Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the InterContinental Hotels Group Quarter 1 Results Conference Call. My name is Rosy, and I’ll be your coordinator for today’s conference. For the duration of the presentation, you will be on listen-only. However, at the end of the call you will have the opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand it over to your host Catherine Dolton to begin today’s conference. Thank you.

Thanks Rosy and good morning everyone. This is Catherine Dolton, Head of Investor Relations at IHG. I’m joined this morning by Paul Edgecliffe-Johnson, Chief Financial Officer. Before I hand over to Paul for the discussion of our results, I need to remind you that in the following discussion, the Company may make certain forward-looking statements as defined under U.S. Law. Please check this morning’s press release and the Company’s SEC filings for factors that could lead actual results to differ materially from any such forward-looking statements. I’ll now turn the call over to Paul.

Thanks Catherine and good morning and possibly good afternoon to you all. Thanks for joining us today for our first quarter trading statement conference call. I’ll begin with some of the highlights in the period before covering each of our regions in turn and I’ll then open the call up to questions. So we made good start to the year driving RevPAR up 1.5% against a backdrop of weak oil markets and the earlier timing of Easter which affected several of our key markets. We increased net rooms count by 2.7% year-over-year opening 5,000 rooms in what is typically our slowest quarter for openings, and we signed more than 15,000 rooms into our pipeline, our fastest first quarter rate for 8 years taking into 220,000 rooms. This gives us a 13% share of the active global industry pipeline which is around 3 times our share of open rooms means we remain well set for organic market share gains. At the same time, we continue to focus on the quality of our portfolio exiting rooms as and when necessary to ensure that our brands remain attractive to get to menus. In line with previous years we anticipate that the run rate for exits will decrease from the level we’ve seen in the first quarter and for the full year we continue to expect the removal rates of between 2% and 3% of opening rooms count. Looking now at our brands, while we focus our development efforts, not just on expanding the presence of our existing brands, but also in gaining momentum and traction for our newest brands, the Holiday Inn brand family continues to be our engine for growth. It accounted for around two thirds of our openings and filings in the first quarter, the best signings performance for the brand…

Yes of course. [Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from the line of Steven Kent from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

I wanted to have a broader conversation with you about unit growth opportunities and your pacing as RevPAR continues to slowdown, are you seeing either a lower propensity of developers to want to build your hotels and on the same time maybe some issues on the financing front?

So development continues to be a very significant part of our growth story, so we've got the RevPAR growth but also the new units additions and certainly in the first quarter the signing that we saw around the world with 15,000 rooms were very strong, so in the Americas we signed 11,000 rooms and that was 20% up on first quarter 2015, 4,000 rooms in China which was 10% up on the same quarter of 2015. So that continues to be really strong, you remember that we talked about at the prelims that we were investing more behind in development resources because we felt that there were some deals that we weren’t able to fully take on because we just didn’t have enough people out in the market. The performance that we've seen in the first quarter is not advantaged by that investment yet, so we do still see a lot of demand for our brands and I think if you think about where we play and the strength of our brands, I think it's earlier perhaps to get financing for them limited service brands are named by lenders to performed very well on a cash on cash basis and they were picking a lot of locations. So perhaps they are an easier sell than some other brands out in the market.

And then just because I am intrigued by it you said you have a next generation guest reservation system, can you -- I didn’t hear you discuss it what are the enhanced features that you're going to be focusing it on?

So this is the program that we've been talking about a little time with Amadeus. Where Amadeus building a new engine if you like for the guest reservation system and we’re bringing our ecosystem on top of that, so that’s being going on for a little while. And that is going to launch in 2017, industry wide potentially industry wide platform and that the engine will be available to other market participants and our proprietary software for our revenue optimization software, revenue management software et cetera which is ours will not be available to others but the back end will be.

The next question comes from the line of David Katz from Telsey Group. Please go ahead.

So the two things I wanted to ask about are one Kimpton you know that you call out is starting to accelerate and it looks like at the moment it’s entirely an Americas brand. Is that something that you think you can grow internationally and is that in the works and something that just takes a little longer to accelerate?

