Thank you to you all for coming. A lot of them, you have been here before, so these are our results. Most of the results are going to be explained by Brad. Just to remind you what we think is special about Judges, we're doing a buy and build model of scientific instruments company. We believe it's a very favorable market to do that because of the long-term drivers, because of a large pool of potential candidates for acquisitions, and the low capital requirements. These are the three things which really drive shareholder value. We've done 19 acquisitions since May 2005 when we started in our present format. It's a bit more than one a year. We're disciplined in acquisitions. Very important to buy sensible businesses and with sustainable earnings and cash flow and to pay sensible prices for it. It's a very simple formula, and that's the thing which has created shareholder values in the last 16 years. Of course, acquisition is a very random path, and the slide shows you know, we have some very good years where we do a lot of deals, and we have other years which are, you know, we try to do a lot of deals, but we don't succeed. We have to accept that as a fact. In fact, after a very good period between December 2019 and October 2020, we had a very good period, and since then we haven't done another deal, but we keep hope. I'll talk a bit more about this, I'm sure, in the question. Little aperçu of all our customers. We have many, many customers all around the world. A lot of them are universities. You see some very prestigious ones on the left, but there's also some less prestigious ones. Basically, all the prestigious ones are our customers or the customers of one of our businesses. We also sell to big industrial companies like Corning, L'Oréal, Fugro, and also some big scientific projects which are either involved in research like the CERN or at an institute or the Diamond Light Source. Also a lot of compliance institutions and basically national test houses. Apart from those which are the users of our products, we sell to OEMs, and you see a little selection of the OEMs who buy our products and sell them on as such or include them in their own products. You know, we had a strange year. Not quite as strange as 2020, but still not quite normal. This was really a year of progressive recovery. We produced record revenue, profits, and cash, so we're quite pleased with that. We had also a record order intake, which not only was 25% up on organic on 2020, but it wasn't so difficult because 2020 was a really bad year with the worst of COVID. We were pleased to be 8% up on 2019, which was our previous record year. Because of that, we feel that we are able to increase the dividend 20% for the full year, which means a 47% final. Of course, there were still a lot of challenges, a lot of travel restrictions. It's really difficult to remember that just a year ago, we were still in lockdown, and we could only eat outside at restaurants, and we couldn't travel further than the frontiers of the country. Little by little, we were able to travel and visit our customers, attend the scientific conferences, and that was a good thing. It has to be said, it was very slow. Actually, most of the conferences and conventions have really started only the very end of last year and are starting now. This year should be a big comeback for trade conventions. Supply chain issues were manageable, and although everybody was talking about them in 2020, where they were not a big problem. They became an increasing problem, and it's still the case. Although we were hoping they would get better, we'll talk about this, but the war in Ukraine is making things again difficult. Of course, throughout, we took care of our staff and made sure they were safe. Although a lot of people have now had COVID, but, nobody was seriously ill, and nobody ended up in hospital, so that was a good thing. The outlook for the year, we still have uncertainty, still a bit of COVID going around the world, and particularly in China at this point, and of course, the war. Still, we feel the environment is more normal than it was the last couple of years. We're starting the year with a record order book of 23 weeks, and we think this will help us have a better year. Performance review. Now it's up to you, Brad. Thanks, David, and good morning, everyone. Now I'm going to take you through the key highlights from the past year. It's clear that we've had a really good recovery in 2021 after the COVID-affected prior year. We've delivered what on the face of it, very, very good record revenues, profits, earnings per share. Really that's, you know, that's performance moving much closer to where we want it to be. Although not completely ahead of all of the 2019 pre-COVID comparatives, and we'll touch on that a little bit later. Going on to the highlights, total revenue up 14%. This is a combination of 10% organic revenue growth up from 5% at the half year and a contribution from our prior acquisitions. The good revenue growth has led to good profit growth, and our adjusted operating profits are up 31% to GBP 18.8 million from GBP 14.4 million in 2020. This has consequently gone down to earnings per share with adjusted earnings per share a record 238.1 pence per share, up from 177.2 pence in 2020. The good revenue growth has been strongly supported by organic order intake up 25% on the prior year and on a like-for-like basis, 8.5% ahead of 2019's prior record. It's a sign that we are getting