Good morning. Welcome to the McBride Interim Results presentation for the six months ending December 2020. I'd first like to welcome Mark Strickland, our new Chief Financial Officer, to his first results briefing. I'm delighted to have Mark on board. He's made a great start and already making an impact in the business. I would like to also express my thanks to Clive Jennings, who acted as our interim Chief Financial Officer, for his excellent contribution during his six months with us. It's worth mentioning that this will be the last results review that we will do on this current regional segmental basis. From our prelims in September, we will move to reporting in our new divisional segments, and you'll hear more about the shape of the group and the way we will present it going forward at the Capital Markets Day later. Next slide, please, slide one. By way of agenda, I will cover the headlines and a brief update on the commercial situation that the business experienced in the past six months before Mark gives you the financial update. I will then report on some good progress in our key business initiatives and finish with an outlook statement before Q&A. Next slide, please. Slide two. Moving on to our headlines. It is very pleasing to be reporting such an improved performance in the first six months in spite of the challenging environment around us from both COVID-19 and Brexit planning, while also delivering to schedule our Programme Compass objectives. The first half year's strong profit improvement has been a result of higher revenues and improved gross margins. We saw a strong performance in our contract manufacturing business, offset by lower private label, mostly a result of the ending of two large contracts. We have continued to see similar category performances across our European markets, as witnessed in the first period of lockdown, with strong sales of dishwash and surface cleaners, but laundry demand weaker. These trends being a continuation of the impact on our changed personal lives as a result of COVID restrictions. We have seen slightly softer prices across a range of our raw materials early in the period, improving our gross margins. Although feedstocks have started to rise at the back end of the period and have continued rising early into the new year. We had a very positive, effective, and resilient response to the COVID-19 challenges thrown at us during the period. Whether that related to demand uncertainty, service recovery, absenteeism, and employee welfare, we have seen no significant production or business disruption throughout the period. Our customer service levels have improved steadily through the six months, recovering from their weak start to the year after our inventory levels were heavily reduced as part of the first wave's panic buying. It's great to see that as we exit the year, our service in the 90%-95% range. We have continued apace with our key business opportunities, such as our logistics savings project, the new factory in Malaysia, and the closure of the Barrow factory. In financial terms, our strong six months saw revenues 1.7% higher, adjusted PBT was up 74%, and adjusted EPS rose 92%. We are announcing later today further details on our new dividend policy, where our intention is to move to an annual dividend declaration, and therefore, there will be no interim dividend at this stage. Our debt cover ratio on an IFRS 16 basis ended the period at 2.2 x on an accounting basis and 1.1 x on the banking basis. Alongside all of this, it is fantastic that we completed all our strategy preparation, organization design, and recruitment, and transitioned on time on January 1st to our new divisional structures. After only seven weeks, it is really encouraging to see the early signs of the positive impact these new teams will have on the group and the way we run the company. Of course, you can see more of this later this afternoon on Programme Compass, should you be able to join us for our Capital Markets Day presentation at 1:30 P.M. Next slide, please. Actually moving on to slide four. Here we have some further analysis of our first half revenue performance, and it can be demonstrated on these two charts. For clarity, the right-hand chart is the total revenue change for the group by segment, and therefore, you can see Household Europe with GBP 2.2 million, Asia, GBP 1.5 million, and Aerosols, GBP 2.5 million, contributing to our total growth of GBP 6.2 million. The left-hand chart demonstrates the category performance for the European business only, and therefore only adds to the GBP 2.2 million that you saw on the right-hand chart. We have seen a strong performance in our contracts business, up 24% in the period. As forecast, we saw two large supply contracts with retailers in the U.K. and Germany end during the period, with the remainder of our private label slightly higher overall. Both the contract losses were examples of why the change to a product-based divisional approach is so important and will reduce the risk of such contract changes in the future, since our technology offer in both cases was too slow to respond to the competitive threat. If you look at our category performance, we continue to see the impact of COVID-19 in our numbers, as I discussed earlier, with auto dishwasher showing 11% growth, cleaners 10.3% higher, whilst our laundry volumes continue to suffer as a result of people being more at home with revenues down over 12%. Within the regions, the U.K. had a difficult period with net contract wins and losses of more than 10%, masked by an underlying revenue growth in line with market averages on our main contract. Our North South regions had strong periods of revenue growth, driven mostly by contract manufacturing with both global and regional contract supplies. For our East region, which is primarily Germany, we saw good underlying growth net of a contract mentioned before. The Asia business continued its recent trends with 12% growth in the period predominantly from Malaysia and Australia. The aerosol business grew thanks to higher revenues from our sanitizing range, which ended 15% higher as a division than the previous year. Next