Good morning ladies and gentlemen. As you know, it's quite unusual for being to speak from the Lepton on these occasions, but today I am roused to do so. Ian will be retiring in the summer after seven years as our Chief Executive. And so this will likely be his final results presentation to us all. Now Ian is an immensely modest person and I’ve no doubt he will hate the fact that I am doing this, but sod it and here goes. Ian became Chief Executive of Wolseley on the July 13, 2009 and the share price that day was £11.34. As you know, it's now over £38 today, a rise of around 250% and up performing approximately by around 200%. He’s refocused the Group on market leading positions in attractive markets, know that today 83% of our revenue is generated through number one and number two market share positions. Now whilst selling more than 30 non-core businesses for more than £1 billion. He’s also brought a real focus on customer service and people development to drive profitable organic growth. Under Ian’s leadership, Group trading margins have been restored and profit over his tenure has increased by over 90%. I am whilst reducing debt from £2.5 billion to approximately £1 billion. The Group has also returned £2.1 billion to shareholders by dividends, special dividends and buyback. Now, Ian would never classify himself as one of the new breed of digital CEOs, but he’s also led the business into ecommerce in all geographies and this now accounts for over £2 billion of group revenues and growing fast. Yes and he also recruited John Martin who will succeed him and I know he will be a strong and decisive a leader as Ian has been. Now ladies and gentlemen, I am sure this will not be the last we will feel here of Ian, as although he is retiring he has still got so much to offer the world of industry and commerce. It's been an absolute pleasure to work with Ian and to see his outstanding talent first hand. And on behalf of the Wolseley Board and the audience here today, Ian, we wish you and Sally [ph] every good fortune and best wish for the future, for your health and happiness, and to say a huge thank you for your considerable achievements for Wolseley.

A round of applauds from this audience is tough going, isn’t it? Thanks for the comments. But let’s get back to business, okay. So in terms of our performance overall, I think it's been resilient in tougher markets. We’ve gained or held share in most of our larger businesses with the exception of Pipe and Climate in the UK and we’ll come back and talk about that. There has been continued improvements in our service metrics, our gross margins, we’re pretty reasonable overall and we’ve been very careful on cost management. The U.S. results have improved significantly in recent months, which is great to see. But we’re still facing some pretty strong headwinds of deflation and also the industrial business. However, the rest of the business, in residential, commercial, and infrastructure, continues to perform very well in pretty robust markets from what we can see. Clearly the UK results were disappointing, the market was much tougher than expected, especially in the key RMI market and the new commercial market. And we are taking appropriate action to right-size our cost base. We know that we can significantly improve our core service processes, which is critical to getting back to profitable growth. The Nordics delivered descent profitable growth. We continue to execute our strategy and have maintained our investment in proven programs across the Group and the cash generation was strong and we increased the dividend by 10%. Let me hand it over to John to go through the financials.

Thank you, Ian, and good morning everybody. Overall sales growth in the first half was 5.9% and we’ll come back in a moment as to how that is comprised. We put in another really good performance on gross margins, which were ahead by 40 basis points in the period. Given the slowdown of the top line, we were careful to control the growth in our cost base whilst maintaining investments in the business improvement initiatives that we’ve talked about for a number of years. And additionally, we’ve committed another £15 million in the second half towards further restructuring in the UK. Overall, reported trading profit of £410 million was £20 million up on last year, of which £11 million came from better foreign exchange rates, but trading profit was hit by £6 million Q1 fewer day. Headline earnings per share were up 6.4% and net debt which is usually at a seasonal high in January was at £1.25 billion in line with our expectations after final dividend and as to the 160 million share buybacks. So overall growth in the period of 5.9% that's come from like-for-like growth net of deflation of 2.7%. Acquisitions contributed another 2.1% and new branches added 0.4% the trading day knocked 0.6% off, so total constant currency growth was 4.6%. The impact of transacting overseas earnings inter sterling added 1.3% to the reported growth rate taking it to 5.9% overall. Our like-for-like growth rate came off in the second quarter to 2.3% with the weakest growth coming in November. Since then growth has recovered and between December and January growth overall was 3.2%. Why have the growth rate come down from that long run average of over 5%, well firstly you can see from the chart that the comparative figures in 2015 were very strong…

