There we go. Alex May, thanks. Good morning, everyone. I'm John O'Reilly. I'm the Rank Group Chief Executive Officer. I'd like to welcome you to the Rank Group results presentation for the six months to the end of December 31, 2021. Thank you for joining us this morning. Hopefully, this is the last time we deliver our results presentations remotely. I mean, if that's the case, I'm confident the end of the pandemic will reflect in the results or the strength of our results going forwards. In terms of the order of play this morning, I'm gonna provide you with a summary of the group's performance over the first half of 2021, 2022. Simon Hay, our Interim Chief Financial Officer, who I'm delighted to introduce to those of you who've yet to meet Simon, will run through the half year numbers in more detail and provide an update on our much stronger liquidity position. I'll then provide an update on the key initiatives in our transformation program for the second half of the year. I'll also touch on the government's gambling review and on our ESG developments, and we'll take any questions that you have. When we published our full year results for 2021 in August, it was in the context of our venues businesses having been back open since May, with recovery underway in the shape of customer visits and revenues gradually improving. As we all know, that recovery stuttered a little through the autumn and winter months, with the increase in COVID case numbers in Q2, eventually resulting in Plan B customer restrictions, the retightening of travel restrictions, and much greater levels of caution among consumers as Christmas approached. Hopefully, we're now through this and recovery is now very much back underway. The group returned to profitability in the first half with an underlying like-for-like profit of GBP 24.1 million. We made good progress in our venues businesses from the reopening in May through to October. Rising case numbers saw the recovery in visitors and revenue stutter in November. Other than in London, where we continued to benefit from rising inbound tourism, with restrictions having been largely removed in October. The return of restrictions on consumers in December, in November in Spain, unsurprisingly, saw revenues decline. The digital business grew revenue 7% in the half, nine percent in Q2, and we've now successfully migrated the Mecca Online business onto the RIDE platform, our in-house technology, and that's a very, very important milestone for the Rank Digital business. Our balance sheet is in a much stronger position. We ended the half with net cash of GBP 55.1 million and cash and bank facilities of GBP 224.8 million. This much improved financial position, together with the initiatives we've been delivering through our rebooted Transformation 2.0 program, ensures that we're very well-positioned to return to the revenue and profits growth trajectory we were on at this time in 2020 before the pandemic struck. The removal of most COVID restrictions across the U.K. from today provides a major fillip to our business for this second half of the year. That's U.K. Overnight has come news that all the restrictions in Catalonia have also been removed from midnight. More positive news today. I'm getting a little more into the detail. I'll start with Grosvenor Casinos, which have been trading free or trading well when free of restrictions. With venues open and consumer confidence returning, Grosvenor made an underlying like-for-like operating profit of GBP 34.9 million on revenues of GBP 161.6 million. A strong recovery despite the rise in COVID cases and the return of restrictions in December, which dampened demand towards the end of the half. Now, compared with pre-COVID 2019, our revenues were down 18%. Outside of London, our revenues were down just 9%, running at around 2019 levels in Q1, but softening in November and December. In London, revenues were down 33% on 2019, reflecting travel restrictions and, to a lesser extent, consumers working from home. When travel restrictions were largely removed in October, visitors quickly returned to London. In November, revenue across our nine London venues was down just 13% on 2019. Just by way of reminder, we have 52 Grosvenor venues across the U.K., of which nine are in London. Those nine account for around 42% of our revenue, in a typical trading year. A strongly performing London estate has a very significant impact on the results of the Grosvenor business. The way London bounced back in November on removal of inbound travel restrictions into the U.K. suggests a strong rate of demand. As soon as our liquidity position improved, we recommenced investing in the key Grosvenor transformation initiatives, investments in product and system improvements, including the first phase of a new table management system. That's particularly helped deliver very strong table margins in the half. We've made good progress in developing our omni-channel service with a new onboarding journey trialed in the half, and that is now rolling out across the estate. We've also seen good traction with the launch of our first venue microsite, thevic.com, which provides customers of the Vic on Edgware Road with all the latest info they need on their favorite casino, alongside the ability to play online on all of their favorite Vic games. Further developments to follow for thevic.com in the second half. Now, we rolled out ID scanning across the estate for the reopening of our venues in May, and we've since introduced a new risk model within each venue to help our colleagues identify customers who are potentially at risk of problem gambling. That's another important step forward in terms of developing our data systems to provide increased protections for our customers. We've successfully delivered two property investments in the first half, a refurbishment of Grosvenor Huddersfield, and the introduction of an additional casino license, and with it 20 additional gaming machines into the Grosvenor Casino in Nottingham, both performing well. In the round, good progress across the Grosvenor estate, and we've lots of opportunities in the pipeline for investment in products, systems, people and property to drive growth as we now emerge from the pandemic. To the Mecca business, and this is tougher. Mecca is more heavily impacted by customer caution about COVID. Our older cohort was slower to return following reopening and after making reasonable progress through to October, our visit numbers fell in November and December as cases grew across the U.K. Consequently, the Mecca business made an underlying like-for-like loss of GBP 1.5 million on revenue down 24% on pre-COVID 2019 levels. Visits