Fonterra Shareholders Fd

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Fonterra Cooperative Group's 2025 Interim Results Briefing. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you'll need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I'd now like to hand the conference over to Peter McBride, Chair of Fonterra. Please go ahead.

Kia ora, thanks everyone for joining us today and welcome to Fonterra's FY25 Interim Results Briefing. I'm Fonterra's chair, Peter McBride, and I'm joined by Miles Hurrell, our CEO, and Andrew Murray, our CFO. I want to acknowledge the positive results the Co-op delivered for the first half of Fall Year 25. These results show Fonterra's strategy in action and represent a lot of hard work by Miles and the team against what is a challenging operating environment for many businesses. As I've said before, Fonterra is an extension of our own farmers' businesses. It exists to provide certainty and manage risk on their behalf while maximising their returns. Farmer shareholders will be pleased to see the co-op reliably delivering earnings, especially in the context of a high forecast farm gate milk price. and the geopolitical uncertainty that continues to ramp up globally. I'll now hand over to Myles and Andrew to speak to the results. Thanks, Myles.

Thanks, Peter. Starting first with our strategy. We've made good progress on implementation while continuing to drive financial performance. We're getting cash to farmers sooner by accelerating the advance rate schedule. As we focus on delivering the strongest farmer offering, we have announced new funding for farmers with lower emissions milk and expanded the fixed milk price programme. We're also looking to the future with investments in site upgrades to create capacity and unlock growth in our ingredients and food service channels. Turning to the numbers, we've had a strong first half with our lift in operating performance. Profit after tax is up 8% to $729 million, or equivalent to 44 cents a share. Our return on capital for the 12 months to 31 January is 10.2%, slightly ahead of our targeted range. Overall, our earnings performance and strong balance sheet have enabled us to pay a fully imputed interim dividend of 22 cents per share compared with an unimputed 15 cent dividend last year. Looking now at our global supply and demand, overall dairy market conditions remain favorable with continued strong demand from key importing regions. On the supply side, the US and Europe are slowly improving as both regions recover from animal health challenges. New Zealand and Australia have both had favorable weather conditions compared to last year, a key driver in the improved productivity. However, both parts of the country are experiencing drier conditions now. On the demand side, we continue to see robust demand coming from most regions, and it is pleasing to see China continue to recover with the last three months up 3.9% year on year. As we look ahead, the global geopolitical outlook is increasingly uncertain, but we're well positioned to manage volatility through our channel and market diversification. I'll now hand over to Andrew to take us through more of the detail. Thank you.