Okay, morning, everybody. For the benefit of the tape, I'm James Wroath, I'm CEO of Wincanton, but I think I've met pretty well everybody in this room before. Thanks for being here today for the presentation of our half- year results for the period ending 30 of September 2022. After a period of calls during the pandemic, we thought it was important to get together face- to- face this time and have a little bit more time for informal discussion over a coffee or two. Actually, following feedback from the Capital Markets Day, we've also invited some of our wider management team along for an informal opportunity to get to know our team better. From left to right, we have Carl Meuwissen, who runs our public and industrial sector, Paul Durkin, who is our Chief Customer and Innovation Officer, Tom Hinton, who you'll hear from in a moment, Ian Keilty, our COO, and Carl Moore, who runs our eFulfilment business. Please take the opportunity to have a chat with them afterwards if you can. I would especially like to welcome Tom, our new CFO, Tom Hinton, to his first Wincanton results presentation. We're delighted that he's joined the team, and everyone's been really impressed at how quickly he settled in and understood both the business and our strategic direction. Here we have the disclosure statement, which I'm sure everybody in the room is familiar with. In a moment, I'm gonna take you through an executive summary covering the main themes of Wincanton's performance, so far for this half- year. I'm then gonna hand over to Tom to talk us through the details of our financial performance, particularly including each sector performance and how we're managing some of the well-publicized challenges in the U.K. economy. I'm then gonna return to give an update on progress with delivery of some of the key elements of our strategy, particularly focusing on technology development, business growth, and ESG. Then finally, we'll conduct a question and answer session. The overall summary for today is that the group is delivering revenue and profit growth, due to our diversified portfolio, particularly in public sector operations. At the same time, we're continuing to deliver a strategy that's transforming Wincanton into a business that creates more sustainable supply chain value for its customers. Financial performance in the first half of this year has been robust, with revenue growth across all four sectors. Profit was also up year-over-year, although by a lower percentage, and Tom will explain some of the reasons for this more fully shortly. Essentially, growth in EBITDA is partially offset because we're choosing to invest in assets to generate future business growth. Of course, on top of that, you'll know interest charges across the economy are higher at this present time. Our balance sheet remains strong, and we're pleased to confirm an increased interim dividend. The underlying strength of the group underpins our strategic process. We're focused on growth in specific markets where we think we can add the most value, and on developing technology-enabled products that ensure we will be successful in doing so. As everyone will recognize, the present macroeconomic environment in the U.K. is challenging, and so we are mindful of headwinds. We continue to prove our capacity to manage the impact of inflation. However, along with many other companies, we'd like to see a more stable and lower general situation. We do have closed book retail operations, such as our two-person home delivery network and shared user high volume eFulfillment, where revenues are important to the group's profitability. Although the open book nature of the majority of our business provides substantial protection against customer volume risk. We do believe in the resilience of our model, underpinned by the long-term nature of our customer relationships, and further, that a recessionary environment can actually lead to a higher propensity for companies to outsource. I'm now gonna hand over to Tom to take us through a more detailed financial review addressing these themes. Tom. Thank you much, James. Firstly, I'm delighted to join Wincanton. It's a business I joined for quality of the customers, the quality of the people, and the growth opportunities, and I'm very pleased to say that's proved exactly the case for the first three months that I've been here. As James said, I'll now walk through the financial performance for the first half of FY23. I'll outline some of the headwinds we face in the business and how we are tackling them. Then I'll finish on the balance sheet, the dividend, and the outlook for the full year. Let me start with the financial highlights of the first half. The diversified portfolio and the mix of foundation and growth sectors has enabled the business to deliver sustained year-on-year top line growth. H1 for FY23 has increased by 9.2%. Bottom line PBT has increased by 2.6% as we continue to build earnings in this challenging external environment. This sustained growth is a consequence of our diversified portfolio. Specifically, this continued growth in public and industrial sector, the consistent performance in our foundation sectors of grocery consumer and general merchandise. eFulfillment customer growth mitigating the volume headwinds that we're seeing in transport networks. Wincanton is a highly cash generative business with tight working capital management and minimal CapEx. I'm pleased to report that the free cash flow sustained the FY22 levels at around GBP 18 million. Net cashflow is much higher than H1 FY22, as FY22 included the. acquisition. Now a feature of Wincanton is the strength of the balance sheet. We have a GBP 175 million RCF facility, and the net debt position at the end of the half year was only GBP 2.2 million of net debt. As I mentioned, we are a cash generative business, and I'm pleased to declare a dividend of 4.4 pence, which is a 10% growth on H1 FY22. Returning to the top of the slide here, revenue grew by a strong 9.2% year-on-year. Let me break down where that comes from in our sectors. Starting on the left-hand side of the slide, which is e-fulfillment, our stated growth sector. Much of the revenue growth is driven by our Cygnia acquisition, which delivered 16 million of the 20 million incremental revenue in the period. We've seen growth in that high volume e-fulfillment sector, particularly from the onboarding of The White Company. Our Rockingham facility is increasing its utilization rate, experiencing almost 50% growth in the half year with delivering incremental revenues of GBP 3 million. Now this sector is experiencing challenges in the two-person home delivery space, and we're watching volumes closely over the winter period, managing our closed book contracts and our subcontractor delivery workforce accordingly. Secondly, public and industrial, which is our second growth sector. A 5.2% revenue growth year-on-year with some good underlying profit trends. Our focus on the public sector continues to bear fruit, where margins are also favorable. Revenue from public sector contracts increased by over 30% between periods. While fuel transport volumes in this sector have held up in the period, we have experienced a reduction in construction volumes and revenue and we anticipate that to flow into the second half of the year. Thirdly, our foundation sectors of grocery and consumer and general merchandise. Core volumes have been consistent in this market, with revenue increasing from our Asda primary transport win from last year, plus inflation