The five macro trends set to define 2026
Future PLC’s earnings call for the second half of 2025 revealed a 6% decline in full-year revenue to £739 million. Despite the revenue dip, the company announced a five-fold increase in dividends and reported an EBITDA margin of 30%. The stock price reacted positively, surging 6.28% to £637.15, reflecting investor confidence in the company’s strategic initiatives and operational efficiencies.
Key Takeaways
- Full-year revenue decreased by 6% year-on-year.
- Adjusted operating profit stood at £205 million.
- Dividends increased five-fold, signaling strong cash flow.
- Stock price rose by 6.28% following the earnings announcement.
- Strategic initiatives like Future Optic and operational efficiency programs were highlighted.
Company Performance
Future PLC’s performance in the second half of 2025 was marked by a 6% decline in revenue compared to the previous year, largely due to a 3% organic revenue decline. Despite this, the company maintained a robust EBITDA margin of 30%. The strategic focus on innovation and efficiency appears to have resonated well with investors, as evidenced by the positive stock movement.
Financial Highlights
- Revenue: £739 million, down 6% year-on-year
- Adjusted operating profit: £205 million
- EBITDA margin: 30%
- Adjusted EPS: Declined by 1%
- Net debt: £276 million, with 1.3x leverage
- Dividend: Increased five-fold
Market Reaction
Future PLC’s stock price experienced a significant rise of 6.28% following the earnings call, closing at £637.15. This upward movement is notable given the company’s revenue decline, suggesting that investors are optimistic about the company’s strategic initiatives and financial discipline. The stock is trading closer to its 52-week high of £1,136.89, indicating strong market confidence.
Outlook & Guidance
Future PLC has set a medium-term revenue growth target of 2-4%, with expectations of modest growth in FY26. The company’s strategic initiatives are expected to be more impactful in the second half of the fiscal year, maintaining a target EBITDA margin of 30%. The management expressed confidence in achieving a 95% cash conversion rate.
Executive Commentary
- CEO Kevin emphasized, "The AI risk is not as big as you think, and AI represents revenue opportunities," highlighting the company’s proactive stance on technological advancements.
- CFO Sharjeel Suleman noted, "Brands matter, and increasingly so," underlining the importance of brand strength in the company’s strategy.
Risks and Challenges
- Market Transition: The digital advertising market is in transition, which may impact revenue streams.
- AI Trends: Changes in AI search trends have led to a 10% decline in sessions, posing a challenge to digital engagement.
- Economic Conditions: Broader macroeconomic pressures could affect consumer spending and advertising budgets.
Future PLC’s earnings call provided a comprehensive overview of its financial performance and strategic direction, with a focus on innovation and efficiency. Despite the revenue decline, the company’s strategic initiatives and strong market positioning have bolstered investor confidence, as reflected in the stock’s positive reaction.
Full transcript - Future PLC (FUTR) H2 2025:
Kevin, Executive/CEO, Future plc: Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. I know it is a busy day, and we appreciate your time. For today’s results, Sharjeel will take you through some market context and the FY25 performance. I will come back to talk through our vision, strategy, and my confidence in how the actions we are taking to build the business of tomorrow will deliver substantial value upside. What we would like you to take away from this presentation is three things. One, a better understanding of the topic that is understandably front of mind for many, namely audience and AI. Sharjeel will cover why the risk is not as big as you think, and I will take you through why this is actually already a revenue opportunity. We want to be open or as open as possible in sharing what we’re seeing and how we’re positioned.
Two, a clear review on what Future is today. A data-first scalable platform and the progress we are making on our strategic initiative to take full advantage of this, in particular as we build out new revenue streams to drive the platform effect, the network effect. Three, and finally, how we are continuing to evolve our business model to drive productivity and efficiency gains and continued strong cash generations. Thank you, Sharjeel. Over to you.
Sharjeel Suleman, CFO, Future plc: Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, everyone. Right, first thing. The score in the second test was 204 for 4 when I had to turn off my phone just now. Right, Future financials. I’ll get serious. We are pleased to deliver financials in line with consensus. Revenue at GBP 739 million was down 6% year on year on a reported basis, with organic performance down 3% as previously communicated. Our adjusted operating profit of GBP 205 million reflects the expected full-year margin of 28%. This margin is flat year on year and demonstrates our disciplined approach to costs. Combined with the benefit of our share buyback program, this has translated into an adjusted EPS decline of only 1%. The group continued to generate good cash flows at 86% of AOP and 96% underlying. The balance sheet remained strong, with leverage at 1.3 after having returned around GBP 100 million to shareholders in this period alone.
And in line with our capital allocation policy, this morning we have announced a five-fold increase to our ordinary dividend and also our fifth share buyback program. To summarize these results, despite the macro challenges, we are focusing on what we can control, executing against our strategy, showing pockets of growth, investing in our future while tightly managing our costs, focusing on cash and applying our capital allocation framework. Before I get into the detailed results, I wanted to spend a bit of time on some market context with regards to our audiences and the impact of AI, given the heightened focus on these areas. Amid all the noise about AI and its impact on media, one question we’re asked most often is what is happening to our audiences. How we are impacted and the extent to which we are impacted is not that well understood.
Sharing that understanding is our responsibility. So let me take you through that today and share some insight about audiences today. Kevin will then pick up on our strategic initiatives focused on our new audiences of tomorrow, as well as AI as a revenue driver. So the first point I wanted to highlight is the world-leading brands we have across many verticals. Brands and the trust they bring to audiences are increasingly important in our view. Brands provide our business with scale, resilience, and multiple routes to monetize content. And our brands live across many platforms. Let’s dig a little bit deeper on those digital audiences in blue on the left-hand side of that donut. Here you can see the 317 million monthly average sessions we get on our website. You can also see the millions, in fact billions, of views we get on social media, emails, podcasts, etc.
