Exclusive Networks SA (EXN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Exclusive Networks First Half 2023 financial results. It's broadcasted live and will be available on demand on our website. The presentation slides and press release for this call are also available on our website in the Investor Relations section. First, I would like to draw your attention to the disclaimer on Slide 2 of this deck regarding the information contained within this document and in particular, the forward-looking statements. I invite all participants to read this. The call today is scheduled to last about 60 minutes. I would like to introduce our key speakers this morning Jesper Trolle, CEO of Exclusive Networks; and Nathalie Buhnemann, our CFO. The presentation will last about 40 minutes and will be followed by a Q&A session. If we don't have the time to take everyone's question, I'm available and happy to take any of your questions following up the call. I will now pass it over to Jesper for a few opening remarks and his overview of the first half results. Jesper, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Hacene, and welcome, everyone, to our first half 2023 earnings call. I'm very pleased to present to you today the solid results and the performance that we achieved during the first half of '23. In an environment that remains challenged by the macroeconomic uncertainty and a general lack of visibility, our amazing teams around the world are executing well and have delivered excellent results. I would like to take this opportunity to thank every 1 of them for their hard work and their dedication towards our mission of a safer digital world for all people and all organizations. In Q1, we capitalized on the momentum coming in through FY '23 and achieved strong results with sales growth well above the overall cybersecurity market. During Q2, we saw growth rates normalize in line with cybersecurity market forecasts as previous tailwinds such as backlog, price increases and foreign exchange rates return to more normalized levels. While cybersecurity is less impacted by some of the headwinds seen across the general software industry with longer sales cycles and greater budget scrutiny, the longer-term demand drivers for Exclusive Networks remains very solid. From a market perspective, CIOs continue to prioritize and invest in securing their organizations in the face of rising cyber threats. This was documented in a recent report by analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group, detailing that 65% of organizations plans to increase cybersecurity spending in 2023, even if their overall IT budget flatten or even reduced. We see new regulatory legislation such as the SEC Disclosure Act announced last week, and the EU Cyber Resilience Act announced earlier this year that will continue to provide market tailwinds as organizations further increase their cybersecurity investments to comply with new stringent cyber legislations. As for Exclusive Networks, our cybersecurity specialism, coupled with our global scale, local sales model, continues to resonate with both existing and new vendors as evidenced by the rapid increase in our serviceable addressable market. Finally, we could not do this call today without mentioning the rapid rise of Generative AI. Many of our vendors are already leveraging AI within their solutions, helping cyber teams automate mundane tasks and analyze vast amount of data. However, now we are starting to see AI used by adversaries to develop malicious code and drive cyber attacks at scale, which will only increase the rapid evolving threat landscape. So in short, I'm extremely pleased with our half 1 '23 performance and very proud of our team's ability to deliver these results. I'm even more excited about the future ahead of us and the opportunities that are presented for Exclusive Networks, our employees, our vendors, customers and our shareholders. So with that, let's now take a look at some of the key highlights of our first half '23 performance. Above all in the first half of '23, we delivered robust double-digit sales growth and strong margin progression when compared to the first half of '22. Our gross sales increased to EUR 2.3 billion, up 20% year-on-year. Q1 gross sales grew by 28% year-on-year, while Q2 saw gross sales up 12% year-on-year at EUR 1.1 billion. Q2 marks our fifth consecutive quarter of EUR 1 billion plus gross sales. And more importantly, it's clearly cement us as a EUR 1 billion-plus per quarter run rate company based on our last 12 months of trading. Our unique model continues to increase our stickiness with our vendors and our customers. Our gross sales with existing vendors and customers increased by nearly 1/3 over the same period last year, with a vendor net retention rate of 131% and a customer net retention rate of 130%. This compares to 122% for both vendors and customers in the first half of 2022. Our momentum in the Americas regions continues. And in Q2, the United States became a top 3 country within our group as measured by group sales -- gross sales, sorry. We've often talked about our opportunity here and the performance further validates our ongoing growth strategy for this region. Half 1 '23 further reinforced our focus on driving profitable growth with net margin, increasing to EUR 222 million, up 18% versus the first half of 2022. This reflects the evolution in mix of geography and deal sizes. In addition, and thanks to the controlled OpEx evolution, we significantly strengthened our profitability with adjusted EBIT reaching EUR 84 million, up 26% versus the first half of 2022 thereby, surpassing our growth in gross sales. This demonstrates our ability to drive net margin growth through value creation for our vendors and partners as well as driving operating leverage and operational efficiencies within our business. Finally, we generated a solid EUR 105 million of adjusted operating free