Morning, welcome to 3i's Capital Markets Seminar for Action's 2022 Results. My name is Simon Borrows. I'm the CEO of 3i and the Chairman of Action. Also on the line is James Hatchley, CFO of 3i, as well as Hajir Hajji, CEO of Action, and Joost Sliepenbeek, CFO of Action. We plan to take you through the presentation that's been put on our website this morning. Action's exceptional track record has continued in 2022, with very strong growth in sales, EBITDA, and cash flow. The performance in 2022 is once again testament to Action's brand and its customer-centric approach. With very low prices proving increasingly attractive at a time of very high shop price inflation. Action has coped remarkably well over the last few disrupted years, and this slide shows how the group has been able to demonstrate resilience and good growth through all phases of the economic cycle. We don't believe there are any retailers that are close comparators of Action, and very few of them move as seamlessly into new geographic markets as Action does. We do track a group of discount format concepts as part of our valuation reviews, and this slide compares Action's performance to that group over the last five years. As you can see, Action's performance over this period compares very favorably. This performance is all the more remarkable given Action was not deemed an essential retailer during COVID in a number of countries, whereas most of these peers were open throughout the pandemic. On slide five, you can see the compounding benefits with Action's growth brings to 3i, and in recent years, the power of that compounding has really started to come through. Let me now hand across to the Action team. You heard from Hajir for the first time last year, and Joost has been a regular as part of this capital market seminar. Hajir, over to you to tell us about your first full year as CEO of Action. Thank you for your introduction, Simon. I would like to provide you with an update of our 2022 performance, followed by an update of our strategy. Our performance in 2022 was strong. After two years of COVID restrictions, 2022 was marked by the war in Ukraine and the impact of high inflation. Despite these challenging circumstances, we were able to grow further. We reported an 80.1% like-for-like sales growth and EUR 8.9 billion in total sales. An increase of 29.6% versus last year. We delivered EUR 1.205 million operating EBITDA, an increase of 45.5% compared to last year. Next to this, we added 280 new stores. Several aspects drove this strong performance. First of all, customers were impacted by inflation and uncertainty about the future, which resulted in a high demand for discount. Secondly, we were able to provide a relevant and strong offer due to the flexibility of our formula, allowing us to adopt our product range. Thirdly, we continued to expand our store base with a record number of store openings. The fourth driver was tight cost controls we maintained to counter the impact of inflation in different areas of our business. The fifth driver is improvements in our supply chain, which helped our good product availability in stores. Finally, I would like to highlight the impressive performance of our employees. People are at the heart of our company and an important part of our success. They provide customer service and create the atmosphere in our stores. The combination of a high demand for discount and the strong offering in our stores continued to attract new and existing customers across all income and education groups. We observed an increasing demand for essential items and had a record number of customer transactions. We have seen a like-for-like increase in the number of transactions by 22.2% as a result of increased customer footfall. This trend is continuing in the first weeks of this year as customers increasingly understand they can get great quality at low price, as well as the daily essentials they need. Joost Sliepenbeek will explain more on our current trading during his presentation. Our performance is also reflected in the growth we've seen across all product categories. Something that stood out this year is the growing number of customers who came to Action for their daily essentials. This resulted in a strong performance of our four FMCG categories: food and drink, personal care, laundry and cleaning, and pets. Next to this, products that helped our customers deal with increasing energy prices, such as plates and electric heaters, were very popular. Currently, we are seeing increasing demand in essential items, and previously we saw other types of products increasing in popularity. The breadth of our 14 categories allow us to respond well to changes in customer demands. In 2022, we had good availability of products in our stores because of our improved supply chain performance. We faced sea freight fluctuations, inflation, and COVID restrictions, but we were able to manage these disruptions well. Over the years, we have built our network capacity and improved our planning capabilities, and next to this, we improved collaboration with our logistic partners. This has led to improved store service levels and good availability of products. We also have seen the impact of inflation in our supply chain, but also in other areas of the business. We have dealt with the impact of inflation by disciplined price and cost management. The flexibility in our assortment is an asset. This provides us the option to choose alternative products when needed. Also in other areas such as energy and labor costs, we have to absorb the impact of inflation. As a discounter, cost discipline is in our DNA, and we critically reflect on areas of cost that we could manage. Although we did increase our prices, we did not fully pass on cost increases to our customers, absorbing some of the higher costs ourselves. This had a slightly negative impact on our gross margin, but also allowed us to attract more customers because we increased the price distance to our competitors. As we grow, both in like-for-like and through expansion, we and our customers keep on benefiting from the efficiencies this brings. Last year, we added 280 stores. We opened most stores in Poland, where we added 81 stores. In France, our number one market, we opened 73 stores. Germany showed great progress, but continued to be impacted by challenging circumstances in the market for locations. We plan to increase the opening pace in Germany in the years to come. Within our newest markets, Italy and Spain, we see strong store potential. After successful pilots, we are ready to increase the expansion base in these countries. In Italy, we added 21 stores in 2022. We now have a dedicated local team in place. The search area for expansion have been extended to the more central parts of the country. We plan to open a DC near Milan in 2023 to support our store growth in Italy. In Spain, we have outperformed our pilot assumptions. We opened five stores in the Barcelona, Girona area. We are currently completing our local team and expect to open a DC near Madrid in 2024. This will facilitate the further growth of our stores in Spain. Our people are a fundamental part of our success, together with our unique formula. We provide work to over 80,000 employees in our stores, DCs, and our offices. In addition, we contribute to local economies, we created over 8,000 new jobs in 2022, doubling our job creation over the year before. In doing so, we provide jobs to a wide range of people, including people who would otherwise find it difficult to enter the labor market. We also adjusted reward packages last year, resulting in wage increases for our employees, helping them dealing with increased cost of living. Finally, we invested in our people, resulting in over 2,500 internal promotions. At Action, we find it important to act as a responsible partner in society. We provided goods, financial support, and space in our DCs to the victims of the ongoing war in Ukraine and the people in need in Syria and Turkey after the devastating earthquakes. We also have made progress in our Action sustainability program. We now have fully supply chain transparency for all private label products. We reached a milestone of 100% recyclable packaging for all private label products. This means that we no longer use PVC or black plastics. 