OVH Groupe Aktie

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to OVHcloud FY 2026 results. Today's speakers will be Octave Klaba, Founder, Chairman and CEO of OVH Cloud; and Julien Rabette, Interim 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. I'm here with Julien Rabette, Interim CFO. We published just today our results of FY '26 this morning, and thank you for everybody to be here with us to have more details about what we have done last year and what we will do the next year. So maybe we can go to the next page.

So on the delivering of our commitment. So we are in this world where we have the assets. OVH has an industrial background. As you know, we have data centers, 250 megawatts of the energy. Roughly, we own our data center, a lot of them and now we are ready to accelerate based on this data center. Also we have network, we have our supply chain, but also on the software part of our business, we will focus on the cloud, of course, but also on the AI, you need cloud, you need cloud to operate AI. And this is why we need them both. We need in the one side cloud and on other side, you have the AI.

So on the second point, in the FY '26 and '27, we have the execution and what is really interesting that this first year when I came back and to start delivering the results, we started to fix the different things that didn't work in OVH and we started to have the positive outcome in FY '26 in the Q3, Q4. And then we started to have the acceleration, as you can see in FY -- in Q3 and Q4 on the different public products that I will go back soon, very quickly with the details.

So execution, discipline, having the real understanding about what the customer wants to really go back to the fundamentals of the company. And of course, this is -- the purpose is really to have the growth, the going back to growth and having the company that is growing double digit with positive free cash flow, generating the value for our investors and of course, continuing being on the debt in the right leverage. So this is how we executed this fiscal year.

So now on the next page, on the key highlights. So we had a growth that it was a little bit more than we had in the guidelines, 7.2%. We had 42% of EBITDA. So if you make the math, 70% of growth went to the EBITDA. It's really exceptional. Don't take that as the guidelines, okay, because we will see what will happen in the FY '27. But in this '26, we are really, really focused on the right execution on the OpEx, on the CapEx and to being -- to deliver the right results. So CapEx, it's a little bit less that we had in the guidelines. And then on the free cash flow, we generated almost EUR 25 million on the free cash flow net. So on the operational milestone, we really focus on the acquisition of the customers. We'll go back to this.

We had -- there were a lot of challenges on the CapEx, and we make it. We upfronted -- front-loaded some of them, but also managing the CapEx in the right way. We increased a little bit prices on our customers to generate additional cash to be able to continue to invest in FY '27. We started to have the -- to finish the strategy and start the execution of the AI strategy. We'll go back to this. And then you have, of course, on the strict discipline, on the financial discipline, on the EBITDA, on the CapEx, on the hardware and the free cash flow and the ROCE.

So if we go to the next page, we -- let's talk a little bit about the assets. So what we have, we have data centers, 250 megawatts of data centers. You have about 140 that is already connected. And then it's -- you have about 110 that we still have available. So this is what we will use to accelerate our growth. And when you take this ratio about EUR 15 million, EUR 20 million per megawatt, you have the really good understanding what we can do with this energy in the data centers. And on the servers, of course, you have -- we manage the really strict way the stock of the components so you can go deeply in the numbers to see what exactly does it mean. But it's really interesting from the cash perspective.

We had a very good relationship with our suppliers on the RAM, hardware, but also CPU, GPUs, et cetera. So we have the continuity of the supply chain. So we don't have the issues to deliver our growth in FY '27. And also, we increased a little bit prices. It was a moderated way and mutualized way. So we have additional cash. So -- and we can continue to invest in FY '27 and deliver the service to our customers.

So if we go to the next page, let's talk a little bit about execution. What does it mean on our side? So we have different segments of customers, as we said last year, we are thinking about the digital starters, digital scalers and corporate. Digital starters is all the customers less than 2,000 per month, 25,000 yearly. Digital scalers, it's more than 25,000 yearly. And then you have the corporate that you know the companies with RFP with the long time line to selling. So we had a different focus on the different go-to-market. And this is why we created all this go-to-market. So we focused a lot on the acquisition of the customers in digital starters, and it worked.

We had a really increased -- we have more than double of the volume, even 3x more volume on the domain names. We have very strong volume on the VPS and even lots of increase of the revenue. On the bare metal entry level, we are really, really good. We have a lot of new customers, and it's really massive, okay? So we are really happy what we have done on the acquisition last year. And we see the results that all of this -- on the H2 acceleration is higher and it's faster than it was on the H1. We had 4% growth on the -- 4% more growth in H2 than H1.

