Ipsos SA (IPS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to the Ipsos 2023 Half Year Results. My name is Caroline, and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note, this call is being recorded and for the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen-only. [Operator Instructions]. I will now hand over the call to your host, Ben Page, CEO; and Dan Levy, the CFO, to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Depending on where you are in the world. Dan and I will now take you through our 2023, 6 months results. The slides are on the website of Ipsos on the Investor page if you want to click along with them as we discuss it. Just a few opening words before Dan takes you through the detailed financials. And the main point is that in looking at 2023, as we said earlier this year, the key -- the fundamental thing to remember is that the comparison with 2022 is very, very different. So 2022 was a year that started very, very strongly. I think by H1, we had 12% growth and then decelerated during the year to end at 5.6%. This year, we start much lower, so the profile is completely different but then expect to see and indeed are seeing acceleration in revenue as the year progresses. And that's why we have kept our guidance at around 5% growth for the year despite the slower start. Dan, do you want to please take people through the numbers.

Thank you very much, Ben. Good morning, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. So I'm on Slide 3, the one which is called Q2 revenue growth in positive territory. So starting here, we delivered EUR 1.087 billion in revenue for the half year results, down 3.1% on last year. This includes a minus 1.1% organic growth, a significant currency effect, minus 1.8% and which is basically linked to the appreciation of the euro against emerging currencies and against the pound sterling and a small scope effect. As you can see on the slide, if you're following on the slide, we have had a rebound in growth in Q2. It used to be minus 2.1% in Q1, and now we posted an organic growth of 0.5% in Q2. And the first year -- the first half of the year, so it has been impacted by basically 3 factors. The first one is the excellent performance that we achieved in the beginning of 2022 and particularly in Q1, where we had very strong organic growth and this led to an unfavorable base effect for this first half. The second impact is the end of the major COVID contract which had an impact mainly on the first quarter. If you strip out the effect of this major COVID contract, as you can see on the slide, the organic growth for H1 would be 1.1%. And the last impact is the decline in our business with major tech clients, particularly in the U.S., which, as you know, are under [ restructuration ]. And our business with the big tech clients went down by 18% in the first half compared to the same period last year. Ben will come back later on the outlook for these s big tech clients. Now moving to the next slide on the breakdown of the revenue by region. The first interesting and striking fact is that there is a big difference between our performance on emerging countries and developed countries. Emerging countries are growing by 9% whereas developed countries, mainly for the reason that I've just mentioned are down by 5%. Into more details, EMEA is down by 1%. But if you strip out the effect of the COVID contract the growth is up by 4% organically, and it's even better in Q2 with 6% organic growth in Q2 without COVID. We have negative growth in Americas globally, minus 2%. And again, this reflects very contracting realities with very good momentum in Latin America, which is growing by 8% and a decline in revenue of around 4% in North America, mainly driven by the drop in demand by the big tech clients, but also to a lesser extent, by some delays in our public affairs business in the U.S. linked to the debate that took place in the second quarter on the U.S. government [ dieseling ] between Democrats and Republicans. And finally, the Asia Pacific region perceived an organic growth of 3%, with a clear upturn in the second quarter, which was up by 7%. So strong acceleration in Asia in the second quarter driven a very good momentum in India, more than 20% growth, and in many countries of Southeast Asia. As expected, we have seen a rebound in China after the end of the zero-COVID policy. With a rebound in second quarter by 6.5%. But as you know, there are questions about the strength of the Chinese recovery looking going forward for H2. In terms of breakdown by audience, our consumer business, so that's the next slide, consumer business rebound in the second quarter to 5%, and we posted an organic growth of 3% in the first half. I think it's just clearly the need for our clients and particularly the CPG clients to keep on understanding consumer behavior in a very complex world with a lot of crisis actually. Our business with clients and employees is overall stable at plus 0.5%. We have very good growth in our service lines dealing with customer experience and channel performance evaluation. But actually, this segment of audience was penalized by the decline in the big tech client demand. And the work on the citizens, as expected, is down by 12.5%, reflecting the end of the COVID contract. Again, the underlying