85% of our stores do not use any natural gas. We are now working on disconnecting the remaining stores from the gas grid, and all new stores are already directly equipped with a heat pump. Regarding emissions from our own operations, we realized a 40% reduction in 2022 compared to 2021, and let me highlight the key initiatives that supported this. The energy consumption in our stores was reduced. We were able to lower the energy usage by an average of 10% per sqm. We reduced our transport emissions by 11%, achieved by using HVO biodiesel instead of regular diesel. Most importantly, we have increased the share of energy from renewable sources. In 2022, 90% of the energy used for our stores, DCs, and offices came from renewable sources. With growing emphasis on sustainable choices, we are committed to make sustainability accessible for everyone. We will continue to improve the quality and sustainability of our products in stores, even if market circumstances are challenging. This brings me to the end of the business performance update, and I will continue with an update on our strategy. Our strategy has remained unchanged. Growth is driven by strengthening our unique customer proposition and further international expansion. This requires a simple, scalable operating model, and in the last years, we increased our focus on sustainability. Last but not least, our people are essential to our success, and as we grow, the focus on people will become even more important. The strategy provide us direction while our business model allow us to scale at low cost. We can offer low prices due to our ability to buy products on a large scale, the flexibility of our assortment, and our location choices. Due to our high volumes, each of our trucks deliver a high volume to only a few stores, resulting in relatively low transport costs. Finally, we maintain a simple business model and have low overheads and marketing spend. Our assortment. We offer 6,000 items across 14 product categories. We work with 3 product types. The first one is A brands, which support our quality perception and allow our customers to easily compare our prices to other retailers. Our supplier brands, allowing us to offer many surprising items for our customers. The last one, our private labels, for which we focus on specific product areas. The goal of our private label segment is to drive footfall with everyday essentials and increase quality perception, as well as the store experience of our customers. One third of our assortment is fixed, including articles such as cleaning wipes, while two-thirds of our assortment changes over time. A recent example of our in out assortment is The Pink Stuff cleaning paste, a recently hyped cleaning product. We introduce 100-150 new articles every week. Our customers find new products every time they come to an Action, which invites them to visit frequently. For our product offering, we focus primarily on low price points. Despite pressure from inflation, we were still able to offer more than 60% of our volume below EUR 2. The following video gives you an impression of a visit to our store. As you have just seen, shopping at Action is a pleasant shop experience, and I would like to stress that the store in the video is representative of all stores. Everything in the store is focused on speed and volume, similar to a food retailer, except our focus is on non-food. Our store layout is simple, with wide aisles and a uniform blueprint layout across all stores. Our customers can find both their daily essentials, such as shampoo and toilet paper, as well as many surprising items. We sell 14 categories and introduce 150 new articles every week, which keeps our customer interested in and invites them to visit our store frequently. One of the key elements in our formula and why customers like us is our low prices. In the past half year, we have managed to increase the price distance to our competitors in all our markets. We measure our prices frequently and benchmark with competitors. In case we do not have the lowest price, we act by lowering our price, renegotiating conditions, or changing the product for a different one. While offering the lowest price, we will never compromise on the quality and sustainability of our products. On this slide, we have highlighted two product examples that underline this approach. The first products are wooden clothes pegs. We upgraded the spring mechanism to ensure that the grip improved, increasing by 20%. The next example is Zenova's Suncare, an Action private label. This product is microplastic-free and reef-friendly. It has received several awards, and the packaging is partly made of recycled plastic. Investing in our private label products allow us to offer low cost, high quality products that customers value. Good examples are the Max & More mascara and Superfinn dishwasher tablets. Our Max & More mascara has received the Best Buy award in Belgium. We improved the formula and changed the brush for more volume. We also improved the formula of our Superfinn dishwasher tablets. Superfinn received several awards. In the coming years, we will continue to invest in our private labels by further improving the quality and sustainability of our products. Currently, we have a total of 73 private labels across 14 product categories, with private label sales increasing in line with the overall growth of our company. Private label sales in 2022 represented 18.5% of total Action sales, underlining the importance of our private labels for our customers. The Action proposition appeals to everyone. Action attracts customers with a wide range of incomes and education levels, both in mature as well as in our new markets. This broad appeal gives us confidence regarding our wide spot potential in new countries. The strong appeal of Action is reflected by the growing awareness of our brand. Growth is mostly driven by word of mouth from our loyal customer base, and our customer base is getting bigger and bigger. Our new countries benefit from this by faster growing awareness. There is still opportunity to increase brand awareness and penetration in our newer markets as well as in Germany. While we invest in digital, allowing us to optimize our marketing mix, our relative marketing spend will remain stable as our formula is basically selling itself. I'm proud to highlight that this is reflected by several prizes that we won in 2022. In our number 1 market, France, we received the award for being the 3rd most loved retail brand. Additionally, we are proud to have received the award in Poland for most loved non-food retailer. Also in our mature market, the Netherlands, we won Best Department Store in the Retailer of the Year election. All of these are prizes voted on by consumers. Our customers value us for our low prices and surprising product range. This is also made possible by the mix of suppliers we work with, our sourcing mix. Over time, we have increased our cooperation with A brands as prices of these products can be easily compared, and they drive quality perception. Next to this, we have always had a strong cooperation with importers and wholesalers. These suppliers are almost an extension of our buying team. Due to their specific product knowledge and commercial sense, they supply us with many surprising on-trend products. Thirdly, we are developing our share of direct sourcing. This allow us to buy at low prices and to enable our sustainability ambitions. We leverage the knowledge that we build from direct sourcing and the interaction with other suppliers. Lastly, we work with stock lot traders. The power lies in the combination of these 4 sourcing types. They provide us with multiple supplier options per article and thus ensures a healthy competition. Even more importantly, unique aspects of each supplier type is reflected in the products our customers can find in stores. We are continuously searching for commercial opportunities. As mentioned in previous years, we're aiming to increase our direct sourcing share over time. At the same time, we want to achieve more diversity in the locations from which we source. This is because there are interesting commercial opportunities in the countries such as India and Vietnam, but also to reduce the impact from potential future disruptions. Currently, we are already sourcing a large share of our products from Europe and the Balkan region, and we want to increase the share of direct sourcing from these areas to enable our growth, but also our sustainability ambitions. Another priority of our company is to invest in a digital ecosystem and in customer touchpoints. Our objective is twofold. By engaging with our customers online, we aim to attract more customers to our stores. Secondly, by linking customer data and understanding our customers better, we can leverage these insights into our marketing and other business areas. A few examples to underline this point. In the past year, we launched the Action app in three new countries in 2022, and this year we added also Luxembourg and Slovakia. We increased sales of our online flash sales proposition, which is currently online available in the Netherlands and focuses on higher price points. Although we are still in a learning phase, we are happy with the results so far and are looking into extending to a new market. The results of our digital investment are clearly visible by the growth in our online reach. For example, we now have over 2 million followers on both Instagram and Facebook. The number of app downloads and My Action account had increased strongly compared to 2021. This allows us to better understand our customers and tailor our offering to their needs. We see that our strong formula, combined with the increase in online reach throughout different channels, results in high awareness. This is the case for our existing markets and in new countries we're starting. For an example, during our recent opening in Slovakia, over 11,000 customers visited our stores on the first day. We at Action, it's all about stores and customers. We keep on investing in our existing store base to continuously create a pleasant shopping experience for our customers, as well as a good place to work for our employees. We further roll out our 2.0 format across our store network. The most important aspects of the new format are a wider entrance, updated colors, and signage that guide our customers. This results in a more fresh and modern look. At the end of 2022, over 1,200 stores have been transformed, and of course, all new stores are built in the new format. In 2022, we performed a total of 76 refurbishments, enlargements, relocations, and updates of our stores. While investing in our store base, we focus on sustainability as well. Where possible, we will make use of recycled materials, for example, for our racking, and additionally, we remove gas installations to make the transition to renewable energy