Mark Dixon
Founder, CEO & Executive Director

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our trading update for the first quarter of 2026. We made a strong start to the year with continued momentum across the business and clear progress against our strategy. And most importantly, we've delivered a 4% revenue growth at the Group level. And System revenue grew at 9%. That's the best we've seen so far. So we're very pleased with that as well.

And all of this despite a clear backdrop of macroeconomic uncertainty and geopolitical events. Anything in particular, developments in the Middle East affect our business directly and indirectly. I think the fact that we're presenting these results today reflects the resilience of both demand and the strength of our model, our global platform. The key message from this quarter is a straightforward one.

Our capital-light model is scaling, demand remains robust and the business is becoming more and more predictable, more cash-generative and more resilient. As you've seen in the numbers, we continue to grow the platform in every way, and we did again so in this quarter. I think, in particular, the Managed & Franchised platform where fee income grew strongly and signings accelerating meaningfully was a very good performance in the quarter.

Over the past years, we've been really pressing the accelerator on our Managed & Franchised business. And as a result, we've reduced our capital intensity, keeping the growth but reducing capital