Alten S.A. (ATE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Interpreted] Hello, everybody, and I would like to thank you very much for attending this annual results session 2025. We -- you will hear several things about artificial intelligence, offshore business because it's part of our world nowadays. I would like to inform you that we are going to be 3 people making this presentation, myself as a Chairman, and not the CEO as I used to be. Then we have Cyril Malarge. He joined a little bit more than 3 months ago. He is the CEO. And it is probably Cyril, who's going to make the presentation next time. And then we have Bruno Benoliel, the Deputy Chief Officer Manager. So in terms of revenues and turnover, those figures have already been announced. We have a reduction of turnover by 1.1% compared with the year '25, but this includes M&A and the essential activity of Worldgrid, which was achieving EUR 25 million. And at a constant parameter, we would have had a decrease of 4.5%. We will come back later on, on those sectors, which are the most concerned. This slowdown of the activity started, first of all, because of IT services, mainly that started already in '24. We had big problems by the end of '24 in the field of Aeronautics, and we had a ramping up again of Aeronautics by the last quarter '25, and that leaves us really very optimistic for '26. And the split up of turnover and growth between France and the rest of the world at the international level was a little bit severe at the international level, much more than for France, but quite similar. As concerns the results, because of a slight increase of the SG&As, we have 8.5% of OPA '25. We were expecting 8.1% and we ended up the year a little bit better. We did not sacrifice our organization or even the investments. On the contrary, we have enormous investments which were done. And we adapted our margins -- increased our margins to have this result of 8.5% in an unfavorable context. And it is, of course, going to improve during the year '26 and '27. Then as regards the number of headcount, engineers are participating in the projects in the group, we have 51,000 by the end of December '25, we had 51,900 altogether, Worldgrid started in November '24. So it did not impact in any way, which means that in a certain way, our activity has -- should we present it like that, has decreased by 900 productive engineers with a ratio which is similar of 90% engineers within our headcount -- overall headcount. And I hope that we will catch up this number by the year '26 and even go beyond that. And I would like you to remember that we have, again, 51,000 engineers also by the end of '23. As regards the geographical split up of our activity, the continents who resisted very well, and this is linked to the M&A that's Asia and Africa, you can see the numbers here of our engineers. We -- 13,900 in Asia and a slight decrease, which goes with the with North America. So we moved from 51,900 to 51,000 engineers. And again, Worldgrid was already integrated in December '24. But what is interesting in this slide is to show the geographical allocation. So on the whole planet, it is obvious that we have to work intensively to reach a much more critical size in Africa as well as China. As regards what happens in the automotive industry, we also have to find solutions for North America where M&A is almost nonexistent. We have a split up of many different little companies and consulting companies, and we need to accelerate the organic development and growth. This international split up and allocation is, of course, very interesting, but we need to bring it to a full potential. We have customers who are split up all over the world, Asia, Europe, Americas and Middle East and Africa. And we have a lot of technical staff working on behalf of those projects, which are delivered all over the world. And this is really of an advantage. We have local people. We have local companies working there. It is particularly good. As regards the allocation per sector, Here, we have the breakdown according to the different activities. And then you will have a dedicated slide sector by sector, delivering more information, but you will have the opportunity to read it by yourself. I'm not going to comment on it. Now the 2 fundamental sectors and initial sectors are Terrestrial Transportation, Automotive and Rail activities. And on the other hand, we have Aerospace, Defense and Naval, but they behave in a different way. Automotive did not suffer so much and represents still 15.2% of our activities compared with 16% 1 year ago. This reduction of turnover -- the turnover share within the global revenue share is because of the decarbonization, which is prevailing going as well as the manufacturing, which is going to low-cost countries, the manufacturing, we have -- so manufacturing is located in U.S. or Morocco and even in China and India. So the automotive sector is decreasing in turnover, but not in terms of headcount. We -- you have to understand that when the sales price or when the cost of labor is reduced or divided by 3, then obviously, the revenue is also and the turnover is diminishing. As regards the Rail part, we have a revamping of projects again by Alstom in particular, Alstom Bombardier as well as Siemens. This brings us to be very optimistic for the year 2026. Let's go back to Aerospace, Defense, Security, Naval. Aeronautics, the civil aerospace made us suffer in '24 because of logistic problems, deliveries, but a very strong recovery, in particular, at the -- for the company, Airbus second half of '25. And this led to a positive development of projects and engineering when -- and the other sectors stabilize. This gives a positive vision, relaunch of activities and the stop of the decrease of those activities, in particular, for Civil Aeronautics as well as Aerospace OEMs. And then, of course, we have to be very careful. We have a nice visibility up to 5 years' time from now. But then we will have the arrival of a competitor from China. But for the time being, we are fine. For