Ipsos Aktie

Hello. Good afternoon or good morning. Thanks for joining. Welcome to our first quarter results announcement session for 2026 at Ipsos. I'm Jean Laurent Poitou, the CEO of Ipsos, and I'm here with Olivier Champourlier, our Chief Financial Officer. What I'm going to be covering today are our results for the first quarter of 2026, an update on our strategy execution. Horizons is the name. You heard about it if you attended our January Capital Markets Day, and we talked about it a bit as we announced our full year results of 2025. I'll provide an update of where we are on the execution path. And then we will take a look at how we are considering the rest of 2026 with an outlook.

But let me start with our first quarter 2026 results and our revenue, which stands at EUR 555 million. If we compare this with the same number a year ago, it's 2.4% less, which, in fact, if we didn't have a significant 5.4% negative currency impact would be a total growth of 3%. That total growth is broken down into 4.3% of impact of the acquisitions we made, particularly the BVA Family, minus the negative impact of having disposed of our Russian business or 80% of it as it happens. So it's not consolidated anymore. And then the organic growth is minus 1.4%, and the combination of all this is what drives the minus 2.4% total growth, but this is in the context of encouraging commercial momentum in Q1.

I have had the opportunity to look at the order book for Q1 in many different dimensions, and I'll cover them in a second. Overall, our organic growth of our order book is 1% against the same quarter last year with an acceleration towards the latter part of the quarter in March, which means that the revenues for many of those orders, which happened late in the quarter will generate revenue further into 2026.

Now as I look at the order book expansion, first by sector. One notable encouraging signal is the fact that our Public Affairs business, which we have had lackluster performance with in the years past and which dragged on our growth in '25 in particular, is back, rising demand, rising order intake. And I'll talk about it some more because it's so important. Solid traction with our consumer and packaged goods clients. They represent about 1/4 of our business. So it is very important for us that our computer -- our consumer and packaged goods clients, which are also the clients among which the AI solutions that we increasingly deploy in the market are resonating with most.

If I look at this now by geography, our 4 largest market, North America, France, U.K. and China are driving our growth. And in particular, we have a very robust performance in China, which, as you may remember, has had some quarters of stability or a bit less.

Now looking at it from the standpoint of our largest clients, the top 30 clients of Ipsos, the ones where we have dedicated client account leadership and campaigns. Those 30 drive our growth very significantly from a sales standpoint in Q1. So good performance across several dimensions of our business from a sales standpoint. Late in the quarter, this will translate gradually into revenue as also our strategy implementation accelerates and drives expanding order book through the quarter. So that's what I wanted to cover, generally speaking.

Let me focus a little bit on Public Affairs because as you heard, we made among our strategic choices, one of them was to continue as a multi-specialist, in particular, continue to believe strongly in the power of having Public Affairs being the global player present in 66 markets serving public decision-makers, doing political polling and helping with policy assessment. That global footprint is one of our very, very differentiating assets as is the fact that we have our own proprietary panels, which serve us extremely well in the public sector.

We also have the ability in many of our large markets and countries to do face-to-face interviews to knock on doors and ask real respondents about what their views are or what their voting intents are. And then finally, we have the ability to leverage some of the methodologies and some of the services that primarily have been borne out of our private sector business into Public Affairs, such as, for example, when we know how to interview and assess the engagement of employees in the private sector, we apply that in the public sector as well.

So Public Affairs is back. We have won prominent government contracts across multiple geographies, which had struggled in quarters past, particularly in the U.S., but also in France and the U.K. So I have confidence that Public Affairs will be one of the drivers of our growth in 2026.

Let me now hand it over to Olivier, who will comment on the numbers on a more detailed basis.

Thank you, Jean-Laurent. Good afternoon, good morning, everyone. Let me go into the details of our Q1 revenue. As said by Jean-Laurent, the revenue was EUR 555 million in Q1, down 1.4% on an organic basis. There was a negative impact of currency of 540 basis points due to the appreciation of the euro against several currencies, in particular, the U.S. dollar, the pound sterling and APAC currencies.

Acquisition net of disposals contributed positively to the growth in Q1 by 430 basis points, reflecting the impact of the 2025 acquisition, mostly the BVA Family that was acquired in June 2025, net of the disposal of our Russian operation in Q1 2026. As a reminder, Russia was accounting for around 2% of our total revenue. Factoring in those items, the total revenue was down 2.4% and excluding foreign exchange currency effect, it was up 3%.

Moving on to the revenue by region. EMEA, our largest region, representing 52% of group revenue, delivered total growth of 5.3% on a reported basis, including 0.1% organic growth. The positive performance was mainly driven by the acquisition of the BVA Family because this business was mostly in France, U.K. and Italy, offset by the disposal of the Russian activities in Q1. In contrast, the Middle East, which represents around 3% of the total revenue of the group was impacted by the geopolitical situation in the region and posted an organic decline of its revenue of 4.4% in the first quarter 2026.

In the Americas, which represents 1/3 of the total revenue in Q1, revenue declined by 4.1% on an organic basis. This is mainly driven by the U.S. However, commercial momentum has improved with a strong increase in the order intake at the end of the quarter in March, particularly. Several contract wins in Public Affairs sustained a recovery in the segment. As a result, the order book in the Americas was slightly positive at the end of March.

In Asia Pacific now, the revenue was up 0.2% on an organic basis but declined by 6.3% on a reported basis due to the negative impact of many currencies in the region against the euro. The first quarter was encouraging with China returning to strong growth. We have indeed a strong momentum in China with large international local clients, especially in technology and automotive. China is one of the markets where we have seen a rapid adoption of our AI-driven offers.

Let me now turn to the performance by Audience segment. Our Consumer segment revenue, which accounts for half of the revenue in the quarter posted a positive growth organically of 0.5%. We continue to see sustained demand from CPG clients for deeper understanding of consumer behavior in a volatile and rapidly changing environment. Our services in market positioning, innovation testing and brand health tracking are benefiting from this demand. This is also an area where our AI solutions and platform such as Ipsos Synthesio and Ipsos.Digital play a growing role in helping clients reacting faster and making better informed decision.

The Clients and Employees Audience revenue was down 3.3%. This decline is mostly explained by timing effect in our Audience Measurement activities which will translate into positive growth over the coming quarters, thanks to a positive order book at the end of March.

The Citizens segment now. The revenue, which include Public Affairs and Corporate Reputation, declined by 2.3% on an organic basis. As mentioned by Jean-Laurent previously, the first quarter marks an important turning point as we have seen the return of public sector orders in markets that had impacted our growth in the last few years, like the U.S. and France, where we see a rebound. During the quarter, we booked several significant multiyear contracts, which reinforce our confidence in the rebound of this activity later during the year.

Finally, the Doctors and Patients Audience revenue was down 4.4% on an organic basis. This activity had a strong start of the year in 2025, where Q1 was plus 5.4%. So this, therefore, creates a tough comparison basis. In addition, we have experienced a slowdown at the start of this year in qualitative studies from the pharma industry clients, but we see an improvement trend based on our order book. Beyond those 4 Audiences, I would like also to underline the performance of our Do-It-Yourself platform, Ipsos.Digital, which recorded a double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2026.

At the end of the first quarter, I would like to underline that our order book is growing by 1% and is in line with the historical pattern. More specifically, the order book at the end of March 2026 represents 55.6% of expected full year 2026 revenue at the end of the first quarter. Overall, this is consistent to the average of the last 4 years, where the total of the order book at the end of the first quarter was 55.5% of the full year revenue. Overall, this analysis supports our outlook for the remainder of the year.

Turning now on profitability and cash generation. It's important to notice that our gross margin and our cash generation at the end of the first quarter are in line with our expectations. I will now hand over to Jean-Laurent, who will tell you more about how we have been able to execute our Horizons strategic plan.

Thanks, Olivier. And before I provide some color on the outlook for the remainder of the year, let me say something about what's going to drive our growth for the remainder of the year and namely the switching to execution mode on the Horizons strategy, which we talked about back in January and which we highlighted the main components of during our Capital Markets Day.

Those 6 items here are the 6 key strategic choices we made and the ones that we are starting to see bear fruits in our positive growth of the order intake in Q1, starting with the fact that we have confirmed our intent strategically to leverage our multi-specialist business offerings. I talked about what this means with the return and rebound of Public Affairs, but it is also very important to note that we are equipping our teams with a first set of 6 and more to come as those are successful, Globally Managed Services, powered by our Ipsos.Digital platform, systematically and consistently applied to services for each of them wherever the client we serve is based.

Those GMSs led by Shaun Dix are already structured with representatives in the key markets where we have decided to grow them with specific accountabilities, budgets, the platforms are there. We are leveraging some of the past investments and adding more through the course of 2026. And then Ipsos.Digital, the platform, which is showing continued momentum in the market, led by Andrei Postoaca. The teams there have also been demultiplied by having specific leaders in our key markets to drive further growth of our digital platform, reinforced by the fact that it is the foundation on which many of our service line-specific, activity-specific AI solutions are based.

Our global company with a local footprint, strategic choice starts to show us the first fruits of growth, particularly in the market you saw in China, where you saw Lifeng, our CEO there, in the Capital Markets Day, explain how he had already started to launch some of the initiatives, and that's what we are seeing translate into significant growth in that particular market. But also in the U.S., which is the other big market where we decided that we would have in addition to the core Horizons initiatives, some markets, particularly tech industry and technification specific initiatives in the U.S. Mary Ann Packo, our CEO; and Lindsay Franke, who you saw on the Capital Markets Day present that strategy are driving it aggressively, and I'm pretty confident that this will materialize in the quarters ahead into accelerated growth.

Speed is an initiative where it will take time because it's the most profound from an operating and tooling standpoint, from a training and capability and skills evolution standpoint. So this will take a bit longer to materialize at scale. We have started on this. AI as a catalyst for market leadership is now being led from a technology standpoint by Nathan Brumby, our recently appointed Chief Technology and Platforms Officer. Nathan joined us close -- just over 2 months ago and is in full swing. And we have a road map, and I'll show you some examples of Ipsos AI solutions in a minute for Q2, Q3 and Q4 launches of AI-powered products.

Also access to real people as a critically relevant competitive advantage is one of our key choices. I'm happy to report that we are seeing increasing level of in-sourcing. What we mean by this is using our own panels, our own respondents rather than outsourcing to third-party providers of such. And this is a key component of our operational transformation, which is led by Alexandre Boissy, our newly appointed Deputy CEO, joining us from Air France, where he had very important responsibilities. And we are happy to say that our operations transformation agenda is also starting to show signs of increased ownership of our own panels.

And then if I think about our evolution to higher value-added services and in particular, our ability to expand our footprint at the clients we serve, our commercial excellence, I mentioned the fact that we are starting to see very superior growth at our top clients. And this is being led by Eleni Nicholas, who's driving an initiative across those large clients. So with Olivier now being formerly our Chief Financial Officer, he was named an interim, and we are happy to confirm it, and I'm very happy, Olivier, that we will be able to continue and work together in that capacity. And more importantly than those leaders, the whole of 20,000 or close there to people at Ipsos and many of our leaders across the globe are being mobilized to make the strategy execution happen at scale and at pace.

So let me give you examples of some of the AI technologies and global services -- new services that we are launching or that we have already in store and that we are accelerating through the GMS model. First of all, an example of what we call behavioral measurement, looking at how people behave when they either buy or consume or use the products of our clients. Two examples of very large consumer and packaged goods players, one in the beverage industry, the other one in the home care industry, products for detergents and washing machines and the like.

We are using AI technologies to help observe with clips and videos that people themselves provide us rather than checking diaries on paper saying how much coffee did I drink today or how many washing machines and how much powder did I use for each of them. So we're using videos to not just translate what was written into what's visible on the video, but also understand better the gestures, the expressions, the satisfaction, many subtle consumer signals that wouldn't be otherwise available to our clients.

A second example is in social media. We are using AI technologies to examine at scale what videos are successful and why detecting patterns on social media. For example, in China, that would be RedNote, which is a very prominent video channel on social. And then we are using the insights generated by this video analysis of those clips to identify which influences, which patterns are the most likely to drive interest and ultimately, the brand awareness or decisions to buy. This is helping our clients decide faster where to target, which influencers to pick and what formats to use at scale.

A third example is in China, which is, of course, one of the innovation hubs of the world, where we have now a very large consumer and packaged goods clients who's relying on Ipsos' synthetic consumer digital twins to replicate the personality traits and the behavioral logic of the clients of that CPG company. Now we are doing this because it helps answer sometimes simple, sometimes slightly more complex questions faster than a full-fledged survey, bearing in mind that we do that with a lot of care to the reliability and continuous update by recalibrating with real respondence and continuously validating the results of those digital twins. So those are 3 examples I wanted to give of how we're embedding technology and AI to create more value at our clients.

Let me now turn to the numbers for 2026. First of all, it's very obvious that everything I'm about to project is based on factoring in what we know and acknowledging what we don't know about what's happening in the Middle East. What we know? In the Middle East itself, which as Olivier highlighted, is about 3% of our total revenue, we are seeing obviously an erosion of our revenues to the tune of several millions, and that's no surprise. But we believe that the outlook will turn as -- governments, in particular, and large spenders will return to growth as and if the crisis and the war slows down and ends, which we all hope for.

We don't see significant consequences outside of the Middle East region, very few, if any, client cancellations, delays in decisions or postponements of contracts. So there's marginal examples here and there, but essentially limited observed consequences outside of the Middle East, which therefore means that barring escalation or prolonged conflict in the Middle East, we don't see at this stage, at this stage, significant impact on our group's full year outlook. Now the situation, as we all know, remains highly volatile, and therefore, both the monitoring, but also the contingency planning in case things deteriorate or escalate or continue in the long run are being prepared. We've done that in 2008. We've done that in 2020. So we know how to adjust and react in case we need to do so.

On a more positive note, let me reiterate why we believe that the positive order book momentum of the first quarter is a good signal of accelerating order intake and therefore, gradual expansion of our revenues throughout the remainder of 2026. First of all, we launched the strategy. We're in full execution mode. But obviously, we're going to bear fruits increasingly as quarters after quarter things happen, particularly with Globally Managed Services, Ipsos.Digital, the impact of our commercial actions and so on and so forth.

It's also reassuring to see that we're about at the same percentage of our full year outlook from an order book already in our books at this point of the year as we have historically over the last few years. But also, I have spent time with our leaders in the various markets. We are looking at it both from a pipeline analysis standpoint and from an outlook based on their knowledge on the front line closest to our clients. And this also reinforces the predictions that we have already highlighted for the year of a 2% to 3% estimated organic growth and an operating profit, which would be equivalent to 2025, which it was at 12.3%.

And I have to highlight something here. Russia was a profitable business compared with the average of Ipsos, and it's now no longer in our numbers. BVA is a company that we acquired, and we're extremely happy with this acquisition, but it was in 2025, and it will continue for a good part of 2026 to be a drag on our profitability with the fact that it was 6 months only in '25, and it's going to be the full year in '26. So in fact, reaching an equivalent profitability in '26 to the one we observed in '25 is actually increasing the core profitability outside of those perimeter effects.

So with that, I would like to thank you for your attention so far. I'm about to open to questions and answers, obviously, invite you to our May 20 General Meeting of Shareholders and also to our first half results announcement, which will take place on July 23. Thank you very much, and let's open it up to questions and answers.

[Operator Instructions]

The first question today comes from Davide Amorim with Berenberg.

Two questions from me, please. Could you please give us a bit more detail on the organic growth decline in Q1? What exactly happened compared to your initial expectation at the start of the year? And what makes you confident that you can still achieve the full year guidance growth despite the more challenging environment? Secondly, Middle East is, I mean, approximately 3% of your group revenue and declined by almost 4.5% in Q1, even though the conflict only started in March. How should we think about the trend for the rest of the year? And how could be the impact on your profitability if the conflict continues?

Thank you. I'll start on the Q1 1.4% negative organic growth first. Of course, the 2.4% is heavily impacted by currency effects to the tune of minus 5.4%. But the minus 1.4% in organic growth is, I guess, what your question is focused on.

So on that point, it is in line with our expectations that we would have a negative Q1. That is not a surprise based on what we had calendarized for the year when we looked at the full year. We knew that horizons would kick in gradually throughout the year. So that was part of our expectations for the year.

In terms of what makes us confident, I highlighted the fact that having an order book that is growing, having a percentage of the full year outlook at this point of the year, which is similar to what it has been relative to the previous full year's actuals, the fact that we see when we look at it country by country, service line by service line, we see confirmation that we will be in the bracket we have given guidance around are some of the parameters that I wanted to reinforce as positive signals towards meeting our initial growth expectations. I don't know, Olivier, if you want to provide additional color on this?

Well, I would like to say that the order intake at the end of Q1 actually is slightly better than what we thought when we have built up our budget in 2026, so which makes us confident or slightly confident that we are in line with the way we calendarize the phasing of the order intake this year. So as you have seen actually, there is a lag between the revenue and the order intake.

But this is really important to look at the way we recognize revenue over the full year because in our company, actually, depending on whether you recognize a short-term contract or long-term contract, it can create some phasing effects when you look at the quarterly revenue. So one of the KPIs that we are looking at is more the order intake and how it's going to translate into the full year revenue more than focusing on the single quarter itself.

Lastly, on Middle East. So as we have disclosed, so the MENA region represents 3% of the revenue. For the moment, there have been a couple of million of impact. It's pretty small actually. We have reacted pretty quickly to mitigate the impact on the profitability of the region. There are a couple of actions that we can take place, hiring freeze and so on. There are a couple of measures. But it's pretty limited to MENA for the moment. We have spent a couple of days with all the management discussing the impact. And for the moment, we don't see any impact or any cancellation anywhere else.

This being said, the macroeconomic environment is pretty volatile. It's true that if the conflict is continuing, we know that the consequence will be that the barrier will be high. There will be some further inflation and it may have an impact and it will have an impact on the global economy. But we are watching that very carefully. And we are used to this kind of macroeconomic condition like in 2008, 2020, and we are able to adapt our cost basis to mitigate any shortfall in the revenue that will come if the conflict will continue.

But we are not -- to the latter part of your question on the what if it lasts for months and not weeks and what if it escalates and drives, for example, the global economy into recession in some of the major geographies we serve. We are not providing a guidance that assumes any of that at this point. If it was to happen, of course, we will adjust the cost base to mitigate the impact on profitability, but that's not something we're guiding to at this juncture.

Other questions?

The next question comes from Conor O'Shea with Kepler Cheuvreux.

Three questions from me. Firstly, on the Healthcare business, it was down in Q1. I think in the press release, you mentioned tough comps, but I think the comps were similar for the first 3 quarters of last year. So would you expect that activity to remain under pressure for at least another couple of quarters? That's the first question.

Second question, in the clients and employees activity, in the press release, you mentioned some effects of timing, phasing lags that should unravel and improve in the subsequent quarters. Can you go a little bit more detail about that? I think it's in Audience Measurement.

And then third question, just more generally, given the expected time horizon of some of the new initiatives to take hold and make a contribution to growth and so on. Would you expect the second quarter to potentially to be also negative in terms of organic growth at say, a constant macro outlook? Or would you be expecting to see at this stage an improvement already in Q2?

Yes. I will answer the first question regarding the Healthcare business, which is actually the way we disclose it is not exactly the Healthcare business, but it's more the business with the pharma companies. So what happened this year, so that's true that we disclosed a negative growth, but we have seen the order intake improving gradually.

There have been some clients in the pharma sector that are under restructuring and are taking longer to take a decision. We have also some program that have been confirmed last year at the beginning of the year for the full year, but the client, they confirm it more on a quarterly basis, so which drag -- drop in the revenue in H1. But overall, the order intake is improving month after month. So it should turn into more positive territory in the coming months.

It's a similar pattern when it comes to Clients and Employees because we mentioned that the Audience Measurement activities, the revenue is declining in Q1. But when you look at the order intake, it's positive at the end of March because the way contracts have been confirmed by clients is different from last year, and this will translate into positive growth in the coming months.

And last question is more about the phasing of the revenue. So as you can see, the first Q1 is minus 1.4%. And obviously, to finish the year in line with the guidance, which was between 2% to 3%, you will see an acceleration of the growth moving gradually in positive territory to finish in line with the guidance.

And I think that's the key point. It's gradual recovery. What will exactly happen in Q2, we're not guiding by quarter. But yes, it is an acceleration throughout the year. And it is based on the speed at which we execute our Horizons strategy. It is based on the fact that we have mobilized the leadership of this company around the key initiatives I've referred to when reiterating what the main strategic pillars were and how we stand relative to each of them.

The Globally Managed Services, the Ipsos.Digital, the commercial acceleration, the technology and AI investments will gradually add more solutions to our bag of tricks, and this will gradually allow us to expand our revenue and strengthen our growth.

Okay. Very clear. But I mean just to drill on the numbers. I mean, if the second quarter is better than the first quarter, but it's, as you say, a gradual process, but the first half is, let's say, flattish overall on organic, then the second half needs to be around 4% or so. The order book has improved, but we're talking about plus 1%, not talking about plus 4%. So is the pickup, let's say, month-over-month so significant that, that kind of second half trajectory is looking doable at this stage?

The short answer is it is looking doable. As I said, we spend a lot of time also with the teams in every one of our markets and services looking at this, looking at obviously, the pipeline at a more granular level. Historically, as you will have witnessed, there are quarterly changes, which is why we're not -- it's not a perfectly constant 1 month after the next progression. There's always swings because some of the orders can be quite sizable and then they generate revenue later. Some of the orders we took in Q1 were actually in March. So they will generate revenue starting already now. So that's why we're not looking at it at a month-by-month or certainly announcing it at a month-by-month basis. But yes, the short answer is it is doable.

The next question comes from Hai Huynh with UBS.

It's Hai from UBS. Just again a little bit on the order book and revenue conversion. Can you help me a little bit on how the stronger March order intake translate into revenue? Is it going to be kind of Q2? Or is it more weighted towards half 2 in terms of the timing? And within that also, in April, have you seen an improvement sequentially in April so far versus March as well? That's the first question. And then the second one is, I know it's only the quarterly top line update, but you're still guiding for flat margins despite some dilutive effects from BVA Family. And you're investing a lot this year into in-sourcing, for example. So what are the offsets that makes you confident that you're actually going to be flat margins this year?

Okay. On your second question first, maybe. We are taking, obviously, a number of measures. We are looking at our cost structure. We are looking at our pricing and everything. So yes, we are offsetting the impact of both losing the Russia accretive business and absorbing some of the remaining dilutive impact over 12 months against 6 of BVA through very disciplined execution on our cost base. But on the conversion and on the ability to say something about April, April, we're still very early to have any numbers worth disclosing here, but on the conversion pattern.

Yes. And I would say about the order book, it was positive in March, and it will generate and translate into revenue from April to the remainder of the year. It's difficult to say at this stage of the year, if it will be more in Q2 or in the second half of the year, but it's going to be in the coming months for sure. This is true that you should have in mind that we have a growth trajectory that is going to accelerate. As far as all the investment that we are making in this Horizons plan, will deliver some fruit.

We mentioned the GMS, the local country-specific plan. There are some regions that are more advanced than some other. In China, the plan started already at the end of last year, and we have seen that it's delivering already some fruit with a very good Q1 and good sales momentum in China, which is really encouraging us to continue in that direction in some other markets outside China.

The last question today comes from Anna Patrice with Berenberg.

A couple of questions from my side. First of all, when you talk about the organic growth in the order book of 1%, what kind of organic growth is it? So until when this organic growth? Does it mean that it implies that you already have in your pocket 1% organic growth for the full year 2026? Or where does it stop? That's the first question.

Second question, you mentioned several times in China that there was a significant improvement. Can you maybe elaborate what was the organic growth in China last year, for example? And what is it already in Q1? And what was the comparison basis maybe? And then the last question is on the America performance, minus 4%. If you can elaborate which sectors are declining and which sectors are growing?

Can you reiterate the first question, please?

Yes. First question is on order book, 1% organic growth at the end of March. This 1% organic growth, what is it exactly? Is it 1% organic growth that you have in your books for the full year 2026? Or what exactly does it mean?

So just to clarify, when we talk about the order book and the order book growth, it is the part of the orders we took that is delivering revenue in 2026, right? So there's 1% more in our order book for the year, right? Then some of them are shorter term than others, which can last all the way until December.

Yes. So that means that at the end of March, the order book is plus 1% compared to the end of March last year. And the order book in the Ipsos definition is the sales that have been converted that will generate revenue on the full year. And as we mentioned it, at this stage of the year, we have in our order book 55.6% of the annual revenue. And it's in line with what we have seen in average over the last 4 years.

Now answering your last question about what was the growth in Greater China in Q1 2029. So it was around minus 3%. So we have seen definitely a turning point in our activity in Russia, which started in China, which started already at the end of last year, but has accelerated and now it's quite strong in Q1 2026.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over for any closing remarks.

Okay. Thank you very much. So in closing, our commercial momentum is strong in spite of a minus 1.4% organic growth Q1. And to use the words of one of the questions, the signals we see on the commercial front, not just that 1% increase, but also the pipeline, the comparison with prior years says that the growth we have suggested for the year is absolutely doable. So I want to thank you for your attention today, and we will be talking again in May. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Good morning, and welcome. Thank you for joining us for this presentation of the 2025 annual results. I have been the new CEO since last September. My name is Jean-Laurent Poitou. I met some of you already. So not just the 2025 annual results, but also in line with what we announced on 22 January when we presented our Horizon strategy for the next few years. We'll tell you about the outlook. I will not reiterate what was said then, but we are -- we'll be looking at the implications of Horizons for 2026. I have next to me Olivier Champourlier, our CFO, who will give you details about the numbers.

So the key figures for 2025. EUR 2.525 billion in revenue. That's an organic growth of 0.6%. Now that's less than the ambition that we have for future years. Nonetheless, the profitability is in line with what we announced for 2025 since we have 12.8% in operating margin before accounting for the dilutive effects of operations conducted in 2025, particularly the acquisition of the BVA Family and infas. Now then growth is less than hoped for. However, with a tight budget policy in the 50 operations, we were able to observe the necessary discipline to stay in line with our expectations for future years. So a few words about what we announced back in September and now the numbers as they have come out in the press release.

In the EMEA region, that's about half of our revenue, organic growth stood at 2%. Now it was 5.5% in 2025 compared to 2024. So there's a continuing momentum on the EMEA region. Now if you look at the various businesses or the various markets or the audiences for the private sector, consumers, customers, patients, physicians. We find that organic growth stands at 2.1%. And so we emphasize this because on the citizens part, then there is Ipsos' activity with the public sector decision-makers, and that has a significant weight on growth. Our business there in the private sector has pursued this momentum with a 2% growth. And so in those areas where the automated services are most used by customers, we still enjoy good growth, including in those areas where services are automated, and that is particularly visible for the Ipsos digital platform.

That's a platform that enables our customers either directly or with the help of our teams to conduct their surveys using that platform with the questionnaires, enabling them to have access to our human response through our panels and having an automatic rendition of the results on the platform, organic growth 27%, about 30% since the beginning. And since this is an automated platform that generates profitability twice as high as the group's average, and that is very promising indeed because in a world where technology, automation, artificial intelligence make it possible to conduct a significant amount of research using these solutions such as Ipsos Digital. This is very promising indeed, even if we can still do better. And then, of course, we're returning to significant acquisitions, the BVA Family and infas, so we are in France, or businesses in Italy -- so that business is growing.

And also PRS IN VIVO, you may remember, this is assessing packaging. With PRS IN VIVO, we have a significant presence in a number of big markets, including the United States. And so infas, which enables us to have a reinforced presence in Germany and the public sector. Now the public sector, public affairs, now this weighs heavily on growth, several hundred million, but this is negative growth this year, minus 8%. So we're talking about EUR 30 million decline compared to last year, nonetheless. Public affairs is a major strategic asset for Ipsos. We reaffirmed this at Capital Markets Day for a simple reason. With our better understanding of citizens, we have items of background that produce and justify our -- well, not just the recommendations, the insights in line with responses we get from respondents as consumers, our patients, but also taking on board their own background, their opinions.

And that, of course, enhances the quality of our surveys. But then this is a resilient business, and that's, of course, the unfortunate side of the -- well, the cyclical dimension of public affairs. This was hit, as you can well imagine, by complex and challenging political situations in our big markets in the U.S., in France, but also in Australia, New Zealand, India. And of course, budget situations and the shutdown in the U.S. certainly didn't help. So significant ups and downs. But in some cases, this business can be countercyclical. And that is, of course, one of the reasons why we keep the business. And then we didn't make the most of that growth potential. Our presence in many countries, a global presence really when you've conducted surveys on major public policies, transportation, health or whatnot, we can inform decision-makers in other countries.

And so we can leverage that. Our presence in public affairs in many countries should enable us to relaunch that business. And of course, I didn't want to spend the whole time discussing public affairs. But even though the performance in -- was a bit disappointing. But without further ado, I'll give the floor to Olivier Champourlier, our CFO, who will give you details about the figures for 2025. Olivier.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. So as Jean-Laurent pointed out, total revenue for the year 2025 stood at EUR 2.525 billion. Total growth, 3.4%. You have organic growth, 0.6%, scope effects 5.8%, and that is essentially related to the acquisitions, the BVA Family and infas, but also negative currency effects of minus 3%. And that, of course, weighed down on revenue. And that is a consequence of euro's performance vis-a-vis the U.S. dollar and other currencies. Looking at regions, EMEA growth stood at 12%. This is significant growth with a positive impact from acquisitions because the main acquisitions from the previous year, infas and BVA were in Europe, infas in Germany, BVA Family in France, Italy and Britain.

Within the EMEA region, organic growth stood at 2%. And that, of course, is a good performance after -- well, in 2025, the growth stood at 5.5%. So within that region, there are several movements. Continental Europe enjoyed a significant growth, upwards of 2% in Germany, in Spain stood at 6%, Belgium 3%. And Eastern Europe, upwards of 10% and driven -- that was driven by Turkey. Same region, you have the Middle East, and this is enjoying dynamic growth, 8%. Nonetheless, it should be pointed out that you have one country with negative growth, and that's France. France suffered a 3% decline. That was mostly due to lower orders from the public sector if you -- and that is, of course, related to fiscal conditions, political uncertainty.

But without that, had it not been for that, then we would have had some growth in France. Americas, 0.3% total growth, minus 3.4%. The difference between the 2 is negative FX with the depreciation of the U.S. dollar vis-a-vis the euro. So you have Latin America with sustained growth plus 5%. North America, by contrast, had a slight decline, minus 0.14%. That business in the U.S. was penalized because there was less public affairs business. And as Jean-Laurent pointed out, the shutdown in the U.S. and fiscal budget restrictions had a negative impact and the revenue was down 15% in the U.S. but restated for that, in North America, growth would have been 2%. Some businesses are resilient in the service lines, and that's consumer goods -- on the consumers market. That did well last year.

Finally, you have Asia Pacific. You have 2 subregions there. China, of course, is the largest country, the biggest country in that region, and their growth was stable last year. And that in itself is pretty satisfactory in what is actual a challenging and indeed shrinking market. And for the rest of the region, growth was negative, minus 4%. That's Asia Pacific, not including Mainland China, minus 4%, and that was impacted by less business in public affairs in Australia and New Zealand, but also India. There was, of course, a host of elections in 2024. Now if you look at revenue by audience, we have service lines for consumers and clients and employees with a similar growth, 2.1%. That includes mostly understanding the markets and brands, the significance of the advertising market and what are known as mystery customers.

Citizens, that includes public affairs then and what we call corporate and corporate reputation, and that had negative growth -- organic growth, minus 8%. The main markets were the U.S. and France that suffered, as Jean-Laurent indicated in an uncertain political environment, the shutdown in the U.S. and fiscal restrictions in a number of states. But a source of satisfaction is the business on doctors and patients that had positive organic growth, 2.4% compared with minus 3% last year. And so we have resumed growth there. That's mostly to do with innovation in oncology, rare diseases and studies on GLP, which concerns the treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity. That these were growth factors for us.

Business on the digital platform also enjoyed significant growth, 27%, but that platform enables us to deliver studies -- service for consumers, and that is the first line on this table. Restating for services to citizens, so the minus 8%. On the private sector, growth was 2.1% and you have to emphasize this, our business with private players remains very satisfactory indeed. Now looking at the income statement, revenue enjoyed 3.4% growth. Gross margin was up 2% so not quite as fast as the growth of revenue. The ratio stood at 68.7%, down 90 basis points compared to last year. Now how do you account for that? There are 2 effects. You have scope effects, and that is the acquisition of BVA and infas. And so this had an impact gross margin to the tune of 60 basis points. Infas is a public affairs business and so not using online platforms. And so the margin there is lower than the group's average. And so that was to be expected. And so no surprises there.

At constant scope, we have a decline of 30 basis points decline in gross margin. That's because we have a high cost of data collection. That trend is only temporary. And for the year 2026, we expect -- in fact, we expect that margin rate to improve in line with previous years. Below that, you have the wage bill and SG&A. These were up -- well, because of the acquisitions mostly, but restating for that, that is acquisitions. The wage bill remained stable. So we were able to adjust our cost structure to the scope of our business. And regarding SG&A, that remained stable as well. There are 2 factors there. We kept investing in technology and information technology. So that's a significant increase, but then we were able to offset that with the savings on other items, SG&A items, mostly on offices on rents. There, the tax -- income tax rate was 25% in line with the rate for 2024.

The operating ratio is 12.8% compared to 13.1%. It's on a constant ratio -- constant scope, it was 12.3%. So that is because of the acquisitions, but this is in a situation we are trying to keep costs under control. Net profit attributable to the group stood at EUR 240 million. You have -- the earnings per share adjusted is EUR 5.5 per share then. Regarding cash flow, gross operating cash flow stood at EUR 410 million compared to EUR 430 million last year, and that is, of course, in line with the lower operating margin. Regarding change in WCR, that was negative to the tune of about EUR 30 million, and that is for 2 reasons, higher business because the business grew 3.2% in Q4 2024. And also, we had provisions for the bonuses for variable compensation, and that was down compared to last year, and that is the disbursement that will occur in H2 2026.

The intangible assets, and that's the CapEx standing at EUR 78 million, up EUR 78 million -- sorry, EUR 78 million, up EUR 9 million compared to 2024. And that is in line with what we told the market. We keep investing in strategic solutions, platforms, panels and generative AI, sorry. Free cash flow stood at EUR 181 million to be compared with an average of about EUR 200 million. So free cash flow is more or less in line, at least close to the average performance of the last 4 years. If you look at below that line on free cash flow, you have acquisitions and financial investments for the year, EUR 178 million, and that is, of course, the acquisitions, the BVA Family and infas again. We bought back some shares to deliver free shares to our employees to the tune of EUR 14 million. Then there was dividends paid about EUR 80 million. And regarding financing operations, there's an increase in that, about EUR 100 million. And that's -- you have 2 operations there. We issued a bond of EUR 400 million in January 2025.

And in June of the same year, we paid back the previous bond, EUR 300 million. So the net effect is EUR 100 million. And then finally, let me conclude with the financial position, the group's financial position. It's an outstanding situation. The balance sheet is sound. Net debt stand at EUR 219 million compared to EUR 57 million last year, but that's because of the acquisitions. The debt-to-EBITDA ratio remains sound at 0.5x EBITDA so above -- way above last year, but that's because of the acquisitions. But regarding gross debt, it stands at EUR 525 million because of the refinancing of the bond, we don't have any short-term deadline. The next one is 2030. And we have undrawn credit lines above EUR 400 million. And so we have, of course, plenty of cash available. Thank you for your attention. And now I'll give the floor back to Jean-Laurent, who will give you a more detailed analysis of our business.

Thank you, Olivier. So we've discussed 2025. 22nd of January, we discussed the future 2 time Horizons, '26, '28 and the longer out to 2030. We're going to briefly return to that to focus on what it entails both in terms of intervention and actions on our activity in terms of numbers for the current year. Our priority is a return to organic growth by continuing to maintain current margin levels and our prime obsession is that of stronger organic growth than the 0.6% that we've just mentioned. We're in a dynamic industry. So we're continuing to see our clients and the example of our change in our activity, excluding public affairs, continues to demonstrate that in 2025, our clients require ever more capacity to predict, to compare information from several source to inform their decisions, investment -- new products, advertising, new packaging, new points of sale, either physical or digital.

So we're in a market that will continue to drive our growth. And for that, we've taken 6 strategic choices that I'll return to briefly. It was a subject of a longer intervention, January 22 that I'll recall here. Firstly, we've decided to retain all the activities that we can cross all our 70 activities and 16 service lines, giving us a clear understanding of the people that we pull and then we provide data on the basis of the surveys to our clients. Secondly, our global footprint because it allows us to take global mandates from key accounts for Ipsos, but also allows us in each and every market to have the insights of that market to know how we pull people in villages, in towns in Peru, how we pull people online in the United States. They're very specific to each market. So our global footprint guarantees the quality of our access to respondents and also the ability to deploy solutions globally.

Third, conviction, third belief, we must move ever fast in supplying answers to our clients at a time where we can with a well-crafted prompt, have a first version of a storyboard or an image for an ad campaign. It's -- there's obviously no question of waiting for weeks to know what will be the impact, the possible score of a particular storyboard or image. Fourth convention to do that, we must leverage technology and AI. Ipsos started years back to invest in contemporaneous tech and AI, but it must transform the way we work to achieve this priority of speed. I mentioned respondents and how our local as well as our global criteria was a criteria for access. Human respondents are the basis on which we can then recalibrate synthetic data, human respondent through the millions of people we can pull each and every day of quality and relevance for our clients will obviously continue to improve to invest in our panels to continue to bring in-house our ability to pull people on a regular basis and therefore, grow our proprietary panels.

Sixthly, our activity remains centered on data information to our clients, but we must improve our position on value-added services, predictively analyze data, integrate data from varying sources that our clients can get either from social media, their own tools, CRM or surveys we supply them or surveys supplied by other marketplace. So these strict 6 strategic choices are key. But what's important is execution. In 2026, the first thing is to implement in terms of technical solutions of the systems and operating models that we're currently developing to have globally managed services that are managed consistently with the same methods, the same price ranges, the same technology, the same way of processing and retrieving the information wherever we operate. Identification, we have 6 heads of 6 globally managed services, 6 out of 70 is a small proportion, might you say, but in fact, that's several hundred million euros.

These are well-established services where these GMS heads throughout the world will be responsible for driving growth and profitability of those services with local teams, not a matter of doing it fully centralized way, consistent with our approach, combining global presence and local relevance with the tools and we invest, and that's where we focus our investment on new tech AI-based solutions so as to recover it to the full DRI that only a uniform approach allies. We invest in the same platform across the board and develop it and deploy it consistently. We managed and leverage the ROI, making the first 6 of these GMSs globally managed services. First 6, once we have an operating model combining centralized management of the service and local rollout, we'll continue. It's but a beginning, we'll have others over and above the 70s. We'll extend it to other products that can be deployed across the world with a more centralized model.

Secondly, we must continue to accelerate the rollout of digital and the use of -- by our clients, EUR 140 million, a platform that has a profitability higher than double that of Ipsos growing 40%, but we must do far more. When we look at our regions, the use of Ipsos digital is broadly dissimilar. So we're going to strengthen usage where we consider. We're not maximizing market opportunities with the platform. We'll continue to enrich the solutions based on this platform, allow us to treat specific services, focus groups, quality, brand insights and surveys, a set of solutions simpler and easier, essentials on the digital platform, allowing our clients to access services that they wouldn't be able to access without. And lastly, we'll open Ipsos Digital to new audiences. Concretely today, a client who conducts a survey with our help or directly on Ipsos Digital has access to our panel. We'll be able to connect other sets of respondents, the data of our clients, respondents who are not just consumers, but business leaders to supply trends on B2B or doctors and patients.

So we'll open this up through the APIs. Access to panels other than those currently available today on Ipsos Digital, we believe that the accelerating growth of Ipsos Digital is a priority within our reach this year. Thirdly, around commercial efficiency. Today, we have a growth that is lower than that we're seeking. Obviously, we're going to go all out on empowering all leaders, the business leaders of the main countries of the business lines in our major markets so that each can have 1, 2, 3 clients with costed explicit targets to which is linked their annual performance. We're going to increase empowerment on commercial efficiency. And then there are a number of large contracts, more efficient platforms, greater in-housing, we must be even more competitive on these major contracts. We're also going flat out on what we have to retain that in terms of renewals to leverage the contracts that we don't currently own. So commercial activity on those major contracts.

And then with the economic equation of having a local development team for the smaller accounts, we will bolster our activity, continuing to conquer new logos with business development teams where that is justified. So with that, we should rely on our heightened commercial efficiency to drive organic growth. But none of that is possible without the strengthening, as I mentioned, of our tech capabilities and to leverage opportunities open to us with AI. So we strengthened our management team with the appointment of Nathan Brumby as Chief Platforms and Technology Officer of Ipsos in charge of all our tech developments and solutions of data processing and AI with 2 simple priorities. On the one hand, continue to ensure that all tools where we've already invested major differentiating factor for Ipsos some more widely used where they can be. It's not the case currently today.

And secondly, by investing in solutions, which for the service lines are AI-based solutions to reach our speed target to automate far more than is the case today. Our production chains speed because we said that tech should allow us on our production chain to accelerate and ensure, as we said at the CMD, responses provided real time for others, less than 48 hours. It's an upheaval. It's a radical shift in the way we work and the tools that we use. Obviously, it's not going to have at the drop of a hat. This is going to be -- it started in 2026. It won't add in '26. It needs to be broken down service focus where the speed factor is key for our clients, where our automation capacity must be leveraged rapidly. And so we've broken down and separated this speed requirement over several years by leveraging our platforms, reinventing our production chain with agents that can automate tasks done by our teams and by rethinking the way we work around many of our major services. For that, of course, we're capitalizing on the strengths that remain, our people, clients and innovation.

I've been in professional services for some 10 years. We have teams that measure the employee engagement rate, do that for the clients, sometimes for us. 76% engagement rate is far higher than the average engagement rate that we're seeing at 72%. That's a benchmark. We have people who have a passion for what they do. They're committed. And then we have loyal clients over all clients spending at least EUR 1 billion so that we supply insight data production services. There's one in 100 who leaves us every year. So we have a churn rate of our client base that's very low. Lastly, innovation. [ GRIT ], an organization that looks at the various market player point named Ipsos, the most innovative company in the sector. We see this importance of innovation at this turning point of market surveys. It's absolutely critical to have this competitive edge brought to us by innovation on playing to these strengths, we're reaffirming our ambition to make Ipsos the world leader on actionable insights in which our clients take major decisions, product innovation, advertising, commercial rollout with a high impact and AI-based.

What does that lead to in terms of the number? These are the targets in our CMD average growth '26 to '28 between 3% to 4%, accelerating in the out years, '29 to '30 to exceed 5%, operating margin of 13.5% in 2028 that must exceed 14% in the following period. Free cash flow cumulative over those -- over the order of EUR 1.4 billion, coupled with our low leverage that Olivier mentioned, our capacity to mobilize debt. If we need to invest primarily on acquisitions, many on solutions and tech accelerators, but also on our panels and acquisitions closer to Ipsos, EUR 1.2 billion that we plan to mobilize over 5 years. In 2026, our organic growth outlook is in the range of 2% to 3%. So we're embarking on this trajectory that will lead us to an average organic growth between 2% and 3% over the next 3 years. Operating margin of the order of that achieved in 2025.

Turning now to the other commitment made at the CMD, an increased return to shareholder of 40% to 50% shareholder return of adjusted diluted EPS. This return will comprise 2 parts: one, an increase of our dividend per share, EPS adjusted diluted at EUR 2. But in addition, we consider that we have the ability without changing the trajectory that I've just mentioned, investing in acquisitions and in our tech and panel to have a share buyback program cancellation, which will be submitted to the AGM in May of EUR 100 million in 2026. So those are the main outlook points that I wish to share with you before opening up for Q&A with 2 items on our agenda, 16th April for the Q1 results and May 20 for our Annual Shareholders' Meeting. Thank you for your attention. We'll now take your questions.

Question number one. Emmanuel.

Good morning, gentlemen. My name is Emmanuel Matot of ODDO BHF. I have several questions. Regarding your target for organic growth for 2026, we note a significant acceleration to 3% compared to 0.6% in 2025. Do you believe that this will be for all audiences, all types of audiences? Or are you looking mostly at the Citizens business, which should go back to normal, having suffered an 8% decline in 2025. So are we looking at a year where -- with a sort of steady growth from H1 to H2? Or do you expect H2 to be significantly higher than H1? That's regarding the momentum on revenue.

Second question about moving parts and the operating margin expected in 2026. Are you looking at something stable at 12.3%? I expect that is to do with organic growth in revenue, this gross margin where you want an improvement in margin and yet the data collection cost went up in H2 2025. And so was that only temporary? And then I imagine that the acquisitions -- well, they are useful, but they themselves should improve their own performances. And then I was a bit surprised by this share buyback program, EUR 100 million. It's about 7% for the shareholder. What prompted that decision?