On the digital scalers, we are more focused on the verticals because all the customers, they are not the same. Some of them, they are in blockchain, some of them in the storage, some of them in the AI in a different way to sell them different products. They are not looking for exactly the same thing. And on the corporate, we had the biggest growth on the last quarter with the new contract that we signed. And we know how to -- having the strong upsell of the current base of our customers. Now we have to be better on the acquisition, and we see how to -- how we will do that.

So on the next page, we have the -- let's talk a little bit about growth and how AI will help us in the growth. So we have on the bottom, we have all our fundamentals of OVHcloud. You have private cloud, public cloud, web cloud, everything that is needed, and we call cloud. On top of that, we will start to add additional products, additional services that there is more AI. And you have full kind of different services. The first of all is GPUs in the data centers. Of course, we need the GPUs if you want to have the AI. The second level is that this is great to have the GPUs, but you have to manage that at the large scale. So we need the different technologies. And the good news that we already have them, but also we acquired some companies to help us to accelerate in this area.

The third part is token as a service. We already have that, but we want to have more token as a service, more services in our high endpoint services. So this is why we made the acquisition of Gladia for the STT specific needs, Speech-to-Text.

Then we started to build what we call the path for AI. And it's really interesting, very exciting area. Maybe we'll have more time to dig inside. It's really a path for the Agentic AI where the agent has the freedom, let's say, to take the -- clog the resources and to solve very complex tasks for the users. And the last part is AI for SaaS and this is where we started to develop and we shared on the VivaTech and we will share on the OVH Summit in end of November, OVHai Workspace, where we have this platform for AI and we have the agents that operate the SaaS services, whatever the SaaS is, we will be able to operate that. okay? So we are going in this direction on the AI to have additional growth in OVH.

So now I will just hand to Julien to give you more financial details about what we have done in the future.

Thank you very much, Octave. Let me start with the shape of the year because we have the whole story. On the left, our like-for-like growth by quarter. Growth bottomed out in the second quarter at 5.1%. It then picked up to 6.9% in Q3 and reached 10.5% in Q4. This is our strongest quarter in almost 2 years and importantly, already at the pace of our FY '27 guidance. This turnaround coincides with Octave's comeback as CEO and action plans launched at the start of the fiscal year. On the right, what matters most to us, the numbers of customers and the clear ramp-up.

Outside the U.S., our customer base grew by 0.7% month-over-month at the start of the year. By August 2026, it was growing by 2% per month, while price adjustments did not have any churn effect. The main takeaway is volume, more customers every month compared to the prior one. In short, the engine is back in shape and the momentum is building up.

Let's move to the quarterly sequential acceleration by go-to-market segment. This slide shows the momentum through our 3 go-to-market segments. Our group revenue rose every quarter from EUR 275 million in Q1 to more than EUR 300 million in Q4, reaching 2 key milestones, EUR 300 million in quarterly revenue and EUR 100 million in monthly revenue in August and July. Digital starters, our historical base, grew 5.4% year-on-year with a clear acceleration in the second half to more than 7% per quarter. Even in a segment often seen as mature, we added close to EUR 30 million of revenue driven by customer acquisition.

Digital scalers are our first growth engine that was up 12.4% over the year, with double-digit growth every single quarter and representing more than half of the group's growth. Lastly, corporates grew 2.7% over the year and Q4 reached plus 7.8%, the segment's highest quarterly revenue in the 3 years, and the inflection point is behind us. As a first takeaway, I want to say we enter FY '27 with all 3 segments growing and a revenue base rising every quarter.

Let's now move to the Private Cloud performance. Private Cloud is our largest business with EUR 690 million. That's 60% of group revenue, up 4.5% like-for-like. The key point here is the trajectory. Q4 grew 7.2%, and the chart shows our monthly recurring revenue ramp-up. After a flat FY '25, MRR rose significantly over FY '26. In August, Private Cloud was thus growing at around 9%, 3x the pace of a year earlier. That was underpinned by 2 drivers. First, bare metal is rebounding, repositioning our entry-level and midrange servers brought in new customers, and this consolidates our European leadership in bare metal. Second, business is stepping up in our key markets, France and our largest market and Northern Europe.

Let's move to Public Cloud. Public Cloud is clearly the group growth engine. EUR 255 million, that's 22% of revenue, up 18.9% full year like-for-like and back to above 20% in Q4, at plus 24.3%. That was driven by 3 factors: first, the depth of our portfolio. With more than 80 products, customers come for one service and upgrade into the full catalog. In a nutshell, upselling works. Second, our 3AZ region, our winning clients, especially since Paris is ramping up. Corporate Public Cloud grew then 28%, [indiscernible] scalers at 21% and starters at 17%. Third, new contracts with well-known institutions such as the European Space Agency. Lastly, growth is broad. France and Benelux [indiscernible], Southern Europe, Central Europe and the U.S. are all accelerating.

