Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you all for joining us today online. In a few moments, Paul will provide you with details of our financial and regional performance for the 6 months ended 30th of June. I'll then come back to provide a brief update on our markets and businesses before we focus on North America and then take any questions. [Operator Instructions] So let me just start with a high-level summary of the first half. Our performance was in line with expectations with revenues at a group level increasing by 3.1% to $3.36 billion and with organic growth of 1.6%. Our International region delivered organic growth of 2.7%. And in North America, organic growth was 1.1%, increasing from 0.7% in the first quarter to 1.4% in the second. We delivered group adjusted PBT of $418 million and a group operating margin of 15.2%, 120 basis points lower than in the same period last year, reflecting the anticipated year-on-year reduction in North America. Cash flow conversion was healthy and the divestment of our French workwear operations remains on track for around the end of Q3. Now Paul will cover all of this in more detail shortly. Moving on to North America. On the right-hand side, at the time of our prelims in March, we outlined a number of priorities for this year aimed at improving our inbound lead flow. In particular, we've adjusted our marketing tactics to put greater emphasis on nonpaid or organic lead generation. And in the second quarter, we began to use a fuller suite of marketing tactics. We continued to enhance our customer proximity and local visibility, for example, to get improved results from local searches like "pest control near me" through the opening of our new satellite branches. And we've now increased the…

Thank you, Andy, and good morning, everyone. I'll run through the key financials of the first half, then move through our regional performance, then explain how our improving data analytics are helping shape our plans to improve our North American performance. Unless I state otherwise, all numbers are on a continuing operations basis, i.e., excluding our France Workwear business, which we announced the sale of at the end of May. I will talk more about that later. Any comparative performance will be on a constant currency basis. With the move to dollar reporting, we've also taken the opportunity to simplify and update our constant currency reporting to a more conventional basis. Overall, we've delivered a solid performance, in line with our expectations for the first half. Revenue was up 3.1% to $3.364 billion with organic revenue up 1.6%. North America was up 2% or 1.1% on an organic basis as pricing more than offset reduced volumes. Adjusted operating profit was $511 million, a decrease of 4.5% with the decline in North America more than offsetting higher profits in International. Our group adjusted operating margin was 15.2% I'm pleased with our free cash flow performance with cash conversion at 93%, ahead of our 80% guidance. This was driven principally by improved working capital performance, and this remains an absolute priority. Net debt to adjusted EBITDA stands at 2.8x, up slightly since the year-end, reflecting approximately $175 million of adverse foreign exchange impact on period-end net debt. We've maintained our half 1 dividend per share at $0.0415, payable on the 22nd of September to shareholders on the register on the 15th of August. Looking now at our performance in North America, where we saw revenue up 2.0% to $2.106 billion. Organic revenue grew 1.1% with quarter 2 at 1.4%, up from quarter…

Thank you, Paul. Over the next few minutes, I'm going to cover off a few important topics. First, I'm going to remind everyone what excellent markets we're in and take a look at their long-term growth rates. After that, I'll show that we've got an excellent opportunity in our International region, which now accounts for 37% of the group before shining a light on North America. Whilst around 80% of our North American business is our pest business, the other 20%, which rarely gets a mention, is our excellent business services companies, and they're all performing well. That will then leave us with our U.S. pest business, which is 25% made up of one-off jobs, but 75% of which is our contract portfolio. Getting the contract portfolio into consistent and healthy growth is our core challenge and our core opportunity. So I'll spend a fair amount of time discussing the 3 areas that we have to win in to achieve that contract portfolio growth and those being customer retention, pricing and vitally important, winning new customer contracts. So let's get underway, and I'll start with Pest Control, which accounted for 83% of group revenues in the first half. Over the past decade, the global pest control industry is estimated to have virtually doubled from $14.4 billion in 2014 to $27.3 billion in 2024, a CAGR of 6.6%. And in North America, market growth has broadly matched that of the International region at around 6.5%. This global growth was driven by key factors such as increased regulation and legislation, urbanization, the rise of the middle classes, consumer demand for higher hygiene standards and the impacts of climate change. Now encouragingly, the forecast growth for the next 10 years remains very healthy with the latest independent market forecast projecting market growth levels…

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Suhasini Varanasi of Goldman Sachs.