in the grocery consumer sector. Within general merchandise, much of that revenue growth is due to new customers joining Wincanton. Nearly 80% of the 14.6% you can see there is from new customers of MGA Entertainment and Primark, both of which started in the second half of last financial year. This revenue growth, this performance, has been replicated in our underlying trading results. Underlying EBITDA has grown by 13%, with that growth coming from across the sectors and particularly within public and industrial. EBITDA margins then being sustained year-on-year. However, depreciation has increased as a consequence of our recent investments in growth. The 20% depreciation growth comes primarily from the right-of-use assets for sites such as Rockingham, Harlow and Cygnia, alongside investment in automation in those locations as well. These facilities are enabling Wincanton to deliver an enhanced profit growth and closed book profits in FY 2024 and beyond. Similarly, the external environment that James mentioned and the cost of using our RCF within the month has increased substantially. We have got limited external debt, though we do use the RCF within the month. It's drawn by GBP 52 million on average during the period. The average interest rates on our RCF have gone from 1.6% in H1 FY22 up to 3.5% in H1 FY23, pushing that total interest cost up from GBP 2.5 million to GBP 4.2 million you can see here. We have got a very strong balance sheet, and I'll return to that a bit later in the presentation. Finally, these investments and interest increases hold back bottom line profit growth, with EBITDA growth at 13% falling to PBT growth at 2.6%. We are pleased with this profit increase in the face of the challenging external environment as testament to our twin strategy of investing in growth markets while also maintaining our diversified customer base. Now that challenging external environment we see manifesting itself in three specific headwinds for Wincanton. Let me take a bit of time to explain those three headwinds and then how we're mitigating them. Those three challenges are the labour market. Across the UK in 2022, the labour market has been challenging and pay negotiations have been front of mind. Wincanton navigated these negotiations well. We for both our colleagues and our customers, and I'll explore that in a second. The second one is inflation across multiple cost lines in the business, linked to both these labour market negotiations and the wider inflationary environment that we're all experiencing. Thirdly, consumer spending and changing purchasing behaviors. Let me take each of them in turn and explain how Wincanton is tackling these headwinds. Let's start with the labour market challenge. As both unionized labour and record low unemployment create a challenging environment for a people-intensive business like Wincanton. Wincanton's got 20,000 colleagues split across 170 locations with 139 customers. Of those 20,000 colleagues, about 56% of them, note the different numbers this one here, but 56% of them are in 5 recognized unions. That cost base, that labor cost base, is 58% of our total costs. This is all driven by labor. Now we note, importantly, we negotiate with all 5 unions, and we achieve optimal results for both our colleagues and our customers. We operate open book contracts, and most labor costs are passed through to our customers. In this financial year, 81% of our wage negotiations have been successfully completed with pay rises secured. Of the remaining 19%, 13% are open book in nature, so the customer bears the cost of labor rate increases. The remaining 6% are our closed book contracts. The 6% are being negotiated, and we work with all our colleagues to give a fair cost of living increase. Now you'll see from the next slide, which is quite a dense slide, how these increases are manifesting themselves in our cost base, and how we are contractually mitigating them to avoid a bottom-line impact. Bear with me as I explain this a bit. As we explained in the full-year result, 72% of the contracts by revenue are open book in nature, so the top left-hand graph here. In an open-book contract, the customer pays the costs, and Wincanton charges a management fee, often with a gain share for cost reduction performance. This top graph illustrates the cost pressures within the open book contract. 67% are people costs, with the blunt average cost per employee increasing by 6% in H1 FY22 versus H1 FY23. This is the labor cost divided by number of employees, which is a blunt measure, but 'cause there will be some mix effect in there, but I believe it's a good proxy for our cost pressures. Then 8% of our cost base, which is the blue circle above it here, is subcontractors. The market has actually loosened year-over-year, reflecting the resolution in driver availability that hampered H1 FY22. These costs have actually fallen year-over-year by 7% as driver supply has increased. Vehicle costs have increased mainly due to fuel costs. Property and utility increases reflect the building, yard, and utility costs as a result of customers investing in their facilities, which drives 94% of that increase, actually. The weighted average of these costs is around 8%. However, as I said before, these are open-book contracts, so these costs are passed directly on to our customers, so there's no bottom line impact. We come now to the graph below it. These are our closed-book contracts, which are 28% of our revenue. As you can see, there are fewer people costs as a percent of the cost base. However, people costs do constitute 39% of the cost base, and we've seen that cost per employee increase by 17%, mainly due to the inflationary cost increases from the well-documented driver challenge from last year. Subcontractors, vehicle costs, property and utility costs are behaving very similar to the open book contract. The net result is that the average costs for the closed book contracts have increased by around 12%. So far, if you look at all our exceptional and contractual rate increases we've delivered in the last financial year, we've delivered an 8% increase in the closed book contractual revenue. There is therefore a headwind in the closed book, representing that time lag of passing these inflationary pressures onto our customers. We work tirelessly as a business to mitigate this closed book inflationary headwind, utilizing the mechanisms outlined on the right-hand side of the slide. Of particular note are the rate reviews, both contractual and exceptional, that allow us to pass on RPI and CPI costs to our customers. Of course, it's always a negotiation, and strong customer relationships, excellent service, and ongoing continuous improvements through fleets, processes, and people are essential for that. Then the final headwind that's impacting nearly all businesses announcing their full year and their half- year results is that of changing consumer spending habits. As James said at the very beginning, we've got a resilient business model and a diversified customer base, equipping us well for this change in consumer behaviors. We start from the left-hand side, and we look at our customer base. 9% of our revenue comes from our non-consumer spending. This is HMRC, it's Defra, it's BAE, EDF. There's food and drink. Our grocery consumer sector makes up 38% of revenue, and then fuel delivery makes up 3% of revenue, which has been a consistent performer half year on half year. These three consumer resilient sectors make up 50% of revenue. Moving to