

And turning now to capital allocation. We have a disciplined approach to capital allocation and our framework remains unchanged. Our top priority is to invest in future organic growth, which supports our ambition to take further market share and enables us to continue to scale the business. In H1 FY '26, we invested in our core systems and IT capabilities, expanding our office footprint, increasing head count and capabilities and developing our data and digital platforms.

Our second priority is to maintain a progressive ordinary dividend policy. Any excess capital is then either allocated to a compelling strategic investment, which could include bolt-on acquisitions to expand our portfolio offering or expansion in international markets or is returned to shareholders. During the period, we initiated our first share buyback to return GBP 45 million of excess capital to shareholders. This completed in mid-February and reduced the issued share capital by 1.7%.

And finally, moving to the outlook. Based on our performance in the first half, we now expect to deliver high single-digit growth in underlying operating profit, which is an increase from our guidance at the beginning of the year of low single digit. We are entering the second half of our financial year with good momentum. However, we face a tougher comparator due to the contribution from larger solutions projects in the second half of FY '25. In addition, the net impact of ongoing memory shortages remains uncertain through the remainder of this year and into next year. And we're also mindful of the evolving macroeconomic and geopolitical situation.

And with that, I'll now hand over to Graham to run through the strategic update.

Thank you, Katie. So as you've seen there, very strong progress indeed during the first half, and there are a number of clear factors behind the strength of that growth and acceleration, which I'll take a few moments to highlight now before we move into the strategic update.

So firstly, I think it's clear that our core strategy continues to work, the competitive advantages that we've created in customer service, and the breadth and quality of our offering continue to differentiate us. They create loyalty and trust with our customers and vendor partners. And we've maintained our investment in that strategy through the slightly tougher market conditions over the past few years and stretched those advantages further.

We've also continued to execute well. The morale and attitude, alignment of our people and leadership has been fantastic throughout and the market has become a little easier in these past 6 months as well, inflation, interest rates and wage growth have moderated, and that's helped our customers unblock some investment. To be clear, we do continue to see intense scrutiny on ROI, but customers are moving ahead with new projects, including, but not limited to, preparedness for and implementation of AI, which I'll come back to.

And as Katie mentioned, we've seen some deals accelerate due to the component shortages that are ongoing. It's very hard to predict how that will play out over the next 2 quarters and beyond, but it was a slight net positive during our Q2. And then we've got AI, which is beginning to manifest in very positive ways in our business. Firstly, AI is becoming a strong tailwind across all 5 of the tech towers that we use to frame our full stack infrastructure offering. Customers are at different stages, but we're seeing demand for AI-capable infrastructure build across all areas.

And the other aspect of AI that's been positive for us in the period and which will develop much more momentum is its effect on our own operations and proposition. As we've mentioned, we've been hard at work on our own systems and technology for years now. And we're beginning to see the dividends from those investments as we bring on stream new AI functionality and automation and develop our own agents. And because it's been of such clear interest to investors over the past few months, I'll pause on the AI topic specifically for a few minutes now because the upside we've seen in half 1 is just the thin end of the wedge and so we'll look at each aspect in turn.

Firstly, the opportunity in what we sell, as AI transforms the applications we all use at work and at home, the infrastructure, those applications operate on and within needs massive investment. And secondly, the opportunity in how we sell. As Softcat's become bigger, our offerings become the broadest in the market and the need for better tools, analytics, automation, to take that offering to market with full effect, the need for those tools has grown exponentially. And now just when we need the most, AI is giving us the means to transform the quality and effectiveness of our go-to-market motions and other processes.

So let's start with the innovation and demand that AI is creating within the infrastructure space. And this slide shows in a simplified way, how the application and infrastructure layers of modern technologies are each being affected. Firstly, if you consider the application layer, there's no doubt that we are and we'll continue to see huge innovation from AI within both enterprise and consumer apps. This is not where we play, although some of our vendors have products which stretch into this space, Microsoft probably being the best example. But the vast majority of the software, hardware and services that we trade in sit within the infrastructure layer.

But AI applications require more compute power of a different nature to a traditional sequential CPU processing. They demand more and better structured and cleaned data. They need that data to be available in low latency environments, whether it's in the cloud or the edge. And this also creates the need for bigger and faster networks, creates new cyber attack and defense mechanisms and so on and so on.

In short, as applications become embedded with and enabled by AI, they demand more power, speed, capacity, flexibility, governance and security from the infrastructure they work on. And that infrastructure layer, that is where we, Softcat, operate. We have the broadest and deepest offering in the market. We serve the largest and most diverse set of customers and the growth in that customer base and our share of their IT wallet is growing at an accelerating rate. So our positioning is perfect.

We've illustrated on the slide here the 5 technology areas that frame our technology proposition, as I said before, spans the entirety of that modern infrastructure. And we're seeing AI have a positive effect on the demand within all 5 of those towers. IT infrastructure is about to get a lot bigger, even more complicated, and this will be fantastic for our business and our industry.

And whether customers are clear or not yet on the applications and use cases that they'll rely on in the future, they know that they will depend upon quality infrastructure, fit for the age of AI, and we are helping them get to work on building exactly that. The help and support that we provide them has therefore never been more important. For example, our access to the latest innovations and road maps of all the key vendors. Our deep understanding of the hugely complicated never-changing infrastructure maps of our customers, which, by the way, will usually contain the technologies of at least 50, 60, maybe 100 different vendors and have been constructed over many, many years.

Our access to the best pricing and rebates through our top-tier accreditations and the co-investment programs we're collaborating with the vendors on to build the support and service structures they need for us to deliver and run this new breed of technology. And the ways in which we augment the skills and capabilities of both our customers and our vendor partners has never been more sought after by both parties. So we're bringing decades of proprietary data, know-how and investment together to create the proposition of the future for our industry and make sure that Softcat remains the very best partner for both customers and vendors.

And this leads us to the next area in which AI is creating huge benefits for us. So on this next slide, we'll flip the direction of travel around and now talk about how our internal technology investments have made us AI-ready. And as you're aware, we've been modernizing our data and systems for at least the past 5 years, the investments we've made are now worth their weight in gold. The importance of AI readiness applies to us in just the same way as it does to our customers. And in this latest period, we've begun to move beyond readiness and into deployment.

For example, we've built a new data lake house with the help of Oakland. Over the past few years, this has cleaned our own extensive internal data and augmented it with multiple sources of external data on customers, market spend, product information and so on. And this is now searchable using AI tools and is serving up new insight, driving new marketing techniques and sales processes within Softcat. We've also built the database of our own capabilities and resources, combined this with the customer and product data we have, and this is transforming how quickly our people can interpret customer challenges, bring forward appropriate options and solutions from within our range and align available resources from both Softcat and vendors and ensure best pricing and rebates are applied as a matter, of course.

And so forgive us the terrible name, but we've called one of these new tools, CatNav. And hopefully, that gives you an immediately clear impression of what it does. It's filled with proprietary data on our skills, capabilities, vendors products, customers, IT environments and so on. And it's giving us a step change in the effectiveness with which our people can navigate and deploy the extensive offering that we have. It's helping both our most senior and our most junior people match customer problems with Softcat solutions faster and more successfully than ever.

And we're also experimenting with many other new agents created in-house across our key business processes such as order fulfillment and rebates. And in addition to our own internal developments, we've been embracing the tools that are becoming embedded within the enterprise systems that we use as well. So Copilot, the most obvious example of this, but we're also seeing AI functionality be released into our finance, service management and other systems. And these new systems will become increasingly integrated as we released this summer, our new Microsoft Dynamics sales platform and our new HR platform as well. Both of those systems are now in user acceptance testing.

And while we've seen tangible benefits already from these initiatives, we're only just beginning to tap into the full potential of what's possible here. And so those are the two ways that we're seeing AI benefit our business right now, through growth in the demand for our services and products and in the transformation of our own operations. What I'll do now is update you on the things that we're doing more broadly within our strategy as well.

So on this next slide, I remind you first that the core of that strategy, the flywheel that powers our growth engine is unchanged. Our special culture delivers market-leading service, that creates trust and loyalty with our customers, has enabled us over many years to invest in and build this broad offering that we have today. And so those are the two sources of advantage, best customer service and the highest quality offering. Despite that, we only still have around a 5% share of a market that's growing and accelerating. This model has decades of opportunity in it still.

But if we turn the page again, you can see that we've sharpened the framework that we use to channel the investments we're making back into our business. The clarity of what we do and for whom and where and how we will play is absolute. And we've created what we call our 4 engines of growth, which you can see in the different colors at the bottom of the page. And we'll invest in those to drive our future growth, and they are sales and customer excellence, the broadest offering operational excellence and a special culture. And I'll talk about what we're doing with each of them -- within each of them briefly now.

So firstly, sales and customer excellence. And we've used this pyramid before to show how our account managers win and nurture new customer relationships right from the very early stages of their careers with Softcat and as they mature over time. And as that relationship develops, trust builds from the foundation of the brilliant customer service we provide and the customer puts more and more of their IT spend through us as we displace incumbent competition within the account.

And during this latest period, we've been focused on enhancing the differentiation that we can bring to the various different customer segments in which we operate from SMB and mid-market in both the corporate and public sectors, through to large and complex enterprise grade accounts. We're looking to enhance all of our go-to-market motions, but especially in that large and complex space where we've got relatively less maturity. We're also working hard to ensure that our systems and procedures for the oversight of customer account allocation continue to evolve. And this is another area where new data analytics and AI are producing significant benefits for our sales managers.

And as we've continued to build our multinational capability and honed our focus around some of the verticals as well, such as financial services and insurance. And all of those efforts have accelerated the overall growth in the customer base and ensure that the progression of customers through this pyramid is proceeding well, too. So for example, growth in total customer count stepped up from 1.6% last year to an annual run rate of 3.5% this first half. And within that, customers delivering more than GBP 1,000 of GP grew by nearly 6% and customers delivering more than GBP 100,000 of gross profit, the layer right at the top of the pyramid there, grew by 11.5%.

