Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today, and welcome to our 2017 Interim Results Presentation. I'm Keith Barr, Chief Executive Officer of IHG, and I'm joined by Paul Edgecliffe-Johnson, our Chief Financial Officer. We're once again holding today's results presentation by webcast. You can find the details on our website and on our stock exchange announcement, so please do log on, as we'll be taking you through a short series of slides over the course of the next half hour or so. It is my first results presentation as CEO I want to take the opportunity to introduce myself to those of you who have not yet had the chance to meet. I've worked in the hospitality industry for over 25 years and have been with IHG since 2000. During that time, I've hold a variety of roles. I've led our mainstream brands in North America and headed up our operations in Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific, before taking up the leadership of IHG's Greater China business in 2009. Since 2013 I've been based in the UK leading IHG's combined sales, marketing, distribution [indiscernible] and brand function as Chief Commercial Officer. As I've said to many of you it is a privilege to be taking over as the CEO of IHG and the results we're announcing today clearly shows the strength of our business, our people and our strategy. Our sector is a dynamic and as fast changing as ever. I've been part of IHG's Executive Committee for the last six years taking essential role in defining and executing our commercial plan, I'm confident that our strategy takes account of this landscape and puts us in strong position for the future. To recap on the strength of our position we've completed our major hotel…

Thank you, Keith, and good morning, everyone. We're pleased to report a good financial performance for the first half. On a reported basis revenue increased 2% and operating profit increased 8%. I will focus my commentary today on our underlying numbers as this gives the clearest explanation of our financial results. On that basis we translated 4% revenue growth into 7% operating profit growth by leveraging the scalability of our asset-light business and continuing our focus on disciplined cost management. This has allowed us to increase our fee margin by 150 basis points year-on-year, whilst continuing to invest for growth. Based on the current outlook, I expect the margin growth for the full year will be broadly in line with our long-term average. Interest charges fell by $1 million, reflecting the benefit of a lower average cost of debt following our recent bond refinancing, offset by higher levels of average net debt. Our effective tax rate of 33% is consistent with last year's interim results, but we do still expect it to be in the low 30s for the full year. The weighted average number of shares decreased due to the cumulative effect of the share consolidations following the special dividend payments made in May 2016 and May 2017. In aggregate, this enabled us to increase our underlying earnings per share by 27%. Reflecting this good start to 2017, and our confidence in the future, we have increased our interim dividend by 10%. Looking now at our levers of growth. We added 23,000 rooms to the system, the highest in 6 years. At the same time as adding these new high-quality representations of our brands, we remain focused on removing hotels that are not delivering a consistent guest experience, exiting 12,000 rooms. This took net system size growth to 3.7%,…

Thanks, Paul. Now I'll give you some highlights of how the winning model has continued to guide our focus as a business. Over time, we've developed our strong and differentiated brand portfolio to fulfill a broad range of stay occasions by evolving our existing brands, creating new ones and buying others to fill white spaces. Our in depth understanding of travel occasions and guest needs helps us to create distinctive brand that deliver a consistent and preferred experience. Using our insight, we continue to innovate and refresh our brands to ensure they remain relevant to changing guest demands and create value for our owners. I'm going to review in detail how our mainstream brand which are at the core of our business are involving. But first a quick update on how we continue to strengthen our position in the luxury, boutique and lifestyle segments globally. Starting with Intercontinental the world's largest luxury hotel brand. We have 188 hotels open globally including wonderful new addition with the opening of the Intercontinental Los Angeles, a 900 room flagship hotel for the brand. A further six are set to open in the second half of the year including a key property in Washington DC. In total we 63 hotels in the pipeline strengthening our leading position. The acquisition of [indiscernible] sold the white space in our luxury, boutique and lifestyle brand portfolio. We are enhancing the brands position in the US with a further six hotels expected to open in the second half of the year. We're rolling out the brand internationally with the openings in Grand Cayman and Amsterdam over the past eight months. We are also in advanced negotiations for more deals, with several letter of intent signed across Europe and Asia. Hotel Indigo is an example of a home grown…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Jamie Wolle from Morgan Stanley, Jamie please go ahead.

Thanks, good morning everyone. Three questions please. Keith you talked about throughout the acceleration in growth by increasing resources, if you could just maybe flesh it out a little bit or is there a sort of target for net rooms growth now. Could you get back to the sort of 5-6% growth rate the company's doing 10 years ago. Secondly in terms of this first half headline numbers 3.6% growth in fee revenue underlying, US pole is 2.1% so looks like the contribution of new space, new rooms etc was around 1.5% which looks quite low even adjusting for those rooms in Saudi, so could you give us a bit about what's causing that and the gap between the rooms growth of 3.6-3.7 and that number. And then finally it looks like the sideings are down quite sharply in the second quarter particularly in North America and you reference in the text how that also caused some lower signing on fees. Is that the new brand coating that sort of temporary slowdown perhaps in U.S. signings, so could that carry on or was that share loss to true, so if you could just talk a little about that please. Thank you.

