Mitie Group Aktie

Good morning. May I welcome you to Mitie's 2026 Annual General Meeting. The time is now 11:30, and therefore, I declare the meeting open and quorate. I'm Chris Rogers, Chair of the company, and I'm pleased to chair my first Mitie Annual General Meeting today.

Before I hand over to Phil Bentley, Chief Executive, who will present the Q1 update, I'd like to introduce my fellow Board colleagues. To the far right, we have Salma Shah, who is Chair of the ESG Committee. Next to Salma is Mary Reilly. Next to Mary is Jenny Duvalier, who is our Senior Independent Director and Chair of Remuneration Committee. Then we have our executives, Phil Bentley, Chief Executive; and Simon Kirkpatrick, the CFO. Next to Simon is Penny James, who's Chair of the Audit Committee; and next to Penny, Chet Patel, who is an Independent Non-Executive Director. And then we have Peter Dickinson, our Chief Legal Officer.

So what I'd like now to do is to hand over to Phil, who will give us a Q1 update. Phil?

I think I'll just stand here. Actually, it might be a little bit easier. So good morning, everybody. As Chris said, I'm Phil Bentley. I'm the CEO of Mitie. And good morning, everyone who's made it today to our 2026 Annual General Meeting here at Mitie's headquarters in The Shard. As always, I'd like to start by saying a very big thank you for everyone here today. And for those of you dialing in for all your support as our shareholders. And on behalf of you, if I may, our shareholders, I'd like to also thank our Mitie colleagues for their contribution to your company's success. We now have over 84,000 colleagues in Mitie, making us one of Britain's biggest employers. Without their professionalism, commitment every day, we simply wouldn't be the company that we are today.

Now for the year ending in March 2026, what we call fiscal year 2026. It was another good year for your company, and we have continued to make good progress. There's another year of double-digit growth, a pattern we have maintained since 2023, with record revenue, record operating profit and record earnings per share and we have delivered yet again record wins and renewals in contracts, a record order book and pipeline, as well as free -- record free cash flow generation, record capital deployments and subject to today's vote on our proposed final dividend, record dividends.

So I think you can see we've had

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We also have a clear strategy. We don't just want to lead in facilities management. We want to lead in facilities transformation, transforming the built environment through building upgrades and projects, particularly in energy efficiency and in safety. And we want to lead in facilities compliance, making sure all buildings are compliant with all the new building safety, fire and water regulations. And as we sell more of our facilities transformation and facilities compliance services to our clients, these services earned us a higher margin.

And that's why we bought Marlowe last August. At GBP 350 million, it was our biggest ever acquisition for your company, but it has positioned us as the leader in facilities compliance with a strong platform to accelerate growth. We've made a good start to cross-selling Marlowe services to our large FM clients as well as delivering cost savings. We are now #1 with our total fire offer with a full suite of active fire and passive fire solutions, and we're the #1 provider of security systems to businesses. But what also excites us about Marlowe is their capability in total water managed services. And as we say now, water is the new energy. Just like energy, in water, we buy it today for our customers. We meter it, we treat it, and we recycle it. We discharge it, and we report the consumption of it.

And we believe it -- believe it or not, with climate change and population growth, expanding in the U.K, the U.K. as a country is running out of it. So there's a significant investment required in water efficiency, resilience and sustainability being spent by our clients, and we're now capturing that spend. For example, we've signed up several existing Mitie clients, including the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston to take these new water services from Mitie and help the client navigate their increasingly complex regulatory requirements and sustainability goals. So those were the highlights of FY '26, and I'm pleased to say that the good momentum from fiscal year FY '26 has continued into the first quarter of fiscal year '27, the results of which we announced to the market this morning.

Revenue is up another 10% to GBP 1.4 billion in the quarter. This is again significantly ahead of a general market that is only growing by 3%. Contract wins and renewals were up by more than 30% to GBP 1.6 billion. And our bidding pipeline, again, is at a record level now at GBP 32.5 billion.

Finally, I wanted to take a moment to summarize the announcement that you may have seen this morning, confirming that the Boards of OCS and Mitie have agreed the terms for the recommended cash acquisition of Mitie. Under the terms of the offer, each shareholder in Mitie will receive 221.6p in cash which comprises cash consideration of 218.5p plus the 3.1p fiscal year FY '26, final dividend, if approved at the AGM today. This values the equity of your company today at GBP 3.1 billion and represents a premium of 46.8% to yesterday's closing share price and a premium of 34.4% to our 6-month volume-weighted average share price and it's a 19% premium to our all-time share price ever.

As we are now in the offer period, you'll appreciate that we must abide by all the takeover panel rules, and therefore, we are limited in what we can say beyond the information disclosed in the announcement today. The Rule 2.7 announcement published today sets out all the details for the rationale for the acquisition and our Board's recommend -- decision to recommend it to you our shareholders. It brings together 2 U.K. headquartered -- 2 U.K. headquartered businesses with complementary strengths to accelerate growth enhance our service offering to public and private sectors and create significant opportunities for our colleagues and the communities in which we serve. OCS operates outside of the U.K. as well in the Middle East and in Asia Pacific and these are faster-growing markets.

So thank you very much for listening. Thank you, everybody, for your ongoing support. And I'll now hand over to our Chairman, Chris Rogers, to answer any questions and lead us through the rest of today's AGM procedures and voting. Thank you.

Thank you, Phil. Turning now to the formal business of the meeting. The notice of the meeting was sent to shareholders and made available on our website on the 19th of June 2026. This can be found on Pages 3 to 4 of the notice of the AGM booklet and will be our guide for proceedings today. Printed copies are available at the entrance to the room.

With your permission, I would like to take the notice of the meeting with resolutions 1 to 17 as read. I now formally propose resolutions 1 to 17, which are set out in the notice of the Annual General Meeting. Resolutions 1 to 15 inclusive are proposed as ordinary resolutions and require a simple majority of votes to be passed. Resolutions 16 and 17 are proposed as special resolutions and require at least 75% of votes to be passed.

Before we vote, shareholders have an opportunity to ask questions. We will take questions in the following order. First, we will take questions from shareholders in the room. And secondly, we will take questions from shareholders who have sent them in via e-mail. Let me now ask whether those shareholders in the room have any questions about the business of Mitie or the resolutions themselves. There will be some roving mics. And could I ask you to state your name and whether you are a shareholder or a corporate representative. Are there any questions?

So I don't think there are any questions in the room. Do we have any questions on e-mail? So we have no questions on e-mail either.

Moving on. Each of the resolutions will be voted on by way of a poll. Before we take the poll, I will briefly explain the procedure. For shareholders attending the meeting today, a poll card was offered to you as you entered the meeting. If you have already completed a proxy form and do not wish to change the way you have voted, there is no need to complete a poll card. The votes you have already cast will be counted. However, for those shareholders who have not submitted a proxy form or wish to change their votes already submitted, please complete a poll card. If there are any shareholders in the room who do not currently have a poll card and would like one, please raise your hand now.

Please complete your poll card by clearly printing your full name and if you are a proxy or a corporate representative the full name of the shareholder you're representing. If you are voting on behalf of more than one shareholder, please complete a separate poll card for each shareholder. Please then indicate how you wish to vote by inserting an X in either the for or against box alongside each of the resolutions or you may abstain from voting by inserting an X in the withheld box. Please note that a vote withheld is not a vote in law and will not be counted when calculating the number of votes for and against a resolution.

Finally, will you please sign and date the poll card. MUFG Corporate Markets will act as scrutineers and will count and check the votes against the register. The final results will be made available on the company's website and will be announced to the London Stock Exchange as soon as possible. Are there any questions on the poll procedure?

As there are no questions, we will now proceed to vote on the resolutions, which I have formally proposed to the meeting. Could those shareholders attending the meeting in person, please mark your poll cards with your votes for all resolutions and raise your hands with your completed poll card. The registrars will collect the completed poll cards from you now.

[Voting]

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes the business of the Annual General Meeting. Whilst final votes have yet to be counted, I can confirm that based on the votes received prior to the meeting, all resolutions have been passed. The final results of today's meeting will be available on Mitie's website later today. In the meantime, if you would like a copy of the proxy votes received, these are available on request from our registrars.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support as shareholders and for attending today's meeting. Thank you.

Okay. We've got a full house today, which is great to see. So good morning, everyone, and thank you so much for making it here today, and especially given the tube strike today. I think we're all getting used to it now. As usual, we are here presenting from our headquarters in The Shard, nice [indiscernible] in this photo here with our new corporate branding. And I hope you noticed when you came in at the entrance there, our recently awarded Royal Warrant a pictured here with Precilla, the stalwart of our cleaning team here at The Shard.

So welcome to Mitie's full year presentation for the 12 months ended 31st of March 2026. And as we'll show, our results in '26 were good. we're confident in delivering our FY '25-'27 strategic plan, which I'll talk on surely. And we are building the foundations for '28 and beyond.

Firstly, turning to the '26 highlights. We delivered strong double-digit growth in revenue and operating profit, and that's for the third consecutive year. Excluding acquisitions over this period, our organic growth has averaged around 7%, and that's well ahead of the wider FM market, which grew 2% to 3%. We've shown our resilience despite the material headwinds from inflation in labor and higher National Insurance contributions with margins up a further 10 basis points. We've got high visibility of our future. We've ended the year with record GBP 16.3 billion order book and a GBP 31.7 billion bidding pipeline, which we'll touch on.

Cash generation was also good, and we plan to extend share buybacks in FY '27 to total GBP 100 million, inclusive of the remaining GBP 40 million of the current program announced last October. M&A is a key feature of our model, as you know, and I'm pleased to say that the Marlowe acquisition is progressing above our expectations. And taken in the round, this positive outlook gives us not only confidence in delivering our FY '25-'27 3-year plan, but believe also that the strategic foundations are in place for continued value creation in FY '28 and beyond.

So here are some of the highlights and numbers. with double-digit compound annual growth since 2023 in revenue, operating profit and earnings per share in wins, renewals, order book and pipeline, as well as in free cash flow, capital deployments and dividends. And with FY '27 still to come, I think we would have taken where we are at today, when we launched our facilities transformation strategy at our Capital Markets event back in October '23. So that gives you some sense of the progress we've made since then.

So over to Simon now. He will help you navigate through the detail of FY '26 performance, then I'll come back and touch on the strategy.

Thanks, Phil. Good morning, everybody. So as Phil said, we're now into the final year of our 3-year plan. So before we get into the detail of the FY '26 results, I'll just give a little bit more color to the financial progress that we've made so far and the financial model that underpins our strategy.

Our model is based on profitable growth and free cash flow generation, enabling us to compound earnings, drive value accretion and increase shareholder returns. At the Capital Markets event in 2023 when we launched the MITIEverse, we said revenue would grow in the high single digits. As we enter the final year of the plan, it's exceeded that target, growing at 13% a year over the first 2 years, supported by the increasing pipeline and the much larger order book that Phil just referenced.

Operating profit is growing significantly faster than revenue at 18% a year, and it's worth reminding ourselves that back in 2023, consensus profit for FY '26 was GBP 207 million. Today, we're reporting GBP 264 million, having made 7 upgrades since then. Margins have been resilient despite the material external headwinds, and this good growth and increasing profitability has led to significant free cash flow generation, which at GBP 162 million is already higher than our FY '27 target. This good free cash flow generation has enabled us to return capital to shareholders and pursue value-accretive M&A, deploying GBP 414 million in FY '26, including the acquisition of Marlowe. As a result of these actions, our TSR since the Capital Markets event is 78%, well above the FTSE 250 average of 29%. And we're compounding earnings with EPS growing at 13% a year.

So with that as a backdrop, I'll move on to cover the FY '26 results, starting with the headlines. Revenue is up by 10.5% to GBP 5.6 billion, driven by good organic growth of 5.3%. Operating profits growing by 12.8% to GBP 264.1 million and we've improved margins to 4.7% despite the significant profit headwinds. EPS is up 7.1% to 13.6p a share, driven by profit growth and share buybacks, offset by higher net finance costs and the shares that we issued to acquire Marlowe. The Board has proposed a final dividend of 3.1p a share, taking the total dividend to 4.5p, up 4.7% on FY '25. And finally, as I mentioned earlier, we've had a free cash inflow of GBP 162 million with average daily net debt of GBP 440 million.