possible. We drive innovation by continuous investment, improving technologies to improve store processes for our employees. A clear example is the rollout of our new handheld terminal for our store managers, which makes the ordering process faster and more data-driven. The Action sustainability program is an important element of our strategy. We focus on people, planet, product, and partnership connected to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Let me guide you through our ambitions for each of the four pillars. Let me start with the people pillar. We have a strong commitment to our people and society. Our people are proud to work for Action. They value working together and the development opportunities that Action provides. Our people are the ambassadors, and they reflect our values and make us unique as an organization. We invest in our people as they are key to our current and future success. As a responsible partner to society, we contribute by supporting local initiatives in the communities we operate in. We improve children's welfare through different partnerships and programs. We have been a proud partner of SOS Children's Villages International since 2018, and for every store and D.C., we sponsor one child. We believe in offering sustainable products at the lowest price, and with our size, we can make a significant impact. We have sharpened our short-term emission targets based on the progress already achieved in 2021. We are now committed to reduce our absolute emission from our own operations with 60% by 2030. Additionally, we have accelerated our ambition to make our stores carbon neutral by 2024, and we aim to reduce energy consumption in our stores by 15% per sqm by 2024 compared to the baseline year of 2021. We started a pilot in 2022 with electric trucks, and we continue the transition to more eco-friendly fuels. Regarding our product pillar, we focus on offering products that are compliant, safe, and responsibly sourced, while offering good quality products at the lo west price. Also, for this pillar, we have sharpened our short-term goals. We will only offer 100% sustainable cotton by 2023 instead of 2024, and 100% sustainable timber by 2024. Our packaging will now be 100% recyclable by 2025, and we will achieve 100% private and white label supply chain transparency in 2025. Next to our focus on sustainability, we're also focusing on building our DC network to ensure that we have sufficient capacity to achieve the desired product availability levels in our stores. In 2022, we opened our third hub in Le Havre, France. Our newest DC opened in West France in January of this year, and next to that, we expect to open two more DCs in 2023, one in Italy and one in Poland. All our new DCs are built using the highest BREEAM sustainability standards. In 2023, we will continue to invest in a future-proof DC network to support our store growth. This overview shows a clear picture of how Action is able to drive growth in new country in a short period of time, from pilot phase to several year of operations. Our expansion is strong in the early years and often accelerates when countries and their organizations are maturing. After entry in France in late 2012, the country quickly developed into what is now our largest market. We have now operated for more than 10 years in France, and in 2022, we opened 73 new stores. Poland is another example how we successfully established ourselves in a new market. In 2022, Poland was our number 1 market in terms of new store openings. Also in 2023, we intend to open many new stores there. Highlighting only France and Poland obviously does not provide the full picture on our expansion so far. Even in the Benelux, which is our most mature market, we continue to open new stores. The success of openings in Italy and Spain, and most recently in Slovakia, clearly shows that Action is welcomed with open arms by customers in every country we enter. We continue to learn from our experiences in the past and apply these lessons learned when opening new markets. In 2023, we will prepare the opening of our first store in Portugal, which we expect to open in 2024. Our new markets, together with the remaining potential in our existing markets, provide significant opportunities for further expansion. Our current estimate white space store potential in existing and identified in scope countries is 4,400 stores. This number is a conservative estimate based on a population density per store of over 60,000 in all countries outside of the Benelux region, where the current actual density is closer to 38,000. This is influenced by both our mature level and the high population density of the Benelux. We plan to revise the density numbers over the coming years as we increase store NDC coverage in our newer countries outside of the Benelux. Let me be clear, although our focus is on increasing the expansion base, the quality of our new stores and the profit contribution will always come first when considering new locations. I would like to conclude by underlining that we intend not only to accelerate our expansion base, but also our sustainability efforts and the company priorities I discussed. We have started 2023, a year in which Action celebrate a 30 years anniversary, with a strong performance. I will hand over to Joost Sliepenbeek, who will give you additional background on our financial results and also provide more details on our 2023 performance to date. Thank you, Hajir. Good morning. My name is Joost Sliepenbeek. I've been the CFO of Action since 2018. In the next 35 minutes, I'm going to present and explain our financial performance in 2022. After that, I will provide an update on our 2023 financials up to and including last week, which was week 11. My first slide is one that I've been using over the last 4 years. It is the financial model behind our strategy. The fundamentals of our financial model remain unchanged. They also explain the resilience of our performance. Resilience in 2 years with COVID restrictions, and as in last year, resilience in times of supply chain disruptions and fast-rising inflation. The inflationary environment has resulted in a cost of living crisis for many people and an increased demand for discount retailing. Our formula has again proven to attract customers who are looking for essential products and a great surprise, all for the lowest price. Our continuous store expansion is an important driver of our performance. We increased the number of store openings compared to 2021 and added 280 stores in 2022. Store expansion contributes to our top line growth, but also results in growth of EBITDA and value. Our performance drivers have not changed compared to previous years, and therefore, many of you will recognize this slide as well. I will talk you through the economics. First, the payback of our stores is very attractive. We rent all our stores, and the average investment spend of circa EUR 479,000 per new store is relatively low. Historically, we've had an average payback of around 1 year. Second, all stores opened before 2022 contribute to our results at the level of store contribution margin. Later in my presentation, I will explain more of store contribution. Third, with an average payback of 1 year, our store expansion is effectively self-funding. For clarity, working capital is not included in this calculation. As you know, we operate with a negative working capital. Therefore, the payback period of new stores would even be shorter if we also took into account the increase in working capital. Fourth, the additional sales resulted in significant EBITDA margin expansion of 150 basis points in 2022. I will elaborate on the drivers of this margin expansion later in my presentation. In 2022, we realized a 30% increase in net sales and a 46% increase in operating EBITDA. Both net sales growth and EBITDA growth accelerated in 2022 compared to 2021. The comparison to our average growth over the last five years also demonstrates that 2022 was a really exceptionally strong year. When I'm referring to EBITDA numbers in my presentation, I also show and mention numbers that exclude the impact of IFRS 16. In the back of the presentation, we've added an appendix with all the numbers, P&L, and balance sheet, including IFRS 16. Our reported like-for-like sales growth for 2022 was 18.1%. The reported like-for-like can be broken down to a price and a volume effect. The impact from a higher average price per product on our reported like-for-like was 7.8% in 2022, while the effect from increased volume was 9.5%. First, I want to explain a bit more on the increase in the average price per product. Confronted with price increases in our cost of goods throughout the year, we have not always passed on the higher purchasing prices to our customers immediately and/or in full as part of our growth margin management. Offering the lowest price remains one of the key elements in our formula, and we are pleased that we were able to increase the average price distance to our competitors in 2022. Our volume increase. We've seen a like-for-like increase in the number of transactions by 22.2% as a result of increased customer footfall. Our reported like-for-like number is also impacted by COVID restrictions in 2021. In 2022, the impact of COVID restrictions on our stores was limited, as we were only forced to close stores in the Netherlands in weeks 1 and 2, and we had to perform vaccination entrance checks in certain German states and Austria until mid-February. In 2021, our stores were impacted by two periods of lockdowns. First, in weeks 1 until 22, with store closures