Coface Sa Adr

day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the CoFACE essay first half 2025 results call. At this time all participants are in a listen-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. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Xavier Durand. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and thanks to all of you for logging in. We're happy to report our first half 25 results. You've seen from the headline, 124 million net profits for the first half. We qualify this as strong results. You'll see through the pitch some of the same themes that we've highlighted over the prior quarters, but I'm just going to go through the key points here. Turnover is up 2.3% at all things equal, with insurance growing 1.7%, a little bit of positive client activity, even though there's no clear trend there. The client retention remains at a near record level. Pricing continues to be, I would say, within the average trend line of history. Good growth on business information, growing almost 15%. Debt collection, strong growth at 35% for the first half. Factoring remains, I'd say, the slow point here. As you know, we are a factor in Germany and in Poland, and that's the heart of industrial Europe, which is the toughest place probably at this point in Europe. The loss ratio is up five points at 40%. which brings the net combined ratio for the first half to 71%. We will go through the risk numbers later on the slides as we usually do, but pretty much the risk, I would say, is under control in an environment which is obviously more uncertain and more difficult than it was in the last four years. We have a net cost ratio which has increased by 2.8%, which has both contained the effect of the slowing inflation and also deliberate investments, dynamic investments by ourselves, which are very much in line with the strategy that we've highlighted for Power the Core a year ago. We are building on data. We're building on technology. We're strengthening our core expertise in credit insurance. We've announced a leadership change here with Jörg Diewald joining Cofast with a long history of both working in financial services and large groups and leading a startup FinTech environment in Germany. And so he's joining to lead the BI and the partnerships areas, which are two growth areas for Cofast. And then Thibault Suraire, which has been with us for more than nine years, is going to lead and focus on technology, leading a newly created technology hub that's really taking stock of the importance of technology of data for us, both in the BI, but also in the core insurance business. We've announced the creation of a Lloyd syndicate that's going to give us two notches of improvements. capability in our solutions to clients and that's particularly important for our financial institutions clients.

We acquired Cedar Rose.