Schneider Electric S.E. (SU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Interpreted] Hello, ladies and gentlemen, shareholders, the general meeting -- Annual General Meeting is open. As published in the BALOs on the 6th of March and 1st of April 2020 and in the special journal of the company of 4th of April 2020, due to health circumstances within the framework prescribed by the order of 25th March 2020 adopting the rules of meetings, this meeting will be held in camera without the physical presence of the shareholders or other persons entitled to attend. It is broadcast live on the company's website. In accordance with the provisions of Article 19 of the Articles of Association, the Vice Chairman may chair the meeting. It is in this capacity that I chair this meeting. Jean-Pascal Tricoire, Chairman of the Board of Directors, takes part -- will be taking part in the videoconference. Next to me is Emmanuel Babeau, Deputy Managing Director in Charge of Finance and Legal Affairs; and Delphine Gieux, Secretary of the Board of Directors. I call the function of scrutineers, Emmanuel Babeau, shareholder; and [ Ellen Pereire ], representative of the Employee Shareholder Fund, Schneider, appointed by the Fund Supervisory Board. And I invite Delphine Gieux to act as Secretary. [ Mr. Louis Cavella ], on behalf of the Board of Statutory Auditors, will inform you of the conclusions of their audit. The quorum required for the holding of this meeting is at least 1/4 of the shares comprising the share capital with voting rights, i.e., 137,431,856. As from the 18th resolution to the 21st resolution, the resolutions fall within the jurisdiction of an extraordinary general meeting. I remind you that for resolutions that fall within the jurisdiction of the ordinary general meeting, the quorum is 1/5 of the shares making up the share capital with voting rights. According to the attendance sheet, I know that at the opening of the meeting, the number of shares present or effectively represented is 367,986,693, so a quorum of 66.38%, the legal quorum to hold a combined shareholders' meeting, is therefore reached. I would point out that there are 366,674,535 votes via correspondence. And for a meeting in camera, this quorum is definitive. The members of the Board will certify the attendance sheet by signing it, and I declare that the meeting has been duly constituted and that it can deliberate in all validity. So the main items on the agenda of this meeting are as follows: approval of the financial statements and determination of the amount of distribution of EUR 2.55 per share approval of the special report of the statutory auditors on a new regulated agreement relating to the conditions of departure of the Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Emmanuel Babeau; approval of the elements of compensation of executive directors paid or allocated during financial year 2019; approval of the compensation policy for the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; approval of the compensation policy specifically applicable to Mr. Emmanuel Babeau, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, in connection with his departure and of the compensation components paid or allocated during the financial year 2020; renewal of the terms of offices of Ms. Cecile Cabanis, Mr. Fred Kindle, Mr. Willy Kissling and myself; appointment of Ms. Jill Lee as new Director; approval of the remuneration of the members of the Board of Directors; statutory amendments to comply with amended laws and rectification of material error; and renewal of financial authorizations and capital increases reserved for employees for their savings or long-term compensation in shares. So on the table is a copy of the Articles of Association, a copy of the Notice of Meeting and documents sent to all registered shareholders; a copy of the BALO of 6th March and 1st April 2020 and of this [ Journal Spécial de l'Association ] of 4th April 2020; the list of registered shareholders; the attendance sheet and table summarizing the proxies of shareholders represented and accounting of postal ballots; the reports, including the management report of the Board of Directors, the report of the Board of Directors on Corporate Governance, which is the subject of a specific section of the management report, and the report of the Board of Directors to the General Meeting of Shareholders; the accounts for the year, statutory auditors' reports, and as I pointed out, here are all the documents. I'm not going to lift them because they are very weighty. As I have already pointed out, Mr. Fred Kindle will succeed me as Vice President and Independent Lead Director -- I missed a venture, I beg your pardon. The tax resolution presented to the shareholders and different documents. And I would point out that reports and financial statements as well as the text of resolutions, the list of shareholders and in general, all the documents covered by the regulations in force have been made available to the shareholders in accordance with the legal terms and deadlines. The main elements of our strategy as well as the reports and the financial statements will be presented by Jean-Pascal Tricoire, then Emmanuel Babeau. I will present the Corporate Governance and the resolution submitted to the shareholders' vote. And now I will hand the floor to Jean-Pascal Tricoire.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this 2020 Annual General Meeting, a general meeting that will be special, first of all, because we are conducting this digitally and it's going to give you a pretty good idea as to how we work at Schneider Electric. Because as you know, we are present in many countries, and when we work together at Schneider, it is especially via videoconferencing. The second special aspect of this meeting is the transition from a financial management, from Emmanuel Babeau, to Hilary Maxson. I will present our new CFO with Emmanuel, and I would like to thank Emmanuel for the 11 years we've spent together building Schneider, that is a different company, that's a transformed company and much better equipped to face up to the future. And third element is the vote that we are going to propose to you to transition from Leo Apotheker to Fred Kindle, as Lead Director, Independent Lead Director. I would like to thank Leo, who did the introduction to this meeting, of all the excellent work we conducted together to ensure the best possible governance at Schneider and to deploy the strategy that they commit to set-up. So we'll start by wishing each one of you good health and that we should help one another to go through this crisis and come out of this crisis altogether. I'm going to talk about the strategy group, and I'm going to explain what the rationale of Schneider is, that is to do the best with the energy we have for all at every moment of the day and to ensure through the Schneider technologies that life should go on better. This period that we are weathering right now reminds us to what extent Schneider is necessary in all the processes and all the applications that are critical for our day-to-day lives. We serve customers who have critical missions for like hospitals, and we are one of the main suppliers for hospitals, the cold chain for agribusiness, most of the data centers for the different Internet sites and the houses, homes, buildings and offices and the water distribution network electricity. Our technologies are extremely useful to increase the safety of the operators and reduce risks through remote controlled systems, through digital systems that make it possible to advise people who are operating in the field without exposing them to necessary risks. All these digital technologies help the operators to operate in maximum security conditions -- safety conditions. Our mission is to develop digital solutions for sustainable development by combining energy and automation to reach a higher level of efficiency. And to better illustrate this, we do it -- this in 3 different ways. The first way is to be the adviser and the partner to support our customers in the transition toward sustainable development, with 70% of our turnovers based on technologies that serve sustainable development, this is what we call the green revenue, and we have companies like Maple Leaf in Canada and Agrial in France, in agribusiness and their research to reduce carbon footprint and to ensure better energy efficiency. And all of this is taking place at a time when there's a fundamental shift in societies and companies and in cities towards more sustainable development. More than 200 large companies across 100 countries have pledged in the next -- the last 6 months to head for the 1.5 degrees trajectory. Take the example of Lidl in Finland, that by using a micro-electric grid based on renewable energies and on energy efficiency, based on digital technologies, it's going to provide 100% renewable energy for its operations and reduce its carbon emissions by 40%. Our second contribution is innovate for a more sustainable world. In 2019, we started a new range in medium voltage. Medium voltage, which was the interface between the electrical grid and applications, and generally used a gas that's toxic, SF6 gas. Today, our engineers have developed a revolutionary product, which is called [ R7 ], which doesn't use any SF6 and doesn't use any gas at all and does insulation