Econocom Group SE (ECONB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Presentation] Good morning to all. I'm delighted to see you again after our February presentation. Given the current health situation, some of the people are present in the room, but we also have some people connected directly to the web stream. So with Jean-Louis Bouchard and Angel Benguigui, we're going to present all of our results for the first part of 2021, and we'll also talk about the outlook we are anticipating for the next few months and quarters. Regarding the agenda, first of all, we'll have a presentation about the highlights of H1. Then with Angel, we're going to go through the H1 results and the financial analysis. And then we'll have a presentation of all of our business lines and the strategic orientations we've chosen to follow for the next few months and quarters. And then Jean-Louis will talk about the outlook we want to set for the group for the rest of the year and 2022. Regarding the highlights. We can take away a number of things that were already shared with you for the first half and a first fact, which was the purchase of the W Butler shares that were bought back. Then Les Abeilles won the call for tenders for emergency and rescue tugboats. And then given the financial situation of the group, we decided to have an early repayment of our EUR 150 million -- EUR 115 million Schuldschein bond loan. And then also what we shared in February, we've gone back to external growth. And so after a process in Q2 and some discussions, we decided to acquire Trams, which is a distributor in the U.K., and that happens in July. Econocom is in motion now. As you know, we've gone back over some fundamentals in the last 3 years. So in H1, we accelerating -- we accelerated on a number of fronts, first around the CSR policy. But as you know, the very nature of Econocom's base business, 30 years ago, we bought and sold IT equipment, so that's bang on with our CSR positioning. And also, as early as H2 last year, we decided to work on our operational headquarters in Puteaux, Ile-de-France to make that better suited to current workplace organization. So there are now a number of services that will make our employees happy to come back to work, and we're also finalizing work-from-home arrangements in parallel. For your information, in early September, we're going to launch the new website, which is more user-friendly, more educational about the very nature of our businesses and the challenges around our markets, and also a lot clearer, easy to read, more accessible. So in mid-September, the new website will go live and we'll give you some additional information that we're used to sharing on our website, and that will be all in a fortnight. To present the financials, I'd like to call Angel to the stage. He'll give you more details about the H1 results and the financial analysis that goes along with it.

Thank you, Laurent. Well, regarding the financial results, you've all got the figures. You read the interim report. We're going to comment on the most salient aspects. And then, of course, during the Q&A session, we could dig deeper into the aspects that seem more important to you that we may not have broached. So on this first slide, we've got the key points for H1 2021. First, revenues returned to growth. We had 1.7% growth, entirely organic, which accounts for a return to growth after a year, 2020, which was tough in this respect. Secondly, an improvement in profitability, which is quite major. We went to EUR 62 million ROP versus EUR 44 million in H1 2020, which is a more than 40% increase. Automatically, the -- if you do ROP over revenues, that's an improvement in the profitability rate of the group to 5%. So that's a 1.4 percentage points improvement over the same period last year. And the last highlight is the return to external growth. The acquisition of Trams U.K., which is a distribution company based in London with roughly GBP 50 million in revenues with a distribution profile with attached services, which is a perfect match for the group, 60% of their revenues are on -- are in Apple equipment. And the rest is Windows, Lenovo, HP, Dell. We took a 60% stake in this company. The 2 managing directors and former majority shareholders are still onboard with us with a 40% stake, 20% each. And so that's a system that we're quite fond of, which is similar to the satellites that we'll say more about later. So that's the first acquisition we've made in 3 years. The last one took place in H1 2018. Coming back to changes in profitability versus 2019. Since the beginning of the transformation plan in early 2019 to 2021, we wanted to give you a glimpse of changes in profitability in the various business segments. First of all, in P&S, distribution with attached services, that accounts for 42% of Econocom's overall revenues in H1 2021. We went from -- we went to 4.7% profitability. That's a 1.4 percentage point increase over H1 2019. And so at the same time, we've improved profitability, but we've also had revenue growth. Because as you'll see later, growth in Products & Solutions was almost 10% group-wide compared to last year. All activities benefited from lower breakeven after the transformation plan that we implemented in 2019 and '20 that we've talked extensively about already. But P&S, we were also able to maintain margins. So with the volume effect and with a lower fixed cost structure and with an increase in profitability and a good business model profile, we were able to improve profitability with growth. For Services, the profitability improvement since the beginning of