It's 9:00 A.M., so we will make a start. Hello, everyone, and thank you very much for joining us this morning. Can I just start by saying what a pleasure it is to be with so many of you in person, particularly after COVID stopped me from seeing you back at our Capital Markets Day in October last year. It's great to see you. Thank you for coming. You will have already seen the results we posted this morning, and Derek will take you through this in more detail shortly. By way of opening, I just wanna start by saying how very pleased I am with our financial performance, with very strong sales growth, good margin expansion, and much enhanced return on capital employed, driven by continued excellent strategy execution. Since 2019, Spectris has been transformed into a more focused and high-quality business, well positioned in attractive markets with structural growth drivers that are closely aligned to our ambition to be a leading sustainable business, and as evidenced by our record order book. We have a strong balance sheet to support our growth ambitions, both organic and in continuing to strengthen and expand our portfolio through M&A. We are investing for growth and attractive returns. We again increased the investment in R&D last year. We completed three acquisitions, and we also formed a joint venture. All this gives us conviction in our ability to compound growth and expand margins into the future. This performance is wholly consistent with our strategy for sustainable growth that we set out at our Capital Markets Day in October, and it provides the confidence in our outlook for 2023. Importantly, we've carried real momentum from last year, and we are excited by the significant opportunities that lie ahead for us. Trading at the start of the year has been very strong, with double-digit like-for-like sales growth and strong order intake, with a book-to-bill ratio greater than one. Consequently, in 2023, we expect to deliver organic growth consistent with our medium-term objectives of 6%- 7%, and that's alongside strong progress on expanding margins and also driving forward our ambitions as a leading sustainable business. At the Capital Markets Day, we looked back to how the work we have been doing in recent years has fundamentally reshaped and refocused the group. We also provided you with a medium-term performance framework, a set of ambitious targets that this strategy will deliver against, as we set out on this slide. We made a great start on this journey with our 2022 results. Organic sales growth of 14% last year reflects excellent execution from our teams right across the group, this builds on a 10% growth that we achieved in 2021. Our reported growth last year was also very strong. It was also up 14%, that's despite disposals removing GBP 66 million of sales during the year. Reported growth is supported by acquisitions that we completed in 2021 and 2022. I think it helps demonstrate how we are compounding growth through M&A. Against a backdrop of high material inflation and constrained supply chains, we delivered good operating margin progression of 50 basis points, there's more to come as the conditions in the market seize, we'll talk much more about this later. Cash flow was robust. We invested in a new facility for our PMS business, and we also invested in inventory to support our record order book, which is a third higher than the end of 2021. For the whole of last year, 2022, the book-to-bill ratio was 1.1 for the full year. Return on gross capital employed was very strong, improving from 13.2% in 2021 to 16%, and we made important progress on our sustainability initiatives. In 2022, we reduced our Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions ahead of plan. We also improved our employee engagement scores. That is why today, as we look forward, we have confidence in our ability to compound growth into the future, delivering 6%-7% organic growth while expanding margins to above 20% and generating attractive cash flow and returns. I'm sure you agree that these characteristics are a hallmark of a great business. Before handing to Derek, I want to acknowledge that great progress is delivered by great people. I wanna take a moment to thank all of my Spectris colleagues around the world. I passionately believe that uniting brilliant people behind a common purpose can change the world for the better, and my confidence in achieving our goals is very much rooted in our people. Right across Spectris, we have exceptional leaders, deep technical experts, innovative minds, out-of-the-box thinkers, a truly diverse team of people performing at the very top level. They have delivered for our customers, they have improved our business, they've supported each other in what's been a challenging macroeconomic environment, always aiming high and getting excellent results. My sincere thanks to all of you for your continued hard work and support. I will now hand you over to Derek to take you through our 2022 performance in more detail. Thank you. That's right. Thank you, Andrew, and good morning, everyone. My first slide summarizes the key numbers for the year, and I won't repeat all the points that Andrew's already covered, but instead I'll draw your attention to a couple of the key metrics not already mentioned. Before I do that, I want to remind you that Omega, as an operating segment, was disposed during the year, and that's treated as discontinued. Therefore, it's reclassified from the income statement for both 2022 and 2021, and therefore is no longer in any of these numbers that you see. The adjusted operating profit of GBP 222.4 represents a like-for-like increase of 14%, and it's 17% on a reported basis. Adjusted operating margins increased by 50 basis points to 16.8%. Tax rate came in just below 22% in line with our guidance, our adjusted earnings per share were GBP 1.599, and that's a 26% increase over the prior year. The full year dividend per share of GBP 0.754 represents a 5% increase over the prior year, and that's consistent with the growth in dividend over recent years, and we remain committed to paying a progressive dividend. Our net cash at the end of December was GBP 228 million. I have a slide now that provides you with a graphical view of the main P&L movements in the year. Sales are shown across the top and operating margin at the bottom. I've adjusted 2021 to remove sales and the profit relating to the disposals from 2021 so that you can get an organic baseline. Again, remember, Omega is treated as discontinued, so it doesn't appear anywhere in this analysis. FX translation movements increased sales by GBP 53 million and operating profit by GBP 12.5 million. We saw excellent like-for-like growth in revenue up 14%, and that added GBP 67.5 million of additional gross profit. Like-for-like adjusted overheads increased by GBP 41.9 million in the year, we're actually 170 basis points lower as a percentage of sales because we held head count broadly flat, particularly in the second half of the year. It's also worth noting that within this increase is an additional GBP 20.3 million of R&D investment. When you're actually looking the full year, in total, we expensed GBP 103.8 million on R&D. That's almost 