slide, please. Slide five. Now to a short update on some market trends and the impacts on McBride. We have seen that brand market share has remained higher over the past six months, continuing the trend that we saw in the first wave. Depending on category, for the most part, volumes have grown less than the total value, hence average prices have been higher, in part, probably from fewer promotions. Retailer shares have changed in various markets from the changed shopper behavior resulting from different restriction levels. In the U.K., we have seen the Big Four power ahead with discounters and convenience lower. In France, the hypermarkets have seen share continue to fall in favor of the supermarkets, and Lidl have also gained in France in the past year. In Germany, the one-stop shopping concept has been impacting the drugstores with more general grocers faring better. Online has seen dramatic increases in penetration and any retailer without an online offer has been left behind. In the U.K., online groceries rose to 15% share in the last six months of the year, double the level of the comparative period in 2019. This trend is also evident across most of our main markets, such as Germany and France, to similar levels. This has clearly most disfavored those retailers, and especially some of the discounters, who for the most part have no online presence. In category terms, we have seen similar patterns across our different European regions with laundry weakness offset by stronger dish and disinfecting products. Our sanitizing products and Aerosols saw lower sales in this first half compared to the second half of last year as volume settled after initial stock-up purchases from customers in the first wave. Like us, many suppliers to retailers would have been extremely busy during this period and coping with all the challenges that COVID-19 has thrown at them. However, in some markets, the push by many retailers to price match or even force lower prices to gain share will be starting to have an impact on margins with our weaker competitors, especially in Germany and Spain. As you can see on the table on this page, if we strip out the impact of key gains and losses from our regional performance, we demonstrated our ongoing business has performed at market growth levels or higher, especially in Germany. Next slide, please. Slide six. As mentioned earlier, it is extremely encouraging to see the good progress that we're making in contract manufacturing with first half growth of nearly 24% in this channel. Mostly coming from a laundry capsules gain and higher demand on running contracts on auto dishwash cleaners, where the influence of COVID-19 has been similar to that seen in our private label volumes. The contracts business now accounts for just over 16% of our total household sales, up from 13% last year and up from the 8% we started at about five years ago. As you can see from the chart, the share with multinationals continues to grow, and it now accounts for 80% of our total contracts business. With that, I'm now going to hand over to Mark and to move on. Page seven, please. Slide seven, financial results. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Before I begin on the financial results, just a quick introduction to myself. I've been a Chief Financial Officer for over 25 years and with a varied background ranging from chemicals to own label and contract manufacturing in the food industry to logistics and consumer services. I joined McBride seven weeks ago, and I'm absolutely delighted to be joining Chris and the team at this time. From my viewpoint, the business has great foundations and as you will see this afternoon, is really well placed to benefit from a great number of opportunities as the sector develops and evolves over the next few years. Anyway, enough about myself. Now turning to the half year to December 2020. Slide eight, financial headlines. The first half of FY 2021 saw the group both deliver a strong performance while at the same time continuing to show its resilience and adaptability to the many and varied challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, group revenues at GBP 362.9 million were up 1.7% in constant currency, reflecting continued strong demand for cleaning products due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This drove a significantly improved performance with adjusted operating profit of GBP 19 million, up GBP 7.4 million on the half year to 31st of December 2019. The resulted adjusted profits before tax of GBP 16.9 million were GBP 7.2 million or 74% up on 2019. Earnings per share came in at GBP 0.071. On the 2nd of November 2020, the company announced that it would commence a share buyback program, as at the 31st of December, the group had purchased and canceled 2.1 million ordinary shares at a cost of GBP 1.5 million, which equates to an average acquisition price of GBP 0.684 per share. As Chris indicated, the company is moving to a policy of annual dividends. Therefore, no interim dividend is proposed, and I will return to this point later in this presentation. Cash flow generation continues to be strong despite a working capital increase of GBP 12.8 million- GBP 50.5 million. As signposted at the final results presentation last year, working capital levels at June 2020 benefited from a one-off upside relating to the consequences of exceptionally high demand in March 2020 and the subsequent rebuilding of inventory. The December 2020 working capital ratio has now returned to more normalized levels. Partially as a result of this net debt on an accounting basis, including IFRS 16, saw an increase of GBP 16.1 million- GBP 117.6 million. Moving now on to slide nine, revenue development. As stated earlier, revenue at constant currency was up by 1.7%. Chris bridged the revenue movements earlier, and I covered a number of the points on the previous slide. I would just highlight the strong revenue growth in both Asia, which is up 12.6%, which was driven by the Australian and Malaysian markets, and Aerosols up 15.3%, driven by sales of sanitizing products which were launched in the second half of FY 2020. I'd also highlight the changing