Ipsos SA (IPS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

February 27, 2020

Euronext Paris FR Communication Services Media earnings 62 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Operator

operator
#1

Good day, and welcome to the Ipsos 2019 Annual Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Antoine Lagoutte, Chief Financial Officer; and François Malin, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Antoine Lagoutte

executive
#2

Thanks. So good morning or good afternoon for all -- to all of you. Thank you for joining this presentation of our full year results 2019. This presentation is available on our website, so you can follow it in the same time on the website. And I will tell you on which page I am. The name of this presentation is Foundations for the New Growth. And I think you will understand why we are choosing this title when I will go into the details of what we have achieved in 2019. So if we move to Slide 4, you can see our organic growth for the year 2019, which reached 3.8%, which is an acceleration compared to what we have achieved at the end of the third quarter 2019. And it means that we had a very strong fourth quarter, with an organic growth of 5.6%. This 3.8% is our best achievement since 2012. If we look at different markets on our top 3 markets, which are in the developed markets, U.S.A., United Kingdom and France, we have a very good achievement of 6%, 5% and 4%, respectively, and this represents approximately 50% of our total revenues. In the top 3, we have also China, and we have put that obviously in the top emerging markets, where the achievement is 10%. And we have also very good results in India, plus 22%; and in Russia, plus 13%. So overall, it's an achievements, it's the first time that we are over EUR 2 billion. We have achieved EUR 1 billion in 2010. And if we compare between these 2 days, it means an increase of 7% every year over the 10 years, and it's a total growth, including the FX and the acquisition effects of the 2 main one being Synthesio and GfK of plus 14.5%. So on Slide 5, we are in a dynamic market. You can see here the last information from ESOMAR. ESOMAR is our organization that is giving the results of the total market, where the core markets has increased by 2.1% in 2018 and by 6.2% if we look at the expanded markets. Ipsos is playing in these 2 parts of the market. And you need also to understand that there is some overlap between all these markets -- all these services that can be offered in this market. So overall, the expanded market is $80 billion. So it means we have still some space to grow in the future. When I move to Slide 6, you have the situation of Ipsos compared to the main competitors. It's again with 4 players, the first one being Nielsen, the second one being Kantar, which was owned by WPP, and I will come back to that. The third one is Ipsos, and the fourth one is GfK. As you can see in this slide, in terms of organic growth, we have higher growth than our competitors, especially in 2018, where our 2 competitors were in the negative area. So if we look at the situation in 2019, what the situation for Nielsen and for Kantar was at the end of the fourth quarter. And GfK, in fact, they are not releasing any more -- any figures because they are not listed anymore as they have been bought by KKR. Regarding the situation of Nielsen, as you know, they are in a spin-off mode. They will separate the media business from the connect business, it's an ongoing process these days. And as you know, also, Kantar has been bought by Bain Capital. They're now owning 60% of Kantar and WPP owning 40%. Also, I think what we consider from this comparison and this different evaluation is that it's perhaps the result of 2 things where the local markets are stronger, and we are always claimed to be local and not only global. And where a meaningful information is perhaps more variable than the data itself -- alone by itself. And because what we want to sell to our client are meaningful information in order for them to take decisions. If we move to Slide 7, where you can see how the sales of Ipsos have evolved between sectors. I remind you that it's not the way that we are managing our business. But it was very meaningful to understand what was the situation in the previous year and why we are in a much better shape this year. As you can see, last year, the CPG sector -- CPG/FMCG was with still the highest one in terms of share of revenues, was declining by 9.1%. During the course of the year, we were more or less at 0. And this was our expectation, to be at 0 or 0 -- or at least slightly below 0 before the end of this year, and it is what we have achieved. So we consider that it's a good trend if we can now back rely to our first sector in which we still believe in, obviously. It's growing also because we are not working only with the large transactions that you know, but also with more local transactions coming from emerging countries, who can be based in India, who can be based in China, in Brazil and so. And we can sell to all these new companies we want to develop expand in their countries and overseas also. TMT, second sector, was 20%. It's not a surprise. We still see a very strong appetite in this sector from our top clients. I remind you that our top clients are within the gas side, and the Google, and the Facebook and overall the -- all the other platform, very large platforms. The overall sectors are in a good health also like pharma, for example, plus 5.4%; financial services, plus 0.7%; public sector, as we are a worldwide leader and as we believe in it a lot, is still growing by 7.7% when the growth was over years, and it represents 8% of the total. Automotive sector, the situation is not easy in this sector, but we are as such in a good position also because we have developed our business in China also. If I move to Slide 9. You are to see what we consider our 7 pillars of Total Understanding plan and also of our growth. First, we rely, obviously, on all clients or the client base. We have 5,000 clients. We have 250 dedicated professionals, where, in fact, we were adding this organization at the group level with our Ipsos global partnering program with the top 25 clients, and we have expanded this program to all main local countries. And the situation of these professionals, they are like -- we can say, like, the situation of senior bankers, we need to have a long relationship with the client, and we need to really understand their needs and their different need in order to use our different service line. So I'm coming to the