CRH plc

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to welcome you to our 2021 results presentation for CRH. My name is Albert Manifold. I'm the chief executive. And this morning, I'll be joined later on by Jim Mintern, our CFO. And together, Jim and I are going to briefly take you through the key headlines of our results for 2021. Now, before we go into that, I want to take a moment to talk to the nearly 80,000 people who have worked for CRH during the course of 2021. We had the continual challenges of COVID, trying to live our lives in the most normal way, the stop-start nature of what COVID impacts upon our world. But all of you went about your life as normal as you could and helped produce what was a really strong 2021. On behalf of your management team and your board, I want to sincerely thank you for those tremendous efforts. I referred to COVID there, and of course, we all hope we're in the end game of the challenges that COVID has brought to us. Let's see how that plays out. Of course, in recent times, new uncertainties and new challenges have emerged. All I can say to you is that we as a senior team, most of us have been here for 20 years. And we have seen this country through some tough times, particularly the global financial crisis and the recent COVID challenges. And we're confident that we have the the sensible nature to our lives, the maturity, the experience to see us through and navigate Sears through whatever choppy waters may be ahead of us into calmer waters. I should say this morning's presentation, whilst I'm talking to you like this, there'll be some slides and presentations behind me. You can follow this presentation with an accompanying slide deck on our website, and I'll be referring to those slides as we go through the presentation. So look, we have a busy schedule this morning and just to give you a sense of the running order that we're seeing here. First and foremost, Jim and I are going to take you through some of the key numbers for 2021 and some of the key trends that were evident in our business during last year and see how they are moving forward and impacting on this year. We also want to take you through some of the way we've been positioning our business and repositioning our business in recent years and how that has changed our business. We're changing because construction is changing and how that has been impacted by our delivery of the solutions model that has been underpinning so much of the delivery in recent years. We're also going to talk about our investor updates in April and to give you a better sense of what we want to talk to you, our shareholders, about to take you through our thoughts. Of course, we will talk about our expectations for 2022 and see how this year has started and how we expect it to evolve. And as usual, we'll have questions and answers at the end. Now, it's not quite normal questions and answers. We're still living in a virtual world at the moment. But later on, I'm going to be joined on stage by Jim and indeed by Tom Holmes, our head of investor relations. And they will be feeling the questions. Tom will be feeling the questions that you are sending in online to him, and he will fill them to us during that part of the session. So if I can just move on and looking at slide two, if those of you are following us on the internet, just to talk about our year 2021. Look, another strong year, another year of continued growth for CRH. Some great numbers there, but for me, the standout last year were two numbers. Number one, the margin improvement, and the second one was the cash generation across our business. We turned 80 cents out of every dollar we earned into cash. And we deployed that cash quite sensibly across our businesses. We invested about $2 billion investing in developing our business through M&A and through expansionary capex. We returned about $1.8 billion through cash returns back to you, our shareholders. And we finished the year with one of the strongest balance sheets we have had in our history. That relentless focus on generating profitability, turning it into cash and making sure we manage our balance sheets in a disciplined way has long been a part of the DNA of CRH and long may it remain so. This morning we also announced the proposed dividend for this year of 121 cents, a 5% increase on last year. And as most of you will have seen earlier this week, we announced the divestment of our Old Castle building envelope division for $3.8 billion. And Jim is going to take you through some more details of that later on in the presentation. If I can just take you through some of the key financial highlights, as I say to you, a robust performance, sales ahead by 12% and profits ahead by 16%. And it's very pleasing for me as chief executive of this business to stand here and say, look, the key metrics that we manage, sales, profits, margins, returns, and cash, all heading in the right