Civil Aeronautics, we want to conquer Boeing and Boeing's OEMs to reach the critical size. So we are very much appreciated being the major partner of Airbus, in particular, in Europe. The problem that we will have is the rolling out implementation of a managing team and competence centers and technical management in the U.S.A. As regards Defense, obviously, an important budget and important budget help us to be very confident -- we have Airbus Defense, Thales, Leonardo in Italy, et cetera. The -- we are optimistic for a very nice development of this activity. One of the problems we might have is that we need to be agreed upon. We need the accreditation outside of Europe as a company, which is a European one and even a French one. The space activities were very stable in '24, '25, even slightly decreasing. But we have joined forces and projects. naval works only for defense. So it is -- it's -- we are optimistic. These are the reference activities of ALTEN, the engineering for Terrestrial Transportation and Aerospace, Aeronautics, Defense, Security, Naval. That's really the big chunk. And then, of course, we want to be present with a significant size on all the other industrial sectors like energy, life science, telecoms, industrial equipment, energy, thanks to the acquisition of Worldgrid, we could open doors, in particular, for EDF as a customer. EDF has managed to define the strategic development for EPRs, and that was really the challenge that we had to face and that we wanted to achieve, by the way, the results, thanks to the acquisition of Worldgrid. So we are very hopeful for all kinds of energetic partners that we might get in Europe. Obviously, we also move on with renewable energies, but there is -- there are less projects where ALTEN manages to integrate like on windmills or solar energy because the equipment is done in countries where we're not really present. But we want to remain very optimistic for '26 and even '27 on the energy sector, in particular, nuclear energy. As regards Life Science, our presence in this field, pharma industries, et cetera, consider 2 main activities. The first one is conception, certification of technical equipment, scientific equipment that we have a lot of pressure because of new molecules and new drugs. This activity is moving over to the U.S.A. Even Sanofi are aiming at the American market. So we need to help them and to support them for what we call the CRO activities. We need to go with our customers. In terms of certification, validation, traceability of pharmaceutical products, where we have -- and that's the other half of the activity in Life Science, this remains very strong. And in Europe, of course, we are one of the major actors. And again, we are particularly optimistic. The balance between both won't help us to grow, but to keep up with this level of activity, in particular, because the other part of Life Science is moving to the U.S.A., and we will have to go with them. As regards the industrial activity, it's not really a crisis. It's a slowdown of the overall mood and activity, be it the OEMs in Aerospace or the ones delivering the resolution for Telecom and even OEMs, they have frozen their investments a lot. And now as regards to the automobile industry, they have started offshoring. They have outsourced to India low-cost country, all their development. So our challenge is to support them in India and other countries like U.S.A. also in particular. So you see that there is a shift. And again, we are confronted with what we have known in the automotive sector 5 years ago. Now for Telecom, we have projects of the 5G and even the upcoming 6G. But again, we have a very strong offshore activity. But we... But we managed also to hold on to our turnover, thanks to the international situation and deployment that we have in Asia. And then the 2 sectors that we suffered most from because we have the yellow ones, we have retail services, media, public sector on one side and bank finance insurance on the other. Those 2 sectors really started suffering by the end of '23 because they started freezing their investments or projects, they slowed down the IT investments, but IT services are our main spokespeople. So the cloud migration, et cetera, procurement of hyperscaler, all this was considerably reduced and slowed down the development of the new releases. for all the IT systems of bank finance and insurance. It was quite violent, I must say, and the decrease has been important. It used to represent 28% of our turnover, and it's only 25%, which are left, I mean, both together. This is not specific to our company, ALTEN. It is an overall situation. All the IT service companies are at 25% with IT business. Now of course, I'm ready to take all your questions according to those different sectors in the Q&A after this presentation. But again, you have a lot of details if you look at the slides that come up after this one, where all the different sectors are detailed in a much more important manner. I also wanted to mention investments in AI for ALTEN, we started 3 years ago to organize ourselves to cope with this technological development as well as functional development of this world of services. The artificial intelligence is aiming at different universes. Well, first of all, everybody is concerned. Within the ALTEN ecosystem, priority has been given to the integration or to train all our engineers to train them with all the tools containing accelerators and leverage possibilities to work on new projects while integrating all those new tools and possibilities. Now since we are in competition with world actors, we have a lot of investments, in particular, in information systems and in training sessions, 65% of our employees have already been trained on AI. So it's a big investment. We had no spectacular announcement, but you can believe me, we are working on that, and we are not late at all. However, we are not a consulting company specialized on artificial intelligence. What we want to do is to master the tools and the accelerators, which are existing