VusionGroup

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Vision Group Q3 2024 sales conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To answer your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Olivier Guernand, Investor Relations Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our Q3 2024 sales conference call. I'm Olivier Guernand, Vision Group's Investor Relations Officer. With me today are Thierry Gadou, our chairman and chief executive officer, as well as Thierry Lemaitre, our deputy chief executive officer and chief financial officer. Thierry Gadou will start with some remarks on the group's third quarter and nine months business highlights. Thierry Lemaitre will then comment on our financial performance for the same period. And Thierry Gadou will conclude with some comments on our fourth quarter and full year outlook. After these remarks, we will be happy to take your questions. As a reminder, some of the information to be discussed on our call today is forward-looking and subject to important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For these, I refer you to the safe harbor statement included in our press release and on slide two of this presentation. This evening's release was issued a short while ago and is available in both French and English on Vision Group's website The slides of this presentation can also be found on our website in the regulated information section. A replay and a transcript will also be available on our website after this call. And with that, it is my pleasure to hand you over to Thierry Gadot for his opening remarks.

Thanks, Olivier. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining our conference call. So before handing over The floor to Thierry Lemaitre to review our figures. Let me summarize the key achievements and the business momentum of the past quarter. Q3 has been our best third quarter historically. As anticipated, we started to accelerate our growth rate in Q3, now close to our full year target of around 25%, which we are confident to reach as this acceleration continues in Q4. In terms of geography, revenue growth was driven by the acceleration in North America as anticipated, while the MEA is still showing a decrease versus last year. I'll come back to both regions in a minute. In terms of product lines, VAS revenues continue to show a similar trend as earlier in the year, with recurring VAS growing rapidly, driven by cloud and data services. and non-recurring services decreasing due to an overall difficult environment for retail. ESL division growth is increasingly driven by the growth of EdgeSense, the new digital shelf system we launched earlier this year, which is now in high-scale rollout in Walmart US and in pilot in other retailers both in America and Europe. EdgeSense is our fastest growing innovation ever, by the way. Sales momentum has continued to be strong in Q3 with, again, high growth in new orders. We are building a strong backlog for the next quarters, which explains our confidence in our full-year target and in next year's acceleration. Let's look at our dynamics per region briefly. North America, now our first market, is clearly the primary driver of the momentum in 2024. The Walmart contract is now in an intensive phase. We're currently rolling out the program as planned, and we will have shipped over 500 stores by the end of this year with a target of 2,300 stores installed by the end of 26. The rollout pace will accelerate in 25. New production lines have been ordered during the third quarter and will be implemented in the next 9-12 months so that we can continue to increase our output capacity throughout 25. Our software revenues are growing rapidly as well. Furthermore, in parallel to the current rollout, new solutions and use cases are being tested to expand the strategic relationship with Walmart. We recently opened a new office in an innovation lab and a customer experience center in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart is headquartered, as you know. And our board of directors and advisory board last week was in Bentonville, where they met with Walmart, discussed strategies going forward, visited stores, distribution centers, and, of course, the new Vision Group Innovation Center. As already announced, let me also remind you that there were several other successes in America during the third quarter. We signed a contract with Ace Hardware, the 21st largest retailer in the U.S., and one of the top national DIY brands. We have announced a rollout with Hy-Vee, one of the top regional grocers in America, and we hope to announce new deals in the fourth quarter, which are currently in their final contracting phases. In Europe, even if the multiple successes of recent months are not yet reflected in deliveries, which is normal due to the industrial lead times, order intake has been growing in Europe since the beginning of the year, and additional new contracts are being finalized in many countries, both in the food and the non-food retail sectors. Just a few examples to mention. The rollout of one of the world's leading sports retailers, which will reach over 20 countries soon. Travel retail is a fast-growing sector, too, and Fusion Group Solutions will soon be in over 40 airports in 15 countries on four continents. So if you travel, you'll see more and more technologies. The home improvement sector is also an area where Vision Group's leadership is undisputed, with several leading brands in the process of international deployment in many countries. Pharmacy is also a fast-growing sector, with several European chains signed into three, including Phoenix, recently announced, each comprising several thousand pharmacies in many countries, and other deals are soon to be announced in that sector. The same goes with health and beauty with one of Europe's leading brands now to deploy in more than 10 countries and several other major chains currently being piloted, including one with our new Edge Sense platform. And that's in Europe again. And new deals in DIY and consumer electronics, which have been signed recently in Europe. So another growth driver in Europe is the modernization of our large installed base and the pace of store renewals and migration to cloud is definitely accelerating. in 24 and will continue in 25. So Europe has many drivers at play to resume growth in 25. And of course, I remind everyone that even taking into account the temporary slowdown in 24, our European sales have been multiplied by no less than 2.5 times between 2020 and 24, which is an average annual growth rate of more than 25% over the past four years, above our European growth guidance of 20% CAGR. So I will now let Thierry Lemaitre take you through our figures and be back for a few comments on our outlook.