Ipsos SA (IPS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon. It's 2:30, and I'm English, so we will start promptly. And it's my great pleasure as your new Chief Executive to welcome you to our first in-person Investor Day in a few years, which is just a reminder, there's a seat by the window there, which is cool, if you want that one. And there's another seat over there. But thank you to so many people for making the trip out here and also to the people who are watching online. And we've called the growth plan that we're here to discuss today the heart of science and data, and that is really encapsulating who Ipsos is as a business, which is it's a business I have spent most of my life in and many people in this room have spent a very large part of their lives in because it's got something special about it. And I want to demonstrate that today. So what underpins what you're about to hear about today is our confidence and our ambition for the future. You saw our very strong results last year, which we'll talk about. You saw our very strong results in Q1. And as we go forward, even though the future nobody can predict the future with perfect accuracy, or if you can, please come and see me, but nevertheless, we feel very confident about the future, and we have huge ambition for the company. The company has changed dramatically over the years, and it will continue to grow in future. So today, I will take you through the key aspects the plan, the heart of science and data. My colleague, Laurence Stoclet; and new CFO, and I'm -- Dan Levy, where is Dan hiding in the audience, Dan. We started recruiting Dan before Christmas, but he's joined very recently. So it's great to have Dan here. He and Laurence will talk about our financial projections. And then something that's very important to us and I know to many of you and also to many of our clients around the world, ESG and what we're doing in that space. And then, of course, technology and my good friend, Andrei Postoaca, who's here; and David Zotter, who's in America, will take us through our proprietary technologies and what that is offering us and how it's changing our performance. We'll then look at some key geographies, in particular, the U.S.A., my good friend, Lorenzo Larini hiding by the window there, joined us 9 months ago with decades of experience in tech companies but doing a great job already in the U.S. And then we'll be joined by my colleague, Amit Adarkar. Where is Amit? Amit joined us in about 2014, 2015 and it's -- I was just looking at India's results before and after your arrival, and I'm very pleased that you're here today. And I'm very pleased that you joined in the first place. And joining us remotely from the biggest country on Earth, [ Lifeng Liu ] will be talking to us from Beijing live a little later. We'll then look at 2 of the key sectors where we can see particular opportunities, health care, and my colleague, Michael Spedding, who leads our health care practice will be -- who joined us through an acquisition, as I joined through an acquisition a number of years ago, will take us through the opportunities we have in health care. And then finally, my good colleague, Kelly Beaver, who's lurking somewhere, Kelly has taken over from me in the U.K. and Ireland but previously led our government business there and, in fact, has just been given an MBE by the Queen for her services to research and COVID, so well done, Kelly. And then, of course, we have time for questions. And because it's a long agenda, we've also, you'll be pleased to hear, put a break halfway through for you to get some coffee, water, et cetera. So we obviously face an evolving market, an evolving world. We have inflation. We have the fragmentation of media and citizens' attitudes. We have a population that is aging. My good colleague, Lorenzo, the Italian, of course, the current birth rates in Italy, there will be no more Italians after 170 years because Italian women just don't want to have sex with Italian men. So they -- but certainly aging populations and changes in health care are a major feature of the 2020s. The second cold war that may be beginning as we speak means, of course, that we may see more deglobalization than globalization. But that, again, actually means many emerging local brands that Ipsos, in many cases, is already working with. All of this puts pressure on governments all over the world to deliver more for citizens' expectations arising across the West. Across Latin America, people want government to protect them, not to get out of the way, to stop things happening, to look after them, and that means that they need more research. And finally, of course, we have the fragile planet that we're all on and the imperatives that business of all kinds finds itself under to deliver on ESG. And we'll talk about our role in that but also our clients' role. All of those things mean the clients need more research. I mean I was talking in Basel to the Bank of International Settlement Governor, so people like Christine Lagarde, Jerome Powell. And there, whatever the final outlook on inflation, they know that we know that change is coming. Our clients are having to change their mix. The C-suite in all of this need reliable information as they did during COVID-19. And all of those issues together often make the need for more hybrid sources of information, which Ipsos' portfolio means that we're well placed to deliver quickly. And that's another key feature that we will talk about in terms of technology. So Ipsos is well-positioned for an evolving world. We have done well in the aftermath of the great crash of 2008. We did very well in the aftermath and during the pandemic improving our profitability and then able to pivot quickly, control our costs and then rebound very rapidly last year. So overall, I think we're well-positioned to capture the changing market, these opportunities. We're part of a very large market, EUR 90 billion. And yes, there are a few global competitors. We outperformed most of those in terms of our growth. We'll talk about that. And some of that reflects, I think, the breadth of what Ipsos delivers. We are now unique in terms of the range of services that we offer. The fact that we work in all industries, not just CPG, not just technology, media and telecoms, important though they are, but also health care and also government and the public sector, so we're the only player that can really address all our clients' primary research needs across the planet. We cover 95% of global GDP. And so as parts of the world grow faster than others, we are ready to take advantage of that. And what we have been investing in recent years perhaps since we last met in person is our proprietary technology but also the combination of that with people, and that's fundamental to who Ipsos is. It's one of the reasons why I've been so proud to spend a lot of my career in the company because it's unique in terms of how it approaches these issues. So we have a unique glocal operating model. We're operating in many markets around the world. We put a lot of accountability and responsibility on the heads of our country managers, and I've been one in the past. It's very, very important that the buck stops very clearly with an individual somewhere. And in our structure, it very clearly does. It also means that we have a real local presence, in so many markets around the world. We really understand what is actually going on in India, what is actually going on in Peru, what is actually going on in Tanzania. You name it, we're there, and we understand what is happening. And one of the changes that we made in our organization under the total understanding plan, which took us through the last 3 years, was to really strengthen the number of senior client officers we have. And this is also a key feature, I think, of the numbers I'm going to show you in terms of our track record because we've now got 12x more of these people in these very senior roles than we had back in 2018. And that's 12x more very senior people, some of whom used to run whole regions or ran whole client organizations on the client side in the past. It's important because those people are there to really make a difference for our clients to give -- to make sure that we're giving them outstanding service. And then, of course, we've got the services that we've chosen to focus on, the 75 specialized services organized into 16 service lines. But that has given us, I think, since our reorganization back in 2018 a real focus on delivery for our clients, and they have rewarded us by giving us more work. And finally, all of that is supported by our very strong global teams in technology, in science, our knowledge center that shares what we know across our network, the operations and support functions that we have. And those are really important because when trouble hits, having a really strong operational structure means that you're able to respond to opportunities. We built the COVID testing program in the U.K. in 2 weeks using our existing infrastructure. None of our competitors were able to do that. So I think we have a unique operating model. I think it's ready, it's been tested in a pretty tough environment over the last 2 years. It's delivered, and we're confident that it can serve as the basis for more growth. So because of that operating model and because of the people of Ipsos, we have outperformed most of our major competitors. So we've outperformed IQVIA, one of the world's largest health companies. We outgrew Nielsen. We outgrew Kantar. We've certainly outgrown our friends at GFK and at Qualtircs. There are some smaller companies like Medallia which don't necessarily make any money that might also be growing rapidly. But overall, our growth has certainly outperformed our major global competitors. We're the only company of our type that is able to deliver, and that is reflected in these numbers. And I think a key point is that as the market changes, so does Ipsos. So 10 or 15 years ago, our largest clients were CPG companies. Now they are often technology companies. Some of the biggest, most advanced technology companies in the world choose Ipsos. As Google put it, we partner with Ipsos to understand emotions that machines don't get. And there's a reason why they could work with anybody, they choose to work with Ipsos. Overall, the technology, media and telecoms clients are now 1/4 of our organic growth compared to 12% for the rest of Ipsos in the first quarter of this year, 18% of our global revenues. I think it's -- at the same time, and this is what's interesting, and I was just reflecting on this with Lorenzo, there are still many of the sort of traditional companies like large oil companies are also our clients. And as the economy changes, as different parts of the economy strengthen and weaken, Ipsos is there with those clients. But certainly, the most advanced companies in the world choose Ipsos. And we also benefit from a very strong reputation. In many of our markets, up to 1/5 of all of our work literally just walks through the door because people know who the company is. We're famous for what we do. We work with all the leading brands. We work with more governments than any other research company on Earth. We've got very strong media coverage, which is important to us. People we need respondents to know who we are so that they want to take part in surveys, et cetera. But also, we want to have that word-of-mouth recommendation. And what we have seen during the pandemic is that overall client satisfaction has risen, and it's now at a higher level consistently than before the pandemic as we pivoted in the pandemic to really face into the challenges our clients face. When we combine that reputation, of course, and it's reinforced by our people, Ipsos is not about me or just 1 or 2 people. Ipsos is about hundreds of senior professionals. That is our model. Their average tenure is about 13 years, centuries and centuries of experience. Their engagement is high, averaging 90%. And that engagement of very strong senior teams around the world means that we are able to pivot quickly to whatever the world throws at us. So again, we're in a strong place with our people. Our engagement score, again, last year, despite all of the stuff that you read in the media about the great resignation, all of that, actually, our staff turnover last year was the same as before the pandemic. People stay at Ipsos. So we have a very clear goal. We want to be the best known market research company on the planet. We want to be at the heart of science and data, combining the people and technology. And we have a strong, I think, organic growth outlook. We promised 3% to 5% in our last plan. We delivered. We are sticking with our guidance of about 5% for 2022. But going forward in 2003 (sic) [ 2023 ] to '25, we think from what we can see in our numbers, what we can see in our business, what we can see in the markets, a higher level of organic growth of about 5% to 7% per annum. So we're feeling positive about the future. We've got some good numbers behind us, as you will see shortly. And when we look at end of this 4-year period where we're now -- which we're now unveiling today, Ipsos will exceed EUR 3 billion in revenues by 2025. We have our compound growth rate of between 5% to 7% each year and then increasing the rate of acquisitions to between EUR 100 million to EUR 200 million a year. There are still many things that we can add to the company to make it stronger, to increase our geographic debt in certain markets. And in terms of profitability, 2021 was an exceptional year, as for so many businesses. As we recovered from COVID, we weren't able to hire to follow that. We had a huge amount of government work for dealing with COVID response. But as we're sticking with our 12% to 13% for this year above 13% over the rest of the period. And importantly, we continue to aim for 15%. And the automation that we're investing in, the switch from offline to digital, which is an ongoing process around the world, and our increasing amount of work in data analytics, in advisory services mean that we can be confident about higher margins into the future. So I think we're very positive about the future. We're also very sensible in terms of thinking hard about both the upside and downside. But that is where, on a very careful reflection over the last few months, we have come out. And in terms of how we'll deliver that growth, there is a very clear and structured plan based on a number -- a limited number of elements. It really relies, again, on combining the best people and the best technologies. And so in a sense, there are enablers, the increased investment that we're talking about today in technology and in data analytics, and there is a new plan being rolled out across the business this autumn. We will increase our CapEx because we can -- by doing so, we will ultimately increase our profitability. We will keep our people at the heart of our strategy because they are fundamental to our success so far. And then in terms of our growth drivers, we have a clear focus on a limited number of geographies where we believe there are more opportunities. Some very specific services, and it's interesting, we -- increasingly, these are services and areas that other people are actually abandoning to us. So this is -- which is -- which again we find very positive. And finally, some smart acquisitions, some intelligent acquisitions that add value to what we do, that increase our coverage or increase our strength. So in terms of what we're doing with data and technology and analytics, effectively, it works in 3 ways. It makes the offer broader. And that's really important because it allows us to address new parts of the market that previously perhaps would not have used Ipsos. Sometimes some local firms and clients would regard Ipsos as too global. This is extending our client base. And you can see it very dramatically in the case of some services like innovation or creative excellence. And it also -- this broader range of services that we're able to deliver as we invest means that we're able to really keep up with very complex client demands. Absolutely key at the same time is being quicker. And what you can see in our business is cycle times decreasing and profitability increasing as a result because our staff have to spend less time on an individual project. So it improves internal efficiency, but it also gives our clients the data faster and gives them more control. And all of that's important because it builds the third element, which is getting closer to our clients. What we're finding with automation is not that our people feel deskilled but that actually they're able to serve clients better. And the reason for that is that they are able to spend less time working on production because it's now been automated in the way Andrei and David Zotter will show you and, therefore, more time thinking about the client problems. Our business remains a people business fundamentally. It's about people working with people. And so it frees them up to do that. And importantly, and this is something very close to my heart. It makes -- allows them to spend more time making sure that what we do is making a difference to our clients. It's helping them drive their own profitability, choosing the best offerings for their consumers, helping them make the best policy for voters and citizens. So those 3 things then broader -- make us broader, quicker and closer, which is very, very important. And they're supported by proprietary and state-of-the-art production platforms, which you will hear about today, the Software as a Service program and ecosystem Ipsos Digital that we have been building now for the last few years and is coming -- is already starting to make a big contribution to the business and newer data analytics, products and services. So we have a better production and more new services to sell to our clients. And those -- that's really, really important as part of what we're doing on growth. Overall then, when we look at all of the new services that we offer and these faster, more digital, more passive services, in other words, not asking questions but just recording what people are doing, we can see growth from 9% back in 2015 to over 30% of our revenues by the end of this period, by 2025. So that means measuring differently. Very often now, we are detecting signals not by asking surveys but by what we can see in social media with our Synthesio business. Ipsos Digital is giving us data in virtual real time for clients, again, faster and better. In terms of analyzing data, the volume of data that we are now analyzing I couldn't even have imagined just 10 or 15 years ago. And we can now do that very, very quickly. Multi-source data is a key part of our strategy. Businesses like MMA that my colleague Lorenzo will talk about in the U.S. but also now exporting and working in Europe, hugely -- a huge part of this. And then finally, our advisory services, which are growing rapidly around the world because clients want to know not just what the answer is but also, of course, what they should do. And the huge experience that we have in this business and indeed in our industry needs to be better utilized. And that's what our advisory services do, helping them think strategically about problems working with the data, et cetera. So over 30% of our revenues from these new services by the end of this period, and this in itself will drive greater profitability. At the same time, we want to keep people bang at the heart of the strategy. 83% of people who work here say they're proud to be Ipsos. As I say, our staff turnover has not gone through a great resignation. It stayed the same as in 2019. And we want to be the best place to work in this industry. I'm absolutely passionate about that. We need to train the best people. We need to retain the best people. And to do that, we will continue to invest. We'll continue to focus on people's well-being, letting -- giving our people more flexibility and control over their work so they can do their best work for clients. We have a Client First program that is already paying off in the markets where it's been rolled out. And we will now roll it out globally. That really focuses on increasing our closeness to clients and how often we win. We will continue to devote 20% of our profits in bonuses and free shares and, again, sharing the growth with the business, which is part of our success. And finally, as important to our clients and everybody in the world, ESG is important to our people. Our people want to see Ipsos making a difference, and it's part of the attraction of working here. So we will continue to focus on that, and we've got a section of this presentation on that. In terms of where we grow, America is key. So we are focusing on some particular geographies. And the reason for America being so important is very simple. It's less than 30% of our revenue globally, but it's more -- it's the majority of the global market. And so the upside is enormous. It's our biggest opportunity. It's a very fragmented market. We have many competitors there, but we're already performing very strongly. And we have a huge amount of opportunity there with our strong relationships with technology, media and telecoms clients, with financial services, et cetera. We already have a large part of our revenue from some other major countries. And what's interesting about those when we look at countries like France, where I'm standing today, or Britain, the U.K., actually, although those are mature in many ways, what we can see is double-digit growth even in those markets. And sometimes where you are strong, you grow stronger. And so that is part of our plan as well. We have real opportunities, though, ultimately, in -- overall in countries like India and China, who you will hear from later. And there are a number of markets like Germany and Japan where we are not -- where we haven't grown as fast as we would like. We can definitely renew our ambition in those markets. Overall, we also, of course, have a huge footprint across the rest of the world. And what we have done in the last 2 years is dramatically improved the performance in those smaller markets. We intend to continue doing that with the Client First growth model, coaching the smaller local teams, helping the leadership teams. We've got a structure in place to do that so that all of Ipsos is performing strongly. But a very, very clear focus on the United States and some of the bigger countries, it makes perfect sense, and it helps in terms of management attention. And then, of course, which services should we focus on, and there are 4 main areas that we want to focus on. So the first is using Ipsos Digital to really deliver global contracts for our CPG clients. They're a major part of our revenue mix. We have huge room to grow in terms of helping them with innovation and helping them with creative excellence in advertising research. We've already seen very rapid growth. And again, my good colleague Andrei will talk about the opportunity and how that's working. Our tech and media clients, again, we have very strong relationships with them already. We will continue to focus on the GAFAMs, as they're called. But I think that we also need, of course, to be mindful that it is not all American, and there are companies like TikTok from China who are now one of our major clients around the world in the Middle East, in the United States itself leveraging our abilities. And then health care, there's only a limited number of global competitors that we really compete with across the planet. This is a growing market. There is room there in market access, in data analytics, and in noninterventional studies. So big opportunities in health care. And finally, government. The great thing about government is if they ever run out of money, they can start printing more. They always have money. They always need to do things. They always have to make voters happy, and we are here to help them in more countries than anybody else. We have lots of room to grow. We already have a best-in-class gold standard digital solution that takes off-line members of a community across the country and connects them for real-time research for very -- of the highest quality, which is what government is looking for. We've rolled that out across the U.K., the U.S. It's rolling out across Europe now. And it's just one example of how we are already #1 in the public sector, but there is a huge amount of upside. So a very clear focus on a few of the services that we're involved in. Adding to that, to help our growth will be some targeted acquisitions. We would increase the rate of acquisitions from where we are now to between EUR 100 million to EUR 200 million a year over the next 4 years. So that's reinforcing some key geographies, reinforcing some of our key service lines and really, I guess, adding in to areas like analytics and advisory where we can see opportunity and bolting on perhaps expertise in some markets where, again, the United States would be an obvious funnel, we can see that there is more that we can do. But underpinning all of that, and I've done 4 or 5 acquisitions myself in my time at Ipsos, is making sure that we have a fit with Ipsos values. We want to add value, not destroy it. And Ipsos is a particular place, so we need to make sure that the people we want to work with want to stay here. Our growth has been driven by the management teams and the leadership team of Ipsos persuading founders and others to stay with the company and grow with Ipsos. And we will continue doing that. And it is part of -- I joined through an acquisition 17 years ago. I've never ever regretted it. We will continue that strategy. So I'd now like to just provide a bit more detail on this. And 2 people will join me shortly, Laurence Stoclet, our Deputy CEO. This is Laurence's final Investor Day. She's stepping down as Deputy CEO later this year. And I'd just like to say to Laurence a huge thank you. Without Laurence, we would not have delivered the results that we have done over the last decade. Laurence's focus on building a really strong ecosystem in managing our finances, but beyond that, actually in many systems in our tech, in IT, it's a huge contribution. And that keeping our noses to the grindstone and focusing on profitability is absolutely fundamental for whoever is the CFO. And Dan is standing behind her. Dan is our new CFO. Dan isn't going to let up, so investors, don't worry, cost control is part of the way of doing business around here. And it's important actually because researchers love doing research. Somebody has got to keep them honest, and the CEO will keep them honest but so will the finance department. Laurence, Dan, the floor is yours. But thank you, Laurence.

