Rubis Aktie

Welcome to the Rubis First Quarter 2026 Trading Update Presentation. Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers to begin today's conference. Please go ahead.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining us today for Rubis Q1 2026 Trading update. You have here on the call, Jean-Christian Bergeron, who is the Managing Partner of Rubis and CEO of Rubis Energie; and myself, Marc, Managing Partner and CFO of the group. Let's have a look, this quarter was one of a very strong operating performance again. The energy distribution business saw strong growth both on volumes and margins in all geographies. The volumes increased by 12%, driven notably by aviation fuel and C&I in the Caribbean and Bitumen in Africa and Europe. Overall unit margins were roughly stable at plus 1% versus previous year. And we observed 3 coherent months. March is in the continuity of January and February.

However, we have seen over the last weeks of Q1, a few precautionary purchasing behaviors here and there, but nothing significant. Since January, we launched our Bitumen business in Europe, which is performing well. In the renewable electricity production, our development continues in line with plans with an increase of the portfolio of 6% versus December 2025 and 32% over a year, which is quite encouraging for the rest of the year. The Creil project, which is the second biggest PV plant in France is expected to be fully commissioned by the end of Q2. One important fact also to underline is that none of our business is directly negatively impacted by the war in the Middle East.

I remind you that we have no operation in the region. Our supply is managed at regional level. And in the only region where we operate, which could be at risk, which is East Africa, supply is directly by local governments. However, we are monitoring the situation in an agile and local way and are confident about our ability to navigate this volatile context. So all those elements makes us confident about 2026, and we reaffirm our guidance. I'm now handing the floor to JCB to go into further details of the activity.

Thank you, Marc. Good morning to all of you. As highlighted by Marc, and you can see that on the slide Q1 2026 delivered a strong momentum across both volumes and margin as margin sales increased by 12% and gross margin grew by 13%. All business lines contributed positively with a particular mention for our bitumen activities.

By the way, our bitumen activities, following a strong 2025, continue to deliver excellent performance in both volume and margin. What are the key drivers of this performance? First of all, LPG. LPG +5% volume and +9% gross margin. Activity was quite strong in Europe across all segments.

By segments, we mean, bulk cylinders, notably with Switzerland, leading, driven by a very robust, bulk demand. Growth also resumed in Portugal. We were struggling a bit in Portugal, but it's getting better now. Autogas remain a key growth driver, especially in France and Spain. In Africa, performance was quite solid, especially in South Africa, where the cylinder segment drove most of the growth during the quarter.

As far as fuel is concerned, as you can see, +10% volume, +8% gross margin. Despite strong volume growth, we need to acknowledge that gross margin increased at a slower pace, reflecting a slight decline in unit margin.

This is obviously mainly driven by the months of March, where the Middle East crisis and rising international crisis led to continued price pressure across many retail activities and across our C&I commercial industrial activities. In the Caribbean, very dynamic activity, although margins were impacted by an unfavorable Euro-USD translation effect that we are not used to that.

Retail performance was extremely strong in both Africa, particularly Kenya, by the way, and the Caribbean with Haiti, Guyana, showing a very robust demand. The commercial and industrial segments, C&I, has also performed extremely well, mainly driven by Haiti and Kenya.

Last but not least, the aviation business was extremely strong in the Caribbean, especially in Barbados, Bahamas, mainly due to the peak tourism season over there. In Kenya, as you recall, this is a very competitive, highly competitive market and we are not fighting too much to keep the volumes because it would definitely give us some very low, even sometimes negative margins.

We are just awaiting the end of that cycle before reengaging more actively in the different bidding processes. Bitumen, we talked a lot about Bitumen. It's again one of the main achievement for the quarter, first quarter 2026. You can see impressive numbers, +44% volume, +49% gross margin.

Overall Bitumen volumes increased by 44%, driven by both the ramp-up of our European operations. You do recall that we started operations in Antwerp, Belgium on the 1st of January, we are now quite on the right mode to deliver the targets that we set to ourselves. Obviously we have also a continued expansion in Africa, where in Africa only volumes grew by 18%.

Again, the quarter marks the launch of our Bitumen activities in Europe, Antwerp, with a very encouraging start that reinforces our confidence in the future of the Bitumen business in Europe. In Africa also, by the way, the performance remained strong, notably in Nigeria, but not only, most of the countries contributed very positively.

South Africa, for instance, stood out supported by additional storage capacity that we commissioned in Durban. Growth was also further driven by our entry in India last year and the increase in our stake in Angola. Remember we moved from 35 to 95% equity in Angola. Gross margin increased quite significantly, as I said, 49% year-on-year with, I would say, contribution across all countries and unit margins remaining quite at high level throughout the quarter. Small comment on support and services. You can see a small decline by 7% of revenue. It's not at all an issue.

It's even, I would say a positive, a positive number because it just shows that we have increased our in-house activities and because as you saw, our volumes were quite impressive, so we just had to privilege our in-house activities and reduce a bit our usual trading activity. Nothing as such that we should be worried again about. Now let's turn to this Photosol. Again, good news. The secure portfolio reached 1.5 GW, up 6% versus the last year, end of last year, and 32% year-on-year. Revenue amounted to EUR 12 million compared to EUR 11 million last year.

It's a +14% growth, and this growth is slightly lower than the increase in operating asset that mainly due to timing effects in the commissioning of new solar farms. Now if we move on to the 2026 outlook, as you can see, Q1 performance for 2026 was fully in line with the outlook we provided to you at the time of our full year results. Once again, it definitely highlights the strengths of our multi-country, multi-product strategy underpinned by strong operational execution and confirming the agility of the Rubis business model.

Despite the current context in the Middle East, which has had no significant impact on our business so far, we expect in 2026 the Caribbean to remain well-oriented, supported in particular by the ongoing recovery in Haiti, the continued strong momentum in Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados, as well as I said before, the strong global momentum in aviation in the Caribbean.

In Africa, the retail business should remain the key driver of performance alongside Bitumen and more and more lubricants. We can see lubricants more and more in Africa also becoming a significant contribution to our results. We discussed about the launch of our Bitumen operations. That started well, and it's encouraging. LPG is also performing strongly, and renewable electricity continues to develop.

You understand from Jean Cristian that we are confident to confirm we are aiming at EUR 740 million to EUR 790 million EBITDA within the framework of assumption that you have here on the slide, meaning hyperinflation impact unchanged versus 2025 and constant EUR/USD rate. So we thank you for your attention, and we are ready to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions]

We have a few questions. So first question from Emmanuel Matot. Are there any large countries that have decided to cut fuel prices, resulting in selling at a loss?

Thank you, Emmanuel. Globally speaking, we didn't face so far any situations as far as capping of prices is concerned. So we have, I would say, the usual countries. Kenya is capping the price. But once again, it has no impact in terms of margins because the fact of capping the prices is just putting putting the government of Kenya, for instance, the subsidies that they pay us.

So eventually, it might have a slight impact on our financing cost, but absolutely not in terms of margin. And by the way, it's not a bad -- it's not necessarily a bad scenario because when you have a capping process being in place, it means that for customers, it's less painful. So it means the pressure on demand. So I would say it's positive and negative at the same time, positive because it maintained quite a high demand and a negative because it might increase our financing cost if governments are not being on time with the subsidy.

We have Kenya and Guyana a bit, but I think we are back to normal now. More or less it was quite okay. Once again, you need to understand also that the key impact in terms of pricing will be more in April and not in March.

Why because there's always a lag effect, and when the international prices are high or they are increasing like we saw it in March, the impact is more due to stock effect, due to the pricing formula that we have. It's more on the month of April. You also asked how did April go. So far, April did quite okay. We had more pressure on the sales for sure, as I said. For two reasons. First of all, because the prices now are getting a bit higher, and also because the precautionary purchases that Marc talked about. Obviously it means when the tanks are full, you buy a bit less in April.

Nothing dramatic as such, but for sure the volumes that we saw in March might be a bit less in April.

In terms of unit margin, so far, we don't have any significant issues. Let's see. It's a bit early to comment on April, but April should be obviously a bit below March in terms of volumes and margin.

Emmanuel asks also what should we make of the M&A remarks? Can you confirm that you are exploring opportunities for significant acquisitions? As mentioned previously, Emmanuel, the group remains attentive to any opportunities that could make strategic sense and serve the economic interest of the shareholders? You know we have the leverage and the firepower to make acquisitions and this is our target to continue to expand. As usual, of course, if any potential option we consider or anything become concrete, you know, we would of course share it with you as we have always do.

Jean-Luc Romain, could you please give us details about volumes and profitability in Haiti? How does it compare to what Rubis would consider a normal situation Haiti?

Thank you, Jean-Luc. In Haiti, 2 things need to be mentioned. First of all, there is since a couple of months a rebound in the demand in the country. The situation has improved a bit, it's not completely definitely back to normal. The situation in terms of security, even if still very tough, is now better under control, so we can see that the business activities, economic activities are not back to normal, but are slightly improving. We are benefiting from that rebound in terms of demand. Also we are benefiting from the fact that we have set up a more efficient logistic organization. We bought some barges from the U.S.

Barges are kind of a big ship where you can put some trucks. We load the trucks at our depot, we put the trucks on the two barges that we have, and then we can move around the island and supply more, I would say more supply safer locations. That has helped us a lot to increase our volumes. That is the main reason why now Haiti is on a good move. We, you have seen that UN is also keen to fight the gangs that are messing up the country. They have set up a suppression's, [ again ] suppression force.

Already, I think 1,000 soldiers from Chad have reached the country, and more are to come.

They are talking about 5,000-6,000 troops that should be going to Haiti in order to bring the situation more in a safer condition. We are quite hopeful. Obviously, we are monitoring that day after day, but so far, 2025 was better. Q1 2026 is also better, and we are quite confident that we should continue to recover in Haiti. Positive developments are there.

Okay. Jean, you can also question on the load factor for Photosol in Q1, attending actually the 119 gigawatt power production in Q1, implied a load factor. Actually the load factor in France this year was the same as last year at the same time. The difference you see and the match is not perfect in terms of growth just because actually we commissioned new plants at the end of the quarter. You cannot calculate directly the load factor. The load factor was the same this year than last year in Q1.

One question from Hubert. Has the blockage of the Hormuz trade route to Rubis some business in bitumen that can be considered as a windfall effect?

If so, when things normalize, hopefully, what are the odds that Rubis can keep that opportunistically gain market share?

Thank you Hubert, good morning. It's a good question. We don't have so far any significant windfall effect. I think, first of all, our products coming from Mid and they're not going through the Hormuz, neither the Middle East region. We are quite safe in terms of reliability of supply. I think the good momentum we have is mainly driven by the need for more infrastructure in Africa.

We are just benefiting from a global positive environment. No significant windfall effect to gain. A bit in Belgium with some, I would say a positive stock effect that has enabled Rubis to be competitive in that highly competitive market.

Once again, nothing significant. So we are not expecting, if the situation normalize, any bad move.

Once again, it's a very solid and robust business model. We have a supply chain with the ownership of our vessels and with a full integration of our supply chain, with proximity to our customers. We have depot, we have everything in place, and we have a good expertise of the Bitumen business. That is what gives us the confidence that the business will continue to grow. That also why we decided to enter into Europe.

Once again, a highly competitive market because we feel that we have the strength to grow market share in that highly competitive, but once again, extremely big market. Results are not, I would say, conjectural. They are definitely structural, and we are very happy about our Bitumen business, and we'll do everything possible to continue to grow that business.

We have another question from Christopher. Why is the renewable pipeline decreasing by 5% in Q1 versus 2025?

Here you have two effects, the first one actually is you have some projects going from development to secure portfolio. You know that the secure portfolio increased by 32% versus last year.

This decrease is a good news. And also with the PPE3 announcements, as mentioned last year, the ambition in France decreased a little bit. We decided to be more selective, more picky in the projects that enter in the pipe.

The rhythm of a new project entering the pipe will be lower.

We don't have any more.

[Operator Instructions]

It seems that we have nothing more question. We thank you for your attention and feel free to contact Clemence, of course, if you have any additional questions. Our next events are our shareholders meeting on June 10th. And our H1 will be published on September 8th.

Also, we have some, governance roadshow, occurring now. You can download the presentation on our website if you want to have more information about our governance.

Thanks again for your attention.

Thank you. Good day.

Welcome to the Rubis 2025 Full Year Results Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers to begin today's conference. Please go ahead.

Welcome to the presentation of Rubis 2025 results. Thank you for being with us today. I am Clarisse Gobin-Swiecznik, Managing Partner of Rubis, and I'm very pleased to be joined today by Jean-Christian Bergeron, Managing Partner and CEO of Rubis Energie. Marc Jacquot, Managing Partner and Group CFO; and Sophie Pierson, Group Chief Sustainability, Compliance and Risk Officer. I will begin the presentation with the key highlights of the year. Jean-Christian will then share the operational highlights. Marc will go into financial performance in more detail. Jean-Christian and I will then present Rubis long-term ambitions, and Sophie will conclude with our renewed sustainability road map.

So let's start with the key highlights of the year. 2025 has been another record year for Rubis despite the depreciation of the euro-dollar. Against this backdrop, our performance reflects the strength of our integrated model and our strong competitive positions and a quality of execution across all regions and activities. It is also notably the result of the engagement and operational excellence of our teams. Among the key figures, we can highlight, first, strong performance across the board with volumes and margins growing while Photosol continues to expand its secured portfolio.

Second, operational strength that more than offset the weak USD, leading to EBITDA in the upper range of our guidance a 90% increase in net income group share and record cash flow generation. And finally, these results reinforce our solid foundations and fuel our growth ambitions, enabling us to propose a growing dividend of EUR 2.07 per share. This strong financial performance gives us confidence as we move into the next phase of our development.

Moving to Slide 5. Let me explain how our integrated model continues to deliver. We continue to expand our end-to-end energy and mobility services. By being present across the value chain, we reinforced our integrated model, increased resilience and create multiple recurring sources of revenue. Customer proximity and operational rigor allow us to adapt quickly to evolving demand across our geographies delivering flexible and tailored solutions. Operational excellence is not only a driver of performance, but a key enabler of margin stability and cash generation. Through strict capital discipline, efficient working capital management and selective investment approach, we ensure that earnings are consistently translated into cash. This supports both growth and shareholder returns. This robust cash generation provides us with enough flexibility to seize growth opportunities. We prioritize projects and acquisitions that are value accretive, low capital intensity and align with long-term energy and mobility trends. This growth strategy allows us to expand while maintaining a strong balance sheet.

When you combine that operating excellence with disciplined and proactive financial management, the outcome is very clear, a strong and steady cash flow generation, fully in line with our historical standards. This integrated platform ultimately reinforces our fundamentals year after year. First, we delivered consistent operating performance. across different macro environments, we have maintained stable earnings and strong cash flows. Second, this performance is supported by a solid financial structure and prudent capital allocation, giving us strong flexibility to invest while maintaining balance sheet strength. This discipline ensures that growth remains value accretive. And finally, this translates directly into a sustainable and growing shareholder returns. It is our 30th consecutive year of dividends up 2% year-on-year.

So I will now hand over to Jean-Christian that will go deeper in the operational overview of 2025.

Thank you, Clarisse. When we talk about our legacy business, we refer to LPG, fuel and bitumen. So let me start with LPG. Even though Europe is generally seen as a mature market or even sometimes the declining market, we still delivered globally strong performance with volumes up 2% and gross margin up 3%. Obviously, a very positive results in that context. Europe remains our largest market, and we saw good momentum there. Autogas performed particularly well in France and Spain and bulk sales were also very dynamic. When it comes to bulk sales to our B2B customers what we call C&I, commercial and industrial customers, we are seeing a very interesting trend. More and more companies are turning to LPG as an efficient and reliable energy alternative, especially as they look for practical ways to reduce their carbon footprint of their operations without compromising on performance. And this is exactly where Rubis brings strong expertise. Our customers recognize the value we provide.

Moving to Africa, Morocco, Madagascar and South Africa remain the main drivers of our performance. At the same time, we have strong ambitions in East Africa. It is still a developing market with a number of structural challenges, but also significant growth opportunities. And that is precisely why in 2026 we created a dedicated LPG business line for Africa. The LPG market across the continent is expanding rapidly. And we believe Rubis is well positioned to play a much larger role.

Now turning to fuel. Here as well, we saw strong growth with volumes up 4% and margins up 5%. fight. Our key regions remain Africa and the Caribbean. In East Africa, Kenya continues to be the main market. Performance in 2025 showed a clear improvement mainly thanks to the adjustment of the pricing formula. Aviation, however, remain more challenging with a very tight margins airline tenders and our decision not to renew some low profitability contracts. So make it short, we lost the volumes in Kenya, but it was our decision. In the Caribbean, IT delivered strong growth, driven both by the significant expansion of the market and by the optimization of logistics, where we introduced as you know, barges alongside trucks to supply the market more efficiently. So finally, Guyana and Suriname also performed very, very well as we see and we see significant potential in both markets for the coming years.