Great, thanks John. So today given the more uncertain nature of the markets rather than updating on the strategy we thought would be better to focus on what is happening in our markets and what actions we have and are trying to take to respond accordingly. Further we've been very consistent in our strategy and were currently very focused on accelerating the execution of that strategy, so what I will do is take the three main customers in turn and run through what is happening in the markets, our performance and our KPIs and then the plans that we have already taken and plan to take for the future. Within the U.S. first if we look briefly at some key facts that we believe are important, firstly, consumer confidence is pretty consistent around the 100 mark although it's still well below the 2007 peak, but overall it remains robust. Existing home sales have been pretty consent around the 5 million mark with overall growth in the last six months. The commercial market has held up pretty well with good overall growth in H1 and the architecture billings index has maintained the score at about 50 in the recent past indicating reasonable growth. However as this is very clear from updated industrial markets had a very tough time in 2015. So despite continued weaknesses industrial the residential, commercial and infrastructure markets are still in good shape. Now turning to our performance. It was encouraging to get back to some good growth in the last three months after full November, as John highlighted. In the civil infrastructure market we grew by 3% in a market which grew by 1%, which is slower than previous periods. We had a tough October, November but since then the business has recovered well and the market…

Thank you very much for the presentation. Arnaud Lehmann from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Firstly on U.S. growth, obviously you had the numbers for November to January and you gave us an update for December to February which was higher growth. Is it more related to removing a weak November or are you saying that February saw an acceleration compared to what you saw in December and January, if that makes sense? So that's my first question. My second question is regarding the UK. You're hinting into some change of strategy, you're putting things back on the drawing board. Could you maybe give us a bit of an outlook of what may happen here? Would you consider maybe disposing of some of the businesses there?

Okay sure. Look in terms of the U.S. growth we had a poor November, December, January, February have been very consistent. So as our numbers jump up a down a bit a half of percentage point each month December, January, February were consistent and November was the tough one. Look in terms of the UK we are not signaling a change in the UK strategy, but we are signaling that we are going to have a hard look at the operating model in the UK. Our UK business is a good profitable business, makes a good return on capital employed and good cash flow and this half obviously we had a very disappointing performance in the Pipe & Center business Pipe & Climate business, sorry we’re just only 12% of our total business actually plumbing and heating didn’t do well but it was only down and little bit, again in pretty tough market conditions. Our infrastructure business actually did okay. But we are conscious that market conditions may remain dull for the next couple of years and therefore we do have to have a challenge to ourselves in terms of the business model and really see if we can find ways to better meet our customers' needs but do that more productively as well. And we highlighted we've already started the action of taking some capacity and cost out of the UK market so we can get it back to profitable growth.

What sort of payback do you expect from your restructuring?

Something under two years in terms of the payback. It depends again -- some are branch closures, some are obviously associate layoffs. Those are far faster. Okay, good.

Thank you. Gregor Kuglitsch from UBS. I've got three -- two and a half questions I think. So firstly I'll start with the US. I think in the first half you had something like 10% flow-through, if I correctly calculate. Can you just give us a sense where you see that picking up to? I think you hinted that you think it's going to start picking up from here. And in that context can you give us -- I think you've flagged industrial continues to be negative but can you give us a sense when you feel you're starting to lap the comparison basis that would allow perhaps a greater decline to head towards the zero mark? And similarly on deflation, I think that obviously started to happen in the second half of last year. If you can just give us a sense where you think, as best as you can see it given commodity pricing, how that will trend? And then this is the second question which is on the UK.

That was your first question.

That was my first one and a half questions, sorry. On the UK, can you just give us a sense the profit outlook that you're talking about, is that net of the £15 million of restructuring? Are you taking that through the line or is that booked as an exceptional item? Thank you.

I think the U.S. flow-through, could it be a little bit better in the second half? Yes, possibly if we get -- if we continue at that 5% or 6% growth rate, because we will stay careful on headcount. Just to reiterate, we are going to continue with those strategic investment plans; they are important for the long-term growth of that business and it's important that we stick to that. So I don't think that flow-through will be dramatically different in the second half, Gregor, but certainly it's fair to expect it to be a little bit better. US industrial. Interestingly last year overall in the second half industrial was flat. It was plus 6% in Q3 and minus 6% in Q4 if I recall. So we ought to be lapping weaker comparatives by Q4. I wouldn't call the end of the industrial challenges just yet because we haven't seen a dramatic pick-up in industrial so far. The deflationary flow-through, actually if you look at the curves -- and I'm happy to show them to you afterwards -- on each of those commodities the curves have continued to decline to where we are. So actually we're going to see a drag on deflation from commodities for quite some time yet, possibly for the whole of this year, calendar. Now of course it depends whether those commodities pick up because if they do pick up in price again we'll see that flattening out. And the profit outlook, yes, it's within our expectations. We have factored in the £15 million of restructuring in the UK in the second half. That's what we factored in. As Ian said, we may do more; we haven't factored more in, we don't have those plans specifically yet. It will depend on the outcome partly of the review that Ian was talking about.

