Atos SE

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ATOS Q3 2024 Revenue Conference call. At this time, all participants are on the LinkedIn-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 withdraw 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, Philippe Salle, Chairman of the company. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Philippe Salle. As you know, I've been appointed as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Atos Group last week, and I will also be taking over officially the role of a CEO in early 2025. I'm very glad, in fact, to join this call this morning, and I'm very excited, I would say, to join the Atos Group at this critical time, of course, and as we are completing the financial restructuring and turning the page, I would say, to a new chapter with a focus for sure on profitable growth, our clients, and our key asset, our people. Thank you for joining us in this Atos Futury 2024 Revenue Conference call this morning. I will now hand it over to Jean-Pierre Mustier, our Group CEO, to go through the key highlights and messages for the Q3. Jean-Pierre, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Philippe, and thank you to all of you for joining us this morning to discuss our third quarter revenues. On the call with me, in addition to Philippe, is Clay Van Doren, our Chief Growth Officer, and Jacques-François Depré, our Group CFO. So before we get started, I want to draw your attention to the small print on slide three, and let's move to the agenda. I will share some key messages related to Q3. Clay will then go into our performance by business line and region, before Jacques-Francois covers the third quarter financial elements in more detail. And I will come back with closing remarks, and then we will take your questions. Let me start with some highlights. First, thanks to the significant progress we have made on our financial restructuring, we can now focus on our industrial turnaround and growth. The decision from the Court on our restructuring plan has just been published a few minutes ago, and you will have a dedicated press release which was just out. The plan will be completed in the next two months. We have also a new governance in place with Philippe Salle, who was appointed chairman earlier this month and will become CEO on February 1st, as he just mentioned. Let me say something important. He's the right person to lead our transformation journey and restore confidence in Atos. These developments are all very positive for Atos, and we have already seen a change in perception with our clients. They have taken note of our restructuring and are looking to resume normalized interactions with us. This should lead to a stronger commercial activity in the coming months. Second, our revenue evolution for the third quarter is in line with the business plan we shared with you on September 2nd. And finally, the discussions with Alten regarding the sale of World Grid are on track and we expect this transaction to close by the end of the year. Discussion with the French state related to the potential acquisition of the advanced computing mission critical system and cybersecurity products businesses of BDS are continuing. Let me now give you an overview of the key figures for Q3. Group revenue was 2.3 billion euro, down 4.4% organically compared with Q3 last year. Evident revenue was affected by the continued market softness in the Americas and Central Europe and by the impact of previously established contract scope reduction. We expect evident Q4 revenue to be slightly down on the same period last year. Tech Foundation revenue decreased in Q3 due to a lower scope of work and contract completion and termination with customers in the Americas and the UK. In Q4, tech foundation revenue is expected to decrease double digits due to previously established contract termination and completion. Order entry in the third quarter was 1.5 billion euros, representing 66% of revenue and in line with the third quarter 23. BDS order entry benefited from several high-performance computer contracts signed during the quarter. Tech Foundation's book-to-bill was 60%, which is consistent with seasonality trends over the past three years. Now that confidence in the financial sustainability of the group has been restored, we expect stronger commercial activity in the coming months at both Eviden and Tech Foundation, leading to a significant improvement of the group book-to-bill ratio in the fourth quarter. Group cash position was 1.1 billion euros, including a 1.6 billion reduction in working capital optimization compared to December 2023. Cash consumption was minus 3 million euros during the quarter, excluding change in working capital optimization of 232 million. Thank you for your attention, and I now hand over to Clay for comment on our Q3 business highlights. Clay.