Well, good afternoon or good morning for those of you who are following us live or online. It was my great pleasure to join Ipsos 24 years ago and to be, in fact, the first group CFO of the company. So Dan will be the second Group CFO. In the same way, Ben is the second CEO of the company. So I've been very pleased to work with all our financial partners to finance the development of our international network both through equity but also through debt because we always had a very, I would say, smart and balanced way to finance our acquisitions. And we have now a strong -- not only a stronger international network, I would argue the best international network in the world. So I think we are already what is our aim to be the best market research company. I would argue that we have the best infrastructure and in fact, we are by the industry recognized as the best in those areas already. So -- and this is why, by the way, a lot of people are trying to poach our teams, including in finance. So how are we going to finance this growth plan for 2025? Well, it starts by a solid foundation. We have a great balance sheet. We are almost totally deleveraged now thanks to a strong generation of free cash flow that we had in the last 2 years. At the end of March, our net debt was only EUR 62 million. Our leverage was close to 0; and our gearing, at 4%. So this means that we have plenty of available credit facilities and that we have, I would say, the right financial structure to finance the plan that Ben has described to you. If we talk about this plan in numbers and in terms of cash because cash is always where I start, so Ben was a bit surprised because I always start by cash flow and not by P&L, but this is what it is. So how are we going to finance this plan? We will most probably increase our debt as right now it's close to 0. We plan to have maximum of EUR 600 million or an equivalent of a maximum of 2x EBITDA in terms of leverage. And of course, we have all the cash that we are generating. This is why free cash flow is important because free cash flow is free. So I always make a joke about this one, but I like it very much. So free cash flow is free. So you have understood we have EUR 1.5 billion to spend. How are we going to spend it? We are going to grow organically but also through acquisitions. So we plan to spend between EUR 500 million and EUR 700 million over those 4 years. Of course, this is an average. We might spend a lot one year and less another year depending on the targeted acquisitions that we are going to do. We plan as well to invest an extra EUR 200 million in specific CapEx. Ben already mentioned, of course, technology but as well our very high-quality panels, knowledge panels that Kelly, my colleague, will also talk about a bit later. And then we need, of course, to share our success with our various shareholders, with our dear shareholders through dividends. So we will keep a dividend distribution policy around between 25% and 30% of our adjusted EPS per year. And we will as well continue our usual share buyback program in order to compensate for the dilution of our share-based payments for our managers and staff. But we will be adding -- depending on, of course, the situation, including the economic environment, we will be adding a new share buyback program to increase value for our shareholders up to 2% per year. And this is how we will be spending all our money, but we should not forget other stakeholders. And this is why the last chart I would like to show you today is around how do we share what's the profit that we create. So starting at the level of our operating profit before bonuses, if we go back just before our last plan, the TUP plan in 2017, which was, in fact, a normal year for Ipsos, we were distributing, I would say, an amount which was significant to our shareholders but maybe not so significant to our managers and employees in terms of bonuses. And all together, the value that we distributed that year was EUR 130 million. In 2021, so last year, which was you have understood an exceptional year in terms of growth, growing by almost 18%, so that was quite exceptional, we generated value of EUR 238 million that we distributed not necessarily very evenly and certainly not evenly between our managers and employees and our shareholders because that year, we, of course, reached all our objectives and we, in fact, even surpassed all our objectives, and we distributed bonuses, which were already very nice in 2020 and in 2021, which was 60% higher than in 2020. So that's why the share of the pie for managers and employees was very nice last year for everyone -- almost everyone in the company. So going into our plan for the next 4 years. By 2025, we plan to generate almost double, so around EUR 440 million of value to be distributed and to be distributed evenly between shareholders. And this is why we are adding this new share buyback program and our managers and employees, 25% each; 20% in corporate income tax. For Ipsos, we are paying 25% in average around the world. We are paying our taxes everywhere, and this is being a good corporate citizen not only at an individual level but also at the corporate level to pay taxes in each country where you operate. And last but not least, we will also invest a bit more than our maintenance CapEx. And this is why we have 30% in our investments. Thank you. So once again, it was a great pleasure. And I'd like to welcome Dan, who has a very easy job and a great smile. So thank you to all of my team.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Laurence. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm delighted to be with you today, and I'm delighted to join Ipsos as new Group CFO. I would like to thank Ben Page for his trust. And also, I would like to thank all the people I've met in the company for the last 2 days, because I've been in the company for only 2 days, for their very warm welcome. And I can say that after only 2 days, you can feel that there is a very solid corporate culture and the strong team spirit in Ipsos, and that is quite important to me. I also would like to say that I'm very pleased to join an international company, a company which is innovative, a company which business model speaks to my statistician background and also a company which I think has a very important societal role to play to understand public opinion, social trends, how consumers behave, how employees feel in their job. I think all of these are very crucial issues and particularly in this uncertain and complex world. And also, this company, as Laurence has just explained, is in a very good shape in terms of a very sound financial situation. We have nearly no net debt. And obviously, we will be able to build on these strengths to deliver our new strategic plan that Ben has just presented today. So maybe a few words to introduce myself. I have a background on both strategic and operational finance thanks to my 12 years' experience as corporate banker at Societe Generale. I started at Societe Generale at the [indiscernible] Societe Generale, which is, if you like, an audit and consulting department that carries out studies on all the business lines of the bank. And I supervised there during 3 years missions both in France and abroad, on very various issues like retail banking, market activities but also asset and liability management for the finance department. Then I became a corporate banker, a senior banker for mid-cap corporates so that were companies a bit like Ipsos, so between EUR 1 billion and EUR 7 billion turnover. Most of them listed, most of them in the tech, engineering or business services sector. And my role was to advise CEOs and CFOs of this company on their strategic projects like M&A and financing for both equity and debt financing. And 5 years ago, [ SG ] Generale Management asked me to lead the merger project of 2 business centers dedicated to large corporates this time. So it's companies like [indiscernible], both French and international corporates. And I've been serving as director of the merged entity for the last 4 years. So this was a front-to-back entity, which mean that they were, of course, bankers in front of the clients but also back offices who were executing the clients' day-to-day operations like cash management and trade. So I have a background in strategic finance, if you like, but also in operational finance. Before SocGen, I spent 9 years at the French Ministry of Finance after having graduated as an economist and statistician. And I was in charge, first of all, of the macroeconomic forecast for France, which was underlying the French budget, [Foreign Language], as we say in French, which obviously involved a lot of modeling and data analysis. So as I said before, Ipsos business in data analytics speaks to my background. And then I held different positions in [indiscernible], which is, if you like, the finance department for state, particularly focusing on public spending control on different departments of the government. And during this period, I also had a very nice opportunity to go to London for 2 years. So I worked for the U.K. Treasury in England, in London, and I spent 2 years there as an economist carrying out studies on the various issues and particularly pension reforms. So I'm not going to say more today. I think it's probably better for you or from the company that I don't speak too much about Ipsos today because, obviously, I've been only in the company for 2 days. I'm looking forward to meeting you in person within the next few weeks and, of course, to seeing you on the 21st of July when Ben and myself will present the half year results. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Dan. Okay. I'd now like to just change the tone and talk a little bit, not so much about money but something that's as important as money, and that is ESG, which is fundamental to who Ipsos is as a business. And we want, as part of our plan for the next 4 years, to really lead ESG initiatives in our industry. And for Ipsos, they work -- this works at a number of levels. It's not just about what we do in the business, but Ipsos, as a leading or the -- one of the leading research companies, is also, of course, working extensively with clients on their ESG issues. And that is like a virtuous circle, our own experience in this area is helping our clients. And as well as that, of course, we have a role in communicating what public opinion is about some of those difficult choices that consumers, citizens, voters are going to have to make over the next 10, 20 years. People need to know how the planet is reacting, how the population of the planet is reacting to these challenges. So Ipsos is working on things like what the minimum wage should be in Amazon. We are working with clients like Mondelez on looking at their sustainability of their supply chain. We are working in terms of just making our own research more representative, making sure that we reach everybody, not just people who like filling in surveys online but total populations. It's a key part of who we are, ensuring that our samples and indeed we get asked this more and more by -- particularly by North American companies, are you properly representing black people? Are you properly representing the Hispanic community? Well, we are. And we have some experts focusing on that. We're working with companies to look at how water consumption can be reduced in production, in the beauty industry, in CPG. We're working on data privacy issues and a whole range of aspects for big data and things like sustainable retailer scorecards. Globally, there are about 600 different scorecards in front of consumers on whether or not a product is ecologically sustainable or what its impact is. And so again, we're working on that. So I'd like now to just focus a little bit on what we're doing at Ipsos to start with, and we're going to spend a bit of time looking at our environmental and social impact, both what we're doing on carbon reduction, and there's a lot, what we're doing internally on people and social issues but also how we're working with the communities that we're based in around the planet and then look at our own governance arrangements, so all aspects of ESG. And I'd like to welcome to the stage Ewa Brandt. Ewa leads our ESG initiative and coordinates the Ipsos Foundation, which is one of our charitable initiatives. So Ewa, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Ben. Just -- thank you. Hello. As you know, ESG is rooted in who Ipsos is as an organization. We joined the United Nations Global Compact in 2008, and we were the first company of market research to do that. In 2014, we created the Ipsos Foundation, and we are supporting most unprivileged children and [ youths ] in the world. And all these initiatives I'm coordinating them with the hundreds of volunteers and -- thousands of volunteers and hundreds of ambassadors in Ipsos networks. Overall, we see 3 pillars to ESG in terms of what we are doing internally in Ipsos. On the people part, and making the progress on the social issues, first of all, as the company Ipsos needs to be a place where everybody is comfortable with his skin, everybody is comfortable being themselves. And we want to be a company that reflects the diversity of communities we are operating in. What's encouraging, as you see, that 8 out of 10 of our people working here considered that they are working in an inclusive company that embrace diversity. Then we're also working on our gender balance at the senior level, and we established very clear targets. In fact, Ben and Didier [indiscernible] on the portion of women being at the senior level in the company. Then as you see, our share of women in 800 top executives moved from 37% to 33% (sic) [ 43% ] in a few years. On the planet, all businesses want to reduce the carbon footprint. And we divided by 2 our carbon emission in the last 3 years. But also, we are measuring our environmental impact on all Ipsos entities on 100 of our countries, 90 countries. And we run 62 environmental projects in 2021. On the carbon offsetting and carbon neutrality, we want to be carbon neutral as soon as possible. Then we started a very ambitious plan in France that we want to be carbon neutral this year and to launch some offsetting projects. For all Ipsos, we will be net 0 in 2035 including our travels, which we have significantly decreased since the pandemic but also now we are at a lower level than before pandemic. But we also -- we are also working on decarbonizing our supply chain, including our interview with thousands of interviews we have around the world and their travels. And then finally, in terms of society, where we are making a difference, it's particularly focusing on refugees. Some of the most unprivileged people today on the planet. And we are very happy to see that today, we are employing 60 refugees. We are supporting over 100 NGOs and schools. But also our Ipsos Foundation is operating in 40 countries, supporting unprivileged children and [ teens ] worldwide, changing their life every day. And as Ben said, we are making a difference on the range of levers inside the company. And we also give the voice to the unheard. Our work is also about making sure that our research is fully representative so that it speaks to not just normal everyday consumers but also all the people, younger people, minority groups in different societies. And there is a huge range of projects we do for government where we have the ability to go the last mile, to include everybody as part of the total understanding. And this is very important for us. So that might be the project we are doing for European Union understanding [ Romanian ] minority communities and the challenges they -- and prejudices they have across Europe. Our work in Australia when we are working with aboriginal communities, with our aboriginal researchers. But all over the planet, we are making sure that people are represented in the totality. So it's what we are doing in Ipsos. And we are very happy that this work is recognized. First of all, we are chosen for complex projects in this area. But also, United Nation Global Compact rated us at advanced level; EcoVadis, in the top 5% of responsible companies; MSCI rated us with AA. And also, we were part of Financial Times Rating as a climate leader; and in France, in the top 25 companies, more responsible companies. That all of that, it's very important as Ipsos is making a difference on both environmental and social issues over the world. And it's something which really motivates our people, and we see that in our internal opinion survey results. People want to work for a responsible company, a company that is committed to making a difference. And that is more than just making money. And that's what Ipsos is. Thank you.

