Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to 3i Group plc results for the year ended 31st of March 2022. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session through the phone lines, and instructions will follow at that time. Participants can also submit questions through the webcast page using the Ask a Question button. I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to the CEO of 3i Group plc, Simon Borrows, to open the presentation. Please go ahead. Good morning. Welcome to 3i's FY 2022 annual results presentation. I'm Simon Borrows, CEO of 3i Group, and also on the call with me today is Julia Wilson, our CFO. The slides supporting our remarks have been put on our website this morning. It's a pleasure to be announcing these results in a more normal environment than we had in May last year or in fact in May 2020. Today, our teams are all back in the office at least three days a week, and it's good to be able to travel and hold in-person meetings across our organization. Globally, things are far from back to normal, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the continuing COVID response in China, creating further uncertainties for us all to work through. Despite these international developments, 3i has continued to focus on the job in hand, and we've delivered some excellent exceptional results with group producing an excellent all-round performance. We managed to double our return on equity this year, achieving a 44% return, and that's after the 22% we delivered in FY 2021. Private equity produced a 47% gross investment return, and the infrastructure team produced 21%. The two portfolios delivered good levels of both realization proceeds and portfolio dividends, and that paid for new and further investments, reduced gearing, and funded a group dividend that we've increased by 21%. Before diving into the detail of the results, I'd like to spend a few minutes focusing on our purpose and giving you a brief update on how we are advancing our ESG agenda. Our purpose hasn't changed. It's not about trying to scale up or be the biggest. It's about generating attractive returns for our shareholders and co-investors by investing selectively in private equity and infrastructure companies and not being afraid to run our winners to take advantage of the permanent nature of our shareholder capital. With our simplicity of purpose, we have more time than others to devote to thoughtful and creative origination. 3i's strong central governance underpins consistent price discipline when we're investing and makes sure that we have a laser focus on asset management to add further value to companies in the portfolio. In addition, our long-term perspective underpins our responsible approach to investment, and it mirrors the approach right from the start of 3i's founding after the Second World War, with the purpose of filling a funding gap to smaller companies in the U.K. Our people are absolutely critical to the achievement of the firm's mission, and the group benefits from strong values and a can-do team-based culture, which brings the best out of our relatively small but very capable international organization. We are thematic investors. That means we focus on sectors where there is a clear tailwind for companies operating in those sectors. Whether it be through our private equity or infrastructure investment teams, the same mega trends apply. Demographics, climate change and the environment, digitalization and big data, and internationalization in the discount and consumer sector. At 3i, we have really picked up the pace of our ESG agenda with the formation of an ESG committee made up from a multidisciplinary team across the group. The ESG group is charged with developing 3i's approach to ESG matters, developing a plan to meet 3i's reporting and other obligations in relation to new UK and EU sustainability legislation, as well as refining our strategies to embed sustainability as a theme and an opportunity in our investment activities. Many shareholders have been particularly focused on the E in recent conversations. As a group, we've been making good progress over the last few years in collecting GHG emissions data from our portfolios, and we are currently carrying out our first climate scenario analysis. We're also commissioning bespoke seminars to educate the entire 3i organization on climate. That work should improve our collective understanding of this crucial topic and our management of climate risks and opportunities across the group and across our portfolio. Okay, let me move on to our FY 2022 financial results. I'd like to start with private equity, where we generated a 47% gross investment return. That outstanding performance is the result of strong earnings and cash flow. As you know, we have a highly disciplined approach to investing, and we maintain that selective approach to new investment. The market saw record transaction valuations across 2021, and despite those elevated prices, we sourced GBP 529 million of investments across new, bolt-on and further investments. At the same time, we generated GBP 1.1 billion of cash from realizations and distributions. Once again, we had a very encouraging round of portfolio company reviews in March. The majority of the companies in our portfolio are well positioned and have made a good start to this calendar year. In general, the PE portfolio has come through the last two years very well. Against what could become a very challenging set of issues for both consumers and companies, we expect another resilient performance this year. He delivered another very good year of earnings