Sam Wells: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Appen's First Half FY '26 Results Webinar. I'm Sam Wells from NWR. And joining me from the company today is CEO and Managing Director, Ryan Kolln; and Chief Financial Officer, Justin Miles. [Operator Instructions] And with that, I'll pass it over to you, Ryan.
Ryan Kolln: Thanks, Sam, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for our H1 FY '26 results presentation. My name is Ryan Kolln. I'm the CEO and Managing Director at Appen, and with me is Justin Miles, our CFO. Today's presentation covers 4 sections. I'll start with the results overview. Justin will then walk through the detailed H1 FY '26 financial performance. Then I'll return to cover our strategy and operational update, and we will close with an FY '26 outlook and guidance before opening up for questions. Let me start now with an overview of our H1 results on Page 5 of the presentation. The first half delivered on the themes that we've been building towards. At the group level, we delivered $119.9 million in revenue. This is 17% growth on the prior corresponding period. Appen China was a standout for the half. Revenue grew 80% to $76.2 million and achieved an annualized revenue run rate exceeding $175 million in June. That is up from $135 million at the end of 2025. The sustained growth reflects the strength of our relationships with the Chinese model builders and the ongoing demand for our data services in the region. Appen Global continues to make progress. Outside of our largest client, Q2 revenue grew 65% on Q1. We're progressing well in our ambition to expand across frontier AI labs in the U.S.A. Capturing cost efficiencies via AI-enabled operations remains a focus for Appen Global. We have identified an incremental $12 million in operational efficiencies. 70% of the $12 million will be executed before the end of the year and the remainder in Q1 FY '27. It's important to note that the cost-outs don't impact the ability to grow within Appen Global. On profitability, we delivered an underlying EBITDA before FX of $5.3 million for the half, a $7.5 million improvement on the first half of last year. EBITDA margins for the half were 4.5%. Our cash balance at 30 June was $44.7 million, equivalent to AUD 64.8 million. I'll now hand over to Justin, who will take us through the financials.
Justin Miles: Thank you, Ryan, and good morning, everybody. A reminder that we report in U.S. dollars and that all comparisons are to the half year ended 30 June 2025, unless stated otherwise. Starting with the H1 FY '26 profit and loss on Page 7. As Ryan already mentioned, revenue increased 17.5% to $119.9 million. Within our operating segments, Appen China revenue grew by 80.4% to $76.2 million, with Appen Global down 26.9% to $43.7 million. Appen Global made solid progress during the half. However, growth in new areas has not yet offset a reduction in traditional work. Gross margin reduced slightly, down 30 basis points to 36.7%. The decrease reflects a change in customer and project mix, noting China margins are traditionally lower compared to Appen Global. Underlying EBITDA before FX improved $7.5 million to $5.3 million. The increase reflects revenue and gross margin growth, prudent cost management and operational leverage within Appen China. I won't talk to Slide 8 as we have just covered this data. So, over to Appen Global revenue and EBITDA on Slide 9. The chart on the left shows quarterly revenue and on the right-hand side, it is underlying EBITDA. The charts demonstrate the progress made during the half. Q2 FY '26 revenue reflects growth from expanding projects with leading AI labs. Pleasingly, outside the largest customer, Q2 FY '26 revenue grew 65% compared to Q1 FY '26. However, as just mentioned, growth in new areas has not yet offset a reduction in traditional work, resulting in revenue of $43.7 million for the half, which is down compared to H1 FY '25. An important point to note is that traditional work has currently stabilized. EBITDA reflects some investment in winning new customer projects and does show improvement during the period. Ryan has already mentioned this, but again, noting that approximately $12 million in operational efficiencies have been identified in the Appen Global segment, with 70% to be executed by the end of this year and the remainder in Q1 next year. Over to Slide 10, which shows quarterly revenue and underlying EBITDA for Appen China and reflects the strong market position Appen China continues to hold. Revenue grew each quarter, with Appen China achieving $76.2 million revenue for H1 FY '26, which was 80% growth on H1 FY '25. Growth continues to be driven by new and expanding LLM-related projects. Appen China exited the half with annualized revenue exceeding $175 million. Pleasingly, in addition to revenue growth, profitability has improved, with increased gross margins due to a greater mix of GenAI projects and increased revenue from high-margin pre-built data sets. Appen China is also capturing scaling efficiencies due to tight OpEx controls as revenue expands. Turning to Slide 11 