the transformation plan is huge, to 7.4% versus 2.1%. As we already explained earlier, first of all, we focused on services in France, Belgium and Spain. We closed or sold units in other countries, which were not profitable enough. We didn't focus on top line growth but on profitability. And so the transformation plan that Laurent has been implementing in the last 3 years in France, which accounts for the bulk of the group's revenues, is now paying off and has paid off with other actions. So now profitability is good with market growth since 2019. And lastly, with the TMF business, we are now more selective in our deals. So with TMF, we'll tell you more about it later. But we have cut fees and extra costs and so breakeven is now lower. There's been a decline in top line, but we've improved profitability. So all 3 business segments are improving their profitability rates, and that's between 2019 and 2021, but we'll also see that it happened between 2020 and '21. Now you have the split of revenues for all business segments for all the main European markets. France accounts for a bit more than half of our revenues. Benelux, Italy, Spain, U.K. and U.S., Germany and Poland are our main regions. For all business combined, so we've got TMF, but also distribution activities, a few services depending on the strategy that we'll share with you in a minute. We're now moving to beefing up our position as the premier company -- general digital company in Europe. There's no other such companies with the same model. So this is the one digital company model that we've decided to follow. With this setup, we're able to bid in European call for tenders that large corporations want more and more. For all 3 business segments, we'll talk about ROP, profitability and growth. For Products & Solutions, you can clearly see, 46% increase in ROP, a nearly 10% increase in revenues and a profitability rate which is nearly 5%. This is a market that's still buoyed by strong growth after the first impacts of COVID. Growth is returning on this market, but now growth is happening despite delays in supplying. So that's because growth is resuming, but in this context, there's a lot of demand, but we're having supply issues and -- throughout the supply chain. We'll speak more to that later. But however, there is strong growth in this business. In Services, profitability is still improving, 17% increase in ROP. The profitability rate is still growing and 3.7% growth between H1 2021 and H1 2020. So revenue growth, in this context, there is still growth with improved profitability and ROP, thanks to great selectivity in our contracts. And here, we are focusing on making the business more profitable. And then for TMF, ROP grew by nearly 70% compared to the same period the previous year. There was a decline in revenues. Regarding the revenue drop, we need to say that there was major contracts in H1 2020 that were not signed again. That's why we consider that the portfolio has improved because with a lot of small deals, we could sign new customers. We are now more selective in our contracts as well. We have operational leasing and structured financing. So those TMF operations that are paid from our balance sheet, we have nearly EUR 40 million in production in H1 2021 compared to almost EUR 10 million for the same period in 2020. And there's an improvement in the profitability rate because we are benefiting from a lower breakeven point as in all other businesses. Our TMF business is not risky. It's not at risk. On this slide, you can see the EUR 175 million in residual value that we've got on the balance sheet. And that only accounts for 3% of the EUR 5.9 billion worth of contracts for the original purchase price that we have in our portfolio. The EUR 2.4 billion are the outstanding, so the upcoming rents that we'll still need to cash. So the TMF business that we're developing is one where, on the one hand, 95% of production is sold without recourse to refinancing companies with very low residual values. And that doesn't even include the potential capital gains on that. So statistically, we know that we get more than double the amount where -- at the end of contracts with remarketing and resale of assets. There aren't many contracts that are terminated. We get replacement of equipment with new investment. So the message we have for you here is that our TMF business is one with disposals, without recourse and with very limited residual values, so very little risk. A review now of the P&L that you've already seen, an increase in ROP, a very strong decrease in one-offs, exceptional costs because of the end of the transformation plan. At the beginning of the plan, we said that we would be forced in 2019 and 2020, we would have to book major one-offs. And now that the plan is over, there's a significant decrease in nonrecurring operating expenses. So there's a very strong increase in net consolidated profit. Keep in mind also that in 2020, we had some disposals that led to major capital gains. So the P&L for H1 is a recurring P&L. Whereas the P&L for H1 2020 was one with some one-offs on both sides, income and expenses, but a 30% increase in net consolidated profit for the Econocom Group. On this slide here, you can see a comparison between the EUR 303 million in net financial debt in H1 2020 and EUR 217 million in H1 2021. Yet in EUR 217 million, we have EUR 91 million for our share buybacks. We have 15% of treasury shares in our share capital. This amount of treasury shares can be used for acquisitions with share exchanges. We can sell them with partnership with an investment fund that would enter our capital. They can also be amortized. And we've got EUR 42 million worth of stock for future TMF contracts. So if you normalize the net financial debt at 30 June, it goes from EUR 303 million to EUR 84 million. That's a EUR 219 million reduction in net financial debt if you restate it for these 2 accounting effects. So that's it for me. Now development strategy for the business line, as we said in the press release in July, we're going to explain the development strategy for Products & Solutions and Services that Laurent is going to explain. And I'll come back to the stage to talk about TMF. Thank you so much.