slightly more consumer exposed sectors, trade and DIY contributes a further 32% of revenue. Finally, the remaining 18% of revenue phases into the markets that have greater discretionary spend. Now, you can argue over exactly which order these last three go in, but furniture, house building, and fashion are certainly more exposed to the cost of living crisis than fuel, food and drink, and the non-consumer markets. This residual exposure is particularly acute in our shared transport networks, a sector that we are tightly managing in order to optimize its commercial performance. Overall, Wincanton's diversified portfolio gives us real stability as we enter into this consumer spending downturn with over 80% of our revenue from more resilient sectors. This resilience is also being seen in our cash flows and our balance sheet. Let's start with a strong increase in underlying EBITDA here, driven by revenue increases, investment in new facilities, and onboarding new customers. If you flow down the cash flow statement, our working capital outflow in the period is only GBP 1.9 million, reflecting how critical we are to our customers, our strong working capital management, and consistent payment terms. The market is experiencing customers paying later. However, this is not typically the case for us. Our excellent cash collection is due to the criticality of our service to our blue-chip customers who pay on time every month. Two large increases in cash outflow in the year have been leases and in CapEx. The leases reflect that investment in Rockingham, Harlow, and Cygnia, and the CapEx is the same as a result of our strategy to really invest in automation, process improvement, and IT. This CapEx reflects spend equipping Harlow, Rockingham, and Cygnia. We've made GBP 10 million of pension contributions in the period and paid the FY22 dividend of GBP 9.9 million. The net result is a change in net debt of GBP 6 million in the period, leaving closing net debt at GBP 2.2 million. One of the strengths of Wincanton is our balance sheet, and this is particularly evident in this cash flow statement, where working capital is well managed, CapEx is light, and net debt is held at a minimum. We have the capacity to invest further in growth, and we will look to drive that in FY24 and beyond, pushing up both EBITDA and earnings. An area of the balance sheet that always receives considerable attention is the final salary pension scheme. The IAS 19 pension surplus continues to increase further, is now GBP 124.5 million, reflecting the contributions made in the year. The technical deficit is GBP 35 million, and we're looking to move the fund into a self-sufficient state in the medium term. The next triennial valuation will be completed after the financial year-end, where we'll agree a revised contribution plan with the trustees of the pension scheme. Importantly, this is a very de-risked pension scheme with the LDI portfolio having minimal leverage within it. It's that leverage within LDI that experienced the exposure with the mini budget when long-term gilt rates rocketed overnight. We did not have any triggering events in our portfolio, and long-term 20-year gilt rates would have to hit 11% before any rebalancing of the asset base would be required to provide additional collateral to the LDI portfolio. I think this is an excellent position for the fund to be in. The board approved an interim dividend of GBP 0.044, which we paid on the thirteenth of December. Wincanton operates a growing dividend policy, and as we saw from the previous slides, this is well-covered by operating cash flow and balance sheet capacity. Finally, let me give you some guidance for FY23. To repeat again, we expect to maintain our growth in the year, a result of our diversified customer base and managing the external headwinds we outlined earlier. Our expectation is growth of mid-single digits for revenue. We expect underlying profit before tax to be in line with market expectations, which are sustained profit growth in absolute terms. We are cognizant of the external environment, and we'll be mitigating the three headwinds of labor challenges, cost inflation, and consumer behavioral shifts through the four mechanisms here. Firstly, protection of our open book contracts and closed book contractual price negotiations. Secondly, our diversified broad customer base covering multiple resilient sectors. Thirdly, is the management focus on operational efficiencies and costs, delivering benefits both for us and for our customers. fourthly, momentum in our pipeline, which James will outline in the next slides. The pipeline is particularly strong in the public sector and e-fulfillment customers, which deliver good margins and align with our communicated growth strategy. James will want to discuss this pipeline, and I'll now hand over to him to discuss our strategy of growth and investment. Thanks, Tom. As he says, I'd now like to go through a strategic update for the group. Tom covered in some detail how we're succeeding in a challenging macroeconomic climate, but I think it's also important to highlight how far the group has come in terms of our strategic realignment. As we discussed, and many of you were there at the Capital Markets Day, we've refocused our group on four particular sectors, clearly identifying both our critical foundation markets, as well as those we've identified for strategic growth. We continue to invest in our e-commerce capabilities, broadening our customer base into smaller retailers through new facilities at The Webb and through our acquisition of Cygnia Logistics. We've also continued the development of our public sector and major infrastructure business and diversified our portfolio, giving us further protection against consumer spending and economic headwinds. At the same time, the world of logistics needs more investment in technology to be more productive and to decrease the reliance on an increasingly stretched labor pool. We're ensuring that Wincanton is taking a leading role in third party logistics innovation, and in doing so, we can add more value to our customers and therefore higher margins for the group. Our clear strategic direction is underpinned by a strong group culture, where we know that value can be driven by the group operating holistically rather than as individual business units. This applies to things such as innovation, but also to people leadership and development, to safety, and to transport strategy, where we can ensure that learning across multiple diverse supply chains creates synergistic value. This morning, I'm gonna focus on three areas of our strategy, technology development, the growth pipeline that Tom has referred to, and ESG. Firstly, when it comes to technology, the group's long-term future really does depend on us being at the forefront of innovation, optimizing the use of assets and finding new, more productive solutions for supply chains. When it comes to technology development, we very much see this progress as a parallel process. We need to be making things happen. We need to be developing, we need to be testing, and we need to be learning. Sometimes we need to be failing to deliver immediate value to our customers. We also need a clear long-term business plan. Through the Capital Markets Day, you'll have seen that Wincanton is leading the way in implementing new technology advancements that deliver value both to our customers and to the group. I've included a selection of examples on this slide, such as the Webb automation and the