Thanks Jamie, I’ll take these along with Paul. I think on the first we’re talking about accelerating growth and resources and where we see the future of opportunities. One of our key focus Jamie is creating capacity to invest behind growth and the discussion of the launch of the new brand in the America is a key thing to underpin that, so we're going to look to accelerate existing brands, how can we take 10,000 restaurants and scale it up now once its fully integrated, how can we launch new brands like the project horizon in the U.S. and accelerate growth there and also our existing brands by investing behind them, things like extended their stay at Candlewood Suites, how can we accelerate the growth trajectory their overall to. So when I think about the business is sort of, we got our existing brand portfolio that are well established brands, how we can refresh that is to accelerate them. We got some new brands, how can we accelerate those and then how can we still have the wide space in the brand portfolio to the launching of new brands a develop those organically. So I think in terms of what our future growth rate, we've talked about seeing that accelerating years to come. And also as we been managing exit, because we have real focus on quality over the years, we're moving a significant number of hotel room and we expect the percentage of exits to come down as we see our pipeline continue to accelerate Jamie, so we do expect the future growth rates of the company at a net rate to accelerate. In terms of the fee revenue first half, may I will turn it over to Paul to talk about that.

So when you look at the translation through from the new space, the RevPAR and how that translates through and you know you will look at the, when the rooms have actually come in and when we will have the available room to start and to generate a revenue and then the mix across the business where we say stronger and RevPAR growth and the impacts of the renegotiation of our joint venture in Asia, Middle East and Africa. So all of this have an impact and that translates through the revenue growth, we've seen enroll. In terms of this findings and how we performed, which course of the signings comes into is always side marginal and so, actually the signs have been strong, starting in China we're really good, we're continuing to be very pleased with our major signings in the U.S. market which held up extremely well but we’re not raising any impact there from the facts of the launch of the new brands and we did see quite a big siding through the holiday and club vacation brand in 2015 and we're lacking against that. But broadly, we remain really very happy with pace of signings in the business which is and we're driving a lot of organic growth for us.

So the reference in the results in the release to the lower fees, I guess signing on the fees, is that a sort of the year and could you quantify that profit revenue.

It is just the phasing of when the, but when we actually sign up the hotels over 2017, what brings us the signing of the --now you're talking a couple of million dollar about, not a number.

Our next question is from Jarrod Castle of UBS. Jarrod please go ahead.

Three as well, if I may. Keith, you mentioned, kind of, areas where you thought you weren't doing things as well as potentially could kind of do then. Maybe if you could just highlight some areas of where you could do better or improve the organization? I'd be interested, coming back to Jamie's question about growth accelerating, could we potentially see a gross CapEx going up overtime? And then just lastly I mean I guess again, broadly speaking the same strategy as what it's been for the past few years but interested to get your thoughts A on M&A and B on what you see as the biggest external challenges that IHG faces?

A broad range of question, then I think a lot of this up, actually in prelims in February and go in more detail as I can touch on them right now. I think having them with the company for 25 years and worked around the world, I think a broad perspective of what we do well in this company and where we can improved. And again one of my area is focuses on continue to I think how we can accelerate growth to drive net system side. In the fundamentally that’s one of the key areas we have to be focused on. And so as looking at how can we think about accelerating growth of launching of new brands and developing new brands and strengthen the performance and return on investment for our owners with our existing brands. And so that’s core part of our model. Also as we wind down some programs how do we retake the capacities behind those programs and reinvest into other areas for us. So GRS is a transformational program, it's coming into the delivery phase now. As that rolls out, then how can we then focus on other aspects of our digital gesture in revenue delivery systems to leverage GRS drive performance do so. I'm really looking at all aspects of the business along with Paul figure out where resources are best placed both functionally and geographically to accelerate growth of the company from a net system perspective, and RevPAR perspective. In terms of growth CapEx I'll turn that over to Paul to give some conversations about that.