The point I want to make is that our websites are not the sole driver of how our passionate audience interacts with us. Next, let’s go a little bit deeper on our sessions, specifically on how our audiences come to us today. Firstly, at the macro level, it is worth noting that the use of Google Search has so far not seen a reduction. Conversational or AI-driven search is growing rapidly, but not at the expense of traditional search. The key point I wanted to share is that only 27% of the 317 million sessions are from Google Search, which is probably a lower percentage than many in this room and watching on the webcast thought it was. It is worth noting that Google Discover, a personalized news feed when you use the Chrome browser or use the Google app on your mobile, did not exist a few years ago.
We find that Discover builds brand loyalty as an excellent source of repeat visitors. Future proactively adapted to that change and will continue to innovate and remain agile. It is part of our DNA. Next, let’s talk about the impact of AI in that blue Google Search segment. We have seen AI overviews that appear on Google Search grow rapidly over the last six months. AI overviews now appear on about 50% of Future’s key terms, words that we value and track. Yes, this growth in overviews has impacted our sessions performance, being down 10% year on year at 317. But we have only seen a 4% reduction in total digital advertising across the year. The point I wanted to make is that the decline in sessions has not resulted in a straight drop through to advertising. Why?
Because while we have seen a reduction in programmatic ads, this has been offset by increased interest in branded content advertising. Brands matter, and increasingly so. And this is even more clear to see in the second half of the year. Sessions were down -16% in H2, but total revenue from advertising was flat. Yes, total ad revenue was flat in H2. As a result, our direct digital advertising revenues have increased to 68% of total advertising. And remember, these revenues come with a higher yield than programmatic. So what does this all mean for our business today? AI search trends do impact us, but only on those revenues that are more directly tied to sessions. We are a diverse business, and those revenue streams only account for 16% of our business. Further, Go.Compare and B2B are fairly immune due to the high barriers of entry.
If you look at the revenue breakdown on this slide, there are areas that are impacted by AI, and there are areas of good growth which will offset areas of decline. And to that point, we are creating our own momentum to drive growth, which brings me nicely to the last slide in this section. We remain laser-focused onto the day-to-day execution of the business, but we are also focused on building tomorrow. Shaping our own trajectory, we are developing new revenue streams which will enable us to deliver our ambition of sustainable revenue growth and cash generation. Direct audience relationships that we pull, rather than audiences being pushed to us, will increasingly drive future monetization. And this is exactly what Kevin will talk you through later. For now, let’s get back to the FY25 financials. Overall, the group’s organic revenue declined as expected by 3% for the full year.
In B2C, we were down 2%. As I mentioned at the half-year result, Future started the year well and was in organic growth for the first few months of our financial year, and despite tariff uncertainty impacting our performance in March, we have seen a fuller recovery in U.S. ad budgets in H2. Go.Compare was down 5%, again in line with our expectations given the record performance last year. It is worth noting that FY25 is the second highest revenue year ever for Go.Compare. In B2B, the tech enterprise market remained very difficult. However, other verticals like financial services and retail have shown good growth, and our SmartBrief asset continues to perform well. Right, let’s get to the detail by each division. Let’s start on B2C digital advertising. It has been about puts and takes across halves and also across geographies.
This year, we are sharing more information to help give a better understanding of the business. Firstly, let’s discuss the high level, which are the two boxes on the left-hand side. Audience sessions were down 10% during the year, and this resulted in lower programmatic revenues. However, there was stronger demand on the direct advertising side. The lower audience volume was therefore partially offset by higher yield at plus 6%, which translated into an overall 4% decline. Now, let’s do the story by geography on the right-hand side of the slide. Back at the half-year results, I spoke about the uncertainty caused by tariffs, and you can see this in the first-half performance in U.S. direct digital ads. However, as we previously highlighted, the U.S. returned to growth in the second half.
We had a number of good client wins across the U.S. in gaming technology as well as fashion and beauty. And overall, our direct business in the U.S. grew double digits in the second half of the year. In the U.K., you can now see the benefit of the sales reorganization coming through. Direct sales in the U.K. grew in the second half of the year. I am conscious that these percentages can sometimes be quite abstract, so let me share a little bit more. This chart shows the success we’ve had in driving digital advertising direct to us, especially in the second half. Direct ads grew 8% in the second half of the year, resulting in H2 total revenue being flat year on year despite the decline in sessions. This gives us confidence that we can grow the business despite the headwinds in the programmatic part of the waterfall.
The U.S. remains the largest market for us, and there is more potential here. Given our number one position in technology and strong positions in other verticals, we can gain market share. Turning to e-commerce affiliates. E-commerce was a game of two halves. We started the year positively with a strong peak trading season, which showed in the H1 performance at plus 10%. However, as we flagged at the half-year, we saw a softer H2 as a result of a decline in unique page views. And in H2, we saw the decline at 22%, a combination of lower page visibility of our buying guides and lower consumer confidence. Basket size highlights this confidence point. It remained flat year on year, with inflation offset by less high-value purchases. This performance in products has been partially offset by continued growth in the vouchers business, which was up 12%.
