Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Vp Group, Vp plc Investor Presentation. Apologies for our short delay. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your question at any time and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll, and I'm sure the company will be most grateful for your participation. I'd now like to hand over to Neil Stothard, CEO. Good morning. Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us this morning. I have my colleague, Allison Bainbridge, with me, CFO. Morning. I'm CEO of the business. There are three elements to the presentation. The first short one, which is I shall just take you through the highlights of the results to 30th September 2022. Allison will then take you through the financial highlights, and I'll finish with commentary on the markets. First, first slide in terms of highlights. I think, first of all, the six months to 30th September were a period of resilient performance for us. We were very pleased with a number of elements of the results. The earnings themselves, the quality was maintained. We improved our ROACE through six months, and we also maintained margins from the equivalent period last year. Recovery has continued, albeit relatively modest, held back by certain market challenges. We've the revenue growth has been partially delivered through increases in higher rates agreed with our customer base. The supported markets for us have been infrastructure and house build, which has been against an inflationary backdrop, but nevertheless positive. Geographically, I The capacity on our fleet's been maintained. We have as a refreshed fleet this year as we had last. As part of that, fleet refreshment, moving on to the ESG comment, we've been able to continue to focus on our drive to improve sustainability in terms of the initiatives that we have and particularly in terms of the type of product that we're being able to provide to our customer base. To highlight the fact that the debt that we have is a period when interest rates are hiking, is 62% is a long-term fixed interest, which Allison will explain in more detail shortly. The final headline for me would be the 11 pence per share interim dividend represents a 5% increase for the year. They're the highlights. I'm now gonna hand over to Allison, who will talk you through the financials. Thank you, Neil. Financial highlights. I think we're pleased that these are a solid set of results showing continued recovery in the strength of our business. The main points I would want to draw out here are the fact that revenue has increased by 6% and has profit before tax and amortization in the period. Also, we are pleased that net margins have been maintained at 11.5%, which we believe shows the strength of our returns. The return on average capital employed is a key measure for us, and we're pleased to report that in the, in the first half, this was maintained at 14.4%. This is ahead of our weighted average cost of capital, which have increased to 9% to reflect recent increases in interest rates, and it was previously at 8%. As a group, we target 15% return on average capital employed throughout the cycle. This target was set over 20 years ago, and we've maintained that target. By that time, weighted average cost of capital was at 11%, so we still feel that there's plenty of headroom within that target and against our weighted average capital. Sorry, this isn't very responsive to my clicker. That's it. You it. You can press it. There we go. Dividends. Moving on to dividends, which is slide eight. As Neil's already mentioned, we are going to pay an interim dividend of 11 pence per share, which is a 5% increase on the previous year. I've already mentioned that we feel we've had a robust set of results and that we have strong returns, and this is reflected in this 5% increase in dividends. Our stated policy is to increase dividends in line with profitability, as long as those profits we feel are sustainable, and also that we pay out 2x dividend cover. Hooray. The group has a strong balance sheet, and in the period, hire fleet, which is the equipment that we rent out to our customers, grew by GBP 10 million and also by 5%. The CapEx in there was GBP 34 million, but Neil's going to talk about fleet CapEx on a later slide, so I'll leave that for now for him. You'll notice on the balance sheet that we have had a working capital swing, an adverse swing, and it has increased by GBP 18.7 million in the period. We feel this is, we had a positive swing as a result of the pandemic, and this is a reversal of that, which we think now will flatten out. Behind that movement is mainly trade debtors. There's a GBP 11 million increase in trade debtors in the period. Half of that is a result of our increased trading, the 6% increase in revenue, and the other half is due to a slight increase in debtor days, which we're monitoring and keeping abreast of. The other element is the fact that our creditors have reduced by GBP 6 million. Part of this is that we had a new system implemented for the purchase ledger. This resulted in some delays for a while, but now we've rectified those and we're now paying in time and the times that we previously were. As a consequence of the movement in net working capital, net debt has increased to GBP 149 million. I'll talk more to that in a later slide. The next slide is around cash flow. We have strong EBITDA. You can see that it's increased to GBP 47.8 million in the period, which is a 7% uplift, which we find is pleasing. On this cash flow slide, you can also see that we've booked an exceptional item in the period of GBP 1.9 million. This was in respect of a strategic review. In April, this year, 2022, we announced that we're going to do a formal sales process. Before we did that, we carried out