And on the right-hand side, you can see another step up as well in the number of deals transacted with gross profit of GBP 0.5 million or more during the period. And while I mentioned we're building new capabilities to mature that offering in the large and complex customer space, remember that these stats cover the whole of the customer range and some of our mid-market customers have requirements just as big as that enterprise segment. So these stats therefore, show that we're continuing to grow across all areas of the customer base. We are not pivoting away from anything. Certainly, we're not reducing our focus on the mid-market. We are adding, as we've always done to our offering, increasing the addressable market as we add new capabilities all the time as well.

And if we turn on now to the broadest offering, I'll give you a reminder here of the scale and depth of our product portfolio and services. The 5 towers of the tech proposition include all of the key and emerging vendors from the likes of Microsoft and NVIDIA through to smaller and newer players. We continue to build our skills and service offering towards those new and emerging areas. For example, we've made excellent progress on the integration of the data engineering consultancy we acquired last year Oakland. So far, we've linked the sales motions of Softcat and Oakland very carefully and selectively. And the pipeline we're building in their cycle is really significant. And the reputation that their services brings to Softcat is strengthening significantly our credibility with some of our best prospects.

And in addition to new offerings, we're also ensuring that our core strengths don't decay. And we're co-investing heavily around the changes that Microsoft and other vendors have made to their programs in recent times and see huge opportunity there as well.

And if we turn on again, we'll come now to operational excellence. I've talked about this area already in relation to the positive effects from our investment in our own technology. So I'll just reiterate a few key points briefly. Firstly, the foundational development and platform enablement we've invested in these past 5 years or more has encompassed core systems and data and built on those foundations, we're now beginning to deploy new analytics, agents and automation to increase the quality of what we do for customers. The new CatNav tool I mentioned, the agents that we're creating across processes like fulfillment and rebates, the propensity to buy analytics that we're feeding into sales dashboards and new marketing techniques.

These are just the first wave of those innovations. These are developments will accelerate as we complete the delivery of the sales and HR systems this summer. And we're just only at the beginning of what I think is going to be a really exciting transformation in our model over the coming years, driven by both the adoption of Core AI functionality in our core systems and proprietary developments on top of and around that enterprise stack. And we're doing this in a very coordinated way. We've got much more proactive oversight of our end-to-end processes than ever before, and we're leading that as always, by well-tenured Softcat people who understand our business and the industry well.

And turning on again, we come finally to our special culture. You can see the essential elements of that culture listed here, and it really does continue to be the single most important foundation for all of our success. During the period, we put a lot of time and attention into strengthening the framework of support and freedom we give to our local office leadership teams and investing, as I said right at the start, in the fabric of our workspaces.

You can see at the bottom there that we've completed in this latest period, the relocation of both Manchester and Dublin offices, and we've refurbished our headquarters in Marlow as well. And also shown at the bottom there, I'm really pleased to say that we've just placed fourth in the latest survey of the Best Workplaces in the U.K. And we're now hard at work on creating a formal employee experience strategy. This will bring together all of the rich feedback we received during the year, both formal and informal from our people, we'll aggregate it against external benchmarks and other insight to ensure that our people continue to get the very best working environment, training and support that we can offer them.

So in summary then, if we turn to our final slide, we've delivered exceptional performance in the first half of the year, and we carry good momentum across all fronts into the second half. There are new elements of uncertainty creeping into the macro, of course, but notwithstanding that, we're very confident of our prospects for the full year. And this confidence is fueled by the positive effects of AI on both customer demand and our own operations, together with the traction that we're getting from investments across all areas of our strategy.

So we'll continue to invest in those 4 growth engines, the most important of which continues as well to be our people and culture. They remain at the heart of everything we do. And so I'll finish as always, by saying that I cannot thank them enough for their efforts and brilliance so far this year.

That brings us to the end of the remarks that we prepared for today. So thank you again for your time and attention. We'll turn the call back now to the operator to take some questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from Joe George from JPMorgan.

Yes. Just two for me, please. Can you guys hear me, okay?

Hi, Joe.

Hello?

Hello, can you hear us? .

Katie, can you guys hear me, okay?

Yes, we can, Joe. Thank you.

I can hear you. Yes, can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Okay. Perfect. Sorry about that. I think it was an issue with the line. Sorry, just two for me. Perfect. Just firstly, on the drivers of outperformance. It sounds like we have some impact from a larger deal and some pull forward from memory pricing. If we strip those impacts out, it sounds like there's still some outperformance versus expectations on an underlying basis. Could you just unpack the drivers of this underlying outperformance? Was it a wider market sentiment being a bit better than expected? Any specific product or customer groups to call out? Just any color would be great there.

And then secondly, just on H2 expectations as a whole. I think the new guidance would imply that H2 EBIT growth could actually be down slightly year-over-year. Could you just comment on how Q3 has trended so far and how we're tracking against that rate so far into H2, please?

Thanks, Joe. Let me kick off, and then Graham can chip in. let me sort of try and give you a breakdown, but I'll do it on year-on-year because obviously, everyone's got different expectations as well. And I'll do OP and then maybe I'll go into GP as well. As you say, we talked about a number of factors. So the deals pull forward because of the RAM shortages, the big deal that we talked about at the end of the year, but we've also clearly seen brilliant performance on the base business as well.

So if I sort of split those down in terms of growth from operating profit, we would say, and this is caveated that trying to identify exactly what's been brought forward because of RAM is obviously not an exact science. But roughly at the OP level, about 40% of growth because of RAM and the big deal and 60% of base for gross profit level, it would be sort of 15% to 20% due to RAM and big deals and then the balance from the base, which would give you on both metrics, still high-teen growth year-on-year.

So as you say, base business is performing really well. We've seen particular strength in corporate but public sector also still grew from a gross profit basis, high single digits. So we're pleased with that as well. But the outperformance was predominantly in corporate too. But as we've said, really broad-based across technologies, broad-based across hardware, software and services as well.

And then in terms of EBIT being down year-on-year, yes, I mean, that was always sort of the case in the guidance at the beginning of the year. Core driver for that is that big deal that landed in the second half last year and we are, at the moment, just mindful of the RAM shortages. We've obviously seen a pull forward how it's going to impact H2 and next year is still pretty uncertain. We've got a couple of dynamics. Number one, we could see more pull forward, but at some point, we think that lead times will push out as well.

So uncertainty coming from that and then the sort of the macro and the political situation at the moment is layering on top of that as well. So that's why, at the moment, we're sort of guiding to leave H2 pretty much as it is. We started the momentum that we've talked about has continued, but we think quarter 4 is still more of the unknown at this point in time, as you would expect.

We'll now move to our next question from Tintin Stormont from Deutsche Numis.

Probably a similar question, but a slightly different angle. Again, about just allocating that outperformance in the first half. If I just stay on the gross profit level and estimate that versus an original expectation of low double-digit growth in the first half, I estimate there was like a GBP 20 million, GBP 25 million GP beat. Is that what you referred to KP as sort of like 15%, 20% of that would be mainly from the pull forward? And 6 weeks into H2, what level of pull forward are you continuing to see?

And then just a second question. Can you also remind us about the timing of the delivery of the large solutions. Katie, you mentioned some had slipped and will be delivered in Q3. Would that sort of kind of be the end of it?

I'll try and cover those, but do remind me if I forget any of your points. I think if we take it versus consensus, which wasn't far off what we guided to at the beginning of the year. On the gross profit level, we've probably seen about 15% over delivery versus that number. And if we break that down in terms of over-delivery between the RAM impact was obviously positive. The large deal has slipped. So it's positive year-on-year, but not quite as much as we expected. So if you netted those off, I would say, about 1/4 of that over-delivery was because of the net of those two items with the sort of the balance due to base business performance as well, if that makes sense.

In terms of the pull forward from RAM, I think we're still definitely seeing some momentum behind that, but it's really difficult to quantify as well. And as you will know from the business, in every single quarter we've got, it's the last month is everything to play for. So we still need to sort of wait and see how Q3 will finish.

And just on the timing of the delivery of the large solutions, obviously, Q3 some said, as you said, has slipped into Q3. And then post that, as far as you can tell in terms of our backlog pipeline.

Yes. So you're right. Initially, we assumed all of that sort of big deal to remember, it's low margin, and you can still see it on the balance sheet as well on the bits which are left. So about 50% of it has been recognized, and we're expecting the remaining of the 50% to be recognized in Q3. The vast majority of that is with the customer, but there's a few more steps before we can recognize it. So we're confident, but as I say, it took a little bit longer than we were expecting.

And in terms of pipeline, nothing else big that we've got in sort of a solid pipeline at the moment.

It's the final one, just super greedy. In terms of AI, if you look at the pipeline and the level of activity in the business, are you tracking what percent of kind of the business -- the new business is kind of being created or in fact, some of the acceleration in new customers? How much of it has an AI change can lend to it?

Tintin, it's Graham. It's really very difficult to quantify that accurately. In very general terms, what you can be sure of is that infrastructure investment has been held up the past few years by more difficult macro interest rates, inflation and so on. And two things are happening right now. The demand for strong infrastructure to cope with AI applications is building and those difficult conditions have abated comparatively. Now clearly, there's new uncertainty creeping into the macro right now as well. So that and the component shortages will have an effect. But the demand on infrastructure coming from AI applications is significant.

So when someone is upgrading a network, is that because they're anticipating more traffic as a result of direct AI applications or is it a future proofing or is it fixing a problem, impossible to kind of track all of those impacts directly. But it's definitely fair to say that AI demand is a strong tailwind to what we're seeing from customers.

We'll now move to our next question from Charlie Brennan from Jefferies.

