Ipsos SA (IPS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you. Good morning or good afternoon to all of you. I am very pleased to welcome you to this exceptional presentation of Ipsos to the financial markets. After a few words of introduction from me, you will hear from Kelly Beaver, our new CEO, as well as from Olivier Champourlier, Ipsos' Chief Financial Officer. The choice of a CEO is the most important and most difficult decision that a board of directors has to take. When I took my chairman responsibility of the board of Ipsos in March this year, we had a best practice and already an ongoing process of succession planning, both for our CEOs but also our board members. In particular, our nomination committee has put in place an ongoing and effective process for succession planning of the CEO position. And Kelly Beaver was an already identified choice by the nomination committee. And her profile was identified already in 2025 and she was put on a development program. On July 30th of this year, so six weeks ago, the board unanimously decided that Kelly Beaver was the right person, right now for the job. Her remuneration is fully in line with the remuneration policy that was approved by our shareholders meeting on May the 20th with 94% support. Kelly has resigned from her position in Ipsos in the U.K. and Ireland. So, she has only a corporate officer mandate and she has relocated to Paris already on July 31st. So we have a new CEO, but we have a strategy, Horizons, that remains the same. So it's the same framework with six strategic choices. Kelly Beaver is the right person to accelerate the execution of that plan because she's an internal proven and ready now leader with 15 years of experience, both in the U.K. and Ireland, but also more recently as the global chairman of our healthcare practice, which means that no ramp-up was required. She has as well an outstanding commercial growth record, with businesses under her area of responsibilities which have grown continuously faster than the average of the Ipsos Group and she has successfully integrated different acquisitions in the U.K. and Ireland. She is as well a wide industry recognized and awarded leader by ESOMAR, our professional association, MRS, and also by the FTSE board report for the 100 women to watch. And last but not least, she has worked on the Horizon Plan and its definition with her colleagues of the Executive Committee since early 2025. So Kelly's mandate is very simple. This is to turn strategy into faster execution. This is about Ipsos having a better performance, which is expected by all our shareholders. The market sets the pace and Ipsos needs a leader who will deliver results at speed. So without further ado, I am very happy to introduce Kelly Beaver.