and suggested in terms of AI to work on projects that we deliver to our customers. And we managed to do that. Each time we were competing for projects we won because we were able to roll out the AI tools. Now of course, obviously, it's easy to win compared to small and little local companies, but not only this, also the big ones. And we were rewarded for that because they appreciated the very pragmatic way of talking about those tools. Now we have to -- we also have to adapt to the tools which are chosen by the customer. But in -- but most of the time, we manage to suggest our own tools because the customers are late in choosing their tools and processes. So sometimes we have this kind of double situation. We come up to the customer with our tools, but they have already started to implement their own tools. But it's okay. We just need a very solid time management according to the kind of projects we are dealing with. In average, the efficiency that we obtain, thanks to the deployment of AI is a 15% -- and that's true for the whole ALTEN universe and engineering, sorry. So to reach 20% or even more percent, it is possible like the technical support or basis activities, but it is, but it is not the major part of our activities. So for the R&D concept, we use AI and the tools for analysis. We reached those 15%. And for one project, if we have 30 engineers, it would have been up to 30% more expensive compared to -- well, compared to what we had 3 years ago. Thanks to AI, we have -- we win our tenders. We are not late. We are much more proactive. We have the AI competence and all the skills which are required to make an important amount of economy. So -- and we are cheaper. So this is what we call AI for projects and we're very performance. We have trained all our managers and the technical management on all the teams, and this is what we call the AI go-to-market and partnerships, and we also have the AI platforms and infrastructures which are requested. We have set the priority on AI for our client projects. And now we would like to use AI to improve our administrative functions, recruitment, accounting, et cetera. So of course, that's being rolled out and has been now since September last year, and we hope that we're going to make some savings with costs. Now when it comes to M&A, where are we? I'm a little disappointed, I have to be honest. I'm disappointed in the volume that we were able to realize in 2025. I would say that 2024, we acquired acquisitions which were expensive, which give us long-term visibility, and that's why we did spend so much. And there was also a small acquisition of 350 people in 2024. If you look at 2025, you can see the 4 companies that we purchased. It's -- there's no miracle here. You've got all the consultants that could have been one single company rather than 4. We have to look at the number of consultants when we consider this purchase of any company abroad, except for one, I believe, in Life Science, which had about 190 consultants in Life Science. And I mentioned that company earlier. That was the one big company. So we are really highlighting specific skills in merger and acquisition. We can find them offshore, and that's why you are going to find 2 major structures and companies in India who have the skills specific to CRO for life science, where you have embedded software, for example, DAS in India. You have the skills there, the skills that we can offer offshore to our clients. And we will come back to that in some detail later, if you will. Now let us look at 2026 and the current outlook. I think that we can hope given the current climate that we are going to be able to have access to acquisitions at normal prices. However, it's not exactly the case as yet. Now when you look at -- this is 90% for all service and enduring companies on the market, they're having a similar experience, except perhaps for those who are in Southeast Asia, most of these companies are in private equity, and they have been able to pay very expensive prices, 50%, 80% more than we are ready to pay for any kind of acquisition, and they were doing this as of 5 years ago. So the private equity companies, I'm not going to cry over them or for them. They're suffering today for their purchases of 5 years ago. They are suffering on a market which for ALTEN is fairly favorable. They are going to have to divest. They are not -- and they're going to have to try and compensate for what's in their portfolio. However, these are the ones who are perhaps our competition for the acquisition of companies which could be of interest to us. We are looking at companies which are fairly independent at normal price. When you look at ALTEN and our position today, I would love to be able to purchase the entire earth with the current ratios. If you look at the multiples that private equity as the triple the multiples that we have and they triple our value on the stock exchange today. Today, we are purchasing roughly 7% to 8% of the operational result plus a year's revenue on a basis which is solid and fairly favorable. Well, we're suffering to find companies in that price range just now. It's not problematic. We are looking at prices and the real estate valuation, given our real estate value and available cash, we are going to continue to hunt down these opportunities even if they don't necessarily fall within our operating income purchase aspirations. Now I hope that we're going to have some kind of [indiscernible] in 2026. And given the slight growth in our headcount in 2026, I think we can imagine what ALTEN will look like in 2026 at Christmas, M&A included. Now if we look at capital, let's move on to shareholders. Well, I don't think there's very much to be said. It's very stable. It's flat and has been for the last 10 years, I think. Of course, for the last few years, I've been talking about my will to transfer 5% of my assets towards charity. Now given the value of these shares, I'm waiting a few years in order to do this. Now I'm going to hand over to Bruno, who's going to talk more about the figures.

