Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to those people joining us online. Thank you for your continuing interest in the RS Group, and welcome to this investor event, the RS Opportunity. I'm Simon Pryce. For those of you that don't know me, I have the honor to have been Chief Executive at RS for 18 months. I've actually been associated with RS since 2016 as a non-executive board member, and I've spent 25 years, or even a bit longer, being a customer of this great business through my career in global industrial manufacturing and services businesses around the world. So the full presentation today is gonna take about two hours. We're gonna split it up with a 15-minute check into the office, coffee, whatever, break. And then we're gonna leave plenty of time at the end for questions. I'd also encourage those physically present to stay around after we finish Q&A, because we've set up two experience rooms for you in this building. And it's gonna help us help you bring our story to life, particularly around what we sell, and importantly, how we sell it. And if you're online, you will be able to access video content of those experience rooms after the session. For those of you online, during the Q&A session, you will be able to answer questions through the Q&A facility, which you can see on the right-hand side of your menu, and we'll try and answer as many questions as we can, both physically in the room and from those online. And of course, Lucy, thank you for one of the most important moments in the meeting, which was the safety moment. And then, because you're in an RS event and you're with RS, I'd also like to address the second, probably most important piece, which is our values call-out, which we tend to do at the beginning of our sessions in RS. And I'd like to take this opportunity to call out my executive committee colleagues, many of whom you will hear from today, for what they've achieved since the executive committee was first formed 15 months ago. They've achieved a huge amount, and in fact, more than any of the other senior leadership teams I've had the privilege of working with throughout my career. While it's been quite hard work, and it's certainly we've got a long way to go, they do espouse what have become our RS values. It's all about one team delivering brilliantly, doing the right thing, and making every day better. What are we gonna cover today? Well, I'm gonna start with what we're not gonna cover. We aren't gonna give any trading information or a trading update, mainly because this is a presentation about the medium and long-term opportunity at RS, but also because we don't have to. Things are pretty much going as we expected them to. What we are gonna provide you with is a lot greater insight into RS and our exciting direction of travel. I think even if you've been following RS for a number of years, you are gonna hear some new things today. We're gonna be very clear about what we do, how we do it, and why our customers and our suppliers value us so highly. We're gonna give you some insights into the growth markets in which we play, and notwithstanding some short-term sluggishness, how those markets are benefiting from good tailwinds and long-term macro trends, which means we're very positive about the medium and long-term outlook for them. We're gonna be very clear about which segments of those markets we address and the size of the market that we're chasing, and we're also gonna demonstrate how our differentiated proposition allows us to continue to gain share in them. We're then gonna take a detailed look at some of the actions that we're actually driving and what we're focusing on, and we're gonna do that through hearing from both our functional leads and our regions, and we'll also share how we're monitoring progress against those actions, and then Kate will also share with you some of the building blocks and the financial profile of how we expect to deliver on those ambitious medium-term targets we have out there, so now, into the meat of the presentation. There's very significant value creation potential here at RS. Frankly, it's why I'm here, and it's why I took the job 18 months ago, and as this slide alludes to, we're making really good progress. I don't want to dwell too much on the past, but where we were when I came in as CEO is broadly where I thought we'd be. We're a pretty solid business. We were. We had ambition, we had potential, we had an improving proposition, and we had good people. However, yet as the two-year post-COVID trading boom started to unwind, a few things began to surface. We had some cultural issues. There was some strategic ambiguity in the organization. We were unnecessarily complex, and we had some operating issues. So that's where we were. Where we are now? Well, we've looked at everything in the business. We've got a really firm grip on it. We've addressed a number of the bigger issues, and we're working on the rest. And importantly, we have a very clear plan for the future, which we're already well into executing. If anything, today, this business has greater ambition and more potential than I thought it did. We're investing to accelerate improvement in that differentiated proposition I've referred to, and we have an enhanced and highly capable executive team, myself included, clearly. Excluded, clearly, rather. Don't know where that came from. Who are providing a much clearer leadership to our really good people. We've embarked on that cultural evolution. We've got clear strategic focus. We've clarified and implemented an operating model that creates accountability and alignment across our regions and our functions. We're much more externally orientated. We're very customer and supplier-centric again. We're removing waste, we're driving efficiency, and we're taking actions to improve our operating leverage. And we've rediscovered that operational discipline that is so critical in effective delivery. So that's where we are. Where are we going? I'm pleased to say, and I hope you'll hear, that we see a very clear path to delivering some exciting financial outcomes in the medium term. We absolutely believe we can grow revenue at twice our market. We absolutely believe we can deliver mid-teens operating margins over time. We see an opportunity to increase our cash conversion from the previously reported 70%- 80%, and we can deliver sustainable returns on invested capital well in excess of 20%. With all the progress that we've made in the last 18 months, we are really confident in our ability to deliver this opportunity. There are five main things that I hope you'll take away from the presentation today. RS is well-positioned in growth markets. We have a strong and differentiated proposition that enables us to gain share in those markets. We're investing in a targeted and prioritized way to improve efficiency and drive operating leverage in our business, and disciplined and effective acquisitions with good integration can accelerate that growth. As a result, there is a very significant and sustainable value creation opportunity for all stakeholders in RS, and particularly for our shareholders. Most importantly, RS is in the hands of a very capable team with a clear and aligned plan and detailed actions which they're executing with operational and financial rigor, monitoring progress effectively, using clear KPIs, creating a culture of openness and accountability as one team, delivering brilliantly, doing the right thing, and making every day better. Here's how the afternoon's gonna flow. I'm gonna spend a bit of time sharing some detail about what we are today. We're then gonna share a little bit about what makes us confident in saying we're well positioned in growth markets. Pete's gonna talk about how we then use our differentiated proposition to grow in those markets. We're then gonna get the executive team and the regional heads to talk to us about how we're investing to improve our efficiency and operating leverage. We're then going to get Michael to talk to us a little bit about acquisitions and how they can contribute to what we're doing. And Kate's gonna put it all together and show you what the financial profile is likely to look like over the next few years as we deliver those medium-term financial objectives. Then I'll wrap it up, and then we'll open it up for questions, and then we'll open our experience rooms for those physically in the room to go and attend. But basically, we should be able to wrap it all up by between 5:00 P.M. and 5:30 P.M. to get you home in time for supper. Just a few pictures. Here are today's presenters, but they'll introduce themselves in a bit more detail when they get onto the stage. But I'd just like to point out a couple of other people who are joining us today, from RS. We have our Chairman, Baroness Rona Fairhead. We have Clare Underwood, our Company Secretary and Head of Corporate Services. We've got Debbie Lent, our solutions and services lead. Andrea Barrett, our sustainability and social responsibility VP, and Zoé Palmer-Smith, who leads our RS Pro business. They aren't speaking today, but they're gonna be around, so feel free to engage with them. They are all very important to what we do. And additionally, and also just as important, we'll have lots of our people in the experience rooms telling you about our products and our customers and how we sell them, and please feel free to ask them anything that you want. So what is it that we do, and how do we create value for our customers and our suppliers? Nothing like a business description to get the blood pumping, is it? It's great. So look, that was just a quick video trying to pull together what we do, and it's sort of part of the culture at RS. I mean, I've always felt that the bedrock of a good and sustainable business is its culture, and we spent a lot of time over the last year or so, engaging nearly 250 RS employees, as well as representatives from our key stakeholder groups, to help us define our culture and where we need to take it. We've revised and aligned behind a core of a purpose, a vision, and a set of values. Our purpose, we felt, still works, and so we continue to exist to make amazing happen for a better world, and we're committed to delivering results for people and planet. Our vision, we felt, is also fit for purpose, so we are trying to be first choice for all of our chosen stakeholders, but we've now defined what that really means and how we will measure progress, that we're making towards being sustainably that first choice. Where we've made the most change is developing a clear set of corporate values, and that's what you should see and feel when you interact with any one of our nearly 9,000 people around the globe, and it's how we aspire and will do business. As one team, delivering brilliantly, doing the right thing, and making every day better. You'll see a bit of a theme emerging here. And we're embedding these values into the way we work and into our people development, performance, and recognition systems, and Steve, who you'll hear from in a bit, and his people team, are driving a lot of these programs, and we're already winning awards on the back of the progress that we're making on our core values, which are now central to everything that we do. So, as I mentioned earlier, one of the things that I found when I first got here was that there was a little bit of strategic ambiguity. So what we've been doing is, and what it felt like is actually in a world of opportunity, we were trying to be too many things to too many people. So when I came in, we did go back to basics. We pulled up the drain, we got out the data to objectively determine what we do, and it's clear. We are a global product and service solutions provider for industrial customers. We are technically led, and we're digitally enabled, and we are the critical link between our customers and our suppliers, creating value for both those communities, and we enable efficiency and sustainability at the center of the MRO supply chain. We also took a hard look at customers. Who are they? What do they do? How do they work? And why did we do this? Well, to work out where we should focus our future efforts. And again, it's clear, we support people who build and maintain industrial assets and infrastructure across the globe, and we supply products for their R&D, design, and small batch, highly configured production, which is about 45% of what we do. Planned and emergency maintenance, repair, and operations, which is about 45% of what we do, and then we do this across a wide range of generally process-oriented industry verticals. I think at the highest level, you've heard us talk before. We have over a million customers, but when you dig into it, we have customers that fall broadly into three types of category, and I've put that on the pyramid here. We call them standard, key, and corporate. Nicky and Pete will talk about this in a bit more detail, but there are two messages I'd like you to take away here. We have a broad base of customers who come to us occasionally, and generally digitally, to buy small numbers of low-value products. We then have a set of key customers who order more from us across a broader range, and then we have a set of corporate customers who order a lot from us across a very wide range. That's message one. Message two is that no single customer accounts for more than 0.5% of group revenue, so we're very dispersed. But actually, 13% of our customers in those key and corporate categories deliver 76% of our revenue, and it's those insights that are important in understanding in the future where we focus and how we invest to determine how we best serve each of those customers in the future. We stock over 800,000 products, and at any one time, we, the book value of our inventories runs at around GBP 750 million, and we augment this stocked range with an additional 5 million plus of products that we list. We don't stock, but we can actually source efficiently from our suppliers. We used to talk about industrial and electronic categorization, but when we actually looked at what we supply, how our customers buy, what they need, and then also what our suppliers think, how they're constructed, how they develop product, and how they take it to market, we realized that this was an oversimplification of what we've done, what we do. We have therefore concluded and reorganized our supply chain and procurement teams behind seven main technical product categories. Our biggest category, automation and control and electrification, is over 40% of what we do, and it's where we lead and the technical experts, but we are also experts and significant players in the other six associated categories that you see on this page, and importantly, those 13% of our customers, the key corporates that I talked to a bit earlier, they buy from five or more categories that we stock, that are set out here. Now, I mentioned that we'd restructured our product and inventory management teams behind these categories, and that's important because it provides us and our suppliers with a much clearer and more effective and targeted interface, and that leads to better strategic engagement, better marketing, better collaborative pricing. Suppliers are really important in this business, and we are trusted by most of the world's leading brands across those seven product categories that I just showed you earlier. We're an authorized distributor for over two and a 500 of our supplier partners around the world. As you'll hear, we're trying to create and build and succeeding in making those relationships increasingly strategic. Don't believe me. Let's hear from what some of our suppliers say. I'm Martin Nobby. I work for Norgren. I'm responsible for distribution for EMEA. And the reason that Norgren distribute through RS is because RS have just such a fantastic marketing machine and such a huge reach to customers. And it's also their credibility around ESG. I think that's becoming so much more important, and it really helps us grow our sales. So I think they really add value to our proposition to our customers. Hi, my name is David Hannaby. I'm a market product manager for SICK UK, representing the whole SICK organization today. Why do we use RS? Well, RS gives us access to a portion of the market where they're not easily able to service ourselves. The markets that RS provide access to a huge number of customers, that our own sales force do not talk to on a day-to-day basis. RS provide them a great service. They offer a next day delivery on sensors that people actually need on for their manufacturing sites on the next day to keep their businesses running. And I promise we didn't pay them to say that. It's really what they think. In fact, Kate and I were out in the States last week, meeting with a number of our key suppliers, and they would echo exactly what you've just heard. So, we don't just sell product, right? We don't just distribute product. We also support our customers with supply solutions and technical services. Our supply solutions are generally facilitated digitally and range from automated and streamlined