I'll do a couple, if I can. Firstly, just on your AI comments there, Graham. Is it fair to say that the vast majority of AI demand today is being felt through the infrastructure side of your business? Or are you seeing it balanced across software, whether that's Copilot or security? And then if I think about AI, maybe through a stock market lens, we're seeing investors jump to the conclusion that AI is going to disrupt traditional vendors. Are you getting any sense from your customer conversations that people are trigger happy to use AI as an opportunity to replace traditional vendors? And do you think your most important vendors for the next 10 years are going to be different from the vendors that you've enjoyed for the past 10 years?

And then as a follow-up, separate issue. Can you just talk a little bit about vendor partnerships and particularly Microsoft? We've seen Microsoft price rises coming through. We've seen volume discounts reduced. We've seen the new launch of E7. Can you just give us any sense on Microsoft, whether that's changed any customer behavior, whether it's pulled forward orders or whether it's created any distortions we should be aware of?

Okay. Thanks, Charlie. And dive in if I miss stuff or if you've got follow-on questions, I'll try and work through them. So are we seeing AI demand concentrated in infrastructure or balanced across software and other things? So this is why we tried in the deck there to distinguish between application layer in the infrastructure layer. So the infrastructure layer isn't just hardware, it's software, hardware and services. So in your data center, it's the servers, the storage. But it's also the virtualization software, the hypervisors, the hyperconvergence software and so on as well. So we are seeing AI drive demand in the data center, in the network in security, in connectivity, in the device estate, and we're seeing it drive it across software, hardware and services.

So the full design of modern infrastructure encompasses all of that. And our unique breadth and quality across all of that, I think, is a huge strength at this time. So we're seeing it everywhere, certainly, in software, security software, but also data center software, workplace software as well. And in terms of stock market reaction and disruption of traditional vendors, it depends on what you mean. So infrastructure estates are huge and complex and evolve slowly, and they're having to respond to this challenge. That means that all of the vendors that we work with are creating new products and solutions to meet this demand.

You've seen whether it's Dell or HPE or Lenovo, Microsoft, everybody has been broadening their offering to meet these new opportunities and new demands. And we are very, very well placed to work with them across that. So whether it's HPE folding in Juniper or whether it's Microsoft developing Copilot and other tooling within the Azure stack, the investment that we can make in our organic capabilities and the scale and reach that we have make us prime positioned to capitalize on these new opportunities and offer them the partnership that they need.

Yes, I think it's going to disrupt some of them. There's always disruption happening there as well. Security is a great space to be, but that's been a tough ground to compete in for security vendors. The same argument to us applies as always, which is we will follow customer demand and sell the winners of that race. And so I'm sure there'll be some disruption and displacement to happen, but that's good for our business. That's conversations with customers and support that we can offer them.

Remember that what we do for customers is many things. We understand their legacy systems. We help them design new solutions. We implement, support, manage that. We optimize and evolve them over time. We can start to use AI tools to help us. With all of that, we've got proprietary data and expert use of agents that we can overlay across all of those areas. And we can deliver real-world outcomes because if you're a CIO or an IT Ops manager in this situation, when you design those new solutions and you turn them on if it doesn't work, who are you going to call, and that's where our service really comes in, in these times because people are evolving and iterating as the demands of AI build.

So I think this will create some disruption amongst traditional vendors, but I think it creates huge net opportunity for them, and our partnerships, therefore, as I've alluded to, are going from strength to strength. So the changes Microsoft are making, the price rises, the volume discounts that are being withdrawn, they're all to enable them to invest in the offering of the future that their customers are demanding for them. And I've mentioned before about how that creates a challenge for us to move our operations around their new motions but that is a net competitive advantage for us because I think the capability we have to do a good job of that for them is a huge opportunity in the competitive market space, and that's why we've been investing so much in our people, our technology and our workplaces as well because the changes we've made to our offices are bringing customers and vendors together with our people more strongly than ever before.

So I'm very positive about all of this. There will definitely be some winners and losers in it. I think you've seen in these results that we're determined to be a winner from all of that.

We'll now move to our next question from Christopher Tong from UBS.

I guess just one question from me on the margin. So basically, with the new guidance, it does imply that margins can be flat, and you've been making a lot of investments kind of internally into IT and offices. I was just wondering how are you thinking about gross profit growth and EBIT growth going forward? Do you think you can decouple the growth between these two?

So I guess short answer is that on a structural basis, no change. We always plan to grow costs ahead of gross profit because it gives us the headroom to invest in the business today for and basically build up our capabilities so we can win in the future. We have less than 5% market share. We're in a growing market. The future potential is huge. And one of the reasons that we think we're posting such good results at the moment is the fact that we have invested over the last couple of years, which has set us up really, really well and it served us really, really well. So we're not going to move away from that approach at all.

Now when we do over deliver, as we've seen in H1, then the over-delivery on gross profit flows down and the margin improves. But in terms of our planning assumptions, we will continue to invest in the business in the areas that we've outlined today. And I think it will serve us as well moving forward as it has done in the past.

And our next question is from Oliver Tipping from Peel Hunt.

So I just wanted to touch on the sort of trend in AI spend in infrastructure. between -- the split between enterprise and SMEs because there's been a lot of talk about how the enterprise is moving towards private cloud and outside of sort of quant funds that have made up a bulk of the SME spend on that. Is this also the case the broader tail of SME clients that you're seeing?

And then lastly, a point on capital allocation. I think these results are a clear indication that you guys must be undervalued at the moment. Are you considering potentially doing a buyback instead of a special dividend this year? And how is your progress in looking at opportunities, broad and diversifying into the U.S.? How is the pipeline looking for those?

Would you mind just reiterating that first question a bit, I want to make sure I answer it properly. So yes, just have another go at it, just so I can make sure I don't miss the mark with it, if you wouldn't mind? And then I'll pass to Katie for capital allocation after that.

Sure. That's absolutely fine. So broadly, the trend in terms of enterprise clients has been moving back towards private cloud from sort of the public cloud. I was just thinking in terms of the infrastructure build-out for SME clients, excluding sort of quant funds, which I think because a couple of the larger deals you guys have done. Is this something you're all seeing for your broader SME client base?

Okay. Thank you really clear now. I think you were clear in the first place, by the way, it's my issue anyway. So I don't think enterprises have been moving back to private cloud. I think they were hugely unbalanced in the first place because they had no public cloud. So there was a natural rush to put workloads in the public cloud. And what we've seen is that turn into a more thoughtful approach of which workload fits best where. Some organizations started with that. Some did just ideologically rush to the cloud and therefore, have had to repatriate things. But on balance, I think what you've seen is the hybrid environments that most architectures are now depending upon, which involves the right workload in the right place are both getting developed.

So there is a strong use case for public cloud with many applications, but they are really important issues about why on-premises, low latency, data sovereignty applies to some workloads as well. So I expect to see growth in both private cloud and public cloud from large enterprises. And I expect to see the same from mid-market. And again, the size of the customer is a factor, but more important factors are things like how old are they, what is their IT legacy, what vertical are they in? What's the scale of their business? What are their security requirements?

So the private cloud is a very, very strong offering in -- for some cases, and the public cloud absolutely has a strong role to play in this as well. So for us, with capabilities across both of those, and the network and security on a holistic basis. This is why the integration of modern infrastructure, I think, is such an exciting place to be. But the short answer to your question is, I think we'll see growth for large and medium organizations in both private cloud and the public cloud.

I think if there was a distinction to be made maybe public cloud is a great place for mid-markets to start with some of this. And then yes, you might see some production environments moving back on premises over time, but who knows, it would be different for every customer.

So in terms of a question on capital allocation and buybacks, so we agree on your point on the share price. We've clearly just completed our first-ever buyback. And I think any further -- well, we'll get to year-end as we normally do, and then we would decide together with the Board what we do them, but following the normal capital allocation principles. Clearly now, we've built the capability to do both buybacks and specials and we'll sort of evaluate what we do at year-end. But I guess, we appreciate what you're saying in terms of buybacks and where the share price is at the moment.

And then I think do you want to take the U.S. acquisition point?

Our stance hasn't changed on that, which is M&A is something that we could use to accelerate our strategy in one of two directions, about new capabilities like with the Oakland acquisition or with geographic expansion. And particularly, we said that the strong demand we're seeing from our customers in the U.S. market and the strength and size and attractiveness of that market as well means that acquiring in the U.S. could be a good option for us. Could be a good option if and only if we find the right target. We've said as well that the affinity of culture and ethos is the most important factor, capabilities and management team that would be excited to join Softcat who we could build a long-term future partnership with.

That would be an exciting step for us to take. But we're no nearer to doing a deal. We're not in any active processes. We are continuing to do our research and look at the options there. So capability bolt-ons, U.S. expansion are both still good options, but we don't have to do them, and we are maintaining a very high bar against the targets that we look at.

Our next question is from Florian Treisch from Kepler Cheuvreux.

I have a follow-up to the memory situation. You mentioned RAM shortages at a time when I believe availability is probably not yet the bigger issue, it's probably more the pricing increases filtering through. So do you really believe that supply will be disrupted at some point in time? And with respect to pricing, when do you believe higher prices are turning into a net negative for Softcat in the market?

And the second one on mean you mentioned copilot several times in the presentation. I'm sure if you ask Microsoft, they will pitch the idea that Copilot is a massive success. But if you look into the market overall, I mean, it's probably much more noise coming out of the field of Anthropic and all the other peers here. So I mean, if I'm not wrong, I think Anthropic actually introduced the partner initiative recently. I mean do you expect to be part of it? Do you really believe let's say, that these players are becoming more and more -- playing more and more into the channel and with that providing revenue opportunities for you? Or do you believe it's really more coming out of your, let's say, historic partnership companies?

Okay. We'll start with the memory one then. So yes, I think it's probably fair, not in all situations, but probably fair to say that right now the impact from the shortages is more on prices than on supply. That will start to develop and change over time. So lead times will go out as prices continue to go up. Quite how this plays through is impossible to predict because the channels that those memory manufacturers sell into, they have a choice about how they do that, and that will depend upon the demand they're seeing from consumer, from hyperscalers from other corporates.

