1Hi, I'm Lindsley Ruth, CEO of Electrocomponents. Welcome to our investor event, March 30th, 2022 at Canary Wharf. For those of you joining virtually and for those of you joining here in person, we welcome everyone to our event. If we look around here at Canary Wharf, what you see is a very safe and secure place. If you look at the technology, the breakthroughs that we've seen over the last 30 years, it's quite amazing when you look at a place like this. Easy to get to, transportation's fantastic. Beautiful venues, great connectivity. Our purpose as a company is to make amazing happen for a better world. Is the world better? Unfortunately, in many areas it's not. The pandemic continues. We're shut down in many places throughout Asia, and obviously our thoughts and prayers are with those people in the Ukraine. Regardless of what we talk about today, we can't lose sight of the importance of those people that are suffering today and the events in Ukraine. Our thoughts and prayers again go out to those individuals. We're looking forward to taking you on the journey today. When I started with this company, March 30th, I moved here. In 2022, I came here to Canary Wharf. I traveled here. I walked into a building, and this is where our story starts. When I came here in 2015, there were three reasons for my trip into London that day. The first was to learn the dos and the don'ts of being the CEO of a UK company, which I'm probably still learning seven years later. I also read a book that was given to me by the Consul General in Montreal in Canada, and it was called Understanding English. Still working on that today as well. There's a third lesson that I learned that day as I went from the London Stock Exchange with Numis to UBS to Tulchan on Fleet Street, and then the 4.7 miles to Canary Wharf to meet with Citi that day. That lesson was, don't take a car to Canary Wharf. What I thought would be a 10-minute ride, 4.7 miles, took an hour and 45 minutes. You know what I did? I had a notebook at that point. In my notebook, which I recently found, I pulled it out and it says, "March 30,th 2015. Figure out how to take the tube," which means the train underground, like the Metro. Today I took the tube, but you know when I joined, I didn't know much about the company other than what I had read. When I joined in 2015, one of the first trips I made, we had our office, our headquarters in Oxford, so I made a trip from Oxford to Corby. There's actually 27 roundabouts between Oxford and Corby, and I remember counting every one of those on numerous occasions. I got to Corby that day. At Corby, we have 1,800 to 2,000 employees. I got there and I was so excited because there were a lot of people back when we used to have offices that people went into. I remember going to that office and actually felt really energized about going into the office and meeting the people. That day, as I walked across the second floor of the conference room facilities, I saw every single meeting room was taken. I was so excited. I walked in and I saw PowerPoint slides. I saw people meeting, talking about things. It was so invigorating. I left that day and I asked Dean, who was the security guard, the man at the front desk. I said, "Dean, how many customers and suppliers did we have here today?" You know what he said? Zero. None. They were all internal meetings. When I joined this company in 2015, unfortunately at that point in time, we were bureaucratic. As I walked around Corby, I realized we had amazing people. We had great people. In fact, I walked around, sat at people's desks, asked them what they did, asked them what was holding back. What was holding them back in terms of making a difference and growing our business and contributing to the company. People weren't discouraged from taking risks, but nor were they encouraged either. What I realized at that time was that we had a company that had average performance, but we had above average people. There was a disconnect. I wonder what that was. The next day, I went back to Oxford, walked into the office. Somebody came up to me and said, "You know, I heard you walked around Corby yesterday. Heard you just walked around and sat at people's desks and talked to them." "Well, I did." "Well, you know, we don't do that here." "What?" "No. We have managers. They don't like that. You gotta go through managers. There's a hierarchy here." You can see where I'm going with this. That's the way the company was operating. We were highly bureaucratic, passive. We lost our way. We had great people, and we had great people that were willing to change. I went home at that point over the weekend. I didn't have good Wi-Fi. I had no television. I was in the middle of nowhere in a barn conversion outside of Bicester. There was a field next to me of cows. I could talk to the cows or I could read and study. I took from the files copies of our old annual reports, old catalogs, 1978. As I was going through the old annual reports and the material, I realized, you know what? This company historically did quite well in times of turmoil. I found things like we were one of the first distributors to launch a website in 1998. In fact, there was a gentleman here at the time. His name was Bob Lawson. He started in 1976 with the company, I believe. That's what I heard. I started going through the material, and I see that in 1998, February 23rd, we launched a website. 1998. Within a month, we had 7,000 users a day. Pretty impressive. We won awards at the time. Amazing. rswww.com. As I went through the annual reports, the first one was in 1968. There was a common theme in all these annual reports. 1968, 1979, 1974. That theme was the customer and the employee come first. They go hand in hand. We had a view of the external world. As I went through the annual reports in 2000, I realized we put in place SAP. That was the beginning of what I call the bad years. Internal focus. Lost sight of the customer. Became bureaucratic. Became too centralized. Lost sight of how you do business in this industry. I thought, I wonder what happened. I can read what happened, or I can understand what happened from the beginning with our founders, J.H. Waring and P.M. Sebestyen. How did they build this company? Throughout history, the company was focused on delivering 24-hour service with a smile, focused on expanding products, differentiating with great technical service and support, but it was always based on having outstanding, dedicated, loyal employees. As I went through the annual reports, I realized in every annual report, there was some reflection on the difficulties in the market or in the world, whether it was a recession or a postal strike or an oil and gas crisis or issues and challenges with industrial relations. The company managed to grow sales and grow profit faster than sales. For some reason, we had lost our way. Those headwinds had become tailwinds, only to become headwinds again. How could we convert those headwinds back to tailwinds and ride that momentum? I thought, I wonder where Bob Lawson is now. I called Jo, my assistant. I said, "You know, do you happen to have Bob's contact information?" She said, "Yes." I said, "Do you think I could meet him for lunch?" She said, "Sure." I said, "Well, let me see. Can we meet next week?" "Sure, I'll try." Sure enough, he was available to meet. I remember going through an annual report, and I looked and I thought, "Okay, that's Bob Lawson. 1993." Won't say how old he is. It does say here. I looked at the photo, and I scheduled lunch with Bob, and I remember I went to the Mill Inn, and I walked into the car park, and I was waiting for Bob to come. I looked at his photo right here. You can see it. That's Bob. I looked off in the distance. You know what? Here comes Bob. Bob comes walking this way, and I think, you know, I wonder what happened with this company. He got it to the FTSE 100, and we lost our way. It wouldn't be great to talk to someone who actually lived this, who experienced it in the past, that could bridge the past to the future and help me on the direction we're going in the future. You know what? I could tell you what he said, but it's much better for you to hear directly from him. Bob Lawson. Good afternoon, everybody. Lindsley and I never talked about what we were going to do today. He said I could have three minutes and talk about three things. Tough. I'm gonna talk about four. Some of it you've heard once already this afternoon, and that just reinforced the importance of what we're saying. First point. When I came back in 1991, I'd left in under a cloud some years earlier, which is another story. When I came back in 1991, it was pretty clear that we had a problem. The first problem was a lack of focus. The company had businesses that were producing hardened computers for the US military. It had businesses that were making computers. It had box-shifting computers, again, in the US and in the UK and Europe. Poor old RS was at the bottom of the pile. The first mission was to focus on RS and all its subsidiaries, which weren't many at that time. That was achieved by disposal and consolidation. It didn't take long. Believe me, it had to be done quick. The second area is an area that Lindsley's touched on. It's a soft area. It's called culture. RS at that time had a culture of introspection. It was the same place that Lindsley found when he took over. The reason, God only knows what caused it, because it had a great opportunity in the market, but it was focused on all its internals. What do we do? The first point is we lit the burning platform, and that was very simple. It was about seven words. If you don't serve customers, why are you here? That seemed to focus people's minds a bit because the answers could be one of two ways, couldn't it? The second was to begin to talk to people about how to serve customers and get everybody in the company to think and say how they could serve customers. The third element, which I'd never done before, which was a good idea though, was failure parties. It's okay to try. Celebrate what you've learned in your failure and move on. That was a massive culture change for the company. The second element was the internet. In my years in the wilderness, I'd spent some time with Boeing and with Lockheed Martin in the States, and the one thing you learned from that was how they were already harnessing the internet, and it wasn't just for procurement. It was for operational control. It was for design and development. Dear old RS was doing nothing. How do we do it? We set up a skunkworks, a separate building away from all the operations, a mix of recruits and our own people, and they were given a mission. I've actually written it down, because it was this. We need to shape, lead the Internet and its use in the component industry. That's what they were there to do. That was number two. Number three was internationalization. We were very fortunate. We work with engineers, and engineers are governed by the laws of physics. It happens the same everywhere. We had an offer that we knew was attractive, but we didn't take it anywhere. The next leg of the improvement of the company was internationalization. It did wonders for morale, and it was a combination of greenfield startups and acquisitions, and we got on with it. What was underlying all of this? It was the foundation. This is the first catalog in the autumn of 1937. It will come as no news to you. No job lines, no discounts, one price only, strictly trade only, unconditional guarantee, 24 hours with a smile, and we only want satisfied customers. There under there is the raison d'être for this business. That's its core culture. Those founders of Sebestyen and Waring created it. I think I was the last person who's ever interviewed by them. Believe me, the Stasi had nothing on them. They shredded you within 30 seconds of meeting you. They understood the business, they were committed to it, and they delivered. It was that that did it. In fact, I'm still wearing the gold cufflinks they gave me on appointment. The little figure on it is Thurm. It was known in the business as Shagnasty. Don't ask me why. I don't know. That was it. Anyway, that's enough of the past. Let's now turn to the future. Lindsley will lead this business to new heights. Ultimately, we will get to the point where we will meet our centenary in 2037, and we will be one of the very successful, uniquely successful companies in the UK Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Bob, and I hope in 2037 I can come back and play the role you just played. Bob is an inspiration and has been wonderful in terms of the time commitment he's given to me and going through the history of the company and helping me with what's transpired over the years and hear from every quarter. I will say that Bob constantly reminds me he has not sold a share of stock since he left the company, so I'm still a proud shareholder of this organization. I met with Bob, learned a little bit about what you heard. Only it was a 3-hour discussion. We continued to meet and to talk, and from there then I stepped back and I said, "If you were to plot our journey," and as I went out and I started to meet with investors, I realized that there were two questions and themes that continuously came up. One was, "When are you going to merge with Farnell?" And the second was, "Is there something structurally wrong with your model?" Because you know what? You've had ten years of consecutive margin decline. All the investors at the time stepped back and thought, "Hmm, maybe we'll wait and see." There were some of those that saw opportunity and risk, and those shareholders are here today. I'd like to say a special thanks to those who believed in me at the time as I was taking over a company that wasn't performing, and it stuck with us. It means a lot to me personally to have your support, and we can't forget those shareholders that have been on the boat with us. Thank you for being on this journey, but we're not done yet. At the time, we stepped back and we said, "Look, what we need to do is we've got to put in place a performance improvement plan." Strategy was important, but it wasn't all about strategy, it was about execution. We said there are three things we've got to do. The first is we've got to put the customer back at the heart of what we do. The second thing we had to do was we needed to drive accountability back into the business. We needed to look at how we could put the profit focus back into the business, how we could operate for less. How do you operate for less and manage to grow? Challenge at times, right? Well, you do it by focusing on culture, by focusing on the people. For us, we had to get people to think like owners. It's important to go through the mental car wash to adjust our mindset, to go from an attitude of we can't do this to we can do this. A can-do attitude to make a difference, to grow this business profitably, to be who we used to be. George Eliot once said, "It's never too late to be what you might have been." George Eliot, also known as Mary Ann Evans. Mary Ann Evans was born in Nuneaton, where we are the largest employer today. It's never too late to be what you might have been. For us on this journey, we put in place this performance improvement plan. At the time, I went out and presented to one of our larger shareholders' conference. I put up a chart, something I use behind the scenes. Ignore the American sense of humor here, please. In my notes, I came up with 10 metrics on health, 10 metrics on wealth. I said, "Where are we?" At the time, we were in the danger zone. What does it mean to be in the danger zone? As I said to investors when they said, "We think there's something strong, structurally wrong with your model," I said, "I don't. I don't. But you know what? The older I get, the more I believe in what people do as opposed to what they say. If you don't buy in, just watch and see what we do." Second question was, "When are you gonna merge with Farnell?" On this chart in the danger zone, there were two of us, so two wrongs don't make a right. We were in a competition to be the best of the worst. We had to change our mindset. We had to adjust our mindset. We had to say, "How do we improve the health of the business? How do we improve the wealth of this business? How do we focus on these and move up with the goal of becoming first choice?" Our vision was then and is now to become first choice. First choice for all of our stakeholders. First choice for our investors here today, future investors of tomorrow. First choice for society. ESG, latest words, latest letters, latest acronym by change of the future. We've been focused on it for the last five, six years, even longer in terms of the workforce in general, but we're doing it because it's right, not because it's the latest fad in business. We wanna make a difference. We wanna make amazing happen for a better world. Then we talk about suppliers. Well, we don't exist if we don't have suppliers. We've got more than 2,500 supplier relationships today. Suppliers are very important to us. As Bob referenced, our customer, our customer experience is in our DNA. We have 1.2 million customers around the world. They're important to us. Our employees, sometimes people say your customer always comes first, and I get it. Some people can say that's great. To me, our employees come first. Why? Because if you want to offer world-class customer experience externally, you have to do it internally first. Our culture is important. It's critical. Everything starts with the culture. At the time, we set out five priorities. We said we need to have strategic priorities aligned with our culture and what we're doing overall to be able to accelerate. We developed a plan called Destination 2025. It wasn't a destination, it was a journey. On that destination, we put in place goals. We said, "Here's our five-year plan. This is what we wanna do. This is where we wanna be." We haven't disclosed that publicly, but today we wanna talk more about it. We're changing the words because it isn't a destination. We're changing the words to say, this is our journey to greatness. Why our journey to greatness? Because along this road and this journey from 2015 to today, we went from being bad to being good. We're not great. We wanna be, so we're on a journey to greatness. What does great look like? Well, in every category we've defined it. It's not what great looks like in our industry, it's what great looks like around the world in different industries. That's where we wanna be. We are not done yet. For us, we want to accelerate, and that's the story and the message of today. If you step back and you say, "What was our greatest weakness when I joined this company?" It was adaptability. It was our ability to adapt to the market. We couldn't. We were inflexible. The tailwinds of the past had become headwinds. We were bureaucratic, we were responsive, we were reactive. How do we adapt to the market? There's never been so much volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and polarization as there is today in the last 30 years. We've managed in spite of all the things that are happening, the pandemic, supply chain shortages, wage inflation, price inflation, Brexit, you name it, what's come our way, the US-China trade war. We've managed to take it and turn it into tailwinds. It's important because in this company we have a history of resiliency. As I went through these annual reports, I took notes and I looked at the words that were used in those annual reports, and that's what you see on this slide. These are quotes and excerpts from those annual reports and it talks about recessions, industrial relation issues and the challenge that we faced economically in the world, environmental concerns, challenges in the world. What we lost sight of was the internal priorities we needed to have to be able to address that. We put those back in place. From there we were able to address where we were and how we get to good. We've done it. We've done it because that's who we always were. It's never too late to be what you might have been. We focused on the triple bottom line. What is the triple bottom line? It's people, profit and planet. You know what? You could ask the question, does profit drive your culture or does culture drive your profit? Well, to some companies, they buy their culture. You want free sushi on Friday? You want a movie Friday night? We'll build a theater. We got plenty of money. We'll build a swimming pool. We'll put a tree-lined rooftop running track on a roof. You can do those things, but they don't last. If you build the right culture, you can build a profit that does last. That's what we're doing because it takes great people to drive profit and it takes profit to make a difference to the planet. The greater the profit we make, the greater the difference we can make. For us, it's about people, profit and planet as we move forward. Today we'll cover these three areas and we'll talk about our goals around advancing sustainability, championing education and innovation which is very important, empowering our people and doing business responsibly. You're going to hear about our ESG journey and what we're doing around ESG to make amazing happen for a better world. Very important. As I said earlier, we want to become first choice for all our stakeholders. We know what it takes to become first choice for all our stakeholders. Today you're going to go through, you're going to hear about the flywheel we're building, how it starts with people and leads to a brilliant experience and then moves to applying wisdom to decision making with data and information, and then how we culminate that into solutions and innovation and drive it with execution. Those are the spokes you're going to hear about today as we move into this discussion. Let's not forget, we've moved to becoming a purpose-led organization and that starts with me. As I've gone through this journey, I've gone from I thought being an okay CEO to being a good CEO. I can remember every time I met with one investor, they