Ipsos

Hello, good afternoon, or good morning. Thanks for joining. Welcome to our first quarter results announcement session for 2026 at Ipsos. I'm Jean-Laurent Poitou, the CEO of Ipsos, and I'm here with Olivier Champollier, our Chief Financial Officer. What I'm going to be covering today are our results for the first quarter of 2026, An update on our strategy execution. Horizons is the name. You heard about it if you attended our January Capital Markets Day, and we talked about it a bit as we announced our full year results of 2025. I'll provide an update of where we are on the execution path. And then we will take a look at how we are considering the rest of 2026 with an outlook. But let me start with our first quarter 2026 results. and our revenue, which stands at 555 million. If we compare this with the same number a year ago, it's 2.4% less, which in fact, if we didn't have a significant 5.4% negative currency impact, would be a total growth of 3%. That total growth is broken down into 4.3% of impact of the acquisitions we made, particularly the BVA family, minus the negative impact of having this pose of our Russian business or 80% of it as it happens. So it's not consolidated anymore. And then the organic growth is minus 1.4%, and the combination of all this is what drives the minus 2.4 total growth. But this is in the context of encouraging commercial momentum in Q1. I have had the opportunity to look at the order book for Q1 in many different dimensions, and I'll cover them in a second. Overall, our organic growth of our order book is 1% against the same quarter last year. with an acceleration towards the latter part of the quarter in March, which means that the revenues for many of those orders which happen late in the quarter will generate revenue further into 2026. Now, as I look at the order book expansion, first by sector, one notable encouraging signal is the fact that our public affairs business, which we have had lackluster performance with in years past, and which dragged on our growth in 25 in particular, is back. Rising demand, rising order intake. And I'll talk about it some more because it's so important. Solid traction with our consumer and package good clients. They represent about a quarter of our business. So it is very important for us that our consumer and package good clients, which are also the client's among which the AI solutions that we increasingly deploy in the market are resonating with most. If I look at this now by geography, our four largest markets, North America, France, UK, and China, are driving our growth. And in particular, we have a very robust performance in China, which, as you may remember, has had some quarters of stability or a bit less. Now, looking at it from the standpoint of our largest clients, the top 30 clients of Ipsos, the ones where we have dedicated client account leadership and campaigns, Those 30 drive our growth very significantly from a sales standpoint in Q1. So good performance across several dimensions of our business from a sales standpoint late in the quarter. This will translate gradually into revenue as also our strategy implementation accelerates and drives expanding order book through the quarter. So that's what I wanted to cover, generally speaking. Let me focus a little bit on public affairs, because as you heard, we made, among our strategic choices, one of them was to continue as a multi-specialist, in particular, continue to believe strongly in the power of having public affairs, being the global player present in 66 markets, serving public decision makers, doing political polling, and helping with policy assessments. That global footprint is one of our very, very differentiating assets, as is the fact that we have our own proprietary panels, which serve us extremely well in the public sector. We also have the ability in many of our large markets and countries to do face-to-face interviews, to knock on doors and ask real respondents about what their views are or what their voting intents are. And then finally, we have the ability to leverage some of the methodologies and some of the services that primarily have been born out of our private sector business into public affairs, such as, for example, when we know how to interview and assess the engagement of employees in the private sector, we apply that in the public sector as well. So public affairs is back. We have won prominent government contracts across multiple geographies which had struggled in quarters past, particularly in the U.S., but also in France and the U.K. So I have confidence that public affair will be one of the drivers of our growth in 2026. Let me now hand it over to Olivier, who will comment on the numbers on a more detailed basis.

Thank you, Jean-Laurent. Good afternoon. Good morning, everyone. Let me go into the details of our Q1 revenue. As said by Jean Laurent, the revenue was 555 million euros in Q1, down 1.4% on an organic basis. There was a negative impact of currency of 540 basis points due to the appreciation of the euro against several currencies, in particular the US dollar, the Pound Sterling and APEC currencies. Acquisition net of disposals contributed positively to the growth in Q1 by 430 basis points, reflecting the impact of the 2025 acquisition. Mostly, the BVA family that was acquired in June 2025 net of the disposal of our Russian operation in Q1 2026. As a reminder, Russia was accounting for around 2% of our total revenue. Factoring in those items, the total revenue was down 2.4% and excluding foreign exchange currency effects, it was up 3%. Moving on to the revenue by region. Our largest region, representing 52% of group revenue, delivered total growth of 5.3% on a reported basis, including 0.1% organic growth. The positive performance was mainly driven by the acquisition of the BVA family, because this business was mostly in France, UK, and Italy, offset by the disposal of the Russian activities. In contrast, the Middle East, which represents around 3% of the total revenue of the group, was impacted by the geopolitical situation in the region and posted an organic decline of its revenue of 4.4% in the first quarter 2026. In the Americas, which represents one-third of the total revenue, in Q1, revenue declined by 4.1% on an organic basis. This is mainly driven by the US. However, commercial momentum has improved with a strong increase in the order intake at the end of the quarter, in March particularly. Several contract wins in public affairs sustained a recovery in the segment. As a result, the order book in the Americas was slightly positive at the end of March. In Asia Pacific now, the revenue was up 2.2% on an organic basis, but declined by 6.3%. on a reported basis due to the negative impact of many currencies in the region against the euro. The first quarter was