EFG International AG (EFGN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. A very warm welcome from the Metropol in Zurich for the full year results 2024 presentation of EFG International. As usual, I'm joined with our Group CEO, Giorgio Pradelli; and our Group CFO and Deputy CEO, Dimitris Politis. As usually, we will have presentations. And afterwards, we have enough time for Q&A. And I also point out the disclaimer on the front page of our presentation as being read. And with that, I hand over to Giorgio. Thank you.

Thank you, Jens, and good morning to everyone. Also from my side, a warm welcome to everybody we see in person in Zurich. It's nice to see so many people. And also a warm welcome to everyone who is following us via webcast. We are obviously here to discuss the full year results for the year 2024. Now before going into the presentation, let me say that 2024 was another year of great progress for EFG. We have delivered a strong set of financial results with accelerated growth and record profitability and in an environment which remains quite complex and volatile. Now moving to Slide 4. Let me walk you through the highlights of the 2024 results. But before that, I'd like to say that for me, this set of results is really the manifestation of how a good execution of EFG strategy should look like. In a nutshell, we had accelerating growth, accelerated NNA. These have been translated into increasing profitability. This has allowed us to distribute the highest dividend per share ever and also to continue to build our capital position. And also, we are very pleased to announce that we were able to deploy some of the excess capital into a new acquisition. Finally, we have signed an acquisition to strengthen our own market in Switzerland. I'll come back to that. So let me walk you through the key highlights that you can see on this page for the 2024 results. First of all, as I said, our NNA inflows are CHF 10.1 billion, very strong performance. This is a growth rate of 7.1%, well above our target range of 4% to 6%. And in fact, this is our 12th consecutive semester of positive NNA. I personally like NNA very much. Some people in EFG saying that I'm obsessed with NNA and this is probably true. And obviously, for our investors and shareholders, this is a key indicator -- is a key leading indicator for our future profitability. But for us, it's also a key indicator of our success with our clients, because it's a sign that our clients trust us, is a sign that our clients trust our client relationship officers, the clients appreciate our services and like our solutions. Furthermore, for 2024, we are very pleased with this result in terms of NNA, also because, this is a demonstration that our strategy and our strategic investments that we have done in previous years, in particular in 2023, we hired more than 140 CROs at the time. I was saying that these investments are bearing fruit and are allowing us to grow faster. The second key point is that, all this growth momentum is translating into record revenues and record profit of CHF 322 million. This is a 6% increase compared to 2023, which was already a record year for us. And by the way, if you take the pretax profit, actually, the growth is double digit at 14%. We have achieved this record profitability in an environment of fading tailwinds for interest rates. By now, all central banks have cut, and we had to absorb higher costs given the strategic investments I was talking about before. So finally, our return on tangible equity at year-end 2024 stands at 18.6%. This is already higher than our target for 2025. Now the third key point, I mentioned it briefly, we are going to -- this high profitability will allow us to propose the highest dividend ever CHF 0.60 per share. This is our fourth consecutive dividend increase and clearly a testament to our capital-light business model that generate excess capital. And in this context, again, we are very pleased that we have signed an acquisition in our home market. We are acquiring Cité Gestion, a Geneva-based bank to strengthen our position in Switzerland. They manage CHF 7.5 billion of assets. And if you bring today the AUM of EFG and Cité Gestion together, we would be pro forma at around CHF 175 billion AUM, which is the highest level we have ever had. Dimitris will go in more detail to present this acquisition. All of this shows that we have entered the final year of our current strategic cycle in a position of strength. And for me, what is really satisfying is to see that our business model continues to deliver sustainable and profitable growth. With this, I hand over to Dimitris, our CFO and Deputy CEO, who will now provide you with a detailed overview of our financial performance for the year 2024. Thank you. Dimitris? The floor is yours.