Thank you, Ewa. And I'd now like to welcome to the stage our Founder and Chairman, Didier Truchot, who will talk about how governance works with the Board of Directors at Ipsos. Thank you, Didier.

So as you have -- no, I don't need that. Can you...

You totally need that.

I'm not a former President, not [indiscernible] but the French President, when he was meeting Barrack Obama has always this kind of help. So it's not -- I would like to talk a little bit about the G of ESG, because, in some cases, we talk about E or S or G and I thought that it would be a good idea to talk about all of that together because this is, in fact, it had been put like that, so E, S and G. So governance. And I would like especially to insist on what we do at the Board level because I'm still the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the company. And as I am now very free of my time, so I'm not so as busy as I was before, I'm certainly looking at how we can improve, how this Board is working and to help everybody and the company, of course, to make it work. So first of all, what is this Board? So in this Board, they are 3 executive directors, so 3 persons who are working as executive in Ipsos: Ben and Laurence, who are just close to me; and Jennifer, who is just in front of me, and with leading our most important programs in terms of managing our large accounts. But Jennifer is also very active in a structure, which is called Ipsos [ Partners ]. And Ipsos Partners is a company which -- where there are 150 Ipsos executive who are shareholders of Ipsos. And an Ipsos Partner is a shareholder of DT Partner, which is the most, I would say, important shareholder of this company. So Ben, Laurence and Jennifer are member of the Board of the company. Then there are 2 directors: Sylvie Mayou, who is also here; and Andre Lewitcki, which I think could not join us today. They have been selected by the unions, the most representative unions of Ipsos in France, to represent the Ipsos employees. And as you know, this is by law that we have this organization. Then we have in the Board 5 so-called independent directors: Pierre Barnabe who, as you may know, have left Atos a few weeks ago and who is now will become the CEO of Soitec, French tech companies. Virginie Calmels, who have spent a lot of her career in the media and the entertainment business in Canal+ and then in Endemol, then she became the Deputy Mayor of the most, I would say, British city in France, which is Bordeaux. So Virginie, in some ways, may make a bridge between Ben and myself as much as she can. And then we have Filippo Pietro Lo Franco, who is a banker with Mediobanca. Anne Marion-Bouchacourt, who was the HR Director of Anne Marion-Bouchacourt -- sorry, of Societe Generale. Anne Marion-Bouchacourt is now in charge of the interest of the business of SocGen in Switzerland. And Eliane Rouyer-Chevalier, who is also a Board member of Legrand and who is a specialist in governance. And then there are 2 nonindependent directors. Patrick Artus, Patrick, in fact, is an external Board member. He is not involved in -- directly in the in the day-to-day Ipsos business. But Patrick had been a Board member for more than 12 years, so he's not now classified as independent. And myself, with the Chairman of this Board and who have been, as you know, the CEO of the company until mid of November. In this Board, there are a couple of metrics that we are tracking. The independence, first of all, and if you put aside the 2 directors which have been, let's say, chosen by the unions as we have 2, then the independence ratio is 50%; men and women, 50%; and there are even some non-French citizens, which is, let's say, a good signal about an international organization. So Ben, Filippo and so on -- and Jennifer. So there are 25% of non-French citizen in this Board. How these Board works? We have at least 6 meetings per year. And for those of you who follow the Ipsos news, in 2021, it has been probably a bit more than 6. So we have these meetings, and we do, during all this meeting, a couple of things. First, we overview the strategy of the company. And for instance, we have worked with Ben about the plan that he has already started to talk about earlier in this meeting. We are, of course, tracking the business performance, the budget. We are closing, as the law asked us to do, the financial accounts of the company. We are giving the green or not the green light about any acquisition and some, I would say, specific important investments. We are, of course, part of the process to select the top executive of the company and the appointment, which is known. We are, as a Board, managing the compensation schemes based on [ clause ] of the recommendation made by the management of Ipsos. And we are also, of course, active in the management of the relationship with our equity and financing partners. There are 3 committees in the Board. The first one is the Audit Committee, which is chaired by Filippo Pietro Lo Franco who is the Chairman, and there are 2 other Board members, Patrick Artus and Eliane Rouyer-Chevalier. So 2 out of 3 are independent members. There is a Nomination and Compensation Committee. Anne Marion-Bouchacourt is the Chairman, Pierre Barnabe and Sylvie Mayou are the other members. And then there is a CSR Committee. The Chairman position is still vacant because it was held before by Florence von Erb, who is not anymore a member of this Board. Jennifer Hubber and Andre Lewitcki are part of this CSR Committee. The truth is that we have not yet chosen a new Chairman because we are in a process to try to think on how we can use this committee to upgrade in some ways or to formalize better the relationship between how Ipsos is looking at its future, is developing strategy and our CSR commitment. So we'll see how we'll do that. And we will probably communicate about this third committee and what will be its scope and its, of course, composition as soon as this work about this potential linkage between this Ipsos' long-term strategy and our CSR commitment is managed. So -- sorry. Of course, I have pushed the wrong button. So going forward, what we want to do. First of all, you may remember that the Board has evolved recently. We -- first of all, we have split the position of the Chairman and the CEO. I am the Chairman of the Board. Ben is the CEO of the company. We are, of course, talking and working together when it's necessary. But the 2 -- we have our very clear set of responsibilities. And there is, by the way, a document which explain very well what is the role of the Chairman and what is the role of the CEO in our governance. And we have, of course, some new Board members, Ben himself, since the end of September of last year and then 2 independent Board members, Pierre Barnabé and Virginie Calmels, because we thought that it would be very useful to get somebody more, let's say, an IT specialist and somebody more digital and media expert in the Board of the company, having in mind what we want to do and how we want to have this company working. What we will do, what is our plan for, I would say, the next 12 months? First of all, we understand that we need and we want to increase the -- in some ways, the relationship between the Board and all the Ipsos stakeholders, starting with the shareholders but also with other stakeholders, to improve how we are working together. We want, of course, to help as much as we can Ben and his Executive Committee to implement and to develop our plan. And finally, because simplification is also a word which I like very much, I -- we will simplify our Board structure. Until last year, we had Chairman and CEO, myself. But then we had also 3 deputy CEOs. This position will disappear -- There are already two deputy CEOs, one of them is -- have left Ipsos. Another one is still in Ipsos, but is not a Deputy CEO. And then when Laurence will leave at the end of September, then there will be no more Deputy CEO. So there will be a very clear and simple structure at the Board level with the Chairman, the CEO of the company and all the other members, including, of course, the Chairman of the 3 committees. So this is where we are. We will probably have some further discussion with some of you in the next few months to understand how we can do a better job with you and help you to better understand what -- how Ipsos is working and what is our, I would say, values and prospects. But for us, once again, the strategy of the company, its long-term plans and what we do in terms of environment, society and governance are very linked and will, in some ways, involve a lot of our energy to make it work as well as possible. Okay. Thank you very much.