over the impact of the pandemic. Now, the strong organic order intake has led to a good to very strong, in fairness, order book at the end of the year. Although, in fairness as well, it's been influenced by the challenges we've had with global supply chains. I'll talk a little bit more about this and order intake a little bit later. The group's got a great track record of turning profit into cash, and we've generated nearly GBP 20 million of cash from operations this year at a cash conversion of 104%. This has helped fund our progressively increasing dividend policy. For the full year this year, our dividend for the full year is up 20% to 66 pence per share, with a final dividend proposed of 47 pence. We ended the year with GBP 1.4 million of net cash up from or better than at least the GBP 5.7 million net debt position at the start of the year, despite an outlay on a new building for one of our businesses for over GBP 1 million and also GBP 1.8 million outlay on increasing our interest in Bordeaux Acquisition from 75.5% to 88%. As a reminder, Bordeaux is the vehicle that owns two of our trading subsidiaries, Deben U.K. and Oxford Cryosystems. Our balance sheet remains a strong feature of the business, and we have high cash reserves, low gearing, and significant headroom on all our covenants. As I'll talk about a little bit later, we also refinanced the group's borrowing facilities for a further five years, giving us significant runway on acquisitions. Inevitably, though, there are reasons to be cautious. The pandemic isn't yet over, and that's despite the U.K. having removed most of its restrictions. We continue to have to expend significant amounts of management and staff effort in navigating the challenges of the global supply chain issues, and we have to prepare ourselves for the consequences of the war in Ukraine. Nevertheless, we enter 2022 with positive order intake, a robust order book, and strong fundamentals. The key things I'll mention, having already talked about performance already, are three things really. One, big improvement in operating margins, reflecting the operational gearing of our business. Although partly enhanced by first-time capitalization of R&D expenditure, and I will come back to talk about that in a bit more depth in a short while. Secondly, our effective tax rate on adjusted earnings is 15.2%, influenced heavily by the U.K.'s R&D tax credit scheme, which benefits businesses like ours that invest heavily in R&D and have less than 500 employees. At the year-end, we did exceed that particular criteria, so we will lose the greatest benefits from this scheme in future. Lastly, for those of you not as familiar with our P&L, we do have adjusting items that take us to the statutory result. The largest component of these by far is the non-cash amortization of the intangible assets that we're required to recognize when we acquire businesses. I wanted to stop here and talk a little bit about capitalization of R&D. Now we have, for the first time in our group's history, capitalized expenditure on new or significantly improved products, having historically expensed 100% of our R&D costs. What this means is it's resulted in an uplift to operating margins of close to 1%, as I just mentioned, and also an enhancement in adjusted earnings per share of approximately 10 pence. Now, as projects are completed, this expenditure will be amortized, and so over the short to medium term, the effect will begin to reduce. I wanted to talk about the example at the foot of the page to illustrate this and help shareholders understand the effect on our results. In the illustration, we've used a few assumptions. One, that we capitalize the same amount every year, and we've used an easily divisible number. Two, that all projects that we start in a year complete by the end of the year. Three, that all projects are amortized over three following years in line with the group's policy. You can see in the first year, significant effect on earnings per share. As you then go into the second year and you start amortizing, that effect reduces, and after three full years of amortization, there is no net effect. Now, we know that this is an example, and it's not gonna be necessarily the same in the real world. But it's an important illustration to show shareholders and in particular, to bring shareholders' attention to the, you know, the artificial enhancement to our performance that having done this has done to our results this year. I wanted to talk about the bellwether for our business order intake. As I always say, important to talk you through the graph on the right-hand side of the slide. On that graph, there are three lines, a red line, a black line, and a green line. The far end of the graph is December 2021. The red line is our internal sales budget. We set this once a year, and we do that as part of our annual budgeting process, and it doesn't change for the whole year unless we acquire a business, in which case we add their cumulative budget. Then what are we measuring against? Actually, before I say that, one thing you would note is that, you know, I hope you appreciate we understandably had a conservative sales budget for 2021 following COVID. What are we measuring against? Well, the black line is the last 12 months of order intake, and so the purpose of that line is hopefully it's at least touching the red line by the end of the year, ideally above it, and that way we'd have had sufficient orders with which to