Two from me, please. On the termite provision claims that have been revised up in this period, can you maybe discuss what drove -- I mean, how should we think about future changes to provisions next year? So for example, next year, if the cost per claim goes up again, will there be another revaluation? I think that's the first part. And secondly, how should we think about claims generally into the second half of the year versus the first half? Is it evenly spread out? Do you expect any acceleration or any changes in the trends? The next question is on the quarterly growth rate. It's good to see the improvement in North America general pest control, including Business Services. But did you see any changes towards the quarter end on the growth in June? Or are you seeing any changes in July, for example? Any color that would be helpful.

Thanks, Suhasini. So the termite provision, yes, we put that up in the first half. It's a fairly mechanistic calculation. And although we're pleased with the progress we're making and that we're being able to reduce down the number of claims that we've got, our recent experience is that on the non-litigated claims, the cost of settling those claims, some of which are rather more complicated claims is up 9%. And as a result of that, as we look out over future years, then we have to increase the provision there. If -- to your question, what would happen in the second half and next year if we saw a variance in the cost per claim up or down, then it is sensitive to our most recent experience. So yes, it could come down again, it could go up. Our cash out in relation to the provision is in line with what we'd expected. And that's the number that I most look at because this is going to continue to be volatile as a number of factors come into play. In terms of the quarterly improvements, Q1, Q2, obviously, Q1, and I spoke about this at the first quarter results, that had the headwind of the extra trading day last year from the leap year. And then if you normalize it across the 2, yes, perhaps a little bit better in quarter 2, but broadly unchanged and certainly not at the level that we're aspiring to. And we don't give a comment on current trading. So not looking at July, July is actually not finished yet even, but we were encouraged, obviously, by the better performance that we saw on leads, which in due course, we would expect to lead into better sales and better revenues.

The next question comes from Oliver Davies of Rothschild & Co Redburn.

Just a couple of questions for me. I guess in Q1, you mentioned that the paid digital search returned to positive growth in March. And then you've obviously mentioned overall lead flow growing in June for the first time this year. So I guess a couple of questions on that. Are you able to give us an indication of the split between digital and kind of organic leads within that kind of total lead data? And then secondly, can you help us understand how digital and nondigital leads progress throughout the quarter? And then my second question, I mean, in terms of one-off jobs, I think you've seen a bit of a slowdown there, I think mid-single-digit growth last year. I think you mentioned 6% in Q1. So I guess, why have you seen a slowdown in the second quarter there?

Thanks. Yes, I'm not going to give you a split of our spend between the channels. I mean that's -- this is a competitive environment and where we spend in paid search means competitors look at that as we look at where they're spending as well. So it's a pretty competitive environment. The data we're showing here is all leads. So that includes paid leads, it includes organic leads and it includes tech leads as well. And really, what we're saying here is we did talk about the fact that we became over-reliant on paid search, and that's because we weren't yet able to get the organic channels working as we needed to. So what you've seen over the last 2 quarters, and in particular in Q2, is a progressive move by us to take money out of paid search and put it into organic search and into other broader channels, like I say, with Meta and top of funnel marketing advertising as well. So it's a migration of spend. We've kept the spend broadly the same across the period, but spending less in the paid area, but also happily the cost per lead coming down in the paid. So we're getting more effective and more efficient in the paid channels, but also deliberately spending fewer dollars there, taking those dollars and putting them into organic. So it is a very, very detailed endeavor here, and Paul and I get daily reports literally. At the end of each day, we can see what the lead performance is. We can see what's coming from paid, what's coming from organic and what's coming from technician leads. And broadly speaking, the story is paid leads down, organic up and tech leads up as well. But I can't give you -- I could, but I can't give you the breakdown of how we split that spend, but that's what you should expect to see more of in the future. I don't think we're close to optimizing where we want to be here, but we are encouraged by what we've seen, and we're certainly encouraged by what we've seen in the most recent weeks. So let's hope it continues into the second half of the year. Sorry, what was the question?

