Ipsos U/Adr

We are going to take you through what we've seen overall this year and also in Q3 and discuss a little bit more about the situation. I'm joined, of course, by my colleague Dan Levy from Ipsos. Could somebody turn on the screens in the studio, please? Thank you. So let's look at the numbers to start with. Overall, at this point in the year, we have a total growth at Ipsos of 3.3% growth. Of that, 2.4% is organic with a scope effect from our acquisitions of 2.8% and a negative FX effect taking us to where we are. But of course, in Q3, As we announced recently, growth has slowed down at half a percent. Organically, it's pretty much flat, 0.1, again with the scope effect and a negative FX effect. So definite slowdown in activity, which we can now talk about. Let's have a look at what we can see around the world. So first of all, I think in France, where I'm sitting today, we have a lot of political uncertainty and a clear slowdown in our French business. It's around 5% of our revenue, but it is significant. In the UK, the new government is still deciding what to do. There is a budget there in six days' time that will set some clarity. And of course, in some Asian countries, we've also seen a slowdown. And that is compounded, in a sense, by the continued mixed performance in the United States and there we can see strong growth in our advertising business, in our innovation business, but we also have some significant and major parts of that business that are underperforming where we are making changes. Overall in the United States we have a new management team now in place over the summer and we're making significant changes inside that business, but it will take time of course for that to feed through. The challenge, of course, is that the world is volatile and uncertain. And across the world, we can see good performance, interestingly, in some other continental European countries like Germany and Italy. The Middle East and LATAM are actually showing double-digit growth. We have resilient demand from CPG, which is important, a major part of our overall customer base. And our Ipsos digital solution is growing strongly as planned. And actually, outside the United States, in the first nine months of the year, we've seen growth at 5.6%. It's just showing the heavy weight of the United States inside Ipsos' numbers. So a mixed picture, but also, of course, some signs of slowdown. I'll hand over to Dan now who will take you through some more of the details.

Thank you very much Ben. So let's start with the revenue breakdown by region and Ben has already spoken a little bit about that. The activity in the EMEA region is still strong with a 4.9% organic growth in Q3 and 6.7% over nine months. The Middle East records double digit growth and we have also very good growth in several countries from continental Europe and particularly Germany and Italy. And conversely, as Ben said, we do see some slowdown in the UK and in France, and in France particularly on the back of the political uncertainty. In the Americas, the Latin America business is still growing very well, but our performance is penalized particularly by the situation in the US. As Ben said, the situation in the US is quite uneven. So we have good growth on some service lines and particularly innovations, but also creative excellence, which are performing well. And this is penalized more by the specific situation in public affairs and health care, which are declining. We have, as you know, appointed a new country manager in the US in May, and we expect the situation to improve during the course of 2025. And finally, in Asia-Pacific, we are growing by a bit more than 3% over nine months. The Chinese situation, the Chinese economic climate is still sluggish, so there is not a lot to expect in the short term from China. And we have seen also some slowdown in the rest of the region, particularly in countries like India, who used to grow by nearly 20 percent at the beginning of the year, but where we see some delays and some wait and see attitude, particularly by large international clients. Turning now to the performance by audience, the consumers activity are driving the group growth, 6% organic growth over nine months. And this is again coming from innovation, customer experience and advertising. The citizens, doctors and patients audiences are shrinking and this is particularly linked to the specific situation in the US that I described before on the pharma sector and on public affairs. By sector now, good growth, very resilient growth, actually, on the CPG client, plus 7% over nine months. I think, again, this is coming from the fact that these clients have been able to increase their prices during the inflation period. And it's probably also driven by the fact that consumer behaviors are changing a lot in this very moving world. And that drives innovation for new products. And that drives, ultimately, demand from market research. Technology, media, and telecom is growing well, plus 5% over nine months. This is mainly driven by the big tech clients' demands. As you remember, we had a very strong growth in 2022 on these big tech clients. Then we have a correction in 2023, and we are now back to a mid-single-digit organic growth in 2024, mainly on product development linked to generative AI development. And I will not be commenting pharma and public sector that I commented in the previous slides. Very good performance of Ipsos Digital, our DIY platform, which is currently growing at 32% organically. Ipsos Digital, as you remember, is typically twice the profitability of the group. And it is actually the very good success of Ipsos Digital which is partly explaining the fact that we are increasing our gross margin in 2024 which enables us to confirm our guidance on the operating margin. We are also pursuing our investments in acquisition and we have launched, as you know, a voluntary takeover bid for Infas. Infas is the leader in Germany on public sector research. It's 300 plus employees and 50 million revenue and we have purchased so far nearly 90% of the share of Infas and so we expect to finish this deal within the next few weeks. And finally, as you know, the LAC1 fund, managed by BPI France, became a major long-term shareholder for Ipsos, which I think demonstrates the confidence in Ipsos' long-term growth potential. LAC1 is targeting to hold between 5% and 10% of Ipsos' capital. Thank you for your attention, and now over to Ben for more business updates.