Let me now highlight our bitumen business, which was one of the strongest contributors to Rubis growth in 2025. Maybe just as a reminder, Bitumen is a product that comes from the oil refining process. It plays a critical role in infrastructure development as it primarily used. It is primarily used road constructions, which accounts for more than 90% of the bitumen applications. In fact, bitumen alone typically represents around 30% of the cost of building a road, making it a key component of major infrastructure projects. So our customers are mainly large infrastructures company, often multinational groups, which provides relatively secure and stable customer base. Where Rubis stand out in this business is our ability to control the entire logistics chain.

Over the years, we have built a fully integrated model from sourcing the product in the Mediterranean region to delivering it directly to end customers. Now this includes fire 5 dedicated bitumen tankers. You may know that includes the tow largest bitumen vessels in the world. We have also import terminals and a multimodal land transport solution that allow us to supply our customers exactly where and when they need the product. Among these tankers, by the way, we have just scrapped one of them, which was quite old and replaced it with a new one, which was under construction since 2013. This new vessel for B2 Ocean is now fully operating. This integration gives us significant economies of scale but also the flexibility to provide tailor-made solutions such as emulsion or polymer modified bitumen often delivered as turnkey solutions with the strong technical support that the teams are providing to our customers.

Over the past few years, we have also expanded our footprint entering several new markets, including Caribbean, Gabon, Liberia, South Africa, Angola and Libya. In 2025, a number of factors supported the strong momentum of the business. Including a strong rebound in demand in Nigeria, the consolidation of Angola. And as I said before, our entry into Libya. And last but not least we increased the capacity, the storage capacity in the South African. During 2025, we also signed a 5-year lease agreement for a 60,000 tonnes storage capacity in Antwerp Belgium, which now enables us to address the European market starting from January 2026, all of this means that today, the business is very well positioned with strong profitability and significant growth potential for the coming years.

So now let me turn to our renewable activities. In Europe, Photosol continued to perform in line with our expectations. The portfolio of assets in operation grew by around 21% during the year and electricity production increased at the same pace. We also commissioned the first phases of the mega solar farm, one of the key projects in our pipeline. The site is expected to be fully operational during the first half of 2026 assets. We also continue to expand internationally with the launch of construction of 2 solar projects in Italy, representing a total capacity of 38 megawatts. Outside Europe, within Rubis Energie more and more of our C&I customers are asking us to support them in decarbonizing their operations and to meet this demand we are also developing renewable solutions, mainly through rooftop solar projects. For instance, in 2025, 3 main projects were commissioned and are now in operation, 2 in Jamaica and 1 in Kenya, representing around 3.5 megawatts of installed capacity. These 3 projects illustrates our ability to design flexible solution tailored to our customers' energy needs.

So we also took another step forward in the Caribbean with the launch of our EV charging offer, further expanding the range of energy solutions we provide in the region. So thank you.

I now hand the floor to Marc, to speak about the key financial figures for 2025. Marc, to you.

Thank you Jean-Christian. What you have just described operationally is directly reflected in our financial performance. At P&L level, our EBITDA is up 7% year-on-year at constant U.S. dollar-euro exchange rate and constant hyperinflation. This performance was mainly driven by the Caribbean and Africa with bitumen as a key contributor. It's interesting to highlight that at constant euro-U.S. dollar and hyperinflation versus 2024 our EBITDA would have reached EUR 772 million absorbing the EUR 40 million headwind related to the weak U.S. dollar and landing above over of EUR 710 million, EUR 760 million guidance range. Net income group share is up 19% versus last year. If you exclude the capital gain from Rubis Terminal sale in 2024, and increase reflect the absence of FX losses related to local currencies this year.

Looking at our balance sheet. Our corporate net financial debt amounts to EUR 602 million at the end of December. Which represents a leverage of 0.9x decreasing by 0.4x versus last year. Cost of corporate debt stood at 4% on average over the year, significantly below 2024 at 5.2%. Last year was impacted by a high and expensive local debt in Kenya. CapEx related to the distribution business increased by EUR 20 million at EUR 185 million. Most of the increase is linked to the new bitumen tanker, which is now at sea and will start its operation during H1 '26, as mentioned by Jean-Christian. Total CapEx in renewable amounted to EUR 190 million. This is in line with the trajectory announced at Photosol Day and is illustrated by both the 110-megawatt operations in 2025 and the 267-megawatts under construction. This CapEx, they are 85% financed through nonrecourse project debt.

For the group, the total amount of CapEx spend, excluding the nonrecourse debt reached EUR 217 million versus EUR 183 million in 2024, which represented an increase of 18%. Overall, 2025 reflects strong operating performance, absence of FX losses related to local currencies solid cash generation and disciplined investments.

Now let's take a closer look at our activities turning to Slide 13. Retail & Marketing. Retail & Marketing delivered a solid performance across the board with EBITDA increasing by 4%. Let's focus on Africa. Three highlights in Africa. First, the bitumen. Bitumen margins increased less than volume, this is the base effect from Q1 2024 when [indiscernible] devaluation impact was passed through to customers. However, the bitumen business was very dynamic this year with demand resuming in Nigeria after 2 difficult years. We increased our participation in our Angola subsidiary to 95% and now consolidated it globally. We also incorporated a new entity in Libya, Jean-Christian mentioned that earlier. Second one In Africa is retail. Retail is contributing well and the impact of the new pricing formula in Kenya is now showing in the margins. Third one, aviation. Aviation is more volatile and it's facing higher pricing competition, leading us to reduce our volume for the moment.

Let's have a look now at the Caribbean. Caribbean region was dynamic. The region contribution is impacted by hyperinflation. Hyperinflation had a less positive impact on EBITDA this year by EUR 17 million. Excluding this impact, EBITDA for the Caribbean increased by EUR 15 million and it was driven by Haiti, where the measures we have taken in our logistic management are truly efficient. Barbados, Barbados won a significant C&I contracts for power generation, which both the volumes, but slightly dilutive on margins. And Jamaica, Jamaica also performed well despite supply conditions slightly less favorable than last year. So considering the impact of the weak USD in the region this performance is particularly good this year. In Europe, the momentum was strong and illustrates the increasing demand for autogas and a gain of market share in a market on which we are challengers.

Support & Services remain stable, which is normal as the segment usually flexes with our Retail & Marketing activities. Our Renewable electricity production EBITDA stands at EUR 47 million. This is up 32% year-on-year. In line with our road map, our development expenses have increased, reflecting the acceleration of the growth of this business, resulting in a consolidated EBITDA at EUR 23 million. Overall, this confirms the strength of our product and geographic diversification.

Moving now to the P&L on Slide 14. Net income group share is up 19%. If you exclude Rubis Terminal equity gain from 2024. This is the result of our strong operating performance together with the less expensive local debt and reduced FX losses related to local currency. EBIT is slightly down versus last year. impacted notably based on new plants commissioned by Photosol and the effect of hyperinflation. Interest costs are down, thanks to lower cost of debt in Kenya. As you know, last year, Rubis recorded significant FX loss particularly in Kenya and Nigeria. Local currencies were more stable and the strategies we put in place to mitigate the FX risk have proven efficient. So we didn't incur any FX losses in 2025. As for taxes, nothing major to flag the OECD Global Minimum Tax is now fully integrated in our normal order. Overall, Rubis demonstrated agility and delivered solid financial results, showing it's cash generation.

Finally a word on our financial debt on Slide 15. Total net debt stands at EUR 1.2 billion with corporate debt at EUR 602 million, maintaining a low leverage of 0.9x at corporate loan. Our liquidity level is high with more than EUR 450 million undrawn RCF in addition to our EUR 760 million cash on balance sheet. The main variation in 2025 came from record operating cash flow of EUR 735 million, which is up 10%, reflecting the good operating performance combined with the absence of FX losses, a EUR 34 million positive impact from change in working capital as in 2024 in the context of low oil prices. Self-finance CapEx of EUR 217 million, which you can see in the dark pink on the graph and total CapEx, reaching EUR 376 million. And our usual June dividends to be paid to shareholders but also to minority interest and general partners.

The second installment received following the sale of Rubis Terminal, 2 installments remain and will be received in 2027 and 2028 for EUR 86 million each. Nonrecourse debt reaches EUR 564 million at year-end. The increase between '24 and '25 is in line with the renewable investment net of SPV debt amortization. Overall, our balance sheet remains solid with ample liquidity to support our future growth. This strong fundamentals underpin our confidence and strategic firepower.

With that, I will hand over the floor to Clarisse and Jean-Christian to present how we intend to build on the strong and accelerate our development.

Thank you, Marc. So behind these numbers, there is a model and that's why I would like to briefly highlight with Jean-Christian before we move to our ambitions. Rubis is a leading distributor of energy and mobility solutions with strong position in Africa, the Caribbean and Western Europe. What makes us different is not only our footprint, but the way we operate. First, we master the whole value chain from sourcing to storage and distribution. This gives us control, flexibility and reliability in markets where supply continuity is critical. Second, we built on the ground expertise and proximity to our customers.

Our teams operate locally, understand market specificities and adapt quickly to changing environments. Third, we are advancing sustainability and decarbonation for our own operations and for our clients. This reflects our [Technical Difficulty ] And finally, we continuously capture opportunities across energy segments and mobility services, from fuels and LPG to bitumen, renewals and retail. These trends form the foundation of our ambitions for the years ahead. Importantly, they are combined with favorable structural trends across our geographies. Our growth ambitions are rooted in clear long-term demand dynamics. So Jean-Christian over to you.

Thank you, Clarisse. Let me now briefly share how we see demand evolving across the regions where we operate. In the Caribbean, the steady increase in tourist flows supports both energy demand and airline traffic, which naturally benefits to fuel distribution activities and aviation sales. In Europe, electrification is gaining momentum, supported by public policies, regulatory frameworks, this trend further strengthen the relevance of our renewable platform, mainly in solar development.

In Africa, the main drivers remain urbanization and strong demographic growth, we can see expanding cities, growing mobility needs and ongoing infrastructure development that contribute to sustained demand for fuels, LPG and bitumen. We are also seeing strong growth in convenience retail, especially in Africa and the Caribbean as consumer habits evolved and the retail markets remain fragmented. This creates opportunities to expand proximity services within service station networks. More and more stations are becoming true multiservice hubs for everyday needs with the positive impact, not only on what we call nonfuel revenues, but also on fuel sales. So all together, these dynamics show that our strategy is aligned with clear and long-term demand trends across geographies.

This slide shows how we build growth from our historical strengths. On the left-hand side, you see our legacy businesses, fuel, LPG renewable in Europe, Europe and bitumen in Africa. These activities from the backbone of Rubis. They provide scale, infrastructure strong local positions and resilient cash generation. But what now matters is how we leverage these trends to unlock new drivers, of course. And this is what you can see on the right-hand side of the chart, our strong positions and brand equity in Africa and the Caribbean give us a solid platform to further expand our retail activities.

In particular, we focus on 2 key levers that generate additional income and trade revenue. The first one the development of nonfuel activities across our service station network. We are talking here about convenience stores, restaurants and other services that closely match customer expectations when they start at our service stations. Second, leveraging our strong forecourt presence to further grow lubricants and LPG sales within our service stations. And the same logic applies to renewables. We are moving from solar projects in Europe to supporting energy transition in Africa and the Caribbean with solution tailored to local markets. This strategy deployed...

[Technical Difficulty]

Strong organic performance building market share, improving execution and strengthening our positions where we already operate. At the same time, we remain attentive to external opportunities as we have always done when we invest, we do so selectively in businesses that complement our portfolio and create long-term run. And throughout this process, we remain rigorous in how we allocate capital ensuring strong returns, controlled risk and a solid balance sheet. This balanced approach allows us to grow, diversify and capture new opportunities while maintaining resilience in a volatile environment. With that framework, let me now tell how sustainability supports and strengthens this strategy.

Our growth ambitions, financial discipline, sustainability ambitions and strategic priorities, all require consistent execution across our markets. Sustainability is fundamental to how we think about our future. At Rubis, sustainability is not an isolated initiative. Since our first road map in 2022, it has structured the way we approach our responsibilities and long-term commitments. It supports our ambitions by reinforcing local accountability, measurable impact and long-term consistency. It provides a framework that helps translate strategy into action country-by-country, business by business. This is how we ensure that our ambitions are implemented in a responsible and consistent way.

With that, I will now give the floor to Sophie to present of our Sustainability road map.

Thank you,Clarisse. Indeed, sustainability supports and reinforces our ambitions. Our Rubis approach to sustainability, the component of our operational excellence. In concrete terms, this contributes to making us more relevant to our customers, particularly by offering them a wider range of lower carbon products and services to making us a more attractive employer and to making us more efficient by managing our risks and our costs. Let's move on to the next slide to discover our renewed road map. Think tomorrow 2030 is part of a logic of evolution and continuity. It builds on the first road map launched in 2022, which laid the foundation of the second road map. This program enabled us to set clear objectives, engage all our business units and structure our actions to deliver sustainable performance. The review of this period highlights a significant achievement of the set objective reflecting the collective mobilization of the teams.

In the spirit of continuity and heightened ambition, certain key objectives are being renewed or further developed such as safety objectives within the new road map in order to continue the progress already underway and to support the group transformation in the phase of environmental and societal challenges. Our renewed road map represents a new step in structuring and formalizing our commitments towards 2030. It is important to mention that it was built in collaboration with our colleagues in the field. So it is organized around 4 pillars: climate, environment, social and society. And the main evolutions compared to our previous road map are, first, formulizing a standalone climate pillar. Climate was obviously integrating into our first road map in the environmental pillar, but it now stands as a dedicated pillar reflecting the increasing importance of energy transition and decarbonization across our activities.

The second evolution is the establishment of a closer link with business, in particular by integrating targets the development of low-carbon products to complement our existing offers and the development of cleaner solutions in Africas. That's 3 other pillars, environment, social and society continue to guide how we manage our impact, support our teams and contribute to the territories where we operate. Together, these 4 pillars provide a coherent and operational framework aligned with our strategy and embedded in our model.

So let me now illustrate this framework work with 4 concrete commitments out of 16 as highlighted on Slide 26. So first, on climate, we are still committed to reducing operational emissions while accelerating diversification towards low-carbon activities with an ambition to multiply our low-carbon EBITDA by 5x by 2030. By low carbon EBITDA, we mean biofuels and solar electricity and services related to these products. Second, on environment, we are committed to conducting a biodiversity assessment on all our industrial sites and solar parks located near a sensitive area with a view to implementing appropriate action plans.

Third, on social, we will deploy a We Care policy across all our geographies to ensure consistent, high-quality social protection for all our employees regardless of local regulatory differences. And fourth on society, we are committed to providing access to cleaner cooking solutions to 3.7 million people in Africa which is a measurable initiative directly linked to the local development. To find out more all the 16 commitments are detailed definitions and baselines on our website.

Thank you for your attention. I will now give the floor to Clarisse to conclude the presentation.

So let me wrap before opening the floor to Q&A. First, so we saw very strong commercial and operating performance. This year across our all geographies and businesses. Second, our seamless execution and agility delivered record cash flows, which illustrates how our robust and healthy our business model is whatever the context. Finally, these achievements make us confident about the future and enable us to propose as before, a growing dividend at EUR 2.07 per share. So despite the current conflicts in the Middle East, and I'm sure we'll come back on it, which, in fact, remains contained at stage for 2026. We anticipate that the Caribbean will continue to perform well, in particular with the recovery of IT as Jean-Christian told, the strong dynamism of Jamaica, Guyana and Barbados.

In Africa, retail should continue to be one of the key drivers of performance together with bitumen. In Europe, we have just entered and launched our bitumen operations in Amberg. So we are very happy of this development. But just keep in mind that for 2026. It will be a transition year and the renewable electricity in Europe continue to develop as planned. So all in all, with a healthy balance sheet and a stable leverage ratio. We are aiming at EUR 740 million to EUR 790 million EBITDA within the framework of the assumptions, just described.

So I think that's all for the presentation. So thank you a lot for your attention, and we are ready for taking your questions.

First question from Orbis Lewis at Kepler Cheuvreux. Given the excellent economics of the bitumen business, why not make an arbitrage and invest less in renewals to focus on this very promising activity that is more in line with our historical business model.

The question is not really a matter of arbitrage, but it's a matter of opportunity. As you know, our renewable business is financed at 85% through nonrecourse debt, and it does not hamper our ability to invest in the distribution business. And actually, this is reflected as you can see in our leverage as it is below 1 today.

You're right Marc. On the top of that, I can add that we are taking any possible opportunities in Africa. We have done some significant growth in 2025 and in 2026. As I say, we are entering now to Europe, and we expect some significant growth in Europe. So there's no arbitrage, as you said Marc, it's just a combination of growing businesses, and we take a full opportunities to grow both of them.

Still on bitumen, we have two questions from Hubert. Can you confirm the reasons why the growth of the gross margin on the bitumen activity is not in line with that of revenues, 28% revenues and 18% net gross margin. And the second one is about the Libyan market, what are the riskd and opportunities, who are the customers and are there local contractors or non-local nationals?

