GB Group plc (AIM:GBG) will look for acquisitions. David Ward, Chief Financial Officer said, “In the last 3 years, in fact, we have invested more than GBP 100 million into technology all through the P&L. We plan to maintain our progressive dividend. That provides a consistent and reliable cash return for our shareholders.

But given our growth plans and high cash generation, We do expect to generate surplus cash over and above that, which we would pay as a dividend. And just as we have been doing successfully now for over 10 years, we would first look to deploy surplus cash to accelerate the strategy through acquisitions. My next slide has more detail on how we think about M&A, but the key message here is that we continue to see a strong pipeline of acquisition opportunities, and it is the Board's view that utilizing surplus cash for acquisitions is better strategically than making additional returns to shareholders.

So of course, those do remain an option that we continue to keep under review. So to M&A. This has been such a critical component of the strategic development of GBG over the last 10 years, and the Board does expect that to continue. We are very fortunate that in our markets, there are many potential acquisition targets, and we believe that careful selection of those targets will allow us to further accelerate our strategic development.

There are 2 main characteristics that we look for in potential acquisitions. Firstly, a target might be able to enhance our access to new markets, new customers or new data. or a target may bring differentiated IP that can help us bring additional value to our existing customers faster than we may be able to do organically.

And often targets we contemplate will have a mixture of both components, just in varying degrees. If we look at our 2 most recent examples of acquisitions, Acuant and CloudCheck, Acuant offered very strong elements of both of those characteristics where CloudCheck was primarily offering access to a new market for us. And following the Acuant acquisition, we actually feel that right now, we have filled out our technology portfolio nicely, and there are no immediate or obvious gaps that we feel we need to plug via an acquisition.

Hopefully, you got a sense from the team today that we have plenty of exciting organic opportunities ahead for us. And in all of our contemplated acquisitions, we focus on repeatable commercial models that support profitable growth with attractive financial returns. And most critically, we look for complementary cultural alignment.

That all said, our short-term focus is on repaying debt and continuing the good progress we have made so far with the integration of Acuant. So we do not expect any acquisitions in the very near term, say, the next 6 months. But following that, we do expect our focus for M&A that would best accelerate our strategy is likely to be an acquisition that would open up new markets or customers for us.

And that would almost certainly be a bolt-on acquisition that we could do either from cash or from our existing debt facility”.