or assortment restrictions across all markets except for Poland. Second, in weeks 47 until 52, where store closures impacted the Netherlands and with assortment restrictions in Austria. In addition, in that period, again, in certain German states and Austria, we were required to perform vaccination entrance checks during this period. In my presentation last year, I explained our methodology for normalizing sales in 2020 and 2021. In short, we normalized our sales for the negative impact of store closures and the positive effect after reopening. For 2022, we did not normalize our sales. No normalization for the stores that were closed in the Netherlands for 2 weeks, and no normalization for the reopening effect. The reason for not normalizing 2022 sales is twofold. First, simplicity. By not normalizing in 2022, we can hopefully refrain from showing normalized developments again in 2023. The second reason is the level of impact in 2022, which was de minimis. Our normalized like-for-like for 2022 is therefore calculated based on 2022 actuals compared to the normalized like-for-like for 2021. For 2022, the normalized like-for-like is 9.7%. This is lower than the reported number because the impact of restrictions in the base year, 2021, was bigger than in 2022. When comparing normalized like-for-likes for 2022 and 2021, the normalized like-for-like is 220 basis points higher in 2022. This is primarily explained by the strong performance of our essential assortment, centered around our fast-moving consumer goods categories and strong seasonal performance in the Q4 of 2022. As of next year's capital market seminar, I will no longer present a normalized like-for-like number. The impact of COVID restrictions on 2022 sales were limited, and we do not expect restrictions going forward. On this slide, we show 2022 reported and normalized like-for-like performance, and I will make some comments on each quarter. Q1 in 2021 was very strong, with a normalized like-for-like of 18%, resulting from strong sales across all our open markets. Since COVID restrictions were more limited in Q1 of 2022 compared to 2021, we were able to report a like-for-like of 27.7%. On a normalized basis, a slightly negative like-for-like of -0.7% remains. The explanation lies, on the one hand, in the strong performance in the Q1 of 2021, where, for example, we benefited from the fact that in Poland some of our competitors were forced to close due to COVID restrictions. On the other hand, performance in the Q1 of 2022 was negatively impacted by vaccination entrance restrictions in certain German states and Austria, for which we do not normalize. As of Q2 in 2022, we were no longer impacted by COVID restrictions in any of our markets. In 2021, we were impacted by restrictions in several weeks of Q2 in most of our markets, again with the exception of Poland and also Italy and Luxembourg. This explains why our normalized 2022 like-for-like is lower than reported in Q2. In Q3, we were not impacted by COVID restrictions or reopening effects in either year, and therefore reported and normalized like-for-like in Q3 are equal. Strong like-for-like performance in 2022 resulted from significant growth in the number of customers who were increasingly buying essentials, mainly within our FMCG categories and decoration items. In Q4, both reported and normalized like-for-like performance were exceptionally strong in 2022. Record-breaking Christmas sales and the impact of COVID restrictions in 2021 resulted in 23.4 reported like-for-like. In Q4 of 2021, we had very strong seasonal sales as well in November. We were sold out too early in period 12. As a result, our full year like-for-like performance in 2022, both on a normalized and reported basis, outperformed our already strong performance in 2021. On this slide, we present the absolute sales growth in the years 2020, 2021, and 2022, in all cases compared to 2019 and only for stores that were opened before 2019. In other words, a like-for-like group. The graph only includes the weeks that these stores were both open and selling a full assortment. There, I need to note that COVID restrictions varied by country and therefore also the periods included in the analysis for each country varies. Czechia, Italy, and Spain are not included in this analysis as the first stores were opened after 2019. As you can see from the graph, the performance of Action has been very strong in all countries without exception. Having said that, there are some differences between the years, and there are some differences in the development of individual countries versus the overall Action development. I will talk you through the most notable differences. In our most mature market, the Netherlands, we still realized strong growth in all years compared to 2019. The performance in our largest market, France, was above average compared to Action total. We performed very strongly in Germany with 29.2% growth if you compare 2022 to 2019. Now, let me give you a little bit more detail on our performance in Germany. In 2020, we had both a very strong reopening as well as hoarding towards the end of the period because of the early announcement of the second lockdown. In 2020, sales were helped by the reduction of VAT from 90% to 60% for the high rate and 7% to 5% for the low rate. In 2021, we cycled against that strong performance in 2020. Additionally, we had a variety of COVID restrictions in various German states that had a very significant impact on customer behavior. However, these stores and weeks were not excluded here because the stores were open, and they were selling the full assortment. In 2022, performance was again strong, resulting in a very significant 29.2% growth between 2019 and 2022. The strongest performance is observed in Poland, where an impressive 46.3% growth is realized compared to 2019. I have to note that the number of stores included in the calculation is only 25. In 2021, our performance was positively influenced by closure of several competitors due to COVID restrictions that were not applicable to Action. Our strong performance continued in Poland in 2022. We had a record number of 282 store openings in 2022, in line with our ambition to open more stores than in 2021. We also had to close 2 stores, not because of performance, but because of a zoning issue in the Netherlands and an expropriation in France. Consequently, we added 280 stores, bringing our total number of stores at year-end to 2,263. The main growth countries were Poland, 81, France, 74, and Germany, 46 added. Notably, we also opened 21 stores in Italy, which is together with Spain, considered an important future growth market. The number of store openings and white space in these countries underline our ambitions to grow even further. For 2023, our ambition is to open 300 stores, which will be the first time in the history of our company. The main growth countries will again be France, Poland, and Germany. We will also focus on expanding our store base in the recently entered countries, Italy, Czechia, and after a successful pilot period in 2022, also Spain. Earlier this month, we opened our first store in Slovakia, where we now have already two stores. Gross margin is an important driver of our strong performance. Inflationary pressures impacted our cost of goods sold as of Q4, 2021, with an even stronger impact in 2022. This made us become even more focused on our margin management. The flexibility of our formula is a very valuable asset in this process as we deliberately offer a changing range of products across our 14 categories. Besides providing a surprising assortment to our customers, this allows us to buy only products that provide an attractive margin. For products that were too severely impacted by price increases from our suppliers, we always have the option to delist the product. Versus 2021, our overall gross margin in 2022 was 40 basis points lower. As I explained last year, our gross margin percentage in 2021 was impacted by two incidental drivers, being a lower promotional pressure and the timing of price increases. I did not expect this to repeat in 2022, but I was only partly right, as lower promotional pressure did continue in 2022. However, in 22, we were also negatively impacted by higher sea freight costs on our direct import purchases and a negative effect from mix in the assortment sold, together resulting in a 40 basis points lower gross margin. Nevertheless, we can conclude that our successful margin management, again, resulted in consistent and stable margin performance across categories and over periods in 2022. Over the next couple of minutes, I will talk about profitability. In this slide, I want to analyze profitability for stores that were open for a full year in 2019, which are 1,321 in total. The slide shows the average store contribution margin by country. Our store contribution margin is calculated as the adjusted gross margin realized by a store, minus all operating costs that are directly attributable. In 2022, this includes the 40 basis points lower gross margin, but not the full operating leverage, because it doesn't include indirect expenses, supply chain, and headquarter costs. Overall, the increase was 230 basis points for this cohort of stores opened before 2019. On this slide, you see the contribution margin of our stores indicated on the left Y-axis by the contribution margin per store in euros, and that is also reflected in the blue bars. You also see on the slide the contribution margin as a percentage of sales, and that is on the right Y-axis, and it's indicated by the orange dots. The graph includes all stores opened before the first of January, 2021. It shows that all our mature stores are profitable. We do not have any loss-making stores. All our stores contribute positively. Actually, we do not have any mature stores with a store contribution margin below 10%. Additionally, we never had to close a store due to underperformance. Both these facts underline that while expanding our store base, we've also always focused on the good quality of our new stores. The statement of all our mature stores being profitable is also true if we add supply chain costs to the calculation. Our increasing scale, together with store and country maturity, has a positive effect on our profitability. In 2019, slightly less than 75% of our net sales was achieved by stores with a contribution margin above 20%. In 2022, this share had increased to almost 90%, while net sales over the same period increased by EUR 3.8 billion. Leverage is also visible in the development of our supply chain costs as a percentage of net sales. Our increasing scale allows us to operate more efficiently within our supply chain. An important driver is the efficiency of our distribution network, indicated by the average kilometers distance from our stores to a DC. The average distance decreased by 12.3% from 2019 to 2022. After the strong increase in operating EBITDA margin of 120 basis points in 2021, we again realized a very significant increase in 2022 of 150 basis points. I will talk you through the most important drivers behind our EBITDA margin expansion. I've already explained the -40 basis points gross margin on the slides about gross margin. Operating leverage is the result of a 30% sales growth, and in particular, 18.1 like-for-like, including 7.8% increase in our average sale price. Inflation impacted various of our cost lines, thereby negatively impacting our EBITDA margin by 60 basis points. I want to highlight that there is a delay in the increase for some of the cost lines. For example, the majority of our rent contracts will be indexed in this year, so 2023, with higher rates compared to 2022. Therefore, the impact of inflation on our OPEX lines is expected to be more significant in 2023. In 2021, we incurred EUR 24 million of extra wage costs to maintain social distancing with door policies, extra hygiene measures, etc.. In 2022, the additional costs directly related to COVID were very limited, positively impacting our EBITDA margin by 40 basis points. Other factors contributed another 40 basis points, and this mainly relates to the impact of lockdowns and restrictions in 2021. Overall, we can conclude that our operating model and tight cost control have contributed to the strong expansion of EBITDA margin. Operating leverage from price increases was only partially offset by cost inflation, and therefore, one could say that we had somewhat of a tailwind from inflation in 2022. Looking at 2023, our normal financial model is that sales growth again will translate into operating leverage. However, in 2023, we will also bear the full effect of the higher inflation on our OpEx lines. In other words, the tailwind that helped us in 2022 will pivot into a headwind with the full impact of high inflation in our OpEx this year. If I add these factors together in terms of the expected EBITDA margin for 2023, I feel pretty safe in guiding towards an EBITDA margin remaining at least at the level of 2022. In 2022, our CapEx increased by EUR 47 million or 26% to EUR 230 million. As a percentage of sales, CapEx was 2.6%, down from 2.7% in 2021. Over the last six years, we've seen a clear downward trend in CapEx as a percentage of sales, reflecting our increasing scale. Our store expansion CapEx increased to EUR 135 million in 2022, which is partly explained by 13 more store openings. A larger part of the explanation lies in higher average CapEx per new store, which was EUR 480k per store in 2022, compared to EUR 435 per store in 2021. Impacts of inflation and scarcity of materials led to an upward pressure towards the last quarter of 2021, which continued over the full year in 2022. As a consequence, our CapEx per sqm increased by 3.3% from EUR 490 per sqm to EUR 433 per sqm in 2022. Also, the stores we opened in 2022 were slightly larger in size compared to our 2021 openings. CapEx for new DCs was EUR 9 million. As I explained last year, in 2021, new DCs had a net positive impact on our cash flow of EUR 15 million, and the driver of this was the sale of our assets of DC Oslo. Our investments in technology in 2022 increased compared to the years 2019-2021 as we continue to invest in a number of large-scale infrastructure projects. One of the elements of our financial model is excellent cash generation. This translates into a high cash conversion historically, gradually increasing from 56% in 2017 to 93% in 2021, with a similar pattern being visible in operating cash flow as a percentage of net sales. Similar to last year, the calculation of cash flow includes CapEx for new DCs in all years presented. The 78% for 2022 is somewhat lower than 2021. This can mostly be explained by a very significant improvement in net working capital in 2021, resulting from the composition and movement of our inventory, as well as the sale and leaseback of DC Oslo, which increased our operating cash flow in 2021 by EUR 32 million. In 2022, the impact on net working capital reversed, and CapEx for new DCs resulted in a cash outflow of EUR 9 million. Nevertheless, our cash generation remained solid in 2022, with a cash conversion rate above the years from 2017 to 2020. Not included in operating cash flow are the dividends that we paid in March and December of last year. Including the December dividend payment, we ended the year with cash and cash equivalents of EUR 697 million. This slide summarizes our operating performance over the last three years, where mainly 2020 and 2021 were impacted heavily by the COVID pandemic. To be clear, this slide includes all the impacts and presents unadjusted figures. Finally, I want to give you an update on current trading in 2023. Today, we are in week 12. As you know, we have a 52-week and 12-period reporting calendar with quarters of three periods, with four, and five weeks. That means that we are now in week four of our period three, with still one week to go until the end of the Q1. The information on the slides covers year to date until last week being week 11. As you can see, our overall sales growth for these 11 weeks was very strong at 37%. Like-for-like was 24.8%. When comparing to last year, this should be compared to normalized like-for-like, which as you have seen on one of the previous slide, was -0.6% for the Q1. Based on year-to-date sales and like-for-like performance, we expect a strong Q1 for both sales and EBITDA growth. In 2022, our growth accelerated in the second half of the year, especially from period 9 onwards, which means that we will be cycling against that strong performance in the second half of 2023. Nevertheless, we are confident to achieve strong results again in 2023. The like-for-like growth year-to-date was again mainly driven by a 22% growth in transactions. We ended last year at 2,263 stores. Our store openings in 2023 are on track. Up to an including week 11, we opened 26 stores, including 2 in Italy, 3 in Spain, and 2 in Slovakia. We had to close 3 stores. 2 because of forced closures from site redevelopment, and 1 which is a delayed relocation. So far this week, we've opened an additional 3 new stores, 1 in Slovakia, 1 in Spain, and 1 in Poland. Today, our total number of stores therefore is 2,289. Last Sunday, our cash and cash equivalents stood at EUR 802 million. Same as last year, we plan to pay a dividend in March. It will be paid next week. After this dividend, our cash level remains solid, especially given that in light of our normal seasonality, we are strongly cash positive from March onwards. With that, I hand back to our Chairman, Simon Borrows. Thank you, Joost. Action has started the year very well, and we're on track to make a significant step up in run rate EBITDA at the 31st of March. As Action's main shareholder, we're looking forward to receiving another dividend next week. 2023 is the last year of Action's five-year 2019 plan. As you can see, the company has already exceeded the 2 key KPIs. 12 months early in the case of sales, and almost 18 months in the case of EBITDA. With the company having outperformed the 2019 plan so materially, we've decided that we don't wish to take a risk on another undercooked plan again. We're presenting you with some key guidelines for your modeling rather than a specific plan. The details are set out here and cover the 4 years starting in 2023. In short, we expect to open between 1,300 and 1,400 stores in the period, starting with 300 this year and exceeding 400 in 2026. In terms of the like-for-likes, we assume mid-single-digit growth in low inflation years and high-single-digit growth in high inflation years. For the avoidance of doubt, 2023 looks like being a high inflation year. While continuing scale effects will put upward pressure on Action's EBITDA margin, we will continue to prioritize customers, so we're not planning more than 40 basis points of EBITDA margin expansion over the next four-year period. Let me bring things to a close by expressing my gratitude to Hajir, Joost, and all the Action team for another very strong year in 2022, and an excellent start to 2023. The 3i team is very involved with Action and has been hugely satisfying to support Hajir in her first year as CEO. She's clearly enjoyed the new role and has been very sure-footed about key commercial judgments and people decisions. Action continues to have enormous white space in front of it, and the early trading from Italy, Spain, and Slovakia is already well ahead of our plans for each country. Let me close with this chart that I've shown you before. Action's development to date on white space potential puts it on track to join a very rare group of retailers where growth extends over decades, not years. Okay, I'll now hand back to the moderator before commencing the Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, participants can continue to submit questions in written format either via the webcast page by clicking the Ask a Question button. We will pause for a moment to assemble the queue. We will take our first question from Gregory Simpson of BNP Paribas. Please go ahead. Good morning. Thanks a lot for the presentation. Just three more financial questions, please. Firstly, just on price increases, so 7.8% increase in 2022, how should we think about that in 2023? Secondly, on gross margin, you had talked about kind of cost of goods deflation in factories in the Far East. How should we think about that impacting kind of gross margin for 2023? Thirdly, just on kind of the addressable market longer term. I know the addressable market is based on kind of, I think 7 countries you've analyzed, which doesn't include the likes of the U.K. or the Nordics. Kind of getting ahead of ourselves here, but do you think those regions could be addressable in the very long term and even like the U.S., for example? Thanks. Joost, do you wanna take the first? Your question was, if I heard it correctly, that in price increases last year, we had this 7.8% increase in the average price, and how is that expected to be in 2023? What I can say is that if I look at year-to-date performance, again that it is until last week, we're actually slightly above where we ended for the full year last year. Having said that, looking at what we are currently seeing in our buying, I expect a lower percentage for the remainder of the year. Did you want to say anything about gross margin or? Personally, I don't think that the price is gonna have impact on the price margin because we're still able to work out the flexibility in the assortment. Are you seeing, gross margin inflation as a result of what suppliers are offering you through the year? Well, it's a little bit of combination. We see that happening in for items which we're sourcing from the Far East. For example, we're not seeing that in Europe. Yeah. At the end, I think we're gonna sort it out in the mix. Okay. Look, on your last point, I don't think any territories are out or completely out of scope. All those countries you mentioned, I'm sure at some stage are gonna come under the review of our property teams and our strategy teams. We do have five very big markets open to us for expansion at the moment, which is why we feel we're very confident about increasing the rates of store openings as we forecast in the plan. That's Germany, that's France, that's Poland, that's Spain, and Italy. They are the priorities for the next few years. Great. Thanks very much. Thanks. As a reminder, everyone, if you would like to ask a question, please indicate by dialing star one on your telephone keypad. We will take the next question from Gaurav Khokhanas of BNP Paribas. Please go ahead. Hey, good morning. Thanks very much for taking my question. The question that I'm interested in is really the gross margin investment you think you'll be able to do over the life of the next 4 years. You talked about sharing the gains with consumers from your leverage. How much opportunity do you think there is to widen your price advantage against your peers? How much do you think gross margins can be allowed to drift downwards in order to still deliver a 14% EBITDA margin? Hajir, I know it's hard to quantify. Do you want to say something about that? I think it is hard to quantify it, but having said that, I think as we grow as a company, we also have a scale of benefit. For us, it's key that we are maintaining the lowest price. I think we have shown that we're very good at that. Although we had a period of inflation, we were still able to have the lowest prices. I think we're gonna continue doing that. I think as you saw on a, on a slide in Adja's section, that we've maintained a pretty significant distance between us and our high street competitors on pricing. I guess what surprised us is the degree to which that gap has elevated over the last 15 months, as many retailers have decided to put pretty significant price increases through. Where in essentials in particular, we've been moderating our price increases, which is a perfect gap. I would think we'll be a bit more of the same while we remain in this high inflation environment. Understood. Thank you. Thank you. The next one is from Philip Middleton of Bank of America. Please go ahead. Yeah. Thank you. That's a really interesting presentation. Just a couple of questions. Firstly, it looks to me like you're guiding for margin improvement to be a bit back-end loaded because you think this year you've got some headwinds, but that will sort of resolve itself in due course. Just to check that's right. Also, obviously, your leverage is phenomenally low. Nobody would expect you to do a leverage recap under these conditions. What's your medium-term capital structure objective, please? Thanks, Philip. Joost, do you want to tackle the first one? Yeah. Although I'm not completely sure if I understood it correctly, so. It is related to the cost of goods sold and the inflation. Are you expecting the margin benefit to come through more in the second half of the year? No. Actually, as I've shown this year but also previous years, our margin management is that we want to keep the margin as consistent as possible over categories as well as over periods. As I said, we will have this extra impact of inflation in our OPEX lines, but that we will offset with the sales leverage, like we did last year. That's actually why I guided towards this, let's say, minimum at the level of 2022. Yeah. Philip, it looks like being fairly balanced across the year if we do our management of cash rates appropriately. In terms of, capital structure, well, I agree with you that we wouldn't want to be going near the banking markets for a big refinancing at the moment. I do expect that, if we get to some calmer waters, then we will be looking at that topic in due course. The group is gonna be very unlevered by the end of this year if we're not able to do that soon. That will be on the plan, but there's nothing concrete at the moment, if I can put it that way. Okay, thanks. That's very helpful. The next one is from Vikram Kumar of Kuvari. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hi, guys. Can you hear me okay? I just had some problems dialing in. Yeah. Yep. Okay, great. Thanks. Yeah, great. I just wanna ask, when you see a period of higher like-for-like, like you've seen or you talked about in second half 2022 and the start of this year, other than inflation, which I know is in there, can you just give us some flavor of the drivers of kind of category spend that really work? It was really good seeing that video of the stores. Obviously there's lots of household type shelf products, which I hear from some companies in some regions that people have got too much on their shelves. Some of the FMCG guys have talked about that. Clearly you're not seeing that. Your customers are still buying. What are the kind of categories that you're seeing increased spend? Is it really just increased footfall? If so, where do you think your major share donors are as the consumer spends more with you? Where does that come from, please, in these countries? Thank you. Hajir. Yeah. So I think in general it starts with having more footfall in our stores. I think has something changed in terms of customer behavior visiting an Action store first. As I showed you my presentation, if you look at the category performance, then the key categories which are standing out are the FMCG categories. Personal care, food and drink, pets, laundry and cleaning, and household is after that. It is again, I think confirming that we are being seen as the store which customers are visiting the first before they go to other stores, including the food supermarket. Right. Next to that, in all our categories we have essentials, but these categories are really standing out. yeah. I think we have seen this for quite a while. Okay. Okay. No, that's really helpful. In some of those sort of household, personal care, pet care, taking from the shelves off the food retailers, you obviously also sell those products. Do you think that's some of the biggest donors to you, of where you're taking footfall and volume from? Definitely. I think what Simon already said, so if you look to our prices, we're very keen on having the lowest price. What we have seen with all the price increases is that competition has increased prices very rapidly, while we have not done that. That is really something where you see that the gap between Action. Yeah. Competitors is becoming even bigger, and that's driving a lot of footfall. I mean, you've seen the Kantar price inflation figures across supermarkets, and you compare that with the price increase number that we put out there of about 7%. Yeah. Okay. One last bigger picture question, sorry, is given that we've all got so used to the incredible success story of Action in terms of both the rollout, movement to countries, and what we've discussed here about, you know, growth of footfall, etc., what do you guys see as the biggest risk to executing rather than us taking for granted, I guess, the execution of that very attractive plan you've laid out very clearly today? What do you guys now see as the biggest risk to that story? Let me say something, Hajir Hajji, you might want to add to it. I think the biggest risks on this journey have been the externalities. I mean, we haven't had a normal year for about four years. This machine has powered on through that. We see the big risks are the externalities that goes for many of the other companies in our portfolio. This is actually a very simple business. Mm-hmm. It's really well managed, and the rollout is just a cookie-cutter rollout approach. We don't have a major operational risk as part of the business. Hajir, you're driving this. No. I think you're very right. If I just look internally, of course, if you have such a fast-growing organization, I think our biggest challenge is to keep things as simple as possible and to maintain the strong culture which we have in our company. I think we also have shown over the last year- Yeah. We were able to manage that also in very, I would say, extraordinary times. Yeah. I would add to that that's the internal challenge. Great. Okay. No, that's really clear. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for today. I appreciate it. The next one is from Richard Chamberlain of Royal Bank of Canada. Please go ahead. Thanks. Morning, guys. Thank you very much for the presentation. Again, very interesting. I just had one on the margin expectations for the coming year. I wonder if you're. Well, I guess, first of all, is there a significant difference in margin between categories, such as, you know, consumables and other categories? Then, are you expecting a mixed margin impact from customers looking to sort of manage their budgets, you know, either by switching between categories or moving down through tiers or engaging more with promotions over the coming year? What kind of mixed changes are you expecting on margin? Thanks. Well, I think the one thing which we overall have seen is that, customers in general are buying lower priced items. I think if you look to our 14 categories, then our margin mix is quite good. We are very much able to just look to the different margins per category, and manage that over time in the mix. We have these 14 categories, and we also have the choices, as Joost was explaining, to sell an item or not. And we need a decent margin to have an item on the shelves. That could be the case that, like we have seen now, that people are focusing much more on lower priced items. We need to make sure that we are the lowest in price, but we still have a decent margin. I do not expect anything in the mix being driven by this customer behavior. All right. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. The next one is from Simon Bowler of Numis. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning. I've just focusing in on your kind of store contribution margin by geography, which you've kind of helpfully continued to provide on slide 50. There's been kind of, you know, a reasonable kind of range of performance, I guess, across those regions, a lot of which reflects kind of maturity over the last kind of 3 years. Just on a look forward basis, are any of those markets which you kind of feel will see greater progress come from versus the others? I guess in particular within that, I appreciate it's a small number of stores that's feeding into that calculation, but, you know, is there any reason why somewhere like Poland wouldn't ultimately achieve the same contribution margin that you see across some of the more mature Western European regions? To start with your last, well, it wasn't really a question, it was more of a statement. I tend to agree. If you look at the slide, you can see that all the more mature countries are trending towards a similar level of store contribution margin. I think the good news that is in the slide as well is that you also see that Germany really caught up there. All the, let's say, more recent countries, I see no reason why they would not have a similar development and indeed grow to a similar level. It's been pretty remarkable how Poland and, say, Czechia have moved very close to that, those margins that the mature countries have produced. Yeah. You have to remember, what I'm showing here is store contribution. Obviously, in the early years, we have a limited number of stores in a country, and then we still have a country office and what have you. That is not included in this number because that is lower in the P&L. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Then just one other quick comment. I think I heard correctly towards the start that you just wanted to kind of follow up on, which was, I mean, talking about kind of the availability of locations in Germany over the last kind of 12 months and before. Just wondering if you could add some kind of extra color on how you see that landscape developing from here. Well, I think in terms of Germany, well, bear in mind that we have over almost 500 stores, and as Joost was showing, every single store is profitable. It's also good to see that the country is well, coming in line with more mature markets. I think what we have seen is that the awareness in Germany was lower, so therefore, we were very much focused on only the really good locations, as we also explained in our presentation. If we just look back, I think, well, we probably could act a little bit faster. We have now also, based on the overall performance, increased the focus in Germany on more locations and opened up the space, and we are also investing in our real estate team. We really expect that we're gonna step up in terms of numbers in Germany. That's really clear. Thank you. There are no further questions on the conference line. I will now hand over to Silvia Santoro, Group Investor Relations Director, to address the written questions submitted via the webcast page. First question from Andrew Lowe at Citi. There are a few here. One, how did the product mix evolve over the years, shares A brands versus private labels? What growth should we be expecting from higher margin private label products? Should we start with that one? Shall I take those two then? In terms of your first question on the product mix, A brands versus private label, both increased over the years. I think we see that with our volume and our growth and expansion in new countries that our cooperation with A-brands has become stronger. So that share has overall increased. I think our investment in private label has also increased over the years, where we find it very important to create our own private labels to attract more customers to our stores. Having said that, I think our model is a little bit different than what we see overall traditionally in the supermarkets where private labels are meant to drive margin. I said, for us it's very important to drive the margin of every single product, so we don't distinguish between A brands, non-brands and private labels. Another question from Samar. Believe that EBITDA margin improvement would largely be backloaded. If so, would be interested to know thoughts around macro assumptions in our base case, e.g., COGS inflation and household income projections embedded within your targets. More generally, what is the longer-term EBITDA margin that Action can achieve? Finally, an update on the next liquidity event. I mean, this is not a modeling session, so we're not gonna be talking about some of those assumptions, but I do think it's fair to assume that over the coming years, the scale effects will have a bigger pressure on pushing the EBITDA margin up. In terms of. Liquidity. There is no sort of major liquidity event or anything like that planned. Another question from an investor: Can you help us think through the potential future leverage of lease costs as a percentage of sales? Lease costs are clearly indexed to inflation, and you are seeing like-for-like ahead of inflation for the most part. Is it fair to say that these can continue to fall from the current 3.7% to nearer best in class of 3%? If you look at only these costs, it's actually already below 3%, so I think that the percentage probably includes some of the other housing costs as well. Having said that, indeed, also if you compare us to other retailers, that component is relatively small, and if we continue at a like-for-like, especially also as long as the average price increase is at the level as it is today, you will see that operating leverage working through, and that includes then also rents. Next question. Can you discuss the sourcing strategy? What are the opportunities around moving sourcing, both proximity and also going more direct? You will likely reinvest this benefit. What is the potential gross margin benefit you could use to fuel best value to customer as you shift? I don't think it has... For us, if we look to our sourcing mix, again, I think that we are planning to diverge more, as I also explained in my presentation. Having said that, I think in the extra mix, we see an extra impact on the margin from a direct sourcing part. I think you need to see every single item in terms of giving the benefits back to the customers and what you allow yourself in terms of also the distance to competition. I think the experience to date has been the margin, gross margin benefits from direct sourcing have gone more to the customer than to Action itself. 75%. Yeah. Given back to the customer. Next question from Elena Jouronova from JP Morgan. What do you believe differentiates your customer proposition versus competitors like Pepco, KiK, and TK Maxx? Well, I can take that one. I don't want to talk about other retailers. I can only talk about Action as a company. The broadness of the categories and the continuously changing of the assortment. We're not a trendsetter, but we're a very fast trend follower. I think that we have invested a lot in our products in terms of not only offering good prices, but also improving the quality and sustainability. We really see that customers are recognizing that. I would say on one side, the broadness of our assortment and our 14 categories are, well, I would say really unique to what Action is doing. Combining that with fast-moving changing assortment, which makes it also very attractive for customers to get to the stores. I think on the daily essentials, we really have to build up a good, very solid assortment over the last years. From Elena, another question on margins. Do you expect the increasing share of FMCG sales to impact gross margins negatively? I also can take that one because as I explained, we have these 14 categories. We already see for 7, 8 months an increase in FMCG. We work that out in the margin to compensate that with the other categories and the products which we buy. Again, I think that is. Well, what we try to repeat and bring across, I think the 14 categories and the flexibility which we have in deciding which assortment we are selling, is really very fundamental also in our, in our margin management. Coming back to the question, no, I don't expect that. Another question about A brands from Rob Platts at Financial Mutuals. Could you talk about the gross margin of A brands for you, the level of collaboration with those brands around price, in-store placement, signage, etc., and your gross plans, and percent basket share of A brands for a typical customer? Well, I think coming back to your first point, for us, A brands is just another supplier, just like we treat other suppliers. It's very important. Our key principle is that we only deal with suppliers if we can offer the lowest price. There is no difference between private label, non-brands or A brands, and that is also the basic cooperation which we have with our A brands. We only have a deal with an A brand if we can offer the lowest price and have a decent margin. We do not do anything extra around A brands promotions or. Our products are selling itself in our stores, that is also what you could see in the movie. We're not doing anything else with specific suppliers, including A brands. What percentage of a basket? 30%, 40%, would you say? I would say, yeah, around 30%. Another question. France, as you illustrate, has been a great growth driver for the business. Spain and Italy are large markets which look interesting, every market Action enters seems to do well. Is it just a case of flexing the product offering a little for different countries? The world over, customers like low prices, and Action are able to provide that. There's never been an issue with entering a country and growing? I think that is the unique part of Action. 95% of our assortment is the same and similar across all countries. 5% we differentiate. That means that if you look to A brands, it could be that A brand is a different brand in the one country or the other country. It could be, if you look to linen, that you have specific sizes in one country, which is then different in another country. The core of our assortment is the same across all the stores and all the countries, and it really works. We also don't see huge differences per performance of categories. We see some differences, but not huge differences. I think, again, for me, in Spain and Italy, we really have outperformed the business case, but also recently Slovakia, where people in queues were really standing in front of the store waiting for an Action. I think that is also coming back on our digital approach over the last years, which we have increased also the awareness around the proposition, where it helps in new markets that from day one, the awareness is there. People have heard about it, read about it, or seen it in another country. Question on locations. How easy or difficult is it for you to obtain new locations? Can you say a few words on your pipeline of new locations? Yeah. We're working up front on our pipeline. I would say that for 2023, we have a very healthy pipeline where, of course, you need to start one and a half year before. The good thing of Action is we can perform in all kind of locations. That means that a lot of landlords are coming to us because they have a good location where they know that Action can perform at, but at the same time, it's also attracting so much customers that is also adding a lot of value for the neighborhood. I would say for 2023, we have a very healthy pipeline. Another question is, who are your primary competitors as you continue to grow? Other peers such as Pepco have similar expansion plans. How will your expansion plans be affected by this? I think looking to our competitors, we do not have one competitor because we have 14 categories, and we're active in 11 countries. That means that you need to define your competition per category in a certain country, and that is also what we're doing. We're also following up very closely who our competitors in that specific country for that specific category are, and we're focusing very much on the prices, which we're also measuring. Again, for us, it's coming back to our basic principle. We always need to make sure that we are the lowest in the market, and that is what we also, who we are and what we're doing. That is also what we're measuring. I would not say that we have one competitor. On locations, I think that we have specific criteria for our locations, which we really want to maintain, and I don't think that in general we see a lot of competition. I mean, another observation I would make is that Action thrives on competition, and it's very much part of the DNA of the business. Other question is, what are the debt hedging arrangements? Chris. As interest rate hedging? Yeah. Historically, we have a treasury policy in place where we aim to have a certain level of our debt volume hedged against interest rate changes. Last year, we have increased that level significantly. Right now, between 80% and 90% of our total volume of debt has been hedged until 2026, up to and including 2026, I should say. That has an interest associated to it between 1.3% and 1.8%. What is the cost of refurbs, and are they a distraction to sales? A full refurb. We distinguish between what we call an update, which is a light touch refurbishment and a full refurb. A full refurb usually requires the same type of CapEx as a new store. You're looking at approximately EUR 480K that I also mentioned in my presentation. Yeah. To, to add to that, maybe just in terms of impact on sales, we really make sure that we're planning it very early in the year, so that we really limited the sales impact. We're continuously also looking to improving the process in terms of speeding up the days that we are closed for our customers. Is it fair to say that you get a good like-for-like positive impact once you reopen? Once we reopen, we have to catch up because customers who were not there for a long period, they will pick up afterwards. In practice, a lot of these are what we call relocations or enlargements. There the like-for-like, the sales growth or, the increase in sales has been more significant than in a one-on-one refurb. Is there any seasonality in sales? Is there any seasonality in sales? Over the last quarters. Yes, I would say, yeah. January normally start always a little bit slower. You're picking up to the season in the summer. You have a period that people are coming back from the holiday, and then it's getting a little bit slower. People are preparing then for the Christmas period, which is the largest. There are quite some seasonality, I would say, where two of the biggest, garden and outdoor during the summer and then Christmas during the end of the year. Question on valuation. Some of your listed peers have suffered devaluation on your chosen valuation metric over recent times. What would be the trigger event for you to adjust the valuation model? James? Yeah, sure. I mean, we, you know, we, we have a very tried and tested valuation policy at Group. That takes into account both Action's strong performance and a range of valuation metrics, and we're about to go into that process now as we usually do. It's too early to say exactly, but, you know, that process will just continue, you know, through to the year end as it has done in prior periods. One final on the PE market in general. Are current events in the global banking market impacting the industry? I mean, it's pretty clear the events over recent times have really slowed up the transaction flow and I would say fundraising, although we're not particularly in the fundraising business. That's another item. The banking or the debt markets look particularly frozen at the moment for most private equity transactions. I would think you've got to be a very strong eye-catching company to be raising the sorts of levels of debt private equity likes to raise for different situations. That will obviously change at some point in time, but it's very hard today to say where that will be. There are no further questions. Okay. Well, I think we'd like to wrap up. Thanks to Joost and Hajir Hajji for their time and answering everyone's questions. Thanks for dialing in. We really appreciate your involvement. Okay. Bye.