autonomous mobile robots or AMRs that we use at Cygnia. It's true to say that every day we're making new progress across both our foundation and our strategic growth markets. It's also not just in warehouse where technology is being developed. We need to lead the market in providing data for customers that allow them to make optimized transport decisions as well, not leaving us just deploying assets in a traditional haulage model. It's also important to have a clear strategic plan, particularly for robotics, where the technology can be quickly deployed and can make an immediate impact. As an example of this, we now estimate that new customers can be onboarded on the Cygnia AMR solution in approximately six weeks now that it's fully operational, and that's the operation we showed at the Capital Markets Day. We're currently running through a detailed data exercise to identify what our business will look like in the future. Today, we very much talk about an asset triangle, where we provide labor, transport, and warehouses to customers. Tomorrow, this will become more of a square 'cause we'll have to add robotic technology to the other three assets. We're analyzing the tasks that people carry out across all of our warehouses in our network. We're matching them against the technology that is both available and the sort of technology that innovation programs like our W² Labs program can clearly foresee. We can then determine a realistic implementation timeline and focus on sequencing the largest opportunities first. Then finally, and probably the thing that people in this room are most interested in, we can devise the financial plan. There's a key strategic challenge in us doing that because in order to assess the financial value that technology can bring the group, it depends very much on how we commercially structure this with our customers, and that within the context of the market's traditional charging mechanisms that you've just heard Tom speak about in some detail. There are several ways this might happen, which I will explain on the next slide. As you'll know, and again, as Tom explained, the industry's charging models tend to be on an either open or closed book basis. Although it is also true to say that sometimes it can be a combination of these two. If we deliver robotics or automation on a traditional open book basis, the commercial outcome is clear. The customer will pay for the investment and accrue the subsequent productivity benefits. Although in this scenario, Wincanton does not gain directly financially, this approach does allow us to take a relatively low-risk approach to research and development, and it allows us to take that learning and use it elsewhere within our business. Also, important to say that bringing innovation and continuous improvement to our largest customers is a crucial part of ensuring that we maintain the foundation business that is critical to our financial stability and our reputation in the market as a major logistics services provider. The closed book pricing mechanism is also pretty well commercially clear. Here, Wincanton make the investment and take the risk, but of course, also therefore access the benefit from that investment, either through higher margins or via a pricing advantage that helps us to deliver faster growth, or in reality, probably through a combination of both. The difficulty, though, of only following these two approaches is that the area that delivers the most financial benefit to Wincanton is, as Tom has explained, the smallest part of our business, and therefore in theory, opportunity is limited. However, the reality is that many of our open book customers do not actually want to invest large amounts of capital in their supply chains. There's an opportunity for a third type of charging model. In this model, Wincanton can invest to provide technologies to those contracts, but on a closed book basis. This approach can deliver opportunity to increase margins in the largest proportion of our business through providing customers with immediate access to productivity enhancements, but while retaining intellectual property and developing products that drive the value of our company. All three of these options have their merits for customers and our business, and all three will be deployed. However, each has a very different financial impact for Wincanton. The proportion of value that's gonna be delivered to the group from this technology development, therefore depends on the split of each charging mechanism. We're working on how we can project this to give future transparency of our ambitions. As Tom said, I'd also now like to talk a little bit about our growth and our growth pipeline. We've got a very well-defined business development approach to growth, and the data that you see on this slide actually comes from the Salesforce system that manages it for us. We aim to win in all four of our sectors, and we've got more than GBP 800 million of potential annualized revenue in our pipeline at various stages. The majority is in early-stage proposal, validation, and creation. Once down-selected by the customer, usually with one or two other providers, we enter the closing negotiation stage before hopefully moving to exclusive contract negotiations. Finally, we declare our victories, aiming to win somewhere between GBP 100 million and GBP 200 million of new annualized revenue each year. This year, we're on track to deliver against this target, as illustrated by the logos on this slide. It's particularly pleasing to see so many of these names associated with our strategic growth market of e-fulfillment. On this slide, we also illustrate the increasing number of industry awards we are winning, especially in technology and robotics-related fields. We are growing our reputation as well as our business. Finally, in terms of strategic development, ESG. We remain committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2040, and our Wincanton Woodland Offset Program continues, and we've added further initiatives on things such as zero-emission road freight and looking at solar panels for Wincanton-owned warehouses. Social value is also an increasingly vital part of our business. We need to be seen holistically as an attractive employer everywhere we're located, and being an active member of local communities is central to this. Our ambitions in the public sector also make social value a prerequisite because of the scoring mechanism that they use in bids. We focused on our People Campus initiative at our full year results, which gives the business an innovative resourcing model and maximizes flexibility for our colleagues' working lives. We're also heavily involved in diversity and inclusion and in well-being cultural change. Finally, the outlook and summary from me. The group continues to execute our strategy and is committed to delivering sustainable supply chain value for our customers. We're excited about future growth opportunities and have a strong sales pipeline, particularly in those markets we've identified for strategic growth. Our focus on increasing technology within supply chains is absolutely paramount. We're investing in developing products that can drive step changes in efficiency. We're innovating to generate value for our customers, bring in new business, and deliver increased profits for Wincanton. We want to invest for our customers so they can concentrate on their core business, and we can maximize returns for the group. As I said at the outset, we believe in the resilience