Good morning, everybody. I'm Randall Sandstrom. I'm joined this morning by Steve Cook. We wanna thank you for joining the SECI results call for first half fiscal year 23. This call will cover the period 31 March through 30 September 2022. I will give a brief introduction, which is on page two. We'll go into the full call. I wanna say that we have a positive message for you this morning. We feel we have good reasons to be positive about the future of SECI. Our portfolio cash flows have been very strong during the first half due to short-term rate increases having a positive effect on our floating rate assets and because of being able to reinvest our fixed rate assets at higher term interest rates. The board has decided to increase the target dividend by a full 10% to GBP 0.06875 per share, which equates to a 7.5% current dividend yield. I think it's also very important to say right up front that SECI and Sequoia are here to stay. Infrastructure debt is what we do. The competitive landscape is improving, and we're aware that some smaller subscale funds have decided to withdraw from the market. On the other hand, SECI is an established fund with an eight-year track record. We have a low cost structure and an OCR of 91 basis points per year. We have scale at GBP 1.6 billion, and our shares are liquid with nearly 3 million shares a day traded. Importantly, our portfolio has also been stress tested by high interest rates, the highest inflation in 40 years, and we've gone through a global pandemic. We feel when you sum all of this up, we have a sound basis for being positive on SECI going forward. If we turn to page three, we can take a glance at SECI. This page discusses diversity on the left-hand side and then some of the important characteristics of the portfolio on the right-hand side. You can see right across the top, we've got 12 different low risk jurisdictions. When I say low risk, these are all investment-grade countries and developed markets and OECD countries as well. Down at the bottom, you can see portfolio diversity by sectors and subsectors. We've got eight different sectors and 27 different subsectors. If you look on the right-hand side, you can see some important portfolio characteristics. I'll discuss the important ones of these. You can see the number of investments, 72. This is high. This ties in with the number of sectors and subsectors we have. This diversity helps to decrease the portfolio risk that we're exposed to. You can see that the average life is short at 3.9 years, the portfolio modified duration is low at 1.6. Both of these serve to reduce our interest rate risk. You can see the equity cushion is relatively thick at 34%. In defensive sectors, we have 54% of the portfolio in defensive sectors now. This helps to decrease the business cycle risk that the portfolio is exposed to. The portfolio weightings are below this. I'll talk about some of the more important ones. You can see in terms of ranking, we've got 58% of the portfolio in senior debt with the balance in junior debt. Mezzanine holdco is an important strategy to us because we find that it's a very, very non-competitive space, particularly in the U.S., which is where we have most of our exposure. In terms of interest type, you can see that we have 58% in floating with the balance in fixed, and that large floating rate exposure has served us well as short-term interest rates have increased. Thanks, Randy. Page four looks at some key financial highlights for the half year. I'll go through these and put them into context and also talk a little bit about the direction of travel in some cases. The first row shows that the average portfolio yield to maturity has increased materially from about 8.4% at the end of the last financial year to 11.2% at the end of the half year. That's driven almost entirely by increases in interest rates, such as short-term rates, like LIBOR and SONIA, and also long-term rates like Treasury and gilt yields. On top of that, we've seen an increase in spreads in our credit markets. The effect of those two factors, higher interest rates and higher spreads, has been to reduce the mark at which the portfolio is independently valued. I think it's very important to stress that that is a unrealized change in the valuation mark. As the loans get closer to maturity, the price will accrete back up to a hundred pence in the pound. We call that a pull-to-par effect, which is quite a material effect. In fact, we estimate it's worth approximately GBP 0.06 per share over the next three years. The result of marking down individual investments has been to decrease the NAV from GBP 1.005 to GBP 0.9364. We'll go through that in a bit more detail on the next slide. Over the same period, the share price declined from 102.8 pence to 81.9 pence, which is a consequence of the decline in NAV, but also an increase in the discount. I think that was driven by a number of factors, including concerns around inflation and rising interest rates. I'm very pleased to say that that has partly reversed already. The closing share price last night was 90 pence per share, which represents about a 2% discount to net asset value. We've talked a bit about the direction of travel on dividends, we're obviously delighted with the 10% increase. That is on the back of very strong cash generation on the portfolio. In fact, the cash dividend cover over the last six months was 1.4x. That does include a number of one-off