Thanks Jarrod. I guess, a couple of things to say, one is our expectation is on the new brands, we're not really going to have to put any meaningful CapEx in Sanya. We would if we thought that it would accelerate the development of that brand but as far expectation is we won't have to. If you think about our long term perspective that we have been talking about so about the permanent capital gains in the business $150 million behind for maintenance and key money, we do think that is adequate for the growth that we are expecting and as we model that out over the next few years at least that goes to be around about the right number and frankly if you look back over the last few years, we haven't actually managed to deploy that much. So there is still a little bit of headroom in that number that we did decide to launch some further brands that did require a little of CapEx.

The last question is on M&A, which, of course, is always a interesting topic. We have had a very clear strategy over a number of years being an asset like company growing organically filling white spaces by developing new brands and also looking at existing brands. We also have headed down the path in M&A and we bought Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants to fill out a white space. And so M&A will always be something that we will consider to fill out a white space, however had to make sure that it is going to be accretive long term performance of the company being a smart transaction. Intangibly there's not a lot out there right now. There are few opportunities of companies that are freely and easily traded today, given the unique ownership structure that that’s out there and so we will always have our eye with that market place making sure that we understand when opportunities present themselves but we'll always be very thoughtful and disciplined about how we pursue M&A so we're not destroying value in the company.

Our next question is from Tim Ramskill from Credit Suisse. Tim, please go ahead.

A couple of questions from me please, firstly in terms of the sort of new brand sort of horizon if you look back at previous brand launches, they do take a very long time to have any sort of meaningful impact I'm just interested with your comment around acceleration, how you believe you can deliver brands to market more quickly than in the past, I'm just interested in sort of what the specific failings have been especially if it takes a long time? And then the second question is around the overall sort of performance of the U.S. industry I know it's difficult question but occupancy levels are at very high levels, supply growth is increasing but it's not enormous and yet overall the sort of growth is pretty muted. I just wonder if you could comment on that, particularly in light of, sort of, Marriott's commentary last night around kind of the outlook for the rest of the year in group business etc.?

I'll talk to you about horizon, having just come from the brand world. I think one thing we've really thought about is how can we develop new brand facet, we've a great understanding consumer insight kind of segment needs indications, we've got all that data, we've got that for use, how do we leverage that quickly, we don't have to start from ground zero every single time building new brand and so mapping out it really clear path if we can. I think also what makes it a little bit different is the level of engagement with our owners. We've had our Owner Advisory Board with us from day one talking about what are the core issues and things that they're concerned about and so we're not just building a product in a silo and then coming out to our owners and saying what works and what doesn't, they're co-creating with us and also Ryan has been linear to development program this is concurrent, so we've things happening in terms of design, procurement simultaneously, so we're really compressing the schedule for how you take a brand from concept into launch and really kind of making that part of our muscle memory as a company which we can leverage going forward. And I also think that other brands that we launched in the past have been in slightly different segments, when you think about it and that's our inherently slower growing segment taking more time to build the scale and this is playing into the mainstream where we've 1,000s of owners already who've invested in this segment and 100s have expressed interest already around this well too and it's a new build brand. So, all those things factor into a belief that we've, and insight we have about how we can really scale this up quite quickly once we launch it and seeing that growth trajectory take off, so there's a number of factors that go into that, but it just plays to our core strength, mainstream brand in the U.S. leveraging everything that we do well, and in terms of the U.S. growth.

If you look at what we've seen over lots of quarters now demand remains extremely strong; we've seen record levels of demand fall in many-many months; and over the last year or so what we've been doing is driving growth through optimizing the mix in the hotels and that allowed us to continue to drive the growth although it is in rather really muted due to the environment in the U.S. and I think that this stage of the cycle you would expect to be seeing more of the revenue growth coming through new unit which is what we're seeing and as Keith talked about it's still very strong demand from our owners for new product, but with our existing brands, and with new brands that fit in development sweet spot. That the land that they have to develop in what banks want to lend against, so I think there's still an awful lot of opportunity but unless we see a reacceleration of US GDP growth hard to see that it then starts the real reacceleration of the US RevPAR volume.

Could I first come back on your comments around you know sort of the future growth in the new brand. Jamie asked you specifically whether you'd set a target for the space growth, just to be clear so have you got any particular views on a plant communicate that will target the market maybe at some point in the next six to 12 months.

No we don't have any plans at this point to talk about external targets to the market. We're focusing right now again on driving the core business and then launching the new brand and how that will translate into growth and then we'll evaluate other opportunities.

Right, thank you.

Thanks Tim.

Our next question is from Richard Star from Bernstein, Richard please go ahead.