So there's different channels that they'll be selling into and how that will play out, it'd be a dynamic situation. And so that's something that we're going to have to watch and manage carefully. However it plays out, I see it as an opportunity for Softcat because the breadth of our offering, the strength of our vendor relationships, the scale and quality of operations we have mean that there's a lot of help we can apply to customers in that situation. If their projects are delayed, we can help them with other things. We can make sure they get access to best prices. Our scale in the U.K. market will give us a priority of allocation in some circumstances as well.

So lots of challenge to come there, quite when it will turn from a net positive to a net negative if it does, and in what form that takes, I don't know, but I back us to do the best job for customers in this environment. So I'm relishing that challenge.

On Copilot and Anthropic, other AI tools, Copilot's a different beast to things like ChatGPT and some elements of Anthropic. And I think it is playing a strong part in what customers are doing with their IT. It's playing a strong part in what we're doing with our IT, and we're using it alongside other tools, as we've said. And I think this is -- what's most exciting about AI is I don't think there'll be one tool or one use case that dominates. And we're working with other partners like IBM, who are creating strong orchestration layers for these tools to work closely together.

This is where our breadth of partnership comes in again because as Anthropic and others start to make their products available on platforms like AWS, with whom we have top-tier accreditations and strongest partnership in the U.K. through their marketplace offering, then our ability to help customers get access to the full range of tools, choose, design, implement, manage, evolve the ones that are right for them. That's where our strength of offering, I think, is the best in the market as well.

So like I said, I think earlier, we will support the vendors that we have relationships with, we'll support new and emerging vendors. Our priority is to get customers the solutions and outcomes that they want. We will use AI to help us design and deliver that. But the expertise we provide in the first and the last mile of that around whichever products are suitable for their outcomes is where we'll continue to add value. So I do believe Anthropic and others will increasingly become an opportunity for us. But I think the likes of Copilot from Microsoft will absolutely coexist with that as well.

We'll now take our last question today from Damindu Jayaweera from Peel Hunt.

If I could squeeze three questions in there fairly short answer, I hope. First one is the rollout of the new sales system going? If you started, I know you are going to run in parallel. Specifically, I just want to understand that there is no impact on pipeline visibility over the 12 months as you roll that out? That's the first question.

Second question is, there are 25 large deals of GBP 0.5 million. It was super impressive guys, well done, it's 10 more than last year. I just wanted to understand the mix in there in terms of verticals to the extent you can talk about. My assumption was it was dominated by financial services, maybe that's not correct. And then the third one I wanted to ask is that we know from recent set of results from HP, Cisco and the like that they are changing their Ts and Cs to allow them to change prices even after you guys have issued POs to customers.

I know you are almost always on top of these things and almost always the first to address these things in the market. So is this a share gain opportunity for you guys if you can deal with those things better than your competitors? And is there anything that we need to be aware of from a GII to GP conversion perspective in those changes on the Ts and Cs? Just those 3 questions.

Thanks, Damindu. I'll try and not disappoint you on the length of answers then. So the rollout of the sales system is going really well. In fact, I was just talking this morning to one of the UAT team that's sitting not far from me now, very positive reaction through the early stages of that. No, we do not expect to have any issues with visibility of pipeline, the project's proceeding really well and getting good reception from the users that are now getting to grips with it as well.

The 25 large deals over GBP 500,000, the mix from those is more diverse than you imagine. So financial services is a strong vertical for us, but there's many others too. So those large deals are spread across corporate, public sector and a whole range of verticals. So really nice diverse growth in those larger deals as well.

The change in terms and conditions, dynamic pricing, yes, another operational challenge, love those because, again, I think our culture, our scale, our relationships with the vendors, the intimacy we have with customers, massive opportunity for us to help guide customers through it, deliver for vendors. So I do see it as a share gain opportunity. I don't think that issue in and of itself is going to mess around significantly with our GII to GP ratios and margins. So yes, lots of work to do there, but that's good news for us, good outcomes for customers, hopefully as a result.

And also thanks for the great slide showing that you are AI winners both externally and internally.

Thank you. This concludes today's question and answer session and today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, ladies and gentlemen. You may now disconnect.

Okay. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Softcat results presentation for the year ended 31st of July 2025. Thank you very much for your interest in the company. I'm Graham Charlton, Chief Exec. And I'm joined today by Katy Mecklenburgh, our CFO, who you'll hear from very shortly.

And a special warm welcome to those of you in the room with us here in person. This is our new -- still relatively new London office, one of several new offices that we've created over the past year.

And I hope it gives you a feel for the Softcat culture and energy as well as seeing some of the new styling and our new logo come to life, too. Before I pass to Katy, I'll begin, as we usually do, with a quick reminder of who we are and what we do because even for those of you familiar with our story, it is evolving at pace as we grow.

And so it's a useful annual check-in, I think. Katy will then headline the annual results, and I'll come back later to give you an update on the strategic progress that we're making. So here we are. Then Softcat is the largest provider of technology solutions and services in the U.K. market. We operate across the full spectrum of modern infrastructure, encompassing security, Hybrid Cloud, compute and storage, data, AI, networking and workplace technologies.

We offer a very rare capability in a highly fragmented market, the ability to help customers design, implement, manage and support increasingly complex and integrated environments through a single partner. We now have over 2,700 employees. And as well as in the U.K., we operate in Ireland and the U.S., and we've built a branch network, allowing us to procure and fulfill on a truly international basis these days.

We combine -- we continue to work with all of the biggest and best-known and most relevant technology vendors globally, often as the largest or one of their largest partners in the U.K. market. And we have over 10,000 customers ranging from small and the mid-market through to large enterprises and from the corporate into the public sectors.

And I'll talk more later about how we continue to expand this range and capabilities and to deliver on what is still an almost unlimited growth opportunity ahead of us. But for now, I will pass you to Katy for an overview of how we've done in the last 12 months.

Thank you, Graham, and good morning, everyone. So I'm very pleased to share with you Softcat's results for FY '25. In summary, our results for the year reflect the strength of our business model and ongoing success in strategic execution.

Despite the continued backdrop of macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty, we've delivered strong double-digit growth in gross profit, which is our key measure of income and in underlying operating profit. Gross profit of just over 18% reflects a 1.6% increase in our customer base and a 16.5% increase in average gross profit per customer, demonstrating further good progress on both metrics.

This growth reflects broad-based strong performance across the business and the delivery of some larger solutions projects during the second half. Underlying operating profit of GBP 180.1 million, which excludes the impact of GBP 7.2 million of non-underlying costs, and I'll run through these in more detail shortly, increased by 16.9% versus FY '24 and was ahead of our expectations at the beginning of the year.

We have continued to invest in the business throughout the period. This includes, as usual, growing headcount, albeit this has been at a reduced rate compared to previous periods and significant investment in new offices alongside investments in our internal technology capabilities.

We've also maintained a strong balance sheet with underlying cash conversion of 95.6%, which is at the top end of our guided range. We ended the year with more than GBP 182 million in cash, and therefore, alongside our normal policy of paying out between 40% and 50% of profit after tax as an ordinary dividend, we are also able to recommend the payment of a special dividend of 16.1p.

And turning to the summary income statement and starting at the top. Gross invoiced income grew by 26.8% to GBP 3.6 billion, surpassing the GBP 3 billion mark for the first time in our history. This reflects particularly strong growth in hardware, up 74.5% with software up 14.8% and services up by 15.5%. Hardware performance was mainly driven by strength in data center and networking sales with also strong performance in server and compute, and this was augmented by the larger solutions projects we delivered in the second half of the year.

These large deals were very large, low-margin data center solutions projects. Software growth was broad-based across technology towers, while services saw strong growth, both in internal and third-party support deals. Revenue grew by 51.5% ahead of GII, largely due to a higher share of hardware, which is reported on a gross basis under IFRS 15.

Services revenue growth of 30.6% was ahead of GII growth, reflecting a higher share of internally delivered services, which are also reported growth. Software revenue grew behind GII due to a lower software gross margin, reflecting mix into low-margin public sector deals and the impact of Microsoft EA changes.

Gross profit, which is our primary measure of income, grew by 18.3% to GBP 494.3 million. This exceeded our expectations at the beginning of the year and reflects strength across our broad portfolio of solutions alongside the benefit of the larger projects in the second half. Gross profit growth was broad-based across our customer segments of enterprise, mid-market and public sector and on a product basis of hardware, software and services with each growing at least high single digit.

By technology area, growth was driven by security, reflecting the ongoing customer focus on cyber investments, alongside growth in data center and networking, where demand was broad-based and supplemented by the larger solutions projects. In workplace, GP growth was more muted year-on-year, reflecting the impact of Microsoft incentive changes and ongoing subdued demand for devices, particularly in the first half.

Overall, gross margin declined by 90 basis points year-on-year, primarily reflecting the impact of the larger solutions projects at lower margin. Underlying operating profit grew by 16.9% to GBP 180.1 million with operating cost growth of 19.1%. Commissions and other variable pay grew broadly in line with commissionable gross profit, while wages and salaries grew by 11.2%, driven by a 7.3% growth in average headcount and a 3.7% increase in average cost per head.

The cost uplift also reflects 4 months of national insurance increases, which came into effect in April. During the year, we've invested in our IT team capabilities and in our offices with 3 office moves to larger floor prints, including the London office where we're presenting from this morning. Included in the FY '25 operating cost is also an impairment charge for our Marlow office and some realized ForEx losses.

Moving slides. As a result of the investments, the operating profit to gross profit ratio declined slightly from 36.9% to 36.4%. In the year, we incurred GBP 7.2 million of non-underlying costs. These included system development costs of GBP 5.3 million relating to the implementation of the new cloud-based sales and HR systems.