Thank you, Giorgio. Good morning, everyone. It's a -- it's a pleasure and a privilege to be presenting these results today. It's great to be standing up here and I have in the back, as your ammunition, record profits, the highest dividend ever, and an acquisition, which may be will preempt the usual question we get at the end, what are you doing with all this excess capital. So I think, now we can at least partly answer that question. But before we go there, I'll take you to Page 6. Page 6 gives you an overview of our performance in the last 6 years. Clearly, we're starting with the high, the CHF 322 million of profit that we had for full year 2024. This is 6% up. But for me, the beauty of this picture is not just the endpoint is the journey that we've been through in the last 6 years. It's a diligent execution of a solid plan, as Giorgio mentioned earlier. It is step-by-step, and we have been improving and building to further improve as we move forward. Now some key highlights for full year 2024. Revenues were up 5%. The revenue margin was quite resilient at 96 basis points. Again, it was a combination of certain things working in the way that we are expecting. So commission margin was up. Also trading, the net other income part was up, as expected as well, the interest-related part was down. Costs in 2024 reflect the significant investment we did in 2023. The cost-to-income ratio at 72.9% means that for the fifth year in a row in this time period, we have been improving on our cost-to-income. As Giorgio mentioned, profit before tax was up 14%, so double digit and return on tangible equity was above our target range of 15% to 18%. EPS, we hit the magic number of CHF 1 per share in 2024, and the dividend was a record one at CHF 0.60 and 9% up year-on-year. On Page 7, we have some of our key figures again. So NNA growth at 7.1%. The revenue margin, 96 basis points, and we added 73 CROs who were hired in 2024. Very importantly, the revenue generated AUM closed the year at CHF 165.5 billion compared to CHF 142 billion the previous year, that is 16% up. I'll come back more to that because that also provides quite some tailwinds in terms of revenue generation. The profitability revenues were up. It's significant because we believe in the resilience of revenues to manage the business forward. Cost-to-income improved and the return on tangible equity is at 18.6%. Final part, which is last but not least, as they say, very strong capital generation. So 500 basis points -- 510 basis points of gross capital generation, the Core Tier 1 capital ratio at 17.7%, that is 70 basis points up year-on-year and a very strong LCR at 242%. I'll skip the next two pages and go straight to Page 10. On Page 10, we have the four metrics that we follow. It's the four targets that we have provided to the financial markets for 2025. Clearly, the net new asset growth has been the highlight of this result of 7.1%, you'll see that we have very strongly rebounded from the previous 2 years. Revenue margin at 96 basis points is well ahead of the 85 basis point target. Cost-to-income ratio down third year in a row and the tangible equity is beyond our range. Overall, if you take all these items taken together, this means that at the close of full year 2024, we are one year ahead of the business plan that we communicated to the market back in 2022. And clearly, we're on track to continue improving in 2025. On Page 11, we have some information about AUM and NNA. So we started the year with AUM at CHF 142.2 billion. We added CHF 10.1 billion in net new assets. And markets and currencies -- markets and currencies were positive this year. They helped us by another CHF 13 billion, just to mention the 2 years before that, they were actually completely against us and we lost CHF 26 billion in that period. So at this point, we are recovering from a lower base that we had before. Clearly, the CHF 10.1 billion is beyond our 4% to 6% guidance. As you'll see on the right, the largest portion of that contribution is coming from new CROs, and we are very pleased with the performance of our new hires, both in 2023 and 2024, and they are both contributing significantly to the CHF 8.9 billion of net new assets that you see at the bottom right coming from new CROs. On Page 12, we show the breakdown of the performance in net new assets and AUM between the regions. I think, the left part is a very telling part for the abilities of this bank. It is a very diversified operation in terms of the breakdown of both NNA and profitability. And what happened in 2024 is that you'll see on the left, all the five regions were in positive territory. Switzerland came with a 5.9% growth in terms of NNA on the back of a negative year in 2023. Asia Pacific is leading the growth at 14%. It is the second year in a row that Asia Pacific is leading the growth in percentage terms. Continental Europe started the year a bit slower, but picked up quite a bit of pace in the second half of the year in 2024. I would say that the same pattern is something that we saw in the U.K. with a very, very strong second half in 2024. And for Latin America, it's the second year of a very strong performance in terms of net new assets. Going to Page 13, where we have the usual information about our CROs. You'll see that, clearly, after hiring 141 hiring or making offers to hire 141 CROs in 2023, which was a peak year for us, we are back to more normalize in hiring momentum. So in year 2024, we hired 73, and we extended or signed contracts with another 16. Look, 2023, as we all know, was a strategic opportunity to hire very good CROs in a market that was dislocated. And we do expect that we will return to our 50 to 70 normalized gross CRO hiring going forward. But over and above the hiring, what is also very important is the AUM per CRO, which are on the right hand of the page. You will see that we have a record AUM per CRO in 2024. The number is CHF 348 million per CRO. And the importance of that is not just that we are hiring very good quality CROs, but it is also that the higher CROs help us improve on our efficiency. Page 14, moving a bit more on the P&L side of the business. Before going to the specifics, I would just -- like, just to highlight again, what has been the strategy over the last couple of years, and that has been consistently communicated. The idea in the last 4 years is build scale and defend the margin. We had a year before where we imagine margins were expanding. So that was a different play. But in the last couple of years, it was about building scale and defending margin. So how did we do in those things? Clearly, we had a very strong revenue line this year. I would call it, it was also very resilient in its composition. For me, the biggest success is the commission income. You will see that commission income increased by 2 basis points and 14% between 2023 and '24. Why am I saying that this is a success, the reason is that, our bread and butter is our commission line. It's the line that we can actually control more. It's the line where we have more levers to work on, and we depend less or to a lesser extent from what happens to markets. We had a significant increase in mandate penetration. I'll come back to that in a couple of slides. Clearly, the NII and NII related items went down, they went down by 13% year-on-year, but we also benefited from increased client activity in foreign exchange and higher swap income, which both helped the net other income line. As information, the life insurance contribution was approximately 2 basis points in full year 2024 that compares to 3 basis points the previous year. Now clearly, we rely a lot on commissions, and they are on bread and butter, but we also have a significant contribution from interest-related components. And here on Page 15, I'd like to just describe how we see NII developing and what we've seen in the last 12 months. On the left-hand side, you will see a breakdown for the last four semesters of our total revenue margin. This excludes life insurance. And you'll see that clearly, it went down from 97 basis points in the first half of '23 to 93 basis points. But I think what is very important is the dynamics in that mix. So commission margin has picked up 2 basis points. We saw a drop in interest-related margin, which lost about 10 basis points between the second half of '23 and the first half of 2024. This was expected because the drop in interest rates and some conversion to interest-paying deposits were coming in at that time. What is very positive is that, in the second half of 2024, we actually expanded the margin that relates to interest components, and we went from 34 to 36 basis points between the first half and the second half. Now what is driving this performance? A couple of parameters, which you'll see on the right-hand side of the page. The first one is that a big component that was going against us has really now become stable. This is the conversion from noninterest-bearing or site deposits to interest-bearing deposits. So you'll see that at the top right, we started with almost CHF 25 billion of noninterest-bearing deposits back in 2021. It went down to CHF 11 billion by the end of 2023, but it has been stable in the last 12 months. I would say that this conversion was the biggest pressure on NII that we've had in the last 3 years, and it's a very positive sign that this has now stabilized. Now what else is happening or what are the parameters, other parameters that will affect NII either in the short term or also in the long term? Clearly, organic growth is a positive as we're growing, we are growing the balance sheet and we will also be getting more nominal net interest income in. We do expect interest rates to go down. Now, I know, there's a lot of debate on the timing, but clearly, over the next 12 months, 24 months, we do expect the rates to go down, that will work against us. At the top right, you'll see a sensitivity to our revenues for a 100 basis point drop across all currencies. So if all currencies go down by 1%, the impact we get in our P&L is a drop of CHF 56 million and it's roughly equally divided between the currencies. However, there are some positive elements, and we have experienced a couple of them already. We have -- we expect that as the yield curve normalizes, our clients will be releveraging. It's very difficult to play the carry trades when the yield curve is inverted or flat. So now, as the yield curve becomes more normalized, we do expect our clients to releverage. We haven't seen any significant amount year-to-date. But we do hope that this is going to be a positive in the future. What we have seen is that as we reinvest our portfolio, our investment portfolio, we get a pickup in net interest income. The reason for that is a lot of -- a large portion of that portfolio was invested back in 2020, '21 because usually, the bonds that we buy are 1 to 3 years in terms of term. And as these mature and get replaced, we clearly get a pickup with higher nominal interest rates. And the last part is competition on pricing for deposits. We saw a lot of competition at the end of 2023. It eased around Q1, Q2 2024. So I think that through that and more optimized deposit pricing that we have managed, we are also improving the NII component of that part. Page 16 is about commissions. You will see that we managed to grow our commission by 2 basis points. The increase is coming mostly