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John Crosse: Good morning, and welcome, everyone, in the room and joining online or on the phones. Thanks for joining us for our FY '25 results. Just a few housekeeping things before we kick off. There are no planned fire alarm tests today. So if the alarm does go off, for those in the room, it's a real one. And you can see the fire exits just behind you marked in green. And then finally, just wanted to draw your attention to the usual disclaimer in the presentation. We've got for you this morning. So without further ado, I would like to hand over to Lukas.
Lukas Paravicini: Thank you very much, John. And good morning, and a very warm welcome to all of you here in the room, and a very warm welcome to you all who join us online. Today marks another exciting day on the journey of Imperial Brands. I'm very pleased to share with you another year of strong performance, and I'm very excited about this being my first time in the role of CEO of the group, a true honor and a true privilege, which I don't take lightly. I'm joined today by Murray McGowan, our newly appointed Chief Financial Officer; and John Crosse, our Head of Investors Relation. I'll start off by giving you the highlights of fiscal year '25. Murray will then join us and share more about the financial performance and the outlook for '26. I will then come back, talk a bit more about our operational delivery, our transformation and also to reconfirm our strategic ambition that we set out in March this year. At the end of that, we look very much forward to all your questions. And with that, let me get down to business, and let's start the presentation. What I really would like to do today is highlight 3 things. First, the quality of our performance during this past fiscal year and how this builds on our growing track record of consistent growth. Second, how our evolved strategy is not just a confident evolution, it is also a step change in our capabilities and a commitment to delivering further significant value to our shareholders. And third, our own personal excitement at the opportunities that lie ahead of us. Since the half year results in May and the announcement of our new roles, Murray and I have been spending a lot of time with our people across our global businesses. This included face-to-face events in all regions attended by more than 600 of our leaders. We've been discussing our recent achievements, our refreshed strategy and how we can make an even bigger impact over the next 5 years. What's been really energizing is the sheer enthusiasm of our colleagues about where we are going next. And it has reinforced my belief that we have the right plan and the right people to make the step change we highlighted at the CMD in March. We'll come back to those plans later. But first, let's look at our fiscal year '25 dashboard. Once again, all the key metrics are delivering in line with our commitments. You can see here how consistent operational delivery is underpinning improvements in our key financial measures and in turn, driving shareholder returns. In combustibles, we maintained share in our priority markets while also delivering another year of strong pricing. In NGP, we recorded a further year of double-digit revenue growth with share growing in all categories. This progress at an operational level has translated into revenue growth of more than 4% and an improvement of more than 9% in earnings per share. This has also been a year of strong cash flow. All this has supported material increases in our -- in both our underlying dividend and our ongoing share buyback. During fiscal year '26, we further intend to make total capital returns in excess of GBP 2.7 billion. These results add to our consistent track record of growth. You can see here how each year of incremental improvement adds up to a powerful cumulative effect over the past 5 years, a 48 basis points improvement in aggregate market share. NGP revenue up 73%, EPS up 1/3, and the GBP 10 billion in capital returns. That's equivalent to 2/3 of our market cap when we started our 2021 strategy. So that's what we have delivered. Even more important is how we have delivered. As you have heard us say many times, the unifying theme behind our success is our challenger approach. These things is about 3 things: getting really close to our consumer, staying focused on the most important drivers of growth and investing to become more agile. During the CMD, you've heard us talk in more detail about how we brought to life this challenger idea. For example, investing in new consumer capabilities, prioritizing must-win market battles, developing a high-performance culture, investing in technology and harnessing our self-help opportunities. It was these investments, these changes, which helped us turn around our tobacco business and build an NGP business where we now have attractive products across all consumer categories. At this point, I would also like to take a moment to thank Stefan, Stefan Bomhard, for his leadership in the turnaround of Imperial Brands over the past 5 years. He leaves behind a strong platform for future growth. Looking ahead, you'll see us continue to play our important distinctive role as a challenger business in this sector. And as we said at the Capital Market Day, our purpose remains unchanged. We're still going to be forging a path to a healthier future for moments of relaxation and pleasure. In this way, we will continue to deliver strong performance for shareholders. I will now hand over to Murray. And when I come back, I'll take a closer look into our strategic ambition and how we transform our business to actually achieve them. Murray, over to you.