Typically, we would capitalize these types of costs, but neither system meets the criteria for capitalization of cloud-hosted systems. In addition, there is a GBP 1.9 million relating to the acquisition of Oakland, which is made up of GBP 0.7 million in transaction costs, GBP 1 million in respect to the fair value of the deferred consideration and GBP 0.2 million amortization of acquired intangibles.

We expect further non-underlying charges in the region of GBP 20 million to GBP 25 million in FY '26, primarily relating to the sales and HR system implementation. These multiyear projects with peak spend in FY '26 build a foundational platform to Softcat's data, digital and AI transformation journey, and Graham will give more color on this shortly.

After deducting non-underlying costs, statutory operating profit was GBP 172.9 million, an increase of 12.2% year-on-year. Net interest income from the year was in line with the previous year of GBP 5.3 million, with an increase in interest costs from the new office lease liabilities, offset by increased interest earned from improved cash management in the period.

And lastly, tax increased in line with gross profit, resulting in profit after tax growth of 11.7%. Touching now on our customer base and portfolio offering. Our growth is supported by the diversity of our customer base and breadth and depth of our customer offering. On the left, you can see the latest customer segmental view of our business, which remains very well balanced. The public sector and enterprise segments of our business together account for just over half of gross invoiced income with mid-market accounting for the balance. The middle chart shows the spread of our activity between our traditional technology resale business and our services offering.

And on the right, you can see that we continue to generate well-balanced income across all areas of our technology portfolio, ranging from the cloud and data centers through networking, security and end-user compute. The diversity of our customer base and breadth and depth of our offering is a key strength of our business, and this underpins the sustainability of our growth model and our opportunity to further scale.

Moving on to our customer metrics. The chart on the left shows the growth in our entire customer base and growth in average gross profit per customer, which demonstrates our ongoing ability to acquire new customers and sell more to existing customers. During the year, we have grown our customer base by 1.6% to almost 10,200 customers and growing GP per customer by 16.5% to GBP 48,500.

The graph on the right shows a more detailed view of those customers with whom we have an established trading relationship and where we thus experienced lower churn rates. This view focuses on the more than 8,000 customers that deliver at least GBP 1,000 of gross profit each year. In this cohort, there is a more balanced profile of growth between customer growth of 3.7% and GP per customer growth of 14.1%.

The longer tail of transactional customers continues to represent an important source of future growth for us, but our established customers generally account for at least 99% of the group's current gross profit. And now moving on to cash. This year, we have slightly amended the definition of cash conversion to reflect the introduction of the underlying operating metrics that exclude non-underlying items. This means that our new APM is underlying cash conversion, which is net cash generated from operating activities before taxation and any acquisition-related cash flows, including deferred consideration outflows, net of capital expenditure as a percentage of underlying operating profit.

Underlying cash conversion in FY '25 was 95.6%, reflecting continued good working capital management as we continue to manage customer and vendor payment terms in our deals. You may have noted that we are carrying more inventory at the balance sheet date than normal. This relates to a large deal, which is still in progress. And while the inventory is elevated, it doesn't impact net working capital or year-end cash as we've been prepaid by the customer and we, in turn, have prepaid suppliers for the stock.

Depreciation and amortization stepped up year-on-year due to the investment in offices and internal technology and CapEx more than doubled to GBP 15.2 million in the year, primarily reflecting the investment in new offices. The increase in other is due to the add-back of noncash impairments and ForEx movements.

Higher cash tax reflects the growth in profits in line with the income statement. We've returned GBP 95.7 million of cash to shareholders during the year and the net cash paid for Oakland was GBP 7.4 million. Thus, we ended the year with a cash balance of GBP 182.3 million, an increase of GBP 23.8 million year-on-year.

Looking forward to FY '26, we expect cash conversion to be towards the lower end of our guided range of 85% to 95% due to the cash outflows related to the sales and HR systems. This next slide covers the dividend. As a reminder, the interim dividend paid back in May was 8.9p.

In line with our new policy of paying out 1/3 of the previous year's ordinary dividend as an interim in the current year, the Board is proposing a final ordinary dividend of 20.4p, reflecting our normal policy of paying out between 40% and 50% of profit after tax. This represents a total ordinary dividend for the year of 29.3p, an increase of 10.2% on FY '24.

In addition, we're also proposing a special dividend of 16.1p. This is in line with our capital allocation policy to return excess cash to shareholders, subject to maintaining a cash flow, which we've raised this year to GBP 90 million from GBP 75 million, reflecting the operational needs of the business as we continue to grow.

Turning now to capital allocation. We have a disciplined approach to capital allocation and our framework remains unchanged. Our top priority is to invest in future organic growth, which supports our ambition to take further share in expanding addressable market and enables us to scale our business over the long term.

During the year, we've invested in the long-term growth potential of Softcat, increasing our office footprint, increasing headcount, developing our data and digital platforms and investing in core systems and IT capabilities. Our second priority is to maintain a progressive ordinary dividend policy. Any excess capital is then either allocated to compelling strategic investments or return to shareholders.

In the year, we've made our first acquisition, buying Oakland, a data and AI services company, and we continue to explore further acquisition opportunities, which could include further capability bolt-on acquisitions to expand our portfolio offering or expansion in international markets.

And finally, moving to the outlook. Looking ahead, Softcat remains well positioned to deliver significant growth and our guidance for FY '26 remains consistent with that provided at our FY '25 trading update in August. We transacted a couple of very large data center deals in FY '25, some of which are recognized in H2 FY '25 and some of which are currently anticipated to be recognized in H1 FY '26.

Large deals are very much part of our underlying business, but these are exceptionally large. And given the cumulative size and phasing of the deals, there is an element in FY '25 that can't be replicated on a 1-year basis. And we've quantified this incremental contribution as a beneficial GBP 10 million impact on FY '25 operating profit. Excluding this incremental contribution from large projects in FY '25, we expect to deliver low double-digit gross profit growth and high single-digit underlying operating profit growth in FY '26, which is in line with our normal growth framework.

When we include the significant incremental contribution from large deals in FY '25, this translates to high single-digit gross profit growth and low single-digit growth in underlying operating profit in FY '26. I think it's helpful to note that this gives a 2-year CAGR from FY '24 to FY '26 of circa 12% for gross profit and 9% for underlying operating profit, which effectively normalizes for that incremental contribution in FY '25.

The FY '25 second half phasing of these large projects and the anticipated H1 phasing in FY '26, albeit noting that this is dependent on both vendor and customer time lines, means that the underlying operating profit growth for FY '26 will be first half weighted.

And with that, I'll now hand back to Graham to run through the strategic update.

Thank you, Katy. And I will now talk about Softcat's future because although the market hasn't been easy over the past few years, it is still in long-term structural growth. And I can't think of a more exciting industry for us to be in.

And to set the scene and remind us of that, I'm going to start with the momentum with which we enter this year. And it's not momentum that we've gained just over the last 12 months. It's momentum that we've developed over 32 years, and you can see it visually represented here. And as you can see, we've come a long way in that time, relentlessly scaling our business to become the biggest operator in the U.K. market, create the broadest and deepest offering. And yet despite that, as I said before, we still have almost unlimited room for future growth.

Our industry is highly fragmented, and we estimate that at most, we've got a 4% or 5% share of the addressable market. And that is to say the market that we're equipped to directly address today. The breadth of our offering has served us very well through both upswings and periods of more challenging market conditions. And you can see that clearly through the consistency of our growth.

And mainly through organic investment, but also now our acquisition of Oakland, we've extended that addressable market in relevance further each year. We've moved into new and exciting high-growth areas such as data services and AI. And over the past 5 years, we've also begun to expand internationally.

We've established a strong foothold in Ireland and with more customers pulling us into overseas opportunities such as in the U.S., we've got the capacity and capability and reach now to accelerate further. So in terms of our future opportunity, I will come at it from a few different angles. But before I get into that, I'll pause just for a minute on something that we won't be changing and something that will be totally consistent about how we will grow in the future.

And that's where we get our primary source of advantage from. And as you know, that is our culture and our people. And this simple illustration, which you've seen before, is still the driving force behind our success. The industry-leading customer service that our special culture delivers creates trust that enables outstanding performance and growth, which enables further investment in our proposition.

So this flywheel is still the heart of everything we do. And you can see in the center of it, the 2 sources of advantage that I think we have, firstly, the highly engaged employees that are the product of our culture. They will always be our #1 priority and the main source of advantage. But the second element of that advantage in the middle is the best-in-class proposition.

And there is a lot going on within that to enhance the value that we can deliver for customers. And we've previously shared the different components of that proposition and described how we intend to develop each in turn. And we've refined that down now into 3 key themes and combine those with the culture to create what I now call our 4 big engines of growth to power us towards our future ambitions.

And you can see them illustrated here, and I'll talk about each in turn about what we've done and about what we will do to build them and tune them up for the opportunity ahead. They encompass the special culture but also sales and customer excellence, the breadth and quality of our offering and operational excellence. Continued investment in all 4 of them will drive our strategy, and so I'll talk about each in turn.

So firstly, our special culture. We are not a special place to work because we've been successful. Softcat has been successful because our people have made it a special place to work and the drive, the energy, the positivity of our people, it's a force of nature, creates a momentum and forward motion like nothing I saw before joining Softcat. We devote an enormous amount of time and effort to preserving the power that, that creates.

And as we continue to grow, the empowerment and support that we give to the incredible people who lead our local office leadership teams, that becomes ever more important. Culture happens at a local level and in a physical environment. And this is one of the reasons that we've invested so significantly over such a long period of time in our workplaces and the training, coaching and support that we give our people. And we've stepped that up over the last 12 months. We've carried out 4 major moves and refits to some of the biggest offices that we have, and we've got more yet to come.

So you can see Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and obviously, the London office that we're in today on the slide there. But Dublin and Glasgow are next, and the new styling has been updated across the rest of the offices as well. But alongside that work on the fabric of our buildings, we are stepping up the recognition and support that those local leadership teams get as well. Each office has got a local identity and a way of doing things, but the ethos, the energy and the drive is the consistent thing based on a genuine care for people and a shared purpose and celebration of success as a team.