encouraging, with China returning to strong growth. We have indeed a strong momentum in China, with large international local clients, especially in technology and automotive. China is one of the markets where we have seen a rapid adoption of our AI-driven offers. Let me now turn to the performance by audience segment. Our consumer segment revenue, which accounts for half of the revenue in the quarter, perceived a positive growth organically of 0.5%. We continue to sustain demand from CPG clients for deeper understanding of consumer behavior in a volatile and rapidly changing environment. Our services in market positioning, innovation testing, and brand health tracking are benefiting from this demand. This is also an area where our AI solutions and platforms such as Ipsos Fantasio and Ipsos Digital play a growing role in helping clients reacting faster and making better informed decisions. The client and employee audience revenue was down 3.3%. This decline is mostly explained by timing effects in our audience measurement activities. which will translate into positive growth over the coming quarters thanks to a positive order book at the end of March. The citizen segment now. The revenue, which includes public affairs and corporate reputation, declined by 2.3% on an organic basis. As mentioned by Jean Laurent previously, the first quarter marks an important turning point. as we have seen the return of public sector orders in markets that had impacted our growth in the last few years, like the US and France, where we see a rebound. During the quarter, we booked several significant multi-year contracts, which reinforced our confidence in a rebound of this activity later during the year. Finally, The doctor and patient audience revenue was down 4.4% on an organic basis. This activity had a strong start of the year in 2025, where Q1 was plus 5.4%. So this therefore creates a tough comparison basis. In addition, we have experienced a slowdown at the start of this year in quantitative studies from the pharma industry clients, but we see an improvement trend based on our order book. Beyond those four audiences, I would like also to underline the performance of our do-it-yourself platform, Ipsos Digital, which recorded a double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2026. At the end of the first quarter, I would like to underline that our order book is growing by 1% and is in line with the historical pattern. More specifically, the order book at the end of March 2026 represents 55.6% of expected full-year 2026 revenue at the end of the first quarter. This is consistent to the average of the last four years, where the total of the order book at the end of the first quarter was 55.5% of the full-year revenue. Overall, this analysis supports our outlook for the remainder of the year. Turning now to On profitability and cash generation, it's important to notice that our growth margin and our cash generation at the end of the first quarter are in line with our expectations. I will now hand over to Jean-Laurent, who will tell you more about how we have been able to execute our Horizon strategic plans.

Thanks, Olivier. And before I provide some color on the outlook for the reminder of the year, let me say something about what's going to drive our growth for the reminder of the year, and mainly the switching to execution mode on the horizon strategy, which we talked about back in January and which we highlighted the main components of during our capital markets day. Those six items here are the six key strategic choices we made and the ones that we are starting to see bear fruits in our positive growth of the order intake in Q1, starting with the fact that we have confirmed our intent strategically to leverage our multi-specialist business offerings. I talked about what this means with the return and rebound of public affairs, but it is also very important to note that we are equipping our teams with a first set of six and more to come as those are successful, globally managed services, powered by our Ipsos digital platform, systematically and consistently applied to services for each of them, wherever the client we serve is based. Those GMSs led by Sean Dix are already structured with representatives in the key markets where we have decided to grow them with specific accountabilities, budgets, the platforms are there. We are leveraging some of the past investments and adding more through the course of 2026. And then Ipsos Digital, the platform, which is showing continued momentum in the market, led by Andrei Postolaka. The teams there have also been demultiplied by having specific leaders in our key markets to drive further growth of our digital platform, reinforced by the fact that it is the foundation on which many of our service line-specific, activity-specific AI solutions are based. Our global company with a local footprint, strategic choice, starts to show us the first fruits of growth, particularly in the market. You saw in China where you saw Li Feng, our CEO there, in the capital markets. They explained how he had already started to launch some of the initiatives, and that's what we're seeing translate into significant growth in that particular market. But also in the U.S., which is the other big market, where we decided that we would have, in addition to the Core Horizons initiative, some market-specific, particularly tech industry and technification-specific initiatives in the U.S. Mary Ann Paco, our CEO, and Lindsay Frankel, who you saw on the Capital Markets Day present, that strategy, are driving it aggressively, and I'm pretty confident that this will materialize in the quarters ahead into accelerated growth. Speed is an initiative where it'll take time because it's the most profound from an operating and tooling standpoint, from a training and capability and skills evolution standpoint. So this will take a bit longer to materialize a scale. We have started on this. AI as a catalyst for market leadership is now being led from a technology standpoint by Nathan Brumby, our recently appointed Chief Technology and Platforms Officer. Nathan joined us just over two months ago and is in full swing. And we have a roadmap, and I'll show you some examples of AI solutions in a minute for Q2, Q3, and Q4 launches of AI-powered products. Also, access to real people as a critically relevant competitive advantage is one of our key choices. I'm happy to report that we are seeing increasing level of insourcing. What we mean by this is using our own panels, our own respondents, rather than outsourcing to third-party providers of such. And this is a key component of our operational transformation, which is led by Alexandre Morboissy, our newly appointed deputy CEO, joining us from Air France, where he had very important responsibilities. And we