Well, we'll take the question about organic growth. And where is this to occur mostly? Well, we have a strategic plan where we propose to invest in what are known as Globally Managed Services. And so these are businesses to do with the first line of business, namely consumers. And so we expect growth there to accelerate because we've been investing in GMS specifically on that line -- on that business line. On public affairs, we were at minus 8% in 2025, and we certainly hope -- expect the situation to improve. Having said that, that was low ebb at minus 8%. So we are looking at a resumption of growth, at least a better performance in public affairs and stepping up business in the other business lines. Regarding the operating margin, we said it would be higher, well, equivalent to that of 2025. And so 2025, we published a margin of 12.3%. So it should stand at about that.

There, again, various factors involved. There were acquisitions and they had dilutive effects in 2025, but the dilutive effects should peter out in 2026 and indeed -- and they should dwindle away in 2027. But we will keep investing. So there will be capital expenditure there. That's, of course, regarding technology acquisitions. And then there will be -- we expect some productivity gains because we will be managing our panels and other instruments to make our tools more productive. Regarding gross margin, historically, well, gross margin has grown over time. This year, of course, it was down because of acquisitions, but there are 2 types of acquisitions. You had infas. Infas is mostly a public affairs business, and there's not much to be gained from synergies.

But the BVA Family is a more traditional line of business covering all areas. And so there, we do expect synergies. Indeed, with the BVA Family, we started merging our teams, and we are proposing new solutions and the teams from BVA are joining our organization there. And so we expect gross margin and operating margin in these businesses to be in line with the profitability of the rest of the group by 2027.

Regarding the share buyback program, well, if you look at the present share price, this was a good opportunity. But also, we believe that the share price does not reflect the actual value of the company in terms of growth, profitability, the debt ratio and all these factors are not fully reflected in the share price. And indeed, we -- even though organic growth was slightly less than our expectations, we still have a good performance. And so when the share price is low, this is a good time to buy back a significant amount of shares to be canceled. And indeed, that will be proposed to the AGM later this year. On revenue seasonality, what are the expectations for 2026? Well, look, we are engaging in an in-depth transformation of our business, new tools, new ways of working, commercial effectiveness and such like. So we are looking at a 3-year horizon. We cannot break down this. We cannot look at this on a quarterly basis.

My name is [indiscernible]. I had 2 questions, a technical question first on digital data, digital twins, new players that are banking on the fact that the digital twins may well replace panelists in the long run. Do you -- are you using that at all? I mean that's the question. And then in view of productivity gains, thanks to AI, Ipsos Digital is growing pretty fast. Why aren't you banking on much higher growth in margin? I mean, you could be more ambitious than that surely.

Regarding virtual data, we don't want to get into the detail of that, but we have 2 strong beliefs. Number one, of course, AI in general, makes it possible to generate virtual twins or equivalents of individual data collected from actual respondents. So if you have a digital twin of the population, say, patients of that category, all you need to do is ask the question and you get the right answer and you don't need to go out and actually send questions to real people with phone calls or surveys and such like. But that's the theory. Well, one thing, though, is these things are changing slowly but surely. But of course, the actual people change as well. We need to recalibrate things. Some responses will need to be adjusted. And well, you have audiences that are more difficult to access. So we can use virtual twins instead, but we have to control for all that. But at the end of the day, we want precise information because if you launch a new product and the virtual respondent is left behind actual development, well, then our customers is spending money in the wrong place.

So we can do this, but we have to rely on actual respondents. We have academic partnerships who are working on that, but cautiously. Regarding the impact on profitability, if you look at 2026, we will be rolling out some of the solutions we have been investing in, but we will need to keep investing to grow these solutions with -- to have differentiated solutions using AI with a broader and broader spectrum of services. So profitability is because, of course, some services such as Ipsos Digital are automated, so profitability increases, but we still need to invest in panels and in other technical solutions. So we are looking at growing margin, and we expect it to grow all the way to 2030. Nonetheless, we have to remain at the forefront of innovation.

Eric Blain from Finance Connect. About the profit margin, you say that the platform has generated 30% growth. What's the revenue of the platform? EUR 640 million. And so with a good profit margin. So that certainly drives the group's margin up, doesn't it? You said that there was dilution effects that these should be -- that would be petering out next year. And so the gross margin at the end should improve, but capital expenditure is remaining stable. So surely, given that, you should do better than last year, not the same as last year. And the second question about EUR 100 million worth of share buyback. Why is this? And if the price -- the share price goes down in spite of that buyback program, will you delist it? And if you look at the profit margin by geographical area, very much like the previous presentations where you had some granularity on margin by territory. Could we have some color on that?

Well, on question number one, the operating margin in 2026. And that is a bit like the previous question. You have to keep in mind that we are looking here at a trend over 3 years. We have a strategic plan, and we are looking at operating margin of about 13.5% by 2028 and 14% for the years after that. So as early as this year, we have been -- there will be capital expenditure with new solutions, and we do expect this to bring fruition later on. Right now, we are rolling out the plan. Some tools are available. Others will arrive in H2, but we have to be realistic here. These new assets will bear fruition later on, maybe by 2027. So for the time being, we simply would like to confirm that, well, we're pretty confident, at least we expect to keep operating margin the same level as 2025. On the matter of profitability because you are referring to capital expenditure, that increased significantly in 2025 compared to 2024, 18%, up EUR 80 million. So we're looking at growth through innovation here. And so we need to keep investing.

That, of course, does eat away at the profit margin. If we look at the payout policy, we are -- well, we repeat what we said, we're looking at anywhere between 40% and 50% of net adjusted income paid back to shareholders through dividends, of course. Having said that, we have no further comments on future buyback programs in the following years and depends on a number of factors. I mean, we do not propose to delist the company. We do propose to remain autonomous and independent. And if you look at a breakdown by geographical area, normally, we do not communicate on that.

But maybe you could at least tell us about numbers in the U.S. or specifically. Maybe you can...

Well, the U.S. market has higher margins than other territories. But the low dollar is a dilutive factor. Yes, there was an effect on currency effect. You didn't mention. No, we didn't mention it because it's not significant.

[indiscernible]

Congratulations for this. A question on the major tech players such as Meta, Google, Alphabet. You mentioned in the past that you were going to generate significant revenue with those key accounts and to be added in your services. Is that still the case today? Could you detail better for us what you're doing for the major U.S. tech clients?

Yes. Well, coming from a world where I had a lot of dealings with the major tech players, the fact that they're amongst our largest key accounts. This is something that interested me keenly, and it ties in with the question about synthetic data to a certain extent. One of the added values we're bringing is our detailed knowledge over and above the mere processing and presentation of data, the lessons learned and access to real respondents because these tech players have access to the people who access their platform. So each has primarily access to the people who access their platform. We have access to everyone, those who access their platforms and the others. So when it's a matter of pulling their reputation on the market to have access to specific audience segments, well, they rely on our capability. And that's our fifth strategic conviction. It's a major differentiating factor in this important world through its economic and social importance of the major tech that we're very relevant for them.

Questions on the line? The first question comes from Berenberg. Over to you.

Jean-Laurent, Olivier, just a few questions from my side. Firstly, could you give us some insights on what you're seeing in terms of activity? Are you seeing a slight improvement over Q4 '25? And secondly, what's the percentage of the utilization of your own panels? And what percentage you're targeting by 2028? And recently, in your presentation, you mentioned GMS. You plan to extend GMS to several service lines. What is the time horizon for that unfolding? And how much might GMS is represented in 2028?

Well, we're not -- well, we'll be presenting the Q1 figures on April 16, as indicated on the slide. So we have no comment at this stage on the activity for Q1. But on the panel percentage, well, we're not going to disclose on the percentage utilization of our panels, but we have an internalization issue. The proportion of our own panels in the activity will increase by '28 to answer your question, this internalization, in-housing an important effort for us. And then after extension of GMS today, 6 services, which we're investing in specific platforms where we're changing the operating model to manage them globally, we are going to land this model in 2026, continue to extend them in the second half of '26, early part of '27, depending on the speed of change. I haven't modelized in '28 what the percentage will be. But what is clear is that we're going to go for a few hundred million to a growing share that will probably top at that horizon half our revenue.

We have another question on the line. From UBS.

Hai from UBS. The first one is just a little bit beyond '26, right? Because you guide for 2% to 3% for '26, but the average for '26 and '28 is 3% to 4%. Now Ipsos Digital is already growing 27% this year. So can you help us bridge towards that gap to 3% to 4%? Are you expecting Ipsos Digital to grow even further than the 27% rate? Or where do you see the acceleration to get -- to bridge that gap? That's my first question. And the second question is just how should we think about the pricing and margin dynamics for GMS versus your traditional ad hoc research? And then the third question is on the free cash flow. So you delivered EUR 181 million this year. And in your CMD, you're expecting EUR 1.4 billion to basically fund your acquisitions and your strategy over the next 5 years. So could you help us also explain on where do you expect free cash flow to ramp up? Is that going to be back-end weighted?

So on Ipsos Digital, indeed, however, remarkable this growth of 30% is it's EUR 140 million. If I just look at the dissimilarity, heterogeneity of usage, and we can beef up the portfolio based on digital solutions. Ipsos Digital will be far higher growth. It's a major focus areas for speed and for obvious economic reasons. On the growth profile and profitability of GMS, that drive innovation through new products, new solutions, new products of our clients based around creativity or the ad segment and behavior analysis. These are sectors that are both today in the portfolio, a few hundred million euros of those 3 broad categories of services that we manage globally, growth and profitability above the Ipsos average. Lastly, on FCF for the next 5 years, yes, we announced an FCF over the next 5 years of EUR 1.4 billion when comparing to what we achieved in '25. You'll see that there's an acceleration pathway versus 2025 to reach that EUR 1.4 billion over the 5-year period.

I think that's about it in terms of questions. It remains for me to thank you, and see you on April 16 for the Q1 results. Thank you. Have a great day.

Good morning, and thanks for being here and for those of you attending remotely. I'm delighted to host the 2026 Investor Day of Ipsos. It's the first Investor Day during which we will be talking about our strategy for the future years since the one we held in 2022. So this is a day when we unveil what the future few years are going to be for Ipsos.

But before I turn to this, I want to welcome the man who created just over 50 years ago this company, not very far from here and has run it and chairs it to this day and has been the man I've been working with over the last several months since I joined Ipsos as the CEO.

So with that, I would like to welcome our Founder and Chairman for opening remarks, Didier Truchot.

I have spent 50 years in the company. So now I will take 5 minutes of your time, so which is a pretty difficult exercise. And I would like to -- just to describe what we had in mind when this company was founded 50 years ago because it's still, we think, relevant. We built the company with 4 at the beginning. And then after 6 months, we were 3 and then 2, which explains that when you are building a new organization, you can face some challenges. But we kept in mind and then we moved from 2 to 3 and so on so. Fortunately, I will not go to 20,000 one by one.

We kept in mind a couple of principles, which we think are still important right now. One, we should never forget that the business in which we are, the industry in which we belong is one of the most interesting business and industry. We are very proud every day doing dozens and dozens of meetings around the world to go to our clients, to present to them our -- what we have -- what we got from them and what we got from the consumers, the clients and so on and to have some interesting and deep discussions about their business, about what this information means, how they can use it, how they can compare it with some other set of information. And by the way, how we can put many information together to go to a clear picture on their business challenges and how they can move forward. It's a very, very interesting job. Unfortunately, not all of you are doing that job. But if you want to go to Ipsos, I'm sure that you will find a job to experiment this strong relationship between people, between us and our clients, between our clients and all our teams across the world.

The second idea that we had was to say that information is important, but information does not have any value if it's not used. And it's true that now we are in a world where there are a lot of information, a lot, many more, by the way, set of information than the one that we had 50 years ago. But this information does not have any value if it's not used. It does not have any value if it's not understood. It does not have any value if it's not coherent, so if it does not give a clear and, let's say, actionable set of information.

So you will hear today and the months to come, what are the plans for Ipsos to develop the value of the information that we provide to our clients, meaning the usage of the information that we are providing to our clients through many different ways, surveys, observations, panels, but also through all the data sets that our clients have close to them, but they don't necessarily use as well as they could.

And the third element is about our industry and how the market research industry should manage its future. We have, in our company, a lot of great people, a lot of great scientists, technicians, analysts and so on. But we have in mind also that if all these experts, all these professionals wants to work together, wants to develop some new technologies and some new ways to look at the world, to understand the consumers, the citizens and so on, we need, at the same time, to put them in a situation where they can build the company, where we can develop our revenue, where we can make money.

And the reason why we want to make money is not just because we're anxious about the money because we know that by becoming and building and developing a profitable and growing company, we'll remain independent. We are in a world where, especially these days, the notion of independence is not as clear as it should, may I say. So at least from our perspective, to remain an independent company, meaning to remain a company which have its future in its hands is extremely important. It's essential for our mindset, for our culture, for our -- how we can mobilize both our teams and our clients around us. But of course, if we want to do that, we need to be successful. We need to grow. We need to make money. And this is the road map that Jean Laurent and his team have in mind.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Didier. I couldn't be more proud than to be the CEO of the company you have created and have a chance to continue on what has been built and what you have so eloquently described.

Today, Didier just talked about the fact that we have our future in our hand. Equally importantly, our ambition is to lead, which mean that we, Ipsos, have the ambition to define the future of the industry we lead. We have the ambition to define how quickly with what tools, with what information, with what value we create for clients we are going to define the future of this industry.

We have an ambition to lead. And we know that at this point in time, this ambition to lead needs to be grounded in some of the most important innovations that define how a company like us, which collects, processes, provides, analyzes information is, which is the ability to use artificial intelligence and new technologies, combined with the expertise of our people to build an augmented Ipsos. And it won't be lost on any of you that augmented Ipsos, of course, has the same acronym as artificial intelligence. It is not an end. It's a means to the end of leading our industry and defining its future.

It is by investing, building on the legacy of many tools, solutions and ways of working, which are already AI-powered at Ipsos today, and you'll hear a lot about this in the next presentations, including mine. It is the ambition to use these solutions to create more differentiated and to move into adjacent services that are powered by technology and AI. It is the ambition to provide our people with ever more streamlined, easy-to-use, integrated tools and solutions so that they can focus on the more value-added activities they can provide to our clients. And it is the ambition to put our people at the heart of it. The expertise that Didier mentioned is what makes Ipsos as a services company powered by technology and AI, the leader in this market.

So I'm the CEO of Ipsos. I joined 4 months ago. I'll tell you a little bit about myself in a second. We also have in the room a number of our key leaders who will present very real-world examples and illustrations of our strategy after I cover it in general. We will also have Olivier Champourlier, our CFO, tell us about what I know many of you are interested in hearing about, our numbers and our projections and what the strategy is meant to enable.

We will have Andrei, who's the CEO of Ipsos Digital, a very important platform for us, and you'll hear what this is and some of you have heard about it in previous presentations. We'll have Shaun, who runs several of our key services. We'll have Moneesha, who's in charge of our market strategy and understanding, who will talk about one of the most innovative global services that we are going to continue and develop and expand. Kelly, who is the CEO for U.K. and Ireland, who will talk about integration and analysis of data. And then we'll look at 2 very important geographies for us, the U.S. with Lindsay, who runs our various services across North America; and Lifeng, who's the CEO for China.

So what are we going to cover today? I'll say a few words about myself. I'll focus on the main strategic choices that underpin our future. And we'll look at the plan because no strategy is worth anything but the execution. So we'll talk about how we're going to execute, and you'll hear many examples of things we already started, things we're about to start, things we will do in the next 2 to 3 years to put us on the financial trajectory, which Olivier will talk about. And then there will be an opportunity for questions and answers.

So let me tell you just a few words about myself because I've joined not just Ipsos, but I've joined the market research industry a few months ago in September of '25. Before that, I've been a leader in a very large organization primarily, professional services, high value-added professional services organization. That sounds familiar, Accenture. I've had responsibilities for digital solutions, for digital services, for AI practice at Accenture. And I've then joined another company, Alvarez & Marsal.

What's important is that my career has led me to work and live in the U.S., where I was for part of my childhood, in Japan, where I covered Asia for a number of years and in many countries in Europe. So I have a very international background. I'm used to the multifaceted and multi-geography companies such as Ipsos at scale. And most, if not all, of the various steps of my career have been focused on growth through innovation.

Finally, either because the parts of the companies I've had responsibility for or the clients I was accompanying as an adviser required transformation. I have extensive experience, not just in how to define the future, but also how to get there through transformation.

Why did I join Ipsos? The number one reason, and Didier said it better than anybody could. What Ipsos does is fantastic. The knowledge of how people feel, what they like, what they want, what they want to vote for, what their appetite for certain tastes or for certain colors or everything that we can help our clients figure out about the consumers, the citizens, the patients, the clients is what Ipsos is about. It's a fascinating, fascinating business.

But very importantly, now more specifically to Ipsos itself, it's a company that has reached from 4 to 3 to 2 to 20,000 people in 50 years in 90 markets. No company has this breadth and scale in our industry. It is a company that relies on the multiple and very rigorous scientific methods, tools and skills of our people. That's an unparalleled strength. It's a company that has long-lasting client relationships. I've discussed with many clients since joining, and it's clearly they are here in the long run. Very, very few clients drop any given year.

It's very international company, of course. And it is a company which has accumulated and continues to develop large amounts of data, which, of course, is very critical to make sure we deliver the value, but also that we can train models and build solutions for the future that leverage the breadth, multiple services, the depth, incredible expertise within our people and the history of data that we have.

But no company can stand still. The biggest danger is complacency. The biggest danger is to feel, "Hey, we've got all that right. We've always been growing. It's going to be okay." There are a few things that since I joined were very clear to me we can do better at. Number one, and you'll hear these words a lot today, the speed at which we deliver our services. It has improved. But at a time when speed matters, and I'll illustrate that in a minute, more than ever, and it always has and it's part of the core operating principles of Ipsos, we need to go even faster, way faster.

Second, we have built and invested in a wide array of tools and solutions. But as I have experienced in other companies, there are more of those which are partially used and not fully deployed than the ones that deliver the full value that the investments would warrant. So we must have more scale and adoption of the tools we have.

[ Four ], we have those long-lasting client relationships. But at the end of the day, it is the house of researchers, it is the house of people who are rightly passionate about what they do and the value they deliver. But the commercial acumen, and I've been running large-scale organizations where commercial acumen was a big part of the success and a bit more of that could lead some more organic growth in the future.

And then finally, we have a lot of experience and understanding of the data we create for our clients, but we could do with more expertise on the integration and the analysis of the broader sets of data that Ipsos' clients are using every day.

And we are about to transform in an industry that is itself and in a world that is itself probably changing faster in the next 3 to 5 years than it has in the last 3 to 5 decades. Our client expectations continue to rely on speed, but it's no longer, "Hey, can you do it a week faster?" It's now if I can create a prompt, and with that prompt, get an ad drafted in a matter of minutes or hours, I can't wait for a week to get an evaluation of whether this ad is going to be impactful and in which markets. It has to be now. So speed now means real-time or super, super fast.

Second, it used to be that finding the data, asking the people, knocking on the doors, placing the calls was important, and it continues to be, and you'll hear how important it continues to be. However, the massive amounts of data and the variety of data from multiple sources, social networks, open data, the one we provide, the one that sits on our clients' systems where they listen to their own clients is just mind-boggling. And there's an expectation that people like us who understand marketing, sales price, social, et cetera, type of information, help our clients figure it out and integrate the data we provide with theirs.

And then the third expectation is that they need us not just to give them the data or to give them the insights, what we find in the data, they need us to increasingly have an ability to help them predict, to help them, not us, make the right decisions with the predictive and we have more foresight than just insight.

And AI is making all this possible. We see AI as an opportunity to lead. AI, of course, will allow us to deliver at speed. And because of who we are and the methods, the tools, the scientific rigor we have built over the decades, we will do that with veracity and reliability. We will provide high-quality data. We'll never compromise on that.

AI allows us, in particular, and it's central to the evolution of our industry, create models of what people might respond, virtual versions of what the real respondents told us. And this is an immense opportunity, but it's as good as the frequency at which and the depth of data with which we trained. So refreshing the data, calibrating, and we'll hear a lot more about that later.

And then thirdly, building AI-powered solutions and services is a way for us to deploy the expertise of our people. So those are some of the opportunities you'll hear many examples of why AI is going to make our future possible. And the name of the game, why does this matter is because it will allow us to grow. Ipsos has an impressive track record of growth. If you look at our total growth since 1999, it's been pretty impressive. And it has plateaued a couple of times. Probably the first time was more in effect of some currency headwinds and a number of other structural parameters. But the last few years have been soft in growth. And what's a bit more worrisome is declining. It's very clear what the mandate is. Go back to that upward arrow.

We have an ambitious organic growth trajectory because at the end of the day, while we will continue to deploy capital to grow not just organically, but organic growth is the signal that we got things right. So our organic growth from 2026 to 2028 is targeted to be 3% to 4% with the investments and decisions we will be talking about in a minute. And beyond that time horizon of shifting and pivoting, it will be above 5% for the 2029 to 2030 time horizon. We will do that with the 20,000 people, with the expertise, with the diversity of talent, services and geographies we operate in. But we will also do that with an extended leadership team.

The leadership team we have, the Executive Management Committee has people who represent our key markets, the majority of our revenues and our key groups of services. And that is absolutely critical. We have a very business-centric renewed Executive Management Committee and global leadership team. And that's what's going to make us successful, and you'll hear from a number of our leaders in a moment.

How will we take the leadership positions? One of the things I haven't talked about is we have innovated, but we haven't innovated and deployed fast enough. So we will be accelerating not just how quickly we deliver to our clients, but how quickly we change our ways of working and we develop and deploy new solutions, so these ways of working become possible. We do that radically, not incrementally, and we do that starting yesterday.

So what are the strategic choices that underpin our belief that we are going to renew with organic growth and continue to accelerate it with M&A? The first strategic choice is to say we will leverage our multi-specialist offerings, and I'll go through each of one in a bit more detail. The second is that we will double down on the strength of being a global company with local footprints. The third one is that the number one priority across everything we do will be to deliver services at speed radically to our clients. The fourth one is to leverage AI as a catalyst for market leadership. The fifth is that we continue to ground our success in our ability to access real people and ask them questions constantly at scale. And the sixth one is that we're going to develop not as our only future value-creation engine, but as an additional value-creation engine, we will move up the value chain in a number of our services.

We will leverage our multi-specialist offering. What does that mean? Ipsos has tens of different services. One of the things that struck me is the variety of skills, but also the things we do for our clients from political polling to checking how behaviors evolve, to measuring the value of our brand. I mean, I could go on, and I would probably use the next half hour if I did. That range gives us resilience. That breadth gives us the opportunity to combine not just cross-sell, but combine offerings at the source.