and braking functions. And we have at Schneider developed a whole series of products that we call Green Premium that comply with all the regulatory requirements for sustainable development. These products represent more than half of the sales in our group and are growing above average. Our third commitment is to ensure that Schneider is exemplary in reducing its carbon footprint and in sustainable development. Now we have taken 3 commitments, that of carbon neutrality in 2025, no gas, end SF6, net-zero operational emissions by 2030, net-zero supply chain by 2050. And it is this commitment for sustainable development that we've been doing for the last 15 years, and this has led us to being a pioneer, a trailblazer in this area. In 2019, we were recognized by a number of agencies as being exemplary in this development towards sustainable development. Now what Schneider has done is much more than just supplying technologies, is to imagine, to invent, innovate with the customers a future that will be fundamentally different, a building of the future that will be 100% digital, all electric, sustainable, autonomous in terms of energy, but also in decision-making, so as to optimize comfort and the use of the building. Same thing in industry. We are developing systems that make it possible for industry of the future to be 100% digital, all electric and sustainable and more and more autonomous, whether it be in local generation of energy, decision-making in terms of processes and energy consumption. What we have done during the last 15 years that have just gone by is that we have become the partner for sustainable development for our customers by proposing a level of efficiency, that is much higher than the technology of our competitors can offer, thanks to the level of integration which is much higher. We call this integration, integration multiplied by 4. The first integration is that of energy and automation that we have talked about and that you can see in the system that we've developed with Acciona, which is an integrated supplier of solutions in the region of Mexico for water distribution networks to reduce greatly the carbon impact of water installations. So in China, [ HMI ], which is a leader in agribusiness, we have gains in operational efficiency and gains in the consumption of energy. The second integration that is complementary to the first is the one of EcoStruxure, which brings together connected products to control systems at the local level, in industrial plants for the machines and buildings, and a whole series of software applications to improve operational management of installations. We have EcoStruxure -- EcoStruxure is 10 years old. It is the plug-and-play system for the digitalization of Schneider Electric. And one of the examples is what we've done with BASF in the United States. We have complete transparency of all the connected objects, and connection to predictive maintenance systems makes it possible to stop production stoppages and to work on all the maintenance. The third integration we have with AVEVA has been this life cycle, one around a unique digital twin, making it possible for our customers to have and to think and progress according to the same digital model, from the design, all the way to the commissioning of and installation and towards operation and maintenance of the operations, installations to avoid all losses at the time of construction and any losses that might take place during the transition from a model or a design, from the design phase, to the operational phase. One example that one can take in this area is what we do with Wilmar, that's the leader in sugar production in Australia. The software works directly with the optimization of the plant in real time, but the use of digital twin has made it possible to reduce by 20% the building of the plant. And the fourth integration enables us to provide to our customers no longer -- the possibility of no longer managing their company plant-by-plant or building-by-building or machine-by-machine, but to connect all of their enterprise with a single digital system which will enable them to optimize all of their consumption, all of their processes and to compare each of the installations they have in their company and to better procure their energy, which were much greener and much cheaper. These are the 4 elements of integration. These 4 elements, which will solve the problem of our customer to integrate all the complexity of the modern technologies, to provide more efficiency, to no longer -- this can only be deployed thanks to the Schneider Electric model, which is different in that it's integrated multi-local path, integrated multi-local open and empowered. We are integrated because we've had One Schneider developed over the last 12 years. We've developed Schneider around strong countries with country managers that are in charge of a Schneider presence in a given geography. And based on a process and a supply chain, logistics and production, integrated functions have made it possible for us to digitalize all of our processes. So during a crisis period, such as one we're experiencing today, it was particularly important because our organization has been tested. It's operational for more than 12 years. And these processes are digitalized, which means that we're very resilient, very proactive and much -- a greater transparency. Another strong point during this crisis event is our multi-hub, multi-local organization. We have organized ourselves in a multi-local world. When we compare revenue to the percentage of our headcount and percentage of our costs in production, we are different from the competition because we are very, very close to our final markets. And all of this enables us to adapt -- in many ways, adapt to electric standards or norms continent-by-continent. And as standards differ greatly from one continent to the next, this enables us also to adapt to the different digital standards in the different regions. The American standard is very different from the Chinese standard, and this enables us, of course, to serve more effectively and more quickly, to more personalize our customers at a time when our customers want systems that are bespoke and they want these systems very quick. And it is the only way for us to reduce our carbon footprint because this very short supply chain makes it possible to limit, reduce carbon emissions. And of course, entering this period with a major health crisis, where frontiers are being closed, countries are isolating one another, this makes us able to react at a local level and to be much more resilient and reactive to face up to the problems of the virus in the different countries. All this goes with another model, which is extremely decentralized, where the responsibility and the means are given or entrusted to our local teams, allowing them to respond very quickly, knowing what they know best, which is their own environment, the country in which they operate. The development of this principle, this decentralization principle that we've been developing throughout the years, is particularly helpful today with this multi-local principle to respond to the crisis that we have. Now another very important part of our model is the partnership concept. No other company works with more partners than Schneider Electric, upstream with our suppliers, downstream with our integrators, installers and panel manufacturers and our partners in technology, with whom we develop our systems. In 2019, we launched a digital site, allowing the whole ecosystem to work together naturally, digitally. This site is named Exchange, and it is clearly successful. On the basis of this recent event, this purpose that makes so much sense today in our environment, based on this mission and on the different models, we mean to overcome the COVID-19 crisis. First of all, this crisis emerged at the end of 2019, which was a record year for Schneider Electric. We had very strong fundamentals, a clear strategy, a well-proven strategic model and a sound financial situation. Our system, which is being multi-local, decentralized, an operational organizational model, allow us to be present in all the countries and respond to the situations in each country. They vary enormously from one country into another. China, for example, is leaving the crisis when other countries are at the beginning of it, and Europe is right in the middle. What is more important than everything is the health of our workers and the communities in which we work. We work in tight cooperation with the local authorities in the countries where we operate. And we have 3 priorities: number one, social distancing measures; personal protection equipment; home working, digital tools and support; and also global benefit standards with life, health and family care, particularly for the most fragile families. And besides what we do within the societies in the area of health, there are also all the contributions we provide to the hospitals and health organizations in all our countries. We are one of the biggest provider of energy control systems in the hospitals all over the world. And our teams are working daily in these hospitals to help them continue to operate and support them in this stressful condition that was absolutely unprecedented. We have 4 main priorities. The first one is our responsibility to serve the