Let's look at Webcloud now. Webcloud generates EUR 200 million. That's 17% of group revenue, up 3.2% like-for-like, and it accelerated to plus 6% in Q4. 2 points to flag about this ongoing improvement in growth. First, a competitive model with an affordable entry price. We have reviewed our web hosting model to make entry price even more accessible, and we launched new products such as Web Hosting 2027, managed hosting for WordPress and OVHcloud Windows Center.

Second, with domain name. The chart shows monthly volume year-on-year evolution. They rose by almost 60% over the year and nearly doubled in July and August. Worth noting that AI is a real driver here. With [indiscernible] coding, more people create website and application and every project starts with a domain name. To conclude about the business line, Webcloud is also our first door into the group for hundreds of thousands of small customers and importantly, it keeps a very strong cash conversion.

Let's look at the financials now. So revenue reached EUR 1,145 million, up 5.6% reported and 7.2% like-for-like, above our 5% to 7% guidance. And second, this slide says one thing, our growth is profitable, but increasingly so. As highlighted at the right-hand column, the further down the P&L you go, the faster we grow with revenue up 5.6%, gross margin up 8.6%, adjusted EBITDA up 9.7% and EBIT up 12.1%. EBITDA margin reached 42%, up 160 basis points and worth noting that more than 70% of incremental revenue converted into EBITDA this year. That level is nevertheless exceptional.

Looking further down the P&L, EBIT rose 12% to EUR 77.8 million. Depreciation increased by EUR 24 million, reflecting new capacity. The financial results improved by EUR 8 million, thanks to FX gain and net income reached EUR 9.4 million compared with EUR 0.4 million last year. The key takeaway, growth converts into margin.

Let's look at the margin in detail now. This bridge focused on efficiency shows our 260 basis points of margin improvement. Every cost line improved and the price adjustments made this year support all of these ratios. Cost of goods sold improved by 0.4 points, thanks to a more favorable product mix with less connectivity and fewer licenses in [indiscernible]. Operating costs improved by 0.4 points with electricity costs falling, thanks to price effects, particularly in France and workforce productivity. Sales and marketing improved by 0.7 points, our biggest gain that underpins the ways to drive better revenue per FTE and lower bad debt provision, which we booked in sales and marketing, thanks to a strengthened cash collection performance. G&A improved by 0.4 points, thanks to workforce productivity.

On the other side, FX cost us minus 0.2 points and profit sharing another minus 0.2 points. In short, FY 2026 highlights a margin gain built on productivity at every level, while we keep investing in our talent and in AI. Let me show you how the EBITDA improvement translates into cash flow now. The bridge show our EBITDA converting to cash. We start from EUR 480.5 million of adjusted EBITDA. Working capital contributed EUR 15 million and cash taxes were EUR 8.5 million. Other items added EUR 1.6 million. These other items cover cash settled share-based compensation and earn-outs, nonrecurring items, provisions, realized FX and other financing activities. CapEx reached EUR 422 million. It includes the EUR 49.5 million of components we bought in advance for FY '27 to secure our supply and protect our costs.

This specific purchase is financed by the dedicated facility and in line with our definition of levered free cash flow, is neutralized, as you can see on the chart. After EUR 52 million of financial interest paid and EUR 39 million of lease repayment, our levered free cash flow is now positive at EUR 24.7 million compared with minus EUR 27 million last year. This is important to mention, it is the first time since our IPO 5 years ago.

Let's look at the CapEx now. Excluding the FY '27 component purchase, CapEx reached EUR 373 million or 32.6% of revenue, below our 33% to 35% guidance and even below last year at 33%. When including the anticipation CapEx, reported CapEx are EUR 422 million or 36.9% of revenue. Hardware accounts for EUR 242 million, 21% of revenue, broadly stable. Two effects offset each other. First, a volume tailwind, we assembled fewer server; second, a price headwind, each server costing more because of component inflation. The strict CapEx discipline was possible, thanks to our integrated model, maximizing existing assets and the front-loading of the CapEx. Now infrastructure and network was EUR 53 million are stable. Product and software was EUR 72 million are also stable and are reflecting the capitalized development work of our teams.

Looking ahead, we intend to keep the same discipline. We do not expect our capital intensity to drift. That is the spirit of our CapEx strategy. Our balance sheet is strong and our financial -- our financing is secured. Net debt, excluding leases, stands at EUR 1,157 million. So all debt is hedged at an average cost of 4.4%, including margin and fees. If we add EUR 144 million of leases, the net debt with IFRS 16 lease is at EUR 1,301 million.