from non-recurring or more transactional elements, because the markets actually offered more opportunities in 2024 compared to 2023. I would say the fact that the recurring part is stable, might not look as a big positive on paper, but the fact that we managed to keep that margin stable at 33 basis points, while we were growing at the rate that we are growing is a big success. Because usually when assets come in, they come at lower yields initially. And then, we work on the assets to improve the yields. So I think that maintaining the 33 basis points is also an achievement. I think, the second element, which is very important, because it is also a forward-looking indicator, is what you see at the bottom left. This is the mandate penetration. We increased from 56% to 62%. Clearly, it's the biggest jump we've had in the last 5 years. Our target for 2025 is between 65% and 70%. And clearly, given this trajectory in 2024, we are confident that we will achieve that. And the reason for that was, mostly all the actions that we took to increase our penetration in advisory contracts, the discretionary contracts have not moved significantly between the 2 years. But the advisory part has picked up significantly. Now clearly, there were other elements that help us overall in terms of our ability to serve our clients. So we had a lot more revenues or significantly more revenues from structured products has been a product that was very well received from our clients in 2024. And we also are active, as you know, in private markets through our own private vintage. Now on Page 17, we're moving to costs. We had a 5% increase in operating expenses, which simply reflects all the investments that we made in 2023. So, the comparison is to put it simply, in 2023, we're doing the hiring, but clearly, we did not have the resources for the full 12 months. In 2024, we carried these costs for the full 12 months, and that is what drives costs up. However, the cost-to-income ratio is down. It's at 72.9% versus 73.3% in the previous year. Over and above the hiring, which impacted the personnel expenses, we had some increases also in G&A. These come from higher depreciation of some assets. We had some higher legal expenses. But in general, I would also say that inflation has been there for the last few years, and that inflation is taking its toll also in the contracts that we have with third parties as they increase pricing. What is very important to note is that, given all the investment that we've done in 2023 and early 2024, we now have an operating platform and resources, which are in place to support significantly higher volumes. So our platform is built. We can definitely become even more efficient as we move forward. But in reality, we have the resources to accommodate much more business than we are running today. Page 18 gives you an indication of the work of our cost line. You see we started at CHF 1.058 billion. The biggest part of the move within the year has been hiring an investment. Clearly, on the back of higher profitability, valuable compensation has gone up. And inflation, as we said, has taken a bit of its toll. I will focus on the last part, because -- which is the, our own cost management actions. Through our actions, we managed to reduce our internal cost by 3%. And if I look back to the last 5 years, we had a very strong track record in achieving this efficiency every single year. The way we approach it is, we need to make room in our cost. So we need to reduce our cost by a portion to be able to invest. It's not just a matter of adding on the investment, we need to make sure that we run the bank more efficiently every single year. In industry, you will not survive if you don't do that. So we are applying -- we're trying to apply the same approach in a private bank and clearly, that has led to the very consistent and continuous reduction in cost to income in the last 5 years. We have a cost program that we have communicated 2 years ago, we have at CHF 49 million executed out of our target of CHF 60 million. The program is running until year-end of 2025. So we are confident that we'll achieve the CHF 60 million by the close of the year. Page 19, which is the balance sheet. No big changes to the balance sheet. As you know, it is an extremely liquid balance sheet. On the asset side, we have CHF 20 billion of liquid securities. And what we are really proud is that, we have been consistently building our capital at the end of '24. The core Tier 1 ratio was 17.7%. It was 70 basis points up compared to the previous year, and it's -- which were also up compared to the year before. The liquidity coverage ratio at 242% is clearly very supportive for us to grow the business. And during the course of the year, we bought about 9 million treasury shares, and we expect the adoption of Basel III Final to impact our capital ratios by about 40 basis points. On Page 20, we have the usual description of how capital evolved. I think, the highlight is the first bar on the left, we created 510 basis points of capital organically. Clearly, we used some as we are growing our balance sheet by creating risk-weighted assets, and we have our dividend. So on a net capital generation basis, we added 2.2% of capital, and this is the beauty of the capital-light model, especially when you reach the profitability at these levels that we are today, we're generating ample new capital. We used 1.2% for the share buyback. And as I said, between 2023 and 2024, we added 70 basis points on capital ratios. Now I'll go to a new section or a one-off section in the presentation, which is the acquisition of Cité Gestion. Take you to Page 22. No, it's -- we're discussing with Giorgio yesterday and he said it's been a 6-year dry spell for us for acquisitions. So we are breaking that dry spell now. Cité Gestion is a pure-play Swiss wealth manager. It's a bank. Primary focus is on servicing clients. It is owned by its managers, and it has had a banking license since 2022. Before that, it was an external asset manager. It holds AUM of CHF 7.5 billion as at December '24, and it is focused on providing advice to high net worth and ultra-high net worth clients. It has had a very good track record in growing the business. If you look at the top right of the page, it was at about CHF 2 billion in 2016, CHF 5 billion in 2020, and CHF 7.5 billion in 2024. It is a very entrepreneurial model, open architecture. So it is very similar in the way that it operates to the way that EFG operates, very high penetration of mandates at 85%, which is higher than our penetration at EFG. And in terms of presence, it is mostly in Geneva and Lausanne, with smaller offices in Lugano and Zurich. And we believe that it has a very good potential to continue growing organically going forward. In terms of some key figures for Cité Gestion, it's about or over 100 basis points in return on assets. Cost to income at about 92% and return on equity 19%, 135 FTEs and our core Tier 1 ratio of 16.5% as at the end of 2024. Going to Page 23 to describe a bit the transaction profile. Clearly, for us, the idea is not just to acquire. The idea is we want to acquire and incentivize the team that we are acquiring and the partners that we are onboarding to perform in the best possible way. So the transaction is structured with a consideration, which consists of a fixed element and an earn-out, which is based on future performance. We believe that is a very strong incentive for the key partners, both to remain, but also to continue to perform going forward, based on the earn-out arrangements. In terms of the closing, it is subject to FINMA approval, and we expect that we should be closing in the second half of 2025. And in terms of how the business will be run post closing, we intend to run it as an independent wealth manager. What is very interesting about Cité Gestion is it has multi-booking capabilities we intend to maintain those and expand on those as we go forward. And on our side, what we contribute, clearly, we contributed through a much stronger balance sheet, a much bigger balance sheet than Cité Gestion has, product capabilities, but also our entire support and operational system to make sure that we provide a very sound infrastructure for Cité Gestion to develop. On Page 24, you will see how this acquisition fits with our overall strategy. All the points listed on the left-hand side of the page are repeats of what was printed in our presentation back in the 22nd of October -- sorry, the 12th October 2022. So there are three -- the top three are requirements on what we acquire and the fourth is about capital management. So for us, for an acquisition to make sense, we need to acquire a presence, market share capabilities in a strategic market, where we are already present. Cité Gestion is a clear tech. We are scaling up operations in Switzerland, and we get the opportunity to create value through this unique opportunity. The second point is strong cultural fit. We all know that unless this exists, there is no way you manage to get an acquisition working properly. The way that Cité Gestion operates, the mindset of the partner is extremely similar to EFG's. And they also have a very strong track record in delivery. So we do -- we are certain that they will fit in terms of culture. And the last point is, it has to create value. Acquisitions are not just strategic. They are financial as well. And the attractive deal economics and the synergies and the value creation that we can also deliver here, means that, we believe that this transaction will be EPS accretive already in 2026. The fourth point is about capital. So we always said that if our core Tier 1 ratio is above 15%, subject to market conditions, subject to M&A opportunities and regulatory developments, we will deploy our capital. Clearly, we're with a very comfortable position at 17.7% today and growing every single year. This transaction deploys about 100 basis points of our capital. So it fits also the last criterion in terms of overall capital position. To close, and this is Page 25. We're now entering the last year of our strategic cycle of the '23-'25 strategic cycle. We are very confident about delivery in 2025. And the reason for that confidence is nothing else than the strong track record that we've had in the last few years. Our priorities for 2025 are very clear. They're not different from what they were 6 months ago. They're not very different from what they were 12 months ago. This is about business development. We need to continue growing. We need to protect our revenue margin. We know that the interest rate part will suffer over time. We are building more on the commission side. And we will need to continue to become more efficient. It's not just cost management, like we are a growing bank. So in that respect, it's a combination of making sure that you become as efficient as possible while you're growing. And clearly, one big element for our success is building scale. As Giorgio mentioned earlier on, the acquisition of Cité Gestion, with numbers the way we are today would bring us to about CHF 170 billion of assets under management. It is the highest level of AUM we've had in recent times. And clearly, scale is something that we have been looking for in order to generate the next level of our profit ambition. Thank you very much. And on that note, I pass the floor to Giorgio for his closing remarks. Thank you.

