Gamma Communications PLC

LSE:GAMA

Q2-2024 Earnings Call

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

Right. Well, look, good morning, everybody, and thank you very much for joining us in our new home at Deutsche Numis. And thank you very much, indeed, to Deutsche for hosting us. this morning.

I think everybody in the room pretty much knows I'm Andrew Belshaw, but I'm Gamma's Chief Executive, and this is our first half results for 2024. We've got a really good set of results that I'll come on to and talk about in a minute. Usual format, I will just kind of give you some highlights. Bill will come and run through the numbers for you. Then I'll talk a little bit more about strategy and some of the trends that we've been seeing over the first half of this year. And that's not going to be a massive pivot. That's really a continuation of what we've been seeing over the last year or two. Then we'll talk about ESG very briefly. I'll talk about where we think Gamma is going to be going over the next year or two, and then we'll leave some time for Q&A. So hopefully, Bill and I will take maybe sort of 30, 35 minutes and then we can allow sort of 20, 25 minutes for Q&A is the plan, but we'll see. Sometimes we get carried away, so who knows.

That's still me, Andrew Belshaw, still CEO, which is great. So it wouldn't be the first time. We've done an intro and changed CEO half through the intro.

So look, we've had a really, really good first half of 2024, and we're pretty excited with Gamma and where Gamma is going. You'll see when Bill does the numbers, all of our business units have grown at the GP and the EBITDA level, and we're very, very proud about that, both organically and with the acquisitions that we've been doing, and we'll come on and talk about those. And why is that?

Fundamentally, our market gets more complex. Communications is getting more complicated. And that's a difficult thing because it makes us a little bit harder for us to explain the business. People kind of ask us what the KPIs are and as the solution set gets broader and as customers want more complicated solutions from us, it just becomes a little bit more difficult to try and articulate the business simply. But it's really good because as the solution set get more complex and customers want more complicated things from us, it means we get a bigger share of their wallet. And that's one of the key drivers for us as we'll come on and talk about.

We continue to invest as well. This will be the first year that we've now reached 1 million cloud seats in the U.K., so we're pretty excited about that. And we actually -- I might have mentioned this a few times. We've reached 1 million cloud seats in the U.K. array. And during the first half of the year, we added 48,000 new cloud seats. And I can't quite remember the last half, we added 48,000 seats. John will remember, but I can't remember, but it was a while ago. So Gamma is in great health. And we continue to invest.

And as Bill will come on and talk about, our new CTO is sort of slightly changing the things that we're investing in, and we're actually spending a little bit less money, but we're achieving more. And as we said last time, where we can partner with people to bring solutions to market, we're not going to build our own solutions where it's more efficient to partner with people, but we are spending money on developing our new portal. And why is our new portal really important? And why is it really exciting? Where is a differentiator for us?

I keep talking about complexity. I keep talking about solution suites. And as customers come to us and partners come to us and they want to provision multiple different things, having a portal that they can use, that's easy to use, just differentiates us on some of the competition. It makes Gamma easy to do business with, which is one of our mantras. The other thing our new portal is going to do is enable us to add new solutions at pace. So as people bring things to market, we will be able to get them to our end users quicker.

And also by the end of this year and into next year, we'll have one portal operating across Europe, which means our larger customers can begin to provision things across multiple countries in one go. And as far as I'm aware, nobody else is really doing that. So we continue to invest in the core business.

But also a feature what I talk about this morning is going to be our acquisitions. So as you know, because we've talked about these before, this time last year, we bought Satisnet net, which brought us a cyber business. I mean that's doing very, very well cross-selling into the enterprise space. We bought Pragma which gives us access to the Ericsson-LG suite of products, and that's helped us get to these 1 million cloud seats and add 48,000. And Coolwave enables us to provide numbering services into multiple countries. And again, we'll talk about that a little bit later as well.

But in addition to that, we've been busy over this summer as well. So just after the end of the half, so early in July, we bought a business called BrightCloud. BrightCloud is what we these days call customer experience business. For those of you as old as me, think of it as CCaaS business, but the world of CCaaS has moved on now and it's not just about running a contact center. It's about giving customers -- of our customers an excellent experience, and that's what BrightCloud do and they bring with us or they bring to us customers like the RAC and customers like Arnold Clark, and we're already taking BrightCloud into our enterprise base to do that cross-sell of the capabilities that they've got.

And we're very, very close to doing what I think is one of the most exciting acquisitions we've done for a while, which is a business called Placetel. And it's exciting because it's in Germany. And it's exciting because it's both a digital business in Germany and also a partner-driven business. And it's going to bring us about 250,000 seats in Germany. That business we've exchanged on, and we'd hope to complete on that in the next couple of weeks, and I'll talk a little bit more about that as well as we go on this morning.

I always say I won't steal Bill's thunder on this slide and then I always do, he is shouting out now. But as I said earlier, we've got 10% growth, and Bill will sort of talk about how much of that is organic and how much of that is by acquisition. But we're really pleased that the top line has grown by 10%. Because if you look at a lot of our peer group, they're not achieving that sort of growth, either organically or by acquisition. Gamma Business, which is our small SME business in the U.K., 12% and our enterprise business boisted by things like Satisnet has grown 15% in the first half. Europe.

Unfortunately, our revenue in sterling terms went down a little bit. But actually, if you look at it in euros, it was flat and GP increased and Bill will kind of run through all of that. And what we're seeing in Europe is some of the legacy business is coming off as we would expect. And the new business is coming on. So revenue in euros has stayed a little bit flat, but GP is increasing, EBITDA is increasing, particularly in Germany, the number of seats that we have is increasing, and our Placetel acquisition will hugely help with us. So overall, I'm super pleased with the first half. I think we've done some great things. We've made some good investments. We've done some good acquisitions. The numbers are very, very positive.

And Bill is going to come and take you through those now. You need to click on that, yes.

[William Castell, executive]

Great. Just to keep you interested, I'm going to present from over here. So I think everyone in the room knows me but those maybe listening or watching on the Internet, I'm Bill Castell, I'm CFO, been with Gamma just 2.5 years or so. I'm going to go through around nine slides. Some of you in the room will know them very well. They are kind of standard slides on that side, 2 or 3 slides around the key financial statements, go through each of the business units. We'll talk a little bit about the organic and inorganic performance. We'll talk about cost investment. And then for those who like to research as the analyst and the sell-side community plus, obviously, our investors, I will update where we are on guidance as well.

So on this first slide, last time around, I said it was a 9-box grid. Good news is I now know it's a 6-box grid here today. Positive, as Andrew alluded to, still my funds slightly new, the revenue figure of 10%. It's all double digits on the top there. So you can see revenue grew 10% to GBP 282.5 million, adjusted EBITDA. And if you want to go into what adjusted means in our RNS at the back, I think it's in the last 4 or 5 pages of the RNS, you'll see all of the adjustments that we do, but they are limited at GBP 62.2 million. So that was up 10% to GBP 62.2 million.

Even better adjusted EPS, and again, I'll talk a little bit about the interest income and other aspects that we have, was up 16%, 16% to 42.5p. That is on a constant tax basis, as always, to my 3 sons. Look at the footnotes, the actual reported number is 13%, but I think everyone remembers the increase in corporation tax back April 2023. So on a like-for-like basis, it's up 16%, reported is still double digit, 13%. So that's a P&L, all very healthy. And as I say, I will go through the organic and inorganic mix on that, but it makes my life easier to start with those 3 double-digit figures.