cash flow in the first half of '23, and we reduced our leverage ratio from 1.6x at end of December '22 to 1.3x at the end of June 2023. So in summary, a strong half -- first half of '23, with a strong performance underlying our capacity to deliver increased sales, combined with diligent cost controls and operating efficiencies further demonstrating our ability to drive consistent and predictable profitability. Based on the strong start to the year and these results, despite visibility remains limited, I'm very pleased to confirm our full year 2023 outlook with our adjusted EBIT now expected to be at the upper end of our range. Many of you will have seen this slide before, is what we call our flywheel for growth that enables us to consistently outperform the cybersecurity market growth. Each of these 5 key focus areas combined to create a flywheel effect that generates momentum, increasing our overall addressable market and compounding our growth. We'll talk more about our expansion with vendors in the following slides. But here, I would like to focus on 2 key elements of the flywheel and how they support our growth. The first 1 is our partner ecosystem and our routes to market. As a cybersecurity specialist with a market-leading portfolio, we continue to attract leading partners from across global resellers, MSSPs, service providers and GSI communities. During the first half of 2023, we grew our partner ecosystem, adding more than 400 new partners to our business. Partner recruitment was particularly strong in North America, where we, in addition to adding key vendors to our portfolio also significantly increased our partner base by more than 20% year-on-year. The other area I would like to focus on our services capabilities that does remain a key part of our value creation and our growth strategy. I've said it before that fundamentally Exclusive is a services business with distribution just being 1 of the many services that we are delivering. Services are a key element of our value add to both vendors and partners, whether it's in the presales phase such as solution design or post sales such as support, training and implementation. Our comprehensive services portfolio has been curated to help our vendors and our partners complement, enhance and augment their own services to generate accretive value to their business. One such service is global project coordination. As over the last couple of years, we've started to see a significant rise in the number of large, complex global deals that require everything from technical consultancy and design to prestaging global supply chain services, implementation and finally, over to training and support. We built a unique ability to support both our partners and our vendors as they seek to help global organizations to standardize the cybersecurity defenses across their subsidiaries around the world. New vendor acquisition and existing vendor expansion remain 2 key components of the flywheel as it allows us to continually expand our addressable market thereby creating headroom for future growth. During the first half of '23, we signed expansion contracts with 6 existing vendors. A key highlight here is the addition of Thales in North America during Q2, which came on the back of the addition of SentinelOne in Q1, 2 of our top 30 vendors. You'll also notice Imperva on this slide, and you will no doubt have seen the recent news on the acquisition of Imperva by Thales, which is expected to close in early 2024. This deal will further strengthen Thales data security offerings but will also extend protection through applications and into the fast-growing area of API security. As a strategic and a long-standing partner to both of these organizations, we are very excited about this announcement, and we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on this enhanced market opportunity subject to the deal closing in 2024. We also welcomed 5 new innovative vendors to our portfolio during the first half, such as Snyk and LaunchDarkly within our cloud native business, Nuaware, a Mastercard Cyber risk assessment and Cyberhaven within Ignition Technology, our dedicated business for emerging cybersecurity SaaS vendors. The compound effect of these vendors expansion and net new vendor signings has increased our serviceable addressable market by approximately $4 billion in the first half of '23, taking now our total addressable market to around $44 billion for FY '23. With that, let's move on to our cloud business. Within Exclusive Networks, we think about our cloud business through 3 distinct lenses. The first being cloud security technology segment, the second being cloud as a route to market and the third being the way that organizations consume cybersecurity and more broadly, IT. Globally speaking, our cloud-based business accelerated in the first half of '23 and now accounts for 29% of our overall gross sales, up from 27% in the first half of '22. Organizations around the world continues to move workloads to the cloud at a rapid pace, which has expanded the attack surface and increased complexities at a time when the threat environment have reached levels never seen before. Consequently, we continue to see strong adoption of cloud-based security solutions where we have key relationships with leading vendors, among others, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet and Netskope. We are proactively beginning to work with the different cloud ecosystem players as marketplaces becomes an increasingly relevant transactional engine and an incremental route to market for end customers with preestablished spending commitments. In this area, we see significant opportunity for our solution design services as well as what I would call last-mile services or post-sale services such as implementation, support and training. Customers' implementation of cybersecurity, cloud-based solutions also offer new future service opportunities for