OVH Groupe Aktie

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to OVHcloud Q3 FY 2026 Revenue. Today's speakers will be Octave Klaba, Chairman and CEO of OVHcloud; and Stephanie Besnier, CFO.

I now hand over to OVH management to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Hello, everybody. I'm Octave Klaba, Chairman and CEO of OVHcloud. Thank you for joining us today. Let me start with the key highlights of our Q3 FY '26 on Slide 2. So this quarter, we generated EUR 290 million in revenue. We had a 6% of growth, net retention, 102%. On the revenue quarter 4 (sic) [ quarter 3 ] 9 months year-to-date, EUR 845 million, 6% of revenue like-for-like, and we confirm all guidance for FY '26.

So some business highlights. We've been -- we were selected for the European Commission deal with consortium. Very happy to be part of this journey. Also, we continue to refresh and to upgrade our entry-level offers like VPS '27, Domain Names '27, Web Hosting '27 to continue to acquire and to be really aggressive on the acquisition of the new customers. Another point is the acquisition of Gladia, AI company Speech-to-Text, STT. And the goal is to build up -- to continue to build up our sovereign and multi-modal AI to our customers. And the last one is we launched the preview of OVHai Workspace during the VivaTech that is open and collaborative agentic AI platform.

On the operational side, we finished organization on the corporate. So we have right now the new team in place. We know we have team in the different countries. Really happy to have done that. We still have the different things to finish on the digital cloud and web cloud that should be done in the next weeks. On the Q3, we had, of course, the anticipated increase of the CapEx, but it was fully anticipated. We don't have the -- main impact on the CapEx because we've been working very well last quarters and to avoid the bad news on the CapEx on the Q3, and this will be also on the Q4. And then, of course, strict financial discipline to maintain our cost and focus on the cash generation.

Stephanie will now talk about our financials.

Thank you, Octave. Hello, everyone. This is Stephanie speaking. So as Octave said, in Q3, we delivered a like-for-like growth of 6.9%, a clear acceleration compared with our H1. So this was driven by, first, on Public Cloud, we are up 20.2% like-for-like, back above 20% and by far, the main driver of our growth, adding EUR 11.1 billion to our revenue. Second, on Private Cloud, we are up 4% like-for-like, contributing EUR 6.6 million. And last, Webcloud and others, we are up 2% like-for-like. On a reported basis, our growth stood at 6.5%.

And now we turn to Slide 5 for a deep dive on each of our business segments, and we start with Private Cloud. So we are now Slide 5. So Private Cloud includes, as you remember, Bare Metal Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud. In Q3, Private cloud reached EUR 174 million in revenue, representing around 60% of group revenue and growing 4% like-for-like. Over 9 months now, it stands at EUR 511 million, and we are up 3.6% like-for-like.

On Bare Metal, we continue to benefit from the repositioning of our entry range offers. Our customer acquisition and starters keeps accelerating, a direct payoff from the new entry-level positioning we took. On scalers and corporate, we keep seeing sustained upselling across our existing customer base.

On Hosted Private Cloud, now the corporate segment is growing, supported by the ramp-up of strategic deals. And this momentum is offsetting an infrastructure optimizing movement as some customers rightsize an environment or churn impacted by Broadcom's price increases. On product side, we launched our new high-end hardware for Managed VMware. It's designed to support the most critical workloads.

We move to the next slide. Now we are on Public Cloud. So Public Cloud clearly is a standout performance this quarter. In Q3, Public Cloud reached EUR 66 million in revenue, around 22% of total group revenue and grew 22.2% (sic) [ 20.2% ] like-for-like. So like I said, we are back above 20% for the first time since Q4 '23. Over 9 months, it stands at EUR 184 million, up 16.9% like-for-like.

On the solutions now for starters, we see solid new customer acquisition and for scale and corporate, we have strong upsell driven by the breadth of our portfolio of products and the traction of our 3AZ regions in Paris and Milan. On entry-range offerings and notably on VPS, so for starters, our customer acquisition remains exceptionally strong, supported by the offer renewal despite supply constraints.

Let's now turn to Webcloud. We are on Slide 7. So in Q3, Webcloud delivered EUR 50 million in revenue, representing around 17% of group revenue and growing 2% like-for-like. Now excluding Telephony and Connectivity, our legacy segment, growth reached 5% like-for-like. Our 9 months Webcloud stands at EUR 150 million, up 2.2% like-for-like. This quarter, we took a first step in the redesign of our offering. We launched our new web hosting offers, and we have now migrated our entire customer base on these new plans. We also enriched the range of new high-end -- high-value solid offers, namely Managed Hosting for WordPress and OVHcloud Video Center as we move the Webcloud business model up the value chain. Finally, in terms of dynamics, customer acquisition accelerated on the back of our offensive sales strategy, led by strong momentum in the Domain Name segment.

And now I will take you through our geographic performance on Slide 8. So we start with France on the left. France represents 48% of our revenue and grew 5.8% like-for-like in Q3. So it's a slight sequential improvement versus the first half. Public Cloud growth accelerates above 20%. We saw it. It's supported again by the ramp-up of the Paris 3AZ region. Private Cloud shows positive early returns from the Bare Metal entry-range repositioning and Webcloud delivered a resilient performance, underpinned by support services and the resilience of the domain names business.

Moving to Europe, excluding France in the middle of the slide, it represents 29% of revenue and grew 7.4% like-for-like in Q3. Growth rebound sharply more than double the rate of the first half, driven by accelerating Public Cloud momentum, while Private Cloud delivers steady growth on the back of our price performance repositioning. And finally, Rest of the World, which represents 23% of revenue and grew 8.6% like-for-like in Q3. Growth is led by the ongoing build-out of Public Cloud and by the resilience of Private Cloud across the region.

I will now hand over to Octave for the final slide of -- on the outlook.

Thank you, Stephanie. So we confirm all the guidelines for FY '26. So like-for-like growth of revenue between 5% and 7%, it will be closer to 7% than to 5%. Adjusted EBITDA more than FY '25. Adjusted CapEx, so keep in mind, this is adjusted CapEx 33%, 35%. And then, of course, levered free cash flow will be positive.

So we are now ready for the questions, if you have any.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Emmanuel Matot from ODDO BHF.

Emmanuel from ODDO BHF. First, you are clearly ramping up your AI efforts with an ambition to develop LLM, if I understand well your comments from the VivaTech conference last week. Do you have the resources to become truly competitive in this market? And isn't it too late for you? Do you plan also to maintain a net debt-to-EBITDA ratio below 3x?

Second question, since you took the role of CEO, Octave, it was in October last year. What remains to be done at OVH to turn the situation around and for you to feel comfortable discussing a road map with us during an Investor Day?

And my last question, maybe for Stephanie. Where do we stand on price increases to offset the surge in memory component costs? Are your main competitors all doing the same? What is the additional contribution of these price increases to your revenue growth this year?

Thank you, Emmanuel. So on AI, yes, we announced different things. This is the Q3 and also as for the Q1, we want to just talk about the numbers, but it's a good question because we started to talk a little bit more about the AI and our strategy, and you will discover in the next months and the quarters, where we go and what we want to build. So we are going in the direction of building up our teams and to be able to deliver in the same time, the investment, but it's also growth -- profitable growth.

So the question is AI is too late for us. No, definitely not, okay? We are in the game because you have the investment that is quite lower right now to invest in the AI. So it's 10x -- 8x, 10x less expensive. You have more teams available on the market. You have a lot of papers with the researches on the market, and you can create data, scientific data. So it's easier -- it's so easier to go in this market 4 years after. And the market is not done in Europe. We are still looking for the sovereignty in this market. The current players, they are not good.

And we think that we can be good in our -- let's say, the vertical that is cloud, everything that we need, for example, code, we need securities, we need the defense. We need to manage the infrastructure at scale. All these things, our customers, they want that. So it's so aligned between what we have data -- internal data, not customer data, but internal data because we manage so large infrastructure with so many internal data that we can use in the AI.

And once we have this and we have more productivity, of course, internally, we can develop faster, we can have more securities, we can go in the less OpEx but also all these tools that we will love to use, our customers will love to use also. So we want to offer them what we need internally. So this is one of the purpose where we go and why it makes totally sense for us to go for that and to making money because, of course, in this AI world, the investment they are very high. A lot of people talking about the investment, not so many talking about the revenue. And this is where we want to show, demonstrate that you can have the revenue, you can generate the revenue and all the revenue can flow the investment and not just putting the money on the table and then hoping that you will transform that in the revenue. So this is on the AI.

On the debt, for me, 3, it's a red line, okay? We don't want to go on the -- more than 3. Our goal is to keep that less than 3 and because it's what I've done for 27 years more and this is where we will be. And the second question I didn't get? Sorry.

What remains to be done at this stage?

On our side, for the first year, what still remains, we need to finish on the Webcloud, digital cloud, starters, scalers organization. This is exactly what we do today. Once it's done, there was few things on the communication that we need to upgrade because as you probably mentioned, there was a lot of discussions about sovereignty, and I'm not happy how we are taking part of this -- all the discussions. So we're upgrading right now that.

And then I think we will be ready to go with it. There's a lot of things they are ongoing. We didn't even start talking because we started working on the step ahead products, step ahead services, step ahead features that we will release in the next weeks, months and quarters that I hope that it will make a difference. Another one?

Yes. So on pricing, Emmanuel, first, we live an exceptional situation. As of today, we estimate that the cost of the memories have been multiplied by 6 in the last 12 months. We consider that it would be multiplied by 9 in September. We have massive price increase on the disk, and now we are hearing inflation potential on the CPUs. So what we've done, as you know, first, we have front-loaded our purchasing. We've made -- we front-loaded the CapEx for '26, front-loaded the CapEx for '27. We disclosed it in H1, so we've made some savings.

Second, yes, we've increased the prices. We've been very transparent on that topic with our customers. We've decided to increase the prices, and we've implemented these increases in April and May. So we're comfortable for now with this level of price increases. The impact on the growth over the 9 first months is not significant. It's below 0.5% and clearly, for us, the key question is, yes, the right price and also the supply. So we have also on top of being careful in the purchasing, we've secured the supply, and that's also something that is very important in the sector right now.

Now, and Octave, you've communicated on it yesterday night, we are going to prepare September. We are working on additional price increase in the given context. There is no need to accelerate massively right now as the price increases on the back of what we've done so far. So we are preparing and getting ready for September 26th, and we'll give more detail to our customers first in the next weeks.

Yes. It's really important that we need to focus on the customers because the increases of the prices that we have in mind are very important. So we want to first communicate with our customers first and then with market.

[Operator Instructions]

No more questions?

Thank you for your questions. I hand the conference back to the OVH management for any closing comments.

Perfect. Thank you very much for being here with us today. So just key takeaways, highlights. We generated EUR 290 million, up 6.9% like-for-like. Public Cloud is growing faster, really accelerating faster with 20%. We were selected for the European Commission. We -- our AI lab, we continue to build up with Gladia and preview of the OVHai Workspace. We finished our cooperation organization. No issue on the CapEx -- anticipated CapEx, and we are very strict on the financial discipline.

And then on the guidelines, we confirm all the numbers without any changing. So like-for-like, 5% to 7%. Adjusted EBITDA more than FY '25. Adjusted CapEx 33%, 35% and positive free cash flow this year.

Thank you very much, and have a good day.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to OVHcloud H1 Full Year 2026 Results. Today's speakers will be Octave Klaba, Chairman and CEO of OVHcloud; and Stephanie Besnier, CFO.

I now hand over to OVH management to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Good morning, everybody. I'm Octave Klaba, Chairman and CEO of OVHcloud. Thanks to being with us this morning. Let me start with the key highlights of H1 '26. As we announced, we generated EUR 555 million revenue and EBITDA EUR 227 million. That means that we generated around 5.5% like-for-like growth this H1. Our adjusted EBITDA, it's 40.9% and net revenue recurring rate, it's more than 100%. And we had this other -- unlevered free cash flow of EUR 32.3 million.

As the key initiatives, so as you know, I started as the CEO 6 months ago, I make my -- a lot of interviews internally, and we already started some strategic initiatives in OVH to start this 5-year strategic plan that we started with '26 to '30. And inside of that, we announced that we will create -- that we actually started to create a vertical in defense market. The goal is really to go after the customers and the needs that we had a lot of feedback in the last quarter, and for this very critical horizon that some customers they ask us.

Another strategic initiative, it's really focusing on the sales side on the Starters and Scalers on the acquisition. We can go deeper insight if you have any question about that. And on the corporate, more focusing on the regular fast closing, midsized deals. And again, I have some highlights if you have the questions about that.

And we announced also that we create our AI lab, and it started -- it was initiated with this acquisition of Dragon LLM. And it's really to address the growing market that we feel that we -- our customers, they want us to be part that it's agentic AI.

And on the operational highlights. So we had a few things that we wanted to share with you. So we had this EBITDA that is quite highest record from the IPO 5 years ago. So we still continue to improve the EBITDA, and it's going up and the goal is really to not to be satisfied with the level that we have today.

And there was another key operational highlight. It's about the front-loaded CapEx to secure the -- our free cash flow in this year and the next year. So I think you will have some questions about that. So we will go deeper with your questions.

So next page, please. On the -- so let's go deeper in the different range of products. So first one is private cloud. So we generated EUR 169 million that represents about 60.5% of our group revenue, and the growth is about 2.9% from the like-for-like growth on the Q2. And on the H1, it's 3.4%.

As the highlight on the bare metal, so you know we started these initiatives in the first H1, first quarter and the second quarter. As the result, we have this 12% more customers acquisition. If we compare H1 '25 and H1 '26, it works better on the acquisition, but we need still to continue and to increase our aggressivity on the market and to win more customers. So what we put in place works, but it's not enough. I want more. And this is where we want to go into H2, in the Q3 and Q4 after more customers on the startup. On the scalers, we have this continued growth, and it works nicely what we have internally. There's still some improvement. But what we have, I'm happy what we have.

And on the corporate, yes, we had some churn on some 2 customers on the corporate that didn't impact on the fundamentals of the -- on the growth. So we still have growth on that, but just we lost 2 corporate customers on that. Yes, we announced that we signed a strategic deal, strategic contract with Alchemy that is a blockchain platform. And we have a lot of successful in this blockchain platform that helps us really understand how to grow faster in the scaler go-to-market.