Cash generated by operations, still a very positive 4%, generated GBP 59.6 million. You're going to hear you talk about our operating cash conversion still at 100%. Those in the room keep on telling me I'm guiding 90% plus, but it always seems to be over 100%. Well, it is at 100% this time around. Actually, when you take into account some of the adjustments when I go into cash flow, the underlying number is closer to 90%, which I'll go through, but still very positive year-on-year growth on cash generation.

We do share buybacks. We continue with a progressive dividend policy. We buy things like BrightCloud, and we still got GBP 142.9 million in the bank. So we're hugely cash generative. We still have a lot of cash. We can talk a bit about capital allocation, certainly, in the Q&A. I will talk about the share buyback that we finished just this Friday, September 2, but we are sitting there at the end of June at GBP 142.9 million. We don't have -- we're not a leveraged company. As you can see, that's our net cash position. We don't have a net debt position. We used to have a mortgage of around GBP 1.7 million in Germany through the acquisition. We don't -- we've paid that off now. So actually, gross cash is our net cash. This is pre-IFRS 16 and deferred consideration.

But a very good amount in the bank still even after all of those different pieces. Progressive dividend policy, similar to what we've done throughout the years, up 14%. So the Board have agreed, decided upon a GBP 0.065, so 6.5p H1 dividend similar to prior periods, but it's not only returning cash through share buyback, but also continuing with the dividend.

All in all, a good 6-box grid, better than H1 last year. Now I'm going to go through the statements. I think everyone is aware, there's a lot of numbers. I'm not going to take you through every single number on the slide. However, I know some people like to print off the slides or at least review them afterwards and look at through all the numbers. I've gone through the revenue 10% growth, which you can see at the top. I think a constant theme to remember Gamma that 89% of our revenue is recurring. That's from the business going forward. And you can see that with GBP 22.7 million of that half year revenue is recurring.

That 10% revenue, when we talked before about the 10% revenue and 11%, as you can see at the GP and 10% EBITDA. At the organic basis, and I have splitted out now both in the RNS and these slides, that translates to 5% revenue, 7%, GP and 8% EBITDA -- adjusted EBITDA. And I will be taking through what does that mean for each of the business segment. Still strong growth, revenue a little bit below the GP and EBITDA, but we'll talk a little bit about Europe and other businesses, but still very healthy. And as Andrew said, we've done a number of bolt-ons with EnableX, Satisnet, CoolWave and then obviously, some post-balance sheet events with BrightCloud and Placetel on that.

Gross margin throughout this has been maintained. You can see there at the 51.6%, so slightly up even with some of those acquisitions. And when you look at the numbers, you can see those acquisitions are more kind of high 30%. So the underlying business gross margins are actually improving. And equally, you can see the EBITDA margin is a healthy 22%.

A good number that's not in my 6-box grid is the adjusted PBT. If you look at the second line from the bottom, you can see that we've grown that 16%. So our adjusted PBT grew 16% through the period, supported by the interest income, which you can see more than doubled. As I explained, we have that healthy cash balance and the interest rate environment is still relatively high. And I think for the foreseeable future will still be a good positive inflow interest income into our business. That's the income statement.

If I now start going through the segments. So I think everyone recalls Gamma is split into 3 segments. We have a Gamma Business that Andrew talked about, which represents nearly 2/3 of our revenue. I will then go through Gamma Enterprise and Europe. Great headlines, you can see 12% year-on-year revenue and gross profit growth. That translates into, as you can see, the 6% and 8%, so 6% revenue growth, 8% gross profit. At the gross profit level, you can see organically, it's the same year-on-year. So maintaining that kind of high single-digit gross profit growth in our biggest unit, which is almost 2/3 of the business on that.

Gross margins, you can see at the bottom, it's not a typo, flat year-on-year being maintained on that side. If you did the math on Pragma, [indiscernible] Coolwave, you'll see that their gross margins are 39%, 36%, so you can see actually the underlying business is being able to take those businesses on but still maintain healthy overall gross margins. We continue to grow, as Andrew rightly said, over 1 million CCaaS cloud seats, now helped by IPEX, which is the Ericsson-LG business, but also organic growth in Horizon, our core product, we have over 850,000 but also IPEX and increasingly PhoneLine+ as well, which Andrew will go into a lot more detail in his slides as he talks through the updates in those areas. So a very healthy performance from our largest business segment.

Moving on to Enterprise. The headline number is even higher, 15% and 14% in those business units. A bit of a similar story on the organic revenue at 5% and gross profit at 6%. You can see that same 6% at this time last year. So again, this business unit has maintained its growth at the gross profit on an organic basis. We made good progress in many different areas on that, and you can see some of the big wins that we've done there, Fusion IoT, Internet of Things, with the AA SD-WAN with Morrison is a big win. We've obviously got Aldi and Lidl already. Now we've added Morrisons.

And then interesting at the bottom is Smart Agent, which is with AWS, so Amazon Connect Contact Center. JD Sports, a good customer for us in the U.K. We're now supporting them with their U.S. business and helping them with a contact center solution in Ohio in the U.S. So it just shows you how you can go cross border and increasing the Enterprise will go into Europe as well. But again, a healthy performance. Satisnet obviously, providing with a 38% gross margin, a big impetus to that [indiscernible] number on revenue and 14% on gross profit. Margins 47.4%, again, maintaining our margin.

If we go into Europe, Andrew alluded to this, when you look at the revenue, and it's minus 3% in sterling. You have to then deep dive a little bit deeper. The interesting thing is you then look at gross profit it's up 4%. On a constant currency basis, revenue is at 0%, so flat, as Andrew said, but gross profit is growing 7%, so a healthy 7%. And it's all about mix. Similar to what I think we saw historically in the U.K. before my time that Andrew has been with Gamma 17 years, so tell me all about the history constantly on that side. But the traditional revenues, so quite a lot of mobile revenue. We have an Epsilon business in Germany, which contributes a lot of revenue, Mobile as well and some hardware sales in the Netherlands has started to decline slightly, which we had expected.

I think the good news is, as I put in that kind of sub-bullet at the top there is that the UCaaS SIP, which is what we're excited about business is growing, in particular in Germany. So you can see seats grew by 12%. And we see more challenging positions. I think Spain is probably in the middle of Netherlands is challenging. It's a more mature market, which has probably contributed to some of that revenue shortfall. But overall, at a constant currency rate, GP of 7% is a solid performance in that side. Where you can see that kind of mix change is actually in the margin. You can see the gross profit margin has grown from 49.5% to 52.9%.

The UCaaS SIP business is a 50% plus gross profit margin, whereas mobile revenue is closer to 20%. So as the mobile revenue obviously comes off, you get less of an impact to the GP, which is why you're seeing this kind of margin mix change in Europe.

This slide. Now bear with me, I'm going to take on a bit of a journey on this and I might even point to some of the things. So this is a slide that I put in and probably has never left out because I think it is vitally important investment, where we're putting our capital to use. When you look at the overheads headline number, you can see they increased 12% to GBP 83.6 million. That's quite a lot compared to last year's GBP 74.7 million. So you might take a step back. Similar to the M&A supporting our revenue and gross profit, we've obviously inherited rightly so cost for that business.

