11/16/2021

speaker
Stefan Bomhard
CEO

Now, good morning to everyone and welcome to our full year results presentation. Now, for me, it's been great to meet many of you in person for the first time in such a long period of time after communicating all the last 12 months in a virtual way. At the same time, I, of course, want to welcome everyone who is also joining us still online today. Now, here in the room I have with me our chief financial officer, Lucas Paravicini, and Peter Derman, who you hopefully know for a long time as our head of investor relations. Now, today I will start by explaining how we're working at pace in implementing our new strategy and how this is beginning to translate into operational and financial performance. Now, Lucas will then take you through the financial results And then I will return with some insights into the very significant positive change that is now underway through the multiple initiatives at all levels of the business. And then I will conclude with our priorities for fiscal year 2022. And after that, I look forward to your questions. Now, put simply, the goal of our strategy is the transformation of imperial politics. into a business capable of delivering reliable, attractive returns year in, year out over the long term. A business that is built to last, just like a building, needs strong foundations. And this is what 2021 has been about. Digging deep and firm foundations to support future growth. This is our strategy wheel that you see here from the capital markets day in January of this year. Now, understandably, the focus back then was on the top three segments of the chart, what we call the pillars, shown in orange here. However, just as important are the bottom three segments, the enablers. These are the hidden foundations that will support the strategic pillars. In the past year, we've made progress in putting the consumer at the center with the appointment of our first chief consumer officer and the creation of a group consumer office. As this structural upgrade leverages the full marketing insights and innovation capabilities of our global organization and has already enabled improvements to our decision making. We've completed a refresh of our leadership team. which we'll come to in a moment. This has introduced a much more rigorous performance management process, and in turn, more targeted allocation of scarce resources. And we have introduced a simpler structure, for example, by reducing the number of market clusters, which is delivering efficiencies in line with our plans. Now, taken together, These new foundations are already helping us execute on the three priorities we laid out to you in January. Now, you will have all heard about the 80-20 rule. Well, our first priority at Imperial is more like a 70-30 rule. This is our new laser-like focus on five combustible markets out of 120 markets which deliver around 70% of our profits. These big five markets also generate the highest profitability per stick or per point of share. Therefore, losing share in these markets weakens our financial performance and undermines our sustainability. Conversely, any market share gains create a positive multiplier effect for us. Later, I will explain how this new strategic focus is being operationalized on the ground. And the early signs are encouraging, but there's still a lot to do. Our second priority is the creation of a focused next generation product business, led by consumer preferences and needs. And to be clear, we're more committed than ever to making a meaningful contribution to harm reduction over time. However, as the smallest of the global tobacco businesses, Our approach needs to be more focused, to be sustainable, and it needs to build on firm foundations. And I will take later in more detail about the progress we're making here. The third priority, creating value from our wider portfolio, is one you'll hear about in future presentations. Here, we've also built the foundations. This includes the creation of a new AAA region with a strong emerging market focus led by Paolo Pochi, who joined us from Procter & Gamble's China business. Now, on this slide, you see a great demonstration of the pace of change and how we have strengthened the leadership team with eight new hires in the past 18 months. And we've attracted high quality talent from blue chip organizations to lead our transformation. We filled important gaps in strategy and in people and culture, while adding deep FMCG experience to strengthen our sales, marketing and consumer insights to blend with our existing strong tobacco expertise. It is a truly diverse team now with no fewer than eight different nationalities represented. And this diversity is already bringing us a fresh perspective, critically for industries and businesses facing change. These foundations are leading to encouraging improvements in our operational performance. In particular, our sharper focus on the top five markets is beginning to stabilize our aggregate market share. Now, this follows consecutive years of double digit basis points decline. And in an industry like ours, where volume is declining, long term market share is perhaps the best indicator of underlying sustainability. And for Imperial, the key measure is the top five share as a portfolio of businesses. Now, our ambition is not to necessarily grow share in all these markets. Our first priority is to stop being the number one shared donor. In any given year, you may continue to see one or more of these markets report temporary declines because of factors beyond our control, such as regulation, excise, or unexpected competitor behavior. And there is no single explanation for this encouraging progress that you see here. This is about many different conscious management actions. And of course, the hard work of 28,000 colleagues who have been mobilized behind a new focused strategy and who have performed brilliantly in a year still characterized by COVID restrictions. As I said, these are encouraging early signs, but we do not take anything for granted. Now turning to our financial performance. We now manage this business using a balanced dashboard which measures revenues, cash generation, financial flexibility, and the effectiveness of our capital allocation. It's great to be able to report to you that on this year's dashboard, all lights are green and all arrows point in the right direction. Now, there are of course some one-offs as you would expect any business of our size and complexity. However, What's really pleasing is that the positive evolution of our financial is in large measures linked to strategic management decisions and the underlying performance of the company. The increase in tobacco revenue reflects our strong pricing, maintained at the same time working hard to to arrest the market share declines. The increase in adjusted operating profit reflects both this strength in tobacco and our strategic decision to reboot our NGP business on a more sustainable footing. The growth in EPS would have been more closely following the percentage gain in adjusted operating profit were it not for the increased tax rate as previously guided. And all of this has translated into strong cash generation, enabling a reduction in leverage, which increases our future financial flexibility and underpins a 1% growth in the dividend. Finally, our more focused strategy is already leading to an improvement in return on invested capital. This reassurance, I hope, of our extremely disciplined approach to the way we put your money to work. I will now hand over to Lukas to take you through the financials. Thank you.