customer purchasing processes through managed inventory solutions to full outsourced, indirect procurement and maintenance stores management. We also provide them with technical services, and they tend to be expertise-based, and we provide specific support for products and applications, and the things that they can be used for. These services cover things like design tools, technical solution development and sharing, product specification and application advice, customization, such as kitting and aggregation, and importantly, using all the data that we have in our organization and the service capability we have to help improve equipment reliability and predictability. We only target providing those solutions and technical services that we are advantaged in providing. As you'll hear from Pete later, they also drive customer loyalty and importantly, pull product through. To support this customer demand for complexity and availability, we have an extensive global footprint with an RS presence in 36 countries, with local fulfillment centers in 26, and seven central or regional distribution centers. We've got over 320,000 square meters of warehousing. In the last four years, we've expanded our regional distribution centers in Germany and in America. We've acquired a new regional distribution center in Switzerland with our acquisition of Distrelec, one in Mexico with the acquisition of Risoul, and we're expanding our distribution capabilities in Asia Pacific, but generally through third-party logistics providers, and we're increasingly delivering through that network sustainably, both by improving the carbon consumption of our physical facilities, and importantly, in the way we ship around our network and to our customers, and all of this allows us to support that complexity or the availability, what's called in the trade, a high service offering, and post our recent investments in capacity and automation. Pleasingly, we've got plenty of spare space to fill those shelves as we continue to grow. Key to our business model is inventory, which requires us to be sophisticated inventory and fulfillment managers, and I think this is actually one of the organization's superpowers. As the slide says, it's all about having the right product in the right place at the right time. But as finance didn't have the pen here, and I was having a coffee with Kate earlier, I know she would have liked it to add to this slide that we shouldn't have too much of it, and we shouldn't have it for too long. But actually, that superpower ensures that we do have the right product in the right place at the right time without spending too much money to do it. As the first block on the left-hand side shows, we have a group-wide approach to inventory management, and we use a common and very sophisticated set of demand planning tools that is supported by extensive external macro and micro data. And we marry that with over 20 years of internal demand data down to an individual SKU level. We have over a hundred specialists who are overseeing and managing that inventory and also our suppliers in real time, supported, of course, by input from our local and regional business leaders who are closest to the demand signal. And this allows us to achieve, in our stocked products, over 95% order availability. And then in the middle block, to get that product in the right place, we operate a global and connected network, which has full SKU visibility, and we generally are moving fast movers closer to the customer and ingesting and replenishing product through our regional distribution centers, which we then distribute out to our network across nearly 200 intragroup distribution routes. And all of this means, as the block on the right says, we get the product to the right place at the right time. It's partly predicting the medium-term demand with relatively high accuracy and a detailed knowledge of supplier lead times. And as the chart on the right shows, even at times of supply chain disruption, and that's the black line at the bottom of the chart, and demand volatility, 'cause actually that's the post-COVID, the pre-COVID and the post-COVID demand line. As the red and the gray line show, we still manage to maintain high availability and strong on time to promise. And we do that without annoying the finance people too much, so that's good news. And we're pretty unique in being both technically led and digitally enabled, allowing access to lots of technical data in multiple formats, which Pete and Nicky will talk to. But critically, having been digital since 2001, the data we have been capturing and continue to capture is key for our customers and for our suppliers. And more importantly, as we aggregate, cleanse, and improve access to that data, it allows us to make increasingly better decisions. And again, you'll hear more from Pete, from Nicky, from Christian, and from Janet on this as a theme throughout the topics that they will share with you. And finally, and as you heard from a couple of those customers, our position in the supply chain means that sustainability has been a focus for this business for a long time. It's an area where we aspire to, and I think, do lead in, and it's a significant business opportunity for us. And Pete will share a bit more about this when he takes you through our differentiated offering. But it is of real benefit to both our customers and suppliers, because we can help address that key priority for them, how to deliver their products and services more sustainably. So hopefully, over the last 25 minutes or so, that's provided you with a bit of a view on what we do and how we do it, and how we create value through that process for our customers and suppliers. So we're now gonna take a look at, having looked at us and the internal stuff, we're gonna start to look outside, and we're gonna have a look at the RS markets, and how we're well-positioned in markets that demonstrate good growth, and we're gonna try and size them in this section, see what's driving them, and share with you what we think it means in the medium and long term. So as you heard a little bit earlier, we operate in a number of different geographies across a number of industry verticals, and in a whole bunch of different product categories to address a range of those customer needs. Sizing this market is quite a challenge, so, for our own planning purposes, we've spent a lot of time looking at external indices that might be a good indicator of how our underlying business will grow. As this chart shows, and I think a lot of you have seen this before, what we found is that our like-for-like revenue growth actually is pretty closely correlated with the various different indices that measure industrial activity, and that's particularly true when you weight it by geography, and it's even truer if you lag it by a couple of months. Although this goes back to 2018, actually, if you take it a further 10 years back, you see very much the same R squared and the same correlation. Internally, for our own planning purposes, we do use industrial production indices and things like PMI as a proxy for what our markets might do in the medium term. Just as we're on this slide, how do we tend to perform against those industries? When you normalize for that unusual post-COVID trading bump that we saw, and that's the little bit of shaded line between the shading between the solid red line and the dotted red line, we generally have historically done generally about two times GDP. Intuitively, we've always known that our market's complicated, and it's big, and we've got a small share of it, but it's also worth putting some scale around what our market really looks like and what the potential market is that we play in. So we've actually done some work that breaks down and looks at sales of the seven product categories that we stock around the world every year, and it's around the big white spend. It's about GBP 1 trillion. Now, if you look at how much of this is sold or available to be sold through the distribution channel, it shrinks to the gray block, and that gray block says it's around 650 billion-700 billion GBP. Now, some of you who have attended these events from RS in the past may have a number of GBP 450 billion in your mind. Actually, on an underlying basis and like for like, that GBP 450 billion is still valid. It's just that since we last did that work, we've opened up new markets, we've expanded our product categories, and we've got more products in those product categories. And then, recognizing that we play in that high availability, high service space, and we don't carry the full product lines in each of those product ranges, that brings us back to that red block in the bottom right of that chart. It says that our addressable market is about 130 billion around the world. Now, look, it's directionally all correct, this. It's not particularly accurate, but what it does highlight is we're playing in a big space, we have a relatively small share in that space, and there's plenty to go after and not only is it a big market, it's also highly fragmented. Pete will touch on this very complex chart in a bit, but this table is attempting to show our relative strengths across our seven product categories in our major markets and the fragmentation within those markets. The red lateral bars show how much of each category's share is held by the top five players, and then the green bars show our relative share by country in those categories. Then along the top are our country markets, and those orange bars are our estimate of the share of the serviceable market we think we can address in those countries. You'll see that our biggest share is in the U.K., and it's just under 6%. Next up is France and Mexico, which are both around 3%. There's a lot to absorb, and I'm sure you're gonna take this chart away, and it is a little subjective, but again, this is directionally correct. And the message we're trying to give you here is that we're operating in a big market that's fragmented, which means we have a material opportunity to grow share over time. And then lastly, in this section, in addition to absolute scale and fragmentation, our markets are also benefiting over the medium and long term from important macro industrial trends. And this chart attempts to demonstrate how some of the more, pertinent industrial trends are gonna drive growth in our product categories over the next five years. And it's generally pretty good news. Things like the continuation of Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things, building efficiency, increased electrification, and accelerating demand for automation and control suggest that our markets are likely to outperform GDP over the next five years, and importantly, in product categories where we are the most technically proficient, where we are closest to our customers and suppliers, and therefore, where we are particularly well-placed to capitalize. So that's it on the markets. Three things I think you should be taking away from this: it's big, we're small in it, we are advantaged, it's fragmented, and there's plenty of opportunity to gain share there. So how are we gonna do it? Well, I think the best person to explain that to you is Pete. Pete runs our largest region, EMEA, and although he'll introduce himself, and you'll make your own judgments, he doesn't look old enough, but he is an industry veteran. He's been in distribution for most of his life, and he's gonna explain how the differentiated proposition that I've discussed will continue to drive outperformance and market share gain in the future. Pete? Thank you very much, Simon. As Simon said, my name is Pete Malpas, and I have the pleasure of leading the EMEA region for the RS Group. I'm not quite sure at what stage you become a veteran, but what I do know is I've spent the last 30 years working in a variety of technical and commercial roles across the EMEA region. It was my eight-year anniversary with RS in August, August the 16th, and for the last four and a half years, I've been leading the EMEA region. It's been quite an eight years and a fantastic four and a half years. I'm gonna build on some of the insights that Simon's already shared with you in the last session, and I'm delighted to have the opportunity to talk to you, not just about EMEA, but our group proposition, and how that differentiated proposition is enabling us to drive market share growth and to gain our share of both the industry and some of our customer's share of wallet. To start with, I want to try and give a little bit of context and a little bit of orientation around the industry. So I wanna use this slide just to help us go through that journey. Generally, and it is a bit of a generalization, but generally, our competitive landscape is split into three fundamental types of service offering or differentiated proposition. At the top of the chart, you'll see along the top, what we would class as the small, local distribution. Some people would refer to them as your mom-and-pop type businesses. Doesn't matter what the product area is, doesn't matter what the technology is, but these organizations tend to specialize in a very narrow category. They're quite often technically proficient, and they have very strong site-based relationships with the customers. All right, so that's the small end of the distribution scale. In the middle, we've got something that Simon referred to earlier, the high service distribution. Generally, these are operating over a slightly larger geographic area, maybe even a broader range of categories, but still within a defined set of categories. And then down the bottom of the chart, you'll see what we're looking at in terms of broad line distribution, and also, I would include into that some of the digital platforms. These organizations offer a broad range, but a little bit less in terms of technical support and human engagement, I would say there. If we look at RS, I mentioned RS is uniquely positioned. We are uniquely positioned as that high service distribution area because you can see the breadth of categories that we operate. Not only is it the breadth of categories we operate, but we offer the high touch with both a digital presence and the technical support that Simon referred to earlier. The second point of differentiation is the truly global footprint that we offer, and there's no one else that would offer such a breadth of range with a digital presence and a high service distribution, and this really supports our customers who are driving that consolidation journey, purchasing across multiple categories, across multiple territories. It also really helps our suppliers, how they can introduce products, service solutions through RS, and really address a very broad audience, and you'll hear as we go through both this session and some other sessions, how our customers and suppliers are benefiting from this proposition, so when we do our research and talk to our customers about what's important, what really drives, share with the customers? There's a variety of factors, but I wanna just step back again and think about the average order value that Simon referred to earlier. Our business, our customers, our customers' buying behavior, they buy a broad range of products, but quite shallow. It's high mix, high complexity. The cost of doing that, the cost of managing a complex supply chain, the cost of managing a complicated inventory footprint, means that their costs are really high. So we compete on value, not price. Look, I'm not saying price is not important, but when you look at price in terms of the customer's key criteria, you'll see it somewhere down on the list. The key criteria for our customers is all about product availability and product range. It's about customer service, customer support, and it's about the provision of value-added services and solution. So building on from the previous slide, our proposition, working across, you know, a broad range of products and delivering those service and solutions capability with an increasingly personalized customer journey, has a really strong fit with these customer needs. And again, you'll hear a little bit later today about some of the strategic investments we're making to further strengthen that proposition in these areas. Simon talked earlier about the work we've done around the categories and the product categories, how we've reshaped our product hierarchy in order to have, first of all, both a consistent group-wide approach, but one that's also more relevant, both for our customers and for our suppliers. He mentioned that our larger value customers are buying across multiple categories, and 50%-60% of our corporate and high-value customers are buying across five or more of our product categories. This clearly indicates, sorry, the intent of our customers to drive that consolidation and how our breadth of range is really helping us. But also, 40%-50% of our customers purchase from the long tail of our products, okay? These products are all often products that are more difficult to find. They're more technical products and difficult to source from our