8% of sales. Acquisitions added GBP 27.6 million of revenue and GBP 200,000 of operating profit. That reflects the developmental nature of the Creoptix acquisition. That brings us back to the GBP 222.4 million of adjusted operating profit. That's a margin of 16.8% compared to 16.3% in the prior year. Looking at how we generated cash and then what we did with that cash, starting by adding back GBP 39.6 million of depreciation and amortization charge, you get to EBITDA of GBP 262 million. During the year, as Andrew mentioned, we continued to invest in safety stock to support customer deliveries despite the continuing supply chain challenges. That resulted in working capital cash utilization of GBP 54.1 million. The end of the year, our working capital was 15% as a percentage of sales, which is at the top end of the range that I typically guide to, and we expect this percentage will reduce in 2023. CapEx of GBP 44.1 million was slightly higher than normal due to GBP 15.3 million of expenditure on a new manufacturing facility for PMS in Boulder, Colorado. That then gives us our adjusted cash from operating activities of GBP 163.8 million, which we then divide into the operating profit to get our cash conversion metric of 74%. That's lower than our targeted range, but that's because of the incremental working capital and the incremental CapEx that I just mentioned. We have a net cash inflow of GBP 241 million relating to transactions. Of this is GBP 365 million of net cash received from the disposal of Omega, offset by GBP 124 million of cash outflow for acquisitions completed in the year. Spent GBP 191 million including costs on the share buyback, which we announced in April, and the remaining GBP 110 million of the GBP 300 announced will be completed over the course of this year. We paid GBP 78.6 million in dividends, GBP 7.6 million on restructuring that was previously announced, and interest in tax had a combined cash impact of GBP 46.3 million, with other movements of GBP 21.4 million gets you to the net increase in the year of GBP 60.2 million. For technical accountants in the room, this slide is included for completeness, you can easily bridge from our adjusted operating profit measures right the way down to the statutory measures. I won't go through every line, I'm gonna draw your attention to a couple. As previously guided, there were no new P&L restructuring costs in the year. We made significant progress on our business transformation program, therefore, we spent GBP 21.7 million relating to material SaaS projects. The finance charge of GBP 19.2 million includes GBP 14.6 of net loss on retranslation of short-term intercompany loan balances. That's because of the volatility of sterling against the dollar and euro, particularly in the second half. As you all know, under IAS 21, that's classified as a finance cost, and there is actually an offsetting gain on the other side going through reserves. Profit on disposal and the operating profit of the final six months of ownership relating to Omega, in total GBP 287, is classified as profit from discontinued operations and is reported below the tax line. That then gives you a statutory profit for the year of GBP 401.5 million. Let's move on now and look a little bit more at the divisions. Spectra Scientific delivered an excellent financial performance in 2022. The division achieved sales growth of 24% to GBP 657.8 million. After taking into account foreign exchange movements of roughly 5% and the impact of acquisitions was broadly marginal, that gets you to 18% like-for-like growth for Scientific. We saw continued strong customer demand in market share gains in all our sectors, particularly semiconductors, life sciences and pharmaceuticals, as well as energy technologies like batteries and fuel cell development. There was particularly strong demand for our products in Asia. Order intake increased by 12%, and Andrew will provide more color on some of the key developments for the division shortly, but I wanted to pause for a moment on the improved operating margin. The adjusted operating profit increased 25% to GBP 140 million, and the adjusted operating margin improved to 21.3%, which is a year-on-year increase of 20 basis points. If you actually look at it like-for-like, it's 90 basis points up. That reflects the volume increase and the impact of both price rises and the new products, offset by the higher investment in R&D and the acquisition of Creoptix. Our business transformation program to simplify, standardize, and automate processes, and simplify the ways of working is on track, and that includes the enterprise-wide ERP solution, which will provide better access to data, offer scalability to support our growth ambitions, and help deliver on further margin expansion. Spectris Dynamics delivered a solid financial performance in 2022. Sales were up 16% to GBP 492.2, and GBP 15.6 million of this delta, 4%, came from acquisitions, demonstrating our desire to compound growth through M&A. FX movements were 5%, that gives you then a 7% like-for-like sales growth. Orders in Dynamics increased 20%, resulting in a 40% year-on-year increase in the order book, that gives us real confidence of momentum as we enter 2023. During the year, this division was impacted by higher cost input inflation associated with its disproportionate exposure to low volume, high performance electronics and semiconductors, that did result in a reduction in the gross margin. Consequently, the adjusted operating profit of GBP 73.6 million is a reported increase of 5%, but it's actually 7% lower on a like-for-like basis. Overheads, however, did reduce by 140 basis points, but that was not enough to offset the gross margin decline, and therefore, you see an adjusted operating margin of 15%. Price increases, though, particularly in the second half, helped reverse some of that margin decline, and further pricing implemented in Q4, and improving material supply, and easing inflationary pressures, all of those combined gives us real confidence for improved profitability in this division in 2023. In addition, the ongoing rollout of the Spectris Business System continues to deliver improvements to the operational effectiveness of the division and provides further confidence in margin expansion. I've included a slide here for your ease of reference, which summarizes the segmental performance of the group, and it also gives me the opportunity to speak briefly about the performance of Servomex and Red Lion. On a like-for-like basis, sales increased by 14% from increased volume and strong price discipline, and the adjusted operating profit for the segment was GBP 27.2 million, an increase of 16% like-for-like, and adjusted operating margin of 15.3%. Group costs were down slightly in the year at GBP 18.4 million. Finally, to help you with some modeling, I've set out a slide for some broad areas of technical guidance. As we've already said today, we expect sales growth to be in the region of 6%-7%, and we expect our operating margins to expand. Working capital should reduce over the year and will be back in the middle of our guided range of 11%-15%. CapEx should be in the region of GBP 40 million. We'll continue to