Hello, everyone, and I'm sorry for the delay. 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, 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 to all the attendees. So this is our interim for 2024 to the 30th of June. And we will be presenting with Brad, our finance director, Mark Lavelle, our COO, and Tim Prestidge, our group business development director. So could we move to two, please? So really just to remind those who know us and explain to those who don't know us, we're doing a buy and build of manufacturers of scientific instruments, and the big question is: Why do we think this is good? And we think it is good because of what we call the three pillars of shareholder value. And I should explain that our purpose in life is to create value for our shareholders, so that's our obsession. And so why does it work? Well, the first one is long-term drivers. So we buying companies in a sector, and these company needs to have good long-term drivers, otherwise they're not gonna produce shareholder value. So we think we have two very strong growth drivers. One is an explosive growth worldwide in university education, and universities are our main client, largely for research rather than education. And the other one is a thirst of every human activity for improvement, and if you're making things, physical things, you can't improve the way you make them or their performance without measuring. So we also make these measurement instruments, which are used in industry. So these two things we think are secular drivers, which will be there for decades and decades. The third one, if you look on this chart, is a large deal pool. Clearly, if you're doing a buy and build, you want to have a lot of targets, so you can select the very best and the very good. And when we started this exercise 19 years ago, we found there was two thousand companies in the U.K. alone making scientific instruments. So a very large number, and out of this large number, you, we believe that people keep them maybe for 20 years, and so you would have probably a hundred of companies which need to find a home when people retire. And the middle one is less obvious, is low capital use, but I want to explain your typical buy and build is like this. You have a public company, and you say, "I'm a multiple of 20 times earnings, and I'm buying this thing on ten times earnings, so I've doubled my money." It's a very good and legitimate, is this your traditional buy and build exercise, but this is not what we do. What we do is we borrow money from the bank, and we buy companies on a reasonable multiple of EBIT, and we try to buy companies which are producing good profits and cash flow, and we repay the bank, and we start again. And this of course avoids us issuing a lot of shares, and we've only doubled the number of our shares since we started, which enables us to enabled us to multiply shareholder value by a hundred times, because there's only twice more shares. If we had a hundred times more shares, we would only double the value of the shares. So, but it only works if you can convert this, these earnings into cash, because if you can't, then again, you have to issue new shares. So these are the three things which make this thing work. And of course, the growth of our companies is based on acquisition, but also organic growth. We're going to talk about all these things. And just to say, what have we done since 2005? We've done only 25 acquisitions, so not a frantic rhythm of acquiring. We've increased total revenue by compounded 21% a year and EBIT by compounded 28% a year. And if you just take organic growth, the organic growth of revenue was 8% compound, and the organic EBIT was 11%. So these are strong figures, which are largely due to the sector we're in. Of course, we pay dividends, because what's the point of making all this money if you don't share a bit with shareholders? We've already paid dividend equal to seven and a half times the original admission price. So people have been rewarded for staying with us all these years. Next page, please. So this is the executive management team. We're here with Brad, Mark, and Tim, and we've recently added Ian Wilcock at the beginning of September, who joined the board. He's Group Commercial Director, and he's part of that team, which make this business excel at every time. And we'll talk more about what we do for that search for excellence. Next, please, Desmond. Acquisition criteria, what do we try to buy? We try to buy companies which are solid. Our business works well if we have companies which produce sustainable earnings and cash flow. They need to be strong exporters because we live in a very international market, and if we sell most of our sales in the U.K., it means that we have a very small share of the global market. We try to buy companies in niches and where we are really strong in our niche, and therefore strong in the world scene. With solid EBIT margin, our gold standard is 25%, and we've been paying three to seven times EBIT according to size. But if you exclude the two outliers, which is the three time and the seven times, all the other deals have been done at four to six time, with an average of five times. So basically, make 20% return every year on our acquisitions. And we've been borrowing money. We're allowed to borrow three times EBITDA, and over the years, we paid between three times three percent and eight percent, and at this point it's closer to eight percent, but not quite, because we use hedging. So deal take a long time to be done. The crystallizing is erratic, so we have some years, like this year, which are successful because we did three deals, and some other years we don't do any. We have an excellent reputation, and we provide good financial certainty to the seller because they trust once they've signed heads of agreement with us, that we will honor them absolutely. And we treat people very well in the company, and it's very important for the sellers. So, and then that, that's the model. We reduce the debt and reinvest in further deals. And this year we've done three deals that we'll explain more about. One is in Switzerland, Lucerne, Rockwash in Wales, and Teer in England. Next page shows the deals as we've done them. So it looks a bit like F1 track, but we don't do that. You know, we don't do deals so fast, but we try to do a lot of good deals. So the next one is what we do