Ipsos

Hello and welcome to Ipsos' Q3 results. I'm Kelly Beaver, Chief Executive of Ipsos and I'm also with my colleague Olivier Champourlier, our Chief Finance Officer. So firstly on the results for the quarter. In Q3 organic growth reached 2% and over the nine months organic growth is sitting at 1.2% versus 0.8% in H1. Our performance is something we are working on accelerating, which is why the delivery of our Horizon Strategy needs to accelerate at pace. Just a reminder for those of you on the call around what the Horizon Strategy is, this is the right strategy for Ipsos. It was put in place in January this year and it is composed of two key dynamics. One which is around building on IPSOS's already very distinctive competitive strengths, our multi-specialist expertise, our global reach with of course our local presence and our direct access to real people, our deep data assets and our methodologies. These are really valuable and increasingly unique. The second key aspect is around AI and technology, ensuring that we strengthen and accelerate innovation and speed as a result of infusing artificial intelligence through our products and through the way in which we work across our organisation. And lastly, making sure that we can leverage as an organisation some of the adjacent growth opportunities in our industry, which AI makes even more possible. Those lie largely in data integration capabilities and data analytics. Together, these distinctive assets that Ipsos has, doubling down on those alongside the infusion of AI, are what we are creating called an augmented Ipsos. When I last spoke to you in the period of September, we discussed three key areas where I was seeking to make progress in that time period. And I just want to cover with you now those three areas. Firstly, leadership. This was an area where I spoke about making significant progress and over the last few weeks we have indeed made good progress on leadership in our organisation. There were two areas where I wanted to improve particularly. One was around the technology space and the way in which our teams are set up to deliver our AI capabilities. We have indeed got leadership in place now for our agentic capabilities and the rollout of AI across our organisation. Secondly, a key area of focus was around our solutions and our offers and there is now a lead for across all of our service line solutions which is a gentleman called Sean Dix as well as a leader for our globally managed services which is a specific component of our service line offers which are higher margin and accelerating faster than the overall growth rate. These two big areas, so technology and indeed our offer development, are critical to our ability to accelerate the Horizons programme at pace. The second area that I want to mention is the rollout of AI across our company. And this strategic partnership has been something we've put in place over the end of the summer period and indeed is now into full execution mode. This is a strategic partnership with Google Gemini. It's a multi-year partnership to accelerate AI deployment right across the group, which both does two things. Firstly, it enhances our employees' capabilities, augmenting the way in which they work. And secondly, and more importantly, it gives us an agentic AI platform which builds on the existing Ipsos Facto 1.0 to create Ipsos Facto 2.0 which allows us to accelerate the delivery of AI products right across our organisation in a more industrialised way at scale. This partnership helps us to accelerate innovation, automation, the speed of research delivery and importantly the speed with which we will accelerate the product rollout right across the world and in our markets. Augmenting speed, which is around accelerating the speed of workflows. Augmenting trust with strict data privacy, governance, and as you would expect, model controls for ownership and protection of our data. And augmenting insights, enabling our researchers to spend more of their time delivering insightful insights to our clients. Secondly and importantly, our Ipsos digital platform. This is our end-to-end research platform which enables us to deliver insights at speed for our clients. It's a really important part of Ipsos' speed delivery infrastructure. And over the last weeks, we have been really accelerating the amount of products that we have available to our teams and our clients on Ipsos Digital. We've been expanding the AI capabilities within Ipsos Digital and rolling out an adoption programme. Just some of the things that are now on Ipsos Digital. We have our creative impact product which now has moved to deliver research in 48 hours for our clients across six key markets. We have added employee experience essentials to Ipsos Digital. This is a faster turnaround employee pulse capability largely targeted at EHR professionals but not explicitly. Many clients in many organisations are interested in getting a quick pulse of what their employees are thinking and feeling today. And Open Reach, which is another important capability that unlocks the ability for us and our clients to put client sample into Ipsos Digital, which expands the multiplicity of use cases for the tool and the platform. A second important area is the AI innovation. We now have agentic concept testing on Ipsos Digital with InnoExplorer, which is one of our innovation service tools and capabilities. This has got self-service chat across 61 markets. And next we will be developing the AI-powered questionnaire design and indeed agents within each of the products that we have in Ipsos Digital. and the platform developments is a really important part. But the secondary part, of course, is ensuring that we are adopting the use of Ipsos Digital at scale in the company to really drive and accelerate its performance overall. We have launched Ipsos Digital First, which is a mandate for Ipsos Digital to be the first port of call for the use and delivery of research in our organisation. Global certification of power users, and Rollout of Global Company Training Program. All of this helps us to accelerate the delivery and execution of Horizons and build that augmented Ipsos. I'm now going to hand over to Olivier who can talk you through the results.