invest in the ERP. Our SaaS costs will be around GBP 25 million. The effective tax rate should be 22%. The remaining GBP 110 million of the buyback will be completed over the next 12 months. Finally, our assumed exchange rates for 2023 are 1.24 for the dollar and 1.17 for the euro. If that proves to be incorrect, then for every cent change in the dollar, it's a GBP three and a half million impact on sales, GBP 600 grand impact on profit. For every euro cent change, it's GBP 2.8 million on sales and GBP 0.5 million on profit. With that, I'll hand you back to Andrew. Thank you. Thank you, Derek. I'm now gonna take you through our strategic progress and outlook. I think, as you know, everything begins with our purpose, and that's what being a purpose-led business means. It's the essential ingredient for galvanizing engagement and also excitement for our strategy. At Spectris, our purpose is to live a value beyond measure, creating a cleaner, healthier, and more productive world. This informs everything we do, from strategy decisions around the board table to day-to-day operational decisions within our businesses. Over the coming slides, I'm gonna cover the key elements of our strategy for sustainable growth, our delivery plan, if you like, as a leading sustainable compound growth business. Firstly, great businesses. We have simplified Spectris into two high-quality divisions. Spectris Scientific and Spectris Dynamics are asset light businesses, both focused on premium precision measurement solutions with industry-leading products and domain expertise. Both are high growth and high margin businesses with exciting potential. As Derek highlighted, Scientific is firing on all cylinders. It's delivering an excellent performance, 18% like-for-like revenue growth, adjusted operating margin of 21.3%, and strong order intake up 13%. I mean, these are world-class metrics. Despite the disruption from COVID, Scientific delivered compound growth of over 5% since 2019, and we see significant opportunities to deliver even more value through our customers' workflows and to drive greater market share. Spectris Dynamics delivered a solid performance in 2022. Sales up 16% on a reported basis, That reflects the contribution from recent acquisitions in exciting high growth markets. We saw strong order growth of 20% with a closing order book up 40% on 2021, demonstrating both the high demand and the momentum underpinning the future for that division. While the performance was a disappointment in terms of the margin, this was caused by exceptional material inflation, and we see this as a purely transitory issue. As such, we are confident in delivering much improved profitability for the business in 2023. To be clear, Dynamics is a great business and can deliver much more. Since 2019, we have compounded growth at almost 5%, and we are confident of improving this in the coming years. That's alongside having a clear path to achieve 20%+ margins over time. To be clear, margin progression in Dynamics is one of the strongest opportunities for the group, and it's a core focus for all of us. On to structural growth markets. We are more aligned than ever to markets with a strong sustainability focus and attractive growth trajectories. We're positioned in technology-driven end segments with really strong fundamentals. Our demand for our products and services is really being amplified by these trends, supporting structural end market growth rates of 5%-6% across the group. Our 2022 growth rates gives me the confidence we are both seizing the market opportunity and also taking share. We are seeing strong growth across all our target markets, and academia is also growing well again. To pick out some specific areas, life sciences continued to power ahead in 2022, particularly in North America, and also driven by investment in biologics, along with high demand for our facility environmental monitoring products. I'd also highlight automotive. Here, we're seeing good order momentum in both physical and virtual test, including some significant large orders for our full scale simulation solutions from some of the world's leading auto OEMs. We continue to expect growing demand for automotive testing, supporting the increasing pace of new EV model launches. Sales and advanced materials grew strongly, especially in the energy, battery and hydrogen and semiconductor segments, where we are seeing above market performance. Finally, we continue to see strong growth at our semicon and electronics customers, notably in Asia, with advanced semiconductor manufacturing playing to our strengths in higher accuracy, metrology and ultra-clean environments. Next, customer centricity. Solving our customers' challenges with leading differentiated solutions is absolutely core to our model. Over the last four years, we have been successful in shifting from the largely transactional selling of hardware to concentrating on solutions, adding value throughout our customers' workflows, excuse me, and processes. We continue to equip customers to make the world cleaner, healthier and more productive, true to our purpose. A few highlights of some significant customer wins over the last year would include the huge success of our end-of-line testing solutions for electric motors, and also our smart analytical laboratory solution, helping the likes of the Geological Survey of Finland to accelerate the green transition to carbon neutral mining. We also designed and installed a measurement system for the Hornsea 2 project, that's the world's largest operational wind farm, to ensure safe and profitable generation. We saw continued strong growth for our particle size analyzers, in particularly for developing battery materials as well as new drugs. Also great demand for our clean room solutions with leading life science and high-tech manufacturing companies, including a monitoring solution for Excelitas, who are a leading photonics manufacturer. We're also getting strong order intake for our virtual testing solutions, which are being selected to accelerate innovation and deliver huge efficiencies for our automotive customers, such as Ford and MIRA. The Ford CEO, Jim Farley, recently went on social media, having driven one of our simulators, praising its ability to recreate the feel of different vehicles and different driving scenarios to improve safety and quality for their customers. These are just a few examples from across our business where we are partnering with industry leaders, solving some of their toughest challenges. This brings us nicely to R&D. Customers see us as a long-term partner, serving their needs today and helping them meet the challenges of tomorrow. R&D breeds collaboration. It breeds customer embeddedness and future opportunity. That is what innovating for growth is all about. Our strong sales performance over the past few years have been significantly supported by both new and enhanced products. Product Vitality, which we measure as currently a revenue from products released over the previous five years, is increasing and it will continue to do so. This is being driven by our increase in investment, up GBP 20 million last year. R&D today is close to 8% of revenue, and we expect