But at 19% of the overall e-com business, this did not offset the decline elsewhere. The second half of the year has been disappointing, but we have been actioning a number of initiatives to improve our e-com business. And Kevin will give more color on how Signal, our strategic initiative in this area, has performed so far. Last but not least, magazines. Magazines have performed strongly at flat year on year against an overall market which is in secular decline. This is a combination of two factors. First, we have produced premium books for Rolex, further print runs for Submariner, as well as revenue from the second book in the series, Datejust. Secondly, a number of our initiatives in this area are now starting to deliver, notably around subscriber acquisition and retention. The resilient performance of magazines demonstrates the strength and value of our premium and specialist brands.
Excuse me. At GBP 192 million, Go.Compare represents a quarter of the group’s business. Revenue declined 5% in the period, which is a solid outcome given the 28% revenue growth we experienced in 2024, translating to a 10% growth on a two-year CAGR basis. Car insurance revenue, as expected, was down in the period, reflecting declines in overall quote volumes as insurance premiums also came down. However, this was partially offset by improved conversions when newer users came to the site. Overall, we are now fourth in car market in terms of price comparison. During the period, we managed the business for returns. We have not chased revenues which are not going to make a profit. And as we have said previously, diversifying revenue is the key strategic initiative for Go.Compare. And other revenues across home, life, pet grew 3% in the year. Turning to B2B on slide 22.
B2B represents around 7% of the group at GBP 54 million in revenue. B2B performance continues to be challenged by the enterprise tech market. However, other verticals within B2B delivered growth in the period, like financial services as well as retail. A further point to note is that while B2B declined across the year, H2 was an improvement on H1, so signs the business is turning around. Within B2B, our SmartBrief newsletter platform remains a key asset that consistently delivers strong email advertising performance for our clients, and this is highlighted by SmartBrief growing 1% year on year despite a very difficult market. Going forward and in response to market challenges, we are actively integrating the B2B group to unlock cross-brand opportunities, both revenue and costs.
For example, we have launched a combined brand sale to our tech clients across SmartBrief, ActualTech, and IT Pro, and this is paying early dividends with client wins. We are also increasingly embedding AI tools such as AdGenie, which suggests new ad copies to clients to improve campaign performance. Turning to slide 24, which highlights our P&L. The group’s gross margin of 73% was up 2 percentage points. The accretion reflects the change in our revenue mix, with less revenue coming from Go.Compare, which is dilutive at the gross margin level but accretive at the net margin. During the year, sales, marketing, and editorial costs were flat, driven by lower sales commissions, less TV media spent as planned, and a number of brand closures, which were offset by inflation on salaries and wages and our planned investment across the teams.
Other revenues, sorry, other costs saw an 11% decrease, reflecting the benefit of R&D tax credits and no FY25 bonus accrual. There was an increase in depreciation and amortization year on year as a result of CapEx investment in prior years. Overall, this meant the group’s adjusted operating profit was GBP 205 million, and margin has remained stable at 28%, which is a good outcome given the revenue declines. And each of our divisions maintained their percentage margins year on year. And at 30% EBITDA, Future remains a strong margin business. Right, on to cash. As I said when I joined, now a year ago, cash conversion is my favorite topic. Future continued its strong cash performance, but we had a couple of one-off items. We had a catch-up VAT payment following an agreement with HMRC regarding our partial exemption method.
Secondly, last year’s staff bonus was paid from this year’s cash. Always the case, but with no bonus this year, there is no accrual and a working capital swing. These items will not repeat next year, and we expect to be around 95% going forward. Moving on to the balance sheet and net debt. After CapEx of GBP 16 million, the group generated GBP 177 million of adjusted free cash flow. And after tax, interest, exceptional, and EBT purchases, Future had a net cash generation of around GBP 83 million. We applied our capital allocation framework thoughtfully to utilize this cash. We spent GBP 3 million to buy Renewal and Quizly, and we have returned circa GBP 100 million to shareholders through dividend and share buybacks. And after those uses of cash, the group saw a modest increase in net debt to GBP 276 million, representing a leverage of 1.3 times.
During the year, we refinanced our RCF and also issued our debut sterling corporate bond. The group now has committed facilities in place till 2029, and we expect plenty of liquidity to execute our strategy. We have cash conversion also expected to remain strong going forwards. This highlights the group’s solid financial position, which is a good segue to capital allocation. Given the return announcements this morning, let’s spend a bit of time on the capital allocation. In the past, the weighting had focused on strategic acquisitions, whereas more recently, it has turned to shareholder returns. While the policy remains the same, going forward, the board intends to have a more balanced acquisition allocation.
With capital allocation, that will invest in and drive organic growth, have plenty of room for bolt-ons to accelerate the strategy, and give a higher and more consistent return through our annual dividend, and also return excess cash to our shareholders. Our intention is to have all of these engines in active operation while maintaining a conservative approach to leverage. I want to give more color on bolt-ons and dividends, but before that, our CapEx will be slightly higher than before as a result of the strategic initiatives. However, at 3% of revenues, Future remains an asset-like business. The one allocation that remains grayed out is strategic M&A. It is not currently a priority. Turning to slide 30. As well as organic investment, we believe that bolt-ons are a great way to create value by accelerating the strategy.
We are focused on bolt-ons that will drive our leadership position in a particular digital vertical, be that luxury or technology. Key criteria include being platform agnostic, aimed at faster-growing segments of the ad market, driving diversification of our audiences, assets that pull audiences rather than assets that have audiences pushed to them. We’re also looking at bolt-ons that can bring in interesting products quicker than building it ourselves, like we did with Renewal, which Kevin will cover in a bit, or lastly, where a bolt-on can give Future a skill or capability in a new area, like Quizly did with gamification and data, and we have a good pipeline of bolt-ons. All bolt-ons will have a clear alignment to the strategy and will be reviewed against a strong set of financial criteria as well. Our first two allocations are rightly focused on growth. This is our number one priority.