Okay. The first business line that we wanted to share details on our strategy for is Products & Solutions. As you may have seen in the results for the first half, we have been able to remain agile despite difficult market environment over the last 1.5 years, in large part due to the public health crisis, which led to a number of companies to implement remote working solutions. We were also able to predict the increase in demand for services and equipment that was going to come from our customers. As it stands, in Products & Solutions, we have a significant presence, which is becoming even a major presence Europe-wide. We have more than EUR 1 billion in revenue. We are the largest supplier in Belgium, #2 in France. And we have strong positions currently in Italy, in Spain, in Germany, in the Netherlands. And we've also been able to strengthen our position, as Angel said, in the U.K. through the purchase of Trams. So we have a strategic presence given the shift in customer demand. We have launched new offerings to better meet the needs of our customers. And this is in large part related to having a one-stop shop solution for clients that can provide multiple products and solutions across multi-sectors, multiple suppliers and multiple products. This is very important for us because it means that a client can simplify their own purchasing processes. They can get integrated services with the products as you can see in our ability to customize our delivery and distribution. We also have end-to-end logistics. And we can maintain maintenance contracts for all of our clients with those solutions. Let me just drill down on to product care. What we mean by product care is our ability to extend the life cycle of our products. This meets a demand that we heard from our customers, both private and in public sectors. The growth drivers going forward in this sector are likely to be the following: the general widespread rollout of remote working, first of all. Of course, most of our concerns revolve around this. We're working on enabling the users in the public and private sectors to remote work. And this means that we need to equip users at home, just as well as they would have been equipped in the office. We're moving towards solutions that are more and more integrated and more and more international as well. This is something that's important to remember, and it's something that we've seen emerge in large corporations recently. And we're also starting to see it in the medium-sized companies and now more and more SMEs as well. And also, we have the ability to finance all of this. This is a differentiating factor that leads to an increase in agility on our end and means that we have better decision-making power for our customers and suppliers. What's our Products & Solutions strategy looking like now? Well, first of all, we want to become the European leader in distribution services. We have the means today with our geographic footprint and with all of the offerings that we launched over the last half. And given the related challenges, we believe that we can become a leader in distribution services. Secondly, to strengthen this trend and to strive towards our ambitions, we want to continue acquiring new companies such as Trams in the U.K. in the first half. This would strengthen our distribution capacity in the U.K. And we've also initiated and we are implementing a number of processes that will lead to further acquisitions before the end of the year. Our future targets will aim to strengthen our position in countries where we have multi-seller, multi-sector approaches to develop our TMF synergies. We've got Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, particularly. So that is for strategy and priority for Product & Solutions in our European presence going forward. Moving on now to Services. I've broken down Services into 3 skill sets. We've got workstation services, first of all. Today, we have recognized positions in France, in Belgium and in Spain on workstations. We are the French leader for remote management of workstations, so what is known as RUN. And we have more than 1 million workstations that are managed by our teams in the 3 main countries in Europe. We have launched an end-to-end solution. We now have the ability to meet the needs of our customers. And we start by working with them on design, looking at how they can manage all of their IT equipment and workstations. And then beyond that, we are able to maintain that equipment and distribute as well. And this is where we start to see the convergence between Product & Solutions that I mentioned earlier and the rest of our services for some of our customer needs who want an end-to-end solution for their tender. Given this, the purchase of the Infini subsidiary a couple of years ago, has true added value because they can work with the customers before the run on design and build processes before the implementation of the rest of the contract. We also signed strategic partnerships at