Yes, good morning. Yassine Touahri from Exane BNP Paribas. A couple of questions. First a question on strategy which clearly has changed dramatically over the past seven years. You've substantially improved your portfolio of assets; leverage is now much lower than it was seven years ago. How do you look at -- how will you consider looking at the next seven years? Will you consider another strategic review? And my two question actually would be on capital allocation. How do you think -- will you think about it? Will you think about more M&A, more investment in branches and IT?

I think you better answer that one, John, because I certainly won't be here in seven years, let alone seven bloody months. Sorry.

No, it's all right. I'm just the CFO.

You better get cracking, John

Perhaps also on e-commerce. It's been growing quite quickly so it could be quite transformative over the next few years so how do you think about that? And then another very question a bit more on numbers. Could you quantify your bill for plastic, steel and copper, just for some sensitivity for how prices are moving?

Yes, okay, we'll do all of those. Look, on the strategy side, if you want me to answer. I would prefer to, how do they say it in America, take the fifth until I've got my feet under the table. But no, I think if you look at the disciplines which Ian has brought to the table over the last six years, the resource allocation process is exactly what we should continue to do. There is nothing wrong with that as a process. It absolutely identified, if you recall all those years back, what were your words, performance builders and growth engines. What was the third one? Synergy drivers.

Synergy drivers, yes.

But actually behind that was a series of really relevant questions about market share, our position, are we equipped to win, margins, the market, the competitive landscape, all of those things, the working capital and asset requirements of each business. We'll continue to apply those; we still do. That's not going to go away. It's an internal process. We should continue with that all the time. So I hope that gives you a sense of that. You mentioned e-commerce. I think, yes, you can see now this year we should get to £2 billion worth of orders taken online B2C and B2B. It's fairly clear that there is good demand for that in the market. We've been very consistent. We want to be the best B2B e-commerce provider in our market, and of course within our categories we also want to have great B2C offerings too. And certainly there is going to be no de-emphasizing of that in the future. And then finally the bill, I've got all of the amounts here. Shall we take that offline at the end on the -- to save me scrabbling around in paper on plastic, copper and steel.

Howard Seymour at Numis. Can I ask a question actually on the UK competitive environment? Because you alluded to the market share losses that you've seen in a couple of areas i.e. potentially stood back from the market. The question I suppose is what's driving the market share movements? I note you mention the possibility of being more competitive you said in product price areas. Is this -- am I reading too much into that, that you're now saying market share gains -- losses are no longer going to be acceptable?

Now look, I think if you look at the market overall, we are not happy with our results, and if we look at the results of the other major merchants, I think we've all had a pretty tough time in the last couple of years. Point one. Point two, absolutely not. We're going to be very consistent now. We have got, particularly in plumbing and heating, our gross margin is stabilizing, which is what we've been working hard at in the past couple of years. I absolutely do not want to give that up. Therefore we will continue down the path -- we lost a very small amount of market share so let's keep it in perspective but it is far more important for us to build the business profitably now than to go chasing market share. So we are going to remain very, very disciplined in terms of where we are on pricing in the marketplace. And I think in terms of where the growth can come from, I highlighted all of the profit levers that we know we haven't executed brilliantly yet. I am disappointed in our execution, absolutely, that's my accountability. So we know we can do a lot better on execution. And secondly I think in terms of the segments of the market, small customers and plumbing customers have done well over the past couple of years and some independent distributors who service that segment have proportionately done better than us. Where the market has been particularly tough is in the large and the regional contractors and I think in the last six months particularly tough because relatively little eco business and government social housing spending has been lower as well. So no, to come all the way back to your question, we are not signaling a change in our approach. We want to remain very disciplined and make sure that we do continue to gradually rebuild the profitability of the business.

Can I just follow up on that then, Ian? You did specifically mention some areas of more competitive. Are these just the commodity areas then? Are there any specific areas that you would target in that respect?