So moving on then to cover the performance in a bit more detail and turning firstly to revenue. This slide shows the key drivers of the revenue growth in FY '26 with the good momentum from FY '25 continuing both organically and inorganically. The first block of the chart shows GBP 54 million worth of growth in core FM from wins and losses and incremental growth on existing contracts with wins significantly exceeding losses. Organic projects growth of GBP 125 million was driven by good growth in defense, data centers and healthcare. This growth includes a GBP 20 million reduction in revenue in Mitie telecoms, where we've exited unprofitable frameworks as well as a GBP 40 million reduction in central government where we lost a high-margin contract that completed halfway through FY '26.

Pricing accounts for GBP 151 million of additional revenue, and we've shown separately on this bridge, the GBP 59 million headwind from the completion of the high-margin one-off search security work last year. When we combine these 4 blocks, total organic growth is 5.3%.

Finally, acquisitions contributed 5.2% of growth in FY '26 and this block includes the infill acquisitions that we've made in the last 18 months, including Argus Fire and the 2 Spanish businesses as well as the Marlowe acquisition, which added GBP 208 million of revenue.

So sticking with the group numbers. Next, I'll cover operating profit. And this slide shows the key financial themes for the year on a profit bridge, highlighting the resilience of our business model. Strategic profit growth of GBP 67.4 million more than outweighed GBP 37.4 million of profit headwinds. Our growth strategy is focused on core FM projects and acquisitions underpinned by margin enhancement initiatives. Core FM and projects profit grew by GBP 12.7 million, driven by new wins, combined with the good projects performance across most sectors. This block includes a GBP 10.1 million loss on one specific contract, which I'll come back to you shortly as well as a GBP 15 million headwind from the completion of the central government contract that I just referenced.

Next, we added GBP 12.2 million of incremental profit from acquisitions, of which Marlowe was GBP 9.5 million. And when combined with GBP 7 million of cost synergies, Marlowe profit for our first 8 months of ownership was GBP 16.5 million, significantly better than we initially expected. We made equally good progress with margin enhancement initiatives, delivering GBP 25.1 million of savings, and we've turned the telecoms business around, breaking even in FY '26, which is a GBP 10.4 million year-on-year improvement.

In terms of headwinds, the completed surge response work was an GBP 11.7 million profit headwind. We made GBP 7.1 million of investments to drive growth, including in our sales and technology teams and the headwind from inflation and National Insurance was GBP 18.6 million, which I'll cover in a bit more detail now. So once again, we were successful in managing inflationary pressures in FY '26. Our contractual protections and strong customer relationships enable us to pass on 94% of cost inflation to our customers, resulting in only a GBP 6.9 million reduction in profit. We said last June that we expected our employers' NI bill to go up by around GBP 50 million in FY '26 and that we'd recover around GBP 35 million of that through contractual protections and commercial negotiations.

The gross impact has been a little lower than we expected at GBP 48.5 million and we've recovered more than we expected, meaning that the net impact is only GBP 11.7 million, that's GBP 3.3 million better than we expected. The total impact from inflation and national insurance, therefore, is GBP 18.6 million, which has been fully offset by the margin enhancement initiatives.

Looking ahead to FY '27, the national living wage will increase by 4.1%, which is a smaller increase than in each of the last 2 years. We're confident that our contractual protections and strong relationships will enable us to price the vast majority of the increase through to customers as we've done in previous years. We don't expect another national insurance increase in FY '27, but we are affected by fuel price inflation. We expect the growth in fuel prices to have a GBP 5 million to GBP 6 million gross impact in FY '27, most of which will pass through in pricing. We expect the residual impact to be around GBP 2 million, which is included in the GBP 10 million to GBP 12 million total impact from inflation in FY '27.

So moving on to cover the divisional performance. Business Services revenue grew by 17.6% to GBP 3 billion, with particularly good performances in security, hygiene and in Spain. The Security business grew by 8.8% despite the GBP 59 million headwind from completion of the surge work last year. Growth was driven by fire safety and security projects, both organically and inorganically as well as new wins in pricing. Growth of 10.6% in Hygiene was driven by some new large wins and pricing and the business in Spain has grown by over 1/3 as a result of the expansion into security and significant wins in the public sector.

Underneath the total revenue line, we show the growth from our 3 pillars of FM, FT and FC. Growth of 9.3% in FM is well ahead of market growth of 2% or 3% and reflects the strong performance in hygiene in immigration and Justice, where we've just started the mill site contract and in Spain. The FT growth is driven by fire and security projects and the growth in Facilities Compliance is largely due to the GBP 208 million of revenue added with Marlowe. Profitability in Business Services has been resilient, growing by 3.7% in FY '25, but margins have reduced by 80 basis points to 6.3%. Revenue growth, MEIs and the contribution from Marlowe have been positive drivers of profit in the year, but they've been offset by the completion of the search security work and the large central government contract that I mentioned earlier.

Moving on to Technical Services, which has grown by 3.5% to GBP 2.6 billion. Engineering, which includes our private sector maintenance contracts and larger engineering projects grew by 1.4% in FY '26. New wins, project work and pricing more than offset the loss of one notable contract and the contracts that we've exited in the telecoms infrastructure business. The Defense growth of 9% and HLG&E growth of 3.4% were largely driven by increases in projects work. In Defense, this included projects for the DIO into Gibraltar and Cyprus and in HLG&E, the projects growth was in health care across a number of different hospital contracts.

As we show again, underneath the revenue table, this project's growth was the key driver of the overall Technical Services growth with FT growing by 14% to GBP 1.1 billion. FM revenue reduced by 2.8% to GBP 1.5 billion as a result of 1 notable contract exit and a reduction in volumes on the landmark contract. With a new senior management team in place, and some early wins, we expect FM growth in TS to improve in FY '27.. The good projects growth combined with MEIs and the turnaround in the telecoms business drove a 24.6% increase in profit, boosting margins by 90 basis points. However, although margins have improved, they continue to be impacted by the headwinds from inflation and national insurance as well as on loss-making contract. As I said earlier, this contract was a GBP 10.1 million headwind to Technical Services profit in FY '26, but it's now completed. It sits in a structurally low-margin sector, which we're exiting. Without this contract, TS profits would have increased by 34% and margin would have been a further 55 basis points higher.

My final P&L slide shows the consolidation of the group numbers with the BS&TS profits that I've just talked through, combining with GBP 58.9 million of corporate costs to make up the GBP 264.1 million group profit and 4.7% margin. Corporate costs are a little higher than in FY '26 as we've invested in sales and technology and due to the inflation and National Insurance increases.

So my last few slides cover cash flow, the balance sheet and capital deployment. We generated a free cash inflow of GBP 162.1 million in FY '26 with the key driver being the operating profit of GBP 264.1 million. Other items was a GBP 59.3 million outflow of cash and was largely made up of acquisition-related costs as well as the costs of delivering our margin enhancement initiatives. The year-on-year increase was driven by the Marlowe acquisition and the Marlowe integration costs.

Next, the pension deficit payments, combined with the add back of share-based payments, was a GBP 24 million inflow of cash. with our DB schemes now in surplus, payments have ceased, and we expect to undertake an insurance buy-in of our DB schemes in FY '27. Working capital was a cash outflow of GBP 35.7 million, driven by the continued growth in the projects business, the longer payment terms on retail wins and a one-off GBP 10 million impact from the new Procurement Act. Offsetting these outflows, we've made further one-off process improvements and continue to rationalize our supplier base. CapEx, leases, interest and tax was GBP 126.9 million cash outflow, which was GBP 21.1 million higher than in FY '25. That increase was driven by CapEx for new contract mobilizations including Millsike, lease payments for the Marlowe fleet and interest costs resulting from our capital deployment actions. These capital deployment actions account for a GBP 414 million cash outflow, which I'll come back to.

And then finally, at the bottom of the page, we see the overall increase in net debt of GBP 251.2 million. This increase results in a closing net debt of GBP 450 million and an average daily net debt of GBP 440 million with the average leverage ratio of 1.2x remaining within our targeted range. Debtor days have gotten a little worse due to the acquisition of Marlowe and growth in the Projects business and credit days have improved despite the new procurement act as we rationalize the supply base and continue to improve our processes. ROIC reduced to 18.1% as a result of the Marlowe acquisition, where we've added GBP 414 million of invested capital, but only 8 months of operating profit.

And finally, net assets increased to GBP 533 million after adding the net profit for the year and the shares issued for Marlowe, offset by dividends, share buybacks and market purchases for employee share schemes. Our strong balance sheet and ongoing free cash flow generation underpin our capital deployment actions. In FY '26, our deployment has increased by 75% to GBP 414 million, including the GBP 228 million of cash used to acquire Marlowe and GBP 15 million of infill M&A across high-growth sectors. We've increased our dividend to 4.5p a share at a 33% payout ratio, spent GBP 29 million purchasing shares in the market for incentive schemes and spent GBP 63 million acquiring 38 million shares through the share buyback program.

As we look ahead to FY '27, infill M&A will be relatively modest as we integrate Marlowe and realize the synergies. The dividend is likely to be at the lower end of our 30% to 40% payout range and we'll continue to purchase shares for all employee share schemes. Finally, we'll continue to return excess cash to shareholders through share buybacks, announcing today our intention to purchase GBP 100 million of shares in FY '27.

So in summary, we've had a positive year in FY '26 with good momentum heading into the final year of our 3-year plan. Revenue growth has been significantly better than our high single-digit guidance. and margins have improved despite the investments we've made and the headwinds from inflation, National Insurance and the completion of the search work. We made a positive step forward in EPS despite higher interest costs, generated good free cash flow and ROIC fallen below 20% but only temporarily. As we look ahead to FY '27, we remain confident of achieving our headline financial targets. In terms of the detail, we expect finance costs will be higher as our leverage increases. Our tax rate will remain at around 25% and ROIC will increase back towards our target of 20%.

And on that note, I'll hand back to Phil.

Thank you, Simon, and thank you for a good story of our progress. It's a good job. And as Simon said, I think we're confident in achieving our FY '27 target.

So where do we go from here? And why did I say in my introductory remarks as I believe we are laying the foundations for value creation for FY '28 and beyond. Well, let me explain a little bit more about that. And firstly, just a reminder of our current strategic plan. I'll do this quite quickly. You've seen this all before. But our strategic plan was built around the 3 pillars of growth in facilities management on the bottom there, growth from our core led by key account growth in facilities transformation in the middle projects led growth, upgrading and decarbonizing the build environment. And lastly, on the top, in facilities compliance, M&A expansion into regulation-led services following the acquisition of Marlowe. Our vision was the future of high-performing places.

And together, these pillars created a differentiated end-to-end proposition to meet our customers' evolving needs whilst moving the group into higher growth higher-margin adjacencies. Revenue growth was at the very heart of our strategy. And on the left, we set a target of GBP 1.2 million billion of revenue growth over the 3-year plan, half of which would come from the core, GBP 200 million would come from projects growth and GBP 400 million from M&A. So I'm pleased to see that after only 2 years of the 3-year plan as I'll show, we've already delivered that growth ambition.

Now you've heard me say before that our strategy was underpinned by favorable macro trends and not surprisingly, these macro trends have endured increasing reliance on the private sector to tackle crime, rising public sector investments across defense, healthcare, justice and immigration, the decarbonization and modernization of the built environment upgrades in power and grid infrastructure, data center investments and increasing regulation around fire building, safety and environmental compliance alongside significant investments in U.K. water. So in short, we continue to operate in markets where our demand for services is structural, long term and continues to grow.

Our bidding pipeline bears this out, a 34% year-on-year increase to a record GBP 31.7 billion, that's double where we stood at the beginning of our strategy. You've heard me talk before about the improving quality of our pipeline with more bids both meeting client prequalification and being submitted through for evaluation. But the mix of our pipeline has also changed. GBP 6.8 billion of the pipeline relates to opportunities in facilities transformation in projects where we've seen a tenfold increase in 3 years as we are added to more of our clients' capital frameworks. And we now include, for the first time, our facilities compliance pipeline at GBP 800 million. And like facilities transformation, and expect this to grow significantly as well as we establish our compliance credentials and qualify onto more client frameworks. The bidding pipeline, of course, then feeds through into a growing order book, reflecting our win rates of over 30% and retention rates back above 80%. We ended the year with a record 16.3% of order book. That's a 3-year CAGR of 19% per annum.