the beginning of the year. The first one is with Artefact on AI. And the second one is Citrix on virtual desktop solutions. These enable us to improve QoS for our service centers and also help us better predict the management of the workstations as we go forward. Becoming #1 in France for workstation services is our ambition. We were already there for the RUN segment, and we want to strive towards that for design and build in the coming 1 or 2 halves. To achieve this, we are looking at purchasing a company that would enable us alongside distribution to be in the top 3 Europe-wide for the implementation of this kind of solution for IT management for workstations. The second skill set is infrastructure asset services. We've decided to support our customers through all of their concerns that have been emerging over the last years related to should we keep some of our legacy IT infrastructure or should we shift to the cloud? We have set up a new advisory structure for all environments. We have partnerships with Microsoft, Amazon. We've also got VMware and Google Cloud Platform. So we do consultancy to support customers in understanding how they can shift some of their infrastructure to the cloud, and in many cases, for strategic and security reasons be maintained in traditional legacy systems managed traditionally. There's a lot of added value in this segment, and it helps us to develop new skills that we can branch out into France and then elsewhere. We are leaning into the mid-market and public market segments at the moment for that. And finally, we have all of our position in apps. In August, we launched a solution on apps and DevOps, so developing business-related apps for our clients and then integrating those apps in a cloud-native design environment. This is our strategic importance based on what I just mentioned. And it will also mean that we can then follow up with customers to leverage added value in their data and then enables us, in turn, to optimize the offering and then use that as added value that can then be shared for app management and infrastructure management for customers in the management of the rest of their IT equipment. Ultimately, for apps, we want to get into double-digit profitability in the next 2 to 3 years. So that's for Services. And as Angel said, profitability is on the rise, and we now have a positive growth dynamic, both organic and nonorganic for complementarity with our other business lines and business development. And now we can move on to the presentation for our TMF business with Angel.

All right. TMF, we're going to break this down into 2 parts. The first part is going to be on where we are. And then the second part is going to be what is our action plan for 2021 and 2022. TMF revenue is down. And TMF's business is no longer the largest share of turnover for the group. In the first half of 2021, it accounted for 36% of overall turnover; Products & Solutions, 42%; and Services, 22%. So why is turnover dropping off? Well, first of all, there are in-house reasons and then there are market reasons as well at play. As you know, we set up a transformation plan, which was necessary group-wide for a number of reasons that we have already explained at length over the last 2 years. The transformation plan did lead to a negative impact on TMF's revenue. We saw sales force attrition. We are restructuring our business. But that means that we're also looking at the human resources situation in sales. So we do have fewer people with less revenue. Secondly, we also had to make decisions to pull out of some small countries with low potential, that we still had small units operating in. And they simply weren't profitable, so we decided to pull out of those unprofitable locations. If you add them all together, we do have also a contribution to the drop in turnover. We also saw a drop in net debt. That's no longer an issue for the group, but 2 years ago, it was. Jean-Louis Bouchard set a group-wide target of net 0 debt to show that we could develop our business without relying on debt. That's something that we did. But to achieve that, it, of course, meant that this wasn't the time to rework our debt structure, which led to attrition in revenue once again. And then we had the market situation. It's important to remember that all of the companies that were focused on SGLs in France, in the U.K., in Germany and Spain, all European countries set up some kind of SGL, which meant that companies focused a bit less on rent. And then as business is picking up again, we are having supply chain issues, and this is something that is an issue for everyone. Over the holidays, I must have read a dozen articles related to the supply chain issues with Chinese port being closed for 3 weeks or whatever. So everyone's having supply chain issues. This is an issue for Products & Solutions and also for TMF. However, our profitability did increase, thanks to our transformation plan. Closing the unprofitable locations meant that we could adjust our breakeven. And it meant that our business is more profitable overall. Secondly, we've been more selective in our approach to operations because we want to be more profitable. Thirdly, we are focusing on high potential markets. If you look at the studies and analysis from the big firms in the U.S., such as Ghana, you see that where the highest IT spending currently is and where the highest forecasts are and where the penetration rate is highest for rates are one and the same. So we'd rather be working in Germany than in Romania, quite simply. Given a choice, we'd rather work in the U.K. than Portugal. So