If we're able to listen to what people are saying about a brand on social media, and we're able to survey the notoriety or the relevance of a brand to the people we ask that question, then one can help us figure out more things about the other. So combining data from multiple sources is something we will do. And that will create new differentiated offers that no one else can provide because we are this multi-specialist.

The third thing is we will productize, combining the fact that we have the ability to invest, that we have the expertise in-house, we will productize some of the fastest-growing services so that we can deploy them at scale more than we have historically. And then finally, still on the service offering front, we will move into adjacent services like the integration and analysis of data, and you'll hear more about this later when we illustrate those strategic choices and how we will execute.

The second key imperative, and that's a big statement, make no mistake. We will continue to leverage our global footprint and our multiple local presence. This is obviously a way to maximize the return on our investments. So it's a way to maximize our global scale is by creating some of those services that we will centralize and manage globally. And you will hear about what those are and why this model of bringing more central innovation and leadership on those services matters. It is also very important to know that when we access real people, it's incredibly important to be present in each of the markets where we need to do that in a country relevant way, in a culture relevant way.

And then what's also very important is that there are markets like the U.S. and China specifically, which you will hear about later, for which given their scale and given they are at the frontier of innovation, we need to have, in addition to the broadly defined and deployed strategic imperatives, specific interventions. So you'll hear about how our global footprint also allows us to create additional growth boosters for the U.S. and for China.

The third strategic choice is to put speed. And if you haven't heard the word speed by now a zillion times, you haven't heard it once from me, right? Put speed as the absolute priority of what we do. And I talked about the fact that it needs to be near real time. And if it can't be near real time, it needs to be within a day or 2, right? 48 hours is going to be the rallying cry. There might be exceptions, but for the majority of our services, that's where we're headed. And that meets our clients' expectations. And being the ones who do it at scale before anybody else is going to be a huge competitive edge.

It's not just a rallying cry. It's not just something we say, okay, we're going to be doing it near real time or in less than 48 hours. We will profoundly enhance the processing chain, everything from what questions should we ask, how do we script them, how do we onboard the people who we need to ask the questions to, how do we process the data, how do we make it palatable and usable and in the hands of our clients so they can interact with it live, right? That whole chain, in order to be near real-time of 48 hours, will be profoundly transformed, not the tools only, but the ways our people use them.

Fourth choice, which, obviously, is a way to achieve that, not just, but in particular, is to use AI as our catalyst for market leadership to deliver faster, to transform our ways of working. Also because in an AI world, in a world where agentic allows to develop and make solutions available much faster, our innovation will be accelerated by embracing AI and by creating the modern architectures, which we've already started to put in place.

It will power our new offers and services. And what's very important is that many of our clients rely on us to provide data, and we'll continue to do that. And some of our clients are buying a platform and getting data directly. But the expansion that AI allows for and that combining the AI with the expertise of our people makes us uniquely positioned to grab is to provide trusted and relevant insights as a service, not just as a platform that goes checks something out and provides the answer back, something that provides an additional value with the expertise of our people and with the speed and scale of delivery that AI only allows. So we will be providing trusted and relevant insights as a service company to our clients.

The fifth strategic choice is to leverage the access to real people. We have millions of people whom we can ask questions day in and day out in the various markets. So by now, you have this big world map on your mind. This is a critically relevant competitive edge.

Having the access to whether they are citizens, consumers, patients, clients, having the access to these people and being able to ask them the right questions is not only what our clients are demanding of us, what they historically and will continue to demand of us that we tell them what the people they want to reach or sell things to or provide a good experience to are in need of or expect or feel, but also because that's the way to constantly train and recalibrate and recalibrate again our models to provide with the variety of things we know about these real people and with the ability to combine the multiple facets of what these people think do like, we have an ability to provide our clients with a total understanding of these people.

And then the last point is moving up the value chain in a number of our services. Make no mistake, we will not switch from being an industrial scale provider of data and information to our clients to being an adviser. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about in our swim lane with the data we provide, increasing the impactful insights, increasing the predictive or the accurate combination of multiple sources of data so that our clients can make faster, better informed decisions. They will make the decisions. We will provide them with the impactful insights with which they can make them. Not just here's what people say, but here's what matters in what people say and with predictive capabilities. And in order to do that, we will obviously diversify the profiles of our teams. We will inject more data, data engineering, data science and AI talent in addition to the many expertise we have already in-house.

So those are the 6 strategic choices. They define who we want to be or more importantly, what we want to be. We want to be and we will be the AI-augmented global market research leader and every one of those words matter as they do, providing and turning data into impactful insights at speed. That's what encapsulates our strategy for leadership.

How are we going to do that? I mentioned that it will be an AI-augmented reinvention. So we're going to continue to spend on building and on deploying, not just having the tools that sit on the table, but having our people use at scale those tools and solutions. We're going to accelerate the speed at which we deliver them, and we're going to accelerate our ways of working.

That will allow us to reinvent the core. I talked about the importance of reskilling and continuing to enhance the value we provide by providing -- and Didier mentioned that, it's a very important word in our strategy, usable market intelligence, market intelligence that our clients can make informed decisions with. Accelerate speed, but also with speed comes increased productivity, and you'll hear in a minute about that. And that's something that I have quite a bit of experience doing, putting more tension into our commercial engine.

And we will create the growth boosters. We have an amazing platform, Ipsos.Digital, which already today generates EUR 140 million of revenue every year and is growing faster, way faster than the rest of our business, close to 30% a year, and it's more profitable. So we're going to double down on this as a big accelerator of our growth.

And I touched when I talked about our strategic choice to be a multi-specialist company, the fact that we have the ability as a global firm to deploy at scale services if we shift the model a bit, and Shaun will talk about that in a minute, globally managed services, services which we productize, services for which we centralize, our ability to make them consistent across the patch and our ability to deploy them at scale. And we will go into adjacent markets, particularly data integration and analytics, which Kelly will talk about in a minute.

We will do that with one thing that we don't want to change -- well, many other things that are successful that we don't want to change, but one which is important in a time of change for our people, in particular, which are operating principles and our core values. These are the fundamental principles of how we operate and what we believe in. And having been through large-scale transformations like this, and I know some of you have as well, having those as sort of the things that don't move when everything else change the processes, the tools, the client value propositions is absolutely critical. That will provide stability, consistency, continuity to our people.

The second thing is, obviously, we are a people business. And so we have a specific part of our transformation program, which focuses on our leadership and the skills of our people. And I'll talk about that some more after we see the various presentations we're about to go through.

And then finally, while I've talked about organic growth and powering up our growth, it won't happen without the continuation of the amazing track record of Ipsos buying companies for accelerated growth. Ipsos has acquired 100 company in 50 years. It has done so with an approach to integration, which, quite frankly, I haven't seen anywhere else. It's fast, it's precise and it has allowed to accelerate the growth of Ipsos over decades. That will continue, and we'll talk when we go through the numbers about how much we believe that needs to accrete to our top line.

And we will also, in a world where tech matters, there are partnerships that we will strike in a very careful and precise way with the companies which have the building blocks that we believe are best teamed with than built or bought.

So with that, I'm going to hand the floor to Andrei. Andrei is the leader who has built Ipsos.Digital with many others, but he is Mr. Ipsos.Digital. It is the platform on which many of the things that I've talked about, not all of them, are going to be possible, including the obsession with speed. And so Andrei, please, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much, Jean Laurent, for the opportunity to speak and discuss about AI, about Ipsos.Digital and synthetic data. So one of the important things is that we are already riding this wave of AI. And I'll give you a couple of examples. Synthesio, our social media analysis, is every month analyzing more than 3 billion posts from 1 million sources with strong LLM, strong foundation.

We have several of the agents that are patented. Ipsos.Digital that we spoke about is our first full end-to-end attempt to make sure that we connect all the systems in one place in order to deliver what we have heard, speed, extremely important, but also to make life of our clients simpler, make life of our researchers simpler.

Synthetic data is something that I will speak more about, but it's at core for a lot of our -- for the DNA of the company, understanding data. And then internal AI adoption, we launched 2023 Ipsos Facto, where it is our AI platform where our client data is secure, it's enterprise. So there nothing leaves our environment. And it has had a fantastic adoption in the company, making sure that people use AI day by day.

So our unique position, we speak about the large language at the core. We can also speak about large data models at the core. So these, the large data models, have been at our core from the very first beginning, analyzing data. And now with AI, it's just getting much faster and much better and much deeper. But the human at the core is essential because we need to make sure that the human is interpreting at the end of the day and making sure that we have the relation with the clients still. And data should not be underestimated. The fact that we access millions of studies that we have data from a lot, a lot of countries and areas of expertise is what differentiates us.

Explainable AI at the core. So one thing is that the accuracy of the data models will always need to be funded in our ability to explain. Explainable AI is basically going back and saying, tell me clearly where this interpretation comes from. And this is at our core for our DNA. We need to found everything in data, in opinion of people and making sure that we interpret it correctly. So the truth, the transparency and the trust that our clients have in giving us their data, in making sure that we treat our respondents with the correct integrity with their opinion.

And we share with enthusiasts. I think this is a journey that we are on that is very much about sharing. It's very much about trying, understanding, trial and error in many perspectives. We don't get everything right the first time. And that is our reality, and it will always be our reality, but we need to make sure that we are transparent and we share what we learn. So we have a lot of white papers. We have a lot of point of views. We write quite a lot in this area. We have even a colleague that now is launching a book smarter together, Manuel Garcia-Garcia, who basically speak about a lot of the things that we have learned, and that's what we want to continue doing.

So now is the right time to focus on those few big bets and truly transform our model and leverage AI for, you heard it, speed, productivity and differentiation.

Let's meet Sophie. Sophie is a cat food brand manager. She can be a cat food brand manager as a human, but we see Sophie in the very near future as potentially also an AI agent at the client that will automatically do what she is doing here as a human.

So what is the ask? She wants to understand the Romanian market and its potential for the brand expansion. So she goes in and starts interacting with Ask Ipsos, with our initial agent. And that is an agent that starts interpreting what is Sophie really wanting? What is the data that she needs? What is the decision that she wants to make? And based on that initial steps, we are, in the same time, finding who are the researchers in Ipsos that are best fit to have this discussion with Sophie.

Then we give her access to past data. We give her access to a lot of data that we have. We give her access to -- she can understand what is said about her brand in the social media or different brands and what other studies have we done for her company in the same place. At that moment, she starts to refine and starts to understand what does she have, and maybe in many cases, we already have the data that she needs and what is it that she needs to go deeper and understand more about.

All this in parallel with the supervision of our researcher, understanding more and more about Sophie. So we refine the need. We can even discuss about maybe she needs a qualitative study. Maybe she needs to deep dive into 20 interviews, and that can be done with AI purely or that can be done with a focus group. But the idea of continuously understanding, refining and then defining what exactly finalizing her research need, what is it that you need and generate the questionnaire, generate the sample specifications and having a first meeting with our researcher to understand the market, to understand that the translation, for instance, is correctly done for the language. And of course, she does not need. This can happen within 30 minutes in the middle of the night, and she can launch the study, but we will always make sure that we try to have the human in the loop.

And with Ipsos.Digital that we discussed, when we started moving from weeks to days. Now we are moving from days to hours. And step by step, from many perspectives, we will be moving to quite a lot of instant data. And I want to be very clear that the journey that you see right now is not that we have it. We can produce it in some cases, we can -- some parts of this journey is already running and functioning. Some parts, we are building. But we are not talking about many years ahead, we are talking about many quarters ahead more.

So this is the Sophie journey. And I want to discuss a little bit about how we are leveraging AI for synthetic data now. And we can split it in 2 parts. One part is data augmentation. And data augmentation, data boosting, so basically, we do 300 interviews and we interpret it, we can extrapolate it to understand much more about different target groups and get it to a 1,000 people -- similar to a 1,000 people population or the data imputation, which is taking -- instead of asking the respondent 50 questions, we can ask the respondent 15, 10 to everybody and 5 to every 10. And with correct statistical methods with a lot of data that we already have about similar respondents, we can impute the answers.

Those, the data augmentation, we have been doing it for -- from -- pretty much from the very first beginning. But with AI, it's accelerated. With AI, we can have a lot more data and a lot more calibration behind. And that is the power, and that is a differentiator.

The PersonaBots, the AI-based PersonaBots is, in essence, our ability to take segmentations and make it more human, human very lightly said, but make an agent that our clients can discuss with. So this is our ability to make sure that segmentation comes to life much more.

Synthetic data or synthetic panels is something that a lot of companies are talking about. And at the end of the day, it's based in very, very profound AI, but also very clear statistical models. We ask a lot of questions from thousands of people, and we are able to predict -- based on other data, we are also able to predict what they would say about topics that they have not answered, okay? And of course, huge opportunity. But in the same time, we start narrow. We start in a few countries and in narrow groups. And everything can be and is tested versus real data. And that is the beauty that you can always test all your assumptions versus real data, so you don't get wild on anything.

So how are we making this the norm? In order to create all this, it sounds easy, but there is an ecosystem that we are basing everything on. There is an ecosystem on software. We have a lot of software to do data collection, to do data lakes, data hub, the reporting panels that we spoke about, that everything that we need to have is really understanding the human at the end of the day.

Then there is a layer which is the data layer, the survey data that we get, the qualitative data that can enhance the quantitative and vice versa, social data, curated client and trusted data. God forbid that they have done studies with other companies, but that's perfectly fine. We can put it in. The more data we can do, the more we can give the depth of the answer to our clients.

Intellectual property level, the Ipsos databases, the engineered prompt, the analytical models. And then a layer of agents. And there, we have a lot of them already, and we will build more and more and more. And the agent is a specialized agent focused on one task. And the orchestration of those agents is also very important to make sure that when do I pick which agent to do that specific task. When do I pick another agent to validate that, that task was done correctly.

On top of that, the platforms, Ipsos.Digital that we spoke about is one, but there are several others, the Synthesio, the media sell, Mystery Shopping, the Ask Ipsos that will step-by-step also be a platform. And all this in order to build clear use cases, clear solution for the different clients, for the different service lines, for our breadth of research that we do.

So in summary, building this unmatched research firepower is built on our fantastic teams around the world, our ability to be with our client in their language, in their country on the data, on millions of data points, billions of data points, on real respondent, at the end of the day, it's essential to make sure that we validate everything with real people, what do they really say; and tech competencies with more than 1,000 people in tech that are building this.

With that said, thank you very much. And Jean Laurent?

Thank you, Andrei. Before we talk about the diversity of our services, I want to reemphasize a couple of things here. What Andrei described, some of it we have, some of it we will have. Before I joined, I would not have been able to say, "Okay, can we do that quickly enough?" But knowing what has already been started, and if you can refer back to an interview that Didier gave in 2020, where he was already talking about the importance of AI as a transformative force in our industry, right?

So it's not like we're starting now. And because of the skills we have, we have people who have tried and failed. We have people who have tried and succeeded, fortunately. And so between us and the people that help us, the partners, we have over 1,000 people. So we will be building these things at pace. And building is fine. We will be driving the adoption of the ones we have and then the ones we're building.

So this is going to happen, and this is going to happen at pace. And this is going to allow the adoption, the expansion and the productization of our services powered by tech and AI, which Shaun is going to tell you about in a second.

So I'm Shaun Dix, as you heard. And I run creation and innovation, which is 5 service lines at Ipsos, which is creative excellence, innovation, our qualitative practice, Synthesio and Observer. As you can hear, I'm a South African, but in my over 20 years with Ipsos, I've lived in various places around the world, which allows me to talk about globally managed services today, which is an important part of Ipsos' ambition, right, our innovation, as we've heard today, but also our leadership in the market.

So you ask yourselves, what are these globally managed services. There are 6 of them initially that we are launching this year. I will go into that in a minute. But I will say this is an initial release. We have plenty of these in the pipeline, which we will release at a later stage, which is a great position to be in.

We have 2 from our creative excellence practice. For those that don't know, that's advertising research, creative development, which helps clients in the early stages of the creative development process, very strategic, very important. It's like the foundation of your house that you're building. Creative assessment or copy testing, as many people in the industry know, is by testing ads and measuring their effectiveness and seeing how that can help clients market share and sales improve.

We have 3 in innovation, which is concept testing and idea testing, product testing, helping clients to get superior products and in packaging testing. And we're sitting today at Ipsos BVA. Through this acquisition, we've inherited a great solution in pack from PRS IN VIVO, which allows us to take unique IP and of course, Ipsos' global reach and scale and combine this to extract more growth from the markets. And of course, behavioral measurement, which my colleague, Moneesha, will talk more about in a few minutes.

So why is Ipsos going on this journey? Well, of course, it's about global consistency through, as Jean Laurent, you spoke about, productization, which is very important for our clients. They expect standardization and a certain level of quality from us, right? Having a stronger marketing position in the market is important because we have unique and ownable IP in the markets, which differentiates ourselves from our competitors. This is a good position to be in.

We will have dedicated resources globally and locally with clear accountability. And of course, this allows us to innovate. We heard a lot from Andrei about AI and Jean Laurent. We have infused AI into these solutions that I've already mentioned on the previous chart. Some of them are augmented with AI, agents, synthetic, some are stand-alone products, right?

And of course, our objective here is to target global client mandates. It's what we do really well, right? And this is where we can get the growth. We believe we can extract double-digit growth for Ipsos, several hundreds of millions of euros over the next few years, and we know the addressable market is large.

So an example of this is Creative|Spark AI. You may have heard of this if you were in the Investor Day speech a year ago. Now the market has expected us to move on with our AI capabilities. If we look at social media as an example, and we look at a global beauty client, who's gone from a few years ago and producing hundreds of social media ads to today to literally thousands of ads. And we assume that, that may go to 10,000 ads -- on the tens of thousands of ads by 2030. And many of the CEOs are speaking about shifting their advertising and media budget to almost half in this space. So we have expanded our solution here to be available in many markets. As I said, globally, this is very important, but to include all the social media platforms, TikTok, the Meta platforms, YouTube, but of course, the important static media.

What clients expect from Ipsos is not just measurement on a key performance indicator basis, they want us to get under the hood. So with our own AI sandbox, we have generated our own variables that allow clients to understand very easily in real time what those diagnostic capabilities are to explain how adverts are really performing at scale in terms of creative best practices, how their branding is doing, how their logos are being placed in ads, et cetera. And we've done that with our own proprietary variables, so they're ownable to Ipsos.

Of course, this allows us to go to large volumes of data. And of course, we are generating our own API capabilities. In layman's terms, this means we can do auto data transfers from our own databases to our client databases because they need the value. They need the explanations on how these vast amounts of social media ads are doing in terms of effectiveness. They don't have this today. It's a real demand in the market. It's very important.

So Ipsos has world-leading best-in-class services. And you'll ask yourself, well, what's new? What's new today, and we have a history of working in a matrix organization, you've been exposed to this probably. But we've made a commercial decision to have more global oversight in this operating model to balance the power, if you will, to have more centrally run businesses, of course, having the depth in the local markets, but that allows us to have that scalability and repeatability. And again, I said we'll start with 6, but there are more to come, right? Having our own unique positions, our own IP in the market is an advantage for us, and it allows us to be better than our competitors for sure.

I mentioned innovation and AI. Andrei, you spoke about Ipsos.Digital. We've been very successful with that. We need to do more with that, but of course, take our AI road map even further. And of course, our global local superpower having access to lots of people, large databases across the planet is something that Ipsos has a wealth of, and we can use that and having the boots on the ground is an important one.

Finally, I will just finish with an example of one of the world's largest global entertainment and streaming companies, case study, where we were working with this company already, right? So you could call it in our terminology, we would say it's to retain. We managed to retain, win this business last year and expand it because of our unmatched business expertise, but also that we had a proven track record in this global to regional to local delivery at scale. And that was very, very important for them because you can imagine they're in many, many markets. But of course, having a global program leadership model that allows us to be efficient, scalable, more disciplined and then, of course, the IP that I mentioned, having the proven metrics to deliver those business outcomes, very, very important for that client.

So in summary, that summarizes the global managed services. And I'll pass over now back to you, Jean Laurent, to take us to the next section.

Thank you. Thank you, Shaun.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you, Shaun. And I can't wait to see the double-digit growth applied to the first wave of several hundred millions of globally managed services that we put in the 6 that are here and then continuing to expand on that. And the various pieces of the strategy as they should go hand in hand. So the example that Shaun gave of Creative|Spark AI, which is pretty impressive in terms of its ability to handle thousands of video clips before they go on social media and assess them rapidly is standing on the shoulders of the Ipsos.Digital platform, right? So this is really a very integrated program.

We're going to go to another globally managed service, which is one of the most innovative, I would say, they all are. But this one struck me as being particularly interesting and very real world, what do people actually do in their daily lives. And that's going to be Moneesha with behavioral management. Moneesha?

Thank you, everybody. Thanks, Jean Laurent. Thanks all for being here. And thank you, Shaun, for that introduction on what a globally managed service.

So I'm going to start by telling you all a little bit about what behavioral measurement is. It is all in the name. It is in the moment intelligence on how people consume, use or buy products and services. This is something that is really important to our clients. But what does it actually do? It gives our clients a consumer-driven algorithm for brand growth.

Simply said, it's just a formula of how many people use, buy, consume my brands, how many times, how much are they paying for it? It helps them decompose those big numbers, those aggregate data sources that they get from other places to truly be diagnostic about what they're doing. It helps us understand by getting to the moments that matter, which is it allows them to connect the what, when and how with the who and why, so that they can truly target those pieces of advertising that Shaun talked about so that they can truly develop their products and services for that right moment.

More and more clients are looking at categories blurring. So breakfast no longer is just about coffee. It could be an energy drink. It could be about hydration. It could be about just a morning walk. Competition is coming from everywhere. Behavioral measurement helps us truly define categories through the lens of the consumers in that moment. It is invaluable intelligence for our clients. It's important for them because what people do is much more important than what they say they do. So how do you really connect the 2 and explore that say-do gap to understand what opportunities exist for them.

It is about measuring real behaviors from real people but at scale. It is intelligence that powers strategy. We talked about organic growth that we are looking for. Our clients are looking for the same.

In today's environment, when a lot of our clients are actually getting growth through price/mix, this is one metric that a lot of marketers are now making their big KPI. Am I driving organic growth? Am I driving real people buying, consuming, using more of our products? And more often than not, these are very high visibility KPIs. Our biggest clients who work with us on the service actually use it for reporting as part of their earnings releases.