Facilities transformation order books are now an impressive -- the order book are now an impressive GBP 2.8 billion. And again, we include our fledgling facilities compliance order book of GBP 500 million. This will only grow as we build out our total fire and security and total managed water offer.

The final point to add on order book and mix is that due to their shortage duration, the vast majority of facilities transformation and facilities compliance held in the order book produces revenue much more quickly within 2 to 3 years. The same mix point is relevant in margins where facilities compliance attracts the highest margins with facilities transformation with slightly lower margins but still higher than our core facilities management. These are all, however, before corporate overheads and shared services, which now in aggregate, absorb about 280 basis points of margin from the gross margin in the contract. Although that ratio of overheads to revenue is falling, it's why independent of our trading margins, we focus so much on our overhead costs. And as you can see on the right, we delivered another GBP 25 million of savings through margin enhancements in FY '26. And on top of that, we made a good start on the Marlowe integration, delivering GBP 7 million of synergies in FY '26, which was ahead of our expectations. We moved Marlowe's alarm receiving centers [indiscernible] from Warrington into [indiscernible] in Craigavon, Northern Ireland. We've exited 15 Marlowe properties. We've streamlined back-office operations and have already started migrating Marlowe onto our cybersecure systems.

These initial savings has given us good momentum into FY '27, where further work streams, including the optimization of field forces, deployment onto a single workflow platform continued property exits and further HR and finance savings are expected. Although too early to adjust guidance to this time, it's no doubt we've made a fast start, and we expect to exit FY '27 the full run rate of synergies that we previously guided. So when I look at our margin mix, our order book, our fast-growing pipeline on top of our micro trends, macro trends. This is why I say we're laying the foundations for the next phase of growth in FY '28 and beyond. Foundations built around capturing share of wallet within our existing facilities management, client base, turbocharging projects in facilities transformation, growth in facilities compliance and finally, accelerating technology and AI to unlock further margin expansion.

So a couple of thoughts to leave you with on each foundation. Share of wallet, as you know, is about doing more for those clients with the deepest pockets and our deepest relationships. We have a world-class Net Promoter Score of plus 64 points, double the FM industry, yet with only 40% of our top clients contracting on an integrated FM basis, we know the significantly more to do. And we've undertaken detailed reach out and research and analysis of our 50 largest strategic account spend. And we've now identified around GBP 1.5 million billion share of wallet opportunities from security in hygiene, through to engineering maintenance, capital projects and now, of course, facilities compliance that we can deliver.

How are we unlocking the share of wallet opportunity? Firstly, through a much deeper sector-led approach demonstrating our expertise and tailoring complete solutions across the built environment in sectors that are different, health care, transport, retail, financial services, critical national environments. They've all got particular requirements. Our corporate website there for mitie.com is dialing up on this sector experience. and we've built an in-house LLM to assist lead generation and just navigating the complexity of Mitie offer. We're investing in our people, redesigning incentives for our strategic client directors and sales teams and enhancing training.

Thirdly, by delivering our own AI-driven insights from our CRM touch points, giving us a better understanding of how we meet our clients' needs. Transport for London, TfL on the David Tube Strike is a good example where we provide hard services maintenance in the past, specialists, security services, drones and technology around detection of Graffiti, for example. And now we've just mobilized 2,200 colleagues on a GBP 100 million per annum hygiene and waste management contract over the next 5 years. This is the same success we've replicated with retail clients, pharmaceutical clients and e-commerce clients.

And on the upper right, you'll see already we've exceeded our growth ambition. We targeted GBP 600 million over the 3-year plan, and we're above that target after only 2 years. Turbocharging projects and facilities transformation is another strategic foundation. Projects revenue has doubled to GBP 1.4 billion since we unveiled our new strategic plan back in 2023. And our ambition is to build to a GBP 2 billion-plus business over the next few years, underpinned by those macro trends we touched on earlier. [indiscernible] leveraging One Mitie to unlock cross-sell opportunities, around 80% of our project work is delivered to our existing FM customers. Continuing to invest in capability through infill M&A, fire and security, water engineering and refrigeration, for example, while scaling up our consulting model, leveraging our deep knowledge of our clients' estates and strengthening our capabilities through apprenticeships, graduate engineering programs and again, rebranding our website under the high-performing projects strapline.

I've mentioned the GBP 45 billion investment going into data centers many times as has the government. And so in the middle, look at the revenue growth in JCA Engineering, our data center principal contractor, together with GB Converge, which delivers sophisticated fire and secured systems to data centers in the U.K. and other fast-growing European locations. Combined, we expect data center revenue to grow from less than GBP 200 million in FY '25 to over GBP 500 million over the next few years as we deepen our relationship with hyperscalers such as Google and Microsoft and with developers such as [indiscernible] and Equinix.

And on the right, you'll see some of our major projects in hospitals, at car ports. And that's without mentioning the U.K.'s largest battery energy storage project we're working on are the U.K.'s largest roof-mounted solar project or the U.K.'s largest extraction project from effluent that we've completed already. That's turbocharging projects. and our reputation and our confidence is growing. And again, on the upper right, we've already significantly exceeded our 3-year target in just 2 years.

The last growth strategic foundation is facilities compliance, and I split that into total water and total fire and security. Starting with total water, total managed water is a GBP 6.7 billion addressable market for it targeted both on our customers' requirements with water as well as those of the water utilities themselves, and we separate those 2. Together, though, there's potential to build a GBP 1 billion business in the medium term. Testing inspection certification, hygiene and treatment, retail metering and billing were one of only 19 licensed water retailers here in the U.K. and water engineering and wastewater management to commercial customers as well as the mechanical electrical module services we're already offering to water utilities. We now manage the full cycle of water for our clients, where growth is being driven by the increasing need to reduce usage and improve levels of cleanliness for discharge.

Again, we have a new website showcasing our capabilities. And here, we're using the refreshed Marlowe environmental services brand, not Mitie, new propositions, new go-to-market tools, improve data on client was to usage and targeted sales campaigns. And we're hosting a 2-day event next month, the future facilities compliance and water and over 200 of our clients are attending. And we're already seeing some early success, such as the GBP 128 million contract award at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston to deliver water network management services and projects over the next 10 years. There, we're looking out to 12,000 assets across the AWE's complex high security estate, including bore holes, treatment plants, pumping stations and a network of reservoirs. The scale of this award is a significant step-up compared to Marlowe's typical contract size. And this is the direction of travel as we cross-sell to our large FM clients and access further public sector water frameworks such as that with the MOD.

So as I've said before, water is the new energy and we believe water will be a major strategic foundation for our growth over the forthcoming years. Staying with facilities compliance, as I said, the other major opportunities in total, fire and security. Here, the combination of Marlowe and Mitie has already created the leading provider in a GBP 5 billion U.K. market with a full range of capabilities as shown on the left, active fire systems, passive security systems monitoring. As I've said, demand is driven by the macro trends of building safety regulations, increased risk awareness and the need for clients to manage their own compliance duties in a more structured way. Growth is focused on a clear go-to-market proposition, again, with new branding. We built a new sector-based sales team. And with the new sales pricing approach as well where we've been testing the elasticity of pricing with our clients.

Thirdly, by self-delivery, bringing work in-house that's currently subcontracted. Scottish Power on the right is a great example of our joined-up approach involving now Mitie, Marlowe capabilities and [indiscernible] on 3 of Scottish Power's national infrastructure program frameworks. With critical national infrastructure, a core sector expertise of ours, we expect, again, this pipeline to grow. Now together, we haven't yet made our 3-year target, but with a year ago at Marlowe and the growth trajectory we see, we do expect to do so.

Now our final strategic foundation is not necessarily tugged on growth but it's targeted specifically on margin expansion and is centered around technology acceleration and in particular, AI. Now we launched the MITIEverse at the Capital Markets event. You remember that's the thing in the middle. We talked about upgrading our core systems, rolling out customer-facing apps and bots and deriving more insights from our intelligent solutions data leg. And today, actually, over 140 of our clients are accessing the data leg. However, at that time, what we did not foresee back in FY 2023 was the fundamental impact of AI.

So what is new to our thinking is how we leverage AI across Mitie, unleashing the power of CoPilot, where we now have over 3,000 licenses and have Claude from Anthropic, where 200 licenses are being deployed. In fact, I've got one of them, so see how we get on. And that's why we've launched what we call Project [indiscernible], process reimagining and optimization, building an Agent orchestration layer to manage agents. We already have the agents. We want to manage them, optimize the workflow, automate customer interfaces building agents that can sense what needs to be done, decide how it should execute it and then act. And that -- I won't bore you with MCP or RAG or A2A, but if you want to ask me later, I'll tell you what we're up to. But we believe in a business like ours with 84,000 colleagues, AI could be a real game changer of how we deliver value to our clients. We've stood up a full team of 70 professionals. So this is the largest mobilization of a change program we've ever run, including McKinsey Quantum Black experts, AI software engineers, [indiscernible] and Mitie specialists. [indiscernible] is our commitment to maintain our leadership in managing complex estates through a scalable Agentic AI platform to upgrade the effectiveness of the built environment, and that fulfills our vision of the future of high-performing places.

We're focusing on 8 high-impact domains. And together, they represent more than 75% and of our cost base -- of our GBP 5 billion cost base, combining Agentic orchestration with human in the loop as shown there. Now it's early days. In [indiscernible], we're not making any forecasts at this time. But we do expect this project to have a long-lasting impact on our cost structure, our margin and the value we share with our clients. We expect to deliver minimal savings in FY '27 as we start to mobilize, but more will come in FY '28 and beyond. Inevitably, there's an upfront cost of this type of program, we estimate GBP 20 million to GBP 25 million this year, and we flagged this as an incremental cost to our other items in FY '27. So as I said, we're laying the strategic foundations for value creation in FY '28 and beyond.

So summing up, FY '26 has been a good year of strategic progress with double-digit growth in revenue, continued margin progression, record order book, cash generation. You can see a summary here and good progress in Marlowe. This momentum, though, will continue in FY '27. That's what gives us our confidence in delivering our existing 3-year plan, but more importantly, we're laying the strategic foundations for the next phase of our strategy and beyond, which sort of brings me to today because today is my tenth Mitie prelims presentation, I didn't realize you can have so much fun over 10 years. And as you know, it was always my intention to retire at the end of our facilities transformation, 3-year plan, and we explained that to shareholders a couple of years ago, it's not new news. With the share price of around 90p at the Capital Markets event when we launched our facilities transformation vision, our shares were almost double. Our strategic investments have been successful and returns to shareholders have been strong. So as we transition to a new CEO, I certainly believe that the foundations for FY '28 and beyond are being laid.

So with that, let's open it up to questions and answers. I'm sure we have some mics around. I'm sure on, we have some mics. We'll start, Alex., sorry, Alex, like my glasses on.

Alex From Berenberg. Just a quick one on the projects business and kind of the target of the GBP 2 billion revenue now and -- you spoke about the data center market. And can you talk about the size and maybe the risk profile of some of those projects coming in? And are you kind of comfortable with that risk profile? And second one, just on AI and tech investment. You've kind of made that strategic investment over the past few years. Is it fair to say that maybe you're ahead of the curve or competition in that regard in terms of you're not a standing start and potential to kind of accelerate further?

Okay. I mean, Simon, we've talked often in our presentation, and you'll tell me the number, but the average job size in projects is about -- is going at about GBP 275, something like that?

That's right, yes.

GBP 275. So we look at the aggregate of GBP 1.4 billion, but it's made up of smaller projects. The average duration of which is about 3 months. But we do have some big ones. And I'll turn it over move to Mark who just came back from Darryford last night from Plymouth to talk about some of our bigger projects and how we're managing Mark and then I'll pick up the AI question if that's okay with you. Just come to the camera, Mark, come to the front.

