Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Ansell's market update. My name is Michael Evans, and I'm Head of Investor Relations at Ansell. Joining me this morning are Chief Executive Officer, Neil Salmon, and Chief Financial Officer, Zubair Javeed. This morning, we released an announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange, providing an update on our expected FY 2023 results, as well as guidance for FY 2024. Neil will shortly provide some commentary on the announcement, after which there'll be an opportunity for questions. As our results are provisional and remain subject to audit, we will not be in a position to provide significant additional detail beyond that provided in the announcement. Answers to some questions may need to be deferred to our scheduled results call on August the 14th. I will now hand over to Neil. Thank you, Michael. In my comments today, I will start with the highlights of fiscal year 2023, update you on the market conditions we see as we begin fiscal year 2024, outline our business goals for this coming year, and also introduce you to our new growth and productivity investment plan. Following preliminary consolidation of our full year results, we expect statutory earnings per share for fiscal year 2023 to be in the range of $1.17-$1.18. Our statutory earnings include the benefit of a successful completion of our exit from Russia, with a more favorable outcome than assumed in the provision recorded last year and disclosed in our last year accounts. Excluding this benefit of approximately $0.02 per share, our adjusted EPS are at the middle of our updated guidance range announced at the half year and within the original guidance range announced in August last year, even if at the bottom end. When I spoke to you in February, I outlined a number of focus areas for the second half, I'm pleased to say that we delivered on our goals against all of these. Our industrial business delivered continued organic growth in the second half improved its margin versus the first half. In healthcare, exam single-use volumes increased sequentially in the second half, we saw pricing stabilize for these products. We had also expected that sales of surgical and life science products would be affected by customer destocking and not reflective of underlying end user demand, this also proved to be correct. Let me provide some comments on trends in our markets as we look to next year. Even in a climate of continued macroeconomic uncertainty, our industrial business is doing well. Strong performance with new products, effective execution of price increases, and continued success in most emerging markets has contributed. Overall, we expect our industrial business to continue to grow, and we do not currently see any signs of any major overall recessionary impact to the business. Turning now to healthcare, and I'll begin with the exam single-use business. If we look at external market commentary, the focus remains on industry destocking. Major Malaysian producers are seeing low utilization rates and are starting to actively rationalize less efficient capacity. Against this backdrop, the performance of Ansell's exam single-use business is encouraging and demonstrates the benefit of our consistent focus on more differentiated products and specialized market segments. The strong sequential volume growth in the second half of fiscal year 2023 was driven primarily by these more differentiated and in-house produced products, and we anticipate the improving volume trajectory to continue in fiscal year 2024. The annualized impact in 2024 of price reductions implemented partway through 2023 will act as an offset to revenue growth in 2024, even though, as I mentioned, we see pricing going forward as now more stable. In contrast, our best estimate for our surgical and life sciences businesses is that they are only partway through their destocking cycle. As a reminder, just 12 months ago, these products were still in widespread backorder, and distributors were seeking to build up their inventory levels. As industry product availability recovered during the first half of fiscal year 2023, channel partners and some end users, particularly in life science, reassessed supply chain risk and began to reduce orders for low end-use demand to restore inventory to pre-COVID levels. As we start fiscal year 2024, we are assuming that destocking still has some months to run for surgical and life sciences, with orders on Ansell only expected to recover to underlying end user consumption levels at some point during the second half. Turning to earnings now, we are confronting several external headwinds. The first of these is a function of foreign exchange rates. As has been our policy for many years, we typically hedge our foreign exchange exposure 12 months ahead. This has provided protection in fiscal year 2023 from the impact of a strong US dollar, and as we have advised previously, those hedge book gains will not continue into fiscal year 2024. We expect higher interest costs as rates rise, and as we've previously disclosed, we expect a higher effective tax rate in fiscal year 2024. We also saw fiscal year 2023 earnings supported by lower incentive outcomes in that year, and the reversal of some prior year provisions for on-foot long-term incentive plans that were set in the initial phases of the pandemic and are now not forecast to vest. This will not similarly benefit fiscal year 2024, assuming we achieve incentive targets going forward. Altogether, the impact of continued customer destocking