say, "Slow down. Don't go so fast." Okay, that's easy to say and I had a mentor for a number of years as CEO and founder of Future Electronics, Robert Miller, and he used to say, "The great man is the one who trains 20, not does the work at 20." I say, "Well, I want to be that great person that trains 20," but it's easier said than done. I try to do the work at 20 and as I went through this process of working weekends, the stress got to me, virtually killed me. I had to hit reset because what I realized was that my idea of dedication and sacrifice and support was a disservice to the people within the company. Okay, I hit reset and what helped me along that journey was a poem, and it's called The Dash, and I had to step back and think about what's my purpose in life. I say this because I think it's really, really important and it has to do with your individual purpose. If you think about it and we talk about your life, when everything is said and done, what is it you want to be known for? For me, I step back and I read this poem written by Linda Ellis. I'll quickly read it to you. It says, "I read of a man who stood to speak at the funeral of a friend. He referred to the dates of the tombstone from the beginning to the end. He noted that first came the date of birth and spoke the following date with tears. He said what mattered most of all was the dash between those years. That dash represents all the time that they spent alive on Earth. Now only those who love them know what that little line is worth. It matters not how much we own, the cars, the house, the cash. What matters most is how we live and love and how we spend our dash. Think about this long and hard. Are there things you'd like to change? You never know how much time is left that can still be rearranged. If we could just slow down enough to consider what's true and real and always try to understand the way other people feel and be less quick to anger and show appreciation more and love the people in our lives like we've never loved before. If we treat each other with respect and more often wear a smile, remembering this special dash might only last a while. So when your eulogy is being read with your life's actions to rehash, would you be in here today and listening online, be proud of the things they say about how you spent your dash. To me, this was so impactful because I thought about my life and I thought about my purpose, and I like to help others. I like to make a difference for others, and I needed to change my role in terms of how I operated, how I did business, my priorities, which were work, work, and family. I said, "Well, okay, I'm gonna change them. I'm gonna focus on God, health, family, work." I've done my best to stick to that. It's important, and it's important that each of us, I believe, has a purpose. Now, what makes the difference in a company is when your purpose aligns with the company's purpose. Us as a company, for us today, we have a purpose. Our purpose is to make amazing happen for a better world. With that, when you step back, you realize we've got a purpose within the company, but it doesn't feel like we're the same company. In fact, if you look out, what you see is, look at all these brands. Got all these names around the world, and then there's Electrocomponents, these E's, right? People come in and think, "Well, what's the E?" The only people that know about Electrocomponents. Anybody wanna take a guess who knows about Electrocomponents? Our investors, people that buy our shares, 'cause nobody else thinks about Electrocomponents. Two quick stories. One is five or six years ago, I went to our business Allied in the Americas, myself and our former chair, and as we walked through, I said, "Don't tell anyone that you're associated with Allied. Just say Electrocomponents and let's see what they say." It was an Allied expo, so we had lots of suppliers, our salespeople there. Very exciting event. As we walked around. Bless you. As we walked around and we introduced ourselves, people said, "Oh, I know Electrocomponents. You're a supplier at Allied." "Oh, I know Electrocomponents. Yeah, you're a partner, right? You know, I've heard of you." No one knew. They didn't know. In fact, there was a LinkedIn post about a month ago that said our sister company in the Americas. It's not a sister company, it's the same company. Today we've said we wanna rebrand this company, and we wanna rebrand this company back to who we always were. Across the world, our people are making amazing happen every day. Together, we're on an exciting journey. From an industrial business-to-business product distributor to a global omni-channel provider of product and service solutions, we have the talent, expertise, and the global network to achieve our goals. We will bring our organization together for a fully integrated business operating under the unifying banner of RS. One brand that's easier to explain, easier to understand, and easier to interact with. One culture united in a common goal with the same vision driving us on, and one team working together to realize our ambition for long-term, sustainable growth. One brand, one team, one culture, because together, we will be more than we are apart. Together, we will make amazing happen for a better world. It's important to note that we are purpose-led as the RS Group. Our strategy remains unchanged, but we're gonna roll up our sleeves and we're gonna get busy on this journey to greatness. What you're gonna hear today is a story which we're referring to now as the RS Way on our journey to greatness. Our strategy's unchanged, but we've got much greater ambition in terms of what we want to accomplish because we know we can accomplish it. We've got the belief and the aspiration, the ambition within the company. We've got leaders that demonstrate what we call the amazing leaders framework. They act with humility, they inspire trust, and they show passion for what they do. Humility, passion, trust. That's what's ingrained in the leadership structure that we have, and we've got a program around the world that will be implemented to go drive the right behaviors. It's called the RS Way, and that's what we want embedded within our organization as we move forward. We do have greater confidence in our opportunity. You're gonna hear about that today, and that confidence shows that we have a significant opportunity in front of us. We're a small player in a large market. You're gonna hear about that from Dr. Lawrence from Texas A&M today, the largest Industrial Distribution program in the world, largest distribution research program in the world. Our confidence is built on great execution. Great people, great plan, great execution. We're good, but if we can do the right things, we'll become great, and we know what that is, and there is much more to come. With that, I'm gonna hand it over to my fellow colleague straight from Australia, my close friend, Mr. David Egan, our Chief Financial Officer. Hi, everyone. Firstly, apologies for my voice, and I hope it will last. I have been suffering a little bit, but please no excuses on my part. I'd like to extend my welcome to everyone in the room and for those of you that are online. Thank you very much for joining us here today. Delighted to have you here. We know who we are, but for those of you that may be new to our story, for those of you that are maybe familiar with our story, let me just remind you of who we are, because this is who we want to continue to be as we go forward. The RS Group, we are a global high-service omni-channel provider of product and services, including solutions within the maintenance, repair, and the operations market. With that market being highly fragmented, digitally immature, with many small regional players. Our 1.2 million customers are the designers, the builders, the maintainers of industrial equipment and operations across many industries. We supply parts and services to keep their businesses running. We are not involved in high volume, and we're not involved in low margin end of the market. Our customer values us because we get it right in the product and the services that we offer them, and we want to ensure that their business keeps running. Our average order value is GBP 210. We are digitally led with 64% of our revenue going through the digital channels, but we offer the choice of that omni-channel, and if the customer chooses to operate and interact offline or through human touch, then that is also available to them as well. We have over 2,500 suppliers, allowing us to have breadth and depth of the products, services, and solutions that we offer our customers, and they're both in stock and also to order. We have a strong own brand, RS PRO, which is a high-quality value alternative, and we offer an expanded range of service and solutions to our customers in solving their problems and saving them time. Our vast amount of data and high technology capabilities are also key differentiators versus our peers. Delivery of our purpose, as you've heard from Lindsley right now, is different. It is a differentiator. We have strong ESG ratings. We have strong and improving employee engagement, and we continue to deliver progress. You may be asking, I hope you're asking, why and how has the group performed and outperformed since Lindsley joined us? We've been driving market share gains and strong profit growth for three key reasons, and Lindsley's touched on these, but let me just reiterate. One, a high-performance, purpose-led culture, helping our people do the best possible job to delight our customers. Two, operational efficiencies and the execution skills. Again, as Lindsley said, distribution is all about execution, and the more focus that we put on execution, we'll continue to delight our customers. Finally, thirdly, focusing on our growth accelerators and really driving value through those growth accelerators. Let's unpack these three themes, because it's from here that it will provide you with the baseline of where and how we've got to good. It also then provides you with that baseline in terms of how we are going on the journey to greatness and how you can then connect the dots in terms of how our people will then tell you about that journey to greatness. People and culture. We put our people first in everything that we do. Our people are our most important commodity, asset, human touch within our business. We have a diverse and very inclusive workforce and culture, and we've been agile and flexible. You look at the challenges that the world has been focused on. We've put our people first. We've provided them, our team, our people, with as much support as we possibly can. Looking after people's health, wellbeing, support, whilst at the same time focusing on their development, their training, and how we contin... Can continue to excel and outperform the competition and delight our customers. Our people have been truly amazing, and I, for one, am absolutely delighted with everything that they do. They are going that extra mile. They are treating headwinds as opportunities. But the most important element of all of this is that they are having fun along the way. When Lindsley says, "Smile," it is fantastic to see our people smiling and enjoying what they're doing. Jordan is gonna cover this in a lot more detail in terms of the whole people and culture journey that we have been on. As we move on to operational excellence, execution and product availability, there's lots of positives here. We have invested in our distribution centers with more capacity and more automation. Scalable global network allowing inventory to be sourced more locally and stocked more locally, which will support stronger growth for our business going forward. We've invested in automation, environmental efficiencies, and new technologies, and we've invested in global shared business services, and you'll hear a little bit more about this later, to drive scale and efficiency. We're leveraging and investing in wisdom, insight, and data, and you're going to hear from Abby and Darshan as to how we're going to use that as a key differentiator and a value driver going forward. Then finally, the three growth accelerators which underpin our vision of being first choice, of being easy to do business with. Two, offering a broad and deep product range with strong, very strong availability. Thirdly, to provide product, services, and solutions that solve our customers' problems. You will hear more about all of those three from our team as we go through the balance of this afternoon. Those three focus areas have delivered outperformance. Since 2014, 2015, since Lindsley's arrival, our revenue has doubled. Our profit has tripled. We've generated GBP 725 million of adjusted free cash flow. Our balance sheet has been strengthened. We've established M&A capability with a strong pipeline. We've completed five transactions, but with very strong disciplines as to why and the financial returns that we're looking from that invested capital. We've delivered nearly 25% return on capital employed in the first half of this year. As Lindsay said, and I reiterate, we have become a good company. We are pleased and proud of what's been delivered, but we're not satisfied. Let's now look forward to the agenda that we will go through today. We see plenty of opportunity on our journey to greatness. We break the future value-generating opportunities down into four themes. One, our addressable market is large, our addressable market is highly fragmented, and our market share is less than 1%. Two, we have a differentiated business model, which is good, but we see significant upside on our journey to greatness. To further differentiate our business model, we will focus on a number of areas, and you will hear about all of these very shortly. Galvanizing a high-performing purpose-led culture. Realizing world-class customer experience. Extending our insight, wisdom, and data. Accelerating to a solution-led innovative business. Transforming our exceptional capabilities. Great is what we are aspiring to get to. We have a purpose-led... Number three, we have a purpose-led culture that is ensuring that we are making amazing happen for a better world with ESG embedded in all that we do. Finally, fourth, we see the opportunity to accelerate our organic growth ambitions through strategically aligned acquisitions. For each of these four, we are in a good position, but we want to be in a great position. It will take time, it will take effort, but the vast majority of the effort will be deemed business as usual with greater pace and greater acceleration. During the balance of today, you will hear from our team and see in the breakout rooms, either here in the room or online, how these four value-generating opportunities will enable us to deliver stronger revenue and high-quality profitable growth enhanced by strategically aligned acquisitions with a mid-teen adjusted operating profit margin and at least a 20% return on capital employed. Let's begin with the first value-generating opportunity, the market. I'm delighted to introduce you to Dr. Barry Lawrence. Dr. Lawrence is a distinguished professor of Industrial Distribution from Texas A&M University. The Industrial Distribution program at Texas A&M was founded in 1956. It is the oldest and largest education and research program of its kind in the world. Dr. Lawrence has been part of the program for more than 30 years. His extensive industry knowledge, contacts, and knowledge about the market is second to none. Dr. Lawrence will be sharing his thoughts on the market, trends, and how RS is positioned. Welcome, Barry, and over to you. Thank you, David. When we look at the Industrial Distribution program, as David said, was started some time ago, and we've watched distributors move through the years and seen what's been taking place. In that, we can get a good look at what the market trends have meant. When it first started, you know, when you first started the processes, it was about following what the suppliers were doing. The suppliers set us up in channels. Channels such as electrical, electronics, and others. What we're seeing is that those channels are being broken apart at this time by companies like RS. As we look at what market trends are taking place and why these things are taking place, one thing is we get this disruption that's led also with innovation. The idea here is, can we disrupt the way markets are working? One way is you can do a disruption where you say, "Okay, we're gonna have a big player who can disrupt the market because they have so much power." Another way we can disrupt, and one that's perhaps more important, is we can disrupt the channel by having the channel itself start to change to where it's now we can have players in the channel moving and running in different processes. Things that will drive this digital transformation. When we look at what the digital companies have done and what the digital processes have done, is they have led to new ways that distributors are working. In the process, we've also been able to rethink the distributor themselves, and that means such things as the massive amount of value-added services that are being led into the marketplace. These value-added services require distributors that have capabilities to lead with these value-added services. When you look at these value-added services are being taken, and we certainly see it in RS, where RS has different divisions with different value-added services, and they become a leader in several of these areas, and that gives them tremendous growth opportunities. How big is this market? Well, you look at the global market, there's only one way to describe it. It's massive. I mean, it's absolutely massive. Although, I think David corrected me before, I'm supposed to say large. You look at it, electronics market itself, it's $788 billion. I mean, David said that RS Components is a small percentage of these markets because they have only, like, 1% of the market. Well, if a market's $788 billion, nobody's going to be big compared to that market. What that means is the market gives us tremendous opportunities, but it's not the only one. We got electrical at $518 billion, and that one is growing fast. Then we have automation and control, and you see facilities and management and so forth. What is RS's position in this? You see the market segments they're operating in. This is really important. They put themselves in seven different markets, and that's really significant because that means that they are a small percentage of seven different markets. Therefore, if they're going to grow, it's relatively simple because you're not gonna be running up against a huge market leader who won't let you make a move. You're a small percentage of the market, so you can literally double the size of the company with relative ease because you're not going up against a tremendous wall. Now, the serviceable markets that RS can go after, we see that they're looking at these seven different areas. Electronics, we've already talked about. It's an enormous market. Electrical is an enormous but fast-growing market. Automation and control is a fast-growing market. Facilities and management is a huge market, slower growth. and mechanical power is again a good size market, not growing quite as fast. Single board computing is a small market, but it's growing extremely fast. A lot of opportunities in these areas. What's fascinating about it, as we have been looking at Electrocomponents and now RS for quite some time, we've seen RS position themselves into these seven different categories. That means that if they hit a particular market, one of the markets maybe suddenly becomes difficult, then they can grow into the other markets. It leaves them openings in several different areas. RS Group, therefore, taking all of that, means that they have positioned themself for growth. That's what's clear to me. I look at the company and say, "This company has put themselves in a position that have limitless opportunity to grow." The markets that they have positioned themselves in are also growing at a significant rate. That means that they've not only given themselves a variety of markets to grow in, but the markets themselves are growing very fast. They have developed and acquired capabilities. They've made a lot of investments in their actual skills, capabilities, and those investments mean that the company can actually deliver on these growth opportunities. If you've got a huge growth opportunity, first question that comes to mind is, can you capitalize on it? They've made the investments to do that, to support their growth opportunities. They have operational strength. We have spent quite a few years with RS Group now. Our students are here, and we've actually done many studies on them, and what we've learned is that they have many operational areas that they are growing into. We've done studies on their integrated supply group and on many of their other groups that are working within the company. They have tremendous skills. They are positioned to take advantage of a consolidating market. The markets are big, but they're consolidating. The market opportunity is immense or large, and RS Group has proven that it has the capabilities to take advantage of this market, of these particular markets. Okay. I'll turn it back over to David. Thank you, Barry. Well done. Just by way of translation, enormous or immense is in my language from Australia, large. Thank you, Barry, for all of that. I'd just like to say, I forgot to say that I'm actually trying to emcee and keep us on track in terms of timing. You're gonna see a little bit of me during the course of today. Dr. Lawrence has also joined today in the room with Dr. Esther and also four of the students from Texas A&M University. Please, for those that are in the room, we'd be delighted if you could spend some time with them later. For those that are virtual, there is a video of the students, and we would be delighted if you could take the time to listen to the students from Texas A&M. Moving on. Let's