No, not so much commodities. Commodities, as John's highlighted, is bloody tough anyway, but I think in some of our key value items, things like mastic and couplings and joints, we were not as competitive as we should have been compared to some of the other entrants that have come into the market and compared to some independents. So again, we've made this point many times before, this business doesn't yield to grand gestures. It is down in the absolute micro detail of how are these 500 or 50 SKUs priced versus competition, and I don't think we were sharp enough on some of those key value items.

Thanks. Aynsley Lammin from Canaccord. Just two, one more just following up on the UK. I wondered if you could comment on January and February. Some of your peers have said underlying market had a good start to the year, particularly plumbing and heating side. Then just obviously you're showing a bit more discipline on the cost front. I just wondered what your view was on acquisitions going forward, what the pipeline looked like, and are you likely to start reining the acquisition spend in for the next six months? Thanks.

John, do you want to do the first one?

Yes. January and February, it's been interesting. You know we hate talking about the weather but December was horrible so January and February were a little bit better than December. There's no doubt December was mild and mild is miserable in the heating business. So January and February were a little bit better than that but I wouldn't say it's -- it isn't a robust growth just at the moment.

I think in terms of M&A, I think across the Group we still push on in the same -- absolutely in the areas that we've been talking about for the past five or six years. John's already made the point; if a major opportunity came along I think it would be right to have a look at it, but we're going to stay very, very disciplined on where we are at the moment and keep pushing on with the bolt-on M&A and make sure we get the integration benefits and the synergies out very quickly. I think we're showing we can do that well and get good return on shareholder money that we're deploying there.

Thanks. Clyde Lewis at Peel Hunt. Three if I may, all on Ferguson. Ian, I'm just wondering if you can update us as to the competitive position in the U.S. and what your competitors are up to in response to Ferguson's continued success. The e-commerce platform, where would you rank it relative to best in class and what sort of changes and investments have you got to make on that front? And the third one was on price transparency in that marketplace. It's obviously sort of a journey and you're on it but how is that journey evolving and is it what you expected to see and how is that impacting your thoughts going forward?

Sure. Clyde, on competitive position, I don't think there's been any significant shift from where we have been in the past couple of years. You know we quantify the second-largest competitor as Home Depot Retail, what they sell to professional tradesmen. We have a market share in our blended business of about 17%; they're at around about 8%, so we're just over twice their size. And then you drop down to Lowe's and then to regional -- quasi-regional distributor in Hydroka [ph]. So the competitive position in our core business I think has remained pretty much the same. Clearly we've done well. Again, go back to driving the service has given us the ability to gain share and to do that profitably. We've talked I think a lot in the past about Amazon. They're still obviously doing very well across many segments. We have not seen any material impact or any impact on our business at all and I think that does come down to various things. One, we have 1,500 branches out there deep in the communities; we have 5,000 outside sales people going out dealing with our customers' technical problems; and then also helped by the depth and knowledge that we have in our plumbing and heating category. And 5% of our business is actually product being returned to us. That is a process that we do very well so we credit back our customers. So we do give the full service and therefore we have not seen any impact. We keep a very close eye on it because clearly an Amazon type creature could have a serious impact. In terms of the e-commerce platform, we absolutely do benchmark ourselves against what we consider to be the best e-commerce providers in the States, therefore absolutely Amazon, Grainger, Fastenal.…

Morning. It's Paul Checketts from Barclays Capital. I've got three as well please. The first is on the improvement in growth, if that's the right way to phrase it, from 4% to 5.7% in the US. Can I just clarify a couple of things? I'm trying to get a sense of how much of that is volume. So can you just confirm that it's nothing to do with the trading days? I think the answer is it's not but could you just confirm that? And how much of it, if any, was due to deflation easing, which again you can't suggest it's not but maybe you'd confirm that? And then the second is on the comps for the US. You've given us some more detail in the presentation on the like-for-likes by business unit and you've commented on the industrial progress and the comps there easing. But if you looked at blended branches and waterworks and other, is there anything we should bear in mind as we go into the remainder of the year? Do the comps get a lot easier there as well? Was it uniform? And then the last point is coming back to the M&A. You've been busy in terms of number of deals but overall spending has been less than the £200 million you've talked about in the past. Is that because there have been transactions and someone else has bought them? Is it because vendors aren't selling? And when you think about the pipeline going forward, can you give us a bit more detail on size and what might get us back up to those levels that you've talked about in the past?

