Welcome to the Judges Scientific Interim Results webinar. All attendees are in listen-only mode, and at the end of the presentation, there will be the opportunity to ask questions. At any point, you can click on the Q&A button to submit a question. This webinar is being recorded. I now hand over to David Cicurel, CEO. David, over to you. Thank you very much, Tamsin, and thank you everybody for listening to our webcast. This is the results for the first half of 2023, and of course, as you can see on this, on the slide, I'm here with Brad Ormsby, our CFO, Mark Lavelle, our COO, and Tim Prestidge, our Group Business Development Director. So we're gonna go to slide two, which I'm going to spend quite a lot of time on it because I think it's important just to remember that what we do. What we do is we do a buy and build in the scientific instruments market, and we believe there's really three reasons why it's a good idea to do that. And we call them the three pillars of shareholder value at Judges. One is long-term drivers. And what are they? Well, the long-term drivers are a long-term and fast growth in university education throughout the world. We believe that even in developed countries like the U.K., there's growth in university education. Just to give an idea of the scale of this, the number of first-year students in the U.K. doubled between 2000 and 2019. Imagine what's happening in China, in Indonesia, in Africa, and South America. This is therefore the long term. The other long-term driver is a desire of everybody in the world to improve what they're doing. We all try to optimize, and of course, if you want to optimize something physical, you have to measure what you're trying to optimize. You can't optimize something you haven't measured, and we make the instrument to measure these things. So we do believe that these long-term drivers are very long-term, and that's the thing. The next thing, or at least we'll start with the third one. If you do a buy and build, you must have deals to do. When we started Judges in its present form, 18 years ago, we checked that we'd find other deals, and we found that there were 2,000 companies just in the U.K. doing what we do, and we felt that was a good pool of potential deals. We believe that out of these 2,000, there's probably 100 companies which need to change hands every year. Of course, we've done 22 acquisitions during that period, so we just need really the one. Also, we're not restricting ourselves to the UK. The third one is maybe a little bit less obvious. It's low capital use. Why is that important? Because your typical buy and build exercise is, it works like this: I'm on a 20x multiple, you're on a 10x multiple. I buy you, and I've doubled my money. This is a very legitimate, and it's the traditional buy and build model. Our buy and build model is different. We buy a company for, say, 5x, so we make 20% on our money, and we pay. In the past, we've paid more like 3%-4%. Now we have to pay 8%, but it's a much better arbitrage. Of course, what I've said is I'm talking about multiple of EBIT, but EBIT, which is earnings, it doesn't help you to repay the bank. What helps you to repay the bank is cash. It only works, that model, if you have good cash conversion, and this comes from having very low capital use, and we-- that's what we have. As Brad will explain, he will show you some figures about this. These-- this is the strategic basis for Judges and why it creates shareholder value, and I would say that shareholder value is our obsession. We, we think that that's what we're paid to produce, although, you know, we're very good citizens, and, I think we behave well, but our, our, our purpose in life is to create shareholder value. How do you execute that strategy? Well, you have to be a disciplined acquirer by owning sustainable businesses, producing, sustainable profit and cash flow and pay sensible prices. We, you have to have also a good reputation as an acquirer, so people, you know, desire to sell you their company when they retire. And then you have, Once you buy these companies, you have to make sure they have organic growth and, and, and they're doing well in your ownership. And our model is to leave these companies a lot of autonomy, and, and, and this is how we think we optimize the performance, but we'll talk a lot about this a bit later. Can I have the next slide, please?... Hello? Oh, yeah, sorry. What are our acquisition criteria? Well, you know, we like strong exporters because we try to buy companies which are in world niches and ideally, which dominate a world niche. Of course, the U.K. is not a huge country, so most of your sales must be abroad. They need to generate sustainable earnings and cash flow. We've been paying 3-7x EBIT for these companies. To be a bit more precise, the three was not one -off, because it was in 2009 when everything was cheap, and the seven is also not one -off, because we bought Geotek, and we paid a higher multiple than usual because it was a large company last year. Really, it's usually 4-6x, and on average, we've actually, excluding Geotek, we paid 5x. We love to borrow up to three times EBITDA, and we've paid, historically, between 3%-8% on our debt. Geotek, of course, was a large deal, and we managed to freeze our interest rate at 5% just after executing this deal. So these have a long incubation period. Crystallization is erratic. You have to pursue a lot of deals before you manage to close them. You have to offer a lot of financial certainty for the seller, and behave in an honorable way, so that they feel safe, that once they've shaken your hand, they know exactly the deal which, that you will do. And then once we bought the company, we have to reduce debt and reinvest the money in future acquisition. Next one, please. This gives you an idea of the acquisition we've done. Some years you'll see don't appear, and some years appear many times, like 2016. I was talking about erratic, and there you got erratic. They're all of very different size, but we love them all. Next slide, please. Post-acquisition. We need very good financial controls. These companies are often family-owned and very rich because they've been successful for many years, and they