In relation to your question on one-off jobs, Oli. So it is always going to be a little bit variable quarter-by-quarter. And what we're really focusing on is driving better performance in getting our contracts signed up, and we're really focusing the sales force on to that because that's the key area of weakness that hasn't been good enough in recent times. So if we can address that, then obviously, that's recurring revenue, as Andy was talking about, is that subscription base. And so that's our biggest priority. We will see some variability in jobs quarter-by-quarter.

The next question comes from Annelies Vermeulen of Morgan Stanley.

I have 3 questions, please. So firstly, on your inbound lead flow, which you called out as very positive in June, 6.6%. Rollins also saw a very strong period in June, driven by very favorable weather. So could you comment on how confident you are that, that inbound lead flow was down to your execution on marketing relative to a very favorable market backdrop driven by sunshine? And then secondly, on this predictive churn model, could you elaborate on what do you look for in that churn model in terms of indicators that would imply a customers at risk of leaving? Have you had any indications of accuracy yet from that pilot where it's correctly identified customers that are looking to leave? And I'd also be interested if it's given you any more detail on why customers are canceling and sort of reasons for attrition. And then thirdly, just on door-to-door, you mentioned a full-scale deployment next year. Could you clarify, does that mean you're planning to roll it out across your entire portfolio in North America from the 23 branches, I think you said today? Or will that remain more selective in certain regions?

Thanks, Annelies. Yes, when the big yellow thing comes out in the sky, there's no doubt that, that has an impact on insects, crawling, biting, stinging insects. So there will be some weather in the numbers. It's incredibly difficult to sift that out and say what the weather impact is. But we are confident that we are seeing returns for the efforts that we're making. So again, I can't break it out and say how much do we think is weather, how much is self-help measures. We're certain that the things that we're doing, we can test and they are having an impact. And as we said, we're not going to get into month by month, but clearly, we wouldn't be sharing June data so positively if we weren't seeing some similar results in the month to date. So I think that's further evidence, this is not just a weather thing. But as I said, can we say it's going to continue through the full second half, not yet able to do that. The predictive analytical churn model won't surprise you, Annelies. It is an AI tool. And the great thing about AI is that we can set the model over multiple databases. So we measure customer happiness. We measure NPS. We measure customer satisfaction. We know when a customer has sent in a complaint. We know when a customer is paying late. We know when we've missed a customer visit. So we can put all of those data points into the model and ask the model to predict based on this, have we got a cohort of customers who statistically are more likely to churn than others. And then based on that, the question is, okay, so what do you want to do with that information? And that's the…

And the only thing I'd add on that, Annelies, is that like we have with the satellite branches where this year, we said and we have delivered that we would cover that within our existing marketing spend by just reprioritizing that in 2026 would be my expectation again. So although, as Andy says, yes, we've got plans for a full scale deployment, we're not signaling that, that's then going to lead to a major increase in the marketing costs.

The next question comes from Nicole Manion of UBS.

I have 2 questions, please. Firstly, you mentioned that one of the things you're still looking to address is the historic underinvestment in building some of your brands. I know there's a lot of moving parts at the moment in terms of the various investments you're making and you're having to rebalance things a bit as you've become over-reliant on [ paid for ], for instance. But I guess the question is, overall, are you confident that you can fund what you need to do by refunneling spend from one area to another? Or do you need to sort of still step up those investments, if that makes sense? And then secondly, just a clarificatory one really. You said you remain confident in the $100 million cost savings and 20% margin post 2026. There's a comment in there, I think, around refined time line. Can you just explain sort of what's meant by that precisely? And apologies if I missed something obvious on that bit.