receipts. If we exclude that, it's approximately 1.16x cash dividend cover compared to 1.06 for the previous financial year. We believe that increase is sustained, in fact, will grow over time because we believe that the era of ultra-low interest rates is ending. We're seeing that feed through very rapidly into the that our portfolio generates because nearly 60% of the portfolio is floating rate. Finally, on this slide, our ESG score has declined very slightly. This is not a consequence of the attitude or the approach we have to ESG. It's actually simply the result of valuation changes. The underlying investment activity remains very focused on improving our ESG score. We expect to continue that path going forward. Turning to page five, this provides a NAV bridge for the six months ending the third of September. I think there's a few key points on this. One is interest income was very strong at GBP 0.053. Obviously, that annualizes to about GBP 0.106, and that's significantly more than dividends of GBP 0.0313 over the period. Clearly, the down bar on the negative market movements has driven NAV over the period. As I mentioned, that is very predominantly, in fact, over 90% of that is just driven by increases in rates and spreads. The other 10% or slightly less is a mixture of idiosyncratic factors, a mark-down on the Salt Lake Potash position, and a mark-up on previously problematical loans. In fact, on a net basis, there was almost no movement on the last two. The other items on this slide are quite minor and as you'd expect for the fund. Thank you, Steve. If we just turn to page six now. SECI has withstood some pretty significant market headwinds over the last six months. If we just take a look at four of these, the first one is macroeconomic uncertainty. You know, we're in a period right now of the highest inflation that we've seen in 40 years. We've experienced very rapidly increasing interest rates over the first half, and we've also seen weak economic growth. Infrastructure is a resilient sector, as we know, and our infrastructure exposure has low business cycle risk, which has softened this effect. Next one, just moving right to the right, is rising interest rates. You know, to put this in perspective, if you look at sort of an average increase in dollar rates and the increase in spreads and sterling rates and the increase in corporate bond spreads, and you sort of average those together, you're looking at an increase of 330 basis points. As Steve mentioned on the earlier slide, the yield on our portfolio has gone up by 280 basis points. Again, infrastructure debt has shown itself to be a low beta sector. Nonetheless, these rapidly rising rates has caused turbulence in the financial markets. You know, it's fair to say that there has been some near-term mark-to-market impact on SECI's fixed-rate portfolio as a result. I think the flip side of this, though, is that we have an ability to reinvest our short date, relatively short-dated fixed rate paper at higher interest rates. Also, I think it's really important to say, as Steve mentioned, that, you know, there is a pretty significant pull-to-par effect that is quite meaningful going forward. On the bottom left-hand side, we talk about currency volatility, and, you know, the dollar has been really strong as the Fed has rapidly increased those short-term interest rates, and that's versus the euro and the sterling. Our hedging strategy has really managed this volatility well. Just most recently, we've seen FX movements moderate on the back of a more fiscally prudent U.K. economic strategy. Lastly, in terms of losses, I think it's important to highlight what is our actual loss rate. You can see right there in the bottom right-hand side of page six, if we consider all sources, it's 47 basis points a year. We need to remember that we have a single B, double B credit quality portfolio. To put that number in perspective, you can see that for a Ba1 portfolio, this is Moody's data, the historical loss rate is 52 basis points a year. We've come in under strong double Bs despite having a single B stroke double B portfolio. Turning to page seven, this sets out some of the very favorable tailwinds that we're currently seeing, which will drive the portfolio performance in the coming years. The first one is the pull-to-par effect, which we've already talked about, which will add, all things being equal, about GBP 0.033 to the NAV over the next 12 months and about GBP 0.06 per share over the next three years. The second is rising interest income. Driven by the floating rate portion of the portfolio, that obviously adds to dividend cover over time. The third box is very important. We talk here about attractive conditions for new investments. This is a consequence of two factors. The first one is higher interest rates, which mean that it's higher for us to achieve our target yields. The second is that the leverage loan markets and the high-yield bond markets are both having a very difficult year. For example, year-to-date issuance in the high-yield bond markets is over 85% down compared to the same time last year. What that means is that many borrowers who might normally look to finance themselves in those liquid credit markets are turning to private debt. In turn, that means that we see a very wide range of opportunities. When we have discussions with prospective borrowers, we find ourselves in a position of genuine pricing power. We can get good