strategic review, which involved financial due diligence and commercial due diligence, the exceptional items are in respect of those costs. I've already spoken about the working capital movement and the fact that net debt has increased by an outflow of GBP 18.3 million. Interest rates will increase in the second half. I'm going to turn to my next slide, which shows that with our net debt and facilities, we are fairly well-placed in the fact that we have 62% of our net debt is at fixed rates. You'll notice that we have two private placements, which are long-term debt. One matures in January 2027, the other element matures in April 2028. That leaves us in a good position in the current environment of increasing interest rates. We do have a revolving credit facility which matures in June 2024, and this is subject to SONIA. It's a margin over SONIA, and SONIA is impacted when the Bank of England raises its rates. As I've mentioned, there's been little impact in the first half's numbers, but we do see an impact going forward, which we will try and mitigate as best we can. As I mentioned, the key point is the fact that we do have 62% fixed. My final slide is on our covenants. Within the banking documents and the loan documents that we have, we have two covenants only. One is EBITDA interest cover, which has to be greater than 3x At the period end, we were at 9.81 times, so lots of headroom there. The second covenant is we have to have net debt to EBITDA at less than 2.5x. At the period end, it was 1.6x. Again, we do have covenant headroom against our covenants. I'm now going to pass on to Neil, who's going to talk about the market. Good. Thanks, Allison. In terms of the market, experience that we've encountered, which have delivered the quality of results that Allison's just described, my first slide talks to the core sectors that the key businesses are exposed to, namely infrastructure, construction, house building and energy, together with a length of smaller markets, which we describe under other. You'll see from the table that all of the markets, apart from energy, showed growth in the period. Dealing with energy and other first, the energy market looks to have fallen quite significantly. That's primarily due to the fact that last year, in the first half, we had a very large shutdown contract at a petrochemical complex, which does not repeat every year. We didn't have the benefits of that activity in the current year that we had a year ago. In actual fact, if you strip that out, the energy market has improved slightly for us, particularly where we have exposure to the Oil and Gas segment through our Airpac business. In terms of other, that's been a welcome increase in activity in that market. That primarily is a result of the catch up on COVID-related industries such as outdoor events and the Aviation sector. We're very pleased to see that those two markets pick up and contribute to the other line. The three main areas for us and the two largest of which are infrastructure and construction at circa 40% each. In infrastructure, we had a positive period of trading with on the contractors on the AMP program, AMP 7, which is in its third year and would have been very slow the previous year. That was a good development for us. We've also been quite busy on the rail activity where CP6, the five-year program in rail, has started to pick up. Perhaps our rail would've been better still but for the industrial action, which has impacted some of the work programs over the last few months for our contractors and for Network Rail. Elsewhere, HS2 was a strong area of activity for us in the prior year on, primarily on phase one, the London to Birmingham leg. We didn't experience the pickup in phase two work that we expected in the current year, as many of the contracts have yet to be let. We hope that having received endorsement from the government most recently that they're going to continue with HS2, as envisaged that that work will come through next year. In construction, the positives are in RMI in terms of the repair and maintenance side, and also we've seen a decent pickup in activity on groundwork in civil engineering, which is pleasing, 'cause that's a fresh development in the last six months. Elsewhere, however, the markets are flat. I will talk to that a little bit in the next slide. In terms of house build, we had a very good first half in the House Building segment with sustained levels of demand, married to which there was a shortage of supply of the type of products that we provide to that segment. The supply shortage is due to the long lead times from manufacturers which have continued. They are easing, but they have continued into the second half. That's the micro Vp view, if you like, in terms of the markets. To take a macro view, my next slide talks to the use or utilizes experienced autumn construction forecasts, which may even now be already out of date, given the pace with which markets are moving. The point I want to make here is that in these four quadrants, you've got the lion's share of what we do in terms of supporting the overall Construction and Infrastructure sector. The top left-hand quadrant, the top right-hand quadrant, and the bottom right-hand quadrant are all, in our view, positive for Vp. All those markets either fell a little or fell a lot at the start of the pandemic, they recovered very quickly. As you'll see, infrastructure is well ahead of pre-pandemic levels. Housing is approaching pre-pandemic levels, and take repair and maintenance activity is also in excess of pre-pandemic levels. There's been a full recovery in those markets, in our view to date. Looking further out and utilizing the forecasts, these graphs have flattened off. I put the same graphs in the prelims six months ago, using the spring