were down 32% with spend per visit up 12%. Clearly, Mecca is a challenge, with the pandemic having impacted visitor volumes for now effectively two years. We're investing in value for our customers as we now emerge from the pandemic. We're rolling out a huge value in the main stage bingo game with lower prices and guaranteed prize boards to encourage customers back to bingo and to drive visit numbers. Our objective is to grow venue-based bingo to ensure sustainable profitability from what are very important social amenities for our local communities. In Enracha, our Spanish bingo and electronic gaming business delivered underlying like-for-like profit of GBP 2.7 million in the half on revenue down 22% on 2019. Our visitor volumes were down 32% with capacity and opening hour restrictions hitting visitor volumes throughout the half. Spend per visit was up 16% as a result of the investments that we've made in electronic gaming across the Enracha venues actually, and which resulted in machine revenue in line with that of 2019 levels, despite that big decline in visits during the period. We've been making further investments in gaming machines across the estate, and we should see this business recover quickly when restrictions are removed. This has been a very important half year for the digital business, and with some very good progress being made. First, revenues are back in growth at +7%. The strongest growth coming in Grosvenor +18%, which benefited from the omni-channel flow of customers with our venues back open, and from the Stride brands operating on the RIDE proprietary platform, which grew 34% in the half. Mecca grew 3% and the weakest performance came from our non-proprietary brands operating on a variety of third-party platforms, which saw revenues decline by 16%. That reflects, I think, a catching up in affordability restrictions and by other platform operators. U.K. Digital new customer volumes grew 16% with a 57% growth in Grosvenor for improved omni-channel journeys and the first above the line investment in the Grosvenor brand for many years. RIDE brands saw new customer volumes up 88% as we begin to scale marketing investment. Mecca was very successfully migrated to the RIDE platform this month. We're delighted to get this over the line. It's a huge milestone in terms of our digital ambitions. The migration was the culmination of two years of development by our excellent in-house team, and we're now well set to drive products and service improvements for our Mecca customers over the coming months. The next up is the migration of Grosvenor, which we expect to complete later in the summer. This will fully release our in-house development capability to drive a pipeline of identified growth initiatives both in the U.K. and internationally, plus, of course, releasing further synergies. We've now delivered GBP 9.5 million of annualized synergy costs for the Stride acquisition, and we expect total annualized synergies of GBP 15 million once we've completed the migration of Grosvenor. In addition to the successful migration of Mecca, we've also delivered a number of further enhancements to player protections in the first half. Central to these have been improvements to affordability journeys for customers, both to ensure customers are playing within their means, but also to reduce some of the friction for the vast majority of customers who are not at risk of problem gambling. We've also further improved our real-time monitoring system, which we call Hawkeye, to better identify and interact with particularly new customers playing at a high rate or high velocity. The Yo Online brands, YoBingo and YoCasino, performed well in the half. Revenues grew by 9%, but new first-time depositors were down by 54% following the marketing restrictions imposed in May last year, which bar any incentives being offered to new customers online in Spain. During the half, enracha.es was successfully migrated onto the proprietary Yo platform. Market growth has slowed in Spain as a result of the changes in regulations, but we've got a strong brand in Spain and plenty of opportunities to drive further growth. Simon. Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. I will start by taking you through a summary of the interim numbers for the six months to 31 December and then provide you with some more insight on our performance by business unit and liquidity position. John has taken you through the underlying headlines on a like-for-like basis. What I'm sharing with you on this slide here is the headlines on the statutory basis. The business has returned to profitability in the period, with net gaming revenue up by 88% on the comparable period to GBP 333.7 million. This performance has delivered an underlying profit of GBP 23.7 million and the reconciliation to the like-for-like profit of GBP 24.1 million that John referenced is in the appendices. Through the period, we've continued to take decisive action to protect and preserve cash on the balance sheet, with the VAT repayment of GBP 83.1 million providing further cash headroom. We have ended the period with GBP 224.8 million in cash and available facilities, and significantly, the group is in the net cash position at GBP 55.1 million at the end of the period. Underlying earnings per share was 3p before separately disclosed items. Let me now turn to the individual business units. In Grosvenor and Mecca venues business in the U.K., our Enracha venues in Spain have remained open for the entire period in review. However, in Spain, we did see restrictions around venue capacity and operating hours, both at the start and towards the end of the period, as the Spanish government responded to ongoing concerns around COVID-19. Grosvenor venues has reported GBP 161.6 million in like-for-like NGR in the period, 18% below the pre-pandemic comparable period, delivering a like-for-like operating profit of GBP 34.9 million. Mecca venues have been impacted more by the pandemic. Overall customer visits are down by 32% on the same period in 2019. With this backdrop, Mecca has delivered like-for-like NGR of GBP 65.7 million and a first half operating loss of GBP 1.3 million. As I mentioned, despite the impact of capacity and operating hour restrictions in Spain at various stages, our Enracha venues have performed in line with expectations, delivering GBP 14.1 million in like-for-like NGR and an operating profit of GBP 2.7 million. Energy costs in the period of GBP 9.8 million are up 80% on the comparable period in 2019. Moving now on to digital. Digital business grew revenues by 7% in the half with like-for-like NGR of GBP 92.1 million in the period, with progressive growth