on some products, together with the earnings headwinds I've just described, means we do not expect to be able to get our earnings back on a positive trajectory in fiscal year 2024, even though the fundamentals of our business remain positive, underlying trends are favorable, and we are executing well against our key priorities. We are today issuing earnings guidance for fiscal year 2024 in a range of $0.92-$1.12. We are not satisfied with this as our earnings trajectory, so in this respect, as a management team, we have spent some time carefully considering a series of short and long-term action plans, with the goal being to respond to these external headwinds, accelerate our earnings recovery beyond this year, strengthen the business foundation, and drive long-term value creation. as I will explain, we do not expect these initiatives to provide material net benefit to adjusted fiscal year 24 earnings. We do accept them to drive earnings growth in fiscal year 25 and beyond. Our first objective is to implement a simplified and streamlined organization structure, achieving enhanced focus on the execution of our customer and market-oriented growth strategies, while also reducing cost through reducing complexity of roles and responsibilities. We expect the majority of these changes to be implemented within the next couple of months. Our second objective is to drive accelerated gains in manufacturing productivity, including realizing the efficiency benefits from upgrades already successfully completed to our manufacturing ERP systems, accelerating and building on success seen in our automation initiatives, and stepping up the deployment of our active make versus buy strategic framework to achieve further cost benefits while always ensuring we preserve Ansell's IP differentiation. We estimate the cumulative cash cost of these two initiatives to be $40 million-$50 million, to be spent over 3 years, but with the majority to be incurred in fiscal year 2024. We expect to be at an annualized run rate of pre-tax cost savings of $45 million by the third year of fiscal year 2026, with initial savings delivery in fiscal year 2024 of $15 million-$20 million. I have excluded the expected cash cost of these initiatives from the adjusted earnings guidance I gave you earlier. In parallel with these efforts, we are also taking action to normalize our own Ansell finished goods inventory levels. Today's high levels of inventory are inefficient and costly and also tie up capital unproductively. Reducing inventory requires us to temporarily slow production for the majority of fiscal year 2024, primarily for surgical and some exam single-use products. We expect that the cash released from reducing inventory will fully fund the $40 million-$50 million cash cost I mentioned earlier for the productivity initiatives. However, the required slowing of production has a negative impact on earnings from loss of overhead leverage, as production fixed costs are spread across lower production volumes. We expect this temporary loss of overhead leverage to fully offset the $15 million-$20 million benefit of the cost reduction initiatives I earlier mentioned that will benefit the fiscal year 2024 period. The final element to our plan is to bring forward and broaden the focus of our successful digital systems upgrade program to include commercial units and complete the move to consistent global ERP and decision support systems. We expect the cash cost of these investments to be in the range of $30 million-$35 million, with the majority to be spent in fiscal years 2025 and 2026. Based on the success we are already seeing, we are confident this program will deliver additional growth and productivity benefits in the medium term. However, we are not sharing benefit forecasts today. We first need to complete the initial blueprinting and business case development phase, and then we will update our benefit expectations, including these initiatives, most likely at our half year fiscal year 2024 results. As I already mentioned, I'm not satisfied with the short-term earnings trajectory of the company, but I am pleased with the underlying development of our business. I believe the actions we are taking as we begin fiscal year 2024 are the right ones for the long-term success of the company. When we finally emerge from the long post-COVID period of adjustment in our end markets, the underlying strength of our business will become apparent and be supported by the benefit of the new initiatives I have announced to you today. I look forward to providing more details on our full year results when I and Zubair speak to you on the fourteenth of August. With that, I will now open up the call for questions. Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Dan Hurren with MST Marquee. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Thanks very much. Just so I've got this clear. A lot of numbers here. The $0.92-$1.02 adjusted EPS guidance for FY 2024, that includes the $15 million-$20 million of benefit that will be realized in year one. Is that correct? It also includes a similar offsetting cost arising from that slowing of production necessary to get our inventory levels down. The net effect of those is neutral. Of course, the loss of overhead leverage is temporary. The cost savings from these initiatives I expect to be long-term. Sorry, Neil, I'm lost here. The $40 million-$50 million in cost is excluded, but it does account for the $15 million-$20 million of savings. Is that right? Yes. Yes. Why don't you see $15 million-$20 million dropping through to the bottom line? That's because of that second effect that I described on the loss of manufacturing overhead leverage as we slow production to reduce inventory. Is that clear now? No, no, understood. Okay. Okay. Yeah, got it. Thank you. Just a follow-up, just on how this will be reported. The IT investments, will they be broken out, separately in corporate costs, or will they be absorbed within the reported segments? We will break them out separately, yes. Yeah, give you visibility to this entire program, including the IT costs. Yeah. Okay, great. Thanks so much. I'll jump back in the line. Thank you. Thank you. Your next question comes from Vanessa Thomson with Jefferies. Please go ahead. Morning, evening, Hubert and Neil. Neil, I just wanted to ask the $39 million normalization of incentive costs, $39 million impact on EBIT. Could we get some more color on how that's achieved, or how that's calculated? Thank you. Sure. Yes. I'll actually ask Zubair to come in on this one. Thanks, Neil Salmon. At the half, Vanessa Thomson, we clearly weren't forecasting an unwind of that nearly $40 million of incentive expense, as you point out. At the half, we had already unwound a large piece of our long-term incentive plans that were on foot. Nearly half of that unwind is related to past incentive plans and, again, long-term in nature. What's changed in the second half was the unwind now of a large portion of our short-term incentives. This was primarily driven by our surgical and Life Science customers destocking, obviously, more than anticipated, in turn, this affected our short-term variable compensation. The loss of sales in that business was offset by the unwind of this variable compensation, and we still land within the range. Hopefully that's clear. Effectively, it's underlying business results means your variable compensation, it obviously recedes. Just to last point on this, that's been the nature of our compensation philosophy for a long time, it goes across a large number of employees. Obviously, we always consider that variable in setting our guidance range. Sorry, is that the, when we look at the breakdown in the reports, and you talk about an increase in provision for employee entitlements, is that something that we'll now see reversed? Sorry. Yes. Yes. This is why it's a headwind. Obviously, as we've unwound that expense in fiscal 23, we would reverse as long as the business performs and we bring our employees back to target variable compensation. That's an expense that we'll have to then bear in fiscal 24, hence why it's a comparative drag. Okay. In fiscal 2023, expense in fiscal 2024. Thank you. The next question comes from Matthieu Chevrier with Citi. Please go ahead. Yeah, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I was just curious to understand what's changed in the business. I mean, aside from the excess inventory that you have to run through, sounds like a lot of changes all of a sudden that were not, you know, kind of talked about previously. I was just curious to understand what's changing your thinking that's brought you to do that, although it seems like it's only a temporary impact from high inventory. Yes. It's a good point. Let me provide some more context to these changes. These changes are not a reaction to short-term pressures, not done merely because I feel I need to respond to 2024 EPS. I've been in the role for 2 years now. As I took over as CEO, we, as a board, we agreed on a period of stability for 2 years, and I think it was also important during that period of time for us to get a measure of what the post-COVID, how long the post-COVID period would be, and what our markets would look like as we emerge from COVID. We are at that point, and these steps that I've taken here are steps that we would have taken anyway. Some of the areas of emphasis have been adjusted to current market conditions, but the fundamentals behind these shifts are, these are long-term strategies that I would have implemented, whatever our short-term earnings trajectory. I believed for a long time that Ansell's organization structure is overly complex for the nature of our business, and it gets in the way of our effectiveness as an organization and our ability to deliver growth. We've delivered reasonably good results, but I feel there is more opportunity in the business, and that complexity also creates cost, where you have a number of overlapping responsibilities. That's the first objective I talked about, so that more efficiently organized, more efficient organization structure, better aligned to our growth strategies. The productivity goals are a continuation. The operations productivity goals are a continuation of strategies that we've been developing for some time. The use of the make versus buy levers has been effective going some years back. We insourced as part of Project Horizon. We have also insourced successfully more recently as part of bringing our Careplus, now Ansell Seremban facility into the frame. On other occasions, we realized that our in-house production capability is not economic versus the best outsourced producers. If we don't feel there's an IP factor in the equation, then we'll look to outsource and rationalize any less efficient elements of Ansell production capacity. Automation is something we've been working on for a while. We have an advantage. The slowing of production in order to draw down inventory creates some room and space within our manufacturing facilities to step forward on automation plans that otherwise often struggle for line