Right, good morning everyone, and welcome to our interim results presentation. It's great to be back here in person seeing you all after, I think it's been informed, quite a long gap.

It's also very handy to be doing it on the back of a good set of H1 results, which always helps. Let's crack on and have a little look through these.

In terms of structure, actually I'm going to go through in terms of some of the highlights, Mark's going to talk through the financials in more detail, and then I'm going to give some highlights before we do the Q&A on our progress against some of our strategic priorities. Positive news in terms of revenue with this real pick-up that we saw in Q2.

Still underlying quite mixed market conditions. Two standout areas probably for us has been the demand from our customers who make the equipment for semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and that's for our encoder product line, and also significant interest from the defense industry, which is a more broader cross-sector of products.

Of real significance I think for us though is not just the responding to the market conditions and the great job we do there, but it's actually on our emerging businesses and the progress that we are making there. These are the bets that we are placing, the investments that we're making for the future, for the long term of Renishaw, and I'm going to go through with you later on some of the progress that we have made there.

Thirdly, just wanted to stress, clearly we are an organization, we pride ourselves in our investment in engineering, in R&D for our long-term growth. The output of that is what is key, and we have had some really significant new product launches recently.

Genuine excitement particularly from our sales team on the opportunities that they now see for making the most of these. In terms of operating margin, improvements there despite currency headwinds, and we'll look through there, and actually we're really looking forward to strong revenue and profit growth for the year ahead, and we've released our guidance for that.

If we have a little look through some of the key performance indicators and some of the themes coming through here, first of all, and that very much that strong growth coming through in Q2. As I said, some areas strong, other areas, such as our sales of machine tool sensors, CMM sensors to the machine tool builders, the CMM builders, is still quite sluggish overall, actually.

The one we always talk about as the extreme is the German machine tool market, which is still quite challenging. In terms of operating margin and flow-through onto the bottom line, then we have taken actions there to improve, to support this.

We had a £20 million cost reduction exercise and also the closure of our drug delivery business, which have supported that margin development. Also as a business, we very much are focusing on cash and cash flow conversion of making sure we are making the most of the assets that we've invested in over the last few years.

We have seen some pressure on that, though. We have had the impact of restructuring costs on that number, and also we are investing at the moment in working capital as we respond to the production demands of our customers.

That's some of the highlights. I'm going to hand over to Mark now to go through the financial numbers.

Great, thank you, Will. I'm going to start by looking at some of the highlights from our income statement.

As Will has said, we've had a record first half, with reported revenue growth at 7.1%, rising to 11.5% at constant currency. We've seen growth in all three segments, and we've also seen an improving order book in all three segments and also all three regions.

When we look at regional revenue performance, however, the picture's a bit more mixed. If we look at the Americas first, really strong growth here, 15% at reported rates, more than 15%, more than 20% at constant currency, and that was driven by strong demand coming through for high-value capital equipment, things like our additive manufacturing machines, our 5-axis coordinate measuring machines, so that's been a real success there.

This region has also benefited from around £5 million of higher pricing and surcharging to offset tariff duties that were introduced during 2025. When we look at APAC, also a really strong performance here, growth of more than 10% at reported rates, more than 15% at constant currency, and here the key positives were rising demand from the semiconductor and electronics manufacturing equipment sector for our position encoders, and also really good growth, really good demand for our Equator flexible gauge from the consumer electronics subcontract manufacturers.

That's the story in APAC. EMEA is a bit of a different picture.

Here, turnover down around 5% at both reported and constant currency basis. We've been reporting some subdued demand here in the EMEA region for a little while, and that continued throughout the first part of the half, but we did see a pick-up in demand later in the period, and we ended the period with the order book stronger.

We also implemented a new sales ERP system in September in some territories, and that did have an impact during the half, but hopefully you can see from the Q2 versus Q1 performance, we've seen a real step-up here in the region, it's actually the biggest step-up of all of our regions from Q1 to Q2, we're moving in the right direction there. On an operating profit level, an increase of 11.4% to £57.5 million and an improved operating margin by 0.6 percentage points.

The moving parts there, as Will has touched on, currency in one direction, organic margin improvement in another, more of that in just a moment. When we look at the income statement, perhaps the most notable thing you'll see is an 8.5% reduction in our gross engineering costs, which reflects some of the cost reduction action that we've taken in the last 6 months.

Profit before tax grew by a similar amount, 11.5%, to 64.1. Effective tax rate in the period was 21.1% at reported rates, rising to 21.8% on an adjusted basis, and that's perhaps more representative of what we expect to see coming through in H2.

Then finally, our dividend payment remains unchanged at 16.8 pence. Right, let's take a look at the operating margin evolution, and I'm comparing now the first half of the prior year with the first half of this year.