geographical mix of revenues within the European household business, where the U.K. has reduced to 21.5% of the household business, the North has increased to 18.4%, and the South has increased to 14.8%. Moving on to slide 10, operating profit development. Overall, EBITDA was significantly up, being due to the increase in sales, a favorable product mix, combined with the slight softening of certain raw material and packaging input costs. That said, we expect the currently high feedstock prices to flow through to a number of our raw materials, weakening gross margins into the second half of the financial year. In terms of segmentation, obviously Household drove the increased EBITDA improvement, growing GBP 5.9 million year-on-year. It is also pleasing to note the continued recovery of our Aerosols business. Corporate costs reduced year-on-year due to less travel and training, which is COVID-19 related, and the number of vacancies remaining unfilled. Finally, as Chris has said, it is worth noting that this is the final time that we will present the business in this way, and in this afternoon's capital markets presentations, we will take you through how we will view and report the segmentation of the business going forwards. Looking at slide 11, income statement. Continuing operations saw an improvement in gross margin to 35.7%, up half a percent versus half two 2019-2020, driven by mix input costs and volumes. Distribution costs have been relatively stable when compared to last year, this in turn has led to a return on sales percentage increase to 5.2%. Whilst administrative overheads before exceptional items and amortization increased by GBP 2.1 million at constant currency, primarily as a result of a year-on-year change in incentive accrual levels, overheads as a percentage of gross profit actually fell to 85.4% from 86.8%, as this measure excludes the aforementioned incentive payments. Year-on-year finance costs were GBP 0.2 million higher, as the prior year benefited from foreign exchange currency revaluations. The effective tax rate in the first half of the year is 23% due to the release of a provision following the settlement of a tax inquiry, which is treated as a discrete item in Half one. The effective tax rate for the full year is expected to be 28%. On to slide 12, balance sheet and cash flow. Return on capital employed increased from 15.6%- 19.3%, mainly as a result of the increase in adjusted operating profit. Cash flow from operations before exceptional items was GBP 14.2 million. It should also be noted that the business has taken advantage of the government's deferred VAT scheme and as at half year-end, had GBP 3.9 million, which will be paid across by 31st of March 2022. Net debt, including IFRS 16, was GBP 117.6 million against GBP 101.5 million as at June 2020. The increase being to the large cash outflow in relation to trade payables, as described earlier, and additional lease liabilities of GBP 5.7 million, mostly in relation to our new Asian facility. On an accounting basis, our net debt to EBITDA ratio was 2.2x versus 2.1x at June 2020. On a banking basis, in other words, the basis upon which our banking covenant is measured, the net debt to EBITDA ratio was 1.1x, which is significantly below our banking covenant of 3x. As at 31st of December, we had EUR 93.8 million undrawn against our EUR 175 million RCF that is committed to June 2022. It is worth saying that the group is now engaging with our existing lenders and a number of potential new lenders to refinance this existing facility. During the year, capital expenditure increased to GBP 13.4 million in cash terms. Full year CapEx is expected to be circa GBP 28 million, which is higher than previous years. In both cases, this increase is primarily due to expenditure upon plants and machinery in the new factory in Malaysia, which will be fully operational April, plus the purchase of assets from a German business that went into liquidation. On to Slide 13 of the financials. Exceptional items of GBP 2.4 million were recorded during the period, of which GBP 200,000 was incurred in respect of discontinued operations. The GBP 2.2 million charges in respect of continuing operations comprised of GBP 1.7 million relating to Programme Compass, GBP 400,000 in respect of a one-off legacy cost relating to the former aerosol site in Hull, and GBP 100,000 relating to closure costs for the Barrow production facility, which ceased operations in October 2020. As I indicated earlier, the board intend moving to a single annual total dividend to be communicated at the time of the annual results. There is no interim dividend. As part of the group strategy reset, and also taking into account these times of global uncertainty, the group will now be targeting an accounting basis debt to EBITDA ratio of less than 2x. Our new distribution approach, which will more fully be communicated as part of our capital market presentation, will link dividend distribution to this debt cover measure. Moving on to pensions. As at 31st of December, the group recognized a deficit on its U.K. scheme of GBP 29.5 million, which compares to 30th of June deficit of GBP 28.4 million. The move to a cash flow-driven investment strategy was completed pre-COVID-19, and has delivered on the expectation of reduced volatility in the reported deficit. Despite this, the net increase in deficit is GBP 1.1 million over the period as a lower discount rate meant that pension liabilities increased more than the increase in asset returns and deficit contributions paid by the group. It is also worth noting that the process for undertaking the U.K. pension fund triennial valuation as at 31st of March 2021 kicks off shortly, and we are aiming to complete the process by the 31st of December 2021. Finally, for me, moving on to slide 14, costs update. As stated, the slight softening of certain raw material and packaging prices observed in the second half of the last financial year continued into the first half of FY 2021. That said, prices of certain key feedstocks have increased significantly through November and December, with most ending 2020 above pre-lockdown levels. Coconut oil and palm