growth, with Action rejoining the top tier. By value, these top 20 companies represent 96% of the total private equity portfolio. The top-heavy profile of this chart is very encouraging, as is the left side bias of the next slide, where you can see the top 14 contributors to value growth as well as a small number of detractors. As you can see, a good number of the portfolio are developing very well. In fact, they are growing at a rate at least as fast as the mighty Action, which has also enjoyed a very good year of recovery after its resilient performance in FY 2021. The Action performance was truly remarkable last year, and that is despite the fact that they still had to cope with store closures and restrictions in six out of 12 months in the year. The Netherlands, Germany and Austria all saw extensive store closures or restrictions last year. In all other countries, we saw record results. Sales, profits and cash flow were particularly strong. Action distributed dividends of EUR 669 million in the 3i year till the 31st of March. Despite ongoing restrictions in the early part of Q1, 2022 has started well for Action. Q1 in 2021 was a very tough quarter because there were significant restrictions and closures in place, with some lasting until May. As you can see on slide 12, Hajir has made a strong start as Action's new CEO, with LTM EBITDA growing over EUR 100 million in the quarter to EUR 932 million. They've had a very encouraging start of a pilot in Spain, with four new stores opened and trading well ahead of our investment case. So far this year, footfall has been very strong across the network. While average basket sizes have been smaller, with one less item and more items purchased in our lower price categories. Action has opened 44 stores so far this year, and we continue to believe Action will thrive in today's challenging environment. A lot of our companies in the PE portfolio have grown strongly. It's been great to see the continued development of our healthcare portfolio in particular. SaniSure has moved forward very well over the last couple of years. SaniSure is a leading independent bioprocessing consumables business, created out of a number of smaller companies, several of which came out of Q Holding. It's on a very good trajectory with compound growth rates in both revenue and EBITDA in double digits. BoConcept also had an excellent year and is now close to doubling the EBITDA since our initial investment. They have strengthened the franchise base, and we've opened 70 new stores since we bought the business. Sales in Japan have been particularly good. Hans Anders, our discount optical retailer, executed a very strong recovery last year after the challenging first year of the pandemic. They produced resilient trading across the business, with continued store growth across both Belgium and Germany. After our investment in further management resource in IT, Hans Anders has become very much an omnichannel business. Our PE team has been active but selective in the new investment market. The six investments they've made are all on the smaller side. We have strong partnerships with these new management teams and have exciting development plans for all of their businesses. We anticipate significant organic and M&A growth over the coming years. In the cases of ten23 health and Dutch Bakery, we've already made sizable bolt-on acquisitions as we have across the rest of the portfolio. Mepal is an interesting new investment from our Dutch team. It's a strong consumer lifestyle brand in the Netherlands with a growing business in Germany. The business is well known for its sustainable food and drink storage and serving products and has a strong reputation for innovation and clean design. We think the business has a significant opportunity for both online and international growth. The private equity portfolio has delivered very decent cash generation with some strong realizations and a good spread of distributions across the portfolio. The sales of Magnitude and recently announced QSR out of Q Holding both resulted in over 100% uplifts over the March 2021 valuations. That clearly underlines the value opportunity in our portfolio. We still own the Q Holding Healthcare division, which is performing well as part of our healthcare portfolio. Infrastructure had another predictably solid year with a 21% GIR, including a 17% increase in 3i share price. Cash income to the group was strong at GBP 91 million, and we continue to see good growth in our North American infrastructure platform with the addition of EC Waste. Scandlines has also had a good year of recovery with strong freight traffic ahead of 2019, resulting in a GIR of 26%. We also received a dividend of GBP 13 million after no dividends in 2020. Okay, that finishes my section, so I'll now hand over to Julia for the financial review. Thank you, Simon. It has been an excellent year for 3i. Once again, we have demonstrated the resilience of our business model. That resilience was clear during the immediate stress of the pandemic, and it is continuing now that we are seeing the effects of inflation and supply chain issues, as well as the more recent consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine that Simon touched on. We delivered a 44% return on equity in the year, which as you can see here, is substantially due to the value growth in our portfolio. Although sterling has been volatile during the year, it finished up against the euro, down against the dollar, and largely flat overall. After paying dividends of GBP 0.40 per share in the year, we closed with an NAV per share of GBP 13.21. That's