Thank you, Cynthia. Good day, all.

Funke and I will cover today the operating environment in the first half of the year. We'll touch on our strategic priorities, discuss financial performance, and present our outlook for the business.

We will reference the numbers in the top right of the presentation so that you can follow along. Please turn to slide 5.

We delivered good performance in the first half of the year. Compared with H1 2025, revenues increased 231% to 365 billion naira, operating profit increased 289% to 49 billion naira, and profit before tax increased about threefold to 34 billion naira.

The numbers reflect our increased scale compared to a few years ago and are on account of a combination of the continued growth in our food and beverage and paints businesses, as well as the acquisition of Chi, which we completed in the fourth quarter of last year. The Chi acquisition was funded via a mix of debt and equity, and we recorded strong growth in profitability after taking into consideration finance costs.

Following the acquisition, we have continued to focus on the narrow set of initiatives that form the core of our approach to running our businesses. We continue to invest in technology, we are careful about capital allocation decisions, and by far most importantly, we continue to focus on talent.

Please turn to slide 7. Operating conditions were mixed in the first half of the year.

We enjoyed tailwinds in the first quarter with accelerating growth, declining inflation, currency appreciation, and moderation in borrowing costs. Conditions were less benign in the second quarter, largely on account of the conflict in the Middle East.

Energy costs increased, impacting production and distribution expenses, as well as selling expenses. Supply chain planning was more complicated, with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz leading to delivery delays and extended lead times for imported raw materials.

Slide 8 and 9 reflect costs for key inputs in our production process. We enjoyed prices lower than levels recorded last year, partly on account of the appreciation of the naira.

A notable exception, worth highlighting, is the sharp increase in the cost of petrol, which had a direct negative impact on consumer disposable income. Please turn to slide 11.

Our performance was on account of and driven by our house of scalable quality brands, which many of you are familiar with. As discussed on the call to announce the acquisition of Chi and on our full-year 2025 results call, we added the Chivita, Hollandia, SuperBite, and Beefie brands to our house of brands.

Please turn to slide 12. On the call to provide an update on the strategic rationale for acquiring Chi, we shared our view that Chi is a commercial powerhouse with attractive market positions in large, growing markets.

We, however, felt there was considerable scope to improve margins. The right of this slide contrasts the historical margin trajectory of our food and beverage business, UAC Foods, with Chi.

You will note that while UAC Foods has enjoyed meaningful margin expansion, Chi's margins declined. Working with the team at Chi, we made considerable progress addressing the margin disparity in the first half of the year.

The work is far from complete, and we expect bumps along the way. Given that we acquired the business on an extremely long-term horizon and are ahead of track, we are encouraged by the overall trajectory.

Please turn to slide 13. Our businesses were cash-generative in the first half of the year on account of margin improvements and working capital expansion.

In making capital allocation decisions, we consider investing for growth, reducing leverage, and returning capital to shareholders. In the first half of the year, we focused on both investing for growth and reducing leverage.

The combination of our improved margins, growth, and cash generation resulted in long-term net debt to EBITDA of 1.6 times. Please turn to slide 14.

If we attempt to distill our approach to its essence, it will be to concentrate talent and capital on high-potential opportunities. In this slide, a number of our key executives assume new responsibilities.

Bolarin Okunowo, who previously ran CAP PLC and delivered outstanding results, was appointed Executive Director, Corporate Services and Transformation at Chi. Yemi Oloyede, who ran UAC Foods Limited and delivered exceptional performance, is now Executive Director, Operations at Chi.

Yemi and Bolarin sit on Chi's board of directors and have made considerable impact over a relatively short length of time. Olamide [Owodunni?]

, who was General Counsel, Company Secretary at CAP PLC, has been appointed to a similar role at Chi, with added responsibility for public affairs and communication. Stephen Adekogbe, until recently General Manager, Manufacturing at UAC Foods, has been appointed Manufacturing Director at Chi.

Our focus on talent over the years meant we were able to largely rely on internal promotions to fill vacated roles. Lekan Adeokun was appointed Managing Director at CAP, where he previously was responsible for supply chain.

