Serco Group Plc Sp/Adr

Thank you, Nigel. Good morning. To begin with, I want to say how excited and honored I am to be assuming the role of CEO for the division from Dave DeQuino. Dave is a fantastic leader and has done an outstanding job leading our business for the past five years. I've been working side by side with him for over four years in my current role as head of US defense and have been directly involved in many of the key aspects of the division, such as developing the strategy, integrating our acquisitions, and growing our pipeline. These are big shoes to fill, but I am highly confident we will have a successful and orderly transition, and I look forward to leading our incredible team and continue us on a path of sustained growth. Now, the Americas Division reported strong revenue growth of 18% in the period, driven by the acquisition of WBB and the strong dollar. Organic revenue growth was 3%. Our citizen service segment saw the strongest revenue growth in the region, benefiting from higher case management volumes on CMS and post-COVID recovery activity levels on the Ontario Driving Examination Contract. Defense includes revenues from WBB acquisition, excluding which there was a small amount of organic decline due to reduced volumes on one large but low margin ship modernization contract. Underlying training profit was 76 million, which increased the profit margin by 140 basis points in the year to 12.2%. The CMS contract continued to be a good driver of margins, benefiting from both higher revenues and further operational efficiencies. Order intake was very strong with a book to bill of 138%. Of particular note is that around 60% of these wins came from new business. Now our most significant new business award so far this year was the 280 million Navy ship acquisition program management contract, which is now mobilizing following a successful resolution of the protest. We also received a new and very exciting 60 million award to provide ship design and build services as part of the No Manning Required Ship Program, also known as NOMARS. In addition, since the period end, we have been notified that we were successful in the rebid of our US Navy C-21 contract. The new contract is expected to be worth around 340 million over five years, which will help reduce risk to our 2023 budget. Overall pipeline for the U.S. business remains very strong and currently sits at over $3 billion awaiting award, which represents approximately 40% of the group today. The majority of America's pipeline is within the defense business, which is taking full advantage of the strategic investments we have made in this market. So I'd like to provide a little color on our US defense business and strategy. Our defense portfolio is nearly $1 billion and supports all branches of the US military, plus select defense agencies and commands. The pie chart shows the composition of our business, which is almost 70% Navy, giving us a significant scale in the Navy services market. We have over 4,500 outstanding people, over half having security clearances operating across the US and in many countries abroad, who cover the delivery spectrum from analysts and engineers to technicians and welders. All our work is government-side and mission-aligned and provides a full lifecycle offering that includes upfront acquisition program management through engineering, modernization, and sustainment. Our defense portfolio has experienced around 9% organic growth CAGR over the past five years, with total growth of around 26% when accounting for acquisitions. Now we've completed three acquisitions in the past four years. BTP systems, which added SATCOM and radar engineering and sustainment capabilities. Alliant Naval Systems, which doubled our Navy business while adding key naval architecture and engineering capabilities, and WBB last year, which doubled our business in both the Army and the Air Force while giving us new customers such as the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Missile Defense Agency while significantly adding to our technical capabilities. Our strategy for defense is to sustain moderate growth across the portfolio. In particular for Navy, the largest of our customers, we will continue to invest and steadily grow this business organically. We will do this by taking advantage of our scale and full lifecycle capabilities, which heavily leverage our investments from BTP and NSBU while continuing our current momentum of key takeaway wins. We also plan to further diversify our portfolio into the other services, namely Air Force, Army, Space Force, and other DOD agencies and commands. Our desire is to double both our Army and our Air Force business in the next five years, which will leverage adjacencies from our Navy market and our investment in WBB. Finally, our plan is to further develop our end-to-end lifecycle capability offering by expanding our technical capabilities in key growth areas such as cyber and autonomous unmanned systems, which our recent No Mars Win is a great example of. We will further leverage these capabilities into the other regions to support growth in our other divisions. Now, two good examples of this are in our international maritime campaign, which is bringing U.S. capabilities to other markets, and our space campaign, which is bringing U.K. capabilities to the U.S. We are very excited about the future of our U.S. defense portfolio, and with sustained growth in the budget, Circo is well positioned to maintain strong momentum in this market over the long term. I will now turn this over to my UK colleague, Mark Irwin. Thank you.