Tate & Lyle plc

Good morning and welcome to the conference call for Tate & Lyle's Q3 trading statement. Your speakers today are Nick Hampton, Chief Executive, and Dawn Allen, Chief Financial Officer. I will now hand over to Nick Hampton for some opening remarks.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Tate & Lyle's third quarter conference call. I will make some brief introductory comments, and then Dawn and I will be happy to take your questions. The group continued to deliver resilient performance in challenging market conditions. We continued to make good strategic progress with further new product momentum and a continued increase in investment in solution selling and innovation. Importantly, productivity, cost discipline, and cash delivery remained strong. In food and beverage solutions, volume and revenue were lower in the quarter, with revenue down 3%. This was due to softer consumer demand and customer destocking, reduced inflation pass-through, and some customers phasing orders into the fourth quarter. When new calendar year contracts, which included the pass-through of input cost inflation, deflation, came into effect, superlatives delivered an improved performance in the quarter. The renewal of customer contracts for the 2024 calendar year is expected to deliver a sequential improvement in volume growth as the year progresses. It's encouraging that with these new customer contracts in place and the phasing of some customer orders from December, we saw good volume growth in January. Turning to the outlook for the year ending 31st of March 2024, in constant currency, we expect to deliver revenue slightly lower than the prior year, with our EBITDA guidance unchanged at growth of between 7% and 9%. We also continue to expect stronger profits from our minority holding in premiums. With that, I will open up the call for questions.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question or make a contribution on today's call, please take note by pressing star 1. telephone keypad. To withdraw your question from the queue, please press star two. So again, that is star one for your questions today. And our first question comes from Patrick Higgins from GoodBuddy. Please go ahead.