And we now have a break after an hour, and we'll see you in about 10 minutes or so. And then we will go into the detail on the geographies, the technology and the services that are part of the plan. Thank you. [Break]

Please rejoin us to restart the event. Please rejoin us. Come in from outside, bring your coffees. Okay. We'll start again, everybody. So thank you for being with us. I hope you've got refreshed. We're now going to talk about technology, about geographies and about services. But we'll start with somebody who isn't in the room, our Chief Technology Officer, David Zotter, who's going to talk about the proprietary technology that we've invested in, underpinning our data collection over the last few years. Let's connect David and play the video, please.

Hi, I'm David Zotter, the Global CTO. I've been with Ipsos for almost 4 years, and boy, my team has been busy. I'm excited to share some of what we've been up to. So let's get into it. Early on, we made a decision that we're going to control our own destiny. As part of this, we acquired 2 important companies: Askia and Infotools. There are many others we have acquired, but today, I'm focusing on these 2 acquisitions and how they enhance our existing platforms and power our future growth. Following on the theme from Ben of broader quicker, closer, these highly scalable core platforms are enabling a constellation of new industry-leading products and services. They are also feature-rich enough to support tens of thousands of clients and a broad range of research methodologies. Being quicker matters. Independence is always the way to go. It is way better to avoid vendor lock-in and limitations. We are now in a situation where we control the road maps and the pace of software development driving a rapid growth. The sooner that a feature gets into our products, the sooner it starts adding value. The quicker a system can change in response to feedback, the easier it is to delight our customers. Of course, we can always enhance our core capabilities with third-party cloud services, and we'll always integrate directly with our customers' platforms. But it is important to outright own the vast majority of core technology behind the proprietary products and services. All of this brings us closer to the research participants and customers. Our response and engagement is superior when we can wholly control their user experience start to finish. The overall automation improves our operational efficiency and frees up time, making a major client impact. We have dozens of sophisticated platforms within our global portfolio. But again, I'd like to highlight these today because they'll power so much of our future growth. Panel One acts like a CRM system for managing our interactions with research participants, providing a 360-degree view of all research-related activities. It is also the core platform for setting up, managing and monitoring all facets of our research projects. Panel One improves our respondent reach and engagement through new and unique ways. It boosts conversion rates for completed surveys through a fourth generation router that matches supply and demand. We're moving to integrate all of our panels and communities into this globally shared platform with more than 50 primary consumer panels already consolidated. Askia is a high-end, multimode survey engine. It is ultra-capable and mega scalable. It offers a clever low-code, no-code environment. Because Askia is part of Ipsos, we can innovate on demand. For example, we have new question types enhanced with AI. Side note, it is an important fact to know and often overlooked, but highly structured historical data built up by Ipsos over the decades is incredibly valuable as training data for constructing forward-looking and machine learning models, as is the case with these innovative question types for Askia. Analysis and Reporting, let's talk about Infotools. It is a Tableau-like reporting platform with advanced capabilities that are unique to marketing research. It offers real-time granular and flexible reporting for our clients. Now we have many specialized and niche reporting tools throughout Ipsos, but this one is truly a Swiss army knife. Infotools provides advanced cross-tabbing, dashboards, storyboards, alerts and PowerPoint exports at scale. Overall, our intent when it comes to data is to collect anything and connect everything. Infotools helps make that possible. Our core platforms are a collection of common elements. They are the underlying defining technologies implemented across our entire range of products and services. Every core platform we acquire or build can be used to rapidly build new products or enhance existing ones. Take, for instance, Ipsos.digital, our crown jewel. Anything functionally added with a new core system can be exposed to Ipsos.digital due to the integrated nature of our ecosystem. You can think of these core platforms as enabling enterprise-level products with consumer-grade usability. Our goal is to design everything from the get-go to the highly scalable, both technically and operationally. Now from a 10,000-foot view, we're basically building a gigafactory for marketing research. It's a big deal, and we're only just getting started. Thank you for your time.

He joined us originally in 2002 and started to help us set up our digital data collection. He then took a sabbatical, but we enticed him back to set up his new project, which is our Software-as-a-Service offering, Ipsos.digital. And that's what he's going to talk about today. Andrei, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much, Ben. Thank you very much. So Ipsos.digital, the SaaS ecosystem, SaaS, we can think about it as a Software-as-a-service, but we can also see it as a survey -- as a system. And if this would work, basically, what we have looked at is taking the strong Ipsos products that we have, products with 30-plus year experience, where we know how to do concept testing, we know how to do copy testing and streamline those products and make sure that they are totally automatic, totally end-to-end streamlined. And taking each of those products and creating a flow for our clients to be able to go from product to product in their research journey. When we speak about end-to-end offer, we go from the start of the product and making sure that all our systems are fully integrated. For copy testing, for instance, we have 11 systems where we have full integration. All the systems speak to each other totally seamless from the start to the reporting. This has really made the great products with all the expertise that we have, with AI sentiment analysis, with the indexes, with the norms, being able to run, what earlier could take weeks, in hours. And this has really been unique. As we discussed, as we looked before, speed is truly what our clients are looking for. And on-demand support, what our clients are also, one thing is very much to know that they can speak with our experts around the world. If they need an expert, they are one call away from a very competent person that will help them. This is what we have launched for the last couple of years. We have now everything in 48 markets. And what we are starting actually this month is also the localization of the platform. China is the first country where we moved the whole platform into Chinese. Our teams are right now translating the full platform, so everything becomes localized. And our intention is to look at it and do probably 20 languages in the next period of time. And you can see it very much as an app store. You can see it as a journey that the client will take. Their product journey should be on the platform. The client can start with the profiling, with market sizing, then they can go in. They have U&A studies, idea screening, concept testing and copy testing and so on and so on. So step by step, the client will see that they are able to do everything on the platform or most of it on the platform. Last fast facts is the pure ad hoc, where a client will not buy a product but they will build their questionnaire themselves. And of course, all the products that we have built have also an ad hoc component where the client can add questions on top of our product, per se. And I would like to give you a little bit of a flavor. So Ipsos.digital, you go in, you see everything. And the whole idea is that it should be intuitive. Let's play quickly a video. And this is the platform. This is how it looks like. You go in, you define your segment. You define your target group. You are able to put quotas. You're able to work exactly as you want, the flexibility that you want and that you normally have, upload your commercial. In this case, we are doing a copy test. You define your commercial. That will then be benchmarked versus the commercials with the same kind of logic. And everything can be done by the client. So all the products that we have, everything we have in Ipsos.digital is done in such a way that can be done by the client, full DIY, or assisted by the researchers. And then you can build, as you see here, ad hoc questions, if you want to add, everything in a simple way. And on the right side, always we see how many hours will it take? What is the price? When will it be delivered. Then reporting, real-time reporting. Once the last interview is done, you have your reporting. The client can work, our teams can work with the data. Our teams don't need to spend time on building PowerPoints, building things that can be automatized. So we have taken away as much as we can from any manual intervention that is unnecessary, allowing our researchers to make sure that they focus on what is important. And that is the relation with the client. So for the last year, this is the last year's number. We have had 500 clients that have been using the platform, 4,000 users at the client and more than 3,000 people within Ipsos that have collaborated with our clients on the platform. Most of our large clients are users of Ipsos.digital today. And what we also see, which is very interesting, is that most clients are buying multiproducts. They are starting in one product, but then they see the look and feel, the UX is the same, so that it's very easy for them to buy more products on the platform. Profit-wise, we are more than double our normal operating profit. And 85% of the projects are researcher-assisted, which means that our researchers can spend time working together with the clients and focus on that collaboration rather than building PowerPoints. And last but not least, our target for 2025 is to reach 12% of the Ipsos revenue through the platform. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Andrei. I'd like to invite to the stage my good friend, Lorenzo Larini. Lorenzo joined us only 9 months ago. So unlike a lot of us who've been here a very long time, Lorenzo is a new boy. But he has decades of experience in the tech industry, running over GBP 1 billion of revenue, I think, for Gartner before he joined us. So well equipped to lead our North American practice, which, of course, as you've already seen, is a key area for growth. And Lorenzo will now talk about that. Thank you.