Jethro Brooks was appointed an Executive Director at CAP, responsible for corporate services and exports, and Tolulope Ella was appointed General Counsel and Company Secretary at CAP. At UAC Foods, Temitope Amodu, the immediate past Chief Finance Officer, was appointed Managing Director, and Rafiu Abatan, who was responsible for engineering, has been appointed General Manager, Manufacturing.

As a consequence of these executive moves, there are several promotions down the line, providing opportunities for growth for some of our talented colleagues. We wish those in new roles great success and are excited for their impact on the business.

Funke Ijaiya-Oladipo, who is on the call with me today, our Group Finance Director, and Ayomipo Wey, our Group General Counsel, have double-hatted at Chi since October last year and have now returned to the holding company. We continue to grow our UAC Academy with a focus on developing the next cadre of leaders.

We continue to work on designing and implementing incentive schemes covering short-term and long-term performance to deliver shared prosperity to those who contribute to value creation. At CAP, we grew our retail footprint, adding 42 new touch points in the first half of the year.

We also had a very successful launch of Dulux Pruce, a brand aimed at cementing our position in the mid-tier segment to complement our existing strengths in the premium and ultra-premium segments. On technology, the big project over the next 18 months is the implementation of SAP S/4HANA at Chi, for which preparations are well underway.

We're also taking some of the technology tools from across the group and deploying them at Chi, as well as taking learnings from Chi to deploy in other parts of the group. Very briefly on slide 15, we show pictures of new product launches over the half year, and I've touched on some of these already.

I will now hand over to Funke to walk us through the financial performance in detail.

Good day, everyone. Please turn to page 17, which provides an overview of the group's financial performance, comparing our results for the first half of 2026 with the same period in 2025.

UAC Group's revenue, operating profit, and profit before tax all more than tripled compared to the same period last year. This reflects the consolidation of Chi Limited, which we acquired in the fourth quarter of 2025 and which now contributes for a full half year for the first time and is the main driver of the year-on-year growth.

Our group consolidated revenue was 365 billion naira for the half year, operating profit was 49 billion naira, profit before tax was 34 billion naira, earnings per share was 658 kobo compared to 238 kobo in the prior year. We generated free cash flow of 71 billion naira, more than eight times the 8.8 billion naira generated in the first half of 2025, and this reflects the higher operating profit due to the contribution from Chi Limited, as well as a deliberate release of working capital, in particular a 30 billion naira reduction in inventory as we work towards optimizing inventory levels across the enlarged group.

Lastly on this slide, our return on invested capital for the period was 25% compared to 40% a year ago, reflecting the much larger capital base following the Chi acquisition. As we grow earnings on that base, we expect return on capital to recover in line with our value creation plan.

Please turn to page 18, which shows the revenue contribution per segment. The bulk of the growth in our top line came from the packaged food and beverages segment, which contributed 268 billion naira on account of the consolidation of Chi Limited, as well as growth in our other company in that segment, UAC Foods Limited, which recorded volume growth across all categories: so spring water, snacks, ice cream, and Zuri seasoning.

The paint segment contributed 2 billion naira, with the top-line growth in that segment up 12% year-on-year, driven by volume growth across our range of Dulux categories, supported by an expanding retail footprint. These increases more than offset a 15 billion naira revenue decline in our edibles and feeds segment, which reflects lower finished goods prices and lower sales volume relative to the prior year, while our quick service restaurants business was broadly flat.

Please turn to page 19, which shows a summary of the group's income statement. I've covered revenue, I will start with gross profit, which more than tripled to 105 billion naira, and our gross profit margin expanded 306 basis points to 28.6%.

This reflects our sales mix, the greater contribution from the higher-margin packaged food and beverages segment, as well as moderating input costs during the period. Operating expenses were 57 billion naira, higher in absolute terms on account of our enlarged group.

However, our operating expenses to sales ratio was broadly stable, increasing only 24 basis points to 15.7%, as higher distribution and logistics costs were largely offset by our continued focus on cost and expenses discipline. Other income was 1.5 billion naira, broadly in line with the prior year.

