Anthony Habgood
Management
Good day, and welcome to RELX' Interim Results for 2018. Thank you for coming. And for those of you on our webcast, thank you for joining us. RELX continued its positive development in the first half of the year. Underlying sales and operating profit again grew satisfactorily across the board, and constant currency earnings per share were up 7%. This is reflected in the board's decision to increase both PLC and NV dividend by 6%. Although it is, as you all know, purely by chance that this year the formula produced the same growth rate for the dividends of each company. We have also had a more active acquisition period since the beginning of the year, and Erik will describe the thinking behind our most recent highly targeted additions. This is the last time that we will announce two separately calculated but linked dividends because the measures to remove complexity and increase the transparency of our corporate structure that we announced this February were overwhelmingly approved by RELX PLC and NV shareholders in late June, and they will become effective on September 8. From then, we will be one company, RELX PLC, with all the simplification that, that implies going forward. From September 10, the new RELX PLC shares will be listed and traded in London in sterling, Amsterdam in euros and New York in dollars, with full weighting immediately in the FTSE 100 index. And we also expect full weighting in the AEX index by the end of the year. So we've had another very busy and successful period. Thank you very much, and I will now hand over to Erik, and he and Nick will take you through the results presentation.