a 12-month increase of 39%. The value growth of 396 pence per share or GBP 3.8 billion in total includes another significant increase in the value of our investments in Action. I'll cover Action first. Simon has talked about Action's performance in 2021, and a lot of you will have attended the capital market seminar that we hosted in March. We haven't changed our valuation methodology. Applying a multiple of 18.5x to its run-rate earnings to 3rd of April of EUR 1,012 million. That gives a valuation on our balance sheet at 31 March 2022 of GBP 7,165 million, and that's after we received GBP 284 million of cash dividends during the year. We are well aware that there has been some downward pressure on the multiples of the companies we refer to when we're thinking about what multiple to apply to Action. There is quite a mixed picture amongst that group of companies you can see here. We do a careful analysis of Action's performance against each one of them, and Action continues to compare very favorably on all the important KPIs we monitor. We combine that analysis with our long-term approach, and that's why we are comfortable holding the 18.5x constant. When we take account of earnings growth and cash generation, we recognize value growth of GBP 2.655 billion, as you can see here. During the year, many of our private equity portfolio companies have contributed a very good performance. They include SaniSure, BoConcept, and Hans Anders, all of whom have benefited from our active management approach. The negatives reflect our decision not to attribute any value to any earnings directly relating to Russia and ongoing pressures in the automotive sector. Some of the parts category relates entirely to Q Holding. Simon has explained, after careful development of that business since our original investment in 2014, we signed the disposal of QSR, the automotive division of the Q business in April this year. We valued that transaction on an enterprise value basis, applying the usual 2.5% discount, and we expect to receive proceeds of about $255 million after the repayment of Q Holding's debt. The medical business, which remains, is now debt-free and has been valued on an earnings basis. By way of reminder, we set the multiples we use to value the portfolio with reference to a set of appropriate comparable companies. As I described for Action earlier, we take a long-term approach in doing that. We take account of average sector multiples and look through short-term market volatility, both up and down. This approach won't insulate us entirely from a very severe market shock like we saw in March 2020, but it has continued to provide a significant degree of buffer for short-term volatility in our valuations. The tragedy of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24th did not translate to a widespread or very deep markdown in equity markets at the end of March. Concerns about inflation, supply chain, and the geopolitical volatility did mean that there was a general decline in multiples across peer companies in the first quarter of 2022. This slide shows how our long-term approach has created protection for these sort of markets. In a small number of cases, we've actually increased the multiples. We've done that to remain consistent with our approach of waiting until we achieve particular milestones in our investment strategy. This might happen when a company shows meaningful progress relative to the sector in which it operates, or when we're making preparations for an exit. We are still careful when we do this. We increased the multiple on SaniSure, for example, and that company is still sitting towards the left of this chart. That sort of solid progress in the portfolio underpins private equity's excellent performance, reflected in our gross investment return of 47%. Our realizations in the year were GBP 684 million, generating realized profits of GBP 228 million. That includes the sale of Magnitude Software at an uplift of over 100%. Total cash generated by the business was just over GBP 1 billion, including the dividends we received from Action of GBP 284 million. As Simon says, we invested a good amount of capital into new, further, and bolt-on opportunities. Our infrastructure team also delivered a strong performance in the year with a gross investment return of 21%. As well as another great year from 3iN, we have made good progress with our U.S. infrastructure platform. We have brought in two third-party investors to co-invest in EC Waste and Regional Rail. As a result, GBP 161 million was returned from those transactions, partly through realization proceeds and partly through a return of investment. It's been good to see a strong recovery in Scandlines as rate has now comfortably exceeded the 2019 levels, and leisure travel is showing signs of recovery. As you know, both infrastructure and Scandlines are important contributors to our operating cash profit. This year, we also had an exceptionally strong contribution from private equity, especially in the form of the Action dividends I mentioned a minute ago. Even if you exclude that income, we still made a healthy profit of GBP 56 million, and that's well ahead of our break-even objective. A quick word on costs. We do expect our operating costs to increase in FY 2023. That's partly because we see a full year effect of the recruitment that we've done in the year, and we've also got to be able to attract and retain the best people across our business in what has become a highly competitive market for talent. Even allowing for increased staff costs, our focus on cost discipline is unchanged. In