have cash in the bank, and they have everything in their heads. We need to really teach these companies to work with figures and facts, which they understand well because they're usually very erudite engineers or scientists, and they understand figures. We leave them a great degree of autonomy. We encourage them to seek always excellence and to fight mediocrity, and also to focus on the long term, because of course, we buy these companies for the long term. In fact, we've never sold any. The next slide is the key messages of the first half of this year. You know, we've kept doing-- following our strategy, as we always do, and we think this strategy is still very good, as good as on the first day we started. We've had solid organic growth and also acquisition growth from, predominantly actually from Geotek, which we owned one month the previous year. This was good growth in most regions. We did two small deals, which did a very limited contribution to the half year. We've increased the dividend 23%, the interim dividend, and we have this policy, which is quite public, that we will increase the dividend by at least 10% every year. We've implemented that policy every year in the last 18 years. In fact, we've paid a compound 23% increase in dividend, and we've strengthened the management team at the beginning of the year with Tim Prestidge, that you will meet later. The business environment is still unpredictable, although it's much better than it has been in the past three years. We had recently a lot of problems with supply chain, but these are starting to alleviate. Geopolitical concerns remain high in our mind, and in our mind, that's the main risk, which is suffered by the business. And then the timing of the Geotek coring expeditions, which is a third of the Geotek business, and Geotek business is a third of the total business. So this is typically a one-year event and not necessarily a yearly event. And when it happens in the year is depending very much on third parties rather than us. So we have to be a bit passive in that matter. And what we've explained in our chairman's statement is that in 2024 we are anticipating that the coring would take place towards the end of the year, probably November. As a result of this, you know, any time switching could have a sizable impact on the recognition of the revenue for that campaign. The outlook, well, we started the second half of the year with a robust order book, as high as it's ever been in June. We're expecting a strong second half, making more money than the first half because we have a coring expedition in that period, so that's a good period. We're confident of meeting the expectation of the market for the full year. Now we're gonna look at a little bit of our performance, and I'll pass on to Brad, our Finance Director. Thanks very much, David, and good afternoon, everyone. Talking through the highlights from the last six months, and overall, had a pretty decent set of results in the first half, although, as you'll see a little later in the presentation, not all of our businesses performed quite as well as we'd hoped. So what's happened in the period? Well, total revenue up 32% to GBP 61 million, and that really is a combination of 16.5% organic revenue growth, coupled with a full first half contribution from our May 2022 acquisition of Geotek. So the good organic revenue growth was supported by good organic order intake, itself up 14% on the comparative period, and that's helped support the revenue growth together with two other things. One, we entered the period with a really strong order book, and that's been maintained throughout the first half. And also, pleased to say, we certainly noticed an alleviation in the global supply chain issues that were causing us some angst last year, although it is also still fair to say that these issues haven't fully receded. As usual, with Judges, when we have good organic revenue growth, tend to have good profit growth, and adjusted operating profits are up 41% in the first half to GBP 14.2 million, up from GBP 10.1 million in H1 2022. And adjusted earnings per share is also up 23%, to a record GBP 152.8 per share. Noting here that the EPS growth is a little subdued compared to the operating profit growth, and that really is a factor of two things, really. One is the increase in the U.K.'s headline corporation tax rate and also higher interest. Moving from generating profit to generating cash, we generated more than GBP 11 million cash from operations in the period at a cash conversion of 81%. We've been able to complete two acquisitions in the period, also supported from that cash generation, to be able to also enter into two acquisitions during the period. Further, we've settled the full Geotek earn-outs, 50% in shares, 50% in cash. We finished the period with net debt of GBP 50 million, down from GBP 52 million at the start of the period, with a gearing of 1.45. It means that we have plenty of headroom on our covenants, a continued strong balance sheet position, and really in a position where we can support, you know, the strategy of the group, which is the buy and build. We've done two acquisitions in the period and of course also, providing shareholders with progressively increasing dividend returns, and we've increased the interim dividend to GBP 0. 