Thank you, Dimitris. It's always great and very clear presentation about our financial performance. Before coming to the closing remarks, just a few words about our priorities for 2025 and going forward and our outlook. What I would like to say here is that, I think, that as a management team, we have -- what we do well, I believe, is to define a clear vision for where we want to go. We define a clear -- we transformed this vision in clear and simple targets. We define a strategic course to get there. And then, as we are obsessed with NNA, we're also obsessed in every -- very, very frequently to assess where we are. So if you want to look at our priorities and outlook, you need to know where we are, not only in absolute terms, we have seen this with the presentation of Dimitris, but also in relative terms compared to the original plan. In terms of the plan, this is what we presented in October 2022. We are clearly in the second wave of our profitable and sustainable growth trajectory. And if you recall, the first wave was all about turnaround coming out of -- an acquisition coming out of an integration. And this phase was about sustaining profitable growth. Obviously, we achieved good, a good momentum. We wanted to sustain that. And as Dimitris has said several times, for us, scale is important. One of the key -- we translated this vision into some key targets. Dimitris already mentioned the key four metrics that we always measure. But also we said we want to grow 15% IFRS net profit every single year for the next 3 years, and we want to achieve between 15% and 18% in terms of return on tangible equity. So now where do we stand versus this plan? And what is very, very good and very satisfying indeed for us is to see that actually, we are running almost at half -- we're running at 26% growth in terms of IFRS net profit. We have, as I said earlier, as Dimitris mentioned, we have already achieved the target in terms of return on tangible equity. So I would say that we are doing very well and if you look on the right-hand side, actually, if you look at the two metrics that we have mentioned, we are basically one year ahead, we are there. This gives us the confidence not to relax, but on the contrary, actually to accelerate. But what I also would like to mention before going into really the priorities and the outlook is that our plan, 3 years ago, was not only about financial targets. And you might have -- you might recall this page, this page somehow is, encapsulates the strategy that we identified 3 years ago, and we are very disciplined and very rigorous in every single week of the year to focus on this page and on the strategy that this page mentions. If you -- if we start from the left-hand side, I think that what is clear is that the drivers of sustainable and profitable growth, focusing on clients and focusing on simplicity have been always at our forefront of everything we do. I mentioned already why NNA is important. I mentioned already why, at the end of the day, our purpose is to create value for our clients. This is extremely relevant for us. But on the other hand, as Dimitris was saying earlier, we need to do it in a very efficient way. I always focus on the foundation of our business. I think, this is extremely important. And we will -- we have done, I think, touching wood pretty well up to now. We continue -- we want to continue to do extremely well. We are convinced that regulatory compliance and risk management are a prerequisite to growth and are actually key for our long-term success. But where we spent a lot of time and a lot of investments in the last few years, and we will continue to do so in 2025, and going forward is in the middle part of this chart, is focused on the accelerators and the differentiators. As we have mentioned earlier, we have invested a lot in talent in 2023, but also this in 2024, and we will continue to do so. And obviously, we need to invest more in content, content innovation and digital solutions. This is important to transform our bank in one of the best player in our industry. Now clearly, if we want to define where we want to go, you need to know where you are. You need to know how strong you are, but also you need to assess the environment. I recall a year ago and at this time, and many people were actually concerned. There was a lot of concern about hard landing, soft landing, interest rates, recession, people, frankly, did not know where the world economy and financial markets were going. And looking back, actually, 2024 was a very interesting and benign macro and financial environment. Having said that, we believe that the uncertainties will persist. In particular, we read it every day, the uncertainty around global trade policies is somehow unknown. Nobody really knows what are the outcomes of that. And clearly, we believe that -- or we can expect higher potential inflation and probably interest rates remaining higher for longer. Geopolitical risks continue to be an issue. So the environment will remain uncertain and volatile. In terms of economic trends, we see a decoupling of interest rates and on the growth cycle between the two sides of the Atlantic. And clearly, financial markets remain quite volatile. And for our clients, what is extremely important are also some secular trends that we see longevity, AI, climate change and the global wealth transfer. As I say always, to the management team, we are not in the business of predicting the future. We don't know exactly. We know that the future is uncertain and volatile, but I think that our job is to ensure that EFG and our clients and our stakeholders can navigate successfully in a complex environment. And given the strength we have built in the last few years, we believe that we can do that very well. Now in terms of the priorities and the outlook, we are very convinced and confident, as Dimitris also has mentioned, that we have a very well-diversified business model. We have a very strong management team, and we will continue to generate consistent financial results to create value for our clients, our shareholders and the other stakeholders. We are convinced that the strategic investments that we have done over the years and the new acquisition that we have announced today will continue to support our revenues and profits this year in 2025 and also going forward. For us, it is important, and we -- as I said, we will invest in content innovation and digital solution, because we want to continue to transform our bank to improve the client experience and achieve operational excellence. Obviously, it has been already -- it has already mentioned, cost management discipline is important. But since we are on a growing trajectory for us, it is extremely important to focus on operational efficiency, ensure that the scale is able to sustain our growth. And for sure, one of the priorities going forward remains to look for additional M&A opportunity to complement our organic growth. So to sum up, we are entering the final year of our strategic cycle with record profit and an accelerated growth. We are -- we will focus, for sure, in ensuring that we're going to have the best possible 2025 to close this cycle, which has been a very successful cycle in the best possible way and to prepare already -- and to prepare already for the next cycle for 2028. And actually, we look forward to updating all the investors and our stakeholders in an Investors Day that we will have on the fourth quarter of 2025. And as we mentioned here, we are confident to exceed the 2025 ambition. Now with this, I close. And the last thing I'd like to say, which is a general point, I had an interview this morning, what I would like to emphasize is that we believe that wealth management and private banking are a very attractive sector. It's a sector. And I mentioned that the ecosystem of Swiss private banks and wealth managers are very competitive. We are doing very well. But as far as EFG is concerned, we are predestined to continue to do well and capture this growth for 2025 and beyond. Thank you for your attention. And Jens, the floor is yours for the Q&A session.