I'll jump to the front. That's the easiest way. It's a good question with regard to the size and the scale of the projects. So if you look at -- as Phil said, the average project value is around about GBP 275,000 today. of our projects revenue is over GBP 2 million projects. And those are principally in the data center space, where we're seeing huge growth and huge opportunity. and also in grid connection work and power and grid opportunities. Often, some of these large data centers are broken down into multiple phases, and each phase has its own contracting mechanisms and pricing mechanisms. So we feel very good with the relationships we have, firstly, with the clients that we work with. Secondly, with our contractual and pricing mechanisms. And thirdly, with the supply chain that supports us with the deployment and the delivery of those projects. But we are very robust in terms of pricing margin expectation, but also contractual risk to ensure that we don't -- we stay within our tolerances as an organization.

Okay. Just to add one more point to what Mark said and what Phil said. And I think we've given you the stat before, but about 80% of the projects that we perform are for our existing customers. And that's an important point because it means we know the customer, and we know that the site we know the site typically that we're working on and that, therefore, brings the risk profile down. And when Mark and Phil talk about the data center projects that we're doing, often those data center projects are bid on a bilateral basis with the customer, i.e., they're not competitive bids. We're working with the customer through each of the phases that Mark just referenced, building out the cost and then building out the delivery plan without another party over sort of to the side, competitively bidding against us.

And then just picking up that AI point and CJ, I might bring you in a little bit later as well. But the investment has gone in before, if you like, was predated AI, and that's the point we're trying to make. So yes, we've invested in IBM Maximo. We've got the most modern instance that Maximo 9.1, that's got AI embedded in it. We've got Cooper. That was a big upgrade for procurement. That's driven a lot of the savings and all that point about preferred supplier list. Our procurement team negotiated top rates with preferred suppliers. And then in the old days, people went off and bought from a local supplier. So if you take the higher, what have you. I mean we would have had different companies doing that and then we consolidated to one. So we've seen preferred supplier uptake usage go up. And AI is embedded in that. You've heard us talk about all the AI we put in SuccessFactors. And then all the bots, we've talked about that before and the interfaces in the apps. But -- and so we've got all that, and we've got the data lay. And I think we've talked before, I mean, our data lay is 0.75 of a petabyte. You know what that means anymore than me, but it's 21 million upright filing cabinets. And every day, we add another 100 filing cabinets. That's the scale of data. We never had the ability to really process that quantum of data in real time. And I think that's where AI comes into it. And CJ, I mean anything to add? I think I'm quite excited about Anthropic. I know a lot of people use copilot with a whole operation with McKinsey now. I mean what's different this time to what we've done before.

There are a couple of things when you think about AI at scale. You have to have the basic layers in place, which is your infrastructure for how whatever they're on the cloud. So we have the elasticity. You need how your application readiness, your core system readiness, and then you have got your data readiness. So we have got our data lake from last 8 years. So these are the building blocks. And in the Capital Markets Day, we launched a Mitie Digital Platform. So what we are doing is we are leveraging the Agentic lay on top of it. That's what makes our journey much more easier into the AI.

Now a couple of things, some of the dates which I want to remind, like January 2024, we launched our AI Ethics Board, Peter tickets and chairs that. So we have got a good covenants around it. We launched our AI Mitie strategy in January 2025. So we are pretty much in the execution phase. And with [indiscernible], which Catherine is leading, we will be doing the change management and at scale.

RAG, MCP or A2A.

Very happy to go into the layers of AI, we share interested in, but I'll keep it off...

And all that was -- that's new. We didn't have that before. We didn't have ports talk about A2A agent to agent and RAG is the retrieval augmentation, what is the G stands for? Generation, and MCP is the model protocol that allows all this stuff to connect. We didn't have any of that. Now whether we're ahead or behind -- we're certainly not behind, but we cannot be complacent. And our biggest competitor, we always think called is CBRE. So whilst we don't see them as much in the U.K., certainly in public sector, what we watch is what they do in the United States. And if you follow, they've just signed a deal with Meta for example, massive data center rollout. We bought JCA, which is data center principal engineer. They bought a data center company, but it was like 10x bigger. We bought a company that did grid connections. They bought one 10x bigger in the U.S. We bought engineering business. They bought peers GBP 2 billion, 10x bigger than I think we're spending. So -- and they've actually -- I mentioned McKinsey, but they just hired the Head of AI from McKinsey in the U.S. to join CBRE. So we cannot afford not to be doing this if we want to compete. But I think it goes to the other point as well, and we've talked about this before and the haves and the have nots. Consolidation is the name of the game because I mean -- alright how much is our IT bill, CJ now if you added up everything. GBP 100 million. So GBP 100 million. There aren't many companies that can spend GBP 100 million, but we could spend GBP 100 million, it might only be GBP 103 million, and we could do over double the size of the data, and that's the leverage of the investment. And that's why I do think consolidation is a potential. That was a long question, but an interesting one. Well, who we've got Sam, maybe -- sorry, maybe lady at the front, Goldman Sachs.

Suhasini from Goldman Sachs. A couple from me, please. just in to see the state of the pipeline, including Marlowe, facilities compliance, et cetera. Can you maybe talk about potential for revenue synergies beyond FY '27. I know that initially, you had talked about potential for dissynergies as well, but it felt like momentum was building. So any color there, that would be helpful. And then I think if you think about the expectations for growth for FY '27, given the state of the order book in Business Services versus technical services, one is up, one is down. Does that kind of signal the way the growth should evolve in those 2 divisions as well?

Okay. So the first question was about Marlowe synergies. And I might bring Christian in a little bit on fire and security in a second, but -- there were some dissynergies originally because I mentioned CBR, the minute we buy Marlowe, they cancel all the work. But I'd argue whether they're I'd ask whether they're acting in the clients' interest, but that's a different point. But -- so there are a few dissynergies to get with, but they've already been more than overtaken by the new work that we're starting to win. And if I stay on water, then I'll turn to Christian because Christian runs the fire and security side of it. But on the water side, I mentioned we got Atomic Weapons. We've done a -- so we've done quite a number of swimming pool upgrades. I'm not talking about this Goldman Sachs partners, but I'm talking about in schools and hospitals are big things [indiscernible] swimming pools now. And so the big upgrades going on there. We've got some work going on with heat extraction and heat pump and water treatment. So the size -- we didn't put it in because it was almost too big to be to be true. So Kate maybe take it out.

But the size of the leads now are 100x bigger than they used to be at Marlowe. So that we don't need as many. We need to be focused and that's where the sales team are focusing. We've got a new team. And so we're very optimistic about growth. I mean, Christian, on the Fire & Security side, we've got some good wins, [indiscernible] what else has been going on?

Yes. So I mean the pipeline, to your point earlier, I mean, it has significantly increased in the last 6 to 9 months until we took over the acquisition of Marlowe. And we've got a really nice mix of business as well. So we have a mix of projects and also some nice new recurring revenue contracts that are coming through. And we're seeing because of the enhanced capability that we have across the 2 businesses combined, the self-delivery capability, as Phil mentioned earlier, is much greater. So we were able to take on multi-disciplined opportunities across our existing customer base. So the pipeline is growing. There are some key sectors that we're aligned to, which Phil mentioned earlier, and we're seeing some good growth in both of those areas. So...

And you're up on plan from where...

And we are up on plan, which is always a good place to be, right? So...

So then the order book, and I might bring Sam in a little bit on BS and TS because -- thanks, Christian. I know you wanted to carry on, but -- because there was a moment in time, and we have -- we haven't -- internally, we talk in tech services about building back better, and that sort of implies that we've not been happy with where we were in tech services. And part of the change there has been changes in management. And we've appointed Sam and I'll ask him to speak a little bit. But TS last year had a really poor year on sales. And that's why it's gone down, and that's why the order book has gone down because we just have -- we hit 15% of the target, something like that. This year, we're already just trying to get ahead, and I'll get Sam to talk about that. So that's not a function -- it's a management function there. It's not an intrinsic business function. And BS will continue to grow. It's just that TS this year will grow. So Sam come on up. Sam joined is in December from Costain, used to work at British Aerospace and [indiscernible]. So it comes from an engineering legacy.

Okay. Thank you very much. So a great question. And of course, we see opportunities for growth within technical services, we see that willingness to pay. And -- but at the heart of that is an ability to be able to deliver engineering excellence. So we talked a bit about the features that will help us towards that. So the tools and the systems that we've got in place, there's been significant investment over the past number of years. And when they come together with AI that creates already firm base for our services. That's really important and a key driver of how we're moving the business forward. What we've also done is to refocus the business along customer-facing lines because actually, whilst we're providing technical services and integrated facilities management across Mitie, actually, our customers are very different. And many of our critical environments customers have similar characteristics.

So if you're working in pharma or Heathrow Airport or BA systems, the consequences of not having your facilities at their best are significant. And so we're bringing in a team that has the experience and capability in those sectors, and we've recently made some appointments around that. And so building that team, investing in the systems capability and putting engineering really at the heart of that is key to the future. So focus on delivering reliable assured best-in-class performance, investing in the systems and then focusing on those customers where we're able to bring the breadth of mighty capability. So we work with a number of customers today who take our full suite of services and projects from our Gazelle businesses. Those are great customers for us, and we're targeting our growth on that.

And when so far this year, we've had a few good ones haven't we?

Yes, absolutely. So we were able to resecure our contract with GSK. We have been pursuing a number of different opportunities. There's been some...

AstraZeneca was a win?

Yes. So AstraZeneca was an important one for us, again, at the heart of our critical environments when we serve our pharma customers. In the case of GSK, for example, delivering 250 million drugs globally from their facility at Barnard Castle. So really focusing on those customers who have absolutely critical requirements because once they're happy with the service, it can create a long-term relationship that we can invest in. So that will be the focus for us.

AS Watson was another one. And I think maybe there's a point there I made about that share of wallet because -- it looks like a big number, but let's just take retail. We're very big in retail in security. As we know, we've got Sainsbury's, Marks Spencers, [indiscernible] boots, we've got a lot. But what we haven't had is the capability to deliver hard services, in particular, to retail, which is all about refrigeration. And so that's why we bought Forest. Forest Is a refrigeration service provider. And so that's an example of the share of what is maybe always been there, but we haven't always had the wherewithal to go after it. And now we can. Sorry, I interrupted you.

No, no, no. I was just going to make 2 points to build on what Phil and Sam have been saying in response to the question. The first one is, as I said in my presentation, FM went backwards a little bit in TS, but we've got good momentum in TS. So that grew 14% in FY '26. And we've got some good momentum there, particularly in defense and in health care. And then half of our pipeline sits in technical services. So whilst we didn't convert those opportunities as well as we'd like to have done in FY '26, we've still got a great pipeline that's out there of opportunities for FY '27 and beyond. And a lot of that pipeline will come to bid and be decided In the next 18 months.

We have a new sales director. We've got a new Finance Director. We've got a new HR Director. We've got a new head of critical environments. We've got a new Head of Health care. I might have missed somebody, but there's been quite a lot of change. Next question. Sam?

Sam Dindol from Stifel. Two questions from me, please. Firstly, just going back to that capturing the share of wallet opportunity. Can you just give us a sense of how you've changed the incentives to get the sales team to sell all the new services you have? And then secondly, on the projects business, obviously, pretty significant growth since the CME. Can you give us a sense of how the margin profile has changed since then? And does bigger projects necessarily mean better margins or any sense of that would be great.

Last question again. So the first one was around margin -- sales, commission and incentives. Kevin, I might get you to have a go at that one. And then the CMO, what's the connection with the CMO?

So the Projects business is growing quite rapidly [indiscernible] just a sense of how the margins trended since then? Does bigger projects necessarily mean better margin?

Yes. I'll let him go there. Do you want to jump in?

Yes, I can do that.

So I think it's fair to say -- I'll do that -- Kevin is thinking about sales incentives is the master of the commissions. So -- but the -- so the margin -- so we've had the growth, we're not arguing about that. We've had the growth. The margins on capital project should be higher generally than. But if we're going to hit, it always knocks it back. And it's not because we always got a hit, but we had we've had a hit in telecoms when we're doing -- we signed up business. We bought a business called ESM, which did grid connections and another 1 where a big order book when then we are left an to delivery, and it's not quite worked out now. So it doesn't mean that we're selling bad business, but it means the buyer we've taken on a bad business. So I think we're getting the margins up where we want it to be, but it's certainly not where we would overall. But if you look at GBE, you look at JCA, they're making good margins. But you just need 1 or 2 claims and it dropped -- knocks the margin, but most of those are historical claims.