Exclusive Networks, such as cloud assessments, migrations and also cloud optimization. The last part of our cloud focus is cloud as a consumption model, which is accelerating as more and more vendors move to annual recurring revenue and SaaS models. You can see here on this slide how our own developed on-demand consumption platform, X-OD, continues to gain momentum with the number of partners trading on X-OD growing by 58% year-on-year including a very strong growth of 130% in the number of transactions versus same time last year. With that, let's move on to the broader cybersecurity segment performance. The strength and the breadth of our market-leading vendor portfolio is a key component in our ability to consistently outperform the cybersecurity market. Our diverse mix of market leaders, innovators and disruptors covers every major segment of the cybersecurity market. And in first half '23, we outperformed almost every major segment. Let me focus on one segment here to demonstrate how we can drive incremental growth that enables us to outperform the sector. Within network security, we are working with 2 of the largest platform vendors in this space. And we have arguably 1 of the largest specialist partner ecosystem in this sector, serving 1 of the largest customer installed bases, which we have built over the last 20 years. As these vendors are innovating and building out their platform capabilities, either organically or through M&A, it gives Exclusive and our partners a great opportunity to go back into their customer base and expand the conversation across new use cases and adjacent cybersecurity areas. Over the last 12 months, on average, across all these leading cybersecurity segments, we have outperformed the market by a factor of over 2x, achieving 30% growth compared to a market average of 13% growth over the same period. We often talk about the opportunity to expand existing vendors into additional geographies within our global footprint, thereby helping to constantly grow what we call our serviceable addressable market. Well, the purpose of this slide is to demonstrate just that the runway we have within our top 30 vendors. If we look at North America, you can see that we have now 7 out of our top 30 vendors in that region, up from 4 at the end of 2022, almost doubling the number of our top-tier vendors in the region. Two of these vendors, I mentioned earlier when we talked about vendor expansions, namely SentinelOne and Thales. Within the addition of these 2 vendors, we are now able to address a much larger market opportunity within the largest technology market in the world. This is a great example of where we can create headroom for growth as opposed to the market growth itself and thereby supporting our ambition to grow faster than the overall cybersecurity market. Despite our ongoing success in expanding with our vendors, it's very clear from this slide that there is still plenty of scope for further vendor expansion, which will help to increase our serviceable addressable market in 2023 and beyond. We have previously talked about how skills, knowledge and expertise are extremely important and valuable commodities within the cybersecurity sector today. The innovation is fast pace. Technologies are complex, and the threat landscape is overwhelming and rapidly evolving. It's not enough for organizations just to acquire the cybersecurity solutions, they need people who are skilled and trained to use the solutions as well. We see our training and our certification centers as key elements in helping organizations to acquire the right skills and the expertise needed across our cybersecurity teams to help manage, monitor and maximize cybersecurity investments. We also leverage our training capabilities to support our partners, teaching them how to better sell cybersecurity to their customers, helping support them through solution design and installation as well as ongoing maintenance and support. Today, we have 25 global training centers providing access to expert training programs led by our specialist in-house accredited trainers. Additionally, we have 2 dedicated training companies, bridging mines in the APAC region and Compendium in the CEE and EMEA regions. Through these 2 specialist training companies, we have delivered more than 9,000 hours of training courses to over 3,400 professionals during the first half of '23. When combining this with Exclusive's own global training services, we delivered a total of 18,000 hours of courses to more than 6,000 professionals in the first half of '23. We've talked a lot about North America today, and it does remain the largest cybersecurity market in the world. And as we said before, a market where we have a massive opportunity for growth. I've already spoken about the expansion with 2 of our top 30 vendors in the first half and the growth opportunity that this represents for our Exclusive Networks Americas business. But North America is also home to many of the Global 2000 companies. And as such, it has a large proportion of large-scale, innovative and high-profile cybersecurity projects. Customers are often at the forefront of innovation creating very attractive market opportunities for Exclusive Networks. As an example of a deal we are working with Fortinet and our partner, WWT, we transacted in Q2 of '23 a multimillion-dollar deal with virtual firewalls, including a 5-year support contract. The end customer is a major retail chain that operates stores across 20 countries and has a global workforce of over 2 million employees with annual sales of over $550 billion. This project is a good proxy for the many opportunities we are seeing across the region, as we continue to grow both our vendor portfolio and our partner ecosystem, setting us up to execute on our long-term ambitions for this important market. And with that, I want to thank you for your time, and I will now pass it over to Nathalie. Nathalie?