We're starting with 15.1% that we reported last year, and on the left-hand side of this bridge, you can see the external headwinds that we face largely from currency, but then being offset by the organic margin improvement we've generated through cost reduction and operating leverage. Starting with currency, that's been a headwind for us for some years now.

We've seen progressive weakening of the US dollar and the Japanese yen against sterling over several years, and we are exposed, of course, to this currency fluctuations because many of our costs are in sterling, most of our revenues are in other currencies. We seek to manage that through the use of hedging contracts, forward currency contracts over 24 months, and over the last few years, those contracts have done a good job in helping to offset some of the movements we've seen on a year-to-year basis.

Indeed last year, when we look at the prior year, we saw a particularly strong performance from our contracts, and that was as a result of us taking them out at a time when sterling was much weaker than it is today, they paid out handsomely last year. That has not been repeated to the same extent, but when we look at this year, our contracts have still done a good job, raising about £5 million of revenue to offset roughly £5.2 million of operating margin change as a result of moving exchange rates.

Overall, when we wrap that up, you've got £8 million less in currency income, in contract income, £5.2 million of movement in currency, £13.2 million, 3.6 percentage points of margin, a significant headwind. With tariffs, that's impacted our revenues by around 1.4%, but had no impact on operating profit, and as a result has had a small degrading effect on operating margin.

Moving to the positive side of the equation, cost reduction, Will's mentioned we ran two cost reduction programs over the last year, a company-wide operating cost reduction initiative aiming to remove £20 million of cost from our run rate on an annualized basis, and we also closed down the loss-making drug delivery aspect of our neurological business, aiming to save around £3 million on an annualized basis. Pleased to say those savings are starting to come through.

The combined impact of those programs has been roughly a 7% headcount reduction for us at a group level to just below 5,000 employees at the end of December, and we've seen £9 million of saving coming through, 2.4 percentage points in the first half, and we expect to achieve that £23 million of annualized savings on an ongoing basis here forward. That's coming through as planned.

The other side of it has been operating leverage, we've generated an 11.5% constant currency growth in the period, that has resulted obviously in more gross profit, which has more than offset inflationary pressures that we've seen in our cost base around things like pay, benefits, health insurance. All right, so that's the margin story.

I'm going to now just walk through each of the three segment performances for you, starting with Industrial Metrology, our biggest segment. Here the story is solid revenue performance, growth of 4.3%, rising to 8.8% on a constant currency basis.

The growth drivers here were our emerging systems and software businesses, these are our 5-axis coordinate measuring machines, our flexible gauges, and metrology software that supports both of those products and helps users to make the most of them. It's really pleasing to see growth in this area.

These are emerging businesses and we're really targeting top-line growth, and here's a key part of our growth strategy, it's really pleasing to see that coming through. Another success story here is our calibration products.

This is an established product line, and we've seen growing demand here particularly coming from the semiconductor and electronics manufacturing sector. Those machine builders actually use our calibration products in their factories to help them to make and pass off their machines.

We've seen rising demand coming from there as activity levels have risen. By contrast, we've seen flat sales for the sensor parts of this segment, so that's our coordinate measuring machine, machine tool probes, and also the styli line accessories that go with them.

That's been flat overall, some high points in Asia, in consumer electronics, but weaker general demand, particularly in Europe and particularly in the automotive sector. When we look at the operating performance of this business, it's roughly flat in margin terms.

We saw essentially currency headwinds being pretty much offset by the combination of cost saving and operating leverage, but we ended up at pretty much the same operating margin. Let's move on to Position Measurement, our other large segment.

This did strong growth in the period, we saw 7.4%, rising to nearly 12% at a constant currency basis. This was something of a game of two halves.

We definitely saw a really notable pick-up in this business in the second quarter, and we've got great momentum going into the second half. The drivers of growth here were strong performances from our established open optical and magnetic encoder businesses.

We've mentioned semiconductor and electronics manufacturing equipment, that's been a key driver, but actually we've also seen strong demand from general factory automation and robotics, particularly for the magnetic encoder line. By contrast, laser encoders have seen a reduction compared to a really abnormally strong period in the prior year.

These are used in front-end semi, in wafer inspection, and yeah, we had an abnormally strong comparator to go against, but we're actually really confident in the long-term future of this business. We think this is volatility rather than a trend.

We've seen rising order book and we've launched new products in this area, we're really confident about the long-term prospects. When we look at operating performance, we've seen similar effects that we saw in the metrology business, currency headwinds offset by cost savings to an extent, but here the product mix change has been quite significant in this period comparator.