speaker
Lucas Paravicini
Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Stefan. Good morning, everyone. It's great to be here with you. Since joining in May, I have been busy getting to know the business, and I thought I might start by sharing my observations of the first six months. I am pleased to report that what attracted me initially to the opportunity at Imperial has been validated by my time within the business. Imperial is a high quality company with some good brands, with attractive market positions and the potential to leverage its strong retail partnerships. However, what excites me is the opportunity to transform the business. And I believe the plan the team has set out can unlock significant value in the coming years. It is also a highly cash generative business which can support investment in improving the business as well as attractive shareholder returns. My priorities are clear and they start with cash. My role will be to optimize a sustainable free cash flow generation from the business. The finance team can play a larger role in supporting the delivery of our strategy. Like other support functions at Imperial, we have an opportunity to modernize our ways of working. This will support more effective decision-making. This is not rocket science. It is about adopting new working practices and being a more effective business partner. I'm also committed to promoting a transparent engagement with all our stakeholders. To this end, we have today provided you with the full financial statements to the accounts so they are available as we meet with investors over the next few weeks. Though these are key priorities for me as a CFO, as I work myself into the role. So to come back to the key metrics that Stefan outlined, our business has performed well in 2021. with solid growth driven by strong tobacco pricing. These financial results are after absorbing some adverse events this year, such as the settlement for the US state litigation and the changes in the Australian excise regime. We have delivered a slightly ahead of guidance despite these factors and while undergoing significant change program. We have grown organic revenue, profit, and return on invested capital. The improvement in ROIC was driven by the increased profit and a more rigorous approach to managing our capital base, helped by the sale of the premium cigar division. Our free cash flow of 1.5 billion pounds was after the unwind of favorable working capital movements last year of 0.7 billion and we made good progress in reducing debt towards the lower end of our target gearing range. Overall, net revenue grew by 1.4% at constant currency. Total volumes declined by 2.9%, slightly better than the level we've been used to in recent years. COVID continues to affect the market size with changes to buying patterns across channels and markets. we have provided some market-level colors in the appendices. Tobacco net revenue grew by 1.5%, with price mix of 4.4%, driven by strong tobacco pricing and strong growth in our U.S. mass-market cigar business. Overall tobacco delivery was impacted by the excise changes in Australia, so excluding these, our tobacco net revenue grew 2.7%, and with an underlying price mix of 5.6%. Our NGP net revenue was broadly stable, driven by our decisions to withdraw from certain markets as we reset our NGP business. Excluding the market exits, our NGP net revenue grew 8.6%. Adjusted operating profit grew by 4.8% at constant currency, with our performance impacted by four main areas. Our underlying delivery was solid, supported by strong tobacco pricing, market share gains, and growth in our U.S. mass market cigar business. We absorbed an £88 million headwind from lower Australia stock profits, and 52 million pounds from the U.S. state litigation charge. At the same time, we stepped up investment by 40 million pounds behind our five priority markets and in new ways of working. This is about building the foundation for the future. In NGP, we reduced costs as we focused our investment more tightly and versus a comparator that was adversely affected by inventory write-ons. Logista also made a positive contribution. Like other businesses, we make certain adjustments to our IFRS numbers to aid performance comparison over time. I want to be very open about how we approach these adjustments. First, on restructuring, we have announced a restructuring program to deliver our new strategy. The actions we have already taken this year will drive the savings in