second pillar, which are 75 services. So it's a lot of services that we can offer to our client. And that's why having a client organization, being able to say what is the need of a specific client, and also, what is a combination of services that we can offer to them is very important to us and is also a competitive advantage. Because for each of this service, we are able to compete to any type of competitors. It can be the large competitors that we have spoken about before or to a very specialized competitor in a niche position. Our expertise. We -- it's a business where we need to rely on science and technology. So we need to have professional and to have some people looking at what are the state of the science, what are the state of the technology and in order to be agile and to adapt to the new knowledge and to the new development of the technology. We are in 90 markets, and I have already spoken about that. For us, it's very important to be perceived in each of this market as local in order to serve the local client, the local champions and also being able, obviously, to have a worldwide coverage with this client. We want to not to grow only organically but also through acquisitions. And our acquisition policy in this plan that are underscored in here is to do 3 types of acquisitions, opportunistic acquisitions, and I will come back on the case of GfK, know-how acquisition and technology acquisitions. We have made 2 major acquisitions in 2018, and we have started the year 2020 with 2 acquisitions, with Maritz Mystery Shopping and Askia, I will come back to that later. Strong brand. Ipsos is already a strong brand, but we want to increase our visibility. I will show you later some partnerships that we have done in order to give to Ipsos much more visibility. And last but not least, it's a people business. So we rely on the talent of our 18,000 employees. We are sharing the values "Proud to be Ipsos". And as they are in 90 countries, we will be sure that we have the same core value, whatever, in which country we are. So I'm moving to Slide 10, where we are explaining also one of the reasons of the growth of Ipsos is the development of the new services. Since 2015, we have launched the new services, which are the services where we were expecting that they will grow in the future and where we have decided to invest more because of that. So it has been a success because we have moved from a situation where they were representing 7% of our total revenues, and now that our company representing 15% of total revenues and then 16%, if we take the new perimeter of Ipsos. And the growth is still a double-digit growth organically and is 11%. Including the acquisition, a 28% acquisition, which is a double of the increase of the revenues of Ipsos overall. These new services, they are classified in 4 different categories. I will not go into the details. But they are helping our clients to collect many new and different type of information and to analyze them in new ways. I am moving to Slide 11. Speaking of the new development of Ipsos. So Ipsos.Digital is a development that we have initiated during the course of 2019. It's a decision to grow in the business where we were not so far. It's to go into the Do It Yourself market because it's a very large market, representing EUR 1.5 billion totally in 2019. And it's answering a certain type of question of all clients and also of a large competition of -- question of potential clients that are not today Ipsos' clients. And we -- they will use for that speed, accessibility and simplicity. What it will allow them to do is to create their own questionnaire. This is not different what can be offered from competitors. But what is very different in the Ipsos offering is that they will also have access to the Ipsos know-how with a library of questionnaires and also with experts available to support the client. So which -- that are the 2 main added value of this offer. Also taking into consideration that asking the right question to the right people is obviously key in our business. So we will help this type of clients to do a survey that is meaningful. So what is the situation at the beginning of 2020? Today, this offer is available in 17 countries. It will be in 40 countries by the end of 2020. And we are integrating in this offer what the improvement of having data liberation that is helping the client to produce the results in a good presentation way. And also Askia with helping to collect the information, I will go back to that also. On Page 12, it's a development of one of the pillar, which is to rely on science, technology and know-how. It's obvious that we need to use the last knowledge regarding science. And that's why we are doing partnership with university, very prestigious university like Sorbonne, the MIT, the CNRS and the King's College, for example, and not only. And we are also working on the internal training in order to be sure that our people is at the right level of knowledge. So technology is also key in our business. It's evolving every day. And so we need to use the best technology and being agile in order to change technology when needed. We need -- so we need to have people able to access the technology of -- for acquisitions and to work on our own development. And we have for that almost 680 employees and around 500 data analysts. We have also Ipsos Knowledge Centre, which is the third pillar, science, technology and know-how, in order to share the know-how built from Ipsos overall the more than 40 years of the Ipsos history and among our 18,000 employees. So we are continuing to do acquisitions and there is, on Page 13, some elements regarding the acquisition of Maritz. So Maritz -- it's a part of the business of Maritz. It's not the entire business of Maritz. The Mystery Shopping part of the Maritz business. It's representing USD 15 million, with a portfolio of clients in oil and gas, automotive and banking sector with 150 employees. It's based in St. Louis, and the acquisition price is $9 million. The opportunity is that we believe in this business where we are the worldwide leader. So we want to expand and to be stronger as the top leader in the world. With this acquisition, this service line will be at EUR 90 million. And so we would be able to expand our offer and to serve this new client. Regarding on Page 14, the acquisition of Askia. So we have made a majority stake in this acquisition. It's a survey technology provider. It will help us to build the survey platform of the future, that will be useful first for Ipsos.Digital, but also for the -- for