Declaración comercial
For immediate release 23 April 2024
RWS Holdings plc
Declaración comercial de medio año
RWS Holdings plc ("RWS" or "the Group"), a unique world-leading provider of technology-enabled language, content and intellectual property services, today provides an update on trading for the six months ended 31 March 2024 ("the first half"), ahead of the announcement of its half year results on 12 June 2024.
Rendimiento del grupo
Organic constant currency ("OCC")¹ revenues declined by 2% in the period, an improving trend compared to the prior year (H1 FY23: -7% and H2 FY23: -5%). Reported revenue is expected to be £350m, down 4% on prior year. Whilst we continue to see soft activity levels from certain market segments, we are encouraged that two of our services divisions have returned to growth and that we are seeing growing traction with our AI-based solutions, supporting a number of new business wins in the first half.
Adjusted profit before tax ("PBT") is expected to be approximately £45m in the first half (H1 FY23: £54m). This reflects weaker performance in some parts of our higher margin businesses, an unfavourable mix of work in parts of Language Services, ongoing investments and year-on-year foreign exchange differences, partially mitigated by increased use of the Language eXperience Delivery platform (LXD) and the cost reduction exercise conducted in H2 FY23.
As previously indicated, we continue to drive incremental revenues from our growth initiatives across the Group and we expect revenue to be stronger in the second half, supported by new business wins across the business and some recovery in higher margin parts of the business. We remain mindful of the wider macroeconomic and geopolitical environment and the continuing market pressures seen in the prior year, which is making visibility in certain segments of our business less clear in the short-term. However, our many years of investment in AI solutions, both to improve outcomes for clients and to drive internal efficiency, position us well to play a leading role and navigate the AI-related we are seeing in our industry.
Cash generation continues to be strong. On 31 March 2024, the Group had net debt² of £40m, after payment during the first half of the £36m final dividend for FY23, £30m under the programa de recompra de acciones and the planned higher level of investment in transformation.
Desempeño divisional
Language Services returned to growth on a constant currency basis, driven by a good performance in Enterprise Services, particularly in TrainAI, where our major global technology clients are increasingly benefiting from our data services expertise. We also won our first TrainAI contracts in other parts of the Group and, with an encouraging pipeline, we anticipate TrainAI will make a further positive contribution to our revenue growth rate in the second half. Clients are attracted to the enterprise-grade security and privacy that RWS offers, as well as its strong ethical practices in the sourcing and quality checking of data for training their AI models.
We are also encouraged by the impact of Evolve, our pioneering linguistic AI solution. Evolve combines RWS's language services expertise with its translation management system (Trados Enterprise) and neural machine translation technology (Language Weaver) alongside language specialist-trained quality estimation and a finely tuned private large language model. After a successful beta program in which a number of clients participated, we are now seeing early revenues from Evolve contracts with major clients. With a healthy pipeline including several clients currently going through proof of concept, we anticipate Evolve contributing to second half revenues and becoming an important part of our AI-enabled services portfolio.
In Language & Content Technology we saw revenue contraction on a constant currency basis although reported revenues increased, supported by good growth in Propylon. We made positive progress in Linguistic AI, with a high level of new bookings in Language Weaver. The division's in-house R&D team led the development of the Evolve solution and continues to roll out the range of available language pairs available through Evolve. Weaker revenue performance in content technology was driven by Tridion.
IP Services returned to growth on a constant currency basis, driven by an encouraging performance in the Eurofile segment with many patent filers remaining committed to existing arrangements over the Unitary Patent. The division had several wins in research and renewal work, demonstrating our ability to serve clients across the IP lifecycle. The Group has also agreed terms for the disposal of its interest in a revenue and cost sharing arrangement, together with some associated assets, relating to a patent information resource business known as "PatBase" for £30m in cash, of which £5m is deferred and will be payable at the latest six months after completion. Completion is expected to take place in May.
In Regulated Industries revenue declined on a constant currency basis, driven by a continuation of the challenges previously noted in the Life Sciences segment, a number of our larger clients going through cost-cutting exercises and the non-repeat of some compliance work to meet regulatory changes in financial services last year. In clinically-oriented work in Life Sciences, we have seen continued growth from our Linguistic Validation solutions.