But at the same time, we believe it is important to consistently return capital to our shareholders. We are very confident in the long-term cash generation of our business. This morning, we have announced a five-fold increase to our ordinary dividend. The dividend will be progressive, and we expect to increase it in subsequent years. It will provide a more meaningful return without impacting our ability to fund the strategy. At this level, there is plenty of cash to be pointed towards growth, organic or bolt-on. Also, this morning, we announced our fifth share buyback, this time for 30 million. This will start in the next couple of days once the current buyback is completed. We have now announced 230 million of share buybacks. And with this, we will have purchased more than 20% of our share capital by the end of the fourth buyback program.
This highlights that if we have excess cash, we will use it to create value. Finally, turning to the outlook slides. We are confident in continuing to deliver on today and building on tomorrow. In terms of the FY26 outlook, we expect modest revenue growth in line with current consensus. FY26 will be H2-weighted as the strategic initiatives and the operating model changes will deliver in the second half of the year. In terms of margin, we are confident of achieving 30% in EBITDA terms. And as ever, the group will continue to generate strong cash flows, improving to around 95%. In the medium term, we are confident of achieving our ambition of sustainable revenue growth and cash generation, again in line with market consensus. Right, at slide 34, I’m only a few boundaries away from a half-century here, which is a really tempting milestone for the bowler.
But don’t worry, I will declare and hand over to Kevin, who will take you through the vision and the strategy. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Sharjeel. Future is a data-first platform that monetizes high audience engagement, powered by technology and enabled by our trusted specialist brands with authority. We will leverage our data insights and intelligence to expand into numerous emerging adjacent data-hungry markets. Remember, we have over 175 brands giving us scale that we monetize by leveraging our tech platform in a multitude of ways, making the platform a powerful vehicle or a powerful value-creation vehicle. Let me explain this platform concept in more detail so you can understand the lenses through which we operate the group. All great platforms have four common characteristics. They are connectors. They are data-first. They are scalable. They deliver the platform effect, a network effect.
To date, we are having successes on each of these characteristics, but we have so much more to go for. Before covering what this means for Future, I would like to emphasize that for us, this goes hand in hand with our financial characteristics of being, one, asset-light, two, having a high EBITDA margin, and three, being a strong cash generator. We tick three out of those four boxes. The one which is missing is sustainable revenue growth. I want to come back and add revenue growth as the fourth bullet on this right-hand side. Now, starting with connecting through brands, Sharjeel has covered the importance of our brands earlier. Let me emphasize this point. We are connecting audiences through the power of our brands. They give us authority. While we know that people also trust brands, people trust our brands.
We have market-leading brands across valuable content verticals and geographies. We are number one in tech in the U.S. and in the U.K. We are number one in homes in the U.K. and number four in the U.S. We are number two in beauty in the U.K. and number four in the U.S. This is our moat. This is a competitive advantage when it comes to taking on market share commercially. The power of the brands is even more important going forward than it was before. Next, data-first. This is where, at the moment, we don’t score a 10 out of 10 and where there is an exciting opportunity to do more. We have an immense amount of data, in fact, one trillion data points in our data lake each month. Yes, trillion.
We already use an extensive amount of data to better inform our content decision-making, for example, what to write, when, and to assess the performance of ad campaigns. But data in abundance is less valuable than data with intelligence and insights. This value is disproportionate. Our content, which helps people find what they want, also gives us data and insights that helps brands achieve their objectives up and down the funnel. So this is not data for data’s sake, but first-party deterministic data that drives value and helps increase brand and ad campaigns’ performance. Now, for example, if you are buying travel insurance and you are in the market for a student laptop that we can leverage, this is very rich first-party data that we can leverage on our brands and/or through partnerships with other brands. This aligns with the platform effect. Third is scalability.
This is about the scalability of our tech and other back-office functions, meaning that back-office costs don’t need to grow in line with revenue and that our centers of excellence can be leveraged across our brands and revenue streams. We are quite effective at this, but again, we can do more, and I will cover this in one of our strategic initiatives later on today. Fourth, the platform effect. For those of you that have been following us for some time, you will be very familiar with it. It is about applying everything we do when relevant to our whole portfolio of 175 brands. It is about driving cross-pollination between products. It is about driving cross-pollination between brands. We do it once and deploy it across brands and audiences, which leads me nicely to our business model.
We have a strong track record of executing it with an EBITDA margin of 30%. The more we drive initiatives and revenue, the more powerful and valuable the platform becomes, creating a flywheel. Let me first cover the theoretical business model before bringing it to light with examples. It all starts at the top with brands and content to reach and pull in the audience in a diversified manner on the right-hand side. Next, we apply a growing set of innovative products at the bottom to further drive engagement, brand stickiness, and a clear value exchange with our customers and clients. Finally, we monetize through diverse routes, from print to digital subscription, newsstand to down to email, and of course, display and video advertising, and alongside each moment, we capture more data, which in turn is used to perfect our products and content and further drive revenue.