The revenues reflect the price of the products we sell and the margins, okay. It generates some volatility in our revenues that are totally decorrelated from our performance. So we engage you to really focus on our margins and EBITDA, if you want to understand the performance for this.

As far as Libya is concerned, it was a good opportunity because we managed to acquire the only importation depot that does exist in Libya. The market is quite significant. We are talking about 200,000 tonne plus. It's a growing market. So far, we are just supplying the market to our depot. The customers are coming to the terminal, they are offloading. They are taking the product from our terminals. So we don't have any trucks moving on the roads. We don't have any significant inland operations. So we are quite confident that it will be a good addition to our bitumen in Africa. We are using the supply chain that is making our success in the West Coast of the Africa. So just a positive addition. And once again, we don't see risk, we see opportunity to grow bitumen business.

We now have two questions from Jean from CIC CIB, about the situation in the Middle East and the impacts on the supply chain on the business and in particular in East Africa.

What we so far -- because things are evolving rapidly. So far, we don't see any negative impact. Most of the markets where we operate, we are not concerned by the situation in the Middle East. So we mentioned East Africa. You can also add to Africa operations in Libya and Madagascar. So far, all the supply chain has been moved to Singapore. So we are getting the product from Singapore. It's very smooth. And we are not facing any specific issue with that change of supply chain. So I would say so far, so good. So we don't see once again any negative impact so far in our businesses for this.

We have two questions that are linked from Mourad Lahmidi of BNPP, should we expect a negative working capital effect due to the spike in crude prices? Should we expect a short-term squeeze in unit margins? And we'll go back to the CapEx activity.

The change in working capital depending on inventory level at year end mainly depending on the oil price evolution. So in the particular context of one price going up, of course, the working capital will be higher.

In terms of unit margins, Marc, what we can say, we are operating in many, many markets where the markets are being regulated by government. So we don't see any positive or negative impact. Just because once again, margins are being regulated by high authorities. Where the market is deregulated to us and to our proximity with our customers to explain to them that the price is increasing, and we need to increase the price accordingly. So we expect to protect our margin. And once again, we don't see any major impact, major risk with that increase of oil price. By the way, we came across the same situation in 2022. And don't forget that the kind of level we are observing today was also the same in 2022. And we managed, and there was no significant impact on our sales and no significant impact on our business models.

Let's now move to Photosol with a question from Jean-Luc Romain about PPE 3 energy policy impact on Photosol. Will it accelerate or slow down in development. And also a few questions around 2027 targets. The delays related to France and the CapEx level expected for '26 and the split between corporate and nonrecourse base.

The publication of PPE 3 provides long awaiting the policy visibility after a prolonged period uncertainty. So for us, that confirms PPE3 confirms that solar remains a strategic pillar for France decarbonation. Within the framework that prioritize system balance, electrification and long-term deployment rather than short-term acceleration at any cost. It also implies from 2026, '27 and '28, moderation of near-term solar deployment in France. But it preserves a clear and robust longterm growth strategy to us for instance. So in the short term, this environment favors, we think that would favor experienced developers with high-quality, well-executed projects and our pipeline, the Photosol pipeline remains fully aligned with these long-term objectives.

Looking ahead, the plan supports sustained growth in decarbonized electricity, increasing demand for flexible and grid compatible solar assets and future upside from storage and system services. So to manage short-term variability and support our path towards 2027 EBITDA targets, we have also taken mitigation actions, notably international diversification and a more selective disciplined approach to new project intake focused on quality returns and visibility.

So we have talked before about our development in Italy. So we have team with 15 people. We have 42 megawatt that will be operational at the end of 2026, 40 more in 2027. We have a pipeline that is incremental with also storage projects and we have quite a big secured pipeline in France. So -- and we have proved that we can convert permitted price and operational since all those years. So the results for 2025 are good. The plan for 2026 is following what we have what we have announced in the Photosol Day. So for now, we are not worried at all.

A quick question from Mourad about going back to high prices. Have you seen some countries starting to think about cutting current prices?

Not yet, for the most not yet. For sure it might happen if the situation continues like that. But once again, to cut the price, it means that the prices are regulated. So no impact on our unit margins. It could even be a good news because if they cut the price, it means that the demand will be remaining solid because of the cost of accessing the product for end customers will be more reasonable. So we don't see that today, and we don't see that in the long term as an issue if some governments decide to cut the price.

A question from Nicolas about the cash proceeds from the sale Rubis Terminal. How much are you expecting in 2026 and beyond.

Nicolas, we are expecting 2 installments one in 2026, one in 2027 of EUR 86 million each.

One question from Mourad Lahmidi of BNPP, how much of the EUR 233 million dividend cash out is related to the statutory dividend to general partners.

The amount is EUR 11 million related to 2024 and paid in 2025.

I can see also a question from Nicolas asking about the net income of Rubis Photosol.

The net income group share of Rubis Photosol amounted in 2025 to negative EUR 30 million.

If we have no more questions, thank a lot to you all for your attention. We remain available on the phone or by e-mail if you want to have more information, we will be on the road today in Paris and next week in London and Dublin, do not hesitate to reach out to us. Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

Welcome to the Rubis Third Quarter 2025 Presentation. [Operator Instructions]

Now I will hand the conference over to your host, Marc Jacquot, Managing Partner and Group CFO, to begin today's conference. Please go ahead.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining us today for Rubis' Q3 and 9 months 2025 trading update. I am Marc Jacquot, Managing Partner and Chief Financial Officer of Rubis, and I'm joined today by Clemence Mignot-Dupeyrot, Head of Investor Relations. Together, we'll walk you through Rubis' financial performance for the third quarter of 2025.

I am on Slide 2. This third quarter was another one of robust operational performance delivered in a period of lower oil prices and adverse euro-USD environment. Before diving into the details, it's important to remind that revenue trends are not a meaningful indicator of Rubis' performance, as they primarily reflect movement in oil prices with no direct impact on our margins.

What truly matters is our ability to manage inventories efficiently and capture value growth through disciplined pricing. And once again, this quarter, the group's solid operational execution more than offset the unfavorable impact of the weak U.S. dollar.

From an operational standpoint, the Energy Distribution business delivered strong growth in both volumes and unit margins across all products. Volumes were up 6%, with overall unit margin increasing by 3%, leading to total margin increasing by 9% year-on-year.

Let me highlight a few key drivers behind the solid performance, namely bitumen, Haiti and Europe. First, bitumen. Bitumen volumes were up 17% year-on-year. As in the previous quarter, this growth was driven by strong demand in Nigeria, where bitumen is increasingly preferred to concrete for road construction and by the consolidation of our operations in Angola. Gross margin increased by 33% year-on-year, supported by volume growth and a more favorable normalized pricing context in Nigeria.

The second one is Haiti. Activity in Haiti continued to recover across both retail and C&I segments. An additional supply cost was integrated into the pricing formula, leading to higher return margins. On the C&I side, the initiatives we implemented to strengthen our supply mechanism and better manage risk have proven effective in supporting margins.

And the third one is Europe. Our LPG operations in Europe were particularly dynamic this quarter when compared to last year with strong autogas demand in France and higher unit margins all across European markets.

In renewable electricity production, our development is accelerating in line with our plans with the secure portfolio increasing by 25% compared to September 2024. During the quarter, we commissioned an additional 26 megawatts of capacity.

Overall, those results confirm the strength of our diversified business model and position us well to deliver our 2025 objectives.

Clemence, over to you for more details on the activity.

Thanks, Marc, and hi, everyone. Let's move on to Slide 3. As you can see on this slide, for the retail and marketing part of our business, volume increased by 6% and gross margin by 9%. Looking at the global picture product-by-product, starting with LPG, volume were up 3% and gross margin up 6%.

As previously mentioned, activity was particularly strong in France in autogas, and that's also the case for Spain. In Switzerland, small bulk demand remained very dynamic in a favorable pricing environment. South Africa was also very strong on an upward trend, supported by a cold winter. Margins were stable there.

On the fuel side, volumes were up 6% and gross margin up 7%. First, the retail activity. It was broadly stable in the Caribbean with variations from one country to another, all of them offsetting each other.

In Africa, volume growth was really strong in Uganda, Rwanda and Zambia, where we rebranded a few service stations. On the margin side, you might remember that Kenya benefited from a second pricing adjustment for the pricing formula mid-July, and we fully benefited from it.

In the C&I segment, volumes grew by 17% and margins by 26%, mainly driven by Barbados, where we signed a major contract to supply the island's power generation company. Haiti also contributed significantly. Marc already went through this. Demand was also quite strong in Guyana and Suriname this quarter.

On the aviation side, volumes declined by 8%, but margins increased by 8% also. As we already mentioned last quarter, this is the result of a selective approach in Kenya where the management decided not to bid on certain airline tenders, which were not profitable enough. Activity in the Caribbean on the aviation side was still very dynamic. Bitumen, Marc already went through it, volumes up 17% and margins up 33%.

Turning now to Support and Services. Revenue was down 17% to EUR 215 million over the quarter. This is mainly due to the earnings profile of the SARA refinery, which generated some margin volatility as is usually the case in Q3. Trading for third parties on the other hand, was quite dynamic in the Caribbean in Q3 '25. And in Africa, we had a few vessels under dry dock maintenance, which led to a lower bitumen shipping activity.

For Photosol, the secured portfolio now reaches 1.3 gigawatts, up 25% compared to September '24, supported by the 26 megawatts, which were commissioned in Q3, as Marc mentioned before. Revenue amounted to EUR 21 million, up 19% from EUR 17 million in Q3 last year, and this is in line with the evolution of the assets in operation. In terms of development, the total development pipeline, meaning excluding the secured portfolio now stands at 5.8 gigawatts, of which around [ 15% ] related to projects outside of France.

Thank you, Clemence. And moving on Slide 4. To conclude, the third quarter was operationally slightly better than we anticipated. As expected, our results were impacted negatively by euro-U.S. dollar translation effects, around EUR 7 million versus last year and EUR 14 million versus our guidance in terms of gross margin. Despite this, the group demonstrated its ability to deliver strong results in the face of currency and market headwinds.

Our multi-country, multiproduct model continues to prove its strength and resilience, consistently driving performance across all our businesses. With solid execution, robust fundamentals and a clear strategic road map, we are confident that this positive momentum will continue through the final quarter. We, therefore, reaffirm our full year EBITDA guidance expected to range between EUR 710 million and EUR 760 million.

We thank you for your attention, and Clemence and I are now happy to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions]

We have a first question from Emmanuel Matot at ODDO BHF, who is asking exposure to Jamaica and the situation in that country following the hurricane. Second question is about the impact of the crew in Madagascar on our business.

Thank you, Emmanuel, for your question. So let's start with Jamaica. First of all, we have 78 people working in Jamaica, and we are happy to share with you that all of them are sound and safe. As a reminder, Jamaica retail and marketing represented 5% of total group EBITDA in 2024. We have there 49 service stations. And as of yesterday, 75% of them were operational. 4 sites were partially operational, and 8 sites were not operational. They were flooded or under the mud.

[indiscernible] and our headquarter are back in operations, loadings resumed within 1 day and product was delivered to our retail sites and our strategic customers. So what we can say is that in Jamaica, we continue to assess the situation. Of course, rebuilding our service station will take some time. Our teams are fully mobilized to ensure the continuity of operation and the service of our customers. And we are covered by insurance for that type of claim with some deductibles that we need to evaluate more precisely.

Now talking about Madagascar. You know the political context in Madagascar was pretty tense with movement initiated by the generation bid, [indiscernible] water and power cuts, inflation, unemployment and [indiscernible] the protest [indiscernible] place end of September and early October, but we can say that they have now calm down after the President was [ instituted ] and the new temporary transition military government is being put in place.

The new government approved the 2026 budget with no negative impact identified for operations in the country. Also during the protest, no loss was incurred. We took all the measures needed to ensure the safety of our employees and infrastructure when event occurred. The only impact we see so far is the shortfall related to a few days of closures of some of our operations, but it is in some very specific zones and the impact is quite limited. Of course, we will monitor closely the evolution of the political situation there.

[Operator Instructions]

We have another online question from Emmanuel Matot, who is asking, why not tighten your EBITDA 2025 guidance? Is the upper end of the guidance still achievable despite the weakening of the dollar?

Emmanuel, our Q3 is indeed a very strong one, and we are confident in reaching our guidance. Keep in mind that about 2/3 of our business is exposed to U.S. dollar directly or indirectly and the translation effect has an impact on our EBITDA. And we monitor this evolution precisely. And that's why we consider that it was not relevant to update the 2025 guidance that we keep as it is.

We have a question from Nicolas Royot, Portzamparc, who is asking, could you please provide an update on the Creil solar site and its commissioning date? Will it be done all at once or gradually?

The answer to this question, Nicolas, is it is done gradually by tranches. Already some tranches were commissioned since February 2025. We have around half of the Creil plant, which is in operation.

Another question from Jean-Luc Romain at CIC Market Solutions. Congratulations on Haiti improvements compared to pretravel usual business and margin, how much would your profits need to increase to go back to usual levels?

Jean-Luc, thank you for your congratulations. But -- Haiti the positive effect we have related to Haiti compared to last quarter was amounting, I would say, to EUR 5 million over the quarter. We still have a long path to go back to the initial performance because the situation in the country is still very trouble, but we are learning how to navigate in this environment. But as long as the security situation remains the same, we will not be back to the level of 5 years ago, I would say.

[Operator Instructions]

It seems that you have no further questions. So we thank you for your attention. And...

We will be on the road today -- tomorrow in Paris with Bernstein, and we remain available by phone or e-mail to organize any type of meeting. Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

Welcome to the Rubis 2025 Half Year Results presentation. [Operator Instructions]

Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers to begin today's conference. Please go ahead.

Good evening, everyone. I'm Clemence Mignot-Dupeyrot, Head of Investor Relations. I am here today for Rubis's H1 2025 Results. I am with Clarisse Gobin-Swiecznik, Managing Partner; and Marc Jacquot, CFO. Clarisse will start the conference.

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. To kick off this presentation of our H1 results, let me very quickly remind you what we do. Our business is about distributing energy while supporting mobility solutions. In Europe, we distribute and sell LPG, and we also produce and sell photovoltaic power.

In Africa, we distribute and sell bitumen to road contractors in West Africa and fuel and LPG in East Africa. In the Caribbean, we distribute and sell fuel and LPG. Those products reached a wide range of customers, both individuals and professionals while the distribution is supported by a reliable and most of the time in-house logistics.

For H1 2025, this diversified business model delivered a steady performance. In a global economic environment marked by uncertainty, our results for the first half of 2025 standout with growth in volumes and margins across all regions and product lines. Photosol continues to progress according to plan on track towards 2027 objectives.

Our group EBITDA grew by 3% and the net income group share by 26%, driven by a stronger operational performance, better FX management and stable emerging currencies. Cash flow generation remains steady at EUR 276 million for H1, which is a key highlight of this publication. All of this gives us confidence in reaching our full year guidance, even in a less favorable USD-Euro exchange rate environment in H2.

The following slide highlights our balanced growth across product lines and geographies. It showcases the strength of our commercial strategies, our agility, and seamless execution. Looking at our H1 performance by business line, you can see that in Retail & Marketing, all products delivered both volume and margin growths. LPG was driven by a very strong commercial momentum in Europe. In fuel distribution, the expected pricing formula adjustment in Kenya took the first step in March. The second step implemented in mid-July will show in our H2 performance.

In bitumen distribution, demand in Nigeria is strongly picking up. The sharp decrease in unit margin visible here is purely a basis effect linked to the 2024 currency devaluation. We already mentioned it in Q1, Marc will elaborate further on this point. As for Support and Services, which covers supply to the distribution business, and the SARA refinery performance remains overall stable.

Finally, the renewable business is expanding as planned with a sharp increase in both assets in operation and secured portfolio, in line with the remark we presented at last year's Photosol Day.

In conclusion, this first half results are yet another demonstration of the group's ability to deliver consistent commercial and operating performance, cycle after cycle. And when you combine that resilience with discipline and proactive financial management, the outcome is clear, the strong and steady cash flow generation is fully in line with our historical standards.

Thank you, Clarisse. Good evening to all. Let's start with the big picture for the first half. Our EBITDA is up 3% year-on-year and flat on a comparable basis. As Clarisse already mentioned, this is driven by strong LPG performance in Europe, while in Africa, Kenya improved volumes and margins in the retail segment, and bitumen return to growth in Nigeria.

Net income is up 26% to EUR 163 million, reflecting the absence of FX losses. CapEx related to the distribution business remains well under control, roughly stable at EUR 73 million while they are increasing in renewable to EUR 85 million, which is a concrete and positive sign that our growth projects are now materializing and are being steadily derisked. Nearly 85 megawatts were put in operation over H1 and 290 megawatts are now under construction.

Corporate net debt is stable at 1.4x despite a negative trend in working capital over H1 which confirms our strong financial position. And finally, cash flow from operations remained strong at EUR 276 million for the first half year, supported by the good operating performance and the absence of FX losses. All in all, that's a solid performance.