On a like-for-like basis, organically, that is a 7% number. So it's in line with our gross profit growth. And then this is where I am going to start pointing. So that 12% jumps down to 7%. However, it gets interesting when you look at our R&D cost. So at the top here on the right-hand side, you can see our development costs. And last year, for the half, it was GBP 16.2 million As Andrew rightly said, this year is slightly lower at GBP 15.4 million. But the interesting number to look at is how much of that we're capitalizing. So last year H1, you can see it was GBP 7.8 million was capitalized. This half, only GBP 4.7 million. And you can see the change in capitalization rate. And I'll explain why that is in a second.

But if you were to apply the 48% to this year's R&D in actual fact, you would have GBP 2.7 million more CapEx, GBP 2.7 million less OpEx. And that would actually result in a year-on-year OpEx of 3% growth. So I'm just trying to show you we are controlling the underlying growth of the business. It's just actually a change in mix of how R&D spend. And that CapEx number, I'm going to give in the guidance and update. I previously guided to 22% to 25 million. It would be no surprises, I'm actually lowering how much we're going to spend in CapEx for the full year, which I'll explain in more detail.

So that is part of the reason why the OpEx is at 7% on a like-for-like basis, but actually underlying is not growing. It's low single digits. Then when you come over to the actual full CapEx because that's R&D that includes CapEx and P&L expense. When we look at actually the CapEx and down here, you can see it's no surprise, as I just said, because we're capitalizing less. It just so happens, it's the same number that we're capitalizing GBP 2.7 million. CapEx is GBP 2.7 million lower H1 2024 than it was H1 2023. And you can see the main bit, as I said, was the development costs.

Why is that? That is because there was some headcount reductions that we did when we decided to focus more on our portal. And then Andrew is going to talk about dealing with large third parties such as Cisco and Ericsson and others that we were going to invest more in, if you like, the infrastructure to deliver to our partners and large enterprise through our portal, which is we feel best-in-class already, but we know needs investment to be the best-in-class for the next 10 years on that side and we're ramping that up.

So H2 CapEx will be higher than H1 CapEx but again, I think it's slightly different levels than we've seen in the last year or two.

Very happy to answer questions on that. I know I whistled through that. Going through the balance sheet, nothing hugely different here. I've talked about the cash reserves. You can see that. You'll see that our receivables and payables have increased but that is expected [Technical Difficulty] as we buy businesses, obviously, the receivables and payables will increase as a result of that. No debt, as I mentioned on the balance sheet. IFRS 16 liability at the bottom here has come down a little bit. That will probably come back up slightly as it's just the nature of when we renew our leases on that. But in Manchester we have moved 2 offices into 1 office in Manchester as part of a consolidation process and bringing our tech teams together on that side.

And then contingent consideration has increased as a result of Satisnet and Pragma, the recent acquisitions we have done on that side. But I don't think any huge new news on here, a very strong balance sheet. Prudent balance sheet going forward.

Cash flow. Again, I might start pointing a little bit here, quite a lot going for cash conversion, still above the 90%. It's at the 100%. I think you recall at year-end, it was 108%. It's not too different to this time last year, 101%. This is just some of the working capital movements normalize in here. But you'll see, as you go through, there's a few adjustments. This is the 90% I talked about earlier. The add back was that in our last year's P&L. So last year, we had a restructuring provision for some of the headcount reductions that we put through. That was around GBP 2.2 million through the P&L that actually got cash paid this year in 2024. So that's an adjustment we put through on that side.

Taxes paid were a bit higher. We had a credit last year. So the taxes paid are more normalized on that side. CapEx, I've already talked about. But then you will start to see here that we've got acquisitions, dividends, the purchase of treasury shares and share buyback, the share buyback process that I mentioned that finished last Friday. That was the number as of 30th of June.

At the bottom of the slide of the last bullet point, you can see that we spent GBP 27.3 million, and that has now expired. So the upper limit was GBP 35 million, and we spent GBP 27.3 million and very happy to answer questions going forward in the Q&A on that side. But all in all, still increasing our cash by GBP 6.6 million, having paid dividends, done the share buyback, paid normalized tax side of that slightly higher tax rate at 26% because of the European countries being in the 30% and obviously the U.K. now at 25% tax rate on that side. But we're proud that we continue to generate significant amounts of cash.

My last slide, and this is where the analysts in the room keep noting down, although they probably have already read the RNS on that side. We've guided, so front page of the RNS, the title across the piece. This time of the year, we give updates. We look at all of the sell sides, so all the analysts who write about us and what they put down for our adjusted EBITDA and our EPS. They put a range down as of Friday. There's quite a lot of research notes have just gone out this morning. But as of Friday, the range on our adjusted EBITDA was GBP 120.9 million to GBP 127.4 million. That midpoint is GBP 124.2 million. We're guiding to the top half of the range, i.e., we're guiding above GBP 124.2 million on adjusted EBITDA for the full year 2024.

Similarly, on EPS, the range is 78.4p to 84p. As I said in my kind of first slide, if you can recall, our first half performance was 42.5p. So it probably takes no guessing that we're guiding to the top end of the range given that's 84p, which is less than double our half year number, so hence, guiding right to the top end of that range.

CapEx, I did previously guide at beginning of the year GBP 22 million to GBP 25 million. I think that mix of expense versus as we move more into the cloud solutions or some of our build between expense and capitalization has changed slightly, and therefore, I've reduced our CapEx guidance for the year to GBP 18 million to GBP 21 million. It was previously GBP 22 million to GBP 25 million, reduced to GBP 18 million to GBP 21 million. It is quite interesting when you start looking at our, if you like, cash EBITDA performance for the year, although adjusted EBITDA went up 10%, obviously, cash EBITDA has increased significantly more of that as a percentage than the 10%.

Cash conversion, I'm sticking to my 90% plus. As I said, I think working capital is still normalizing but for more my tenure 2 or 3 years, I think cash conversion was around the 94%, 95% as we work through the working capital, we've been above 100%. But over time, I expect it to kind of normalize back to that 90%-plus level.

And then just reiterating, share buyback program has expired and the Board decided not to extend this buyback beyond its original term. But I think Andrew will talk about it, I'm sure maybe in the Q&A. We've also saying that the Board is considering a discussion with shareholders, the move from AIM to MAIN as well.

That finishes it. I'm going to hand over to -- back to Andrew, who's going to give a strategy and market update.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

Bill, thank you. Right, I think I said at the beginning, this is awful phrases evolution, not revolution. The sort of market trends that we've been seeing have been pretty consistent now for a couple of years. I've got new glasses. I'm struggling to see that's something I have to stay around. But the drivers that we've been seeing that have sort of helped us throughout 2024. We kind of see those carrying on into '25 and even into '26.

And the first one up there, I alluded to at the very beginning of the presentation this morning. Our customers are looking for solutions that are more complex. They involve more it. When we were sort of -- when I stood here 10 years ago, when Gamma first floated, we talked about voice and we might have talked about broadband and now it's video, now customer experience, it's WhatsApp integration. It's all of those things. And even comparatively small businesses need those and want those.

