Our performance is encouraging. In a difficult consumer environment, we achieved a 1 per cent increase in overall sales. Our underlying sales, excluding the effect of regulatory price changes, are flat year-on-year – a good performance against the wider retail market where overall like for like sales fell by around 2 per cent.
When we met in May I told you about our intention to focus on the health and beauty market. These figures reflect that – with volume growth of 5 per cent in pharmacy and 7 per cent in beauty. We also delivered our plans for margin, cost growth and working capital.
Of course, profits are lower reflecting our continued programme of making Boots a modern, efficient, competitive retailer, with continued investment in price and the infrastructure.
We are maintaining the interim dividend at 9.1p.
Jim will comment further in a moment.