move on to our differentiated business model. As I said, and as Lindsley said, it's good, but it's not good enough, and we see plenty of opportunities for us to move this forward. To explain how we're going to move forward on our journey to greatness, I'm gonna hand you over to our colleagues. Galvanizing a high-performance, purpose-led culture. You're gonna hear from Jordan. Mike and Jessie will describe how we can realize more from delivering a world-class customer experience. Abby and Darshan are gonna explain how we can extend our wisdom, insight, and data for our customer lifetime value and our decision-making. Doug and Simon are going to outline how we're accelerating our solutions business and how innovation is coming to the fore of our group going forward. Finally, in distribution, as Lindsley keeps saying, execution is key. We have Sean Fredericks explaining through an example, an APAC example or the APAC journey, as to how it's all coming together within that region in transforming our executional capabilities. Let me introduce you to Jordan, our new Chief People and Culture Officer, who's gonna talk to you about our purpose-led culture. Over to you, Jordan. Hello. Hello, everybody. Great to be here today. I'm gonna be spending some time talking to you about how we intend to galvanize a performance-led, high-performing culture. I joined RS in January this year as its first ever Chief People and Culture Officer, which for me in and of itself is a really clear statement about what is important to us as an organization and what we intend to continue to focus on over the next three to five years. Why? Because organizations that actively invest in their culture outperform their competitors on average by 30%. Fast-forward to a post-pandemic era, and that gulf is set to broaden by as much as a further 10%. I did this yesterday, I forgot the clicker, so that's the feedback. Clearly, I've not taken that feedback on board. Start again. There we go. I'm on track. As an investor, how important is culture to you in terms of its impact on your return on investment? This important? Even more important than that? Because my guess, if I'd have asked you the same question 10 years ago, you probably would have thought that I'd turned up to the wrong convention. Yet here we are today, and performance and the value of a performance-led culture and its commercial value is real. Have I still got sound? Yeah. How do I know that? Because I was the person that the more progressive PE houses used to send in to perform that assessment. As I was kind of preparing my speaker notes for today, I wanted to really ensure that my purpose as a Chief People Officer was aligned to your purpose as an investor. Out of interest, how would you describe your purpose as an investor? Is it to make lots of money? Is it to generate return on investment? Because I don't know about you, but those reasons that we've just discussed, they feel almost too simple, too basic, because I would argue that for most of us in this room here today, our purpose is much, much deeper than that. So maybe for some of you, it's to provide for your families, or maybe for some others, it's about creating the opportunities for your children that you never had. Regardless, my point being, as people, purpose drives everything that we do, which is why you've heard all the people here today talk so passionately about the value of a purpose-led culture and why we need to make that our greatest differentiator. Which kind of leads me elegantly full circle back to my purpose as a Chief People Officer, which is to work with everybody in this room and all the people in our organization to make a purpose-led culture our greatest differentiator and drive that value for you as our investors. Two weeks ago, we were awarded Company of the Year at the PLC Awards. I bet if you were to ask any of the leaders here today when we have our breakouts and you mingle around, what they would say was the key to our success. I guarantee that what most of them would say is that it's our people who continue to be our greatest differentiator as an organization and the reason why we continue to stay ahead. What do we mean by galvanizing a high-performance culture? It sounds quite fluffy, doesn't it? What I would say is, as a Chief People Officer who's done this in a number of organizations, is that the litmus test for me is that none of this is rocket science. So when our people walk through the front door every day, we want them to understand our strategy, but more importantly, we need them to understand the part that they play in delivering that strategy. We need to ensure that our people have the skills and mindset to get us there. How many times do we hear such and such is really good at their job, but they've got terrible behavior? Well, in my mind, we need to speak to that person about their terrible behavior because it's not just about their technical competence. This is really important in today's era. When our people show up every day, we want them to do so without the fear of discrimination, fear of being judged, that they can show up as themselves, whoever, whatever that might be. I want us that when people apply for a role in our business, the candidate experience is so fantastic that they talk about it in the market regardless of whether they get a job with us or not. I think the most important thing for me, and this will be something that everybody can relate to, leadership experience. A human, authentic leadership connection with the person that you work for where you know their names, you know their family, you know what the dog's called. Because how many of us have worked for really ineffective, terrible leaders, and what was the net result of that? We probably left. I wanted to spend just a few moments bringing some of our workforce to life. As it stands today, we have around 7,500 people globally across 32 countries. We have a perfectly even split of men and women. 39% of our workforce are Millennials, 36% are Gen X, 14% are Boomers, which I bet you were quite surprised by that, weren't you? We've also got 6% that identify as other and 5% who identify as Gen Y. I could sit here or stand rather and wax lyrical on all of the great things that we've done in the people and culture space as an organization. However, as someone that's relatively new to the business, I thought it'd be actually much more impactful if I just called out a few of the things that have really stood out to me in my really short period of time of being here as an expert. In 2020, our D&I strategy earned us a top place in the top 50 most inclusive employers in the UK. Our retention rate is around 90%. Since 2019, our employee engagement scores continue to trend in the right direction, and as they stand today, we are scored at 75 points out of 100. To provide a bit of context around that, it needs... We need to get to 79 out of 100 to be in the top 25% global organizations and to get to the top 10%, we need to score 82 out of 100. In our engagement scores, what was really interesting to me, the highest performing factors were well-being and inclusion. For those of you that know anything about culture, they are two of the hardest topics to land authentically in an organization. The most important thing as well, which is something that Lindsley's talked about, we have a number of cutting-edge development programs that are united in a single purpose, which is to drive the behaviors that are really important to us as an organization. Can anyone guess what those behaviors are? We heard them earlier. Passion, humility, and trust. Now, I will never forget my second interview with Lindsley, where we had a really open and honest conversation, and we said unless we were really gonna go for it, and we're gonna make be number one for our people and make culture our greatest differentiator, why would we bother at all? For me, our mission is really clear: to create a space for our people where they are proud and excited to come to work. We've all worked in organizations that had a great culture. We've all worked in organizations that had terrible culture, and we know what we did again. It's a bit like the leadership experience. As I add my finishing touches to the people plan, which I look forward to sharing more of an update with you in due course around the progress that we've made, there's three messages I wanted to leave you with today. Number one, for me, this is all about the leadership experience, which I talked about before. Making sure that there is a genuine connection between our leaders and our people, which makes them want to come to work. By 2030, we want to have 40% of our senior roles held by women and 25% held by ethnically diverse candidates. Why? Not to tick a box, but because when people look into our organization, I want them to see people that look and sound like them. I think the key thing for us in today's society, particularly with all of the acquisitions that we've done, we need to ensure that we have a digital employee experience that is seamless regardless of whether you're logging on in Asia-Pac, you're in America, or you're in EMEA. I've talked a lot about people and culture today. I wanted to hand over and just let you spend a couple of minutes listening to how some of our employees feel about working at RS. I love how ambitious we are here. We really love to dream big and try and make those a reality. I think it's the opportunities that we have to grow and to develop within the organization. There are so many chances for you to progress and lots of learning opportunities out there. What I love about RS culture, it's an international and inclusive organization. It's very pleasant to work with people different than you. This is a business that allows everyone to bring their true selves to work every day. That's not just important from a business perspective because it's releasing us to show our true potential and our true value to the business. It engenders loyalty in those of us who work here, but it's also good humanity as well, and that's what gives our business the soul that it has. We celebrate success, but we are not complacent. Once a milestone is achieved, we set another higher bar and challenge ourselves. The best thing about the culture here is the emphasis that we put on people. I mean that both personally and professionally. For me personally, being the mother of two young children, maintaining a work-life balance is key. Professionally, I've been fortunate enough to develop within the organization as opportunities have presented themselves. Most recently, moving myself and my family to the United States to take on a new role whilst always feeling fully supported by the business. The ability to balance your home life with your work life. You know, I've never had any issues with raising my two children and progressing my career at the rate that suits me. I have been really motivated by our new ESG program. I love that we as a business care about the impact that we're having on people and the planet. It's really heartening to see that we as a big business are playing our part in making the world a better place. I am extremely proud of our education program with the position that we have in the engineering and technology industry. It's incredibly important that we play our part to nurture and empower the next generations of amazing young engineers. A real pleasure to be here today. Thank you for taking the time to come along. Thank you to everybody who's dialed in remotely. I'm going to hand over now to my fantastic colleagues, Mike and Jessie, who are going to be talking about realizing world-class customer experience. Thank you. Thank you. Realizing world-class customer experience, it's what gives RS competitive advantage. As Lindsley said earlier, this is right at the heart of how we go from a good company to a great company. Jessie and I are going to attempt a double act here today, stay with us, and we're going to bring to life for you why we've earned the right to win, why through realizing a world-class customer experience, we can and will continue to outperform the market. This is about, for us, doing two things consistently well. The first, as Lindsley talked about earlier, is our ability to be agile, to adapt to change. For us, that's about adapting to the changing needs of our customers and making sure that we build relevant customer experiences one customer at a time. The second point is that we need to do the fundamental basics of industrial distribution brilliantly. Change is a constant, and I think that we're very proud of what we've achieved, and certainly over the last two years, we've demonstrated that we can be agile, we can adapt to change. That will need to continue. Some things don't change. Some things stay the same. For me, and I don't know about my colleagues here, but it was an incredibly proud moment, Bob, for you to come up on stage. Seven years in the company, you know, Lindsley's spoken about you an awful lot. I get a lot of inspiration. I've been in the industry for 26 years in industrial distribution. For just about 20 of those, I've competed with RS. You know, I know the things that. Where we've lost our way. You know, when you showed this catalog earlier, I didn't know you were going to show it was what I was given on my first day in the company seven years ago. The reason it's important to me is that we should never lose sight of the fundamental basics. As Bob called out earlier, for me, it's pretty straightforward. A replacement part for every job, service with a smile, and the customer is always right. That's never going to change. For industrial customers, they're always going to need the right product to do their job. They're always going to need the right services to help them solve the problems that they have. They're also always going to need suppliers that are easy to do business with to help them save time and money, and that will stand the test of time, so we can't lose sight of that. Now, if we move on and start thinking about the culture in the company, which is what Jordan just talked about, and I think and relate that to what customers have always told me for those 20 years of competing with RS and now the seven years within RS, one thing's for sure, one thing this company does really, really well and has done throughout its history is deliver great customer service and great customer experience. Why? Because it is in our DNA, and I firmly believe that, and it was hard to compete against at times. As we look ahead and we think about our growth for the future and greatness, I want to introduce you to this framework about how we accelerate our growth. It's pretty simple, and it's why we're different. It incorporates agility with our ability to do the fundamental basics brilliantly. It starts with an intense and forensic understanding of our customers, their needs, and that has to be changing all of the time. With that, we can build compelling value propositions with the right products and services and touchpoints so that our customers come to us time and time again through experiences which are relevant to them because customers are different. Then finally, if we do that's what makes us first choice. Jessie's now going to bring to life the first part, which is very, very much the recipe for success, which is truly understanding our, who our customers are and how we then take that forward. Jessie. Yeah. Thanks, Mike. We start with a forensic understanding of our customers, as Mike said. We serve over 1.2 million customers globally in a highly fragmented market across a variety of industry verticals. Knowing and understanding them and their wants and their needs is imperative to delivering a customer experience that keeps them coming back. Our initial point of segmentation is what you see here on the left of the slide, our customer pyramid. At the bottom of the customer pyramid is our transactional customers, the customers that come to us for our product range and suite of services. As you move up the pyramid, you start having deeper and deeper relationships with these types of customers that are looking to integrate Their suppliers, and even to looking to consolidate their suppliers. Sorry, that's our key customers, looking to integrate or maybe even fully outsource to us as an organization. We know those customers as our standard, key, and corporate customers with our revenue roughly split 25%, 50%, and 25% today. What's important to know is that in that GBP 400 billion global market opportunity, the opportunity is split a third, a third, a third. Our ability to deliver against this in a profitable way is where our growth will come from. We don't just stop there with our segmentation. We understand that every customer that we're serving, beneath that customer name target ID is a human being with a job role, with performance goals, with corporate objectives. We have analyzed over 100 billion data points and have arrived at a customer segmentation strategy across 11 potential target personas in the industrial B2B space. 11 personas, three of which you can see reflected on the slides today. You'll learn more in the customer experience breakout room later. We use that as a global tool set to ensure that we have the right information to create a truly relevant experience in every touch point that we have with our customers. We understand our customers, then it's about giving them a great compelling value proposition. For industrial B2B customers, they're doing a range of activities. They're designing, they're building, they're maintaining industrial operations and equipment, but also they wanna do that safely, and more importantly for the future, they wanna do that sustainably. That's very much where our value proposition starts. After that, it's about ensuring that we give them the right product choice, the right products and service solutions, and also making sure that we're easy to do business with. Now, there's a very, very important change happening in our industry, which is the convergence of electronics and industrial technologies into mechatronics. For industrial customers, that means that more often than not, they're searching for a combined experience so that they can access those technologies. When Dr. Barry Lawrence was talking about that market opportunity in the channels, from a customer perspective, as they're thinking about consolidating. They want to be able to buy their electronic products, their electrical products, their controls and automation products, their mechanical and fluid power products, their facilities and maintenance products, and their safety products, ideally through a seamless experience through one supplier. That is what makes us different. Nobody else in the world has that capability. On the product side, we're building out a unique range, and we have built out a unique range of electronic and industrial products. We have over 80,000 own brand products under the brand of RS PRO, which is significantly important and continues to grow exponentially. We've also invested in technology, ensuring that we can ingest and set up new suppliers, but also go deeper with existing suppliers so we can expand our range as quickly as possible, relevant to our customer needs. As David said earlier, we've expanded our distribution centers in the Americas and Germany to give capacity in order to do that. On product and service solutions, we've built a portfolio of services which are in play today: e-commerce, calibration, DesignSpark. Doug's gonna cover these off in much more detail later. That makes the customer sticky. It creates loyalty, and as Doug will tell you, it also drives growth. Finally, ease of doing business. That's harnessing the power of a digital experience with a human touch where relevant. Why is that important? Because customers today want to transact with us and interact with us through different means, and we need to make sure that we can achieve that. We've invested in our digital experience. We've gone live around the world with a responsive website, which means customers can effortlessly move between one device and another. We now have over 50 million visits to our website every month. We've launched live chat across all of our platforms with over 10,000 customers a month now interacting digitally but with a human touch. For our over 1,500 technically trained salespeople around the world, we've invested in training programs and making sure that they're focusing on high-potential customers with quality first in what we do. Now, do take time to get into the breakout rooms as David's spoken about. We will cover off much more detail around our customer experience, around our product offering, around services and solutions, but also around innovation. Let's hand over to Jessie, who's gonna talk more about how we take this to market through that customer experience. Thanks. Yeah. This all culminates in our ability to deliver our customer proposition across each of our customer segments in a value accretive way. We are digitally led with a human touch, and so what we see reflected with the customer pyramid again up on this slide is that with our transactional customers, our standard customer base, we have created and developed a highly relevant, seamless, yet digitally enabled experience to serve them in the most profitable way. As you go up the pyramid with our key and our large multinational corporate customers, we strategically deploy our highly skilled sales and service professionals that Mike spoke of to increase the stickiness, to add value, and to increase the overall value that we are able to get out of our customers. This is how we deliver profitable growth against that total market opportunity. We have also deployed a very effective and critical listening capability. You see up here reflected the voice of the customer and the voice of the supplier, both best-in-class solutions that allow us to have real-time insight from our customers, from our suppliers, that we can feed in not only to fix immediate challenges, but also to think about how