direction for 2021. But the key metric for me is margins. In a world where we face significant cost headwinds, when almost everybody else was taking a step backward on margin, CRH was stepping forward. And that really is down to the heart of what we're doing in our business, the solutions model, which makes us into much more of a price maker than a price taker. And very pleasing to see, as you can see on slide three, for those following online, again, the returns moving ahead. You know, few people want to talk about returns for the obvious reasons, but we never stop thinking about them. They're not where we want them to be, but we have been making progress and there's more to go there. If I can now turn to our two major markets that we're in, in principle, the first one to North America, which makes up about 70% of our group EBITDA. And just to remind you of the franchise we have in that part of the world. Historically speaking, we were based in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest part of the United States. In the past 15 years, we've had a strong push South and West as we follow basically population trends and economic growth. And now we find ourselves having a great mix of stable cash flow generated in the northeast and higher growth as we push south and west. As I talk about that northeast part of the United States, and I mean all the way across the Midwest, that really is home to the most intensive and extensive road infrastructure network in the world. Now, they don't build too many new roads there. But they have to do significant repair and maintenance as a result of the really brutal North American winters. Those roads have to be replaced and repaired pretty much every seven years. CRH has over decades built up a fantastic franchise across that geography of 120 million people. We provide a great service. We have long-standing partnerships with the states in that part of the world. And we have multi-year projects that carry on year after year. That is really just a bond for us, that business. It just keeps coming in. It's great business. And, of course, it helps us as we push south and west, chasing the higher growth, aligning our business with the stronger growth areas driven by population trends, movements, and economic growth in the south and west. And now we find ourselves here, again, the number one building materials in North America, the number one building materials in the most profitable construction market in the world, where demand is underpinned by three fundamentals – Strong population growth. The US population grows by about 30 million people every 10 years. Strong economic growth. And crucially, the money to pay for both public and private investment in construction. We have a balanced end use across our North American businesses. We are skewed more towards infrastructure. That's where we want to be, both public and private. It's our core competence. We like large scale, complicated, horizontal construction, both above and below the ground. That has been underpinned in recent years by strong federal support and state spending. And of course, you will have seen in November of last, the infrastructure and investment bill that was signed that committed a further $1.2 trillion to infrastructure spend in the United States in the coming years. That will increase the spend on infrastructure from the federal government by about 50% over the next five years compared to the previous five years. And that aligns very, very well with our solution strategy. Complex, complicated, specified, highly regulated, large, awkward, horizontal construction is perfect for us to play. Because we don't just provide products or materials, we provide services such as design, planning, engineering that goes with it. And that is at the heart of the solution strategy. If I can turn to the biggest business that we have, our America's materials business, which is significantly exposed to infrastructure, delighted to see that sales in EBITDA were ahead in 2021 over the previous year and volumes ahead in all products. But the story of this business is the margin, a business which is hugely exposed to energy costs. And we had very, very difficult headwinds last year. And yet we still managed to move the margin ahead. Attesting to the fact we have a different business model. And we tried to explain it by saying we don't sell rocks anymore. We sell complete road systems. We exited that business last year with very strong backlogs. And that has continued into the first quarter of this year. And as I stand here today on the 3rd of March, our backlogs are well ahead of last year. on the three key metrics for us in terms of quantum dollar terms, in terms of the volumes of products and also the margin within those businesses. So that bodes well for a good start to 2022 in our Americas materials business. On slide seven, if I can move over to building products, another continuous