And that complexity is a good thing because, as I say, it means people are willing to spend more money. It means that we can get a share of their wallet, and we see it as a growth driver. But what we have to do as a business is we have to make sure that we have all of those solutions sitting in our portfolio because we can't sell what we don't have. And that's a mix of building it ourselves. It's a mix of buying it in, but it's also making sure and I keep kind of coming back to this point. I know it sort of doesn't sound very exciting, but it's having that pool, having that online capability that enables our end users and our customers -- sorry, our NGs and our partners to be able to provision stuff quickly, easily and pull together the bundles that they want and need.

The second growth driver, and I'm -- I know I've been talking about this for years, and I'm probably going to carry on talking about it for years, is the German market. So Gamma is now properly in Germany. In a couple of weeks, we'll complete on the Placetel acquisition. As I say, that will give us the best part of 300,000 seats in Germany. It will give us an online portal and a really good brand that people know. It will give us a presence in the west of Germany as well as the presence we already have in Bavaria and it will enable us to kick on in a market that is still less than 10% penetrated. So as I've said before, the German business market is bigger than the U.K. business. It's more biased towards SMEs with the Mittelstand businesses. And it's exactly the sort of market that Gamma has done very well in the U.K., but it's less than 10% penetrated.

And we continue to look for additional acquisitions in Germany that will enable us to exploit that market. In the U.K., so coming on to point three there. The U.K. is still 50% penetrated with cloud communication systems. So 50% of businesses in the U.K. as of today, they've still got hardware. The nice thing about that hardware Gamma doesn't sell hardware PBXs, but we do sell SIP and our SIP goes into hardware. And we've got something like 3 million to 4 million business people using Gamma SiP. And over the course of the next 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 years, those people are going to move from a SIP-based hardware solution onto a cloud solution.

And we see that as a huge growth opportunity. Why is it a growth opportunity, because as people move solutions, again, we get a bigger share of their wallet. If people choose to move from SIP going into hardware to a Microsoft solution, something like Operator Connect, generally, we double the GPP user that we're making. If they choose to move to one of our cloud communication solutions, say something like Horizon, something like the Ericsson LG product set, something like the Cisco product set, we can more than double the GP we're making from users. And we're just beginning to see the start of that trend now. We're just beginning to see that SIP back.

If you look at our SIP numbers throughout the first half, they've actually gone down. Some of that is rationalization, working patterns. But some of it is people just beginning to move to new solutions, beginning to move to Microsoft Solutions, beginning to move to cloud communication solutions. And that's really good for us because it increases the amount of GP we're making from each of those users.

And the fourth thing, fourth driver is the PSTN switch off in the U.K., where we said last time that was supposed to have happened in 2025. BT have now pushed that back to 2027. I make no comment on our views as to the certainty of 2027, but BT are confident that's the date that they can hit. Whenever PSTN switch off happens, people are beginning to think today about what they need to do to their comms to be able to cope with that PSTN switch off. So that means we've got people with legacy broadband moving to fiber solutions, which is great because we make more money. We've got people with legacy voice solutions, moving to cloud-based solutions, where again, that's our PhoneLine+ and I'll talk to our portfolio in a minute, whether that's PhoneLine+, whether that's Horizon and again, we make more money.

And one of the reasons we've added 48,000 cloud seats in the first half of this year is because people are beginning to prepare for PSTN switch off. So even though it's not happening as quickly as we'd hoped, we are beginning to see some of the trends that we were expecting to see. So all of those growth drivers have driven us in the first half of this year, and many of them will sort of see us right for the next sort of 2 to 3 years.

I showed you this slide before, I won't spend enormous amounts of time talking about it. But why is Gamma in a great position to exploit those market trends we've just talked about? Well, we are, I think, somewhat unique in Europe in that we have these fantastic relationships with the global tech giants. So people like Microsoft, people like Ericsson, people like Cisco, people like Amazon, they want to talk to Gamma. And why do they talk to Gamma? Because we have the unrivaled distribution reach. We have over 3,000 channel partners across Europe. We have relationships with hundreds of enterprise customers, mainly in the U.K. We're working on how we develop those relationships with Enterprise in Europe as well.

And it means we can take those solution sets that the big tech giants produce, and we can push them into markets in a way that nobody else can do in Europe. And we're not merely a distributor of other people's stuff. Gamma is at its heart a telco. We have a carrier capability. We can knit everything together with numbering. So again, if you're a Microsoft user and you want to use phone numbers, we can do that for you. We were not reliant on a phone -- a third party to do that for you.

And we also have, we keep going back to it, a fantastic quality of service. People deal with Gamma because we make their lives easier. We make it easier to consume a lot of these solutions. And again, I keep coming back to it. That's why we need to keep developing our portal.

I was trying to take all of the acronyms out of this slide and the UCaaS has accidentally snuck in there. But these are the various kind of solutions that we've been providing over the years. And again, you'll have seen this slide before, but I just wanted to give you an update on what we're doing. Colin, who's our new CTO, joined us at the beginning of January this year, and he's just completely revolutionized the way we're doing our technology within Gamma.

So we're bringing stuff out now more quickly and we're bringing stuff out more cheaply as you've seen with Bill. So it's not that we're doing less. We're just doing more, but we're doing it cheaply. And that's because Colin just made us much, much more efficient. We're offshoring some things now for the first time, and it means we're just able to get things into market a lot more quickly. So things like PhoneLine+ is our product that we build ourselves. We own the IP for that. It's designed for small businesses or fewer than 10 users. We continue to develop that. We continue to put new features on it, things like WhatsApp integration. And we'll be charging for those new features.

So we're going to have a sort of upgrade path that we can pull users through. IPEX worked with Ericsson that's now available not just to the Pragma partners. So if you remember, we bought the business called Pragma around about Christmas time, but now we can sell that IPEX suite of solutions into Gamma partners well. And again, when our new portal is out at the end of this year. People will be able to provision that all into 1 portal.

And our relationship with Cisco continues to grow and continues to develop as well. We're now able to sell the Cisco Contact Center and Customer Experience products through our acquisition of BrightCloud. But also, we've now got -- so for Horizon, if you want to use Horizon with Gamma's collaboration suite, that basically means Gamma's video tool, you can do that. You've been able to do it for a number of years. If you want to integrate it with Microsoft, you can do that. But as of next Monday, you're going to be able to integrate that with Cisco Webex as well. And if you're sitting there going, "I used Cisco Webex 5 years ago, and it wasn't very good". You're absolutely right. It wasn't very good 5 years ago, but it's pretty good now.

And so all of our Horizon customers, all 850,000 of them in the U.K. will be able to upgrade and put Webex on top of that, a very competitive price point as well. And not just that, but again, as of next week, we will be selling in -- sorry, Cisco Webex in the U.K. So for some of our larger customers who want that more enhanced experience with all of the AI bells and whistles, the cameras and the room suite, so that the camera kind of follows you around the room, spookily it knows what you're doing. So if you're right on the white board, it stops video and you and video is the white board, and it's got lots of sort of AI tools that kind of tell you whether your network is working and why your calls are dropping.

It's absolutely phenomenal. I mean I saw a demo the other week where people were doing a comp call and they got 1 of those kind of children's yappy dogs that your kids may have had at some point, just stuck it on the middle of the table. Couldn't hear it at all. The AI capabilities and that are so good now that it just snaps eliminates all the background sounds. People want all of those capabilities. As of next week, they can have them through the Cisco product.

