26 February 2025

Empresaria Group plc

("Empresaria" or the "Group")

Strategic Update

Empresaria (AIM: EMR), the specialist staffing group, provides an update on its strategy ahead of announcing its full year results on 27 March 2025.

Strategic update

We previously identified three pillars for growth: a focus on our core sectors of Professional, IT and Healthcare; diversification of our service offering to our clients; and delivering continued growth in Offshore Services.

As part of our focus on our core sectors we made good progress in simplifying the Group in 2024, exiting from five small individual operations in Finland, China, Australia, Japan and the UK all of which operated in sub-sectors or markets where we did not plan to invest. We are now accelerating our strategy by sharpening our focus on our core sector operations in the UK and the US while continuing to develop our other two pillars for growth.

As a result, we plan to continue to exit from those operations that are not aligned with this strategy, creating a more cohesive and streamlined Group consisting of:

This strategy enables us to scale our businesses more efficiently and effectively. The UK and the US are two of the world's largest staffing markets and provide significant opportunities for growth, cross-selling, diversification and operational synergies. With a strong presence and proven track record in these markets, we can better leverage client relationships, shared efficiencies, and sector expertise.

These operations are supported by our Offshore Services business which has been a great success story for the Group over many years, delivering 25% compound annual growth rate in net fee income between 2017 and 2024. We see significant opportunity to drive the next phase of growth through expanding our offering to existing clients and taking our back-office services to clients outside of recruitment.

Focussing on the UK and US alongside Offshore Services will enable us to invest in growth more efficiently and accelerate the delivery of impactful projects and initiatives. In 2025, we will move to a single brand across the UK and US operations to enable us to more effectively engage with clients, expand our offering to them and build our market presence while retaining the benefits of specialist teams.

This represents a significant transformation of the Group which we believe will help us to drive scale in these areas, improve the Group's financial position and enhance value for our shareholders. The exits are expected to take up to two years as we look to find the best home for these businesses and maximise the value achieved. On completion we expect to have eliminated the Group's net debt position and enabled a significant reduction in the Group's overheads.

We will provide updates on progress in the normal course of reporting.

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