for the profit and loss summary. I won't talk to all line items. However, there are a few additional points to highlight. There was a decrease in employee and in other expenses in Appen Global, and this is highlighted later in the presentation. Employee expenses for Appen Global were down 19% on PCP and other expenses down 29% on PCP. The decrease was achieved through technology innovation and automation. The decrease in Appen Global was offset by additional expense from the Appen China segment to enable the delivery of strong revenue growth. The $14.9 million NPAT improvement and $8 million improvement to underlying NPAT reflects the improved performance for the half as well as a decrease in amortization. I'll finish up with the cash flow summary on Slide 12. The cash balance at the end of the period was $44.7 million. The Australian dollar equivalent cash balance is AUD 64.8 million. Despite the decrease in balance compared to the prior period, a strong balance remains. Cash flow used in operations was $2.7 million. In comparing to the prior period, it is important to note that H1 FY '25 was positively impacted by the receipt of a payment from a major customer in the first week of January '25 versus December '24 as scheduled. Cash flow used in operations for the period was impacted by the timing of customer receipts, annual payments during the period and working capital required to support strong Appen China growth. Cash used in investing activities was $1.9 million higher compared to H1 FY '25, due to higher investment in product development and new facilities for the Appen China division. Cash used in finance activities of $2.7 million reflects lease payments. Cash was used to fund operations and CapEx. That concludes the financial performance slides. I'll now hand back to Ryan.
Ryan Kolln: Thanks, Justin. I'll now cover our strategy and operational progress that we've made in the half. So turning to Page 14. To understand Appen's services, it helps to start where the value sits in AI development. There are 3 fundamental building blocks for AI development; compute, algorithms and data. So, compute is abundant and commoditizing. Algorithms are increasingly open and largely commoditized, while unique data is becoming scarce and is a major source of differentiation for AI model performance. But not all data is equal. There are many facets of data used to train models, all with different uses. Public data is largely exhausted and it's already been captured in existing models and offers little ability to differentiate. Synthetic data is reliant on other models to produce, does not solve new or novel situations and can result in model collapse if overused. Real-world bespoke data, the kind that Appen creates, enables new AI approaches. It brings human expertise and interactions that improve and evaluate models in ways that alternatives can't replicate. This is the market that Appen serves. Primary way that we serve our clients is through a managed services approach, where we build custom and high-value data sets that are specific to the AI model needs. The usual first step is that a researcher comes to us with their data needs. It can be a description of the task, expertise requirements, quality rubrics, data volumes and time lines. Our delivery experts work very closely with clients to deeply understand their intentions and translate that into a data workflow that typically coordinates a set of complex and iterative handoffs between humans and AI models to generate the data. We deliver through a combination of our research and delivery experts, our proprietary software stack and our expert workforce marketplace. The output we provide is high-quality data for leading AI organizations, including the global Tier 1 AI labs. What differentiates Appen is the combination of the platform, people and our global reach. Our workforce is a core competitive asset. More than 1 million contributors across 200-plus countries and over 500 dialects and languages covered. We focus on building out our domain expertise in our workforce. We now have contributors covering more than 100 specialist fields from computer science and mathematics to law, medicine and the creative disciplines. Generative AI demands a different type of contributor. It requires people who can reason, evaluate and provide expert level feedback. Our workforce has rapidly evolved to support the new expert level requirements of our customers. And our service offering continues to expand and covers 9 categories, and it's evolving rapidly with the needs of our customers. Some of the areas that we're working in include LLM training data covering supervised fine-tuning, RLHF and preference annotation; multi-modal data across text to image annotation, aesthetic scoring, video labeling, embodied intelligence; speech and audio across a broad set of languages; domain expert annotation in medical, scientific, legal and financial fields amongst many others; model evaluation covering LLM and vision benchmarking and search quality performance; computer vision and physical AI for autonomous driving, robotics, smart