We've continued to receive positive external recognition for the strength of the culture, including, for the first time, being certified a Great Place to Work in the U.S. alongside the existing accreditations that we have in the U.K. and Ireland.

And we just had the whole company together at the NEC in Birmingham for our annual kickoff to celebrate what we achieved last year and plot our route forward together. And we're now in the process of getting our people's feedback, whether from new apprentices or veterans of 30 years, and we do have some of those to hear what they feel that we're doing well and where we need to improve and evolve.

And their feedback along with that, that we get from our customers, those are the 2 single biggest and most important inputs each year to our strategy. And so that leads us on to the second one of our engines, which is sales and customer excellence. And this is all about ensuring that our sales teams continue to lead the industry through the training, support that we give them, but it also extends beyond the sales teams to encompass what is truly an organizational approach to customer service.

This pyramid, which is familiar to many of you, and we've used it before, shows a representation of how our salespeople shape that customer opportunity over time and deliver growth through outstanding service, building trust and loyalty. Each layer of this pyramid is defined by the amount of gross profit delivered by our customers. And as you move up the chart, you can see an increase in customer tenure as we form deeper relationships, we have more vendor presence in each account and the lower churn rates that result as we build that trust.

In the bottom layer, the customer pool are customers with whom we've either not yet trading or have just made a transactional start. And these customers are generally with our -- and being targeted with our -- by our junior account managers and just beginning to work with us. But as you move up, through the layers, the relationship builds towards that trusted adviser status. And so at the top there, the pyramid at the top, it isn't simply a reflection of the size of the customers and IT budgets in that layer. You can see that only around 1/3 of the customers at the top there are the largest enterprise scale organizations that we work with. 2/3 there are still mid-market businesses.

That shows the success that we are able to have in the mid-market space, but also that we've got very significant scope to do more in the enterprise segment as well. And on the right-hand side, we've outlined a number of large solutions that we are delivering each year, which is up by around 50% in the last 12 months. And as we keep growing our capabilities and our offering and deepen those relationships with more and more customers, we expect to continue to grow that large solutions element of our business as well.

And turning the slide again now but staying on this topic. And as I alluded to earlier, feedback from our customers is a key input to how we build for the future. We formally survey all of our customers on an annual basis, and that feeds into the customer satisfaction report, some of the results of which you can see summarized here. And they remain exceptionally high. We had a record number, far more than ever before, actually, customer contacts respond this year. And we've never had more people telling us so clearly how highly they rate the value of the service that we provide. Our NPS score increased by 1 to 64. But the survey results also give us insight into what our customers are focusing on and planning for their businesses, unsurprisingly, data security and AI feature prominently.

And our acquisition of Oakland is helping us to drive more conversations across those areas. The desire in our customers to innovate their business models is also very clear. And having a single partner, as I mentioned before, that can collaborate on all these areas is a huge advantage. We can advise on integrated solutions that can be implemented part of long-term strategic road maps and our account managers.

They can remain focused on working with a customer in the areas that are important to them and not banging a single self-interested drum. And that alignment of interest is an incredibly powerful force for performance, especially in more challenging conditions and for sustaining our long-term relevance to the customer. And turning now then to the third engine and the breadth and quality of our offering. And this slide is another one that should be familiar. I think it neatly captures the range of our portfolio, comprising the technical skills that we have, the services that we provide across all the technology areas, along with the vendor accreditations that we hold.

And across the top, you can see how we segment our technology proposition into 5 key areas. And this gives us a very rare span across the entirety of modern infrastructure from the edge to the cloud from software to hardware to services from physical supply of devices to the rearchitecture and management of data. We work with all the largest and most established vendors. We're accredited to all of their top level programs, and we are the first port of call as well for exciting and emerging new technologies.

Our services range from advisory and architecture through to implementation, support and management of solutions. And this gives our account managers the confidence and credibility to work with their customers knowing whatever issues or challenges that particular customer is currently facing, regardless of where it is in their technology stack, Softcat is best placed to help them in some way.

And over the past year or so, we've been adding to and deepening those capabilities and services as we always do. That's been again through organic hiring, but also for the first time this year through acquisition. So we'll have a look at a brief overview now of that Oakland acquisition, which we completed back in April. And it has significantly enhanced our capability in the data and AI space. And among other technologies, it also supports perfectly our partnership with Microsoft.

Now we originally worked with Oakland as a customer of theirs and to help us -- they were helping us with our own data transformation. And in working with them, we could see a number of things. Firstly, that they were a quality provider, they were capable, and they could execute. But we could also see a very clear affinity between their culture and ethos and ours.

And we could see that the help that they were giving us was relevant across all of our customer base, too. Data engineering and governance is the key foundational layer to AI transformation and the creation of agentic AI systems. And as we say internally, the more that we looked at that -- on that previous slide that I showed you of our proposition, the more that we could see an Oakland shaped hole in it.

They could see it as well. We brought the 2 businesses together. They were with us at the all-company kickoff event, which I just mentioned. And watching our 2 businesses come together has been really exciting because the pipeline that we're developing and the response of the vendors like Microsoft, but also like IBM, like NVIDIA, Intel and many, many others and the conversations we are having with customers about their data is really exciting.

And this isn't just a benefit to Softcat for the consultancy and data engineering revenue stream that it will bring to us. The acquisition significantly expands our addressable market in other ways, too. And as you can see from some of the vendor names that I just mentioned there that play in that data and AI and high-performance compute space, but it also deepens our relevance to the expanding portfolio of many other traditional players that operate across our portfolio as well.

So we're delighted with the progress we've made on the joint integration plan. It's been focused so far on very carefully and selectively linking up our sales motions. And that, as I said, has generated a terrific pipeline, both for Oakland and for the broader Softcat portfolio.

And finally, now we'll turn to the fourth engine, operational excellence. And our vision is to build a business which is increasingly automated, smarter, easier to interact with for both customers and our supply chain and using data more intelligently. We will -- this will improve both the scalability and also the effectiveness of our business, but also enhance customer and employee experiences, helping amongst other things for us to get the right part of our service deployed for the right customer at the right time.

And we've been investing for years now in our own internal processes and systems, and we'll continue to do that to modernize how we work. We've got a representation here on the slide of what we are doing. And we've indicated how as we get these base systems and the data governance and other foundational layers complete, then we'll be able to move into the optimization and innovation of how we deliver.

And the timing of these investments starting as we did around 4 or 5 years ago to plan and develop some of this, starting with the implementation of a new finance system 3 or 4 years ago, a new database architecture and integration layers, now extending into service -- new service management system, which we implemented last year and now into our sales system and a new HR platform.

All of this comes just as these core platforms are beginning to embed AI in the way that they work. And the creation of agents and agentic systems with the overlay of Copilot, which as you know, we fully deployed a while ago across the organization. I think this puts us in prime position to truly transform the ways that we, Softcat work in the years ahead.

And as I said, during the year, we started work on the deployment of Microsoft Dynamics as a replacement for our existing sales system. The latter had been in place for more than 20 years. We expect user testing on the new system to begin next year in the early summer. And ultimately, all of this work and investment is designed to enhance about what I talked about before, an organizational approach to sales and customer excellence.

The technology and tools that our salespeople, technical engineers, credit controllers, legal team, amongst many others, will have at their disposal will be contemporary and AI-enabled. And as we look to scale our business in the U.K., in Ireland, in the U.S. and beyond, these investments will provide us with the operating platform to do what we do best, fantastic customer service delivered by a special team of people.

So those are the 4 aspects of our strategy going forward and a flavor of what we're doing within each to make Softcat an even better partner for our customers into the future. But I'll finish by talking about where we will begin, where we will be deploying this approach and what we're doing in the different geographies that we're now operating in.

So this next slide shows the geographic range of our operations today. And despite having the largest share of the U.K. market and having created the presence that you can see on the page there, from the U.S. out to the Far East, despite all of that, we're not even yet in the top 10 globally in our industry today.

And that's great news. Because while the U.K. is and will remain a core focus and a market with more than enough opportunity in and of itself to perpetuate the growth rates that we have been delivering, despite that, the U.K. is now only one of the markets that our customers are asking us to do work for them in.

As I mentioned earlier, we've made a great start in Ireland. We have a local team there selling to local customers. We will keep investing in that team, and I believe that we can aim to be the biggest player in that market one day. And we also have an emerging presence in the U.S. with a team there now of around 20 growing in tenure. It's a mixture of new local hires and tenured Softcat U.K. [ exports ].

And in that market, we are not yet selling to local customers. We are just delivering for existing U.K. and Irish multinationals. But the culture in that team is already as strong and vibrant as in any of our U.K. offices, and we're developing some really good momentum. And we've got lots of good options through which to keep building in the U.S. chief amongst them. And the one certain way through which we will do it is by continuing to organically to invest in the team and office that we've already got there.

But we also believe that Softcat could be a fantastic owner for an already established operation in the U.S. And the evaluation of inorganic options there is something that we've previously described before as a no-lose effort because just by doing that work, by looking and evaluating, we are learning more about the market and how to build the existing team.

So our progress in the U.S. could continue to be a steady organic build or we could accelerate it through acquisition. Either way, we've made a great start there. We've got the capability, capacity and ambition to act if we see the right opportunity. But finding the right opportunity is the key phrase in that sentence. We've set a high bar and finding a management team with an ethos aligned to ours based around genuine care for their people and culture, like we did with Oakland, that's the nonnegotiable part of it.

But also like with Oakland, I think we've shown that we can extend and accelerate our business through M&A. And so we will look for the chance to do that in the U.S. In addition to the plans we've got there in America, the U.K. and in Ireland, we'll also continue to build on the growing network of branches that we've established across the rest of the world, in Canada, Europe, Asia Pacific. We do now have an office of 3 people out in Singapore, but we'll keep developing the rest of world fulfillment capability, too.