We've reduced by about 4 percentage points, but to 23.4%, still a strong operating performance here. I think the more meaningful comparison to take is if you look at the comparison against the whole of last year, which was 22.5%, the first half really was a bit of an abnormal period.

We've got good momentum here, good top-line growth, and improving underlying margins. Finally, Specialized Tech, the smaller segment, but the one that's grown the fastest in this period, growth of more than 25% at a constant currency basis, really strong growth, and that has been almost largely coming from our additive manufacturing business within here.

We have a strategy here of selling to key accounts, and we've seen many of those adding to their fleet of machines as they ramp up production, but we're also targeting new customers and we've seen quite a lot of those coming in in this period, and we've seen particularly strong demand from both new and existing customers in the aerospace and defense sector, that's been the notable change in demand in the period. Spectroscopy down slightly, slightly stronger in Americas, slightly weaker elsewhere, but we've seen good order momentum on that recently, normally has a stronger H2, looking forward to that this year.

In neurological, that's the smallest part of this product group, and the key sort of thing here is that we completed the closure of the loss-making drug delivery aspect in the period. When we wrap all of that up and look at the moving parts on margin, we can see a real step change in performance here, 22 percentage points of margin improvement, and we're now just short of breakeven on this segment.

The moving parts there, yep, currency again slightly less proportionately than the others because of slightly different regional sales patterns. We've seen cost reduction obviously coming through with both the company-wide program and the focused drug delivery activity, but the large majority of the margin improvement coming through here is from operating leverage with the growing AM business, so that's been the key driver of margin improvement.

Right, lastly from me, just a quick look at return on capital and cash generation. We focus on return on invested capital to make sure that we're allocating resources to profitable investments.

We saw an improvement here to 13.2%, 0.6 percentage points. We have a target of 15%, clearly we have some way to go, and the way we're going to get there is by driving our operating margins back up to our target range and also keeping a lid on investment in capital.

We have had a period of higher investment in recent years in property, that's now behind us, and we're operating at a lower level of capex. In the first half, capex was £17 million, and we're expecting to run at a rate of about £40 million for the year as a whole, and that's focused mainly on plant and equipment to support capacity and productivity growth.

That's part of the cash generation story. The other side is working capital.

We have ramped up working capital in the period. Obviously we've seen a bit of an inflection in demand in Q2, and so that's triggered us obviously to increase our production rate, drawing in more piece parts, more work in progress, etc., we've seen that during the period.

Our cash conversion overall just below our target at 68%, but we think we're doing all the right things here in terms of keeping a lid on capex and making sure we're supporting growth with our balance sheet. Finally, our cash balances currently just over £240 million at the end of the period, down compared to the summer, and this reflects the outflows that we've seen on the cost reduction activities, on working capital, and on the dividend payment in respect of H2 last year.

All right, I think that's enough from me. I'll hand back to Will.

Lovely. Thank you very much, Mark.

As I said, I'd like to now talk through some of our strategic priorities and a little bit of look more into the future. I'm going to focus on the first three of these because I think the cash generation and ROIC we have already touched on.

The first area here is the key strategy for us, which we've always talked about, of long-term growth through product innovation. It's our key overriding strategy.

To set the scene for this, I just want to reflect back, firstly, on our long-term value creation model, something we've shared and many of you will be familiar with. Just to go through, if we look on the left here, then we can see that the markets that we operate in, that £6 billion addressable market, and really most importantly the fact that they are favorable markets that we think on average are growing by more than 5% a year.

You can see the drivers in the four boxes around the addressable market. What we've seen recently probably is acceleration here, all the news on AI and the data centers there really feels like it's accelerating the growth from the electrification area there.

We are certainly seeing I think continued acceleration of our customers also looking at the adoption of automation and how to automate processes right across from machining to metrology, a range of things there. We're also seeing probably a broader one, which maybe cuts across slightly differently with all these of the expenditure on defense, and it's really how do we help customers there with their manufacturing agility, ramp-ups, new technologies to go in there.

Positives and some changes going on there from our market. The key bit for us then is how do we outperform.

On the top right, you can see those key three themes. The first is growing in existing markets.

This is how do we sell more sensor technology normally to the machine tool, the machine builders around the world, whether that's semiconductor or machine tool. We'll often talk about this in terms of the number of dollars we get per machine tool spindle sold for the machine tool industry, for example.

Next, increasing technology value is about us selling the increasingly complicated systems, capital goods together with the software to enable them. Then thirdly is looking in terms of moving into new markets, and to be clear, this is very close adjacent new markets to where we already operate.

With all of these, the innovation side, being disruptive, having the USPs is absolutely key for us to succeed and give our sales teams around the world the strongest advantage that we can. Really pleased that actually despite reducing engineering expenditure, what we are seeing is a really strong pipeline of products that we have recently launched, and also we've got a really healthy pipeline of products to come through for the future.