to maintain that level going forward. In 2022, we launched some significant new innovations, really just too many to mention here, unfortunately. By way of another great example, in Spectris Dynamics, we completed our largest ever development project, a powerful open source hardware and software data acquisition platform with very broad applications. This will revolutionize how both automotive, aerospace, and other customers gather and analyze their data, bringing their disparate existing data acquisitions, systems together into one place. It is called FUSION and ADVANTAGE, and we're very excited by it. I thought it'd be great if we could just show you a short video. At Spectris, we believe in innovating for growth. From automotive to aerospace, customers are striving to shorten development times, bringing products to market more quickly and at lower cost. Today's sophisticated product testing requires multiple sensors using disparate systems, generating data that is difficult to compare and analyze. HBK's new data acquisition platform, FUSION and ADVANTAGE, solves this data chaos challenge by combining FUSION's high-precision data acquisition system with the powerful ADVANTAGE analytical software in a single, scalable, integrated solution, delivering the results customers need when they need it. Spectris Dynamics, empowering the innovators. In addition to R&D value enhancing, M&A remains an important part of our compounding growth strategy. Over the last two years, we have acquired five businesses, further building out our leading positions across key end markets. We maintain an active pipeline of potential acquisition targets from early-stage technologies, such as the acquisition of Creoptix in Spectra Scientific last year, to bolt-on acquisitions, such as Dytran Instruments. The acquisition of Creoptix strengthened our affinity offering for early-stage drug development. That's really important to our pharma customers, but also to our workflow strategy. Dytran strengthened our piezoelectric and MEMS sensor offering, while also expanding our sales into North America. We also formed a joint venture with Dewesoft to develop a new industry open standard in data acquisition hardware. We also consider large-scale opportunities, where we see a compelling strategic and financial logic. While organic growth will always be our first priority, we continue to see strong and significant opportunities for targeted M&A growth. We also continue to drive operational excellence to improve productivity and also strengthen our competitiveness. The Spectris Business System, or SBS if you like, forms the basis for our continuous improvement mindset, where everybody in Spectris is empowered to improve the business every day. In 2022, we reduced our like-for-like adjusted overheads by 170 basis points, as Derek mentioned, and these savings have enabled the group to offset gross margin pressure and deliver an increased operating margin for the year. SBS really supports our expectation of delivering strong progress on expanding margins in 2023 and into the future. Last year, we also deployed SBS on reducing lead times to support customer order fulfillment in, clearly in the face of supply constraints. For a number of our products, that resulted in us being able to offer much, greater availability than our competitors, and also therefore enabled us to also gain share. In addition to SBS, we are also driving forward with a number of business transformation projects, such as the ERP installations that's happening in both divisions. This will enable our businesses to become leaner, more efficient, and also more scalable for growth. We expect the benefits to start being delivered from 2024, and that will ultimately deliver 150 basis points of margin improvement at the group level. The key takeaway here is really our constant focus on driving improvement and making progress towards delivering that 20%+, margin target for the group in the medium term. As you know, sustainability is very much at the heart of our purpose. We have a clear ambition to create a positive and lasting impact for the environment and for our communities. We break this down into the 4 areas on this slide, areas where we are building a sustainable future. Just to pick up on a few here. For our planet, we have made excellent progress on our sustainability initiatives. We reduced our Scope 1 and 2 emissions by over 20% in 2022, and we also made important early progress on our Scope 3 ambitions, with over a 30% reduction in our Category 4 emissions. We also extended our EcoVadis supplier assurance to over 30% of our supply chain, and we've also commenced the development of our product sustainability work streams. Also, we improved our operational energy efficiency last year by 21%, and that's a 37% improvement since 2020. Clearly, that's helping to mitigate against energy cost inflation. Just as a reminder, we have committed to net zero across Scope 1 and 2 by 2030 and across Scope 3 emissions by 2040. For our society, we are really proud to be engineering brighter futures for students across the world through The Spectris Foundation. During 2022, the foundation made grants of almost half a million GBP, reaching more than 21,000 students in over 15 countries to support wider access to a quality STEM education. The foundation also granted GBP 100,000 to community projects that were selected by Spectris employees. In summary, we delivered a very strong performance last year. We enter 2023 with momentum and a very healthy order book, and we have started the year strongly. We will continue to deploy our strong balance sheet to support our organic growth initiatives and to compound growth through M&A. We expect to maintain this momentum in 2023, delivering organic growth of 6%-7% and making strong progress on expanding margins and really grasping the margin opportunity that we have in Dynamics. We will always remain true to our purpose, sustainably delivering these results, driven by our values-based, healthy, high-performance culture. Delivering value beyond measure for all of our stakeholders. Thank you very much for coming, and thank you very much for listening. With that, let's move to questions. Andy. Good morning. It's Andrew Douglas from Jefferies. Nice to see you both. Three questions, please. The 36% order book growth, just kind of working through that. Yeah, you've got five to six months visibility. I'm sure you're not gonna grow at 36% organic in the first half. Yeah, if you have a good first half, I'm just trying to figure out how much you're putting in for that second half growth rate. It feels to me like you're not assuming a huge amount of growth in the second half within your guidance. I guess that can be taken positively or negatively, depending on your view of the world. Is that a fair assumption in terms of how we get to that 6%-7% organic? Yeah. Look, we are absolutely confident in delivering that 6%-7% growth. I mean, you know, we're only in February. We still got 10 and a half months of the year to go. I think just, you know, the last two, three years have taught us that events can conspire to happen. You know, we clearly finished the year with a record order book, you know, almost six months of order cover. January started well, book-to-bill above 1 for January. Like, you know, against Q4, you know, Q1's an easier comp in that regard. You know, I would expect maybe a slightly more level year than we have historically seen. you know, it all depends on how much, you know, the order demand continues to hold up through the first half of this year. 