forecast for 2022. There was a bit more optimism in the air at that stage. That's flattened out, but we don't mind flat. Flat profile is something that we can manage against. And certainly we believe the infrastructure and the repair and maintenance forecast, I think the housing forecast probably would, if it was struck today, would be flatter, if not slightly declining. Nevertheless, we're positive about those three elements of our market exposure. The fourth slide really just illustrates the gap in construction that new non-residential, which is items like new schools, new hospitals, commercial buildings, office block, office buildings, that really fell away post-Brexit. It then fell away even further during the pandemic. There was little or no recovery as we came out of pandemic, and the forecasts are still relatively modest in their recovery going forward. I think that's a latent opportunity for us from an optimistic point of view, whenever that market changes. More currently it's a subdued market, it's a flat market. It's a market that we can and will participate in going forward. Our focus is probably looking at area, other areas of the market at the moment where there is potential for at least some growth. Just quickly running through the business performance slides. At a group level, good revenue growth at 6%. Operating profits were also up 6%. Margins are maintained half year on half year. That's against an inflationary backdrop in terms of our costs, and it perhaps illustrates the way in which we manage the business. We manage it efficiently, and also that we've been able to, in terms of costs, pass on some of the inflationary costs that we've incurred onto our customer base through increased higher rates. There are two divisions in the group, the UK division and International. The U.K. is much larger. You'll see here that our growth in the U.K. was slightly less than the average, so 4% at revenue line and 3% in EBITDA. Nevertheless, quality of the profits in terms of margins have been maintained, and we have delivered profit growth, which we're very pleased with. I talked to the markets, and this is what's influenced the U.K. in particular with AMP 7 and transmission work, a positive for our businesses, but a weaker performance in HS2, and a slightly more subdued performance than we might have expected on rail. In construction, RMI continues to be a positive, and we've most recently seen a nice pickup in terms of civil engineering activity. New Build, as my previous slide illustrate, is still relatively subdued. House Building has been stable throughout the period. There are clearly some challenges to come, but we are generally more of the view that the decline, potential decline in house building is going to be gradual and over a period of time, rather than the short, sharp shock that we experienced in the global downturn 10 years ago. Overall, margins maintained in the group, but in a period of lower growth. International, which is much smaller, we're very pleased to see an increase of 28% in their revenue levels, which translated into more than doubling of profits. The margins for international are still below the group average. We're looking for further improvement to come there, and we're confident that will happen. We've seen a good recovery in our international markets. In the case of our businesses in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, that's primarily due to a delayed lockdown compared with, say, UK and Europe, where activity has picked up a little bit later, and particularly in the first half of our financial year. The other side is what I mentioned earlier about a positive energy market, including a pickup in oil and gas. A pleasing half year for international. In terms of investment, we've spent broadly the same, marginal increase in new CapEx this year. We spent GBP 34 million versus GBP 32 million last. A lot of that investment has been in sub-substitutional products which are replacing petrol and diesel driven equipment and being replaced by battery and solar powered solutions, and we've had a lot of success in delivering that to our customers. We did order quite extensively at the start of the calendar year in anticipation of some growth and also anticipation that there were gonna be lead time challenges all the way through 2022. Well, certainly the lead time challenges have continued. However, our view, and I think the market's view of growth, has been more dampened. As a result, we haven't necessarily gone ahead with all the capital orders that we made. Those orders have effectively gone back into the market, and this has happened with, I think, pretty well across the board in terms of the sector. That's given the manufacturers a bit of an ease in terms of supply chain lead times. Added to which we've seen some improvement with a long way to go, in the fact that the manufacturers are now getting some of their components more quickly than they were six to nine months ago. We've managed that well. I think we'll continue to manage CapEx tightly over the next six to nine months, dependent on how we see markets develop over that time. One of the responses to a flattened rather than a rapidly growing market has been for us to look at the fleet that we already hold and to identify some areas where we can reduce investment in underperforming assets. In the first half, you can see that we've got considerably more disposal proceeds in the period. As you'll have seen from Allison's slides, they've been delivered at good margins and an overall good contribution to the group. In net CapEx terms, the fleet is actually book value, Sorry, the fleet investment that we've made in net terms is 8% down on the prior period. That doesn't mean that we're our fleet's getting older. As Allison's