[Interpreted] Hello, everybody. Good morning. Well, here you can see the evolution of the group between 2029 and '22, going back slightly, you can see that we doubled in size you look at pre- and post-COVID years, which is not bad. And since 2022, '23, the group's activity has stabilized around EUR 4.5 billion in turnover. You can see the number of engineers yourself. You can see there's a slight organic degrowth. Our engineers, we have 51,000. Well, they are spread out between France and the international field, where we have roughly 39,000 in 2025. As you heard, we had to look at -- we had to face organic degrowth of 800 -- over 800 of these engineers. So 331 in France and the rest out with France. We thought that by purchasing Worldgrid, we would have had 956 engineers and 650 are in France and the rest are out with France, spread between France and Germany, I believe. Now there's another small change. You can see a change in France, which was a small bit of turnover. Now it's roughly 35% of turnover. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from this in terms of group strategy, but this is just a technical effect linked to the organic degrowth in France over the last few years and the acquisitions that have been made, for example, which have bolstered the turnover in France. Very quickly then, we can see there's a drop in 4.4%. We thought through acquisitions that 4.3% would be okay. We have a change in scope. We have FX impact, which is fairly significant. You can see that on the slide given to the group overall appreciation, particularly with regards Canada, U.S.A. and particularly the rupee and the Chinese currency, this has had a huge impact. Now 32% of the group's turnover is made abroad out with France. You can see the impact of foreign exchange, it's not constant. Now let's look at that turnover by geographical area. And I'm going to go over this fairly quickly because we've already spoken about the activity at some length. We did this last month through the publication of our 2025 figures. Here you are then in France, organic decline about 5% in the last quarter. You have an activity which was penalized by the downsizing in the automotive industry, which was down 20% in France, and that's 10% of France's turnover. And if you also look at minus 20% in turnover, we explained that because part of these products are carried out in countries we call low-cost or offshore countries. Therefore, turnover is obviously weaker. Telecom, let's look at telecom. There's been a fall of 10% and in bank and financing, we're at 17% in terms of decline. However, the upside is that in Aeronautics, we are growing again. It's 1/3 of the French turnover. So you can see that's a growth of 3%. Defense, well, there's some surprises there because that represents more than 12% of turnover. We're up 15% in France and Rail has actually grown as well. You have the figures in front of you. Internationally speaking, then, where are we? Well, look at Southern Europe. South Europe is still performing very well, satisfactorily anyway. It's a geographical zone, which is still showing some organic growth. If you look at the Iberian Peninsula, you've got over 85%, which consists of -85% comes from Spain and industry, which is 5% of the zone's turnover. All the rest are growing, particularly in the last quarter. Italy, the activity slowed down in the first quarter. You can see it's growing again, roughly 3% per year, except for the telecom industry, which is quite poor turnover in Italy. But apart from them, everything else seems to be progressing fairly stably. Germany. Germany, which is recruiting or recruited a great deal in '24. We're looking at the 3 quarters. We've been taking things slowly carefully. We can see a slowed growth in -- we've gone from 20% to 3% in the fourth quarter. Degrowth, which has slowed down, however, because when you look at the degrowth in automotive industry, this has fallen due to the lack of outfitters or the disappearance of outfitters in this activity through and orders from the OEMs. So that is beginning to stabilize, okay, at a weak rate, but it's stabilizing. And you can see this in German OEMs. You can see there's a slight decline but it is stabilizing. So overall, the automotive industry, which is more than 40% of the German turnover is representing half -- pretty much half has gone -- has fallen by 25% with sequential growth, which has had a huge impact in the last quarter. Another sector, which is important for Germany is the aeronautic sector, 20% of turnover in Germany, an activity which had been declining up to the third quarter, but is fighting back nicely in the fourth quarter, an activity which is growing not only sequentially but year-on-year in Germany. And finally, in Germany, well defense. Defense, which is a sector of activity, which is fairly anecdotal and activity, which is growing, which has developed and has developed greatly in the last few quarters and it's roughly 7% of the turnover in Germany. In the U.K., where are we? 2% -- 12% growth, not been particularly marked otherwise, not within the public or the private sector. Defense represents 10% of the turnover. And if we go to the Benelux countries, you can see a fall by 11%, but no improvement at the end of the year. 9% of the activity in Belgium has fallen -- has fallen to 9%, I should say. Again, if you look at the -- and similar in the Netherlands. In Eastern Europe then, the activity is stable. change, which is fairly contrasted between Poland, which is 3/4 of the activity of -- in Eastern Europe, up by 3%. You have Romania, which has fallen by 10%, I think, linked to the bank and financing sector. In Scandinavia and the Nordic countries, most of -- 70%, I would say, of the turnover is done in carried out in Sweden. Now Sweden is very much like Germany. You've got an activity which is very much focused on the automotive industries, 55% of the turnover in Sweden, and this has fallen by 25%. So roughly the same as what's happened in Germany without really slowing down terribly much, but we still see it's falling back. If you look at Finland, we have a very concentrated sector in machinery, declined by 12%. In North America, the activity has fallen by 6%, a rhythm, which has slowed down in the last quarter, interestingly. In the United