Thank you, Jesper, and good morning, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today for our first half 2023 financial release. As Jesper said, I'm happy to report that we had a solid performance in the first half. Let's start my presentation with a quick zoom into the second quarter before going into more details on the full first half financial results. So let's start with Q2 sales on Slide 15. The growth in sales continued in Q2, but at a slower pace than the trend observed during the past quarters. Gross sales have reached EUR 1,152 million in Q2 2023 compared to EUR 1,027 million in Q2 2022, up 12% reported and 15% as constant rate. We have been reporting quarterly sales above EUR 1 billion for more than 1 year now. While remaining at double digit, the growth tends to normalize as we enter into a tough basis of comparison. For the record, in 2022, the growth accelerated in Q2 and was maintained to a consistent 42% of growth in Q2, Q3 and Q4. Despite this effect, we managed to post double-digit growth in Q2 2023 at 12%. In Q2, the 12% growth in sales is fully driven by volume increase. The negative impact of 1.2% in dollar fluctuation has been offset by a stable increase in price of 2%, whereas backlog has nearly no impact in gross sales in Q2. In Q1, if you remember, 10% out of the 28% of growth was driven by nonrecurring effects. As you can see on the right hand of the slide, the growth continued to be driven by our strong and diversified vendor portfolio. The 12% growth is broken down with 8% coming from existing vendors on existing geographies, while 4% driven from vendor expansion. Let's move now to Slide 16, presenting our regional sales. Starting with EMEA, the region experienced a normalization of the demand and a tough comparison basis in Q2 2022, which shown a growth of 43%. Gross sales for the region reached EUR 897 million, with a 12% increase compared to last year, 15% at constant rate and 61% of growth since the year of the IPO. Even if EMEA's mature region in cybersecurity, it continues to drive a large part of our growth. Moving now to Americas. The growth continued its outstanding trend at 48% in Q2, 52% at constant rate. Gross sales in Americas have more than doubled compared to the same period 2 years ago, reaching EUR 158 million. This allows U.S. to enter our top 3 largest countries alongside with largest historical European countries such as U.K. and France. Finally, coming to APAC. In Q2, gross sales went down 22% reported and 17% at constant rate. This was mainly due to a high basis of comparison in Q2 2022, where we signed large deals in Singapore and the Philippines, it accounting for more than 10% of the total variation. More importantly, despite short-term volatility, we remain confident in our ability to capture the value in this region. Let's move now to Slide 17 to analyze the breakdown of sales by geography and deal size. With no surprise, you can notice the continued increase of the weight of Americas reaching 14% of the total gross sales as a result of the strong pace of growth experienced in this region. On deal size breakdown, the trend remained stable with a slight increase of deals above EUR 1 million, 2 points. This is mainly driven by an increase in the number of deals above EUR 1 million, while the very large deals with value above EUR 10 million are diminishing. This is also mainly driven by the significant growth of Americas, where large deals are more frequent than in other regions. Let's now move on to our H1 2023 release. Let's start with a snapshot of our P&L on Slide 19. As you can see on this slide, and as Jesper mentioned in his introduction, we had a strong performance in this first half and notably with strong profitability improvements. Net margin was up 18% at EUR 222 million, and our operating profitability grew faster than our top line with adjusted EBIT up by 26% in H1 2023. I will first comment on our half year gross sales performance before detailing the profitability. So let's start with the Slide 20. Gross sales in H1 2023 have increased by 20% reported, up 22% at constant rate compared to the same period last year to reach EUR 2.3 billion compared to EUR 1.9 billion last year. Our 20% growth is mainly driven by our existing base of vendors and geographies, accounting for 17% while vendors expansion account for 3%. Moving on quickly to the breakdown of sales by geography and deal size in H1 on Slide 21. The geographical breakdown remains similar to the trend perceived in Q2, with the EMEA remaining the largest region for the group at 78% of the total gross sales in H1 2023. And with the remarkable development of the Americas region, up 3 points at 