It is a growth booster for Ipsos. This has been one of the fastest-growing services. What makes us really good and the first port of call for a lot of our clients is the fact that we have immense scale. We talked about our unparalleled scale, our boots on the ground, which allows us to do this in flexible ways, whether I can reach someone online, by phone, in person, all of these opportunities are available to us at Ipsos.

We are able to do fit-for-purpose designs. Andrei talked about Ipsos.Digital. Do you want this information in 24 hours? We can make that possible. Do you want to go back to the same person over and over again to look at them over a period of a year? We can make that possible. Only Ipsos can do it. And the strength of our panels and partnerships gives us this access to these real people and great technology.

The other element is that these are large engagements and drive long-term partnerships. This is often an off-ramp to lots of strategic discussions with our clients.

So we do all of this today, and we are growing. But to really make sure that we capitalize on that and be fit for the future, we do need to transform what we do and how we do it, which means if I'm doing some work understanding laundry behaviors from people, today, I may ask them, "Thinking about the last time you did laundry, tell me which detergent you used, what was your wash cycle, what kind of clothes did you wash?"

Imagine a world where we have a respondent who is able to give us that information by answering only 2 or 3 questions because their washing machine will send signals to their diary app to tell them what load is being watched, how much detergent they are using is coming from an automated weighing scale that is also connected to that interview device. So it's really about bringing some of those together.

Behavioral measurement, as a globally managed service, is about transforming what we do by building an enhanced delivery model with our network of global and local teams; scaled and fit-for-purpose analytics, which means applying synthetic data both for enhancement and for representation, reaching those folks that we can't; technology and AI, so really enhancing our data collection tool with that integrated app, I'll tell you a little bit about it; and productization, we talked about that, which will allow us flawless execution at scale and with efficiency.

Top 2 examples of how this will work. Today, we have an app, respondent-friendly. It helps us capture images. It helps us connect to devices. Very quickly within this year, it's going to be about capturing voice and audio, so natural conversations with respondents, live barcode scanning, again, reducing the respondent burden.

To give you an example of what that means, if I have 2 minutes in a survey today capturing a lot of details about what people are doing, that transformed to just 2 seconds of somebody uploading an image, which is analyzed in real-time, telling me not just about what they're doing but the overall context around it. I know 2 minutes to 2 seconds doesn't sound impressive, but imagine if you were asking 10 questions each 2 minutes long and that transforms 20 minutes to 20 seconds. A huge improvement, not just from an efficiency standpoint, but also the richness of the information that's available.

In summary, behavioral measurement with Ipsos 2026 and beyond as a globally managed service continues to be about real behaviors from real people. However, it's about moving from just asking questions to observing more, to inferring more and learning more. It is about multi-source connected intelligence and it's about driving impact from insights. Thank you all.

Thank you, Moneesha. And I think by listening to the examples to the services, you maybe relate more to what I said very early on when I said why did I join Ipsos. It's the passion of our people, and you have 2 examples here with us across the patch, wherever I go, whichever teams, members I meet, whichever role they play, that's what they love to do. And it's easy to understand why it can create passion in our team.

So that's the part where we told to you about what we're doing, what we're scaling, but we're also using the abundance of data and the importance of data and the skills that our experts can provide helping make sense of data and the technology skills that we're going to keep enhancing at Ipsos to go into adjacent markets.

And so that's what Kelly is going to tell you about as we look at our growth plans for data integration and analytics. Kelly is the CEO of our UKI business.

Thank you all. Brilliant to be with you today. And I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what Ipsos is going to do to harness the AI and technology developments that we can see around us, alongside our deep knowledge over the intricacies of research data and, of course, the expertise that our teams bring in each of the demands that Ipsos work to harness an opportunity in an adjacent area, a close adjacent area to our business which is readily growing.

But first, a little bit about some of the macro level trends that Jean Laurent touched a little bit on earlier that means this is an opportunity for growth for our business. Firstly, it will not escape you that there is a huge surge in both the volumes and the types of data that are available today, whether that's first-party data, CRM data, sales data, social data, media data, research data, open data, I could go on. But it's not just the volumes and the types, it's the sheer complexity of the data structures and the continuous feeds that are now available across all of those and more. That creates complexity but also opportunity.

Secondly, AI developments themselves create opportunities for us to scale, become more efficient and to take products and services that are analytics and integration-related products across markets and across clients.

The other trends relate to clients very specifically. Firstly, clients are really seeking to control their data. They recognize that data in this world where there are volumes of it available, that is a competitive advantage, but only if you can harness it well. But having control of the data that you own yourself, means you want operators to work with you and partners to work with you on your premises where your data is secure and help you to augment that with other data sources.

And then my last key trend is about the rising demand we are seeing for partnerships with our clients where they want partners to turn this volume and complexity of data into predictive business intelligence to help support their competitive advantage and, ultimately, their decision-making. These trends accelerate the opportunities for growth in what is an adjacent market for Ipsos. But this is not a completely new thing for Ipsos.

Today, we have approximately 1,000 people who operate in our data teams, whether they're data engineers, data managers or, indeed, our data analysts. And they operate across some of the business areas that you may know like mixed market modeling, but also within the core domains that we have expertise, whether that's with brands, with media, public affairs and indeed health care. So this is not a new but it is an interesting and growing adjacency.

And it is, as I say, a vast and a high-growth market in totality. Data integration itself is about bringing data together from various sources to create one single comprehensive view of the truth. And the second is about -- data analytics is about analyzing data sets to find useful information that are solving problems on very various fields. These are both distinct markets in their own right but they also interconnect. And if you look at the sheer scale estimates of this market, there are estimates just for the U.S. alone for data analytics and data integration combined by 2032 will reach around 400 billion by way of scale.

So these are sizable opportunities. But of course, not all of this is an opportunity for Ipsos. And we need to be really clear about the segment of this market where Ipsos has a strength and an opportunity to play. And that is, of course, the part of this market which is the market research segment, about bringing market research, social research data to connect those data sources that we know increasingly well alongside other data sources, some of those that I mentioned earlier.

So the segment that Ipsos is focused on is not the segment that is currently serviced by business intelligence platforms, management consultants, IT integration companies, it is a market research segment of what is a growing and significant adjacency based on the client demand and the huge opportunities in data.

And we do have a unique opportunity and a unique position in this market. It is Ipsos' intent to lead the market research sector. And in doing so, we will also seek to lead in the market research segment of the data integration and analytics marketplace. And as Jean-Laurent set out earlier, we've made strategic choices as a business. Those strategic choices enhance our unique position in this market research segment for DI&A, or data integration and analytics.

The first of those key strategic choices that will make a real difference to our position is the fact that we will retain our multi-domain expertise and the second is the sheer geographies across which we operate. There is no other organization operating in our sector with the scale and the variety of service offerings and the depth of that across the range of markets that Ipsos operates.

So if you think about a client problem or a challenge, and I will give you one in a minute, if you think about one of those, being able to bring to that problem not just their data and their understanding of it, but the data we hold on, how they interact with the media, brands and the citizens of the particular country, that holistic approach is unparalleled in this space.

The second key strategic choice that I wanted to flag that makes a difference to our position is that access to our own data. We will be bringing our own data to our clients' problems, and that data is based on trusted, reliable foundations of real people. And this is not just what people think and what they feel, increasingly, as Moneesha set out, it is also what they do, how they behave and passively supporting the measurement of that. This itself creates a strong foundation for AI-powered analytics and, indeed, in all of the data inputs that may be forming part of any synthetic data supported tools, too.

And the third I wanted to flag was the fact that we are tech-agnostic. We have, yes, a thousand fantastic technologists within our business, as Andrei said out earlier, but we are able to work with the changes in AI and keep pace with those given our tech-agnostic situation at Ipsos and to work on client premises with their technology solutions, whatever they have chosen to have in-house. That is a fantastic additional competency, too.

So now a real-life example, and I bring you one from a luxury automotive company from a study that we've just recently finished, an engagement with this client. If you think about car dealerships and where they are located, how are those decisions taken? And actually, in this scenario, they were taken on a more ad hoc basis previously. But it was recognized that with a more data-centric information base, you would be able to create decisions made on a solid foundation of data and evidence, which would help you increase sales revenue, sales of new cars, servicing revenue from new cars if you were able to pinpoint the best geographical locations based on the proximity to potential buyers and people who would be having those cars serviced.

Now of course, Ipsos' engagement in this can work with this clients data and their first-party data, the historical sales records that they have and the demographic characteristics that they have. But we can also bring to bear other things that matter whenever you're thinking about who might buy a luxury vehicle, for example, the social, cultural, political views perhaps, their economic attitudes, geo-spatial and wealth, luxury consumer trends data. We have a host of data that when brought together in the right way, can help clients understand how to maximize sales revenue from the location in which those dealerships are situated.

And indeed, this is what Ipsos has done in this scenario. I'm going to show you something nice. This is just a mockup of some of the work that we produced. But do not go and make investment decisions and place dealerships in any of these locations. This is dummy data only. But this data was -- and the decision-making that took place within this organization, everything we did was visible at the Board level. It fed into the commercial decision-making, their forecasting models. And today, now this AI-based analytics that is helping support monitoring how the dealerships are performing and, indeed, allowing people to make changes in real time to improve performance.

So in summary, this area is a great opportunity for us given that it is a close approximate adjacency where we already have skills expertise. Today, we do in and around EUR 100 million in this already across a range of different service offerings. And it's our intent to create investments in this space, which will allow us to take it to 10% of Ipsos global revenues by 2030.

And there are 3 key things that we will be doing. The first is ensuring that our global service offerings are treating innovation around data integration and analytics as a key priority and investing in that around our core disciplines. The second, the proportion of our staff base and how that looks today, shifting to have more data engineers, data management and AI professionals at our core. And then importantly, this is also a priority area for Ipsos, for partnership and for acquisitions.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Kelly. Thank you. This is a mouthwatering adjacent opportunity. When I was running one of the verticals at Accenture, this was really the space I operate in. I know that if we are in our swim lane, as Kelly has described, focused on the data that centers on the market research type of information around marketing, sales, social, et cetera, this is a significant growth opportunity for Ipsos, and we will seize it. It's not something we can just switch on and get done because it will change the work mix. It will change potentially through acquisitions, but this is a market we're going to go and conquer.

Now we've talked a lot about what and we've talked a lot about adjacencies, but now let's switch gears and look at the geographies. I said that you have 2 flags here that are close to each other and the 2 leaders of that market are close to each other in the room. That's here. But the reality now is that those 2 markets are at the frontier of innovation and are very, very, very big. And so our strategies leverage what you've heard and add on to it. And what I wanted to make sure that you hear from the leaders coming from these 2 markets how we're going to make specific interventions that are relevant to each of them.

So we will start with the U.S. and with Lindsay, who is the Group President for our North America Services. Lindsay?

Thanks for having me here today, and excited to talk a little bit about what we are going to do in the U.S. market and specifically highlight how we have a very connected plan from what we've heard from Jean Laurent and my colleagues about unify, bringing the strategy to life in the market to win with our clients and win more.

I think a few key things that I want to touch on is the fact that we will be leaning in to accelerate our globally managed services. We know these are areas where we can grow and grow more. So we will be dialing that up. We will be scaling our Ipsos.Digital offering. This is something that meets the needs and demands of many of our clients to meet their questions with business speed in the moment and agile answers. We'll be advancing, like Kelly talked about, our insights, our integration and our analytics. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that, of how this meets a big market need we see that's increasing and will only accelerate with AI.

And as Jean Laurent talked about earlier, it's not only about what we're going to be doing in the future but about the things we're going to do to deliver today to accelerate the things that we can do with our commercial behaviors, our talent and win now in our market.

I want to first set the foundation when we talk about where the strategy meets the market and what the opportunity is we see for the U.S. specifically. We know today that there is a projection for outsized economic growth even though the U.S. is a mature market. There's projections of it being 1.5 to 2x even the growth we see in Europe. So we know this is an important market for Ipsos to win not only in the U.S. but for our global growth. And I'll talk about how we see those two interconnected.

The U.S. market is home to 9 of the 10 world's most valuable global brands. They are headquartered in the U.S. and 7 of those 10 are located in the Western region of the United States, which is where we see the epicenter of AI, technification and category disruption happening. These are companies like Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, just to name a few, where we can really lean into the center of gravity to help how we transform our company and grow. And we see this as an opportunity for us to design disproportionate growth very purposefully, not only through this strategy we have built but through the execution excellence we will bring to our clients in the market.

So I think there's a couple of things that I wanted to touch on, first, starting with how we are going to win with tech giants and beyond in an AI world. And this is about us bringing that truth and trust to bear and how we are winning today with clients. So I first want to talk about how we are winning with some of the largest clients in the market. When we talk about the world's most valuable companies, including the tech giants, they sit on more data than anyone in the world. Kelly talked about this with the multiple sources of data that many of these companies are sitting on. Yet they are coming to Ipsos to choose us to help them contextualize all of this big data, to help them provide the human nuance to make important, trusted, high-stake decisions.

And why do they do this? Because more data does not always mean more understanding. And AI often is creating a lot more noise, and these clients are coming to us to help them distinguish the signals for their business from the massive data noise. We see that real humans in the loop, like Andrei talked about, at speed, they are going to be critical to helping our clients create additional unique data points of view and helping to provide a competitive advantage for their business. This is mission-critical for our clients and the world's largest companies to make strong impactful business decisions.

In fact, one of our senior executive clients at a big tech firm, said to me, "Lindsay, the reason I continue to come to Ipsos is because I know you will help us provide real human truth so I can make confident decisions for our Board, our team and our customers." And this is why they continue to come to Ipsos. We know this is a market advantage and opportunity for us because as we have heard with our strategy, we're going to continue to invest in verified human access and intelligence at scale.

We specialize, I think this is really important, in proprietary and unique datasets for our clients. We heard this from Moneesha that this is important. Every company out there wants unique data and information to hold that competitive advantage. And we are a unique partner to help them do that. We are embedded, as Kelly talked about, in clients' decisions and workflows. We have APIs into their stacks and our data ecosystems to allow us to be a seamless partner in their decision-making on an ongoing basis. This is important for you to understand because it allows us to be an integral part of the system and is uneasy to unseat in terms of our ongoing partnership.

When we think about this, I talk about big tech companies, the tech giants and all of the data that they sit on today. But this scales well beyond tech and is doing so at an increasing rate because as more companies bring in more big data, lean into the technification and leverage use of AI, they are going to require more human nuance and contextual understanding that Ipsos can provide as a key partner for them. So this really is an evergreen market need that we are seeing increase with the use of AI in an AI world.

The next area where we are going to lean in and really focus is the B2B space, particularly in the U.S. but for global as well. And we'll hear a little bit more about how this is relevant in both the U.S. and China. But this is an area where we know demand is growing. We know that this is a large underserved market particularly from the market research industry, and I'll talk a little bit about that. But you will see that there is as much economic value in commercial buying behaviors, decisions, product development, marketing as there is in the consumer side. Listen to many companies' earnings reports and they talk about the growing revenues coming from the commercial side of their business. So we know this is a good opportunity for us to continue to win and grow with Ipsos.

There are high-stake decisions that are being made as part of these commercial growth plans for many of these companies and our clients. And the research industry historically has been built on models and methods that were built for consumer decision-making. These models break down and do not deliver the rigor that are necessarily needed for complex business decision environments for marketing and for brand growth. But the good news is, is that at Ipsos, we have been doing this for several years, partnering with some of the world's largest B2B organizations, both on the consumer side and the commercial side to help them make important trusted decisions.

An example of this, to bring this to life for you, is we were working with and have been with a large global technology platform who is looking to amplify their reach, their awareness and their engagement with small to medium business, buyers and large enterprise buyers. They needed help with their communications and to scale this quickly. We not only were able to bring them real access to these professionals but leveraged some of our services, like Shaun talked about earlier, to help them refine their messaging, define their platform and engage their customers. By doing this, we were able to help them redefine their communications platform, have a measurable lift in awareness among their key targeted buyers and also increase engagement.

Not only did this drive measurable business impact for this client, but it also won them many industry awards for their creative, which is very difficult to do in the B2B space. Not only have we helped them have an impact on their business, they are bringing us along on the journey to scale this product and offering globally as they continue to grow as an organization because we have embedded ourselves as a strategic partner with very important information and nuanced insight to help them grow their business. So we are already trusted by many of these global B2B leaders. We will continue to invest and develop here.

Lastly, we see the U.S. market as an important global launchpad for scalable growth. So it's not about just doing something in isolation in this specific market, but it's about leveraging the gravity of headquarter large companies in the U.S. for a decision center for multi-market programs. We know often when we win a starting program in the U.S. with the headquarters of a company, we can help them take that and scale it to many other markets globally. And this is something that we will purposely lean in to doing more in our partnerships with some of the most important companies in the world.

The next thing that we will do, I talked about at the beginning how there's many of the world's largest companies headquartered in the Western part of the United States. This is very much where there's an incubator, growth, development and innovation mindset happening. And this presents an opportunity for us to co-develop offers and, with proximity to these companies, help understand what are the things that are most relevant to help drive their business decisions. And as Shaun talked about, as we will build more globally managed services to help really drive the future of our company, we will use the proximity of these companies to help do that and build globally exportable IP that we can scale and grow overall.

And last, we will see that the strategic market symmetry will happen in terms of using this as a headquartered budget decision center and innovation incubator and doing this simultaneously with China as well as two key market engines to drive the growth. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you, Lindsay. When I first went to the U.S. and met with Lindsay and the leadership team in that market, I was initially surprised. I would say, "Those big tech giants, is it really how big they are as clients of ours?" They handle data. They have their own AI and data engineers and all that. The reality is both because we provide access to the real people in addition to all the data that they get through their systems and through their platforms. And the reality is because we provide the expertise to make sense of the data in a way that very, very few companies, if any, in the world can, makes them some of our largest clients. So that was very impressive and that's something that we will make sure we continue and expand upon.

But let's go to another innovation frontier, China, with the CEO of our Greater China business, Lifeng.

Thank you. China's story. The first thing I want to share with you is China -- Ipsos in China, we have been the leader in the market for decades. We have been outperforming the market even after the COVID when the market is shrinking.

And today, the most important message I hope you can remember after this Investor Day is, after we're activating the six strategic focus mentioned by Jean Laurent in his presentation, including AI, including AI access to people, including speed and integrated services across different service lines, our clients are happy with our fast deliveries. They are happy with our capabilities in terms of addressing their business questions. And being a global and local company, we are also helping Chinese clients going global. By doing all those kind of things, acting all these kind of things, I'm happy to tell you, now, Ipsos in China, we are again on a very good organic growth trajectory.

I'm going to give you a few examples how we are activating those kind of initiatives, starting from AI, how our AI capabilities are incubated and activated in China. As mentioned by Jean Laurent and also Andrei and also Kelly, our team in China, our AI lab and also our data lab team, they are now leveraging AI and data analytical capabilities, help clients come up with new product ideas by analyzing supply side and demand side information. By doing this, actually, we have significant improved speed of innovation process and success rate of many clients. That's the first example.

Second one, also by leveraging AI and the social analytic capabilities, we are now -- China is a market. Social media marketing is one of the important approaches to generate sales. So we are leveraging AI and also social analytic capabilities to help our clients to select better social influencers, to draft better content so that they can have better returns from social marketing campaigns. Andrei mentioned about Persona Bots. So we also train Persona Bots in China so that our clients could ask questions to those bots any time for their concept testing, screening or inspiration purpose.

Here, we are in Paris. About 15 months ago, we had a successful Olympic Games. But that's another story from China. One of our leading clients, their management team were struggling with two versions of advertisement. Within one day -- they were struggling and they don't know what to do. Within one single day, Ipsos, we, by training 60 Persona Bots using the transcript of qualitative studies, the previous studies, we helped them select the better copy within one single day. The clients are extremely happy. And they announced this kind of wonderful collaboration in their official WeChat account.

As Jean Laurent mentioned, access to people is probably the most important competence for Ipsos. We are also enriching that in China. China is -- people spend a lot of time on social media. With our new access to people approach, now we can help to acquire consumers responding from the social platforms. China, there is a big market with social network users, 1 million-plus (sic) [ 1 billion-plus. ] By doing that, we can actually access them in a very cost-effective way. Also, not only to consumers but also to business decision-makers. As Lindsay mentioned, B2B business is a great opportunity for us. Our capability access business decision-makers, social media influencers in China has been further enriched, and it has uplift our B2B business in China dramatically.

And nowadays, many Chinese companies, they become new buyers in research. They often start by data. So by providing high-quality data in large scale with speed, we have greatly boosted our up-to-data business in China.

We are a global company with a strong local footprint. At Ipsos, we have been in China to help many Chinese clients. Like Huawei, Didier actually visited Huawei a number of years ago, Xiaomi and also many other automotive clients to develop competitive go-to-market strategies. And our innovation team, innovation service lines help our clients develop their product and service strategy globally, very successful.

And in China, we have initiated studies several years ago. We observed the Chinese brand -- the trust of global consumer to our Chinese brand. From this chart, you can see Chinese clients are in a very critical moment. In the history, the first time, Chinese brand, the trust level are no longer be negative in developed markets. And you can also see Chinese brand has reached a new high in emerging market. Many Chinese brand, now they realize -- Lindsay, take it easy. They realized they need to build their brand by providing emotional benefits. They need to build the brand globally.

And this is a great opportunity for us because they are going to make a big leap forward from value for money to brand building. And we are going after United States. I hope one day, there are several big clients could be [ hosted home ] in China. So this is a great opportunity for us. We have a very strong brand research team. We have very strong advisory team. And Ipsos, we are #1 in China. We are very happy. We have been the partner for them to go in global market and we'll also be the partner for them to build a strong global brands.

In summary, looking forward, I'm very confident that Ipsos in China will make more contribution to the group. And also, of course, we'll help more Chinese clients, more international clients to succeeded even greater in China and also globally. Thank you.

Thank you, Lifeng. Thank you. Okay. It's a lot. So final stretch and we'll go to Q&A. But I have to explain something here. All of this is significant change. It will mean significant change for our people. It will mean the ability to grow organically and to complement with M&A. And that won't be possible if a number of things which I alluded to, our operating principles and our core values, are not the one thing, the one set of principles and values with which people can recognize Ipsos for what it is.

And so we will continue to operate under those four operating principles: that we provide reliable information, never ever compromise on this; that we provide information that is simple, that is accessible, that is usable, there's the substance behind it and it's been scientifically grounded and it's delivered at speed. As you can see here, as many times as we've used the speed word, it's been there forever. It's radically different tomorrow from what it was yesterday, but that thing isn't new at Ipsos.