line with our plans, with a full annualized savings of almost £70 million by the end of fiscal year 2022. We have further initiatives planned for the coming year to realize a balance of savings in line with our plans. Our overall restructuring costs are also in line. And we have completed our legacy cost optimization programs this year. Our NGPE strategy included a comprehensive review of our NGP business and its assets. This has led to £180 million of NGP intangible assets impairment, with £73 million included in restructuring costs and £45 million included in amortization and impairment. We will continue to provide transparency of adjusting items and seek a greater alignment between reported and adjusted operating profit where appropriate. We grew EPS by 2.8% at constant currency, reflecting our profit delivery and lower interest charge as we reduced debt levels. Our confidence in our cash flow, our strong cash flows, provided us with the opportunity to proactively repay early the 1.25 billion US dollar July 22 bond. This reduces gross debt and has no impact on our net debt. As outlined previously, we have continued to face upward pressures on our tax rate and expect this to continue into fiscal year 22. Our cash performance remains strong with 1.5 billion pounds of free cash flow generated in 2021. This does not include the proceeds from the PMM cigars sale. As expected, our cash delivery was impacted by the unwind of last year's 0.7 billion pounds working capital upside, largely due to duty collection timings at Logista and the UK. Our underlying cash conversion remains strong with good progress on working capital management. Our capex was reduced last year as we pause some projects pending our strategic review. I expect CapEx will return this year to our usual levels of around 300 million per annum. As I mentioned earlier, cash will be one of my key priorities. At the end of 2021, our gearing ratio was 2.2 times or 0.5 times lower than the start of the year. This has been driven by three factors as shown here. With about 40% of the improvement driven by our underlying cash generation, capital allocation is important to me and the company, just as I know it is to our equity and debt investors. It is an essential value driver. And our four capital allocation priorities are designed to do just that. Our first priority is to invest in the strategy to create a sustainable business with growing cash flows. Second, it is to strengthen the balance sheet. And I met recently with our credit rating agency who reinforced the importance of debt reduction to underpin our investment grade rating. Third, we are committed to providing reliable cash returns through the dividend. And fourth, We will return surplus capital once the balance sheet is sufficiently robust. We are making good progress, as you can see here, and we will provide more color on capital returns as soon as we move closer to our target leverage. Twenty-two will be the second year of our of our two-year strengthening phase where we will step up investment behind our priority combustible markets in our NGV trials and our new ways of working. And our outlook for this year is consistent with this five-year plan. At constant currency, we expect to deliver net revenue growth at a similar rate to the 1.4% we achieved this year. This reflects some mixed pressure as COVID-19 restrictions are lifted. Adjusted operating profit is expected to grow slightly slower than net revenue, as the U.S. state litigation settlement costs will not be repeated this year, and with the underlying margin held flat by the step-up in investment in line with our plans. We expect performance will be weighted to the second half, reflecting the phasing of investment, the prior year comparator, and timing of COVID unwind. While there is a risk of inflationary cost pressure, as a tobacco company, we are very well placed to manage them through our purchasing strategy, high gross margin, and pricing. A higher tax rate of around 24% will be offset by a lower finance charge. As I have reflected on 2021, I would summarize three main areas of progress this year. We have made a good start to building the foundations for the second phase of our plan, accelerating returns from 2023. Second, we have undertaken work to strengthen our performance with initial promising signs, but more to do. And third, we have made good progress in strengthening our balance sheet, which will give us greater flexibility and a stronger future footing.