On the hosted private cloud, on the Starters and Scalers, we still see that there was a few optimization of our customers. We are working on this new product. And I think in the next weeks, where you will see some announcement that we'll make with Broadcom. In other corporate, it's -- we really ramp up of this mission-critical deals that it's a really interesting market that we didn't have yesterday that based on the 3-AZ, maybe we'll have a chance to talk about that.

Next page, please. On the public cloud, on the public cloud, we generated in the Q2, EUR 60 million, that is EUR 119 million in H1. There was 26% of Q2 growth and 14.5% of the growth in Q2. That means on the H1, it's 15.1% of growth. So we have a solid new customer acquisition.

As I said, we changed the things, but still, we can make it better. On the scalers, strong upside of the current customers, and we see the opportunities on the additional products on this 3-AZ approach that we have that customers really like, and we see some migrations from the current data centers to this new model of the 3-AZ.

On the corporate, we have more traction on the corporate. Still, those small -- the 2, 3 products that is still missed, and it will be delivered in the next quarters that will help definitely to go after this corporate market -- on the corporate market. So we've also have been working a lot, and we will secure more our public cloud on this end-to-end encryption on the confidential computing on the -- all the securities that it's -- that we can deliver on this public cloud in the product. And this is additional value that some customers, they are asking us.

On the entry level of the range of the product, the VPS and the SaaS, we have a good proof that what we've done, it works well because we had more than 100% of additional customers that we had in H1 '26 versus H1 '25. That means that we doubled acquisition of number of customers.

We started to see that in the revenue, and we'll see how it will evolve in the next quarters. But this is kind of prove that the strategy of the very aggressive prices, more volume, more customers and then having this machine to upsell and going and helping customers to use all our products, it works.

Now we need to scale that and to go after more geographies, more customers and to be more aggressive, and this is what we will see in the next quarters.

Next page, please. On the Web Cloud, we generated EUR 50 million, that means on the H1, EUR 100 million growth of the Q2, 70.5% and on that 70.5% of our group revenue. And then our growth is 2.4% on the Q2 and 2.5% on the H1.

There was still -- yes, I would just go after the topics, and then I would just add additional comments on that. So on the starters, we just didn't really started repricing and to generate new demand, okay? This is exactly what we are doing right now, and it will be delivered in the next 2 months, 1 or 2 months, it's really ongoing.

So we want to be really seen as very competitive on the starters market for the Web Cloud, but we have also the opportunity to go after the more higher market of the customers. They are more pro business that they trust us and they order us more products. So we want to go after this 2 segmentations of the products and also working on the web AI. And you will see the next quarters, next months, this transformation of the web cloud to the web AI that we will operate over the next months and quarters to go after this totally new market where AI helps our customers to build a faster, faster delivering website, help them to operate them to having the marketing, to having the additional products, the additional services. And this is what we are doing right now on the web cloud.

So you don't see really the results of that in the numbers today because this is what we started last quarter, and there's still a lot of things to do, but you will see by the end of this fiscal year, I hope the first result of this strategy.

Next page, please. If we see on the split by countries, France, we have in Q2, a growth of the 4.5%. That means on the H1, 5%. On the Europe, excluding France, we have 2.9% and then on the H1, 2.5%. I have to say that it was a really complex quarter. There was a lot of -- there was something that is really new, but we have seen that last 2, 3 years. And it seems like on this Q2 period of time, we will see in the next years, this customer optimization because it is end of the calendar year for events and the beginning of the next year.

And I think this is what we have seen -- we started to see as the -- for the last year, this year and 2 years ago, that we have this kind of the new pattern of the behavior of the customers in December, January, February, where you see optimization of the cost and to having these discussions probably internally on the budget and the event starting as lower as they can, the new year and event then grow over the year until the December.

So it's something that it's not confirmed yet. We're still working on the numbers to really understand. But this is also what we see on this Q2 result that we knew that it will be -- it's a tough period. Now we started to know and started to understand why it's a tough period. Still work to do to really understand the behavior of the customers and to confirm that we will have in the future this Q2 pattern on our revenue. So I don't know yet, but it is what we started to see. And then the rest of the world, we had this Q2, 8.7% and then H1, 9.5% still continue to grow on the bare metal and on this public cloud product.

So I will let Stephanie to go in the financial results, and I will have talk with you on the outlook.

Thank you very much, Octave. Hello, everyone. This is Stephanie speaking. Thank you for being with us this morning. So let's begin this financial section with our key financial figures for H1. So we delivered a profitable growth with a record adjusted EBITDA margin since our IPO and solid unlevered free cash flow despite having significantly front-loaded our CapEx ahead of H2. We'll come to that point.

So we recorded an organic revenue growth of 5.5% and adjusted EBITDA margin of 40.9%. So we are up 90 basis points compared with H1 '25, thanks to our operational efficiency. And CapEx was 42.9% of our revenue, up 6.9 points compared with last year H1 '25, of which 11% were front-loaded for H2. We have decided to make proactive investments to secure our supply chain and mitigate the impact of skyrocketing component costs, which began to materialize in our Q2.

Despite this anticipation of our CapEx, you see that we generated a solid unlevered free cash flow of EUR 32.3 million on this H1. So going to the next slide. Regarding our top line, as Octave said at the beginning, we delivered a like-for-like growth of 5.5% during this H1. So this was driven by, first, a private cloud performance, up 3.4% like-for-like, impacted by a 1.2 point headwind from the churn of the 2 corporate clients that we mentioned during our Q1 results. And we have also a softer hosted private cloud dynamics following Broadcom price increases. Second, public cloud continues to lead our growth trajectory, up 15.1% like-for-like, confirming its position as our primary growth engine. And last, Web Cloud, up 2.4% like-for-like.

So now let's take a closer look at our P&L on the next slide. So P&L, as you can see, we achieved another strong step-up in profitability with an adjusted EBITDA of EUR 227 million in H1, and it represents a margin of 40.9%, our highest margin since our IPO. So the strong 90 basis points improvement in our EBITDA margin is coming from a positive mix effect on our direct costs, reduced electricity costs as a percentage of revenue compared to H1 at less than 5% of our revenue. And I can tell you that we are hedged in the current context also for the next 18 months. And we have also a strong operating leverage on our fixed cost base.

We delivered an EBIT of EUR 35.4 million, representing a margin of 6.4%. On a like-for-like basis, if we exclude the one-off gain from the disposal of a legacy data center in Paris last year, our EBIT margin remained broadly stable. After including a financial result of minus EUR 28.7 million and a tax expense of EUR 0.7 million, we recorded a net profit of EUR 5.9 million for H1, slightly lower than last year.

Now let's look at the increase in profitability, how it translated into cash generation. So our strong profitability enabled us to generate a solid unlevered free cash flow of EUR 32.3 million in H1 '26. So our CapEx, if we exclude M&A, amounted to EUR 238 million -- EUR 238.5 million exactly in H1, and it represents 43% of our revenue. Our growth CapEx accounted for 30% of revenue. And again, 11 points of our CapEx were deliberately front-loaded ahead of H2 to secure component availability and contain hyperinflation. Recurring CapEx represented 13% of revenue. So our level of CapEx is compensated by our profitability and change in operating working capital requirements, which was higher than usual and amounted to EUR 54.7 million in H1, and it includes phasing effect due to late orders in February. So all in all, after leases and financial charges, our levered free cash flow stood at minus EUR 14.2 million.

So now let me give you a detailed view of our CapEx on the next slide. So our CapEx, again, excluding M&A, represented approximately 43% of revenue in H1. So let me explain the key moving parts. First, on the hardware CapEx, it represented 33% of revenue, EUR 187 million. So it's a step-up compared with EUR 27 million in H1.

And as I already mentioned, this was a deliberate decision in face of a global supply crisis on memory and disk components to first secure our component availability and contain cost hyperinflation. Second, our infrastructure and network CapEx came down to 2% of revenue, EUR 11 million, with some phasing effect from H1 to H2. And product and software CapEx remained stable around EUR 37 million, 7% of our revenue, reflecting our continued investment in expanding the product portfolio. Notably with new public cloud services and mission-critical offerings while we control our costs. Other CapEx remained marginal, around 1% of our revenue. So now given the exceptional supply environment, we have adjusted our full year CapEx guidance, which I will walk you through on the next slide.

So as I just mentioned, the global component crisis, particularly on memory and disk has led us to adjust our full year '26 CapEx guidance. So I will take you through the bridge on this slide. You'll remember, our initial guidance was 30% to 32% of CapEx as a percentage of our revenue. The exceptional hyperinflation on memory and disk components add approximately 3 percentage points.

However, we decided to front-load some of those CapEx, and by doing so, we realized a saving of approximately EUR 10 million in our H1. So we are already partially offsetting the inflation impact through proactive timing, and we are securing our supply. So this brings our new FY CapEx guidance to 33% to 35% of revenue.

This adjustment is cyclical and not structural. It reflects the current component inflation environment. We have already passed through price increases to part of our customers effective April 1, and we continue to monitor the situation closely to calibrate further adjustments as needed. On top of this, we are going to build a dedicated stock of approximately EUR 50 million in memory and disk components. Those are standard components, and there are no obsolescence risk, and it will be strictly earmarked for '25 consumption. This exceptional envelope allows us to secure availability.

This is very important, and we lock in pricing ahead of further anticipated cost increases. Here again, by purchases in H2 rather than at the beginning of '27, we estimate additional savings of approximately EUR 15 million, 1-5. So in total, EUR 10 million in H1, EUR 15 million coming up in H2.

Our front-loading strategy generates EUR 25 million savings that would have been lost had we waited. To finance this EUR 50 million of lock-in stock for '27, we will use a dedicated exceptional financing facility.

So our underlying business generates sufficient cash to cover all our FY '26 investments and delivering a positive levered free cash flow in FY '26 that we confirm today. So including exceptional and dedicated financing for those lock-in stock for FY '27 CapEx.

Let me now turn to our balance sheet and financial structure. That will be my last slide. So our financial structure remains robust and well positioned for the future. Our net debt stood at EUR 1.125 billion at the end of February '26, and it's broadly stable compared to August '25. Our leverage ratio has continued to decrease 2.6x our EBITDA, in line with our debt policy.

The all-in cost of debt remained unchanged year-on-year at 4.4%, demonstrating the quality of our hedging strategy. Available liquidity stands at EUR 236 million, comprising EUR 36 million in cash and our undrawn EUR 200 million multipurpose credit facility. As you can see on the right-hand side of the slide, we have no major debt repayment before FY 2030, giving us significant financial flexibility.

Our funding sources are well diversified. We have our EUR 500 million inaugural bond at a fixed rate of 4.75% maturing in FY '31, rated BB- by S&P and Ba3 by Moody's, our EUR 450 million EU taxonomy aligned green loan maturing in FY 2030. So it's a first for a European cloud player. Our EUR 200 million EIB credit facility; and finally, our undrawn multipurpose facility of EUR 200 million. And this credit facility was also converted into a sustainability-linked loan, further reinforcing our commitment to responsible financing.

So in summary, we have a strong, well-hedged balance sheet with no near-term refinancing needs, supporting our path to positive free cash flow. And now I will hand over to Octave to discuss our outlook.

Thank You, Stephanie. So for the FY '26 activity, our guidelines don't change, doesn't change. We anticipate like-for-like revenue growth of 5% to 7%. Adjusted EBITDA margin more than FY '25. CapEx, adjusted CapEx, if we consider really FY '26 activity is 32%, 35%, that is a little bit more, but levered free cash flow -- free cash flow will be positive for this '26 activity. So now we open the floor for your questions, if you have any.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Ines Mao from BNP Paribas.

I just have 2 questions. The first one is on your CapEx breakdown. So I look at the CapEx breakdown by component. I see that hardware was up as a percentage of revenue, which was voluntarily. But if it was only hardware, why was also recurring CapEx higher in H1 year-over-year? And my second question is, can you comment further on potential pass-through price increases to moderate the impact of this price up cycle on CapEx? Is it still on the menu? Or is -- yes, can you give us more color on this?

Yes. Thank you, Ines. So we have a slight increase of our recurring CapEx to 13% of our revenue. This incorporates also the impact of inflation that started to kick in, particularly in our Q2 numbers. And as for the price increase, we have already started to partially pass through the impact of this inflation. We launched the first initiative around increasing our prices April 1. We are doing it tactically. We don't price all our customer bases. We focus particularly on the new configurations, on new customers and also on products where we have less price elasticity. And obviously, I mean, we remain very careful, like we mentioned, and we will continue to monitor the evolution of the prices to be ready to react and to engage into potentially new price increases if needed.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Derric Marcon from Bernstein.

So the first one is on price increase. Can you quantify the impact that it will have in 20 -- in fiscal year 2026? And what was factored in the unchanged guidance of plus 5%, plus 7%? And if we look to 2027, what would be the impact of this price increase? That's my first question.

The second question is about the telephony and connectivity. Do you see the trough coming in the next quarters? Or where do you see the trough for this business because it's still waiting on the performance of Web Cloud in H1? And my third question is on AI. Could you quantify, please, the impact of AI on public cloud growth?

Thank you, Derric, for your questions. So first, on the price increase, I mean, we've just launched them a few days ago. Like I said, I mean, we've done tactical price increase, and this will have a gradual effect. We have some of our customers that are committing. So bear in mind that this will flow through over several quarters. We will also monitor the impact of this price increase. So far, it's too soon to tell you a clear impact. In any case, on that basis, we have no -- we have decided not to change our guidance, and we confirm the 5% to 7% range for this year. And again, for the same reason, I mean, we monitor the impact in our Q3. We'll have a better view probably at the end of Q3 of this impact, and we will work also on the guidance for '27 in the coming months, and we'll get back to you with indications and guidance for '27 at the end of October during our full year communication.

On the VoIP and access, thanks for this question. So no, we don't see any change for the moment. We started to work on the web pages on the offers just last quarter, and it's still the work we are working on. I hope that the next quarter, it will be done, and we will start seeing the difference in this decrease of the revenue because it's impacting the perception on our growth on the Web Cloud. So it's sad to have this decrease of the revenue while we're doing well on the domain name of the e-mails, et cetera.

So I understand your question. Still it's work -- the work will be delivered. I hope it will be May 1 on the -- or June 1, on the new range of the Web Cloud and the new range of the VoIP. And when we will see also what to do exactly, we have different options for the access, for the connectivity.