Hello. Ipsos is an outstanding company with an enviable market position. And I'm very proud to lead Ipsos through the next phase of its development and journey. Firstly, a little about myself. So I was born and raised in Northern Ireland, in Belfast to be exact, and I am 43 years old. I have been at Ipsos for 15 years, but before Ipsos, I had a career in management consultancy as an economist and as a researcher. During that time, I was a researcher at the University of London, I worked for organizations including PricewaterhouseCoopers and also Coffey International Development, where my role involved working across developing economies and emerging economies around the world. More recently, whilst working at Ipsos, I have indeed received numerous awards, but those awards are linked to our company and our people's ability to deliver in the most complex of research circumstances. I have received an MBE, which is an award from the previous Queen of England for services to academia, research and the COVID response. And I have a number of roles that span academic institutes like Oxford and King's College. But importantly, during my time at Ipsos over the last 15 years, I know how to deliver and to deliver impact for our clients and commercial growth for our company. And there are three key things I'd like to reflect on. First is understanding the operational aspects of our industry, delivering alongside our people, delivering to our clients, to help them shape, improve, to grow their organizations. Secondly, in my role across the U.K. and Ireland, that business hosts 14 of Ipsos's global service lines, and it gave me the depth of understanding of the full range of Ipsos's service offerings. And more recently, and in a previous role at Ipsos, I have had the chance to operate on a global level, whether that was running the international social research business for Ipsos, or more recently, as the chair for our global healthcare practice. These aspects of the roles that I've played at Ipsos enable me to execute faster within the Ipsos context with knowledge of our people, our clients, our industry. What is my leadership style like? Well, I am incredibly execution and performance driven. Clear mandates, clear plans, clear accountability, clear delivery timeframes. That is how you drive execution at pace, alongside being a very global and inclusive leader for our people. Secondly, as Laurence mentioned, I was part of the leadership team who put together the strategic plan for Ipsos. That was a plan I was involved in developing and now I have the privilege of leading our teams to execute. And a reminder for those of you on our key six strategic choices. This plan, the execution of this plan is now critical, but this plan is something that I 100% believe is the right plan for Ipsos. Firstly, Ipsos is a multi-specialist business. Part of our strategic plan is to ensure we can go faster with some of our services, which we believe on a global platform can accelerate the growth of Ipsos. These are called our globally managed services. There are six services which need a consistent delivery platform and strong commercialization across our 90 markets. That is core to how we will accelerate growth. Secondly, we are and we continue to be a global company with a local footprint. And under this pillar, there are three key elements to execution. The first of those is ensuring we enhance the commercial nature of our organization and the way our people deliver commercially. But importantly, two key country plans, one for the U.S. and one for China. Those markets are pioneer markets where Ipsos has an opportunity to really accelerate our growth. Thirdly, and importantly for our clients, speed is increasingly important. And Ipsos has a commitment to deliver a high proportion of our services within a 48-hour window, whilst maintaining the integrity and quality of what we deliver, which our clients absolutely demand. Our digital platform, Ipsos Digital, which allows us to do end-to-end research delivery at scale and fast, is a core part of the third strategic aim. Fourthly, AI as a catalyst for market leadership. And this is not just about the productivity improvements that AI offers. This is more about our ability to accelerate and improve the products that we offer our clients by enhancing them with artificial intelligence. Fifthly, access to real people? Ipsos has access to real people in all of the markets that we operate. And alongside accelerating with AI, doubling down on access to real people on which AI absolutely requires high quality inputs is a critical part of our strategy. And number six, expanding into adjacent service areas such as data integration and analytics, which is an adjacent market to the market we currently operate in. Those are our six strategic choices and they will, when accelerated in the delivery aspects, they will allow Ipsos to grow faster. Now I'm going to hand over to Olivier Champourlier, our CFO, to talk through a current trading update.

So thank you Kelly. Let me now turn to current trading and give you an update on where we stand at the end of August. So first our order book is up 1.2% year to date on an organic basis, same level we reported at the end of June. So the commercial activity has remained positive and stable over the past two summer months. Regarding the revenue, we are up 1.1% year to date on an organic basis, which is higher than what we reported at the end of June, where we were at 0.8%. The growth of our revenue has been positive since June and is now closer to the growth of our order book as of the end of August. We will give you a full detailed business update during the release of our third quarter result on October the 23rd. With that, I will now hand back to Kelly for an update on the Horizon plan.