Ipsos as a whole company as it's possible to collect all type of response through text, images and so. Askia is a French company with subsidiaries in U.K., Germany and U.S. And the revenues are around EUR 5 million, and it serves today more than 150 clients. Coming back to our 2 acquisitions -- 2 main acquisitions of 2018. As you know, the GfK Research acquisition was an opportunistic acquisition with a reasonable acquisition price. It was a very good complementary offer that we have, adding more resources and more clients in public affairs, health care, innovation, customer experience and Mystery Shopping that we have already spoken about. What we have achieved in 2019 is that the integration is now complete. The integration process took part during the third quarter of 2019. As you remember, we have both people and contract. So then it takes time to really offer -- transform the offer in a Ipsos offer and not as in contract that -- where GfK was, at the beginning, in front of the client. Now for all the clients, we are directly in front of them and throughout the process that was going through the year 2019 and also the integration of -- in the projection of Ipsos, the projection to serve the Ipsos clients. It has given us some more advantage with the knowledge panel that is existing in U.S. with the NORM and SimStore platform that is helping in order to have augmented reality, in user experience and in the access in health care. What we are expecting in 2020? So compared to 2019, as I was explaining, now we will have a full year revenue base. So we will have around EUR 200 million of revenues in 2020 compared to 2019 that was not complete and that was, in 2019, EUR 175 million. And this target is also to have now in 2020 a profitability similar to the Ipsos one, which was not the case in 2019. And it was expected that it was not the case. Regarding on Page 16, the acquisition of Synthesio. So Synthesio was a strategic and technology acquisition in order to have directly access to the social media listening, to the web listening. Because we want to be, as much as possible, responsible for collecting of old -- own data because the quality of the data is essential. So it's a good combination with what we can do in our own service line, SIA, Social Intelligence Analytics. And it's good where it's combined with Synthesio, where we collect directly the data. So 2019 was the year of integration and development. They have launched -- Synthesio have launched a new module called Signals that is helping the client to not collect only information about them, but also about the competitors and to have that presented in a very good way, in a BI reporting module. We have started to work on the commercial synergies between the Ipsos and Synthesio offering. Overall, the Social Intelligence Analytics service line amounts EUR 24 million of revenues. And we are expecting an acceleration of this growth in 2020, we're targeting a EUR 30 million of revenues. We are a strong brand, and you can see that on Page 17. As in each of these markets, we have key partnerships with top local -- it can be media or it's the world economic power. It's -- so it's really very well recognized media services in all these countries. So I'm moving on Page 19. We are now decided to have raison d’être, which is to have a statement of what we are doing and in what we believe. So it's really the continuity of our Total Understanding plan and of what we were thinking about in our new advertising campaign. And it's delivering reliable -- so reliable is key information -- for a true -- true is key also -- understanding of society, markets and people. So this is our raison d’être. And I think it's the very clear way of what we want to achieve in the society and with our clients. Moving on Page 20 and 21, you have here what we have done on Corporate Social Responsibility. So it's a long way coming from 2000 -- we have started in 2008, where we have been the first market research firm, participating to the United Nation Global Compact program. We have created CSR Officer group position in 2012. We have launched our Ipsos whistleblowing procedure in 2013. We have created a CSR Committee nomination from the Board of Director and with the Board Member managing this committee in 2014. And the same year, we have launched the Ipsos Foundation. In 2016, we have launched a CSR training program that our employees are using to know better regarding our CSR target and what is possible for us. In 2017, we have set some nonfinancial objectives to be achieved in 2020. 2018, we are doing the Prix de la Mixité which is a prize related -- an award related to the number of woman in our Board. We have 60% of women in our Board of Directors. 2019, we have signed a partnership with the Tent Foundation, and we have a target to recruit 100 refugees in 2020. And 2020, we have launched a carbon offset scheme for business travel. So every year, we are launching new initiatives. Moving to Page 21. The 3 pillars of the Corporate Social Responsibility are first, on social, where we are launching some new rules with our suppliers. We are checking that they are participating to the United Nations Global Compact program. And we are also targeting that all countries with more than 20 employees have a CSR company. Also our foundation, the 2 main elements are we want to work on education of disadvantaged children. And we have also moved to work more specifically on refugees -- children refugees in order to be sure that they're integrating well in the companies that -- in the country that they have joined. On the environmental part, our target is to reduce by 10% of CO2 emission in 2020 and to reduce also our business travel. And on the corporate part, which is very important for Ipsos as we are a people business, we want to increase the level of employee engagement. We have a benchmark also because we are doing the same sort of measures regarding the engagement of the employees, for clients -- for our clients. So we can be sure that we can measure if we are better or not than the competitor -- not the competitor, but the market and the benchmark. And we want to reduce our attrition, turnover rate of people again because people is our main asset. We need also to train them, to measure their satisfaction through the Ipsos Pulse survey and to double check that there is no discrimination, and that there is gender equality in the workplace. And we are also a member of the UN Women's Unstereotype Alliance. So I will now leave the floor to François Malin that will present you the 2019 financial results.

