Woodside Petroleum : Test123

Good morning and welcome to our 2013 Half-Year Results briefing. We appreciate your continued interest in Woodside.

Sharing the conference call today is Lawrie Tremaine, our CFO. Phil Loader, our new EVP Global Exploration, is also with us to outline Woodside's program to grow our exploration portfolio.

Slide 2.

This slide shows our normal disclaimer.

This includes a reminder that all dollar figures in this briefing are US dollars, unless otherwise stated. Slide 3.

Beginning with Woodside's financial headlines for the half, once again we achieved a very solid performance across our key financial metrics.

Adding a full half of production from Pluto LNG has resulted in strong operating revenue of almost $2.9 billion, despite weaker commodity prices and our Vincent FPSO being off station throughout the half. This number was also impacted by a changing product mix, which Lawrie will discuss shortly.

Higher production and sales volumes, combined with lower tax, saw our net profit after tax increase by 8%.

We have reduced our net debt levels, down to $2.2 billion from a figure that just 12 months ago was

$4.8 billion. Our lower net debt, growing cash flows and a low gearing level leaves us well positioned to fund future growth.

It also allows us to return capital to shareholders, through higher earnings per share and increased dividends. We're very pleased to deliver an interim dividend almost 30% higher than last year. This is on top of the special dividend of 63 cents per share we announced in April.

Slide 4.

Briefly reviewing our business performance for the half, and I'd like to start with the highest priority for our business

- the safety of our people.

You may be aware that Woodside has set a goal of achieving global top quartile health and safety performance by 2017, and I'm pleased to report that our early progress has been good. At the end of June this year our Total Recordable Injury Rate was 3.46 per million hours worked, down from 3.99 in the corresponding period last year.

Lawrie will break down the production numbers shortly, but the key take-away is the step-change in production that Pluto LNG has brought to our business. Notwithstanding some planned and unplanned interruptions during the half, we still achieved a record first half production figure of 41.9 million barrels of oil equivalent.

Our improved financial position compared to 12 months ago - net debt more than halved, gearing level halved, cash and undrawn facilities almost doubled - put us in a very good position to fund long-term growth. And I do want to emphasise today that Woodside remains very much a growth company. It is in our company's DNA, and this will not change.

But given our very strong balance sheet, we are also in a position to reward our shareholders via increased dividends.

Our disciplined approach to growing our portfolio has netted us some important value-creating opportunities. During the half we finalised our two farm-in agreements offshore Myanmar and had two offers accepted to farm in to the prospective Porcupine Basin offshore Ireland. Finalising our entry into the Leviathan joint venture is taking time, but we were pleased during the half to receive some clarity from Israel's Cabinet around gas export policy.

Finally, we are continuing our process of cultural and organisational change, with a focus on bringing in leadership talent in areas such as exploration, technology and project execution. You will hear shortly from one of our new additions, EVP Global Exploration Phil Loader.

I'll now hand over to Lawrie to take us through the financial results. Slide 5.