Thank you, Giorgio. Thank you, Dimitris, for your presentations. We would move to the Q&A section. I think we take, as usual, some questions in the room and then, we move to the telephone line. So do we have a question in the front? Let me take the gentleman first, thank you very much.

It's Michael Klien from Zürcher Kantonalbank. First question, maybe just in terms of Basel III Final impact. You mentioned it's about 48 basis points. Can you provide more granularity in terms of what the driver behind the increase is? Is it operating risk? Is it more the FRTB, is it something else? Second question on segmental reporting. If you look at the investment and wealth management business as well as on the corporate side, we see some large increases on the expense side. Can you provide more granularity what happened here? And also, what we should expect in terms of development 2025 and beyond? And then, the final point is on EFG Asset Management. We see this second year again in terms of outflows. Is this something that is structural? Are there some other drivers and also what should be the strategy going forward or the guidance for the coming years?

So let me take the first one on the impact of Basel III Final. It is -- we expect to be about 40 basis points as we mentioned. The negative impact is coming mostly from the areas of the trading book and the equity side. It's the areas where you have multipliers which are much heavier than what we used to have. The areas where we're actually benefiting is mostly the area of residential mortgages, because the weighting has gone down to 20% in certain cases for that. And that is mostly the two big numbers that come together in terms of getting to a total of 0.4%. I would say that in general, we, as a bank, have a fairly simple balance sheet. So clearly, we didn't have any significant impact. Now on the -- I want to check your point, because I didn't -- we didn't have any significant movements on the cost side between -- in the segmental expenses. Well, look, the investment and wealth solutions is very important, because it's the area -- it's one of the areas that we invested quite a bit in terms of delivery and having the potential to grow our device to our clients. Some of the increase in the expenses also comes, because we had now to procure more services for us to receive research, because we don't do everything in-house. So and unfortunately, all these elements are rather expensive. On the corporate side, let me take it offline in terms of the increase on the corporate side.

Regarding the last point, which is about EFGAM Funds, I think clearly, you're right, it is the second year in a row that we have significant outflows. But let me give you, first of all, an overview in general of our Investment Solutions business. I think, as I was mentioning earlier, we have invested a lot in what we call content innovation. And we are doing very well as far as advisory is concerning. I think, that in terms of the number of investment counselor, in terms of the products, in terms of our offering, I think we are very competitive and actually the NNA in advisory and the penetration, as you have seen, have been extremely good. In terms of discretionary, I think like many, I would say, we had a difficult year in 2022. We stabilized in 2023. And I believe that in terms of performance, 2024 was very good in terms of commercial success. We started to see the first green shoots, but I believe that in 2025, DPM will continue to do well. Regarding the funds, the situation is a bit, I would say, in one end is you need to find your niche. We had several products that were fixed maturity products that came in some AMCs that actually were issued before let's say, 2022 that came to a close, so they were not renewed. So I would say that it's -- there are some contingent elements that are short term. But for sure, we are assessing strategically what we want to do with the funds going forward.

Great. Thank you. Do we have another question in the room? Otherwise, we would move to the telephone line. So quickly here.

[indiscernible] You made big efforts and success, you are successful in approaching your targets 25%. I'm just wondering on the cost/income ratio. It looks to be quite ambitious going down to the 69% something, your target. So could you add maybe some explanation how you're going to reach that target? Given -- I mean, you made the progress, but it's quite a step you have in terms of the ambitions.

No, it's a fair comment. I think that, we have a very strong track record in the -- if you look at the last 5 years, we started with a cost-to-income ratio, which was above 85%, and now we are at 72.9%. So we're talking about more than 12 percentage points of reduction over the course of 5 years. So we're talking about roughly almost 3% on average reduction every year now. Again, it didn't happen 3% every year, but this is the average of our track record. 3% is pretty much our distance to get to the 69%. I think, the difference of 2025 compared to 2024, because in 2024, we didn't get a very significant move, is that 2025 is a year where we don't need to increase resources. Actually, we need more to streamline our resources, the ones we already have. And it's going to be a year where the business generated in -- already in '24 and in '25 will help drive the revenue line. So in terms of the dynamics, we're talking about significant -- an important increase in revenues, everything else being equal, with a very limited impact on the cost side. I think that delta will open up more the operating leverage that we have in 2025. And we still have the 69% as a target for 2025.