quarter-on-quarter. Grosvenor has delivered an 18% growth in NGR to GBP 25.8 million in the period. Mecca was more impacted by the preparation of the migration onto the RIDE proprietary platform, which successfully completed earlier this month. Nonetheless, Mecca delivered a 3% growth in like-for-like NGR to GBP 34.9 million. In its first full comparable like-for-like period, Stride brand performance is a contrast between its two parts. Performance on the proprietary brands on the right platform has increased by 34% at an NGR level in the period. However, the non-proprietary brands operating on third-party platforms declined by 16%, reflecting the catch-up effect of affordability restrictions across those platforms. Stride's like-for-like revenue was GBP 21 million for the period. The Yo business continued to perform well with comparative period growth of 9% to like-for-like NGR of GBP 10 million, despite the challenges from the introduction of marketing restrictions introduced in Spain. Like-for-like operating profit for the digital business unit was GBP 3.7 million in the period. Moving on now to the income statement. The underlying operating profit was GBP 23.7 million. The net interest charge was GBP 6.5 million, and I would anticipate a similar charge in the second half. Separately disclosed items totaled an income of GBP 84.9 million in the period, and I will take you through the detail of those on the next slide. The underlying effective tax rate was 19.2% due to the mix of profits across the different jurisdictions, the increase in the tax rate in Gibraltar from 10% to 12.5%, and the non-deductibility of amortization costs. Our cash tax paid is expected to be lower with the ability to utilize prior year losses against the current year profits. The effective tax rate for the underlying profit for the year ahead is expected to be 18%-20%. The key item in the separately disclosed items is the refund of GBP 83.1 million on the VAT paid on the gaming machines in the period from April 2006 to January 2013. This is shown separately as the refund itself, net of costs, and the interest thereon of GBP 5.6 million. In addition, as a result of the improved performance since reopening across a number of the Grosvenor venues and the effect of the transformation actions taken in 2020, it has been necessary to reverse GBP 10.8 million of previously impaired assets across six of the Grosvenor venues. The additional profit of GBP 3.1 million has also been recognized on the disposal of the Belgian business, which we completed in April 2021. Onto the cash flow. The cash generated from operations in the period was GBP 139.6 million, including GBP 81.7 million from the separately disclosed items. There was GBP 13.4 million of CapEx as we recommenced investment in our venues estate, predominantly with two refurbishments in Grosvenor and investments in new gaming products and improved customer experience. We also continued to invest in digital, largely in the tech integration. Interest in tax paid was GBP 10.2 million, and we end the period with no rent or duty deferrals and all supplier payment management is back to business as usual. We will meet the loan repayment amortization of GBP 29.6 million in May this year. At 31 December, as I mentioned earlier, we have a net cash position of GBP 55.1 million before leases, and with lease liabilities reduced by GBP 26.8 million to GBP 196.3 million, we have a closing net debt position of GBP 141.2 million, and cash and available facilities closed the period slightly above expectations of GBP 224.8 million. Finally, we expect to meet our waiver liquidity test of GBP 50 million when it is next tested at March. After that, we revert to our banking financial covenants, which is a net debt to EBITDA ratio of less than 3x and EBITDA to net interest payable of more than 3x, which will be again applying from the 30 June 2022 test date. As we remain in a banking covenant waiver period, we are unable to pay a dividend. However, the board will review the dividend as we return to normal banking covenants in the second half of this financial year. We anticipate GBP 50 million in CapEx investment for the full year. As usual, the appendices set out our usual data sheets and provide you some more insight. With that, thank you, and I'll hand you back to John. Many thanks, Simon. The group's transformation framework helps to ensure our key initiatives are properly prioritized, resourced, and are tightly monitored as they progress through to delivery. With a much improved financial position of the group, which Simon's outlined, we've been able to accelerate investment in the transformation program, through the first half and in particular into the second half. We've delivered a number of projects in the first half, and with the additional inflows of cash from the VAT repayment and from the return to cash generative trading, we have a very strong program of transformation initiatives in this second half of the year. This chart aims to show you some of the key second half deliverables across each of our seven transformation work streams. In the Grosvenor Venues work stream, we're accelerating our investments across the estate. Our refurbishment works commence in three venues, Bristol, Walsall and St. Giles, which is otherwise known as Tottenham Court Road, this month. In February, major development works commence in the Grosvenor Casinos in Merchant City in Glasgow and in Blackpool. We've got a further four projects expected to begin work in April. All those projects improve the customer journey, add fun, excitement to the customer experience, and increase the range of facilities for our customers to enjoy. The estate has been historically under-invested, in my view, and we therefore have plenty of opportunities to make very significant improvements. We're gradually rolling out a new table management system to optimize table openings and minimum bet sizes, and we're launching a new progressive game and electronic roulette terminal called Lucky Lady's Charm. Within Mecca, the key development is the investment in Main Stage bingo value. Low prices for the Main Stage bingo game and bigger guaranteed prizes to encourage consumers back to bingo as fears about the pandemic ease. We're opening a new style Mecca venue in Luton. Mecca Luton has a contemporary design to appeal to a broader customer base. Our research tells us that 30% of women would consider visiting a bingo venue, if it were appropriate for them. This new design aims to attract a broader cohort of younger customers while not alienating our core customer base. The concept is researched very well, and we should inevitably learn a huge amount from the