Good morning, three questions from me if I may. You've mentioned a few times on the call already about the wish to fill in some white space in your brand. I was wondering whether you could comment on where you see that white space being, obviously the midscale space but where else do you see space. Secondly just on the franchise plus in China, just the early learnings you got there. I noticed from your supplemental information the numbers are in a grade 50% occupancy and the rate below the managed Holiday Inn Expresses there but very-very small sample at this space or anything probably you can add on how that's performing. And then thirdly you said at the top of the call that you're fully asset light but there still seem to be a few hotels that seems to have moved the needle like Holiday Inn Aruba, the InterContinental Barclay New York. What's the plan currently for the remaining owned hotels, is there a plan to remove those from the portfolio some point over the next few years, thanks very much.

Thank you. So in terms of White Spaces we've met both our needs and occasion segmentation and price points for the portfolio and so the way we then prioritize is where do we see the highest value segments that are out there, where we have the ability to leverage our existing infrastructure enterprise to drive performance so launching another mainstream brand in the US plays in that space there's clearly opportunities in luxury as well so sitting above InterContinental we talked about being a space that we could pursue. There's also couple of spaces in resorts, there're spaces in extended stay, there's also a space that's clearly under kind of the collection brand opportunity and so there are a number of different territories that we’ve mapped out, the way that we have to think about it is how we want to sequence them, in terms of what's the highest value creation the speed to market and making sure we invest in the core business to drive that performance first and foremost, but they have to be scaled. Means that fundamentally going forward we launch brands that has to be able to scale up appropriately for the segment that we're going after. In terms of franchise plus I think that we have really you know early days, some great success there, we've invested behind the platform, invested behind the development resources in China now they're moving towards franchise and built that out. I think we had 24 signings I believe in the franchise plus program and we were just talking with the China team yesterday and seeing real momentum there overall. When it gets down into specific performance I haven't seen anything, haven't seen anything flagged there in terms of being a challenge or at least a learning, but again we know franchise quite well from the US. We're -- we've an evolved platform to work in China and we've constantly iterated as time goes on and we learned from it there, but really confident with our scale position over 300 hotels been there since the early 80s, we know the market we know the areas and really sense that there's a strong demand behind it and if there is any other comments on performance.

Express works incredibly well in China if you look at the occupancies that we get through expenses expected pretty much the same occupancies that we get in the North America market is a very well proven out around this, Jamie also talked about guests and owners. And the franchise started a new proposition we’re actually signed more than we thought and the once that we got the range is open tough and it will take a lot to run apart and get that full operational metrics but we're actually really enthused by what we've seen. And then coming on to your last question Richard, around the asset-light, we are effectively asset-light. We will always have a little bit of almost investment working capital but behind the strategic opportunities in the business the most significant to reach is the $150 million we put behind and even which we put in the three hotels in the North America market and those are performing well and we will defiantly look at recycling that capital out of it and putting it perhaps behind another opportunity if there was one to [indiscernible] brand, so we don’t think we need to do that behind a new brands launch, we have some other smaller investments 50% of being to go reside in New York again the hotels forming very well so. We marked, recycle that one there is a few others, the holding in New York Barclay, I wouldn’t expect us to feel short-term to medium term at least. So we will always evaluate how we best use the capital in the business and recycle it. But effectively all the big hotels now been sold.

Our next is from Julien Richer from Kepler. Julien please go ahead.

Two quick question from me, the first one back on the demand to keep in the U.S. do you see any changing international any demand and how do you expect a fix situation to moving down the [indiscernible] going forward and the second question, I would like to have your opinion on the recent acquisition made on the private hotel segments in the U.S., it seems that there is more and more stress on that hotels. How is your view at that going forward.

Could you state the second quarter again.

Looking on your recent acquisition we had, I think buying some share in [indiscernible] Collection, [Wyndham] Also, interested in the pilot content segments, I would like to have your view on that.

International demand, we seen very limited impact on international inbound demand into to the U.S. and through a largely domestic business going forward. If you look at our mainstream estate then they are staying principally domestic travel. I'm seeing strong international inbound in many, many markets as well too and then cases where there may be some outbound may have come off, its supposing domestic travel, so things like in the UK where may be people are traveling a bit more metro in UK, strengthening our UK performance there. So really no red flags from our perspective on international inbound in the U.S. in terms of demand.

In terms of the investment the high made behind, all types of accommodation, when we look at this area and we evaluate the opportunity there where it could become scale whether its really work with our revenue delivery platforms and our loyalty excreta and you could probably do something there, but just looking at which is the biggest opportunity for us, and certainly something like our new midscale brand. And then we will look at the other that are out there and think where it fit within the white spaces that Keith talks about it's probably not top of our list not to say that we would never do something there if the right opportunity came up. But there are some that probably fit better with our revenue channels and getting to that space.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question is from Jaafar Mestari from J. P. Morgan. Jaafar please go ahead.