once we own these companies. And, the first thing we do is, and then Brad does, is install very good financial controls and make sure that this happens even before we buy the company. We leave, the management of these companies great autonomy. This is our model. But we have a team of the three people that I mentioned before, Mark, Tim and Ian, which are promoting excellence within these companies and give them a lot of assistance. And, really, we are focusing always on long term, and we're trying to teach, our management team to focus on the long term. So of course, this is, the announcement of our interim results. So the key message of this announcement, that's the next slide, is we've had a challenging environment, geopolitical tensions everywhere. The order intake in China, which is an important market for us, has been very sedate, and we're 60% down on the previous year. We didn't get a coring contract for this year, which is an important part of the company we bought two years ago, Geotek. So it's a substantial portion of that, about a third. But ideally, we do a coring contract every year. We can't do much more, but this year we don't have one. But we have one, as I've explained, for 2025. A lot of projects have been deferred and are slow to crystallize, and so a lot of business has gone from H1 to H2, and even some of them to 2025, so trading have been subdued. Order intake has not been very active, so it's been quite soft, and cash conversion hasn't been strong. We'll talk about it a bit later, but we still ended the half year with a solid order book. It was obvious to us for quite a while that without the coring contract for this year, it would be a struggle to achieve our forecast. Little by little, it became obvious that we wouldn't have one for this year, but we would have needed, you know, a reasonable environment. But the environment was hostile, and therefore we revised down our market expectation by 10% in July. So, apart from that, you know, we have to explain that the short-term fluctuations in business, they affect our results, but they don't affect our strategy of building the group. And we kept building the group, although these short-term influences didn't exist. So we did two acquisition in the first half. We're increasing the dividend 10%, which is our promise to shareholders that we would do that every year, and we've done that every year for the last 19 years. But of course, in the good years, we increase it by more, and we've achieved 24% compound increase in our dividend in the last 18 years. After the end of the period, we did another acquisition, which actually much larger. We had a good eight months for acquisition. We have extended and increased our banking facility. We signed a coring contract, but it will only result in an expedition in the early months of 2025, and we recruited Ian Wilcock, which is a very strong addition to our management team. And now I'm passing to Brad, who's gonna explain about the performance for the period. Thanks very much, David, and hello, everyone. If we can move on to the next slide, please. Now I'll take you through the results for the first half, and as David mentioned, we've not had a great first six months. Yeah. Total revenue down 1% to GBP 61 million. It's a combination of a 3% drop in organic revenue, partially offset by contributions from our recently acquired businesses. The drop in revenue, unsurprisingly, has affected our profitability, and adjusted operating profits were GBP 12.3 million, compared with GBP 14.2 million in the prior period, and that's a drop of 13%. Now, we get good growth, good leverage out of our high fixed cost base when we do get good growth. However, unfortunately, it works against us when we have organic revenue decline. Earnings per share increased to... Oh, it didn't increase, I'm sorry, decreased to GBP 123.7. That's a 19% reduction. And that was impacted by higher interest and also the final period of the increase in U.K. corporation tax. Now, the drop in organic revenue of 3% was closely matched by a drop in organic order intake. And whilst we maintained an organic order book of around 17 weeks throughout the period, this resulted in an anemic comparable for revenue. And it's clear to us that the drop in order intake, seen partially in North America, but certainly quite strongly in China, have affected us, and I'll come back to order intake in more detail later. Moving from performance to cash generation, we've got a strong track record of generating cash from our profits, and we generated GBP 7.8 million cash from operations, but only at a cash conversion of 63%. And this is well below our expectations, where we should be really around 90%, and I'll talk more about that later as well. Our cash generation enables us to support our policy of providing shareholders with progressively increasing dividend returns, and we've increased the dividend for the interim to GBP 29.7 per share, an increase of 10%, and that really is our minimum, and we deliver our minimum increase when performance isn't where we expect it to be. Weaker cash conversion has also affected our net debt position, and adjusted net debt was GBP 52 million at the end of June, compared with GBP 45 million at the start of the year, and while we acquired two businesses in Luciole and Rockwash, which added GBP 7 million to our adjusted net debt, and we also spent GBP 3 million on CapEx. Net debt wasn't quite as good as we wanted it to be. At the same time, gearing was still 1.5 times. We still have significant headroom on our covenants, and we still have a strong balance sheet position. Now, post-period end, we amended and extended our banking facilities, and I'll come back to that later. We've also acquired another typical Judges business, which David will talk about later as well. Now, looking at the rest of the year, we've seen an uncertain climate for order intake, with many orders moving to the right. And whilst we still have a good order book, and we now have order intake above the same period last year, we still have much work to do in order to be able to meet the revised expectations for the full year. So moving on to performance slide. Already talked much about performance, we'll just pick on a couple of things. That reduction in revenue, you can see the impact on our margins. That's the operating leverage effect. The effective tax rate has increased to 