slides show, the net book value of the group's fleet has actually increased in the period, and we still have a very young, fit for purpose fleet across the whole of Vp. The last slide is just in terms of outlook for the group going forward. We are undoubtedly, in our view, in a lower growth environment, and therefore, accordingly, we've gone back to basics in terms of running the business. We're managing costs efficiently. We're trying to mitigate the impact of supply chain inflation by passing on those where we can to our customers through increased higher rates. We're also imposing higher rates, a higher hurdle rate for investment, to reflect the cost of money, but as we see it going forward. It's, they're our main responses to that environment. In the U.K., I think infrastructure strength will still be good for us as a group. We do see stability stroke modest decline in House Building, and I think we're happy that we can continue to flourish with that type of market backdrop, but we do see a Flat Construction sector, and we're managing the business accordingly to that expectation. International markets, we expect to improve further, and we look forward to that happening. We are driving our own sustainability strategy, and we are supporting customer aspirations as we work closely with our supply chain and our customers to come up with ever more innovative solutions to help with the sustainability challenge that we all have. It's been another strong period of investment in technology, both in terms of enhancing the customer experience, but also in terms of our managing our business operationally more efficiently. We've continued to invest in our people, our learning and development programs across the group of moving ahead nicely. We've taken on another 40-plus apprentices this autumn, and our graduate program has again got a full intake in the current year. Trading continues to be in line with board's expectations to date. We've got resilience and proven business model operating in diversified markets. I think with that, we're confident that continuing to deliver the outstanding long-term return to shareholders that we've generally provided in the past. That's the end of Allison and my presentation, and we look forward to see if we can answer some of the questions that have come up. That's great. Neil, Allison, thank you very much indeed for updating investors this morning. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while Neil and Allison take a couple of moments to review your questions that you've submitted already, I'd just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the Q&A and the slides will be available via your investing company dashboard. Neil, Allison, you can see you've received a number of questions from investors throughout today's presentation. If I could just ask you to open up that Q&A tab. Thank you to all the investors for your questions this morning. Neil, if I may just hand back to you to read out those questions and where appropriate to give a response, and I'll pick up from you at the end. Okay. You want me to read them? Yeah. By I'm sure you're capable, Allison. Well, I'll read them, and you can answer them. I I think that's what we did last time. That's the normal 50/50 we apply. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Right. Ready? Given two robust results, why do you think the share price isn't better reflecting the opportunity here? Yeah. I mean, it's a good question. It's a good observation. I think, in truth, we are one of many stocks in the market at the moment that are dragged, in my view, dragged down by just a general negative sentiment, in markets at the moment, both in the UK and elsewhere. If we look at our peers, I don't think that we've fared any worse or particularly any better than any of the others. Obviously we're confident that we're continuing to produce excellent results. We've certainly produced similar results when the share price has been a lot higher than it is today. I think having been through around the city this week, there is still a certain significant level of caution about guessing how quickly things will improve. Much as we'd like to see the shares reflect the performance and strength of the Group, sometimes we just have to be patient, but we're doing the best we can. Yeah. Okay. The next question then is, how are you looking to build out your International division? Would you consider acquisitions to expand outside the U.K.? Yeah. We've always felt that having activity outside of the U.K was part and parcel of the breadth of opportunity and risk mitigation for us as a strong player in the U.K. We were very beholden to the U.K market. We have invested, we've got two international businesses, which is Airpac, which is based in the U.K but has operations in Perth and in Singapore. We have TR, which is based in Melbourne, in Australia, but with activities in New Zealand, Malaysia, and Singapore as well. Certainly that is an area of the world where we would like to put more investment, and to a degree, that's been held back over the last two to three years as we've battled particularly with the pandemic. I hope that that will be an area where we will see some further investment in due course. The other element of international is that two of our UK-based businesses, which is TPA and Groundforce, we set up a European activity there some years ago, and that those businesses are now starting to mature relatively quickly in good markets, and we're very pleased with their development as well. Those, certainly for now, those businesses report, are reported in the UK divisions results. What I can tell you is that overall, if you take the International division plus the European activities, we've currently got about 17% of Group revenues coming ex