Murray McGowan: Thank you, Lukas, and good morning, everyone. As many of you know, I joined Imperial Brands just over 5 years ago, heading up Strategy and Corporate Development. And in that role back in 2021, I led the development of our previous strategy, which we shared in January '21. And more recently, I led the work to develop our evolved strategy that we shared in March of this year at our Capital Markets Day. Now I am really honored to have the opportunity to step up to be Chief Financial Officer for Imperial Brands, and I absolutely share Lukas's excitement about the opportunities that we have ahead of us. As I pick up the CFO baton from Lukas, I'm pleased to show you another positive year of financial results and a year of strong delivery. As Lukas said, we've maintained aggregate share in our 5 priority markets, whilst delivering strong pricing. We have again delivered double-digit net revenue growth in NGP and strong operational performance has enabled us to deliver group adjusted operating profit in line with guidance, up by 4.6%. This, together with the GBP 1.25 billion share buyback, enabled us to deliver high single-digit EPS growth that we committed to. Leverage of 2x is in line with the target of being at the lower end of our 2 to 2.5x range. And this has been driven by cash conversion near the upper end of our 90% to 100% range, delivering robust free cash flow of GBP 2.7 billion. Turning to volume and price mix at the regional and group level. Once again here, we can see the strength of the tobacco value model in action. Our investment in brand equity and improved sales execution enabled strong pricing across our footprint, shown in orange on the chart. Price/mix has more than offset volume declines shown here in gray to deliver tobacco net revenue growth of 3.7%, a similar rate to last year. Volume declines in Europe and AACE improved relative to historical rates and strong pricing in Europe helped deliver net revenue growth of 4.2% in this region. In the U.S., we saw strong price/mix of 9.9%, more than offsetting volume declines, which were slightly more moderate than the prior year. Moving on to adjusted operating profit. Tobacco performance has been the main contributor to group adjusted operating profit growth, supported by NGP and Logista. In tobacco, the strong pricing I just described has driven higher profit. As usual, we benefit from the operational gearing as we move down the P&L. In NGP, losses remained at a similar level to last year as we increased investment in certain parts of our portfolio, for example, Zone in the U.S. We're making good progress towards building a sustainable and profitable NGP business as we continue to build scale. Overall, tobacco and NGP adjusted operating profit grew 4.9%. At Logista, performance was behind prior years with growth from tobacco price increases offset by performance in the long-distance transport sector. So overall, I am pleased with the 4.6% growth in group adjusted operating profit. Now as CFO, I will always be transparent about items that we classify as adjustments. Today, we are disclosing 2 charges related to our 2030 strategy. The first is an impairment charge related to our recent announcement that we will cease production at our Langenhagen factory. The second relates to the initial cost of our wider transformation program. These costs are within the guidance we gave at our Capital Markets Day back in March, and the remaining costs related to transformation will be adjusting items in future years. Strong adjusted operating profit growth, coupled with the share count reduction has driven earnings per share growth of 9.1%. The increase in tax reflects a slightly higher adjusted effective tax rate at 23.3% with higher net finance costs in line with our guidance. There was a small increase in minority interest, reflecting the strong performance in Africa. These impacts are more than offset by the benefit of the reduced share count. During the year, we repurchased just over 5% of our share capital, bringing the total repurchase since we began the share buyback program in 2022 to 15.8%. Turning to cash and capital allocation. Our operating cash conversion was 97%, enabling strong free cash flow generation of GBP 2.7 billion. This means that over the past 5 years, we generated cumulative cash of GBP 11.6 billion. Now disciplined capital investment remains a key part of how we create value. And let me assure you that I remain committed to our capital allocation framework as I step into the CFO role. Our first priority is to invest in the business. As a reminder, our approach is primarily organic. We have committed to invest in transformation, but we will also consider bolt-on acquisitions where they support the delivery of our strategy. Second, we maintain a strong and efficient balance sheet. Third, we deliver progressive dividends. And fourth, we're committed to returning surplus capital to our shareholders. As we announced on the 7th of October, we've increased our FY '26 share buyback to GBP 1.45 billion. As Lukas said, we've now returned over GBP 10 billion to our shareholders since FY '21. This represents 2/3 of our market value when we launched a previous strategy in January 2021. And going forward, we are committed to an evergreen share buyback throughout the next 5-year strategic period. Our expectations for the coming year are in line with the medium-term guidance that we set out at the Capital Markets Day in March 2025. We will continue to invest to support low single-digit tobacco and double-digit NGP net revenue growth on a constant currency basis. Given the strong momentum in our NGP business, we'll continue to invest to drive growth while balancing our objective to build a sustainable and profitable business. Group adjusted operating profit is expected to grow in the 3% to 5% range, driven primarily by the continued profit growth of our combustible business. In line with previous years, because of the phasing of combustible pricing and investment, performance will be weighted to the second half. Free cash flow generation is expected to be at least GBP 2.2 billion after investments in our transformation. The growth in adjusted operating profit, combined with the ongoing share buyback is expected to deliver at least high single-digit EPS growth, even after slightly increased tax, finance and minority interest costs. At current rates, we expect foreign exchange translation to be a 2% to 2.5% tailwind to profit. As usual, there is a slide in the appendix with guidance on the specific items. Now, I believe the results we are delivering today demonstrate the strong foundation that we have built that will enable us to continue to deliver over the next 5 years and generate value for our shareholders. Thank you. I'll now hand back to Lukas.
