Thank you for joining us so early. Very pleased to report a good H1 despite the many challenges we faced. Revenue is up 191% to GBP 247 million. EBITDA up 212% to GBP 47.6 million. Underlying EPS up 34.7% to 3.61 billion. This latter demonstrates the accretion of the last two acquisitions. Sorry, the last two major acquisitions. This year in H1, we completed two acquisitions, the Johnston Quarry Group and RightCast, and both are excellent additions to the group. Our Greenblock low carbon technology continues with strong momentum, giving us confidence of achieving our 2040 net zero target. We also announced this morning a JV with ArcelorMittal to construct and operate lime kilns at the Dunkirk Steelworks. These kilns will capture the carbon emission and connect to the D'Artagnan storage project. This will give us production of around 900,000 tons of green lime that will require no ETS carbon credits. Now I'll pass you over to Max and Garth to give you more granularity on H1. Morning all. Thank you for joining us for these half year results. I'll do a quick review platform by platform with some ideas on trading and outlook. Starting with the first platform we created, the Channel Islands. Slightly slower start to the year, mainly due to phasing all projects ending pretty much at the same time at the end of last year and new ones starting early this year. Quite a very strong in general, so we got some momentum going through the first quarter. In general speaking, good demand outlook, good cost management, electricity and other things, and other cost inputs as well. We're working quite hard on an extension to the quarry that you see a photograph of on the slides, western extension, which gives us another several million tons of reserves to be able to continue operations in Jersey. We're also working quite hard on similar type of projects in Guernsey. The outlook in general for the platform is good, both in terms of residential, local infrastructure and commercial development remain good both in this year and early in 2023. Going to the next platform, Precast Concrete or PPG, our business in the U.K. focusing on precast concrete. Strong trading performance in general, helped by, of course, the infrastructure portfolio that's being built in the U.K. Strong demand still from RMI and DIY spend certainly in the first half starts to normalize slightly as we go through the second half. Generally speaking, some commercial house building, that's still very strong. Outlook for the group remains good. Cost control is good. We acquired a small addition, RightCast in the north, gives us a footprint further north in the U.K. Also gives us extra skill in terms of, staircases and bigger sort of structures of that nature, more design and engineering teams that do deal with those sorts of projects. As a result, we are quite confident on this platform performing well throughout the rest of the year. England and Wales consists of GD Harries in Wales and the Johnston Quarry Group, which we acquired earlier in this year. Primarily quarrying activities and dimension stone. Good trading in the first half. A number of more tricky months to overcome in Harries because of plant breakdown and other things. Generally speaking, on track. I have now one SWTRA South Wales trunk road contract which will start later this year into next 2023 and then 2024, 2025. That's for the maintenance of the road network in South Wales. Improved margins across everywhere with the types of aggregates we sell. Also made a good investment in the major quarry in South Wales with the new fixed primary crusher, which is expected to come on stream somewhere in September. As a result, product mix-wise and location-wise, we are and remain very confident on the performance of these two businesses. Dimension Stone, moving over to Belgium now. Strong first half of the year. That's again a continuation of the various trends we had across last year. The amount of infrastructure and housing means that's generally speaking is good for the business that we've got. Also shipping and shipping cost means that there's less stone from outside of Europe coming in, which again helps the sustainability effects of this type of material, less GHG or carbon intensive than ceramics and other replacements. As a result, good order books from last year is maintained and keeps being filled at the same rate, and that's still the case today. We are extending this forecast. There's quite a bit of work going on that from that perspective. Again, for this platform, a good first half and a good outlook for the rest of the year. Benelux in general, that's all activities in the Benelux but Dimension Stone. A mix between the various operations. Great performance out of B-Mix. Concrete businesses in the north, slightly slower volumes out of the crushing installations in Soignies in the south. It has to do with allocation of volumes, between us and the wholesale partners we sell into, but still in line with roughly with what we expected for the year. Cost management is good. Energy increases and so on, electricity prices being managed actively. We are starting now to produce precast concrete out of our facilities in Limburg, and that's a starting point for the PPG group we spoke about earlier to get a footprint into the Benelux and expand from there. Generally speaking, good outlook, still good demand from infrastructure perspective, good demand from housing perspective, as demonstrated by the dimensions of our platform as well. Again, confident for the rest of this year. Going to go into Nordkalk, several