the UK. I think probably I'd prefer that to be nearer sort of 20% plus. We're not looking to. With the UK will continue to be our core market. Okay. Thank you. The next question, at the beginning references the my retirement, which was announced at the same time as the interim results, and it makes a nice comment. Thank you very much for that. The question goes on to say: What's the planned investment moving forward into New Equipment, et cetera, and where are you looking to invest? Yeah. I think I tried to answer the current or to talk to the current scenario for capital. Maybe on the question. Current scenario of capital investment. Next year we're guiding analysts towards a similar level to this current year, which is a similar level to last year, which is enough to keep our fleet certainly refreshed. The other dynamic is that we don't always reinvest in the same areas, so we're obviously continuing to optimize as we see it, where we should have the investment. I think that we will we'll be looking to invest, as we always do, in New Equipment as the growth opportunities present themselves. Obviously, if the markets improve, at a greater rate than we are all currently expecting, then I would expect New Equipment investment to accelerate in the same way. In terms of where we're looking to invest, again, as ever, we will invest where the opportunity lies. Whether geographically UK, Europe or international, or within the subsets of the divisions within those categories, we will go where the activity lies. Okay. Thank you. Next question. I'll try not to click too quick. Do you see the House Building sector providing the business with good revenue opportunities? I think the House Building sector. It's general consensus that it's going to go through a more difficult phase, certainly in the short term. For us, as a business, we don't need it to be dramatically improving. We, as I said in the presentation, we can cope with flat, and we can even cope with an extended decline. The equipment that we provide to the Housing sector, particularly our UK Forks business, it's a workhorse, if you like, for every house building site. To a degree, the customer needs the product, whether they're building, 75% of the number of homes on the site or 50% of the number of homes on the site, they still need the product on there. I think that I'm... We're as a business, we're still confident that House Building is a good place for us to be. Okay. Thank you. The next question is, please could you discuss the effects of inflationary pressures on rental fleet renewal? Yeah. It's a very good. Well, it's not necessarily a good topic. It's a very good observation. I think that the inflationary pressures on capital equipment have probably been higher than in any other area of our group activity. As I've said in a few of these meetings this week, one of the great things about rental is that obviously we don't like our cost input costs to go up, but we have, because we're buying that product to rent out for the use, its useful economic life to us, which might be five, six, seven, eight years, we have the ability to claw that inflationary increase back over that time period in a way that would be very difficult to do if we were just buying the product and then having to sell it straight on. I think there's an inbuilt dampening effect of the sort of extensive inflation that we've seen this year. A lot of the products that we operate in the environmental side, we say that over 60% of our fleet is zero emission at a point of use. That means that's product that doesn't have an engine that's not producing CO2 emission. A lot of those products don't have many moving parts at all. That means that they last a long time, which means that, again, we can, we're not having to rapidly replace a cheaper product with a much more expensive product. We can spread that cost of that over a much longer period. Inflation isn't stopping us investing. We can't... We will continue to work with the products that our customers require and the services they require, and obviously, we've got to pass on some of those costs if the customer still requires the product. The next question is, how do you see the competitive environment evolving in the current outlook? I think it's difficult to quite work out what will happen from a competition point of view because the supply chain extended lead times, as I described earlier, will, I think, subdue all our enthusiasm if we spot an area that we would like to disproportionately invest in or maybe be tempted to do that at a price. I think that the competitive environment at the moment is relatively stable and probably reflects the market outlook for the time being. I think when competition's likely to become more visible again will probably coincide as and when some or all of the markets which we operate in start to pick up in terms of prospective activity. It's always competitive, the Rental sector. We're very used to that. I suppose my answer to the question is that I don't see any particular reason for it to change from the current levels at this stage. Not consolidation or anything like that? Yeah, I mean, in terms of consolidation, yeah, I... Who knows? I mean, the, it's not something that I particularly like to speculate on. I'm sure there will be people planning to do things, but that's fine. No particular comment on that. Yeah. All right. Okay. Sorry, went too far then. Could you say a bit more about the reasons for announcing the formal sales process and then terminating it? Was it just a matter of price? Do you want me to answer that, or do you want to do it? Well, you can chip in on things. I'll certainly, yeah. ... on things that. The reasons for announcing it. We announced the formal sales process in April of this year. The reason