companies, the local authorities, the health authorities around us, all the entities that are fighting back the crisis. This is why we continue working. Our service teams are out there in the field. And we continue to be extremely operational. The second responsibility is adapting Schneider to the conditions of the crisis. We have to adapt our costs in a structural way. We have to pay attention on cash flow and cash generation. The third priority is to prepare the aftermath of this crisis. Of course, we will come out of this crisis. We have to prepare to leave the confinement as we did in some countries, prepare our business, which will be highly demanded after the crisis. And the fourth priority is our responsibility vis-à-vis our environment and the communities in which we work throughout the world. Therefore, we created a dedicated fund called Tomorrow Rising, to help the communities respond to the crisis, improve the resilience of the communities around us so that in the future, we can all respond better to such crisis. Of course, you heard about the Schneider Electric participation through the making of respirators in France, in the U.K. -- the United States, sorry, and in India and also the 3D face shields. We use the fundamentals that we developed in the past 15 years, a strong and diversified geographic presence. We are multi-local for our employees. We want our employees to be closer to the market in order to respond in a well-adapted way to the local features of this crisis. A portfolio of activities that is rebalanced to avoid the cycle effect; more developments in digital and services, it is now double of what it was 10 years ago; and the cost base, as I said before, which is based on partners which makes us even more flexible. All this leads us to generate a double cash flow in 2019 compared to 2018. We have more capacity to overcome the crisis. And what also helps us is that we are One Schneider, an integrated model for over 12 years, multi-local since more than 5 years. I started operating on that. And finally, the development of our digital and services activities. These activities are much more resilient. They can -- they are able to continue activities in times of crisis. And we are ready for the world after the crisis, a world where the digital demand will be stronger, where everybody will understand the importance of having resilient control systems, electric systems and critical infrastructure when it will be harder to travel, a world that will be aware of the power of nature, wanting to rebound or to help improve the situation against climate change, the research of circularity and life cycle services and recovery plans. It's a world where many key markets, which are the strong markets of Schneider, will want more technology, particularly hospitals and IT. When we entered this crisis, we just finished 2019, which was a record year thanks to the execution of our strategy. A few numbers. Our revenues was beyond EUR 27 billion, with an adjusted EBITA of almost plus 9%, almost EUR 4.2 billion and adjusted net income of EUR 2.9 billion, up 14%. And the free cash flow, as we said before, is over EUR 3.5 billion. And this is certainly the most striking characteristic of our financial year 2019. Thanks to the sound numbers, the sound financial situation, we can propose dividends of EUR 2.55 per share. This is plus 8.5%. It will be voted at the shareholders' meeting. And the total shareholder return, it was 60% in 2019 only, ranking #1 among direct peers. Our 2 activities, Energy Management and Industrial Automation, contributed to these record results. Both activities are growing. Both activities have a sectorial profitability of over 18%, which allow us to really welcome those results, which are better than what we ever had before. We will continue to implement the strategy we described in the past few years, more products, more services, more software and better systems that are more profitable. These 4 catalysts of Schneider results are absolutely up and running in 2019. And I would like to remind you that this combination between digital, which is software and control, and services, represent 25% of the financial year 2019 revenues. This is a higher growth than the average of the group. We have a better margin. It is also a leverage of growth for connected products, which are not included in those 25%. If you introduce also the connected products, we have almost 50% of the revenues. So 50% of our revenues are in digital and services. And what we do in those 2 businesses allow us to build our customer intimacy. Here are numerous examples of EcoStruxure as we developed in 2019 with our customers in all the geographies and in our 4 main markets: buildings, data centers, infrastructure and industry. Finally, if we look at this with some distance, if we look at the results over a larger number of years, well, in the past 3 years, we committed with organic revenue with a plus 3%. We ended with 5%, which is much better than the initial objective. Our organic adjusted EBITA is growing over 70 basis points each year, which is much better than the 20 basis points we committed to. And the organic growth adjusted EBITA is growing by 9.4%, which is more than the 4% to 7% we announced 3 years ago. The basis of this 2019 year, which was a record year, great in performance, allow us to propose for a vote a dividend which is growing. So for Schneider Electric, this is the result of 10 years of dividends progress. The shareholders trust, you, who were with us at each stage of our investments, our choices, our transformation, be it in difficult times or in more prosperous times. Now I would like to give the floor to Emmanuel Babeau, who is going to explain in detail this financial part. I would like to thank Emmanuel for everything we did together, for this transformation we achieved, as I just described. This is something we did together in the past 11 years. I wish Emmanuel a great future career in the new company he's joining, and again, all my acknowledgment for everything he did in Schneider and everything we did together. Hilary Maxson will replace Emmanuel Babeau. She joined Schneider with a great experience in our industry, particularly the energy industry, where she worked for many years. She was recruited in Hong Kong after a very international career in the United States, of course, since she is an American citizen, but also in America, Africa, Asia, South America. She was in charge of the Energy division of Schneider Electric, the biggest, so she's really up and ready to replace Emmanuel Babeau at the Head of Finance. Thank you very much, Emmanuel, and it's off to you.

Dear shareholders, good afternoon. It's a great pleasure for me to meet with you and comment on the results of this past year. As you will see on this video, we are in particular circumstances. We were all impacted by this COVID-19 crisis. So I will also explain what will happen in 2020, how this crisis is impacting us and how we can respond to this pandemic, how we can overcome this crisis in the best conditions. So let's have a look back to 2019, first of all. For our group, it is a successful year. And I think it is fair to say that 2019 was the illustration of the strength of our strategy, the quality of its implementation with records that were achieved on all the main financial parameters during this financial year. First of all, I would like to look at a few numbers for our company in 2019. First of all, the revenues, EUR 27 billion. It's a progression of 4.2% in comparable scope. And you see that the 2 activities, the Energy contribution and Industrial Automation, which is the other revolution of our industry, those 2 activities are growing. If we look at Energy, we get to EUR 21 billion. If we look at Industrial Automation, we're growing by 0.1% to reach EUR 6 billion. If you look now at the progression by geographical area of the revenue during 2019, you see that all the main regions are progressing. The most notable was North America with a 6% growth in comparable scope with an excellent performance. The other major region of growth is Asia Pacific, where China is a great zone of growth for us. We continue to grow in India, Australia, Indonesia. Only Japan was disappointing in 2019. We are also progressing in Western Europe, another big region for us with a growth of 2%. All the large countries are progressing in this zone. Rest of the world, good growth here, 4% in comparable years. And we have contrasted performance here. You have Russia on one side with South America and Africa, which had a good performance, but it was more difficult and challenging in the Middle East. Let's now turn to our 2 main activities, Energy Management first. This activity helped us make EUR 21 billion with a progression of 5.2% in organic growth. And you have the operational margin, the adjusted EBITA margin, which is 18.4%, this is to say up 80 basis points. If you look at all the regionals -- all the regions, the most spectacular was North America with an 8% progression. In the U.S., we speak of a 2-digit growth, double-digit growth. Asia Pacific was also very dynamic with plus 5%. And then you have Western Europe and rest of the world, up 3%. Let's now look at the other activity, Industrial Automation, with EUR 6.3 billion. The operational or EBIT margin is also growing by 1 basis point. And you