meet our sales budget. The green line is the last four months of orders annualized, so we multiply that by three. That we look to track the red line ideally, because then if it tracks it consistently, we know we're having consistent order intake, and that enables us to have optimal capacity. Although, as you'd always see on the graph, because it's a shorter-term measure, the line is a lot more jagged and because order intake is never smooth. What happened this year? Well, you can see that the black line went ahead of the red line relatively early in the year and it stayed comfortably above that and kept growing. The green line was pretty much for the whole year ahead of the red line. This illustrates why we've had 25% increase in our organic order intake, and we've ended up with a really strong order book at the end of the year. Now, I would say there are a couple of things that also affect the order book, in particular to say some logistical and supply chain challenges which stopped us from being able to deliver as much as we might like to have delivered through the year. Secondly, also a really strong acceleration through the second half of the year, and consequently, given the lead times in our group, we wouldn't be able to deliver most of what we actually brought in in the last quarter. Now, at the end of the year, great order book. Where, where are we now? Well, for the first 11 weeks, we're slightly ahead of the same period last year. Overall, a positive picture going into 2022 with slightly better order intake than we had at the same time and a really strong order book. Here I just wanted to stop to just talk a little bit about 2019, because I alluded to this at the beginning of my part of the presentation that we're maybe not quite as good as it might look on the surface. I think it's valuable for shareholders to be able to see this. 2019 was previously our record year. First thing to say, as we talked about already, organic order intake for 2021 was 8.5% ahead of 2019. That on a like-for-like measure is better. Financial performance hasn't quite caught up despite the fact that we've got record performance this year. I thought it valuable to show shareholders why I feel that we still have a little way to go. Now, I touched on a little bit about our ability to deliver in the last slide, but actually the real key are in the items that are in the table at the foot of the slide. Firstly, R&D capitalization for the first time this year, and secondly, since the end of 2019 we've acquired 3 businesses. Moorfield Nanotechnology in December 2019, THT Thermal Hazard Technology in May 2020, and Korvus Technology in October 2020. Those three businesses, their acquisition EBIT, were a combined GBP 2.4 million. You take away the effect of R&D capitalization, you take away the effect of those three acquisitions, our comparable profit is 90% of what we achieved in 2019. It's clear that whilst we've had a record year and we've done really well and a strong recovery, we've still got a little way to go before the financial performance is actually ahead of what we did in 2019. Moving on to the next slide on the components of our profit growth. This slide reconciles between the 2020 and 2021 contribution of our businesses, and this is before central costs. Those are the two big columns on the left and right-hand side of the slide. Now, reconciling between those two columns are three further blocks. The first one showing strong growth at the vast majority of our businesses, although you can see in the second block a couple of our businesses dropped back in their performance. The third block shows the full year contribution of our prior acquisitions. All in all, a very positive picture for the group and shows the value of a diversified group. Balance sheet and cash flows. The group has an excellent track record of cash generation and a strong financial position, and we built on that in 2021. We generated GBP 19.6 million of cash from operations at a cash conversion of 104%. David mentioned low capital use at the start of the presentation. We normally expect to have less than 10% of working capital compared to revenue, although at this year-end, slightly higher than that. That's really been a consequence of the supply chain conservatism that our businesses have had to exhibit and also our inability to travel to international installations, complete those, and collect the cash therefrom. Having said that, we have a blue-chip base of customers, both universities and industry, and you saw that when David talked through the customer base earlier in the presentation. The most important thing for me on that is that we experience minimal bad debt. Our strong cash flow provides the group with resilience in tough times and enables us to deliver our buy and build strategy and provide progressively increasing dividends for shareholders. We've been able to increase the final dividend to 47 pence per share, and consequently, our full year dividend is up 20% to 66 pence per share. We've managed to turn GBP 5.7 million of net debt at the start of the year to GBP 1.4 million of net cash at the end of the year. Hence we have and continue to have significant headroom on all our covenants. Lloyds Bank continue to provide us with unwavering support, and this year they helped us refinance our bank facilities, providing us with a further five-year runway. I'll talk more about the refi a little bit later. Moving on to return on total invested capital, and