Lukas Paravicini: Thank you very much, Murray. And in this part, I'll start off by giving you a bit more details about our operational delivery and how they underpinned our fiscal year '25 performance. I will then turn back to our strategic ambitions, and I'll explain how in our opinion, the distinctive combination of actually consistent in-year delivery and an accelerated transformation add up to a compelling investment proposition. So let's start with the tobacco business. We have driven pricing successfully and created significant value. This pricing has been achieved while also maintaining stable share in our priority markets. Our portfolio has been performing in line with our strategic objectives. The times where we were the largest owner of market share have gone for good. Our overarching priority is to balance aggregate share, pricing and long-term brand building to generate sustainable value. In any given year, we may make deliberate decisions in individual markets to monetize share gains made in previous years. The U.S. and Germany, our 2 largest markets, which together account for about half of our revenue and profits. And we have grouped them on the same slide because they share key characteristics. In both markets, we are benefiting from long-term investments in our sales force, which have improved effectiveness and coverage. In both markets, we are competing successfully at the premium end with iconic brands like Gauloises and Davidoff in Germany and Winston and Kool in the U.S. In both markets, we are also capitalizing well on our consumer down trading into the discount segment. Both markets continue to be highly affordable for consumers, and we see attractive opportunities for the future. In Germany, we have continued the improving share trajectory of last year after a decade of share declines. Aligned with our strategy in the U.S., we delivered stable share in what is a highly competitive marketplace. Our U.S. business also has a strong mass market cigar franchise, led by our premium Backwoods brand. And this has continued to grow well over the past year. Turning to the other key markets. In Spain, we took a conscious choice to monetize share gains over the past 4 years. We see this market as continuing to be highly affordable and attractive over the next 5 years and beyond. As we have always said, the U.K. and Australia both face rising excise rates, leading to growing illicit trades. And we expect these trends to continue into fiscal year '26. Having spent time in both markets recently, I've been impressed by our team's ability to continue to generate value. In Australia, for the first time, we moved into the #1 position in terms of market share. And in the U.K., the team managed our tobacco business skillfully, while also making good progress building a meaningful NGP franchise. And our Africa cluster contains diverse markets from Morocco in the Northwest to Madagascar in the Indian Ocean and accounts for 10% of our operating -- our tobacco adjusted operating profit. As you would expect, in any emerging markets business, the performance of individual countries can vary. But in aggregate, these markets have been growing strongly and consistently. And we expect it to become an even more material contributor to the group over the next few years. So let me talk now about NGP. We continue to see share growth across all categories. In modern oral, we are excited by the significant growth we are delivering with Zone in the U.S. We have established a national share of 2.8%, and the product is now available in 100,000 stores. And we are committed to ongoing investment in building this brand. In the Nordic markets, we are also growing strongly with Skruf. Here, targeted innovation in flavors and the design of our pouches is paying off with a positive response from consumers. Our vape business is performing well. We're focused on Western Europe where vaping is established as a dominant category. Across our footprint, we are growing share. And in the big 3 European markets, the U.K., France and Spain, we now have well-established double-digit positions. I've been particularly pleased to see the agility with which we adapted to regulatory changes. Our new pod-based blu Kit ranges was rolled out at pace during the year and has already become the big driver of our growth. In heated tobacco, we have made further progress. Here, we are growing share in our focused footprint. While it is early days, our new Pulze 3.0 device is winning positive feedback from the trade and consumers. So it's been a strong operational performance, which builds on our solid record. I'm proud of what our teams have achieved over the past 5 years. Their success gives us a firm foundation for the next strategic period. But I want to be clear, absolutely clear, this management team is not resting on its laurels. As we said at the CMD, we know we need to go further, and we need to go faster. And we are confident we have the right plans to deliver continued strong performance for our shareholders. At one level, our strategy is a confident evolution. As I said earlier, we will continue to follow the challenger approach, which has underpinned our recent success. Our strategy will further drive significant sustainable value in our combustible business and build an NGP business operating at scale. This is a combination, we believe, create material value for shareholders over the next 5 years. These are the twin priorities, which sit on the top of our strategy wheel. But this is more, more than just an evolution. Delivering these ambitious priorities will require