Hello. Welcome to our capital markets session. Thank you for coming. I know it's quite difficult to get out here with the train strikes and everything, but we appreciate you coming along to see what we're doing. With the first technology exposed show for three years, we thought it might be an ideal opportunity to invite some of our investors and analysts to come along and see what we're about. The theme of today is growth, how the group's set up to continue its long-term growth strategy, whether it's supporting businesses joining us, whether it's bringing on new products and vendors, whether it's helping the development of our team. Hopefully, we'll give you some feeling for that. Most of you will have heard Stephen Lamb and myself talk incessantly for years, so we thought it'd be a good opportunity to introduce you to 4 of our team. The first one is Tom Sumner, who's here on my right. Tom is the Managing Director of our EMEA business. He joined the company, I don't know, 15 years ago, probably something like that. He worked in the business management team in Diss. He went on secondment to Sidev, our French business, just after we bought it in 2010. That was our first foray into the sort of mainland European market, and he's been instrumental in building that business out across Europe. That's now our biggest division. We'll hear from Bobby Swartz and Alex Kemanes. Bobby, looking very smart in those photographs, I think. He's the CEO of Starin. Joined the group in February 2020. He'll tell you a bit about himself. Alex, looking extremely serious in that photograph. He's the Managing Director of NMK, and they joined the group at the beginning of 2021. Finally, of course, Mark Lowe runs our U.K. and Ireland business. Mark was in our business management team in Diss as well, went on secondment to Australia for three years, took his family, helped us to integrate and develop that business, then came back and became chief operating officer in the U.K., and now managing director for a number of years now, so doing a great job over here. After we've gone through our presentations, then we'll have a short Q&A session, and then we've arranged for some people who know about products to take you on a tour of the show and you can ask questions of course then, but by all means, ask them during the Q&A. I think when we come back, we've got a few drinks and nibbles. Hopefully that's help make for an interesting session. I'll now hand over to Tom, who will talk to you about his part of the business. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, Stephen, and good afternoon, everyone. As Steve has mentioned, today's presentations will focus on how we've been developing and building the business. In my slot, I'm gonna cover two main areas. Firstly, how we've been growing our access to our addressable market and why that's important to us. Secondly, how our group structure has been adding value to our local operating companies, supporting their development and growth. To start with, I wanted to summarize how we've been increasing our access to our addressable market, and I thought I would try and provide you with a fairly visual representation of this. To do this, I've put together a simple matrix summarizing the strength of our technology offering by territory. We regard we've got eight core technology pillars. Most of those up there are probably self-explanatory, but for clarity on a couple, UC, that's unified communications, so typically meeting room and corporate solutions such as video conferencing or collaborative sharing devices, and LED being a large, you'll see plenty of these in the show, I think, but typically large, bright, modular panel displays. It is our goal to provide our customers with the best-in-class, so tier one, A brand solutions and full solutions to our customers across all of the technologies that we operate in. In a project, you would typically see multiple numbers of these technologies in a single solution. It's in our interest to win as much of that project as possible and to address as much of that project as possible. Albeit that isn't actually necessarily that easy to do. In terms of the support and service required to provide these technologies, that can differ quite a bit from technology to technology. Territory-wise, we now operate in countries that with the use of AVIXA, which is our industry trade body, represent around 55% of the global AV market. There are a number of other territories we still have interest and desire to get into as well, other parts of North America, parts of Southeast Asia, the rest of the Nordic territories in Europe and parts of Eastern Europe. We would imagine we could increase our access to the global AV market to around 65% or territories representing around 65% of this global market. At the start of 2010, we were a U.K. and Ireland distributor predominantly focused on projection displays and technical video categories, and we had a really strong presence and platform in that space. Since then, we've been fairly dramatically increasing our presence across technology markets around the world. Much of this is spearheaded through a fairly progressive M&A program. Importantly as well, off the back of this, we've been using those relationships and the knowledge that we brought into our group to access new technology and markets through our existing network of companies. Fairly recent example, Starin joining our group in the U.S. The Starin acquisition was very much aimed at us getting a foothold in the U,S market, but it was also aimed at us gaining access to this unified communication space. Prior to Starin joining us and our eLink acquisition, which is an acquisition in Germany, we had practically no presence in this UC space. Since then, we've been building our portfolio, building our knowledge importantly, and the expertise within the team and building our teams up. But importantly as well, building those relationships and expanding those relationships into other territories. We've expanded relationships with key brands in that space, such as Poly and Zoom and DTEN and Neat and others, to put in place a really strong product offering. What this doesn't show is our market share. This denotes the quality of the product offering we believe we now have in place. If we were to look at this from a market share perspective, actually it would probably show that we've got a lot more upside potential. We're showing plenty of green and a fair amount of orange on here, denoting that we have a product offering or a very