challenges earlier in the year. The UPM strike, which cost us four months of high-grade quality products being sold into the paper production in Finland that cost us quite a few million GBP. We recovered that over the next few months. We had plant breakdowns at other major customers, and again, similar impact to slower production, but again, through cost management and efficiency, we managed to recover all that. Energy increases obviously in the various markets, Finland, Poland, significant. Dynamic pricing has helped us there, hedging has helped us there, and as a result, we are performing well across this platform. We've bought these additional limestone reserves in Poland, and remember, there's a large quarry we operate there that has various extension programs ongoing, and that's in line with what we expected. We think that volumes will remain all right across the rest of this year. Good performance out of this most recent platform. Garth? Thank you, Max. Just a quick overview of key measures for the first half on a financial basis. Reported revenue of GBP 247 million, up 190% year-on-year and 17% on a pro forma like-for-like basis. EBITDA of GBP 48 million, up over 200% year-on-year and 6% on a like-for-like. EBITDA margin of 19.2%. We had some improvement there. That's somewhat masked by the top line growth due to the cost pass-throughs, inflationary pressures. EPS at 3.61, up 35% year-on-year. Cash at GBP 46 million, demonstrating its strong cash generation for the group. Bear in mind, we spent GBP 38 million on M&A and GBP 15 million on CapEx through the period. Leverage ratio therefore at 2.24. We did stretch ourselves to do Johnston without dilution, but we managed to work that trend down further through the year. Just on the income statement, just covered off obviously revenue. Profit from operations grew 130%. Below the operations line, net finance expenses increased due to a larger debt profile of the group on the back of the Nordkalk acquisition. Other gains relate to forest call options, realized forest gains for sale of property, plant, and equipment, and share of earnings from associates. Income tax at circa 80% of profit before tax is more in line with what we were sort of guiding. In the prior periods, we benefited from utilization of tax losses, primarily in the U.K. All of that translates into underlying profit of GBP 23 million. Adjusting for outside equity interest, reported EPS at 3.61p, which is a substantial improvement year-on-year and demonstrates the earnings accretion from the various acquisitions we've completed recently. Looking at the balance sheet, net debt started the year at GBP 164 million, GBP 48 million in underlying EBITDA. We absorbed about GBP 19 million in working capital. That's pretty consistent with expectations. It's mostly seasonality. Paid GBP 6 million in taxes and just short of GBP 15 million in CapEx, which translated into GBP 7 million of underlying free cash flow. We then paid GBP 54 million in M&A. That's also including the debt we absorbed as well. And GBP 6 million of other outflows. That's a combination of financial derivatives, net finance costs, and non-underlying cash costs are captured there as well. That then translated into a closing position net debt of GBP 278 million for the group. Wraps up the financial piece. Hand back to Max. Thank you, Garth. Two slides very quickly on the outlook for the second half. Generally speaking, as we're trading today, and that's between our July's trading update and today's numbers, we are still confident for the second half. Trading volumes, so that's across everything we sell, whether that's housing, infrastructure, or industrial minerals, even commercial real estate, remain good. We benefit from the fact that we have a diversified group across multiple jurisdictions and multi segments. One month, some segment can be faster or slower, and another month it turns around again. Generally speaking, order books, the refilling of these order books and the outlook that we've got in the various segments seems to be holding up well. Of course, obviously, the big question is, do energy price increases as a result of that at some point in time harm demand? We're very much looking at various trends and indicators there. We haven't so far seen a significant amount of them in terms of slowing our forecasts and our outlook. That is indeed a point that we look at closely. Generally speaking, from a cost management and inflationary pressures, we have the same strategy as we had earlier in the year, which is dynamic pricing, a touch of hedging, and a touch of cost management initiatives. As a result of that, we are managing that inflation, inflationary pressures quite well. Looking more long-term, we're very happy with the footprint and very happy with the various industries we're now exposed to, and this is a diversified footprint that we have managed to build and we'll continue to invest in that footprint and invest in the expansion of that footprint as we go along. Now, one of those ideas on the next slide is a joint venture with world steel leader, ArcelorMittal. We have a joint venture signed now to build a number of kilns co-located on the ArcelorMittal steelworks in Dunkirk. This is a significant development for us, for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is a large development, 900,000 tons of quicklime per year, which is a significant volume. A large proportion of that will obviously be supplied to the ArcelorMittal steelworks for the production of the steel in Dunkirk. The rest of the volume we will