Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for coming, for battling you way in this morning and for those of you on the webcast, thank you for listening in. It gives me a particular pleasure today that we're reporting first half results, which are showing growth in sales and profits for all 5 of our businesses. With underlying revenues and constant currency growing on aggregate at 5%, earnings per share for the parent company has grew at 11% for PLC and 18% for NV. These are record results and mark an important step for us, in that they really reaffirm our positive momentum. We're also reaffirming our commitment to continuing to dispose of businesses that no longer fit our strategy and to do this for the benefit of our shareholders. Our increase in dividends of 6% for PLC and 18% for NV reflect the earnings increases and our confidence in the future. The evolution of our boards is continuing with our announcement today that Linda Sanford will be joining us in December. As Senior Vice President of Enterprise Transformation and IT of IBM Corporation, Linda has over 35 years experience in technological businesses and in particular, in leveraging technology to achieve business transformation. She's also been a nonexecutive director of ITT for almost 15 years. And I'm sure she will bring valuable experience to our boards. Mark will now take you through the results and Erik will describe the forward momentum in the businesses in more detail.

Thank you, Chairman, and good morning. I'm pleased to report a very strong set of results. Underlying revenue growth was 5%, excluding a 2% benefit from biennial exhibitions cycling in, that is exhibitions that took place this year, but not last year. Underlying revenue growth was 3%. Underlying operating profit growth was 7%. Including acquisitions and disposals, overall revenue was up 5% at constant currencies and in sterling. In euros, overall revenues were up 12%, reflecting the weakening of the euro first half from first half. The adjusted operating margin increased 1.1 percentage points to 27.7%. Adjusted earnings per share were up 11% for Reed Elsevier PLC at 24.7%, and up 18% for Reed Elsevier NV at EUR 0.47, and it's good to hear the bank chime in. On constant currencies, adjusted earnings per share were up 10%. The growth in reported EPS, that is including amortization of acquired intangible assets and disposal gains was 52% for Reed Elsevier PLC, and 57% for Reed Elsevier NV. Cash flow was strong, with a 52% conversion of adjusted operating profits into cash in the first half and 94% on the last 12 months basis. Our balance sheet is in good shape with net debt-to-EBITDA of 2.3x on a pensions and lease adjusted basis, or 1.7x on an unadjusted basis. The interim dividend is up 6% for Reed Elsevier PLC and up 18% for Reed Elsevier NV. The significantly higher increase for Reed Elsevier NV reflects the weakening of the euro against sterling since last year's interim dividend announcement. I'm presenting the figures today, as usual, in sterling. The same charts with euro figures can be found in the appendices to the presentation. Reported revenues and adjusted operating profits were up 5% and 9%, respectively, in sterling, and up 5% and 8%, respectively,…

Well, good morning, everybody. Again, thank you for coming and for taking the time to be here today. As you've seen this morning, we continue to make good progress in the first half of the year. Our financials are improving, despite the difficult macroeconomic environment, and we're continuing to transform our asset base and its earnings quality, through organic development and by systematically evolving our portfolio towards higher underlying revenue growth and profitability. In terms of operating performance, our first half underlying revenue growth has recovered from an all-time low in 2009 to 5% growth this year, on an underlying as-reported basis. And if you exclude the effects of biennial exhibition cycling from each of the past 4 years, like-for-like underlying revenue growth has recovered to 3%. Our first half underlying profit growth without any adjustment for exhibition cycling has recovered to 7%. And our first half earnings per share growth at constant currencies has recovered to 10%. And despite increasing the organic investment in our business, and completing a few acquisitions, we've taken our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio back into a range that we're very comfortable with, now at 2.3x on a pension and lease adjusted basis. And as you saw from Mark, in the first half this year, all 5 business areas delivered underlying revenue growth and all 5 business areas delivered underlying profit growth. So let's take a brief at each one of them. Elsevier grew 2%, with a good unit volume growth across Science and Health, particularly from emerging markets. Throughout the first half, we saw double-digit growth in usage and in article submissions. We also saw strong revenue growth in databases and tools and double-digit revenue growth in electronic revenues across health markets, offset by print declines. Going forward, we expect the first half trends to…