a further step change in our capabilities. And the 3 elements on the bottom half of our wheel, our strategic enablers explain how we will achieve them. Taking these elements together, the big opportunity is this. We are a business that was stitched together from many acquisitions over several decades. Over the past few years, we have made progress towards building a consumer-centric, simplified and more joined-up business. And we have assembled a fantastic team of people with a unique blend of broad consumer experience and deep knowledge of our consumer, our markets and our industry. But this journey, this journey remains unfinished. During the next few years, by investing further in our consumer capabilities, our technology and data and by equipping our people with the right skills, we are setting ourselves up for success. We will, at last, complete our long transition from a loose collection of businesses to become a true challenger business, which leads the industry in consumer intimacy. And we will become an agile, data-led and high-performing organization. And at that moment, we will fully unleash the brilliant talent we have brought together. An important element of this new team is our 1,000 strong global consumer organization. Our investment in people and capabilities has enabled us to continue deepening our insights into the consumers we need to target. This enables us to build more sharply differentiated brands, which create passion among our consumers and drive material commercial outcomes. A fresh capability we have added over the past year is our new brand building framework. This adds more rigor to how we identify target consumers, build compelling marketing campaigns and ultimately, deliver share and revenue. An early output of this work has been our new "Touch of Blue" campaign for Gauloises in Germany, which is already helping drive an improvement in the share trend. We are applying the same processes to our NGP business. For example, here, you can see some of the work we are doing with our Zone in the U.S. and blu here in the U.K. Armed with a clearer view of our target consumers and their needs, we are getting more intentional in how we innovate in tobacco and NGP. For example, by mapping the flavors preferred by our Moroccan consumers, we discovered we were missing an important opportunity. To meet that need, we launched Gauloises Rich Gold, and it's performing well. In vape, the new blu Kit range I mentioned earlier was in response to our consumers expressing a need for more authentic tasting flavors and a differentiated quality design. In O&D, in close collaboration with consumers, we've revamped the format, creating a new pouch that delivers superior flavor, faster nicotine release and a smoother mouth feel. And excitingly, as you will have seen in the area outside this morning, today marks the official launch of our nicotine pouch in the U.K. market under the Zone brand. And the latest iteration of our Pulze heated tobacco device is another example of highly focused innovation. We know our consumer wants convenient, all-in-one package, which closely replicates the experience of a cigarette. And the early signs are that this is going to be a winning proposition with our consumers. Over the past 12 months, we made further progress in transforming the other elements of our business to simplify our organization and become more efficient and data enabled. Our 5-year program to build a new ERP platform is on track, and we recently went live in our first large production site. We've launched a stronger and more integrated business planning process. We continue to drive efficiency through manufacturing excellence. And in October, we took the difficult but necessary decision to withdraw from Langenhagen factory in Germany. We're also continuing to drive sales excellence, investing in technology and the skills of our sales teams to become the trade partner of choice. Right now, it would be fair to say we are still playing catch-up with other consumer businesses, which started transformation years earlier. Over the next strategic period, though, we can accelerate our progress by learning from the journeys taken by our peers. We can leapfrog technologies and we skip unnecessary development steps. I think of the opportunity as being a little bit like those emerging countries, which successfully jumped from coins and banknotes, straight to mobile wallets. At future results presentations, I look forward to providing more detail of our transformation plans and updating you on the progress we make. As we grow and transform our business, we want to do so in a responsible, sustainable way. We continue to invest in consumer insights and scientific research to develop our understanding of how we are contributing to harm reduction. Our most recent research looked at the behavior of adult smokers with no plans to quit when introduced to blu vapes. It was very encouraging to see that 6 months into the survey, between 1/3 and 40% of participants had either significantly reduced smoking cigarettes or stopped completely. And we are committed to incorporating these kinds of insights into how we market and develop our future product ranges. Also today, we are announcing further reductions in CO2 and waste. Now let me draw all these trends together. It's been another year of consistent broad-based growth. Strong foundations are in place for the next 5 years, and we have a clear strategy for value creation. Our focused approach to getting close to our consumers and building differentiated brands works well. We now have a stronger, more