be able to utilize ourselves within our network and start to commercialize that product. The main significant point here is that since we are co-located on the ArcelorMittal steelworks, we will use residual heat from the steelworks to heat the kilns and use biofuels to fuel them, and we will send all the CO2 emitted by the kilns into the Dunkirk CO2 hub. As a result, this lime will be, when it's all fully operational and connected up, completely green, not requiring any E.U. ETS carbon credits. That will be a first, I think, in the industry and a very significant development for us. We expect to invest around EUR 20 million as a JV partner, as will the other JV partner, ArcelorMittal. The rest will be funded through debt. We expect the whole setup to be operational from 2026, generating return on invested capital in line with what we expect to generate. That wraps up the slides presentations for this morning. Very happy to take any questions on any of the points above. In terms of CapEx and cash flow, what's your sort of expectation there for the balance of the year in terms of what you think you spend on CapEx and the other working capital movements around the edges, I suppose? It's heavily skewed into the second half. You know, cash flow generation. That will pick up. Operating cash flows will pick up dramatically in the second half. On the CapEx front, it's gonna be similar, slightly more probably. There's some large works happening the way, in Finland and in Belgium. They'll be in similar ballpark. GBP 35-40 million. Yeah. Okay. The working capital number, I mean, you have, I mean, obviously higher prices, you're holding the same number of stocks, there's clearly an outflow. Does that reverse a little bit in the second half, or do you think that balance of sort of less physical stock but higher value is fairly neutral through the second half? Yeah, just the way the months, 'cause we essentially roll into this year with two fairly lean months, particularly December obviously. That's when we're pulling that cash flow through. We start with two relatively lean months. It's weighted about approximately 30- 70. It's a big swing in the second half. Keeps things interesting in the first half. Couple of questions, yeah. [audio distortion] Obviously the JV sort of brings much more lime into the business sort of as a percentage of what you do. I mean, is that the plan sort of to maybe in the future more lime as a sort of percentage of what you do? I guess maybe your thoughts on why the reasons for more lime. Okay. Sort of along those tracks. It's a product that we make in Nordkalk. It's not a major focus for the Nordkalk business. If you take Nordkalk versus other limestone and lime producers that identify themselves as lime operators, they would have the opposite split. 90% of their business is lime and the rest is some stone. It's a sub-segment that they have a really good position in the north, but that's basically it. We think and what we see is that lime is an essential product in pretty much everything you touch every day. That's steel, paper, porcelain, you name it's into everything. But it's also into a number of products of the future. Batteries and all that technology need further lime. Anything has to do with cleaning up most of either product, industrial processes or waste at some part. Lime plays a role. From that perspective, we see quite a bit of change in the future that we can. That's the second reason. Thirdly, if you can expand your lime by having a very strong partner next to you that will help you offtake large volume of the production through the JV arrangement, that makes the whole measure quite interesting. Earlier in the talk, you know, part of the wider strategy, but geographic expansion, you know, opportunity. I wonder whether sort of the views on where that might happen. I know you talked of Germany and other places, you know, in the past. Whether that's shifted a little bit recently. You know, some places like Germany, not the most optimistic construction markets, but you did things like that. I don't know if that's changed or? We've got a footprint that's around the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. We show that on slides. You see all the countries that fit in that. There's two countries that we've always pointed to that are completely empty, and that was France and Germany. Obviously Denmark. There's countries in there that have just a light footprint. France, we are starting to get a bit of a presence in now, especially through the joint ventures. That's one. Germany is still the same as it was. Are we looking at Germany? Yes, you have to if you're in that geography. It's still the largest industrial economy in Europe and one of the largest in the world. It's within the footprint that we've identified, so you need to have a look at what you do. Whether that's immediate or in the future, I don't know yet. That's being considered actively. There's plenty of opportunity in the other markets. U.K. being one, Benelux being the other, and then the north. In response to that actually. There's a sort of a, I suppose it was quite, you know, a good contribution from operational efficiencies in the first half. Up Up to a certain cost. I don't know, sort of a rough idea of the, sort of pound number that you think maybe helped first and then maybe what you might have alluded to in the second half, there was some more to come. What the aim was maybe in the second half just. [audio distortion] Yeah. Help with the bridge. I think we've stated previously with what we lost on the, UPM