This is Sami at Exane BNP Paribas. Three questions if I may. First of all, on the scientific publishing front, we've seen an acceleration in organic revenue growth of S&T to 5%, can you comment a little bit on what's driving that? Is it emerging market? Is it SciVal? Or other drivers noteworthy? Secondly, in the current publishing, scientific publishing model, you reject around 2/3 of the articles you receive. In a theoretical world where gold open access and article processing charges were to dominate, do you believe that you could monetize the 700,000 articles that, today, you reject, for instance, through submission fees or other types of payments? And lastly, on exhibition, should we still expect margins to come down by, say, around 100 bps because of the Alcantara Machado acquisition, or do think that the top line growth and the operating leverage may offset the dilution?

Okay. Let me take those. I may get back to Mark on the last one a bit on the specific acquisition-related dynamics there on exhibition margins. You said, first, the acceleration, the slight acceleration of revenue growth in S&T. I mean, last year, we operate at about 4% and now it's moved up slightly to 5%. The main high-growth areas and their -- in addition to the fact that we have double-digit -- sort of usage growth and submission growth across science and health and research, the main drivers of that slight tick up are emerging markets growth, as well as strong revenue growth for databases and tools. SciVal, as you mentioned, is a small piece of that, it's the higher growth of the larger existing databases and tools that are probably the bigger impact of that uptick. Of course, Scopus is one of them but we have several other specific databases and tools as well. You asked secondly that if the sort of payment model evolves in some way faster than it has over the last 10 years, is there something we would be doing with the volume that comes in. Clearly, the way we see it, as I said, is that we're open to serving the scientific community under any of these payment models if that is what they would like us to do, all right? And we believe that with our scale, and in global scale, our technology platforms, the things that we offer, that we will be able to do that, at least as well as others. So if you look at it then, one of the things that we have, of course, as you said it, we have essentially 1 million articles that are submitted to us today, and 2/3 of those we don't publish under today's model, and that's exactly what you're pointing out. And you could see scenarios where payment models evolve based on what our customers want, whether they want us to behave slightly differently with those, and we would adjust and serve them that way and that might actually, as you mean, as you said, mean that there are some alternative revenue streams that then grow a little more than they have so far. I mean, at this point, I told you that roughly 1% of our volume is currently under some form of author pays or author's funder pays. So those are clearly things that we will be open to looking at. The last piece, exhibition margins. I think you're getting into the specific math on the joint venture buyout. So maybe Mark wants to comment on that.

Yes, and you're right in that the acquisition of the remaining 50% of the joint venture means that we now consolidate 100% of the revenues. You're always equity accounting for 50% of the profit, so we get 100% of the revenues but only 50% of the profit, so it is diluted to margin. But that was during the first half. We actually bought it at the beginning of the year but also will true for the second half as a whole. So you can see that the margin of the first half was increased by 0.4 percentage points and that's after absorbing that affect in the first half and so you'll see a similar effect in the second.

Andrea Beneventi from Cheuvreux. Two questions if I may. First, could you please shed light on the advancement of the rollout of Lexis, of the new Lexis, the share of customers that have moved to the new product, please? And secondly, regarding the 6% of revenues coming from advertising, what are the key verticals contributing to it, please?

