Victrex plc

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Victrex Q3 IMS call hosted by Chief Executive Officer Eason and Chief Financial Officer Ian Melling. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session, and instructions will follow at that time. I would like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to Jakob Sigurdsson to open the call. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thank you, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to the call for Vectrex's Q3 interim management statement. I'm Jakob Sigurdsson, CEO, and I'm joined on the call by Ian Melling, our CFO, and Andrew Hansen, our head of IR. I will firstly summarize the key points of the announcement. Ian will then cover the numbers. Now we're going to come back and touch on some further progress in our mega programs, and then explain the latest outlook. We will then open the call to Q&A towards the end. Remember also that today's IMS follows on from a recent trading update three weeks ago, where we indicated that our expectations for Q3 and revised expectations for the full year. The overall key message today is that the outlook for the year is unchanged from what we communicated in that announcement. And in fact, the Q3 numbers are in line with our guidance at that time. So let's first turn to the headlines from Q3. Firstly, volumes are lower on macroeconomic weakness and destocking across several end markets. And as we talked about a few weeks ago, this is driven by electronics, energy and industrial, and value-added retailers. Ian will cover those numbers separately in his session. We do continue to see really good progress in aerospace, which is on track for double-digit growth on a full-year basis. Automotive is also stable. And in medical, we're pleased that we're continuing to see good progress. And this business is well on track for double-digit growth, although we do have a tougher second half comparative in medical. And remember, the second half of 2022 saw a bounce back in elective surgeries across several regions. So overall, despite a very challenging period, we do remain well positioned for a macroeconomic recovery. And I will now hand it over to Ian.

Ian.