have areas for growth, rest of the world with 8% and Asia Pacific progressing by 2%. And we have 2 other areas which are more challenging, North America, minus 2%, and Western Europe, minus 1%. It is important to remember that all the discrete automation, that is for the car industry, electronics, all these activities were under pressure in 2019 after 2 years of major growth, double-digit growth in 2017 and 2018. Cross-linked to our strategy and also due to the quality in the deployment of the strategy, and that's crucial because we have set very clear objectives so as to carry out our strategy, and in 2019, we achieved this with a great deal of success. First objective was to sell more products, more connected products to our clients. And we have a growth of 3% in this area. Whereas the economic cycle or context was not favorable. Over the long term, we want to develop massively services, which enable us to be much closer to our customers, create customer intimacy and also to be able to perform better with a volatile economy. We've an 8% growth with software, which is a priority, and we invest organically and inorganically. And thanks to AVEVA, we've had double-digit growth, and we continue to sell systems in projects. So we combine products, advice, expertise, software to our customers. So we want to do this in better condition with better margin. In 2019, we had a growth of revenue thanks to these systems, but we've also grown margin linked to these activities with a progression of 40 basis points. Now the quality of deployment is, no doubt, due to improvement of our gross margin, not only in 2019, but over the last 5 years. Gross margin is important because it reflects the added value that we provide to our customers. Are we able to provide innovation, a different proposal and a lot of technological content? The more we can do this, the more we will increase our gross margin. And we have a spectacular increase in gross margin, from 37% in 2015, 39.5% in 2019, and we intend to continue with this positive growth. This has enabled us to generate more than EUR 10 billion to -- EUR 7 billion in margin, a progression of 7%. And we have also done an excellent control of our costs and of our capital deployment. We have reduced our costs and enabled us to increase our investments. And when we look at the net between the savings in terms of better productivity and efficiency that we have generated and all the reinvestments that we've carried out, we have growth of what we call our SFCs of 5%, which is much lower than the growth of the gross margin of 7%. So we can grow our revenue and our profits faster than our costs and our investments. So the result of this will enable us to have a better operating result, with an adjusted EBITA that is much growing faster than our revenue. So we got 15.1% to 15.6%, which is a notable progression in our adjusted EBITA margins. So that's EUR 3 billion -- EUR 3.9 billion to EUR 4.2 billion. So it's a progression of roughly 10% in 2019. And you can see that this improvement of profitability is a lasting trend. It has been 5 years in a row that we've improved year-on-year our operational margin, our EBITA margin. And we're going to continue to do this in the coming years. Now if we look at the rest of the P&L, I'll draw your attention to 2 points. So first is on other income and expenses. And you have seen that we have major expenses, EUR 411 million in expenses. Now these are expenses that are nonrecurring, exceptional, due to the divestment in a number of activities. They're, for example, work to focus our portfolio on our priorities. Namely in 2019, we divested a video surveillance activity, Pelco, generated a substantial loss. This will not recur in the coming years, of course. The second aspect I would like to draw your attention to, the financial -- net financial costs. We have new reduction, major reduction in 2019 of this cost. It was EUR 261 million compared to EUR 310 million expense of financial costs in 2018. So we're continuing to lower the cost of our debt by -- through long-term debt, subscribing to long-term debt with more interesting interest rates thanks to our solid financial results. So the net result group share is EUR 2.413 billion, improved 3%. But if we look at adjusted net income, if we take out the recurring losses, we have adjusted net income of EUR 2.933 billion, that's plus 14%. And we have adjusted earnings per share, is even higher, it's plus 15%, EUR 5.32. So we can say that in 2019, all the objectives that we had set in our governance have been reached. We have overreached them. We attained our revenues of 3% to 5%. In fact, we were at the upper part of the bracket with 4.2%. We wanted to have an increase in EBITA margin of 50 basis points. We did better, 70 basis points. So we wanted to increase our adjusted EBITA by 4 -- between 4% to 7% on a like-for-like basis. We're at 8.7% progression. And concerning our Sustainability Index, we wanted to attain 7 out of 10, and we are practically 8 over 10 in the result of Sustainability Index. So what is important for us is not simply to perform well in 2019, but it is to ensure that this performance is lasting, that it's a constant trend. And if we look back over the last 3 years, at the end of 2016, we had set ambitious objectives for 2017 through 2019. We have systematically overreached these targets of revenues. We wanted an average of 3%, and we were practically at 5% growth on a like-for-like basis. Now concerning our organic adjusted EBITA, we wanted a growth between 20 and 50 basis points year-on-year, but we have achieved roughly 70 basis points on each of these periods. And we wanted to have organic growth adjusted EBITA, 4% to 7% on a yearly average, that we have practically attained 10% year-on-year. So this result resulting from a strategy that is a winning strategy and the quality of the deployment of the strategy, and this wealth ensures us great consistency and regularity in the performance of the company and the results it achieved. Now there's one figure in 2019 which is the most striking, that clearly illustrates the transformation of the company, and that is the generation of free cash flow. We have generated EUR 3.2 billion free cash flow before the gains thanks to IFRS 16. So that's an accounting aspect that I won't detail, and that is a great increase of free cash flow. So how can we have such an acceleration of generation of free cash flow? Well, it's very simple. It's the result of a progression over a number of years in our revenues. It's also a result of the improvement year-on-year of our margin. I mentioned that also. This is also due to the fact that we are developing or evolving our activity towards greater quality, value. We can grow our activity using fewer industrial investments and with fewer and less inventory and reduce our costs. And this has resulted in a strong acceleration of our capacity to generate free cash flow. Now this also -- it means that end of 2019, we have a very solid financial result, and we've never had such a solid balance sheet. And net debt over adjusted EBITDA is 0.7. And all of this is accompanied by a very well-controlled use of capital, for example, with acquisitions. We're going to have also a dividend payout, a progressive dividend payout. And I'm going to -- all of this enables us to be very disciplined and to ensure that we get value for our shareholders. So good net income results and increase of dividend per share at EUR 2.55 per share. That's an increase of 15%, and this will enable us to propose a growth of dividend. So we have a dividend of EUR 2.55 per share, that is up by 8.5%. And here, again, we can talk about regularity when it comes to performance. If we look back 4 years, we have a growth of dividend year-by-year of roughly 8%. We went from EUR 2.04 to EUR 2.55 from 2016 to 2019. If we look over a 10-year period, we had multiplied it to the dividend by 2.5. So this general shareholders' meeting is special for me because it's my last shareholders' meeting. And in a few days, I will leave Schneider Electric after having spent 11 years in this wonderful group. And I wanted to look back over the past years of the work we've done with Jean-Pascal and the performance that we managed to achieve for you, shareholders. And on this graph here, you have what would have been your return on investment. If you had invested EUR 100 in July 2009 in the Schneider share compared to the same investment in CAC 40 shares, so EUR 100 invested in 2009 is now worth EUR 400. Whereas EUR 100 invested in CAC 40 companies at the same date is at roughly EUR 200. So an investment in Schneider has generated 3x more than investment in the CAC 40 over this 11-year period. If we look over the last 3 years, and we've shown here the way that the shares performed up until just the eve of the COVID crisis for return for our shareholders, which was remarkable with a progression of 69% increase in value share, so we are the best among all of our competitors, all our peers over this period of 3 years. Now of course, you could say, okay, that was yesterday. And since the 2019 financial year, we have been hit by the COVID-19 crisis, which has had an impact on all of us markedly. No one is exempt from this. Everyone is impacted by this. For us, the most important thing is to react in the best possible way to ensure that we'll be