Veolia Environnement Adr

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining this conference call to present Veolia's 2025 results. I'm accompanied by Emmanuel Meunier, our CFO, and by Danielle Tuguès, head of Spain. I'm on slide four. 2025 was the second year of our four-year green uptime, and I consider it as a truly pivotal year in our trajectory, and I will tell you how. 2025 was another year of outperformance, and historical high. We exceeded our guidance with an organic EBITDA growth of plus 6.3 percent, above the target range of 5 to 6 percent, despite a complex environment and with a particularly robust fourth quarter. In the two years since the start of green-up, we have significantly improved our profitability with an increase of 150 BP in our EBITDA margin and plus 11.8% average annual growth of current net income. The first half of GreenUp is a real success, and we are fully in line with our trajectory, even ahead when it comes to our ROCE at 9.4% after tax at the end of 2025. This is two years in advance of our targets. But in 2025, above all, we resolutely resumed external growth, with two major multi-billion dollars acquisitions in water technologies and U.S. hazardous waste, two of our growth boosters, accelerating, therefore, the group's transformation towards more international and technology-driven businesses and enhancing the group's growth profile for the years to come. We have also enhanced our shareholder return in 2025, as we complemented our dividend policy with a multi-year share buyback program related to our employee shareholder plan. The excellent 2025 result, as well as our strong fundamentals, allow us to be very confident for 26, with an ambitious guidance and full confirmation of our green-up trajectory, building a stronger group going forward. I'm now on page 5, where you see that 2025 results are at a historic high and largely exceed our initial objectives. Revenue reached 44.4 billion euros, up 2.8% excluding energy price, which are essentially pass-through for us, as you know. EBITDA increased by a substantial 6.3% on a like-for-like basis, above our 5% to 6% guidance range. and shows a margin improvement of 70 basis points, plus 80 basis points in 24. We are now at the historical high of 15.9% EBITDA margin rate in Veolia. This is thanks to our continued performance improvement and recurring efficiency gains, with an enhanced performance outside Europe, where EBITDA jumped by plus 9.3%. complemented by the last synergies coming from the Suez acquisition four years ago. Current net income was up plus 9.1%, in line with our guidance and demonstrating our strong operating leverage. Net financial debt remains well under control at 19.7 billion euros, even after 2.3 billion euros of net financial acquisition close in 2025. Our leverage ratio is at 2.79 times at the end of 2025, well below three times. Testimony to our strong financial discipline and our capacity to have room for manoeuvre in the future. Finally, we reached our Rosé targets two years in advance and achieved a remarkable 9.4% after-tax Rosé in 2025. Page 6 illustrates our enhanced growth in international markets, notably outside Europe, where our businesses are not only faster growing but also more profitable. with an EBITDA margin already at 17.8%, which is better than the 15.9%, nevertheless, historical high for the group as a whole. Our revenue grew by 4.1% organically outside Europe, with excellent performances in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, notably. Emmanuel will detail each zone performance in a minute, but I would like here to highlight a few key commercial successes. In the Middle East, After years in the making and technical design, we were awarded, and we've just signed a few days ago, a $500 million project in Saudi Arabia for the Saudi Aramco Total Energy Consortium set up. We will design, build, and operate a massive new plant to treat the super complex effluents of this petrochemical site. In the U.S., in addition to strategic education of cleaners, which we expect to close mid-26th, Our biggest and most transformative acquisitions is the merger with Suez, as you know. We've complemented the strong Argenic growth with free tuck-in in Haas de Suez, which are high value creative. In Chile, we signed the first hybrid municipal industrial dissemination plant in Valparaiso. In India, we secured two strategic contracts for two of Moonbind's larger water treatment plants. Both facilities will use Velia cutting edge technologies.

Finally, in Europe, we also enjoyed a very encouraging commercial momentum. Page 7 shows our performance played by activities.

On the one hand, our booster activities, which is water technologies and bioenergies, have continued to grow at a steady pace in 2025, plus 4.3% organic and plus 8% in cleaning cookings, almost two times faster than strongholds. Strongholds, on the other hand, confirmed their resilience and infrastructure-like profile with a 2.2% growth. As you know, strongholds and boosters go hand in hand, with 30% of our revenue coming from a combination of activities. Those numbers are a confirmation of the sustained demand for our proprietary solutions to tackle critical needs, from securing water supply to treating pollutants and protecting health. This top line performance translates well into value creation with EBITDA up 4.8% for stronghold and jumping by 12.1% for boosters. Emmanuel will give you all the details in a few moments. 2025 was also the year of the successful launch of new technology and offers. I would like to give you two examples on slide 8. First, in PFAS treatment, which as you know is a fast-growing and very promising business opportunity for Veolia. We achieved €259 million of revenue in PFAS in 2025, which is up 25% versus zero in 2022. And as you know, we aim to reach €1 billion by 2030. In 2025, we developed, beyond PFAS, our end-to-end management solution from detection to disposal, combining water technologies and hazardous waste, and including our drop-fast proprietary technology to optimize HDI disposal. We already provide PFAS treatment in the U.S., in France, and in Australia, and we've already deployed 30 PFAS removal units in our U.S. water operations and plan an extra 50. In the area of new urban energy, we presented our new ecothermal grid offer in Poznan last November. It's a truly green heating and cooling solution for existing and greenfield networks using untapped local sources of energy, which is really unique at Veolia. We target 350 million extra revenue in 2030. We actually already have a pipeline of 1 billion pounds sterling of projects in the UK as part of the deployment of our new eco-thermal grid offering. And I'm very pleased we were recently awarded a first in this UK pipeline with flagship scientific welcome genome campus in Cambridge. I'm now on slide nine. In two years, The delivery of the greener plan, combining resilience and growth, was above our own expectations, both in terms of growth performance and strategic transformation, and this in spite of a complex economic and political context, which impacted foreign exchange rates, fiscal stability and production costs, notably energy costs. These first two years were indeed marked by a strong improvement in our profitability and value creation, with an average annual 11.8% growth in current net income group share between 2023 and 2025, combined with a spectacular improvement of gross state post-tax to a record high of 9.4% in 2025. Our performance during these first two years was also augmented by the completion of the Suez Energy Plan, which evidenced our capacity to boost the performance of the business we integrate. On slide 10, given our very strong 25 results, the board will propose to the AGM a dividend of 1.5 euro per share, up 7% versus 24, and 20% since 23, and in line with our EPS growth. Since the start of GreenUp, as I mentioned in the beginning, we have also enhanced our shareholder return as we complemented our dividend policy with a multi-year share buyback program in order to offset the impact of our employee shareholding program. And this represented €402 million in 2025.