Mitie Group H2 25/26 Earnings Report

Mitie Group EPS Results

• Actual EPS: GBX 13.60
• Consensus EPS: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

Mitie Group Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $5.62 billion
• Expected Revenue: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

Mitie Group Announcement Details

• Quarter: H2 25/26
• Date: 6/4/2026
• Time: Before Market Opens
• Conference Call Date: Thursday, June 4, 2026
• Conference Call Time: 4:30AM ET

Mitie Group (LON:MTO), together with its subsidiaries, provides facilities management and professional services in the United Kingdom and internationally. The company operates in four segments: Business Services, Technical Services, Central Government & Defense (CG&D), Communities. The company provides decarbonization, electrical grid connections, emission intelligence, energy and carbon, EV fleets, and heat solutions, as well as solar energy; cleaning and hygiene, engineering maintenance, integrated facilities management, landscape, and waste management services; project and workplace services; and Fire & security systems, front of house, intelligence, vetting, and security guarding service. It serves to financial, professional, life science, manufacturing, media, telecom and tech, retail, shopping centres, transport, utilities, central and local government, critical environment, defence, education, healthcare, and justice and immigration sectors. The company was incorporated in 1936 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

Mitie Group H2 25/26 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: Mitie reported another strong year, with revenue up 10.5% to GBP 5.6 billion and operating profit up 12.8% to GBP 264.1 million, while margins improved to 4.7% despite inflation and higher National Insurance costs.
• Positive Sentiment: The company highlighted very strong visibility, ending the year with a record GBP 16.3 billion order book and a GBP 31.7 billion bidding pipeline, both of which support confidence in FY 2027 and beyond.
• Positive Sentiment: Free cash inflow reached GBP 162 million, ahead of Mitie’s FY 2027 target, and management said this supports continued capital returns, including an intention to buy back GBP 100 million of shares in FY 2027.
• Positive Sentiment: The Marlowe acquisition is outperforming expectations, with GBP 7 million of synergies already delivered and management saying integration is progressing well, helping strengthen Mitie’s facilities compliance and fire/security platform.
• Neutral Sentiment: Management framed FY 2028 and beyond as a new growth phase built around deeper share-of-wallet wins, projects expansion, compliance services, and AI-driven process redesign, but noted that the new Project Prio program will require upfront investment before meaningful savings arrive.

Presentation

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Good morning. We've got a full house today, which is great to see. 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, nicely set in this photo here with our new corporate branding. I hope you noticed when you came in at the entrance there, our recently awarded royal warrants. I'm pictured here with Priscilla, the stalwart of our cleaning team here at The Shard. Welcome to Mitie's full year presentation for the 12 months ended 31st of March 2026. As we'll show, our results in 2026 were good. We're confident in delivering our FY 2025, 2027 strategic plan, which I'll talk on shortly. We are building the foundations for 2028 and beyond.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Firstly, turning to the 2026 highlights. We've 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%-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 2027 to total GBP 100 million, inclusive of the remaining GBP 40 million of the current program announced last October.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

M&A is a key feature of our model, as you know, I am pleased to say that the Marlowe acquisition is progressing above our expectations. Taken in the round, this positive outlook gives us not only confidence in delivering our FY 2025 to 2027 three-year plan, but belief also that the strategic foundations are in place for continued value creation in FY 2028 and beyond. Here are some of the highlights in 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. With FY 2027 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 2023.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

That gives you some sense of the progress we've made since then. Over to Simon now. He'll help you navigate through the detail of FY 2026 performance, I'll come back and touch on strategy.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

Thanks, Phil. As Phil said, we are now into the final year of our three-year plan. Before we get into the detail of the FY 2026 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's 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 two years, supported by the increasing pipeline and the much larger order book that Phil just referenced.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

Operating profit's growing significantly faster than revenue at 18% a year. It's worth reminding ourselves that back in 2023, consensus profit for FY 2026 was GBP 207 million. Today, we're reporting GBP 264 million, having made seven upgrades since then. Margins have been resilient despite the material external headwinds. 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 2027 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 2026, 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%. We're compounding earnings with EPS growing at 13% a year.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

With that as a backdrop, I'll move on to cover the FY 2026 results, starting with the headlines. Revenue's up by 10.5% to GBP 5.6 billion, driven by good organic growth of 5.3%. Operating profit's grown 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 GBP 0.136 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's proposed a final dividend of GBP 0.031 a share, taking the total dividend to GBP 0.045, up 4.7% on FY 2025. 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. Moving on then to cover the performance in a bit more detail and turning firstly to revenue.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

This slide shows the key drivers of the revenue growth in FY 2026, with the good momentum from FY 2025 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 Defence, data centers, and healthcare.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

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 2026. Pricing accounts for GBP 151 million of additional revenue. We've shown separately on this bridge the GBP 59 million headwind from the completion of the high-margin one-off surge security work last year. When we combine these four blocks, total organic growth is 5.3%.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