'Cause clearly, over the next five, six months, we will be building our order book for the second half. Sure, it doesn't feel like you're expecting a massive you know, second half to hit your guidance in terms of how you've positioned the year in terms of first half order book and what you need to do in the second half. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We've seen elsewhere in the sector, life sciences has come under a bit of pressure. Clearly we've had a massive boost from COVID. Any signs that any of your customers are kind of stopping ordering or pushing ordering out or double ordered or anything like that in terms of the life sciences stuff? Yeah. Certainly no sort of double ordering, sort of destocking, I mean, into life sciences. Really for all our businesses, we don't sell into a stocking model, into distribution networks. What is purchased from us goes directly to specific projects. We've never really been worried about that destocking sort of phenomena. Think some of our suppliers may be more worried about that as the, you know, broader supply chain. You know, we don't see any destocking. I think it's fair to say that sort of life sciences and pharma has normalized back to that sort of longer 4%-6% through cycle growth rate and was the first of our sectors to do so. You know, we were growing at phenomenal rates through 2021, the first half of 2022, we never anticipated that that could continue anyway. We have seen the sort of that, you know, life science and pharma sort of, I'd say, you know, normalizing to that 4%-6%, I mean, growth rate. I've got loads of questions, but one more. In terms of the acquisitions spend, you spent GBP 125 million on acquisitions. Can you just help us with our modeling in terms of the EBITA contribution from that 125 last year? Yeah. I mean, a good chunk of that is in the Creoptix business, which is still in its development stage. When you take the 6% or 7% growth number. Yeah ... that includes all of that. Yeah sort of in at the top line. Then in terms of the contribution, you know, it's not gonna be a huge number. You need to take that into account in the margin guidance we've given. Okay. Not, not a huge amount of benefit from F. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Andy. Thanks. Thank you. It's Andy Wilson from JP Morgan. I've got three as well, actually. I wanted to ask on pricing, in terms of pricing carryover that you're, I guess, embedding into that 6%-7% for 2023, and also, I guess, expectations on pricing in 2023, I guess standalone in terms of going forward. I think it was just said at the half year, clearly, you know, we've been playing, some might say catch up on pricing versus inflation. I think it's just, it's inevitable. As our order book grew, that became progressively more of a challenge. You know, with six months order cover, any pricing we put through, you know, was gonna take six months really to start to have any material impact. You know, we are carrying some pricing in the, in the order book, unrealized pricing through into this year. So we will see some pricing benefit from what's already in the order book from Q4, that's been occurred in January flowing through into the rest of the year. I think in terms of the, you know, the price volume ratio last year, we were 8% volume, 6% price. We would expect that to invert, you know, through this year. It will skew more to price over volume. In terms of just ordering it, I guess it's a similar question, one of Andrew's, which is just around, you don't sell a lot into distribution, if anything, and I don't think there's really anything that goes into channel partners. I'm assuming that cancellations are just a very rare event, if at all, seemingly because everything's just application specific. Just to check, is that right? That's correct. Yeah. I mean, we've, I think we've been a record for, in these events over the past two years. You know, we've been tracking cancellations ever since that sort of COVID rebound happened, and were we just seeing some sort of, you know, speculative buying. We've, you know, our cancellation rate is very, very small and hasn't changed over that period and still hasn't changed. It's a quick one, just on M&A. I sort of noted your comment, I dunno whether it was deliberate or not, in terms of interest in technology, early stage technology and then bolt-ons, and I don't think you sort of extended to larger deals. I dunno if that was deliberate. I guess that's kind of the question, whether that forms a bigger part of... Well, no longer forms part of the thoughts on M&A going forward. No, I did actually say, you know, we absolutely will consider larger transformational deals as well in my speech, unless I missed that line out, but I think I did. It's probably more likely I missed it. No, as we said all along, we will look at everything from early stage technology businesses through bolt-ons, through to businesses that are equivalent in the size of our current divisions or slightly larger. We maintain a very active pipeline, as I said. That pipeline is still healthy. Clearly it's been very much a sort of seller's market over the last two years. We haven't seen really much sign of that shifting. I mean, clearly the cost of debt has gone up quite significantly, which has changed the complexion in terms of affordability of deals for us and for everyone else, particularly PE. If anything, we've sort of seen the market, you know, quieten down over the last six months and not seen a huge amount of sort of price multiple valuation shift as of yet. Maybe it will become more of a buyer's opportunity over the next 12, 18 months, but I think, like, you know, it's still too early to say. Thank you. I'll pass on to someone who's listening. Mark, do you wanna go next? Sabine's behind you. Thank you. Can you just run us through the moving parts of the margin progress you're expecting this year? Is that mostly gonna be out of Dynamics? Can Scientific go even higher than it is at the moment? Is that about gross margin recovering, or is that more squeezing of overheads? Well, I want to make a few comments, and I'll pass to Derek. I mean, clearly, you know, the Dynamics presents the biggest opportunity for us. As I said, we absolutely see no reason at all why Dynamics can't get to 20% margins. You know, that's not gonna happen overnight, but we are driving continuous improvement through our SBS initiatives. We'll be installing the new ERP and process transformation within Dynamics in 2024, so they'll get the benefit of that coming through in 2025. In terms of, you know, their gross margins, that is really what hit them last year. As Derek said, it was the disproportionate exposure to low volume, high performance computing chips and sort of, you know, high performance PCBA boards for their simulators, for