Alten S.A.

Good evening.

Thank you everyone. Thank you for attending this audio call, Alten, about the revenue at the end of November 2025. The activity is the same as what we've commented last month during the quarterly activity results. The activity has simply eroded a little bit more. There are no further news that would counter or even modify the comments that we made in September. At the end of September 2025, the revenue was 3 billion euros, down 3% compared to last year. In France, the activity is up 4% and outside of France, it's down 3.9%. On a like-for-like basis, the activity is down 5.2% as anticipated and down 4% in France and 5.8% outside of France. as you probably know the activity was sanctioned by 1.5 opening days than last year in the first quarter for a 0.6 impact on organic growth at the end of september 2025 so our organic negative growth is 4.6% on a like-for-like opening days. The revenue is down 1.7%, 991.9 million euros compared to 2024.

Our activity is 4.5% down on a like-for-like, 5% outside of France, and 3.5% down in France.

The headcount of the group has continued to decline on a like-for-like basis. At the end of September 2025, we had 57,000 employees, 51,100 were engineers, 57,000 at the end of 2024 outside of work grid, and 55,900 employees, 51,000 140 of them are engineers in 2024. Out of the 340 engineers that we have, 32,000 of them are outside of France. On a like-for-like basis, since the beginning of the year, the engineer count have been down 281 people in France and 500 approximately outside of France. In France, the organic decline is 4%. The activity was impacted by the automotive sector, down 22% year-on-year. Telecommunication, down 20%, and banking, down 20%. Aeronautics remain stable. Defense sector is up 12%, and railway up 6%. These sectors have remained dynamic in France. Comments are quite similar to what we said last time, and you will see it's pretty much the same across the different geographies. Iberia, the activity has continued to go up by 5.6%. Almost all sectors are up. Italy, the activity is up 2.3%, slowed down at the beginning of the year 2025, but is now stabilizing around a 3% growth rate. germany we have a 16.8 decline of the activity the uh we have a slowdown of negative grade and of the negative grade um it was 16.8 and now it's 20 or it was 20 last year and now it's 16.8 and it was minus 15 in q3 um the revenue is down but there could be a restart in aeronautics in germany you will see Defense is growing significantly up 50%, but it only accounts for 6% of the German activity. The UK activity is down 12%, especially because of the automotive sector.

And so down 10%.

And in the civil aeronautics, the decline is slower. The sectors that are growing are defense, obviously, up 15%, and accounts for 10% of our revenue in the UK. Benelux, the decline has continued to slow down, down 8%, which means that at the end of September 2025, the accumulated decline is 11%. And Belgium, automotive is back to growth, such as life science as well. in important activities for us because they account for more than 60 percent of our belgian activity that was uh up until now declining netherlands the activity is stabilized in the semiconductor activity that accounts for 40 percent of our revenue there a sector which we believe shouldn't go back to growth in 2026 thanks to the asml accounts Eastern Europe flat activity. Poland, which accounts for two-thirds of the revenue, is up 5% approximately thanks to the banking and finance sector. The other sectors are up. Romania, the activity is down 10% because of the automotive banking and finance. sectors in scandinavia the decline of the activity is stabilizing around mauritius 20 22 because of the automotive sector and uh uh trucks which accounts for a large part of this of the swedish revenue fifty percent of it Same situation for tooling machines in Finland, which accounts for 80% of the revenue, but it's going back to a balanced situation. North America, activity is down 7% in the US, which accounts for three-fourths of the activity in the area. The decline has accelerated this year because of the automotive sector. down 12% now because mainly of your OEMs in the US. The automotive sector accounts for 28% of the revenue in the US. And the other main sectors that are life signs in the tertiary sector, the negative growth rhythm has slowed down. Canada, 20% of the activity and the activity is up 5% and 7% in Q3, thanks to a rebound in the aeronautics sector, which accounts for 20% of the Canadian revenue and the banking and finance sector that account for 40% of the revenue in Canada or the sectors in Canada rather. APAC, the activity has once again declined in the third quarter. The negative growth is 1.3%. APAC, the activity there is around zero. Mainly, as you will see, because of one country, more specifically, which is Korea, because China, that accounts for one third of the activity in the area, is actually up. Four percent of the sectors are up, except for telecommunications, which accounts for 20 percent of the activity in China. India, that accounts for 27% of the APAC, is down 5% because of the tertiary sector and other industries. In total, these sectors account for almost 40% of our activities in India. All the other sectors are up, including automotive. Japan, 23% of the area is up, 23%. 13%, rather, thanks to automotive and tertiary sectors. Finally, South Korea, which accounts for 6% of the region, is significantly down 30% because of the automotive sector, which accounts for more than 50% of the revenue in Korea and is down almost 50%. So if we now look at the activity, depending on the sectors and the different verticals, same here, no change compared to the comments that we made last month. Automotive for 15.5% of the revenue is down 16%, 12%. in manufacturers and also down in the OEMs. There's no signal that the activity will stabilize. Let's hope that the EU... So it was 28% for the OEMs. Let's hope that the EU will take decisions that will be favorable for the sector next. year railway is up one percent and it should grow in 2026 and arrows face a 15 10 of the revenue and is almost stabilized in the third quarter which means that four percent of the negative growth union the activity is back to positive activity if we compare to q3 24 25 and this operation um But not on year-to-date. But this is a good sign of stabilization, and let's hope that we will pick up beginning of 2026. Defense naval activities, which account for 8.6 percent of the revenue, are up 11.2 percent. The growth has accelerated in Q3, up 14 percent. Energy has grown 3.9% thanks to the nuclear sector, up 9%.