speaker
Stefan Bomhard
CEO

you very much with that i'll hand over back to stefan thank you lucas i mean in this section of the presentation i want to give you more of a granular feel for the distinctive culture we're building at imperial and how our people are implementing the strategy now first I would like to remind you that we're now approaching the end of year one in a five-year strategic plan. And as you know, it's a strategy of two unequal halves. The first two years are about foundation building, creating the consumer mindset, enhancing our performance management processes, and creating a simplified, efficient structure. We anticipate The acceleration returns to start in earnest during the subsequent three-year period from fiscal year 23. Across Imperial, it has felt really like an extremely busy and purposeful time in the last 12 months. Now, since I last presented to you in May, still virtual, COVID travel restrictions have been easing in many of our markets. And I have taken the opportunity to meet face to face with consumers, customers and our people on the ground, both in some of our key combustible markets and in the trial markets for pulse and the new blue proposition. Now, this is something I have found incredibly energizing, especially after the COVID core period. And I love hearing the passion of our consumers for our products. And I love hearing from our customers about how they feel Imperial is supporting them. And I love to hear from our people about their new ideas and their efforts for the business in what, thanks to the pandemic, clearly still has been a difficult period of time for many of our people. And our people have a huge energy and a huge hunger to win and when you're on the ground and experience it you can really feel it now one of the key priorities as a leadership team is develop a stronger common culture which will enable our people become even more successful now an important fact about imperial is that while its brands have a deep heritage as a company as a global force in tobacco we are actually quite a young company imperial became an independent listed company only 25 years ago and all our acquisitions have been more recently this means that imperial has not had the time to develop a deep common corporate culture throughout all its subsidiaries now creating the right culture is for me an essential part of this foundation building phase of our strategy. And the shared purpose and value set will make a reality of the critical enablers I discussed earlier, consumer centricity, simplified operations, and a performance driven way of working. Now, when we set out our strategy in January of this year, we said we were developing refreshed purpose and vision statements and behaviors. During the year, We've had conversations with people in the business at all levels and in all regions to gather their thoughts. And we've got some really great ideas and great insights. And last month at Imperial's first ever all staff conference, we launched our new purpose, vision and behaviors, which taken together our new guiding principles. Now, the conference was highly interactive and we received really encouraging feedback from our people. In the coming year, we'll be putting in place a variety of activities to start properly embedding this new culture. On our website in our communications, we now describe our purpose as forging a path to a healthier future for moments of relaxation and pleasure. And our vision is to build a strong challenger business powered by responsibility, focus and choice. I think there are some important ideas contained in these statements, and I'm really happy to discuss them further in our Q&A section. For now, I would like to highlight one concept that is particularly important for me. Our vision to become a strong challenger business. I strongly believe that as the smallest of the big four tobacco players, the only way we will be regarded as the highest quality of the pool players is by operating as a challenger. This means being agile, spotting value pools that play out to our competitive strength, acting as a fast follower where appropriate, and creating competition and choice in the markets. Being a challenger business means challenging on behalf of our consumers. There are 1 billion adult smokers in the world, and I think it's important that they appreciate it as active citizens, diverse individuals, and informed consumers who deserve better choices. In a moment, I'm going to talk about some of the newer choices we are offering consumers, both in combustibles and NGP. Now, being a challenge is also about challenging on behalf of our customers. from the multinational key accounts to the many small family-run tobacconists that we serve. And I know from my visit in the past few months, they want a strong challenger to provide choice in our industry. Finally, being a challenger means being willing to challenge our own business model. We know that we're never going to be the number one in quantity of in-house R&D spent. But where I think Imperial can be number one is in the quality of our third-party relationships as we build a sustainable NGP ecosystem. This is an area where I intend to provide more color at future presentations. ESG is another area where we're building new foundations. Turning our aspiration of a healthier future into reality is really important to me. We're committed to providing adult smokers with potentially reduced harm products. We'll do this by creating an NGP business which is targeted and consumer centric and is therefore able to grow sustainably. And I will outline our new approach in a moment. At the same time, we're going to be careful about issuing bold round numbers targets in this area. The NGP market has surprised on the downside in terms of growth state and as a number four player, the absolute size of the market is not something we can define. And we will develop our NGP business responsibly. Now, Pulse and Blue are designed exclusively with the existing adult smoker in mind. And they're only ever marketed to that community. And we will continue to work hard to restrict use access. Our ESG priorities are aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. And we've already achieved much in the important social and environmental areas, such as energy efficiency, farmer livelihood and reducing