Spinning up. For the H1 results for Victoria, I'm gonna take you through the initial indicative summary, and then hand over to Brian to do the numbers, and then Philip to cover off operations. The three, the key numbers on which are here on page four, the revenue was up to GBP 776 million for the six months. EBITDA was just over GBP 100 million, and the pre-tax profit was GBP 53.1 million. The key things around that is firstly, obviously, we had to deal with very high inflation of raw materials, that was down through a number of options. Firstly, we obviously did some price increases, passed on cost to customers. Secondly, we worked with our customers to do some product engineering, which Philip can take you through in more detail if that becomes relevant. It is, for example, the ceramic tiles, we made them slightly thinner so that we'd use less gas to manufacture them. We used hedging and contract pricing to control the cost of some raw materials and again, focus a little later talking about our logistics operation because the very high quality service levels we provide customers make them slightly less sensitive to price increases than otherwise. Going forward, we expect to further improve the margin from where it is today. There are some significant synergy gains that we expect to achieve from the integration of the acquisitions that we've made in the last six months, or 12 months, I should say. Firstly, there is some consolidation of manufacturing capacity that's going on where we are restructuring or reorganizing some of the production capacity in the business. We have started insourcing logistics operations, particularly in the U.S., which is both improving service levels and also lowering our costs. We are also taking out some head office costs and overhead that has been accumulated when we bought Balta. One of the critical things which will also help us improve our operating margins going is, and it's, is the reduction of input costs into the, into the cost of goods sold. Those two charts that you can see at the bottom of page six, very, in a very sort of, summarized way. The raw materials for carpet and rugs is primarily polypropylene, and ChemOrbis, which is the index for, that covers polypropylene prices. You can see that earlier this year, we were paying around GBP 1,400 a ton for polypropylene. That is the product that we are now selling, because we bought the raw materials earlier this year, made it into product, and that product's now being sold. Through our accounting policy, which is, as you would expect, under IFRS's FIFO, those costs are currently being carried through the cost of goods sold. What we are now and have been for the last three months buying raw materials, it's now dropped by around 40%. Given that polypropylene or raw materials for carpets between 45% and 54% of COGS, you can understand that having a reduction like that makes a material difference to the COGS. On the right-hand side, we import a lot of product, particularly into the U.S., out of China or the Far East. Beginning of this year, we were paying between $12,000 and $14,000 a container. That's now down to between $2,000 and $3,000 a container. It's been falling steadily through the year, as you can see on the chart there, back to a more normal level. Of course, again, until we get a full turn of inventory, the cost that we're carrying through the COGS, again, was reflected in these very high shipping container prices earlier this year. There are some natural inbuilt uplift in operating margin that we can expect to see over the next six months. In terms of demand, the key thing is that obviously there are, there is fluctuation in demand for flooring for due to, as a result of consumer confidence waxing and waning over time. However, fundamentally, the underlying industry is growing at 2.6% a year. It has done that for the last 30 years. That's volume, I should say, 2.6% of volume over the last 30 years. Whether we have a slightly softer demand over this, the next 12 months or not, long term, it makes very little difference to the overall growth rate of the business. We can, we are well positioned in any event to ride out any softness demand. Firstly, because we are a geographic diversification, and the U.K. at the moment is particularly soft, compared to some other countries, but we're maintaining demand in some of the other countries, and that's the advantage of being so diversified. We are also one of the lowest cost producers, the most cost-efficient producer of product. Operating like that gives us the flexibility to, shall we say, maneuver against our competitors who are not such low-cost producers. Something that Philip will talk about a little bit, I think, is the fact that we are a mid to high-end producer of product. Our brands are all mid to high-end or nearly all mid to high-end. That demand has stayed remarkably resilient so far, against softer demand at the low end. Mid to high-end Victoria, which is where Victoria trades, has seen sort of a much stronger demand. The last point I'd wanna make on fluctuations in demand is Victoria has always had low operational gearing. That's intentional. We've structured the business that way. With nearly half our cost base being fully variable and another, 40% being semi-variable, we only have a fixed component of about 8%. In other words, as revenue falls, should it or demand falls, costs fall automatically with it. We don't need, and therefore the earnings are not dramatically affected. Lastly, I just want to go on to speak about the balance sheet and cash generation. The key thing here is we are focusing very strongly for the next 12 months, maybe two years, on integrating the existing businesses that we've acquired and operational improvements. Acquisitions will take a back step to operational activities. We're now a GBP 1.5 billion a year business, generating we