revenue, excluding the COVID contract shows that the public sector is growing organically by 3.5%. And again, Ben is going to come back in a few minutes on the strength of our order book on public assets. And lastly, our business with doctors and patients have stabilized in Q2. Overall, on the whole half year, it's down by 3%. Business has indeed suffered from delays in decision-making by certain pharmaceutical industry customers. That said, the momentum is good and the order book since the beginning of January, is organically up by 9% so that we should see a rebound in revenue in the second half of the year. So this is basically where we are on revenue. And now I'm going to the next slide, which is -- because it's important to actually to explain that because we are in an acceleration period, the first half results will not be half of the full year results. And we need to take into account a better indicator to have a look at the forward-looking picture, which is the order book. And as you can see on this slide, the order book is up organically by 2.6% at the end of H1, and it is accelerating over the course of the first half. Q1 was 1.6% and as you can see, Q2 is up by 5.3%. So clear acceleration. And if you strip out the effect of the COVID contract, the Q2 order book is up by 6.2%, which is, if you like, the underlying the right indicator to measure the underlying performance of the group. I'm going to next slide to show the contributions to order book growth. As you can see on this chart, we have a very good dynamic on the public sector with a double-digit growth in order book and the contribution to the growth of order book globally is 1.2%. Good resilience in our CPG clients as well with a contribution of plus 1.2% to the whole order book growth. And very good performance in other sectors, which are not as important as the share of our revenue, but which are delivering a very good performance as well, like the financial services and the travel and transportation after the opening of the economy. As you can see, a big tech sector is weighting on the order book growth with a negative contribution of 1.4% and the end of the COVID contract is weighting as well negatively by 1.5%. So we are, therefore, seeing a lag between the order book and the revenue. And it might be actually useful to reexplain what is the definition of our order book, so that everybody is clear on that. So order book is the sales, which will bring about revenue during the year. So it's confirmed orders, which will bring revenue during the course of the year. And I just remind you that we recognize revenue in a linear way. With a linear recognition between the beginning of the project and the end of the project so that at the end of the year, the order book is equal to the revenue. So what are the reasons why we have a lag between order book and revenue. There are mainly 3 reasons for that. The first one, obviously, is the end of the COVID contract. The second one is quite obvious is the fact that we are accelerating. And when you are in an accelerating period, obviously, revenue tend to lag behind the order book and the sales. And the third reason is what we call a mixed effect because we have been experiencing good performance on service lines, which tend to have longer maturities than the average of the group and particularly tracking and public affairs. And as a consequence, we are left in a situation where our order book is up by 2.6%. Our revenue is down by 1.1% and the lag between the 2 is the 3.7% that you see at the bottom side of the slide which is revenue lagging with the high order book in Q1 and revenue that we will see coming in H2 mechanically because again, all the order book we have in H1 is going to translate into revenue in H2. So next slide. The acceleration in order book confirm what we have said many times since the beginning of the year which is that the shape of 2023, as Ben said in introduction is going to be quite different from the shape of 2022. 2022, we had a very strong start in revenue with very high organic growth 20 -- and then lower growth in 2023 is going the exact contrary with lower growth and lower profitability in the first half and a strong improvement in the second half. And so we are fundamentally returning to a more usual annual pattern with an H2 significantly stronger than H1, both in terms of revenue and profitability. And this is what you can see on this table. So we have shown on this table, the share of different metrics, the share at the end of June as the share of total -- the total of the year, as you can see on the first slide, the order book at the end of June represents 72% of the order book at the end of the year. And we are actually doing in 2023, when we look at our guidance, we are at 73%. So we are in line with our guidance in terms of revenue. The same thing on turnover. Turnover historically has represented at the end of June, 45% of our revenue for the full year, and we are in line as well as on this. Same on the gross margin and same on the operating margin, which obviously gives us confidence on our ability to meet our objectives for 2023 at the end of the year. Another way to have a look at this is actually to look at the chart, which is the next chart, which shows the gap between the operating profit in the