Liquidity amount to EUR 255 million, that is EUR 55 million of cash and our EUR 200 million multipurpose facility, which is undrawn. There is no major maturity before FY '30, and our debt is built on 3 pillars. First, the EUR 450 million green term loan maturing in FY '30; second, the EUR 500 million bond maturing in FY '31; and third, the EIB facility, which amortizes gradually. The EUR 49.5 million drawn to finance the FY '27 component is a short-term facility repaid after year-end close. We are rated BB- by S&P and Ba3 by Moody's. Lastly, our leverage ratio stands at 2.7x, down from 2.9x in FY '25. This is now calculated on an IFRS 16 basis, including lease liabilities. It is one of our North Star ratio.

Let me start my presentation with our ability to create value. Our second North Star ratio is return on capital employed. ROCE reached 7.7% in FY '26, up 60 basis points from 7.1% and more than double than 3.3% of FY '24. Investments are paying off. The capacity we built is now generating revenue, and our investment discipline keeps capital employed under control, and we have room to grow without new heavy investment. ROCE increasingly frames every decision we take. From growth CapEx and acquisition to how we finance our equipment, every euro we invest must improve our return on capital.

With that, I hand over to Octave for our FY '27 outlook.

Perfect. Thank you, Julien. So just to give you the guidelines for FY '27, we changed a little bit, I think you will have questions about that. So we wanted to guide you on the 5 instead of 4 components. So the first is growth like-for-like, it's more than 10%, double digit, let's say. We know that it will be a little bit more, let's say, but we want to be cautious when we start this fiscal year, we want to deliver what our '27, not overpromise about the different numbers that maybe we would -- we could not deliver. So on the growth, it's 10% more, and we'll see how it will grow in the year quarter-over-quarter.

On the adjusted EBITDA, we know that it will be more than last year, and we put 42.5%. We have a good understanding about how much it could be more. But we want to -- again, we really be cautious about what kind of margin we can deliver and to having something that we don't overpromise.

Free cash flow, of course, positive. So there was no question about that. You saw that we delivered EUR 25 million. I don't know yet how it will involve because we will want to accelerate as much as we can. And if we see more free cash flow in our numbers, we will probably investing more to accelerate even more our growth. So this is the dynamic of how we are thinking about the growth.

Now we removed the CapEx. And why we removed CapEx because it was -- there was a few things that we didn't like about the CapEx. There was no revolution about the way that we make the CapEx. We continue the discipline, and we will -- you know how much here you have the numbers about this 42.5%. But also last year, we realized that in the beginning of the year, we started with the guidelines about the 30%, 32% and then we changed to the 33%, 35%. And then we finished the year with 32.5%. So honestly, it means nothing. It's not -- it means a lot of things, but it's moved over the year. And we don't like the guidelines just moving over the year, trying to understand how we work on the CapEx. And also another thing that we will start using more IFRS 16 that will also be used in the same time that the CapEx. So there was too complexity to share the things about the CapEx.

So we wanted to add additional 2 guidelines just to secure and to say we don't do the nasty things about our numbers. So the first, ROCE has to grow, and it will be more than 9% okay? So it's something that it's really important. We need to create the value, and we need to continuously in thinking about how the investment create value for our investors. So this is the first process.

And the second, we want to commit on the leverage ratio. So usage of the IFRS 16, it's not just the way just to hide the CapEx. We want to be cautious about also this ratio, and we make the choice about 2.7x between the EBITDA and the debt of the company. So this is the way that we want to guide you and to give you an overview of the FY '27. So if we can just make the key takeaways. So on the foundation, we have -- we really -- been working on the acquisition of the customers. We really wanted to be sure that we can deliver FY '27, so the full continuously supply continuity.

AI strategy, it's clear, and we will start to work more on that, on the execution. There was also the FY '26 fully delivered all the guidelines. We have really high flow-through EBITDA, but don't take that as the guidelines. It was really exceptional. We'll see what we will deliver in FY '27. And first free cash flow positive since IPO. I made before 2016 free cash flow positive. So this is where, let's say, I'm at home.

I like this company when they deliver free cash flow because it's a freedom that we need to go in the right directions to make this company even bigger. So free cash flow, it's really, really important for me. And on the FY '27, it's revenue more than 10%, leverage positive free cash flow. And then on the ROCE, more than 9% for the FY '27.

So now we are open to answer all your questions if you have any.

[Operator Instructions]

The next question comes from Ines Mao from BNP Paribas Exane.