Thank you, Ben, and thanks, everybody, for giving me the opportunity to share with you an update about our exciting business in the U.S. Ben mentioned that before already, we live in a world which is increasingly complex and complicated. So I will actually try to keep things simple for you. I will focus on 3 things and 3 things only, the 3 key pillars of our future growth in the U.S. Number one, we have strong momentum today. Why that is important? Success breeds success, and we need to keep that momentum going. We have a vast market upside. Ben talked about that. I'll give you some more details. It's a highly competitive market, but it's incredibly, incredibly fragmented, which represents an opportunity for us, not just organically but also inorganically. Number three, that's the how. It's really important. We have compelling value offerings and propositions for the most demanding and most leading-edge clients in the U.S. And if you combine that with a pragmatic, commercially savvy growth plan, that's a great platform for success. If you can switch the slide as well. So talking about momentum. What happened? As you know already, 2021, we had strong results. But in 2022, right now, we moved from single to double-digit growth. And what is even more interesting is that it's not just about the acceleration of the growth. It's how the growth is delivered. Number one, we talk about Ipsos.digital, twice as profitable of the other offerings. If we are growing double-digit in our business, we are growing triple-digit in Ipsos.digital. This is not just about profitability, it's about scalability and it's about agility, on how we deliver, which our clients love. It's more diversified. Now I don't need to tell you why diversification is important in business. We have been growing double digit in 12 sectors, the most diverse. So the first conclusion is we have a very appealing offering for any industry, industries that are impacted in very different ways by the new economic context. And I'll give a little bit more color about that as well. Our growth is the outcome of client impact. We have been analyzing, and looking at many of them, hundreds, actually thousands of inputs and feedback from clients. And I can tell you that we are not perfect yet, if you're wondering yourself. But the data is clear. We are really good at getting better every single year. You see some of the qualitative feedback we get from clients. I think that is important as well. This is one of our top 3 clients, leading technology players in the U.S. And they say that our partnership is built on 2 things: the quality of our work and the flexible agile way we engage. That gives us an opportunity, the quality of the work we do and the reputation we have built, to work with the vast majority of the most admired companies in the U.S. If you look at the Forbes list, we work with 25 out of 30 of the most admired companies in that list. Why is that important? Think about the work for talent in the U.S. The story is very simple. If you are a young, talented, top performer, you can work with any of those brands or you can work for Ipsos and work with all of them. And they love it. We have a really compelling value proposition, which is the foundation of the success in the U.S. in big tech. I know that area very well as I come from technology. And I can tell you that the first most important thing to do in that space is -- because they have a lot of money, you need to focus on things that really matters to the top. You need to focus on things that are business critical to these companies. One example here. TikTok, we help them to monetize their live streaming platform as a shopping channel for GenZ. That's a top-of-mind priority for a company like that. And I'm not saying that we did well. The client posted that on social, as you can see. It's even better when clients sell for us. We have accelerated growth in -- across the sectors within big tech, 30% growth across tech, social media as well as streaming gaming platforms. And why we're confident we'll continue to be there? Very simple. We are very well uniquely positioned on themes that equally are incredibly important to these companies. Let me give you a couple of examples of that. We have unique capabilities, and we work with many players to attract content creators, influencers, engage them and developers as well. Think about developers for the metaverse, how critical that is. It's very simple. Making the ecosystem for these players attractive to their platform is the difference between success or failure. That's how it is important. The second one, I guess, I don't need to explain too much. If you are a social media company, if you are a big tech company, you have to make sure that you monitor and address reputation -- events that impact your reputation, policies, change our regulatory environment, which can eat your bottom line in a way which is dramatic. And we have a best-in-class platform to do exactly that. Ipsos AI and advanced analytic capabilities are making our reputation and policy legislation intelligent platform leading edge in the market for that. We analyze a variety of data, it's multisearch, survey-based, not survey-based, public data like news, social media data, policy legislation, public government data, I can go on for the next two weeks, 6 million data points analyzed real-time. Our advanced analytics and AI tools feed through this data our automated real-time configurable dashboard that clients can use. So they are always on top of events that impact their reputation, on how policies are changing locally or globally. And that platform also trigger actionable alerts because it's not just about reporting the news, it's about changing the news as well. And these clients need to sense and respond in real-time because this is a world where things happen in real-time. Some of the capabilities that we have that make these powerful solutions and engines are the ones you see on this screen. For example, our Synthesia offering, which is our AI-enabled consumer intelligence platform, has been widely recognized, you can see the example here from Forrester, as a leader in that space. Equally, I think Ben talked about that already, MMA, our marketing measurement offering, again, recognized top Quadrant globally and by Forrester as an offering. We have incredible components in terms of AI and data treatment capabilities that can help us to build really compelling offering for our clients. Now Ben talked extensively about the Total Understanding model. That is a model that positions us in the U.S. in a very unique way. You can see here people, human at the center. But humans, we are different things. We are citizens, we are patients, we are consumers and we are professionals. If there is one thing that we have learned, all of us, during the pandemic, is the fact that these things, these boundaries are blurring. Think about the effect of COVID. Think about the impact obviously, in terms of the health care crisis as patients. Think about the impact on professionals, how we've been working. Think about the impact of what we've been consuming, We have been using some more e-commerce platform, I guess, during that time. And many of has changed their perspective on how to vote. We have scale and presence in each of these segments in the U.S., and we continue to build scale and presence in each of the segments. If you combine that with our unique data and AI capabilities, we are the only ones in the U.S. who can connect the dots and create a truly end-to-end 360 perspective about humans in a way which is actionable. We still have a vast, huge market. Ben mentioned that. You can look at different sources of data, but I can tell you the conclusion is always the same. Our market share is less than 5%, whatever kind of data you look at. But it's an incredibly fragmented market, more than 3,000 players in that space, 3,000. But only less than 10 of them of more than $500 million of business in the U.S. So highly fragmented but in a market where skill matters. So that gives us obviously again, an opportunity for organic but also inorganic growth. Ipsos is #1 in 1 out of 20 and #2 in more than 15 countries -- actually more than 20. In the U.S., we are only #6. We have scaled but we are only #6. We know how to get at the top, particularly when we think about actionable plans, on how we are going to grow and how and when we leverage our global capabilities. Okay, yes. Somebody say -- somebody smarter than me once said that hope is not a strategy. You need to have a plan. It needs to be pragmatic. It needs to be good, well executed. So we have a very pragmatic plan for gaining market share. I'll give you an example. We have identified roughly $200 million of multiyear contracts, large big contracts that are currently assigned to competitors and are getting to an end in 2022. We know who's the decision maker. What are the pain points, when it's expiring, what is the value of the contract. We have the SWOT team, we have a game plan, and we are targeting each of those in a very structured way. And we are not going to play a pricing game because we are recognized as the most innovative company in our space. So we are designing smarter solutions for clients so they can happily migrate to what we offer. You've seen in the table before probably of $20 million opportunity in a tech company expiring in Q4. The ones of you who are more attentive to the data, you probably have noticed that. We are strong in tech, and that opportunity is in particular about helping these clients to make their advertising more effective. We have an offering in that space, creative excellence, which is targeted exactly on that. And I wanted to give you some color about that offering for 2 reasons. Number one, the market in the U.S. for advertising is gigantic. $320 billion expected in terms of spend in U.S. by 2024. Interestingly enough, 50 out of the 100 top spender on advertising in the world, 1/3 based in the U.S. But the other element, which is very important as an ingredient, we have a very differentiated offering. So I'll give you some examples, which are hopefully fact-based and objective. The first one is we have global scale and expertise in more than 40 markets, real people that understand creative excellence in the single markets. That makes a lot of difference, particularly for these global players with a global footprint that we want to work with and we work with today. We have a global benchmark onboard in more than 100 countries. We have data accuracy, which is as twice as what our competitors can offer. And last but not least, we have gold standards, gold standards. One example is we've just made a partnership recently with the Association of the National Advertisers, it's a very powerful association in the U.S., for the gender equality measure. It's a database. It contains data. It's scientific and it can help clients to launch campaigns that represent women in the correct way. So it's a topic which is making good business for us, but it's also making good in the world, representing women in the correct way. Now to conclude, in summary. I promise I would keep it simple. I started with 3 things, I'm going to finish with 3 things and the same things. We have strong momentum. We're already experiencing profitable double-digit organic growth, and that is anchored to real client impact that we measure and we constantly address. Number two, we have a vast market upside. It's clear that it's large. The market is fragmented, and that represents opportunities also for acquisitions, clearly. We have a compelling value proposition. I'll just give you an example, I could give you more. We have a highly differentiated offering and we have a really practical and operational go-to-market plan. Thank you.

Thank you, Lorenzo. And now, Amit. And Amit has come all the way from Mumbai to join us today to talk about one of the largest markets in the world. Amit has been with us for at least 8 years. I think you've doubled the revenue in that time, so no pressure to keep going. And tell us about India, Amit.

Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Ben, for the kind introduction, and good afternoon, everybody. I'm delighted to be here to take you through the India story. My attempt over the next 10 minutes is to give you a sense of what's happening on the ground, how are things evolving? What does it mean for our business? And how do the local changes sort of feed into our likely ambition, which sort of then feed into the overall Ipsos agenda of hitting EUR 3 billion revenue. Now obviously, India has always been talked about as a land of opportunities. No surprises. We are the second largest populous country. In another 20 years' time, it will become the most populous country. But something has happened in the last 2 years, where we have this increased sort of conviction that things will really get into a fast track mode over the next decade or so. I think what has contributed to this change is perhaps the pandemic in a slightly unfortunate way. It was a bit of a wake-up call for the country. A lot of measures have been taken in the last 2 years especially, and that has really put the country on a path of exclusive growth. I mean this year, among the G20 nations, India is supposed to be the fastest-growing economy with a real GDP growth of between 7% to 7.5%. And there's a sort of very ambitious target of hitting a $10 trillion GDP by 2030. Now obviously, this offers tremendous opportunity to our business in India. We have been trending quite well over the last 5 years. And with the changes happening on the ground at a country level, I'm confident that we can sort of keep the same momentum going on in the future. So let me begin with just giving you a sense of what has changed in the last 2 years, especially the pandemic. Now obviously, the pandemic was quite harsh for the entire country in terms of the health impact. We have reported a death count of more than 0.5 million people. There's a lot of livelihood loss. And I think my sense is that this is a wake-up call for the government. And in terms of what actions have been taken, which have very far-reaching impact on our business and our potential, I would just talk about the 3 bullets that you see on the chart. The first bullet is about governance and digitization. The entire country has been put into a very rapid path of digitization over the last 2 years because the pandemic caused a stoppage of the physical work. We had one of the harshest lockdowns twice, in fact, in the last 2 years, which means that the government and the businesses were forced to adopt digitization at a pace which was not seen ever in the past. There was a lot of focus on governance because, obviously, in a pandemic kind of situation, corporates and governments have limited funds. I mean, to Ben's comment about governments can print money. I'm sure the Indian government can't afford to sort of print as much many as some of the Western government. So to that extent, there's a lot of focus on efficiencies and governance so the money actually reaches the right causes and the right kind of people. I've got a couple of examples I want to talk about. There's something called as direct benefits. A country of more than 1.3 billion people with a lot of people sort of living at subsistence level, you need to make sure that the money reaches these people. During the pandemic, a lot of bank accounts have opened and money actually reached people. Now what does it mean? It means that the impact on economic sustenance was sort of mitigated because of these measures. There is an entire new system of integrated payments, where the only thing you need in India now, if you want to sort of go around, is your mobile phone. You don't need a credit card, you do need a debit card, you don't need cash. There's an integrated payment system which is sort of doing more than 2 billion transactions every month. And this opens up a large sort of sector of business, which is the BFSI and fintech kind of sector. We have so many companies who are leveraging on this integrated payment system. Like one example is that the retail stock market participation has gone up 5x in 2 years. And as a result, we are working with a lot of fintech companies because these companies did not exist 3 years ago. And now we're working with these companies because they are just leveraging the integrated payment system. The second part is this renewed focus from the government side to look at localization and self-reliance and especially on manufacturing. India was never a large manufacturing hub. We've always known for services sector. But now there's this push from the government to be known as the next manufacturing hub, whether it is automotive, whether it is health care, whether it is green energy. And a lot of incentive schemes are getting rolled out. And that has the impact for us because we do a lot of work in automotive, and that work is just shooting through the roof. We do a lot of work in health care. And that has a big business impact for us because manufacturing will bring in a lot of investments, and it will bring in a lot of spends that clients would like to sort of make with us. And the third one, which I think it's a bit of a motherhood statement, is this entire transformation linked to technology. The government has talked about India being the data center to the world. And in fact, I'll talk about how Ipsos is leveraging this development in my later part of the presentation. There's a lot of native mobile-only thinking. And over the span of last 2 or 3 years, we've had 100-plus unicorns, the third highest in the world. And we already work with nearly 15 of them at the last count. So what you see is a fairly dynamic market which has opened up and got a bit of a wake-up call in the last 2 years and now it's sort of set out on a very aggressive growth, almost touching 9% or 10% on a CAGR basis. What does it mean for us? The good news is that we have a very clear momentum, which we established even before the pandemic. We were growing in double digits for the last 5 years. We will continue to grow in double digits, but with these developments, our growth rate will further go up. The second part, and this is a constant theme that Ben talked about and Lorenzo talked about. India, like many other markets, we are sort of fragmented market. And to that extent, for Ipsos, there's a vast upside to build up scale even in the future. And I think the most important thing from my perspective is that -- we have assessed the situation, and we have perfect clarity and focus about what we need to do, and I'll talk about some of that in the future. So I talked about the fact that we have been growing at double digit and we'll continue to grow in double digits. But the significant development is that we've doubled the market share from a 5% value 5 years ago to 10% right now. Now what has made a big difference is our focus. We've always pursued 2 or 3 large opportunities at a time and really put our mind and soul and heart behind it and [ won big ]. One example is public affairs, and that's something which Ben touched upon as a priority for Ipsos globally. We did not have a public affairs business 5 years ago in India. We started with 0. We decided to get into it. It made sense. We are the largest democracy in the world. We launched the public affairs, sort of played the right kind of strategies. And within 5 years, we're already the market leader in India. We are already the leading players in automotive and health care sectors in India. And I think Ben touched upon the global strategy of being global, at the same time, being local. That has worked out quite well for us. In fact, our business in India is quite well diversified, with nearly half of the business coming from large global multinational clients and the remaining half coming from local clients, not just the traditional local clients, but even the unicorns and sort of the new age companies. So we are in a strong footing when it comes to India. Let me talk a bit about the market. The total market for market research and analytics in India is valued at around $2.5 billion, which makes India the fourth largest market globally in terms of research and analytics. What is interesting about India, which is not so much true for some of the other large markets, is that a substantial portion of this $2.5 billion opportunity comes from what we call as outbound. So these are companies based in India, but their clients are based in Lorenzo's home market, which is U.S.; or Kelly's home market, which is the U.K. So they don't service Indian clients. Obviously, so we have 2 kinds of opportunities. One is a domestic market. And the second one is, how do you tap into using the India ecosystem to support Ipsos' global ambitions. So we actually are playing with 2 different strategies. I talked about fragmentation earlier. We have more than 150 companies who cater to the domestic market. I'm leaving out the outbound market here. But just like Lorenzo talked about, only 5 companies have revenues worth more than USD 10 million, and Ipsos being one of them. Now again, we sort of heard this earlier that Ipsos is #1 in more than 20 countries and #2 in more than 15 countries. We are #3 in India. But obviously, the ambition is to push ourselves to go to the #1 position in the shortest span of time. I talked about this earlier, but just to recap, we have 2 big strategies we want to focus on. One thing is how do we quickly reach the domestic market leadership position. And second is how can we leverage India ecosystem to support Ipsos' global activity. So let me give a couple of examples of both these strategies, which are already at play. The first one, winning big in domestic markets. I want to talk about 2 examples. Both of them come from a public affairs business. Both these are large contracts that we won only this year. The first one, it's sort of [Foreign Language], which means cleanliness in Hindi. It's a survey which is done by us for the government of India. And the idea is to monitor and report the government's sort of -- it's the government's report card in ensuring cleanliness all across urban India. So this involved putting 3,000 people on the ground who visited 4,700 towns. They met up with 2.6 million people to get citizens perceptions about cleanliness in their cities, on their streets, in their gardens, all of that. What is important is this was not just a survey. But we worked very closely with the government in managing their social media handles by spreading the right kind of messages, in fact, helping them create powerful audiovisual advertisements. So this was not an exercise in surveying, this was an exercise in helping the government on governance. We won this in the first quarter of this year. And the second example I want to talk about is, in fact, something that we won this quarter. And this refers to drinking water quality. And we are working with the government on trying to gauge citizen's perception about their access to clean and healthy drinking water all across 500-odd cities. We will end up visiting 5 million households. In addition to gauging citizen feedback, we'll also collect water samples and get them tested in labs to see if the actual water quality, as sort of demonstrated by the labs, does it tally with citizens perception. The one thing I like about both these contracts, obviously, one thing, if I were my P&L had, these are large contracts and they help us in getting to our end game quite sort of fast. But more importantly, this serve a very critical purpose to help our government, help our society in becoming more sort of conscious socially, to ensure that citizens have clean cities, they have clean drinking water. And it feels really warm and nice and fuzzy to see that Ipsos is contributing to some of these goals. So this is about domestic strategies. How are we helping Ipsos? By using the India talent pool. Just a couple of months ago, we opened our first data services center in India. This is a small beginning. Within a span of 2 months, we already ramped up to 100 FTE. And by end of Q3, we want to ramp it up to 300. But as I said, this is just a small beginning. I'm sure this exercise will get more and more ramped up over the future. So what is the idea? The idea is to use the Indian talent and sort of provide support to Ipsos' production efforts and thing -- there was a mention about production being a focus area, using the best kind of technology as a part of David's presentation. So the idea is to use the India talent pool, equip them with the best tech, have the best-in-class quality processes and be a support function to Ipsos globally, it helps in ensuring standardization quality, and obviously, it adds to the margin. In the earlier presentation, which Lorenzo talked about MAA, and MAA being such a strong sort of focus to develop the analytics capability. So Ipsos, we have a team of 150 analysts based in Bengaluru, who is working with the U.S. team very closely to provide that analytic support. So I think in a nutshell, we have 2 strategies. One thing is to obviously win big locally and grow Ipsos' business in India. And secondly is to keep on supporting Ipsos' global ambition using the Indian talent ecosystem. So this is my last slide. I just want to touch upon the drivers of future growth to grow the domestic business for us. So I think we want to overinvest in some areas. Public affairs being one of them. I talked about how India, being the largest democracy, offers a lot of potential to grow this business. We want to focus a lot on health care. Especially post the pandemic, there's a renewed focus on health care. There's a lot of indigenous health tech activity linked to the start-ups, and I think we see a lot of potential to grow that business. And finally, advisory services. because India is a complex environment. A lot of our clients come to us with not necessarily straightforward research needs, but also business needs. And our advisory teams are fully equipped to support them in their go-to-market strategy. The second bucket is investing aggressively in TMT. I mean Lorenzo touched upon it. In India, this sector is sort of undergoing a rapid change. A lot of development is native development, which is a mobile-only thinking development. So we see a lot of scope to work in this area. 3 or 4 years ago, 9 out of 10 of our top 10 clients came from the consumer side, the CPG side, what Ben talked about. Now it's only 2. And 8 companies are actually sort of non-CPG, and that's where we see TMT growing in focus and emphasis growing ahead in the future. We want to sort of get some stability in the business by equipping the business with some continuous media and consumption measurement. And finally, we want to look at focused acquisitions to build growth. So with these kind of sort of drivers, I'm confident that we'll be able to support our global ambition in achieving rapid growth. Thank you for listening to me. Over to you.