And your last question, Derric, was on AI contribution. You remember, I mean, we always mentioned and that was true so far that we remain cautious with regard to AI, considering the level of return of investment that we've seen so far. So the contribution remained quite small because we invested tactically to answer also some requests from our customers. It's around 1 point like in the previous quarter.

Now I mean you may have seen the announcement last week, we've decided to launch our lab -- our AI labs. We've made a small acquisition for Dragon LLM. And last point is that we -- in the context of this inflation on the standard components, we do see a clear improvement on the GPU return compared to CPU. And now it looks like we could achieve similar return on GPUs and on some of our CPUs. So basically, what I'm saying is that we are seeing an evolution on the market and on the economics, and we are ready to invest in the coming quarter more significantly in AI.

The next question comes from Qihang Zhang from Lazard.

It's regarding your leverage -- levered free cash flow guidance is guided to be positive for financial year 2026. Could you please elaborate on this front? Is the EUR 50 million locked-in stock for '27 included in this guidance? And how should we think about the working capital for this year?

Thank you for your questions. So to be very transparent on the levered free cash flow, like we explained, we are going to acquire components ahead of '27 that will be clearly isolated and stopped for '27 for EUR 50 million that will help us secure our supply chain. And also by doing so, it's prudent management because we will generate what we estimate around EUR 50 million of cost savings. So we are going to invest EUR 50 million more exceptional. And in front of it, we are going to set up an exceptional short-term financing of EUR 50 million.

So those 2 elements will be included in our levered free cash flow and neutralized. So basically, I would say, adjusted for '26 basis, our levered free cash flow is going to be positive in '26. We don't guide for any specific numbers. It will be, in any case, above 0. And working capital, I mean, we don't guide also specifically. You see that we have some positive impact for this semester because we had some payments that were out of the period, it will also depend on the timing of the reception of the CapEx. So it's a bit too soon to comment on our working capital for the full year.

Thank you for your questions. I hand the conference back to the OVH management for any closing comments.

Perfect. Thank you very much for your questions. Just to have the key takeaways, highlights. 5.5% growth like-for-like. Adjusted EBITDA that is a record from IPO and the front-loaded CapEx for FY -- so H2 '26 and a lock in the stock for CapEx FY '27.

Last strategic initiatives, we have -- we wanted to highlight 3 of them. Defense market, we go after this. Going after the acquisition of the small customers, digital customers, having more pressure of that and going after this more regular midsized deals and also launching our AI labs with the acquisition of Dragon LLM. In FY '26 guidance, 5% to 7% of growth like-for-like, adjusted EBITDA more than FY 2025, adjusted CapEx 33%, 35% of the revenue and positive levered free cash flow. I want to thank you for all your questions at the time and having a very good day.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to OVHcloud Q1 FY 2026 revenue. Today's speakers will be Octave Klaba, Chairman and CEO of OVHcloud; and Stephanie Besnier, CFO. I now hand over to OVH management to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Good morning, everybody. I'm Octave Klaba, Chairman and CEO of OVHcloud. Thank you very much to be with us today for our Q1 FY '26 revenue conference call. And we would like to wish you a very happy New Year, '26. Let's start with Slide 2 for our key highlights of the Q1 '26.

So as we announced, we generated EUR 275 million in revenue. We made more -- we made 6% of growth like-for-like and we have a solid rotation rate of about 105%. With this Q1 FY '26 figures, our unchanged financial discipline, we can confirm our FY '26 guidance, including free cash flow positive generation. Regarding to our business highlights, some highlights, first is, we signed additional emission practical deals. We announced LCH but also, we signed several contracts on our offer OPCP, on-prem core platform. We continue to expand our presence in -- to meet the sovereign demand after Paris and Milan.

We announced deployment in Berlin that will be opened early in '27. We provided -- we've been working on providing high-performance AI workload. We partnered with SambaNova to provide high-performance AI workload dedicated for large head inference. If we talk about operational initiatives, of course, we'll probably talk about, we redesigned early in '25 our supply chain that allows us to deliver our services to our customers and at the same time, respect our investment on budgets.

The second is we implemented -- we started to implement and we accelerate the implementation of AI usage internally to boost our productivity in the different areas, different departments, and we focus a lot on the website, on the user experience on the website, on the support, on the billing improvement, specifically for the digital startups. And the last one is that we didn't change any disciplined on cost. We really focus on the cost. We already have this model of the fixed cost that will allow us to really to have this protection on our margins.

I will let Stephanie to talk about more details about financial results.

Thank you, Octave. And hello, everyone, this is Stephanie speaking. Thanks for being with us, and of course, Happy New Year to everyone. So as Octave said at the beginning, during this Q1 '26, we delivered a like-for-like growth of 6%. So this was driven by, first, a private cloud, up 4% like-for-like. Second, our Public Cloud segment, very dynamic, up 15.8% like-for-like and which is the first contributor to our growth. And third, Web Cloud up 2.3% like-for-like.

Let me now turn to Slide 5. We'll do a deep dive on each of our business segments. So first, in the Private Cloud, which includes Bare Metal Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud, we delivered EUR 167 million in revenue in Q1, which represents 61% of the group's revenue. As highlighted on the right-hand side of the slide in Bare Metal Cloud, so for starters, our customer acquisition strategy is delivering its first results with an increase in number of customers, for scalers now, we delivered a solid growth from existing customers, which demonstrate our capacity to upsell and cross-sell our customer base.

And for corporate, we are impacted by the churn of 2 customers that decided to re-internalize their infrastructure. On Hosted Private Cloud business now, we are seeing early adoption of our new offers from starters. We're now focusing on finding the right price positioning to further accelerate, scalers continue to optimize their infrastructure and corporate kept on delivering a good performance driven by demand for sovereign offerings in Europe.

So now we move to the next slide. We'll talk about Public Cloud. In Q1 '26, our Public Cloud segment reached EUR 58 million in revenue, it represents 21% of total revenue, and it grew by 15.8% like-for-like. In our Public Cloud core business, which means IaaS and PaaS solutions, we benefited from a solid starters customer acquisition, supported by the ongoing upgrade of our website, our manager, our customer onboarding process and support. Scalers also grew significantly, driven by a strong farming, thanks to our product cross-sell capacity. And for corporate, we had a decent start to the year, even if we still need some additional features to fully unlock the segment potential.

In addition, the rollout of public cloud in our 3AZ regions boosting cross-sell opportunities, it attracts new customers that are seduced by our mission-critical offerings. Finally, regarding our entry-range offers, VPS, it's back to high single-digit growth this quarter and supported by the launch of a new range, requiring additional supply capacities.

We move to the Web Cloud segment. Now on Slide 7. So the Web Cloud segment reached close to EUR 50 million in revenue, 80% of total group revenue, and it grew by 2.3% like for like. If we exclude our legacy subsegments, so Telephony and Connectivity growth reached 5.5%. The performance is driven by the first results upon new competitive positioning for starters. And again, we are working on improving the customer experience to improve the growth of the segment.

Regarding scalers, we are implementing a dedicated partner program, dedicated for web agencies to make sure they have a seamless experience and can grow at OVHcloud. Looking at our geographical split now on Slide 8. So in France, revenue grew by 5.1%. Public cloud delivered a strong double-digit like-for-like growth, driven by good customer acquisition. In private cloud, we signed mission-critical and OPCP contracts and in Web Cloud the new positioning is starting to show first results.

Let's now look at our international sales, which account for 52% of our revenue. So first, in the Rest of Europe, growth reached 4.1% like-for-like. We recorded a satisfactory early start for public cloud of the Milan 3AZ region and private cloud performance was impacted on the other side by the departure of a corporate customer. In the rest of the world, Q1 like-for-like growth is 10.5%. The growth was driven by the encouraging rollout of public cloud in the United States while private cloud growth in the region remained resilient in the first quarter.

I'll now hand over to Octave for the final slide on the outlook.

Thank you, Stephanie. So let me confirm our guidelines for FY '26. So we expect to have this like-for-like revenue between 5% and 7%. Adjusted EBITDA margin above FY '25, CapEx part of the revenue 30%, 32% and of course, levered free cash flow positive. Now we are open to the questions that you probably have.

[Operator Instructions]

Happy New Year. I've got a couple of big picture questions, if I can. Firstly, I guess we've seen increases in memory and other component pricing in recent months. Can you talk a little bit about that strategy you have to mitigate those factors as you go through the rest of FY '26, both in terms of procurement and maybe in terms of eventually passing on some of that through to pricing?

And then secondly, through last year, there was increasing discussions around the EU's early-stage plans to help fund the creation of AI Gigafactories across Europe. I'm not sure we've discussed this topic previously. So it's a pretty simple question. I guess how do you think about that topic? And is that an opportunity you have any interest and potentially participating in, should maybe France or some other adjacent country be granted one?

Okay. So on the first question about the CapEx. As you know, there was a global memory and disk supply chain is under pressure. One year ago, we knew that it would happen. So we started our anticipation 1 year ago. So what we have done is that we took a step ahead and fully changed the supply chain early '25, with optimization of component management, which increased the availability of assembling servers. So for FY '26, thanks for this anticipation, we don't have an impact on the cost of CapEx.

Why? Because we have built the inventory in FY '25. And early in FY '26, we make the support to our growth trajectory in all our FY '26. That means that we pull in the CapEx in between September and December, that will protect our prices for all FY '26. So that's why we control all the costs for FY '26. In FY '27, we anticipate the increase of the cost of CapEx linked to this shortage. You know that, as I said, OVH will be in this step ahead mindset. So if any -- there is any decisions to make, we will be first to make that on the market.

On the AI Gigafactories, so we've been talking about this initiative with European Commission. And what we -- we are very surprised about the fact that all the initiatives, they are country. And even if we talk about the European Commission, we don't talk about Europe. And as a European cloud provider, we don't have just a country-by-country strategy. We have a global European strategy. That's why we started to -- because of this initiative, we started to talk with the different partners, maybe future partners in Europe, different countries to build something across different countries and not just France, Germany, Poland, Spain, et cetera.

We would like to design some of the build, something that is more by 6, 7 countries. And of course, it doesn't mean that it will be one big data center, but with a lot of GPUs, but it will be more per country, smaller, but more per country with more sovereignty and approach that what we see for the moment on the market. So we continue to follow this initiative and to see what it will mean in the future. But for the moment, we prefer to build that with the future partners that we are talking with, because also what is really important is that we want to talk about the revenue, not just talking about the CapEx and not about the OpEx, about the data center, but also who will pay for that at the end of the day.

And for the moment, it's just the initiative to create the assets. but nobody talks really about how it will be used and who will be used and who will pay for that. So our approach is more pragmatic talking with the go-to-market partners in every country that will help us to deliver the revenue, to find the customers, to find the needs and deliver the products more that capacities, CapEx and et cetera. So we are more in this mindset of -- for these kind of initiatives.

The next question comes from Derric Marcon from Bernstein.

Good morning, everyone. Happy new year on my side as well. Two questions, if I may. The first one, Octave, can you give a time frame for the EUR 2 billion revenue target you set this morning in the press release, is a 5-year, 7-year story or less than 2 years? It would be interesting to understand your mindset on this target?

And the second question, on the initiatives you took since you return CEO of the company, what was the payback or the early payback you have seen already materializing in the figures or, let's say, the performance of the company since the start of fiscal year 2026 and what remains -- left on the table for the coming quarters?

Perfect. Thank you. Maybe I will start on the second question. So if we talk -- we're talking about the digital state. So yes, we see the results of the initiatives, some initiatives that we already took but we need to continue to work. And the initiative for starters is really launching the entry-level offering is really price repositioning for the Bare Metal, Hosted Private Cloud and VPS and it started to work. So we see on the VPS, we have more demand that we can deliver. So now we are working on the supply to reach the targets of the CapEx that we want to spend for this range of products.

On the cost of Private Cloud, public VCF starting to have the first customers we are still in the process to improve the product and to deliver additional features, but we see that the product started to have the customers and to be used with the new kind of customers and the bare metal, it's something that we started a few months ago, and we see that it's really -- we are back in this, let's say, Tier 1, so it's really entry-level bare metal.

Now we are in this process on the bare side this first -- we continue to improve some products, for example, right now. We are working on the VOIP. We are working on the Web Cloud. We are working on the DoD additional products. and it's still ongoing. And on the second hand, once we have this entry-level successful, now we need to farm these customers and to help them to grow in OVH we see the additional opportunities that we didn't see 3 months ago or 6 months ago, that we will start right now to ready to bring -- allow OVH to grow faster in the -- thanks to these additional customers and the successful that we already have in few of our products. So this is for this question. About EUR 2 billion. It's really question of the mindset and organization internally.

Today, we have a company that can deliver EUR 1 billion plus, okay? I think if we don't change anything, we are able to deliver EUR 1.4 billion, EUR 1.5 billion in the next years easily. But we cannot deliver EUR 2 billion. So the first thing that we need to do is really to set up internally the company so they can deliver EUR 2 billion. And it's really understand what does it mean to deliver EUR 2 billion revenue in just 1 year. So how many data center, how many servers, how many products, how many customers? And what is the right organization to reach this EUR 2 billion revenue.

And this is the mindset that I tried to push in the company and the reflections about do we have right people? Do we have right organization? Do we have the right processes inside of the company to deliver this EUR 2 billion? And my goal is really to prepare this company to make this EUR 2 billion, to have the right people, to change the things that doesn't work today but has to work tomorrow to deliver EUR 2 billion. Once we have this overview, and we know what does it mean and we started to implement that I believe that we will have the first result, and we will be able to give you the date when we will reach that.

For the moment, it's really the mindset of the -- inside of the company that they want that everybody has in the head -- in the mindset, in the head to say, we have to deliver this goal, what we need to change internally to deliver this goal. What does it mean.

Yes. But if you want to reach this goal 10 years from now or 20 years from now, it's a different story. So...

Of course. But I didn't come back to deliver that in 10 years, okay? So believe me, I want to reach that as soon as possible because again, EUR 2 billion will be a step. We have -- this company is amazing. We have so many talented people. We have the products. We have built the last years, additional products. We have this amazing market and a lot of opportunity in the sovereign market in Europe. And now we -- you have to just to bring that all together to deliver and to deliver EUR 2 billion will be first step of this expansion of OVH in next year.