their real-time computing, for the advanced data acquisition systems that we provide. You know, we were just, you know, in terms of availability, we were having to pay extremely high input prices. We have been putting prices up, but as I said to Andy, it takes time in terms of flowing through those prices that's going into the order book to actually realize in terms of the sales line. We have got some pricing benefits. I mean, with that, I'll let Derek. The only thing I would add to that, I totally agree Dynamics is where the bigger opportunity lies, but Scientific can do better. And we're not so much in a question of squeezing overheads, but just focusing on good cost and bad costs. You know, where we think we can get a good return and it's a good spend, we're not afraid to spend. You know, it's also worth noting in that overhead line how much is R&D. There's a big chunk of spend there that we're expensing. Mm-hmm ... that is R&D, and that sort of brings the margin down, but it obviously gives us opportunity in the future. The only other thing I would observe on the overheads is the Spectris Business System, which we've now been talking about for sort of three, four years is delivering. We are improving process efficiency. We're improving the way we do things. We're simplifying the way we do things. That means that when we grow the top line 6%-7%, we're not having to put in the same level of cost as we would have done in the past, and that operational leverage comes through. You know, all of those factors will come through, and that all gives us confidence towards the 20%+ that we guided to in the capital markets day. Okay. One slightly raised one, if I may. What are you expecting for wage cost inflation this year? Some people have suggested that's harder to pass through than higher material costs in terms of pricing, but- Yeah. I mean, it's a slightly tricky one because it differs by territory and differs by person, if you like, and differs by dynamics within the organization. If you were to take a kind of a planning assumption of around 5%, that's not a bad planning assumption. Yeah. In terms, Mark, as you point about sort of passing through, I mean, you know, clearly, as we looked at pricing, through the end of last year, we were anticipating what we'd be paying in terms of wage inflation and cost of living supplements this year. So we, you know, we have factored that into our thinking and our guidance for this year already. Thank you. Right. Next to you. Yeah. Morning. It's Rory Smith from UBS. Thanks for taking my questions. Just to come back to Andy's question, the 6%-7% organic growth for this year, how much of that is underpinned, do you think, by the carry-through on pricing in the order book? If you're thinking that that volume-price skew mix inverts this year, I'm just trying to work out if you're actually maybe being just slightly too conservative on that, on that guidance and if the world isn't as awful as some of us, that it will be, that could actually be a low number. Yeah. As I refer back to my earlier response, really. I think, you know, we're too early in the year to be able to sort of talk about all of the moving parts. I mean, there are a number of moving parts in, you know, both the, you know, top-line growth and the margin, that we're, you know, clearly working through. We do have a record order book, 6 months cover, started the year strongly. You know, we certainly anticipate that our end markets, you know, like we talked about, pharma and life sciences, will progressively normalize to the sort of, you know, the 4% to 6% through cycle growth rates average. It's just at what point does that happen? I mean, we are butting up against some very tough comps now. Yeah. You know, we grew very strongly in the back end of 2021 and for the first half of 2022. You know, I think, you know, we will be updating you another 3x this year as we go through the year. You know, we'll clearly provide more color. Great. Thank you. Just to follow up on that six months of visibility, do you know what the range is or what is the range across your businesses, thinking more about the short cycle at the sort of lower end? Yeah. I mean, for both the two divisions, Scientific and Dynamics, it's very similar in terms of the order cover. Dynamics has actually got slightly more, because they had stronger order intake through the second half of last year. They're, you know, they're slightly later cycle compared to the scientific division. Again, it is sort of, it's quite nuanced. If you want to buy a wafer analyzer in semiconductor, you're joined the queue for 2024 at the moment. I mean, we're rapidly increasing capacity in supply chain, at the moment, we, you know, we go out over 12 months in terms of availability on that product. Some of our particle analyzers, again, in semiconductor, you know, it's eight, nine months order times at the moment, which again, we're trying to actively work down. You know, it does depend within the business as well. Really the, you know, within the other side, you know, it's really only Red Lion that sells into the sort of distribution network. There, I mean, they've got quite a high backlog, much higher backlog than ever they had historically because of all the electronics. I mean, basically everything they sell has got stuffed with electronics. You know, they are doing very well at the moment, and you see that come through in the, you know, in the other results that Derek showed, you know, strong operational performance from both companies, definitely responding to, you know, the treatment we wanted there. You know, it's really only the Red Lion business that's on shorter lead times. Very clear. Thank you. All right. Next, yeah. Thank you. Tom Fraine from Shore Capital. Just one very quick question initially. Is any of the R&D spend, is any of that capitalized at all? In terms of M&A, have you seen a sort of, more, you know, greater pipeline, more opportunities since interest rates have come off and there's potentially less competition from PE now? Yeah. I'll answer both the two questions. I mean, in terms of R&D, we're not capitalizing any R&D. I think we have a few trail projects still because when I joined, the policy had been changed to capitalize some R&D. Some of those projects are just running out now, but it's a very small amount. Our policy going forward is we do not really want to capitalize R&D. We'd much rather expense it, and, you know, have a clean set of numbers. In terms of M&A, as I said, I mean, you know, we've really not seen any sort of shift in behavior within the sort of market other than the fact that, you know, the number of deal flow has dropped dramatically. I think a lot of, you know, assets people were thinking of potentially selling, have just been put on hold or put on ice for the moment and waiting and seeing. You know, there's a lot less activity from PE at the moment because of the, all the cost of capital and the access to debt. You know, they're sitting on a lot of those assets, and there's not much happening. Thank you. Bruno. Thank you. It's Bruno Gjani from BNP Exane. Just coming back to the backlog. I appreciate it's the longest it's been ever, so it's