able to address the crisis and to -- whether it's in the best possible conditions and to prepare for the end of the crisis and what is going to happen in the future. Now let's look at our major priorities to be able to weather this terrible situation of COVID-19. The first priority is ensuring the health and safety of all our employees everywhere in the world and protect all of our employees to ensure that they have the right conditions to make sure they didn't incur any risk that they've got the right equipment, the PPE and all the conditions with teleworking to ensure that we provide maximum safety for the same thing. And the second thing, and this is extremely important, is to ensure business continuity and flexibility of our business activities. We are essential, thanks to our technology and what we provide to our customers to ensure the continuity of the lives of our societies and our lives, whether it's the hospitals, data centers, everything that we contribute to in all the different industries and all the different business activities. We ensure continuity of service out there where it is critical and where it is necessary. And of course we take into account this difficult and volatile context. And we're really focusing on financial solidity, and our company is very robust, and we're really focusing on generation of cash. And also, lastly, of course, in these moments of uncertainty, we are really focusing on cost management to ensure that we maintain them as low as possible, with efficiency plans and cost cutting measures where we can carry these out. We have just published revenue for the first quarter. And I think we can clearly say this first quarter has been essentially impacted by China, because of COVID-19. You can see that our revenue of EUR 5.8 billion is down on a like-for-like basis of minus 6.4%. Management of energy and industrial automation have been impacted in the same way, minus 6%; Energy Management, minus 7.3% for automation, Industrial Automation. When you look at the change by geographical area, you see it's essentially in Asia Pacific and China, where we've had the greatest decline, minus 19.3% for the first quarter, essentially in China. Other -- 2 other areas are being already impacted, but to a lesser degree, and essentially in the month of March, that was Western Europe and rest of world, with roughly minus 2%; and North America, which was still in growth of plus 0.6%. Of what I said, the future is not discounted or not canceled. The future is not going to be -- it's going to be difficult, but it's important as from now on to prepare for the world after the crisis. And you all know very well, each crisis provides a number of obstacles and tensions and problems to overcome. But in each crisis, there are opportunities to be seized. And what we clearly see is this crisis will have an impact on the global economy, it will have an impact on societies. And it will have an impact on our company, but it's going to accelerate these 2 major revolutions that we are dealing with: management of energy, and that's the energy transition, revolution; the revolution of the industry of the future. And we must ensure that the acceleration of change, we will support this and we will benefit from it in the long term. The digital economy is going to accelerate yet again, and we see this with teleworking in this crisis situation, which we see also with the development of software and development of e-commerce and the importance of this digital economy, where the data centers are backing it up and all the networks. We can see that there is a huge amount of resilience that will be necessary, resilience in terms of distribution, resilience to be able to overcome obstacles and problems to ensure critical services in hospitals and to provide essential services. And everyone clearly understands that it's not a crisis that's going to stop investments in sustainable development. On the contrary, it's going to accelerate investments in this area, and we're going to accompany these investments. And we clearly see that all of these are investment projects for the end of the crisis that are going to be significant. They are going to go in the directions that involve our technologies and our business activities will make other company -- this resumption of the economy, which will be very favorable for us. Efficiency, sustainable development are 2 major values that we support, and they're going to be even greater priorities in the future and going to help us to -- and we are preparing to support these changes for the betterment of the company. Now in this crisis, we are continuing to work with our shareholders. We want to make sure that we are close to them, and more than ever, dialogue with our different shareholders is very important. And you know that the -- it's the Advisory Committee of shareholders, we work with them, and they meet with the management. And the Shareholder Advisory Committee are there for you to ask questions. They provide excellent advice and answers to your questions. And we want to ensure direct interactions and we will continue these interactions and fiscal meetings as soon it can be possible. But we'll continue virtually in the meantime. I'd like to thank you and to say how Schneider Electric is really committed to address all the challenges of this crisis and to be as resilient as possible. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Jean-Pascal, Emmanuel for these presentations on the situation, the respective prospects for the group. Before I present it to the Board's activities and to report to you on my work as Vice Chairman and Lead Independent Director, I hand back the floor to Jean-Pascal Tricoire, who will present to you the members of the Board of Directors. Thank you.

Thank you, Leo. This is the Board of Directors. You have 13 members, 13 directors representing the diversity of Schneider, 5 ladies and people coming from all over the world. The organizational chart you're going to see is also including Jill Lee, who joined recently as a nonvoting Director. She was already very active. She's from Singapore. She works in Switzerland. And she had her whole career or big part of her career in our industry. So she knows our industry very well. And today, you will be invited to vote for her as a Director. We wish her welcome. She's bringing competence and diversity to our Board of Directors. Finally, as you know, Fred Kindle will replace Leo Apotheker, as -- in the same position, that is as Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors and Independent Lead Director. And given the particular circumstances of this shareholders' meeting, Fred Kindle couldn't be with us but he recorded a short video. So while we're doing this transition, I would like to thank Leo Apotheker. He was a Director during 12 years. He joined before the big financial crisis. And he supported Schneider's journey throughout. He was -- for 6 years, the Independent Lead Director of Schneider. And I think we never say how much the governance of the company is part of the success. And the Board of Directors is absolutely key for governance, and Leo did a lot to make this governance progress and beyond the rigorous operation of the Board, as he did it. And he assisted the executive to improve, he put all his knowledge and competence at the service of Schneider, his knowledge of software and digital. And this is one of the main success of Schneider in the past few years. He has a great sense of entrepreneurship. And I think that a company's, first and foremost, a human adventure, and the way we work together, this cooperation, this partnership, was a great human adventure. And the good news is that Leo will remain Director in Schneider Electric, and will continue to share his expertise with us, doubled with an exceptional knowledge of the group. So thank you very much, Leo, and you have the floor for the rest of this meeting.

Thank you, Jean-Pascal. Thank you very much. In 2020, your Board of Directors will have 3 changes. You will have a new Director, Jill Lee; Second, a Director representing the employees, who will be appointed within 6 months; and a new Vice Chairman, Independent Lead Director. Why is it so important to have a new Vice Chairman, Independent Lead Director? As you know, the status of Schneider Electric, says that there has to be the appointment of a Vice Chairman, Lead Independent Director. But as long as this charge is in one person, so Jean-Pascal doing the 2 functions. The Vice Chairman, Lead Independent Director will guarantee the good governance of the company. As such, he chairs the Committee of Remuneration and he also organizes the executive sessions, and he meets with the shareholders. The Board of Director will deliberate on this accumulation of functions and decided to continue in 2020. The appointment of a Vice President, a Vice Chairman is necessary, and it has to be among the Independent Directors. I joined the Board 12 years ago, and this seniority or loyalty makes me lose the quality of being an Independent Director in view of the law. So a new Independent Lead Director has to be appointed, and the Board decided that this would be Fred Kindle, who accepted this position. As Jean-Pascal just said, for obvious reasons, Fred couldn't come with us today, but he wanted to share with us all the vision he has for the company.

