Wolters Kluwer S/Adr

Hello everyone and welcome to the Wolters Kluwer full year 2022 results webcasting conference call. My name is Daisy and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. Today's conference is being recorded. Please note for the duration of the call your lines will be on listen only. You will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the call. This can be done by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad to register a question. At any time if you require assistance please press star zero and you'll be connected to an operator. I will now hand the call over to your host, Meg Gelden, Vice President of Investor Relations, to begin today's conference. Please go ahead, Meg. Thank you.

Thank you, Daisy. Good morning and welcome, everyone, to Volterskuller Full Year 2022 Full Year Results Call. Today's earnings release and the slides for this presentation are available on our website, volterskuller.com. With us on the call today are Nancy McKinstry, our CEO, and Kevin Endrigan, our CFO, who will discuss our 22 results and will take your questions at the end. Before we start, I'll remind you that some statements we make today may be forward-looking. We caution that these statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the statements. Factors that could affect our future financial results are discussed in note two of today's release and in our annual report. As usual in the presentation today, we will refer to adjusted profits, which exclude non-benchmark items. We also refer to growth in constant currencies, which excludes the effect of currency movements. And we refer to organic growth, which excludes both the effect of currency and the effect of acquisitions and divestments. Reconciliations to IFRS can be found in Note 3 of today's release. At this time, I'd like to hand the call over to Nancy McKinstry.

Thank you, Meg. Hello, everyone, and thank you for taking the time to join us on this call. I will start by giving you the key highlights of 2022, then Kevin will take you through the financials in more detail. After that, I'll come back to discuss divisional developments and the progress that we've made against our strategy, including the creation of a new division comprised of four of our enterprise software units. I will then finish with an outlook for 2023. So let me start with the key highlights of 2022. I'm pleased to say that 2022 was a good year for us on many fronts. We sustained organic growth of 6% and drove a significant increase in our adjusted operating profit margins. Excluding the favorable effect of the stronger US dollar, we delivered 8% growth in diluted adjusted earnings per share in constant currencies. Adjusted free cash flow was 1.2 billion euros, an increase of 7% in constant currencies. ROIC improved to 15.5% and the balance sheet remains very strong. We returned more than 100% of our free cash flow to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks. We also made significant progress on strategic and ESG goals. Expert solutions grew 9% and now represent 56% of our total revenues. We increased both our employee engagement and belonging scores by 1% last year. And we made very important progress against our TCFD roadmap, completing an assessment of our greenhouse gas footprint and submitting our near-term targets to the science-based targets initiative for validation. We also prepared plans to create a new division called Corporate Performance in ESG to leverage market opportunities and synergies. I will come back on all of these developments, as well as the divisional highlights and the outlook. But first, Kevin will present the financials in more detail.