strike, right? Yeah. That it was the same, and we obviously managed to hit our target, so it was a combination of operational efficiencies there, and some overperformance elsewhere in the business. Probably halfway on each thereabouts. Okay. Cool. We'd expect that the operational efficiencies to continue through the second one. That's just final one, sorry. Looking towards this winter, obviously kind of progressively hedge over time. Specifically sort of looking into the next sort of six months at work. Is there a way of what percentage is hedged essentially? As it is here right now, you know, you've bought 50% of the energy you actually get to use, so that's kind of locked in. Is there a rough idea? Well, it varies. I don't. You can say the whole plan, maybe that's. Yeah. Sort of energy intensive part of the business. It's over 60%. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. There are two effects that need to be taken into account. There's electricity, obviously our fuels, and then gas. Electricity hedged, fuels for both, gas forward. What we are doing is shifting significantly away from gas because of the viability concerns to other fuels. And then also to more use of electricity and that sort of thing. That also when you're into the year and you've got a nice balanced picture in terms of what you've hedged and what you haven't, that is obviously with an expectation of certain type of fuel use. If you dramatically were to shift away from one and dramatically increase the other, then you obviously mess with that balance. That said, we're quite happy with how we approached the year in terms of hedging. In terms of gas supply and gas prices we're paying are not nowhere near what they're currently looking like. Electricity in some places, same sort of thing. In others, slightly less efficient hedges, but then compensate with dynamic pricing and price increases. It's a good picture so far. Nordkalk and the UPM strike. I think the original expectation was you'd sort of get the volumes back over a couple of years, so we'd take into next year. Is that still the idea or? Yeah. Yeah. We lost four months of volume and then probably half a month in May 'cause they were ramping up. The rest of the year was not long enough to recapture the entire volume. We recaptured a portion, and the rest goes into early parts of next year. That said, the paper mills are running well, so as long as the energy doesn't start to cause a problem there, that trend continues as it is. In Belgium, quick question. You've obviously gained from a lack of imported stone 'cause of high shipping. Shipping costs are coming down a bit. Are those volumes coming back or do the rates have to fall a long way further? I was just wondering if you could remind us of the timing of the Soignies expansion and whether that's on track and you've got permits and the government stuff. We don't see huge amount of volume coming back in. I think some of the supply routes that have been disrupted this much, so that then will have a while to go before that gets shifted around. There's also constraints on supply of this type of stone out of certain parts of Asia, in particular China, where they've just really basically stopped selling it outside of their own country. All of that means that a certain logistical chain is now broken and doesn't necessarily come back that quick. There's a focus on ESG and the fact that this stone that we sell is fairly local and therefore fairly light in terms of environmental footprint. That's helpful. From that perspective, all permits for the extension are in place, and have been in place for a while. That's good. It's the extension behind the crushing lines that you can see on some of the pictures. That will start to open, the first parts of that ends next year. We have replaced or removed a road that was crossing that section. That road should be finished by the end of this calendar year. That then leaves us with the entire section open for overburden removal, and then starting to get that to start there. That's in line with planning. Good. Sorry, just on the Belgian stone business again. You talked about, I think, a sort of strong order book and, if I understood rightly, orders coming in to replenish that. We've quite a big contract recently won in Charleroi, right. I mean, even with that going out, is the order book still in place? Just by way of reminder, how long is that order book now compared to your books as a customer? It's not so much an order book in terms of length of months. It's an order book in terms of volume of stone committed. It has been running at a much higher level than it used to. We're in sort of 50$-60% higher order book volume than a normal trend would have been in the past. It has stayed there, and that's the same sort of volume of order books from the end of last year. It replenishes, therefore, automatically the same volume. There's some bigger projects that have come in. As you mentioned, Charleroi city center. It's actually also the picture that we see on the website of the home page of our website. It's quite a nice key project. These sorts of infrastructure projects are now coming in, and that's very helpful. For now, still the same. Actually, your data's on green block. It looks as if you've broadened the product offering. Yeah. into pretty much all corners of PPG net. Is it being successfully sort of sold, or is that sort of still a sort of promise, and is it being taken up by all the customers? I suppose sort of, presumably you can move it into the new acquisition as well to. Yeah. Sustain