Energy sector is up 6.7%.

Life sciences has grown 2% in Q3. Medical devices is down 14% when it accounts for 20% of our revenue, while the pharmaceutical sector is down 2%. Industrial semiconductor, which accounts for 9%, is down 6.6%. It's the other industries that is down 9.5%, while semiconductors and electronics is only down 2.6%. Telecommunications, 4.5% of the revenue is down 7%. An activity that's gone down 12% with OEMs and 7% in operators, mainly for the operators because of a shrinking of budgets with French operators. Finance sector, 8.6% is only down...

1.8%.

France is the only country where the bank accounts are still down. The other countries have gone back to growth. Retail services and public services, 16.6% of the revenue is down, mainly because of the decline in budgets in the public sector. It's down 7.5% in retail, DSI in retail.

We have quite a lot of projects ongoing.

M&A. We had not announced any acquisition in the first half of the year. We had announced that there were a few companies in the pipe, and that's still the case. There are about 15 of them. We, however, closed three small companies between July and October 2025. A small company in India with a front office in the US for 7.5 million revenue and 120 consultants of the CRO. And ADAS, another one in ADAS for the automotive sector that has a 5.2 million revenue. about 200 consultants, 270. And another company in Spain with subsidiaries in Latin America, mainly on digital transformation that has a 19 million euro revenue last year, 310 consultants. We still have companies in due diligence across different continents, India, the US,

China and France, Germany and Latin America, for the most part.

Will there be other companies that we will be able to close by the end of the year? I do think so, yes. But because the due diligence is still ongoing, it's not granted yet. perspective the forecast for 2025 remain unchanged compared to the guidance that we gave in july and confirmed last month the economic context has not changed their third quarter has hasn't changed it hasn't seen any change in the trends as you may have seen here and their activities is however giving timid signs of stabilization but the activity has not really improved no more visibility in europe the automotive sector is still heavily impacted and in france the situation as you probably know is quite specific and on a lack for like situation we still believe that we'll have organic negative growth around 5.2 percent for the year 2025 we're hoping that it will be closer from 5.2 than 5.5 and the guidance that would given around margin in july is confirmed around 8.8 for operating margin in 2025. I'll give you the floor now, so if you'd like to open the floor for the attendees so I can answer questions, should you have any. The Q&A session is now open. Feel free to raise your hand if you have questions.

Laurent Dor.

Can you hear me?

Yes. Two questions.