Thank you, Amit. Thank you. I'd now like to -- we're now going to try and connect to Beijing. So -- and Lifeng, hopefully, if the technology allows, he's not allowed out of China without about 3 weeks in quarantine, and we thought that would be a bit much to ask him to spend 3 weeks in quarantine to join us. But we're hoping to be able to beam him in directly from a very sunny Beijing evening, and we'll see if my colleagues can get the technology to work. If they don't, we will move on. Lifeng?

Yes. Ben, can you hear me?

Fantastic. Yes, I can. There you are.

Thank you. Thank you.

Great. Good evening.

Good afternoon, everyone. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Ben. This is Lifeng Liu speaking, greetings from Beijing. I'm sorry, I cannot be in Paris in person and I have to do my presentation online. Because as Ben mentioned, I will be in quarantine and if I travel internationally, and the quarantine could be very long. But I hope you will find my presentation helpful because it's about our growth story and the action plans in China, a healthy competition between China and India. Okay. You probably know we just had 2 months of lockdown in Shanghai and 1 month in Beijing. The good news is now the lockdown has been lifted, and we are very much coming back to normal. The next slide, please. The central government -- can move on to slide. Yes, thank you. The central government is implementing a right range of economic stimulus plan. Therefore, I expect the business and the overall economy will also go back to normal. One signal is the PMI index, which is an important indicator for Chinese economy released by Caixin, which is a famous financial magazine in China. The manufacturing PMI increased to 41 (sic) [ 49.1 ] in May from April's 46, and it beat the market forecast of 48. So actually, it's good news. Next slide, please. I want to share with you, we have had a very strong growth, year-on-year growth in Q1, and it was based on a very record strong performance in Q1 last year. Also, I would like to highlight, despite lockdown, our year-on-year monthly growth in May is back to positive from a negative position in April. And very importantly, we are still aiming to achieve our annual budget in China. Our growth is healthy and diversified. I think Lorenzo also mentioned, the same as United States. I have listed some high growth service lines here, and they are growing at 20% or above. Also from a client perspective, high-growth actually comes from cosmetics and beauty, consumer electronics, platforms and interestingly metaverse clients in China. Next slide. Okay, move. Here, I would like to remind you that China is the third largest market research market, I think Ben also mentioned that, right after U.S. and the U.K. However, the gaps between China and the U.S., also the gap between China and U.K. are still very big. I want to give you some numbers. China market now is about USD 3 billion, which is 30% of U.K. market and only equivalent to 6% of U.S. market in 2021 based on [indiscernible] report. As a market with 1.4 billion population, the market research spending per capita in China, this is a very important number, only $2. So market research spending per capita in China is only $2 compared to $145 in U.S. and $136 in the U.K. So you can see there's a huge potential. You can imagine there is a huge potential in China's research market. When GDP per capital is increasing, and I strongly believe it will increase very rapidly, this potential is becoming more and more materialized. Ipsos, I'm very proud to see that Ipsos, we are #1 market research firm in China with about 6% of market share. At the one hand, we are at a leading position. And on the other hand, we are -- we have a vast upside opportunities for Ipsos in China to grow because you can see the number, the market is still very much fragmented. Next slide. Then the question is how we are going to seize these opportunities. As I mentioned, Chinese GDP is still growing despite of COVID and other challenges you know that we are facing. But I do believe there is one trend, and this trend cannot be reversed. It cannot be reversed, which is, I believe, is consumption premiumization. People in China need and will have better quality of product and services and more personalized brands. So the clients, they will have to spend more money to understand how consumers attitudes, habit and lease are evolving. We are building high-end consumer panel in China. We see a high-end 2C panel to fulfill this increase in needs on accessing and understanding the high-end consumers from the clients. This is a great opportunity. The second opportunity, I think everyone is sitting here and also we hear a lot from Lorenzo and Ben's presentation, we have the feeling that Chinese brands are becoming more and more global. I can tell you with proud Ipsos is the leading player in helping Chinese clients to understand the consumers at a global level. So we are doing the majority of outbound research in China. This part of the business grew by more than 40% in 2021, and we are confident we can keep this momentum. We are further strengthening the outbound research team in China. And Ipsos, we have, as Ben mentioned, a very good global and local coverage, and we are very strong -- we have very strong specialized service lines, which is a very unique composition for Ipsos, which can help us to win more business. The third opportunity, Chinese clients they lack technology and they are keen to digital transformation. As Andrei mentioned, we are offering localized survey, localized community and even localized social listening platforms. And at the same time, we are also developing new capabilities. For example, by building our Data Science Institute in China, which is very much in line with the notion Ben just mentioned, the heart of science and the data. So by doing that, we are building, for example, BI Board to provide multisource data merge and data visualization function, and also we are leveraging deep learning modules to analyze big data to help our clients to explore new product development opportunities and also understand better consumer trends. The fourth opportunity, as the second largest economy in the world, there are many, many new emerging and booming clients. We have seen how Chinese consumer electronics clients growing, TikTok's one of them. The same as smart home appliance clients, many of those kind of Chinese clients. And we will see more platform clients, more new energy vehicle clients, more healthy clients -- health care clients and more medtech clients from China. By implementing the client-first strategy, initiated by Ben and Didier this year, we will continue getting closer to clients and pitch new business to -- from new emerging clients. Ipsos now the top 20 clients, 10 of them, they are Chinese in China. So Ipsos -- why we can do that? Because Ipsos, we differentiate our offer from our competition by specialized services. It works well. I don't want to go to the detail, but I can tell you it works very well in China. We will continue to enhance our services lines and our service line teams in China. The fifth one, B2B opportunities. Many big clients, especially platform clients and technology clients. In the past 2 decades, we were focusing on 2C business. But nowadays, we spent a lot of resources, tons of money, investment, in developing 2B business. Ipsos, we have a strong advisory team in China and we are enlarging them. We are also building, very importantly, B2B expert panel or professional panel in China. We can see this part of business is growing and it will grow even faster. Let me quickly recap. We are going to take solid actions to seize these 5 opportunities. They are consumption premiumization. Chinese people are getting richer. Chinese clients going global. Now there are many more and more Chinese emerging clients and we can have great opportunity with tech-driven related services and B2B business, which is a unique strength Ipsos China we have as well as advisory services. So on behalf of 1,500 Ipsos people in the [indiscernible], actually is now 11:00 p.m. in China, I'm going to say we are confident to acquire even higher market share in China and continue achieving sustainable and profitable growth in China in the following years. I think this is the end of my session, and thanks a lot for your attention. With that, please allow me to hand over the mic to Ben in Paris. Thank you and enjoy the rest of our presentations. Thank you.

Thank you, Lifeng. And I think you've just seen from those 3 very different markets is a very strong demonstration of the strength of local leadership that we have. I could have chosen many other countries to show you, we chose 3 of the largest and some of them -- some of the biggest populations. But I think it gives me great confidence when I look at -- when we -- when I look and hear from our leaders on the ground delivering day in, day out for our clients. The final 2 presentations now are about our focus on some particular sectors as part of our growth plan over the next 4 years. And it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you Michael Spedding. Michael, like me, joined Ipsos through an acquisition. Originally an accountant, but now an absolute health care person. And Michael leads our health care service line globally. Clearly, health care is one of the areas with huge opportunity, Michael?

