Gattaca plc (LON:GATC) Chief Executive Officer Matthew Wragg caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the company’s full-year FY25 results, key growth sectors, and ongoing investment in technology and strategic priorities.
Q1: Gattaca has now released full-year results reporting a solid performance for FY25 with PBT at the upper end of guidance despite a challenging macroeconomic backdrop. Could you walk us through the key financial highlights for that period?
A1: I think we are continuing to improve. It is a tough market out there, but we’ve had up at £3.3 million on PBT, which is about a 13% increase on last year, so nice to move forward in that direction. Revenues up 2% as we continue to look for more market share.
NFI was down slightly at 3%, but for known one-off reasons, so no major concern on that. It’s good to see the investments in our largest sectors starting to come through and growth there.
We’ve still got a really solid cash position as well, finishing at £15.7 million for the year and continuing with the dividend, so full-year dividend of 3p this year as well, so slightly up on last year.
Q2: Infrastructure and energy saw strong year-on-year growth. What are the main factors driving growth in these sectors and are they areas of particular strategic focus, given their potential?
A2: Yes, they are. I think we’ve been really clear about our strategy over the last three years and a big part of that is really focusing. We’ve got a very strong position and have had for a very long time in markets such as infrastructure, energy, and also defence.
Clearly, infrastructure has had some programmes which are happening, they lend themselves to contract requirements. Equally, over the last two years, we’ve made it an intent to invest and grow in our energy sector, and we have significantly grown the scale of our capability in that market. Now, we’re starting to see the returns of that on both a contract and a permanent basis.
I think there’s clearly a need for a lot of work to be done. This lends itself to highly skilled personnel for set timeframes, which works well for our contracting prowess. Really, we’re just being super focused on the customers in those marketplaces, making sure we know exactly who’s doing what and that we’re really well positioned to be the supplier of choice.
Q3: Could you provide us more details on the project TWICE AS and how AI, automation and technology enhancements are expected to impact productivity and NFI per head in FY25?
A3: We’ve invested a huge amount in our tech stack over the last five years and that’s been really well embedded in now for the last two to three. We’ve put in a number of automations and AI to help with our processes and it’s definitely contributing a bit to that improvement we’ve seen in NFI per head in the last year, which is great.
TWICE AS is about really kicking on from that. We’ve made some great steps, but we’re now in a much better position to make either big or really small changes that have a really big impact on either our customer experience, customer loyalty, or supercharging our consultants. We’ve got some amazing very specialist consultants and if I can help them to be even more effective by having better tooling, better processes, then that’s going to help them to deliver a great service to their customers.
TWICE AS is about capturing all of that and looking for those opportunities, both in the go-to-market approach, but also in the back office.
Q4: Why do you think Gattaca’s performance is so strong compared to its peers?
A4: It’s all about cycles. Let’s be candid, over the last three years, we had a job to do, we weren’t in a fantastic place as a business and therefore, we put in an amazing tech stack, but we had to rebuild some of the fundamentals of a people business.
Really over the last three years, we’ve just been very obsessive around our strategic focus, making sure that we’re doing things in the right way and building really positive momentum. We’ve had to be doing that; we happen to have been doing that during what’s been a three-year downturn in the market. So, whilst many of our listed peers have had to pivot from record highs and experience some tough times, we’ve just been in that more fortunate position of just continue doing what we’re doing and that’s exactly what we’re going to be doing now.
So, we’ve got our priorities very much focused even more so now on our external focus within the business, we’re in a really good shape. Now it’s about how do we really obsess about that marketplace and make sure we capitalise on it. We didn’t maximise the potential of the post-COVID boom, so you’ve absolutely got to make sure that you are in a great position ready for the next one. We’re just making sure we are.
Q5: You just mentioned priorities there. Looking ahead, what can investors expect from Gattaca over the next six months in terms of growth and strategic priorities?
A5: We’re just going to keep doing what we’ve been doing. We’re very focused on what markets, what services and being the best we can within that.
We’ve got our four strategic pillars. The external focus is a big one. We’ve very recently just in our recruitment services, we’ve just aggregated all of our brands into Matchtech to make that a real powerhouse, making it far easier for all of our customers to access all of the services we do in that and help my people be more successful and also helping us really leverage the tech stack to its full capability. So, we’re absolutely going to continue focusing on that.
We recently, at the turn of our financial year, made the acquisition of InfoSec People, which is going well and we’re integrating it well. We want to get that fully integrated ideally pre-Christmas and we’re on track for that.
We’re then really looking at how do we continue to grow. I think we’re a really good home for people and businesses now. So, we are looking at increasing our sales headcount through the hiring of both junior and experienced people and we will continue to look at possible bolt-on acquisitions if we think they will absolutely make us better and that there’s a really, really strong cultural alignment to the organisation.
So, continue what we’re doing, really focus on the markets that we’ve committed ourselves to and just keep building that momentum that we’re doing at the moment.
