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S
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Capital plc Annual Report and Accounts 2025 09
Letter to shareowners continued
quality commercials using AI technologies such as Runway,
Luma, Flux, Omniverse (Nvidia), Substance (Adobe) and
Unreal that take hours and days to produce at significantly
lower cost rather than traditional production techniques,
which take weeks and months at significantly greater cost.
Thequality continues to improve in real-time and clients
that are exposed to the results of these AI technologies
are very excited about their implementation and the
commercial impact on their marketing budgets and return
on investment. As a result, we are changing our revenue
model from a purely, time-based approach to one more
based on outputs – i.e. use of assets and subscriptions.
We are seeing significant opportunities for new business,
particularly driven by our AI tools and capability.
Newbusiness wins so far this year include new or
broadened relationships with Asana, Amplifon, Samsung,
Square, NCS, Opella, Visa, Cinemark and HelloFresh.
Wealso continue to expand many of our existing
relationships, in particular General Motors and Amazon,
which have ramped up significantly in the second half
of the year. In April, we won a large “Real-Time Brands”
assignment with our existing client T-Mobile. In July we
were engaged by a leading US-based Global FMCG, as
their Content Studio Agency Partner, which draws on
both our “Real-Time Brands” and “Orchestration Partner”
propositions with a focus on quality creative combined
with dimension and cultural relevancy, beyond simply
making assets at scale. These new wins contributed to
our second-half performance and over time are expected
to be significant relationships for us. In October, another
existing US-based Global FMCG client appointed us to
help implement AI throughout its marketing supply chain,
a partnership based on a new subscription-based model
focussing on outputs and outcomes. We continue to win
multiple exploratory assignments and AI film projects, as
clients experiment and explore AI applications and develop
AI use cases. AIcapability is becoming more central to the
agency’s way of working and new business efforts. In this
regard the Company’s early adoption of AI and proactive
approach to staff training on AI is beginning to pay off.
We have won four major AI industry awards in the last
twoyears.
Our new go-to-market propositions, Orchestration
Partner, Real-Time Brands, Media Acceleration and Digital
Transformation are all starting to resonate strongly with
clients. These are built around hyper-personalisation at
scale, social media, brand strategy, platform expertise
andleveraging of technology.
Environmental, Social and Governance
(ESG)strategy
We remain committed to the pillars of our ESG strategy:
People Fulfilment, Our Responsibility to the World and
One Brand. We continue to focus on improving our external
reporting, our reporting tools and governance to help
us move towards increased transparency and effective
reporting and to comply with current client requests and
global regulatory requirements.
We remain focused on the wellbeing of our people and
their experiences and recently added Debra Stroff as
our new Chief People Officer. Her leadership will foster
a culture where technology serves our people, allowing
every individual to grow and find more space for creativity.
Developing stronger cultural awareness remains central to
our commitment to inclusion and operating as One Brand.
Across the Group, we support communities through donated
hours, and deliver For Good projects with clients that
generate positive social, cultural or environmental impact.
We continue to enjoy our B Corp status. The certification
reflects our commitment to stakeholder-driven governance,
social impact and DE&I and transparent reporting.
Summary and outlook
Clients are expected to remain cautious in the near
term due to macroeconomic uncertainty, evolving tariff
dynamics, and the conflict in the Middle East, alongside
shifting technology priorities toward AI capex rather than
marketing. Despite this, the Company remains confident
in its strategy, business model, talent, and scaled client
relationships, positioning it for sustainable long-term
growth. 2026 like-for-like net revenue is expected to be in
line with current analyst consensus, slightly below 2025,
with operational EBITDA margin targeted to increase by
at least 100 basis points, primarily due to the annualised
impact of the 2025 cost actions. Despite a challenging
first quarter, with the conflict in the Middle East having
an impact on clients, the Company expects an improved
performance in the second half, reflecting the seasonal
nature of the business and the phasing of new business
revenue. The proportion of operational EBITDA in H1 2026
is expected to increase compared to H1 2025 due to the
annualised impact of the 2025 cost out actions.
Our targeted range for net debt at 31 December 2026 is
£60 million to £90 million. We target medium term leverage
of under 1.0x operational EBITDA and below our previous
range. Net finance costs are expected to reduce from £25.7
million in 2025 to circa £20 – 22 million in 2026. Over the
longer term we expect operational EBITDA margins to
return to historic levels of around 20%.
The strategy of S
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Capital remains the same. The Company’s
unitary, purely digital transformation model, based on first-
party data fuelling the creation, production and distribution
of digital advertising content, distributed by digital media
and built on technology platforms to ensure success and
efficiency, resonates with clients. Our promise ‘faster,
better, cheaper and more’ or ‘speed, quality, value and
more’ and a unitary structure both appeal strongly, even
more so in challenging economic times.
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