John Martin
Management
Good morning everybody and welcome to the Stock Exchange this morning. Thank for coming along to our Full Year 2017 Results Presentation. I’m really pleased this morning to welcome a new boy. Our new CFO, Mike Powell. Many of you know Mike from his previous roles, but it is great to see him now wearing Ferguson blue colors. I should also mention an old boy. We have got our Chairman, Gareth Davis down here at the front, making sure that we stay on song today. I am just going to summarize a couple of the highlights of the year, then hand over to Mike for the detail of the operating and financial review, and then I’ll close on strategy and how we are executing that strategy. Firstly the highlights, from where we were six months ago, actually market conditions improved and commodity deflation eased in the second half. So we grew overall at 6% this year and that’s over 8% in the final quarter. We were very pleased to make further progress on the gross margin, up 40 basis points and about half of that is underlying improvements. Trading profit well ahead 8.7% up on last year. We also delivered our best ever working capital results. We are very proud of that. On strategy, last year we started out with three objectives. The most important of those being to achieve above market growth, stronger growth in the US. Our strategies seem to be working because the growth in all of our major business units improved and we grew across all regions in the US. In the UK the transformation is on track, but it does remain very early days. In the Nordics, as you know we clarified the strategy and we also tidied up some of the other investments in the portfolio. We did some decent disposals during the year. The most significant development though in the business this year has really been on the people front. The handovers both to Mike and also to Kevin Murphy towards the end of the year, they’ve been done really thoroughly and with the minimum of fuss. It is great to have such talented and experienced executives now in place to take the company forward for the next stage of our developments. If you get the company’s name wrong today, we have a charity box, it is £10, it is nearly full already, and as you know now these are our last numbers in Sterling. We are making the change now to dollar reporting. That project is being pretty much done. Finally, really strong cash flow and also disposal proceeds that’s provided us with the opportunity to do a 500 million share buyback program and Mike will start that shortly. Now, I hand over to you Mike for the operating and financial review.