bpost NV/SA

Hello and welcome to the BPOST 3rd Quarter 2023 Analyst Call. My name is Caroline and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. Please note this call is being recorded and for the duration of the call your lines will be on listen-only mode. However, you will have an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the call. This can be done by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad to register your questions. If you require assistance at any point, please press star 0 and you'll be connected to an operator. I will now hand over the call to your host, Mr. Chris Peters, BPOS of CEO, to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Thank you, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to all of you, and thank you for joining us. I'm pleased to open this analyst call for the first time as CEO of BPOS Group. I'm Chris Peters, and I've just joined the group this week. With me, I have a team you know well, with Philippe Darcien, who was our CEO at Intrim until my arrival, Kunt Alterman, our CFO at Intrim, as well as Antoine Lebec from Investor Relations. We are pleased to present our third quarter 2023 results. It's been just a few days since I've joined this great company, and I've already had the opportunity to discover some of our operations and meet our employees, notably in North America, and I'll continue to do so in the coming weeks. I've already seen plenty of exciting opportunities and challenges on the horizon, and I'm really looking forward to working with my fellow executive committee members to embrace these opportunities and contribute to the future success of this company. Given that I've joined the group less than a week ago and the third quarter results were achieved under the leadership of Philippe and Kun, I will now turn the floor over to them for the presentation and the Q&A session. Philippe, Kun, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Chris, and good morning to all. We posted the material on our website last night. As usual, we walk you through the presentation and we then take your questions. Two questions each will ensure everyone gets a chance to be addressed in the upcoming hour. I am pleased to report a good set of results in a seasonally softer quarter with our group underlying performance exceeding again our planned despite continued adverse conditions. As a reminder, and for the sake of clarity, I would like to draw your attention to the reversal of the provision related to the service repricing in the context of our compliance reviews, which which had in this quarter a positive impact of €5 million on income and EBIT at Belgium level and consequently at group level as well. Our group operating income for Q3 stood at €979 million and declined year-over-year by 4.2% for a strong performance. And our core business at Aurasia continue to grow overall, but at a slower pace. Our group adjusted EBIT stood at 28 million euros with a margin of 2.9%, or at 23 million euros and a margin of 2.4% operationally when excluding the provision reversal. This is a very limited decrease of 3 million euros compared to an EBIT of 26 million and a margin of 2.5% last year. And this, despite some additional costs related to the compliance review and the inflationary pressure on costs, we are now familiar with. I will now hand over for Koun for more details on the financial of this third quarter, and I will then take the floor for the outlook update. Koun, the floor is yours.