13% of the total gross sales in H1 2023. Finally, APAC is down 2 points at 9% of total gross sales, reflecting the business activity during the period. On deal size breakdown, the split remains quite similar to Q2 with growing part of large deals, partially linked to the expansion in the Americas region, where deals are larger. Moving now to the H1 operating performance on Slide 22. Our adjusted EBIT has reached EUR 84 million in H1 2023 compared to EUR 67 million last year, implying a growth of 26% partly driven by the absolute value growth in net margin, reaching EUR 222 million, up 18%. The net margin on gross sales ratio came in at 9.5%, down 10 bps compared to last year. In addition, the profitability showed an outstanding growth above the top line growth, with adjusted EBIT up 26% at EUR 84 million reaching an adjusted EBITDA net margin ratio at 37.8% in H1 this year compared to 35.4% last year. This improvement is mainly driven by our business model which implies strong operating leverage resulting from growth in sales and tight control of OpEx. As a result, you can see on the right hand of the slide, the OpEx weight has decreased by 240 basis points. At the end of June, OpEx stood at EUR 138 million. Now moving to Slide 33 -- 23. We present the profitability at a regional level on this slide. So starting with EMEA. Our most mature and largest region reached EUR 89 million of adjusted EBIT for EUR 1.8 billion of gross sales in H1 2023, up 27% and 19%, respectively. After an outstanding performance in the first quarter, the second quarter progressed at a softer pace reflecting the normalization of the demand. Over the period, adjusted EBIT progressed faster than gross sales, thanks to the tight control in OpEx and the first fruits from our operational efficiency actions. In Americas, the region posted the highest growth in sales of 49% reaching EUR 298 million in H1 2023 compared to EUR 200 million last year. This continued sharp growth was fueled by the strong growth of existing vendors, combined with the fast ramp-up of new vendors. Americas posted also the highest growth in adjusted EBIT, up 59% from EUR 4 million to EUR 7 million. This increase in operating leverage derived from the operating model in the Americas, large deals are managed by less people than in other regions. Finally, with APAC, gross sales and adjusted EBIT were down, respectively, 4% and 5%. This trend is mainly due to a higher basis of comparison as large deals were boosted the performance in Singapore and the Philippines in Q2 2022. Let's now complete our P&L view on Slide 24 with the item below adjusted EBIT. As you can see on the slide, adjusted net income has reached EUR 45 million in H1 2023, up 18% compared to the same period last year. This is resulting from the strong improvement realized on the adjusted EBIT, partially offset by increasing financial interest costs. Financial result has deteriorated from EUR 13 million loss in H1 last year to EUR 26 million loss in H1 2023. This is mainly driven by the cost of financial interest from H1 2022 to H1 2023, accounting for EUR 7 million, driven by the general increase in interest rates in our economical environment as well as other financial effects amounted to EUR 6 million, including nonrecurring impacts and hyperinflation effects from [ Turkey ]. For a reminder, the company is starting to hedge the financial debt in November 2022, benefiting of the hedging should start to bear fruit in H2 2023, and the deterioration will be lower in the second half. The decrease -- now going to an income tax. The decrease of EUR 3 million in tax expense from H1 2022 to H1 2023 is mainly driven by one-off tax losses recorded in H1 last year. Without this one-off from last year, our tax expense would have shown an increase due to our improvement in profitability. Our effective tax rate is 25.1% in H1 2023 compared to 42% in H1 2022, including the one-offs and compared to 24% last year without the one-off impact. Moving now to our balance sheet structure on Slide 25. Our balance sheet remains healthy and is mainly composed of goodwill and intangibles from acquisitions for roughly EUR 1.4 billion. This amount is decreasing each year due to our amortization plan. Changes in working capital amounted to a negative EUR 81 million deviation compared to last year, in line with our activity growth and including a nonrecurring effect due to the implementation of factoring in H1 2022. And the net debt stood at EUR 226 million compared to EUR 260 million at the end of December 2022. We will detail the free cash flow in the next slide are the main driver to explain our cash generation in 2023. Moving now to Slide 26. So