Once all the necessary adjustments to the model have been done to take account of the new project, we then need to calculate our credit metrics first, the debt to book ebitda. So for the debt to book equity ratio, we've gotta go to the model and within parentheses, grab all of our debt instruments, which are the short term debt, and the long term debt, and the new bond, and divide that all by the book equity. That's the balance sheet equity value. We also need to do this for the net debt to ebitda. So again, within parentheses, we need our net debt, which is all of our debt instruments, short term debt, long-term debt, and the new bond minus our cash and cash equivalents divided by the EBITDA for the group as a whole, our total EBITDA for the EBITDA to interest expense. We haven't been given a breakdown of our interest calculations for the historical period.

So as a result, we cannot calculate the EBITDA interest expense for the 2024 year, but we can calculate EBITDA interest expense for the 2025 and later years. So we need to take the EBITDA, total EBITDA for 2025 and divide it by just the interest expense, which right down at the very bottom is the interest expense on the total debt, the existing debt, but also the interest expense on the new bond as well. So if we demonstrate the debt to book equity as a percentage, we can see that this is below the 75% maximum. Our net debt to EBITDA is also below the 2.5 maximum in 2025, and our EBITDA interest expense, our EBITDA coverage ratio is also above the minimum of six times. Let's copy this across for all of the six years of the forecast, and unfortunately, this demonstrates a bit of a problem for us. Although the debt to equity ratio stays below 75% in every period, we've got a bit of a problem with the other two ratios. In 2026, the net debt to EBITDA is above 2.5, and the interest coverage is below six. This suggests that Charles River Laboratories won't maintain their double B plus credit rating that they were looking to maintain. The final step in this process is to answer the couple of questions that we got at the end. We'll ask to highlight any simplifications in our analysis. Well, we did make an assumption in relation to the CapEx happening evenly in the first two years, and also any other alternative actions. Now, we're told to consider the Charles River Laboratories cash flow statement to help with this analysis. So let's go and have a look at that. If we look at the Charles River Laboratories cash flow statements of 2024, we can see that in their calculation of operating cash flows, there is a substantial stock based compensation balance. This is a non-cash expense that is deducted to calculate net income, but you can see that this is a substantial expense for the business, and as credit rating agencies tend to do, if we were to add this back, given that it's a non-cash expense to our ebitda, we would end up with a substantially higher EBITDA number benefiting both of those troublesome ratios in 2026. Another thing to note from the cashflow statement is that the company is spending a significant amount of cash on stock buybacks described here as the purchase of treasury stock. In order to improve these ratios and to give more headroom against these ratios, even with the adjustment for the stock-based compensation, Charles River could give himself more headroom by cutting back on the share buybacks to reduce the size of the bond issuance necessary for these new facilities.