Maybe just to complement, I would say that, clearly, when we did in October 2022, our plan, we could not foresee what has happened in 2023 in this location of the market and we could not foresee that we would hire basically over 140 bankers. And as you know, our guidance was always between 50 and 70. So what I'm trying to say is that, we made a very important investment in 2023. And clearly, the cost base increase for that reason. Now the good news is that usually, in our model, when we hire new bankers, they need a couple of years usually between 18 and 24 months to breakeven. So people that started in 2023, they are coming to that level. And then the third year, they start producing significantly. So 2025 is where we should see a lot of those investments really the costs are already in the P&L and obviously, the revenues and the revenue potential is not there. And as Dimitris said, we need to close this gap of 3 percentage points. And for sure, we are all determined to do that.

Okay. Great. I think we move to the first question from the telephone, please?

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Nicholas Herman from Citi.

Yes, can you hear me, okay?

Yes, Nick, good morning.

Congratulations on already hitting your profit targets on your plan. A couple of questions from my side. Just firstly on M&A and the Cité Gestion acquisition. Good to see you finally do an acquisition, even if it's a small one. Just quickly, firstly, on the revenue line. How does that mandate pricing compared to yours? And I guess, I'm surprised to see such a high ROA for what is effectively an external asset manager that's highly geared to mandates. But presumably, that margin should be sustainable given that high mandate gearing. And then from a profit growth perspective, the 92% cost-to-income is quite high. I mean, obviously, they are still fairly small. Presumably that will improve over time as they scale. But will there also be efficiency opportunities from a back office perspective? And I guess, once they are fully integrated, where does that go to? I guess another way of asking the question is, you have a requirement of a more than 10% ROI, even if I assume 15%, that seems to imply a year 3 net profit of CHF 15 million, which doesn't really imply much operating leverage or profit improvement. So just kind of curious where my math is not stacking up? That would be helpful. So, for my second question on costs. Dimitris talked about a need to streamline resources, yet you've not announced anything incremental in terms of cost savings. In terms of the delta, and this kind of widening of operating leverage, is 2025, therefore, a bit of a one-off? And how should investors then frame your efficiency potential if operating leverage is accelerating over the medium term? And then, the final question, you did see some pretty strong growth in lending even if I adjust for some FX. Was this driven by Swiss franc based lending? And just can you talk about your lending trends in your other most -- across your significant currencies, I guess, that will be dollar and euro. I know that you said that your clients have not been doing too much while yield caps have been flat to inverted. But just if we could dig into that a bit more, that would be great.

Let me take first the Cité Gestion question that you had, Nick. The first part was, can they maintain their revenue margin against, which is over 100 basis points. If you look at the equivalent products that we have on the discretionary side, because they have a very good penetration and discretionary mandates, we are also at the 120 or even sometimes higher margin. So it shouldn't strike you that the level that we have in terms of margin is actually at that level. Don't forget that they've only been recently been a bank. So in terms of other AUM, which are deposit, let's say, where you earn a lot less, it's very limited. So there is very focused in discretionary and advisory. So I think that the mandate penetration and the revenues and the margins generated by that business can definitely hold and they've had a very good track record in holding that margin over the years. Now on the efficiency side, clearly, this is a 92% cost-to-income business. Our value proposition is not just the synergies at the back end. Our value proposition is to make sure that we provide them an extra level of power for them to grow their business with our clients. That is balance sheet, that is product, that is advice and access to our infrastructure. So I think, all-in-all, I think you would be pessimistic, the numbers you are giving are clearly a lot more pessimistic than what we believe could be the scope of this acquisition and what it can deliver over time.

Maybe if I can complement one thing, Nick, the way I see it, this acquisition is basically a growth play. It's a business development, NNA play. And we believe that -- and this is why we think it's going to be a great partnership, because we see that they have a very good engine for growth in a very attractive market that will consolidate the market of the wealth managers, independent wealth managers. And at the same time, if we combine forces on the infrastructure side, we believe that they can grow at the pace they've been growing at a significantly lower marginal cost-to-income ratio. So this is where we believe that we're going to have the synergy, but to be very clear, it's not a restructuring play. It is a clear growth play.

Second question was more about whether we are streamlining resources and what that means, if I heard you correctly, Nick. The plan here is that -- if you look at our FTEs between 2023 and 2024, we clearly added and we added both in the front part of the business and at the back part of the business. Now what I mean by streamlining is we need to make sure we fully digest all these hires that we made, that we continue working, making sure that we replaced some of the underperformance with better performance. So it's a continuous process that we've always been doing. I think the messaging here is, don't expect that, that growth that you saw between '23 and '24 continues. It is -- we are at the point where we have enough resources, and we need to make sure that we use them in the wisest possible way to generate revenues. I don't know if that answers the second part of your question before we go into lending.

Yes. I guess so. I was just -- I guess, erroneously -- evidently. My impression was that you had additional scope to kind of optimize the cost base. I guess you are kind of saying that just you're doing it through, as you said yourself, just replacing under performance with better performance, which results in limited cost growth. So yes, I guess you have answered that indirectly.

I don't know if you want to take the lending part.

Yes. Maybe on the lending, just -- I think, you were interested in terms of the trends that we see about lending and leveraging or deleveraging. I would say that the good news is that the trends of deleveraging that we have seen, in particular in 2022 and 2023, I would say, are over. This, on the other hand, doesn't mean that we see a lot of releveraging. We see at the moment a situation of stability where there are some green shoots. It will depend also on how interest rates will move and the shape of the curve, clearly, if the curve becomes more positively steepened, then this was -- obviously will be positive. Clearly, we are, as I said, positive, but we are generating NNA of 7% in excess, lending is much lower than that. And this you can see also in our penetration. Our penetration is going down. It was 12% last year, it's now 11%. And I think this is probably the lowest that we have had.

The lowest and 5 years ago, it was 15%.

So in a nutshell, we are happy that we don't have deleveraging, whether lending will grow at the same rate of NNA, I'm not yet convinced, but at least it's no longer a drag on our growth.

[Operator Instructions]

We have any other? Michael Klien.

Just a small question on other operating -- other operating income, it was CHF 25 million, I think, for the year, so about CHF 6 million in the second half of the year. Can you provide a little bit more detail in terms of what that was? Second, on mandate penetration. You mentioned obviously Cité Gestion acquisition is going to improve that. Can you just remind us where the current penetration is on the discretionary mandate side? And then finally, obviously, the net new money, net new asset growth was very substantial driven by the new hires as you have highlighted. Now other peers have also hired new relationship managers. Why do you think you're being so much better than others?

On other operating income?

No, no. I'll take the other one. But start...