Acquisitions contributed 5.2% of growth in FY 2026. This block includes the infill acquisitions that we've made in the last 18 months, including Arcus Fire and the two Spanish businesses, as well as the Marlowe acquisition, which added GBP 208 million of revenue. Sticking with the group numbers, next I'll cover operating profit. 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 a good projects performance across most sectors.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

This block includes a GBP 10.1 million loss on one specific contract, which I'll come back to 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. When combined with GBP 7 million of cost synergies, Marlowe profit for our first eight 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 2026, 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.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

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. Once again, we were successful in managing inflationary pressures in FY 2026. Our contractual protections and strong customer relationships enabled us to pass on 94% of cost inflation to our customers, resulting in only a GBP 6.9 million reduction in profit.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

We said last June that we expected our employer's NI bill to go up by around GBP 50 million in FY 2026, 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.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

Looking ahead to FY 2027, the national living wage will increase by 4.1%, which is a smaller increase than in each of the last two 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 2027. We are affected by fuel price inflation. We expect the growth in fuel prices to have a GBP 5 million-GBP 6 million gross impact in FY 2027, 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-GBP 12 million total impact from inflation in FY 2027.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

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. The business in Spain has grown by over a third 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 three pillars of FM, FT, and FC.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

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 HMP Milsike 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 2025, 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.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

Engineering, which includes our private sector maintenance contracts and larger engineering projects, grew by 1.4% in FY 2026. 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 in Gibraltar and Cyprus, and in HLG&E, the project's growth was in healthcare 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 one notable contract exit and a reduction in volumes on the Landmarc contract.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

With a new senior management team in place and some early wins, we expect FM growth in TS to improve in FY 2027. 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. Although margins have improved, they continue to be impacted by the headwinds from inflation and National Insurance, as well as one loss-making contract. As I said earlier, this contract was a GBP 10.1 million headwind to technical services profit in FY 2026, 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.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

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 2026, as we've invested in sales and technology and due to the inflation and National Insurance increases. 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 2026, 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-over-year increase was driven by the Marlowe acquisition and the Marlowe integration costs.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

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. We expect to undertake an insurance buy-in of our DB schemes in FY 2027. 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, 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 a GBP 126.9 million cash outflow, which was GBP 21.1 million higher than in FY 2025. That increase was driven by CapEx for new contract mobilizations, including Milsike, lease payments for the Marlowe fleet, and interest costs resulting from our capital deployment actions.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

These capital deployment actions account for a GBP 414 million cash outflow, which I'll come back to. 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 1.2 times remaining within our targeted range. Debtor days have got a little worse due to the acquisition of Marlowe and growth in the projects business. Creditor 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.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

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 2026, 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 GBP 0.045 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.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

As we look ahead to FY 2027, 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%-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 2027. In summary, we've had a positive year in FY 2026 with good momentum heading into the final year of our three-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 surge work.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

We made a positive step forward in EPS despite higher interest costs, generated good free cash flow, and ROIC's fallen below 20%, but only temporarily. As we look ahead to FY 2027, 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%. On that note, I'll hand back to Phil.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Thank you, Simon. Thank you for a good story of our progress. It's a good job. As Simon said, I think we're confident in achieving our FY 2027 target. Where do we go from here? Why did I say in my introductory remarks that I believe we are laying the foundations for value creation for FY 2028 and beyond? Let me explain a little bit more about that. 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 three pillars of growth in facilities management on the bottom there. Growth from our core led by key account growth in facilities management. Transformation in the middle. Projects-led growth. Upgrading and decarbonizing the built environment.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

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. 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. On the left, we set a target of GBP 1.2 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. 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.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

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, an increase in regulation around fire building, safety and environmental compliance, alongside significant investments in U.K. water. 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. The mix of our pipeline has also changed.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

6.8 billion of the pipeline relates to opportunities in facilities transformation in projects where we've seen a tenfold increase in three years as we are added to more of our clients' capital frameworks. We now include for the first time our facilities compliance pipeline at GBP 800 million. Like facilities transformation, I'd expect this to grow significantly as well as we establish our compliance credentials and qualify onto more client frameworks. The bidding pipeline, of course, 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 GBP 16.3 billion of order book. That's a three-year CAGR of 19% per annum. Facilities transformation order books are now an impressive GBP 2.8 billion. Again, we include our fledgling facilities compliance order book of GBP 500 million.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

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 shorter duration, the vast majority of facilities transformation and facilities compliance held in the order book produces revenue much more quickly within 2-3 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.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