And our core values of integrity, and you understand why integrity. There is a very solid reason why we need to protect integrity. Curiosity is the thing that makes us market differentiated among many others. The collaboration, one of the things that I personally enjoyed about the sequence we just went through is this is a team. They collaborate. They have so many different points of views, places and things that they do. But it's collaboration. Client centricity, client first; and of course, the entrepreneurial spirit. Those things are going to be what allow us to have some stability through the transformation.

Our people. We have a specific work plan to continue and enhance the employee value proposition, to continue and enrich and solidify and diversify our leadership bands, to continue and expand the cultural traits of our people, to be the Ipsos that we see are going to be so different from yesterday.

On leadership, I'm a big believer that leaders will be better leaders as they have more diversified experiences. So we will accelerate the rotation of our people. We're going through a talent assessment of a large number of our key leaders. And we will mobilize our HR group and the leadership development program, that has already started, which is tremendous, to create a solid, diversified in their experiences and where they come from and what they do leadership bench.

On skills. It's very clear that this can't happen if the skills of tomorrow are the skills of yesterday. So we are engaged in a very significant workforce planning effort to make sure we have the right skills in the right places, including significantly expanding on the 1,000-plus people that do data science, data engineering and AI engineering, as you would expect.

And then we will continue to evolve the culture of Ipsos. You heard about globally managed services. That means an appetite to both be very local but also leverage those solutions. I can't wait for the moment that our ability to help social influencers in China have a better impact in the market becomes one of those globally managed services. But you see, the culture shifts. So people embrace what comes from elsewhere rather than focus on what's invented here and, of course, enhance the commercial skills and talent of our people.

And then finally, M&A because we are not going to build everything we talked about. We're not going to build everything that's necessary to make that vision a reality. And so tech and AI acquisitions for building blocks that we believe are going to be faster bought than built. Adjacent market expansion, data integration and analytics is an obvious case in point. We'll see if we find attractive valuation targets that we can go after in this space. And we will continue on the successful trajectory where we believe it can help us establish a leadership position in a market where we don't have one by buying more Ipsos-like companies in specific markets and segments. Of course, the first two are going to be the ones where we dedicate the majority of our acquisition firepower, and you'll hear in quantitative terms with Olivier in a minute what this is about.

So those are the three enablers to make the transformation possible at scale and at pace. And with that, I would like to now come to the point that many of you have been waiting for, for the last 1.5 hours, which is the numbers. And the numbers will be presented to you by Olivier, our Chief Financial Officer. Olivier?

So good morning, everyone. For those of you who don't know me, I'm the new Group CFO at Ipsos. I've been with Ipsos for 20 years, working very closely with the two former group CFOs. So this journey has given me a deep understanding of our organization, our business model and our culture of financial discipline. So it's a real pleasure to be with you this morning to share our business plan, our strategic plan, which translate into the trajectory of value creation.

To set the stage, the plan has three priorities. First is to accelerate growth, second is to improve our profitability and third is to generate strong cash flow in order to finance our investments but also increase the return to our shareholders. So let me start with our recent performance and then I will explain how we are going to deliver on those three priorities.

Starting with 2025, I would like to confirm first that our preliminary results, non-audited, for 2025 are consistent with the guidance we gave to the market in October, which means an organic growth of 0.6% and an operating (sic) [ operating margin ] of 12.3%, which is, at constant scope, the equivalent of 12.8%. We -- how to move from 12.8% to 12.3%. So we have this year the effect of two big acquisitions in infas and BVA, that have a dilutive effect of 50 basis points.

We finished the year with a healthy balance sheet. Our financial structure is very good. The net debt-EBITDA ratio is at 0.5, which is good. What does it mean? It means that we have plenty of credit facilities that we can use to finance the ambitious strategic plan that Jean Laurent and the rest of the team has described to you.

Now I would like to talk a bit more about our organic growth and how we are going to accelerate. As you can see, our growth rate over the last 3 years in average was at 1.6%. And we are not satisfied about it. So this is why we are launching this strategic plan, which is to accelerate the growth over the next 5 years. We will do it gradually. We plan to have a growth between 3% to 4% over the next 3 years, and this will accelerate over this period to achieve a growth rate of 5% from 2029.

What are the key drivers to accelerate on the growth trajectory? So as we have explained, first, we are going to push some services, some high-potential services like the globally managed services. Those are services that are already experiencing double-digit growth, a good level of growth, and we are going to push and to expand them even further.

Secondly, we have an Ipsos.Digital platform, which is the do-it-yourself platform that is very successful. The level of business with this platform is around EUR 140 million, a growth of around 30%. And this will continue in the future, but we can do even better because this platform is not huge at scale in all markets.

Third point is to develop adjacent services like data integration and analytics, Kelly explained to you what is it about. And then a third -- a fifth (sic) [ fourth ] driver, it's about speed. By delivering faster and real-time information, we will reduce the cycle time and have some competitive advantage which allows us to win market shares compared to our competitors.

And lastly, as part of our value, client first is an important one. And by being more client-centric, we will be able to grow faster. So this is all about commercial excellence. So altogether, those levers will support a solid, diversified, sustainable path to growth acceleration.

This growth acceleration will, of course, come with an acceleration also of our profitability. You can see that the average profitability over the last 3 years was at 12.8%. We want to accelerate and achieve 13.5% for 2028 and go beyond 14% in 2029. There are three drivers that we have identified to accelerate and improve our gross margin.

First, it's about the business mix. Obviously, we are going to push the GMS. We are going to accelerate the use of Ipsos.Digital. We are going to enter into adjacent markets like DI&A. And all those services or new offer today delivers higher margin than our traditional model. So by pushing them further, it will have a positive impact on our business mix.

The second point is about productivity gains. So what is it about? It's about being more efficient in our operating model. We are going to invest in AI-driven improvement across our operations. And this will help to increase the speed of execution and, in the end, better utilization of our resources and provide obviously productivity gain.

And the last one is cycle one, it's the dilutive effect of our acquisition that we are experiencing in 2025, which will go down over time. So we will beneficiate from synergies with our two -- the last two biggest acquisitions. As a result, this trajectory supports our ambition to deliver an adjusted EPS growth of 8%. So your adjusted EPS growth, we plan that it will grow by 8% year-on-year starting from 2026.

Now the last question is about our cash allocation plan for the next 5 years. How are we going to finance this ambition plan? So first, we will probably increase our additional debt up to a maximum of EUR 600 million and/or an equivalent of the maximum of 2x the EBITDA in terms of leverage. Secondly, as we will accelerate on growth and improve our profitability, we are aiming to reach a free cash flow of EUR 1.4 billion over the next 5 years, which is -- in average, per year will be EUR 280 million.

And now the next question is, are we going to spend all those resources? First, we are going to invest up to EUR 1.2 billion mostly in acquisition, in M&A, but -- as Jean Laurent described it to you. And also, we will invest in CapEx in innovation -- in incremental CapEx, innovation, transformation, investment in AI. So it's a huge amount. But this is what we are aiming to invest.

And then, of course, we will associate our shareholders to the success of the company. And in that respect, we are aiming to increase the return to shareholders between 40% to 50% of the adjusted EPS, mostly through dividend. This is more than what we have given to our shareholders in the last few years because we were in the range of 30% to 35% of the adjusted EPS.

And last but not least, of course, it's really important for us to associate all the talents, the managers, the staff to the success of the company. And as the company will grow over time, we will increase the employee free shares plan that we will give to our team. And here, we have an estimation of investment of EUR 150 million to EUR 200 million.

So as you can see, we have an ambitious plan and we build it up on a solid financial position. Our objective is clear. We want to accelerate on growth. We want to improve our margin, and we want to increase return to our shareholders. Thank you for listening. But before, I would like to say a big thank you to all the Ipsos colleagues that have really worked out today to present you this plan. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Olivier. And that was a nice final touch indeed. I can only associate.

So we're going to go for Q&A. Thank you for listening. And the floor is going to be open both in the room and on the phone line. I think we have a first question here.

[Audio Gap] time. And one of the reasons but also one of the consequences of this growth trajectory have been the fact that our people have grown. So [ JD ] started as a junior trainee. No, it's not right. He wasn't really coming from E&Y, I think.

But anyway, so -- and I would like just to ask the new Chair of the company, who will start her job March 1, as you probably have seen. Laurence have started in Ipsos in 1998 as a Financial Director. She did prepare with me and with the Board of the IPO at Ipsos that we managed in 1999 at the top of the Internet bubble. So it was a good time to go to the stock market. And then she moved across the company, across the jobs. She became the Deputy CEO of the organization before 2010. She worked with me closely. And when I did inform the Board that unfortunately, I would not be able to stay in my position for some health reasons, everybody thought that she was the best option that the company had because of her experience, because of her talents, because of her dedication to the company.

So my question to Laurence is, how do you feel now?

Well, first of all, it's with a profound emotion, Didier, that I will take over from you as President. And I'm using the word President for a good reason. It's because Chairwoman doesn't sound right. I am not Superwoman. So I will be the President of the company, and I will use the French word for that. And I would like, of course, to thank Didier and my colleagues at the Board for their trust and confidence. And some of them are in this room today with us. So thank you so much for your confidence in me.

Obviously, I know our industry extremely well, being there for 27 years plus 3 years as a student. So it's a total of 30 years. And I know the company from the inside, having built what I would call its global infrastructure. For those who know me very well, I am a total fan of technology. Why is that? It's because I don't like to waste my time and that I like anything that can help me save my time, okay? And of course, like any woman, I have raised three children. But I have been away visiting all our Ipsos countries more than half of my time. So I can tell you that I was the first person in Ipsos to have its computer linked to its cellphone back in 1998 to still be in touch with Paris when I was traveling.

So I started acquisitions in technology back in 2018. This is when I convinced, first of all, myself, and then Didier and then the Board to acquire Synthesio, our first investment in technology. Synthesio is our social media listening platform. And I am a great believer in using social media data and any other data that exists. And of course, I have also decided to create Ipsos.Digital. And I was lucky to convince Andrei Postoaca to join back Ipsos to lead these initiatives.

So it is a great responsibility to lead at this time the Board but also to accompany Jean Laurent, its renewed management team and all our Ipsosians. You need to know that 60% of Ipsosians are women, and they are all very happy to see a woman as the President of the company today. And we have, of course, with my colleagues of the Board, the full determination and commitment, but determination is a stronger word for me, to create the conditions for the teams to raise their levels because we have great people. But we need to raise the stake, to raise the level. We need to act quickly to reinvent ourselves and make real what you have described, and that I like very much, this augmented Ipsos. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Laurence. Ipsos wouldn't be what it is today without Laurence. I talked about -- just one example, I talked about how rapid it is to integrate companies. This is one example in Synthesio and Ipsos.Digital is the platform. So I couldn't be happier, Mrs. President, than to be working with you and to continue to work with Didier as a Board member and with the other Board members, those present today and those not, to take the company to the next stage and to write this exciting next chapter. So thank you very much.

And with that, we are opening up to the second question. Olivier, if you want to join me. And okay, here we go.

Conor O'Shea from Kepler Cheuvreux. Just three quick questions from my side. Firstly, on the EUR 1.2 billion investment that you've outlined over the next several years, just to understand, does that exclude CapEx? Is that only M&A? And if it does, do you also expect an increase in CapEx as a percentage of revenues over next year? How much? If we could have that.

So I'll start under the watch of Olivier. No, it's not only acquisition, it includes investments, which do include CapEx. And the split will obviously depend on the acquisition opportunities and on the build or buy choices that come along the way. If you want any...

Yes. No, absolutely, in this EUR 1.2 billion, we have a big proportion of acquisition, mostly acquisition. But it's also additional CapEx to investment in AI and so on that we have embedded in this envelope.

So roughly, what do you expect the CapEx as a percentage of revenues to increase to, a range or versus the current rate?

We are going to continue to be very disciplined in the way we spend our money. So we don't expect that the CapEx ratio over turnover will increase significantly. We are going to manage that in a very disciplined way.

Okay. And if you don't find sufficient M&A opportunities at an acceptable price, given a market that's competitive in that respect, will you consider share buybacks? Olivier, I think you said the returns to shareholders will be mostly through dividends. But does that leave the door open to buybacks at these share price levels?

We have not decided yet to use a share buyback plan, but it can be, yes, integrated in this return to the shareholders, yes.

All right. Last question. You've given guidance on margins for the next 3 years as an average, which is very helpful. Is there a possibility that margins first go down before the increase? So in 2026, should we expect with the extra investment, EUR 1 billion in AI, over the next 5 years that our margins could decrease a little bit before increasing?

We will be able to talk about our guidance for 2026 next month when we disclose our final results, which you've got a preview of, after audited and when we talk about our guidance for '26.

Emmanuel Matot from ODDO BHF. Several questions. First, how do we have to compare your organic growth ambitions with your addressable market? Are you in a position to win market shares or not in the coming years?

Second, what has Ipsos learned from the previous road map, which had also great ambitions but was not able to achieve all of them?

And my last question. After a few months at Ipsos, Jean Laurent, what is your view of as -- Public Affairs business? Because it is concentrating lots of difficulties currently. So do you plan to further invest on it? Or could we consider it as, I don't know, an asset for sale in the coming years in case of no recovery of that business?

Okay. On the market share question, obviously, we have looked at the market at large and in every way, shape and form. The reality is with these growth rates, it's quite clear that we would be gaining market share. But one number I don't obsess about is how big is the market because there are estimation that range from [ 90 billion to 150 billion. ]

And the reality is that we are in one of those professional services market, it's not the only one I've operated in, where any single player as large as it could be, as large as Ipsos is in the market, social research is always going to be single-digit percentage points of the market. So the reality is our growth depends on what we do and how well we execute what we talked about today. Not about the market CAGR. That's the answer -- really, is the very candid answer to the market share point. It's about us and how we define the future of our industry, first and foremost.

What have we learned from -- I mean, we've learned a lot. And I said a few things already in the introductory comments about they need to accelerate the pace at which we innovate, about the need to adopt, to not build technology for technology's sake, but to consider that whatever we budget for the new solution we're spending technology money on, we have the means, the management focus and the way of deploying these solutions. And believe me, making usable and adopted technology solutions, as I've done a lot in my life, is one of the reasons why I believe we already have, and it's good news, we already have things that if we push the let's use it a lot more and less mandate that it be used more where it isn't used enough, we can fast forward growth. So those are a couple of things, but I said a few others around the commercial excellence muscle we've got to continue and build up.

On PA, yes, I think you said it's been struggling. Yes, last year, you heard, for those of you that were on the Q3, that it was a drag on our growth. There were times in history where it was a boost to our growth. The reality is it's part of our diversified model. It's part of when I say we are continuing -- strategic options, strategic choice, number one is to continue with our diversified model. That does include PA. It brings some of the resilience we believe in. It doesn't mean we are satisfied with the growth as it is. It's part structural. There are always electoral cycles, macro political situations and public spending cycles that drive some of the PA fluctuations.

But the reality is there are a number of things that we can and will do to boost the growth of PA. It wasn't a core tenet of the strategy today, but I'll give you one example. We know what policies and what quantified impact those policies have in some countries. I don't think we do a good enough job today of globally spreading that so that we can tell public decision-makers, policymakers in other markets, hey, here's what we found about public transportation and how people feel about this and that way to change it in this city or in this country and take it elsewhere. We also create a lot of politically and social studies that we publish out there. I'm not sure we monetize all of them the way we could. So there are a number of boosters we will apply to our PA business. And we will retain our PA business.

Yes -- sorry, by the way, there's one thing I should have said because I found it out. Political polling is not a huge part of our business but it's a huge part of our brand. And believe it or not, we talked about access to real people. When you pick up the phone and it's Ipsos or it's Ipsos Doxa in Italy or it's infas or it's Ipsos BVA in France, et cetera, people stay and answer. Because for the first time, they don't just see the results of the poll. They contribute to the research. And so that's a huge asset.

Sorry, next question?

This is Anna Patrice from Berenberg. A few questions from my side. First, on the M&A. Ipsos has historically been targeting quite aggressive M&A strategy -- well, not aggressive but ambitious M&A strategy. So what gives you the confidence that this time around, you'll be able to find there good companies to acquire and integrate and at reasonable multiples? And what do you see as reasonable multiples? That's first question.

And there are other questions more on the growth. So during the presentation, if I look at different slides, there were phrases like commercial excellence. Like was it not the case before? What are you going to improve in terms of commercial excellence? There were mentions of adjacent services that you want to develop. What are exactly those adjacent services? There were examples of the B2B, where demand is growing. So can you give us more exact examples, what exactly do you see, which category is there, which clients, which segments or something more [ touchable, ] please, that will be great.

And on the human interference, again, if you can give some concrete examples that AI is important, but human is also important. So if you can just give a bit more examples how you see that, that will be quite useful.

Okay. Just a couple of questions then. So on M&A, yes, the company has been acquisitive. I'm not sure I would qualify as aggressively acquisitive. There were two very significant acquisitions recently. The previous time, it was 2018, 2019. So there's been a string of smaller ones along the way but Ipsos acquires in a rigorous and seizing the opportunities. So to your question on why it makes us think there are still targets out there available, part of the answer is what you heard today, is that there will be more opportunities. And it's not the first time, Laurence mentioned Synthesio, already quite a way back, but we will continue to look for technology building blocks.

We will use it to diversify into adjacent market, which is another one of our questions, I think the best illustration and we're not necessarily going to list all of the potential acquisition market -- adjacent markets we're considering. But a very clear one is going into the services that's around integrating the data and providing analytics services, the data integration and analytics services you heard about. It could be an area where we find attractive targets. We will be diligent on the multiples, as you would expect and as we have demonstrated in the past.

Commercial excellence, I can say a word here. Yes, I could give a list of what it takes to go from commercially good to commercially excellent. I've done that in my past. I've run large-scale parts of Accenture, and I've built a new business as part of a smaller company called Alvarez & Marsal. So I think I'll just tell you this is something I know we can do better. It's part science, part art, and it's probably a bit more science than art. And then I'll make sure we prove it by increasing our sales ratio, and that will prove the point.

On B2B, I mean, the simple message on B2B is we have massive ability to inquire and process and make the most of responses from consumers, citizens, patients, clients, so B2C essentially or B2C being customer or citizen. What you heard both in the U.S. and in China, not the only markets, but two very key markets, and it's interesting, the symmetry between the two. There is an untapped market in accessing small, medium business or a large corporation, for example, general services or real estate or technology buyers, the people who decide what software, what services to buy. And that's something that our clients are demanding, and there aren't many players in the market that have the ability that Ipsos will have to go after B2B as an adjacent or high-growth area. We do quite a bit of it already so it's not totally new, but we believe we can do a lot more.

And I'm not sure I got your last question on the human aspect.

AI actual examples.

AI actual examples, okay. So if you think about the -- we have this social listening, which is one capability. Very AI powered, right? You heard about billions of data points regularly captured. So only AI can process that. We also have a very solid brand assessment business, right? And there's quite a bit of technology that allow us to do the very large-scale global assessment of the various KPIs for our clients' brands.

The ability to combine the two requires a lot of human expertise. Looking at the signals that come from social listening and how they might influence the next result of the brand tracking campaign is something that only humans can do. And then we will use that to train models, and we will detect patterns. And then the humans will say, this pattern is relevant. This is a correlation, not a causality. So this is how we iterate. There's no way this becomes fully automated, just no way.

Others? Two here.

Emmanuel Chevalier, CIC. I have two quick questions, please. If I remember well, public opinion was strategic. But we have also health, which was strategic priorities in terms of M&A at your last CMD. What is the situation today?

And second question, you gave us a target of 8% EPS growth per annum from 2026. Does this include M&A?

Okay. So on healthcare, you're right, it was together with PA part of the previous story. It has suffered. It's back. So I think it is something that we have a new leader of. It is a space where -- I mean, suffice to say that if you look, it mostly serves what others might refer to as life sciences, pharma, right? So that's the centricity there. And it is very fast-growing market. The growth of pharma is superior to the GDP. So that's one of the reasons why we continue to bank on it as one of the things that will drive our growth.

So yes, healthcare and PA continue to be important to our business. And as per the strategic choice of remaining a diversified company, including in terms of sectors, healthcare continues to be a significant part of it. I won't comment on necessarily how much of it would be M&A power. We'll see about that in due time. On the 8%?

Yes, on the 8%, yes, it does include M&A in it.

Marie-Line Fort from Bernstein. I have two questions, please. The first one is about M&A and CapEx split. According to my calculation, you will invest roughly EUR 400 million in terms of CapEx, so leaving EUR 800 million for firepower for M&A. What extra growth are you looking for, for this M&A? This is the first question.

And in terms of margin, what are the productivity gains that you're expecting for the next few years? Have you an estimation about the potential savings in terms of staff costs, for example?

Okay. So on the last question because that's, of course, a very important question. Yes, there will be activities that will be automated, and therefore, there will be places where we need less people. But at the end, are three drivers that will offset that to a significant extent. Part of it, of course, will be reflected in the gross margin and therefore in the profitability improvement. But there are three things that matter.

One, with the growth percentages we're talking about, this will allow to absorb some of the productivity gains without the impact on the head count that you're alluding to. The second one is Ipsos is a vertically integrated company to a very significant extent. And we will continue on this internalization trajectory, which means where we have in some markets outsourced, we will bring some of those activities back in-house, which will also drive an offset of productivity impact compared to the top line growth.

And the third thing is we're moving up the value stack in some services in terms of our positioning. And of course, and that ties back to the other question on examples of human and artificial intelligence, that requires more people, more analysis, more predictive analysis, more making sense of data as opposed to providing the data, which we'll continue to do as our core business as well. Those require more people.

So those three factors, growth, internalization and higher value-added services requiring expertise are three of the drivers that offset some of the productivity impact. The rest will be delivered in the bottom-line numbers that Olivier mentioned.

Regarding the acquisition and the M&A, you need to have in mind that this is how we want to use the money that will be generated by our free cash flow and also by our ability to leverage and fund through credit facilities is very difficult, by difficult, it's opportunistic. So some years we can do a big acquisition, the following year will be less. So it really depends on the opportunity that we will have in front of us in the next 5 years.

Of course, we are working actively, and we are reviewing a lot of targets every month. But as we want to stay disciplined, we just go after acquisitions that really makes sense for us, either to buy new technologies that we can leverage across the group or to become the leader in one of the markets where we're operating too, like we did with BVA or I&O in Netherlands that allows us to be today #1 in this market.

And just on the two numbers you mentioned. So those are your numbers, EUR 800 million and EUR 400 million. But the statement is very simple. The majority of the EUR 1.2 billion will be dedicated to M&A and a significant part will be dedicated to investments in future solutions and in deploying the transformation we're embarking on.

Davide from Berenberg. Just a few questions on my side. What share of Ipsos group revenue is generated by your platform today? And what level of contribution do you expect them to reach in the 3 to 4 years?