And we continue to work with Microsoft. Microsoft can integrate with all of those products. And some people choose to do that. Some people don't choose to do that, and that's up to them. And we continue on the left-hand -- sorry not the left-hand side, my left-hand side, your right-hand side, we continue to analyze other products. And that's 1 of the key things that we do. We don't sit on our laurels. We don't give that set now. We've done enough we continue to look at what are the other things that we need to bring into the portfolio so that our customers have access to the very, very best set solutions.

I'm not going to spend very much time on this slide at all. Just really say the acquisitions that we've done fit very much into the strategy that we sort of set out a couple of years ago as our 2026 strategy. And again, just to spend a few more minutes just reminding you of the things that we've bought and why we've bought them because it's a really important part, I think, of the Gamma story over the last year and certainly going into the future. The Gamma is not only organic growth story. I hope as you've seen when building the numbers. We are growing organically and I think growing organically pretty well for our sector.

But the acquisitions are so important. So what Satisnet does for us? Satisnet gives us a security capability, where we've been selling networks to companies like Aldi and Lidl, we're now able to go and sell the secured service around that so we can secure people's networks for them provide that stock managed service. And that just makes customers a little bit stickier. It gives us an upsell opportunity as well.

Pragma, I've talked about quite a bit already this morning. Pragma gives us access to the Ericsson-LG suite of products. And again, that just means we maintain our position as 1 of the key market leaders in the U.K., selling cloud communications solutions. So we've got Horizon. We've also got IPEX next to that. And we've also got PhoneLine+. We have a cloud communication solution for every business of every size. And Coolwave. Coolwave is perhaps 1 of the more unusual acquisitions we've done. Coolwave just helps us provide numbering for our customers. In at least 14 countries, we have fully compliant numbering. And what does that mean? Well, it means by the end of the year, what you'll be able to do is go on the Gamma portal as an enterprise customer and be able to provision Microsoft Operate Connect through 1 portal in 6 or 7 European countries if that's what you want to do, and that is what enterprise customers want to do.

So you don't have to go out and buy 6 different solutions. You just buy 1 solution from Gamma. And we've actually got what we call limited compliance in 70 countries. And what limited compliance does mean it sort of sounds whenever I hear people say it, it sort of sounds like it's a bit dodgy or something. What limited compliance means is we're kind of fully compliant in a particular segment of the market. So that segment might be where we can support people like Microsoft and Cisco or it might be where we work with some of the other hyperscalers like Amazon, helping them with some of their sort of telephony needs in different countries.

So Coolwave just enables us to do what we do in more countries, which again just opens up new markets for us. Maybe to spend a little bit more time on some of the new acquisitions, although we've sort of talked about these as we've gone through the morning. So BrightCloud, we bought in July. BrightCloud is also a provider of primarily Cisco CX tools. And what BrightCloud plus Gamma does is Gamma comes with a tremendous pedigree of servicing enterprise customers. BrightCloud has a very, very deep capability in providing CX and cloud contact solutions to enterprise as well.

And when you put Gamma and BrightCloud together, we are the leading provider of CX solutions into the Enterprise space. At the moment, just in the U.K., but again, I'm challenging the team and we're challenging ourselves how can we sell some of these things in Germany, how can we sell them in the Netherlands because Enterprise customers over there have exactly the same needs and nobody is doing it particularly well. So we're now able to go to our large enterprise customers or our large enterprise targets, and we can talk about the Amazon Contact Center that we've been working with for a number of years, and we acquired that capability through Mission Labs.

And we can now also talk about the fantastic Cisco suite as well. And we continue to look for other CX and CC experiences that we can bring into the portfolio. So again, if you think about future acquisitions we may do, that's 1 of the spaces that we're looking at. And we've talked about Placetel a few times this morning. As I say, ex CFO, this is my excited face, believe it or not. But Placetel really does transform our German business. The acquisition of Placetel into the Gamma Group, as I say, the reason we sort of talk about it completing in a couple of weeks is we're actually buying Placetel off of Cisco. And what they've had to do put crudely in words, I understand, is get all the bits of that business into 1 legal entity so that we can buy it, and that's taken a little bit longer than we'd hoped, but that will be completing in a week or two.

It will bring us, as I say, that digital portal, that partner portal over 0.25 million sitting customers or seats rather that sit on that platform. It gives us presence over in the west of Germany. So it moves us out of being a Bavarian business and gives us that presence across the whole of Germany. And it enables us to be a proper competitor in Germany. We think we'll be comfortably in the top 5 of cloud solutions providers in Germany and that leading provider, and of course, it just deepens that relationship that with Cisco, which is, I think, important for us.

And if I may be so bold, quite important for them as well as they think about how they're taking their collaboration suite to market in Europe. So that's what we've been up to. Those are some of the trends we've been seeing. We just have a quick update on ESG. Again, if you're interested in ESG, we have a whole ESG website and the address is just down there. There's just a couple of things that I'll pull out. I won't keep talking about the environment. I mean, as you know, gamma has been doing green minutes for about 15, 16 years in the U.K. now before anybody knew what carbon neutral was or net 0 was.

So we were well ahead of the game on that. I think 1 of the areas that we've been a little bit behind the game, if I'm entirely honest, is giving stuff back. And I'm really, really excited that in the first half this year, we've launched the Gamma Scholarship Program. And what that means is we're supporting a number of STEM students in 2 universities in cities where we have Gamma offices, so in Glasgow and in Manchester. And we're just helping students who may not be able to do those courses to do those courses. And frankly, we're probably a little bit overdue in doing that. And we need -- 1 of the things we really want to do is expand that program out because it's really important that frankly we upscale the U.K. and get lots of people into studying STEM subjects.

But it's 1 of the things we feel we need to do as a responsible business. The other thing on that would be hugely remiss of me not to mention is Gamma from a governance perspective, we've been running ourselves like a public company. We are a public company. We've been running ourselves like a main market. I hope we've been running ourselves like a public company. We've been running -- it's the quality of presenter might let us down sometimes. But we've been running ourselves like a main market company for a number of years now. And the Board feels that now is the right time to seriously consider making that move up to the main market. AIM's been in our home for 10 years. It's been a fantastic home and it's looked after us very well.

We are now 1 of the top 5 businesses on AIM comfortably and a move to the MAIN market we would be seeing in the FTSE 250 use. And we are a FTSE 250 business. We should be FTSE 250 business, we'll run like a FTSE 250 business. And I think 1 of the reasons for that is when we look into the future and we look at some of the acquisitions that we might want to do, being on the main market just gives us access to a bigger pool of capital, more investors and particularly international investors, so that we haven't got a sort of transformational acquisition on the horizon. But as we kind of look out and think about the things we may want to do over the next 2 to 3 years, we feel that being a FTSE 250 company sitting in the MAIN market. would be the best time for us.

So it's something that we're exploring, but that will be, I think, the direction of travel that the Board will be taking. So the outlook then, and you'll be very pleased to hear that this is my final slide. I've been standing here for the last 10 years. talking about how gamma is this amazing business where you've got recurring margins, you've got stable margins, you've got cash generation. You've got a really, really strong balance sheet. We've returned more cash to shareholders than we've returned ever. through doing the share buyback and increasing the dividend, and we still have a really, really strong balance sheet.

