Hi. And good morning to everyone in the U.S., it's Mark here, and I'm here with Paul Richardson, our CFO; and Andrew Scott, our Chief Operating Officer. I think what we'd like to do let me take quickly through results for the first half a little bit about how we see the future, the presentation this morning is online, and then we have to give you the chance in the U.S. or where most you are to ask any questions that you have, if you have so we're trying to keep the front of it shorter rather than longer. I think before Paul takes you through the numbers quickly just to put the results in context and how we think about them. I think the good news is that it's the first quarter of positive growth, I think if you see in four quarters, our last quarter's Q1 2017, 0.7% so make positive sense for the first half and I think that's positive. We are not declaring victory I think we have the July number in the statement which takes us again to 0.3 for the year, but we are expecting to hit that number -- well, not hit that number, we are expecting to raise our net sales less pass-through cost growth slightly in the full-year to similar with first half. I think the second relevant metric is the headline PBIT operating margin. It's slightly lower from 13.7% to 13.3% and Paul I think quality all going to that piece of it a little bit more detail in this presentation. To put that in context, it's around £20 million out of the cost base of £5.3 billion. I think if you look at the control of the cost, we had good control of our stock, we invested some of…

So, I got work with the slides on the screen. Mark's really covered a lot of highlights on the first slide, Slide 3. The key points as he mentioned obviously it was the like-for-like less pass-through cost growth of 0.7 in quarter two, making 0.3 for the half year, and we have also made it clear that North America is still our challenging market, actually the decline in North America was greater in the second quarter at minus 3.3 compared to quarter one at minus 2.4. It was challenging in the advertising, data investment management and brand consulting areas, but good improvement came through North America and on media based management business but it remains a very high priority, if we are to improve the overall group performance. We talked about a lot -- there is a very detailed kind of helpful water flow chart as we call it on the margins difference, which basically shows that the stock cost remains flat. The stock cost before incentives is slightly better. Incentives however were slightly higher, which actually netted out the stock cost ratio being flat. The other elements for change were some property costs of 0.1 and other operating costs of 0.2. Making an overall change of 0.4 margin points in the half year, which is likely to be the expectation on a full-year basis compared to last year's margin. So it's basically down 0.4 on a full-year basis as well as a half year basis. Have we had kept staff under good control and headcounts and average to be reduced by 2,000 staff for about 1.7%. As we mentioned, very good progress on the cash proceeds from disposals with no loss of revenues to the group and minimal impact on profit so far, which at the half year asset…

Thanks, Paul; and so I’d just talk briefly about how we see strategies evolving. It’s early days and to some extent it’s my second day on the job though, so Andrew and I have been working on this for the last 4.5 months and we haven’t been standing still, we’d be getting up with developing the thinking as work underway within the Company and it’s important to what we do. I think the starting point is that I am optimistic about the future for WPP and for our industry. When I talk to clients, I talk to lots of clients and this is lots of clients over the last three or four months, they value what we do, but they want us to do something differently. They value the strong set of assets we have, the 130,000 people in 112 countries around the world help them build their businesses. We’re in most cases one of the most important partners, if not their most important partner in that business. And they want us to succeed and across that they value the technology, data capabilities that we bring. And but they won’t have easier access to that and when I listen to clients, and if our task is to return WPP sustained growth, I think we need to start by focusing what our clients want. They want us in a simplistic terms to be easier to navigate, have fewer silos within the organization, have more resources placed on the things that they value in creativity, technology, data and few other things that do value and a back offices, finance functions. They want us to continue to have a broad geographic spread, but make it easier to organize our resources in far flung markets to help them succeed in local markets and many…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] We will now take our first question from Daniel Salmon from BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Welcome Mark to the CEO position. I think versus your predecessor, one of the key themes that I've heard is certainly more focused on competition from the consultants in your prior role and particularly I think you got to see it up close. On the earlier call today and meeting in London, you've talked a little bit that Wunderman putting teams in side, on site it at your clients a little bit more, I know that’s not new for agencies. But it does sound to me like something I think is associated a little bit more with how a consultant mark didn't work. And but what I’m really asking about, if there are two or three things that you would highlight that are most important to competing with that group that you liked to see go forward at a high level? And then just the second one in-housing continues to be a regular conversation, and it does seem that it's shifting a little bit from certain capabilities around social and programmatic that we were talking about a few years ago to things being a little bit more orientated to some services like creative. I would love to hear your high level view Mark on where you see CMOs looking to do things themselves more and maybe a loop that back to how go into market can change for your agencies to help them with those changing needs?

So, I think probably that's right. I saw the competition more acutely at Wunderman and perhaps we see in other parts of the business. I think the as someone asked the question this morning it's true. The competition is in part because the consultants are doing some of the things we historically did and in part because we are doing new things that we didn’t use to do that the consultants did. So I would look at it in both directions. And within that I think lies what we need to do to be successful. I think we have to understand how to implement the end marketing technology in our company and help to help clients develop programs that run through from strategy to creative to the execution of technology and where we were at successful Wunderman where we can put big programs that are in place with clients. I think the second thing we need to do is hire somewhat different mix of talent probably we need to hire some talent in the consulting companies and we are doing that. The new Head of Wunderman in Singapore came from Accenture. The person that ran our Shell pitch came from Deloitte Digital. But though interestingly, these had agencies backgrounds before so I think that there is a sort of hybrid individual that we are heading towards, setting with new different types of talents to understand technology, but we also understand how agency businesses work. And when working in agencies so the attract thing is not one way. I mean I think in the last two weeks, we need to remember is creativity, I mean the value of our business is the ability to generate ideas, to inspire consumers, to develop visions around how companies can grow. And I do think…

We take our next question from Peters Stabler from Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead sir.