Well, good afternoon, everybody. It's an absolute pleasure to present the health care service line to you. And in this presentation, I want to cover 2 points. Firstly, to make sure that you really understand how exciting it is to be working in the health care sector at this point in time. And secondly, why it is such a great opportunity for Ipsos' future growth. So just to start off with some context. In the health care service line, we focus on pharma prescription, biotech; medical devices and diagnostics; and digital and connected health. Just to be clear, pharma OTC is covered by other Ipsos service lines, where the consumer expertise is better placed. So I think all of you know that when you look at these markets, which we focus on, they've shown resilience and they've shown growth over the last few years. But what's more important is when you look at the future forecast growth for each of these segments. Pharma Rx and biotech forecasted to grow 6%, medical devices and diagnostics the same, digital and connected health at 17% per annum. Really significant growth. So let's look at what's causing this growth. Now there are a number of growth drivers. We have aging populations, which Ben talked about earlier. But there's greater access for populations around the world to health care as governments recognize how important health care is for those citizens. But what's really exciting in health care is the incredible advances in science and technology. It's accelerated drug discovery and development. And I think when we look forward in 10 years' time, we will not recognize the health care system or the treatments available. But it's not just about the growth which makes us excited about the sector, it's about the transformations going on. What we're seeing is a market which is changing very rapidly. Now a number of these changes were already happening pre-pandemic. But during the pandemic, they accelerated. And just to pick out a few. Firstly, there's a growing need for our clients to prove the health care economic value of their products, which is increasing the demand for real-world evidence. During the pandemic, we lived in a low-touch society, and that transformed the customer engagement strategies or channels. And finally, we have the incredibly rapid rise of digital health, whether that's telemedicine, the use of wearables, diagnostics or digital therapeutics. So what we see is a growth market which is getting more and more complex for our clients. And the absolute beauty of that is that this is increasing the demand for our services. So when we look at our services, what do we do? Fundamentally, we help our clients through their commercialization process along the product life cycle. So we work with our clients at prelaunch and they answer questions, such as where should we invest. We work at launch. How can we maximize our access, our value and our launch plan. And when the products in the market, are our strategies and tactics working. And the way we do this is by delivering a multidisciplinary offer, which is a combination of our services, our knowledge and expertise and importantly, the access to Ipsos assets. So if we look at our services, we have our customer insights, which are primary market research led; our syndicated solutions, which are real-world evidence and primary market research. And those 2 segments actually form our core offer. We then have our added value services, market access and HEOR, healthcare advisory and our real-world evidence non-interventional studies. Now non-interventional studies are actually clinical studies which are highly regulated. But here, we're able to utilize our market research skills and our global infrastructure. But to complement our services, we have our therapeutic expertise. We have deep expertise in key therapy areas, such as oncology, vaccines and virology, autoimmune, rare diseases. We also have our deep health care knowledge around the markets which we're focusing on. We have our health care data science and advanced analytics teams. And we have a global network, which enables us to deliver in a globally consistent manner but also have that local knowledge. So looking at our competitive advantage, it's fundamentally about our global connectivity and our agility which enables us to integrate insights to our clients' business problems and questions and be their trusted advisers. And we do this through a combination of our knowledge and expertise our market-leading primary market research capabilities and added value services, our syndicated real-world evidence, and then our ability through our multisource data approach utilizing data science to actually combine primary market research and other data sources. And this is all strengthened by our access to wider Ipsos assets, our client centricity and focus, which results in strong client relationships and high satisfaction, and our global network with local knowledge. So what's our strategy for growth? There are 2 parts. The first part is continued expansion of our core offer. This is where we want to continue to enrich our insights through multi-source data strategy, utilizing our PMR, our primary market research skills together with other data sources. We want to continue to create new and innovative solutions. The market is changing, we've got to innovate with it. Examples of that are working with Ipsos.Digital to provide new solutions for rapid research within our market. Also, expanding the syndicated portfolio rapidly either into new disease states or working with other service lines to create specific offers. And then the expanding of our network because it strengthen our capabilities in our key markets or key health care markets and continue to extend the network. Then we got the accelerated expansion of our added value services. And the 3 areas we're focusing on is market access, health care advisory and also real-world evidence non-interventional studies. And the reason we do that is that these added value services are highly complementary to our core offer, they enable us to address new client budgets with existing clients. And also, they tend to be higher margin. Now both these strategies are really underpinned by the investment in a multisource -- multidisciplinary talent pool. So that's health care, data sciences, it's therapeutic expertise and it's added value specialists. So if I can move on. Just to conclude, health care sector is a really exciting market to be operating in. And I believe it offers a significant opportunity with all the capabilities we have in Ipsos to really grow and accelerate our growth. So thank you.

And now, I'd like to welcome to the stage Kelly Beaver, MBE. Kelly joined us, I think, in 2008 from PwC, where we poached her team to help us develop an evaluation business, and she then very successfully led our government business in the U.K. before becoming the CEO of the U.K. and Ireland business last year. Kelly?

Thank you, Ben. And it's really great to be with you. I think I'm your last presentation of the afternoon. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what Ben spoke about earlier, which is the consistent and resilient demand of government clients for our Ipsos Services. And you have already heard a little bit about some of the new challenges that our governments are facing around sustainability, climate change, but they also face all challenges and new contexts, like inflation, which is a big challenge around cost of living in many markets globally today. At Ipsos, we already have the market-leading public affairs business globally. We operate across 43 markets, and we have a long heritage in public affairs in the U.K., where I'm from, but also Canada, France, U.S., Poland, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, I could go on, Serbia and Croatia. But public affairs is not just a local business, it's a global business. And many of our clients are also international organizations like the World Bank, the United Nations, and of course, the European Commission. Our teams are multidisciplinary. With research at our heart, we also have statisticians, economists, policy specialists, and we cover in-depth each policy area that our clients need research, insights and advice within. And that is really important when you're providing insights to government. In many of our mature markets, we have institutional partnerships with academics but also with think tanks. They help us amplify the impact of our output, and they're really important. In London, for example, we have partnerships in place with Kings College London, and that's a fantastic partnership for our profile. And whilst we are the market leader in many of these markets, that does not stop us growing. In the U.K., we are most definitely the market leader. We still grew 56% in the last 10 years, and we still continue to grow rapidly. There are other benefits outside of revenue from having a strong public affairs business. Ben touched on one of these key benefits earlier, which is the profile that the public affairs business delivers to Ipsos. Political polling, yes, small part of our revenue profile, a big part of our brand reputation and our impact. But our citizen strand through Public Affairs also deliver a range of impact, impact for livelihoods around how citizens think, feel, behave. And those are newsworthy outputs that help us amplify our media profile and our brand reputation. And that brand reputation is absolutely critical because it gives us a license to sell with our clients, but it also gives us a license to bring in, to attract and retain the best talent in the industry, and also, of course, respondents which we rely on, and they need to know who we are and that helps us to attract and retain them. Other benefits, which we have seen upscale in the last few years are what public affairs can deliver around resilience to market shocks. Ultimately, when the chips are dying, the last man standing is often the government. And through the COVID pandemic, we saw people in their masses turn to government for support, financial support, but guidance also. And having a strong public affairs business that can support governments with those endeavors is absolutely critical to the resilience of our business. Through the COVID pandemic, of course, we delivered surveillance activities for government, which involved us testing the population at home at scale for antibodies and also COVID, and that's work that our entire teams are also very proud. Government face new challenges, refugee crisis, inflation, to name a few, and we see the demand rising for our services as a result. And of course, public affairs on our citizens strand, as you've heard from Lorenzo, as you heard from Amit, as you heard from Ben, is a really important cornerstone of our ability to deliver a total understanding. Whilst our competitors are becoming more niche, we continue to be able to offer understanding of full human, who we are as citizens, consumers, employees, professionals, et cetera, as Lorenzo spoke to. And in the U.K., this has been a really important part of our build strategy over the last few years. For example, pharmaceutical companies coming to us and asking how planetary health will impact on public health in the future and what does that mean for the services that they need to offer. We can bring our understanding of citizens and we did, together with our understanding of the health care industry with Michael's team in order to deliver true understanding of future scenarios so that they can think through their product offerings. Similarly, large banking client came to us and asked what kind of financial portfolio offer should they have for immigrant populations in the U.K. We brought our understanding of the immigrant population through our citizen offer together with our consumer offer around financial services to help them navigate their product offering. And public affairs also, that research is grinded in some of the most robust and rigorous social research techniques. That's where huge bodies of our statisticians and methodological rigor lives within the business. And that has a massive halo effect across everything else that we do. And as Lorenzo touched on earlier, this nets us between citizens and consumers that we occupy is becoming increasingly distinctive in our marketplace in the U.K. and globally. Now I'm delighted to be able to talk to you a bit more about knowledge panel. Laurence spoke about it earlier and mentioned that this is a new product that we are developing across Ipsos. It actually came from the U.S. the acquisition of GfK in the U.S., where we acquired a panel called Knowledge Panel, which has 60,000 panels [indiscernible]. But this is not just any panel, it's a unique and distinctive asset. Because of the way we recruit people to this panel, we recruit it in a randomized way, which is unique in its market and different from how other panels are built. And it's the way also that we attract people who are off-line. Whilst this is an online panel, we have people who are offline, and this still matters because a small but important proportion of the population in many countries remains offline. We bring them online by giving them technology, which allows them to come online for the discrete purpose of responding to our questions, so it does not change their digital behavior and allows us to provide to our clients, not just in the public sector but across a wider sector. And understanding with precision, population level estimates, and what population as a whole in the country, think, feel, do, but also discrete populations within that. So if you wanted to understand the immigrant population or you wanted to understand population in a specific geography, we will get a precision estimate. This is a quote from one of the clients that we have worked with in the U.K. So we took the panel from the U.S., and we replicated that methodology in the U.K. in 2021. And this panel has been incredibly successful within just 1 year of operation. The public sector clients, but again, not just public sector clients interested in the precision of estimates that we can give on the population. Often, if you want to know upscale, you need a census. If you don't have a census, you have to do a random probability face-to-face survey, and they're expensive. Now we have a random probability on line 2, which allows us to deliver those precision estimates in a cost-effective way. And this was one of the growing endorsements from an academic panel who looked across a range of survey techniques, and they say that the Ipsos Knowledge Panel was the closest to the health surveys on a key estimate of gambling harm. This is a list of some of the clients that we already have in the U.K. And you can see, yes, public sector, but also broadcasting organizations like the BBC; health care clients like Surgo Ventures; and also clients in the financial services industry because they need proper estimates of the population. And now as I stand here today, teams at Ipsos or expanding Knowledge Panel across 27 markets in Europe. So these are the EU 27, and this will be established throughout the course of this year. And why is this important, because we've seen already within the markets that Knowledge Panel exists that it fuels revenue growth in those markets for a range of clients who need these precise and gold standard estimates. But it also helps us to elevate our profile, because it is a platform from which we can generate content for media consumption. And whilst it's important for those markets, it's also important for our international clients because they're a methodology for Knowledge Panel, that is the same in all of these markets allows cross-country comparisons to be made in a robust way at scale, and there is demand for that amongst public sector, among foundations and amongst technology and financial services clients, to name just a few. And lastly, the other big building block as we seek to build our public affairs globally, Knowledge Panel gives us a unique tool and asset in many of the markets where it will be created over the next year to build a public sector practice off the back, and that is absolutely critical and unique. So PA growth opportunities. PA is growing. PA will continue to grow because we have a huge amount of headroom, not just in some of the core markets that you heard about today, such as the U.S., across the EU individually within those countries, but across the EU as a collective. Major markets like India, where we've stepped up and are now the market leader. As Amit spoke about, we still have headroom for growth, as we do in Africa. And we have opportunities to deepen in our core markets like public affairs in France, where we have seen that despite being the leader, we can still grow substantively. And of course, we have our international client base, too, where there's a significant headroom opportunity. One of the reasons why we've been able to continue to grow in our mature markets and things that we will be doing globally now are expanding the services and products that we offer within the Public Affairs service line. Knowledge Panel is an absolutely critical one of those. But beyond that, governments require more than insights and data. From us, they require advisory and evaluation services. They want to know whether the policies and the services that they're delivering our value for money and how can they improve the value for taxpayers money. They want to know how effectively their policies are reaching their achieved objectives. And those are the kind of questions that we at Ipsos can answer for them. The third key product is data integration products. So these are things like the product Lorenzo showed earlier, Political Atlas, which allows us to use data that exists already from census and other administrative sources layered with attitudinal data that we can collect through our surveys and real-time passive measurement data as well. So the clients, government, local government, national governments, can, on the touch of a button and looking at their screens, they can see at a geographical base what's happening, what citizens care about, what they're worried about and how they can act. And then lastly, behavioral research. We saw this amplified and the need for it during the pandemic. But now with other issues, the government face like net zero and sustainability and climate change, behavioral research is becoming an increasingly important pillar in our offer. All of our growth will be supported by a combination of organic investment, partnerships and also acquisition in some of the key markets that I've mentioned. So just in summary, Public Affairs is a growth market in its own right, but also as a cornerstone for total understanding and the growth of Ipsos globally. It represents a significant growth opportunity. Thank you.