kernel oil ended the half year at their highest level since late 2017 and have continued their upward trajectory into the early part of the second half of this financial year. Further price fluctuations on other direct inputs were experienced due to supply and demand imbalances, though these have proved not to be material overall. The ocean freight market has seen significant increases through our first half year as availability has become a growing global issue, and it is something that we continue to monitor closely. The large on-cost for recycled plastics versus virgin plastics also remains. Distribution costs overall have remained relatively stable compared to last year, despite the ongoing challenges arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, it's worth noting that we are seeing some cost inflation as a consequence of Brexit and its impact on the U.K. and EU supply lines, in particular, costs arising from the associated administrative changes and certain packaging requirements. Thank you, and I'll now hand you back to Chris, who will cover our key actions and activities. Thank you, Mark. If we can move please on to slide 16. In September last year, we published our 2025 product sustainability targets as part of our commitment to delivering initiatives all aimed at reducing the impact on the environment of the products that we supply. This is the first major commitment as part of our new ESG ambition, more of which we will talk about at the Capital Markets Day later. In September, we outlined a series of specific product sustainability targets grouped under three pillars of plastic reduction, responsible sourcing, and increased levels of compaction, and therefore lower chemical use. Whilst we will report more fully at finals time, it is pleasing to note we continue to make good progress against these targets, and I pulled out some examples as a demonstration of that. Plastic bottles are the most prominent challenge for us. Our aim was that by 2025, we will supply on average more than 50% PCR content across all our bottles. The amount of PCR per bottle, of course, varies. We are making progress, today, 65% of our PET bottles include some PCR content, up from 50% of the bottles this time last year. In addition, we now have six of our seven liquid sites able to produce bottles with 100% PCR content following machine upgrades and modifications. Additionally, we are aiming for all our plastic packaging to be 100% fully recyclable, and at over 99% today, we are progressing well. Currently, 75% of our paper board is from FSC-approved suppliers. Our plan to remove PVC from all packaging should be delivered during 2022. Our drive to eliminate mixed-layer plastics, which are difficult to recycle, has been made easier now with all our Unit Dosing sites able to produce single-layer plastic doypacks. Internally, our technical team continues to endeavor that every new product we develop should deliver a more sustainable footprint when compared to the product that it replaces. Slide 17, please. By way of an update on some of our key initiatives, we continue to make great progress despite the distractions mentioned earlier and the general busyness of our teams. The Barrow facility, which was a laundry powder and auto dish factory, closed in the autumn of last year, and its production transferred to our French powder factory and the Luxembourg dishwasher factory. This whole project has been handled extremely professionally with no major challenges or disruption, with only site clearance at Barrow left to complete. The benefits to our powder business will be significant with a savings from fixed costs and overheads already visible this year and into the next year. Our capacity expansion in Malaysia, which will see us operating from a brand-new facility near Kuala Lumpur, is progressing well despite challenges from movement control orders in Malaysia. The factory construction and preparation has been completed to schedule in January. Small delays due to COVID efficiency and local government now means we'll be transferring through March, and the factory will be fully operational from April. This is a significant step for the business and allows us now to progress with plans to expand our household operations in the region and grow further our personal care volumes. The new factory will allow us to produce in excess of three times the current quantities of our previous facility. We have two significant logistics projects underway, both of which will realize significant savings in the order of approximately 10% of our logistics costs. The first project is to do with warehouse operations, which will see us move from 22- 14 locations over the next couple of years and has already now started with the first warehouse in France closing this month and the restructure of the supply to the German market with the consolidation to a single location in the Northern German area during March this year. The second project relates to our transport management and transport planning, where we will be moving to an outsourced arrangement, which will start up in quarter four, and where we expect to see primary transport costs reduced from improved truck fill, cheaper truck lanes, less mileage, and more reliable hauliers. Slide 18, please. The Aerosols business has continued under its new standalone management to push ahead with a significant number of product developments, especially in the sanitizer range, including such items as one-stop dispensing, allowing a whole can to be dispensed from a single press of the actuator for use in things such as meeting rooms, taxis, classrooms, et cetera. We completed the installation of a new filling line acquired at the end of last year to provide more capacity for sanitizing products, and we've seen good performance this first half-year with sales growth at 15%. During the period, we've installed three of our four liquid production lines that were acquired from a former competitor that liquidated during last financial year. This GBP 4 million asset deal brings significant capacity increases for our liquid production operations. The demise of the competitor was another demonstration