Now let's take a closer look at our activities. Retail & Marketing delivered a solid performance across the board with EBITDA increasing by 3% year-on-year. In Africa, we have three things to highlight. First, retail. Retail is contributing well and the impact of the new pricing formula in Kenya is expected to be fully visible in the second half.

Second, aviation, which is more volatile, is facing higher pricing competition, leading us to reduce our volumes for the moment in Kenya. And the third one is bitumen. Bitumen margins increased less than volume and this is a basis effect from 2024 when naira devaluation impact affecting the financial results below the EBITDA was passed through to customers.

Now let's look at the Caribbean. The Caribbean region was broadly stable, which is in line with our expectations. Guyana slowed down a bit with the election coming up in September, creating some kind of wait-and-see behavior among our B2B customers.

In Haiti, the measures we have taken in our logistic management are starting to pay off, even if volumes remain a bit soft. Jamaica is normalizing with supply conditions slightly less favorable than last year.

Now Europe. In Europe, the momentum is particularly good as a result of our challenger positioning combined with the excellence drive of our commercial teams and a colder winter this year.

Looking at Support and Services, it remained stable, which is normal as this segment usually flexes with our Retail & Marketing activities. Now the renewable electricity production, what we can say is that the power EBITDA stands at EUR 22 million, which is up 38% year-on-year. In line with our road map, our development expenses have increased, reflecting the acceleration of the growth of this business, resulting in a consolidated EBITDA at EUR 10 million. In conclusion, this is a robust operating performance, attesting to the strength of our product and geographical diversification.

Let's have a look at our financial results. Let me highlight just a few items here. The net income group share is up 26% or on a comparable basis, 18%. This is the result of lower expensive local debt levels and reduced FX exposure. When analyzing our income statement, let me remind you that the share of net income from associates in H1 2024 included Q1 results from Rubis Terminal. Interest costs are down, thanks to lower debt in Kenya and more favorable interest rates.

As you know, last year, Rubis recorded significant FX losses, particularly in Kenya and Nigeria. In H1 this year, local currencies were more stable and the strategies we put in place to mitigate the FX risk have proven efficient, and we didn't incur any FX loss. As for taxes, nothing major to flag, the OECD global minimum tax is now fully integrated in our normal run. Overall, Rubis demonstrated agility and delivered solid financial results, fueling its cash flow momentum and supporting its balance sheet.

Now a word on our financial debt. Total net debt stands at EUR 1.4 billion, with corporate debt at EUR 910 million, maintaining a healthy leverage of 1.4x at corporate level. Our liquidity level is high with more than EUR 180 million under RCF in addition to our EUR 530 million cash on balance sheet. The main variation of this debt this half came from the steady operational cash flow of EUR 390 million, which is up 11%, reflecting the good operating performance combined with the absence of FX losses. A negative impact from change in working capital of EUR 68 million after a very positive effect in H2 '24 as a consequence of lower trade payables.

CapEx of EUR 164 million, which is higher than last year with the ramp-up of Photosol, hence, our usual June dividend that we paid to shareholders, but also to minority interest and general partners.

Nonrecourse debt increased by EUR 63 million, in line with the renewable investments. All in all, our balance sheet remains solid with ample liquidity to support our future growth.

Thank you, Marc. Before we open the floor to Q&A, let me wrap up. So first, we saw Rubis commercial and operating performance. Second, our seamless execution and agility deliver reliable cash flows through the cycle. Finally, these H1 achievements make us confident, we are on track to reach our 2025 targets even in the less favorable euro-dollar context in H2.

With a healthy balance sheet and a stable leverage ratio, we confirm we are aiming at EUR 710 million to EUR 760 million EBITDA within the framework of assumptions you have here on the slide.

Thanks a lot for your attention. We are ready to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions]

We have no audio questions for the moment. I propose you begin by the written questions on the webcast.

So we have 2 questions on the webcast from Auguste Deryckx of Kepler. Question number one is group EBITDA was stable on a comparable basis despite 5% volume growth, what are the key headwinds preventing stronger margin conversion?

What we can say on the margins, as I mentioned, the LPG margins were stable over the first half. And in the fuel distribution business, so the unit margin decreased by 1% in H1. And this decrease came exclusively from the Caribbean, especially from Jamaica. In Jamaica, the supply is not in Rubis' hands. And last year, we had very favorable condition for this supply. And this semester, actually, those conditions normalized, I would say. So that's the first explanation.

Second one is on the bitumen, bitumen distribution business. So the volume growth in Nigeria resumed, as we explained. And H1 2024 was high due to the FX pass-through and the significant decrease in margin is explained by the basis effect after H1 2024 devaluation, after considering the guidance.

We have 2 questions considering on euro and USD FX. So question number one is -- but both questions have the same answer. Question number one is what level of FX rate and hyperinflation assumptions underpin the guidance, the EBITDA target of EUR 710 million to EUR 760 million. And what contingency levers do you have if the macro backdrop worsens. And another question from Emmanuel Matot is what is the total negative impact we can expect for 2025 on your EBITDA?

So regarding the guidance and the hyperinflation embedded in the guidance. We have the same level of hyperinflation in the guidance than in 2024, meaning a positive impact of EUR 25 million -- EUR 24 million on the EBITDA, EUR 22 million on the EBIT and minus EUR 10 million at a net income group share level, okay? So this is our assumption, and it will be -- and this is something that we will know only at the closing. So there is a lot of uncertainty in the hyperinflation. So we cannot commit on this number.

In terms of impact of U.S. dollar, euro, the initial assumption we have was the euro-dollar level of the beginning of the year, meaning an exchange rate of $1.05 okay, for EUR 1. Now we are at $1.17 or $1.16 depending of the day. What we can say is that the good performance of the H1 will compensate the favorable impact related to the U.S. dollar impact. The margin we have in U.S. dollar is concerned, actually, I would say, 2/3 of our business, okay? So you can calculate what is the impact yourself on for H2.

[Operator Instructions]

So we have another question online from [ Jean-Luc Romain ]. Could you please give us an idea of what the renewable EBITDA is before development costs?

So the renewable EBITDA before development cost is what we call the power EBITDA, the power EBITDA amounted to EUR 22 million in H1.

We have another question from [ Thomas Trotter ] saying about the aviation business. Are any of your markets showing activity in SAF, sustainable aviation fuel and is that a market Rubis might get into?

We are more or less agnostic to the type of fuel we distribute. We adapt to the demand of our customers. We would be able to distribute SAF and we do, in some places, especially in the Caribbean, but it's mainly a question of offer and demand, and there is not a lot of offer to date. We are, in any case, adapting ourselves to the demand from our customers.

Another question from Mr. [indiscernible] about Photosol portfolio evolution. It is not on the slide you have here in the presentation that is in the webcast, which you can find it on our website.

[Operator Instructions]

We have another question from Emmanuel Matot at ODDO online, asking us if we have any impact of U.S. tariffs during the summer?

Rubis geographic and operational model makes it largely insulated from the direct effects of tariffs. We are not present in the U.S. nor in China, and we do not depend in any case of U.S.-based or China-based suppliers in our distribution business.

On the indirect side, the products and services we offer are essential, particularly in the energy space. As such, demand tends to be relatively inelastic, meaning it remains quite stable even during periods of price volatility or economic slowdown. So I would say we have no effect of tariffs on our P&L or results.

Another question from [ Roger Degree ]. Can you update us on the CapEx plans and specific projects for the next year or 2 in the energy distribution business?

Roger. What we can say on the Photosol CapEx, this level, as you know, will increase in line with the ambitions communicated to the market at Photosol Day. So this is a EUR 1.1 billion CapEx in the 2024, 2027 back-end loaded. And for 2025 it should be in the range of EUR 150 million to EUR 160 million. Talking about Rubis Energy, so the distribution business, we should be in the normalized level in the -- I would say, EUR 185 million on the run rate.

Another question online. Can you give us an update on the shareholder structure? So the answer is public. The shareholding structure as of today is, the largest shareholder is Mr. Patrick Molis with more -- a bit more than 9%. Then you have the Bolloré Group through Plantations des Terres Rouges, a bit above 5%. You have Mr. Sämann 5% or so, Groupe Industriel Marcel Dassault a bit above 5%, and then the rest of the shareholding is structure an overall split between different shareholders.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing remarks.

Thanks a lot for being here. We will be on the road on the days to come. So do not hesitate to reach out to us if you want to schedule a meeting or if you have questions, you know where to reach us. Thanks a lot, and have a nice evening.

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for this combined General Assembly that I now declare open. I'd like to warmly thank all shareholders who were so kind as to join us to attend this meeting. I'd also like to welcome all those of you who are connected online to follow this AGM live. At my side, Jacques Riou, Madam Clarisse Gobin-Swiecznik, Managing Partners and Marc Jacquot, CFO, also present on stage.

Marc-Olivier Laurent, Chair of the Supervisory Board; Madam Laure Grimonpret-Tahon, Head of Compensation Governance; Mr. Alberto Pedrosa, Chair of the Audit Committee and CSR.

I'd also like to welcome the front row members of the Supervisory Board. Of course, we're also welcoming a few guests and journalists who are present in the hall. This meeting is public in nature. It's broadcast on the Rubis website, and a recording will be available on the Rubis website as per applicable legislation. Lastly, let me point out that an officer of the court appointed by the company is with us to ensure the smooth running of this meeting.

To facilitate the vote on resolution and to be able to rapidly display the results, we'll be using an electronic voting system for this meeting. You will have received on entry electronic voting devices at [indiscernible]. It falls to me to establish the Executive Committee as statutory managing partner and in accordance with the articles, I'm chairing the 2 members of the meeting with the greatest number of votes who have agreed to act as scrutineers are Compagnie nationale de navigation that holds 9,349,609 shares represented by Mr. [indiscernible]. Thank you.

And Société [indiscernible] whose 6,200,047 shares represented by Madam [indiscernible] here present. Thank you.

So the Executive Committee of this meeting is thereby constituted with the agreement of scrutineers, I propose that Madam Eva Chauvet, Legal Counsel, Secretary of the Supervisory Board should act as Executive Committee of the Secretary for this meeting.

Also in attendance, we have the statutory auditors of our company, Mr. Cédric Le Gal, Mr. Frédéric Nusbaumer from PwC audit as well as Mr. Jacques-François Lethu, Madam Agathe Labaquere representing KPMG SA.

I'll now move to the formalities. You are gathered here at the initiative of the management for a combined assembly in accordance with the notice of meeting published 5th of May and the convening notice published 23rd of May. The agenda for this combined meeting is to be found on Pages 2 and 3 of the convening notice on Page 12 and 14, the addendum to the convening notice, all documents and information required by law to be found in the document next to Madame Eva Chauvet.

These documents as per law were made available to shareholders at the registered office of the company. I'd add that we'll be welcoming the shareholders until the section devoted to Q&A. The beginning of the Q&A will mark the end of the registration of shareholders before we vote on the resolution.

10th of June 2025, the share capital reached EUR 129,041,351.25 divided by 103,450,000 ordinary shares. There was furthermore on the 10th of June, 70,000 shares of treasury stock. These give right neither to the vote or dividend as to provisions of Article L.233-14 of the code of 201,000 shares deprived of voting, the automatic privation of shareholders exceeding the fraction that wasn't legally declared by the Compagnie nationale de navigation Mr. Patrick Molis, when crossing the legal threshold 5%, this automatic privation is applicable for a 2-year period following the declaration of regularization by the shareholders by mail received by the Financial Markets Authority dated 29th and the 31st of May as well as 3rd June 2024.

The quorum for this combined meeting is of 20% for voting shares for the ordinary meeting, 20,555,000 shares, 25% for the extraordinary meeting. According to the provisional attendance sheet, I note that shareholders present or represented or voted remotely hold 64,712,000 shares at 62.92% of the quorum. So the company -- this meeting is quorate. I consequently declare that the meeting is duly constituted and may take valid decisions. The agenda of this combined meeting that I'll summarize briefly interventional highlights and strategy, the financial results, a report on sustainability, a report on corporate governance followed by the statutory auditor's report and then interaction with shareholders followed by the vote of resolutions closing the meeting.

The meeting will proceed as follows. We'll speak before you successively, Mr. Jacques Riou, Madam Clarisse Gobin-Swiecznik, setting out the highlights and strategy, Mr. Marc Jacquot, presenting the financial results. Madam Sophie Pierson, Head of Sustainability, Risk and Compliance, will present the group's sustainability approach, joined by Madam Alix Lajoie, Chairman of Rubis Photosol and Mr. Jean-Christian Bergeron, CEO of Rubis Energie. Mr. Marc-Olivier Laurent, Chairman of the Supervisory Board, will present our governance. Mr. Cédric Le Gal from PwC audit representing the statutory auditors will present the reports of the auditors as well as the report for sustainability certification as well as taxonomy.

Following these presentations, we'll have an interaction with shareholders for a maximum duration of about an hour during which you'll be able to put your questions orally. Inform you that company has received electronically 5th and 6th of June written questions from 2 shareholders, which answers on our website were provided. We'll conclude with a vote on the resolutions, which will happen under the supervision of Madame Eva Chauvet, Secretary of the meeting. These resolutions are to be found on Pages 49 to 59 of the notice and 12 to 14 of the addendum to the brochure followed the request for resolutions on the agenda by the CNN, the management report on resolution propounded 16-48, the view of the Supervisory Board as well as the position of management on resolutions placed on the agenda by CNN to be found on Pages 7 and 8 in the Addendum brochure.

Let me remind you that the report of the auditors made available to you Pages 72 to 74 of the convening notice and the certification of sustainability and taxonomy information issued by PwC audit to be found on Pages 75 to 78 of the same document.

Thank you for your attention. I'll now hand over to Jacques Riou to discuss the group's activity.

Thank you, Gilles. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Very pleased to be with you for this general assembly. There were a few comments regarding the quality of the sound last year. I'm sure you appreciate the comfort of the [indiscernible]. I see that you're unanimous in that view, and so we'll hear ourselves clearly. In terms of highlights, I'd like above all to recall that last year, we disposed of the 55% that we owned in our former subsidiary of Rubis Terminal. This is a transaction that generates EUR 375 million and a capital gain of EUR 85 million. Now 2024 was another year of growth, growth of volumes, first of all, the plus 5% volume growth.

This is a very significant growth in volume terms. And obviously, there are local variations across the 3 continents where we operate. All geographies contributed to this growth, and that's extremely satisfactory. I was, of course, referring to Rubis Énergie, distribution fuels, which is our I'd say, our legacy business, our second business that of electricity production, PV. No need to recall that. The key indicator in this regard at this level is that of the pipeline of secured assets. What do we mean by that? These are assets in operation, assets under construction and assets that have received planning permission.

Actually, we have a 100% success rate on, of course, the operations for which we've obtained planning permission, then it takes about 2 or 3 years to secure the connection and to build the facility. Another highlight, we're pleased to announce that we launched the first tranche of our PV plant in Creil. When it will be complete in a few months' time, will be the second most powerful PV plant in France and it because the most powerful in our portfolio. It's an installed power of 200 megawatts.

Interesting, we've made good progress on a joint effort between our 2 subsidiaries, and we're now well organized a joint effort to deliver hybrid offers, fuel and PV across the various geographies in which we operate with each time, appropriate organization, something that is not all that simple and meets a demand from professionals in these various parts of the world.

So notable growth in operating cash flow boosted by working capital requirement, our injection and the reduction in nominal prices of petroleum products, plus 18% to EUR 665 million. Rubis has still a very strong growth of cash flow. There's nothing new on that front. We're always pleased to submit to your vote an increase of the unitary dividend that will be distributed next week at EUR 2.03, EUR 1.95, EUR 2.05 of growth. An exceptional dividend that you've already received the EUR 0.75, and that's the distribution of the capital gain that I referred to a moment ago concerning the disposal of our stake in Rubis Terminal.

In terms of the results, well, when we say growth, we say solid results. You have a reminder here of the 3 areas in which we operate, of course, Europe, where we -- LPG essentially an energy transition of course, and more recently, PV and fuel distribution service stations, but more marginally in the Channel Islands.

In the Caribbean, we're, of course, a significant distributor with a strong market share of fuels and other similar products, LPG distributor, and we're beginning operations for PV renewable power. You see with 52% of EBITDA, Caribbean is delivering an excellent score, higher in percentage terms in the group to what was the case in previous years. Africa, with 31% of EBITDA saw fine volume growth with problem of margins that were deferred to the beginning of this year, deferred margins in Africa.

We have our usual activities. We have a fine bitumen activity, distribution of bitumen. We started out with just one country in Nigeria, and we're now present across 10 countries. EBITDA, EUR 721 million is fully in line with expectations. And same with net income, EUR 342 million on a par with years '23 and '22 -- '23, '24, the 2 best years in Rubis' history. So we can kind of zoom out 5 years. I mean it's not that far back, but there's kind of a contraction of all external shocks that every company was faced with over the period. You all recall the years 2021, COVID that shut down of all economies pretty much, 2022, an inflationary shock of memorable proportions, '22, '23 accompanied by a significant hike in interest rates. These are all pretty violent shocks.