27 per share. That's an increase of 23%. All in all, you know, we have a strong balance sheet position, we have good cash flow, in good position to be able to face challenges ahead. You know, if you look forward to the rest of the year, we know there are still some out there. Well, they will clearly... Geopolitical situation at the moment remains, you know, a concern to us and, you know, never far from the front page of the news, but at the same time, improvements in supply chain, although not fully, fully resolved. You know, if you look for the knock-on for some of those things, you know, the increased inflation and the increased interest rates still at a higher level than I think we'd probably like. You know, standing back from that, we've had good order intake. We have a really, really strong order book. We're expecting a strong H2, and hence why, you know, we've stated to the market this morning that we're confident in meeting market expectations. Moving on to the next slide on performance. Talked a lot about the performance already, so just stop on two points. One, just wanna touch on tax, and our effective tax rate on adjusted earnings is now up to 22% and moving upwards. That really is a consequence, as I mentioned before, of the increased U.K. headline corporation tax rate, which has gone up to 25%, and also us now being a large company for the purposes of the U.K.'s R&D Tax Credit scheme. The second thing is, we do have adjusting items that take us to our statutory results, and, you know, they're reasonably big in this period for a couple of reasons. One, we have non-cash amortization of the intangible assets that we're required to recognize when we acquire businesses. Secondly, there's a very big one-off this year, a GBP 5.5 million charge, which relates to the difference between the market value of the shares we issued to satisfy the element of the Geotek earn-outs that's payable, that was payable in shares, and the difference between that market value and the price we'd agreed at the date of the acquisition for issuing the shares. Now, under IFRS, we're not allowed to adjust the total acquisition consideration, so the consequence is we've had to put it through the P&L as a charge. Moving on to our next slide. Talking about order intake, as I always do, you know, it's the bellwether of our business, so as always, I'll talk through the graph first. On that usual standard graph, we have our three lines: red line, a black line, and a green line. The red line is our internal sales budget. We set that once a year as part of our budgeting process towards the end of the year, and that line doesn't move unless we make a substantial acquisition. And the end of the red line, and the far end of the graph, is the end of June 2023. So measuring against our target, the red line, we have the black line, which is our trailing 12 months of orders, the last 12 months' history, and also the green line, which is the last four months of orders annualized. Now, in this period, we've also added a few more lines because of this, the substantial acquisition of Geotek last year. So we wanted to show both the organic position and the total group. So what can you see on the graph? Well, if you look at the black line, the black line is almost touching the red line, which means that for the last 12 months, we've had orders that are very-- pretty close to this year's sales budget. And if you look at the organic part of that, you can see that the organic trading 12 months is actually slightly ahead of the organic sales budget. So a good picture, which shows, you know, illustrates why you can see the 40% organic order intake increase during the period, and why we ended up with 22 weeks of orders at the end of the period. And then since the end of June through to the end of August, we're still 13% up on our organics, and the orderbook, the organic order book is still 21 weeks. So this, alongside inorganic order intake as well, you know, shows and illustrates why we're, you know, comfortable in saying we're confident of meeting market expectations for the full year. So on to the next slide. And, you know, a profit bridge to help everyone understand a little bit about the evolution of our, of our profit during the period. And what this slide's reconciling is the H1 2022 contribution of the business, compared with the H1 2023 contribution of the business, and this is before central costs. They're the two big blocks at either end of the slide. So the first block, reconciling is, you know, we've had big organic growth from a number of our businesses, and at the same time, some of our businesses have gone backwards, and you see that, that red block in the middle, about half the size of, of the growth. So overall, still good organic growth. I certainly, personally would like to see that a little bit smaller, but overall, still a good, good picture. And then the third block is the full first half effect, compared to last year of our acquisition of Geotek, and also a modest contribution from the two acquisitions during the period. And moving on to the next slide. Briefly touch on balance sheet and cash flows, and, you know, we ended the period with GBP 50 million net debt, compared with the GBP 52 million net debt at the start of the period. We've made two acquisitions in the period, Henniker and Bossa Nova, and David will talk about those a little bit later. But I also want to touch on another reason why our debt's not quite as low as we hoped, and that's because we've had working capital outflows as well, particularly in inventory, where we've continued to have two reasons, really. One, a big chunk of supply chain conservatism. That's making sure we've got, you know, sufficient stock to ensure we can build our instruments and satisfy and delight our customers by getting them there on time. But as I mentioned before, supply chain issues are not fully over, so we've also got quite a bit of almost completed work in progress or instruments that are nearly done, but missing one or two components. We have a reasonably high level of those, as we're still waiting for some things to come in. Those two things together have meant working capital's increased, and, consequently, we've not generated quite as much cash as we would have liked. I think just the key thing to reflect on is that historically, before we went into the pandemic, we were looking at a working capital on average, which is around 10% of our annual revenue, and it's moved closer to 20% at the end of this period. It's certainly an important factor for us. David talked about this earlier when we were talking about the business model, the importance of turning profit into cash. While we've got a cash conversion of 81%, it's reasonable that it's not as good as we like, which we'd expect to be 90%+. So, you know, ongoing focus going forwards to help us reduce that 20%, of annual revenue closer back towards 10%, but it's not something which you can just click your fingers and restore overnight. So moving on to the next slide, and, another key measure for us, return on total invested capital, ROTIC. And just a reminder for