States, it's 70% of the North American zone. The Automotive, Life Science and Rail and recent services zones have fallen by a certain amount, but have stabilized. In Canada, however, you can see this is 25% of turnover. The activity has grown by 5%, thanks to the automotive, finance and aerospatial industry. In Asia Pacific, we have the activity, which is slightly is slowing down with changes which are different depending on where you are in Asia, you've got China, which represents 1/3 of the area. All sectors have grown even automotive, except perhaps for telecom, that should be the exception. India represents 27% of the zone. We see a fall in automotive. Japan, 23% of the zone's activity. You see it's growing 12%, but that's thanks to the automotive industry and the tertiary industry. Korea, given the climate, we've just lost a major client, and this led to a fairly significant degrowth, 25% in the automotive industry, which represents half of Korean turnover. So overall, you can see there is a degrowth of 4.5% in a very organic fashion, but very heterogeneous performances across the board. It's -- we can see the real -- in the Nordic countries in the Germany, there have been -- that's where we see the real degrowth, and that will have an impact on the group's results. So 2025 then, let's look at that without any surprise. The second part of the year, it was superior in terms of profitability. Obviously, the calendar was more favorable in terms of days. We can see an improvement in activity, which was much better in the last quarter and a reduction of costs, which actually was maintained through the second end of the year. And this allowed us to really be at 8.5% in terms of operating profit and activity. So better than what was anticipated. And given the current context, it's giving us quite satisfactory profitability, I should say. Now we look at operational margin, well, this was already felt the impact of an unfavorable calendar, less working days in the last quarter. So that you can see the results here. But the level of activity has been very well mastered. We are slightly above the normal rates. So very similar to what happened in 2024. If we look at the increase of payroll taxes in France and the U.K. has to be considered in the operational margin of the group. It's had an impact. We know we've talked about Germany and the Scandinavian countries. You can see the lowering of activity in certain countries has had an impact on the gross margin, not only of Germany and the Nordic countries, but all around because it has an impact on the entire group. However, when you look at SG&A, very well managed in 2025. This allowed us to maintain satisfactory profitability because we went down by 25 bps compared to 2024. This gives us an operational margin for the group, which is down by 65 bps by -- compared to 2024, but will be reestimated if our turnover continues to grow. Now with operational activity, you also have some lines which you might be familiar. We look at shares, EUR 21 million, which is comparable to last year. Now these asset payments are reconciled in-house, but the assets which -- assets and liabilities are subject to deadlines for investment and this has an impact on cash -- overall cash. In 2026, I think it will be roughly the same as 2025. If you look at our nonrecurring profit, it is slightly up, but only in apparent fashion because the fine that we had to pay to the competitive authorities, EUR 21.5 million for an appeal that was upheld in court, well, we shall see. This has to be taken into account. And the nonrecurring profit is EUR 24.8 million, so it's slightly down on last year. But if you look at the current context, it also includes EUR 3.7 million of acquisitions, EUR 1.4 million of complementary fiscal and social implications here and abroad, structuring costs, EUR 12 million, which are dedicated directly to Germany. So all these costs have to be borne and expressed somewhere. For the first time, you can see up here the amortization of intangible assets, which is the acquisition price for Worldgrid. Now usually, the company includes and reconciles this given the size of the targets, the difference between prepaid and equities with Worldgrid when you look with regards to the size of the operation and the intangible assets, and we registered a part of the acquisition price within the accounts. in compliance with IFRS3. So part of what we see in the accounts is going to correspond to this amortization. Goodwill then. This brought us to our depreciation, which isn't really habitual for us. We went for the first time -- first time in 10 years from EUR 44 million last year to -- with goodwill in our accounts given the pressure between IT and finance activities in France, particularly for ALTEN anyway. We had to depreciate as well, amortize as an acquisition that we carried out in Life Science for reasons which Simon explained earlier internationally. And again, we have acquisitions. We purchased an entity in India, and that allowed us to -- that meant that we had to have an overall depreciation for these activities of EUR 67.4 million. So that means that we have an operating result, which is down 30% as opposed to last year because we're at EUR 200 million in 2025. Tax then we're at over 80%. That means we have a headcount that has gone up, and that has been reflected in our payroll taxes, obviously, and our exceptional contributions to tax -- fortune tax in France. Fiscal deficits we're very active in this field, particularly abroad. We look at this tax that we had to pay in the U.S., all of that has to be considered. For 2026, we have an effective level of 29%, which is more coherent with the reality in which we live. On the financial income analysis, I don't think there's much to say. We're cash positive. Our results we have an income analysis, which is with the IFRS16 is there. We're at EUR 5.9 million. When it comes to negative charges linked to our exchange position and the currencies in which we work, obviously, the dollar and in other countries that don't choose the dollar, all of that has to be reflected and other intentional income charges, which correspond to charges all around the world. So you can see on site retreat minus 4%, but an economic result of up 0.8%. Then geography then, where are we with the