Question one, would you please tell us about you and when and how you joined the Schneider's Board? [Foreign Language], Dear shareholders, thank you for the opportunity to quickly introduce myself. My name is Fred Kindle. And I apologize that I cannot address you in French, [Foreign Language]. Unfortunately, I'm sorry about that. So I'm a Swiss national and was born and raised in a tiny country called Liechtenstein, which is in between Switzerland and Austria. I started in Zurich, Switzerland where I got a Master's Degree in Engineering. Worked for a couple of years. Then decided to go the United States, where I got a Master's in Business Administration. This was at the Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. After that, I worked as a consultant with McKinsey in New York and Zurich. And in 1992, I joined Swiss-based mechanical engineering company Sulzer, a company that produced pumps, textile machinery, all sorts of mechanical equipment. And I became the CEO of this company in 1999. Five years later, in 2004, I got the opportunity to become group CEO of ABB in Zurich. You probably know ABB as a direct competitor of Schneider Electric. Four years later, I left and became partner in an investment firm in London, where I was involved full-time until the end of 2015. And amongst several investments we made in this private equity firm called Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, you may know Paris-based Rexel SA, which is actually a distributor of Schneider Electric products. I was a Director at Rexel for several years. Since 2016, however, I focused my work basically on consulting a little bit and 3 board positions, including the one at Schneider Electric. Why did I join the Schneider Electric Board? When I was CEO at ABB, I got to know Schneider Electric indirectly as a competitor. And today, I can admit that there was always a, let's call it, competitive admiration for this company. Several years later, Jean-Pascal Tricoire asked me whether I would be interested in joining the SE Board, and the answer was very easy. I had no hesitation to say yes, since Schneider Electric is a world leader in its industry, a high-renowned company, and its leadership was also known to me. And obviously, I knew Jean-Pascal Tricoire very much and really appreciated him as a colleague and a very competent professional leader. So today, April 2020, I have been on the Board for Schneider Electric for 4 years. Question two, how do you see your role and contribution as new Vice Chairman, Lead Independent Director of Schneider Electric? The role of the Vice Chairman and Lead Independent Director is very important to make sure that the top leadership and governance at Schneider Electric is effective. As you know, Schneider Electric is very lucky to have very competent leadership at the top of the organization, and I want to mention Jean-Pascal Tricoire by name. He has led Schneider Electric to true success in the past years. And he has done this in the combined role of Chairman and CEO. This combined role works well in the current setup with the given persons. Having this in mind, however, one task of the Vice Chairman, Lead Independent Director, is to make sure we have a well-balanced decision-making process in the Board, where every Board member has enough weight in the discussion. The Vice Chairman, Lead Independent Director needs to make sure that the enormous power handed to the Chairman CEO is embedded into a cohesive Board, where opinions are freely mentioned and the best decisions for the company are taken. And this is the case at Schneider Electric. Another important task is to serve as a speaking partner and confidant for members of the executive management who report to the Chairman CEO. They may have thoughts and concerns that need to be collected by someone and acted upon, if necessary. And similarly, an additional function is to liaise and meet with the main investors and shareholder representatives, listen to their thoughts and present Schneider Electric's concept as it concerns good corporate governance, environmental, societal and regulatory aspects. Last but not least, the Vice Chairman, Lead Independent Director needs to be a trusted, respected speaking partner for the Chairman, Lead Independent Director. I think that's a key aspect of this role as well. And I can say, I'm very thankful for the excellent work that has been done by my predecessor, Leo Apotheker. I can only hope that I can continue in this fashion and help Schneider Electric to remain as successful as it has been in the past years. Thank you very much. Question #3, what do you consider as the key aspects of the role of a Board? The Board of a company has several key functions. Let me start with the most important one from my perspective. The most important one from my perspective is to select the best people for running the company, in particular, of course, as it concerns the Chairman and CEO and the members of executive management. And then we need to support these people and the organization in general to maximize the success of the company. And let me emphasize that success, of course, includes financial gain, but not only. True success is actually about a variety of different factors: financial gain, but also societal progress, environmental benefits and much more. All the tasks of the Board include aspects like: installing good corporate governance processes; examining and approving the strategy of the company; and monitoring the work of the organization and operations. As I mentioned at the beginning, I could go on with many more, but these are the functions that stand out for me, and if a Board does all of this well, then we are in a good way. Let me just add that in especially challenging situations, such as we are experiencing today with the fallout from the coronavirus crisis, it is paramount that the Board makes sure that we, as a company, are setting the right priorities, which includes, of course, safeguarding the health and safety of our own people, employees, customers and suppliers. Thank you.

[Interpreted] I would like to thank the shareholders for the trust you put in me in the 6 years when I was the Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors and Independent Lead Director. I'm sure that this position will be efficiently taken over by Fred Kindle, certainly better than me. At the end of this meeting, at this Shareholders' Meeting, you will have 13 Directors, 8 Independent Directors, 42% are women. And by the end, we will have another member in the Board. You see here on this graph a geographical spread of the Directors, which is perfectly suited to the needs of the group and its strategic priorities. What are the activities of your Board in 2019? As the law and the name says, it administers the company. The main activities can be shared in 4 categories. In 2019, the Board of Directors of Schneider Electric worked on all these subjects, except for the appointment of the leaders. The performance of the group, the good redistribution to shareholders. And to allow the group to meet its objectives for the shareholders and all the stakeholders, we have established an ecosystem. We look at the possible opportunities and determine the strategic orientations of the group. The monitoring of risk mapping and controlling risk management are also important functions of the Board of Directors, as you could see in the mapping showed in the annual report. And on another topic that we will develop now, another activity is the corporate governance. The Board chooses the method of management, appoints and assesses corporate executive officers, determines executives' compensation with your approval and carries out annual assessments. At the end of all those works, the Board of Directors will inform the shareholders, as you saw in the reference document, and proposes decisions that we will submit today to your approval. In order to do so, the Board of Directors met 7 times in 2019 with a duration of 7 hour per meeting, where absence is very exceptional and always excused, with a 93% attendance rate. There were also 5 committees preparing the works of the Board, knowing that each Director participate at least 1 or 2 or 3 of these committees. I will now present the resolutions. Amongst the most significant resolutions, you have the proposal of the dividend. The Board proposes a dividend of EUR 2.55 per share. This is an increase of 8.5% compared to 2019. This is paying out the extremely good performance of the group and the sound financial situation. The Board would like you also to approve the corporate officers' compensations for 2019. As you can see it on the screen, it is absolutely compliant with the approved policy last year. The compensation of Jean-Pascal Tricoire and Messr. Emmanuel Babeau that you can approve for the seventh and eighth resolutions are raising by 4% against 2018. As you can see on this graph, this evolution continues to be perfectly matching the performance of the group. This alignment is due to the structure of the compensation of the corporate leaders beyond the financial and extra-financial performance of the group. On the basis of this observation, for 2020, the Board proposes to keep the same structure for the compensation of the present Chairman and CEO and the Deputy CEO. It will continue to be based on the 3 main pillars for all the leaders of the group, which is the pay-for-performance alignment with shareholders' interest and competitiveness. For 2020, within the second resolution, it is proposed to keep the same structure of fixed and variable compensation for Mr. Tricoire and to keep the same performance criteria that you approved in April 2019 to determine the annual compensation and the acquisition of performance shares. For the acquisition of the latest, this was -- or the latter, sorry, for the first time, we include a performance indicator for sustainable development, which testifies for the excellent developments of Schneider Electric. There would be a discretionary power, however, in duly framed conditions. And at any rate, will be under your scrutiny, a power that will allow to follow the particular circumstances of the COVID-19 crisis. Concerning the particular case of