everyone, you know, it really is a function of the multiples we pay for the businesses we acquire. So we start on the left-hand side of this graph with FTT, where we paid close to 5x, and therefore start just over 20%. Improving ROTIC really requires either improved financial performance or buying businesses at lower multiples, or both. If you look across the graph, you can see a couple of big cliff edges. In the middle of the graph, when we acquired GDS and Scientifica in 2012 and 2013, respectively, they were big acquisitions for us back then, and then also at the far end of the graph, the similar sort of cliff edge when we acquired Geotek. Smaller acquisitions really minimally affect ROTIC now. What happened in the period? Well, we started at 21.3%. We finished at the end of June at 22.8%, so, you know, we continue to strive to improve. Mark and Tim, in a little while, will take you through how we go about that in a bit more detail. So moving on to the next slide, it might be the penultimate one on diversification. You start on the left-hand side. Now, it's important we let you know, you can see from that pie chart that there's no one single company that dominates our group. Our businesses also manufacture instruments for different end markets, so we're diversified by scientific application. As you can see from the other two charts, there is no one single country or region that overly dominates our group geographically. And you can see from the bottom that that's because we export more than 85% of our revenue, and it goes across the world. So moving on to my last slide on financial history and really a summary of, you know, some key financial factors which show the success of our group over the long term. You can see revenue, profits, earnings per share, have all grown strongly over the group's history. This period, most—no difference there, really, with record revenue, record profits, and record earnings per share. Dividends have also grown by at least 10% per annum throughout the last 15+ years of having provided a dividend, and our compound growth of the dividend is over, is 23%, which is consistent with the increase we've made to the interim dividend this period, to GBP 0.27 per share. We continue to focus on cash flow generation within the group, which really serves to help enable us to reduce our acquisition debt, make room for more acquisitions, and fund that growing dividend. On that note, I think I'll pass back to David to talk about our group's growth strategy. Thank you very much, Brad. So the next slide shows growth strategy. Of course, that's what we want to do. The growth drivers are now on the slide, and really our growth comes from M&A, buying businesses and organic growth. I think we have to recognize with the time, the passage of time, and growing the business, the share of organic growth is likely to become more and more important as an element of total growth. But in the meantime, I'll comment a bit on acquisition, which is the next slide and the one after that. We did two small acquisitions. I am not gonna talk for hours about this, but of course, open the question. We bought Henniker, which is involved in deposition. We have quite a few companies involved in deposition, and so we're interested in that. This is about plasmas and about changing the, the properties of surfaces. It's in Cheshire. We, we, the total price is GBP 2.3 million, including a potential GBP 500,000 earn-out, in the expectation that the company will produce GBP 580,000 of EBIT in the current year. We have the hope that it will, so we paid 4x. The next one is Bossa Nova. It's strange because it's really one of the smallest deal we ever completed, and it's very far away in Los Angeles. It's a company producing $400,000 of EBIT. We paid $1.6 million, which again, 4x. The reason we bought a company which is that far is because it's very complementary with our company, Dia-Stron. Both companies make instruments to test the properties of hair, which is very interesting for people who make shampoos and dyes and also equipment to curl their hair, for instance, curlers and all this, and dryers. Ours is the one we already had, which is Dia-Stron. We've had it for seven years. It is about the mechanical properties of hair. So is it easier to break the hair by pulling on it? This is about the appearance. They're very good at imaging and interpreting and digitalizing the image of locks of hair, and so that you can add, because it's all about beauty, but it's very difficult to say, how do you add beauty to beauty? But they can do that, and it's very useful for our customers who are interested in making claims that their product are good for people's hair. So these are two companies which are, you know, very, very synergistic, and they work hand in hand, and they had a commercial agreement already for a year, and it's been very fruitful. So, but of course, we're also interested in organic growth, and I'm gonna pass on to Mark and Tim to talk about organic growth, because what we do to these companies after we bought them is critically important. Thank you, David. And, good afternoon, everybody. I'd like to really just pick a few items out of this quite comprehensive slide, and then Tim is gonna come along and pick a few more out and give his angle on things. So I think the first place to start is right in the middle with our autonomous structure. So Judges' model of running the businesses is very, very specific, which is that we believe that autonomy trumps integration and cost cutting. So there are many groups around the world whose strategy is to buy businesses, to crash them all together, to have a central production facility, maybe a central finance facility, et cetera, and really, ... remove the autonomy of the businesses. We believe that in these small niche businesses, which are very close to their markets, there is enormous power in having a small, HQ, usually with R&D, sales, production, and finance all in the same place. And that means that they can respond very quickly to market changes, they can tweak a product, they can produce it quite quickly, and they can ship it out to the market. So the basic autonomy structure is based around that concept, that