margins and fees, but also attractive lending terms, for example, strong covenants. The fourth point is just the amount of infrastructure funding that's required. There's been a record level of private equity and infrastructure raised, thanks to that $874 billion. Nearly all of that will look for leverage. If we assume it's at least 2x leverage, which is conservative, that means that equity will need one and a half trillion dollars of debt. That's in a market when, as I mentioned, liquid credit markets, including investment-grade bonds, are relatively weak, bank lending is relatively weak, and therefore that creates a very significant opportunity for private credit. We're seeing that across all the jurisdictions that we lend in. I'd also mention in the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act is creating a tremendous demand for infrastructure investments through the private sector. For example, as a result of the tax breaks that investors can get for investing in infrastructure equity, which in turn will also require more leverage to enhance equity returns and make the projects affordable. Thank you, Steve. We just turn to page eight, please. We'll take a look at some recent investments and some short case studies on these investments. Right at the top, you can see Workdry is the U.K.'s leading provider of essential and emergency water handling infrastructure solutions. They've got a long track record. They've been around over 75 years, starting in 1946. The company delivers pump leasing, temporary water and wastewater pumping solutions, and modular water treatment and processing solutions to both the water utility sector and customers in the infrastructure construction sector. What we did was we made them a GBP 50 million senior secured loan, which was part of a larger GBP 170 million facility. We're earning a yield to maturity of 9.5% on that loan. Down at the bottom is Green Genius. This is part of a Lithuanian headquartered Modus Group, which is an experienced renewable energy developer. They operate in eight different European countries. What we did was we provided them a loan in Polish zloty and that equates to about a GBP 33 million equivalent loan. Again, it's senior secured, it's for a construction facility, and we're earning a really decent yield of 12%. Thanks, Randy. Turning to page nine. I wanted to add some comments on our ESG approach. As many of you will know, this is a very important initiative to us as manager and to the fund, and we have a very comprehensive ESG policy, which in fact is gonna be shortly updated and will be available to investors through the fund's website. We started at the time of the last annual accounts reporting under TCFD, and there'll be enhanced reporting going forward under a range of initiatives, including TCFD and SFDR. We're also increasingly looking at aligning our investment activities with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and this slide indicates or shows nine of those goals that we achieve or help to achieve through our investment activities in infrastructure debt. To wrap up, turning to page 10, I want to leave you with the following thoughts. Firstly, we've been through a considerable shock in terms of interest rates, inflation, slowdown in the global economy. Before that, the pandemic. I think the fund has weathered that storm very well due to its high proportion of floating rate loans. Its short average maturity, which provides a bedrock stability for the portfolio. Going forward, that increased level of interest income and the increased, therefore, dividend cash cover has allowed us to increase the dividend, target dividend by 10% with prudent coverage ratios expected on the dividend. On top of that, we expect the NAV to improve through strong pull to par. Portfolio credit quality has been robust. We've seen a loss rate of less than half a% per annum, which compares very well to other forms of lending. That is based upon a rigorous approach to credit selection and structuring, diversification, and a proven workout capability. On the origination fronts, we're seeing extremely attractive opportunities. In fact, I would say the fund has never seen a better environment for lending. Interest rates and margins are high. We have tremendous pricing power in our discussions with borrowers, and we're able, therefore, to be very selective indeed on the loans that we put on the portfolio's balance sheet. Finally, I just want to remind you that we're increasing the target dividend by 10% from GBP 0.0625 per share to GBP 0.06875 per share, commencing in the 3rd quarter dividend due in January 2023. Thank you very much for your time this morning, and if you can submit questions, we'll answer as many as we can in the remainder of this call. Well, thanks everyone. I can see quite a few questions have come through over the last 20 minutes, and Randy and I will do our best to work through as many of these as we can. I can see there's a couple of questions arising around FX hedging. I'll talk a little bit about that and try to roll a few of those questions into the same answer. I think the first question relates to the P&L statement in the accounts. The question is, why does it appear to show a significant FX hedging loss? I think the answer is that, you know, what's happened over the period is a corresponding liability on the, effectively about 100% hedged. There is a loss on hedging, but again, on the