Adecco Group Ag Unsp/Adr

Thank you for standing by. My name is Kate and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the ADECO Group Q1 2026 results. All lights have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Benita Barreto, Head of Investor Relations and External Communications. So please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining the ADECA Group's conference call today. I'm Benita Barreto, the Group's Head of Investor Relations. And with me are the ADECA Group's CEO, Denis Machuel, and CFO, Valentina Facayo. Before we begin, please take note of the disclaimer on slide two. Today's presentation will reference both GAAP and non-GAAP financial results and operating metrics. This conference call will include forward-looking statements, which are based on current assumptions and, as always, present opportunities as well as risks and uncertainties. With that, I will now hand over to Denny.

Thank you, Benita, and a warm welcome to all of you who've joined the call today. Let me begin with slide three. I'm really pleased to present you one result that show a very strong start of the year. Organic revenue growth has continued to accelerate. In the first quarter, revenues rose 5.3% year-on-year on an organic training days adjusted basis, a strong result. The group made further strong market share gains, outperforming key competitors by 365 basis points. And we delivered a market-leading healthy 18.8% gross margin. The group EBITDA, excluding one-offs, was 24% higher year-on-year on an organic constant currency basis. In turn, the EBITDA margin expanded 20 basis points year-on-year to a robust 2.6%. was reduced 0.2 times year-on-year, consistent with the ratio improvement delivered at the end of 2025, while the group's operating cash flow performance was solid, in line with normal seasonality and reflecting the business use of working capital during periods of rising revenue growth. Moreover, the group has continued to make swift progress with its AI agenda, from which we are capturing, encouraging productivity and growth. Let's turn to slide four, which highlights how rigorous execution, including deploying AI tools and services, is supporting the group's strong growth momentum. The left-hand side shows flexible placement and outsourcing volume data for the EDECO business. Against a mixed market backdrop, the ADECO group has seen volumes recovering for over 12 months. In Q1, volumes further improved sequentially, achieving solid growth year-on-year and moving consistently higher than levels achieved in the first quarter two years ago. Moving to the right side, our talent supply chain solution delivered healthy operational results this quarter. Looking at performance for our largest clients, the temp placement fill rates improved by 400 basis points year-on-year, with a 25% faster time to submit and a 30% reduction in time to fill. As the chart shows, against a backdrop of 20% higher demand from our largest clients, we are able to increase fill position 25% year-on-year in Q1. This is a key part of how we gain market share. So how did we achieve that? Well, actually let's move to slide five, where we highlight how AI is driving productivity and growth across the group. We continue to scale a more efficient integrated AI driven platform model across the group. We have consolidated more than 30 Salesforce instances into a single AI-enabled digital platform with 27,000 recruiters now operating on a common tech stack and all recruiters equipped with Gen AI capabilities. Automated order processing is up more than 65% year-to-date across nine countries with plans to drive pace and efficiencies further. The group's adjunct AI rollout has accelerated with agents now added to Germany, Spain, and selected global recruitment centers. We will upgrade existing agents this year and deploy around five new agents. For example, we are currently piloting an onboarding agent in Spain, offering benefits such as instant automated candidate verification. We already see tangible operational benefits. More than 30,000 agent conversations are now held monthly, while over 110,000 candidate skills have been updated through agents, enriching our candidate database which support better search and matching. To date, agents have delivered around 20% time savings for our recruiters. By the end of 2026, we expect 50% of ADECO revenues to be covered by Agentic AI. With these agents, we will be more efficient and more effective in delivery for our clients. And this in turn will help us grow faster. Let me now hand over to Valentina to deep dive on our Q1 results.