home, AR/VR and embodied AI. And we also offer reinforcement learning environments, off-the-shelf data sets and platform and tooling solutions. The breadth of our offering allows us to evolve with the needs of the leading AI labs. We have recently expanded our data set offering significantly. These are the existing data sets that we either own or resell with value-added services on top. We are seeing an increase in the demand for these data sets, and we are building out our catalog to meet the specific needs of model builders. Some of the areas we have recently added data sets include reinforcement learning tasks, code repositories, book corpuses, enterprise data for Agentic AI and many other standalone data sets covering unique areas like medical dictation, STEM Q&A and infographics. These products accelerate time-to-value for our customers and often also come alongside managed service projects to add value to the data sets. We anticipate this to be a solid growth driver in the near future. A unique proposition of Appen is our coverage of the 2 AI epicenters, namely China and the U.S.A. We operate 2 dedicated businesses to cover these markets, each purpose-built for the specific customer requirements. Appen Global serves the U.S.A. and Europe, targeting hyperscalers, foundational AI companies and vertical AI builders. Demand drivers include AI capabilities, new customer expansions and new data modalities. Appen China serves China, Japan and Korea, targeting Chinese big tech, foundational AI and vertical AI builders. In addition to the demand drivers, international expansion is an increasing driver of Chinese model builders look to complete in the global markets. Each business has its own dedicated operations and technology stack. That separation allows us to optimize for the distinct requirements of each market without compromise. As Justin mentioned earlier, Appen Global's technology road map has continued to deliver operational efficiencies. Employee expenses in H1 FY '26 came in at $14.4 million, down from $17.7 million in H1 FY '25. Other expenses were $8.1 million compared to $11.4 million in H1 FY '25. We continue to be highly focused on driving technology-led efficiencies across our operations, particularly through the use of AI. We have identified approximately $12 million in incremental annualized cost efficiencies. Around 70% will be executed over the remainder of FY '26, with the balance by the end of Q1 FY '27. Importantly, there's been no operational impact from the cost-out work executed to date. We are capturing efficiencies through AI-enabled operations, not by reducing our ability to deliver high-quality data at speed. Let me now turn to our outlook and guidance statement for the full year. We remain confident in the AI data market and Appen's ability to contribute meaningfully to the development of leading foundation models. We continue to see positive signals on LLM-related growth from both Appen Global and Appen China customers. We're winning new work with leading AI labs and expanding existing programs. We remain focused on driving technology-led efficiencies across our operations. And as in previous years, Appen Global revenue is predominantly project-based and seasonality continues to skew revenue towards H2. Considering all of this, we reaffirm our FY '26 guidance of group revenue of $270 million to $300 million and underlying EBITDA before FX margin of 5% to 10%. That concludes our presentation for today. Thank you for your time and your continued interest in Appen. Justin and I are now happy to take questions.
Sam Wells: Great. Thank you very much, Ryan and Justin. [Operator Instructions] We'll kick off with some pre-submitted questions before getting to any analyst questions today. First, on profit sustainability. Can you clarify how much of the recent EBITDA improvement is driven by a permanent structural cost reduction versus temporary project-based revenues?
Ryan Kolln: Yes. Thanks, Sam. So, we're definitely focused on a sustainable cost base and profitable growth across the business. The good thing is that, particularly for China, we are seeing improved margins. That's coming through the gross margin of China improving, but also we're getting the leverage of scaling efficiencies in the China business. And as we've called out, we've continued to drive OpEx improvement in Appen Global. So, a multitude of factors, but we see this as a sustainable and ongoing trend in the business.
Sam Wells: Okay. Great. And just a follow-up there. What baseline quarterly revenue is currently required to maintain positive EBITDA through the second half of FY '26?
Ryan Kolln: Look, I think it's fairly similar to where we're at today in Q2. As we said, we've made some efficiencies across the business. So, there's not a material uplift required to deliver profitability through the remainder of -- at a quarterly basis.
Sam Wells: Great. And on cash runway and free cash flow, given the cash balance, what's the current projected time line to achieve consistent positive free cash flow?
Ryan Kolln: I'll throw that one to Justin.