All of the acquisitions that we've been doing are also recurring margins, stable margin, cash generation, we only buy things that don't change that business model because it's so important to us. I said earlier on, the cloud PBX penetration in the U.K. is still only around 50%. And there's this opportunity for us going forward to just continue to ride that wave of people moving from a hardware solution into a cloud solution. But also as people are going to migrate from SIP into cloud communications, as I say, we have somewhere between 3 million and 4 million business users, individual users using Gamma SIP on a day-to-day basis.

And the challenge for me and the challenge for the Gamma team is to move those people onto 1 of the more lucrative solutions for us, which is something that people want to do as their communications need change. The German market is a little bit behind the U.K. And I've said it a couple of times this morning, Germany is still only 10% penetrated. We have a fantastic opportunity to grow in Germany. And now we have Placetel sitting in the Gamma portfolio, that's really going to help us take on the German market.

We continue to invest. We're investing in different things. We're only investing where we can make a difference. So we invest in things like PhoneLine+ which is our product aimed at the smaller end of the market because nobody else is doing it well. We invest in things like our Contact Center Solution because we can see that a mid-market contact center solution, nobody else is doing that well. We invest in our portal, because it's a differentiator for us. But where we partner, we partner with people like Cisco, we partner with people like Ericsson, we partner with people like Microsoft because, frankly, they're doing stuff better than we could ever do because their budgets are 10, 100 1,000x bigger than budgets. But we do continue to invest in getting all of those solutions into the hands of customers and end users.

Our acquisitions have been hugely helped. And hopefully, you've seen that this morning, everything we're buying is accretive, and we plan to carry on buying. As the world gets more complicated, as we need more solutions in the portfolio, we are constantly looking for additional things to buy. We're constantly looking to see if we can open up particularly the German market more by acquiring more. And whilst it's taking a reasonable management time doing that, it's not bending us out of shape, and we're turning down far more things than we're actually acquiring but we're taking M&A very, very seriously.

So I think the future for Gamma is really bright. I think we've had an amazing first 6 months, and thank you very much indeed to all of the Gamma staff for all of their hard work over that period. But I think the future is very, very bright. There's a lot of growth drivers in this market, and we are very, very well placed to exploit them.

And with that, I will hand it over to Q&A. Harvey? There is a mic. Yes, we have a mic.

[Harvey Robinson, analyst]

It's Harvey Robinson from Panmure Liberum. Just looking at disclosure in terms of divisions. Once Placetel is closed, it obviously means that Germany is quite material within the European business. Do you think you'll be splitting that out for us going forward? Obviously, it's a key focus, and we'll be watching carefully what you're doing there. So any thoughts on that would be helpful.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

I'm going to go with you, yes, but I should probably hand over to...

[William Castell, executive]

Do my job. Yes. And we got the auditors in the room in Deloitte, so they will be smiling at this, yes, because I think with Placetel you can see that the '23 results was just over GBP 28 million of revenue when you add that, I know some research analysts have looked at that and said, okay, it's getting quite sizable, the German revenue, once it goes over 10%, then it's a reportable unit. That probably won't happen this year because subject to completion over the next week. Also, there will be only a few months, but certainly going to '25, that is the expectation on that.

[Harvey Robinson, analyst]

And just on related sort of tech question. As you -- as we go fully cloud and PBX, if you like, software networks everywhere, does that -- when you look at your product portfolio, does that sort of blur everything? I mean, you obviously got Enterprise down to PhoneLine+. Does it effectively mean there is 1 platform for everyone everywhere all the time? Is that the sort of long-term direction of travel? Or will it still be segmented and sold differently?

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

I think in the near term, it's going to be -- yes, I mean we could be seeing, well, we could be sitting here in 10, 15 years. It's not going to be you and it's not going to be me, but somebody could be sitting here in 10, 15 years and maybe somebody has built a platform that you just turned bits on and off to get from small to very, very big. I mean as we sit here, the reason we can't have PhoneLine+ sort of IPEX and Horizon and whether it's at the top end is because it just doesn't work. But having said that, things get very blurry. So for example, down at PhoneLine+, we're doing WhatsApp integration, which 2 or 3 years ago, you'd have gone that's a very clear contact center thing for large businesses.

But actually, you might have a, let's call, small local pebble restaurant that just wants to watch all its customers and say, we're doing something on Saturday night. So I -- for me, those use case's getting a bit more blurry. We also find something like PhoneLine+, for example, 1 of our enterprise customers is the card factory. And we sort of tried to sell them a big, high solution. They actually end up buying PhoneLine+ because all they want in 1 of their shops is just basically a phone, that answers. And they don't need any of the clever stuff.

So you have kind of enterprises buying stuff that we've built for small businesses. And then you have small businesses asking for features that we thought -- so all of that is just beginning to blur. As we sit here right now, it is still reasonably segmented but we could be seeing here in the future with a complete end-to-end.

[William Castell, executive]

But I think that's exactly just to answer that as well. That's the importance of the portal. The portal that we've got, we've had a Horizon, we've grown that significantly. If you saw all of the new products, IPEX, teams, et cetera, we just need to make it as easy as possible. And I think in this current day, everyone -- once everything immediate patients is limited with our partners, we want to make it as simple as possible to serve that end customer. So certainly, that ability to go on to the portal and literally decide exactly what you want, I think is increasing and hence our investment in.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

I'm not sure whose hand up first, we're going to Jones at the phrase this get you sit at the front.

[John Karidis, analyst]

So sort of 2 lots of questions, please. First...

[William Castell, executive]

Here we go.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

You got a pen?

[William Castell, executive]

Right. Yes, here we go.

[John Karidis, analyst]

On Placetel questions there. One, what's the likely cost of that acquisition? And then secondly, I'm guessing there might have been competition to acquire Placetel. How did you come to acquire it versus the other top 4 players in that market? So that's Placetel. And then secondly, I'm trying to think about the prospects for group CapEx going forward. So I need to ask a question about the portal cost, I guess. Whether it's expensed or capitalized, well, in this case, capitalized for CapEx. Should we think about it as it being exceptional and therefore, there's likely to be a drop off, either in CapEx or OpEx going forward? And what's the phasing of that, please, if that's the case?

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

Talk about place to the portal.

[William Castell, executive]

Yes, let's do that and then I can do that work.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

Okay. So I think -- so right, 1 of the reasons Placetel is a little bit complicated as we sit here today is, as I sort of alluded to, I'm not going to ask your question, I'm going to tell you why I'm not going to answer your question, and I will answer it in a couple of weeks' time. Cisco kind of bringing all of the bits and pieces into 1 business. And 1 of the things they need to do is sort of sort out the transfer pricing between the bit that we're buying and the mothership. And that's going to kind of feed into what we buy and how we pay for it. So the reason I'm very confident in announcing it is, however that plays out, I'm very confident and I've got a very good deal. So I can't -- if I sit here and give you numbers, they might change I'm not giving you numbers. But what we'll do is send Mr. Castell out in 2 or 3 weeks when everything is nailed, and we can give you some numbers.

In terms of the level of competition, it's always 1 of those hard things, isn't it? Because every bit of M&A I've ever done, everybody tells me there's like 98 other people who want to buy their business, and that's why I have to pay lots of money for it. So you are never quite sure who else was looking for it. I believe they had other suitors. I think it's a testament of our relationship with Cisco. And also just the ease of doing something with Gamma that they decided to let us have it. But it's taken us a little while to do the negotiation. It's not been a trivial one.