As you can see on the right, we delivered another GBP 25 million of savings through margin enhancements in FY 2026. On top of that, we've made a good start on the Marlowe integration, delivering GBP 7 million of synergies in FY 2026, which was ahead of our expectations. We moved Marlowe's alarm receiving center, their ARC, from Warrington into Mitie's ARC in Craigavon, Northern Ireland. We've exited 15 Marlowe properties. We've streamlined back office operations and have already started migrating Marlowe onto our cyber secure systems. These initial savings have given us good momentum into FY 2027, 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.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Although it's too early to adjust guidance at this time, it's no doubt we've made a fast start, and we expect to exit FY 2027 with the full run rate of synergies that we previously guided. When I look at our margin mix, our order book, our fast-growing pipeline on top of our macro trends, this is why I say we're laying the foundations for the next phase of growth in FY 2028 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. 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.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

We have a world-class net promoter score of +64 points, double the FM industry. Yet with only 40% of our top clients contracting on an integrated FM basis, we know there's significantly more to do. We've undertaken detailed reach out and research and analysis of our 50 largest strategic account spend. We've now identified around GBP 1.5 billion share of wallet opportunities from security and 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. Healthcare, transport, retail, financial services, critical national environments. They've all got particular requirements.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Our corporate website, therefore, mitie.com is dialing up on this sector experience, and we've built an in-house LLM to assist lead generation in 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 day of a tube strike is a good example where we provide hard services maintenance in the past, specialist security services, drones and technology around, detection of graffiti, for example. Now we've just mobilized 2,200 colleagues on a GBP 100 million per annum hygiene and waste management contract over the next five years. This is the same success we've replicated with retail clients, pharmaceutical clients, and e-commerce clients.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

On the upper right, you'll see already we've exceeded our growth ambition. We targeted GBP 600 million over the three-year plan. We're above that target after only two years. Turbocharging projects in facilities transformation is another strategic foundation. Project revenue has doubled to GBP 1.4 billion since we unveiled our new strategic plan back in 2023. 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. 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 in fire and security, water engineering and refrigeration, for example. While scaling up our consulting model, leveraging our deep knowledge of our clients' estates.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Strengthening our capabilities through apprenticeships, graduate engineering programs, and again, rebranding our website under the high-performing projects strap line. I've mentioned the GBP 45 billion investment going into data centers many times, as has the government. In the middle, look at the revenue growth in JCA Engineering, our data center principal contractor, together with GBE Converge, which delivers sophisticated fire and security systems to data centers in the U.K. and other fast-growing European locations.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Combined, we expect data center revenue to grow from less than GBP 200 million in FY 2025 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 Kao Data, ARC and Equinix. On the right, you'll see some of our major projects in hospitals, at carports, and that's without mentioning the U.K.'s largest battery energy storage project we're working on, or the U.K.'s largest roof-mounted solar project, or the U.K.'s largest heat extraction project from effluent that we've completed already. That's turbocharging projects, and our reputation and our confidence is growing. Again, on the upper right, we've already significantly exceeded our three-year target in just two years. The last growth strategic foundation is facilities compliance. I've split that into total water and total fire and security.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Starting with total water, total managed water is a GBP 6.7 billion addressable market for Mitie, targeted both on our customers' requirements with water, as well as those of the water utilities themselves. We separate those two. 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, we're 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 modular 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've a new website showcasing our capabilities. Here we're using the refreshed Marlowe Environmental Services brand, not Mitie.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

New propositions, new go-to-market tools, improved data on client water usage and targeted sales campaigns. We're hosting a two-day event next month, The Future of Facilities, Compliance and Water, and over 200 of our clients are attending. We're already seeing some early success, such as 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 after 12,000 assets across the AWE's complex high security estate, including boreholes, 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.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

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. Same with facilities compliance as I said, the other major opportunity is 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.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Again, with new branding, we built a new sector-based sales team, with a 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. ScottishPower on the right is a great example of our joined-up approach involving now Mitie, Marlowe capabilities and RH Irving on three of ScottishPower's national infrastructure program frameworks. With critical national infrastructure, a core sector expertise of ours, we expect, again, this pipeline to grow. Together, we haven't yet made our three-year target, but with a year to go of Marlowe and the growth trajectory we see, we do expect to do so. Our final strategic foundation is not necessarily targeted on growth, but it's targeted specifically on margin expansion and is centered around technology acceleration and in particular AI.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

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 lake. Today actually, over 140 of our clients are accessing the data lake. However, at that time, what we did not foresee back in 2023 was the fundamental impact of AI. 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 of Claude from Anthropic, where 200 licenses are being deployed. In fact, I've got one of them, see how we get on. That's why we've launched what we call Project PrioProcess reimagining and optimization. Building an agentic orchestration layer to manage agents. We already have the agents.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

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. 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. 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. This is the largest mobilization of a change program we've ever run, including McKinsey, QuantumBlack experts, AI software engineers, Nearform, and Mitie specialists.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Prio 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% 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 Prio, and 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 2027 as we start to mobilize, but more will come in FY 2028 and beyond. Inevitably, there's an upfront cost of this type of program.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