A few weeks ago, when Simon and you were looking at the number of engineers billed for each client for the past three to four years, week after week, rather, there was a stabilization is this a trend that you've continued to observe in the past three weeks three to four weeks and second question could you share um with us what's changed since the arrival of syrian in the group And the now of engineers on a week-by-week basis, yes, there was somewhat of a stabilization in October. We'll have to see what the forecast for the end of the year will show, as you know. You're probably familiar with the model and the customers and their projects at the end of December, and to be able to have a real understanding of what 2026 will look like in terms of embedded negative growth, we'll have to wait to see the number of projects at the end of the year and the ones that will restart immediately in order to see what will be the end of year cut, as we call it, to see if this trend of stabilization of the activity is confirmed or not. We're getting contradictory messages. We have some clients, I can't give you names, but people who have said that they have that they would accelerate outsourcing and that they would not renew projects in France and who are looking for alternatives to start other projects outside of France. We're also getting other messages that are slightly more encouraging from clients who are telling us that they have a portfolio of projects that are significant, which are going to be accelerated in 2026. So, like I said, there's very little visibility, and I mean it. As for Cyril's arrival, you know cyril he will join us on november 17th he is going to take over the general general management of the group so operational activities management and steering of the group which are now covered by Simon. And of course, there will be a long transition period. Simon and Cyril will be working hand in hand during that transition period. And I hope and we're quite sure, actually, that Cyril will be able to bring a lot of ideas and will help us work on the consolidation of some elements of the strategy that have already been mentioned because most of them are on the last page of the presentation to accelerate different organization measures and transformation actions. that need to be undertaken in the group in order to be able to take on the different challenges and the pooling of offers. We have a lot of different offers, services offered in the group that are very high quality, but because of the organization based on geographies not mastered well enough.

And we will probably

accelerate our offshore activities it won't be like iet because we won't have half of our headcount offshore but we will probably have a significant increase around 50 to 100 percent of our offshore headcount which for now still accounts for only 15 percent of the headcount of the group that could go up to 25 within the next three to four years okay thank you

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Dorr.

Are there any other questions?

We have a question from Nicholas David.

Nicholas David, you have the floor.

Good evening.

Can you hear me well? Yes. I have a question. about the impact on price because we have talked a lot about volumes and quantities because this is what is the most detrimental, I would say, but we will get to start, well, we'll get to talking about the trends for next year, what will be the trend in this very challenging market. I'm a... It may be an argument for our customers. Are they at this stage any pressure on prices or not? Well, the discussions have not started with our customers, far from it. The requests from our customers... concerned productivity gains today with engagement programs from suppliers and service providers in engineering and technology to commit over two, three-year periods to make gains on projects for which we can have specific amounts according to the project, according to the sectors. It can range from 10% to 15%. or even 20% in some cases. And actually, our commitment is to implement some organizations, sometimes a little bit more offshore, to meet this. And sometimes there are penalty provisions. So if we can't show that we were able to have a 15% productivity over three years, then we can get sanctioned. So that is, we need to pay, I don't know how it's called in France, not... Well, a penalty, a fine to the customer. So that's a percentage of the unmet productivity. So you have like very complex provisions. I won't go into details, but today we are following this logic in AI. is part of our productivity logic today. So, we have customers who ask whether you can use AI on a given project, and if you can use AI, please issue two different proposals, one with AI, one without AI. So, the idea is to perform better, to have more productivity. So we can help some of our projects with AI tools and it can cut the cost by, I don't know, 10%, 5% or 10%. But then we have the number of FTEs that is impacted. And this is seized as an opportunity for our customers, you know, to... their roadmap and their portfolio of projects. And as far as we know, and I'm thinking of clients, I mean, they're all very much late because of financial management that is steering cash flow. With regard to rates, daily rates, hourly rates, depending on the countries, there will be requests from our customers to lower the prices, but it's too early to tell. I think that last year we had rises in our prices, I think in 2024. on time and material. So the price lists have increased, not as much as the previous years, but it has increased. But the impact of price in our turnover is a very complicated exercise for different reasons. So we can identify where prices have increased If we have to charge per hour per day, but then we have different effects and causes and related to the country, to the population, whether engineers are junior or senior engineers. And you have all the activities related to work packages where you have global prices for a specific team. And then we have to manage our own productivity, our in-house productivity, because this is no longer about time and material. It's about increasing productivity and therefore margin on our projects. So this is not... price logic, but more of a project based approach. And then our job is to optimize this while complying with the productivity logic that is requested by our customers. Okay. My second question was about the banking sector in France. So you still have this downward trend. And we see the growth for our competitors. Is there any problem in our position at Alten and the banking sector? Do you suffer from reductions in their suppliers? On IT, you don't have such high volumes than engineering. So what's your approach there? Degrowth in France in the banking sector has slowed down. Given the impact, the influence or the weight of France in the banking sector, even though we have a degrowth that is 1.8%, and even... even though there is a growth in other countries, we reached nearly a zero growth. It's not the same level of degrowth that we had a year ago. But you're right to stress that unlike stakeholders that are much more generalist, have more of a general approach than we are and rely on functional trade offers, on banking activities, Per se, I'm thinking of investments done by some banks and including the renewal of their workplace environment. Well, we do not have any offer or well, we could say we don't have any offer on these specific activities. We have technical technological offers. So as our offer is not as diverse as our competitors from IT, what we used to call SS2Is, Well, we need to dedicate resources on tools, functional tools and projects to the detriment of infrastructure and technical projects. And so that's something that I am not denying. I have already commented that IT budget, there was such an inflation. that that is absorbed by software vendors today because of sas migrations that we have to make decisions and it's probably um it's probably to the detriment of technical projects and so we had to you know we had to face increased rates that are quite substantial for some software vendors yes this is the kind of feedback that we got but the good news is that syria is experienced with the banking sector Yes, exactly. Maybe I missed a figure. What's the degrowth of France in the banking sector? I think I missed a figure. But there is a significant improvement, right? The degrowth of France on the banking sector. Maybe I'm mixed with Q3, Q4. So we are down 20% indeed. So down 20% year-to-date Q3 and year-to-date. And down 14% on Q3 only in France. Yes. So there is a slight improvement. It's still a long way to go. Yes, exactly. All right. Thank you.