waste. However, we recognize the world around us is changing fast. And the climate crisis is no longer something we speak about in the future tense. It's with us here and now. So when we speak about forging a healthier future, we have in mind not just the health of our consumers, but also the wider health of our people, as well as the health of the planet we all share. As a result, we have accelerated our commitment to be net zero by 2040. We've also recruited a new head of ESG to lead a strengthened team who are taking a fresh look at our strategy and priorities. And they are identifying the areas where we can make the strongest positive contributions, as well as assessing how we measure and report success in this area. And we will provide a more detailed update this year. Turning now to our strategic pillars. A key pillar of our new strategy is our greater focus on strength and performance in our five priority combustible markets. As a reminder, we've identified multiple detailed growth initiatives in each of these markets, which we have grouped together into six categories, as you see here on the chart. Let's look at how are we applying these in our priority markets. First, the U.S. Now, the U.S. represents about 35% of our tobacco profit. We also significantly stepped up investments and sales and marketing behind the growth initiatives here. We have recruited 200 extra salespeople, expanding our sales team by around a quarter. And their training is well advanced and a detailed assessment of Salesforce coverage and geography by store is informing us how we're deploying these extra resources. As part of our plan, to improve our participation in the sub-premium segment, we've begun trials of some new packaging for Winston in Texas, consistent with our consumer-led approach. Our actions delivered another 20 basis points of share, the strongest performance in recent years and the third consecutive year of market share growth. As this has been achieved, with Winston and Kool, our sub-premium brands, holding share in their segment while we have continued to grow our share in the deep discount segment through Sonoma and Montclair. And pricing remains strong over the past year, delivering growth in revenue and profit. Our US mass market cigar business is a great example of Imperial operating as a strong challenger Building brands that give consumers exciting choices and executing with creativity and pace. We've achieved an excellent set of results with volumes up over 45%. Growth has been driven primarily by the fast-growing natural leaf segment, and backward is the main driver of that success. We've been leveraging this iconic heritage brand through a complete consumer engagement program, including point of sales promotions, events, and special edition flavors. Some of them you saw outside. These initiatives have delivered more than 500 basis points of share gains, helping us become the number two in mass market cigars, up from number four only a year ago. Now, looking ahead, We've made investments which will improve the sustainability and quality of leaf supply, so we're well placed for further growth in the mass market cigar segment. Turning to Germany, we lost share again here this year, but encouragingly, our share performance did improve over the last four months. We're investing more here too. Also, we are realistic and make time for our initiative to stabilize the trend following nearly 10 years of consecutive years of share decline. Like the US, we've upgraded the effectiveness of our sales teams through new hires and by optimizing their distribution across underrepresented channels and geographies. We've also strengthened our key account capabilities, which have lacked behind our peers. The sales initiatives are starting to deliver results, while we know our investments and brand building initiatives will take longer. However, we have stepped up investments here too, initially with our flagship brand JBS, where we have launched a new campaign under the banner, Let the Players Play. You've seen some of the materials outside. It is an encouraging start, but it remains a highly competitive market. by investing smartly and executing well with much more we can do here. Going over to Australia, we made a deliberate choice here to prioritize financial delivery by putting through price increases in September 2020. Now this had a significant impact on market share in the first half of the fiscal year. We've since taken steps to address this decline, consistent with our value-led approach in this market. We adjusted prices on specific product lines to ensure their price points reflected their brand equity and competitive positioning on the price ladder. We refocused on building key account relationships and improving trade advocacy, which has been a strength in the past but had lost focus recently. We invested in new crush ball formats for Parkinson's Simpson in the fifth price tier and behind our Riverstone brand in the fine cut segment to deliver share gains in the second half. Again, encouraging progress in a highly competitive market. We delivered share gains in the United Kingdom and in Spain, which have both been supported by our focus on local dual brands. Now, this is an important change in our strategy. Across many of our markets, we are now refocusing on local brands, our national champions, which have historically been neglected in favor of their international stablemates. Now, this neglect has contributed to share losses over quite a number of years. And these same local brands are now key to our long-term recovery. In the UK, we relaunched Embassy Signature. Now, this has tapped into the latent consumer connection with Embassy, while at the same time leveraging our strong trade partnerships and filling regional gaps in distribution, particularly in the south of the UK. We have achieved a 1.8% share for embassy signature in this first year. A great result, especially in a dark market like the UK. Now in Spain, you might not know this, our three largest brands are all local brands. Noble, Fortuna and Ducasus had all struggled in recent years through a lack of investment. Noble has strong equity with national coverage and with revitalized interests through a successful program of limited edition packs. We've also invested in new pack formats with Fortuna, which have performed