of the challenge faced by some of our German competition, where the drive for unsustainably lower prices ultimately removes suppliers and eliminates local stable supply bases. We have continued to invest in capital through this period with our strategy in mind, and we continue to see format capability improvements in both dish and laundry now being installed to provide improved variety in product and packaging formats for our customers. Moving now, please, on to the last slide 20. We are keeping our full year's earnings outlook in line with our December trading statement. We continue to see quite some variability in order patterns and stock levels at customers. We see this across most categories and regions, and our teams continue to work hard to ensure we keep pace and maintain strong service levels. As anticipated, we expect to see higher feedstock prices feed through into our gross margins in the second half, and our new teams are already working on the mitigation ideas and options. As COVID restrictions start to relax, we are already looking at potential medium-term impact on volumes and categories. While it's not likely to have a significant impact this financial year, preparation for next year is crucial to ensure that we are ready. We remain vigilant on continuing our efforts to minimize the impact of COVID on our business activities and of course on our colleagues. Late in 2020, we have launched our McBride Cares program focused on supporting our colleagues' well-being and other matters affecting home and work life. Finally, our new organization and our new divisional structure is now live, and the new team's completing the transition from our old ways of working. I am so encouraged by what I can see already seven weeks after we started with evidence improvement of focus, accountability and pace. Thank you for your attention. I will now hand back to the operator for questions. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. The first question comes from Charles Hall from Peel Hunt. Charles, please go ahead. Morning, everyone. A couple of questions, please. Chris, you mentioned the loss of two larger contracts was down to being too slow to respond to technology changes. Can you give a little bit more detail on those technology changes and why you were too slow and why that will be addressed with the new format? Secondly, on the shift to online, how do you see that playing out for McBride? Morning, Charles. Thank you. Yeah, the two contracts, they're both laundry contracts. One was a capsules contract, one was a Powders contract. I think it's fair to say, and you'll see a bit this afternoon, capsules is an extremely fast-moving category, where format and packaging as that product develops in the market. It's fair to say, I think, with our generous approach before, we are behind the ball, in a number of cases in different markets in the formats that are now required. I think we did not have time to react and respond to a new competitor, well, a competitor with an emerging new format and a new packaging concept that we were unable to match at the time. The same similar true within Powders, slightly different issue, more about compaction there. Again, the lack of, if you like, focus and attention at the front end on products that are changing more rapidly, which tend to be in unit dosing, as you'll see later, has definitely led to us being a little bit behind, and we have to catch up. The new structures and the new way we're working, and you can see it already, will be far more attentive and far pacier, and we need to go back to leading that sector. That was the reason we lost that contract. We can win it back, of course. I think it's fair to say on the online, I think the numbers I've seen demonstrate that whilst we've seen something like 16% of grocery moving online, only about half of that in terms of our household products has moved online. While food has moved heavily online, household has moved less aggressively online, if you like. Still higher, of course, it's not the same. I think the penetration is half that level. Certainly in the U.K., that's the statistics I've seen. On our product formats, are working fine in that environment. I mean, at the moment, a lot of these companies are shelf-picking. We're not needing specific formats. It is something we're alert to. We have created products that we continue to offer online, particularly unit dosing through special brands. We offer the small product, as we've explained before. We supply that to our customer there, we've seen some more interest from people like Amazon in formats that work well on an online premise. I think at the moment, we're not seeing significant change other than making it as efficient as we can for our retail customers to be able to select the products either on shelf or from the warehouse. The format changes are not necessarily coming through at this stage. That's perfect. Thanks. Thanks, Charles. The next question comes from Nicola Mallard from Investec. Nicola, your line is open. Hi. Morning. A couple of questions, if I may. You've talked about feedstock prices rising, and now sitting above pre-COVID levels. I just wondered, is there a move in place to start to look to recover some of those through price? The other question was around Asia in terms of a new facility there. Can you give us a bit more background in terms of the capability of the products that you can manufacture over in Asia? I mean, you mentioned personal care, but you also said there's increasing capacity available. I was just wondering what else you could be looking to sell in that part of the world. Thank you. Thanks, Nicola. Good morning. In terms of the first question on feedstocks, I think at the moment, yeah, we are doing early interventions in terms of any new prices that we might be quoting in the market, taking into consideration the direction of travel we see by the time any new tenders that we're launching at the moment would hit the market, which could be six to nine months away. We already take that, of course, into account in our pricing. At the moment, we are not moving to wholesale actions on price increases across the business. I think it's around the new structure of the business. We will be looking in a very different way at how we might target pricing or cost initiatives within products to recover that margin. At the moment, we're not planning wholesale price increases. We will look to recover in different ways, like we always do, with the lag that we would normally expect. That's the first question. The second question on Asia. Today, the business is primarily a personal care and skin care business. The products range, the normal ranges, I would say, from liquid products, predominantly liquid products, sorry. We're talking bath foams, shower gels, shampoos, through to creams and gels and so forth. That we will create a huge amount more capacity in those product ranges just by extending our production filling lines into the new space that we've got. We will look to be installing, shortly, household production lines, again, for liquid products, where we look to expand some fairly basic stuff at this stage, things like wash up liquid, and general cleaners, and laundry Liquids will be the further stage. I think we know we'll be transferring, and you'll hear a bit more this afternoon, transferring technology and utilizing the European platform in innovation and technology to support the ambition there. The installation of these lines and the transfer of this technology, we do not consider to be overly technical or exceptionally difficult to do. We manage it pretty well in Europe, and the facility that we've got will provide the space both for mixing and filling and packing for significant expansion household. Again, you'll hear a bit more on that this afternoon. Okay, thank you. The next question comes from Martin Deboo from Jefferies. Martin, your line is open. Yeah, Chris and Mark, hello. It's Martin Deboo, Jefferies. Similar question to Nicola's first one, just clearly the issue into H2 is rising inputs. Just to push you a bit harder on it, what sort of commodity basket inflation across the business do you expect to see in H2, just to give us a sense of how much of a challenge it presents? Just remind me, around the mitigations, do you have any sort of formula pricing arrangements in place with customers to cover commodity inflation, or do you just have to go out and negotiate it? Good morning, Martin. In terms of rising inputs, we don't typically quote, but I know where the feedstock rises have happened late in 2020 and are continuing at the moment in 2021. I think our predictions are typically based on feedstocks rather than obviously any derivative forecasts. We're obviously relying on historic trends between feedstocks and derivatives. It's fair to say some of that has moved around a bit through the pandemic as demand has been much more influential than pure feedstocks. We think the impact on our index is going to be upwards of somewhere between 1% and 2% by the end of the year. Not throughout the whole period. It will rise progressively through the period, potentially exiting around that level at the back end. Again, very subject to the way demand moves and I think the feedstocks are a bit more predictable or a bit more visible, but it's the impact downstream on ethylene and other derivatives. Look at the pricing mechanism point, as we've said many times before, virtually all our retail businesses is not on a pass-through arrangement. That's the way the industry works. We take the rough and the smooth and we mitigate as best we can in between cycles. The good news is though, of course, with our increasing contract percentage that you've seen in the numbers, those are typically on pass-throughs. We have price adjustment arrangements with our contract customers that mean that the burden of material changes is taken by the customer on our retail business, and it's up to 15% of the group today. A rise in contract manufacturing helps mitigate that. We will also look, going forward, at hedging mechanisms, see what hedging mechanisms we could do perhaps against some of the raw material feedstocks. Look at some of our contract constructs that we can change going forward. Okay. Thank you for that, gentlemen. Thank you. Another reminder to participants to press star followed by one on your telephone keypad if you would like to ask a question. We have another follow-up question from Charles Hall from Peel Hunt. Charles, your line's open. Thanks. Chris, you mentioned that service levels ranging 90%- 95%, obviously it's been a pretty difficult period with COVID restrictions in a number of facilities. Are you now finding that you're getting more consistent service levels coming out, and where do you need to get them to be confident that you're going to be retaining business going forward? Yeah. Thanks, Charles. You're absolutely right. It's been a huge priority for us. Of course, it's so important. COVID has made it a challenge. I think a couple of points. I'd say, first of all, I think our recovery from the sort of April, May, June time where our stocks were decimated after the first wave panic buying, we saw inventory drop something like 40% in that period. With factories that are very full, it takes a while almost full, completely already in liquid products, for example, in cleaners and so forth, it takes quite some time to rebuild the inventories. Inventories are a key part of us maintaining our service position. We've certainly built those inventories back, and I would say we've pretty much most sites were back fairly quickly, three months or so, three or four months. We have seen a number of locations that have struggled more, and we have put in additional measures and additional, if you like, interventions to really prioritize customers in the right way to make sure that we approach our customer base in the most positive and constructive way we can. I think since the end of December, we've been consistently around the 95%. We are heavily focused on maintaining that. I think the challenge a little bit is sporadic order volumes and inconsistent order volumes that just push and test us a little bit in terms of our inventory and our production prioritization. We think we've got some really good processes going