Sir Andrew Witty
Management
Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody and thank you for joining us for the Q3 Analyst Teleconference. As usual, I'm joined by Simon Dingemans, our CFO, who after I made a few introductory comments will add his commentary to the quarter and then we'll open for Q&A. So, GSK's third quarter performance as seen had continued to deliver a broadly based sales growth, bring significant new products from our R&D pipeline to market and grow returns for our shareholders. If I turn to the numbers first, total sales were up 1%, core operating profit up 11% and core earnings per share were up 16% to £0.289. The increase in core operating profit was driven by continued strong cost control, including a reduction in R&D expenditure and the delivery of a further benefit from the program of initiatives we started in 2012 to reshape and reduce certain long-term operating expenses. As we saw last year and signal to you earlier this year, contributions from this program are unevenly phased and we will continue to look for more of these types of opportunities to help deliver sustained reductions in costs and balance sheet liabilities. We continue to return cash to shareholders with the dividend again increasing by 6% to £0.19 a share and £1 billion of shares were repurchased by the end of the quarter. I can also, today, reaffirm our full year guidance of core EPS growth of 3% to 4% on sales growth of around 1%, both at constant currencies. Sales grew 1% despite the impact of a significant decline in China sales and the timing of various vaccine tender shipments. This was a resilient performance and is being driven by contributions across the group. In the U.S. first of all, sales grew 2% impacted by wholesaler and retailer…