first half and the operating profit at the end of the year. When you look at the past, typically the pre-COVID period between 2017 and 2019, there used to be a gap of more than 4 points, percentage points between the operating margin in the first half and the operating margin at the end of the year. And as you can see, we published an operating margin for H1 of 8.7%. And when you add a bit more than 4% to this, you can see that we can be comfortable on our guidance of around 13% on the operating profit. Turning now to the next slide, a few comments on the P&L itself. So I'm not going to come back on the revenue, which I have extensively commented already. Maybe a few words on the gross margin. Gross margin, as you can see on the P&L is at 77.7% as a share of turnover, up a 100 basis points as compared to last year. This increase is explained by, first of all, the end of the COVID contract which whose collection costs were higher than the average of the group. So when you take out this COVID contract, it has obviously an impact with increasing the gross margin ratio. We have also the impact of the transitional shift from offline to online that we keep on seeing between H1 2022 and H1 2023. And the third impact, obviously, is our ability to increase our prices in a world where inflation is still present. In terms of operating costs, payroll has risen by 2.7% due to the full year impact of the recruitments that we made in 2022 to cope with growth. But we have been very cautious in terms of operating costs in the first half of the year, and this will produce its full effect on the profitability of the second half. Overheads rose by EUR 7 million, mainly due to a catch-up on IT and technology expenditures. And an increase in travel expenses. But again, the ratio of overhead to gross profit remained significantly lower to what it was before COVID. Overall, the operating margin, as you can see on the P&L of the first half is 8.7%, down 260 basis points compared to the same period last year. I think it's very important to say that because of the return to a certain degree of cyclicality in our business because of the expected acceleration in our revenue linked to the acceleration of our order book and because of the full impact of our cautious approach to operating costs in the first half, all of this will lead to a significant improvement in our operating margin and in our cash generation in the second half of the year. And at the end of the day, as you can see on the P&L on the slide, adjusted net profit attributable to the owner stands at EUR 70 million as compared to EUR 98 million last year. Just a few words with the next slide on the cash flow statement. Starting with the gross operating cash flow, EUR 137 million nothing to add really on the working capital, which is comparable to last year. We have invested EUR 29 million this year, more or less the same amount as last year and the free cash flow for the first half is standing at EUR 24 million compared to EUR 53 million last year. Again, all of it is explained by the decrease in the net results. So nothing else to add on the free cash flow. And again, this is going to improve significantly, obviously, in the second half of the year, and we are confident in our ability to meet our target on free cash flow. In terms of financial operations, we have made some acquisition in the first half. The first one is called Xperiti. It's a platform in the U.S., which will enable us to develop our B2B capabilities. And the second one is a small company on -- in health care in China called Focus RX. And we have [indiscernible] spent EUR 6 million in the first half by doing some acquisitions. As you can see on the next slide, we have purchased EUR 64 million of Ipsos shares. Part of it is to finance the free share program for Ipsos employees and part of it is for our new free shares -- new sorry -- share buyback program to reward our shareholders. We bought EUR 27 million in the first half with a view of canceling the shares, which will be canceled in the second half. And we target to do EUR 15 million in all during the whole course of 2023. And last line, we paid back EUR 30 million of Schuldschein loan in June. At the end of the day, the cash position of the group at the end of H1 is EUR 301 million compared to EUR 368 million at the end of June last year. And last slide, maybe before I give the floor back to Ben. We are in a very good position in terms of balance sheet, a very sound financial situation. As you can see on this chart, our net debt is standing at EUR 129 million at the end of June, lower than the net debt last year, which was EUR 154 million, and the leverage ratio is establishing itself at point -- time -- 0.4x as the EBITDA as compared to the same level as last year. We have also a very good liquidity position with around EUR 500 million of undrawn credit lines with a maturity above 1 year which obviously -- which obviously would enable us to repay the debt we have in the next 2 years, EUR 48 million in 2023 and nothing 2024. And maybe a last word to say that our gross debt is at 80% at fixed rate, which is obviously quite important and a good news in a world where interest rates are increasing. Thank you very much for your attention, and I now leave the floor to Ben for some more business updates.

