Olivier Bohuon
Management
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our Half Year Results Presentation. I'm here with Graham Baker, our CFO. He was in the room last time but not on stage. He joined us at the start of March; and also, with Phil Cowdy. You all know he's a smiley face. He's with us today. And I will start by covering the highlights of the half year, followed by a review of our second quarter trading performance. Graham will then take you through the numbers and our guidance, and we'll conclude with an update on strategy and on few topical areas. And as usual, we'll take questions at the end of the presentations. The underlying revenue growth of the first half was 3%. Currency reduced growth by one percentage point and the effect of disposal of GYN was two percentage points. We have started the year well in line with our plans and there are many highlights. We returned our Emerging Markets business to solid double-digit growth of 12%. Our Knee franchise delivered another period of above market growth led by a strong contribution from our JOURNEY II platform. In Advanced Wound Devices, PICO is transforming and expanding the way negative pressure is used and its strong growth continues. Our trading profit in H1 was nearly $0.5 billion, giving a trading margin of 21.1%. This represents a 30 basis point improvement on the prior year period. We have focused on improving our commercial and operational execution. As shown by the results, we're making good progress and there is still more to come. An improvement in tax rate and a one-off tax benefit had delivered EPSA growth of 15%, and Graham will cover this in more details. I'm pleased with this first half. Taking into account trading days, we improved our…