Thank you, Kelly. Good morning, everyone. So let me go through our financial performance for the third quarter. So, in the third quarter 2026, Ipsos generated revenue of €636 million, broadly stable compared to the same period last year on a reported basis. The organic growth was positive, plus 2% for the quarter alone, driven by good performance in EMEA. China, and the citizen business. For the first nine months of the year, the organic growth reached 1.2%. As a reminder, in the first quarter, the revenue was growing on an organic basis at minus 1.4%. It moved to plus 0.8% at the end of June, so for the first six months, and now we are at 1.2% organic growth for the first nine months of the year. At the end of September, we have some positive scope effects of 1.6% which are driven mostly by the acquisition of the BVA family. As a reminder, this is an acquisition that we made last year at the end of June. So when you compare this year to last year, last year we have one quarter of revenue and this year we have three quarters of revenue. So this is a positive impact on the scope effect and offset partly the deconsolidation of the Russian business. that move out from the scope from January the 1st, 2026. Currency effects were negative at minus 1.9% and reflect mainly the appreciation of the euro against the dollar for the first nine months of the year. But it's worthwhile noting that actually for the last quarter itself, in the fourth quarter, we had positive effect of 0.8%. So the trend reversed. Lastly, regarding our order book, so the order book is for the revenue that will be generated in the year, it reached 1.2% at the end of September, a similar level than what we have already at the end of June. So for the quarter alone, it's growing at 2%, but it's not strong enough to change the decimal. So now let me go through the performance by region. Starting with EMEA which is our largest region. So for this region the organic growth for the third quarter was plus 3.5%. So all of the sub-regions have delivered positive performance with the exception of our Our sub-region which is Middle East which has been negatively impacted by the conflict in Iran. So all in all for EMEA the total growth is plus 2.8% and in addition to the organic growth we add as I said already some positive scope effect which impact mostly EMEA which has been driven by the acquisition of the BVA family. So now fully conciliated for nine months this year and that has offset partly the deconciliation of our business in Russia. Moving to Americas now. So this region experienced a negative growth for the third quarter of minus 1.2% and to be flat at the end of September. So for the first nine months of the year the organic growth is flat. Those results are definitely below our expectations and mainly reflecting delays in the execution of the Horizon plan for the first half of 2026. This is one of the reasons why we need to accelerate and we are going to accelerate in the execution of the plan for the remainder of the year. Asia Pacific achieved a nice organic growth of 4.3% for the third quarter and in total for the first nine months of the year it's plus 2.8%. So in the region we continue to experience a very strong performance in China supported by good momentum among both large local and international clients as well by the success of our AI enabled offerings. India also contributed positively to the growth of the region in the third quarter. So let me now look at the performance by audience perspective. So here, as you can see, we have mixed performance amongst our audience. Our service line dedicated to consumers, clients, and employees recorded organic growth of 0.7% and minus 2.5% respectively in the third quarter alone, and 0.9% minus 1.1% over the first nine months of 2020. Activity was notably driven by our innovation and marketing optimization marketing spend optimization solution so we have a business line MMA in the US who had significant growth in the second in the third quarter while we have certain businesses that have experiences less growth notably advertising campaign measurement on the back of a very strong quarter last year Our activities serving citizens performed strongly, with organic growth of 8.6% in the third quarter and 4.7% for the first nine months of the year. The recovery is supported by several contract wins since March, particularly multi-year agreements reflecting renewed demand for a deeper understanding of citizens. This is the core area of expertise of Ipsos and one where our global scale gives us a strong competitive position. We also saw strong acceleration of the growth in the doctor and patient segment with organic growth reaching 5.7% in the third quarter and 1.6% for the first nine months of the year. The growth is supported by a dynamic market environment driven by increased drug approval in the US and continued innovation in the pharma sector. We have seen particularly strong momentum in GLP-1 alongside Immology and Oncology. Lastly, I would like to highlight that our platform, do-it-yourself platform, Ipsos Digital, grew by 14%. for the first nine months of the year. As mentioned by Kelly already, increasing the use of Ipsos Digital is an important component of our speed program and of the broader execution of Horizon. So let me finish now with the outlook for 2026. Given the level of the order book at the end of September, which is growing on an organic basis at 1.2%, A comparable number than what we had at the end of June. Now the organic growth expected for the year is between 1.2% to 1.5%. And this outlook takes obviously into account the uncertain microeconomic and geopolitical environment, notably marked by the impact of the conflict in Middle East that has negatively impacted our business in the region. Lastly, the group confirms its objective of achieving an operating margin rate equivalent to the one of 2025. We continue to maintain strong financial discipline while making the necessary adjustments to successfully execute the Horizon Plan. And with that, I will hand back to Kelly, who will present now Horizon in action.