You want me to start with the most difficult question. Thank you, Dimitris. No, look, about the new hires for me, it's always difficult to comment about competition. So I usually don't do it, and I will not do it this time. We are very pleased actually with the teams that -- and also, to be fair, we are very honored that in 2023 and 2024, so many very good teams joined us. I think, they are great talents. And the great majority is doing very, very well. We try to support them. I think, obviously, when we embark in these ventures, it's always very important that there is cultural fit. And again, I think what we do, I believe, quite well is, two-way due diligence in the sense that obviously, we assess the teams. But I can tell you that, their due diligence on us is similar to what analysts and investors do. I can guarantee you that. So we tried that when we decide to sign the partnership, it is clear what they can expect from us and what we expect from them. So we are quite pleased. I cannot comment our competitors. Now in the mandate penetration, maybe I can take that as well. As you know, on Page 16, you have the overall penetration. We don't disclose the difference. I mean, the breakdown between advisory and discretionary. These are the only two components here. Well, the funds as well. So there are actually three components. I can tell you that clearly, advisory is the biggest with us. But not too far away from -- and discretion is not too far away from an advisory. So it's significant, but we usually don't disclose the breakdown.

On your question about other operating income, Michael, I think you're referring to the specific line in the accounts, which is CHF 24 million, CHF 24-point-something million in the year. It's a combination of items in that line. It includes -- give you an example, it includes some small recovery we had from prior year loss on an insurance that was recorded several years ago. So it's a combination of things, that going to do into that other operating income line. Also because it's a combination of also about other profits and other losses and the other losses were also lower than previous years. That's the reason, the number is significantly higher than the prior year.

Okay. I have in the meantime, received a question by e-mail because apparently, Máté from UBS cannot register. So I will read the two out quickly. So the first one from UBS, Martin would be, could you comment on where do you foresee running Cité Gestion in terms of cost/income ratio in line with the group? Also could you comment where you expect scale benefits back office advisory? And then the second one is, what do you expect in terms of net CRO growth in 2025 for EFG, excluding Cité Gestion. What level of gross hiring will be necessary to achieve this? Sorry, the last question is net CRO growth and what level of gross hiring you need for that?

You want to take the...

Yes. Look, and it's unfortunate that we could not hear Máté, but hopefully, he can hear us in when we provide the answer. I think, the ambition of all these acquisitions that we're talking about and the way they have laid out in terms of the parameters that they need to fit is that any acquisition in the end should be coming at a marginal cost-to-income ratio, which is lower than the one that we actually have. In terms of creating value, clearly, what we're trying to do here is help Cité Gestion, improve on its capabilities. So build on the revenues, help on the infrastructure, so that we create something which is on a marginal basis is even lower than the cost-to-income that we operate. That's the benefit of coming in with significant scale vis-a-vis the company, which we are now acquiring. So the ambition matter is to actually be better than the 69%, 72% cost-to-income ratio that we currently operate.

Regarding the question on the CROs, obviously, it's a difficult question in the sense that we do not have a target in terms of net CROs. In terms of gross CROs, our guidance has been very, very clear, our guidance. And it's not a target. I'll come back to that in a second. Our guidance is between 50 and 70 new CROs on every year. And as we said, 2023 was an exceptional year. We did double that, double the top end. 2024 was a more normalized year. We are at the top end of the range. And what I can say is that, first of all, these are not targets. We do not give targets to our regional business heads or head of private banking to hire, because for us, quality of the bankers of the teams is more important than the quantity we're achieving a target. And when we find good teams and obviously, good teams want to come to join us and to build a partnership with us. Obviously, we are very pleased, and we can move quite quickly. And we don't have a cap. So we go on as much as we can. Now if we don't find them, then fine, we are patient. So this is how we operate in terms of, let's say, a gross 50 to 70, what does it mean in terms of net? Also here, it depends on -- obviously, on many factors. Clearly, the success of the new joiners is one. And then obviously, for the CROs that's been with us for quite some time. Every year, we have retirements, then there are situations maybe where we part ways. So it's very difficult. Ideally, we would like to -- obviously to have a positive growth, but it doesn't need to be -- I mean, if you would have, I would say -- and again, this is just a guidance, 5% net growth, that would be good for us, which is in line basically with our NNA growth, this is in line. But again, we do not target gross hirings, we give a guidance, and we don't target -- we never target net hirings.

Good news, Máté confirmed that we were able to listen to at least. So now we have another two questions on the phone. So if we can have these, please.

The next question comes from the line of Nicholas Herman from Citi. He has a follow-up question.

Just a couple of follow-ups, please. Recurring fee income, I can see that, that was flat on the year, but it looks like there may have been an improvement in the second half. So can I just ask me to confirm the exit run rate on recurring fee margin? Yes. I guess just, more broadly, you have better, I guess, visibility on your interest margins now that deposit migration has effectively stopped. You are operating well ahead of your -- the gross margin that your business plan is based on. So how are you thinking now about gross margins over the medium term? I guess, you'd say a low 90s margin sustainable over the medium term? And then finally, on M&A, so just we've seen, you now do the Cité Gestion acquisition, how we're already moving -- moving on, but just how does the market look now for acquisitions? Are you also just generally seeing more in the market? Or was it just a bit of a one-off?

Let me take the first two questions. So on the recurring fee margin, Nick, clearly, we provided information for the full year. I had some indications available about comparison of first half to second half. I don't see any big changes between the two. So I would say that what you see there as a full year from the -- on the breakdown between recurring and non-recurring is a good indication of the exit going forward. Now I think your question about overall margin is more interesting. Look, and I've been -- I don't know, maybe I'm too conservative in terms of my usual estimates on where NII will land. Look, clearly, we are not in the business of trying to estimate what's going to happen in the next 3 months, in the next 6 months, that is a lot more difficult given the timing of interest rate cuts. But overall, today, we are in a better position than what we were expecting overall. So the 95, 96 basis points that we have is a testament to our resilience. In terms of the margin, I would expect that everything which is interest related over time will get eroded to some extent. Now you see like in terms of a benchmark, if you see the sensitivity to 100 basis points across all currencies, that is roughly 2 basis points hit on our margin. And we can debate whether people expect 100 basis points cuts in the next 12 or 18 months or not, but this is the quantum we're talking about. And at the same time, we are really working to improve our commission margin, with the penetration of the mandates being a very significant factor in this play. So I think, I guide a bit in a conservative way overall on the margin. We've said that we are now at 96 basis points. The target that we had was 85, probably the truth is somewhere in the middle over time. But exactly the timing of how we get there is a lot more difficult to predict. I think, every single time we have this question in this forum, the answer is, we are more positive than we were 6 months ago, and we are more -- even more positive than we were 12 months ago, because we're facing a world which is much more inflationary and we don't expect the interest rates cuts to come as quickly as we were 6 or 12 months ago. So I think that is also going to play out in a positive way for us going forward, Nick.