reaction of our customers when we open later this quarter. Elsewhere across the Mecca estate, we're trialing a program of smaller investments to improve the external appearance of our venues, supporting the strong price and prize board offer. In Enracha, we're completing the rollout of a new gaming machine management system, which among other things, provides us with much stronger play data at both a game and customer level, plus two further small property investments to improve electronic gaming and sports betting facilities. In the omni-channel work stream, we're delivering further improvements to the omni-channel journey for existing Grosvenor venues customers, so they are more readily recognized and rewarded when they go online. We'll be launching further venue-specific microsites for Mecca Luton and for the Rialto Casino in Leicester Square. Across the Mecca estate, we're now stepping up the focus on our first joint liquidity game, Mecca Fortune, featuring it as a major part of the schedule, both online and in venues across Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings. A joint liquidity across channels ensures some really big prizes that are up for grabs, with Mecca Fortune both online and in our venues. Within digital, the key transformation initiative is now completing the development effort for the migration of Grosvenor onto the RIDE technology platform. A roadmap of developments now kicks off to enhance the Mecca Bingo service now that it's on the RIDE platform. In Spain, we'll be launching sports betting on both Enracha and Yo brands, and subject to final regulatory approvals, we'll be launching Yo Bingo in Portugal. Within the safer gambling work stream, we have the next phase of our digital customer protection development work about to commence, which will merge a number of different data models into eventually a single player protection framework to both further help identify at-risk play and to streamline the customer interaction process so that they are more timely and relevant, and where appropriate, less intrusive. In Grosvenor Casinos, we have further enhancements to make to the risk model we introduced in the first half. Across all of Rank's U.K.-facing businesses, we're about to launch a comprehensive training program to further strengthen the safer gambling culture within the business. In the organizational capability work stream, we have further work within the finance area, automating and standardizing more of our processes across the group. We've just about brought in-house all of our development with a number of new signings into the IT team, and we're rolling out more components of the employee value proposition, including providing clearer career paths and developing further opportunities for our venues colleagues. A busy second half. The U.K. government's review of gambling legislation continues, and a white paper is due to be published in the next few months. The timing of that is not very clear at the moment, but government have indicated it will be in the coming months. The review focuses heavily on digital or remote gambling, and I expect more prescriptive measures to emerge, which will help draw a new line in the sand for online operators. For land-based gaming, this is a once-in-20-year opportunity to ensure that legislation and regulation is appropriate for today's consumer and is equitable relative to online regulation. By way of a reminder, the 2005 Gambling Act created an experiment of 16 new casino licenses in the U.K., of which eight were eventually opened. Those eight casinos have operated under very different and more favorable regulations than other U.K. casinos, which continue to operate under the old regulations of the 1968 Gaming Act. The key regulatory changes sought by casinos are outlined here, harmonization of the 1968 Act casinos with those of the 2005 Act, enabling up to 80 gaming machines from the current restriction of 20, and the ability to offer sports betting. The ability to provide table games on electronic terminals based upon a random number generator, as occurs online, rather than necessarily on a live gaming event, which would enable games like blackjack and other table games to be offered at lower stakes than could be delivered on live tables. The ability to offer enable customers to access cashless gaming transactions in the way we do as consumers in any other retail transaction. Now, with the exception of sports betting, which would likely require primary legislation, those other proposals could be delivered through secondary legislation. For the bingo sector, the key changes we're proposing are the removal of the current requirement that no more than 20% of gaming machines are category B3, which are by far the most popular machines with our customers. We're also asking for additional side games for customers to play alongside the main stage bingo game, giving our players more opportunities to win. We're also asking for the provision of cashless gaming in bingo. Our expectation is for a tightening of regulations governing online play in the U.K., alongside modest but very important regulatory changes for land-based casino and bingo venues and for our customers. Today, we're launching the group's first responsible business report, and that provides an overview of the initial work we've undertaken to establish the appropriate approach to the development of our ESG strategy. Our work in this regard focuses on four areas, customer experience, colleague experience, environmental management, and community engagement. Now, the next stage of that work will be to further develop our core initiatives within each of those four key areas and also to define the key performance indicators which will enable us to report on the social and environmental impact alongside our financial reporting calendar. There's a link to the report from this morning's results RNS, and you can also find it in full on the Rank Group corporate website. To the outlook, and you can see here the statement we published this morning. The first three weeks of January have seen soft trading across our venues businesses. The digital business trading in line with expectations, and meccabingo.com has already returned to pre-migration revenue levels. We built up strong momentum back in 2019-2020 before the pandemic struck, with today's removal of just about all restrictions in England, and the rest of the U.K. removing restrictions in the coming days, we're well positioned, I think, to get back to that strong growth. We expect Grosvenor to now recover quickly, particularly when inbound travel to London picks up. For Mecca, we expect a slower build as consumer confidence