competition, and that's really important. So when you have customers on a consolidation journey, it's both the high runners, but also the long tail of products. And having this full range, and we'll talk about that again a little bit more, is really helping our customers on that consolidation journey and to consolidate more with RS. So we have RS Pro, and you'll see RS Pro when you go into the customer zones upstairs later today. RS Pro is a high-quality range of products. It's also a very broad range of products, and it's priced competitively, and we ensure that high quality because we only source from our accredited manufacturers, many of whom are actually our existing strategic branded partners. RS Pro products are subject to rigorous testing, okay? That against internationally recognized standards, with pricing strategically positioned to make sure that we can ensure we maintain some strong margins. We have over 80,000 RS Pro products covering 1,500 subcategories, and our focus on embedding this brand is really important. Interestingly, RS Pro is the most commonly researched term on our website, and 34% of all new customers, their first order includes RS Pro products. But it's not just about RS Pro. RS Pro is complementary and symbiotic with our branded partners, because of those 34%, 88% of those returning customers subsequently buy additional branded partners. So it really is complementary to both our business, but also that of our branded suppliers. And RS Pro enhances customer satisfaction, it drives loyalty, and it continues to offer significant growth potential throughout the group, but specifically, I would say, in our Americas business, and I know Doug is going to share some of his thoughts on that with you a little bit later, today. Simon mentioned the environmental ESG agenda that we have, and it really does support our purpose. But it's not just about the way in which we deliver our products to our customers, it's about the types of products that we supply to our customers. Our Better World product talks to, as I say, not just our purpose, but enables customers to make decisions they can trust over and above the generic offer, which is very often available in the marketplace. Better World products were launched in 2022, and our range now spans 30,000 products. They're sourced from over 100 suppliers, with many supporting energy reduction or renewable generation. Our Better World products are underpinned by a claims-based framework that provides confidence that sustainable products are backed by verifiable claims, sorry, I should say, that our customers can trust. That framework also provides our suppliers with a process that enables them to develop their own certification for their products, which is, which is really helpful. All of our Better World products have at least one sustainability-related improvement. Increasingly, we see that ESG is an incr... integral part of the sourcing and selection criteria for our biggest customers. We recently secured a large international multi-site contract for a large Caterpillar service partner. Okay? ESG had a 20% rating in the final decision-making criteria for us to win that contract, and that is not uncommon, particularly now with the bigger, broader, contracts. And Andrea and the team are very supportive for us in winning those customers. So we're helping our customers in achieving their sustainability goals, and we're helping customers qualify what they're doing, and you'll see here and hear more about that, as I say, when you go into the zone later. We worked with Siemens, and Siemens, I would say, are obviously one of our most strategic suppliers. Interestingly, they're also one of our largest corporate customers. So we worked together with them on our sustainability framework, and together, we created a video I just want to share with you for a moment. At Siemens, we are a true engineering company. We are strongly convinced that with the best technology, we can really make the world a better place, and this is now where the whole company is heading to. With our sustainable products, we really aim to help our customers to also achieve their sustainability goals, and we are very happy that RS is our partner here to bring our products to our end customers and really join us on this way towards more sustainability. We are planning to bring about two-thirds of all of the products that we currently have in the RS webshop into the Better World product range. Our main goal is to enable our customers to fulfill their sustainability goals, and we only can do it if we work together. I think partnership is the key for the overall success, and this is why I think it's such a great idea to partner with RS. Both of our companies anchored sustainability in their DNA. So in my opinion, we are pioneers. We have the opportunity to accelerate the sustainable transformation of industry. Shaping our future together. Shaping our future together. Shaping our future together f or a better world. Before the video, I talked a little bit about the importance of our Better World product, how important it is to our customers, but also to our suppliers, and how it supports our purpose. But in addition, there's a really strong and real commercial opportunity to be realized by offering that deep, credible range of sustainable products, and that's something we're working very hard on as we move forward. Simon talked earlier about our different services and solutions. We know that these are a key purchasing requirement for our customers. They act as a clear differentiator and address a number of customer pain points and a number of customer challenges, whilst critically providing RS with a pull-through product sales that we're seeking, but at the same time, driving increased customer loyalty and delivering faster and more resilient growth. I'm going to talk a little bit about the EMEA data, because that's probably something that I'm most familiar with, and it's where our services and solutions proposition is arguably the most advanced and mature today. Customers we know who use solutions spend, on average, five times more with us than customers that don't use services solutions, and they churn at a far, far lower rate. Our solutions growth has outperformed our base business and delivered an 11% compound average growth over the last three years, and today, as we sit here, now 30% of EMEA sales are driven by solutions and services, so it's a really key part of our strategy. When Simon talked about customer segmentation, and more importantly, we talked about customer buying behaviors for the different types of customers, but I just want to say, we have a digital proposition. We've touched on that several times today, but our digital customer experience is available for all of our customers, okay? But that is where we enhance and differentiate that using the expertise of our sales, technical, and customer support teams. As the chart shows, we enable that customer experience, that digital customer experience, I should say, sorry, for all customers, but we combine that digital and human touch, especially for those higher value customers who also rely on our technical expertise and problem-solving. For customers who have the higher potential, more complex needs, and customers who are looking to consolidate, we have the knowledge and expertise of over 1,800 sales, technical, and customer service specialists. This optimized combination of digital enablement with a human touch is what differentiates both against the traditional non-digital peers, but also versus the digital pure-play people that cannot offer that level of expertise. Building on from the previous slide, that advantage of combining the digital and human engagement, we're focusing on enhancing that further with more investment, which we'll talk about in a moment, to deliver an increasingly personalized experience. We are technically led, we are digitally enabled, and we have been digital since 2001. Around two-thirds of our business is now transacted online. We have 27 websites available in 14 languages, and they showcase an enormous amount of technical expertise. We host an abundance of technical data, data sheets, videos, application stories, news, research papers. We have enhanced search capability and personalization capability with our new AI-enabled search engine, which is being deployed across 27 markets, and if you can't find what you're looking for on the website, you can speak to one of our technical experts. You can either do that in person, through chat, or a virtual demonstration, or listen to many of our podcasts. Training our sales and technical teams and product specialists around products, services, and solutions is really important, because that enables them to take a more consultative approach, particularly with the higher value customers who have more complex needs and on that consolidation journey, and in our Americas region, we've introduced a digital approach to delivering technical support and application advice to engage with both customers and suppliers, providing virtual demonstrations of industrial products and applications. So hopefully, you'll reflect on that and the session led by Simon, and start to feel the real differentiated proposition that we offer. And with that, I'd like to hand back to Simon, who'll talk more about some of our strategic actions. Thanks, Vic. See what I mean? Industry veteran, even if he doesn't look it. So, having heard about that differentiated proposition and how it drives share gain, we're now gonna take a look in a bit more detail at where and how we are investing to drive outperformance, improve efficiency, and improve operating leverage. And you've started to see this wheel appear in our slides, and this is the pictorial embodiment of our focus strategy. It highlights the areas that we are focusing on, and where we have built detailed action plans to accelerate our journey to become, and to consistently be, first choice for our customers and suppliers. And we anticipate continuing to invest between GBP 35 million and GBP 45 million a year for the next few years to deliver on these initiatives in six main areas of that strategic wheel. People are at the hub of everything that we do, and as we focus on attracting and retaining the best people, we'll continue to create an environment where they feel included, excited, and able to do their best work. We're investing in all of our customers, but particularly those with significant potential lifetime value, and ensuring that we are serving them and all our other customers in the most cost-effective and efficient way. We're building closer and more strategic relationships, as you heard a bit earlier, with our key suppliers, and in addition, and at the same time, broadening and more curation of our product range. And we're developing solutions that support closer and stickier relationships with those customers and drive product pull-through. And we're also improving our multi and omni-channel, and digital customer interfaces. Why is that important? Well, it creates a much more consistent, seamless, tailored, and best-in-class experience across all the channels that our customers touch us in. And we're delivering all of this through operational excellence through sustainable and efficient physical, digital, and process infrastructure. And we've got great clarity on who owns these initiatives, and now you're gonna hear in a little bit more detail from the individuals that are leading them because we have organized this organization to accelerate delivery of this opportunity. And we've done it by simplifying our operating model, and this has improved alignment and focus across the organization. In our model today, our regions and the countries within them are our primary strategic and operational execution and delivery units, and they're closest to our customers and know most about them. Our regions are supported in their efforts by three accelerator functions that are set, that set high-level group strategic direction. They act as centers of excellence and expertise in the places in which what they play. They own the global processes that our businesses increasingly run, and they share best practice across the regions and the countries. Our regions and our countries are also aided in their delivery by four enabling functions, and they're there just to support business delivery, and they drive efficiency and scale benefits across our organization. And this is, this allows us to ensure that we have clear accountability across the whole organization on who is responsible for delivering what, to enable rapid and effective decision-making, and importantly, drive much improved execution. So with that, and that quick overview of how we've set up to deliver, I'm now gonna hand over to some of the accelerator and enabler functional leads, and also the regional heads, who all sit on the executive committee, by the way, to give you much more detailed insights into those key areas that we're focusing on. So I'm gonna ask Steve, People, Nicky, Customer Experience, Christian, Products, and Janet, Operational Excellence, to join me on the stage. We're gonna hear from them, then we'll take a break, and then we're gonna hear from the regional presidents as they share with you how some of these initiatives are translating into actions across our region. Thank you, Simon. Good afternoon, good morning to those of you that are joining online. I'm Steve Izquierdo, the Chief People Officer. I've worked in HR for nearly 30 years, working in global organizations like BP, PepsiCo, more recently, Ultra Electronics, and my personal leadership purpose is all around helping others reach their full potential, and I'll return to that at the end of my section. I joined RS just over a year ago, actually, on the same day as Kate, so you got two for the price of one, and I joined because of the tremendous opportunity to grow this business, to drive operational efficiencies, and specifically, to play a key role in delivering our vision for our employees, which is all around creating an inclusive and engaging environment, where everyone is proud and excited to come to work. They can perform at their best, they can develop, and they can thrive, and that's for our 8,600 permanent employees and 780 contingent workers across RS. So against that, in order to deliver those key objectives, we have put together a holistic people plan, which is really focused around four key areas. So firstly, implementing an effective and efficient operating model. So in addition to the work that Simon just shared with you in terms of clarifying the role and accountabilities of the key parts of our organizational structure, so the regions, the enabling functions, we obviously spent quite a bit of time at the start of this year putting in place the accelerator functions. But the work that we have done has been much broader than that on our operating model. We have made significant strides in increasing the focus on performance management and KPI measurement, and Simon will talk a little bit more around that later on. We are improving our ways of working through not just launching, but embedding and living the values in everything that we do, and also in the work that we are doing on process simplification and on operational excellence, and within the people function, we've also worked at creating an M&A playbook to strengthen our role and responsibilities in those activities going forward. Secondly, we are continuing to invest in talent and capability. We continue to be able to hire great talent into the organization. Over 95% of our open roles are actually filled by our in-house recruitment team, with an average time to fill of around 37 days, and with agency cost avoidance of around GBP 2.5 million. We know that when people have heard about RS, they feel really positive about joining this organization. And so we have been focused on creating our employee value proposition, and we're really excited about being able to launch Go Beyond Amazing externally in the next few weeks to raise awareness of RS and the fantastic opportunities that exist within our organization. We've increased the number of early career opportunities at RS, and we were absolutely delighted to be recognized externally from that recently, placing 82nd in the top 100 apprentice employer awards for the work that we are doing in this area. We continue to build capability through our leadership and management development programs and for our all-employee offerings through our RS My Academy. And we're making good progress with strategic workforce planning, which will further help shape our talent strategy going forward. Thirdly, we continue to try and create a winning culture and drive diversity and inclusion through the organization. The launch of our values have been incredibly well-received across the organization, but they've also given us a strong platform to retain what was really good about the culture, but also to make some subtle shifts in the culture that we want going forward. So things like being more performance and execution-focused, having