I have two questions please, and they're both on Project Horizon. Firstly, on the price point, the $95 to $205 is that enough discount to Holiday Inn Express? And why is the white space not closer to say $85 which is the average mid scale ADR in the U.S. And secondly you said you wanted project horizon to become one of your largest brands in the U.S. what source of long term essentially here and we are talking about 40000 rooms like Crowne Plaza or is it potentially in the 100,000 rooms like holiday Inn brands in the fullness of time.

We are talking about how we approached the overall brand development opportunity, we did a very robust demand based segmentation for the U.S. mid scale market to really understand the consumers are in there, the stay occasions and the price points they were operating at to really understand where does this brand need to be position so it's not cannibalize Holiday Inn Express. And any time you launch a brand in a segment you are going to have some level of cannibalization. But what we did was focusing very much on the guest experience the room design the price point the innovations happening are in Holiday Inn Express with new breakfast new guest rooms, new public space clearly pulling them apart creating enough distance that in all the analytics that we did showing that an $85 to $95 range had minimal, minimal cannibalization with the Holiday Inn Express brand and especially where it is pulling in new customers to IHG from a huge segment of $20 million of revenue, 14 million customers to today are really decent franchise, unhappy with the existing brand offerings that exists today. And that’s because many of those brand offerings today are hotels that are in the second or third brand experience of their lifetime. They were sitting maybe in [IHE] one of our competitors we said that they no longer fitted in our brand portfolio because of quality and location they fallen down. And so huge opportunity for us to launch a brand at this price, but it’s a smaller room is different guest experience at different price point. It’s a different customer staying on different occasion so we are very, very confident with the analytics behind that. in terms of scale, we have used probably another scale brand for IHG and so you will be thinking more in the Holiday Inn Holiday Inn Express range going forward is the scale this brand should achieve given the scale of that segment of the industry and our ability to access those customers.

Our next question is from Angus Tweedie of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Angus please go ahead.

Paul you made a couple of comments about European demand. I was wondering if could elaborate on how you see the shape of that going forward perhaps until 2018. And then secondly on Chinese RevPAR performance I was wondering if you could give us a bit more color about any sort of, spillover you're seeing between Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, and Tier 4 cities, and how that's been trending as well?

So, in across Europe as you're aware we've been very busy with what we've seen, and I suspect we'll see a continuation of that demand in most of the market through the second half of 2017; again as we pointed out in the release we're lapping in the second half slightly a tougher comp so while the demand will be there, won't necessarily translate into supply same level of RevPAR growth but continues to be very encouraging, and really whether you look at the UK or whether you look at from or whether you look at Germany with the trade fairs there similar sort of pictures, so, and we're very pleased with what we're seeing in Europe at the moment. In terms of the Chinese RevPAR performance it's been proving out of what we've been talking about over the long term; there's a lot of demand there and we've seen in the last I guess 2.5 years RevPAR comes through -- RevPAR growth comes through in the Tier 1 cities as demand has stayed strong but supply has fallen back a little bit as there's enough hotels in those cities; in the first quarter we saw better growth in the top end of Tier 2 and we're really starting to see that now spread down a little bit through Tier 2 and some of the Tier 3 cities as demand is very strong and the supply environment is ameliorating a little bit and obviously we still want supply because we're opening a lot of hotels in this market but it is becoming more choosy and I think that's going to be really good for the long term RevPAR potential in those markets.

Our next question is from Stuart Gordon from Berenberg Bank. Stuart, please go ahead.

Steve have been pretty clear until recently that pace of system losses continue in line with the last few years but -- and pursuing some of this new growth it looks like if you're changing the spent somewhat just looking for some color why are you lowering the huddle for owners staying in the system because you think you're perhaps being too stringent or you expect the lot of the owners to potentially shift to the new brand rather than drop out of this completely?

So, in terms of the new brand we do expect that it'll be new build, so we're not anticipating that this is somewhere where people who would otherwise have left us would go, and we do continue to be very stringent in terms of quality and ensuring that our brand always deliver consistent customer experience; that said I think we've recycled through a lot of the hotels we want to leave. We do think that within 2% to 3% of exits that we've talked about the potential of that to come down, down to the lower end of that range but that's not about us reducing our quality requirement or letting people stay in, it's more that recycle to some of that hotel and also we brought in longer contract which means that we've more ability to manage those contracts and we then have the same deadlines looming in after all hotels [leaving], so I think we're managing the process a bit better as well; so absolutely no any reduction to quality requirement.

[Operator Instructions] We have no further questions online, so I'll hand back to you Keith and Paul.