adjusted operating free cash flow reached a solid level amounting to an inflow of EUR 105 million in H1 2023 compared to EUR 166 million in H1 2022. The free cash flow has been impacted by the negative impact of net working capital due first to the one-off effect of the pan-European factoring program implementing in H1 last year, and that represents a one-off impact of EUR 41 million; and secondly, due to the 20% increase in sales in H1 2023. As a result, we managed to realize an outstanding 116% of cash conversion in H1 2023 above the 80% ambition expecting for the full year 2023. Moving now to Slide 27, where we present the detailed components of the net working capital. Our net working capital has remained stable at 1.4% of gross sales due to a slight increase in trade working capital from EUR 160 million to EUR 170 million despite our 20% increase in sales. The increase in activity has been largely compensated by an increasing use of factoring program and operational efficiency in the management of our inventory. As a result, net working capital was maintained at the same level than last year. However, it should be noticed that this level is much lower than the standard level of working capital in our business around 4%, as previously mentioned. Finally, on Slide 28, we detail the evolution of our net debt. The solid cash generation generated in H1 resulted in a net debt improvement from EUR 260 million at the end of December 2022 to EUR 226 million at the end of June 2023. As a result, our leverage ratio improved and came down from 1.6 at the end of last year to 1.3 at the end of June 2023. This leaves us to the last slide, the Slide 29 to conclude the presentation with the outlook. As you can notice, we entered in Q2 into a phase of normalization of the demand. And even if we are still positive on the long-term drivers of the market, we are currently exposed to an environment still challenged by macroeconomic volatility and uncertainty. However, we remain confident in meeting our full year 2023 guidance. Considering our cost allocation performance in H1 and the results of our operational efficiency actions, we now expect our adjusted EBIT to be in the upper end of the range of the guidance. Thank you for your attention, and I now give back the floor to Jesper for our key takeaways.

Thank you, Nathalie. Nice work. So to finish off where I started today, I'm immensely proud of what we have achieved during the first half of 2023. Despite the current macroeconomic conditions and the limited visibilities, our team's performance has been nothing other than outstanding in delivering these robust half -- first half 2023 results. Although we are seeing growth normalizing, the cybersecurity market continues to be both highly resilient and relevant as CIOs prioritize cyber spending within overall IT budgets. We anticipate that this will continue for the remainder of the year and into 2024. Our unique and our proven business model enables us to continuously expand our overall market opportunity. The pivotal role that we play within the cybersecurity ecosystem enables us to drive long-term value for both our vendors and our partners. And our specialist cyber expertise gives us strong market relevance as the cybersecurity landscape continues to be fragmented, rapidly evolving and ever more complex. Finally, as I said in the beginning, the long-term fundamentals of cybersecurity spending remains intact, and we are extremely well positioned to capitalize on this in 2023 and beyond. I'm very excited about the future ahead of us, and the opportunity that these are presenting for Exclusive Networks, our employees, vendors, customers and shareholders. With that, I want to thank you all for your time today, and I will now pass it over to Hacene to open up for Q&A. Thank you.

Thank you, Jesper. Thank you, everyone, for your attention. And I believe there are already people in the room waiting to ask questions. So operator, we can now open the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question today comes from Alastair Nolan from Morgan Stanley.

Great. Maybe just to kind of dig in a little bit on the outlook for the second half. Obviously, a very strong set of results for the first half. But if we take the existing guidance range and even the upper end of those ranges, it does it imply somewhat of a slowdown in the second half. Can you just talk to us a little bit more around the kind of puts and takes there, what you're seeing in terms of the environment, you mentioned some slightly longer sales decisions, et cetera. So kind of maybe where the kind of upside and downside risk is into the second half. That would be really helpful.