Thank you so much for all those presentations. I hope, like me, when you see that, you can feel confident about the future of the company. So we are going to stay at the heart science and data. We have very strong foundations. I think you've seen those today. You've those in our financial track record, which we can now build on. We are in a strong place. We have a strong new management team. You've met some of them today. We will announce more of them in the next few weeks. So we're in a good place in terms of management and leadership. We have a very clear strategy in terms of the sectors, the services and the geographies that we're going to invest in and that we're going to focus on over the next years. And underpinning all of that, I think, and I hopefully demonstrated today, is a clear technology strategy that is driving our efficiency, our productivity and profitability, and of course, our revenue. And all of those things together make me very confident about the future. But more than anything, I think what's also important is our culture. And the culture of Ipsos underpins all of those things in terms of making us adaptable in an uncertain world and resilient. And with that, I would like to say thank you to everybody involved in producing today. It took a lot of work to pull together. So thank you. Thank you all for people who have come in person and for the many people listening online. And we now have time for some questions, which there may be some. So thank you again.

Conor O'Shea, Kepler Cheuvreux. Two questions, please. First question on Ipsos.Digital platform. I think you mentioned 500 clients using that. Can you give us an indication of how many -- what proportion roughly of those are new to Ipsos? That's the first question. Second question, can we have a sense of what proportion of client base is, say, digital disruptor companies, particularly the smaller ones, home delivery companies, this kind of thing where we've seen some massive valuation correction this year? And then thirdly, a question on the margins. You're not going for much margin uplift by 2025 despite good revenue growth. Is there anything specific in that sort of investment in talent? Or is it just caution at this stage with -- in a salary inflation environment and so on?

Of the 500 clients on there, I would probably guess that 10% to 20%, to be honest, but it's a guess, so if you want to, we can go and verify. 20% would be brand-new clients. So that's that. In terms of our exposure to new digital delivery companies who might have their valuations destroyed in terms of market reductions, it's relatively small, to be honest. I mean we are -- our main technology clients are the major household names that you'll hear about. So we're not highly dependent on one of the food delivery companies or something like that where, as you saw the chart in the financial times today like me, I expect. In terms of our promises on OP, we are being cautious. There are -- we have a lot of positive elements in terms of our profile, what we're doing, how our revenue is made up. But at the same time, of course, as you say, there is an inflation issue, and we do want to do CapEx and we want to return and we do want to return some money. So that's where that's coming from. And I think what I have been taught by my fellow new CEOs in this sort of position is better to underpromise and overdeliver, rather than the other way around.

Just to add on your great question on the evolution of the technology space, particularly in the U.S., we see that a lot. I think it's more the positive effect for us because a lot of the small competitors, I mentioned the 3,000 before, a lot of them are getting in trouble. They're very small. They're not very profitable. And as Elon Musk said, there has been a lot of money going to the foods, and this is going backwards now.

Emmanuel Matot from ODDO. First, what is driving up your organic sales growth ambitions for -- from 3%, 4% previously to 5%, 7% now for your new road map? Second, what does Ipsos need to move to the next step in terms of EBIT margin? I'm always thinking about this long-term 15% target. What do you think about it? Third question about your M&A strategy. Is that right, you do exclude sizable acquisition? Are you still interested by opportunistic acquisitions?

So I was talking the other day to the company [indiscernible] that revenue is 500 million. So we are not excluding them, but we haven't factored them into our growth strategy. So it might happen. But as we don't want to -- we're not going to promise that. But that will happen. So going back, I think the underlying -- the increase in the sales growth, I think, simply is that the operating model is clearly working now. We can see that in the examples that you've seen around the world. You've seen our growth in the first quarter. And so I think that makes us feel confident that even with headwinds, we can see upside. And again, when you look at the space that we have available to us in some of these major markets that we've just discussed today, that -- I think all of those things together and the way in which when you start to break our performance down at a territorial level, obviously, as we do and we look at it on a very regular basis. That is what is underpinning our confidence about our ability to deliver that. We haven't talked today about LatAm. It's again, it's another other region of the world, we've got great double-digit growth there. So looking across the world, everything is firing on all cylinders, and that makes us, I think, confident. Secondly, the fact that some of our some of the areas we're focusing on, actually, we are now -- other market -- Kantar, for example, the sale of its health care business, the sale of its public sector business. Actually, in some ways, we think -- well, we disagree and we think those are areas to grow, we think there's opportunity. And again, we hope that we've demonstrated that today. So all of those things together underpin our belief that we can grow at a faster pace than we were pre-pandemic and during the pandemic. And on the EBITDA, as I said, it is the longer-term ambition. We need to be cautious, but we are continually improving cycle times with the investments that we're making in technology. The increased CapEx is designed to help do that as well. So again, we're promising a minimum of 13%. We didn't say we wouldn't do more, but we set a minimum of 13% at the end of this period. And as well as that, in terms of the profile of our work, we have an increase -- we have a number of plans that we haven't talked about today, but we may talk about at another meeting, in terms of how we grow our analytics, data science and advisory businesses. We have a very clear set of investments and organic growth opportunities there that we're working on. All of those have the effect of growing margin along with the underlying thing, which as a long-term investor in Ipsos, of course, you'll be very aware of. The switch from off-line data collection globally is still a major factor in India and places like that. But the gradual switch from offline to online also has an underlying effect on our operating profit. So all of those things make us confident. Against that, we need some contingency. So that's why we've promised a minimum of 13% and not 15% at this stage. Any more for any more?

I do have a couple of questions. First one or first 2 ones on your new services. You are at some point during the presentation a target of 12% revenues on your SaaS offering. What are the other revenues on Ipsos new services, are they composed of advisory revenues?

No, that -- so the new services that we talk about growing to over 30% over the next 4 years, so they include not just Ipsos.Digital and Software-as-a Service, but also, yes, as you identify our advisory business, but also our growing social listening business, Synthesio, and the SIA, which are very important, increasingly for clients trying to get early signals of change. And a series of products like and services like MMA, which is highly profitable. Growing very, very rapidly. Involves dozen hundreds and hundreds of different data sources to address client problems in the area of market mix modeling. So there's a combination of those, plus a number of your investment in analytics in the United States. And of course, the United States is often a leader in these things. But again, our network allows us to take some of that and again, export it around the world. So it's that combination of all of those that make up our new services growing above 30%.

And another question as well on this part of the presentation regarding Ipsos.Digital. Very simplistic one because I don't have a lot of knowledge on GDPR. But how much can you leverage from your database, i.e., in these projects, whether they are in DIY or in a research-assisted mode, who owns the data? And can you leverage on it?

So Andrei, do you want to...

There is need for reference of the ownership [indiscernible] potentially the same as in the normal business.

So we've collected the data, the fact that it was done on Ipsos.Digital would be the same as any of our other platforms. Yes. Laurence, do you want to comment?

Yes, I will answer to that. In fact, with all our clients, and we are working and Sheryl Goodman here, is our General Counsel. She's American, but she spent part of her time in Paris. So you think it's part of the Ipsos global culture as well. We have and she has developed over the years. Sheryl has been working for the last 20 years at Ipsos, and she is the queen in this industry of market research. She is the most well-known person and reputated for clients' contract. Now it's true. And we have a template that we are using. It's the same for all our clients. So there is no difference whether they are using Public Affair services, Ipsos.Digital. That's the same. If they want to work with Ipsos, we have certain rules. No exclusivity, for example, confidentiality, how they can use our name publicly. We control the way our clients are using our names, if they want to release the results. That's very important to us. And of course, the report belong to the clients, but the individual disaggregated answers from respondents belong to us. And all the products, of course, IP, et cetera, it's our ownership as well.

No, you're right. The full methodologies that we protect is a very important part of our contracts.

And the respondents are our respondents, yes.

And well, the last one and I'll give back the mic. You gave some figures in terms of recruitment for data scientists. Could we have a sense on salaries and salary inflation?

I think -- I mean, I think the point with data, it is a challenge for anybody trying to hire data scientists will have experienced this and coders, et cetera. And what we -- so we faced the same headwinds a lot of people face. What we can do is give people a great environment to work in. We're also growing -- with some success, growing people organically so that we're not just trying to compete with somebody with 5 or 10 years' experience. We are home growing some of our own. So I don't have any doubt about that. I mean if you look at India, where we've already managed to hire, we're on target for 300 people to work in our data center. And increasingly, as we -- in markets where there's more competition like the United States, what we're doing -- and the MMA business is a very good example of this, they work very closely with 150 Indian colleagues in Bangalore as an integrated part of what they do. So yes, of course, there are challenges in hiring data scientists, but we believe that we are able to address those both through a combination of good training, being the right sort of culture and the right sort of place to attract these people, interesting -- were interesting and important work. And second using cheaper centers like India and Malaysia as part of our strategy there, where there's a very large educated workforce that we can also take advantage of.

Just a follow-up question on data and the cost of generating data and accessing it through partnerships and so on. Would you say that that's increasing or not? I mean, obviously, you're moving shifting steadily to online collection that would decrease everybody...

The unit costs of data collection is going down because we're -- I mean we're -- now we've got real-time data from tens of thousands of households in some countries. The quantity is phenomenal. So on an absolute per unit basis, it's going down. But of course, we are handling ever larger volumes. And so yes, we need data partnerships. We've actually just negotiated down the cost of one of our major data partnerships. But yes, it's -- again, it's part of the mix. It's something that we factored in. It's not something that is going to threaten our profitability, let's put it that way.

And the second question on the panels. I understand that you could generally pay people to get on to panels, not always, that identity duplication is a problem.

Okay. So there's we've got, again, there's a sort of a cold war of the deterrence on that, and we're continually upgrading the checks that we make in terms of checking for the validity of respondents that they are who they say they are, they live where they say they do. All of those things are happening. So we're -- again, it's an ongoing challenge, but it's one that we're happy to address. And in fact, we are confident that what we're doing is superior to many of the products that are available in the marketplace.

Just to make it clear for you, Conor. When it comes to survey data, it's still fully owned by Ipsos, we don't buy from anybody else. So -- and what Ben was mentioning was something else. It was in social media lessening. But survey, we do everything. We don't buy. Or if we do it, it's just from time to time because it makes sense. But it's part of our strategy to be fully integrated and fully -- so the technology, the panels, everything.

End-to-end integration and with us owning the whole process, and that's really important. We're not dependent on third-party vendors for our core activities at all.

A follow-up to the follow-up on data. Could you speak a little bit about cybersecurity and how you protect individuals whose responses you collect?

Okay. I'm not -- I'm not going to pretend that I'm a cybersecurity expert, although actually, we're one of the leading providers of data about cybersecurity to many governments, including in the U.K. I mean our general philosophy has always been to remove the personal identifiers respondent record as soon as possible after collection, so that people cannot be identified even by people inside the company. And we've handled millions and millions and millions of people's data for decades without there being a problem. We continually upgrade our defenses and it's something that we're very acutely aware of. But the reason the world's largest companies place their trust in us is because we have world-class setup in terms of our cybersecurity. We even have, in some jurisdictions, clean room access to government data directly, which, again, is a sign that people are willing to trust us with their governments willing to trust us with their data. Any more in the room, okay.

Just one last one. I'm going to be very, very -- it's a very open question and a follow-up to the current environment and how you're behaving there. If we were to be hypothetical and if we enter into a stagflationary environment, could you give us some color or some granularity in terms of how much of your activities or revenues are protected in terms of defensiveness of your sector verticals, contract terms, cancellations, renegotiations in [indiscernible]

Well, I mean, I think we're off -- remember, a lot of our work is only 3 months in duration. And so we're [indiscernible] in Turkey. And in fact, the learnings from operating in those markets have actually been quite useful as more of the world starts to experience something it hasn't seen for a very long time. So we are able to change our pricing quite quickly. We don't have that many long-term multiyear contracts. And we've done -- one of the first things we did in the last year when inflation started to rear its head was to do an immediate review of all of our contracts and to build in more protection where we could against inflation. So we're not -- I don't think we're not too worried about inflation, although we're certainly sensitive to it and where it's something that we're continually paying attention to. And on stagflation, again, recession and inflation combined, I think the footprint across the world -- because inflation in China is only 2%. The footprint across the world and the diversity of what we're doing, the fact that government makes up a very significant part of our work, means that we have some protection against somebody who is solely focused on just what consumers did or something like that. And that's what, again, gives me more confidence about our ability to get through, to flex and adapt, control our cost base if we need to. Any more for any more? Do we have any online? Okay. Thank you very much for your attention, everybody. We're happy to talk individually afterwards, and I look forward to meeting more of you in person, Laurence? Thank you. And drinks and food are available.