Ian El-Mokadem, director ejecutivo de RWS, comentó:
"The Group's first half results reflect good progress in a number of areas and signal that we are well positioned for clients' increased appetite to harness AI to meet their language and content needs. Our successes with TrainAI and Evolve demonstrate that our AI-enabled solutions are resonating with clients at this pivotal moment for our industry. Through our unique combination of proprietary technologies and longstanding linguistic expertise, we are uniting the best of human and artificial intelligence to deliver innovative new offerings and support internal efficiency.
"We are pleased to see that both Language Services and IP Services have returned to growth. Our growth initiatives, such as Linguistic Validation and eLearning, are also delivering incremental revenue and we have seen encouraging performance in Language Weaver, our long-established AI-centred machine translation solution.
"It has been disappointing that we have not seen the recovery in Regulated Industries as quickly as we would have hoped and that sales in some parts of our content management software business have been slower than planned. We expect both to show some recovery in the second half.
"Delivery of the Board's full year expectations remains dependent on continuing to successfully leverage our growth initiatives and AI offerings to compensate for ongoing headwinds in some areas."
Actualización de la placa
Following the departure of Lara Boro, David Clayton has been appointed as Senior Independent Director, with immediate effect.
Notas:
¹ OCC excludes the impact of acquisitions and assumes constant currency.
² Net cash/net debt comprises cash and cash equivalents less loans but before deducting lease liabilities.
Para más información, visite: www.rws.com.
RWS Holdings plc 01753 480200
Ian El-Mokadem, director ejecutivo
Candida Davies, directora financiera
MHP (asesor de relaciones públicas financieras) GME@dhr-rgv.com
Katie Hunt / Eleni Menikou / Catherine Chapman 020 3128 8100
07884 494112
Deutsche Numis (nómada y conjunta Broker) 020 7260 1000
Stuart Skinner/Will Baunton
Berenberg (conjunto Broker) 020 3207 7800
Ben Wright / Toby Flaux / Milo Bonser
Sobre RWS
RWS Holdings plc is a unique, world-leading provider of technology-enabled language, content and intellectual property solutions. Through content transformation and multilingual data analysis, our combination of AI-enabled technology and human expertise helps our clients to grow by ensuring they are understood anywhere, in any language.
Nuestro propósito es desbloquear la comprensión global. Al combinar la comprensión cultural, la comprensión del cliente y la comprensión técnica, nuestros servicios y tecnología ayudan a nuestros clientes a adquirir y retener clientes, brindar experiencias de usuario atractivas, mantener el cumplimiento y obtener información procesable sobre sus datos y contenido.
Durante los últimos 20 años, hemos desarrollado nuestras propias soluciones de IA y hemos ayudado a los clientes a explorar, crear y utilizar aplicaciones de IA multilingües. Con más de 45 patentes relacionadas con la IA y más de 100 artículos revisados por pares, tenemos la experiencia y los conocimientos necesarios para ayudar a los clientes en su camino hacia la IA.
Trabajamos con más del 80% de las 100 marcas más importantes del mundo, más de las tres cuartas partes de las 20 'Compañías más admiradas' de Fortune y casi todas las principales compañías farmacéuticas, bancos de inversión, bufetes de abogados y solicitantes de patentes. Nuestra base de clientes se extiende por Europa, Asia Pacífico, África y América del Norte y del Sur. Nuestras más de 65 ubicaciones globales en los cinco continentes atienden a clientes en los sectores automotriz, químico, financiero, legal, médico, farmacéutico, tecnológico y de telecomunicaciones.
Fundada en 1958, RWS tiene su sede en el Reino Unido y cotiza en AIM, el mercado regulado de la Bolsa de Valores de Londres (RWS.L).
RNS puede usar su dirección IP para confirmar el cumplimiento de los términos y condiciones, para analizar cómo interactúa con la información contenida en esta comunicación y para compartir dicho análisis de forma anónima con otros como parte de nuestros servicios comerciales. Para obtener más información sobre cómo RNS y la Bolsa de Valores de Londres utilizan los datos personales que nos proporciona, consulte nuestra Política de privacidad.