23.1%. That's the consequence of that final quarter, from the start of this year to the end of March, of the increase in U.K.'s corporation tax headline rate from 19% to 25%. And lastly, for those of you less familiar with our P&L, we do have adjusting items that take us to the statutory result. The largest of these is GBP 4 million non-cash amortization of the intangible assets we're required to recognize when we acquire businesses. So moving on to order intake, and this really is the bellwether for our performance. And to talk you through that one, wanna talk about the graph on the right-hand side of the slide. To remind everyone, it has three lines on this. This is our internal graph that we use every week to look at order intake performance. It has three lines on it. There's a red line, a black line, and a green line. The red line is our internal sales budget. Not to be confused, I might add, with consensus numbers, but it's our internal budget, which we set every year as part of our annual budgeting process. That's our target. The black line is the trailing 12 months of orders. That's the last 12 months history, and the green line is the last four months of orders annualized, so basically multiplied by three. What we're looking for ideally is for the black line to at least be touching the red line come the end of the year, 'cause then we would have had sufficient orders with which to meet our internal sales budget, and ideally, the green line will be tracking the red line. But it's always a more jagged line because it's a shorter term measure, and order intake is never smooth. The end of the graph is pretty much to date. So what can we see? Well, for the last 12 months, then you look at the green line, it's looked, you know, pretty flat, and there you can see the effect on our order intake. For the last six months, we've been affected by the drop in North America and also significantly, the 65% drop in China orders, and it's now affected us quite a lot, and we're back at levels below 2022 now. So, you know, a big effect for us, and I'll show you a little bit more about that later. Then when you look at the graph and go, well, how does the black line compare to the red line? Well, you can see you compare the black line to the red line. The red line you can see, you know, expected this year. We budgeted and expected for a decent improvement in our organic orders. Well, you can see it hasn't happened, and consequently, there's a significant gap. The result of that, in July, we felt that, you know, it was necessary to update the market, that we weren't gonna meet the original market expectations. Now, we finished the half year with an organic order book of 17 weeks. Since then, we're now into positive territory, organic orders, and the order book's over 20 weeks, which also includes the Geotek Coring contract that David mentioned. It's clear we still have much work to do to deliver on our full year numbers. Moving to the next slide, and this bridge, I reconciled between the H1 2023 and H1 2024 profit contributions of our businesses before central costs. They're the two big blocks on each end of the slide. Reconciling between these, you can see the effect of our drop in performance for the group, with a much larger red block of decline than increase. Improvements in some of our businesses overshadowed by reductions at others. And then lastly, a small positive block for the effect of our more recent acquisitions. It's not the picture we looked for at the beginning of the year or expect. Ideally, it would be the inverse. Moving on to the next slide, and talk about balance sheet and cash flows, and really, the key thing to talk about here, as I was alluding to earlier, is the levels of cash conversion, which is 63%, are well below our expectations. For our business model to deliver the highest returns for shareholders, we need cash conversion to be at least 90% on average. The consequence of this lower cash conversion means that we haven't been able to make any inroads into our working capital levels, which themselves were higher than the pre-COVID, pre-supply chain issues. With working capital at more than 20% of annual revenue, this compares to the pre-COVID levels of around 10%. We have much work to do to restore this balance. As I mentioned when we last recorded our seminar, inventory levels were in the region of 10 million + above the levels before COVID. Whilst understandably, we have more inventory at the half year, because we're gearing up for what we know is a higher H2, I'm hoping that we're gonna make some good inroads in this and also in creditors by the end of the year. Now, gearing was 1.5 times at the end of the period, and we've maintained, as I mentioned before, there was significant headroom on our covenants, has good borrowing capacity, and the unwavering support of our banking group of Lloyds, Santander, and Bank of Ireland. And post-period end, we were able to amend and extend our facilities. We go on to the next slide, I'll talk a little bit about those. So previously, when we acquired Geotek in May 2022, we refinanced the group's banking facilities into a tri-bank group, a GBP 100 million bank facility. That consisted of a GBP 25 million term loan, a GBP 55 million revolving credit facility, and a GBP 20 million accordion, all maturing in May 2026. Now, we've extended that facility until July 2028, so that's an extension of two years, and increased the facility to GBP 140 million, which is now made up of a GBP 90 million RCF and a GBP 50 million accordion, with no change to our existing covenants of gearing and interest cover. All in all, this gives us sufficient firepower for the foreseeable future to continue to buy the businesses that we think are right for this group. Moving on to the next slide. Return on total invested capital, or ROTIC, which really is another key measure for us, and in its simplest form, is a function of the multiples you pay for the businesses you acquire. So on the left-hand side of the graph, when we first acquired FTT, we paid close to five times. We started slightly above 20%, and improving ROTIC requires improving financial performance and/or buying businesses at lower multiples. Now, of course, if you pay higher multiples, you have a mechanical effect. So when we paid six times for GDS and Scientifica earlier on in our life, you can see the big cliff edges that happened