Sir Andrew Witty
Management
Thank you very much and good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to this Q2 Conference Call. I’m going to also in addition to talking about the quarter just make a few comments on the current situation in China, although these will be limited given the status of the investigation. Let me first of all start by just summarizing where we are for Q2, and I'm pleased to say that our business is performing well. We’re delivering on our strategy to improve financial performance for the group and during the quarter, EPS grew 4% to 26.3p in commission exchange rates and we’ve increased our dividend by 6% to 18p a share. Importantly, we continue to deliver very encouraging progress on our pipeline, this quarter alone we saw three major new products approvals in the U.S. Breo a new treatment for COPD and Tafinlar and Mekinist for the treatment of metastatic melanoma. These new medicines are clear evidence of the innovation GSK is producing in areas of higher medical need. And these approvals also speak to GSK’s rate of R&D productivity with further readouts expected on 13 more assets over the next 18 months. I can also let you know that the first two of those 13 have already readout positively in the last few months. We’re very optimistic that we can deliver valuable new product flow. And in terms of current products, Group sales grew 2% this quarter in commission exchange rate with strong performance across the Group. We’re very pleased with the performance of our U.S. Pharmaceutical and Vaccine business, which was up 5%, the best performance for long time held by strong growth in Respiratory, Oncology and Vaccines. In emerging markets in Asia-Pacific, pharmaceuticals were up 7% while vaccine sales were down 13, reflecting the timing of vaccine tender shipments, which…