asset values. At the same time, as I talked about, asset values themselves fell in terms of the average price at which the loans are marked. You've got those two, you know, two sort of things going on at the same time in the asset valuation question. When you actually, cut through it all and disaggregate the noise, what you get is the effect that you can see on the NAV bridge on page five of the presentation, which is we made a, you know, a very small gain on hedging. That's actually just driven by the way in which, interest rates. Sorry, currency hedges get marked. There's a interest rate component to their valuation. On an actual sort of NAV basis, like I said, we're pretty much fully hedged. Also, I'd just like to say, you know, we're clearly keep an eye on things like margin call risk and, you know, managing the FX hedging book. That's all been very smooth. We have excellent credit lines with our counterparties. You know, we've been able to manage that hedging risk, you know, throughout the process. Turning on to the next question. I've been told my microphone is cutting out, so apologies for that. I hope you people got most of that last answer. You know, the next question we've got on this list is around the PIK. The PIK interest I received over the period. As we noted in the accounts and in the presentation, we actually had some exceptional levels of cash interest received, you know, predominantly linked to investments, two larger investments that repaid. When they repaid, we collected cash and interest that had accrued in cash obviously. That adds on to the cash interest cover. Clearly that's a bit of a, you know, exceptional item. There were two loans in particular. One was Hawaiki, which was a subsea data cable. The second was our refinery deal in Scandinavia, which incidentally was considered a bit of a problem loan over the COVID period. Obviously completely turned around and in the end was very, very profitable. If you strip out the effect of those exceptional items as it were, and you look at more of a sort of run rate, it's about 1.16x dividend cover, compared to about 1.06 in the previous financial year. From the same source, follow-up question. Any new impairments in recent months? No. No is the answer. You know, overall with the portfolios in good shape. I think the usual caveat has to apply, which is, you know, any loan portfolio, you know, clearly has credit risk and there's always a dispersion of performance around the mean. Some companies overperform, some underperform, but there's no immediate red flags and we think overall the portfolio is in really good shape. Randy, do you wanna do the next part of that question? Yes, I'd be happy to do that. Sorry, let me just read this. Do we see risks rising as a result of economies weakening? I think there are a few points to talk about there. Firstly, with infrastructure, we're starting in a strong place. Infrastructure is a resilient asset class, providing essential services, as we all know. That last point, essential services, what that means is that, you know, it's just not as sensitive as a discretionary corporate, for example, you know, which people can either spend money on or not spend money on. Also, with infrastructure, using infrastructure represents a pretty small percentage of one's disposable income. That also decreases the sensitivity to the business cycle. Secondly, SECI has a large portion of its portfolio, as we mentioned earlier, in defensive sectors. That's 54% of the portfolio, that significantly decreases the amount of business cycle risk that we're exposed to. As part of that, we simply avoid high beta sectors such as energy E&P. Another important point is that, you know, when we make a loan, we do a lot of stress testing. What this means is that we look at, you know, different scenarios, a sort of base case, a downside case A, a downside case B, for example. Really what this does is it stresses the revenues, and that stress feeds through to the loan covenant so we can see what the effects are of a decrease in revenues, and we always wanna build plenty of a buffer. I think linked to that, there's a similar but slightly different question about the greatest GDP risk in the portfolio. Randy, maybe. Yeah, happy to do that one as well. I would say that's the U.K. You know, I think a lot of people consider the U.K. to be in a recession probably about now. Most economists expect that recession to last for all of 2023. That's mitigated for us by the fact that we've only got 17.5% of our portfolio in the U.K. As I mentioned earlier, we are in defensive sectors, largely defensive sectors. There's a related question or a sub-part to that question, which talks about our OCR, our operating cost ratio, and, you know, recognizing that it's low and how do we achieve that. The largest part of the OCR is the investment advisory fee. When we set SECI up, you know, eight years ago, we tried to make that very competitive, looking at the other funds that are out there. In addition to that, we rescaled and rebased the way that we calculate that fee, which has had the effect of making it even more competitive. What that rebasing was to charge 74 basis points per annum for any capital up to GBP 1 billion, and then 56 basis points per annum for any capital that's raised over GBP 1 billion. That has the effect of not only making our fee pretty low, but our fee be a smaller proportion of the total fee as the fund