James Fairbairn
Group CEO & Director

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us for our 2026 half year results. I’m Jim Fairbairn, the CEO; and with me is our CFO, Ben Fidler. And I’d like to do some brief introductory remarks. I’ll set the context and give some highlights, and then I’ll pass to Ben to go deeper into the financials. And I’ll then come back and talk about how we are continuing to make progress in executing the strategy, and then I’ll end with a comment on the outlook. So to start with the highlights, we are pleased with our good performance in the first half.

We are on track and on plan. We’ve reported core organic revenue growth of just under 10% and we’ll see strong demand in aerospace and defense and also IGT. Medical has also returned to growth. All of this has more than offset continued softness in automotive. And as we said we would, we have delivered margin improvement on the back of volume growth and our successful Optimise repositioning and restructuring.

And I’ll talk later about the pace of progress on Optimise and how we intend to go further. So in summary, we are on track and pleased with progress in the first half, and we are happy to reconfirm our expectations for the full year. Let’s look at the growth and also the momentum across the group. Across our total core