That's really helpful. Just to clarify, you said somewhere in the middle. Does that also take into account not just the 100 or whatever basis points cut that kind of the market is expecting, and we can also debate on how fast that comes through? Or does that also account for the potential or any potential migration back out of term deposits and when interest rates -- when interest rates fall below a certain level, I don't know, if they fall below 3% dollar rate, then we start to see the migration. Just curious, when you're talking about somewhere in the middle, does that also factor in any migration out of term deposits as well? Or would that be incremental to that somewhere in the middle?

Look, the latest data points that we have is that, that migration has stopped. That migration was clearly happening because the interest rates have gone up and as they go down, we don't expect to get that pressure any longer. So that is one part. On the interest rates, 100 basis points, as I said, the sensitivity of 100 basis points for all currencies is 2 basis points. That's the only other data point I can provide. Now as I said, we can debate timing. We can debate all the other things. But we also have positives working in our favor for NII. For instance, the repricing of the investment portfolio or the redeployment as old bonds mature and new bonds get purchased. So I think that is helping and defending the NII margin at the same time.

Now coming to the -- coming to the next question, Nick. I think that -- and by the way, just a comment on this discussion -- from my perspective, it's clear that we need to play defense on NII, and we have done that now for, I would say, a few years. And I think that the teams are very good in doing that. For sure, we need to play offense on the net commission income. Dimitris mentioned it very -- in a very eloquent way earlier during the presentation that we are doing quite well. But on the other hand, if you look at the slide, in particular, Slide 16, we are not -- we are still below the 2021 level. So, I think there are opportunities on the net commission income. But, given that Dimitris is conservative on the margins, I think that we need to be bullish on the volume. And to be bullish on the volume, clearly, we have only two ways. One is to continue to deliver well on NNA. So organic growth. And I think that -- we have now a good track record, and we continue to do well. And hopefully, Cité Gestion, hopefully, we don't need to wait another 6 years to do the next acquisition. I think, regarding the market, M&A markets are always difficult to predict, but my sense is that we had 4, 5 years of really drought, there was COVID, nobody moved in 2020, 2021, 2022 was a war and interest rates going up, nobody moves. So there were 3, 4 years of really stagnation. Now my sense is that the market is moving. Some of our competitors have also done already some acquisitions. And again, the only thing we can do, you cannot plan. I mean, we can plan many things. I was saying earlier, we like to plan and we like to track, but it's difficult to plan acquisitions. But I think, it should be more likely than not that in the next cycle or in the next whatever quarters or semester, we can do something. But we don't have anything concrete now. We are very pleased about Cité Gestion.

Just one clarification. I've been consistently conservative on the NII margin. I have been consistently wrong by being conservative.

So continue to remain conservative.

Very good. I think, we have one final question on the phone, and then I think we come to the end if we can have the question, please.

The next and final question comes from the line of Notker Blechner from Finanz und Wirtschaft.

I don't know if you told us something about the cost of the transaction of Cité Gestion. Could you tell us? Could you give us more details about that? And how difficult was it to find an M&A target? Did you look for a lot of other candidates and could you exclude special dividend now with your exceeding capital? And last question, you, Mr. Pradelli, you said that your goal would be that EFG becomes one of the leading brands in international private banking. At the moment, you are not in the top 300 of the banks, the brand -- of banking brands. How will you achieve that goal?

So I'll take the first part of your question. In the last 5 years, we have looked at several acquisitions, much lower number than what we had seen before. And I think that out of the four of five that actually materialized, we participated in a couple. I think that this acquisition is the best fit from the ones that we've seen in recent times, in terms we have evaluated. And I think that is what makes the difference for the probability and the quantum of the success that we can have through the acquisition of Cité Gestion. The price is not disclosable. So we're not disclosing the price of the transaction of the acquisition. The only indication that I can give you is that the impact on capital is 100 basis points just to give you an indication of the size and the quantum of this transaction. Now on the discussion about the last question, whether we're going to be thinking about special dividend. We are not announcing any special dividend. The normal dividend is at the highest that it can be. And we are also continuing at the same time with the share buyback. So on a combined basis, actually, the overall return that we provided in 2024 to our shareholders is not just limited to the pure dividend. So a combination of dividend yield and share buyback brings the overall return to something which is around 7% if you take everything in, which we believe makes it a very good yield for a Swiss-based investment. And at the same time, we will continue looking for more M&A given our capital position. So we hope that we can deploy it, as we've said many times before, by creating value through a reasonable and profitable M&A actions going forward.

Now on the branding, actually, it is a very good question. And now regarding the point of the rankings, I'm not so sure what you're referring to, but we track and we follow the brand finance, which is an FTE publication. And we are -- and we have been now for several years, among the top 500 brands in financial services, and we are on a positive trend. We are improving, let's say, our ranking. Having said that, you are right. We are punching above our weight on many, many areas. But for sure, in branding, we are not -- we are punching below our weight, and we need to do -- we need to improve on that. Now how are we going to do that? I believe that we are going to do it in the same way we have approached everything else, which is to be very -- to have a very clear objective, very clear vision to set targets and to monitor our progress. If you look -- again, I make reference to brand finance, because we spent some time the way they calculate the rankings is not a cryptic way. There are very clear criteria, and we need to improve on that. At the end of the day, though, there is also the fact that we will have to spend probably more on branding now in the right way. We are probably underspending our competitors if you compare marketing spending and brand spending versus total revenues. But this is something that we are building gradually. And I'm sure that when we will update the market about our 2028 strategy, we will come back with more details. But the point is -- the target is clear on our, let's say, on our radar from the top management team.

Great. Thank you. I think, we have no further questions, so I hand over again to you for some final comments.

So first of all, I would like to thank you all for following our session today and for your questions, your interest and your support. And if I'd like to sum up, actually in 2024 -- in 2024, we delivered record profitability and an accelerated growth. You can be sure that we will continue to focus on delivering and executing our plan for 2025. And as I mentioned earlier, we are confident that we can exceed our 2025 ambition. And last point, again, we want to enter in the next cycle for our 2028 strategy cycle in the strongest position possible and we look forward to updating all of you in Q4 of this year. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.