01 · Outpost at 14
Boom, shock, reset, and a first clean year.
Six years of group accounts in one place. Revenue went from £7.5m to £40.3m and back to £23.8m, then recovered to £29.9m in FY26 on a smaller, more UK-weighted business. Everything below is read from the filings at Companies House (company 08291535). The scans were OCR'd and cross-checked against the next year's comparatives.
Timeline
The dates that explain the numbers.
- 2012Incorporated in Bournemouth, 13 November, by Duncan McWilliam (ex-MPC VFX supervisor). Commercials first, then features: Jason Bourne, Nocturnal Animals, 426 shots on 47 Meters Down.
- 2019Montréal opens, for Québec's tax credits. A Singapore hub is announced in July; it later drops off the studio list.
- 2021YFM Equity Partners invests (Series A, £3.7m of shares). Robin Shenfield, ex-CEO of The Mill, chairs. LA opens. The Indian company is incorporated in September; Mumbai artists start remotely.
- 2022Follow-on round (£3.5m shares plus a £2m convertible loan note). London opens in Covent Garden; headcount passes 720. Mumbai's Goregaon studio opens. Tim Chauncey becomes CTO.
- 2023Peak, then the strikes. FY23 revenue reaches £40.3m. In March the board decides to close LA and the Frontier Montréal studio. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes follow; the CEO says headcount fell from about 950 to 250. The whole operation moves to AWS.
- 2024£2.5m Preferred A1 raise in February. Québec caps VFX service contracts at 65% of eligible cost from 31 May, which Outpost says cut the effective credit on new Montréal work by about 25%.
- 2025The reset year. FY25 revenue falls 38% to £23.8m; Montréal is cut. The UK's enhanced VFX relief applies to spend from January. Outpost "returned to monthly profitability" in the second half. Sinners and The Lost Bus work lands; Silo S2 wins the RTS VFX award.
- 2026A clean year. FY26: £29.9m revenue, £1.06m EBITDA, no going-concern uncertainty. Two Oscar nominations, an Emmy nomination for Foundation S3, #4 in Televisual's Facilities 50. Rutvij Barot becomes Country Head, India (July); Tara DeSimone returns as Montréal EP (September).
Today
Four studios, three countries, one cloud
- Bournemouth (HQ) and London: the UK company, 152 average employees in FY26
- Mumbai: full-service (prep, matchmove, comp, assets, FX, lighting, animation); about two-thirds of LinkedIn-visible staff
- Montréal: rebuilding, with a new EP and four open roles in September 2026
- Runs on AWS, ShotGrid, Nuke, Houdini, Maya and Mari
- Leadership: Duncan McWilliam (CEO), Gez Hixson (COO), Tim Chauncey (CTO), Kate Warburton (Director of Production), Rachel Matchett (UK MD), Rutvij Barot (Country Head, India)
The numbers
Group accounts, years to 31 March, £. EBITDA is operating profit plus depreciation and amortisation; the FY25 and FY26 filings show the same figures on the face of the income statement.
Revenue, £m
FY21 is the unaudited comparative in the FY22 accounts
EBITDA, £m
FY23 includes £3.58m of restructuring and impairment
Staff costs as a share of revenue
Wages, social security and pension ÷ turnover
Average employees
Group, and the UK parent company
| £ | FY21 | FY22 | FY23 | FY24 | FY25 | FY26 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | 7.47m | 19.08m | 40.25m | 38.39m | 23.80m | 29.89m |
| Gross margin | 26.4% | 34.4% | 29.1% | 28.0% | 19.0% | 25.6% |
| Administrative expenses, % of revenue | 45.4% | 35.8% | 30.5% | 26.3% | 35.1% | 22.7% |
| Operating profit / (loss) | (1.26m) | (0.27m) | (4.15m) | 0.64m | (3.83m) | 0.87m |
| EBITDA | (0.51m) | 0.55m | (3.63m) | 1.08m | (3.32m) | 1.06m |
| Staff costs | 5.69m | 12.87m | 27.64m | 24.96m | 17.83m | 19.32m |
| Revenue per average employee | £49.5k | £70.7k | £70.9k | £55.9k | £57.6k | £72.2k |
| Cash at year end | 2.01m | 0.40m | 6.55m | 4.66m | 1.25m | 2.12m |
| Cash from operations | (1.18m) | (0.19m) | 2.28m | (3.63m) | (2.49m) | 0.77m |
| Trade debtor days | 22 | 25 | 24 | 13 | 43 | 33 |
| Audit opinion | unaudited | clean | qualified + MU | qualified + MU | qualified + MU | clean |
Notes. "MU" is a material uncertainty on going concern. The FY23–FY25 qualifications concern £1.80m of FY23 restructuring cost the auditor considered recognised a year early, which moves profit between FY23 and FY24 but not their total. Ratios and per-head figures are calculated from the reported lines.ReportedCalculated
The labour lever
Why the hours matter more than anything else on the P&L.