Second question, when I choose to work with Ipsos.Digital and, generally speaking, the other platforms, what is your competitive advantage compared to pure software players like Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey and also against the traditional research companies such as Kantar?

And the last question. On your point of view, what the investor and the market misunderstand today about Ipsos?

Maybe I should ask you the third one. But I believe some might be missing a trick, but hopefully, the ambition we have -- I'll start with the last one because it is an interesting one. Our ambition is very clear, is in every sector, there will be companies that embrace the changes that are made possible by the new solutions and by the new technologies and by the speed at which technology can be deployed for value creation.

And those that do that faster and those that started earlier, I'm lucky, I'm part of one which started quite a while ago, will emerge as the winners. And others might not, right? So that is, in my view, a very clear moment of opportunity for Ipsos to define the future of this industry. Those are not just words. That's a reality. When I visit, when I look, when I listen to the stories you heard about today and many others that would have made this a day and not a couple of hours, it's just very real.

On the platform, the only number we talk about is indeed the volume that Andrei talked about, which is EUR 140 million of revenue directly attached to Ipsos.Digital. It will be tempting. And in a prior life, at Accenture, at some point, we did disclose what was the digital revenue and things like that.

At the end of the day, if I think about our business, we have 11,000 monthly active users of Ipsos Facto. So they do that because as part of the study, they use AI. So at one end, I would say, okay, how much of our business is AI powered already today? If I include in that every time someone uses Ipsos Facto for a query, for a fast response, inquiring on our data, it's probably the majority, right? If I look at it narrowly with just one of the platforms, but the largest one, Ipsos.Digital, that's EUR 140 million. I'm not embarking in the how do we measure that. Because at the end of the day, what matters is that we have more and more of the Creative|Spark AIs, of the inno lab Explorer or the many solution-powered services.

We're not becoming, to your other question, a software vendor. I talked earlier about the importance, we continue to be a market research company and an insights-as-a-services company. We're not becoming a software vendor. We will use technology and AI to make those services ever more relevant and, what's more, ever faster delivered.

Eric Blain, Finance Connect. Just a follow-up question, it's about you need to adapt your workforce to your new strategy, if I understand well. That means that we have to anticipate some restructuring costs due to this change in the workforce.

And my second question is just when I heard about speed, I think that it's a great pressure on price. I am right? Or...

Okay. So on the impact on our workforce mix, obviously, yes, the workforce mix will change. I believe, and I know that the Board and I believe that it is part of our responsibility when some tasks are being automated to emphasize with training and upskilling and reskilling the movement of our people to other tasks. So our #1 priority is to reskill and upskill.

Does this mean that in the margin expansion plans, there are no cost-focused measures? Absolutely not. There are in order to progress. But the essence is both because growth, internalization and going up the value chain, provide the opportunity for more people work. And our imperative, our duty to our people to upskill and reskill, those are the main answers to your question.

Your other one on the deflationary impact of automation. Maybe Andrei, if you want to take this one because that's exactly the experience we have. We benefit from having a EUR 140 million business where the value and volume mix has shown us the answer to your question.

Yes. No, this was actually -- when we started the journey with Ipsos.Digital, this was one of the big worries. What will happen? Because it will be a little bit cheaper. You deliver faster, but there will be some price adjustments. But what we saw was actually that clients were buying more.

So the same client would buy, and we have some fantastic examples with concept testing, where the client would have bought just one concept test. But now they were able to buy one concepts test, get it within a couple of days, realize it was not good enough, redo the concept test, then add a FastFacts study to understand more about the client, more about the market and then actually did a third concept test, which would have been.

So that is something that definitely we see. And definitely, we see also with the advertising part. And yes, it's definitely part of the future.

Okay. We are out of time. I thank you all for your contribution, for your questions, and I'm looking forward to the next months and years ahead. Thank you.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I'm Jean Laurent Poitou, the Chief Executive Officer of Ipsos, and I'm delighted to be joined by you in presenting our third quarter results for the year 2025. I'm joined by Dan Levy, our Chief Financial Officer.

Over the next 45 minutes or so, I will start by sharing a few observations about what I've seen since joining Ipsos last month. I'll share a little bit about myself, my background, and I'll talk about a few of the beliefs on which we will ground our strategy for the next few years. Dan will present our results, and we will open up, of course, for questions-and-answer session.

Let me start with a few observations regarding what I've seen since joining Ipsos and spending time across various geographies with our clients, with our technology and digital partners and most importantly, with our teams.

First of all, Ipsos has a unique position as an independent leader in market research. One of the characteristics that struck me most is the global reach and diversity of geographies, of sectors, of services we offer. No other firm have this combination of looking at, in particular, the people as citizens, as patients, as clients or customers who experience the channels and products of the companies we serve.

That is combined with a long history. Ipsos is actually celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, which on top of the legacy it gives us, provides us with unmatched depth, breadth and length of data, which is the fuel without which no technology, digital and particularly artificial intelligence-based solution can be trained.

The other thing I've been very impressed with is the robustness and diversity of our cadre of close to 20,000 people ranging from sociologists, project managers, researchers, data engineers, data scientists, field interviewers and all the support functions. Ipsos has a unique diversity of talent.

I've also been impressed in discussing with clients, also with technology partners, digital solution providers that we work with and leverage with the trust and respect that Ipsos has in our industry. And that trust, particularly the trust from our clients, which materializes in the long-term relationship we have with many of our largest customers, is one of the foundations on which to build our future sustainable profitable growth.

And then finally, we have the means to our ambitions. We have the financial profile with growth, and we will talk about that some more as we talk about our results; profits and cash, which are allowing us to have the wiggle room to invest or repurpose some of the existing investments into what we believe is critical to accelerate our organic growth in particular.

So we have the means of our ambitions. However, we cannot rely on what got us there. My experience, which I'll talk about in a minute, shows me that it always is critical to be able to change and have the courage to change, in fact, at the moments when we are successful. There's no room for complacency in this rapidly evolving market.

And in particular, as I think about the main 2 things I want to focus on, one, while our growth has been steady, the organic component of that growth does need to accelerate. It is absolutely critical. Second, I strongly believe that being a technology-enhanced professional services firm means that we need at this point of inflection in how technology, digital solution, artificial intelligence change the way many industries evolve. We must embrace this even more. There are very solid foundations on which to build, and we need to accelerate.

We need to accelerate with speed as the main thing our clients are demanding of us and scientific rigor as the absolute mandatory ingredient. Without which, our clients won't trust the insights that we provide them based on the combination of what we learn from the real-world respondents we interview and mobilize and the data, including synthetic respondent that we leverage.

So my beliefs in what will guide our direction moving forward. We will continue to be the diversified firm we are. We will have this unique advantage of leveraging the history of data that we can rely on and the breadth and depth of data so that we can train models and provide insights that are usable and actionable at speed with scientific rigor. And then we will continue to leverage the fundamentals of rigor and discipline, which I'm very clear are needed more than ever to drive the sustainable profitable growth I mentioned.

I have the background to deliver on these ambitions. I come from over 3 decades of being a consultant, but more importantly and significantly over 2 decades being a leader in the professional services industry. I have a very international profile and background. I spent some of my youth in the U.S. I was an expatriate in Asia, based in Tokyo over a number of years. I've worked and lived across a variety of European countries. I understand the differences in the markets we serve from the U.S. to China, from Europe to Asia Pacific.

I'm also a very growth and innovation-focused leader. And I believe that growth through innovation is, as I just touched on briefly, a key ingredient of what is going to drive Ipsos moving forward.

Now I will be able to talk more about how those ingredients materialize in a strategy and financial trajectory for the years ahead. In January as it's pretty clear that with just a month or just over a month, in fact, under my belt at this point, it would be unreasonable to do it right now, even though I have the luck to be leveraging a lot of work that has gone on into building the strategy that I will disclose on January 22.

In terms of what I will do over the next few weeks, I just mentioned that finalizing the strategy is absolutely critical. You all want to understand what we will be investing in, how we will continue to leverage mergers, acquisitions, but also partnerships as a way to fuel our growth as Ipsos historically has with over 100 acquisitions throughout its 50 years of history.

I will be spending a lot of time, as I've already started to, in the field, meeting with the people, meeting with the clients where the action actually means that I will be able to get the best sense for what is critical in our future success.

And then while we work on the long-term strategy, I will be raising the bar on execution on a few areas of rigor and execution discipline where it is absolutely critical that we get it right now and not later.

So with that, let me hand it over to Dan, who will present our results for the quarter. Dan?

Thank you very much, Jean Laurent. So Ipsos posted a good performance in Q3 with a total growth in Q3 of 7.6%. And as you can see, an improvement in organic growth, 2.9%, compared to Q1, which was minus 1.8% and Q2, 0.7%.

If we look at the first 9 months of the year, we posted a EUR 1.8 billion -- nearly EUR 1.8 billion revenue since the beginning of the year with a total growth of 3.6%, organic growth of 0.7%. Obviously, FX effect with negative impact, which is mainly linked to the depreciation of the dollar and a few other currencies against euro and the scope effect of around 5%, which is mainly coming from the acquisition of BVA of infas that we did since the beginning of the year.

The situation is improving in the U.S., where organic growth since the beginning of the year amounts to 0.9%. And the U.S. is still a bit of a tale of 2 cities. Excluding Public Affairs, we are growing organically by 3% since the beginning of the year, and this is on the back of improvement in the pharma sector, good performance with CPG clients.

But on the other hand, we do have a tough political context in the U.S., as you all know, with the DOGE at the beginning of the year and the shutdown that has now happened a few weeks ago, and we don't know how long it is going to last. And all of this, obviously, is continuing to impact our Public Affairs business, which is down by 15% since the beginning of the year.

We see a good improvement and growth improvement across all regions in the third quarter. I've already spoken about Americas. But if you take EMEA, EMEA is growing by 10% as a total growth on the back of the acquisition of infas and BVA. Organic growth at the end of September is 1.6%, which is a good performance given the tough comparative that we had last year. And only on the third quarter, we are growing by 3.2% in EMEA.

We see good performance in Continental Europe but also in Middle East, but this is partly offset by the situation in France, where, as you know, there is a lot of political instability. France is down because of this political instability and Public Affairs by 4%. If we were to strip out the Public Affairs business, France would be in slight positive growth.

In Asia Pacific, we see a slight positive growth in China. But again, this is offset by the Public Affairs business in several countries in Asia Pacific, particularly in Australia, New Zealand and India, where there have been, either in '24 and '25, general elections and sometimes tough budget constraints.

If we now move to the performance by audience, we see good performance across most audiences, but obviously, the performance is held back by our Public Affairs business. Our service line, which are dedicated to consumers, clients and employees are growing by 2% since the beginning of the year. This performance is driven by our activities relating to ad testing to marketing spending optimization and to mystery shopping.

The Doctors & Patients audience is growing and is recovering compared to what we saw last year in 2024. It is growing by 5% since the beginning of the year organically. This is on the back of coming -- recoming innovation on a lot of several of pathologies. But on the other hand, there are risks on these audiences, which are coming from the current discussions in the U.S. on drug pricing and also the slowdown in the drug approvals by the FDA after there has been a few thousand layoffs in the FDA with the DOGE action.

As you see, the Citizens business is really driving down the performance, minus 9.2% since the beginning of the year organically. It continues to impact by political instability, and this is the case in the U.S., in France and again, in several countries in Asia.

If you strip out the Public Affairs business, our organic growth at the end of September would stand at 2.3% instead of 0.7%. And if we strip it out on the third quarter, we would grow by 4.2%, excluding Public Affairs, which shows how our performance is weighing down by Public Affairs and the rest of the business is doing well.

We continue to see very good momentum on Ipsos.Digital. Over the first 9 months of the year, we are growing organically by 28%, mainly on product testing and ad testing. The profitability of Ipsos.Digital is twice the profitability of the group, and we target around EUR 140 million of revenue on Ipsos.Digital for 2025.

So at the end of the third quarter, you have understood that the group posted a solid performance among the private sector clients, but the group organic growth is being impacted by our business on Public Affairs on the back of political instabilities, many general elections, budget constraints. And as a consequence, we revised our organic growth target to around 0.7% for 2025.

Our operational discipline and financial discipline enables us to maintain and confirm our operating margin at around 13% at constant scope. This is excluding the temporary dilutive effect of the acquisitions of BVA of infas, which are estimated at around 60 basis points for 2025.

I thank you for your attention. And now I hand over to Jean Laurent for some concluding remarks.

Thank you, Dan. And I would like to emphasize what impresses me most in today's discussion, which is the growth trajectory, starting the year with minus 1.8% in the first quarter all the way to 2.9% in the quarter we're announcing today, which is a number that Ipsos hasn't reached in quite a while. And I think it's important to note that.

And the other thing that is very important, as we all think about the impact that several disruptions, particularly digital AI and technology disruption may have in our markets. Our private sector activities, the ones where probably the innovation intensity is one of the highest, continues to grow quite significantly with 2.3% year-to-date and most importantly, 4.2% over the quarter we're announcing today. So those are some of my takeaways and things that I wanted to emphasize.

Now I have to invite you to the very important Investor Day we intend to hold in January. That was initially scheduled to be in November. But as I alluded to in my introductory comments, it's quite clear that we need a couple of months to actually make this strategy mine and finalize it with the many people who are working on it together with me at the Ipsos management and in the teams. And then there will be the announcement of our annual results on February 25.

Let me now open it for questions and answers.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from Conor O'Shea at Kepler Cheuvreux.

A couple of questions from my side. Just in terms of the lower guidance in the fourth quarter, could you give us a little bit more color in terms of the -- is this all Public Affairs related? And if so, in which markets? In particular, is it mainly the U.S. because of the shutdown? Or is it also in the French and U.K. markets?

And also a broader question in terms of the sort of below par growth and maybe a bit early for you, Jean Laurent, to say, but do you see any kind of deflationary kind of drag on growth from AI, from generative AI so far? Or is the weaker growth only coming from -- or mainly coming from Public Affairs?

So maybe on the last question, of course, this is not the time for growth outlook in '26, and we will talk about that some more early '26. But looking back, though, what I mentioned in my closing comments is the fact that in the private sector, where we are seeing probably some of the most intense AI-driven potential disruption, it hasn't been visible in our activity levels or in the deflationary impact you mentioned. That's one thing that I want to observe.

Now obviously, we are watching that space and both looking at how our unique positioning in the market with the breadth of data will actually allow us to leverage what you just alluded to rather than be the victims of it. So that I'm very convinced is going to be a very important part of the strategy we announced in January. Now...

Yes. On the guidance, so it's true that we have seen an order book in Q3 and particularly in September, which was lower than expected during the summer. It is mainly coming from Public Affairs. And as you say, it's mainly U.S. and France, plus a few other countries that I mentioned during the presentation in Asia and particularly Australia, New Zealand and India.

And not only have we seen lower order book than expected in Q3, but obviously, we also do the consequences on that in Q4 because we can imagine that given the political instability in France, for instance. And given the shutdown in the U.S., this is unlikely to improve significantly in Q4. So at the end of the day, the lower guidance is a consequence of not as good as expected situation on Public Affairs, particularly in the U.S. and France.

The next question is from Marie-Line Fort, Bernstein.

I've got two questions. The first one is about the Public Affairs segment, very naive question. The Public Affairs that still a real future given the increasing budgetary constraints? And how in the future will you deal with the restriction in the budget?

The second question is about the BVA integration, how it's going on? And are you still targeting breakeven 2026, 2027? Could you give us an idea about that?

So maybe I can take the one on the Public Affairs. I think we should not be too much focused on the present. It is true that Public Affairs business has been difficult in 2024 and in 2025 for reasons that we clearly understand. There has been a lot of general elections. And we know that when there are general elections, there are patterns of electoral cycle, which tends most of the time to slow down the Public Affairs [ comments ]. On top of that, there has been some political instability in many countries and some budget constraints. It is true.

On the other hand, we need also to remind us that Public Affairs started to use market research very late compared to private sector, and there is a catch-up that could keep on going in the next few years. And we are, at Ipsos, probably the only large actor on Public Affairs. Public Affairs tends to be a local market. We are the only large actors. Most of our competitors have divested their Public Affairs business. So there is a case, I mean, for growth in Public Affairs in the future, and we will -- when we will announce our strategy in January, decide whether this is a pillar of our strategy. But I think we should not remain too focused on the last 2 years, which it is true had been tough for Public Affairs, but which doesn't mean that it will be the case in the future.

Regarding the integration status of the acquisitions, and I'll focus probably on the largest one because it's a large one and the largest one Ipsos has done since 2018, the BVA Family. It is proceeding.

I'm coming from a history of having worked with companies that go through M&A transactions, I must say that the speed at which it is happening is a proof of the muscle memory of the ability that Ipsos has to acquire and integrate rapidly, particularly with the strength of its operations and financial and processes that are absolutely the same everywhere, which allows for these integrations to go relatively quickly and smoothly. We are already leveraging synergies. The organizations are aligned.

We are also scaling the very important asset of the package testing, PRS IN VIVO, which was one of the key ingredients. And I must say, having been with the BVA teams in France and in Italy with DOA, it's a very cultural integration that is going on at the moment. Of course, it takes a bit of time. We're only 4 months into it. So I believe that it will take the usual 18 to 24 months to completely be less dilutive than it is today. And so we confirm that there is a transitional profitability dilution of around 60 basis points on this year's results.

[Operator Instructions] Gentlemen, there are no more questions registered at this time. I turn the conference back to you for any -- excuse me. We do have one further question from Anna Patrice, Berenberg.

Yes. Thank you very much for the introduction and all the information provided. Could you comment a little bit more on where you have seen acceleration because you had quite a good performance in Europe and in America in Q3? So a bit more specific, what has been driving this improvement? And why you think it will be accelerating in Q4 apart from Public Affairs?

Yes. So we have seen acceleration in Q3 on the back of a few service lines that I mentioned before, which are the consumers and clients audiences and particularly on things like ad testing and also mystery shopping. And as I said before, the profile of Q3, Q4 is mainly coming and the fact that as a consequence, we might see some slowdown in Q4 as a consequence of the guidance we just revised is again mainly coming from Public Affairs.

Okay. But then the weight of the [indiscernible] is it more Q4 or Q3 or it's much the same thing? And does it mean that the Public Affairs will further decline. So it is minus 15% year-to-date. Do you expect that it will further decline in Q4? So more than 15%?

Yes. So again, as I said before, we have seen a lower-than-expected order book in the summer, particularly on Public Affairs with some delays in the decision-making, sometimes some cancellation of projects, particularly in the U.S. with the DOGE. And we have also drawn the conclusions in the Q4 forecast to an extent. So we have done very recently a new forecast with our countries to see where we stand when we look towards the end of the year. So the revision of the guidance, again, is coming mainly from lower-than-expected order book in Public Affairs in Q3 and the consequence we draw for Q4, given the fact that it's probably unlikely to improve in Q4.

Now I'm not going to give specific numbers, but obviously, the numbers that we see on Public Affairs in Q3 and Q4, and the fact that we are doing good performance on the private sector on the private client sector is consistent with the new guidance of 0.7% organic growth for 2025.

Okay. Understood. Another question to Dan, please. Before you were also communicating the growth by the client sectors like CPG, telecom, financial services, automotive, et cetera. So can you provide a bit more details how the growth was across the client sectors, please?

Yes, sure. So on the CPG clients, we are growing, and that's a good performance despite the tough comparison that we had last year. On CPG, we grew by 6% last year. I think, again, this reflects the fact that the CPG clients in a very evolving world needs to know a lot about change in consumer behavior, market and pricing optimization, measure of the impact of their advertising campaign.

We see also very good performance on IDP, our DIY platform. Obviously, in the CPG, the situation is quite different across the different players. There are players where the growth is high and other players, a few of them, which are implementing currently some cost-saving measures. So this is what we see on the CPG.

On the health care, I've already commentated what's going on. Public Affairs, we discussed it quite a lot. Maybe a few words on the big tech clients. On the big tech clients, we see, as you know, a very fierce competition among the different clients, the different big tech clients on AI, which are -- who are investing billions and billions to build new models and to build new apps using generative AI.

As a consequence of this, these big tech clients tend to have shifted their market research demand from the marketing use and the marketing teams to the product development teams because they are investing a lot quite ahead of the innovation cycle, and we are clearly adapting to that.

We also see, and Jean Laurent has mentioned that, that speed is absolutely key for these big tech clients. They need to have faster insights and they need to have also AI-integrated solutions. And again, a bit like in the CPG client, the situation is quite diverse among the different players. We see very strong growth with some of the big tech clients and lower demand with others.

And the last question is coming from Marie-Line Fort, Bernstein.

I just want to understand what is really missing to Ipsos to deliver stronger organic sales growth. It is a question of mix, technological tools, speed to market, execution. Could you classify what the importance in terms of these topics?

Yes. Of course, a lot more will be shared as we finalize the strategy and discuss it with you on January 22. But you mentioned some of the key ingredients. Speed is absolutely the thing that clients are demanding of us. And the fact that we have solutions ranging from Ipsos.Digital to some of the solutions we have in, for example, creative or in product innovation are foundations, but we need to continue and accelerate, and that will be a big part of our prioritized investment and focused investments that we will spend more time disclosing in January 22.

But we will be leveraging both for the processing chain. Everything from automated scripting to integrated and automated data processing all the way to more interactive and real-time data insights provisioning to our clients through the dashboard and the interactive tools we will put in their hands. So that has a significant impact both on speed and on the richness of usage and actionable insights that can be provided to our clients.

And then we will also be using AI a lot more in the years ahead to create differentiated solutions, whether it is to generate more insights in the product innovation space, whether it is to accelerate it in creative or in market research for market and society understanding.

So 2 main areas of focus. One is speed through accelerated and automated delivery of our research activities. The second one is a lot more customized and easy to use for our clients, parts of the technology stack on the client-facing activities that we do for them.

Gentlemen, there are no more questions registered at this time. I turn the conference back to you for any closing remarks.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much for attending today. I will be very happy to spend time with you again on January 22 for our Investor Day and then on February 25 for our annual results. Thank you very much.

Good morning from Paris, and welcome to the half yearly results for Ipsos. I am Ben Page, the Director General. I'm joined by my colleague, Dan Levy, our CFO, and before we dig into these numbers that you've just seen in the video, I just wanted to comment on public opinion globally because, of course, we are Ipsos, and that's one thing that we look at constantly. What's important to remember is just the way in which inflation has, for the years now been the #1 concern of the public globally.

When we ask them what their biggest problem is you can see, 1 in 4, say it is their key problem and half are mentioning it as an overall issue, along with their own finances, and that's well ahead of any of the geopolitical tensions that bother us in business or the march of technology. So it's very important to remember that because we're still facing consumers all over the world who despite inflation having fallen can remember, of course, what prices were just a few years ago.