fact, we expect costs to remain well below 1% of assets under management. Our focus on maintaining a simple balance sheet and a conservative approach to capital management is also unchanged. We closed the period with liquidity of GBP 729 million. We extended the maturity of the RCF to 2027. We have used that facility during the year to manage short-term investment and realization flows. As of the 31st of March, we were back to being undrawn. While we recognize that there are uncertainties, we have a good line of sight for the realizations and refinancings that lie ahead. This is an important consideration in setting the second dividend for the year to remain in line with our policy. Reflecting the strength of the year's financial performance and our confidence in the balance sheet for the year ahead, we announced this morning our intention to pay a second dividend of GBP 0.2725. Of course, that's subject to shareholder approval. Thank you, and I will now hand back to Simon for some closing remarks. Thank you, Julia. I would like to finish this presentation by having a look back at the last 10 years. I want to do that. Because Julia is about to retire from 3i, and she has been such a key member of the team since 3i's restructuring in 2012. As this slide shows, there's been a complete transformation of 3i since 2012. The group has become a highly effective PE and infrastructure investor with real focus and discipline across the entire organization and investment processes. We are now a top performer in our sector, with the rewards flowing to shareholders, as you can see on this slide. If any of you have been smart enough to invest in 3i in late May 2012, or had blind faith, as my mother and a few of my former colleagues did, by 31st of March this year, you'd have been looking at what my PE team like to call a 10X on your investment. Many people at 3i have been responsible for that performance, but few have had such an influential role as Julia. She's been my go-to person whenever I've wanted another view on a people decision or a judgment, and she never fails to give me an insightful and completely objective response. Julia has been an outstanding Finance Director and role model at 3i and will be sorely missed by everyone here. In James Hatch, we have a more than capable successor who is already very highly regarded within the 3i organization. While I'm sorry to see Julia leave, I'm also really excited about working with James as Finance Director and Jasi as Chief Operating Officer in the years to come. Of course, I'm also looking forward to continue to work with this and support our strong teams in private equity and infrastructure. We still have a lot to achieve at 3i, but we can now pursue our further potential from very strong, rock solid foundations. I'm now going to finish by using virtually the same outlook slide as we used last year. We're clearly facing a very uncertain environment. Sitting here today, it's very challenging to predict just how difficult things will become for consumers and for the corporate sector. From a 3i point of view, we've never been better placed to face some of the difficult headwinds we may encounter. Our teams have many years' experience of doing things well and actively managing our portfolio to get ahead of issues. Our portfolio has demonstrated its resilience over the last few years and is a focused, high-quality collection of companies with over 80% of our proprietary capital invested in Action, infrastructure, healthcare, discount consumer, and B2B services. They all have the underpinning of being bought with firm price discipline and relatively low levels of gearing. Also, 90% by value of the PE portfolio is outside of the UK. If Mr. Putin decides to provoke a broader conflict in Europe, then all bets are off. As it stands, we believe 3i can continue to deliver strong returns. We're certainly not stepping away from our mid- to high-teens return target that we have materially exceeded over the last 10 years. In many ways, the 3i model is now becoming a real compounder for its shareholders as Action has become for 3i. That's the end of the presentation. We'll now open things up for questions. Thank you. Participants can submit questions in written format via the webcast page by clicking the Ask a Question button. If you are dialed into the call and would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. We will pause for a moment to assemble the queue. Thank you. We will take our first question from Luke Mason from BNP Paribas. Luke, please go ahead. Yeah. Good morning, guys. Just three questions from me, please. Firstly, on deployment, I know it's mention of aggressive pricing for private market assets. Given the downturn we've seen in the market year to date, are you seeing more opportunities, or do you expect to see more opportunities, perhaps for bigger deals this year? Just secondly, just a broader question on rising interest rates. Just interested in your views how this will impact 3i across different spectrums, I guess on valuation multiples, portfolio financing costs, future returns, et cetera. If there's anything to comment there. Just on Action, I know I've heard from them recently, just in terms of store openings, 44 so far this year. I think the target is for more than last year. I know there was talks previously about some difficulties, perhaps in store opening, and I know it's H2 weighted, but is there anything you can comment there in terms of what you're seeing so far? Thank you. Okay. Well, why don't I take the first and the last, and Julia take the second. I mean, I think this is going to be