we build and enhance and iterate on our customer experience in the future. Now, becoming first choice is not something that we can award ourselves. Can't just pat ourselves on the back and say, "Hey, you're first choice." You have to earn it. You have to earn it. When you look at the performance results that you see reflected up here, we're certainly along the right path. Over the past two years, we have an indexed growth rate here by customer segment across the pyramid over the last two years. You see in the top reflected customer count, we are serving more customers. You see in the bottom reflected average order value. When we serve them, they are buying more from us. We are seeing growth. Our customer experience is working, and we know we have so much more growth out there in front of us. But don't just take it from us. Here's a word from one of our corporate customers in the German market, Lufthansa, who already has deemed us their first choice. Let's take a look. Good morning, Christian. Thank you for having us here in Hamburg at the Lufthansa headquarters. Our central purchasing department has concluded a contract with RS Components and makes the entire RS product range available in our internal portal. This naturally makes my ordering very easy. Great. With test and measurement tools, I have a huge range available from RS at any time and quickly. When it comes to designing and building very specific test instruments, I naturally appreciate the extensive range of electronic components. If something is not available or is available, then there will always be an alternative with RS. I will always find something to continue constructing. Nice. Nice. Yes, of course, we also work with other competitors, but with RS I have everything available quickly in a huge, broad range. Why should I order from anywhere else? Great. Yes, availability is of course very important from a broad range, but new articles and innovations are at least just as important. The personal contact, a good, large range and, of course, quick delivery. Great to hear from one of our pretty loyal customers there, and hopefully that just summarizes what we've just discussed in terms of where we are today. Of course, we can't stop there. You know, as I said before, realizing world-class customer experience is a journey. We've come so far. We've come to a place which is good, but we wanna go to a place that's great. We do that by continuing to focus on our growth accelerators. For our customers, this is about using insight and predictive analytics so that we understand their needs before they even know what they are. In the area of product, moving towards much more data-driven range expansion and optimization led by insight, making sure we're listening to the needs of our customers in an effective way. On products and service solutions, rolling out to more markets those services we already have, expanding out our global i ntegrated supply offering, but also bringing new services to market, which I know that Doug will talk about with Simon later. In terms of ease of doing business, it's continuing to enhance that omni-channel experience, which means we've got to continue to work on those digital interactions and also working to make sure that we optimize our sales organization. That's how we will realize world-class experience. Now, underpinning that, and we must not forget, as an industrial distributor, that our relationships with our suppliers is an absolute key enabler here. Actually, we've talked a lot about world-class customer experience. We have to be equally focused on world-class supplier experience, because more and more in a digital world, that ecosystem of suppliers and distributors coming together to create world-class customer experiences, bringing technology, new innovation, solutions and services to market is only going to increase, and we want to be right at the forefront of that with our supply partners. Quick video from one of our key strategic partners and suppliers, Siemens. My name's Scot Gardner, and I am the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing globally for Siemens Digital Industries. For Siemens Digital Industries, we use RS because you're a recognized and reputable brand. Customers know you, whether that from the catalog world or in more recent times in the digital world. You're a one-stop shop. People come to you, they can take products from ourselves, but they also can meet other requirements as well. If you're industry, that's typically what you need. You need someone that you can rely on, who delivers, and can bring things together and make your world better. RS helps Siemens in our business because, like industry, you're open 24/7. Industry needs that to deliver what it needs to do. You know, supporting our customers very rapidly, very agilely is truly amazing. Actually, that's a big part of the value Siemens sees in RS. Our ability to bring together logistics, customers, and their needs very rapidly is a great support for them and for us. RS will help us in the future because the market for industrial technology is growing steadily. Coming out of the back of the pandemic, customers want to know how to digitize, how to transform. By partnering together, we can help kickstart our customers into those changes and transformations that they need to take to be successful together. If I was to describe RS in three words, I think reliable, international, which matters to many of our customers, and partner. Actually working closely together on what we do together in the future. Great. Just in summary, realizing world-class customer experience, it gives us competitive advantage, and it's how we're going to go from good to great through being agile and through doing the basics brilliantly. Continuing to expand our range and optimize our product offering to our customers, building out our portfolio of products and service solutions, and continuing to enhance our omni-channel experience. That's what's at the heart of our continued ability to outperform the market. On behalf of Jessie and I just wanted to extend a real thanks to all of you for listening around the world and for you who've who are here today. It's a real privilege to talk to you, and hopefully you can take away some positive messages there today. Thank you. Hello, I'm Abby, and today I'll be going through the E of great, so how we extend our wisdom, our insight, and our data. Now, wisdom is something that we all possess. It's something that grows as we learn more, as we see more, as we do more. But we're not always that good at accessing it or using it to its fullest. But what does wisdom mean for us in the RS Group? How do we use it? How do we access it, and how do we use it as a source of competitive advantage? In essence, wisdom is our unique knowledge. It's the information and the insights that we get from our data and our people. It's how we then turn that into meaningful insights to predict the future and to predict our outcomes. The first of the sources that we get this wisdom from is our digital presence, and you just heard Mike and Jessie talk about that. It's a source of our competitive advantage. Not only that, but it provides us with a huge amount of data about our customers, what they buy, what they're looking at, when they buy it, who does the buying. The second part of our wisdom comes from our data. We take all of this customer data, we combine it with our internal data, with our external data. We've got over 100 billion records. That's phenomenal. If you think about the opportunity there, it's huge. The third part of our wisdom comes from the caliber of our people, and you've already heard Jordan talk about that. We've got thousands of years of collective experience in our industry. That's really invaluable. We've got really deep customer and supplier relationships, and we need to use that. It's when we combine these three elements together that it gives us our unique wisdom. That's where we get our wisdom from. How do we then use it effectively and help us to become first choice? Commercially, we use our wisdom to make the most of our product range, which suppliers we choose to do business with, how we do business with them, how we set our prices, what markets we choose to operate in. It helps us to identify our most profitable customers and helps us to tailor their experiences. From an operational perspective, our wisdom helps us to look to the future and plan. Where should we be located? Where should we place our stock? Where would we choose to operate? Also our transportation routes. A really great example of this is we have super efficient transportation routes that drive less miles but also drive sustainability. How do we do that? We do that by taking our insight and our data. We use our wisdom. The other area we look at is how we drive and monetize revenue through our insights. Our insights are hugely valuable for our suppliers. We know things about their customers and the market to help them to do things like think about new products to put into their range or more certainty around demand. It's a fantastic opportunity, one that drives value, but also deepens our relationship with our suppliers and also enables us to delight our customers. I'm now going to hand over to Darshan, who's going to speak about some examples of how we use our wisdom with our customers today. Thank you, Abby. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Darshan. I lead our data science function at RS, and I want to talk to you today a bit about how we are harnessing the power of data and machine learning to drive effective commercial decision-making. I want to bring this to life through some examples of things we do today using machine learning to inform customer lifecycle management. Through these models that we've developed, we're able to deploy customer targeting and interaction strategies that allow us to specifically grow and maintain customer loyalty and value, and lifetime value as well, while also improving our CX through relevancy. This covers everything from models where at one end of the funnel, where we're trying to identify profitable B2B customers at one end, right through to the other end, where we're looking at how we can identify risk and decline. If I just expand on a couple of these just to bring to life, because I appreciate it's still quite high level. Prospects. When I talk about prospects here, I'm talking about people who are not yet our customers. High propensity prospects. We have a huge amount of traffic to our website on a daily basis, and it might surprise you to know that a large proportion of this is actually from people who are not currently our customers. These are people who come to our website, interact, and leave. The conversion rate for these prospects is also pretty low, especially when you compare it to our customers who visit our website. Given these two facts, high volumes, low levels of conversion, clearly trying to go after everyone is ineffectual, right? Especially through some of our paid marketing routes. How do we actually go about choosing who we target? Through millions of historical data points, we've developed a predictive model which allows us to score prospects based on their potential and their future profitability, so that we can start to intelligently select who we target for acquisition. The way we have actually done this is we take many, many millions of data points around kind of, you know, what channels people are coming in through to our website, what pages they're looking at, what products they're looking at, what they're doing with their basket, and what we do is we relate that back to a successful, profitable conversion. Ultimately, we use data from yesterday to predict for tomorrow. Through some of our retargeting activity through paid marketing, this model starts to help us to balance both the reach of how many people we try and go after, along with the efficiency and effectiveness of it. What we see is that, you know, we see conversion rates up to 15 times higher, depending on how selective we get, but it's all enabled through data and the modeling. What about when these prospects become customers? What do we do then? We can see on the screen there's a number of different models, and this is just a small selection of the things that we have to help with, to help the business. You know, there's a number of different things we've got that support once they become a customer. We'll pick on the priority matrix. Sounds quite fancy, doesn't it? It is. Once these prospects become customers, the focus then is on longer term opportunity. Through a segmentation model that not only focuses on current value today, but looks at opportunity and headroom and potential as well. The way we do this, again, we model across many different data points. I think it's something like 140 different data points across every customer globally. What it does, it allows us to scientifically size the opportunity for every customer. This is answered differently. Again, similar to the previous model I went through, it allows us, it gives us the control to differentiate that focus and where we apply resource, and you do that based on where the opportunity exists. I think you heard Jessie talking about corporate key standard. Some of those are actually derived directly off the back of this. Again, this is combining machine learning with the commercial expertise of our sales and marketing teams to extract maximum value. That gives a bit of an insight to what happens today, which is good. Where do we wanna get to be great? On screen rather, it's relatively simple, right? We've got data. We wanna build a machine learning engine which generates outcomes that drives relevant next best actions. What we're talking about here is developing a 360-degree view of every customer. What is the risk? What's the potential of that customer? What level of risk is associated with that customer? Which products should we be trying to cross-sell to that customer to drive up our lifetime value, which is a key correlator? What value-added services and solutions should we be proactively trying to sell to that customer? Having that all in one place and then taking that insight and then driving value through every customer interaction and delivering the most relevant next best action, both reactively and proactively, and doing it all in a joined up, consistent way across all channels and touchpoints. If you think of Mike and Jessie talking about delivering a world-class customer experience, you know, for me, I see this as a key enabler to it. You know, we've got 1.2 million customers at one end. We've got, was it 1,500-strong sales force. We've got numerous digital channels. This is the bit that sits in between it. You know, I've been at RS for 18 years now. No, I don't look it, do I? Or do I? You know, my journey started in 2004, so quite I'm one of the old boys, although I don't look it. Yeah, data's always been my passion. As you can probably tell, I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to data. From my point of view, you know, if the customers are the backbone of our business, as they are for any business, the data we generate from them is like the oil. I think now the thing is to get us to great. It's about how we equip ourselves and enable ourselves through the capabilities that we are developing to really start to harvest this valuable asset into a scalable, value-driven solution. In summary, we are driving value today through relevancy and efficiencies and so on, which is good. We are just scratching the surface, we really are. The opportunity in being great is huge. With that, I'll pass back to Abby. Thank you. Brilliant. Thanks, Darshan. Apologies for the laugh. I didn't expect him to make me laugh. How are we going to exploit this opportunity? Well, we're on our journey to become a truly insight-driven organization, one where we use our data-driven insights to support all of our key decisions across the organization. We want to use insights to help our hugely talented people to make the best out of their judgment and their experience. We want to help people to make consistently better decisions and better outcomes, whether that's commercial, operational, or revenue generating. As Darshan mentioned, we're just scratching the surface, but we know what we need to do. We've got a great plan, and we're committed to grow in this space. Now you've heard about our wisdom and the different parts that we take that we feel provides us with differentiation from our competitors. We're going to continue to learn and grow our wisdom and enable us to make consistently better decisions than our competitors. We want to create a more forward-looking, predictive company. Now, wisdom might be something that we all possess, but RS Group are in a unique position where we have wisdoms our competitors don't. Now you have wisdom on why we will remain first choice for all of our stakeholders. Thank you. I'll now hand over to Doug Moody, whose role is focusing on accelerating our programs to become solution-led. Hello, I'm Doug Moody. I'm Chief Services Officer, which much like Jordan's position, is a brand-new role in the company, specifically focused on accelerating us to be a solutions-led, innovative business. Hi, I'm Simon Hilton. I am Senior Vice President of Business Development for Integrated Supply. I thought we'd start today with the voice of our customer and hearing what solutions and services mean to him. My name's Simon Briony. I'm the Site Reliability Manager at Kraft Heinz at Kitt Green. Our main line here at Kitt Green produces 1,200 cans of baked beans per minute. We have various lines that produce up to 20 to 30 million cans per week. It's extremely important to us to meet our customer needs. RS manage our lubrication schedule on-site, and also they do some CBM, which is condition-based monitoring, to help us identify problems and fix them before they break. RS are helping us be amazing every day because due to the scope of their works, I don't believe there's anybody else in the market who does that. RS are part of our shift teams and have lots of experience with our equipment. They also help improve performance due to their knowledge of our equipment. If we don't lubricate bearings or gearboxes or pumps, they will fail within hours. If we was to have a failure today due to a particular machinery failure, we would stop the business. The people at home would not have the beans for their breakfast or for their teas or whatever it may be. I don't think our business will be able to function to its 100% degree without RS being part of our business. If I was to describe RS in three words, it would be reliable, dependable, and forward-thinking. We live in a transforming world. Even I enjoyed my beans with breakfast this morning. We live in a transforming world, but we also live in a world where we see the integration between the digital world and the services and solutions that we gain from that every day. Our customers seek simplicity and reduced process cost. They live in a very inherently complex world. Think of Lucas, the engineer, who spent his morning looking through specifications, other data to make sure he has the right sensor. Then he has to fill out a purchase requisition that he passes on to Isabella, the buyer, and she goes through numerous steps to go through the procure and pay process. This very complex cycle takes up our customers' valuable time, resources, and costs significantly more than the parts themselves. That's right. The GBP 50 sensor that Lucas wants costs him normally GBP 100 in process cost to bring it in the door and to store it. Our customers' challenges and the opportunity for us to benefit our customers doesn't end there. It goes on through the build process and the maintaining process in our customers' plants and operations. We can create significant value across the life cycle of our customers. What do we mean by solutions? Well, we've talked a lot about products and our customer experience. Our customers aren't just looking for products. They're looking for solutions to their problems. That's where we bring services and that great customer experience and products together to create solutions that make us first choice. By solving their problems, our customers' problems, we also support our suppliers, and we create results for RS Group and therefore for our shareholders. Given the market trends, our large customer base, we have the opportunity to grow with our current solutions to solve their problems today, and then to evolve those through an iterative and collaborative process to create new value propositions. As we'll talk about with our innovative ecosystem, to innovate new solutions that are disruptive business models in the market. We will lead change with solutions in RS, which is part of my job, in our customers, and in the market. Today, our solutions span the whole customer life cycle. We have solutions that touch every base, but we are growing those every day. With that, we will change RS and provide these solutions throughout the life cycle. As you see, we have opportunity to grow, and we have lots of different solutions that I'd love to talk more about today, but we don't have time. I'd like to personally invite you to the solutions room during the break to talk to some of our experts about the solutions. Now I'd like to turn it over to Simon, who'll cover one of our growing strategically important solutions, integrated supply. Thank you. It's mid-afternoon, and we're all flagging a little bit, but I'm going to excite you with integrated supply. I'm going to explain it to you very simply, bit of education, in three simple steps, so you understand the solution we offer. On the left-hand side is our customer. Our customer has a core process. They take raw materials, they take some energy, they've got some people and some machinery, add value in a factory and produce a product. In this case, they're producing a muffin. This is a very refined and simplified process. Making a muffin, it has three ingredients or