As mentioned earlier, we recorded an operating profit of 49 billion naira, 289% higher, and our operating profit margin expanded 201 basis points to 13.4%. Below the operating profit, our net finance costs were just under 16 billion naira for the period, compared to 3.6 billion naira last year, and this reflects interest on the borrowings from the consolidation of Chi Limited.

The share of profit from our associate companies was 1.3 billion naira, slightly lower than last year, as the prior year included a gain from the sale of non-core property assets at MDS Logistics that did not recur in 2026. Our profit before tax was 34 billion naira, 210% higher than the prior period, and our profit before tax margin was 9.4%, 62 basis points lower than the prior period, as the higher finance costs more than offset the margin expansion we achieved at the operating level.

Please turn to page 20, which shows an overview of the group's financial position as at 30 June. We have roughly 76 billion naira in net assets.

Our net debt reduced to 257 billion naira from 294 billion naira at the year end, which is a reduction of about 37 billion naira. Following this, the group's long-term debt to the last 12 months EBITDA ratio improved to 1.6 times, and this deleveraging is a central priority and part of our value creation plan.

Capital expenditure was 3.6 billion naira, and this is roughly 1% of our revenue and focused largely on the repair and maintenance of existing assets. The group's cash cycle improved by five days to 106 days, reflecting our focus on optimizing working capital, particularly lower inventory days.

Please turn to page 21, which shows an overview of the group's net debt profile. The key takeaways are that half of the group's debt is short-term, this is working capital financing, while the balance is long-term debt, largely attributable to the addition of Chi Limited.

The holding company carries total debt of about 99 billion naira, roughly a third of group debt, and this reflects our group treasury structure, where UAC, the holding company, raises debt centrally and on-lends to subsidiary companies, and this is part of our strategy to optimize finance costs, as it gives us the flexibility to access a broader range of funding sources. This is the end of the financial highlights, I will now hand over to Fola to take us through the next section of the presentation.

Thank you.

Thank you, Funke. Please turn to slide 23.

Over the course of the first half of the year, our efforts were largely focused on integrating Chi under UAC's leadership and working with the team at Chi to improve margins. We've made considerable progress here.

As part of these efforts, as mentioned, several key executives assumed new roles in the group, and we wish them great success in their new roles. Our focus going forward will continue to be on process, technology, and disciplined capital allocation, and we hope that this will drive continued margin improvement and cash generation.

A mammoth project we have before us and that will absorb a considerable amount of management bandwidth will be the implementation of a new ERP system, SAP S/4HANA at Chi. However, it's a project we successfully executed in the recent past across all other entities in the UAC group.

Finally and most importantly, we will focus on rebuilding our talent depth to drive the next phase of our growth and expansion. Thank you for your attention, and we will now take questions.

Thank you very much. Thanks for the very good presentation and for your good results.

I have three questions. One is on margin, and you had talked about how you have improved margins significantly, especially with the Chi business.

I would just like you to unpack that a bit in terms of what specific actions, and what portion of that is probably due to lower input cost, and what other actions were taken to drive that margin optimization? The second question is on Zuri seasoning, and just want to understand what your strategy is for that seasoning segment in terms of competition, in terms of route to market, and all that.

My third question is on volume growth. You had mentioned that you experienced volume growth across all segments.

I just want to understand if that is really relating to your legacy UAC Foods products—snacks and the rest—or if that applies across board, that is including newly acquired Chi products? Thank you.

Thank you very much, Williams. I think you have three questions, I've captured them here.

First was the specific actions that drove margin improvement. In a business like ours, there'll be thousands of small things that go into improving margins, which we wouldn't have enough time to go into today.

If I sort of distill the biggest levers, you may recall if you listened to the call post the Chi acquisition, that we felt we had bought a very, very good business and that we were very impressed by the quality of the team at Chi. I think the single biggest initiative was sort of stepping back as a team and setting our goals and objectives, of which margin improvement was one of them, and the various leaders of the business came up with dozens of initiatives around procurement, energy optimization, packaging optimization, route-to-market optimization, pricing, and it's the combination of these thousands of decisions that resulted in the progress we've seen so far.

I would stress that the quality of the team and the shared ambition and objective to drive the margins is perhaps the biggest step we took. Maybe I should also add that we tweaked the incentive system so that everyone in the company, every single person in the company, is incentivized by profitability, to deliver these margins.

Zuri seasoning sits within let's call it innovation department within Food and Beverages, still very, very small. I would reckon it's probably going to be fractions of a percent of our group revenues, and what the team is testing is twofold: are there gaps in the market in terms of product offerings, open flavor perspective, and where these gaps exist, can we effectively serve them using our existing distribution framework?

It's very, very early days, I think launched less than a year ago, and we're going to monitor and see how that evolves if there indeed gaps and if we are well-placed to serve those gaps. By volume growth across all segments, we refer to our big segments of Food and Beverages, Chi and UAC Foods, paints, and the like.

We wouldn't go into the specifics of what happened with SuperBite versus Gala or 50 g evaporated milk versus 120, but across all the big segments, we saw volume growth.

You may recall that I said we saw a reversal in conditions in the market in Q2, where the price of petrol spiked meaningfully, and transportation is a big charge on the consumer wallet. We don't know for 100% certain, but we suspect that this may have contributed to CAP's Q2.

Now on the positive, one of the things that CAP has focused on doing over the last few years has been broadening the product portfolio to introduce more affordable offerings at the right margin, and is one that we've talked about quite a bit. If you look at the prices of CAP's products, you have almost a factor of five in certain cases between the cheapest and the most expensive product.

A big initiative done in the second quarter was the launch of Dulux Pruce, we get the benefit of the Dulux halo in a mid-tier segment that is roughly half the cost of the traditional decorative Dulux. One of the things we try to do is set our companies up to do well or at least survive regardless of what macro hits we take, and that's what we're trying to do with the paints business.

We're working on an even more value product, but that won't be ready for a few more quarters.

Thank you, Williams. On the QSR business, our focus has been on sort of fixing the base of the business, and we have made considerable progress, but still very, very far from where we want to get to.

I think that the loss rate has more than halved in that company. We would continue to try to sort of get that business fixed and then take a decision.

If medium term is sort of three years, yes, we would have either meaningfully scaled that business or come to some other conclusion. The focus now of the management team is on fixing the core of the business, and the team there has done a pretty good job of shifting the trajectory, which we have not been able to do in a few years leading to now.

Thank you, David. I think if you look at slide 12, we've in the half year taken the margins of the business we acquired from 2% to 15%, about a 13% uplift, and it's on a roughly 500 billion naira revenue base.

We think we've already unlocked quite a bit of profitability from the business. As I said, we haven't stopped, and we expect some bumps in the road.

Chi still has lower margins than UAC Foods, and they're in very, very similar sectors, we still see some more room. Just to clarify, we've already made what we think is meaningful progress, and I would argue even ahead of what we expected.

We feel that if we keep on doing the things that we did that took us from 2 to 15, we would see a little bit more come through by way of profitability in the business.

Just to call two things out. The Chi acquisition won't affect the quarter-on-quarter comparison.

We had Chi in both Q1 and Q2, there'll be no comparison there. Yes, if you look at the revenues in Q1, just 191 billion naira, and Q2, 173, it is lower.

Like I said, in Q1, we had macro tailwinds, not only were we doing what we could to grow the business, we were also getting benefit from an improving macro. In Q2, that reversed, we continued to do what we could to drive the business, but there were meaningful headwinds we had to contend with.

In what we do, the price of petrol is extremely important consumer spending power is extremely important. Now, we have multiple growth initiatives, sort of category extensions and the like, that we're constantly working on.

The timing for these is uncertain; it may be a quarter, it may be slightly longer. Our overall view remains that of strong optimism around the continued growth of the business.

In certain areas, we are constrained for growth on account of capacity, and we've already committed the capex to put that capacity on stream. Long term, we're very optimistic about the growth.

Quarter on quarter, these things change. As regards H2, we unfortunately don't give earnings guidance.

Okay. Thank you, Ahmad.

The way we approach dividend is to keep dividend at a certain level until we change. Now, that level was 22 kobo for many, many years.

We moved it to 1 naira, and we would assess our capital investment requirements for growth, deleveraging, and capital return to shareholders. There's been no decision taken, but our approach is, rather than target a certain percent of profit, which could result in meaningful volatility, to keep dividend at a particular level until we change it.

We did a fourfold increase this year. We would see how long we hold that, and then if a change is appropriate, we would recommend same to shareholders for approval.

Okay. For the paints business, to drive growth, we focus on, I guess, maybe three primary things.

The first is continuing to deepen our retail distribution, our points of presence, which we'll continue to do. Second is to have the broadest possible product range in that network.

Then the final bit is, I guess, just the quality of service that we deliver to our customers. The focus is just going to be, as I mentioned, driving the new mid-tier brand we've launched, Dulux Pruce.

We have one more brand that we intend to bring to market in terms of broadening range, and continuing to roll out more and more points of presence to meet the consumer.

Okay. I will try to tackle some of them, and for one, I might ask Funke for additional detail.

The first one, I think, is trying to, if I understand it correctly, disaggregate the growth in the Food and Beverages business across UAC Foods and Chi, and then see if we have any different views in terms of the outlook for both businesses. This is how I understand the first question.

In the first half of the year, UAC Foods grew faster than Chi, but I'm not sure whether it's on account of any underlying difference between the businesses versus the fact that at UAC Foods, we were happy with the levels of profitability, and so it was just growing the business. I think we grew that business probably 15% in naira and maybe mid-20s in dollars.

At Chi, the growth would have been lower. We will see if we can get the exact number, but at Chi, we were coming from 2% margins in the business, and so the focus there was on fixing the margin base versus aggressive growth.

Given that we have meaningfully closed the gap in terms of margin differential between both businesses, we don't see any underlying factors that would drive differences in revenue growth between both businesses. They both have massive market opportunities, talented management teams, it's going to come down to execution, but we don't see any underlying factors that would meaningfully impact their respective growth.

Working capital target, I would say we're at best in line with plan, if not maybe a little bit behind, but at best in line. It's going to be a focus on improving over the course of the year.

We still think that we can bring that down a little bit more. Funke, I don't know if you have any specific numbers on working capital target and plan?

I think when we acquired the Chi business, what we had noticed at the time was that companies that relied on importation of raw material would lead them to hold longer inventory than is probably required. That was a focus.

We wanted to bring the numbers down. I think the benchmark at the time was our paints business, which was holding around definitely under 100 days, around 90 or 95.

Clearly, with these numbers, we're not there yet, there's a little bit more, I think, we can do in terms of the inventory days for the group. Okay.

Thank you, Funke. Just to give the number for Chi, I think Chi's revenue growth was mid-single digits in naira, and in dollars, sort of 16% in real terms.

Again, it's a lot more exposed to imports, because of the appreciation that grew sort of mid-single digit in naira and then mid-teens in dollars. UAC Foods grew faster than Chi.

Now, in terms of the long-term incentive plans, the group plan concluded or is concluded, and the next plan will be measured three years from now. It'll be measured in three years' time, and if the targets are met, settled then.

Just to understand that for three years, there's no measurement, and it's a three- to five-year plan. This begins to come into question three years from now.

Thank you, Ebuka. Just to explain that the 140 billion naira is working capital financing.

You'll see we typically show that number versus the working capital balance. It's it's a number that goes up and down.

We borrow, buy raw materials, sell, pay down. It's a roll it's rolling financing.

It's not an obligation that has a an end date that needs to be repaid 12 months from now. The long-term debt we have is seven years, is seven-year money, and there we're we we are on current course to pay that pay that down much faster than initially anticipated.

Thank you, Shruti. First three months, customer purchasing power improving, and then last three months, we saw that slow down.

It's very difficult to pinpoint exactly what, but we think the sharp rise in the cost of petrol may have impacted purchasing power.

Thank you, Cynthia, and thank everyone for participating in our call and for the questions, and we wish you a wonderful rest of the day. Thank you.