And yes when we bought the brand, I guess at this time last year it was very specifically because both the Kimpton team and ours felt that there was an opportunity to take it internationally, create a major platform in the U.S. but taking it onto the next level did require to linkup with a global operator. That was the plan then and that continues to be the plan now. We’ve signed the first one outside of the U.S. in Amsterdam. We’ve actually got one signed up in Canada I am not sure if that really counts particularly as international but…

I think it does yes.

Okay. And then there is a number of other prime global cities where we are in discussions with owners to take Kimpton and also expect to see more progress on that through the year. So an awful lot of interest but we’re making sure we’re getting them into really good real estate locations. That’s the focus rather than just allowing them to be signed anywhere they work best when they’re in really strong on the locations.

And what kind of level would you consider, where is the tipping point in terms of scale on a brand like this, is it 100 hotels, is it a couple of 100 hotels?

I mean considering together we think about the penetration we’ve got in the U.S. market and you think about the number of hotels that the brand has in say Washington DC and had in San Francisco and it is a brand that often is relatively smaller hotels so you could have multiple ones in big cities. You got to have the right guests staying there who wants to stay at Kimpton, but the guest needs date is something that is there across Europe, I think it would be really successful in Europe people are looking for boutique brands and in Asia in China let’s say there is an awful lot of demand so I can see it getting to a decent unit count every time. And it’s never going to get up to the level of a Holiday Inn express I mean we’re not trying to take it there to be ubiquitous but it’s certainly got a lot of runway for growth.

Now just comparing the tone of what you’ve put out and the numbers that you’ve put out with some of the other large competitors that have already talked to us. In one case, a competitor used the term I guess a great thaw for the remainder of 2016 versus 1Q where there is a lot of concern about whether the cycle was really over and much more discussion about the downside but I think it would seem from them that their tone was relatively positive. How would you classify the tone of your outlook for the remainder of the year?

Unfortunately we don’t give guidance as you know David but what we’ve tried to do is help the underlying performance we’ve seen and so in the U.S. in particular which I know is there are a lot of people have focused their attention. In the first quarter, you’ve got oil market down 10% the non-oil markets up 3.3% and with about in the 100 basis points impact from Easter. And then as we think about what sort of comp we are lapping, if you think about the first quarter of 2015 with those oil markets were maybe 1% down and then quarter 2 and quarter 3 and quarter 4 of 2015 got worse. So minus 5 minus 5, minus 10, so as we move through the year we are going to be lapping against the easier comp and for the second quarter you got to have the Easter impact coming back in. So I think that there is plenty to be sort of confident about and we’re not providing specific guidance but there is certainly some things that hurt the first quarter more than we expect them to hurt the rest of the year. If you look across our business as a whole, you’ve also got in the Middle East you’ve got the negative 10% growth there shading the strong performance in the other market so for those 1.5% in RevPAR if you take out any market that are oil impacted you’re up at 3.4% even after that Easter impact.

And just lastly if I can ask about, kind of the M&A landscape I am certainly not going to ask you what you want to buy or what you would buy but if you could just give us your overall view about the industry and the M&A landscape and what opportunities are looking like presumably you look at everything, but what kinds of things you're seeing and how that's evolved over the past couple of quarters?

I would certainly try to David I guess we kicked off the M&A cycle with the acquisition of Kimpton, and we bought back because really strong brand a lot of brand equity there and very clear in terms of the management contact so that was something that then we could take internationally and that is what we like, it is something that got scale in one market, but then a lot of opportunity and a lot of guest requirement and owner preference for it so we could build around the world. Frankly something else comes up, but like that like a Kimpton we would look at it very-very hard and equally we're quite disciplined in how we look at acquisitions and we do want to make an appropriate return on capital employed. So we don't have to pay, so it got to be something that as we look at the growth that we can add onto a potential acquisition it penciled out for us and we look at everything and we are already the largest player in the luxury segment, we're of course by far the largest player in the midscale segment and the mainstream segment, we've got the biggest loyalty programs in China. So we play in all the large markets there, so there is a lot of organic growth for us if we can add to that where good M&A opportunity like another Kimpton then we absolutely well.

[Operator Instructions]

We have got no further questions, then thank you very much everybody for dialing in, really appreciate your interest and Rosy I think that we can close out the call. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining today's conference. You may now replace handsets. Thank you.