Thanks very much, Olivier. So I wanted to share with you some examples of how we are delivering from an AI augmented capability perspective. And just taking a few of these and what's been delivered over the last quarter. Firstly, having a look at something delivering under Strategic Aim 4, which is our ability to deliver AI as a catalyst for market leadership. Predominantly new products, AI powered. And this example is an AI enhanced observation which augments L'Oréal's ability to make R&D decisions. It's a lovely example because I think it is easy to understand in many ways. So we have conducted work which took consumer recorded videos of how people did their home hair colouring. So this was to help L'Oréal uncover what some of the key friction points were in at home hair colouring and so that they could understand how they could improve the overall product. So those at home recorded consumer videos have been transformed into insights and actionable improvements for our clients. using AI computer vision and modelled with deep observational science which is led by our qualitative researchers at Ipsos which enables our clients ultimately in this case to understand what were the barriers or the challenges or the friction points to doing hair colour at home so that they could then think about what they can do to make it easier for people to use those kits, the instructions and indeed understand the packaging requirements better. This This particular example has led to industry awards for the team that has delivered it and for us it is a capability that has since been expanded across many of our markets across the world. This test, learn, scale and the industrialisation of our AI solutions is critical to the acceleration of the Horizons programme. Secondly, a good example from our Synthesio capability. So Synthesio is a capability that allows us and our clients to analyse millions of conversations that are happening online so that they can take those conversations and take decisions off the back of them as part of a often a wider data ecosystem. So for Synthesia we now have a dedicated AI agent which is integrated through an MCP which allows our clients to have social listening and intelligent social listening delivered directly into their LLMs and ultimately their workflows as clients which increasingly is an important aspect of how we are working today and what we need to continue to accelerate in the future. For the clients, they can make quicker decisions. It's integrated into their workflows and ultimately seamless insights into the decision-making process. Over the course of the last quarter, we've also had some great new success stories with this particular partnership with TV Beat in New Zealand. Audience Measurement is one of our multi-specialist service lines and under our Strategic Game 1, leveraging our multi-specialist business offerings, we can see this as a great example of where we're bringing our deep knowledge of audience measurement and the local context that we are deeply rooted within in New Zealand to win and deliver exciting programmes for our clients. This example is a partnership with TVBeat to deliver the new total TV audience measurement system for TV New Zealand and Sky in New Zealand as well. Ipsos is delivering the establishment survey component of this and also using our proprietary media cell Thank you very much. And then lastly, before we open up for Q&A, I wanted to share one of the pieces that happened just a few weeks ago. So Ipsos led a conference called the Human Advantage Conference. This is one example of many of Ipsos leading really the future of conversations, not just of our industry, but of wider societal change, how the world of work is changing, how innovation in organisations is changing. This conference brought together over 2,000 organisations, companies, business leaders, Nobel Prize winners, some of the greatest thinkers of our time to really discuss and move forward with what is the future of work? What does leadership look like in a world of AI? How will consumer behaviour and trust respond? Absolutely fantastic, Ipsos convening, world-class thought leadership, and thanks to ultimately the BVA family acquisition that was done in 2025, where we inherited a high degree of additional behavioural expertise. So I'll stop there and we can open for Q&A.