Mr. Babeau, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the group, who is leaving in a few days, the Board is submitting to your approval a regulated agreement relating to the departure of Mr. Emmanuel Babeau with a -- no severance pay, noncompete agreement for 2 years, with noncompete indemnity of direct competitors to Schneider Electric. Therefore, there will be no noncompete indemnity. But he will have the right to retain performance shares granted in 2018 and 2019, and for the first 4 months of 2020 and keep the performance shares granted in 2018 and 2019, within the limit of his time within the group over the acquisition period, representing a maximum of 27,445 shares, the final acquisition of which will depend on the achievement of stretching performance conditions in 2020 and '21. It will be published in '21 and '22. The convention, as proposed, reinforces the guarantee of the group with no extra cost and no impact on its cash flow. This is the object of resolutions 5 to 10. Finally, the compensation report shows all of the quantitative and qualitative information in the 2019 compensation already approved for by Schneider Electric. You can see on the report on the company's governance that this is presented for 2019. Among the 5 resolutions for the renewal of the Board of Directors, the first 4 will begin with mine. And I will not tell you my biography. I think you already know it. Cecile Cabanis joined the Board of Directors of Schneider Electric in 2016, chairs the Committee of Risks. The Board would like to underline, appreciate the quality of the works of Mrs. Cabanis. Fred Kindle, if elected, who already joined the Board in 2016, will become Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors and Independent Lead Director at the end of this assembly. In order to fulfill this role, he will still be at the Committee of Investment, but he will leave the Committee of Audit and Risks. Willy Kissling is the most senior member of the Board and participates with great involvement to many works of the Board works since he is a member of 3 study committees. And lastly, we propose to elect a last Board member. And that is Ms. Jill Lee from Singapore, who is residing in Switzerland, where she is a Financial Director of Sulzer. Jill has perfect knowledge of the Schneider Electric business activities and of Asian markets. She was coopted as a center -- that is a member, nonvoting member on January 1, 2020, and has already taken part very actively in Board work. Her financial skills really mean that she is very competent for auditing risks. These following resolutions concern financial employee annual authorizations. We will continue to buy back shares and also to start again the employee savings schemes to enable Schneider Electric employees to share in the profits of the company as being shareholders. I will hand the floor to Loic Wallaert, who's -- the Mazars audit company, for the presentation of the 5 statutory audit reports, the annual accounts, consolidated accounts, regulated agreements and tracked actions concerning share capital for the employee share plan, and increase of capital reserved for employees in the foreign companies of the group.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Ladies and gentlemen, hello. I have the pleasure of presenting to you today on behalf of the statutory auditors the 5 audit opinions that we were issued. These reports were made available to you by your company on its internet site. I propose, therefore, to present them to you in summary form. They concern an audit opinion concerning annual accounts and an audit opinion concerning consolidated accounts, a report on regulated agreements and 2 reports concerning transactions of -- concerning share capital. In our 2 audit opinions, we certified without any reservations the annual consolidated accounts that will be presented for your approval in the first and second resolutions for your General Shareholders' Meeting. As far as concerning -- the consolidated accounts will indicate the first application of the IFRS 16 rules concerning leasing contracts and the interpretation, IFRIC 23 interpretation of the treatment of tax, processing tax. And we will present both the key aspects that we believe according to our expertise were the most important for the auditing of accounts. And these concern for the annual accounts, the evaluation of shares and of the receivables attached to these shares for consolidated accounts, we have focused on 4 aspects: goodwill valuation and valuation of trademarks with indefinite lifespans; capitalization, the evaluation of development costs; recognition and recovery of deferred taxed assets held in respect of tax loss carryovers; and lastly, the identification and appraisal of risks, provisions for uncertain tax positions and contingent liabilities. We confirm also that our reports give all the other necessary information that is mandatory. Concerning the fourth and fifth resolutions for your General Shareholders' Meeting, we have issued a report on the regulated agreements. We remind you that the commitments that were previously approved by the general assembly are no longer in this report. Our report includes the new agreement and will be the object of a prior agreement of your Board. And this concerns commitments concerning Mr. Emmanuel Babeau on the occasion of his departure from the group on the 30th of April, 2020. And in addition, no agreement approved during the shareholders' meeting was enforced during the 2019 financial year. Lastly, concerning the extraordinary shareholders' meeting, we have issued 2 reports concerning -- resolutions concerning the share capital. This concerns issuance of ordinary shares or securities with cancellation of preferential subscription rights, and the definitive conditions in which these subscription were made having locked and so we will not issue an opinion concerning this -- and as a result, on the proposal of the cancellation of preferential subscription rights that has been made to you. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Chairman, thank you for your attention.

Thank you, Mr. Wallaert. So all the reports having been presented to you, now the floor is to the shareholders now. This being a camera meeting, so no questions can be raised during the meeting. So only the written questions that were presented before this shareholder meeting. Those proposed by the Advisory Committee, Shareholder Committee, we received 12 written questions from the Responsible Investment Forum. All the answers from the Board is published on the Internet site. Before handing the floor to Emmanuel Babeau and Jean-Pascal Tricoire to answer 2 questions of the Advisory Committee, Shareholder Advisory Committee that have been asked in written form, I would like to read the message from a Marie-France Amic, who speaks on behalf of the committee. First of all, the shareholders, through the committee, would like to commend the initiative taken by Schneider against COVID-19, the creation of the Tomorrow Rising Fund and the contribution of Jean-Pascal Tricoire, the members of the executive committee, to this fund. And since it's open, the shareholders will be able to match our contributions. The first question is as follows: The crisis, the COVID-19 crisis has shown the strong interdependence between countries and companies. Your business model is based on using installers. What feedback have you had concerning the problems they're encountering with a reduction of their activity and how you're going to help them to weather this crisis? Emmanuel, the question's for you.

It's a fundamental question. Jean-Pascal said in his report, the Schneider Electric team, this ecosystem that we have generated around us, this network of partners, and the installers are part of this ecosystem is essential to our success, and this what gives us our ability to be very close to our final customers and to have extremely diffused presence. It's very complicated at this time to continue for installers, and we are supporting them as much as we can. Now they are greatly impacted, an example of France, we see unfortunately the majority of the works have been stopped, and this has an impact on our installers. The first thing we're doing is that we're very close contact with them, directly of course. But also through the different professional associations and through the distributors. There's a great deal of work that's being done to help them and to help them sort out all the red tape when it comes to applying for support and assistance or helping them in this area. You saw clearly, during our presentation, we ourselves, a great deal of our business activities are still ongoing because we have to continue to ensure these critical services, and the Schneider team is going to continue to work and we're going to involve our installers for these critical operations. And at the end of confinement, I think we're coming to the end of this confinement, and it's necessary to resume our activities. We're working with them to ensure that we, when we get back to activity, there should not be any health risks for people working in the field. And we are looking, on a case-by-case basis, to see how we can start-up business activities normally again, making sure that we take no risks. All the sites, work sites, that can be reopened will be reopened. Now we also have to work on training of our partners and installers. So a lot of work has been done in digital training, with webinars. And the last thing what's being done, we have a sort of task force or a watch team for the more critical cases. If any of our partners were in major -- encountering major problems, we are there to help them, to provide support and see how we can help them. And that's all -- these are all the things that we're doing with our installers and more widely, with all of the partners we work with.

Thank you very much, Emmanuel. I'm going to read to you a second question, that Jean-Pascal Tricoire will answer. You took strong commitments within the context of the EV 100 initiative of -- in perspective of 2030, 2050. Will the coronavirus crisis have an impact on these commitments by postponing to a later date these objectives?

