Julie Brown
Management
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to our half-year results presentation. I'll start by covering the highlights of the first half and then Mike Frazzette, our Chief Commercial Officer, will give you an update on trading. I will then take you through the numbers and conclude with a summary. As usual, we'll take questions at the end. Some of you have asked me about Olivier. His treatment is progressing well and we expect this to be completed by late autumn, as we announced previously. He's remained actively involved in running the business throughout the period and he's no doubt watching this webcast. The underlying revenue growth in the first six months was 3%. The strong growth in our knee implant franchise continues at plus 7%, led by JOURNEY II our kinematic knee. And we have further extensions to this platform coming. Sports medicine joint repair goes from strength to strength, with 10% growth. Geographically, the U.S. grew at 6% and, excluding China and the Gulf States, the emerging markets grew in the mid-teens. Blue Belt was acquired at the beginning of the year and the integration has been very smooth. In addition to its good operational performance, we've made important progress towards expanding the indications with the NAVIO surgical system. Trading profit declined 3% underlying to $483 million, giving a trading margin of 20.8%. Significant headwinds from transactional exchange, Blue Belt, China and the Gulf States, have been mitigated by the Group optimization program and acquisition benefits, to leave a net decline in our margin of 170 basis points. Our EPSA declined 2% at constant currency. And, today, we also declare an interim dividend of $0.123, in line with our formula and representing 4% growth. For our UK shareholders, at current exchange rates, this translates to 9.4p per share, representing over 20% growth, due to the recent weakening of sterling. I'm now happy to hand over to Mike for an update on the Q2 trading performance.