Okay. Let me do both. You said Lexis Advance. As you know, the way we're rolling out Lexis Advance is different functionality sets, different customer sets, different users groups in different slices. So slightly different from just one having big thing that's being rolled. But if you ask, your specific question was what share of our customers are currently active. If you say, what share of our number of customers, today, if you do total across large and small today have an agreement that's active where somebody's using some feature set or some slice, we're probably today at about a 1/4 of our customers base, in terms of customer account, right? So let's call it 1/4, about 25%. Clearly, the share would be higher in the larger accounts, larger customers that have therefore have some use in some periphery rather than the smaller ones, but that's the total number. The second question you asked was in advertising, what are the verticals? Well, in the advertising, the print advertising is primarily in RBI, but there's also, of course, some pharma promotional advertising in Elsevier, and there's some advertising also of different formats, primarily electronic actually, inside LexisNexis. So there's some that are discipline-specific, pharma-related and legal. But if you look at the bulk, the vast bulk in RBI, it stretches across several different segments. These are the main, these are the advertising streams that exist in our major leading brands, which are, of course, the larger -- the brands that you're aware of in the U.K., Netherlands, and so on. And it's also a subset of several smaller journals that serve a wide range of industries, whether that's agriculture or aerospace or real estate and others, right? So it actually spreads along several industry segments.

This is Alastair Reid from UBS. Firstly, just sort of asking Sami's question in a slightly different way. You said that if your customers want you to do different models for open access and how they pay for it, that you will. When you speak to them, do you think that they actually do, given all these submissions you actually reject. If they author was actually paying for them, they might suggest less -- slightly less incentive to reject quite as many of them? And that has some issues in terms of the quality control, if you like? And then secondly, you talked about, I think, in the presentation, in terms of legal margins for this year, that the top market environment would limit the upside for further margin expansion. Is it right to assume that the margin expansion we've had in the first half is viable for the full year?

The first one you said, I believe that where we are today, today in terms of payment models for scientific publishing, article publishing, reflects what the customers and the markets have asked for. I mean, these models that we're talking about, the alternative models, there are several different ones, they have been around for essentially over a decade and they have evolved based on market demands and needs. And I think it will continue to do so. They have some seen some growth and the growth rate will depend on sort of where people go as customers in the future. Clearly, there are always pluses and minuses of every one model and what you mentioned is a concern that some people have had, but I think, quite frankly, those are balances that you have to work with in all types of scientific publishing, all types of journals, you have try to figure out how is it that you publish in that journal, how do you manage quality, how do you manage the positioning of the journal and the brand in the marketplace. The second question was legal margins. The reported margin in the first half this year is fair reflection of how we're operating these businesses or how we have operated it so far and how we will continue to operate it. Whether the yearend margin will be exactly that, on that run rate relative to the previous year or not, we don't know at this point. But clearly, we are operating, so far, this business with a slightly higher run rate margin than we did a year ago. I think that's basically what you're asking. There's no one-off or time shift or something that may be funny in the first half. I think that's the way I should answer it.

It's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. Two questions, please. First one, Exhibitions clearly going well in the first half, that's a very fragmented market. Do you have a decent pipeline in terms of bolt-ons in the exhibition area because that would presumably look like a good use of your capital at the moment? And the second question, you've done good work on cost, given that depreciation is allowing you to increase over the next few years, as your CapEx has gone up as a percentage of sales, are you confident that you can keep on delivering increases in operating profit margin over the next few years even if revenue growth is still fairly slow?

Okay. Yes. Let's start with acquisitions in exhibitions. Exhibitions, as you've seen, is a high-growth business in organic terms. And the main strategy in Reed Exhibitions is to continue to drive high organic growth, primarily by launching in high-growth segments and high-growth geographies by leveraging their global industry sector groups and their global technology platforms that they're rolling out. So you can get that organic growth machine continuing to drive organic growth over time. We are supporting that, as you know, by small acquisitions, primarily in high-growth sectors and markets, pursuing the same strategy when there are individual exhibitions up for sale or when there are partnerships where we can leverage our global scale and expertise to help the local partner and buy out a part of it or the whole thing as we ended up doing in Brazil. That continues to be our strategy. In the first half, we did a few small acquisitions. In addition to the joint venture buyout in Brazil, we bought small exhibitions in Brazil and China, for example. And we continue to look at a pipeline of those at this point and we will continue going forward. We do not see a dramatic change in that pipeline or acceleration or a slowdown, but we do think it's a good use of capital to do those when we can plug them into our global strategy, our sector and geographic strategy that already exists and we can leverage our scaling capabilities to do so. The second question was depreciation increase. Yes, as we've gradually increased CapEx, we increased it a little bit in several different areas, but primarily in legal. Of course, as you know, over time, you will then see depreciation increasing coming through the P&L. And you asked about its impact on margins. We…