And in the meantime, during that period, one of the main markers of our activity that is the price of petroleum products. And if you take the price of a barrel that was about the same level in 2019. Well, it collapsed, you'll recall in 2020 down to $20, even a bit less at some point, then it grew back strongly in '21 significantly to reach a high at $120 and more first half of '22 from $20 to $120 and then plummeted to reach current levels of the price of oil has risen significantly in the past 24 hours, we're about $67.

So in this context, this difficult context, what happened? In 2020 and 2021, Rubis results did not take a strong -- were not hurt significantly. And in '22, we picked up in '23 and '24, we posted the best results in the group's history. I wanted to zoom out a little bit because in practice, I like looking at medium-term trends. And so it's fine, good to post results, but we've also worked extensively on another dimension. You know that our activity is also very much something that we do with regard to sustainability. Our first CSR report was done in 2011.

Our first carbon report is published in 2019 as far back as 2019. This year, we have our first CSRD standard sustainability report, which is a lot of work for any company for us, too. And maybe you've noticed that our annual report has been increased by about 200 pages to cover all of these topics. So what are our results? You'll hear more detail during the roundtable segment in a little while. We've seen a 5% cut in GHG emissions in the period since 2019. You might say 5% is a modest figure. But let me remind you that the trend is an increase of 5% per year throughout the group.

So if volumes go up, there's more transport, more refining. And so GHG emissions on Scope 1 and 2 come mostly from our boat fleet and our Martinique refinery plant. We've also continued our training efforts with all of our collaborators, already half of our staff have been trained to future developments in our activity, over 80% of our drivers -- and truck drivers have been trained to do defensive driving. I won't explain what that is, especially important in countries where the road infrastructure is not at the top level, if you will. And all of our staff have been trained to anticorruption and other ethical issues.

In late 2025, we published a new road map, which will describe the next steps for the next 5 years. Beyond our purely economic activities for a long time, we've been -- we've committed almost since the beginning, but at least for the past 15 years towards communities in which we operate and work. This means that we have put together programs, particularly with Rubis Mecenat funds that was created in 2011, which is first of all, supporting contemporary art, but also reporting and other projects to help underprivileged youth attract these youth and then train them through the practice of art.

It is, in fact, interesting to know that when you manage to attract somebody with an activity that he or she is passionate about, something artistic, there is a real palpable benefit for other school disciplines. I mean we're talking about children who are of school age. Most -- all of our subsidiaries through partnerships with about 60 associations and NGOs have such programs. We have 2 examples under your eyes that we are very passionate about. For example, the township of Thokoza in the south of Johannesburg, with a beautiful project. It was launched in 2012. We have about 500 beneficiaries, 100 bursaries. And many of our -- of the children that we -- or teenagers that we sponsored now show their work in galleries in South Africa or even are invited to France.

On a very different note, I wanted to say or perhaps repeat, I don't know if I've said it in the past 10 years, but we do have a primary school in Madagascar that was built by the group, the building itself, the facilities and the teaching team that's supervised by people from our group. And we host and bring to school about 100 children a year and have been working with them over the years. So it's a very underprivileged part of Tamatave in Madagascar, and we're very happy about this program because it has -- it enjoys great reputation. Something else that we do is to reinforce governance. It's work that's being done extensively in the context of partnership between the Supervisory Board represented by the people to my left and our managers at my right.

And so we've worked a lot the last year in order to improve and extend the prerogatives and powers of the Supervisory Board and to codify and document all of that very much along the lines of what the best practices are that we've found amongst our peers, particularly Société en Commandite that exists on the market. And so that meant that we consulted and asked for the opinion of the Supervisory Board when a number of investment decisions were made of over EUR 100 million for some strategic decisions.

Similarly, it might be the case when there are management-related decisions or other decisions to do with how the company is managed and who the managers are, something that started in 2024 and I think has been well received. I think you can say that because we meet -- we have at least 200 meetings with various investors in a year. And so we have very many contacts with the whole range of investors. And so we get a lot of feedback. The Board also worked extensively this year with 11 meetings, 94% of presence. The makeup of the membership of the Board [indiscernible] is the, in fact, the responsibility of the Board itself, basing its work on a subcommittee or a committee that is part of the Board in partnership with a specialized firm that only works with the Board and receives the applications or actually get out the applications that seeks them out.

We'll have a chance to talk about it later on, but we suggest appointing 2 new benches that will be something that we don't do very frequently, of course, and something that is very much part and parcel of the succession plan that is now known for, which will lead both historical leaders on this side of the of the [ roster ] to withdraw at the end of 2027.

And so as part of this item, we will suggest appointing Marc Jacquot to my right as well. Marc Jacquot is the group CFO and has been in the group for 5 years. You may have had a chance to meet him already and Jean-Christian Bergeron, who I think is a little further down and will talk to you a little bit later today and is Head of Rubis Énergie.

So I think I'm done, and I think it's my pleasure to give over to Clarisse.

So my part will talk about Rubis, its challenges, its qualities, the issues that we meet on a daily basis. Who is Rubis? Rubis is a distributor of Energy Solutions and Mobility. And what does it mean concretely for this company and for all of you as a result? Our objective is to support all of our customers and clients, so individual and professional customers with a complete gamut of products and services, fuel, as you know, for transport and transit and to meet the needs of industrial clients everywhere, bitumen to improve the network in Africa, in particular, liquefied gas also called LPG for domestic and industrial uses like kitchens and heating, but also for a few years, we've been doing PV solutions to produce low carbon forms of energy that are suitable for some of the regions that we operate in, local authorities and companies.

What's beautiful is that this offering is hardly sensitive to economic cycles. Why? Because it meets fundamental consumption needs, but also and most importantly, because it is based on a multi-energy source and multi-country model, which allows us to neutralize risks. The strength of the model relies on 4 assets, the quality of our assets, the operational excellence of our operations in the field, which is something that is recognized wherever we are present. And another very important thing is the mastery that we have over the state-of-the-art logistics chains that we've put in place these past 2 years to supply regions and be competitive in those regions.

The entrepreneurial spirit of Rubis that you know well and makes sure that operational decisions are made as close to our customers as possible, which makes a difference and also a strong local presence. This model allows us to come up with bespoke solutions for the countries in which we operate and so help locally develop those countries and continue to project ourselves into the future.

Energy and mobility needs, as you know, are going to keep growing in the coming years. Why? Because they are driven by demographics, the growth of the middle class and AI technology and so world's economic growth, generally speaking, our positioning as leaders on this markets, our local presence and our operational agility allow us to meet this growing demand. How do we meet that demand? Of course, we are still growing our service -- mobility service offerings, but we'll come back to that. And we also integrate new energy mixes to support new modes of consumption, mainly in Europe.

So in a rather changing geopolitical landscape, our structure allows us to continue our long-term strategy whilst following new emerging global challenges. This long-term strategy is based on 2 main pillars. The first one being our active growth policy. We significantly supports organic growth of about 5% a year with a targeted acquisition process so as to mainly reinforce our regional position. We also pursue partnerships in order to reinforce our market position and the quality of our offering. For example, at the beginning of this year of 2025, we signed a partnership with Castrol, the lubricant distributor that is well known in Eastern Africa for service stations as well as for our industrial customers.

The second pillar, of course, is the diversification of our offering. To complement what we distribute on a daily basis, we develop new lower carbon offerings that are adapted to the demand, for example, electrical charging stations in Guadeloupe and Martinique, in particular, for professional clients, for example, car rental companies or supermarket parking lots. So all of this, of course, is underpinned by our financial discipline, low debt, risk control and higher profitability objectives. It also means that we have ambitious sustainability objectives, but Mrs. Pierson will tell you more about that.

As the expert, we have 3 main objectives. Environmentally speaking, we want to reduce the carbon footprint of our most CO2-intensive activities for maritime transport and refining. On a human basis, we keep recruiting people locally with over 90% of our teams recruited locally, constant training, and we want to keep protecting our staff with over 97% of our employees that have health coverage everywhere we are present. And the safety and security of our assets and people remains a priority for the group with a proven policy in this regard.

Ethically speaking, our ethical code and our anticorruption code are being deployed at group level, 99% of our employees have been trained to these topics -- on these topics. Now let's take a look at the main areas that we are present to see what the main operational countries are for 3 zones. Starting with Africa. The African continent will have another 1 billion inhabitants by 2050. What does that mean for Africa? It means acceleration of urbanization with 60% of houses slated to be in cities, more needs for transport and services and the growth of the electricity demand in light of the fact that electrical networks are adapted and insufficient.

How do we answer those needs? The reliability of our logistical chain allows us to sell bitumen that meets the requirements and needs of international builders. We develop our service area network by adding some complementary differentiating services. For example, modern restaurants, access to small supermarkets, car management services, charging stations for scooters to site only a few. We also offer LPG seen as a transition energy source in Africa, replacing coal and wood for cooking. And we've also created our first PV facility for a large international client in Kenya with a size of 500 kilowatts a peak.

As regards to the Caribbean, I would like to focus on the fragmentation of these islands and the challenge that it represents in terms of access to resources, in particular, in areas whose standard of living is going up like Guyana and Suriname and in other islands, the standard of living is going up with a strong upward trend in tourism that's been picking up, meaning there's more need for more flights, more need for fuel and Rubis has a role to play in making mobility possible in these areas. For this, we have deployed a bespoke logistics network with over 400 service areas, fuel for aviation, fuel for maritime transport and industrial companies in the zone, LPG for domestic industrial uses and also low carbon solutions like electrical charging stations, PV self-consumption offerings for our professional clients.

Caribbean expresses the operational excellence of our group serving the population and its economic development. Let's lastly turn to Europe. The European market is a mature market with an acceleration of the energy transition to low carbon power and reduced dependence on exports. Rubis has diversified, invested in renewable power through Photosol in [ powers ] has doubled its secure pipeline and plants in the space of 2 years.

This activity meets European demand for the changing energy mix and to strengthen Europe's sovereign. I won't go back on Creil, Jacques mentioned. We commissioned the initial megawatts of [ Creil ], the second largest solar power plant in France. It will be fully operational early '26 and will power 85,000 homes. As to our legacy LPG business, we continue to gain market share in a stable LPG market. Good growth momentum in LPG fuel distribution in France and Spain for clients not connected to the grid or industries. These challenges have been addressed by Rubis for over 30 years. This operational excellence is the result of a robust CapEx policy. Marc Jacquot, CFO, will return to that in his presentation.

So to conclude, be assured, dear shareholders, our commitment and the resources we're rolling out. Our goal is to continue to ensure long-term controlled and profitable growth for you. This 29th successive dividend that has increased. Before handing over to Marc Jacquot, let's watch Rubis in images.

[Presentation]

I'll now hand over to Marc Jacquot for the financial report.

Thank you, Gilles. So I'll now discuss the financial performance of Rubis in 2024 and also give you some outlook for the current year. So this year, as you delivered a strong performance after 2 record years, 2022, 2023 illustrates the strengths of our diversified model, both in terms of distribution and products, services and geographic footprint. Volume-terms growth was delivered for our energy distribution across region, across all product lines. Productivity of renewable power is up in accordance with the road map that we presented to you last September. In '24, the group generated EUR 665 million operating cash flow. That's plus 18% versus last year. Rubis also very solid net income above EUR 340 million. This year allows us once again to propose an increased dividend.

So let's now turn to the detail of our operating performance, beginning with our [Technical Difficulty] activities linked to the supply chain with distribution activity that we master, thanks to our logistics expertise and our local presence, talking about ships, the vessels, storage, pipelines. And in '24, this activity generated EUR 223 million, slightly up versus last year. It's an activity that's stable and plays a key role in maintaining our operational excellence and above all, in containing our supply costs. Then there's the downstream segment, Retail and Marketing that represents the distribution business. That's the fuels, kerosene, bitumen, LPG, biofuels, distributed in bulk or in stations.

In 2024, this activity, as Jacques indicated, grew over 5% with adjusted margins that were stable across all geographies. Now this performance stems from our ability to supply key goods and services to our clients in a reliable, competitive manner whilst complying with best international standards. Turning to Europe. Rubis is on a mature market. LPG continues to generate very strong cash flow. Margins are up 6%. And then there's Africa. Africa, put simply, Rubis distributes bitumen in the West and fuel and LPG in the east of the continent. Volumes up 8%, but adjusted margins are down 8% this year.

Why? For volume, it's that bitumen in Nigeria was below expectations. But in other countries, South Africa, Cameroon, Guinea, we posted good volume growth. And on the fuel and LPG front, our program to modernize service stations done in East Africa launched right after acquisition of activities that has borne fruit. We see market share sharply up. But for the margins, Rubis was hurt by a challenging economic environment, high inflation, notably in Kenya. So that weighed on profitability of the network. Now the good news here is that we have margin revaluations already underway and will apply as of the end of H1 of 2025. And then Caribbean activity remains very strong, high levels, well, well positioned in, as you know, Guyana, Suriname, 2 countries whose economies are buoyed by recent oil discovery.

Guyana is ramping up and Suriname that should come into production in 2028. Lastly, a few words on our renewable power production activity, our growth driver in Europe, where Rubis covers all life cycles of a renewable power plant, the first cycle that includes identification of the land, obtaining planning permission, connection to the grid, all the Photosol projects that constitute the pipeline as it's known.

And this latter represents 5.7 gigawatts posting continuous growth. These projects will materialize gradually with conversion rates estimated between 40% and 80% depends on what point in the life of the pipe we find and generate EBITDA in a maximum of 7 years. In parallel, Rubis has 1.1 gigawatts of what's known as secured portfolio ready to be built or already under construction or under operation. The goal is to reach 2.5 gigawatts of secured assets by 2027. And lastly, our assets under operation, 535 megawatts generated EUR 36 million EBITDA in 20 -- all to -- end-to-end. We have EUR 721 million in EBITDA in '24, slightly down, minus 3% versus '23 on a comparable basis, split equally across our various activities.

Turning now to our balance sheet. Shown here is the net debt development between '23 and '24. There are 2 lessons. The first is that our cash flow remains very solid this year allows us to stabilize our debt. And available cash flow stands at EUR 320 million after paying financial expenses and our investments split in '24 at 1/3 for renewable and 2/3 for energy distribution. The second lesson is that our balance sheet is sound and confers great financial flexibility to implement our strategy.

The financial leverage below 1.5x EBITDA places us in a very comfortable position and confers a degree of maneuverability. A few comments, sorry for this rather crowded chart that I'll run through. On the left, the consolidated balance sheet of your company total EUR 6.7 billion, slightly up versus '23. We see that noncurrent assets reached EUR 4.4 billion, reflecting the expansion of renewable plants and ForEx as partially offset by the sale of Rubis Terminal. So let's now -- on the right, let's look at the statutory accounts that are holding. The assets currently down at EUR 1.1 billion, the fixed assets, EUR 1.1 billion.

Top right, we go from EUR 1.4 billion down to EUR 1.1 billion following the sale of Rubis Terminal that was last November. And then current assets immediately below. Combine the income company expenses to circulate cash to the subsidiaries of the group as well as the proceeds still to be received after the sale of Rubis Terminal amounting to just over EUR 260 million. And then cash is pretty constant at EUR 240 million. And with that, we'll be able to fund notably your dividend this year. So let's discuss the dividend. Thanks to strong results and robust balance sheet, we're proposing this year a dividend of EUR 2.03 per share paid out on 19th of June, exdate 19, 29th consecutive year of growth in the dividend.

We had the payment pertaining to the disposal of Rubis Terminal last November. We have a total payout this year of EUR 2.78 per share. A few words on the outlook for '25, we anticipate the following. In Europe, we're expecting a stability in LPG and acceleration of the development of renewable power. Africa, the growth is set to continue with higher volumes in bitumen and service stations accompanied by improved margins that were under pressure in '24. And lastly, Caribbean, we anticipate stabilization of activities at a high level. So on this basis, we're aiming an EBITDA group level between EUR 710 million and EUR 760 million. And the Q1 trends are encouraging. Volumes and margins are up across areas and that reassures the guidance for the Q1 results.

It's important to note, you know that we have no activity in the United States, no activity in China. So we're not exposed to the customs tariffs that are making front page news of late. In a word, your group is faring very well and offers fine outlook for the coming year. Thank you.

Thank you, Marc. I'm now going to give the floor to Sophie Pierson, who's right here. She'll present on our sustainability approach. I think she will be joined by Alix Lajoie and Jean-Christian Bergeron.

Thank you, Gilles. Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders, I'm honored to have this opportunity once again to present the year's key sustainability achievements and how that aligns with our strategy. Sustainability is a driver of value creation for your group and therefore, for you, our shareholders, and this translates into 3 main areas: enhanced operational efficiency; new revenue opportunities; and lastly, risk management, which ultimately safeguards value. These are the benefits that we'll be exploring together during this segment.

First, I'll walk you through the major milestones over the last few months. Then I'll give you a tangible sense of what sustainability looks like in practice. I'll show a video from our subsidiary, Vitogaz in Madagascar, it was filmed during my recent field visit 3 weeks ago. And then the heads of Rubis Énergie and Rubis Photosol will explain how sustainability is embedded in their respective activities.