Just want to highlight a few that I think are really key for our strategy and for our success. If we first of all look at Industrial Metrology, we've had a really strong reception for the Equator X and MODUS IM Equator software that goes with it.

Equator X brings very high-speed measurement to the shop floor, and it does it without the need for a master part to compare with, our customers immediately get the benefit that it brings. The real enabler with it is the software, which dramatically deskills the level of knowledge needed to be able to program the device.

What we have with the combination of these two is amazing performance on the shop floor, metrology where you need it at the point of manufacture, and also far simpler for our customers to deploy, and far more flexible in terms of the range of different parts that they can measure. This is really key for us.

You can see there's excitement from our existing sales team all around the world and what they can do, the customers that liked our existing products but need this, but there's also excitement in terms of the new routes to market that we can open up. People who are selling already a machining and manufacturing solution where this can be a part of it, they can own it, they can sell it.

A lot going on there and a lot to do. From Position Measurement, Mark talked earlier about with our laser encoder product line being sold into wafer inspection.

The great thing here is this is always a market where the challenges of the next generation of wafer technology is getting smaller, these customers always have really tough metrology challenges, and we've really stepped forward with our next generation of laser encoder in terms of the performance that we are now giving to those customers. Again, had the chance to meet some of them recently, really positive on the relationship that we have with them.

Astrea we have talked about, this is actually a new area for us using inductive. Again, it's been really well received by the market in terms of the metrology performance that it delivers.

Then finally, from a specialized technology point of view, Strada is our new Raman instrument. Raman traditionally is an instrument used for the Raman expert in the Raman lab who will do things.

Strada is designed to simplify, it automates the Raman process from a hardware, dramatically simplifies the software, it's Raman for the non-Raman person. If you want to solve a problem, you can do it with this, you don't need to know anything about the technology that is inside.

This has opened up different opportunities, different markets for us with Raman. Finally, Libertas is new software that we've launched to go with our additive manufacturing business.

What this does is when you are making a part additively, you have to put in supports to hold it in place. What Libertas does is, by doing very clever, novel scanning strategies, dramatically reduces the number of supports that you need.

What this does is it speeds up the cycle time, you don't have to build these supports, you save time, you save waste because you're not processing the material, and you also save post-processing time because there's a lot less then of support material to remove after the build. It's pushing forward the productivity of our machine for our customers.

What it also does actually is really improve that the tricky surface on additive part is the bottom, and the surface finish of that with our new software is really noticeably moved and a step change of performance there. This was really well received by a number of our customers.

A strong, healthy product launches there, much more to come in the future. While we absolutely see that our future is the growth, what we've been clear on and talked to you about is making sure that the business is as focused and as lean as it can be to support that growth.

If we look at the initiatives that we have going forward, then in terms of this graph, you can see that, I guess Mark earlier brought us up in terms of the 15.7% that we end up with this half year now that we've just announced on. For the rest of this year, we still see continuing to have some currency headwinds, some benefit from the cost reduction program, and then actually the flow-through of the margin from the revenue development taking us up to our end-of-year results.

The interesting bit really is going forward, we set ourselves targets on this. Some of that will be achieved by the revenue flow in the future of looking at the growth strategy, that innovation-led growth strategy, but the other bit is then the development on productivity across the group.

We're in early stages on this, I guess we've already done some activities which we've talked about, we're very much now in the planning stage of what are the best opportunities that we have as a business going through that, and then working on the program to deploy that. When we're back up here for Capital Markets Day in June, it's going to be a great chance to update you in more detail on those plans and what we intend to do.

Thirdly, I want to spend a little bit of time on the emerging businesses. As I highlighted at the start, I think overall this is the bit that is the most encouraging for me with the developments that we have seen here.

Right across the board on our different reporting segments, we have emerging businesses. What we have looked at here over the last several years is quite a bit of work and focus on these areas.

You'll have seen if you've been monitoring us for a while that some of these businesses are ones that we have divested or closed, some of them are ones that we've had for a while but we've made quite significant strategic changes on them. Those ones I would classify as the metrology, CMM and gauging systems, and additive manufacturing have both had, and in some respects quite a similar, of really focusing down, understanding what our differentiators are, targeting key customers, and making sure we are very clear what we are about.

It's been great to see both of them really starting to do well. Additive in particular, this time that strategy of focusing on customers with volume opportunity, focusing on a highly productive single-size machine is really starting to pay dividends.