as a consequence of that, and likewise, when we acquired Geotek at seven times in 2022, that drop as well. And since the period end, as a consequence of our performance not being quite as good, return on capital is reduced to 20.7%, and we've got to work hard to improve that and push that back up in the direction of 30%, which is where we aspire. Moving on to the next slide, diversification, and if we go from left to right, you can see a split of revenue by all our companies, and there's no one single company that overly dominates. We're also diversified by scientific application. Our businesses manufacture instruments for different scientific markets. You can see also geographically, that there's no one single country or region that overly dominates, and it's a useful point here to show the impact. You can see in the China wedge, it's not yet come through into revenue, but the difference between order intake in the first half and delivery of the revenue and the orders we already had, that's a real big effect for China. Lastly, on the right-hand side, we provide some analysis of our revenue by end market, 20%-25% in geotechnical, around 20% in industry optimization, and we have somewhere in the region of 40%-50% normally for life science and semiconductors, which we amalgamate together because the instruments used and the techniques used in academic and industrial research are largely the same. So moving on to my final slide, which summarizes some of the key statistics about the long-term success of our group, and revenue, and profits, and earnings per share, have all grown strongly over our past, despite us not having the best year so far. We've delivered fantastic compound growth, both on organic revenue and profit basis over our history. We have a compound growth in the dividend of in excess of 20%, and this first half, we've increased the interim dividend by 10% to GBP 0.297. Our constant and continued focus on cash generation serves to help us weather challenging market conditions, acquire the businesses we want to acquire, pay down the debt, and also be able to fund that growing dividend return for shareholders. And on that note, I'm gonna pass back to David, who'll take us through the growth strategy. Thank you, Brad. So, growth comes from M&A acquisitions and from organic growth. We'll talk about organic growth in a few minutes. I'm just gonna talk about the acquisition we've done in the half year and after the thirtieth of June. So the first two acquisitions are unusual for Judges because there are. The basic purpose of acquisition for us, we try to buy good, solid businesses which are capable of standing on their own feet. So Luciole is a very small company, which is in Switzerland. It makes an instrument called OTDR, which is really a measurement of the properties of fiber optics. We have a company making the same type of instrument, OTDRs and other instruments, which is in the U.K. and which is addressing the telecom markets. And, so the OTDR they make is to measure fiber optic over, like, 50 km, and we're working on one which will do 100 km. But this one is for small lengths, maybe, you know, tens, 100 m, and it's really much more into vehicles and planes and tanks and trains. So, the scientific concept is the same, and we can understand it, but the markets are different, which is very interesting for us because the telecom market is very cyclical. We have a lot of ups and down. We make very good money during the ups, but no money at all during the downs. And, the Luciole business is not at all tied to the same ups and downs. So it has only three employees. Two are selling and retiring, and one is retiring in the course of next year. So we can really consolidate these two businesses, and they will be a lot more stable than they were before. The company makes about CHF 500,000, which is a bit like GBP 450,000, and we paid four times for it in an earn-out, which is based on the average earnings over a period of four years. So they can make the earn-out for the period which finishes at the end of this year or for the period of four years, which finishes at the end of next year. The next acquisition is Rockwash Geodata. It's a company based in Wales. It is very similar to one of the three activities of Geotek that we bought two years ago, and it's that activity is the digitalization of the analysis, of course. So, companies in mining, oil, and geology, they extract cores, and they keep these cores forever in big warehouses... and sometimes they want to have information from these cores, so you go and get them. So the digitalization service that we provide is to install near these repositories a couple of containers which are stuck together with a lot of instruments and scientists, and to do kilometers and kilometers of cores. Like this, the people in these companies, instead of going to get the information from the cores, they can get the information on the laptop. Basically, they could do all the properties of these cores, which are known today, that you can analyze today, they can have all this in their laptop. It's a spectacular service that we believe that's one of the best businesses of Geotek. Miners and oil companies, when they drill, they produce something else, which is chippings or cuttings, and this is basically gravel. By law, they have to keep this gravel, so they keep them with a location where they produced it in plastic bags, with the exact emplacement where they found them, and they usually do nothing with it. Rockwash does exactly the same thing as the digitalization of these chippings. We believe this is highly synergistic with Geotek. They are doing business or trying to do business with the same sort of customers and sometimes also with the same customers. And so we believe this is gonna be very good, and it's highly synergistic. So we paid GBP 2.25 million, and there is an earn-out, and the total price could reach GBP 6 million, provided the company makes GBP 1 million EBIT in 2024 or in 2025. It's not expecting they will do in 2024, but in 2025, if everything goes well, it's quite a possibility. After the end of the period, we bought Max Sputter, but we call it Teer Coatings, because this is the trading company, which is called Teer, and it makes coating equipment. So we have other companies making coating equipment. Coating, or generally, thin films, is a very, very widespread process in