CSL Limited

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining CSL's results presentation for the first half of the 2026 financial year. I'm Mark Dearing, CSL's Head of Investor Relations. Please note, this briefing is being webcast. We've a lot to get through today, but as usual, I'd like to draw your attention to the important disclaimer on your screen. A copy of this, along with our other ASX materials, have been published on the CSL and the ASX websites. You will also have seen an announcement we made to the ASX yesterday relating to the appointment of Gordon Naylor as interim chief executive officer and managing director. We'll hear from Gordon shortly, but before we do, I'd like to introduce our other speakers today. With me here in Melbourne is Ken Lim. Ken has been our CFO since October last year. Prior to that, he was our chief strategy officer and has previously led our Securus business unit. Also here is Chief Commercial Officer Andy Schmelz. Andy joined CSL in 2023 as Executive Vice President, CSL Bearing, and last year his role was expanded to include CSL V4. And finally, we have Dave Ross, General Manager and Senior Vice President of CSL Securus since 2024. And prior to that, he was the Head of Commercial Operations in North America since 2017. I'll now hand you over to Gordon for some comments before we get into the detail of the results.

Thanks Mark and good morning everyone. My name's Gordon Naylor and following the announcements yesterday, I'm CSL's interim CEO. My main job is to run the business, giving the board the space to find and appoint a suitable successor. I'll briefly cover my background, but in that respect, I will work to be an experienced set of hands for about a year. Interim does not mean that I'll be taking a back seat. With the support of the board, I fully intend to drive the company forward. In the short run, we have an ambitious half year ahead of us, and we need to complete the strategic transformation that is now well underway and already delivering value. At the same time, we must deeply examine CSO's journey, especially over the last decade, to fully understand the opportunities for improving strategic growth and profitability. As an investor, I'm not prepared to accept that we can't do better and I see opportunities to do so. Just to briefly recap on my time with CSL, I have a deep connection to the company over my 33 years as an employee before I was invited to join the CSL board in December. Along with Brian McNamee and many others, I took CSL from an unloved part of the Australian government to global leadership in plasma therapeutics and then influenza vaccines. We had and continue to have a deep understanding of those industries and the economics that drive them. I was a key player in the globalisation of the company and was heavily involved in the major acquisitions that Brian drove to establish CSL Plasma, Bearing and Securus. I then took CSL Plasma to global leadership and at different times ran various functions including the global supply chain and IT. I was Chief Financial Officer through a period of remarkable growth. My last assignment was to build Securus into global influenza vaccine leadership. Dave and Ken were key parts of my team. I'll make a couple of early high level comments before handing over to Ken. I think that the strategic framework is sound. The challenge is whether we can do better within that framework. I'm very happy with Securus. It has used its global product leadership to drive market share gains in an extraordinarily difficult US market, a classic CSL play. The non-cash impairments around the V4 products are allowing us to move forward. The cash flow from the iron franchise and the growth opportunities in nephrology make this an attractive space. Your focus and my focus will be on bearing. It's a highly attractive growth sector and we have the right assets. This is where the greatest opportunity lies. CSO remains a strong and consistent cash generator. I'm looking forward to engaging in more depth with our shareholders over the coming weeks and months. With that, I'll hand over to Ken and the rest of the team.

Thanks, Gordon, and good morning, everyone. Before I get into the results for the first half, I'd like to remind you of our strategic framework. The results we're presenting today represent a step in a broader transformation of CSL with the objective of delivering enhanced growth, profitability, and shareholder returns. Andy will then provide an update on bearing and V4, and Dave will take you through the securest result. I'll then discuss our financials in more detail, as well as our guidance for the rest of the 2026 financial year. Many of you will be familiar with this slide from our Capital Markets Day in November. CSL's growth is underpinned by our leadership in large growing markets with high unmet medical need. We're embedding a relentless focus on cost leadership to deliver profit growth that's faster than revenue growth and generate strong cash flows that enable us to reinvest in the business. I'm confident that this strategy will underpin strong, sustainable shareholder value creation over the long run. Six months ago, we introduced a transformation program to simplify our organization and drive stronger growth. I'm pleased to say we're progressing well and are already seeing significant value creation. I'll speak to some of the key initiatives. Those in white are now complete and those shaded gray are underway. In terms of portfolio growth opportunities, we're excited about our collaboration with Varmex on a potential new coagulation treatment. And just this week, we entered into an early-stage research collaboration with Mimo Therapeutics, focusing on their recombinant polyclonal Ig technology. On the efficiency side, we've rationalised R&D sites and streamlined our corporate functions, resulting in savings that we'll see flow into the P&L this year. We've integrated Bearing and V4's commercial and medical functions, eliminating duplicated spend that has facilitated reinvestment in our US and China commercial capabilities. In plasma collection and manufacturing, we've reallocated collections to more efficient centres and are making strong progress on multiple yield enhancement projects. While we're pleased with our progress so far, there's still a lot of opportunity ahead of us. And as I said earlier, I'm confident we'll see these initiatives translate into strong, sustainable shareholder value creation over the long run. Turning now to our financial results. While we made strong progress on the transformation program, we're clearly not satisfied with our first half results and we'll be speaking to the initiatives we've implemented to drive stronger growth going forward. Our first half performance was also adversely impacted by government policy changes and one-off costs associated with our transformation program and asset impairments. I'll get into more detail shortly. We have a strong balance sheet in cash flows and today are announcing an expansion of our share buyback from $500 million to $750 million today. Looking at our high-level financials on a constant currency basis, group revenue fell by 4% and NPA declined by 7%. Reported net profit after tax was down 81% after factoring in the one-off cost that I mentioned earlier. Cash flow from operations was $1.3 billion. Looking ahead to the full year, we're maintaining guidance and have an ambitious plan for growth in the second half, driven by IG, Alberman, and our newly launched products. I'll return later in the presentation to discuss our full-year results guidance in more detail. With that, I'll hand over to Andy Schmelz to discuss the performance of the Bearing and V4 businesses.