This is Ines from BNP. I have 2 questions. So first, earlier this year, the message was that you lacked GPUs, particularly latest gen GPUs. So what has changed exactly? Is it because you actually have secured, thanks to last year's front-loaded CapEx and that's only for full year '27 expected demand? Or is this enough to actually meet demand in more longer term?

And the second question is, so 10% organic growth is your floor for next year. How much contribution from the repricing of servers do we expect to be on this organic growth guidance?

So if I understand it well, it's why we start to investing in AI now and not before and what is the fundamentals of that? So you have different things. You have the first thing that we didn't think that there was a lot of demand for the GPUs 3, 4 years ago. And we -- because of the -- we saw some competitors that are invested in the GPUs and didn't sell them in Europe. So I was a little bit cautious about the usage of the CapEx in the last years. So this is the first.

And we think that right now, the demand is there, but I want to have the proofs. So we are still cautious about investing in the GPUs and seeing how it can grow, how many customers are there, there was the pressure on the prices, et cetera. So we are in this period of time that we are testing the market on that. So this is the first.

And the second is that the old GPUs, the H100, they were not really a lot -- they didn't have a lot of performance. When you have this new generation of the GPUs, B300 and R200, we are talking about something different, really magnitude of the performance more. And that makes sense for the customers. And also, we saw that it makes sense for us for the inference, for the training, for the -- because the reduction of the cost and the productivity, let's say, that of the CapEx, it's huge.

You reduced more than 20x the cost of the same performance over just 3, 4 years. So when you invested 20 in 4 years ago, for the same performance today, you can just invest one. So the productivity of the hardware, of the software that you have in the market is really huge. And this is why we want to start investing in that and to see how the market reacts.

The second question?

It was on repricing.

Yes. On the repricing, we will not communicate a lot about this repricing about the part of the revenue because there's 3 parts that will -- you will see in the graph. The first part is cloud. We have growth of cloud, as you saw on the public cloud in the last quarter, we had more than close to 25% of growth. So it's really cool. And we want to continue to having this kind of growth and maybe even more in cloud, in Public Cloud in FY '27. So we'll see how it will react.

You have the second, you're right, we have the repricing, but it's temporary. And there was one part of that, that we don't know yet because, of course, with the increase of prices, you can have churn and the real increase of prices we had in the beginning of this month, one part, and there will be still in November, still in December over the 2, 3 months. So we don't know yet what -- how much it will be from the repricing. We are not sure, let's say, that we know how it should be, could be, but we don't have the real numbers right now, and I want to wait before communicate any numbers about that.

And the third part that will accelerate our growth, it's AI with the investment in the GPUs, but not only. Keep in the mind that reselling the GPUs, it's really competitive activity because you buy the same hardware, you deploy that in a little bit different data centers and then you go on the market. So how different you can be selling the same GPUs over the different data centers worldwide. So we need to be cautious about that and saying how much revenue we can make from the GPUs. But also, this is why we want to invest in the software in the AI and not just GPUs in the hardware.

This is why we are talking about the inference, about the token as a service, about Batch for AI and the AI for SaaS. So it's not just one product that we want to go on the market. We want to reduce the risk on the investment in the AI over 5 different kind of services and see which one can have the good traction and then growing on that, maybe it will be just 2 of them, maybe 3 of them, maybe 5 of them, that would be great. But we don't want to just put every bet on just GPUs in our data center and saying that's it, okay? So on this -- this is why also on this revenue about more than 10%, we are cautious about -- we need this first quarter and maybe even the second quarter to see how exactly it's growing and then go back to you with maybe the adjustment of the guidelines for FY '27.

The next question comes from Emmanuel Matot from ODDO BHF.

The next question comes from Richard Bishop from Tresidor.

I have 2 questions. The first one, how do you expect CapEx to develop next year? And the second one, it looks like you drew about EUR 72 million of debt in H2 and repaid about EUR 23 million. What does that relate to?

So on the CapEx, we will not give you the soft guidelines or the hard guidelines because as I said, there was something that we control in the right way, and you can see how we were cautious about that in the FY '26. Also, we changed the percentage in the guidelines last year. So it was not really a good way to give you. But also on top of this CapEx that we could invest directly with our cash, we will use the IFRS 16 that will also generate additional cash directly in the year. So it's something that will be faster to transform to the free cash flow.

So all in all, how much CapEx, we will see because we -- as I said, we have a room a little bit about should we accelerate or should we slow down investment in the AI. And because of that, we don't want to really to guide you on the CapEx because we will -- it will probably evolve in the year. If it's going faster and we have new customers and it's this business, we like them. We like this business, but we will put more resources, more GPUs in our data centers. If it's not going in the right direction, there was a lot of pressure on the prices, we will slow down the investment in that. So giving you the CapEx, it will be something that will not be -- we will not be able to really guide because it will change over the year.