science and industry. These are very, very sophisticated coatings, which are applied with very powerful equipment and very reliable equipment. Each machine can cost like GBP 0.5 million-GBP 1 million, and the company is equally divided between selling the instrument and providing coating services. So it's a highly sophisticated coater. So the company makes GBP 1.75 million adjusted profit, adjusted, assuming they're paying rent on their building. But of course, they don't pay rent because they own it. So basically, we paid six times the adjusted EBIT, plus the value of the building. So that comes to total of GBP 12.3 million. So it's a very typical Judges' deal, and we expect it to contribute immediately to our earnings. And then we're gonna talk about organic growth, but I'm passing it to Mark and Tim. So if I could just say a few words as an introduction to this section. I think we've talked earlier about a challenging environment and subdued trading, which has very much been the case during the first half of this year. But the people that have seen this presentation before or familiar with us will probably notice that the slide that we're showing here hasn't changed. You know, this is the same slide as before. And there's a key message in that, which is that, you know, our commitment and how we manage the businesses once they're part of the group, and the keys to our organic model hasn't changed. Yeah, this is something that we fundamentally believe in as a long-term driver of shareholder growth, and so it's not something that we've significantly. It's not something that we change on the basis of sort of short-term trading challenges or volatility. The other thing I'd highlight is that, I mean, the things that happen in that sort of environment, you know, one tends to see in a more challenging environment areas across the business, across the group, I should say, sorry, where there are opportunities for improvement. Those sort of things will be more evident when there's a challenging environment, and equally well areas across the group that are very resilient. And so it tends to sort of highlight for us, you know, if there's an area, a sort of systemic area across the group where there's an opportunity for improvement, well, can we help by introducing new ideas, working with external providers to sort of help us deliver new capability into the organization? Or where there are areas of resilience within the group, what can we share? What can we learn? What can we use, you know, use our peer network? So both of those aspects play very much to the Judges model. So an emphasis that, you know, even in challenging times like this, there are very positive attributes to the Judges model that we can bring to bear. I'll hand over to Mark. Tim, thank you very much, and good afternoon, everybody. Given the time, I'm gonna try and skip through this pretty quickly, 'cause I think it's important that you have a chance to ask the questions you want to ask. I'm just really gonna make four points. So first of all, I think a really important facet of the group is the importance of its diversified and decentralized model. I find it useful to compare us with something like a buy and build of, say, British builders merchants. You know, if we were going around the country, hoovering up all sorts of small independent builders merchants, what we'd end up with is a group of companies that were broadly all the same, selling the same sorts of products to the same customer base, with the same drivers, and the same ups and downs in the economy. And therefore, there'd be a real driver there to look at you know, consistent measures, consistent ideas, cost-saving measures, and structures that measured every business on the same facets. Our situation is very different. Every business we've got, give or take, is different. We're all in scientific instruments, but they make different instruments. They sell to different markets, they sell to different customers, and they've got different drivers. So it's really important that we don't take, as it were, the builders merchant approach, and that rather we're much more subtle and nuanced in the way that we run these businesses, knowing that the companies themselves, the technical people in them, the marketing people, have deep, specific knowledge in these tiny niches. And they're probably the world's most knowledgeable people in those niches, despite the fact they might only employ 40 people in the entire business. So it's a very different setup, and it requires some pretty subtle and nuanced oversight and some flexible management of those businesses. You know, a good example of that is that we don't talk about the specific performance of individual businesses, but if we sat down in 2019 and looked at the list of businesses, and I got 20 of you in a room and said, "Right, which business do you think is gonna deliver the best compound average annual growth rate over the next five years?" My guess is that not a single one of you would have the company that did deliver that in your top 10 out of 20. So very different businesses deliver different performance based on all sorts of different markets and different factors, so we just have to bear that in mind. The second is that we're really keen to continue to encourage those businesses that were once independent to keep their small, fast, entrepreneurial mindset. They're close to the customers, they can do things quickly. So, you know, rather than being a big group with huge bureaucracy, where if someone wants to move a waste paper basket, they do a 200-slide deck, send it up to head office, and a couple of years later, they get some daft questions about it, and maybe five years later, they get approval. You know, we're talking about a business where someone's got an idea, the MD pulls everybody together, they have a chat about it, and two hours later, they start knocking walls down. It's that sort of speed and pace that we're trying to encourage. But again, you know, that has its pluses and its minuses. When things are going really well, it's really easy to let people do that. When times are a little bit more challenged, the places that you need to push and resist, et cetera, are different for every business, and it's an interesting challenge. The next point is something which I always mention, which is about leadership training. You know, most of these small