sustainable combustible business. And in NGP, competitive products across all categories, and we are building scale and margins. But we are never complacent, and we take absolutely nothing for granted. That said, as we look to fiscal year '26, we feel confident that we can continue to deliver sustainable growth. At the same time, we are excited about the opportunities to further transform this business to deliver a step-up in our capabilities. It's a transformation that will ensure that we can deliver sustainable growth in the years to 2030 and well beyond. We think that when you stand back, what we are offering is a highly attractive investment proposition, broad-based operational delivery, which translates into growing revenues and profitability with strong cash generation and significant capital returns at what is still a very attractive valuation. As we always say, if you are invested in us, we thank you for your support. And if you aren't yet a shareholder, well, we think this is a great time for you to take another look at what we are doing and where we are going next. Thank you very much. And with that, I would like to ask John to open for our Q&A session.
John Crosse: Great. Thank you, Lukas. I think as usual, we'll start with questions in the room first. We've also got questions on the phone for those of you who joined by telephone and also on the webcast as well. [Operator Instructions] But as I said, let's take the first question from here in the room. Do you want to go at the front? Can you please state your name and your organization as well, please, just for those listening on the webcast.
Mirza Faham Baig: It's Faham Baig, UBS. First question, I appreciate Imperial has transitioned away from a share donor. And sorry for being pedantic, but the volume share performance in the U.S. and Germany has turned slightly negative in the scanner data. And the question is, as competitive activity rises in the deep discount segment, how are you thinking about balancing aggregate share stability versus value delivery? And the second question on Zone in U.S. nicotine pouches. I appreciate that you've been able to keep share relatively stable as the category has become more price competitive. The question is 2 part. Where do you believe if you stand with Zone's product -- Zone's product quality versus that of incoming launches? And would you maybe look to use some of the duty drawback benefits to reinvest into price?
Lukas Paravicini: So those are 3 questions. I'll try to answer them in sequence. Please remind me if I forget one. Let's start with market share. Listen, as you pointed out, I think what you have seen over the last 5 years is that we have clearly moved away from being the biggest donor of market share in the industry, if you go back 5 years to where we are today. I don't think that has happened by accident. That has happened because we have invested in our capabilities. We have built a muscle. And that capability is all around starting with the consumer, starting with the consumer, understanding our consumer better, hence, being able to build more differentiated brands, invest into better innovation, which you have seen over the last years coming to market. We have invested in our sales force. We have actually extended sales coverage in Germany and the U.S. We have increased significantly productivity by adding technology to that. And I think we have been very agile in also managing our portfolio of brands and portfolio of markets to always achieve a stable market share across our aggregate 5 markets, which is our goal. And the goal is stable market share. That's what is in our model. And I think we have shown that capability, that agility to balance off well market share and pricing or revenue. And I'm convinced, I'm confident in those same capabilities that going forward, we can still generate very much value out of our combustible business without losing share. Okay? I'm sorry, that was the first one. I thought it was it. There was sort of relief of that question. Yes, U.S. Zone. Well, we are really excited about U.S. Zone in the U.S. Actually, our growth has actually accelerated in the second half. And you all know there has been quite a bit of aggressiveness, which we would never follow. And so we are pleased. We gained -- we started 18 months ago. We came from nowhere to 2.8% market share. We're in 100,000 stores. And we have a proposition that our consumers really like. We maintained our market share throughout the summer and throughout September, throughout that competitive pricing. This is a growing category, and it is highly competitive. We always expected more competition to come in. We are confident in our product proposition, and we are confident in building a significant business in the U.S. continuing to grow at our pace on the long term. So that's the second one. The third one was duty drawback. Listen, now that we have clarity with duty drawback in the U.S., as you know, in summer, there has been some legislation passed through Congress in the U.S. We have very agilely put ourselves to work. And it is not as easy as -- it's not a thing you do overnight. But as a global organization, we are well placed to take opportunity and benefit of that duty drawback scheme. We do have to certify certain lines and certain factories abroad for U.S. imports. We do hope -- so it's less a question of if, it's more a question of when. We -- I mean, we -- let's be clear. We hope that this year, we still see a little benefit, but we'll for sure ramp it up next year. So that will come. I think that covered everything.
