GlobalData sells data, analytics and intelligence to the world’s largest industries. Its business is telling other companies what is going to happen to them.
On Monday it published half-year results and the shares fell as much as 25 percent to 53.9p, having already slid from around 85p in early September. Panmure Liberum kept a buy recommendation and cut its target price from 140p to 100p, reduced its 2026 EBITDA forecast by twelve percent to £111.3 million and its pre-tax profit estimate by 17.5 percent to £78.1 million. It also cut underlying growth assumptions to one percent for 2027 and two percent for 2028.
The underlying numbers are not a catastrophe. Revenue rose 4.1 percent to £162.9 million, adjusted EBITDA rose 5.2 percent to £54.8 million with the margin improving to 34 percent, and the interim dividend was maintained. Pre-tax profit fell 6.1 percent to £23.2 million as finance costs doubled to £7.7 million on increased bank debt.
The number that did the damage is one percent. That is underlying revenue growth, stripping out acquisitions, against headline growth of four. The company attributed it to elongated sales cycles. Full-year adjusted EBITDA is now expected below market consensus, which had sat at £121 million to £126.7 million.
And then there is the target. At the end of 2023 GlobalData set out a three-year plan: £500 million annualised revenue by the end of 2026, a 45 percent adjusted EBITDA margin, high-single to double-digit organic revenue growth and a renewal rate above ninety percent. By the March full-year results, the £500 million figure had quietly left the list of stated priorities and the margin goal had moved from 45 percent to towards 40. The half-year run rate now sits around £163 million.
Chief executive Mike Danson called the first half a period of organisational progress but below our ambitions, said the benefits of the transformation have not yet shown up in the financials, and that the foundations are in place with the focus firmly on execution.
Here is the coffee version, and every roaster who has ever tried to go wholesale knows it.
You are excellent at reading the market. You can tell a client exactly which blends will move in their neighbourhood, what to price them at, what the trend in oat milk is doing to their margin. Your advice is good and they pay for it. Then you write your own three-year plan, and it assumes that the contracts you win take eight weeks to sign, because that is how long they took in the good years.
They now take five months. Nothing else in the plan changed. That single number, applied across every deal in the pipeline, is the difference between hitting the target and abandoning it, and it is invisible in any individual negotiation. Nobody said no. Everything simply took longer.
Elongated sales cycles is a phrase that sounds like an excuse and is actually the most common way ambitious plans die. Growth targets are built on velocity assumptions, velocity is set by the customer’s internal budget process, and the customer’s budget process is not something you can sell your way past.
The margin improving to 34 percent while all this was happening says the cost work is real, and the company has kept paying its dividend through it.
They can see everybody else’s weather. The forecast that matters is taped to the back of their own door.
Source: AskTraders, “GlobalData Shares Plunge as Half-Year Results Disappoint”