Justin Miles: Thanks, Ryan. Thanks for the question, Sam. Obviously, part of the strategy, we're talking about the efficiencies and the performance of the business and the growth in Appen Global, we're well towards -- heading in the right direction and well towards achieving that. That is the goal, sustained profitability and free cash flows. So, we've got enough cash. We've got a strong cash balance. There's enough working capital. We're confident that the runway is there. There's no additional funds required to manage the growth. So, we're definitely heading towards it. We're heading in the right direction, and we're not too far off.
Sam Wells: Okay. And another follow-up there. Should shareholders expect the current cash reserves to be sufficient to fund operations until self-sustainability is reached?
Justin Miles: Based on everything we know today, yes.
Sam Wells: And just one more pre-submitted question before we get to the analysts. On revenue diversification, outside Appen's core hyperscaler clients, what specific momentum or contract wins are we seeing in the broader enterprise AI market? And how long are these -- sorry, are the typical sales cycles for these newer revenue streams?
Ryan Kolln: So, we're very focused on the large foundation model builders and the Neo Labs that are popping up, typically spun out of the research division of these large AI labs. So, that remains the focus of Appen at the moment. That's where the bulk of the spend is in the market. and it's highly aligned to the capabilities that we're building. In terms of the deal cycle time, it can vary quite extreme. Some of the deals are very, very short lead time. If researchers are contemplating specific areas they want to work through and there's a good amount of back and forth that can introduce a longer sales cycle, but it's certainly trending towards much, much shorter sales cycles.
Sam Wells: Okay. Great. Next question comes from Nicola Willmette at Barrenjoey. Nicola Willmette at Barrenjoey, would you like to ask a verbal question?
Josh Kannourakis: It's Josh Kannourakis here. Can you hear me?
Sam Wells: Yes.
Josh Kannourakis: Cool. Sorry. Nicola's just looking at me a bit funny here. All good. No worries. So, just the first couple of questions to get kicked off. First one, just around in the global business. So I know, obviously, there were some reasonably chunky customers in terms of -- that you had contracts for that you ended last year on. Some of those contracts were potentially coming back. Like what have you seen in terms of the start? I know visibility is obviously not high. But what are some of the, I guess, the conversations and scope for work that you see from both, some of the traditionally big customers that you have, but also, as we said, some foundational other customers into the second half. And just to talk a little bit about what confidence you have in that deliverability to deliver into the second half there?
Ryan Kolln: Yes. Thanks, Josh. So, there are a few things that are giving us some really good confidence at the moment. So, first is we've been able to penetrate into some new areas within existing customers that are really focused on the foundation model build. And we've started in specific areas that -- starting with the first project in a specific domain. And now what we're seeing is a much broader set of conversations around growth opportunities, not just within the projects that we're working on, but across a broader set of domains. And a lot of these growth opportunities are in areas that we've been strategically investing our capabilities in. So, some of the things that we've called out like coding, finance, health care, really pushing into the more valuable part of the market at the moment to support AI development in specific data modalities.
Josh Kannourakis: Got it. That's helpful. And traditionally, the margin on those sorts of projects as well versus maybe where the historical gross margin is. Can you give a bit of context on that?
Ryan Kolln: Yes, it can vary, but you should think about them broadly similar to the traditional margins that we've seen in the business.
Josh Kannourakis: Got it. And just while we are on global, just the competitive environment in terms of what you're seeing out there. Obviously, there's a number of players. What are you guys seeing in terms of when you are in those new markets, what the competition is? Is there price? Is price coming into it? Is it more around the deliverability or the quality? Maybe just to talk through some of those frameworks that you think customers are using to choose the vendors in that space.
Ryan Kolln: So the ability to deliver high-quality data is always number one. We don't see price as a major factor, particularly for the AI labs. We see quality and speed being the 2 primary considerations. And we used to call out, there are some competitors that are growing very rapidly. And that's built on a lot of -- they're established within the companies. They have got the trust of the researchers. And the researchers go directly to them because they trust their ability to deliver quality and they trust -- it speeds up the cycle rather than running an RFP process. And that's what's giving me a lot of confidence in the Appen Global momentum that we're seeing is because of the conversations that we're having in specific labs, and it's across multiple labs. They're really satisfied with our work. The quality is really great. That's leading to bigger opportunities. But it is on the back of their confidence that we are delivering high quality and that we can turn around the data really quickly for them. So the thematic that we're seeing with some of our competitors is really starting to play out within Appen Global.