a pretty interesting year for investment if you want my view at the moment, we have interesting weather ahead of us, and we're obviously seeing some material corrections across the place. While we've performed very well over the last 10 years, the one KPI that we've failed to meet every year is our investment target of GBP 700 million. We failed to meet that because of price concerns, generally, and we've been very cautious in that regard. For instance, in FY 2022, we've essentially bought GBP 335 million worth of new investments in private equity. In FY 2020, we bought GBP 275 million worth. We did spend quite a bit more on things like bolt-ons and stuff, but in terms of pure new investments, you can see how gun-shy we've been on these two highly prized vintages in particular. For me, at the moment, this feels like there's going to be more opportunity, and we stand a better chance of hitting that KPI that we've really struggled against for the last 10 years. Let me pick up on Action before I hand to Julia. We are about 20-23 stores behind plan in terms of store openings so far this year. That's for two specifics in particular. The largest part of that number is because we did suspend store openings in Poland for over a month with the outbreak of the Ukraine war. We just weren't sure whether it was appropriate to push forward with that 'cause quite a number of those stores were in the middle and towards the east of the country. Anyway, we've taken decisions to refire that plan up, and so broadly speaking, we expect to be back on plan for store openings by the late summer. We're also anticipating that we are going to open more stores this year than we opened last year. That is still the plan. Julia, if you wanna do rising interest rates. Yeah. Thanks, Luke. As you alluded, it has many implications. Clearly some of the pressures we're seeing in markets today is a general concern about rising interest rates. When we think about multiples, I'd say interest rates is just one of many factors that falls into the market multiples that we look at. As I talked about earlier, we're quite careful not to follow the market up as it has done on the back of low interest rates. We've built these established buffers in our valuation, which certainly gives us a shock absorber effect. You know, that policy, if you like, is protecting us for this current volatility. I think when you think about financing for the portfolio, first things first, we don't aggressively leverage the private equity portfolio. When we put refinancings in place, it's because it's a business that's performing well, that's generating good cash that can manage the leverage quite comfortably. We're not trying to pressurize there. In terms of interest rate hedging, we have a systematic approach for each company about the right strategy for that company, taking into account its financing profile, our exit plans, and all those sorts of things. Clearly, in Europe, we've got, in inverted commas, the benefit of the zero percent floors on the facilities that are in place, as well as interest rates start to rise in Europe. You know, we're not blind to it, but our banking team has a very close attention to all of those financing considerations. I suppose the final dimension I'd say is actually we tend to sit on fairly high levels of cash at the center here. Actually, rising interest rates and generating a bit of return on that cash might be nice for a change. Great. Thanks. The next question is coming from Philip Middleton from Bank of America. Philip, please go ahead. Yeah, good morning, and thanks for taking my call. Particularly thank you to Julia for all the help over the last few years. I hope you enjoy whatever you do next. I'm sure you will. Simon, I think it was you, but certainly somebody in the statement talked about building a stable of compounders on top of Action. This is something you've discussed before a few times. Could you talk a little bit more of that, how close you think you are to that, how close you think you are to moving more things into a kind of longer and longer hold bucket, and how important that is to you? Thanks. Sure. Thanks, Philip. Thanks for those remarks about Julia. We don't have anything that is quite where Action is or about to be moved into what we would term a long-term hold position where we'd approach the assets slightly differently. We do think we've got four or five potential candidates, particularly from the healthcare and the consumer sector. Now, not all of those will achieve that goal, and we see that as the gold star for what we do is having further long-term compounders. We do see several of those as being very likely to move across. As I've said before, I don't wanna curse any of them by naming them. You will know about them when they graduate into that place. Thank you. The next question is coming from Romain Kumps from Kepler Cheuvreux. Romain, please go ahead. Yes, good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. First question, if I look at the Q1 of Action, it seems that sales were in line with the Q3 2021, but margins were quite well below, roughly just over 10%, I would say. Could you maybe elaborate a bit on margin dilution you're seeing due to inflation, I guess, on Action? Maybe related to that, how do you see that evolving in the coming quarters? Yeah, I think Q1, Romain, is always a lower turnover quarter for us at Action, and it always produces a degree lower EBITDA, ultimately, as you get through to EBITDA margin than you would see in the other quarters where there are higher densities of sales coming through. There are two things