gradually recovers. When we provided a trading update in October, we provided guidance for underlying EBIT for the full year between GBP 50 million and GBP 75 million. Despite the challenging trading conditions we then experienced through November, December and into January, we now expect, subject to no further material restrictions, EBIT for the year ending 30 June to be within the range of GBP 55 million-GBP 65 million. Now, Simon and I will take any questions. Alex, if that's okay. Many thanks, John, Simon. For those in the audience, if you could please raise your virtual hand if you have a question. Our first question today comes from Gavin Kelleher at Goodbody. Gavin, if you can take yourself off mute, please go ahead. Hi. Morning, John? Morning, Simon? Just a couple from me, please. Firstly, on digital, you have increased marketing investment in H1 period. How should we think about marketing in the digital business, marketing spend or marketing investment going forward? Was there a bit of catch up in H1 in terms of it as a percentage of net revenue, and now we'll see a benefit from that coming through? That's my first question. Then my second question, on the more extensive or increased, excuse me, investment in the Grosvenor estate and in Mecca, how quickly will you see the return on that investment as we move forward? Gavin, morning. Let me take them in the order. First of all, marketing investment. Yeah. Marketing investment in the half was up 37% on the same half last year. We invested heavily in the half and we put Grosvenor back onto TV for the first time in many years and had a strong campaign which continues actually for Mecca on TV. Across the piece, 37% increase. Also, we've been scaling marketing in the Yo brands, which has also helped drive strong growth in new customer acquisition. 54% growth in new customer acquisition in Grosvenor in the half and an 88% growth, I think, in the Yo brand. A big step up in new customer acquisition volumes. Second half, yeah, I think there was a bit of catch up. Second half, we will ease back, not hugely, but we'll ease back a bit in the second half. We are. We've been driving good quality acquisition at customer acquisition at relatively low CPAs. But nonetheless, there will be a bit of easing back on the throttle in the second half of the year. In terms of the estate, it does vary by CapEx proposal by venue, actually, but we're seeing returns of 18 months through to two and a bit years is kind of where the payoffs are. Some much quicker and we've done pre-pandemic, we've had good examples of properties which have paid off the investment in less than 12 months. We're seeing strong returns and we expect that to continue with this range of investments in the second half. In truth, and probably inevitably, the more, the greater the amount spent per property, then the longer it takes to return is a general rule of thumb. On the other hand, properties like Merchant City in Glasgow, which is such a strong property, I mean, it's a. If you went to Glasgow and tried to find a location for a casino, it would be the one you would pick. It hasn't had money spent on it for a number of years, and it reflects. We are going to be doing a major refurbishment of that property, so that will take a little longer to return, but very excited about the prospects in Glasgow. That's perfect. Thanks, John. Thanks, Gavin. Our next question comes from Richard Stuber at Numis. If you could take yourself off mute, Richard, please go ahead. Yeah. Hi, hi, morning? Just a couple of questions from me, please. First of all, on the timing of the migration of Grosvenor, it looks like it's marginally slipped. I was wondering, is that related to the migration of Mecca Online? I know there was a few sort of slightly negative press articles around the migration, so were there any sort of lessons you've learned from that which you'll now be putting in place, for the Grosvenor migration? And the second question is, could you just give any more sort of detail or numbers on multichannel customers? Clearly, they've picked up nicely in Grosvenor. I think in 2021 you lost GBP 20 million revenue from those customers. Do you expect that to be sort of recouped, in its entirety over the next 12 months or so? Thank you. Thank you, Richard. Morning. On the migration of Mecca. Yeah, well, I think you probably read the comments that we made at the bottom of the article. It was a long way down the article that our comments appeared. We made the point that it was just untrue. Look, I've done lots of migrations in my career, lots of them, and they're always painful. I mean, they're inevitably painful because you're taking a site down. You start from the premise that customers are not gonna have access to their account for a number of periods of time. It took us longer than we had hoped to bring the site back up. Oh, there's a bit of background noise. Apologies for that. Having brought the site back up, we had some instability, and we took it down and brought it back up the following day. It was down for the best part of eight, nine, 10 hours longer than we would have hoped. We quickly brought it back up and, as I said, or think I've already said, performance is now at least in line with and arguably better than we were performing on the Mecca site before we did the migration. I'm delighted with the outcome. The team have done an amazing job, worked incredibly hard to deliver what was a very successful migration. You know, as I say, we've now got a faster site and the customer numbers. However, whichever metric you look at over the last kind of week, 10 days, particularly actually into the early days, into the data, which I saw this morning for the first two days of this week, is very strong for Mecca. We think the team have done an outstanding job actually. In terms of the migration of Grosvenor, we had hoped to complete by the end of Q2. I'm now saying summer. Not because of learning lessons. We had hoped to migrate Mecca before Christmas, and in the end, I thought we should delay until the early part of January. We did that, so we got back into the new year and we did the migration of Mecca. I think we've got quite a bit of work to do to get Grosvenor migrated. We've got certain integrations we've still got to deliver on. I think for safety's sake, we're saying into the summer. Hopefully not later than that, but we'll see. I mean, this is development, so you never quite know till you get there, until you've done testing and more testing and more testing, but that's what I expect it to be. In terms of the multichannel question, yeah, look, it's gonna take us some time to get back to the heady heights that