Yes. All I'd say to build on that, I agree with all of that is the margins are better in projects than they are in FM by a percentage point or so, as we've kind of discussed in this fall and before. But as Phil says, we like them to be higher, and they're certainly moving in the right direction. The only other thing I'd say is just to directly answer your question about larger projects, is that typically, we see our larger projects actually deliver good margins. And so for example, if I take our 2 largest projects that we've recently completed, in the last 12 months. So we're talking about projects of a tens of millions size. They're in double-digit margins.

Kevin, tell us about sales commission? And do you want to come to the front?

It's quite a subtle is working -- and quite a simple and subtle change really. So historically, sales teams have been incentivized to sell in their business or their service line, just historically, that's the way it's always been done. We made a very subtle change to ever reward sales incentives around whether you sell in a sector, in a service line. And that just unlocked a lot of cross-sell between the different teams, structurally as well with change in the past 2 years. So again, historically, sales teams reported into the business unit managing directors. When I took the role a couple of years ago, we centralized our last sales function. So it was a mindset change as much as incentives and also SCD incentives. So making that bonus plan more aligned to growth and operational delivery have been the things which have unlocked it.

And the last one I'd just say about that is we used to have a marketing team that reported to me is probably my fault, but -- and we were good at big -- what I call big end market in this world and all that sort of stuff. But the little end marketing is the support that the marketing team do for specific bids or sector development. And all that work is going into the website now is done by what I call little end marketing. And marketing now reports to Kevin. I mean, you have a degree in marketing, Kevin. And actually, the sales and market both working for you has made a big improvement in delivery. Is there questions? James?

James Beard From Deutsche in U.S. Two questions, please. Firstly, how do you think you're positioned and what do you see as potential risks should there be a change in Prime Minister in the U.K.

And secondly, can you give us a little bit more color on that technical services contract that lost GBP 10 million in FY '26? What happened and why you're confident that, that shouldn't repeat in the future?

Yes. I mean, so I think this is my sixth or seventh prime minister so far in 10 years. So we're sort of used to that in a way. So that comes with the territory. I think behind your question is maybe a shift to the left, maybe is that part of it. But I think if you look at what the burden on national insurance, that is always the law of unintended consequences. You've seen the impact across the country of lower employment in 18 to 23 year-olds, for example, so I suspect we're not going to see anything like that. Again, I think there's a view that business has showed quite a lot of the burden there. When it comes to awarding of contracts. I'm not going to name them, but we do spend time with civil servants in departments.

The last thing they want is to take people into the system that they've got to manage and then pay a government pension scheme too, because as you know, that's a DB scheme still and become experts in suddenly become experts in engineering and security, which is what we do. So we're not seeing any sort of change to that. And at the same time, those strategic investments in defense and health care and crime and what have you still features any political color is going to have to continue to invest behind. So I don't see the changes on that. Let me deal with the tech services. So that was a government department one. I know the bid well. I think I may have told you, it was one of our biggest bids, one of our biggest contracts of which projects was over GBP 80 million a year. So -- and FM was more than GBP 80 million. So it gives you an idea of the scale, all right? Knowing that we make money in projects, but we're bidding on the FM. And the bid was cleverly priced at a minimum floor. So if you went below, you had to bid at the floor, and we bid at the floor and actually the winning bid, bid at the floor.

So it wasn't about price. We were below the floor, and it was a question of what do you do with that access and where do you reinvest the floor if you follow that, okay? And we actually -- we put more into pay because we've seen a contract churning people on minimum wage, and we wanted to invest more in our people. The winning bid put more into social value and local outreach. And the difference between the price -- the scoring -- I mean I read it and some were excellent and some are outstanding. By the time I read it no idea what was outstanding, what was excellent because they were both really good. It wasn't about price. It was the tiniest margin. Now outside given the way of the game, Shortly after we lost that contract, we were awarded a big security contract with the same department. And you could argue that they weren't ever -- and this is the post-Carillion world, of putting all eggs in one basket.

So the question is, and we never know were there influences to not award Mitie both. And I'll never know that. But what I do know because I went through it was a good bid and it was very close. Now the financial impact was quite significant because it was an into-serve contract that was coming off a 10-year bid. And we always tell you we work the margins up. And even if we'd want it would have had a hit because we were dropping margins, we dropped below the minimum. We were dropping margins. So that would have happened win or lose. But then we lost the project follow-through, and we were doing a lot of project work, a good margin. We're doing a lot of EV charging and solar whatever else. So there aren't funny enough, we also do a deep dive on losses and lessons learned. There are many lessons learned on that ironically, we have a good relationship with the client. And we couldn't have -- we did a good bid. We couldn't have bid it lower.

So James, I think there are a couple of elements to your question. There's that central government contract that I referenced in my presentation, that's a year-on-year headwind because we lost it halfway through the year. We're also asking about the contract in TS that had the loss, they had the GBP 10 million loss. Yes, so that's a telecoms contract. It's the same contract that we referenced at the half year. So I referenced the loss on it at the half year. The losses got a little bit bigger. As I said in my presentation, that contract is now completed. So it completed in May. So we're not going to have the same problem again in FY '27. It's in a sector, as I said, that we're exiting. It's a unique contract in the way it's structured in the terms. And essentially, essentially, it was bid on a highly competitive basis. The legacy order book that we had against that contract wasn't deliverable for the cost base and the rates that were previously in there. And therefore, we've been.

So it's a 5 plus 2 and it had deflators in it, and we don't do that anymore. We did. And it was on my watch. We bid it. We wanted to get into telco, and it led into why we ended up in telco maintenance and then from there into ADB acquired design and build mobile phones. It's not been our best moment. But it had a deflator we made money to begin with and eventually, every -- the rates -- labor rates going up, steel is going up, hard to get telco engineers, and we get paid less every year. And the last 2 years, it was painful. And then there was a backlog that essentially -- the centers the bill to fix, and so that's why we're out of it.

Yes. But I'll reiterate the point I said at the start of that, which is that we don't have another contract like that in our portfolio.

Chris, you had one -- we don't want to keep you any longer than -- Chris here.

Chris Bamberry. A couple of questions. The renewal rate about rounded to 84%. So that's closer to the 9% longer-term average. Do you think you can get back towards that average? And if so, what do you need to do Secondly, you're now 8 months in tomorrow, though, just kind of big picture, what have been the pleasant and lesser pleasant surprises against your original expectations and perceptions of the business.

Yes. And I think -- I won't bring you in Kevin, but that's credit to Kevin because, again, I think we -- it's a little bit of the case. And this comes back to -- it was a -- some of those losses have been in engineering facilities in the FM and TS technical services. And I think the view, if you look back on some of those that we didn't renew, some of the early warning signals around the NPS, the Net Promote score, the client feedback, the lack of relationships built through the organization might have been an early predictor that there's something we needed to fix. And that's why Sam has made a big difference because Sam has been much more visible with the clients. And Kevin is collecting all the -- so we're now tracking the NPS of those renewals coming up and the relationship management plans. And we have a whole plan around retention that starts well before we get a bid. And that's where we certainly -- we were metaphorically waking up when we got a bid.

Well, if we're playing our cards I wouldn't even had a bid who would have taken off market. And when we do it well, we do it really well. And it comes back to the quality of the SCDs. And I think of a very largest contract, I won't name it, but we've extended it 3 times now through great relationship building and great delivery, and that's what we need to do. Marlowe -- look, I think start on the accounting side, we've had to make a few provisions that they didn't make. There was a -- we have a more prudent approach to bad debt. We have the stuff that they used to put below the line, and this is what analysts would have said, we never saw the real clean numbers, which we're now absorbing above the line. So from a get-go, we're probably lower than you might have thought. And that goes a little bit to the -- you've got to get that in mind when we delivered GBP 7 million of synergies when we said we wouldn't deliver anything. So the good side is we've delivered GBP 7 million tags. And we're really getting after it. We've got a really good team. We put in Alvarez and Marcel with a really good team. And we're just blitzing it now. We know exactly how to deliver it. We've got some really good people on the optimization. I mentioned pricing elasticity procurement back office, there was a lot of paper. IT. We sent out 2,000 laptops, rebuilt 2,000 laptops because nothing was cyber secure. And we're on top of it. And we get the momentum behind these wins, and we're off to the races. So we're very happy with the acquisition. It's not unusual there are a few issues to begin with. And then I said, we had that canceling, which we anticipated. But to be it was a little bit higher than we anticipated out of the traps.

Just very quickly pick up on the pricing point, just to say that, as you'd expect, we've got an excellent structure and process around how we price through inflation through to our customers. That process didn't exist in any sort of shape or form like we have in Marlowe. And so there's -- we're coming on a journey from that perspective, and there will be significant improvements going forward from a pricing perspective.

We had all the sales people in the room and asked them of what they sold, did they know what the profit was none of them did because they were bonused on volume, not on margin. So in your bonus to margin margins sold and then margin delivered and there's a phasing, 2 phasings over a year. And if you're not delivering the margin sold in the actuals, 6 months it gets clawed back.

It's Nick Ward from Ocean Wall. Could you perhaps just offer a little bit more qualitative commentary around the process reimaging optimization program? Specifically, maybe give us a little bit of a flavor as to where you feel generally processes are today. How much of this is around generally taking costs out versus actually improving the quality of what you're delivering for your customers? And also, how much of a toll do you think inconsistency of processes is impacting the quality of the data that you're northing and therefore, the quality of what you can offer in terms of insights and better ways of working.

Yes. I mean if you go -- if you're there on that one, 28% 29, as I said, hidden in there, we talked about -- we put this [indiscernible] called Scan AI, which scans all the key strokes across Mitie. And it's anonymized. So I can tell you that the most frequent key stroke Mitie is cut and paste. So you're cutting data from one part to another. Another quite frequent one is Amazon, but that's a different question. But what it showed there was lots of different ways of doing the same thing. And over time, customer practice in the in with the best of intentions to try and give a client what it wanted in particular. We've ended up morph in lots of different ways of doing the same thing. So there's a big opportunity to standardize, and that's the real standardize and simplify. And it's a bit of both. I mean, as you look on '29, essentially, there's bots alongside everybody here. That's what -- that's the picture we want to show because we don't want to just be a people, but we've always got a human in the loop, it should drive. And the -- if you think about how we run a contract, a complex contract, we might have 15, 20 of our people managing all the different touch points down in the organization. And the whole point in the orchestration there is that they can help to manage that more effectively.

And then there's probably or on the client side overlooking what we're doing. And eventually, we would see a world where the bot, the agents at the top could talk to an interface with the client on their side, major the other side and maybe take efficiencies out of their own oversight because they'll just get a bot talking to a bot. And for some clients on a journey who would go -- and I won't name those either, but there are 2 or 3 clients for us who are really trying to transform their own business model. And if we weren't joining them at the party, if you like. I'm sure they'll be looking at somebody who was. So I think you'll see that momentum building about -- from a client point of view, tell me what you're doing to help me manage. So I can see whether my places are really high performing. And the only way you can join all that up will you be the winner in our industry. And so I think it's a lot about value, but value to the client -- but value then has a 2-way meaning because on the one hand, that sounds like I'm giving back some of my margin in the saving. But on the other hand, the value of what I provide a client may justify a higher margin. And that's the bit we aren't at that point yet, and I think it will be a bit of both. So I think there'll be ask my successor in 2 years' time how it's going but I think you'll find it's quite a big deal.

Brilliant. Thank you, as always, for your patience. Thank you for your support, and we'll see you in November.

Thanks, everyone.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Mitie's interim results presentation for the 6 months ended 30th of September 2025, H1 FY '26 as we call it, which as usual, we are broadcasting live here from The Shard We're also joined today by Chris Rogers, Mitie's new Chairman. Welcome, Chris. And I also welcome Sam White. Sam White is our long-awaited and much welcome Managing Director of Technical Services division, who joins us from Costain on the 1st of December. So thank you, Sam, for slipping off quietly here. Now it's just over 2 years ago since our Capital Markets event that we held here, where we launched the Mitieverse, if you remember, in our facilities transformation vision. And we've now reached the halfway mark in delivering our FY '25 to FY '27 3-year plan.