And of course, you can see here the overall proportion of people who say that they feel at high risk from inflation. And in the last year, of course, we've seen inflation coming down, but the proportion of the public who are thinking about the problem hasn't really changed the total 32% to 31%. And so that's really important, I think, to remember when you're thinking about the general challenges facing many sectors of the economy who depend on consumer spending. Of course, geopolitics is always with us. And last time we spoke when I was presenting the Q1 results, of course, we remarked on the fact that for the first time ever in our tracking of different countries reputations we had more people saying that China was a force for good in the world than the United States.

This month, you can see the proportion of people who say that they're avoiding American products is 7 in 10 in Canada, 6 in 10 in China. I'm not saying that what they do is always what they say. A major part of our work is understanding the difference between what people say and what they do. But the fact that you got so many people, 4 out of 10 people globally saying that they're trying to avoid buying American products. It's just an indication of the upheaval that we face at this point of change in our geopolitical system.

So with all of that, what's happening at Ipsos. And I'm pleased to report our total growth in the first half of the year is 1.5% you can see that in the profile of this year in terms of growth is much more like our 2023 performance than our 2024 performance. We decelerated during 2024, in 2023, we accelerated, and we can see that same pattern happening this year. And so in the last quarter, growth of 0.7%, our profitability at 8.3%, which will strengthen during the year, and Dan will explain that in a little bit more detail.

Our free cash flow at EUR 54 million about the average or slightly ahead of the average for the last 3 years and again, reflecting the profile of revenue recognition during the year. So overall, a reasonable return to growth in Q2. But of course, we're expecting it to strengthen during the rest of the year. And I'll now look at, of course, a little bit more detail and here is the United States, you can see minus 1.7% in the first quarter, plus 0.5% in the second quarter. And so we're encouraged by that with our management team now well embedded, new management team well embedded in the United States working very cohesively and effectively together.

We are -- they are still heavily affected by the activities of DOGE and cuts in federal spending, which is dragging them down. If you look at the other parts of the business in United States. We have an organic growth of 2% in the first half. And we can see that our CPG clients who use us for a whole range of things around innovation, brand development, brand growth. They have continued to spend money. And we have a new leadership in our pharmaceuticals business we can now start to see some real growth in our pharma sector globally.

So we're encouraged by what we saw in the last quarter, lots more to do, but some encouraging signs. We've also, of course, completed the acquisition of The BVA Family. This gives us a stronger position in France, in particular, but also in Italy and the U.K. and it brings us new expertise that we can now roll out our whole network. And in particular, they are world leaders in pack testing, which we'll talk about in a minute, but also they bring a strange mystery shopping, and in work for government and the public sector, particularly in the transport there.

And so we will be -- because of the strength of those brands, we are renaming Ipsos in France as Ipsos BVA. Ipsos in Italy will become Ipsos Doxa and the PRS IN VIVO brand for the pack testing will be rolled out all over the world. They've got some really innovative research techniques that we can now roll out, they are stronger in luxury, but also in behavioral science. There's a range of things that they bring to Ipsos that as with previous acquisitions, we will now be able to roll out.

And if you look at pack testing, in particular, which is the PRS IN VIVO business, they are a recognized leader in this space a huge database of examples to build on and to use and to put into AI to speed up decision-making, really profound expertise in this space. and great relationships and long-term relationships with many of the CPG players and others. And so now we're able to take this to a geographic footprint that by my estimate is around 10x larger, which should really give this team now combined with our innovation team at Ipsos some real impact.

So I'll hand over now to Dan to talk through some of those details and the phasing in a little bit more detail. But thank you.

[Interpreted] Thanks, Ben. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. So let's begin by the breakdown of organic growth by region. Performance is improving in H2 across regions. EMEA, the first half comes in at 6.3% growth driven essentially by the acquisition of infas in Germany. Organic growth comes in at 0.8%, 1.8% achieved in Q2, reflecting good results in Continental Europe, but also in the Middle East.

Conversely, a more challenging business in France heavily affected by the political situation, notably on our public affairs business. The Americas delivering organic growth of 0.6% in Q2, 0.5% in the U.S. As Ben said, measures taken by the management team in the U.S. are beginning their fruit. Of course, the political context remains volatile in the U.S. and in fact, public affairs business, but the performance of other service lines is encouraging because overall, they're up 2% in the first half, driven by consumer clients and health business, which, as you recall, affected activity in '24, but picking up in H1 '25.

Lastly, business in Asia Pacific impacted by the absence of recovery in China hurt by the structural difficulties. The economy is facing against the backdrop of inflation. Asia is also affected by our drop in public affairs after many elections in a number of Asian countries in 2024. Performance is also up in Q2 across audiences. Service lines for employee services and clients, 0.8% in Q1 and 1.6% in Q2 in spite of an unfavorable base effect, strong growth same time last year. It's driven essentially by our market positioning optimizing marketing spend, measuring the impact of ad campaigns and mystery campaigns or activity with citizens is down sharply 11% since the start of the year because of the political situation in the U.S.

And as Ben recall, the DOGE impact, but in France and in Asia, the electro cycle and certain budgetary constraints led some public clients to wait-and-see attitude, medical and patients plus 5% versus last year, innovation in terms of oncology, rare diseases on GLP-1 should drive growth going forward. We prefer to remain cautious, notably in the U.S. because the political context could impact both vaccine development, but also the marketing of new medicines.

Our DIY Ipsos digital platform, delivering excellent performance 26% growth in H1. Operating margin of Ipsos digital is almost twice that of the group. We continue to reach the offering new solutions on Ipsos digital, our annual target is for EUR 140 million.

Moving now having discussed the top line. Let's move to the comments on the P&L. Gross margins 68.4% in the first half as against 68.5% same time last year. This decrease is due to the integration of infas in Germany. The gross margin is sharply lower at a group level. the integration plan to restore the ability is underway. Like-for-like gross margin is up 30 bps over last year, notably due to the strong growth of Ipsos digital.

Turning now to operating cost, payroll is up 3.1% because of a scope effect and at constant scope, payroll is only up 0.7%. We continue to adapt our cost base to the evolving business and our head count is down by about 2% at June 30 versus 31st of December 24. The full impact of this head count reduction will accrue to profitability in H2. As Ben said, H2 will be sharply off in terms of profitability.

General expenses up EUR 7 million, that's a scope effect because of IT, tech and panel acquisition spend in line with our road map and then other expenses and charges, negative balance of EUR 10 million. These severance costs but also negative ForEx impact with -- because of the sharp depreciation of the dollar, notably in Q2 '25.

Lastly, for H1, the operating margin comes in at 8.3%, below the operating margin of noncurrent expenses impacted by about EUR 5 million of acquisition costs, acquisition of BVA and infas EUR 3 million for the depreciation net asset in Russia. We're looking at the impacts of the vote by the dome on the 15th of July. Last of a law as of 2026 will limit the capital of market research companies held by foreigners. This bill has been under discussion at the Domo for 2 years now. we've depreciated the net book value of Russian operations in our balance sheet.

Adjusted net income comes in EUR 72 million against EUR 82 million last year. I think it's important to recall that we're expecting a significant improvement in profitability in H2 of the year, driven by the expected acceleration of growth in H2. As Ben said, we'll have a year whose profile will be closer to that of '23 than '24 with an accelerating growth and full effect of cost containment measures in H2, which should drive profitability. As you can see on this chart, H1 profitability close to that of 2023.

And of course, we maintain our Operating margin target at 13% at constant scope. The operating margin of H1 was impacted by unfavorable ForEx, notably the site and the dollar. Turning now to the cash flow, the change in working Capital is stable versus last year, thanks to the optimization of our billing and settlement procedures reducing the payment terms and a lower level of receivables due to the negative growth of Q4 and Q1 '25, investments are up at EUR 38 million, in line with implementation of our tech road map.

And all in all, free cash flow comes in at EUR 40 million would have been the EUR 54 million at constant scope excluding acquisition. As you can see at the table at the foot, EUR 54 million is lower than that of 2024 last year. H1 was favored in free cash flow by a shift of part of the cash because of the strong growth at Q4 '23, as you can see, free cash flow early '25 is higher than that of '23 and '24.

Lastly, we spent EUR 174 million in acquisitions all in all, essentially with the acquisitions of The BVA Family and infas, cash at close comes in at EUR 250 million. Net financial debt stands at EUR 251 million at the end of first half, EUR 57 million at the end of last year, a slight increase of the leverage at 0.6x EBITDA link, of course, to the acquisition of infas and BVA, excellent level of liquidity of EUR 450 million onto credit lines after renegotiated EUR 150 million. As you can see on the right, after the issuance of our bond of EUR 450 million at the start of the year. We have no significant debt maturities before 2030.

Thank you. Back to Ben.

Thank you very much, Dan. And I thought it would be good just to briefly update you on where we are on technology and AI because this is obviously now fundamental, both to our industry and to Ipsos. And in particular, the work that we're doing on synthetic data. So synthetic data, of course, has the potential to dramatically reduce the need for large sample sizes. In some cases, or to even remove the need to interview anybody at all. But it needs to be done carefully, we caution with security, which is 1 of our watch words.

And so we are using it for areas of data boosting, if you need or of a certain subgroup of the population who are hard to find, our work is showing that if you have enough examples of that subgroup and enough data, and this is where the size of it as and its history and the waves of surveys we have going back decades even to the last century in some cases, means that we are very well placed to do that. we can now reliably add in particular group's population to a survey and save money and time. we can impute questions.

And so one of the things that we're doing is looking at the ability, if you know people's answers to 20 questions on a particular subject can you reliably predict their answers to another 10 issues that you haven't actually had to spare or waste time or time and cost interviewing them about, but you can impute those answers.

And then, of course, in terms of the use of data, I'll show an example at the moment. AI is allowing us to create synthetic personas, PersonaBots based on real data from dozens of surveys so that you could look at different segments of the population, but importantly interact with them. You can have a conversation and not just the specialists in a client organization but anybody inside that client organization can now have a conversation with the AI, where it is representing the persona of a particular type of voter, a particular type of consumer to get deeper insights and ask further questions.

And then finally, of course, we have full synthetic data. we will be building digital twin panels in large countries where we know exactly from our knowledge panel, what the views of large numbers of people in those markets are on key questions and now, of course, we can validate the synthetic data digital twin models we will be building and so that for many issues, you would be able to simply say, rather than asking the actual humans, you can ask the synthetic panel created from those humans views and tested and validated in a way that was just not possible a few short years ago because of the level of computing that is needed.

And so just to give you one example of that, we've rolled out PersonaBots across our business in virtually every part of it. And one example is on a topical subject, GLP-1, so weight loss drugs. What you can do here, of course, and this is the gold -- a big gold rush in the pharma sector. is talk in detail to different segments of the population in terms of their usage and attitudes towards GLP-1, dig into those questions look at how they're reacting to different ideas, different packaging, different treatment options.

And it gives you a secure environment to do that, but 1 in which, again, it's democratized lots of different people in the marketing function and the client organization can use that data and talk in real time. And again, it really brings to life research that previously was perhaps sitting on a page or on a screen. Now you are talking to these personas almost as though they are real people, but doing so in a reliable way.

And we're working closely on this with Stanford University. They have a specialist unit focusing on synthetic data. And so we are testing out these solutions. We are validating them in a wide range of parts of our business, we have both very accurate data from things like the knowledge panel, which Nature Magazine, for example, during the pandemic showed us the most accurate panel in the United States. And we're now able to, of course, to produce those answers and understand where we are going to be able to produce accurate estimates using synthetic data and where there is more risk. We will publish some of our first learnings with Stanford by the end of this year, but a very important development inside the business.

Meanwhile, of course, we continue to use AI across our business to speed up and 1 particular area is the creation of Agentic AI, the Ipsos Insights agent. So it builds on our platform that we built over 2 years ago now with a safe internal use of AR using a large number of different large language models. What this does now is allow clients we're working with 1 of the largest technology companies in the world, 1 of the largest brewers to load in their own data and survey data from other sources, put all of that together, sales data and then interrogate it very rapidly to understand if demand for this goes up, what will happen to consumer reactions if the price was to change, et cetera, et cetera.

So really speeding up our ability to clean data, to put it together and to extract more value from it. And very exciting to see that. Also, of course, using the algorithms of AI to speed up delivery. We have taken things that would have taken literally days down to hours and things that took hours down to minutes. One of the tools that we're using for reporting allows you to safely take later set, so there are no hallucinations because it's rooted in that data set, but very quickly in any language on earth pretty much, interrogate that data, ask it to produce charts, et cetera.

So maximum improvements in speed that we hope to see as we deploy these technologies across this, but always, of course, mixing human intelligence with artificial intelligence because our work on synthetic data shows that it's very easy to be very wrong. And that is something that, of course, at Ipsos where we are trusted by our bands is something that we are absolutely conscious of at all-time safety, security, speed, substance and simplicity. So in terms of our outlook for the rest of the year, we are in a volatile global environment. You only need to look at the news to know that.

But nevertheless, what we can see is that our growth is on track at what we can see at the end of this half is that our growth is on track to be above last year and that with the cost control measures that we have in place and with the profile of revenue recognition during the year, we will see our margin being delivered at around 13% at constant scope.

And that is where we are right now. Very happy to take questions. We will see you again in October and more instantly on November 19 with our Investor Day, where we will take you through we have been working on in our Horizons 2030 plan, which covers many of the things that I have briefly touched on today.

Thank you very much.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from Emmanuel Matot with ODDO BHF.

[Interpreted] Several questions. Firstly, can we have an idea of your order book end of June, is it consistent of organic growth of 1.3% organically growth, or so should that order book need to accelerate over the coming months. Second, question, how to manage to retrieve the situation in the public affairs service line, whereas the budgetary context is very challenging for many governments. .

Third question, the threshold of 13% operating margin. Can it be protected, ring fenced for the number of years without any genuine recovery in the activity. You've done a good job on your margin in '23 and '24 already, whereas the context was more challenging than expected and last question, you were active on M&A, but not in the U.S. with a return to growth in the United States, have you looked again at -- in that region.

Okay. I'm maybe going to take the first question because Ben had to boost his translation, maybe he didn't listen to it, I think. So on the order book, we don't communicate on the order book, but actually, what we can say is that what we have seen in the first half and the results of this first half plus the order book and what we see in the business is consistent for guidance. So we don't communicate on numbers, but what I can say is that the order book is consistent with the guidance of an organic growth above last year. Did you get the question?

Yes, I'm fine. Thank you, Emmanuel. So on public affairs, I think, obviously, there's a unique situation in the United States. In other countries, it's sometimes due to cyclicality in terms of where the governments are and overall I would say and we've still got some markets where we have very good growth. But I would say that government remains, I think, a growth area. We've got aging populations. We've got voter on both left and right in politics, there is an expectation for government to do more, that puts continued pressure on them to cause deliver and -- but deliver cost effectively.

And interestingly, if you look at, for example, the U.K. over the period 2010 onwards, we had a new set government, we had austerity. But in the end, they needed the data. And what you're seeing in our public affairs business in many markets now is not survey research being fundamental but evaluation. So the profile of the work is changing. And we can see if you're looking at the global market. And so this is -- if we build that bridge if we invest in this social program, what will the ROI be?

And that's something that we have particular expertise in as well as, obviously, our long-standing expertise in social research population studies, studies of staff working in the public sector, et cetera. And so for all those reasons, I think it's -- we can still see that in the long run, this is a successful area. We are #1 globally in terms of our footprint in this space. And we still see that there is huge upside. We have a small market share in most markets. If you look at us compared to some of the other major consultancies, we think there is still upside there.

On the margin, I mean, Dan will come in from his perspective. We have reduced our head count this year so far by 1.8%. We can control those because, of course, the vast bulk of our costs are wages we need to keep driving efficiency and many of the technologies that we're deploying should enable us to do that. And above all, we can be flexible about how we deploy people. So for those reasons, and thank you for recognizing efforts in '23 and '24, we believe that we can balance growth and profitability.

And maybe on that, we can add that, as Ben said, we are going to present our strategic plan in November. Obviously, the objective is to grow the strategy, the growth strategy and it is true that, obviously, maintaining a high margin is easier in a growth trajectory rather than the low growth trajectory. So first of all, obviously, the answer is growth.

And second, it is true that when you look at different aspects of our business in terms of the P&L, a lot of things are pointing towards an improvement of operating profits in the future. First of all, there is a mix which is coming basically from the progress that we make on our platforms and particularly Ipsos Digital, which tend to be with higher profitability than the average of the group. And then all -- we have different service lines which are growing quicker, and we have higher profitability than the group.

And there is, on top of that, all the rationalization that we are doing in our operations and all the productivity gains that we are actually seeing for the time being, and we are going to be seeing even more in the future thanks to generative AI. So I think it's a mixture of all of this. Obviously, we will give some more indication in November about the margin going forward. At the same time, it is true as well that we will need to invest in the future on our platforms on generative AI and investment will obviously have also an impact on the margin at some point.

And on acquisitions in the U.S., I mean, I think we are -- still, we are always looking at the United States. I think there's -- prices remain pretty high, but there are some very interesting things that we're looking at right now there, and we will keep you informed as we progress. .

The next question is from Marie-Line Fort of Bernstein.

I've got 3 questions. The first one, and I'm sorry if I missed the figure, but could you share with us the share of new services in H1, including digital, but in total, the new services. The second question is regarding the outflow for financing acquisition just was wanting to know if in H1, you factor in all the outflow or if there is price complement in the second half and the last question, sorry, I forgot. I will come back just later.

Around 22% in H1, mainly driven by Ipsos Digital and the growth of Ipso Digital that we detailed before. On the acquisition, we have pretty much paid everything on BVA and infas already. So there shouldn't be any significant outflows in the future.

ForEx because you had an extreme charges in H1 due to the collapse in the dollar, what could be the impact on the second half?

An expert on FX.

Well, the best way in terms of forecasting FX is basically the random walk. So we basically don't know. It's true that the impact of FX has been particularly tough in H1, and particularly in Q2 because if you remember well, the dollars been depreciating in Q1 after Trump was elected, but when he started to speak about tariffs suddenly, the dollar tended to depreciate and that has obviously a big impact on our -- both on our top line, but also in terms of FX on our P&L, both on operational and nonoperational items. .

We will see what happens in H2. I don't know how the dollar is going to be evolving, but it might be indeed that at the end of the year, we might have some impact on linked to the depreciation of the dollar.

The next question is from the English conference call is from Louise Wiseur of UBS.

Two questions for me, please. The first one, with regards to your margin in H1, could you -- it has gone down from 10.1% to 8.3%. Could you discuss a bit more the building blocks between the 2, and the second question, still around margin, but this year, you will get negatively impacted by the acquisition of infas and The BVA Family, which is margin dilutive. When do you think you could actually improve the margin of these businesses to quit margin?

And -- sorry, just something on the back. And when do you expect the could kind of like get back to that 13% including the scope effects? And roughly just on 2026, would you expect, given we will have another 6 months of The BVA Family inclusion in the numbers? Would you expect that to also be margin dilutive?

So on your first question I think, again, as I said before 2024 is not probably the right relevant comparison with 2025 in terms of H1 because the profile of the year is quite different in 2024 and 2025. In 2024, you might remember that we had strong growth at the beginning of the year, which is, by the way, the reason why we had the favorable base effect in 2025 and then a deceleration of growth during the year, 2025 is really more likely to look like 2023, which is low growth at the beginning of the year an acceleration during the course of the year.

So obviously, it means that compared to 2024, the profitability is going to be far more skewed towards H2 than H1. And this explains basically the gap between the H1 profitability in 2024 and 2025. On top of the fact that we probably entered the year 2025 with a bit too much cost. And as I said, we have done some cost management measures, which are going to bear fruit in H2 and improve the profitability.

So basically, I think you should be looking at H1 profitability compared to 2023 it was 8.7% in 2023, and we delivered more than 30% in terms of operating profit over the year. I would add on top of that, that usually H2 is far more important on profitability than H1, it's usually 30%, 70%, 70% in H2. So we are comfortable with the guidance of around 13% of operating profit at constant scope.

In terms of impact of the acquisitions, as -- I mean, the assessment has not changed since Q1 where we said that we expect BVA to be dilutive in 2025 of around 40 basis points and infas of around 20 basis points. So all in all, with the 2 acquisitions in 2025, you could expect a dilution of 60 basis points on the operating margin. We expect to restore the profitability of both companies within the timing of, let's say, 18 months to 24 months, which means that there is likely to be an impact again in 2026, but probably far less in 2027.

[Operator Instructions] There is another question from the English call. It is from Eric Blain of Finance Connect.

The next question is from Anna Patrice of Berenberg.

Perfect. So I just wanted to -- connection with a bit not great on my side. So I missed some of the questions so apologies for repeating the question. Could you provide an outlook for the Q3 and also on your order book. There was a question from Emmanuel from ODDO, and unfortunately, I haven't heard the answer, is the discussion of the guidance and at some point, the organic sales growth. .

And then how do you see the acceleration of the growth of Q3, Q4, et cetera. Another question is more on the margins. So you said that you had too much of cost beginning of 2025. I would like to understand a bit more about it. So why that was the case? What are you doing? How do you plan to optimize, what are your concrete measures that you are taking?

Okay. So do you want to take it?

Well, I mean, on the outlook, I mean, as we've said, we don't publish the order book, but everything that we can see in the order book at the end of Q2 says that we should be growing by more than we did last year, which is what we provided as guidance. The phasing of that, you can look at the revenue and you can -- last year and see how the comparisons work. on margin and cost control, we -- what we have been doing and what we did in 2023, actually, when we fixed a similar situation is to put careful control on recruitment.

Remember, our staff turnover is very roughly around 20%. And so if you don't hire replacements, the payroll falls fairly mechanically. We've also been very mindful that although we are investing in technology and in AI, we are balancing our investment in our Gen over the year, looking at the profile of the work in order to deliver consistently for shareholders. And our ability to manage those costs which was proven in 2023 and 2024 is really the type of approach that we're using this year. So -- and coupled with, of course, the pattern where the comparisons get much easier in the second part of the year. Dan?

Well, I think, yes, I have nothing to add, basically. So when I say that the costs were bit high at the beginning of 2025. It was not as such, it was compared to the activity that we had in Q1. You remember that we organic growth was minus 1.8% in Q1. So we are being sensible about cost, and we have adjusted our cost base being very careful of hiring people and adding resources where -- in the places where we are growing and being more careful in the places where we are growing less.

No more questions. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

[Portions of this transcript that are marked [Interpreted] were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]