Let me begin by highlighting the enhanced sustainability disclosure that is now available to you this year with the publication of our first sustainability report in line with European regulations. As Jacques said, this has meant a major work for Rubis, we see this as a positive step forward, improving the transparency of the information you receive on issues will contribute to the group's performance. Amongst the key initiatives this year, I'd like to focus on our road map to reduce GHG emissions by 2030.

Starting with our own assets, where the group is committed to reducing emissions by 20% between 2019 and '30. This target takes into account the continued growth, as has been said before, in petroleum product sales in regions where demand is still rising, particularly for mobility. And so we're forecasting a 30% increase in volumes between 2019 and 2030. In other words, we're aiming for a 40% reduction of the carbon intensity of our operations, which is not a small figure. We are focusing our efforts where the majority of our Scope 1 and 2 emissions are concentrated, namely refining and maritime transport, where we have approved and budgeted action plans. You'll find the details of that in our sustainability report, which I mentioned a minute ago.

Our road map also addresses Scope 3 emissions, i.e., the group's indirect emissions. Here, we've identified 2 key levers. The first is our ability to influence the decarbonization of third-party transport, maritime and road, primarily through increased use of biofuels. The second lever is, of course, the diversification of our own product portfolio to support the transition wherever demand emerges or grows, whether for customers of our energy distribution subsidiaries or through the growth of our Solar Power Generation business.

We'll return to this topic in more detail shortly with Alix Lajoie and Jean-Christian Bergeron. Beyond climate, the human and local dimension remains at the heart of our sustainability road map, which has guided us since 2022. 99% of the group's employees are hired and deployed locally. As we've already said, we're committed to creating quality jobs in every market where we operate. Investing in safety, providing over 46,000 hours of professional training in 2024, covering over 92% of our employees and offering health coverage to all staff even in countries where this is not mandated by law.

Factoring in the local economic and social impact of our activities is a key reason why your group is seen as a trusted player in the countries where we operate. Let me share a recent example of my visit to Madagascar with a testimony from Zo Andriamampianina, Managing Director of Vitogaz, Madagascar filmed on the construction side of a new LPG storage facility that will help secure the island's growing energy needs.

[Presentation]

All right. This is an exemplary construction site on so many dimensions, particularly as regards to safety because this construction site has seen no accidents that led to stoppage because we have 4 safety officers on site on a permanent basis.

Continuing this presentation on the importance of sustainability as part of your group's performance, it is my pleasure to welcome Alix Lajoie, President of Rubis Photosol and Jean-Christian Bergeron, CEO of Rubis Énergie.

Jean-Christian, you became CEO of Rubis Énergie last January and previously managed operations in East Africa. How is Rubis Énergie adapting to sustainability challenges?

Well, I think the example of Madagascar is a great example of that of how we adapt to sustainability challenges. This beautiful project, by the way, is a rather large investment of $15 million and something else that will be exploited very quickly because in mid-November, this project will be quite operational. On sustainability challenges, what I wanted to say is that our job is to get energy to our clients. And our clients want reliable, competitive, but also they want low carbon and clean energy, which is why we've got an ambitious road map around 2 pillars, the first being biofuel and the second pillar being solar energy, which we're going to be bringing mainly to our industrial customers.

On both pillars, clearly, our teams are mobilized on Pillar 1. We already have a lot of existing projects in Caribbean, where we collect biofuel. So we want to recover [indiscernible] to create fuels, particularly the SAFs for aviation. So the whole ecosystem there. On solar, as we said earlier on, our ambition is to help our clients, bringing them low carbon energy, helping them decarbonize their activities.

We've given the Guinean example is going to create the equivalent of 1,000 homes energy per year, and we have a lot of other projects in the pipeline. So very concrete projects. We've already cited the beautiful partnership with Photosol, which is also working with us.

Thank you, Alix, for this partnership. So all of this is being created in order to do decarbonization, but also very importantly, to create value for our customers.

Thank you, Jean-Christian, for these concrete examples. Alix, you lead our carbon-free or low-carbon electricity generation efforts. How does sustainability also require and combine with adaptability in your business?

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. It show that adaptability is a key word for us at Photosol because of the experience that we have in our various markets, which taught us to navigate a sector, which is a strong growth sector, certainly, but which also faces lots of changes, whether it's regulatory public policies, tendering procedures. So we exploit infrastructure, the energy production facilities. And so that means long term. And in order to navigate that, you need adaptability and sustainability.

Particularly, as far as we are concerned, our sustainability strategy is based on deployment and on robustness and diversification approach. Robustness for Photosol means 2 things that I will share with you in the form of examples. First of all, we decided to have a strong technical knowledge of all of our solutions to be integrated on the whole of value chain for large electricity projects, which means that we've internalized a lot of projects at the stage of ideation conception, but also technical teams with having strong engineering skills, allowing us to be present at the conception design and the technical challenges of our projects, financing teams, but also operation and maintenance teams.

So we've decided to internalize the maintenance and operations of our in production assets so that we have constant feedback from those projects for those assets on production, helping us improve and change the way we work going forward for helping future projects. The another thing is what we do in terms of sustainable purchases with our suppliers and stakeholders. We have integrated new strong requirements for the equipment that we receive. For example, we also test this equipment in our labs as we bought a piece of equipment.

We've also put in sustainability and traceability requirements in all of our contracts, the same with our suppliers. Our strategy is to have strong links with 1 or 2 players that are leaders on the market with similar skills so that a tender process, for example, we can make sure that the price is competitive, but also that we can be resilient there you go. So that's what I had to say on robustness. But diversification that's another access of our strategy. And for the past few years with the support of Rubis, we diversify ourselves. Usually, we did large ground facilities, but now we can do degraded and even farmland, so we diversify because we do also large roofs with [ 5 for ] Mobexi which we've acquired and now we can do roof solutions to address the needs of some Rubis customers, consumers of the industrial and farming sectors.

And last, diversification is geographic because we now have a presence in various European countries. And indeed, diversification makes it possible to better navigate the volatility and the variance of changes that may happen in national policies in particular.

Thank you very much, Alix. That's the adaptability by design, really. Jean-Christian, what you do in terms of sustainability is also highly linked to the robustness of the business model, particularly through risk management. Could you elaborate?

Yes. Clearly, it's at the heart of it by mastering or getting all of the risks, the diverse types of risks under control, you can really secure your business on the long term. I might also add that in highly competitive environments where we work, it's also a really strong weapon to be better than the competition and really does a strong competitive edge on many markets, particularly where the clients that we address are also sensitive to our sustainability efforts.

Of course, it's not just decarbonation that I mentioned earlier on, but there's also a number of standards that we impose on ourselves that in many cases, exceed local legal requirements, whether it's safety, security, social, ethical standards or commitments. So I think it's important to be ahead of the game in terms of what the governance might ask of us. And also, Rubis has a very strong local presence. We've said it already. This strong local presence allows us to support initiatives. We have very strong topics. We've seen the great example of the Tamatave's school, education, as health, gender equality, road safety, all of these things have already been mentioned and they are very important.

We have all of these initiatives, which makes us even more legitimate in those countries and places.

Yes, it's true that local presence is very much part of Rubis Energie's DNA and has been since its beginning. Alix, project acceptance by local stakeholders is also crucial for the success of solar initiatives. So how do you integrate these challenges into your work?

That's right. Local acceptance is very much part and parcel of the projects themselves. We do not do decentralized projects like this without acceptance, without local presence. At Photosol, we in fact, regionalized our teams. We have offices and teams everywhere in French regions as well as in Italy, in those regions where we set up shop. The recent Photoshop is a reference player in agrivoltaics projects that combine energy production, green electricity and agricultural production on the same land.

It's also thanks to the -- our ability to dialogue with the people with the local population with dedicated teams, R&D dedicated teams in charge of partnerships, a consultation team that dialogues with all of the stakeholders locally and regionally so as to create projects that actually are value creating for everyone. Also the fact that we have launched a number of pilot projects, R&D with [indiscernible] with the chambers of agriculture or companies like [indiscernible], where recently in the month of May, we started an agrivoltaic greenhouse with [indiscernible]. And those are examples that will help us improve what we do in this area.

And I think we've already shown that we're able to combine several uses of the same land creating value for partner farmers, for the communities, for the territories and profitability for us.

Shared value creation. We'd like to know a lot more about your activities but we have to continue. So in conclusion. Just a word to sum up your respective activities?

With Rubis teams, we're really keyed up and convinced to promote strong mobility. We're confident this will help us to continue to grow and expand our activities, of course, more sustainability with a lot of value created.

And from my side, contribute to the energy sovereignty of France and Europe and drive its innovation potential to seek out efficiencies in industry. France and Europe, for that matter, will need to bring in AI automation, seek new electric power production facilities that requires investing in renewable capabilities vital to the energy mix.

Thanks, Alix and Jean-Christian for these very valuable insights, which I'm sure has enabled our shareholders to better understand how sustainability is part and parcel of our daily activity. It's these proven successes on the ground that nurture us that drive us forward, help us to build our next road map 2026 through 2030. We'll tell you more about that at the end of the year. That's our take on sustainability, shareholders, including transitions, energy and societal to drive commitment, maintain the trust of our stakeholders. Thank you.

Thank you very much for that. I'm now going to hand over to the Chair of our Supervisory Board, Marc-Olivier Laurent.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders, my name is Marc-Olivier Laurent. I took up the Chairmanship of the Supervisory Board very recently, subsequent to the resignation of its -- the previous incumbent, Mr. Nils Bergene for personal reasons. I'd like to pay a personal tribute to him on the initiatives that he's undertaken in the 2 years which he chaired the Board to undertake a profound transformation of the Board's processes so as to meet his task to ensure permanent control of the management partnership under Article 9 -- 29 of the partnership.

Jacques refers to deep changes reflected in the internal rules of the Supervisory or the strengthened role of the Supervisory Board in succession policies for the management partnership as well as that of the leaders, strengthening the Supervisory Board for budgetary processes for strategy, the issuance of a prior opinion, very strategic transaction for amount of over EUR 100 million and implementation of Board executive sessions that are held in the absence of the managing partners.

I believe I reflect the Board consensus and say that with the support of this renovated tool, the intention of the chairs of the specialized Board committees is to extend and to deepen this action to constantly meet the request of our shareholders, that is that we fully exercise the role of the supervisory, constant supervision of the role of the company.

Just a brief reminder of the rules. I went back into the articles of the company, which state under Article 29 that the Supervisory Board ensures the permanent control of the management company also state under Article 14 that it doesn't authorize it to interfere in any way in the actual management of the company. But Article 14 also states that opinion and advice act of control and supervision do not constitute acts of interference in the company. I think that with that balance, opinion, consult, supervision and control, I thought it was the general view of the Board is that we have the wherewithal to fully exercise our role, and it's our intention to continue on that path.

We'll now go into the detailed governance of the group in 2024. Let me just say that the documents referred. The first document is the report on corporate governance of the Supervisory Board to be find on Pages 257 to 322, the chapter of the universal reference document and the report of the Supervisory Board to the AGM Pages 60 and 61 of the notice of meeting. Sections devoted to the text and the rationale for the draft resolutions to be found on Pages 16 to 59 of the convening notice.

I'll now present to you the major changes in governance in 2024, beginning with the succession plans of the Board.

Apologies for that slight glitch.

So of course, we're all aware that given Mr. Gobin and Mr. Riou's planned departure, the change of the succession plan is a very important topic for the future, and it is put to the vote the 2 managing partners who are very confirmed managers of the company who bring to the partnership the full weight of their past experience and these 2 appointments will take effect 1st of October 2025, received the unanimous support of the Supervisory Board and will be the subject of the vote of resolutions 4 and 5 of this AGM.

I think we've got a short film to show you, presenting these 2 individual candidates.

[Presentation]

So thank you, sir. I'll continue my presentation. Changes regarding the Supervisory Board were significant during the course of '24, now '25, what's going to happen in '24 shown here, the Board pattern with an independence rate of 92% up and 42% women stable versus last year to what Jacques Riou said, the Board met 11 times in 2024 against 5 times in 2023. There's clearly an acceleration in the Board's activity this year. For 2025, 6 members of the Board are proposed by the Management Board and put to the vote of this AGM, a significant renewal of the Board that today comprises 11 members, 4 members are proposed for renewal.

A new member been co-opted by the Board is to ratification, a new member to the appointment. Lastly, 2 new members proposed by the shareholder CNN approved by the management are proposed to your vote. Following the AGM if all these candidates are confirmed by your vote, the Board will comprise 14 members in independence rate, 93%, 43% women. The view is 14 Board members, a good figure. It shouldn't be unduly inflated, and we'll make sure of that. I'll now ask the candidates to introduce themselves in turn, starting with -- no, that's me, sorry. Apologies. Starting with Cécile Maisonneuve, who you know, she's up for renewal. Cécile, do you want to say a word? No. The assembly knows who you are.

You -- Alberto Pedrosa is up for renewal and who chairs the Audit and CSR Committee, an active Board member. You have Carine Vinardi who's an independent Board member is also up for renewals, already a Board member. Now let's turn to the new members. I'll ask Antoine Sautenet to come and introduce himself briefly because he's soliciting your vote.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Delighted to be with you today. A few words. Antoine Sautenet, age 46. I'm currently Head of Sustainable Development at Michelin Group. I'm a lawyer by training, and I have and very international experience that combines both the public and private sector with 3 main components in my career. Part 1, starting as a researcher, an academic career as professor in international law and associate research at French Institute for International Relation with strong expertise, Europe, Asia, world trade. Second part of my career in the public sector still the economic diplomacy. I worked at the Foreign Affairs Ministry on issues of development aid funding mentioned earlier, also matters of investment, IP with a strong focus on China.

Third part is the private sector. So for 12 years now, I joined Michelin with 9 years' experience abroad in particular, in Thailand was in charge of developing the business in distribution in Southeast Asian authorities, public affairs and 3 years in charge of Michelin in Canada, a major subsidiary for Michelin North America. Three years ago, I joined the group as Head of Sustainable Development. We're in charge of orchestrating CSR performance at Michelin. So my rationale, I was struck by the interviews that I had with people from Rubis, the quality of the human values that were conveyed during my interviews, maybe 2 key aspects of motivation.

The first and perhaps of contribution. The first is, given my international experience, I'd like to be able to bring an economic, social perspective on both energy distribution, energy -- renewable energy production, but also a second key point, given my experience in a group such as Michelin, CSR to contribute to the robustness mentioned earlier, also the resilience of the group's CSR performance while taking account of the specific of activities, the fact there's a very strong presence in developing countries. That's me in a few words.

Madam Nutu will now say a few words, please.

Good afternoon. Suzana Nutu, I'm 51 years old, married, 2 children. I'm a Romanian origin, worked 20 years in France, dual national. I've been working for 25 and large French groups. I've worked for Lafarge, Alstom and Sanofi. My expertise articulated around 2 main areas that are very complementary to the qualities and skills of the Board.

Firstly, for 15 years, I've been managing major transformative M&A projects, notably acquisitions of companies, international business, focusing on markets, some of which are common to Rubis such as Africa, Nigeria, South Africa, Latin America and Ecuador, Guyana or U.S. and Asia. My latest project at Sanofi was to sell the public health division over EUR 200 billion in sales, 11,000 employees and the sale of Doliprane. And prior to that, prior to being Head of M&A, I was in charge of treasury, finance, internal business control, managing plants in Romania. That's where I started out. And I have to say I don't have much experience in the energy sector, but I believe there's a lot of energy expertise on the Board.

My motivation is to support the growth of Rubis. I understand it's a focus of interest here to work with people who are very competent, joining my colleague, Antoine, that I mentioned in the selection process where human value and authenticity are highlighted. Thanks.

I'll ask Mr. Molis to come and introduce himself.

Good afternoon. It's the second time I'm introduced. Last year, my self-introduction wasn't extremely successful. I agree with the Chairman of the Board just said about the progress that has happened in terms of governance. I welcome it. I salute it. I think there's some more work to do. I think I will suggest a few avenues for improvements. I will not apply. I think -- or introduce myself. I think most of you know me, I'm not an activist [ fund ]. I have [ managed fund ]. I have managed companies in the petroleum, aviation and defense sectors.

I have long-standing experience in Africa, and I keep my companies for a very long time. Rubis is a beautiful company. Once more, I would like to welcome our work and Gilles Gobin, who built this great company buying a small company that I was, in fact, in charge of at the time, which is at the heart of the development of Rubis Terminal. As you know, I am the majority stakeholder of Grupo Rubis. I will represent the interest of the CNN. But also, I will look very closely at interest of the of the[Technical Difficulty] managing partners, which didn't use to be represented in the Board, at least since the [indiscernible] family left the Board in 2023. And so it's very important, I think, is very important to improve governance.

A lot has been done, but a lot remains to be done. I would like to thank Gilles Gobin for the dialogue that we've been able to start a few months ago to reach an acceptable agreement so that I can be associated if you've voted this resolution to the work of the Board and be assured that I will certainly defend the interest of all managing partners of this great company.