And believe me, I want to deliver as soon as possible in the ones I'm sure about that, I don't want to bulls***, okay? I want to give you the right data that I will reach. For the moment, I tried to set up the company that everybody thinks about that. We are aware, what does it mean? We know how to deliver that, once we have this confidence about the delivering, and we see that in the first results, I will be back to you and to announce the date.

Yes. And I'll have one more question on that target. At EUR 2 billion, what would be the proportion of the revenue coming from U.S. -- from the U.S. in your mind, rough figure?

Yes, it's part of the right questions. It's also what part in Europe, Asia, but also about the products and also about the go-to-market. So we are in this 3 dimensions way of thinking about all these geographies, all this universe of products and all this go-to market. And we need to make work all of them in the same time. This is a challenge. This is how this company can be successful when you work on all the universes of products, you don't forget what, where you work on the all geographies and you go after all kind of customers. And again, if I go back to the fundamentals of company, we have a lot of them, except one, we are not good in the acquisition of new customers today. We have the right product but we are shy on the commercial part.

We need to upgrade this part of OVH. And my really focus, my initiative is really about the acquisition of the new customers. So believe me, what is really important is to build the right strategy and the right tools. So we are able to acquire a lot of customers. So we have today discussions in board, but also internally about how we can accelerate acquisition of the new customers. One of the question that is really fundamental is how in 2030, okay? So in just 5 years, everybody in Europe can know that OVH exists, it deliver the digital products, it delivered the public cloud, it deliver the digital experienced, digital environment to build the product and to be in all economy, okay?

So my goal right now is thinking about how we can reach this target to be known by every European citizen because once we are in this mindset that everybody in Europe knows that we exist, we deliver this kind of product. They can test us very easily. They can use our products, then we will be able to farm them and to help them to grow in OVH but we need to solve this issue about the acquisition and the awareness, really advertising, creating the brand not just in France but also in Europe. And this is the way that we are thinking about that.

And my goal, it's really in 2030 every European citizens knows us, okay? This is my target that everybody knows that we exist and we deliver what we deliver.

Thank you for your questions. I hand the conference back to the OVH management for any closing comments.

Thank you very much for your questions and for this call. So just to -- the takeaway, the first range of the takeaway is that we made this EUR 275 million revenue and 6% of our like-for-like revenue growth. We have the additional mission critical deals, and we continue European expansion in Italy and Germany right now. The second is operational incentive on the cash flow generation. So we optimize supply chain to secure our cost and server availability.

We are working on the usage on the AI internally to improve our productivity, and we keep being disciplined on the fixed cost on OpEx in the company. And the last one that we confirm our FY '26 guidelines, we have this like-for-like growth between 5% and 7%, adjusted EBITDA above FY '25, CapEx, 30%, 32% and the positive free cash flow, including free cash flow.

And thank you very much, again, have a good day.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to OVHcloud FY 2025 results. Today's speakers will be Octave Klaba, Chairman and CEO of OVHcloud; and Stephanie Besnier, CFO.

I now hand over to OVH management to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Hello. I'm Octave Klaba. I'm the Chairman and CEO of OVHcloud, and I'm really glad to be here with you to share with you the financial results of '25 with Stephanie. We can start on OVH. OVHcloud relies on 3 pillars. The first that we are in the vast and rapidly growing cloud market. The second that it's scale globally. We want to scale worldwide. And the third one is that we just are launching our next strategic plan, FY '26-'30.

So on the key highlights of the FY '25, we delivered our guidelines that we announced 1 year ago, 9.3% of growth of the revenue, more than 40% of adjusted EBITDA, unlevered free cash flow that is doubled from the last year and the CapEx about 33% of revenue. We also achieved significant milestones, more than EUR 1 billion revenue. Also in the corporate market -- corporate customers, we generated more than EUR 200 million revenue. In Public Cloud, more than EUR 100 million revenue. And also to give you the overall highlight about U.S., United States, we generated more than EUR 100 million revenue.

Also, we improved significantly all our key financial numbers. Yesterday, Board decided to unify the role of Chairman and CEO, and I've been appointed as the CEO with the main objective to shape drive our FY '30 plan. For this new plan, we need tight governance and the bold execution, really unified vision, strategy and execution to make that fully aligned.

I would like to thank a lot Benjamin for the work on the last 12 months. Our focus will be on restoring growth momentum, boosting free cash flow and improving ROCE. We have the 5 years plan on investment. And also last 10 years, we invested heavily. It's time really to have the money back on all the investments. This is my mindset for the next 5 years.

So -- just to give you also the upside that we have. So I've been talking about the EUR 200 million in corporate. Yes, but it's just in France because we have 80% of this revenue is in France. So our -- let's say, our takeaway of that is that we have a playbook for the corporate market. And now it's time to upgrade in France because we have new opportunities to go after the new kind of customers, bigger customers, but also to deploy this playbook that we had in France, in Italy and Germany. So this is what we will do in the next quarters and years.

The second significant upside is in Public Cloud. As you see, we just generate 20% of our revenue in Public Cloud based on PasS. Usually, you should have 50%. So we still have a lot of upside. It's really just beginning of the story on the Public Cloud.

Last one, it's U.S. we generated more than EUR 100 million in U.S. So we have success in U.S. It's rare for a European company to have success in U.S. This is our case. But what you can see that our EUR 100 million revenue, it's mostly Private Cloud. So we didn't even start our story of Public Cloud in the U.S. So this is what we will do in the next quarters and years.

Let's see about the financial results or financial key numbers. About adjusted EBITDA, you see the cycle of 5 years investment. So we increased the adjusted EBITDA over the last 5 years. But also what you see that you see this percentage of adjusted EBITDA, it's now growing. We just restored the minimum level, and we'll continue to grow on this adjusted EBITDA. And you can see that also on the unlevered free cash flow that it's just positive this year. And it's just one step ahead that we will go back to you next year announcing that we are free cash flow -- unlevered free cash flow and then we continue to generate cash for the next years.

This is the first time that we would like to share with you ROCE since IPO. So we start average ROCE in OVH. Keep in mind that ROCE is based on the 2 different activities. The first activity is investment in the hardware and infrastructure, and the second is investment in software. So this is average ROCE that we have in OVH. And if you come to our Investor Day, we will show you -- we'll split that and we show you how it will evolve in the next year.

So let's have a look on the, what we call, go-to-market. And this is a new way of showing you our activity. Of course, we have to keep universes of products, but we have also in the mind that all these products, they are going to the market in a different way. So the first way is Digital Starters. It's all small customers, let's say, less than EUR 25,000 annual revenue. Here, we have less than 5% of revenue -- of growth. I will not tell you that it is fantastic, and we'll probably go back to that.

The second is Digital Scalers. And here, you can see how -- what is our growth. It's more than 20%. We totally succeeded in growing -- helping our customers -- digital customers, still digital customers, growing with OVH, upselling the product, having different geographies. So we have a playbook, and we know how to do that in the next years.

And the last one is corporate. It's totally new, let's say, it was totally new 5, 6 years ago to go on this new market Corporate; big companies, banks, pharma, government. And here also, you see that we are growing more than 12% and generating more than EUR 200 million. So if now I'm looking just on some numbers. We have more than 1,200 customers that just generate in OVH more than EUR 100,000 ARR, and it's growing. It's growing -- we will show you every year how it's growing from this perspective also. I think we should spend a little time on the Digital Starters because less than 5% of growth is not good, especially when it represents more than 50% of our revenue.

So let's have a small -- going zoom on that and to see what's inside. So on the Digital Starters, we have 3 different kind of products. Public Cloud, it's 60%. Private Cloud is 40% and Webcloud is 90%. So what we will do on that in next years? Of course, those -- the issues that on support that we need to solve. This is our feedback on our customers. And we will do that. We already started work on the AI, work on the new experience of the support. You probably have seen that on my Twitter. We want to have improved price performance on the Private Cloud and Public Cloud products. So -- also, you probably have seen in the last weeks that we launched VPS new range and we started to announce the new product that has better price performance on this range of product. There was another topic that we -- because of the sovereignty market and the business isolation between the U.S., Europe, et cetera, we totally cut access to the Webcloud from U.S. customers. So we need to restore that, and we will work on that also.

We've been talking about this Hosted Private Cloud and VMware that was bought by Broadcom last year, and we have some impact on this entry level of Private Cloud, of Hosted Private Cloud. This is why we launched public VCF, but it's not enough. We will launch the new version with the additional features in January, and we'll continue to help this part of the customers that they want more managed services to host a very small scale of cloud.

And of course, AI, okay? Our customers also, you can see that Webcloud market, Bare Metal Market, Private Cloud and Public Cloud, it's impacted with AI. We need to innovate. We need to bring on market a new solution. We already started. And in the next quarters, we will launch new products, specifically on this AI solution. And it's not just that. I just highlighted 5 small topics that we started to execute, and we have more ideas how to restore this growth in this Digital Starters go-to-market for OVH.

So on the next page, just to explain why we unified leadership and vision, strategy and execution. So you -- it's not enough to have a good vision and good strategy if the execution is not aligned with the vision and the strategy. And the main focus why I was appointed is that we want to be really sure that the vision and the strategy that is decided in Board, it's really executed in the small details everywhere and not just on the part of the business. This is why I'm here, and this is -- I have both jobs to align Board and align execution and to bring to OVH the better performance growth in the next years.

So also, we started to work on this 5 years strategic plan, FY '26-FY '30 to really to explain to our customers, to our teams, to you, to our partners, financial partners, where we want to be in 5 years, what is our direction, what OVH looks like in 5 years and then also explaining the way -- the path that we will use to go over and to execute all the strategies step-by-step, year-by-year, quarter-by-quarter and to deliver that in the free cash flow positive way of thinking. This is what I have done for 16 years before 2018. This knowledge about having really focusing on the growth, but having -- focusing on the free cash flow, it's something that is now mandatory for us after the 10 years on the heavier investment, first in the data center and then in software.

And this is why we announced in upcoming Investor Day early in '26, we want to also to explain you in the details what does it mean in the numbers, financial numbers, what does it mean on the growth, what does it mean on the margin, what does it mean the EBITDA, what does it mean on CapEx, what does it mean on free cash flow and also ROCE. ROCE is something really important that we are focusing on. But also it's too global. I would like to explain and go deeper and to show you what does it mean on the infra, what does it mean on software and how we will improve the financial numbers.

So let's talk about the FY '26 guidelines. So this is what we announced on the growth, 5% to 7%. This is what we wanted to announce. Of course, we are not happy with that, and we're working hardly on that. Adjusted EBITDA, it will be more than FY '26. So it depends on the growth. It will be easier to deliver more once we have more growth. But at least we will deliver more than FY '25. CapEx, 30%-32%. And of course, levered and free cash flow positive. And it's not just a little positive. It will not be EUR 1 million, it will be more.

So thank you very much. I will now let Stephanie to present the details about the financials of this year. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Octave, we can already see the energy today. Thank you all for being with us. I'm Stephanie Besnier, CFO of OVHcloud, and I will begin with the FY '25 results. And to start, we look at our performance by product segment in Q4. So first, Webcloud. We posted revenue of EUR 46.8 million for Q4, up 5.8% like-for-like compared to previous year. The performance is mainly supported by domain names growing year-on-year at double digit, thanks to the successful rollout of our new offer, the multiyear renewal in several geographies. And as I have said previously, we plan to boost the other segments of this business of Webcloud with AI and to expand it abroad.

Second, Public Cloud. Our revenue reached EUR 61.9 million in Q4, up 18.1% like-for-like. We had a strong ARPAC growth, and this was also supported by solid increase in IaaS and PasS offering, including AI. And then on the right side, Private Cloud segment registered revenue of EUR 168 million in Q4, up 4.8% like-for-like. Our performance suffered here from a high comparison basis in Q4 '24. You'll remember that it was boosted by the price increase of VMware licenses. Now on the flip side, this new pricing policy impacted significantly our Digital Starters on which we plan to focus in the short term.

So now let's have a look at our results with our key financial figures for the full year '25 on the next slide. So what you can see is that we achieved all our financial targets, and we delivered a profitable and cash-generative growth with an organic revenue growth of 9.3%. Second, an adjusted EBITDA margin of 40.4%, up a strong 200 basis points compared with FY '24. Third, our adjusted EBITDA in million euros reached EUR 435.8 million (sic) [ EUR 437.8 million ] compared to EUR 381.5 million in '24. Fourth, our CapEx was 33.3% of our revenues, down 120 basis points compared with FY '24. And in absolute value, we invested more than last year with EUR 361.4 million in FY '25. And last, an unlevered free cash flow of EUR 57.6 million, which has more than doubled compared to FY '24, 2.3x exactly.

So now let's take a closer look at our P&L on the next slide. So in FY '24 -- FY '25, sorry, our profitability significantly improved with a 15% increase of our adjusted EBITDA and a margin of 40.4%. So we had a significant improvement in our EBITDA margin, 200 basis points, and this comes from, first, the reduced electricity costs as a percentage of revenue. Compared with FY '24, we are at around 5% of our revenue this year. It was 6% in FY '24. And we have also a strong operating leverage, thanks to a higher volume of servers produced with contained operating costs. So this strong cost discipline led to a clear improvement in EBIT, which increased to EUR 69.4 million. It represents a margin of 6.4%, up 380 basis points compared to FY '24, which is almost twice as much as our EBITDA margin increase. Year-on-year, our EBIT increased by 2.7x. This demonstrates the management focus on driving profitability through the business.

Now below our EBIT, the financial result reached EUR 65.1 million, and it includes the fees related to the previous debt for EUR 10.1 million, an increase in our interest rates over the period and a higher net debt. After including a tax expense of EUR 3.9 million, we recorded a positive net profit of EUR 0.4 million, a significant improvement compared with a net loss of EUR 10.3 million for FY '24. So for the first year, a positive net profit.

Let's now look at how this increase in profitability translates into cash generation. So this strong growth in our profitability is also reflected in our gross cash flow from operating activities, which rose from EUR 378 million in FY '24 to EUR 422 million in FY '25. So after a strong H1, boosted by a phasing effect, as you remember from our discussion in April, the change in operating working capital requirement has now normalized and is slightly positive, amounting to EUR 1 million for the full year FY '25.