What this means in practice for driving growth? Well, it is about existing and new audiences that we can monetize with existing and new products driving net new revenue streams. Right, let’s have a look at how it works in practice today using Kiplinger. Kiplinger is a largely U.S.-focused personal and investment brand, largely a subscription brand. We have put Kiplinger through the platform effect in the last 12 months. Understanding our audience and the data, improving the monetization of existing and new audiences, the results are clear. We have diversified the audiences with 16% digital audience growth coming from social, referral, and email. We have monetized these new and existing audiences more effectively, driving 10% overall organic digital revenue growth. This example is not unique. We are seeing similar outcomes on Cycling News, Cycling Weekly, Homes & Gardens, all showcasing diversified audiences with more effective monetization.
All of this with our existing tech not adding the new strategic initiatives to propel it. We do it once, and we deploy it across. Now, let’s have a look at how Colab, a strategic initiative, and how it is making our flywheel spin faster. Colab is about creating a network of content creators that use our platform to publish and monetize their content using our tech stack. We can do this at scale through a revenue share model across brands. Now, let me explain how it works using Editors in Residence. That’s a Colab product on Who What Wear. Content creators such as Carla Welch and Tiffany Reed publish their content on Who What Wear to build their own personal brands with ours, and we benefit from their audience. They then use our suite of products to monetize their content effectively on their own.
They don’t have the tech and capabilities to do so effectively, so they monetize their content, and we get a revenue share. What this means is that this is a 100% variable cost model to us, leveraging existing and new capabilities, and along this journey, we collect data, audience data, e-commerce data, adding to our one trillion monthly data points, generating valuable insights. We increase our audience through the creators, making our brands more powerful. We attract, in turn, new creators that are looking to build their personal brands whilst making money. These are early days, but the green shoots are giving us confidence. On Colab content, we get three times the social traffic, diversifying further from Google SEO. We are also getting incremental e-commerce revenue on top of digital advertising, and the platform effect has yet to be deployed as this is only on seven brands.
On this example, we are monetizing new audiences with existing products, but we are also monetizing new audiences with new products. I hope this example has clearly and practically showcased the power of the flywheel. Before turning to new initiatives, let me give you a quick update on the other two we presented in September. They are about revenue building across brands. They are about brand-agnostic initiatives, starting with Signal, which, as a reminder, is our e-com 2.0 proposition to diversify our affiliate model and meet our users wherever they are, such as on social media. Signal has produced to date over 160 collections powered by our editorial teams or Colab content creators, translating into over 900,000 page views, and we have doubled our social and email traffic compared to traditional content.
Next, Future Plus, the embodiment of our Google Zero strategy, driving engagement directly with our audience through a range of products and tools. The green shoots here are very encouraging. While we have only launched it on three brands in three months, it has driven 67,000 new members for whom the sessions are four times longer, driving more revenue, and Cream on Top is adding insightful first-party data in our data lake. And picture that. We have delivered all this and more in less than 10 weeks, and we have yet to leverage the platform effect, the network effect in full, as we have not yet deployed these initiatives across the group. And now, let’s turn to the new initiatives. At our investor webinar at the end of September, we rolled out our 12-month roadmap with initiatives to deliver on our strategy. Today, I will cover three new ones.
One, AI Audience, which we are calling Future Optic. This is about how we are leveraging our expertise to create net new revenue streams. Two, Renewal, the Go.Compare membership propositions that focus on increasing retention. Three, fostering efficiency in our business model. Now, onto Future Optic. Most people view AI as a risk to us. Sharjeel has addressed why this is not as big as feared. What I’m about to cover now is the opportunity it represents. Authority inside AI surfaces is now a monetizable asset, not just a nice-to-have. We are already monetizing this authority. My use of the present tense is important because we’re seeing it in our numbers. So it all starts with brands because of the quality of our content, because of the history and the years of archives that come with it, because of the brand’s equity.
Our brands are authoritative and influential, and they are even more influential on LLMs, given the concentration of citation versus traditional search or SEO. We then leverage our tech platform, our data, and our audience specialist teams to understand how LLM works, creating a playbook on AI visibility. Now, this playbook is not static. It is refined constantly. This, in turn, informs our editorial teams on what, when, and how to produce content that is visible, ensuring we are best placed to answer valuable prompts. And in turn, the work of the editorial teams is fed back and informs the work of the tech, data, and audience teams.
As we are building LLMs’ authority and can demonstrate our savoir-faire, the sales team is able to leverage our brands combined with our editorial authority to sell branded content packages to advertisers in order for them to be visible and drive, in return, their own brand equity. This LLM visibility is not made up. Profound and AI analytics companies say that TechRadar is the third most cited source on ChatGPT, and looking at our own key terms, we are leaders in 8 out of 10 content verticals on AI overview. Now, the problem we’re trying to solve here is that there is a shift in audience. Our brands and our customers are looking for visibility in large language models. What we are doing here is that we need our content to be visible on LLMs as it is in conventional search.
The fact that we are leaders in SEO combined with the trust and authority of our brands gives us a competitive advantage. Just like we work to be the best at SEO, we work to be the best at LLMs, and we can transform this knowledge into bespoke advertising packages for our clients, as I said. Simply put, this is about driving new revenue streams from new audiences as well as new direct revenue, one that does not require our audience. This is happening and driving our revenue right now. On this slide, you can see an example of Future Optic in real terms through a large campaign we did for Samsung in the late summer this year. Samsung was looking to promote one of its products and wanted visibility in AI as well as on authoritative brands like Tom’s Guide.
We produced a bespoke package for them, which included a range of formats, helping to educate humans and bots with accurate, up-to-date information and advice. The outcome of this campaign was successful, with uplifting mentions between 23%-33%, giving us close to 5,000 LLM citations. Samsung is not the only client we sold Future Optic to. We have sold it to other tech and luxury clients, demonstrating our ability to build the playbooks and deploy it across brands and clients. And the pipeline is building, including renewable opportunities. Now, turning to price comparison initiative, before we dive in, I want to recap on how we drive value in price comparison.
