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Q3 2009 Premier Farnell Plc Earnings Conference Call - Final.

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OPERATOR: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Premier Farnell third quarter results conference call. My name is John and I am your conference coordinator. For the duration of the call, you will be on listen-only. However, at the end of the call, you will have the opportunity to ask questions. (Operator Instructions).

I will now hand you over to Harriet Green, Chief Executive Officer, to begin today's call.

HARRIET GREEN, CEO, PREMIER FARNELL PLC: Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining us today as we share with you Premier Farnell's results for the third quarter and the first nine months of 2009. With me this morning are Mark Whiteling, our Chief Financial Officer, and Laurence Bain, our Chief Operating Officer, who will both be available to answer your questions following the presentation.

I trust that you have had an opportunity to view our statements this morning and I really appreciate you taking the time to join with us.

Our results for the third quarter show positive growth in all of our core MDD regions and demonstrate our continued success on the Web.

I will now give you an overview of our strategy and our highlights for the quarter. Mark will update you on our financial progress before we go into a slightly more detailed quarterly performance review.

Following our presentation, we will open up lines for questions. If you are an investor, journalist or employee joining the call and have questions, please feel free to contact any one of us at any time after the call as well.

Our strategy remains unchanged and as a result of progress we have made, we have begun to take actions to accelerate our transition to the Web whilst also taking into account the potential impact of the slowing global economy. As we move forward with our Web transition and in order to ensure that we are appropriately structured for the future, we have already taken the actions to reduce our global employee headcount by approximately 300 people. The one-off costs relating to these headcount reductions will be GBP3 million during the fourth quarter and an annualized benefit of GBP12 million.

In addition, as a result of our investments over the past seven quarters, we now have the systems and infrastructure in place to drive even more actions around the Web. As customers can transition if they continue to choose to transition to this content-rich channel, we have the ability to remove some of the fixed costs associated with our other channels and improve our operating efficiency.

This was a critical part of the strategy and these actions allow us to create a permanent shift in our cost space. We anticipate the benefits of these integrated programs for cost reduction and operational efficiencies will allow us to reduce our operating expenses as a percentage of sales by 2%.

Accordingly, we are raising our longer-term target for return on sales from 10 to 12%.

I will take you through our Q3 highlights. And then Mark will provide a more detailed review of our financials.

So, on the chart Q3 financial highlights during the quarter we spent 2.3 million of incremental...

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