Thank you very much, Dan. So just taking you into some of the details on the business and to help understand the revenue position and also our outlook for the year. So on big tech, we are down 18% in the first half compared to 2022. And of course, there was a boom in tech in that at that point. And this is really reflecting the sum of the some, but not all, and I want to talk about that, some of the tech companies getting overexcited by the massive acceleration they saw in e-commerce and advertising during lockdowns and assuming there was a permanent new trajectory for their businesses, then having to retrench in the summer and autumn of 2022, which we saw. That has also meant that the teams that we often work within those businesses are being disrupted and then sometimes they've been exited from those businesses. We're still doing a very large volume of work in the tech sector. And indeed, one of the biggest tech companies in the world has already exceeded its annual target with us. Another has just commissioned one of the largest studies we've ever seen. But overall, spending is down. They're still buying tracking studies, mystery shopping, corporate reputation studies. And AI, of course, is now triggering a gold rush and a real concern in some of those businesses. For example, in search, Google has had to up its game because Microsoft is now steal a march on or at least with the public. And we are actually working not only are we using some of these tools, which I'll talk about a bit later. But of course, we're also working for these businesses on how they might go to market among professionals or among the general public with those offerings. But overall, yes, spending is down, and it particularly affects the United States, which is part of the story in the profile of our revenue because obviously, many of those companies are headquartered there. So more of the work was done in the U.S. and in other parts of Ipsos. Another challenge is China. I don't think any analysts at the end of last year when they heard that lockdowns were being just abandoned in China would have expected growth to being quite so weak as it has been in the first half in China. So if you look at the overall GDP of the country in Q2, it only grew by 0.8%. Now our growth is rather better than that, we've got revenue growth of 1%. And in Q2, it actually rose by 6.5%. We can see real growth in the consumer sector, in telecoms, and of course, in automotive, where the Chinese automotive makers aim to be the #1 global provider of electric cars. But generally, the takeoff is lower than we would have predicted when we were thinking about our budgets last autumn and there's still a lot of uncertainty. A key question now really is what's stimulus if any the Chinese government will be doing to increase expenditure and then how that plays out in terms of research spending. And what's -- I think one of the challenges for any global business at the moment. It's just the unevenness of what one sees even across Asia because if you move from China to India, you go from a world where there's potential deflation in China and where the economy is basically flat. To India where GDP is growing by 6%, the industry is growing, our industry is growing by over 10% and our revenues are up 22% in the first half of the year. Real growth here, again, in innovation and product development and testing, in market strategy, in government and in health care. We're doing some really -- some of the biggest projects we do anywhere in the world, given it's the most populous country for the Indian government in terms of the number of people that we interview. So it is a booming market. We can see considerable opportunities in government, in advisory, in health care services. We are looking at acquisitions and are in conversation and acquisitions in that space to further boost. We're already #2 in the market. We're looking at tech, media, there is as an interesting tech player that we are in conversation with at the moment that would scale our abilities in this space and also provide services to the rest of the group. So India is great news. The only challenge is, of course, India is nowhere near as big as China as a proportion of our revenue. But very encouraging to see that growth there. A much bigger sector for us is government, and obviously, anybody who is studying the company will know that we have made a strategic decision to focus on our strengths in the public sector around the world. We are, as other leading global players have pulled out of this market, we believe that we have some unique opportunities here. So our order book so far this year have concerned orders for the year looking across Ipsos is up 11%, which is great. The revenues, of course, lag it, and part of that is especially driven by the United States, where the standoff between the executive and Congress over spending has meant that some of those federal departments are not committed -- have not committed to annual budgets because they're worried in case the sort of curtain on expenditure falls at any point. So they've been delaying their expenditure, but the overall programs are secure. We have overall globally a very strong position in terms of our policy expertise, the different domains inside the public sector and also in terms of very high-quality survey research and multimodal data collection, which are incredibly important to government clients who want to know that we have the ability, which if you followed our presentation on Investor Day, you would have seen demonstrated our ability to reach the last mile in any country that we are working in, which gives us a strong competitive advantage. So you can see in the context that our government signed themselves in around the world where their spending is under pressure from inflation, but also the cost of government debt rising nearly everywhere. With aging populations where expectations of the state to step in remain high. All sorts of problems of inequality, climate change, you name it, government has more and more demands on it. And that means making sure that the money they do spend and that they do have is spent effectively, and of course, is recognized by voters and citizens as having being spent effectively. And for that reason, there is a healthy growth in the public sector work, and we expect that to continue. Another area in this disrupted world in which we find ourselves where we can see good growth is in brand health tracking, because fundamentally, brands matter and in a world that is emerging from the pandemic