Our CapEx now amounted to EUR 361 million, so again, representing 33.3% of our revenue. We invested 21.4% of our revenue in growth CapEx, and we invested 11.9% of our revenue in recurring CapEx. All in all, we are generating an unlevered free cash flow of EUR 57.6 million in FY '25, 2.3x, like I said, our FY '24 level. Now our levered free cash flow amounted to minus EUR 67 million, and I can reconfirm to you today that our target for FY '26 is to deliver a positive levered free cash flow.

Let me give you on the next slide, a reminder of how flexible our model is with the split of our CapEx. So during FY '25, we reduced the capital intensity of our infrastructure CapEx, and we significantly optimized the component inventory management to increase at the end of the day, the availability of our assembled servers in our data centers. So to achieve a positive level of free cash flow in FY '26, we will continue our efforts to optimize inventory management. In FY '25, our hardware CapEx represented 21% of our revenue. So it's 5 points higher than FY '24. Why so? This is linked to a proactive push on assembled server and to -- sorry, to reduce the time to delivery of our servers, but also to prepare the growth for FY '26. And we focus, by the way, on the entry range servers that we mentioned also for the Digital Starters.

As planned, we reduced infrastructure and network CapEx, which are 3 points below last year. We focus on the data center occupation rate that was at 66% at the end of FY '25. We continue the usual infrastructure and network work to prepare for the next phases of growth. We have currently around 250 megawatts of installable power capacity, which is a strategic asset for future growth. Then as planned, our product and software development CapEx stabilized in absolute value, and it represented 7% of our revenue. We continue, obviously, to develop and enhance our products, particularly in our Public Cloud offerings and New Sovereignty offer. Finally, the other CapEx declined in FY '25 compared to last year. It includes mainly the cost to open new local zones, compliance costs and the proceeds of a sale of a legacy data center in Paris in H1.

On the next slide, let me remind you in detail our financial structure. So as you know, in '25, we successfully refinanced with an inaugural bond issuance and the implementation of the first EU taxonomy aligned green loan by a European cloud player. So we have a solid debt profile with a net debt of just over EUR 1 billion, available liquidity of EUR 242 million and a controlled leverage ratio of 2.7x, in line with the group's debt policy. At the end of August '24, '25, all the group's debt is hedged, and we have an average interest rate of 4.3% over the year '25. So the refinancing was also marked by a diversification of our funding sources. So as you can see on the right, we have no major debt repayment before our fiscal year 2030.

And our main sources of financing are now, first, a EUR 500 million in senior unsecured bonds at a fixed rate of 4.75%, maturing in fiscal year '31. And this inaugural bond has refinanced part of the group's existing debt. It's been rating BB- by S&P and Ba3 by Moody's. Second, we have a EUR 450 million green bank loan maturing in fiscal year 2030. Third, a multipurpose drawable credit facility for EUR 200 million. It's not drawn at all as of today, and it will mature in fiscal year 2030 with an extension option of 1 plus 1. Finally, we have a loan of EUR 200 million from the European Investment Bank.

I will now hand over to Octave to talk about our outlook. Thank you.

Perfect. Thank you very much, Stephanie. Just to tease you a little bit for the Investor Day. We would like to talk about the different topics. The first is go-to-market. You just had the overview of the free go-to-market, but I think there was a topic to go deeper to understand how it works, how different it is, what its experience and customers, the countries, the products. So we will go deeper in fact.

The second is Public Cloud and AI, of course. Public Cloud because this is what we started to invest in 2021. Now we have all products. There was also questions about AI, what we can do, what we do for our customers, where we are going to market investment, not investment CapEx, a lot of questions. I would like to highlight the answers from OVH perspective. Of course, sovereignty market, a lot of opportunities and there was a lot to tell you about this market, this specific part of the market. Of course, because we make the CapEx, we would like to highlight data centers, where we are, what we are doing, how we use our assets and how it will work in the next years. ROCE has the results of the investment and also because we will be free cash flow positive for the next 5 years, what will be -- what is our -- what we have in mind for the capital allocation. So this is the 6 topics that we would like to highlight in early '26, and I would hope that you will come and spend a little time with us to have a deeper understanding of what we are doing.

And now with Stephanie, we can answer your questions if you have some.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from George Webb from Morgan Stanley.

Octave and Stephanie. I've got a few, if I can. Firstly, Octave, maybe two for you. As you kind of step into the CEO seat as well, I presume you're looking at areas around, as you mentioned, product and maybe customer experience that you can sharpen within the business, you can improve the execution around. How confident are you that those things can be achieved without needing incremental margin investment and that you can continue to take up adjusted EBITDA margins?

Secondly, you talked about maybe having a Public Cloud journey in the U.S. I guess, over there, you don't have the data sovereignty differentiation. So when you think about the potential value proposition you could go to customers with in the U.S. around Public Cloud, would that be predominantly price versus performance? Or are there other differentiators you can use to perhaps win against competitors?

Maybe one for you, Stephanie, with regards to the outlook for 2026, the 5% to 7% organic growth range is below where you exited Q4 at 7.5%. So there is a further slowdown implied. Can you give any color around how you think about the shape of the organic growth we should be thinking about for the year ahead? And actually, maybe one very last one, maybe back to you, Octave, and not to preempt the Investor Day and the 2030 potential targets, but you've talked about restoring growth momentum. So I guess it's fair to say that your expectation would be that 2026 can represent a trough in growth and then maybe you can start to accelerate back towards double digits at least at some point thereafter.

So maybe I will start on the last question. Of course, we are not happy about our guidelines, and this is why also part of the -- why I'm here today to lead -- to execute the strategy. What we see is that for the last years, the company was really focusing on the Digital Scalers and Corporate and didn't invest in the right moment, didn't innovate in the right way in all the Digital Starters segment of customers. Of course, we have seen that, and you see that because we didn't deliver across the different years, the guidelines, we had the different profit earnings. And this was the part of the story that you didn't have why, now you have why? Because it's clearly explained that. And this is also why, talking with Board, we decided to appoint me because of this experience also across the first years of OVH that we created OVH from nothing until EUR 400 million, EUR 500 million and all this experience of the digital, all the experience about the acquisition, all the experience about growing the customers, freemium strategies, going to different geographies, going to different countries and trying to help the customers starting the journey in OVH.

And this part, it's really important. Even if it's the very, very small customers, this part of journey is really key because a lot of customers, even corporate, even the very big Digital Scalers, actually, they start testing us being Digital Starters in the beginning. So all this experience, all this journey in the beginning, the 3 months, 6 months, maybe sometimes it's more than 1 year before they started to trust us and to starting to grow with OVH, it's all part of this Digital Starter market. So this is where we will focus. And there is few products that we identified that we are focusing right now because we just have seen that the revenue of this product just decreased significantly over the last 5 years. And one of my goals is to really go back to these few products and to trying to restore the growth that we should have today.

But it's not the only part. I think the market changed. There are new opportunities. There was -- AI is a new way also to be consumed by the customers, the product new customers, but also the way that we can use AI to go faster on the market. And this is also part of the story. It will be -- we take the time during the Investor Day to have the highlights about what we are doing internally also with AI.

So maybe answering your question about Public Cloud in U.S., yes, the playbook, the why our customers will use us in U.S. is not the same that Europe, you're right. But we have a lot of customers that actually love to mix the products between them. They love to use Private Cloud in the same time that as Public Cloud. And to being smart between using something that is, for example, bare metal for the deployment of the platforms, but having at the same time Public Cloud, so they can make it cheaper, some parts, the cheaper or they can go faster with the additional 40 products of managed product. So this is the flexibility, the range of products that they are looking for. So the playbook is, as usually, it's not just sovereign. It's not just Public Cloud. It's the mix of what we have on the table and what we offer to our customers. It's all the portfolio that our customers, they love to consume for what is the best for them, bare metal, Hosted Private Cloud and Public Cloud, what is the best -- for which part is the best. And mixing that, this is where the value is by using OVH versus cloud providers where they have just Public Cloud, okay?

And if you want bare metal, a lot of bare metal, a cheaper one with a lot of bandwidth with deploying specific software, actually, you cannot do that in the hyperscalers. So this is where we see a playbook for OVH in the U.S. It means that, of course, we have 2 data centers. We see what does it mean having the Public Cloud in U.S., specifically when we think about all this playbook of Public Cloud. What it is, it's the region, region on 3 data centers. This is what we have in Paris. And we will start in the next weeks in Milano, in Italy. And then we have plan to go to Germany, but also in U.S. to offer this setup for Public Cloud. And both will make this growth that we hope that we'll have in the next years in U.S. specifically. Maybe did I ask -- answer those questions...

On the seasonality, so thank you, George, for your question. What we do see right now is a tougher H1. We expect also to benefit in H2 from a more favorable comparable basis plus all the work that is currently launched on the passive private cloud, for example, to answer to the concerns of our small customers, the Digital Starters that are facing the high price increases by Broadcom. And generally speaking, on all the different product range. So as of today, a tougher H1 and improving in H2.

Maybe another question?

The next question comes from Hugo Paternoster from Kepler Cheuvreux.

Yes. I hope you are hearing well.

Yes.

Great. Great. I will have three questions. And the first one is on the Public Cloud momentum that you had. I guess part of the growth is fueled by AI-related workload. I just wonder if you could perhaps provide us more color on the AI demand that you may see. How it participates to your growth? And how are you seeing it going forward as well in terms of product development internally? It will be my first question.

Okay. On the Public Cloud, so we have more than 20% average growth over the last 3 years. On the AI specifically, we are very opportunistic, okay, on the AI. And let's -- give me 2 minutes just to overlay that. You have training and you have inference on another part. We are not part of this training market. There was less than 10 potential customers, a lot of CapEx. There was a lot of uncertainties about the return of the capital. We decided not to play in this part, okay? So this on the training, this is my answer.

On the inference, this is where we play. And we are playing -- we play, I will explain you, on the different levels. First, on the GPU levels. We don't use just NVIDIA. We use some other GPUs. Why? Because we found that the answer for the speed, for the price, for the performance, for the different agilities; we found some other solutions that it's not NVIDIA. Of course, we have NVIDIA. But on our side, internally and for our customers that in the product that we call endpoint AI, we don't use NVIDIA only. But -- so this is one part of this inference. Another part of this inference is just to -- offering to our customers the GPUs. And we have seen the evaluation of the demand where, let's say, 1 year ago, it was the smaller GPUs, and now we have the bigger systems. And this is where we play offering to our customers, not just the cards, not just GPUs, but the systems -- of few systems, for example, of the 8 GPUs, 16 GPUs, et cetera. And this is specifically for this market of the sovereign market that's where the customers, they want something that is totally isolated, totally secured because their data is very, very isolated, very sensitive.

And we play in the 3 different locations in this area. We play in our data centers, of course, mainstream offers. You can lease the GPUs. We will start very soon on the second new cloud. So it's a sovereign -- let's say, sovereign part of the market where we will offer this product early in 2026. We are just finishing the platform for the second new cloud or the Public Sub. And then there was a new -- totally new market that we have now the customers, the product and the customers that they're asking us to deploy that On-prem. Thanks to our OPCP offers, On-Prem Cloud Platform, that we are able now to bring the software on the hardware and to deploy that wherever the customer really wants. So we're playing on these 3 different go-to-markets, let's say, on the AI. The growth on the percentage, there was a part -- there was 1%, 1.5%, 2% of growth.

But still keep in the mind that we are not pushing on the CapEx for GPUs in the AI market. Why? Because we don't have the proof that we can make money on that on the long term. There was -- the life cycle of the GPUs, it's so fast, the prices, they are so low that we are not sure that allocating the CapEx on the high -- a lot of money on that will bring us ROCE, bring us ARR, will probably grow revenue, will grow EBITDA, but it will not be generating cash. So we're investing in that because our customers, they ask us to do, and this is where we have the growth because they want to work with specifically with us, but it's really opportunistically done to not to lose the customers, but it's not used to win the customers, to have the new customers. We are very defensive on that because of the cycle of life and the CapEx intensity with the ROCE generation, it's something doesn't work in my mind. So I prefer to go in the very opportunistic way in this market.

Okay. Okay. Very clear. I will have a follow-up question on the guidance. So I've understood that you expect a tough H1. Could you be more specific, I would say, in terms of segmentation? What should we expect for H1 and potentially for the full year in terms of Private, Public and Webcloud?

Hugo, we don't disclose in detail the guidance by segment. What we can say is that we -- for Public Cloud, I mean, we have a strong growth like you can see, and we expect this to keep the momentum. On the Private Cloud, what was particularly strong this year was the impact of the Broadcom increase. We benefited from it until May '25. Right now, what we do see is the impact on the Digital Starter customers. We have a decrease of volume, and we're working on it with the launch of a dedicated offer.

And then on the Webcloud, you know that we have also a different kind of market dynamic on this Webcloud. We have benefited from the strong dynamic in domain name so far. So it will probably be a bit tougher in H1 again, and it should also improve at the end of the year with the work that is also done on the portfolio and support, et cetera.

Okay. Got it. Got it. And the last one on the CapEx allocation. Just wonder if you could provide us a little bit of color on the data center strategy. How do you think about the average size of your data center going forward? Will you potentially put more emphasis on regional data center, small data center and potentially staying -- will you stay on a proprietary basis for those data centers? How should we think about it?

Yes. Okay. It's a very, very good question because in 2016, I raised EUR 250 million to invest in the data center. It was 10 years ago. And 10 years ago, we invested just for EUR 250 million. We created a large asset of data centers. This is what we are talking about, the visionary decisions and the strategy to having the step ahead and to trying to imagine what would be the future and what are the good move today. So we invested in all these assets, and we have them. If we would like to have this investment today, probably you would pay 10x more for the same -- exactly the same asset just 10 years after, okay? And this is the reality of the market because AI, power consumption and all the complexities that you have today to build a data center. So we have the data centers, and it was a very good move from OVH perspective to invest this money in the data center.

Now once I said that, we can use these data centers, existing data centers in a better way. This is what we started to do last year, FY '25. If you see our numbers, you can see that our CapEx of hardware, the percentage of this investment, it's much higher than the investment in the infrastructure. So the amount of money that we invested in the infrastructure was really lower if you compare to the hardware investment. Why? Because we started to optimize our data center resources, and we find a way to host more servers without spending more CapEx in the infrastructure. So this is also the way that we started to change our investment in not just hardware, but also in the data center. But it's not the end of story. There will be a few additional moves that we will deliver in the next years to continue to improve our ratio between CapEx in the hardware and the CapEx in the infrastructure, okay? So this will be a part -- there will be a lot of improvement in this specific ratio.