different sectors? In France, operational results, condensed income statement, 16.2%. As you can see, it has to be retreated because you haven't got the non-allocated costs included, the noncorporate ones anyway. So we're at 9.3% in 2025 and you have to compare that to 9.4% in 2024. And of course, less working days as well, which do have an impact on our income statement. Again, impact in France is 30 bps. When it comes to economic performance, we can see there's an improvement of 35%, thanks to the lowering of tax in France. Internationally, however, we've seen operational result, which has gone back by 60 bps. In Germany and in the Nordic countries, we can see there's a real lowering of activity between 2%, 1% and 3%. In Benelux and in North America, the APAC region, when you look at activity, we're looking at 6% to 10% in terms of retreat and decline. And in the U.K., Nordics and Southern Europe and Eastern Europe, we have a result which is above 10%. So all in all, for the group, we have operational profit of 8.5% with performances which are heterogeneous across the different geographic zones. Now the balance sheet, again, I don't have a great deal to say. It's identical to the one that we had last year and the years before. Perhaps you should just notice one thing. You look at on tangible assets, noncurrent assets, we could reduce liquidity there. We have net cash flow, which was going to almost at EUR 100 million. debt, which is EUR 7.5 million at the end of 2025. So EUR 1.5 million and more than a year. Consequently, you have gearing, which is largely negative. Here's the analysis of our cash position. And we're looking at 2025 here, let's remember. Our cash flow -- now you can see we [ EUR 300 ] -- we're looking at the difference between the finance and the percentage of cash flow. So we have operational cash flow here. We have nonrecurring elements, which have not been significant that we had to bear EUR 45 million to the tune of EUR 45 million. We have this tax paid. You can see the amount in front of you. So we can see that the net cash of EUR 390.2 million. Now in France, we pay our taxes over the actual year, the year afterwards. So there is a slight discrepancy with regards to other countries. you have cash generation, which can be explained in the cash position, there's -- you can see there is an increase of 50%. You can also look at the organic growth and EUR 30.7 million, an improvement in DSO in days because we've gone up to 96.5 days (sic) [ 86.5 days ] at the end of 2025. And this in spite of the favorable evolution of the country mix because this was developed where the tax was actually quite high. Now with suppliers, this was in decline, because we had less use for outsourcing that helped us make some savings in terms of the premises and variations, they're not very significant. Now we look at CapEx, which is still quite feeble, 0.3% in terms of the turnover, historically quite weak anyway. And this is also linked to much of the IT in France have moved to OpEx has moved to OpEx pardon me. We've gone towards SaaS, and we have migrated many applications towards the cloud. Now we have a free cash flow, which has gone up to 5.9% of the turnover. And financial investments, EUR 62.9 million are largely made up of M&A. So almost EUR 63 million, EUR 70.9 million for the OPs in 2025. Return for action for shareholders, dividends, et cetera, EUR 62.2 million. With regards the other financial flows, well, they are linked to exchanges and the translation. So what is the cash flow, then we're at EUR 390.2 million. Now as I said, I'm giving you the follow-up of free cash flow over the current year. And we have to look at the total 12 months. It's the only way you can read the -- you've got the presentation. It's available on our site, so you'll be able to get a bit more information there. Now there's a summary here of the results, the 225 results and of course, the financial results for 2026. So activity has gone down by 4.5% at constant scope and foreign exchange, but only really went down 2.2%, thanks to a revival of the Civil Aeronautic and banking sectors like with France. Now Energy & Defense have been accelerating over the last quarter. And just by way of information, if you exclude the decline in the aeronautic world, which can be explained, organic degrowth was limited to 1.5%, which is actually fairly satisfactory given the current climate. This has been impacted by the calendar. The gross margin reflects the problems in the different countries despite the SG&A effect, which is lower than over the past years. So we remain with an OPA at 8.5%, which is better than what we had anticipated. We hope to improve the cash situation by the end of the year. And then despite the uncertain environment, we will have to wait for the end of the first quarter 2026 to deliver more precise information on the outlook for the global outlook for 2026. You know that the beginning, the start of the year is -- shows a slowdown in activity, and it ramps up then later on during the year. So we will have to organize the recruitment and reorganization of projects to have a more fine-tuning presentation and to -- for the year '26. I am going to -- no, I'm not going to hand over to Simon. I'm going to comment very quickly on what we did in terms of ESG performance. As you know, ALTEN has been acknowledged from the quoting agencies as a high-performing ESG company. We started having an evaluation even long before ESG became stringent. And before having to report on that specifically, the quotation started already in the year 2010. And since then, we constantly improved our quotes. We are always at the top of the companies within the sector. And we are very much appreciated by our competitors, I must say, because it is a continuous policy, which is reflected that as well as it is performance. So we have the certification, which is very much appreciated. And then as regards the CO2 print, we are better off than the target. We have reduced the GHG emissions by 60% compared to 2019. We even wonder if we should not reevaluate in a positive way the objectives since we are really better -- I mean, to reevaluate the targets for 2030 since we are really very -- in a very good situation. Now I hand over to Simon for the growth strategy for the coming years.