Yes. Look, as we sit here today, I'm going to do this from memory. I don't have the data in front of me, but roughly 50% of U.S. pest revenues are branded Terminix, roughly 30% are branded with 1 of the 9 or 10 regional brands that I've mentioned before. So brands like Florida Pest Control and Western Exterminator and then roughly 20% are branded as independent standalones. So what that tells you is the independent standalones will cease to be branded as independent standalones, and they will become either Terminix-branded, which we think is well funded or they'll become 1 of the 9 brands. So what we are saying is we have to support those 9 brands alongside the Terminix brand. The effort that has gone in, in the last quarter into those 9 brands or most of them is going into organic search. So there's a lot of things you can do with brand support. We've not gone down, for example, TV ads for the 9 brands. We have gone down TV ads for Terminix. So the majority effort to improve the performance of the regional brands is coming out of paid -- not coming out of paid, but reducing paid and really putting our efforts into organic search. So as we sit here, we're not saying we need to put more money. We think we've got the balance about right. But as we get better -- and we surely will get better. As we get better and we get smarter and we can see stronger demonstrable returns on investment for where we put those dollars, if there's a good case to say, hey, look, if you put an extra dollar here, you're going to get $4 back there, I'm pretty sure the CFO would be pushing us…

The next question comes from James Rose of Barclays.

I've got 3, please, 2 on leads and 1 on branch integrations. Firstly, on leads, could you talk about the quality of the improvement of leads you've seen so far to the conversion of ARPU? Are they better than what you've got from paid search leads last year? And then secondly, do you see that the leads you're getting are fueling contract sales more than they were previously rather than going into jobbing work? And then the final question is on the branches you've already integrated and have said are not up to standards. What are the execution improvements you've highlighted or flagged in those which you want to tweak or change going forward?

Thanks, James. Really difficult, and we're into master class level questions now, which is always a challenge certainly for me. Look, you've got 2 funnels at work here. You've got a marketing funnel and you've got a sales funnel. So in the marketing funnel, and those of you who are into this will be very familiar with what I'm talking about. You've got top of funnel activity, so building brand awareness all the way down to paid search and organic search at the bottom of the marketing funnel. And what we're saying is we're investing in the top of the funnel in brand awareness. Brand awareness is the best quality sort of leads because if you're searching for Terminix, that means you're very likely to buy from Terminix. So that's why we drive up the top of funnel and brand awareness. So as we see people calling us on the phone because they want to speak to Terminix, that's a very good chance that they want Terminix to solve their problem. If you go to the bottom end of the funnel and you have technician leads, the conversion rate of technician leads is not typically as good. And we call them creative leads because we've got our technicians trying to convince a customer that they need a solution that the customer didn't even know that they had a problem. So it's not surprising that the conversion of tech leads comes in at a lower rate. So this is always a mix effect. So it's really quite difficult to unpick that and give you a decent answer. But what I think we're saying is the quality of leads that's coming in through top of mind, top of funnel awareness brand-based leads is good quality, and we can see that improving. Technician…

The next question comes from Will Kirkness of Bernstein of Societe Generale Group.

I've got 3 questions, please. Firstly, I just wonder if you could give any sort of metrics on the satellite stores in terms of revenue profile or EBIT ramp as they start to mature or perhaps return on investment. Secondly, just on the U.S. retention, the 85% -- obviously, you've talked about that before in terms of where the group is, but I think you've maybe felt that it would be tough for North America to get there. So 85% as a sort of target feels like a step up. I just wonder if you're seeing something positive in the data that's giving you a bit more confidence there. And then my last question just around Hygiene & Wellbeing. I think Q2 growth there was 0.4% organic. I just wondered if you could quantify -- you talked about being [ price-led ]. I wonder if you could talk about what the price component was.

Yes, let me try and unpack that. I don't think you're going to be surprised with my answer to the first question in terms of giving you the metrics in terms of the satellites. I've probably said this as much as I can, really. The satellites are small. So a small physical office, often a sort of business park or high street location, branded Terminix typically with a few people working in the office. And these are people that already exist in the organization. So it's the incremental cost of the operation is the lease cost and running the office. The technicians already exist from the mother branches. The salespeople already exist from the mother branches, admin already exists. So the branches per se don't carry a big cost other than the actual cost of the physical location. So the number of leads that come in, again, I haven't disclosed that, but they start slowly. And until you get -- I think it's 10, until you get 10 reviews, customer reviews, the big search engines don't recognize you. So when I talk about these branches getting optimized, you've basically got to get loads of customers spotting you and making happy reviews, 5-star reviews. Once you get a volume of 5-star reviews, then you turn up on search. So in terms of return on investment, it's relatively straightforward for us to get the number of leads to more than pay the cost of the branches but that's not our ambition. Of course, our ambition is to drive up significant volumes of local search. So we fully funded the cost of the 100 and 150 branches all within the operating plan. It's not like we've had to put a big chunk of extra cost into the business. On U.S. retention, you're absolutely…

The next question comes from James Beard of Deutsche Bank.