I would now like Mrs. Lauvergeon to come and introduce herself.

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm the last one to speak, and I've been told that I didn't have more than 3 minutes. I'll try to stick to that time. Very happy to be with you today. I'm personally passionate about 2 things on the professional plane, which is the energy and innovation. I spent a lot of time working in energy. I was on the Board of Engie for 12 years, of Total for 15 years. And as we speak, I have founded and run a company called ALP that invests in innovative and useful companies.

And we help a lot of entrepreneurs to succeed. And so that's the innovative -- innovation side of what I do. This passion for energy is very real for me, which is why I got this suggestion that I joined your Board. I was immediately enthusiastic. And I must say that I have a fairly broad experience in boards from various countries, geographies, sectors, though it's mainly energy, tech and finance. I also have fairly extensive experience in small and sometimes even very small companies, so companies of various sizes with always a strong focus on governance.

I had decided to sort of pull out of governance bodies, for example, because I was on SUEZ Board of Veolia, as you know, decided to buy up the company and this took up so much of my time that I decided to be on fewer boards. But I tried to also help support the community, for example, I share the simplification of public policies and the state of MEDEF, an important task.

Thank you very much. We can now move to the next point of our agenda, which is the compensation of managers in 2024, which you will vote on the resolutions 11 to 14. It has been studied in depth by the Committee of compensation and then the Board -- the Supervisory Board made sure that it complied with the 2024 compensation policy. You noted that the variable portion of the compensation is only 37.5% of the total that was possible vis-a-vis an objective of 100%. So that's for 2024. As far as 2025, a number of changes have been made. Some of the criteria for performance criteria for the variable part, the deletion of Article 55 -- 54 and changes in the ceilings.

The Supervisory Board gave favorable opinion for the content of Resolution 16, specifically because what I just mentioned applies to current managers, a compensation policy is being introduced for new candidates, Mr. Bergeron and Jacquot, a specific policy defined via a broad benchmarking of similar executives. The compensation has been fixed and the variable part can go up to 80% of the fixed part. As far as rules for holding this has been decided and this resolution has garnered a positive opinion from the Supervisory Board, and that would be Resolution 17.

In terms of the current variable remuneration -- compensation, which was capped at 50% is now capped at 80% for the leaders to be appointed. You now have the performance criteria for the fixed and variable part reflecting the changes that I just mentioned. There are a few changes, nothing of substance but in terms of the weighting so as to comply better with the company's objectives as currently stated.

Just a word about 2024 compensation of Mr. Christian Bergeron, my predecessor. Here, you have the terms of his compensation. And just one last, very last word on the compensation policy for the fiscal year 2025 as regards to the Supervisory Board, and we have suggested a significant raise of the amount to reflect a very significant increase of the -- both the number and of the work done by the Supervisory Board with a total budget of EUR 551,750.

The last item on our agenda is the multiyear variable compensation program under Resolution 30. What we suggest is that you vote for a program of performance shares. The previous one, by the way, had been voted in 2020 -- 2022, sorry, for a duration of 2 years. In 2024, we hadn't suggested a renewal of that program. But this year, we suggested for a duration of 3 years. So the authorization would cover a maximum of 1.50% of the equity, including a sub-ceiling of 0.20% for the new managers.

Former executives, by the way, are not part of that renewal. And so financial authorizations submitted to the current general meeting. I will give you some time to read what is on this slide.

And I am now able to wrap up. Thank you for your attention.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would now like the statutory auditors, Mr. Cédric Le Gal of PricewaterCoopers to present their various reports. Thank you.

Madam, ladies and gentlemen, managing partner, shareholders on behalf of KPMG, PwC, I'm honored to report on the assignment entrusted to [ ISA ] reports. Our reports pertaining to FY 2024 in the convening notice to this AGM as well as the universal registration document 2024. We've issued 7 reports, a report on the annual financial statements, a report on the consolidated financial statements, a report on related party agreements and 4 reports on transactions in the capital. PwC issued a report on certification of sustainability information and taxonomy.

As is customary in this AGM, I propose to highlight the key points of these reports. I'll start with our report on the annual financial statements of your company on Pages 433 to 436 of the universal registration document.

Annual financial statements are drawn up under French GAAP. And as part of our audit, we considered the assessment of equity interest as the key point of our audit. We reserve without -- we approve without reservation the report. Second report on the consolidated financial statements of your group found on Pages 429 to 432 of the universal registration document, consolidated statements adopted by the IFRS adopted by the European Union. They aim to give a fair view that the financial statements contain no material restatements adapted both to the activities in various businesses of the group as well as its organization. It was shared as well as the conclusions of our work with financial division of the group in the course of regular exchanges throughout the year.

We also reported on our work to the management partnership, the Audit and CSR Committee as well as the Supervisory Board report on the consolidated financial statements concerns one key assessment of the recoverable value and depreciation impairment tests of goodwill. We certified without reservation or observation the consolidated financial statements of the group. Our third report concerns related party agreement to be found on Pages 437, 439 of the URD mentions agreements authorized and entered into during FY '24 submitted to your approval.

And our report also mentions agreements previously approved by this assembly during prior years whose implementation continued during FY '24. The report on sustainability information and taxonomy to be found on Pages 251 to 255 of the URD. This of limited application concerns compliance with ESRS, the process implemented by Rubis to determine published information, sustainability information included in the sustainability statement and the taxonomy on the basis of procedures implemented. We've identified no error omission or major inconsistency regarding consistency with ESRS and European regulations.

Part 2 concerns two observations and [ technical linked ] to the first application of CSRD and 1 referring to the disposal of Rubis Terminal, which was finalized during the course of FY '24, whose environmental, social and governance data are not to be found in the statement of sustainability for FY '24. Lastly, in respect to the extraordinary shareholders' meeting, we issued 4 reports pertaining respectively, to resolutions 23, 25 to 29, 30 and 31 authorizing transactions that might have an impact on the capital of your company. They contain no observation on our part. We'll issue supplementary reports if and when your Management Board exercises the relating authorities.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attention.

Thank you. So we are now going to move to questions. Before we move to questions, let me just remind you we received written questions on the part of 2 shareholders, Mr. Ronald Samann and [ Julie Brown ], the e-mail indicated to this stated that in accordance with applicable rules, answers to these questions were published on the website of the company where they can be consulted. We will now take questions from the hall to whom may I give the floor?

Yes, sir. If you could kindly wait for the microphone, please.

Yes. I've been a shareholder for 18 months of your company. I think I did -- I was right to do so. I've got a question on Photosol because we never talked about the interview and these huge gaps of panels of PV panels, I mean, that require at least what is the maintenance? I suppose you've got to do revisions every annual, every 2 or 5 years they need to be maintained. So how is that operating? If it's -- if maintenance costs are high and also in terms of surveillance, I mean, are there no risks of vandalism of these panels?

Yes. I'll answer that question. So maintenance of panels represents about 20% of the operating expenses, the OpEx for these panels. The point that's important to note is that maintenance is already done by a unit, a team, dedicated unit in our second important. It's modeled when we -- when Photosol responds to tenders to RFPs, the maintenance is modeled in the expected IRR, internal rate of return.

Well, of course, surveillance are necessarily protected. I mean they're connected to the grid, I mean, with significant power, and we watch the sites -- sorry, with drones. We use drones to survey the sites to check there's no intrusion, theft. It's not easy to kind of walk away with a solar panel.

That's true. And it'd be easy -- more easily broken by bad weather than by vandalism and they were covered, were insured in such situations, in the event of breakage or bad weather.

Yes. I'm a long-standing shareholder [ of ] Rubis. I've got a question. You're based in many countries, including notably in South America. There's a currency effect. How is -- I mean, with the various -- the -- how is that reflected in your accounts, the ForEx?

So Rubis is exposed to currency fluctuations and more specifically to the dollar because we buy petroleum products on international markets in dollars, whereas we sell them. The sales and expenses in countries that are in local currency. Some countries, Angola, Zambia, Suriname, where there can be shortages of dollars, which sometimes generate longer conversion lead times or at least gap between the fixed rate and the actual rate.

How do we manage that? Well, we bill save exception, we invoice in the functional currency of the end customer. That's the first point. Secondly, when it's possible, we put in place currency hedges to secure our margin. And lastly, when the currency hedges are not available, I'm thinking here notably at Nigeria, Kenya, we put in place natural hedging strategy aimed at offsetting opposite flows in the same currency [Technical Difficulty] what we also try and do is finance locally our requirements in local currencies, and we finance in foreign currencies, receivables to achieve a degree of balance.

So that natural hedge that we put in place in Nigeria and Kenya has proven its efficiency this past few months. Now the cost, well, there's no -- in a natural hedge, the cost for the financiers who are working on this, that is it requires a watch on the various items in the balance sheet. There's no real cost. It's difficult as a rule to quantify those hedges.

Question from over there.

Mr. [ Jacques Riou ], I've got a question, annual report, Page 341, dividend paid to the management partner, 6.3.2 owing to an indefinite and several responsibility to that of a managing partner. Basically, you're going to receive 3% of the increase in the share price over the past 3 years, EUR 11 million. I didn't see that in the presentation. Always there's no high watermark included.

In other words, once the shares reach the threshold, it's low point, the share is going to pick up. So you're sure to receive money. But over and above the question I'm expecting an answer to the partners will change. The managing partners will change, as you've indicated, how can we have a guarantee? We -- a guarantee of the solvency of the managing partners because I see that just to Gobin family, 2.8% the market cap of the company, EUR 3 billion, that's EUR 70 million.

And if there's a financial partner on the company, the value of the shares will drop. So that guarantee -- are there other guarantees, people on the Board independent have a vision of the assets of the partners to make sure that we, as shareholders, well, we give the keys of the company to people who are sufficiently strong financially.

That's my question. Mr. Gobin, you announced that you were going to leave. I didn't quite understand is that the AGM that will be held in June '28 or '27. Because if I read the articles, you're born in 1950, the AGM in 2018, once partners over 78, he can no longer be a partner. So in terms of succession plan, it's just to bring forward by 1 year if you leave in '27, in June '27, the date that was planned historically. Can you confirm what I've just said? And I have every confidence in Madam Clarisse Gobin, I enjoyed, I loved her presentation.

Well, there's something very positive and that is very gratifying. So there is indeed a high watermark in the current draft of Article 56 over 3 years, as you've said, to ensure that these fluctuating effects don't bring about dividend payments in certain circumstances when the share price has a yo-yo effect over short period, something that existed over a 1-year period a few years back.

And in December '20, the period was extended to 3 years. That was in December 2020. So that's 4.5 years, and it was approved 99.8% by the shareholders. So I think I've answered that. As regards to the assets, I mean, I regret -- I think you agree that with that, we can't really guarantee a bit more than EUR 1 billion in debt. It's a reality. I don't disagree.

What is the purpose of a limited partnership? Well, we involve individuals who are fully engaged, fully committed even if our asset is very much way below these figures. They have a key value. And you have managers who are fully committed and aligned with shareholders, shareholders for their part on their side, see their risk limited to their sole contribution. It's a configuration. It's only in these share-based partnership that this occurs.

Is it really useful? Well, it allows to develop Rubis Group since the first investment by [ Gilles ] a few years back, which was something like EUR 80 million to arrive at a group that today weighs EUR 3 billion to grow, to develop long-term plans. I remind you that, for example, we're trying to develop a long-term plan in renewable PV requires perseverance, belief, conviction and to push these activities.

There's sometimes a lag between the expectations of a stock market and the share-based partnership is a very good answer to that when it has a listing, which is the case of Rubis, to bring together shareholders for a joint venture and therefore, to fund the group's creation also to confer a degree of stability in a pretty chaotic world.

To the stakeholders, thinking of Rubis employees, the talents that we seek to retain, talents we seek to attract. All these questions are of prime importance and this stability avoid kind of creeping control measures. There's a whole range of fundamental usefulness, which was initial choice of this partnership. I mean, I'm not saying that this limited partnership is the sole solution. I mean the fluidity of the stock market with a stability, long-term vision, which involves the managers fully, the leadership fully. It may sound theoretical, but it isn't. Think about it, every day. And I can tell you that we think about it and sometimes even a bit at night.

So 2027, the articles provide that the functions of the partners stop at 78 years of age, that's to say. So it would have been -- it's, in fact, it would have been at the assembly ruling approving the '28 accounts to present -- to stand in '29. So with Jacques and I will leave the partnership following the AGM approving the accounts of '26, that is in June '27, 2 years before the deadline.

That seemed to us, and it was a wish of the other managing partners to be able to support the transition in the smoothest and efficient possible way. Thank you. Further questions, [ Mr. Salmon ].

I've been a shareholder for quite some time, nearly 20 years or more. I have 4 questions to preferably Mr. Jacquot. First one is one thing you just said -- what you presented, namely that oil price has gone up. I would like you to give us a little bit of an explanation how you see that, over which time period because in my mind, the oil price is falling and falling and falling, but I may see it the wrong way. The question, of course, is are you talking WTI or Brent crude. That's question number one.

Question number two. The second one is that it has been maintained more than once that Photosol is profitable. And you, Mr. Jacquot, as the CFO, I would like you to explain how the financial accounts show a loss of EUR 40 million, which is very significant. And yet management maintains that Photosol is profitable.

The third one also connected to the Photosol is you're saying that we are on a trajectory of developing Photosol in the right way consistently. Maybe I misunderstood that. But in February 2022, you have predicted 1 gigawatt in capacity installed by 2025. Provided that I'm correct, in March 2023, you have declared this objective to be 1 gigawatt by 2026. On Photosol Day, I was there, if you remember, you announced 1 gigawatt in operation by 2027. And if I'm not mistaken, today, the reality is that we are at 0.5 gigawatt. Now I'm not sure whether this is all correct. I would like to have an explanation on that.

The last one point I would like to make. I'm not sure whether it is strictly to Mr. Jacquot is that in every single Annual General Meeting, we are provided with the news how fabulous, absolutely fabulous the dividend is and the dividend increase. May I just bring one example. Last year, around this time, the share price of Rubis was about EUR 34, now the share price is EUR 29. How does dividend of EUR 2.03 compensate for this enormous loss in the share price?

So for 20 years now, I've been shareholder. I've got 4 questions to ask. Question to Mr. Jacquot here mentioned an increase in the price of what I'd like a bit more detail as to how, when because I only seen the price constantly drop in the price of oil. But maybe I'm mistaken, the answer probably linked WTI or the Brent crude, if you could tell us that?

Second question, a question that concerns -- second question is on Photosol. Yes, we see the profitability of Photosol. We also see an increase of -- Yes. A third question on the trajectory, we spoke about a good growth trajectory. Figures were announced in '22, in March 25 we announced a target of 1 gigawatt bill in '26. I was present at the Photosol Day where we announced 1 gigawatt in '27. I understand that what's delivered is 0.5 gigawatt. Could you perhaps correct me if I'm mistaken.

A final question here again, possibly for Mr. Jacquot. Every AGM, you will explain that the dividend policy is absolutely fabulous and is increasing. I'd like to give you a mere example. Last year, the share price at EUR 34, this year EUR 29. How can the dividend of EUR 2.03 can offset this drop in the share price.

Thank you for that translation. So on the price, firstly, on the price of oil. Well, you know Mr. Salmon, you know the company well, generally speaking, Rubis is insensitive to the price with -- I mean, our unitary margins are stable and they're based on the volumes that we distribute, not the price of the project -- of the product. But it is, however, true that when the oil price drops, there can be some positive impact on the volumes because we produce cheaper and kind of even basic products that will be better, ditto for financing stocks. When stocks cost less, well, we have a financing cost of those stocks that is lower.

I'm addressing here, I think, your first question. On Photosol, I'll take that one. So we're a little bit surprised these questions at the AGM, Mr. Salmon, a member of the Supervisory Board, and he has full latitude to put these questions during the Supervisory Board meetings, but we'd be very happy to answer them. We held an official Photosol Day with targets for 2027 that are absolutely not called into question. And when the right trajectory to get there, we already explained on multiple occasions that the development is one and the secure pipeline is there, but there are lags in implementation because of connections in France, and legislation slowing on the projects, CEO, Patrick Pouyanne of Total Energy has also stated that during his many interventions.

So we are fully in line with what is announced to the market, which means that the objectives given right after the acquisition of Photosol are no longer objectives on the market. What counts is those that were announced for 2027.

On your second question regarding the profitability of Photosol, it's not the first time that we're both faced with this lack of understanding. When we explain that Photosol is creating value, we mean by that, that we're building an asset. We're not necessarily talking about net income short term. When we're a company that is in full growth. It doesn't deliver its potential on day 1. Remind you of the profitability criteria of Photosol that you must know almost off by heart now is that in terms of the project, we're seeking profitability of 7% to 9%. When we answer tenders and the operation of finance, 90% by nonrecourse debt that gives a return on equity and ROE, that's double digit.