As a reminder, our business model set out to leverage our scale, our technology and our capabilities to unlock the value of our customers' estates through facilities management, facilities transformation and with the recent acquisition of Marlowe Facilities Compliance. And as we say, to become the future of high-performing buildings and places. So -- and at this stage, I'm pleased to say that the business is on track and momentum is growing. Encouragingly, we have maintained double-digit revenue growth for the fifth successive 6-month period, significantly outpacing the market, and we've shown good margin resilience despite the headwinds from national insurance and wage inflation. We've delivered record contract wins again and renewals and have continued to grow the order book and pipeline again.

Free cash flow generation was good and our leverage at 1x EBITDA is modest, hence, why we launched in October a new GBP 100 million buyback program over the next 12 months. We're confirming our FY '26 EBIT guidance of GBP 260 million with the integration of Marlowe going well. And AI, as I'll show, is having a wide impact in the business. And we're on track not only to deliver our ambitious FY '27 targets, but also to take us beyond '27 with our growing momentum. So I'll discuss all these points shortly after Simon takes you through the H1 '26 numbers.

Thanks, Phil. Good morning, everybody. So as Phil said, we're now halfway through our 3-year plan. So before getting into the detail of the half 1 results, I'll give a little bit more color to the financial progress that we've made so far and the financial model that underpins our strategy. Our model is based on profitable growth and free cash flow generation, enabling us to compound earnings, drive value accretion and increase shareholder returns. At the Capital Markets event in 2023, when we launched the MITIEverse, we said revenue would grow in high single digits. At the halfway point of our plan, it's exceeded that target, growing at 12% a year, supported by the increasing pipeline and much larger order book that Phil just referenced. Operating profit is growing a little faster than revenue at 13% a year. And it's worth reminding ourselves that back in 2023, consensus profit for FY '26 was GBP 207 million. Today, we're forecasting GBP 260 million, having made 6 upgrades since then.

Margins have been resilient despite the material external headwinds, and this good growth and increasing profitability has led to significant free cash flow generation, enabling us to return cash to shareholders and to pursue value-accretive M&A. As a result of these actions, our TSR since the capital market events is 68%, well above the FTSE 250 average of 30%, and we're compounding earnings with EPS growing faster than revenue at 18% a year.

So with that as the backdrop, I'll move on to cover the half 1 results, starting with the headlines. Revenue is up 10.4% in the half to GBP 2.7 billion, driven by good organic growth of 6.4%. Operating profit has grown by 7.6% to GBP 108.8 million. And as Phil said, we've maintained margins at just over 4% despite significant profit headwinds. EPS is up 5.6% to 5.7p a share with profit growth and share buybacks offset by higher net finance costs. We've declared an interim dividend of 1.4p a share, up 7.7% on FY '25. And finally, we've had a free cash inflow of GBP 51.9 million with average daily net debt of GBP 332 million.

Moving on then to cover the performance in more detail and turning firstly to revenue. This slide shows the key drivers of the revenue growth in the first half of the year with the good momentum from FY '25 continuing both organically and inorganically. The first block of the chart shows GBP 70 million of growth in core FM from wins and losses and incremental growth on existing contracts with wins significantly exceeding losses. Organic projects growth of GBP 48 million was driven by good growth in both divisions and includes a GBP 13 million reduction in revenue in Mitie Telecoms, where we've exited unprofitable contracts. Pricing accounts for GBP 77 million of additional revenue, and we've shown separately on this bridge, the GBP 41 million headwind from completion of the high-margin one-off surge security work last year. When we combine these 4 blocks, total organic growth for the half is 6.4%.

Finally, acquisitions contributed 4% of growth in the half. This block includes the infill acquisitions we've made in the last 18 months, including Argus Fire and ESM as well as the Marlowe acquisition, which added GBP 51 million of revenue. Sticking with the group numbers. Next, I'll cover operating profit. And this slide shows the key financial themes for the half on a profit bridge, highlighting the resilience of our business model. Strategic profit growth of GBP 31.3 million more than outweighed GBP 23.6 million of profit headwinds. Our growth strategy is focused on core FM, projects and acquisitions, underpinned by margin enhancement initiatives. Core FM and projects grew by GBP 6.4 million in the half, driven by new wins, combined with a good projects performance across most sectors. These upsides significantly outweighed lost contracts as well as one specific contract provision, which reduced profit by GBP 5.4 million. I'll come back to this shortly when I cover Technical Services.

Next, we added GBP 4.7 million of incremental profit from acquisitions, including GBP 3.1 million of profit from Marlowe. We've made good progress with margin enhancement initiatives, delivering GBP 10 million of profit, and we've turned the telecoms business around, making a small profit in half 1, which is a GBP 10.2 million year-on-year improvement. In terms of headwinds, the completed surge response work was a GBP 7.8 million profit headwind. We made GBP 6.2 million of investments to drive growth, including an extra GBP 2.8 million of contract mobilizations and the headwind from National Insurance and inflation was GBP 9.6 million, which I'll cover in a bit more detail now.

Once again, we were successful in managing inflationary pressures in the period. Our contractual protections and strong customer relationships enabled us to pass on 95% of cost inflation to our customers, resulting in only a GBP 3.4 million reduction in profit. We expect cost inflation and pricing recovery in half 2 to be broadly consistent with half 1, resulting in a net P&L impact for the year of around GBP 8 million. We said in June that we expected our employers' NI bill to go up by around GBP 50 million in FY '26 and that we'd recover around GBP 35 million of that through contractual protections and commercial negotiations. Recovery in the first half of the year has been slightly better than we expected, leaving a residual cost of only GBP 6.2 million. As a result, we're forecasting a full year net impact of around GBP 13 million, all of which will be offset by MEI.

Moving on then to cover the divisional performance. Over the past 2 years, we've been simplifying our divisional structure, consolidating 4 divisions into 2. First of all, we broke up Central Government and Defense, moving the more soft services-focused central government business into Business Services and the more engineering-focused defense business into Technical Services. We've also broken up Communities with the majority of it being amalgamated into Technical Services other than Immigration and Justice, which now sits comfortably in Business Services alongside the Security business.

Turning then to Business Services in more detail. Revenue grew by 15.1% to GBP 1.4 billion, with particularly good performances in Security, Hygiene and in Spain. The Security business grew by 12.2% in the half despite the GBP 41 million headwind from completion of the surge work last year. Growth was driven by Fire Safety and security projects, both organically and inorganically as well as new wins and pricing. Growth of 13.3% in Hygiene was driven by some significant wins in FY '25 and pricing, and the business in Spain has grown by almost 1/3 as a result of the expansion into security and significant wins in the public sector. Underneath the total revenue line, we call out projects revenue, which has increased by 30.5% to GBP 167 million as a result of the growth in the fire safety and security projects that I just mentioned.

Profitability in Business Services has been resilient, in line with the first half of last year at GBP 85.3 million, but margins have reduced by 90 basis points to 6%. Revenue growth, MEIs and the contribution from Marlowe have been positive drivers of profit in the half, but they've been offset by the headwinds from cost inflation, national insurance and the completion of the high-margin surge work.

Moving on to Technical Services, which has grown by 5.4% to GBP 1.3 billion. Engineering, which includes our private sector maintenance contracts and larger engineering projects, grew by 4.8% in the half. New wins, project work and pricing more than offset the loss of one notable contract and the contracts that we've exited in the telecoms infrastructure business. The Defense growth of 5.2% and the HLG&E growth of 7.1% were largely driven by increases in project work. In Defense, this included projects for the DIO in Gibraltar and Cyprus. And in HLG&E, the projects growth was largely in the health care sector across a number of hospital contracts. These DIO and HLG&E projects, combined with good growth in data centers and power and grid, helped total TS projects to grow by 10.6% to GBP 469 million.

This project's growth combined with MEIs and the turnaround in the telecoms business drove a 22.9% increase in profit, boosting margins by 60 basis points. However, although margins have improved, they continue to be impacted by the headwinds from inflation and national insurance as well as a provision for loss-making contract. As I said earlier, this contract was a GBP 5.4 million headwind to Technical Services profit in the half, but it will complete in May 2026. It sits in a structurally low-margin sector, which we're exiting. Without this contract provision, TS profits would have increased by 36% and margin would have been 40 basis points higher. We expect TS margins to improve significantly in half 2 as projects revenue and margin enhancement initiatives ramp up.

My final P&L slide shows the consolidation of the group numbers with the business services and technical services profits that I've just talked through, combining with GBP 26.9 million of corporate costs to make up the GBP 108.8 million of group profit and the 4.1% margin. Corporate costs are a little higher in the period as a result of inflation and the national insurance increase. My last 2 slides cover cash flow and the balance sheet, and we generated a free cash inflow of GBP 51.9 million in the half, with the key driver being the operating profit of GBP 108.8 million. Other items was a GBP 25.6 million outflow of cash and was largely made up of acquisition-related costs as well as the costs of delivering our margin enhancement initiatives.

Next, we have a cash outflow from working capital of GBP 24.4 million, driven by 3 key factors: our seasonal cash outflow in the first half, where we pay suppliers for the high volume of project work that's completed at the end of the previous year, the growth in the projects business, which consumes more working capital than FM and longer payment terms on a number of new wins, particularly in the retail sector. Offsetting these outflows, we've made further process improvements and rationalized our supply base. CapEx, leases, interest and tax was a GBP 61.1 million cash outflow, GBP 13.8 million higher than the first half of last year. The increase was driven by GBP 8.7 million of CapEx, largely for new contract mobilizations and GBP 3.7 million of additional interest as a result of our capital deployment actions. These capital deployment actions account for GBP 305.1 million of cash outflow, including GBP 41 million of dividends and GBP 228 million of cash consideration for Marlowe.

Finally, at the bottom of the page, we see the overall increase in net debt of GBP 272.4 million. This increase results in a closing net debt of GBP 471 million and an average daily net debt of GBP 332 million, with the average leverage ratio of 1x remaining at the lower end of our targeted range. Debtor days are consistent with FY '25 and creditor days have improved as we rationalize our supply base and continue to improve our processes. ROIC reduced by -- ROIC reduced to 16.3% as a result of the Marlowe acquisition, where we've added GBP 380 million of invested capital, but only 2 months of operating profit. And finally, net assets increased to GBP 544 million after adding the net profit for the year and the shares issued for Marlowe, offset by dividends, share buybacks and market purchases for employee share schemes.

So in summary, we've made a good start to FY '26. Revenue growth has been better than our high single-digit guidance, and we've maintained our margins despite the investments we've made and the headwinds from inflation, national insurance and the completion of the search work. We made a positive step forward in EPS despite higher interest costs. We generated good free cash flow and ROIC has fallen below 20%, but only temporarily. As we look ahead to the second half of the year, we expect revenue growth to continue in double digits. Margins will be higher than in half 1, and we remain confident of achieving our full year profit target of at least GBP 260 million.

Finance costs will be higher as our leverage increases due to the acquisitions and the share buybacks and EPS will grow despite these higher finance costs and the shares issued to acquire Marlowe. Completing the FY '26 guidance, we expect free cash flow to be more than GBP 120 million this year and ROIC will increase back towards our targeted 20%. And on that note, I'll hand back to Phil.

Thank you, Simon. They seem a decent set of results to me. But I think more importantly now is to talk about where we are on our strategic journey since we pivoted our business model from service-led facilities management to project-led facilities transformation and then now to regulation-led facilities compliance. Just as a reminder, our strategic plan was focused on growth, growth over 3 pillars. And the foundation of our strategy pillar 1 was centered on growth from the core. Key account growth and scope increases, delivering condition-based maintenance, risk-based security, demand-led hygiene for our customers. And this is a heartland of facilities management.

Pillar 2 of our growth strategy was centered on our projects capability and infill acquisitions, transforming the built environment, better workplaces, greater energy efficiency, higher security. This is a heartland of facilities transformation. And our third pillar of growth was M&A, bringing in new capabilities to meet our customers' evolving needs in sustainability, environmental compliance and fire and security. This was our move into facilities compliance with the acquisition of Marlowe. And taken together, our strategy set out to build an unrivaled set of integrated capabilities to deliver the future of high-performing places.

