Randstad Nv Unsp/Adr

Hello, welcome to the Randstad Q3 2025 results conference call and audio webcast. For the first part of the call, participants will be in listen-only mode. And afterwards, there will be a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press key pound five on your telephone keypad. Please note, that you're limited to one question per round and a follow-up question, if time allows that. I will now hand over the word to Sander van het Noordende, CEO, Mr. van het Noordende.

Please go ahead. Thank you very much, Elba, for that kind introduction. And good morning, everybody. I'm here with George and our investor relations team to share our Q3 results. Let me first say it's been a special quarter as we celebrated our 65 year anniversary. And of course, this milestone is a celebration of our enduring commitment to shaping the world of work and to be a true partner for talent, providing clients with the talent they need to succeed and finding talented jobs and careers they are looking for. So this quarter we've been very focused on executing our partner for talent strategy and I'm pleased to report that our delivery excellence and our digital first progress combined with commercial and operational discipline has led to a good set of results. The market environment in Q3 was in many ways similar to what we saw in Q2. We remain in the stacked and job market. We see more resilience in temp while as expected, the professional and per markets remain challenging. From a geographical perspective, we see diverging trends with ongoing recovery in North America and Southern Europe and sustained momentum in APEC. Condition in Northern Europe remain challenging and we expect this environment to persist for the remainder of the year. Against this backdrop, we delivered solid results. We achieved revenues of 5.8 billion euros, an EBITDA of 191 million euros and a margin of 3.3%. Looking forward, we continue to see stabilization, most notably in North America and Southern Europe, with temp more resilient than perm. On the other hand, major Northwestern European countries face ongoing uncertainty in the wake of various domestic challenges. However, I'm proud of the discipline that we have shown in our execution in Q3 with good progress on our operational and enterprise specializations. And from a commercial point of view, we've grown activity and runs at operational. We have had some good client wins in enterprise and digital and professional job flow is back at pre-summer levels. And that said, we've been very focused on executing our strategy and I want to share some meaningful progress that shows things are coming together at scale because that's what we need at Randstad. The main milestone this quarter is clearly Ransat Digital in the US. We went live with our Torque Digital Marketplace with the talent community of now over 1 million IT specialists. We have transformed our business from the classic linear and recruiter dependent model into one that's community centric, high velocity and AI powered. And this does not only result in a better experience for clients and talent, but also in enhanced productivity. And with this move, we immediately add another 1.3 billion euros in annualized revenues to our digital marketplaces. A second area where we are making great progress through our digital marketplaces is our healthcare growth segment. In the Netherlands, Zorgwerk successfully navigated the transition from freelance to temp, driving strong double-digit growth. We've expanded our Appel Medical app in France with self-scheduling, empowering talent even more. And as mentioned last quarter, we've gone live for healthcare in Belgium, and in the first months, talent take-up was enormous, with 50% of shifts filled within one hour, of which 30% filled within 10 minutes. And finally, we're making strides in Australia with now over 40,000 self-scheduled shifts. And this growth segment is now generated over 800 million annual revenues through digital marketplaces. Lastly, I'm pleased with your transformation of our Ransom operational business in the US. And as I said before, it's not just the launch of the digital marketplace, it's the business model. Leveraging the power of digital first in combination with talent and delivery centers gives a better experience for talent in terms of flexibility and speed and for clients in terms of fulfillment and quality of talent. Also, it allows us to spend more time with clients because of a higher productivity in delivery. Finally, we run our business at a higher clock speed. As an example, we now have our supply-demand balance by zip code and by roll at our fingertips, allowing us to take immediate action where needed. And the good thing is that all of this is already contributing to growth and profitability. So these transformations are taking the way we run our business to a next level with a higher velocity, more data and more position. We're setting up a new base camp, if you will. And the great thing is it's all powered by next generation AI embedded in our digital marketplaces. Combined, our digital marketplaces are now generating approximately 4 billion in annualized revenue, which is 15% of our total business. And that's massive. To conclude, we're executing well in fragile markets. We're operating our business with rigor and discipline, and at the same time delivering on our pipeline for talent strategy with, of course, the best team in the industry. George, over to you.

Thank you, Sander, and good morning, everyone. Let me start by bringing where we left it last time. So overall, the stabilization we highlighted the whole year, and in Q2 in particular, continued into Q3. We increased our workforce, just to put into perspective, by over 10,000 employees in Q3 sequentially, compared to last year's similar increase of 4,000 employees, two and a half times. Despite an adverse foreign exchange impact, we'll talk more about that later, we generated more revenue sequentially as well. At the same time, while clients on caution are favoring flexibility, the actual hiring confidence remain extremely low and our permanent placement placements felt that impact. Overall, as the decline rates is like Sander mentioned, combined with our focus on operational efficiency, combined again with a linear cost structure, allow us to protect profitability and further the leverage. But let's break this down by regions first and starting on page eight with North America. In North America, we continue to see good strategic and financial progress this quarter, with growth and profitability improving across all specializations. In the US, our operational business grew 1% and continues to perform ahead of the market, as we have now implemented our new way of working. Sander alluded to it, but let me remind you, this is not only the marketplace, it's the central delivery for our client and talents. It's optimizing roles and responsibilities around specialization, and it's the immediate talent availability and our accommodation footprint. Through digital first and more harmonized ways of working, we continue to generate quarter after quarter productivity gains and are able to remove structural costs, operating now already a significantly leaner cost structure. The professional solutions and permanent hiring showed signs of stabilization at a low level, declining still 11% and 18%, as I mentioned before, in permanent. Digital grew 2%, and we celebrated the rollout as we heard from the center of the marketplace. Enterprise was, for the whole region, 2% broadly stable sequentially. In Canada, we also saw good underlying improvement and return to growth in the quarter. The EBITDA margin for North America came in at 4.6%, up 100 basis points year over year, a solid step towards a structurally higher operating leverage already under the new model.