Thanks, Alastair. So let me take that question. So I think we mentioned a few times in our prepared remarks that we do see a lack of visibility due to the macro environment. I would say the backlog that we have now is more down to normalized trading levels. There is some elevation in pockets, but generally speaking, the backlog is kind of back to normal, reflecting the growth we have had in the business. We have also, as I think you alluded to some high comparison versus same time last year in the second half. In terms of pipeline, we still have very strong pipelines, but we are seeing, as also evidenced by many of the vendors that it takes longer to close deals. We see business that sort of move towards the end of the quarter because there's a lot of negotiations going on. Customers like ourselves, by the way, are managing their expenses. And that leads to a lot of delayed decision cycles and extended decision-making cycles, I would say. What else can I say? Yes. I mean we remain confident. We see bookings continue to grow. They are not growing at the same pace as last year, but bookings still grows. And so again, we feel good about the second half as where we're sitting now. I would just say to you and everyone else on the call that when we set guidance back in 2022 -- 2023, sorry, in February, we obviously had some level of visibility into our first quarter performance. And as such, we are still sort of delivering our business along the lines of the outlook that we set.

And our next question comes from David Vignon from Stifel.

I have 3 questions. First is on drivers of growth in Q2. Could you give some insights into the drivers particularly the impact of last year's price increases? And are you still benefiting, sorry, from the release of an elevated backlog? And the second question is a follow-up actually from the first 1 on the guidance and the profitability guidance actually. And you are now guiding for the upper end of the range at the adjusted EBIT level, which implies that the H2 adjusted EBIT or net margin would be similar to last year. In H1, you had more than 200 basis points of improvement. And on the net margin side, your guidance -- the upper end of the guidance implies 8.6% net margin which would also be similar to last year when there were a lot of large deals, and it could be at 90 basis points drop compared to H1. So my question is, are you seeing a better momentum on very large deals that could lead to a significant decrease on the net margin? And on the adjusted EBIT level, are there any cost increases that we should take into account either due to inflation, or linked to potentially increase pace of hiring in H2? And my third question is just a clarification on the working capital. I think you mentioned 4% as a percentage of gross sales as the normalized level. In the previous call, you mentioned 2.5% to 3%, so could you just clarify what we should expect in the midterm and how fast we get there?

So let me take question number one, and then I'll hand it over to Nathalie to answer question 2 on the guidance, profitability and the working capital on question 3. So in terms of the demand drivers in Q2, we saw strong performance with some of our platform vendors. Vendors that can go in, in a customer environment and create a deal where they can sell across adjacent cybersecurity segments. I alluded to this in my prepared remarks on how we are working within network security with some of the platform vendors we have there. So that's a big driver of growth. We also still see very strong momentum within cloud security and also within endpoint protection. And so I would say that in terms of trends, it hasn't really changed to previous quarters. You also asked about the release of backlog. So as I explained to Alastair in the previous question, our backlog, we had some release not a lot, but we had some release in Q1, building on the momentum from end of the year in FY '22. But in Q2, we didn't really see any further releases and the -- that's also why we now are saying that our backlog is back to what I would call normalized trading levels. I mean we never really book and bill everything on the same day. So there is obviously a first in, first out in the backlog but it's very current and it supports our current levels of trading. And then I'll let Nathalie talk about our guidance and the working capital.