Now any successful strategy needs to be underpinned by attractive macro trends and [ Mitie's ] from decarbonization, higher security, repurposing the grid, accelerating data center investments to increase public sector spending in defense, in justice, in health care and immigration. We're fishing where the fish are. And since we launched our new strategy, 2 further macro trends have emerged. Number 9 here, building compliance regulations are raising compliance requirements. Number 10, investments in water infrastructure will top GBP 100 billion over the next 5 years. These are themes that I will return to shortly.

In terms of our performance, as Simon touched on, H1 revenue was good. New wins lapping a strong H1 FY '25 plus renewals grew to a record GBP 3.8 billion total contract value in the period. And more importantly, as a leading indicator of growing momentum, our order book grew 31% year-on-year to GBP 16.5 billion TCV. Now we split the order book by time buckets this time. And on the lower left, you can see that revenue expected to be produced from the order book over the next 3 years has grown by 32% to GBP 8.6 billion of TCF since this time last year. And on the right, you'll see how our pipeline has not only grown in size from GBP 17.6 billion TCV 2 years ago to GBP 33 billion TCV today, but it's also grown in quality.

Let me explain that. The pipeline funnels opportunities from prospecting at the very early stages, such as identifying future bids on public sector frameworks through to a pre-qualification questionnaire as a bit of a mouthful, and becoming qualified to bid. And then on to a bid submission itself with the final stage of BAFO, best and final offer before a decision is finally made by the client. And as you can see, the quality of our pipeline has been growing. And at this time, at the moment, we've got over GBP 2 billion of TCV sitting in BAFO. This is another leading indicator of our growing momentum, particularly given our improving bid win rates. And it's this growing momentum anchored in the 4 strategic imperatives shown here, which gives us confidence that our business model will not only deliver our FY '25 to FY '27 ambitions, but will also sustain growth beyond this current 3-year plan.

Sustaining growth, firstly, by capturing more of our clients' facilities management share of wallet by upgrading, cross-training our strategic client directors, SCDs, we've identified over GBP 1 billion of additional client spend that we could deliver. Secondly, sustaining growth by turbocharging projects, building a GBP 2 billion-plus division over the next few years and sustaining growth thirdly, in compliance and water. Following the Marlowe acquisition, we now have a GBP 550 million Fire & Security Environmental Services compliance business, and we aim to grow this to GBP 1 billion in the coming years. And finally, as our AI strategy drives efficiencies and costs out, we see margins expanding beyond FY '27.

Now a little bit of detail on each of these imperatives, starting with SCD, strategic client directors and client share of wallet. By deepening our relationships within our strategic accounts, we know we can deliver more value to our clients. Integrated facilities management, IFM is only currently delivered to 40% of our top 50 contracts just 10 contracts where we've completed a share of wallet deep dive with Kevin, our Sales Director, we've identified a further GBP 500 million of work in security and hygiene, engineering and projects and in compliance currently delivered to our clients by third parties.

Winning here requires more senior business builders with new propositions, a wider understanding of Mitie's capabilities and how AI and data can drive insights and upsells with stretch incentivization. And our best SCD of our largest strategic client is now leading this new team. And we know how to do it when done well. Take 2 examples here on the right. One is a retailer has gone from annual revenues of GBP 16 million at the start to an estimated GBP 55 million this year. We've added more facilities management services, increased projects. roof-mounted solar panels, for example, is a big push for this client. And that's before we talk to them about refrigeration services where we announced an infill acquisition today or about F-Gas compliance and water services for Marlowe.

And second is a transport customer with annual revenues of GBP 25 million in FY '14. And today, that number is GBP 119 million, and we've added more sites and more services. And turning to the blue triangle in the upper right there, we always expected growth from the core of facilities management to be the biggest contributor of our 3-year plan. Growth from the core for me is probably the most important thing that we think about day-to-day. And we've outperformed our own expectations here and have already delivered over 90% of our GBP 600 million incremental growth target at the halfway stage of our strategy. Our Block 2 growth imperative is turbocharging projects in facilities transformation. And by any measure here, our performance has been outstanding with strong growth from the capabilities we've added in fire & security, power and grid and building engineering. An order book of GBP 2.9 billion today, up 53% year-on-year, a pipeline of GBP 6.9 billion, up 130% year-on-year and an average project size now at GBP 270,000 per job, up 80% year-on-year.

And turning again to the Maroon triangle this time on the upper right. Again, we've outperformed our own expectations here and have just about delivered all of the GBP 200 million incremental growth that we set for FY '27 at the halfway stage in our strategy. Our final growth imperative is in the GBP 7.6 billion facilities compliance market, where the acquisition of Marlowe positions us as the leader -- market leader, providing us with a platform to accelerate growth. Adding Marlowe's capabilities to Mitie's existing Fire & Security business created a differentiated total fire offer with a full suite of active fire and passive fire solutions as well as creating the market-leading provider in security systems.

But what really excites us about Marlowe on the right-hand side is their capabilities to build a total managed water solution. And as some of you will have already heard me say, water is the new energy. We buy it, we meter it, we recycle it and we report the usage of it. We've already signed up 2 existing Mitie clients to take these new water services literally in the last couple of months. But the really big prize for me is AMP8 Asset Management period 8, the latest set of regulations from Ofwat that will see GBP 104 billion invested in water efficiency, resilience and sustainability between 2025 and 2030. This is a material opportunity for Marlowe Environmental to deliver end-to-end solutions across the water services value chain from sourcing and metering through to transport, wastewater management and compliance and delivered at national scale.

Simply put, our aim is to be the provider of choice for our clients as they navigate increasingly complex regulatory requirements and sustainability goals built around water. So take the public sector, for example, previously, Marlowe did not have pre-qual approval in public sector bids. But Mitie is a cabinet office approved strategic supplier, and we're already now precleared to participate in some material upcoming public sector bids. And on the right upper triangle, again, we set a target there of GBP 400 million of revenue from M&A step out. The step-out being facilities compliance. It's early days after less than 2 months of owning Marlowe business, but revenues will now grow rapidly as Marlowe scales up to approach the GBP 400 million target.

Now whilst we are on the subject of Marlowe, it would be remiss of me not to take a moment to update you on our progress with the acquisition and the integration. The business is trading in line with our expectations and the synergy work streams are moving ahead. We're on track to deliver at least GBP 15 million of cost synergies in FY '27, and we'll exit FY '27 having fully integrated Marlowe and having captured the full GBP 30 million of synergies to be delivered in FY '28. We're removing duplicate corporate, administrative and other support functions through automation. We've reviewed procurement opportunities and moving the Marlowe supply chain to Mitie's preferred supply list and 3 sites in Marlowe's property portfolio have already been closed.

We're exploring major efficiencies from automating field force scheduling and delivering route density savings. We've already migrated 1,500 of Marlowe's Environmental Services colleagues onto Mitie's HR platforms, putting in controls around pay rises and bonuses with the remaining fire and security colleagues to follow before the fiscal year-end. And we're migrating Marlowe's IT applications on to Mitie's Azure platform to raise cyber resiliency. So in short, we're making good progress. And of course, in FY '27 and beyond, Marlowe will be a positive to the group's total overall margin. A final contributor to our 5% margin target.

And the last of our 4 imperatives is the execution of our AI strategy, reimagining and automating workforce and workflow management to drive better service efficiencies, reduce back-office costs across the business and drive margin accretion. And I've tried to capture our thinking in the next 2 slides, going back to the MITIEverse of the center there, the Mitie Command Center, which we introduced at our Capital Markets event in October '23. We haven't forgotten about it, creating the single pane of glass of the built environment. And our AI strategy has 4 components. Upper left, all our core systems, which are already cloud-based have been AI-enabled or in the case of Workplace+ and SAP will shortly be AI-enabled.

Lower left, all of our major customer apps, Merlin for risk and for cleaning, ARIA, ESME and Net Zero are all interconnected via our HARK connected workplace to the IoT platform and they're producing real-time data. And the upper right, the output from our core systems and apps feeds our leading enterprise insight platform, Mozaic360, developed on Microsoft Fabric and integrating all the operational data across all our intelligent solutions. Mozaic360 provides comprehensive operational and strategic insights into the daily operations of the built environment of our clients.

And finally, bottom right, as it were, our task mining from SkanAI has led to a growing number of AI bots or agents, enabling smarter, faster, more consistent ways of delivering tasks. But the real game changer since we launched our 3-year plan is the power of agentic AI and agentic mesh using the Microsoft Copilot Studio platform to connect and orchestrate our AI agents to deliver a single pane of glass in the MITIEverse Command Center. In Technical Services, we're orchestrating those AI agents which deal with our clients, those that execute work orders, those that interact with the supply chain, develop life cycle upgrades, close out jobs in the CAFM. When completed, this agentic mesh will provide that single pane of glass for workflow management. And in the MITIEverse Command Center and Business Services, a single pane of glass for workforce management will mesh all our recruiting, vetting, onboarding, training, deploying payroll AI agents with outputs from the supervisor layer highlighting productivity numbers, best-in-class performance.

And the final output from the MITIEverse Command Center will be a large language model, answering questions such as how does my building running costs compare to others? Or what's the optimum way of reducing costs by 10%. These are the questions that today, although we have much of the data, we simply didn't have the processing power to answer. But with the MITIEverse digital twin of the built environment, we'll be able to provide better service, greater insights to our clients and also at a lower cost. So my expectation is that we'll have completed our agentic mesh by summer '26. So if you need a bit of a line down after that, let me wrap up.

We've had a strong first half in FY '26 with double-digit revenue growth and good profit growth. Contract wins and renewals are at record levels as is our order book and bidding pipeline. Cash generation is good, and it shows we can undertake value-creating acquisitions and deliver shareholder value from buybacks. It's not either/or at Mitie. FY '26 profit will be at least GBP 260 million, and the Marlowe acquisition is progressing well. AI efficiencies will underpin our 5% margin aspiration. And with 18 months to go, we're on track to not only deliver our stretching FY '27 targets, but with our growing momentum, we're confident our strategy will carry us into FY '28. So with that, let me now turn over to Q&A. Thank you. We need some mics. We've got [ Demolo. We've got Marie ].

Alex Smith from Berenberg. Just 2 quick questions for me. First one on the projects division, the turbocharging. I guess the sizes of the projects have grown. Can you highlight any key areas of focus? And are you happy with the risk profile of those projects? And then number two -- sorry, just on the growth in the pipeline. Immigration and Justice seems to keep growing there. I guess, kind of Prism renewals and your entrance into that division. If you could provide some color on that, that would be great.

So what I'll do is ask Mark Caskey, who runs our projects business. And I think -- I mean, this year, we should end close to GBP 1.5 billion. We've set a target of GBP 2 billion over the next couple of years. That's ahead of where we indicated before. And Mark, why don't you just give a bit of color. We had a Board meeting here earlier in the week, signing up some quite big projects in -- big opportunities in projects. So why don't you talk a little bit about that.

Happy to, Phil. So thank you. Where do we see the biggest opportunities going? If you go back to the slide, Phil talked about -- sorry, a pipeline greater than GBP 7 billion, which is more than double up from where we were this time last year. And the growth is really coming from 3 areas. Firstly, being data centers. Secondly, being in the power and grid space, you think of everything around buildings need connections to the power systems, you've got battery storage and renewable projects that are underway. And then lastly, there's a significant amount of momentum in the marketplace at the moment around retrofitting the built environment. And if you think about our -- a lot of our project work sits on top of our FM clients and we dedicate project managers to those FM clients, that's where we're seeing the natural uptake.

The risk profile, we're so -- I mean, very rigorous around from a contracting perspective, we've invested in our commercial function as well. So we're really sort of like on the ball when it comes to margin profiles. A lot of our projects are short cycles. So even if we are doing larger projects, they're often broken down into numerous phases so we can control the price risk, the delivery risk and the scheduling to manage against ultimately our client expectations. So...