this is another key measure for our group. In its purest form, it's a function of the multiples we pay for the businesses we acquire. On the left-hand side of the slide, when we made our first acquisition, FTT, and paid close to 5x, we start at around 20%. Growing ROTIC thereafter requires improved financial performance and/or acquiring businesses at lower multiples. The big cliff edge, as you can see in the middle of the slide, when we acquired GDS and Scientifica, but then record multiples of 6x, you can see when the group was a lot smaller, the impact of higher multiples on ROTIC. Likewise, you can see when we acquired THT in May 2020, the reducing effect. Smaller acquisitions have less impact on ROTIC now. At the end of this year, we'd improved ROTIC back up to just over 28% from 23% at the start of the year and continue to work hard to return ROTIC to recent highs of around 30%. This next slide shows a good picture of the diversification of the group. You see on the left-hand side a summary of all of our businesses' revenue, and you can see that no single company dominates. Our businesses also manufacture different scientific instruments for differing markets, so we're diversified by scientific application. On the right-hand side of the graph, you can see that no individual country or region overly dominates our geography. A good diversified picture. Well, this slide summarizes some key financial statistics about the long-term success of our group. Revenue and profits and earnings per share have all grown strongly over the history of our group. This year, we've delivered record revenue, record profit, and record EPS. Our compound annual organic revenue growth has gone back up to 7.4%, which for a group that business model is acquiring sustainably profitable businesses is creditable. We continue to focus on cash generation in order to be able to continue to reduce acquisition debt, fund future acquisitions, and reward shareholders with continued growing dividends, of which this year, the full year dividend is up 20% to GBP 0.66 per share, and our compound annual growth of the dividend remains close to 25%. On my last slide on the refinance, in May 2021, we refinanced our original banking facilities. A GBP 35 million facility was replaced with a new five-year GBP 60 million facility. This is broken down into a GBP 19 million term loan, GBP 35 million revolving credit facility or RCF, and a GBP 6 million uncommitted accordion, which if used, would add to the committed revolving credit facility. The covenants are consistent with our previous facilities, and the interest that we're paying is closely aligned with the previous deal. Overall, it's providing us with significant increases in our acquisition firepower. On that note, I'm gonna pass back to David to talk about our growth strategy. Thank you very much, Brad. We go to the next slide. Really two elements of growth. One is M&A and the other one organic growth. With the passage of time, you know, in the early days of Judges, for those who've been interested in us for a long time, you know, M&A was the predominant driver of our growth. With the passage of time, we own more and more companies, and the organic growth has become really as important an element. We talk about acquisition next, and we have to be really disciplined in doing acquisitions. What are we looking and what is the object of that discipline? Well, we must find companies which are strong exporters in a global niche market. Our business generally is a very international business. People don't really care where they buy the stuff that they need. As a result of this, if you don't export a lot because the U.K. is a relatively small part of the global scene, it means that there's a lot of competitors around there. Although you have a lot of export opportunities because you don't export much, but it means that you have other companies who are also ready to invade your own market. We need solid EBIT margin. I think these are the two first things we look at in any business. We're really looking for companies generating sustainable profits and sustainable cash flows. We've been paying 3x to 6x according to the size. As companies get bigger and predominantly when they go across GBP 1 million EBIT, there's a lot more people interested in buying them, and the process is a lot more competitive, and it's more difficult. You have a lot more failure in what you're trying to do, so you have to pay more. The bank has allowed us to borrow 2.5x EBITDA, and we've been paying between 2% and 4%. Now interest rates are a bit up, but in the scheme of things, it doesn't affect us so much. What we have to understand about this, there's a long incubation period, and it's very erratic in terms of managing to catch the target and complete the acquisition. We have excellent reputation, well deserved. I'm sorry to boast in amongst sellers, and we're really providing financial certainty to sellers because we never renegotiate the terms that we've agreed in the heads of agreement. We try to be really honorable throughout the process. I think at the beginning when we started, it probably cost us because people expected that the final deal would not be what we had promised. We had to promise a bit more than we needed. Now it has given us enormous kudos in the community of people who have things to sell. In particular, we've done many deals where people have actually signed heads with somebody else who didn't behave quite so