Thank you, Olivier. It is imperative now that Ipsos and our teams accelerate the execution of the Horizon strategy. Over the last six weeks, I've been working alongside our leadership teams around the world to ensure that Ipsos and our business has clear operational plans in place for each one of those strategic aims. These are 26-week operational plans and I use the word weeks on purpose, rather than months, rather than quarters, rather than biannual, weeks is the period in which we will monitor our progress and deliver and execute against our strategy's priorities with clear milestones, clear leadership, clear accountability, and an acceleration of delivery. In the next four weeks, I will appoint the leadership positions that are needing in place in order to accelerate Horizons. Within that four-week window, we will accelerate the AI rollout across our organization. And in the next four weeks, I will accelerate the rollout of the use of the Ipsos Digital Platform. This is our end-to-end digital platform which allows us to deliver research insights at speed to our clients by mandating its use in a number of critical markets. Within eight weeks, our globally managed services will have clear acceleration plans in delivery mode, not in development. And indeed, we will also have an acceleration of product development with the infusion of AI in how we go to market with the critical products that Ipsos executes for our clients around our markets and around the world. Today, we have a strong and experienced leadership team in place at Ipsos, with a mix of those who know Ipsos and know our industry, and also with those who are new and bringing an external perspective to our business. That leadership accountability is critical to be reinforced across each of these initiatives so that we can accelerate the pace of our delivery. And I'm pleased to share some improvements already in the area of enabling AI across Ipsos. I have in the last six weeks appointed a new Chief Platforms and Technology Officer for Ipsos, who is based in the U.S. and who deeply understands how technology and market research intersect. Because this is not about technology or AI for the sake of it. This is about technology and AI to drive the quality, to drive the value in the research process for our clients. And that is Humair Mohamed. I have also nominated and appointed a global lead of AI solutions and client engagement. And I'm very pleased to say that Cynthia Vega will be joining Ipsos at the end of November. Cynthia is a long-established leader. She has operated most recently at Kantar, before that Nielsen. She has a deep understanding of LLMs, of synthetic, of agentic AI, and importantly, how you infuse it into the research process to deliver at speed to add value to what we do for our clients. She also is part of a Forbes committee around AI as well. Across Ipsos, we have now enabled Microsoft Copilot for all of our employees, and more recently signed the partnership with Google Gemini. This is both for our enterprise platform and also, importantly, for our agentic platform. And with that, we will be releasing a series of new products over the course of the next 12 weeks and the next 24 weeks. And again, the focus here is on speed of execution, speed of launch to market. For example, we will have in the next 12 weeks InnoTest, which is our solution on Ipsos Digital to help our clients identify winning ideas and concepts. This will enable us to go faster to help them make smarter investments and stronger have stronger innovation pipeline. The key difference in what we are doing here is that we are adding in synthetic respondents, which will allow us to accelerate the pace with which we test the innovations and allow us to make the most of the time. them to predict and improve the benchmarks for their trial innovation products. Secondly, in the next 12 weeks, our Ipsos Synthesio solution will be delivering on our, this is our social listening platform. It will be delivering AI visibility, which is about helping brands today understand how they are showing up on LLMs. This is a question we get asked a lot by our clients and in the next 12 weeks, this new product will be launched. And of course, with the agentic platform that we are getting from Google Gemini, we will also be able to start launching agentic products within the next 12 to 24 weeks. For example, InnoExplorer, which is powered by our Ask Ipsos agent system, which is a complete agentic system, and allows us to simultaneously connect to other systems. So this will be our current databases around innovation product development, alongside Ipsos platforms, like our social listening platform, and importantly to client systems as well. Allowing clients to test innovation concepts at scale, at speed. And then finally, our Creative Spark AI. This is a tool which allows our clients who want to test a higher volume of creative ads, which they could be running across socials, but other media outlets as well. At pace, at scale, again in future. used with synthetic respondent data. This product pipeline and accelerating it is critical to our growth milestones as an organization and by embracing AI and agentic capabilities within Ipsos at speed, it will allow us to execute our plan faster. And now I'm delighted to introduce our new corporate communications campaign, which is about the power of bringing human insight and human capability together with AI. This is what we're calling augmented Ipsos. Please play the video.

The world is moving faster than ever. Markets evolve, behaviors change, opinions shift. Access to data and information has never been easier. Yet for our clients, making decisions has never been more complex. Better decisions start with better data. Data has to be collected, analyzed, verified. It needs scientific rigor to become truly reliable. In the next episode, we predict what comes next by continually evolving how we decode the world. It's how we've helped clients with our multi-specialist services to navigate change for more than 50 years. As artificial intelligence unlocks new possibilities, Ipsos' experts in 90 countries are helping turn data into better decisions. Expanding the reach of research, connecting data in new ways, and pushing analysis to the next level. further and faster, delivering insights that matter across society, markets, and people. At the heart of Ipsos are our people, and we provide access to millions of real people around the world. combining artificial intelligence with human intelligence to deliver deeper understanding and better decisions. Augmenting speed, augmenting insights, augmenting trust, to turn complexity into clarity and clarity into impact. This is what we call augmented Ipsos.

Ipsos, game changers. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed watching that. So just a reminder, our third quarter results will be available on the 23rd of October at 8:30 a.m. Central European Time. And you will hear more then about current business performance and indeed broken down by market and by audience group. But for now, I welcome Q&A based on what you have heard today.

[Operator Instructions] First question is from Marie-Line Fort.