Josh Kannourakis: Great. And just moving on to Appen China, another stellar result, obviously. But when we look at that business, now it looks and we've seen, I think, probably one thing that's changed a little bit since we last talked is just the rapid release, including, I think, even yesterday, one of the sort of GLM-3 coming in one of the Chinese models coming in at sort of record thing. And then Qwen and the like as well coming out with some fantastic models. I mean, there's been a lot of talk around the geopolitical aspects here, but it does feel like the Chinese models are definitely trying to accelerate into the U.S. and other markets as fast as possible. And I think some of the OpenRouter stuff was saying it's over 60% of the tokens are coming through from those models. So like, I mean, I'm just interested in maybe under the hood what the trends you're seeing? And how should we sort of think about the breakup of that work, the continuation of that trend? It looked like, obviously, in the Q4, there was a bit of an acceleration and then margins are also tracking. So, maybe just a bit of a context around the type of work you're seeing, the type of customers, your confidence in revenue momentum and then confidence around the margin upside there.
Ryan Kolln: Yes. And look, it's some incredibly exciting and impactful work coming out of from the open source model builders in China, which I think we all get a lot of visibility into and we can all kind of predict that, that's going to be a continued focus. I think some of the things that we see on the ground in China, which don't get as much exposure outside is the real focus on, I'll call it, consumer-based AI, where through the super apps, the companies in China, the AI labs, the focus on things like health care advice, financial advice. We're starting to see a lot of video generation, AI video generation, particularly in short-form videos. And I think they're a fair way ahead of the U.S. on the video generation side. We're at least getting the applications out that are supported by these models. And then the third really big driver in what we're seeing in China is the international support required to support Chinese technology companies that are heavily reliant on AI. So, you can think about social media companies, e-commerce companies. There's a really big driver for supporting their international ambitions.
Josh Kannourakis: Okay. Great. And just a final comment there just on margins. Obviously, that fourth -- sorry, the second quarter margin was very strong. Do you think that can continue? And how should we think about, I guess, the cost base versus margin perspective there in terms of what further expansion we could see across this year from China?
Ryan Kolln: Yes. We certainly expect that trend to continue. And we're seeing good operating leverage come out of the China business, and that's a trend we expect to continue also.
Sam Wells: Thanks, Josh. Next question. Sticking with China. Is your Chinese lab revenue recurring in nature, a valuation and data that's refreshed every model cycle or one-off data set builds? And a follow-up to that, roughly how much of the $175 million run rate would repeat if customers shift to new models next year?
Ryan Kolln: Yes. Thanks, Sam. So it is a mix of what we do. There is work that is directly related to the development of new models. There's a lot of work that we do, which is related to the evaluation of existing models, making sure that they're working in applications, et cetera. There's also a lot of work that we do that is very experimentative with the researchers that actually may never make it into a model. So it's a difficult one to dissect because the needs at a project level change and vary on an ongoing basis. But I think what we're seeing in both the Chinese and the U.S. market, there's certainly no slowdown in the model advances and the model release cycles. If anything, it's speeding up. So, I think the notion of, if China stop building models, what would happen is not one that we're too worried about. We're very focused on supporting them as they evolve into new models. But as I called out, also different applications, particularly on things like short-form video, robotics, speech. There's a coding development. There's a very rich ecosystem of applications that sit on top of the existing models.
Sam Wells: Okay. Great. And just a follow-up there. Does anything built in China like data sets, tooling capacity gets sold back to global customers? Or does sovereignty and customer requirements keep the 2 segments commercially separate?
Ryan Kolln: It is largely separate and the data export controls in China kind of mean that there's no data that's sold back into the global customers.
Sam Wells: Okay. Great. And switching to Appen Global. Can you just elaborate on the Board's long-term strategy for the global business? Will growth be primarily organic? Or is there the ability for acquisition-led growth? And if organic, which higher-value services and initiatives will drive growth to improve gross margin?