Just one -- thanks, Mark. Just one brief build on that, picking up on Mark's point about the short project life cycles. Phil picked it up on his slide, but you see on the turbocharging project side that the average size of our projects is GBP 270,000. So from a risk perspective, the majority of them are relatively small. They turn over relatively quickly. And importantly, 80% of them are with our existing customers. So we know the customers. We've got a good relationship. We can, therefore, negotiate decent commercial terms, and we know the estates that we're working on.

And on the prison immigration, I thought I might bring Jason in and stand up, Jason, if you look at the camera that way because Mark, you were sort of off -- you're off screen there. So next time, I ask you back again, come to the front here. But Jason runs our Business Services division, as you know, our largest. And as Simon said, we've moved the immigration and justice because there's a security element of immigration and justice, absolutely in our case. And we're already the largest provider of security services in the U.K., and we're building a strong position in both immigration and in justice.

Yes. Thanks, Phil. Look, the increased pipeline has been driven by, first of all, the announcements of the significant investments being made into the prison infrastructure, driven by the aging infrastructure currently in place and new prison places required. I think we have acquired leading capabilities in Mitie over the last 2, 3 years, and that's resulted in us being successful with Millsike, the U.K.'s first all-electric prison, where we successfully mobilized that prison and in the process of ramping up to full capacity. I was there yesterday and incredibly impressed by the standards that the Mitie people are delivering.

But also that puts us in a good position, gives us a good foundation for future growth as more new prisons are getting built and more prison places coming available. And from an immigration point of view, we've all seen the increase in immigration centers. We have -- we are currently mobilizing our latest immigration center at Campsfield, and there's more new immigration centers being opened. And the third point is around the investments being made in the prison and probation estate, which is a significantly aging infrastructure and a current live contract in flight to upgrade all of those services. So 3 real key areas of interest for us with good capability and good opportunity for growth.

I mean just to take a little bit more on that, as you saw on the Slide 17, I mean, the pipeline, as you touched on, I've got a great question from Alex, GBP 8 billion. I think it's fair to say we've got a couple of quite big ones in the BAFO stage at the moment. We won't say any more at this point. We don't want to jinx it. But there are some big jobs coming down the track.

And we should also say that whilst there is some concentration in immigration and Justice and Defense, actually, that growth in the pipeline that we've seen come through is spread across a number of sectors. So yes, immigration and defense, but also health care, transport and aviation, we've also seen some fairly chunky increases.

Sam?

Samuel from Stifel. Two questions from me, please. Firstly, on the strategic client directors, can you just remind us how they're incentivized and how you're sort of educating them about the Marlowe proposition? And then secondly, on facilities compliance, having covered Marlowe AMP8 and the water opportunity there is not something they particularly touched on. So I'd be interested to sort of get a sense of the opportunity you see now they're part of the bigger group and sort of what is going to be the typical AMP8 contracts you're sort of going to look to win?

Yes. Why don't -- I mean, Mark, I might get you back to the front here with a mic if you come to the front once I set you up on the SCDs, I'll answer the facilities compliance point first because the SCDs, we used to call them SAMs, strategic account managers, but we want them to be much more strategic in business building. And I think it's fair to say we've had people who are good operationally, but not necessarily people who are good client on the client really understanding the client's breadth of the share of wallet. And that's where Kevin Tyrrell, our Sales Director, has been working hard on growing that out.

But in terms of incentives, I mean, we've -- talk about some of the people we've got and then we know how they're incentivized. It's going to be on the growth of the business of the client and specific to their account in terms of profit, revenue, Net Promoter Score and employee engagement. But I'll just say a little bit about that.

In terms of our SCDs, we've identified our top 50 accounts. And part of their role and what we're supporting them with is bringing the best of everything of Mitie to the benefit of those clients, whether it's in hard services and engineering or soft services and/or projects. And what we've recognized as well is we're investing in our sales community or business development community to give them, let's say, the access to the resources to help them support our clients in terms of some of those conversations. Another area we're investing is our consulting capability.

And again, whether it's workplace, facilities management, energy and sustainability consultants, we've got over 300 of them in the business, and we're allocating them to the SCDs to be able to have a different order of conversation with our clients to really bring the full value of Mitie to solving their business challenges and improving the value they get from their property portfolio. And as Phil said, on the incentives, we reward them for growth. We reward them for the full P&L stack that sits underneath their client responsibility.

And on the pipeline, I could show you that, Sam, but you might go to see it. This is our top 30 opportunities from the Marlowe opportunity. And the first one, I'm not going to say it is, is GBP 47 million, the largest. The point I would make as well is that we don't have not yet scrubbed the pipeline and the order book for Marlowe. So there is nothing in there at the moment in the numbers. We'd expect to have done so when we've got it all in the CRM system, Kevin, and we've actually qualified these opportunities. But -- and I deliberately said the point I made that Marlowe were not public sector bidders. They ended up doing some work in hospitals, but that's because CBRE gave them the job and it was public sector, but they hadn't contracted directly with public sector.

We opened up that completely now. And there's some big bids already in play where we've made bids. We're waiting for answers, and we'd hope to announce those quite soon. But the opportunity is probably bigger than I expected. And once we've scrubbed it -- and actually, this is where we need to pivot Marlowe away from -- I've euphemistically used this phrase before, fire extinguishers in Scout huts and get into proper B2B. That's where the price -- that's why we bought the business. And we're quite excited about what it could look like. Tom, yes.

Tom Callan from Investec. I've also got 2. Just one on that GBP 2 billion pipeline that's BAFO. Can you just remind us in terms of the conversion -- the typical conversion of pipeline to order book and also typical contract length? Just trying to get a sense as what that might be...

Kev, I might bring you in on that as well, the back there. I know you like hiding in the back. But our win rate on -- there's 2 types of wins. There's wins around -- there's retention and we give you that number, and it's running at 80%. It's quite volatile in terms of if you lost a big contract in a short period of time. And then we've got wins on cold calls and wins on projects as well and the rates of those. But Kevin has been our Sales Director now for about 18 months, and we've got a lot more analysis now. Is it 18 months or 12 months' I can't remember? 18 months.

Yes. So conversion rate, we look at 2 different numbers. One of them is conversion rate of pipeline. The other one is conversion rate of tender win rate. So our tender win rate is things which come to market, we're actively bidding on. And our win rates have gone up into the low to mid-60s in the past 12 months. Our pipeline conversion rate is sitting about 27%. So it depends whether that pipeline converts into a tender, we bid on the tender, win rates are going up in that area.

And I think that's -- it's a double-edged sword for us because we try and take all our private sector clients away from a tender process in what we would call an off-market deal. But that's exactly what our clients do to us. I mean, we went for BT, but it stayed with the incumbent. And the number of -- in tech services, a number of clients that were in the pipeline never came to market. because they rolled it with the incumbent. And it's why -- but in public sector, you can't do that. You can't just do a quiet deal. So it's why there's more volatility in public sector because that is a straight shoot out on a tender process.

So that's why not all of that pipeline ever comes to us. But that -- and that's why there's a predominance in the pipeline of government. We know that's definitely going to come out. We might hope NatWest comes out next year, which we do, but we don't know if it'll ever see the light of day. Okay. There's another one, James. Are you sleeping, James? Didn't your wife have another baby?

Still on the first one.

All right...

But not sleeping. James Beard at Deutsche Numis. I've got 3 questions, please. Firstly, going back to the projects business and the projected growth to GBP 2 billion revenues there. You've -- how much of that is driven by growth in -- expected growth in average ticket value versus just growth in the number of tickets that you're generating in that business going forward? Second question is on Marlowe. Can you just talk through what is happening with the existing customer base there, whether you are retaining or seeing the great of any sort of degree of retrenchment within that existing customer base? And then thirdly, on the telecoms business, noted the GBP 10 million profit swing in the first half. What is your expectation on the second half for that?

Okay. I'm just in the mid of speeding it up because otherwise, we'll be here for a while. But I mean, the projects, it's a bit of both. We sell more jobs, but there's some very big jobs out there. If you look at Longcross was a GBP 90 million job at the data center, and that was for only 1/3 of the full potential there. So you get some sense of the size of the scale. And Longcross in when fully built out is 90 megs what's Harlow, that's a lot bigger.

It's 37 megs, but because they're densifying significantly, the amount of MEP you're putting into a data center now is increasing the average project size.

So there's some big stuff there. When you can think about the battery energy storage deal that we announced, Staythorpe, that's GBP 70 million. And there's a lot -- there's a big pipeline in battery energy storage as well. And what was the statistic? We -- our company that we bought ironically out of administration, G2E has done what, 25% of the U.K.'s battery.

So the battery storage capability in the U.K. is about 4.5 gigawatts at the moment. And G2 Energy, which is the company that we acquired just over 2 years ago, have developed over 25% of that capacity in the U.K. And so they're a really powerful brand when it comes to investors and developers into energy storage and battery storage solutions.

Okay. Marlowe, look, we -- it happens every time. Every time we buy a business, if they do any work with a couple of our sworn enemies, they cancel it straight away and Marlowe had a bit of that, but it's not material. We've got it -- and for every bit of business that a competitor has taken away from us, we have work that we were doing with third parties that we can now give Marlowe. So you're going to -- you're not going to see a big change in that number for now. And then on Telco...

Yes, just briefly on Telco. So you recall that we already initiated our turnaround plan on Telco, which was starting to have a positive effect in the second half of last year. And therefore, we won't see a big delta half-on-half this year versus last year in the second half.

It's growth that we need one of the reasons why we pulled back, we shared work that we were losing money on essentially. And then what we want to do is try and rebuild from a profitable level, but we've taken the revenue down by 50% -- 40%. Chris?

Chris Bamberry, Peel Hunt. A couple of questions. You've also had a very successful period in terms of contract awards. How much would you put down that to what you've been doing over the past few years and perhaps what's been changing in terms of customer behavior? And secondly, on Slide 20, you identified GBP 0.5 billion of opportunities with 10 contracts. Just trying to get an idea of kind of a scale of uplift there, what was the revenues on those contracts?

Do you have Kevin, on the 10 -- I don't know if I have that we have to come back to you if you haven't got it. The 10 -- we don't have the revenue -- not on the top of my head, we'll come back to you on that. It's a fair question as a percentage of uplift. But just -- I mean, a quick way of doing it a different way is our top 25 clients generate 25% of our revenue and our top 50 generate 50%.

It's a bit more than that actually, yes. So top 25 are closer to 40% actually. And the top 50 are just over 50%. So it's quite a concentration in that top 25. So given that we're taking the 10 largest there, we'll flesh it out.

Yes, we'll flesh that one out. I forgot the second question. What was it? What was the second question? So it's about -- the question was around winning contracts. It's quite volatile. I mean, it surprises me in some ways that it keeps going up because it is dependent on the size of some of the deals that are out there and it drives a weighted average. A big -- a government contract, I can think of 2 government contracts that are GBP 2 billion together, okay, that were at BAFO. So -- and that can be -- and because it's -- our public sector win rate, Kevin, will probably be a little bit lower than the number you gave.

So I guess there's a couple of things for me. I think building capability over the past few years, and we've seen all the capability we've built in our core FM service offering around hygiene, security and engineering, we continue to build. Continue to build capability around our project capability as well, strengthening of relationships on the back of really strong NPS. So strong NPS is the foundation for retention, which gives us the ability to continue to grow. So I think you apply good NPS, improving relationships with our clients, which we'll continue to do through the SCD program and building internal capability, the things which are enabling us to win.

That was a much better answer than mine, actually. But it actually reminds me because we've never had a group Head of Sales. Now you may say that's rather shameful in our fault. But we used to leave each business unit running its own stuff, doing its own stuff. And in the end, we decided that wasn't a good idea. So 18 months ago, we brought them all under Kevin. And you've replaced quite a few people now. And we do it through a standard way of bidding, standard reviews, all of the data is in this CRM system. And we've just become a lot more methodical than we used to be. And that hasn't -- the value of that hasn't finished playing out yet. We've still got people literally just having joined us less than 6 months ago who are with a top track record. And one thing I'd say, we've not had any difficulty attracting talent into Mitie. Any more? Excellent. Thank you for your support, as always, and we'll see you at the drinks and not -- what is it? The 20 -- 20 something. Next week. If you're not invited, go and see Kate. Thanks, everyone.