more accountability, being more collaborative and more innovative. And we have already embedded these values into our hiring, reward, and performance management processes. We continue to make a difference through our four employee resource groups: Embrace, Elevate, oomers, and Spectrum, and this month, we will be launching an ERG focused on wellbeing, neurodiversity, and disability. Overall engagement across the organization remains incredibly high, and we now measure this and track this on a quarterly basis. We are incredibly proud of our Americas business, who recently placed 81st, so slightly better than the 82nd, in the top inspiring places to work in North America, which was a fantastic achievement and the first time they have ever done that. Finally, we are focused on making sure that we have the right reward and recognition across the organization. Earlier this year, we took the opportunity to update our reward philosophy and practices to ensure that it was driving the right short-term and long-term performance, that they were aligned to our values, and that our offer was compelling to attract and retain the best talent going forward. A few examples of what we have done in this area to make some changes, so in our annual bonus plan, we have created greater consistency in an alignment on our performance metrics across the group. We have increased the percentage that was weighted to profit and decreased the percentage that was weighted to revenue in order to focus the organization on profitable growth. We've improved the line of sight to group, region, and market metrics to balance what individuals can directly influence, but also giving them some skin in the game across the whole organization to drive collaboration, one team, and to ensure that we make the right trade-off decisions. We've also introduced an individual element, and that enables us to reward the achievement of strategic objectives and key results, which might not necessarily get reflected in the short-term financials. It also helps us differentiate our top performers and drive that high-performance culture that is embedded within our values. And with regard to long-term incentives below the executive committee, we have shifted that program into restricted share units in order to improve the competitiveness of our overall package and to mitigate some of the cyclicality of our markets. I'm delighted at the progress that we are making in the people plan, and also I'm incredibly proud to lead a strong people function that is supporting and enabling our business. Over the last 12 months, I have found we've got some really, really good people in this business. We have a really, really good culture, and we've got a really strong strong business, all of which have the potential to grow significantly. And in line with my personal purpose, I'm committed, excited, and passionate about helping us realize that potential for all of our stakeholders. Thank you. I will now hand over to Nicky, who will excite you around our customer opportunity. Thanks, Steve. Good afternoon. I'm Nicky Young, Chief of Customer Experience. I've been with RS for ten years and held a variety of leadership roles across digital, technology, marketing, and innovation, and prior to that, I was with British Telecom. I really want to bring to life what we're trying to do here for our customers and how we're delivering excellence for them. RS is a truly customer-centric organization, and as you heard from Simon, we have a very strong, active customer base of 1.1 million customers globally. Our customers are time-poor and have an urgent need for our products as they look to maintain, repair, and develop critical operations across industries. Our focus is on acquiring, developing, and retaining higher lifetime value customers, growing our share of wallet with those customers, and aligning our cost to serve to the customer value. To do this, we're focused really in three key areas. The first is creating a single view, unifying all of our global data sources of our customers to help us build a holistic view of our customers' businesses. From this, we can clearly see we have tens of thousands of high lifetime value customers that present a significant opportunity for growth for RS. As an example, we have a large multinational intralogistics customer who has operations today in 18 countries, where we have sales engagement with them in three, which equates to GBP 500,000 in revenue. There's clearly an opportunity to grow this relationship sixfold or even larger in some of their more significant territories. This is very representative of the potential opportunity we have across our existing customer base, and we see an opportunity to grow revenue by further hundreds of millions across this base. The second is how we're capitalizing on our unified efforts to align our global brand behind RS, continuing to raise awareness of our target core customer group in our focused industries, as you heard earlier, to make RS an instinctive preference for them to consolidate their MRO spend and fully understand how RS can serve and support them best. Of course, we're continuing to look at how we acquire more customers that look like this, and from our own intelligence and from our market and customer understanding, we can clearly see which customers are looking to go on that consolidation journey and build long and meaningful engagements with RS, and the third element is really how we're utilizing our rich data and understanding and our digital capabilities to align our cost to serve to customer value. We continue to utilize AI technologies to help us drive greater and more scalable efficiencies across our organization. As an example, we have 500,000 offline inquiries from our standard customer base today for copy invoices, requests for parcel tracking, that we believe we can service through our digital-only offering, unlocking millions in additional profit opportunity. Today, we provide a good service to all of our customers. Moving forward, it's clear we're gonna be focused on those customers that create a greater sustainable value opportunity and provide them with a great service. Now, I'd like to hand over to Christian to talk about how we do this with our partners and suppliers, and how we broaden our range for our customers. Thank you. Thank you, Nicky, and good morning, good afternoon, everybody. My name is Christian Horn. I'm the Chief Product and Supply Chain Officer. I've been with RS three and a half years, but spent 30 odd years before that with leading international B2B distributors, both in senior leadership roles in commercial and operations. I want to add a bit more color on the importance of partnering with our suppliers and of constantly creating and expanding our product ranges, driven by our customer needs insights, and what we're doing to accelerate our capabilities in this space so that we can really harness the opportunity. What's really important to understand is that we are a real essential part of how our suppliers go to market. Now, the degree to which they engage with distribution varies, but the value we bring to all of them, essentially, as you've heard in the testimonies earlier, that we reach their current and future dispersed end user base with their products, all wrapped up by our technical offering and our service capabilities and distribution network, and actually, suppliers see us as quite uniquely positioned in this space, because many, if not all, of their other distribution partners, either only operate in certain markets, they don't have the same depth and breadth and deep category expertise, they don't have the same customer reach, they don't have a sales force, or they don't have the same digital capabilities, and as a result, many of them see us as an increasingly attractive way and effective way to get more products to more end customers. And to many of them, it's really, really important because many of our suppliers have direct sales organizations, and they are reviewing how they can change their go-to-market, so they can focus their own sales organization on larger customers or large project opportunities. So the degree to which we can help them reach more customers, helps them in their efforts, too. And actually, where these suppliers have direct sales organizations, many and more and more of them actually give their sales force credit for our sales into their end user base, so that we forge really strategic partnerships. It also means we partner with many of our suppliers on identifying joint customer opportunities or working on solving specific customer problems. And that's really important for our customers, 'cause they can be assured that we have the full backing of the original manufacturer in this place. It's really important then that we are able to constantly enhance and refresh our assortments with our products, supplier's latest product innovations, but also that we're able to add more of the existing products for our suppliers, because many of them are opening a wider range of what they offer to us as a channel. A real good example of how this can drive growth is the partnership we developed with a leading global manufacturer in our mechanical and fluid power category. This particular supplier, historically, didn't really work with distributors. They were largely going through their own sales motion. We built a strategic business plan with them, with multi-year growth targets. We started introducing 2,500 products, trained our respective teams, built joint marketing campaigns, and in the meantime, we've increased that assortment from that supplier to over 20,000 products. What this has driven over the last five years is this supplier is now one of our top 25 suppliers, with a CAGR of only 20% over the last five years. Even in the last 12 months of tougher trading, this supplier has grown double-digit with us. We actually have another 5,000 products that we're gonna be introducing by the end of the year. That really drove share gains for us and a much wider customer reach for the suppliers. We have a lot of opportunity to do similar things with more suppliers, but historically, we have been limited in our ability to bring enough new products into our channels quickly enough, particularly in EMEA, and that was driven by some of our legacy systems. After the Americas, we just recently refreshed our entire tech stack that we use to inject product into our ecosystem and to be able to publish that on our various digital channels. We went live with this new capability in August. What this has allowed us to do, is to triple the number of products we can launch, you know, per day, per week, per month, per year, and to reduce the time it takes to inject those and make them available for sale by over 90%. We also consistently improve our data model and how we, you know, acquire and enrich product content. We've been making further enhancements to our digital channels to make sure we can maximize the opportunity from those content capabilities. And in expanding and curating our range, RS PRO plays a really, really important role because it is our brand of quality, choice, and value. And we also extensively use data, and increasingly AI, to make really disciplined decisions on what to introduce, what to stock where, and how much, so that we optimize working capital and asset utilization, but that we also then invest intentionally where needed in our infrastructure. And in all of that, we increasingly partner with our suppliers on a pan-regional level. We're working with them globally to either identify and drive growth opportunities or to help them reduce the cost to serve the distribution channel. And I think the video you saw from Siemens on Better World Products is a really, really strong testament of the strength of those partnerships. In summary, I hope this highlights some of the exciting growth opportunities we have, from continuing to partnering with our suppliers, continuing to curate and expand our product range, really allowing us to continue to outperform the market, but also operating more efficiently. And as a result, the accelerated expansion of our product range is actually the biggest driver of sales growth in EMEA in the next five years. And with that, I'd like to hand back to Nicky, to talk about our acceleration in services and solutions. Thank you, Christian. Just want to further note that Simon and Pete shared around the importance of our technical solutions and services, and how they are really a differentiator for us when engaging with customers, and it really helps drive greater product pull-through, and for our most loyal and valued customers, truly helps solve some of the challenges that they face, embedding RS further into our operations and enhancing our competitive moat. For our high lifetime value customers, our portfolio of solutions give them an opportunity to progress through our digital procurement and supply capabilities, right through to full outsourced procurement and inventory management with our RS Integrated Supply offer. Our procurement solutions are really the doorway to our broader solutions portfolio, and in combination with our supply solutions, help customers solve some of their challenging problems around driving more sustainable inventory management within their facilities. As an example, we have a customer today that we've engaged with, based in the U.K., in the utility sector. Over the last four years, we've seen this customer grow their spend from hundreds of thousands to multiple millions with RS. Really, through the process of consolidating their category purchases with RS, rationalizing their supplier base, and adopting our digital and supply solutions across 11 sites, that we now ensure customers get the products they need, available on time, when they need them, for the very next day and the very job they need to get done. The second aspect is how we're broadening and expanding our technical solutions and services. As mentioned, our products can be quite technically complex, and our customers have a real need to make sure they've got the right form, fit, and configuration to solve the problems that they've got. As Pete mentioned, you know, we're doing this through engagement with suppliers, typically through our design centers, but also more recently in the U.S., where we've opened up our virtual hub to allow us to engage with engineers who can remotely engage with us from their site and facilities, to help support them with product selection, configuration, and ensure they get the right support for the solutions and applications that they need. This really joins in the combination of our most powerful aspects in our digital capability and our human touch expertise. And lastly, as mentioned, if the customer is looking to outsource their procurement and inventory solutions, we do this through our integrated supply offer. We're focused on driving greater profitability of this part of our operation, leveraging the data and customer pull-through information we have to further embed ourselves in our customers' operations. Our solutions portfolios are very well regarded by our customers, as you'll hear more about later, and really help solve their problems, creating greater loyalty and greater value opportunity for RS. And this all comes together through our customer experience, intelligently understanding our customers' needs and tailoring our offer to service them best. We're continuing to enhance our customer experience, both digitally and through our human touch, in a number of key areas. First aspect is really how we're building on our AI recent rollout for our search platform. That allows us to continually optimize on-site finding of products through rich content and accurate information to drive improvements in our digital conversion. The second aspect is we've globally rolled out our customer relationship management tool, with common processes to equip our sales leaders with rich customer data and tailored proposition, focused on those customers that present us the greatest value-based opportunity, where we can grow strategically and create sustainable value creation. The third, and as you'll hear from Kate earlier on our broader investment agenda, is our investments into our digital commerce platform. Our global platform ensures we can continue to enhance our experience and provide that market-leading offering. Today, we have a superior ability to help customers find the right products with the right rich content, with a plethora of technical information, as you heard Pete refer to earlier, and we're also enhancing our buying experience for our most frequent visitors. This global platform allows us to continually increase improvements to our experience at a faster rate and utilize those core capabilities to drive adoption of things like our e-procurement offer in the U.S., which Doug will touch on again shortly. And finally, we're bringing all this together through our connected channels and understanding of how we tailor our proposition across all the engagement points that our customers interact with us