Ryan Kolln: Yes. We're certainly focused on growth in Appen Global, profitable growth. We think there is a significant pathway and runway through organic growth in the business. So, inorganic growth right now isn't a high priority for us. And in terms of the services that we provide, it's continuing to work very closely with the AI labs to meet their needs. And we called out in the presentation some of the ways that we're evolving. That is in kind of really close response and feedback to what we're hearing and getting requests for from the AI labs. So, we will continue to evolve to meet the needs of the data for AI training, for AI evaluation across LLMs and the future variants of AI models.
Sam Wells: Great. And sticking with Appen Global, how deep and durable are Appen's relationships with core clients? Is Appen pursuing frontier AI companies such as Anthropic? And how does it convert pilots into recurring larger scale work?
Ryan Kolln: Yes. So, our target customers are all of the leading AI labs. We work with a real majority of them today. There are a few that we're targeting and making really good progress on to break into. In terms of how we convert a pilot into a larger project, it is really -- and this is a very typical sales cycle where we come in and do a small piece of work. And based off the ability to deliver really high quality at speed for that piece of work, building the trust with the researchers and then showing them our capabilities and the work we're doing across different clients, that confidence that we build based off the project, based off what we're seeing elsewhere and the conversation that we have and the way that we bring value to the AI labs is the best way to get up that, we'll call it the revenue curve as quickly as possible.
Sam Wells: Got it. Just a follow-up question from Josh at Barrenjoey.
Josh Kannourakis: Just a follow-up guys on the robotics side of things. There's been some interesting news this week. Figure, one of the big humanoid robot companies has come out with a platform for building real-world training data. And I mean, I'm just interested, obviously, they're big. They're very well funded. But what's the opportunity you guys see in robotics? And if you think about the capability and the muscle you've had to build, like, are there any other options to create a specific sort of more white label product or a specific product for robotics that could be used by some of these humanoid companies, both in the U.S. but also in China, which is obviously a huge focus for the government there?
Ryan Kolln: Yes. Thanks, Josh. Good question. So, you can think about 3 sources of data that are needed to train, particularly the humanoid robotics, which are getting a lot of focus at the moment. So, one is what's called eco-centric data collection, where data is being collected by humans who would typically have cameras strapped to their body, sometimes on the forehead, sometimes in different positions on the body. And this is capturing what humans are doing in the real world around things like anything that requires some type of physical manipulation, particularly with the hands and arms. That's a really big focus, and that's some of the data that Figure AI released was around these ego-centric data sets. This part of the market is very interesting. It's a little bit of a commoditizing really quickly because there are many companies that are out there and going and collecting the data, et cetera. The second part of data needs are related to the annotation of that data. And it's less about the annotation of what we saw with autonomous driving, which is putting a bounding box around all of the images. It's more assessing and filtering for quality standards, making sure that the instruction set matches the image because there is really vast quantities of data. There are LLMs being run across it. But what we're finding is that there is demand for human involvement in the quality assessment of that data that's being captured. The third data source is more simulation-based, where it's getting humans to describe in a simulated environment, the task that the robot should be completing as a way to provide the training data. There is one fourth bucket, which is related to teleoperations, which we don't really play in too much, but that's another interesting evolution of the market. So like the LLM front, it's evolving very quickly and the needs of the robotics builders are changing really quickly. And we're trying to find the best place, as you say, Josh, that's got a durable and long-standing value add, but is also going to generate good margins for the business.
Josh Kannourakis: Great. And just final one for me. Just in terms of obviously being quite a bit of movement and change in strategy from one of your potentially big social media customers out there. I know you had a fair bit of work from them towards the end of last year. Have you seen any of those larger projects start to resume or get any signaling on when you expect some of those projects to resume?
Ryan Kolln: Yes. So, we're still, I mean, in close communication with all of our clients on their needs. And what we find is that these shifts can come very, very quickly. So, there's a lot going on across all our clients. They're changing strategy really quickly, and we stay super close to meet their needs.
Josh Kannourakis: Got it. But yes, not -- hasn't sort of resumed some of those larger ones as of yet, just more so a second half story?
Ryan Kolln: Yes. Look, there's always a -- there is a traditional skew to the second half. So, we're confident that we'll see that growth come through.