focusing on the larger markets enables us to achieve critical mass faster to draw in good talent and then further drive profitability. And finally, we've also strengthened our management team in all units, in all countries, in all TMF units group-wide. That means that we are better managing the business line and better managing profitability in turn. So a drop in revenue, but an increase in profitability. That is the current situation. But let's talk environment. We have detected a number of growth drivers for this business line going forward. First of all, a step-up in digitalization and remote working. The end of COVID has ramped up the acceleration of digitalization because most large corporations and most public administrations were locked down during COVID. And they've now fully understood that it's important to invest in digital technologies so that they can implement remote working as and when, and it's likely that remote working is here to stay. Second, public sector investment. There is a lot of money that's going to be coming in, in a lot of European countries. And we think this is a significant growth driver for the rental business because there will be lots of companies and public offices that will want to look at that solution. Thirdly, an increased focus on circular economy. Laurent mentioned this in the introduction. We're seeing movement on CSR as has always been the case within the group. But the focus on the circular economy is gaining in importance. And if you look at TMF, where we manage the end of the life cycle of our rental assets, it can be a growth driver. Next, we have the big European tenders. We are getting more and more of them. We are seeing more big European players that want distribution, financing internationally with a one-stop shop approach and/or through one company. And that leads us to the one digital company that we have and continue to implement. We think that there's a significant growth driver to be found there. And then finally, customers coming back to rental solutions with SGLs. Given our solution and given the business environment, we have set up an action plan. In 2021 and 2022, this is an action plan that has already begun from the beginning of 2021, and this is a growth-focused one. We've increased profitability. Now we need to increase growth. And we've decided the following. First of all, we've decided to strengthen our sales force. We've already undertaken this, and we want our sales force to increase by at least 30 people net by the end of the year, 120 to 150, which doesn't mean hiring 30 people, but probably 50 to offset the churn rate, people leaving, people being fired and the like. And this is a plan that is across multiple countries and has already been started. Secondly, external growth. We mentioned external growth in Services. We mentioned external growth in Products & Solutions, but we're also looking at external growth for TMF, with priorities assigned to Germany, France and Benelux. Thirdly, development of structured financing solutions. We explained why we were not able to do what we were doing 3 or 4 years ago during the transformation plan. Now we've been able to multiply our production by 4 in the first half. We're continuing with production numbers that we are not where we want to be. We want to be at about EUR 100 million per annum, which is our short-term target for that. Next, we have new solutions for the public sector. First of all, we have seen that the public sector is a field in which digital technologies is likely to ramp up quickly. The circular economy, we're going to give you an example in just a minute, working on what we can do for the end of the life cycle of our assets. And we're also working to expand our range of assets for the rental business, so not just pure IT, but also industrial equipment and also health care. And this is something that a lot of our competitors are already doing. We also have partnerships that we are moving forward on, successfully at that. We have a first partnership with Atos, which is Samira Draoua, our Director for TMF France is handling. And then finally, to be able to live up to the demands of the large European tenders, we are combining TMF and P&S together. Because for these kind of tenders, you need dedicated teams, and we have implemented a dedicated team. We already had dedicated teams in France. Because in France, for Products & Solutions and TMF, we have strong positions in the country. We're leaders in TMF, and we're #2 in Products & Solutions and that's not something that we had in other European countries. So we're strengthening TMF. We're purchasing and strengthening Products & Solutions. And we have implemented a dedicated team to answer large tenders from non-French clients. There you go. I hope that this will lead to some questions for our Q&A segment. And we'd like to give you a quick example of a new solution that we have, which is related to the circular economy. This was developed in France by Samira and her teams on carbon. [Presentation]

Well, we're going to move on to the next item on the agenda after we've shared with you the highlights of H1 and had a discussion about the results for H1 2021 and the associated financial analysis and we've tried to convince you about the strategic directions chosen for each of the business lines and the ability of each of these business lines to work together and create higher value added for our clients. Let's welcome Jean-Louis Bouchard, Founder of Econocom, who's going to talk about the outlook that we'd like to set for the next few quarters, and then we'll move on to the Q&A.