today. We're confident we can provide a really seamless, high-value engagement, offering the right products, the right solutions and support at the right time to ensure our customers have the best engagement when they engage with RS. And now, let's hand over to Janet to talk about how we're delivering that with operational excellence at its core. Thanks, Nicky. And yes, the CIO is having technical difficulties with my Taylor Swift mic. So, nice to meet everybody. Thank you, and welcome to those of you online. My name is Janet Robertson. I am the Global Chief Information Officer, and yes, I'm American. I recently joined from Raytheon Technologies, or rebranded RTX, the parent company over Collins Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, and Raytheon business units. And I've been here just up under five months. Very excited to join this amazing company. While my professional career has been based in technology that enables business, my professional education, or my formal education, was really in industrial distribution and engineering. So kind of come full circle and come back home. This really gives me a solid foundation of the business understanding in this industry, so I'm excited to be here. The process and technology maturity path that we're on, that we're gonna share with you, that you've heard about, is very complex, and it does take some time. I know that it can be done, and that it will be done. I've also done it before, so I'm excited to really bring the expertise that I have to this. I'm confident that we're gonna be able to deliver it brilliantly. Having migrated from its core as a catalog distributor in the late 1980s, RS has been technology and digitally enabled for more than 20 years. You've heard that a few times now. However, we've grown both organically and more recently by acquisition, and invested to create increasing differentiation. That's led our processes and technology that runs them to become increasingly complex, inflexible, and inefficient over that time. As a result, we've been on a journey to improve this efficiency, reduce the focus on internally developed and coded solutions, and increasingly look at best-in-class front-end applications that are already made, improve our operational efficiency, and therefore optimize that full technology landscape. But first, the clarification of our operating model and the way we've changed here in the last 18 months has given us an opportunity to look at our back office and middle office processes, which really you have to kind of manage first before you throw a tool at it. For example, we have 14 different ways of ingesting an order into our business. It's kind of too many. During this harmonization process, we are using benchmark processes, using proven best practices to inform our upgrade from our very customized SAP landscape and environment to a more standardized implementation. We've started this journey, and you'll hear more from Kate about what that means in terms of our margin improvement over time. We've also recently inventoried and dispositioned over 1,000 different applications and tools in our technology footprint. As we harmonize and drive the consistency there, where it's prudent, and along with the process harmonization, we'll have a targeted initiative to reduce that footprint and that technology's footprint stack by 30% over the next five years. This will establish us a cutting-edge technology platform while reducing our overall cost of technology as a percentage of revenue. So meaning, our, as our revenue increases, our costs don't stay at that same rate. Now, the data and the value driven from the data insights that we've talked about will be key to supporting our business to meet both long- and short-term investments or objectives. We're building our enterprise data platform as we speak, and in just in the last two months, we've ingested more than five terabytes of high-value data. That's huge, in two months. So what does that mean? Well, it means the data foundations that we're setting up are gonna unlock incredible value through a variety of use cases. As Nicky and Christian mentioned, and me and Pete, we talk about data and unlocking that customer experience and the targeted use of automation and everybody's favorite buzzword, AI. And this is just the start of our journey. We're confident the investments that we're putting forward for these trend, these new maturity e-evolution, are gonna drive a lot of value for the company. After hearing me talk about process and technology, I think it's time for a break. You guys are all starting to go to sleep, but stretch your legs, check your email, and grab a refreshment. We are running a little behind, but I wanted us to come back in exactly 15 minutes. We're gonna all be prompt, and so we can get to the after-experience rooms and refreshments. 15 minutes from now is exactly 3:45 P.M. or 15:45. Look forward to seeing you all back here. Thanks for having us. So welcome back. And just before we have our regional presidents come up on stage and share with you how they are taking those areas of focus that you've heard about from my executive colleagues that are leading their functions and executing them in the regions. We've talked a lot about availability and breadth of product range and immediacy. And so what I thought we'd do before you go in to hear from the regions, who'll talk about their customers a little bit more, is we've talked about verticals, we've talked about the nature of the people that buy from us. I think it's important to understand what they need and why. So if you look at this chart, the thing that actually unites all of our customers is they have very, very similar needs. And we've worked this out by actually doing an awful lot of customer interrogation and insight. They come to us basically for four things. They come to us for planned MRO and emergency MRO. This is about keeping their factories and their assets running when they break, fixing them quickly, and when they need maintaining, having the product and capability immediately available to fix it. We also do work quite a lot for small batch, highly configured production, and we also work with people who are designing products. And these customers all have one thing in common. They generally have very limited visibility of what products they're gonna need. They don't know which machine is gonna break, they don't know which product they're about to design, and they don't know which circuit board to put into it. With limited demand, when they realize what they need, they order it, and they don't think about particularly planning how they order it. You tend to find that our customers place small orders. Our order value is relatively small, a couple hundred quid. But you also find, generally, particularly our key corporates, they place lots of them. Small orders in terms of value, high volumes of them, and they have a huge range of product that they order. What it means for us is we have to be set up to deal with a broad range of products, large volumes that ship every day to a very broad range of destinations. That also has some implications on our ability to predict what's gonna happen. Now, with our plans and emergency MRO, in individual customers, that's highly volatile. They don't know what it's gonna be. It's gonna break. They don't know what it is, and they don't know what they're gonna need. But for us, because we're serving over a million of them around the globe, actually, MRO, planned and emergency, has relatively low volatility. It's not tied to the production cycle, and therefore, it's a pretty predictable, sustainable business. The area where we see more volatility is in our small batch and highly configured production. And why is that? Well, these people are making small amounts of highly complex and generally optimized product. They're exposed not just to production cycles but to capital investment cycles. So something to remember before you get into hearing the regional presidents discuss their business is the MRO business is a lot less volatile. That's 50% of what we do. The small batched, highly configured, production is a bit more volatile, but all of them have the same need. They need large volumes of small orders, of lots of products with technical support and availability. Having it there to keep your production running is really, really key. But again, don't listen to me. Have a listen to what our customers say. So the way I describe RS is, it's very partnership. It widened up the opportunities that we had to not only provide us the components we need to maintain our assets, but technical support, engineering background into that to enable us to look at the wider industry, what's going on in industry, and also bringing some innovation. Really, it's a wrap-around service of engineering support that previously we just didn't have. So product range is fantastic, but we also have on-site support when we need it. If I could describe RS in three words, I would say expertise, partnership, and customer focus. We use RS because of the friendliness. RS gives us that first step in. I think that's a relationship answer, really. Relationship to the vendors as well, too, the supply that's available through RS. The response time and the kindness are top tier with RS Americas, and, of course, having everything in stock helps. RS has become an essential player and an everyday partner to accompany us in the challenges that arise and that we have today. We buy from RS primarily for the responsiveness of the teams and the availability of products. And then, secondly, it's also the quality of the internet tool. We find the stock there, we find the price, of course, but also all the technical elements, the FDS, the data sheets. For me, the first value of RS is perhaps putting the customer's needs at the center. It's not having a value of saying, "Here's what we propose, choose." It's more like saying, "What do you need, and we will bring it to you. Before RS came in, it was a total disaster. Putting that project in place made a massive difference for our business. It's just. Yeah, it's a dream for me. Working with RS was an absolute pleasure. I've done a couple of projects working with service suppliers, and RS stand out massively. As Simon said, it's always great to hear from our customers. I promise you, that wasn't scripted. Even that RS is amazing. But when you reflect back to the session I ran earlier this morning, we talked about the key customer needs. If you watch the video and re-listen to the video again, you'll see a number of those key needs coming out. It's about product range, it's about availability, it's about technical support, it's about advice. Nothing about price coming out, but you know, it really is a good alignment. Before the break, our team shared some insight around some of our strategic initiatives. We have one group plan, but our group strategic plan is really tailored regionally. Between Doug, Sean, and myself, we'd now like to take the opportunity to provide you with just a little more insight into our respective regions, and importantly, share some of the examples of how we are accelerating our strategy independently, to continue outperforming the market while driving operational leverage. So I'm gonna kick off and look at EMEA. We've jumped two slides. Can we just go back one, if that's possible? Okay, so EMEA. EMEA is a large and diverse region. We have a really strong coverage with a good footprint, but importantly, we really still have a strong runway for growth. We've sized the service addressable market at around 60 billion, with 70% of that being concentrated in the U.K., Germany, France, and Italy. So whilst we want to grow everywhere, those four are our priority markets. The rate of consolidation is actually increasing, and that's driven by a number of factors, but most of all, by our customers who are on that consolidation journey and trying to drive across multiple categories. So if I look at the EMEA region, I could really look at the U.K. and France, first of all. The U.K. and France are the most mature in terms of our current strategy. They have diversified their customer base, they have diversified the products in which they service. They have diversified the industries in which they serve, and therefore, they are more resilient in performance today. If I look at our German and Italian business, they are a little bit more exposed to the discrete manufacturers and the OEMs, which is really linked to the demographic in that market. From a product category perspective, their share from areas like semiconductors, passives, and single-board computing is still around 10%, okay? Now, that's down 8, down from 18% two years ago, but is still double the share that we're seeing in our U.K. and French businesses. But all of our businesses are evolving in EMEA. We're all following the more balanced approach and doing that through the acquisition of customers, more MRO orientation, to get a more balanced growth profile and more sustainability. We're also focusing on RS Pro, our own brand, to make sure we can maintain and protect our margins, while also continuing to accelerate our digital penetration. I mentioned earlier that digital purchases were around 60% of group sales. In EMEA, that's around 70%. 74%, actually, to be precise, and we want to continue to drive this and make sure that our e-tailing and our e-billing capabilities remain leading in the industry. So if I move on from the current situation, we can see from in EMEA, we still have an opportunity to grow our share of wallet with our larger customers, while driving operational efficiency and leverage it. Our organic strategy is focused on accelerating the acquisition and development of high-value customers. It's about expanding and curating our product range while growing our services and solutions. It's also about improving our customer experience and driving productivity as we lower our cost to serve, and you've just heard about some of the strategic initiatives that will facilitate this. From a customer perspective, we continue to refine our segmentation model as we learn more about the needs of our customers, and importantly, the potential value and lifetime value that those customers offer us. We're seeking to grow our share of wallet with those larger customers, and we're growing significantly. We've won six new corporate accounts, for example, this business year alone, and our corporate sales is growing a share of RS EMEA sales, significantly over the last four years. Moving forward, we aim to further accelerate our share of sales from those larger and particularly the corporate customers. As I said earlier, we've strengthened our focus on the resilient sectors and the verticals, which are less cyclical and those that have a stronger inclination around MRO, break-fix, and planned MRO. You heard from Nicky how we've deployed a CRM solution across all markets of EMEA. With this, we've introduced a unified RS way of selling. We're using a consistent language, and this has enabled us to gain greater visibility of our customers and our opportunity pipeline. We've talked several times today about our new search engine. That's delivered a 50% reduction in our null search results. That means customers can find what they're looking for more often than not, and that's led to a 3% improvement in customer satisfaction on that part of the journey. Christian, very articulately, talked about the great work we've done to improve our NPI capability. We know breadth of offer is critical, and our ability to expand and curate the relevant range is becoming increasingly important. We're actually seeing a 9% increase in the number of unique articles purchased from those large key and corporate customers, and we're also seeing an increase in the number of lines per order. Driving operational effectiveness is a key metric for the EMEA region. Many of you will be aware of the investments we made into our distribution center in Germany recently, and as a result, we've seen a 28% reduction in direct labor in that area in the last two years. Our recent investment in improving information around our delivery time will also drive efficiency, as we will reduce the number of inbound queries relating to the status of orders. And finally, in EMEA, we remain focused on our operating margins through optimizing our pricing while tightly managing our cost base. Just before I hand over to Doug. And one of the benefits of being in this industry for 30 years is you've gone through many of these cycles, and I've seen many of these cycles. And I just wanna say, I am super confident in the opportunity that lies ahead of us. I think my experience is that strong companies always emerge from these cycles stronger, and I think we've done some fantastic work in the last 15 or 18 months to really set ourselves up for success and build a platform that enables us to take the RS Group and the EMEA region onto the next level. And with that, I'd like to pass over to Doug. Thank you, Pete, and good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everybody online. Hello, I'm