businesses, they're incredibly knowledgeable about the science and the markets and the products, but many of the people in them haven't had long experience of leadership in other organizations and knowing what good looks like in those terms. So one of the things that we're particularly proud of is the investment we've put in the leadership training, teaching people who are technically great, with great knowledge of their market, how to lead a team of people, and to hire people who can be great and expand the company, beyond the reach of a particular individual. We've got roughly 100 people on the boards across our 25 businesses, and about 75 of them have gone through a two-week leadership program, which has had a significant impact in them. As new acquisitions come along and people come and go, we try to put the latest group through, and we've got a new... A dozen more, going through that in three weeks' time, starting off on that process, and that's been very important. Then the fourth point I'd make is just about learning across the group. The businesses are really good at talking to each other and learning lessons from each other. You know, whether that's which distributor you can trust in China, and we've got a great example of a number of our companies moving distributors recently, and that beginning to have a significant impact, not just in China, but in other areas. We've got companies that are less good at their production, and we've got other companies helping them out. Some companies have been really great at improving their pricing, and they've been helping the customers that are less good at that. One or two businesses are particularly good at pinpointing the products that customer wants and getting those delivered through their new product process fast, as opposed to taking too long over it, and you know, even real basic things like, how are we gonna motivate the salespeople with the commission scheme? Should that be based on sales? Should it be based on margins? Whatever, so there's a huge amount of learning going on around the group in good times and bad, so those are really the four areas that I'd like to highlight as being particularly important over the last year, and in fact, over the last five or six years. Back to Tim. Thanks, Mark, and I'll just say a little bit more on a couple of those points as well. The point around leadership development and the focus on the senior leadership teams is one of the bullet points that we make in talent development, allying that to the point also that Mark made around where it's strengths or areas of strength in some of the businesses, for example, in terms of their distributor or channel management. That's, you know, we've looked to particularly enhance over the last period and build upon strength across the organization with sales in particular, and sales leadershiP&Learning from some of the companies around their, you know, their choice of channel, a channel partner, their choice of distributor. And another example of that would also be in working capital management, so on the finance side, similarly, building that strength within the organization and learning from those parts of the organization where there is particular strength there. Another thing I'd highlight in terms of the particular focus on talent, and again, Mark mentioned this in terms of the entrepreneurial spirit of the leaders within our companies because of the autonomous model that we have. But what we've identified is that while it's really important to have that, you know, autonomy, in many cases, there is still a need for and real benefit to having some structure to some of the processes here. And one I'd like to highlight in particular is the strategy process. So, you know, we're actually just going through this at the moment. We obviously have a top-level strategy for the group, but what we also have is an individual strategy that is developed by each of the businesses within the group because they are autonomous, and they are knowledgeable at their particular niche market. We ask the businesses to put together a three-year rolling strategy, but that is done in a relatively structured and defined way, in terms of what questions it asks, and how it's to be laid out, and how it's to be what process to consider in terms of where the company is now, where it wants to get to, how to get there, and then who's gonna do what by when, in terms of developing an action plan out of that. Putting in place quite a structured framework, which is something that we help with, centrally. Another couple of things as examples there in terms of, as I mentioned earlier, new things that we've introduced into the group, in introducing ways of thinking about the new product development process in a very agile way, looking to really capture at the earliest possible time in that process, the value proposition and what the customer genuinely needs as a way of accelerating the NPD process, in part, by being really clear on what product it is you're going to develop, but also hopefully by not developing the sets of all those products that aren't going to solve those problems, and thereby not wasting one's time on that. So that's an ongoing exercise that we're helping with across the companies, and a number of the companies have been through some workshops and that over the last six months or so. And a final point for me is also encouraging a greater focus on intellectual property in general and patents in particular. But not in the context of just blindly encouraging all the businesses to go get a load of patents. This isn't about just getting things applied for and granted, just for the sake of it. It's really to encourage the businesses that if they're thinking about thinking in a way that is potentially patentable, then they would be thinking about novelty and inventive step. And if you're thinking about novelty and inventive step, then you're thinking innovatively. And fundamentally, our belief is that if our businesses are thinking innovatively, then they're gonna outperform their competitors in their field in the long term. And that is the culture that we're seeking to amplify and embed further within the organizations. Thank you. I'll hand back to David. Thank you very much, Tim. And in view of the fact that we want to really give the opportunity for question, I'll go quickly through slide 27 and the outlook. And