Now if we talk about the future, where is our future in the data center. So today, we have what we call campuses. That means that we have somewhere a few buildings and that they work together, okay? And this is what we call campuses. We have Gravelines, we have [indiscernible], we have BHS in Montreal, we have in U.S., et cetera. We see that it's a very cheap way to deliver the data center resources for our customers because you have a big amount of servers. You can reduce your OpEx and the CapEx per server because of the volume, because of the fixed investment, fixed OpEx. And it was a very good way to really start into having the business for over 25 years.

Now we see that the next move for us will be regions, regions in 3 data centers. So we started with Paris. And because we don't know yet what should be the scale of these data centers, should it be small, I would say, 1 megawatt; middle range, 10 megawatts or it should be bigger, 40, 50 megawatts each. We don't have answers for that because our journey in Public Cloud just started. Okay? We just, 18 months ago, finished the -- all range of products, and we started just to sell that in Paris and now in Milano. So this is why we leased the data centers in Paris. This is why in Italy, we just bought 1 data center and we leased 2 of them. This is why in Germany, in Berlin, it will be probably the same strategy. It will be the same probably in Ashburn, where we already have 1 data center and we probably lease 2 others.

The goal is really to understand what should be our scale. And then once we know what is the right scale because we want to spend -- we want to allocate the CapEx in the right way and having the good return, then we will be able to decide what is this move. Should we continue to lease, should we invest, what side of the data center, if you want to invest. So we don't have answers, all answers for that. This is why for the moment, we are going in this direction. And I hope in the 18 months, 2 years, we'll have the clearer overview or view about what is the step about the data centers if we talk about this region. And waiting this moment, and also, we started to deploy what we call local zones. It's really the first step in the leasing to start a new market and to see if there is any potential growth that we can have in Madrid, in Oslo, in Denver, in Vietnam, et cetera. So we wanted also to invest very little money to different markets and to see where we can have very easy and very smooth growth without any risk about CapEx allocation in the hardware or the network in the different locations.

The next question comes from Daniel Schafei from Citigroup.

I just wanted to come back to the Broadcom issue. You mentioned that customers are kind of leaving due to the higher Broadcom price increase that happened earlier. What kind of churn do you see there in the moment? And was that significantly higher than you initially expected? And now that you're kind of offering those OPCP offerings, what success do you see there? And are these significantly more margin dilutive to the business itself?

And then maybe also then on the second note, to the guidance for '26, 5% to 7% growth. Just wondering, what is your expectation within that on European growth specifically? And then maybe also just to follow up on U.S. accelerating. So this part of the business is continuing to perform very well. Just wondering, how are you seeing the competitor landscape progressing there, the likes of Akamai or Rackspace? Do you fare well in comparison to them? Or are they trying to be also more competitive. And also, do you see a risk of other players entering the space as well?

I will take the first, Broadcom, OPCP. Stephanie, if you can about the outlook. And -- so on the Broadcom, you have -- the way that we see Broadcom is that we have, let's say, 2 ranges of product. The first is entry level and then you have the corporate customers. On the entry level, it was really the beginning of story 15 years ago with VMware. We found new customers for VMware because we had this large market of bare metal, okay? And we offer our customers instead of managing bare metal, offering them very good prices about VMware and products that they have fully automated.

What is the issue from the last year? Last year, the licensing conditions changed that the minimum course is very technical stuff, that is the way that VMware sells the licensing or server that you need a minimum number of the CPU -- cores in the CPU that they will bill you. If you have very small servers, in fact, you have a minimum to pay that is quite more than the customers they had today. And so the increase of the price, it was unjustified from the customer's perspective because I just give you the numbers. If they had 8 -- even they had to pay 16. Okay? Why 16? Because it's a minimum of contract that VMware, they said this is the minimum that you have to pay.

So it's very technical, but it impacted all this entry level of customers. What was our answer? Our answer was we can build a product that the customer, they don't have dedicated servers with VMware anymore, but they will be shared across 5, 10, 20 different customers. So this is what we call Public VCF.

And our product that we started to work, it was about 12 months ago, and now it went live, and we have an additional version and it's coming on the January. But my point on that is that this is what I call a visionary, strategic and execution alignment. We knew 2 years ago that it will happen. We could have developed all these products 2 years ago and be ahead on the market. And this is what I want to bring to OVH. Having this anticipation of the issues, having this step ahead about the opportunities and to work today about what the customers will want tomorrow because we started to see the things and the small week signals that bring us additional information.

I will give you another example. This is what you asked about OPCP. OPCP, we didn't talk about OPCP to you guys. We haven't talked at all. I think we didn't announce anything. We started to work on that 5 years ago. And specifically, 2 years ago, we started to work on this product with 30 guys. Now we have 100 guys working on that. And we are still going free cash flow positive, and it's totally financed with our cash that we generate. But what we bring on the market? We bring in the market a new product that allows us to deploy cloud, Public Cloud, wherever the customer they want us to deploy. So we have a new range totally of customers because of this liberation day and also of the VMware Broadcom shock wave that you have on-prem a lot of issues, customers that we didn't have before, they have a lot of issues because there was no more VMware available for them. And they see that having the dependency on the technology is a risk for them. This is why they started to talk, a lot of them, they started to talk with us about, "Hey, I want this product in my data center." And it's just right now. It started a few months ago, 2 months ago, 3 months ago, 5. But we started to work on that 2 years ago, okay? And this is what I call a step ahead. This is what I call vision, strategy and execution alignment and to be really on the market before the market is creating. We want to create the market and not just to be part of the existing market, okay? So this is one example of OPCP. And I feel that OPCP will be multi-hundred million revenue in the next years. But because we see that this is where our customers, potential discussions that we have, we are talking about EUR 10 million, EUR 20 million per contract, and we have a lot of discussions, okay? When it will come, give us a little different quarters because it's very big contracts, a lot of contracts, telco -- every telco in Europe, they had the issue. Every telco in Europe talks to us. And it's just one example.

So this big issue, now we have products to address. We need to transform that to the signature contract, deployment, relationship and the revenue. And it will come just not in the next quarter. We see that it will come in the next few quarters, and it will be massive. And this is one part, one example of a product that we just started to develop in the right moment. And this is what I want more for OVH, and this is why I'm here. Stephanie, maybe on the...

Yes. So on the balance between Europe and U.S., U.S., we expect higher growth from U.S. compared to Europe, and there are different explanations, mostly related to the mix. I mean, in Europe, most of our Webcloud business, and you know that it's a single-digit growing market. Most of our Webcloud business is in Europe. So clearly, you have a mix effect here. In the U.S., we have -- and it's almost only Private Cloud. But still this being said, you have almost half of our U.S. business that is done with what we call the Digital Scalers. You have a huge market in the U.S. of these kind of customers. We have a very good relationship with this profile of customers. And here, you have also a market that is growing at a higher pace than in Europe.

So in the U.S., on top, we intend to expand the portfolio of products. Octave mentioned it. I mean, we are still at the beginning of the story for Public Cloud. So that will be one of the focus that we will have for the U.S. development. We want also to expand in Corporate. That will be another lever for growth in the U.S. So you have different growth drivers plus a very strong local dynamic that will support the growth in the U.S. for FY '26 and after.

Our next question comes from Ines Mao from BNPP Exane.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Perfect. I have a few follow-up questions. I understand there's been a substantial change in, let's say, paradigm in H2 for Private Cloud growth, but what has changed exactly in the environment and that I assume you expect this to persist next year given the sort of indications for H1 2026.

Then I have another question on the go-to-market strategy from here. I understand there's a core focus on revitalizing the momentum with Digital Starters customers. But from a strategic perspective, why are you focusing on them? I know they're quite big currently, but why not on enterprises given that where I assume the largest ARPU, the largest contract as well. Are you seeing like some kind of a bottleneck in terms of competition in the enterprise market? Is it easier for you to actually revitalize Digital Starters instead?

And just one last question. There's a big focus on increasing levered free cash flow next year. What's a satisfactory level in your eyes? I know, Octave, you mentioned not a low single digit, but what could be a blue sky scenario typically?

Okay. So on the Private Cloud deceleration, I mean, the Digital Starters represent around 40% of our Private Cloud revenue. And we mentioned it, we have suffered from the workload optimization in the last quarters. We do not benefit anymore from the positive impact of the price increase from Broadcom. But on the flip side, like we said, I mean, we do see the decrease in the volume. So what we are going to do and clearly, that's also one of our focus to reboot the growth. First, we will reposition our entry range products in Webcloud, in Private Cloud, in Public Cloud, but clearly in Private Cloud as well. We have the refresh of the usual tailored offerings and the work that we've done with the public VCF to offer attractive products after this impact from VMware repricing. We remain very focused to our price performance ratio. And here, all the work that we are doing on the cost will help us in offering very attractive pricing for this kind of product. We will obviously improve also the support with the AI-powered solutions and improve the customer experience on that topic as well. And finally, on the digital experience, globally speaking, from the onboarding of the customer till the billing, we have a plan to improve again the journey of the customers, which again, for digital represents 40% of our Private Cloud revenue.

And your second question, Ines, on private cloud, do you mind repeating? We didn't get it.

Yes, sure. So the second was more why are you actually targeting Digital Starters from a strategic perspective? Is it because -- I mean, I assume enterprises that's where there is the largest ARPU upside, the largest contracts as well. Is it because the competition is kind of like too high? And then the third question was about levered free cash flow, the blue sky horizon scenario for next year. What's a satisfactory levels in your eyes?

On the leverage, it's really positive. It will not be EUR 1 million plus, just EUR 1 million. It will be higher. We don't want to give you yet the numbers because it's really a lot of uncertainties on the execution. It really depends on the growth. Today, we see this growth between 5% and 7%. But if we fix early -- faster the issues on the Digital Starters, of course, we will grow faster. And because of this, let's say, OpEx -- really focusing on OpEx, we should deliver more. But I don't want yet to give you any numbers. It's too early, and we still have 10 months to execute.

And on the Digital Starters go-to0market, I think we -- it's not new. We did address it and saw it through the product. Clearly, I mean, again, it's 90% of our customers from the Webcloud, which is structurally growing at a lower pace than the rest of the products. So it's impacted. We had this impact from Broadcom and in Private Cloud. And the reason why we are looking at it a bit differently is that we've decided also to address this segment from the customer perspective and to tackle the product offering, but also with the whole customer experience, trying to rework the website, have dedicated actions on the support. And at the end of the day, we want to be even closer to those customers that have been the historical customer profile of OVHcloud.

Maybe last question.

The next question comes from Derric Marcon from Bernstein.

Yes. Octave, one question for you because I take your point on product road map and the fact that it would be great for your company to come in the market with right product at the right time. However, I'm really wondering or try to understand what couldn't be corrected in time by the 2 previous CEOs because product road map is a long, let's say, length time frame. And so Michel Paulin and Benjamin Revcolevschi were there. What couldn't they correct at the right time on that topic. Was it too difficult to adapt the product road map on time? I'm really struggling to understand if everything was known before, like you said, why didn't you adapt yourself to this market reality? That's the first point or the first question.

And the second question is about the CapEx. So I see on Slide 18, the reduction in CapEx linked to infrastructure and network. But when you look to the CapEx linked to hardware, you see a significant increase in fiscal year 2025 compared to fiscal year 2024, plus 40%, I think, something like that. You said that you were accelerating the production of hardware or the assembly of hardware in fiscal year 2025 to prepare 2026. But look, you don't adapt CapEx to the current reality of your top line growth. So I'm really here challenging you about your motto, i.e., doing more with what you have already built. We don't see that in the figures, at least, for 2026 outlook. So why isn't it more visible?

Thank you for your question. A very good question about why we are so late about Digital Starters. Let's answer directly because we are a public company, okay, and we have the governance and its governance, it's not like a private company. You cannot decide the things just because you feel these things. You have to make the decisions based on the real figures. And this is what I also took call to name a vision. I executed the strategies with vision. That means that because you feel the things, because you have the weak signals, you can make the decisions.

Once you're a public company, you have the governance, you have Board, you have all the discussions. You have the quarters, you have the half years, you have the fiscal years and you have to work with that. And this is what has slowed us down to make the right decisions about this issue that we have seen we've seen we felt -- I felt a few years ago. And at some point, I want to take my responsibilities and to deliver because I feel that we can fix all these issues and not to have the excuses that's why we didn't do that. And this is also why I'm here. I'm not here to tell you what, why, when happened. I want to tell you about how we will fix the issues. This is my goal. This is where we are. I cannot change the past. What I can change, I can change the future, and this is what I will do.

On the CapEx, you're right that the CapEx should be lower this year because of this growth. You're totally right. But what if tomorrow, we find what is the issue and we have double-digit growth. When we will be able to deliver this growth because of the servers, supply chain, tensions in the supply chains because of the AI, et cetera. We are ready to deliver the growth, more growth than we have today in the guidelines. It depends just on our capacity to fix the issue, the small issues, the issues that we have. If we fix that very quickly, we'll deliver more growth because we have every stuff -- everything that customers will want. And we are looking -- we are fixing why they don't want it anymore. Let's keep that a very simple way, okay? So we have servers in the data centers that we are ready to sell. You can see that there was no complaints coming from the customers this year from September about the time that we need to deliver the bare metal, for example. And if you compare 12 months ago, we had learned a lot. For September, October, November, December, until I fixed the issues with the teams. And from January, no more issues about the delivering, we delivered everything. And then something happened in April. We are looking what it is, why? What's changed? Why the perception they do different things, and we want to fix that. Once we fix that, we will go back to you with the different guidelines.

Today, I don't want to deliver you the dreams that we are not able to deliver, okay? I'm here to deliver the expectations that we give you, and this is what we see today. If we see something different, if we see more and we can see more, we will deliver more because we have all the servers. And this is why we decided to invest this CapEx that will fuel revenue FY '26 in FY '25. This is what you have seen that the CapEx on the FY '25, they are a little bit higher. Why? This is the root cause. Because we have decided to invest in the servers, in our data centers to be ready to deliver the growth. And now we are working how to make this growth, where was the issue, where it's -- what was broken and what is broken and how to fix that and then go back to this 10% more growth.