it as a Greenblock. Yeah. We're making or scheduled to make about 20 million breeze blocks this year. In concrete, we might actually exceed that. That will then be 60% of the volume of blocks that we make, 40 being standard. We have a range of available products in all the type or everything that we make. Retaining walls, structural concrete of various types. We started to make precast piles out of green concrete mix. From that perspective, it is exactly doing what we hoped. We offer everything that we sell either gray or green, as the customer can choose. We think that we can systematically move that further to more and more of our portfolio. The new business, RightCast, its specialism is staircases, precast staircases, into various sort of lift shafts and train platforms and so on, where very specific structural concrete is needed. Sometimes the required strength does exceed what you can do out of Greenblock or the permissions or the standards don't allow. That's something that we need to work on. That's also one of the things that we work on actively with Marshalls. Okay. I'm assuming that you've got a fairly good idea as to what price premium you get out of green. I mean, can you give us an idea as to how much more expensive it is for a customer? Um- Breeze blocks, for example. We have always said that we don't make it much more expensive than standard, so that nobody can argue that it's too expensive to use. It's a few percentage points more expensive than a standard block. Things have almost started to be more interesting in terms of the ingredients used. They start to be more expensive than standard cement. Because I think suppliers of the various ingredients start to tell us, "Hmm, this is greener than your standard product. Give us a bit more money." That one might widen the gap a bit in time as we pass that on. The philosophy remains, let's try and make as much in low carbon and have the benefit of having a lower footprint as a business and not ever giving anybody the argument that it's too expensive to use. A general one on pricing. I mean, clearly things are moving around still on energy and fuel, as you've highlighted. As we stand here today, what sort of base level price increase do you think you need across the group to cover off all the cost increases? Well, effectively what we've pushed through so far, and that's the same sort of rhythm. It's a difficult one to answer because the diversity of products that if we were making one stone, it would be fairly easy. It depends on how much energy we've used in the production, but particularly the materials. That's a good answer. If you look at forecast for turnover last year versus actual turnover this year, you can see, you can back calculate what that sort of means on average. As David says, the prices are comparable to other products. We just had a question. Yeah. From Paul Cuddy, asking on the GBP 30 million debt due in 12 months, and how that would be funded and how the JV as well would be funded. First bit by Garth Palmer, like that GBP 40 million worth of debt due in 12 months. 30. It's just. It's just The amortization line. Yeah. Is that what? Yeah. Right out of operating cash flow. Maybe. On the first answer, it's just out of operating cash flow that we generate through the group, and that's the amortization of the main debt facilities that gets classified as due in 12 months 'cause that's a proportion of our global debt facilities that need to be repaid as part of the standard terms there. The JV is a standalone business. We will be an equity investor in the JV, as will ArcelorMittal. We shall be both putting around about EUR 20 million into that JV. JV will then become a company that itself can take on debt facilities to fund its activity, and that is the expectation. That it's, as an entity, will be a levered entity, and that debt will then be secured against the plant and the contracts that the JV will have. A fairly standard setup. Question from Christian Jureit. Does the group still have the ability to hit 20% EBITDA margin target given inflationary backdrop? I believe so. We're currently with the inflation as it stands, we're obviously protecting the overall profitability. That's the whole strategy. Sometimes margins suffer a bit. Sometimes you can maintain them as a margin percentage. We're quite happy with how we've achieved that so far. In the longer term, the structure of the group, the positioning of the group, I think will allow us to get to above the 20% point as we have systematically stated in the various releases we put out. Another question from Christian. What is the board's appetite for M&A in the current uncertain backdrop? Well, will you allow to answer that, Rob? Yeah, it's fairly simple. If it's accretive, then it's on the table. To add to that, maybe there's a number of things that really strategically make a lot of sense for the group to do. As you can see with the joint venture we've done, we've also got sort of the extensions in Belgium, the crushing lines JV we've got there. There are various projects which are phased across years, and it allows us to continue to develop the group even though the current outlook may be uncertain. These projects start to come in in 2025, 2026. We keep the pipeline of developments of this business relatively filled, which allows us again to build it further. That's the approach that we currently take given share price levels, given uncertainty. All the questions? Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much, everyone. There's no further questions. Thank you. Thank you.