The COVID crisis does not have any impact on way of -- do you have an echo? The coronavirus crisis has not impacted -- I had a lot of echo, one moment. So I'm going to start again. So there's no impact on our commitments when it comes to sustainable development. Schneider's mission, its [Foreign Language], its purpose of delivering to customers digital solutions for safety or environmental, is something that we apply in our particular case. So we are among the 200 companies that subscribed to the 1.5 degrees objective in the Global Compact. We're part of a group of 8 companies that have set objectives of reduction of greenhouse gases based on initiative that relies on scientifically evaluated methods. And we have taken commitment of improving our energy consumption through the EV100 companies -- EV100 countries. These companies are committed to using renewable energies. Our E100 and the EV100 companies that's going to go towards electric transition, all these initiatives. And we are participating in all of these initiatives. We have decided to take commitments that are even more focused, carbon neutrality by 2050, accepting the principle of using green certificates that enable us to compensate for certain carbon emissions. Now to be net 0 in terms of operational emissions in 2030, that's Scope 1 and 2 that concerns Schneider Electric. And to be net 0, including all our suppliers in 2050, and you know that 70% of the value that we generate is produced by its suppliers. So it's considerable effort, a collaborative effort all along our value chain. And I mentioned also, to end SF6 in medium voltage and throughout our industry there's toxic gas that is impacting climate change, and to have a system without gas-based, only on air by 2025. It's a factor at Schneider. It is a commitment that is not going to change as a consequence of the COVID crisis. What we have observed with our customers and within our ecosystems, COVID reminds us how nature is a threat to our living conditions and our lifestyles. And the diffusion of the virus and climate change are the effect of our increasing urbanization and economic development. And around the world, there is a growing awareness, thanks to COVID-19, and it's really making sure that companies are focusing on the fundamentals and especially fighting against pollution, fighting against climate change. And the different packages for redeveloping the economy will be really focused on the fight against climate change.

I'm going to hand the floor to Delphine Gieux to read the resolutions.

Thank you. Thank you, Leo. The quorum for the vote of the resolutions for the Ordinary Meeting and Extraordinary Meeting, having been obtained, we can therefore proceed. The first resolution is -- concerns the approval of operations and corporate accounts for 2019 financial year. The votes expressed therefore and shown approval of the first resolution. The second resolution, also that is to be decided by the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting, concerns consolidated accounts of 2019. The resolution is approved 100% -- the resolution adopted 100%. Third resolution, that's for the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting, concerns distribution of dividend of EUR 2.55 per share. The dividend will be paying out on the 7th of May 2020. This resolution is approved, and the resolution is adopted at 98.95%. The fourth resolution, this is for the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting, concerns information related to party agreements executed in previous financial years. The resolution is adopted in a majority of 99.56%. The fifth resolution for the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting's approval, it concerned related party agreement in relation to the departure terms of the Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Emmanuel Babeau. This fifth resolution is adopted, the majority of 97.14%. The sixth resolution concerns the Ordinary General Assembly -- General Shareholders' Meeting and concerns the compensation report for the 2019 financial year. And the resolution is adopted at 93.36%. Seventh resolution, which concerns the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting, concerns approval of elements of compensation benefits of all tax paid or granted in respect to the 2019 financial year to Mr. Jean-Pascal Tricoire. Based on the votes expressed, the seventh resolution is adopted with 89.39% of the votes. Now eighth resolution for the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting's approval, concerns the elements of compensation benefits of all types paid or granted in respect to the 2019 financial year to Mr. Emmanuel Babeau. The resolution is adopted, 92.86%. Now concerning the ninth resolution for the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting's approval, approval of the compensation policy for the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Tricoire, the resolution is adopted with a majority of 90.55%. The 10th resolution, which concerns the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting, were asked to approve the compensation policies specifically applicable to Mr. Emmanuel Babeau, Deputy Chief Executive Officer in the context of his departure and the elements of compensation and benefits of all types paid granted to him to in respect of the 2020 financial year. The resolution is adopted with a majority of 94.08%. The 11th resolution concerning the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting, are asked to approve the compensation policy of the members of the Board of Directors. The resolution, 11th resolution, is adopted with a majority of 96.76%. This 12th resolution, which concerns the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting, concerns the renewal of the term of Mr. Leo Apotheker's mandate or term of office for 3 years. His term of office will come to end at the 2023 Shareholders' Meeting. The resolution is adopted with a majority of 94.12%. The 13th resolution within the competence of the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting is on the renewal of the term of Mrs. Cecile Cabanis for an ordinary duration of 4 years. Her mandate will end at the end of the General Shareholders' Meeting of 2024. The resolution is adopted with a majority of 79.08%. The 14th resolution is in the competence of the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting. It is proposed to renew the term of Mr. Fred Kindle for an identical duration of 4 years. The mandate will, therefore, expire at the end of the Shareholders' Meeting in 2024. The resolution is adopted with a majority of 98.33%. And the 15th resolution of the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting, it is proposed to renew the term of Mr. Willy Kissling for a duration of 2 years, given his age. The mandate will end at the end of the shareholders' meeting of 2022. The resolution is adopted with a majority of 84.28%. And the 16th resolution within the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting, you have to approve the appointment of a new Director, Mrs. Jill Lee, for a duration of 4 years, which will expire at the assembly of 2024. The resolution is adopted by 86.32% of the votes. The 17th resolution and the competence of the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting is on the authorization granted to the Board of Directors to buy back their own shares, the company shares, within the following limit: authorization limited to 10% of share capital maximum is EUR 150. Authorization is valid 18 months and was adopted at 98.62%. The 18th resolution is under the competence of the Extraordinary Shareholders' Meeting, which is to adopt the amendment of Article 11.4 of the Articles of Association to make it consistent with the amendment laws and provide the appointment of the second Director representing employees by the European Works Council. The resolution is adopted by 98.91%. The 19th resolution is also in the competence of the extraordinary meeting, is on the amendment of articles 13 and 16 of the Articles of Association to reflect the amended laws and correct a clerical error as well. The resolution is adopted by 98.91%. The 20th resolution is also the competence of the Extraordinary Shareholders' Meeting. This is about the increase in capital reserve for employees. Delegation of authority granted to the Board of Directors for increasing the capital in favor of employees adhering to the company's savings program, with a maximum below per rate of 30% on the average listed price. The resolution is adopted at 96.89% of votes. And the 21st resolution, the last resolution of the Extraordinary Shareholders' Meeting, it is asked to increasing capital reserve for a specific category of beneficiaries, employees in foreign countries within the group, authorization covering 1% of capital deductible on the ceiling of 2% for increase of capital reserve. This 21st resolution is adopted with 97.02% of votes. We reach now the 22nd resolution, the last one for the Ordinary Shareholders' Meeting, its powers for accomplishing formalities. The resolution is adopted with 100% of votes. Thank you for your attention.

Thank you. Well, thank you, Delphine, for this reading of all the resolutions. I -- I am very happy that the Shareholders' Meeting approved all those resolutions. Thank you very much to all the shareholders for that. And thank you also for following this meeting in our original and digital form. I regret that we couldn't meet in person today. I would like to thank all those who organized this very good shareholders meeting, in particular, Delphine Gieux. Thank you very much for your commitment and your trust for so many years. We are fully mobilized to go through this crisis of COVID-19. And first and foremost, for the health and safety of all our employees throughout the world, to continue our activities and our business, particularly the mission-critical that we have to accomplish. Please make sure you take good care of yourselves and your families. Let's meet next year for the Shareholders' Meeting 2021. Leo?

Jean Pascal, ladies, gentlemen, thank you very sincerely for attending this Shareholders' Meeting. Before we all leave, I would like to wish you well and give you the next date of the meeting, which will take place on the 28th of April 2021 at the Palais de Congress of Paris. And I hope we will meet again in great numbers. Thank you very much. Have a good afternoon. [Portions of this transcript that are marked [Interpreted] were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]