six months. Normally, you operate with a backlog that's closer towards four months worth of revenue coverage. I'm just wondering, if we look out over the next 12, 24 months, would you expect that normalization back to around four months, or is there some structural reason or otherwise that it should remain really at these abnormally elevated levels? We don't anticipate sustaining a sort of six-month backlog forever, Bruno. It, you know, the timing of that will obviously depend really just on that whole book-to-bill ratio, and, you know, how we see demand flowing through. You know, as our end markets normalize back to that sort of 4%-6% growth, and I think it's important to sort of reflect on the sort of microtrends that's driving our business rather than the macro. I mean, we are definitely benefiting from, you know, the sustainability thematics, the electrification, you know, demand for healthcare, life sciences, you know, automation, greater levels of productivity, particularly in a high inflation environment. I mean, that is all helping drive our business on a micro level. we, you know, we expect the end markets to normalize back to that more like 4%- 6% growth rate, then we are doing sort of 100 basis points better is our sort of minimum target. Then, you know, it's just when does that happen? You know, I would expect to see some of that happening this year, but the extent to which it is, I think it's still too early to say. Just a quick follow-up on that. I guess if you put semi market to the side, and if we look at all the orders at the group level, lead times that you're quoting to customers today, are they closer towards those historic average levels, or are they still... relatively, they're still elevated. Right. We are actively working to bring them down. As I said in my speech, you know, certainly for our particle analyzers out of the Malvern Panalytical business, where a number of you visited last year and you saw the SPS flow line there, we've deployed more flow lines through that business and deployed you know, similar methodology with our suppliers. We've actually, you know, now almost back to making to stock, which is for that product line is where we want to be, because we historically used to book and turn a number of those units in the month. That seems like dim and distant history, we are back, you know, we're getting back to that level. You know, that, as I said, has made us much more competitive in the market. If you want a Mastersizer and Zetasizer, you want a particle analyzer, you know, we can offer greater availability than most of our competition. That's a really helpful place to be. Just a final one. The revenue outlook is quite encouraging. On the order front, particularly as we look towards H1 of this year, the comps look incredibly tough. Should we expect really quite a divergent trend between like-for-like revenue growth and like-for-like order growth as we look towards H1 of this year? Again, I think it's too early to say. I mean, you know, January, we had a book-to-bill greater than 1 in January. we are, you know, maintaining, you know, and our sales are up over 10% in January. you know, we're still seeing strong demand. you know, we keep coming back to this question as though, you know, when we will see things sort of normalize. I think it's gonna be, you know, my sense is it's gonna be progressive through this year. Just how fast that happens and the extent to which it happens, I think, you know, it's best that we update you as we go through our quarterly and half-yearly trading statements. Great. Thank you. Yes, George over here. Thanks very much. George Featherstone, Bank of America. I just wanna come back to the comment you made, Andrew, on the other businesses. They've shown some encouraging improvement towards the back end of the year, responding to treatment, as you put it. How much further can you improve them? Has there been any change in your longer-term view on these businesses? Yeah, as we've always said, I mean, they're high quality businesses. Historically, they have had margins higher than we achieved last year, so we're really pleased with the progress on the margins last year. Much better operational execution. We replaced the leadership in both businesses through last year. I'm very pleased with the progress they're making. We certainly see opportunities for them to further progress their margins through this year and going forward. You know, the question is that they are, they are niche-y in nature, and it's really a question of scale, and are we the best people to scale them or, you know, or would it be, you know... Are we, you know... Effectively, are we then gonna be the best owner for those assets? For the moment, we're very pleased with the performance, and we'll continue to drive their operational and strategy execution forward. Thanks. On the R&D spend, clearly stepping up again a little bit this year. When we think about the medium-term operating margin, can you give us a sense, I guess, in terms of what you expect the ongoing beyond this year R&D share of sales will be? Will it continue to step up, or will there kind of be a bit of a reduction as you go through a new product cycle? I mean, our guidance is 8%, so we're sort of, you know, we're getting it to 8% and then holding at 8%. I mean, year to year it could fluctuate a little bit, but I think, you know, 8% as a guidance is a good, you know, is a good level. Certainly our Vitality Index, you can see is ticking up nicely as we have ramped up the R&D. We are accelerating the Vitality Index, and our target there is to get, you know, we finished 25% last year. It was up on the previous year, and, you know, get that to sort of 30%-33% over time. Yes, Rich. Hi, it's Richard Paige from Numis. Just a couple from me. On the like-for-like end market breakout you gave us, one that stood out to me was the automotive. Very strong. Can you just give us an idea of how much that's new customers versus growth with existing customers, please? Yeah, well, Rich, I mean, a lot of the growth is actually in our virtual test division, so that's a, you know. We highlight as the capital markets a little bit of a case study on the acquisitions that we've made there in terms of Concurrent Real-Time. The MTEC acquisition we did back in 2019. No, the RightHook we did in 2019, MTEC in 2021, I think it was. And they're really strengthening, you know, the VI-grade acquisition we made in 2018. You know, we've. By the end of last year, we actually, we doubled the sales for the over the last four, five years for virtual tests. Gone from about EUR 40 million to almost EUR 80 million. Very strong growth there. It's really is this, you know, we are riding the shift of, you know, certainly in automotive by large automotive OEM customers trying to accelerate time to market, reduce development costs. It's a big part of their sustainability agenda. I mentioned MIRA during my speech. I mean, they bought one of our large simulators, part of that was, you know, was, yes, accelerating development times for their customers, also from a sustainability perspective. It's a nice case study in our annual report you can read where we actually model the sort of