responsiveness to the market, closeness to the market, is something you can really only achieve if you leave these businesses broadly autonomous. Now, as I say, there are many other groups that have a different view, and, you know, if you're somebody that believes strongly in, you know, synergy and cost cutting, then, you know, Judges is frankly not the group for you. We are a player that believes very, very firmly in the power of autonomy. The question then is, you know, what do we do to help these businesses when we acquire them? I think this falls into really three or four areas. A lot of the businesses that we get or that we buy have been run by a founder for a number of years, and usually that founder is very knowledgeable about the industry, quite often about the technology, quite often about the customers. They're not experienced business people, so the sort of things that they have not put in place tend to be good finance structures, monthly reporting, analysis of data to understand where they're making money and where they're not. You know, many of these businesses, of the smaller businesses, are pretty unsophisticated when it comes to profitability. You know, if at the end of the year, the bank balance is in the black, they're happy, and if it's in the red, they're not. It doesn't go much further than that. You know, we look at producing in the lightest possible way some basic monthly accounts. We also require them to forecast what they're gonna do next month and then deliver to that forecast. We also like them to do a little bit of analysis of what they've achieved and try and find out what went right and what went wrong, and, and learn from that. In terms of the operational side of the business, my personal belief is there's a, there's a lot of assumption that every manufacturing business in the country or the world already runs pretty well. We're all used to seeing these wonderful images of BMW and MINI and Nissan producing fantastic products quickly from these automated factories. The reality is that most factories in Britain and around the world, from small businesses, are actually operated pretty poorly, and many of them haven't even taken up some of the lean initiatives that were introduced in the late 1970s, early 1980s. And therefore, actually, there's some pretty low-hanging fruit in many of these businesses just to get them performing better from an operational point of view. And we're very good at introducing those new ideas and raising the bar in the performance side of things. And maybe the final area that I just wanted to focus on is leadership, and probably this, for me, is the most important side. That, you know, many of the people that started these businesses are scientists and technicians, and as I say, they know their customers very well, but they're not experienced at running businesses. And pretty soon as the business starts to grow, you start struggling with hiring new people if you take an autocratic view. Somebody that can grow with the business and somebody who can hire great people and let them get on with stuff rather than seeking to micromanage them is really important. As these businesses grow, the premium is on helping the leaders to evolve and become better leaders with less focus on their technology and more focus on building their senior teams. In some cases, people are near retirement when they sell to us, and therefore that's less of an issue. If we're looking to bring new leadership in, we would focus on the leadership aspect. We've got some great examples where, you know, someone with years of experience within an industry has left, and someone with no experience in that industry has come along and doubled or quadrupled the size of the business quite quickly. So it's not industry knowledge by itself, which is necessarily the answer to improving many of these businesses. And as I say, we try and develop the leaders we can, but in some cases it is a question of bringing in some new blood. Those are my main points. So let me pass across to Tim, and he's got a few others that he'd like to sort of highlight. Great. Thank you, Mark. Yes, I'm gonna highlight a couple of things in the top two boxes there and then spend a little bit of time talking about the bottom two boxes, in particular, the one on the right around strategy and ambition. I think the first thing I'd like to do is just describe within that context of, you know, the autonomous management structure, how is it that we go about... If I, you know, I pick the example of processes for governance and compliance, how is it that we go about making that happen and enforcing that, so to speak, when that might otherwise be seen as, you know, a difficult thing to do, when you're also wanting your autonomous, you know, the autonomous structure? We are a listed company, so clearly, you know, we understand there's a legal obligation and a moral obligation to have a you know, fully appropriate governance, audit, and compliance structure in place. But I think it's fair to say that a lot of the businesses that we acquire or have acquired, they're smaller entrepreneurial businesses, small family-run businesses, and those types of controls might not have been put in place. They might not be front and center in the mindset. So what one way of thinking about this, well, okay, there's a lot of controls that we have to try and implement here. But really the last thing we want to do is go against that sort of autonomous structure. We don't want to enforce lots of things. So, for example, we don't want to have a large head office staff who are leading this governance and compliance and sort of taking responsibility for it off the operating companies. On the other hand, neither do we want to push, you know, a large amount of structure and compliance requirements into the companies that then requires them to build out large teams and sort of mismatch their requirements for staff to towards covering those sorts of requirements. So as an example, you know, we found the solution here is more around really being very thoughtful and careful around how we construct appropriate, adequate processes and policies, and then making sure that they are, you know, written in such a