Simon Pryce, Chief Executive, commented: We are today publishing our interim results early to provide shareholders with details of our stronger than anticipated first half performance and excellent strategic progress. As flagged in our 5 July trading update, demand in our core defence & critical detection markets have remained robust. This together with our focused strategy and technology investment is driving expansion in our £12bn sales pipeline
(8), and further growth in our order book which, at £1.3bn, is a record for Ultra. We delivered good underlying revenue growth in the period and operational performance was strong, despite the mainly Covid-19 driven operational inefficiencies in Maritime which have now been broadly resolved. Our Focus; Fix; Grow transformation programme is already delivering ahead of plan and we are now more confident in our improvement potential with a better payback than originally a