of our model, underpinned by the long-term nature of our customer relationships and our consequent ability to continue to deliver for shareholders. In the short term, we're absolutely mindful of macroeconomic headwinds and the impact that they can have on our performance. We maintain expectations for full-year PBT in line with consensus, resulting very much from the resilience of our business model. Thank you. We'll now move to a question and answer session. Steve. Morning. Just thinking about the use of the balance sheet in terms of the CapEx versus M&A. There's a lot of in-house development. Do you think there's capabilities that you will need to buy in to assist that journey? Then secondly, on that theme, where do you think the easiest short-term wins are that you can transfer the knowledge that you've got already into those sectors quite easily with the you know the biggest efficiencies? Secondly, with your conversations with customers who are obviously feeling the pain of an inflationary environment as well, are those conversations sort of linked to, you know, perhaps saving money both sides in terms of, you know, delivery, service reductions, as well as the, you know, the level of costs that you're both discussing? Tom can answer any questions on the technical piece on CapEx. I would say, you know, we're well-placed to invest for our customers for the right returns. As I said in the slide around closed book to open book, that's something that we're definitely interested in looking at. Your question about resources and expertise is a really good one. You know, we don't intend to start building factories and making robots. It is very much about a partnership approach. We are deliberately working with a number of partners. The partner that we're using in Cygnia is different from the partner that we're using to talk about a potential use of AMRs in the grocery sector because we want to, you know, spread our bets. Not every technology will work. Some technologies will work better than others. Talking to lots of people gives us the opportunity to find the best one but also to maximize the available resources. In doing so, though, the important piece is that we make sure we insert ourselves properly in the value chain, and that's particularly, without getting overly technical on it's particularly around software and middleware. Robots have to talk to warehouse management systems and there has to be a translator in between. It's important that Wincanton's fingerprints are all over the middleware because that's the technology that allows us to connect in. I think it's really important to also say that, you know, one of the many benefits of us buying Cygnia is it's created a lot more of an area where we can test things in a closed book environment. Though we can work with our big open book customers on developing technology and bringing in particularly robotic partners, that process is always elongated because you have to directly involve the customer and you have to work through it together. As I said on the slide, that'll be an important part of our development, but it does make things a little slower. The Cygnia AMRs that you will have seen, you know, in development at the Capital Markets Day are now fully operational, and essentially the team put that program in approximately nine months. As I said in the presentation, we can now onboard new customers onto that in six weeks. We're able to make our own investments in our own operations and deliver value immediately to customers. That's a real strength. Then your second question, interesting one. Carl, please feel free to chip in if you've heard differently, but I haven't heard anyone wanting to cut service at the moment. If anything, what they're looking for in peak is a more consistent adherence to SLAs. The challenge is always, you know, different customers, different SLAs, service level agreements in terms of, you know, how quickly will you get an order to your home once you've ordered it. The challenge in peak is maintaining those normal SLAs, you know, same in February as in December. I think there's more pressure now to deliver that coming into this peak because service performance is absolutely critical for customers. Again, that's where AMRs really help because we're able to process more orders a day, more flexibly by using robotic technology. Carl, I don't know if you've heard any customers particularly cutting- No, that's exactly the same. It's visibility as well. Customers are wanting to see that visibility of their order. Increasingly that's the service that we're providing for them as well. Did that answer everything, Steve? Andy? Hi. Good morning. Two questions. What in relation to the cash, you know, the balance sheet is strong, potentially can get even stronger if the pension review goes your way. Like, going forward over, say, the next two to three years, what are you looking to do with the cash that's been generated? The dividend's already generous. Is there an M&A still? Potentially, you know, are there other companies you're looking at or other things that you're looking at? The second question is in relation to managing the ongoing inflationary environment. Are there any kind of like low-hanging fruit in terms of costs that can still be taken out to protect the margin? Tom, do you want to take the bit about cash in general? I'll do the bit on M&A, and then Ian, perhaps you can do the bit on costs. Yeah. As you said, we're cash generative. If we expect a positive result in our pension triennial, we put less money in every year, we're gonna generate quite a lot more cash every year. What we'd like to do with that, which it's back to the slides that James was saying before, it's about how do we invest that in technology within the group that we can then apply to our customers. That, to us, is where we want to use the cash going forwards, and we'll be outlining that in the future as well. Yeah, the other opportunity, as we did with Cygnia is M&A. We're continually looking at the market and let James talk about a bit further. Yeah. I mean, strategically, M&A is not particularly easy in our space. As you know, we're focused on the UK and Ireland. There aren't any scale plays, so not that we would be interested in. We're more interested in sort of growing the value of what we do. We made an acquisition in e-fulfillment with Cygnia, which we're delighted with. We did that in order to build our reputation with the smaller retailers, but particularly the medium-sized retailers. We're very much known as a services business that services the really big retailers and, you know, that's a double-edged sword. It shows your capabilities, but it can also frighten off smaller retailers. Having Cygnia in the camp really helped. as I said earlier, it gives us a really fantastic area to test and move quickly in terms of innovation. I don't believe we need to buy any more e-fulfillment business because I think we can grow organically from the reputation that we now have and the opportunities that Cygnia provide us. Doesn't mean there might not be opportunities that pop up that we'd be interested to look at, but probably not in the short term. I'd say strategically the one area that we do look at and are looking at quite frequently is this whole piece around technology, and particularly around integration of technology into our buildings. Like I said earlier, we don't wanna be a robotics manufacturer, but there is a space in the middle, where we think we might be able to develop some more