strong product offering in place. In some of these areas, we're just getting started. We've got a platform, we've got access to these markets now, but we're only just starting to build our business in these areas. The output of this is that we have a balanced group operating across multiple technology categories and geographies. We've in particular focused on the more technical specialists, higher margin product categories to evolve, expand our portfolio and proportion of our business in those areas. Geographically, we've made a couple of material acquisitions in H1 in the U.K., this year, which has temporarily changed the mix away from our longer-term trend, which is that the U.S. and EMEA regions will represent a greater proportion of our business. We would estimate though by 2027, perhaps a quarter of our business will be in the U.S., maybe 40% of our business will be EMEA. Fundamentally though, the groundwork we've put in place over these last few years has given us more cards to play than we've ever had before. Increasing the amount of this large global market that we can access and providing us with a great platform. I think that's. Our desire to access as much and get into as much of that market as possible is shown through this slide. You might just have to bear with me as I run through these figures here. AVIXA, our industry trade body, they estimate the global AV market size is worth around GBP 173 billion. We believe around 15% of this is addressable. When we remove geographies and segments of the market that we're not interested in working in, and adjusting the size of the market to distribution sales out value, we reckon around 15% of that is addressable, which would give us a total addressable market worth around GBP 26 billion. Our revenue of GBP 856 million last year would give us a market share of this addressable market of around 3.3%. AVIXA are forecasting that our market will grow by 6.7% compound annual growth rate through to 2027. This would place the market to be worth around GBP 292 billion. Working on the same assumption, that 15% addressable market, that would give us a market worth around GBP 44 billion that we would be happy to operate in. If we were able to maintain our existing market share of 3.3%, that would provide us with a theoretical revenue of GBP 1.45 billion. Clearly, though, if we're able to continue in the current trend of increasing our share within the global and addressable market, if we could increase that to 5%, this addressable market, that would equate to GBP 2.2 billion in 2027, or just over GBP 3 billion based on 7% and rising further from there. Moving on, I wanted to touch on topic of how the group have been adding value to our local operating businesses. Our main principle is that we want to enable our local businesses to grow. Primarily that's through allowing our local leaders to go and build great businesses in their local territory, which are relevant for their territory and appropriate for their market. That's not by us doing everything ourselves in the center. That's us through creating a platform, a platform of support, knowledge, information, resources, and also physical infrastructure and various other tools, for them to go and use, to as appropriate for their local market. I thought I'd just give you a few examples really of what that looks like for us, and I've sort of put it into four main areas. Central support, local expertise, and this sort of peer group model that we've adopted, vendor access, and digital infrastructure. Taking the first two categories, we've managed to accumulate a lot of knowledge now within our business of our market, our industry. Fundamentally, as an organization, we are there to build specialist profitable AV distribution companies. Most of our businesses have got similar challenges even if their local markets are slightly different. At local level, we're answering questions like how do we grow but still remain specialist or how do we represent multiple technology categories, but still be able to answer the phone when a customer has a very specific question about a certain technology type and not pass it around the organization multiple times. Still be able to answer their question as quickly as possible and with the knowledge that's required. In coming up with those things, we just make sure we're passing as much of that information around organizational design, the specialist departmental knowledge, functional knowledge, as well as our expertise and relationships through the businesses and not just centrally, but also very much locally in a peer-to-peer model, so on a more bilateral way from company to company. A current example of this is we've moved countless numbers of warehouses in the European markets over these last few years as we've upgraded our infrastructure to support our growth. We're going through exactly the same thing at the moment in the US. In the U.S., we're looking to upgrade our infrastructure to make it scalable, to make it fit the purpose for the next five years and our growth in the US market. James Parker, our Director of European Operations, who's led our warehouse moves in the EMEA region, is partnering with his US peer in the States to do the same thing. He's don,e it before a few times and he'll do it again. I think we've got a very methodical way about how we build our businesses. How we develop them, how we invest in them, and the support that we've put in place. It's enabled us to very consistently grow our companies and our vendor partners see that. Typically, most of our vendor partners have a great deal of confidence that if a new company comes into the Midwich Group, they will just grow. It's almost like that stamp of approval or sort of a brand image that if you become part of the Midwich Group, we will deliver. That's a huge asset for us. Typically, when a new company comes into the group, we've got a queue of vendors very keen to work with us in the new market. That gives us a great deal of confidence over our own M&A program, but also our ability with that company to grow their share within the existing technology markets that they work in, or help take them into new technology markets as well. I think, Alex, Bobby, and Mark will probably touch on that point further through their presentations as well. The final area I just wanted to touch on this slide was digital infrastructure. I think this is an important part of the platform that we can provide our group companies. It's an area of focus for us. At the moment, we're on