you know, what I want to say again is we have a very robust business model. We have a difficult short-term time in the markets which is affecting our revenue and our profits. But the positive long-term fundamentals are completely untouched, and we have pursued really the construction of the growth of the company in terms of management team and in terms of acquisition, and this has been completely separate from the production of regular earnings. What I want to say is that, you know, from the point of view of building the group, whether we have a coring contract in December or in January, doesn't make any difference, because in the end, it produces the cash, which repays the bank and enables us to do further acquisitions. So we're really trying to produce regular earnings, but the short-term ups and downs do not really affect the long-term health of the group. So that being said, you know, we have to recognize we have a challenging year. We haven't changed our guidance for the end of the year, but we do realize that there are a lot of vulnerabilities relating to the timing and order and revenue, which can affect the result for the year. So, just the next page, what I want to say is we have a robust business model, a lot of potential deals, strong growth drivers, good diversification, complete focus on shareholder value, profits, cash generation, debt reduction, dividend growth. We've paid a compound 23% growing dividend. And, up to now, our shares are free of inheritance tax if they're held after two years, but the future may be different. And now we open, I think, to questions. Great. Thank you very much, David. So we've got loads of questions. When debt financing is taken for acquisitions, how is it structured? Should interest rates continue to come down? Will Judges have the opportunity to refinance existing debt? So, there's one for Brad, I think so, if that's all right. Well, I don't think the two necessarily need to be linked. I mean, for us, it's a straightforward revolving credit facility we now have, so we can make repayments as and when we have available cash to do that. So for us, you can repay, you can borrow, you can repay, you can borrow. So for us, what we have at the moment suits our needs. We have an accordion, which is uncommitted, that we can then draw down on if we need some significant additional funding. So that gives us plenty of flexibility for the coming years. Of course, if we do a very big deal, we might have to do something a bit bigger than this, but for everything we'd normally want to do, this covers us for at least a few years. In terms of interest rates, well, I, you know, I think the big question first is, are they gonna come down, and will they come down in a hurry? I'm not sure that they're necessarily gonna be rushing down, and we've protected ourselves by hedging the vast majority of our debt already at rates which I think protect us for the coming years. I, I don't see interest rate... If they, if they stay around where they are, they go down, well, 1% over the next year or so, in that sort of regions of having a significant effect on our, our approach. And, of course, it's always helpful if rates come down because they're gonna cost you a little bit less. But it's still pretty well-priced, given the multiples we're paying for the businesses we acquire, to still help the model deliver great returns for shareholders. Great. Thank you very much, and I think this is referring to a coring contract. Is it feasible for a second, oh, it is coring contract, to fall into full year 2025, with the first contract being so early in the year? Yeah, in a nutshell, very simple answer, yes, it is feasible. It's not an easy thing to have two in the same year, and people shouldn't count on us have a second one, but it is feasible. But what you have to realize is there are only four ships in the world on which you can do these expeditions, and the expeditions include a lot of other companies than us. So they do a lot of other experiments from that boat, and it's complicated to put together, and I would say the odds are we can't do two next year. Thank you, David. And a few more questions about the coring contracts. Can you advise what typical revenues are for each contract, and an indication of the number of potential customers for the coring contracts? And if you could increase sales of coring contracts, how many does Geotek have capacity to fulfill in one year? So you've answered that last one, really. Yeah, I think I've answered this. I'm trying to answer quickly, so, because you have a lot of questions. I would say, the coring contract we signed is, about the same as, the two previous one we had. It's still quite difficult. It's, say, a few million dollars, and, it could easily reach, a third of the profits of, of Geotek. And, yeah, I think the limitations is that, you know, you typically have four customers. The U.S., Japan, China, and India are the most permanent customers there, and, I've explained about the limitations. Great. Thank you very much indeed. And do the difficult market conditions that Judges is experiencing also improve the prospects for acquisitions? No, we don't think it's the case. We buy only excellent companies and very cash generative. So every company that we bought had a lot of cash, that we, of course, pay this excess cash on top of the price we pay, and they're not under pressure to sell when they have a bad year. And it's people who typically they've spent 20, 25 years of their life building a business, and they want to sell well at the end, and they all manage to survive. So if they want to sell and the climate is not good, and they have a bad year, well, they'll sell later. That's what. So good companies don't sell quickly in a rush when business is bad. There's an opportunity to buy bad companies when business is tough, but it's not the companies we try to buy. Great. Thank you very much. Armfield has grown revenue strongly and expanded employment strongly in full year 2023, and expanded employed staff, although still loss-making. Does the growth mark the turning point in Armfield's recent history? That's one I think for Mark, but I have to say before passing on to Mark, but we try to avoid talking too much about individual companies because of commercial concerns, because we have competitors, and so we don't like to encourage our competitors in any shape or form. But Mark, do you want to say one or two words about that? I'm not really sure that I can say anything that I'm happy to say, really. Excellent. So sorry, but- I think I'm tempted to pass on that one for commercial confidentiality reasons. I do apologize. Excellent. Okay. Thank you very much. Sorry that we're shirking this one to whoever asked the question. Can the reduced order intake from China be replaced elsewhere, or is it a case of waiting it out for the long term? Well, yeah, you know, I think we see the growth in the fantastic growth we've had in China from the time we started in this business until the COVID crisis will not be there anymore. But China will grow, but China grows less as a country, and a lot of the growth is moving now to private consumption rather than public investment, and we, of course, don't sell consumer products. And then finally, there's the issue of buy Chinese. So I think that the climate will be less favorable, but of course, we sell throughout the world. China's now maybe 10% of our sales rather than 12%, and we will find, you know, we have growth in many other places. The States hasn't been great this year, but I'm sure it will come back. Europe has been more favorable, and of course, the new China is probably India, which is a very large country with a growing population compared to China, which is halving in the next few decades, and very educated and very poor, and as it becomes more prosperous, I think there will be great opportunities to do more business there in another a lot of other emerging economies. Great. Thank you very much. Can you do anything to dilute the lumpiness due to Geotek's coring? No, I think we can't. The only thing we can do, and we're doing, is growing the group as we've done over the years. And I think in five years we won't talk about Geotek coring if we manage to do acquisition at the rhythm that we've done. It just, you know, it's big. We've had in the past big, lumpy things that we didn't talk necessarily about, but we thought about them, and now they, we don't even think about them. So as the group grows, the impact of the coring expedition will diminish, and it will diminish as part of Geotek because we think the main growth of Geotek will come from these digitalization services. Great. Thank you very much. And you mentioned that supply issues have impacted half one cash flows. Can you explain a little bit more? Yeah. Can I take that one? Yeah, please. I don't think we've said that we think supply issues have impacted. I think we're over the supply chain issues, but I think we've still got a legacy for how our businesses are behaving in that environment. I think it's a you know, it's helpful to appreciate that before the supply chain issues, you know, you had this, and David gave an analogy earlier before this, that you know, customer was king, and then all of a sudden, suppliers became king, and I think that's an important point. Now, I think once there's enough components and raw materials moving around the economy again, then the balance needs to settle back towards where it was. I suspect that maybe we have a little bit of the balance wrong in some of our businesses at the moment. I can only say that anecdotally, but at the moment we're looking into that, and you know, it's part of my, one of my pet projects, I think, for Q4, which will be to look into how all aspects of our working capital and try and help our businesses think about how they're doing business a little bit more. Really, the challenge is to go back and understand what we did before 2022- -and what we're doing differently now. Different. You know, I think that's an important thing for us to be really, really clear about and then make some progress thereafter. Great. Thank you very much, Brad. And final question: To what extent does recurrent revenue contribute to the group? Is servicing and calibration of scientific instruments meaningful to revenues, and are sales of instruments typically outright, or do leasings and rentals feature? Okay. So, Do you wanna do that, David, or do you want me to? Well, we want to do everything in a rush. You know, in two words, our main business, selling instruments. Servicing and calibrating is really minimal. Servicing is not a big component. We do services. The main provider of services, Geotek, but also Teer, because half of their business is providing services. We have some other companies providing services, but it's not a very important part of our global turnover. And rentals is only Geotek which does rentals, and it's not a substantial, but it's a nice part of the revenue, and it's very expensive, so people end up often buying the machine because it's too expensive to rent, which is what we like. Great. Thank you very much indeed, and that's the end of questions. David, do you have any closing remarks? Yeah. Yeah. First, I wanted to thank you and Tim, and thank all our audience for taking the trouble to listen to us. I would like to say these are not ideal results, and we're, we are happy with them. We're working hard to produce better results at the year-end than we produced in the first half. I would say we have really good confidence that the second half will be better than the first half because there's three pieces of business which are important that we were hoping to get a lot in, already in the first half, but their contribution is now tied in, in the second half, so we can really identify that, and there's a contribution of Teer Holdings. We have confidence we're gonna do better. We are vulnerable to events still, which is not a pleasant thing to be, but the important thing is to remember that the growth path of the group is absolutely not dependent on these short-term results. We don't like the short-term ups and downs. We don't have many, and it's only the fourth time we have a down in ninety years. We hope not to have that too often, but it will happen, but it doesn't impinge the growth of the group. So we hope to be able to service our shareholders with more growth in shareholder value in the years to come. Great. Many thanks, David, Brad, Mark, and Tim. And to everyone listening, you'll now be taken to a web page to give feedback on today's presentation. If you can't complete it now, you'll get a follow-up email. We'd be really grateful if you could take a few moments to complete. Many thanks for joining. This is the end of the webinar.