Simply put, it is about improving the consumer funnel by, one, reducing the cost of acquisition, two, increasing the conversion, i.e., consumers request a quote actually convert into sales, and three, increasing the retention, not having to acquire back these consumers each and every time they come back to renew their insurance, so how have we delivered since the acquisition in 2021? To drive acquisition, we have leveraged our SEO capabilities with a center of excellence in our B2C business, sharing best practices. We’ve leveraged our in-house ad space, meaning utilizing any unsold inventory on our B2C website. We’ve renamed it Go.Compare to drive direct landing onto the site rather than on search results, and to drive conversion and retention, we have fully replatformed Go.Compare. This has enabled us to, one, consistently improve the login journey, two, push effectively new products to drive engagement.
That integration of Go.Compare and being excellent operators of this business has translated in strong financial outcomes with 9 percentage points, 9% CAGR revenue growth, and 7 percentage points improvement on EBITDA margin. This is only the start. We now have a true platform that we leverage to drive further upside. Let me show you our first price comparison strategic initiative, Renewal. Back in March 2025, we bought Renewal because it combines all your insurance details in a single place, no matter where you bought from and who your policy is with. No more searching through emails in a time of crisis. It helps users to manage their policies, including renewal dates, offers, and advice, moving Go.Compare, from just being about buying a policy to being alongside our users all year round whenever they need us.
All to say that it fast-tracks our membership proposition with the aim to improve the consumer funnel I presented earlier by being the best place for consumers to manage and save costs on household-related products. Now, it is worth sizing up the opportunity. Today, 25-30 million adults in the UK use a price comparison website to buy insurance every year. This is the addressable market. This year, we spent GBP 75 million on pay-per-click or TV campaigns costs. This is a pot we believe we can reduce without impacting revenue. We want to be more efficient and have better returns on marketing spend. So what are we doing with Renewal? We will relaunch the app in Q1 to drive growth at Go.Compare beyond market growth. This will encourage renewal on Go.Compare, improving our marketing efficiencies, therefore improving retention.
It will drive cross-selling opportunities. It will enhance our rich first-party data lake that can be leveraged across the group, making our data and users more valuable to us. It will attract new customers to an engaging value-added app. This is the focus of Renewal. I’m hoping that I have convinced you to download Renewal and become part of the journey with us. Now, to date, we have been good operators. We have made Go.Compare a better business. The financial outcomes are the proof points. However, what I want you to recognize is that we aren’t just here to be good operators. We are here to leverage the platform we have created to drive further growth. To do so, we will continue to leverage Go.Compare assets, supercharging this with Future group assets.
The outcome will be to fuel Future’s growth profile by improving acquisition, conversion, and retention, driving the platform effect for any of our brands. Turning to the last strategic initiative I want to cover today, a more efficient operating model. Innovation is transforming the way we do things. We are leaning into this to drive productivity and efficiency gains. The group-wide program is about creating efficiency and sustainability on our value chain and business model. We are doing this by rethinking and streamlining our processes and structure using AI tools to drive automation. This initiative will drive GBP 20 million of efficiency savings by FY 2028, maintaining our EBITDA margin at least 30%. This initiative is the perfect demonstration of our DNA through agility, innovation, and focus on execution and delivery. Focus on execution and delivery. I look forward to updating you on the progress we’re making.
I know we have covered a lot of ground today. There is momentum. If you were spending a day with us, you would feel and see it. I just wanted to leave you with three thoughts. One, the AI risk is not as big as you think, and AI represents revenue opportunities that we are delivering today. Two, we’re further leveraging the platform to drive initiatives across businesses. I have taken you through AI Audience, price comparison, and the operating model, and how all these initiatives will drive the platform effect, the network effect as we deploy them across the Future ecosystem. Finally, we’re continuing to evolve our business model to deliver efficiencies. In summary, we are delivering on today at pace whilst building for tomorrow to deliver sustainable, profitable revenue growth and cash. I just want to share my conviction and excitement with you.
And I hope the following slide helps frame the opportunity. Our strategy supported by our initiatives is to drive that sustainable, profitable growth over the medium term of 2%-4%. This is, as Sharjeel Suleman said, our number one priority. This is a significant change from the last three years where revenue has declined by 4% on average. This isn’t predicated on a material change in macro. We are good operators, and therefore we are confident on having EBITDA margin of at least 30%. And we will continue to deliver cash conversion of at least 95%. I am keen that we are open and transparent, and we will continue to share our progress and new initiatives through a webinar before our half-year results in May. Thank you for listening. I will now open the floor to Q&A. I’ll take a question, a question from each, please. Thank you. Morning.
Morning. First one for me, Gareth Davis from Deutsche Numis. Sorry, was that I’m restricted to one question, or I can ask the three that I was going to ask. I’ll ask the three. No, I won’t. Come on, not ask three. Direct advertising, very strong performance in H2, big step up in both markets. Can you just talk a little bit about how lumpy some of the contracts are in there, how much visibility you’ve got into ’26, some of the self-help that kind of drove that beyond a slightly more positive macro backdrop? I’ll start, and I’ll pass it on to Sharjeel. So in terms of the contract length, it varies by client, to be fair, right? From 3%-12%, right, by and large. In terms of the quantum, right, it is, again, varies by clients and propensity to spend depending on the campaign.
