Ipsos

for joining the Ipsos Q1 2024 results conference call and webcast. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may signal an operator by pressing star and zero on their telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ben Page, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much and thank you to everybody on the call for joining. Good afternoon and good evening. It gives me great pleasure just to take you through the first three months results of the year and the headlines are 4.8% growth with revenue of 558 million, That growth is comprised of four and a half percent organic growth But also a two point seven percent scope effect because of the acquisitions that we added last year There is a negative FX effect, but overall four point eight percent in absolute terms What I'd now like to do is just hand over to my CFO Dan Levy who will take you through a few more of the details Dan

Thank you very much, Ben. So let's start with the revenue breakdown by region. As you can see on this table, we realize a very strong performance in EMEA in Q1 with an organic growth which is nearly 10%. Performance is very good in most continental Europe markets, and particularly in Switzerland and Germany. Germany is doing far better this year as compared to what it used to do in the past years. It seems that the recent change in management in Germany is starting to pay off. Very good performance as well in Asia-Pacific, which recorded an organic growth of above 9%, as you see on the chart. India and Southeast Asia, which had already done very good performance in 2023, are continuing their momentum with double digit growth. We see also some growth in China in Q1, but we prefer to remain cautious at this stage on China, given the lack of macroeconomic visibility and the structural challenges that the Chinese economy is currently facing. In the Americas, we keep a good momentum in Latin America. But as you see on the chart, the Americas globally are down by around 3% coming from the United States. We are facing in the United States some market softness impacting most professional services sectors. And we observe also from our client a kind of wait and see attitude due to the forthcoming presidential election in November that certainly creates uncertainty. So our performance in the US, as you have understood, is uneven. On the one hand, we have made progress and we have seen some recovery from most of the major tech clients. And we expect on tech clients moderate growth in 2024, both in the US and globally speaking. Our service lines dedicated to consumers in the US are also doing very well. But on the other hand, our public affairs business is suffering from the end of a few non-recurring contracts that we had in 2023, and also a slowdown ahead of the presidential election, which is a usual pattern when you have general election on public affairs. Healthcare activity is temporarily down in the U.S. as well, but it should recover in the coming months. We have here a timing effect because some contracts were booked a bit later in 2024 compared to 2023. And so all in all, the market will remain difficult in the U.S. in the short term, but we expect performance to improve during the course of the year. And our order book in the U.S. at the end of March is ahead of our revenue, so there should be some catch up during the course of the year. I also would like to point out that a new country manager is going to be appointed in May in the US with a new managerial organization which will be put in place in North America to support our strong ambition in North America. America, I remind that to you, represents half of the market research globally. It is a very fragmented market and it is a market in which we have a lot of growth opportunities. Turning now to the performance by audience, As you see on the chart, we have very good performance on consumer activity with double digit growth. This reflects the very strong resilience of our activity with CPG clients, which is particularly driven by our service line, which focus on innovation, on brand tracking, on market positioning and on qualitative studies. The other audiences, would it be clients and employees, citizens, doctors and patients, are impacted by the unfavorable environment that I described in the United States. But if you exclude the United States, all these audiences are showing very solid growth. We are doing well as well on our new services. So our new services, I remind you, encapsulate all our platforms, Ipsos Digital, Ipsos Facto, our ESG offer, science and data, and particularly our data analytics work advisory. And this is growing nicely at 15% organic growth in Q1 and now represents 21% of the group's revenue. And so now I leave the floor to Ben for a focus on the last development on generative AI that we will obviously develop more during our investor day in June.