We estimate GBP 20 million-GBP 25 million this year. We flagged this as an incremental cost to our other items in FY 2027. As I said, we're laying the strategic foundations for value creation in FY 2028 and beyond. Summing up, FY 2026 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 our summary here and good progress in Marlowe. This momentum, though, will continue in FY 2027. That's what gives us our confidence in delivering our existing three-year plan. More importantly, we're laying the strategic foundations for the next phase of our strategy and beyond. Sort of brings me to today, because today is my 10th Mitie prelims presentation. I didn't realize you could have so much fun over 10 years.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

As you know, it was always my intention to retire at the end of our facilities transformation three-year plan, and we explained that to shareholders a couple of years ago. It's not new news. With the share price of around GBP 0.90 at the Capital Markets Event when we launched our Facilities Transformation Vision, our shares have almost doubled. Our strategic investments have been successful, and returns to shareholders have been strong. As we transition to a new CEO, I certainly believe that the foundations for FY 2028 and beyond have been laid. With that, let's open it up to questions and answers. I'm sure we have some mics around. I'm sure. Sit down. We have some mics. We'll start.

[Alex Smith, Analyst at Berenberg]

Alex.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Alex. Sorry, Alex. I haven't got my glasses on.

[Alex Smith, Analyst at Berenberg]

Yeah, Alex Smith from Berenberg. Just a quick one on the projects business and kind of the target of the 2 billion revenue now. You spoke about the data center market, and could 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? 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?

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

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

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

That's right, yep.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

GBP 275. 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 three months. We do have some big ones. I'll turn over maybe to Mark, who just came back from Derriford 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, so come to the front.

[Mark Caskey, Managing Director at Mitie Group]

I'll jump to the front. It's the easiest way. It's a good question with regard to the size and the scale of the projects. If you look at, as Phil said, the average project value is around about GBP 275,000 today. 14% 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 on grid opportunities.

[Mark Caskey, Managing Director at Mitie Group]

Often, some of these large data centers are broken down into multiple phases. Each phase has its own contracting mechanisms and pricing mechanisms. 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. We are very robust in terms of pricing margin expectation, but also contractual risk to ensure that we stay within our tolerances as an organization.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

Just to add one more point to what Mark said and what Phil said, I think we've given you this stat before, but about 80% of the projects that we perform are for our existing customers. That's an important point because it means we know the customer and we know the site typically that we're working on, and that therefore brings the risk profile down. 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 to the side competitively bidding against us.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Just picking up that AI point, and CJ, I might bring you in a little bit later as well, but the investment that's gone in before, if you like, predated AI, and that's the point we were trying to make. Yes, we've invested in IBM Maximo. We've got the most modern instance, Maximo 9.1, that's got AI embedded in it. We've got Coupa. That was a big upgrade for procurement. That's driven a lot of the savings and all that point about preferred supplier lists. Our procurement team negotiate top rates with preferred suppliers. In the old days, people went off and bought from a local supplier. If you take the hire what have you, we would have had 15 different companies doing that, and they would consolidate it to one.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

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 and the apps. We've got all that, and we've got the data lake, and I think we've talked before. Our data lake is 0.75 of a petabyte.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

You don't know what that means any more 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'll never have the ability to really process that quantum of data in real time, and I think that's where AI comes into it. CJ, anything to add? I think I'm quite excited about Anthropic. I know a lot of people use Copilot with the whole operation with McKinsey now. What's different this time to what we've done before?

[Cijo Joseph, Chief Technology and Digital Officer at Mitie Group]

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. We have got everything on cloud, so we have the elasticity. You need to have your application readiness, your core system readiness, and then you have got your data readiness. We have got our data lake from last eight years. These are the building blocks. In the Capital Markets event, we launched the Mitie Digital Platform. What we are doing is we are leveraging the agentic layer on top of it. That's what makes our journey much more easier into the AI. Couple of things, some of the dates which I want to remind, like January 2024, we launched our AI Ethics Board. Peter Dickinson chairs that, so we have got a good governance around it.

[Cijo Joseph, Chief Technology and Digital Officer at Mitie Group]

We launched our AI Mitie strategy in January 2025. We are pretty much in execution phase, and with Prio, which Kathryn is leading, we will be doing the change management and at scale.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

RAG, MCP, all that A2A.

[Cijo Joseph, Chief Technology and Digital Officer at Mitie Group]

Very happy to go into the layers of AI if you are interested in. I'll keep it off.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

All that's new. We didn't have that before. We didn't have bots that could talk to us, A2A agent to agent. RAG is the retrieval augmentation, what does the G stand for?

[Cijo Joseph, Chief Technology and Digital Officer at Mitie Group]

Generation.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Generation. 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. We cannot be complacent. Our biggest competitor we always think of is CBRE. 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. If you follow, they've just signed a deal with Meta, for example, to do massive data center rollout. We bought JCA, which is a data center principal engineer. They bought a data center company, but it was 10 times bigger. We bought a company that did grid connections. They bought one 10 times bigger in the U.S. We bought engineering business, they bought Pierce, GBP 2 billion, 10 times bigger than anything we're spending.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

I mentioned McKinsey. They've just hired the head of AI from McKinsey in the U.S. to join CBRE. We cannot afford not to be doing this if we want to compete. 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 how much is our IT bill, CJ, now, if you added up everything? GBP 100 million. GBP 100 million. There aren't many companies that can spend GBP 100 million. We could spend GBP 100 million, it might only be GBP 103, and we could do over double the size of the data. That's the leverage of investment, and that's why I do think consolidation is a potential. That was a long question, but an interesting one. What have we got? Sam, maybe.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Sorry, maybe a lady at the front.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

Aashni.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Aashni at the front, Goldman Sachs.

[Aashni Sawhney, Analyst at Goldman Sachs]

Hi, good morning. Aashni from Goldman Sachs. A couple from me, please. It is interesting to see the state of the pipeline, including Marlowe, facilities compliance, et cetera. Can you maybe talk about potential for revenue synergies beyond FY 2027? I know that initially you had talked about potential for dis-synergies as well. It felt like the momentum was building. Any color there, that would be helpful. Thank you.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Yeah.

[Aashni Sawhney, Analyst at Goldman Sachs]

I think if you think about the expectations for growth for FY 2027, 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 two divisions as well? Thank you.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

The first question was about Marlowe synergies, and I might bring Christian in a little bit on fire and security in a second. There were some dis-synergies originally because I mentioned CBRE. The minute we buy Marlowe, they cancel all the work. I'd ask whether they're acting in the client's interest, but that's a different point. There are a few dis-synergies to begin with, but they've already been more than overtaken by the new work that we're starting to win. If I stay on water, I'll turn to Christian because Christian runs the fire and security side of it. On the water side, I mentioned we got Atomic Weapons. We've done quite a number of swimming pool upgrades. I'm not talking about the Goldman Sachs partners, but I'm talking about in schools and hospitals are big things, swimming pools now.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

There are big upgrades going on there. We've got some work going on with heat extraction, heat pump, and water treatment. The size, we didn't put it in because it was almost too big to be true, Kate made me take it out. The size of the leads now are 100 times bigger than they used to be at Marlowe. 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. We're very optimistic about growth. Jason, on the fire and security side, we've got some good wins, Virgin Media O2, AES, A.S. Watson Group. What else has been going on?

[Christian Watts, Managing Director, Fire & Security Systems and Compliance Services at Mitie Group]

Yeah. The pipeline, to your point earlier, it has significantly increased in the last six to nine months since we took over the acquisition of Marlowe. We've got a really nice mix of business as well. We have a mix of projects and also some nice new recurring revenue contracts that are coming through. We're seeing, because of the enhanced capability that we have across the two businesses combined, that the self-delivery capability, as Phil mentioned earlier, is much greater. We're able to take on multi-disciplined opportunities across our existing customer base. The pipeline's 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.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

You're up on plan from where.

[Christian Watts, Managing Director, Fire & Security Systems and Compliance Services at Mitie Group]

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

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

The order book. I might bring Sam in a little bit on BS and TS because. Thanks, Christian. I know you wanted to carry on, but.

[Christian Watts, Managing Director, Fire & Security Systems and Compliance Services at Mitie Group]

No.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

There was a moment in time, and internally, we talk in tech services about building back better. That sort of implies that we've not been happy with where we were in tech services. Part of the change there has been changes in management. We've appointed Sam, and I'll ask him to speak a little bit. 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 hit 15% of the target, something like that.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

This year, we're already starting to get ahead, and I'll get Sam to talk about that. It's a management function, that. It's not an intrinsic business function. BS will continue to grow. It's just that TS this year will grow. Sam, come on up. Sam joined us in December from Costain. He used to work at British Aerospace and Babcock, so comes from an engineering legacy.

[Sam White, Managing Director, Technical Services at Mitie Group]

Okay. Thank you very much. Great question. Of course, we see opportunities for growth within technical services. We see that willingness to pay, but at the heart of that is an ability to be able to deliver engineering excellence. We talked a bit about the features that will help us towards that. The tools and the systems that we've got in place, there's been significant investment over the past number of years. When they come together with AI, that creates a really 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. Many of our critical environments customers have similar characteristics.

[Sam White, Managing Director, Technical Services at Mitie Group]

If you're working in pharma or Heathrow Airport or BAE Systems, the consequences of not having your facilities at their best are significant. We're bringing in a team that has the experience and capability in those sectors, and we've recently made some appointments around that. Building that team, investing in the systems capability, and putting engineering really at the heart of that is key to the future. 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 Mitie capability. 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.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

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

[Sam White, Managing Director, Technical Services at Mitie Group]

Yeah, absolutely. We were able to re-secure our contract with GSK. We have been pursuing a number of different opportunities. There's been some.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

AstraZeneca was a win.

[Sam White, Managing Director, Technical Services at Mitie Group]

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. 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. That'll be the focus for us.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

A.S. Watson was another one. I think maybe there's a point there I made about that share of wallet, because it looks like a big number. Let's just take retail. We're very big in retail, in security. As we know, we've got Sainsbury's, Marks & Spencer, Co-op, Aldi, Lidl, 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. That's why we bought Forest. Forest is a refrigeration service provider. That's an example of the share of wallet's maybe always been there, but we haven't always had the wherewithal to go after it, and now we can. Sorry, I interrupted you.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

No, I hadn't started. I was just going to make two 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. We've got good momentum in FT in TS, that grew 14% in FY 2026. We've got some good momentum there, particularly in defense and in healthcare. Half of our pipeline sits in Technical Services. Whilst we didn't convert those opportunities as well as we'd like to have done in FY 2026, we've still got a great pipeline that sat there of opportunities for FY 2027 and beyond. A lot of that pipeline will come to bid and be decided in the next 18 months.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

We've got 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 healthcare. I might have missed somebody, but there's been quite a lot of change. Next question. Sam? Sorry.

[Sam Dindol, Analyst at Stifel]

Hi, 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 a sense of how you've changed the incentives to get the sales team to sell all the new services you have? Then secondly, on the projects business, obviously pretty significant growth since the CME. Can you give us a sense of how the margin profile's changed since then? Does bigger projects necessarily mean better margins or any sense of that would be great. Thank you.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

What was that last question again? The first one was around margin, sales-

[Sam Dindol, Analyst at Stifel]

Incentives

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

commissions and incentives. Kevin, I might get you to have a go at that one. Then the CMO, what's the connection with the CME?

[Sam Dindol, Analyst at Stifel]

The projects business has grown quite rapidly since the CME.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Yes.

[Sam Dindol, Analyst at Stifel]

Just a sense of how the margin's trended since then.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Margin.

[Sam Dindol, Analyst at Stifel]

Does bigger projects necessarily mean better margins?

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Yeah.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

Yep.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

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

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

Yeah, I can do that.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

I think it's fair to say I'll do that whilst Kevin's thinking about sales incentives. He is the master of the commissions. We've had the growth. We're not arguing about that, are we? We've had the growth. The margins on capital projects should be higher generally than FM. If we get a hit, it always knocks it back, and it's not because we always get a hit, but we've had a hit in telecoms when we signed up business. We bought a business called ESM, which did grid connections, and another one where a big order book, when then we're left having to deliver it, and it's not quite worked out. It doesn't mean that we're selling bad business, but it means the buyer, we've taken on bad business. I think we're getting the margins up where we want it to be.

[Sam Dindol, Analyst at Stifel]

Yep

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Certainly not where we would overall. If you look at GBE, you look at JCA, they're making good margins. You just need one or two claims, and it knocks the margin back, and most of those are historical claims.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

Yeah. 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 forum before. As Phil says, we'd 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. For example, if I take our two 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.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Kevin, tell us about sales commission. Do you want to come to the front?

[Kevin Tyrrell, Chief Sales Officer at Mitie Group]

Is this working? Yeah, it is. Quite a simple and subtle change, really. 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 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, we've changed in the past two years. Again, historically, sales teams reported into the business unit managing directors. When I took the role a couple of years ago, we centralized all our sales function. It was a mindset change as much as incentives. Also, SCD incentives, making their bonus plan more aligned to growth and operational delivery have been the things which have unlocked it.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

The last one just to say about that is we used to have a marketing team that reported to me. It was probably my fault. We were good at what I call big M marketing, the swirl and all that sort of stuff. But the little m marketing is the support that the marketing team do for specific bids or sector development. All that work that's going into the website now is done by what I call little m marketing. Marketing now reports to Kevin. You have a degree in marketing, Kevin. Actually, the sales and marketing team both working for you has made a big improvement in delivery.

[Sam Dindol, Analyst at Stifel]

Thank you.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Was there questions? James? Was it James? No, not James. Yeah. Not James. What's he called? No, it's Chris.

[James Beard, Analyst at Deutsche Numis]

Okay, I'm going to stay.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

No, I'm not talking about you. Sorry. Go on.

[James Beard, Analyst at Deutsche Numis]

Thanks. That's quite the intro there. James Bird from Deutsche Numis.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Yeah.

[James Beard, Analyst at Deutsche Numis]

Two questions, please. Firstly, how do you think you're positioned-

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

You got me wrong. I thought I got your name wrong, James. No, I thought it was James.

[James Beard, Analyst at Deutsche Numis]

No, you got the name right. 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.? Secondly, can you give us a little bit more color on that Technical Services contract that lost GBP 10 million in FY 2026?

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Yeah.

[James Beard, Analyst at Deutsche Numis]

What happened, and why you're confident that that shouldn't repeat in the future?

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Yeah. I think this is my sixth or seventh prime minister so far in 10 years. We're sort of used to that in a way. That comes with the territory. I think behind your question is maybe a shift to the left, maybe is that part of it. I think if you look at what the burden on national insurance, there's 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. I suspect we're not going to see anything like that again. I think there's a view that business has shouldered quite a lot of the burden there. When it comes to awarding of contracts, and I'm not going to name them, but we do spend time with civil servants in departments.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

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. Suddenly become experts in engineering security, which is what we do. We're not seeing any sort of change to that. At the same time, those strategic investments in defense and healthcare, and crime and what have you, are still features that any political color is going to have to continue to invest behind. I don't see the changes on that. Let me deal with the tech services, though. 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, out of which projects was over GBP 80 million a year.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

The FM was more than 80. It gives you an idea of the scale. All right. Knowing that we make money in projects, but we're bidding on the FM. The bid was cleverly priced at a minimum floor. If you went below, you had to bid at the floor. We bid at the floor. Actually, the winning bid bid at the floor. It wasn't about price. We were below the floor, and it was a question of what do you do with that excess, and where do you reinvest the floor? If you follow that. Okay. We put more into pay because we'd 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.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

The difference between the scoring, I read it, and some were excellent, and some were outstanding. By the time I'd read it, I had no idea what was outstanding, what was excellent, because they were both really good. It wasn't about price. It was the tiniest margin. I've slightly given away the game. Shortly after we lost that contract, we were awarded a big security contract with the same department. You could argue that they weren't ever. This is the post-Carillion world of putting all eggs in one basket. The question is, and we'll never know, were there influencers to not award Mitie both? I'll never know that. What I do know, because I went through it was a good bid and it was very close.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

The financial impact was quite significant because it was an Interserve contract that was coming off a 10-year bid. We always tell you, we work the margins up, and even we, if we'd won it, we'd have had a hit because we were dropping margins because we dropped below the minimum. We were dropping margins. That would have happened win or lose. We lost the project follow-through, and we were doing a lot of project work, a good margin. We were doing a lot of EV charging and solar and whatever else. Funnily enough, we always do deep dives on losses and lessons learned. There aren't many lessons learned on that, ironically. We have a good relationship with the client, and we did a good bid. We couldn't have bid it lower.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

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. Were you also asking about the contract, specifically in TS that had the loss? That had the GBP 10 million loss. Yeah. That's a telecoms contract. It's the same contract that we referenced at the half-year. I referenced the loss on it at the half-year. The loss has got a little bit bigger. As I said in my presentation, that contract is now completed. It completed in May. We're not going to have the same problem again in FY 2027. It's in a sector, as I said, that we're exiting.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

It's a unique contract in the way it's structured and the terms, and 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.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

It was a five plus two, and it had deflators in it.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

Yeah.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

We don't do that anymore.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

No, we don't.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

We did. It was on my watch. We bid it. We wanted to get into telco, it led into why we ended up doing telco maintenance, from there into ADB, acquire, design, and build mobile phones. It's not been our best moment, it had a deflator. We made money to begin with, eventually every year labor rates are going up, steel's going up. Hard to get telco engineers, we're getting paid less every year. The last two years it was painful. There was a backlog that essentially they sent us the bill to fix. That's why we're out of it.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

Yeah. 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.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

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

[Chris Bamberry, Analyst at Peel Hunt]

Morning, Christopher Bamberry. A couple of questions. The renewal rate rounded 84%, so that's closer to the 90% longer term average. Do you think you can get back towards that average? If so, what do you need to do? Secondly, you're now eight months into Marlowe. Just kind of big picture, what have been the pleasant and less so pleasant surprises against your original expectations, and perceptions of the business? Thank you.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Yeah, I think, I won't bring you in, Kev, but credit to Kevin because again, I think it's a little bit of the case. This comes back to some of those losses have been in engineering facilities, in the FM, in TS, technical services. 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 Promoter Score, the client feedback, the lack of relationships built through the organization might have been an early predictor that there was something we needed to fix. That's why Sam has made a big difference, because Sam has been much more visible with the clients. Kevin is collecting all the app. We're now tracking the NPS of those renewals coming up and the relationship management points.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