on in the two factories in particular that were struggling. Both those are back up now, where they're getting towards where they need to be. Particularly one is back up in the 90%s, which pulled our average down, if you like. Yeah, look, I think we can keep our service levels high. It's a key feature of the new divisional setup. If you look at our divisional setup, you'll find that unit dosing and Powders, Aerosols in Asia have service levels always up in the 95%s. It's predominantly our Liquids plants, which are the ones that have been the busiest, I would say, in Liquids in the last six to nine months. A key focus in the divisional position will be to keep that service level high. Those teams are accountable for it. It's their factories and their production forecasting and planning, and them being embedded in their industry with their customers will keep it front and center for those teams as a key metric going forward. Look, I think go back to the point around how do you best recover input prices, how do you best mitigate contract wins and losses is to be absolutely first-class in service, and that's a high priority for the business. I think one observation coming into the business from outside is actually how we measure customer service levels. There's two ways you can measure customer service levels. One is on original order, and one is on agreed supply. Let's say a supermarket initial order was 100, and we agreed to supply 95 today and five next week. Our service level, the way we measure it, would be 95. The way service level is measured elsewhere in food industries, et cetera, the service level would have been 100% because we agreed we would supply 95, and we supplied 95. I think also we need to look at we perhaps overly criticize ourselves on service levels when perhaps if we measured it on agreed order, our service levels would be higher than just on the planned initial order. Yeah. That's just an observation, as I say, joining the business. Interesting. The recent issues with Brexit and transport between the U.K. and Europe and also supply chain from Asia, have those had a material impact on service levels or is that being just coped with? No material impact. They're things that the business is dealing with. In fact, Brexit is becoming very much business as usual with perhaps a raised level of admin and vigilance around making sure that goods do cross the borders in a timely fashion. The Asia freight issue has affected our Asia business a little bit because we obviously transport things like auto dish capsules out to Australia from Europe. We have had some increased costs relating to that. I think it's bigger where we do buy components from China. We have seen significant rises in both freight rates and also actually premiums on things like the triggers because there is a worldwide shortage, believe it or not, of triggers, the things that are on the spray bottle. Getting hold of additional triggers, which has, of course, been very popular through COVID-19 for surface cleaning, has given us some increased cost. It has not affected service. Our teams have done a great job managing in that situation. Great. Thanks for that. The next question comes from Damian McNeela from Numis. Damian, your line is open. Okay. Hey. Morning, guys. Thank you very much for taking the questions. A few short ones, hopefully. 200 basis points of gross margin improvement. You've indicated that it is split between mix input costs and volumes. Is it spread evenly or is there any one of those three that is the bigger driver, would be the first question? No, I would say it is broadly spread evenly across those three. Okay. That's great. Thanks, Mark. You indicated that you are seeking to refinance the debt. I'm just wondering, I don't want to pre-prejudice your discussions with the banks, should we be expecting cost savings to arise from that or not? Is that just really just extending out the facility is the next one? I think it's an interesting banking environment given the COVID situation. I think rates have gone up in the markets generally, and also banks have been offering shorter terms, so increasingly going for three plus one plus one and four plus one. We would hope that given the business its robust performance through this period and also the defensive nature of the business and its cash flow characteristics, that it will be a relatively straightforward almost rollover of the facility. We are aiming to try and get a five-year facility. Whether we do is a moot point. I would hope that we'll get quite good rates, as I say, given our credentials. Having said that, as I said, the banking world is somewhat changed over the last 18 months and certainly changed since the last refinancing four years ago. I'm very positive that there'll be no issue refinancing the business. Okay. Thanks. Understood, Mark. Just the last one from me. Can you remind me what the cost savings from Barrow are expected to be and how much we saw of that in H1? Yeah. We saw a fairly limited amount, Damian. Morning. We said somewhere between GBP 2 million and GBP 3 million, I think, when we announced the closure. Obviously, we closed it from October onwards, you can do the math. Yeah. Okay. Thanks for that. I can cope with that one. Just keeping it early in the morning. The next question comes from Andy Edmond from Equity Development. Andy, your line is open. Yeah. Morning, gentlemen, and well done on progress. Chris, I think I heard you say that recruitment is effectively done, and it may be that you'll cover this in a bit more detail this afternoon. Can you give us a little insight to the mood and confidence within the group and how pleased you are with the leaders that you've been able to recruit? Maybe Mark might have to cover his ears for embarrassment here, just an impression of how everybody's settling and how pleased you are with momentum. Yeah. Morning, Andy. Yeah, nice question. Thank you. Look, recruitment has been difficult, as you might imagine, through the period with travel restrictions and stay-at-home orders, as it were. Look, I've been super encouraged by the quality of the candidates that I've seen, and we have