Staff costs were £19.3m, 64.6% of revenue. Non-staff costs (vendors, cloud, software, premises) were about £9.5m. EBITDA was £1.06m. So one percentage point of staff cost as a share of revenue is £299k, which is 28% of the year's EBITDA.
A point can come from three places, and each one is measurable weekly:
- Utilisation. Paid hours that never reach a show. In a fixed-bid business they are pure cost.
- Bid accuracy. Hours a shot takes against the hours it was sold for. Overruns are absorbed unless a change order is signed.
- Mix. Which site and which grade does the work, at what cost per hour, against what the client is paying for it.
The same arithmetic explains the bad years. FY25's staff costs were 74.9% of revenue. Ten points on FY25 revenue is £2.4m, more than half of the £4.4m swing in EBITDA between FY25 and FY26.
Staff costs per the accounts' employee note (wages, social security, pension). One point = 1% × £29.89m. Peer comparisons on The VFX business.Calculated
What moved in FY26
Revenue rose by a quarter on the same average headcount. The mix explains most of it.
UK-billed revenue, FY25 to FY26, from 55% to 78% of the total. Rest of world fell from £10.7m to £6.5m. The strategic report credits "enhanced tax incentives in the UK".Reported
Average UK-company employees, while the group stayed at 414. That puts about 262 people outside the UK, mostly in Mumbai, against about 305 a year earlier.Calculated
Staff cost per average employee in the UK company against the rest of the group, FY26. The overseas average fell as the workforce shifted towards Mumbai.Calculated
Mumbai and Montréal
The two overseas studios work under very different economics.
Mumbai: the labour engine, run as a captive
Incorporated in September 2021 as a subsidiary of the UK company. The accounts describe it as "a service company to all group studios". Aggregated Indian filings put FY25 revenue at about ₹35 crore (around £3.3m, eliminated on consolidation) and net profit at about ₹3.4 crore. That margin is consistent with a cost-plus mark-up of roughly 16%.
- India taxes the mark-up, while the UK carries £6.95m of unused tax losses. The mark-up level and its benchmarking matter for group tax.
- India's Labour Codes (from 21 November 2025) require basic pay of at least 50% of remuneration, which raises provident fund and gratuity costs.
- Mumbai is one of the world's largest VFX hubs (about 10,900 people in the 2025 World Atlas), and attrition there has historically run at 25–30%.
Indian figures are from aggregator summaries of MCA filings, not the primary documents.Reported
Montréal: cut, then rebuilding
Opened in 2019 for Québec's credits. The Frontier VFX studio closed after the March 2023 restructuring, and Montréal headcount was cut again in FY25. The operating entity is now OP Visual Effects Inc.
- Québec capped VFX service contracts at 65% of eligible cost from 31 May 2024. The effective rate on service contracts is now about 26.65%, below the UK's 29.25% net.
- Outpost describes the credit as "available to our customers": the producer claims it, so it shows up in Outpost's price competitiveness, not its P&L.
- Tara DeSimone returned as Executive Producer in September 2026, citing "already booked work in 2026", and four roles were posted that month.