way that they are straightforward to implement, and that we can cascade the responsibility for implementing those processes or implementing processes to follow those policies down through into the companies, so, you know, without requiring them to build huge teams around that. So we certainly leverage resource across the group, across different group companies to help us to do that, but it's all about having adequate and pragmatic policies. Another example, if I go across to the operational excellence slide, the operational excellence square, sorry. Mark mentioned earlier that the balance between autonomy and synergy and that the way we see the autonomous model as trumping synergies every time. Maybe an example where some aspect of synergy is useful to us, and it was very much a strength of the design of the group, is in this sort of group-wide functional benchmarking. I like to describe the group, somewhat tongue in cheek, that the way that we work is one for all, all for one, and everyone for themselves. You know, the group as a whole excels when all the individual companies in you know, individually excel. But the benefit of the group structure, you know, having these independent companies that are separate, but they all have very similar, very similar challenges and lots of things in common, we operate in a sort of open book way. So the strengths of companies can be discussed and described amongst the group, and we use that in a sort of benchmarking way. So for example, if one company is looking to hire a role, that they can ask openly, you know, "Who's got real strength in this type of function across the group?" Or if they're looking to implement, say, a new piece of software or a new control or ERP software or something, they can look to understand what's been done before across the group, and they can, you know, they can use that learning and use that information. So in some sense, I suppose there is a healthy internal competition, but that sort of group-wide functional benchmarking, around what's the best in class that we have internally, that is an aspect of how we do sort of value synergy. I'm going to turn now primarily to the strategy and ambition, corner. And I just want to describe, so I mean, Mark and my respective roles. We chair a portfolio of the operating companies. And I usually find it easy to describe the role in the first case by saying what it isn't, and what it isn't is Mark and I running the companies. That's absolutely not what we do. So what do we do? Well, the way that I describe the role is to say that, firstly and foremostly, we want to ensure that we have absolutely the best talent in place, running and leading those companies. So that sort of really highlights the idea of focusing on senior leadership and the senior leadership team and the development programs. We also want to make sure that that leader, that talent leadership, is building around itself the strongest possible team that it can, and that's around networking, collaboration, and the succession planning element. The other things that we then look for are that that team is building an ambitious but rational strategy. So what I mean by ambition is that it's clearly showing a deliberate intent to grow. So there's a desire to grow well ahead of an underlying industry growth rate, for example, and that you know clearly demonstrates that the business is wanting to deliberately do something. It's not just going with the flow of the industry. They are planning to actually you know actually do something and grow the organization. It's rational in that, you know, it's reasonable, it's sensible, and it's based on fact. We also want to make sure that the team is acting on that strategy, so they're doing something about it with urgency. Again, it's not our role to write the strategy, but we have assisted in terms of providing a sort of structured strategy process that enables the companies to identify, you know, to state their ambition and to identify how they want to try and achieve that ambition and what they're gonna do about it. If we were to sit in front of you today and tell you about our top 100 actions for growing Judges Scientific, obviously, that would sound crazy. But actually, a real strength of our model is that when we think about across 20 companies, maybe that's five key actions each, actually, it's totally plausible. Through this autonomous and through this devolved organization structure, we can be confident that the companies have identified what the key things are that they can do. They're that granular, and they are driving specific actions in order to drive towards the ambition that they've stated that they have. Okay, I'm gonna hand back to David now. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mark and Tim. So, as our outlook, we're gonna repeat something we said before. You know, but we, we've been conducting our business model, which has been proving how robust it is over and over again, with a strong balance sheet, good long-term fundamentals, and, total focus on shareholder value. Our environment remain a bit uncertain, but inflation, like we haven't had for many years, and high interest rates, the geopolitical environment is volatile as I've seen in my whole life. Sterling is a very competitive currency. This is very good for us because our costs are in sterling, and most of our revenue isn't. And we have some positive improvement in, in supply chain. Current trading, well, you know, we've had robust order intake and sales, and a good order book to start the second half. We're expecting a strong second half, helped by a coring expedition, and we're really confident that the results for the whole year will meet market expectation. Next one, please. So what's the investment case? Well, all the things we've said, we have a robust business model with discipline. We got loads of targets, we're acquiring earnings-enhancing companies. We have very good long-term drivers. We have a well-diversified group by geography and scientific application. The management is totally obsessed with shareholder value, which is profitability, cash generation, reducing debt, and growing the dividend, and achieving a higher return on capital. We've grown