capabilities. The roadmap I talked about, the strategic roadmap I talked about from in terms of robotics is gonna generate a lot of projects, in terms of how we might automate more of what we do in warehouses, and we're gonna need to make sure that we have the resources in order to deliver those projects as quickly as we can. Again, we can build those, and we are building those organically, but there may be an opportunity to also look at that inorganically as well in order to accelerate the timeline. In terms of cost-based control, Ian, COO? Sure. Morning, everybody. I think the short answer, Andy, is yes, there are still some very attractive opportunities in our business. They are delivered by one of those synergistic sort of cultural layers within Wincanton that goes across the different market sectors. We call it operational excellence. I have a team who are and have been for many years actually driven by delivering improvements bottom-line improvements in both our open and closed book businesses. Elsewhere you might hear it called continuous improvement, lean thinking, Six Sigma. We've got literally hundreds of those professionals embedded in many of our open book contracts as well as a small team centrally who are driving out those improvements year on year. It's the way we offset some of those inflationary pressures in the open book accounts, and it's why our customers come to us as experts in supply chain. Also delivering in our closed book environments as well. Of course, you know, we enjoy benefits on both sides. In the open book, we benefit from gain share mechanisms when we deliver those improvements for customers. In the closed book, clearly it drops straight to the bottom line. I think interestingly, technology is continuing to refresh those opportunities. If I just go really quickly around that asset triangle that James talked about. In terms of people, we're using marketplace-type technologies as we are in warehousing actually to better match supply and demand. An example would be different peaks in different customers. We'll be moving our people and passporting and cross-skilling them to work in, say, a trade and DIY environment in the summer, but perhaps a grocery and retail customer in their Christmas peak that we're about to see. In terms of transport, you know, we're increasingly using that kind of big data AI approach as we develop our control tower technology so that, you know, we can optimize and reoptimize deliveries and transport fleets. In terms of warehousing, yeah, it's a combination of, again, marketplace technologies where we're using you know, supply chain visibility. Carl referred to that, to ensure that we're filling ours and our customers' warehouses, but also you know AMRs and the robotics is creating a whole new series of opportunities to drive efficiency in our warehousing operations. There's plenty to go at. Very optimistic about the future. Alan? Hi. Hi, morning, guys. Thank you. I just had a question about, I think it's GXO was saying customers are looking for more hybrid closed book, open book contracts. I was just wondering, firstly, if you could talk about that. Is that what customers are asking you? What are they trying to make you take, and what are they retaining themselves in terms of risk? Yeah, I mean, I think the reality is it's always been the case that there is a hybrid open and closed book. The challenge sometimes with customers is they wanna start open and then move to closed, and that can, you know, create commercial risk for us. I think where it will become more and more apparent is in technology, as I said earlier, 'cause I think that's where you get into a place where customers, you know, don't want to invest, and we hear it directly from some of our biggest customers. They've got lots of things to invest in, you know, customer-facing technology, stores, brand, websites. You know, supply chain can very often be quite a long way down that list. Yet, supply chain is one of their biggest costs. The opportunity is for organizations like ourselves, and our competition, frankly, to make those investments, and to, you know, deliver immediate value to the customers, but higher value for us. What I would say for us versus our competition and what has to be the case is that because we are focused entirely on the UK and Ireland, because we are a, you know, relatively lean PLC, we can make decisions quickly. You know, I worked for years for one of the global logistics firms. It's just more difficult. Some of you work for global banks, I'm sure you know how, you know, processes can slow down when you're very big multinational corporations. For us, you know, getting things like Rockingham, The Webb, you know, that was a highly attractive building because it was already kitted out with automation. We were able to go from seeing that building to getting board approval to negotiating it in about two months, and I don't think that's what our competition could have done. The same as, you know, building the robots or implementing the robots inside Cygnia. Our decision-making processes are pretty lean, so we wanna make a thing of that with our customers versus what we think our competition might be a bit slower. Yeah, I mean, that whole closed-book open-book pendulum swings, you know, all the time and always has as procurement looks for different ways on the customer side to get lower prices. We think. Well, I genuinely can't say it enough, technology, particularly in warehouses, is the next step change transformation for supply chains. We've had, you know, more than 20 years of the sort of continuous improvement, turning the wheel that Ian's talking about, which is, you know, critically important, but it's the law of diminishing returns. Technology, robotics, automation, big investments, you know, will transform U.K. supply chains. I've just got a couple more. Just on the closed book sort of resourcing flexibility, I think we sort of touched on it, but could you go into a bit more detail? Let's say BrewDog sales fall off a cliff or whatever it is, or Neal's Yard, whatever it is. How much flexibility is there to just shift that cost immediately into someone else that, for that time period is experiencing better growth? Is it as simple as that? Therefore, actually, that whole piece is more safe than we might think it is? I'll let Carl give a more detailed explanation. The two customers you described is really easy 'cause they're in the same building. We have a model beyond that when they're not in the same building. Carl, would you like to just explain a little bit how it works? Yeah. I mean, we are moving more towards a lot of collaboration and shared user sites, but we're also shared user campuses as well. Across Northampton, we've got seven sites, so we can move resource around the campus as well as just the contracts for individuals. That's what I'm talking about with regards to visibility. It's visibility of forecast and demand, and when that doesn't land, we then have the opportunity to move resource a lot quicker than we have in the past. Just make another supplementary point, which I think is quite important. Some of the investment that Tom and James have talked about in our automation is about making that automation multi-user, which we do believe distinguishes us from our competition who tend to be more prone to sort of single user, single building type, you know, contracts. Does a couple of things. One, and then it also allows us to. You know, we're not risking that investment on one customer, so