strong performance by this division. Now this division is made by three businesses. Our APG business, our architectural products business, which mainly is a US residential play for new and repair and maintenance. It provides products for the outdoor living space, the backyard. We own that backyard. Now, 2020 was a record year for APG until 2021 came. So that also was a bigger year, a new record. That's the gift that just keeps on giving. It's a fantastic business. The second business we have is our infrastructure product business. And again, this is effectively a play on new infrastructure. This provides products and materials that transports vital utilities around the United States. Principally, it's in and around water, the transportation of potable water, wastewater, sewage around the U.S., but also about vital utilities such as telecommunications, information technology, largely underground, but also overground as well. Highly specified work, which is where we like to play. And the last business in our building products business is our OBE business. the one that we announced at the disposal of on Monday, a very solid year on the back of a recovering non-res industry in North America. This is the ninth consecutive year this division has shown profit and margin growth. Now, that is not just happening because the industry is helping us or there are favorable tailwinds. That's happening because this business is absolutely the focus of our integrated solution strategy, which continues to deliver for us. But we'll talk about that later on. If I can move over across the Atlantic to our other main region, Europe. I said we're the largest building materials business in North America. We're also the largest building materials business in Europe, and crucially, the largest building materials business in the high growth central and eastern European markets. Last year, we saw resilient repair and maintenance business in four key markets, France, Germany, the UK and Ireland, and resilient residential spend across those markets. Happily, we're starting to see Western Europe really becoming a hub for innovative, sustainable construction in our businesses. And the really good thing about this is that we can then communicate and transport this to other high growth markets, both in Central and Eastern Europe and the South and Western part of the United States. It's easy to transfer that knowledge and understanding, which is key to our solutions business. In Central and Eastern Europe, the two big markets of Poland and Romania again benefited from EU stimulus packages, and again, very good demand for residential construction. I'm delighted to see again in Eastern Europe a higher take-up for more complex end-to-end solutions, which we see in other parts of our business. Now, before I talk about trading in Europe, I must mention our businesses in Ukraine. We employ over 800 people across four locations in Ukraine. From Odessa in the South Central and the Black Sea, all across the West, the two big operations over there on Mykolaiv, which is close to the Polish border, and Kamianets-Podilsky, which is close to the Moldovan-Romanian border. Happily, all of our 800 people are safe and away from the conflict zones. We are doing all that we can to work with them, work with their businesses, and work with their families to support them in any way we possibly can. For those who want to move west across the border, we are helping and facilitating the movement of them across the border up to this morning. About 60 families have moved across into Poland and Romania principally, and we are supporting them when they get across that border. And I know that all our thoughts are with them this morning in terms of the challenges they're faced with and indeed the future ahead. If I can move to the trading performance of our Europe Materials Division in 2021. Again, I'm very happy to see both sales and EBITDA ahead of 2020, but they should be because we had a big chunk lost out of 2020 as a result of COVID. But they're also ahead of 2019. So we are ahead of pre-COVID activity levels in terms of sales and profitability, but also in margin. The margin we have performance in 2021 in the teeth of those cost headwinds is ahead of a pre-COVID 2019. So when all else are going backwards, SeaRage are stepping forwards. It's not just good cost control. It's not just commercial excellence. It's about our solution strategy that is embedded within our business, delivering higher performance. And specifically, I call it within our Europe materials business, we saw really good infrastructure spend in France, UK and Poland, and pretty much residential was strong everywhere across our markets. So that's just a brief review of our main markets. I'm now going to pass it over to Jim, who's joining me on stage, who's going to take you through a more detailed review of the financial performance of our business in 2021.