Yes. The improvement in growth rate is like for like, so it is same day. Deflation, actually slightly strangely deflation ticked up slightly but nothing material. In respect of the U.S. comps, the rest of the U.S. comps get easier too. Actually slightly they get -- comparably they came off further because industrial was flat in the second half last year. So blended branches and waterworks also had very strong comparatives in Q1 and Q2 going into Q3 but later in the year all of those comparatives ease Paul as the growth rate last year did come off by the Q4. M&A investment, no, we haven't lost anything that we've had in the pipeline that we wanted to complete on. There just hasn't been transactions that we wanted to conclude. In terms of possibilities in the pipeline at the moment, there are two that are more medium sized. There's a couple of things which are groups of branches, which would be nice. That's the sort of, if you want the sweet spot. And then there remains quite a few pretty small acquisitions similar to those you saw on the board. But we haven't lost anything. I can't remember how long ago it is that we lost something. It's just not like that. The large majority of these transactions are negotiated. In fact I don't think any of those on the board were auctioned at all. So these are really -- because for the vendor the most important thing very often for the family businesses is what's going to happen to the vendor, what's going to happen to the vendor's family, what's going to happen to the associates that people rightly care about because it's a relationship business and we are usually buying businesses when they're the bolt-ons essentially for those relationships.

Thank you. John Messenger from Redburn. Three if I could please. The first one was just on -- and it should be pretty simple -- but the finalization of the French disposal. Does that have any impact for cash, for write-offs just on obviously the agreed deal when we think of the second half? The second one was just on the acquisitions impact in the half-year. Was that £136 million of top line, £1 million on the bottom, you mentioned there obviously some investment going on, particularly John, but can you just flesh out, was that actually -- clearly IFRS baloney tends to have an impact here as well in the writing off stored up profitability on stock. Is there anything in here that is abnormal? Because I would have thought there should have been a better rate of profit coming through on the acquisition spend, particularly BathEmpire from last year. And then the final one was just -- and thank you for the detail on the UK and the U.S. in terms of cost structures. But when we just look at those slides that broke out labor and other costs, I just wanted to check, from the point of view of how the UK can be turned around in that obviously you've disclosed a gross of £23.7 million, labor is 11% of sales and all those other costs are about 9.3%. If I contrast that with the US, the best in class, that's £30 million on gross, 14.3% on labor and down at 7.8% on all those other costs that run through it. The critical thing I look at there and think is actually the labor absorption of gross profit is broadly similar, about 46% of the gross. The issue is all the other costs. When you look at the UK, and I'm just thinking here it's 2006 when that DC opened, I would have hoped that after 10 years there might be quite a lot of depreciation dropping out next year, maybe not, they would have at least just started to create a bit more EBIT momentum. When we just look at that structurally, do you not need to go out and find revenues to put through the cost structure or are there enough areas through the restructuring you're talking about that you can really realign to a better margin business and a better return business there? Sorry, a bit of a big one.

Right, okay. So the French disposal, there is £18 million of loan notes. There's no cash due. They would be longer dated. We have £50 million of residual property in France which we will get on with and dispose. Timing, we just need to work through those, John, and then those should be the last cash flows from France. Acquisitions, the accounting -- the stock accounting and receivables accounting is always brought into line with our accounting on day one, but the delta there goes through goodwill. Those goodwill adjustments are tiny. They are totally immaterial. The real issue is alignment of the operating expenses. So for example we bring people in. If you look at most of those acquisitions we've done in Ferguson, we bring people in; we bring them straight into the Ferguson career structure and Ferguson salary structures so that they are culturally Ferguson associates as soon as we can. Secondly, with the smaller acquisitions we bring them onto our systems on day one. So we've done all the pre-training before then, typically in the weeks beforehand. We're putting the systems -- we're putting excess management in. That's the investment cost. Specifically with respect to BathEmpire, BathEmpire, we bought it in to generate a market position in that space. We have continued to invest in it. It isn't very profitable today, as you can see from those numbers; however, we are very happy with its progress. Strategically there were more issues than just -- sorry there were more opportunities from that acquisition than just generating profit in the first six months. The UK/US comparison is interesting. There are many more small sites in the UK driving the other costs. We reach far, far, far further. You can see if you just divide revenue by the average number…