In terms of the quality, it’s like it matches with what the brand gives. The brands, we have market-leading brands. Not only we pull, we’re working to pull the audience, but we’re also actually working to actually pull in the advertisers, and they’re coming. In terms of pipeline, it’s a healthy pipeline. Yeah. The way I would look at it is, remember all the things we’re looking at in terms of visibility, the same thing is happening to our clients as well. This isn’t just a Future or immediate thing. This is happening to other brands around the world and other companies as well. So our authority is more important. And that’s why when I said brands are more important and increasingly so, that was what I was saying.
In terms of how we’re faring, Q1, similar in terms of what we’ve seen in Q4, which is branded content doing well and direct sales growing as a percentage. So similar trends. Then the second one, similar one on Go.Compare. Obviously, the tough comps this year made it a little more difficult, but we’re sort of starting to lap those now. From a car insurance perspective, what are you seeing and sort of confidence in pickup in other areas? We’re still expecting a bit of a lag there given home was sort of later to come in. I think they are. Yeah, I’ll come out. I’m not going to get into month one, October, month two, November. These things will ebb and flow. Q1 has historically been the soft quarter for Go.Compare anyway. Let’s step back.
Let’s have a look at what we think the year will be for Go.Compare. Car insurance premiums declined last year. Inflation is now still in the market. It’s through 3%. So that hopefully should start working in our favor going forward on car. Others, it’s still the diversification strategy. We’ve got some very exciting initiatives coming up, which I’m not going to talk about today, but some really interesting things that we’re doing. And we’ve launched Renewal as well. When I stand back, low to mid-single digits, Go.Compare is what I’m looking for for the full year. Whether that’s from home, life, pet, van, car, we will see that. But our ambition is around mid-single digits to low single digits. And then final one, just point of clarification, really. Kevin, you sort of said we’re not 10 out of 10 on data.
Did you mean in the context of we’re not collecting the right data, or did you mean we’re not using the data in the way we should be and we’re not taking advantage of it? We’re not using it all, in both, right? I think that we are dutifully, rigorously working on this at pace. I think there’s more upside. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hello. For you, I’m from ABN AMRO. One quick question on the strategy side. Could you elaborate a bit more on the whole Google Zero strategy, the horizon, and how you see that bringing impacts to the business? Yeah. Thank you for your question. The Google Zero strategy, look, we have audience from Google Search and a diversified audience mix. Google Zero strategy is about focusing on non-Google Search channels for growth.
We obviously welcome the Google Search source of traffic, of course. Our focus is to focus on the quality of the brands, building that up, building the customer proposition, and the value exchange between us and the clients, us and the customers, and with a clear view of attracting them and pulling them in. Thank you. Yeah, it’s Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I’ve got three, please. If you go one at a time. Thank you. Okay, sure. The first one, seeing how big Google Discover is on your pie chart. I mean, there were some issues in terms of the algorithm change there, which other people experienced this year. Has that been a problem for you guys? Is it a risk that you’re so exposed to that that they can make any change whenever they want? They could get rid of Discover if they wanted.
Thank you for the question. Nick, the critical thing to understand is our audience is diversified, right? And our focus is to focus on diversifying it further, right? And with regards to the Google Discover, it demonstrates that it’s a personalization feed, as Sharjeel said. It demonstrates the value and strength of our brand, how our content connects with the people, our consumers. And it works. With regards to the algorithm that you mentioned, we have dedicated focus, resource, talent, expertise. And that is key to us. The landscape changes. We react as much as we plan ahead. And at all times, we’re here literally inches away in order to actually combat that and thrive and build off that.
Yeah, the second question was, to what extent do your new initiatives need to come through, as you hope, through the year in order to hit the revenue guidance you’ve given us for the full year? We’ll answer it in two parts, right? I’ll take the strategic roadmap first. The key for us is to have an approach whereby we can go at pace on many fronts. Now is the time because we’re seizing the opportunity and creating our own momentum at pace. For us, we’ve shared with you the green shoot, and it’s a constant iteration, and for those that works, we’ll double down on it, and for those that doesn’t, we’ll stop it, and we have, like Sharjeel Suleman just said a moment ago, we have a raft of initiatives that we’re planning in the background, so that is a healthy operating model and how we’re approaching it.
Now, in terms of the numbers. Yeah, I’ll take it. The key thing to say on the strategic initiatives for me is it’s not unproven items. Future Optic, we’re selling in the market today. It is happening right now. But there’s also a bunch of BAU initiatives that we haven’t spoken about, Kev, but we’re doing them. Anyway, that’s what we do. We run the business today and build tomorrow. Very true. I wouldn’t say it’s reliant on that, but there is a weighting piece that I’d like to bring out. Revenues are probably going to be around 45% H1, 55% H2. Because some of the operating model will come in later on, the profitability will probably be 40% H1 and then around 60% H2. It’s not that the strategic initiatives have to all fire, all work for us to hit those numbers.
There’s some benefit baked in, but there’s other stuff which we haven’t talked about as well. Okay, and the third one, a bit geekier, the change in working capital was, I think, the biggest outflow that we’ve seen ever. So can you talk us through what drove that? And given you’ve got 95% cash conversion expected this year, can we expect definitely a smaller outflow and change in working capital this year? Yes, you can. Right. I love this. So I pulled out two key drivers on working capital, and I’ll give you two or three others which weren’t working capital as well related. So underlying 95%, why is that? Future doesn’t have stock, right? It doesn’t build assets. I mean, I asked the other day what our stock was. It was about GBP 1 million on the balance sheet. It turns out it’s paper. So we don’t have stock.