the dividend above 10% every year for the past, I think it's actually 18 years or 17 years, and the compound growth rate of dividend, actually, since we started paying it, is 23% per annum. And then for those who are not young and are resident in the UK, it's the shares are free of inheritance tax after two years of holding them. So that's a very good thing, and I hope it lasts quite a long time. And that being said, we're open for question and answers. Thank you very much, David. To ask your question, click on the Q&A button and type your question. First question: Do you have any recurring revenue, and if so, what sort of percentage? So we have, I'll answer this one myself. It's simple. We don't have a lot of recurring revenue because we sell largely capital goods, and people don't need to buy them every year, so most of it is one-off. We have some recurring revenue in the sense that some of the instruments that we have have parts which need to be renewed. And of course, Geotek has some recurring revenue because a third of its business is services which are of a recurring nature, apart from that, but it's a small minority of our business. Thank you very much. Are the coring expeditions at Geotek of varying revenues? If so, what would be the typical order size or the typical range of those varying revenues? Also, how does the revenue recognition for the coring work? Okay, well, yeah, there's varying revenue, but it's, it, they're quite large. It's as good as several million, and you know, typically, would be probably between GBP 3 million-GBP 6 million every... and the recognition, I'm gonna pass on to Brad, who is an expert in this subject. It's, you know, simply put, the revenue recognition for the coring contract is a slightly complex version of percentage of completion. Thank you. That was very succinct. I could have made it a lot more complicated, I can assure you, but it's the most simple way of explaining it. Is there any change to the M&A environment following the increase in interest rates? Yes, I think there should logically be, because at this point, say we need, as I've explained, to pay 8% on our debt, and last year we froze the Geotek deal at 5%. So on a GBP 80 million deal, the 3% per annum makes a big difference, so logically, it should be. I can't say that I'm seeing the effect of it, but the longer it lasts, the more it will change the environment. I'm convinced of that. But I have no experimental knowledge that anything has changed in the M&A scene, but things should get cheaper. I would say that just comparatively, large deals are more subject to higher interest rates than small deals. Small deals, say, in a nutshell, if you pay 4x EBIT, you get 25% on your money, and the interest will eat up 7%, 8%, it leaves a lot. But if you pay, say, 7x, like we paid on Geotek, and you pay 8%, so you get 15%, you get 8%, it leaves you 7%, which is a lot less. So, you know, we think that logically, we should have reduced values, mostly for larger deals. Thank you very much. Do you standardize the ERP systems throughout the group? That's one for Mark and Tim. Okay. The answer is no, but small manufacturing systems, there are not that many ERP systems which will run those sensibly at a sensible price, and therefore, no matter how much people look, they end up coming back to three or four systems which sort of do the job pretty well. We like to-- In many ways, we like to give the companies the illusion that they can have whatever they want. In practice, they always come up back to one of the, one of the same four systems. Of course, the other point is that if you've got colleagues around the group who've got one of those systems, it does make implementing it and writing reports for it that much simpler. So there's a sort of pull from the companies rather than a push from us, that standardized systems or using one of that shortlist ends up being just much easier for everybody. In terms of our end of things, we mandate a certain amount of minimum information which they have to send it to us every month, and provided they can provide that, it doesn't matter to us what ERP system they have, as long as it works their business. Thank you very much. Are there any lessons or surprises so far from the Geotek deal? Has anything not gone to plan or gone better than you might have imagined? I would say, you know, like, I mean, make no mistake, whenever you buy a company, you get a lot of good and bad surprises because all companies are quite complex. You know, we do feel that it's an excellent company. And I can't say, you know, we've had on the whole, it's more or less as we expected, but we have some positive things and some negative things. But on average, we're really happy that it's what we were thinking. And, and so we'd buy it again for the same price if we could. Tremendous. Thank you very much. What's the restriction on frequency of coring expeditions? Is it demand or is it internal? Do you want to take this one, Mark? Yes, certainly. There's actually, without going into enormous amounts of technical detail, the way that most of these coring expeditions happens, requires, quite a lot of, third-party involvement, and there are all sorts of people that need to come together for these projects. And for many of them, there are only one or two players in the world. Most of these need a ship, and there are really only, at the moment, two ships that can do this worldwide. There are other things that need to come together. You've got weather limitations that differ in different parts of the world. So there are really quite a lot of... And then the other thing is that although you might expect that this is, you know, this as a sort of potential future source of revenue, would be something that's led by oil companies. Actually, most of it, at the moment, is led by governments and universities, and, you know, their budgets are, you know, perhaps a little bit less flexible than a commercial company, and their timings are a little bit less flexible. So there's quite a lot of constraints on the process, and it would typically be pretty difficult. You might possibly just get two in a year. Some years you'll get naught, but, you know, David's point that on average, we'll see one a year, is sort of borne out, not just by the commercial realities, but also by the availability of all these different elements that have to come together for the project. Tremendous. Many thanks, Mark. How does the sales process work at Geotek, particularly in relation to securing new service contracts? Have you made any changes to the sales team or sales process? The questioner goes on to ask: Are you still expecting to sign a new service contract this year? Do you expect the three service contracts you've inherited to be renewed? Mark, can I leave it with you again? Nice short question. It is, yes. Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, we need to be slightly careful about going too far with some of these questions in terms of giving, you know, commercially sensitive information out. What I would say is that all of the Geotek business is concentrated on relatively few players. There are only so many people in the world who are interested in the services and the products that Geotek produces. So it's not like we have a sales team of 100 scouring the earth for new leads that we've never come across. I've been very impressed with the intimate knowledge that the small and highly focused sales team we have has of the key players in these markets around the world. You know, the sales director, well, I'm—again, I'm not gonna actually name specific companies or countries, but, you know, the sales director was on three different continents in the last three weeks and talking to the key players. So we're very happy with the sales process and the knowledge and relationships we have with. I wouldn't. It's more than a handful, but it's not hundreds of key players. I'm sure there's something else in the question that I didn't quite cover, Tamsin. Is there, was there anything else you'd pick out? No, it goes rather specifically into some of the contracts, so I think you probably don't want to answer that. Yeah. Following on, is there any change in the competitive environment? Um- -for Geotek? So, one of Geotek's great attributes is that it's what, you know, in the old days, used to be called in the IT world, a sort of systems integrator, in that what it's really good at is bringing lots of different technologies to bear on an individual project. And therefore, they're not particularly worried about new techniques coming on board because they simply buy them in. So many of their projects involve seven or eight different scanners, looking at different aspects of their core samples, et cetera. And therefore, what it means is that they're very nimble, and if a new a sexy new technique comes along, they can buy those in, bolt them to their system, and integrate them with the data gathering, which they do. So, what I would say is that, actually, the data side of things itself has become increasingly important in that world. And, our ability to, gather data from a number of different sensors and, integrate and display that, has become particularly important. So in terms of competitors, there have been new single-sensor companies which have appeared, but, Geotek's USP, which is the multi-sensor situation, is, relatively unchanged. Tremendous. Thank you very much. All of the questions were really about Geotek, but the rest of the presentations obviously answered all the questions. There's one more that's just come in: What's the percentage split of sales through the different customer types, industrial, universities, and other research facilities, et cetera? Well, I'll answer this one with some difficulty because it's very speculative, but we, we believe that universities are about half of our sales, without having any evidence, because, of course, it's always sometimes difficult to know where your sales are going. And, and a good proportion goes also to test houses. And of course, some of them are universities. This is one of the source of our difficulties. But I, I would say, you know, if you took universities and, and research centers, maybe 50%-60%. Test houses, maybe 20%-30%, and maybe industries, probably again, 20%-30%. But we don't have proper figures to justify this, this. Great. Thank you very much. Just a final question: Tim, what have been your insights and learning after six months at Judges? So, Tim, I think it's one for you. It will be for me, that one. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, thank you. I think there's one thing in particular that I'd highlight, and it's come up in a few themes in the presentation so far. And that's the nature of Judges and Judges Scientific. That's honorable, honest, open, what you see is what you get. It was sort of David's founding ethos for the company, and you know, it's still true to this day, every day. And it's not just talk, it really is reality. And I think a real learning point for me has been, and experience for me, has been the importance of that to not just to the headquarters team, but the culture throughout the organization, and also the importance of it to prospective acquisitions as well. So of the... When I have met prospective acquisitions and described that, you know, as an element of the group, it's always very, very well received. It always seems to be one of the key reasons why they are very keen to work with us. So I think there's a real close tie there with the way that Judges operates and what the potential sort of acquisition pool is looking for as well in the process. That ties together really, really well. So that's one of the key learning points for me. Tremendous. Thank you very much indeed. That's the end of questions. David, do you have any closing remarks? No, no. First, I want to thank my colleagues and the two of you also, and of course, everybody who attended and bothered to listen to us for a whole hour and asking many questions. We hope to see many of you in six months for the final results. Tremendous. Many thanks, David, Brad, Mark, and Tim. For everyone who's listening, you'll now be taken to a webpage to give feedback on the presentation. If you're unable to complete it now, you'll get a follow-up email. We'd be really grateful if you could take a few minutes to complete. Many thanks for joining. This is the end of the webinar.