Yes, good afternoon. The first one is about your guidance of 2% organic sales growth given what you achieved at the end of August. What are the achievements you need to achieve over the next four quarters? This is the first one. The second question is about global managed services, do you confirm that this GMS should generate double-digit growth? And at which time or reason do you think you can achieve this target? Regarding Ipsos Digital, how do you view the development of the platform? We can see in Google Trends that Ipsos Digital fell sharply in July and August. Is it significant and is there a specific reason for this? And the last question is probably for Laurence Stoclet to understand why Kelly has not been appointed before and at the time of the previous managerial transition. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much for your for your questions. So perhaps, Olivier, you can take some of the questions up front.

Yes, so regarding first of all regarding the guidance, what we have said today is what we know. What we know is that our order book is growing at 1.2%, our revenue is at 1.1% year to date on an organic basis. The month of September is an important month. So this is the reason why also we'll give you a full detailed update on the business by geography, by service line during our third quarter result.

And perhaps just a moment on, without giving the details on the numbers today, because that will come in Q3. The globally managed services are a really important part of our strategic plan. Each one of those is a scalable solution built on a platform base, which allows us to replicate and sell in a consistent way across our markets. So those are a really important part of the overall Ipsos plan. And Ipsos Digital is a combination for us of continuing to deliver against the roadmap of technological development, but also the adoption rates of Ipsos Digital across all of our markets, and the services that we offer. So those are two very important accelerators for us. And we'll tell you more about the performance in Q3.

Yes. So Kelly was identified as a possible successor for the CEO position already last year, as I had mentioned. And it was at the time of the change of CEO between Ben Page and Jean-Laurent Poitou. And at that time, the nomination committee had put her on these development programs and he started to learn French, was given a global responsibility inside the company to supervise and manage our healthcare business, and she had also followed some specific different international trade trainings. The goal was to have her ready in two or three years. So that was the choice made by the nomination committee of Ipsos already in the summer of 2025. More recently because the performance of the company was not where it needs to be, because the execution of the Horizon plan needs to be faster, much faster actually, the board decided to hear Kelly, who was already once again identified, and when convinced, as I have said, that she was the right person right now for the job, and decided to make an, I would say, immediate change in an unanimous manner. So that was what actually happened. And I am very happy to have Kelly in the seat driving Ipsos today.

Next question is from Emmanuel Matot, Oddo BHF.

Hello, thank you for this presentation. I hope you can hear me well. I have two questions. First, where Ipsos is lagging behind in the rollout of Horizons? Where do you need to accelerate significantly? And second, do you still plan to invest in a transforming operation for a total amount of EUR 1.2 billion over the period of the plan? Do you still plan to do significant acquisitions? Thank you very much.

Excellent questions, Emmanuel. Thank you. So the Horizons plan needs strong operational plans beneath it. So the strategic aims, each one of those in the last six weeks, we have worked hard to develop with the leadership at Ipsos, very clear, very time bound, very clearly owned elements of the operational plan across the entire Horizons program, this activity has taken place. For me, accelerating on our growth priorities are critical, the globally managed services, the use and adoption, and also platform developments on Ipsos Digital and the product rollout with AI, which I talked a little bit about in my presentation, those are three critical drivers. The tech and AI deployment at pace and I spoke a little bit to that as well, and then ensuring clear leadership accountability across the Horizons plan. Your second question, which relates to our intent to make investments. Ipsos has got acquisitions in its DNA. We have invested in over 100 acquisitions during Ipsos's 50, nearly 51-year history so far. And it will continue to be important on our journey, ensuring that those are strategically relevant to Horizons, whether that is about accelerating our technology and the build of technology in our organization, whether that is about accelerating in the added value areas such as data integration and analytics, or whether those are opportunistic purchases that allow us to expand access to real people or expand the service offerings that we offer today. One thing that also won't change at Ipsos is our disciplined way of reviewing acquisitions to ensure valuations are reasonable and that the returns are good. So I will stop there. Any, thank you. Thank you.

Next question is from Conor O'Shea, Kepler Cheuvreux.