we can bring new customers into that automation if you know, volumes decline. Two, it also importantly allows us to access, and I think we touched on this at the Capital Markets Day, a whole tranche of very profitable customers who couldn't ordinarily access, for example, automation and productivity improving technology, 'cause there's a certain scale you need to be at in order to run those. Those of you who visited us in Rockingham would have noted it was a 500,000 sq. Ft. Warehouse. You kind of need to be at that sort of scale to get the economics out of the building. Some of the customers we can now access, particularly in Carl's area, wouldn't fill that building and thus couldn't justify either the site or the automation. That multi-user kind of delivers on a couple of levels. It provides an underpin in terms of flexing between different customers, but it also allows us to appeal, particularly in efulfillment to customers that, perhaps others can't reach. I visited Cygnia again recently and saw the AMRs in action. One of the really exciting things, so we have a beauty customer there that would normally have sort of 500 orders a day in peak for about a week, 10 days, goes to 5,000 orders a day. The way the team described it to me is actually what we're gonna do is normally it's a manual operation. It's not worth putting 500 orders a day into the AMR automation, but 5,000 is. For a 6-week period, we push them into the automation, and that means maintaining those service level agreements to customers suddenly becomes possible. Whereas in the past, we'd have had to have hired, you know, 200 extra people just for that contract. The AMRs, because of the productivity that they drive, allow us not to do that. It's, as Ian says, shared user environment with that investment is really exciting. I've just got one more. Is the offer of your CapEx on open book a relatively unique offer in the market? Because I guess the point is if it is, open book's traditionally quite competitive, it's pretty low margin. If that differentiates you, that's good, that's great. But then on the other hand, how do you make sure that it's not something that's just eventually competed away, you know, Asda or whoever? You know, we expect you to do this, and all of a sudden margins go from 5% back down to 3%. First part of the question is we don't know. I'd be foolish to stand up here and say our competition's not pitching the same thing. Generally, what we've seen in terms of their implementations, they look like classic open book implementations. We do those. We've got customers in our network that we have worked with, particularly on goods to person automation, and it's been entirely done on the open book and doesn't deliver financial value to Wincanton. What it does deliver to us, as I said in the presentation, is it delivers knowledge, right? Even if we don't gain financially from doing something with a customer, we delight the customer because we make sure the implementation goes smoothly, but more importantly, we learn. We say, "That system works really well. Now let's look at where else we can use it on more of a closed book basis. Sorry, what was the second half of the question? Just, is there a risk that it becomes commonplace? Yeah. Yes, there is. With our biggest customers, absolutely there is. With the, you know, with the big dominant retailers and the big multinational consumer products goods, absolutely. Their procurement teams are excellent, and they will find every ounce of value. That's why it's important to see this as a twin strategy, which is, yes, we wanna drive technology, we wanna drive that value, we wanna be stickier. We've had conversations with some of the biggest retailers in the country who are up for us making those investments, but we also want to do it on a shared user basis. We wanna do it for smaller, you know, medium-sized retailers where we have got a better chance of retaining that value. The reality of our model today is stickiness, or the traditional third party logistics model, is stickiness driven by great service performance and strong relationships. Those margins have been eroded over the last 20 years. What technology allows us to do is to actually, you know, differentiate, have the best technology in place and drive higher margins. It's possible that over time that gets eroded, but if you've got the best technology and you move the fastest, then you've got the best chance of keeping it for quite a long period of time. It's all right. Gerald, right by the mic. I'll come to you in a minute, Alex. Morning, Gerald Khoo from Liberum. Three from me, if I can. Firstly, on the e-fulfillment side, how are your customers reacting to the Royal Mail strike? Are they just accepting the delay? Are they switching to other parcel carriers? You know, what are they doing? Secondly, you talked a lot about the importance of technology. How much of that is about people and skills? How much of it is systems which you can make proprietary in some way? Basically how, to what extent, is that advantage easy to defend? Or how much of it is a case of the competition just hire your people and the knowledge goes out the door with them? Finally, given the toughening economic outlook, how do you mitigate against customer failure or, you know, or the customers getting into financial difficulties? Carl, do you wanna just pick up the piece about parcel carriers? Yeah. With regards to carriers, yes, retailers have reacted to that. They are looking at having multi-carrier strategies so that they can switch volume out to other carriers. That's not something that's particularly new because carriers have reached volume as you've gone through peak in prior years. They've always had that opportunity to move. We've seen carriers who've gone out of business in recent years, so that drove the contingency as well. Important to also say that, you know, service level agreement to a customer. You order something online, you expect it in three days. The quicker we can pick it and make it available means even if there is a day delay because there's a strike or there's an issue, the customer can still hit their SLA. It just puts more pressure on us to get things picked as quickly as possible and the risk of sounding like a broken record. Therefore, robotic technology and AMRs help us to do things quicker and prevent us having to smooth the peak. Manual operations mean you have to smooth the peak. Second question around people and skills, technology. I think the answer is, at the moment, people and skills are absolutely critical. What we have that integrators and robotics companies don't have is customer relationships, right? We talk to supply chain directors on a daily basis. The advantage, what we bring to our partners when we go out, we often talk to robotics companies and robotic integrators, the advantage we have is we can introduce them to the right people. That partnership is what we're developing, where we say, "Look, you know, we'll introduce you, but we're going very much together or we're going as Wincanton, and you need to stay in the background because we want that value." We're developing that capability. As time goes on, I think the people and skills becomes less relevant and systems and technology becomes more relevant because once you've put middleware in, and once you've got robots talking to customer warehouse management systems, it becomes much harder to change the system. You know, there are robots as well. If it's on a closed book basis, there are