Well, the outlook, are you interested in that? Yes. Well, for the employees, for shareholders, for our friends in finance, for all of our partners, I know that you would all like us to have a 3- or 4-year strategic plan detailed month-by-month with revenues and profit, all that, nicely packaged together that would straightjacket us. As I don't really like that, that's not what we're going to do. Yet I'll share with you what I've got in mind, what I've shared with the whole management team, with our partners and explain how we are seeing things. You've just seen where we stand midway through 2021 after a slightly hectic journey with a change -- big change in management 3 years ago. And there are still some of them in the room now, something that I'm very pleased about. And then we had some problems in Italy, in the Netherlands, and then there was a small pandemic that got into the picture. So we've got through quite a few things. And listening to you earlier, I thought that although this pandemic is tragic for a number of people, what is going to remain after that at the global level in 10 or 20 years? What are the basics? First of all, in terms of death, although that's the most tragic aspect, especially when you're impacted firsthand, when there are 7 billion people on the planet, it's not 1 per 1,000 in terms of mortality. So with this pandemic, for 90% of people, these are people who would have passed in the next 12 or 18 months. So in 10 to 20 years, that's going to be anecdotal in terms of the overall death curve. But what's most striking is that it's a global event in terms of awareness about man's place on the planet. It's fashionable people talk about the planet. As you know, I started in that. I was repairing used cars when I was a student. So I was already doing that. And when my girlfriend said I was a great deal, I liked that. And then I worked at IBM. And when I left IBM, I thought I would deal in used computers. And now we're still doing that because we've got a center that was fully renovated. We just opened a center remanufacturing 430,000 pieces of equipment every year. They could be a trend. But we've been doing that for 48 years, and we're really proud about it. So coming back to my topic, the outlook. Where are we? Where are we going? As you can see, our business has not changed that much. We're not talking about phenomenal growth rates of 20% a year. We're talking about 2% to 5%. It's all under control. It's all a known quantity, but there's no fundamental change. But if you look at the background of Econocom over the last 10-odd years, it's worth coming back over because before we talk about the outlook, it's important to see what our journey was -- oh, sorry, I don't have the hand microphone. Yes. As you'll have understood, I can't stand still. So you can't try and keep me behind a lectern. So since 2009 up to 2020, 2021 here, what happened and what can we expect for the future base on what happens? You can see that first for shareholders. If you're interested in the price share, I'm -- I have a bit of an interest in that. There were 181 million shares in 2009. There are now 187 million. So if you invested in 2009, you weren't diluted. If you were brave enough to stay onboard, although it was an event -- an eventful ride, well, it's held up well because the number of shares has remained stable, but the value was -- grew fourfold. And so the -- they got about EUR 1 in dividend in the last 12 years. So they got their money back, but their basic investments grew fourfold. Revenues. You can see that it was somewhat stagnant, and then it dropped. But there has been a 3.5-fold increase. Despite a number of restrictions, drastic restrictions even for economies, well, that led to some selectivity. So of course, a slight decrease in revenues. And then there was the crisis, big sectors were impacted, transport, hospitality and so on. So they bought less. But the outlook right now is for revenues to return to growth. If you look at recurring operating profit, it's the light blue curve. It's increased steadily even during restrictions. There was a slight decline, but last year, it was still increasing, and we hope that it will increase again as it is this year and the next. Then debt. You'll remember there was an announcement that I made, coming back to zero net financial debt. A lot of people laughed about it. But unfortunately, for them, well, you can see that in red, our banker friends started to get worried about the debt level. There are a few here in the room, but they are not fully reassured because from what I heard from Valérie, she's got a lot of contacts with them, we've renewed our long-term credit