grows. Thanks, Randy. We've got a question in around Bulb, what recoveries have we had to date, and what do we anticipate in the future, and what effect will it have on the NAV? I think, yeah, I'm very happy to answer that question. As, you know, put it in context, the Bulb loan is only about 1.1% of NAV, it does seem to get a quite a disproportionate amount of attention. To answer the question, we've had GBP 14 million, one-four of cash received, since last November when the company went through administration. That's about 1/4 of our loan amount has been received already in cash. We expect to receive significantly more cash than that. In fact, right now there's about that amount of cash in the business, as it stands, and there's more cash coming in. The reason why we are gonna get these recoveries is, as people are very well aware, Bulb itself is in special administration and may be sold to Octopus. We have security over the company which provides all the IT, the systems, the brand name and all the employees. That company, called Simple Energy, charges a fee to Bulb and will continue to be able to charge fees, once it changes hands, which includes a payment for using the brand and using the IT systems, which means it's a very profitable business. That's providing recovery. That also forms the basis of the mark on the loan, which obviously reflects where we expect recoveries to come. I think there's potential, upside above and beyond that. One thing we're looking at is, you know, ways in which the value of the software can be monetized, and we'll be able to make announcements of that, going forward. We haven't given any credit for that, in our valuation of the loan. That's all upside. The way we've valued the loan is really just based upon cash and cash, income that's highly visible. you know, I guess, what effect will this have on our NAV? Well, it will be, minor but positive. I suppose minor in the sense that the loan itself, like I said, is only 1.1% of NAV. You know, clearly that creates limited potential for increases and a meaningful contribution. You know, it's something we're very focused on, and we've marked it cautiously, and I hope there's upside above and beyond that. We've also got a question on our floating rate exposure. The question is: Is there a desire to increase the proportion of floating debt? I think the answer to that is that we're happy right now with the exposure that we have. As we mentioned, it's 57% of the portfolio, and that has really served us well as short-term rates have increased. I think, you know, as the interest rate cycle matures, we might look to decrease that slightly just around the edges, but not yet. As the rate cycle gets longer in the tooth and it matures more, we might look to do that. I can see a question here about the investment income line on the P&L statement. Yeah, I think the short answer is that accountants don't look at portfolio income in quite the same way as, you know, we do as, you know, as people making the investments, I guess it's fair to say. That number includes, you know, realized gains and losses. Includes interest income fees, et cetera, and there's an element of FX going on there as well. The best way to look at it, frankly, is the NAV bridge that we put into the presentation. We have a very similar table in the investment advisor's report in the accounts. Effectively, if you look at what, you know, you or I would call income from the portfolio, so interest income and fees, that was about 5.3 pence, as I mentioned, on the half year. Which, you know, obviously annualizes about 10.6%. Very strong interest income. Then the final question we have on the list is about the total NAV impact of problem loans, not just over the period, but over time. Excuse me. This is what Randy was talking about when he mentions the loss rate. The loss rate is simply any credit losses. Includes not just realized losses, but also, if we sell an investment to avoid a loss, for example. If you calculate that over time, it works out at a bit less than half a percent per year, which, as Randy mentioned, compares very well to, you know, some investment grade debt. One way to put that into context is that over the last eight years, we've earned about 3% more than high yield bonds, right. That's the illiquidity benefit or the premium you get for private credit versus liquid credit. Our loss rates have actually been slightly less. Our gross yield is 3% higher, and our credit losses are less than you'd see in the high yield bond markets or the leverage loan markets. I think that speaks to the sort of risk return characteristics of infrastructure credit. Thank you, Steve. I think that's it on the questions. Just in closing, we would like to thank everyone for your time this morning on the call. In closing, we'd like to say that we're in a good position to have confidence, and this confidence has been backed up by action. In the last six months, SECI has bought back shares. The directors of SECI have bought shares. Individuals of Sequoia, the IA, have purchased shares. Sequoia continues to have a substantial position in SECI shares. Further, these results demonstrate the positive aspects of having a resilient asset class, such as infrastructure debt, combined with a large floating rate exposure and short average life, which allows for reinvestment at higher rates. Once again, thank you for joining the call, and this concludes the call for this morning.