Thank you.

We have now a question from a phone number. I will hand over to you and will ask you to please introduce yourself before you ask your question. Thank you. Good evening, Bruno, Derek, El-Singh. Can you hear me? I have four questions. The first is on life sciences. You mentioned an improvement, the trend on Q4. And yet it was a sector that you were quite pessimistic about for the past few months. Can you please explain, give us some clarification about this trend on Q3? Is it a trend that could last potentially? And maybe explain the positive and negative aspects that you have identified for the next 12 months. The second question is the... Can you give us the predictability of having 15 days before the 31st of December? Do you think about a specific number for our engineers at 100, 200, 300? Were there bad years? with a great volume or are we talking about 50, 100 engineers each year? What kind of... What's the error margin? And my third question is on net hiring or the net degrowth or organic degrowth of staff. So I think it's Dan240 in Q3. Can you please... give us the breakdown and the distribution between countries where it's increasing those where it's decreasing because offshore is positive onshore is negative i believe and my last question is on automotive industry and when we look at the comments for each country and correct me if i'm wrong but it feels like there was a significant um low but um But when you look at Korea, well, you said like Italy, China, Japan, they're doing pretty well in automotive. So what about the other countries that are negative? So you say that we have not reached the lowest point in Germany, for example. There are countries where things are doing better. Well... What are the positive trends? Because the investors are quite worried about this. You've asked quite a few questions. Yes, yes. And I've been quite straightforward from the very start. On life sciences, indeed, there was an improvement on Q3 for the group. Shall we draw any conclusions on what is about to happen in Q4 or will happen in Q4 next year? Honestly, I can't give you a straight answer. I have no clue. Because if we look at the activities that have decreased, declined this year in life sciences, we had pharmaceuticals, pure pharmaceuticals that was impacted on the second quarter with the termination of some projects, and some of them have been resumed in the US. So that was because of the context, and we didn't know for how long it would last. We have projects that will end and be transferred to the US. So for pharmaceutical companies in Europe that have announced it in the press. And so we can't feel the impact of this yet. So we don't know what will be the impact on our activity in Q4 and 2026. But I don't know exactly what will happen. But what happened in Q3... that was quite significant in life sciences is that all activities with medical equipment which was experienced a downward trend in q1 and q2 are down are nearly null on Q3. So if you look at the whole life science sector, there are a combination of effects. So maybe our usual customers, Philips Medical, Zemus Medical, etc., maybe since last year they have tightened up and kind of loosened again the strings of the purse for the investment budget. Well, over a quarter, it's hard to tell. So we'll see what will happen in Q4 if we can identify a trend. But to date, that's the current state of play. I can't tell for sure how it will evolve in the next six months. I'm sorry. Just to... to make sure I understand. So nearly stability in medical equipment and resumption of some projects that have been stopped in the US. So these are the two main factors. Yes, the two factors. We have struck a balance in the third quarter on medical equipment. And besides on pharmaceutical parts, we have a few projects that have ended. because of activities being transferred to the US, but a lot of portrait had stopped in the US and have been resumed and have resumed in Q3. That doesn't give us an idea of the long-term development of the activity. For the end of year, maybe we'll have AI tools one day to predict this. Sorry, what did you say? You are better than AI. Your feeling, your intuition is better than AI. I can't hear you very well, Derek. Maybe you don't have AI tools, but you have intuition and your skills. That's good enough.