so. It comes out into the marketplace, very simple. That is 80% of their spend, 20% of their transactions. A simple process. The difficult part, the complex part, is the next part of the process. That's the indirect supply chain. These are all the parts that they need to keep the plant running to keep making the muffins. They go through an indirect supply chain, which goes all the way from the vendor, the transactions into a stores, back out and into the engineer's hand. There's multiple points, touch points in that process. All of those can develop pain points for our customers. We do see them develop pain points for our customers. I've seen customers which have 75% invoice rejection. For every product they use, they keep four on the shelf. They have 10,000 products in a stores, only use 1,000 a year. They have 1,000 vendors on their system, 500 they use once in a year. It's a very inefficient process, and they get bottlenecks, pain points, and cost accumulation. What integrated supply does is it takes all of those pain points, it wraps them up into a bundle, and we turn it into a service to the client. We do it for them, only we do it better. We do it in a digitally enabled way. We enable it through our own procurement and stores management platforms. That's very important because it allows us to control the process. It allows us to do all the transactional processing, all the buying, all the storage, all the analysis, and we collect all the data. We gain all the wisdom from their supply chain. That's integrated supply. That's what we do. Take the pain away. It goes from simple, complex, solved. That's integrated supply. On the other side of the integrated supply contract, every time we win one, we convert that client from multi-source, multi-transactional, tactical business into a long-term strategic relationship. The key point of that long-term strategic relationship is that we become the marketplace and through the group, we become the provider. We have a completely protected marketplace that we can provide to and provide value to. Two key areas that all that insight and wisdom gives us. One is we can drive further revenue into the group through the supply chain, RS, Needlers, Liscombe, et cetera. We can drive that product conversion to private label through RS PRO, and we can use our data and our wisdom to generate new innovation, new services. For example, our RS Plus offering, which takes the technology and the digital platform we have, merges that with RS's value-added services to create a new solution for those people who aren't ready to outsource fully or aren't fully scaled to outsource at the moment. We also interact with Industria. Industria acts in that core process and generates demand for the indirect materials, so very complementary to us. I guess there are a couple of takeaways that I'd like you to take away about our integrated supply, is that it is long-term, it is recurring, and it's value retentive for us. Back to Jordan. Okay. We've talked about how solutions make us first choice, but what's the impact? What you see up on the graphs here are four of our customers where we've introduced services and solutions into the business with them. As you can see, whether they're a utility, whether they're a process manufacturer, or they're a major global online retailer, or whether they're a high-end OEM, which is a discrete manufacturer, when we introduce services and solutions, we multiply the relationship, the insights, the loyalty, probably most importantly for us and our shareholders, the volume of business with us. As you can see, we're focused on accelerating to become and be more of a solutions-led innovative business. We intend to do that by growing our existing services, evolving our value propositions, and innovating to disrupt. To stay on the theme of innovation, we're gonna watch a film now about the ecosystem around innovation within RS and how that'll lead to future growth. Innovation. It's in our DNA. Take DesignSpark, our world-leading online design engineering community, which now has 1.2 billion members globally. Or RS PRO, our 80,000-plus private label range. How about OKdo, our single board computing and IoT business spin-out? There's our suite of value-added services that keeps our customers working, and our grassroots higher education and early careers team supporting young professionals. The exciting part about all of this, we're just getting started. We're building our future innovation around four key trends. Digitization in the workplace means new services and new capabilities, like our virtual technical lab in the US and developing a knowledge platform for industrial customers. Data is everywhere. Capturing that data and turning it into insight to create value for customers, that's what RS Industria is bringing to the factory workplace. We're supporting businesses that are addressing sustainability challenges and creating our own services and solutions to help improve outcomes for businesses and communities. Technology is shaping today and tomorrow. We're exploring emerging tech to identify and bring in the new capabilities that will create value, increase loyalty, and reduce cost. Our ecosystem of internal innovation, partnerships, and open innovation, working with startups and businesses across the globe, are helping us innovate faster, creating liftoff and new value for customers, suppliers, and stakeholders that build long-term advantage. Living up to our purpose, making amazing happen for a better world. As Lindsley said, all of this doesn't mean much unless we can transform that into executional capabilities. To cover that, I'll be followed by Sean Fredericks, our President, Asia Pacific, and Ellen Li, our CFO, Asia Pacific. Unfortunately, Sean was unable to travel, so he'll be joining us by video. Hi, my name is Sean Fredericks, and I am responsible for RS Asia Pacific. RS Components has been operating in APAC since 1998 and has direct operations in four sub-regions, namely Australasia, Greater China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Ever since inception, RS have never made profit in APAC, and in FY 2016, RS APAC had revenue of GBP 160 million and an operating profit loss of GBP 15 million or -10%. In FY 2015-2016, the region went through a significant restructuring program to reduce costs by 40% of the workforce and closing offices, reducing warehouses, which helped APAC achieve break-even operating profit in FY 2019. With low single-digit growth through the following years, it still was nowhere near close to an acceptable performance. For the last two years, we have designed and executed transformations to further grow the region from low single-digit growth to a high-growth, high-profit region. What we have been doing is setting business fundamentals for sustained high performance, which includes four key elements of the business. Number one, strategy and organization. Number two, people and culture. Number three, operational excellence. Number four, focus on results while constantly increasing the bar. In the strategy and organization pillar, the focus is on building a local value-driven strategy and creating a lean and scalable organization to drive the strategy. Under people and culture, we focused on finding the right people for the job, promoting leaders internally and hiring external high-caliber people to create a P&L-driven and empowered culture by giving teams basic tools and insights to run a profitable business. In operational excellence, the focus is on aligning the functional and individual goals towards business strategy and constantly looking for ways to improve efficiency by achieving more with less. At the same time, driving a results-driven culture through transparency of results and clear accountabilities, and of course, celebrating successes as one team. We have been living these processes in APAC for the last two years and have achieved some significant milestones. Having an aligned local and dynamic go-to-market strategy and constantly evolving it, drive P&L empowerment and accountability, identify, promote, and develop our leaders and teams while focusing on diversity, implementing an A to Z strategy deployment process which aligns goals, objectives, and direction, and building a results-driven organizational culture with problem-solving skills across the board. A couple of notable successes for us has been in the areas of the end-to-end strategy deployment and execution. Utilizing our collective market knowledge and external trends, we developed our strategy for APAC and implemented through a structured lean methodology-driven deployment process. We demonstrated problem-solving and next-level thinking by implementing a small order handling charge to overcome the increased freight challenge caused due to the supply chain disruptions in COVID-19, moving towards sourcing and stocking more products locally within the Asia region so that we reduce freight costs, lead times, as well as reduce our carbon footprint through less international freight dependencies. While we relentlessly pursue our performance with fast execution, we also keep ESG closely within our view. Small order handling charge was implemented in the beginning of this year to encourage customers to consolidate their orders to reduce unnecessary deliveries and reduce carbon footprint. Our local sourcing initiative has the same goal, to shorten the delivery path for a greener planet. Who understands? Good. Okay. I'm Ellen Li, CFO of RS Components Asia Pacific. I come from Taiwan, so I thought I would start with my self-introduction in Chinese. I'm based in Hong Kong. I oversee the finance operations of 12 markets in Asia Pacific. Earlier, you heard from my colleague, Sean Fredericks, talking about fast execution in Asia Pac. I'm here to talk about the center of expertise and how it strengthens the fast execution in the region. In 2018, we established the Center of Expertise, COE, in Foshan, China. COE is part of the global business shared business services. We started from zero to more than 250 people now. The reason for setting up the COE is that we see huge opportunities. The opportunities for us to be more profitable, the opportunity for us to be more efficient, and the opportunity for us to become a world-class company. In COE, we have customer service, finance, inventory management, and reporting, and other functions to support the region. The COE is formed by people who are very international. We have people speaking over 10 languages and interact with customers in different markets in different time zones. Let me give you a couple examples how people improve the processes in the center of expertise. Our customer service team process over 100,000 orders every month. In the past, the process was managed in each market with local decision. After the work was consolidated in the center of expertise, the team was able to standardize the process and making it consistent across the board and further prioritize the order in an efficient and systematic way. Finance is another important function in the center of expertise. By consolidating the AR collection work in the center, the team was able to assess the customer credit at a regional level and offer more competitive terms to our strategic customers. The team was also able to exchange the AR overdue information among the markets more effectively and try to minimize the collection days as well as the default risks. Over the last two years, our DSO, the collection days, has significantly improved, which generated millions of positive cash flow to the region. The standardized processes makes it very easy for us to scale up the business while operating for less. Since 2018, we have saved millions of GBP on labor cost and overheads. With that, we are able to reinvest the fund into the strategic initiatives and to further increase the company value as well as the shareholders' benefits. Our journey with the center of expertise has begun and progressed very well so far. There are still other transformational projects awaiting to happen in the center of expertise. The COE will continue to be the solid foundation to support the fast-growing business in Asia Pac. [Foreign language]. Thank you very much. I Thank you. I would be very delighted to share with you more about the APAC story in the breakout room later on. Please come to me before going to anyone else. Now you are going to hear from my colleague Sean again talking about the performance progression in the region. As a result of these developments, we've been able to transform the APAC business into a truly outstanding world-class business with revenue, net profit, employee engagement, NPS, all at an all-time high. We have moved RS APAC to be a relevant and meaningful competitor. Our 600+ employees around the region are far more engaged and motivated as our My Voice results have increased from 59 to 77 in just two years, with participant rates at 95%, taking us to the top quartile of engagement compared with our peers. I wanna thank you for listening and look forward to meeting you. Thank you. Thank you, Sean and Ellen. It's a fantastic example, but one of many across our group, where execution is fundamental in terms of both our existing performance, but also the opportunity that we see going forward. I would just ask you to just think about this. Execution is key to our future success. That is a very live, real example. Go into the breakout rooms and you'll see plenty more where further execution is going to take us forward. I just ask you to put your hands together for our APAC team because we do believe it is quite an outstanding progression that's been delivered. We've now taken you through two of our key value-generating drivers. You'll be delighted to hear that we're going to now have a break. We're gonna have a break for 20 minutes. You're gonna stretch your legs, grab a drink. We'd also like to encourage you to visit our breakout rooms, whether you're in the room here or if you're online. For those virtually, in the main menu of your... on the left-hand side, you'll find a tab called Breakout Room. Here you'll find some great content and some great videos that have been taken of our team, and these, and the breakout rooms and the future value opportunities. For those of you in the room, there are four distinct rooms here. Two on my left and two on my right. You will get some time at the end of the session, but we would encourage you to try and visit each of the four rooms. The first room is our solutions room. Here you can explore our value-added solutions, integrated supply, and RS Industria. We invite you to look deeper into how we solve our customer, customers' urgent issues and bring value to their organizations. Our second room is the customer experience room. Here you can see how we create competitive advantage by building and optimizing a connected series of personal experience for our customers. The third of our breakout rooms is our product room. Here you can learn about our own brand, RS PRO, and our expanding product ranges and how we partner with our suppliers and to drive value to our customers. The final room is our innovation for the future room. Here we'll know all about our young people are our future. We're passionate about inspiring, nurturing, and empowering the next generations and being socially and environmentally responsible. We're with them every step of the way, and let us take you on a journey from a curious child to a budding young engineer, seeding the creators, entrepreneurs, and visionaries of the future. Also in this room, you will see The Washing Machine Project, and Nav, the CEO of The Washing Machine Project. This is very special to us as an organization. This is RS Group's global charity partner of making amazing happen for a better world. We'll leave you with that. You have 20 minutes, and the clock is started. Thank you. Hi, I'm John O'Rourke, and I'm in Fort Worth, Texas. Hi, I'm Jerry. I'm from India. Hi, my name is Ling. I am in Copenhagen. Hi, my name is Augustine Rosario. Hi, I'm Armando Vargas. Hi, I'm Jessie Dearien. Hi, I'm Christiana Bettis. Hi, I'm Barbara. Hi, I'm Dan Brennan. Bonjour, je m'appelle Sandrine Vivien. Hallo, ich bin Christian. Hi, my name's Hayley. Hi, I'm Vivian Vincent. Hi, I'm Mark Taggart. Hi, I'm Nadja Trogisch. Hi, I'm Bernadette McFall. Hi, I'm Larissa. Hi, I'm Manisha Kadoche. Hi, jeg hedder Anders [Foreign language]. Hi, I'm Jane Massey. [Foreign language] Hola, mi nombre es Ángel Rivera. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hello. Hi. Hi. Hi. [Foreign language]. Hi. [Foreign language]. Hello. Hi. Hello. Hi. Hi, my name is Joe Gibney. I've worked for RS Ireland for the last 45 years, and I've enjoyed supporting all of our customers. Just some of our amazing people, and I'm sure there's many others in this room as well. Welcome back, everyone. I hope you've had a break and a bit of a chat and coffee. For those both virtually and in the room, you've experienced the early stage of our breakout rooms. I would really encourage you, for those in the room, to visit our room, the breakout rooms at the end of the event. For those that are online and virtual, please take your time and visit the online breakout section within this event. Now on to our third of our future value-generating opportunities on our journey to greatness. This one is, we are making amazing happen for a better world with ESG embedded in everything that we do. I'd like to introduce you to Andrea Barrett, our VP of Social Responsibility and Sustainability, who will outline why ESG is so important, how it's embedded in all that we do. Andrea, over to you. Hi, good afternoon, everyone. It's great to see you and to be here today. I'm really excited to be part of this event to highlight our transformation and our journey to greatness. I joined the business in January last year as our first VP of Social Responsibility and Sustainability. I met many of you in November last year at our interim results when we launched our 2030 ESG action plan. At RS... Have we got some slides? Are they there? Yes. Great. We believe that our purpose-led culture and strong ESG approach is key to being first choice with our stakeholders and driving our journey to greatness. I've seen many times over the last year how this approach is differentiating us with our stakeholders, and that's our people, our customers and suppliers, communities, and of course, you, our shareholders and investors. As Jordan said earlier, we're galvanizing our people around our ambition to be a great company that makes amazing happen for a better world. This is an extremely motivating and inspiring proposition, and I think it really speaks to why so many talented people are really attracted to join RS and stay with us in the long term. I know that I personally have had such an incredibly rewarding first year in the business. The power of purpose doesn't end with our people. We are positioning RS as a leader in creating a more sustainable and responsible global industrial sector, and that has many benefits for our customers and our suppliers. For our customers, we are a strategic ESG partner, offering them a cleaner and greener distribution model, more sustainable products and service solutions, and help to steward a more responsible supply chain. This approach is key to helping us grow, retain, and really attract new relationships. Let me give you an example. Our strong ESG approach has really helped us to win two new multimillion-pound relationships, one for RS in the UK with a large Caterpillar dealer, and another for Synovus in the US with one of the world's largest semiconductor manufacturers. We see that ESG is now a key category in the majority of customer pitches and tenders, and our approach is really helping to differentiate ourselves. For our suppliers, we're demonstrating that we're first choice to position their latest clean tech and sustainable products, as well as boosting supply chain standards. For our communities, we're supporting young engineers and innovators to build their skills, but also to develop future innovations that are helping to solve societal and sustainability challenges. Finally, to you, our investors and shareholders, we believe that our strong ESG approach gives you confidence that we've got the right strategy, that we're managing our most material ESG risks, and seizing the opportunities that we have to grow and consistently deliver returns in the long term for all of our stakeholders. How are we doing? Well, I'm really pleased to say that we're making strong progress against all of our four global 2030 ESG goals. I'm really excited to share our progress with you in May at our full-year results, but today I just wanted to give you a few highlights. Our first goal of advancing sustainability. We're in the process of validating our three science-based carbon reduction targets across all three scopes of our emissions with the Science Based Targets initiative. For the first time, we're introducing ESG targets into our people's annual bonus incentive across all levels and geographies, something we're really proud of, and we know it's going to drive progress. There's a huge amount of work happening to deliver our net zero ambitions. If I was to highlight just one key example, it's in the restructuring of our supply chain to source, store, and deliver more products locally and closer to our customers, and this is all made possible by our global footprint of 14 distribution centers. This approach is really helping to drive cost, miles, and emissions out of our supply chain and help create a better future for everyone. Our expanded DC in Germany is such a brilliant example and really helps to bring this all to life. It has a solar power roof and green grass seeded roof, state-of-the-art automation and technology throughout, and its central positioning in Europe means that products travel less miles to reach our customers in continental Europe. With our goal of championing education and innovation, our second goal, we support hundreds of thousands of young people through