that have affected this. One is that we did have ongoing restrictions in this Q1, as well as last year. We had our stores completely shut in Holland for the first half of January, for instance. There were other restrictions affecting other countries. We probably lost a marginal GBP 50 million plus of sales from that sort of thing, where you'd probably see a higher margin put on those marginal sales than would normally be the case. There are a number of things, noise still in the numbers, which have pulled that Q1 number slightly back. We still expect margins to be in line with what we said in March for the year as a whole, notwithstanding what we've seen to date. All right. The second question, looking a bit at the rising rates and environment, I was wondering how could that impact future refinancings at Action, noting that cost of debt, of course, is already quite high at the company. Could we maybe see more traditional dividend being paid as opposed to refinancing on the back of that? Well, I think we've just had a year of traditional dividends, and the likelihood is that we will have another of that. We're not in a rush at the moment to go to another refinancing. All right. Amazing. The next question is coming from Bruce Hamilton from Morgan Stanley. Bruce, please go ahead. Yeah, thanks. Thanks very much. I'd echo Philip's comments to Julia, so all the best for the future. Just on the kind of inflationary impacts and ability to sort of reprice or you know move the top line in pricing to offset that, can you run through a little bit how you see that across the say top 20 assets? I know with Action, there's been some scope, but is there further scope from here? How should we think about the other assets within the portfolio? Thank you. Okay. I'll have a go at that, Bruce. I think in the consumer sector, you would say we're likely to see a mixed response there. You've actually got a number of companies in that sector, which we think will thrive from a tighter, more difficult consumer environment, where inflation is, if you like, affecting not only input prices, but particularly the purchasing of goods. We think Action is going to thrive this year. All the early signs indicate that. We think Hans Anders is likely to have another really solid year, in terms of the sort of value lines, and we think Royal Sanders will have another very solid year. Then you've got a number which will be sticky, we think. A good indication of that might be something like MPM, the cat food business, which is growing very strongly in the States. But it's also facing much higher input costs. So the two things going together are going to produce a solid year, I would say, a solid year of good growth again, in that thing. Then there's, I guess, a couple of questions which are around companies like BoConcept. You know, they've just had a record sales month in April, their best ever sales month. But it might be that we see orders start to slow as we go through the rest of the year if the concerns about the economies in general or as people slowly are. Not seeing it yet, but that could well be on the cards. In terms of the healthcare assets, we're actually seeing strong trading across all of them. We don't have too many concerns about that this year. Then in some of the breadth of the assets, it's a little bit of a mixed bag with one or two bits of caution around new contracts being one of the things like that. Whereas other things like WilsonHCG, our people business is on a real tear as employment's been picking up across the States and across Europe and other places. It's really a mixed bag, I would say, but the majority of our companies, we think, have real pricing power and can take advantage of the current disruption in the markets. Great. Thank you very much. The next question is coming from Michael Sanderson from Barclays. Michael, please go ahead. Morning, Simon. Morning, Julia. Obviously echo the comments for Julia once again, and I hope Barclays don't cause you too many troubles in the future, from your role there. Two questions, please. The first one is, you sort of moved the dividend up, talking about sort of the outlook on realizations and refinancing. Any color you're willing to share about sort of how you think about the year ahead in the mix between those two buckets of realization refinancing? The second one is around the multiples. Clearly, we've got a couple of names trading above the average of their peer groups, and that's, as from what I've always understood, is performance supported. How comfortable would you be with having more than a couple above public peer group given sort of public or market volatility at the moment? Thank you. Do you want to take that second one? Yes. I think in terms of the dividend, Mike. We've always had the view that the dividend, the progress and momentum in the group should be not only reflected in NAV, but the development of the dividend as well. We do see our major problem in the next few years as being a buildup of cash and that is what we see. We haven't changed our view about that. We have a pretty interesting line of disposals over the next 18 months. We've started those well. You know, if we look at the Q Holding disposal, the industrial business was meant to be the weaker part of that business and lo and behold, we got $625 million for it. We're sitting with the healthcare business with effectively no debt in Q now. We do think for good companies, the interest is there, and we have a further set of a sales plan for this year. Some of those will be well understood by bankers and others because they're already in motion. We