But -- and all in all, you have a ROCE and you have leverage ratio that will reflect. So we will not go on top of that in any case, in any case. It has to generate the value first. And the second, the ratio has not to be more than 2.7 end of FY '27 because we want to protect also the cash flow and having this free cash flow. So we have the constraints, free cash flow, ROCE, leverage ratio. And in all these constraints, then let's play and let's see what we can capture as the faster growth, as the higher EBITDA and respect all the three ratio that we gave you on the free cash flow, ROCE and the leverage ratio of debt.

The next question comes from Victor Lamarre from Euroland.

Could you give us a little more detail on the ROCE improvement expected in '27? And specifically, how much of it comes from the better yield on the [indiscernible] generation you mentioned earlier? And how much from something else would find it hard to see how the picture is generally positive in an environment of elevated hardware prices with only limited repricing?

So on -- maybe Julien?

Yes, sure. We are going to be, as Octave said, managing strongly our OpEx and our CapEx discipline, which means that our revenue is going to flow into EBITDA. We are showing in our guidance that we want to improve the margin. So therefore, the ROCE is going to be improving naturally as we are having a stable and a strong balance sheet, so capital employed.

And at least, it would be 9%.

The next question comes from Derric Marcon from Bernstein.

So 3 questions on my side. Coming back on the price increase, I understand that you don't want to comment that much the impact on the top line growth and the guidance for 2027. But could you help us to understand what's the underlying assumption you have taken in the current guidance, so at least 10%. Does take into account an impact from price increase or not at all and you wait -- you are waiting 1 or 2 quarters more to understand what could be the churn rate or what should be changed compared to the initial scenario you have taken. So i.e., what's today included in the guidance for 2027? I think it's important to understand that.

On ROCE, can you help us to understand what would be the best case scenario? So 9% is of course, better than the level we have seen over the past 3 years. But what would be the ideal scenario if you look [indiscernible]?Is it 10%? Is it 15%? What's the, let's say, ideal threshold that you see on this new, let's say, KPI that we should live with now?

And the last point on the revenue opportunity by type of AI services. So the 5 new AI services you were mentioning in your figures, can you help us to understand the revenue attached -- the revenue opportunity attached to each of them and how fast can materialize into incremental revenue for OVHcloud?

Thank you for your question. I understand your question about how much repricing. We put a little bit in very good growth in the last quarter. And we've been working so much on the volume. So we also expect to have a good transformation of the volume and the upselling to going with the new customers that they will consume more our services specifically in Public Cloud. So we put a little bit of repricing inside, but we are really, really cautious because the market, the customers, how they think what kind of the services they can move from us to another competitor, another service. There was not so many options for them, what we saw because everybody started to increase. You can have the just phasing, and you can have this -- sometimes someone can increase the price a little bit later, but we are still -- even if you increase our prices, if you take the Public Cloud, the Public Cloud prices, we are still half of the price of AWS, okay? So even if we were 3x less expensive. Now we are just 2x less expensive from AWS perspective, and we will see what AWS will do.

As you know, probably Azure announced 2, 3 weeks ago that they will increase the prices in Europe by 11%, 17% on the compute and also the high percentage of the storage. So it's all that evolving -- all that is evolving. And in the -- we are confident. We have the good fundamentals. But look, there are so many moving parts right now, and I don't want to give you the guidelines that I won't be able to deliver. And I know that 10%, we can make so much and we have the plans, we will see. But for the moment, Q1, we just increased the prices. And we'll see how all this is working. If it's working well, yes, it will be more than 10%. If it's not working well, we'll have at least 10% and we'll not deliver the goodness that we will not be able to deliver. Also on AI...

Just pause 1 minute here. I understand that. But in the at least 10%, what's the scenario included in this guidance? Is it a price increase impact at least equal to what you had in 2025? What's the bear case? We understand that it's a bear case, but what is implied in this bear case? Is it 2 percentage points? Is it 3 percentage points? Is it less than 2026? It's important to us to understand what's the starting point and what could be the potential upside even if it's not the guidance. You see my point?

Yes, I see your point, but I won't be able to give you more details about that. It's really -- we need to go through this quarter. I wanted already to tell you that it will be more than 10%, okay? Because it does not give you the specific percentage of that, that's just saying, hey, guys, it will be more than 10%, for sure, okay? This is what I will be able to deliver. So we didn't take this 10% double-digit guidelines as what is inside of that. We are just saying we will make this more than 10%, for sure. Now we'll have to this first quarter just to see where we will land and how it will improve, then we'll be able to go back to you. But in this specific 10%, there was no specifically -- we didn't take this and this and percentage of that. We're just saying, okay, let's guide that it will be more than 10%, okay?