robots that we're delivering. We hope to move along that curve to create greater stickiness. I'll let Tom answer your third question about what we're doing about managing credit risk. Yeah. Well, first there's a serious credit vetting for all customers when they come through on our books. We monitor it. I mean, quite literally on a daily basis, what our debt to book looks like. The payment from our customers is very well structured. We know when that cash is coming. We know when that cash is coming in. We closely follow up with our customers. Because of the criticality of the service, it means we're very high up on the payment list of all our customers. You know, it's a very fast reaction. Like, if we don't get paid, you don't get served, you don't get any products. Therefore, we do get paid, and we're very high up on that list of payments. You know, our bad debt charge was zero for the half year period. I think, though, in you know, moving into the smaller retailers, moving into a shared user environment, implicit in that is that our credit risk does go up. But in a shared user environment, you're not leasing a warehouse for one specific customer. The important thing is to have you know, highly focused business development that's always looking to bring new customers in, always looking to fill the pipe from the top so that, you know, when you do lose things from the bottom, they're quickly replaceable. We feel you know, we very deliberately pick the language that says we have foundation markets 'cause they absolutely are the foundation of our business. That does allow us to up the risk profile a little bit in other areas of our business in order to drive higher margins. The credit risk is fundamental to how we manage it. Alex? Morning. Alex Paterson from Peel Hunt. Four from me, please. All very quick ones, don't worry. First one is just on the investment that you've been making in automation and robotics. Has there been any sort of benefit from that in the first half, or does that benefit start to come through in the second half? I just wonder if you can talk a little bit about the profile of that and what the kind of payback period would be. Secondly, on the pension, it sounds like you would expect if the current environment stays as it is in terms of yields and so on, that you won't need to continue with those, deficit reduction payments. Obviously, the trustees will have their view, but would that be right? Is that the expectation it's gonna stop? I think that's at the end of FY24, isn't it? Thirdly, on the RCF, you seem to have quite a large facility for a GBP 52 million need. Would you look at reducing that? Do you actually pay a fee for the size of the facility, a flat fee, whether you draw it or not? Can you save anything by making that smaller? Or is that a false economy because actually you might want the flexibility? Keeping on the revolving theme, with the changes we've seen in government, how does that impact the public sector work that you've been bidding on? Does it continue unaffected or does it sort of get set back as personnel changes sort of filter through? Thank you. Great. Thanks, Alex. I'll take the first one, investment in automation. No tangible benefits in the first half. There'll be some, a small amount of benefit, I think, in the second half driven from in particular using the Cygnia AMRs through peak. But the bigger impact is gonna come next financial year when the Webb at Rockingham is full, which you know by sort of midsummer of next year it'll be full, and that's when we expect to see the benefits of giving customers a much more efficient solution and therefore keeping more of the benefit ourselves. Tom, to pick up the pension RCF and then Carl, other Carl, you can pick up the government piece. Let me start with the pensions one then. We've got a GBP 35 million technical deficit at the moment. Our payment plan is about GBP 20 million per annum up to the end of this financial year. Then it steps up actually. Currently got agreed with them, the pension trustees up to 25. That would rapidly get us in a positive situation. We want to aim towards self-sufficiency. Our conversation with our trustees is how do we provide a contribution over a seven-year period or so that takes you towards a self-sufficient state? That's the discussion that we're having with the trustees. We do the triennial at the end of this financial year, and then that negotiation will take place kind of over the summer before we actually agree anything, which won't be till July, August time of 2023. You can kind of, you know, impute from that what you expect the contribution's gonna be on the pension, but it's a negotiation. We'll be working closely with the trustees to try and deliver the right outcome for them and the right outcome for us. Then in terms of the RCF, yeah, there is a standing kind of cost for the facility, but I think it's at about 25 basis points. Looking at William here. There is, of course, a kind of undrawn facility cost. But I think that flexibility is really important. As I said, you know, you draw on an average of GBP 52 million over the first half of the year. That means that there's some times when you're, you know, slightly up above it, sometimes slightly below it, which gives you headroom, and that headroom is just so important for any, you know, changes. For example, any of the payments of our, you know, big monthly payment. You know, if, you know, Kingfisher pays you two weeks late, you kind of need it. So you need that flexibility in the RCF, and that gives us some of the headroom that we need if we're gonna suddenly see an opportunity, whether it be an M&A opportunity or whether it be kind of a technology investment automation opportunity. So I actually quite like the scale of the RCF. When I first joined, I was like, "That's quite large." I think it's probably about right, actually. Thanks, Tom. Carl, changes in government and how that might impact our public sector strategy. It's been quite an exciting six months from that perspective, hasn't it? Look, I mean, the first thing I'll just say is the majority of the work that we do in the public sector is non-partisan. There's broad political consensus on, for example, borders. You know, we're not gonna stop moving healthcare products around the country, regardless of who's sat in Number 10. I think, you know, in terms of immediate threat, it's very low. I think, what we have seen is some delays in decision-making. Particularly since the summer when, you know, there was a big change in the number of ministers and, you know, and decision makers. That hasn't yet impacted on end date procurements. We're largely seeing procurement start dates being delayed, but they're just compressing them into shorter periods of time. I guess the third thing I'd say is, you know, the other big change we've seen obviously, in the last months has been in public spending and the outturn or the outlook for public spending. I think to James' earlier point, really that brings opportunities for us because I suspect what we're gonna be seeing is government wanting to get more stuff done in the private sector and less in the public sector. Yeah. Okay. Conscious of the time, are there any final questions? No? Okay. Well, thank you very much everybody for joining us in person. If you do, I think there's coffee in the other room. Is there still? He says, looking at people. I believe there's coffee in the other room, but if you wanna catch up with any of the team, please do. Thanks very much.