are happy to say that our operations transformation agenda is also starting to show signs of increased ownership of our own panels. And then if I think about our evolution to higher value-added services, and in particular our ability to expand our footprint at the clients we serve, Our commercial excellence, I mentioned the fact that we are starting to see very superior growth at our top clients, and this is being led by Eleni Nikolas, who's driving an initiative across those large clients. So with Olivier now being formally our chief financial officer, he was named an interim, and we are happy to confirm it, and I'm very happy, Olivier, that we'll be able to continue and work together in that capacity. And more importantly than those leaders, the whole of 20,000 or close there to people at Ipsos and many of our leaders across the globe are being mobilized to make the strategy execution happen at scale and at pace. So let me give you examples of some of the AI technologies and global services new services that we are launching or that we have already in store and that we are accelerating through the GMS model. First of all, an example of what we call behavioral measurement, looking at how people behave when they either buy or consume or use the products of our clients. Two examples of very large consumer and packaged good players, one in the beverage industry, the other one in the home care industry, products for detergents and washing machines and the like. We are using AI technologies to help observe with clips and videos that people themselves provide us rather than checking diaries on paper saying how much coffee did I drink today or how many washing machines and how much powder did I use for each of them. So we're using videos to not just translate what was written into what's visible on the video, but also understand better the gestures, the expressions, the satisfaction, many subtle consumer signals that wouldn't be otherwise available to our clients. A second example is in social media. We are using AI technologies to examine at scale what videos are successful and why, detecting patterns on social media. For example, in China, that would be Red Note, which is a very prominent video channel on social. And then we are using the insights generated by this video analysis of those clips to identify which influences, which patterns are the most likely to drive interest and ultimately the brand awareness or decisions to buy. This is helping our clients decide faster where to target, which influences to pick, and what formats to use at scale. A third example is in China, which is of course one of the innovation hubs of the world. where we have now a very large consumer and packaged goods clients who's relying on Ipsos synthetic consumer digital twins to replicate the personality traits and the behavioral logic of the clients of that CPG company. Now, we are doing this because it helps answer sometimes simple, sometimes slightly more complex questions faster than a full-fledged survey, bearing in mind that we do that with a lot of care to the reliability and continuous update by recalibrating with real respondents and continuously validating the results of those digital twins. So those are three examples I wanted to give of how we're embedding technology and AI to create more value at our clients. Let me now turn to the numbers for 2026. First of all, it's very obvious that everything I'm about to project is based on factoring in what we know and acknowledging what we don't know about what's happening in the Middle East. What do we know? In the Middle East itself, which as Olivia highlighted is about 3% of our total revenue, we are seeing obviously an erosion of our revenues to the tune of several millions, and that's no surprise, but we believe that The outlook will turn as governments in particular and large spenders will return to growth as and if the crisis and the war slows down and ends, which we all hope for. We don't see significant consequences outside of the Middle East region. Very few, if any, client cancellations, delays in decisions, or postponements of contracts. So there's marginal examples here and there, but essentially limited observed consequences outside of the Middle East, which therefore means that barring escalation or prolonged conflict in the Middle East, we don't see at this stage significant impact on our group's full-year outlook. Now, the situation, as we all know, remains highly volatile, and therefore both the monitoring but also the contingency planning in case things deteriorate or escalate or continue in the long run are being prepared. We've done that in 2008. We've done that in 2020, so we know how to adjust and react in case we need to do so. On a more positive note, let me reiterate why we believe that the positive order book momentum of the first quarter is a good signal of accelerating order intake and therefore gradual expansion of our revenues throughout the remainder of 2026. First of all, we launched the strategy. We're in full execution mode. But obviously, we're going to bear fruits increasingly as quarters after quarter things happen, particularly with globally managed services, if so, digital, the impact of our commercial actions, and so on and so forth. It's also reassuring to see that we're about at the same percentage of our full year income outlook from an order book already in our books at this point of the year, as we have historically over the last few years, but also have spent time with our leaders in the various markets. We are looking at it both from a pipeline analysis standpoint and from an outlook based on their knowledge on the frontline closest to our clients, and this also reinforces the predictions that we have already highlighted for the year of a 2 to 3% estimated organic growth and an operating profit which would be equivalent to 2025, at which it was at 12.3. And I have to highlight something here. Russia was a profitable business compared with the average of Ipsos, and it's now no longer in our numbers. BVA is a company that we acquired and we're extremely happy with this acquisition, but it was in 2025 and it will continue for a good part of 2026 to be a drag on our profitability with the fact that it was six months only in 2025 and it's going to be a full year in 2026. So, in fact, reaching an equivalent profitability in 2026 to the one we observed in 2025 is actually increasing the core profitability outside of those perimeter effects. So with that, I would like to thank you for your attention so far. I'm about to open to questions and answers, obviously. Invite you to our May 20th general meeting of shareholders, and also to our first half results announcement, which will take place on July the 23rd. Thank you very much, and let's open it up to questions and answers.