Thanks, Albert. Good morning, everybody. I'm delighted to be here this morning presenting my first set of results as CFO. On slide 11, what we have here is an overview of our cash flow and our net debt position at the end of 2021. I think this slide is a really good example of how our relentless focus on cash generation and our disciplined capital allocation has ensured a strong balance sheet at the end of December 2021. Moving from the left, we exited 2020 with a net debt of $5.9 billion. The cash inflow for 2021 was $4.2 billion. We converted 80% of our EBITDA into cash and we reinvested in the growth of our business. We also returned cash to our shareholders. We completed M&A activity, 20 Bolton acquisitions, a net CAD outflow of $1.2 billion. That figure is net of divestment proceeds. We spent $1.6 billion on capital expenditure. And we returned $1.8 billion to your shareholders. And I'm going to go into a bit more detail on each of those in a moment. That all resulted in a net debt position at the end of December 21 of $6.3 billion, or 1.2 times net debt to EBITDA. That's one of the strongest balance sheets we've had in the history of CRH and gives us optionality for further value creation for shareholders into the future. I'd now like to talk about some of our acquisition activity in 2021. We completed 20 bolt-on acquisitions for a consideration of $1.5 billion. That represented an EBITDA entry-level pre-synergies of seven times, which really highlights our focus on maintaining our strong financial discipline, which of course has been a real hallmark of CRH for many years. Looking into a bit more detail on those acquisitions, the vast majority of the acquisitions were in high-growth markets, in the South, in the West, in the Mountain West states of the United States. And there were areas where we built out our integrated solution strategy, adding complementary products and services, leveraging and building out, filling in around our existing materials and products businesses in these same regions. Previously, we used to sell products, but today we are providing end-to-end value-added solutions to our customers. We're solving the problems they face every day. We used to sell rocks. Today, we are selling road solutions to our customers. We had lots of opportunities in 2021 for M&A activity. We have a strong pipeline as we enter into 2022. And I mentioned that we had significant financial capacity coming out of 2021. However, as CFO, I can tell you that whatever opportunities come our way, we will remain disciplined and never lose our focus on shareholder value. Albert mentioned earlier that on Monday earlier this week, we announced the disposal of a building envelope business for an enterprise value of $3.8 billion. That represented a very attractive exit multiple of 10.5 times 2021 EBITDA. And we expect that deal to close in the first half of 2022. The reason behind the investment decision followed a comprehensive review of that business. As you're well aware, we have been active managers of our portfolio. We divest, we've reinvested, and we continuously recycle the capital. And in fact, since 2014, we have divested $12 billion of our businesses at an exit multiple of 11 times, and we've reinvested $18 billion at an entry level of eight times multiple. And as a result, today, we now have a narrower, simpler, more focused, and more connected business. which is a higher quality asset base, generating higher growth, higher margins, better cash, and crucially, higher returns. I mentioned earlier about our strong balance sheet at the end of December 21. We exited at 1.2 times net debt to EBITDA. And of course, that gives us optionality for further future value creation. When I look at it, this optionality falls into a number of categories. Firstly, in terms of acquisitions, we continue to focus on the high growth markets. We continue to look for opportunities to build out our integrated solutions, businesses which are connected into our existing material and products businesses in those same areas. We have a good pipeline of activity, but of course, we're going to maintain our discipline when we consider every possible option. Looking on to capital expenditure, and particularly around expansionary capex, We spent 1.6 billion of capex in 2021. In 2020, with the pandemic, we had considerable uncertainty across a lot of our markets and we curtailed our capital expenditure activity. As we exited 2020, visibility improved in our business and we were able to step up our level of capital expenditure to the 1.6 billion spend in 2021. A lot of that spend happened in those same growth states, so Florida, Texas, into Arizona, out into California, and as well in that solution space. And I was delighted to be able to support those projects because some of those projects are the lowest-risk, high-returning projects we have within CRH. So it was a delight, as I said, to be able to see that tick up in CapEx in 2021 up to $1.6 billion. Also, further optionality about returning cash to our shareholders. Albert mentioned earlier, we've proposed a 5% increase in dividend. That represents 38 years of a progressive dividend policy in CRH. We're in the current tranche of the share buyback of $300 million, which will finish no later than the 30th of March. And that, at the end of December 21, we had returned over $3 billion, or almost 10% of our share capital to our shareholders. All of these acquisitions, the capital expenditure, the return of cash to our shareholders are crucially supported and underpinned by our structurally better business that we have today, which is delivering higher growth, higher margins and higher returns. I'll now hand back to Albert. Thank you.

Thanks, Jim. Jim. talks there about a structurally better business, and that's a term we use in CRH, and we've used it for quite a few years. But what do we mean by a structurally better business? How do we back up this claim? How do we measure on some of the key metrics upon which we should be judged? Well, let's go and look at some of those key metrics. First metric I want to look at is our EBITDA growth. Look at our EBITDA growth against our peers. Here we show our peers being our global peers, the big cement guys that are out there. Our US peers, we've got two major US peers, I won't name them, you know who they are. And it looks at the growth in our EBITDA on 2018 to 2021. Now, I didn't arbitrarily pick this period of time. Actually, I could have picked any period. You can go back and check it yourself. But here you can see CRH has outgrown anybody else in our industry. So, okay, that's interesting to see. So you can buy growth, you can take on growth anyway, you can be well positioned. How well are you running your business? How efficiently are you running your business? Well, let's look at the margins in our business. Let's look at the next slide. This looks at the expansion of our margin over the same period of time. Great performance by our global peers, almost 3% ahead. US peers, a little bit ho-hum, but CRH almost 500 basis points ahead. By investing in our business model, by investing within a business, by working hard every day, we have improved the efficiency of a business to bring that margin performance. How does it all end up? Let's look at the next metric. Look at operating cash. In the end, it's all about cash. And here again, you find CRH the winner. The good performance by both our global and US peers, very good, very impressive. But CRH ahead yet again. You know, it doesn't matter what I pick. It doesn't matter the metrics. It doesn't matter the period. CRH outperforms. We have delivered superior value to you, our shareholders. Now, we know getting to the top is one thing, but staying there is something else. And CRH has no interest in being static in any way, shape, or form. We want to put more distance between ourselves and our peers. And let me explain to you how we think we can go about doing that. CRH has been a changing business over the last decade. We have made great changes to our business model and to our structure. We have reshaped our business over the last 10 years. 50% of the business that we owned a decade ago have been sold. We've repositioned our business. We've disposed of the peripheral geographies and we've focused on our two core markets, developed world markets of North America and Europe. But importantly, within those markets, we've geographically refocused. We've pushed hard to the central and eastern European part of Europe where there's higher growth. We've pushed south and west across the US with a strong population and economic growth. We've caught that rebalancing of our business between strong cash cows of western Europe and northeast United States supplements the high growth businesses that we have in the east of Europe and the south and west of the United States. We've become a narrower and deeper business. We have refocused our business on core areas of competence. We are less an intermediate supplier of base commodity materials. We have got closer to the ultimate customer, our customer and our customer's customer, over the last 10 years. And as we've moved down that value chain, we have understood an awful lot more about our customers' needs and their problems. And that has allowed us to solve some of their problems for us by improving our offering. Sometimes it's about broadening out the product range. Sometimes it's working with them to make them understand how we can adapt our materials and innovate our materials to make their lives easier. Offsite construction, more complex construction, working with their designers and their engineers to make their life easier. And I can best express this by two of our major businesses, our fastest growing businesses. Our America's Materials business, 15 years ago, principally just broke rock and sold rock, a basic commodity. Well, then we decided we want to turn that rock into asphalt. And in turning it into asphalt, we decided, well, maybe we should get involved in actually laying some of that asphalt. And having laid some of that asphalt, our customer said to us, well, look, if you're providing the rock and the asphalt and you're building the road, Who's going to handle all the culverts and the water runoff? And how are we going to manage the on-ramps and the off-ramps and the bridges? And we got more and more involved in that. And now we are a complete supplier of the whole road solution to our major customers, the federal government and the states in the United States. I look at our APG business, our fastest growing business across CRH for almost 10 years. 15 years ago, that was a business that basically sold grey pavers. that were used for commercial or indeed industrial purposes. And then we started to think, well, maybe we can start making them in different colors and different shapes and different sizes. And we can bring them to the residential market. And then we worked with the two major big box customers, Lowe's and Home Depot's in North America to start branching out and broadening our product range to not just make pavers, but hardscapes and walling products and capstones and bark mulch and swimming pool products. So now our offering to our customer and our customer's customer is the complete range of products. And when we talk to the outdoor manufacturer, the actual contractor who designs this and puts it in place, we help him design it for his customers. Again, it's a complete package. We have helped our customers by finding out what their problems were and adding value to our offering to them. And by adding value to our customers, we're getting paid for it. It is no longer any good to be a sole provider of base materials in the world that we live in. Quite simply, you cannot run a business in 2022 with a strategy that was conceived in 1970 or 1980. You have to adapt and move on, whatever business you're in. And our focus on solving our end customers' problems is at the core of how we're going to grow Searage for the next decade. We call the integration of materials and products and services, we call that integrated solutions. And it comes to life by some of the examples that I've explained to you. That evolving part of our business is responsible for about 65% of sales so far across our businesses. And it benefits our customers, it benefits CRH, and it benefits you, our shareholders. Now let me explain how it benefits those three important stakeholders. Let me first of all talk about our customers. You know, I'm talking to you this morning, our investors, our owners, our shareholders. Actually, I spend most of my time, as my colleagues do, talking to our customers. And we hear consistent themes coming back to us. They are coming under increasing pressure with regulations, specifications, ever-changing government policy. They're under pressure to become more sustainable, to decarbonize, to recycle more. They're under pressure to improve the quality of their construction, to improve the lifespan and resilience of what they build. And at the same time, they have to speed up construction. They have to clean up construction to reduce the impact of construction on the local environment. And all of this has to be done against the background of, we want lower costs. And the constriction of the fact that labour supply is tightening. Now, government set vision and they set policy. But they never tell anybody what to do or how to do it. The contractors, well, their job is full. They're focusing on the complex matter of the construction process itself. And more and more, contractors, designers, architects and engineers are turning to manufacturers like ourselves to collaborate and innovate with them on how we produce materials and products that can solve their problems and deal with the challenges they are faced with. I mentioned already, we are the number one building materials business in North America. were the number one building materials in Europe, the two most complex regulated markets in the world. Nobody has that breadth of understanding of the materials and products of the different end uses, the different geographic challenges or the climatic challenges that CRH has. We are the ones who are best positioned to pull all that knowledge across that breadth of end use, geographies, business areas, to put it together to find solutions for our customers. It takes solutions. That ability, that knowledge takes our solution strategy right into the heart of our customers' offices as we help with them design the products that will build the world of tomorrow without destroying the world we have today. It's good for CRH. solutions that delivers for series because our two major markets are of course very heavily regulated there are solid fundamentals of population growth economic growth and indeed money to pay for the businesses going forward we're focused on our core area of competence which primarily are infrastructure and residential they are both very heavy regulated and specified areas there are policies that are enforced and are required to do business there on the provision of materials and how you construct and there is an ever-increasing focus on sustainability Resilience, increasing efficiency, lowering costs. And if you can tick the boxes on all of those issues, you will see increased demand. And companies that innovate and deliver and adapt to that changing environment will be rewarded with extra business. And we see that as being high quality growth. And that's what has been behind the delivery for the last three or four years in CRH. And ultimately, this all comes together for you, our shareholders. It brings benefits to you. You have seen the last three or four years how we have delivered superior performance. By focusing more on the public purse, by focusing more on what we consider to be a resilient residential demand going forward for the next number of years, we think we have reduced the cyclicality of our business. But running a solutions business across the materials products, it's a complex business. You need a different skill set to manage the different parts of the value chain. But CRH has always managed different businesses in different ways. And we have shown our ability to do that in recent years. And we're confident that by the execution of solutions and extension of that business across our existing profile, it will translate into higher growth in sales, profitability, margins, and cash. Now, I can't leave the subject of solutions without talking about sustainability. Sustainability is at the very core of our integrated solution strategy. And decarbonisation is at the core of our sustainability strategy. We have a long track record of industry-leading carbon reduction in CRH. Last year, we pulled back our 2030 targets back into 2025. And today, we're announcing new targets. We will reduce, over the 10 years to 2030, our total emissions of CO2 by 25%. Let me be very specific. In 2020, we emitted 46 million tonnes in total of CO2. And we are committing this morning to reduce that to 35 million tonnes by the year 2030. It's a 25% reduction. I wish I had time this morning to go through more detail on that. I don't. It would take about 45 minutes. But that's why we have set aside time in April at our investor audit to do that. And in April, we'll explain to you exactly how we're going to do that. When we will achieve it, what will be the cost? All of these plans have been verified by the SPTI to 2030 and take us in line with our overall ambition of being a net zero carbon company by 2050. Now, there's a lot more to sustainability than decarbonisation. It's also important to talk about circularity and indeed the products that we make that will build a more sustainable world. For a decade, CRH has been focused on circularity. It's a deeply embedded part of our business now. I stand here this morning with great pride to say to you, I'm the CEO of a business that is the largest recycler of any product in the United States. We recycle, nobody recycles more plastic or paper or cardboard. We recycle more building waste than any We recycle more product than anybody else. But what do we do with it? Well, we're also the largest road builder in the United States. And today, the roads we're building, 25% of all those roads are being built with recycled material. It took us a decade to get there. It's progressive work. It will increase in the years ahead. But by using recycled material in the building of roads, we are protecting and preserving the scarce resources that are out there. And, of course, we are extending the vital expensive reserves that CRH owns. Also, 100% of all the products we make are recyclable. Now, we have invested over the last decade over a billion dollars within our businesses on innovation. A lot of it has been focused on increasing sustainability. A lot of it has been actually responsible for delivering the solution strategy that's delivering for CRH today. And we will continue to do that going forward. However, additionally, we have set up a $250 million venture fund. specifically to commercialize some of the really good projects that we have up and running within our businesses to commercialize them more, to see exactly how we can get them to market that can contribute not just to our business, but also to the sustainability agenda for our industry. If I can leave you with three key thoughts how we think about sustainability in CRH. We are committed to producing the materials that we produce in a more sustainable way. We are also committed to innovating and producing products that will enable our customers construct in a more sustainable way. It probably means more offsite manufacturing and more industrialization. And crucially, we are committed to innovating and manufacturing products that will help us all live our lives in a more sustainable way. And we will talk a lot more about that when we talk in April. The reason why we've asked for this investor update in April is because we want to have a mature conversation with our shareholders. We want to take time outside of the very busy reporting window we find ourselves in at the moment and take an opportunity to expand on the key components of our integrated solution strategy. There's no big reveal here. This is about a mature conversation to explain to you how we are going to deliver more value to all stakeholders in CRH and how we place sustainability and in particular, decarbonisation and circularity, right at the core of our strategy. We'll also set out how our portfolio is going to evolve in the decade ahead and how we are going to allocate the fruits of our work, the capital, to maximise value for you, our shareholders. Now, the format of the investor day is shown on slide 27. It's a live webcast. Myself and Jim will be there. We'll be joined by Randy Lake, our Chief Operating Officer, It'll be on at 9 a.m. East Coast time, 2 p.m. GMT. And we'll take about 60 minutes to discuss our plans and our thoughts. And we'll have plenty of time for Q&A afterwards. I'm sure you'll find it very interesting. I look forward to updating you on that. So with that, I'd just like to conclude this part of the presentation by talking about our outlook for 2022. You've heard me talk about the fact we've had a strong start, a strong finish to the year. We've also had good order books. The momentum in our businesses is good. Demand is there. So we look forward with positivity. Of course, there are challenges. There are challenges with regard to cost. There are challenges with regard to the uncertainty of what's going to happen in Central and Eastern Europe. However, we will have a strong focus on the matters that we can control. Our costs, our commercial excellence, and we'll keep focused on our cash. And we'll update you again when we speak to you in April. So with that, that's the end of the formal part of the presentation this morning. What I'd like to now do is move to Q&A. I'm joined here by Tom Holmes, our Head of Investor Relations, and Jim. And together, I guess, for the next 25 or 30 minutes, what we're going to do is just take your questions that you've sent in to Tom and answer them in the best way we can. Tom, good morning. Hi. Thanks, Albert.