our education programs and our DesignSpark platform, as well as selling to over 200 universities worldwide, and that's growing every day. Why? It's simple. This action not only helps us to close skills gaps in our industry, it's also driving commercial sales for RS, and it's fostering that innovation that solves societal problems. That's why we're rolling out our global education program in many more of our markets this year. I hope you enjoyed hearing all about this in the future room, the future innovations room in the breakouts. I also hope that you got to meet Navjot Sawhney, the founder of the Washing Machine Project. Such an incredibly inspiring gentleman. You know, the innovation that you've developed is really helping communities in need, so we're so proud to have you as our global social partner. If you didn't get a chance to talk to Navjot Sawhney, please go and do so. Also, you have a little flyer in your goody bag. I'd encourage you to read all about the Washing Machine Project, and if you feel compelled to, there's a QR code where you can donate as well. Thank you. Our third goal, empowering our people. You heard from Jordan earlier about the exciting progress that we're making to ensure our culture is our greatest differentiator, but most importantly, how we're really empowering our people to lead the next level of our business success and transformation and how that's driving our journey to greatness. Doing business responsibly is our final goal, and our focus here is all about creating a more responsible and sustainable supply chain. We are taking incredibly proactive action to screen and manage all of our suppliers. We know that this is the right thing to do above all, but it's also creating real value for our customers who have increased confidence and choice over their buying decisions. What does this all mean? How are we being recognized? Well, I'm really proud that we are being recognized for our strong ESG action with top-tier ratings that are really differentiating us with our customers, our suppliers, and hopefully with you as well. For the first time this year, we've been voted Sustainalytics global top 50 ESG companies. We're rated A with MSCI, A minus with CDP, and we achieved a gold medal rating with EcoVadis for our first ever EcoVadis rating. We know as well that our strong ESG approach was absolutely critical to our win of company of the year at the PLC Awards recently. I wanted to just spend a bit of time reflecting on how we help our customers to achieve their ESG goals. You've heard a great deal today about the strength of our differentiated product and service solutions offering and the opportunity that we have to take these to the next level. What I find really exciting as an ESG passionate person is how we're placing sustainability at the heart of all of this. We're really focused on helping our customers to run their businesses more efficiently, more cost-effectively, and more sustainably at every stage of the industrial life cycle. I know you would have heard quite a lot about that in the breakout rooms, but let me just break it down for you into three key areas. Firstly, design. Our DesignSpark community is a hotbed of design and innovation for sustainable engineering solutions for 1.2 million engineers and innovators. One of their latest activist engineering campaigns is encouraging that community to develop air quality solutions that are having positive health and environmental benefits for all. Moving on to the build phase. RS product solutions help our customers to optimize their operations, reduce costs, and improve energy and water consumption. Products sit across our categories, and they range from things like high-efficiency motors through to energy-efficient LED lighting. Today, we're expanding this range and working really hard to introduce an RS responsibility product flag that will give our customers greater choice and confidence when buying sustainable products. Tomorrow, we want to expand our products and our customer segments so that we're serving flourishing low-carbon industries, and we're at the center of helping enable that clean tech innovation and sustainable infrastructure of the future. Lastly, the maintain phase. Our innovative and data-driven technologies are helping our customers maintain their operations more efficiently. The RS Industria, it's the future. It connects factories and provides essential condition monitoring data reports for engineers, helping them to optimize asset performance and the longevity of their equipment, and it also helps to cut costs and energy consumption and wastage. The integrated supply businesses of IESA and Synovos, they're amazing. Simon described them brilliantly. They're in-house providing that seamless MRO procurement service that helps our customers optimize their operations and streamline their buying. Above all, it's consolidating supply chains so that they can become greener and more efficient as well. What messages do I really want to leave you with? Well, for me, it's that our diversified product and service solutions are meeting our customers' increasing ESG needs, while also positioning RS to grow in the low-carbon economy. This is all underpinned by a cleaner and greener distribution model and a purpose-led team who are really driving that additional holistic value for our customers and suppliers on all fronts. I personally think this is such an extremely powerful combination, which makes us a more attractive partner, and it supports our ambition to grow market share as well. Thanks very much for your time. I'd now like to hand over to my colleague, Michael Cramb, to bring to life the strength of our acquisition strategy. I just wanted to say, we have huge opportunity to grow our ESG solutions as well as serve low-carbon markets through our acquisitions in the future. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Canary Wharf, to everybody here in person and those present online as well. My name is Michael Cramb. I head up the corporate development team for Electrocomponents. That means I have responsibility for M&A, among other things, and that's the topic of this next section of the afternoon. There's four things I'd really like to cover with you. First, just to give a sense of where we've come from in terms of M&A as an activity in the group and what's changed recently. Second, to talk a bit about our approach to M&A, how it fits with our strategy, what we look for in a target. Third, talk about our track record of M&A. Finally, take a look forward at the pipeline of opportunities and the potential we think that M&A has for the group. Where have we come from? When I joined the group, just under six years ago, I think it was safe to say that delivering on M&A was a challenge. We'd been off the pitch for a very significant period of time. The last acquisition we'd done was Allied nearly two decades previously. We had no track record of M&A. Our financial performance meant we had very little financial firepower at that stage, and we were off the radar of anyone who was looking to sell their business. They didn't think of us as a natural buyer because we hadn't been involved in M&A or showed any ambition in terms of M&A for a very significant period of time. Literally, M&A was something we read about in the papers after it had happened. Now, yes, definitely challenging, but I have to say, from a personal and professional perspective, one of the most interesting and professionally rewarding challenges I've had to tackle in terms of an M&A role. Fast-forward to where we are today, and I'm proud to say that I have been part of the team that's transformed our position and prospects in relation to M&A, and where we can now say, actually, we have the financial credibility and track record that means we can credibly look at M&A. We're firmly on the radar of anyone looking to sell their business, and that we've got a developing track record of M&A as well. Our financial firepower in terms of the balance sheet is huge now. It's genuinely a transformation of our position and prospects as regards to M&A. One question there, if we had come forward six years ago and said, "Actually, we're looking at a material program of M&A," I don't think we'd have had the mandate from the people in this room. I'm not sure what your reaction would have been if we'd suggested that back six years ago. Where on the spectrum from mild surprise to absolute horror you'd have actually been. That's where we've come from. That's the starting point. Now let's talk about how M&A fits with our business strategy. Our M&A program is explicitly strategy-led. I'll start with what that means at the highest level and then drill down a bit. What that means at the highest level is that our strategy remains primarily organic, supplemented by value-accretive M&A where appropriate. I could stop this talk at that point because that is one of the main headlines. However, I've got another six minutes, so I will carry on. Secondly, M&A is not an end in itself. It's a means to delivery of strategy and execution of strategy. Okay, so that's the high level theory. What does that actually mean in practice? It means step back and say, "Is there an attractive product or service market opportunity we can exploit?" If the answer to that strategic question is yes, then the question is, what's the best way to tackle that opportunity? Is it to buy or is it to build? Is it M&A or is it organic? If the answer comes back, actually, it's buy, then what we do is accelerate work with our preferred list of targets, work out which ones have got the highest value creation potential in our hands, and work on those to deliver an M&A transaction. The chart there on the right as you're looking at it isn't quite as random as it seems. For every one of those targets up there'll be an internal business owner, there'll be a detailed profile and assessment of that business and its value to us, and an assessment of its availability. Out of that, we'll drop a course of action and an agreed plan for pursuing that opportunity. Nothing is left stagnant. Everything is pursued and pushed through the pipeline. We have pursued both the make and the buy routes over time. As you can see, up there are some of the brands that have come from those two different sides. We're not particularly wedded to doing one or the other. It's actually just which is best for the group, and for our shareholders. We're back on the pitch, and we're tying our activity closely to strategy. What do we look for in an acquisition target? Three discrete but related things. First, good strategic fit. Second, sound acquisition economics. Third, something we know we can integrate successfully. I think we've been reasonably clear publicly about what we mean by the strategic fit. That's our product and service solutions, product expansion or geographical expansion. Most of our acquisitions will typically fall into one of those categories or more. They too tend to overlap. We don't just get those on their own. Secondly, sound acquisition economics, and that's not just the accounting for the transaction. I think most people in this room would be horrified if any of our acquisitions weren't materially earnings accretive within a relatively short space of time. That sets the bar way too low in terms of shareholder value. What we want are acquisitions that will beat our cost of capital by a comfortable margin in year three. That means they're shareholder value accretive. As a rough rule of thumb, although this varies by market and varies by transaction, that means we're looking for a 13%-15% pre-tax return in year three. Thirdly, the target can be successfully integrated. That covers everything you'd expect. It covers getting your arms around the people and the customers in the business to make sure they're not picked over by competitors. It's systems, it's warehouses, everything you'd expect, but actually often forgotten, and at the top of my list, is culture. I know the stock phrase is that culture eats strategy for breakfast. I have my own version of this, and it's culture eats acquisition synergies for a mid-morning snack or an early lunch. Now, this is a really serious point. I've seen more acquisitions derailed and failure to deliver on them because of culture clash than any other single factor. That means we look for acquisitions that either out of the gate have a high degree of cultural compatibility or ones that we know with the requisite time and effort and work we can be made to work together. ESG considerations are also a very significant factor in our acquisitions now, and we will analyze those, incorporate them into our analysis, work out the economic effect, and they're part of our decision-making process. The E part tends to turn up as a hard liability or a cost. The S and the G tend more to play into integration or ability to extract value from the acquisitions, after we've done them. That's what we are after. What are we not after? We're not after turnarounds. We're not after businesses with suspect economics. We're not after businesses where we don't think there's a good cultural fit. That economics point in particular is important. I will plagiarize horribly at this point with a quotation for someone who's extremely well qualified to talk about this. When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it's the reputation of the business that remains intact." Can anyone tell me who said that? Warren Buffett. Good. Glad to see we've got another student of this age in the audience. You're very welcome. Okay, now let's move on to our track record. Five transactions in the last five years. Total consideration just over GBP 250 million. Blended acquisition multiple of 10x EBITDA. A good mix of strategic rationales there in terms of why we actually did them, whether that's product and service solutions, product expansion or geographic expansion. I hope from everything you've heard already today, it'll come as no surprise that there's more under the service and solutions banner than anything else. That really does represent a major change in intention, capability, and capacity compared to where we were six years ago. If that's what we've done, what is our plan? What does the pipeline look like? It's no exaggeration to say that the pipeline has absolutely never looked better than it does at the moment. It is a really exciting clutch of opportunities we're looking at. That has been driven by a number of things inside the organization. Firstly, by our internal teams, so our businesses, who are they bumping up against in the market? Who are their suppliers telling them are good? Who are customers telling them are good if they're not buying from us? It's from advisors and intermediaries, it's from central work we've done on it. Put all that together and you get a very, very healthy-looking pipeline. The funnel on the right there, just to give an illustration and sort of a sighting shot on the scale of it, there are literally hundreds of businesses at the absolute top of that funnel. That's our broad sweep of the market. There's hundreds on our radar. That doesn't tell you much in itself, but go one step down, that leads to probably tens or many tens of approaches to and initial discussions with target businesses during any 12-month period. That, in turn, is what feeds the 10-15 or a dozen or so, typically in a 12-month period, detailed discussions with businesses where we might do a significant amount of work on a potential target. One level below that, at any time over the past 12 months, we've probably been engaged in great detail with three targets at any point. That's the sort of rough shape of the funnel as you go down it. It's very healthy in terms of range of size, from the small to a small number of much larger targets that we keep under constant scrutiny, and in terms of the strategic rationale that underpins each of those acquisitions. At the moment, if we had to pick a geography, we'd say it's the Americas where we see the greatest promise. It's probably the most highly developed industrial distribution market, and it's certainly got one of the most liquid M&A markets. We'd also want to focus on product and services solutions, again, because we know that from what we've heard already today, that helps us differentiate, and it's what our customers want. Over the last 12 months, we haven't transacted. That is entirely a reflection of the discipline we have showed. It would have been very easy to spend a significant amount of money over the last 12 months, but we didn't because it wouldn't have been value accretive. Looking forward, this isn't just a paper exercise or a paper opportunity. As I said before, we've got very significant financial firepower. We've got a very strong balance sheet. Given the strong reception that our placing in 2020 received, we could conceivably repeat that for the right sort of opportunity. Put that together with the last bullet point there, which is we know that over the next 12, 18, 24 months, there's probably a good GBP 2 billion of EBITDA that's going to be marketed for sale, and the conditions are good for us to be able to capitalize on the M&A opportunity while retaining that discipline. Okay, just to wrap up. There's three plus one things I'd like to leave you with. We remain disciplined but excited about the opportunities we see. Disciplined is the absolute key there. This is about value accretion. I've talked about the pipeline. It's the best pipeline I've seen since I was here and in about any organization I've worked with. Coupled with that discipline, M&A can play an increasing role in delivery of our strategy, without a doubt. We've got a lot under review at the moment, and there's a really good mix in there of the small and the large and the strategic rationales that underpin that. However, don't forget what it says at the top of the slide, and the key word there is acceleration and accelerating. That's the message I don't want to lose. When we talk about M&A internally, we're not talking about a change in strategy. We're not talking about a rewrite of the strategy. We're not talking about M&A for the sake of M&A, although as the person who was hired to do it, that's tempting sometimes, but the discipline kicks back in, obviously. What we are talking about is think about all the things you've liked about the Electrocomponents story over the last six years and our strategy. The M&A opportunity is more and faster. Thank you. Now I'll hand back to David to take you through financial performance. Thank you, Michael. Exciting opportunities, but please rest assured discipline will remain at the forefront of all of those choices and opportunities that we see. Now you've heard about the four opportunities of the value creation as we go on that journey from good on our journey to greatness. Now what I'd like to do is talk to you about how that journey to greatness will drive stronger revenue and quality, profitable growth. Lindsley talked earlier about how much change we've seen within the group. We've rebuilt the foundations, invested in our business. We're well-positioned to capture the opportunities. We've been resilient and turned headwinds into opportunities. Over the past seven years, as I said earlier, but I'd like to remind you, we've doubled the revenue, we've tripled the profit. Despite the poor market backdrops and all of those obstacles along the way, the pandemic, we've continued to invest operationally. We've delivered outperformance and grown market share, illustrating the growth momentum is being driven by that market share. We are a highly cash generative business. We've strengthened the balance sheet, leaving us well-placed to invest organically or inorganically should those options and opportunities arise. We've generated nearly 25% ROCE in the first half of this financial year. This follows two years of investment, quite significant investment within our distribution centers, our technology and our people. We've done some acquisitions along the way. We're delivering strong returns. During this time we've rebuilt our dividend cover to 2.6 times based on consensus estimates. Our track record of value creation, I would say, is strong. We now have the strong foundations to facilitate growth. The building blocks of our strategy are unchanged. As Lindsley said earlier this morning, this afternoon, the RS Way is what will take us forward. The RS Way is allowing us to broaden our product range, including developing our specialist own brand, RS PRO. It's allowing us to grow our B2B customer base and improving the customer journey. It's allowing us to increase our product and our service solutions and the proposition to our customers. It's allowing us to use data and insight in the choices and the decisions that we're making. It's allowing us to improve the operational efficiencies and the operational effectiveness across our organization and delivering an improved experience to our customers and our suppliers. This is all underpinned by our purpose of making amazing happen for a better world. We are more confident in delivering stronger revenue to drive high quality, profitable growth. As outlined by Michael earlier, we are looking at acquisitions which are strategically aligned and will accelerate that revenue growth. First and foremost is the organic opportunities still remain very strong. This is not an acquisition play, this is an acquisition play that supports the organic growth opportunities. We're looking for businesses that fit culturally and operationally, but financially they must add value. We're not targeting a certain number or size of deals a year. We will be very selective in terms of what we choose. We continue to target a mid-teen adjusted operating profit margin. A key component of our outperformance to date has been our high return discipline. Rest assured, that remains unchanged. We have an underpin of delivering at least 20% ROCE. We have strong cash generation and conversion, robust working capital controls, and a well-invested capital and operating base. We do not see a material change to our capital expenditure plans, and we will continue to invest operationally as we have done over the last six, seven years since Lindsley Ruth has been in place. Turning now to capital allocation. We believe and hope you too do as well. We have a strong balance sheet, and we target net debt to EBITDA of up to 2x on acquisitions. We are prioritizing investments into growth opportunities. As you look at our capital allocation, first, to drive stronger organic growth through ongoing investments in our differentiated business model and inventory position. Secondly, through the inorganic opportunities that we see. Finally, we will have a progressive dividend policy, and we'll consider share buybacks or special dividends as and when appropriate. Delivering on our journey to greatness and the ambitions that we have is underpinned by our scorecard. It brings together the themes that you've heard today. The scorecard that you see on the screen is a small selection of the key targets that we have in driving that future value. Delivering this will generate strong revenue and high quality profitable growth. Some of the key targets are on the slide. Our scorecard framework, it underpins our delivery and our expected progress. Our scorecard is cascaded throughout the organization, and our scorecard aligns to the remuneration, incentives, and rewards. With this, I'd like to take you right the way back to where I began this day, and I talked to you about the four key levers of future value generation. We are proud and pleased in terms of the progress and the performance to date. We're not satisfied, and we believe there's plenty more opportunity to go. We see plenty of opportunity on that journey to greatness. Let me remind you of the four future value-generating opportunities that you've heard from our team. We have enormous market share opportunity. Translated, large market opportunities. Today we've provided detailed information about our differentiated business model and the components that make that up. Of galvanizing a high-performance-led culture. Realizing world-class customer experience. Extending our insight, wisdom, and data. Accelerating to a solutions-led innovative business, and transforming our exceptional capabilities. Great. We want to be great. Thirdly, we have a purpose-driven culture and vision, which is making amazing happen for a better world, with ESG embedded in all that we do. Then finally, we will carefully target acquisitions to accelerate our growth opportunities. These four value-generating opportunities linked to the RS Way scorecard will deliver stronger revenue and higher quality profitable growth, enhanced by strategically aligned acquisitions with a mid-teens adjusted operating profit margin and at least a 20% ROCE. With that, we believe that there is plenty more opportunity for us. We hope, and I hope, that you believe in us to go and achieve it. With that, I'd like to hand you over to Chris Westfall, who's going to summarize today. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, and good morning or good evening to those of you that have joined us. My name is Chris Westfall, and I don't know if I'm going to be the most effective speaker on the stage today, but I want you to know that I am the most grateful. I'm filled with gratitude. I'll tell you why. Because I've had an opportunity to work with all of the storytellers that have stepped on stage today. I have seen amazing happen, and it has thrilled me and made me deeply grateful to be able to share in this story of purpose. Purpose. When I think of purpose, the thing that has really helped me to understand what purpose is Beer. That's right, Stafford Beer, the English social scientist who was the father of cybernetics. Cybernetics is the study of management and control, and Stafford Beer famously said, "The purpose of a system is what it does." Today, we've heard stories from a variety of storytellers with a singular purpose to illuminate what for me is a powerful summary of the story. That summary starts with the balance sheet, the financials, and an even-handed approach to M&A activity that I find very powerful. It's combined with wisdom. Wisdom that is unique, a wisdom that comes from data and insights, but also the gathered expertise and experience of the organization's most valuable asset, its people. We heard a story today that began with the past, but we all know that the past does not create the future. The future comes from right now. Patterns of the past, right? Patterns of the past determine how we will face the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead on this journey to greatness. We heard about those milestones on that journey. As you continue to step into your story of purpose, remember that the purpose of a system is what it does. If you want to know what's going on beneath the story, look at what the organization does. Look at the experience that you have had today, the patterns that you have seen from the past and that you've seen demonstrated on this stage today. The story is one of acceleration. The story is one of opportunity. The story is one of execution. That story starts with people first and foremost. As you think about what you've heard today, remember the story goes on. The journey continues. As you consider the story that you've heard today, will you help us to tell it? My name is Chris Westfall. I'm the US National Elevator Pitch Champion, and I want to thank you for your time today. I'm deeply grateful to be here. Cheers. When I first came in 2015, as I said earlier today, I came to Canary Wharf, and here I am seven years later. I started today by talking about three things. The first was the do's and the don'ts of coming to the UK as a UK CEO of a PLC company. It was suggested to me during the break by a good friend of mine who's sitting right in front of me, he said, "Maybe you want to parachute in later." I thought, "No, that's probably one of the don'ts I learned seven years ago. Do not parachute if you're a UK CEO. Investors won't like that." The second thing was understanding the English. I read a book by Kate Fox. I was told phrases like, "It's interesting," doesn't really mean interesting at all. Things like, "Suggest," means you don't really need to do it. "Strongly suggest," however, means you better do it. During the break, it was strongly suggested that we spend more time talking to this side of the room. I decided to sit here and talk a bit with this side of the room. Then the third thing was taking the Tube. Thank you, Shelly. I came here via car, took the Tube this morning, learned how to take the Tube. About that journey, my journey and this journey of greatness, I'm inspired like the students here. In 1992, when I was graduating with my degree in distribution from the same school, Texas A&M University, Bob Lawson was the CEO of the company. Now, that just goes to show how young I am and not how old he is. At that time, Bob was the CEO, and I've learned a lot about Bob. Bob demonstrates all the leadership traits and behaviors that Jordan talked about. Bob is a person that's passionate about the company, about life in general. He's a wonderful man. He acts with humility. One of the most humble people I've ever met. He inspires trust and integrity. A great example for us. I'm so appreciative of him taking the time to be here today to help us bridge the past to the present and the present to the future. As I started today, I talked about my journey. My journey hasn't stopped, but it's gone from a bit of a star in this production to one where I prefer to be the director or the producer. It's now time for the rest of our company to become stars. One of the purposes of today that we didn't mention in the beginning was to showcase the amazing talent we have within this company. For you to feel, to see, but to feel the culture that we built and that we continue to build. Now, what you've seen is obviously a sampling of the talent we have within this company. Around the world, we have some amazing people. Not everybody even here in the audience today was able to come up and present because of time constraints. Unless you want to go on for another six hours, and then we can ask them to do that. I'm pretty sure you don't. For us, it's that talent, the people, that will propel us to greatness. We're on a journey to greatness, and I assure you, we will get there. As I thought about my role, and as I went through this transition and really looking at my purpose, I said there's really four C's. Four C's that I want to be great at doing, and that's how I think I'll become a great CEO. They are to coach. Coach more effectively. Spend time mentoring our people. Spend time leading by example. Spend time coaching individuals on what they need to do, teaching about our business. It's also about communicating the vision, the purpose, telling our story. We all have to be able to tell the story in our own words, but it's the same story, and it's that story of how we go from good to great. To be able to create. To be able to create this ecosystem. We're not competing companies against companies anymore. We're competing ecosystems against ecosystems. This is important about our partners as it is about us individually. I'm really pleased today to have the president of Rockwell Europe here in the room with us. It's very important that we continue to build and develop the relationships with our suppliers. We had Siemens on a video earlier, but our partners, our suppliers, are so critical to our journey, and we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for them. Connecting. Connecting our people, connecting companies to build this ecosystem, connecting emotionally with people to help develop our culture. As I sat down at home, which no longer is outside of Oxford, it's now in central London, but guess what's the same? Poor connectivity. I still don't have great Wi-Fi, still don't have great connectivity to watch television, so I still do a lot of reading and writing at home. I thought about it. I thought, "Well, you know what's missing? We've got a company purpose. I've got my own purpose. There's the dash, which applies to individuals." There's not a company dash. I sat down, I started writing. You know I'm not a poet, and I know it. That's pretty good actually, made that up. Sorry. I started writing the company dash. I started writing something. I read it back and I thought, "This is pretty good." I looked. I don't drink, so I looked at it the next morning and I thought, "Well, that's not very good at all." It wasn't my best, and I mean, I don't drink. I looked the next day and I thought, "That's not good." I called Jo, my assistant. I said, "Jo, can you see if you can get a hold of Linda Ellis, who wrote the Dash?" She said, "Let me try." She sent me an email. She said, "You've got a call with her next Tuesday." I got on the phone with Linda. I said, "Linda, I've got this idea. What do you think about it?" She said, "You know what? Let's write it." What you're about to see is the first time this has ever been shown anywhere in the world, but it's called The Company Dash, and it's by Linda Ellis. Linda. Hello, my name is Linda Ellis. I'd like to share a poem titled A Company's Dash. This is an inspiration by Lindsley Ruth and myself. There is a date that marks the beginning, followed by a date seldom foreseen, and a single dash to represent what happens in between. Throughout the dash of a company, generations take their turn, and history shows successful are those who adapt and grow and learn. Many have come before us, and many will follow when we leave. We are one era of our business with high goals to achieve. When we focus on what's important, true priorities at hand, we realize we're blessed as we invest in our people, our product, our brand. Giving back to the community while building prosperity and growth, creating a culture that demonstrates how a company can do both. We are each a link in a chain, made strong by our connection. Together we weather the winds of change that blow in our direction. It's true we seek the profit, thus we won't deny the cash. All that matters in the end is the way we spent our dash. A special thank you to Linda, who I know is online right now from Atlanta, Georgia. Thank you, Linda, for putting this together and for giving us the rights. Greatly appreciate that. We'll have that in our offices around the world. With that, I wanted to say a couple of things. I'd be remiss as we talk about the great turnaround in Asia, not to mention the fact that I can stand here and tell you today we are performing the best we've ever performed in Europe, the Americas and Asia. Around the world, we've done an outstanding job. Our people around the world have stepped up over the last few years in particular to take us to this place that we are today. During the pandemic, we did not miss a beat. We were able to transition to work at home virtually. We were impacted one quarter, and then we accelerated. I've talked to many CEOs of distribution companies around the world that struggled to start new projects through the pandemic. We did not. In fact, we completed two major warehouse expansion projects during the pandemic. We didn't miss a beat. Whether it's inflation, we've been able to put our prices up. Whether it's increased freight rates, we've been able to stock more locally. We've been able to mitigate this cost elsewhere. Wage inflation put a focus on our employees, give everybody, every single employee in the company a bonus in December. It wasn't asked for. We thought it was the right thing to do. We care about our employees. Those aren't just empty words. We do care. We care about their health, their well-being, not just of our employees, but of their family members as well. If we have 8,000 or 7,500 employees, if we say 8,000, if every employee has a partner and two children, that's 32,000 people that depend upon us. We don't take that responsibility lightly. We don't wanna reduce jobs. We wanna create jobs. We wanna benefit society. We wanna make a difference, and we wanna make amazing happen for a better world. So I'd say to you, to those investors that have been on the boat with us, thank you so much for believing in us, for believing in me. For those of you that have joined over the last couple of years, thank you for believing in all of us. For those that have thought they missed the boat, you haven't. We aren't done yet. There's still room on the boat. There's a lot of investors that would like you on the boat too. Please join us. Come on this journey with us, as we're on a journey to greatness, and it's just beginning. With that, I'll say thank you, and we are going to open it to questions. We'll take 10 or 15 minutes for questions. Is that okay? Because I know people have to go. Rory, I'm not taking a parachute and jumping off the ceiling, but you have a question. No, obviously, as you know, I'm very jealous of your bookshelf of old annual reports. Even I can go back to FY 2015 when you joined. Since then, the average order frequency is up 20%, average order value up 40%. What was a bit surprising is the total customer number is only up 20% in that time period, given all the advantages you're talking about. With that wallet share expanding, can you say how many customers your initiatives have elevated from standard to key to corporate, and how you think about that kind of upsell and expansion of wallet? Then secondly, much shorter, what is a great conversion margin to you nowadays? Thank you. I'll let David take the conversion margin question. 'Cause clearly I've got the big chair and he's got the little chair. I just realized how. Is that intentional? Did you set it up that way? You know, David and I have been together, I think it's been 43 days today. We've got another five days together, and then I'll be gone. I'm just curious, after 48 days, what are you gonna do without seeing me every day? It's gonna be odd, isn't it? Yeah. I'll answer that once we're done. No, no. That's good. That sounds like typical response. I'm just giving him enough time to answer the conversion ratio. Conversion. He'll start with that, I'll do share expansion. Conversion, we've said on the slide that we're, you know, driving towards that 30% conversion ratio. In terms of expansion of wallet or share of wallet, I think if we go back to 2015, if you look at the customer numbers today, and I can't comment on the customer numbers then, 'cause there was a mix of B2C, B2B, and I'm not sure exactly how things were counted. Today, the number could potentially be higher if we had all the B2C customers that were in the numbers. We don't look at that. We look at customers that we think are solid customers that have long-term potential. In terms of the corporate count, customers and that opportunity, and I think, you know, Jessie talked about earlier in terms of the opportunities being one-third, one-third, one-third, the 25 to 50 25 in terms of the customer base today. I think if you look at the corporate customers and how do we expand the share of wallet, you heard the phrase earlier about building the stickiness that Mike talked about with customers. Really, I think, Rory, it's about how do we build that moat against our competition? How do we build the value-added services, the technical support? We know customers that buy one or more services from us tend to spend a lot more. How do we build up that moat of technical capability, the value-added services, the omni-channel, the ease of doing business, and build up the product portfolio to where, as you heard from the Lufthansa customer, that they don't have to go anywhere else? I think- That's what we're doing. I think the only build I'd say is it's also about the quality of the customer as well. You know, as Lindsley said, we want a greater share of their wallet. We want to be their first choice, and it's targeting those higher quality customers as well as driving new customers into the model. It's existing share, existing customers and their share of wallet that's really key in all of this. Josh. Microphone's coming. Do we have a second mic in here? We do on the other side. Afternoon. Thanks for the answer on the customer number. Just $400 billion market, huge market. Pounds ... less than 1% market share. If you could give us some color. Obviously, we saw the market research. A lot of it is in Asia, which is, you know, a market which you have finally turned profitable, so the long runway of growth ahead of you. Can you give us a sense of how much of that $400 billion market you think is outsourced? Because on that number, even Grainger is, you know, less than 3%-4% of the market, you know, and they're four times your size in terms of revenues. When we look at 1.2 million customers each placing whatever $210 of average order value, that brings to what? About 11 orders per customer every year. Yeah. So for you guys. When you see your growth come through, does it come through the customer number, more frequent orders or, you know, the basket size growing for each of them? The last, there are many more, but I'll stop at this third one. The last one is, when you think of capital allocation for the future, obviously there's a massive M&A opportunity, but you also have very attractive opportunity like, you know, you show the vending machines, which are, you know, okay, capital intensive, but they give you a very attractive ROI much early on than a small bolt-on acquisition. You know, you could also do predictive maintenance, which gives you know, a bit of investment, low capital tie-up, but slow growth addition. Of the various avenues of growth you have, where do you think you would like to direct more capital and why? Yeah. Let me tie the first and the third together, and we'll let you know, part of being more of a director producer is maybe us passing off those questions. Mike can take the one on your second question on customers and the frequency of business and your breakdown with the 11 orders per customer. First of all, in terms of the market, we talk about GBP 400 billion, but as you saw the numbers, if you did the quick math on what Barry put up, you would get to GBP 2 trillion. Amazon uses the number $7 trillion. The US distribution industry via the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors has 105 member associations, 105 different types of distributors, from groceries to chemicals, oil and gas, to electrical, electronic distribution, industrial distribution. That represents about $7.2 trillion in the US It's a massive market. Right. If you look at our strategy, it's a matter of so you say what is possible. That's where we came up with GBP 400 billion. You talk to Grainger, which D.G. Macpherson is the CEO of Grainger. We talk to him quite often or Fastenal with Dan Florness. We have these conversations about the size of the market, and you gotta understand this market is highly fragmented, and Grainger's large within the United States and Canada, and they're not as international in terms of their reach and their broad approach to the market is more regionally focused. There's not a true global distributor out there. We wanna be that, but then you could say, "Well, we're not in Brazil and some areas of South America." I think as you look at the market, you're gonna see a lot more consolidation over time. You're gonna see scale built up, and we're gonna see more larger companies are gonna emerge, and you're gonna see a trend with digital that's gonna force a lot of smaller companies that can't afford to invest. It's not just, you know, a lot of people went through the pandemic, and they realize it's not just about having a transactionally enabled website that makes a difference. There's a lot more that goes into it. You get a website and realize, like, what is this organic search thing? You know, search engine optimization, what's that? Pay per click, you have to pay? You gotta pay Google to actually get your... Be on the first page of Google? Because if you wanna hire. I won't tell you that joke. Yeah, with the move to digital around