Doug Moody. I'm President of RS Americas. I've been with the company for about two and a half years, and what really drew me to the company was the opportunity we're talking about today. Because I come from a background where I was leading large P&Ls across the globe for our customers, our suppliers, in many of the targeted industries that we have, including my previous role as COO for Johnson Controls, $3 billion APAC business. So I could see the opportunity. Here at RS, I'm currently president of RS Americas, obviously, but I was also chief of solutions and services because I can see the value that we can bring to the market. So let's talk a little bit about the Americas business. About three-quarters of our sales are in the U.S. and Canada business. This is a business that we rebranded in 2023 to signal our expanded ambition, and we continue to build the RS brand equity across the Americas. The other quarter of the sales are in LATAM, with Risoul, which we acquired in 2023. This is a Mexican distributor that the integration has gone very well, and they're very advanced in that, and they're contributing positively with good growth. Our focus with Risoul to date has really been to begin their digital journey and expand their range and their, our, MRO capabilities. But Risoul brings a lot to RS around that solutions mindset, the capability, and a very strong Rockwell relationship. Over the last 18 months or so, after the market cooled, after industry-leading growth in fiscal years 2022 and 2023 in our U.S. and Canada business, the team didn't just react. They took the opportunity to reposition the business to capture future growth and build scalable, automated and efficient operational processes, and reconfigured the business to reduce cost and capture future leverage opportunities. Across the business, both businesses have a strong reputation for automation and control, electrical and technical products. They have, and with that, they have a very strong following with the builders of industrial assets. I'm talking about the internal engineering departments within plants around the world or around the Americas, with system integrators, and also with those discrete manufacturers that Simon talked about, that build those low volume, high technology products that you see across the industrial base. This customer base, although we do have a significant part of MRO within users, this customer base has led to less direct MRO opportunities across our business. However, it has given us a very strong position through our technical and service strengths, with high value, loyal, and repeat customers who give us world-class business-to-business NPS scores in the high 60s. This customer base also makes us more, as Simon talked about, a little bit more exposed to the capital investment cycle and the industrial production cycle. Also, this customer set, the markets they serve, and their procurement habits, have historically drove a higher human touch and less procurement and supply solutions demand. But the trend toward digital and spend consolidation that we've talked about is real, and we're seeing it across the business, and therefore, we have a great opportunity to deliver value through more solutions and the consolidation of their spend. We can also capture more increased share with the end users by leveraging a lot of our global solutions and systems that you've heard about, as Pete's talked, as Nicky's talked as well. So our future position, we take our technical strengths, coupled with the digital assets that Nicky talked about, the product things that, Christian talked about, and the service solutions across the board, has positioned us to capture a greater share of wallet with our current customer base, and also expand into targeted verticals to consolidate both their project and their MRO spend across multiple product categories. So what are the key strategic actions over the next five years that have delivered that exciting and more sustainable growth in the Americas region that I saw when I first joined the company? First, with our current customer base, we have a great opportunity to expand our share of wallet by broadening our product offer and selling more complementary solutions across that technical space. Additionally, with the improved segmentation that we've talked about, the enhanced CRM and sales tools and effectiveness, as they said, it's global, and we're rolling that out right now, will help us expand our end customer base in those targeted verticals to capture the lifetime value through MRO and spend aggregation. To give you an example of this, so you can see where we're taking the US in the Americas business. We've been a major supplier to those system providers for a major e-commerce retailer's distribution centers. You probably know who I'm talking about, and so we've been actually supplying the stuff that's going into all the automation that's in those types of facilities, but we haven't always followed that equipment to the end user, and by using, we have the opportunity to use the experience and the tools of EMEA around supply solutions, inventory solutions, and others, to follow that equipment and systems into the end user to capture that lifetime value from those products. Also, in the area of customer experience, as we've talked about a new digital platform, we're leading the expansion and upgrade of the group initiatives to upgrade to a greater scalability, flexibility, and operating leverage to that more effective digital platform that links all the interactions. And these are some of the opportunities I saw, the interactions between our customers, our suppliers, and partners, not only for products, but also for services and other capabilities out and data. This digital platform has already been launched in Risoul, and we're rolling out later this year in the U.S., linked with the upgraded search that Pete talked about and other website functionalities. This is, as we've talked about, this is a globally linked effort. We're the lead on that in the process to capture that greater operating leverage, both organically and to quickly get value out of future inorganic plays. In the area of products and suppliers, Christian talked a little bit about deepening our partnerships with the key suppliers due to our digital and marketing prowess, our technical support, our stocking, delivery, and sale, and really, very importantly, our sales presence. And we see many of those suppliers seeing us as the distribution model of the future, and they're leaning in heavily to say, "Hey, we want to do more with you." And so we've expanded our relationships with a few key European and U.S. manufacturers that have yielded growth with joint sales and marketing efforts. Like I said, going out, the sales teams going out together and capturing those opportunities collaboratively, which is also improving our margins because we're working together to capture them where it works best for us. Also, and very importantly, as we talk about expanding our share, as we prove our technical expertise and our way of going to market, they've increased our product authorizations across ever-expanding technical lines. And of course, better collaborations on digital content, and this ties in with our new platform. This is on top of our ongoing curation and expansion of our range to better serve those consolidating customers, and of course, in the U.S., now that we've rebranded, our intent is to expand and really focus on expanding our own brand, RS Pro, with a targeted product offering for the Americas customers, and obviously to increase our margins across the board, so these strategic actions position the Americas for significant growth, reduced volatility and sustainable growth over time, and improved gross margins, gross and operating margins as we go forward. With that intent, we're broadening our customer base to include more end users and more of that MRO, gain our share of wallet with our ever-expanding product and solutions offerings, and of course, the potential to accelerate our strategy with inorganic expansion of share in markets now that we have more scalable and more consistent processes across the business. I'll now hand it over to Sean Fredericks, who will discuss our businesses in APAC. Thanks, Doug, and thanks, Pete. Good day, everyone in the room, and of course, everyone online. It's a pleasure to share what we're doing in terms of Asia-Pacific and some of our plans going forward. I'm Sean Fredericks. I'm responsible for the Asia-Pacific region, and I've been in the company for about five years. Prior to this, I led a couple of multinational manufacturing companies in the Asia-Pacific region, and saw firsthand the incredible opportunities we have as a company in RS to grow the region with some focus in that specific region. Our Asia-Pacific business has traditionally been a basic regional representation environment. However, now our plans are to take advantage of the geographic coverage we have and leverage some of the stuff that the rest of the company is doing to build our growth in an efficient way and see upside on the profit margins. Asia's, for RS, is the least mature market, or region in the company, in terms of operational infrastructure and digital capability, local market capacity, brand equity. And so in the region, we have four, nine direct operations or nine countries. Everyone knows Asia is very diverse, but eight, nine countries, eight languages, multi currencies, religions, a lot of people, but a lot of opportunity, too. And so the way we s et our regional structure up is by subregions, and that's Southeast Asia, Australasia or ANZ, Japan, and then Greater China, which is Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. We're quite unique in terms of our geographic footprint in the region, and from a like-for-like competitor standpoint, there is no one else that compete or has what we have, within that region. We don't have a comparable global distribution competitor or peer, in terms of what we have. Our plan is to really evolve what we do have, efficiently in refining our service potential and capability with an increased emphasis on emerging parts of the economy, like Southeast Asia. I think everyone's seen the transitions from China, and geographically, there's a lot going on, so we're perfectly placed to take advantage of that. If we could please, s o yeah, in terms of our opportunity, utilizing what we have, specific customer types or the high-value customers as a focus target is the main part of our strategy with our geographic footprint. And really to identify the most valuable potential customers that are capable of high spend deals, but also willing to pay for value that we can offer across the board. The service offer is really a localized play, so Asia for Asia, in terms of the way we go to market, localized capability, real-time, cultural, language, currency. And then that localized digital experience is critical to succeed in Asia, in particular, against some of the Chinese and Japanese e-commerce giants that really play on the high volume, low margin side of the business. That's what we're up against in terms of the localized infrastructure we need. Can you move on? Okay. Sorry, the slides are not working. In Asia, what we do have is quite a heavy reliance on the electronics segment, which is highly cyclical, of course. Traditionally, it's been about 30% plus of our business. We've mitigated that by focusing on the industrial side of the business, which is far greater and far bigger opportunity. In terms of the industrial business, it's continued to grow in almost all markets across Asia, and that's a successful area for us. The localized product portfolio that we have is really about trying to not replicate the 700,000 SKUs that we have across the company, but really the select products that we know is fit for purpose, we can compete. There's local variances, we can support it with inventory, and market through local language, local tools, in local currency. We're well placed and have a phenomenal opportunity in the region, to be a significant and valuable competitor, by leveraging not only our geographic coverage and our localized teams, but what we have in the rest of the regions or the other couple of the regions and the central infrastructure, and really pull from that, utilizing the best of all worlds, to leverage just what we got. So very exciting for the business, and we're evolving and maturing and seeing some really good progress. So now Simon will come back to the stage to share our progress and our strategic action plans. Thank you. So you've heard from a number of my executive committee colleagues. Now, you've heard from the functional leads that are leading and designing a lot of those initiatives, and then you've heard from the regional presidents on how those initiatives are being implemented in their regions, and the different and nuanced action plans that they have, which build on all the hard work that's going on across the group. Now, of course, I have mentioned a bit earlier, operating discipline, and when you've got so much going on in a global organization, that can be a challenge. But importantly, one of the other things that we've done as part of reintroducing our operating model is to also install a rigorous and integrated performance management system. And that is allowing us to oversee the impact that these actions are having, to monitor the costs and the benefits as they are realized. And using charts like this, which set out the KPIs that we're using to monitor progress, it's enabling us to observe what's going on, to react more quickly to changes, to take quicker advantage of opportunities, and to accelerate and improve the execution of those actions to deliver the targets that Kate's gonna talk about in a minute. But that's all going on inside our organization, and there is an additional piece to the RS story. And so I'm now gonna ask Michael to come up and talk to us about how our growth can be accelerated through further disciplined acquisitions. Michael? Thanks very much, Simon. My name is Michael Cramb. I head up the corporate development team at RS, so I have responsibility for M&A, strategic planning, and treasury. I've been with the group for about eight years now. Prior to that, I spent the previous 25 years in various commercial strategy and M&A roles in industry and working for the U.K. government, and for my sins, I trained originally as a lawyer, and that's where I got the M&A bug. I'm here to talk to you today about disciplined acquisitions to accelerate delivery of our strategy, growth, and hence value. But before I dive into this slide, I'd just like to set the context a bit and explain a bit about the nature of M&A at RS. First, there's a genuine opportunity here, and we've heard a lot about the very attractive organic opportunity available to us. And we're fortunate that there's also a complementary inorganic one, and this is a reflection of the same features and attractive features of the markets that we've had described to us today. Large, attractive, fragmented, and critically, with potentially very attractive M&A economics, particularly when we're talking about consolidation. So the opportunity is there, is the first thing I would say. Second thing I would say is M&A drops out of and does not drive strategy. It is not an end in itself. It's a way to accelerate delivery of our strategy, potentially with better economics, potentially delivering the strategy more quickly, but it's not, categorically not, an end in itself. And behind it, every M&A decision that we've made, and I'll come on to those in the next slide, there's a side-by-side make versus buy decision. What's the market opportunity? What's the best way to tackle it? What has the best economics? What's the quickest time to value? Lastly, our process and our approach to this is explicitly value-focused. This is about strong capital returns, it's about free cash flow returns, it's about significant positive NPV. It's not about EPS, it's not about scale for the sake of scale. It's not about any other accounting measure. We are explicitly value-focused. So having said that, three stars need to come into alignment before we'll make an M&A decision. The first is, does it fit our strategy? Strategy, at its heart, is a collection of choices and decisions, particularly at business unit level, around where are we going to play and how are we going to win. So what are the market opportunities we want to tackle? So what geographies, what products, what customer types, what verticals, what segments, what categories? And what is our proposition going to be when we're looking at tackling those market opportunities? So that t hose where to play and how to win choices. So does the M&A opportunity advance that strategy or not? And if it doesn't, why are we looking at it? Are we looking at modification to our strategy? And if not, then we shouldn't be looking at that M&A opportunity. But what that means in practical terms is that for every M&A opportunity, you'd expect it to deliver something down