What we're now seeing is those repeat orders coming through, both from actually the customers that we've talked about in the past, whether that's often medical that we talk about, but is really also being accelerated now with interest and customers in defense understanding the opportunities that additive gives for them. Now what we also did when we exited from some of the business that we didn't feel were going to meet the criteria for what we wanted for the long term for the business was we did pick out some of the best areas of innovation that we felt we had across the group and tried to accelerate those.

As Mark talked about when he was talking about the position measurement, both enclosed optical encoders really starting to go well, but I think that for me the star here is definitely on the inductive encoders, Fortis. I talked about it in the innovation.

We've launched this as our MVP of saying we're just going to do one size, we're going to get it out, we're going to really hit the deadlines, the team did a fantastic job of doing it. The feedback from customers, the metrology is superb, the ease of use is superb, and now we have customers saying that they really want to switch over to our technology, design us in on existing platforms, design us in on new platforms.

Now this is designed for a broad range of industries. The one at the moment where it feels like it's hitting the sweet spot is on the defense industry, and we have actually recently made the decision that we need to invest more from an engineering and a manufacturing point of view to make the most of the immediate opportunities that we have here.

These businesses all take time to come through, but this is one that feels like it is working at a different pace to what we are used to. Really important for us, and when we're talking through with the team internally, moving these emerging businesses through into established is key.

We have a lot of exciting R&D going on for the future, some of which is going to power existing businesses, but some of it is the new emerging businesses of the future. We need to make space for it to come through so we can invest in it by migrating some of these at the moment.

Lots of positivity going forward. With us, there's always the uncertainty in the markets that we operate in, but we certainly feel like we have momentum going into H2, and I'm really pleased to give a positive revenue and profit trading guidance for the year ahead.

Thank you very much. We now have time for Q&A, which is great to be doing in person.

Thanks, Will, Mark. Lacie Midgley here, Bloomberg Intelligence.

Just a couple from me. First I guess on the China strategy.

At the full year, we talked a little bit about the entry-level market there, perhaps kind of looking at lower-priced alternatives to some of your core products. I know we're not far on from the full year in that discussion, but is there any update on the strategy there and how that's evolved and any progress you can update us on?

Certainly. I think, just trying to think back to exactly what we said at full year, but certainly what we are looking at now is we have certain products which are established, but we can tweak and adjust so that they are limited in performance for an entry-level China market, where we can target to go after business at a lower price to the customer.

We're doing that in quite a limited way and testing things out, so that's very specific. We're also getting the innovation engine, and it's interesting here, particularly probably on some of the more sensor technology side of the business, the innovation engine has come up with some really good ideas on stripping manufacturing cost and simple designs, particularly encoders, there's some really quite exciting stuff for the future coming through that allows us to target the entry-level market at a different price point.

Now, people always worry about this in terms of what does that mean in terms of threat of the different areas, but actually this is stuff which is designed such that it's only suitable for entry level. What we always see in things like the encoder market is things gradually moving on, some areas will become more commoditized.

As that happens, we'll have new opportunities elsewhere. So.

That's really helpful, thank you. On additive manufacturing, it's clearly moving in the right direction, which is great to see.

I think these are obviously much bigger-ticket items for you, not many are going to be needed to kind of move that Specialized Technologies dial. You talked to the defense customers, but in terms of size, are these smaller end-users?

I'm just trying to think about how significant the move is there, how quickly we get to that becoming an established business. Is this about kind of expanding AM usage and really embedding the technology with your existing customers, or is it growing the base and new customers?

I know you've talked to both of those, but a bit of extra color on how you see that would be helpful. Yeah.

I think both of those are key, and often we'll try and say, look, we're focusing on existing customers and repeat business and not doing too much, and then new customers will come along. Absolutely we're targeting existing and new.

Size of the customers can range from really large to far more dedicated specialists supplying into industries. I think the most important bit across the board on this is people embracing and understanding the benefits, designing for AM, and showing then to their customers, 'This is the advantage you can get, and what we can do for you now with this.'

It feels like for a long time, and we've had this on machine tool probes, we had it on Equators, we had it on the ballbar product in calibration of us doing the marketing. Once the customers start saying, 'This is what it can do,' things start to really accelerate.

There will for sure be ups and downs on that journey. As you say, with big-ticket items, it doesn't take that much to change.

It's also different for us from a manufacturing point of view, ramping up with encoders is somewhat different to ramping up with the scale and complexity of an AM machine.

Thank you. Mark Davies Jones at Stifel.

A couple of things, please. Firstly, slightly longer-term question, but obviously it's frustrating in some ways to see all the good organic progress and profitability eaten up by FX, and I'm not going to ask you about hedging strategy-- Oh, please.

More about the cost base. You are unusual in having so much of your R&D and manufacturing located in the home market rather than pushing that out into the regions.

Is there any change in the thinking about that, or do you think that's core to your ability to sort of control the technology go-to-market?

Yes, that's a very good question and one that we are considering at the moment. My honest thought is probably the reason that we would be moving any manufacturing would be for geopolitical access reasons, because honestly, as we have things in terms of single point of manufacture areas, we feel is extremely efficient.

This is one of our strategy decision topics of what we should be doing, and are there certain products could be some of the stuff that was tying in with the question on low-cost, which are ones that we decide we make further afield. The primary reason for doing this would not be to give ourselves more stability from a currency point of view, it would be a nice benefit from it.

Okay. Just a little one, I won't ask you about share buybacks because you can't say anything.

Given the strength of the numbers and the strength of the balance sheet, is a flat dividend a bit mean? Is there some sort of reweighting to your thinking around that?

We target a dividend cover of 2, and if you look at the midpoint on the profit for the end of year, then this would give us that with a flat divi. Clearly I guess we have an optimism around the business, but it is one quarter that things have happened, and we don't want everyone to get carried away.

Just I guess that probably the fuller answer to that is on a capital allocation point of view, this is more of a strategic question for us to go through as a board of thinking of how we want to run the business and use that cash, or return that cash. That's the bigger question for the future, not addressed by a divi, really.

Okay. Thank you.

Thanks. Morning, it's Richard Paige from Deutsche Numis.

Two from me as well, please. On the defense, it sounds as though I may be getting this wrong, but your growth is going to be ahead of the market, there's new applications or new customers you're winning within that.

Can you just elaborate on sort of end-use within the defense market, please?

Really broad. Astrea we talked about, which will be something that defense customers could integrate.

Additive manufacturing can be something that parts can be made with, versus a lot of indirect stuff probably through machine tool, CMM builders and etc., which will allow the metrology and the precision of machine parts needed for going into defense. Direct and indirect, a real mixture there.

In terms of where we are on investment curves, I not sure that we really know, to be honest.

Thank you. The other word that normally goes with defense, aerospace.

We haven't spoken about it much here, but obviously with the industry ramp and so forth, expect that to be a reasonably strong area of demand for you as well?

I'm not sure exactly what our aerospace numbers are at the moment, but it's not a--

I would say that's probably we're seeing that coming through with our agility sales, particularly in the Americas, we've got a lot of key customers that are in the aero engine sector in particular, but also airframe to a lesser extent. That's been a driver of performance more recently in the non-defense element of A&D, although obviously there's some overlap there in the engine business, they tend to serve both sectors.

I think one key point when you're thinking about additive manufacturing, and I think this is a good thing for all of us, but if you're working with an aerospace, there is an awful lot of checking, balances, review, it's a very long development time, you're working with a customer before you get sales. Defense is far quicker on things that maybe don't have as long a lifetime.

Perhaps if I could just add as well, I think there's quite a lot of new business formation going on at the moment in some of the more recent platforms that are being developed for modern warfare, there's new players entering the business, and we're seeing some of that within our customer base, as well as repeat business coming from established customers.

Hi, it's Bruno Gjani from UBS. Just because we were on that defense topic, I just have a small follow-up.

When you mentioned on the inductive encoder side that you were winning some customers and you were now being spec'd in on some new accounts, does that specifically relate to defense? Because if that's the case, I was wondering whether, if now you're being spec'd in, you could actually see a material rise within that product line, or how are you sort of thinking about that component?

Yes, this is still small. We have one size of Astrea at the moment, and it's great with the customers, they love it, but suddenly it's like, 'Okay, I need this size, and I need this size, and I need this size,' which does create some engineering and manufacturing work.

Yes, that's going to be a positive. It's quick in our terms that we think of for encoder business development, but it's still not going to have a material impact in the next year or so.

Understood. It reads as if the emerging product line businesses were really strong within the half and the quarter.

I was just wondering if there was any way you could maybe roughly quantify the contribution to growth from those emerging product lines? Might not be.

I think probably at the moment, take the positivity, but probably we're better off keeping it just to the reporting segments that we have.

Understood. Were there any subtle differences the order trends were really encouraging, or sort of read to be really encouraging ahead of revenue growing really well, the order book was growing.

Were there any subtle differences within what you observed in order intake, particularly as it relates maybe to Q2? For example, I'm thinking of you called out machine sensors as being actually quite flat in the half.

Did you see any sort of pick-up on the order intake side there that's worthy of calling out, or not really, it's sort of similar drivers to revenue?

Not worthy of calling out, I would say, on machine tool sensors. The places that we saw the stronger growth were also the places that the revenue picked up, there's a strong correlation there.

Additive, position measurement into semi, those were probably the highlights, but generally automation demand for the wider position encoder business as well.