François Malin;Investor Relations

executive
#3

Good morning or good afternoon to everyone. François Malin speaking. So for the presentation of the financial information, let's start with Slide 23. As said before by Antoine, 2019 is a record year with over EUR 2 billion of revenue for the first year ever and have reached that after hitting the EUR 1 billion mark. The growth is at plus 3.8%, which is the best annual performance since 2011. It should be noted that the growth is generalized through all sectors, all region and all audience segments. So this is a good performance, in particular, in Q4, in which we have an organic growth at plus 5.6%. For information, the FX impact is positive with plus 2.3%, and the scope effect is at plus 8.6%. Moving to the Slide 24, which describe you the income statement. We have a total revenue growth at plus 14.5%. I will not go into the detail again of the revenue. But looking at the gross margin, you can see that 2019 gross margin is at 64.3%, slightly below the level of last year, which was at 65.1%, but fully explained by an acquisition effect. Effectively, the impact of GfK Research on the gross margin is at 61%, so it has a negative impact due to a mix effect in the data collection model. Understanding that's -- in -- at Ipsos we have a more important part of online compared to the acquisition that we made last year on GfK Research. Without this impact of the acquisition, the gross margin would have been at 65.3%, meaning above the gross margin of last year, which is, again, a good performance. Looking now to the operating margin. The first thing that you can see is that the operating margin on revenue is flat with 9.9% in 2019 and '18. This good performance is to be noted -- is -- need to be noted, in particular, in a year with some acquisition integration on Synthesio and GfK Research. The main explanation drivers are the payroll in line with the growth of the revenue at 14.5%, of which 9% is driven by the acquisition. On the [ GenEx ], meaning the apprentices, the travel and the IT cost, we have totally maintained this cost. And the goals of this cost is only at 5.5%. A good performance in regard of the valuation of the total revenue. Once again, the acquisition impacts the level of the operating margin. And the revenue from the acquisition, the operating margin would have been higher in 2019 compared to 2018. Now if we focus below the operating margin, we have other nonrecurring income and expense. This year, we have a higher level of NRI that is driven by some reorganization costs due to the Total Understanding project and some integration costs associated to the GfK Research. It should be noted that this level is higher, of course, compared to last year, but will not be repeated in 2020. Now on the finance cost. It's up compared to last year, and it is explained by a higher average level of debt in 2019 compared to 2018. And this is following the acquisition that we performed in the last quarter of 2018 for GfK Research and Synthesio. Looking quickly on the other elements, we have an income tax that is at EUR 36.9 million. The income tax rate is a bit lower compared to last year with 25.9%. And all these things considered, we have -- what we have in adjusted net profit -- attributable to the group, sorry, an increase in performance by 3.4%, with EUR 129.5 million of revenue this year. Maybe just a quick comment on the other financial income and expenses. What we have here is first an impact of IFRS 16. This year is negatively impacted on other financial income and expense for IFRS 16 by EUR 5 million. Due to this, we have this same amount in the operating margin. And overall, there is no impact for IFRS 16, but only some presentation adjustment. And last year, in 2018, we had another financial income that was linked with the sale of a minority shareholder participation in a digital marketing company for EUR 10 million. Going to -- just saying again about the increasing revenue that we have by region, I'd say the -- briefly in the KPI the growth is generalized to all regions. So we have EMEA with plus 2%; Americas, plus 