Yes, but...

It can vary from one year to another, you know, the cut that we can have. It can range from 400 to 800 people. But by the end of the year, so around mid-December, or even before that for some customers. We can have information on the level, well, the projects, whether they will end or not, so we can anticipate. But actually, you need to wait not for the 31st of December, but the 15th of January to be able to make a correct assessment. And so the gap is not over 50 engineers. A 50 engineer gap wouldn't be very significant at group level. But it can be on several hundreds of engineers. The net staff hiring, you made the right calculation, is down 240 people. And for most of them, They come from onshore countries. That means Germany, partly UK and the US. And finally, your last question was about the automotive sector. I agree with you, but there are three countries in which we face a decline in growth, which is France. So significant degrowth, down 30%, then US and Germany. And on these countries, You don't see any other offer? For example, Germany, when you cut 60% of your business with the OEM from the automotive industry, well, at some point you reach bottom low, so you can't go any lower than this. Yes, but it's still decreasing, so maybe it won't be as... as important in the future. And for OEM, well, for some of them it was down 90%, down 60% was the average. So yes, 90%, you can't go much lower than this. But for manufacturers that had lowered but not as much, the slowdown in activity is not over yet. And we can't tell... To what extent this will be in Germany in 2026? And actually, that's why the German Chancellor has talked recently about this, because he fears this situation to worsen. So you say France down 30%, US down 28%, Q3 or year-to-date, I think, and then Germany? I don't think you have mentioned that figure. Q3, year-to-date for Germany? Yes, year-to-date and Q3 only to see the variations, the differences between these three countries. So US was 28%. And automotive down 12%. I'm not sure it's Q3 or year-to-date. So for your question on Germany, Germany year-to-date is down 27% on automotive. And it's still an ongoing trend. We have this downward trend. And on Q3, we are down 30%. So it's even more significant.

On German automotive industry, we have two different phenomenons.

We have a lowering the volumes of projects, assignments and contracts. So it's mainly OEMs and to a lesser extent, manufacturers. But there is also this shrinking in business, even on new projects that have been launched, because part of the projects today are worn over offshore. And for the US, we are down 12% on year-to-date, and our phenomenon is quite similar for similar reasons. We were down 15% on Q2, and we are down 17% on Q3. for the automotive industry with this acceleration of degrowth, whether for manufacturers or for Q3 and then OEMs, but mainly for OEMs though. Okay, that was clear. Thank you. So down 30% for France was Q3. Because you say down 20% for year-to-date. Down 30% for France. Down 30% for France was generally, globally. For the automotive industry, automotive sector, yes, automotive sector. And 22% year to date. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for your patience. Thank you. Moving on to a question from Aditya Buddha. You have the floor.

Hi Bruno. This is Aditya from Bank of America. Can you hear me? Yes, sure. Thank you. Just a quick question. So you maintain the outlook for the full year of minus 5.2 to minus 5.5. Based on the year to date, that implies actually that you will have anywhere between something around minus 5 to minus 6.3% in Q4 to get to that number. So actually talking about growth being worse than Q3. Can you show what is going to drive that sort of further decline in Q4 versus Q3? Is it any particular sectors or markets?