landed, well, I wouldn't say all of them, but we've pretty much got all our senior team in place. I think it's very encouraging that people wanted to join McBride. People are excited about the Programme Compass, both internally and from what we've said so far up through September externally. I think we've had plenty of interesting people coming to the company. I think in these times, as Mark mentioned, it's a staple products business that's highly defensive in that sense and good cash generator and in good financial shape. It's not been difficult to attract quality candidates. I think internally, I've been thrilled by the engagement. We've worked really hard at the whole transition. Actually transitioning an organization, and as you'll hear a bit later, something like 40% of our white-collar colleagues have changed jobs in this new structure. Really, despite the fact we're managing it very closely, really very little noise. People are really positive and excited about the new engagement, I guess, with something they feel they can touch and reach because they belong to a division. They belong to something they can influence directly. So far very positive. I'm really pleased the momentum in the business is very positive. Look, I think there are markets that are tough at the moment. There are parts of the business that it's not going to be straightforward. This is a tough industry. I think the new way of looking at it, the new way of operating, and the new teams that we've got, it feels a very different business already, even after the seven weeks. For me as Chief Executive Officer, particularly, and my previous Chief Financial Officer life, it feels a very different business to manage with a much broader, less flat structure, if you like, a little more senior management, general management in the middle level to drive the key business activities. We start to see that already, and I think it's very encouraging. Well, good to hear. You might find it a little bit harder to get people to sell you shares at attractive prices from now on, but looking forward to this afternoon. Thanks for that. Thanks, Andy. The next question comes from Sarah Wellford from Edison. Sarah, your line is open. Good morning. It is Sarah Wellford at Edison. Just one question on the contract losses. I guess perhaps maybe you are going to go through this this afternoon, but where do you think you are in terms of the desirability of the contracts? Obviously, you have exited some unprofitable or less profitable businesses in the past. How do you see your current portfolio of contracts? Are you broadly happy with them, or do you think there is just still some management to be done there? Well, good morning, Sarah. Look, I don't think we wanted to lose those two contracts. They weren't ones we exited deliberately. These are ones that we completed the term on them, if you like, and then they came up for tender. Sure. Look, I think we've got a variety of really high-quality contracts. We've got ones where we clearly need to improve our game. It is all around our focus and specialization coming back into this business. Whilst a lot of the innovation in our sector is fairly light, particularly in the Liquids ranges and, say, some of the Powders products, in things like unit dosing, which is, as you'll hear later, such a high-growth sector, we do need to be stronger and better and faster at upping our game on our product formats and our packaging formats. I think this is a reflection just on six years in the business, I guess that, besides things like service and responsiveness to customers, the innovation pace needs to be different for different parts of the business. We maybe have had a more single approach, more generous approach to what priorities we give to different projects and how we yet use our resources. This new structure will create that focus and will create that direction in order for us to choose more wisely, resource allocate better, and allocate capital better. They're just a reflection on those two individual things. I would hope in all our businesses going forward, we will see people nudging up and improving the margin returns that we get from our contracts. Our service and innovation performance will mean our reliability should see fewer and fewer tenders going forward. We're not sitting here with banks of awful contracts. It's much more about how we approach them with our customers and provide something new and exciting when it's time. Okay. Thank you. We have a follow-up question from Nicola Mallard from Investec. Nicola, your line is open. Hi. Thank you. Actually, following on from Sarah's remark there. Just on those contracts, I wondered whether you could give us a feel for the scale in terms of what the growth would have been, the 3.6 or the 1.7 at the top line, if you hadn't have lost those. Also, where are we in the cycle of losing them? Will we see that as a drag in the second half, or should we be anticipating, obviously, that it's largely progressed from here on in? Then this might be one that you do want to push into this afternoon, but on the costs, you've talked about having a much leaner operation and a smaller central cost line. Of the GBP 160 million or so that we see in that admin line, what do we think is still shared cost, as in the center, and then what have you been able to push out into the divisions? On the first one, Nicola, I think broadly, roughly speaking, it's around about GBP 10 million of annualized sales between those two contracts, some of which impacted in H1, and there'll be some of it rolling into H2 as it annualizes, of course. We've got that included in our forecast, of course. We knew about it even before we started the year. That answers that one then. Mark, do you want to answer on the cost? Yeah. In terms of cost, we will go into a bit more detail this afternoon. Under the new structure, over 85% of cost is directly attributable to the divisions, i.e., under their own control. Commercial costs, technical costs, supply chain costs, et cetera, move out of central functions and into the divisions. Yeah, a lot of that will move into divisional responsibility. Okay. Perfect. Thank you.