Thank you very much, Dan. So I just wanted to share with you the real world impact that Ipsos has for many of our clients in some examples now, because of course, our whole job and the unique thing about the company is of course our global footprint, but also now our unique position in the market in terms of the range and diversity of services that we're providing to our clients. It's a very complex global context. We've recently released our latest global trends report. There's a link on this slide if you'd like to have a look at it. But it's a reminder of the, you know, just the volatility of the world that we're now in. And whether it's the environment, politics, which throws up new surprises virtually every day, geopolitics, whether they're geopolitical or indeed locally, changes that we're now seeing in our societies, both with migration, but also, of course, the declining birth rates, which are going to become more and more of an issue right across the West. And then, of course, the impact of technologies like generative AI and how people as individuals and just individual consumers are reacting to that. can see for example the rise of a trend we call nouveau nihilism if you have a look at our report the young younger people who have just given up trying to get on because the cost of housing is so difficult the chances of getting a good pension are too challenging so a lot of things that our clients are facing and we're helping them navigate some real-world examples of work that we're currently doing for the Renault group we're looking at behavioral change around mobility and And this is helping Renault to pair up its individual brands, so Renault, Dacia, Alpine and Mobilize, really digging in deep into where people are on the migration to electrification of car use and how they're making choices over engine type, etc., their frequency of use and indeed attitudes to car ownership. So pretty fundamental in terms of understanding the market. Over in the United States, where we have a very exciting election, which of course is producing huge uncertainty, it's currently pretty much a toss-up, although if you ask my personal opinion, Donald Trump is likely to win at the moment, but still some time to go. But of course the challenge the United States has at the macro level is becoming a multiracial democracy that is at ease with itself. Many of America's biggest challenges are actually around becoming comfortable with itself rather than any external challenge. So for Paramount, we're looking at how do you serve a very diverse population? What are these different groups in the population looking for? How do you make your advertising effective? And interestingly, we can see in our in our latest work, six out of 10 people in the US saying that people are at brands are actually losing authenticity when they're trying to look diverse and inclusive because it just looks so fake. So how do you do that in an authentic way? Back here in France during the Olympics this summer, we've been looking at how do people actually get there? How did that work out across France? 13,000 interviews during the Olympics from dawn till dusk in multiple languages, looking at all of the big games venues. Just again, an example of the diversity of the work that we're doing and helping SNCF do a brilliant job in terms of making the networks work, much better than in my country, the UK. And then finally in Britain for the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, looking at how the BBC can responsibly use AI. Of course, the BBC is responsible for the majority of broadcast content in the United Kingdom and looking there at exactly how do people react to the use of AI in the production of news and entertainment using AI. And that, of course, has shaped their editorial guidelines. As they say, the chief technical advisor says it's fundamental in planning their future AI use. So across the economy, across the world, Ipsos is making a difference. And it's one of the things that motivates our 20,000 keen employees. We've also just been named one of the world's most trustworthy companies by Newsweek and one of the best companies to work in the world by Time magazine, which again is nice to see. And so overall, we can see some headwinds at the moment, but we're very positive about the overall direction. And when it comes to the outlook, of course, as Dan has already said, of course, we can see a slowdown in growth. We have depreciated our expectations for Q4, which takes us to an organic growth for this year of around 1%. But we are protecting our operating margin by managing our costs carefully and also helped, of course, by the ongoing improvement in our gross margin. So our operating margin will be around 13%. Acquisitions this year have added around 60 million. And of course, we are in ongoing conversations about more. And with that, I will stop and take your questions. So thank you.