Cisco never sell businesses is what they told me. They buy lots of businesses. They're just not very good at selling them. It's taken us a little while to pull it together.

[William Castell, executive]

So I think -- and I think 1 point else on the announcement you have seen that we talked about a wider kind of global relationship with Cisco's result linked related to the transaction. So when I come hopefully, in a couple of weeks' time and give you an update, then I can give you a bit more detail about that. And clearly, in our year-end results pending that we close it. there'll be PPA and et cetera, so you get to really into the details of it all. But it's not a simple transaction but a good transaction.

So then on to the CapEx side. So I think the portal -- some aspects of the portal will be launched this half. I can't say the second half of this year. So it's live. It's not a kind of dream that's going to come suddenly and just be dropped in 1 drop. That's whole process of multi drops that Andrew alluded to in a different way of working on that side. So I think it's going to be an ongoing project of 18 months at least. And I think we've alluded to that, that it's not just a '24, but a '25 project.

As you're aware, previously, quite a bit of CapEx, and I know at the end of last year, we were thinking of building our own kind of software. We've done PhoneLine+, but we're thinking maybe something that kind of IPEX, Horizon space ourselves. But clearly, we've taken decisions as Andrew rightly said, Cisco has got GBP 1 billion R&D budget. We're not going to compete with that. So that kind of CapEx that was there, we're no longer spending so that resource has been redirected to the portal.

Andrew always jokes if I start to say that, yes, CapEx will come down, there will be something new in 2 years' time because it's -- it's no joke. There'll be something new. So I don't -- if I just look to the portal, I would say, yes, it's going to be intensity over the next 18 months, and then it will move more probably to maintenance because all of the building and the APIs would have been done across the piece with -- we know that normal bought and Ethernet, we got at nets all building, everything is moving to fiber. That's just 1 thing part of our business is connectivity.

And we need to make sure the portal can accommodate whatever that world changes to. But I think you've seen the shift from 22% to 25% down to 18% to 21% with that kind of OpEx, CapEx, I think that will be the going forward the next 18 months. then I'm sure we'll be saying the portal is a portal, but there is something new after that. But I don't think you can see some kind of spike up. All other things being equal, depends on the M&A that we might do and other things might come about. But as we sit here with the business we've got today. So that's the case.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

Questions at the back and then we'll come to James next.

[Unknown Analyst]

Siyi He from Citigroup. And I have 2 questions, please. And the first 1 is really on operating leverage. I think over the last 3 to 4 years, when you will look at the growth rate, and I think the growth rate is quite similar when we look at revenue and EBITDA. And just wondering, because this time, you see accelerated growth on EBITDA level. And wondering if you can give us some indication of what has been driven is because of the cost controls? Or actually, we move into this kind of structural improvement of gross profit because of the product mix?

And my second question is on the capital allocation, I guess, the 2 aspects of that. And you have GBP 144 million cash balance...

[William Castell, executive]

GBP 142 million.

[Unknown Analyst]

And the first part of the question is why do you decide to discontinue and not complete the GBP 35 million buyback? And the second of all is on your M&A candidates. The reason you haven't done some major M&As. Is that because there is a lack of candidates? Or is a larger scale that you will need to list them on an markets to complete it?

[William Castell, executive]

I'll certainly go for the first one.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

I was going to say you take the first capital allocation, I can talk a bit about M&A.

[William Castell, executive]

Exactly. And I'll try not to go into M&A because I do M&A as well. Yes. On the -- so operating leverage, you're right. I mean, so if we go back to the principles over kind of the last 5, 10 years, the focus we had is improving EBITDA margin by having gross profit grow quicker than costs. Clearly, we've been doing a lot of M&A, which is you can see the inorganic that's why split it out a bit more. I think on the revenue side, yes, it was -- it's 5% and the GP improved. I talked about the European story of that traditional revenue coming off. And I think that is a function of Europe as we go more into the UCaaS space, which is higher-margin business.

However, I think the story, as always, is a bit of a mixed one. As we increasingly work with big players such as Cisco and others, you'll find, especially on that Cisco WebEx, that's more to the ward to the top end. So you should be generating revenue. And instead of me spending the -- not made, the company spending on R&D, Cisco and others will be spending their R&D themselves. And so you'll probably find that increase a bit. You'll probably find the GP margin, there'll be pressure on the GP margin going forward as we partner.

However, pound for pound, the growth is still the -- is still a good story. So I think -- I don't think it's a monumental change, our 50% plus gross profit margin. But I think it will be challenging to keep improving that into the mid to high. I think there'll be a bit more pressure on it. But our overall GP pound will continue to increase. And then interestingly, our cost of sales might go up. But I've just talked about us capitalizing less on OpEx. I think there will be still efficiencies on the OpEx side because we won't need as many -- as much maintenance or other aspects because our big partners will be doing that development and maintenance for us.

And everything we talked about offshoring and other aspects, I think with Colin coming in, I think there is that drive to see how we can spend and get more for the money that we spend. So I think it's a little bit of a mixed story.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

Very good.

[William Castell, executive]

Sorry, M&A.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

No, M&A. So yes, I mean, the M&A scene, if such a thing exists in the U.K. is being a bit weird. Certainly, over the summer, there's been this slightly unusual -- it's not an unusual phenomenon. It's probably entirely predictable, actually. But suddenly, we had a general election, which everybody thought was going to be in October. Then we had a change in government, which I don't think was a huge surprise once the election was called. And then they said there was going to be a budget at the end of October, and everybody is now panicking what she's going to do with CGT rates. So anything that's sort of got an entrepreneur still owning a business or owning a chunk of a business is suddenly going into kind of panic sales frenzy.

So we've seen a lot of stuff fail over the summer some of which has been reasonably ill prepared for sale.

[William Castell, executive]

There's no summer holiday.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

So this summer has been quite busy in terms of looking at things. And as a result, I'm not sure we're going to get anything done by the end of October. But it certainly pushed people to think about sales prices. There's a lot out there at the moment. Also some situations have opened up in Germany, which -- of which 1 of which is Placetel, which is great, but there's others. So there's definitely things that we're looking at, and we've certainly been a lot busier than we've been before. Again, going back to sort of size, there's not a lot in our space that would be truly transformational for Gamma as we sit here today.

So there are acquisitions out there that will be larger than we've done historically. So if you think most of the sort of acquisitions we've been doing have been in the tens of millions, we're definitely looking at things that are going to be in a couple of hundred million. but nothing that's going to be so big that it would be sort of like a merger of equals or anything like that. So I suppose what I'm saying, there's a lot out there for sale at the minute. We're looking at a lot of stuff. We're rejecting more stuff than we're proceeding with inevitably.

Some of that could be a little bit bigger than we've done historically, if we can get all the way through and convince ourselves in the due diligence, it's the right thing to do. But there's nothing that's likely to be hugely transformational in the sense of sort of 50%, 60% of Gamma's size.

[William Castell, executive]

And then I'll come back to that and answer share buyback question. So on capital allocation, you just heard, I know we don't disclose clearly were they aware of our cost of equity. Effective rate of return, the share buybacks and other aspects. So we do look at all the return hurdles. And sometimes, there's a strategic deal out there, but it's just not the right price, and we're not willing to pay in excess for it. So I think that's 1 aspect.