we did that was we were approached by a major shareholder who happens to be a trust with independent professional trustees. They were looking at their portfolio, and they asked us if we would view to see whether there was an opportunity to sell those. As a board, we obviously had to consider this request and took some advice on that. We were also advised that we couldn't just sell that particular like 50% of the shares 'cause it was a major shareholder without being detrimental to the others. It had to be the 100% of shares that were put up for sale. Before we announced the process, we did, as I mentioned in the presentation, some due diligence on commercial and financial things, which came through well. We didn't have any red flag issues, but there were some things that we could look at in there. The next thing we had to decide was whether we would do a public or a private process. If you follow the private process, according to the rules, you can only approach six likely bidders at one time. Because we have a major shareholder, it was felt that we wouldn't actually know who was really the interested parties, and we wouldn't necessarily get best value on that. We decided to do a public process, which indeed opened up quite a lot, a broad range of interest once we got to that process. As I mentioned, there was a lot of interest. There was interest from trade, from private equity, from the U.K., from Europe, from overseas. There was a lot of interest generated. When we made the decision to proceed, things had started to dim a little bit. The main thing that had happened was Russia had invaded Ukraine. We were aware of that when we made the decision. A lot of the things that subsequently happened hadn't happened at that time. The political instability, the rising inflation hadn't happened. We made a decision to proceed with it. As I mentioned, we had lots of interest from bidders. As time went on, the bidders did start to fall out because I think interest rates and things started to get a little bit more difficult. We got through, and we got to the second stages with bidders, but we weren't able to... They weren't giving an offer that we would feel that we could recommend to shareholders. Once we decided that, which was in August, we announced that the process was completed. We had assurances from the major shareholder, from the trustees, that it wasn't their intention to pursue this path again in the foreseeable future. Indeed, I should have mentioned that they weren't unhappy investors when they decided to ask us to make this review. It was just part of their due process of making sure that they had the right balance of investments in their portfolio. Throughout it, we maintained business as usual. We aim to do that, and we think we did a decent job of that. Neil and I did most of the work, so we were able to shield the business from most of the disruption. I think the fact that we can point to robust results in the first six months of the year, shows that we were largely successful in avoiding any distractions, from the process as well. There might be one or two other points. No, I think you've said it. I think that's part fine. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Next. Go. I think you need to go up. This one. No, maybe that's it. Okay. Okay. question then, "If HS2 was to be abandoned north of Birmingham, how big an impact would it have on your growth prospects? Okay. The HS2 work that we had during the six months we just reported on was fairly minimal. We've delivered these results without that opportunity. Yes, it would be an element of growth for certain of our businesses that would be disappointing not to participate in, but it wouldn't really be a big problem. I think that it's just something that we will cope with in the normal way as happens. At the moment, as I say, we're hopeful that it will happen. If it doesn't happen, we'll just move elsewhere. That's great. Neil, Allison Bainbridge, thank you very much indeed. You've taken all the questions that have been submitted from investors. Thank you once again to everybody for their engagement this morning. Neil, Allison, I know investor feedback is always important to you guys, and I'll shortly redirect everybody on the call to give you their feedback. But I wonder, before doing so, if I may, Neil, just hand back to you just for a few closing comments to wrap up with, after which, of course, I'll redirect investors on the call to give you their feedback. Okay. Thank you, Mark. Yes, I think my main comment is that these are a good, resilient set of numbers that we've produced in quite challenging times against a backdrop of high inflation and the potential distraction, but hopefully Allison's answered that of an FSP. Despite 2023 creating some uncertainties for all of us, we're still feel positive that we can enjoy that opportunity. One of the Q&As mentioned Allison's retirement from the business. I will take the opportunity again to thank Allison on behalf of both myself, our colleagues, shareholders alike for her tremendous support over the last 12-- nearly 12 years. While we look forward to Anna Bielby, who's Allison's replacement, starting with us in the new year, we are sorry to see Allison go. I would just endorse the positive comment that one of the Q&A sent. That's us. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. That's great. Neil, Allison, thank you very much indeed for updating investors this morning. Ladies and gentlemen, could I please ask you not to close this session as we'll now automatically redirect you for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the company can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team at Vp plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session, so good morning to you all.