[Interpreted] Thank you very much, Bruno. And to conclude on this presentation before the Q&A, a few important points as regards the strategy for the 3 to 5 coming years for the ALTEN Group. First, ALTEN as one of the top 5 world leaders in the consultant and engineering business is very hopeful in consolidating this privileged situation despite the fact that we have world actors like the big Indian companies, but we are part of the top. So it's okay. The customers do appreciate our positioning. And however, it does not mean that we have reached the top of our capacities, in particular, as regards artificial intelligence, but not only. So to keep this success, you have those 2 slides that you will discover, but you have to remember mainly 2 things. ALTEN is an international structure, and it is not possible to think country by country. The strategy of ALTEN before COVID was to privilege country managers as well as an organization with trainings and business managers, project managers. We recruited in China the best engineers, et cetera. But it is not enough any longer. So on all the items that you can see on this presentation, we need and this is really our light. We need to really strive for this international organization. It's a change of mindset in terms of the organization of ALTEN. And it also means that competencies and skills need to be different. If you take HR, which is the first column, you need to create mobility of managers, in particular, French ones because this is our basis. This is the solid one, and this is where the big experience is located. And we need to convince them to go to Asia, other European countries, U.S., et cetera, because it is not by asking the chasing specialist in the U.S. that we will find managers who will know everything about our business and be very quickly efficient on the business model. So we need to really, really to lever on mobility, which means that we have to invest massively on human resources and career development plans. In the second column, you can see that the global account managers can't remain within our countries anymore. I mean it is not possible to service Rolls-Royce or GE while having everything concentrated on the -- in one country. So the sales organization is not bottom up anymore with managers trained on the spot, et cetera. It also has to be top down because it takes global managers for the 120 most important customers all over the world. And you can believe me, this is not very easy. It's particularly important even beyond growth or slowdown, et cetera. And Cyril Malarge actually joined us. And he will be in charge of the setting up of this international organization, which is going to help us to really very well support those 120 international customers. We have also already managed to have an international technical management, and this is done, and it's okay, which means that we manage projects at the international level. Now we just have to consolidate this aspect. And this is the third column to capitalize on all our offers. We have fabulous offers in China, in India, in Canada, in France, obviously, and even in Spain for analytical AI. Now we need the whole group to profit from that, which means that we have to value our offers. It's an important challenge, to be honest. And then without coming back on that, this is what I said at the beginning. We also need within the field of M&A to get a hold of complementary structures. We have the financial structure that it takes. So we need those main and major bricks to be integrated within our international structure. We could use our cash differently like buying up our own shares because of the value of the shares. It's an ongoing discussion that maybe we will have with you, by the way. But if we prove that we have the possibility to get a hold of very fine targeted companies, it will be very nice to use this cash to do that. So as a conclusion, the 5 fundamental pillars are well defined, and we are there to challenge that. We have Cyril who joined. We have international managers. We are very optimistic to reach those -- this target of 70,000 engineers in 2 or 3 years' time, we will see. It will depend on the conjuncture. It was okay before COVID, and we doubled. We went from 25,000 to 50,000 between 2017 and '22, and then it slowed down because of COVID, et cetera. But it's not only a figure to be successful. It's -- in particular, we need to lean on this international organization, which is going to be our major challenge. So well, I thank you very much for your attention. It took us some time, but we are at your disposal to take your questions.

[Interpreted] Thank you very much for this presentation. Let's move on to the question-and-answer session. We have a first one, which is from Aditya can't hear...

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Just a couple from me. So firstly, on the 2026 outlook, as you said, visibility remains low and you want to wait for Q1 to refine the outlook. But can you just talk about how you're thinking about the development of growth during the year? When you think you might be able to return to a positive trajectory given your conversations with key customers? Second, on the margins as well, how we should think about the different moving parts. Any further -- any impact of the number of working days and any other factors there? And finally, on AI, you mentioned all the capabilities and the investments you've made. But can you share some numbers on what percentage of bookings are related to Gen AI today or what percentage of revenue? And which sectors are you actually seeing more demand for your solutions on AI? Is it more on Automotive or Life Sciences? So if you could give a bit more color on that.

Okay. So on the outlook for '26, Aditya, as I explained in January, it's too early to say because we are in the business where many projects end at the end of each semester. Accordingly, we start the year with a lower level of business, and it takes normally 1 to 3 months to recover before we can start again. Last year, in '25, we were facing a difficult year because it took a lot of months before we recovered. In '26, what we are seeing is that the recovery is slightly faster. But before the end of March, to be frank, it's very difficult to have a real feeling in those times because there are difficult times to have a real feeling on what could be the outlook, even though it's just the first one for '26. So we will give a more precise view on the expectations in terms of revenue growth or revenue outlook probably in April. Regarding the margins, it's exactly the same. Of course, we hope that we will get and reach a better profitability in '26 than in '25, but it's clearly linked to the revenue growth or evolution for '26. That said, and you're right to mention it, we have in '26 1 day more than in '25. So that could normally help to improve the margin by roughly 25 bps depending upon the geographies. For AI and our capabilities in AI, Simon explained that we are infusing AI in many projects, many geographies and many activities and many projects. We have succeeded in experiencing a very successful book with many customers within many verticals, of course, with our main customers like Airbus, Stellantis, Thales, Rolls-Royce, et cetera. There is -- so to be more precise, this is among our main customers than the AI infusion is the most advanced, and that's not surprising, of course. To tell you exactly what is the percentage of booking coming from AI, we don't have that number because we don't -- we put some AI wherever it's possible and it's not possible in all the type of projects because I remind you that we are not 100% dedicated to software coding or testing. This is not the main part of the business. So the main part of the business today cannot be addressed by AI. But every time it's possible to, of course, we help the customer to make some productivity gains with AI. So we -- as we don't have a dedicated activity, which is AI consultancy unlike other IT companies, like, for example, Accenture, Cap, et cetera, I suppose. I will say it's a day-to-day business for our business manager and technical management to propose AI every time we think and they think that it could be helpful. So in terms of revenue, what type -- what level of revenue it will bring for '26, accordingly, I cannot tell you because we will see at the end what happens and what type of -- how many projects and what percentage of projects will be managed with some AI support throughout the year. We have a question coming from someone asking why due to our multiples, we don't launch a share buyback. So I'm going to let Simon answer that question.