4%, with in particular plus 6% in the U.S.; and Asia Pacific at plus 7%. The 2 main region of Ipsos, EMEA and Americas, will present over 18 -- 80% of the revenue in 2019. On the split between the developed and the emerging countries, we can see that the developed country represents 69% of the shares with an increase in growth of 2.9%. And logically, the organic growth of the emerging country is higher with 5.7% on the share of 31%. So in terms of growth for revenue. As you know, in the semester 2 of 2018, we started to follow and to check the revenue by audience. This is something new with the implementation of the Total Understanding project. Here again, the growth is generalized to all types of audience. We have consumer linked with the CPG partially, which is -- which showed an organic growth at plus 2.5%. The citizen and employees are at plus by 5% -- 4%, sorry -- the clients and employees, let me correct. And then citizen is our champion of the year with plus 7%. Last but not least, the doctors and patients show an organic growth of 5%. If we move to the Slide 27. Sorry, for not having mentioned the slide before. Here is the bridge of the operating margin. As said before, without the acquisition impact, the operating margin would have been higher. Here in the detail, what you can see is that the good positive impact are first, the gross margin that we have; second, FX impact; and as mentioned before, some IFRS 16 positive impact of EUR 5 million, offset by a negative impact below in the income statement. We have some negative impact, but positive in the portion of the TUP investments, meaning that we reinforced the team with the client organization last year. And this allowed us to drive a positive growth overall. Moving to the cash flow statement on the Slide 28. What we see first is a good performance on the gross operating cash flow, with EUR 266 million versus EUR 206 million last year. Here again, you have a positive impact of IFRS 16 for EUR 44 million. But net from this positive impact, the gross operating cash flow remain higher than the one that we have in 2018. And the offset of this impact of IFRS 16 is in lease payments below in the line just before the free cash flow line, you have this line of EUR 44.7 million. So altogether, and again, the IFRS 16 is only a presentation backed with no impact overall on the financials. What we can say also on the cash flow statement is that we have some change in the working capital that is explained by an excellent Q4. As a reminder, the Q4 of last year, only in organic, is at plus 5.6% with a record of revenue of EUR 600 million for only the Q4. So this explains the change in the working capital and the level of the free cash flow at EUR 64 million at the end of the year. In more detail, you have more net interest paid due to an increasing average level of debt in 2019. And below the free cash flow line showing EUR 64.3 million, you have some investments for a total amount of EUR 28.6 million. This is linked with EUR 5 million of GfK Research, plus the acquisition of 10% of QuestBack, which is an ERM platform and some payback of minority shareholders. At the end, you can see that the cash at the end of the period is -- again, is in line, I would say, against the 2018 with EUR 165.4 million of cash for Ipsos. Regarding the debt on the -- related maturity. The gross debt is amounting at EUR 746 million. The debt is spread with reimbursement over the next 5 years. Considering the cash that we have in hand with EUR 165 million disclosed in the previous slide, the net debt is steady with EUR 578 million. It shows a healthy situation and we have, at the end of December 2019, over or close to EUR 5 million -- EUR 500 million, sorry, undrawn credit facility with maturity over 1 year. To conclude, the shareholder equity exceeded EUR 1 billion, considering the net debt explained before, the gearing is at 51.5%. The leverage is improving with -- multiplied by 2.4 and interest coverage also with a multiplication by 7.8% (sic) [ 7.8 ]. I'll let this picture, Antoine, to conclude on the outlook of the next 2 years.