CO2 savings and the environmental impact savings from actually designing through simulation and doing, you know... It's not just the digital twin, it's actually the, you know, the, you know, hardware in the loop, driver in the loop, software in the loop capability that we offer that's allowing customers to be, to, you know, develop products far more sustainably, including reducing the number of tires used in a prototype, you know, vehicle by about 3,000 sets of tires. I mean, it's a lot of rubber not being produced. You know, it's actually quite impactful. You know, we are seeing huge demand. You know, a quote from Jim Farley, that was a nice post on LinkedIn that he put up there, you know, driving one of our simulators, and with him in the cockpit. It's a great testimony. Cool. Thank you. Just the second one. You mentioned in the statement, obviously, the U.S. orders softening in the second half. Could you just elaborate a bit more on that? Is that where the pharma impact. Yeah. Pharma, yeah. Part of the pharma normalization was happening in North America. I think generally we've sort of seen North America just sort of normalize faster or, you know, slope a bit. To me, that's sort of fairly normal behavior for North America. I mean, typically, North American companies are much quicker to act on the macro signals than maybe European or Asian companies are. It's not unexpected. We don't see it as, you know, as problematic. Thank you. Yeah, Harry. Excuse me. It's Harry Philips from Peel Hunt, finally. Just a question on capital allocation, because just if you, if you run your cashflow number and you sort of run circa 90%, that's sort of say GBP 200 million just for, you know, to pick a number. You've got some of the buyback left to do, GBP 230 million net cash. You start to see the math quite quickly, clearly. I'm just slightly surprised. When, when do you pull the trigger on a buyback or something like that? Unless you do some significant M&A. It's clearly gonna be very inefficient. What's the trigger for sort of deciding to go down that route rather than sort of doing it now or. Yeah -whatever? I mean, there's never one trigger, Harry, in reality. I mean, we're very clear that we look at our capital that we have. Our primary desire is to invest organically, grow the business that way, we're doing that. Our second desire is to grow inorganically and make acquisitions, we're doing that and have done that. If we think we've got excess, then we give it back to shareholders, either through a buyback or special div. We're in the middle of giving money back to shareholders, the GBP 300 million. That's sort of in train. Look, I mean, we'll continue to monitor the balance sheet and look at the options between those three options and decide which makes most sense. Obviously, we would like to make some more M&A. We've undertaken GBP 124 million last year of spend on acquisitions. You don't have to do significant acquisitions to eat into that balance. Equally, having the money available, if there's something bigger that comes along and there's a good opportunity to take it, then we will. We kind of look at it in the round. We have a buyback that's in train at the moment. We didn't feel the need to extend it. There are acquisition opportunities that we would like to take. We'll keep it monitored. There's not a specific trigger or a specific balance sheet date or anything in reality. We kind of look at it at the time, looking across the whole spectrum of what's in front of us and try and get the balance right. I think, I mean, obviously, I would say this because we've made this decision, we feel like we've got the balance about right. It's also quite nice to increase the ordinary dividend. That sort of sits outside our capital allocation. It's the 33rd year that we've increased that. That's quite a nice trend as well, I think. We do have a couple of questions, Andrew, just that have come in online. Right. Let me just fire a couple of these. Just when you look at Spectris Dynamics and the mix of the growth, the 7% growth between physical test, virtual test, and software, is there any interesting story there? I mean, yeah. There's nothing really I would say I'd call out that differentiates the split between sort of physical, virtual or, you know, our software sales. You know, within physical tests, I highlighted sort of our end-of-line testing for electric motors has been particularly strong. I mean, we almost doubled the revenue of that product line over the last 18 months. Virtual tests, I've spoken about. Software, some of our material analysis, durability analysis software, again, is selling very well. You know, broadly, it's a pretty common sort of growth across the whole of dynamics we're seeing. Also how much capacity, additional capacity does the new facility for PMS give us? The new facility in PMS is over doubling the size of their existing footprint. The existing footprint is getting quite tight, in fairness. You know, we've been looking for some time at a new facility and found a building last year, which we bought outright because we believe that gives us greater flexibility over time in terms of how we use it. It's, you know, we're also looking at it with an eye to sort of acting as a distribution center for sort of towards the West Coast for our scientific division in North America as well. Okay. Nothing more. Okay. Any other questions? We are about out of time. All right. Well, let me draw to a close. Thank you again for coming. Great to see so many of you in the room. It's great to be back to doing these things physically. Just so I summary. You know, we delivered a very strong performance in 2022. We're very pleased with how we performed. Equally, we're very pleased with the momentum that we've carried over from last year into the start of this year, with both a very healthy order book, but also continuing strong demand and a book-to-bill above 1. You know, that gives us the confidence in terms of the guidance that we've given today in terms of 6%-7% organic growth this year with strong margin progression. You know, we look forward to updating you through our trading update in April. Clearly some of the questions that you asked today maybe give a bit more color. Sorry? HBK here. Of course, that. Good. Uh, and, uh... Thought. Yeah, don't know. We just as a way of a sort of a sort of pre-advert, if you like, we are organizing a Dynamics mini capital markets day teaching at our virtual test facility in Italy in June. It'll be the week of the 19th of June. We've just got to land on the day. We may extend that to sort of a broader sort of Dynamics investor sort of roadshow in Europe if there's sufficient interest as well. You know, the facility in Italy has, it's the way we design and build our full-scale simulators, and it really sort of will showcase not just the virtual test division within Dynamics, but we'll also be bringing in some of our other software solutions and physical test and smart sensor solutions that we will showcase on the day. We'll advise you the date as soon as possible. If you wanna ride on a simulator, book early. With that, look forward to seeing you all again in April. Thanks very much for coming.