Thank you Philippe, and may I also bid you all a happy New Year and thank you for making the tremendous effort to get to London.
As Varda said, 2012 was a difficult year and while the long term fundamentals of the industry are exciting, we must all get used to the fact that short-term volatility is now a fact of life in the industry.
When Cecil Rhodes and his colleagues established De Beers in 1888 I am sure they could not have expected to create such a long-lasting legacy, but here we stand a century and a quarter later, ready to begin a new chapter in our history.
De Beers Group of Companies marks the 30th anniversary of the world's richest diamond mine
This will almost certainly be the last time that I will be with you in my capacity as Chairman of De Beers, a company whose history has been intertwined with that of my family’s for four generations.