lines for roughly EUR 400 million, EUR 396 million, so we're EUR 4 million short. So you'll have to do something about it. But there, we have a bit more debt. It would be stupid not to have any debt given the current stupidly low rates. But we're not going to go back to absurd levels of debt unless we carried out a huge acquisition, so we could mobilize some of our treasury shares owned by the group. We could also use some of the credit lines that we've got. And we could negotiate a new credit line. On this chart, with the results that led to these results, there was the acquisition of ECS in 2010. That led -- that gave strong impetus then and the acquisition of Osiatis and that of the satellites. I've prepared a slide on the satellites because earlier, we were talking about 3 businesses, but we didn't talk about what the satellites do. But the businesses or the satellites can always be compared or seen as reporting to some of the businesses there in Products & Solutions and Services or in financing, but there are always strong synergies with the financing business. After a couple of years, 30% of the satellites' revenues stem from financing activities. Well, the track record of satellites is important because if you want to look at the outlook, you could see that there were acquisitions, significant acquisitions like ECS and Osiatis, and there were 20-odd acquisitions. Out of these acquisitions -- sorry, I'm backtracking because otherwise, it's no good. So out of 20, there are 16 that were true successes, at the top right. So if I click on the right button, and there were 4, we could modestly call them -- well, we wouldn't call them failures because they were not failures, but they're not working that well and we learned a lot from that. So none of them went bankrupt, but we are in the process of selling them. And others were successes either with big capital gains or strong synergies with the rest of the group. And what we can say is that these satellites in 2020 accounted for 26% of group revenues and 22% of ROP. Thank you to Bruno Grossi in the third row, who's worked a lot on that. So we're not going to stop doing that. Anyway, the reason I'm talking about all that, when it comes to the outlook, is that if you look at the outlook chart, what we're hoping for now is that we are -- we have had a fourfold increase compared to the situation 12 years ago. So we hope to have the same journey in the next 10 years. I would like to grow revenues by a factor of 4 to 3.5, share price times 4 and so on and so forth. And the question is whether it's doable or not. What would make it feasible is, first, a financial situation. As you can see, there's no reason why we wouldn't have the wherewithal. We have the wherewithal to have more acquisitions, even big ones. The market, well, the market, is it so much different from what it was 12 years ago? Not so much in TMF. There haven't been any C changes. Everything's changed a bit. We're not in TMF now. Digital is -- pervades almost all sectors. So the market's boomed in distribution. The markets boomed as well in Services. It's changing very quickly to new definitions. There's the move to the cloud that's changing a lot of things. So yes, the business has changed, but the overall situation is not that different when you're a one digital company. The main difference in that is connected a lot to what I was saying about the pandemic, the pandemic is going to lead to the fact that the 7 billion people are going to realize that they're sharing the same planet. No one escaped it. No country dominated another. You couldn't say that China, the U.S., Korea, the others, some were better than others and -- in some phases of the pandemic, but the whole world is the same. So we realize that we're on the same planet. We have to show solidarity. And that's a big change that's happening, something that's much bigger than is reflected in statistics. We have to show solidarity. This pandemic is forcing this solidarity on us. I created the company 48 years ago. I called it ECS, Europe Computer System. That was the beginning of Europe, so I thought that Europe would be built overnight. And now we have a more united Europe, a more united world. And so what's happening, the outlook for me is that the same is going to happen again. The market is still there. We have a good situation. We've learned a lot of things. So of course, we've done a lot of stupid things, but we've learned from our past mistakes. But we have learned from mistakes. There will be mistakes again, of course, but we're going to have a fun ride because we're going to do a lot of things. So the outlook is that as early as this year and next year