well. I've highlighted just a few of the investment initiatives in these priority markets. The early progress is encouraging, and I look forward to updating you in the coming year. While our greater focus is on the five priority markets with other attractive markets in the portfolio and regions with the potential to be future growth engines. Looking at the tobacco portfolio, we grew share by 20 basis points worldwide. We've already highlighted the potential of Africa, which as a region represents 8% of our tobacco operating profit. Now, in several francophone markets, we are the number one player with strong brands and unparalleled route to markets. The region has been overlooked in the past, resulting in underinvestment and a performance that has not matched the market potential. Again, we're using multiple levers. The better application of our global brands, such as Goldwells, in more premium price tiers. Leveraging a renewed focus on our local dual brands, filling gaps in the price ladder and closing our sales coverage gaps. Encouragingly, these initiatives delivered an 8% growth in revenue and 20% increase in profit for the region. Turning now to NGP, as I said earlier, We have an opportunity to build a successful NGP business that can make a meaningful contribution to harm reduction, one that plays to our strengths and is centered around meeting consumer needs. Our new approach is different from the past and from our larger competitors. And it's another good example of our challenger mindset in action. We will be focused on the markets where an MGP category already has an established presence and where we can leverage our existing combustible route to markets. These will be our strongholds in the United States and especially in Europe. Our role in these markets will be to provide greater consumer choice with a differentiated product offering that meets an untapped consumer need. And it's not about having a market-leading product, just one that captures the interest of our target consumers. We have often focused too much on the product and its features at the expense of the total consumer offering. Now it's a lot more about the branding, the consumer communication, and the role of our trade partners in providing consumers with a compelling offer. It's also a cost-effective approach, which will be disciplined and measured, and most importantly, placed to our strengths, our smaller size, and our ambitions. I'm pleased to be here to be able to report that we launched Pulse, our heated tobacco proposition in the Czech Republic and in Greece, in line with our plans. This allows us to start bringing our energy peace strategy alive for you, and demonstrate what we meant in January. Our choice of pilots was made after careful consideration of available data and based on the assessment of the need for consumers' and customers' choice. Heated tobacco has become well established in both markets, having been launched several years ago. In each country, the category now represents at least 10% of the total nicotine market and continues to grow well. And in each country, Imperial has a well-established route to market with a 15% share in the Czech Republic and a 12% share in Greece. The compact nature of both markets allows a national launch, so we can fully test our proposition. Now, it's early days, but we have had an encouraging initial response from both trials. How do I define an encouraging response, you might ask? First, we have achieved distribution targets in both markets very quickly. Our customers have welcomed the opportunity offer consumers an alternative offering in this space. I saw this firsthand when I visited both markets in the past month and met trade partners in 30 different outlets. Now, while we've achieved good trial rates with consumers, the key test will be the consumer feedback and repurchase rate over the coming months. Now, this will be critical in informing our next steps and will be a good test of our new approach. And I look forward to updating you on this and our interim results. I'm also pleased we began our trials of a refreshed consumer marketing proposition for Blue. in the US, in Charlotte, in North Carolina. Now, since this is the US, we have not changed the product because of the PMTA constraints. The focus again is on the overall consumer offering, the packaging, a new marketing campaign, working with the trade on the point of sales presence, and developing a new online sales platform. Now, this has been developed with the oversight of Andy Dasgupta and his team who we are now starting to leverage with all their capabilities. Again, this is early days. We've made encouraging progress, but we'll wait to see the continued consumer feedback. So overall, I am pleased with the progress made in this first year of our strategy. We're starting to see green shoots emerging as a result of the actions that we've taken. Now, looking ahead at 2022, fiscally at 22, we will continue to focus on building these foundations and to strengthen the key areas of our investment case. Fiscal 22 is a further step up year in investments in our private markets to support the revitalization of our core tobacco business. Our NGP trials will allow us to test our NGP approach and inform our next steps towards making a meaningful contribution to harm reduction and provide options for growth. We're rolling out new ways of working, which will drive operational improvements and strengthen our performance. And our focus on strong cash flow will remain a key priority, as you heard from Lukas. and we will remain highly disciplined in our capital allocation, which we fully recognize as a key part of our investment case. Back in January, we set out a clear five-year plan. Today, we've been able to confirm we have delivered on our first year's objective. This, I hope, gives you the confidence in our ability to continue to deliver for you and to realize the full potential of this business. The new team is in place to lead the transformation and deliver a stronger, more consistent performance and unlock value for shareholders in the years to come. So thank you for joining me today. Lucas and me would now love to take any of your questions, either here in the room or online. Thank you.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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