CANAL+ S.A

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. This is Maxime Seyda, CEO of Canal+.

And I'm Amandine Ferret, CFO of Canal+.

We are delighted to be with you today. Together, we'll present the Canal+, results for the first half of 2025. Starting with our key strategic and financial priorities before I hand it over to Amandine Ferret, and she digs into our H1 financials and beyond. I would like to provide some detail on how we have made progress on each of our priorities with, of course, our key objective to generate profitable growth and cash on all activities by building the best global and local content value proposition, by extending our distribution through innovation and strategic partnerships, and by growing our scale. Let's start by focusing on how we are generating profitable growth and cash on all activities. As you will see, we are on track to deliver our upgraded guidance for the full year. In H1 2025, our organic revenue grew by 0.9%, reaching close to 3.1 billion euros, confirming our 2025 expectation to achieve organic growth. EBITDA is right where we expected it to be, 246 million euros before exceptionals, and we anticipate a much stronger second half of the year. Amandine will come back to this. And finally, cash flow is a real highlight. With 416 million euros in CFFO in H1, we are well on our way to hitting our full year guidance of over 500 million euros. To generate profitable growth and strong cash flow, we are making sure the group focuses on profitable contracts, activities, and retail customer segments. Second, we are taking real steps to improve the profitability of our European operations through cost reductions. Third, on the tax front, we are aiming to proactively resolve tax issues. Fourth, we are focused on materially improving cash generation. On the first part, profitable contracts, activities, and retail customer segments. We have ended, as you know, the Disney contract at the end of 2024. We are now closely assessing our Vietnam business. Amandine will come back to that. We have ended wholesale deals in a number of our geographies, in Poland, in Vietnam, and in M7 territories, when we felt these were not profitable enough. And this has enabled us to increase in H1 organic revenue, despite our overall decline, and to reach our EBITDA in-language expectation, with an increase that we expect in H2 2025. On the European segment, as you know, our focus is to reduce costs to improve profitability. I just mentioned the Disney contract. We saw the end of our League One contract at the mid-year 2024. We have exited our pay TV channels from DTT in France for Canal+, and we have ended the CA channel. We have launched a redundancy plan affecting 250 employees and 150 external contracts. uh we have renewed agreement our agreement with the french cinema organizations on more favorable terms than in the past and as you may have seen we have decided not to sign a new agreement with league one because we considered that the financial conditions were not uh up to our standards so with all of this we are on track to progressively deliver uh material improvement to our profitability in europe without a doubt on the tax issues We have finally reached an agreement with the CNC, the French National Center of Cinema, which has enabled us to avoid a negative cash outlay of close to 100 million euros. And we are in very active discussions with tax authorities on VAT. Our goal is to clear up all legacy items on tax. On cash generation, which is, of course, a key focus for us, we have implemented several structural initiatives. As I mentioned before, we, and by we, I don't just mean the management team, I refer to everyone at Canal+, are significantly reducing our spending without impacting our content value proposition. We are working on improving working capital, tax, and financing topics, And these initiatives have come a long way in helping us change the situation. As you know, I have decided to change the organization at the beginning of the year with all financial teams reporting directly to Amandine. She has put in place new processes in place, and we have had the results that you see here on the left-hand side of the slide, both on cash flow from operations and on free cash flow. Cash flow from operations has increased by 86% since H124, now reaching the 460 million I mentioned, enabling us to confirm our full year guidance of a number above 500 million euros. And free cash flow boomed by close to 200%, reaching 370 million euros, And we are now very proud to be able to give a guidance on this number and we expect the full year 25 number to be above 370 million euros compared to 29 million euros for the full year 24. now moving to the key part of our strategy and building the best global and local content value proposition you know our unique offering aggregates all the free-to-air channels all the pay tv essential pay tv channels both third party and in-house our premium canal plus channels all across geographies and finally our very close technical and commercial relationship with a number of platforms that i mentioned streaming streaming platforms that i mentioned here On our content value proposition, the way we see our strategy is with these three pillars that you can see here. First, enhancing our in-house production capabilities with StudioKanal. Second, providing the best premium rights on KanalPlus channels. And third, developing key strategic content partnerships. On our in-house production capabilities and StudioKanal, H125 was strong for StudioKanal on cinema. reminding you of the global box office hits with Paddington in Peru, Mad About the Boy, Bridget Jones, and We Live in Time, but also local box office hits like Runt, which was number one in Poland, Color of Time, and L'Amour C'est Sur Côté, which were in the top five in France, and I'm Still Here, which won the best Academy Award for foreign movie last year. We have four movies at the Festival de Cannes, selected at Festival de Cannes, and at half-year, Studio Canal ranked third in most of its European, sorry, in the top three in most of its European geographies, including France, and was number one both in Germany and in Australia in terms of distribution. On the series side, we have had a very strong H1 with the hits that I mentioned here. Widow's Game, which was number one on Netflix in 34 countries. High Tides in the top 10. Ladies Companion in the top 10 in 66 countries. And our flagship series, Paris Has Fallen, which had record viewership in France. was a smash hit on all our territories and worked very well for Hulu in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK, which both of them ordered season two as well as Canal+. We are now shooting the second season of this hit series. We are focused on developing IPs at Studio Canal, and these are just a few examples. Studio Canal Stories is all about adapting books into successful films or series. You have a few examples here, Sign Swept Away, The Beth O'Leary. Even before the book was published, we are developing this into a series. The next live action Asterix, generally the biggest movie of the year in France, will be produced by Studio Canal. We launched Studio Canal Kids and Family. We will be launching the Paddington musical come the end of the year in London. We are developing our next franchise that you can see here on the right hand side, Pippi Longstocking movie and animated series. And we will produce both of them with Hay Day, David Heyman, the famed producer of the Harry Potter movies of Barbie and of the Paddington movies with us and of the next James Bond. So he's a very popular and busy man, but he will be producing Pippi Longstocking with us. And we have launched a new label on horror movies horror films called six dimension and you have here a few examples of movies we are developing the first movie to come out of that will be a movie based on our movie that we own on our library on our catalog which is called silent night deadly night and of course it will come out at christmas um we have had a very strong season in terms of viewership on our platforms all across our geographies we have here a few examples uh which we had a 40 percent audience share that's a record in africa plain oriental did very very well that's a french series we had a record on canada plus poland with the series that you see here um Canal+, in H125, beat TF1 during one night and M6 during another night. So Canal+, as a cryptic channel, pay TV channel, beat free-to-air channels twice in H125 with the two movies that you see below, Monte Cristo and Un petit truc en plus, which were the two biggest movies of 2024 that were already broadcast on Canal+. We have a phenomenal year in terms of sports. You have a few examples on the right-hand side. Maybe I'll just mention the all-time record for Canal+, with more than 6 million viewers on the Champions League semi-finals PSG Arsenal. On the ultimate part of our value offering, the streaming platforms, two news here that I want to highlight. One is that we have integrated the content of Dailymotion, our leading European short-form video streaming platform with 400 million monthly active users, directly into the Canal+. So our subscribers can now stream hundreds of short-form videos which are refreshed several times a day through Dailymotion on the Canal+. Very proud of that. And last but not least, as you know, we now have agreements with these streamers that you see here in a number of geographies. And we announced a first-of-its-kind deal for Netflix and Canal+, and the extension of our partnership with Netflix to all of French-speaking Africa. So that's close to 25 French-speaking countries. And we just launched this offer a few days ago. um on the second pillar distribution and maybe walk you through the fact that we launched our new upgraded canal plus app experience which is really focused on mobile devices it is now available on all ios devices in france poland and africa it seems we have a technical problem Okay, and we will launch this.