Sam Wells: Next question comes from Conor O'Prey at Canaccord.
Conor OPrey: Yes. Hopefully, I have managed the technology. Ryan, a couple of questions. Maybe if we go back to the -- I guess if we go back a few years to the previous peak of the business, one of the defining characteristics was a heavy customer concentration really around 2 customers driving a lot of the revenue growth. I'm wondering -- and I think you and I were both -- you are in the business, me observing the business from the outside. We're both around that. And I'm wondering what -- at that time, I wonder what lessons you're taking from that, especially in the China business, which is going through a sort of similar analogous kind of growth path? Are you able to diversify the revenue across more customers to sort of lessen those risks?
Ryan Kolln: Yes, Conor, it's certainly a focus for us. And I think the difference between what that period that you're explaining, where there were a couple of big customers that contribute a lot of the revenue, the China AI ecosystem, there are some very dominant players, but there's a decent number of them that it's not market skewed towards too big kind of customers like it was traditionally. So the focus for us is we want to serve the big accounts to the best that we can. There's a huge amount of growth potential there. We also work with a really large number of customers in the China business. This covers the Tier 1 labs, Tier 2 labs, start-ups that are getting into the space. So, I'm less worried about that diversification risk that we had previously vis-a-vis what's happening in China at the moment.
Conor OPrey: And then just back on Global. Is it fair to characterize the revenue trends there as the kind of the legacy business deal, I guess, we would call it the content relevance piece? Is that in a sort of a structural decline? Is that decline? How would you characterize that? On one hand, we're still seeing that possibly swamp all the other kind of good stuff that's going on? Or is it, I'm guessing it's more complicated than that, but maybe you can sort of break that apart a little bit for us?
Ryan Kolln: So, there's certainly an element of that, Conor, where we've seen some of our more traditional work decline as its LLMs are able to replicate some of that work. But what we have seen, particularly in the first half of this year, some good stabilization across some of the vast majority of that work that we're doing. And we are seeing the uptick in the newer areas related to LLM development. So it is certainly a factor what you're describing there and quite accurate. But we are, as we called out in the presentation, seeing the stabilization of some of the revenue from more of our traditional work.
Sam Wells: Thanks, Conor. Next question, just on cost-out. You've identified $12 million in annualized cost efficiencies in Appen Global, with 70% to be executed by the end of Q4 this year. At what point does the incremental margin benefit of this program start to visibly flow through the P&L?
Ryan Kolln: Yes. Justin, I'll pass that one to you.
Justin Miles: Yes. Thanks, Sam. So, there will be some benefit towards the end of the year, but it's not going to be material the way the timing works. So, I think there will be incremental benefits in the second half and in Q1 with the full benefit from the start of Q2 next year.
Sam Wells: Great. And just a couple of final questions here. Is the Board considering acquisitions or other strategic transactions? If so, what capabilities or businesses would Appen specifically target?
Ryan Kolln: Yes. Like I called out, M&A isn't -- we're very happy with the organic capabilities that we're building. The market is changing very quickly, and we need to be dynamic and responsive to the need. So, we're largely focused on organic growth in the business.
Sam Wells: Okay. And final question. As profitability and cash flow recover, would the Board consider share buybacks, dividends or other capital returns?
Ryan Kolln: So the Board will closely look at the capital allocation and consider all options as we continue to improve the cash reserves in the business. So yes, that's certainly for consideration.
Sam Wells: Okay. That's all the time we have allocated for questions today. If you do have any follow-ups, please feel free to send them through to me via e-mail, and we'll endeavor to get back to you. And maybe with that, Ryan, I'll just pass it back to you for any closing comments.
Ryan Kolln: Yes. Thank you, everyone, for your time today, and thank you for your continued interest and support in Appen. We continue to play a major role in the AI ecosystem. It's a very fast and rapidly evolving space, as I'm sure you are keen interest in. But Appen's role is for over 30 years now has been at the forefront of AI, and we look forward to continuing to supporting our customers and delivering great financial results for our shareholders.
Sam Wells: Great. Thank you. Thanks very much for joining. That concludes Appen's first half FY '26 results call. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you, and goodbye.