because we'll have acquisitions again because we have the resources, we acquired one company, but when we acquire one company, you know that there are more in the pipeline. There will be -- we'll be traveling around Europe with Angel and Laurent. As early September, we'll go back to the U.K. and Germany, not Belgium again because -- if I could, I could go to the moon or Mars even. But given everything that we've learned, we want to go back on a same journey with acquisitions and based on what our customers are asking from us. The reason we had such a journey is because our clients in the last 12 years has started asking us for a pan-European offering that has accelerated. And now I saw that earlier, the group had 50% of turnover in France, but we still have 50% outside France. So in 10 years' time, maybe it will be 25% France, 75% rest of the world. There is potential. We have the right team. We've had a remarkable management team in the last 3 years. A lot of good people are joining us. That's remarkable. I think that now thanks, in particular, to all the efforts made in the last 3 years, there's been a very good atmosphere inside the company, which is reflected outside. Angel, Laurent and I received a lot of applicants, people of very good quality joining us now. And so that makes me very optimistic about the outlook for the next 10 years. And now questions, if there are any.

So we're going to move on to questions, if you have any in the room, but also for the people watching the web stream. And we have people with microphones if you want to ask a question. Any type of questions, really. We need to have pre-prepared questions for that to get the ball rolling. We've already got questions from our guests listening in remotely, one by Matthias Maenhaut, a Kepler Chevreux analyst. One about distribution. Could you give us more details about the market share in Belgium, France? And more generally, what's the competitive landscape like? Is it a fragmented market? Who are the main European competitors in distribution? Well, I'll ask Philippe Goullioud to join us on stage because he is coordinating this know-how and this activity with all the business lines. Philippe?

Well, our positions vary depending on the countries. But we have a leading position in Belgium. We're #2 in France. And then we're a challenger in the other countries, a very strong position in Italy. That's noteworthy, and we're going to improve it in the next few months and quarters with the acquisitions that we've talked about. And the second part of the question is whether the market is rather fragmented with a lot of players or rather consolidated. The market is consolidating, but there are some legacy players that are found in each geography. We know them, who they are in France and Benelux. There's not a lot of change in terms of players although consolidation is happening. And as we shared during the presentation, there are more and international more calls for tenders. So presence in the various European countries is a great asset. Yes, you could see that because you helped us a lot for a big RFP in Europe that we won because we had an international presence, and we wouldn't have won it, as the clients clearly stated, we wouldn't have won it if we hadn't had a presence in all the countries. And so we could win against frequently local players. And so with our local teams, we can win, thanks to this presence, as Angel said.

Thanks, Philippe. More questions? So I'll go on. Regarding TMF, you've talked extensively about beefing up your sales force. In general, how long does it take for a salesperson to reach nominal productivity and have the right level of maturity in terms of efficiency?

Well, historically, TMF sales reps where IT specialists and came from the big OEMs. They needed the technological know-how. Now it's all about financing. So you needed 18 months previously. Now as long as people have a good financial background and a good rapport with people, financial CFOs of companies, it takes about 6 months.

Question in the back of the room. So this is related to TMF. Maybe you could just introduce yourself?

So TMF has been struggling over the recent times. We're seeing that there are factors that are hamstringing development such as supply chain issues. What are the dynamics that you're seeing, though, for recovery there? At what point do you think the activity will have bounced back? And secondly, related to the planned acquisitions, do you have valuation multiples in mind at this point?

Now we did have some microphone issues there, but I think I understood your question. So you asked a question about multiple players for acquisitions, correct?