properly, and when the deal failed, they always come back to us. We're really the buyer of choice for any deals which has failed. The model is very simple. You know, we generate cash flow in what we bought, reduce the debt, and reinvest in further acquisitions. Very simple model. This year was not a particularly active year, so we didn't buy any new company. We did, however, increase our stake in Bordeaux Acquisition from 75.5% to 88%. You know, it looks like a non-event, but, you know, spending GBP 1.8 million on an acquisition on the basis of 4.5x EBIT is like doing a small deal. In 2020, Bordeaux generated GBP 2.8 million EBIT, so it was, you know, it's quite a sizable subsidiary for us. What do we do after acquisitions? Well, I'm gonna pass it on to Mark, who's the one who does it. Yeah. Excellent. Thank you, David, and hello to everybody. We're obviously not gonna tell you everything that we do with our acquisitions, otherwise it wouldn't be our secret sauce, but let me give you a few hints about what we get up to after we buy businesses. I think the first place to start is that we're not a turnaround operation. We buy good businesses, as David has talked about. If they're good businesses, they've already proved that they can design great products, make them, and sell them. What we find is that most of the businesses that we purchase have limitations. In some cases, that's limitations to do with staff. Many of them are very small businesses with something between 20 and 60 people working for them, and many of whom have worked for the business for a long time and have had little exposure to the outside world other than the business they've worked for. Many have worked there since they left university. What that breeds is a sort of lack of knowledge about what the real world outside their business is about and what its capabilities are. Going back to that old phrase that the media laughed at about the time from Donald Rumsfeld is that they don't know what they don't know. Part of the process that we go through is to show them what they don't know, and in many cases, that enables them to make some changes and some improvements very quickly. We do quite a bit on the basics. We quite often buy businesses who don't do monthly management accounts. They look very hard at a few things each month but don't focus very much on the margins they make in a month. You know, if you're a small business and you're alone, a critical issue for you at most stages of your growth is cash. Now, when you're part of a group, clearly cash is important, but it's not the be all and end all. The focus can shift a little bit to profitability, to margins, and you can afford to obsess less about cash and maybe take a few different decisions. That also means that we've got opportunities for capital expenditure, which you don't have to run past a bank, and that we can assess for you. We insist that they put a few basics in place, monthly management accounts, strong financial controls. It may be surprising to hear for many of you that some of these business aren't used to doing stock takes. We bought business once where their stock take was someone wandering around saying, "Yeah, that looks about like half a million." That was the number that went in their accounts. We are much more rigorous with that and make sure that proper financial controls are in place, proper stock takes, proper assessments, et cetera. We make sure the basics are in place. A lot about what we do is about making sure that they are positioned for growth. In many cases, businesses have got to a particular size but then think that growing a little bit further is gonna be a real challenge for them. Quite often, that's around the whole concept of people. One of the things that I've spent a lot of time with is, A, developing the capabilities of the existing people in the organizations, encouraging them to bring outsiders in where they need additional skills, and raising the bar on recruitment to make sure that we get excellent people in rather than just good enough. For many people, making the change between a 20 or 30 person company, perhaps turning over GBP 5 million or GBP 6 million in a company twice that size, requires a big change in mindset of the type of capabilities of people that you need to recruit. That, as I think I've said before in these events, also requires a sort of mindset change in terms of the importance of management per se. Many of these businesses have been very focused on technology, and we have lots of people in them with PhDs on particular aspects of the business. That doesn't always mean that those same people are great at running a team or great at running a business, and therefore, the skill of leadership and management becomes increasingly important as those businesses grow. One of the other things we do is we don't set absolute standards for businesses. We're very aware that each different business has a different dynamic, and that rather than having black-and-white guidelines, we spend a lot of time working with each of the businesses to make sure that we encourage them to do what they can do rather than some arbitrary number. We encourage companies to look at their stock and their stock turns, at their debtor positions, at their return on sales, return on capital, and strive for better, but not towards an absolute standard, something that's relative to the potential for that business. In terms of growth, we quite often find that businesses in