We have a whole plan around retention that starts well before we get a bid. That's where we suddenly, we were metaphorically waking up when we got a bid. Well, if we'd played our cards right, we wouldn't have even had a bid. We would've taken it off market. When we do it well, we do it really well. It comes back to the quality of the SCDs. I can think of our very largest contract, I won't name it, but we've extended it three times now through great relationship building and great delivery. That's what we need to do. Marlowe. Look, I think, on the accounting side, we've had to make a few provisions that they didn't make. We have a more prudent approach to bad debt. We have the stuff that they used to put below the line.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

This is what analysts would've said. We never saw the real clean numbers, which we're now absorbing above the line. From the get-go, we're probably lower than you might have thought. That goes a little bit to the, you've got to get that in mind, when we've delivered GBP 7 million of synergies, when we said we wouldn't deliver anything. The good side is we've delivered GBP 7 million synergies. We're really getting after it. We've got a really good team. We put in Alvarez & Marsal. We've a really good team, and we're just blitzing it now.

[Chris Bamberry, Analyst at Peel Hunt]

Yeah.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

We know exactly how to deliver it. We've got some really good people on the optimization. I mentioned pricing elasticity.

[Chris Bamberry, Analyst at Peel Hunt]

Exactly.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

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. We're on top of it. We get the momentum behind these wins and we're off to the races. We're very happy with the acquisition. It's not unusual. There are a few issues to begin with. As I said, we had that canceling, which we'd anticipated, but to be honest, it was a little bit higher than we anticipated out of the traps.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

I'll 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 it in Marlowe. We're coming on a journey from that perspective, and there will be significant improvements going forward from a pricing perspective that benefits us.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

We had all the salespeople in a 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. In Mitie, you're bonused on margin sold, and then margin delivered, and there's a phasing, two phasings over a year. If you're not delivering the margin sold in the actuals six months on, it gets clawed back. I've forgotten your name again. Yes, over here.

[Chris Bamberry, Analyst at Peel Hunt]

That'll be easy.

[Nick Ward, Analyst at Ocean Wall]

Sorry, thanks. It's Nick Ward from Ocean Wall. Could you perhaps just offer a little bit more qualitative commentary around the process reimagining 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 genuinely taking costs out versus actually improving the quality of what you're delivering for your customers? Also, how much, if at all, do you think inconsistency of processes is impacting the quality of the data that you're unearthing, and therefore the quality of what you can offer in terms of insights and better ways of working? Thank you.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Yeah. If you're there on that one, 28 and 29 as I said, hidden in there, we put this thing called Scan AI, which scans all the keystrokes across Mitie. It's anonymized. I can tell you that the most frequent keystroke in Mitie is cut and paste. You're cutting data from one part to another. Another quite frequent one is Amazon, but that's a different question. What it showed was lots of different ways of doing the same thing. Over time, customer practice, with the best of intentions to try and give a client what it wanted in particular, we've ended up morphing lots of different ways of doing the same thing. There's a big opportunity to standardize, and that's the real standardize and simplify. It's a bit of both. As you look on 29, essentially there's bots alongside everybody here.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

That's the picture we want to show because we don't want it just to be a people, but we've always got a human in the loop. It should drive. In the end, if you think about how we run a contract, complex contract, we might have 15, 20 of our people managing all the different touch points down in the organization. The whole point of the orchestration layer is that they can help to manage that more effectively. Then there's probably 15 or 20 people on the client side overlooking what we're doing. Eventually we would see a world where the bot, the agent at the top could talk to an interface with a client on their side, an agent on the other side, and maybe take efficiencies out of their own oversight because they'll just get a bot talking to a bot.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

For some clients on a journey who would go, and I won't name those either, but there are two or three clients for us who are really trying to transform their own business model. If we weren't joining them at the party, if you like, I'm sure they'd be looking at somebody who was. 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." Only when you can join all that up will you be the winner in our industry. I think it's a lot about value to the client. Value then has a two-way meaning because on the one hand, that sounds like I'm giving back some of my margin and I'm saving.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

On the other hand, the value of what I provide a client may justify a higher margin. That's the bit we aren't at that point yet. I think it'll be a bit of both. Ask my successor in two 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.

[Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO at Mitie Group]

Thanks, everyone.

[Phil Bentley, CEO at Mitie Group]

Thank you.

Participants

Executives

• Christian Watts, Managing Director, Fire & Security Systems and Compliance Services
• Cijo Joseph, Chief Technology and Digital Officer
• Kevin Tyrrell, Chief Sales Officer
• Mark Caskey, Managing Director
• Phil Bentley, CEO
• Sam White, Managing Director, Technical Services
• Simon Kirkpatrick, CFO

Analysts

• Aashni Sawhney, Analyst at Goldman Sachs
• Alex Smith, Analyst at Berenberg
• Chris Bamberry, Analyst at Peel Hunt
• James Beard, Analyst at Deutsche Numis
• Nick Ward, Analyst at Ocean Wall
• Sam Dindol, Analyst at Stifel