Funding and balance sheet
Investor instruments rather than bank debt, which shapes how much cash discipline matters.
Outpost VFX Ltd is the top company. YFM Equity Partners' funds (British Smaller Companies VCT and VCT 2, and YFM Growth funds) hold all the Preferred A and A1 shares, about 37% of voting shares by count. Founders, directors and management hold the ordinary classes.
Borrowings of £3.2m at March 2026 are mostly the £2m convertible loan note and its accrued interest, plus a preference-share liability; only £96k is due within a year. The 7.5% preference dividend has been frozen since June 2025. YFM has confirmed it will not seek repayment for at least 12 months from approval of the FY26 accounts.
Net liabilities of £1.53m on a book basis, against cash of £2.12m, up from £1.25m a year earlier. The onerous-lease provision for the vacated LA and Montréal space (£0.86m) runs off in 2027, and lease commitments fell from £9.2m (FY24) to £4.6m.
Why it matters
With no bank facility to lean on, cash timing matters as much as EBITDA. That means milestone billing ahead of the work, debtor days, and accrued income on shows that are behind on invoicing. FY26 debtor days were 33, against 43 the year before.
Finance Dailies' group P&L page shows earned vs invoiced vs collected by show and month, built from Xero invoices and payments.
Work and recognition
Repeat franchises and returning directors; the CEO puts repeat business at 70–80%.
Sinners and The Lost Bus (both Oscar-nominated for Best VFX), Wicked: For Good, Captain America: Brave New World, The Naked Gun, Primate, The Dog Stars; The Uprising (Paul Greengrass) in production.
Foundation S3 (Emmy-nominated 2026), Silo S2 and S3, IT: Welcome to Derry, The Sandman S2, Bridgerton S4, Avatar: The Last Airbender S2, The Night Agent S3, Monarch S2.
RTS Craft & Design VFX award for Silo S2 (2025). Televisual Facilities 50: #42 in 2017, #4 in December 2025. ET Human Capital Gold award for Mumbai's remote-work management (2023).
Technology
Where the operational data lives.
Pipeline and tracking
ShotGrid-based "with a lot of proprietary tools" (CEO, 2022). Nuke, Houdini, Maya, Mari and Hiero, with Python, Git and Jira. Since 2023 production has been standardising ShotGrid use across sites. Outpost's own job ads ask for ShotGrid.
Cloud and AI
All on AWS: EC2 virtual workstations, four Deadline instances for render, WEKA storage. The face-swap model trains 8× faster on H100s. At FMX 2026 the CTO spoke about agentic systems that take manual orchestration off artists and production. AI in this context is a cost and productivity line that bids will have to price.
Open questions
Lines in the filings that the accounts don't fully explain.
How is revenue recognised on a show, and who signs off EAC?
The accounts recognise revenue by stage of completion on cost. Cost-to-complete is the key judgement, and working capital swung by £3–6m between FY23 and FY24. How often is EAC re-forecast, and with whom?
What does Mumbai charge the group, and how is it set?
A cost-plus captive with an implied mark-up of around 16%, taxed in India, while the UK carries £6.95m of losses. Group foreign tax was £1.04m in FY24 and a £795k prior-year credit followed in FY25.
How is cloud cost attributed to shows today?
With every workstation and render node on AWS, cloud is a show cost. Is spend tagged by show, split by account per show, or allocated by a key such as hours?
Where does the rate card's day rate come from?
Is it built up from cost per hour plus a target margin by site, or set by the market and checked against cost? The answer decides whether the EBITDA model starts from cost or from price.
How are UK and Mumbai splits decided in a bid?
With 29.25% net on UK spend for the client, does the bid pack show each client the net cost of each site? Who owns the Additional Information Form data for clients' AVEC claims?
What happens to the accrued loan-note interest?
Accrued CLN interest rose from £318k to £625k in FY26 while group interest expense was £25k. I'd guess a reclassification, but it is worth knowing for the cash model.