Yeah.

Now, if we were to achieve minus 5.5, it would mean that for Q4, the implied decline would be roughly 5.8, which, to be frank, is really a worst case that would assume that some customers would cut further projects that we today do not know about. But we cannot, let's say, we have to consider that assumption also because in the past, in the recent quarters, It happened many times. This is really the worst case. If we were to achieve minus 5.2 for the whole year, it would imply a minus 5% for Q4. which is probably more accurate due to what we see and we know now. But again, we are at the end of October. And still, we have two months to complete. OK? We could also imagine that that assumption could be beaten if the activity gets more stabilized. But due to the economic context and due to what's happening today within many customers, there is a huge unpredictability of their behavior. Reason why we are confident with the guidance. And today, even though I'm quite cautious... I would be more comfortable with minus 5.2 than with minus 5.5. But again, we have to be cautious. This is the reason why we have maintained the guidance.

Understood. Thank you. That's very clear. Could you also just talk about what you're seeing, maybe specifically, just a bit more, I guess, on the automotive and market? Because I think, as you said, the customers are still uncertain about You spoke about the shift to offshoring. Can you talk about how you're seeing any impact there in terms of, I know, maybe the competition from some players who already have a larger offshore presence? Are they benefiting in terms of some of those projects as a result of that?

Aditya, please, could you repeat? Because my sound is not very good, I think. So you are talking about offshoring and the competition?

Yes, yes, exactly. So I was talking about the impact of the shift to offshoring in automotive, but also other sectors. Is that maybe leading to some of the competitors who already have a larger offshore presence winning a larger share of the projects because of that?

Well, no. In our business, there is no, I would say... there is no massification of projects that can be achieved within the IT business because the project size is always quite small if we compare with projects within BPO activities or, I would say, more traditional IT projects. Within that business, I mean, if a project is gathering 80 to 100 people, it's a huge project and many of them spread over many geographies, India, Germany, France, US, you know. So the competition with very strong offshore base used to massifications is not able to compete with and also to manage very small projects at the project that we handle in that business. In the future, we know that the need for offshore will grow for economic reasons. But the pace of growth is really easily manageable. And when necessary, we can easily ramp up 500, 1,000 people in offshore capabilities like we did in the past. So we do not fear the competition with existing offshore capabilities because what is key is first to be able to win the project with a local front office and also because customers are asking for local front office for technical management of the project. What will happen probably in the future is that players with engineering capabilities offshore with front office will be able to win additional projects against the competition. And even though our revenue within the auto sector is declining, for the reasons that we have already commented many times, I'm really convinced that Alten... and probably other big players who own market shares against a competition in Europe and also probably in the US, a competition which doesn't have the capability to wrap up easily projects in offshore capabilities like India or Morocco or other countries. And against players, I'm thinking about big local German players with no offshore capabilities at all. So on one side, The offshore trend, and again, it won't be 10,000 people. We will have an increasing number of people. Perhaps we will double within five years as a maximum, but it's really easily manageable. That will lead to a decreasing revenue for the project that will be shifted to offshore. But on the other hand, we will win additional projects because the market will be more concentrated. within the global R&D budget of the OEM and more generally of our customers. So at the end, what will be the result? It's difficult to say whether we will... win additional revenue. Well, today the global revenue is declining, but not because of offshore. It's declining because of the European and also US OEM obliged to cut their investment in R&D and engineering. It will come to a time when this cut will stop, and they will have to increase their budget again.

Thank you very much Bruno. Thank you.

We have a new question from a phone number. I will hand over to you. Please introduce yourself before asking your question.

Good evening, Bruno.

It's Emmanuel Parouf from Julien Dupont. Can you hear me? Yes, I will. On M&A, are we in line with the acquisition prices? Because we had definite prices in the past. My second question is, As on the positive aspects that you've mentioned for 2026, are we talking about two, three clients or more important, you know, to end on a positive note? I was thinking that I had in mind it was in the aeronautics sector and Airbus, maybe there's more, it has more traction.