And so to summarize now, we've delivered, I think, this year, another year of very strong performance. We bring fantastic forward momentum into this new financial year. We've refined how we think about the strategic priorities that will power this next exciting phase of growth for Softcat, and we've got really well-defined plans to invest across all of those. We are expanding the horizons over which we can deploy our model for future success. But while we might enable new tools and new approaches in new markets, we will always have people and culture as our #1 priority and principal driving force.

So thank you again for your time and interest in Softcat today. We're happy to start taking questions now. We'll begin in the room, and then we'll open it up for anything that comes in on the lines as well.

It's Andrew Ripper from Panmure Liberum. Well done on the results. A couple from me. Just on the numbers, you talked, Katy, in your section about FY '26 being H1 weighted. I wonder if you could give us a sense of degree. I appreciate you've been very clear about the full year, both inc and exc the exceptional deal in FY '25. But to what degree do you expect, for example, GP growth to be H1 weighted this year?

Sure. We don't give formal guidance, but to be helpful, happy to give a bit more color. So it doesn't seem this large data center deal is recognized in H1 and noting that there are dependencies on both the customer and the vendor. But we expect GP and OP, the 2-year growth rates, i.e., based on FY '24 to be roughly the same H1, H2. And that should give you for H1 OP growth, something in the range of mid- to high single digits and a slight OP decline in H2.

And Graham, as you finished on sort of international strategy, just picking up on the U.S. I mean you've had a fair amount of time looking at potential deals. What -- can you sort of elaborate on how close you are or what your perspective is on potentially doing a deal? Have you found companies which would fit culturally, but you've not been able to agree on price? Or are you not as close as that to potentially doing a deal? And on the organic front, you made the point there that you've done a great job with existing international customers. When do you get to the point organically that you start serving local businesses in the U.S.?

Yes. So we've not to date got to the point where everything was right apart from price. We've done a lot of work to understand the market, to develop our own, I guess, scale and capability to the point where it is the right step. And obviously, we've got closer to that over time. I think we're in a position now where if we find the right thing, it would be a good step for Softcat to take.

The main or the most clear element of what it would take is around the people, the leadership team wanting to be part of Softcat, having a culture that's generally based around people. The rest of the criteria for what might work for us in the U.S., we're more open-minded about.

The team that we have there to the second part of your question is I guess it's kind of operating between the 2. So it is just working with existing customers, but it is now developing local relationships with those customers and therefore, unearthing new opportunities in the local market, but we're not winning net new customers there.

And so as I said, the one thing that we know we'll do is to keep investing in and building that team, and that will open more opportunities. When do you get to this crossover point of winning net new customers? Well, I don't think organically, we're at that point probably imminently. But you can see why, therefore, this makes sense because if there is an operation in the U.S., similar ethos to ours, would look at Softcat and think you'd be a great owner, you could accelerate us. Well, it works for everybody. That's exactly what we found with Oakland.

And so if and only if we see that, then we've got the ability to act. But we don't need to. As I said, the U.K. and Ireland and the multinational aspects of the customers that we've got, there's more than enough for us to go out there, but we have the capacity. This is the right step if we find the right thing for us.

Just really quickly, just to finish off, Katy, back to you. Just in terms of the exceptional systems cost this year, GBP 20 million to GBP 25 million. I assume that's all cash. And if you could just confirm that? And then do you expect some residual costs to flow into FY '27?

So yes, happy to give a bit more color on those. So the GBP 20 million to GBP 25 million has got 2 parts to it. The largest part is the system development work, which I'll come back to. But there is also an element that's still Oakland. So that deferred consideration we accrue over the earn-out period, which is 3 years.

And that -- and we've got intangible amortization over a similar time period, both of those sort of noncash. There are staged payments, but they're not always in cash within a year. The larger part is system costs. At the moment, we're focused on Phase 1 of the project, and that Phase 1 will run into FY '27.

So we said that the peak spend is FY '26, but they're multiyear deals. And Phase 1 in FY '27, very roughly half of the spend in FY '26. Phase 1 focuses on the foundational elements of the system. So we're trying to keep the initial scope as tight as we possibly can to minimize delivery risk.

We then directly follow on with a Phase 2 and then Phase 3 of the project and that will add in additional features. The exact scope and the spend will depend on the list of requirements and the return that these give. So we'll decide that sort of when we're at the end of Phase 1. And I guess, as long as they are costs that we could have capitalized had there not been this sort of nuance around SaaS-based licenses, then that's what we treat as non-underlying. So I hope that gives you a bit more flavor. But -- and you're right, the systems are largely cash [ in the year ].

Damindu Jayaweera from Peel Hunt. I mean it's incredible to see the growth in sort of the larger deals. I mean it's 46 deals above GBP 500,000. What I wanted to understand is that, obviously, when you talk about the exceptionally larger deals, the data center deals, I think there's an assumption, I think, rightly that they come initially at least lower margin. The deals that you're talking about here, broadly like those 46 deals, they come at more normative margins, I assume. Is that okay?

Yes. I mean there's a whole range, and it depends -- the scale of the deal is one aspect, but the role that we're playing in the deal, how much advisory architecture work are we doing, how long has the project been going on for, what role do we have in implementation and support management of the solution when it's up and running.

So those larger solutions deals, they range across all 5 aspects of the tech proposition that we drew out can involve different levels of service. So the margin is a very broad range as well.

And Graham, tied to that, given that you have the -- you have higher and higher CAGR basically as you go up the pyramid now, is there anything need to change from a sales motion perspective to upsell to some of these existing customers? And I guess it applies to these large data center deals as well if you have to make better profit from it? Or is that motion already there?

No. So the short answer is yes. We are developing our sales motions because they're different in public sector, different in large customers, different in different technology areas, different depending on what each customer has in terms of skill set internally.

So our playbook of sales motions is always expanding. And as we've expanded it, it's developed into large complex customers, different areas, security assessments, data governance and engineering network now as well. So -- and that's a good point. I mean the sales motion around Oakland and the consultation they do extends our kit bag again, and it has benefits because we might learn that motion in that data center space, but then we can apply it in security and other spaces, too.

So that, I think, is one of our -- has been one of our key strengths. And a lot of this comes from the bottom up from our people, seeing opportunities, saying, right, if we can do this, they create a best practice, they share it, and it develops across the business. So yes, new sales motions is definitely part of our growth.

Can I squeeze in one more question, please? So I guess you've added 180 people on average when you added to Oakland this kind of additional capability, and you just alluded to the fact that, that becomes quite important on a go-forward basis. So can we start to think of like tuck-in acquisitions as almost acquihires? And essentially, the 150 to 200 range that you normally hire can now be thought of as a slightly higher range potentially because of M&A?

Yes. I mean, capability acquisitions like Oakland, we will -- and again, it's hard to predict because you could foresee different situations as well. But we are looking to bring in capable people who want to be part of Softcat or energized by our culture. So yes, I think us thinking about M&A in that capability space as an acquihire is a reasonable mindset. But equally, in the -- if we bought something in the U.S., we'd be looking to retain and empower their people, not rip them out and replace it with Softcat people. We're not pretending that we can drop Softcat people in and engineer -- a complete change in culture. We need that cultural affinity and those people to be the anchor point in the first place.

Tintin Stormont from Deutsche Numis. I'll do 3, but they're really quick. In terms of the year just gone, if I adjust out the GBP 10 million in EBIT, but gross it up on a gross profit basis, it still looks like sort of like 15% GP growth for the year, 12% and then sort of 17%, 18% in the second half, if I take off sort of GBP 12.5 million in the GP in FY '25. So there's an acceleration still without the projects. Is there anything you would call out in terms of the environment and all of that?

So I think something to be minded of is even in H2, we've taken that incremental contribution, but still some of the remaining growth is still the large deals that we've taken. Those other smaller but still large deals of above GBP 500,000 gross profit also back half weighted as well. But the overarching performance on the base business is strong as well. So it's sort of a combination of all of those 3 things, too.

But -- and so what was behind that kind of run rate organic build in the second half? I mean the device cycle certainly started to uptick in the second half, but it's still a relatively small part of our numbers, and it wasn't growing ahead of the rest of the business either. The -- so no, I think it's just -- I couldn't really call out a particular trend. I think it's just ebb and flow of when customer opportunities come up more than anything else.

And then just a couple of quick ones on M&A. When you're looking at the U.S., you're developing a bit of M&A muscle with Oakland. When you think about 20 people in the U.S. and you're thinking about who you could potentially add, assuming it ticks the boxes, is there still a comfort range in terms of how big you want to go in terms of managing that risk?

Well, I mentioned, we're more open-minded on some of the other criteria apart from the people-centric culture. So the right scale of operation that we could acquire, yes, I think there's a fairly broad range to that. I don't think we want it to be too small because we want a team that's established and that we can empower and support. But equally, to your point, you don't want that to be too big as well because it probably does, at some point, start to bring bigger execution risk. But -- so there's a sweet spot there, but it's in quite a broad range for us.

And then finally, one more. Finally, just in terms of the systems, obviously, quite a lot of work going into '26 and '27. If you look back at the NetSuite was quite a big change, too, a couple of years ago, what were the learnings from that in terms of operational risk, in terms of kind of how you're managing the rollout for the sales and HR systems?

Well, we -- sorry, do you want to start?...

So I mean, I wasn't here for NetSuite, so maybe you're a better place. But NetSuite was probably the first and largest program that we did. So we had lots of learnings from it. And large IT projects are not easy. So I think we've gone in to the project knowing that and we've put in the best team and governance that we possibly can, and we're being as sort of mindful as we can.

Sales teams have been involved hugely in the design, the scope and that [ comms ] as well. So the sort of heart and mind piece is well underway as well. So I'm sure it's not going to be easy. I don't think they ever are, but I think we've done everything that we possibly can to set ourselves up in the right way to do it.

Yes. And as Katy said, I mean, the NetSuite project was a successful implementation. We've also done ServiceNow implementation for our own internal IT and also our service operations. We've done a lot of database work as we've mentioned, too.

