Sir Andrew Witty
Management
Thank you very much. Good afternoon and welcome to this Q2 call. With me is our CFO, Simon Dingemans as usual. As you can see from the results we have just published, we delivered a strong second quarter, with group sales up 4% CER to £6.5 billion. Sales growth was generated across all three businesses in the company, and was particularly driven by new pharmaceutical and vaccine products, which for the first time, had sales of £1 billion in the quarter. In the same quarter last year, this portfolio had sales of £446 million, so clearly a doubling over the year. The growth delivered and demand for these new products is one of the reasons why we have today announced £275 million worth of capital investments to increase our manufacturing capacity in the U.K. I am also very pleased with the continued progress we are making on cost control, and the delivery of integration and restructuring benefits, which are tracking ahead of schedule. Taking together for the quarter, we have delivered core earnings per share of £0.245, up 16% on constant currency basis. For the half year, core EPS growth was 12% CER. Given the momentum we have seen so far this year, we now expect to deliver core EPS of the upper end of the guidance we gave to investors in the first quarter. With 2016 core EPS percentage growth now expected to be 11% to 12% in constant currency terms. Clearly, currency has had a significant impact on our results for the quarter, both in total and core reporting, and Simon will talk you through these in more detail in a second. Moving to cash flow, net cash inflow from operating activities for the first half of the year was £1.7 billion, that compares to half from 2015…