Carrefour Sa

day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the CAFWA Fall Year 2024 Results, Webcasts and Conference Calls. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 and 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speakers today, Mr. Bompard, Chairman and CEO, and Mr. Monlige, CFO.

Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the presentation of our 2024 results. In a nutshell, 2024 was a challenging year for European food retailers. Consumption was weak and markets were competitive. In this context, Carrefour decided to invest in its competitiveness and pursued its transformation at a high pace. Overall results show steady delivery. We see growth in recurring operating income at constant Forex, growth in EBITDA, and the net free cash flow in line with expectations on multi-year trajectory. Those results are notably driven by the good performance of our three key countries, France, Brazil, and Spain. In the French market, affected by a decrease in consumption volumes, Carrefour France realized a remarkable year. 2024 marked our strongest investment in prices and led to our best price positioning since 2020. It has been well-noticed by customers as reflected in a plus five points in French NPS and the market share growing in Q4 on a like-for-like basis, excluding Cora and Match. In parallel, we opened more than 450 new convenience stores thanks to a historical record number of new convenience partners choosing our brand. In addition, We continued hypers and supers conversions to franchise and lease management. The current match integration is moving forward very well with successful store conversions and operational alignment. Alongside with the integration of 27 former casino stores, we demonstrate our ability to execute large-scale integration. Thanks to these acquisitions, Carrefour France has its highest market share level in over 10 years. Additionally, Carrefour France implemented strong cost reduction initiatives. Recurring operating income increased once again and reached a new high above €1 billion, its highest point in 10 years. 2024 marks the sixth consecutive year of recurring operating income and operating margin improvement. The second major satisfaction is Brazil, which is on a strong growth trajectory. Brazil's recurring operating income growth reached close to 25% in local currency. Atacadao has performed better than the market and kept attracting more B2C customers. Carrefour Varejo also had good commercial traction with price investments on the new dedicated offer for B2B customers. Atacadao stores continue to ramp up in line with their synergies target. To sum up, Carrefour Brazil is set to enjoy an attractive growth trajectory in 2025 and beyond. Alongside Brazil, it's worth noticing a record level of profit in Argentina, at 115 million euros. Our leadership puts us in a favorable position to benefit from the normalizing inflation undergoing in the country. Third, we see a positive trend in Spain. Carrefour decided to re-establish a favorable price gap versus large market players and invested significantly in price in 2024. This move came at a cost, but had a very positive impact. Customers have noticed our improvements as translated in the NPS. We reached a positive like-for-like every month since September. As a result, we end Q4 with market share gains and a wrap-up in profitability. Budget's positive year aside, our other smallest European countries experienced a more challenging year, with different routes across geographies. In all our geographies, we continued our fast-paced transformation. Private-label penetration keeps progressing and has reached 37%. E-commerce growth continues with substantial profitability improvements. We reached 6 billion euro GMV, plus 18%, reinforcing our leadership position in home delivery along with market share gains in click and collect. We also successfully increased our NPS in all our geographies by five points. At the same time, our cost savings plan remains firmly on track, delivering €1-2 billion in annual savings as planned. With all that, recurring operating income increased by 1.4 excluding currency effects, EBITDA grew by 1.7% and net free cash flow reached 1,450 million in line with our 2026 trajectory. Last, our performance extends to our social and environmental actions. We achieved a score of 111% in our corporate social responsibility index. In particular, we made our scope one and two emissions Reduction goes five years ahead of the planned timeline with a reduction close to 50% by the end of 2024. And we have accelerated the path of suppliers joining our 1.5 degree climate trajectory. The percentage of suppliers has doubled since the launch of our initiative. Moving forward to 2025, I would like to make two main comments. First, Our pricing strategy is effective. We've seen this, especially in France, Spain, and Brazil, and we are confident in our commercial edge going forward. Therefore, we will continue to invest in our competitiveness to accelerate our market share gains momentum. In 2024, this will be financed by ongoing progress of strategic initiatives, especially procurement efficiency, digital transformation, private label on continued cost discipline with a yearly target of cost savings went to 1.2 billion euros in line with 2024. Given all this, we are confident that recurring operating income, EBITDA and net free cash flow will grow slightly. Second comment, after our Carrefour 2026 strategic plan and given the market environment, we have decided to drive the company forward with radicality. A few weeks ago, we launched a strategic review of our portfolio of activities. This includes all our businesses and organizational models without off-limits topics or entities. The first decision we took is to acquire the remaining share of Carrefour Brazil. We have been expanding there with an extremely competitive business model and through a series of targeted acquisitions. The purchase of all Carrefour Brazil shares will allow our local management to focus and consolidate our undisputed market position. This move will generate sustainable value for our customers, employees, partners, and shareholders. The second decision that we took is to increase our investment in our French operations substantially. There will be a significant investment in French stores in particular. We are confident that we will enhance our customer experience and provide strong commercial returns. To conclude, I now move on to our dividend policy that is in line with previous years. We have decided to increase our ordinary dividend by 6% reaching €0.92 per share. On top of this, we add a special dividend of €150 million or €0.23 per share. All this leads us to a total return of 8% as Carrefour continues to offer one of the highest yields in the industry. To wrap up, we have both confidence in delivering a strong 2025 year and determination to focus on what matters and take strong decisions to enable us to accelerate in our core countries. Thank you for your attention. I will now hand over to Mathieu for more details on our financial performance.