Ipsos

miss the band page you'll watch an introductory video on Ipsos' third quarter results.

Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us. I'm joined today by Dan Levy, our CFO, and it's our pleasure just to take you through the results for the last three months in the third quarter of 2023. As we've been communicating this year, the profile of revenue growth in 2023 is very different from 2022, where we started very strongly and then slowed down during the year. This year, as we discussed at the beginning of the year, we are seeing the acceleration that we predicted. And so the quarter's revenue is £588 million, and that means that the organic growth has gone from minus 2.8 in the start of the year, where of course there was a very strong comparison with 2022, which meant of course that we were always going to struggle to meet that, plus 0.5, and now in the last quarter, 4.3. So there's a very clear acceleration and one which we expect We've also now left, of course, behind the COVID cliff edge that we had from the very large volume of jobs on COVID during the pandemic, and that was in some ways distorting our comparative. That is now over, and we should see further good growth in the next quarter. Dan. Thank you, Ben.

so starting with our performance by region origin in q3 are growing are showing organic growth and we see the acceleration in growth in all of them the activity in emea shows a very good momentum with the growth close to a seven percent mainly driven by european continental europe and particularly france which is doing a very good performance in q3 and as has been said this is the first quarter what we when we don't don't see anymore any negative base effect relating to the end of a large covet contract Business in America is growing by a bit more than 2%. This is showing a contrasted reality between Latin America on the one hand, which is growing by 8%, and North America, which is growing by a bit less than 2%. In the United States, obviously, we are impacted by the declining demand from major tech clients, which continue to wait during the summer. But as we said, we are still seeing some interesting discussion, ongoing discussion with these big tech clients, both on traditional market research, things like product testing, mystery shopping, brand tracking, but also a lot of new opportunities around generative AI. And we have a very encouraging pipeline. On Asia-Pacific, we are recording a 3.5% organic growth. Again, a very contrasted situation between China, which is obviously impacted by the weakness of the economic rebound in this country, and on the other hand, other countries in Asia, and particularly India and Southeast Asia, which are recording a double-digit growth. If we now turn to the performance by sector, all sector show sound growth, except obviously TMT, which is impacted by the big tech. The first one, which is, as you know, our most important sector, the CPG sector, which represents a quarter of our revenue. has happened to be quite resilient given the macro context with a growth of 6% in organic in Q3. I think these clients, these TPG clients, succeeded in passing inflation on their prices and as a consequence improved their margin and are investing and keeping investing on innovation. As I said, TMT is mainly impacted by the big tech clients. The pharma sector is improving significantly. We had a difficult start of 2023 and a difficult end in 2022 in the pharma sector. It has clearly keeping improving quarter by quarter This year, these clients have now completed their reorganization post-COVID, and we have also seen an increase in drug approvals in 2023 as compared to last year, which obviously drives the demand for market research. Public sector is growing double digit, plus 17%. As Ben said before, it is the first quarter when we don't see any more effect of the end of the large COVID contract. And I'm not commenting on the rest of the sectors, but as you can see, they all show a sound growth in Q3. Breakdown by audience. I'm not going to be too long on that, as I mentioned most of the drivers. Consumers, our activity with consumers are growing by 8.3% organically, mainly driven by brand tracking, marketing optimization, and our qualitative service line. Client and employees is clearly the audience which is the most impacted by the difficulty and the declining demand in the big tech, which explained the minus 3.3%. Citizens is growing by nearly 3% and doctor and patients, as I said, is catching up in line with the pharma sector, growing by 6% this quarter. And now over to Ben for a bit more detail on the business.