Just a final one that I was sort wondering on is on laser encoders in terms of the mix headwind in the first half. What I wanted to get a sense of is whether the mix in the first half is abnormally low within laser encoders, and therefore there's a potential for that to grow in the coming sort of, let's say, 12 to 24 months, or was it that the mix in the first half of last year was abnormally high and actually we're at a normal level today?

The latter is more the case. It was an exceptional period in the prior year.

I'd say the laser encoder product line has been a real success story for us over the last sort of 10 years or so, and we have a strong niche position in wafer inspection, and that is obviously tied to front-end semi, and the trends in that market look decent at the moment. We've seen rising order book, we're optimistic that if you look through the perturbation of the prior year, there's a nice growth story here.

Understood. I'll pass it on.

Sorry, can I do a couple more? Defense, I don't remember being in your sort of breakdown of end markets being a big chunk in prior years, could you give some sort of sense of the scale of that for you?

I know it's tricky with your routes to market.

Yeah. I think we normally talk about 5%, but it feels like that's creeping up at the moment, and it's probably being quite impactful in certain areas that we've talked about.

Aerospace normally is where defense sits, we just haven't called it A&D, and perhaps we should. The bulk of that historically has been civil, but yeah, the defense proportion of that is rising, and as a share of the total, it feels like it's increasing overall as other segments are less buoyant.

Okay. Thank you.

The other one is you talked about geopolitical considerations in where you put your manufacturing. How about where your customers do?

There's been all this talk about kind of reshoring and much less evidence of it actually driving investment. Are you seeing any of that coming through?

I think it's really hard to say. What we are certainly seeing is some of our customers where we would have shipped product to a certain country now saying, 'Okay, actually, over the next 6 months, we are migrating manufacturing to a different area.'

Some of that's going the other way, countries moving out, actually, and then there's a broadening in other areas. It's actually quite complicated.

We met with some of the electronics equipment manufacturers recently, and I think we probably need to understand a little bit of more about why they are going to certain areas and what those trends are going to be. For us, that doesn't matter much because we'll do the work with the design teams and then it tends to be just where we deliver the products to, but--

No, I guess I was also looking at the strength in the US, and is that do you think more product-specific than market?

I think there's a good capital investment going on there at the moment. Again, probably some of the underlying manufacturing with component side of it is maybe less, and we see some things going in, some things going out.

Clearly, if you're a manufacturer that's going to be exporting, making stuff in the US, you may decide you're better off not making it there, which we have seen.

Okay. Thank you.

Much to the complaints of our US team of doing all the work and then moving the business to a yeah.

Another long-running story. Yes.

Harry Phillips from Peel Hunt. Just one question, please, on the order book.

You talk a lot about the order book in the statement, but obviously don't give us a number. I'm assuming it's reasonably short-cycle.

In terms of the book-to-bill, given the revenue growth you've had in the period, can you at least give us an idea of where the book-to-bill might be against that? Then would it be right to assume that the order book is reasonably short-cycle, maybe additive manufacturing apart, or is that naive?

It's not and it is. I think the one thing we would always put in as a caveat, you're right with the additive.

On encoder, what we will see is when our customers start to get more stressed because they really think they've got orders coming through, and they often don't find out until the last minute, they will start to put on call-off orders and they'll give us a 12-month, 18-month order with predicted volumes which will go onto our order book. They will cancel that extremely quickly if they change their mind, but they will also shout when they want double that.

We look at the order book and it gives us a feeling, but you can't rely on it either.

We know that some of it will melt away.

Just precisely on that point, I suppose twofold. Does that heat, if you like, give you a window around pricing?

If you get extreme demands in terms of potential demand pull and I suspect you don't want to sort of mess up on line, but and then the second is, how do you plan your manufacturing around that? Because clearly, if you sort of responded directly to those order flows, you could load your cost base, and then, as you say, if you then get a cancellation, you're left with sort of stranded cost-type stuff.

What's the Renishaw way of interpreting that sort of front-end into a smooth manufacturing curve?

You say smooth as though it's anything but normally when these things happen. Clearly we're trying to work on very uncertain data, and we talk about this, many things, even if there's investment going in, the end customer may not decide on which supplier they want to use.

Those suppliers may all be using our encoders somewhere, but they may be using different encoders from us. You can't even say, 'Okay, we know it's going to come, let's make this,' because then this customer gets it and they want something different.

With us, it's trying to make sure, as much as possible, long-term strategy is migrate customers to our latest technology that's far more designed for automated assembly so we can ramp up, and then it's supply chain holding up for us to be able to respond. Safety stocks, and when we look at it in terms of our invested capital, we are high there because we know this happens in the markets that we operate in, we have to deal with that.

Then there's just a lot of panic that goes on to try and make everything happen as quickly as it can. It is on the more commoditized stuff then quite complicated of understanding, because often we may even be dual-sourced.

It's us and a competitor are both designed into a product, and then it may be then who can supply better, quicker, press whatever else. I'd

just add we're also increasing our use of temporary labor in some parts of the supply chain for things like cables for encoders, there's a lot of them to be made, and we use more temporary labor in our plants in India. Would

you want to go first, as you've got it?

Just have a question on ERP. Could you perhaps provide an update in regards to how that's panning out in terms of phasing, strategy, sort of key milestones to come?

Yes. We can't say it's certainly been a challenge.

Having done our Canadian office, which went relatively smoothly, we've now done our most complicated UK center. We experienced an awful lot of challenges.

I think it's fair to say we are through the worst of that now, but we still have a number of challenges that we want to make sure are resolved and working smoothly before we roll this out further, with Germany being our next company that will transfer over to D365. Yes, it has not been a pleasant experience, and a lot of lessons have been learned.

Understood. On the machine tool builder market, sounds as if Europe has been soft for a while.

I was just wondering whether you're seeing any signs of green shoots as it relates to German stimulus spending in '26 and beyond, or are those not apparent yet?

The last conversation I had was back at the end of last year with the head of a German machine tool company, and they were talking about this being a 5-year recession like they saw back in the '90s of a really tough time. Didn't think it was going to get any worse, which was like, 'Oh, thank Yeah.'

It's really tough over there. Domestic market, export market, and I think as we talked about, we've seen some of them being taken over.

It's tough.

Lastly, could we touch maybe upon humanoids? There are some companies in the market, sort of traditional industrial companies with let's say less expertise in automation and robotics that have been talking about this quite a lot, and the financial market has rewarded them for it.

Do you have a suitable product today that could serve that market? Do you have any existing relationships with sort of humanoid OEMs, and do you view it as a potential opportunity, say, over the next 5 to 10 years?

Okay. I thought the first bit is, 'Are we going to do a humanoid robot?'

, which would have been an easy, 'No.' No, we are definitely not going to do that.

The bit we are talking with some people around here is on the encoder, the rotary encoder technology. In our view, probably this is going to end up being a quite commoditized low-end market, and the price point they'll be looking at is not going to be attractive, and we've got better opportunities to go after.

It's something we look at, we'll monitor, but I don't see it being significant for us.

Got it.

Morning. Rich Hill from Jefferies.

Just a couple of questions, just looking at margins. Looking at position measurement, obviously you had one of the largest margin movements kind of out the division.

Just wanted to ask you, you've kind of talked about FX and the mix, just whether there's anything else in there that's more cost falling in there comparatively? I guess to Bruno's question earlier with it perhaps normalizing, just how you kind of see that in the second half, whether kind of that bit of growth in the order book for the laser encoders will kind of offset it a little bit for the second half?

I'll take that. I don't think we see anything sort of particularly different in terms of sort of cost base escalation going on in there.

We did reduce costs slightly less in the position measurement sort of side of the organization than in some of the other areas in the cost reduction process, but that was because we had some areas that we were really seeking to invest in, and some of the emerging elements of the product line that we felt we wanted to allocate resource to. It had a slightly lower proportion, but we're talking a percent or so.

It's not a huge factor in this. No, the primary driver in the short term was mix, but we're seeing it's well into the 20s in operating margin and I think long-term going in the right direction.

Thanks. Then if I may, just a chance question looking at your kind of emerging products, and we've heard kind of importance for your strategy going forward.

Just in terms of margins, and appreciate not specifics, but the assumption being that they're lower kind of margin to go as they come in, as you gain that market share, but just looking at that kind of profile as they become more developed. I guess what kind of time frame or any other details you could give us there would be great.

Do you mean in terms of the gross margin or bottom line?

More bottom line.

Okay. If they're emerging, they are definitely ones that are not hitting our profitability targets at the moment.

They're at different stages, we have targets on when different ones should be getting into better stages of profitability, and ones like CMM and gauging are far more established than some of the ones that we have just launched.

Thank you.

Chris, have we got anything online?

Nothing yet.

Okay. All right, closing remarks.

Yeah. If there are no more questions, I guess in terms of overall, great to be back here in person.

As I said at the start, it feels like a really good H1 set of results, still lots of uncertainty as there always is with us going forward in the short term. For me, I think the leaving messages would be on the medium to long term, if you look at the opportunities we have from the innovation engine, and also the progress we're making on those emerging businesses, and the focus areas that we have there, that's the excitement that is within the business, and the excitement that should be around Renishaw.

Thank you all very much.