Jakob Stausholm
Management
Thank you, JS. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. As JS has already told you, we have today disclosed a set of strong financials. When you look at the profit and loss and cash flow statement from top to bottom, you'll see that all underlying comparisons from the first half of this year to the first half of last year have improved. Our top line has improved by 3%. However, if you exclude the coal businesses that we divested last year, the underlying growth is 7%. We saw a double-digit improvement in EBITDA, and we saw an even stronger improvement in cash from operations and free cash flow due to our high cash conversion in the first half. Following our project update on Oyu Tolgoi announced on the July 16, we've impaired the asset value with a net income impact of $0.8 billion. We've taken a cautious approach which captures the average of a range of potential outcomes. This Oyu Tolgoi impairment represents the main variance between IFRS net earnings of $4.1 billion and underlying earnings of $4.9 billion. JS will provide a further update on Oyu Tolgoi later. Because of strong earnings and a strong cash conversion, the Board was able to both increase the interim dividend to $3.5 billion, while we continued to strengthen our balance sheet as demonstrated by the reduction in pro forma net debt. Now let me step back before diving into the details of our results. The value creation, expressed in terms of profitability and growth, is strong for Rio Tinto. Our profitability continues to improve and reached the highest level on recent record in the first half. We saw our return on capital employed reach 23%, and this is based on underlying net earnings after tax. Despite being in a very capital-intensive business, our…