the past have run out of ideas for new products and that their selection process has been poor. The R&D director's favorite product is the one that gets developed, rather than the one that might sell the most. We encourage the businesses to try and be a little bit more selective over the products that they choose. Once you've invented a product, you need to make it. Again, we found that a lot of the businesses have a sort of granddad shed approach towards manufacturing. Whereas when you're a bigger business, you really have to look at that as a proper independent discipline, which requires the very specific skills that manufacturing engineers have, which are very different to those for R&D engineers. Most of our businesses actually moving on to having invented a product and then produced it, you need to sell it. Most of our businesses have a pretty good sales network, which has been developed over time, even the smaller ones. Again, we still encourage them to go a little bit further and work across the group, look at other distributors that other of their peer companies have and see if we can expand a little bit geographically. Then the final point would be having made the product and sold it, we obviously need to count the money, and we are very keen to make sure that each of the businesses has an IT system which is suited to its size and gives them the information they need to make good forward-looking decisions on the business. Those are the sorts of areas that we particularly focus on. I think we've had a degree of success in most of those areas over the last few years. As each new company comes in, we try and make sure that we challenge them in all of those areas. In fact, in a few businesses, when a business comes on board, we find something new that we'd not seen before that we can then disseminate across the group. It's not just teaching them, it's also learning from the acquisitions where relevant as well. I'm sure you may have some questions on that, but let me leave it at that for now. Thank you so much, Mark. We're just gonna remind you a bit what we said about the outlook and the investment case. Why would we have our shares? Well, I think, business has been robust through this very difficult period. We have a strong balance sheet, actually stronger than at the beginning of COVID. Our long-term fundamentals, our strategy, everything is unchanged, and everything was unaffected by what happened in the last couple of years. We have intact or even enhanced ability to execute deals. Of course, the pressure is on me to find them. I realize this, and I'm sure we'll have a lot of questions that I won't answer. We still, as ever, focus on shareholder value. We're still in uncertain times. COVID is not completely over. Of course, governments have a bill to pay. Quite rightly, they injected a lot of money in the economy by paying people who couldn't work. That was a very good thing. Of course, the bill hasn't been paid, and it will be eventually paid if we don't want to leave it all to the future generations. You can expect, as you had after the financial meltdown in 2008, successions of periods of stimulus and of austerity in different countries. Hopefully, as last time, it won't be synchronized with all the countries at the same time. You know, we'll be able to navigate and do more business in places where there's more stimulus and less austerity. There's a lot of geopolitical uncertainty. Of course, we, you know, all horrified by the aggression against Ukraine. This could still degenerate. Of course, there has been and will remain tension also in the Far East. It's not necessarily gonna be an easy ride on the political front in the next few years. Of course, you have inflation. Inflation because of all this money which has been injected. Inflation because of the supply chain issues and the price of oil because of the war. Of course, the possibility of higher interest rates for a period of time. Although we you know, all the prediction are all this will not last, but we will see. Of course, current trading for the current year, we're starting from a strong position with 23 weeks of order book. This, you know, the highest we've ever had. We've had quite reasonable order intake in the first 11 weeks of the year. Strong financial position, good backing from the bank, and we're well equipped to continue our strategy, which we see no need to change. The investment case, a robust model. We've had discipline. We intend to remain so. A lot of targets. We need to buy any earnings-enhancing companies. There are some, but this is why we don't do so many deals, because we want to be sure we're doing the right thing. The long-term growth drivers, which are, you know, colossal growth in higher education and the constant striving for optimization of everything humanity does, and therefore the requirement for measurement, all this is still there and will be there for still many generations. We have the benefit of great diversity in geography and applications. We completely focus on shareholder value. That means the pursuit of profitability, cash generation, and reducing always debt, and growing dividend at least 10% per year, and generating return on the capital we've invested. In fact, we've done better than 10% growth in dividend. In the past 15 years, we have a compound growth rate of dividend of 23%. Of course, the shares are free of inheritance tax after they've been held for 2 years. I think this concludes the presentation, and we're onto questions. We've got a question from Robin Speakman at Shore Capital. Yes. Thank you. Good morning, chaps, and congratulations on a good set of results in a still difficult year. Mm-hmm. It's clear there's more to come. In that respect, I just thought it'd be useful to know, in respect of the businesses that sort of didn't perform that well last year, for, I'm sure, varied reasons, what are the signs for those businesses as we're sort of entered 2022? Are you seeing more general improvement across the business? Are the laggards moving forward now? Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much, Robin. Yeah, I think there's a variety of reasons why some businesses were slower than others to pick up the ball. You know, one example is, for instance, CapEx freezes. You know, we have one of our subsidiaries were dependent on orders from large corporates, and corporates have been slow at revoking their CapEx freezes. Although there was a bit of an acceleration of orders in that company towards the year-end, it was very anemic. We hope that now it will be over. Also with you know, when there's been a CapEx freeze, people don't and there's no trade shows to go and see what you're going to buy next year. Well, you just don't put in any orders. We hope also with the rekindling of physical scientific conference things will improve for that particular business. We also have realized that not all, although all these companies are quite international, but they don't always sell to the same parts of the world, and some parts of the world have been hit by COVID at different time, and the inability to travel there has been a big factor. These are all the reasons why, you know, some companies are doing better faster than others. Those which haven't recovered so quickly last year, we hope whether they will catch up this year. Okay. Thank you. We'll go to Sanjay Vidyarthi from Liberum. Morning, all. It may be a slightly different, a difficult question to answer, but given the spread of your businesses, in terms of the competitive environment, has the pandemic caused any distress in any of your markets? Have you seen any consolidation or any of your competitors falling by the wayside to an extent? Just, you know, if there are any particular examples that stand out, we'd be interested to hear. I don't think. I mean, we could be affected by consolidation among our customers, but you know, I mean, a lot of customers is universities. They don't tend to merge so much, so that's a good thing for us. We haven't seen much in terms of consolidation of competitors, which would trouble us, of course, because we don't want to be left behind. You know, not much has happened really on the strategic front in the last two years because everybody's been trying to you know, survive and prosper in a difficult climate. Unless one of my colleagues has something to add, I think really the picture is very much what it was in 2019. Yeah. If I could just add, I would completely agree with David in terms of customers and competitors. Maybe the one area that we've seen a little bit of action has been in small suppliers. I think the pandemic has caused one or two small, and when I say small, I mean companies employing just a handful of people, where the owner is close to retirement, to just say, "I've had enough," and go. We have seen a few tiny suppliers close their doors. That I think has been the only impact over the two years. As David says, nothing in terms of consolidation of competitors or customers. Okay. That's great. Thank you very much. Thank you. We've got a question from Nicholas Cotton, who says, "Great results. Thank you. How's the acquisition pipeline looking into 2022, please? Yeah. Thank you very much, Nicholas Cotton. You know, let's go back to two years ago. Of course, as you realize, we never comment really on the actual situation that we see at any point in time, and so we won't change that. I just want to repeat what I said in the past. I mean, first of all, what's changed with COVID is, you know, enormous uncertainty for many, I think, the fear that their companies wouldn't survive. This is not a time when you decide to appoint somebody to sell your business. Clearly, you know, at the beginning of 2021, it hasn't been a great time for filling the pipeline of acquisitions. We did a couple of deals in 2020, THT and Korvus, but they were both deals which had been started before the beginning of COVID. But we managed to complete them during the pandemic, although we couldn't travel, so it was all done remotely as we all, you know, life has changed now. We all lead our life from our basements. This is how we did these two deals. Really there wasn't much coming into the pipeline as we expected. What I did say before is that what I was expecting is to see the following thing. Anybody who's then well into their sixties and who created a business and is basically their family fortune is largely in that business, they have to consider retirement and selling the business in that decade between sixty and seventy, because nobody really wants to leave a widow with a business to sell which has no management. It's a very difficult thing to accept that you're getting on, and you have to do something about it, and anything can happen at any time and leave your family in a mess. Everybody's thinking about it, like everybody's got some gray hair or no hair has to be thinking about these things. Of course, if you've lived 