with lots of disruption, new players in the market and the global marketplace is being disfragmented in many ways. We've got a phenomenon you can call [ global ] where you might be a global business, but actually, you need to really think about how you go to market in individual countries rather than having one-size-fits-all. All of that drives demand to really understand how brands are perceived across the world. We've also got these trends like direct-to-consumer brands like L'Oreal, it's been here, I'm in Paris speaking to you today, doing a very large proportion of their sales just simply direct to consumer. And the world -- a cookieless world means there is more and more need for large CPG companies to have their own data lakes and therefore, do their own multi-source analysis that they need help with. To bring all those data sources together digital, passive measurement and actual sales data and attitudinal data. So we've seen growth of over 6% a year since 2019. This year, it's actually up 7% in terms of the forward order book for the year. We've got that. And the benefit of this area of work is that this is not about one-off projects. These projects typically last 1 to 3 years and bringing in other services at Ipsos advisory work on the back of it work in looking at bringing in social media analysis with Synthesio to look at things. And what we've been doing is actually focusing on some messages and some key aspects for our clients. We launched our brand success narrative for brand health tracking with the 3 keys for it at the Cannes Marketing Festival in June based on 7,000 different studies that we've analyzed them to see that beyond price and functionality, the things that brands have to get rise are there, how they shape expectations how they understand context, which itself can do in many ways better than anybody else because of the range of countries and services that have aspects of human existence that we cover and then demonstrating empathy. We have built all of those factors now into our brand health tracking and our contextual brand or tracking model and we have also added ESG brand tracking. And actually, looking at our work on ESG in total across Ipsos, which you've now started developing as a business area. As well as our own work to reduce our carbon footprint, improve our gender balance, et cetera. That has actually so far grown by 45% this year compared to the first 6 months of 2022. So another one that is important. And then finally, on technology, we -- of course, this time last year, we weren't talking about generative AI. A year later, I have 5,000 people using our own generative tool called Ipsos Facto, where we have built in as a beta tech site for 2 of the largest tech players. Various tools for our internal people to use so that they have a safe and secure copyright and privacy- friendly place where they can work on the data build new models and analyze data plans. I mean, I was using it just before this call, incredibly impressive. As we demonstrated at the Investor Day, we already have 12 use cases, including analysis transcription, translation, et cetera. It's certainly making things faster. We are running experiments where we compare humans reports on particular subjects with the generative AI and how quickly we can produce them, also hallucinations because it does hallucinate. And that's one reason why we want to be in control of it and certainly be intelligent and sensitive in terms of how we use it. But that's been very successful and also a very rapid and agile rollout. At the same time, Ipsos Digital, which we have been talking about the last few years, our Software-as-a-Service platform. That continues its growth at over 30% so far this year. It is on -- we are on course to hit EUR 100 million in revenue on Ipsos Digital this year, and it's a very important part of increasing our addressable market and it's part of the story of why our gross margin is improving at the ongoing digitization of our work. So all of those things are, I suppose, bright spots. There are difficulties and had a slow start in the United States, but the parts of the business are growing very well indeed. And in terms of the overall outlook for the rest of the year, I think we can see that acceleration in the order book, these confirmed orders that will translate into revenue in the rest of the year from 1.6% in Q1, 5.3% in Q2. And if you take the midyear point, which we show in the chart here, where we can see 73% of the orders that are confirmed will be confirmed revenue for '23 have now been booked, is entirely in line with the last 6 years were all -- and actually at the same at par or better than all of [ large ] with one exception. And the 1 exception, of course, is 2022, where we had a very, very fast start to the year with that post-COVID recovery where it was 75%. For everybody else, for every other year, we are pretty much on target. And I think that makes me feel pretty confident looking at all of the other numbers that Dan has taken you for the amount of revenue visible at this point in the year, the percentage of operating profit visible at this point to say that we should continue to confirm our guidance. And there are uncertainties. I mean, for anybody, any business, whether it's the Big Tech in the U.S., we're in discussions. We're seeing them coming back, but we certainly need to step up the pace. Our IoT needs to be at about 10% on last year for the rest of the year. We're well aware of that. The reason we are more confident about that is that the comparison gets easier and easier all the time, particularly in the last part of the year where in some months last year, there is virtually no there's no improvement to beat. So we believe we can do that. We know that there's uncertainty for the light what will happen in China. But overall, I think on balance, the balance of probabilities is that we should be able to do around 5%. We should -- and on operating margin, we're very confident that with our control of costs, both payroll and Gen X, we are on course to hit the newer, higher operating margin that we have sustained over the last few years compared to the pre-pandemic period. But very happy to take any questions.

[Operator Instructions]. It appears no question over the phone. Thank you.

Thank you very much. If there are no more questions, we're always happy to talk to anybody who wants to call us or go into any details. But otherwise, we will see you at the next quarter's results. Thank you.

Thank you for joining today's call. You may now disconnect.