Well, the way we see it is this. Is that our leverage ratio we're at today and net debt-to-EBITDA ratio at 2.3x on a pension and lease adjusted basis, that is a comfortable range to be in for the company. And at this point, we think that's where we are as an ongoing operation. So separately, we are running a slightly accelerated effort this year of disposing of assets. And as a part of that disposal process, we are saying that we don't want to sit on that cash and have the dilution from it. But as a part of the disposal efforts, we're reinvesting that cash by buying back our own shares. So you should see it as a part of our disposal effort.

It's Richard Jones at Goldman Sachs. Firstly, just on legal. Just wondering how you characterize the conditions in the legal market at the moment, if you seen any signs of any improvement there? And then secondly on that, what you think is happening with market shares at the moment in legal? And then secondly, on disposals, you talk a lot about selective disposals. I just wonder how you think about any kind of bigger potential disposals of any of the major segments and just how you would think about that?

First, the legal market situation. The legal market, if you start with the U.S., where there's the most available public data, of course, and the largest market, U.S. legal market, of course, had a big downturn in 2009. And since then, sort of been going -- they've been pretty stable but subdued are probably the words that people use. They stabilized and in the first this year, that general theme has continued. The first half this year looked a bit like there was some small increase perhaps in sort of total legal employment and a little bit of an increase here in some of the law firm revenues, but it's very slow and very low. Therefore, you'd say, it looks like the legal markets continue to be stable, perhaps with some small growth. And we've seen some positive signs, of course, in usage and other things on our product. But the market itself, I think, is very slow growth at this point. You asked about market shares. As I've said before, we've operated in this market for a very long time, and we've had essentially the same large player as the other main competitor in that market for a long period of time. And underlying organic growth rates in like-for-like markets seem to be very similar over the years in the U.S. market. And therefore, market share have stayed similar. We think that has basically continued in the recent past and we don't see any significant changes in that market share dynamic or that growth rate dynamic, even though it can always fluctuate a little bit, sort of half year on half year or year-on-year, we don't see any fundamental shift in shares. I think, if you look at some of the international markets we operate in, it would appear…

It's Ian Whittaker from Liberum. Just 3 questions. First of all, just in terms of your Science and Technology part within Elsevier. You talked about fast-grow markets sort of boosting your organic revenue growth there. Can you just say what that growth was in the faster-grow markets? It leads on from Sami's question, talked about the 5% growth in the first half. The second thing is, we have the Finch report talk about, I think it was a price point of GBP 1,350 for open access articles. Have you run some sort of scenario analysis, sort of based on that, seeing what would happen your margins in the Elsevier business if you were to move to an open access model under that revenue price point? And then the third thing, just on Risk Solutions and the potential margin growth that you could expect there. You've obviously have very good like-for-like growth coming through. It's a sort of business where -- which should be an operationally good business and you should get high drop-though rates of revenue growth down to profitability. Can you give us an idea of what your thoughts are on the progression of margins from now?

Can I just make sure I understood? The third question relates to what business?

Sorry, the third question was just on Risk Solutions.

On Risk Solutions, okay. Yes, okay. Well, first, on the growth in scientific research and fast-growth market. What you can look at is, as I said, I mean, the revenue growth there over the last couple of years has sort of been in the 4% to 5% range, now ticking up to 5% right now in the first half. And a large part of the volume growth and spend growth comes from what you can call high-growth markets or emerging market. The definition actually in Science is a little trickier because many of those high-growth market are not so emerging anymore. They emerged a long time ago, and they're very clear global leaders right now that are higher-growth markets. And I think that many of those that you wouldn't call emerging in the scientific world. They're very, very important global leaders and they contribute at the same quality level and the same scale as a what you would traditionally call a developed market. I think that's slightly different from how you would look at those countries from a consumer, retail or GDP basis. So therefore, it depends on what you want to include. The way we think about it is that the markets that are showing significant increases often show increases in spend with us and on Science that is not too different from their GDP growth, right, over time. So if you look at countries that have their high single-digit growth in GDP, it's typically likely that they operate with similar revenue growth for us if we are broad-based scientific solutions provider supplying information tools for the research sector, right? Sometimes it's higher than that when they're catching up and sometimes it's a bit lower than that. But that gives you good indication. The Finch report, you talked about…