do think we should see some further good realization proceeds going forward. We're confident in the returns that we can generate out for the NAV as well. Yeah. Thanks, Mike. Yes. In theory, when you think about the point of the buffers, I said, we haven't followed the market up, and we're not necessarily following the market down when it's in a period of volatility. We're obviously not trying to do a mark-to-market valuation of the portfolio. We're trying to do a long-term approach, which is really focused on ultimately where we're going to get to in exit. Whilst I don't think you should be baking in a 100% uplift on every exit that we do, that does give you a touch point in what has been a difficult market period. I'd particularly point to the QSR transaction, which we signed in early April. You know, that's right in the sort of heat, if you like, of what we're seeing at the moment. I think it would very much depend on the time when it came to looking at the valuations of what's causing, if you like, the flip of the buffers, that would come through. One other factor I haven't really talked about as well that we mustn't forget, it's very easy to get distracted by Bloomberg on a day like today. We are operating in private markets, and so the other factor that we do have in mind is our ultimate exit and transaction multiples. That would be another factor that we'd be thinking about when we're seeing this short-term volatility. You know, there isn't an immediate alarm bell that runs off just because things get closer to those marks that we've got on comparable companies. Thank you. Just to kindly remind you, if you are dialed into the call and would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. You can also submit questions on the webcast page by clicking the Ask a Question button. Thank you. There are no further questions on the conference line, so I will now hand over to Silvia Santoro, Group Investor Relations Director, to address the written questions submitted via the webcast page. We have one that's related to the last question that was asked on multiples, which is, what might cause you to relook at multiples at the end of June? And then secondly, what's the average multiple on the non-Action PE portfolio? So, we do a quarterly evaluation process. I've always made the point that the evaluation processes that we do at September and March are, if you like, a deeper dive, because we have the benefit of the semi-annual portfolio company review meetings that have happened just before that when we've retested against investment strategy, and we've talked about exit process. In the normal course, a June and a December valuation would be more like a roll forward approach. That said, we look at it in detail every single time. You know, for the factors that I've just talked about, we would continue to be thinking about where the company is sitting on its investment strategy and where the market is going. I think that would be a standard valuation process. The second question, Silvia? The average multiple ex Action. We're sitting at around about 13x at the moment in the book. I mean, it might be worth adding that we value the portfolio off the previous quarter end. When we're talking about today, we're doing it off the earnings for the calendar year to December. In June, when we're updating the market, we're talking about the earnings to March, which we obviously already know about. That's why we said the portfolio's had a good start to the year. Yeah. We do have a further question from the web, which is: How do you factor higher interest rates and cost of equity into your valuation multiples, particularly for Action? Are there any sensitivities you can provide? Do you want me to take that one as well? I mean, I'd say we factor them in in the way that we. When we buy a company, we have to decide what's the set of companies that we're going to track against. You know, that will often be the companies that we've used to think about the price that we want to pay for the investment. They are typically much larger quoted companies. When we set, if you like, if you think about it as almost like the starting buffer, we're looking at the size and the maturity of our company relative to those other companies. Implicit in that is the gearing structures, the cost of equity, and all the factors that go into that. It really is about tracking the company against the investment strategy, and how we're feeling in terms of progress towards exit. I couldn't give you a sensitivity relative to interest rates and cost of equity 'cause it's really not a formulaic approach. It's a very careful judgment around each company that we're thinking about in terms of its investment strategy and how we think we're going to grow the value. We hedge the financial packages when we make a new investment, so they're all completely hedged. Yeah. Another question. Please could you offer some KPIs for April and early May for Action by geography and for the asset as a whole, and perhaps the portfolio as a whole? Well, in terms of Action, April's been another really good month. There were again some restrictions in April last year, so we'd expect to see a continuation of very strong like-for-likes and footfalls. It's been another very good month. We've had all of a week in the new period, and that was a good week ahead of budget. I think we can close the presentation here. Okay. Well, thank you to everyone. We appreciate the questions. We appreciate you calling in, and we look forward to meeting with some of you over the next few weeks. Yeah. Thanks very much. Thanks very much, everybody.