2008, when you were maybe 55 and you thought maybe I won't survive, it's a big scare, but eventually you did survive, and you didn't go bust. T12 years later, maybe you're around 67, and you have another scare like this, and then you survive. What do you think? You're gonna go and wait for the third shock, and maybe you won't survive. How does it leave your family? I think a lot, and I've been saying that for the last two years, a lot of people will rethink their lives after the pandemic and think, you know, "Must I do something now?" You know, or should I wait for the next time when I can't do anything and maybe it's too late. I'm expecting to have this pipeline refilling post-COVID and a lot of people thinking, okay, you know, now is the time to think about it. Maybe not do something immediately because everybody suffered, and you want to show a nice set of results when you put your company for sale. Eventually, a lot of these companies will be triggered into selling in the next few years. That's what I believe. Mathias from Shore says, Congratulations on great results. Can you elaborate on the impact of inflation on Judges, particularly how have input costs developed, and how do you think about pricing power of our products? Let's take the second one first. In terms of pricing power, we have pretty good pricing power in most of our businesses. Probably 10% or 15% are operating in slightly more competitive markets and have to be careful, but in most cases, we can pass on costs. In terms of the cost we're seeing, it seems to have gone in two or three waves during the pandemic. There was certainly shortages which led to cost pressures from components early on, which then seemed to ease and then seemed to come again. Certainly a couple of months ago, the signs were that those were easing. I think in the last few weeks, whether it's to do with Ukraine or whether it was coming anyway, we've begun to see a few more pressures again. I mean, to give you an example, we had a situation a few days ago where one of our suppliers to one of our customers confirmed that they were on for delivering something in six weeks, and the following day they phoned up and said, "I'm sorry, it's gonna be 56 weeks." You know, the concept of having a lead time of more than a year on a product that you're used to getting in six weeks is pretty difficult. If the shortage is like that, then there's no reason why suppliers shouldn't increase. You know, what we're seeing is that, you know, 90% to 95% of products are fine, and then suddenly out of the blue you'll get a tiny product which is critical, maybe not that expensive, that's doubled or tripled in price. There's absolutely no pattern when I go around the businesses talking to them about what they're struggling with, and every week it's a different issue. It's very difficult at the moment to put your finger on it. Our margins haven't suffered so far, and as I say, in most of the cases, we feel reasonably confident we can pass it on. Thank you, Mark. We have a question from Barry Singleton, who asks, "Why have you decided to introduce capitalized development costs? Is this in relation to a particular activity and will not be repeated, or will this be an ongoing practice and an ongoing line in your accounts in future? Thanks for the question. I'm very pleased I can pass that question on to Brad. Yeah, it's. You know, expectation is an ongoing line in our accounts. Yeah, we've historically not been required to capitalize, and we wanted to bring it to shareholders' attention. We've needed to capitalize development expenditure. It's become material for the group, and I don't expect it to not be material going forwards. Yes, I think every year you're going to see this effect. I talked about the effect earlier in the presentation. I think you'll see similar, possibly increasing, but certainly similar amounts, assuming that this year was a normal runway for product improvement on new products, which in my mind, it didn't seem a year which was particularly different in terms of the businesses feeling like they suddenly had loads of extra new products they wanted to create. I think you should expect a similar runway going forward. For the next couple of years, the results will be slightly flattered, and that flattery will be reducing over the next couple of years. I think once we've got to sort of year four, we'll be more like a very balanced impact on the P&L. Thank you, Brad. A question from Matthew Davis from WH Ireland. You've provided a clear intent with respect to the dividend and medium-term growth, which is well covered by earnings. Is there an absolute minimum level of cover management are working towards? We don't have a set minimum level, and we'll take into consideration individual events if that was to cause a potential short-term issue to this. As it stands at the moment, you know, we're comfortably above any level we might consider needing to think about increases to the dividend. Certainly, you know, we're nowhere near on an ongoing basis feeling like there isn't adequate cover for the dividend over the, you know, medium term at least. Thank you very much. That's the end of questions. David, do you have any closing remarks? Thank you very much. I wanted to thank everybody for coming, and also Tamsin and her team for organizing it, and of course, Mark and Brad for helping me with the most difficult questions. I hope to see you all in good health and with good results in September. Bye.