One question for Mark and one for Paul. Mark, we’ve long believed that the migration at digital has been a tailwind due to higher labor intensity associated with execution and measurement and particularly on the media side. Wondering if the industry is reached the sort of tipping point on the creative -- creative agencies where an accelerating reduction in the number of non-digital creative assets, as combined with an efficiency gains in digital to now present a headwind where overall, the non-working spend as the total percent of spending is now structurally lower. And if so, can we see additional pressure or do you see an equilibrium being reached at some point? And then secondly, for Paul on Slide 14 where you break out the margin by region just wondering how we should think about that longer-term given the pretty significant disparity advantage in the U.S. would you expect the U.S. to the even with a small amount of growth to trend toward the rest of the group or for this relationship to stay intact any insight there would be appreciated?

I mean I sort of understand your analysis I think trying to get to the same conclusion that you do as I see how you look at it. I mean I think that there’s definitely pressure on the traditional parts and I think that has been more intense in the last couple of years. I do think that’s continued growth in the digital parts and they’re more labor intensive as you pointed out there’s increased execution and volume of data ironically means that to over analyze to be more analyzed, but I think it’s really more that in part because the way we are structured, they are cutting pressure on the traditional without being structured to capture the new and in some ways the trick that we need to do to better lead to the work line, to better alignment of our resources and greater use of common production and technology platforms is captured in new areas of growth from clients. I think if we talk to clients whilst they’re sort of some parts of traditional market budget made out in cut I think overall what they’re spending is increasing particularly when you include the newer clients. So I think there’s a number of factors, it’s capturing the new work from existing clients and also growing and being relevant to capture and particularly being relevant and competitive with the new clients.

So, it's Peter on margins. So I think in the way I think about it is traditionally we’ve had best margins in North America pretty closely followed by some of the margins in Asia Pacific, Latin America, Africa, Middle East combined. And the weakest margin that’s traditionally being sort of European market, and I think it really comes down to some pretty simple sort of economics in terms of -- firstly, it's the scale of the budget that we operate with and clearly the budgets in North America are bigger and the opportunities are great to make sense in a sort of more homogenous market than many. So that will by trend often give you the biggest opportunity. It's where we can transfer skills between offices and between businesses more easily compared to say some of the European markets so obviously language does play a factor. Then the second element is sort of the frictional cost of change, and obviously in a changing revenue environment it's really how you advance to that opportunity in the USA, you can as we call it turn on the fix you can ameliorate your cost very rapidly with a change in revenue outlook where it's so much harder to do in certain Asian certain European market. And finally, I think the social cost in some of the European markets require high. So all those factors tend to give you the belief that America will with its current sort of labor structure still be a very strong market in terms of performance and again labored it for the fixed in terms of cost. Our market share, our market positioning, I think gives us very good scale and presence on the Asian and Latin America markets. I think that should be good. So I think the order of ranges of prophecy will remain pretty similar going forward.

We will now take our next question from Doug Arthur from Huber Research. Please go ahead.

When you look at the second quarter in particular, you really had pretty good growth in an awful lot of major markets, you know, U.S North America and then by sector data investment management being the laggards and ongoing laggards. So I guess is as you look at your operations over the next six months is there anything you can do from a structural point of view in North America in the data investment management sector to change the growth trajectory or do you think it's mostly cyclical?

Well I think, I don’t want to focus on some of those investment management is that it could happens, it’s the core markets the UK, U.S, Germany, France in a certain degree staying. So and insight businesses still finding it challenging there in those markets where as we have often said the insight business in the software market is not from a specific actually doing very well. So I think there are competitors to how we carry out that business, not all with the same economic model, but we’re to a certain degree hostage to where the market there major markets are and while we’re all making investments in the fast growing markets they don’t scale at the same pace as the business we have in North America, UK and Europe. So that will be it needs the industry to perform better on our own businesses so to keep up with that I think some of our businesses within the camp operations are very strong they are making investments the panel business is doing really well some of the consulting businesses are doing very well. And that is again like always a mix bag of how we are doing. So that sense I don’t see any major change. The U.S. as we mention it's been really four quarters now finding more of disappointment and first it was so triggered by I think since like major account losses, if you recall into the AT&T days it's actually principally affected the USA. The Volkswagen which had some effect, but obviously more in Europe as well, and I think we've gained the momentum strongly in the media business and seen that come back. The other businesses having yet I think recovered the strengths that we they should have in the major American market. So, I think that's the work we've got that's the challenge we've got to take on. They are trying to get since back in some of the other businesses that haven't been as successful in North America over the last 12 months.

There are no further questions at this time. Mr. Read, I’d like to turn the conference back to you for any additional or closing remarks.

Well, thank you very much everyone. I don't have anything else to add at this point. And we'll see you in the few months, if not before. Thank you.