The key thing is those are two one-off items. If we hit our numbers, we’ll pay a bonus year. So that won’t happen this year. The key one, it was about GBP 16 million one-off payment to HMRC. It’s a partial exemption piece. We can talk one-on-one, and I can explain to you exactly what that is. That’s not going to happen again. We’ve settled with HMRC. It’s a working capital piece because we had already provided for it last year. So that’s why there’s no P&L effect. It’s purely a cash and a working capital piece, the accruals coming down that we had provided for. Those are the two big swings. There’s deferred income, which tends to go down every year a little bit because subscriptions are sort of down every year. So again, I can spend a bit more time talking to you about that.
But even if I take just those two out, the GBP 16 million and the GBP 4 million, that GBP 20 million gets you from 86 back to 96. So I’m very confident on that. But there were a couple of other cash items which impacted leverage, but in a good way. We gave back GBP 100 million buybacks this year. That fourth one went a lot faster. I mean, it’s about to finish in the next couple of days. So we bought back shares quicker than we had done previously. That impacted it. David’s sitting right in front of you. David did a really good job on the RCF and on the corporate bond. But we had bank arrangement fees. So that was a bit there as well. And when I take all of those out, the working capital and the one-offs, I’m very confident in our cash generation going forward. Thanks.
Thank you. Good morning. It’s Jonathan Barrett from Panmure Liberum. I do have three, but I’ll go one at a time if that’s okay. Not too much more to ask, really, after the others. Just one very broad question. Now that you’ve kind of been running the business for a while and you’ve seen how the world’s evolving and you’ve got your plans, is 175 brands the right number? So that’s the first question. There’s no good answer for that. It’s like all of our brands, right, is additive, right? And the way how we actually invest on those that has the most promise, potential for growth, and where brands tend to actually underperform, whereby it’s telling us that there is no consumer demand for it, there’s no client demand for it, we are fiscally responsible. We don’t run brands to be unprofitable, and we review them.
We have a work stream that is always on. It’s always on. And we actually review our brand performance over time, like we’ve done so in the past. Thank you, and then the second question, your growth guidance, again, 2%-4%, just thinking about everything you’ve said today, how does the 2%-4% work out? Which bits of the business are going to do what, roughly, so that we can understand your assumptions on that, please? Okay, so stepping back, around 1% next year is what consensus is at the moment, FY26, right? FY27, possibly around 2%-2.5%. The bit that Kevin talks about is his and mine and the board’s ambition going forward. That’s why we’ve got the 2%-4% going forward, probably from 2028. But that’s the base, right? That’s what we believe. How does it pan out? Well, very similar to what you’ve seen.
Direct ads are becoming more and more important, right? 68% of our total ads are from brands. We see that growing. That will drive mid-single digits from advertising perspective. At the same time, you’ve got to remember we’ve got a very large magazines business, print, newstrade as well as subscription. That is declining. We’re declining a lot less, and I know we were flat this year, and that’ll always be our ambition as we turn it around, but that’ll probably decline low single digits going forward as well, so you’ve got a bit of growth there, and you’ve got that. You’ve got e-commerce, but then you’ve got Signal coming in. When I overall look at it, B2B, sorry, B2C, flattish this year, then a little bit more growth, and a little bit more growth going afterwards.
And then in B2B and Go.Compare, we’re great owners, and we’ve got some fantastic plans for both of those businesses. But again, those are probably growth plans, yeah. Growth plans. And I see mid-single digits for those two in terms of the long run. And when you do the math and the weighting across the piece, I think you kind of get to the 2 to 4 going forward. Thank you. And then just thinking about the various AI platforms that are out there, scraping it out at the moment, any thoughts on who’s looking like they know what they’re doing, who’s going to be in your space, who you really need to pay attention to? You mentioned a few names today in the day. Just anything you want to say about that, or do you want to start that one?
One thing for us all to remember, we’re platform agnostic. We will be where the consumers and the client are, and we will actually deliver the value exchange for both at pace, and look, we adapt. So the agility, right? To the earlier question from Nick, we will adapt depending on what the world we face. Andy Renton from Cavendish. Just got a question around Google Discover. So is that part of the Google Zero strategy as well, or is it just search? And has that source been impacted differently to search? And then is there sort of a difference in terms of the audience that is delivered from each of those, just given that it’s obviously a larger portion of your audience? Right. Can you repeat, please? Repeat. Yeah. Okay. So is Google Discover part of the Google Zero strategy? Is that source also impacted differently to search?
And then, is the value of the audience that is delivered from Discover different to search? In terms of, is it part of the Google Zero strategy? Well, look, we’re looking at it from the lens of email direct, right, and social platform to us or within social platforms and the likes. Two is like, so that’s what I mean by Google Zero strategy. Is it yielding differently, right? Depends on the content that is surfaced through those channels. And if it is depending on the category as well and depending on the type and depending on the volume. So the answer is that there’s many variables that affect yield in this channel versus the other channel, right? And I think your middle one, so the question was, is that source being impacted differently by chatbots to the search? No, they’re just different.
It’s like consumer pattern, as in personalization, what is in there in terms of like it’s like the more you consume, the more you actually sort of like it surfaces more of the same type over time. So two different type of use case and therefore two different types of economics. Thanks. Thank you. Any further? I’m getting the kind of from the back there, but anyone for anything else? No? We can wrap up. Thank you. Thank you ever so much, and I hope you have a good day. Thank you very much, everyone. Thanks. Bye.
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