VICTORIA PLC (VCP) — Half-year Report for the six months ended 30 September 2023

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the VICTORIA PLC Half Year Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q and A tab that's just situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so, and these will be available via your investor meet company dashboard. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll, which will appear on your screens now. And I would now like to hand you over to executive chairman, Jeff Wilding. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, and thank you very much to everybody for join joining the call. I think the to before I hand over to Brian to take you through the numbers, there's just a quick introduction I'd like to give about the macroeconomic environment. Clearly, there's very little we can do about that, and that's driving consumer demand for product, obviously, not just ours, but more generally. However, the thing that gives us confidence in the future is demand always recovers, and it recovers sharply. And the reason for that is when a consumers are feeling less confident about the future, have less disposable income, or housing transactions are lower. That doesn't mean that as I've said in the statement to the shareholders yesterday, that doesn't mean that the stain on the carpet goes away and the ceramic tile that's cracked in the bathroom magically repairs. And so the moment consumers start to feel confident about the...