It's Mark Braley at Deutsche Bank. Just 2 questions. On screening within Risk, can you just remind us of effectively when you'll get the visibility on this year's hiring season and when you'll be able to tell us whether screening is going to have a good year or not? The other one was for Mark. In terms of thinking about the 2013 and 2014 debt maturities, how do you think about that? Do you do that from existing cash and free cash flow? Do you term out the debt to take advantage of the fact that it's relatively easy to raise money for good credit at the moment? What's the thinking? And actually, when do you have to make a decision on the 2013 one?

Screening. Of course, we service, to a large extent, a broad-based set of industries in screening and it's a U.S. business, I think all of you know. And -- but the industry areas that we are more correlated to than others, in terms of new hirings, is actually retail industries and the industries supporting retail, not directly but industries are related to retail growth. And then you can say -- you said this year's hiring season. I think with more is actually having 2 hirings. There's a Spring hiring season that we think of. We keep going throughout the year, but then there's another sort of Fall hiring season. And at this point, we clearly have lived through the Spring hiring season. And if you look at it that way, it was probably occurring a little bit earlier this year than last year. I think some of that has to do how holidays fall and weather and other things. But in total, the run rate in screening in the first half, the growth rate, I should say, the growth rate in screening this year was similar to the kind of growth what we ended up with for the full year last year, all right? But if you look at it into the Fall hiring season, sort of the next hiring season, the new hires coming in there, it's too early for us to express any view on what might happen in the future. I'm going to let Mark talk about the...

Yes. No, we will be coming to market later on of the year to refinance '13 maturities. I mean, with our free cash flow and ready access to commercial paper market, there's no liquidity need to do so, but it's a good piece of maturity planning.

It's Jonathan Helliwell at Berenberg. We haven't said much about Health today. I wonder if you just sort give us a feel if there's any change to market conditions across the segments there, particularly the patent cliff coming in and so on? And the second thing is just on Exhibitions, if we look at the -- if we take 8% as the underlying rate, x biennials, x phasing in the first half, what are you seeing for order books? Is there any reason to expect anything other than 8-ish H2 and forwards from there?

Let me just make sure I understand what you said, I didn't hear the words you used when you said, in health, you said there was something coming in?

The patent cliff that people talk about, just the big pharma companies being got by?

Yes. Got it. Now I know what you're talking about. Yes, in health market. For us, the way our health markets operate, very similar to what we've seen over the last 12, 18 months. There's basically no change, which is that we continue to see in medical research the same trends that we see with other disciplines of research, similar trends across. And we talked about those already. And when it comes to the rest of health, we're basically seeing continued and fast-moving format transition, since that business is now sort of in the midrange of formats, right? Sort of half-half. Getting very close to sort of half print, half electronic. You are at a rapid format transition from the old print world to the new electronic world. And we saw electronic revenue growth across all health markets essentially in double-digits, offset, of course then, by print declines. And if print declines were particularly severe, if you want to look at that, were particularly high, just like before and like they have been for the last couple of years now in print book sales to individuals, in particular, in Europe, Continental Europe, as well as in print pharma promotion, print pharma advertising. And as you pointed out, there are a lot of -- actually, a lot, but there's an increasing number of branded drugs that are coming off patent. They have been coming off and continue to do so. And that pace continues over the next -- or this year and will continue. So there are several of those coming off and therefore, we don't expect those general trends to change. Now clearly, the overall level that you transition from print to electronic in one of these businesses is dependent on where's the general economy is and what's going on…