And in the Board, we thought that I'm probably the better guy to find this as fast as possible and to deliver the growth. So you are right in terms of CapEx, but we are here to grow. It's not just to deliver the guidelines that we have today, but I don't want to overpromise.

Understood. Thanks for your transparency and [indiscernible].

Thank you very much. So maybe we will close this Q&A just with the takeaways. So 3 things, we delivered FY '25, all the guidelines, EUR 1 billion revenue, significant milestones with the different areas and major improvements in key financials. Unified leadership, CEO and Chairman, we've been talking about that. And the last one, guidelines. For the moment, we see 5%, 7%. Adjusted EBITDA will be more than FY '25 at least. CapEx, maximum 30%-32%. And, of course, levered free cash flow positive.

Thank you very much for your time. We appreciate all your questions, and we are here to deliver.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to OVHcloud Q3 FY 2025 Revenue Conference Call. Today's speakers will be Benjamin Revcolevschi, CEO; and Stephanie Besnier, CFO.

I will now hand over to OVH management to begin today's conference.

Hello, everyone. I am Benjamin Revcolevschi, CEO of OVHcloud, and I'm very glad to be with you today for our Q3 FY '25 revenue conference call.

So let's start with Slide 3 for the key highlights of this quarter. So our performance in Q3 was resilient. We generated EUR 271.9 million in revenue and like-for-like growth of 9.3%, meaning that on a 9-month basis, we generated EUR 807.9 million and grew by 9.9% like-for-like. We have demonstrated quarter after quarter the stickiness of our customers. And even in this context, we had a net revenue retention rate of 104% in Q3, which was underpinned by a solid customer acquisition and also a well-performing FY '25 growth of recently acquired customers.

Also during this quarter, we had a strong confirmation that demand for sovereign alternatives has never been more vivid with an acceleration of inquiries for sovereign solutions from customers. So we have an unchanged discipline on costs, a sustained focus on profitability and cash levers. And finally, we confirm all our FY '25 guidance.

So let's move now to Slide 4 and our strategic pillars. Indeed, in this rapidly evolving geopolitical environment where we see that public entities and private companies are looking to preserve their strategic economy, I would like to remind you of our vision at OVHcloud and how we answer to our customer needs. Indeed, OVHcloud has succeeded in building up strong core business fundamentals, and we will continue to leverage them to deliver our 2 priorities.

First, we are focusing on operational efficiency of our fundamentals to grow our revenue and leverage productivity. This will help us to deliver more predictable and profitable growth. Our second focus is to improve structurally our cash generation, and this is truly critical to our long-term success as it ensures our capacity to continue to invest, but also to innovate.

Then on the right of this slide, you can see that we are also strengthening 2 of our future revenue growth upside. First, we'll continue to reinforce our position as a leader in data sovereignty solutions. Strategic autonomy in key sectors such as cloud is becoming critical in Europe. And our customers are looking for alternatives, and we are committed to provide them with trusted cloud solutions.

Our second upside is about enhancing our public cloud product offering to answer customers' growing needs. As an example, we continue to strengthen our artificial intelligence solution and also to roll out new products in our 3-AZ regions.

These 2 core business fundamentals on the left and these 2 growth upside on the right are the pillars of our vision for OVHcloud to deliver our ambition and our financial targets.

So let's move now to the next slide to highlight the business achievements of Q3. First, you see on the product side that we keep rolling out new products, especially in AI. We launched Data Platform, which is a powerful unified solution to manage data and to facilitate our customer's data projects. We also released AI Endpoints, which is a unique API to connect our customers' apps to the best-in-class generated AI models. And we have more than 40 LLM, large language models, that are available today to be directly and easily connected and consumed by our customers.

In the middle, you can see that this quarter was also highly dynamic in signing new deals that will ramp up progressively in the coming quarters. For instance, Arquus in the defense sector is a strong illustration of the dynamism in the public sector defense vertical, particularly for sovereign offers.

Looking at Visma, which is a leading provider of mission-critical business software is also a good highlight of our capacity to serve larger customers and software editors on our public cloud offerings.

And finally, on the right, you can see that we continue to work on adding new data centers, and we will officially launch our first Italian data center in Milan, with offerings available for our customers in the very next week after a year of work in the building. And we have rolled out our public cloud offerings also in our Paris 3-AZ region, which was long awaited by our customers.

But let's now have a look at our performance by segment, starting on Slide 6 with Private Cloud. So when we look at Private Cloud, which includes, as you know, Bare Metal Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud, in Q3, we delivered EUR 169.3 million in revenue, which represent 62.3% of the group's total revenue, and we achieved a like-for-like growth of 8.6%. On a 9-month basis, we generated EUR 503.5 million in revenue and grew by plus 9.8% like-for-like.

During the quarter in Bare Metal, our customers responded to overall macroeconomic deterioration and uncertainty by looking for more entry-range servers. And thanks to the strategic repositioning that we have done on these type of servers, we have had a very successful customer acquisition dynamic, up by plus 25% compared to Q3 last year.

And when we look at Hosted Private Cloud, which represents circa 20% of the Private Cloud segment, we had a continued strong demand for sovereign offerings and for our most advanced certification, the SecNumCloud specification and which reached an ARR, annual recurring revenue, of EUR 20 million in Q3, growing by more than 50% year-on-year.

And as you know, we successfully passed through price increases to our customers with a limited churn from large accounts. In revenue terms, this was, however, partly offset by the ongoing optimization on the entry-range service. But we have acted. We've launched a new offering, VCF-as-a-Service, to help our customers who are looking for entry-range options on VMware solutions. So all our action plans will bear fruits, and we target an improvement for this segment in the midterm.

Let's move now to the next slide about Public Cloud. In Q3 FY '25, the Public Cloud segment reached EUR 53.6 million in revenue, representing 19.7% of the group's total revenue and achieved a like-for-like growth of 17.2%. On a 9-month basis, we delivered EUR 157.4 million in revenue, and we achieved a like-for-like growth of plus 17.3%.

As you know in recent years, we have been investing in our product offering, and there's a strong demand for our existing public cloud products driven by artificial intelligence, in particular, such as compute, but also storage and containers, databases. So we continue to grow strongly, and thanks to an improved customer experience and simplified billing, increased availability of these products in all our data centers, we have been able to accelerate customer acquisition by plus 12% versus Q3 last year. And this growth will continue as we continue to work on new features and new regions.

We just released Data Platform and AI Endpoints, and we just launched our Paris 3-AZ region that will be replicated in other cities, with Milan, Italy to be the first next open.

Now moving to the Web Cloud segment on Slide 8. In Q3 FY '25, the Web Cloud segment reached EUR 49 million in revenue, representing 18% of the group's revenue and grew by 3.8% like-for-like. On the first 9-month basis, the segment reached EUR 147 million and grew by plus 3.2% like-for-like.

In Q3, if we take just our web presence offers, meaning excluding our telephony and connectivity legacy subsegment, growth trend is almost twice as much, up plus 6.8%. The growth is mostly driven by strong performance in domain names, driven by market share gains in several European countries. Our action plans on other subsegments are being implemented to boost demand.

And I'll now hand over to Stephanie Besnier for a deep dive on the financials.

[Foreign Language], and hello, everyone. I am Stephanie Besnier, CFO of OVHcloud. Thanks for being with us this morning.

So as Benjamin said at the beginning, during the third quarter, we managed to deliver the sound and resilient growth of 9.3% like-for-like. This was driven by, first, for the Private Cloud 8.6% like-for-like growth, and this was supported until April by a positive pricing effect following Broadcom's new licensing model for VMware. Second, we had a dynamic Public Cloud segment, up 17.2% like-for-like, almost equivalent to our first 9 months growth. And third, a solid Web Cloud & Other's performance, up 3.8% like-for-like, showing an improvement growth rate of 250 bps compared to Q2.

Now moving to next slide, we look at the business dynamics by region. So in France, revenue grew by 7.2% like-for-like in Q3. We had a Public Cloud that delivered a strong like-for-like growth of 16.9%, driven by a good customer acquisition in Q3.

Private Cloud increased by 6.6% like-for-like, impacted by macroeconomic uncertainties weighing on tech customers. And representing 29% of the region's business, Web Cloud & Others delivered a slight growth driven by a good domain names dynamics.

Let's now look at our international sales, which account for 52% of our revenue. So in the rest of Europe, Europe, excluding France, growth reached 8.1% like-for-like in Q3. In this region, Central and Northern Europe are the most dynamic regions, as shown by the recent signing of a contract with a Nordic company, Visma, a leading specialist in accounting, payroll, invoicing and human resources software. Southern Europe on the other side faced a slowdown, but the momentum should be sustained by the opening of our new data center in Italy, in Milan.

In the Rest of the World, the growth kept being strong, with Q3 like-for-like growth of 15.6%. We witnessed accelerating traction in Public Cloud, fueled by the recent rollout of products in the region. And in Private Cloud, we continued to deliver strong double-digit growth in the United States and in APAC, thanks to our development strategy focused on tech companies.

So I will now hand over to Benjamin to talk about our outlook.

Thank you, Stephanie. So before we move to the Q&A, let me reconfirm our guidance for full year 2025. After a solid performance in the first 9 months of the year, we fully reconfirm our FY 2025 guidance.

We expect FY 2025 like-for-like revenue growth between 9% and 11%. We expect on a full year basis an adjusted EBITDA of circa 40%, thanks to an unchanged operating discipline. In line with the efforts to improve the profitability that we have demonstrated in H1, the group continued its cost discipline efforts, focusing especially on controlling G&A expenses.

On CapEx for fiscal year 2025, we anticipate the total CapEx to be between 30% to 34% of our revenue with the split between recurring CapEx expected between 11% to 13% and growth CapEx expected between 19% to 21% of our revenue.

And finally, we expect an unlevered free cash flow to be above EUR 25 million on a full year basis, improving compared to FY 2024.

We can now open the floor to your questions.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question is from George Webb from Morgan Stanley.

I've got a few questions, please. Firstly, touching on the strategic repositioning on some of the Bare Metal Cloud offerings, could you talk a little bit about whether that's implementation of a newer, lower-priced entry range of servers? Is it a price reduction of the existing range? Or is it something else?

And secondly, as we think about the growth factors into the fourth quarter, the base comparables were a bit tougher year-over-year. Should we be expecting growth to remain around Q3 or potentially decelerate slightly? And therefore, should we really be thinking about the full year outcome on growth maybe being towards the lower half of the 9% to 11% range in our view?

And then just lastly, bigger picture on the sovereign demand inquiries that you called out, could you talk a little bit about the breadth at which you're seeing that across Europe? Is it mostly France? Or is it quite Pan-Europe?

Okay. Thank you. So I'll let Stephanie answer on the Bare Metal, and I'll take the 2 others. So maybe Stephanie on the Bare Metal.

Yes. Thank you, George, for your question. So indeed, what we did on Bare Metal is we actually did both. We launched a new offer, which is basically in the middle of our second life servers and our existing entry range, so-called Rise, with a server that is positioned around EUR 55 to EUR 60. So it's a very competitive offer that -- for the support on the new offer.

And we actually also lowered a little bit on prices for the entry-range server, the Advance range. That's what we usually do. I mean, you're familiar with the model, you know that we manage the life cycle of our servers. So where we come close to the upgrade of one range, we tend to be a bit more aggressive on the prices. But at the end of the day, the ambition is clearly to accelerate and increase the customer acquisition.

You saw the number, I mean, compared to the Q3 '24, we grew the number of new customers on our Bare Metal by 25%. So that's precisely the objective of this strategy, and we are also preparing for the upgrade of this entry range existing servers on which we have made some adjustments on the pricing. At the end of the day, the focus remains the same. We are very focused and determined to deliver the objective in terms of profitability. So these measures do not come with the cost on our profitability.

Thanks, Stephanie. Yes. So on your question on Q3, Q4, as you've seen, we pointed out, I think, during our presentation that, indeed, we experienced kind of a slight sequential deceleration in our Private Cloud growth at the end of the quarter. And this was linked to, I'd say first, the infrastructure optimization from some of our tech customers in Europe who were faced these macroeconomics uncertainty.

But it's also this mechanical end-of-price contribution from VMware Broadcom, which was expected. So I'd say that, firstly, we had -- sooner in this quarter, we had anticipated this macro headwind landscape if it was -- even if it was not yet visible on the top line in March or April. And this is the reason why we have proactively launched action plans to reposition, as Stephanie just commented, our entry range prices in our Bare Metal segment. That was meant to match the changing needs of our customers in this new macro context and also to boost new customer acquisitions.

But I would say that, secondly, also in response to this deceleration trend, we also took actions by launching new Hosted Private Cloud offering, which we call Public VCF-as-a-Service, and this is meant to answer and match our customer needs for private cloud.

So it's very important that you understood and you feel that these action plans have been implemented with a clear focus to maintain our profitability trajectory. So indeed, in this, I would say, uncertain macro, we delivered a 9.9% like-for-like growth in the first 9 months of the year. So far, June showed stable trends versus May, which is still, yes, 1 week to go. So all in all, we'll be within our revenue guidance range of 9% to 11%. And that's why we indeed do reconfirm all of our FY '25 financial guidance.

And then to your third question on France, Europe and sovereignty, as you know, we have at OVHcloud a clear positioning strategically on sovereignty for many years. We are, I would say, sovereign by design. We are the cloud champion for sovereignty and sustainability. And indeed, in the past 2 months, we have seen and created engagement at C level with companies or institutions, private, public that we didn't meet before.

And what's interesting that now these discussions are happening, are ongoing at not only -- so C-level, but now they are moving to sales and tech levels. So that we push on what we can do together. I can tell you that 2/3 of the top, for example, French integrators have approached us, and we discussed in the past week that C-level to engage and to accelerate the dynamics, we're sponsoring at both level.

Or another example, I was, 2 months ago, in Strasbourg with the top 100 CIOs, the -- of the biggest, large French companies. And for 2 days, it was all on top of sovereignty and how we move forward to have 2 European champions that respond to that.

So of course, it's still early to give you a precise figure, right, for Q4, but I think the demand has significantly strengthened, and the revenues are expected to materialize in the outer quarters, right? So given the -- this is linked to the typical cycle of these projects and customer taking decisions and then migrating to the cloud or switching providers, this takes time.