we were at. The GBP 20 million, I think, is a number that is a combination of Mecca and Grosvenor, and it splits broadly GBP 12 million for Grosvenor and GBP 9 million for Mecca. There you are. Best part of GBP 21 million going back in time. We're below those levels still, but we've had three consecutive quarters of growth. Across both Grosvenor and Mecca, both businesses growing quarter-on-quarter, digital revenues from customers that are also venue customers. We're heading in the right direction. We're not back to where we were, but we're certainly heading in the right direction. That's great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks, Richard. Our next question comes from Ivor Jones at Peel Hunt. Ivor, if you could take yourself off mute, please go ahead. Morning? A couple of things. In the London performance in the half, I know you don't wanna get into massively granular detail, but is there a split between the high-end and the other casinos? Can we see the absence of international travel, particularly, and whether The Vic and others much more back to normal? Ivor, yes. Simple answer. You're absolutely right. Look, you know, a lot of at the very high-end, and we don't have a high-end Mayfair casino, but at the you know, the Gambling Commission categorization of high-end casino is the seven or eight in and around Mayfair. We have one of those casinos, but of course, a lot of those have closed. They still haven't opened because of the absence of international tourists into London. We've got our two higher-end casinos, which would be The Park Tower in Knightsbridge and The Barracuda, 1 Baker Street, which are our kind of highest end. They're not high-end casinos, they're not Mayfair, but they're higher-end casinos. They've been the two casinos which have inevitably been impacted more significantly by the absence of foreign travelers into London and particularly Middle Eastern travelers into London. Other London venues have performed better. At the other end of that spectrum would be a venue like the Rialto in Leicester Square, which just by virtue of being in the location it's in, sees a lot of people through the door. It doesn't typically get those higher-end players but sees a lot of people through the door. Yeah, you're absolutely right in your assumption. Thank you. On Mecca, revenue's up half on half about GBP 27 million and profit's up about GBP 4 million. I've looked at the helpful detailed notes you've given, but I still can't. It seems to be spread across multiple lines. I can't quite work out why the operating leverage hasn't come through more strongly period-over-period. What am I missing? Well, Mecca hit harder by energy costs. That, there's no doubt. The increase in energy costs has hit Mecca harder. Our breakeven point in the Mecca business coming into the year was about 2.4, and I think, Simon, you'd now say it's more like 2.7 on a weekly basis. More than 2.7 now. Yes, on a weekly basis, and that's function of an increase in people costs inevitably, so some inevitable salary inflation. But just as much actually based upon energy costs. I think across the half, our energy costs are up GBP 4 million against our expectation going back to when the targets for the year were set. An equivalent amount up on 2019, a little bit more actually up on 2019. We expect it to be up 9.5% across the full year. That 9.5% is split 60% Mecca, 40% Grosvenor. It has a bigger impact actually on the Mecca business. They're probably the two things that weigh a bit more heavily on Mecca. I mean, in simple terms, Mecca just doesn't have the headroom that the Grosvenor business does. On a decline in revenue, it makes more properties more marginal very quickly. We've now got to flip that around as we come out, and my judgment call here and the team's view is that this is all about giving value back to customers to drive visits as we now emerge from the difficult trading that Mecca's inevitably experienced over the last two years. I wanted to pick up on what you said about value 'cause you talked about the main stage game. What does that imply- Yeah. What does that imply for interval games that have typically not been good value either? Are you withdrawing them or reducing their visibility or frequency? What we're doing actually is we are reducing their frequency and to some extent their visibility. In Luton, we're removing them completely. Typically, you know that a bingo venue in the U.K. has what we call a rig, and people are playing an interval game with a GBP 1 coin into a coin mech at their table, and we're removing that completely in Luton. I think they come to play bingo and it's the main stage game with a bingo caller. We are focusing on value. We're also focusing on entertainment. We've put all of our callers through an MBA, a Mecca Bingo Academy. We are putting entertainment back into main stage bingo and delivering it in a much more fun and entertaining way. You know, it is work in progress, but the team have been making amazing inroads, actually, and added now to a new price and prize board, which will give much better value to the consumer. We think that's. I mean, it is kind of very simple. Not very complicated this, is it really? It's not complicated at all. Customers come to bingo, come to Mecca to play bingo, and more customers will come, therefore, if we give them better value on the reason why they come, which is to play bingo. It's a pretty simple premise as we now emerge from the challenges of the last couple of years. Thank you. There are a couple more things I wanted to ask. Shall I go away and see if Alex will let me back in again? No, you crack on, Ivor. I would keep going. Thanks, Alex. You've obviously reaffirmed your CapEx guidance for the year. Yes. You've listed lots of projects with a relatively rapid return that you can invest in. What's the range of possibilities for CapEx for next year? What will drive that range? Is this peak year? I think this is close to peak year. Our challenge here actually is management bandwidth. This is not a cookie cutter, and I've worked in lots of businesses where you can cookie cutter refurbishment. You can hone it, engineer it, hone it, roll it out at pace across the estate. Our business is not like that. It needs every venue is different. Every venue has a different customer base. Every venue needs to be very carefully planned and very carefully implemented. I think we're sort of at our peak bandwidth now in the second half of the year. I'd expect our CapEx to maybe increase a little next year, but not much beyond the GBP 50 million mark. Probably GBP 50 million - GBP 60 million would be the sort of number I'd be thinking about at this