Thank you. This is the conference operator who will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one under touchtone telephone. To remove your staff from the question queue, please press star and two. Please pick up the receiver when asking questions. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question is from Emmanuel Matour from Odo. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning, Ben. Good morning, Dan. Hi, Emmanuel. I hope you can hear me. Yeah. Three questions for me. First... Which part of the decline in the U.S. in Q3 is related to difficult market condition, and which part is related to the lack of management leadership, according to you? What measures have been taken in response to the serious difficulties you are facing there? Second, does a difficult situation in the U.S. call into question your acquisition plans in that country? And third, do you feel confident about business perspectives with CPG customers in the short, medium term? It seems that the sales growth from that segment has slowed down in Q3.

Thank you. Okay, well, why don't I take some of those and then we'll see where we come out. So in terms of the US, I would say it's difficult to be precise, but it's probably 50-50 in terms of internal versus external factors in terms of what happened in Q3. And in terms of what we're doing about it, we have recently announced the appointment of some new senior leadership into our government business in the United States, our PA business. We've got a further announcement that we'll be making in the next few days in terms of the leadership of that business. So that's a substantial part of the U.S. and we know that we will start to see some positive changes there. I don't think it throws into question the possibility of further acquisitions in the U.S. because overall the U.S. market You know, we can see if you look at the numbers, you can see continued growth in that market, often tech enabled, but across it and indeed the government market in the U.S. looks pretty strong and indeed government spending in the U.S. continues. CPG has been very resilient post the pandemic, and Dan has already referred to the sector's ability to increase prices in the first part of the recovery, which protected their profitability. They're now, of course, facing consumers who are still, even as inflation falls, still very worried about the cost of living. And what that means is that they need to keep working very hard on innovation. I mean, it's very interesting when I spend time with our CPG clients, just how how much work they're doing around the world in terms of trying to respond to smaller brands coming into their categories you know anybody can sort of stop almost start a brand with an instagram account anywhere these days so we we expect that to be pretty pretty resilient It's always innovative and it's always challenging in that sector. It's a very resilient sector, but also very innovative and wanting to try new things. But we think the solutions that we have there to help them with their advertising and to help them with their innovation in particular, and we've just been one of the largest consumer good groups in the world has just made us their main innovation partner, for example. That means that we stay, I think, positive about that. I don't know if you want to add anything, Dan. I think you It's fine, yeah. Thank you, Emmanuel. Thank you very much.

The next question is from Gregor Hermann Berenberg. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. The first one would be maybe on growth. I mean, if we look, obviously, the nine months organic growth, it's quite decent on most regions and audiences. But if we look at Q3, we can clearly see a slowdown on all regions and all audiences. So I'm just wondering how confident are you that next year, you'll be able to somehow recover or change the dynamic here. I guess regardless of macro, which is a bit tough to forecast, but you've pointed that you had managerial issues in certain places and that we're just seeing a dynamic that is just declining. So yeah, how confident are you for 2025 to change the dynamic here? Maybe the second question would be on the margins. They hold up quite fairly. Can you be a bit more specific on what exactly you have been improving on despite the much lower growth? How are you confident you can maintain this level? And maybe just on M&A and and potential return to shareholders. Do you have a bit more visibility? I think you had a plan for a certain amount of spending by 2025. You have spent a little amount of money of that plan so far. Do you have more visibility? Do you also think about potential share buyback? Is there anything you can update us with at the moment, especially when we consider the current valuation of the firm? Thank you.