believe, or at least the analyst predicting GBP 200 million of EBITDA, which we believe is the company will meet this year. We're a decent sized business, and there is a lot of opportunity to further improve earnings. What we're focused on is improving the operating profits and getting those synergies out, and then secondly, cash generation. We have invested some money in the first half of this year into inventory. Why did we do that? Two reasons. Firstly, raw materials were the supply chain for raw materials was very irregular for 2021 at the beginning of this year. The way we were able to keep our factories operating at optimum capacity is we bought more and carried more raw materials than we normally do. That allowed us to take opportunity or take advantage of some of our competitors who did not have product to supply the market. That's why we saw double-digit like-to-like growth, organic growth last year. The second reason that we invested some money into inventory is to protect to be able to continue to supply product, most particularly ceramic tiles. You know, it's easy to forget or maybe overlook now, but four months ago, five months ago, there was a lot of talk about gas rationing or industrial gas rationing in Europe. Gas prices hit EUR 300+ a megawatt hour. Philip made the decision to invest into and put money into inventory. We overproduced deliberately so that if there was gas rationing and we had to suspend production or if gas prices got so high that it was uneconomic to produce, we could supply and meet our customers' needs out of inventory. As it's turned out, the panic over gas prices and gas supply has abated somewhat in recent weeks. As a result, we intend to turn that inventory back into cash over the next few months. We're expecting to see between now and the end of the financial year, GBP 100 million of net positive cash flow. That's after exceptional costs. There are some exceptional costs that'll be associated with restructuring Balta. After all exceptional costs, we expect to see GBP 100 million of net positive cash flow in H2. That's going to come from normalizing the inventory through SKU rationalization as we integrate the businesses, obviously operating profits, which we expect to make to H2. Lastly, there will be some surplus asset sales. As Philip integrates the businesses we've acquired, there will be spare plant and machinery and spare real estate. That's a pretty brief summary of this year and what we expect to do in the next six months. I'll get Brian to take you through the detail now on the numbers. Thanks, Geoff. Good morning, everyone. I'll present the financial slides on what's been a record year for Victoria. I want to see some of the highlights and then hand over to Philip, who will take you through the detail on each of the divisions. As I said, it's been a good year so far, and we expect it to continue into the second half. I'm on slide 10. Here you'll see that we delivered revenues of GBP 776 million compared to the prior year, GBP 489 million. That's an increase of 59%, but on a like-for-like basis, that's 7.7%. Like for like for us is before the impact of the acquisition on a current basis. You'll also see that the majority of divisions showed double-digit growth, even when compared to that record year we had last year as we came out of COVID. In terms of EBITDA, we achieved over GBP 100 million, a 19% increase on the same period last year, driven by a mixture of organic growth and the acquisitions we made in the period. We completed two acquisitions, the largest being the carve-out of the rugs and broadloom business of Balta in Belgium, but who also have operations in Turkey, which we completed in April. After that, we completed a small rugs manufacturer acquisition of Ragolle, which is also in Belgium. As a result of the two acquisitions, we're now the largest soft flooring manufacturer in Europe. Philip will look at each of the divisions later, and we will look at the improvements on the underlying EBITDA margin on the next slide. Go to slide 11. We presented similar analysis at the year-end. There were two major components of the impact that we have on our margin. This bridge goes from the full year margin of 16%, where we ended up this year. The two major impacts are the acquisition mix effect and the cost inflation pass-through. The acquisition mix effect comes as we tend to buy businesses with lower margins than our own. During the integration period, we expect to see a drag on the overall group margin as we complete the synergy projects. This we've seen this year with an impact of 110 basis points on the reported margin. The most significant impact of this is in the U.K. and Europe soft flooring division as we continue to integrate the Balta acquisition. This business will be fully integrated into our industry leading scaled operations over the coming 24 months and provide us with in the U.K. and U.S. market. The second impact, which again we highlighted, the results back in July, is driven by the sometimes double-digit inflation on our input costs and how we pass these on to customers. We've continued to see inflationary pressures in the first half on raw materials, labor, and energy across our businesses. To mitigate this, our management teams have implemented price increases where necessary. Being laser-focused on cost and synergy initiatives, hedged to manage key input costs where available, and worked on product [engineerings] with our customers to mutual benefit. To support our customers, however, where we have increased prices, we passed on the costs without adding an additional margin to the cost inflation. This has helped maintain absolute margin and market share, but it's had a negative impact of 130 basis points on the margin perecntage as we reported. This leaves us with a reported margin for the six months of this year of 13%. As Geoff said earlier on, we expect to see this improve in the second half as we've seen raw material prices start to stabilize, our synergy projects continue to deliver, and we see the benefits of cost-saving initiatives that management have put in place. Moving on to slide 12. You will have seen this slide before, I think it's worth just spending a few minutes talking about the exceptionals and on underlying items. How we define these. These items are either irregular and therefore including them in the assessment of business performance, which leads to a distortion of trends. Are technical adjustments, which ensure the group's financial statements are in compliance with IFRS, but do not reflect the underlying performance of the business in the period or they're both of those items. There are only two items which are cash items, the first two on the list, and totaling GBP 6.2 million and the rest are non-cash items. The key ones to draw your attention to, but I'll just go quickly go through the cash items. The acquisition and disposal costs relate to fees that we pay to advisors for either completed or reported acquisitions in the period. Predominantly, this was the end of the acquisition of Balta, the acquisition of Ragolle, and the recently completed IWT acquisition. Is down year-on-year as a result of the lower acquisitions that we made in the year. The second cash item is reorganization costs. This is where we're integrating our businesses, and the majority of the cost that we face in the first half is for Balta. It should be noted that there'll be more costs in the second half, as Geoff mentioned earlier on. We expect that these costs will be cash neutral over time as we dispose of surplus real estate assets once the reorganization is complete. Moving down the list, negative goodwill, there's quite a large number in there. This is an exceptional income where we have negative goodwill on the acquisitions of Balta and Ragolle that we made in the year. This is where the price that we paid is lower than the fair value of the assets which we acquired and IFRS require that we usually take that to the income statement. Moving on to the non-underlying operating items. Acquisition-related performance plans. This is quite a long way of saying that these are earn-out payments that we make for businesses that we acquire using that mechanism. Again, IFRS require that we charge these to the income statements when the payments are earned rather than adjusting goodwill. As these payments are irregular, they should not be included in the underlying performance. Amortization of sorry, acquired tangibles is a large number in that section. Again, from an IFRS perspective, we're required to value intangible assets when we acquire businesses. We exclude them from underlying performance to avoid any potential double counting of costs of the business. I'll give an example here. Once we acquire a business, we have to value customer relationships. However, on an ongoing basis, the business incurs costs while we're maintaining those customer relationships, and therefore, if we're taking an amortization charge plus those ongoing costs, there's double count there. Therefore, we exclude the amortization charge from the underlying performance of the business. Another gap item is inventory and the uplift of fair value when we acquire inventory. From an IFRS perspective, the inventory needs to be fair valued. That means that on the opening balance sheet, the inventory is put at a value which is very close to the price that we will sell it at. When we sell those products, we do realize a profit, and if we ignore this uplift, we would not be showing the correct trends for the business. We've excluded the accounting adjustment which uplifts the inventory. A new item for this year is hyperinflation. We were required to adopt hyperinflation accounting for the businesses that we operate in Turkey. The cumulative inflation over the previous three years has been in excess of 100%. That means that all of the income statements and balance sheet items have to be re-indexed to update them for a notional purchasing power. As our businesses in Turkey have the majority of their sales in either U.S. dollar or the euro and the indexation results in a net gain to EBITDA of GBP 1.5 million, we believe that this does not reflect the underlying performance of those businesses. Therefore, we have excluded it. Another item that arises as a result of the hyperinflationary accounting is the monetary gain which has gone through finance costs. Again, we've excluded that from the underlying trends of the business. Finally, on this slide, the finance items related to preferred equity. This is the non-cash charge which represents the pick on the. the. Okay, moving to the cash, slide 13. We generated GBP 22.1 billion of operating cash before interest, tax, and exceptional items in the period. The key driver which impacted this was the movement of working capital, which is made up of a number of components. As Geoff mentioned, we took a conscious decision in 2021 to increase our levels of raw materials to ensure that Victoria could maintain its production schedules in the face of severe disruption to global supply chains. We're now seeing these supply chains return to more normal levels, which will allow us to reduce the inventory holding in the second half to more normal levels. A second component of this outflow was that in the early months of this financial year, we also saw the continuation of double-digit inflation on raw material and energy costs, which are now going through a working capital in the form of higher inventory values and also receivable balances values. Again, we expect this to wind in the second half of the year and generate cash flows into the business. Moving on to slide 14. This is the graphical representation of our net debt movements in the period. We ended the period with a net debt of GBP 651.5 million. It should be noted here that this is net debt, so our gross debt has not changed in the period. The main movement that we've seen in the first six months is the acquisition of Balta and Ragolle, which is the GBP 354 million block in the middle of that page. The other item worth noting here is as a result of weaker sterling, there's also been an adverse inflation impact of GBP 27 million. As Geoff mentioned, almost all of our debt is long tenors with the earliest tranches of our low coupon, at 3.65%, which is low compared to the current pricing in the market. Those bonds are not due till 2026. Finally from me, moving on to slide 15, you can see that the net debt of GBP 661 million has left our leverage stable at 3.4x, which is in line [with Victoria's] financial policy. You will also see on this slide that we have cash of over GBP 73 million, and this combined with the undrawn RCF of GBP 160 million and other undrawn facilities at the end of the period, means that we've got significant liquidity of over GBP 250 million, which puts us in a very healthy balancing position. Okay. With that, I'll hand you over to Philip to present more of the details. Thank you, Brian. The operational overview. Overall, we have the focus of course on operations and acquisition integration. As you know, we've done a number of acquisitions in the last year and a half, which we are fully in the process of integrating, the most recent one, Balta and Ragolle. We also did IWT and Graniser in Turkey and earlier in the last year, Cali. There's a lot of projects going on in integrating that and looking for synergies. These synergies will drive material earnings and cash flow growth over the next two years for sure. To go into some more detail, let's have a look into the division. In the first division, the U.K. and Europe soft flooring, where we have full focus on integration and production gains. To understand really what has happened, we need to have a look at the margin bridge. It was already mentioned earlier by Brian, the acquisition mix effect was 2.8%, and the inflation pass-through effect was 0.4%. This diluted the profitability to 13.4%. What we in fact need to explain from the operations point of view is the 340 basis points. What has really happened? The reason for that drop, of course, there was a fast cost inflation of the COGS, the raw materials, the energy, the labor. We couldn't catch up fast enough with the price increases, so there was a bit of a time lag. And also, because there were some lesser volumes in the first half year, and this has led to a lesser cost absorption. How will we mitigate that? Of course, with price increases. We've done price increases, and we have to hang on to price increases, even in a market where the prices are going down or slightly going down, stabilizing to go down. We will keep our prices with the customer for a bit longer because we still have the inventory turn there. We do some product and value engineering. There's cost savings in all the different companies. Of course, there's the restructuring. The largest part of the restructuring is in Balta. This was known on the moment that we, that we did the acquisition. We know that the footprint in Belgium was too large. We have decided to close one plant, and we have laid off 240 people. We've just terminated the process of negotiations with the trade unions. In the next few weeks, these people will be laid off and 140 people will be transferred to different plants in Belgium. We've closed down the extrusion of the yarn. It was always a question, make or buy. Making yarn with the current energy prices and the feeder of the chips, which we had in Belgium is not likely to happen and to continue. We've reduced this capacity massively, and we've brought it to Turkey. Some of the weaving looms are also brought to Turkey, and some will be changing factories in Belgium. There's some expansion of capacity in Turkey. We have to put a new building there as well. Don't forget, and I want to reiterate that Brian has mentioned it before. It's not new for Balta. Balta has production facilities in Turkey. It has two production facilities close to Izmir and Uşak. We will continue to build on that. A bit lesser footprint in Belgium, a bit larger footprint in Turkey. Just a reminder as well, when we acquired Balta, 2/3 was of the revenue which we acquired was rugs and 1/3 was Broadloom. There's a Broadloom factory as well in Belgium, we are pushing more volume from the Belgian factory into the U.K. factories as well. Manufacturing in the U.K. is cheaper currently than in Belgium from a labor perspective, from energy perspective, and to some extent also from a raw material perspective. I think it is important to mention Balta because that was the largest one. Something else to remind every one of you is logistics operation, which remains definitely a key differentiator for us. This is driving the market share gains. The service proposition remains at 94% for delivery within three days and even at 90% for next day delivery. This has proven to be a very valuable asset which we are having. Glad to say that the project, the Worcester project, as we call it, with a new distribution center in Worcester, with a purpose-built warehouse of 190,000 sq ft, which is a net carbon zero, is fully on time, and we will take access of that in February next year. For the moment, we took early access, and we are building already the cutting tables, and we will start building the racks next month. If we move on to ceramics. Ceramics has had record revenues and profits. The profitability is on track and in line with the previous years. The main reason for that is that there has been the energy price rise was so massive that there has been an industry-wide price increase, which was done, some of them linked the price of the sales prices to the big about overprice of the gas. It was so vast and so fast. That's something we did. We done the whole industry was separate. We've been taking advantage of that as well. We've also done on top of that, we've done some product engineering, as Geoff has mentioned earlier. Working on the pile, not the pile, tile height. Trying to spend a bit less raw material. We've done massive price increases as well in line with what the rest of the trade has done. Yes, there was a little bit of hedging, but this has, as a matter of fact, it has helped us to do lesser price increases. It was all pretty much in line with the expectations and what the rest of the industry has done. If we look into the three geographies, we have three geographies in ceramics. In Italy, we have seen a very strong demand in the DIY business in the first half year, and this continues to be in the second half year. From the operations point of view, we've also acquired an atomizer. As you may remember, in Spain, we are already completely, fully integrated on the atomized clay capacity. We were not fully integrated in Italy. With the acquisition of this additional atomizer, we are fully integrated now in atomized clay. We have also built in the back end of last year a multipurpose, brand new kiln in Serra, which has been helpful because with the 30%-35% more output, we've created extra capacity there. In the Ascot factory, we've done a new, complete new line as well for large sizes, large size tiles, which seem to be pretty much in demand. On top of that, there's still the Grow project. We've mentioned that last year as well. This is a project which has been confirmed by the board. It's a brand new plant which will be driven on green hydrogen, which will be carbon neutral over time. We should have this factory up and running in the beginning of the second quarter of 2024. In Spain, we've invested and fully focused on a segment which was very fast growing and profitability, which was the polished tiles. We've invested in a polishing line in Spain. We've also taken a good look at the Saloni brand, and we've been repositioning the Saloni brand because that's the one brand we have, which is less residential and which is like more commercial brand. The commercial has been good in the first, in the first half year. We've benefited from that. We've added a new showroom in Alicante, and fifth of December, we are opening a new showroom in Madrid completely with this new image rebranding image. Turkey, very important that we're looking for more synergy projects with Italian plants. This is pretty much underway. We are rolling out a Capex program as well to be able to export more. As you know, when we acquired Graniser, 70% of the revenue was export, 30% was domestic market. We have a lesser interest in the domestic market. We are fully focused on exports, and we want to make this export grow from 70%-90% up to 100%. Therefore, we needed to do some investment to come in line with quality standards, European and U.S. quality standards. Third, region or division, Australia. Australia was good. Strong organic revenue and EBITDA growth in Australia, completely in line with the expectations. As you know, Australia came out of lockdown a bit later than in Europe. The demand was strong in the first half year. Retail spending was good. Also it's fair to say, I think that we have had less supply chain disruption in this part of the world and also a lesser inflation, which has been helpful. Important in terms of product. We have this brand Dunlop, which is an underlay manufacturer and also an LVT distributor. The LVT is growing pretty fast in Australia and we are growing together or in line with the market growth, even exceeding the market growth in LVT because we have been working on new collections and enhancing our service proposition. In underlay, very little to say about underlay because we just at full capacity there, and we keep on delivering this full capacity into the market. Last but not least is the U.S. market. U.S. market where we have acquired this brand, Cali, about a year ago, and we've done a recent acquisition of IWT. It's important to say about the U.S. that we are mainly interested in distribution, not in manufacturing capacity. In the meantime, the revenue is about $400 million in the U.S. if we take everything combined. That's Cali, IWT, and also the rugs of Balta. Don't forget Balta has two warehouses as well in the U.S., in Savannah and in Rome, is doing 45% of its revenue in the U.S. If we combine and if we see all of that, if we look at what IWT is, if we look at what we've done with Cali, to stop the third party logistics and to create our own distribution in a purpose-built warehouse, also on the East Coast. We have four warehouses on the East Coast now. What we are doing is we try to feed more product through that pipeline. We have more products. We said that in last meeting as well. More product from the group. There was artificial turf, there's rugs, and we try to put these two product categories more into these distributions. With IWT, the most recent acquisition, of course, That's 7% in ceramics and 30% in LVT, and we are trying to put more ceramics product through the distribution network, although they will remain as an independent brand in the U.S. I would say overall, when we look at all of the divisions, I would call it a solid performance in a challenging environment. We are convinced that the margin is a bit subdued for the moment in the soft flooring, that we will come back there. Don't forget that whatever we've done in the first half year was done at very expensive raw material prices and inventories. As we go through the inventory turn and we buy cheaper raw materials, this will be helpful in trying to restore the margins. If you top it up with the synergy effects, I think we're in a good place. Yeah.