Yes. Okay. Thank you, David, for your question. Regarding the guidance, you said that the adjusted EBIT should be quite the same. It's not exactly true. If you take the figures compared to last year, we'll be increasing less than 10%, that's true, but the EBIT was still increasing. As Jesper said, we do not have sufficient visibility today to enable to say something else on the sales and considering the growth in sales, you can consider the growth in EBIT. As you have seen in our H1 performance, we have significantly improved the profitability percentage, so this 1 is something that we have insisted on, and this is due to our actions. And when you said that we have increased by 240 basis points compared to last year, that's true. But I think the operating leverage should not be compared in terms of percentage from H1 to H1 because it's a continuing improvement that we are doing with our people. And we should compare this to the end of December. Even if there are some seasonality, and you are right. So December should be better than June. But in any case, it's really a continuing improvement. So comparing to last year, it's not -- for me, it's not the right way to compare and you need to take into account also the result achieved at the end of December last year. Moving now to the working capital topic. It's true that we were much more around 3% at a standard level. What you should know is that we have more and more multiyear deals on our backlog and in our sales. And these deals are scheduled in different years and our finance over several years. So it means that they are on the working capital of the company, which means that you will have in the future and increasing working capital for every company in our business. And this is a trend that we have been I think, experienced for the last 12 months, and it's significantly increasing. And this is the reason why it's more reasonable today to see 4%, but it's on the net working cap and the -- that's my answer, if you have any more questions.

Maybe just, David, 1 point of clarification. So when Nathalie says on the profitability actions, it's not like we have put in place a big cost reduction action. As we've often talked about, we are focused as a company to continue to drive operating efficiency within our model. And so on 1 hand, we are seeing that our attrition levels are stabilizing. They're coming down and they are stabilizing. And that, of course, leads to an improvement there. And then secondly, we are leveraging like most other companies, we are working on leveraging digital transformation, robotization, integration of tools, self-serve portals for customers and clients. And all of these things is what we describe as actions to operationally make our business more efficient. So I just want to point that point of clarification.

And we're now taking a question from Balajee Tirupati from Citigroup.

Balajee Tirupati from Citi. Two questions from my side, if I may. Firstly, you commented on continued delayed purchase decision-making from customers. Could you provide color on how sales cycles have evolved over the past couple of months? Has your visibility improved or deteriorated over this period? And are you seeing any signs of further deterioration or stabilization? Second question is clarification on operating margin. Could you share how has been the operating margin performance in first half period compared versus internal expectations in the beginning of the year? And going the second half period, the expectation of rather flattish year-over-year margin improvement, is it factoring a certain degree of conservatism on account of limited visibility? Or are you expecting to ramp up hiring preparing for future year growth?

Thank you for the questions. Let me maybe take the first 2, and then I'll let Nathalie talk about our operating performance and second half outlook. So in terms of where are we -- what do we see in the environment. So the delay in decision-making is something that we started to see actually from the back end of Q4 of 2022. And I would say we are at the same level today. It doesn't get -- today, we see it sort of as -- we don't think it's going to get worse. Well, we don't really know, but what we see is sort of it looks like it's kind of stabilizing. And I think you see 2 types of vendors out there, some saying that it's stabilizing, other saying that they expect second half to probably be a bit tougher. I think we lean more into the first camp where we see things are starting to stabilize. And so we don't see signs of further deterioration right now. But obviously, we are in an environment with lack of visibility as we talked about. I think everyone was expecting that we would not have any more interest rate increases after this 1 that's coming. Now we saw new data points coming out yesterday. Now people talk about maybe a further increase. So there is just -- there's a lot of sensibility and a lot of volatility in the environment, and that does impact how customers think about their decision-making process as they are spending even also on cybersecurity despite the threat landscape. In terms of the -- and so I think that links to your third question around our operating performance, which is, we don't have enough visibility. We have guided our gross sales to be above EUR 5,150 million, and we are still targeting that. That can come with more momentum, bigger deals, but more pressure on margin, but good operating leverage. It could come with smaller deals with better margins and also operating leverage, we don't really have line of sight to that right now. So when we look at our pipeline, when we look at what we see right now, when we have the experience from the first half, we still feel good about the full year guidance that we put. And obviously, with the improvements we've done on our operating margins, we are confident that we can reach the higher end of the guidance as we explained in our remarks. And I don't know if you want to say anything about the second half margin improvement.

We cannot say more than what we already said, by the way. So we just confirm that we'll be in the upper end of guidance. And I think that gives you clarity for your expectations and your models, but we cannot say more than what we said in the press release, and there is still uncertainty and lack of visibility. However, we have achieved a very good performance in terms of adjusted EBIT and net margin ratio in H1, and we are very proud of this and we are going towards the target we have in the long term of 40%. So that's just great. And that just give us comfort to say that we would be in the upper end range of the guidance. But that's it.