the world, that's gonna force a lot of consolidation. Smaller companies who can't afford it are gonna put themselves up for sale. I think what you're gonna see over time is a more consolidated market. That just gives you a great example of the point that we make, that the world's largest distributor, which I would argue is more Sonepar at $30+ billion than Grainger, and Sonepar is global, and then Rexel, and then Ferguson. Those are all distributors, right? Electrical, fluid power, and then you've got Grainger out there as more MRO. Well, they're not electronics. We cross the bridge and get into those areas, and that's where we see the opportunity, as Barry pointed out earlier. If you tie in M&A, David and I just spent a month traveling around the US, and I joke because his word after every session was refreshing as we saw the business. Now, keep in mind, distribution in the Americas started way before distribution in Europe and way before distribution in Asia. You got a more established structure where more business goes through distribution, which is becoming more solutions-focused. When you talk about M&A, we talk about a three-pronged approach. Expanding geographies, there are some geographies where we need to have a stronger presence. Two is expansion of products, and three, where we've really been focused, is value-added services solutions expansion. Can you accelerate your organic growth faster by acquiring integrated supply, other types of solutions, condition monitoring, which has led to predictive maintenance solution? Yes, you know, we see an opportunity to both build capability and buy capability to help us accelerate the build. When you talk about vending solutions, you gotta be careful on vending 'cause you don't wanna just set a number out there, and we have implementations, we have sites we've implemented across Europe, but you don't wanna set a number out there of 10,000 within 12 months because then you end up with bad deals, bad contracts. We wanna have an intelligent approach to building scale over time with that. Mike? Yeah. Is this on? Yeah. Great questions. I'm just trying to remember all of them that you asked. As it relates to the back to the customer pyramid, I mean, it starts with what Jessie talked about, which is fundamentally understanding the different types of customers within it. If we think about acquisition versus average order value, which is your question, the reality is, if we think about it from a scale point of view, a corporate customer and we would say could spend anything from GBP 250,000 a year up, and some of the customers can spend many GBP millions because they're consolidating their indirect material spend to fewer suppliers. Ultimately, the average order value there is gonna be ranging much higher. A key customer is going to be ranging. Sorry. A key customer is gonna be spending anything from GBP 25,000 up, typically within one market. That customer still is looking for ease of doing business, and we know that buying behavior means that they wanna buy more products from fewer suppliers. We have a number of customers that are buying within narrow product categories today, and as we expand our range and we go deeper, not just with new suppliers, but equally. Oh, so you're standing up. Good. Standing to attention. As we expand our product range, but also we open up more of a stocked and non-stocked offering, what we can see is our customers are going broader with what they're buying. Okay. The standard customers are more transactional, as Jessie said, you know, GBP 25,000 and below, more self-serve, but still even they are starting to buy more across the basket. It differs as well around the world. We're at different maturity states, and our brand is recognized in a different way. You know, if you take the UK today, you know, customers would typically have a strong association with RS and understand that it does sell across electronics, electrical, facilities maintenance into MRO. If we go to the Americas today, our American business, you know, it's still very much centered around some electronics, but actually automation and control and electrical with a real ambition that we wanna take that product range out into MRO and into the more industrial space. The opportunity there with existing industrial customers that are buying automation control to grow that out into facilities maintenance, into safety products, into mechanical, which is where we're focusing on expanding the range, is significant. There isn't a one-size-fits-all is the answer, okay? We are channeling our focus on acquisition towards customers where we have high potential, and we're going over quality rather than quantity, to David's point, including how we're driving our acquisition marketing. We also see a huge opportunity for further share of wallet growth from our existing customers as well. You know, if you go to Amazon today and, not that I'm promoting Amazon, but, you know, if you happen to go to Amazon, you place an order, let's say for your groceries, right, from Amazon Fresh, which has an amazing delivery service too, you'll see on the right it will say, "Do you wanna buy now or is this gonna be a continuing purchase," right? If you click on that, you'll get it once a month, and it'll keep coming, et cetera. Brilliant. Great strategy. You don't have to buy it. What we wanna do is get a solution with a customer to where we just start putting parts on the system. We just add parts and parts, and, you know, the parts just flow when they need it. It's not about average order frequency, it's about winning the product and constantly being able to support that product. That is our integrated supply model. Our integrated supply model essentially is that, right? The purchasing team can have one buyer. You don't have to have 45. You can have fewer buyers. You can focus on the system. You can focus those buyers then on what's of strategic importance, back to Simon Hilton's chart earlier, on where the value is and really where they can go drive the reduction in price and then save money and time from a cost standpoint on the support of the factory. That's where we wanna get in the future, Rajesh, and we're not far away. We have elements of that now, but that's that total solutions approach that we need to have in the future. Just one quick build on the capital allocation. Just bear in mind that we are a low capital intensive business organically. Again, we will continue to invest appropriately into the organic side of our business. Equally, you know, the surplus funds could then be utilized for the inorganic side to accelerate the organic side. Other questions? We have virtual questions here, which would work better if the iPad was charged. It's dead. Yes. Thank you. Does it work? Yes, it's Oscar from JP Morgan. I have two questions. The first one's going back on your organic capital expenditure. Could you just run through your distribution center capacity? You've done two expansions. Do you have any more to do in the future? Do you have more automation in your existing distribution center footprint? That's the first question. The second question is on end markets and growing into new verticals, maybe like safety. Are there other verticals out there, maybe like life sciences, that you could get into? Would that be organic or M&A? It seems like both. This question, if we can go to Debbie Lentz, who's President of supply chain for us today. Hi. Yes, Debbie Lentz, President of Supply Chain. In terms of our DC capacity, we're very proud of our distribution center network. We said that we have about 3 million sq ft of capacity across the globe with our most recent investments, one in Fort Worth, Texas, and one in Germany. That was a big investment that's gonna support us for growth way out into the future. We'll probably have some tweaks. We're looking at Southeast Asia. Certainly we'll be putting in some automation, some more state-of-the-art warehouse systems, but those are the big buildings for the near to mid future. Thank you, Debbie. Just in regards to products and our expansion philosophy, if you look within the four walls of a factory and you say, "What are the products that we could provide in a different fashion by having solutions pull them through?" Well, 80% of what we sell is indirect, so indirect in support of that factory line. The products that Simon referenced in his chart on, it's not those three ingredients that go into the muffin, although we sell those that go into certain things like electronics and factory equipment, automation control equipment, et cetera, but it's that 80% to help support the factory. There's a lot of areas there around fluid power, pneumatics, mechanical fasteners, products like that that we can get into over time that have a similar look and feel to what we currently have and a similar margin feel. That's the way we'll go. In fact, I would say there's 13 segments of distribution that we could fit within and provide those products and solutions over time. We're not short on opportunities. It's a matter of execution and how we build out that capability as we move forward. That's really important. For us, you know, it starts with working with supplier partners too. Automation and controls are advancing more than any products, and so I'm really excited about opportunities with companies such as Rockwell and who's here today, and with the old Allen-Bradley portfolio and what they're moving towards in terms of solutions approach. A lot of companies out there are becoming more solutions focused. Parker Hannifin does an outstanding job with their Win strategy and what they do, and I think distribution fundamentally is gonna have to change. It's no longer sufficient for what customers need today and what suppliers need in a partner. We wanna usher in that new era of distribution and be that disruptor, that difference maker to our suppliers as well as to our customers as we move forward. I know we got some questions here, if I can just move to online. We've heard about what Sean and his team did in Asia Pacific. What has been happening in the US and specifically the Americas? Ken Bradley is our President of the Americas. He'll stand up here, and if we can get Ken a microphone. This is, Ken, you gotta look into the camera. This is a question that's coming across virtually. Hello, everyone. Ken Bradley. You know, if you go back about three years ago, I was actually heading back to Texas from a stint that I'd spent in the UK, where I was taking the opportunity Lindsley had provided me to really get exposure to the broader business and understand the best of what was working both across Europe, across Asia, and then ultimately take that back to the US. What Sean talked about today, you know, was really a turnaround story. In going back to Texas, which is my home, and getting back into the business that I've known for many years, I wasn't stepping into, and we weren't stepping into a turnaround situation. We had a good business. We have a good business. What we have is a business that needed an injection of life. It needed an injection of an elevated ambition, and that started with people. It started with the culture. It started with, you know, people bringing that ambition, and then it really translated into a discipline around how we deliver change. That change is no surprise. It was across the fundamentals that you would think of. It was really, you know, coming off the back of our distribution center expansion. We were able to really quickly move into a gear where we started 3x'ing the rate of new products we were introducing into the business, and we've been sustaining that pace. There's plenty more to go at to the point that the gentleman just raised around the products we can move into. Then you think about customers. We've actually done a considerable amount of work on optimizing how we deploy our sales resources, you know, using AI to get the right opportunities in their hands, helping them to be proactive, creating specialization around business development. A lot of work done in the sales organization. Jessie, who here is representing digital and marketing, led the team on a considerable focus around digital and really enhancing, you know, our search engine optimization, our performance marketing, you know, our. Ultimately using AI tools there as well, and now continuing that journey on really enhancing the customer experience so that we can be a first choice digitally as well. You know, if you look at other areas of opportunity we've faced into, you know, our RS PRO private label. You know, we've really been on the entry-level part of the journey there. We have a significant acceleration. We are accelerating. It's growing much faster than our business, but there's so much upside there. Also, diving into value-add solutions is another area that we placed as an objective for ourselves, and you've seen some of the examples today with the virtual factory application engineering lab that we've got in Fort Worth. A lot still to go at, but the reality is, I think that's the exciting part of it. It's because we're just getting started. Again, love you guys to go with us on the journey. Thank you, Ken. I'd like to point out, you know, Ken is president of the Americas for the RS Group. He's leading Allied Electronics & Automation. Should have said this earlier, with the brand change, we're not gonna do anything stupid. We're gonna mitigate the risk. It won't change immediately, but we'll make sure the websites is approached and that will change over time to make sure we don't lose customers, we bring everyone on this journey. It's important to have one culture and to have the Americas be part of this whole organization. They bought into this move and Ken's done an outstanding job at leading those efforts and the change. Next question, two questions, one for Jerry Abraham and one for Chris Beeson. Just give you some time, Jerry, to get ready. RS PRO has been a bit slower recently. What is the reason? What are the opportunities in the Americas? What are the new products that you're gonna be bringing to market, Jerry? What do you see as the future potential, and how soon are you gonna do it? Thank you. Yes, with RS PRO, we had some challenges with supply chain, which we have addressed, and we're seeing slowly upturn in terms of our performance, especially in February, and we expect that to continue as well. In terms of new products, I think, we wanna double our product range the next five years. That's the plan, and we're planning to add products across all the categories, from, electronics all the way down to, tools and consumables, because we believe there's a great opportunity for us to grow there. There was one more question, which I think I've How soon? The Americas. Yes. I think Americas is the biggest opportunity for us for two reasons. One, I think we built a foundation. Now, RS PRO as a business was almost in its, on its knees when Lindsley joined, and we had to create the foundation, and the foundation's across quality, choice, and value. Product quality, providing choice for customers across multiple categories, and finally, providing customers product at the right price. Because we have done that, now is the time for us to accelerate across the Americas, expand in our investment in brand development, expand in investment in terms of marketing, and finally expand our investment in terms of product developments in the Americas. One quarter equals a year. Speed. I think just one quick build on the RS PRO. There is no magic number in terms of where RS PRO can get to other than we certainly believe that there is significant opportunity to grow. When you look across our regions, you know, the EMEA region, you know, the percentage of RS PRO of revenue is in the high teens. When you look in Asia, it's in the low teens. When you look in the Americas, it's in single digits. So actually all three regions has opportunities, and as Jerry and the team expand out that product range, we see opportunities to use RS PRO as a very strong value brand. I'm really excited about. We have a great leader in our RS PRO business. Jerry's been here a long time and is doing a fantastic job. Love to spend time with him and give him a bit of a hard time at times as well. He's also been leading our pricing initiative, love to see a few questions for him on that. Our team in RS PRO is fantastic. We've got a really talented team, a great sourcing team, protects the risk well, do a phenomenal job at working with our product teams to be able to source the right products that customers need, not what we just wanna put on the shelf and we think that we can sell. Really important. Next question. Chris Beeson, how does electronics fit in with your focus on industrial B2B customers? Let me first of all say Chris Beeson joined us during the pandemic in the last two years. Chris was a key player at DigiKey, where he ran worldwide sales among other functions as well. Chris has been in the industry a long time. Used to be a company I'm familiar with called Future Electronics, so many years ago. Chris really knows a lot about this industry. He's very well established in the industry. I'll tell you, he knows what great looks like in terms of electronics. Chris, how does electronics fit with your focus on industrial B2B customers? Well, in my first couple days with the company, I was asking myself the same question. I say that jokingly. Barry really highlighted a very key point related to the convergence that's occurring, and I think many deemed it as standalone electronics, standalone industrial, but there's absolutely a convergence going on. I'll add one more C. In the electronics community, there's a big curiosity as to how they become more industrial. Even with our established industrial suppliers, as the aggregator, how do we tie more of that together? I think there's just a terrific opportunity. We can get deeper into the technology aspect of things, you know, IoT, Industria 4.0. A lot of these things drive electronics into the industrial type of environment, so I think the synergies are really strong. What is also unique, I believe, is if you look at the landscape, and we all have competition, but there aren't many companies that have this combination or foundation already in place of electronics as also industrial. When we talk about execution, we talk about speed, the ability to be at the forefront of that opportunity, I believe this is a company that's very well positioned for that. That's my interpretation. Thank you, Chris. Any questions here in the audience? Any last questions? There's one question over here. Jane. Hi. Jane Sparrow from Barclays. You talked about delivering stronger sales growth. You've talked about your sort of long-standing mid-teens margin target. Lindsley also talked about building that moat when you answered Rory's question. Given the opportunities you see in front of you, if there's an opportunity to build a sort of bigger, wider moat that sustains sales growth further and further into the future, how do you think about that balance between your margin target and your sales growth? Would you be happy with margin sort of plateauing for a couple of years, but that sales growth accelerates further and further? Well, I'd put that question to our investors. If we could do a poll, we could ask them that question. My answer to that would be no. We have established a mid-teens operating margin with the goal of growing to the level that we've communicated, 2x the market organically, so that's organic, not with acquisition, and we obviously wanna grow faster than that. We know there's obviously an acceptable trade-off of lower operating margins for higher growth, but we don't see that being substantially lower. All the targets we're looking at, you know, we're not in a position with M&A where we're looking to get turnaround deals. You know, we've been down that road. We don't wanna go through that again. For us, it's a matter of looking at opportunities that are a good strategic cultural financial fit. By financial fit, you know, we're looking at companies that are delivering 3% operating profit thinking we're gonna take them to 12%. We're looking for companies that are in that mid to high teens, not mid to high teens, mid-single digits to low double digits, in that realm, to where we can deliver the revenue and margin synergies, not go out looking at how we can rip out costs and build the cost synergies. There's too many great opportunities out there for that. For us, organic growth may come at lower operating margin, but we wanna make sure we deliver the return on capital employed, and we continue. There's plenty of business out there in this industry when we talk about over GBP 400 billion of opportunity to grow our business and still make that mid-teen operating margin. When that day runs out, and maybe we have to go look at lower margin business, I would say that's for that next CEO down the road, not within the next five years, 'cause I'm committed, but maybe way down the line, 30 years from now, the company can look at that. Once we get to GBP 30 billion or more in revenue, then maybe we have to worry about it, but it's not anytime soon. That answer your question, Jane? Yeah. Hope so. Any last questions? That's it. Thank you sincerely to everyone in the room and to everyone virtually. I hope that you believe in us, in our ability to take this company on that journey to greatness. We're confident. We hope you are, because the car has started, and it's left the car park, and we're on that journey. Thank you for attending. Thank you for those people that are online. I'd like to say a huge thank you to our team, front of house, back of house. You've been amazing. For those in the room, I'd really encourage you to please visit our breakout rooms. There is a bar at the back of the room that may hopefully entice you to grab a drink and go to the breakout rooms, meet and talk to some of our people. They want to talk to you. Thank you and good night, good morning, and see you later, and we're on that journey. Thank you.