separate ERP systems throughout our businesses. We are going through a project to move on to a common ERP platform. That should provide us some opportunities around efficiencies just in terms of our processes and also commercial opportunities. In mainland Europe, we are looking to drive a more commercially integrated organization. In practice, that looks like centralized. Selectively some centralized stock sharing or ability to pull inventory from one warehouse to another. Clearly as our business grows and scales the upside opportunities of us being on a consistent platform around the world through efficiencies and commercial opportunities will increase as well. Finally, on my last slide, which you'll probably all be pleased to hear, I wanted to provide you a bit more information on how we've been creating some central support on the customer side to work with our network of local companies to grow both local and group business. Almost four years ago now, we moved a gentleman called Kevin O'Dowd into our Head of Global Accounts. Kevin previously worked for our Irish business, Square One. Kevin now does two things, primarily in his role. He works to build relationships at head office level with our global integration partners, so multinational customers, typically working with their procurement teams, their procurement directors, to influence those accounts to align their procurement strategy to Midwich Group organizations. Kevin also works with those global integrators to facilitate multi-territory projects, an increasingly important part of our business, as we've become an international group. Those can be actually quite complicated. That could be a lot of products across a lot of territories that we have to get there, and across multiple currency zones as well. For the customer, having one central point of contact rather than having to talk to many of our companies is extremely helpful in us forming this proposition. Kevin internally is known as Father Christmas to some of the companies 'cause he's the guy that brings them a few presents typically in the form of some projects. Through this approach, we have won GBP millions worth of incremental business across automotive with automotive end users through our global partners such as Lotus and Ferrari, Kia, and with corporate and retail end users as well, such as Shell and Amazon, Uber, IKEA, and more. On the final point, I wanted to give an example of how we've been supporting some of the UK accounts or UK-based accounts post-Brexit. We had a number of U.K. customers or U.K. Arms of a global company that were rolling out their projects for the continent from the UK. Post-Brexit, this became more complicated for them and more difficult to do. Kevin O'Dowd, working with our Dutch business and our UK account management team, has transitioned this business into our Dutch business, which is called Van Domburg, based near to Rotterdam, and that's a major hub center for us. It's got a large warehousing and logistics facility. To our customer, that's added value because it's enabled them to retain that business with their end user customer. For us, it's meant that that customer's remained sticky to us. But in addition to that, our proposition has meant that we've actually added a load more incremental business on top of it as well. That's everything from me. To recap on my side, I hope that's helped just to frame out a bit of what we're doing and some of the opportunity available to us, and also provide a bit of context for the upcoming presentations from the rest of the team. We're operating in a large market, which we now have more ability to access than we've had before. We've got more cards to play than we've ever had before. There's plenty of upside growth potential. Equally, there's still a lot to do, but I think we're putting the international structures in place, and I think we've got the team to do it as well. On that note, I'll hand over to Bobby. Hello, everyone. I've been told bow ties aren't cool anymore, so trying to open collar it here a little bit. Bobby Swartz. I've been with Starin for about 15 years. Before that, worked in the musical side of the businesses, Guitar Center, Woodwind & Brasswind, Musician's Friend, one of the largest music retailers, so guitars, things like that. It's kind of a place where you go, AV is where a lot of musicians find their way to when they want real jobs. That's kinda how I find myself here with a lot of my brethren. First off, a little introduction on Starin. Starin is not a verb. It's not a noun. It's a proper name. Jim Starin was our founder back in 1988, gave the company his name. Started as a rep firm, working with manufacturers in the sales cycle, going to the integrators, taking products, taking a territory, driving that business. Good way to start. Things changed around 2000s. Distribution started to come in. Let's start with this brand. Let's take this. Let's actually add the value and move the box. What can we do with that? How can we reach more customers? Well, there was some magic in there. There's some value in what can be done with that. Didn't take long before distribution was 100% of Starin's business, and I was a part of that. I started right when it was transitioning. 2016, the employees. This is important because a lot of this presentation is gonna focus on people, and that's what's helped propel our growth. 2016, the Starin employees bought out the company. It's an ESOP-owned. It's a scheme for an owner to step back and take over. That entrepreneurial spirit was part of the DNA, some of that fabric of Starin. That's throughout our people. It is what carried over. It's how do we bring value to our customers. We're all in this together. How do we drive it forward? It's very important. 2020, February 26th. We all know around where that date falls. Very rip-roaring emotions for the next few months. The acquisition by Midwich. We'll go into a lot of detail on how that, the timing was perfect for us, I think, because actually it really helped with a lot of aspects of growth, and we're gonna cover into those. 2021's all about refocusing. 