In the share buyback, you're right, we didn't complete the 35 million part of that kind of liquidity of the stock on that side. We did mention, it's careful wording as always an RNS to say this share buyback has expired. Share buybacks and other distributions, we clearly discussed rightly so at the Board level. So we're not saying we're not doing it again. We're not saying we are, but we're just saying that we keep a close watch on it. And clearly, something we haven't discussed is the AIM to MAIN consideration going forward, and we need to keep that in mind. And we've known what others have done in those processes previously.

[James Lockyer, analyst]

It's James from Peel Hunt. On the portal, I know that you've got a sort of brief details around what you're planning to do with that over time. But given you've talked about wanting to make it more seamless, bring more products in, make it easier to bring those things in. Is it fair -- or how should we think -- how do you think about the potential for the portal being there for price discovery for customers across the whole ecosystem over time? Because right now, you go there, me as a customer, I see 1 product. But is there price discovery opportunity as you build more products into that over time?

And second question, just on the, I guess, the organic growth rates for the SME business. good just to understand roughly of that growth rate versus volume quite useful there, please. And then on M&A targets without going into detail, you talked about now going a little bit more into CX and contact center. Obviously, you currently focus purely on the communications element of that, but customer data to make those communications more sort of valid is becoming more important. How do you think about CRM and those angles?

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

Really good question. Can I just be clear what you mean by the price discovery piece when customers go on the pool.

[James Lockyer, analyst]

So obviously, if there's -- if I go in there, there's 1 product to the most, there's 1 price. That's MAIN go on there and you've got multiple different products across multi different providers. I might be able to see a different prices...

[William Castell, executive]

If the channel partner's looking at it.

[James Lockyer, analyst]

Channel partners, what are for me to -- as a partner sort of become more aware of what prices are and maybe.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

No, absolutely. So the way we set things up, and I don't think this is going to come as a massive surprise to anybody. So I think is saying and pro not all partners paying the same price. So bigger partners who commit to doing a bigger volume are paying lower prices than smaller partners who aren't doing the volume. And I think it was ever thus. When you go into the portal, you log into the portal as you, so you see your prices.

So therefore, you can't kind of go hang on a minute, somebody else. So say you will see your prices across the whole suite. So you may be able to see -- and indeed, this is 1 of the things we want you to see. If you're kind of provisioning an Ethernet circuit again, it's not -- as everybody knows, it's not our own fiber, we're backing off. You might be able to see that, that Ethernet circuit going into that building is cheaper with supplier A and supplier B, and we'll make that available to you on the portal and you take you might have a view that you want to buy a more expensive 1 because you prefer that supply.

And I think we'll do more of that going forward. So that almost -- I mean we sort of call it internally kind of compare the market type approach. But I think we'll do a bit of that. But what you won't be able to see is you won't be able see what other people have.

[William Castell, executive]

And I think also if you're looking between phone line plus IPEX revise and Cisco Webex is different functionality, all decent margin business for us, clearly, different price points. But I think there's a bigger advantage that we meet all the needs of that channel partner rather than the channel partner looking and saying it's not quite right or it's not quite right price, and I think it's sort of a competitor. I think actually there's more advantage for us that we have the functionality they want, especially on that SIP PBX hardware as that migrates to the cloud, there's different functionality depending on what hardware structure you have on PBX.

We feel now we're in a much better place certainly than we were 12 months ago to give options across the piece.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

I'm sorry, James, remind me your second question.

[William Castell, executive]

So that was it. Then the next 1 was organic kind of price versus volume discussion. I think everyone is where we're in less inflationary environment. So probably, again, we don't give the split. But similar to last time, this is more of a volume-led business than the price business. So you heard Andrew talk about the 4,000, 8,000 and going over GBP 1 million. We continue to grow, but we continue where we can to put price or incentivize through price by doing discounts for volume on that side.

But I think we're probably back closer towards the kind of pre-inflationary spike mix where it's kind of coming a little bit that more to volume than it was over the last 12, 18 months.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

Sorry, sorry I think the honest answer is no, it's not on the agenda today, but it's sort of on the longer-term radar. Yes, I mean I think that's the honest answer, James. So are we about to launch something this year, next year? No, but inevitably, yes. I mean just paying back to you what you said, a lot of contact centers have an awful lot of data, and you can do an awful lot of things with that data and you can add value to it, so could we be sitting here in 2, 3, 4 years' time having Board? Yes, maybe. And I think a lot of that becomes customer-led.

So at the moment, if you're a customer we're seeing people kind of procure the CC, CX piece and then probably procure that data from somebody else. If we start seeing RFPs with all of that's bundled, then it's just a classic Gamma, you end up partnering with somebody who does that and then you end up buying.

[William Castell, executive]

Might we do the Satisnet.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

Probably not short term, maybe medium term. Do we have any other questions in the room? Or I might slip in the booth, do we have any questions on the line?

[Operator]

Yes. So we do have 1 again on M&A online it's from Stephane Beyazian at ODDO BHF. In terms of M&A for Germany, what would be the ideal target profile?

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

Well, Placetel will be the ideal target profile, which is I mean there are no more than 3 or 4 businesses in Germany that we will buy. And we could kind of sit here and name them. And I think it will be sort of fair enough to assume that we're probably talking or have talked or will talk to all of them. And I think we've been fairly open in the past. We want to be doing more M&A in Germany, but some of those situations haven't quite opened up. So I think people are well aware of the businesses. that we're talking to in the businesses that we cover because there's not that many cloud businesses.

If you look at the top sort of 4, 5, 6 cloud businesses, you cross off Deutsche Telekom, probably not going to buy them, cross off Vodafone, maybe no, because you're probably not going to -- if they divest Germany, who knows. But yes, I mean -- and then you're down to some sort of quite manageable businesses that I think people know who we're talking about. And I think as and when those processes kind of come up, we'll have a look at them because they're all kind of reasonably fast growing cloud businesses.

So we maintain an open mind, and I suspect part of it is as much about the situations that open up and just getting to some of those businesses a little bit more quickly as it is kind of picking 1 or 2 out of those 4 and saying we're not looking at the other 2, if that makes sense.

[Operator]

Thanks, Andrew. That's all from the webcast, so I'll hand back to you for closing remarks.

[Andrew Scott Belshaw, executive]

Okay. Anything else in the room before we -- well, just to really say, again, thank you very much indeed for coming out this morning. And thank you to people online, and thank you for the interaction because as ever, it's been very good, and we've had some fantastic questions. Bill and I remain around if anybody wants to ask anything else, or get any further clarity. And I think everybody on the video, you probably have our contact details anyway.

But just to say, we've had a fantastic first half. And again, I can't thank the Gamma team enough for all of the hard work they've put in to deliver the kind of numbers in delivering both the organic, the acquisitions, integrating the acquisitions and making sure we're getting the most out of those as quickly as we can. And we look forward to the future. We think we've got a very, very bright future. The world, as I said at the beginning, is becoming a little bit more complicated. Communications world is becoming more complicated. And that's great for us because if we can embrace that quickly, bring on solutions quickly, get them in the hands of partners and end users quickly, then we can grow ahead of our space, which is been doing consistently now for some time.

So I think the future is very bright, and we're very excited. And yes, we look forward to coming back in the next sort of 6 months and telling you how the second half of the year has gone. So thank you very much indeed for your time this morning. And we're around for a bit yet. Thank you.