Can you tell us more about this?

I mean, we're still looking at the same multiples that you're aware of. So we always buy on multiples of seven or eight, but most of the time it's seven with earn-out systems, two to three years. So we haven't modified our strategy in this regard. sometimes we submit bids with higher multiples higher than ours when there are no earn outs because the seller want to sell and are considering an exit so we find ourselves in a situation when we have to take over management steering of the company and have to integrate it directly into our operations and when we buy with a seven or eight multiple and earn out so of course if it's not growing of course we we pay it seven times but that's not the objective what we want is the seller to have an earn out so if we have to take into account the uh earn out with an ebit based on the acquisition date we're around nine and ten so we haven't really changed our policy in terms of acquisition. Now, about the potential mergers in 2026, there are no specific sectors except for the sector that are already growing outside of aeronautics. that's showing positive signs. But I think that in the end of the day, things will stabilize in the automotive sector once the manufacturers have stopped their strategy. And when you read the press, it's not the case. You clearly see it. Investments that were made in 2022 or 2023 were, for some, It's not exactly what I mean, but people thought that it would be possible probably to be ready by the deadline, but especially for batteries. where om's really were involved it's not granted so what i think is that there are a lot of investments that are still on all today so the eu will still have to make decisions but mainly talking about europe and we'll then we'll know which direction investments will have to pick up if investments are possible because they're manufacturers that have try to have agreements with Chinese OEMs who have stopped their development batteries and who will simply supply with the Chinese, which raises question in the value chain. But if whether I think that we'll have to continue to have this negative growth in the next six months, I think that yes, in the automotive sector in 2026, we will have a stabilization of the activity. But it's hard to anticipate as of today. That being said, the rules of the EU will have to apply no matter what. So at one point or another, all the investments that have been postponed will pick up. But that doesn't mean that offshoring to save money won't happen anymore. For the other sectors, the situation is the one that I've already described. I don't want to sugarcoat it for 2026. For now, it's not very sweet. The situation is not very sweet. If I may, when do you think you will be... able to stabilize the situation before going back to grief. Well, the life science, there are a lot of uncertainties and what we're not aware of is how deep the EU is disinvesting in pharmaceutical companies in Europe. Will European pharmaceutical companies move towards the US for different reasons, because of custom rights and the clear incentivization plan by Trump to relocate their activities in the US. There are some companies that have said that they would probably opt for the US. We're not seeing the impact yet of this in the activity, but we're not yet able to assess to what extent this will have an impact.

And the other reason is that drugs are cheaper in Europe than in the US.

Medicine is cheaper than in the US. Especially in France, the prices are really low.

But that's no reason to...

relocate R&D activities in the US. But at the same time, we don't do molecule development. We're not really ready in R&D. We're present in regulatory activities, clinical trials, and this is something that's more difficult to offshore. And I'm not saying that the pharmaceutical sector is going to completely move out of yeah but we're expecting moves in 2026 and we don't know to what extent we don't have that visibility Thank you very much for that. Have a wonderful night. Thank you. I actually have another question that I've just received on my computer in the Q&A box. An anonymous attendee who's asking whether we can reach our historical 10% margin rate in 2026, even though it's still need to give a guidance in 2026 but given the 2025 uh negative growth uh embedded negative growth in the structure of the pnl the reason is clearly no not in 2026. uh 2027 maybe i don't know hard to tell it will really depend on the 2026 activity levels if we're able to go get back to growth mid 2026 the 10 percent uh a bit operating result of the activity. Of course, we're trying to reduce costs continuously, but we need a growth of our top line and we need a recovery of our activity to be able to leverage our current level of SG&A. So 2027 maybe, but 2026, absolutely no, no, we won't reach this 10% rate in 2026. I don't know whether there are other questions. We don't have any other hand raised in the Zoom call, so are there any other questions? Well, I think we have heard all the questions. If there are no further questions, I would like to thank you for partaking in our conference for our activity at the end of September. So to summarize, as you have heard, there's no change in the situation

since last month's conference.

The next meeting will be January 29th, and I will then be able to answer Eric's question on the end of December card. Thank you very much, and I will see you shortly. Thank you.