2022, where we're at right now, we'll talk about a little bit of those numbers and move pretty quickly through. What do we do in Starin in America? What is our focus? We're a highly specialized AV distributor, and again, adding context for our flavor of that, focused on UC, focused on education, and really in those two verticals, doing the best we can. We'll talk about why that's important, why we don't have so many of these other pillars right now at Starin. We can bring highly value-added services, it goes beyond just having a product and having it in stock. How do you respond to your customers on time? How do you have the technical expertise to navigate, I don't know, giant supply chain issues that might be affecting the entire globe? You know, practical little things, but those subtleties are when you have experience and focus, that's why you can be trusted. Trust is so important in, you know, businesses like ours because it is about that reliance. It's about that next order. It's not one project. It's not one order. It's continued business from the same people. Over the last few years, especially, since 2020, we have the globally leading portfolio of UC, unified communications products. A lot of names up there you recognize, even outside of AV. You probably go home and you're typing on a Logitech keyboard or have a webcam. Crestron controls everything from home to beyond. These are brands you see, you know. This portfolio has been absolutely. It's not just about adding brands. Coming into supply chain, this was incredibly important to make sure that we could provide like-for-like components to customers who couldn't otherwise get them, where they have a reliance on one widget. Well, if that widget's not available, there are fourteen other widgets ready to go. How do we make sure they can get all of their widgets out? Again, that trust, that reliability. Very proud of our focus and highly specialized brand portfolio, and our vendors appreciate that as well, these same vendors. When we look at the total US market, anybody flipping through the handouts, it is US market. Typo, my fault, not anyone else's. My fault, my fault. Not North American. Total US market, $69.6 billion, give or take. That's with a B in US dollars, not sterling. Key things here is we are a fractional percentage point of that total market at Starin. It's important to keep in mind. This year we've had organic growth, and where we can grow in that market. That's why things like recession fears, deflation, they don't bother me personally. They don't keep me up at night because our market share potential to continue growing now with our focus is so incredibly important and strong. This year, first half, we've had 82% organic growth. There's been no acquisitions in the US. This is because of that focus, where we've taken it back. This is where it comes to Tom's point, where working with the group in 2020 has been really important because it's helped us really realize and focus and give us almost the permission in some ways to say, "It's kinda scary to say we're gonna get rid of some brands which are providing income because we don't wanna spread ourselves thin. We wanna think there's more we can develop." It's obviously been able to work here, and we'll touch on some of those in a little bit more. The global market share, though, we've brought brands, as we saw, have come into the group, bringing us some of the UC. That was our specialty coming in. Through the group now, we've been able to have other brands that vendors look at us in a different light. Relationships that the group has had with key vendors that otherwise already had their own network in North America. They didn't use distribution. We don't need distribution, is what they thought. They would use it everywhere else in the world, but not North America. Coming to us and now having these conversations, "Hey, there is a value proposition here. Wait a second. You guys can actually generate business for us?" Suddenly they're, "Why don't we have distribution in America?" We've added brands like Shure have come into our brand card. That's new to this last year. We kind of picked the right market for at least the last couple of years. There's this little thing called Zoom that maybe two years ago here you didn't know too much about, then it became a unicorn. We've worked with them as a hardware partner in the UC area because they sell software. The software doesn't do anything if you can't communicate. That's been the fastest-growing, according to AVIXA, the fastest-growing market segment, has been unified communications, and they're forecasted to continue to be one of the highest growth segments in all of AV. What happened since joining the group? This is where the excitement starts to really happen. 2020, I mean, it was actually kind of a fun year. There was the acquisition. We celebrated. I was getting ready to come over here to ISE, big trade show. It was in Amsterdam. My very first official call came from Tom explaining, "You guys have a word that it's called policy. Out of an abundance of caution, nobody from Midwich should be attending ISE because of COVID. I was like, "Oh, no, Tom, it's okay. I'm already on a plane. I'll go." I learned that policy actually means breaking that's gross negligence. Those words I understood, so clarification. Instead I came to Diss. I was able to see Diss, and that was the last time I seen, actually see the headquarters. It was inspiring because all these ideas I had in my head on how could we grow as a company. We were roughly 50 employees, give or take, in that time. I saw things, I was like, "This is what we could be," how it was organized, how the operations ran. I came back with all kinds of ideas. Over the course of 2020, let's take these ideas and let's make a plan on how we get to this next level. It was cutting off brands, cutting off parts of markets, and refocusing on UC. 2021 was all about that rebuilding. It was all about saying, "Here's what we have," and without really changing any pieces, how do we just bring everything together to a spear point and say, "This is what we're gonna go after." It was a focus on our employees, our people first. That comes back to the employees and the entrepreneurship of relying on my people. Our motto changed from something really long and unwieldy about business and communications to just care more, be better. A little cliché, but care more for our people first, care more for our industry, care more for each other, community globe. Be better. Be just a little bit better than you were the day before. Be better than your competition. Very easy for the rest of us to get around. See how that works over 2021. It was an interesting year. Second half really came up. 2022 right now, it's all about growth and scale. We've realized again that 82% organic growth so far in the first half. We've added, our employee count has increased by almost 30%. The market perception has been, I would go to trade shows four or five years ago, and it'd be like, "Starin, what do you guys do?" Even on our home turf, and that was embarrassing. Now we go to trade show InfoComm, and here is, there's no more asking Starin who, and that's a part of this growth, that focus and being an aspect of the group. Now it's about resilience. I feel we have a company that, I mean, we saw COVID as a challenge, and we grew right through it. Now there's really nothing else, I think, in our way of taking what we have and just now continuing to increase. Now to Tom's point, as we grow in UC, where we start showing those market segments, there's nothing to say in the future that we can't take what we've done, this magic recipe, and apply that to other technologies, other focuses as we go. To summarize, in my last slide, and I'll let somebody else start talking here. It's been about investing just our people and about the scale. We have a very agile business structure now. We've been known to pivot. We pivoted really well post-acquisition right into COVID, and trying to figure out how to work remotely just like everybody else kind of did at the same time. Which way is the wind blowing? This is the decision we have. We've really pushed, and we've increased our profit margins in the last two years while growing the revenue. Two things that are hard to do, but it's about the services we're providing our vendors. Our vendor partners are just as important as our customers. We're part of an ecosystem, and we feed through that. When we bring these all these things together, it's now they say, "Oh, distribution's just not a cog in the wheel that costs us money." No, we bring value to our vendors by connecting them. During this supply chain logistics we've had. We all know about them. Distribution, we've been able to realize that value with our customers 'cause again, we're a part of the total system. We can provide total solutions to our customers, whereas an individual manufacturer can't. They're just one piece of kit to an overall. People are starting to notice. I mean, there was a beautiful article, and that quote's kind of golden, but really it's on every benchmark of the company, we're a stronger organization than we were two years ago, and it's all about now scale, agility, and people first. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Alex. I'm the managing director of NMK Electronics. My slides, we're just gonna touch a little bit who we are, some milestones, and our integration into the group. Sorry, guys, I always mix this up. There we go. Just a couple of key stats before we get started. We're 35 years old, based out of Dubai, and we operate out of 5 locations in Dubai, Qatar, and most recently in Saudi Arabia. We have 70 full-time staff members. We operate 34 vendor contracts, of which most are exclusive to the region, and we serve the 6 Gulf countries, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, and Saudi Arabia. The leadership team is made up of Dino Trimis and myself. I come from an entrepreneurial background, having led and scaled a couple of businesses. I joined in late 2017 and was tasked with the organizational structure and strategic direction of NMK. Dino joined in 2013. He, his father is the one who started the business, so he's been in the business well before that and comes with a lot of AV technical knowledge as well as commercial knowledge around the business. Like most Midwich companies, we are a trade-only value add distributor. Before we move on, I think there's some utility in just explaining the three verticals of our business, which are the three that we see here: Systems, Pro, and Retail. Now, Systems, which is our biggest part of the business, that makes up about 60%, that's really anything that we classify as a fixed installation. The speakers in this room or in a corporate boardroom, anything that's a fixed and permanent install. Our Pro is anything in the live and rental space, so a large concert, anything being supplied into a big festival, the line arrays or a microphone we classify as Pro. Retail is when we supply into the channel via our dealer network. Pro and Retail make about 20%, each. Value add. What do we mean by value add? You know, a lot of people throw this word around, and you know, for us as NMK, we don't consider ourselves the typical distributor, the box-moving distributor, and that's because our market is a little bit different in the Middle East that we work with projects. Seventy percent of the business is projects driven, and 30% is run rate. Now, that means we have to do a lot of the heavy lifting that typically a system integrator might do. We have to work very closely with integrators and end users, designing solutions and specifying our products to make sure that these are specified in a project so we can win that. Because like I mentioned earlier, we have exclusive contracts, so by locking in these projects, we sort of ensure the business of the system integrator, and that's really where we bring the most value as a distributor. Aside from the after-sales or marketing to the vendor, it's really our control on the projects. Some milestones here. As I mentioned, we started in 1987 in Sharjah, which is one of the seven Emirates, and we started with Shure and NewTek. These are two of our biggest brands to date, and we've had contracts with them for over 30 years. That's really what our business is about. It's really about the longevity and the growth within the region. Dino joined 2013 and, you know, by 2015 is when we started solution selling, which is what I highlighted earlier about our value add. This is where we really started seeing the business grow, and sort of get that hockey stick growth there when we started working with the system integrators around the solution selling. I joined in 2017 to sort of help support that growth. 2018 is where we opened our first office outside of Dubai. This is an interesting one because we really got in early with Qatar and, you know, we saw a lot of the investment going in from the Qatari government, you know, trying to build a sustainable economy. You know, now with the World Cup. There's been a lot of investment going into the country. Regionally, we started to see a lot of other countries follow suit, trying to sort of replicate what they've done. Video, 2019 is when we went into videos. We've always been a legacy audio business and, you know, 2019, we started working with Epson on the video side, and that's a segment that, you know, is really picking up for us, and we're really investing heavily in growing that side of the business. COVID, as Bobby had pointed out, you know, I don't wanna touch too much on that, but for us, I think the takeaway was really the resilience of our team as well, and the importance of building a good company culture. That's really what got us through it because, you know, business was really low, you know, especially in the distribution side for all of us. It was bleak at the time. We didn't really know where it was heading. The Midwich acquisition happens in 2021 and, you know, here, this is kind of where our business changed, you know, along with Stephen, Tom, and everyone's guidance. From the first day when we announced that acquisition, for us, it was really we had vendors throwing themselves at us, you know, wanting to work with us. We had global accounts that wanted to work close, closer with us, and we were already established in the region. You know, we thought, you know, we had a good footprint. You know, when this happens, and it was a very humbling experience for us to see this because we weren't expecting it. You know, we did think we had a good stronghold, and then we see this. All these brands that you see here, we started working with them post that acquisition. On the left-hand side is our UC&C business, which I think Tom and Bobby both highlighted, is a very important segment. This is now contributing about 5% of our revenue from zero, where it was last year, and it's growing incredibly fast for us. Our portfolio has really been crafted out now. The brands you see on the right, L-Acoustics, QSC, and Televic, for which we operate exclusive contracts. These. You could literally start a distribution company with these three brands alone. We started working with them last year. That's really the upside that we have here in the region. Our experience center. This is something that I've personally been wanting to put forward for many, many years and, thankfully, Stephen and Tom, they understood the vision, and they really supported us, you know, with time and investment in putting this space together. It was really unique in the Middle East. This is our HQ in Dubai. We've created a really remarkable space that it has a lot of vendors in the facility. We try to create a place where someone can come in and experience the technology and really see how they work cohesively in an environment as opposed to going to a vendor and seeing one product. What we've done here is sort of put them in naturally in the environment in a meeting room or these. These are the big line arrays that you would see. I don't know if anyone's been to Expo this year, if you saw that big dome, Al Wasl Dome. That's the same sound system, the same immersive sound system that they have in that space. We've tried to replicate technology that you would see out in an environment, in a controlled environment here. I like to use this quote from Steve Jobs that says, "How do people know what they want if they don't know that it exists?" That was really what we've achieved here and we've tried not to throw technology in your face. It was more about creating that journey. This is one of the rooms. It's an immersive room, so we have multiple areas within our facility just highlighting the technology and how it can be used. This is an interesting space because, for example, we have companies using this to do walkthroughs on real estate or training on oil rigs, how they would train on in life case scenario situations. We've tried to use a lot of this technology to really give. You know, show them how to use it. Again, without Midwich's support on this, you know, it would've been real tough 'cause the way we were doing our business really transformed when we moved into this. We've had over 900 plus visitors alone since January come and visit the space, and that's end users and system integrators as well. Education. Education's always been in our DNA, so this is something that ties into the experience center as well as our value add because, as I mentioned earlier, you know, we have to do a lot of the heavy lifting. We have to spend a lot of time introducing the system integrators to our products because the more comfortable they feel using it, the more likely they will specify it in a project. That's really where the value add comes here, that we have to invest in these people. All this training is free, and we have a calendar that runs throughout the year. We do this for all our brands and, again, part of our sort of value add experience here. What's next for us? Greater regional focus. As I mentioned, you know, a lot of countries are looking to shift away from the oil dependency, and much like Qatar, a lot of the region is doing the same. You know, we've seen in Kuwait, for example, huge vertical farms going up, investing in infrastructure and really trying to create that sustainable economy. Saudi is a very interesting one, because I'll give you a story. Maybe some of you don't know that. You know, 2019, you couldn't have music or background music in anywhere in Saudi Arabia. In June, they sort of relaxed that law. They got rid of it. Overnight, you could have a concert, you could have background music in a store. I'll never forget when I was there in 2019 when this law first came out, they had multiple speakers in a Zara store all playing the same song, but nothing was in sync. There was no infrastructure, there was no audio cable in the ceiling to actually put in these speakers. That's sort of the scale of the opportunity here. It's an era of historic change, actually, and we're at the beginning of the beginning on this journey within the region. Again, you know, with Midwich coming on board here, I think Bobby touched on that very well when he said, you know, that it is really like an extension to us in the support and the operational efficiency and, you know, from a finance perspective or, you know, James doing the warehousing. I think for us, this has really been a learning curve and, you know, we were doing stuff historically, and then someone points out, "Why don't you do it this way?" You're like, "Yeah, you know, makes sense." It was really, I think, you know, the upside for us now is tremendous going forward, and the support is really phenomenal. That's it from me. Thank you, everyone, and I'll pass over to Mark. Great. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. Hi, everyone. As Stephen mentioned, my name's Mark. I'm the Managing Director of our UK and Ireland businesses. There's been quite a lot going on in technology distribution, as you might imagine, so I thought a really good use of our time for the next 15 minutes would be for me to attempt to give you some insights into our journey. What's happened since 2020, how we and the market have performed against quite a complex backdrop, how we add value, spoken about that quite a bit today, and just a closing thought on the future. By way of a recap, the U.K. and Ireland is our second-biggest territory, so representing circa 40% of group turnover in the first half of 2022, being GBP 239 million. We employ over 750 people across eight businesses that span from Dublin to Cardiff to Bracknell to our headquarters in Norfolk. As I mentioned, I thought a good place to start would be by talking about our journey. If we cast our mind back to 2020, which I'm sure we can all remember very vividly, we'll remember deserted cities, grounded planes. We remember the use of the word furlough. The use of the word pandemic increased 57,000%, I believe I read somewhere. Governments ordered people to stay at home, and we had an overwhelmed health service. That was 2020. If we think about 2021, I've got to add a few caveats here. I think anecdotally, societally, and probably, I think we'd all agree it was slightly better. Financial markets staged some sort of a recovery. We waved goodbye to lockdowns and got used to dealing with social distancing. We enjoyed holidays, albeit many people enjoyed a staycation in England. Of course, we started to reap the rewards of a successful roll-out of the vaccine. Anecdotally, and probably, 2021 was better in many regards than 2020. If however you work in technology distribution, you'll feel slightly hard done by that comparison because there's an awful lot going on in our world, so I thought I'd tell you a little bit about that. If we start chronologically, January 1, 2021, we had Brexit to contend with, and it became overnight much more complicated to move products across borders. The ports became jammed. Anti-Brexiteers dubbed Kent the toilet of England, and these ginormous queues were formed. This wasn't the biggest queue we'd see that year because Krishnan Kanthavel came along in the Ever Given and parked it diagonally across the world's busiest shipping lane. The irony being that these little white and metal containers on the top of this boat were costing us 500% more to move than they were compared to pre-pandemic levels. The world of operations, logistics, and shipping had been flipped on its head. If we were lucky enough to get product to the UK, we couldn't get HGV drivers, and the courier networks became jammed. When we could get product and we could get drivers, at some points we couldn't even get fuel. It was quite an unusual time. That's before we mention this beast, Chipageddon, which is a term that we use to refer to the world's most significant and sustained shortage of semiconductor chips, meaning that the products that you use and that we sell were in constraint. It wasn't just product that was in constraint, there were various problems with labor availability. In the summer of 2021, over 500,000 people per week were being pinged in the pingdemic. These are big, uncharted problems that we hadn't dealt with before. Ordinarily, we'd get together to talk about them, but we couldn't because we were hybrid working or sent home. 2021 was significantly better for society, but it was quite a complex year to be operating as a technology distributor. As we roll into 2022, many of those issues have abated, but the backdrop is still equally complex, and I'm sure we'll all agree that that's a backdrop that's dominated by volatile markets and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. That's a little bit about our journey. Next, our performance. Let me start with the performance of the market against the context of that backdrop. Using data from AVIXA, our again our industry body, they suggest that the UK market in value terms will see a compounded annual growth of 6.68% in the five years to 2026. A market that's showing good scope for growth and good resilience during fairly difficult times. Equally, AVIXA also acknowledge that the market is recovering, and in value terms, 2022 is projected to be between 5%-6% behind pre-pandemic levels. 2022 compared to 2019. Our business, how have we fared? If we compare our first half revenues to H1 2019, our revenue is up 53%, U.K, a nd Ireland and 8% on an organic basis. If we look at a year-on-year comparison, U.K. and Ireland revenue is up 86%, 30% organically, and 119% operating profit growth. The market, resilient and recovering. Our U.K. and Ireland business is significantly ahead of the market. How? I believe personally that it's absolutely our people that make the difference, and we're blessed with an engaged, highly motivated team of expert people. Because of that, when there are changes in the market, we can respond really quickly and maintain our competitive position. If I can give you one example. I'm sure another thing, a term that we're familiar with from the pandemic is WFH, work from home. I'm sure many of us can relate to that, and I'm sure many of us do it. As I mentioned, we employ over 750 people in our business, and 700 of us are hybrid workers now, enjoying a mixture of working in the office and working from home. Our vendors are doing the same, our customers do the same, and our customers' customers do the same. How does that impact us? Historically, we had a team of people that used to drive their cars to visit people. In the first half of 2022, rather than doing that, 59% of our formal meetings that we carried out were held virtually, so using the technology that we sell. Because that's quite effective and quite efficient, we can do a lot of them. We rolled out over 2,000 formal meetings with customers, which is actually that shows an increase of 30% more formal interactions with customers H1 versus the year before. For sure, COVID has caused big shifts in the market. One is that businesses are rapidly mopping up technology so they can communicate, and we're talking about the boom in unified communications. Equally, COVID caused some dormancy in some markets. Markets like the rental and live events business were fairly. They were hibernating in 2020, and they were just stirring in 2021. We calculated that would give us or generate a revenue deficit of about GBP 10 million. A COVID revenue hole of GBP 10 million. We set ourselves the challenge of filling it. We focused on this unified communication space, quite simply. We went on a new vendor campaign, and we added 15 tier one vendors, and I'm sure you'll be familiar with some of them. Fast-forward to H1 2022, and that strategy worked. We filled that gap and some. Revenue from these vendors was GBP 24 million H1 2022, being 14% of all of our revenue. The added bonus, of course, is that the live events and rental market's coming back too now. If you'd like to see the product, again, similar to the example that Alex gave, we have a customer experience center in Bracknell. It's the only AV-centric experience center of its kind. It encapsulates product and training facilities. It's 47,500 sq ft. In the first half of this year, we opened it in late 2021, I should say. In the first half of this year, we've seen 1,598 visitors, 200+ people trained across 15 events, and we have over GBP 500,000 of the latest products on technology all the time. We've been quite busy. We also acquired two businesses. We acquired a business called Nimans, who are based in Manchester. Surprise, surprise, they're a unified communications business. They're a team of experts that make things like Zoom Rooms and Microsoft Teams Rooms work. In the first five months that they were part of our group, they turned over GBP 51 million, or contributed GBP 51 million of revenue, and they employ over 200 people. We also acquired a business which is a specialist value-add business, security and CCTV business, I should say, based in Cardiff, employing 95 people and contributing GBP 20 million of revenue in the first half of 2022. Security and CCTV is quite interesting. It's quite different. One, it's a resilient market. It's already ahead of pre-pandemic levels and forecast to grow over 5% compounded annual growth according to AVIXA. Equally, we're seeing a trend whereby security solutions and traditional AV solutions are being used side by side and on the same network. That poses quite an interesting opportunity for us. I guess in terms of buy and build, that's all about buy. I guess it should be my prerogative to tell you a little bit about the buy and build element, the build element of buy and build. Of course, we've been really busy integrating Nimans and DVS, being acquisitions that only happened recently. We've now done most of that work, and we're now working on the growth development strategy. Quite simply, we found 3,000 accounts that buy UC equipment from Nimans and that buy security equipment from DVS that don't buy traditional AV products from any of our other group companies. We've given Nimans and DVS access to nucleus products that we think they can sell. In a very short time, they've amassed sales of over GBP 1 million into over 100 customers across 30 brands, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. That's just an example of how we try and enable growth to, for new businesses that are joining our group. We've done all of this while not losing sight of the big picture. What I mean by that is that I think it's clear, and we'll all agree, that COVID's had a profound impact on many verticals, many technologies, and the way people work. I think it's also had a profound impact on people, and they expect more from their employer. As a business, we've placed a much greater emphasis on focusing on things like charity, community, diversity and inclusion, the environment, and mental wellness. I can't cover all of that, but to give you a few examples, this year we're well on track to raise over GBP 50 thousand via our Gift of AV corporate fundraising initiative. That will be dispersed across 14 different charities that have been chosen by our people. That brings the total for the six years to over GBP 250 thousand. It's not just money. We often try and give time. We've donated over 300 hours to a few community projects, including working with Norfolk Wildlife Trust and the RSPB on some conservation projects. In terms of the environment, we've rolled out electric car chargers at most of our sites, moved to green energy, set up an electric car salary sacrifice scheme, removed all non-recyclable marketing paraphernalia from our businesses, and the list goes on. We've rolled out 500 diversity and inclusion training courses and trained 12 mental health first aiders that run virtual coffee mornings and other initiatives to make sure that people are okay. What I'm trying to say in a roundabout kind of way is that we're really trying to make sure that we maintain our position as the best employer in the industry. I think that's been recognized. We won several awards, including the Inavation Awards Award for Best Employer and the CRN Awards Award for Best Place to Work. Not only have the outside world recognized what we're doing, but our people have recognized it as well, and they voted by not using their feet. Our annualized staff turnover in the five months to May, which is our last reportable period, was 7%, and that's very significantly better staff retention than the rest of the UK tech segment. I'm nearly done. I guess it'd be a good idea to recap 'cause it's quite a lot of information. I hope that I've shared a bit about our story. I think it's really clear that there's a lot going on, and quite a lot of what is going on is completely outside of our control. We can't do anything about that. What we are in control of is how we respond and deal with things, and we're blessed to have a highly engaged, motivated team of experts that help us to be proactive and adaptable so that when things change, we can make sure that we maintain our position. I hope I've given you some examples of how we add value and how we enable growth. I also hope that the sum total of these things you can see has culminated in us being significantly ahead of the market. As for the future, it'd be quite bold of me to make any predictions. I guess we will all acknowledge that there's a really complex backdrop for all businesses operating in the U.K. at the moment, and that might mean that some of our markets in the AV world, like some of our smaller markets like retail and leisure, perhaps they'll be subpar for some time now. Equally, there's an abundance of opportunity. Things like continued margin improvements and the ramping effect of new vendors, as well as strong government and education segments and, of course, the unified communications business that I've mentioned. On balance, I think the complex landscape of the market does present significant opportunities for us at Midwich, which is why we're all extremely positive. Thank you for listening.