We have every day internally some questions with ALTEN teams because, obviously, with the value and the capitalization of ALTEN, we are very tempted to make some share buyback. [Interpreted] And we have -- obviously we have a balance sheet that enables us to buy up to EUR 500 million of our own shares to buy back, and it would be an excellent investment. But as I said before, we constantly raise the question. We are waiting to be clear on the volume of merger and acquisition that we will that we will work on during the first half year of '26. And according to the volume, we will see whether we start a project of buyback shares or prefer to invest. We do not want to have too much debt. Sometimes it is appreciated, sometimes it is not. But I mean, of course, it is very tempting to do that. We will look according to the M&A, whether we do that or not. And if we proceed to the share buyback project.

[Interpreted] We have a few raised hands among, Ina [indiscernible], for instance, you raised your hand.

[Interpreted] Can you hear me? Two questions. I understood you want to have more offshore engineers. Is it a capacity transfer to answer or cope with the existing contracts? And my second question is on costs, extremely difficult to understand. I'm sorry because it's on the phone. Sorry, it was difficult to hear.

[Interpreted] I can deliver an estimate of offshore engineers with the figure we would like to have for the future according to the way we appreciate the present situation and even the future forecast. And you can very well imagine that it differs from one sector to another. We won't have any offshore on defense or even Aeronautics, even if the American Aeronautics had offshore to India, but this will be handled differently. The 2 big activities that do offshore, that's automotive, where they want to go up to 80%, there is no nationality anymore. And also R&D can be done everywhere why not in China? And the second sector is telecom. There is a lot of supervision of data and deployed net and grid, and this is the same. It can be done everywhere in the world. So on those 2 sectors, it's going to be important, but less on the others. So we have a little bit less than 10,000 people in offshore for projects. And I go back to the definition. What is offshore? It's a project which is issued in one, let's say, Western country, U.S.A. -- well, North America and Europe that we are supposed to deliver or work on in low-cost countries like Mexico, South America, for the U.S. Morocco, Senegal, where we are present for a certain number of customers now and India and Vietnam in Asia and less Poland and Romania. They are less local than they used to be. So it's probably going to double, which means that ideally, we are supposed to reach 20,000 engineers in low-cost countries to cope with the Western demand. And then it will depend on what we are going to roll out in the U.S. because the U.S. has offshored a lot even for strategic fields like space and defense. So if from tomorrow on, we have 20,000 engineers working for the U.S., it is obvious that we are going to have 10,000, if not 15,000 exclusively for the U.S. But those projects, we will -- well, we will have those projects only if we proceed to major acquisitions, like companies working exclusively for the U.S. Apart from this, that may happen -- apart from that, we should move from 9,000 to 20,000 in 5 years' time with a logical development. And this means that we will altogether have 70,000 to 75,000 engineers. There is no major cost linked to this kind of situation. I mean it's a -- global costs are expected like training, et cetera. But this is something that we -- it's not going to cost too much. It's not going to be a major investment. We just need to gain projects because then it will go along with it. It could be possible that, well, in Vietnam, we have, let's say, roughly 1,000 engineers. It's possible to go up to 3,000. This is not going to be too expensive. What is important is to win markets where we are not present today. And to be more precise in our answer, there is -- a transformation has already started, and the offshore transformation will be dedicated to 20%, 25% of bps on the existing. And all the rest will be how to conquer new projects that we really have to obtain. -- in the U.S., in Asia.

[Interpreted] We have a question from Derric Marcon.

[Interpreted] I have several questions. I hope you can hear me well. The first one is on the allocation of your activity according to the Project Logic. We have to go back very far, but you had a breakdown of your activities according to electronic engineering, et cetera. Is it possible today to quantify the part of your activity, which is closer to engineering? And what kind of productivity gains could you expect in the field of AI? The second one is on the write-off of goodwill because it's not comparable to 2025, like automotive sector or the company in U.K. that you had bought. It's much more about activities, which like Life Science, it is not the sector that has suffered most. So I would like to understand if it is the companies which went down. And what about this goodwill? And the third one I don't know what is impacting the cash flow of -- on '25, cash out, et cetera. And then I also understood that you can't give any precise information about the real impact of AI within the project. But if we take a snapshot today, do you have statistics on the number of projects containing AI versus the one having nothing at all with AI? I would like to know the number of projects containing AI compared with the global amount of projects having none of those tools.