John Crosse: Next question in the room. Damian, you want to take it down the front.
Damian McNeela: So Damian McNeela from Deutsche Bank. First question, just following on from Faham's question on Zone. I think you indicated you're in about 100,000 stores. Just can you talk about whether -- what your expectations are for further distribution gains behind Zone for the coming year? And then just in terms of NGP profitability, it was broadly stable in the year just finished. Given the sort of expectations for sort of relaunch of Zone in U.K. and U.S., how should we think about NGP profitability next year? And then just the last one on the NGP side. European NGP revenues growth slowed in the second half, obviously, because of lapping launches in the first half. But can you sort of indicate what we should expect in the second half, please? Sorry, for FY '26...
Lukas Paravicini: '26. Yes. So let me go back. I'll quickly answer the Zone question. I'll also touch on the NGP in '26, and then Murray will answer the question on the profitability. So listen, we've been in 100,000 stores. There's a bit more to come there. There's some more distribution we can harness. Ultimately, we want a weighted distribution of north of 85%. Well, there's some to be hold there. But I think that's one element of our growth and our confidence. The other is that we have a proposition that our consumer, which we target very precisely, does enjoy our products. And there is confidence that by continuing to invest behind the brand, we will be able to continue to grow at our pace that product. In general, when you go back at NGP and the growth you highlighted or asked for in Europe, I just want to step back again and share our excitement of where we are with NGP. Let me just remind you where we are 5 years ago. Many of you in this room would not give us very much credit for NGP. Since we almost doubled the net revenue, we have a proposition in all 3 categories. Over the last 3 years, we have grown double digit in NGP, and we have grown share in all 3 categories. And we have committed to build or we have an ambition to build a meaningful business over the next 5 years. And we have underpinned that commitment with a double-digit growth. Now we've pointed out in the CMD that growth will be different depending on regions and categories. We knew that vape is a category which is more mature, which goes through regulatory changes in the years we are in the middle of. And hence, you will see a different growth rate from O&D -- sorry, nicotine pouches and heated tobacco. But if you look at Europe, the point you make, if you look at '25, our modern oral nicotine pouches in Nordics grew very, very well. Our heated tobacco in Italy grew very well. But yes, vape is in the middle of a transition from a disposable vape to a rechargeable, reusable pod-based system, which obviously has that effect of slowing down growth. Okay. Sorry, you wanted -- I keep forgetting that there are other questions.
Murray McGowan: In terms -- profitability -- as we said in the Capital Markets Day, we're really clear that we want to build a sustainable, scaled next-generation products business that generates both profit and cash and contribution to the group. What we're not looking to do is set an average time line as to when we'll hit that profitability. As we look at our businesses now, we see opportunities to invest to drive growth, whether it be Zone in the U.S. or Zone in the U.K. or other vaping opportunities or heated tobacco in Southern Eastern Europe. What we do believe is those we can see healthy margins, healthy gross margins across our portfolio of next-generation products. And if you look in the appendices of the presentation today, we share the margins across each of the different platforms. So we believe the right call for us is to invest to grow and to grow towards profitability. But we are confident that by the time we get to the end of the plan, it will be a good contributor to the group overall. In terms of your specific question about profitability next year, I wouldn't expect a significant shift in terms of level of profitability for next year. But in the grand scheme of our P&L, we think it's a sensible investment from a shareholder perspective.
John Crosse: [Mariah Deshnov] from Barclays here. Just thinking about your agreement with TJP, does that prevent you at all from launching Skruf as a product in the U.S. if there was interest? And also, if there were to be any PMTAs of any new products in 2026, would that have to be done through TJP or how would that work?