on this side here. So geographical expansion, product expansion, value-added services and solutions, or good old-fashioned consolidation. Secondly, and I alluded to this before, we need sound economics. And as I said, that doesn't mean EPS accretion, that doesn't mean accounting measures. That means value accretive. And for practical purposes, for us, we've said that means beating our cost of capital by a comfortable margin within a reasonable period. How is that for vague in terms of not giving you any numbers? That means take our cost of capital, add a suitable margin over on it, and that's our hurdle. And if you're not doing that within three years, you should be asking questions about the acquisition you're looking at. And synergies are what make us competitive in processes. If we think we found the absolute bargain of the century that nobody else has noticed, and it's worth way, way more than everybody else thinks, we probably ought to check the wiring in our spreadsheet, because if it looks too good to be true, it is probably too good to be true. And synergies are what drive the trade in M&A, an asset being potentially worth more to us than it is to its current owner, and us being able to negotiate a split of those synergies that is acceptable to both sides. Finally, the target can be successfully integrated. That is shorthand for, we believe we can deliver more value than our acquisition plan and more quickly than our acquisition plan. So our acquisition plan, in terms of what's the value capture available to us by doing the M&A transaction, should be the floor. But there's a number of points that underpin this. When we talk about it can be successfully integrated, that covers everything you'd normally expect, obviously. So, are we going to get antitrust clearance or have antitrust problems? Are our competitors going to pick over all our best customers and all our best people? And critically, culture. This is absolutely critical because we need to anticipate and manage otherwise potentially disruptive and distracting culture clashes. I've seen more M&A transactions derailed at the culture stage than perhaps for any other reason. If people are distracted, if people are worried, they're not going to be performing, and your competitors are going to pick off your customers and your people. Now, all of this is against the background of ESG, and it's a factor in every acquisition we look at. You know, on a good day, it's a positive because we're looking at a business that has excellent ESG credentials. It's a positive, and we should perhaps be mimicking and imitating some of what they do. You know, in the real world, quite often it means factoring in something for a bit of catch-up. So out of this slide, what I'd like you to take away is that our discipline and focus on value creation is absolute, and it will remain so in future. So that's fine as a sort of statement of general principles. What does that actually mean in practice for us, and what have we actually done? So on the next slide, this is our track record for M&A. Don't try and read it and digest it all, but what I hope you can see is that there's those strategic rationales that were down the right-hand side on the other page, now across the top. And you can see a lot of what we do ticks, literally ticks more than one box in terms of the strategic rationale. So you can see our strategy reflected in the M&A activity. The second thing I would point out is that if you top these up, I think the first five years probably comes to about GBP 250 million, and then the next three years comes to double that. So the pace of activity, it's aligned to our strategy, and it's also accelerating. The other thing I talk about on this slide is the M&A pipeline, and our pipeline, our radar, so the targets that we're monitoring, either directly or indirectly, it runs into the hundreds, literally. And then through that, there's a filtering process of researching those, assessing them, prioritizing, maybe some informal contact, maybe formal contact, depending on where we want the process to go ultimately. And that spans everything from small bolt-ons, that there's an opportunity potentially to accelerate and industrialize and do more of those, right up to quite large transactions that could be transformational, either at a regional or even a group level, a small number of such transactions that we monitor and keep tabs on over time. So we have a very healthy pipeline, yes. It spans all geographies, sizes, strategic rationales, yes. But we do need to bear in mind that our capacity to execute and use M&A to accelerate delivery of our strategy, and hence value, isn't limited by our capacity to transact, but for practical purposes, it is bounded by our ability to digest and to integrate. And so before I get too excited with my M&A hat on, you know, the last thing I want to do is derail existing value creation programs that are ongoing in the business, by distracting the team, by overloading them, and overstretching and abusing the resource that we've got available. You know, having said that, our largest transactions, Risoul and Distrelec. Risoul is pretty much into steady state and business as usual now, and out of what we traditionally call the integration process. Distrelec is well advanced, but it's ongoing, and there's an ongoing resource commitment there. So the opportunity for M&A is there. It's large, it's actionable, but we need to continue to weigh up the opportunity cost of resource as we go. When we look at what you'd otherwise say is, "That's a really, really attractive pipeline, why aren't you doing much, much more?" It's because M&A has an opportunity cost. That's a lot on the principles. That's a lot on what we've done. That's a bit on our pipeline. Let me try and bring that to life a bit by talking about our most recent three transactions in a little bit more detail. On the next slide, we've got Risoul, Distrelec, and Trident. Three different businesses, three different geographies, three different strategic rationales, but one common theme, accelerated strategy delivery and value creation. If you look at these, Risoul, the rationale was geographical expansion into Mexico, where we didn't have a big presence at all. Product expansion with their range of products and their service and solutions capabilities. Predominantly revenue synergies driven critically, led by cross-selling of the products and services for each other, and adding, us adding complementary brands to their business, adding RS Pro, and them teaching us about how to sell services and solutions at which they are absolutely expert, and on track to meet or beat the hurdle rate target return that we set the acquisition, at the time we bought Distrelec. Sorry, at the time we bought Risoul. Contrast that with Distrelec. So this is about consolidation, in the EMEA market, and exploiting the capacity we have in our distribution center in Germany, in Bad Hersfeld, which is well invested. So combining the operations of the business and teams on a strictly best of both basis, and an accelerated and stretched integration pattern. Back to what I said at the start about integration being okay. That was what was in the acquisition case. How can we do more? How can we do it more quickly? And again, on track to meet or beat the original return targets that we set the business at the time of acquisition. Trident, the smallest here by some margin, but a great case study, I have to say. Expanding our product and service capabilities, revenue synergy, again, led with cross-selling, but also leveraging local infrastructure. Trident are based in Perth. We didn't have a physical presence there. Our customers in the region were crying out for a better service level. That acquisition now allows us to deliver to those customers. And really great going straight out of the blocks post-acquisition. And across all of those, we haven't wavered in terms of tying them back to our strategy. They must advance our strategy. We've unlocked targets that, in theory, were never for sale. We asked people about Risoul. They said the Risoul family will never sell. It is the crown jewel. You will never unlock that business. By courting them over a long period of time, we managed to get a bilateral transaction with them, and a really good shot at the business and convince them to sell to us. We've used internal resource wherever we can to do due diligence and to drive integration, and we've built that integration muscle. You know, are we perfect at that? You know, no, we're not, but you know, integration, it's a bit like driving, barbecuing, and interviewing. Everybody thinks they've got a God-given ability to do it without any sort of training. Whereas actually, it's an acquired skill, it's something you need to work at and get good at. That's where we are at the moment. The other thing we've done throughout all of this is keep that pipeline topped up. So every time one comes out of the bottom, because we eliminate it or we transact, we top up with two to make sure that we've got a very healthy pipeline. And we've got the world-class problem of having to prioritize the opportunities now that we pursue to look after the best ones first. So that's our criteria, that's our experience, that's our track record, and that's some case studies on what we've done most recently. And that concludes my comments today. But before I hand over to Kate, what I'd just like to say, and what I'd like you to take away from this session, is that the opportunity is large, and it's already working for us. There is plenty of scope. Yes, of course, whilst retaining that discipline and focus I talked about and being mindful of the opportunity cost, there is plenty of scope to continue and, in time, to potentially increase the pace of M&A activity. Those two things, taken together, have the potential to materially accelerate delivery of our strategy, growth, and value. I'd now like to hand over to Kate. Right, good day, everyone. And you'll be pleased to know I'm on script, so I'm going to stick quite closely to the timing that's been assigned to me. I am really delighted to be here today on almost my one-year anniversary. What we've heard so far describes RS as we are today and our strategy to make it significantly better. We've talked through our markets and areas of differentiation. We've described the progress that we have made in the last year, which has been significant, and topic by topic, my colleagues have described the business priorities that we are collectively working on. I now have the opportunity to explain to you what this means in numbers. In front of you, we have the financial outcomes of our strategy. These are consistent with what you've heard before, with the exception of cash, which we are upgrading to 80% from 70%. This reflects the improvements that we're making, including vigilance on working capital. Our targets are ambitious. We seek to grow organic revenue at twice the market rate through the cycle, and we're creating a pathway to deliver mid-teens market margins sustainably. We will manage both our capital and working capital investments closely, such that cash generation exceeds 80%. With disciplined, organic, and inorganic investment and first-class execution, we aim to deliver ROCE in excess of 20%, well ahead of our cost of capital, and together, this will deliver sustainable growth at high levels of ROCE and will drive significant shareholder value creation. You've heard a lot of detail today about the markets in which we operate, the positive industry trends, and we demonstrated our geographic diversity and our differentiated position, which from speaking to customers and suppliers, as Simon mentioned only last week, it's very much valued. However, we also know that we can be much better and have today articulated an integrated strategic plan, which is focused on making us more relevant for customers and suppliers, more effective at serving them, more data-led in our decision-making, and significantly more efficient, so that more of every one pound that we generate translates into operating profit and cash. We've taken you through our strategic action plan and how we can differentiate our business further. The answers to these three questions have guided our investment choices: What is good for our customers and suppliers that delivers top-line growth? What reduces immediate waste, distraction, and duplication? And what enables us to efficiently scale such that our cost base grows at a lower rate than our revenue, so that we can retain more of every pound? Specifically, we previously announced an organic investment of around GBP 40 million per annum, which is to target high lifetime value customers, focus on technical and specialist product ranges, scale our solutions offer to drive product pull-through and customer loyalty, strengthen and tailor our customer experience, and drive operational excellence to better leverage our physical, digital, and process infrastructure. This builds on the key foundations that we've delivered in the last year, establishing an operating model which enables clear collective decision-making, establishing business KPIs, which are actively monitored and acted upon to ensure that we're on track and have early warning where we need to course correct, and put in place business-led investment plans, which balance the benefits, costs, and interdependencies to enable us to effectively execute. We can operate more efficiently. We announced in November 2023, over GBP 30 million of cost savings, which were a function of increasing our focus, reducing waste, and accelerating the clear synergy benefits from the acquisition of Distrelec. We're well on track to meet our targets by the end of the financial year. We also believe that there was more to go for, and as we've looked at our ways of working, embedding the operating model and analyzed the efficiency of our spend, we've identified opportunities to improve our operating margin by around 150 basis points. It is going to take a bit of time to get there, and our progress will be visible to our shareholders as our gross profit to net profit conversion improves. Our strategic plans aim to remove costs that does not add value to customers and suppliers, and to ensure that we have the processes and systems that don't enable that to get added back again when market conditions improve. Janet's highlighted the areas we're focusing on: harmonizing our processes in the middle and back office, evolution of our technology to support our business, and using data analytics to target and reduce areas of demand failure. This demand failure currently increases our cost to serve, and we'll be optimizing our warehouse productivity further in our systems to ensure that we're providing the right service to the right cohort of customers, which is appropriately rewarded. The route to achieving the reductions is varied, and in part includes investment in process design and technology, and this is included in our investment plans. In addition, there will be an element of restructuring costs to effect these changes in line with what we've achieved so far, and we expect around a one-year payback on restructuring costs. So let's bring this all together. There are a number of key pillars to delivering mid-teens margins. I'm gonna start with a little bit of orientation. In full year 2024, our operating margin was 10.6%. When I include the full year of Distrelec, so that extra quarter, it reduces marginally to 10.5%. First, we've included the 13 million GBP of self-help savings already announced back in November. Then there is the opportunity to drive further cost efficiencies, estimated to be the equivalent of 150 basis points of net margin from our cost base, which will improve our drop-through, which I talked about earlier. When we deliver those improvements in our ways of working by reducing complexity and enabling scale, then the pace of change and our run costs should be well below the revenue growth opportunity that we see. You'll see these improvements in the gross profit to net profit conversion. My regional colleagues are focused on the strategic actions which enable us to better deliver for customers and suppliers in a market opportunity that has got plenty of space for growth. Revenue growth is required for us to meet our mid-teen net margin target. As we well know, underlying market growth is changeable, and we've estimated that we will double market growth expectations over the medium term. For the modelers in the room who'd like to have some indication of what this could look like over time, this slide may provide you with an indicative view. Again, I'm just gonna give you a bit of orientation. We signaled around £15 million increase in organic investment to broadly £30 million in full year 2025. We expect this to range between GBP 35 million and GBP 45 million a year over the medium term. There is some in-year restructuring costs to affect the cost savings. There was GBP 13 million in full year 2024, and we'd announced a similar number for full year 2025, and there's likely to be further restructuring