time and activity within a site, if the site is running at high utilization rates. These are a set of strategies that are not a reaction to current issues, but the right decisions taken in any context for the long-term success of the business, and with some fine-tuning, that does respond to shorter term issues, but that's at the margin rather than fundamental to what we're doing here. These have long been considered by myself, and I feel that the right time to execute on them is now, for those reasons that I summarized. Understood. Just another one on the destocking. I mean, what, how do you get your confidence in where you're at in the destocking phase? Because it seems like it's been a bit, you know, left field when it came about, and all of a sudden, people have changed their behavior in ordering. How do you get comfort in where you stand in that restocking cycle? Yes, well, we must admit, first of all, that it's difficult because we're trying to form a picture across many geographies, across the world, many different distributor partners. And even if we get a good handle on distributor partner decision-making, and we also have to consider end user decision-making. I think we'll never have full visibility to inventory levels ahead of us, but we've set ourselves an objective to get substantially better than we were 12 months ago. We have developed new IT systems that track sell in, sell out data, where we have that available, that encourage distributors to give it to us, where they haven't in the past. That creates a model of the supply chain, either where we can verify it with reports of inventory or modeling ourselves based on behavior. This is giving us an increased visibility of what's ahead of us and decisions that distributors are making, information that we didn't have previously. It's those models that I'm relying on now to give a longer-term view ahead of destocking trends than I felt able to in the past. It's work in progress, so it would be false for me to say we now have complete visibility as to decision-making ahead of us. I think you're right to reference in your question that this shift happened very quickly, in, from some months, where there was still a real concern that I'm gonna run out of product, to then suddenly I've got plenty of product, and now I can get it from several people, and now I'm concerned about economic conditions. I'm gonna switch within a short period of time between ordering to build up inventory, to ordering to reduce inventory. We've seen that play out now across several different businesses at different phases in the cycle. The most recent one, to be affected is the surgical business, but it was a similar story. For example, single-use a year ago, that business is now emerging from that phase, and that's encouraging to see. We expect surgical to emerge from it too, but it's got another few months to run. Great. Thanks very much. Your next question comes from David Low with JPM. Please go ahead. Thanks for taking my question. Just a few, some of which have been touched on, but just with the incentive payments, frankly, we were aware that they were going up. I was unaware of the magnitude. Can we talk a little bit about what they are in a non-year? ... Zubair, do you want to address that? We don't disclose the quantum in any normal year, David. Of course, the $39 million or $40 million or so, again, I've said that a big piece of that is from prior long-term incentive plans. The number's gonna be a smaller than the one that we've just printed here in terms of the headwind, but we don't disclose that quantum. Is this $39 million uplift a back to normal type experience? I mean, are we going from a year where nothing was paid to $40 odd million? Give us ballpark. I mean, it seems I recognize there's some sensitivity, but perhaps, like, if you could talk to historics and whether this is, you know, indicative of what it was in previous years on average? Yeah, in the number. To forecast it. Indeed. There's some... As I said 2 minutes ago, there is some unwind here of short-term incentives, but that leaves some payment to be made against short-term incentives. You'll notice we did come into the, as Neil said earlier, the bottom of the original guidance range we issued. Some short-term incentives are there, but long-term incentives have been unwound. This is a little bit higher, not too much higher than what a normal year would be in total. Okay. All things being equal, this actually might be a smaller amount in the following year, in FY 2025. In F 20-. Yes, indeed. Okay. All right, I have a few things I want to try and cover off on. I'll keep going. The interest cost is higher than I thought. Yeah, frankly, I'm sure that's my poor analysis. Could you help a little bit on the level of debt or gross debt that you expect to have after these various programs, please? Again, it's hard to give you a gross debt number, because that would mean we'd have to be precise on the cash number and how we're paying down gross debt. We won't give you that. Of course, this higher gross debt, in that interest number, we're assuming a higher gross debt number, and on top of that, there's a higher average borrowing cost. They're the large drivers of the interest increase, and then there's a small $2 million in there that's linked to lease accounting as we commission a new warehouse in the U.S., David. Gross debt and, like I say, average borrowing costs are the key components of that increase. Okay. Yeah, we don't know where rates are gonna go, but I mean, in terms of the debt that is gonna be on the balance sheet after these various programs, would it be sensible to assume if rates stayed where they are, that the interest costs are gonna be higher again in the following year? Yeah. Well, I would say, you know our business, the generation of cash we have, we typically stay around the 1, just over 1 to turn of net debt to EBITDA leverage. I don't expect that we're gonna do anything radically different there in that regard, David. I don't expect interest rates to continue creeping up, as we move out. Okay. Yeah. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I know your business, but like my last question, I feel like we've been here before. We're now talking savings that equate to 20% of EBIT, give or take, in FY 2026. All things being equal, I mean, let's assume street consensus numbers are not stupidly wrong in the $200 million range, we should be adding these savings onto our FY 2026 numbers and lifting forecasts in that period. Or, of course, I raise this question because we've been through restructuring programs, and that benefit has often been lost to other factors. Just anything you'd sort of add to our ability to forecast into the future, please? I mean, it's this isn't the time to talk about any other factors, so we're very much focused on these programs. Yes, we have confidence that they will, that... I mean, these are worked through pretty specifically, with pretty specific details attached, and we're confident that we can deliver this level of benefit from the initiatives we're announcing. Yes. I think, I mean, the most significant... Okay. -previous initiative we launched was with the Project Horizon after the Sexual Wellness divestment for industrial, and I think we did see those benefits come through for industrial margin. We believe we delivered on that program. Eventually, it was then the pre, post-COVID effect on healthcare has been the bigger mover since then. Our previous track record here and the detail of these programs gives me confidence that we can execute against them. Yeah. Okay. I mean, one last question: Does that imply that consensus forecasts are too low on that basis, given this is a significant addition to what we're forecasting, notwithstanding there's plenty of other moving parts? It just seems large enough that the, you know, street should be raising numbers in those years when this is all to be delivered. Well, I, yeah, I wouldn't want to get to earnings expectations two, three years out. This call is focused on the next 12 months, and where we need to take the business from here. Yeah. Understood. I didn't particularly expect you to give us specifics that far out, but thanks very much for taking my questions. Thanks, David. Thanks. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone. We'll now pause a short moment to allow questions to be registered. Your next question comes from Dan Hurren with MST Marquee. Please go ahead. Thanks so much. We've got a couple other questions there. Just, I guess going back to this incentive cost. I was just thinking now, you know, $39 million to normalize that. We've previously pointed out that SGNA looked suspiciously low as a percentage of sales, to which the company rejected the idea that there were unsustainable cuts being made there to sort of get results. You know, should we be thinking about the underlying business, you know, looking back, so we understand where we go forward, you know, have results over the last 18 months not being a true reflection of the margin of the business because of this unsustainable, or because of these lower incentive costs? Well, I think. Incentive costs will vary year-on-year, and that's been a feature of the business for the 10 years that I've been at Ansell. Incentive costs are a higher mix in our compensation philosophy than for some companies with a very strong pay-for-performance culture which works both ways, of course. This year is a lower year in terms of payout. Some variability there, but I would say if you backing out incentive costs, our approach on SGNA the last couple of years has been an incremental one, managing to try to offset inflation, taking a cautious stance, being very careful about which positions we have, being focused on adding positions targeted to growth strategy, but not making any more considered decisions about SGNA. The organization structure now, and I won't be giving you any more details on this at this stage because we're still working it through. But now it gives us the opportunity to not to reapply or ensure that our SGNA resource is deployed most effectively against delivering the, our growth strategies. As I said, also where we see unnecessary duplication of responsibilities, then we will seek to address that during this shift. That's we have taken a more considered approach to SGNA in reviewing this program. Over the past, two or three years, if you exclude incentive costs, then it's been a steadier picture on SGNA. SGNA largely increasing with inflation, as opposed to any more structural changes. Okay, thanks. Last question, I'm not really, I don't really know even an answer for this, but generally, the installation of ERP systems has been poison to ASX listed stocks. It's just led to problems and downgrades and multi-year problems, including Ansell I think. I think going back more than 10 years, I think there were some downgrades from Ansell when it first initiated it. Could you just talk about how this is gonna be done? Is it, will it be outsourced? Just anything to give us confidence that this isn't gonna become the myth that becomes for so many other companies. Well, to give you some confidence, we've completed more than 11 go-lives in the last, I may get the time wrong, I think around 18 months, two years, at different sites across our network, and we've had barely a day of disruption post-go-live. These are both, selling... Sales, smaller sales units, and very large manufacturing units, thousands of people at the time, cutting over from one system to another. We do this with an internal team. We use some third-party consultants to help with the specifics of the technical capability of the system. The implementation team, the business design owners, the accountability sits internally. I expected some trepidation, indeed, when you embark upon a major ERP journey. I would not have made this commitment or announced this to you if I hadn't gained a very high degree of confidence in our ability to execute, and not based on promise, but based on track record. It's really impressive, and the fact that we haven't talked about it to you is perhaps the best evidence that these implementations have been seamless. It's not only ERP, it's also decision support systems. We've overhauled, in the last 12 months, our entire demand and supply planning software solution, also putting in a best-of-breed system, and that's had immediate benefits and improved, an improved management of demand planning, supply planning, inventory planning, and also gives us the confidence with improved service levels to customers that we've seen as a result of this, we can now start to reduce inventory without affecting those service levels. A strong track record of success. Admittedly, we are increasing our ambition here with the program that I've outlined, but with an already well-established track record, and it's the same system that we've implemented successfully many times over, that we're continuing to implement. This is not embarking down a brand new technology path. This is taking something tried and tested, already working at many sites across Ansell, and now extending it across the entire Ansell. When we get there, we think that will be a very significant benefit to our efficiency as an organization. Actually, that's helpful, Neil. Thanks very much. Just on those costs, a small amount in FY 2024. you know, it's kind of peaking $5-$10 year one and pretty even after that, or there'd be a hump in it? I'm just trying to think how to. It steps up in 25 and 26. Yeah, I mean, you're roughly right, year one, and then double that in years 2 and 3, and then a tail in year 4. This program we're announcing it to you now 'cause we want to give you the full picture, but it's the one that needs the most work before it's baked. There could still be some adjustment to those timings. We wanted to give you a sense of it today. Yeah. No, helpful. Thanks very much, Neil. Appreciate it. Okay. The next question comes from David Stanton with Jefferies. Please go ahead. Good morning, thank you very much for taking my question. Just a follow-up from other questions that have been asked, I'm a simple man. I just wanna understand, in terms of incentives, it's an incentives question, sorry to bang on about this, F 24 profit will be lower than F 23. Can we get more color on, you know, the low accruals that I expect to see in 24, not continuing into 24? Is it as simple as there's been a change in how the incentives are sort of accounted for in 23, in 24 compared to 23? Any color on that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. No, no. I mean, I think some of these questions we'll need to answer when we get to our full disclosures and the remuneration report and so forth. There's no change in any of our incentive philosophy here. And what's different is we have assessed it's not only the plans that are vesting or applicable to this year, but we've also taken a new look at plans over a broader timeframe. As we come off the pandemic highs, we now assess those plans as unlikely to pay. And so that's a normal procedure, something we do every year and required, of course, for accounting reasons. That the unwind of previous accruals on those is also part of the number that we're talking about here. Any further details on that, David, and I think we'll need to wait for the full year results and the annual report. Okay. Thank you. Your next question comes from Lyanne Harrison with Bank of America. Please go ahead. Good morning. Well, I've got a question around the organizational restructure and the streamlining of that. Do you have a sense of, you know, how many employees that might affect and also what the cost of the restructuring program might be? Yes. I understand the question. We're not providing that extra level of information at this point. I hope to be in a position to be able to do so at our full year results. Yeah. Sorry for not answering that today. Okay. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Neil Salmon for closing remarks. Well, thank you for your interest and for good questions today as ever. We remain committed to the long-term value creation opportunity in this business. As I said at the end of my prepared remarks, I'm convinced that once we work our way through this long post-COVID period of adjustment, and as we deliver on these new initiatives that I've just announced, which are for the long-term success of our company, the true value of Ansell will emerge, and that's what I and my leadership team are committed to demonstrate to you, our valued analysts and shareholders. Thank you all for your time today.