Understood.

And the second on the AI, on the GPUs, it's -- you have different constraints that is a really interesting part. You have the constraints, of course, of the capacities in the data centers that we don't really have, but we have some of them because we need to, let's say, to add additional UPS, additional generators, et cetera. So it's a very small level of the CapEx, but it takes a little time, a few weeks, a few months to happen in the data centers. But you have another thing that in the GPUs, you have the wait list of the -- when you put the orders in the NVIDIA and you have to just wait when you will be delivered. And we have the good news of this delivering of the GPUs. So I think on this one part of the increase of the prices will come definitely from the GPUs.

I cannot tell you how many GPUs we order because, again, it will evolve -- probably involved in the year. But then also, we are just in the beginning of journey of the Level 2, 3, 4, 5. And the feedback that we'll have on the -- our AI Summit with OVHai Workspace and that will go to the GA probably January, February will be really interesting because in the beginning, it will be the freemium, okay? So everybody will be able to create an account and use this product. But we think that there will be a lot, a lot of customers that will transform this freemium that will not cost so much money because everything is internal and we manage all the cost in the right way.

But then when they transform to the paid subscription, it can generate a lot of money. So we don't know yet. And this is also the way that we started to guide in the beginning of 2027. And I'm really sorry that it's uncomfortable for you guys. But we have so many moving parts. It's going well. It's going in the right direction, but I want to see what are the real numbers first and then go back to you saying, we see these numbers. These numbers will be confirmed and then we will deliver the guidelines, this kind of the numbers. And we -- because we are going in these different directions, different investments and trying to derisk the investment in AI, I don't have all the answers today in October.

Yes. And the question on ROCE, the return on capital employed, what would be the ideal level for you? 9%, is it just the starting point? Or what's the maximum you are targeting here?

Derric, Julien speaking. I think what matters is the trend on ROCE. As you can see, we've been managing that very carefully over the last few years. So we are going to be improving the ROCE, and we are really expecting to improve. So that's our goal.

Yes. So it will be more than 9% also, hopefully. But now keep in mind that in the way that if, for example, we don't see a lot of businesses in GPUs and the market is closed that we stop investing in that. So of course, our ROCE will grow. If we have the opportunity to invest in the GPUs and to going after the market and to going even faster on the revenue and EBITDA, the ROCE will be a little bit less. But all in all, it will be more than 9%. And all this -- this is why we are not so specific about our numbers in the beginning of the fiscal year because there was a lot of opportunities, and we want to capture that and still respect all our guidelines.

And it's also why it's not just we don't know everything, it's also there was a reaction of our customers, reaction of the market and to see where it's going, who is ordering, how fast we're ordering, what is the answer. For example, you didn't see any announcement from our side about the GPUs for the moment, but we started to sell them. So we are doing that in another way to see where the market is and how deep this market is. So all that is also keeping in mind that we give you a lot of information, and we realized last year that a lot of this information were used by our competition.

And that's good. That's good. We have some kind of the transparency about our business model, about our secret sauce, about the different things. But we realize also that we gave too much and they use our secret sauce to go after us or trying to be even more competitive with us. So we also want to have this ability to go fast on the market without announcement of a lot of things, but just capturing the market. And then when the market is captured, we go back and say we did it.

Yes. Understood. Can I have just a follow-up? On the corporate segment, could you explain why the growth was so weak, why you mentioned strong upselling. Any specific one-off or headwinds here that will not repeat in the coming years?

So you're right saying that the first quarter -- first 3 quarters were weak on the corporate. This is also why I came back and changed the organization of the go-to-market and specifically on the corporate. So on the corporate, you saw that our announcement of the hiring of the key people, we hired the Head of the Germany for corporate. We hired the Head of the Italy. We changed the organization of the corporate in our -- in France last quarter of the Q4. And now we are going back after the market to accelerate the growth.

Now we were really focused on the big businesses. [indiscernible], for example, that we announced the signing of the contract. It's not a small contract. It's a really, really big contract, okay? So to having the impact from -- when you generate so much revenue, having the impact, you have to work on the volume, of course, but also being focused on the big deals and not the small deals that will take time to deliver. For example, the European Commission, it will be something that will grow. It will be nice, but it will be over 12, 24 months. And we were focused on something that is quicker, faster that we can see the results over the months, over the quarters and not the years. And this is also how we focused more our sales force on the corporate to build the relationship and to go after the additional businesses that we can actually realize that we make them and we see the revenue.