So I think we've built up good and very recent capability around systems. We've invested in the delivery of this. We're working in close partnership with Microsoft on it. We chose together to partner with Microsoft that would do the implementation with us. So the tightness of the 3 teams we brought together to do it.

And again, learnings from NetSuite, getting our internal people pulled out and dedicated to the project, not as a side project, but we've got salespeople and specialists and people who use the existing system dedicated full time to the delivery and configuration of this.

So when you get out of the textbook of how to do these things well, we have followed it, and we're doing it with people operating in that Softcat culture. So I think we're giving ourselves the very best chance. Equally, the way that the delivery will be managed, there's a huge amount of attention going into the derisking of that as well. So -- whereas -- we're feeling very confident, but it's a big systems project, as you rightly point out. But yes, I think our approach to it and the learnings we've had recently should stand us in very good stead to do a good job.

It's Charlie Brennan here from Jefferies. Can I ask a couple of questions on the guidance? It feels like there's a lot going on. There's some nonrecurring benefits from '25 with a large customer. It also sounds like there are some nonrecurring costs from the Marlow write-off and FX costs. So if I try and cut through all of the noise that I can't forecast particularly well, if you hadn't have won any big deals, I would have expected guidance to be low double-digit gross profit growth and high single-digit EBIT growth. Let's call it, 12% GP growth and 9% EBIT growth. But you have won some large deals.

We've got some of them in the balance sheet. So why isn't the 2-year CAGR higher than 12% and 9%? That's question number one. And question number two is GBP 300 million still sounds like a big deal. Do we have to assume that you win one of those a year going forward? Or are we going to be sat here in 12 months' time with you talking about the nonrecurrence of a big deal and a growth normalization in 2027?

Okay. Let me answer the second one because it's the, I guess, the easiest [indiscernible] maybe it goes combined. The rate that we've got, we've got, as you say, a very large deal in -- the majority falls into FY '26. Some of it was in FY '25.

But it is more normalized and doesn't contribute as much as the element that was in FY '25. We consider FY '26 numbers to be sort of normal base [ than ] run rates that we'd be able to expect to apply our normal growth framework to say the double digit -- low double-digit gross profit and the high single digits.

So no, we wouldn't expect to adjust that out. What we've tried to give you is the clarity of what we sort of deem incremental of those 2 large deals in the cumulative nature. And I guess I'll go back to that 2-year CAGR is 12% and 9%, and we're pretty confident in that as well.

But it would have been 12% or 9% without the big deals. So where is the conservatism coming from? Why don't we see a higher 2-year guide than 12% and 9%?

So I think those large deals have always played a part of us getting to the, let's call it, 12% and 9%. We've done even better than that in FY '25, which is what causes, I guess, the noise between the 2 years. And you're right, there are one-off costs in there as well. So hence, that 2-year CAGR. And the FY '26 run rate is much more normalized.

So if you look at the 2 years, it gets rid of all of the noise that you've got in FY '25. But big deals are and always have been part of what we do. Now whether in FY '27, that will be lots more of above half, we'll have something really big, I don't know. But from a sort of probability point of view, that's how we sort of look at that forward growth rate.

Okay. And then I'll just sneak in a third one, just on competition dynamics. Were those 2 data center deals won in full competitive tender? Or were they preselected based on historic relationships? And then when I think about the competition for those larger deals, I guess it's against the more global, more national players, whether it's a CDW or WWT or Computacenter. I guess everyone would point to breadth of capability if we were to speak to those larger players. What do you think your differentiation is against that more sophisticated competitor set?

So I don't -- I can't really think of many deals where we're not in a competitive situation. There is always competitors in the accounts we're working with. So individual deals might be less or more of a tender situation, but absolutely, there's competition for those deals and those customers. When it comes to the confidence of a customer in a big solutions deal like that, there's many aspects to it. There's relationship and longevity of that relationship, human beings trusting each other. That's a huge factor. That's backed by technical skill and capability, which we've invested in chronically and have some amazing teams operating in great ways now to do that as well.

There's geographic fulfillment reach. And so it's always an art form and a combination of those things. We never want for good competition. There is -- it's a highly fragmented market. There's always good people out there, whether it's the names that you mentioned or other players. So I think the progress we've made has shown that we, Softcat have been able to and have developed -- clearly, our culture and the customer service leads to good relationships. I've talked about the breadth and depth and quality of our offering. We've talked about the geographic reach and the investment we've put into that.

And I think the combination of those things is what -- and how we can see to develop them further is what leads to the ambition that we're setting out to keep [indiscernible] as well. But we'll always have a good competition. You can't win them all, and we don't.

Oliver Tipping, Peel Hunt. I've just got a couple of quick questions. The first one is, given that you've got large multinationals pulling you into the U.S., will the U.S. client list lean towards larger enterprises? Or will the mix be more reflective of the U.K. mix?

I mean it will trend towards the larger end of our mix just by -- it tends to be larger organizations that have multinational operations. So yes, so slightly trending that way, but it does reflect the mix that we have as well, like we have a lot of good mid-market customers pulling us out into the U.S. as well.

Obviously, public sector is different. But in the corporate space, I think it will be largely reflective of the U.K. Now if we take an inorganic step in the U.S., then depending on what we acquire, there'll be a slant there as well. But no, it's reflective of the mix that we've got.

Great. And then the second one is, I know you're expanding your internal services capabilities. But obviously, compared to sort of just selling a license where you can sort of increase GP per head infinitely, there's only a limited number of hours in a day you can provide a service to someone. So does that have any impact on your growth of GP per head in the medium to long term?

Well, you can look at the last 10 years for how this might pan out because we've been doing this for, well, 15, 20 years, building that service capability. And what we've always said is we're not pivoting to be a service operation. We don't see software, hardware, services as different things. We don't -- our customers don't come to us talking about software, hardware or services. They come to us talking about problems and solutions.

So our service business has built at the same rate of the rest of our business. It's always been in that 14% to 16% range of gross income. I think you should expect to continue to see that be the case. Who knows? We don't know because we don't, like I say, think about it like that. We follow what customers need. And the P&L will end up being what it will be.

But our margins and our margin profile has been pretty consistent over that time as well. So yes, I'd expect -- if you trend forward from what we've done over the last 10 years, you might see a similar path into the future as well.

Joe George, JPMorgan. Just one for me, please. Just on the U.K. backdrop, can you talk a little bit about customer spending patterns there, particularly with regards to any trepidation into the upcoming budget? And to what extent you've seen stable end market conditions there, please?

I mean, I think from the last couple of years or 2 years ago, we sort of said that we were seeing a bit of a change. And things haven't gotten easier. They haven't gotten harder either. And we obviously didn't have the easiest budget last time around in general for the economy.

So I think it's fair to say we're just assuming it's the same kind of macroeconomic backdrop that we've seen over the last couple of years, and that's what we've planned against, which seems a sensible assumption.

Maybe just 2 for me. One really quickly on headcount growth. What are sort of your expectations for sort of next year or 2?

So I think we talked about this year was a moderation from what we've done over the last couple of years for multiple of reasons. And we, I think, next year will pick up a little bit, but generally stay more muted. We're hoping now as we scale, we're investing a lot into IT and technology and systems.

And therefore, that should allow us to scale with a -- still we'll be growing headcount, but not as much. I think the other dynamic, though, is the cost per head will continue to go up as we automate sort of more transactional work, and we have to build out sort of core capabilities. So I think that trend is what we would expect to see continue.

Yes. Got it. And maybe just one more. On Software revenue growth, it was 6%. So I was just wondering what the gross profit growth was for software.

So the overall software was double digits. So basically, the GII to revenue is somewhat to do with front margin and then depending on what you get in rebates can bolster that. And therefore, the overarching growth was in line with everything else.

It looks like we might have reached the end of the questions in the room. So I wonder if we've got any on the lines.

We have a question from Martin O'Sullivan from Shore Capital.

I just had a quick one, if I could, on your market share, the 5% market share in the U.K., just in terms of pushing on towards high single digits and beyond, what sort of operational or strategic changes, if any, would be required to support that level of scale? And given the fragmented nature of the IT services market, is your market share ambition better served by continued organic expansion or leaning more into acquisitions like Oakland?

Thank you. If we imagine a Softcat that has 10% or 5% market share, the operational changes we need to make are none other than that, which we've described in the presentation today about the things we're doing with our tooling, the further investment in new headcount, new offices and the fabric of the buildings that we occupy and that kind of thing.

So we're doing everything already in the plans we've laid out to be able to build the business of that nature. And is it better -- can we get there through organic or inorganic? I mean, I think we've proven that we can do this, and increment market share organically, and we will continue to do that. I have high confidence in our ability to do that. Acquisitions like Oakland could be a helpful part of how we do that. Back to the question about is it an acquisition or is it at an acquihire? I mean it's semantics, it doesn't really matter. But when we get customers telling us what they need from us, we see where vendors are moving to, we create organic plans to do that. And if it's going to take a long time and we need to move faster, then we can consider acquisitions to help us on that route. So that's how we think about it. And I don't think it's one or the other. It's likely to be a combination of both going forward. But I'd reiterate the high bar we've set on M&A and that beginning around ethos and culture is a nonnegotiable.

And I'd add to that, what's also helpful is that actually probably our market share has gone down a little bit. We've added into our TAM because of Oakland, we now play in a slightly broader offering, and we've also added Ireland in as well that wasn't in there as well. And again, we've got a lower market share there, so even more runway to grow.

It appears there are currently no further questions. With this, I'd like to hand the call back over to management team for closing remarks.

Great. Thank you. Well, as I said at the start, we really appreciate your time and attention on Softcat today. Thank you for listening to the results. We are really pleased with the performance we've had. We're more excited than ever, as we said, by the opportunity, we've got clear plans to address it. So we look forward to keeping you posted on how we're doing. Thank you.