Just one question from me. On their call last week, Rollins referenced the impact of Google AI summaries on leads traffic to their websites. And I was just wondering whether you've seen the same impact during the period as they have and what you've been doing to manage and mitigate that.

Thank you, James. The master class continues, I love it. And yes, Google indeed did release their AI mode in Google Search. I think they released it in the States actually about 4 months ago. They just announced they're releasing it here in the United Kingdom. It's part of what's been going on, frankly, in search now for the last year or two. I read a statistic the other day and it was on ChatGPT, so it must be true, mustn't it? The statistics said that in the United States over the last 12 months, 60% of all searches no longer result in a click, by which that means that either people weren't searching for something that they wanted to buy or it means that they got their answer from AI. And I mentioned this, I think, last time we were talking. Part of what we're doing in -- I mentioned we've refreshed 200 pages of content and a lot of that in the regional brands as well as the Terminix brand. What we're doing now is making sure that the content of our sites is the content that the AI model, the AI large language model, is looking for. So you have to have better quality content. You have to anticipate, well, what are the questions that searchers are really going to be asking and what are the answers that AI is going to give them and does your website have the content to feed that answer. Because if it does, the AI answer will often feature you in their answer. So I know it's a bit wordy what I'm saying there. The short point is we're very aware of the Google changes. We're a very -- we're a Google company. We often describe ourselves as a Google company. We're very close to Google as an organization. So we're very aware of the changes, and we've been very, I'll say, quick. But we're working hard on content to optimize the content to the latest changes in the AI model. And it's not just Google, other search engines are doing similar things. And so this is not a Rentokil Terminix phenomena. It's not a pest control phenomena. It's a global phenomena with the big search engine companies trying to make sure that they can keep their income from search. And we have to be nimble and quick and thoughtful. And that's what we're doing. So we're focused on the quality of the content to match it up with what the AI likely answer to the most obvious questions will be.

The final question comes from Suhasini Varanasi of Goldman Sachs.

I just have a couple of quick follow-ups, please. Is there an update on the appointment of the CEO in North America? Any update there? And just on the guidance for the year, when you say it's going to be in line with market expectations, if we had to mechanically just adjust for the Workwear disposal, I think your consensus on company compiled is $922 million of PBT. So we just take off $57 million from that, which was last year's Workwear profits to get to this year's number on PBT?

Thanks, Suhasini. I will certainly cover the first one. Look, CA North America, I'll say something when I've got something to say on the subject. What I will tell you is the guy that's running it, Alain, who I mentioned before, he's worked with me for 16 years and spent 16 years running pest control businesses around the group and running marketing, is doing a brilliant job. He's absolutely flying in that role. The team have responded to him really, really well. So I'm very happy that we've got Alain there on an interim basis. And when we've got something we can update, I'll gladly share it. But I'm happy with where we are. I'm happy with the process.

Suhasini, on your question around guidance, it is unavoidably a little bit more complicated with the accounting that we have to use now for this discontinued operation. Our commentary around being in line with expectations is on an apples-to-apples basis. So that consensus number that you referenced is effectively what we look at our internal expectations against and say, yes, we believe we are in line with that. When the business does exit, then at that point, I think consensus will change. People will take it out and there will be an adjustment for the profit exiting, but also for the depreciation. So those factors will both have to be put in. But as we look at what people have for the France Workwear business in their numbers, then extracting that should still mean -- will still mean that we are in line with market expectations post. But thank you for the question, Suhasini. And I think that wraps up the call today.

Thanks, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Really appreciate it. And I look forward to updating you with the Q3 results in, well, just a few weeks' time. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks, everyone. Bye now.