So we had some issues Q1, Q3, Q4. But now it's restarted with the new deals. And hopefully, it will grow faster in the FY 2027. Keep in mind also that we've been talking about that in FY '25, even [indiscernible] that we lost 2 big customers I think it was '25, but it took 4 quarters just to clean up that. And you could see that in this Q1, Q2, Q3. And now it's clean up. And again, everybody is back to the work. And I have -- I hope that we will restart signing the contract on the corporate from the corporate perspective.

The next question comes from Emmanuel Matot from ODDO BHF.

Sorry, I am back but this time, my mic is on. I hope you can hear me well now. Three questions for you. So first, Octave, is it correct that you're about to offer an alternative to the Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace Office suites? Was this a request from customers context of sovereignty in Europe? And what will be the model behind this offer? Could it be free to start with?

Second question, do you see any risk related to the macroeconomic and geopolitical environment, particularly in France, where you are still doing half of your revenues? And last question, are you planning to make any further advanced purchases of memory components in fiscal year '27 for use in fiscal year '28 with financing by dedicated debt?

Thank you for the question, Emmanuel. So on the OVHai Workspace, so you could say that, but I will not say that, okay? Because if you see the old world, all the way of the productivity, yes, at some point, we will have some SaaS services that you can have the e-mail, video conferencing, drive, messaging, editing the documents. But with AI, all the services has no value. It's really easy to develop all these services and then adding to our customers. So I would not tell you that we are building Office 365. I would tell you that we are building the platform AI that will operate SaaS services for the customers.

And by the way, we will have Office 365 in the platform. We'll have the digital business. We'll have the custom agent, and it will be a lot of additional software inside because it's so easy to develop additional software to build that in the platform. But the main thing is how you operate all the SaaS. And we think that the way to operate that is changed totally. You probably use a Claude code, you probably use a ChatGPT. And I think this will be the way to send tomorrow the e-mails to explore your drive to having the summarization of your video conferencing to making the business on the web and also to building your next generation -- next application, the small application for your job if you're in financial, legal on the HR vertical.

So it's something that it's really new, really innovative. And the way that we build that, you don't see that for the moment for the market. I didn't, okay? So maybe there was someone that is developing, but it's something that will be really new. So -- and on Summit, we will show that because we didn't for the moment exactly for the same reason that I told you just before because our competition. And I don't want to share the good ideas, the smart ideas, the way to how to grow. And this is why also we were a little bit less transparent about what the OVHai Workspace is. So this is the first answer for the first question.

The second question, you're right, in France, it's tough. It's -- we see that a lot of customers, they wonder what's next. They are waiting for the elections. And there was a lot of questions about what will be -- what will happen after. They hope it's not on the right level and you feel that on the business. You feel that on the business. And this is why also all our, let's say, acquisition actions are working so well because we started to do what we know how to do that in the best way, very competitive offers that doesn't cost us so much to deliver and help our customers to make the business.

And then we are waiting with them to have this time that they have more money. They have more means, they can grow faster, but at least they are with us. We acquire a lot of customers, the 100,000 customers, more than 100,000 customers that we acquired last month. So it's massive. It's not small. It's massive. And we will work with them to help them to grow in the right way in this world that has a lot of uncertainty. And having this brand OVH that can bring this kind of the value, the way of working to trying to protect the customers, it's something that customers definitely, they like.

On the last question, it's a good question. I don't have the answer for that because I don't know the prices of the FY '28. I don't know how it will evolve. And we -- honestly, I don't know. It really will depend on the prices about the strategy of the -- what will be the investment of our investment in FY '28 in the hardware. There was a lot of things and that we will work probably in H2 to see what will be the best scenario. Maybe it will be the good scenario, maybe not. I don't know yet. If it's something that we will activate again. Hopefully, no. That would say that we are going back to some, let's say, fundamentals, some normal world, regular world, but I don't know today. I don't have the answer for that.

Back to the OVH management for any closing comments.

Okay. So thank you for the time that you spent and for the questions that you spent. So as you saw that we closed this year as a good year. I'm very happy what we delivered, and I'm really happy how ready we are for the FY '27. The company is really in another shape, a lot of excitement, a lot of people that they are working hard to deliver the performance. And I'm really, really happy what we have right now. And we will work on this growth on the FY '27 with the profitability, with the free cash flow target that we have and of course, improvement of our value creation. It's something that we have as the North Star, and we are thinking about that every morning. every night about how to invest in the right way, the money and to generate the growth and the value. So thank you very much, and see you on the road.

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.