I think on growth, it's important to remember that while we're presenting data at sort of three or four regional level in this, which is what we share in these calls, if you look at Latin America, for example, it's performing very, very strongly. The Middle East North Africa, very, very strong. Outside France or the UK, in Europe, again, strong growth. So the geographic footprint, even with a macro slowdown, it's noticeable that quite a few companies have downgraded their revenue forecasts for 2024. at the moment even in that situation we can see parts of the business that are growing strongly and that gives us some confidence that if we can get things right particularly in the united states where we are obviously making quite a few changes that we should see some decent growth on the margin what we're seeing is obviously ongoing digitization but importantly now the ongoing application of automation and the use of generative AI. The majority of our employees are now certified on the use of generative AI. It's something that we've been doing over the last few months, and that really does improve productivity. So I think Those things together mean that we're pretty confident that we can protect our margin and continue to invest into the future. On acquisitions and share buybacks, I'll hand over to Dan. We are having conversations of a completely different magnitude to the deals that we have announced so far. Dan.

Yeah, so maybe just to start with the word on the margin. So as Ben said, we have made some productivity gains on the back of more automated platform and the investment we are doing on our platforms and also in the way we collect and manage the data, particularly on the direct cost, are bearing fruit. And that's what you can see both on the improvement of gross margin, but also on the on the payroll and also beyond the payroll I think the ability to maintain the operating profit is coming from the improvement of the gross margin which partly comes also from a favourable business mix and particularly from Ipsos Digital that I mentioned before which is growing very nicely. On the M&A, as you know, we have not reached the target that we set in 2022, but there is no point doing M&A for doing M&A. We are looking at small to mid-sized companies currently, and we do have the possibility to invest given our low leverage.

Okay, thank you.

The next question is from Marilyn Ford Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Yes. Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. The first one is for the citizen business. Could you share the geographic mix, U.S., Europe will be enough, and would you see potential for recovery in 2015 after 2014 with many elections? And the second question is about your visibility. What visibility have you got on your order book today, and what is the last trends?

So on the citizens segment, I think the key, the U.S. is a heavy weight in that business, a very, very heavy weight, much higher than America is in the business as a whole. And as a result, the underperformance in the United States explains most but not all of that. I mean, we've also seen when governments change, which they have done, done recently in the uk and in france both major countries in the ipsos group together with the us it is the majority of our government there's more than you know a large a large part of our government business what you tend to see is uh a slowdown both because in in the uk for example where i come from there is something called perda where all activity stops in the month before the election, you then have new ministers who need to learn about their jobs, their posts and their spending plans. And of course, in the UK, those are all on ice while they work out what they're doing with the deficit. Because of that, there has been a slowdown in government spending in the UK. And, you know, over time, of course, the government, I mean, Rachel Reeves is visiting the IMF to explain how we're going to borrow more money to spend on things which should ultimately lead to The need for more research to understand how effectively those investments are playing out. But it will take some time into 2025. And that's the same situation in Washington, D.C., with the U.S. government, where, again, state spending, whoever wins the U.S. election, and Donald Trump has some fairly expansive ideas about various aspects of government spending. potentially it does take time because these are very chunky contracts you know 10 million plus and those of course take time to be allocated and then to start to play through in the account so again it will be in this you know later in 25 that you would expect to see the citizens segment really pick up to be honest um but overall in terms of visibility very roughly uh we you know we can there are some of our businesses where we can see we have 80 of the revenue visible at the end of uh the first quarter but in general we have about 30 only 30 or so of our revenue visible at the end of january for the year so you're and you're roughly running very crudely at around three months visibility on the total envelope. So that's how it's looking at the moment. It is slower, but I think we can see very clearly through that to the underlying structural growth.

Thank you.

As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone. I turn the conference back to the management. There are no more questions from the conference call.

Well, thank you, everybody, and we will see you again in February for our annual results. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye.