Viridien S/Adr

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Veridian First Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be the question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you need to press star 11 on your telephone keypad. You will then hear an automatic message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw a question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would like to hand the conference over to our speaker today, Jean-Baptiste Roussille. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Nadia. Yes, good morning and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this presentation of Derrida's first quarter 2025 results. I'm Jean-Baptiste Roussille in charge of corporate finance and investor relations, and the call today is hosted from Paris, where Sophie Zurchia, our CEO, and Jérôme Servre, our group CFO, will provide an overview of the results as well as comments on our outlook. Following the overview of the year, we will be pleased to take your questions. And before I hand over the microphone to Sophie and Jerome, just a few words to tell you that I'll be leaving the company tomorrow. It's been an exciting year preparing and completing successfully the refinancing of our debt. And I wanted to thank Jerome and Sophie for giving me the opportunity to join the team a year ago and grow professionally and personally. Starting tomorrow, I will be replaced by Alexandre, who is actually with us as well today. And Alexandre, actually, I could say that the share price almost doubled under my watch, and I wish you all the best. Best of luck to do even more. Now, I leave you with Sophie.

Thank you very much, Jean-Baptiste, for your contribution over the last year, and I wish you the best. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for attending this presentation. A market environment remained favorable during the first quarter. Marked by robust business performance, significant commercial wins, and solid profitability aligned with our long-term ambition. Revenue grew by 10% and our EBITDA increased by 35%, achieving the strongest profitability for the first quarter over the past decade. Net cash flow was minus $20 million or positive $22 million when correcting for interest, which were exceptionally paid in Q1 versus historically in Q2. Recent global developments with tariffs and additional production from OPEC Plus have introduced uncertainty in the market. However, as of this call, we have not observed any significant changes in our clients' behavior. We are primarily exposed to offshore deepwater projects, which require a longer-term perspective, and during the quarter have seen our clients increasingly focused on reserve replacement and organic exploration. Outside of any global geopolitical or economic consideration, which may increase impact into the future, our first quarter was marked by two key events. First, our vessel capacity agreement ended in January, further enhancing our asset-light strategy. This transition provides us with significantly greater financial and operational flexibility. Second, we successfully delivered all targeted milestones to date from our financial roadmap, which we presented in our Q4 2023 call. This included the recent refinancing of our debt, which extended its maturity to the end of 2030, and reduced the level of gross debt by $200 million compared to a year ago by utilizing excess cash on our balance sheet. Our liquidity remained strong, bolstered by an increased RCS facility, which demonstrates the trust our banking partners have in the group. We reiterate our strong and continued commitment to reducing leverage, using our increasing cash generation, and looking forward to further growing our company and delivering increased value to our stakeholders. We'll go on to slide six now with DDE segments. DD segment revenue grew 16% to $214 million, with adjusted EBITDA up 32% at $137 million, with both geoscience and earth data contributing positively. Slide 7 with geoscience. Geoscience external revenue reached $110 million, up 25% compared to last year, as we deliver on our strong backlog. There was also a positive impact from a significant sale of our Geovation software. We continue to invest in our high performance computing to enhance productivity by automating manual tasks and delivering the highest quality imaging results, truly leveraging our digital expertise. Looking at slide 8 with Geoscience operational highlights. Our imaging business has shown exceptional strength driven by the global adoption of our advanced elastic for waveform imaging technology. North America exceeded expectations with standout performance and we recently secured a cycling re-imaging project in Algeria, highlighting sustained interest from clients in the Middle East and Africa for our highest quality imaging solutions. We continuously broaden our client base as the value of high-end imaging becomes increasingly meaningful. Additionally, we made a significant sale of our GeoVation imaging software, as I mentioned earlier, which is typically sold to national oil companies to support the internal processing team. In low carbon, we are working on a large critical mineral study in Saudi Arabia, leveraging our unique capabilities and strong brand recognition in the Kingdom. We also won a new project in the North Sea for carbon sequestration, thanks to our innovative GeoSeam solution, which is a coupled reservoir in geomechanical modeling and simulation software technology. In HPC and digital, we onboarded two new clients on our cloud platform, one in material science and the other in image rendering. Going on to Earth data now with slide nine. Earth data segment revenue grew 7% to $104 million compared to last year, making it a strong Q1 historically. Our new KPI, cash EBITDA, grew 12% to $39 million while we finalized the acquisition phase of our Laconia project. Now going on to slide 10 for the operational highlights. During the first quarter, we completed the Laconia sparse node acquisition in the US Gulf, and the early results are delivering game-changing images. Our latest technology is revealing new geological details of the subsurface, enabling our clients to significantly reduce their exploration risk. We believe that this new dataset is timely for the recently announced release round. In Brazil, we received the environmental permit for the megabar extension of our program in the North-East, a frontier area of interest due to its similarities with Guyana and Suriname. Leveraging our digital leadership, we regularly invest in reprocessing projects, which allows us to extract more value from existing data at a marginal cost compared to new acquisitions. We are making great progress with an industry-funded re-imaging program in the Ivory Coast, targeting a basin with the potential for multi-billion barrel oil reserves. In the low-carbon space, finally, We completed two carbon storage screening projects for continental Europe and have more opportunities in the pipeline. Like turning on to sensing and monitoring with slide 11. Our first quarter SMO segment revenue was $87 million, remaining nearly stable compared to the previous year. This stability was characterized by increased revenue from land activities and reduced revenue from marine activities. The adjusted EBITDA was $14 million, a margin of 16%, showing the positive effects of our restructuring plan. Now on slide 12 with operational highlights. We are experiencing steady activity with national oil companies on land projects and see strong interest in our nodal systems across a broad range of geography. Latin America and North Africa are experiencing increasing activity while in Asia and the Middle East, activity remains sustained. Marine is driven by the sale of streamer sections to replace older equipment, as well as by our leading acquisition software systems, Walker for streamer navigation and Gator for seabed and nodal operations. This software helps our clients optimize their seismic operations. And this technology was further adapted to support port and logistics activities and he sold us Marleen in the marketplace, bringing efficiency, transparency and enhanced safety to maritime operations. We had another successful sale of Marleen this quarter in Asia, contributing to our new businesses' revenues. And further in our new businesses, we secured two new contracts for infrastructure monitoring in North America. And we're also witnessing growing global demand for geotechnical monitoring, particularly in the rail and mining sectors. Our defense business is benefiting from supportive momentum and increased opportunities. And looking ahead, SMO should be well positioned for both growth and improved profitability through the cycles. Let me now hand the floor to Jérôme to comment on our financials.