stage. Thank you. On the digital side, you talk about 37% increase in marketing. That's not how the accounts present a change in the marketing number in the digital line. What's the gap? I'm gonna need Simon to help me with that. While Simon's doing that, 37% is the increase in marketing investment. If I add affiliate numbers into that, it makes it higher. Yeah. Brings it up to 50%, I think. Maybe that's the differential, but I'll let Simon go into the detail. If we break down the costs, the cost line goes up more like 15%. Some of the marketing will increase. Either there will be across the affiliates as well, that Greg Johnson referred to. The marketing line that you see in the segment note is just pure marketing costs. The affiliate marketing goes through cost of sales. Oh, okay. Brilliant. last one, I promise, is games on third party platforms. What's the future? Is that some value to be realized that didn't seem to be strategically part of the group? Yeah, I think there is value to be realized. We are still enthusiastic about that part of our business. It has had a difficult six months, but I think we're at the bottom of that and, you know, my expectation is that that will turn around in the second half. We are still introducing new brands, and yeah, I think we are optimistic about the future of that business. You know, the next kind of 12 months will determine it, I think. No, we are keenly enthusiastic. Is it getting marketing money, some of this marketing money behind it? It is. Even though you can't control the product? It is. No, we do. Well, we sort of control the product. We're not the platform owner here, so we're not the licensee, but we are responsible for the marketing and the front end of the platform. It's our brands, we control the CMS, and we control the way the site presents to the customer in real time. We are delivering the marketing dollars behind those sites. We are in reasonable control over the offering to the consumer, but ultimately not the platform and the license holder. That's the model. We've got a very large number of brands here, and to date, it's been a successful business. It's had a tough 12 months. I think we've got a very, very good team managing this business, and we expect to now be turning it around. We'll have to see how each of those platforms are different, and we'll have to see how that plays out over the next 12, 18 months. Okay. That's great. Thank you very much for all that time. Much appreciated. Thanks, Ivor. Thanks, Ivor. Our next question comes from Greg Johnson at Shore Capital. Greg, if you'd take yourself off mute, please go ahead. Morning, gents? Just turning one of Ivor's questions on its head there. The operational gearing at Grosvenor venues is probably lower than one would expect it. Yeah, this would suggest that the cost base is lower today than it was pre-COVID. Is there any sort of temporary reasons why that should be the case? Or could we expect that as revenue recovers, profit could get back quicker to sort of past levels at Grosvenor ahead of revenues? Secondly, just on digital, with the migration now of Mecca and all the operational tweaks and developments you can put through, how quickly should we expect that to start to come through on an acceleration in the top line? Great. Thank you. Morning, Greg. Sorry. Morning. Apologies. Let me take the first one, and maybe Simon, you can take the second one. Mm-hmm. If you wouldn't mind. Let me start with the first one. The leverage of the Grosvenor business. We did it. As you, Greg, you'll recall, we put a lot of change through the Grosvenor business in the early phase of the transformation program, and we did take a lot of cost out of the business, and we changed the kind of leverage quite significantly back in late 2018, early 2019. That reflected in a very strong turnaround in the profitability performance of Grosvenor, and it coincided obviously with the business growing in revenues too. We managed to deliver on both of those objectives. Over the past six months, the margin in the Grosvenor business held up very strongly, despite the fact that obviously revenue's been down. You know, as revenue comes down, you'd expect the margin percentage to come down too, and it has come down from the highs of where we were in 2019, 2020 pre-pandemic. Not by as much as you might have thought, given the revenue number in the first half. That's in part because we've been running at a lower cost base than we would like. We have had, like the rest of the hospitality sector, more vacancies in the Grosvenor business than we would like, and that has impacted a bit on revenue too. It's impossible to determine. Our NPS scores, so our customer scores of the service that we've delivered, have held up really well. In fact, if anything, marginally increased significantly in Mecca actually during the half, increased marginally in the Grosvenor business. That's positive. Nonetheless, one of the keys in running a casino business is to optimize table opening and have your tables open in line with demand. A lot of our investment in systems is driving to exactly that, so we can optimize table opening, make sure we've got you know, we're using AI to ensure we've got the right people in the right venues at the right time, is what we're doing. A lot more work to do on that, actually. We have been running behind on Grosvenor colleague numbers in the first half, and we've been playing catch up. Partly that is a function of post-pandemic, partly it's a function, you know, I mean, people, you know, colleagues on furlough, and at the end of furlough, making a conscious decision as to whether they want to return or not. There's been some impact of Brexit on the return to work in Grosvenor too. Not surprisingly actually, because historically, casinos in the U.K. have relied heavily on European nationals coming to London, coming to the U.K., coming to our big cities to run tables and have a good time. They, you know, now that's more difficult for folk post-Brexit. We've been running light on people. We've been working very hard to recruit, and we've been working very, very hard to bring people in at the kind of front of house, bar, kitchen level and then accelerate people through. We've been running gaming academies up and down the U.K. We've trained about 300 promotions into licensed croupiers or dealers in the first half. But nonetheless, we've been running behind. We've got some catching up to do, therefore, on colleague numbers. It will reflect in revenue, but we've got some catching up to do. There will be some upward pressure on costs in the second half of the year. There's also gonna be some upward pressure on energy costs because the split between the October, November, December months and January, February, March months are much more heavier energy use in January, February, March in truth. We'll see some higher impact of energy costs coming through in the Grosvenor business in the second half. I think our margin will come down a bit in the second half, despite the fact that we expect our revenue to grow. Hopefully that's answered the question. Simon? Thank you. Yeah. Morning, Greg. Just picking up on your second question there about the digital migration. I think as John did, maybe have mentioned earlier, since the migration completed in early January, you know, Mecca numbers are back at pre-pandemic numbers that we were seeing come through in terms of our weekly run rates. We are now expecting that obviously to continue and take through over the next six months. We would expect that to come through. Obviously, the team move on towards looking at the Grosvenor migration, but freeing up some capacity to look at product development into the Mecca platform as well. You know, we've been quite pleased that we've got within the first few weeks. We're back at the pre levels we were seeing before we transitioned, and we'd expect that to continue. Perfect. Thank you. Thanks, Greg. We have a follow-up question from Richard Stuber at Numis. Richard, please go ahead. Yeah, hi again? Just a couple of follow-ups, please. The first one is, Simon, I think you've mentioned that the break-even for Mecca has gone up from GBP 2.4 million up to GBP 2.7 million. I'm assuming sort of energy costs will stay high and they don't, so it doesn't go back to where it was. In terms of sort of break-even generally in your estate, are you seeing some more marginal venues there which you may consider rationalizing? And the second question, again, it's about sort of digital. Are you talking about sort of launchings of Yo Sports in Spain, and Yo in Portugal? How material do you think these two parts could be, and how quickly do you think this, their top line can grow? Thank you. Let me deal with them in reverse order. Yo, first of all. I think one of the challenges, Richard, in Spain at the moment is, you know, we're continuing to grow. We've got a very strong brand in Yo, but with the inability to provide any incentives to new customers, and that's a customer that's not a customer today. To become a new customer, you can't incentivize somebody. Even when somebody becomes a customer, you can't incentivize anybody in the first 30 days or until they've verified themselves and made themselves available to offer some incentives. That's a bit of a weakness that the customer actually has in Spain today. Of course, in sports betting, the key driver of business is the price. What price Real Madrid are this weekend is the driver. The sports operators do have an advantage over us right now in terms of customer acquisition. The importance of getting YoSports and Enracha Sports live is very important, and it's a project we've been working on for a few months now, is progressing well. We're a bit ahead of schedule, and we expect to be going live, as I say, in the second half. Portugal, we just don't know. I mean, there isn't a bingo operator in the Portuguese market today. We're gonna launch a YoBingo. It's a strong country in terms of bricks-and-mortar bingo, but we don't know what the online strength will be 'cause the market doesn't exist. Very much kind of new dawn territory. We really don't know. We'll find out in the fullness of time. Optimistic, and we're going about this in the same way that we've the same success formula of the Yo business, not one that we inherited obviously, one that we acquired. The same formula that the Yo business adopted in Spain is exactly the same program that we're delivering into Portugal. Fingers crossed, we hope it goes well. We don't know till we try. The first question was about Mecca break-even. Yeah, in the first half, circa 40 venues made positive EBITDA, including the rent, so kind of on a GAAP basis as opposed to IFRS 16 basis. There you go. I managed to say that, Simon. I'm impressed. My gold star for the day. Yeah. But that means that we've got circa 30 venues that were underwater in the first half. But look, we are not focused on rationalizing or closing the estate. What we're focused on is getting all of those venues back into delivering profit margin. It's not a big surprise that with the conditions, the market conditions we've had over the past six months, Mecca is impacted more heavily than Grosvenor just by virtue of the makeup of its customer base, the demographics of its customers. As we now come out of that, we expect that we will be driving, and my expectations, we'll be driving growth. These are important social facilities within local communities, so the last thing I want to be doing, I mean, the team know my view on this, is when we close a venue, it's we have failed. It is all about driving customers back into those venues in the second half of the year. Thanks very much. Thank you. Ivor has come back to the floor. Ivor, you have one minute. Thanks. Can you talk about the lease maturity profile in Mecca, following on from that question, and what's happening on renewals? They are less than a minute, so thank the 40 seconds. I'll be very quick. We've taken advantage, if that's the right way to put it. That's the wrong word to use. We have been busy during lockdown, renegotiating leases wherever we possibly could. We had a lot of leases that were coming up for renewal during 2020, 2021. We've done a lot of lease renewals, particularly in Mecca. We've done some Grosvenor ones too. We've done an awful lot of lease renewals over the past 12 months, and we've made significant savings in rent as a consequence. What we're not doing in Mecca, and we're not doing it in Grosvenor either, where we possibly can, but certainly in Mecca, what we're not doing is signing long leases. What we're doing is negotiating leases with landlords with sensible break clauses. I think the lease and Simon gave some numbers, but the lease position in Mecca is in very good shape. Not to say I wanna be closing leases. I wanna be trading all of these venues. Thank you. Excellent. John, we are done with questions, so back to you for any closing comments, please. Thank you very much. Thank you for all the questions. Very much appreciated, and thank you for joining us today. We are hopefully, when we come back in August, it'll be firsthand, it'll be lovely to meet people in person again. Looking forward to that. Thank you very much for joining us this morning, and enjoy the rest of the day. Thank you very much for joining, everyone. Bye-bye.