Antoine Lagoutte

executive
#4

Thank you. So I'm moving to Slide 32. Slide 32 should be read with Slide 33, and we will come back to that. Our outlook today is that we will maintain our expectation, our long-term expectation, our midterm expectation. So there is no change in this presentation. That for us, the achievement of an organic growth between 2% to 4% will allow us to reach an operating margin of -- in 2021 of 11% and to have an average EPS growth of 10%. And this will -- based on this organic growth and certain amount of acquisitions, every year between EUR 50 million to EUR 100 million of acquisitions. Some investment in CapEx of EUR 45 million every year and maintaining an optimized leverage between 2.5 and 3x. And also maintaining a dividend payout between EUR 25 million to EUR 30 million (sic) [ 25% to 30% ] per share. So saying that it's the situation that we know today and this might be impacted, obviously, by the impact of the COVID in the month or in the days or in the weeks to come. So why today we consider the outlook is still achievable is that because we have started the year with a very good volume of order, was increasing by 10% compared to the previous year. And also because so far, and we already mentioned of that, situation is mainly contained in China and in some Asian markets, and China represents 7.5% of the total group revenues. Obviously, depending on the evolution of the situation of the virus, we will recommunicate when the reassessment might be meaningful and at least not later than when we release our figure for the first quarter in April 2020. We will not show you a video, obviously, during this presentation. But if you go into the presentation, there is a link for a video, we're saying what we have done in China. And we have been interviewed by the Chinese TV channel. And what the people are doing within Ipsos in China during this situation. They are doing more online surveys, introduce more web listening, listening to each other and other media, social media in China. And a lot of our employees are working for home and not going into office, but you can have a look at this video after -- at the end of this presentation. So this is the end of the presentation. And now I will let the speech to you if you have any questions for me or François.

Operator

operator
#5

[Operator Instructions] We can take our first question from Conor O'Shea of Kepler Cheuvreux.

Conor O'Shea

analyst
#6

Just a couple of questions. Firstly, Antoine, you mentioned the COVID situation in China and was referenced to that in the press release. Can you just highlight some of the practical problems? I think it was mentioned in the press release, face-to-face interviews, I guess, focus groups and so on, what are the practical problems? And how could you overcome them? And is online collection a big part of that market in terms of surveys already? Or could you accelerate that? That's the first question. And the second question on the self-serve platform, Ipsos.Digital. Can you give us an early sense of what the demand is there -- is it like that -- do you expect that to be a significant contributor to growth in 2020? Or is it more of a slow buildup with maybe a more material impact next year? And if you could give us any sense of how much OpEx was related to that in 2019, but maybe cycle out now that the platform is fully developed? And then just a last question on the debt maturities. You've obviously got significant amount coming up over the next 2 years. When are you planning to refinance that? And is that process already -- have you already started to prepare for that?

Antoine Lagoutte

executive
#7

Okay. Thank you, Conor. So the first question is regarding China. To be clear, we are impacted in China by this virus. Don't forget also that in China, at the beginning of the year, there is Chinese New Year. So there is the period where the Chinese people are in vacation. It's the most vacation part of the year for the Chinese people. So the impact is partially reduced because of that. But nevertheless, it will have an impact. It's too early to measure it precisely. But as we said, we cannot do anymore or it's not meaningful to do any face-to-face interview. It's not -- so we are replacing, as much as possible, with online surveys, with web listening, and you will see that in the video. If you look at the video, we are explaining that we are taking the opportunity to doing even more online surveys and web listening surveys. But nevertheless, to be honest, it's sure that you will not launch a survey for launching a new product in this situation. So there are some jobs that are delayed. We hope that when -- if the situation is controlled and is improving, then we will go back to a more normal situation. And there will be some catch up. I'm not expecting 100% catch up, but there will be some catch up because some surveys are delayed. They have not come so there are delay. But too -- I would say, too early to say more than that today. The situation in China, I would say, China, Korea, so some Asian countries are directly impacted. The rate, not at all, measurable.

Conor O'Shea

analyst
#8

Okay. And could you -- just 2 quick follow-up on that. Is there a big difference in terms of the proportion of online collection in your Chinese Asian operations and developed markets?

Antoine Lagoutte

executive
#9

It's like in the developed -- it's close to the developed market. I don't have the exact figure in line -- in mind, but I think it's around 60%, something like that at -- swinging down a bit.

Conor O'Shea

analyst
#10

60%? Okay.

Antoine Lagoutte

executive
#11

Then on digital, the expectation is to reach, in 2023, EUR 100 million of revenues. But so far, we are really -- you should see that in a start-up mode, and I cannot tell you any figures today, let's say. But it's 3 development that we're building in, not only in additional sales externally, but also using the platform offset in order to have a more -- a really good technology system to collect on the accounts. And then regarding the debt, as François mentioned, we are -- the possibility to not do any particular new loan because we have this EUR 500 million of facilities. But nevertheless, we have started to discuss with our banks, and we will see what we will do. But there is no pressure. The main reimbursement that we have in 2020 is regarding the USPP. So are we going to do another USPP in total? But we are -- as you know, we are -- in our financial debt, we have USPP, we have Schuldschein, we have the indicated loan, we have a bond that we have launched last year. So we want to be agile and to have a large portfolio of different financial instruments.

Conor O'Shea

analyst
#12

Okay. And just one quick follow-up on the Ipsos.Digital platform. All the development costs are capitalized before the launch at the start of the year. So there's no OpEx relating to developments in, say, 2019 P&L? Or were there some?

Antoine Lagoutte

executive
#13

All right. Almost all is capitalized, as it is, you also knew, our policy to capitalize what we can.

Operator

operator
#14

Thank you. There are no further questions in the telephone queue at this time. We can now take our next question from Olivier Parein of Crystal Asset Management.

Olivier Parein;Crystal Asset Management;Portolio Manager - European Equities

analyst
#15

I would have just 2 questions, please. One is on the restructuring costs, which have been higher than expected in 2019. Could you explain why they were higher? And more importantly, what do you expect the restructuring costs to be very roughly in 2020? And then second question would be about the working capital impact that you had due to your strong fourth quarter. How do you expect the working capital to evolve in 2020, please?

Antoine Lagoutte

executive
#16

Okay. So the first element, yes, we had, in fact, more restructuring costs in 2019 for 2 main reasons: the project Total Understanding, where we had then reviewed what the people were doing, and we had to make some reassessment of what is the best organization. So we had some costs because of that. And the second element is that because of the acquisition of GfK also. During this integration process, we have to take some decisions and also some -- we had also some costs because of the implementation of using our own capacities for producing the surveys that GfK were -- was previously servicing. So that's why, for us, it's not something that should be repeated next year. I would say on a normal year without any extraordinary acquisition or nonpayment like this, it should be around EUR 10 million because there is otherwise some countries where the situation is not so good, and we need to take some decisions. Then on your second question on the working capital, what -- you need to link that to the fact that, in fact, the strongest growth that we have in the revenues organically, and also in -- totally, was in the last quarter. So because of that, these revenues has been so far booked in our client accounts, but still not transformed into cash. So it will be transformed into cash during the first quarter of 2020. So I am not expecting such an increase next year. If we say that the organic growth would be between 2% to 4%. And if the seasonality is not that bad.

Olivier Parein;Crystal Asset Management;Portolio Manager - European Equities

analyst
#17

If I may, there was one more thing which I didn't understand very well, which was shown. I think you said at one point that the order intake was up 10%. Could you confirm that? And also, how big is the order book then, please?

Antoine Lagoutte

executive
#18

The order book -- it's the order book where -- the level and the increase of the order book when we have started the year was plus 10%. So -- and that's why we are confident to maintain our 2% to 4% organic growth for the year so far. And this order book is between 30% to 40% of the total revenues of the year.

Operator

operator
#19

Thank you. There are no further questions in the telephone queue at this time. [Operator Instructions] There are no further questions in the telephone queue.

Antoine Lagoutte

executive
#20

Okay. So thank you very much to all of you for having listening to this call, and we wish you a very good day and a very good afternoon.

François Malin;Investor Relations

executive
#21

Thank you very much.

Operator

operator
#22

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

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