Stephen Hare
CEO & Executive Director

Good morning, and welcome to Sage's results for the first half of FY '26. I'm joined today by Jacqui Cartin, our Chief Financial Officer. I'm going to start by focusing on 3 key messages this morning.

First, Sage had an excellent first half as we continue to expand the value that we deliver to small and midsized businesses. We achieved broad-based double-digit revenue growth, driven by strength in our key products, and we accelerated our renewal rate, added new customers and increased ARR by around GBP 275 million year-on-year. At the same time, we expanded margins with mid-teens growth in both operating profit and EPS. And we generated strong cash flows, allowing us to invest for the future and continue to deliver attractive capital returns.

Second, we're driving growth through AI, strengthening our competitive position and making Sage inherently more valuable. In an agentic world, AI depends on trusted systems of record like Sage to reason and act, making our role more critical, not less. We're building AI for people for whom accuracy and compliance are paramount. We're making our products more powerful by embedding trusted intelligence directly into customer workflows in a way that's governed and transparent by design, and we're scaling these capabilities fast with AI-powered features now available to over 500,000 customers across the group. Helping finance teams accelerate cash flows, close the books faster and confidently turn insight