Lukas Paravicini: So TJP Labs is our partner. We were very agile a few years ago, and that was a good demonstration on how we look at bolt-on acquisitions, how we move agile when it comes to opportunities and where we want to enter new market. And we have a contract manufacturing agreement with them. We bought the products. So the products are ours. They are under in the PMTA. So the question whether we want to launch a product that is used on the Skruf in the U.S. has nothing to do with TJ Lab. It has to be with the PMTA process that you would have to require a PMTA. And then that is a more complicated undertaking. So TJ Lab is our contract manufacturer, but has nothing to do with the choices we make on products. And there was -- no, that's it. Yes.
John Crosse: We'll take another question in the room. And then we'll go to the phone lines. There's one waiting.
Bastien Agaud: Bastien Agaud from Bank of America. On the next tobacco product directive, experts say that we should have something probably next year calling for potentially normalization at the European level, whether with some restriction on the flavor. So given the opportunity on the potential geographical expansion, whether with restriction on the flavor, is that an opportunity for you? Or how should we think about it given potentially more country where you can open or whether with more restriction on the flavor? And I'm thinking about modern oral particularly.
Lukas Paravicini: So I think I remember when I joined this group, the first thing that I learned is that there is regulation and there's a lot of noise around regulation. But I also learned quite quickly that regulation has been with this industry for the last 30, 40 years. And the industry and ourselves have built a muscle to adapt and live with regulation, which we fully understand and support. So I think that's the first point. We are a company that is accustomed to operate in a regulated market, and we will adapt, and we have adapted well to that like the others in the industry. I think the EU TPD that you are referring to is a well-established, long process. We have now finally seen the basics or the proposal. As you know, there's lots of differences around the 29 markets or 27. I'm not sure really how many in the European Union, I apologize for that. But in the conglomerate of all those markets, there's all different kind of opinions. And so it will take at least to your point, we believe it's a good year for this to harmonize to find a solution. But we know the direction and the direction actually helps us also put a framework. We've always been in favor of some thoughtful regulation that allows adult smoker to get to those products that help them get off smoking, but also prevent you getting to those same products, which we do not market to. So we'll see what comes out. We are confident that we'll continue to operate well in that framework. And as you said, more regulation that is thoughtful will actually help us going forward.
John Crosse: Great. Thanks, Lukas. We go to the phone lines now. Sharon, do you just want to remind people on the phones again how to register?
Operator: [Operator Instructions] I will now hand back to you, John.
John Crosse: Thanks. So we do have some questions in the queue. The first one is David from Morgan Stanley.
Unknown Analyst: David [indiscernible] from Morgan Stanley. I just had one question on cash flow looking forward. How should we think about working capital in '26 and outer years? Should we expect an inflow or outflow?
Murray McGowan: Thanks for the question, David. Working capital, we try to ensure we maintain a tight control on working capital as a group. In terms of guidance going forward, look, we guide on free cash flow as a business. We're very clear the guidance for the business in the meantime in the medium term is from GBP 2.2 billion up to GBP 3 billion by the end of the strategic period. Working capital, we're not expecting any significant shifts plus or minus during that period of time at this stage. So we don't guide on that. I think the focus more on the free cash flow commitment, so at least GBP 2.2 billion next year.
John Crosse: Great. Thanks, David. We do also have one question that's come through online from [John Guy]. John, I think we've answered that. Your question was around the building blocks of driving double-digit growth in NGP next year. I think we covered that early on. John, do drop us an e-mail and get in touch if you feel you need a bit more detail, but I think we've answered that already. So come back into the room if there's any other questions in the room. No. Okay. There's no other questions online. So with that, I hand it over to you, Lukas, to wrap up.
Lukas Paravicini: Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to have you here. Thanks for your interest. And again, as I said, we are very excited with not just what we have delivered this year, what we have delivered over the last 5 years. Again, also thanks to Stefan, who is not with us today, but has always been instrumental in delivering the last 5 years. But also very excited about how we continue our confident evolution in delivering against a good tobacco business, sustainable value there, why we build an NGP business at scale and also very excited how we're going to step up our capability built around getting closer to consumers, invest further in technology to underpin our strategic ambitions. Thank you very much, and hope to see you soon again. Thank you.