Bureau Veritas Sa

Ladies and gentlemen, hello and welcome to the Bureau Veritas half-year 2025 result presentation. On today's call, we are with Inda Garvey, CEO, and François Chabat, CFO. Please note, this call is being recorded, and for the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only. However, you will have the 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. I will now hand you over to your host, Inder Kalbi, CEO, to bring in today's conference. Thank you.

Thank you, Benoit. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone. Welcome to Bureau Veritas' first half 2025 results presentation, and thank you for participating. I'm joined today in Paris by François Chabin, our Group Chief Financial Officer. We have quite a bit to cover today. Let me start with health fund results. There are several key achievements I would like to highlight. Over the past six months, I'm pleased to report that Bureau of Risers has made substantial progress in executing our LEED28 strategy, delivering a robust performance that demonstrates both our operational resilience and our focused execution of the strategy. We have delivered as you planned through a combination of specific construction plans and an acceleration in performance programs in an environment where our customers continue to grapple with uncertainty. Finally, to further accelerate the strategy execution, we have announced changes to our executive committee leadership. Before I move to discuss the numbers, I would like to thank all our colleagues around the world for their contributions to these results. Turning now to our financial highlights. We delivered the revenue of 3.2 billion euros, up 6.7% organically, with a 6.2% increase in the second quarter. On a reported basis, our revenue grew 5.7%. Growth was driven by high volumes when targeted pricing programs throughout the semester. This is a testament to the resilience of our business as we continue to update underlying market trends across the board. The adjusted operating profit increased by 8.8% year-on-year to €491.5 million, generating a margin of 15.4% at 44 basis points year-on-year and at 55 basis points at constant policies. This reflects our operational leverage from ongoing performance programs. Our adjusted earning per share is up 2.4% to 0.65 euros and up 6.4% at constant currency. Combined with our dividend yield and the 200 million share-by-back program completed in Q2, we delivered double-digit returns as per our Week 28 commitment. Our net financial leverage is kept at a level of 1.11, broadly stable compared to December 2024. Based on this robust health year performance and taking into account a number of other factors, we confirm our 2025 outlook. Looking at the mix now, all geographies and activities delivered resilient growth. This growth was supported by solid market trends. We are in the middle of pivoting our portfolio, fully in line with the 28 portfolio priorities. What is important to highlight is that two of our businesses are growing double-digit on an organic basis and three are growing at high single-digit or double-digit, taking into account the organic and the scope effects. This is true in consumer product services, buildings and infrastructure, and certifications. By geography, the Middle East and Africa posted once again a very strong organic growth at 20.8%. primarily fueled by critical energy projects in oil and gas and a buoyant activity in buildings and infrastructure. In Asia Pacific, we delivered 7.6% organic growth with strong activity in South and Southeast Asia. Our performance in China remained steady with mid-single-digit growth. Australia's industry services segment notably accelerated in the second quarter. The Americas region recorded a 5.7% organic growth, This performance was supported by sustained momentum in data centers and energy sector in North America and robust activity levels in Latin America. Finally, our European operations delivered an organic growth of 2.9% with high activity levels in the southern and eastern parts of the continent. We anticipate positive momentum for the coming quarters, supported by stabilizing inflationary conditions and emerging investment trends. Let's now look at our mix and why our portfolio is well positioned to navigate current macroeconomic changes. In fact, I want to come back on our mix with a different perspective, providing an understanding of the regulatory versus non-regulatory services. What we can see here is that we have a balanced approach that spans risk mitigation services and regulatory services. Nearly half of our portfolio comes from regulatory services. These are physical services and safety, health, and risk management mandated by law or regulation with a significant part immune to hasty deregulation. This, therefore, provides us with a stable, predictable revenue foundation. A good example is marine and offshore operations that are regulatory by nature. The other house stems from risk mitigation services. These voluntary services are driven by enterprise risk programs and oftentimes industry standards. We're able to capture growth opportunities as organizations proactively invest in risk management. For example, certification services are largely voluntary. In addition, our portfolio further demonstrates resilience through a healthy mix of OPEX and systems, CAPEX and products. This is a diverse mix and is evolving as we build scale and leadership in our portfolio. These two approaches or these two views of our portfolio give you a complete review of our resilience mix. We are able to navigate today's market challenges while executing our strategy to reach our 2028 ambition.

Let me move to update you on the 28th.