And I'd say that more work globally where Photosol is creating value on the mid- and long term. It's when we look at the change in its secured pipeline because the secured pipeline, 1.1 giga today has required all the licensing work, find the land, get the authorizations and connection date to the power grid. And then there's construction, so there's a lag in time and a slight disconnect, decorrelation between the value creation and the reality, which is the net income -- sorry, on value creation, if I could just say that since we acquired Photosol, the secured pipeline was doubled over 3 years. So it gives us an idea that dynamism [indiscernible] and the team that you saw earlier. And in fact, our benchmark here on the French market, when we invested 2.5 giga of capacities created every year increased.

Today, the market has -- is growing by around 5 giga. So for the time we invested and the current period, you have an illustration of the dynamism in the market and the value that's currently being created, takes, of course, several years. Sometimes it can take between the start of the development project and its delivery in France, it can take up to 7 years. What is secured today will deliver EBITDA in the coming years and the performance in France is not extraordinary either there are Italian neighbors where we're based delivering 7 giga per year like in Spain, not to mention Germany that produces 15 giga a year. In '22, Germany was producing as much as the whole French base. So there's real dynamism in this market that we know how to capture and capture now. And it's this pipeline that's being created with very high success rates, will deliver the future EBITDA.

Concerning the share price, well, for 3 years now, the June 10 closure, Rubis is the only company in its listed peer group to see its share price growth plus 5% versus its peers, minus 11% and a TSR 35% over the period compared to 1% for its peers. I think that says it all.

Further questions over there.

Well, hello. Good afternoon. Sorry to bother you with Article 56 of the articles, which I hope won't be the Band-Aid of -- kept in [indiscernible]. Okay. So we -- high watermark is in the definition that we thought the high watermark for the meeting to understand well. It's the highest price of the -- the highest share price that it's ever reached. So it means that in the definition of Tweedie Brown as it was put to around EUR 54 and the share price, not including reinvested dividend is about EUR 60.

So -- what's more, the second problem is that of this AGM in 2020 where you kind of rebase on a comparable basis, obviously, with a far lower share price. So when you have the possibility of having a 10% of distributable earnings allocated to you on the basis of that equation, I don't know whether it's the alignment of interest between the partnerships that fluctuate between 2% and 10%. I mean simple question, intellectually, you're ready to revisit that provision because it doesn't follow alignment of interest with the partners.

Second question concerns the departure of your previous Chairman, Nils Christian Bergene, was reelected last year with a Soviet style vote. So I fail to understand maybe I missed something, but 6 months, 8 months on after his reelection, he goes off with that explanation, personal reasons. Obviously, the diplomatic formula usually used. Thank you for answering that.

Now regarding the question on Nils Christian Bergene, they were questions were put by Mr. Salmon and we gave a written response on our website. So on alignment, nothing more to add compared to -- Mr. Nils Christian Bergene decided to leave unilaterally. He contributed considerably to the work as a Board over several years, including these past 2 years as Chairman, by reaching out to many investors to have progress in the internal roles as Chairman of the Board, Nils Christian Bergene, who has been a member of our Board for a long time, assumed the Chair very recently, and he took that decision. These things can happen without looking for other explanations. For the managing partnership as Marc-Olivier Lauren said on behalf of the Board, he drove a number of changes in the internal rules, rules of procedure that are very interested. And for that matter, we're held by the investors whom we've regularly meet.

Regarding alignment, well, the high watermark, in fact, where you are intervening is that you disagreed with a high watermark a year ago or 3 years ago, now you want an indefinite duration. That's what I was given to understand. I mean everything is possible to go tell you that there's kind of a magical formula to get a company to operate, read all the targets each and every year in all situations. Well, we all agree in saying that there's no miracle. There's no silver bullet. But I mean, for people who weren't either in the shareholders or the management partnerships who initially approved the status of managed partnership, Soviet style, 4.5 years of shareholders, many of whom have here considered. It was a good formula at Soviet-style majority. Okay.

The articles is the constitution of the company. We don't change the articles every year or every 2 or 3 years, we need to remain reasonable. Nothing is perfect, but it was considered a good solution 4.5 years ago. Quite honestly, I failed to understand why it would become a poor solution or a bad solution today. Having said that, when a question is put to us, we like to answer, in 2020, we already did that because we presented these significant changes as they were back then. And what we said is we were going to consider the matter.

We don't change the articles of an SBF company without looking at it 3 times, without seeking advice, without preempting the reactions of other shareholders. When you see 200 investors in a year, I mean it's like in a management committee, there are diverging views. It can't be done hastily and hurriedly. We said we're going to consider it. And by next year, we'll let you know -- the AGM next year, we'll tell you if we believe that appropriate or not or if it requires changes to the answers. That's the answer we can give you today.

Any other business-related questions? You have the microphone but does it work?

My name is [indiscernible] I work for a trading firm. First, I'll try in French. But if I can't do it, then I'll switch to English. In 2021. I had written to you about share buybacks. You planned to do some in 2020 up to EUR 25. That was the price. I liked it. Because you, at that time thought that [ EUR 55 ] was the value of the company. It was smart. After that, you didn't do much at all in terms of share buyback. It took me some time to understand why that was the case. And I think the share buybacks don't help managers in terms of calculating the dividend, but a normal dividend, which for tax purposes is very bad, serves them. And so how can you say that there's strong alignment between both groups?

Share buybacks. Indeed, value distribution to shareholders can be done in several ways. Share buybacks is one way, paying out dividend is another way. And until today, Rubis decided to pay out dividends. And so it's the 29th year, now that the group has decided to do that. And of course, we've already had this conversation [indiscernible] have position on that. As you know, we did some in 2021, right before I joined. And today, we still have small buyback programs to offset the dilution that comes from the performance-based compensation of [indiscernible].

Perhaps I could add one thing. It's true that the dividend -- point of view from dividend and share buybacks and the demarcation line has often been the Atlantic Ocean, but now this demarcation line exists in Europe. We have a dividend-only policies Marc was saying, which I think many of our individual shareholders like. We don't just have people who don't like dividends, don't like for the tax reasons. So you need to satisfy and have a consistent policy over time. We did do some share buyback. We certainly didn't feel that it was a panacea, particularly as regards to stock price.

And don't forget, we generate a lot of cash, but we have a group with strong growth, which means we need CapEx. And we need the cash flow to do the investment beyond paying out dividends. I know that it's a conversation that's been going on for a long time with some of our shareholders, you are one of them. I respect your point of view. I know that the companies that have gone for share buybacks -- sorry, dividend, we would need to divide to halve the dividend to do share buyback. And I'm not convinced everybody would like that either. So I understand the conversation. We have a similar conversation with other investors. When we have other conversations with other investors that have other points of view, that is our policy. And I think it is justified.

[indiscernible] individual shareholder. I have 3 questions. I'll ask for clarifications and ask questions. On Photosol, I understand each project has its own debt, but it's part of one company. So each project is independent from a capitalistic point of view with the main company bringing 10% to each project. Is that the truth? Yes. In light of the fact that you're developing projects quickly, do you have a CapEx -- cap with a minimal margin threshold? And when do you think the company will become free cash flow positive?

And the third question is around Rubis Energy. Last year, I asked a question about the development in Guiana, a high potential country. What has been done in the meantime?

All right. Yes, I do confirm that each project is responsible for its own debt and is independent. On the cap for CapEx, we have announced a CapEx plan with EUR 1 billion in expenditures between 2024 and 2027, which will be financed between 80% or 80% of it will be financed by debt. And so once you've said that, you can ask the question of what's going to happen and will we stop financing that growth.

So I think the question will be asked in a few years from now in 2 ways because there are 2 options, so to say, either we recycle capital perhaps by sending up and running projects in minority or majority so that you get some new cash and to refinance some development or you can decide to do fewer developments, and that's something that those things that are possible that we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Yes, we will have to get to a certain critical size so that we can start thinking about those types of partnerships or disinvestment.

Guiana, yes, it is 800,000 population. The growth is huge. It is the fastest growth in the world and has been since 2020. And that growth has been driven by the fact that mines, fields have been discovered, which means that there are associated revenues. We don't produce oil, do we? So we benefit from the indirect effect of these discoveries with rising standard of living, more infrastructure and all the things that mean that there will be more consumption. So it's the beginning of that story. We've been in Guiana for about a dozen years. I think it all happened through buying some assets from Chevron, and we were investing there on a regular basis.

There's another country, by the way, Suriname, an adjacent country, where we built a petroleum product deposit, which is experiencing the same story a little later. I think oil will be produced as of 2028 in Suriname. So we will see the same effect, but a few years later. As far as French Guiana, I think we're protected. There's no [indiscernible]. I think people will be happy with that. The 3 territories are all very close to one another, the 3 adjacent countries in the north of Brazil.

I just wanted a clarification when you compared Rubis' stock price to a panel of stock prices or companies. Could you say which ones? [ OTI, GTC ] Parkland? So distribution or petroleum-based products, distribution companies that are listed.

All right. No other questions. I think we will now ask [ Ivar ] to move on to the vote on the resolutions, if you agree. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As indicated at the beginning of this meeting, the quorum required for this combined general meeting is 20% of the shares entitled to vote for the ordinary part and 25% of the shares entitled to vote for the extraordinary part. The final statement of the attendance sheet shows that the shareholders present or represented or having voted remotely hold 63.41% of the shares with voting rights. The required quorum is therefore exceeded. I propose that I only present the title that summarizes each resolution.

Let me remind you that the full text of each resolution is contained on Pages 49 to 59 of the convening brochure and on Pages 12 to 14 of its addendum. If you allow me, I'll start by explaining what the modalities are for electronic voting. I think we have all the details on the screen. Please first check that your smart card is inserted correctly. As regards to the vote, if you want to vote for the resolution, please press the 1 key. If you want to vote against the resolution, press the 2 key. If you wish to abstain from voting, please press on 3.

When the word acquitted appears on the screen of your vote, this means that your vote has been counted. And if necessary, there are houses that are present in this room. So I will therefore now present the resolutions, and I invite you to vote after I have said voting is open. First resolution, approval of the financial statements for the 2024 financial year. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. The resolution is adopted.

Second resolution, approval of the consolidated financial statements for the 2024 financial year. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. The resolution is adopted.

Third resolution, allocation of profits and determination of dividend, distribution of a dividend of EUR 2.78 per share for 2024, interim dividend of EUR 0.75 per share paid on an exceptional basis on November 8, 2024, and payment of the balance of EUR 2.03 per share on an ordinary basis on June 19, 2025. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. Resolution is adopted.

Fourth resolution, approval of Mr. Jean Christian Bergene as a general partner, non-managing general partner as of October 1, 2025, subject to the adoption of the 17th and 33rd resolution submitted to this meeting and with prior effect, voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. Resolution is adopted. Fifth resolution, approval of Mr. Marc Jacquot as General Partners as of October 1, 2025, subject to the adoption of the 17th and 33rd resolution submitted to this meeting and with effect prior -- with prior effect. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. The resolution is adopted.

Sixth resolution, renewal of the term of office of Mr. Marc-Olivier Laurent as a member of this Supervisory Board for a period of 3 years. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. The resolution is adopted.

Seventh resolution, renewal of the term of office of Ms. Cecile Maisonneuve, the member the Supervisory Board for a period of 1 year. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. The resolution is adopted.

Eighth resolution, renewal of the term of office of Mr. Alberto Pedrosa as a member of the Supervisory Board for a period of 1 year. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. Resolution is adopted.

Ninth resolution, renewal of the term of office of Mrs. Carine Vinardi as a member of the Supervisory Board for a period of 1 year. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. Resolution is adopted.

10th resolution, appointment of Ms. Suzana Nutu as a member of the Supervisory Board for a period of 3 years. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. Resolution is adopted.

11th resolution, approval of the information relating to the compensation of corporate officers for the year ended December 31, 2024, referred to in Article L. 22-10-91 of the French Commercial Code. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. The resolution is adopted.

12th resolution, approval of compensation and benefits paid during or awarded in respect of the year ended December 31, 2024, to Mr. Gilles Gobin in his capacity as manager of Rubis SCA. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. Resolution is adopted.

13th resolution, approval of the elements of compensation benefits paid during or awarded for the year ended December 31, 2024, to Sorgema SARL in its capacity as Manager of Rubis SCA. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. Resolution is adopted.

14th resolution, approval of the compensation and benefits paid during or awarded for the year ended December 31, 2024, to Agena SAS in its capacity as manager of Rubis SCA. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. Resolution is adopted. 15th resolution, approval of the compensation and benefits paid during or awarded in respect of the year ended December 31, 2024, to Mr. f Nils Christian Bergene in his capacity as Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Rubis SCA. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. The resolution is adopted.

16th resolution, approval of the compensation policy for Mr. Gilles Gobin, Sorgema SARL, Agena SAS as managers of Rubis SCA, subject to the adoption of the 33rd resolution submitted to this meeting. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. Resolution is adopted.

17th resolution, approval of the compensation policy for Mr. Jean-Christian Bergeron and Mr. Marc [indiscernible] in their capacity of managers of Rubis SCA subject to the adoption of fourth, fifth and 33rd resolutions submitted to this meeting. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. The resolution is adopted.

18th resolution, approval of the remuneration of the compensation policy for the members of the Supervisory Board of Rubis SCA. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. The resolution is adopted.

19th resolution, determination of the total amount of the annual compensation of the members of the Supervisory Board, EUR 551,750. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. The resolution is adopted.

20th resolution, approval of amendment #1 to the assistance agreement concluded between Rubis Photosol SAS and Rubis SCA falling within the scope of Articles L. 225-38 and following articles of the French Commercial Code. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. The resolution is adopted.

21st resolution, approval of the renewal of the tacit renewal of the assistance agreement and its amendment #1 concluded between Rubis Photosol SAS and Rubis SCA falling within the scope of Articles L. 225-38 and following articles of the French Commercial Code. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. The resolution is adopted.

22nd resolution, authorization to be given to the Board of Management for a period of 18 months to allow the company to buy back its own shares. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. The resolution is adopted.

23rd resolution, authorization to be given to the Board of Management for a period of 24 months to reduce the share capital by canceling the shares held by the company. Article L. 22-10-62, the French Commercial Code. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. Resolution is adopted.

24th resolution, delegation of authority to the Management Board for a period of 26 months for the purpose of increasing the capital by capitalizing profits, reserves or bonuses. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. The resolution is adopted.

25th resolution, delegation of authority to the Management Board for a period of 26 months to issue shares and/or equity securities giving access to other equity securities or entitlement to the allocation of debt securities and/or transferable securities giving access to equity securities to be issued by the company with preferential subscription rights. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. Resolution is adopted.

26th resolution, delegation of authority to the Management Board for a period of 26 months to increase the number of shares to be issued during capital increases with preferential subscription rights and in the event of excess demand. Voting is open.

[Voting]

No more voting. Resolution is adopted.

27th resolution, delegation of authority to the Management Board for a period of 26 months to issue shares and/or transferable securities giving access to the company's share capital as consideration for contributions in kind of equity securities or transferable securities giving access to the share capital. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Vote is closed. Resolution is adopted.

28th resolution, delegation of authority to the Management Board for a period of 26 months to issue shares and/or securities giving access to the company's capital in the event of a public exchange offer initiated by the company with cancellation of shareholders' preferential subscription rights. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. Resolution is adopted. 29th resolution, ceilings on the issuance of shares and/or securities, giving access to the capital by virtue of financial delegations, overall ceilings of 40% of the capital, including sub-ceiling of 10% of the capital for capital increases entailing the waiver of shareholders' preferential subscription rights. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Vote is closed. The resolution is adopted.

30th resolution, authorization to be given to the Board of Management for a period of 38 months to proceed with the free allocation of existing or to be issued performance shares to members of the company's salaried staff, members of the salaried staff and/or executive officers of the company or related companies or economic interest groupings or to some of them entailing.

[Voting]

The vote is closed. Resolution is adopted.

31st resolution, delegation of authority to the Management Board for a period of 26 months to issue shares with cancellation of preferential subscription rights of shareholders for the benefit of members of the group company savings plan at a price set in accordance with the provisions of the French Labor Code. Voting is open.

[Voting]

No more voting. Resolution is adopted.

32nd resolution, amendments to Article 28-2 of the Articles of Association to reflect certain legislative changes relating to the organizational arrangements of the Supervisory Board. Voting is open.

[Voting]

The vote is closed. The resolution is adopted -- 33rd resolution, deletion of Article 54 of the Articles of Association. Voting is open.

[Voting]

The vote is closed. Resolution is adopted.

35th resolution, ratification of the cooptation of Mr. Antoine Sautenet as a member of the Supervisory Board. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Vote is closed. Resolution is adopted.

36th resolution, appointment of Mr. Patrick Molis as a member of the Supervisory Board for a period of 3 years. Voting is open.

[Voting]

The vote is closed. The resolution is adopted.

37th resolution, appointment of Mrs. Anne Lauvergeon as a member of the Supervisory Board for a period of 3 years. Voting is open.

[Voting]

The vote is closed. Resolution is adopted.

With the votes over, I now give the floor back to our Chairman.

Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Madam Secretary. Don't forget to return your voting devices on your way out. Thank you for your attendance and participation and see you next year. Thank you.

[Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]