costs in the following few years. We've already started delivering cost savings, GBP 8 million in full year 2024. We indicated around GBP 24 million in full year 2025, with the outer years benefiting from additional cost efficiencies as our process enhancements and technology investments deliver. Moving to the next slide, where we'll talk about cash conversion to fund our investment plans. The effective investment choice is to deliver an attractive return on capital employed is key. We believe we can do better than our current cash conversion target of 70%, so today we are increasing that to 80%. This signals a very clear focus between working capital investment, particularly inventory, which has been referenced a few times today, and gross margin delivery, and will require disciplined choices for both organic and inorganic investment. Michael has covered the inorganic investment in detail, highlighting our good pipeline of opportunities and how we will balance those choices to ensure that we can complete the digestion of our most recent acquisition with the delivery of our strategic agenda. We reiterate our 20% return on capital employed target, although I want you to note that investments in very large infrastructure or M&A may temporarily disrupt in-year ratios. We're not planning any large CapEx projects in the short to medium term. For M&A, we target to comfortably cover our cost of capital within three years, while keeping leverage within a sensible range, and lastly, a summary of our capital allocation policy, which hasn't changed. We first target our organic opportunities, seeking to improve our supplier and customer offer and operate more efficiently. We have no shortage of opportunities to choose from, and inorganic investment in a fragmented market, which can accelerate our strategy. We have good cash flow and balance sheet capacity to manage an attractive pipeline, and our financial leverage is targeted at net debt over EBITDA of around one to two times. Any excess capital belongs to shareholders, and we remain committed to a progressive dividend policy, albeit, as I've indicated before, expectations on increases in the short to medium term should be modest as we grow back into the current dividend distribution. The RS story, as illustrated, is an exciting one in numbers. It's a great combination of underlying structural growth in a highly fragmented market, with profit growth also underpinned by self-help levers. Strong growth at high ROI will drive shareholder value for years to come, and overall, it is an opportunity that I am delighted to be a part of. I'm now gonna hand you back to Simon. Right. So I'm always conscious that there's a risk when you ask people who are really enthusiastic about their businesses and the opportunity in front of them, they tend to overrun, and of course, we have. But I'd just like to spend a minute pulling things together. We've got a really exciting future at RS, and I hope you can feel that from the energy and from what the team is saying and doing. We've come a long way in the last 18 months, and we've achieved a lot more than I personally expected we'd be able to, and that's thanks mainly to the efforts of a lot of our good, hardworking RS people. We've embarked on a cultural evolution, and we're making great progress. We're even winning prizes for it. We have a focused strategy that's supported by aligned and prioritized action plans that we're executing through a simplified operating model, which creates clear accountability, and we're driving efficiency in our systems and our processes with enhanced capability. We've rediscovered that operational rigor and discipline with an integrated performance management system, which everybody is a part of, which is leading already to improved execution, and we're investing to accelerate. And that brings us to the end of the formal presentation. I hope at the end of this two and a half, two and three-quarter hours, you feel you understand a little bit more about RS and a little bit better understand what we do. You've seen the strengths and the depth of our leadership team, who are all over this business. We are realizing our potential. We're well-positioned in growth markets, with strong and differentiated proposition that enables us to drive market share gains as we invest in targeted and prioritized ways to improve efficiency and drive operating leverage, with the potential to accelerate our growth with disciplined acquisitions. And when you bring it all back, there is a really significant value creation opportunity here for all stakeholders, but particularly, and as you see from our achievable but stretching medium-term targets, this is particularly true for our shareholders. And importantly, we and the board are very confident that we can deliver on this exciting opportunity that is RS. So that's it. That's the formal presentation done. We're now going to open up the floor, and for people online, to ask any questions that they want. I think there is a way, as I described earlier, that you can use the Q&A facility for those that have joined online. So over to you guys. Perhaps you could just say your name first and then the organization you're from, and then we'll try and answer it. Hi. Hello, Annelies Vermeulen from Morgan Stanley. I have two questions, please. So firstly, I just wanted to delve into the service solutions. Do you have a target or a sense as to what percentage of revenues that will grow to over time? You've helpfully given the Europe and the U.S. and Asia split. Should we expect the U.S. to reach those Europe levels over time? And also, what is the margin differential for those solutions versus non-solution business? I assume it's margin accretive, and I'm just wondering how that ties into your mid-teens margin guide over time. And then secondly, on M&A, you know, you talked about the fragmented markets, the large pipeline, but obviously the opportunity cost of M&A as well. Given the timing of deals can be difficult to predict, and sometimes I suppose more opportunity might land at your door, is there any barrier to expanding the M&A team or allocating more resource to execute on that? Thank you. Thanks for that. I mean, on services and solutions, no, we don't have a formal target. It's important to understand that our services and solutions businesses are available to customers as and when they need them, and the services and solutions that we provide are ones that we're importantly advantaged in being able to provide and that we can scale. But the most important reason is it creates customer stickiness and pull-through. So while they do make a margin on their own, where they really benefit us is they get us much closer to the customer, and we pull a lot more product through. You heard from Pete in his section on Europe what that actually means for our business. The margins that they contribute are in the business. You see it, but they are not a particularly enhancing or detracting piece of what we do. And on M&A, we have lots of opportunity with M&A, but shareholders' funds are precious. We have a clear strategy, and we will only execute M&A in a disciplined way, where we can see good value creation, and we have the capacity to do it. So I'm pretty comfortable we've got the right team looking at the right things at the right time, and if and when we see those value creation opportunities, we'll execute them. Thank you, Annelies. Hi, it's David Brockton from Hey, David. Deutsche Bank. Can I ask two, please, as well? You've clearly set out how you're competing in markets and products where you've got a differentiated proposition. One area where arguably the business hasn't had historically and has lost share has been electronics category. Can you maybe just touch on whether you plan to do anything different for this category? I appreciate you've reclassified the revenues. That's the first thing, the first question. And then the second question relates to the structural trends that you set out, which are obviously positive, by and large, for the business. I guess there is also a sort of an additional structural trend, which could be the risk of disintermediation and sort of OEMs going direct, particularly as we move towards connected factories. So can you just touch on whether that's something that you are seeing at all? Sure. And whether that's something that could be perceived as a risk? Thank you. Thanks, David. I mean, Pete, do you fancy having a chat on electronics? Yeah, okay. Was that a yes or a no? That was a yeah. No, I think we laid out earlier the different product approach, and I think we're just being more deliberate moving forward about who our target customers are, to make sure we're identifying what does electronics, to use your phrase, mean for the industrial customer. I think, therefore, by being more deliberate and choiceful, we can make sure we maintain our market share in the space in which we want to play. Yeah, and look, I think we are an electronics distributor, but we are a specialist electronics distributor, and that categorization of what we distribute is very much tailored to what our customers need for that emergency break-fix MRO, that planned MRO. And I actually think we've seen huge benefit from what we've done, particularly from our electronics suppliers, who very much now understand and are supporting us in accessing that customer base that they can't access directly. On the sort of the risk of disintermediation, I think you heard from all the guys that, you know, we are technology led, we are digitally enabled. But what our customers are looking for from us, you can't really get from Amazon, right? It's not that bog standard, we don't really need to know what it does, we just want the cheapest one as quickly, and we don't really care when we get it. So for us, our proposition is very much tailored to a different customer set than will naturally go to those aggregator websites. So, look, it's something we're conscious of, but the continued investment that you hear from us and the areas that we're focusing on are continuing to differentiate our proposition, so we don't see it as a major threat. Good afternoon. It's Rory McKenzie from UBS- Ah. Here in the middle. It is unfair to pick out just one quote, but I think Nicky alluded to tens of thousands of key accounts that could become corporate customers, representing hundreds of millions of additional revenue. I appreciate you're still early in the, you know, new CRM systems and the data lakes you're getting intelligence from. But what have you found that explains why customer A, that might be exactly like customer B on the outside, only orders from you 20 times a year, not 120? And then secondly, in this 40 million organic investment, what is that gonna get you on the ground? Is that 20% more sales reps? Is it 30% more marketing AdWords online? Can you just give a few more examples to how you're gonna chase that opportunity? Thank you. So, clearly, you will have noticed that finance did not get hold of a copy of Nicky's script before it came out. But no, look, I think, crudely, at the end of the day, we don't really always understand what our customers buy when we sell things to them. Right? So we don't have, today, an ability to say to our sales team: "That is a facility that we should be able to sell GBP 250,000 a year into." A lot of the work that's going on with Nicky and the team, which includes, by the way, our investment in our CRM tools, includes working through our customer master data, working out how to identify and target those high lifetime value customers, is really all about targeting our sales force. Telling them that there are seven facilities that this company has that can all buy GBP 250,000 of kit. Why are you only selling GBP 10,000 of kit? So it's actually turning our sales force, and we've been on this journey, to be clear, for six or seven years. It's turning our sales force from being order takers to active sellers. Now, that progress takes time, it takes education, it takes the right systems and support, but that's what Nicky is really alluding to, the ability to target our sales force, and by the way, what comes with that is also product curation and product development and supplier engagement and supplier marketing, and that's why Nicky gets so excited. And by the way, I think it's a good thing that finance didn't get hold of his script beforehand, because that is the nature and scale of this opportunity. Do you want to talk about what the GBP 40 million is gonna buy us? So the GBP 40 million is not about putting extra salespeople on the ground and sending them about. The GBP 40 million that we've talked about is a set of organic investment projects in order to really transform how we operate. And the key examples I gave about that would be things like the CRM tool, so getting that capability in play, the investment we're making in harvesting our data, the information that Janet came across. The significant investment that we're needing to put into our middle and our back office. So stuff that I hope suppliers will never, ever see and never care about, but reduces demand failure and makes our processes much more simple, and in so doing, means that they're significantly more scalable, 'cause otherwise, your only other way you can do it is work around it and throw people at the problem. So those are the dynamics of the investment. So it's much more around plumbing and infrastructure from a processes and system perspective, and also, as Janet talked about, making sure that we evolve our technology. Does that help? Thank you. I mean, I think, Rory, in summary, I mean, what Kate alluded to is, you know, GBP 40 million a year for the next few years. It buys you what we've just been talking about. That's really what it's all about. Thank you. Thanks, Rory. Hi, it's James Rose from Barclays, here. Hey, James. Hey there. I've got two, please. Going back to key accounts focus, if I may. Could you just try and help us understand and gauge the sense of the sort of scale of opportunity there? I mean, for example, the market share figures you shared with us at the start, you know, in the sort of low single digits, is that representative of the market share you would have with a key account or a corporate customer? And then secondly, on the offline sales channel as well, could you sort of share your thoughts on how important a channel that is going forward? Thank you. So I might ask Nicky to talk about offline sales, while I just try and pick up on that key account point. I mean, I think the reason for putting those shares up is not that, is not because that's the share we've got of any individual's customer spend. It's actually to show you that in our most developed business, which is the U.K. and Ireland, the country market, where we've been doing this the longest, we've got about a 6% share. What we were really trying to give you the opportunity to think about is our next two biggest markets, France- sorry, the next two biggest shares are in France and Mexico. If you just bring all the geographical countries in which we operate up towards the U.K., there's a huge opportunity there. And you do that by focusing on those key customers that we talked about and all the other stuff that we're doing. But don't forget, you know, the U.K. and Ireland has been in this space for 80-odd years, right? So it's taken us 80-odd years to get there, so this won't happen tomorrow, much as I'd like it to. This is a continued evolution and a continued investment that will drive those share gains, of which key accounts are a piece. Nicky, how important are offline sales? Hi. Yeah, I think just going back to the context we set around our digital share is in the 60s. And we see continued engagement from an omni-channel perspective, helping service our customers, you know, which we really see the firepower of digital and our human touch. But it's important to note that actually a lot of our customers do engage with us offline, where they could service themselves, you know, more effectively through our digital capabilities. And as I mentioned and referenced, you know, we have 500,000 offline inquiries, which we think we can satisfy and retain in our digital channels and drive that engagement further. While, of course, as Doug alluded to in the U.S., continuing to digitize our solutions to drive greater share of that operation. So I think offline will always play a factor in our organization. We do want to be an omni-channel partner with human touch, really value-added, but we'll continue to invest in retaining customers digitally where we can. Thanks, Nicky. I'm just conscious we're getting close to the 5:00 P.M. cut-off time for our online audience. So while we'll keep going here, I'd just like to say to those of you online, thanks very much for joining us virtually. I'd encourage you to look at our experience rooms, where we'll be posting some video content after this session. And we look forward to engaging with you going forward. But now, I think just five more minutes on Q&A in the room, and then we'll break and head out to our customers.