So it's going to take a few more months. But we see the ramp-up of certain contracts. We just mentioned also in this presentation that Arquus, for example, in the defense sector is -- that we negotiate a few months ago, this illustrates that there is a fundamental dynamic and it shows that clearly positions ourselves as a solid and credible choice for sovereign cloud in Europe I hope it answers your questions.

We will now take our next question from Ines Mao from BNP Paribas.

I just have 2 questions. It looks like there was good demand momentum in APAC that will be in the Public Cloud solutions. So are new colocation data centers on the potential roadmap in this region, or elsewhere actually?

And my second question is I see that the growth in Rest of the World, which includes the U.S., is slightly decelerating in Q3 and that Bare Metal demand, especially for the higher range solutions, was kind of impacted in the U.S. So is the deceleration in the Rest of the World reflecting the slowdown in the U.S.? Or is demand momentum sustaining there?

Okay. I'll take the first, and then Stephanie will answer the second. On the new colocation, so in APAC, indeed, so there is a high growth there. You know that we have the data centers in Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney, Australia. We don't intend to open new geographies.

The 2 things that we do there is that, first, as we have done in Paris with the 3-AZ region, right, with super resilience, we create that. You know that the next one is Italy. And indeed, we plan to expand this 3-AZ model in the Rest of the World, including APAC.

And the second dynamic is indeed our local zones. As you know, we expand our local zones all across the world, also in the largest cities of the world. We have deployed more than 30 of them, and we continue to deploy them also in APAC.

Thank you, Ines, for your questions. So on the Rest of the World growth, yes, indeed, it's marginally lower than Q2, but what we can say that, first, you have different base effect for Q2 and Q3. I mean, Q2 in '24 was quite low for our Rest of the World region at 6.9%. So you have a strong base effect difference.

Also what we can say in the U.S., I mean, the growth come a little bit lower than Q2. This being said, it remains very high, and it's our fastest geography within the group. So it's still a very dynamic region.

We will now move to our next question from Emmanuel Matot from ODDO BHF.

Three questions for me, please. First, you mentioned a contract with Arquus for your second cloud offer. Was this a contract that required many months of negotiations? Or was it done quickly given the new geopolitical context? Are you the only supplier also of these companies for its cloud need?

Second, we are hearing a lot about hyperscalers promoting new sovereign cloud solutions. Are they really secured for European customers? Or is it just marketing in your opinion?

And my last question, could you remind us your M&A strategies? Because of French newspaper mentioned last week,that OVHcloud is well positioned to buy some assets from wireline that are not traditional cloud service provider.

Yes. So on your first question, indeed, with Arquus, so indeed, it's defense armored vehicles. These projects indeed take some months to discuss with the customers. As you know, these are SecNumCloud, very secured solution. So this requires indeed the discussions with the customer to evaluate every time that you truly answer to the constraints of the customers. And indeed, we see that health care, defense, public sector are truly sectors, verticals that we currently see the dynamics.

As for the other supplies, usually, I mean, the -- our customers have different options. They still have sometimes some on-prem infrastructure, and they usually also use several suppliers to deliver their services.

On your second question on the hyperscalers, indeed, you know that we see that there is a change mindset, right, since the very -- since the beginning of the year, I would say, linked to the geopolitical tensions. And indeed, we see some examples. Recently, even Denmark a few days ago, right, decided to gradually replace hyperscaler solutions with the European alternatives.

So at -- at OVHcloud, we have always embraced that our motto, innovation for freedom, so giving the freedom of choice. So we commit to support open, responsible, reversible access to technologies for cloud, for AI. That's how we get -- we got also the second cloud qualification with very high qualification in France with new offerings that we definitely issued. And I think that's -- this is truly, I think, our difference on the market.

And there's always a question whether the hyperscalers can guarantee indeed, or not, the fact to be immune to extraterrestrial laws, to extra European laws, and we always call for transparency of all communication by the competitors on that, so that customers understand truly what they are confronted to when they chose their supplier for sovereign offerings.

And third, for the M&A strategy, indeed, you know that we have a very clear strategy, which is that we -- and we proved it in the past years, we do M&A to accelerate our product roadmaps, very targeted. So we acquired 5 companies in the past years to accelerate our product roadmaps. Also, we can -- our strategy is also when we want to open new data centers faster, as you saw in Italy recently with an acquisition. And it can be also to expand our customers with portfolio of customers to leverage the cross-sell opportunities. But I would say that the main focus is indeed the acceleration of our product roadmap.

And our next question is from Jahan, Valentin-Paul from Stifel.

So on the growth territory, bearing in mind that you perceive a profound by having shift in '17 and you have a growing number of discussions with French public entities and private entities and at C-level, considering bearing in mind that you explicitly mentioned a marked acceleration in your customer acquisition dynamic, should we conclude from this that growth is going to accelerate sharply in the coming quarters? And can we consider the 10% growth target for 2026 to be outdated and too cautious from now on? Do you think this growth target for 2026 is still relevant? And if it is still relevant, why given your narrative?

I think, as I mentioned in my first answer, indeed, this -- there is a dynamic indeed of more inquiries, as I mentioned, at C-level. I could tell you that also I had, in the past weeks, many meetings also at ministries level in Europe. I mentioned the integrators. We truly see this momentum. Despite of that, I think that, as I mentioned, it's going to take some months what to come from discussions to projects, qualification with the teams and to see it at the strong revenue level.

And I think to your question on the long-term growth, I think that this is, for us, a long-term growth guideline. And this Q3 publication for us is not the appropriate time for us to provide the guidance for next year. And as you may have understood during the -- already at this presentation, I think we are implementing specific action plans that will be approached and mitigates this macroeconomic uncertain environment. But truly, today, I mean, we are very much focusing on Q4 execution. And especially, by the way, we have a rigorous budget process that's ongoing for next year.

We will now move to our next question from Daniel Schafei from Citi Group.

I just want to come back to the U.S. growth. So I understand U.S. growth is mainly driven by diversification efforts of companies to not only rely on U.S. data center players, especially after events like Liberation Day. So can we expect that U.S. growth will decelerate again into 2026 to some more normalized rate after kind of this year of those events passes?

Well, I think it's very early to say today what would be the outlook for '26 as for U.S. growth. I think that we have been, for many years, in the U.S. now, more than 10 years. We have data centers, East Coast, West Coast. We have 10 local zones that we also opened in 10 big cities in the U.S. And I think we continue to enrich the solutions that's delivered in our data centers in the U.S. So...

Yes, it's mostly Private Cloud as of today in the U.S., and we're making some specific efforts to make the Public Cloud product also available. But as of today, it's only a minimum part of our business in the U.S. So that's also an area where we should see some acceleration of the growth. And clearly, I mean, the -- our U.S. customers choose OVH for pricing positioning reasons in most cases, and this remains very much valid. So I mean, we are very confident on our U.S. business.

Okay. Perfect. And just to follow up on this. So can I -- obviously, it's a bit too early to mention 2026, but just to understand the growth dynamics. So in addition to kind of Europe hopefully coming back a little bit more in 2026, there is also a point that U.S. will continue to be resilient, right? So this is fair to assume.

Yes. Well, I mean, when you look at the -- what is communicated in terms of macro, in terms of IT Directors making decision, it's still very difficult to have a good visibility. We -- so we remain, as of today, very cautious. We are working on '26 right now. So we're not guiding for '26 in our Q3 publication. But we are taking all these factors into consideration, and we'll come back in October with our full year guidance.

I think we're very -- yes, we're very action-oriented today truly on executing our -- delivering the offering, targeting the right project customers. And I think that when we stick to our momentum and to grow and also cash flow generation.

[Operator Instructions] And our next question is from Derric Marcon from Bernstein.

I've got 4 questions. The first one, and it's often about top line growth, so the first one, can you share with us any data point or KPI that you are tracking to measure customer appetite for your solutions, so qualified pipeline, nonqualified pipeline, anything that can help us to understand if customer demand is stable quarter -- or month after month, quarter after quarter or you see, let's say, an increasing appetite for your customer on existing solution or the new solution that [indiscernible]?

Second question is about Q4. So sorry to come back on that, but you are talking about predictable growth. But if I take your guidance full year, I think you had already the question during the call, but keeping 9% to 11% organic growth target for the year when you have already closed 3 quarter means that your guidance for Q4 imply a range of 6% at the low end of the range, 14% at the upper end of the range. So I was wondering here if you can help us to, yes, narrow this range, which seems to me for next quarter a bit very wide, let's say.

Third question is on the ramp-up of existing contracts. You mentioned some of them. Can you quantify that? And conversely, can you also quantify the headwind you faced at the end of the Q3, so on your Private Cloud business? Was it meaningful in terms of revenue loss versus your budget? And should we interpret the fact that June is in line with May as something saying that if nothing has changed in Q4 versus the end of Q3, this miss will remain versus your budget?

And my last question is about the level of net retention rate, so 104%. I was wondering if this number, which is quite low compared to historical level, comes from the fact that customer -- existing customers are not yet adopting new products or the churn rate is higher than what we have seen on average in recent years.

Okay. So I'll start with the data points, the NRR, and Stephanie will answer to Q4, and I'll give a flavor also on the ramp-up of contracts. The -- on the -- first on the top line, on the top line, you mentioned data points. I think if I pick one for Private Cloud, indeed, as you saw, we have implemented a strategic positioning, as we mentioned, of our entry-range Bare Metal products. And indeed, we can already see the results because in terms of customer acquisition, it's up 25% year-on-year, right? So we see this impact in terms of customer acquisition.

If I look at the retention rate, the NRR, indeed, it's 104%, Q3, right? It was 107%, H1. So we don't guide, as you know, on NRR. In 2020 and 2021, I think we were around 103%. And we have been around 110% in the last year. So the evolution of NRR, I think, is mostly linked to what we have seen -- what we've been seeing for the last months in our Private Cloud segment in Europe, especially in Hosted Private Cloud, meaning that existing customers are optimizing, I think, their cloud infrastructure. And this is to understanding connected to this uncertain macro environment.

And as you see, we take action, right? We take action. We launched specific action plans to boost the acquisition of customers that are looking for these entry-range servers. We are indeed launching VCF-as-a-Service offering. So -- and we don't see a change in the churn, right? So I think we stick to our action plan, and we are not worried by this 104% NRR.

On the ramp-up of the contracts, I think that, of course, you see there is different dynamics. We see some customers, like I mentioned, that like Arquus in the defense sector, right, where you have indeed different phases into the project. So this is a SecNumCloud project. And we see kind of 2, 3 phases where, indeed, the -- this contract months after month, while enriching not only consuming more, but also including more with the disaster recovery, with SAP offering, et cetera, these are bringing a true ramp-up into the contracts.

And then you have some new contracts, right, for also sovereign cloud. If I could take you an example, Derric, we have public cloud or, I would say, para-public body that is currently calling for RFP. And we are talking typically of EUR 1 million, EUR 1.5 million per year revenue over 8 years, right? So this is typically, but this is new. This is -- but this is the way customers also today are pitching for growing their sovereign offering. This is typically directed as a sovereign offering deal.

And maybe, Stephanie, on the Q4.

Yes. Derric, so again, just to share with you what we do see as of today, I mean, we have some very strong drivers. I mean, you see that in Public Cloud, we have a strong growth. U.S. remained also very dynamic also with some optimization, but all in a very dynamic sector.

We have also a good trend of the sovereign. We have good acceleration and growth of our SNC offer. Plus like we said, I mean, we have a good pipeline in terms of request RFPs. It does take a bit of time, but I mean, the trends are very good.

Private Cloud, it's a bit different. I mean, we have some sequential deceleration that we have observed in the -- in this Q3. We have the macro uncertainty, and our customers are asking for infrastructure optimization. Like Benjamin said, we have also the end of the pricing effect at the end of April from Broadcom. So we are losing this driver in -- starting in May.

But as a result, I mean, we've made those adjustments to the offer that we've launched a new offer to be very competitive. We've revised slightly the pricing also to accelerate the customer acquisition and to offer also some competitive offer to our customers that are suffering, particularly in Europe.

So all in, we are making a strong effort to answer to our customer. We have also the new offer in the Private Cloud. And at the end of the day, that on that basis that we confer our full year guidance. What we do see in June as well, I would say 1 week to go, but we saw a stabilization of the trends compared to May. That's also a good element.

So all in, yes, we confirm the full year guidance for our top line as 9% to 11%. That's what we can say. And we are also, very important for us, confirming our guidance for EBITDA margin around 40% in this context. And we also confirm our cash guidance with an unlevered free cash flow that we expect to be above 25%. (sic) [ EUR 25 million ] So an improvement compared to FY '24.

Yes. Very important that you understand that we continue our cost discipline that we've launched since October. And as you know, the focus is mostly on costs and gross margin, but also on G&A. And definitely, we have profitability measures especially focused on G&A to ensure that we deliver on profit, on cash. And that's how we maintain the guidance for the full year.

I mentioned 25%, it's EUR 25 million for the base -- the '24 base for unlevered free cash flow, sorry.

And there are currently no further questions at this time. With this, I would like to hand the call back over to OVH management team to conclude today's call.

So, yes, thank you for these questions, and thank you for attending our Q3 '25 call. So I'll wrap up this call to tell you what.

First that our performance in Q3 was indeed resilient. So we reached the EUR 272 million revenue, which is up plus 9.3% like-for-like growth compared to Q3 last year. In this uncertainty of the macroeconomic environment, we have successfully adapted our positioning in Private Cloud to meet our customer needs. For example, as we have mentioned, we repositioned our prices for entry range of service to boost customer acquisition. In parallel, in Public Cloud, we continue to deliver a solid growth, too, by new products and customer acquisition.

But from a business perspective, we benefited from a strengthening of inquiries of sovereign solutions with new deals that will ramp up in the coming quarters, as for example, as mentioned, the Arquus in the defense vertical.

In parallel, we have continued to roll out new products across Public Cloud, especially in artificial intelligence with Data Platform and also with the AI Endpoints. We also continued our geographical expansion based on the 3-AZ model for high resilience and availability with our new data center opening in Milan.

Finally, as planned, we continued our efforts to discipline cost with sustained focus on profitability and cash levers. So based on this trajectory, we confirm our FY '25 targets, like-for-like growth between 9% to 11% and adjusted EBITDA margin of circa 40%, a CapEx between 30% to 34% of our revenue and an unlevered free cash flow above EUR 25 million, improving compared to last year.

Thank you very much again, and have a great day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. Ladies and gentlemen. You may now disconnect.